by Ginger Booth
Melkor squatted down to meet her on her own level. Gone were his charismatic good looks. She faced the man with fish-eyes and gills again.
“They hurt you?” he asked.
Sass blinked at him blankly for a moment. In her brief reprieve staring at a recharging robot toy, fatigue caught up with her. Then she realized her hands and shirt had blood on them. “Oh. No, Ueno’s minions tried to steal my mink. Fidget bit her.” She stroked the beast’s soft fur, marred with rusty pink patches and coarsened for defense against acid waters. “Good girl.”
Melkor huffed a soft laugh, then slid down the wall to sit beside her. To Sass, this was like looking at him instead of herself in a mirror, his jacket wrinkles and flesh pressed flat. His apartment looked a hell of a lot better than her accommodations, Scandinavian wood furniture with simple cushions in an otherwise Japanese-styled room, East and West meeting in harmony. She bet he even got a toilet at chair height.
“We need to talk,” Melkor murmured. “About what you told Ueno.”
“You sold us to Hakone,” Sass accused. “What did you get for us?”
“I? Nothing. The Ambassador sent you here, for Pontiac.”
Sass’s tired brain tried to pick out what hair the man was splitting. Could he be saying he wasn’t in alignment with Pontiac’s decision? Or did hope cause her to grasp at straws? And did it matter? She gazed up the smart wall. “Walls have ears. And Hakone’s have an AI to listen.”
“You claimed that. Why?”
“You poured tea into your teacup on the screen. Was it actually bourbon into a shot glass?”
“Shochu into a high-ball glass. Like Japanese vodka. But mapping an avatar to a face isn’t that difficult.”
“Do you have a picture of yourself as a child? Before your…mosaic. And possibly of your parents as well?”
He placed a photo on the wall, a handsome boy of maybe eight, grinning in eagerness. The parents looked worn, their gazes hard, the background perhaps an algae-stained interior staircase on a cruise ship that had seen better days. The Melkor projected on the smart wall was a fine blending of how the parents had aged.
She shook her head. “I’m sure. An AI adjusted your image on the wall.” Fidget met her eye and nodded. “For Ueno’s amusement. And to humiliate you. And I don’t know if I’m speaking to Melkor or Ueno now. If Melkor, the conversation is not private.”
He looked thoughtful. “She can’t humiliate me. But I see your point. Can we talk now? Or do you need sleep first?”
She met the fish-eyes with her own. Friend or foe? It hardly mattered if she could play two adversaries against each other. Then something clicked. He said the Ambassador sent her to Hakone, not him. For Pontiac’s benefit, not his. And the way he’d repeatedly mentioned his origins among the boat people. Once he’d been mangled into this fish seeming, could he ever escape? Was that why Pontiac did it, to indelibly brand its dome folk as nonhuman?
“Sleep first,” Sass said thoughtfully. “But you can tell Clay?”
“I will. One question first. Your nanites. Our medics say they’re capable of repairing cells and tissues to reassert birth DNA. Yes?”
Their medics were awfully good if they figured that out so fast. But that was the lure of Earth. That their vast population had surely advanced science faster than the thin colonies, who could produce no more than a handful of scientists, isolated from worthy peers.
“My nanites and Clay’s are unique. We’ve never been able to replicate them.” True, so far as it went. The exceptionally good Yang-Yang nanites, which Sass’s crew saved from obscurity, required external controllers. And they didn’t start out by killing the host, a major plus.
Melkor studied her face. “We received a message from your Commandant, Benjamin Acosta. Captain, your commanding officer is not the age he appears, I think.”
“Oh, he’s smarter than he looks,” Sass claimed with sinking heart. “May I see?”
34
Luna remained Earth’s first and largest space colony. The rest were outside the Goldilocks zone, too hot or too cold.
An hour before, Ben had quit fussing with his dress uniform and checked his hair one last time. He reminded himself that this didn’t need to ‘work.’ It just had to be said. He adopted a stern expression alien to his face, and began recording.
“Nations of Earth and Luna. I am Benjamin Acosta, Commandant of the Colony Corps. We’ve come to your solar system on a peaceful research mission. We pose no threat to you. We did not address you directly and ask for permission, because we didn’t know your comms protocols. Before we arrived, the interstellar colonies believed these worlds had failed. It appears that was true for Ganymede and the other space platforms. But not you, and not Mars. We are glad to find you alive.”
He took a deep breath and pressed on. “I approached Mars One and was able to establish communication before visiting the surface. Our ship Thrive One visited Earth. They intended to observe Earth’s status before making contact. In the meantime, we’ve acquired your comms protocols. Now we can open a dialogue.
“We are open to the possibility of trade. We have technological advances that should be of interest to you. Cultural exchange is also valuable. Mars One is already benefiting from this peaceful interaction.
“But before constructive talks can begin with Earth or Luna, I require you to release our ship Thrive One. This includes the captain and all crew and equipment. This is a prerequisite.
“I look forward to your prompt attention to this matter. Acosta out.”
He reviewed his lame little missive. It contained no ‘or else’ because he had none, only the vague promise of benefits.
But his starting position needed to be stated. He hit send.
Sass’s heart panged as Ben’s familiar face blinked out on her wall, to be replaced by the fish-guy. She looked down and stroked her mink to hide her emotion. She’d guess this was no more than a Hail Mary pass on Ben’s part. But it was sweet of him, and clear confirmation that he knew their situation.
She sure hoped he didn’t mean to try anything beyond negotiation. But she allowed that the attempt needed to be made. He couldn’t know how badly it would fail. His words would be twisted and used to trick him. Because Ben was a rational boy from Poldark, from a more-or-less rational world. No one from Mahina’s educated elite could comprehend a world government determined not to fix its broken atmosphere, whose overriding goal was to kill their multitude of citizens faster.
“Thank you for showing me this. I assume there have been responses?”
“Hold fast to your belief that he’s smarter than he looks,” Melkor advised dryly. “But he isn’t the twenty-five he appears.”
“We enjoy a number of medical advances,” she agreed. “Our environments are deadly. None of them fit for human habitation. Medicine was a priority.”
“Reassert DNA?” Melkor reminded her of his question.
“Possibly.” Her eyes rose, but only reached his gills. Was that what he asked? Whether the colonies’ medicine could undo the abomination inflicted on him and those like him? She met his eye. “But that would be unwise on you. It might undo your seeming, revert you to what you looked like on Ueno’s wall.”
His face shut like a trap. “We will speak privately in the morning.”
The wall blanked, and Fidget sighed as the power levels dropped. Sass remained seated, petting her. She should lie down, to conk out the moment her cheek touched the scratchy reed mat. But she wondered how Earth responded, even now, to Ben’s polite invitation to talk about freeing her.
Whatever they said would be lies.
Earth was huge. Over a billion insane players, all seeking some advantage, some edge to make their miserable lives slightly better. Could Ben possibly understand that? That no one here ever truly represented a cause larger than her own sorry ass? Oh, they might think they did. Ueno flattered herself as a champion of Asia. Melkor might not love Pontiac, but his job was to defend the interests of America’s dome dw
ellers. And he was good at his job. But even the hundreds, maybe thousands of entities that passed for governments here, were run by people with private agendas.
Not that her insight would help Ben any.
“I wish I could talk to him, huh, Fidget?” The mink flattened her ears and drooped on her damp wick. By which Sass deduced the creature hadn’t found a route to break a signal out to their people. Sass picked up the rag to wet it again before she passed out.
This saved the mink another shock. Because the wall suddenly showed Clay sitting cross-legged as herself, gorgeous as ever with a tired smile. “We can keep each other company.”
“Sight for sore eyes,” she assured him. “But don’t talk.” She placed a finger on his projected lips. “Love you.”
His finger reached out to flatten in response, probably where he saw her own lips. “Love you too. Sleep fast.”
She ruefully turned to consider the squat toilet. “We’ll do it together, back to back?”
And they did. And if Ueno Aimee thought to disconcert their Western sensibilities, she’d be disappointed. The tent cities of Sass’s childhood offered no toilet seats. Nor had Mahina’s raw regolith before the atmosphere grew breathable. She squatted like a pro. And Clay handled the chore standing.
Then she lay down facing Clay, one hand on her soft mink. She was right. The cool tatami kissed her cheek and sleep swallowed her in moments.
Sass didn’t sleep long. Guards yanked her off the floor. A frantic Fidget scratched her face clambering aboard, apparently restored to full ferret-like flexibility during the few hours of Sass’s nap. Morning begins at midnight, Sass noted with a yawn. Just as she was shown out the door, from the corner of her eye she saw other samurai burst into Clay’s cell to rouse him, too.
The stroll was brief, only a few minutes through deserted hallways, all within the gaijin compound. Clay fell in beside her along the way. Their escort halted and rapped at the bottom of an upscale Western door. Melkor opened it and stood out of the way as the samurai herded the lovers into the living room familiar from Sass’s wall.
All three, and the mink, waited silently as the guards withdrew. Melkor followed them to shoot a bolt on the door. He waved and the tasteful Japanese smart walls, adorned with wood and rice paper and landscapes of big nature and tiny humans, vanished into a particolored chaos of confetti. They hummed aggressively, too, with a vibration she felt creeping up her legs from the tatami floor.
Sass recoiled at the ghastly displays. Clay raised a hand to stroke the small of her back. She met his eye gratefully. His lover’s touch grounded her.
Melkor waved at the walls. “We’re shielded,” he murmured. But he drew close and still spoke quietly indeed. “We need to talk.”
“Won’t Ueno object to you interrogating us?” Sass challenged.
“Ueno Aimi’s feelings are not my concern. Could your people really repair Earth’s atmosphere? Make it breathable again?” His enormous fish-eyes bored into Sass’s own from well within her social radius comfort.
This wasn’t the tack she expected him to take, dammit. “Possibly. My team haven’t had time to complete their studies. Pontiac distracted us.”
She caught herself glaring and dropped her gaze to his gills, on a level with her nose due to his greater height. She’d thought he wanted his human form back. But this was a different agenda, more pressing somehow. Well, if he needed anything urgent, it sure as hell wasn’t terraforming.
“Too much oxygen,” she recalled. “My botanist hadn’t figured out how you had so much oxygen. Last time I spoke to him. He would know more by now.”
Melkor drew back, the muscles around his mouth grown rigid. “You said atmospheric terraformer.”
Her eyes rose to meet his again in surprise. “Yes, Zelda. She works for Eli, my botanist. Eli leads the science mission.”
Clay saw the disconnect where she did not. “On our moon, terraforming is the unifying science. Most worlds gave up. Their survival margins were too tight, terraforming a gift for their great-grandchildren. They couldn’t afford it. But Mahina never gave up. Our team is a botanist, an atmosphere specialist, and an agronomist. Hell, the chief engineer’s first career was in civil engineering. But they were all educated in a system whose holy grail was the gradual terraforming of Mahina. Even their domed city is a hodge-podge of little pocket biomes while they work out the details. Our botanist knows his stuff.”
“Oh,” Sass agreed. “Yes. Earth’s people specialize more than ours do?” Clay confirmed with a slow blink. “Please understand, terraforming takes a long, long time. The colonies couldn’t possibly fix your planet for you. But we’ve learned tricks that are safe and sure. Slow. I’d have to speak to Eli and Zelda to hear what they think is possible. But on our world – our new home – we’ve sealed an artificial atmosphere with a stable ozone-based wrapper. We crack water for the oxygen, and large-scale agriculture does a lot of the heavy lifting. Including landscape-scale plantings, genetically modified trees and such.”
Clay offered, “We visited another world that used nanites to precipitate out a sulfuric acid load from the atmosphere, and slowly bury it. That wasn’t very close to completion.”
“But you have the power,” Sass realized suddenly. She glanced at the walls, still writhing in electronic insanity. “Your walls. What is the power source?”
“Humidity,” Melkor breathed. “And yes, we crack water for oxygen. Earth has no shortage of water.”
Sass pressed her lips askew. If the fancy new tech required humidity, fat lot of good it would do bone-dry Mahina or frozen Sagamore. “How much humidity do they need?”
Melkor blinked, surprised by the question. “Very little. These walls operate even in the Sahara.”
She brightened. “Oh, good! Melkor, what do you want?”
“Emancipation from the Northern League,” he whispered.
“Oh. That…doesn’t seem very likely. Does it?” God save her, she’d fallen in with a revolutionary.
The diplomat’s eyes lidded. “If I got you out of here. To people eager to hear what you have to offer. Could you deliver? Not to the Northern League. You saw for yourself. The League has no interest in saving Earth or her people. Only to preserve the status quo, with them safe in their domes and terrorizing everyone else.”
Two PO-3 asteroid hoppers and a couple smaller support ships could do zilch to bring down a regime that held this planet in a vise grip for a couple centuries. Her more recent essential decency required Sass to speak truth, that she couldn’t help him. But her inner tent rat prevailed.
“We’d love to help you. And yes, we can deliver. But you need to get me back to my ship.”
“That I can’t do. Baikonur is in the middle of Russia. My contacts don’t have the reach. They’ll promise you they can. But they can’t.”
Sass’s eyes narrowed. He spoke disappointing truth to her rosy lies. And she believed him. “Boat people?”
He nodded with his transparent eyelids.
“There is no way for me to rejoin my ship. Is there.”
He sighed and tilted his head.
“Is this the oxygen source my people couldn’t find, Melkor? The boat peoples are still working to save the planet?”
“Yes.”
Clay murmured, “We need to get our people out. We owe them that. And the ship.” His hand ranged up between Sass’s shoulder blades. “But we don’t need to leave with them. We’re home, Sass. And Hakone is a dead end.”
He was right, she allowed. Given Hakone’s agenda, staying here was too great a risk. The drugs she’d been given in Pontiac could make her reveal Mahina’s location, a secret she earnestly needed to keep. Even suicide wasn’t an option for them.
Unless… She’d forgotten so many details about Earth. And then they reasserted when they were relevant again. Could she forget again, in order to protect the Aloha system? On Vitality, on the years-long trip into exile, she intentionally willed herself to forget about Earth and instead look for
ward to the colony. Clay probably even ordered her to do it. But no, that protection was only a theory, too flimsy to stand up to a drug.
“We need to get out of Hakone,” she agreed. “But we’re not the scientists. Without my ship, I have little to offer. Can you get us out?”
“Yes,” Melkor said simply.
She continued frowning at him. “What will it cost you?”
“As you’ve probably realized, I’m an inside agent. My job is to look for opportunity, and take it when it appears. Pontiac could fall today. The Tyrant is old, the Ambassador a fool. It will right itself, of course. Any upheaval would distract them for only a matter of days. But since it could happen any day now, I choose today.”
“This is a one-way trip for you, isn’t it?”
His lips pressed flat. “One I’m eager to make. If this is an opportunity worth taking.”
“But all you can promise is to get us out of Hakone,” Clay reasoned. “And introduce us to boat people. Who are no doubt charming.”
That snide note was addressed to Sass. She didn’t need the reminder. Submarines erupted into a fur-fly in the Sargasso just a few days ago, American navy versus boat people, and possibly boat peoples versus each other, while she simply flew away. The proposed new audience had little to offer, and no control over the space defenses or the League’s fighter jets.
But they probably had comms, and less ability to jam hers. Sass stroked her warm mink stole. “Yes. Get us out of here. We’ll help you all we can.”
Melkor’s eyes lidded in his fishy nod. “This way. Silently.”
A closet door on a side wall had a control panel beside it. He reached a finger toward it, and its control lights flickered. He waited a moment longer for a sign Sass couldn’t perceive, then touched the panel. The door sprung open, to a more ostentatious living room with similar confetti walls. “Ambassador’s suite.”
