by Mel Keegan
Much had changed since then. Roark Hubler was out of the service, flying with Asako Rodman, copilot aboard the Harlequin, as soon as Richard Vaurien’s contacts could get her out of drydock. And Mick Vidal was gone. Marin frowned as he saw the ghosts passing across Travers’s face.
“You miss him, don’t you?”
“Mick?” Neil did not even pretend that he did not follow Marin’s line of thought. “I suppose I do. He was a good friend. He could get right up your nose sometimes, make you want to haul off and hit him, but … he was a good guy.”
“And he fancied you,” Marin added. “Couple of times, I caught a glimpse of him trying it on with you.”
“And you didn’t make a scene.”
“Why should I?” Marin only shrugged, and for some moments watched the line of the mountains drift closer in the forward canopy. “If you wanted to hump Mick Vidal, me storming in and breaking his nose wouldn’t stop you wanting. And if you didn’t want to, you’d tell him ‘no’ without a word from me.”
For a full half minute Travers digested this and then asked bluntly, “And if I’d taken him up on the offer of a quickie?”
Marin was unperturbed. He surveyed Travers with arched brows. “Did you want to?”
“For half a second,” Travers admitted. “He’s a … was a very attractive guy. You didn’t notice?”
“Oh, I noticed,” Marin admitted. “He never made me any offers. I’m not his type, apparently. You are.”
Again Travers skipped several beats and then asked, just as bluntly, “And if he’d made you the offer?”
With a smile which Marin hoped was purely enigmatic he said, “I’d have considered it seriously, for a good half a second. Maybe longer. He was a very attractive guy. But I’m already involved. Mick knew, and he was decent enough to back off. I respected him for that, as well as having the guts to fly the Orpheus into hell.”
“Yeah.” Travers looked away. “Shapiro’s going to speak at the memorial. You and I have to front up and face his parents, his siblings. Christ, I hate these things.”
“People need them.” Marin held out his hand until Travers took it. “They need closure, especially when there’s nothing to cremate, nothing to inter. Mick is just … gone. There’s a lot of people who’re going to miss him a great deal for a long time. And you’re one of them.”
“And not you?” Travers wondered, lacing their fingers.
“He didn’t get close to me,” Marin said thoughtfully. “He never invited me close – probably because he saw me as a competitor. Part of him wanted you for a lot more than the proverbial quickie, and I was the one in the way. He kept me at arm’s length, and I understand that.”
“I suppose he did.” Travers’s fingers tightened around Marin’s as he swung his feet down, leaned over and hunted for a kiss.
It was deep enough to take Marin’s breath, make him wish the flight to Riga were not so short. His hands cradled Neil’s head, holding him to it for a long time, while the Capricorn scudded through a band of low clouds. The trim shifted, the AI pilot began to give away altitude, and at last they separated with a groan, a curse. Travers’s eyes were dark with dilated pupils, and Marin indulged himself in a chuckle.
“Hold that thought,” he suggested.
“Thought? Who’s thinking?” Travers reached down and adjusted himself in slacks that were abruptly a size too small. “Damnit, I’ll give you something to hold!”
But not while the Capricorn was already negotiating with the Riga ATC. The lights of the Resalq science community had begun to flicker through the Jupiter spruce on the high slopes where the air was so thin, human lungs struggled to cope. The only large trees that throve were the genetically re-engineered conifers designed for terraforming worlds where the air was weak, oxygen-poor.
“Wastrel 101.” Mark Sherratt’s voice had never sounded so welcome. “Wastrel 101, we have you on tracking. Follow the beam, Curtis. We’re parking you behind the house – there’s no space out front. Problem?”
“No problem, Mark.” Marin turned toward the comm pickup with a smile. “Damn it’s good to be back.”
“It’s good to have you here,” Mark told him, “even for a couple of days. Dario and Tor got in two days ago. I know you’re going to Velcastra soon. I should go myself – Robert Chandra Liang and Alexis Rusch will be there. I feel … responsible for the loss of Michael Vidal.”
“Don’t,” Marin said quietly. “The mission was critical, he took it without hesitation, and what we learned is his real memorial, not a lot of speech making and posturing by Velcastran royalty.”
Mark breathed a sigh which was clearly audible over the comm. “I know. But I sent those young people to their deaths, and I feel it, Curtis. I’ll never stop feeling it.”
The lights of Riga streamed upward as the Capricorn sank toward the vast slope behind Sherratt’s house. Downscan showed the busy front yards, where five cars and three trucks commanded every meter. Travers whistled. “He has a houseful.”
It was no less than Marin had expected. The whole community was picking up, making ready to move out. The Carellan Djerun was parked in orbit, and the AI reported that Sherratt’s other two ships were already tasked and working.
The reality hit Marin broadside. In a week, two at the most, Riga would be locked down and operating on AIs and drones. The Resalq would be gone from here, as they were already gone from Saraine – back in deep space, silent and dark as shadows, where Zunshu probes would not see them and Confederate warships could not touch them.
The landing beam brought the Capricorn right down into the open area between the greenhouses and the labs. It was eighty meters from the house, which was too far in the intense cold and thin air of these highlands, but the greenhouse connected to the house by a pressurized conduit, and Marin tweaked the autopilot to put the ship down with the port side hatch no more than ten meters from the greenhouse pressure door. The ship set down without even a mild bump to tell them it had settled. Red and green telltales cycled across the instrument surfaces as the AI powered down all systems, and the cockpit lighting came up.
Without a word, Marin stood. Travers was watching him closely, knowing how odd this must be. For so long, the Resalq community had been the one constant Marin had never questioned – a haven to run back to, a source of support, succor.
Cold enveloped him as the hatch opened. The night sky glittered with hard, bright stars, and for a moment Marin held in his last breath of oxygen rich air, tolerated the intense chill, to gaze up at the milky place in the northwest. Hellgate.
Then he hurried on, a pace ahead of Travers, and hit the ’lock release to get into the greenhouse. Heat and moist air greeted them, and he drew in another deep breath, grateful for the oxygen, and the living scents of humus, earth, growth. The lights were always on over the beds where fruits and vegetables grew. The vines ran riot in artificially light gravity, constant heat, humidity and full-frequency lamps. Strawberries and cherries, peaches and nectarines, marched in fifty meter lines, where tiny drones fussed over them night and day.
The drones would continue to work here until the Resalq returned, but part of Curtis Marin foresaw a day when power cells flatlined at last, and these plants were neglected, for the Resalq had moved on, and like their ancestors, they never returned.
“Curt?” Travers caught him by the shoulders. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Premonition? Or just perfectly natural human paranoia, like a kid being terrified of change.” He rubbed his chest. “Something in here is afraid they won’t come back. When they find new worlds beyond the human territories, they’ll abandon this half-life in the shadows, and Riga –” He shook himself hard.
“And Riga will be a ghost town,” Travers finished. Big arms went around Marin. “Some of them are almost certainly going to wander and keep wandering. They were nomads for centuries. It gets to be a habit. What’s the word? Diaspora. But Dario was grumbling to me about the new generation, ki
ds of twenty and thirty years old. Some of them want to be gendered, for chrissakes! And they won’t take kindly to being ripped out of the worlds that are all they know. Human culture has become their culture – the music, the dumb situation dramas, the dance clubs. Even the sex, if the fact they want to be gendered is anything to go by. They’ll be back as soon as it’s safe, and if parents want to keep families together, they’ll have a foot still in this camp as well as one in the new.”
Marin gave him a wry smile. “You’re making more sense than I am, just at the moment. I’m sorry, Neil. It’s like …” he struggled to find the words. “Everything I ever knew is unraveling.”
“Except me,” Travers added.
And Marin permitted himself a soft chuckle. “Except you.” He clasped both hands at Travers’s nape to hold him. “You’re tough. Sometimes, tougher than me.”
“Denser, maybe,” Travers allowed. He pressed his lips to Marin’s forehead. “Look, before you give up on them, talk to Mark.”
“Mark,” Marin said darkly, “wants us to quit Shapiro’s service and go with the Resalq, remember? What’s that sound like to you? Like they’re not coming back, and he wants to keep his friends and kin near.”
“Or like he wants to keep them alive,” Travers argued as they made their way between tangerine bushes and racks of rabbit-ear lettuce. “Shapiro could get us killed.”
He was right, and with an effort Marin set aside his misgivings. The greenhouse ended in a lock-in, lock-out hatch, and the two-meter, flexible conduit covered the last ten meters to one of the house’s four rear entries. The conduit was intensely cold, but the oxygen levels were high enough for human comfort.
They were in, and Marin was holding his hands to a heating vent, when light footfalls announced Mark Sherratt, and for the first time in months he found himself in the Resalq’s embrace. Travers would never have protested, but even if he had, the embrace was offered to him a moment later, before Sherratt stepped back to look at them.
“You look grim,” he observed.
The red-gold mane was loose about the shoulders of a bright silkscreened shirt; his feet were bare beneath the ragged cuffs of old, worn denims. He looked tired, but Marin saw a steely quality in his eyes, in the lines of his face. Everyone was feeling the stress, from Shapiro on down, and Mark was at the helm of a group almost as large, as complex, as Shapiro’s own.
“Grim?” Travers echoed. “We just came from Fleet Sector Command. They’re packed and ready to run, on a three minute alert.”
“So are we.” Mark jerked a thumb over one shoulder, indicating the house behind him and, by extension, the rest of Riga. “All the critical gear has already been moved out. We’re working down a list of priorities now, salvaging what we can, in order of importance. The Aenestra and the Hulleros are parked in low orbit.”
“And the Carellan?” Marin wondered. “We spoke to Joss before we came down.”
“The Carellan is working,” Sherratt mused. “Come on, get warm. Have you eaten? We’re just about to serve dinner – and before you say a word, Roy Arlott seems to be an excellent cook. No one will ask you to eat Resalq food! Make yourselves at home, please. I’m right in the middle of something. Let me finish, and I’ll join you for dinner.”
As the only human domiciled in the bosom of a Resalq household, Roy would swiftly learn to cook, since the Resalq were likely to slather butterscotch sauce onto a raw onion, dunk it in oyster sauce and balsamic, and serve it as a delicacy. Their palate was very different.
The aromas of cooking food wafted from the house’s big kitchen, reminding Marin of how hungry he was. He and Travers had eaten long before they left the Wastrel, but anticipation had robbed Curtis of his appetite at the time.
Three autochefs stood in the kitchen, stocked to suit the Resalq, but Roy Arlott was actually cooking. As the only human, he could not rationalize stocking a ’chef for his peculiar tastes, but the Riga properties produced some of the best produce on Borushek, and Sherratt’s kitchen was the equal of anything Marin had seen.
He was busy between oven and workbench, while Leon Sherratt sat on a tall stool with a glass of red wine, apparently pretending to help chop vegetables. The sun-blond dreadlocks were clasped back, and Arlott looked fully in command of the kitchen, though Marin saw the shadows of anxiety even in his face.
“Curtis, Neil.” He lifted a pair of glasses from a high cupboard. “Help yourselves. The gold glass bottle, not the green. The stuff in the green bottle would strip paint.”
“I like it,” Leon protested, saluting Marin and Travers with his glass. “How are you guys? Last time we saw you, you were sick as a couple of dogs.”
“Better,” Travers told him, offering his hand while Marin took the glasses and poured the dry white. “We got the full therapy and some rest. We’re good.”
“You’re sterile,” Leon said ruefully.
But Travers’s big shoulders only shrugged. “Shapiro got us the full Fleet contract, documents and all. If we ever want children, they’ll be made in a lab on Fleet’s dime, not ours. That’s good enough.”
“Is it?” Leon looked doubtful.
“Don’t mind him. He’s Resalq, and they come with a double set of chromosomes, remember. They’re all daddy and mommy rolled into one. Sterility would halfway traumatize one of them. ” The little language teacher dusted his palms down on the seat of a pair of cutoff jeans, and then wiped them on the breast of a tie-dyed teeshirt that read, ‘Soy un genio, te molesta? Potomu chto, yesli on, sore wa anata no un ga waruidesu.’ Travers was peering at the decal, puzzling together the fragments of Slingo which wandered through the ancestral Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Arlott laughed. “Save your brain cells, Butch. It says, ‘I’m a genius, it bothers you? Cuz if it does, tough luck.’”
“Cute shirt,” Travers decided. “Gets you punched in the nose now and then, does it?” He gave Leon a grin and pulled up a stool, just in time to take a glass from Marin. “So, what’s for dinner?”
“White fish that were swimming in the Havana River this morning, sautéed vegetables that were in the greenhouse this afternoon, and chocolate mousse with brandy cream.” Arlott paused for long enough to take a swig from his own glass. “They told me you were coming in, so I’m cooking enough for three and leftovers.” His blond brows popped up. “You staying over?”
“A couple of days.” Marin gestured vaguely with his glass. “Until we ship out with Shapiro … Velcastra.”
“You hungry for some human company?” Leon guessed.
But Roy’s fair head shook. “I just need to know who I’m cooking for. It’s a safe bet these two can’t cook worth a damn. And you’ll need to slice those mushrooms a lot finer, Lee. Look, like this.”
He swiped the knife out of Leon’s hand and demonstrated with enough flair to impress Marin. It was Travers who observed, “You’re happy here.”
“Yeah, I am.” Arlott looked up with a smile. “All the work I can handle, all the Resalq I can learn … the ancestrals, who’re an education in themselves, every damned day. Leon to myself every night, beautiful place to live, great car on the driveway, three meter surf an hour away, down the mountain. What’s not to like?”
But his face was filled with shadows, and Marin said quietly, “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Yep.” Arlott heaved a large sigh. “I go where Lee goes, and … he’s going. Aren’t you, babe?”
“I go where they need me,” Leon said with a certain resignation Marin appreciated. “Besides, it’s not safe around here. Zunshu on one side, Confederate battle groups on the other? No way, kiddo.” He tousled Roy’s hair affectionately. “We’re out of here for the duration.”
“For the duration,” Marin echoed, and shot a hard glance at Travers. “Meaning, you’re coming back?”
The shadows were in Leon’s eyes too. “If there’s anything to come back to,” he said cautiously. “I like it here. Riga and Saraine were always my homes, but if there’s only rubble where they
used to be … there’s other worlds.”
“Resalq worlds,” Travers mused.
“And human,” Roy added. “There’s me, and you two, attached to Mark’s house, but half the Resalq in Riga have human friends and family. There’s going to be a lot of us on the Resalq ships leaving Borushek.”
And they would take human culture with them, just as surely as the very young Resalq would cling to the music, dance, fashion, language, they had come to cherish in cities like Elstrom, Hydralis and Sark. Marin savored the crisp, light wine and tried to imagine a new world where humans, Resalq traditionalists and the young Resalq who were either gendered or wanted to be, built a new world, developed a culture that would weave together into something new. In a hundred years, two hundred, the hybrid culture would have a flavor, a character of its own, quite alien from anything the homeworlds knew.
“When?” Travers was asking.
“When do we ship out?” Leon puffed out his cheeks. “We could go like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Everything we own is in four bags aboard a Tropheo, parked in the garages downstairs. Mark’s stuff is already up on the Carellan – or at least, everything he couldn’t bear to lose. The rest will follow, crated, stored. If the bastards give us the time.”
“Time,” Arlott echoed, and looked at Marin with rueful, haunted eyes. “They have no idea how much warning we’ll get if it happens.”
He meant, if a Zunshu device dropped into the Borushek system, riding the gravity express out of the sensor blind of Hellgate. Was three minutes enough? Marin did not know the answer, but Travers was saying quietly,
“This is one of the better fixed systems, Roy. It’s one hell of a lot harder to get in or out of Borushek than it is to slither in or out of Omaru, much less Saraine. The whole system’s ringed with sensor platforms, part of the civilian traffic network, as well as Fleet’s own deepscan system. If a Zunshu weapon arrives here, you should get plenty of warning.”
“Unless it drops in, right in orbit,” Leon said darkly, “and just does its thing right there. In which case there’ll be no warning at all, so it doesn’t matter a damn, because we won’t know a thing about it!”
