The grenade hit her translucent body and exploded. It left a large brown mark on her side, but it did not penetrate. The giant worm writhed in pain, her tail slapping down on the ice near George. Then Katy fired the M-16 and small, red welts appeared, the bullets cutting through her thick skin. The creature screamed again and Katy fell to the ground, her head pounding.
First the android. Then you. You will die, but your child will live inside of me. She will be a part of me. She will call me mother.
“No,” said Katy. She got up again, and fought the urge to lay down on the ice and let go. Everything seemed hopeless and lost. But she would fight for the baby.
She fired two more grenades. Then unloaded on her with the M-16. The Queen wasn’t taking George, and she wasn’t taking the baby. Two more grenades whizzed over Katy’s head. Koba was standing there, his face white. The worm slowed, but it was coming for George.
Katy willed herself to step forward, towards the creature. She made it to George, crawling, and grabbed him by the hand and pulled back as hard as she could. But he didn’t move. Koba came and they edged him back slowly.
Still the giant worm came on. She was wounded, her body oozing yellow fluid. It towered over Katy and Koba, casting a shadow on them like they were standing next to a building.
Katy fell in the ice but refused to let go of George. Koba was crying.
See. You cannot win little girl. You all are mine.
Katy bowed her head and started to cry. “Jolo!” she screamed. But it was too late. She would die here next to George. She cried for her baby.
Late to the Party
Hurley knew the Maxwell V2 Stingray better than anyone in the core. Not many were old enough to remember. Made in Marxed, near Faraley, a hundred or so years before, during the expansion, back when everything was new and dangerous and space ships were overbuilt. Maybe a little too heavy by Fed standards, but it made up for it, like the Argossy, in strength and speed. The Fed killed production fifty years ago saying they were too costly and started making the standard Fed Small Fighter. That’s what they called them: Small Fighters. And they couldn’t hold a candle to the Stingrays.
The Stingray was armed with an old-style plasma cannon and Hurley wondered if it would fire. He had to rig the fuel cell to get power and he was worried the cell would give too much juice too soon and fry the weapon.
But that was the least of his problems. The moment the little boat broke through the ice it veered off course and even though it stayed above the ice, he couldn’t get control of exactly where he was going. He was in a gentle, lazy turn to the right. He’d checked everything in the hole before they left. It had to be one of the ailerons stuck, forcing him in a wide circle to God knows where. He went so far out he noticed there was black earth out beyond the ice, but that fact would mean little if he finally got back to the mall and everyone was dead.
After he’d checked everything ten times and cussed and banged on the canopy for good measure, he checked the dumb little computer. The older boat didn’t rely so much on computer controls and that suited him just fine. He was an engineer and his mind immediately thought of mechanical and structural issues first. But there, three screens deep, he noticed one of the manual flight controls was selected: hover pattern.
He hit the button to deselect it, and instantly he had control. He turned left and it felt good, like scratching an itch. Now he could fly this thing.
He turned back towards the ice patch and engaged the single engine full out. It whined and the whole boat just hummed along. The last time he’d been in one was when he was in his twenties, flying support for merch boats going into uncharted space.
The Argossy came onto the screen a few minutes later, the Greenback right next to it. Both on the ice. And no red. That must be good news, he thought. Then he pulled up the heat source scan and spotted ten or so humans on the ground. But there was something else: a large heat sig that he couldn’t make out. Huge. It was moving towards two of the humans. It suddenly flashed hot on the screen, maybe explosions. They were still fighting. And the thing as big as a ship didn’t really move like a ship.
The Queen was on the ice.
He pointed the little ship at the big heat sig and armed the plasma guns.
Soon he was just within range. He lifted the safety off the plasma guns and pulled the trigger just to see if they worked.
Nothing.
He was almost there. Close enough to use the forward camera. He magnified the screen and there, filling the screen was the giant worm. The hideous creature had giant dark spots on its side and appeared to be wounded, but it was still coming for the two humans on the ground.
“Not today,” said Hurley. He retracted the plasma gun back into the recess on the side of the little boat and pushed the stick all the way forward. He decreased altitude to about three meters off the ground. The ice was a gray blur. There were several dead BG boats on the ground. But his eyes focused on the giant thing he could now see clearly on the screen. He aimed the little boat dead at the center of it. He smiled. No dumb proximity warnings on this little ship. He tightened the harness and edged a few degrees to his right. He wanted to be dead center and at max thrust when he got there. The old boat was full out and had started to shake. The thrusters were at 104%.
“Real close, now, Baby,” said Hurley. “Let’s show ‘em what you’re made of.”
Goodnight, Georgia
Katy didn’t hear the ship until it was on them. It came in fast, like a bullet shot from a gun. The giant worm above her was at full height, rows of long white teeth exposed. Katy couldn’t run. Couldn’t move. There was a tearing noise right above her and she could see the underside of Hurley’s old boat for a split second and then it sunk into the flesh of the worm like a knife, nearly ripping her in half.
The boat broke through and spun out of control, end over end. It hit the ice upside down, flipped over several times, one of the short wings and other bits breaking off, and finally came to a stop a hundred meters away.
Suddenly Katy could stand and she grabbed Koba’s hand and they started pulling George back again. The Queen was nearly sliced in half. Her insides oozed down onto the ice in a thick yellow mucous. It melted the ice as it slowly spread out like lava all over the ice on top of the mall.
Greeley came up and they carried George back to the Argossy. They found Hurley still strapped in, a bloody spot on the inside where his head had hit the canopy. Risa got the canopy up and checked him. She looked down and shook her head. He was gone. They placed him alongside the other fallen humans.
Koba and Greeley stayed close to Katy, everyone helping with the wounded or getting food from the hotel or making sure there were no more of Hazuki’s men around. They should have been happy, but it was like a bad dream to Katy, and the worst part was to come.
Greeley took off his battle suit and walked with Katy to the Argossy. George was there, along with two of the women and one of the boys.
Katy just looked at Greeley. She didn’t have to ask.
Greeley rubbed his hands over his face and fiddled with a strip of plastiskin covering a shoulder wound. Finally, he looked at her and she knew she wasn’t going to like it.
“We were in a bad way there and had it comin’ from all angles. And one of the BG boats was nearly dead but it limped its way over the mall and it just stopped there. Then George started running for it. But Hazuki got him. That wounded ship disappeared. Then another near dead BG boat comes along and stops right over the mall and Jolo runs right up under it.” Here he stopped for a moment, rubbed his hand over his eyes. “And then,” he stopped and just shook his head. “And then he was gone. Just disappeared like the ship before.”
“The Queen said I would never see him again.” And Katy started to cry and Greeley gave her a hug.
“We’ll find him. He shut down the power source somehow.”
“It was some kind of portal,” said Koba.
“Why didn’t he tell us?” said Katy.
“I wouldn’t’ve wanted him to go either.”
“He had to do it. He saved us all,” said Riley.
Katy sat in the corner of the med bay next to George waiting for the nightmare to end. Barth, George, Hurley. And now Jolo. It was too high a price to pay. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Jolo still there, still stomping through the Argossy. He’d yell at Greeley, then when the big man wasn’t looking, he’d grin at her. There was always energy when he was around. Always hope.
Katy held George’s limp, android hand. The med bot would do what she could. She plugged him up to the charging cell, but he was unresponsive. Wires ran out of his head into the computer but there was no communication. There was a bandage over his face where the bullet went in. Usually his skin would repair itself almost immediately, but the wound remained open, exposing the fiber wires and electrical bits. Katy couldn’t look at it.
George needed Merthon.
For the next few days Katy stayed right there in the med bay. She slept on a cot and Koba brought her food from the hotel. They found a stash of slightly out-of-date Fed rations and Koba said everyone was working together nicely. He was going to break into the vault soon and Riley and Risa were working on getting one of the freighter haulers from the junk pile working so they could carry the weapons back.
But Katy didn’t really want to go anywhere. Here was the last place Jolo was and this is where she wanted to be. How could she leave him?
……
Ten days after the final fight on the ice over the city known as Atlanta, three ships broke through the atmosphere and headed home. It was the first time in a hundred years that a ship had left jump point one. Riley and Risa piloted a large freighter filled with kinetic weapons from the stash in the downtown Atlanta annex building. Risa’s Greenback was in one of the fighter bays of the freighter.
The other ship, a Fed transport, was piloted by three of the women rescued from the breeding program. There were twenty-seven boys all told, and nine girls liberated from the upper floors of the hotel. Of the twenty-eight women rescued from the breeding program, five women fell in the final battle.
Greeley found the old woman that took care of the pregnant women but she refused to come with the survivors. Hazuki’s body was not found, but Risa claims an ion cannon blast from the Greenback killed him.
Katy piloted the Argossy as usual. Jolo’s chair remained empty, but everyone looked to Katy for leadership. Greeley stuck to her like glue, bullying anyone who did not carry out her orders immediately and with the deference and respect reserved for high ranking Fed officers. Eventually she had to pull him aside and tell him she was okay. After that he backed off, but only a little.
Katy told him she was fine, but that was a lie. She sat in her chair and ran the numbers: Two dead, one near dead, if an android really died, and Jolo missing. But they had rescued sixty humans.
Sixty souls doomed to die on Earth were coming home. Home to what? No one knew. But they got the weapons that would help the core. Would Jolo be happy with that?
There were moments when she got angry and had to go to the storage bay and yell as loud as she could, her screams echoing off the hull of the ship. And then she would go to Jolo’s room and lie in his bunk and cry. Why did he have to keep giving so much to these people who would never fully accept him?
One evening three days out from Earth, Katy was in her bunk, her hand over the small bump in her belly. “You’ll see your Daddy soon enough.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I hope you see him. He loves you so much.”
“Cap’n Katy.” A small boy name Chuck was standing in her door with no shirt on.
“I’m not the Captain,” she said.
“Who is?”
“Jolo.”
“The man wid da gun? He gone.”
“He’s coming back.”
The boy stared at her blankly. “Who you talkin’ to?”
“My baby.”
“Ain’t s’pose to tell nuttin, Cap’n—I mean, Katy, but Korley done brought a cat named Richard on board.”
Katy smiled.
“You wanna play wid us?” the boy said. “We in the big play room.”
He grabbed her hand and they went down to the storage bay and Katy watched the boys and girls play. They laughed and yelled, their voices echoing off the hull of the Argossy. They ran and jumped and fell and cried. They ate Fed rations and dropped the wrappers, crumbs on their smiling faces. And not a care in the world. Like everything was okay. Like there was no war. Like Jolo was still there.
……
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About JD Oppenheim:
My name is JD Oppenheim and I live in Japan with my wife and two kids and write sci-fi novels and teach English. I studied fiction writing at the University of Florida in the late 80s, back when an IBM 286 was a fast computer. I thank you for reading my novels and I hope you enjoy them.
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—JD Oppenheim
The Jolo Vargas Space Opera Series Box Set Page 61
