Stellarnet Rebel

by J. L. Hilton

  “Kill them,” Hax suggested. “Aim for the head.”

  A few minutes later, the Duin on the wall was standing in the middle of a pile of bodies. Hax stared at Belloc, his mouth hanging open as if he would speak, but he said nothing.

  “What now?”

  “You just keep going.”

  Belloc nodded. “Like life.” He pointed, which caused the image of Duin to point. “Why is he turning green?”

  “If they bite you, you turn into a zombie, too.”

  “May I try again?”

  Belloc played through several of what Hax called “levels,” and then decided that he should be getting back to building the tippa with Duin.

  “Thank you very much, Hax. It was almost as fun as swimming.”

  He started to remove the gloves, but Hax said, “You can keep them. Duin doesn’t want them. He is sort of attached to bloggirl’s bracer, y’know, cuz it’s bloggirl’s doodad. So, take them, if you want.”

  “I want,” said Belloc. Then he remembered about human money. “What do they cost?”

  “Pffft. There is no charge for awesomeness. It’s…what I do.”

  Then Hax explained to Belloc that the gloves were also designed to work with the Asternet, anywhere in the colony.

  “Like bracers?”

  “Uber Bracers of Power,” Hax said in a booming voice. “Can you zap things, like Duin can? With your hands?”

  “Hunt?”

  “Right, hunt. With the Glin Touch of Doom.”

  “I can.”

  “That will still work, too, with the gloves on. Try it.”

  Belloc extended his hand and zapped. Rather than coursing across his palms, electricity arched from the ends of his fingers in bright, thick bolts.

  “Careful with that,” Hax warned. “And you might want to keep it to yourself, so you don’t get them confiscated.”

  “Yes.” Belloc flexed his fingers and examined the gloves. He had never owned anything so wondrous in his life, could never have dreamed of anything like this. “Thank you.” He reached out to touch the human in a gesture of gratitude. But his hand passed right through Hax. “You are a spirit?” Belloc was both terrified and awestruck.

  “No.” Hax shrugged. “Just a sim.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I appreciate the offer, Director Hewson, but what you need to do is take that food to the slums of Los Angeles, and the medical supplies to the earthquake victims in Turkmenistan. It would cost too much to bring it here, for Glin who can’t make use of it. We need armaments and military assistance. Then we can provide food and medical care ourselves.”

  Duin tapped on his bracer and began recording another vid-mail as he walked down the thoroughfare.

  “Doctor Syed, until someone from Earth establishes a military base on Glin, or sends in a private security firm, I can’t ensure the safety of your scientists. It would be dangerous to try and set up a research outpost. Even if you send science blocks to Asteria Colony, I won’t be able to help you gather specimens from my planet. I have my hands full here.”

  He sent that vid-mail and then opened a window to his alternate email account, which was encrypted and routed through Hax’s servers, outside the Extrasolar Space Colonization Consortium’s system.

  Secretary Yao, your country seems to have no remorse about sending unauthorized blocks of colonists to Asteria. I don’t see why you couldn’t also ship a few unauthorized munitions within those unauthorized blocks, so that I could make a very authorized deposit into your account.

  A group of humans with shaved heads and Glin-like colors tattooed into their skin were waiting for him in the thoroughfare. Duin kept walking.

  “When are you going to take us to Glin?” asked a woman wearing a shirt programmed to alternate between the phrases “I <3 frogs” and “Unnatural Slut.”

  “When it freezes over,” Duin said in Glinnish. In English he said, “I’ve told you, several times, it’s not an MMORPG, it’s a war zone. You need to join a military and ask them to send you. Please. I would love for them to send you. In HIG360 ships, with rockets and bombs.”

  “We’ll go and fight Tikati.”

  “Yeah, we’d waste the fucking Tikati.”

  “With what? Your good looks?” Duin sighed. “Thank you, yes. I’m very busy. I will contact you as soon as possible.”

  He entered the private hallway of R-51 and shut the door on the would-be Glin. In his compartment, he found J’ni and Belloc unpacking what looked like a crate of trash.

  “Do you miss your grandmother?” Belloc asked her.

  “I do. She was—”

  “What’s all this?” Duin interrupted.

  “Augla, nagloim,” J’ni greeted him. “It’s what’s left of my block. They returned the evidence from the investigation.”

  “One crate?”

  “Looks like. We received thirty-six crates today, but the rest were addressed to you. Belloc put them in dot-5.”

  They’d ended up with the full use of every compartment in R-51. No one else wanted to live there, for their own safety, considering what had happened to J’ni’s block, and because most of the lights, Asternet walls and other features weren’t working. And those who did want to share their block were fans like the ones Duin left outside.

  “Did the crates arrive in authorized or unauthorized blocks?”

  “Authorized,” she said.

  “Then not a single one of them will contain anything like a programmable missile launcher or a particle grenade. Nothing like that will get past the ESCC inspectors.” He knew. He’d tried.

  He looked over the items on the table—bits of broken teacups, scraps of fabric, various twisted and blackened objects. Then he glanced at J’ni and Belloc. They were giving him concerned looks, even as their eyes were having silent conversations with each other.

  “Did you talk to Owen?” asked J’ni.

  “Yes,” Duin replied. “He said the IRA hasn’t been active for decades, and if any Provos show up in a time machine, he’ll let me know.”

  J’ni chuckled, but Duin did not find Owen’s flippant attitude amusing.

  “Don’t count Owen out, yet,” she said, seeing the look on Duin’s face. “What about Blaze? Any progress there?”

  “No! All day long I sit in meetings, send email, repeat myself ad nauseum, while my people and our water continue to disappear. Damn it!” Duin kicked over a chair as he paced the room. Belloc picked up the chair and set it right.

  “Duin…” She tried to soothe him, but he did not want to be soothed.

  “Five months ago, no one on Earth knew anything about our oppression and the destruction of our world. Now, they know everything in minute detail. ‘Oh, here is where the Tikati built a dam and all the j’ni downriver died.’ And, ‘Here is where they keep two hundred and four water tanker ships.’ And, ‘There is where they put a great big compound where they force Glin to dig in the mud.’ For what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He swung his arms in furious circles. “And yet nothing has changed, not one scrotum.”

  “I think you mean mote,” she suggested. “Or smidgen?”

  Duin waved his hands, as if swatting away a cloud of flies. “I meant iota!” He stomped out into the garden.

  J’ni followed him. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the worst part. I deal with what’s in front of me, J’ni. I had a ship, I learned to fly it. I flew it here, I tried to get help. Blaze wants water, I got him water. You offered to help, I told my story. You were incarcerated, I helped you get away. Blaze asked for information, I went and got it. I brought you back. Now… I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Everyone has answers, but no one has solutions. My patience is drying up, like everything else on Glin.”

  “They’ve got to figure out what’s in it for them,” said J’ni. “We understand what’s at stake for you and your people. But do you understand what’s at stake for Earth? I’ve done
my damnedest to get them to care, but caring only goes so far. The people with the power and the money don’t need to care, they need to profit.”

  Duin gripped the edge of his work bench, which was a scavenged piece of metal paneling laid across some water tanks. He hung his head in mental and physical exhaustion. The lights on his bracer flashed incessantly with incoming messages and notifications.

  She moved to his side. “It takes time. Dr. Geber’s work is one potential benefit to humanity. The possibility of your world becoming a source of textiles and other exports, that’s another. There’s also so much more research that could be done on the planet itself, its ecosystems, minerals, natural resources and the biotechnologies used by the Glin. But you’re asking Earth to invest trillions of units, to send people and weapons, to go toe-to-toe with the entire race of Tikati, to sustain a war because the Glin can’t?”

  A piece of the metal panel snapped off in Duin’s hand. He tossed it aside. “I don’t need them to fight our war, just give us a fighting chance. I can pay for the weapons with money, if seeing justice done is of no value to them.”

  “Who’s going to teach the Glin how to use them? Who’s going to teach them tactics and strategy? Where? And how long would it take? You can’t hand them a laser cannon and say, ‘Here you go. Try to kill Tikati, not yourselves.’”

  He wondered how she knew about the solar-powered laser cannon that was hidden on Glin at that very moment. He couldn’t remember telling her about it.

  “You are up against the worst of humanity itself,” she continued. “You try to address the strong and heroic within the human heart, but there are so many others who play on our fears. For every blog post we make, there are a hundred more that say helping Glin will bankrupt Earth, or damn our souls, or cause the unnecessary deaths of thousands of humans.”

  Duin’s voice strained under the weight of his dismay. “Those who stand aside in the face of tyranny, only clear a path to their own door.”

  She grasped his arm and rested her chin on his shoulder. “If the Tikati came to our door, there are quite a few people on Earth who would consider that a favor.”

  “Tikat won’t stop at Asteria,” he warned.

  Her hands tightened on his arm.

  “J’ni?”

  She didn’t answer, but gazed off at something he could not see. He touched her cheek and she blinked.

  “Have you been drinking the Water of Life, again?” he asked.

  “What? Oh…no. What you said, it worries me.”

  “It should.”

  The bioluminescent lights in the garden cast soft shadows of purple and green over her face, and highlighted the patterns of glowing threads in the bava his mother had given her.

  I have too much anger, he thought as he looked at her. I am forgetting joy.

  “When you’re in a river, Duin, do you know what else is around you?”

  “In the water, you mean?”

  “Where the river started, and where it ends. And what is swimming up ahead of you.”

  “Yes. In the water, our senses are changed. We feel a wallump is near. Or another Glin. Or a waterfall. Perhaps we taste it, somehow, or we feel different vibrations in the water. It’s yet another mystery for your scientists to unravel.”

  “Sometimes I feel that way,” she said, “as if I can feel what’s coming.”

  Duin wasn’t surprised. She was a Truth-Teller, after all.

  “And what do you see for us, in the river of time?” he asked.

  “I think that, whatever comes, you will have the strength to prevail,” J’ni said. Then she smiled. “And I see you coming with me to Aileen’s. Belloc is going to sit with the session players tonight. He’s been practicing with them, with the pelu and ooji, and learning to play…well, every instrument he can get his webbed hands on, I think. Fiddle, harp, pipes. He’s amazing.”

  “Is he?” asked Duin with forced pleasantness. There were other Glin he’d known, long ago, who’d had incredible—some believed supernatural—musical aptitude. And they were also dark blue. Duin didn’t want to be reminded of them. He had enough to worry about.

  “You need to come with us,” she said. “Come and relax.”

  Duin went, but he didn’t relax. A young man in a “Free Glin” T-shirt brought them water and the sentiment drove Duin to distraction. Belloc sat up on the stage with the musicians, playing a reel on Danny’s fiddle as if he’d been doing it his whole life. Duin pattered his fingers on the table, not in time with the music but in time with his own agitation.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” J’ni said. “Belloc hears a tune once, and he can play it.”

  “Mm.”

  I should be making him practice with the Tikati ship, not with a fiddle. Then again, if Duin were correct about Belloc, what he should do is make him swim in the sky ocean without a space suit. Duin sighed. One problem at a time.

  His bracer flashed with an incoming top-priority message, and he noticed that J’ni’s flashed as well. She glanced at Duin and the look on her face said, What now?

  Over the music and voices in the packed pub, J’ni was able to hear the message through her earrings. Duin could hear it by feeling the vibration through his arm. It was from J.T. and addressed to both of them. Her INC catalyst had paid extra to send vid-mail, and his round, craggy face appeared in small windows on both of their forearms.

  “Heads up, girls and guppies. We just got word that Tikat is sending a representative to Asteria Colony. Blog the shit out of it, will you? Like I have to ask.”

  Duin was out of his chair and pushing his way through the crowd before J.T. even got to the word shit. Leaving J’ni and Belloc at Aileen’s, he ran to the military zone. Considering the lag from Earth, and the unknown amount of time it took someone to tip off INC, for all Duin knew a Tikati could be on Asteria already.

  He called the colonel.

  “Blaze, damn it, this is an epic mistake!”

  “So, you’ve heard,” Blaze replied.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Duin headed down the I-40 thoroughfare to one of the little-known military zone entrances.

  “I just found out. I was going to tell you, but you seemed to be having a good time there at the pub, I didn’t want to spoil it. There’s still several hours before their liaison arrives.”

  “How can you let a Tikati into this colony after the abuses they’ve heaped upon Glin?”

  “It’s not in the colony, yet,” said Blaze. “And you need to remember not to mistake my congeniality for complicity. Earth is neutral in this conflict.”

  “‘Conflict?’ This is a war. This is a crisis.”

  Duin waved his bracer at the guards, so they could see the small window through which he conversed with the colonel. A larger window, showing the colonel from a different angle, also appeared on the wall.

  “Let him in,” Blaze told the guards. Duin continued toward Blaze’s office.

  “A conflict is deciding between shellon or hidal for dinner,” he said. “A conflict is when your wife doesn’t want you leaving klup on the floor of the tippa. This is not a conflict. This is tyranny. This is sin. This is evil.”

  “Christ, you’re excitable. It’s only one Tikati, on only one ship.”

  Duin groaned.

  “I have my orders,” Blaze said.

  “Did you even try saying no?” Duin acted out both roles of an imagined conversation. “‘Colonel Villanueva, please don’t shoot the Tikati ship out of the sky when it arrives.’ No. ‘Invite the Tikati for tea, and you provide the water.’ No. ‘Give it a tactical tour of the station, so it knows all of your vulnerabilities.’ No. That’s not so hard, is it? No. It’s a two-letter word.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Mr. Envoy of the Freedom Council. There’s nothing in those orders says you can’t be here to greet him. Where are you?”

  “Outside your door!”

  ***

  Less than ten hours later, Duin was sitting in a conference room across the t
able from a Tikati named Kitik.

  This stale piece of shit has the audacity to wear a bava. The fabric was draped around the Tikati’s head and body, hiding its true form. It appeared to be a little larger than the largest human, and the thick plating of its head was carved to resemble a human-like face. The placating mock-smile made Duin want to reach across the table and slap it with his zappy hand. When it spoke, in perfect English, the mouth did not move, of course. Its voice came from somewhere within its throat. Its eyes glowed yellow, flickering like flames.

  Duin hoped that the hours it spent gaining med clearance from Dr. Geber had been painful.

  “The Freedom Council is an illegitimate organization,” said the Tikati, waving a fabric-sheathed hand in Duin’s direction. Or what appeared to be like a hand, but their appendages were not the same as human or Glin. “This so-called ‘envoy’ should not be here and has no authority to represent Glin.”

  “I don’t represent Glin,” Duin said. “I represent the cause of liberty.”

  Blaze addressed the Tikati. “Earth withholds judgment as to who has authority and who doesn’t, Liaison Kitik. That’s one of the things we humans hope to ascertain during your visit here.”

  The colonel was sitting to Duin’s right, halfway down the table. His rank insignia glowed light blue on his body armor because he was now the head of the UN peace-keeping troops, several of whom lined the room. The flags of the nations of Earth glowed on the walls. The conference room was in the military zone and its cameras were not accessible to civilians. But for this meeting, a live feed had been approved for the Stellarnet.

  Duin glanced at J’ni. She sat across from Blaze, to Duin’s left. The colonel had introduced her as Genevieve O’Riordan, the Interstellar News Corporation blogger who would witness this meeting on behalf of Earth. If the Tikati understood what a blogger was, or had any knowledge of J’ni’s relationship to Duin, it gave no indication.

  J’ni studied her bracers and typed on the tabletop. Duin’s device was on her other arm, because he didn’t want to reveal to the Tikati the extent of his knowledge about human technology.

  “This Glin, and his fellow Freedom Council members, are terrorists and criminals,” said Kitik.