by Rob Boffard
“Pretty good, right?” Corey points to the screen. “I don’t know what’s inside those ball things, but they’re intense. See here? This one takes out pretty much an entire section of the station. And – there – you can see the ion thrusters on your ship right there. That’s how I knew.”
Roman’s lips tighten a little as he watches the footage, but he doesn’t say anything more. Malik lets it play. When it reaches the end of the clip, the image on the screen pauses, stopped on a blurry shot of someone’s hands.
“I just thought you’d want to see.” Corey says it like he doesn’t really care, but it’s hard to keep the frustration out of his voice. It’s not going to work. Roman isn’t going to switch sides just because of some crappy movie footage. He knows what he did.
Malik’s finger hovers over the screen. “Do you want me to run it again, or …”
Corey shakes his head. This is like stumbling around in the dark, hands out, trying to find something he can hold onto.
“What’s going to happen?” he says. “When the other ships get here?”
No response.
“You gotta be running out of time. They could be here at, like, any minute, right? And if you’re not free by then, which you probably won’t be because you got tape and cuffs, they’ll just blow you up along with the rest of us.”
“That’s messed up.” Malik sounds incredulous, but there’s something else in his voice, too. Most people wouldn’t pick up on it, but Corey knows his brother, and he hears it as clearly as a siren in a quiet neighbourhood.
“Super-messed up,” he agrees.
“Why’s he doing it, though? Did he say?”
“Nah.”
“’Cos it seems like a lot to go through just to destroy one of your own stations. Was there, like, a virus, or …”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. He says there wasn’t one.”
“Oh. OK. How come, then?”
They both look at Roman, expectant.
“Nice try,” Roman murmurs. For a second, Corey is alarmed – he can’t see Roman’s hands, just like down in astronautics. But surely not even Roman could get through the cuffs and all the duct tape.
“Seriously,” Corey says, amazed at how calm he sounds. He has the same tone of voice as when he, Jamie and Allie are talking shit to each other, riding their boards around Austin, or sprawled out in one of their rooms. “Just tell us. You heard my dad. We’re all dead anyway. What difference does it make?”
Roman looks away. His expression is blank, but the set of his shoulders has changed, very slightly.
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you,” he says.
Corey and Malik exchange a look.
“Well, that’s lame,” Corey says.
“Lame?” The way Roman says the word sounds as if it’s from another language.
“Yeah,” says Malik. “He’s right. That’s lame. And it’s bakwas.” In that instant, Corey is absolutely certain that if Roman were free, the man’s hands would be wrapped around his throat.
Malik continues. “You were talking about series before? I got one for you. It’s this science show with Jordana Simmons, and she always says that you can explain anything to anyone if you know how.”
Corey looks at him in surprise. “You know Molecular?”
“Well, yeah. I watch it sometimes. When I’m bored or whatever.”
“You know she’s dating Terio Smith? From the Djinns?”
Malik grins. “Yeah. Lucky.”
“Hey, you’ve already got a girlfriend.”
“Shanti isn’t … well, she might be. I dunno.”
The look on Roman’s face could crack a planet in two.
They’re probably never going to see Molecular, Jordana Simmons or even Terio Smith ever again, but Corey doesn’t care. Deep down, on a level of instinct he has no name for yet, he knows he has to keep going.
“You,” Roman says, enunciating each syllable. “Wouldn’t. Understand.”
“You keep saying that, and we keep saying—”
“You’ve got no one to blame but yourselves. What happened at Sigma was your fault. You, and everyone on this ship, and everyone on the station.”
Corey and Malik gape at him. “No, it wasn’t,” says Malik.
“We didn’t fly in and drop a bazillion bombs on the place,” Corey says. “We were just hanging out at the pool and stuff.”
“That’s not what I—”
“You’re trying to blame us? We were literally on vacation!”
“Enough.” There’s a note of furious desperation in Roman’s voice, like he wants nothing more than to end this conversation, and knows that he can’t.
A thought occurs to Corey – one he can’t believe he didn’t have before. “Back downstairs,” he says. “You could have just let them tie the thing around my leg. The …” He searches for the word. “The tourniquet. I probably would have died.”
Corey half expects Roman to snap back, to show the same swagger he did when he dared Hannah to let him loose. He doesn’t.
“You said …” Corey clears his throat. “If you wanted me to die, then why’d you tell Mal and my mom how to stop the bleeding?”
Roman shakes his head. “Doesn’t mean you have to suffer,” he says quietly.
“So you’d kill me quick?”
Roman frowns. “What?”
“Me and Mal. You said I didn’t have to suffer, so you’d kill us quickly, right? Because we’re kids? How would you do it? Because you obviously wanted to kill everybody on Sigma, which includes us. Right?”
“Cor.” Mal looks like he wants to throw up.
“No, I’m serious. I wanna know. Break my neck, probably, right? What about the grown-ups? Same thing? Or would you kill them—”
Roman cuts him off, the frustration bleeding into his voice. “You don’t know a damn thing. People die all the time, and, usually, they don’t even know why. They die for all kinds of reasons, and the people who kill them aren’t always the bad guys. When you get older, maybe you’ll understand.”
There’s a half-second of silence, and then Roman realises what he’s just said. An expression of embarrassment spreads across his face. He looks away, not meeting Corey’s eyes, the expression fading as quickly as it arrived.
For the next ten seconds, nobody says anything. Cory can just hear the low murmurs from the grown-ups at the other side of the main deck.
“You’re right,” he says. “Maybe I will. I’m planning to do a lot of things when I get older.”
Roman’s eyes flick to his, just for a second. Corey pushes on.
“I’m gonna be a pilot. And not just on the ships they have already. We’re gonna make new ones. My friend Jamie’s going to design them, and Allie’ll do all the business, and then I’ll fly them. They’re going to be the fastest ships in the whole galaxy.
“We’re going to be the first to break light speed without warping. I’ll need to learn how to fly first, so I’ll need to go to Navy pilot school, but I’ve been doing all this reading and I think I should be OK.”
Roman doesn’t react. Corey puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Mal’s going to become a famous movie director. He’s gonna go to film school, and then he’s going to start making them himself, for real, not just on his tab screen.”
Malik stiffens, then nods, very slowly, clutching his holocam tight. Corey continues. “They’re going to be the best movies ever. He’s going to win Oscars and make millions of U-dollars and—”
“Stop,” says Roman.
“And then I’m going to go to his premieres, and I’ll get to tell everybody that he’s my brother. Hopefully Mom and Dad have sorted their shit out by then, and Mom is President of the Senate and—”
“Majority Leader,” Malik says.
“Right, right, Majority Leader. And Dad’s company is really big. Then, maybe if I get good at flying, Mal can make a crash movie about me and Allie and Jamie, and—”
“Stop.”
Roman turns his face towards them. “Just stop,” he says. “That’s enough.”
And that’s when Corey realises he doesn’t have anything else to say.
He’s used everything he had. If Roman still doesn’t want to help them, then he has no idea what to do next.
Chapter 54
This is wrong. This is all wrong.
Problem, solution, action. It got him here, and it’s going to get him out. But still, Roman can’t help but think of the last two messages Madhu sent him.
They’d taken a long time to arrive, which was hardly surprising. It was a central irony of the Great Expansion that it had actually increased the time it took to send messages – not like it was before, when humans were still just on Earth, and sending a message from one side of the planet to the other was instantaneous. When you were talking light years of distance, the fastest way to send a message was to put it on a ship, and send that ship through a jump gate. And then you’d better hope that it was the right ship, or the right jump gate, because the only way you’d know you’d got it wrong was when that ship came back, and the captain looked at you sideways.
In the manner of military bureaucracies since the dawn of time, the Frontier Navy made things worse. There were a lot of jump gates, a lot of ships, an uncountable number of messages, and a way-too-small group of underpaid, overworked people responsible for making it all happen.
When he’d got the messages, Roman had been on the Titan base, lying on his bunk and half listening to Rodriguez and Simms arguing about soccer. The notification had blinked up on his lens, and when Brigita and Madhu and everyone else had appeared, he’d automatically glanced at the timestamp on the message. It had been sent two months before, and he’d sighed in irritation.
He didn’t mind too much, though. A late message was better than no message at all. He missed them – and Cassiopeia – far more than he thought he would. He’d been away for four years by then, and the gangly twenty-year-old frame he’d had when he’d left had been built into a lean, hard twist of muscle.
Madhu’s big, whiskery face filled the camera. Brigita was squashed in on his left, with everyone else clustered around them: Jocinda, Yoshiro, Ling-Xi, Mhotar, the Twins. Even little Alexa, eighteen months now, her eyes just visible over Mhotar’s shoulder. The camera unsteady, the view filled with hands and elbows and smiling faces, jostling for space.
“Hello, son!” Madhu boomed. His words were followed by a tidal wave of noise as everyone yelled out their own greetings. In his bunk, he smiled. Alexa was getting big.
“We don’t know where you’ll be when this gets to you,” said Madhu.
“In a brothel!” roared someone offscreen. Roger, maybe. Another round of piercing laughter, yelling, Brigita briefly vanishing from view, presumably to smack the back of Roger’s head.
“We miss you, though,” Madhu had continued. “We’re all waiting for you to come back on leave.”
Yoshiro stuck his face into the frame. “Zigs had her puppies!”
Madhu gently pushes him away. “I’ll tell him, my beta, don’t worry. Anyway, things are OK round here. There was a breach in one of the grow domes but the automatic systems caught it fine, and it’s past harvest anyway so it was empty anyway. We’ve got a shuttle shipment coming in a couple of days …”
Roman had half tuned out, listening to the usual parade of shipments and recycler issues and how Jocinda could do fractions now. He’d heard many, many variations of them before, and all he wanted was just to listen to their voices. Let the wonderful noise wash over him.
“We’ve got a new girl coming in,” Brigita had said.
“Oh yes!” Madhu’s eyes lit up. “Five years old. They found her in the rubble in Kepler.” His face had darkened slightly. “I think we may have to work hard for her. But I’m giving her your old room, if that’s OK, because it’s one of the nicer ones. Brigita’s cooking soyburgers when she comes, and Ling-Xi’s going to make a new welcome banner. Her name’s—”
He’d been interrupted by a fresh wave of laughter and shouting. Roman had never found out the name of the girl, or if she’d even made it to Cassiopeia. He had no idea where she was now.
“Anyway,” Madhu said, and once more the video was packed solid with faces. “We miss you, and we love you, and please reply if you can!”
There was a huge, roaring chorus of byes and love yous, and then Madhu’s hand blocking the camera as he reached out to switch it off.
The second message was just Madhu by himself. The hab was dark, and he spoke in a quieter voice, as if he didn’t want to disturb sleepers – which, Roman had thought, he probably didn’t. Brigita would be in bed, as would the rest of the kids.
Madhu’s oval face shone white in the light from the camera. “I wanted to talk to you about something that I haven’t told the others yet,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about, and it would mean a lot of work, but I think we could do it if we got it right.”
He’d leaned closer to the camera. “This is something for the future, you understand me, not right now. At the moment, we take in maybe one or two children a year, but I think we could do more, especially since the outpost is getting bigger.
“I want to apply for additional funding from the Frontier, and actually set up a proper, official home for kids here, not just a foster one. Brigita doesn’t need me to keep the habs going – I just get in the way mostly. And I think, when all this soldier nonsense is over, you should come back and run it with me.”
He’d held up a hand, as if Roman was already about to protest. “You don’t have to answer now. But just think about it, yes?” He sat back, and in the low light, he suddenly looked very old. Old, and yet somehow content.
Roman had closed the message, then his eyes, lying back against the pillow, happier than he’d been in weeks. It was absurd, Madhu’s suggestion – but then again, why not? Why the hell not? If he could give other people the life he’d had, he could more than consider the debt repaid.
Messages took a long time to arrive, and information a long time to filter down. No one in the Frontier was particularly concerned when a series of inconsequential, lightly populated terraforming outposts were attacked by Colony forces, and no one bothered to tell the advanced ops division in Titan orbit.
By the time Madhu and Brigita’s messages got to him, they’d already been dead for two weeks.
The strike had been nuclear: a desperate, last-ditch move by the Colonies, who were losing the war and badly trying to scorch as much Frontier territory as they could reach. There was nothing to bury. No outpost to visit. Roman couldn’t even get near the site, thanks to the radiation.
There’d been psychiatrists, of course. The tight arms around his shoulders as his squadmates spoke to him in quiet, sombre voices. There’d been talk about taking him off active duty, but he’d turned that down flat. He wanted – no, needed – to keep fighting.
The solution part of the equation, in this case, was obvious. He wanted to get the fuckers who did this. The Colonies were going to pay. He was going to hit them again, and again, and again. He was going to be there when the Frontier arrived in orbit around Talos-18, and bombed it into extinction.
In the year following the strike on Cassiopeia, it was all he could think about. A laser focus bright enough to block out absolutely everything else. All he had to do was keep staring at the light, and everything would be fine. He didn’t dare look away.
But while he was focused on the blinding light of revenge, the Colonies had surrendered.
There’d been a treaty. Peace talks. There’d been no retribution. Talos-18 had been allowed to stand, along with dozens of other Colony worlds and outposts. No one was punished for what happened to Cassiopeia.
And the decisions to do all of this weren’t made by soldiers. They weren’t even made by admirals. They were made by Frontier senators and lobbyists and activists – people just like Corey’s mother, come to think of it. Exactly the same. The ones who’d
never done a day’s fighting in their lives were suddenly pushing for peace, making all the right noises about reconciliation and mending broken bonds. They’d held rallies and summits and symposiums, diplomatic solutions were reached, and it was just … over.
He’d gone from confusion, to disbelief, to a cold, simmering fury. The war was done, and as the treaty was signed and the base corridors filled with joyful shouts that the war was over, Roman had sat on his bunk, staring at nothing.
He knew he wasn’t innocent. He’d killed plenty of people in the name of the Frontier. But they were military targets, or, at the very least, civilians who weren’t supposed to be there. If his commanding officers had told him to wipe out a civilian population, he and every one of his squad would have spat it back in their face.
This was different. The Colonies had utterly wiped out multiple outposts full of non-combatants, and they were just going to be allowed to walk away. People were celebrating it.
He does not remember a good deal of the past ten years.
He wasn’t high up enough for the Navy to retain, nor did he have any experience that would be useful to them in peacetime. His savings kept him going for a while, and when that ran out he’d taken a job at a space construction firm, running an exosuit in Earth orbit.
He threw himself into training: hours and hours of weights and running and repetitive drills, not knowing what else to do. And all the while his hatred of the Colonies grew. He nurtured it, held it close, mostly because he didn’t know enough not to, the black fury keeping him going as he cranked out his five-hundredth pull-up of the day.
And, in time, that fury came to have a twin: his hatred for the Frontier itself. For the civilians he’d helped protect. They’d let his family be wiped out, and they wouldn’t let him take revenge. To them, it was as if Madhu and Brigita and everyone else had simply never existed.
He knew it was irrational, knew that he couldn’t truly blame every single Frontier civilian in existence. But he discovered that he just didn’t give a shit. Not any more.
It occurred to him early on that he could get revenge. He had enough training to hurt the Frontier in a dozen different ways, if he wanted. But what was the point? Sure, he could attack a small station, or take some civilians hostage somewhere. He certainly wouldn’t be the first ex-soldier to try. But the Frontier bureaucracy stretched out across a hundred worlds, and it didn’t change just because a few people lost their lives.
