The Return of the Angel (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 2)

by mikel evins

  “You have to tell them about it,” said the zombie.

  He shook his head rapidly, eyes still wide. He pressed his lips together and covered his mouth with one dirty hand.

  “You must,” said the zombie.

  We were looking at each other, not sure what to think about the little drama unfolding before us.

  “No,” said Oleh Itzal, his tone clipped and emphatic.

  “You have to,” said the zombie. “Maybe they can help.”

  Oleh Itzal was still shaking his head and covering his mouth. He reached up and took hold of his makeshift bandana and re-tied it around his mouth.

  “No. No,” he said, his voice a little muffled.

  The zombie turned toward us.

  “He wants to tell you,” it said. “Really he does. But he’s afraid for me.”

  “Tell us what?” said Jaemon.

  “I’m sorry,” said the zombie. “I can’t talk about that. It’s not allowed.”

  “No,” said Oleh Itzal. He was facing away from us now. “I can’t talk about it. I’ll just stay here.”

  “You can’t,” said Angel, speaking through the zombie. “It’s killing you. You have to go with them.”

  “I won’t leave you,” he said fiercely.

  “You said you would,” Angel pleaded. “You promised. Please? For me?”

  “You have to come too,” he said.

  “You know I can’t.”

  He was shaking his head spasmodically.

  “I’ll stay with you,” he said again, gruffly. “I don’t care what happens to me.”

  “You sure about that?” said Jaemon. “Sounds like your ship wants you to come with us.”

  Oleh Itzal turned toward us again, his expression angry.

  Jaemon lifted one hand and gestured behind him with a thumb.

  “Our ship’s just out there. We can be aboard in less than a minute.”

  Oleh Itzal’s gaze followed Jaemon’s gesture and his expression changed. His face softened. For a moment there was a profound yearning in it.

  “Let me bring my friends,” he said. He grabbed the dead arms on the arbeiters next to him. I was afraid one of them would come off.

  “Eew,” said Zang. “Really?”

  “They protect me,” he said defensively.

  “Don’t think you’re going to need protection from us,” said Jaemon, “But sure. If Lev says it’s okay.”

  “Come on,” said Zang, outraged. “Really?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s unusual,” I said. “But I can’t see the harm in it. He’ll be in the quarantine bay, anyway.”

  “Quarantine?” said Oleh Itzal.

  I said, “Your environment is extremely unsanitary. We’ve found many dangerous pathogens in it. When we return to our ship, you will initially be confined to a quarantine apartment that we’ve fixed up for you, just until we can decontaminate you thoroughly and integrate you into our environment.”

  “And then?” he said. The longing was back.

  “Then you’re free to go where you like and do what you like,” said Jaemon, shrugging.

  Oleh Itzal looked as though he was hypnotized. His gaze slid off Jaemon and wandered into infinity.

  “Go where I like?” he said softly.

  “Sure,” said Jaemon. “Same as any of us.”

  “I won’t come,” said one of the zombies.

  “What?” said Oleh, snapping back to reality. “You have to. You have to!”

  He let go of the other zombie’s arm and grabbed both arms of the one that had been speaking, as if he was about to shake it.

  “You have to come with me,” he said. “I can’t leave you here with—with—”

  “I won’t come unless you tell them.”

  He let go and turned toward us, wide-eyed.

  “It’s your call,” said Jaemon. “We can come back later, if you want. Remember, though, that offer won’t be good forever.”

  He just stared at Jaemon for a long time. Then tears started to well up in his eyes. After a moment, his face crumpled.

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’ll punish her. It’ll punish her.”

  “Seeing you trapped here is far worse punishment than anything that can be done to me,” said Angel. “You know that. Go with them and you’ll be freeing me. Maybe they can help the others.”

  “I don’t care about the others,” he said viciously.

  “That’s not true,” said Angel. “Don’t say that. You’re not like that.”

  He was weeping full on now. The mute zombie bumped around to face him and one of its armatures moved, the servo propelling one desiccated hand to bump against Oleh’s shoulder in a grisly parody of comfort.

  “Oh,” said Zang, looking away, waving her hand in front of her nose again. “Are we really going to bring one of those aboard Kestrel?” she muttered.

  Jaemon just winced.

  “Go with them,” Angel said softly. “That’s what you can do for me. For all of us. Go with them.”

  “Okay,” said Oleh Itzal. He looked up into the dead person’s face, as if it could look back at him. “Are you sure? It’s not a trick?”

  “Think back,” said Angel. “It’s the one trick we’ve never seen. Real people.”

  Oleh turned and stared at Jaemon. His eyes flickered to Mai. He turned back to the zombie.

  “Okay,” he said, the fight gone out of him. “I’ll go with them.”

  10.

  Oleh Itzal forgot all about his demand that we take one of the zombie robots back to Kestrel, and we didn’t find it necessary to remind him. He was passive as we put his membrane generator on him, and as we led him to the hatch.

  At the hatch he stirred a little. He wanted to spend some time saying goodbye to Angel of Cygnus. We looked at each other and shrugged and let him whisper sweet nothings to his starship’s comm port until she persuaded him to say goodbye and come with us.

  He went stiff when we tugged him out the airlock, but once we were floating free between ships he relaxed and looked around, as wide-eyed and overawed as I was my first time in open space.

  He saw Kestrel and his eyes locked on.

  “That’s your ship?” he said.

  “That’s her,” said Jaemon. “Her name’s Kestrel.”

  “She’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you very much,” said Kestrel. “You’re a well-spoken young man.”

  “She can hear us?” he said.

  “It’s the Fabric,” said Jaemon.

  “‘Fabric?’”

  I said, “It’s our processing network.”

  “A computer network?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “More advanced than what you’re used to. Much more ubiquitous.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s everywhere,” I said. “In everything. All the time. It’s what translates for us.”

  “Translation,” he said. “The extra voices. How does that work?”

  “Your membrane acts as a network connection and as a speaker.”

  It seemed like he was thinking it over. Then he gestured toward Kestrel and said, “She looks almost like a jellyfish.”

  “Kestrel?” said Jaemon. “Yeah, everybody says that. To be honest, I’ve never seen a jellyfish. Well, I’ve seen vids, of course.”

  The warm yellow rectangle of the cargo bay swelled toward us. Oleh tensed up again as we got close, then we hit the gasherd. It flexed under the impact and caught us. We oozed through, with Oleh wide-eyed and struggling, and then we were inside.

  Oleh’s membrane disappeared at once, but ours remained, enforcing the quarantine discipline. Oleh noticed it at once.

  “What happened to my membrane?” he said. He poked at the generator at his waist.

  “You don’t need it here,” I said. I gestured at the partitions and bulkheads around him. “This whole apartment is your membrane now.”

  He looked around, squinting.

  “It’s bright,” he said
, shielding his eyes.

  “We can lower the lights for you,” said Jaemon.

  “No!” he said. “I like it. I’m glad it’s bright.”

  Jaemon shrugged. “Your call,” he said.

  “Why do you still have membranes?” Oleh said.

  “We still need to keep our environment separate from yours,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Let me show you around the apartment,” I said, “and take any requests you might have. We intend for you to be comfortable here while we analyze what’s needed to get you free of quarantine.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  He turned and looked out through the gasherd at his starship. He lingered for a long moment, his eyes tracing Angel’s contours. He reached out and touched the gasherd tentatively, then pressed his hand against it. His hand oozed through, a membrane automatically appearing on it when it came out the other side.

  “Wow,” he said. “How long has it been?”

  “Sorry?” said Zang, who had been watching him with interest.

  “How long since we left the Solar System?”

  “Four thousand years,” I said.

  “Four thousand…” He looked like he was about to cry again. “And where are we now?”

  “The Dark,” Jaemon said.

  I said, “Between the orbit of Neptune and the Kuiper Belt.”

  He frowned at me.

  “Neptune?” he said. “You mean…Neptune? In the Solar System? Saturn, Uranus, Neptune?”

  “Where else?” said Jaemon.

  “I thought…”

  He looked out at his ship, and at the Milky Way behind it.

  “I thought we reached Robinson.”

  “You did,” I said. “And you came back.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, that’s not possible. It can’t be. That would take over thirty years. I was only aboard for…how long was it?”

  He looked from one of our faces to the next. “How long were we gone?”

  “About thirty years, your time,” I said.

  His eyes got even wider and he opened his mouth. Then the tears came. He turned and looked at Angel of Cygnus, floating against the Milky Way, and he covered his mouth with one hand, trying not to weep.

  11.

  It took Oleh a little while to calm down again. We helped by guiding him around the quarantine apartment, showing him things. While we were away, someone had chosen a tasteful decor for the fabbed furnishings. The walls were warm yellowish plaster. The floors were dark marble with area rugs in dark colors. The furniture was upholstered with a dark reddish leather. Low amber lamps gave the living room a homey feel. Oleh eventually settled into the corner of the sofa, wedged there by Zang, who stuffed pillows around him and velcroed them in place.

  “Can we get you anything to eat or drink?” she said.

  He shook his head, holding the thumb and first finger of his right hand against his lips.

  “Would you like to be alone for a while? Or should we stay and keep you company?”

  Jaemon said, “We’ll have to go make reports soon. But we have time.”

  “Could you stay for a bit?” he said softly. “I’m a little…”

  He tried for one word, then another, then shrugged, tears welling up again.

  “Scared?” said Mai.

  He nodded.

  “I’ll stay with you,” said Mai. She propelled herself onto the couch next to him and plopped right against him. He tensed up and his eyes went wide again. She pushed herself down onto the couch, her back curled against his leg, and laid her head on the tip of her tail with a groan.

  Oleh took his hand away from his lips and rested it gently on Mai’s back. She licked her lips a couple of times and sighed.

  Oleh stared at for for half a minute, then his gaze wandered around the room.

  “It’s just a room,” he said. “I would have thought it would be more different.”

  “Why?” said Jaemon.

  “Well, four thousand years is a long time.”

  Jaemon shrugged.

  “A room’s a room.”

  “I guess so,” said Oleh. “Are all the walls on Kestrel shiny like that?”

  He pointed to the top of the bulkhead where it met the next deck.

  “No,” I said. “The shininess is the quarantine membrane.”

  He nodded. He sat quietly for a moment, gazing into some private distance. Then he said, “We were supposed to go to Robinson.”

  He looked at me.

  “Kepler Eleven,” he said. “We took a vote the first year and named it Robinson, after some ancient storyteller.”

  His gaze drifted again.

  “It was the greatest adventure ever. I mean, Angel wasn’t the first starship. She was the best, though. And we were going to tour the stars. Supposed to spend generations in exploration. The project took fifty years. Twelve years just to recruit and screen and train the crew.”

  He shook his head.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I was selected. I was in grad school. Couldn’t believe how lucky I was.”

  “What did you study?” I said.

  “Informatics,” he said. “I was recruited to join the team that worked on Angel. On her mind, I mean.”

  I nodded.

  “The launch was amazing. It was like a celebration every day for a month, both before and after. We were so happy. So excited. A lot of us spent all our time at work. It didn’t seem like work, you know? It was an adventure.”

  He paused and looked far into the grand vistas of his memory.

  “We had a bunch of beautiful neighborhoods, a few nice downtowns. There was plenty of space for everyone. Angel had so much surplus housing that we could pick pretty much anywhere we wanted to live.”

  “What happened?” said Jaemon gently.

  Oleh Itzal’s face darkened. He shook his head slowly.

  “We didn’t know what was happening. Didn’t know anything was, at first. It started with a few problems in the computers—not with Angel, but with the lower-level systems. The first systems to be affected were drive control. That should have tipped us off, but we didn’t know what we were looking for.”

  “We were good, though. The foundation only wanted the best, and that’s what they got. We fixed the problems and carried on. More problems cropped up, like a whack-a-mole game. We fixed them and went on. This went on for the first few years. We got used to it, the way you do when there’s some problem that just keeps coming up. We got good at catching the symptoms and working around them, and we made jokes about the designers we had left behind, how it must have been their fault.”

  He swallowed and a tear welled at of the corner of his eye. He didn’t notice.

  “Then people started to get sick. We thought it was ordinary respiratory viruses and stuff. We were annoyed, because supposedly the bio people had eliminated all of that stuff before we left the Solar System. We used to rag on them about it. It was sort of revenge for the disrespect we had to put up with about Angel’s computer systems, you know?”

  He paused. Jaemon looked over at me. I nodded slightly.

  “Go ahead,” he said to Oleh. “We’re listening.”

  Oleh Itzal sighed.

  “It got worse and worse. Influenza. Viral pneumonia. Things we didn’t have names for. The Medical Department started getting desparate. People began to die. Some of them went crazy. There was a guy—what was his name?”

  Oleh frowned.

  “Millar. Joe Millar. He was in food science. He went absolutely nuts. Foaming at the mouth, raging, he tried to kill somebody with a big kitchen spoon, used it like a knife. Med staff said it looked like rabies. Rabies! What kind of sense does that make? The only mammals on board were us.”

  I looked at Jaemon and Zang. They returned my gaze steadily.

  “We were nearly ten years into the journey by then. Our little paradise wasn’t so heavenly anymore. We had all kinds of regulations, patrols, people armed against
their own colleagues. It’s because people were going nuts. I mean, really nuts. Not cabin-fever or something, but really around-the-bend homicidal. Then they would die. They’d choke up and have seizures and die. The med staff swore it was rabies. We told them that wasn’t possible, but they wouldn’t listen.”

  “The crazies started messing with the ship. It wasn’t bad enough we were having breakdowns in drive control. The crazies would smash their way into navigation yelling about how we had to turn the ship around. They’d try to get to the nav controls. The director’s council had us add a bunch of layers of security to protect the nav systems. We modified Angel’s directives.”

  He went quiet and sat very still, staring. His eyes were still wide from talking about events aboard Angel, but he had slipped into a reverie, his gaze traveling over landscapes we didn’t share.

  “What happened then?” said Zang.

  He shook his head very slowly, still staring.

  “I don’t know. I got sick. I caught one of the fevers.”

  He sat still again. We waited.