by M. D. Cooper
It was not a belief that Amy agreed with, but no one really cared what she thought. Only her recent ordeal garnered her any reprieve. She had overheard one of her instructors commenting to another that it was too soon for her to be back in school, but her father wouldn’t hear of any objections.
Amy wasn’t certain why her father had pushed her back into school so soon. On the trip back to the Peloponnese system, he had coddled her and doted on her—but the moment they docked at The Isthmus, he behaved as though she was a nuisance. When he hit her and told her to leave him alone, she realized that nothing had changed. That nothing would ever change.
She had hoped that her kidnapping would make him love her more, and fix whatever it was that often made him so upset with her.
On the trip back, she’d thought it had. Or maybe it had just been hope. Now Amy knew better; her father just wanted her at his side because that was how things were supposed to be. It was because having a scion was expected.
Not because he wanted her.
It was a sobering thought for Amy; to realize that her father didn’t really care about her. Maybe he didn’t even like her.
Now she had to combine that realization with the knowledge that her mother was still out there, and that Rika had come to rescue her.
Amy couldn’t help but wonder what her mother would think of her. Stavros was a cruel man, Amy understood that now—but had it made her bad, too? When he hit her the most recent time, Amy hadn’t been sad—she had been angry. She’d wanted to hurt him back. Hurt him bad.
Does that make me just as bad as my father?
Amy sat on her large bed in her large room, surrounded by all of the toys and things a person could ever want. But none of it made her happy. Somehow it all felt like a cage.
She pulled out the picture of her mother and brothers and touched her mother’s face.
“Oh, momma,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry…please take me back. I’ll do anything to come back to you. Anything.” She said it again, repeating it like a prayer or a mantra, in the hopes that maybe—across all the space and stars—her mother would hear her and know that her daughter was alive.
Her father’s boisterous voice echoed down the hallway outside her room, and Amy tucked the picture away. She knew that if he found her with it again, he would beat her like he had when he first learned of the picture.
Father had taken the picture from her then, torn it up, and burned it—he didn’t know that she had made two copies. Amy guarded that second copy as though it was the most sacred object in the galaxy.
“Amy, there you are,” he said when he stopped in her doorway. He didn’t let her close the door unless she was changing, and even then he would open it to see what she was doing. She had taken to changing in the bathroom down the hall. At least he didn’t burst in there.
“Hello, Father,” Amy greeted, putting on her best smile. She had learned long ago that being happy around her father was best. If she was sad or grouchy, hoping for compassion, she often got something else.
She could see Mech C913—the one she liked to call ‘Silver’—in the corridor behind her father. Silver had always been nice to Amy. Even though she couldn’t speak—or wasn’t allowed to, at least—Silver had shown kindness to Amy on many occasions.
Amy called her ‘Silver’ because Mech C913 reminded her of her mother just a bit. Some of her mannerisms seemed similar—or Amy liked to pretend they did. Sometimes Amy dreamed that Silver was her mother, come to watch over her.
But that was a horrible dream. Amy knew what her father did to the mechs, how he hurt them. She felt as much pity for Silver as she imagined Silver felt for her.
They were just two sad people trying to survive the stormy seas of her father’s moods, as he tried to control everything around himself.
Stavros strode into her room now and stood at the foot of her bed, folding his arms as he stared down at her. “Your instructors at the academy told me you were distracted today. Not paying attention.”
Amy sat up straight and looked her father in the eyes. He hated it when she didn’t address him directly; another lesson he had taught her the hard way.
“I’m sorry, father. I have no excuse. I will do better tomorrow.”
Stavros nodded slowly. “I’m sure you will.” Then his hard expression softened, and he walked around her bed and sat beside her, placing a hand on her knee. “Are you still troubled by what happened? I’m working to find out who hired your captors; I won’t stop until I’ve found them and killed them.”
It occurred to Amy that something must be deeply wrong within her father if he thought that killing people, that vengeance, would fix anything. She had no idea what would fix how she felt, but she knew that killing people probably wasn’t it.
At least there was now a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light was the woman in the picture she kept near her heart.
“Thank you, father. I’ll sleep better, knowing that I’m safe.”
Stavros gave her a sharp look. “That’s right, you’re safe now. I have my best protecting you. In fact, I’ve even hired Rika to ensure you stay safe.”
Amy nodded absently, and then suddenly remembered she wasn’t supposed to know that yet. “Rika? Rika who saved me? Really?”
Her falsified excitement seemed to convince her father, and Stavros nodded. “Yes, the same Rika. She’s busy now, but I expect that she’ll get to see you soon. Maybe tomorrow.”
Amy nodded, the thought of seeing Rika the next day also on her mind. “Thank you, father.”
She reached out to embrace him—a gesture that she rarely initiated anymore, but it seemed to please him, and he wrapped his arms around her.
“It’s good to have everything back to normal; I’m glad to have you home again,” he said.
Amy looked over her father’s shoulder as they held one another and noticed that Silver had turned away; the skull painted on her helmet—which her father had made the mech adopt recently—was pointed down the hall.
Not that Silver could really look away. Amy had overheard some of her father’s generals talking once about how all the mechs like Silver could never look away from anything. They saw all things at once, all the time.
Her father moved back, and Amy clamped her arms around him tighter, putting one hand on the back of his head.
“Amy, it’s very nice that you don’t want to let me go, but you must.” With that, her father pushed away, and Amy’s hand stuck for a moment in the short curls of his hair.
She pinched her fingers together, hoping she would manage to pull something free—worried that she would fail, but terrified she would succeed. When her father cried out, she knew she had been successful.
“Ow! Amy! What the fuck?”
The back of his hand collided with her cheek and sent her sprawling across her bed. Amy’s eyes filled with tears at the sudden pain,; she thought she saw Silver step forward in the hall and then stop, her head twisted to the side like she’d been hit as well.
“Here we were having a nice moment, and you had to push it too far,” Stavros scolded as he rose from her bed. “I was going to take you out tonight, but now you can spend it in your room. And your instructors had better tell me you were perfect after school tomorrow!”
He stormed out of the room, kicking the door wide as he left. Silver seemed to hesitate for a moment, until Stavros called out, “Meat!”
Long, gasping sobs wracked Amy’s body as she sprawled atop her blankets, her face aching from the blow. As her father’s angry footsteps faded, she quelled her cries and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
Once she could see, Amy examined what she held, still pinched between her fingers: three hairs. Two of which still had the root attached.
APPROACHING FATE
STELLAR DATE: 04.02.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Approaching The Isthmus, Sparta
REGION: Peloponnese System, Politica, Praesepe Cluster
Chase settled into t
he co-pilot’s seat as the pinnace began its final approach to The Isthmus.
“Damn that thing is big,” Chase commented as he surveyed the thousand-kilometer arch floating in space.
“Yeah, don’t see a lot of stuff like that this far out from the core systems,” Patty agreed with an appreciative nod. “From what I heard, the people in this system were going to build a ring around their planet—like old High Terra—but they ran out of funding after getting this much done.”
“Seems like a bad omen,” Chase considered. “High Terra was destroyed.”
Patty shook her head. “You’re getting it mixed up with Mars 1. That was destroyed, smashed down into Mars; High Terra is still there. It’s where the capital of the AST is now.”
Chase rubbed his chin. “Are you sure? I could have sworn I learned about this back in school. The Jovians dropped all manner of bombs on Luna, Earth, and High Terra. Destroyed them all.”
“Where did you go to school? Daycare doesn’t count.” Patty qualified, giving Chase a dismayed look. Then she admitted, “Yeah, the Jovians did all that, but they didn’t actually destroy Earth’s ring. They even maintained it enough to keep it from falling apart. A few hundred years ago, they repaired it; fixed Earth up, too. It’s a big garden world now.”
“Well, yeah; I knew about Earth,” Chase told her. “I guess I just got my ancient monuments confused. Not like I ever plan to go there.”
“Really?” Patty asked as she altered vector to slot into the docking lane The Isthmus Space Traffic Control had sent. “I’d love to go see it. It’s where we all came from, you know? Earth…Can you imagine? The only humans in the entire universe just down on one small planet. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like. I would have been terrified; anything could have been out there, and they were so fragile.”
Chase nodded in agreement. “Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. Though turns out there was nothing to worry about. The whole galaxy is our oyster. That Fenny guy was right.”
“Fermi,” Patty corrected. “Seriously, did you go to school at all?”
“Well, my hometown was destroyed by Nietzscheans when I was twelve, but I managed to complete what I could in different refugee camps.”
“Right,” Patty said, then shook her head and sighed. “I forget how young some of you are sometimes. Anyway, we still don’t know if the Fermi Paradox holds true—in its entirety, at least. Human expansion has just finally reached the edges of the Orion arm. We’ve explored…about nine, maybe ten billion cubic light years? The galaxy is twenty trillion in volume. We haven’t seen one percent of one percent.”
“Yeah, but we have scopes; a lot of scopes. We can see the whole galaxy,” Chase replied. “There’s nothing out there but stars and dust and gas.”
“Dense nebulas are hard to see through—some impossible—and there’s the galactic core’s shadow. We can’t see anything in the cone of the galaxy it occludes. You could hide one hundred human-sized civilizations out there.”
Chase laughed. “You’re starting to sound like one of those conspiracy theorists. There are alien civilizations all over—they’re just hiding from us.”
Patty shrugged in response. “Not saying there are, not saying there aren’t. Just saying we don’t have enough information to speak with certainty one way or the other.”
“But which do you believe?” Chase asked.
Patty hmmmed as she turned off the ship’s grav-drive, letting The Isthmus’s docking systems take over.
“I’d like to believe that we’re not alone. It’s a comforting thought, wouldn’t you say? But I fear we are. The only aliens humanity is ever going to meet will be ourselves as we evolve and change.”
“So, all this? The entire universe, and it’s just us?” Chase asked. “Seems like a big waste.”
“Your statement assumes that there is some purpose that the universe was created for. If it’s a random blob of energy that exploded in a big bang, then there is no purpose; the universe has no agency. We’re just microbes that have managed to move from star to star.”
“You have a way of making a person feel insignificant, Patty,” Chase diagnosed as he gazed out at the stars of the Praesepe Cluster gleaming around them.
“Contemplation should always make you feel small,” Patty replied. “Helps you know your place.”
“Ha! Now you’re the one assigning some sort of agency to the universe, like there’s a grand purpose to all this. That would be necessary, for me to have ‘a place’.”
Patty looked at Chase, meeting his eyes; hers were filled with more sadness than he expected. “A grand purpose? I haven’t found it. But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some overarching design?”
The thought of some preordained plan filled Chase with anger. Who would design a place filled with such pain and angst? “I’d like to meet the designer; tell them what I think of their great purpose.”
“Would you rather that you never had existed at all?” Patty proposed. “Should none of what humanity has done exist because we struggle, because there’s suffering? Would the galaxy be better if we were wiped away?”
Chase didn’t know how to reply to that. The idea of a galaxy without humanity’s handprint was a sad one. To imagine all the stars that people lived around, the worlds they had made, the vibrancy that life brought…thinking about what it would be like if it never had happened—that felt sadder than all the evils that had befallen people through the ages.
“ ‘ ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’,” Patty intoned.
Chase nodded silently. That he could understand. Perhaps it applies to everything; it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.
Patty reached over and patted Chase’s knee. “But buck up, Chase. Right now, we’re going to do our own small part here; make the galaxy just that much better by taking out a slimeball like Stavros. Stop being so morose and get your game face on. We dock in nine minutes.”
Chase gave a soft laugh, though it was not enough to dispel the melancholy that had settled over him. Who was that last bit of Patty’s rah-rah speech for? Me, or Patty?
Probably a bit of both.
HANDOFF
STELLAR DATE: 04.03.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Philip Kirkus Academy, The Isthmus, Sparta
REGION: Peloponnese System, Politica, Praesepe Cluster
Amy had spent the following day trying as hard as humanly possible to pay attention to her teachers, but it hadn’t gone well. She may as well have tried her hand at flying a starship, for all the success she had. It just wasn’t happening.
Her instructors seemed to notice. When she asked to go to the restroom near the end of the afternoon’s second class, her instructor nodded, but caught her arm as she passed.
“When you get back, you’d best finish those algebra problems perfectly, or I’ll be speaking to your father after class.”
Amy swallowed and nodded silently before walking as calmly as she could from the classroom into the hall. She turned left at the first intersection, and then right, striding down the long hall toward the bathroom. She kept her eyes staring straight ahead, but managed to peer into the dark alcove where Rika had hidden the day before.
As she approached, Amy noticed a small motion within and knew Rika was there waiting for her and the vial she clutched tightly.
Amy ducked into the alcove and saw Rika with a smile on her lips as she reached out for an embrace.
“Rika, I got it; I got the hair,” Amy whispered, holding up the small vial in her hand.
“Excellent!” Rika cooed proudly as she took the vial. She slipped it into a crevice on her arm that closed up, secreting the container and its few precious hairs away. Then Rika’s eyes narrowed, and she touched Amy’s cheek, her cold steel fingers coarse against the girl’s skin. “What happened? Are you OK?”
Amy flushed. “I’m fine, it’s nothing. Don’t worry.”
“Amy,” Rika’s eyes were seri
ous as she spoke in a level tone. “You don’t need to hide anything from me; there is no shame in what happened. What someone else does to you is a reflection on them—not on you. Always remember that. Sometimes even we get hurt when we go on missions. It’s never fun, but we take it, we get back up, and we carry on.”
Amy nodded silently, tears welling up in her eyes. “But he’s not a mission; he’s my father. He’s supposed to love me.”
Rika pulled Amy in close, her body hard, but her cheek soft as it pressed against Amy’s head. “I know. The ones we love are always the ones who can hurt us the most. It’s just how we’re made.”
Amy looked up at Rika. “But I wasn’t made, not like you. You’re a mech. I’m a person.”
She instantly regretted the words she’d chosen—they were wrong and she recognized her father in them, but she didn’t know how to take them back. Instead, she pressed her face down into Rika’s cold neck, hiding from the anger that was sure to come.
But it didn’t come.
“I wasn’t always like this,” Rika told her quietly. “Once, not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, I was a little girl like you. Just trying to understand how I fit into this mad universe—just like you are now. It’s OK that you said the wrong thing, Amy. You know it hurt me, and you don’t want to hurt me again, so you’ll grow and get better. It’s all that any of us can do.”
“I’m sorry,” Amy whispered. “Am I bad? Has he made me bad?”
Rika placed a hand on Amy’s head and gently pulled it back so they could see one another’s eyes. “No. He has tried to make you bad, and you have some bruises and scratches from it. But you are good. I would know; I’ve seen a lot of bad. When you see your mother again, and she wraps you in the best hug you’ve ever had, you’ll know I’m not lying. You’re a good girl, and no one else can change that about you. Do you understand?”
Amy wasn’t sure if Rika was right about everything she had just said, but she really wanted her to be right. More than anything, she wanted Rika to be right.
