by Kieran Shea
The chairman frowned and didn’t look at either of them. “Oh, with such substantial losses and the disastrous collateral deaths, our solicitors deliberated launching an inquiry once the scow that rescued you returned from its skip. But seeing that you’ve been out of pocket for so long, I believe I should make something clear to you: the entire matter is now closed.”
Puzzled, Leela and Jimmy looked at each other.
“Closed, sir?” Jimmy asked.
“Mmm, yes. You see, with the extended time gap between your rescue and the scow’s skip back I don’t think you’ve been made aware of something. Enlai Universal and Azoick? Our two companies consolidated two months ago. We’re Enlai-Azoick Universal Holdings now, the largest interstellar mining company in existence. Investigate ourselves? It seems rather pointless.”
Leela nearly leapt up from her chair. Jimmy put a hand on her arm. “But, sir,” he implored, “hundreds of people lost their lives out there. The Adamant, the K7-A station, all of it was destroyed. It was—”
“What?”
“Well, a massacre, sir.”
“Immaterial.”
Leela squeaked, “Immaterial?”
Grumbling peevishly, the committee members gathered their dataslates and stood as well. As they left the conference room, the chairman planted his hands on the table with contempt.
“I can’t believe I need to make this any plainer for you two,” he said mirthlessly, “but have either of you ever had the good sense to read the fine print on your contracts? Company indemnification clauses address fatal hazards. While I can understand this may seem like an outrage to persons of your capitulating stature, resources like you are expendable. By signing contracts, whoever perished out there accepted all risks whether intentional or not, yourselves included. Conveniently your ilk always seems to put such things out of your minds, but no matter. Effective immediately you are both released from your obligations.”
Puzzled, Jimmy asked, “Our obligations?”
Leela covered her face with both her hands. “I think he means we’re fired, Jimmy.”
“Oh.”
After the chairman left, Leela got up and gripped the back of her chair. It occurred to Jimmy she was this close to blowing her stack and he was about to say something to calm her down when she picked the chair up and hurled it across the room.
“Those bastards!”
Jimmy crossed to the thrown chair and righted it. “Looks like this fancy dog-and-pony show was just a formality.”
“A formality!? People were killed out there, Jimmy! The Adamant was blown to bits. These starch-collared jerks and their stupid merger, they can’t just pretend none of it happened!”
In an effort to fix things, and quite mistakenly, Jimmy thought some consolation was in order. “Hey… things will work out, you’ll see.”
Leela glowered at him. “Oh, sure. Maybe you can be all lackadaisical about everything, but I’ve put in nearly eight solid years with this stupid company. I’ve busted my butt for them. I’ve risked my life. I even tried to save their damn station and those snotty clowns, they didn’t even bother to say one word about that. They don’t care.”
“Leela, c’mon…”
Leela marched out of the room without another word.
* * *
It took some arranging on his part, but Jimmy negotiated a low-cost shuttle ticket back to Earth on one of the inner-system budget carriers. With the transport shuttle employing fractional skip power and thin on amenities, the trip home would be an uncomfortable forty-seven-hour slog and he just wanted to get it over with. Post-stasis and before their grilling with the investigative committee, Leela informed Jimmy she was staying on the Neptune Pact Orbital. She said it was because she wasn’t ready to go home just yet and explained her nerves needed some more time to decompress and she would make other arrangements. It bummed Jimmy out Leela didn’t want to travel back to Earth with him, because he wanted to try to convince her into taking him back, but sadly he realized he had to respect her decision. After all, it was probably for the best.
In the men’s room of the discount carrier’s boarding lounge, Jimmy shaved with a disposable razor. Leela had apprised him that when she got rid of Piper’s body and cleaned up all of her blood, she’d jettisoned his straight razor as well because it was evidence. She’d asked about Piper’s necklace with the engagement ring and the amulet, and Jimmy had said that when Piper was dying he had vaguely agreed that he’d get the necklace to Piper’s fiancé.
Jimmy nicked himself several times with the cheap disposable and dabbed his cuts with some toilet tissue. Studying his tissue-specked, haggard face in the mirror, he thought about his late father and mother and felt melancholic. Had he listened to his parents and stayed in school, who knew where he’d be now? All this loss, all this needless destruction and death—was any of it worth it? No, he thought, it definitely was not.
Everyone always claimed you should live for the moment, that everything could be taken away from you in an instant. Jimmy knew he used to adhere to this notion, but he made a deal with himself now. He decided he would never travel to space again, because he wanted to live for a long time and simply back home on Earth.
Live clean.
Enjoy a few sunrises.
Plant a garden. Maybe fly a kite once in a while.
He wanted to read the classic literature canons and absurd philosophies of all cultures, both vibrant and forgotten, to see if they could help him make sense of his condition, and maybe in time he thought he could begin to make amends for his actions. Jimmy the cloistered, James Barclay Vik the saint. He saw himself volunteering with a relief program or tutoring misguided kids somehow. After a long and lonely time with all these noble pursuits perhaps then he’d find someone to share breakfast with. Or not.
That last idea wasn’t exactly a priority. While he’d wanted to patch things back together with Leela, after everything that’d happened it seemed like he was waving for a ship to come back for him just as the flags of the poop deck crested the horizon. He likened it to that painting by Géricault—The Raft of the Medusa—only Jimmy saw himself alone on the lashed-together planks. With no one left to cannibalize, it was up to him to paddle on for his own redemption.
After cleaning himself up, Jimmy threw the disposable razor into a waste bin as an announcement drifted into the men’s room. The shuttle Sultana was boarding in ten minutes.
At the embarking gate, Jimmy shuffled his way into the queue. It wasn’t a full flight, but directly in front of him two passengers were conversing about the events that had transpired on K7-A six months ago.
“Yeah,” one passenger went. “I overheard a bunch of suits from Enlai-Azoick yakking over at the concession stands. Seems the whole station and one of their freighters totally bought it out there.”
“No way,” the second passenger said. “And everyone died?”
“Well, not everyone. There were two survivors, apparently.”
Without even thinking, Jimmy raised his hand. The two passengers turned and looked at him.
“I’m one,” Jimmy said quietly.
The two conferring passengers were aghast. Another passenger a few feet ahead in the line, a broad-necked brute of a man with an anvil-like head, turned and stared at Jimmy.
“Did you just say you were on Kardashev 7-A?”
“Um, yeah. I was.”
“My fiancée was on K7-A.”
Jimmy’s face went white.
Collision course, part trois.
57. AFTERCLAP
And so, later, aboard the shuttle Sultana…
“Liar!” Piper’s fiancé bellowed inside his helmet. “Don’t tell me my baby died out there like the rest of them! This amulet recorded her last moments. You cut her throat, saw-grinner!”
Jimmy let his weight drag him to the floor and curled into a ball. On some pale empirical level he fully accepted that getting his ass handed to him was a rightful and just comeuppance, so what could he possibly sa
y in his defense? That Piper was going to kill him first? If Jimmy whipped together the grandest and most profuse of apologies, would that assure him a swift and merciful death?
In hindsight, perhaps he should’ve waited to give his attacker the necklace until they safely landed back on Earth. How could Jimmy have known the triskelion charm recorded his and Piper’s last moments together aboard the Adamant’s tender? But no. Once they were aboard and well under way, Jimmy’s conscience gnawed at him. Eventually, when the shuttle passed Earth’s moon, an announcement from the flight deck advised the Sultana was on approach and spurred him into action. Jimmy got up, and finding him in his seat, gave the necklace to Piper’s fiancé.
“Listen, you don’t know me,” he said, “but I think this belongs to you. Piper told me to tell you she tried.”
Piper’s fiancé gave Jimmy a disconcerting glare, and when he lifted the necklace and engaged the amulet everything skated straight to hell in a hurry. A confusing thermal hologram of Piper bleeding out and calling him a saw-grinner appeared in the air between them.
“And where’s all this hijacked loot, huh?! Answer me!”
Alas, the word hijacked changed everything.
While discount inner-system shuttle services may have been a take-your-chance undertaking, one thing that no space transportation provider tolerated, even a discount carrier, were certain words mentioned even in jest. The syllables of “hi” and “jacked” in sequence, while muffled, were picked up by a cabin mic and a small armored turret with a threat-neutralizing stun cannon descended from the ceiling. Painting Piper’s fiancé as a target, the cannon zapped out a crackling blast of fifty thousand volts and he fell to the floor. Like a fat hornet, a security drone emerged from the turret a second later, and the hornet-like drone pounced and crabbed over the man’s immobilized frame. After injecting a sedative into his neck, the drone took flight again and hovered above Jimmy.
“Sir, remain still.”
Jimmy moaned and rolled over. “Oh, god, thank you. I knew something was wrong and that freak attacked me. I think—I think he was trying to go for the door or something. I tried to stop him, but he overpowered me.”
A camera lens on the drone flickered as it assessed the situation. It spoke with a modulated, adenoidal tone.
“Are you injured?” the drone asked.
“Would it be okay if I sat up?”
“Slowly, no sudden movements. The shuttle’s countermeasures are now locked in on you.”
Gradually, Jimmy sat up holding his cracked ribs. He looked at the stun cannon pointed at his head and then at the hovering hornet drone as it scanned his body for weapons. The drone initiated a secondary cursory physical scan. Registering a tally of contusions and two hairline fractures of Jimmy’s right ribs, the drone gauged him a possible victim/hero in the recent altercation and dispatched a secondary message to the authorities and the flight deck.
“Thank you,” Jimmy whispered hoarsely.
“Sir, authorities on the ground and the pilots have been notified. Remain still.”
“Ahhh… um, have you seen my necklace?”
“Sir?”
Jimmy gestured to Piper’s zonked-out fiancé. “That animal took it when he attacked me.”
The drone eased back and returned to an aerial position over Piper’s fiancé. While he was anesthetized, the necklace was still clutched in the man’s hand.
“This necklace, sir?”
Jimmy nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one. My late mother… she gave it to me. It’s all I have left of her. A family keepsake. The ring was hers too.”
After a second spent determining that Jimmy wasn’t a menace, the drone lowered and used a pincered hook to secure the necklace. Gliding forward, it dropped the necklace in Jimmy’s lap.
“For your safety and the safety of the other passengers, it is necessary that you return to your seat and remain there until we touch down.”
The shuttle leveled out. Sunlight poured into the cabin.
Jimmy looked out a porthole on his right. The blue skies and clouds were so beautiful. None of us deserve this world, he thought. He got to his feet and the drone rose with him.
“I’m sorry, but would it be all right if I used the bathroom? I think I’m going to be sick.”
Rubbernecked in their seats, the other Sultana passengers in the main cabin were looking at Jimmy. Many of the passengers had flipped up their helmet visors, mesmerized by the scene. The drone counseled:
“If you feel you are ill, please be prompt with your emesis and then return to your seat as instructed. The authorities will meet the shuttle upon landing.”
Jimmy nodded. Hobbling into the bathroom, he locked the door behind him. With his damaged ribs it took some effort to kneel down, but he’d a feeling he ought to make things look legit. There was no way to know if additional security measures or even a camera was monitoring the bathroom, so faking a retch Jimmy slipped the necklace with its engagement ring and triskelion amulet into the toilet and pressed the flush button.
Per international agreements, the Sultana purged its waste tanks somewhere over the Arctic Ocean.
58. BACKSLIDING BACK HOME
TEN MONTHS LATER
There was one thing you could always count on in Vancouver and that one thing was a ton of rain.
It was a Saturday afternoon and a virtual cataract of minimal pH buckets poured down from a slate-colored sky as Jimmy patrolled the sidelines. Not the best day for rugby in the park, and excluding extra time there were nineteen minutes left in the day’s match. The junior girls’ club he helped coach was down twenty-nine to thirty-four. Despite the mucky conditions, all the girls and gathered supporters seemed to be having a good time.
After the altercation aboard the Sultana, Jimmy and Piper’s fiancé were promptly manacled and detained by the authorities at one of the European Confederacy’s largest interstellar skyports. The skyport was just outside of Paris, and it turned out Piper’s fist-happy beloved was wanted in connection with nearly a dozen open murder investigations involving The Chimeric Circle. Regardless of his story and his hostile, blubbering accusations of Jimmy (not to mention the atrocious lack of corroborating evidence, seeing that Piper’s necklace was flushed into the Arctic Ocean), after Jimmy was held for eleven hours the authorities saw no reason to keep him further and let him go. Piper’s fiancé, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. Taken to a cooperative government black site, he confessed to many of the crimes related to The Chimeric Circle under enhanced interrogation and was later executed extrajudicially by lethal injection.
As for Jimmy, after a week of moping around Paris’s silo-cinemas, brasseries, and cafés he decided to return to his hometown for a much-needed recalibration of his internal compass. He supposed he could’ve started again just about anywhere or stayed in Europe, but being around all the nearly forgotten city landscapes of his hometown and easing into its congenital Canadian attitudes, he thought returning to Vancouver would even his keel. It did. He quit drinking, stayed inconspicuous, and took an under-the-table position as a night custodian at a dynamo-part warehouse in possibly the sketchiest part of town.
The night custodian work afforded Jimmy a small, storage-container apartment in a neighborhood that, like the part warehouse, would never know a rebound, and for a while, not knowing what befell Piper’s fiancé, he lived day to day in fear. Jimmy knew better than to start researching what had happened to Piper’s beloved, as that would mean raising his head and registering for all sorts of regulated services. However, as the weeks stretched into months he started to breathe easier and gave up looking over his shoulder altogether. Life wasn’t exactly peaches and cream, but his job kept him busy from nine at night until five the next morning, and he filled most of his remaining free hours with torpedo kick drills and the like.
He’d happened into the assistant rugby coach position because one day he read a flyer posted in the laundromat around the corner from his pathetic living arrangements. Turned out the h
ead coach who’d posted the flyer ended up being an old rugby rival and remembered Jimmy from their shared youth.
As he stalked back and forth along the sidelines, Jimmy heard a noise, and he looked up to see a bright yellow aerocab spinning down from the rain clouds. The aerocab alighted just beyond the playing fields in a fenced-in parking lot, and when the passenger got out it was as if a ball of warm, gelid light pierced Jimmy’s core. The aerocab’s passenger was the last person in the world he ever expected.
Leela was dressed for the weather: a glossy black slicker, matching umbrella, and boots with a pink hooded sweater and jeans beneath. Taking her time, she took up a position beneath a frail whitebark pine near the parking lot’s fence. Seeing Jimmy along the sidelines a hundred meters away, eventually she gave him a small wave.
Holy shit, Jimmy thought. What the holy hell is she doing here? He hadn’t seen Leela since they’d parted ways on the Neptune Pact Orbital, and while he thought about her constantly and sometimes even dreamed of her, he never imagined he would see her again after everything he did. Hastening over to the coach, Jimmy explained he needed a break because an old friend had just shown up unexpectedly. When he pointed Leela out beneath the pine tree by the fence, his old rugby rival told Jimmy to take his sweet time.
Circumventing puddles, Jimmy jogged over to Leela, swept back his hair with a hand, and let out a laugh.
“What in the world are you doing here?”
Giving her umbrella a twirl, Leela said, “Well, let’s see. I did some research on my own, but you’re one tough hombre to find. No communication service providers, no entertainment credits, bank records, or smart-tech accounts—I ended up having to hire a professional investigator. Tracking you down cost me a bundle, thank you very much.”
“I’ve been trying to keep a low profile.”
“I’ll say.”
“Gosh, it’s really good to see you, Leela.”
“Likewise.”
“So what’re you doing here, huh? Are you traveling? On leave? Working?”
