Atlas Alone Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  BEFORE MARS

  “A psychological thriller wearing the cloak of a gripping sci-fi story . . . delivered in excellently page-turning fashion.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A thrilling read but . . . also a deep dive into the protagonist’s psychology as she grapples with what she discovers on the Red Planet.”

  —Space.com

  “Part science fiction, part corporate conspiracy thriller; Newman navigates both landscapes while deftly transplanting the myriad social, economic, and political struggles [that] we know on earth, but are grossly magnified in the confines of a Martian colony. . . . [Newman] channels both Andy Weir and Elon Musk to craft a compelling space odyssey.”

  —The Mountain Times (NC)

  “A slow-burn psychological thriller . . . a science-fictional spin on the gaslighting theme [depicted in] novels such as The Girl on the Train.”

  —Financial Times

  PRAISE FOR

  AFTER ATLAS

  2017 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD NOMINEE

  “Newman writes with exquisite precision of grief, divided loyalties, and the struggle for self-actualization . . . gripping and sorrowful.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A lovely locked-room mystery in which the stakes are incredibly high. . . . Emma Newman creates addictive page-turners, and this is another fine example.”

  —Starburst

  “Newman combines the classic mystery novel whodunit with a frighteningly possible reality of corporate-owned governments . . . keeps the pages turning until the unexpected conclusion.”

  —Booklist

  “After Atlas is a complete and nearly perfectly plotted and paced story.”

  —Books, Bones & Buffy

  “The story dug its hooks under my skin so that even now, days later, I’m still reeling from that punch-drunk sensation I get when I finish an amazing book. . . . Emma Newman has written a police procedural like she was born into this genre, laying out the clues and following up on all the leads before pulling everything together for a stunner.”

  —The BiblioSanctum

  PRAISE FOR

  PLANETFALL

  “Gripping, thoughtful science fiction in the vein of Tiptree or Crispin. Unique, timely, and enthralling . . . absolutely beautiful. What a glorious, heartbreaking maze of a book.”

  —Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author of Once Broken Faith

  “Newman has crafted a thrilling tale of murder, mystery, and madness on a world where humanity is still its own worst enemy. Horrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure, the catastrophe driving this narrative will keep you riveted until the very last page.”

  —Kameron Hurley, author of The Stars Are Legion

  “Builds and builds to this remarkable crescendo. . . . The ending had me breathless . . . an awesome book.”

  —Roxane Gay, author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

  “Think Interstellar; think Prometheus. . . . Beautifully written: an unfolding alien mystery and complex, utterly believable characters.”

  —Stephen Baxter, national bestselling author of The Light of Other Days

  “Filled with wonders, revelations, and edge-of-the-seat suspense, Planetfall is a fascinating, heartbreaking exploration of love and loneliness set against an awe-inspiring backdrop. An instant classic of the genre.”

  —Gareth L. Powell, BSFA Award–winning author of Macaque Attack

  “A strange but mesmerizing book in which almost nothing is as it seems . . . reads at once like a character study, a mystery, a hard-science-fiction tale about the colonists on an alien world, and a surrealist science fiction about alien life.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “This heartbreaking adventure is a tragedy of science and faith.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY EMMA NEWMAN

  PLANETFALL

  AFTER ATLAS

  BEFORE MARS

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Emma Newman

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Newman, Emma, 1976– author.

  Title: Atlas alone / Emma Newman.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Ace/Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019. | Series: A Planetfall novel

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018050764 | ISBN 9780399587344 (paperback) | ISBN 9780399587351 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | FICTION /Psychological. | FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6114.E949 A95 2019 | DDC 823/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050764

  First Edition: April 2019

  Cover art by Anxo Amarelle CGI

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Bobbu. They know why.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the Planetfall Novels

  Also by Emma Newman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  THE TRICK IS remembering that it’s all a game. Somewhere along the way I seem to have forgotten that. I don’t even know what the rules are anymore.

  “So, the rules are very simple,” Travis says, smiling as he shuffles the playing cards. “We each start with ten cards and—” He fumbles, scattering a few of them across the table. He laughs, dragging them back into a pile. “This is harder to do in real life than in mersives.”

  Travis brushes a lock of auburn hair back from his face, one that is too handsome to be believable in real life. He looks like he should be a nonplayer character in a mersive, the sort a creative director would choose as the dangerous lover in a spy story. Or the romantic lead in some soft porn mad
e for lonely hearts. And I can see how looking that way has made Travis’s life easier. How he merely chuckles at his own ineptitude rather than rushing to hide or downplay it.

  “Right, let’s try that again. Beggar-my-neighbor is a really easy game in which . . .” He pauses, looking across the table at Carl. “Are you with us, Carl?”

  Carl is resting his chin on his hand, eyes glazed over. His black hair, still thick even though he’s in his forties, is now peppered with gray. It’s like he’s aged ten years in the last six months and lost a stone in weight that he really needed to keep on him. Poor bastard. I’ve known him for over twenty years now and I’ve never seen him look this bad. Not even when we were being hot-housed.

  He blinks. “Yeah, sorry. Just a bit tired.”

  “Have you eaten?” Travis asks softly.

  Carl just glares at him.

  “We’re worried about you, Carl,” Travis says. “Aren’t we, Dee?”

  Inwardly, I groan. This is not the way to handle Carl. There is no way to handle Carl when it comes to his hang-ups about printed food. And dragging me into this is not going to help either.

  I look at Carl, then back at Travis. “Don’t bring me into this.”

  “Into what?” they both say at exactly the same time.

  “Into this”—I wave my hands at them—“intervention.”

  “Eh?” Travis cocks a perfectly shaped eyebrow at me. “This is just a card game, Dee.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Carl says to me. “This is an intervention, but one for you, not for me.”

  Carl directs another glare at Travis. “At least, that’s what I was told.”

  Travis sighs, resting the pack of cards in the palm of one hand. “I’m worried about you too, Dee. I just thought that spending some time playing something easy and relaxing together would be good for you.”

  I fold my arms and sit back. “And there was me thinking you had a sudden hankering to play shitty old games in a state-of-the art spaceship. I thought you might have found it funny or something.”

  “Well, I did have a ‘sudden hankering’ to play it,” he says with a shrug. “I was playing a mersive and there was this family and they were playing beggar like my gran—” He waves a hand. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you haven’t played mersives with us for . . . months. You keep canceling plans. And when we finally persuade you to come and join us, you drop out.”

  “He has a point,” Carl says, his voice softer. “We haven’t shot the shit out of stuff on Mars since . . . since a long time ago.”

  How much is held, left unsaid, in that pause. And the irony is, the thing he won’t say, that he is skirting around like an arachnophobe locked in a room with a tarantula, is the reason I don’t play games anymore.

  But I won’t say it either. I can’t. So I end up just sitting there, staring at my best friend and his sort-of lover, none of us mentioning the thing that is slowly killing us.

  “I just haven’t fancied it,” I finally say, drenching the words in nonchalance in the hope the two of them will just slide off and we’ll talk about something else.

  Travis and Carl exchange a look. I swear, if either of them says another word about this bullshit, I will walk out of this crappy communal eating area, find an air lock and chuck myself out into the void. We’re six months out from Earth now, and the cold vacuum of space is more appealing to me than this room’s depressing functional furniture and 360-degree display of whatever sentimental view of Earth has been called up by the last people in here . . .

  And then I don’t see the table, the chairs, the others. I see a huge bed with luxurious dark gray cotton sheets, the bright colors of the communal room fading to the muted tones of my parents’ bedroom.

  “Can you put the mountains view on the wall for me, Deanna? You know the one—the one I like.”

  Picking up the remote . . . cycling through the interface to display the mountains for him on the bedroom wall. The smell of vomit lingering even though I’d scrubbed the carpet twice. Watching the huge television display change from a sunset over New York to a mountainous landscape that was always his favorite. “There you are, Daddy.”

  “Thank you, Button. Oh, that’s so beautiful. That’s better.”

  Turning around, noticing his eyes swollen shut so he couldn’t possibly be seeing the view, the crusted blood, the way his forehead seemed to curve inward above his right eye and the terror of it! The terror of seeing the towering man I adored lying on the bed. Dying.

  “Dee?” Carl takes my hand. “You with us?”

  I blink. There’s a forest showing on the walls around us. Not mountains. There’s the background hum of Atlas 2’s life support. We’re not even on Earth anymore. And I’m not a child.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I was miles away.”

  It’s then that I notice how bloodshot his eyes are, and the scattering of burst capillaries around his eye sockets. He could get those sorted out, if he wasn’t so terrified of a stranger touching him. Shit. I should have done something sooner.

  “Carl . . . have you thought about getting some help with the food thing?”

  He pulls his hand away and picks up the small pile of playing cards in front of him. Shit, there’s a pile in front of me too. When the hell did Travis deal those?

  I pick up the cards I’ve been dealt and start to spread them out like a fan. I’ve done this only a few times in mersives, and my fingers feel clumsy holding the real thing. The design is quite bizarre, now I’m looking at them, especially the royal cards. So stylized, so . . . old. They’re not newly printed, and the edges are worn soft from handling.

  “Where did you get these from?” I ask.

  “They were my grandmother’s,” Travis replies, sorting his cards too. “She taught me how to play all sorts of games with them.”

  “Did she not like tech or something?”

  He laughs. “She was the lead programmer on Bright Purple.”

  I lean back, impressed. Bright Purple was one of the most disruptive, radical crowd-sourced AI projects of the early twenty-first century. Arguably, their work made the interface with our Artificial Personal Assistants what it is today. And as their work was unassociated with any corporation or single government, they could take the research in directions that no one else thought were profitable, leading to breakthroughs that made neural chip technology possible. I know about it only from work; one of the young up-and-coming mersive directors wanted to find something edgy to make a documentary about, but we couldn’t even get her proposal past Legal. Someone in the Noropean gov-corp really didn’t want that story from the time of democracy and wild crowd-sourced activism to be dredged up again.

  “What happened to that project?” I ask. “It never made it into the post-riots history mersives.”

  He nods, not looking up from the cards. “Well, it didn’t fit the post-riots narrative, did it? Couldn’t have people remembering that some really good things were happening before the collapse of democracy. That maybe the gov-corps weren’t the magical, fair solution they wanted everyone to think they were.”

  I’m surprised by the bitterness in his tone. He’s usually so . . . positive. So eager to be liked.

  Carl has noticed it too and is looking at him over the top of his cards. “Was she still alive when . . .”

  “No,” Travis says quickly. “She died when I was at university.”

  The atmosphere, not great to begin with, sinks even further. We all spend far too long arranging our cards. Travis turns over the top of the remaining cards in the center of the table between us as I think a command to my APA: “Ada, show me the rules of beggar-my-neighbor.”

  A few lines of text appear overlaid across my vision. Travis was right, thankfully—the game is really simple. “Oh, wait a minute. We’re not supposed to look at our hands,” I say, and the other two groan. One read-throug
h and I blink the rules away. My APA interprets the movement and the words zip up into the top right, forming an icon I can select if I want to refresh my memory during the game.

  “Well, this can be a practice round,” Travis says, back to using that disarming smile. It doesn’t work on me though.

  “And the first card turned over and put in the middle is from your own hand,” I add. “We’re just supposed to have our cards facedown in a pile in front of us.”

  Carl collapses his fan of cards and dumps the pile down in front of him. “This game had better be worth it.”

  “You’re just hangry,” Travis says. “Why don’t you eat something and then you’ll enjoy it far more.”

  I sink a little in my seat, waiting for Carl to blow up at him, but the poor bastard hasn’t got the energy for that. “No, it’s fine.”

  Travis puts his cards down too, looking at him. “It really isn’t, Carl. Look at you. You’re wasting away.” He looks to me for support, but I keep my eyes on the cards.

  “All right,” Carl snaps, holding his hands up. “What do you want me to do? Admit that I’ve been struggling to adjust to life on board? I can’t be the only one!”

  “Why don’t you talk to us about it? We want to help. Right, Dee?”

  I want to punch Travis so hard right now. This is not my style, nor is it Carl’s. This is the sort of “friendship gets us through everything” bullshit sold by twats marketing nostalgic mersives that hark back to a time when people socialized outside of work. But if I say nothing, I’ll look like a bloody drone. I look at Carl, meeting his eyes, hoping I am conveying a silent apology well enough.

  “We won’t judge you,” Travis carries on. “Why don’t you tell us about what you’re struggling to adjust to?”

  Is he fucking joking? Does he want Carl to mention the thing we haven’t talked about for months but have thought about constantly?

  Carl slides down in his chair. “Just . . . I mean, c’mon, living in a giant . . . metal . . . skyscraper ship thing flying through space . . . It’s . . . unnatural.” So he still can’t talk about it either.