by Justin Sloan
He nodded.
She cocked her head, eyes narrowing, and he realized he needed to get out of this situation. Luckily, she smiled.
“Amazing stuff they give you, huh?” She stepped forward, hand reaching out to touch his arm, and she did, her finger brushing along his exoskeleton. “What’s it do, exactly? Must do all sorts of cool stuff ours doesn’t.”
“It does,” he replied. “Hey, you’re interested? Happy to put in a good word for you when I get back.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure, just keep up the good work,” he said, letting his facial expression ask her name.
“Oh, I’m new. Gloria, er, they call me Glow because I light ‘em up, I guess,” she said and ran a hand through her hair. “Seems pretty stupid, huh?”
“Not at all,” he lied, putting on his best smile. “I’ll look you up and come find you.”
“I’d like that.”
At that point she was definitely flirting with him, given the way she was biting her lip, and he had to nod politely before walking past her. For the last year he’d been confused about why he hadn’t been into the idea of a woman flirting with him. But now that he was slowly regaining his memory and had his wife back, it all made sense. Being flirted with or checked out still felt nice but wasn’t tempting in the slightest.
Everything would be fine as long as he kept moving, he told himself, relieved to see she wasn’t following when he glanced over his shoulder—not following but staring after him, eyes on his rear end. He walked faster, feeling like a piece of meat. Of course, she was just another soldier without a memory. They weren’t the enemy, at least as long as they weren’t trying to kill him. New Origins and the people behind the company—they were the enemy.
He made it to an emergency exit and waited, hoping Alicia had taken care of this step of the process by now. Holding his breath, he pushed on the door and it opened without any alarms going off.
A camera flickered, turning off as he entered, and he knew he had to move fast. According to Gulch, this wasn’t an emergency exit at all but rather the way to reach the otherwise inaccessible top floor where the item would be guarded.
Once he reached that floor, which he did quickly with his enhanced speed and strength, he pushed in, moving fast toward the guards. One was behind a wall of glass, though, so while he slid in and quickly knocked the first one out of commission, the second had a chance to grab a short-range net blaster. Moving around the glass, the guard came out shooting.
It caught him but wasn’t a perfect shot. The weights used to wrap the net slammed into his legs and knocked him off balance. He fired, but he wasn’t there to kill anyone if he could help it. The shot hit the man’s arm and the net blaster dropped.
The guard’s armor had kept him from actually being hurt. He was more surprised, but the surprise was nothing compared to the look in his eyes when he turned from the would-be wound to see Marick up, knee slamming into his face.
“Ah!” the man shouted as his nose burst, and then Marick caught him with a downward elbow that dropped him to the floor.
Two guards down.
He turned, scanning the room. It was clearly a sort of storage facility, much like the one Alicia had told him she’d found back in the dome on Horus. Here, there seemed to be way more tech—more of those wrist pieces she so loved, several belts and chest clasps, and special ops vests that had various buttons for other options. Taking one of those could just as easily cause him to blow himself up as be of use, so he focused on the task at hand.
There, inside the glassed-off area the guard had come from, was the green box. He traced his hand along the top, wondering what could possibly be so valuable. Knowing what little he did about Gulch, he could be sure it was a weapon of some sort, and there didn’t seem to be much other than weapons in the room. And in that moment he realized he wasn’t about to let that criminal kill innocents. He understood the irony, and hated it. He’d been serving as a PD soldier, doing what they demanded—the bidding of little college brats who knew little more than their father’s bank accounts and what that would get them. Whatever else he’d done, however, he had to push from his mind to join all the memories that weren’t there.
The worst was the thought that he’d been trying to kill Alicia. He’d even thought he had her once, not knowing she was his wife and that they’d been in love before New Origins tried to take that away from him. No, nobody would be calling the shots for him anymore. He had his own plan, and he just had to hope this teleportation device had enough charges to get him through it.
Leaving the building was a piece of cake, having wrapped the priest robes around the box. He’d tied it like a bundle, slung it over his shoulder, and walked out like he had an extremely large box of chocolates in there.
Even though New Hope had set up a system for stopping people from getting in, getting out was easy. After strolling from the building, he glanced around, smiled, and then continued on to the pods that would take him to Gulch. There’d been no alarm and no reason to teleport. And he had bigger plans.
They’d told him where they would take Alicia when they were done, so he’d join them. The pod ride went smoothly, and the walk down the long hallway was uneventful.
Marick strolled right into Gulch’s office as the guards stared at him with confusion. He opened the priest robes so the guards could see that he held the green box, and he was smiling confidently.
“I got you a gift,” he said as the guards assessed him.
Gulch stood from his desk, staring at him in shock. “What the… You can’t just walk in here! If they followed you… if they’re monitoring—”
“I’m counting on it,” Marick replied, then nodded to Alicia where she stood in the corner.
He dove for her, already having started the countdown of his teleportation machine, and grabbed hold of her as she initiated her bubble shield. Shots rang out and guards started running for them, but the jump point wasn’t far so the readiness bar bumped up quickly.
“What’ve you done?” Alicia asked, staring around at the chaos and then down at the green box.
“We can’t let them have this,” he replied, and then they were gone, dissolved into the blue and purple light.
6
Alicia: Space Station Ramiel – Docks
Alicia fell to her knees as the shield faded around her and Marick materialized to her right. She wasn’t in pain, but she certainly had a spinning head and wasn’t sure she would ever get used to that sensation.
“Where…?” she started to say but then looked up to see that they were in a corner of the docks and that the elevator wasn’t far off, already being boarded.
Marick was wasting no time and was already picking himself up, grabbing her by the arm with his free hand while clutching the green box with the other, muttering something about hurrying.
“What happened?” she asked, looking at the green box. “This is crazy! You risked everything!”
He shook his head. “It’s got to be a weapon. I don’t know all the details. I just know I’m not letting someone like Gulch get his hands on it.”
“We need to get off this station,” she replied, already walking with him toward the elevator.
He nodded but was glancing to his right. Following his line of sight, she noticed soldiers moving forward, preparing stun batons. The soldiers were keeping a low profile, at least, but would be looking for the two of them.
“Split up,” Marick said. “They don’t know us by looks, right? Get to the elevator no matter what happens.”
“I’m sure as hell not leaving you.”
“You won’t have to.”
She turned left, working her way around in a crescent toward the elevator. Halfway there, though, she realized they would likely need access of some sort. Gulch would’ve been in charge of putting that together if he hadn’t been planning to kill them. She still wasn’t sure which direction that would have taken.
Instead of making straight for the ele
vator, she headed for the control tower. If Marick saw her, he’d figure out what she was doing. Because of shipments from the mines and others preparing to move out to Titan, the docks were quite busy and nobody questioned her. She made it to the control room, wearing her Project Destiny lookalike uniform, and walked right up next to an overweight man listening to music and checking details on a screen projected from his wrist piece. He barely nodded in her direction before continuing on.
She smiled, moving through screens for the elevator manifest. When she saw that it was leaving in mere minutes, she realized that Gulch definitely hadn’t intended to actually let them leave. Essentially, they had avoided death or indentured servitude. Worst case scenario, whatever was in the green box would have killed all of them.
Finishing up, she set the system’s scan to synch with her wrist computer and emit a series of fast pings that would jam its signal, all at the press of a button. Then she moved out of the control room and descended the stairs on the other side, quickly heading over to the elevator. Unless they boarded soon, there would be trouble.
Marick had apparently noticed what she was up to and had moved to the corner outside the elevator, looking like any other passenger waiting to board. He’d even engaged the two women next to him in conversation so he’d look like he was part of their group. Excellent.
She reached the dual sliding doors of the elevator—an elongated box of a machine that almost resembled a miniature space station. Her wrist lit up as she hit the button to engage the pings, and a buzz followed as the system fizzed out momentarily. There were no alarms and nobody turned to her in shock, both good signs. The elevator was a three-level structure equipped with a bar, sleeping docks, and more, so she found a corner where she could see the doorway and turned to wait for Marick.
A message came over the channels to halt the elevator, but she was still hacked in. As quick as a flash, she deleted the message and overrode a command that someone was trying to enter to stop it. Judging by what she’d seen of the overweight man at the control tower, he wouldn’t have noticed.
Still, where the hell was Marick? He wasn’t where she’d last spotted him.
Her hands felt clammy as she looked at the crowd, scanning for him. Then, she froze. Gulch, with three of his guards, was emerging from a special pod. He must’ve had other means of moving about faster than the regular transport pods. Judging by the way the station soldiers were moving out of his way, many of them were either in his pocket or frightened of him.
And they had eyes on Marick!
She started to move for Marick, but he saw her, held up a hand, and shook his head. Waiting anxiously and considering ignoring him to run out and help, she realized he was scanning the spot next to her on the elevator. All others had boarded at this point, and there was an empty spot nearby. It might work.
But when she turned back to him, she saw two of Gulch’s men converging on his location. Marick swept one of them to the ground and then slammed his hand into the face of the next. More were running out, and a couple of soldiers were staring around in confusion. Alicia guessed those soldiers weren’t in Gulch’s pocket. Maybe they could be of some use.
She was about to try something drastic when Marick lunged for Gulch, grabbing hold of him and shouting for the others to stay back. The elevator doors dinged, about to close, but the blue and purple light was already starting at Marick’s feet.
Gulch screamed, howling in pain. He didn’t have a shield like the one Alicia used, and he didn’t have the PD enhancements like Marick. Maybe if he’d taken his drugs, they could have temporarily warded off the effect, but apparently he hadn’t.
With a flash, Marick was on the elevator with Gulch in his hands. The prison boss’s skin bubbled and burst, smoke rising from him as Marick pointed him toward the closing doors and hit him with a strong kick in the rear.
It was only due to the man’s thin frame that he even made it through the doors, toppling out onto the docks as his men converged on him, trying to help. His screams of agony carried through the elevator as it began its descent to Earth, pleasant announcements playing first in English, then Japanese and several other languages as if none of that had just happened.
Alicia turned to Marick, took his hands, and shook her head.
“That was…”
“Insane,” he said. “Wild?”
“I was going for amazing, but yeah. Stupid might also work in this situation.”
He laughed, glancing about, glad to see the others had all descended to the lower levels already. “I almost thought we were done for,” he admitted. “At least me. As long as you got away, that would’ve been enough.”
“Hey, this whole trip started to rescue you, in a sense. If I returned to Earth without you, it would all be a pretty big waste, don’t you think?”
“When you put it that way,” he said as he leaned in and kissed her, “I suppose you’re right.”
“Any chance they’ll stop this thing and call it back?”
He shook his head. “Forces waiting for us below? Most likely… maybe even Nightshade.” A shudder went through him at that thought, but then he put on a smile and said, “But at least for now, we’re safe. Once the elevator starts, it’s incredibly dangerous to stop it.”
With around thirty passengers and some cargo, the elevator wasn’t too packed, so the two were able to move about with relative ease. It would take ten days to reach the anchor station just outside Yokohama, Japan, and then they had to make plans for reaching the U.S. either through a magnetic cross-Pacific subway or maybe intra-orbital flight. They were leaning toward the former, feeling quite ready to be done with space.
Alicia glanced up, watching as Space Station Ramiel disappeared into the distance. She still wasn’t sure how Marick felt about how it had all gone down, about how they had earned their spot on the elevator. But the fact remained that they were there, descending toward Earth just as they needed to be.
It was time to sit back, relax, and prepare for the next stage of this fight.
7
Marick: The Space Elevator
The elevator’s lower levels were much more advanced than Marick would have thought. Having only traveled via transport ship and otherwise been on space stations in recent memory, he hadn’t considered that a space elevator would have simulation chambers, but that’s where he and Alicia spent much of their time during the journey down.
One particularly good simulation involved a large man from the twentieth century singing Hawaiian music while they sat on what was called North Beach, sipping margaritas. The drinks were the only real part, but the rest felt every bit as real, right down to the texture of the sand and the scent of an ocean breeze. The singer was on the beach to their right while simulated children ran about him, chasing a ball, kicking up sand, and living the sort of life Marick couldn’t begin to imagine.
“I don’t suppose you remember our vacation to the beach?” Alicia asked, curled up next to him.
He leaned over, smelling the earthy scent of her hair and smiling. “Tell me.”
She cuddled up into him, leaning her head on his shoulder and watching the simulated sunset. “It was in Italy, shortly after you’d proposed to me. This beach off one of the paths in Cinque Terra—”
“Where you can walk along the water between the towns,” he said as an image hit him of rolling, tree-covered hills and flashes of sunlight on the water.
“That’s right.” She sat up, staring at him with interest. “On this one part of the walk, you pulled me into the trees, started kissing me, and—”
“Oh my God!” he said as he, too, sat up. “We caught that couple!”
“Yes!” she said with a laugh. “They were right there, doing it on his jacket, and they just stared at us as if we were the ones who weren’t supposed to be there or were doing something wrong. You remember?”
“Not a hundred percent,” he admitted, “but little bits and pieces.”
“And the beach?”
&n
bsp; He cocked his head, now remembering the sand against his elbows, kissing her neck, and… He put a hand to his mouth. “We didn’t.”
“I think we were a bit drunk. There was a wine shop, and we’d had a little too much. We were joking about the couple when we found the beach secluded, and… I don’t know, after the high of you proposing and us going to Cinque Terra, I think it all just took over. We couldn’t help ourselves.”
He leaned back, laughed, and then pulled her in for a kiss.
A warning light flashed and a voice said, “Remember, no inappropriate action in the simulation room.”
They laughed, and he said, “One day, I’m taking you back to that beach.”
“Promise?”
He nodded, running a hand through her hair and staring into her eyes. “Nothing could stop it from happening.”
She smiled, satisfied with that answer, and stood to offer her hands to help him up. “It’s time we gave someone else a turn.”
“Odd though, isn’t it?” he asked.
“What?”
“That I’m having these little bits of recollection.” He blinked, closing his eyes and rubbing them. “Like, I’m remembering more as we get farther away from the station.”
“That, or the more you’re with me.”
He nodded, considering that as they exited, leaving a young man traveling on his own to enter behind them. Alicia led the way to the observation room where they were able to look down and see Earth approaching, though still a ways off.
“Either way, you might actually have your full memory back one of these days,” she told him. “Then everything will be normal again.”
“Minus the whole,” he said but then leaned in, lowering his voice to a whisper, “privatized military making a move against Earth governments.”
“Let’s hope that’s all taken care of fairly quickly by people other than ourselves. We’ll get the message to my sister and then wash our hands of the whole thing. Disappear.”
