“How is everything? What happened? I haven’t heard anything since we left the array,” Lex said as the medics led him to the little makeshift infirmary they’d set up in Nick’s garage.
“Communication is still down for the most part, and the storm hasn’t completely vanished, but emergency networks are starting to report in, and it seems like the worst the storm did was flip some cars and tear up some roofs,” Nick said. “But it could have been worse. A dozen more kilometers per hour on those gusts and we’d be testing the design limits of those buildings. I ought to know, it was my crews that built them.”
As Lex neared the infirmary, a familiar black form could be seen in the courtyard beyond.
“Is that the SOB?” he said.
“Uh, Lex, maybe you should get fixed up before you go check out the ship. It didn’t exactly escape this unscathed,” Michella said.
As it turns out, that decision was not in their hands. No sooner had Lex spotted the SOB than the SOB spotted Lex. Its thrusters flared and it rose into the air flitting nimbly over the villa and scattering those below as it dropped down beside where Lex was standing.
“Hello, Lex. It is good to see you again,” said a voice over the loudspeakers.
“C-coal?” Lex said, his voice catching in his throat. “You… I mean… you were—”
“If you are about to reference something protected by Temporal Contingency Protocol, don’t,” she said. “I kept doing that.”
Lex blinked some of the emotion from his eyes and took a moment to survey what had become of his ship. Aside from having a mind of its own, the nose of the ship was pummeled out of shape. One of the heat dissipation fins had failed to retract and looked like a smashed insect wing dangling from beneath one of the thrusters. Gleaming metallic scrapes marred its matte-black finish in a hundred different places.
He turned to Michella. It took a few seconds for him to find his voice, and a few seconds more to find the proper words.
“Michella, again, I’m glad you’re okay…” He pointed to the SOB. “But I’m not letting you borrow my ship again.”
Epilogue
Lex paced around the table in his apartment. The aftermath of the Indra IV debacle had kept him and Michella apart for the better part of the last few days. She was due to arrive any moment, so he’d hastily assembled the most romantic dinner his limited skills could muster.
“Okay, Squee, what am I forgetting?” he said to the creature who watched him curiously from atop a bookshelf. “Salad for starters. Macaroni and cheese in the oven. Cheesecake in the fridge, and Mitch-accino ready to go. Oh!”
He fished out the ring box from his pocket and placed it on the table. “And we’re starting with the proposal this time.”
Lex’s slidepad chirped. He fumbled for it in his pocket. “I’m taking bets, Squee. Is this Michella canceling? I’ll give you even money.” He glanced at the screen. “It’s Jon. Jeez. I think he’s more nervous than I am.” He answered. “Hey, Jon.”
“Lex! Did you ask her?”
“No, she’s not here yet.”
“Then she must be just getting dropped off. I just finished a call with her.” A voice shouted something indistinctly in the background. “Would you be quiet, Donnie, I’m getting to that! Listen. Donnie and I are in the parking area. We want to be the first people to congratulate you.”
“Yeah, sure. Listen. I’ll buzz you in once she gets here. Wait in the hall. I’m going to ask her the first chance I get, so when I open the door again, the deed is done.”
“Great! This is so exciting. I can’t wait.”
“Yeah, me neither.” Lex looked to the door. “I think she’s here. See you in a few minutes.”
He hung up just as she opened the door. Squee bounded down to the floor to greet her.
“Michella!” He stood aside and majestically presented the table. “Ta-da!”
“Trev, we need to talk,” she said, her tone serious.
“Yes! Yes we do.” Sensing something unpleasant was about to dislodge his plans, he practically dove at the table to snatch the ring box. “I just have one thing to ask.”
She raised her hand. “Let me finish. I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened over the last few weeks. Basically since you started the preliminaries here on Operlo.”
“You’ve given a lot of people stuff to think about since then. But, real quick—”
She continued. “I didn’t handle this as well as I could have. I let my inner journalist get in the way of my good judgment.”
Lex opened his mouth to say something, an incredulous look on his face, but held his tongue.
“What was that about?”
“Nothing. It’s just… Michella, I’ve wanted to ask you this for a long—”
“No, no. I know that look. You had a snide remark lined up, and I want to hear it. This whole fiasco has churned up some hard feelings across the board, and I want to air the grievances. What were you going to say?”
Lex gritted his teeth. “Can we please not do this right now?”
“Out with it, Trevor.”
“You don’t have an inner journalist. You have an outer journalist. You’re a journalist first and everything else second. This wasn’t you letting some inner compulsion run away with you. This was you not bothering to rein the compulsion in. But that’s fine. It’s who you are. Hopefully, it taught you something and we can work on not cutting a fiery swath across a bunch of other people’s lives and livelihoods next time. If you’re here to say you’re sorry for how you acted, great! I understand. All is forgiven. Now if we could—”
“That’s just it. You don’t understand. I’m not sorry for what I did. People need to know the truth. I can’t just let things fester in the darkness because it would make my life or your life easier.”
“Oh, so that’s what this whole thing has been about? Shedding a little light on the darkness? And what did the light show you? That the league is legit. Legitimately legit. And you knew that in week two. But you kept digging.”
“Just because you don’t find corruption on the surface, it doesn’t mean there’s none underneath.”
“And what clues were you following that suggested you should keep digging?”
“Don’t be a child. We both know Patel is a mobster.”
“Yes! We all do know that Patel is a mobster. That isn’t exactly a ‘stop the presses’ sort of revelation. But you weren’t investigating Nick Patel. You were investigating Preethy Misra.”
“That was for you. I wanted to make sure you didn’t screw your life up a second time.”
“Well you did a bang-up job of it, Mitch. It’s going to be another six months before they can get the Indra station fixed again, so half of the tracks are going to have to have their races postponed. The league’s whole launch has been scratched for a future date ‘to be determined.’ Suddenly, the life I wanted, showcasing my skills in a genuine competition instead of delivering packages and celebrities, is ‘to be determined.’”
“Better that than end up tangled up with the mob again.”
“And there it is,” he said. “We’ll ignore that both of us—and a bunch of other people—didn’t end up nearly getting killed by mobsters until after your bad publicity opened the door for them. And we’ll ignore that the ‘some things are more important than the law’ mentality of Nick and his crew is the only reason you’re not in prison right now for breaking any number of laws to investigate them. This wasn’t ever about me. This was about the mob. You weren’t protecting me. You were scoring another point against organized crime.”
“You say that like there’s something wrong with it.”
He held up a hand. “You’re right. I’m being selfish. For a while, I was angry that I wasn’t the most important thing in your life. I figured out numero uno was going to be The News—capital N—when we were still in college. But fine. My job was probably more important to me than it should have been. So I w
as number two. That’s still pretty good. But it has been made pretty clear that I’m not number two. Because there was plenty of important news brewing all around the galaxy. Important things that could use some light shining on them. But you dug here, and you kept digging after finding nothing, because this was your chance to score another potential blow against your personal vendetta. So that makes me, what? Number three? And even that isn’t a deal breaker. I wouldn’t be thrilled, but I could accept if I was number three behind something you love. But I’m number three behind something you hate. Number three behind a self-destructive crusade. To you, that’s more important than us.”
“It is! It is more important than us! Maybe you don’t want to hear it, Trev, but there is no such thing as a good mobster. They all have blood on their hands, and they all are a threat to society. It’s who they are! They can’t be a mobster without that simple fact being true. So if it comes down to it, if it comes down to you and I getting our happily ever after in exchange for turning a blind eye to this stuff, I will always choose the truth.”
They stared at each other. The intensity of the moment was such that at some point Squee had hopped down and placed herself between the pair as if to separate them. The first to act was Lex. He lowered his head and turned away, marching to the closet and grabbing his jacket.
“Well?” Michella said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not. You’re not wrong. All of that is more important than us. And I guess I’m just a weaker person than you, because I’m done making sacrifices for it.”
He headed for the door.
“Get back here, Trevor. We’re not through with this yet.”
“I think we are, Michella. I think we’re through.”
He snapped his fingers. Squee gave Michella a quick look, then joined Lex at the door. He tapped it open to find Jon and Donnie standing there, looks of mischievous excitement on their faces.
“Well?” Jon said. “What did she say?”
“Plenty,” Lex said.
He pulled the ring box from his pocket, tossed it to the floor, and paced down the hallway toward the long, cold night.
From The Author
Thank you for reading! If you liked this story, or perhaps if you found it lacking, I’d love to hear from you. Below are links to some of the places you can find me online. For free stories and important updates, join my newsletter.
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Discover other titles by Joseph R. Lallo:
The Book of Deacon Series:
Book 1: The Book of Deacon
Book 2: The Great Convergence
Book 3: The Battle of Verril
Book 4: The D’Karon Apprentice
Book 5: The Crescents
Other stories in the same setting:
Jade
The Rise of the Red Shadow
The Redemption of Desmeres
The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy
The Big Sigma Series:
Book 1: Bypass Gemini
Book 2: Unstable Prototypes
Book 3: Artificial Evolution
Book 4: Temporal Contingency
The Free-Wrench Series:
Book 1: Free-Wrench
Book 2: Skykeep
Book 3: Ichor Well
Book 4: The Calderan Problem
Book 5: Cipher Hill
Collections:
The Book of Deacon Anthology
The Big Sigma Collection: Volume 1
The Free-Wrench Collection: Volume 1
Other Stories:
Between
Fallen Empire: Rogue Derelict
Structophis
The Other Eight
Indra Station Page 25