The Henderson Helios: A Sci-Fi Adventure Novella

by Beatrice Crowl

  Was the kid with the Eldroon accent simply…born and raised in Eldroon?

  “My parents weren’t anywhere near that war. Least, I don’t think they were.” He looked a lot older as he exhaled. “My dad left before I was born. I’m not even sure who he was. My mom loved her stardew more than she loved me. She just forgot about me most of the time. She probably hasn’t even noticed I’m gone.”

  Stardew, uck. Nasty stuff that had set off a scourge of addiction on Ri, especially in Eldroon. It hollowed out the mind, turning users’ brains into gunky mush. The colony wasn’t near organized enough to do much about it, especially with a region so resistant to “invaders”. The general consensus was that the Eldroon folks’ brains were rotted away anyway from the toxic waste they lived in. A dew addiction couldn’t do much more damage.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  He shrugged like he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’d detached himself from it and focused on the present and the future instead of being dragged down by his past.

  “What about your parents?”

  The sun burst from behind a cloud, flooding my garage with a calming, natural light. I’d never talked about my family with Ryan. Or anybody. Wasn’t something I liked to discuss.

  But we were having a sharing moment. “My dad liked to drink. When he drank, he took his anger out on me. My mom let him.” The sentences were hard to get out.

  “So you left?”

  I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice. The sun fell behind a cloud again and cast us into the darkness of my paltry, artificial garage lighting.

  Ryan stared at the 280, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He looked so much like an adult, but then, he’d never really acted like a kid, had he? He enjoyed the nightlife, sure, but he never shrugged off work the day after. He always kept on household chores. Worked well with customers. He was more adult than me sometimes.

  “Your parents find you? Is that why you’re in such a bad mood?”

  I’d never considered that as a possibility. Why had I never considered that as a possibility? In my head, my family was forever frozen as they were when I left at thirteen. They couldn’t even exist in the present. Older. Wanting to see me.

  I shoved the thought away as too terrifying to contemplate.

  “Nothing like that.” I had to tell him. “I didn’t tell you the whole story about the expo.”

  He frowned as if checking his mental calendar for the date of the expo. “There was a bombing there late at night. I assumed you had left before then. Were you in that?”

  The flame on my cigarette hit the filter. “Kinda.” I tossed it away, and it landed in the tiny gap between the floor of my garage and the cement outside. “Myka was there when I stole the plans.”

  “Myka Benton?”

  I pulled out another cigarette. It was one of those days. “Yeah. She was trying to steal the plans for Cadinoff.”

  He stared so hard, the full story spilled from me. Myka and me being handcuffed together. The ride in the hanging gondola. The singing, the zero-g, the puppies. I left out the part with the lemur. Had to keep some boundaries. As I got to the showdown at Halcyore’s, it became more difficult to speak. The next part was still painful. I forced it out in stilted sentences. Myka had told me that she had feelings for me, and I had lashed out. I had ridiculed her. I had thrown every insult I could think at her, and as I did the Myka I had found during that night had dissolved. She’d reverted to her corporate self.

  I had tried to tell myself that it was her true self. She had tried to play me, and I’d stopped her. But the more I told myself that, the less I believed it. Now I wanted to smash my face into the 280 for thinking it.

  Ryan left me hanging, not speaking as I waited for his judgment. He flicked ash from his cigarette.

  “That’s a lot to leave out of the story.”

  I laughed, grateful he broke the silence. “Yeah.”

  “You were an asshole to her at the end, there.”

  I sucked in smoke. “I know.”

  “So you’ve been miserable for months because you yelled at Myka Benton after being handcuffed to her all night.” He spoke his thoughts out loud. “So you feel guilty about it.”

  I didn’t want to think of it like that. “I just didn’t want to deal with what she was saying.”

  Ryan had a weird look on his face—a scrunchy look reserved for when he was thinking through some engineering problem. His leg started shaking. “So what, exactly, did Myka say?”

  “I didn’t take down a transcription or anything.”

  “Just…I guess…did she mention what happened one year ago?”

  I’d forgotten about the kidnapping thing. In the heat of the moment, my mind had blipped past it entirely. She’d said she’d helped me then, which didn’t make any fucking sense.

  “She said something about having helped me last year. Clearly bullshit. You were the one to rescue me, right?”

  His rescue of me was one of those heart-warming relationship moments. If there were an “Elly and Ryan” scrapbook, it would have a featured place of honor, with digital fireworks and little hearts. Ryan had rescued me by bursting into Cadinoff HQ with the Corporate Enforcement Agency behind him. He’d careened through a firefight to get to where I was crouched in hiding, somehow not getting shot in the process. If I could’ve taken a video of a terrified Ryan staggering across the hot zone between the Cadinoff soldiers and the CEA officers with windmill arms and wobbly legs, I’d keep it in a special lockbox and bring it out for fond laughs and playful ribbing.

  But Ryan’s face went white in a way it shouldn’t with this memory.

  “Ryan, you were the one to rescue me, right?”

  One look was all I needed to know that he was about to pull the rug out from under me and then hit me with it.

  “Yes, but…” He ran a hand through his hair and threw the unfinished cigarette away. “I didn’t know what to do, okay? I contacted everybody I knew, but who the fuck is gonna go against Cadinoff? I called the Corporate Enforcement Agency and they just ignored me. Because I’m just a kid crying about his boss being kidnapped by Cadinoff. Nobody cares about that!”

  My stomach dropped like the acceleration dip of an old Behemoth Neutron.

  “I was making plans to break in on my own, somehow. Bad plans. Stupid plans. But I was desperate. Then Myka showed up here.”

  That wasn’t what had happened. Absolutely not. Nope. Nuh-uh.

  “I thought she was gonna kidnap me too, but she gave me all these blueprints and details on your location and access points in the building. A data tab full of this shit. And then she gave me the name and comm code of a guy in the CEA who’d actually do something for me. So, yes, I rescued you…using the plan Myka handed over.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

  His voice rose. “She told me not to! I figured she’s going behind Cadinoff’s back and wanted to restrict the number of people who knew about it. Weird corporate espionage shit or something. I didn’t think she did it because she was into you! No offense.”

  I couldn’t take any, could I? Before the expo, the idea of Myka Benton having genuine feelings was a fantastic party joke. An impossible thing, like unicorns or a way to run the Edelwarg 4-8 without it overheating.

  This past year, all the times Myka had poked her head in and acted mysterious, I’d assumed it was a Cadinoff power play. Reminding me that Cadinoff could still get to me. But what if it wasn’t? What if the whole time, she’d just wanted to spend time with me? When I was being held by Cadinoff—when she was acting like a micro-manager with her questions and her constant supervision—she wasn’t gathering intel. She was…

  This whole time, she’d been into me, and I read it all wrong. Every time.

  Especially at Halcyore’s. She’d been telling the truth about all of it, and I threw it back in her face.

  “Why’d you yell at her?” Ryan knocked me from my thoughts.

  Another ci
garette. This was definitely a multiple cigarette conversation. “I wouldn’t be good in a relationship. Too much like my dad.”

  Ryan left me hanging. Again. More, he basically dropped me entirely, and I had to fall into that awkward embarrassment panic spiral in silence.

  “How are you like your dad?”

  Ryan didn’t usually ask such dumb questions. “I drink too much.”

  He shrugged. “So does everybody in the Back 40. What else?”

  “I’m mad all the time. And I yell. And I can’t guarantee that I won’t do more than yelling if I had a partner.”

  He was thinking through an engineering question again, as if what I’d said was so difficult to understand. He, more than anyone, knew what I was like.

  “You don’t yell at me.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “When?”

  Right fucking now I was yelling in my head. All the rage and embarrassment and the need to grasp onto some ounce of self-respect by taking it away from somebody else. This was real, and it was in my head all the time.

  But did I actually do it? Yelling in my head, sure, but I wasn’t actually yelling. Had I ever yell at Ryan? Surely I had. He’d made me incredibly angry. That one time—the only time—he’d come home drunk and staggered into a customer’s Wheeler 409x, ruining the job. I was pissed then. Or that time he kept grabbing the clothes I threw on the floor and piling them on top of my work bench. That was infuriating.

  But I hadn’t yelled at him.

  Had I ever yelled at Ryan?

  “I think you see yourself as worse than you are.” Ryan fidgeted with the foil on the cigarette pack. “You know I’d leave if you were a shit to me.”

  He would. I’d said as much, myself. He wasn’t my son. He could leave anytime he wanted. But he didn’t want to.

  “I stay because you’re good to me.”

  Something in me shattered, and I couldn’t look at him during it. Or no, nothing shattered. I’d thought I was broken, but maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was a person who came from a bad home and learned how to be better. Maybe my father hadn’t fucked me up. Maybe I wasn’t like him at all.

  Except for the drinking. I did too much of that.

  I swallowed the ache in my throat. “Doesn’t matter anyway.” I watched the flame on the cigarette burn down to the filter. No more cigarettes. “Myka’s a contract worker for Cadinoff. Even if I wanted, things could never go anywhere.” She was loyal to her company. That’s why I’d yelled at her.

  “Yeah, that’s hard to get around, isn’t it?”

  It was.

  * * * *

  I didn’t drink for the next week. I didn’t do much of anything except slouch on the sofa watching whatever was on the vidstream. Hour-long product sponsorships? Sure. How to bathe your dog? Please. Guy Who Eats Everything Part 2? Absolutely.

  “Watching” was too strong a word for it. The vids played in the background while my brain worked in overdrive. Freeforming thoughts and feelings like I was doodling loopy circles on a blank art canvas. I turned over all the facts, considered hypotheticals, and played out so many scenarios. This process usually marked the start of a design, but there wasn’t an engine this time.

  Well, I guess an engine was involved.

  Ryan took over all the work in the garage. And though he kicked the sofa every time he walked by in protest, he still brought me food and water and took over the secretarial service. Basically, the kid was great. Full marks. Best apprentice ever.

  I needed all my brainpower to figure out the key questions: How did I feel about Myka? What did I want to do about her?

  These would have been easier to answer before that expo.

  It was just one night of fun handcuff hijinks, and I knew very little about her besides that she can sing and she likes puppies. That all being said, I had felt comfortable with her once we both let down our guard. When we worked together to make an impossible jump or to scale yet another flight of stairs, I felt like I had a full partner and it felt good. She was fun to be with, and her voice when she sang nuzzled in my head like a warm blanket. The way she swapped out impractical heels for athletic shoes but still wore a short skirt, the way she eagerly asked for puppies at the photo studio, the way she rescued us from the Cadinoff mercs outside of Halcyore’s. Oh, and I could never forget her three-word humiliation of Benjamin Brassard.

  Fine. I liked her.

  I had no clue what to do with that. Relationships were foreign territory. A relationship with a person beholden to a corporation that had fucked me over? That was a non-starter, right? Besides, even if Myka wanted to leave Cadinoff, she’d need a modest gold mine to pay off her debt. It wasn’t like I had any gold mines.

  Maybe this couldn’t go anywhere. It was just a thing that happened that was over before it started. Maybe I should be okay with it and move on with my consolation prize: the engine design I’d spent my entire life working on.

  It was around this “let it go” point when Jagcoop arrived at the door. The vidstream played an episode of Earth or What? where a woman argued with the appraiser about the giant poodle statue sitting in one of her living rooms.

  I hadn’t even heard him come in, but he approached while running a hand through his peach fuzz hair. This was a visit I should have expected but didn’t. I was dumb.

  “Hi there, El.”

  I sat up, suddenly aware of my neglect of personal hygiene during this past week. I smelled like ass. To be fair, so did Jagcoop.

  “Hey.” I’d been a jerk to him, hadn’t I? I should say something about that, but I wasn’t great at apologies.

  Jagcoop watched the screen, but he remained standing. “I seen this one. It’s from Earth, right?”

  “Nah. The statues are mass produced on Bellia.” Much like authentic Earth animals, authentic Earth artifacts were rarer than a proper start-up sequence on a Natel V. The rich people on the show had usually been suckered into buying junk for planetfulls of money. It was a laugh.

  “Huh. I’d buy it. If I had room at my place.”

  And the idle small talk ended. Time for the awkward part. “So, that whole expo thing…”

  “Yeah, I didn’t know that Sev Tech stole your design. I didn’t know anything about the job. It was just a job, you know.”

  “I know.” I rubbed my face and turned down the volume. “I’m sorry that I used you like that. It wasn’t great.”

  If he was mad, he didn’t show it. Jagcoop was a guy who’d take a few punches and still call the puncher a friend. “It’s fine. It was a little rough at the time, but your friend came by a couple days later with the money and everything. Helped me get in the clear.”

  “My friend?”

  “The woman they handcuffed you to? You two were working together, right?”

  Back in the gondola, I’d insisted that Cadinoff take care of Jagcoop. I’d forgotten in the rush of everything after, but Myka hadn’t. Even after Halcyore’s she’d made good on her word.

  “She gave you money?”

  Jagcoop nudged me over to take a seat. “Money, yeah. And she somehow smoothed things over with Sev Tech. Made sure my reputation didn’t take a dive. Keeps jobs coming in.” He picked at something stuck in his back teeth. “She was nice.”

  I held my head and regretted doing so as soon as my hands hit unwashed hair. Bad tactile feeling. “Yeah.” Real nice.

  “And I heard you got that design. Don’t know much about it, but I’m happy for you. Probably big money there, right?”

  “Probably. Hadn’t thought about it, but yeah. It’ll bring in some big money.” It’d bring in more if I locked down the patent and played things like a corporation. Milk the proprietary rights. But that wasn’t my thing. I was going open design; whoever wanted it, got it. Best way for technology to advance.

  But even with an open design, I’d get money coming in. New jobs, publicity, grants and funding. I wouldn’t be able to live in a Hightower condo, but I could expand the garage. Hire some new people. Maybe ev
en get a bigger place.

  “Were me, I’d buy one of those poodle statues,” Jagcoop said. “Build a patio and put it there. Also a zero-g room. You know, for sex.”

  How much money would I get from this? My attorney had sketched some numbers, but I hadn’t paid attention. My habit was to assume I had no money and would never have money, and it had served me well thus far. But with two corporations fighting over this design, then this thing was worth a shitload, right? Some would get shunted to legal and attorney fees, but the rest? Maybe I should find a financial adviser.

  An idea settled in my stomach, blooming from days of endless thinking. A crazy, stupid idea. An idea that I knew was what I wanted to do.

  Even if it would throw a wrench into everything.

  The Smartest Thing I've Ever Done

  I puffed the elba root cigarette as I savored the grimace of the receptionist.

  Of course Cadinoff had a professional human receptionist. No robots or holos or underpaid teens for Cadinoff. They had to show off that they could employ the most expensive workers, just like they had to build their colonial headquarters with reams of glass and modern architectural foofy. Levels moved and dazzled and natural lighting blah blah blah. The wet dreams of the rich person’s designer.

  I hated this fucking building.

  Ryan didn’t know I was there. Nobody knew I was there. Well, one person knew I was there, but I had paid them and they didn’t care. The rest? Well, I didn’t want to be talked out of this.

  “Be a dear…Mabella.” I spotted the name tag. “Could you ring up Glezos? Let her know Elly Henderson’s waiting to see her.”

  Mabella blinked multi-hued eyelashes. “Do you have an appointment?”

  I rested an elbow on the desk. I’d made sure to get nice and greasy before coming, and I branded a palm print of burned engine oil onto that desk. “Nope. Tell her it’s about the solar engine design plans. She’ll want to see me.”

  “You need to set up an appointment to see Ms. Glezos.”