by TS Hottle
When she opened her eyes, the windows had gone transparent once more. Before them, the surface of a large satellite stretched out ahead of them. The milky blue half-sphere hung above the gray horizon. Beside her, JT vomited into the helmet.
He looked up at her, his mouth wet. "Sorry." His voice came out as a croak.
"Relax," said Suicide. "Where we are, we can get something that can fix you up."
"And where's that?"
She pointed at the blue and white world hanging in the sky. "Gohem."
Retroact: 411 IE
In orbit of Tian
The vast expanse of the Eastern Ocean spread out below Yun. She took her hands off the controls and watched as her hands floated up. "No gravity?"
Akrad sat next to her in the copilot's seat, hands laced behind his head. He wore the most beatific smile. "Why do we need gravity?"
"What if we want to leave orbit?" Yun became aware of her hair floating out to the sides. She turned to look, and strands hit her in the face. Turning back made it worse. She reached up to push it away.
Akrad was laughing at her. "This craft can't leave orbit. It's a trainer."
"And I made it into space." She frowned. "Well, the computer did most of the work."
"If it didn't, we'd have no pilots. Everyone starts out on autoflight." He unstrapped and allowed himself to float. "And everyone wants to try microgravity their first time." He spun in the air so that his hands would reach his console. "Give me control?"
Yun tapped a key and transferred control to the other console. She watched as Akrad punched in a couple of codes.
He looked up and grinned. "Automatic. We're good for three orbits before we have to return."
"That's almost five hours," said Yun. "What will we do for five hours?"
"Well…" He reached inside his flight suit and pulled out a small box. Inside sat a white gold ring with a gem she had never seen before. "Cui Yun, will you marry me?"
It took her a moment to realize she had stopped breathing. What could someone say to this except, "Yes!" She unstrapped from her seat and pushed herself toward him. Before he could slide the ring on her finger, she said, "I have one condition, though."
Akrad looked a little hurt.
"I need you to do one thing for me," she said. "Something no man has done for me before."
"What's that?" he asked.
She began unzipping her own flight suit. "What do you think?"
Akrad smiled, slid the ring on her finger, and began unzipping his flight suit. "I've never made love in zero-G."
Yun tugged off her flight suit and began working on her bra. "I've never made love, so it's a first for both of us."
6
They called the dusty satellite above Gohem "Menh." It looked very similar to Luna, which did not surprise Suicide the first time she visited. The name "Gohem" meant Earth, and besides Tian, she had never seen a world that so closely resembled humanity's cradle.
Only Menh was more crowded than Luna, owing to the two hundred fifty-year head start on settlement. Suicide put down on the far side of the moon, unusually smooth for being tidally locked away from the parent world. Here, though, traffic control tended not to ask questions, and the spaceports mostly had private owners.
Suicide had to haggle on the landing fee. She had room to negotiate. What Amargosa did not cover, the Metisians would. Compact credits still spent well on Orag worlds, assuming one did not get screwed on scrip conversion. She landed the Arcanum in an underground bay.
While they waited for the pressure to equalize, she said to JT, "If you're done puking your guts out, go show our hairy friend here a good time."
"These people are the civilized humans, right?" said Boolay. "I mean they look more like us."
"Not really," said Suicide. "Orags are a species of human that went extinct about fifty thousand years ago on Earth."
Boolay arched his bushy brows. "Did you kill them all?"
JT puttered around the aft of the cockpit, looking for a place to dump the contents of the helmet. "Earth warmed up. Neanderthals used to be cold weather people. Some died off. Some bred into the Sapiens population. The rest got rescued by some unknown spacefaring race and deposited here."
"Bred into?" The Zaran's eyes lit up. "Do they still do that?"
"I think you found your spirit animal, Austin." Suicide looked up and saw a man, a Homo sapiens, no less, approach the ship. "Let's go. Gotta talk to our host, then go see a friend."
They followed Suicide down to the hold. As she triggered the loading ramp, JT tossed the helmet into the recycler.
"You gonna pay for that, monkey man?" asked Boolay.
"Put it on my tab," said JT.
"Guys." Suicide walked down the ramp toward the approaching man, rather overweight in greasy coveralls. "Bart!"
"Yun," he said in a rough voice. He trotted over to Suicide and wrapped her in a bear hug. "Where have you been hiding these last five years?"
"Amargosa."
Bart's face took on a blank expression. "You mean you were there when…"
Suicide nodded.
"And you survived?"
"I'm here, aren't I?"
Bart smiled, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth. "I'm not surprised at all. What brings you to this rustic paradise?"
"I need you to hide my ship. It's on someone's radar who doesn't need to see it." She cocked her head at JT and Boolay. "And I need these two to stay out of trouble for a couple of hours while I go meet with a friend."
"Same tab as the docking fee?"
"Absolutely. Keep the records on ship. No one needs to know until I get her home."
"You got it. What name would you like the ship to fly under?"
"Goldeneye," said JT.
Suicide whirled on him. "Really?"
"You wrecked my ship. I want her back."
Boolay shook his head. "Apes."
Ergas could have passed for Sapiens. He spoke unaccented Humanic. His skin tone made him look almost native Australian with a big nose like most Orags. Only the Neanderthal brow ridge dispelled the illusion of recent Earth ancestry. Plus, despite the magic of Orag rejuvenation, Ergas had perpetually graying hair and more lines on his face than most of his species.
"Yun, my friend," he said when he spotted her walking into the tavern. He had a gravelly voice that suggested a lifetime of smoking various herbs. "What brings you to Menh? And why aren't you down on the planet?"
Suicide accepted Ergas's embrace and returned it. "Ergas, you old bat, why are you still hanging out on the wrong side of the moon?"
He looked her over. "Didn't your ancestors colonize most of this side of Luna?"
"Martian?"
Ergas laughed. "You're too nimble-footed to be a Dome Dweller. At least for any terrag I've ever met." He gestured for her to hop onto a stool. "Whatever poison you got, her drinks are on me."
She looked down at her palm, checking the time. "It's five o'clock in Shandug. I'll have a tequila with a mead chaser."
Ergas slapped her on the back. "Me, too. What in the name of the Qenneg are you doing here? Last I heard, you abandoned your Compact and your private contract to go live in a shack on Amargosa."
The bartender put down two shot glasses in front of them before pushing two pewter mugs of something foamy. Suicide held up her shot and clinked it with Ergas's before downing the tequila. This she chased with what the Orags called mead. They might have invented the drink long before their ancestors on Earth died out, but this was not the drink associated with Vikings, Jefivans, and, in a cheap, watery form, the orbital docks of Bromdar. One needed bees for honey, and Gohem most definitely did not have those.
The mead tasted bitter to her, the sweetness kicking in as she swallowed it. "I'm still on Amargosa. Someone blew up my shack. But if you must know, I work for the provisional government."
"The great Suicide abandoning the Compact?" He put his hand to his chest. "I'm shocked."
"Have you seen the weasel they have as Presi
dent now?" For that, she needed a bigger swig of mead. "Did you know that smarmy little bastard has the only remaining death warrant on Hanar?"
"Hanar. Cute. I understand they're squabbling with Metis over who owns Amargosa."
"Actually, they're sharing the load of defending and rebuilding it. Saves the cost of removing a hundred thousand Gelt settlers and takes into account the other species we didn't know lived there."
"Ah. The werewolves."
"Lycanths."
"Well, that's what the word translates to in Goheem." He downed his mead in one long quaff, then signaled for another. "And one for my poor, anemic terrag friend. You know we left them behind on Iden for a reason."
"Earth," said Suicide. "And your kind died out on Earth. Couldn't handle the end of an ice age if I recall correctly."
"Terrag propaganda," said Ergas. "Anyway, what can an old fossil like me do for a sweet young thing such as yourself."
"I'm not young anymore," said Suicide.
"Compared to me, you're a baby."
"So's your new Qenneg," she said, referring to Gohem's hereditary figurehead. "And the last two people to call me 'sweet' are now ashes hanging around my neck. I'd be sweet if either of them still lived, but here we are."
"You sell yourself short, Yun. Now what's on your mind?"
She held out her left hand, palm up, and fingered the chip in her wrist. A hologram of a blonde woman with a short, severe hairstyle and a white suit with flared sleeves and leg hems flickered above her hand. "Know this woman?"
"I do," said Ergas. "But you knew that already. Didn't you?"
Of course, she did. Otherwise, she'd have booked rooms for JT and Boolay before traveling planetside for a couple of days.
"Sexy, if you're into terrag women. Present company excepted. You're in your own category, my dear." He leaned in closer to look at the image. "That there is one Jez Salamacis. Came to Gohem on my ship about, oh, thirty years ago, back when I looked a lot more handsome, not like some aged farmer on a Cludo Belt world."
In all the time Suicide had known Ergas, she never did find out where or what the Cludo Belt was. "She was one of those terrags sent to the Peandargoem so they can live forever without rejuve."
"Peandargoem?"
"The big research clinic planetside."
"Really?"
"You know we only rejuve once. Well, some of you do that, too. The Thulians?"
"At that Clinic of theirs on Amargosa." Suicide thought about it. "And on their homeworld, though they cut that off two years ago."
Ergas winked, an odd gesture for an Orag. "Rumor has it there's more than one pass to Thule. They've just kept the other two a secret."
"Rumors," said Suicide. "Thule has a large diaspora, but no one's been there since the Yaphit Pass collapsed. Unless there's been some major advance in projection drives or hypergates."
Ergas laughed. "So, what do you want to know about this one?"
Suicide made a fist, wiping Jez Salamacis from existence, at least in holographic form. "Who is she? Did she pay her own way? And how in the hell did she end up the President's chief of staff."
"The answers are, in order, some star-struck girl who found a cause—though I'll be damned if I know what that was—some outfit called Juno paid for her trip, and I assume she met your Mr. Leitman at some point and made her case with her womanly wiles." He smiled. "Depressing, but it's an old story that keeps adding chapters."
"Have you taken any other charters from Juno?" She began flicking through snapshot images on her palm.
"Not for about fifteen years or so. Who are they, anyway?"
"Until a few years ago, we thought they were a GMO startup, a sloppy one at that." She held up her palm. "Was that their symbol on any of their correspondence?"
"Plain letterhead and message header," said Ergas. "Signed off on by some guy named Klament. GMO company, you say?"
"My copilot's mother owns a huge corporation. Somehow, they ended up owning JunoCorp for a time without realizing it. One of those investments some flunky buys intending to sell it off for a quick profit so he can go to his boss and say 'What a good boy am I.'"
"And what happened to the flunky?"
Suicide frowned as she closed her fist again to get rid of the images. "The Gelt vaporized them in the early part of the war."
"Convenient."
She reached over and grabbed Ergas's forearm. "Look, I know how you protect your clients. But I need to know. This Juno, we think they're a terrorist group. They've already targeted the Thulian Colony and a village on Amargosa's western face."
"And your shack?"
She felt herself grimace. "That actually was part of it. I was hiding one of the governor's daughters."
Ergas nodded. "You know I maintain a strict privacy policy."
She knew. She also had to ask.
"However," he said, "someone tried to blow up my little Yun. The least I can do is unleash her wrath on them."
Suicide wrapped the Orag in a hug. "I knew I could count on you."
"Always, Yun. Always."
Her palm tingled. She looked down. The text on her palm jolted her. She signaled for another tequila shot and downed it as soon as it was in front of her.
"Something wrong?" asked Ergas.
"My crew. Can't stay out of trouble."
"There are three of them," said the constable. "I assume you only want to pick up two."
Suicide stood at a counter facing the local constable on the other side. The constable was tall for an Orag. His pronounced brow ridge would have marked his Neanderthal ancestry more clearly than most of his brethren. Suicide noticed the scars on his hands and one over the man's eye that neatly divided his left eyebrow in two. The nose sat a little crooked as well, a badge, she assumed, more important than any he might wear on his clothing.
"Tell me what happened," she said, trying not to sigh.
"A terrag and a zarrag walked into a comfort shop on the mezzanine level."
She suppressed amusement at the constable's speech, refusing to use the Humanic word "Sapiens" or the Zarans' native word for themselves. Yet he struggled to translate "mezzanine" into Humanic for her. "Go on."
"The terrag waited in the lobby drinking coffee," the constable continued, "while his companion booked a comfort girl and went back. Ten minutes later, the comfort girl screamed for her bodyguard. The terrag went back despite the manager's orders that he stay put. The zarrag and the bodyguard had engaged in a physical brawl, and the terrag jumped in on the side of his companion."
"And the reason for this brawl?" Suicide cocked one eyebrow.
The constable stared back at her for a moment, his expression blank.
"I'm on a mission for the provisional government of Amargosa, Constable. Governor Best is a friend of the Qenneg. So, I know you're not going to ask me for a bribe." She folded her arms. "Or do I take this up with the Metisian Consulate on Gohem."
The constable laughed. "No one takes the Metisians seriously."
"Okay, the Hanarian Embassy, then." Suicide looked toward the ceiling as though Gohem were visible through it. Never mind that it actually lay three hundred ninety thousand kilometers beneath her feet. "The First Citizen is awfully fond of my terrag friend. She could easily get your security franchise revoked."
The constable sighed. "The terrag and the zarrag, right? You don't care about the bodyguard?"
"The bodyguard is the comfort shop's problem. The other two are mine. And believe me, they are a problem."
The constable let out a loud, high-pitched laugh, something Suicide could never get used to in Orags. "In the interest of good interstellar relations… And to get that whining monkey out of my cell… I'll release both of them to you." He turned and stepped very close to Suicide. "But they don't come back to this district again, not without a writ from the government. Understood?"
"Not a problem. Take me to them."
She followed the constable down a dingy corridor. It opened into a low-ceilinge
d chamber, even by Orag standards, ringed by single-occupant cells. In one, a large Orag with his head wrapped in a bandage, lay back on a slab snoring. Boolay sat in the second cell, not looking up at Suicide. She stopped for a moment in front of him. He looked like a hairy child who had just been scolded. She thought, but dared not say aloud, that he resembled a sulking chimpanzee.
"I'll deal with you in a moment," she said and moved onto the next cell. There, she found JT Austin holding an icepack over his left eye. "I expected better of you. A brothel?"
He looked up, a frown fixed in place. "I wanted to go to a bar for a couple hours, maybe play gamjod or darts or something."
"Are you so hard up that you have to pay an Orag comfort girl for sex?" said Suicide. "What happened to that settler woman you said you visited going to and from the farm? And I thought you and that Gelt lady who cleans your cabin had something going on."
"Anda cleans my place in exchange for rations and food from the farm," said JT. "And I watch Sarah's daughter for her. You might be surprised to know I've been celibate since the liberation. Just don't have the interest."
"A real killjoy," Boolay called out from his cell. "The madam even offered to give him half an hour on the house."
"Shut up, Boolay." He looked up. "I was defending my crewmate." He looked over toward the other cell with his good eye. "Much to my regret."
"And why did Boolay get into a fight with that girl's bodyguard?" asked Suicide.
"He didn't pay," said JT. "But he is a shipmate, so I came to his defense."
She felt her jaw go slack. "Wait a minute. You've been a monk for the last two years, and you jump into a fight that's not your own?"
"We lived how long in that mine among Marines and weekend warriors?" said JT. "'Fight as a unit' was drilled into my head the whole time."
She shook her head. "JT Austin grows up. You amaze me."
He smiled, still holding the ice to his eye. "Good. Now amaze me by getting me out of here."
