by H. J. Lawson
Guilt filled me for leaving Treavyn behind. So far away I may as well have planted him in the ground for eternity. I’d traded my last days with the person I loved most to chase a cure that wouldn't be found.
Treavyn. I miss you.
Kearyn caught my thought and pulled back from my mind. Thoughts of my fiancé hurt her, a reaction I didn't anticipate or plan for, and I could no longer meet her eye. But she tapped on the back of my hand to gain my attention.
"The Tide called him the seedling."
I nodded. While linked, Kearyn had been privy to my knowledge of Treavyn and I hers. She absorbed my feelings as I experienced her loss, her deep hurt when he abandoned her. How much she missed him.
"Riley hasn't met Treavyn before?"
"No." I shook my head. "No, I don't think they ever met."
"Did you ever hear about the Humness Immunity?"
Despite my drag of hopelessness, I laughed and nodded. Two decades after the last known case, it remained a favorite of every sex education class.
The Humness virus had infected thousands of people, causing terrible deformities through eradicating calcium from bone. All treatments applied met with little success until a scientific panel discovered a select group of immune people and further discovered the immunity could be passed from person to person via sexual intercourse. A communicable cure instead of a communicable disease.
My laughter stopped. "You don't think..." I trailed off because of course; she thought that. The suggestion made a kind of horrible sense. I looked at the pod and screwed my face up as I tried to imagine the act required.
At that, Kearyn laughed. "Don't be stupid." She held out her hand as though to ward off the scene I was picturing. "I'm going to visit Walt. I think he has a crush on me anyway."
Chapter 15 – RJ Crayton
Treavyn
The moment the shuttle door opened, Treavyn jumped down, took two steps, opened his mouth, and hurled all over the rocky clearing on the mountain. He didn’t bother to look up at Colonel Jones. He could feel her contempt for him; he didn’t need to see it.
He was an extraterrestrial who got sick when flying. He imagined she cruelly found it funny. So what, he flew poorly. He was sure there were Vikings who got seasick. Now didn’t seem the time to call her on her contempt for him. Not to mention, anyone would have gotten sick during that bumpy trip. He wasn’t even sure how the pilot landed in the narrow clearing.
“You finished?” Colonel Jones asked him, her tone dry.
Still hunched over from vomiting, he dragged his sleeve across his mouth and nodded. “I’m good,” he said, standing upright.
Treavyn wasn’t sure where they were. She’d stated that they were going to the Omega base, but he didn’t see a base around. He looked ahead. A narrow path led to a rocky protuberance peeking from the mountain. There seemed to be nothing there. Colonel Jones started walking, and he followed. The man who had been their pilot, whom the colonel had called Rusty, brought up the rear.
They didn’t walk very far, the path curving around the protuberance, and then there was the mouth of a cave. Jones entered the cave first, so he followed. After a few feet, there was complete darkness. “Crawl,” he heard her say, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. He was about to open his mouth to ask when his head smacked into the rocky surface of a cave wall.
“Hands and knees, Mr. Dennessee,” Colonel Jones barked to Treavyn. “We crawl 10 meters, and then we’ll be at the hatch opening. It will be easy from there.”
Treavyn dropped to his knees and crawled. Thankfully it was a narrow space, and he couldn’t really go off track. “Stop,” Jones called. “Bang into me and I will kick you.”
“She will,” he heard Rusty say in a deep baritone.
Treavyn stopped, and a moment later, he could see the glow of an electronic panel up ahead. Jones’ butt was immediately in front of him, and for some reason, the etymology of the term brown-noser came to mind. He didn’t want to be a brown-noser.
An electronic whir followed by a pop sound signaled a hatch opening. Light poured into the cave. Jones crawled through the hatch first. Treavyn followed, and Rusty brought up the rear. They went a couple of feet more through a tunnel and emerged in a small white room.
“Welcome to Omega base,” Jones said, and she started walking again, out of the little room and into a steel-paneled corridor. It was very high tech, the sort of thing he’d seen in the blueprints of space shuttles. Only, this seemed to be buried somewhere in the side of a mountain. He followed Jones closely, though Rusty seemed to go in a different direction. Shortly, they arrived at a door with an electronic panel next to it. She punched in a code, and the door unlocked. She pushed it open and held it for Treavyn. “After you.”
Inside was a fully functioning scientific lab with the latest equipment. Jones walked over to a table stationed with a computer and other equipment and pulled out a stool. She pulled out another stool for Treavyn.
He walked over and sat next to her. She looked him dead in the eye. “You’re going to tell me what that message means. How do we get rid of them?”
Treavyn swallowed as he mulled the message over in his mind. He had a mother and brother here on Earth. And though he loved them dearly, he still felt incomplete. So his message to the universe had been simple. “I am here. I want my family.”
But the message she’d shown him…that message, it wasn’t anything like what he had expected. “Treavyn, we thought they would love you. We thought they would be for you what you needed. Our experiment with individualism has failed. We are sorry for our mistake. We will resolve this problem of the earthlings. You may choose to help us or, if we have erred, you may choose to stop the resolution. Simply use your key to halt or speed up the process. Your judgment is our judgment. We are The Tide.”
Treavyn looked into Colonel Jones’ cool blue eyes. They were hard as steel. She inclined her head toward a doorway on the side of the room. Treavyn’s eyes followed her motion, and he saw a metal door with a glass pane.
“Three men died going to your mother’s home and retrieving every possible thing in there that could be a key. We’ve also brought belongings from your apartment. You need to show us the key.”
Treavyn shook his head. “I don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said. He had no idea what the key was.
“You’ve been in contact with them,” Jones insisted, her diminutive frame somehow managing to appear imposing. “You are one of them.”
He shook his head and closed his eyes. “But I’m not,” he said. “Don’t you understand? I’m not one of them.”
“They left you here, and now you’ve launched a spacecraft without permission, and you’re supposed to have a key that could stop this disease or speed it up. You need to give us the key and show us how to use it.”
These people didn’t understand. This woman didn’t understand. She was a bully who thought by browbeating him enough she could make him conjure up information he didn’t actually know. He stood up to his full height, straightened his shoulders, and stood squarely in front of her, hoping he looked imposing. “I do not know what this key is,” he said. “I have been racking my brain since you showed me the message.”
Jones stared at him a moment more, still looking as cruel and unyielding as ever, and finally, she said, “Go in the room and see if you can find anything. We’ll be locking you in here while you look.”
Locked in. Treavyn hated the idea of that. He hated small spaces, but she had a right to ask him to look. If he somehow had a key, he had to find it. No one else should die because of the family he thought he wanted. The only family he needed was Grace. It was time to stop The Tide.
Colonel Jones
Caroline had just finished securing the lock on the panel, ensuring that Treavyn Dennessee was going nowhere. They needed that key, and she’d tried to give him room to come clean, to tell her everything. If he wanted to help, he would have fessed up immediately. Instead, he’d kept secrets
and played dumb.
They needed answers, and coming to Omega base was the last option. This secret hub, built inside a mountain, was all very old James Bond movie-ish. There was a secret launch pad that could jettison a few shuttles into space. They even had a top-level space station outpost, the Orion base. The military kept it under wraps, and a few top officials could be evacuated there for safety. As she understood it, some were already there. Had gone when the virus hit. She could have been out there, too, but she thought the planet could still be saved.
She knew it could still be saved. She just had to get Treavyn Dennessee to give her the key. Everything in his personnel and psychological records indicated that by applying pressure, he’d crack and give them what they needed.
Only he seemed to be a pretty tough little rock there. She wanted Humpty Dumpty, and instead, she was getting a quite contrary Mary. She breathed out, trying to release a little bit of the frustration as she realized with a lump in her throat that she might have to execute her backup plan.
Just then, Captain Baker rounded the corner. He was tall, almost six feet, with beautiful chocolate skin, black hair sheared nearly to the scalp, and a whole lot of muscles. She swallowed and tried to appear nonchalant as he neared her.
“Caz,” he said.
She shook her head. “Call me Colonel.”
“Then I take it you’re going to quit calling me Rusty?” he asked, with raised eyebrow.
Rusty Baker was Caroline’s ex-husband. Handsome, rugged, kind, and, basically, everything she had ever wanted in a man. If only she’d been everything he wanted in a woman, it would have worked. But he wanted babies and home and hearth, and she wanted…well, she wanted to be in charge when shit like this went down. She didn’t try to conform for him. She simply told him goodbye and moved on. At least, she put physical distance between them. Until now. Rusty was the best pilot she’d ever met. It was probably why she’d fallen so hard for him. She was a sucker for any man who was the best at what he did.
She offered a look of contrition. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I just called you Rusty for his sake. It’s none of his business what your last name is,” she said, inclining her head toward the locked door where Treavyn was searching for the key. “Besides, you’re good with people.” Her eyes darted down as she decided to admit the truth. “You’re better at it than I am, and I thought he might open up to Rusty since he has no wish to cower under Colonel Jones.”
Rusty raised an eyebrow and still looked sexy, with his rugged jaw, broad forehead, and intense brown eyes. “I’ve told you that climbing on top and barreling through doesn’t get things done, Colonel Jones. Sometimes it takes sidling up gently, whispering in an ear and waiting for your target to come to you.”
Caroline looked away from her ex. She didn’t know if picking him to pilot them to Omega base had been a good idea or not, but she couldn’t stand the thought of him dying out there while she was safe and sound in here.
She looked up at Rusty, and he was a step too close to her. She could smell his soap. He still used that vanilla-scented organic stuff she’d introduced him to after they got married. The vanilla smell was faint, but it was still noticeable when you were this close. She took a step back and spoke firmly. “I have two hours to get information from him,” she said. “He needs to get me a key. I’d appreciate it if you could go in there and—what did you call it?—whisper in his ear.”
Rusty looked at the closed door, then back at his ex-wife. “Whispering takes time,” he said as he leaned on the door and folded his arms across his chest. “What happens in two hours if my whispering hasn’t worked?”
Caroline prided herself on being straightforward. She stiffened her back and looked him dead in the eye as she told him the truth. “Then I have to play hardball. I have to tell him the truth. That we’ve reestablished contact with the ship he used to send his fiancée and my sister into space.”
“Kearyn?” he asked, a frown forming on his face. “Why would Kearyn be with his fiancée?”
Caroline shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Isn’t Kearyn always where she shouldn’t be? She’s always in the middle of a shit storm, and half the time she’s the cause of it.”
Rusty put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off, and he grimaced but said nothing about her response. “Is Kearyn going to be alright?”
Caroline looked back at the door, trying to force down the emotion that should come with her statement. “That’s entirely up to Mr. Dennessee. In two hours, I’m going to come back here and tell him to give me what I asked him for or I’m going to blow up his fiancée and everyone else on that ship.”
Chapter 16 – E.E. Isherwood
Treavyn
I let my head fall to the hard table with a thunk. I'd grown tired of the ham-handed attempts at empathy from the colonel's errand boy, Rusty. “You'd be helping yourself,” he said as if it wasn't obvious. Not missing a beat, he added, “Mr. Dennessee, you'd be saving your girl, up there.”
My girl, I thought.
The words resonated in a way my interrogator could never imagine. They'd unlocked something I'd been suppressing. I needed to study some old memories. I was sure they were part of understanding the key. But I needed quiet! Thus, the head slam.
I recalled her eyes...
“Fine. Take a few minutes. I'll be here,” Rusty said with a soothing reassurance.
The memory washed over me as if it were happening all over again. Oh, I wish it could. I gripped the seat of my chair as I experienced the full weight of the tide. A cosmic supernova that happened only once with “my girl.”
“That was amazing, Tre,” the woman cooed.
Spent beyond description, I pulled back from her. We floated naked in the little pleasure craft’s upper berth—essentially a bedroom with a transparent ceiling of stars. At the moment we shared a pleasant view of Australia.
“That was— Um. I didn't know... That was my first time,” I stammered.
“Of course it was, you dope. Why do you think I brought you 250 miles above the planet? I didn't think I'd ever get you alone.” She reeled me back to her in the zero-g. “I have the connections. Might as well use them, huh?” She giggled.
“But this. I didn't plan—I didn't know!”
“Of course not. Sometimes I think you don't even know what men and women do. What we just did. You liked it?” she said a little defensively.
“I felt...” I took a long moment to simmer in her heat. Though she surprised me with her forwardness and her pretense of wanting to take a quiet flight out of the sight of the prying eyes of the press, I couldn't make myself complain about the subterfuge she used to get me there. She'd given me an emotion I didn't know existed.
“I felt like I belonged.”
“Okaaay. Yes. Belonging. That's a great word for it.” She bit my ear playfully. “Are you saying you and I belong to each other?”
I wanted, no, needed, to say yes. Her shape. Her curves. Her eyes. The idea of belonging to her as one being can belong to another was gnawing at my core. I did want to repeat the act we'd just shared. That piece of primal humanity overrode all my other directives. Yet, my soul protested that our joyous intimacy was still leaving me too far from her.
At the moment, with those bright eyes reflecting the blue seas of the planet below, I smiled as I knew she desired.
“Here, in your arms, we belong to each other.”
Minutes later, we belonged again.
“Hey! Sleepy.”
I lifted myself and blinked. The warmth of the memory faded as I adjusted to the harsh light of the Omega room again. “Sorry, I, uh, was thinking.”
“Looks more like you fell asleep. Look, we don't have much time. I need you to look at all this crap we brought for you and see if any of it opens any doors in your memory. A key. Get it?” Rusty's deep laugh was for show.
The messy stack in the adjacent room looked pathetic inside the spotless military base. All my earthly possessions amounte
d to a small shipping container's worth of stuff. It had been delivered, then ejected into the room. Clothing was piled next to kitchen utensils. Some of my treasured books—a rarity in our digital world—were tossed in a corner like a hated stepchild. They even brought my mother's recliner from her apartment. Could the key to the galaxy be stuffed inside the fabric of an old chair?
Inwardly I laughed, but I knew better than to make Rusty aware of my internal discord. “I'm trying. Really. I just need a little more time.”
His calm facade cracked. “Don't you get it, man? We're down to minutes. If you don't tell the colonel all she wants to know about this damned key, more people are going to die. Don't you care about anything?”
I'd read about one of Earth's ruthless dictators. Until the Darwin Alliance in the twenty-third century, Joseph Stalin was the undisputed king of murdering his countrymen. He said a million deaths is a statistic, while a single death is a tragedy. What did that make a billion infected souls? And why did I feel nothing for humans as a species?
Under his glare, it was hard to think, but I found Stalin's twisted words reassuring: A trillion lives is an infestation. A single life—hers—is a treasured gift from the universe.
“I'm trying,” I repeated with the drone of mock desperation.
“Then get your ass into that room and dive in. It's now or never, T-bone.”
I walked to the pile of belongings, already knowing the answer wasn't there. The dark man's interrogation had done me one favor by recovering that 250-mile-high memory from my past.
The key wasn't even on the planet.
***
“Sir, we lost her. Someone opened the damned pod. I'm sure of it.”
“Did we get the results we needed? Were our projections correct?”
“Everything in the telemetry suggests we can purge the infection, just as we thought, but it's less clear whether the test subject died before the removal began, or if she succumbed during the evacuation. It doesn't matter. You can take them out, sir!”
