by Sayuri Ueda
“How very radical of you,” said Karina. “Have you been poisoned by Kline’s ideas too?”
Suddenly, Shirosaki felt himself being jerked back as the shuttle thrusted forward. Without skipping a beat, Karina launched out of the chair, twirled around easily in the reduced-gravity environment, and pointed her gun at Shirosaki.
Shirosaki dodged the first shot and fired back. They exchanged fire at close range, the bullets shredding the fiber of their ballistic suits. Shirosaki winced as one bullet grazed his cheek and ear.
Karina’s gun clicked empty. Karina threw the gun down and lunged at Shirosaki. He swept aside her punch and swung with his gun. Karina evaded the attack and unleashed a kick. Shirosaki wrung his body away hard.
The shuttlecraft cleared the station and the autopilot program began to take a flight angle toward Asteroid City.
Karina grabbed Shirosaki’s gun arm. Overpowered by Karina’s strong grip, Shirosaki reflexively pulled the trigger. Several shots hit the control panel, and Karina’s face grew ashen. The shuttlecraft accelerated before the navigational system had fixed course and began to veer from the flight plan.
Karina pummeled Shirosaki in the face, wrested away his gun, and leapt at the controls. The shuttlecraft decelerated per Karina’s command and switched to inertial guidance mode, rendering the inside of the vessel a zero-gravity environment. The reverse thrusters and directional controls were not responding.
Unable to repair the damage, Karina turned to Shirosaki and said, “Look at what you’ve done. We’ve gone off course.”
In zero-gravity conditions, Karina was easily able to yank Shirosaki toward her and shove him in front of the controls. “Get the shuttle to stop.”
Shirosaki quickly scanned the gauges and said slowly, “Give me the data on the parasitic machine first.”
Karina turned her back on the cockpit entrance and aimed the gun at the back of Shirosaki’s head. “If you want to live, you’ll do as I say.”
“In exchange for the data.” Turning around, Shirosaki confronted Karina with a look of calm. “Your move, Karina. If you kill me now, you won’t stop this shuttle. Turnabout is fair play.”
The two looked each other in the eye for several moments until Karina bit her lip and silently pulled the trigger.
Shirosaki stood motionless. Click.
When Karina realized she was out of bullets, an enervated look came over her face.
Shirosaki looked at her with sad eyes. “You lose, Karina Majella.”
Just then, he heard a quick, sharp noise, like a harsh whisper. Karina froze.
Shirosaki’s eyes grew wide at the reddish-black stain spreading around the spear sticking out of Karina’s chest. She swept a hand across the wound and gazed at the blood glistening on her palm. Her body quivered, not out of shock but from the spasms fortelling her death.
Suddenly Karina twisted her face and thrashed violently, like a harpooned fish, her usual look of scorn a distant memory. What stood before Shirosaki now was an animal struggling desperately to pull the spear out of its chest.
Unbeknownst to Shirosaki, the effects of the neural inhibitor had worn off, and Karina was instantly assaulted by excruciating pain. The collective pain from the shocks and beating of the interrogation, her broken toes, the gunshot wound in her leg, and the speargun piercing through her back and lung had bombarded her brain at once, signaling her end. Karina cried out from the pain tearing through her body. No longer in any condition to devise a counterattack, Karina could only writhe in agony.
Karina’s impaler flung her against the wall by the spear. Harding walked stiff-leggedly into the cockpit, his boots magnetized. Harding trained his gun at Karina, making certain Shirosaki would not get caught in the crossfire, and drilled two bullets into the back of her neck.
Crimson blood spurted out of her throat and mouth, the droplets spraying the air like beads from a broken necklace.
Shirosaki swallowed and stared at Karina’s profile.
Karina continued to twist and turn, drenched in her own blood, frantically resisting the moment her light would be snuffed out, her soul plucked from her body. With one hand clutching her chest, she reached out with the other at something imaginary. Watching as she cradled something in her arms, Shirosaki was hit with a pang of nostalgia but didn’t know why.
Karina stopped in mid-motion with a look of agony frozen on her face. The light in her eyes had gone out. Her body floated inside the vessel, a lifeless mass.
Harding approached and after putting his fingers against her neck to confirm Karina’s death, he muttered, “Good riddance.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t do it to save you. I was only thinking of killing her.”
Shirosaki checked over the navigational system and a cold sweat began to form on his brow.
“Don’t tell me we lost control of the shuttle,” said Harding.
“The system’s been shot out. The shuttle is headed for Jupiter.”
“Are you telling me we’re flying into Jupiter?”
“No, we’ll probably crash into Io first,” Shirosaki said.
“The thought of diving headfirst into a sea of magma doesn’t exactly turn me on. Can you fix it?”
“Negative. We don’t have the necessary equipment, not the least which I don’t have that kind of engineering knowledge.”
“So we’re just going to go down with Karina in a ball of flames?”
“There’s another way—we get the station to send another shuttle after us. We might be saved if we can rendezvous with the shuttle.”
Shirosaki moved out of the cockpit to check the shuttle door to see if it could be opened manually. But when he got there, he discovered the manual controls had been damaged in the shootout with Karina. Shirosaki couldn’t get the door to budge.
Giving up, Shirosaki checked the air lock used to exit the spacecraft for extravehicular activity. With the green lamp on, the air lock appeared to be operational. But the hatch could not be used to dock with another shuttle. Shirosaki and Harding would have to exit the spacecraft wearing space suits and spacewalk to the shuttle themselves.
Shirosaki returned to the cockpit and explained the escape plan to Harding.
Harding looked pale, having lost a lot of blood. Though the bleeding had stopped, he appeared stricken and spent, not to mention irritable.
“Exit the shuttle?” Harding snapped. “The radiation in the Jovian atmosphere will fry our cells beyond repair.”
“Not immediately. The hard-shell suit should protect us a little, and the molec machines in our bodies should repair some of the damage.”
“If you want to go, you go on ahead. I’m too banged up to get into a suit. Forget about me and get the hell out of here.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Shirosaki. “We’re not done here.”
Shirosaki dragged down two space suits from the rack.
“You’re wasting your time,” said Harding.
“If we do nothing, we’ll fly straight into Io. You and I will hold out somehow until the rescue shuttle gets here. That’s the choice we’ve got. You have a family too. Don’t you want to get back to them on Mars, or would you rather die here with Karina? You can’t let her have the last laugh for taking you down with her.”
Harding made no effort to move.
“Get up,” barked Shirosaki. “Think about getting back to your family.”
Shirosaki forced Harding’s body into a suit. Harding twisted his face in pain but did not put up a fight. Thanks to the zero-gravity environment aboard the shuttlecraft, Shirosaki found it surprisingly easy to strap Harding into the hard-shell suit. After confirming Harding’s suit was leakproof, Shirosaki climbed into one of his own. Holding Harding under his arm, Shirosaki kicked off the floor and floated toward the exit.
Harding kicked Karina’s lifeless body with his good leg as they floated past. Karina and the blood globules surrounding her drifted slowly toward the control panel.
Shiro
saki moved along the wall to reach the air lock and operated the touch panel to deactivate the lock. He entered the chamber with Harding and closed the hatch behind them. The decompression sequence initiated automatically. After confirming that the pressure inside the air lock had reached zero, Shirosaki opened the outer hatch.
Without any scenic markers in the star-filled darkness as frames of reference to determine their inertial velocity, the shuttle appeared to be at a complete stop.
Shirosaki thrust himself into the void.
Suddenly his left periphery took on a colorful hue. He twisted his body in that direction, and a majestic vision of Jupiter filled his view. So enormous was the planet before him that it barely looked spherical but like a flat wasteland, etched with intricate striations that stretched as far as the eye could see.
Shirosaki burned the gas jets on his suit in the direction of Jupiter, slowing their velocity.
The two men silently watched the hulking white shuttle pass their flanks.
“You still with me?” Shirosaki asked Harding, after activating the rescue beacon.
“Yeah, I’m here,” mumbled Harding.
“Look,” Shirosaki said. “Io.”
A small shadow floated before them with Jupiter’s striations in the background. The radius of Io was approximately three hundred kilometers larger than that of Europa. In contrast to Europa, a moon covered in ice, Io was a fiery moon rife with volcanic activity. The active volcanoes, whose names were derived from the fire gods of many Earth cultures, erupted, spewed molten lava across the rocky terrain, and at times spit plumes reaching a height of over a hundred kilometers. Up close, Io was a blazing yellow moon dotted with black and auburn spots.
Shirosaki and Harding stared at the gaseous plumes climbing into space. The shuttlecraft flew a straight path toward Io. Shirosaki imagined the moment the shuttle would crash into Io’s surface. The metal coffin containing Karina’s body would break in two, completely engulfed by the molten waves, and be incinerated. Or perhaps the shuttle would plummet straight into the gaping mouth of a volcano, and Karina would disappear into the volcanic ocean along with the vessel. It was a fitting end for a woman who’d chosen to live violently and known only killing. She had been like a flame. Having burned herself and others to ruin her entire life, Karina had only found meaning in turning everything to ash. Shirosaki had no ruler by which to measure the value of such a way of life.
“Feels a little like offering up a sacrificial lamb,” muttered Harding. “Like making a sacrifice to the gods with Io as the altar. Makes me want to sing a mass for the dead.” Harding hoarsely recited one verse from Mozart’s Requiem: “‘When the damned are confounded and consigned to keen flames, call me with the blessed.’”
Saying nothing, Shirosaki floated in space, holding Harding in his arms.
“Will you listen to my confession, Shirosaki?” Harding asked.
“I’m not a priest. I have no interest in hearing penance.”
“Not that. It’s about Veritas.”
“Veritas?”
“A Round in the special district. Ey was…a friend.”
“A friend? But you hate the Rounds.”
“It was because we were friends that I grew to hate em. I thought I understood, but then I wasn’t so sure and I got scared. I had to push em away.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it when we’re back at the station?” said Shirosaki, sensing a lengthy confession. “Right now, you should conserve your energy.”
“I may not last until the shuttle gets here. Let me get this off my chest.”
Shirosaki did not answer.
Taking Shirosaki’s silence as a sign of consent, Harding began to talk in a deep murmur.
“When my team began our year-long detail on Jupiter-I, the special district wasn’t as restricted as it is now. It was common to see the Rounds roaming the residential district, and the staff were fine with it. When we first arrived here, we often mistook the Rounds for staff, since they wear the same uniforms, and we could only recognize the Rounds as either male or female,” Harding said. “We chatted with them when we saw them in the mess and relaxation room and visited the special district. Even enjoyed a game of zero-gravity squash in the zero-G zone from time to time.
“And you saw that bioengineered forest,” said Harding. “To those of us raised on planets, the special district was like a lush greenhouse. It was a place I used to go to relax.
“Veritas was an astrophysicist, whose job was planetary observation, and was researching Jupiter. Ey had that slender look of a woman, but once we got to talking, ey seemed like a stand-up guy to me, so we hit it off right away. We shared the same generational sensibilities that made you forget ey was a Round, probably because ey had spent so much time working with the staff outside the special district, like Dr. Tei. Veritas had an impartial way of looking at things that was like a breath of fresh air to me. Who knows what Veritas saw in me?” he said. “Although, ey said ey didn’t know any security-types like me in the special district. Many of the Rounds act on their curiosity, I suppose. They’re a subspecies driven by space exploration, so if that need isn’t being met, they have a tendency of satisfying their inquisitiveness through those around them. Just as we were trying to figure them out, the Rounds were trying to do the same just as intensely.
“As time passed, my relationship with Veritas began to change. It’s hard to say how it started. But we liked each other from the start, so we were suddenly drawn to each other. I realized that I was feeling something more than male camaraderie. Not in a homosexual way. I was attracted to the female part of Veritas. Humans are nothing more than animals. Once I became aware of the female half of em, I got a little skittish. And to make matters worse, half of Veritas is biologically female. Maybe it’s because I could recognize the male half of em, too, that eir female half seemed all the more radiant.
“Pitiful, right?” Harding said. “A man in his forties with a wife and kids. But I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t get Veritas out of my head. I tried to resist, but it didn’t work. One day, I finally crossed the line.”
Harding paused for a moment. Shirosaki could hear Harding breathing heavily over the transmitter inside the suit. “You should stop talking.”
“No, let me do this. This is where the story gets good,” Harding said. “I figured, we’re both adults responsible for our own actions. Maybe if I sleep with em once, I’ll stop fantasizing about it and be able to put it out of my mind. Veritas consented right away. Since the Round male sexual organs are hidden from view, I was able to get inside Veritas without feeling too weird about it. Eir male organ began to react too, of course, but by then, I was engaged in the act and frankly, I did everything not to notice that part of em. Out of sight, out of mind. I chose not to see what I’d rather not. I made love to Veritas as if ey were a woman, and Veritas let me. It was a convenient trick, but we were both satisfied at the time.
“Under normal circumstances, we would have been fine. All we did was satisfy our sexual needs. It was there and then gone. A one-night stand between two consenting adults, but we didn’t stop there. At first, I was the one to make love to em, but soon, that wasn’t enough for Veritas. It was inevitable, considering the Rounds are absolute hermaphrodites. They achieve a psychological balance by simultaneously loving as a man and being loved as a woman. Their mentality is fundamentally different from ours. Sure, Veritas knew that I was a Monaural from the start. Ey must’ve known what ey was getting into, but the body reacts independently from what the brain might be thinking. This arrangement couldn’t last.
“As cold as this may sound, I was content to go on satisfying my sexual needs as a man. But Veritas didn’t know how to relieve eir own needs as a man. What, you think ey should have got off with another Round?” asked Harding. “At first, that’s exactly what ey did, but Veritas soon discovered it wasn’t going to work. That eir lust wasn’t going to disappear until ey’d satisfied those feelings with me. Because that’s ess
entially what love is—the burning desire to consummate a relationship with a specific partner. Which is why Veritas couldn’t stand not being able to love me as a man.”
Shirosaki’s eyes grew wide. “Wa—wait,” he stuttered. “You’re not saying Veritas—”
“Ey came to me wanting to love me as a man. What ey was demanding was that I engage in a homosexual relationship. Now I’m perfectly aware that as a social norm, we’re not supposed to discriminate against queers. At the same time, I have both a reason and the right to refuse that kind of proposition.
“I only wanted Veritas’s female half. So I did everything to deny eir male half any sexual pleasure. I suppose that kind of sadism got me off even more. And I have to admit, the fact that I was flouting a taboo had something to do with it. It was a dirty way to treat Veritas, I know. But I kept telling myself that I wasn’t a Round. I told em that I could never be the woman in this relationship. I’m not a woman, but a Monaural man. I couldn’t do what ey asked, I told Veritas. I just couldn’t give over my body in that way.
“Veritas didn’t back down after one or two rejections. Ey started chasing me around the station, not like a jilted woman but like a dog in rut. That was when I realized just how serious this situation had become. Seeing no easy way out, all I could do was run. It was around this time that the members of my security team got wind of the mess that I was in—suddenly I was some kind of laughingstock. They were outraged, of course, but their reaction was more resigned than critical, probably because they recognized it was a trap any warm-blooded man would have fallen for. So it was Veritas they made a target of their mockery.”
“So what happened?” asked Shirosaki.
“I was painted into a corner, damn it,” answered Harding. “I punched Veritas in front of the men. Called em a pervert and told em to never come near me again. It wasn’t that I hated em, but I thought Veritas might give up with a strong enough push. The team looked at us and laughed—I mean, bent over with tears in their eyes. We were quite a freak show. But they were looking for a diversion from their duties on the station, so I guess our affair seemed like a farce to them.
