Saving Mars

by Cidney Swanson

  The box made a buzzing noise and a panel flashed a “CHIP DENIED” message.

  “Holy Ares,” muttered Jess, swiping her right wrist instead.

  “PLEASE CHOOSE A TRANSPORT” flashed across the panel this time and Jess ran down the row looking for something fast. None of them looked like great candidates. Maybe Pavel would know.

  “Which one’s the fastest?” she asked. “Please. My parents can’t help. They’re too far away.”

  Pavel’s mouth shrank into a frown. “Take my bike. It’s faster than any of those.”

  “Really? Where is it?”

  Pavel walked away from the motor pool row to another, smaller group of bikes. Placing his thumb over a scanner, he started the engine. Jess hopped aboard.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, scrutinizing the dash for gears, braking, acceleration.

  “I’m going with you,” said Pavel.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Jessamyn, tell me what’s going on. It’s like you’re a totally different person all of a sudden.” His grip, as he placed a hand on her forearm, felt strong.

  “I’ve told you everything. My brother’s in danger. Now let me go,” she said, trying to shake his hand off her.

  “It’s my bike—I’m going with you.”

  I don’t have time for this, Jess thought. “Fine,” she heard herself agreeing, “But I drive.”

  He shrugged, hopped on behind her, and linked his arms around her waist. “Careful,” he said. “It’s been modified to be faster than most Series 400s.”

  Jessamyn accelerated and turned onto the main street, following her chrono-tattoo. The hover-bike was fast.

  “When we get to my brother,” she hollered over her shoulder, “You have to promise to leave. Take your bike and get out of there.”

  “Your brother’s in bad trouble?”

  “Promise you’ll go,” said Jess.

  She slowed for a traffic indicator, uncertain what the consequences would be for reckless driving, and not wanting to find out. The engine whined softly as they waited, and Jess decided to pump Pavel for information, something she wished she’d done last night. It had been a fool’s use of time, conversing about stars and deserts.

  “Where’s the municipal hoverport?” she asked.

  “My bike’s not fast enough?” he asked as she sped forward.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Do you know which city-zone the hoverport is in?

  “What’s your brother got himself mixed up in?”

  Jess worried that she was spooking Pavel.

  “If my brother has injuries, I want better options than waiting for emergency services to respond.”

  “If your brother’s injured, I’ve got a med kit under the bike seat. I can stop bleeding, set bones, whatever he needs.”

  Jessamyn chewed her lower lip, worrying she’d never get rid of Pavel. She wished she could risk calling Ethan to learn more about his situation, but she couldn’t until she got rid of Pavel. She continued following her tattoo’s directions, feeling more and more anxious as it transformed from green to yellow to orange. Just hold on another minute, Eth, she thought.

  “Do you know where the nearest hoverport is or not?” She was less than a half-kilometer from Ethan’s location. Jess blinked her right eye three times, causing the membrane in her eye to shift into place to reveal cloaking fabrics in operation. She prayed they’d cloak-tarped the Terran transport. There it was! Sitting in a parking lot behind a rusted-out truck.

  “Jessamyn,” said Pavel. “That last barrier we passed through? People can’t normally drive through that.”

  “They can’t?” asked Jess.

  “No, of course not. This facility is under high security. The only reason you got through is that my bike is registered to Lucca Brezhnaya. What is your brother involved with?”

  “I’m not sure,” replied Jessamyn, bringing the bike to a halt. She swung her legs out. Hades, she weighed so much on Earth. She looked Pavel in the eye. “But I know he’s in trouble and I have to try to help. Please, go. Now.”

  Jess glanced down at her tattoo, glowing deep red. Seven minutes had passed since he’d called. She needed to find her brother now whether Pavel stuck around or not. She thought of something.

  “If you don’t leave, I’m messaging emergency services that you’re kidnapping me,” said Jessamyn.

  “What?”

  “Because you’re worried I’ll earn your apprenticeship.”

  “You’re joking,” said Pavel. Jess saw an angry look flash across his face.

  “I’m counting down from five.”

  “Jess—”

  “Five. Four. Three.”

  “Message me and let me know you’re okay,” he said, flicking his wrist over the spot where her scan chip lay. Jessamyn had no idea how to “message” Pavel, but she wasn’t planning to in any case. “There was no need to threaten me,” he said coldly. “I’m doing this because you asked. Because I liked the you I met last night.”

  Pavel revved the hover-bike and drove off, leaving her alone in the dark.

  Chapter Eighteen

  NO LANGUAGE TO EXPRESS

  Jessamyn noted that her clothes had returned from their spray-shrunk state to their former size. Reaching into a back pocket, she pulled out a thin black balaclava and gloves. It wasn’t as effective as a cloaking fabric, but the black rendered her difficult to see in the pre-dawn gloom. She advanced toward the cloaked transport. Through her glove, the red tattoo glowed softly. Suddenly, her ear implant began transmitting again.

  But it wasn’t her brother she heard. Voices, electronically altered, filtered through the device in her ear. Ethan was with others, it seemed—but who? Friend or foe? And then, glancing along the building, she saw him. Ethan was being marched and then made to halt facing a wall, legs apart and hands clasped atop his head.

  The voices she’d heard weren’t Kipper and Harpreet—where were they? And how was she going to free her brother? She glanced at her tattoo, preparing to flick it off. But it was doing something funny. As she crept toward her brother, the red flashed to orange. She paused. What was going on? Had Ethan set her tattoo to lead her somewhere instead of to him? What else was there? The transport?

  She angled toward the vehicle and the chrono-tattoo glowed cherry red. Another couple of steps and it shifted to a deeper red. She crept up to the side of the transport, hoping to find something that would allow her to rescue Ethan. Lifting the tarp and opening the door silently, she slipped inside.

  “Jessamyn, daughter,” said Harpreet, seated in the transport. “Thank goodness. Listen carefully. Kipper’s been shot. I don’t know where they took her. Or if she’s alive. Don’t use your left chip again. Stick to the right. Do you understand?”

  “What about Ethan?” It was all Jess could do to utter her brother’s name.

  “I’m going to negotiate for his release. If things don’t go well, I need you to do two things. Listen to me,” said Harpreet, grasping Jessamyn’s shoulders. “Set aside your concern for your brother; you cannot save him, but I may be able to.”

  Harpreet passed Jessamyn a sling-pack meant to sustain team members for up to forty-eight hours solo. Jess couldn’t remember half of what was inside the tiny bag, but the simple act of accepting it awakened a part of her that felt bold and alert, like she felt in a cockpit.

  “I’m listening,” whispered Jess. “What are my orders should you fail?”

  “First, cover yourself in the small cloaking wrap.” Harpreet handed a flat-folded object to Jessamyn. “It is extremely heavy in this gravity. Then, set this transport to auto-destruct using this device.” Harpreet placed something small and black into Jess’s palm. “We can’t have the vehicle traced back to Skye. There’s another motor pool two streets back. You would have passed it.”

  “Yes,” said Jess. She’d seen it.

  “If I don’t succeed, go to the Galleon and get those rations back home.”

  Jess nodded once, the p
ilot in her accepting her mission without question. Then the sibling in her struggled to the surface. “Save my brother,” she whispered.

  Harpreet touched Jess’s cheek softly and exited the transport. Jessamyn watched from inside as Harpreet strode toward the small grouping, shoulders back, head carried high. In Jess’s ear, a jumble of voices competed for her attention. Her sibling-self ached to follow each word, as if by listening carefully she could expedite her brother’s safe return. But the pilot in her focused instead upon the tasks with which Harpreet had charged her. In minutes, the transport would either carry the three of them to safety or need to be destroyed. It all depended upon how skillful a negotiator Harpreet was. Jess spun up the transport’s navigation and disabled autopiloting. Then she retrieved the small-vehicle cloak from the seat, settling it on her lap. It weighed more than it ought to have, like Harpreet had said.

  Harpreet’s clear and cheerful voice echoed in Jess’s ear device. “Good day, gentlemen. I understand my son has been the cause of some trouble. Well,” she said chuckling, “It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten me out of bed early.”

  A rush of angry voices, shouted commands. Jess couldn’t make out the individual strands of conversation.

  “I am sure there will be a hefty fine due from me as his mother,” said Harpreet, raising her right wrist. “Now, then, which one of you collects fines? Or, considering the large amount I am certain to owe, would it be best to distribute the funds evenly?”

  Having readied the vehicle as much as was possible short of starting the noisy drive engine, Jess allowed herself to watch Harpreet and her brother. She saw one of the armored officers take Harpreet’s right wrist and scan it. A hopeful smile crept across Jess’s face. Harpreet is so good at this, she thought.

  Then the officer grabbed her other wrist and scanned it as well.

  “No!” Jess murmured. Would they arrest her for double chipping? Or might Harpreet have enough funds to buy the officer’s silence regarding her second chip? Jess wondered if she should run out as well, to offer the currency stored on her chip. How much would it take? She didn’t know. She hadn’t paid close attention to the lessons on bribery.

  But, no. Something was wrong. Very wrong. She heard her brother emit a low hum, monotone, sustained. Then she saw a second officer approach Harpreet with a billy club held high. Through her earpiece, Jess heard the sound of the weapon as it connected with her friend’s tiny form. Harpreet fell, and Jess cried out silently—no!—and in that moment she felt very small, very young, and completely inadequate.

  Two officers raised Harpreet—gentle Harpreet—forcing her arms up and over their shoulders. Within her ear, Ethan’s hum grew into a quiet tune. Her brother never hummed anything but one sustained note. But as she listened, she heard him humming a child’s ditty. The goodbye song visiting children sang when playtime with the planetary dog ended. Goodbye, goodbye, next year we’ll both have grown, goodbye, goodbye, we leave you now for home.

  Why the goodbye song? What was her brother doing?

  He was telling her to leave.

  Her eyes stung with tears, hot and sharp.

  Yes. It was time to leave. She had a job to do. As she slipped quietly from the vehicle, sling-pack over one shoulder, her eyes caught on something familiar: a plastic container on the back seat. Ethan’s collected items, lying atop his wafer-computer. Her heart seemed to split in two and she felt one of the halves float out of her ‘til it came to rest beside the carefully arranged items. Tenderly, she retrieved her brother’s wafer. She didn’t trust herself to gather his collection without tears.

  No tears, she commanded herself.

  From inside her head, she could hear a single Terran voice. A commanding officer had arrived and the others kept silent before him.

  Jess shifted the heavy cloak to cover her as she walked away from the vehicle. One hundred meters, she told herself. Then destroy the transport. Then take the food home.

  Her earpiece relayed a crisp single voice. “That’s the pair of them, commander.”

  Take longer strides, she told herself, bowing under the weight of the cloak that shielded her from the officers.

  “Counselor, proclaim the pertinent section of The Bill of Human Rights to the inciters.”

  Fifty steps to go, Jess told herself.

  “All citizens of Earth share certain inalienable rights including the right to live out a span of two-and-seventy years.”

  Keep going. Thirty steps more. Each step felt harder than the last.

  “Read the findings against the prisoners.”

  Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight, she counted. Don’t look back. Her weight seemed to increase in an exponential relationship to her distance from her brother.

  “Citizens of Earth, you have been found guilty of attempting acts of terror against your fellow citizens and an act of treason against their government.”

  Don’t look back don’t look back don’t look back.

  “Pronounce the sentence,” said the commanding officer.

  Take another ten steps, she told herself. And then ten more. Then you’re done.

  “You are each required to perform acts of manual labor beneficial to those citizens you have attempted to harm. You will receive reorientation training during the balance of the remaining years of your life. Your current bodies will be entered into general reclamation and you will be assigned geriatric bodies in which to carry out your sentences.”

  This isn’t happening, Jess told herself. But it was. She turned, the weight of her cloak insignificant beside the weight of her sorrow. One hundred meters stretched between her and the transport. She collapsed to the ground, spent.

  “Prisoners, turn slowly about.”

  Jess saw her brother turning, saw Harpreet being turned. Ethan hummed the goodbye song again.

  “I’ll find you,” Jess whispered. He would hear that. Would it give him hope? Courage?

  Ethan hummed the goodbye refrain more loudly.

  “Officers, fire,” called the commander.

  From inside her earpiece, Jess heard two light popping sounds, like birthday balloons punctured at a party.

  Harpreet and Ethan crumpled to the ground.

  Jess stared wild-eyed, her face folding into an origami of pain.

  Jessamyn, the girl who slept surrounded by words, had no language to express what she felt.

  Chapter Nineteen

  JOB TO DO

  Dawn stretched across the sky, a sickly white which spread like fungus. Slowly, the greys of night gave way to a world tinted with color. Jessamyn’s eyes distinguished red-tones in the guards’ armor which, minutes before, had appeared as merely dark. A flare of light from their hover-transport confirmed the red of the armored officer carrying her brother’s unconscious body.

  Jess remembered Brian Wallace’s injunction against bribing members of the Red Squadron Forces. Surely Harpreet had remembered it, too. The old pirate had gambled and lost. Jess felt a fierce anger burning its way through layers of numbing pain.

  Why hadn’t Harpreet tried something else? They could have snuck the cloaked vehicle closer and tried a rescue. Harpreet could have approached under cover of the smaller cloak and thrown it over Ethan while Jess distracted the guards. They could have blown up their vehicle—a certain distraction! Surely there were dozens of other scenarios which would have ended better than the one Harpreet had chosen.

  Jess shook her head. It doesn’t matter now. You’ve got a job to do.

  She crouched under the weighty cloak, awaiting the moment when she could detonate her abandoned vehicle. Ethan’s earpiece continued to transmit, and she heard confused chatter aboard the departing Red Squadron transport. Eager for a name, a destination, something to tell her where her brother and Harpreet would be taken, she listened, breath held. And then her lungs seemed to compress as she realized she had no hope of finding Kipper. Or even knowing if she lived still. It was all wrong, so wrong. It was the destruction of the Red Dawn all over again.
She forced herself to take a deep breath, to prove that the weight upon her lungs was a nothing, born of imagination.

  From beneath her dark glove, Jess’s chrono-tattoo glowed faintly red, mocking her loss of her brother with its refusal to change color as the hover-transport lifted off and crossed the sky, taking him away.

  Don’t think about it, she ordered herself. Just destroy the transport.

  Her hand shook as she raised the detonator that would erase any damning evidence pointing to Skye or to Mars. She had no idea whether the device could transmit a signal while the heavy cloaking garment covered her. Deciding not to risk a malfunction, Jess shifted the weighty cloak back so that it lay in stiff folds against the building beside which she crouched. Lifting her black-gloved hand once again, she toggled an “on” switch and tapped a glowing button.

  The transport came visible for a split second, lit from inside as the interior blew to pieces. Windows shattered outward and the cloaking tarp billowed, then settled itself back upon the transport, minus the bits which had covered the windows. The vehicle remained difficult to detect. Beside it, a derelict truck rocked gently, as from a gust of strong wind.

  Jess stood to leave, folding her own rumpled cloak until it was no larger than a computing wafer. As she tucked it inside the sling-pack between her brother’s wafer and a folder of first aid items, she thought she heard a tiny something. A mere ghost of noise. Not hearing anything more, however, she decided the sound must have been one of the many coming from inside her earpiece. Unfortunately, she was wrong.

  Strong arms grabbed both of her hands from behind, twisting one arm to the point where she felt sure bones would shatter.

  An angry voice whispered beside her ear, “Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t die right now.”

  Chapter Twenty

  THE MOST ELOQUENT PERSUADER

  Jessamyn recognized the voice, even colored with anger.

  “Pavel?” she whispered.

  “One good reason, Jessamyn,” he said.