by B. V. Larson
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know quite how to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” she asked in a tiny voice.
“Etta is my daughter. She’s your granddaughter, Mama.”
You could have heard the grass grow for about five seconds. My mom had this weird look on her face, like she was going to cry, pass out, or both.
Instead, she leapt up, ran over and hugged me. Then she let go of me and slapped me a good one.
“You little bastard,” she said, almost whispering. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Uh…I didn’t know how.”
She grabbed my wrist and began working the touchscreen on my arm like a pro. Navigating the tapper’s menus, she soon found a movie featuring Etta and watched it with tears running down her face.
“She’s got to be almost two. She’s walking, a few steps at a time. Two years, James? You kept my only grandbaby from me for two years?”
“Oh no, hold on,” I said. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t know about her myself until a couple of months ago.”
Then I told her the story. All about the crazy colonist girl named Della, who’d killed me a couple of times before getting purposefully pregnant. I left out the part about her killing me, of course, but the story still didn’t sound entirely wholesome to my mother.
“You barely know this girl? And wait a moment—are you saying this child isn’t even on Earth?”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I’m saying, Mom. She’s on Dust World…you know, Gamma Pavonis. I’ve never even met her. Della gave me a few pictures, but that’s all.”
“Are you sure the child is even yours? I mean, she looks like you—but this Della person—she’s doesn’t sound like a reliable source of information.”
“You mean she probably sleeps with plenty of guys, right? Well, according to her, she doesn’t. But as to the parentage—I’m sure about that. Della’s father is kind of a…a doctor. He did the DNA test.”
“They have your DNA?”
“Yes.”
The truth was, they had plenty of my DNA back on Dust World—more than I did in my own body, in fact. They’d dissected a couple of my corpses and knew me better than I knew myself. They had enough damned DNA to build a whole new James McGill if they’d wanted to.
My mom was crying again. I tried to comfort her, and I transferred all the pictures and movies I had to her tapper. I don’t think this helped much. She looked at them, but she still wasn’t happy.
When she’d settled down, we had lunch, then I went back to my shack. I walked back home like a hound dog who has just experienced a good solid kick in the hindquarters. As far as I could tell, I’d done the worst job possible of breaking the news to her, and she’d reacted in the worst possible way.
James McGill had struck again.
That evening, my dad tapped on my door. I let him in and faked a smile. He managed a flickering one of his own.
“What’s up, Dad?”
He stared at me for a few seconds. “You have any of that rot-gut beer left?”
“Sure do.”
I put a cold one into his hands and popped one open for myself.
He took a slug before talking. “Your mother is freaking out.”
“Yeah…I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to break it to her that way.”
“It’s not about how you told her. It’s about the news itself.”
“She’s always hinting about wanting to be a grandma,” I said. “I thought she might be happy after she got over the surprise.”
“Really, James?” he asked. “Our first grandchild is on another planet, and you thought she’d be happy? We’re not getting any younger, you know. You might not have noticed, but we’re aging—you’re not, but we are. We don’t have forever to wait.”
Thinking about that, I frowned. It was true. A mercenary in the legions, a man who stuck with it, could live a century or more without aging. Centurion Graves, for example, was somewhere around seventy to a hundred years old, but he looked like he was around thirty-five, tops.
That sounded great when you were a kid, and it was. But your family, the people who weren’t in the legions, they kept on aging. On every campaign I flew out to the stars and usually died out there in some fashion. Using the alien revival systems, the legion rebuilt a new body and mind for me from stored data. Since they didn’t bother to do body-backups often, I usually came back physically younger than the age I’d been when I’d left Earth.
But back home everyone plodded along through a normal, quiet life. My parents had been aging all this time. I’d seen it, but I hadn’t really thought about it until now.
“Mom wants to see the baby—is that what you’re saying?” I asked.
“Of course she does,” he snapped. “How can you be so smart and so dumb at the same time?”
He was angry, and with good reason, so I didn’t object. Besides, it was a question I’d often asked myself. Instead of responding, I took a big hit of my beer and got up to get a fresh one. I offered him another one as well, and he took it.
“She’s already pricing out a fare to Dust World,” he said a few minutes after we’d each consumed another brew in silence.
“What? You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not. It’s going to cost me a year’s pay.”
Alarmed, my mind was racing along new paths. Della had told me she was married. Not only that, when I’d last visited Dust World, there wasn’t really anyplace for tourists to stay.
“Dad…you should probably try to stop her.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“But Dad, Dust World…it’s not like Earth. Most of the planet is a deadly wilderness. The people there, well, they don’t think like we do.”
“Obviously not. Couldn’t you have used some kind of protection, boy?”
“Sorry Dad, she took me by surprise.”
He snorted in amusement and shook his head. He usually didn’t drink much, and he was on his third beer already. I put another one in front of him on my floating coffee table. After a moment of thought, he cracked it open.
“You know what your mom’s talking about?” Dad asked me. “Already?”
“What?”
“Moving out there. Emigrating. Hegemony has a new government policy, you know. If you buy a one-way ticket out there and promise to colonize, you can go for half-price. That’s a quarter the price of a round trip. We might be able to afford that if we sell this place.”
My eyes widened another notch. “But…”
“That’s right,” he said. “I’d be going with her. Now you know why I’m drinking every beer you put in front of me.”
I was beginning to understand. My mom was a hard one to dissuade once she got an idea stuck in her head. I was the same way—but this was crazy.
“You can’t move to Dust World,” I said. “That’s nuts. The place is like a giant Death Valley. Even worse than that.”
“I know. But most of the colonists are settling on the other planet in the system, the ocean world.”
My eyes widened. “That’s where the squids were wiped out! That’s an even worse idea. The squids still think they own that planet. They might show up any day and eradicate whatever humans they find squatting there.”
My dad shrugged. “They might do that here on Earth, too. In fact, most people think it’s only a matter of time. If the Empire doesn’t send the Battle Fleet back to Frontier 921, we’re all toast someday soon. Maybe your mother is right. Why not see the child before that happens?”
“We’re building our own ships,” I said in a confident, boastful tone. “We’re building up Earth’s home fleet every day. And our ships can take theirs, two to one. I’ve seen them do battle.”
“Imperial warships can, not Earth’s ships,” my dad said. “People keep making that mistake. Galactic ships from the Core Systems are built by aliens who know what the hell they’re doing. An Empire-built ship can take down cephalopod ships easily. Every news vid
shows that. But our homegrown designs are totally different. Have you seen them? Big balls of puff-crete laid over wire ribs—our ships look like crap, and they’re untested. Some experts say they’ll pop like balloons in battle.”
My dad was right, of course. Hegemony was building ships as fast as they could, but our initial designs resembled lop-sided dog turds floating in space. The ships were constructed more like barrels with guns sticking out than anything else. The hulls were formed with puff-crete layered over a titanium grid-work to give it shape and something to stick to. The process reminded me of the way people built in-ground pools. Concrete with rebar buried inside like metal bones. The new Earth ships were slow, heavy and ugly. Could they fight? That was conjecture.
With remarkable speed, my dad and I finished the entire twelve-pack I’d been saving in my fridge for the weekend. After that, we were both in a markedly better mood. Cracking jokes, we walked back to the house together where we found my mom watching another video of Etta. She’d managed to find a clip of the baby taking her first steps.
We sobered up immediately. My dad and I exchanged glances.
“I’ll talk to Della about this, if she’s still on Earth,” I told him.
“If she’s on Earth, wouldn’t Etta be here too?”
“No. Dust Worlders are different. They raise their kids as a group. Della joined the legion, but she didn’t bring Etta with her.”
My dad shook his head. “They sound like they don’t think the way we do.”
“True enough,” I said. “But listen, if it’s possible to go out there, I’ll help with the return fare. You guys wouldn’t make it as colonists on such a harsh planet.”
My dad gave me a hug, and I stared over his shoulder at the big screen in the living room. Etta had sandals on, but her feet were still black with grit. None of the colonist adults around her seemed to care, or even to notice, that she was dirty.
I stepped back outside. Standing in the dark with gnats and mosquitoes buzzing near, I tapped a fateful message to Della. I didn’t know if she was on Earth or not, but as soon as I hit send and the little twirling icon began to rotate I felt my heart speed up a notch.
The note I sent said simply: Della, we need to talk.
The wait was longer than usual. I’d begun to think she’d left Earth and gone back to Dust World after all. Hell, she might well have ditched life in the legions entirely and gone home, calling the whole thing a bad dream.
But she hadn’t. My tapper screen stopped twirling, and a tiny chime sounded in the dark. She’d gotten my message.
-2-
A day or two later, in the middle of the night, I heard someone in my room.
Della had never responded to my message. She’d gotten it—that much I knew. But I couldn’t tell if she’d read it or not. She had that information blocked, as most people did.
To tell the truth, I’d done my best to forget about the whole thing. I knew my mom was still tense about the situation. Every time I saw her, she asked me questions I couldn’t possibly answer.
How tall was Etta now? What did she weigh at birth? Were there complications during the delivery? What was the name of this husband fellow, this faceless stepfather who was supposedly caring for the child while her crazy parents were off getting themselves repeatedly killed on alien planets?
In answer to all these queries I could only shrug and shake my head. She growled at me every time I did that, accusing me of a dozen forms of idiocy and negligence. I took it all in stride. I knew she was upset—and with good reason. Della and I were far from ideal parents.
A sound in my room alerted me to the presence of an intruder. It was the crinkle of loose paper on dirty carpet. I knew the sound well as I often made a similar noise every time I crossed my littered floor.
My big-knuckled fist twitched reflexively on the neck of the bottle of Kentucky bourbon that was still in my grasp. I’d fallen asleep with the bottle in my hand because I’d run out of beer yesterday.
For all my faults, I’m a legion-trained Veteran who’s been physically assaulted more times than I can count. Such experiences never fail to change a man. I think, in truth, I was never fully asleep anymore. Some part of me was always awake, watching, listening for the smallest hint of danger.
The part of my brain that was still operating set off alarm bells tonight, and I released the bottle with a sudden splaying of my fingers. The bottle thumped down and the contents began to glug out onto the carpet—another in a patchwork of innumerable stains.
That same hand flew upward with unerring aim. My fingers found a throat, and they squeezed.
My eyes cracked open, and I coughed. The action caused a tiny line to be cut into my windpipe. Someone had a knife at my neck.
“Drop the knife,” I said to the intruder. Blood ran down my neck, warming it in twin lines.
For a brief moment, the intruder and I struggled in the near blackness. I wasn’t about to let go of that throat. Sure, the knife-wielder might well kill me—but it would take a few seconds for the life to run out of me. You ever seen a pig with a cut throat? Often, they wriggle for a long time before they stop twitching.
The neck my fingers were wrapped around didn’t feel all that thick or strong to me, and I figured I could probably squeeze my assailant half to death before I lost consciousness.
I was okay with dying for a good reason. Sometimes, putting a good scare into an attacker gave them pause the next go-around.
Sure, I was probably the one who was going to take an unscheduled trip through the revival machine by the end of this fight. But my murderer was at least going to know it hadn’t been easy.
For about five seconds, the two of us grunted and strove. Then I heard a sound that surprised me. A thump and a metallic clatter. My attacker had dropped the knife—it was gone from my throat, no longer sawing there.
But I didn’t let go of my assailant just yet. I groped with my other hand and clicked on the light.
Della’s pale face grimaced at me. She looked pissed off. I let go of her and sat up. She gasped and rubbed at her throat. There were finger marks there that would bruise up by morning.
“If it was anyone but you, James,” she said, “your head would be lying on the floor.”
“You should have knocked,” I replied. “Normal people on Earth do that—you know about knocking, right?”
“I like to be in control when I enter an unknown situation,” Della explained.
“That’s not a good enough reason to sneak into a house and put a knife in someone’s face, girl.”
“If you’d only relaxed and let me control the situation, you wouldn’t be bleeding now.”
“I’ll have to try out that theory next time I come over to your place.”
We both took deep breaths and tried to calm down. It took longer for Della to settle down than it did for me. She had a bit of a temper.
Della and I had always had a strange relationship. She was paranoid, and so was I. We’d killed one another on several occasions. When a person has a history like that with another person, there are always trust issues afterward.
“Why did you send me that note?” she demanded.
“Because I wanted to talk to you.”
“I know that. About what?”
“Etta—and my parents.”
That surprised her. She blinked and frowned thoughtfully. “I thought it was about Turov and Claver. About some new scheme you’d hatched to take over the world with those two.”
“Now hold on,” I said, “I’m no rebel. I just tend to accidentally get involved in the plans of others.”
She chuckled. “Yes, and then you screw them up. All right then…tell me what your parents want with Etta.”
“They want to see her, of course. My mom’s talking crazy about going out to Dust World on her own.”
I explained the situation at length. She seemed baffled by some points, such as my mother’s extreme desire to meet her one and only grandchild. But at the same t
ime, she seemed pleased that they were taking such an interest.
“Maybe I should have brought Etta to Earth to be cared for by them,” she said thoughtfully. “That had never occurred to me.”
“That’s an idea,” I said.
Della shook her head, frowning. She picked up her knife and sheathed it while I watched her hands carefully. Della and I had killed one another just about the same number of times as we’d made love. I didn’t like those odds, so I always kept my eyes open when I was with her.
“I don’t think I’d like to raise a child here, on Earth,” she said at last. “It’s too different. Your people are soft and lazy, James.”
“Not me.”
She looked up at me and laughed. “No,” she admitted. “Not you.”
“So that’s what I wanted to ask you about,” I said. “I wanted your permission to visit Etta.”
She gave me a baffled look. “Permission? No permission is required. You and your parents are blood-related. You have the right.”
It was my turn to look her over in appraisal. I realized, at that bleary moment, just how little I knew about how she would respond in different situations. In a way, I’d picked the most culturally diverse person I could possibly have found to mate with. That hadn’t been my plan, but that’s how it had turned out. Hell, she wasn’t even from Earth. We spoke the same language, but that was where the similarities ended. A girl from any continent on my home planet would have been more comprehensible to me than Della.
“Okay then,” I said. “So you wouldn’t mind if we traveled out there to see Etta. But there’s another party involved. What about your husband?”
Her eyes flicked to my face, then dropped away. She shook her head. “Don’t worry about that.”
“What? How can I not worry about it? He’ll have thoughts of his own. I’m sure you realize that. He might not appreciate seeing me and my parents. You have to warn him, or send him a note at least. What’s his name?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Why not?”
She looked up at me again, troubled. She heaved a sigh and sat on my couch. I sat beside her, puzzled.
“My husband,” she said finally, “he doesn’t exist.”