Aidan Redding Against the Universes

Forever Falls-1

Forever Falls

1Most universes don’t get an official name, only a number, but for obvious reasons everyone called this place Freefall.

This universe also had the messiest corpse I’d ever seen.

Devin Gupper, experimental mathematician and metallurgist, looked like he’d lost an argument with an orbital mass driver. His remnants lay crushed against the steel surface of the Debris Shield. Broken bones jabbed through his torn flesh. Blood dries normally in Freefall, but his uniform was still drenched.

I breathed through my mouth and demanded my stomach still itself. You will not throw up. You are Aidan Redding, security third and the toughest damn woman in this universe. You volunteered to come out here, and you will not throw up. I insisted that I believed myself, but I felt pretty sure I was lying on all counts.

Security Second Ella Forecourt knelt beside the body, her thin face thoughtful as she studied the wreck of Gupper’s body. “I can’t say for sure—we need to get him down to Medical and get a proper autopsy.” Ella had to raise her voice above her normal papery rasp to be heard above the constant rustle of wind. “But this doesn’t look like a beating.” The dinner-platter helmet perched on her head made her gaunt frame look even thinner.

“What then?” I really didn’t want to take another breath. There’s something extra horrible about the smell of a totally broken body, how everything that belongs inside you gets mixed into this gut-stabbing stench. I’d seen bodies before—you couldn’t spend your first year out of college working security for the Montague Corporation, exploring and exploiting alien universes with different natural laws, without someone having a heart attack or getting assaulted by antimatter-propelled chipmunks or discovering that the grass would eat your face on alternate Tuesdays.

But Devin Gupper’s death was the most spectacular and messy yet.

Forecourt looked up at me. “I’d say he fell.”

I couldn’t help it. I looked up.

The Debris Shield is a steel awning, about ten meters across and a hundred long, mounted in a long notch hacked in the jagged green-and-gray granite cliff. It reflected the endless sunlight with a brilliant silver shine you could probably see for kilometers. So long as I confined my gaze to the riveted and dent-pocked surface beneath my magnetic boots, I could pretend the steel deck was in a normal facility.

Looking up shattered that illusion.

The cliff goes up forever. No, it doesn’t look like it goes on forever. It really does. A stone horizon splits the sky and circles around left and right. The sky glares the red of a volcanic sunset.

The whole universe hung sideways. The only solid surface was this vertical cliff, with the Montague facility clinging to its face like a desperate ant.

Fall off the edge and you’ll never hit bottom.

Humans couldn’t live here. Life couldn’t even evolve here. The Portal’s mathematical transformations changed us so we could survive, but the only living things in this whole universe were the ones we had brought with us.

Montague engineers hadn’t built anything above the Debris Shield. That was the point of the Shield, to protect the facility from intermittent falling pebbles. If a rock came free directly over us, a hundred feet up or a hundred kilometers, it would eventually ping off the Debris Shield instead of my skull. Or anyone else’s. The sloping surface encouraged everything to bounce away from the facility below.

I never feared heights on Earth. But this looming, lifeless infinity gnawed at my soul. My magnetic boots and hemp safety line seemed inadequate against forever.

Gupper had disappeared seventeen hours ago. And he reappeared, just now, atop the Debris Shield. Had he climbed the cliff? What for?

“Redding!”

I jerked my attention back. After two months of inspecting cargo and airing the uniform, volunteering to climb onto the Debris Shield had sounded good. Apparently I wasn’t up for it yet.

Forecourt looked at me, head c****d. “The sooner you take the pix, the sooner we can get under cover.”

Freefall didn’t faze Forecourt at all. Okay, Redding you’re second toughest woman here. Still, get your act together!

I fumbled for the optical camera dangling from my neck. We both wore broad helmets and heavy padded impact suits, but a pebble at terminal velocity would still leave a mark.

Back on Earth, sousveillance cameras would have caught Gupper’s impact in life-definition video. If I’d needed actual photos, I would have used optic implants to suck in everything and sort out the good shots later. Digital cameras didn’t work on Freefall, let alone implants, and this camera only had thirty sheets of light-sensitive paper. I needed to capture Gupper from every angle in thirty shots, without touching his body and without letting my shadow cross the image, all with equipment three centuries obsolete.

Freefall doesn’t have a sun. It has many, a column of giant fuzzy orbs of fuming amber majestically plunging from the top of infinity to the very bottom, out in the middle of the hazy red sky. The red sky behind me, and below. So long as I didn’t stand where Gupper and I made a perpendicular line from the cliff, the yellow-red orbs shed enough light for the optical paper to work.

Peering through the tiny glass viewfinder, I framed Gupper’s black hair and a shoulder. The camera felt clunky in my gloved hands. At a press of the lever, the camera whirred to release a piece of plastic-coated paper no wider than my hand.

I set the exposed paper on the deck to dry, mindful not to touch the surface where the photograph would appear, and moved on to the next angle.

My magnetic boots clanked at each step. I got halfway around Gupper and had to circle back around to avoid dragging the safety line through the pool of coppery blood drying on the deck.

I’d joined Montague to see the universes, all the universes, not move shattered bodies.

Frame fractured flesh. Click. Whirr.

Thirty pictures isn’t enough to really document a death scene, but I split them as best I could. Despite the breeze, when I finished sweat covered my face. My stomach had seethed itself into a turgid knot, but I kept my gorge down even with intermittent surges of bile at the back of my throat.

“Good,” Forecourt said as I clicked the last photo, studying the images coalescing on the exposed films. “I can see why Montague put you on camera duty, you have a real eye for this. Now help me get him in the bag and down to Medical, and we’ll see if we can figure out how he died.”

I’m proud to say all three of us made it off the Debris Shield and behind safety rails before my lunch broke free.

2Doctor Cleese took one look at Gupper’s shattered remains and declared that he’d fallen. He took a few test samples, stuffed my death scene photos into Gupper’s medical file, and sent Forecourt and I on our way. I hadn’t gotten any blood on myself, but after stripping out of the impact armor I grabbed a quick shower in the locker room just to steam the stench from my sinuses. I came back to my locker, where I’d left my Montague uniform folded on a bench, and found a slip of paper on my khakis. Find out why Gupper went up there – Forecourt.

Forecourt supervised Facility security. I guess she had something more important to do than investigate the first accidental death on Freefall since the construction crew dug us into the cliff. I’d met every one of the one hundred and nine—eight people at the Freefall base, and vaguely remembered Gupper as the one of the maniacs who worked in the Diffusion lab, dangling from a zeppelin out in the haze. But a few of the Diffusion folks worked here.

And at least the Diffusion folks were less obsessed than the neutronium miners.

I slipped into my khakis, fastened the brass buckles on my boots, checked that my radio and taser were firmly clipped to my belt, and set out.

Where Medical and Security were buried inside the granite, the Diffusion lab clung to the outside of the cliff, supported steel girders driven a yard deep into the stone and high-tension cables strung up to the next layer of girders. At orientation they told me that the whole facility looked like an old North American pre-conquest cliff-dweller city. Better still, three of the Diffusion lab’s walls were clear glass—no, not plasteel, but actual, old-fashioned, so-called “shatterproof” glass. I’d been through here on my orientation tour and never felt the need to return.

The lab was normally quietly busy, the only sounds the occasional power tool or mathematical discussion. Now four people stood in a tight knot amidst lab tables and sample bins and dangling spotlights and tools. Stacked notebooks and binders filled the spaces where computers would sit in a lab on Earth, and shelves of thick paper books lined the inner wall. Computers didn’t work on Freefall.

Voices hoarse with grief cut off when I swung the door open.

News traveled faster than I did.

Haider Takamoto, mathematician and director of the Diffusion Lab, turned to face me and visibly steeled his round features. “Da?”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Aidan Redding, from Security. I know this is a hard time, but I need to ask you some questions about Devin Gupper.”

“What was he doing up there?” a tiny woman said. Her name danced on the tip of my tongue, but the text over her shirt pocket reminded me.

“Miss Pouter, I was hoping you could help me find out,” I said. “He worked with you fairly often.”

“About half the time,” Takamoto said. “Always the hope to stay here more, but his experiments drag him out to the Hindenbarge, da?”

That Ukraine Union accent can’t be real. Can it? “What exactly were his duties, Doctor Takamoto?”

Takamoto turned to the other woman in the room.

I knew Doctor Cedar. You couldn’t help noticing her. Redheads had become increasingly rare over the centuries, but some fluke of genetic chance had given Cedar copper-bright hair and a frame a handspan too tall for any other woman. A thousand years past, she would have manned the pikes just like the Irishmen around her and dared anyone to argue.

People called her Paddy. But not to her face.

“We were working on titanium,” Cedar said, her voice tight. “Building models, floating them out into the diffusion zone, seeing if we could make a strong, stable, diffuse titanium.”

“Don’t we mostly diffuse steel?” I asked.

She nodded. Tears glistened in her green—green—eyes, but the set of her jaw would have cracked anyone else’s bones. “Diffuse steel is profitable, but diffuse titanium would have been twenty-eight times so.”

“You could have done it,” said the fourth person, perched on his padded stool.

Cedar turned to glare at him, anger seeping through every word. “You told him it was stupid at every turn, Marcus.”

Marcus shrugged his bony shoulders. “Male bonding.” He ran his fingers through his curly Mediterranean hair. “You know. Just.. bullshit.” His voice grew soft. “But he knew his stuff, or he wouldna been here. You two woulda whupped it. I had a hundred on next month in the pool.”

The Montague Corporation’s ridiculous return on investment meant they paid the best salaries in the world, and they were choosy on who they took on board. I had no doubt of Gupper’s professional abilities.

Just his climbing ones.

Cedar shuddered, fighting back passions roused by Marcus’ ambush of support.

Takamoto reached her side half a heartbeat later. “Is okay to cry.” He put a solicitous hand on her shoulder. “Devin deserves a tear.”

Cedar’s chest shook for a moment, then she turned away from us, letting Takamoto’s hand fall.

Takamoto’s face flickered through worry, irritation, and distress. His eyes followed Cedar.

I knew the look. He had hopes, hopes involving Cedar and himself. With her unique look Cedar had probably caught the eyes of every man in Freefall, and kept half of them.

“I know it’s hard,” I said, “but I have to ask. Do any of you know why Gupper went above the debris shield?”