A Flash Before the Eyes

by cliosmuse

Chapter 10

Saul Tigh grumbled a bit as he trudged along after the scientist. He glanced back at Sam and Starbuck. "So tell me, Starbuck, why is it precisely that you're still wearing those gloves?"

She looked down at her hands. The others had removed theirs (no external injuries, seemingly none internal either: no need). She shrugged. "Force of habit, I guess."

"So where are we going again?" Saul grumbled at their leader on this particular walk, Galen Tyrol.

"Brooklyn. We're going to Brooklyn." They traipsed along toward the Manhattan Bridge somberly. They had been walking for five hours. The journey could have been done more quickly, of course (even without availing themselves of subterranean or overground transportation). But, more often than pleased Starbuck, Galen would stop short in his tracks and turn in a circle, marveling at what had become of the City. (She and Sam, of course, had already borne witness to these sights on their journey uptown; but, in the end, she refrained from mentioning the delays, for she could tell from Sam's occasional winces that his body needed the rest.)

The Upper West Side: in ruin. The Park: shrouded in death. Times Square: bodies upon bodies; neon lights illuminated only in memory.

Tory: "And where are we going after that? That's the part that is sitting a little uneasy with me."

"Well, before we do anything, we're going to check radio waves, the internet, satellite transmissions for signs of life." He walked on but shot a pointed look back at Starbuck. "Just because you say there's no one left doesn't mean there's no one left."

Tory frowned. "No, I got that part too. It's the next part I'm not so sold on."

Again, Tyrol glared at Starbuck as he began to speak. "For the past fifty years, the U.S. government has been working steadily – and, I should add, covertly – on problems of deep-space travel. You know from your history books that the farthest we've sent a manned shuttle is to the orbit of Neptune. But the trip wasn't very well-received publicly. NASA was all but disbanded, and the space program has been sort of an underground project since then." He paused. "Figuratively and literally."

Tory frowned. "Can you remind me what happened?"

"It was before our time. Actually, my grandfather worked on that project; devoted his life to it. What happened shattered my family. It's why my father and I never spoke after I decided to pursue my degree in theoretical physics. Six months after liftoff, we lost satellite contact; after a year, we began doubting the survival of the vessel and crew. There were a few holdouts –my grandfather among them – who tried to remind the president that the trip was projected to take years. But it didn't do much good. We mourned our dead. There were vigils around the world for months, protests of the space program. So it was put into… remission, I guess. And when the crew came back into radio contact eleven years and thirteen days later, too many people had already forgotten or filed the whole expedition away as an unmitigated disaster to really notice. For all intents and purposes, they were dead; and, after all, there was no more space program."

Tory nodded. "But you kept working."

"And others before me. Communication through deep space is one serious problem. But so is our lifespan. It took the crew of the Apollo Redux a decade to get to Neptune and back. By the time they returned, they were ten years older. So if we couldn't make ships to go faster –"

Starbuck: "You couldn't?"

He glared. "We couldn't. We'd have to make our crew live longer. Hence our work on human stasis."

Tory shook her head. "So let me get this straight. You want to put the five of us into some sort of lala-land and shoot us out to the end of the galaxy? This is the great plan? Why in God's name would we want to do that? Why on Earth wouldn't we just try to rebuild what's here? I didn't become vice president of one of the largest financial corporations in the world without knowing a thing or two about organizational management."

Sam spoke for the first time. "Tory, the Earth is deadly. For whatever reason, we seem to be tolerating it. But that doesn't –" He choked on his words. "Doesn't mean our children could. My daughter didn't." He swallowed; tried to regain his composure. "We'd forage for a while; eventually run out of edible foods. And we'd die. I think I'd rather take my chances on space."

Galen pulled a map from his pocket. In the night, armed with a flashlight, Starbuck had raided the astronomy department, searching for viable representations of familiar star clusters. What she found were fairly rudimentary, but they would do: she had put together, as best she could, a heading and set of relative coordinates between Earth and the Twelve Colonies. The professor coughed. "And I guess we have a destination."

They walked on in silence for some time, each deep in his own thoughts (perhaps even contemplating this seeming shared destiny). Finally, Saul paused; glanced at his feet pointedly. "So, if we can fly to the outer corners of space, why can't we drive to this lab of yours?"

Tyrol kept walking. He felt as though he had been responding to Tigh's questions – all of their questions – all morning. He didn't know why the whole trip seemed to have suddenly become his responsibility: after all, this entire journey was Starbuck's idea. But, as she didn't seem inclined to respond to Tigh, he did: "First of all, a transporter would be unstable in traversing all of this rubble." (Bodies, he meant. Traversing all these bodies.) "Second, and most importantly, the electric starters in all of these vehicles will have been fried. Like we should have been."

As if to demonstrate his point, Saul crouched to the ground, placed his palm flush against it, and looked up at Galen with a smirk that read, "Like that?" As he drew his hand away, a blue spark, like lightning, followed. He dusted his hand off and shoved it in his pocket.

Galen nodded. "So we walk."

Tigh walked more quickly to catch up with the professor. "Oh, come on, Doc. We haven't even tried a transporter. What if you're wrong?"

Galen stopped in his tracks and swung around, his face red. "Okay. You want to know if I'm wrong? Does anybody else want to see if I'm wrong? Fine. We'll see if I'm wrong. It's the end of the world, and we'll see if I'm fucking wrong. From now on, get her to lead this little party."

He stomped over to the nearest vehicle, glared back at the group behind him, and reached his hand in through the open window, past the charcoaled driver. His hand was inches away from the starter when suddenly the engine came to life, and he fell backward, away from the car, scrambling on hands and feet away from it, crab-like. His eyes were wide. "I didn't touch it. I didn't touch it."

For a few moments there was only silence, and the noise of the engine, almost obscene in the quiet of this city.

It was Tory who broke the spell. "Well, it looks like you were at least partly wrong."

Galen was shaking his head, looking at his hand. "I didn't touch it. Didn't lay a hand on it."

Tory rolled her eyes. "Okay, so we'll do a little experiment." Looking around herself, she latched her eyes on the vehicle behind the one Galen had started. She marched toward it deliberately and opened the door (her hair stood slightly as she touched the metal). Reaching in, she held her hand six inches from the starter. She felt a slight shock, and the engine roared.

She pulled back from the car and smiled at the others in satisfaction. "I'd have to say, that's a pretty good party trick." She grinned slyly. "I think the only question now, Galen, is: your ride or mine?"

And so they debated the merits of the two vehicles over the terrain ahead, enjoyed to a degree the focus on something so frivolous in a world now barren of frivolity. When at last they were ready, Tory looked pleased with herself, Tyrol put out. They called to the others, and Sam and Tigh came forward. But Starbuck was nowhere to be seen.

Once she'd slipped out of sight, she began running. She ran and ran and ran, and it felt good to push her lungs to their maximum capacity, to breathe in this grey air. At first, she could hear their voices calling to her, but after five or ten minutes, it receded to nothing. It would do no good to explain why she had to do this alone.

Finally, she slowed, stopped. Pulled off her right-hand glove (made the mistake as soon as she did of brushing her fingers against a lamppost and pulled them back in an instant as the shock ripped through her body; looked at fingers in minor amazement as the blackened tips began to repair before her eyes). She dug her hand deep into her pocket and pulled out a pen and pad (a set insulated in non-conductive material; it didn't bear the scorched blackness that most of the bills that fluttered in the wind did). On the top sheet were scrawled copious notes in a script that looked still so incredibly foreign that she couldn't imagine how she'd written it.

Directions to the research facility. Access codes.

"Why do you need to write it down?" Galen had asked her before they'd left the university that morning.

"I'll feel better if I write it down," she said. "Just in case we get separated."

And so now, alone, she turned toward Battery Park to find Anastasia Dualla.