“Please don’t give me any more shit, Bella,” she said. “Please just help. I’ve gone round and round and round in circles and there’s no other way.”
CHAPTER 14
AXEL THREW THE SHIHOKA in reckless S-curves through the sky of Juradis, showing off the power of the antiquark drive. The fighter was one of the latest ships to come out of the Barjoltan shipyards. The engineers had integrated a sentrienza propulsion system into an upgraded version of the Vulture airframe.
The sentrienza did not commonly manufacture fighters, as they had not had any enemies to fight for several thousand years. It turned out that there was another reason, too: at high velocities, the antiquark drive’s specialized external heat rejectors produced a static buildup on the skin of the spacecraft, as they collected electrons from the ionized gas in space faster than they could be discharged. There wasn’t much ionized gas in space, but when you were travelling at fighter speed, you bumped into enough of it that the electrons added up.
The human and queazel engineers on Barjoltan had hacked the static buildup problem by installing plasma contactor units, which grounded the new fighters to their space environments. It wasn’t a real solution, but they didn’t have time to pursue perfection.
Every pilot in the Fleet hoped for the chance to fly one of the new fighters in the defence of Betelgeuse system. Axel didn’t know if he would be selected, after his ambiguous performance on Noom. Hopefully today’s flight would count in his favor. He glanced aft, using the Shihoka’s internal cameras, to see if his passengers were suitably impressed. They sat frozen in their couches, looking queasy.
Axel flipped the Shihoka over and dropped the ship into a dive. Nicholas Smythe grabbed for a barf bag.
Professor Smythe, actually.
Meg’s father.
He had been a professor of English at the University of Tokyo, until the Ghosts conquered the city.
Now, newly arrived on Juradis, he sat next to Axel’s father, Philip K. Best, rigidly watching his personal screen as the ocean hurtled up at them. Nicholas was short and pudgy, with a receding hairline that testified to his scanty professor’s salary; Philip, tall and personable, oozed money from every surgically minimized pore. They were not obvious soulmates.
Never mind. Axel was looking forward to springing Nicholas Smythe on Meg. Her father was the only family she had. His surprise arrival on the planet would hopefully give a much-needed boost to her spirits.
Axel levelled out close enough to the sea to make both passengers gasp, and decelerated to a vertical landing on the highest point of Skaldaffi, where a flexible asphalt platform had been put in. “Welcome to Juradis, Nick,” he said. The professor had asked him to call him Nick.
Even Philip K. Best wobbled a bit as he descended from the airlock. “Very impressive flying,” he commented dryly. Axel hid a smile. He knew he had acted like a rebellious teenager, but he just couldn’t help it. Besides, his father had done terrible things. He deserved worse than a somewhat hair-raising deorbit flight.
“My implant’s performing well,” he said, guiding them across the asphalt to the thatched shack that served as a terminal.
Like almost everything Axel said to his father, this was a thinly disguised jab. His implant had been a present from his parents when he was 17. It not only delivered high-end esthesia functionality, on a par with the implants issued to Navy pilots, but tweaked his brain chemistry to control the peaks and troughs of his moods. Sometimes he disabled it. He kept thinking he could make it on his own, without the tech. But he never had been able to cope without it, not long-term. Right now it was enabled. He couldn’t afford to go into a downwards spiral when Meg needed him to stay positive.
“They don’t know we’re coming,” he told Philip and Nicholas, in a half-apology that there was no vehicle waiting to meet them. They started down the steep hill from the two-bit spaceport, walking in the shade of the trees.
“Oh?” Philip said. “You mean this isn’t for our benefit?” He nodded up at the Walking Guns arrowing in formation across the sky.
Nicholas said hoarsely, “They say it only takes one of those things to destroy a planet.”
Axel had only heard that about a million times. But he was trying to get along with ‘Nick’ for Meg’s sake, so he said, “Imagine all that power under our control! If Meg can successfully negotiate their transfer to the Fleet, she may have saved humanity.”
“That’s what she always wanted to do,” Nicholas said. “That’s why she joined the Fleet. I wanted her to stay in college.”
He pursed his lips, and sidestepped an overripe spikefruit lying on the track.
Axel triggered his comms implant with a sideways flick of his eyes. He called the Vienna, using the Shihoka to rebroadcast his signal. “Sully?”
“You upstaged the Walking Guns,” Sully Tan said, from the Vienna, a dark gray lozenge on the sea. “I’m sure that wasn’t on purpose.”
“The Eagle has an antimatter cannon,” Axel said. “I’m tempted to try it out. Like shooting clays.”
“Don’t.”
“Looks like the display is finished, anyway.” The Walking Guns were dropping altitude, converging on the lagoon side of the island. “Are Meg and Bella on the beach?”
“I think so. Let me call Bella.” There was a pause. Longer than Axel would have expected.
He walked faster, inhaling the smell of the alien jungle. He remembered his first visit here last year. He and Meg had been confined in a sun-soaked pit after asking too many questions about CHEMICAL MAGE. He glanced back at his father and Nicholas Smythe. The bald top of Nicholas’s head had already turned an angry pink.
“Axel?” Sully’s voice was urgent.
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Where are you?”
“On the way down from the spaceport.”
“Get downtown as quick as you can. Meg’s in the clinic.”
“Jesus God! Why? What’s happened?”
“Nothing … yet. Listen, it’s none of my business. But I seriously think you should get there as soon as possible.”
Axel broke into a run. His father shouted after him. Axel paid no attention. The thudding of his boots on the track echoed the beat of fear in his heart.
*
Nine and a half minutes later, Axel slammed into the dusty little wood-slat clinic. Bella Tan sat dejectedly on a bench while her daughters played on the floor. “Meg?” he gasped.
Bella straightened up and began to speak, but Axel was already rounding the desk, ignoring the PATIENTS ONLY sign. He charged down the hall, into the single operating room.
Meg lay on the cot with her feet up in stirrups. A medical robot arched its arm sinisterly above her pelvis. The female clinician studying the robot’s screen said, “Hey! What the heck?”
“Meg!” Axel bent over the cot and awkwardly hugged Meg’s shoulders, further alarmed by her stricken, angry expression. He couldn’t see any blood. “What happened, sweetheart? Are you OK?” She clamped her lips shut and turned her head away.
The clinician said, “Are you the father?”
“Yes. Is she OK? Is the baby OK?”
The clinician looked relieved. It crossed Axel’s mind that he’d met her before, but he was too distressed to place the memory. She beckoned him out of the room, telling Meg to remain calm, she’d be back in a minute. In the hall, she said, “She’s in good health, and the baby is also in good health.”
“Thank God.”
“Are you aware she’s requested an abortion?”
“What? No … no. I was not aware of that.”
“I agreed to make an exception to the paternal consent rule, since her friend testified that she’d threatened suicide.”
“WHAT?”
“They said you were on Barjoltan. I decided it was too risky to wait until you could be contacted. But now that you’re here—”
“I don’t understand.” Axel lurched back towards the operating room. Before he could open the door, Meg
herself came out, barefoot, holding her flimsy gown closed.
“If I can’t have the baby, she can’t have it, either.”
“She? Who, Meg?” He tried to take her in his arms, but she shoved him away.
Then she told him about a contract, signed on Sakassarib, that stipulated the surrender of Meg’s first-born child to the sentrienza, in exchange for …
… the life of Axel Best.
It was his fault. Axel’s mind reeled. The sentrienza had claimed his life in exchange for the water they took from Sakassarib. They’d been going to experiment on him, quite possibly while he was alive and conscious. He had known that Meg had somehow obtained his freedom. But he had not known about this.
“It’s not a real contract,” he said, thinking of his father’s armies of lawyers. All abandoned back on Earth, of course. “She can’t enforce it.”
“You think not?” Meg snapped. “Did you see those things in the sky?”
Axel tried again to hug her. She pushed him away. Bella and the children joined them in the corridor. “Sorry,” Bella said to Axel. “I didn’t know what to do.”
The clinician frowned. “This is something to do with CHEMICAL MAGE, isn’t it?”
Axel suddenly remembered where he’d seen this woman before. She was one of the refugees from Majriti IV who had settled here after their colony world fell to the Ghosts. She had helped Axel and Meg when they came here to interview the metaphysicist Emile Zaragoza, whose research had underpinned the CHEMICAL MAGE project. And in return for her help, Axel had … hit her on the head, actually.
He tried a smile. It was meant to be charming but came out weak. “We’ve met before. I owe you an apology.”
“You people from Earth always hit first and apologize later,” she said. “The future of humanity isn’t on Earth. It’s right here. Which is why it would really suck if CHEMICAL MAGE is going to screw up our lives all over again.”
“This is nothing to do with CHEMICAL MAGE,” Meg said. “Can we please just do the procedure before Emnl comes looking for me?”
“No,” Axel said. This was the one thing he was sure of. “I do not consent. We’re out of here, Meg.” He knew for certain that she would regret this if she went through with it. Hadn’t they talked about the baby with nervous anticipation? Made jokes about how screwed-up it was likely to be? But it would be loved. He would love it. She just had to not do this. She’d thank him later for stopping her. “Come on, sweetheart. Where are your clothes?”
“Fuck you,” she said, blindsiding him. “Go back to Barjoltan.”
Axel looked at the other women for support. “I’m legally entitled to refuse consent.”
“Please,” Meg said to the clinician. “Please!”
The woman didn’t move. Arms folded, she said, “And what happens when the faerie princess finds out?”
Seizing the moment, Axel steered Meg into the operating room. Her clothes were piled in a wicker basket. Just a bathing suit and a sarong. “I swear to you,” he said, holding them out. “I will die before I let the sentrienza get their hands on our child.”
“You will?” Meg grabbed one of the attachments for the medical robot. It was just lying in a tray. This shitty little clinic didn’t have good security, and probably did not even observe basic rules of hygiene. But the scalpel attachment in Meg’s hand looked sharp. “Back the fuck up, Axel,” she said in the cold, detached voice he knew too well. “I will do it.”
He stepped back, raising his hands with her swimsuit and sarong still in them, his gaze glued to the blade. “Meg. Don’t do it. We’ll run away. We’ll go where she can’t find us.”
“The sentrienza are everywhere.”
“We’ll go …” It came to him suddenly in a flash of rightness. “We’ll go back to Earth.”
CHAPTER 15
BEFORE MEG COULD RESPOND to his impetuous suggestion, Philip K. Best and Nicholas Smythe burst into the room.
Meg dropped the scalpel. Axel picked it up and tossed it into the corner.
“Dad?”
“Baby,” Nicholas Smythe said, holding out his arms uncertainly.
“Oh, Dad. What the heck are you doing here?” Meg embraced her father with a long-suffering sigh. It was amazing the way she packed away the ferocity Axel had just seen. But her eyes, above her father’s shoulder, were still dull, focused a thousand yards away.
“I guess this wasn’t the best-planned surprise,” Nicholas said gruffly. “Did we catch you in the middle of something?”
“There’s never a good time,” Meg said. She self-consciously smoothed her hospital gown. “I can’t believe you’re here, Dad! I thought you were still in Tokyo.”
“I threw in the towel after the Ghosts bombed the campus during my seminar on Byron,” Nicholas said. “They’d bombed the trains, too, so I had to walk home. When I got there, I looked at the old place and just kept walking.”
“Whoa, My father, the action hero!” Meg said. But her eyes still looked dead.
“Phil’s people were kind enough to help me get a berth on a Hail Mary ship. That was twenty months ago.”
“Tokyo is a Ghost city by now,” Axel’s father said. “London, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai? All lost. Modern Atlantises.”
And it’s all your fault, Axel thought, despising his father’s pretence that he and his collaborators had nothing to do with the fall of Earth. But now was not the time to play the blame game. “Dad, ah, Nick? Maybe we could give Meg privacy to get dressed.”
He made sure that Bella and the children stayed behind with her. With those sweet little girls in the room, she wouldn’t do anything stupid.
Out in the reception area, Philip said, “Axel, exactly what the hell is going on?”
“Guess what, Dad? It’s none of your goddamn business.”
“It’s happening on Juradis? Makes it my goddamn business. She’s meant to be negotiating the transfer of the Walking Guns—”
“Screw the Walking Guns. This is about my child. Your grandchild.”
Father and son stared murderously at each other. Nicholas intervened with surprising tact, changing the subject. “Axel, when I was boarding the shuttle to transfer to my ship, I overheard something funny. The prices of these fares, you know, are astronomical. They declined for a while, but now the supply of ships is running out, so … The point is that everyone at the spaceport was extremely rich, except me. And the woman in line ahead of me was on the phone with someone. She kept saying, ‘Yes, but should I stay or go? It was supposed to be safe in Betelgeuse system, until that cowboy Hyland effed it up for everyone …’ And I stood there wondering what she’d think if she knew I was part of the team that effed it up for everyone.”
Yes, Axel had found out something unpleasant about Professor Smythe since he disembarked from the latest overcrowded refugee ship to arrive from Earth. ‘Nick’ had been a consultant to the CHEMICAL MAGE team. That’s how he had got a ticket to Betelgeuse.
Axel managed a humorless chuckle. “You’d probably have been torn limb from limb.” Seething, he went to the window and looked out. The sun’s rays were lengthening. On the other side of the street, a mara sprawled on the ground, soaking up the afternoon heat. It looked like a homeless person back on Earth. In fact, the mara had a natural habit of lying around like that. But the thought triggered complex emotions of longing and guilt. Axel had lived his life on Earth inside a bubble of wealth. New York, Washington, Geneva, Hawaii … he had no one specific place to call home. Yet now, suddenly, he yearned for all of it: the pulse of traffic on 5th Avenue, the crunch of snow on Alpine ski slopes, the smell of pot-stickers on a Shanghai street corner.
He wanted to go home. He’d give up his job on Barjoltan, his chance of flying a Vulture in combat. He’d give up everything, to get Meg and the baby safely back to Earth.
But how the hell could they get away?
*
Meg tied her sarong. She stooped to put on her sandals, avoiding Bella’s eyes. She didn’t want sympathy. Sh
e had tried her best, and been beaten.
The clinician touched her arm. “I just can’t take the risk.”
“I know,” Meg said. “You’ve got children, too.” She walked past the woman and went out to the reception area. Axel reached for her—couldn’t he keep his hands off her for five seconds? She brushed him off. “I’d better go see what Emnl’s doing. A lady-in-waiting’s job is never done!”
Her father fell into step with her as they walked down the road towards the beach. “So I’m going to be a grandfather,” he said, almost shyly.
Meg dug her fingernails into her palms. “Looks that way, Dad.” She was happy to see him, of course she was. But he looked so old it scared her.
They arrived at the beach just in time to see the Walking Guns land in the lagoon. They plunged into the water amidst clouds of steam. They were hot— they’d been burning around the sky for ages. “Each of them’s got a tiny black hole in its belly, according to Emnl,” Meg told the others. Surfacing, they bobbed around like seals, cooling down and replenishing their water reserves.
Emnl waded in the shallows, her multicolored wrap gathered over one arm, the tip of her braid trailing in the waves. She carried her sunshade folded now that the sun had set. Standing there alone, she looked oddly forlorn, despite all the people watching from the beach. Then she turned and grinned at them and the illusion vanished.
“Hello, Governor,” she buzzed. “What an honor.”
“Your Majesty,” Philip K. Best said stiffly, slipping on the sand in his dress shoes.
“And who’s this?”
“My father,” Meg said. She mashed her lips together. She felt some kind of an outburst coming on. What had Axel said in the clinic? Let’s get away. If only they could.
Emnl swayed out of the water and padded up to Nicholas on her wet, sandy, four-toed feet. “Do you teach karate, as well?”
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