by Bobby Adair
Home. At least for a while.
Chapter 62
Dozens of stasis pods, each powered-up with an Iapetus resident inside, are in a line on gurneys ending at the open loading door of the freighter docked in the hangar. Several hundred pods are stacked along one wall.
Bird points at the pods as we exit the freighter. “We’re staging them for quick turnaround when the freighters land.”
I turn to see the crew already opening the loading bay on the freighter on which we just arrived.
“They’ll refuel while they’re here,” he says.
I hadn’t even thought of fueling. “You have H stores?”
“We drill it,” says Bird. “Iapetus’s rocks are laced with frozen hydrogen deposits. All we have to do is pump in some steam and warm up the rock a little bit. Hydrogen freezes at negative four hundred and fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit. It changes from liquid to gas at negative four hundred and twenty-three. It doesn’t take much warming to free up what we need.”
I turn my attention to the Turd II. “What about my ship?”
“Should be ready in about a week.”
“Seven days is a long time.”
“Should give you plenty of time to talk to your people and decide what you want to do.”
“Maybe too much time,” I say. “I might overthink it.”
“You’re not buying a sofa,” says Bird. “You’re making a decision with hundreds or thousands of lives in the balance.”
“Or billions,” I say, and feel like a pretentious idiot for having voiced the thought.
“Don’t feel bad about saying it,” says Bird. “You’re right. If we stay and fight and win, billions of lives will be changed. Billions might be saved.”
“Gambling a few thousand to save billions,” I say. “When you put it that way, I can’t help but feel selfish for considering a run out to the colonies.”
“Don’t oversimplify it,” says Bird. “You and I both know the odds of the gamble. It might be that nothing can be done to save earth. Nothing you and I can do. Not now. Not with what we have. Then what is renewing the war going to get us except dead?”
“Yeah.” My eyes are on a row of thick glass windows overlooking the hangar. None are broken. Inside, I see people. They’re not wearing orange suits. “You’ve repaired the airlocks?”
“In this section of the base,” says Bird. “We have to sell the ruse if the Trogs come back. And to do that, we need to have a station that contains atmosphere. That’s the only way it works.”
“How big is the base up here?”
“More than we need,” he says. “We could house a thousand, maybe two thousand, if we didn’t mind close quarters.”
I sense the presence of Phil and Nicky. And then I see them standing at one of the windows, looking down at us.
Bird sees where my eyes are focused. “You’ve got people to talk to. Get to it. I’ll give you some room. In the mean time, I have things to tend to.” Bird heads toward an airlock at the back of the hangar as he points to another, a smaller one leading into the office complex beneath the row of windows. “That’s you over there. Let’s plan on getting together for dinner the day after tomorrow. That’ll give us both time to think things through.”
“A deadline?” I ask.
Bird shakes his head. "No deadlines. Not yet, anyway. But you know as well as I do, the world spins whether we're watching or not. Eventually, circumstances will force us to make choices. It's better to face the future proactively, don't you think?"
“The day after tomorrow,” I agree. “Good luck.”
“Good luck to both of us.”
Chapter 63
I have my helmet off, hanging on the clip from my belt. I'm still armed with my railgun, of course, carrying extra ammo, hand grenades, a C4 charge, and a disruptor on my back. My suit bears a dozen scuffs and scars. It's dusted with the soot of burning ships, and is sprayed in the flash-frozen blood of countless dead.
Breathing in the smell of this new station’s air—every station has its own unique smell—I’m aware of the odor inside my suit, something you get used to when you’re packed inside for weeks at a time.
When I walk into the room, Phil doesn’t trouble himself with words. Instead, he crosses over and wraps me in a hug—weapons, dirt and all. I put an arm around him as Nicky comes close and slithers its spindly arms around my thigh. So close, the Gray’s fermented-diaper smell mixes with my odor. I shiver, and want to pull away.
I still have trouble seeing the Tick for what it is, a part of the Nicky-Phil unitarian psyche, or however they think of themselves.
Phil lets go of me and smiles. He has happy tears in his eyes. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it.”
I laugh. “Death’s too slow to catch me.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I know, but it makes me sound like a badass, right?”
“Or a dumbass.”
I laugh. It’s kinda funny. But mostly I’m happy to be reunited with Phil.
He turns and walks over to the window. “Have you talked with Silva yet?”
“She’s outside.” I point through the hangar doorway. “Drilling the troops with Brice and the others.”
“Have you talked to her yet?”
“I just came in on the ship, Phil. You saw me.”
“I didn’t know if you’d radioed her on the way in.”
“Why is this so important? Have I missed something?”
“No,” says Phil. “She missed you is all.”
“I missed her, too.” I take up a place by the window. “How’s she holding up?”
“She’s a resilient girl,” says Phil. “How are you doing?”
“Same as always.”
“How’s that?”
“You’ve known me all my life. You don’t know? You didn’t read it from my mind?”
“I know how I think you’re doing,” says Phil. “How do you think you’re doing?”
I take a moment to figure out the right words, and then shake my head when they come out. "Pedal to the metal, racing to somewhere I can’t see.”
“What’s that mean?” asks Phil.
“I used to feel certainty when this whole thing started,” I tell him, “back when we were playing at war games in the anti-grav simulator we set up in that old theater up in Breck. Now, I don’t.”
“You thought winning would be easy?”
“At the time, I would have told you no, because I knew things would be hard." I shake my head again, and my eyes wander off-focus. "Every step has been harder. Every loss has been more difficult than the last. And to be honest, yeah, I thought by now we'd have won the war. I thought most of us would still be alive." I sigh. "I thought a lot of things."
“Are you giving up?”
“Are you asking me if I’ve decided to go to the colonies?”
“No,” he says. “That’s how I would describe it. For you, it’s giving up. Quitting. Surrendering.”
I don't argue.
“I don’t want to talk you into going,” he says. “A smart man, a rational man, would go. I’m not saying you’re not intelligent, but I don’t know you’ll be able to live with yourself if you do it.”
“You have been poking around inside my head, haven’t you? Staying or going, that’s all I’ve been thinking about for three days.”
“Did you and Colonel Bird talk about it?”
“A lot.”
Phil turns away from the windows and goes to sit beside one of the desks in the room.
I follow him over, drag out a chair, and drop my low-g weight in it to face him. It takes nearly an hour, but I fill him in on the things Bird and I discussed. Phil, to his credit, listens, makes no judgments, and asks few questions.
At the end, he finally speaks. “Which way is Bird leaning?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“If he decides to go to the colonies, will you heed
his advice and go no matter what you’ve decided for yourself.”
“And spend the rest of my life feeling like I ran away?”
“Yes,” says Phil. “If you take Bird’s assessment of the situation at face value, then staying here without him means you’re little more than a hard-headed fool who’s going to die and get everyone who stays with you killed as well.”
“I think Bird is right,” I admit. “I am what I am. A fighter. I can lead my grunts into battle, but I’m no general.”
“No,” agrees Phil. “You’re not cut from that kind of cloth.”
“With no general, we can’t win.”
“Without someone to believe in,” says Phil, “someone like you, Bird can’t either. Not to belabor the point but you need each other. So will you go to the colonies?”
“I might have to.”
“It might be the most difficult thing you ever do,” says Phil, “yet it’ll be the right choice.”
“What about you?” I ask. “You need to leave for the colonies to protect Nicky and her egg. But you know as surely as I’m sitting here the Rusty Turd did what it did because you and me and Penny were on the bridge.”
“Not everything of importance we did was on the Rusty Turd,” says Phil. “You were out there fighting the war with your disruptor and your railgun.”
“It was the three of us,” I tell him. “In truth, it was all of us. You, me, Penny, Brice, Lenox, Silva, Peterson, and the others.”
“And the majority of them, we’d never met before we saw them at the staging station at the Silverthorne Spaceport,” says Phil.
“What are you saying?”
"I'm saying it makes you a good leader that you want to give credit to your people. And you should. We all fought together, and people died for you, for the revolution. But you need to recognize what all the rest of us see. You’re the catalyst that turned us into something more than a bunch of grunts with guns. It’s you.”
“Who did this, who did that? None of it matters, Phil, unless you’re in the mix.”
Phil guesses what the question is I’ve been circling around. “You’re asking me to stay if you stay?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 64
Phil reaches over and takes Nicky’s small hand in his.
I suppress a shudder.
“I know this is hard for you,” says Phil, “seeing Nicky and me.”
Common social graces would have me pretend that’s not true, yet I know Phil’s already aware of the truth. So, I nod. “I’m trying.”
“I know.”
“Do you think you’ll ever be able to accept what we are to one another?”
“Maybe I’m just not as evolved as you are,” I admit. “I can’t promise anything except that I’ll try. That’s the best I can do.”
“Will you try?” he asks. “Honestly?”
“You think I haven’t tried so far?”
“You know you haven’t. You tolerate Nicky. You want me to help you with the Turd II because you believe in my talent with grav and nav.”
“You have lots of talents,” I tell him.
“What you need to understand is that everything I did to assist on the Rusty Turd, I did with Nicky’s help. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You need to accept that.”
I look at Nicky’s big black eyes embedded in a passive face. “I do know, on an intellectual level. This is hard for me.”
“You harbor a lot of hate for the Grays.”
I can’t disagree.
“Have you ever thought about how hard this is for Nicky?”
“I thought you two were some kind of merged transcendent intellect.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m right, right?”
“Yes,” says Phil. “In a way. But Nicky knows where she came from. She knows the other Grays are her kin. As different as they are from what she is now, Nicky feels the pain of what we do when we kill them.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“And what about Prolific Man Killer?” asks Phil.
“What’s he got to do with anything?”
“You went against everyone’s advice to make peace with him, and then to befriend him. You were able to set aside your hate for Trogs and do that because you were finally able to see him as something besides a one-dimensional monster. He’s not human, yet he’s a thinking feeling being, just like you.”
Phil’s argument sinks in quick.
“Yeah,” Phil pushes, “just like you, with relatives and wants and dreams and fears. A commander who cares for his people and loves his family and wants to do his duty for his kind.”
Nicky’s unnatural face is too much to look at, so I hang my head instead. I never accepted Nicky because I didn’t want to. That’s the truth of it. I acted like an ignorant bigot.
When I look up, I make eye contact with Phil, and then with Nicky. “I’m sorry.” I unlatch the metal rings connecting my gloves to my suit, remove them, and reach across the table to take Phil’s hand in one of mine, and to take Nicky’s hand in the other. “It’ll be difficult for me to get past what I am, but I apologize, to both of you.”
“That means a lot to us,” says Phil. “Now stop feeling sorry for yourself and go find Silva.”
Chapter 65
The water falls slowly in the low g, pouring out of the showerheads above us. Just Silva and me. Alone, and together.
Our suits, our weapons, our inner liners, everything but our naked skin is lying on the floor outside the shower. We’re in a war zone, and we’re risking our lives to feel each other’s touch.
There are no words, what we have to say is best said without them, with touches and kisses, and hugs that seem to last forever but never long enough. We can’t get enough of one another, and every second we spend apart seems long enough to break our hearts.
The doubts I had about what I feel for her are gone. I tell her I love her. She says the same, a dozen times, and then a dozen more.
The small apartment we've commandeered doesn't look to have been touched since the Trog invasion. The sheets have been blown off the bed. The cupboards are open, and some of the dishes and utensils are on the floor. Two chairs, the only furnishings besides the bed, are shoved into a corner, one on its side. The bed is the only thing we're interested in, and we spend the next several hours there, trying to make up for the time we've lost apart, trying to salve the anxiety we both felt when death was stalking, and we were afraid the other of us was going to be killed.
“If you ever do that again,” says Silva resting her head on my chest while I stare at the ceiling.
“In a complete sentence?” I ask.
She sits up and punches me in the stomach.
“What?”
Lying down again, she says, “Sending me away. You were supposed to be right behind us. You lied to me.”
“Not exactly.”
“Exactly enough. You knew you weren’t going to board the Turd II when you sent Brice inside with us.”
“I knew.”
“And you knew I’d thought you were coming or I wouldn’t have gone.”
“Yeah,” I admit.
“That’s what a lie is. Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”
“I wanted you to be safe,” I say. “I thought you’d have a better chance aboard the Turd II. I didn’t know Phil was going to go all Captain Ahab and start ramming cruisers.”
“We didn’t do anything you wouldn’t have done. What did you expect was going to happen?”
“I was hoping you guys were going to bubble jump to safety. Maybe I didn’t think it through.”
“If we did bubble out, you’d be dead right now.”
“Probably.”
“Definitely.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re as stubborn as everybody says you are.”
“Is that a lot?” I smile. “Of stubbornness, I mean.”
“Not if you’re a sociopath.”
“A sociopath?” I ask. “That’s harsh.”
“I’m just mad at you.”
I look down at her, running my eyes over her bare skin, tracing the curve of her hip with my fingers. “I like it when you’re mad at me.”
“You know what I mean.”
“If you say so.”
Silva sits up and crosses her legs, done with the after-sex snuggling. “I need you to make me a promise.”
Rolling on my side and propping my head in my hand, I ask, “What?”
“You can’t just agree?”
“Not until I know what it is.”
“Why? Don’t you trust me?”
“You’re being difficult today.”
“I told you. I’m mad at you.”
“Fine,” I say. “I promise to do whatever it is you want me to promise.” I instantly regret it.
“You’re an asshole.” She punches me again. “You don’t mean it. I see it in your eyes.”
I reach out to pull her close. “Come here.”
She pulls away.
I say, “I thought you loved me.”
“Don’t be a bitch about it.”
I laugh. “A bitch?”
“You know what I mean.”
I sigh. “I liked it better when we weren’t talking.”
“Don’t dig your hole deeper, Mister.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do?”
She pauses to let a dramatic moment build. “Don’t ever lie to me again. Not even if it’s a lie like the one you told me when you ordered me onto the Turd II. Don’t mislead me. Ever.”
“Okay,” I tell her immediately.
“Just like that? You didn’t even think about it.”
“You’re not turning into one of those high-maintenance crazy chicks, are you?”
“Chick?” She’s offended. “I’ve killed as many Trogs and Grays as you. I’ve been by your side since this war began—”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’ll never say ‘chick’ again.”