by Trisha Telep
This little freckled blonde woman, who had run away from him to save him, had stolen his heart forever.
Annie couldn’t get enough of his lips, the velvet skin at the nape of his neck. She kissed down the side of his face, and she whispered, “Just this night. And then you go. Please.”
I will never leave you.
And she gave up trying to convince this man, who had the force of a hurricane, to do anything he didn’t want to do. She knew he wanted to kiss her, and for one night she’d gladly take every last kiss that Billy Murphy had to give.
I’m going to take your kisses in return, Annie. Make you mine, forever. But first I want to make sure you are safe.
With a sigh, Annie did the thing she never did, and accepted things for what they were. Bit by bit, her consciousness receded from his, then with a sudden snap she was back in her body, and Billy Murphy was back in his.
They lay together in a sweaty, intertwined heap of longing. “I want you, so bad,” Annie said.
“No kidding, right?” Billy said out loud, and laughed. “But I’m not getting naked with you, no way tonight. By this time tomorrow, though . . .”
By this time tomorrow, if Annie had her way, Billy would be safely gone. Her desire pulled hard, deep in the base of her belly. Annie licked her lips, and tasted the sweat and tears mixed together. And she was surprised to find the taste sweet.
They turned off the lights. Instead of lying in the cot, Billy insisted they sleep behind the bed, pressed up together on the floor against the flimsy back wall of the hut.
“Trust me,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”
His voice, so everyday and cordial, such a contrast to the raw passion they had just shared.
“But what about Violet?” she asked.
“I’ll take care of that little bitch.”
She got that he didn’t trust Violet. But how could a little, unarmed lab AI do her any harm?
Annie soon found out.
Somehow Annie fell into sleep, tucked inside Billy’s sheltering arms. He smelled like cinnamon and musk. She dreamed of far-off gardens filled with spices and wild creatures, fierce and beautiful.
Billy’s face hovered over hers in her dream, open, finally at peace. The war was over . . .
Annie awoke to furious buzzing and violent curses, flailing arms, and the hoarse cries of a man fighting for his life.
She rolled under the cot to get out of the way, and the battle royal raged above. She heard the crash of furniture, the desk smashing to the ground, Billy’s angry roar, the whine of Violet’s wings.
She reached up and felt for the blaster still hidden under her pillow.
No! Annie!
And she drew her hand back just as fast. As if Billy had smacked her.
A second later silence thundered down over them, as if the battle had never happened.
“Billy?” she whispered, suddenly full of a terrible foreboding. “Billy!”
No answer, and after another minute Annie decided she was done with hiding.
She hesitated, waiting for Billy to yell into her mind again.
Nothing.
She crawled out from under the cot and flicked on the bare bulb that hung over the smashed remains of her desk.
Billy lay sprawled across the floor, utterly still. With a cry, she rushed forward and rolled him over with an adrenaline-fueled strength, searching his body for wounds. Violet buzzed up into her face, like a fat, lost cicada in Forest Hills in August.
She slapped the insectoid AI away from her. “Stand down!” she ordered. But instead of responding, Violet buzzed away from her, drunkenly banging into the flimsy synthwood door over and over again.
As Annie watched in horrified fascination, Violet fell to the ground and crawled away through the crack between the door and the threshold.
“Billy.” She turned back to him, racking her brain, trying to figure out how a tiny AI could fell a big lug like Murphy. How could Violet have killed him without any firepower at all?
She checked for a heartbeat and found it, faint but steady. She let her hand rest against his chest. She listened to his breathing, so tentative that it seemed it might stop again at any moment.
Come back to me, she whispered inside his mind, not realizing she’d done it until he stirred under her, responding to her words with movement.
She stretched out next to him, warmed his cold body with her own, restraining her panic like a ravening dog on a leash.
“Back,” Billy said aloud a minute later, words slurring. “It was poison. Little viper.”
He opened his eyes, and Annie looked into him, disappeared into him. If he lived, she had to get him out of here.
She blinked hard to break their connection, and looked around the ruined hut. She could see beyond the circle of light shed by the bare bulb overhead.
Daylight. They’d survived the night.
“Do you . . . do you need an antidote?” Annie stuttered, though she didn’t have one, nor any knowledge of how to concoct one.
“Nah. The genmod. Comes in . . . handy.” With a groan, Billy sat up, his sides heaving. “That poison, though . . . it woulda worked on you. Easy.”
Poison. Annie shuddered. “Violet.”
“Hells yeah, Violet. She didn’t have bullets or lasers inside her. I knew to check for that, before. But they stored poison in her. I’m not a drone specialist or I woulda known.”
With growing amazement, Annie realized he was apologizing to her. “You saved my life. You realize that, I hope.”
He shrugged. “She never woulda come after you if I hadn’t showed up. Violet’s here to make sure you stay here, working. But now she realizes I’m taking you away from here, away from FortuneCorp. And her real job is to kill you rather than allow you to get off-world with that Bowman drive. If they can’t have your genius, nobody can.”
Annie’s stomach did a slow flip. She’d always thought Violet worked for her. She was wrong. Annie worked for Violet, and if she messed up, she’d be terminated. For good.
“She used up her first strike on your pillow because your face wasn’t there,” Billy said. “She had to move fast to get past me, she knew that. Didn’t have the time to register you weren’t sleeping in your usual place. But man, her reserve dose was enough to do the job, too. Ow.”
Annie stared and stared at her pillow. The cover was shredded apart, and a thick, brown liquid puddled on the synthfoam padding.
She tore her gaze away and turned her attention to Billy’s wounds. Annie could see the vicious punctures slashed into his palm.
“She got away,” Annie said, and pointed to the door.
“She’s probably got an emergency beacon signal programmed in ’er,” Billy said, getting to his feet. “Time for us to get out of here, wicked fast. I hear FortuneCorp is working on a wormhole drive. If they’ve perfected it, then they can get here in two hours, not two days. Gotta go.”
A sick dismay settled over Annie like a thundercloud, a terrible certainty of doom. The room did a slow spin, and she felt like she was going to puke. “But go where? FortuneCorp owns this whole sector. I can’t hide from them, Billy. You came all the way out here to find me, but it’s too late, no matter what Roberto told you. I think you can save yourself if you get out of here fast enough.”
Billy’s laugh shattered her. He drew to his full height, magnificent, alive, and unbroken, and she looked up from the floor at him in wonder.
“I don’t work for FortuneCorp. I don’t belong to them. Never did. The US Army broke me down and built me over as a genmod freakazoid. But FortuneCorp can go suck it.”
He reached down for her with his bitten, bloody hand. Annie held on and pulled herself to her feet.
“Remember those brothers I told you about? The ones that helped me find you? They got free of FortuneCorp, just like you’re gonna. They set up their own planet, with their own ways and their own freedom. And I’m taking you there.”
“But . . .” Annie’s resolve to sacrif
ice herself faded in the blaze of Billy’s furious stare.
“No buts. I know, I know, you want me to go and save myself. I ain’t built that way, and you know it. You wanna save me? Then come with me. Because if you’re not leaving, then I’m staying, and we’ll deal with FortuneCorp here, together.”
He pulled her to the door, and this time Annie didn’t hesitate. She left her past, her fear and her determination to hide, lying on the floor behind them.
“Sully’s on the way to pick us up,” Billy said. “We could use a gardener out there where we’re going, on that new planet. You’re just the woman we need.”
They walked away from the trashed hut and into the jungle that had grown out of Annie’s vision, through her patient fingers and over time, with careful tending.
After a moment’s hesitation, Annie decided to speak her last misgiving. “How is it you can talk inside my soul?” she asked. “Roberto never could do it. He tried. It seems like, I don’t know, cheating somehow. Like it wasn’t right I couldn’t commune with him like that. And here we are, you and me . . .”
Billy stopped walking and turned to face her. “Yeah, my bro Roberto was possessed of many gifts,” he said with a sigh. “You guys were good together. But, Annie girl, Roberto’s gone. And he left your protection to me.”
They stood in a clearing surrounded by gently drooping vines, along a pathway of soft moss. The sun filtered weakly through the dome, arching high above both their heads.
“I was the team leader you know, and Roberto worked under me,” Billy continued. “I called my brothers into union. That was my strength. Roberto could see ahead. But I could speak into his heart. And you can speak into mine, Annie. You know what that means.”
She did know. It meant that despite Billy’s physical strength, his horse-sense – as he called it – and his ability to survive anything, his love for Annie ruled him.
The jungle grew up around them, rich and green and fragrant.
When Annie looked around, she saw only the two of them walking alone in the garden. But she knew, despite all appearances to the contrary, they didn’t walk alone. For one thing, Violet, the killer, still hunted them out there.
But Annie reached for Billy’s hand and squeezed, and despite the terrible urgency that they get off AlphaZed3 now, he waited for her, the way he always had.
Annie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and saw with her inner sight the place where Billy spoke to her. And she saw that in truth three of them walked in the jungle at dawn.
Goodbye, Roberto, she said inside of her, knowing that Billy could hear her too. I will love you forever.
Adios, mi corazon, Roberto replied. Anika will stay with me, Annie goes with Billy. You go on, and I will too. We will meet again, in that place beyond the edge of forever.
Annie kissed Roberto in her mind, and finally let him go. The whisper of his goodbye echoed over her as he faded away, speaking into her for the first time, and the last.
She watched him go, blinked the vision away, and took a look around. Only a moment had passed, but all had changed.
She was still in the clearing. Billy still waited for her. For the first time, Annie believed she could be free. Free of FortuneCorp, free of the past, free of herself and her fears.
“I never spoke with Roberto like that, you know, in the soul,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I really want to say goodbye to him.”
She waited for the faithful tears to appear, but for the first time, they didn’t come.
Billy spoke out loud, gently, with a sort of reverence. “Aw, you spoke to him without words, always, Annie. You have the soul of a healer. A grower of seeds, right? Anybody who could grow a world like this has the power to whisper into a heart. And what I heard was Roberto saying goodbye to you. He let you go, he wants you to go, you’re free. He still loves you.”
He took her hand and quietly pulled her forward through the little Eden she had cultivated. And she only paused to pull the Bowman eco-drive out of the ground. To take it with them, to grow a new world.
And they came to the perimeter, behind the research hut, where Billy had moved through the barrier between her fledgling paradise and the ice.
“I don’t have a cold-weather suit for you,” Billy said. “You can’t go out there yet.”
They stared beyond the clear barrier between Annie’s warm, unfurling garden and the frozen hell howling outside. Dimly, she could see the landing pod Billy had used to come down to her. It was already half-buried in the swirling snow and clouded ice of the native world.
And then she saw it. The rebel ship breaking through the ice planet’s orbit, hovering over the frozen surface. She read the words painted crudely on the battered hull: The Sullivan.
A warm cascade of light shot from the belly of the ship to Billy’s landing pod, then traveled along the ice to the permeable plexisurface of the geodome, seeking Billy. His soul.
The light poured through the clear membrane, warming her like the sun of her childhood. Annie put her hands up against the plexi, feeling the cool membrane yielding to the pressure of her fingertips.
And then right before Annie walked through into the protective light of The Sullivan’s waybeam, Violet rose up from underfoot. Beating her wings into the ground, like a homicidal mechanical hummingbird with a hypodermic needle for a beak, stabbing Annie’s shoe again and again and again.
Her poison vial, now empty.
Billy looked down, then scraped Violet off her foot with his boot, and stomped until the AI was no more than a cluster of crushed gears.
“I bet the beacon inside the AI still works,” Billy said. “We’re getting out of here, just in time.”
With that, they pressed through the membrane and walked up the pathway of light and into the belly of the ship that waited for them.
And Annie looked back one last time, to the garden she had grown, to the illusion of safety she was leaving behind. The dome glowed in the morning sunlight, iridescent as a soap bubble, the blasted frozen whiteness surrounding it.
Roberto wasn’t there.
A huge weight suddenly rolled off her shoulders, a burden she’d never realized she carried, until it was released. After a long, barren season, she was ready. It was time for Annie to let the grief move through her, radiate and fade away, though not the love, never the love. She’d never forget him, would love him always, but now she knew she was strong enough to carry the loss forward into the future.
Annie turned, kept walking into the light. And Billy Murphy walked beside her. She’d never run away again.
New Earth Twelve
Mandy M. Roth
One
Delta Quadrant 2948, on board Expedition Vessel Rhea
Olivia Blu punched the last sequence of coordinates into the ship’s control panel. She double-checked her course, waiting for the display screen to give her a visual of the destination of her choosing. As her destination appeared, a level of enthusiasm that couldn’t be tempered rushed through her. Olivia’s gaze went to one of the many cameras mounted throughout the huge transport vessel. The camera made a tiny noise and zoomed in on her. She smiled, obviously pleased. “That’s it. Twelve is less than a week away. We did it.”
“No,” a deep, totally masculine voice said from the communication unit in the bridge. “You did it, Livia.”
She snorted, pushing her long dark hair back from her face. She tied it in a loose bun and ran her fingers over the display screen showing the planet they were approaching. As a Goldilocks planet, it was situated among the stars in such a way that it could possibly support human life. Its atmospheric pressure was within the necessary range to be able to hold water, and by all accounts and probe readings, it had breathable air and everything needed for survival. The only thing they didn’t have were clear images of the entire surface. The series of probes they’d launched over the course of the journey had malfunctioned mysteriously, giving only half the data required. Like the recon team sent over thirty years ago, th
e probes had vanished.
It wasn’t the first planet humans had tried to colonize. She doubted it would be the last. The first eleven tries had been met with one failure or another. Sickness. War. Alien races that were unwelcoming. The list went on and on. The twelfth try would be different. She was sure of it. It had felt like this day might never come. But there it was on her screen – planet Twelve.
“I was thirteen when I woke up. I think we both know that without your guidance and help I’d have been put out an airlock long ago,” she said casually.
The man controlling the cameras was quiet for a moment. “I wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.”
“Cam,” she said respectfully, her attention still pulled to the sight of Twelve. “Let’s be honest here. Quincy would have found a way to override your control of the vessel, and he’d have ejected me out an airlock had you not been there to walk me through what to do, and had you not activated all the androids on board to assist.”
“I wasn’t there, Livia,” he said, sounding overwrought. She wondered if he had as much remorse as it sounded like he did. “I’ve never been able to actually be there.”
“In physical form, no,” she agreed. It was true. He’d been a voice for the past ten years of her journey – a guiding voice, but a voice all the same. “Cameron, you’ve been there in all the other ways that matter.”
She touched the image of Twelve on the screen. She didn’t want to dwell on the negative, on all that couldn’t be altered. She wanted to try her best to focus on their future, even though it meant changes on the horizon. “We did it. In less than a week we’ll be in Twelve’s orbit. A lot of things will be different, won’t they?”
He fell silent for a moment. “You know, my pre-set orders for pod release have started. I’ll be able to be there physically very soon, Livia.”
Olivia bent her head. Emotions welled in her. She should be elated by the news he’d be up and about soon. She wasn’t. She liked having his undivided attention, and that would end the minute he woke from stasis. She knew it was selfish, but she couldn’t stop the way she felt.
