by Scott Rhine
“Please. I gave you so much blood that I passed out. Why can’t you let me help him?”
“He doesn’t need help. We check on him every day. He’s getting good at hunting crabs. He has everything he needs there—better than Bora Bora.”
“All I’m asking for is a number.”
“You’re not planning to go out tonight in the dark, are you?”
“No. Some glue has to set. I’ll head out tomorrow just after supper.”
“Okay.” Yuki fed her the coordinates of the ex-pilot’s camp.
After a few minutes, Yuki called Oleander. “Hey. A hypothetical question: if a certain mutual friend were about to disobey orders, would it be wrong to stop her before she gets fried?”
“What’s Mother Hen planning?”
“She’d going to commandeer a colony boat tomorrow after dinner and take it somewhere off-limits.”
Oleander’s stream of curses impressed Yuki, and she’d lived with circus people. “I’ll make sure the boat in question is locked up or destroyed before she has a chance to break any more rules. Red won’t be able to save her a second time.”
“You’re a good friend.”
“This can’t end well. If she makes it out to that island, she might as well stay. Thanks, Yuki. I owe you one.”
Chapter 31 – Blank Patches
The next time Mercy snuck out, the boat she had spent the week building was padlocked to the pier. She could defeat the lock by disassembling the craft, but that would take her remaining daylight. Instead, she opted to creep into the shed to find the right tools. Risa was waiting for her when she came back out with her arms full. “Let me help,” said the head-of-security’s wife.
“Ack!”
Relieving Mercy of the stolen tools, Risa said, “Red’s told us stories about your sister Mary pulling stunts like this all the time to see boys.”
The thief lowered her head. “He needs me.”
“You need to learn to follow Z’s orders. He always has a reason. You just earned a week of extra duty to occupy the excess free time you seem to have.”
Mercy learned to grind pieces of curved metal to reinforce the storage room’s hull while Risa experimented with welding techniques. After the first six segments, Mercy complained, “Why do I have to polish both sides to a mirror sheen? We don’t care what the inside looks like.”
Risa said, “Anything rough can rub through a spacesuit. Even a sharp corner can be lethal.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tuesday night, Auckland needed assistance. After she took his vitals, Mercy said, “Between the honeymoon and Yvette’s absence, your symptoms resemble mononucleosis.”
The groundside doctor looked sheepish. “I’ll try not to overdo it if you won’t. You have bags under your eyes.”
“I’m getting my required six hours of sleep a night, as long as Rosie the Riveter waits till after nine to start.”
“You look worried.”
“Yuki is having trouble adjusting to one arm,” Mercy said, shading the truth.
“Phantom pains?”
“No. But I’ve seen her reach for a door with the wrong arm, or attempt to stop herself from floating into the wall with her missing left. It’s hard, especially when they kicked me out of Olympus.”
“We also serve who only sit and wait,” he said, quoting Winston Churchill about people who waited at home while loved ones fought on the frontline.
“Don’t give me that. I saw Sojiro getting you hooked on The Rich Cry, Too.”
“Yeah, well he said the first one was free.”
“Seriously, you need to find a project. You could shear those Angora rabbits and learn to spin the fur into yarn.”
“I don’t know.”
“Pratibha crochets. It makes a nice hobby in a rocking chair, especially when you’re making booties.”
He smiled. “We’re trying, but nothing to merit a sonogram yet. Have you picked an exercise regimen? It might help with the nightmares and worry.”
“I always swam with my mother, an hour every morning.”
“I could sign off on that if you have someone stand by with a spear, in case there are sharks in Prime Meridian Lake.”
“Deal. If I schedule it early enough, Oleander can accompany me as part of her patrol.”
Wednesday morning, Mercy walked down to the lake with her friend and stripped down to her underwear. Oleander carried the clothes and followed along the shore as Mercy swam the equivalent of twenty laps in an Olympic-sized pool. “Damn, girl, I thought I had sexual energy to burn off.”
Accepting the towel as she climbed out of the water, Mercy said, “This is nothing. When I was training for the space program, I would swim the bay from our house over to the . . .” Suddenly short of breath, she stopped to grab her knees. The memory of her lost family and home overwhelmed her.
“It’s okay,” Oleander said. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
Several minutes later, Mercy dressed in dry clothes, and the younger woman said, “Can I call Olympus on your headset?”
“Why?”
“Z listens to all my calls now.”
“I can talk to Yuki for you,” Oleander offered.
“She asks my advice on personal stuff with Toby sometimes.”
“God, no. I’ll give you access to my gear, and you can talk to her after I’m asleep.”
“Thanks.”
Mercy waited till the lunch break she had in common with Yuki. When they were both officially off the clock, Mercy called her friend. “Hey, girl, anything new?”
“I made up a pedicure bag and surprised Toby with it last night.”
“And?”
“He got really excited . . . just before he plucked it from my hands and ran downstairs to the shower with it.”
“Okay, you’ve got to admit that’s creepy. Does he stroke his own feet and call them precious?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Inside joke. Check out the nail clippings. If he left a pile where other people are going to poke their bare feet, dump him.”
“We’re kind of past that stage in the relationship.”
“I had to try,” Mercy said lightheartedly. “Have you looked at the island lately?”
“Your man does calisthenics every morning. Sojiro watches him with me sometimes. Today, Sojiro played music to accompany the workout. ‘It’s Raining Men’ was my favorite. You were right, the artist is good company.”
“Anything interesting at work?”
“Mmm. I can’t talk about it.”
“Darn. I miss using my brain.”
“But hypothetically . . .”
“I’m listening,” Mercy said.
“What would make a white patch on the gravity sensors?”
“How big?”
“A rectangle about a kilometer across.”
“Sampling error. Try it again.”
“If it persists?”
Mercy paused. “True grav fields would be spherical. I can only think of three reasons. One, the jump nexus is interfering in a pattern, like the hexagon on Saturn. Two, one of the domino fragments is lodged in the sensor array.”
“And three?”
“The data is buffered for almost a day before you see it, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone with a higher computer security rating could be trying to hide something from you.”
****
Thursday, Yuki ran the blank patch again—twice, with the same results.
She couldn’t tease a reaction out of Toby again, almost as if he’d snuck off to another rendezvous with one of the repair crew during her shift. Yuki’s shampoo had been moved and used, and Toby’s hair didn’t have that smell.
Whoever the bitch was, she would have well-groomed feet. The Japanese woman monitored everything the doctor did like the chickens watched the beetles. Some of the scratches on his back could have been construed as letters—a taunt of ownership from another lover. Her anger si
mmered.
Friday, Yuki zoomed in on the mystery zone with the pure optics. The region was the same gold and tan as the rest of the dunes, perhaps with more shadows. When the desired rectangle appeared, the out-of-bounds pixels turned gray. The effect happened in real time, adjusting to their point of view. Someone was blocking her efforts. Did the planners already know? Were the Zeisses playing with her? Or did the crazed doctor have a mission from someone who’d plumbed the alien secrets from afar? She decided to call a meeting of the committee for Saturday night.
Zeiss decided to pass the meeting off as a regular event, boring and routine. Toby was sealed off in his room, lest he say something embarrassing or be reminded of the dreaded Yvette.
As the others arrived, Yuki paid attention to the nails of all the women. None of them had been particularly pampered, or freshly trimmed and filed. That left four other women as possible lovers, Mercy included. The thought of such a betrayal made Yuki weak. Other people stole and lied; Mercy was a rock in an ocean of human waste.
Interrupting her thoughts, Zeiss tapped Yuki on the shoulder. “What’s the big secret?”
“How close can we approach Alcantara?”
“Red can brush the atmosphere, a few hundred klicks up. A minimum-fuel approach would take us about two days. Why?”
With a flourish, Yuki displayed a composite photo of the blank spot. “Someone is keeping a secret from us.”
Zeiss noted, “That’s by the nexus point where we were supposed to enter the system.”
Sojiro gasped. “Is it a crash site from someone who came in too fast, a refueling station, or a colony?”
“I don’t know,” Yuki said. “That’s why I want to get closer. Whoever is masking the data in our system won’t be able to block the visual through the sunlight windows.”
Monday evening, images of the dunes filled the sky of Sanctuary until their orbit carried them over the critical region. At the moment of truth, the shutters slammed shut prematurely, denying them the secrets of the alien world again.
Sojiro jacked into the interface. When he emerged, Zeiss asked, “Who is interfering?”
“Snowflake.”
Everyone in the control room cursed. Their own ship was fighting against them.
Zeiss said, “Do you think Snowflake switched the flight paths so we wouldn’t see this?”
Yuki shrugged.
“What are our options?” Red asked.
The manga artist said, “We can use the instruments on Ascension to view the surface. Alternately, we could launch a probe, but we’d also need to record those results from Ascension.”
“I want to save the probe for our final destination,” Zeiss said, unyielding.
“This could be the destination,” Yuki lobbied. “We can return with planets’ worth of data and multiple examples of alien tech. We’ll be conquering heroes. Sanctuary could be carved up by the experts. It would be enough.”
“No. First, we’ll try the view from Ascension in a couple weeks when we’re ready.” Nothing more was decided that night.
After the others returned to camp, Yuki made a casual remark while she was brushing her hair for bed. “Maybe we could bring in Mercy and see if she can sneak around the computer block.”
“No Mercy,” the doctor said.
Yuki was furious at him. She beat him black and blue with the hairbrush. When she finished, she stood, shaking. Toby crawled over to kiss her feet. “You know what I need, what I deserve,” he said.
Chapter 32 – Walking on the Sun
Every day, Mercy swam farther to build up her endurance and to strengthen her resolve. Once she decided, she began to plan her escape. The destination helped to focus her time and give the daily drudgery meaning. Her headset would need to be left behind, and other survival items scrounged. She hid the gear under the corner of the chicken coop because no one else gathered those eggs. Next, she wrote a how-to manual for anyone who took over caring for her chickens.
Only one piece of information remained for the trip; although she had hoped to obtain it from her mother when the time was right. Next time Oleander loaned her a comm set, Mercy called Yuki. She made up a lie to make sure the conversation would be in person. “I need a favor.”
“Yes?”
“You know how I’ve been swimming? Well, I left my chronometer on this morning when I jumped in. It’s water resistant, but was never meant for immersion.”
“Miss Safety ruined UN property. That’s priceless. You want to borrow my wrist unit so Zeiss never finds out.”
“I’d appreciate that. I’m already on probation.”
“Sure, sweetie. I never use it because I prefer the contact-lens clock. You’ll have to reset the watch yourself because doing that one-handed is a pain for me. When the stasis generator froze all the electrical impulses, my eye clock lost 3,925 hours.” Yuki recited the number like the gulag sentence in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
“Sure. I’ll trade you for some berries. Sneak down to Zeppelin Point over lunch, and we’ll make the swap.”
“Deal.”
At the appointed hour, Mercy watched her friend descend the stairs as Toby peeked out the window. Then she remembered the telescopic windows. While her friend was occupied, Mercy activated her interface with Snowflake. “Saturday, during the next meeting of the planners, obscure my image from Olympus if anyone asks to see it. If I signal you again with the word FAIL-SAFE, please give me another four hours of obscurity.”
There was no answer from Snowflake at this distance, but she was certain her block would hold for the few hours she needed. While everyone important was distracted, she’d make her move.
When Yuki arrived, they hugged. After the Japanese woman handed her the chronometer, Mercy whispered, “Thanks. Can I ask you something personal?”
“No, I won’t tell you how I’m planning on eating these strawberries,” Yuki said, wryly. “Although, Toby might offer some of these to the ghost of Yvette. He still talks to her.”
“Actually, I wanted to ask about your first time with a man. How . . . did you bleed much? Did it hurt?”
Yuki bit her lip. “I broke that myself before a man was involved.”
When Mercy blushed deeply, her friend asked, “You mean, you don’t . . . ?”
“No!” Then Mercy saw Herk stomping down the spiral stairs. “Oh, crap. Toby turned us in.”
“Run. I’ll handle the boys. We won’t be able to meet like this again.” Yuki looked surprised as Mercy kissed her on the forehead.
“Good-bye.”
Mercy stopped at the chicken coop to reset the wristwatch. The chronometer had lost nine hours less time than Yuki told her to expect. How odd—she’d been very precise about her lost time. Any investigation of the mismatch between contact lens and wrist was swept from her list of concerns when she arrived at the women’s dormitory. The ticket for another week of extra duty was waiting for her, signed by Zeiss himself. It made her want to take up cursing.
****
Saturday morning, Mercy told Oleander, “I want to sleep in today. Hauling bricks wore me out.”
The guard smiled. “That’ll teach you to put your dirt in the boss man’s hole,” she said, quoting from Cool Hand Luke, a Paul Newman prison movie that Sojiro had shown them.
Mercy wanted to object to the implication, but she had been feeling like a prisoner. The moment Oleander was asleep, Mercy began her morning chores, saving the chicken coop for last. She strapped the oversized, waterproof fanny pack to her belt before gathering the eggs. After dropping the harvest off in the kitchen, she told Johnny, “I’m going to go on a honey hunt on my day off. I’m going to hide until dark and pretend I’m alone.”
He chuckled and gave her a fat wedge of warm cornbread to take along. Planting a peck on his cheek, she added the food to her pack to save for later. For breakfast, she had a modest helping of eggs.
The hardest part of the journey would be walking, not jogging, the two and a half kilometers to Prime
Meridian Lake. She had to pace herself and keep her muscles rested. Rather than swim the distance to the island directly, she had decided to do it in three legs, with plenty of opportunity to recuperate in between. Reaching the dock, she stripped off her minimalist clothes and placed them in the waterproof pack. Her Susan B Anthony necklace went first into the RFID-protected credit-card pouch. She decided on the neoprene cap over her hair, not to shield herself from Oleander’s scouting, but to ease her way through the lake. In the first phase, she swam roughly three hundred meters to the lip of the massive space window. The water was cool, but nothing pursued her.
Mercy intended to walk along the surface of the window for about eight hundred meters, until she was abreast of Exile Island. Like the decontamination room, the window casing was smooth enamel, extending almost a meter above the water. Unfortunately, the surface was slippery, offering no purchase. Normally, she could count on waves to lift her up, but Prime Meridian Lake was glass smooth.
If she failed here, no one would find her body. No one would know.
Calm down, she ordered herself. Mercy removed the pouch from around her waist, held it out of the water, and unzipped it. Carefully, she dried her fingertips and palm on her shorts before groping through the pack for what she needed. Mercy held her breath as she pulled out the first sticky strap. Looping it, she smacked the strap onto the side of the white, enamel wall. Repeating this process, she planted a second loop. She slipped the third strap around her hand and resealed the bag. This enabled her to climb the short wall like her father’s hero, Spiderman.
Reaching the rim, she found the edge was only ten centimeters. The window was recessed so the shutters could snap into place, flush with the top. She imagined racing across the surface with the stars at her feet, dancing across the face of the planet. Here, the plan hit another bump. This window was facing the sun. Expecting the glassy substance to be the same temperature as the water, she placed the ball of her left foot down. She heard the sizzle of the water that dripped from her clothing before the pain bit, and she instinctively rolled away, back into the water. Once, she’d caught a soldiering iron before it hit her mother’s good rug. Mercy had been so proud of herself for saving the rug—until she smelled the cooking skin. This heat wasn’t quite that bad; rather, it felt a little hotter than hot asphalt on which a weatherman had fried an egg.
