by Susan Grant
Ugh! Woozy, Jana almost passed out.
Then, the assassin went down. At first she thought he was kicking to fight off Cavin, but soon saw that his legs jerked and twitched uncontrollably.
“Seizure,” Cavin explained when she ran to him. He pulled the killer’s head back and wedged a piece of his torn shirt in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue.
When the seizure passed, the REEF opened his eyes. They really were a disconcerting blue, she thought. At first he seemed unable to focus, then he moved his gaze from Jana to Cavin, where it remained.
“If you agree to a peace treaty between us, I’ll make sure you get to safety,” Cavin told him, removing the tongue guard.
The REEF seemed both shocked and repelled by Cavin’s offer. He was weak, in far worse shape than Cavin. Tremors ran through his body, and palsy affected his hands. No wonder his shots had gone wild. “Leave me here.”
“You require medical care.”
“On this primitive world? I think not.”
Jana recoiled. Earth wasn’t that primitive…was it?
“I’m dying,” the REEF said. “I will do so alone. Go!” Another small seizure silenced him.
“Jana, help me lift him.”
“Do not touch me. Do not. Obey my wishes.” The REEF’s blue eyes shone with the determination they’d previously seen only when he had Cavin in his sights. “I rigged your internal computers to self-destruct, just as I suspect someone has done to mine. I cannot do anything about it, but you can.” He paused to grimace in pain. “The destruct signal is coming from me. Me, Far Star. And my malfunctioning systems will not allow me to shut it off. As long as I am alive, you will continue to break down. Do you understand? If I die, you live.” He reached up and grabbed his arm. “Go, don’t be a fool. Make a new life now that you have the chance.” Then, as if ashamed, he looked away, self-loathing tightening his mouth. “My contract is void. Ended. I have ended it. I will not track you anymore. Or anyone…”
The assassin’s head sagged back to the dirt. As he gazed up at the sky, his expression turned from ashamed to pensive to, finally, regret. Jana wondered what he was seeing, or thinking. Then his pupils contracted as his eyes rolled back. A shudder ran through him. And then he lay still.
Jana jumped forward to administer CPR. It was crazy, trying to breathe life into Cavin’s killer, gasping as she attempted to start his heart, but it seemed wrong somehow to let him die. It would make her no better than him. She wasn’t sure how long she fought to save the REEF, but Cavin stopped her.
“He’s gone,” he said.
The realization brought an odd mix of emotions. The relief was intense, yes, but it was sad, too. What a lonely wasted life.
With her help, Cavin climbed to his feet. “We can’t leave him like this.” But they couldn’t bring him, either. With Cavin’s halting help, she pulled the assassin’s heavy body closer to the trailer. “But there’s no one out here to pick up the body.”
“We’ll inform the Gatekeeper when we get there.”
They stood, casting shadows over the body. In death, the killer seemed somehow at peace. Jana shook her head. “It’s like he gave up. That he just decided to stop living. I thought a REEF fought to the end, even after the end.”
Cavin’s voice was gruff. “Not this one,” he said. “Not this one…”
THEY’D WALKED—staggered mostly—across five miles of desert on a narrow paved road with no signs. Even though the REEF was gone, the consequences of his interference with Cavin’s bioimplants remained. Cavin leaned on her like a drunk. It took all her strength to keep him upright. The Coalition invasion force was on the way, and the one man who could save them was half-delirious.
“Jana…” Cavin took a faltering step. Then his lips pulled back in agony as his hand flew to the side of his head. His grunt of pain tore at her heart. His boots crisscrossed, and he tripped, taking her down with him. This time he didn’t get up.
“Come on, spaceman. We’re almost there.” She touched trembling fingers to his lips, his eyelids, his bristly jaw. His cheeks were sunken. Black rings under his eyes stood out starkly against his pale skin. He looked like hell. He looked as if he was dying.
He shook his head. “It has to come out,” he gasped. “The gauntlet computer.”
“Cavin, you’re in no condition to do surgery.”
“You are.”
She reared back. “Oh, no. No, no.”
“I’m almost blind.” He felt along the dirt until he found her hand. “Take out the pocketknife, Squee. Do it now.”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
His hand flew to the side of his head. His mouth opened in a silent curse. He was in agony, and she was the only one who could help him, the only one who could perform the operation.
Outside and without anesthetic.
A surge of nausea overwhelmed her. She ran several feet away from the side of the road and barfed.
When she returned to Cavin, tears streamed down her face. She unzipped her purse and hunted around blindly for her little red Swiss Army knife. As she contemplated the knife in her hand, she said, “I don’t know how I can do this. I can’t look at blood.”
“Think of it as fruit juice.”
Her stomach rolled. “Cavin…”
“I have faith in you, Squee.” He clasped her shaking hand to reassure her. Or maybe he just wanted to stop the shaking before she cut him.
She removed the gauntlet’s outer shell, the cuff he wore like a bracelet. He guided her fingers over the internal computer. The edges were easy to feel. “That’s where you will cut. Feel the seam.”
She slapped her hand over her mouth as her empty stomach convulsed. Again she ran off to be sick.
She wanted to panic, she thought as she retched. She wanted the self-indulgent pleasure of screaming until her voice gave out. She wanted an irreversible coma.
Be brave. Be everything you’re not. Your hero needs you now. He needs you to be strong.
If she let him down, she let the entire planet down.
With that realization, something seemed to change in her, deep down inside her. It was like the day she’d found her voice, only this time she’d found something else: courage. And although she knew Cavin wouldn’t take credit for either, she gave him silent thanks for both.
Sweating, she returned to him. Blinking to clear her vision, she dug blindly through her purse for a Handi Wipes cloth to clean the knife and his skin. It was sadly unsanitary. Infection was a real possibility. He was going to need stitches and real medical care after this.
But as she searched for the wipes, her hand closed over a wad of tissue paper. It was the little matryoshka doll her mother had given her. It was like an artifact from another time, another place. She pulled off the wrapping, releasing a whiff of rose scent.
Cavin inhaled the perfume. “Am I hallucinating, or have you brought me flowers?”
“Something better. It’s a gift my father gave my mother when they first met. It’s a matryoshka, a Russian doll. He gave my mom a series of these over the weeks he courted her.” Jana lifted the lid off the doll, revealing the smaller one inside. “In each doll you find another one hidden. They get tinier and tinier. My father tucked love notes inside the littlest doll in the center. I treasured these as a child.” She closed her eyes briefly, reciting: “‘Life is sometimes easy and sometimes hard, but love is the only constant. No matter how far you rise, or how hard you fall, a good love will always be there for you.’ Last week my mother gave me this matryoshka to remind me of that.”
Jana placed the wooden egg-shaped figure in Cavin’s good hand, closing his fingers around the doll. “Now I’m giving it to you, so you can be reminded, too.” She tried to keep her voice steady, for him, for her, but it was getting difficult.
She hefted the knife. Nearly weightless in her hand, it glinted in the sunshine. “God, Cavin. I wish I had a leather strap for you to bite, or a bottle of whiskey for you to slug down, but all I have
is this doll.”
His expression softened with a mix of tenderness and confidence—confidence in her. “This is better than any strap or whiskey.”
Jana brought the knife to his skin. Cavin’s hand tightened around the matryoshka doll, clamping down as she pushed the blade into his flesh and made the first cut.
Chapter Twenty-Six
WITH HIS FOREARM wrapped tightly in the remains of Jana’s silk suit jacket, Cavin stood, feet spread wide for balance, gratefully leaning on her as they started to walk again. They didn’t know yet if the operation had worked, but at least Cavin was no longer in excruciating pain. What discomfort that came from the unstitched wound in his arm didn’t come close to what he’d felt before she’d cut him.
Although he’d lost all of his computer-assisted abilities, he hadn’t reverted back to his native language with the failure of the translator. His English was more accented and a little less smooth, but still there. Likely the translator had facilitated his human brain’s natural transition to fluency.
Somewhere over the next hill was the farmhouse Connick had described. And the Gatekeeper. “Damn them,” she muttered. “Where are they? Why haven’t they come looking for us?” A Men In Black taxi service would be just the ticket. When this was over, she was putting in a suggestion so the next people who had to save the world wouldn’t have to go through this much trouble.
They’d covered maybe another quarter mile when a distant roar broke the silence. A cloud of dust rose on the horizon ahead. The dust cloud coalesced into a car. Her stomach dropped and a chill washed over her. What if it was the REEF? What if he’d come back to life to finish the job for the third time, Terminator-style. She should have known he wouldn’t have let them go, no matter how damaged he was, no matter how changed he seemed to be.
No matter that he’d died and she felt his heart stop.
Pebbles and grit popped under truck tires as the vehicle pulled alongside them. Inside was an old man with skin that looked like leather. He wore mirrored aviator Ray-Bans, which seemed somehow perfect on his seamed face. When he smiled, his lips were so thin they were nonexistent. “You took so long to get here that she sent me out to find you. Not supposed to pick anyone up, usually. Under the circumstances, thought we’d make an exception.
“You must be the Gatekeeper,” Jana said.
“No. I’m the Handyman.”
Who was next? The Hairdresser? The UPS guy? “No one told us about a Handyman.”
He shrugged. “Isn’t much to tell. The Gatekeeper is who you need to see. She’s waiting for you.”
So the Gatekeeper was a woman. A female guarding the grand prize in a male-dominated world of secrecy. There was a sort of poetic justice in that.
Cavin seemed more alert as they helped him into the roomy cab of the truck. He pulled his seat belt around Jana first and then himself. It was a typically protective Cavin gesture, and the best sign yet that he was returning to normal.
She took Cavin’s hand in hers, holding it on her lap as the truck bumped along the pitted road. “They don’t keep up with the maintenance around here, do they?” she remarked.
“No one’s complained in forty years. But then no one’s been up this road in forty years, either.”
“How do you get your food and supplies? What do you eat?”
He made that lipless grin again. “Can’t give away all the secrets, Senator.”
“No.” Jana guessed he couldn’t.
A farm appeared. There was a tumbledown barn and a small house. It was probably once white but harsh weather had turned it gray. No crops, no animals, only sand. It put the D in desolation. “Do you live here year round?”
Another grin. Sans lips. “Sorry, can’t give away all—”
“—the secrets,” Jana finished for him. He and the Gatekeeper must be on the government payroll. She hoped they got a generous salary, vacation and benefits, too, because no one should have to live like this.
The Handyman parked and helped Cavin down from the truck. They walked to the farmhouse. There was nothing that indicated that the original, recovered crashed spacecraft from Roswell, New Mexico was hidden here.
The screen door opened with a squeak of old hinges. A short woman with a shining smile greeted them. Improbably, she wore an apron. Crinkly, graying orange hair was pulled back from her face in a bun. Freckles speckled her pale skin, and her brown eyes shone. She looked to be in her fifties—too young to have been alive for the original crash landing, but maybe her age was as much a ruse as the rest of this place. “I’m the Gatekeeper.”
“I’m Jana Jasper. This is Cavin of Far Star.”
“I baked cookies.”
Um, okay. “Thanks. Probably we should save Earth first, though. Then have a cookie break.”
The woman chuckled. “All right.” She gave Cavin a long, admiring stare. “So, here you are at last. He who can unlock the gate. The Key.”
“We have little time,” he said, also apparently feeling the need, as Jana did, to coax her into action. Everyone on this farm seemed to move in slow motion.
The woman squinted at the sky. “I know. They’re coming, aren’t they? Follow me now.”
She walked around the side of the house where an ancient-looking pair of doors led to a root cellar. The Handyman hoisted them open. The doors fell to the ground and dust poofed up in a cloud. The Handyman shone a flashlight into the darkness. Dust motes swirled. Spiderwebs laced across the opening. Whatever was down here had not been looked at in a very long time.
Cavin supported his weight on the handrails. They creaked under the strain. Beneath the house it smelled musty and like dirt. Jana couldn’t believe there was a spacecraft hidden there. She looked around for a large lump covered by a dusty old tarp like you’d find over a treasured antique car in someone’s garage.
“It’s downstairs,” the Gatekeeper said. “Step here, next to me. Now, hold on tight.” She pulled on a thick rope dangling from the low ceiling, and the floor fell away.
Jana yelped as they plummeted down with it, feeling suddenly light on their feet. The sensation was unnerving. The walls raced past and then the walls were gone. They were in near total darkness.
The square piece of floor on which they stood was an elevator. The Gatekeeper was with them. The Handyman was not. “He has to look after things on top,” the woman called out above the noise of wind. “In case someone comes calling.”
If the road hadn’t been used in forty years, it wasn’t likely too many people came calling. Maybe the real story was that the Handyman didn’t have the security clearance the angelic redheaded Gatekeeper did.
The president didn’t even know where this place was, according to General Mahoney. Neither did the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Only a select few, slightly crazy people. Fanatics, perhaps, were the best keepers of secrets.
Jana’s stomach and the wind whipping her hair told her they were still falling, but the area was so vast it was easy to lose the sensation of speed. Her ears popped. There was a impression of deepness. At last, the elevator slowed, stopping smoothly.
“Turn around,” the Gatekeeper said.
And there it was. The famous spaceship. The Roswell saucer. The shape was oval and the wings were so stubby that she could understand how the flying saucer legend had started. Only it wasn’t a legend.
The dark, smooth metal hull gleamed dully as they stepped closer. There were no lights, no sounds. No signs that it worked, or that it ever had worked, flown here from another world. Jana hoped it was dormant and not dead.
A row of blocky symbols decorated one side. Seedpod, she thought: the little ship’s name. A film of some kind coated the windows, preventing her from seeing inside.
Cavin approached the ship confidently and walked up the open ramp. The trim around the hatch was mangled, bearing the scars of tools. Earthling tools. It had been pried open.
The cockpit was small and dark. Cavin slid into the pilot seat as if he owned it. As Jana waited with the Gatek
eeper at the root of the ramp, he uttered a sound that sounded suspiciously like a growl. “Yenflarg,” he snapped.
The Gatekeeper’s eyebrows lifted. “Yenflarg?”
“It translates roughly to ‘shit,’” Jana said.
Cavin slapped his hands down on the armrests and turned around. His eyes blazed with anger at the Gatekeeper. “It’s damaged. Badly. Computers are missing. Vital panels! Your tinkering has destroyed this craft.”
Jana had never seen Cavin lose his temper like that. Everything he’d risked, the fate of the world, it was all in jeopardy because of Earth’s clumsy curiosity and years of tinkering. Maybe they were as primitive as the REEF had suggested.
The Gatekeeper scurried to an ancient-looking cardboard carton with Orange Crush Soda printed on the side. “They saved all the parts—right here. We never threw anything away.” She delivered the box to the cockpit. The contents rattled as she set it on the floor. Cavin pulled something out and fitted it to the instrument panel. Soft chimes heralded the awakening of long-slumbering equipment. Illumination came on in the cockpit, spilling light onto the smooth concrete floor below where Jana and the Gatekeeper waited.
Jana whooped. “You did it, Cavin!”
The Gatekeeper showed her first true signs of emotion as she wrung her hands in her apron. “I lived to see the day. I lived to see it.”
More lights came on up and down and all around the sides of the ship. Then the windshield erupted in a swirl of colors that faded into a serene backdrop of stars.
Jana took a closer look. “How come some stars are moving?”
“They’re not stars,” Cavin said. “They’re ships.”
Jana felt faint. “It’s the fleet.”
“Yes,” he said, continuing to work. “They’re almost here.”
Almost? What did that mean? “How long?” Call her sick, but she had to know how narrow the margin had been with them getting here.
“A week, more or less. No…it’s less.” He squinted at scrolling, three-dimensional text in his native language. “I’ll get an exact reading in a moment. Hold on—”
