Unreconciled

by W. Michael Gear

  Fighting his rising sense of dismay, Vartan bowed respectfully, backed away from the throne.

  As he headed for the door, he glanced around. Took in the watching Irredenta. Eighteen of them, mostly pregnant or nursing women. The rest, who were outside standing watch, numbered seven—including those guarding the children in the barracks—six if Minette was gone.

  Leave? To where? They had already reached the end of the line.

  “What do you believe, Vartan?” he whispered under his breath. That the universe would provide?

  But his only answer was silence.

  72

  Miguel Galluzzi turned, hearing more of the maniacal laughter. Freelander seemed to be compressing the air, making it hard for him to breathe. He stared frantically up and down the poorly lit hallway, past Astrogation Control. Thought he saw a thin woman staring at him from the shadows. But for the long black hair, she might have been Tyne. Or, locked in the AC, had she let her hair grow?

  “Captain?” Shig asked.

  Galluzzi’s heart began to pound, a foul taste on his tongue. A panic like he’d never known sent a tickle through his guts. Thoughts went dead in his head. He couldn’t stand it. Had to get away. Miguel turned, ran, frantic to get away from that awful door, that eerie and haunted hallway.

  Mindless, he pounded down the corridor. Powered by terror. A cry strangled in his throat.

  “Captain? Miguel! Stop!” Shig’s voice barely penetrated the heterodyne of fear.

  Crazed, thoughtless, Galluzzi’s feet hammered the deck. At the companionway, he instinctively turned: an animal in desperate flight, seeking only to hide.

  Taking the stairs two at a time, he rounded the landing, charged out onto the Crew Deck, and fled pell-mell down the flickering corridor. Winded, he staggered to a stop, peering fearfully up and down the dimly lit passage. Nothing. Eerily empty, as if robbed of space itself. The effect was as if part of the very air, sialon, and light were missing. The reality he saw had the curious property of being incomplete.

  Well, but for the endless lines of overwritten script.

  Galluzzi tried to catch his breath, wheezed. His heart fought desperately to beat its way through his ribs.

  Exhausted, Galluzzi slumped against the wall, felt his trembling legs give way. He slid down the smooth surface to curl into a ball. Across from him, barely legible in the looping script, he could scry out the words: With each breath inhale the essence of the dead.

  Tears began to well, silvering his vision. Was that what he was doing? Inhaling the dead?

  Tyne Sakihara, beautiful Tyne, with her soft dark eyes, petite nose, and charming smile. Dead. Up there. A moldering skeleton?

  He’d loved her with a full and uninhibited passion. Figured that ultimately, after they’d exhausted their careers, in the end they’d be together. Married. The two of them had fit together that well. Soulmates. Of course they’d taken different berths, separated for the time being. That was mandatory. Part of the sacrifice officers made in Corporate spacing.

  I saw her. He ground his teeth in grief and despair. He was as sure of that as he was of gravity.

  Galluzzi scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms. Tried to press the image of Tyne’s face from his memory.

  Her voice sounded so clear she might have been standing over him: “I saw the first of the bones, you know.”

  Galluzzi winced, tried to tuck himself into a smaller ball, to collapse his body until he could squeeze himself completely out of the universe.

  Unbidden, the image formed in his mind: a jumbled pile of macerated human bones made a meter-tall mound on the floor. They had been dumped in a confused heap in the middle of the Crew’s Mess, cleared as it was of tables and chairs. A brown-haired woman wearing a shift knelt in the center of the room. She held a string to the floor. A second woman, holding the other end of the string taut, walked in a slow arc. With a scribe she marked out a perfect circle.

  “We were no longer in command,” Tyne’s voice explained. “The decision had been made that death and life were one. That only through death could life survive. Wherever Freelander had gone was eternal. Tried reversing the symmetry. Didn’t work.”

  She paused, then added, “Jem and I made the decision to euthanize the transportees. It was our last act of kindness. No one could explain why, but we were infertile. The women didn’t conceive. Couldn’t make Freelander a generation ship. So it was just us. Living off the dead.”

  Galluzzi clamped his eyes tight, pressed harder with his palms, but try as he might, he couldn’t stop the vision. If anything, it clarified as if he were there in the Crew’s Mess.

  One of the women began using a vibrasaw to cut a shallow trench in the mess floor, following the scribed circle. The other began wiring the femora together, carefully choosing each for the proper length.

  “Jem and I didn’t want to end like that,” Tyne told him. “It was crazy. The Chief Engineer used a cutting torch on the ship’s AI. So we locked ourselves in the AC. Stayed there until it was clear that Freelander was lost. That we were going to be in that room forever.”

  “How could you?”

  In his mind, Tyne smiled at him. Love, like he remembered so clearly, shone in her eyes. “In the end there is no right, no wrong. We are nothing more than chemical composites of carbon-based molecules that are directed by chemo-electrical impulses designed to allow the highest probability of replicating those same chemical composites. Billions and billions of us. Anything else, like ethics, morality, notions of deity, ultimate good or evil, are nothing more than abstractions. We need those delusions to mask the reality of what life is. They provide us with a sense of purpose.”

  The Crew’s Mess was filling with people now. Crew in uniforms showing various states of repair. He watched as they began lifting the wired-together femora, raising them like a wall and fitting them into the trench excavated into the floor.

  They’re building that creep-freaked dome of bones!

  “Do you know that I still love you?” he asked.

  “Cling to whatever you have, Miguel. In the end, it’s the only thing that makes existence worth enduring.”

  In the Crew’s Mess, the Freelander crew were separating all of the arm bones from the jumbled pile.

  73

  Where she lay in the shadow of a defunct air compressor, Talina watched through her rifle’s optic. She’d dialed the magnification up, which gave her a good look at the man. Maybe early forties, black hair, dark eyes. He was perched on the top of the admin dome. Every so often, he’d raise the rifle he held and use its optic to scan the compound. Most of his time he spent listening with a long-range microphone. He kept the laser fixed on the science dome window.

  From the moment Talina had seen the thing, it was apparent that the Unreconciled knew exactly who was stalking around Tyson Station, and who was in the science dome.

  Which meant what when it came to relative strengths and who might move on whom?

  They knew Muldare, Taglioni, and Kalico had weapons. And might even know Muldare was wounded, and that Kalico was sick. If they’d heard that Talbot was dead, they’d know his weapons had been retrieved. Kylee—young though she might be—was half quetzal and enraged over the deaths of Mark and Dya. No telling what kind of havoc the kid might unleash on both the Unreconciled and herself in the process.

  Talina pasted her cheek to the rifle’s stock. Sighted through the optic. Took a series of deep breaths to oxygenate her blood, exhaled, and watched the dot settle on the watcher. All it would take was a couple of pounds of pressure on the trigger, and the dome-top rifleman’s head would be jelly.

  Maybe it was guilt over the woman she’d shot. Maybe it was the tortured expression on the man’s face. The guy looked like he was wrestling with too many demons of his own. She slipped her finger back to the rest above the trigger.

  The soft chitterin
g came from behind.

  Talina used her elbows to crawl back, rise to a seat, and glance at Flute. “Find anything useful?”

  The quetzal flashed a pattern of infrared that read, “Young in half bubble. Three adults watch.”

  “Kids are in the barracks dome,” she said to herself. “Not more than an hour ago, someone hurried from the admin dome to the barracks.”

  She ducked down as the door to the admin dome across the way opened. A handful of people, mostly women, hurried out and headed for the barracks. They were talking softly, shooting scared looks at the night as they went.

  Talina heard the words, “. . . in the morning” and “Where will . . . go?” The rest was confused babble.

  Talina checked the dome-top guard. His attention was fixed on the people beating feet to the barracks.

  Using the distraction, Talina sprinted to the edge of the shop dome, out of the lookout’s sight.

  Flute, like a dark cloud, followed silently, his hide patterning the ground in perfect camouflage. Wouldn’t work if the dome-top guard had his IR turned on.

  At the rear of the science dome, Talina rapped three times. Waited. Rapped twice more.

  Seconds later the lock clicked open, and the door swung out.

  Talina sent Flute in first, then followed, locking the door behind her. The young quetzal, almost two meters at the hips, filled the hallway, claws clicking on the duraplast.

  “So,” Kylee asked from up front. “What did you—”

  Talina put a finger to her lips.

  After Flute had deposited himself in the conference room and was out of the way, Talina leaned close, whispering in Kylee’s ear, “They’ve got a long-range microphone fixed on the lab window. They’ve been listening to everything we said.”

  Kylee’s blue eyes widened as she mouthed the words, “They know we’re here?”

  Talina gave her a quick nod, whispered, “How’re the others?”

  “Sleeping.” Kylee frowned, staring off toward the lab door. With a finger she beckoned Talina toward the conference room. This was on the science dome’s north side, shielded from any eavesdropping by the snooper’s laser mic. Closing the door, Kylee asked, “So, what are they planning?”

  “Don’t know. My guess? Something with explosives. They tried that on Kalico and your folks to start with. Given that we’re armed, it’s the best way to try and take us down.” She glanced up at the ceiling. Just ordinary duraplast. Proof against wind, rain, and hail, it wouldn’t stand a chance against magtex. “If they’ve got a demolition expert, he could crack this roof open like an eggshell.”

  “Eggs have shells? Thought they were just soft membranes the sperm had to get through.”

  “Not many chickens down at Mundo, huh?”

  “Oh, you mean birds. I’ve seen pictures. For some reason Mom wasn’t big on terrestrial ornithology.”

  At the mention of her mother, Kylee’s eyes tightened, her jaw firming.

  Talina knew that look. “Don’t even think it. For the moment, we’ve got other responsibilities. First there’s Kalico and Dek. I need you to keep them safe. Will you do that for me?”

  “Those fucking cannibals killed Mom and Mark.”

  “How about you and I take it up with Messiah Batuhan when we get Kalico, Dek, and Muldare out of here. Deal?”

  Kylee gave her that searching look. Finally said, “Deal.”

  “Good. Now, let’s go sit next to the window where that guy on top of the dome can hear, and spin all kinds of stories about how we’re attacking the dome with rifles, grenades, and seismic charges sometime in midmorning, shall we?”

  “And what are we really doing?”

  “Slipping out the back way about an hour before dawn. While they hit the science dome, we’re flanking them at admin. At the same time they’re busy blowing this place up, Flute and I are barging into the radio room to call the PA shuttle to come pick us up.”

  “Flute?”

  “Can you think of a better way to terrorize a bunch of soft meat?”

  “Wish you wouldn’t use that term when you’re talking about cannibals.”

  “Good point.”

  74

  More than anything, Dan hated being afraid. He’d lived his entire childhood in fear. The consuming, soul-numbing kind. His pedophile father had used Dan’s fear like a sharp blade to separate him from any thought of rebellion or betrayal. Wielded it masterfully to keep Dan compliant and an accomplice in the man’s perverse sexual proclivities.

  When, at sixteen, Dan had killed his first victim, the act washed through him like a revelation: he had power. A realization that reinforced itself like the rebar in a concrete wall when he’d stood over Asha Tan’s dead body a mere year later. That he never suffered a moment’s remorse was, he realized, a blessing. One that he could never fully comprehend but deeply appreciated.

  Despite the bone-chilling fear in his youth, he’d never known it like he did in that plexiglass box: numbing, crushing, soul-devouring. And all the while, Windman’s severed head was mashed against the plastic. The nose had been flattened against the transparency; the lips had pulled back, mouth gaping with the bugs crawling in and out and up the nostrils. Those eyes—drying, shrinking, turning gray—kept watching Dan with a haunting gaze. The damn head mocked him, belittled his impotence. A witness to Dan Wirth’s total helplessness and terror.

  All of it was compounded by the suffering heat, the thirst, and hopelessness.

  Just when he could take no more, when he was on the verge of unlatching the door and throwing it wide, a quetzal would appear. The thing would gnaw on the box or attack it with those razor claws. Helpless and mesmerized, Dan would watch shavings of plastic curl away under the blade-like teeth or peel in strips as the claws carved off long curlicues of material.

  By the time the first rays of dawn had lightened the eastern horizon, they’d chewed a hole in the corner just above Dan’s head. The smell of quetzal breath had choked him.

  He’d been delirious by then, fantasizing a thousand nightmarish images. In some he was back in his father’s bed, hearing the old man’s cooing voice as he forced Dan from one degrading act to another. Or in Hong Kong, ducking and running as Corporate security forces hunted him, chased him past piles of dead rioters, their bodies all interlaced.

  Then had come the numb surrender into oblivion . . .

  Windman’s head was hanging in a gray haze, talking to him. The man’s voice couldn’t quite penetrate the plastic. Sounded muffled and indistinct.

  Fucking prick. What a candy-dicked screw up. Couldn’t make himself understood, even in death.

  A piercing sting in Dan’s arm shattered the image, caused him to start. To pay full attention.

  “He’s coming around.” This was a woman’s voice, not Windman’s.

  “Dan?”

  He knew that voice: Allison. But how had she gotten into the box with him?

  He tried to speak, heard a rasping.

  “Dan? Wake up.”

  His head hurt. When he tried to swallow, it was with effort, and a terrible taste filled his mouth.

  He got his eyes open, blinked his vision clear. Saw a ceiling. And then Ali leaned over, a reserve behind her blue eyes, tension in her lips. “Dan? Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” he croaked. The rasping? That was his voice? “What the fuck?”

  Raya Turnienko leaned into his field of view. “You almost died. We have you stabilized, rehydrated, and you’re on an electrolyte and sucrose drip. Your organs are rebounding. You’ll be weak for a day or two, but there’s no permanent damage.”

  “I was . . . in that fucking box. Quetzals.”

  Allison crossed her arms, studying him with an unnerving intensity. Disoriented as Dan was, he could see the change in her. Something dangerous and new. Predatory. Reminded him of the fucking quetzal
s that had been chewing on that shit-sucking box.

  “You know,” Allison observed, “it’s a miracle that you got into that arbor box. As it was, another hour or two, and you would have shut down. We’d be digging a grave for you up at the cemetery. As it is, Fred Han Chou only needs a soil auger to dig a hole big enough for Windman’s head.”

  Dan winced. That fart-sucking head. The fricking thing was going to fill his nightmares from here on out as it was. Maybe he’d go up and piss on the thing’s final resting place.

  “When can I get out of here?”

  “Tomorrow . . . if there are no complications,” Raya told him.

  To Allison, he croaked, “What’s happening at The Jewel?”

  “Shin, Vik, and Kalen have it under control. Everyone’s delighted that you’re alive.”

  He heard the lie in that. Fought down a cold sliver of anger. Anger? Why? What the hell did he care?

  The image of three deadly eyes in a huge triangular head filled his memory. He could feel the vibrations as teeth chewed away plastic. The snot-sucking thing wanted to eat me.

  Now that he’d made it, his people couldn’t have cared less.

  I’ve got two big safes filled with plunder.

  And what was he going to do with them?

  “Did Taglioni come back?”

  Allison’s eyebrow quivered, as if in a question. “He’s out with Talina at Tyson Station. Something’s gone really wrong out there. There’s been no contact.”

  So, the rich prick was probably quetzal shit, or maybe lunch for a bunch of cannibals.

  “Figures. My fucking luck.” I could have gotten out.

  NEAR THE BROOK OF KEDRON

  I think of the story of the garden near the brook of Kedron. I think about it often. That place where another messiah faced his darkest hours. Of all the messiahs, his story speaks the loudest in this particular moment of tribulation.

  Am I forsaken?

  Have I failed the universe?