Bitter Angels

by C. L. Anderson

  How do you choose between

  what’s right and revenge?

  “You’ll let them live,” I whispered hoarsely. “They’ve slaughtered and tortured and enslaved us, and you’ll just let them live.”

  “No,” she answered quietly. “I’ll make them live.”

  “And what’s the difference?” I sneered.

  “Terms and conditions,” she answered. “I told you I was tortured? The man who ordered that is still alive, and he’s going to stay that way. In fact, he’s immortal now. He’s living in a comfortable pair of rooms in the middle of his home city, and he’ll live there forever, nice and cozy. He can’t go outside. He can’t talk with another human being face-to-face. He can’t even go comfortably insane. He’s alive and stable, and we’re going to keep him that way. He never gets away from what he’s done, never gets to have a better life or another life. He never meets his Maker or sees his Heaven. He gets to watch while the kingdom he built fades from the historical record and the city he ruined is rebuilt by his enemies and opened up wide, because all the people he tried to lead to his brutal salvation like his enemies’ way better.

  “He’s ours. He’s mine, in his two-room cell, forever and ever.

  “Do you want revenge for you and yours? Help me make the Blood Family live with what they’ve done.”

  My hand was shaking, making the fingers drum against my thigh. “It’s not enough.”

  * * *

  Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  * * *

  This book is dedicated to my husband, Tim.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to thank Juliet Ulman and David Pomerico for all their help bringing this book into existence, and, as always, the Untitled and Excelsior writers’ groups who patiently sat through many drafts.

  PROLOGUE

  DONNELLY

  Nikko Donnelly stood beside the sealed, arched air lock, his attention fixed on the screen in front of him. He did not even glance at the wonders in the black sky outside. He spent far too much time staring out at them as it was. Instead, he watched the ship finishing its approach to Habitat 3. It was a badly thought-out and desperately maintained collection of tubes and spheres, only capable of lumbering between thin atmosphere and no atmosphere.

  Donnelly was wizened, grizzled, and tired; tired of himself, tired of his world, tired of more things than he could name. His people called him “Old Donnelly” behind his back and “Sir” to his face, because whatever else he was, he remained the commander of Habitat 3 in the Erasmus System.

  The Erasmus System’s first human colonists had tightly focused imaginations and never got around to naming their space stations, let alone any of the purely decorative worlds that could be seen from its windows. They all went about their orbits tagged with codes for use by pilots and the flight controllers; R3ES1, R3ES2, Habitat 1, Habitat 2, and so on.

  Outside, the clumsy ship matched Habitat 3’s spin and eased its docking bolts toward the port. The magnets seized tight. The red lights beside the air lock’s polished-metal door blinked to green.

  Donnelly could imagine the crew letting out sighs of relief. One more run completed, and once more, everything held. Unfeeling as he was, Donnelly had enough sympathy for the crew that he cycled quickly through the checks coming up on the ancient screen. Once this would have been done automatically, but it had proved too easy to hack the commands and let uninvited guests onto the habitats. Donnelly did not consider himself a slow learner.

  When it came to machines, at any rate.

  At last, Habitat 3 gave him permission to pressurize the air locks and cargo bay. He laid his palm on the door’s access pad, and the metal door shuddered as it rose.

  The cargo bay was a cavernous, meticulously clean place. Shining white composite coated its deck and curving walls. Red lines on the floor marked off unloading bays. Blank black screens and access pads dotted the walls behind the bays.

  Once, six or seven ships a day had docked here. Now, the chamber echoed to the sound of Donnelly’s footsteps as he stumped across the deck. A single line of half-rusted pallet carts waited beside the outer air lock. All the rest of the equipment was in storage, and no one, least of all Donnelly, expected it to be brought out again.

  Donnelly palmed the next access pad and the sleek white inner door lifted away to reveal the outer air lock and the incoming ship’s battered, soot-streaked door. That door hissed loudly as it slid open.

  The first person to step into Donnelly’s empty cargo bay was a little man with neatly curled black hair. He came from a world where brilliant color was the fashion, but he himself wore sparkling black and gleaming white: black coat, white trousers, polished black boots, white gloves. Donnelly, in his battered boots and heavy work jacket, shunted his jaw back and forth a few times to keep from sneering.

  “Good to see you again, Nikko,” said the little man.

  “Bloom.” Donnelly nodded. “How’s the run?”

  Bloom shrugged in answer. “Too long, too cramped, and too cold, but we all do as we must. Are you ready for us?”

  “Cleared out level five. Dare and his people were here a week ago, but they only filled it up by about a quarter.”

  “Good. They’ve warned you the runs are going to pick up tempo for a while?”

  Donnelly nodded, more than a little annoyed that Bloom didn’t think he knew his job. What was worse, however, was that this time Donnelly really didn’t know what his job was. He’d been told to make sure the habitat was in top working order. He’d been told to start minimizing the internal supports and furnishings, and maximizing the holding capacity, but no one had told him why.

  “Better get to it, then,” Donnelly grunted.

  “As you say,” agreed Bloom blandly.

  Behind Bloom, the ship’s cargo doors slid back to reveal a solid wall of silver canisters, each one about the size of Bloom’s torso. The ship’s crew, a group as hardened as Donnelly—with even less use for Bloom than Donnelly had—began sliding out pallets full of the canisters and stacking them on the waiting carts.

  The gravity was light, but inertia was in good working order, and the massive cargo took careful handling. Only once did a worker, a young man with a stubbly chin and one eye sealed half-shut by an old burn, look up at the mismatched set of supervisors.

  “What are these things?” he asked, clipping a strap around a full load of pallets.

  Bloom beat Donnelly to it. “They’re your cargo, and your job is to shift them.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Yeah, but, what?” Bloom expertly mocked his nasal young voice. “Are you getting paid to do your job or to stand around with your flap open?”

  The crewman muttered under his breath and glanced at his captain. The man grimaced. An amethyst tooth flashed in the harsh light as he signaled for patience.

  Bloom just turned away.

  “You say these are to go to level five?” he asked Donnelly.

  “Yeah.” Donnelly nodded.

  “I can take it from here. You can go back to your other duties.”

  Donnelly clenched his jaw, knowing that he had no real duties to return to, a fact that stung worse than his casual dismissal and even worse than being stuck in this echoing tin can, utterly and completely dependent on people he couldn’t trust and who didn’t give a good goddamn about him, blood ties or no.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what’s going on either,” he muttered to Bloom.

  Bloom’s smile was thin and mirthless. “No, I don’t suppose I am.”

  “Do you actually know?” />
  This time, Bloom just shrugged. “I don’t particularly care.”

  Donnelly knew he should let it go, but he couldn’t. He was tired and he was cold. He knew things were coming to a head. He didn’t know how or why, but he did know how deadly ignorance could be.

  “The First Bloods are gonna fuck you over with the rest of us, do you know that much?”

  “Oh, no,” replied Bloom softly. “Not this time.”

  ONE

  TERESE

  “Bianca’s dead. We need you to come back.”

  That was how it started for me. A few words, and Misao Smith’s familiar voice.

  Bianca’s dead.

  I stood there, staring at my handset while those words sank through brain and blood to tangle around my guts. Behind me, the noise from Allie’s twenty-fifth-birthday dinner kept on. We were holding it on our glassed-in balcony. Outside, Lake Superior’s turbulent waters were as iron grey as the low blanket of clouds overhead. Allie sat at the head of the confetti-littered table, laughing in that odd hiccoughing way she’s had ever since she was four, while Jo and Dale gave each other shit about…something. Any second, David was going to tell the two of them to calm down. Then they’d start giving the old man shit for treating them like they were all still four.

  I hadn’t switched the screen on. I remember being vaguely grateful for the oversight. This way, my family wouldn’t see who interrupted Allie’s day.

  Bianca’s dead.

  I hadn’t seen Bianca for over three decades, but I hadn’t forgotten her for a single day. She was my first mentor in the Guardians, and my best friend for my entire service.

  “Terese?” asked Misao coolly.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m still here.” Mostly. Part of me stood beside Bianca, seeing her toss her hair back over her shoulder, like she did when she was getting serious. Nothing could convince her to cut that hair, even though it constantly got in her way.

  Bianca’s dead.

  “How…?”

  “I can’t tell you on this set.” Misao’s voice was flat, final, and annoyed.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose hard, trying to get the pain to focus me. My hand started to twitch. In another second I’d be shaking. The happy family noises all fell away. David and the kids had noticed something was wrong.

  Misao let out a long sigh, the sound of strained patience. “Will you come in?”

  The thousand things I could say flashed through my mind. Misao, it’s my kid’s birthday, for God’s sake! What happened? Tell me what happened! No! I’m done with this. I promised them all I was done!

  Silence behind me. Silence on the handset.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “There’s no…”

  But I switched it off and turned away. My whole family was staring at me.

  My family. My life and heart distributed among four separate lives. Dark, intense Allie, home tonight for the family celebration and out tomorrow with her friends doing things I suspect I wouldn’t want to know about. Jo, our middle child, had dyed herself white to stand out in our little crowd. Dale, my youngest, my son, the earth-brown image of his father with the same eyes set in his handsome young face.

  His father, my husband, David stood up and walked around the table.

  “What’s happened? Who was that?”

  I couldn’t answer. I just held out the set, and he saw the name. He sucked in his breath sharply. Behind us, all the kids cast glances at each other. There gets to be a kind of telepathy in a family. There are words you stop needing to say. In ours they were “the Guardians.”

  “They want me to go in tomorrow,” I said.

  “Will you?”

  I nodded.

  “Terese…” He drew my name out into a warning.

  I tried to dismiss it. “Misao won’t let me alone until I hear them out, David. The sooner I do, the sooner I can tell him to…bugger off.” My voice was far weaker than I wanted it to be, a fact that David did not miss.

  “What else did he say?”

  I met his gaze, oddly helpless. “Bianca.”

  He saw the tears at the corner of my eyes, and he knew the rest.

  David folded me in his arms and rested his hand on the back of my head. I closed my eyes, breathing in his scent, willing myself to sink into his warmth and remain solidly in the safe, whole present. But my mind wouldn’t let go. I kept seeing Bianca: dark, stout, stubborn Bianca, with her gleaming eyes. Smart, fast, ruthless, fearless. Canny in ways I couldn’t begin to match. Where had she been deployed? I didn’t know. I’d lost track.

  When the hell did I start losing track?

  “Come on.” David kissed the top of my head. “We haven’t cut the cake yet.”

  “Right. Right.” I wiped at my eyes and attempted to smile at my children, none of whom smiled back. I sat down at our table and handed Allie the knife. But the party was really over, and we all knew it.

  ————

  Four in the morning. I couldn’t sleep and I was back in the dining room. We turned off the noise filters at night, so I could hear Lake Superior’s waves rushing up to the shore. The late-November wind muttered out there, piling up the heavy clouds. The weight of the air told me snow rode on the back of that wind. The moon had gone down, and the windows were utterly black. I could see myself clearly; a faded ghost in a satin robe wavering in the depths of the black glass. I smiled grimly at the thought. By rights, I should have been a ghost by now.

  I rubbed behind my ear; the very bottom of the curve between my skull and my neck. There was nothing but smooth skin there now, but I still carried the harsh memory of the wound and the pain, where they’d cut out my Companion.

  The Companion is the tool and backup each field officer in the Guardians is given just in case they are captured in a war zone. The Companion is a friend, a reminder, a helper, and, if you’re extremely unlucky, he or she is the witness to your death.

  They are also one of the few secrets the Guardians actually keep. I should say kept. They’re certainly not a secret anymore.

  During the Redeemer Uprising four decades ago, I was captured. I was tossed in a dark cell and dragged out on occasion so I could be made to experience a lot of pain. My captors managed to detect my Companion and when they did, they cut it out of me, quickly and brutally. Then they tossed me back into the dark.

  It was Bianca who rescued me. She pulled me out of that black hole.

  She saved my life.

  That was what made this so bad. Bianca was dead, and not only was I not there to save her, I hadn’t even known she was in danger.

  The sound of Dale’s snoring cut through all my heavy thoughts, accompanied by the soft breathing of the heat pump. Something beeped in the kitchen. In the living room, something else pinged in answer.

  Night noises. Home noises.

  This wasn’t the first place David and I lived together, or even the third. We’d bumped up against each other occasionally over the years before we got married in the middle of what you could call unsettled times in our lives. We were well into our third centuries then—that time when most people had officially launched from their second families and were starting to build their third. David had left his birth family and tried a marriage family, but it hadn’t gone anywhere and he hadn’t tried again. I was trying to create something I could call normality as fast as I could. He found me fascinating, in a wounded-bird kind of way. I found him wonderful, in a lifeline kind of way. It was mutual need that passed for love, and we got married.

  Under those conditions, we moved around a lot. Bangkok. Moscow. San Francisco. We had an apartment up the Adas Apaba cable for a while, and then there was the year down in Marianas. It was there, we, or rather I, hit bottom literally as well as figuratively. David threatened to leave, which finally got me into the kind of treatment, both mental and physical, that I’d been refusing for years.

  When I got out, we found this place in the middle of Lake Superior. Whitecap was a new, small town on a new, smal
l island. We both craved peace and quiet, but we believed it was just for a little while.

  Instead, that desire broadened and deepened. Against the odds, our tumult turned into real love, for this place and for each other. We built and added and accumulated and stored. We found out which restaurants we both liked and where the good doctors and stylists were. There were more exciting places to be, and some even more beautiful, but we were settled. Settled enough that the morning the house-doc put up the flag that I was carrying our first child, we did nothing but celebrate.

  I heard a step on the bare floor and straightened, instantly alert. Some instincts do not go away. David’s reflection moved to join mine in the black glass, getting closer, until I could feel his warmth against my skin.

  “Do you think it’s because of the Erasmus System?” His breath stirred my hair. Picking conversations back up, even after hours of silence, was something he’d always done.

  “It’s got to be. That’s the only one I’m doing analysis on right now.”

  We were silent for a while. There was only one question in his solemn eyes, and I waited for him to ask it.

  “Why are they calling you in? You could give them all your current analysis over the set.”

  “I don’t know.” What I didn’t say was how much it scared me that Misao had called at all. If the Guardians were calling in thirty-year retirees, it meant one of the dozen hot spots I knew about, plus any new ones I might not, was close to exploding into actual war.

  War. The ancient, perverse, pervasive nightmare we’d banished from the Solar System with the Pax Solaris, the Common Cause Covenant, and the Laws of Humanity. I’d dedicated my life to preventing its return as human beings spread themselves out into the galaxy. The effort nearly took my sanity and my life. I’d tried to retire, to enjoy the peace I’d helped to keep, but it seemed war had come down to find me. I looked up at the clouds and wondered what was behind them.