She had no idea what was normal or abnormal for a baby. Maybe feeling like you were caring for a particularly expressive plastic doll was just part of the process.
The woman, Ubra, had mentioned something about how Yalin had been hurt. Some accident inside the facility, apparently.
She hadn't given any more details, and Yalin seemed entirely unhurt. Her only injuries were the rash Rose had inflicted.
There's something not right with the girl, she thought. I know it. I can't escape knowing it. I don't need to own a working car to recognize that there's something wrong with a crashed one.
For several days, this was life. Caring for an eerie, inhuman baby. Having her girlfriend carp at her. Poking her head out of doors and seeing the city decay on its feet.
One night, someone broke down her door.
She was up for what seemed like the thousandth time that night, caring for Yalin, when there was a sudden crash of splintered polywood from the front entryway. Her heart siezed in her chest, as if one of the polywood shards had been driven into her chest.
What...?
She threw a cloth over the baby, and approached the entryway.
She was blocked from seeing the door by a corner. Around the corner, she could hear footsteps.
She tried to think of what to do, how to play this, how to respond to demands for money or her body.
But she had no chance at all to prepare for the view of Ubra Zolot.
The short woman was wearing a bulky, indistinct coat. It could have been hiding body armor, and weapons. There was a crudely cut-out badge pinned on her chest, identifying her as one of the Solar Arm Constabulary.
"Why are you here?" Rose asked.
"You know why," Ubra said.
Yalin gave a soft cry, like wind from a distant place. Ubra's eyes snapped towards the sound, and she started walking a straight line to her baby.
Rose was in the way. She had a lot of centimeters and kilos on Ubra, but she was brushed aside like an insubstantial leaf.
"How is she?" Ubra asked. "I want to know everything."
"She's...er...fine..." Rose said.
"That's good," Ubra picked up the infant, and started checking her. "Saves me from having a problem. Saves you from having a problem."
Rose glanced at the door, and saw that it was hanging from one hinge. The other was smashed in with a size-9 boot. It was a cheap tenement, rented on the quick with the last of her savings. Yves had loathed it, adding another divide between the two.
"Listen, you could have knocked," Rose said. "I would have let you in."
"You might have been asleep, and I don't have time to fuck around."
"Why didn't you come during the day?"
Ubra glanced upwards. "Look, maybe this is falling on deaf ears, but I need to keep a low profile. I got someone to forge a shitty new identity for me, and so far it's allowed me to remain a free woman, but I do not want anyone to investigate it any depth or breadth. No day visits. So warnings. If my behavior is in any way predictable, someone might find me."
She seemed almost hysterical in her paranoia. But perhaps these were days when hysterical paranoia was the correct way of processing things.
"The building has security," Rose said. "There’s going to be video and audio of you entering the front door."
"No need," Ubra said. "I spent a day casing the street. I know everything about it - what time there are patrols, what things they check, and what things they ignore. At the end of the street you can pull up a plate, and access a main distribution frame - several hundred twisted pairs, routing security feeds from all the tenements. I might have knocked out power to a few surveillance cameras before I found your one. Right now, that invisible pinpoint camera you've got wired over your front door is displaying a beautiful, crystal-clear picture of static. I'll reconnect you when I leave."
"There's also voice sensing that's listening to you speak now," Rose said. "It matches your voice against every wanted person in the Solar Arm's database."
"A database that I'm not in. In any case, that was the Solar Arm's database, heavily engineered with a bias towards keeping Reformation Conspiracy agents out. Now, all of those agents are heroes, so I suspect they won't be touching that database with anything hotter than zero degrees kelvin in the near future. Just to be on the safe side, I looked up some datasheets for how these houses are usually laid out, and jammed a paperclip into the microphone. Irreversible, without excavating several square feet of polyfiber. I'm sorry about that. I'll pay you for the damage, as soon as I figure out how to safely transfer money."
She caught sight of the red rash blooming across Yalin's bottom, like a coral reef of excoriated skin. "What...is...this."
"A mistake," Rose said, sullen and angry.
“Obviously,” Ubra’s lip curled in contempt.
I'm the one making mistakes, am I? Rose thought. Having to care for a baby because you had a gun and you looked like you might hurt me if I didn't take it. Fuck you. Fuck you forever.
"Listen, you need to get some cream for that,” Ubra said. “That looks nasty, and it’s hurting her. This is not something you fuck with – we’re at a delicate stage in the child’s life, and the part where she’s most sensitive to harm. Plus, you need to start instilling some proper work habits into yourself if you want to be a mother.”
The last sentence was a red flag to a bull.
“You goddamn psychotic bitch,” Rose hissed. “I never wanted to be a mother. You’ve made me a mother surrogate against my own goddamn will. You’re not raising your own child. Do you ever look at yourself in a mirror.”
“Yeah, I’m a bad person,” Ubra said. “I’m an irresponsible mother. Hit me with whatever you’ve got. I’ve been hit with worse.”
“How long is this going to go on? How long will I be unable to work, unable to have control of my own life?”
“As long as it takes,” Ubra said. “
“So you’re still looked for Andrei Kazmer.”
“Yes.”
“Any luck?”
“I assumed he’d just go on a rampage and leave a trail of bodies and mayhem I could follow. But as soon as I left the mountain, the trail went cold. I guess he would have ended up in one of the city’s public shelters, but I haven’t found him in any public databases. Nor has he been arrested. So I’m just dragging the waters here, seeing if I can find him. He’s the most violent and dangerous person I’ve ever met, and I doubt he’ll stay off the radar for long.”
“He seemed pretty calm when I brought him in,” Rose said.
“You fell for an act. He can be charming when he needs to, for short periods of time. I still blame you for that, by the way. You had an opportunity to put him in prison. Instead, he ended up with Vadim, who basically used him as a tool for political advancement. Now Vadim’s dead – who could have seen that coming, huh? – and there’s a dangerous lunatic on the loose. You’re not the only person to blame. But blame is infinitely divisible.”
“I couldn’t fucking do anything!” shouted Rose. “There was just shirtless stranger saying he wanted to be put into prison…what was I supposed to do? What crime could I possibly charge him with? I was a soldier, and the sky was falling on us. Get a grip, and start living in a real world. You are fucking insane if you put the blame on my head.”
“Jesus, you think my sanity is remotely in question at this point?” Ubra said. “Look, you’re just going to have to shut up and get with the program. This has been my life for years. The baby’s a product of rape. I’ve been a prisoner in one place or another for the last five or so years. All of my friends are lost in space. I’m still here, and you’re coming along for the ride, like it or not.”
She paced around the kitchen, muttering crazy thoughts in an incongruously sane tone.
“He could be anywhere. Four compass directions. A sky above and another sky below, on the other side of the planet. He’s ruthless, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get whatever he wants. I have no idea w
hat his goals are, or how he plans to achieve them. I have no theory of mind. If I knew some more about his psychology, then I might be able to get a bead on him. But now…. Yeah, this could take a long time.”
Rose caught sight of a figure coming down the metal stairway, making nearly no sound in her slippered feet. Ubra had her back turned, and couldn’t see.
Yves lunged at the woman, but even with the element of surprise, she wasn’t fast enough.
Ubra sidestepped, straight-arming Yves Gullveig as she cannoned into the floor.
Rose screamed, and tried to run to help her girlfriend. Ubra stepped between them, putting a foot on the downed woman’s back as she struggled to get up. “You both want to think more than twice before doing something stupid.”
“Relax, Yves,” Rose said, feeling numb. “She’s a psychotic bitch, but she needs us alive to take care of the baby.”
“Who the hell are you?” snarled Yves Gullveig from the ground. “Why are you meddling in our lives? I’ve lost my girlfriend. I moved over here and I thought it was going to be great. Instead, there’s a baby, and there’s you hanging around. This is all your doing, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Ubra said. “It’s all my doing.”
She got up, and started heading for the doorway.
“I’ll be checking in, once or twice a week. If you wanted to leave the door unlocked, that would be fine. Alternately, you might want to invest in a deadbolt. One of the neodymium ones, preferably. There’s no way I could have kicked my way in if you had one of those installed.
She walked out into the dark. The night was like a soft, toothless mouth that swallowed her whole.
Rose helped Yves to her feet. The angry woman slapped her hand away.
“Can we call the police?” Yves asked.
“She’ll find out,” Rose said. “And that will be a massive escalation of hostilities. Right now, she needs us to care for her child. If we rat her out, she might look around and decide someone else would be a better candidate to wake up sixteen times every fucking night. And at that point we’d have a different name. ‘Loose ends.’”
Rose stared at the broken door, wondering how they could close it. Pick all the pieces up and wedge it in place with a chair, maybe?
Things were so easier to break than to put back together.
“It’s just a rough period for us,” she said, trying to comfort the woman. “It will get better. With my training and skills, I could probably find work as a private security officer. Yeah, yeah, I know that’s rich, considering I can’t even keep my own apartment secure. We’ll figure out a way. There’s always a way.”
Yalin started to cry.
A bloodless, passionless cry that chilled both of them to the marrow.
The sort of crying you’d imagine a doll with vocal chords would do.
Valashabad, Mars – June 23, 2143, 1200 hours
Mars was the first of Terrus's colonies outside the Terran gravity well. It was at the awkward stage where it was still too young to have a national history and just old enough to have pretensions in that direction.
The planet was large, austere. The red sands stretched far away, copper-hued in the pale glow of the sun. A ring of cities had sprouted at the equator, clinging to the narrow band of warmth in the frigid desert.
There had been no life there. No canals. No cities beneath the ground. But man, in his ingenuity, had corrected all three.
It was a planet of Bedouins. The cities were an aberrant mistake, edifices that the planet almost seemed to mock. The deserts swamped them, rendering them into pathetic and unimpressive buoys bobbing on an endless substrate of red sand and rock.
Back in the days of the Caitanya-9 colony, Mars was the planet that astronauts trained on. It was considered the closest thing the solar system offered to the conditions on that far away world.
Now, Caitanya-9 was almost seeming like a fantasy, a fiction.
Not because of its disappearance.
Because that would have implied that the human race, once, had colonised distant stars.
Governor Ryush Narya reviewed the latest devastation from Terrus.
“A bill has been passed by executive authority of Raya Yithdras,” his chancellor Errdu Kyth said. “Henceforth, all expeditions beyond the asteroid belt require a signed letter of authority from the Aerospace Customs Officer. To be clear, that means all expeditions, regardless of their purpose. Civilian. Military. Scientific. It all has to be manually approved before you can get thorium jets firing on the tarmac. And as of now, there’s a two week backlog. Unless they hire addition officers to expedite the process – and they won’t, wait and see – we’ll soon be looking at delays of months for space travel.”
“She’s devastating trade,” Ryush said, fuming. “Just what the devil is going on? How does this help her? I know that it doesn't help us.”
When the civil war had begun, he had the ignominious fate of being the first planet to fall to the Reformation Confederacy.
They hadn’t been conquered. He’d simply surrendered.
This decision hung around his shoulders like an albatross. There had been no other way, he told everyone. Sometimes he even told it to himself, when he lost faith.
He hoped that the war between Raya Yithdras and Sarkoth Amnon had been just a clash of personalities, rather than a genuine pole shift in governmental policy. He, as did everyone on the colonies – lived a precarious existence at the edge of subsistence. Nobody wanted trouble. They all just wanted a quiet, peaceful life. They wanted to pay their taxes, get as much funding as possible and as many and shipments of metals and water as possible, and generally continue eking it out in the cold of deep space.
Now, Yithdras was treating the colonies with barely disguised contempt.
Budget cuts. Draconian restrictions in their traffic, mercantile sector, and transport.
Already, more than ten thousand residents had left Valashabad, travelling back to Terrus, where it was still possible to trade. With Mars' economy in freefall, he was feeling like the planet was a gourd with a hole stabbed in it, leaking its inner essence out into space.
It's like she's trying to kill the colonies, he thought.
He was not yet at the stage of despair. The days after war were not much different to the days before. No doubt everything would swing back to the center, and the Reformation Confederacy would become more sophisticated in its policy.
But these letters were not helping his mood whatsoever.
“Were you aware that the Prime Minister has booked an audience with you in an hour?”
“An hour?”
“Yep. She's travelling out to the Neptune colony, to oversee plans to relocate the gasworks to closer to Terrus. She said she'd stop by, and that she wanted to talk to you.”
“Well, I suppose I don't have a choice.” Ryush said. He imagined the silver-flamed Dravidian landing in Valashabad, something that was only slightly worse for him at the moment than the falling of a guillotine.
In general, the colonies thrived on independence.
When a Prime Minister landed and wanted to inspect things, it was always bad news.
“There's another thing,” Kyth said. “She wants to have access to a wide-open space. The ballrooms on the upper terraces of Valashabad palace would be ideal, and I've granted them to her.”
“Why? Does she want to teach me to dance?”
“Better jump on the opportunity. Soon you’ll need a signed letter before you can do that, too.”
Valashabad's architecture tended towards the towering, the convoluted, the extravagant. Buildings reared into the pale Martian sky nearly five or six kilometers high. The decreased gravity and low air pressure meant that they were safe from both shear and compressional pressure. The planet was an architect's dream – a perfect canvas to build on, and enough iron ore to build with.
Ryush and Kyth rode a pneumatic elevator up to the ballroom. Outside, tinted windows gave a view of the city as it convolved itself into a p
lane of towering buldings, all of them parallaxing down to the same level.
It was hard to miss the sense of desolation. The sense that the streets now held half as many people as they normally it.
The elevator thrummed almost noiselessly, moving like a pill capsule in a glass throat. Finally, they were released out on to the ballroom level.
Raya Yithdras was there. She smiled, and waved.
There were others.
At first, Ryush thought the fifteen or so men and women in the room were statues. Their skin was an ashen hue that caught the light, turning it into a smear of dirt. Their clothing was form-fitting nanomesh body armor, wrapping around the bulges of deltoids, biceps, and pectorals. Ominous slits covered their bodies, like mouths in their flesh.
And they wore white masks, covering their faces from view.
“Welcome to Mars, Prime Minister,” Ryush said, stiffly. She extended a bejewelled hand, and he kissed it, reluctantly.
“I am honored to be here, Governor Narya.”
“Who are your friends?” He gestured at the statue-like people. Behind the masks, he could feel their eyes flickered over him, and he felt exposed, and cold. As if the gaze was like the whipping of a cold and inscrutable wind.
“They have nothing to say,” Raya said. “They are an armed escort that secures my safety.”
Armed escort? The freakish strangers weren’t carrying a single gun can he could see.
“I am loathe to sour this meeting by pointing out that weapons are not allowed in the Valashabad ballroom,” Chancellor Kyth said.
“Again, they are friends,” Raya said. “Honor the spirit of the law, and then, if there’s time, honor the letter.”
“Very well. So, what can we do for you?”
“Oh, nothing,” Raya said. “You've done so much for me already. Your infrastructure and refuelling sites allowed us to win the war. You've sheltered thousands of our ships, and millions of our troops. You even caught the saboteurs Sybar Rodensis sent to disrupt the peace. You've been an invaluable ally in this struggle, Narya. I came here to express my warmest thanks. Also, to give you a gift.”
Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Page 5