Stellarnet Rebel

by J. L. Hilton

  She laughed. “Stop it, you’re scaring me.”

  “It’s a big, fat, oily fish, and it’s so good.”

  “So you’re the one who’s been snacking on my fish pond.”

  “I’m sorry, J’ni,” he said in all seriousness. “Should I pay for them? I keep forgetting about money. We don’t use it on Glin.”

  It took her a minute to realize he wasn’t being sarcastic. “You’ve been eating my tilapia?”

  “Your tilapia, yes, I’m sorry, you know we don’t believe in property as humans do. It’s like having to get permission to breathe. It’s food. They were swimming there, looking so delicious. Do you know that delicious sounds like the Glin phrase for tripping and falling into a river? But, yes, my apologies.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Duin,” she said, and tried to get the thought of eating live fish out of her head.

  “Truly?”

  “Well, yeah, but I need to know how many you ate. We have to track everything.”

  He squinted and scrunched up his face and turned his head this way and that. “I don’t remember. Maybe ten.”

  “Ten?”

  He touched his thumb to his knuckles, counting. “Or maybe four of four.”

  “Sixteen?”

  “I’ll get you more.”

  It was a sweet sentiment, and made her smile. “Where? It’s not like you can go to a lake and grab some.”

  “I miss lakes. And I miss fog. And I need to stop thinking about it,” he said with a slight catch in his voice, “or I won’t be able to see my way to your compartment.”

  “I’ll make sure you don’t fall into any compost chutes,” she promised, sliding her arm through his as they walked through Sector G.

  Duin began singing the song he learned in the pub that evening. “As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I…” Then he tried singing the same line several times in Glinnish. “Does the word fair mean gathering or does it mean unbiased, in this song?”

  “I think it means lovely, as in Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone…”

  “Omigod, it’s Duin!”

  A group of colonists mobbed Duin and Genny. One of them l’upped a live feed from the closest netcam and displayed it on the walls of the thoroughfare.

  “Look, there we are with an alien.”

  “’Lo,” said Duin. He and Genny kept walking and the group followed.

  “Wave to my mom.” A young man held up his arm, aiming his camera at Duin.

  Duin waved.

  “Do you probe people?” someone asked.

  “Probe?” Duin repeated.

  “Can you breathe underwater?”

  “No, but I can hold my breath a very long time,” he answered.

  “Do you know how to make crop circles?”

  “What are crapsicles?” asked Duin.

  “Can you levitate things with your mind?”

  “Post your questions on the blog, ’k?” said Genny. “Or email Duin at I-N-C dot ast.”

  “Yeah, awesome.”

  “Later.”

  “I touched him.”

  Genny and Duin entered the stairwell up to her block’s private hallway.

  Duin put his foot on the first step, turned to her and said, “I think I prefer the humans who hit me with pipes.”

  Then everything exploded in a riot of light, smoke and sound.

  ***

  The next thing Genny knew, it was dark and her arms hurt. She was on the ground, but she couldn’t remember falling down. Sitting up made her head hurt. Attempts to activate her bracers were unsuccessful.

  “Duin?” She could barely hear through the ringing in her ears. “Duin!”

  “I’m here.”

  She inched her way toward him in the darkness, trying to avoid debris, and the stairwell was illuminated by an object in Duin’s hand. It was the ball he let Estrella play with. By its faint glow, she could see he’d been thrown to the ground and lay there on his back.

  “I am injured.” His suit was torn. Dark, thick blood oozed from his side.

  “Oh, my god, Duin, no, no, no…” Tears welled up in her eyes. She removed her shawl and held it against his wound. The blood soaked through to her hands.

  Moving the light around, he assessed their situation. An emergency seal closed them off from whatever had happened above. Not that they would want to go up, since there might be oxygen leaks, if not great gaping holes into nothing. And not that they could go up. The metal stairs were destroyed. Emergency panels also closed them off from the stairs down to Level One.

  “I think I can lift that.” He pointed to some twisted steps blocking the door to the thoroughfare. “Then you can get out.”

  “No, don’t move. I’ll stay with you. A rescue team will be here any minute.”

  “If we don’t run out of oxygen first. Or some new calamity occurs. You should go while I can still move. Before I lose consciousness. No point in both of us dying.”

  “You’re not dying. And I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Go to Seth and—”

  “Seth?”

  The tone of her voice told Duin everything, and he smiled in spite of his injury. He lifted a hand to her cheek and touched the river of tears flowing from her eyes.

  “You don’t love him.”

  Placing her hands on either side of his face, she said, “I love you, Duin.”

  She hoped he felt the words as much as he heard them, through her hands and in his bones, the way sounds vibrated through him. Then she kissed him. His hands grasped the back of her head, and he returned the kiss with unrestrained fervor. But it ended all too soon.

  “Go. Now. Please.” Even as he begged her to go, he did not let go of her. “You must live for me, for Glin, for the truth, and for everyone who needs your kindness, as I did. Don’t argue.”

  She didn’t.

  With her help, he climbed to his feet and put his back against the broken stairs. He tucked the light ball into the front of his suit, and with all his strength heaved the tangled mass of fallen metal, lifting it until Genny could reach the door.

  “I can’t open it,” she said. “It’s locked down by the emergency override, to prevent air loss.”

  “Stand back.” His breath wheezed with the effort to hold up the twisted metal. Stretching a hand between the steps, he zapped the panel on the wall. The door opened for a moment but the emergency override shut it again. He put his hand on the wall and zapped it continuously. The door opened enough that she could see the illuminated thoroughfare of Level Two beyond. The walls flashed with several overlapping windows and a cacophony of voices and alarms.

  “Warning. Oxygen loss in block K-83. Evacuate the area immediately.”

  “Dispatching external repair bots and emergency teams…”

  “Medtechs responding to K-83…”

  “Go,” he said.

  Without a word, she took one last, wretched moment to look at him, the fading blue-green light casting his face in harsh shadows. They said volumes to each other, in a language neither human nor Glin. Then she crawled under the wreckage and squeezed through the door. There was a metallic crash and a moan as Duin dropped the stairs. The door clanged shut again between them.

  She ran. Each step was more painful than the last as she moved farther away from him, struggling to see and to breathe through her tears. His blood turned black on her hands.

  Chapter Seven

  Genny sang an entire sober version of “Carrickfergus,” at Duin’s request. He insisted that singing would speed his recovery.

  “That song sounded very different, though, when you were in a trance.”

  She sat beside his bed in the H-Sector med-block. “I was never in a trance. I was twisted as a bar rag. Drunk out of my mind.”

  “And you had a revelation. You told me you were in love.”

  “I did?” Maybe she should have watched the archives of that night after all. “Then the whiske
y knew something I didn’t.”

  “I thought you were talking about Seth.” He snorted. “That man doesn’t really love you at all, and should be drowned for his stupidity.”

  “Unlike the man who does love me?”

  “I do love you, J’ni,” he said. “But I am not a man, I’m a Glin.”

  “I know.” Her fingertips ran down his arm, along the line where his light and dark coloring converged. Without his shirt on, she could see that he was pale across his chest, stomach and the undersides of his arms, and colored across his back, similar to many aquatic creatures on Earth. It was a natural camouflage for a race which spent so much time in the water. “I didn’t realize how much I loved you until I thought I was losing you.”

  “In peril, our truths are revealed,” he said.

  Duin was unconscious when Med-techs had carried him out of the stairwell and he’d remained that way for several hours. They were the worst hours of Genny’s life. According to the files of the early Asteria researchers, critically injured Glin entered a kind of torpor, diverting all energy into self-repair. And Duin was healing, Dr. Geber assured her. But she didn’t believe it until Duin opened his eyes and smiled at her.

  Genny was well enough after a few pills, injections and a burn spray. But her bracers were useless, so she no longer had a locator. It didn’t take long for her followers to realize that she’d disappeared and to start piecing together what happened. Using the wall in the med-block, Genny composed a few brief tickers and sent an email to her INC editor J.T. In spite of the lack of updates, her followers and page views continued to increase.

  There was a netcam in the hospital room, but she didn’t turn it on because she wasn’t ready to show the universe how she felt about Duin. The shippers on the message boards would squee if they knew. But there were also the kind of people who would attack them again.

  And he is still married to Ullu, Genny reminded herself. But she didn’t feel wrong. She loved him and he loved her. He had been without his wife for a long time, alone in his grief and his war with Tikat for over three years.

  Blaze appeared on the wall beside Duin’s medical file and displays of his vital signs. “You awake? How do you feel?”

  “Like I was bitten by a garrablug,” Duin said. “But it wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Right. I’ll pretend I know what the hell that means. Meanwhile, I thought you should know this wasn’t a natural catastrophe or an accident. It was a bombing.”

  “The Tikati did this, didn’t they?” Duin said.

  “Simmer down, Cochise,” said Blaze. “If their ships got within a thousand miles of us, we’d know it. No, this was some fucknut, or herd of fucknuts, within the colony—with goddamn access to explosives, which is just what I need.”

  “You can’t scope them on the netcams?” asked Genny.

  “I’ve had my people searching every archive within twenty-four hours of the incident and within five blocks of your compartment, and we’ve come up with two leads so far: jack and shit. They’re expanding their search to forty-eight hours, but I don’t think they’re going to find anything else, except squat. The netcams around your block were on the glitch.”

  “Glitch?” said Duin.

  “Not working,” Genny explained.

  “The only locators going in or out of your block were the ones that belonged there,” said Blaze.

  “Which doesn’t mean a damn thing,” said Genny. “Maybe whoever did this didn’t have a locator. Or they removed their device and left it somewhere else.”

  “Or it could be that one of your blockmates is responsible,” said the colonel. “We’ve got Taya Spiel and Wyatt Hartford on lockdown in her aunt’s block. Mose Bellamy is with the kids on Level One, but I’d be hard-pressed to think she had anything to do with it.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Duin.

  “But Nik Zabat is missing,” said the colonel. “No body. No locator.”

  In all the time she’d been on Asteria, Genny had never seen Nik face-to-face, only his incarnations. “He was always gaming and never left his compartment.”

  “Then we might have to wait on an analysis of the wreckage to get DNA confirmation,” said Blaze. “Which brings me to the unfortunate news that your block is totally fubar, darlin’. That means ‘fucked up beyond all recognition,’” he barked when he saw Duin open his mouth to ask. “It’s an acronym. As in blown to kingdom come. The investigation may take awhile, Genny, and I have no idea how many of your personal possessions survived or when they’ll be returned. You’ll have to make do with whatever you’ve got in your hands at the moment.”

  Duin was holding her hand at the moment.

  “But if you need anything, you ask,” said the colonel.

  “Thank you, Blaze,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” His window disappeared.

  “What will Mose do?” Duin asked. “How will she run her school?”

  “I called her a few hours ago, when you were unconscious. There’s already a new block on its way, sponsored by the Mission of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and they’re sending a sister to help her.”

  “I thought Mose didn’t have any siblings.”

  “Not Mose’s sister, a holy sister.” Genny handed him another drink of water. It was his sixteenth…maybe twentieth. She’d lost count.

  “What is it that makes her holy?” Duin emptied the cup.

  “She’s a nun. She’s sworn her life to God.”

  “Mm.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t like God.”

  “But you believe in the Great Ocean.”

  “That’s not a belief, that’s knowledge. I fly over the Great Ocean every time I go to Glin. It is the source of all things: the Glin, the storms, the water and the currents which control our lives. I don’t need to believe. I know. I see its patterns in everything.”

  “That sounds kind of like God, Duin.”

  “No.” He grimaced. “From what you say, God dams everything. Why? Rivers should be free to flow. It’s too much like the Tikati for my liking.”

  “Not dam, D-A-M. Damn. D-A-M-N. Condemn. Doom. Curse.” She handed him his translator, which had survived their ordeal intact.

  “That is even less affable,” he said, setting the translator aside. “Do you believe in God?”

  “I guess. But I believe in humanity more. Which makes no sense, I know. Faith in God only requires belief without evidence. Faith in humanity requires belief in spite of the evidence.”

  “Will you be able to live in the new block, with Mose?”

  “I wouldn’t want to. I don’t want to endanger the children.”

  He caressed her shoulder, trying to console her as much with his touch as with his words. “Here you are by my side, concerned only for my well-being, and the well-being of others. What about yourself, J’ni? All of the things you believed were yours, they are all gone.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I still have you. And who, being loved, is poor?”

  He grasped her head in his hands and pulled her to his lips. This kiss lacked the desperation of the one in the stairwell—which was overshadowed with fear and sorrow. This time, he kissed her with a thrilling surge of raw passion. She sank into his smooth chest and the muscles chiseled by a lifetime of swimming.

  Dr. Geber entered the room. “As much as I might be interested in studying the biochemistry of Glin arousal, I don’t have time today. So, free up the bed for someone else.”

  Genny pulled away from Duin, feeling a little dizzy as she did so. Helluva kiss. “Are you sure? He was just unconscious half an hour ago.”

  “He looks conscious, now.”

  Duin clapped his hands together. “Yes, I’ve had quite enough convalescence for one day.” He sat up and swung his feet off the bed, removing the sensors stuck to his skin.

  The doctor examined Duin’s side. There was a nasty, dark scab delineating the edge of the original wound, but it was otherwise mended. “The speed
of your recovery is amazing. I’ve got some assistants coming out here to sequence the Glin genome, but I think we should study this first. We could make a fortune, if we found some way to stimulate this rate of healing in humans.”

  “Mm.” Duin reached for his shirt. Genny helped him pull it over his shoulders and began buttoning it for him.

  Dr. Geber waved a stylus in the air, making notes on the wall. “Call me if anything changes, but I think you’ll be fine.”

  When the doctor left the room, Duin grasped her hand and gently bit the soft pad of skin below her thumb. It was a gesture both playful and seductive, and a flush of warmth rushed through her.

  “What will you do, now, J’ni?” he asked in a low, sultry voice.

  She found it difficult to focus on her reply. “Go to the Tech Center, I should get my bracers fixed.”

  “Where will you sleep tonight?”

  As tired as she was, sleep was not on her mind. “Donations are already coming in from my followers, and INC will probably finance another compartment. I’ll be fine.”

  “You are resourceful and resilient, of that there is no doubt.” Duin placed her hand on the back of his neck, drawing her to him. “I would share food with you.”

  “You want to have dinner?”

  “In my compartment. Will you join me?”

  “Yes,” she promised.

  ***

  Out of habit, she touched her forearm, to let Hax know she was on her way. But, of course, the gauntlets were in her bag. It felt unnatural and unsettling to be disconnected. She hoped she didn’t develop Offline Anxiety.

  The Tech Center was in R-02, on the edge of the military zone, not far from Duin’s compartment. It contained no compartments, garden area or hallways. The four long walls of the block were covered with countless windows, icons and displays. Genny tried not to trip over the bots rolling among the tables, tool racks, electronic parts, buckets of lumina paint and boxes of Mysteria T-shirts.

  “’Lo, bloggirl,” said Hax, waving for her to follow him.

  “I hope you don’t mind. I let myself in. It wasn’t locked.”

  “I saw you coming three blocks away. If I didn’t want you here, believe me, you wouldn’t get in. Lasers, pew pew.”