Bitter Angels

by C. L. Anderson

  “Maybe they’re better off dead.” The words opened a kind of gate inside me, a flood of emotion so close to relief I couldn’t even be afraid of it. I had held that thought in the depths of me for longer than I knew. The fight for survival exacted too high a toll. We were all better off dead.

  “Do you really want to be the one who makes that decision? Do you want to be like the Erasmus family, deciding who gets to count as a human being and who’s just fodder for your disappointment?”

  “You don’t understand,” I whispered. “You don’t understand!” I shouted.

  “They’ve taken people from me, too. They used them and they murdered them. What else do I have to understand?” She reached out and gripped my hand hard, as if attempting to squeeze her conviction into me. “I am not going to let Erasmus win, Amerand. I will not leave this system standing. But I need your help.”

  I was trembling. I had come here in the certainty that this was the last thing I would ever do. There was no future for me. There was nothing beyond this chamber. Terese was trying to rewrite the hastily constructed code of my last moments and force a future onto me.

  I moved my lips, but there was no sound. How?

  Terese understood me. “You were going to send this thing into the middle of Fortress, right? Crack the city apart? I need you to pick us a new destination.”

  My mind sputtered, trying to force itself into some kind of position that could take into account the possibility that I was not going to die. “Where?”

  “Oblivion.”

  I heard the word, but my mind which had been so sharp up until now could only absorb it slowly. “Oblivion is dead.”

  I watched compassion wash over her. I didn’t want it, not then, not ever. I didn’t want anyone to understand what I felt, or what I was going through. I wanted to hoard all the pain for myself.

  “They’ve turned it into a bolt-hole,” she told me. “They’re going to hide there until after you’ve destroyed Fortress and the Pax Solaris has cleaned up. They think we’ll just take away the refugees and abandon the system.” The gleam of discovery lit her eyes. “This place is too far off the beaten path now, and takes too much effort to maintain. No one else would colonize it. The surviving Blood Family can wait until they’re good and forgotten. They’ll have all the time there is.”

  Anger, red and alive, burned in me. The gall was incredible. They’d allowed a whole world of people to die, and they were going to plunder the corpse.

  I was breathing hard. I was dizzy. My whole mind was turning over, and I didn’t know where to look, what to think. “What do we do?”

  “Exactly what they want you to do. You’re going to set this thing off. Only you’re going to miss. Instead of jumping to the inside of Fortress, you’re going to drop us as close as you can to Oblivion.”

  I considered this as best I could. I was going to Oblivion in a peeled core. I was going to my dead home. My first reaction was born of my time in the Security. “They’ll shoot us down.”

  “It’ll take seven hours for a missile to get there. I checked, as far as I could. My people will be here before then.”

  My second reaction came from my pilot’s training. “We could end up inside Oblivion.” And die. I had come expecting to die, so I wasn’t quite sure why I suddenly cared.

  “We could,” she admitted. “This is on the face of it radically stupid.”

  “Then why are you doing it?”

  “Because I want them focused on me. If they get their hands on me, I can make them think I’m just trying to cover my people’s escape.” Her smile was thin and bitter. “They’ll probably think I’m spying, but that’s okay too.”

  “What are you really doing?”

  “Spying and covering my people’s escape,” she answered so promptly that I knew she was lying.

  “And if you die?” I asked.

  Her voice was absolutely calm. “Then I die trying.”

  Die trying. I was so tired. I didn’t know if I could. I wanted to just die. But maybe I had strength enough left for this. I could have just killed myself after all, as Hamahd had done, as my father was going to do, but I’d wanted to accomplish something first. Taking out Fortress in all its foul glory had been my something.

  Perhaps I could change my plans. I had wanted to help the Solarans. I’d wanted to help Terese. Perhaps I could die trying, too. Maybe then it wouldn’t hurt so badly.

  “I’ll take you,” I said, and I was able to meet her gaze again, and her gaze was absolutely grim.

  “Understand, if you come with me, you will be acting under the laws and constraints of the Solaris Guardians. All of them.”

  All of them. “Yes.”

  “Will you swear it?” Part of me couldn’t believe she was taking the time to do this. Another part of me understood perfectly.

  “I swear on my mother’s life and my father’s. I swear on the memory of Oblivion, I will abide by your commands and follow your orders.”

  She nodded. “I accept your oath on behalf of the Solaris Guardians.” Then, suddenly, like a burst of starlight, a smile spread out across her face. She reached up and touched my cheek as she had once before. “Welcome to the fight, Amerand Jireu.”

  Then she stepped back until she moved into the nearest emergency cradle.

  I turned to the access panel. I moved two codes. I changed three input parameters. I set the timer.

  I slipped into the cradle next to Terese’s. I secured my restraints and my webbing, and I looked across at her. She smiled at me from behind her oxygen mask.

  I pulled my mask down. I closed the cap on my cradle.

  I watched the access pad flicker over from silver to green to red.

  The explosion went off right next to my ears. A world of weight slammed against my chest. I would have screamed, but I had no air in my lungs.

  Darkness.

  THIRTY-SIX

  TERESE

  I watched the access pad flash from silver, to green, to red. I tried to breathe deeply, calmly. Tried to get ready for whatever was to come. I glanced down at the message on the back of my glove—I’d left it up there. My last message, the one I’d sent to David at the same time I’d sent out the SOS to Misao. I kept it there, along with the red marker indicating it had gone through. Whatever happened next, I would not disappear without a word.

  It was real to me, David, I’d said. It was always real.

  The explosion tore the world apart.

  My next awareness was pain. Pain in my head, in my rib cage, in my guts. Slowly, it trickled through to my conscious mind that if I was feeling pain, I was alive.

  My eyelids felt heavy as concrete. I forced them open.

  I saw nothing.

  I tasted blood in the darkness. Panic screamed through my brain. I was in the cell, they were coming for me, there would be more pain, I couldn’t stand any more pain…

  I dragged in a breath that tasted of blood and tried to find my right hand. I thought I could feel my fingers, my palm, my wrist. I twisted my wrist, my numbing fingers searching for the release.

  My arm fell forward and slapped against something. I hissed as fresh pain tore through my elbow joint. I flexed my index finger and felt the brush of my glove against the tip. I bent my wrist up and scrabbled against my cuff until I found the switch for my handlight and pressed it. A burst of white blotted out the world and I had to screw my eyes shut until that particular pain faded.

  When I was able to open my eyes again, I was staring at a wall of salt-and-pepper stone, coated with a white powder that was all that was left of my cradle cap. I hung tight against the webbing. If it gave way, I would fall, full length against the pulverized silicate and stone.

  I knew what it meant, and my breath started coming short and fast. It meant we’d missed. Instead of landing near the surface, we’d jumped inside Oblivion.

  With some difficulty, I turned my head, my heart banging against my aching ribs. The sides of the compartment were curved. If I was t
his close to the stone, how close was Amerand? I gritted my teeth and raised my light, angling it to my right.

  Amerand was also still in his straps, but he was wedged firmly between the wall of the compartment and the broken stone.

  I took a deep, useless breath and pulled my arm back up, trying not to scream, but I got my oxygen mask off. There was air pressure, or I would have been bleeding out my pores by then. The atmosphere had to be breathable, at least in the short term, because there was no way anything in this shattered eggshell of an engine core was still functioning, including the O2.

  “Amerand!” I croaked. “Amerand!”

  He blinked, slowly, groggily.

  “Amerand, talk to me!”

  His tongue pushed itself out of his mouth several times. I couldn’t see any blood, but that meant nothing.

  “Come on, Amerand, try!”

  He turned his head back and forth. The mask grated against the stone, and dragged off over his cheek.

  “A little more to the left next time,” he whispered.

  Relief washed through me. A smile flickered on his face, but rapidly turned into a grimace. “I’m stuck.”

  “Yeah. Hold on.”

  “Yes.”

  After some pained struggling and a lot of cursing, I managed to free my left arm so I could sort of brace myself against the stone underneath me while I undid my webbing. The gravity was light enough that I easily caught myself on both my hands, though the pain in my wrists made me gasp. I pulled my boots free from the ankle braces and let my feet drop.

  For a moment, I just stayed there on hands and toes, as if I meant to start doing push-ups, breathing in the gritty, hot, stale air.

  Stale air, repeated the part of my brain that still remembered the more usual hazards of spaceflight.

  “Right,” I whispered. “No time for this.” I lowered myself onto my belly and twisted around. Slowly, I started wriggling toward Amerand.

  “You noticed the air, too?” he said.

  “I was hoping you hadn’t.” I stripped off a glove and shoved my hand into the narrow crack between his ribs and the webbing.

  “I grew up in pressurized tunnels,” he reminded me, and made an effort to suck in his gut. “Believe me, you learn that a smell like this means there’s no new air coming in.”

  Stone tore my skin. I prodded cloth and skin and Amerand grunted. “Sorry.”

  Finally, my fumbling fingers found the webbing catch. The sharp edges of the stone dug deeper into my knuckles as I pressed and wriggled. At last I heard the blessed click and the security webbing drifted slowly down against my arm.

  I edged my hand down. There was enough room to undo his right-hand cuff, but I couldn’t slide my arm between his body and the stone to get to the other.

  “How about your left hand?” I asked. “Have you got any room at all?”

  “Give me a minute.” He closed his eyes and bared his teeth. I waited, listening to the rustling as his fingers searched and strained. I tried to breathe shallowly. I tried not to think what it meant if we had come to rest in a pocket of stone deep in the core of Oblivion.

  Click.

  “Got it.” Amerand opened his eyes. “I think.”

  “We’ll find out in a minute.” I scrunched backward, and he reached out, stretching and wincing and wriggling, until his fingers curled around the ragged stone ledge. One centimeter at a time, he eased himself out until he was crouched on hands and knees beside me.

  It was noticeably warmer. Sweat coated my forehead.

  “Now what?” he said.

  I did not have the strength to sugarcoat the situation. “Now we find out if we’re dead or not.”

  If we were only partway buried in stone, we might be able to break out through the damaged hull. If we were deep inside the moon’s core, we had until this little pocket of air ran out.

  “Up?” he suggested.

  “Up,” I agreed. I shined my light around the curve of the hull that had become our very low ceiling.

  “Here.” Amerand grimaced but reached out, tracing a thin black crack that had appeared between the stone and the hull.

  I swallowed and pressed my hand experimentally against the hull where it curved overhead. “We’ve still got at least a couple of hundred pounds over us.”

  “If it’s clear of the stone,” he said. “Can you see anything we can use as a wedge?”

  I held up my gloved hands. He stared at them, then at me.

  “They’re armored. Our materials scientists are very good,” I said.

  “All right.”

  I shifted. Every part of me hurt, but I managed to get my feet under me with no more undignified gasps of pain than strictly necessary. Amerand pulled one leg into place, then the other, and braced himself on the cradle’s edge so he could crouch flat-footed on the stone with his shoulder pressed against the hull.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I placed the very tips of my fingers against the thread-fine fissure. “Ready.”

  Amerand strained. He screamed and heaved upward. A thunderous cracking like the sound of a great tree falling surrounded us. Slowly, the hull separated from the stone.

  Air. Sweet cool air rushed in on us, along with rich yellow light. I jammed my fingers into the space, and I prayed. Amerand shouted and the space widened and I turned both hands sideways and shoved them in farther.

  Amerand panted beside me and when I turned my head a little, I could see that his face was streaked with dirt, sweat, and blood.

  I held a couple of hundred pounds of broken ship’s hull supported on my hands. If our tech people were not as good as they were supposed to be, I was in for a whole world of hurt.

  Amerand braced himself again, but before he could press up, the crash of rending metal sounded all around us. The hull peeled back and toppled sideways, and we stood blinking in the light and warmth of Oblivion’s port yard.

  Half a dozen men stood in front of us. They were Clerks. They wore the high-necked black jackets, but these had been shortened so they were more like tunics than coats. They had black gloves on their hands and their eyes glittered hard and distant as they silently lowered their black guns to take aim at us.

  The Clerks said nothing. The guns clattered as they worked the actions.

  I lifted my throbbing hands in surrender.

  “Who are you?” demanded Amerand hoarsely.

  They did not answer. One of them pointed to the floor beside him. Moving slowly, I put my knee on the ragged edge of the hole we’d made and pushed myself out. Amerand, not taking his gaze off these strange, militarized Clerks, did the same.

  Five of them held their weapons leveled at us. The sixth strode across the floor made of the salt-and-pepper stone but polished to a high gloss. He laid his hands on a pair of gilded doors that would have been at home in the palaces of Fortress. They opened for him. He stood aside and nodded to us.

  The message was plain, and there was nothing we could do. I laced my hands behind my neck. My shoulders cried out in protest, but I gritted my teeth. Amerand, after a moment’s hesitation, copied my gesture.

  I was glad. I did not want him giving these silent Clerks any excuse to shoot.

  They surrounded us: two in front, two behind, and one on either side. They moved with eerie precision, and with no sound but the slap of soft-soled boots against stone. They did not look at one another. They barely looked at us. They didn’t have to. They were listening to the voices in their heads.

  The Clerks marched forward and we had no choice but to move with them.

  I had seen blueprints and photos of the old Oblivion. It was a mass of narrow tunnels lined by single-person cells. What open yards there were had been built with secured guardhouses in the center so that the inmates were never without supervision. That was, of course, not counting the screens, the drones, and the guards in their mechanical armor.

  That was all gone now. Swept away. What opened around us was another palace.

  We walked a
long a granite thoroughfare. At our left hand there was a low wall carved from the same salt-and-pepper stone. A garden of blooming plants and miniature trees spread out below us. A stream bubbled over rounded stones and trickled down the middle of a lawn of grass and wildflowers. I smelled lemons and roses.

  Mai Erasmus sat on a blanket in the middle of that garden, a perfect picture of pastoral bliss out enjoying the summer sun with her baby on her lap. She looked up as we passed and her eyes widened. She poked at the infant in her arms, trying to make the baby look up where she pointed and waved.

  She grinned at me and waved once more, but they marched us around a corner.

  I glanced up at Amerand. He kept his eyes rigidly ahead. His face had gone pale beneath the dirt and blood, and his knuckles were white behind his head. I could not begin to imagine what he was feeling.

  This must have taken years. It must have taken dozens of flights back and forth. Now I knew what had been erased from the records I’d sent to Misao.

  The military Clerks led us through cavern after cavern of parks and gardens. The chosen of the Blood Family laughed and ran through their exquisitely designed playland, exploring their new domain. There weren’t a lot of them. I counted about thirty. Assuming that was somewhat accurate, the murder Amerand was supposed to have carried out on Fortress would have taken down at least seven hundred and fifty people. That was if you didn’t count the Clerks and the servants, which I was fairly sure they hadn’t.

  I had thought the people of the Erasmus System were being exploited as labor to bring their masters profit. They weren’t. They were being used to dig out the new city of Oblivion and serve in immortality experiments.

  And to act as distractions for the stupid saints who came to try to help the thirsty population.

  The natives of Dazzle hadn’t seen it because they were willing to put up with anything as long as the OBs were kept away from the farm caverns. The natives of Oblivion hadn’t seen it because the only form of government they had ever lived under was slavery and confinement.

  We Solarans hadn’t seen it because they’d showed us what we feared and we went tearing off after it.