by Michele Lang
A rush of panic spread through Anika's body. “I have to hide. You understand why.”
“I know you believe it was a rival corporation that murdered Roberto, to shut him up. To shut down your research. But think about it, Annie. Why didn't they murder you in New York?”
The question hovered in the air between them. Billy's hands reached for her and caressed her shoulders. And the shock of that touch roared through her like an ion storm. “I told you, Annie, that I love you. The night of the memorial I knew. And I told you. I knew it was too soon. You had to let him go, and I told you I’d wait, as long as it took. I fell for you the second I saw you. Roberto told me that I would.”
Anika tried to speak, but she couldn't manage a word.
“Wait up, hear me out. The genmod does funny stuff, you know that. It gave Roberto some precog, he knew when stuff was going to happen.”
Anika swiped the tears off her face, as if she could wipe Billy's words away. His fingers tightened over her shoulders, and she took a big, shuddering breath, fighting not to let go, not to release her true feelings.
“He had changed, by the end,” she finally said. “Maybe it was the genmod. Or maybe it was just the war.”
“Roberto told me he was going to die, the night before he was murdered. He told me he was planning to speak out about the stuff he’d seen in the war. But it was too late. And he told me I was going to save your life, just in time. And here I am, before it’s too late, just like he said.”
His arms slipped around her, protecting her, and Anika melted into him. After two years of running away from Roberto's killers, she'd finally turned around and faced the past, the grief of not just losing Roberto, but Billy too.
“I'm safe out here, I think,” she said, her voice muffled from inside Billy's arms. “As long as I just do my work and don’t cause any trouble, I don't think any other corporation can get through FortuneCorp's sectors. FortuneCorp runs the whole show out here.”
“It's not safe. It wasn’t safe for Roberto, surrounded by his brothers. It’s not safe for you, out here all alone. I came to get you out of here.”
Anika cried then, remembering. Billy just held her, his silence saying so much more than words ever could. The tears slipped away after a while, though she knew, like the tides they’d return. They rolled in every night, as she stretched out on her cot, her fingers touching the blaster for courage.
But that time was done, now that Billy was here. He could still leave in the morning. If she had her way, he'd go when daylight came, free and alive. Free of his obligation to her. But everything had changed because he had found her. Even after he went back to his life, Anika would remember that he had come.
“One night,” Anika insisted. “Stay the night and you’ll go in the morning. Just like I first said. And as long as I stay here working, and as long as you don’t poke the powers that be and just go your way, we should both be okay.”
Billy’s smile flashed across his face, banishing the shadows. “I got the Murphy's luck, Annie. Too late to stay out of trouble, too late the day I was born. But I’m here.” He knew as well as she did that a night could last forever, that anything could happen between this moment they shared, and daybreak.
#
Reunions are funny, time-bending things. After only a few minutes more, Billy and Anika had recovered from their emotion. Anika took Billy into the jungle, for just a few minutes, to show him her artistry.
She beamed her arc-light torch skyward and dappled shadows filtered through the broad leaves stretching over their heads. “Those are tiny weeds back at home,” she whispered. “My technology grows crabgrass into trees, clovers into climbing vines. I grew this jungle in a single growing season. It would take fifty years, a hundred, for any other terraformer.”
Anika crouched down and dug around in the sandy dirt until she found what she was looking for. She pulled the black tube out of the ground to show Billy. “This is what the trouble is all about,” she said. “The Bowman eco-drive.”
“Could anybody just take it and grow stuff?”
“You need the expertise of course. But if you had the secret of it…”
She left the rest unspoken. Such a technological revolution was worth espionage, murder. To steal it, to control it, or at least to stop it.
#
They shared their dinner, eating picnic-style on the floor by the side of her bed, leaning against it. Anika took a sip of protein gel. It didn't taste like much, but it did the job of nourishing her. And all she cared about was Billy, anyway. Getting as much of him as she could before he had to go away again.
She was hungry for the human contact, for the simple pleasure of talking to somebody. But it was more than that. This was Billy, the man who populated her secret dreams and kept her company in her memories. As Roberto faded away, Billy became more vivid, and she held on to him like a talisman, like a soldier’s good luck charm.
Never mind that he had the Murphy-backwards luck he mentioned. She wanted all of him, that lopsided smile, that incandescent stare that made the rest of the universe disappear. It sounded idiotic, but she wanted to protect him. And if she couldn't protect him by staying away from him, she wanted to give him a place of sanctuary, where he could let go of the banter, let go of the war, and find a peaceful garden to lay his head.
But it wasn’t that simple.
Anika put these thoughts away. Here with Billy, she was Annie, not Anika, and for the moment she could leave the beleaguered scientist behind, and be Annie, Billy's girl, at least for a single night.
“So how did you get from the Jobs Prize to planet AlphaZed3?”
She sighed and leaned back against the cot, feeling the heat of his arm all along her side, even though they didn't touch. “I don't know how I ended up here, really,” she said, wrenching herself away from the tangled mess of her thoughts to look at him, in the flesh, next to her. “But making this planet habitable means big money for FortuneCorp,” she said.
“You wanna to know how I found you out here? I knew you and Roberto worked for FortuneCorp, first off. And that aside from all your science, you love growing things. So I thought to myself – ‘Self, what would a scientist who loves growing things do for FortuneCorp?’ Grow new worlds, of course. After that, I hacked into the employee database of off-world employees and I was hot on your trail.”
Annie’s dinner congealed into a hard, cold pit in her stomach. “Nice little felony you committed there, Murph. And don't you realize they have a whole Sheriff's division at FortuneCorp that'll trace your virtual tracks and hunt you down in the meatworld?”
Billy's smile got small and quiet and dangerous. “It was worth it, Annie. I found out who killed Roberto in the database, too – the information was right in his dossier. In yours.”
The silence thundered between them.
“Don't worry about me. I have my ways of getting in and out of virtual space alive. My contacts. My brothers.”
Annie nodded at him, numb to her bones. “So you know who killed him.”
“You want to know.”
“I'm not so sure. What can I do about it, even if I do know?”
Billy didn't answer her. Instead, he guzzled the rest of his own protein gel and crushed the titanium can between his fingers. He kept crushing it into a tiny cube, as Annie watched.
“Once I found out where you were and who killed Roberto, I had to find you,” he said.
“So here I am, you found me,” she said, a little waver in her voice. “Growing this ball of ice into something habitable.”
Billy turned his head to look at the flimsy synthwood door to the hut, and Annie knew he could look right through it with his modified eyes. “That Bowman eco-drive is incredible. No other worldcorp has technology anything like it, not yet anyway. You grew a whole world.”
“Well, a few hundred square meters worth. But we have to make it more than a few kliks wide for a colony to settle here and get to work. The precious metals frozen inside the i
ce are worth trillions. Once it's habitable, we can extract that ore and conquer the whole quadrant. We can use this as a regional base.”
She still spoke of “we,” what she and FortuneCorp could do together. It was a habit she had, maybe a bad one, but she wanted to belong to something – anything that was bigger than her and her fears.
Billy kept staring at the door, and didn’t look away even when Annie dared to touch his shoulder. When he didn’t respond to her, she squinted at the door as if she could see through it too, through sheer orneriness.
Nope.
Before she could say anything, Billy whispered directly into her mind:
What’s that?
Those two little words sparked the shakes in her, from deep inside, working out to the tips of her fingers, to the ends of her hair. For two reasons.
One, Billy spoke directly into her mind. How did he do that? She wasn’t genmod in any way. Not even Roberto could do it, whisper into her soul. And he had tried.
So, what just happened?
The other reason was that Billy seemed to have seen something lurking in the jungle she’d grown, outside the perimeter of her research hut. But she hadn’t introduced any fauna to her flora, not yet.
So, what the bloody hell was out there?
Billy must have picked up on her fear, for he rose silently to his feet, and put her behind him. He took a blaster out of his boot (so that was where it was) and walked to the door, step by soundless step.
Once he reached the frame, he motioned Annie back, and she decided not to argue. Before she could take cover behind her desk, Billy reached forward lightning fast, and swung the door open.
In a flash, Annie saw the hummingbird-fast metal wings and screamed, “Don’t shoot!”
Billy reached forward and pinched Violet out of the air and into one of his big, square palms. Violet squeaked, and the gears ground audibly in the joints of her translucent wings.
“That’s my lab assistant,” Annie said, shaking so hard she reached for the top of her desk to keep from toppling over. “Violet. That’s what I call her.”
Billy brought the wriggling AI to her desk, opened the roll top with an elbow, and pinned its metallic little body against the realwood surface.
“Looks like a killer drone to me,” Billy growled.
“Violet’s FortuneCorp-issued. And yes, they make the drones. But her directive is to assist me. She does growth measurements around the dome’s perimeter, to see how permeable the dome membrane is at the edges. To see if we can extend the geodome biosphere. I should’ve warned you about her. Sorry, I’m such a ninny.”
Billy snorted at that, sighed, and let Violet go. She buzzed on her back for a minute, like a metallic dragonfly, and then she found her footing and swung onto her furry-looking titanium feet.
“What’s that?” Violet asked in her high-pitched, buzzing voice.
Annie restrained a sigh. “This is my old friend, Billy Murphy. He was, erm, in the neighborhood, and decided to stop by and say hello.”
Violet’s compound eyes took in Billy and Annie in a single glance. And for the first time, those jeweled, all-seeing eyes unnerved her.
They seemed to see right through her. Seemed to know who killed Roberto. And why.
But her dangerous days were done. She was a frontier gardener now, she wanted to tell Violet. And that’s all she wanted to be.
#
Violet joined them for the rest of their little picnic. Billy no longer looked at Annie or said much of anything. He just watched Violet. And Violet watched Annie.
“I need to return to my monitoring duties,” Violet finally announced. “Are you sure you are okay here, boss?”
Annie smiled at her. Oh, she knew Violet was programmed, and didn’t grow spontaneously out of carbon-based life, but she’d never cared. Violet knew an endless supply of silly jokes, entertained her and diverted her through long days of data analysis and eco-development, and heat generation under the geodome. Violet distracted her, on long, lonely, dark nights balanced on the edge of forever.
Her smile faded, though, as Violet’s wings buzzed into life. For the first time, Annie saw a creature created by FortuneCorp, one whose loyalty extended through her to her mother – the corporation. She was programmed for Annie’s well-being, but where Annie’s interests conflicted with FortuneCorp’s, Violet would see her boss’s demise as in her own best interest.
Annie was just a conduit to Violet’s ultimate loyalty. And if she interfered with that loyalty, what then?
But Annie only said, “Good night, Violet. All’s well. As usual, mark me as off duty until sunrise.”
“Will do, boss.”
And with a buzz and blur of wings, Violet was gone into the night.
#
“You are in terrible danger,” Billy whispered, after Violet was well and truly gone.
“I know,” Annie whispered back.
“No. You don't know who killed Roberto. Who is likely to kill you, too.”
Annie was afraid to know the truth. The truth was too horrible to hear.
Billy slid closer, put an arm around her, and leaned his head against hers.
Warmth flooded through her, and after a moment of basking in the pure human contact, Annie realized with a jolt that it wasn’t just emotional warmth she felt. Her body seemed to have connected with Billy’s. Their consciousness seemed to have merged.
Roberto had once described the mental union he’d felt with his team, the way the genmod made it possible for them to fight as one. And now she felt that merging for herself. Billy spoke into her now, the way he’d once spoken into his team.
FortuneCorp
Was all that Billy said. He said it into her mind.
That was all it took, to strip the willful blindness from her eyes.
FortuneCorp.
It was FortuneCorp that had known about her background and profited from it.
FortuneCorp, that knew she’d refused to go off-world while Roberto still served in the Glass Desert. He was their employee, but he was also a US citizen. He had undergone the genmod without their express permission, and FortuneCorp knew that not even the corporation could recall Roberto from the field of war.
So FortuneCorp had killed Roberto.
Not a dying radiation-poisoned terrorist, as the government had told her. She hadn’t believed that for a minute, but she’d assumed it was some corporate rival, some other worldcorp, killing Roberto in country to kill his value to his own company.
But FortuneCorp, her employer and Roberto’s, had killed him. So that it could post her off-world like it wanted. To test the Bowman eco-drive, gain that competitive edge.
Now she understood. As long as she worked on the Bowman eco-drive and asked no questions, FortuneCorp got what it wanted out of her. But if she quit, if she betrayed the company’s loyalty, her value to FortuneCorp was gone. And if FortuneCorp couldn't have her talents, nobody could.
Her life was balanced on a razor’s edge. She opened her mouth to speak, but Billy stopped her with a kiss. A kiss so mind-blowing in its intensity that all the devastating truth melted in its wake.
She surrendered to the fire of it, and it burned away the fear, the grief, the pain. The “we” was gone, was never more than a lie. Only an incandescent rage remained. And for the first time, an acceptance of the fact that Roberto was truly, forever, gone.
Billy whispered from inside that fire, into her mind. I am getting you out of here. Alive. I swear.
Annie made a little sound, and didn’t bother trying to get her brain cells to respond in words. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him, and just kissed Captain Billy Murphy back.
He caressed her gently with his fingers, their tips feathering down the back of her neck and against the length of her arms. With a sigh, she surrendered to him, let the molten flood of feeling crest over all of her defenses.
His kiss became more insistent, and she opened her mouth to his, curling into his arms as they twined togeth
er on the floor. She ran her fingers through that thick hair, felt the stubble along the edge of his jaw, and that inner sensation of openness and vulnerability was almost more than she could bear.
She almost pulled away then, begged off, asked for more time, made some excuse and slipped out of his fingers. But Billy sighed too, and to her shock her heart surged inside of her. Began beating in tandem with Billy’s heart, throbbing together in a single rhythm.
I will never leave you, he whispered into her, and all she could do was make a little sigh of gratitude in response. He kept kissing her even as he set her full length along the ground, and pressed his body against hers.
The warmth of him spread, and their shared fire rose up in her. His hands found her bare skin, under her tunic, and she trembled under his gentle but insatiable touch.
Their hearts beat together, faster and faster. And then, at the same moment, their eyes opened. And it was like she was inside of Billy’s body staring back at herself. She simultaneously looked into him, and he looked into her. This communion was more intimate than even the act of sex; they mingled souls as well as their bodies.
From that double vantage, she could see what he saw when he looked at her. Feel what he felt. And the tears sprung up in her eyes. She was beautiful!
Billy kissed Annie again, as if he could kiss his life force right into her. She was the only woman who could slip through his fingers and right into his heart. He’d felt closer to her just hunting her in the cyberworld, and then the farthest quadrants of space, than to any other woman he’d ever known.
This little freckled blond woman, who had run away from him to save him, had stolen his heart forever.
Annie couldn’t get enough of his lips, the velvet skin at the nape of his neck. She kissed down the side of his face, and she whispered, “Just this night. And then you go. Please.”