Amicon took back the lead. “You showed them the backdoor. You led them into that substation. You might as well have turned off the shield yourself.”
“What? That’s a lie!” After initial surprise, Isabel stood up like a pillar of fire. The rage ran deep and she shocked even herself with the intensity of her protest. She was not in the resistance but she would not sell a client down the river like this. “I didn’t do it. Sure, I gave them a few tips along the way. How else would I last in the business this long? But I would never deliver the killing blow. I helped you when no one else would.” That was an overstatement. There were plenty other gun sellers who dealt with Amicon and his troop. She was just the most prolific one, but it wouldn’t suit her point to say: I helped you when so many others did too. “My weapons kept you in the fight. Why would I shut you down? It puts me out of work. You wanna find the reason for your defeat, that’s all fine and dandy, but I’m not it. Lay the blame at someone else’s door.”
“Lies of a traitor,” Lucius snarled.
Admiral Takanaga raised one hand. It was enough to commandeer everyone’s attention. “Perhaps. But through her actions in the past, Isabel Rocarion showed us she is honourable. And we need her assistance this last time.”
“And you will blackmail me into giving it?”
“It’s a language you understand well,” Pace told her. “We don’t have any ships left. We need your services as a smuggler.”
“No.”
Puffs of air escaped from four throats at the same time. Pace reacted differently. The right side of his face crumpled in confusion. Isabel felt proud that she had made that stone image flinch. “You decline, knowing it will cost you your freedom, and most likely your life?”
“I decline because you have insulted me. I’m not a smuggler. I’m a gunrunner.”
“I fail to see any difference.”
“You fail at many things. Smugglers traffic anything. Drugs. Slaves. Sex workers. Rotten food and beer made out of dog’s piss. I specialise in weapons.”
“Gunrunner then. Your misguided pride clouds your good judgement. I can still countermand the order. The file won’t be released. Your Earthen masters won’t be notified and you will be able to fly as far away as you please. You only need to lend us your ship and services for a day or two. The choice is yours to make. Do you want to be a dead general or a free… nothing?”
He might as well have said: how do you plead, guilty or not guilty? His patronising attitude only hardened Rocarion’s course. “You know, you could have said all that in fewer words. The answer is still no. I don’t cave in to threats.”
“You stupid, ugly woman!” Lucius banged on the table again. The little man stood up again and the table covered him to half of his sunken chest. His eyes were bright with a sparkle of madness. “I make a formal motion to the council. We kill Isabel Rocarion right here, right now! Who seconds?”
Isabel laughed. It was a rich laughter of true merriment. She couldn’t help herself. Lucius wouldn’t kill a spider on the wall. He didn’t have the stomach wet work required. As for everyone else, she carefully reached for the gun resting under the coat and aimed the shooting ends at Pace. If anyone was going to make a move against her, it was the Arbiter.
“There will be no killing here.” John Amicon rose next to Lucius like a frazzled angel in black. He laid a placating but firm hand on the small man’s shoulder. “We are the Colonial Congress, the voice of the oppressed, the oasis of enlightenment in the universe overrun by darkness and greed. We will not succumb to their methods. Not now, not ever.”
He addressed the other members of the council, one by one. “Doctor Sandy, your compassion is an example to us all. I know that you have already forgiven our guest.”
The Doctor smiled at Isabel. In her eyes was only sorrow but she nodded slightly in confirmation. Amicon moved on.
“Admiral Takanaga. You are a man of honour. You have given your word and you will not break it.” Always straight and calm, the old Japanese stood up and bowed to Isabel. She felt compelled to nod back at him. Amicon moved along.
“And Jacob, through those few years together at this table you’ve kept yourself a mystery, but I believe I got to know you better than you thought I might. Your actions are always guided by what reason dictates.”
John Amicon walked to where Pace sat and offered his hand to the man. The perfect silence stirred. The famous Amicon handshake, mark of greatest esteem, reserved for those John Amicon was prepared to call his closest friends, those he trusted above anyone else. Isabel raised one eyebrow. Amicon’s choice was not only surprising but distasteful and possibly calamitous. But others seemed to look on with reverence as the Arbiter stood up and accepted. The two men looked into each other’s eyes.
“Our bluff misfired. We can’t gain anything by spreading misinformation about Isabel Rocarion. It’s been an honour serving the Colonies by your side, Jacob. I’m urging you to send the signal to your EEF man and to erase all copies of the falsified record. We’ve discussed the further steps already. Carry out the mission. I trust in you explicitly. And so should you all.” The last words were directed to the room at large. Isabel had an urge to roll her eyes. She could do it scot free too. The glasses would shield her from the others knowing. But she didn’t. She fixed her gaze on Amicon and Pace, instead. Something was going on between them, under the surface, away from the words just spoken. Try as she might, she couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Jacob Pace replied in his rustling tongue, “The honour is mine. I will not betray your trust.” He touched a small black bar above his chest pocket and it gradually changed colour to red. “Done. Consider yourself demoted, Isabel Rocarion.”
All the theatrical dramaturgy involved so far paled in comparison to what Isabel saw then. A little smile crawled on top of Pace’s lips. Sure, it was a crooked grimace loaded with mockery and contempt, but still, a smile. The rarest phenomenon in the known universe was hers to behold.
“Thanks, Paceman. I knew you couldn’t go through with it. Me? A general? The armies of the universe would disband before acknowledging it.”
“You have seen right through me, completely and without error,” he spread his little bit of sarcasm. The smile disappeared into the annals of history, never to return.
“No! I won’t agree to this! She has betrayed us! How can you be this blind?” the Quartermaster shouted.
“Lucius, calm down,” Doctor Sandy hurried to the man’s side. She touched his forehead before he pushed her away with a force which almost made her fall. “You’re burning up with a fever. You need to rest.”
“There’s no rest left! She killed us all! She’s our greatest enemy!” Lucius kept on going like a lunatic. It really was little more than the babbling of a sick man. The scales fell from Isabel’s eyes. In the past, she had only contempt for his ever-deteriorating behaviour. But now she knew that she should have pitied the man instead. He was ill, physically and mentally. And the illness made him unpredictable.
No one could deal with the crazy better than the man who had always been steady in his course, honest about his agenda. John Amicon approached the angry Quartermaster and spoke in tones as calm as the breeze above the oceans of the archipelago world called Brogan’s Tears. “This is not true, Lucius. Our greatest enemy isn’t her. It isn’t the soldiers flying above us. It isn’t the Earth, even, not its corruption, not its hate. The worst danger lies within us.” Amicon touched his heart. “In here, I feel a lot of contrary feelings every day. Every night before I go to bed, I want to rip a hole in the wall like it was the President of Earth Council himself. I want to weep for the losses we’ve been through. I wake up and I feel despair, and it is so complete that I find it hard to do anything, say anything.
“But I look around and I find hope in little things. The birds singing. The rays of sunshine touching my face. They remind me that life carries on regardless, so I have to carry on too and give it my best. Lucius, i
f we give in to hatred, fear and violence, then who do we become? We’ll be no better than the ones who set us on this road, the ones who reaped the fruit of our hard work without giving us the benefit not just of our reward but the most basic things every human deserves: respect, freedom to live our lives as we please, the unfettered pursuit of happiness till the end of days. But if we go down the deceptive road of hatred and destruction, we will only destroy ourselves and our work faster and more completely than any Earther with a gun ever can. We may have lost this war, but we have prevailed in spirit. Please, Lucius, do not take that away from us by insisting we behave like a troop of despotic killers.”
John Amicon was the man of many words. But it wasn’t just the words that made an impact. It was the way in which he spoke them, the absolute certainty and clarity that gave the listener no room to doubt that he was saying what was in his heart. Back on Earth, when he was a lawyer, an activist, and one-term councillor (he ended up indicted on charges of corruption, ultimately found guilty in absentia as he absconded from what his supporters believed to be unfair allegations by the government), Amicon used to sit down with his political opponents and make them change their mind. At the very least, he managed to obtain some form of respect from them. But then that respect turned into fear, and fear led to persecution. By going after John Amicon, the Earth Council had created a symbol against their system of abuse and sown the seeds of the greater conflict that came to be known as the Colonial War.
Amicon’s fine but overlong speech had a magical effect on Lucius. The Quartermaster fell into his chair and sobbed lightly. Amicon moved in and embraced him. Lucius mumbled into the man’s sleeve something that may have been an apology. Whatever he meant to say, Isabel Rocarion knew she was safe from his outbursts for now. But she had lost more precious minutes. With the clock ticking away to oblivion, she pressed her luck.
“What about my compensation?”
“Pay her what she’s earned,” John Amicon told Lucius like a father would tell a small child.
Silence fell once more. Isabel Rocarion was reassured, though. She’d entered the assembly room toying with the idea of taking out her gun and bringing the old-fashioned argument of brute force to the polite conversation. It wasn’t her favourite negotiating strategy, so she was glad she didn’t have to fall back on it.
“What?” Lucius was still a tiny bit incredulous.
“Pay her what we owe her, in full.”
“Yes. I second it. Please pay Isabel Rocarion. We gave her our word,” Admiral Takanaga supported the move.
“I agree,” Dr. Sandy joined in.
Jacob Pace said nothing, neither to support nor to object.
“Right. Of course.” The Quartermaster bent down under the table to pick up something which rested at his feet this whole time. He re-emerged with the Colonial stash in his blistered hands. It turned out to be a piteously small blue cassette made of reinforced cosmic steel. Light cast a rainbow on the grainy surface; the treasure really was buried at its end.
Isabel watched Lucius open the cache with the swipe of his fingertip. She noted the contents inside. The cassette was half-filled with blue-grey bricks, each one worth one hundred thousand cosmos. Oh the irony, the Colonials were using currency established by Earth to pay their Expeditionary Forces. But everyone was using it and there was little else Isabel would be ready to accept. Liquidity was key.
In all, there were at least a million cosmos inside the case and it was about to fall in the Earthers’ greedy hands, minus her small cut. What a waste. She knew exactly what she would do with that kind of money. Her gun fingers itched beneath the suede glove. The temptation ran high, whispering sweet words of encouragement. She served herself first and foremost. She could do a ton of good stuff with that kind of dough.
She gulped the song down her throat and didn’t get back to it. Two hundred thousand cosmos were more than enough to satisfy her needs, even if she was leaving the gunrunner gig for good.
“Two hundred thousand, as promised,” Lucius handed over two bricks. They weighed less than Isabel had expected. She watched her own reflection in the bricks, the slight upcurls in the corners of her mouth telling it all. She made it! She was rich! There was no elation. No ray of heavenly light enveloped her. The lightning of sudden inspiration didn’t strike her. She picked up a whole lot of money but her pragmatic nature told her it meant nothing. She still had to live long enough to spend it.
30 minutes and one second left, her glasses told her. She got what she wanted with time to spare.
“Thanks.” She dropped the cash into her coat pocket and backed out towards the steps. She was done with the resistance. Bye-bye, romantics and idealists. “Nice doing business with you. Call me if a miracle happens and you keep the shop open.”
“I was rather hoping you’d stay for another few minutes. I have one final offer for you,” John Amicon said. He sounded more casual than someone with a knife pointed at his throat.
Isabel would be lying if she said she wasn’t intrigued. Amicon was a practical man, not a time waster. Time. It was ticking away but, with the bars secured, she still had enough minutes to run a quick chat and then she’d exit the scene with a margin she considered comfortable.
Isabel plopped back in the chair and sat back with arms crossed on her chest. “Give me your best shot, Johnny.”
Amicon took the seat directly opposite her and leant forward with steepled fingers. “I know I’m done for. That’s why you came, to check I hadn’t already scrambled, didn’t you? Your EEF masters will be very disappointed if I break out of their tight net and run off to cause some more mayhem. Don’t worry, I will stay here and let them take me. I understand they will make a grand show of it. I’m ready for anything.”
A part of Isabel was dolorous. Amicon’s capture worked better for her, but she felt some kind of fondness for the man who grew from a footnote into a legend over the last decade. He still had supporters. Even on the cusp of their final victory, the EEFers feared that John Amicon might somehow not be here; that he would re-emerge in a different nook of colonised space to spread more anti-Earth propaganda and rouse millions to oppose Earth Council’s domination again. But he was here. He’d given up. Half of humanity was going to be disappointed, another half delighted. There was no soul without feelings in the matter. How could there be? The great cosmic civil war was about to end!
“This isn’t about me, or any of us, in fact.” John Amicon’s stare was stern and more focused than ever. “The resistance is dead. We will go quietly. What I want to discuss is... personal.”
“No, I’m not gonna marry you,” Isabel couldn’t help herself. A snort accompanied her response. She looked around and was surprised to see it burst out through Admiral Takanaga’s nose.
“I’m glad you haven’t lost your sardonic sense of humour through all of this. I know you did things that went against us but I still trust you. Call me naive but I really have no other choice, with all our ships gone or destroyed,” John Amicon said.
Isabel glanced back to Admiral Takanaga. Collected again, the Japanese acknowledged it in silence. Rockwall had nothing left that flew.
“I know what I... what we are going to ask you goes beyond the things you were prepared to do throughout this conflict. But there’s nowhere else we can go. We need you to do smuggler’s work. A humanitarian job. We need you to provide safe passage for some very vulnerable people.”
Isabel’s stomach lurched. After all the years, had John Amicon learnt nothing about her? She was not a smuggler, and most importantly she took no idle passengers, ever. “You want to move people, ask a ferry service.”
She uncrossed her arms and moved to stand. Amicon reached out and put his hand on top of her glove. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you see them.”
He gave a wave to that door he’d come from earlier and there they were, a neat line of people moving down the steps to the edge of the light oval. They had prepared their sequence beforehand. First wen
t a woman with straight red hair, John Amicon’s wife, a good 20 years younger than him. She was accompanied by a child on each side, a boy on her left, a girl on her right. The Amicon twins. Isabel searched her memory for their names, couldn’t remember. How old were they? Perhaps three, no more than that. They were spaceborn, innocents who knew nothing of Earth. They’d be a great bounty to the EEF commander who caught them…
“You kept your children here?” Her blood was boiling over this. Something stirred inside her. Amicon risked his own children! “What kind of parent are you?”
“A desperate one. By the time we knew we had lost, there was no captain here I could trust to take them. They’d either flat refuse or worse, sell them to my enemies. I knew you were the only captain I can trust. And the best one.”
“You’re a silly man,” Isabel shook her head and went back to watching. After the Amicons walked a man in civvie clothes. She wasn’t fooled by the quick change from the fighter pilot’s coveralls. Troy Sandy, the good doctor’s younger brother, looked back at her with a sour look. Isabel knew he wasn’t going willingly and if she decided to take him aboard her ship, the Anvil, he’d likely cause her a deal of worry. Her conscience, troubled by the sight of children, eased a little. Not by much though. That slick fox Amicon knew what he was doing, parading little ones first so she wouldn’t get too worked up about anyone she might see.
And then there were the Takanagas. The Admiral’s wife was a small woman with wrinkles like an overripe peach. She was flanked by two daughters and a son-in-law, holding her, helping her to walk. She looked ill. Her natural son was missing. He had been taken, or killed, in the pitched battle the Colonial Fleet had thrown against the incoming Earth forces. That was Admiral Takanaga’s own desperate last-ditch attempt to stem the Earther tide and it ended in a total disaster. They would have done better if they’d used those ships to escape to the fringes of space or somewhere.
No one knew what happened to the Admiral’s son, a navy officer. There was no word yet but prospects didn’t look rosy. 80 percent of the Colonial ships were destroyed, some others captured. A mere handful slipped away to who knew where. It appeared they didn’t think it was wise to come back home to Rockwall at all. Isabel agreed.
Her Last Run Page 3
