The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  I knew better, though. That gust of wind was no coincidence. The last night I had spent on Tern Island, my grandfather had hammered on the locked door of my bedroom, screaming at me, calling me Bianca, Beatriz, even my mother’s name, Angelique. I had curled up in my bed, terrified, until I had felt a small presence beside me. She had lain next to me, holding my hand as tight as possible, her small body pressed against mine, and we had hugged one another as the storm in my grandfather’s head had raged just outside the door. It had lasted all night long, and when I had woken in the morning, drained and exhausted, there had been an impression on the bed next to me, but I had been alone.

  “So what now?” Ethan said. “Are you going back to space?” His voice sounded cautiously neutral.

  I would have thought I’d had enough of Earth. Ghosts, people trying to kill me, unpleasant memories. On the other hand, I lifted my face to the sun, its warmth giving me strength and energy. Maybe it was time to stop running from memories and face them head on, the way I had always prided myself that I did. I had ghosts to lay to rest after all, or at least one small ghost. It was the least I could do for Bianca Fermes, who had been one of my grandfather’s victims long before I was born.

  Space had been a respite, but it wasn’t home. Even gravity no longer felt burdensome, as if my muscles were eager to regain strength. It helped that Ethan’s arms around me felt good and strong, a reminder that gravity didn’t just hold us down, it held us together, too.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I think I’ll stay awhile and see if I can get used to one-g again.”

  His response was to give me a kiss, one that was neither kind nor comforting, but hungry and passionate. He broke off to whisper in my ear.

  “Welcome home, Captain Sabatini. It’s about time you came back down to Earth.”

  Fade Away and Radiate

  Michele Lang

  The only woman on an uninhabitable planet listened to the wail of the nightwind, alone in a research hut in the dead of the night. She studied her data outputs, and tried like hell not to think of Roberto. Because thinking of Roberto got her thinking about why she’d come to this desolate place. And thinking of her self-exile made her think of the man she was running away from . . .

  There was a knock on the door.

  It was the moment she had imagined a million times with dread, and yet now that it had come, she wasn’t ready. With a gasp, Anika Bowman jumped from her chair, but before she could make any further moves, the door to her field lab swung open.

  She glanced across the hut, to where her blaster lay hidden under her flat foam pillow. Her fingers itched to grab it, but it was too late now. Anika had bet her life on the simple fact that she was too far away from the rest of humanity to be murdered. If she survived the next few minutes, she would never make such a stupid mistake again.

  Anika forced herself to look at the hulking figure filling up her doorway. Far away, outside the geodome in which she’d built the hut, the nightwind howled, hungry, unrequited. The haunting sound still pierced her heart.

  “It’s me,” a muffled voice said, crackling over the spacesuit’s interface.

  For a single, agonizing moment, she imagined it was Roberto, come back to her across infinity. That behind that mirrored helmet, Roberto was speaking to her now, that somehow he’d returned, as he’d once promised.

  A miracle. But, no.

  Roberto was dead, just another casualty of the Glass Desert war. Roberto hadn’t come back to her in a box, or an urn, or even on a memory stick or a download with a farewell message. He’d just gotten vaporized, as if he’d never existed in the first place.

  Whoever this warrior was, hidden in his spacesuit, it wasn’t her husband. Roberto was never coming back. She was sure of it.

  Big square hands encased in spacegloves reached up to remove the domed, mirrored helmet. She took a half-step back, her heart pounding so hard in her chest it shook her with every beat.

  Anika saw the man’s face. She staggered backwards in her shock. Roberto would have blown her away less.

  “Billy Murphy, it’s you,” she managed to gasp. “Never thought I’d see your face again.”

  Captain Billy Murphy grinned and looked her up and down in a single glance. It was him: that thick, uncontrollable black hair. (Much longer now since the last time she’d seen him.) The deep-blue eyes, the spare, effective body. That face, even more appealing for the marks inflicted by all the trouble he’d survived.

  “Yep, me,” Billy replied, and he laughed. “Took long enough for me to find you, am I right? Like you didn’t want me to find you.”

  She stared at him in wonder as he shut the door behind him, clomped into the research hut, took a look around. Didn’t take more than a quick scan for Billy to see all there was to see.

  The truth be told, she was relieved. Her life in the hut was over, no matter what happened now between her and this man, the last one to see her husband alive. And no matter how much she’d once craved the solitude and the silence of this stony, dead planet, Anika knew she couldn’t live in this frozen hell forever.

  “How did you find me?” Anika forced the words past the lump in her throat. She would rather die than cry in front of Billy Murphy. She’d already done too much crying in this man’s presence. She didn’t dare do it again.

  Billy laughed louder, and pulled the fingers of his gloves one by one with his straight, white teeth to get them off. “Bet you wanna know how I cracked your code.”

  He was like a tiger transformed into a man, pacing the little room in his armor, sizing up her potential as a meal. Both of them knew she was no warrior.

  The floor shook under his boots as he walked, cracked his knuckles, and wiggled his fingers to get the circulation into them again. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”

  For now, Anika couldn’t help playing out what was going to happen next, going at a hundred times normal speed in her mind, like an end-of-life experience. The return to Earth. Her attempted, reattempted, and then final resignation from FortuneCorp – that place that had made her career, the place that wanted her soul along with her employment. A world corporation that intended to own this galaxy, that didn’t let the little cogs in its mighty machine just break away.

  So she would spurn the company, walk unaffiliated, unprotected, in New York. And one fine afternoon, walking along Broadway or riding the helobus, or reading newsfeeds in Petraeus Park, the end would come for her at last. A murderer would poison her, or kidnap her, or just wipe her out. It happened to genetic and nuclear scientists all the time. It had happened to Roberto. And if Billy was anywhere around, it would happen to him, too.

  His expression softened when he saw her stricken face. “Listen, I made you a promise,” he explained. “At Roberto’s memorial. I swore, and I swore it to Robbo first. If anything happened to him in country, I was coming back after to watch out for you. You and I ain’t got nobody else.”

  “I don’t need watching.” Anika cringed inside at the huskiness in her voice. She cleared her throat and stood straighter, not willing to yield to his charms. It was the same way she stood up to the fears that still stalked her every night. “I’m a big girl, and I’ve managed to survive just fine on my own all this time. I don’t need your help.”

  Billy crossed his arms over his big, armored chest, and he shifted uneasily on his feet. It was as close as she’d ever come to seeing him losing his cool. “You’re a good girl, and I know why Roberto loved you so hard. But you’re lying to me. You’re not surviving out here. You’re lingering. Okay?”

  The silence rose up like a ghost, and they stared at each other through the suddenly too-little space closing in between them.

  Anika felt the damn tears coming, but she refused to shed them. Instead, she walked across the little room in three steps to her cot, and the blaster hidden there.

  “I know you’ve traveled pretty far just to get here,” she began.

  “That would be an understateme
nt.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at that, at the way Billy tugged at her heart. “Yeah well, I think the best thing for you to do, Mr Spaceman, is stay the night, have some grub, and stock up on provisions. And head right back out in the morning. I’m assuming there’s a craft in orbit waiting for you. No way you could head out to this quadrant all alone.”

  Billy laughed again, more gently this time. His thick, black hair stood on end, all messed up from his helmet. He pushed the buttons at his wrist points, and the exoskeleton of his suit softened. He pulled the suit down and stepped out of it, looking like a man now and not a robotic killer.

  He looked vulnerable.

  But Anika wasn’t fooled. She knew what Billy really was, what Roberto had been before he’d gotten snuffed.

  K-Ops. Genetically modified soldiers in the United States Army, technology owned by FortuneCorp, the soldiers serving their country. Sent by the US military to do what regular soldiers didn’t have the physical or mental stamina to do.

  Roberto never spoke of what he’d done as a soldier out in the Glass Desert. He had wanted to leave the war behind when he had come home to her, and she hadn’t needed to know the details of his job. She’d wanted to love those memories away until he had to go back and make more of them.

  But the last time he’d come home, Anika could tell something had changed. Roberto had changed. As if he knew the next time he went back to the Glass Desert, he wouldn’t be coming back.

  “I didn’t come all this way just to say hello.” Billy broke into her thoughts, his voice a little too calm.

  A jolt of fear shot down the length of Anika’s back. She didn’t want to hear any more, but she owed it to Billy to hear him out. He had come to the edge of the known world to find her.

  “Do you know how Roberto died?” Billy asked.

  Anika’s mouth was dry as sand. She licked her lips and shrugged her shoulders. “It’s war,” she managed to say. “Soldiers die in war. You don’t need to tell me more than that.”

  He squinted at her, as if he were trying to figure out how much she already knew. “But you need to know. If you don’t already.”

  Anika tried to relax but couldn’t. Billy took a seat on Anika’s desk chair, set in front of an ancient roll-top desk that looked ridiculously out of place on an uninhabitable planet at the back end of nowhere.

  Billy’s hands rested on the arms of her chair. She watched his strong fingers caressing the old-fashioned realwood, and wondered where he hid his own weapons.

  She knew he was armed. She scanned his spare, hard body for the weapons – traveling from those strong, knowing hands up to his muscular arms encased in dark-blue flight silk, across the defined shoulders, the curve of his neck . . .

  She realized, belatedly, that Billy had stopped talking. Anike tore her gaze from Billy’s insanely beautiful body and forced herself to stare right into his eyes.

  Eyes the color of midnight, of desolation. He seemed to pin her to the cot like a butterfly. Those eyes spoke of suffering she would understand, like Roberto’s. And yet his voice, vibrating inside her chest, remained gentle, kind.

  “Roberto didn’t die in the field, you know.”

  “I know,” Anika whispered. Miserable now, remembering. Billy was the one who had told her, after the memorial, in a low, quick undertone, far away from everybody else. The details were dangerous, she knew.

  “Somebody got inside the barracks, somebody who knew they wanted Roberto specifically. They got past all of us – genmod soldiers – and killed him and escaped before we could do anything. And, Annie. I didn’t tell you this. There was no investigation. Nothing. We were told to act like it had never happened.”

  Annie swallowed hard. “I figured he didn’t die the official way, the way the government told me.”

  “What did you think?”

  She shook her head as if she could negate the truth away. “Both of us worked for FortuneCorp, not like you soldiers. He never told you, did he?”

  “Nope. As far as anybody on the team knew, he was just another soldier.”

  “Well, he wasn’t. We worked together on genetic research, human and ecological modifications. He was a geneticist, I’m a biologist. Together we worked on eco-transformative research. How to mutate human beings, and climates.”

  Billy nodded, not looking too surprised. “Roberto was way smarter than me,” he said. “A million times smarter. But didn’t have as much horse-sense. And you don’t just need a killer instinct to survive the Glass Desert, Annie girl. You need prey instinct, too. Roberto just wore his smarts out in the open, and it cost him.”

  The lump in Anika’s throat all but choked her. She shrugged and tried to laugh. “I always warned him to watch his back. Doing our kind of research is so dangerous. Rival corporations will kill scientists, kidnap them and extract their knowledge. And Roberto put himself outside of FortuneCorp’s protection, going to war. But he wanted to understand what it was like to undergo genetic modification himself, and the only way to find out was to become a soldier. Like you.”

  “Roberto didn’t fool nobody. I figured out after a while that he was a scientist, not a grunt.”

  “Ah, yes. He told you his motto? ‘Geneticist, modify yourself.’”

  Billy grinned sadly at the memory, and at Anika’s imitation of Roberto’s Spanish-inflected voice. For a moment, it was like Roberto was there with them, sharing the joke.

  Anika smiled, and Billy looked into her soul again. But this time, his gaze felt more like a caress.

  “I suppose a rival corporation got Roberto. Espionage. That’s what I figured when I heard he was gone.”

  Billy stared at her for a long moment, and then he withdrew his gaze, looked into the middle distance, his open face suddenly unreadable. “After the memorial, I went back for six more months.

  “Hard months, Annie. Hard, hard months. The whole team died out there, one by one. The genmod can help – infrared vision, limb regeneration – and it will keep you alive in the field, but the morale went bad.”

  Billy shifted in his chair, and looked into the distance, like he saw the pictures drawn by his words. She willed herself into complete silence. And Billy kept telling her the secrets of his war.

  “Soldiers are superstitious, modified or not. And after Roberto was murdered on the base, our luck seemed to go with him. We knew some kind of bullshit was going on, okay? But we had no way to prove it. I figured with his scientist background, he made some bad enemies. Maybe he was even a spy, yeah? We didn’t know for sure.

  “I got the Murphy luck, ya know. Bad luck that gets you to the other side every time. But the other guys – their luck was just bad.”

  He leaned back in the chair and sighed. And Anika trembled, only then realizing that she had been holding her breath as he spoke.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, watching the pain play over Billy’s face like a shadow. “It must have been awful.”

  “Worse for you,” he replied, his eyes still closed. “I’m the luckiest man alive, to get out of the desert. But you think he died because of you.”

  Anika took a huge gulp of air then, the guilt twisting like a knife in her chest. It was true. Roberto died because of the work they had done together.

  Before she could say anything, Billy opened his eyes and looked at her. “Everybody in a war feels guilty for surviving, Annie. That’s just part of the gig.”

  He looked ordinary again, the smart-ass kid from Southie that he’d once been, before he joined the Army to get the genmod. But that street kid was gone forever too, and both of them knew it.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “You run with a pack in the war, and once those guys are gone, it’s like you’re missing a limb.”

  She nodded. That pain she knew all about. Still felt it, every day.

  “I’ll tell you how I tracked you down,” he said. His voice was soft now, his Boston accent faded. “My tour ended and I was a lone wolf. So I come back to the Rotten Apple, and the
first thing I do in New York is look you up, like I promised you. And him.”

  They exchanged a long, low glance, and Anika knew he was thinking of the memorial, too. The things he’d said to her. The way he’d sworn to protect her, the way he’d held her in his arms as she’d cried. That was a long, long time ago now.

  “But you were gone,” he continued. “Six months after the memorial, and your house was all locked up, I couldn’t find you online. At first, I figured you was dead too, and why not? So was everybody else. But you took care of everything too neat. You disappeared too perfect.”

  She’d tried like hell to stay away from Billy. Because if a rival corporation had killed Roberto like she suspected, then a rival corporation would likely want to kill her too. After all, she and Roberto had worked as a scientific team. She had told her FortuneCorp regional supervisor about her fears, and they had told her the matter was under investigation. But, like Billy, she’d heard nothing more.

  And that silence had terrified her. Both she and Roberto had done research on classified techniques for human genetic modification and ecological re-engineering. Those techniques were worth billions. Now that Roberto was dead, Anika had been the only one who could complete the research track they had started together.

  Anika had run off-world, all the way to AlphaZed3, to escape the reach of any other corporation. Her new technology, the Bowman eco-drive, would serve as a living legacy of her husband’s vision. And Anika had believed the remoteness of this posting would protect her from deadly visitors.

  Billy’s appearance put the lie to that notion. She knew to her core that Billy would never hurt her, that he had sworn to Roberto that he would protect her. But if Billy could make it way out here, anybody could. And the blaster under her pillow wouldn’t save her.

  The tears spilled over Anika’s cheeks, onto her lips, tasting of regret and loss and fear. And loneliness, such terrible aching loneliness, so deep that she didn’t dare surrender to it.