Stellarnet Rebel

by J. L. Hilton

  “I would have to hurt him badly.”

  “Mm. Probably not a good idea.”

  Belloc shrugged. “He would heal. If we were on Glin, I could put rizwij in his food.”

  “Would that make him sleep?”

  “It would render him immobile and give him hallucinations. Which is like sleeping. But you wouldn’t like him when it wore off.”

  “Anah!” Duin cried out from inside the tippa. He pushed aside the strips of plastic which curtained the doorway, the way vines had hung at the threshold of Sala’s hut.

  “What? What’s wrong?” J’ni got to her feet.

  “Nothing’s wrong!” Duin laughed, a bit too maniacal even for him. “Good news. Very good news.”

  He rushed to her and kissed her. It had been too long since he’d kissed her. She understood how busy he was, how precarious the situation, and how difficult his decisions. But understanding didn’t make her miss him any less. Clutching him, she returned the kiss with such force that when they stopped, they were both breathless.

  “I… I have to go, right now, but I will be back very soon,” he said. “Don’t—please don’t leave the compartment until I send Belloc. And stay with him, no matter what happens. I don’t trust the Tikati to be anything but the sinister, ruthless monster that it is. Yes?”

  “I’ll be careful. Wary. Vigilant.”

  “You are ten times as clever as any Tikati, but I worry.”

  Considering how they took his family, his village and his world, she didn’t blame him. “I understand.”

  “I worry less when Belloc is with you.”

  Yes, Belloc is as good as having a small army of Glin, she thought, recalling how many were needed to restrain him for Ga’Duhn. But was there anything that would help her worry any less about Duin?

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To see Owen.” Duin kissed her again. For days, even when they were in the same room together, he’d felt a million miles away. She relished the closeness, the hard strength of his arms and chest beneath his wallump suit, his webbed hands cupping her face. She didn’t want to let go.

  “Soon,” he promised, in a half-whisper, half-kiss. “Very soon you will have my full attention.”

  Belloc followed him out the back door of the garden, leaving through the adjacent block instead of their own private hallway.

  She went into their compartment so she could watch him on the colony netcams. Belloc was in his Zentai suit, several yards behind Duin.

  Close to Aileen’s, she lost sight of Belloc. J’ni opened windows of the pub’s live feeds but couldn’t scope Duin, Belloc or Owen. “Damn it. Stale fucking netcams.” They were everywhere, except when you really wanted to see something.

  Leaving all of the windows open, she continued watching the wall. About twenty minutes later, she spotted Belloc coming down the thoroughfare near their block.

  As soon as he entered the compartment and removed his hood, she asked, “What’s Duin up to?”

  “He found a source for weapons. He must meet them in the sky ocean, not here, so he’s leaving Asteria.”

  For the next day, J’ni found it impossible to concentrate on answering email or keeping up with her discussion boards. The Tikat liaison was in private meetings to which she was not invited, but she interviewed the delegations sent from Earth. She blogged what she could and tried to cover for Duin’s absence by making several posts comparing the current ecological devastation on Glin with the problems on Earth at the turn of the century. She also posted some of Duin’s recent vids of his planet—those which contrasted with the Tikati’s allegations of widespread improvement.

  But the interviews, the emails, the blog, even the corners of her compartment, all pressed the lack of Duin upon her to the point of suffocation. His absences had never bothered her this much before. She gave up trying to work or to sleep, and went out into the garden to find Belloc.

  Peering through the strips of plastic in his doorway, she saw him fighting a ghost hunter guild that included a high-level mad scientist, a fairy queen and a retro-cyborg. Belloc still slept on the bare ground, his few possessions hung inside the woven walls of his tippa, and he used the open floorspace to play Mysteria whenever he had a chance.

  His gloves were connected to a fog wraith character programmed for him by Hax. It did not require constant attention, since Belloc was too busy helping her and Duin to maintain a full-time game incarnation. Other players thought the wraith was a “mob”—a non-player mobile object in the game, like a steam troll or zombie—that randomly spawned in the Wet Moors quest.

  She’d watched Belloc play before, and no one ever beat him. He couldn’t be zerged, though several guilds had tried. It helped that his injuries regenerated within seconds, he was resistant to electricity and water-based magic, and anyone within a ten-foot radius of his incarnation lost mirth points until they succumbed to despair and stopped fighting. Belloc usually owned them long before that happened.

  “Come in,” Belloc called out as he dodged the fairy’s ethereal sword. He kicked into the air. On the wall, his incarnation kicked the Tesla coil from the scientist’s hands.

  J’ni stepped inside the doorway.

  “I didn’t know you had a meeting today.” He bent backward at an impossible angle in order to avoid a bolt from the cyborg’s raygun. “When do you need to leave?”

  “I don’t. I need a friend, not a defender.”

  He turned to J’ni. “You have it.” Belloc touched his glove and his incarnation flickered and vanished from the wall. The incarnations of the other players looked around in confusion.

  “You could have finished your battle first.”

  “If you need me, then my most difficult battle is already won.”

  J’ni wasn’t sure what that meant, but her concern for Duin outweighed her curiosity. “I’m worried. How long is he going to be gone?”

  “Until he returns. He can’t bring the weapons here. He would take them to Glin. It will be another day or more. Don’t worry.”

  A loud banging echoed through the garden. Belloc touched his gloves and checked the netcams around their block for the source of the noise. J’ni peered at his arm and saw Owen in the stairwell knocking on the wall with a wrench.

  “Should I worry now?” The slight tightening of Belloc’s face and narrowing of his eyes told her yes.

  They went through her compartment, and Belloc let Owen in. Aileen’s bouncer removed his flat cap, crumpling it in his hand as he spoke.

  “Genny, I came to tell you something. Your fella went out to make a deal.”

  She wanted to sit down, but her legs wouldn’t move. She searched Owen’s face for the words he wasn’t saying. “I know what he was doing. What happened?”

  “He met up with the agents and took possession of some cargo. Then those Tikati jackboots nabbed him.”

  Her heart plummeted into her feet, and she staggered. Belloc moved to catch her, but she managed to remain upright. Too stunned to feel the anger, too numb to cry, she asked, “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. My contacts said he was last seen being chased by several ships.”

  “And that’s it? They left him?”

  “What else could they do, Genny? They shifted to Earth and sent word to me. It took awhile, for the lag, and it going through alternate channels.”

  She tried to fill the cold void of fear inside her with the heat of action. “How long ago did this happen?” She touched her bracer. “I’ll get Blaze to send someone out there.”

  “Fuck, Genny, you can’t go telling the Big Man. This is a covert operation. Your fella didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “My fella doesn’t want to die at the hands of the Tikati, either.”

  “He knew what he was doing, Genny, and he knew the risks,” said Owen.

  Yes, there were risks, but she’d always believed that Duin could overcome them. “Is that it, then?”

  “That’s the sum total of all I know,
Genny. I’ll tell you if I hear anything else.”

  “Thank you.” It was mere courtesy. She didn’t feel thankful at all. Owen left her block, and a terrible thought crossed her mind.

  “Belloc, who else knew about this deal?”

  “Duin, Owen, the gunrunners, you and me. No others.”

  “Then how did the Tikati find him?”

  Belloc shrugged in that graceful, rippling way of his. “If Duin didn’t watch the sensors, a Tikati patrol could take him like an udul snatching a neep from a pitat leaf.”

  She shook her head. “Space is a big place. Too big for that kind of random bad luck. Do you think the gunrunners, or Owen, might have betrayed him somehow?”

  “I think many things, J’ni. And I trust no one but you.”

  “Did Duin say not to tell Blaze?”

  “He said that it might upset his relations with Earth.”

  “Blaze can keep a secret.”

  Moments later, Belloc was in his Zentai suit and trailing her to the edge of the military zone. He sat to wait for her while she went to the colonel.

  Blaze took one look at her face and cursed. “Goddamn it.” He repeated it several times as he typed on his desk.

  “Blaze, I need your help.”

  The colonel held up one hand and she said no more. After a few moments, he waved for her to sit down. “’K, Genny, make it quick. My office cam is glitching on a loop of the past few seconds, since you walked in. But that can only go on for so long.”

  She gave him a quick summary of what happened. “Owen and Belloc might know the coordinates of the rendezvous. You could send out a patrol—”

  “No, I can’t. That’s too far from Asteria. Our ships don’t go more than an hour in any direction, and suddenly we’re way out there, Christmas caroling, fa-la-la, in the very same spot an illegal arms deal went down? That will make Earth look very, very bad, Genny. Like we knew what Duin was doing and supported his actions.”

  “But, Duin gets money from the U.S. government.”

  “What we do and what we appear to do are two different things.”

  “Then I’ve got to go to Glin. I’ll take Kitik up on his offer. He’s finished here, right? The G20 was his last scheduled meeting, earlier today.”

  “Which Duin was supposed to attend.”

  “Call Kitik, tell him you’re going to send your witness with him. Tell him INC is very eager to learn all it can about how much the Tikati have…” she sneered at the word, “… helped the Glin.”

  “We don’t have a clue how much the Tikati know about you and Duin. If those ‘businessmen,’ or anyone else from Earth, has told them how y’all are shacked up, or if the Tikati have the technology to access the Stellarnet—”

  “If, Blaze,” she interrupted. “If someone told them. Or if they’ve managed to patch into the Stellarnet and decode all the encrypted signals, and if they even know where or how to l’up my blog. That’s a whole lotta ifs, and I’m willing to take the risk. Why would they ask me to come if they knew?”

  “To fuck with him. They get you, they get to him.”

  “It’s Duin, Blaze. I’d walk through hell barefoot, if I had to.”

  “You are crazy. Crazy as a damn alien.”

  “I have to leave without telling Belloc.”

  “The blue guy? Looks like the marlin hanging on my granddaddy’s wall?”

  “Don’t let him into the military zone, don’t talk to him, don’t tell him anything until I’ve gone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’d find a way to stop me.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The longest he’d ever waited for J’ni was eleven hours and twenty-three minutes.

  He’d watched her enter Sector M, Level One, eleven hours ago. She said she would be there for a while. Based on his limited experience with humans, “a while” could mean anything from a few minutes to several days.

  Belloc checked his gloves again. Her locator didn’t show up when she was in the military zone, but it would at least tell him if she was anywhere else in the colony. No, he hadn’t missed her. And she didn’t appear on any of the netcam archives or feeds that he viewed and reviewed.

  The last time she’d contacted him was at 1208. That was after the Tikati liaison informed Elder Blaze that Duin would no longer be involved in any diplomatic efforts between Earth and Glin because he’d been arrested. She had cried as she told Belloc, tears of joy that Duin might still be alive, and tears of misery for his imprisonment.

  Belloc thought she was beautiful when her eyes rained. Even though it pained him to think that water meant she was suffering. But Owen—whether or not he was involved in Duin’s capture—was right about this: Duin knew the risks and had chosen his way. Belloc recalled the conversation he’d had with Duin before the Tikat liaison arrived.

  “If something happens to me, it rests upon you, Belloc, to replace me. That’s one reason why I brought you back with us from Wandalin, why I wanted you to learn English, why I taught you to fly the Tikati ship.”

  Belloc wondered what his other reasons were, but he didn’t ask. Instead, he said, “What would I do to replace you?”

  Counting on his fingers, Duin answered, “Respect love. Defend freedom. And kill Tikati. Awah na glem. For water and freedom.”

  But Belloc was no patriot. He’d been in his own sort of war with Glin all of his life. Even if his world were free tomorrow, he would remain on Asteria, if the humans allowed him to stay.

  “What about J’ni?” he’d asked Duin.

  “Yes, she’d help you. She could tell you what I would do, and teach you how to blog.”

  That wasn’t what Belloc meant.

  He waited another hour in the Colony Square, watching the humans and thinking about what he would do if Duin never returned and he had J’ni to himself. Then he pulled on his gloves and touched her name. Genevieve O’Riordan. He said her full human name in his mind. Genevieve Elena O’Riordan. Then her Glinnish name. J’ni Nagyx Duin. He allowed himself a moment to ponder the sound of J’ni Nagyx Kehlen and decided that someday he would tell her his true name.

  Not available.

  He touched the contact icon again. Same result. He closed the app, reopened it on his other glove.

  Not available.

  Moving to a more quiet area of the station, one of the “blind spots” Hax had shown him, he removed his hood and touched the link to the Tech Center.

  “’Sup, Corundum Conundrum?” answered a Hax whose vivid red hair was cropped very close to his head.

  “My gloves aren’t working.”

  “Nope, your gloves are tits, Bel. A-OK. Copacetic. Shiny.”

  “Then why can’t I contact J’ni?”

  “Your Iseult is not in the colony, Tristan.”

  Iseult and Tristan were words unknown to him, but Belloc understood “not in the colony.”

  “She’s in the military zone.”

  “No… she’s not.” Hax checked something on his wall. “Sorry, bro, looks like she left at 1400 with Liaison Kitik, some of the UN doofs and a military escort.”

  Belloc bolted for the Tech Center. “She did not leave,” he told Hax as he sprinted down the thoroughfare. Clanging open a stairwell door, Belloc hopped a railing, pushed off a wall and then hit the lower landing at a run.

  “I have some pretty compelling evidence that she did. I’m looking right at the vid from the Hangar C archive.”

  The next thoroughfare was busier, and Belloc danced through the crowd without slowing. “She would have told me!”

  “Right,” said Hax’s voice from Belloc’s glove, “because you would have totally let Captain Creepface take her away.”

  “Meh!” Belloc jumped over a stack of crates in a connecting hallway, rolled and was on his feet, through the door and into the next thoroughfare, without slowing.

  “You realize you’re showing up on a couple dozen different netcams without your hood on?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The Tik
ati liaison is gone.”

  And J’ni was gone. Nothing else mattered. When Belloc reached R-02, he ran up to the red-haired Hax and swept a hand through him. “Where’s the real one?” He searched the room.

  “Hax-Prime will arrive in six minutes forty-three seconds,” said the Hax-sim.

  Belloc’s thoughts and feelings raged within him like a devastating soom. Of course she went because she thought she could learn more about what happened to Duin, maybe even see him again, for which Belloc admired her beyond measure. The depth of her love for Duin and the courage it gave her were as immense as the Great Ocean.

  But he couldn’t allow her to remain in danger. That was not an option. It was his sacred duty to keep her safe. Plus, if something happened to her, and if Duin escaped, he would find Belloc and feed his little pieces to the driznit. Very slowly.

  “Can I buy a ship?” he asked the Hax-sim.

  “You have that much money?”

  “I have the passwords to J’ni and Duin’s account. And the passwords to Duin’s secret accounts.”

  Hax-sim nodded. “It would take about six weeks to get here.”

  “I can’t wait six weeks.”

  The manifest for Sector W appeared on the wall, and Hax-sim gestured to it. “Most of the private ships have already returned to Earth. There are two ships in the hangar, but they need maintenance. Six more are arriving sometime within the next couple days.”

  “I can’t wait a couple days.”

  “Well, how long can you wait?”

  “I must go now.”

  “You could shift yourself over there, and then shift back with her.”

  “Could I?” asked Belloc.

  “Sure, if you’re about to crap a physicist and a sub-particle engine.” Hax looked at the young Glin in expectation.

  “What about military ships? Can I buy one of those?”

  Hax-sim shook his head. “Not unless you’re the king of an unstable yet strategically valuable region, with the hand of the United States up your puppet-ass.”

  “I’m not,” Belloc answered, even though he didn’t quite understand. “Am I?”

  “My sources say no.”