by C. Gockel
“No, you’re not recovering. You’re getting worse,” James said, putting a hand on her arm.
Noa jerked her arm away and broke into a lope again. A moment later, they reached the end of the block of townhomes. She attached the top of the ladder to a rooftop behind some enormous fern trees. She half-slid, half-climbed to the bottom, and then peered down the street. “I don’t hear any patrols,” she said.
“Nor do I,” said James.
Noa looked back at the ladder. “Might as well leave it … can probably walk through the rest of the complex.” She inclined her head toward a wall of fern trees that demarcated the edge of the townhome development. Perhaps twice as tall as the townhomes, they obstructed the view of her brother’s buildings.
“Let’s continue on the ground,” she said, heading in the direction of the trees. The street had lamps, but it was an older section of the neighborhood, and there were plenty of trees and ferns to hide among … and truthfully, she didn’t want to scale another roof right now; she was tired. She needed to conserve her strength. She bit the inside of her lip. Was she sick, as James had said? So many women had gotten sick in the camp. Of course, she had to have been exposed to something. She shook her head. Illness had a mental component. She would will herself through this; she could have her breakdown later, on the Ark, once they got past the blockade. Ducking her chin, she broke into a lope again, but she was grateful that she needed to stop and check to see if the coast was clear between clumps of vegetation and shadow.
A few minutes later, they reached the fern trees. The trees were part of a narrow stretch of “urban forest.” Civic planners had put a path down the center of it. Skirting the path, Noa led James toward Kenji’s building.
After long minutes of silence, James said softly, “Who will fly the Ark if you are caught?”
“I don’t know.” Noa panted, and her gut constricted. “Maybe Ghost could share the engineering designs of the ship, and one of the Fleet personnel could fly it?”
“Do you think a pilot could be prepared in less than forty-eight hours?” James asked.
“Maybe,” said Noa, panting heavily.
James continued, his breathing regular, his lope easy, “I’m not a tactical expert … but it seems once the protests take place, it will be difficult to stage them again. At least some of the leaders will be captured.”
Noa only grunted. She tasted bile on her tongue.
James was mercifully silent for a few more minutes, but then he asked in a light voice, “Is it standard military procedure to rescue a single individual at the possible expense of the mission?”
“If that person is of strategic importance, yes. Starmen don’t leave Starmen behind.” Noa said it to herself, to James, and to the universe at large. She could barely hear her own words over the sound of her panting.
“But he is working for the other side,” said James.
“They’ve deceived him,” Noa hissed. “You don’t understand how vulnerable he is!”
She drew to a stop, her locator app telling her they were in the correct place. She went to the edge of the trees. Kenji’s building was across a field of open parkland the size of one city block. She didn’t need an app to know the distance. The city was built on a plan. A block was 500 meters. Between her location and Kenji’s building, there was a playground, a dog walk area, plenty of trees and shrubs, and a “nature walk” that cut a circuitous route through the field. He’d chosen the home so he could be close to nature even in the city; he hated crowds. Now, for Noa, it meant plenty of places to hide.
Her eyes scanned the building and she picked out his unit. Noa’s breath caught in her throat. “I see him!” she said. She didn’t think she’d ever really believe in God, but she did at that moment. She felt so much relief swell in her chest that it was almost physically painful. A part of her hadn’t believed Ghost when he’d said Kenji was still free—she thought it was false data to lead her astray. To lead her here to be captured …
“I see him, too,” James said.
Noa scanned the park. She didn’t see any Guards on the trails. She looked to the roof of the building, and didn’t see any snipers, but James was right. They would be waiting for her inside. So she had to keep her time within the building limited. She scanned the balconies. Maybe she could climb up on the outside; she still had her coil of rope. She remembered James jumping half a meter in the air. If they could just reach the second level, between the rope and his augments, they could make it. She took a deep breath and felt fear turn her limbs to cold lead. Maybe James could make it ... Her hands and limbs were shaking, not with fear, but with exhaustion. She gritted her teeth. She’d made a career of taking action despite her fear. She crept closer to the edge of the field. They’d thought they’d catch her—but she’d steal him out from beneath their noses.
She took another step forward.
“Noa,” James whispered.
She took another step.
“Noa,” James whispered again.
She opened her mouth, about to tell him her plans, when he hit her from the side and behind, knocking her flat to the ground behind a small cluster of ferns just before the forest edge.
She lay in the damp earth, without protest, certain he’d knocked her down for good reason. Her heart beat in her ears, she could see nothing and hear nothing. His weight made her ribs and her lungs ache.
“What are you doing?” James whispered, his voice urgent. “You almost walked into the spotlights!”
Noa peered out over the dark field. “What spotlights?”
“You don’t see them?” James whispered, shifting his weight and allowing her to breathe a little more.
“No, I don’t, get off me!” Noa said, trying to pull herself out from beneath his hovering body to the edge of the cluster of ferns to get a better look. James knocked her flat again.
“What are you doing?” Noa snapped.
He didn’t answer, but she felt his hand at her temple—or his fist, rather—and heard the click of a hard link being inserted, and suddenly the scene before her transformed. Spotlights were sweeping through every inch of the park. They were mounted on the roof of Kenji’s building. Noa’s eyes widened. In the physical world she saw only darkness, but superimposed over the shadows were men in camouflage wearing elaborate eye gear—a lot like night vision goggles from the old military museum. A team of four was moving in James’s and Noa’s direction. They stopped and dropped below a low embankment about 400 meters away. She made out the shapes of rifles on their backs. Noa’s shock raced across the hard link before she could stop it.
James’s voice came in her mind. “You did not see?”
Noa trembled with rage and helplessness. She projected the dark park she did see. She looked up at the spotlights, and mentally cursed in every language and dialect she knew. James was still on top of her, but his avatar appeared just in front of her. “Well, that language was colorful,” he said. She felt nothing when he said it, no flash of amusement, nothing, but his avatar did raise a brow.
Noa let her avatar stand beside his.
“What is your plan?” he said.
Scanning the balconies with James’s eyes, Noa saw Guards there as well. Her dismay slipped across the hard link before she realized she still hadn’t battened down the apps that hid her emotions. “I’ll figure something out,” her avatar said. She hadn’t thought it would be easy.
James’s avatar turned to hers. She didn’t feel any emotion over the link; but his avatar’s brows were drawn, and his lips were turned down. It was strange how alien a frown looked on his usually stoic face. Noa’s avatar looked away quickly and back to the scene before her and the spotlights she hadn’t seen. “It’s light just outside of the visual spectrum,” she mused through her avatar.
In the periphery of her vision she could see his avatar blinking. “Ah … you’re right,” James murmured. “Ultraviolet. I didn’t know I could do that.”
“How well can you see my brother?�
�� Noa’s avatar asked. “Do you have telescopic vision as well?”
The perspective changed so quickly, it was like watching the zoom on a hologlobe. Suddenly, she was sitting down on Kenji’s balcony looking up at him through the glass doors. To her immense relief, Kenji didn’t look harmed, or even nervous. He held a cup of tea; his hand wasn’t even shaking. His clothing was neat and pressed, he’d gained a little weight, in a good way, and his hair didn’t show the telltale signs of fidgeting it always revealed when he was nervous. “He looks good, at least,” she breathed.
“He looks very well,” James said.
Noa’s heart pounded in her chest. “They didn’t incarcerate him because they wanted to use him as bait,” she said into his mind.
“But they thought you were incarcerated—why would they need to do that if you were already locked up?”
“They must have just released him.”
“Then why doesn’t he look half-starved like you do?” James’s avatar said, and she was shocked by the anger in his voice.
Noa couldn’t answer. In the physical world, she struggled to get up, to crawl closer, but James grabbed her, and like the devil on the shoulder in a Luddeccean holo he said, “He never went to the camps, Noa.”
Noa frowned. As though that meant anything. Her mind spun … “Because he’s brilliant … they’d still find a use for him. Especially since they don’t rely on the ethernet, they’d find his mind indispensable. They probably threatened him … said they’d hurt me if he didn’t cooperate. I’ve got to get him out of there, I can’t let them use him!”
“He doesn’t look like someone who is worried about his sister dying,” James said, as Kenji took a neat sip of tea. Before she could retort, James said, “He seems quite safe. By trying to save him you’d be putting his life at risk, wouldn’t you? The men we saw in the field were armed.” He didn’t look at her when he said it. His voice was light, almost curious, as though it weren’t a question of life or death but a mental exercise. “Noa?”
“Of course I have to save him!” she shouted over the mental link, though she remained silent where they hid behind the shrubs. “He’d do anything for me—anything for this planet and his people!”
James’s avatar tilted his head. She felt nothing from him, but his avatar looked doubtful. “If he would do anything for his people … would he want you to risk your life and the mission to save him?”
“He … he … ” Noa’s avatar crumbled to the floor of her brother’s apartment. Behind the ferns, in the physical world, her head fell to the damp earth. She locked down all her emotions before they rose in a deluge.
Kenji had his arm through Noa’s. He guided her through the penthouse apartment on Luddeccea, threading them past the party guests. It wasn’t his apartment; that was below in the same building. This one belonged to someone from the First Families. Noa noted that the furnishings were simple and tasteful, the carpeting below her feet was as soft as her bunk, and there was a prayer room off to one side. A crucifix was prominently displayed on the wall, flower vases and three books directly below it. Noa knew without looking that the book directly below the crucifix was a Bible, to the left would be the Torah, and the right would be a Koran. The owner of the apartment was Christian, obviously, but all of Luddecceans gave respect to the Three Books. The room was empty. It would be in bad taste to step inside a prayer room during a party … which begged the question of why put the prayer room in a central location in the home, and leave the double doors wide open—but First Families always made sure the prayer room was in a prominent location.
Her brother patted her arm, snapping her attention back to him. Kenji was smiling, just a quirk of the lips, but on Kenji that was a sign that he was ecstatic. They reached the floor-to-ceiling windows that were the western wall of the abode, and he said, “You won’t see a view like this on Earth.”
The penthouse overlooked a park in the heart of Prime, the main city on their home world. The sky was crystalline blue, and there wasn’t a rim of smog that followed the horizon. Noa’s eyes roved over the tops of the strand of fern trees that marked an urban nature trail. She thought she could make out a complex of homes between their branches, but with the angle it was difficult to tell. Beyond the homes she saw a few buildings and then …
“The ocean,” said Kenji, “without a large stain of sewage just offshore.”
“You’re right, it’s nothing like Earth,” Noa said … or a shell of Noa said. She had a strange sensation as though she was here, and not here. She was half a being. Her hand instinctively went to the scars on her abdomen, still in the process of healing. At the last moment, she jerked her hand away, and nervously fidgeted with her rings instead.
Kenji didn’t seem to notice. Still beaming, he said, “You should move back here. Exciting things are happening.” Part of her wanted to say yes. To go back to the starship where she and Tim were stationed … had been stationed … felt like a return to prison. It was the walls—the gray industrial metal walls of the whole damn ship, even the room they shared. The small three-meter-by-three-meter space that was their home hadn’t been so bleak with Tim to tease her, to smile at her, or even to shout or scream. Even their fights had been life, their life, and now it was broken. She could fill her half-life with crystal blue skies and verdant green, find a new life here in the place where she had once lived.
Her thumb twisted the rings around her finger. The grief counselor had said not to make any decisions before the end of one Terran year. Noa closed her eyes.
She heard a change in the conversation among the guests as at least twenty divergent conversations merged into one soft murmur.
“My friend is here!” Kenji said. “Come, I’ll introduce you to him.”
Before she could protest, Kenji spun her around. A man whom Noa didn’t recognize strode through the front door. His uniform and the ribbons on his chest marked him as a Captain in the Luddeccean Guard.
“Yon is amazing,” Kenji said. “He worked his way up the ranks, and he’s not even a First.”
That he had made it to Captain in the Guard without being a First Family member spoke volumes about his competence. But Noa couldn’t help notice that he didn’t smile as they approached. “Captain Yon, this is my sister Noa, I told you about her,” Kenji said. “She is scheduled to re-enlist in the Fleet in a few months. You should talk her out of it. She was a hero during the Belt Battles of System 6. She’s a pilot and would be a great addition to the Local Guard.”
Yon looked down his nose at Noa. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, Kenji,” he said. His face remained completely impassive. He looked down at Noa’s hand. One of his eyebrows rose. “You’re married … what does your husband think of having a pilot for a wife?”
And this was why Noa could never come home. Yon might have climbed the ranks on merit, he might be able to see the value of people beyond the offspring of the Firsts, but he would still have a blind eye to female talent. Even though, despite his higher rank, Noa had seen more combat, and had more genuine experience than he had or was likely ever to have.
“I don’t have a husband,” Noa said, not surprised Kenji hadn’t bothered to mention that she was widowed. It was the sort of thing that would slip his mind, even though he had teared up at Timothy’s memorial.
The Captain’s brow furrowed into a scowl. The corners of his lips curled down. His gaze shot to Noa’s rings, and then back to her. Maybe if she said she was a widow he’d give her a look of pity instead of a look of disdain that bordered on betrayal. She really didn’t want his pity. When his eyes met hers again, Noa gave him a tight smile.
Not returning the smile, he excused himself, and crossed to talk with another two officers of the Guard across the room. The slight smile on Kenji’s face as Captain Yon left gave Noa pause.
Later, when they were back at Kenji’s place, her brother surprised her by saying, “I’m sure Captain Yon will offer you a better position in the Guard than you have in th
e Fleet.” While she was straining a splash of potent redfruit juice into two mugs of steaming soy milk, Noa looked up in alarm. “Kenji … he’s not going to offer me a position in the Guard.”
“Of course he will,” Kenji said. “I recommended you—and after System 6 and the Belt Wars—he’d be a fool not to.”
Noa looked down at the juice. “Well, he’d be a fool, alright.”
“Think of it, Noa, you could come home every night to Prime.”
Noa looked up.
“You could have a place like this instead of the tiny one room you and Timothy had on the ship.” Kenji spread his arms, gesturing toward the admittedly expansive two-bedroom apartment. Two bedrooms and a prayer room. Noa’s eyes slid to the cross on the wall, and the Three Books below it. Kenji was an atheist, but he always said he respected the peace religion brought Luddecceans.
“I’m not his idea of a Lieutenant Commander,” Noa said, throwing the strainer in the sink.
“What do you mean?” Kenji asked.
“Didn’t you see the way he looked at me, Kenji?”
Her brother stared at her blankly.
Noa’s heart fell. “You didn’t see, did you? Is something wrong with your app, Kenji?”
“I must have forgotten to turn it on,” he said, meeting her eyes too firmly.
“Why would you have turned it off to begin with?” Noa demanded.
“Because caring what people think takes too much energy,” Kenji said. “It distracts me from my work.”
“But with the app—”
Kenji’s face got flat. “Did it ever occur to you that I was born the way I was for a reason? That maybe my … my focus … is a gift, not a handicap?”
“You always said your app made you feel connected, not alone … ”
“Sometimes people need to be alone,” Kenji said.
“Yes, but … ”
“I’m less alone here in all the ways that really matter,” Kenji said, taking a step toward Noa, head lowering and shoulders rising in a way that would be threatening if Noa didn’t know sixty ways to kill a man with her bare hands … Still, she found herself taken aback. She scolded herself. Kenji didn’t mean it like that.
