Francesca chilled. She was going to see Raoul and she could lie once more to get there. After all her story was his story too because without him the story would be true, except that August would be back and alive telling it, not her.
That night they left. Shooting to the moon on the same ship she and Raoul had travelled in months before filled her with nostalgia for him. In such a short time they would be together again. It seemed unreal. Some family members from the crew were travelling there with her. Some wanted to thank her for some reason, which Francesca felt uncomfortable with since she hadn’t actually done anything to help anybody. Mostly they wanted to take pictures with her. One woman kept looking at her strangely, which prompted Francesca to make a sign against the Evil Eye. One of those things her Tia had left her.
That creepy clone dude was also on-board. If there was a guy deserving of the Evil Eye, it would be him. Probably no point, as Francesca doubted it would work against the Devil himself.
Towards the end of the flight she heard him playing that horn of his and wondered what shit he was getting up to with it. She gave him a hard look that she instantly wished she hadn’t because he took it as an invitation to come up the aisle towards her.
He pretended not to know her at first, as if he was dragging out of some long-lost memory or something which was about as convincing as some decked out pimp pretending he had honest feelings for her. She went through the routine of admiring his music, which got her thinking about how he’d used his playing to hack the deep space network and what he might be getting up to.
“Music can take you places you’d never otherwise see.”
Which was like him confirming it for her. She played it dumb and said something non-committal. On the guy went about salvation and suffering and heartbreaks. It was like he was trying to send hidden messages in normal conversation, the way he spun hacks out in his playing.
“Is that so?” The sooner she could get away from this guy the better.
He looked at her with psycho eyes, which made her think he was going wipe her out for killing August, or at least let her secret out. Despite her tenth-degree ninja juju training she started to sweat. Dios mio. She felt so bad about what she’d done she’d almost wished he would do something to make her pay. She gave him the shrug with the legit excuse that ComSec had called her down early, which was true anyway, but Francesca felt like she was lying about it for some reason.
Reading between those lines, she was sure he was on to her whole horrible secret, that she would have fooled exactly everyone except for him, and he was covering for her for his own weird clone reasons. The way he had rigged the Deep Space network through his music it was almost impossible that he didn’t have a front row seat to the whole thing. The guilt this thought brought was crushing. It was bad enough that she had finished off August, the main man that she admired, but what made her feel like a totally useless asshole was that she was more worried about being uncovered than what her betrayal had meant to him.
Francesca wondered if there was any way to kill the clone without people finding out, the way she had with August. Even thinking about that made her sick. If it hadn’t been for the clone, she wouldn’t have connected with Raoul. She was truly grateful for that, but only that.
Enough of this head-trip. Francesca needed to clear her mind in order to practice flying this disc, so it was a good thing the pilot was a good-looking enough guy, which is what she needed to keep her attention on his every word and away from her shitty thoughts. Flying down from the Lunar Transfer Vehicle parked in orbit around the moon was done in a disc, an honest to goodness flying saucer, covered with a clear buckeyball dome for protection. The thing was designed to maximize visibility. It was evacuated to avoid the possibility of a catastrophic depressurisation, so you had to suit up. The flight down was awesome, and soon any memory of the clone and all the other memories he brought up were lost in her sheer marvel at everything. Francesca imagined herself as the goddess Diana, the huntress returning from her hunt, descending in her throne into the open moon.
She was glad she insisted on driving the disc. Part of her training had been in piloting these things, if only in the simulator. She was damned if she wasn’t going to take advantage of her new power of celebrity to have some good old-fashioned fun. With judicious blasts of the retro rockets, Francesca dropped the flying disc down among the broken peaks of the Montes Alpes, falling into valleys and frog hopping at the last possible moment to avoid collision with the lunar ground, and then bounce, up again into the luminous Earthrise.
But at the same time, Francesca knew she couldn’t enjoy herself as she much as she once would have, because now she was the Queen of Shit. With Elena she had excuses, but not anymore.
“What the hell Salvador?”
“Just having fun Stony.”
“Well get it over with. We have work to do.”
Francesca was buzzed when her disc skipped down at Luna City and she bounded into the waiting airlock. To hell with everything. She was going to see Raoul as soon as she finished this shitty little job, whatever it was.
What it was a total full-on lock-down. Stony was in fine form, personally checking every encryption setting. Elite ultra-tuned Ginyu Force storm troopers were everywhere. And something big was going down in the deep space landing pad section because it was all blanked out, even to her grade. The security was more intense than even when August Bridges was building the wormhole. Just thinking that name made Francesca blush in shame, but there was a reason all that had happened, and a reason she was here, and that reason was named Raoul.
Why they put all this security on a routine transfer of the crew coming in from Tsuchinshan was hard to figure out. Maybe they had another terrorist on-board, but it would have to be Bhatterjee herself to need all of this. From her side it was totally boring, just checking things other people had checked already. With the part of her brain that wasn’t mindlessly repeating procedure she began to think about the clone playing his sax on the way up. It seemed to be a weird thing to do.
Maybe his solo would shed some light on things. Francesca ran the same filters she had on the Deep Space stuff and, sure enough, it was in there. Subtle deviations off the notes that looked like static but held another coherent signal. She couldn’t break the encryption yet but noticed an odd echo signal crawling around the notes coming from somewhere else in the ship. Most of the other guys had been miners, not ComSec, but there was definitely a two-way thing going on in there. She had to tell Stony.
One of the ComSec guys told her he’d gone off to the ancillary launch pad. “Why’s that?”
“Oh, to secure that transhipment of asteroid miners. They aren’t being let in while the op is on.”
So, the blanked out main pad wasn’t about Raoul. That meant her lover to be might be just standing around down a short corridor that was completely open to her. Francesca’s heart went pow.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“I’ve got something I need to show the Sarge. A possible security breach. Probably not, but I need to get it looked at.”
A few quick loping steps down an ‘under repair’ gantry and she was there. The whole gang. And there he was, waiting for her like in a million dreams, grinning radiantly, boring into her mind with his smiling wise eyes, completely welcoming. And there, tight beside him, defending the space between them with psychic laser beams, was that woman with the Evil Eye from the flight. She was friendlier now. She was also, as she announced herself, Raoul’s wife. Her name was Jolene, a name he had never felt it necessary to mention in all the months of close quarters.
“Oh Francesca. We are so happy to see you again.”
Raoul stood by impassively, watching it happen, his sad lovely eyes with every word retreating by parsecs into the forever distance of never was.
“Raoul has told me so much about you that I feel you and I have a lot to talk about.”
Raoul’s wife was so gushingly thankful for her husband’s rescue
that Francesca could scarcely stop her soul from vomiting all over the woman’s intentionally too revealing dress. He hugged Francesca carefully, not the warm soulful hug that used to wrap her damaged soul in a cocoon of light. Like a brother.
Tactfully excusing herself from the party, as soon as it would not be too obvious and rude, Francesca wandered away into the greater Luna City compound to find a dark place to match the congealing blackness of her mind. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no such place to be found. Un-monitored space was at a premium in this cramped mining compound that some marketing genius had named a City. People were everywhere. Francesca returned to hyperventilate in the airlock by the discs and resisted the urge to race out of it. There would be too many alarms if she did. That, and her desire for privacy at this painful moment, exceeded any urge to end herself. She let her actions numbly follow the least-distance avenue of escape and, donning her spacesuit, she took refuge in a familiar place by hoisting herself into the vents. She completely forgot what she had come to tell Stony.
There was no need to go exploring to find greater solitude because this was it, so Francesca curled up into a ball just inside the vent opening and wept. Out leaked the pain and inner desolation that had stored within her for many years. Softly, but not constrained, like a confluence of many rivers meeting on a level plain. She did not sob. All resistance in her body washed away on an even tide of sorrow. She succumbed to her feelings and the rising flood, within an hour, crested leaving her strangely refreshed in its wake.
But when the tide began to ebb it turned red, drawn back to the gravitational centre, the central fact of the whole shitty mess, which was that Raoul was a complete dick. He had gotten inside of her mind and played her as she had allowed no man to do before. It was a complete invasion and the asshole thought he was just going to walk away from it all, with her heart tossed casually into some poetic bullshit collection jar. He hadn’t even had the honesty to sleep with her, which was the slap in the face that she could not abide. She would have figured it out if they had because she wasn’t a fool, but the slippery creep had made himself, instead, into some Saint of her imagination, some unattainable dream of perfection on which all her hopes could collect. Francesca’s thoughts turned casually to murder.
A red light began to blink on and off and on and off in Francesca’s eyes. She ignored it for a while, until her irritation drove her to open the priority channel that beckoned in her neuroview.
“The prisoners have been taken by the Revs. Down to the H2O extraction tubes or up through the arboretum. Split two teams in those two ways. Raj and I will check the back-landing bay just to be safe.”
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. That message in the clone’s static - it had been important. Francesca was sure of it. The latest complete screw up in her career full of screw ups. She thought to call in, but the shame of the whole thing caught in her throat. How could she explain why she was hiding in an airlock vent?
“Roger that C30. How did they escape?”
Francesca’s interest perked. C30? The clone?
“They tagged the captives right next to me. I moved into a vent and the darts were thwarted by the cover. Afterwards they dragged them off with the group who took Gudanko.”
“I gotcha C30. We have recaptured Gudanko - they dropped him and ran. You say they still have the prisoners. The boss wants them bad.”
“Doubtless you’ll collect them. To button-up the back-door Raj and I will block off the South lock.”
“Copy that C30. Tango Uniform.”
Tango Uniform for Thank you? What a bunch of try-hards, playing super soldiers after being cooped up on the Moon for so long picking their asses. Here is the question of the day - if they were so hot why send only two guys to the only real escape point? Their incompetence annoyed her, mainly because it distracted her from what she wanted to rush out to do, which was to go kick in the teeth of the man who had pretended to be someone she could have loved. She shifted herself and her stony heart back down toward the head of the vent deliberately, like the assassin she had become.
“Assistance request. Raj has been hit. The terrorists. Past the last advance to the landing locks. Come quick.”
“Roger that UOR C30. We are on our way.”
This meant they were coming right to her. Adrenaline gripped Francesca as her muscles tensed and she flipped around ready to spring out of the vent. Four figures dashed underneath. Francesca launched down on the last one to pass with a fury. Her anger burned from her breast and she burst into green flame. She snagged her prey around the neck, wrenched hard and the figure rolled over her back with a disconcerting absence of resistance, so gently that, for a second, she had the sensation that she had grabbed a pillow in a spacesuit, not a living person.
Keeping the momentum of surprise going against her more numerous adversaries, Francesca laid into her downed victim’s solar plexus with a solid thud. As she wailed into his gut with a third and fourth vicious kick she got a view of the downed man’s face. It stopped her in her tracks. He seemed so ridiculously relaxed, like he was lounging at the Copacabana or something and not getting the absolute shit beaten out of him. Their eyes met, and she could swear that he was actually feeling worried about her, like she was some long-lost friend who had gone bat-shit crazy. For some reason that look both enraged her and disarmed her, like a bomb blowing up inside of her backwards into her gut. She stalled.
Arms grabbed around her back and began to pull her away. The arms were weak though, like her own skinnies after she had returned from her long voyage off gravity. Francesca easily broke the lock and turned to face her attacker.
The face looking back at her stopped her cold. What? She could have sworn she was looking into the eyes of a guy who totally couldn’t be there.
“You.”
The ghost of August Bridges levelled a shaky fist at her. She stopped breathing. He recognised her all right, after coming all the way back from his deep space grave to get her. Then just when Francesca, frozen in terror, thought he was going to reach into her heart and pull it out, someone else grabbed her and pushed her hard off her feet.
Even though she could have flipped her attacker, she was too freaked out to do anything. Francesca crossed herself as the woman who had pushed her came at her wielding an air canister. They locked eyes. Francesca knew that face too, but how? She thought the woman must have recognised her too because she suddenly put down the bottle down and backed away. A thought of Elena flashed through Francesca’s mind, of how she had failed her. And for no reason that made sense she felt the same way towards this stranger. Like she was letting her down.
“Don’t get in our way again,” the woman shouted, and Francesca fell back. Her broken heart suddenly seemed too heavy to bear, the shock and the guilt of seeing August, the strange hold over her of the downed man, and now this woman for whom she felt strangely accountable. As Francesca sat there she was caught up in a giant wave that had come straight across the galaxy to sweep her away. A tsunami so impossibly big even the Silver Surfer would get rolled.
Then the clone ran in and over to a panel.
“I’m exploding the lock.”
Pop. Out they flew. The instant decompression spewed them out onto the ground. It took a few moments for Francesca to orient and, as she did, she spied the four figures taking off towards the nearby landing disks. The first two were already strapping in while the second two scrambled for the one furthest away. She pelted after them, in long vaulting strides, targeting the slowest whom she recognised as the man she had downed. He was bent over and hobbling. She peeled him away just before he could step up to the disk after the clone, and as she yanked him down the landing disk dome locked in place. The rockets fired but, instead of lifting away, the disk pivoted towards them as if the pilot was trying to fry them with his boosters. In fact, that was exactly what the evil toad was attempting to do.
Francesca noticed a twisted piece of panelling laying near them, which had been the outer airlock do
or before the explosion. The panel was laying on the lip of a small crater, with just enough room to crawl under. She tugged the man after her with little resistance and managed to wedge them both under just as the booster rockets bore down. The panel buckled under the pressure but did not give and, thankfully, deflected the heat. Otherwise they would have fried.
When she was sure the attacking disc had finally lifted off, Francesca dragged the man towards the last landing disc, so he wouldn’t be out exposed to a second attack. The man caught on to her intent and ran as fast as he could manage. When they had entered the landing disc webbing she strapped him in. She noticed he was bleeding from his mouth, but otherwise gave the impression that he wasn’t particularly bothered. He smiled kindly at her and mouthed “Thank you.” What the hell for?
Francesca turned her attention to the landing disc controls. She lowered the dome and rocketed off in pursuit of the others.
A few minutes later she heard the clone over the security band. “Team 5. Team 5. The lock is blown. One of your guys I didn’t recognise dropped down on them. The fugitives ran him down with a disk plus one from their own side. I’ve taken up pursuit so watch my sign. No need to follow along with the last disk. They can’t survive out here and there is no place to hide. I’ll follow hanging back, so you can track us.”
“Roger C30, this is Comsec. Not sure who you’re talking about though with that extra man getting the drop on them. Not one of ours. We’re all accounted for, even Raj here with one nasty lump. Come back in before you are out of return range. We don’t want to lose you too. Over.”
Francesca frowned. Nothing added up. There was no other landing disk on the pad that she had seen. And the clone couldn't confirm that she and her captive were dead because they weren’t. She smelled something foul. She looked around and saw no one following them. The only conclusion was that it was the clone who was the person who tried to pulverise them. That made no sense, no? The clone would have absolutely no idea who she was and, because of that, had no reason to want her dead. And the guy next to her didn’t seem the type to invite murder. Well now that clone had made a terrible mistake because she was definitely in the mood to want him dead, and when she caught him it would be more than just wanting. Francesca concentrated all her rage on this outcome and jammed her foot on the accelerator.
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