“I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.” Axel said, cradling his coffee cup. “I never saw myself as a father, but …” He smiled dazedly.
“Have you told your own father yet?”
Axel’s father, Philip K. Best, served as the governor of Juradis. Gil worked with him in his role as a liaison for the queazel community, and considered him a fundamentally decent man, whose yen for risk-taking was only what one might expect from the former CEO of an interstellar corporation. Philip was, anyway, a better man than his son gave him credit for.
“Nope,” Axel said. “Guess I’ll have to at some point.” He shrugged.
“Then you are not thinking of naming the child after him?”
“It might be a girl! Anyway, no.” Axel pushed a plate of algae cookies across the table. “These are awful, I’m warning you.”
“What will you call the child, then?”
“Meg wants to name it after Colm.”
The name made Gil jump. “You don’t agree?”
“I’m just hoping it’s a girl,” Axel joked. His shoulders sank a fraction. “She misses him. I get that. I miss him too. But …”
It was on the tip of Gil’s tongue to blurt out his news. He had met Dhjerga Lizp. Colm was alive! But the sudden darkness in Axel’s expression held him back. Gil had been a diplomat for years; he defaulted to discretion when in doubt. And now he doubted whether in fact Axel would welcome his news. He lapped a mouthful of coffee. It was not very good. “Do you think Meg misses him … too much?”
Axel sighed. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“How else would you put it?”
“We all want things that aren’t good for us sometimes.” Axel raised his head and with a challenging stare turned it around on Gil. “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
“This coffee is quite horrible,” Gil said. “The blend has been adulterated. The best coffee in the Betelgeuse system comes from my own estate at the north pole of Juradis.”
“I know. You introduced the crop yourself, didn’t you?”
“I did. One of my small successes.”
“You introduced tobacco, too, right?”
“Yes …”
“And grapes.”
“Not a success. The soil is too alkaline and dry. Anyway, our hawbrother berries make a superior beverage.”
“So you’re sticking to hawbrother wine these days? That’s good to know.”
Gil wriggled his hindquarters in irritation. Axel had seen him at his worst, when he was a recluse, living alone at Castle Nulth with a bottomless supply of drink and drugs. “I have lost my taste for stimulants, if that is what you’re asking.” He had not touched tropodolfin, or any of the myriad other substances humans had invented to improve on nature’s chemistry, since Colm disappeared. Now he felt a twinge of the old craving. It was Axel’s fault.
“Colm was a junkie,” Axel said brutally. “We caught him … well, never mind. It freaked Meg out.” He gazed into his coffee cup, lips sealed.
Gil knew that quite well. He, after all, had encouraged Colm’s tropodolfin addiction, for the sake of the CHEMICAL MAGE project. At Castle Nulth, he had shared his supply with him. Watched as the drug interacted with Colm’s implant, unleashing his gift for magic. And he had gotten an illicit thrill—hadn’t he?—out of sharing his most degrading vice with someone else. Having a companion on the road to hell.
A friend.
On Dhjerga Lizp’s list, handwritten by Colm, had appeared the damning words: Tropodolfin … or ANYTHING you can find …
Colm must be suffering agonies, wherever he was. Gil had experienced the misery of withdrawal for himself, and queazel physiology was more resistant to addiction than human. He did not want to put Colm through that wretched cycle again.
So when Dhjerga had said, “And what about this stuff? Is it chemicals or what? Any of that around here?” Gil had said no. It was true, anyway—hard drugs were not found in spaceship component distribution centers. No, he doesn’t really need that, he had said—and Dhjerga, believing him, had crossed those items off the list.
Gil had been there that night on the weather deck of the Unsinkable when Colm vanished. He shivered at the memory of the crazy glitter in Colm’s eyes, and the rattling of the spoons … and that instant when he had found himself alone, with only a chill in the air.
CHEMICAL MAGE had been a mistake. It had accomplished nothing. It had inadvertently brought the Ghosts to Sol system, killed hundreds of innocent subjects, and wrecked Colm’s life. Gil refused to be complicit in continuing the deadly experiment—and he believed that Colm’s plea for drugs was simply withdrawal talking.
After all, Colm had also asked for spaceship parts.
A more than typically resourceful human, he was building his own ship.
He would be coming back the usual way, via FTL.
And that, Gil now decided, would be soon enough for Axel to know about his return. Axel and Meg had a chance to be happy. However unexpected and inconvenient, their child would bring them joy. It had already made a new man of Axel. His mental state would not be improved by the knowledge that his rival was on the way home.
“Was there any specific reason you came out here?” Axel said, with a determined smile. “It can’t have been for the coffee …”
“No it was for the algae cookies,” Gil said, swirling one up with his tongue. “Ugh. Quite disgusting.”
“I warned you.”
“How are the new builds coming along?”
“We’re ahead of schedule. Five frigates and three cruisers completed. That’s in addition to the ships we got from the Duke of Noom.”
“The sentrienza’s Rigel fleet is thirty ships strong. If they send the entire fleet …”
“We’ll crush them.” Axel spoke for the benefit of the civilians nearby. His eyes told a different story. He was worried. Even the Rat, Gil knew, was worried. And why should they not be? Even if they did crush the Rigel fleet, there’d be another fleet behind that one. And another. And another. How could the humans and queazels prevail against a 500-world empire?
Gil had had a thought in his mind for some time which he uttered now. “Sooner or later we shall have to take the fight to Elphame.”
Elphame: the homeworld of the sentrienza, abode of the Gray Emperor. A fortress world in the Orion Cluster, more than 2,000 light years from here. Gil, of course, had never been there, but he’d been hearing about its impregnability since he was a kit.
“Damn straight. Show the faerie bastards no mercy,” Axel said. He clearly took Gil’s comment for bravado, and Gil left it there.
“The minefields around Noom and Juradis are almost complete,” Gil said. The queazels had responsibility for those. “It would help if we had some Walking Guns to reinforce our defenses.”
Axel grimaced. “Have to talk to Princess Emnl. Sorry, I mean Queen Emnl.” The sentrienza princess had insisted on the title as a condition of helping the humans, even though it was meaningless, since she remained in the Fleet’s power “The Guns are her big bargaining chip. She won’t turn them over to our control without some major concessions. Meg is supposed to be negotiating that right now …”
CHAPTER 13
MEG LAY ON HER back beneath a beach parasol, watching seventy-two Walking Guns carve calligraphic tracks across the sky. They were Flying Guns as well. Beyond the parasol’s shade, Betelgeuse pounded the white sand of Skaldaffi, an island in Juradis’s northern hemisphere. Waves frilled on the beach. Children, wearing sun hats the size of truck tyres, romped in the foam, catching the pink pearl jellyfish that floated ashore at this time of year. Meg was watching the Walking Guns because she couldn’t bear to watch the children. This time last year, the sight of human children playing would have brought an uncomplicated smile to her face. Now, it awoke the abiding horror that swamped her mind whenever she thought of the future. It had been downright cruel of Emnl to make her come here.
But of course, Emnl was downright
cruel. She was dangling the Flying Guns like a carrot in front of the Rat’s nose. They were sky-writing now, spelling out the word Victory in sentrienza, human, queazel, and shablag script. The mara, the other slave race who lived on Juradis, were illiterate. But even they (there were a couple of mara on the beach, catching fish with their hands) gazed approvingly at the display. It looked like a promise: Victory … But whose victory? This aerobatic display ratcheted up the pressure on Meg to deliver the goods.
“Would it kill you to let us use them temporarily?” she snapped.
“You know my price,” Emnl replied.
And the trouble was, Meg did.
Emnl’s lavender hair trailed across the sand. She lay on a stripy towel, swathed in a protective garment resembling a multicolored burkini. Sentrienza skin was even more vulnerable than human to the high levels of UV radiation from Betelgeuse. Large mirrored sunglasses hid her eyes, but Meg just knew the bitch was gloating.
“In fact, I’m doing you a favor,” Emnl said. “Our contract, as initially formulated, was a fair exchange. In return for the life of Axel Best, you promised me your first-born child.”
Meg looked away, balling the material of her sarong in her fist. Back on Sakassarib, where she signed that contract, she had thought it was a sentrienza joke. If it got them off that damn iceball, she’d have signed anything. She never planned on having kids, anyway …
Well, look at her now. The sarong tied high under her breasts hid the little four-month bump, but she felt the fetus moving every day now. The first time, it had scared the shit out of her. She’d gone to the clinic, thinking something was wrong. No, said the automated diagnosis system. Your baby is perfectly healthy. She’d been glad that day that there was no human staffer on duty. She’d related the whole episode to Axel as a joke, and he’d duly teased her about it. “I guess we’re all dumb, when it comes to babies.”
You got that right, Axel.
She felt so dumb, not just about babies but in general.
So dumb.
Sure, Smythe. A piece of paper, or bisshengri hide, or whatever it was, signed in a sentrienza mound on an iceball in the Betelgeuse system, can’t possibly be enforceable …
Except now it was. Because Emnl had the whole Fleet over a barrel. The Marine guards standing at the treeline, and the gunboat in the lagoon, were just window dressing. Emnl, though still a prisoner, held the whip hand. The Rat had authorized Meg to offer the sentrienza princess—OK, queen—pretty much anything she might ask for in exchange for the Walking Guns.
Emnl had asked for clothes, jewellery, and a tropical holiday, for starters, but Meg knew she was just toying with them. She only wanted one thing.
Meg’s baby.
“You owe it to me anyway!” Emnl reminded her. “I’ll throw in the Guns as a bonus.” She made them loop the loop in the bright yellowish-blue sky. People applauded. “Out of the goodness of my heart.”
Meg pushed herself up on her elbows. “The goodness of your heart? Don’t make me laugh.”
“You can have a caesarean section at seven months,” Emnl said. “The Rigel fleet cannot get here any sooner than that.”
“Why do you really want it? Why mine? I know you guys had a nasty habit of stealing human babies in the old days. But why be so picky? There are hundreds of kids around here.” Meg gestured at the children wading in the surf with their dripping nets full of jellyfish. She felt bad for suggesting that Emnl pick on someone else, but she knew it wouldn’t happen. Emnl was only interested in her baby, for reasons she refused to disclose.
“It is sure to be a nice baby,” Emnl said placidly. “How could it be otherwise, with parents like you and Major Best?”
And she twitched her sunglasses down, and winked at Meg with her optical membrane, one eye transforming from a faceted golf ball into a luminous blue orb that reminded Meg of Emnl’s mother, the late queen.
She knows.
Meg had never been sure on this point. After all, how could Emnl have gotten access to her medical records? But now she was certain.
She knows.
She got up, stumbling as the blood rushed to her head. She jammed her sun hat on.
“Where are you going?” Emnl said in alarm.
“To talk to Bella. She’s right over there. I assume I’m still allowed to chat with my girlfriends?”
*
In fact, Bella Tan was Meg’s only girlfriend. She was married to Suleiman Tan, the ex-Navy pilot who’d flown with Meg and Colm on Majriti IV, and then worked with them in the Kuiper Belt. When the shit hit the fan, you could count on Sully Tan to have your back. His rock-steady reliability was only matched by his wife’s gift for making lemons into lemonade. Axel had helped Sully bring his family to Juradis. Now the Tans operated one of the krill fishing factory vessels that plied the planet’s oceans, helping to feed the refugees who had formerly been prisoners on those very same ships.
The Tans’ ship, the Vienna, lay offshore in the haze. They had arranged to call at Skaldaffi when they heard that Meg was coming. She hadn’t asked them to do it, but now she was glad they were here.
She sank down in the shade of Bella’s parasol, two minutes down the beach from where she’d been sitting with Emnl. “I can’t fucking take it anymore.”
Bella raised her eyebrows reproachfully. Her younger daughter, Zainab, age six, was building a sandcastle beside her lounger.
“Sorry. I swear like a sailor, I know. But I am a sailor. At least I used to be. I mean it, Bella: I cannot go on like this.”
“She’s a rhymes-with-witch all right,” Bella said supportively. “The blood thing? That was just sick.”
Emnl had requested a blood bath—literally a bathtub full of blood, to bathe in. Meg and Bella had brainstormed with the manager of the Drumlin Hotel, where they were staying, and ended up filling a tub with fish blood, while saying it was the blood of queazels as requested.
“Well, her mother used to hold court on a throne made of skulls, so like mother, like daughter, I guess,” Meg said. “But that’s not what I was talking about, actually.” She hesitated. Then took the plunge. “I mean this.”
She cupped her hands over her stomach. Her temples were pounding. Too much sun.
Bella swung her legs off her lounger and reached for Meg’s hands. “Are you OK? You’re not bleeding or anything, are you?”
“No.” Meg drew on the anger that had been building up ever since Colm left. Since before that. Ever since she was a teenager. “I wish I was miscarrying. I—I can’t have this baby, Bella. I need to get rid of it.”
*
“Please think about this, Meg,” Bella said desperately.
Meg had threatened to drown herself if Bella didn’t help her. Now they were walking through downtown Skaldaffi, a sleepy strip of shops along the road leading to the village in the island’s jungly interior. Meg still felt like she was on the way to drown herself. Like mother, like daughter? Meg’s mom had committed suicide when she was a teenager. Meg had always resented her for leaving Meg and her father on their own. Now she felt like she honestly might follow in her mother’s footsteps, if she couldn’t get this straightened out.
White dust coated their sandals and feet. Local humans and mara lounged in the torpid shade of awnings. The only sound was the distant whine of Emnl’s Walking Guns, still wasting fuel all over the sky. Crystal, Bella’s elder daughter, scuffled behind them with Zainab, the two girls quietly squabbling, upset at being dragged away from the beach.
Meg had told Emnl she was going back to their hotel to get a snack. “Pregnant females eat a lot,” Emnl had said understandingly.
In reality, they were going to the island’s one and only medical clinic. Now that Meg had made up her mind, she was desperate to get it over with. She needed Bella’s help, though, because abortion required the consent of both parents. Bella knew everyone here and would be able to persuade the clinician to make an exception.
Meg just wished she would stop trying to talk her out of
it.
“I have thought about it, Bella. I’ve been thinking about it for months.”
“I can’t believe Axel is OK with this.”
And there was the rub. Bella did not know that Meg had lied to Axel, lied to everyone. Yet Emnl had somehow found out …
Meg didn’t want Bella to find out, too. That would really complete her fall from grace. She dodged the issue. “Axel knows how I feel. It’s like I’ve got this little alien living inside me, making me fat and tired and sick and grumpy. I hate it.” She wasn’t even lying. Pregnancy was a major drag, and she felt zero emotional connection to the fetus. How could she, when someone else had a prior claim on it?
Bella rubbed her eyes with tanned knuckles. The sight of her tears shocked Meg. Bella was as tough as nails. “You’re not totally wrong. They are like little aliens at first. Cry, feed, poop, sleep, cry, repeat.” She glanced back at her daughters. “But oh, Meg, it’s the best experience you’ll ever have in your life! The first time your child smiles at you, you’ll forget all the pain and sickness and grumpiness. You will wonder how you ever could’ve thought of—of getting rid of it.” They were standing in front of the clinic. “Please, please.” Bella grasped Meg’s wrist as she reached out to open the door. “Please give him or her a chance!”
Meg jerked away. Bella was making her think about the fetus, dammit. Think about it as if it were a child. This wasn’t helping.
“I know you want your life back. But is that really a good enough reason to—to end the baby’s life?”
“Mommy? Mommy, are you OK?”
Crystal and Zainab pulled at their mother’s arms, their squabbles forgotten.
“Mommy, why are you crying?”
“It’s OK, darlings,” Bella said. “Auntie Meg felt a bit sick. But she’s fine now. Aren’t you, Meg?” She stared challengingly at Meg, daring her to enter the clinic in front of these two lovely, un-aborted children.
Meg went in.
Bella followed her and flopped down, stone-faced, on one of the benches. There were several people waiting ahead of them.
Crystal and Zainab made a beeline for the crate of toys in one corner. Meg stared at the screen on the far wall. A reminder that skin cancer was less costly to cure if caught early. The same went for pregnancy, obviously. Four months was pushing it. But it was still technically possible.
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