Silver Eyes

by Nicole Luiken

  Anaximander refrained from pointing out that Mike hadn’t thought of it either. “Don’t open your mouth.” The words came out jerkily, four words from different sentences replayed separately.

  I opened my mouth wide.

  “Good enough for me,” Mike said. He released my legs, and Anaximander let go of my arms.Rianne wasn’t quite so trusting; one blastgun remained leveled at my gut.

  I ignored her, focusing on Mike. I’d almost killed him. I held his hand. Squeezed it. “Thank you. Again.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Mike said, reading my mind.

  “I know.” But it felt like my fault. Eddy had installed Loyalty chips in all three of us, but I’d been the only one affected by the override. I felt as though I should have been able to resist, too— however stupid that was.

  “I should have taken you to a surgeon.” Mike’s grim face made me realize I wasn’t the only one who felt guilty. “Made the UN pay up like what’s-his-face promised you.”

  “You can assign blame later,” Anaximander said. “We have to capture Eddy.” He retrieved both blastguns from Rianne. “You stay here and tell Jerome what’s happening. Mike, Angel, let’s go.”

  Rianne didn’t look happy, muttering, “Yes, Dad,” but she stayed behind.

  “What’s our plan? Eddy’s armor will protect him from our blastguns,” I said as we backtracked down the corridor.

  Anaximander hesitated. “A hail of bullets won’t kill him, but it might smash him against a wall hard enough to knock him out. It’s our best chance.”

  My blood chilled, but I made myself speak. “No, it’s not. Innocent people could get killed if the two of you start blasting away at each other in your armor. Plus, you might rupture the hull. Our best plan is to send me in alone. I’ll tell Eddy I killedyou both, then take him by surprise and disarm him.”

  Mike nodded reluctantly. “You’re right. You’re the only one he won’t shoot on sight. But you’ll have to be careful. As soon as Eddy realizes you’re free, he’ll activate the override again.”

  “I can fix that,” Anaximander said. “Code fourteen. Don’t. Obey. My.” A pause while he searched for the right word. “Commands. Code twenty-four.”

  “Great.” I smiled in relief. “I hate—”

  “Code fourteen,” Anaximander said, double-checking, and I stopped smiling because the override command overrode the previous command not to obey Eddy.

  Mike read that truth on my face. “Hell.”

  “Code twenty-four,” Anaximander said, and I was free again.

  All of us were unhappy, but our options were severely limited. The plan had to stand as it was.

  Anaximander contacted Rianne on his palmtop. “Where’s Eddy?”

  Rianne came through. “According to the latest reports, he’s in the cargo bay. He’s getting close to finding Timothy and his mother. They’re hiding in some containers.”

  It took five long minutes to reach the entrance to the cargo bay, but Eddy was still busy blasting containers when we peeked through the door. He must not have found Timothy and President Castellan yet. From the looks of the exploded water containers, he was getting frustrated.

  Mike stopped me before I could expose myself by going through the door. He kissed me twice,one fierce and one sweet. “You can beat him.”

  I hung onto his neck a moment longer than was necessary. I was afraid that the next time I saw him, I might have to shoot him.

  I called up the memory of how I’d felt when the chip had made me shoot Mike, set my face into lines of sorrow and murderous hate, then pulled myself through the doorway into the cargo bay.

  Eddy was only ten feet away, and he saw me immediately. His avid gaze drank in my pain like a parasite latching on to flesh. “Did you kill them for me, my angel? Did you kill your teacher and your boyfriend?”

  “Yes,” I gritted out. “Someday— Someday.” The words were a promise that made Eddy smile. He didn’t know someday was today. I dodged water bubbles and floating debris, moving closer to Eddy.

  “Once this is over I’ll have to get you to tell me all the little details. It’s a shame about Anaximander,” Eddy said carelessly. “He was useful to have around. But I suppose I have you now.”

  He smiled. The sight made me shudder. “I hate you.” I glared. Eddy would expect such clichés.

  “Poor Angel.” Eddy was almost purring. “You’d kill me if you could, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Well, disarm him anyhow. I calculated the meter and a half of distance between us. If I pushed off hard from the floor, I should have enough speed to rip the blastgun from Eddy as I went by, but then what? There was no way to dispose of the weapon before Eddy called out my override code.

  “Opening each crate is taking too long.” Eddyfrowned, then raised his voice. “This is your five-second warning. Come out now, or I’ll blow you to smithereens. One. Two.”

  Don’t fall for it,I thought.He’s bluffing. He wants to see your faces.

  “Three. Four. Five.”

  Eddy aimed at one of the crates. I was about to make a try for his gun, when President Castellan’s nerve broke. “Stop! I’m in here.” Her voice came from a crate two over from the one Eddy had targeted.

  “Open the crate,” Eddy said to me.

  I thumbed open the latches and raised the lid, gambling that Eddy would want to gloat a little, not just kill his sister on the spot.

  President Castellan emerged. Her hair was in disarray, but she showed no fear. “Hello, Edward.”

  His triumph instantly turned to rage. “Don’t call me that!”

  She shrugged. “As you prefer. I’ve always thought Eddy was a little boy’s name, not a man’s. But then you never grew up, did you, Eddy? You see something you want and you grab it, without thinking about the consequences. You embezzled the money earmarked for Spacer Augments and squandered it on toys. You might have gotten away with it once, but you got greedy. You stole all the money, and the Spacers began to complain. You created a mess, and ever since you’ve been scrambling frantically to clean it up. Now you’re going to kill me. But killing me will just make a bigger mess. A murder investigation this time. The UN will be all over you like a rash. You’ll never be president of anything larger than a jail cell.”

  “Shut up.” Face full of rage, Eddy jabbed the blastgun in her direction.

  I watched his trigger finger anxiously. If I sprang at him now, the gun might go off.

  “And if I don’t shut up? What will you do? Kill me? Some threat. You’re already going to do that.” President Castellan looked scornful.

  Eddy bared his teeth. “Yes, I am. But first I’m going to make you watch while I kill your precious legacy, your son. Angel, cuff her to a crate, then start opening the rest. When you find Timothy, bring him to me.”

  President Castellan tried to resist, but I was stronger and quicker. She was cuffed to the handle of a crate within a matter of seconds. “Sorry,” I told her. “I don’t want to do this. He’s controlling me with a Loyalty chip.”

  “Stop chatting, and hurry up!”

  I moved to the closest crate and flipped up the lid. Timothy stared up at me with terror-wide eyes. “This one’s empty.” I shut the lid before he started to float out.

  President Castellan didn’t overtly react, but from the new tension in her body I knew that she knew I was lying. “Beanstalk security will have called the UN by now. If you surrender now, you might go to jail for only a few years instead of the rest of your life.” She moved slightly, pulling Eddy’s attention to her to give me a chance.

  “How stupid do you think I am? I won’t go to jail, if all the witnesses are dead and can’t be questioned under TrueFalse,” Eddy said.

  “It’s not that you’re stupid,” President Castellan said dispassionately as I maneuvered myself to theside and behind Eddy with a series of small pushes. I flipped up more lids. “It’s that you’re lazy.”

  I launched myself at Eddy. My feet hit him in the middle of his ba
ck, knocking him into a spin. Before he could react, I tore the gun from his grasp and bounded up off the floor. But the exit was too far away, and I knew it.

  Where the hell were Mike and Anaximander? I’d done my job. I’d disarmed Eddy.

  Any moment now Eddy was going to call out my override code and command me to stop. I tried to distract him by aiming the blastgun at the breastplate of his golden armor—

  And my finger stuck in the trigger.

  I couldn’t pull the trigger. No matter how I struggled, my finger wouldn’t move that last quarter inch.

  Eddy began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, giggling helplessly, while I watched in dawning horror. “Poor Angel,” he gasped at last. “You weren’t expecting that, were you? I’ve been playing a trick on you.”

  I remembered the way I’d been unable to perceive Rianne after Eddy commanded me to “forget” her. “What did you do to me?” I demanded, but I knew. Sometime since I’d entered the cargo bay, Eddy had invoked my override command. Then later he’d commanded me to forget that he’d done so, setting up his “joke.”

  “I said, ‘code fourteen,’ as soon as you entered the cargo bay,” Eddy said. He was all but dancing, he was so pleased with himself. “This whole time you thought you were acting only on your own initiative. Who’s the moron now, huh?”

  I swallowed. “What did you do to me?”

  “Which time?” Eddy grinned nastily. “The first time I used your override was back at the Operations facility.”

  The time Anaximander had tried to prevent Eddy from talking to me alone and had walked into a wall.

  “I commanded you to act like a chicken. You flapped your wings and cock-a-doodle-dooed and tried to lay an egg.”

  I flushed with humiliation and dread. I couldn’t remember acting like a chicken—Eddy had obviously used the override to wipe out my memory of the episode—but it was after that that Shadow Angel had started to fear him.

  “The second time was at Timothy’s convention when I talked to you alone upstairs. You told me all about your plans to give Timothy some fun by taking him to the planetarium, and then—” Eddy stopped maliciously, letting my mind imagine all sorts of horrible things. Had he made me beg? Crawl? Kiss him?

  I rose to the bait. “What did you make me do?”

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Eddy said. “Did you have a stomachache afterward?”

  I frowned, couldn’t remember.

  “You ate a paper plate,” Eddy said. “I told you to think it was a cupcake and eat it. Then for dessert you ate some of my pocket lint.”

  “And this time?” I asked.

  Another snake-slither grin. “Well, I was a little upset with you for not doing as you were told and killing Anaximander and your boyfriend. So I made you break your finger.”

  I looked down at my hands and saw immediately that my left little finger was red and swollen, but I couldn’t feel any pain. It wasn’t even numb; it felt perfectly normal.

  “I commanded you not to feel the pain,” Eddy said. “It would have spoiled the joke. But the joke’s over now. Feel again.”

  I gasped in agony, tears springing into my eyes, as my broken finger screamed back to life.

  “Leave her alone, you sadistic creep,” President Castellan said, outraged on my behalf.

  Eddy smiled as he turned his attention back to her. “Did you think you were going to be rescued? Sorry. Now then, I commanded Angel not to attack me until after she’d found Timothy so he must be in one of those three crates there.” He pointed, then turned to me. “Angel, shoot—”

  I fired the blastgun before Eddy could command me to shoot Timothy. I fired into the air with the muzzle right next to my ear and the shot temporarily deafened me. The recoil propelled me backward and sent jagged pain streaking up my finger. I screamed and deliberately kept on screaming.

  Eddy’s mouth opened. He shouted. But I didn’t hear him and therefore didn’t have to obey.

  I threw the blastgun away, buying time. Eddy lunged toward me, and I flung myself sideways out of reach, yelling with all my might, fingers in my ears.

  Two, three, four bodies dived past me. Mike and Anaximander and several Spacers tackled Eddy, immobilizing him and unscrewing his helmet. Without his armor and his invulnerability, Eddy lost interest in fighting. He surrendered.

  He looked around for me, but Mike slapped a sticky-gag over his mouth before he could yell any more commands.

  Just to be on the safe side, I stayed where I was until they took him away.

  Four minutes later Anaximander freed me. “Code twenty-four.”

  “Thanks.” I could have asked him to put me back under override command again and tell me to stop feeling my finger, but I decided that I preferred the pain.

  THE NEXT FEW HOURS were total chaos.

  Mike stayed with me while I got my finger splinted and numbed, and then we rejoined the main group. We got there just in time to see five UN police officers arrest Eddy.

  They removed his sticky-gag. Anaximander and Mike floated on either side of me, ready to act if Eddy invoked the override, but he wasn’t quite stupid enough to incriminate himself in front of UN police.

  “It’s about time you got here,” Eddy complained. “Those people kidnapped my nephew, Timothy Castellan. I came here to rescue him.”

  “No, you didn’t!” Timothy shrilled. “You tried to kill Mom and me!”

  I happened to glance at President Castellan at that moment and saw the tearful joy on her face. I wondered how long it had been since Timothy called her “Mom.”

  Eddy looked at Timothy with pity. “Is that whatyour kidnappers told you? It’s a lie. How could you even think that about me? After all the baseball games I’ve taken you to?”

  President Castellan put her hand on Timothy’s shoulder and pulled him away. “Don’t waste your breath on him. We’re telling the truth, and TrueFalse will bear us out.”

  Eddy’s smooth expression curdled. “Your persecution of me is going to hurt you at the next board meeting,” he shouted after her. “Don’t think I won’t be there. My lawyer will get me out of these in two shakes.” He held up his handcuffs.

  President Castellan kept her back to him.

  I shook my head. Eddy actually seemed to believe that he still had a place at SilverDollar, that his lawyer could somehow make the money he’d embezzled and the Loyalty chips he’d installed disappear. He’d probably never been in trouble before that he couldn’t bribe his way out of. President Castellan was right; he’d never grown up.

  Eddy must have continued spewing accusations, because police officers soon arrested Jerome.

  I knew other arrests would follow, everything coming out under TrueFalse. Both Anaximander and Rianne had committed a crime and might go to jail. With luck, a jury would rule that they had already been punished enough, but I thought that neither Anaximander nor Rianne would mind paying the price of a few years in prison since Timothy’s kidnappings had ultimately resulted in Augments for their people.

  At President Castellan’s request, the police officerleft off Jerome’s handcuffs and merely guarded the hatchways while she and Jerome got down to some serious business.

  “The Augments are our first priority,” President Castellan said. “I’ll need data on who needs what and which cases are the most serious. Edward was in charge of the entire Martian mining operation so all the information I have on file is suspect. He may have inflated claims in order to embezzle more money.”

  “We have our own records; I can get you that information.”

  “Excellent,” President Castellan said briskly. “Now, on to finances. Edward’s accounts will be frozen until after his trial; it may be a year or two before SilverDollar regains whatever remains of the funds he embezzled.”

  Jerome started to draw himself up, to protest.

  President Castellan held up a hand. “I can promise you five million immediately for the worst cases. I can get that out of emergency funds; the rest I’ll have t
o argue out of the board of directors.”

  I tuned out as the conversation turned to more boring budget details.

  Rianne brought Mike, Timothy, and me sandwiches, then hung around the edges of the meeting. “What’s happening?” she whispered as we all chowed down.

  Instead of answering her, Timothy looked at her reproachfully. “What are you doing here? You promised me you’d go to the hospital.”

  “There was a line,” Rianne said defensively. “Eddy injured a few people, you know.”

  “They should have received treatment by now,”Timothy said. “Come with me. You’re going to the doctor right now.” He left his sandwich floating in midair, took her arm in a firm grip, and started towing her to the door.

  “But I want to find out what happens!” Rianne complained.

  “Mike and Angel will give you a full report,” Timothy promised, undeterred.

  My lips twitched, but I didn’t go to Rianne’s rescue. I suspected she enjoyed Timothy’s concern.

  The discussion between President Castellan and Jerome had heated up. Now they were discussing the fate of the Martian mines. Jerome was pushing for a promise, and President Castellan wasn’t giving it.

  “Once your people receive the Augments they need, they’re no longer trapped in space. They can live on Earth if they’d like.”

  “But we don’t like.” Jerome chopped his hands through the air. “We want to stay in space.”

  “No decision has been made to close the mines,” President Castellan said. “But the economic climate is changing. If SilverDollar doesn’t change with it, we’ll go bankrupt and the mines will shut down anyhow. Then where will you be?”

  “Then sign the mines over to us,” Jerome said stubbornly. “We’ll keep them going.”

  “Now, that truly isn’t possible,” President Castellan said. “You’re forgetting that SilverDollar doesn’t own the mines. We just have a lease. You need to talk to the UN about negotiating your own lease.”

  Jerome’s jaw dropped.

  I couldn’t resist. “Or you might want to talk tothe UN about taking out a loan and terraforming Mars.”