Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  The stutter, the head tic. Noa put her hand on his arm without thinking. His eyes slid to it and then slid up to her face. Blue eyes on hers, his lips did not move as he whispered across the link, “I think it will be easier if I showed you.”

  She nodded. And then the world went black.

  James showed her everything: the walk through Gate 8, the darkness behind his eyes when he had listened to the transmission—and he translated the transmission for her, too. Noa’s avatar had stood quietly the whole time, arms crossed as they were in real life, as close to him as they were in real life.

  When it was all over, they stood in the mental space between their minds. Noa looked up at him and said nothing for a long while. “It could have been a hallucination,” Noa’s avatar said.

  “It wasn’t,” said James.

  “A dream.”

  “I don’t dream—I recycle memories, that’s all—and that’s what this was,” James’s avatar responded.

  In the mindscape and the real world, Noa narrowed her eyes up at him. “So, this … ” she waved a hand and turned the scene to the interior of Gate 8. “Is your way of telling me you might be an alien?”

  In the real world James’s head ticked. “I … I … ” His avatar ran a hand through his hair, and then chuckled mirthlessly. “I wish I could say that for certain.” He met the eyes of Noa’s avatar. In the darkness of the mindscape, they were nearly black. Her avatar still had the scar on her cheek, but her hand was whole. Her brow furrowed, and her mouth opened. Before she could speak, he said, “Noa, I know I’m wrapped up in the Archangel Project somehow … ”

  “And I am, too,” Noa said.

  He shook his head. “No, not like me. We both know the evidence points to me being the Archangel—”

  “And I’m probably the Heretic.”

  James’s avatar blinked.

  She held up her wrist, and then scrunched her eyes at the sweep of dark brown perfect skin. “In real life, it has the tattoo … ” James looked down at her avatar’s wrist, and remembered the tattoo from the physical world in perfect detail. Running his hand down her avatar’s wrist, he left the tattoo behind. H0000616.

  “The ‘H’ stands for ‘Heretic.’” Her lips stretched into a thin, bitter smile. “They never told me why.” The smile crumpled. She hissed, and he felt frustration, anger, and despair seep across the link.

  “Noa … ” James stammered. “Something is wrong with me. The time before I woke up in the snow, it feels like a dream, less clear, hazy, as though I was a completely different person.” He closed his eyes. “Before I got to Gate 8 … I was a different person. I couldn’t have killed anyone.” He looked down to the ground. “I couldn’t have walked past a dead mother and child and not felt something, not tried to help.”

  “You don’t know you didn’t feel anything!” Noa snapped. “It was the dream, the memory, something was wrong with your recall.”

  “I can’t even smile, but I have all these abilities that I don’t even remember I have. Noa, something is wrong with me. I’m broken.”

  “We’re both broken!” Noa said, throwing up her left hand. On her avatar it was whole … and two platinum bands were on her ring finger. Noa’s eyes widened as though she’d just noticed them. Her avatar pulled her hand close and suddenly they were surrounded by wraiths. A woman on a crutch holding out her hand, a corpse’s face frozen open in a scream, a guard beating a woman bent over a sewing machine. Long lines of women trudging between barracks, and Kenji throwing up his arms before a wall of fire. Noa’s memories, James realized—or her fears.

  A hazy recollection came to him, of the man he’d been before, with another woman—her father had just died, her face streaked by tears. James’s other self hadn’t felt anything particular for that woman, but he’d felt for her loss. He had gathered her into his arms and pulled her close.

  With his avatar and his real self he reached out and pulled both Noas to him. It felt awkward, like his arms didn’t belong to that man in the memory who’d comforted the woman so easily. Maybe his arms didn’t belong to that man. But as soon as he touched her, Noa practically melted against him, as though she belonged there. It was so right, it was overwhelming; he found he could say nothing. Noa was quiet too, but the wraiths receded.

  He felt her take a deep breath. She didn’t pull away, and he didn’t let her go. Two bands on the ring finger of her left hand. She might be married. He felt as though she wasn’t for some reason … but he found he didn’t care either way. He dropped his cheek on the top of her head and pulled her tighter.

  “See, both broken,” she said.

  He rocked her, his hand trailing along her back. He could feel the tiny ridges of her spine. “There are too many coincidences, Noa.” The words came out of his avatar in a sigh. “We both know the same dead language, I found you in the snow using a frequency that should be secure. I knew your name, your age, your rank.”

  She pulled back and looked up at him sharply. “And?”

  He shook his head. “That’s too much, you have to find that odd.”

  She pulled farther away, and his stomach fell. Looking away, Noa crossed her arms and shook her head. Her jaw hardened. “No.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t believe that there is an alien force at work,” James said, stepping toward her. She didn’t look at him. He persisted. “You saw what happened at Gate 8, not just in my memories, but in reality.”

  “No,” she said again. The set of her jaw became even more stubborn. She glanced quickly at him but then away. “I still think you’re a hyper-augment, wrapped up in this madness for no other reason than I am. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Noa, you can’t be in denial anymore.”

  Still not looking at him, she shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  James rolled his eyes. “The Luddeccean forces were shot down with technology you admit humans don’t have yet. You can’t ignore that.”

  “I’m not ignoring it!” Noa snapped across the link. Her avatar turned to him, arms crossed. Lip curling, she said, “I’m saying. It. Doesn’t. Matter.”

  James’s avatar’s jaw dropped. In real life, his jaw remained shut as though snarled in wire.

  “I’m saying I don’t care.”

  James blinked, in real life and in avatar form.

  “You saved me,” Noa said. “You saved Oliver. You’re helping me save my whole damned planet. I don’t care who you are … or … or … ” she waved a hand. “Or what! If you’re an alien, well, you’ve treated me better than my own people.”

  James eyes widened; he realized he hadn’t taken a breath in several long minutes.

  “I don’t care.” She waved her hand again and shook her head. “What you are!”

  His head ticked to the side in real life. A feeling hit him with such force he couldn’t even name it. Relief, gratitude, victory, and a seething desire for more, all wrapped up in a neuron and nano screaming explosion. It took him by surprise, and ripped through his mind with such intensity and speed it overwhelmed the applications that kept emotions from slipping across the link.

  Noa gasped and rolled back on her feet.

  In the dark mental mindscape, a huge metal door suddenly appeared, so large it would have stretched up to the bridge if it had been real. Before James could ask for an explanation, the door swung open with a clang, and Noa’s and his avatars were bathed in white light.

  James gasped in wonder. Noa dropped her eyes, and then looked at him and shrugged. “That’s me … sometimes when you send emotions over the hard link I hallucinate. This one slipped.”

  She wasn’t doing anything to hide it. He supposed a several-story door with white light pouring through was hard to disguise.

  He looked back to her, suddenly embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to send you that.” It had been rude. And too much.

  Her eyes stayed locked on his. “It’s really alright.”

  He still felt ill at ease. Raising an eyebrow, he tried to mak
e a joke of it. “Another odd coincidence?”

  She didn’t say anything, but he thought he saw the corners of her lips curl up just slightly. A feeling slipped across the link, and it tugged him toward her before he’d even deciphered it. When they were standing so close there was no distance between them, his mind caught up with what his body already knew. She wanted him, too. He felt the familiar tug of longing swirled with something else. He felt like if this were it, if the ship were to disintegrate, if they never reached the Kannakah Cloud, he’d accomplished something, something enormous, and this moment meant as much as life itself. The door in Noa’s hallucination disappeared and there was only her and him and blinding white light. He lifted a hand to touch her cheek—in real life and to her avatar. Her eyes closed. Her lips parted slightly. And if he was an alien, he had some very human desires. His forehead fell onto hers. If he was alien … “I’d never hurt you, Noa. You must know that.”

  Her hand caught his. “I know.” She let her assurance slip across the link and it filled him with relief. He sent the feeling back and the floor beneath them vanished in the mindscape.

  For a moment they stood, the shared desire flaring across the hard link between them, and the white light of Noa’s hallucination turning to orange. Her more fragile body pressed against his, and electrons streamed between them. The hallucination, everything—it felt right. They were two nuclei about to fuse in the heart of a star, and he had never felt more human.

  19

  Kenji stood, head bowed, finger on his lips, listening to the static that was the transmission from Time Gate 8. In the midst of the static the words, “archangel” and “heretic” rang like bells. The rest was incomprehensible. “New code,” he said when the recording stopped. “It will take a while to decipher it, but with the clues provided by context and—”

  “Why did they say ‘archangel’ and ‘heretic?’” shouted Counselor Zar. He sat at the left of a long dark table in the bunker conference room at Central Authority.

  Kenji lifted his head, and had a moment of claustrophobia. The ceiling was low, the room was cave-like, despite the Luddeccean Green paint on the concrete-block walls. At the other end of the table, behind the premier, was the emblem of the dove. It smelled like dust, and the dryness of the air prickled his nostrils, pumped as it was through filters for disease and chemical agents that seemed to extract every bit of moisture from it. The room was packed with twenty military advisors, counselors, and the premier. All his friends, all his allies in this war for the soul of humanity.

  … but it was too much. Too many people, too many faces, he couldn’t keep track of all the shifts of bodies, flickering frowns, and narrowing eyes around him. He looked back down at the long conference table. Its highly polished black surface reflected only himself. “That is impossible to say definitively at this time.”

  Zar spoke. “They’ve cracked our code for their … their … thing … ” Kenji dared glance up at Zar; his face was unusually red. Kenji squinted. Was he angry? Embarrassed? Frightened? “And they’re throwing it back in our faces.”

  “We don’t know that,” Kenji protested, staring back down at the table. Hadn’t they heard what he’d just said?

  “Maybe they have a sense of humor,” said Counselor Karpel.

  “Why would you think that?” Kenji raised his head to the Counselor, genuinely curious. It seemed far-fetched that the intelligence would bother with something so trivial as a joke.

  Ignoring Kenji, drumming his fingers on the table, Karpel said, “We should have never given it such an obvious code name.”

  And that Kenji agreed with wholeheartedly. But it had been important to some people that the code reflect the apocalyptic nature of their enemy.

  The hall erupted in a buzz of conversation before Karpel replied. Kenji tried to focus, but all the different words, and the inflections they were spoken with … they were dizzying. He put his hands to his ears in frustration.

  “Quiet!” said a voice from the end of the table. Kenji looked up to see the Premier Leetier standing there. Leetier was slightly shorter than Kenji, and broader, his hair straighter—he was older, but had less gray hair. He possessed an ability that Kenji found nearly magical—the ability to silence a room. And sure enough … the room was now quiet, except for the distant hum of an air vent, and farther off, a drip. “Mr. Sato, we have something else I’d like you to analyze.”

  “Yes …” Kenji stammered. “Please.” No arguments, no emotions, just analysis. He nodded, glad and relieved. There were footsteps and several sheets of glossy paper, each as long as one arm laid before him on the table. Kenji lifted the still damp pho-toe-graphs. A buzz rose in the room, but with something before him to concentrate on, he could ignore it.

  The pho-toes were an ancient technology, but what Kenji had to work with. They might have been able to form a three-dimensional representation of the battle with images captured from the satellites that had once ringed Luddeccea, but the Guard had destroyed the satellites. He scowled. Gate 8 and all the major time gates needed to be shut down, but the satellites weren’t part of the intelligence. Their destruction had been a waste. He shivered, and suddenly felt heavy.

  He shook his head and tried to dampen the coil of dread loosening deep within him, and to ignore the chill that was spreading to his limbs. He focused on the pho-toes; they showed two-dimensional images of the Ark mid-battle. There was one taken just before the torpedo had grazed the hull. He stared at it, estimating the damage the ship had received, and then closed his eyes and whispered a prayer, “Thank you, great Jehovah.” Kenji didn’t really believe in God, at least not the way most Luddecceans believed in Him; but he found praying focused him, kept him centered.

  He lifted his head, and found all eyes at the great conference table on him. “They’ve sustained damage to a timefield band midway down the hull,” he said. “They won’t be going very far.”

  A breath of relief escaped his chest and he looked back down at the pho-toe. They could still save Noa. He put a hand through his hair. He had tried to warn her … He felt his stomach churn, like he needed to vomit.

  “We may not be able to save your sister, Kenji.” The words came from the opposite end of the conference table. Kenji’s head jerked up. The premier was the only other person in the room who was standing.

  Kenji’s jaw sagged. “But … she’s a victim. You saw him, he looked like her dead husband. Of course she would be drawn to him.” His hands began to shake. He’d never given much credence to the Luddeccean view of women being creatures too ruled by their emotions for the hard tasks of leadership and governance, but seeing Noa fall so easily into the clutches of one of them, so easily enthralled …

  “The lives of millions of Luddecceans are at stake,” the Premier said. “The virus they carry on the Ark could spread to the other colonies in the system.”

  Rolling back on his feet, Kenji swallowed hard.

  “Forget about them,” said a gruffer voice. Kenji turned to the Admiral of the Luddeccean Guard. Sitting next to the premier, he was leaning forward in his seat, eyes on Kenji. Was he angry? Suspicious? Kenji couldn’t tell.

  “We’ve seen the power of Gate 8, and we know the devil isn’t above using it.”

  Kenji tilted his head. Did the admiral believe the station was possessed by the devil? It was hard for him to tell who in the Premier’s council were devout, who were opportunists, and who were people like himself—people who didn’t believe the letter of the prophecies, but believed in the spirit. The spirit was what mattered, wasn’t it?

  “As long as it’s up there,” the Admiral continued, “none of us are safe on Luddeccea. We are all hostage to its whims.”

  The table erupted in debate. Kenji heard someone say, “Hunt down the Ark, destroy the pet monstrosity aboard, and show that devil in the sky we aren’t above using our force.”

  At those words, the pho-toe slipped from Kenji’s fingers. He nearly fell over, but caught himself on the table. His
breathing came so fast and so hard that the debate in the room faded into a distant hum. He’d almost thought he’d lost Noa just a few hours ago, and now they were talking about destroying the Ark and his sister. He had to save her from the monster she was with and the Guard. His fingers curled, and his body trembled. He had to save her … she would have saved him.

  “Hostage!” He barked out the word with such force his body straightened.

  The room went silent.

  “Kenji?” said the Premier.

  Kenji put his hands at his side and tried to meet the Premier’s eye. He hated eye contact. It was a struggle with some animal part of his mind that wanted to look anywhere else. His eyes watered with the effort and he blinked.

  Someone started to talk, but the Premier held up a hand again and once more the room went silent.

  Fingers jerking uncontrollably at his sides, Kenji tried to keep his voice level. “The intelligence, it values its … avatar … ”

  “Archangel,” someone hissed.

  “Devil,” someone else whispered.

  “Djinn,” said someone else.

  Licking his lips, Kenji said, “We can use it as leverage. To prevent Gate 8 from destroying our planet.”

  “We can take it apart,” said someone else.

  Kenji released a breath. “And we could save Noa.”

  Someone inhaled sharply. Kenji swallowed. He heard someone whisper, “He couldn’t stop her before.”

  Someone else whispered, “He was right about the plot to steal the Ark … ”

  Kenji bowed his head. His fingers twisted with his heavy robe.

  “Of course we will try to spare her.” Premier Leetier’s voice cut through the whispers. Kenji’s eyes drifted closed, and he couldn’t bring himself to meet the man’s eyes again. But he nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”

  The Premier’s voice rose in volume. “Kenji Sato’s unique mind is of essential use to us. He is proof that together, humans can prevail against any demons of spirit or technology. If his sister is valuable to him, she is valuable to us.”