Carter led Whip to the LZ, but she doesn’t know where the base’s entrance is.
“These cameras have sound?” I ask, walking down the steps.
“You made it!” Brick says, relieved.
“Was there ever any doubt?” I ask, shaking Brick’s hand.
“A lot,” Chuy says. “He’s been pacing like an expectant father.”
“And you?” I ask.
“Vete a la mierda, cabrón.” She follows the insult with a smile, and I return it. We’ve run through routines like this a hundred times in the past. Feels different this time. How could it not? The fruit of our combined loins populate this base—literally dozens of descendants, and more in other bases around the planet. Chuy isn’t aware of the grand scale of our personal effect on this future world—but the folks with my genes in them stand out in my now-very-full mental filing cabinet. Some of them even look like her.
“Good to see you, too,” I say, and I acknowledge Drago, Adrik, and BigApe with a nod. There’s a lot I’d like to say to all of these people. To Chuy about…you know, stuff. Apologies to Brick. Sympathy to BigApe. God, I can’t even look at him. But there isn’t time for any of that.
“Someone give me audio on those two,” I say to the room, knowing that one of the people at workstations will get it done. A moment later, audio from the feed fills the large room.
“You sure this is the right place?” Whip asks. Sounds annoyed.
“This whole planet is the right place,” Carter replies.
They’re both wearing head-to-toe, mechanized body armor, but the size difference reveals who’s who.
“You need to call in the fleet,” she says. “Now.”
Whip shakes his head. “I’m not calling in a mass deployment until—” He holds up a finger. “We confirm this is the right place.” Holds up a second finger. “And I’m sure this isn’t a trap.”
Letting them wander around in the jungle is tempting, but they’ll eventually stumble on the entrance.
“We could kill them,” Brick says, voice low and serious. “Right now.”
“I understand why you want to,” I tell him, “but that wouldn’t solve anything, and that’s not the plan.”
“What is plan?” Drago asks.
“First,” I raise an index finger, “I’m going to say, ‘Hello’. Let them know we’re here.”
“You can’t be serious?” BigApe says.
I ignore the comment, in part because I can’t bear to look at him.
“I’m coming with you,” Brick says.
“No,” I say, “you’re not.” Feels weird giving elder Brick orders, but that is why I’m here. “I need you to get everyone on-planet in a ship and ready to rotate the hell out of here.”
“You want us to abandon Beta-Prime?” He sounds disgusted by the idea. “We didn’t bring you here to retreat. We can’t leave the planet undefended.”
“It won’t be,” I say. “Trust me. Just be ready to rotate on my command.”
He takes a moment. Simmers down. “Where to?”
I head for a console and motion for the woman seated at it to move. She steps aside and waits. My fingers work the keyboard like an old pro, maneuvering through software, typing in a string of letters and numbers, and then dropping it all into the holographic feed.
I’ve never done any of that before, and the celestial coordinates I just punched into the system came from the part of my brain that is glowing blue. When I look up, no one is looking at the location displayed on the celestial map, they’re staring at me.
“What?” I ask.
“Your eyes,” Chuy says. “When you were typing. They were blue.”
“Not just blue,” Drago adds. “Like headlights. Glowing.”
“Long story,” I say. “For another time. Right now, I need you—” I point at Brick. “—to get every ship in the fleet, and every person on-world, to those coordinates.”
Brick finally looks at the hologram. His eyes widen. “This is Union Command. What do you expect us to do?”
“The Union is paranoid. All data is centralized and stored on Union Command. Find the data centers. Burn them to the ground.”
“What good will that do?” Will asks. “Our home will still be under attack.”
“Beta-Prime was never humanity’s home,” I tell him. “It’s theirs.” I look to the floor. “But if the Union’s data is destroyed, the Predictors can’t do their job, and if that happens—”
“The Union will be divided,” Brick says, making sense of it all.
“Every planet in the Union will be lost to the others. No way to communicate. No way to rotate from one place to another. They’ll have to start over, on their own.”
“They won’t last a hundred years,” Chuy says.
I nod. “Rabbits on an island. They’ll hump themselves into extinction.”
Drago shrugs. “Not bad way to go.”
“But a good way to start over.” I punch in a second set of celestial coordinates. “Here.”
The new planet appears in the holographic display.
“Earth,” Brick says, disappointed.
“The planet is recovering,” I tell him. “Slowly. But with some TLC, future know how, and a good ol’ ‘can do’ attitude…”
Brick sighs.
“It’s where we belong,” I say. “We’re not ready to be anywhere else.”
Saying it stings. Means I’m giving up Elysium, too.
Ah well.
I reach my hand out to Chuy. “Ready?”
She steps into my grasp.
“What are you going to do?” Brick asks.
“First…parley. Second…we’ll get creative. Whip showing up without the rest of the Union fleet wasn’t part of the plan. So, I’m improvising.”
“Improvising?” Brick says, sounding concerned. “I don’t think—”
Before Brick can finish expressing his concerns, I fire up the PSD and rotate into the fourth dimension, emerging a few seconds later, right in front of Whip and Carter—all by myself.
41
Whip and Carter do a good job hiding their surprise at my sudden arrival. Whip takes a single step back, raising his weapon. Carter doesn’t even do that. She kind of just looks at me. I can’t see her eyes through the armor, but she’s putting off a coiled snake vibe.
“Whip,” I say in greeting, not offering a hand. Then I turn to Carter. “Judas.”
Whip’s facemask snaps open as he chuckles. “That’s a good one. I missed your sense of humor, boss.”
“Likewise,” I say, trying to hide my inner conflict. Like Brick, Whip is older, but he still wears the face of my friend and trusted brother. It’s his heart that’s changed.
“You enjoyed every second of it,” Carter says.
“Wait,” Whip says, smiling. “Hold on. You did the horizontal mambo with him? Him, but not me?”
Carter shrugs. “I fuck who I want. Got us here, didn’t it?”
“Look,” Whip says to me. “I know you’re angry at me. I get it. For real. But the status quo is different now. A guy like me can rule the fucking galaxy. I have a damn harem, man. You know I’m not down with the racist Undesirable bullshit, but I’m living the life. Unfortunately for you…”
He swirls his hand around his face, but I get his meaning.
I’m black.
“You killed Brick’s wife.” I motion to the electric whip he still carries.
“Whoa, whoa,” he says. “That’s a gross exaggeration. I don’t know what Brick told you, but—”
“I was there,” I say.
His face scrunches up. “No…you weren’t. Don’t know if you’ve figured it out yet, but we’ve been tracking you since you hijacked that piece of shit you’ve called home for the past five years. You weren’t there.”
“Whatever it is you think you know about me…is wrong.” That’s not entirely true. He probably had an accurate picture of my life up until today. But I’m not the same person I was an hour ago. What I ne
ed, is for him to believe that everything he thinks he knows is wrong.
It’ll put him off balance.
Make him feel isolated and exposed.
When that happens, he’ll call in the fleet. With the Union hard up for real estate, I don’t think they’ll lay waste to the entire planet. They’ll put boots on the ground and plan to slaughter the Minutemen up close and personal.
“I’m not the person you think I am,” I say, almost growling the words out and willing the Europhid presence in me to do me a solid. I can’t see it myself, but the confusion on Whip’s face lets me know that my eyes are, once again, glowing blue.
I raise two fingers toward Carter. Fire an imaginary gun.
Carter is struck in the head, hard enough to flip her like a pancake. Her armored body hits the ground hard. This time, Whip reels back. His facemask snaps down.
The sound of a distant sniper round catches up to the bullet, rolling through the forest.
No idea if Carter is dead. I honestly hope so. But that armor they’re wearing looks tough.
Whip looks from me, to Carter and back again. “Ho-lee shit. That—seriously—that was awesome. People in this time don’t appreciate theater. But that… Don’t take this the wrong way, but I wish you were white.”
“Wouldn’t change anything,” I say. “I’d still be standing here, and you’d still be shitting yourself.”
He goes rigid. Whip is a lot like Marty McFly. Call him yellow and he sees red. Tries to hide it. “C’mon out, Chuy! Let me see that fine Mexican—”
A bullet explodes into the bark of a tree just a foot from Whip’s head. He looks at the bullet hole as the rifle’s report echoes around us.
“I’m going to give you one chance,” I tell him. “Repent. Come home. Fight the good fight.”
“You don’t stand a chance,” he says, and he means it.
“Would with your help,” I say, but I don’t mean it.
“Brick would kill me, first chance he got,” he says, and I wonder if he’s considering coming over to our side.
And if he accepted the offer? What then? Forgive and forget? He’s committed atrocities. Murdered people. He’s about to launch a planetwide genocide.
There’s no coming back from that.
And both of us know it.
“Thanks for the offer,” he says. “Going to make killing you a little harder. Well, just a little.”
Remembering the way Whip struck down Brick’s wife, simply because she wasn’t one of the Union’s pale desirables, fills me with rage. I don’t want to let him go. With a point of a finger, Chuy could drop him. We could take him and Carter inside, dismantle their armor, and make them answer for their crimes. But I have no choice. The plan doesn’t work if he’s dead.
But I can whup his ass first.
I rotate behind him, grasp hold of his whip, plant a foot on his ass, and shove. He topples forward, but he turns the fall into a roll. Comes up on his feet, aiming his weapon toward me.
I’ve seen what his rifle can do. Not wanting my face melted, I focus on disarming him.
The whip is easy to operate. Button on the handle. It comes to life with a crackle. Before Whip can pull the trigger, the weapon is severed in two with an electric snap.
This thing is powerful. Might even make short work of his armor.
He confirms it by taking a step back, just out of range. No way the rifle is his only weapon. The armor probably has hidden lazzer weapons, maybe even mini rocket pods.
No way to tell who would win if we went toe-to-toe right now, and I don’t want to find out. I want him to leave.
I point my fingers at him the same way I did Carter. “Last chance.”
“That’s a fancy trick,” he says, motioning to the PSD on my belt. “Sure wish I had one. Oh wait.”
Whip rotates away.
What the fuck?
He appears again, crouched over Carter. Hoists her up. “When you see your boy, Porter. Thank him for the tech. Adios, assholes.”
He rotates away with Carter. Just as he slips from the third dimension, a bullet slaps into a tree, right where his head had been.
I don’t have time to care that Chuy lost her patience. “Chuy.”
“I heard. Come get me.”
I rotate through the jungle, reappearing just long enough to grab Chuy.
“Know where you’re going?” she asks.
Takes just a moment of thought to access the Europhids’ planet-wide awareness and locate the Bitch’n in orbit. I don’t answer with words. I just hold on to her and rotate off world, appearing on the Bitch’n’s bridge.
The seats are empty.
I activate my comms. “Porter. You copy?”
No answer.
“Morton. You copy?”
Chuy moves to a control panel. “Local comms are offline,” she says, and with the press of a button, she turns them back on. “Porter. You copy?”
Still nothing.
“Fuck… Burnett. You copy?”
“D-Dark Horse?” He sounds terrified.
“Where are you, Burn?”
“Locked in…in a supply closet. H-Hildy is with me.” His voice is shaky. He’s fighting to stay coherent. Breaks my fucking heart. “We’re okay, but…but…”
“There’s a bomb,” Hildy says. “In the hangar! Said they were going to activate it when you got back!”
“Go!” Chuy shouts, and I rotate to the hangar.
Takes a fraction of a second to find the keg-shaped bomb, but several seconds longer to fully comprehend what I’m seeing.
Porter and Morton are bound to the bomb, arms outstretched as though embracing the device, though I think they were trying to embrace each other around it. They’re both stripped bare. Morton is covered in the kind of wounds a lazzer whip might cause. He was tortured.
That’s how they got a PSD from Porter…
My legs go wobbly as I approach.
Emotion bubbles up, raw and unhinged.
Flashes of their final moments are assembled by my imagination. The grief. The shame. They hadn’t been strong enough to withstand Whip’s and Carter’s assault, and in the end had given our enemies a tool that could help defeat the Minutemen.
But I don’t blame them.
I blame myself. They’re not soldiers, but I brought them into a war.
I drop to my knees, tears flowing freely.
The Union sucks. It’s pure evil. But people are still people. The future might be so dark that the folks can’t see the truth about their lives, but these two…they were stars. Not a trace of hate in their hearts.
They didn’t deserve this.
“I’m sorry,” I say, putting my hands on their heads, covering the lazzer holes that took their lives. A sob escapes my lips. “I’m so sorry.”
A red light atop the bomb begins blinking. Sobers me fast.
I wrap an arm around the device and rotate away, leaving Morton and Porter behind. I’m not thinking when I rotate. I just do it, trying to get away from Bitch’n.
The moment I emerge from the fourth dimension, my skin burns. I catch a glimpse of the bomb floating away into a black void, realize I’m in space—without a suit, and I clench my eyes shut. Searing pain grips my body as the vacuum of space decreases the boiling point of my bodily fluids. If I didn’t routinely exhale before rotating, the air in my lungs would have expanded, popping them like a pair of balloons inside my chest.
I’ve got a few seconds before the damage is irreparable.
Maybe fifteen seconds to live.
But my heart is broken.
My thoughts confused.
My nervous system overwhelmed.
I know what I have to do, but I can’t think of how to do it.
And then, the bomb detonates.
42
Orange light pierces my eyelids, and I brace for oblivion.
Explosions in space don’t make sound, or produce shockwaves, but I’m close enough to the bomb that the momentary combustion will li
kely atomize me.
My stomach churns. I feel a tug, like gravity. And then, I collide with something solid.
Did Chuy maneuver Bitch’n between me and the explosion?
Did she hit me?
Doesn’t make sense. Mostly because I don’t feel like I’m dying anymore.
Because I’m not in space.
There’s a floor beneath me.
Warm air scorches my skin as it thaws. My lungs scream in relief when I take a breath.
I lie on the floor, curled up like a newborn, wracked by pain and the confusion of life, breathing desperately.
This is Bitch’n. Has to be. But how did I get here? I don’t remember activating the PSD, never mind navigating the fourth dimension and rotating back out.
I’m alive, though.
But Porter and Morton are not.
I force my eyes open. They burn, but I can still see. Another few seconds out there and the damage to my body would have been permanent. Because I’d be dead.
“Chuy,” I say, my voice weak and rasping.
“Where are you?” she asks. Sounds like she’s running.
I scan the space around me. Really confused now. “My quarters. I’m…in bed?”
Fueled by rage, I push myself up, shouting in pain. My body resists, shouting back, ‘lie back down, asshole!’ But fuck that. I’ll lie down when this is done, or when I’m dead.
The moment I get my feet beneath me and I’m standing upright, the door slides open. Chuy rushes in, an awkward look on her face.
“I’ll be okay in—” She throws her arms around me. Squeezes hard. Never has something simultaneously hurt so bad and felt so good.
“Asshole,” she says, still holding me. “That was the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.”
“Wasn’t going to let anyone else die,” I say.
She leans back to look me in the eyes. “You could have—”
“What?” I ask.
“Your eyes.”
“Blue again?”
“Flickering,” she says. “Fading.”
“That explains how I got back,” I say. “I was a dead man. Don’t remember triggering the slew or rotating.”
“They can control you?” She sounds horrified.
“If I’m ever not myself, and you think I’m lost for good, I give you permission to put a bullet through my glowing blue brains.”
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