The Dust

Birth

Beta One woke to the beeping of a suit alarm. The helmet display pinged red indicators for air. The emergency lights and weightlessness told her that the shuttle took a beating.

Thinking back, she could remember a flash of flame. They must have been hit by a stray round during the battle, or maybe the rebels had wanted to keep the shuttle from making planet-fall. The difficulty of drawing in breath was telling her that the filters had reached their capacity and she needed a new bottle of air, so her reflections would have to wait.

In the dim sodium orange, the essence of the flames seemed to linger. She reached toward a hand-hold, barely allowing her fingers to curve around it as she pulled forward, moving between the bodies. Most of them had been killed from depressurization, as their frozen visages suggested, but a couple were in suits and had simply been crushed when the ship's burn had ended early, a risk common to the atmospheric shuttles whose harnesses weren't rated for more than 4G.

She found what she was looking for on the body of a corpsman. The supply bag still bore a centuries-old red cross emblem, too instantly recognizable to be abandoned even after humanity had almost forgotten the origin of the iconography. She carefully grabbed the kit and fumbled through it, watching the disturbed miscellany slowly fall back into place after the gas they were packed in escaped, and grasping the emergency air bottle carefully between her fingers and both of the thumbs on her right hand. Closing the satchel with her left, she carefully ejected the old air bottle and placed the new in its place, twisting it until the dull click echoed through the suit.

It reminded her of pulling back the slide of her pistol. She pushed the sling over her shoulder, feeling the increase of weight as her breath began to flow more easily.

The emergency lights began to flash on and off. The digital viewports had all shut down with the reactor, but the lights indicated the point of no return. In five minutes, the shuttle would begin to burn if it wasn't oriented properly for unpowered re-entry.

The escape pods were on the other side of the shuttle. She pushed herself on, navigating the deck, which was askew enough to make her steps feel off-balance.

A lance of heat shot into her abdomen as she rounded a corner. She stumbled backward, falling in slow motion to the deck of the ship. A warning klaxon drilled its way into her ears, something that was pointless considering the fact that she knew she had just been shot. Her body wanted to go into shock, a consequence of the design of the human form that wanted time to heal and repair itself when it got hurt. Her creators hated that particular feature; the replicants didn't have to survive combat, and if they did they could easily be dropped into a tank to have their bodies restored to factory default. The discord between nature and artifice kept her head spinning for few seconds as the neurachem kicked in, drowning out the pain with a spark of fire that called for action.

Her mind was already working even as she began to right herself. Her attacker had to be a drone small enough not to show up on the tactical network. The display on her pistol promised that it would send a tungsten-uranium penetrator downrange when she pulled the trigger. She took a step forward, going into a controlled fall. She focused on the corridor, pistol raised.

The barrel aligned with the drone as her brain sent the firing commands, time moving at a speed that allowed her to beat the drone's computers to the punch. Three rounds flew through the vacuum, sparking as they punched through the drone and left holes into the void where the shuttle's hull had been. It began to fall, and Beta One let the drone plummet silently from where it was hovering.

The escape pods were not far, but she was careful to avoid another ambush from a hunter-killer. Her suit sealed the holes, but only after the flesh had begun to freeze. The neurachem made the feeling less a pain than a discomfort. The yellow and black industrial warning outline on the door to the escape pod was a welcome sight in the darkness, and a quick twist of a lever popped the hydraulic door open.

The escape pod detached with a soft bang. Beta took off her helmet, breathing the pod's reserve air and looking up at the sunshields above her. New Haven was the closest planet to Aspera's twin suns, and it was positively cooked by the radiation it received; so much that even the thick magnetosphere couldn't turn away the harmful rays. From below, however, the sunshields resembled massive flower blossoms, spreading out in the planet's orbit to provide coverage for the major cities.

When the war began, the Federals had poked enough holes in them to make them practically worthless, but that only added to their beauty as the shreds of material hung like individual petals still barely attached to the central hub of the shield.

When she landed, Beta reflected that Haven was the worst name for such an inhospitable planet. The pod reminded her to put her helmet on before she breathed in the spore dust, which would be a death sentence even with her engineered immune system.

She looked out at the bleak wastes, watching the planetary defense cannons firing streams of projectiles into the air. The escape pod's exit hatch hissed open with pneumatic force, and she strode out into the heat of New Haven's day, watching the citadel's wall stretch into the sky beside the mountains.

There was work to do.