Excerpt: This is How it Ends/Just a Glimpse/Under the Infinite Skies/Legend of Paredin

He opened the door properly, and looked at the person standing there. About his age, neatly groomed and clean. Wearing a pale blue uniform shirt with black trousers, regulation black shoes already picking up dust from the incessant winds in this place, and a cap tucked under one arm. “Major Lindov?”

Arkady grimaced. “I’m not Major anything, anymore, I assure you. I’m long out of the program, I don’t even have my license anymore. I think you’re looking for someone else. If I recall correctly, he died about six years ago. Good day.”

“I’ve been instructed to take you to meet some people, sir.”

“Some people. What some people would they be?”

“The premier. And the head of the spaceflight program. And I think the chief of the army, sir.”

“Is that true?” He began to study the uniform more carefully, looking for some indication that it wasn’t the standard uniform. This was so ridiculous that it had to be a prank of some kind, though he didn’t have any friends, so there was no one that could have done this simply to get a laugh out of him. “Well, you can tell those distinguished gentlemen that I’m in no condition to see them, being quite drunk.”

“You’re sober, sir. I can tell. Get in some clean clothes and we’ll take a drive.”

“I don’t have clean clothes, I’m afraid. I only do the washing about once every two months. No one in this place cares whether I’m dressed in clothes that I washed yesterday or last year. No one here cares about anything, and that includes that damned asteroid. I don’t care about it, I don’t care about humanity. Go and find someone else,” he looked at the uniform again, “Lieutenant Gurlov. And meanwhile, find some new boots to lick, because if you’re my age and haven’t broken into Captain and you’re a pilot, you’re doing something seriously wrong.”

“I was demoted in rank, sir. I was a Major, too. Now get dressed, sir. I don’t care what you put on. We’ll stop somewhere and find something for you to wear.”

“What did you get demoted for?”

“That’s irrelevant. Get dressed, sir.”

“You keep saying that. I keep not doing it. Doesn’t that indicate something to you, former-Major?” Arkady shifted at the door, trying to decide whether or not he was going to close it in the man’s face. But he knew what this had to be about – there was only one reason that those three men would want to talk to him, and the thought stirred something that had laid dormant in his for a long time. Throwing this away would be the stupidest thing he’d done in his life – stupider even than crashing the shuttle.

“Yes, that you’ve not yet made up your mind yet, sir. Make it up quickly, because I don’t like this city and I’d rather be going as soon as we can.”

“Fine. Give me five minutes and I’ll put on the very cleanest clothes I can find.” He closed the door and looked around the dark apartment, trying to remember when he’d last done any washing and where any clean clothes might be hiding. Finally, he settled on a pair of jeans with a ripped knee that he thought he’d only worn three times since he’d last washed them and a fifteen-year old t-shirt that was faded beyond description; he wasn’t even sure what it had looked like when it had been new. Hardly appropriate attire to go before three of the most powerful men in the bloc, but they should have given him more warning if they wanted something better.

When he walked back out, Gurlov looked him up and down and said, “We need to stop somewhere. You can’t go to this meeting dressed like that.”

They ended up stopping in a store just outside of Moscow, one that still sold respectable clothes, and he allowed Gurlov to buy him a shirt that had buttons and a collar and trousers that didn’t have any holes in them, but he declined to get a new pair of shoes; his old boots suited him just fine, even if they didn’t match the rest of what he was wearing.

They drove to the airport then. “I thought you were driving me to the meeting,” he said as they got out. “And you didn’t tell me that I’d need to bring luggage. Or at least a book to read.”

“You don’t have any luggage to bring, sir. You don’t have enough things worth saving to fit in a small suitcase. This way.” Gurlov started to walk through the gate, flashing an ID to the guard stationed there. The guards looked at him menacingly when he walked past them, but made no attempt to stop him.

There was a sleek, six-passenger plane waiting for them. Arkady had never flown sub-orbital planes, but could appreciate the beauty in the engineering of this one and would have liked to at least see the cockpit; he wasn’t going to ask, though.

Arkady settled down into one of the oversized seats and stretched out. It was the most comfortable piece of furniture he’d been near in six years and he was going to enjoy every moment of it. The two of them were the only passengers, and they were both quiet enough that he could hear the pilot going through his pre-flight checklist, and that triggered another something in him. He closed his eyes and willed his ears to close as well.

It took far too long for them to take off, and it wasn’t until they were up in the air that he opened his eyes. The first thing he did was look out of the window. It was a cloudy day and so he couldn’t see all the way to the ground. That was like the day of the crash, too.

They’d said that his control had been expert, and that he’d deliberately crashed the shuttle outside of Moscow; only about three miles outside of the most distant suburbs. They said that it had only been his skill that had saved so many lives. But they thought that he’d lost control later than he actually had; they’d thought he could actually see the ground and had forced the shuttle into a steeper dive to avoid Moscow.

The truth was that he had been in something of a panic. It was a fairly well-controlled panic, and he’d been more focused on trying to get it out of its dive than making the dive steeper. All he’d been able to hear where the cries from the cabin and the monotonous drone of the computer reading out how badly they were going to crash, but all that was going through his head was a list of the things that he’d memorized, years ago, that he could do to stabilize the thing, and he’d run through them one by one. By the time that they were below the clouds, he’d lost pretty much all control and he was just holding on and waiting to die. It was true that he’d caught a glimpse of Moscow in the bare seconds that it had taken for the shuttle to travel the distance between the clouds and the ground, but he hadn’t been thinking about how to avoid hitting it. In fact, the only thought that he remembered was thinking how nice it was that he was dying outside of Moscow.

He’d definitely blacked out upon impact, but when he’d awoken he found that he was still alive, though struggling to breathe, and there was blood in his mouth, but he otherwise didn’t feel as though he was in imminent danger of dying. He leaned over to his copilot, but the man’s neck had broken and there was no pulse.

It had taken some doing to free himself from the five-point restraints, particularly as one of the buckles was bent so badly that he had to use a piece of metal to saw through the belt to get it to release, and then he fell forward onto the controls, giving himself some nasty bruises that wouldn’t go away for nearly a month afterwards.

The shuttle had hit on its left side, towards the back, and had fractured into two pieces, the one that had hit first being the slightly larger of the two. The front had detached somehow and lodged nearly nose-down in the ground. Once he was freed, he had no idea how he was going to get out. Of all the things that hadn’t broken, it was the super-strong glass that composed most of what was around him. There were cracks here and there, just as there were cracks along the whole of the structure, but he was weak and he knew that even at his strongest, he wouldn’t be able to pull them apart far enough to squeeze out. He climbed up to where the door was and found that it was jammed shut, and he was at exactly the wrong angle to have any leverage worth a damn to push it open.

He was in shock by then, and so it took him a few moments longer to see the bodies. When he saw the one that was half-draped over the separation between passenger area and cockpit, he realized, and he shouted out, “Can anyone hear me? Is there anyone else alive?” Then, he hadn’t been able to fathom the events that might have led on him to survive.

Looking up the passenger area was when he realized that the shuttle was in two pieces. The top end of his piece, jagged and awful, was only about ten feet higher, and he thought that he might be able to climb that high. His left arm ached, but he tried to forget about it, just like he tried to forget the stabbing pains that came whenever he lifted his arms above his head or when he had to use his entire upper body to pull himself up chair by chair, trying not to touch any of the bodies.

He had no idea how long it took him before he finally reached the rip, and he had to spend quite a while resting, struggling for each breath and spitting blood to keep from swallowing it. He had no idea how bad his injuries were, but knew that they’d never look for survivors inside of the shuttle, and if he wanted to live, he was going to have to get out. With another pull, he was able to get over the lip and balance himself about twenty feet in the air above ground. Looking down, he knew there was no way that he was going to jump and risk killing himself by exacerbating whatever injuries he already had.

So he began to look for seams of any sort as he began a chaotic descent that had him slipping in several places only to grab desperately onto a piece of metal that was jutting out. Finally he was on the ground, and that was when he was noticed, as he was staggering across the ground.

The ambulances had been there, of course, but they’d been attending to the other part of the shuttle, which had landed some hundred feet distant, and hadn’t noticed the figure climbing from the front-end. But he began to walk towards them, bloodstained and staggering, and they had run up to him, immediately making him lie down, with a collar around his neck – despite his protests that his neck was fine and if it was going to have broken, it would have done so while he was escaping – and drove him to the hospital. They sedated him while he was in the ambulance, and he hadn’t woken up for nearly a day, while they ran all their tests on him to make sure that he really was as alive as he claimed to be.

***
He only focused again when they were descending, and although it was smooth and he felt almost nothing, he found himself gripping the armrests. There was nothing that he could do about it this time if the plane were to suddenly stall.

Gurlov noticed. “I promise you, this pilot is very well-trained, sir.”

“So was I.” He didn’t breathe easily until they were back on solid ground, and even then he could feel the sweat cooling on the back of his new shirt. He hadn’t flown in any capacity, even as a passenger, since the crash, and he remembered why that was now. All he could see were the clouds barreling past him and the alarms going off. He consciously forced himself out of recollection and looked over to Gurlov. “Do you keep going with me to the meeting?”

“Of course, sir. I was told to escort you. I was informed that you were likely to never get there if I didn’t make sure of it, sir, and was threatened by further demotion if I failed to comply or let you get away or didn’t get you to come in the first place.”

“They were going to knock you back down to the ranks?” Arkady laughed. “You must be the worst pilot in history, the worst at flying and the worst at managing your career. I don’t think I’ve ever met a pilot lower than a captain before.” That put him in a strangely good mood, and he waved towards the road. “I don’t have a car. I assume you do.”

“Yes, there should be a car waiting for us.”

“So you’re not even going to be doing the driving?”

“No, sir, just the babysitting.”