by J. L. Hilton
“Tanks to the front,” ordered Hax. “That’s you, Duin.”
Duin moved front and center, shrugging a coiled chain from his shoulder and twirling the zap-sword in the air.
Belloc pulled J’ni to the rear of the group. “You’re squishy.”
“I’m what?”
“Easily wounded. Too important to risk. Stay with me.”
A gap appeared, splitting the wall in front of Duin. He sidled through as soon as it was wide enough to let him pass. The opening continued to widen, and the gamers joined the fray.
The thoroughfare went on for five more blocks before it was sealed off by another wall. Tikati were entering the area through the connecting hallways, battling a scattered handful of troops in glowing light blue or U.S. uniforms. J’ni recognized Blaze, who had pushed up the blackened and damaged visor of his helmet so he could see. He carried a Multi, which looked like a smaller version of a Gatling gun but shot lasers, grenades and bullets. Bullets appeared to be all Blaze had left.
Duin ran to the colonel, cutting through the onslaught with his crackling whip and sword, leaving three dead Tikati behind him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Blaze yelled.
A jet of flame roared across them both. Duin’s whip lashed out over the colonel’s head, hitting the Tikati’s flamethrower and causing it to burst into a fireball.
“I believe the idiom is, ‘I owe you one.’”
“You wanna do me a favor, get those colonists the hell outta here until this area is secure!” The colonel fired several rounds and ran out of bullets. “Shit!” Throwing the Multi aside, he grabbed the nearest weapon—a couple of shock poles—off the ground.
A Tikati emerged from the doorway to J’ni’s left, its wide mouth of spiked teeth snapping on the stem of its extended neck like a horrific venus flytrap. She and Belloc both fired. Where the bolts hit, they embedded in the creature’s exoskeleton and flashed. The Tikati crumpled, but another came in right behind it.
Belloc jumped onto the body of the fallen Tikati and leaped over the flamethrower of the second. His gloved hand crackled with a burst of lightning that shot out and rippled over the black-plated creature. It convulsed and fell. Belloc gripped its torso like a shield as yet a third Tikati came through the door, spraying fire. J’ni threw herself across the floor, and fired her crossbow. Bolts hit the Tikati, and one caught Belloc in the arm. The projectiles flashed with electricity and the Tikati died.
“Naz,” said Belloc, a Glinnish exclamation of pain. He dropped the dead Tikati and ripped the bolt out of his arm.
“Oh, god, I’m sorry!” said J’ni.
“You’re forgiven.” Belloc tossed the bolt aside and helped her to her feet.
There were no more Tikati in the thoroughfare, but she could hear the sounds of fighting elsewhere and the boom of distant explosions.
“We should take this opportunity to retreat.” Duin tromped on the bodies of his dead enemies, only stopping to help a wounded UN soldier to his feet.
“Retreat? Retreat to where? My ass?” Blaze kicked a Tikati arm out of the way to pick up another Multi while his people tended their wounded. “We’re overrun.”
“We can regroup in Level Zero,” Duin said.
The colonel removed his dented helmet. “Level what-the-fuck?”
“Below the colony,” J’ni said.
“Below the—oh, why am I not surprised. No, we’re getting the hell out of here.” Blaze barked into his arm. “Initiate emergency evacuation protocol delta oscar oscar—!”
“Wait,” Hax interrupted, listening to his earpiece. “They’re leaving.”
“Who’s leaving?” the colonel demanded.
Hax opened windows on the wall, displaying live feeds from outside the colony. The Tikati ships, including the three that were on Sector M, were withdrawing.
Blaze touched a contact on his Mysteria list. “Salinas, do not pursue.” He pointed to the wall, at a cluster of Earth ships leaving with the enemy. “Those belong to us.” He touched his arm again. “Kozlov, did you begin an evacuation without my authorization?”
Kozlov’s Mysteria incarnation—a rusty metal robot—replied. “No, colonel, we can’t get into Sector K from our end. It’s blown to hell.”
“Hax says the Tikati hijacked them,” said Hax, referring to his sim assistant in the Tech Center.
J’ni didn’t understand. “I thought they wanted Duin.”
Duin watched the ships disappear beyond the horizon. “And I’m sure they would have been happy to have me. But no. The attack was only a distraction.”
“An epic distraction,” Nik said.
“But why would they take our ships?” J’ni asked. “They have thousands of their own.”
“Because if they study those military transport ships…” Blaze flung his helmet at the floor. “Shitballs!”
Belloc, who had just spent so much time with Engineer Gorski, finished the colonel’s thought. “Because if they study those military transport ships, and they figure out the shifting technology, they will be able to reach Earth.”
Chapter Twenty
The Tikati haven’t returned. Our Asternet was up within a day of the attack, relying heavily on the Haxnet servers that run Mysteria. Sorry our posts weren’t available right away, but we had to wait until we were reconnected to the Stellarnet, after new satellites were sent from Earth by the ESCC.
Repairing the rest of the colony is an ongoing process. Emergency oxygen arrived, as well as several algae-powered air generators. Replacement parts were sent from the block production factories on Ceres. Most of the damage occurred in the military hangars and the public thoroughfares (see our previous post with the maps and damage reports). Sector M is a huge mess. Fortunately, all of the colony’s green-blocks are still intact, so food isn’t a problem, and the Tikati didn’t disrupt the water reclamation or the recycling systems.
In all, two hundred and five people were killed in the Colony Square. Another hundred and thirty-six colonists died in the thoroughfares, and one hundred forty-nine U.S. Air & Space Force and UN Peacekeeping troops were killed. It was the deadliest off-Earth attack in history. (Casualty list)
But one death is unconfirmed. Seth MacGowan was last seen at the edge of Sector J. From there, he entered an area ravaged by Tikati, and beyond that there is no vid archive available. He never reported to the military zone, and his locator is offline. His body hasn’t been found.
ESCC investigators scoped the netcam archives and traced Seth’s locator for the week leading up to the bombing of my block. They are still interviewing people who interacted with Seth during that period. So far, they’ve uncovered no evidence which connects Seth to the incident.
Email investigating officer [email protected] if you have any information about the bombing. Tnx.
Even if he wasn’t responsible for destroying her block, Seth was involved in Duin’s capture and subsequent torture, interfering with the purchase of weapons which would have aided the Glin resistance. But she couldn’t share that information with her followers. As far as most people knew, Duin was merely on his way to Glin when he was harassed by the Tikati. Not that there was anything wrong with arming his people, in her opinion. But if he wanted to continue as an “ambassador,” it was better that he not be known as a “gunrunner” as well.
It was almost dinner time. She uploaded her post, and went out in the garden to look for Belloc. Music was playing in his hut. It sounded like a symphony from the historic playlist, maybe a few hundred years old, or the soundtrack to a new level of Mysteria.
Through the plastic strips and fiber optic threads dangling in his doorway, she saw Belloc’s walls were filled with a cosplay ballroom simulation. He danced across the floor as if he had an invisible partner in his arms. While Duin was intense and expressive, Belloc had a graceful economy of movement. It suited this dance perfectly. His back straight, he stepped left, stepped right, then spun to face the doorway.
“Are you co
ming in?” The dancers continued swirling on the wall behind him.
J’ni parted the curtain and entered his hut. Belloc was wearing new PVC pants, matching boots and a sweater. After the Tikati attack, Aileen and Owen had gifted him a knitted sweater all the way from Ireland. Traditionally, it would have been made out of wool, but real wool was rare and expensive. So this one was knitted from a softer and lighter synthetic yarn. At the moment, it was programmed to match his pants.
“Are your clothes the color of my hair?”
“006666.” He recited the hex code.
“What is this?” She pointed to the wall.
“Waltzing. It’s one of your dances.”
“It’s not my dance.” She laughed.
“Humans create such beautiful, intricate patterns, J’ni. The pelu I gave you is nothing compared to all of this.” He gestured to the wall in a way which seemed to indicate the dance, the costumes, the music, and all of the human achievement it represented.
“The flute you made me is awesome. I could sell it on Earth for five hundred thousand units. Maybe even a million.”
“Could you?”
“But I wouldn’t. I love it because you made it with your own hands, carved every one of those little j’ni flowers, and taught me how to play it. I’ll keep it forever.”
“I’m glad.”
“What do you want for dinner? I know you like those Korean sweet potatoes, or I have three kinds of seaweed, but we’re all out of eggs.”
“You want to share food with me?” He sounded surprised.
“You eat with us all the time.”
“When Duin is here. But he’ll be gone for several days.”
Duin was visiting the new U.S. military base on Asteria. The Alpha Centauri Central Security Station—or ACCESS, since the military was fond of acronyms—was blocked together after the attack, despite ESCC and UN opposition.
Belloc was tense, and J’ni wondered what had upset him. Maybe after all he’d been through, he wanted some time to himself. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”
“No.” He grabbed her hand. “Please stay. You could dance with me.”
“I can’t dance like that.”
“So learn. It’s not difficult.”
He’d said the same thing to her when he took her swimming for the first time.
“Easy for you to say.” It was her response then, too.
He smiled. He looked even more handsome when he smiled, but he did it so rarely. “Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not.” But something like fear tingled through her as he placed his hand around her waist and drew her close.
“You were afraid of me when I asked you to swim,” he said. “But that was the day we met. You know me better now.”
“I wasn’t afraid of you on Wandalin.”
“Your other hand belongs on my shoulder,” he said, and she put it there. As when he taught her to swim, he guided her patiently through the movements. But this time he could do so with words as well as gestures. “Step forward with your left foot when we move left. Step back with your right foot when we move right.”
She tried to watch his feet as he guided her. “You’re much more coordinated than I am.”
“Coordinated? Containing spacial coordinates?”
She looked up from his feet and into his eyes. “Agile. Dexterous. Graceful.”
“If you could learn to swim, you can learn this. It’s like swimming through the air.”
“I think this is safer than swimming.”
“Is it?” Belloc twirled her, then grasped her and dipped her backward. He laughed at the surprise on her face. Just the way he’d laughed during her first swimming lesson. “Don’t worry, I won’t let you drown.”
“I know.”
He lifted her upright again, and resumed the dance pattern. J’ni gave up trying to think about the steps and followed his movements intuitively. Like being carried on a river, she floated on the current of his momentum, guided by his hands and by the subtle changes in his posture and balance.
His wide, glistening eyes did not leave her face. “If you weren’t afraid of the water, or of me, why were you afraid?”
Saying I don’t remember would be a lie, and J’ni respected him too much to lie, even about so small a thing. “I didn’t want you to see me without my clothes on.”
Sliding his hand farther around her waist, he pulled her to his chest and whispered in her ear. “Then, you were afraid of me.”
“No, not really. Not so afraid that I thought you would hurt me, it was…” What? Something about the way he looked at her, something about the way his emotions spoke to her without needing words. Just as they spoke to her now. His cool stillness reminded her of the lake on Wandalin, with its beautiful, powerful machines far below the surface, dangerous machines that would have sucked her in. Below his calm surface was a powerful will and a powerful want drawing her into him.
“J’ni.” The music went on but he stopped dancing. Without moving at all, they had moved past a line she didn’t even know existed until it was crossed.
“Belloc.”
“My hands belong to you.” Those hands drifted, one cradling her head and the other slipping down her back. “And so does my heart.” His mouth moved to hers, but he didn’t kiss her. He waited, savoring the closeness.
“Oh, my god,” she whispered, and her lips could not avoid brushing his as she spoke.
“My hands could do more than protect you. They could please you.”
J’ni didn’t know which she found more disturbing—the revelation that he wanted to please her, or the realization that she wanted to be pleased. She could not let herself be carried by the momentum of this dance.
“Duin.” She said the name like a talisman, a protection from the confusion she felt.
“He’s not here.”
“He’s not here because he’s trying to save your world,”
“You are my world, J’ni.”
“Don’t.”
“Why? In the pub, you told me I was beautiful. Like a jewel.”
J’ni pushed him away and ran into the compartment she shared with Duin. She slammed the door and changed the entry code so Belloc couldn’t get in. What if he tried to zap his way in? Her stomach lurched, and she ran to the bathroom, heaving into the sink. And when she stopped heaving, she started crying.
Belloc kept her sane in Meglin, when she had no Asternet, no connection to Earth, no contact with Duin. He helped her translate “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” into Glinnish so she could participate in the Singing Circles. He carved her a flute, and taught her to play it. He helped her make clothes. Belloc stood at her side when she unpacked the remains of her demolished block, and helped her face the reminders of all her losses. He protected her on Asteria—not only from the Tikati invasion, or from the threat of xenophobes like Seth, but from her own fear as Duin moved ever further down his dangerous path of liberating Glin. Belloc had become more of a family to her than her own family. He was her best friend.
Belloc had helped save Duin from the Tikati. “I came for you. You are the only reason I’m alive, J’ni. And the only reason I’m not alone. You are everything to me.” How could she have been so stupid? He wasn’t repaying her for saving him from Ga’Duhn. He was waiting for the day he could seduce her, win her away from Duin. And now that he saved her life, did he think that she owed him something? Did he think she would leave Duin? Or did he hope to carry on behind Duin’s back?
He knocked on the garden door. “J’ni?”
In her mind’s eye, she could see him standing there, only a few feet away, desperate to pass through the wall separating them—the wall between the bathroom and the garden, the wall between his heart and hers.
“J’ni, I can hear you crying. Please let me in.”
His voice was heavy with emotion. Which made her heart ache all the more, and then hate him for the ache.
His voice came through her bracer. “Tell me what I did wr
ong. I’ve hurt you. Please, forgive me.”
She ripped the device off her arm and chucked it at the shower stall. “Go away!” she yelled.
Belloc didn’t try to contact her again. They were long days, the days that dragged by until Duin returned. She didn’t blog anything, or answer email. If J.T. or any of her billions of followers and lurkers wondered why, let them fill the message boards with speculation and pour over her last public netcam appearances. She didn’t care.
***
“It’s glorious, J’ni.” Duin rolled several crates into the room. He unstacked them and spread their contents across the table and floor. There were bavat, papers, various devices, even small arms and ammunition from Earth. “The United States is going to help us, with their rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air…” Duin sang her national anthem. “And they don’t give a wet pud what the UN or the ESCC has to say about it.”
“Good. It’s what you’ve been wanting for months.” She sat up in the bed.
“Yes.” He placed a loud kiss on the top of her head and then dug into one of the crates. “I have a gift for you. I know it’s not the same thing, because it didn’t belong to your grandmother, but I thought you would like it.” He held up a teacup, and saw the look on her face. He frowned. “You don’t like it.”
“I do. It’s beautiful, Duin. Thank you.”
“Mm. You don’t look like you like it, nagloim. Is it horrible? You don’t like the little blue flowers. Your Nana’s were lavender, I know.” Duin sat down beside her and she fell into his arms. He dropped the teacup on the bed to stroke her hair. “What’s wrong? Are you thirsty? Where’s Belloc? Why isn’t he here?”
“I don’t need him.”
“But he’s always with you. He’s supposed to… I thought that…” He seemed unsure of what to say and settled on, “Where is he?”
How angry would he be, or what would he do, she wondered, when he knew the truth?
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since Monday.”
“Why?”
“He hit on me.”
