“We’re not well liked within the Alliance,” he said. “We think we are—what Fifty-six calls the infallible human optimism—but we are mostly hated for our intolerance and our lack of understanding about other cultures. If the Disty had declared war on us, a war that they would have been able to justify, a culture war, we would have found ourselves alone against former allies. The destruction would have been unimaginable.”
“Yet you imagined it,” the second representative snapped. “And paid for it with twelve lives.”
He closed his eyes. “Probably,” he whispered. “Probably.”
Fifty-five
They looked terrified and somewhat sick, the seven people who sat in the game room of the Emmeline. They were scattered on the couches, not touching the screens in front of them, ignoring the food the serving ‘bots kept circulating.
Seven people who, hours before, had been going innocently about their lives, and would have continued to do so if Flint hadn’t found them.
They looked different than he expected. He had expected them to have a similar appearance, perhaps because they were all about the same age and had gone through the same horrors in their childhood. But the three women, all of whom sat on the same side of the room, varied from portly to thin, from gray haired to hair an unnatural blue, from middle-aged features to features so clearly enhanced that they seemed not quite human.
The four men were just as different. Two were rangy, with the unnatural thinness that suggested too much time in zero-G—perhaps space work, perhaps terrible travel conditions back when they were children. The other two looked a bit too comfortable. One had the round body so preferred in the Outlying Colonies—fatness as a sign of wealth. The other seemed so normal that Flint would not have noticed him on the street—brown skin, brown eyes, brown hair, a softness to his body that suggested a lack of exercise, a way of disappearing in a room filled with people.
The private security team that had brought them to the Emmeline—a team hired from one of Armstrong’s best and most discrete firms—had told Flint that the remaining five survivors had refused to come. Even though the officers who had found them mentioned imprisonment, the five who had stayed behind claimed they would have preferred anything—even death—to returning to Mars.
Flint had a hunch that, in their shoes, he might have made the same choice.
He had spent the first hour of the flight getting the Emmeline out of the Moon’s restricted space. There had been a difficult moment when he had gone past a group of Disty ships still hovering outside the boundaries.
DeRicci had told him, as she gave him his final instructions, that these Disty were waiting. Apparently, someone had told them that negotiations were underway, and any impulsive actions on the part of the Contaminated Ones would go badly for all involved.
Flint wondered how long that truce would hold.
DeRicci had also told him that he wasn’t going to land on Mars. Instead, a Disty ship would dock with his and take the survivors to Lowell.
Flint hadn’t informed them of that yet. He hadn’t said much of anything.
In fact, while he had been in the cockpit, alone, negotiating the ship through the rough section, he had opened the communication system to the game room, and listened to the survivors. Their conversation had been perfunctory, conducted almost as if speech were required. The introductions had a tinge of sadness, or perhaps it was the sentences that followed:
I remember you.
I haven’t seen you since that night.
I had no idea what happened to you.
And on, and on, until Flint wanted to shut off the conversation. Then it switched to the ways they were brought to the ship:
They told me they’d take my children if they couldn’t take me.
They told me I’d be imprisoned if I didn’t come.
They told me I’d be killed.
They told me. They told me. They told me. And Flint had become the representative for “they.” Had DeRicci known how these people were picked up and convinced to go on this mission? Would she have asked him to participate if she had?
When the ship was safely away from the Moon, he put it on autopilot, linked it to his own personal network, and left the cockpit. He walked down the carpeted halls, past the large, fancy galley that came standard on this version of the yacht, past the sitting area and the main dining area, to the game room.
He didn’t play games and he had asked to have the room converted into something else. The manufacturer had toned down the games, but convinced Flint to keep part of it, saying that his guests would appreciate the opportunity to do something fun on long voyages.
He never thought of this yacht as fun, nor had he ever expected guests. Still, he must have had a vestige of that conversation on his mind when he placed the seven passengers in here, after showing them each their separate quarters.
The game room had an unused air, even now, when it was filled with people. The room smelled faintly of musky perfume and garlic—the serving ‘bots were carrying around some sort of beef-and-garlic concoction they had pulled from his stores. The concoction was wasted on this group; no one was eating.
All seven looked at him when he came in the room and leaned against the stylish black wall. He had decided, as he had walked here, that he had nothing to lose in disassociating himself from the various government agencies that had rounded them up.
“I overheard your conversation.” He nodded at the small systems panel near the ceiling, just so that they knew he hadn’t hidden the sound system capabilities from them. “We can turn back if you want. I’m not any kind of authority. I’m just a pilot they’ve hired to take you to Mars.”
“You’d take us home?” asked Hildy Vajra. She was the youngest survivor, barely four months old when the massacre happened, yet she looked the oldest now. She clearly hadn’t had any enhancements. Her eyes had laugh lines in the corners, and her skin was beginning to get a patina of age.
“Yes,” Flint said. “I can’t vouch what would happen to you after you arrived, but I would take you back to Armstrong and try not to call attention to your arrival.”
“Meaning what?” Kiyoshi Stewart asked. He was the oldest, and had come the farthest that day. His home was in one of the small, remote Domes near Tycho Crater.
“My yacht docks in Terminal 25,” Flint said. “One of the privileges there is that the port doesn’t have to report my comings and goings to Space Traffic. If they don’t notice us, then we’ll have gotten in easily.”
“Only no one can get onto the Moon right now,” Elwin Wilson said. He was the soft one, the one who blended into the background. Flint was surprised he had spoken up at all.
“I know some people. We could probably land,” Flint said.
“Which would call attention to us,” Juana Marcos said. Her beauty was so perfect that it looked fake—the high cheekbones, the almond eyes, the smooth skin. Her eye and hair color matched perfectly, and the color of her cheeks picked up the pinks in her blouse. Her legs, covered in cropped pants, were crossed at the ankles and swept to the side as if she were at a party instead of riding away from her home.
“It might,” Flint said. “It might not.”
“What’ll it cost us?” Wilson asked.
“Nothing,” Flint said. “I’m not doing this for the money.”
“Then why are you doing it?” the last woman, Eugenie McEvoy, asked. Her blue hair looked like an affectation. All of her clothing did as well. It didn’t quite fit, and seemed like something someone else had picked out for her.
“Because Mars is having a crisis, and we’re going to have one, if this doesn’t get solved. From what I understand, you people are the only solution.”
“The massacre,” Salvatore Weiss said. He was the fat one, his voice as sculpted as his body.
“Yes,” Flint said.
“They expect us to go back and save the people who killed our families,” Weiss said.
“Maybe their descendents,” F
lint said. “But there are a lot of others there. Innocents who had nothing to do with that massacre.”
“So?” McEvoy asked.
“So it’s your choice,” Flint said. “But no matter what happens, the news of the massacre is finally out. That’s some good which has come of this.”
“As if that brings our families back.”
Flint looked sideways. The last survivor, Glen Norton, finally spoke up. He had been lounging in the corner, his long legs extended. His eyes, hooded and tired, met Flint’s.
“Of course it won’t,” Flint said.
“But you said that as if it would, as if we should care that the universe finally knows about our little tragedy. So what if the Disty are having one? So what if humans die because of some weird cultural difference? I don’t care.”
“Then why did you come?” Marcos asked him.
Norton moved his head ever so slowly toward her. His gaze ran the entire length of her, from cropped pants to perfect cheekbones, and Flint got the sense that Norton didn’t approve of what he saw.
“I had no choice,” Norton said curtly.
“I’m giving you a choice,” Flint said. “You can go back.”
“Do we vote?” Norton asked. “What if six agree and one doesn’t? Then what do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Flint said. “I’m just the pilot. You’re the ones who are probably going to lose a week or two helping folks you don’t know.”
He wasn’t quite sure why he had phrased it that way; maybe because Norton had annoyed him. Maybe because Flint didn’t really want to turn back. He wanted this crisis solved, and the seven of them had the power to do so.
“People helped us,” Vajra said quietly. “Took us in when they didn’t have to.”
“People also slaughtered our families.” Norton’s voice had a sarcastic strength. “If we follow your logic, we could be saints or sinners, depending on how we choose to see our past.”
“I think that’s exactly right,” Stewart said. “We could hate or we could choose to be different. I’ve always chosen to be different.”
“I’m rather fond of hate,” Norton said, and crossed his arms.
Everyone stared at him.
Then Flint said, “If you make the passive decision, you will end up on Mars. I think you’re all better off to make an active one.”
“They rounded us up like animals,” Weiss said.
“It was like the past all over again,” said Wilson.
“I have only been that scared once before,” Marcos said.
Flint nodded. “That’s why I’m giving you a choice.”
Vajra sighed. “What do we become if we don’t help? Will this get fed to the media?”
“I have no control over that either,” Flint said. “I can get you there or not. It’s that simple.”
“I say we go,” Stewart said. “It’s the right thing.”
“The right thing.” Norton shook his head and closed his eyes.
“Don’t you have a vote, Mr. Norton?” Vajra asked.
“I think we know how he stands,” Marcos said coolly, obviously still smarting from that appraising look he had given her.
“So let’s find out how the rest of us feel,” Weiss said. “If you don’t mind, mister, can you leave us? And maybe shut off that intercom in the control room for a little while.”
Mister. Flint hadn’t realized that he had failed to give them his name. “Sure,” he said.
He nodded at them, then eased out the door. He wasn’t about to shut off the controls. He wanted to know at all times what the people on his ship were doing.
But he would give them the illusion of privacy.
Just like he was giving them the illusion of choice.
Fifty-six
Hauk Rackam watched the wall screens in his office, staring at the hundreds of ships still leaving Mars’s orbit. Hundreds of ships, all because he hadn’t closed the ports. His assistant, Zayna Columbus, kept reporting the Disty death toll to him, mostly to rub it in. She had disagreed with him all along. He had made one executive decision, and she hated the fact he hadn’t taken her complete advice.
He had no idea how many dead there would have been in the ports if he had closed them when she had suggested, all those hours ago. He knew quite well that the colliding and exploding ships were his fault, just like the saved lives—the fact that only Wells and Sahara Dome were affected—were also his fault.
And Columbus’s idea.
Rackam closed his eyes, rubbing them with his thumb and forefinger. When this was all over, he was going to resign as incoming leader of the Human Governments of Mars. He had thought it a ceremonial position—he had even checked the bylaws: it was a ceremonial position, except in the unlikely event of a governmental vacuum.
Which had happened. He made sure he had recorded everything: the unavailability of the Disty High Council, of the Death Squads, of anyone who could give him advice. He even had Wyome Nakamura collate everyone’s notes on the events of the past day, so that when the inevitable trial came—and it would—he would have evidence to present that someone had to act, and his assistants convinced him that someone should have been him.
That knowledge didn’t help his conscience, though. He had a feeling that if he had been smarter or perhaps less focused on his own fear, he might have made a better choice.
He hadn’t been made for this kind of decision. He had no training for it, no mind for it, and obviously no stomach for it.
It would haunt him for the rest of his life, even if no one brought charges against him for all these deaths.
“Sir?” Columbus was at his door again. She seemed even more grotesque to him, with her lack of concern about her appearance, her too-intelligent eyes always seeing everything, that narrow and disapproving mouth.
“What is it now?” he asked, letting the weariness he felt into his voice.
“We’ve finally heard from the Disty.”
A drop of sweat ran down the side of his face and settled on his chin. “And?”
“They have a solution, sir, and they want us to make the arrangements with the governments of Wells and Sahara Dome. They’ll take care of their own people, but there are humans to be decontaminated as well.”
Solution? Humans? Decontaminated? Could he be so fortunate?
“What do we have to do?”
“A Death Squad will arrive in Wells in two days. The squad will use its own ritual to decontaminate the Dome as well as the humans inside it.” She tapped a chip on the back of her hand. “I have a list of instructions. The humans of Wells are supposed to do all these things to prepare.”
Rackam wiped the sweat off his chin. “What about Sahara Dome?”
“It’s more complicated for them. The Disty want several members of Sahara Dome’s human government to go to Wells for decontamination so that they can then meet with some of the ranking Disty. Apparently, what has to happen in Sahara Dome is long and involved, and the Disty don’t trust the news of it to a go-between.”
Rackam stared at her for a long time, parsing her words. He was to make sure everything happened in Wells, and then it was out of his hands. “Did they say anything about us? About culpability? About the ports?”
“No,” Columbus said, “and I’m not about to prompt them. So much has happened, they might ignore some of the smaller things.”
Lost ships and lost lives were smaller things?
He knew sometimes the Disty didn’t care about their own people at all. He had just figured that was the Disty’s business. Now it had an effect on him.
Everything had an effect on him.
He sighed and looked at those ships, still leaving the ports.
“Fine,” he said to Columbus. “You talked to the Disty, you may as well talk to Wells. Tell them what they have to do. Make sure they do it. Okay?”
“You don’t care what ‘it’ is?” Columbus asked.
He didn’t look at her. “Am I ordering more death?”
&n
bsp; “Not from what I understand. This is actually a solution.”
“Then I don’t care about their damn rituals. I just want this whole thing to end.”
“It looks like it will, sir,” Columbus said. “Barring unforeseens, of course.”
Rackam shuddered. Unforeseens. This entire event had been unforeseen. He didn’t want to think about any more unforeseens.
“Just see that this gets done,” he said to her.
“Yes, sir.” She bobbed once, then left the room.
He folded his arms on the table and hid his face in them. Someone else was going to handle everything from now on.
He just wished he knew a way to forget the past twenty-four hours. Forget them for the rest of his life.
Fifty-seven
Flint sat in his cockpit, arms crossed, listening to the vote. At first, he tried to count the voices weighing in, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t familiar enough with them. He wasn’t sure if Norton voted at all. Since this wasn’t a formal vote, no one had made little ballots or asked people to raise their hand.
Instead, they simply declared themselves, all of them—to Flint’s surprise—in favor of going. Then they discussed how difficult the next few weeks would be on themselves and their families. Vajra suggested that this might help them deal with the massacre itself. The others quietly agreed—all except Norton.
He let out a small bark of a laugh. “You think you’ll ever get over that? It’s not something people recover from. We’ll wear its stain for the rest of our lives.”
“Maybe we’ll be able to deal with it better,” Vajra said.
“You mean bury it, don’t you?” Norton asked.
The others shut him down, but Flint shuddered, just a little. The man told enough truth to make him difficult. Flint hadn’t liked him. Having him in the same room during this decision process had probably been hard for all of them.
When the group elected Weiss to tell Flint their decision, Flint shut off his overhead speakers. He kept monitoring the conversation on an internal link.
Buried Deep Page 30
