Planetfall
by David Barber
part 1
To wear the Engineer’s tattoo, there’s a test.
Kay steers Arp down unused corridors with flickering lights. The bruising grip on his bicep never loosens. They are heading for an airlock.
Kay and Arp are names from the generations that never knew Earth.
Chief Engineer Parker waits by the lock next to a row of ancient orange extra-vehicular suits. He wears the sidearm inherited from his father. Some wonder if there are still bullets for it, but no one has ever tried to find out. Parker is that sort of man.
Kay creaks the airlock door wide. “Get in.”
Arp hesitates. The Engineers run the Aft decks. Joining them is an escape from the drudge of everyday.
“It’s about trust,” prompts Parker. “We have to be able to trust you, and you have to trust us.”
Except Arp doesn’t trust Kay, doesn’t trust the look on his brutal face. Is this their way of getting rid of a troublemaker? Catching Kay off balance, Arp bundles them both into the lock and pulls the door shut.
“You crazy little—”
Parker peers curiously through the small round port.
“Not funny, Chief,” Kay shouts.
When the door opens again, Kay has his hands round Arp’s throat and Arp has his hand poised over the vent button. They stand motionless.
“Welcome to the Engineers, kid,” says Parker.
* * *
The boy was tired of scrubbing crud from the vat. He wiped his nose, smearing chlorophyll across his cheek. The boy is Arp. He hasn’t even imagined joining the Engineers yet.
The old man carried on explaining how the green boomed and bust. Booms, you tapped off the extra green for the kitchens. Busts, you recycled the soured batch and started again, but the vat had to be cleaned first. Now the boy knew this, too.
The man was one of the last contacts with the old world. When he died a decade later, Arp and his like were finally released from the past, free to fall into their own future.
“Tell me again about when they threw things away.”
The man roused himself. Opinion had it that his prentice daydreamed and was odd.
“I mean, how did they throw things away?”
“A world is big. They just left them someplace else.”
Perhaps the boy just wasn’t very bright. People said IQ was dropping because of some build-up in the closed recycling loop, or something essential getting lost, nobody really knew. Nobody even knew how to find out. Some said it was nonsense, but then the stupid would say that.
“Like stuff,” Arp suggested. Stuff was the irreducible exhausted residue that recycling wouldn’t touch any more. Lots of biostrains had gone weak.
“No,” said the man irritably, “not like stuff. What do we do with stuff?”
They stored crumbly bricks of stuff in the hope that somebody would come up with a use for it.
The man scratched at the sore on his chin, trying to recall the stories he’d heard as a child. “Alright. Say a man had a worn-out shoe. He’d just throw it away and get a new one.”
Arp understood new. Each meal was new. It might be yeast-cake or krill-stick, and sometimes with vegetables or fish. Fish was best. It was the notion of wasting things that he didn’t get.
“But where’s the new shoe come from?”
“Look,” said the old man, getting impatient, “they took things from the pile they hadn’t used yet, and when they’d worn them out, they threw them on another pile. Alright?”
Arp opened his mouth then thought better of it. The man didn’t smack him much, though he got angry more often these days. Arp couldn’t get past that first pile getting smaller.
Night-meal was krill-stick and green. Too salty. The man usually read until his eyes got tired. There was talk of tithing books again; cellulose for the bulk feedstock. The man shook his head. It was iron and magnesium the green needed.
Grumbling, he searched again for his book.
Tomorrow the scrubbed vat would be filled with nutrient and fresh green added. Squeezed into the hidden space behind it, a rare private space, Arp thought about waste. Something not put in the recycler. He tried to see what that meant.
You could tear up a book and scatter it, but that was just mulching. If you were hungry enough, you could even boil and eat it, so it still wouldn’t be wasted.
It took ages to move blocks of stuff, bury the old man’s book deep and cover it up again. He’d thrown the book away.
He said it out loud. He’d wasted it. Arp savoured the feeling of what it was like to be selfish.
* * *
Arp didn’t want to turn into the old man, but you had no choice about being prenticed. Arp was spindly for his age. His features were pale and sharp and his gaze guarded. He didn’t understand why girls ignored him, and there was something in his solitary nature that provoked boys.
Walking past them in the corridors, they would casually try to trip him, but he just kept his head down and stepped around. This was how it was for him. Like having the old man instead of parents. But this time one of them surprised him with a stinging slap to the head, and Arp had to be dragged off him, screaming and flailing.
He still relived that moment, stood over the cowering boy, following the horrified gaze of others down to the eyeball in the claw of his fist.
The family of the blinded boy came for Arp but the old man defied them, demanding a fair hearing. It was the first time Arp saw Chief Engineer Parker up close, his famous sidearm, the authority he wore so lightly.
“You do this?” he asked Arp, indicating the boy with the bandaged eye.
Arp nodded mutely. It must have been him.
The other boys were brought in one by one, and the Chief Engineer quickly spotted the contradictions in their stories. Soon there were derisive hoots from the crowd.
“My boy still lost an eye,” protested the father.
Parker turned on him. “You want an eye for an eye?”
“Want what’s fair,” the father muttered. The family glared at Parker.
“Fair? Your boy started it. Five against one.” Nods from the crowd.
Arp was an orphan, with no parents to offer compensation, so the Chief sent Arp away to the farm decks. Anything happened to him there, he warned, the family would answer to the Engineers. Arp didn’t understand, but he’d gained a reputation and was avoided. Farm work wasn’t closely supervised, and he found it easier.
Years later, someone with their own reputation for violence couldn’t believe the stories about this scrawny youth. The fellow used his fists on Arp and soon had him curled up whimpering. But Arp came back later with a metal rod and broke bones.
Folk whispered he was crazy. The Engineers, who stood aloof from all this, took notice.
* * *
After night meal, when the lights dimmed, grown-ups would sit and talk. Arp’s favourite stories were “The Boy Who Could Do Better,” and the scary one about the dark decks.
The boy who could do better never settled. He stirred recycling slurry, but didn’t like the stink and thought he could do better. He shovelled dirt on the farm decks but got blisters and thought he could do better. He scrubbed crud from vats, but got covered in green and thought he could do better. And so on. Arp misunderstood the stories. He also wanted more than life on the decks could offer.
Sometimes bits were added, like how the boy tried being Captain, but got tired of eating and drinking and sitting in a big chair all day and thought he could do better. Arp hated it when folk laughed at that.
And there were different endings. The boy opened an airlock because he thought he could do better Outside. Arp tried to imagine that. Sometimes the boy thought he could do better on the dark decks. That got mixed up with the scary story.
A boy — it was always a boy, no girl would be that stupid — gets lost on the dark decks and hears footsteps following him. He runs, but feels a breath on his neck. And so on. Then the storyteller grabs a child and tickles them.
There is nothing to eat on the dark decks, What can we put in the bubbling pot? Nothing to see in the dark, put my eyes in the pot. Nothing to hear in the dark, put my ears in the pot. Nothing to say, put my tongue in the pot. Don’t need your laugh, (more tickling) put that in the pot. What will you put in the bubbling pot?
Each child has to say something different. Arp once said he’d put his head in the pot and everybody laughed. He was angry and pleased at the same time.
Years after, he ended up with an Engineer’s tattoo, scavenging the same dark decks.
* * *
Arp held the lamp high and shadows danced on the walls of the empty space.
The dark decks were unheated and unlit; the ones nearest Aft were already stripped of anything useful. Scavenger gangs from Engineering had ripped copper wire from the walls or dragged machinery back to be cannibalised.
They didn’t believe the stories, but still made sure they were back by night-meal. They knew no predators but themselves, yet deep instincts warned otherwise. Only Arp worked alone, a sure sign he was a strange one, folk said.
These corridors had been abandoned long ago, during the Mutiny, when decks forward of Engineering were denied electric and great doors were lowered for a generation.
“Them that sides with the Captain, dies with the Captain,” a Chief Engineer famously says in a story.
Tradable items could still be found in empty rooms. Books and oddments like scissors and spectacles. But this picking over of the past wasn’t what Arp wanted to do either. He felt he could do better.
Peering, he held the lamp closer. There were fresh footprints in the dust.
He backed out into the corridor, where frost glittered on the walls and his breath clouded the air. For a foolish moment he thought he heard something and raised the lamp, peering this way and that.
“Wait,” insisted the something.
Arp bolted down the corridor, his heart hammering, not looking back for fear of a breath on his neck, until he stumbled over his own feet in the racing shadows, and the oil lamp smashed, slopping a ripple of faint blue fire along the deck.
Gradually the flames flickered into darkness. After a while, he imagined he could see again. Stepping forward, hands outstretched, he sensed a vast space, as big as Engineering and looked up. High above, stars were slowly moving. He was seeing by starlight.
At first Arp was too intent to notice a glimmer and a faint tapping sound, but something had sniffed him out and, lost in the dark, he whimpered. He whimpered like a frightened child.
“Wait,” said the man’s voice again.
And then a girl. “We have good news.”
* * *
They climbed deck after deck, all dark and cold. The man hobbled ahead, holding up a lamp and gripping a length of pipe that clinked on the deck like an extra step. The girl in the shadows beside Arp never stopped talking.
“What’s wrong with his foot?” Arp whispered to the girl.
“He just carries that pipe to fight off monsters in the dark.”
“Nothing wrong with my hearing,” Jek called back.
“We are taking you to the Bridge. We have something wonderful to show you.” Her accent was strange.
“So you’re Officers?”
The girl snorted a nasal sound, almost a laugh. A girl, careless of the dark decks.
“The Captain has a message for your Chief Engineer.”
Arp considered this. “But how do you manage without electric?”
She didn’t laugh now. “There was backup, separate from your reactors, called thermoelectric. But never enough.”
“But shutting the doors worked.”
Arp had forgotten the limping man.
“Oh, yes. We are only a handful now. Amy is my cousin. Everyone I know is a relative. You would have won in the end.”
“Jek is having a crisis of faith,” Amy whispered.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by David Barber
