Nicky was wriggling and fussing in her arms. “What’s up, little guy?” Axel reached for him.
“He’s probably wondering why you shrank,” Meg said dryly. “At this point he thinks his father is that damn battlesuit.”
But Nicky quieted down when Axel took him. Following them into the main cabin, Meg felt a pang of emotion too complicated to process. She admired the unthinking competence with which Axel handled the baby, carrying him one-handed, echoing back his babble: “Goo? Ga. You got that right, buddy. Ga ba ba. Oh, you need a change, huh? OK. Do we have clean diapers, Meg?”
“Yup,” Meg said. “Washed them this A.M.” And wasn’t that a fun way to spend the morning. “They should be dry by now.” While Axel was on call, she had had to get good at the whole changing, feeding, cleaning-up routine. But she still got the feeling that Nicky loved Axel best. And why shouldn’t he? He must be able to sense the passionate protective love that Axel showered on him ... on the child he believed to be his son.
Oh God.
Please let him never, ever find out.
They’d hardly finished changing Nicky’s diaper when the comms alarm went off.
“I’ll get it,” Meg said. She went forward and played the transmission over the PA system.
“HRF Infinite Jest to unidentified small spacecraft in Belt Sector Two high.” A flat female voice read off the Shihoka’s coordinates. “Identify yourself and advise your intended course and destination.”
“Infinite Jest, I copy you,” Meg said. “This is the Shihoka, from Juradis, intending Earth orbit insertion and de-orbit in thirteen days and eight hours.” The Jest’s signal originated from LEO. “So I guess we’ll see you soon. You can share the jest at that point.”
Her light-hearted teasing sprang from relief. The Fleet was still here, still fighting! Her worst nightmare had been that they would reach Sol system only to find the radio waves dead, the system overrun by Ghosts.
She knew Axel had been worried about the same thing. She said to him, while they waited for the Infinite Jest’s reply, “So what do you think? You actually stopped them?”
Axel’s face darkened. Meg kicked herself for bringing up the topic of the distant war on Kisperet. At the same time, she resented Axel for being unwilling to talk about it. Only the future of humanity was at stake, after all.
“I don’t know,” he said eventually. “We’ve killed a lot of them.” He seemed to run out of words after that. He lifted Nicky out of the acceleration couch they used as a playpen—Axel had crafted the soft side walls out of empty rice and flour sacks, while still in his battlesuit—and set him on his thighs, facing him. He played with the baby’s arms as if Nicky were piloting an imaginary spaceship. Nicky smiled beatifically.
“But have you won?” Meg said, tired of Axel’s evasions. Thinking for the hundredth time: Why didn’t Collie Mack take me?
“I wouldn’t know,” Axel said. “We’re just the slaves.”
“Ugh.”
“Yeah.”
The Infinite Jest did not get back to them until they had almost reached Earth. Axel was in the cockpit, monitoring their deceleration burn. Meg was in the main cabin, showing Nicky the globe of Earth on the big screen. For her it was a tearjerking sight.
The voice of the Infinite Jest’s comms officer crackled over the PA system. “Shihoka, do you read me? Orders follow.”
“Orders?” Meg muttered.
“Proceed to Aldrin Station.” The comms officer named the largest of the orbiting fuel depots and personnel transfer points that the Fleet operated in LEO. Axel split the big screen and threw up a long-distance composite image. Half a dozen carrier-size ships and many more small ones orbited in sync with the station, or docked with it. “Do you copy?”
“I copy you,” Axel said. “And thanks for the invitation. However, we respectfully decline. Our destination is Earth, not LEO.”
“Too bad,” the comms officer said. “We are requisitioning your spacecraft.”
“Requisitioning?!” Meg yelled, startling Nicky.
“What you see on your screens is the final stage of the evacuation of Earth.”
At that moment, Earth set beneath the Shihoka.
They were orbiting over Asia.
That whole huge landmass, which used to blaze with city lights, was dark.
“Oh, baby,” Meg said, bowing her forehead to Nicky’s. “Oh sweetheart.” She shouted through to Axel, “Guess you haven’t won. The Ghosts have.”
“Don’t give up,” Axel said to the Infinite Jest’s comms officer. “Keep fighting! Listen, the Ghosts aren’t unstoppable…”
“Didn’t you say you came from Betelgeuse? Yeah, so I’m guessing you haven’t been here in a while. Take a look at Beijing, or New York, or Tokyo, and tell me if they could’ve been stopped.”
Tokyo. Meg flinched at the mention of her hometown. But Tokyo meant nothing to her now that her father was not there. She glommed onto the fact that the officer had only mentioned large cities. Out in the countryside, people were surviving, regardless of what the Fleet said.
“So this is the final evacuation,” Axel said. “Where’re you heading to?”
“Juradis, of course.”
Meg gritted her teeth at the bitter irony of it. The sentrienza were going to get exactly what they had wanted all along. A compliant, manageably small remnant of humanity living as slaves in the Betelgeuse system. She wondered if the Rat would stand up to them, and how long it would take them to casually obliterate his fleet. Or maybe they already had.
“Hey, Meg,” Axel said. “Are you sitting down?”
“Huh?”
“Hence,” the officer quacked, “we have placed a requisitioning order on your ship. It belongs to the Fleet, anyway.”
“Sit down,” Axel said, and to the officer, “Belongs to the Fleet? Ma’am, I am the fucking Fleet. My father is Philip K. Best. Admiral Hyland appointed me captain of this spacecraft, and I have nothing more to say to you than this: If you want it that bad, come and get it.”
Meg whooped approvingly. She lurched into the nearest acceleration couch with Nicky on her lap as the drive spun up to a thunderous throb. Axel opened the throttle and dived towards Earth.
“Axel, I love you,” she said, and at that moment she meant it.
She could hear the grin in his voice. “They’re shooting at us.”
“For real? Motherfucker.”
“Just low-strength energy beams. They know that stuff can’t get through the Van Allen belts. It’s just warning shots. Thanks for the warning, guys … and I will now proceed to ignore it.”
Meg remembered how naively enamored she had once been of the Fleet’s purported ideals. Honor, justice, mercy. Now, it had all degenerated into an ugly scramble for survival of the fastest and richest. She was probably better off without her naïve faith in humanity, but she still grieved its loss.
She worked frantically to strap herself and Nicky in as Axel pulled a defensive trajectory change. Loose items flew around the cabin. “Whoa, cowboy.”
“Sorry. Habit.”
Meg fastened the last buckle and glanced at the screen. Earth spun. The dayside came back around. The Atlantic. North and South America. As the Shihoka de-orbited into the troposphere, Axel said, “I’m gonna scan the civilian radio bands, see if we can pick up anything from the ground.”
Meg hugged Nicky. “Axel, I’m starting to wonder if this was such a great idea. What if there’s no one left down there? Only Ghosts?”
They had endlessly discussed what they would do if this was the case. Their answer was: Put down anyway. But now Earth looked less welcoming. The Atlantic stretched out cold and gray.
“I’m picking up Ka-band chatter,” Axel said. “There are survivors, all right. Barbados, Antigua, Malta, Gibraltar … They’re all on islands.”
“And this woman? Have you picked up anything from her group?”
“Not yet.”
The Shihoka screamed down out of the clouds over
the Atlantic. It broke the sound barrier a hundred miles west of Scotland and decelerated at full throttle. Axel’s carefully calculated burn brought the ship to a stall above an island less than a square mile in area, a lopsided triangle covered with birch and pine trees. The Shihoka dropped vertically, on a column of flame that sizzled in the rain, onto a stony beach. The seaweed was too wet to catch fire.
A dingy sailboat bobbed off-shore.
A whitewashed cottage stood behind the beach.
Smoke was coming out of the cottage’s chimney.
Meg gave Nicky to Axel, took her AK, and scanned the beach from the open airlock. The fresh, wild, salty air almost knocked her over, it tasted so good. She aimed her weapon at the cottage. On the Shihoka’s IR screen, it had looked like a bonfire.
A woman walked out of the cottage. She had bright red hair. She carried a hunting rifle.
Meg descended the airlock steps. They approached each other warily. Meg’s heart knocked against her ribs. She said, “Are you Bridget?”
CHAPTER 31
THE MAGUS’S HEADQUARTERS ON Atletis extended for miles under the ground.
The rebels had fought for every square inch.
It turned out that the wind turbines had only been a backup for the Magus’s power grid. A deeply buried, and quite modern, hydrothermal generator ran the lights and air circulation in the underground maze. There were caverns full of machinery so rusty that it fell apart at a touch, and even Colm couldn’t tell what it had been designed to do.
The Mage Corps Headquarters occupied a small area within the complex. In this maze-within-a-maze, the spongy walls had been paneled over with wood, pictures hung, and candle sconces installed, to fool the mages into thinking the place was human-built. The Magus had been too proud to let it be known that he was squatting in a disused sentrienza base.
The Magus’s inner sanctum was a covered hall, like an ark plopped down in one of those great caverns, wired for power. Here the Magus made his last stand, flinging soldiers at the attackers faster than bullets fired from a machine-gun. The piles of corpses blocked the tunnels. Old ones at the bottom, fresh ones at the top. Colm ended it by having his Marines tunnel down 200 meters and drop charges down the shafts of the hydrothermal generator, blowing the pumps and shutting off power to the whole complex.
They found Dryjon and Diejen, along with several other prisoners from the Families of Kisperet, chained to the Magus’s throne like dogs.
After that no one wanted to spend another minute in the complex. With the power down, the air circulation had failed. The smell of rotting bodies was overpowering. They trekked back to the surface. Colm instructed his Marines to lay more charges in the egress tunnels, burying the dead where they had fallen. He half hoped the Marines themselves would be buried, too—he had come to hate them, unfairly, for their ruthless skill at butchery. To his disappointment, several of them clawed their way to the surface, emerging like beetles from the shallow end of the tunnel on top of the ridge.
During the battle the rebel forces had camped in Innismon, around the Son of Saturn. The rocket towered over their victory banquet, as it had once towered over parties back on Kisperet. Colm, the man of the hour, accepted toast after toast. The mead they had liberated from the outlying villages, where a small population of freemen had grown food for the Magus’s headquarters, packed a punch. Colm’s euphoria gradually dulled into misery, a reaction to the months of slaughter he had personally ordered and witnessed. He stumbled off into the fields and puked behind a hedge. He wiped his mouth, groaned, and straightened up. Then he looked around.
The limethion was watching him.
The creature was a puzzle to everyone, since it could not be copied, but could be taken from one place to another, as if it were a mage—but it was not. It was just an alien. It had become a sort of camp mascot for the Ghosts, who found its scavenging ways hilarious. Colm, personally, had gone right off it the first time he saw it dining on a bloated corpse. “What do you want?”
“I like this place,” the limethion said. “I do not want to go back to Mitheikua. I shall stay here.”
“Good for you,” Colm said grumpily, although he actually did know what the limethion meant. It was the beginning of Atletis’s long day. Birds sang in the hedges. Bees droned. Music drifted from the pavilion. There was a tender, damp warmth in the air. The pale ghosts of Cerriwan and Kisperet overlapped in the sky, a sight you’d never see on Earth, yet ironically, out of all the alien planets and moons Colm had visited, Atletis felt the most like home. “Is that all you had to say?”
The limethion swished its scaly tail through the tall grass. “Dhjerga wants to talk to you.”
“Oh, he does?” Dhjerga had only been at the banquet for a few minutes, and had then returned to his own camp in the forest. He had not taken much part in the war at all. Fair enough, he’d been gone for a while, fetching explosives from Juradis. But ever since his return, he’d been hiding out in the forest most of the time. He had shown up for the final battle but not helped with the mop-up. Once a deserter, always a deserter, Colm thought uncharitably. “Well, I’m not hiking all the way out there. Tell him if he wants to talk to me he can come here.”
He walked away from the limethion and sat down on a wheelbarrow, which had been used to transport lettuces. At any given point during the war, half of the rebel forces had been fighting and the other half farming. Colm was wearing brand new clothes fetched from Kisperet: fawn leather trousers, the same snowy shirt that every other man had on, and a sheepskin gilet with embroidery on it. Now he had a mucky arse. So what? Mages did not do laundry. They just threw shit away, or gave it to the slaves and fetched new stuff.
He lay back in the wheelbarrow, with his boots on the ground, and closed his eyes. The sun reddened his eyelids. Maybe the mead would help him get some sleep. He’d spent most of the battle hopped up on tropodolfin, sleeping very little. He was worn out, but instead of drifting off, he thought about the blisterpack of tropo in his pocket. It was his last one. When it was gone, he’d be back to noak leaves.
Something tickled his nose.
His eyes popped open. He hit out reflexively. Diejen leaned over him. She had been tickling him with a daisy. She danced back out of the way of his clumsy swipe, laughing.
“Do I not even get to take a nap in peace?” Colm said, although his spirits rose at the sight of her. She was wearing a new outfit fetched from home, one of those elegant split skirts with a tasseled blouse. She was thin and pale from her long captivity, but her eyes shone. The long sleeves covered the marks left on her wrists by the Magus’s high-potential gloves.
“You weren’t sleeping.” She sat down beside him. “Everyone’s having a lovely time.”
“Even you?”
“Even me. I can still hardly believe I’m walking free under the sun.” She lay back and basked in the rays of Kisperet’s no-name star.
“Now you know how the faeries live,” Colm said.
“Yes, the stories say they don’t like sunlight.”
Colm had shared his surmise that the Magus’s complex was an old sentrienza mound. Perhaps the sentrienza had once discovered Kisperet and then forgotten about it again, although that didn’t seem like their style. In fact, Colm suspected Atletis itself was an artificial body. Lady Terrious called it a heimdall. If it had been formed with plenty of iron and other heavy metals in the core, that would explain the gravity, as well as the magnetic field that helped it hold onto an atmosphere. An artificial origin would also explain the one-in-a-million orbit that prevented it from either crashing into Kisperet or spiraling away. But the machinery he found in the caves had clearly been thousands of years old. There was no sign that the Magus had been in contact with the sentrienza.
Diejen interrupted his thoughts. Her eyes were closed, her face bathed in sunlight. “Are you going to leave us now?” she said in a careful tone.
For the first time, Colm opened his heart to her. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I d
on’t know what I want to do. I feel like shit, Diejen.”
“You won a historic victory.”
“That was mostly Axel.”
“You slew the Magus—”
“But did I? Did I? We never found his body—”
“Yes, Dryjon said the same thing,” Diejen admitted.
“What if he flitted?”
“Or maybe we did find his body, but we didn’t recognize it. After all, no one knows what he looks like.” The Magus had never revealed himself to the Mage Corps, always issuing orders, praise, and censure from the darkness of his throne. Colm had seen this repulsive piece of furniture when they finally took the Magus’s hall. It was the size of a four-poster bed, with clawed golden feet and double layers of fur curtains around it. Even when Diejen and Dryjon were chained to it, they had only ever seen the Magus’s boots.
“He’s probably buried with his slaves,” Diejen said. “You could go and dig them out if you really want to be sure.” Her lips twitched in amusement at the idea.
Colm remembered those last awful moments in the Magus’s hall. They had broken though after the power went out. Smoky pine torches and the Marines’ headlamps had lit a carpet of corpses and ruined battlesuits, heaving like stranded jellyfish, seeping blood. Colm had stepped on men who were still alive. He writhed at the memory of how they’d twitched under his boots. Dhjerga had leapt forward and cut his brother and sister free, while Colm hacked down the curtains around the throne, expecting to face the shadow that had haunted his childhood … and all he’d found was a wooden chair, with armrests the size of tables, and a depression in the seat shaped like a very large rear end. A faint whiff of sulfur lingered, layered onto the reek of death.
Diejen patted his hand, bringing him back to the present. “It’s all right,” she said. “Today is a day for celebrating, not worrying.”
Not worry? She might as well have told Colm not to breathe. “Diejen, if he’s flitted, he may have gone to Earth. My family may be in danger.” He had never forgotten the evil promise the Magus had made him that night in the zoo, when he showed him a scrying of Bridget. I’ll have her, and then there will be one. Then I will have you, and there will be no mages left on Earth at all. Colm had told Axel roughly where to find Bridget, but he did not know if Axel and Meg had found her, because he’d lost contact with them after they exited the zero-gravity field. Five tropo pills left. He glumly feared he would waste them like he’d wasted the rest of his supply, just staying awake and cheerful. Juggling? Conjuring? Coin vanishes? He couldn’t do a goddamn thing left-handed.
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