Outside the room, she heard her mother’s voice. Jessamyn was home. She tilted her head to catch Lillian’s words.
“She’s not in her room,” Jess heard her mom saying. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. It’s just …”
Jess heard her father’s deep baritone. “Did you check Ethan’s room?”
There was a long pause. Her mother didn’t respond. And then Jessamyn heard Lillian’s familiar tread as her mom walked toward her.
Jess sat up, eager for the remembered touch of her mother’s worn cheek against hers. She felt like a four-annum-old child again.
But her mother, when she entered into the room, did not offer an embrace.
“This is your brother’s room,” said Lillian Jaarda, voice pinched with anger and pain.
Jess blinked. Her inner child scrambled for cover. Under the pretense of rubbing sleep from her eyes, Jessamyn hid her face. Excuses shuffled against one another for precedence. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to watch the stars. I miss Ethan. She shoved all the excuses away, unwilling to expose the soft underbelly of her soul.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Mom,” Jess croaked. She placed a hand to her throat. She’d meant for her voice to convey sarcasm, not thirst.
Lillian Jaarda opened her mouth to snap something in retort but then seemed to change her mind. As she left the room, she called over her shoulder, “We’re sitting down for morning rations.”
Jess rose, realizing she’d slept in her clothes. She didn’t feel like changing even though she knew her mom wouldn’t like it. Well, her mom could just deal. Jess paused before the rations table, and her father leaned over to kiss her forehead.
“Morning,” he said, smiling.
“Morning,” she replied, her own face carefully neutral.
“Do you have plans to take over your brother’s room?” asked Jess’s mother in clipped tones.
“No, Mom,” she replied, pausing from a sip of water. “I just had a bad dream. I thought maybe watching the sky would help.”
“I see,” said her mother, her lips tight.
“The Secretary had a case of the new rations delivered this morning,” said Jess’s father, attempting to gently steer the conversation.
Lillian made a noise that indicated irritation. Jess’s mom disapproved of preferential treatment being offered to one citizen over another.
“I said we’d pick our rations up like any other family,” said her mother, “But the courier looked scared she’d lose her job.”
“You have that effect on people,” said Jessamyn, regretting the words as soon as she’d said them.
“One of the many qualities for which I agreed to marry you, my dear,” said her father, smiling calmly at his wife and daughter. “In any case, I signed for the box. And if I remember correctly, the flavor of the fresh rations will be quite, hmm—what’s the word? Eye-popping?”
“Yup,” Jess said, sinking into her place at the family ration table. She stared at her brother’s empty seat and wondered for a moment what it had been like for her parents, staring at the two empty chairs for the past thirty-nine mornings and evenings.
“I’ve got several messages for you,” said Lillian, all business. “You’ve got a full schedule the next week, young woman.”
Jess nodded as she reached for the copper-wrapped bar. She checked the date stamp. From this day forward, she would know with certainty that she or Ethan or Crusty or Kipper had handled these exact rations, exchanging them for bars of pressed Marsian tellurium. She watched her father as he opened his by first running a finger under the flap the length of the back side and then pinching the raised flap between forefinger and thumb. A quick twist and the packaging opened in his experienced hands.
Jess felt her throat squeezing tight. It was the same method her brother used.
“There will be a memorial service for those lost in service on Terra,” said her mother. Her matter-of-fact delivery of the information was intended to hide her emotion. But Jess knew every crease upon her mom’s tired face and could tell how deep the wound ran within her mother’s heart. “Then you’re scheduled for travel to New Tokyo and one other settlement—there’s still some debate as to whether it will be Squyres Station or Allentown.”
“Let her enjoy her morning ration,” murmured Jessamyn’s father. “Plenty of time for that later.”
“No, there is not plenty of time,” said Lillian. “That is precisely my point.” Turning to her daughter, she spoke again. “We’ll need to get suitable clothes for both the memorial and the … the …” Her mother paused, closing her eyes tight and grimacing. Lillian Jaarda never wasted water. “You’ll need something to wear to the celebration as well.”
Jess sighed. “I’ve got my Academy whites. They’re good enough.” She hardly ever had the opportunity to don the impractically white garb. Mars’s red soil made a mess of a good pair of whites so fast that they didn’t get much actual wear.
“Well, apparently the Secretary’s event coordinator feels you should be dressed in civvies for the next week, and that means we have a trip to downtown New Houston to fit into your busy schedule,” snapped Lillian.
“Dear,” interrupted Jess’s father, “I’m sure Academy whites will do.”
“Fine,” said Lillian, rising from the table. She smashed the copper wrap into the recycling mech’s narrow mouth. “You tell that to Ms. Interfering Niedermaier, why don’t you?”
The room became very quiet. Jess listened to the hum of the recycle mech.
“I’ll tell her,” said Jessamyn. “I’m sorry she bothered you. I’ll ask Mei Lo to make her stop.”
Jessamyn’s mother opened her mouth to say something but then seemed to deflate, her head falling into her hands, elbows hanging in the air.
“Mom, it’s going to be okay,” Jess said.
Her mother gave no response.
“It is, Mom,” Jess insisted. And then, before she could stop, she found herself saying, “I’m going back for Ethan. I promise I’ll find him. Then everything can be the way it was.”
That got her mom’s attention.
“What are you talking about?” asked Lillian.
“MCC owes it to Ethan and Harpreet and Kipper to send someone back to get them. Well, we don’t know if Kipper’s still alive. But her family deserves closure, at least. And Harpreet is, like …” Jess paused, struggling to find the words. “She’s a planetary treasure.” More quietly, she added, “And so’s Ethan.”
Lillian Jaarda raised her head, her eyes glistening with tears she refused to let fall. “How do you even know if he’s alive?”
“I know, Mom, okay? I would know if he … if something …” She broke off . “I would know. Besides, he sent a message.”
“He did?” Jessamyn’s parents asked the question together.
“Holy Ares,” muttered Jess. “I can’t believe they considered that classified. Yes. Ethan sent a message. It was weird, but it’s all the proof I need to know he’s okay. He couldn’t have done it if he’d been caught again, which means he must be okay. He’s with two very good Terrans.”
Her mother made a noise of derision and Jess found herself in the strange position of having to defend members of the Terran race.
“Good Terrans exist, Mom.”
“What did Ethan say?” asked Lillian, her voice soft. “In his message?”
Jessamyn frowned. “I didn’t memorize it. I’ll have to get it for you.”
Back in her room, she found her brother’s wafer and brought it to the rations table where she read aloud the strange message: “When you pass through the fire, you will not be scorched, Nor will the flame burn you. So says Ethan.”
Lillian’s face drained of all color. “It was the laser array,” she said.
Jessamyn stared at her mother, who had evidently decided to stop making sense.
“So that’s why Mei Lo wanted his expertise with ancient Terran computer code,” said Jessamyn’s father, nodding, his brow drawn tight.
<
br /> “She sent him on a suicide mission to disable the lasers,” said Jess’s mother.
Jess’s eyes grew wide. Her mother figured that out from a bit of garbled poetry? “How do you know the lasers are disabled?”
Her father held up one hand. “We’re not asking you anything about your mission. I’m sure MCC has not authorized you to speak upon the subject. However, two weeks ago, a rumor began circulating that the satellites would no longer fire upon ships leaving Mars orbit.”
“It’s created a public-relations nightmare for Mei Lo,” said Jess’s mother, rubbing her temples.
Jessamyn ignored her mother’s statement—which sounded unrelated—and returned instead to the message from Ethan. “Why did you immediately assume Ethan’s message had something to do with the Terran satellite lasers?”
“His message—it’s a quote from a story we used to read to Ethan,” said Jess’s father. “Before you were born. The story of three men condemned to pass through a fiery furnace who survived the ordeal without so much as the smell of smoke upon their garments.”
“If we’re right about the laser disabling—and you don’t have to tell us anything,” continued Jess’s father, “Then the message you received is simply a confirmation that he was the one to disable the lasers’ ability to target ships departing Mars.”
Jess shook her head slowly. “No one was supposed to know except the five Mars Raiders aboard the Galleon, and Mei Lo.”
“We’re not asking you to confirm anything, Jessie,” said her father.
“No, no,” said Jess. “If people know about the lasers, I don’t see the point hiding it from you. I never got the chance to ask him if he succeeded—” She stopped abruptly. Memories of leaving her brother behind threatened to swallow her whole.
“So Ethan is alive,” whispered Lillian.
Jess forced herself to come back to the present, to her hope of rescuing her brother. “Yes,” she replied. “Yes, he is. And I intend to find him.”
“Oh, Jessamyn,” said her mother, shaking her head slowly. “You’re so young.”
“What?” demanded Jess, hands upon her hips. “Is it too much to expect a little support here? You’re his parents. First Mei Lo gives me a bunch of flimsy excuses and now you’re saying no, too? We owe it to them.”
“They’ll never let you go,” Lillian said dully. “Not now.”
“Why not?”
Her father sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Mei Lo is under a lot of pressure right now,” he began.
“You want to know pressure?” asked Jess. Within her a frantic desperation built to tell her brother’s story. She was done with holding things in for the sake of others. “Try standing in front of a firing squad of Terran Red Forces!”
Lillian froze.
“They lined him up with Harpreet, and they shot them, Mom,” said Jess, a tear coursing down her face. “I didn’t know if they were both dead or alive or what. And I broke into the hospital to try to get him back. I tried, Mom, I tried so hard. And it wasn’t enough. Ethan’s stuck inside someone else’s body on Earth because I wasn’t smart enough to save him. But I’m not going to make the same mistakes next time.”
Jess’s mother, her face pale white, rose slowly from her chair. “You talk to her,” she said to Jess’s father. “I can’t.” Lillian walked out of the room.
Jessamyn’s father frowned, uncertain whether to follow his stricken wife or remain with his daughter.
“What is going on?” asked Jess. “I thought Mom would be grateful.”
His decision made, he sat with his daughter. “Ever since the announcement about the lasers was leaked, there’s been a contingency … a faction, if you will, who argue we should use this opportunity to renew trade relations with Earth.”
“Why?” asked Jess. “We fought a war with them.”
“Yes,” said her father. “And now there’s an idea that it’s time to put all of that behind us. That a more prosperous future awaits us if we can re-engage in trade. Things we need in exchange for tellurium.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” said Jess. “Has everyone on Mars suddenly forgotten what Terrans are like? Because I’d be happy to provide a refresher course.”
Her father shook his head. “The ideas are taking hold in people’s minds, Jess. The hope for a brighter future.”
“Our future looked plenty bright last time I checked,” said Jess.
“People don’t want to wait.”
“People are idiots in that case,” said Jess hotly. “What makes anyone so sure Terrans wouldn’t blow us out of the sky from Earth instead of Mars if we went there to converse about trade relations?”
“Hope,” her father said simply. “People—some people—want to speed up the timeline for terraforming. Some want a better quality of life. Some are just struck with Terran-fever, I guess.”
“There’s nothing wrong with our quality of life,” said Jessamyn.
Her father smiled sadly. “Says the girl who’s seen life on Earth.”
“Yes, I have seen it. And it sucked. We don’t want anything to do with the water planet, trust me. They are all crazy over there.” She frowned, thinking of Pavel and Brian Wallace. “Well, most of them are crazy. My point is, we do not need that kind of crazy interfering with life here on Mars.”
“Your mother and I agree with you,” he said. “But all of this Terran-fever means Mei Lo is rather overwhelmed at the moment. It’s not a good time to request a return mission.”
Jessamyn sat silently. She wasn’t going to argue the point with her father. Nor did she intend to drop the subject with Mei Lo.
“I need to go sit with your mother,” her father said softly.
“Of course,” said Jess. She stayed where she was. She couldn’t handle her mom. Not right now.
Down the hall, Jess could hear her father’s soft voice. A sense of disappointment filled Jessamyn as she examined the empty space surrounding her. This was not the homecoming she’d imagined. Nothing was right.
I just want things to be like they used to.
She wanted her brother back. She wanted a version of her mom who hugged. And now a bunch of greedy Marsians were standing in the way of everything she wanted. A faction, her father had called them. She wasn’t certain what it meant, but the word sounded horrible.
Pounding a fist upon the rations table, Jess rose and exited the front airlock, stepping into her walk-out suit and passing out of her dwelling.
Everything was horrible.
8
A PREDILECTION
By the end of her first few weeks at the New Timbuktu Gold Processing and Re-educational Center for the Retirement of Criminals, Harpreet Mombasu had made quite a name for herself. If you were depressed, prisoners advised, you should speak with Harpreet. Anxious? Consult Harpreet. Worried about your future? Harpreet. All of which tended naturally to: Have a yearning to confide desperately secret information? Harpreet will listen.
Not that she had forgotten her own sorrows or concerns. But on the twelfth day of her captivity, Harpreet had awoken from a dream with the certainty that the Red Galleon would touch down safely upon Mars.
“Well, that is most welcome news,” she said upon awakening. She didn’t question the information, simply took her dream as proof-positive the event would transpire.
Which tended to make her even more open to listening to the sorrows and concerns of others.
To date, she had heard the confessions of not one but two individuals who claimed to have formerly served as Head of Global Consciousness Transfer.
The fact that their stories, told individually, corroborated one another made it hard for Harpreet to doubt what either reported. The second (Harpreet thought of him as Number Two) told of how he’d agreed to assume the body of the first and to keep secret this deception. The first (Harpreet thought of him as Number One) expressed dismay at having awoken in prison, in a new body, only to see his former body accompanying Lucca Brezhnaya as if noth
ing had happened. The same body had apparently now been delivered to a third Head of Global Consciousness Transfer (whom Harpreet thought of as Number Three.)
“She likes to maintain the appearance of stability,” lamented Number Two. “But her government is rife with instability.”
Harpreet nodded and listened.
The Chancellor, it seemed, had a predilection for sending top government personnel to this particular prison. The hard labor wasn’t as likely to be the end of you as, say, the camps in Antarctica or Devon Island. Of course, Lucca had no problem summarily ending the lives of those she deemed of no further usefulness. Or those who simply angered her on a bad day. The political prisoners in New Timbuktu thus had some hope of being of further use to their former employer.
“And it is your desire to work once more for so corrupt an individual?” Harpreet often asked those who brought her their confessions.
The answers varied. Some swore they would die before aiding Lucca again. (Harpreet even believed some who said this.) Others said they would jump at any chance to leave New Timbuktu. No one, however, refused to answer Harpreet’s innocent-sounding question. Harpreet was too easy to confide in.
Thus the Mars-born woman began to form a list of the stories of those who wished to see a different sort of government upon Earth. She had no means of knowing if her information would ever prove useful; she simply gathered it as one might gather and sort interesting-looking rocks back home. And at the same time, she appreciated the opportunity to be of use and encouragement to those who were part of her new life.
One day, she made the acquaintance of Kazuko Zaifa, a scientist who had formerly worked in Budapest at the facility governing the satellites circling Mars.
“They accused me of leaking information to inciters,” she explained. “Information which allowed the inciters to breach security and infiltrate the building.”
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