by TS Hottle
Today had been the worst. Sergeant Shriver (never Ms. Shriver, Madam Shriver, or Mrs. Shriver) put the class through a series of moves in something called Judo. They did mostly tucks and rolls and occasionally threw each other to the matts. Yun hurt her knee early on, but "Sergeant" Shriver had no sympathy. Yun, she said, was faking. Yun was a coward. Yun disgraced everyone whoever wore the uniform.
"I'm eight!" Yun screamed back. "I never fought in a war!"
"Good thing," the "sergeant" screamed back. "Everyone depending on you would die!"
Yun folded her arms and refused to do anymore until they sent her to the nurse. Instead, "Sergeant" Shriver sent her to the headmaster's office.
The headmaster, an older looking man named Kim Pak, called in the nurse to look at her knee. Yun had, in fact, strained some tendons. The nurse demanded to know what the hell "Sergeant" Shriver was doing to those kids.
"We wanted someone well versed in martial arts." Mr. Kim smiled sheepishly at the nurse. "The Education Commission has gotten a bit paranoid since the first Laputan attacks." He looked down at Yun and frowned. "Though I can't see what this young one could do to those golden freaks. They're giants."
Mr. Kim called Yun's father, who took her home in silence. Yun saw by the set of her father's jaw that he would explode as soon as they got in the house. He had on his jumpsuit, meaning they had called him from the airfield but not been flying. The Cui household had few rules, most of them set by her mother, but one remained ironclad. Never pull Cui Jiao-long off the airfield or down from a flight.
"What am I going to do with you?" he snapped as soon as they made it inside the door. "Sergeant Shriver says you're not trying, that you spend more time weaseling out of martial arts training than practicing."
Yun pointed at her wrapped knee. "She hurt me, daddy. The nurse says I pulled tendons, maybe tore my… my… fenismus?"
"Meniscus," Jiao-long corrected. "Well, maybe if you…"
"Yun, go to your room." Cui Ya stood in the entrance to the kitchen, still dressed as she always did when working in her office. "I need to speak to your father." She gave Jiao-long a hard look. "Alone."
The tone with which her mother said "alone" was one that often told Yun she was in trouble. Except she leveled it at her father. Daddy's in trouble. She slipped upstairs to her room and took out a notepad. Her mother insisted she learn to write, draw, and do math on paper. She even learned the ancient art of carrying ones and canceling digits. Out of everyone in her class, only she could do long division.
She did it in her head. Her teacher was not intimidated. Hardly, Mr. McMaster praised her for going the extra kilometer. So, Yun began to doodle, drawing shapes and stick figures. Her mother had likened such mindless doodles to warming up on a piano before playing it. Yun could not play anything beyond "Chopsticks," but her mother could make the piano sing. Often she played Mozart and Beethoven and Elton John after hearing a piece only once or twice. Sometimes, her father, in a surprisingly beautiful voice, would sing the Elton John songs along with his wife's playing. Yun wished their lives had more moments like that.
She also wished her mother would play more modern music.
The noise of their argument reached her room. Yun could not make out the words, but the tone came through loud and clear. Cui Ya had won the argument long before Yun had reached her room. Her mother's voice told her she had reached her limit, that she thought her father had behaved badly. It was an old quarrel that sometimes amused Yun.
Tonight, it took on an unusual intensity. The phrases "You're being a moron!" and "macho pilot bullshit" came through the door like stray bullets fired at a wall. Her father responded with pleas and mumbling, like a teenage boy caught taking the flitter or coming home too late. He raised his voice once.
Yun found herself halfway through a drawing of the setting sun outside, the pagoda like structure of the nearby Buddhist temple flanking a fat, setting Helios with the spire of a Catholic church, a sight Yun saw every evening from her window. The faintness of the clouds and the shadowing of the two buildings surprised her. She had not known she could do that. Yet she stopped when she heard her mother shout, "Then I want a divorce. And I'm taking Yun with me."
Silence.
Then sobs. Her father's sobs. The house went quiet for several minutes. Yun knew her parents still talked, even if the sound didn't reach her. Houses had a certain buzz about them when people were awake, a fact she'd known since before preschool. She listened.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, a creaking of wood muted by carpet. Her father opened the door. His eyes immediately went to the pad and paper with its pencil drawing of the sunset outside. They widened.
Jiao-long sat on the edge of his daughter's bed, his posture having softened. He still stared at the pad. "I had no idea you could draw like that."
"I like to draw," said Yun. "It's my escape. Like flying is for you."
She saw a warmth come into her father's eyes she had never seen before. "Your mother and I talked. After we get you physical therapy for your knee, your martial arts lessons will be handled privately. And by someone less…" He closed his eyes, clearly searching for a better way to say what he wanted to say. "We'll get you a teacher who knows we're not at war, and even if we are, war's not here on Tian."
"And Sergeant Shriver?"
Jiao-long smiled. "My CO and I will have a talk with Mr. Kim about her. Just to make it clear I'm not happy, I'm bringing my wingman with me."
"I thought Lieutenant Faldo retired."
"My new wingman. Her name's Eileen. And she is not to be screwed with." He winked. "Kind of like your mom."
3
Suicide found herself in her third ground vehicle and second barrow in less than a day. The barrow had belonged to JT, war salvage as he called it. Actually, he had taken it from the Founders' Mine when the resistance finally stepped down and turned operations over to the Colonial Guard. Before the invasion, it had likely belonged to one of the settlers scattered between the mine and the Townships.
He had left it for her at the shack on his way to the Parker farm, the place he had inherited when Lizzy Parker died. Lizzy Austin, Suicide corrected herself. They had been married when she died. JT had signed the farm over to Colonel Quan, saying he was no farmer. The arrangement worked. Quan had been the Parkers' farm manager and Lizzy's godfather. Why shouldn't he have some piece of her family?
Somehow, the barrow survived the blast that destroyed the shack. She drove it over even worse roads than those leading to her former home. The sun sank fat and red in the east when she arrived at JT's secluded property north of the mine, a place his late father-in-law had dubbed Walden.
"I thought you would have gone home and called," said JT, sitting on a bench outside his cabin. He strummed an acoustic guitar and managed some passable, if aimless, chords from the instrument. "What's wrong?"
Suicide stalked from the barrow toward the cabin entrance. "Unfortunately, I have no home. Someone blew it up."
JT put the guitar aside. "Maybe you shouldn't advertise your location so much. I thought the point was to get away from people."
She looked around the clearing. "What will you do when someone besides me or Quan learns you live here?" She glanced at the door. "Your girlfriend still here?"
He sighed as he stood. "I'll have you know she's partitioned the back part of the main room off for herself and Athena."
"And Naomi."
"And Naomi." His face hardened. "And she is not my girlfriend."
Suicide nodded to herself. "And yet, here she is, cooking for you, cleaning for you, tending your garden. The woman's a head of state, JT. You don't think she ditches power and luxury because she enjoys housekeeping. Do you?"
"Actually, she enjoys the anonymity here."
Suicide pushed her way inside and spotted Lattus Tishla, First Citizen of Hanar, wearing a shift that would barely pass for a slip for human women, leaning over the cabin's bottled-gas stove, sniffing the contents of two pots. The
Gelt woman turned and gave Suicide that disturbing canine-filled smile. "Commander Cui. Joining us for supper?"
"Apparently, I'm a houseguest. Someone blew up my shack."
Tishla dropped the wooden spoon she had been stirring with into one pot. "That's horrible. Why?"
Suicide's eyes went toward the basinet holding little Naomi Best.
"Oh," said Tishla.
"Someone knew Jayne Best sent her to me." Suicide's eyes went sideways as she stole a glance at the gap in the partition creating Tishla's room. A Gelt girl, who resembled an eight-year-old had she been human, stood in the entrance. She had the same shimmering white hair as Tishla. "No one knows you're here, First Citizen." Her gaze went to JT, now coming inside. "But it doesn't take a genius to figure out where he lives."
JT paused in the doorway. "Something I missed?"
"Just bringing Tishla up to speed. Someone wants those children dead. They want all the Bests dead."
"Why?" asked JT.
"Do you know why the Thulians setup their colony west of New Lansdorp?" asked Tishla as she moved the pots off their burners. "Have you noticed how young Jayne Best looks in the news feeds. You've met her a few times, JT. She almost looks adolescent. Yet she's a hundred and fifty. No signs of your rejuvenation treatments."
"Is that why there are a lot of Orags in the colony?" asked JT. "They're supposed to be masters of rejuvenation, but they've had trouble translating their techniques to Homo sapiens."
"They've mastered it," said Suicide. "But it's for their species of human, not for Homo sapiens. There's a slight alteration between Neanderthal and modern humans that's eluded geneticists for centuries. Only, the Thulians have cracked the problem."
"Then why cut themselves off from the rest of humanity?"
"They didn't. They only cut off their homeworld. There are more Thulians walking among us than anyone suspects." When she saw something flicker behind JT's eyes, she said, "Yes, your mother's friend, Germanicus, might be one of them."
"He's not," said Tishla. "We've met. I know how he is the way he is, but I'm sworn to secrecy." She looked down. "I'm also sworn to secrecy on the Colony."
"How do you know so much about it?" asked JT.
She looked up again and smiled at him. "You know better than that. I'm a geneticist. Granted, DNA is an alien form of genetic structure to me, but the principles are the same. I agreed to add my Honors research to theirs when I give up the First Citizen's role, though I can't say why yet."
"What are they doing there exactly?" said JT. "I thought the Colony was a refugee camp."
"And yet," said Suicide, "you were offered a place there, even encouraged to take up the Compact's offer of a Navy commission if you agreed to spend a year there."
"They're amortal, JT," said Tishla. "They can't die except by violence, accident, or extreme disease. They can't even get cancer, which is something I'd like to see in my species."
"Cancer's treatable," said JT. "Have your nanite swarm send the genetic structure to your doctor, and boom, you're vaccinated before it's even noticeable."
"That's treating cancer," said Suicide. "These people can't even get cancer. Their bodies won't tolerate its presence."
"So, they're immortal," said JT. "Wow. Why not make this widespread?"
"Amortal," said Suicide. "Immortal means you can't die at all. Anyway, spreading the genes is what the Colony is for," said Suicide. "Basically, they're breeding themselves to seed humanity with the genes. If you'd have gone to the Colony, you'd have been treated. You would never undergo a standard rejuvenation treatment, but your part of the bargain would have been to make more little JTs, each one just as amortal as you."
JT laughed. "My parents worst fears become my job description."
"They're serious. The first settlers on Thule decided humanity's only hope was to achieve some form of amortality. They've been working at it for centuries. And someone doesn't want that to happen." She produced the fragment from her jacket pocket. "This is from a kinetic needle, a device small enough to slip into the atmosphere undetected but still cause a lot of damage."
"Why not just fire a charge from a portable railgun? By the time it hits, the shooter can escape from the launch point." He took the fragment and looked it over. "That symbol is JunoCorp."
"JunoCorp?"
"You know that creeper vine that overran Ragnar Township before and during the occupation?" He held up the fragment and showed the symbol. "JunoCorp supplied the spores. The bumper crop it produced was how Lucius Kray got himself elected warlord."
"I didn't know warlord was an elected office." Tishla's scowl looked more ferocious than her smile. "And that bastard Marq Katergarus worked for Juno. Is that the same thing?"
"Possibly," said Suicide. "But I thought your mother's company dismantled JunoCorp, based on testimony from Marcus Leitman before he became a politician."
"That's Katergarus," said Tishla. She spat. "How did that beast become your president?"
JT laughed. "Until Amargosa decides who's in charge here, he's not my president." He winked at Tishla. "And cooking for me definitely buys you my vote."
"You'll come to Hanar if Amargosa returns to the Compact." She turned back to the stove and pulled the pots back onto the burners, making a racket as she resumed cooking. "Unless your ambassador brings me Leitman's head on a platter."
JT looked down at the fragment again. "I haven't talked to my father about anything to do with the war. Besides, I'm sure he's afraid I'll sign up and head straight to the front." He grinned. "Don't know what he's afraid of. I survived a fusion blast."
Tishla glared at him, no longer paying attention to the pots she had going. "If you come to Hanar, you'll be my personal pilot. I won't risk losing you again." Her expression softened. "Besides, if I owe you my life, and you die, who does that debt go to?"
JT gave her a sheepish grin. "My little sister?"
They ate outside at a picnic table. Each took turns feeding Naomi Best pureed fruit. Lattus Athena sat between her mother and JT asking each of them questions, alternating between the Gelt Mother Tongue and Humanic. JT nearly choked when the girl asked in Humanic, "Mother, when are you kicking Trevor out so JT can move in?"
Suicide watched with amusement as JT tried to regain his breath. He did not turn blue, so she knew she did not have to dislodge anything from his windpipe.
"What are you telling her, Tish?" he wheezed.
Tishla blushed, which always looked strange to Suicide. It was probably the gray skin and yellow eyes. Such a being should not have been able to blush. "The girl's fond of you." She tousled Athena's hair. "And you did bring her mommy back from Amargosa intact and unharmed."
"Madam First Citizen," Suicide said, "I know you like doing the servant act for JT and for your Chancellor's family, but we're in a crisis here. Someone clearly does not want this world to secede as part of Metis nor do they want us to join with your world. You're going to have to go to New Lansdorp and talk with Governor-General Jovann. You're going to have to coordinate a response."
Tishla cocked her head as she looked at Suicide. "Commander, do you think I'm deaf, dumb, and blind up here? Who do you think ordered our ships to ring the planet? I am in daily contact with Athena Jovann as well. The way this 'dispute' over Amargosa stays amicable is we coordinate. Metis has the hypergates. We have the rest of the planet covered." The scowl returned. "More than that useless Compact of yours has done since this started. What do they do there on Earth?"
"Panic that your Realm is going to nuke every core world," said JT.
"Not my Realm," said Tishla. "They cut us loose. Remember?"
"Which brings me to my next point," Suicide interjected. "Someone's after the child. And this child…" She pointed at Athena. "… is the basis of your claim on Hanar. Until your world can enforce its sovereignty, you might not want to have both these children together."
Tishla smiled. "I have to leave soon, anyway. We are electing our first real parliament. It would look bad i
f the First Citizen was missing."
"Even worse," said JT, "if they find her dressed like the maid in a cabin with some lazy human pilot."
Tishla responded by grabbing a nearby towel and snapping JT in the head with it. "I'm here to get a break from the job, maybe the last one I'll have for a long time." She smiled. "If I'm lucky, I'll find a human to replace me as First Citizen, and I can retire someplace like this." She became serious once more. "I'm headed to New Lansdorp in the morning. I'm driving, then taking the maglev."
"Won't that set off some red flags?" said JT. "As soon as you step on public transportation, you'll be identified as Lattus Tishla of Hanar. Won't be hard to get that information."
"I'll be Adyan Reyanna, the name I came to Amargosa under during the occupation. According to that legend, I'm a displaced Gelt settler who still hasn't found a place to live." She tousled her daughter's hair once more. "And this little one is my niece, Sansar."
Suicide's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. "Isn't that the name the last Sovereign gave up before She was murdered?"
Tishla shrugged. "She was famous before She ascended to the Throne. Who's to say my fictional brother wasn't an admirer." She cocked her head toward the cabin. "Your friend Quan loaned me a bat wagon from the farm. I can drop you off at the Founders' Mine if you like, or you can come with me to New Lansdorp. We can skip the maglev."
The thought of driving two days over roads in varying states of repair or completion made Suicide's back hurt. "Ellie Nardino should know where the other Best child is, Carolyn Best." She gave JT a quick glance. "That one and I need to fly into lycanth territory tomorrow."
"Um…" JT's face twisted in a look of confusion. "You know we need another ship, even if it's an atmospheric shuttle."
Suicide laughed. "Young one, do you not think I can lay my hands on another ship?"
