During this period Mia had kept her head down, even though she was the subject of much praise, bordering on adulation. She smiled, and nodded, and kept her mouth shut. She was acutely aware what it was like to be on the other side of the coin, when the world has turned against you. She knew it would all settle down after a time, and people would go back to worrying about the more mundane things in life, with MASS and their apologists ceasing to be headline news.
Something must have startled the two birds at the fountain as they flew off in unison, up to the safety of the superstructure. Mia followed their path upwards with her eyes, and then heard a familiar whirring sound. She looked around to see Dr. Jann Malbec walking towards her. The whirring sound was Gizmo following beside her. Mia stood up and waved as they approached.
“Is it time?” she said.
“Shortly. We still have a few minutes. I came a little early because I have something for you.” Jann took a seat, Mia sat down opposite her, Gizmo whirred in beside them.
“Good to see you, Gizmo. It looks like you’ve had a few upgrades.” Mia admired the new appendages the little droid sported.
“Thank you. It is good to see you too, Mia. And yes, I have had my full complement of weaponry restored.” A compartment opened on one of the robot’s shoulders and a plasma weapon extended outward. It swiveled around, pointing in different directions before retracting again.
“That looks very intimidating.” Mia laughed.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Gizmo.
“I have something for you, Mia.” Jann reached in the folds of her robe and extracted a small wooden box, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It was old and battered and looked as if it had lived a long life. She handed it to Mia.
“I believe this is yours.”
Mia hesitated for a second, not believing what she was seeing. Then she reached out and tentatively took the box, clasped it in both hands, and looked at Jann.
“Where did you get this?”
“We finally did a search of Christian Smithson’s personal effects. This was in one of his bags, along with a number of other missing items.”
“I don’t believe it.” Mia looked at her jewelry box, the one she had spent so much time and energy trying to get back. “I was beginning to think I would never see it again.” She set it down on the table and opened the hinged lid all the way. Inside were some small items, earrings, a few bracelets, rings. At the bottom of the box was a piece of folded paper, which Mia extracted. She opened out the folds and a small, cheap pendant fell out onto her hand. She held it up for Jann to see. It was a small six sided star, cheaply made from thin pressed metal. At its center was a small red plastic gemstone. It looked like something a child might wear.
“This is what I risked my life to get back.” She handed it to Jann, who took it and examined it.
“It must mean a lot to you.”
Mia was reading the worn and tattered note that the pendant had been wrapped in. A tear came to her eye as she read it. She wiped it away, sat back and looked at Jann.
“You know, I never really believed you, that first time we met. I’ll be honest, Jann. I thought you were just some crazy paranoid weirdo.”
Jann laughed. “Well, you’re not the only one. I think that may have been the general consensus at the time.”
“You know, the only reason I took the job was to get back this note and that pendant you’re holding. Your job offer was a way for me to go after Christian. I knew he must have taken it. I never, for one minute, considered you might have been right about the murder of that courier at Nili Fossae.”
Jann didn’t say anything for a moment. She was looking back and forth between Mia and the pendant.
“I know what you’re thinking. I must be bonkers, it’s just a cheap kids toy. The type of thing you’d find in a Christmas cracker. And yes, on face value that’s exactly what it is. But it’s also what saved my life and brought me back from the brink.”
“Mia leaned forward. “Let me tell you a story, something I’ve never told anyone else before now. You know what happened to me, back on Earth, killing that kid and all the crap that got dumped on my head. It was all in that report you read. But what’s not in the report is, about a year after, I was in a bad place, drinking, popping pills. I was a mess and my life was going down the toilet fast. Anyway, one morning after an all night binge I discovered to my horror I had drunk all my stash. So there was nothing for it except to leave my shithole apartment and score some more. I was so drunk it took me a while to stumble to the store. That’s when things got really messy. I don’t really know what happened exactly. But the owner called the cops and I was hauled off, kicking and screaming, at least that’s what they said.
“I spent the night in a cell downtown and sobered up. The cops all knew who I was, of course, so they went easy on me. Next morning I got out and made my way home. When I got there someone had left a copy of the local rag nailed to my front door. The headline read, Kid Killer Cop Arrested for Drug Store Hold Up.” Mia sat back in her chair.
“It wasn’t true, of course, at least not the hold up bit. But it was the last straw. Something in me cracked, I couldn’t take any more. So I decided to end it all with a drug overdose. The only problem was it would take me a few days to score enough to do the job.”
Mia picked up the letter and showed it to Jann. “Then two days later, before I had time to off myself, this came sliding in under my door.”
Jann took the note and started reading it. She looked up at Mia when she finished.
“Yeah. And this was inside it.” Mia held up the pendant.
“It was from the woman whose kid I’d killed. She had watched me being dragged through the courts and vilified in the news. She had witnessed my steady descent into an alcoholic drug addict. She had every reason to hate my guts and want me dead. But instead she sends me this note and a pendant that belonged to her little girl. You see, she forgave me. She didn’t want me to be another victim in that awful tragedy. She had seen the headline in the paper a few days earlier and she reached out to help me. Can you imagine what it must take for someone to do that, Jann?”
Jann shook her head gently.
“I had taken away her little girl and yet she had it within her to try and help me. I could totally understand if she despised me. In my mind she had a right. Not like the others who simply hate for ratings, or worse, for entertainment. No, she had the right, and she chose not to.” Mia stopped and brushed a tear from her eye. Then she held up the pendant again.
“She sent me this as a gesture, something to remind me of her girl, a token to let me know that she held no malice for me.” Mia went quiet for a while, just holding the pendant in her hand.
“Anyway, it’s what saved me,” she said after rubbing away a last tear. “I decided from that moment on I would clean up my act, get sober, put my life back together. I’m not saying it was easy, no. It was hard, but when times got tough I would take this out and hold it, and it would give me the strength to carry on.”
Mia smiled at Jann. “So you see, there was no way I was going to let some two bit loser like Christian get away with stealing it. It just wasn’t going to happen. I would have hunted him down until the end of time. That’s why I took you up on the job offer. It was a way for me to go after him and get it back. Even if that meant I would have to blow up the MASS space station and prevent the genocide of the colony in the process, then so be it.”
The two women sat in silence for a while before Jann reached over and picked up the pendant again. She studied it for a moment, this time in a new light, before she finally spoke. “Tell me, have you ever worn it?”
Mia shook her head. “No… I couldn’t.”
“Why not.”
“I never felt worthy, I suppose.”
Jann handed it back. “I see no reason that a symbol of all that is good about humanity should not be on display.”
Mia looked at the pendant for a few moments, contemplating it. Th
en she undid the clasp on the chain and hung it around her neck. She sighed as she pressed her fingers to the star now hanging around her neck. “Okay, Jann. I’m ready now.”
<<<<>>>>
Extract from the First Book of Martian Poetry, by Xenon Hybrid, President of Mars. As recited at the decentenial celebrations.
The Plains of Utopia
Dust devils dance
Twisting and entwining
Like an alien ballet
Dusty vortices track the surface
As I reach out to touch
And move as they do
To be as one
With the spirits of Mars
Far out here, on the Plains of Utopia
Reproduced by kind permission of the Government of Mars and The Greater Martian Territories.
Author’s Note
I hope you enjoyed reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it for you. If you did, then please leave me a review. Just a simple ‘liked it’ would be great, it helps a lot.
To receive updates on future books in the series, please join my Readers Group or connect with me at www.geraldmkilby.com. You will also get a link to download my techno-thriller REACTION and the follow up novella EXTRACTION for FREE.
About the Author
G. M. Kilby grew up on a diet of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark and Frank Herbert. This developed into a taste for Ian M. Banks, Stephen R. Donaldson and everything ever written by Michael Crichton. He is currently working his way through the entire canon of Neal Stevenson.
Understandable then, that he should choose science fiction as his weapon of choice when entering into the fray of storytelling.
REACTION is his first novel and is very much in the ‘old school’ techno-thriller style. Whereas, the COLONY MARS series, is more of a hard scifi feast.
He lives in the city of Dublin, Ireland, in the same neighborhood as Bram Stoker. And can be sometimes seen tapping away on a small laptop in Bram’s Cafe, with his dog Loki.
You can connect with G.M. Kilby at:
www.geraldmkilby.com
Published by GMK, 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Gerald M. Kilby All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed, or electronic form without express written permission. Please do not participate in, or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies or events is entirely coincidental.
This book has been edited for US English.
Version us1.0
For specials and updates on upcoming books, please join my Readers Group at www.geraldmkilby.com.
You will also find a link to download my techno-thriller REACTION and the follow up novella EXTRACTION for FREE.
Jezero City: Colony Four Mars (Colony Mars Book 4) Page 17
