Now Playing on Outworld 5730

by R. T. W. Lipkin

  Chapter 52

  In contrast to Outworld 5730, Outworld 75 was experiencing a drought. At first, talk of the lack of rain had been a fun conversation topic, something different, something new, to chat about. Oh, it’s been simply days since there was any rainfall. Isn’t it glorious? All that wetness can be so tedious and gray and dull. Our two suns are better than any one rain.

  But after endless months, the fields turning browner by the day, and no rain still in the forecast, the lighthearted chitchat had turned into concerned discussions.

  You’d think by this point in civilization something like rain wouldn’t be difficult to come by. Didn’t they cure this sort of thing centuries ago? It’s not like this is Earth or some remote outworld. Science—it’s useless when you really need it.

  Clive Idrest, though, didn’t care. It would rain eventually. It always did. And he, like most of the residents of Outworld 75, could easily afford to have his food imported. In fact, most of his food was already imported, since the crops that grew in the remineralized soil on 75 were not half so tasty as the food supply from 37, the galaxy’s so-called breadbasket.

  He’d had his regular delivery from 37 rescheduled and had increased the order. He could smell a profit a hundred million light-years away. Most of his neighbors could as well, but he had a particularly close business relationship with the main supplier on Outworld 37, so he knew he’d get the best of the lot. With luck, it wouldn’t rain for a long while. All to his advantage.

  Clive stood, naked, looking out the glass wall that fronted the largest ocean in this half of the galaxy. The red-gold waves billowed and rushed backward. He’d built this house to impress Marguerite, but she refused to be impressed.

  A murderer who couldn’t be impressed. Unbelievable, yet it was so.

  In the window’s reflection he saw the young man who was lying facedown on his bed. Alexander, who had just come back from his duties on Earth. He and his glorious body were more interesting to Clive than the last several women he’d had.

  Alexander was always suitably enthusiastic and even pretended the kind of passion Clive had never seen from Marguerite, despite all his efforts to arouse her. And Alexander, unlike Marguerite, did as he was told. That was aphrodisiac enough, and Clive went back to the bed, slapped the olive-skinned man on his rump, and laughed as he mounted him, ignoring Alexander’s surprised cry as he penetrated him.

  He was as tight as Marguerite had been that first time. Clive thrust himself farther into Alexander and laughed again as Alexander moaned dramatically underneath him. Clive pushed in and out while he pictured Nicholas Coburn at his destroyed manufacturing facility, crying and moaning in a different sort of way, a more satisfying way.

  Guaranteed that sex always freed your imagination, even when it didn’t satisfy your needs.

  “What do you want?” he said to Alexander.

  “More,” Alexander said as he moaned.

  Of course he would say that. In the beginning, Marguerite would fight him, resist him, flail away at him. Once she scratched his face and drew blood. That was grand. He loved seeing her passion.

  He loved her. The only woman, the only person he’d ever loved or ever would love. But when you rescue someone, they should be grateful. And Marguerite was not. Yet he knew she’d never leave him.

  The moment he’d seen her emerge from the storage bin on the transport, he’d wanted her and known she’d be his wife. She was filthy and unkempt, but he immediately saw her potential, saw her extraordinary beauty . . . and her extraordinary fear.

  She’d done something unspeakable, that much was certain. No one just hides away on a transport, probably not knowing where it was headed or how long the journey would be—it could be years or even decades—hiding away in a storage bin, unless they’d committed a high crime.

  Clive had stared at Marguerite as she backed into the wall, as though it would absorb her and end her torment, and he’d guessed correctly that she was a murderer.

  That much they had in common. There was something that happened to you once you’d taken another life. Something glorious. You had control, you had power unlike almost anyone else, and once you got past the useless guilt and the unnecessary fear, you had an asset that would serve you better than any other. As it had served him.

  He’d wanted to take her right there, but he’d restrained himself. After all, this woman would be his wife, and he had to show her that he was serious.

  “Mr. Idrest. We didn’t know this woman was aboard,” said Gilbert, who’d been piloting transports for Clive for years. Totally trustworthy, as you’d have to be in order to take weapons across the galaxy, often to places where they’d been outlawed. As if you could outlaw anger and violence.

  With one hand Alexander held on to the railing on the headboard as Clive grasped his hips, working himself up, farther into him. Alexander had his other hand on his own cock, which was fine with Clive.

  “Gilbert. Thank you for delivering her,” Clive had said, as though he’d planned to import Marguerite along with the weapons.

  Marguerite had moved even closer to the wall, and she was panting. The fear in her eyes, in her heart, was exhilarating.

  “Come with me, my dear,” he’d said, holding his hand out to her. “I have everything waiting for you.”

  He’d had nothing waiting for her or for anyone. He hadn’t known there was a stowaway on the transport, much less that the stowaway would become his wife. He’d never planned to marry anyone, but this was different. A fellow murderer, and someone he’d always have the upper hand with as well. Perfection.

  As he rammed himself into the grunting Alexander, he wondered if Marguerite had gotten pregnant yet.

  Chapter 53

  “I still can’t believe you’re alive,” Nicholas Coburn said to Beau Ogden.

  “Nor I,” Beau said, shaking his head. “I’d given up, you know.”

  The two men were climbing through the wreckage, Ogden limping alongside Nicholas as they worked through every millimeter of the site along with the investigators, who had yet to determine the cause of the fire.

  It might be the eighty-seventh century, there might be intergalactic travel and settlements on other worlds, but fire, the most primal of elements, was as powerful as it had been in ancient times, able to destroy whatever it touched—or bring it to life.

  Fortunately, although the main building had been demolished in the explosion, the company’s auxiliary plants were all still in operation and had been able to take up some of the shortfall created by the devastation.

  The business might not have been completely destroyed, but the lives that had been lost could never be replaced.

  Nicholas had cried the afternoon he’d gotten to the remains of his largest factory, only the second time he’d cried since he was seventeen and had had to leave school after his mother had died suddenly, the victim of a still-unnamed infection that had felled not just her but most of her colleagues at the hospital.

  Although he’d read the message a thousand times while he was on the transport and knew that the factory was gone, it was something else to see it for himself. To be there. To taste it and smell it and live it. Like wandering about the house where his mother had always been, bereft in the emptiness.

  To be ripped away from Marguerite and taken back to his real life, to be taken back to Earth. He was already so entrenched here that he wasn’t sure he could go back to the majestic or, because of what had happened in his absence, if he could ever attend another.

  He’d have to find a better way to be with Marguerite, to be with her the way that he’d dreamed of, the way that he’d been planning for. The two of them, together, married, their children laughing and playing, the family living anywhere she’d choose. He’d thought he’d give up anything for her.

  Although now . . . with this factory gone.

  He and Beau, miraculously still alive after being trapped under the wreckage for two days and discovered only by accident, trod over the re
mains of their life’s work. Nicholas couldn’t shake off the despair. Three people who’d worked for him for years, giving him their labor, their loyalty, their hands and minds and imaginations, and their trust. And he’d let them perish.

  He’d talked to Wyatt Conroy briefly before he’d left. But only briefly, as everything had unfolded so precipitously. One minute he was the Duke of Bedford, making love to his cherished wife, and the next moment he was Nicholas Coburn, inventor and businessman, his business in ruins, his closest friend dead.

  Conroy’s work would be affected as well, since the destroyed factory had been the main supplier of several components that Conroy Aerospace depended on.

  He and Wyatt had had such a fine beginning to the majestic, out on their own, hunting and fishing, reveling in the elements, laughing at everything and at nothing, drinking without limits or restrictions, and uncaring of the lives, the duties, the businesses they’d left behind.

  Nicholas had particularly enjoyed the fun of making Marguerite wait for him, delighting in the heightened sense of anticipation. Yet now, aching for her, he wished he’d spent the time with her instead of with Wyatt.

  And something drastic had changed in Wyatt’s carefree demeanor the moment they’d come to the manor house and he’d seen that Trevelton fellow. But Wyatt never said what the problem was, and Nicholas was too busy with Marguerite to ask, or care, although he understood that the two men must have known each other already. And despised each other.

  “Nick,” Beau said. “Look at this.”

  Beau was pointing to a stack of melted rods, the ones that were used in the production of their company’s premiere component, an essential element in the drive of every intergalactic vessel.

  “That’s impossible,” Nicholas said.

  “Yet there it is,” Beau said. “They’re melted.”

  “It has to be arson,” Nicholas said. “How else could that much heat have been generated?” The rods were nearly impervious to heat—they had to be in order to work properly. That they’d melted was a sure sign that the fire hadn’t been an accident. A powerful accelerant had been used, although Nicholas didn’t know what that could be.

  “The evidence we’ve been looking for,” said one of the investigators, and Nicholas and Beau both agreed.

  “Find out who did this,” Nicholas said to the investigator. “There are three families who need to know. Who must know.”

  But Nicholas already knew who must have been responsible, and he’d make sure that Clive Idrest was brought to trial. That he’d be made to pay with his very life for the three souls who were forever lost—their loves, their hopes, their dreams, their unmet futures, smoldering in the ashes under his feet.

  Chapter 54

  How did you find out? Those were the most exciting words Clive had ever heard from anyone, and certainly from Marguerite, since now she’d be his.

  “I hope the lunch is to your liking,” he’d said as they dined out on the patio of the house he’d lived in at the time. The one with the view of the Arc Range, which cut Outworld 75 in two around its bulging equator. The vista was stunning, yet Marguerite had hardly looked at it.

  “Thank you, yes,” she’d said.

  They’d been together for three hours with a brief time apart for her to wash and dress in the clothing he’d had procured for her, a shimmering dark green toga with a purple band at its edges. She looked like a living statue in it, her alabaster skin like a polished stone, her auburn hair draping over her shoulders.

  But statues didn’t quake the way she was quaking.

  “Is something the matter, Marguerite?” Clive said. Of course something was the matter. It was only a matter of how much time it’d take him to get her to admit it.

  “It’s quite good,” she said. Despite her obvious fears, she was eating heartily. But the intermittent quiver in her hands betrayed her.

  “I imagine the food in the storage bin of the transport isn’t very well prepared,” he said with a short laugh.

  There was in fact no food there at all, and he wondered how she’d fed herself, how she’d taken care of herself. He knew how long she’d been on the transport, since it had left Outworld 15 four days ago and no one had been on the ship when it was docked there. He was certain of that because of the protocols that were always followed.

  Clive had directed Gilbert to research the linears from Outworld 15 for him, so Clive would shortly know exactly what Marguerite had done, even if she wouldn’t tell him herself.

  “It does make one a bit shaky for a while,” Clive said while he cut into his food. He usually didn’t eat lunch, preferring to work instead, but this was a special day. And his whip-thin body could bear up under the extra meal. Although he had other plans for dinner, and they didn’t involve food.

  “Travel?” she’d said when he left the conversation open for her to speak. No one likes an unfinished thought. The human instinct was to finish it for you, even if your choice was wrong. Better that than silence.

  He’d laughed then, nearly spitting out the food in his mouth. “No, my dear,” he said. “Murder.”

  She coughed and pushed slightly away from the table. Her body looked magnificent in the toga, as he’d suspected it would, and he stared at her with his cold yellow eyes. She far surpassed every fantasy, every ideal he’d built up over the years. No woman, real or ideal, could possibly match her.

  “It was cold on the transport,” she said, trying to regain her composure, pretending to be interested in the food again.

  “I experienced that as well,” he said. “The cold. I believe it’s because all the blood regroups itself at your heart, shrinking away from the very extremities that were responsible for the killing—and protecting you where you’re most vulnerable.”

  Marguerite dropped her utensils and readjusted the toga, which was slipping off her shoulder.

  “It’s why we have so much in common,” Clive said. “My fellow murderer.”

  He followed her gaze as she looked frantically out over the Arc Range. As though she’d be able to leap off the patio and cross the treacherous divide as easily as she’d stowed away on the transport that’d taken her away from the locus of her unforgivable crime.

  “There’s no point denying it, Marguerite,” Clive said. “Wouldn’t you like one of these?” He pointed to the plate with the blue raspberries on it and pushed it across the thick glass table, toward her. He’d been saving the raspberries, a rare treat even on Earth, for a special occasion, and this was definitely it.

  “How did you find out?” she finally said.

  “We’re two of a kind,” he said. “I knew immediately.”

  “You’ve killed someone?” she said as she shrank away from him.

  “Of course,” he said. “Very satisfying, don’t you think?”

  He admired the way she was able to say nothing while also not becoming overly emotional. Not surprising, since murder took immense nerve, which she seemed to have plenty of.

  “Do you think next week will suit for the wedding?” he said, eating one of the raspberries. Their texture pleased him, but that day, everything pleased him. An ideal day, just handed to him as if by the gods themselves. The weapons Gilbert had delivered far better than what had been promised, the deal he’d been working on for weeks finally concluding, and most of all, the unexpected arrival of Marguerite Rhodes, soon to be Marguerite Idrest, his wife.

  “No,” she said, but that evening, after Gilbert had reported back to Clive, she changed her mind. Because as little as Marguerite wanted to marry Clive, she wanted even less to stand trial for murdering her father. Particularly since she knew what the verdict would be.

  Chapter 55

  Trevelton ignored Calvert. He was staring at the pistol, probably trying to figure out how it worked, Saybrook thought. Ephraim had always been loath to work a firearm in the same way that Wyatt had never wanted anything to do with a sword.

  That either of them had been interested at all in such ancient wea
pons was odd enough. Yet there were far more antique gun enthusiasts about than there were swordsmen. Wielding a sword was useless and extremely tedious.

  “My lords?” Calvert said.

  “No, Calvert,” Saybrook said. Trevelton didn’t even bother to respond.

  “Assume your places, then,” Calvert said as he and Saybrook exchanged a brief nod.

  Violet held on to Rosie’s arm. Rosie put her head against Violet’s shoulder, covering her eyes.

  “They can’t. Won’t someone stop them?” Violet said.

  Everyone heard her, but no one moved. The group from Brixton, busily engaged with their food and drinks, were whispering to one another between swallows, and it seemed as though they were making bets.

  The duelers’ places had been marked off with stakes, and Trevelton and Saybrook turned their backs on each other and walked out to their marks.

  Calvert, the empty box under his arm, moved out of range of the shooters and pulled a large white handkerchief out of his pocket.

  When Trevelton and Saybrook reached their places, Calvert said, “On my signal, my lords.”

  “You can’t let them,” Violet shouted as she stood up.

  “Quiet, girl,” someone called back from the Brixton group. “You’ll ruin their concentration.”

  Rosie pulled Violet back down. “He’s right, you know,” she said to Violet. “Be quiet.”

  “Make them stop,” Violet said softly enough that only Rosie heard her.

  “I can’t, Vi,” she said. “No one can.”

  “On my signal, my lords,” Calvert said again. The entire hillside had gone deathly quiet. Even the Brixton day-trippers had stopped their munching and speculating.

  Saybrook’s usual slumped posture straightened, and Trevelton adjusted his stance.

  “Now,” Calvert said as he dropped the handkerchief.