by F P Adriani
My mouth moved right to his ear. “How do I know you didn’t come because you wanted to see her again?”
He sighed then, his arms sliding up over my shoulders till our faces were almost pressed together. “I love you. Don’t you know that by now?”
My head lowered to the side a bit.
“Unfortunately,” Tan continued on a sigh, “I can’t prove it right now. If we do have an audience, I don’t want to give them that good a show.”
I laughed a little, raising my head now.
*
For the next several hours, we didn’t give them any shows—we didn’t give them anything. Someone had left a bunch of fiction books in the room. So both Tan and I read in mostly silence, then we napped in mostly silence. There was nothing else we could do. And considering that the naps might be the last resting opportunity we’d have for days….
A banging woke me.
Startling to a seated position, my hand reached for my gun and my head whipped around as my tired eyes struggled to adjust to the shadowy room…then they finally did adjust and I realized where I was. The banging had come from the hall: someone was knocking at the door.
Tan had woken too; he slid to sitting on his bed’s edge, his face looking so adorably sleep-sluggish that for an instant his expression tugged at my pounding heart, thankfully slowing it down.
The banging started again and I got up to open the door.
Chuck stood outside. “We’re almost at the destination. Arlene wants to see you. We need the coordinates.”
*
We stood in Hu’s room again, the four of us, the two “couples,” assuming Hu and Chuck were actually a couple.
I finally—verbally—gave them the latitude and longitude coordinates for The Grasslands location.
And then Hu frowned at me. “So you’re not going to show me the notebooks.”
“Nope. I memorized the numbers just for this.”
I watched her astonished angry eyes. “Are you telling me you left the notebooks somewhere?”
“Nope. They’re right here.” I held up my case, my fingers lightly tapping on it a few times.
Both she and Chuck groaned. And her voice rose quite a bit when she spoke. “So then you’ve been carrying them around in a suitcase?”
“This isn’t any old suitcase. And if you’ve got any bright ideas, you can’t open it. Only I can and only in a certain way will the contents be preserved then.”
Tan had been silently watching us all, but now he said, “Why should Pia trust you?”
“Why indeed,” said Hu. “I figured she wouldn’t. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t trust the coordinates. Nevertheless, they’ll need testing.” Turning to Chuck now: “Go to the bridge and give them the numbers. We’ll meet you there.”
Chuck walked away fast. I didn’t understand why we all weren’t going together. Then Hu started moving, favoring that same leg as earlier, the one the doctor had been manipulating.
Her face twisted now. She must have seen both Tan and I eyeing her with curiosity. She glanced at us, then away again as she slipped out into the hall. “I’m having issues with my leg. It’s been getting worse lately. The treatments temporarily leave me even more lame.”
We didn’t respond. We just kept walking. It seemed Tan didn’t want to watch her limping along, and I still didn’t want to think of Hu as anything other than a lunatic, certainly not someone who could be in pain. So what? She’d caused enough of that here….
We finally stood on the bridge.
Shayla was one of the pilots; she sat before the panoramic front window. A guy sat beside her, and another guy sat at a panel on the bridge’s right side.
In the window, a gray-brown blur of Diamond ground moved ahead of us.
“About two minutes till we reach the location,” Shayla said.
The transport slowed down quite a bit, and, even though the Sun would be setting soon, I could still make out the land’s features. It was mostly flat here, flat but treacherous, the super-sharp narrow grass blades growing into such tight tangles, it looked as if the pale ground had a coating of dark animal hair.
I didn’t know what the hell we were supposed to see among that tangle, but I’d given Hu the exact coordinates Amy had listed in her notebook.
“We’re above the target right now,” said Shayla. The transport hovered in circles over the spot, which looked like the same hairy mess as everywhere else around here.
Hu looked at me now, a little too hard a look.
I sighed loudly. “What—what? Those are the coordinates. I told you the truth.”
Her head turned to Chuck on her other side. He was examining one of the panels near that other guy, who I assumed was a navigator.
“Well?” Hu asked Chuck now. “Do you see anything remarkable about the topography?”
“I’m still looking,” he said. And the transport remained hovering-circling for a few minutes while he continued looking and punching at keypad buttons near the panel.
“Well?” Hu finally said again, but impatiently this time.
His head turned her way, our way. Then, slowly, he shook his head. “Nothing. No indication of anything unexpected, above ground or below ground.”
Now Hu turned right back to me, as if I were to blame.
I said fast now, “You yourself said this place was impenetrable. What did you expect to find?”
“If I had the notebooks you have, it would help.”
“Can I speak in front of them?” My head jerked hard, toward the other three Hu-people on the bridge.
“Yes. Everyone on the transport is cleared.”
“Well then, the notebooks didn’t say precisely what was at the spots, but she said they were covered, hidden. How she spotted them, I have no idea. Her notebooks have missing information—I mean I think they do. I’m not a scientist! I don’t know.”
“Well, Chuck has some science background. So if you’d let him see them….”
I didn’t respond.
And it was her turn to sigh loudly. “All right then. We’re making another stop soon.”
“Where?”
“To meet some people,” Hu said, motioning to Shayla, who revved up the transport’s engines. Hu turned, seeming about to walk away.
But my voice stopped her. “I’m not sure how much you know and Amy didn’t specify how, but she believed if the locations were disturbed…it could crack the planet.”
“Don’t say that about the cracking anymore,” Tan said fast now. Until that moment, he’d been silent the whole bridge-time. Now his mouth was shaking, and he’d turned his head away from me, his face the same mask of worry as the night before at dinner.
“It’s frightening, isn’t it?” Hu said, her cool eyes on him. “No matter where you are, there are forces bigger than you. But on Diamond—everything seems so hard and tough. It’s difficult to believe Diamond’s also fragile. The illusions here are being shattered, one by one.”
“Not fast enough,” Tan said, “at least the ones about the people.” There was a challenge in the hard tilt of his head—toward Hu.
I thought I saw a sarcastic laugh lurking behind her bland smile, but if the laugh really was there, it never left her mouth. “And you’re referring to…?”
“A friend of mine. Killed in a North Pine Mine explosion six years ago—that’s what I’m referring to,” he said, breathing in heavy angry gusts in her direction. They were standing pretty close together, but his agitated breathing bothered me more than his sudden passionate anger. I knew how Tan felt about his friend, but his response seemed more than that to me now….
And I wished he hadn’t said and done all this in front of Chuck, who once again looked like he wanted to kill Tan. He took a step forward, but Hu held up an arm in his direction before he could reach Tan.
She said to Tan now, “Well, I’m sorry about your friend. I think it’s past time I indicate that I’ve been privately negotiating with The Council lately. It hasn’t exactly
been going very well, but I’ve still sent suggestions over the grapevine to ease up on the sabotage. It’s been somewhat effective.
“The thing with rebellions is: the people who join them tend to be rebellious personalities. They easily reject listening to others, including rebellion leaders.
“But, ultimately, this has been a war—we may not be shooting missiles at each other, but it’s still a war. And there’s collateral damage then. You don’t plan collateral damage—it just happens, even when you’ve been told no one would be in a place somewhere, someone winds up being there.”
“Which is why you don’t fucking do what you’ve done,” Tan said, his voice rising.
She sighed very hard, her bottom lip vibrating with the rush of air. “Now look: this is neither the time nor the place for debating this. Do you really think that would help this new situation? You looked frightened before. Sorry to say this to you, but you need to remember that feeling, Tan.”
With that, she spun around and walked out of the bridge.
*
I followed her. I didn’t intend to; it just happened. My feet carried me out the doorway and behind her along the hallway.
“You have a real crap attitude,” I said to her back.
Her shoulders lifted once, but her head remained in its forward upright position. We reached her room and she punched the button to open the door. She turned around then, looked at me, sighed and said, “Just come in.”
So I did. She punched the button to close the door.
Now she asked me, “Did you do anything with the information I gave you about your parents?”
Stunned at the turn of the conversation, I just blinked at her.
A long silence followed while she stood there, apparently waiting for me to respond. “I didn’t do anything,” I finally said. “What could I do?”
She sighed again in an impatient way; then she shook her head, a slow disappointed shake. “So you’re just letting them get away with it.”
What the hell did she expect me to do? Go after them with guns blazing and thereby commit suicide?
But, really, the truth was: I had joined her in this mad trek partly because…it was like a fuck-you to them. Hu was an enemy of theirs. My getting involved with her sent a message of sorts. To directly fuck a giant human organization was always dangerous and could always backfire. But I was fucking them indirectly now; they just didn’t know they were being fucked. For now at least, this was the best I could do.
I said pretty much that same thing to Hu now.
And she finally nodded, her face looking less impatient. “I said to you once that we had more in common than you think. I won’t repeat that now. But you just think on that. Here’s the thing: I want to make a pact that we’re both satisfied in the end here. No matter what happens, we both get something at the end.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know yet. But do you agree?”
“I suppose so.”
“I expect people to honor their agreements.”
I just laughed. The irony….
“What I said before, about The Council—I really have been working on something there. They’ve made me an offer. A year of jail time. I’ve got to agree to never release the info I know. They also want me to hand over everything I have. That’s a deal breaker of course; I won’t be doing that. It’s my insurance. Like I’ve said, you know all about that, Pia.”
Now I wondered what the hell she was trying to tell me: would she soon be on their side? What the fuck? “Well, you basically just criticized me for doing nothing. Now you’re indicating you might cave?”
Her red-head shook whip-fast. “No, no caving. Just changing tactics. Maybe I’ve had enough of trying to work from the outside so far away. The progress has been too slow. And I’ve got to think of myself for once. This has all taken a toll on me, as you can see from my leg problem. I’ve not exactly been living in the most healthy way possible.”
“How do you know The Council’s telling the truth about their deal?”
“I’ve already had lawyers go over the offer. It’s in writing. It’s just a matter of our coming to an agreement, satisfactory for both sides. A year-long stint for general terrorist acts, and they’ll drop all the other charges. I’m probably going to do it to, well, help clear my name and reinvent myself. A year’s nothing.”
Hu must not have closed the door all the way because I suddenly heard Tan’s voice say, “It’s also not long enough.”
A loud sigh from Hu. She moved to the door and punched the button to open it further. She pulled a half-smile, half-sneer at Tan. When she spoke, her voice was back to her normal ice. “So nice to get support from someone whose dick you’ve sucked.”
Tan’s face reddened, his body shook; he looked as if he wanted to both yell and cry.
My mouth gaped at Hu. I didn’t know what the hell to say at first, I was so damn angry. I didn’t need the fucking visual she’d just given me.
My mouth finally moved and uselessly shot at her, “Did you really have to say that?”
I rushed out of the room, hearing Tan growl, “Goddamn you,” at Hu.
*
“Pia,” said Tan.
“Pia,” he repeated in a louder voice.
He was out in the hall, knocking on the locked door of our bunk room. I stayed put. Fuck him.
“Come on, Pia. I’m just letting you know we’ve landed, wherever the hell we are….”
I grabbed my case, opened the door, and said loudly to him, not caring if anyone heard, “No more of this sleeping in the same bunk room.”
“What—why?” His pale beautiful face looked hurt. But I really didn’t give a shit at this point.
When he spoke this time, his voice was a lot lower. “Don’t let this happen—don’t let it split us up.”
“Oh I see: when you wanted to do that for weeks now, it was okay. But when I’m not happy, I’m just supposed to suffer my dissatisfactions.”
I moved down the hall. And he trotted behind me as he said, “But you’re unhappy about things that happened years ago—I can’t change them!”
I reached one of the transport’s outside doors; I punched it open and stepped through. It was nighttime here, the stars glistening high above in the black. But the transport’s lower lights threw enough light onto the ground so I could see for quite a ways: no humans nearby.
I stepped farther away and turned to Tan. “You know, I wish for things sometimes. Silly things. You know what I wish? That we both met each other first; that there was never anyone else but you for me and me for you, that we’d both been virgins.”
Now Tan said in a soft slow voice, “But that’s not silly. People feel that way when they love someone else. I feel that way about you too….”
“I didn’t know you then, so now I don’t know all of you—there’s a piece missing. And she’s got it,” I said, hurt in my voice more than anger now. The hurt felt worse. She’d had him when he was innocent, when his outlook on everything, including Diamond, might have been different. He was probably a different person then. And I’d never know that person….
“But I don’t know anything about you from then either,” Tan said now. “And I still feel like I don’t know you. You’re still full of secrets, things I don’t think you’ll ever tell me, no matter what.”
“Maybe some things I can’t tell you about,” I said in a quiet but grim voice.
A noise came from the transport: Chuck suddenly walked out, followed by Hu, Shayla, The Joker from that night of the costume ball, and the doctor. The doctor wasn’t holding his bag, but The Joker was holding a Heran automatic weapon.
“We’re meeting someone,” Hu informed me and Tan. I just sort of nodded in her direction. I couldn’t look at her right now. For a moment inside her room, I’d felt as if we’d come to some weird understanding; then she’d destroyed that understanding with that comment to Tan. I’d never been a jealous person, but that comment nevertheless burned my ass. Wh
ere Tan was concerned, it seemed I was becoming increasingly selfish….
“Do we wait here or what?” I asked Hu, feeling annoyed again.
“We walk, in the direction behind you.”
I now saw that Shayla held a big floodlight in her hands, and she shone it beside me.
Keeping mostly inside Shayla’s bouncing beam, we all moved across a big field…for quite a while, uphill. I was beginning to pant. So was Tan beside me, but I barely looked at him the whole time.
“Where the hell are we going?” I grumbled into the night air as I adjusted my case on my back.
“Better get used to this,” said Hu, sounding really out of breath. “Transports can’t…fly directly over much of Astrals. They’re watched by satellite too—don’t want too much attention. We may…have to hike our way up.”
“What!” I said, over my shoulder. “But Tan and I aren’t prepared for that.”
“Oh don’t worry,” Hu said. “We’ve…got everything we need.”
“I’m sure you do,” said Tan. “But it would have been nice if you’d fed us on the transport.”
There was a silence. “Well…I am sorry about that. It totally slipped my mind….”
“I’m sure,” Tan said, sounding snide now.
I was about to speak again and echo what he’d said, but a loud voice preempted me.
“Stop right there,” the voice boomed from in front of me and Tan. I stopped, he stopped, I assumed everyone did because near the beam of light’s edge stood a short man holding a long large gun—and pointing it right at us.
My gun sat in its usual holstered place beneath my jacket, but considering I was outgunned, I wasn’t about to pull my gun. At least it turned out I didn’t have to….
“Damian, it’s me,” Hu suddenly called from behind me. Then she stepped forward more.
The guy seemed to shift, his gun tilting down a bit. “Arlene? Well this is a surprise. I don’t know these other people at all though.”
“They’re with me,” Hu said.
