by Patty Jansen
“Wait,” he said. “There is something I want to say.”
I had been about to get up, but sat back down.
He continued. “Sage and I will leave you tomorrow because you’ll be crossing the border and they don’t like us in Prairie. I have something I want to give to you now because I won’t get the chance tomorrow morning.”
I frowned, and he continued, “I know you’ve been trying to get me to talk about political things. Finding out where I stand or what people in this country think. If you really need to know, most people here voted against joining you lot, if they voted at all, and to be honest, most of them didn’t.” He let a silence lapse in which I might have asked him which way he voted, but didn’t. Politics was deeply personal here, I got it.
“But there are certain things… if they start, they cannot be stopped. If you try, bad things happen. We’ve seen that before, if you get what I mean.”
I didn’t.
He groped in his pocket and gave me a datastick. It was an older model, like I’d use in high school.
“You were wondering about the people who worked in the space vehicle factory, whether I knew anyone who had worked there when they still operated, because ten thousand people used to work there. I don’t, and to be honest, I was too young to care. An old man in town gave this to me a while ago, but I hadn’t done anything with it until recently. It doesn’t look very exciting. It’s a list of all the people who used to be employed in the factory. Just names, birth dates, previous employment, that sort of stuff.”
“Anything can be useful. Thank you. I hope you’ve kept a copy for your own use.”
“Sage would have one. I don’t. I don’t want it. Too hot for me. I really don’t want to be political.”
“A list of personnel is political?”
“I was getting to that. It looks pretty boring until you investigate these people. People warned me that if I looked I’d find stuff I didn’t want to know, and I was too chicken to look at it, but I finally did last night.” He shrugged, clearly uncomfortable. “You’d think that out of something like ten thousand employees, some would have stayed in town when the factory closed, especially since they were mostly locals. A workshop manager could easily find work in town. There wouldn’t be much work, exactly, but there would be some, right? Enough to employ one or two people at the very least.”
I frowned at him.
“They’re all gone, like they never existed. I couldn’t find any of these people anywhere. You know, even if some would have gone into the woods, at least a few would have settled in a town nearby. At least the women. They’re not usually too keen on camping out and stuff.” He shrugged. “I can’t find any of them. They’ve just... vanished.”
I felt cold and remembered the words of the old warehouse owner in San Diego. The Southern California Aerospace Corps had their headquarters in the building for a few short years. They packed up and disappeared.
If these were the same people who had occupied many of the administrator roles at Midway Space Station, those had tried to take a ship and disappear to a secret place.
They were people who didn’t want to be found. They had sent ships to Barresh that no one knew about until recently. According to the Thousand Islands Pengali, they still visited, although I’d been unable to verify that.
This news was highly consistent with what I already knew.
“One thing I don’t understand,” I said.
He looked up at me, his dark eyes with a sad expression. It was as if he knew roughly what I was going to say.
“Why haven’t you said anything about this before?”
“You don’t understand. You’re from a free place, and a place where, if you have proof, people will believe it and not try to twist it to suit their political views. You know, this land is tired. I might live across the border, but I’m a Free American by heart. This is my country. It pains me to see what’s happened to it. Over the years and year and years, our leaders have worn us out. They’ve made division about us, the common people. They’ve told us we’re good and the other countries are bad and that’s why we should keep living like we’re in a war zone. It’s all based on twisted facts and lies. After a while, you’re so tired that you even start believing their garbage, because not to believe it is setting yourself up to be an outcast. But if you press almost any decent person in this country, they know that great wrongs were done in the name of our corrupt governments. It’s not just Patterson and his vile bunch in Denver. The other governments are just as bad. I could tell stories about the shit that goes on in Miami. I have a distant cousin who drives leisure boats out of Havana and gets to deal with the government people who can afford to come on holidays. You should hear the stories he tells. It’s the same all over. People only looking after themselves. The rest of us being too poor to challenge.”
He blew out a breath.
“Long story short, people around the canyon area know that this group of space scientists went missing. That they left Mexico because they didn’t want to fall under Nations of Earth, and that they came to America Free State, and that they hijacked that shuttle that came down in Texas and took it God knows where. And that all their twelve thousand odd employees just vanished off the official records. And if you say that some of their stuff turned up on other worlds, I think we have a problem. Because many of them left San Diego for all the wrong reasons. But no one wants to say anything because there is a lot of garbage associated with it all. Bribery, thievery, slavery and stuff like that. You know we used to be a slave country? Well, we never got over that. Myself, I have ancestors who used to be slaves. I have native blood. I have African blood. I have Spanish blood. I want to stand up and look you folk in the eye as a proud man and say that we’ve done good things or died trying. That’s why I give this to you. Because no one else will do the investigation you’re doing. We’re too tired and too afraid to do it. We can’t. We have no money and equipment.”
“Thank you for your trust in me,” I said. “I hope that I’ll be able to live up to some of your wishes.”
“Oh, you will. Anything is better than what we have now. It’s sad, but there it is.”
It was late and getting cold by the dying fire.
I went inside where it was also cold, and the air was laced with the scent of musty bedding. I didn’t sleep very well, and, by the sounds of people wandering around the cabin at night, neither did most of my team.
A few people went outside very early in the morning. I heard them rummage in the living room, whispering to each other in Coldi. Apparently another communication window was about to open up.
I only got up when I could see light outside the window. The mist hung low over the lake, and the surface reflected the misty trees like a perfect mirror. It was incredibly still and peaceful.
Sheydu and Anyu sat at the table where we had sat last night, with all their devices on the rough wooden planks.
I went to stand next to the fire pit, surprised that it still gave off some warmth.
“We have limited coverage,” Sheydu said. “I’m trying to get the news and get a few messages out.”
“Anything I need to know about?” I asked.
“There is a lot of activity in the air.”
“Where does it come from?”
“Nothing to do with us.”
Judging by the tone in her voice, this worried Sheydu.
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, yes. They’re unknown ships. We can’t trace what they are.”
“There have been attacks from the air. You wouldn’t expect the local military to carry out surveillance? I would think that sort of activity would be normal. I very much doubt they’d carry any type of identification that we can read.”
“We don’t know what they’re doing.”
“You mean they’re tracking us?”
She gave me a dark look.
I was venturing into questions she wasn’t at liberty to answer.
So what was going on? Was it that the Asto military couldn’t shadow us with these craft here? Or that she had expected Asto military craft to be nearby, but the presence of these unknown craft meant they couldn’t be? Was she meant to have received some intelligence from them?
As we sat there, Junco came outside, bringing steaming mugs of tea. He set them on the table and stood back, watching what Sheydu and Anyu were doing from a distance.
The bus was coming up the road along the lake.
It stopped in front of the house and Poppy came out, shouting, “Breakfast!”
She brought a big box down the steps, which she took into the cabin, leaving a smell of fried eggs in her wake.
There were plenty of eggs and baked tomato, and bacon for those who wanted it, and fluffy white rolls and a box with sauces.
The Pengali kids were highly amused by the mustard bottle. If you squeezed it, the mustard came out.
As it turned out, Pengali liked mustard, and when we had finished eating, the two kids wouldn’t let go of the bottle.
“It’s almost empty. They can have it,” Poppy said.
Pykka still clutched the bright red bottle like a treasure when he got onto the bus.
We had to say goodbye to Sage and Junco.
I told them I’d try to update them with how we were doing. They’d been good to us, and I suspected they were at least somewhat sympathetic to a political change that allowed the region to re-join the world, and Nations of Earth. Living in Mexico, Junco was already part of this world, but his heart was with his roots across the border. I hadn’t yet looked at his information. I’d give it to the team when I had a chance. Likely, Deyu and Reida could do wonders with it. Once we located a device to read it.
Poppy drove the bus down a winding path through a forest. This was one of the few dense living forests I had seen. On the West Coast, most of the trees had been dead, and I was told there were never very many to begin with.
It was pretty here.
Once, the bus had to stop for a group of three large-eared deer crossing the road. Poppy made noises that she thought it was a pity she didn’t have a gun, because they were good eating, but I didn’t think she would have survived Deyu’s anger had she shot them.
Then it was into endless plains. We kept going for most of the morning. I looked at maps, the kids played games, Veyada slept and the Pengali kids giggled about his snoring. Deyu was drawing deer. On the same page, she had drawn a squirrel and a beetle. And Sage’s dog. Towards mid afternoon, we came to another medium-sized town.
Here, we had to get on a train and we said goodbye to Poppy.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The train station was a disorganised sea of travellers.
A line of vehicles waited to drop off passengers. Long queues of people waited at the ticket machines. I’d thought people booked places electronically, but apparently that was not so.
The station had four platforms, and all were crammed with passengers.
Entire families lugged bags bulging with their possessions. Children sat in strollers and other contraptions. People argued over sparse seating on the platforms, and over who could stand in front of the boards with the timetable.
Clay had pre-purchased a ticket, so the attendants who determined who could get onto the platform only needed to see proof of payment.
A helpful man said that our train was about to come in.
A few people in the sea of passengers noticed us coming down the stairs to the platform.
The information that a “group of aliens” were getting on the train spread like a ripple across the waiting crowd. People looked at us and then looked away.
Telaris and Deyu moved to the front of our group. They were both impressive and visibly armed.
People moved aside, not meeting our eyes.
I’d have expected some shouted protests, but no one said a word. It was strange and eerie.
These people were scared.
I thought of what Junco had said last night. They were afraid of us and their own authorities and would rather stay quiet to protect themselves and their families.
In all conflicts of the past, tyrants were helped by complicity of people who saw themselves as unable to affect change.
This was one of the favourite lines my professor at Mars University used to say.
It was one of the things you’d busily scribble down as a student but never understood until you’d seen it in action.
If a regime wore down their citizens enough, it took a landslide to move the people into protesting. That was the stuff that civil wars were made of. This part of the world had already seen two of those. They were tired. People were going to think of themselves first, and this made the problem of entrenched power worse. It was a vicious circle.
Nicha and Telaris had hired two adjacent cabins for us, where we installed the children and dumped all our gear. My team took off their most obvious weapons, while keeping the concealed weapons.
The weapons went with the bags into the rack above the seats.
Most of the team stayed with the children while Evi, Nicha and I went in search of the food carriage.
We walked through the public cabin in single file.
Evi attracted a lot of attention. He’d put on sunglasses and with a bit of goodwill, his bronze-coloured hair looked like it might have been dyed. But most dark-skinned people in Mexico had not been as dark as he was, and really dark people were definitely not as common across the border. He looked like a hired bodyguard and that, in turn, focused attention on the rest of us.
Several people were watching news on devices, and while we walked past, I tried to catch a glimpse of what they were looking at. The headlines were revealing.
Heroic army effort underway to protect citizens.
Some of those soldiers were also on the train, mostly young men travelling in groups of three or four. They wore a basic uniform in army green without many decorations. They seemed nervous, and I was wondering what the minimum age was for kids to join the armed forces, because many looked young enough to still be in school.
When I was at university, one of my professors placed a great deal of importance on knowledge of world history and we’d read about the young men who were so keen to sign up for the First World War that they lied about their birth date, only for masses of them to be slaughtered on the battlefield.
What good could an army of teenagers be in response to attack by an Aghyrian entity? Or was everyone lying about the origins of the attack and did they know where it came from? Like South Africa?
I was starting to see ghosts everywhere.
I caught a glimpse of a vid showing Celia Braddock declaring in a rousing speech that she would send the full force of the army to crush the bastards.
“You heroes can do a lot more than they expect,” she shouted. “They won’t be surprised. We will take back our country and avenge this cowardly attack.”
The audience in the vid was cheering and yelling, and a couple of train passengers joined the owner of the device in watching it.
Whatever I saw of Celia Braddock, I liked her less and less. She seemed to thrive on short accusatory statements. Her speeches held little substance. They were full of angry rhetoric and low on details. She pretended that hers was the only country affected.
“What army?” I asked Nicha, who was walking behind me. Because I was unsure that the four countries would work together, and they were probably accusing each other, as well as Mexico and Canada, of collaborating with the attackers.
“I doubt she cares, as long as the people love it,” he said. “You can’t argue with her. She just makes up stuff just so that she is right. She’s always done that.”
He grew up in London, home of a large population of north American refugees. I had asked him to talk about what he kne
w before our trip, and he said he’d been very young and occupied with other things. However, since coming here, he’d made some valuable observations that stemmed from his internalised experiences. That people were protective of all four countries despite their differences. That they all viewed Nations of Earth as a bully. That they didn’t take kindly to outsiders analysing the North American conflicts. That they viewed Mexico and Canada as invaders who had illegally obtained some of their land. That they had pride in self-sufficiency, even if that stubbornness also led to food shortages and the necessity of rationing.
They outwardly presented as a proud people who argued that they didn’t need the rest of the world. Behind the scenes, though, Junco had told me that everyone was tired.
When we got to the food carriage, they only sold doughy rolls, and no vegetarian options were available, so I only bought food for the non-vegetarians and the others would have to use their rapidly dwindling supply of Asto military rations.
When we came back to our carriage, the first thing I noticed were two bubbles floating near the ceiling in the corridor.
Oh no.
We had two cabins. I’d noticed that the security team was holding a meeting in the first and all the kids sat in the second. I yanked open the door. An avalanche of bubbles spilled out. The cloud was so thick that I could barely see anything. Bubbles stuck to my face and in my hair and my hands.
Opening the door released a cloud of them into the hallway, which meant the density in the cabin dropped, allowing me to see in.
Ayshada was laughing so much that his face was bright red.
Pykka sat with the mustard bottle on his lap. He had attached its nozzle to the bubble blowing contraption with a small piece of hose. He was just squeezing the bottle, causing the contraption to release a cloud of bubbles into the tiny cabin.
He saw me, gasped and hid the thing behind his back, but this only caused the thing to blow out another puff of bubbles as it got caught between his back and the seat.
His eyes widened, like a frightened doggie that has just peed on the carpet.
