by L. K. Rigel
What had Mike done to get that ID? Sky had said he was attached to the Imperial household—the phoenix was the Imperial logo—at some mid level position. Things must be a lot worse than she thought for him to risk faking an ID for her.
The monitor switched to local news and showed 801 K Street collapsing into rubble and ash. So the fire hadn’t been a mere maintenance issue. The shot switched to a scene from last week. Paris, when the Eiffel Tower had been bombed. The bottom crawl read: Another DOG pile?
A bone-chilling scream split the air. It was like a war cry, eager and bloodthirsty. Outside on the tarmac, flames licked the pad underneath the shuttle. At the counter Tyler looked up at Char, and she mouthed the words, What’s going on?
A ripple of explosions obliterated the shuttle moving from the tail to the cockpit, and a delayed blast disintegrated the glass wall behind Tyler. He looked surprised. His head and torso flew off to the right and his legs collapsed to the floor with her backpack.
Char was out of the chair, but her boots were welded to the ground. People around her screamed and ran in slow motion. Far away, a child was crying. Acrid smoke poured in from the blown-out window and burned Char’s eyes.
She waited for Tyler to get up again, though some part of her brain knew that was not going to happen.
Someone lifted her off the ground. The gaping hole in the wall got smaller as she was carried away. “Tyler.” Her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else.
“Tyler’s dead.” Jake’s voice, dull and terrible. He put her down and held her face between his hands, making her focus on him. The calm eye in this storm. “We have to run now.”
Another explosion set Char’s adrenaline flowing. She followed Jake down a service staircase and out of the terminal to another tarmac and a funky looking ship, minuscule compared to the Imperial Shuttle. The cargo bay door at the rear was just closing with the hiss of pneumatic seals.
Jake leapt onto a distended platform that was rising to the cockpit. “Let’s go, Meadowlark!”
She accepted his hand, and he pulled her onto the lift. Char, she wanted to say. But it didn’t matter. They were all going to die.
“Don’t answer that,” Jake said. She realized com was ringing. She reached for her ear, but Jake slapped her hand. “The signal will screw up my telemetry.” He ripped the com off.
“Hey!”
“You’ll get it back.” He zipped it into his pants.
The lift ended in an airlock. Jake slid the door open and ushered Char into a galley just outside the cockpit. On the wall over the airlock, a sign said Mind the Gap.
Jake motioned her through the door to the cockpit pushed her into the co-pilot’s seat. He pulled the security harness over her chest and leaned in to lock it. Without thinking she rested her hands on his shoulders. Childishly, she wished he’d hug her or tell her everything was going to be okay.
“I’m sorry.” She pulled her hands back. She wasn’t thinking straight, like her brain and her body had been separated in a freak accident.
“Tyler was my co-pilot.”
“But he was IHS.”
“Not really.” Jake strapped her arms down. “Mike Augustine wanted to make sure you made it to the shuttle without getting the real IHS involved. The orange jumpsuit was too big for me, so Tyler drew the duty.” He secured her legs. “For safety. So you won’t knock yourself out on the way up.”
“Passengers are locked down, boss.” A bald and extremely tall woman leaned in through the galley door. She had tattooed eyebrows and eyeliner and no eyelashes. Her eyes were metallic red-brown. Not implants. Her left cheek was tattooed with the letters SJ. She was gorgeous. “Tyler?”
“Not coming, Rani.” Jake flipped switches and turned dials and punched code into the control panel. He gestured toward Char. “Mike’s package. We’ll take her up. Shuttle’s gone.”
“So I heard.” The disapproval in Rani’s voice could rival the most self-righteous enviro.
“Now would be good.” Jake pushed her out and sealed the door.
He was about to sit down when he stopped and turned to Char, strapped in and unable to move. With an odd expression on his face, he reached for her chest.
“Don’t get excited.” He lifted her necklace over her head. “I’m not going for your precious parts.” He zipped the amulet into a pocket in her flight pants.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Meadowlark.” He secured his harness and punched the ignition. “Let’s get the hell off this rock.”
In Which Char Sees Jake’s Junque
Sixty seconds in, Char could barely breathe. If only the G-force could purge images of the terminal attack from her memory as well as it pushed the air out of her lungs. Tyler’s eyes. The child’s sobs. That horrific scream. Had it been male or female? As if it mattered.
Ten minutes in, they broke free of gravity’s hold and eased into orbit. Her body wanted to float out of the seat, but the harness kept her secure. Tyler’s harness. Her chair was twice the size of Jake’s. Tyler was my co-pilot.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About Tyler.” Such insipid words for something so horrific.
“He was a good guy.” Jake’s voice cracked. All his former cockiness was gone. He turned dials and looked at readouts and tapped in commands without emotion.
The Space Junque rolled, and Char was looking at the earth above her. Benign-looking tufts of white obscured a portion of the planet. The clouds gave the impression of angels diving to earth from heavenly cliffs. She’d pray if it weren’t such a ridiculous notion.
“I didn’t think it would feel so…safe isn’t the right word.” No wonder Sky had loved it up here. “Relieved?”
“Dependable is how I think of it,” Jake said. “The laws of orbit are immune even to human stupidity.” He pushed something, and the shuttle rolled again. The stars came up in the window, endless brilliant jewels on black. “I’ve got a payload to drop off at the V first. Then I’ll run you over to the ISS.”
The Imperial Space Station was the seat of world government, one of two massive orbital stations where the world’s rulers and those lucky enough to serve them escaped the misery of life on earth. The second was Vacation Station, the V, a playground for the aristocracy and other elites.
No ghosts came up on the shuttles. No malaria, no fallout sickness, no enviros, no weapons. No reminders of the rot below.
It had started with the Great Sea Level Rise and moved inland. Char grew up listening to daily reports of the ocean’s relentless invasion into the world’s coastal cities. News consisted of images of doom, of civilization coming undone. Another metropolis abandoned to the rats as its buildings fell into each other, foundations disintegrated in fetid standing water.
Nancy LaVu, the news anchor on the airport terminal monitors, established her fame with stories about fantastical explosions caused by ruptured gas lines in still-standing skyscrapers. She’d shoot pictures with a zoom lens while hanging out of a helicopter. A cheap ploy for ratings, and it worked. It got her off planet to an anchor desk at network headquarters on Vacation Station.
On television, breathless announcers like Nancy narrated the worst of times so often it became background noise. Then this morning Mike had called. Get to the airport now and get up here. Trust me on this one, Char. Just do it. Now she understood the attraction. At two hundred twenty miles above sea level, you could pretend things weren’t so bad.
But things were so bad. Worse than bad.
Jake threw off his harness and stood up to stretch, anchoring his boots in footholds on the floor. He was in great shape, definitely not engineered. Those were genuine, earned muscles under that shirt. He looked a few years older than Char, twenty-eight, maybe thirty.
He swung her chair around and removed the straps from her arms and legs. Again without thinking, she reached out and ran her fingers through his hair. He looked up sharply, and she pulled her hand away, expecting anger or irritation. But there were tears. It had all gotten to him
too, then. Tyler should be sitting here. His friend, not some woman he didn’t know. She smoothed the furrow between his eyebrows, not sure if she wanted to comfort him or if she wanted him to comfort her.
He lifted the harness off her chest. As she floated up from the seat, he grabbed her to pull her down. Instinctively she wrapped her legs around his waist to anchor herself and put her arms around his neck. His hands felt good on her rib cage. He made her feel safe. He looked up, and she kissed him. She guided his hand to the single strap on her top. He pulled it down and kissed her neck, her collarbone, and moved toward her breasts. In the weightlessness, she moved easily to give him access to anything he wanted.
“Jake, we’re orbiting and stable.” Rani’s slight Hindi accent broke in over the speaker. “Do you want to go around once or twice before hook-up?”
“Once,” Jake gasped. He pounded on the console until his fingers reached the speaker switch and turned it off. He unfastened Char’s flight pants and his own. She kept from floating away by holding his face between her hands and kissed him again. She needed this connection, now. She swung her weightless body down and writhed against him and with him. The words I’m alive, I’m alive pulsed in her brain until she shuddered with spasms of heat and release.
With no warning, as if gravity kicked in, they fell. Char’s knee rammed against the armrest of Jake’s chair. “Shibadeh!”
“That’s harsh.” Jake said. His eyes never left her as she climbed off him and pulled her clothes back on. “I guess Rani turned on the AG.”
“The Space Junque has artificial gravity,” she said. “So it’s not as funky as my first assessment.”
A familiar chime interrupted them.
“You’re ringing in my pants,” Jake said. His smile was happy and a little sad at the same time. He pulled her com out of his pocket.
She looked at the display and put the com in her ear. “Hi, Mike.”
“Char, my god. I thought you were on the shuttle.”
“I hadn’t boarded yet when they attacked.” She felt guilty, like she’d been caught in some mischief. But Mike wasn’t her brother—or even her brother-in-law.
“I’ve been out of my mind,” he said. “I asked a guy I know to make sure you made it to the shuttle.”
“Tyler… .” She couldn’t go on. Somehow that made Tyler’s death worse. It was her fault he was at the boarding gate. He should have been safe on the Space Junque when the bombs went off.
“No,” Mike said. “A guy he works for. Jake Ardri. Where are you?”
“Mike, Tyler’s dead and it’s my fault.” That was it. The dam burst. The tears started, and she couldn’t go on.
“Give me that.” Jake took the com off her ear and plugged it into the console dock. “Mike. Jake here. The Junque’s up. Obviously, I have your package.”
“I’m gratified to hear it. How soon can you be here?”
That was the third time Jake called her that. Mike’s package. Not pleasant, on more than one level.
“I’ve got private pays on board. I should drop them off before hooking up with your illustrious facility.” All business. As if nothing had happened between them. That was fine with Char. She still wasn’t ready for personal complications.
“They can wait in the Junque and be glad they’re off planet.” Mike sounded different. Cold. But then, she’d only ever seen him with Sky. “I want to see Char. She sounds pretty shaken up.”
“It was nobody’s fault but the damned DOGs. Tyler was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I’m sitting right here, guys.”
“You’re clear for dock eight,” Mike said. “Dump your passengers later.”
“Not a problem. Catch you in forty minutes.” Jake signed off and entered the flight data.
They’d reached nightside. Pictures of cities at night taken from space were nothing to reality, more intense by orders of magnitude. “Is that Garrick City?” Char asked. The lights were a dazzling white and gold blaze curled around a span of blackness—the Garrick Sea.
Garrick Corporation had the sole Imperial charter to process the world’s remaining oil. The company was building an entirely new and secure city adjoining their refineries, about fifty miles west of old Chicago, which had been lost to the Rise when the Great Lakes merged into one body, now called the Garrick Sea.
“Real pretty.” Jake laid the sarcasm on thick. “I hear there’s ten times as much ghosting these days outside Chicagoland.”
Char gasped. That level of ghosting would call for an immediate quarantine. But … “They wouldn’t dare quarantine the Mountain Zone.”
“You think?”
Garrick did what it liked and no one, not even the Emperor, suggested anything should be different. No. IHS would not quarantine the Mountain Zone.
“Anyway,” Jake said, “ghosting isn’t contagious, and IHS knows that. Quarantines aren’t about public health. They’re about control. About having a scapegoat.”
Char thought of Rani. Bald, no eyebrows or eyelashes. The metallic cast to her eye color. She hadn’t gone ghost, but she was obviously a mutant. Was Jake a sympathizer?
“What’s Char short for?” He changed the subject. “Charcoala? Chartreuse? Charming?”
She relaxed. The sex had meant nothing. It was to satisfy a primal need. She had no doubt Jake felt the same. Still, she felt a friendly kind of bond with him. Together they’d escaped death.
“It’s short for Charybdis.”
“Right. And you have a sister named Scylla.”
She liked that he knew what her name meant. “Matter of fact, yes. My twin. We called her Sky.” It felt strange, and good, to say the name aloud without pain stabbing her heart. “We were natural born. Our mother never wanted children. She named us after monsters to get back at our father for impregnating her.”
“Blasphemy!” Jake laughed as he said it. “But why didn’t she bag you?”
“Against her principles. It was early days on the technology. She said there was too high a risk of picking up resistant bacteria.”
“She was right. But a full-term pregnancy, wow. She must be a brave woman.”
“She was insane,” Char said. “Not brave.”
“Was?”
“She and Dad lived in Pasadena,” Char said. “They were there when the TU blew up Section 5.”
“Shib, I’m sorry,” Jake said. “Damn religios.”
“Yeah. Well. My parents were only two out of the millions the Talibanos Unidos murdered.”
“Whackjobs,” Jake said. They were quiet for a few minutes then he asked, “What about your sister? You said you called her Sky. Did she live in Section 5 too?”
“No. She was an engineer with Tesla. I haven’t heard from her since a few months after they closed the vault.”
“Well, you might see her again.” His kindness was genuine. “One day we’ll get past all this.”
All this. “Sure, it could happen.” It had been a year. The Tesla seals were inviolate. Nobody could get in—and nobody could get out either. The vault was equipped to sustain the team for the five years they needed to complete their work. Seven months in, they quit sending messages.
“So, natural born then.” He was trying to cheer her up. “No wonder you have friends in such high places.”
“Mike? He’s a mid level bureaucrat.”
Jake laughed. “I’ve heard Michael Augustine called a lot of things. Called him a few things myself. But never mid level.”
Jake overestimated Mike’s position, but she didn’t want to get Mike in trouble so she let it pass. “And what about you? You must have connections. You’re young to own a ship. How did that happen?”
“The Emperor keeps only fertile concubines.”
It took a minute to decipher his meaning. “Your mother is an Imperial concubine. The Emperor is your father.”
“Technically. I’ve never met him. He gave the Junque to my mother. And this ship too.”
Groan, groan, groan. “I
didn’t realize I was flying with royalty.”
So confusing. Jake defended ghosts and ridiculed quarantines. But he was no rebel; he despised the DOGs and the religios. And his father was the Emperor.
“Merely royalty’s bastard, ma’am.” He spread his arms and tilted his head. “Your boyfriend Mike is closer to the Emperor than I’ll ever be. Don’t be impressed.”
“I’ll force myself not to adore you.” But she already liked him. “And Mike isn’t my boyfriend. He’s Sky’s fiancé.”
Jake leaned back in his chair, seemingly lost in thought. He flipped a few more switches on the console and handed Char’s com back to her. “So you want to see my Junque?”
She wrapped the com over her ear and smiled. “I thought I already had.”
Hell Comes Knocking
The soap was scented with lavender, the shampoo with ylang-ylang. But the marvelous thing was the water. Glorious clean hot liquid pulsed over Char’s shoulders and down her back. Three cheers for artificial gravity!
Windows in the bath and the bedroom looked out on the space side of the station. Beautiful when she didn’t think about it. Terrifying when she did. Sky had raved about this view of the stars.
No Mike yet. He’d left a message: Take as long as you like in the shower, then meet me at the Blue Marble.
How did they do it? Down below, at least in the Pacific Zone, personal water was limited to seven gallons a week, including what you drank. The station’s hydroponics annex must have turned out amazing. She hoped Mike would have time to show it to her.
Her suite was like a cave in a futuristic fairy tale, not buried in the earth but suspended at the cusp of space. Little bits of treasure were scattered about. Carelessly, as if they weren’t precious things. The scented soaps. A ceramic cistern of cold water. A bowl of raspberries. A lacquer box of makeup with the seals unbroken.
She dipped a sable brush in brick-colored mineral powder. She hadn’t painted her face in ages, and now she went all the way with eyeliner and shadow and lip gloss.
