by Sean Platt
In the corner of Heather’s eye, a column of darkness seemed to protrude from the monster’s body. It beckoned like a big hand, urging her to cross the street.
“Yeah, yeah,” Heather muttered.
Five blocks and two near-misses later, Heather defocused to see the shadow leading her into a building. It was a store of some kind, but it had either been raided or closed. The door was ajar, and opened easily when Heather pushed it.
Inside, she found herself staring down the barrel of a gun. A bald man with a black goatee was holding the weapon, but he lowered it after a surprised second of staring.
“You’re Heather Hawthorne,” he said.
Heather skipped the obvious counter-question, opting for something more self-promotional — there was some of the old, arrogant Heather left inside her after all.
“I guess you know me as the poor girl’s Piper Dempsey,” she said, taking the lowered weapon as a good sign — and, now that she thought about it, glancing around for the shadow that had, for reasons unknown, led her to this strange man.
“No. I know you from Good Girls Don’t Have Wet Panties.”
A small smile formed on Heather’s lips before she could stop it.
“Who are you, and why are you in here?” And why, she wanted to add, did my big bad wolf of a companion bring me here?
He told her his name, his mission, and what he might be able to do if he hadn’t found himself pinned by patrols, unable to leave the building.
Then Heather, who found herself (maybe not so) coincidentally able to make a difference after all, told him how she might be able to help.
CHAPTER 58
To Piper, Raj’s gloating outside the cell bars felt a bit like Rumpelstiltskin, except that instead of raging at story’s end, he’d done a happy dance. Raj hadn’t actually danced, of course, but his body language had been buoyant, boyish, very I told you so. Piper was almost glad for him. Everybody won here, and if Raj wanted to believe they hadn’t gone willingly, then let him.
Jons entered the holding area after Raj left. He waited longer than Piper would have thought, but she assumed that was Raj’s doing, too, or at least in deference to the supposed man in charge. This was kabuki, in part. If Raj didn’t leave feeling that Jons was uninterested in speaking to his prisoners alone, it could fall apart. He might have watched Raj victory-dance back to the mansion through a window. He might have followed him for a few blocks, returning to the station only once it was obvious that Raj wouldn’t be doing the same.
He didn’t immediately speak. Jons looked from Piper and Cameron in one cell to Christopher in the other then said, “I hope you bitches are happy.”
Piper blinked. Christopher, who seemed to know the chief well, took the bait — not quite asking for clarification but making vague hand gestures indicating the man should continue.
“Grandmama Mary gets Miss Dempsey out once. Right through her motherfucking basement. Nobody even knows she’s involved, and why should they? Old black lady in a wheelchair. So now I put her ass on the line again, not actin' like a proper grandson at all, and what happens? ‘Oh, Malcolm, go arrest them from your grandmama’s house. Bring trouble down on your grandmama, Captain Jons.’”
“You could have moved them before doing what I told Lila to — ”
“Shut your fucking mouth, Christopher. I’m not finished.”
Christopher held up his hands. Jons turned to Piper and Cameron.
“‘Course I can’t move you. ’Cause how would that look? Can’t call Grandmama on the phone, can I? Can’t go running over, ’cause Big Chris says it has to happen right fucking now, isn’t that right?” His gaze flicked to Chris.
“If we’d waited, it only would have — ”
“Thought I told you to keep your mouth shut?”
Again, Christopher raised his hands.
“Not so much I mind helping out. I didn’t become a cop to help ET take over the planet. Ain’t what I signed up for. I gotta choose a side, I guess it’s my species. And okay, Grandmama’s house is good cover. And if that cover’s gotta blow, so be it; at least it served its purpose. But you send me in there? I gotta do it?”
“You could’ve sent — ”
“I meant in the big picture, Chris! Ratting on ourselves.” He turned again to Piper and Cameron. “Why didn’t we just bring you two here to start, save the poor old lady?”
Piper wanted to point out that the decision to hide them had been Jons’s, not her request. But she didn’t like being told to shut up.
“Did … is she okay?” Cameron asked.
“Oh, sure, if you count havin’ to pay for a new door out of Astral Social Security okay. If you count Raj taking a fucking pie okay. Since when is it okay to walk into some old lady’s house and take her pies?”
“But is she … ”
Jons waved a mammoth hand — perhaps, Piper thought, realizing how ridiculous his rant might sound. “Oh, like I’m gonna tell Raj who she was, and like he’s gonna figure it out without a computer. She puts on a good act. He buys they forced their way in and scared her, poor confused lady, can’t find her pills in the morning. Whatever. But now what? Chris, you’re such a smart guy, what you gonna do now, with all three of you in here? Raj has his way, he’ll ask for your heads. It’s all I could do to get there as humans before the Astrals caught you. You’re lucky the network is down. I’d have had to enter you. They’d probably be all over this place right now because of it. Clock’s ticking, kids, and here we are with our fists up our own asses. How we gonna get those fists out our asses before someone makes the connection between Mary and me or Raj comes back with Reptars wanting to eat you?”
“We could run,” Cameron said.
“Oh, that’s fucking brilliant.”
“Why not?”
“That’s how this started! You’re in Heaven’s Veil, son! I don’t mean to insult you, but the two times you busted your way in here? They opened the door. And from what I hear, about the one time you excaped?” (Jons said the word with an X: excaped.) “Sounds like they let you go because they needed you to do shit for them. So now I’m supposed to just let all three of you go? And hell, don’t tell me I guess I go, too, because now I’ve got an expiration date, thanks to you. All four of us, just march up to the gate. ‘Hey, Mr. Alien, you mind if we run out for some bread and milk? There’s a Quickie Mart just down the road — we promise to come right back.’”
“We can’t just sit here,” Cameron said, weaker than Piper would have hoped.
To the ceiling, Jons said, “Jesus, my man, look at this white boy.” Then to Cameron: “Maybe I can draw you a picture. You are in the safest place you can be. This is the best you can do right now. You hear? That’s why Chris sent me. Now Raj is off your ass, and Chris looks a little bit better. The Astrals won’t look for you in custody if I don’t tell them you’re here and the network stays down. But this ain’t Candy Land, neither. You’re in a box, and there’s nowhere — and no way — to run.”
“The Apex … ” Piper began.
“Is a dead end,” Cameron finished.
Piper looked back. “What?”
“Thor’s Hammer isn’t there.”
Piper felt the floor fall from under her. She should feel disoriented. Instead, she felt anger.
“Excuse me?”
“I was wrong. I was wrong about my dad’s research.”
“When did you have this grand epiphany that sent us into the city, where I never wanted to go in the first place? When were you going to tell me that we’d come for nothing and that I was right all along?”
She thought Cameron might fight back, but he looked stepped on. Piper wanted to hit him, to tell him to stand up straight and be a man.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“I told them. I told Charlie and Nathan that I didn’t know where it was. How could I? I’m a guitar player. I was traveling, playing dive bars and hooking up with groupies.” He glanced at Piper, maybe w
ondering if he shouldn’t have said the last thing. “My father was the scientist. I thought he was crazy. For years, I wanted nothing to do with him. Fucked up his marriage, fucked up with me. A nut job crawling through caves, looking for giant rocks, dragging his kid to Egypt to dig through pyramids and climb Mount Sinai looking for shards of stone tablets. But I was a punk kid back then. I didn’t care about any of it. Mayan temples, Olmec heads, who gives a shit? I certainly wasn’t taking notes.”
“But his files … ”
“I was guessing, Piper.” He sighed, his head practically hanging. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to fight, and he wanted to surrender. He slumped back, finding the wall. Finding the bunk, wasted.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Bannister. You say you shouldn’ta come? I’ve got to agree. Now there’s a second mothership. Lots more shuttles, more Titans, more Reptars. I can barely keep them out of the station.” Jons huffed a small laugh. “Hell, I can’t keep them out of the station. Now that the chips are down and they’ve got something brewing at that big blue pyramid, it’s become apparent just where we stand in the natural order. Maybe they mean to kill us all or make us slaves — either way, this playing house we’ve been doing for two years isn’t how it’s gonna be for long. We’re still around, pretending to be civilized, because they let us. Now it seems they’ve got other plans. There are Titans in and out of here all day long now.” Jons pointed at the door out of the holding area. “That door right there? That’s the only thing between the three of you and a laser beam execution. But now it’s not just a Titan deciding to walk through that you have to worry about. Raj will gloat for a while because he wants to savor his shit. But then he’s gonna tell Dempsey. And if he doesn’t trust the viceroy, he’ll start talking to Astrals, looking for a promotion. We four got days left, maybe hours.”
There was a knock at the holding area door. Jons called for entry, and a bland-looking policewoman opened the door, with two people in tow.
“Captain Jons?” the woman said. “This lady needs to talk to you.”
Piper was surprised to see the station’s visitors and wanted to call out, to cry — something.
But her own emotion fled almost as it came. Because how she felt seeing the new arrivals was nothing compared to the shock that had claimed Cameron’s face.
CHAPTER 59
Meyer watched the pilot, trying to get inside its head. It was impossible. He could feel something coming off the Titan, like heat. He could sense chatter with the collective in the way Divinity had always …
(Since before? Since years and years past?)
… spoken inside his mind, but it was third party, from a distance.
Meyer focused. Watched the Titan’s hands move. He found he could almost participate, in some odd way, in the process of flight. The large white female in her robe was in the middle of a brightly lit circle, pan-sized hands out like someone searching for balance.
But Meyer could see more than most humans would be able to. To most, it would look as if she was steering the shuttle with her hands, even though they were touching nothing. Moving through some sort of force field or aether. But it wasn’t quite that. The hands were moved by the mind, much like the ship. After all, how could a ship be moved by hands? The hands were only an intermediary. Only mentality allowed the ship to move from here to there without spending more time than necessary in between. Only mentality allowed the micro-distortion inside the ship’s belly that kept the occupants from being liquified by what would appear, from the outside, to be instant accelerations and decelerations.
“Are we going to the primary mothership?” Meyer asked.
The pilot gave a placid smile.
“I’ve only been to the primary mothership.”
The pilot’s hands moved. The trip was taking most of a minute. Straight flight was easy, but there was a human aboard. He might not understand — at least that’s what the pilot probably thought. What the collective probably thought, through the pilot’s single instance. And humans (so Astrals seemed to think) couldn’t grasp the idea of believing a thing into truth. They’d think it was magic. Humans thought that the world occurred and observation followed, despite their scientists demonstrating otherwise.
Stubborn.
Impatient.
Chaotic.
Cruel.
Pitiable.
Redeemable.
The adjectives flew through Meyer’s mind along with ten thousand others. His brain only caught those that sped by in his language, although he couldn’t help feeling that once upon a time he’d have heard and understood them all. Not because Divinity spoke to him, but because his was a mind Divinity was able to speak to.
Because how he was right now, Meyer was becoming increasingly sure, wasn’t the way he’d always been.
He thought of Trevor. The pilot’s flat, bold features flicked toward him, eyes assessing. Meyer pushed it down and away. Just another datum buried in the dark, muddled depths of a human mind, unworthy of chasing into the muck.
The pilot looked away then up. Watching the bottom of the approaching mothership, clearly visible through the one-way silver skin like a giant overhead window. He’d been resisting the urge to look down, but casting his eyes up and seeing only the slight sliver haze to remind Meyer that he was in a supposedly opaque craft made him do it now. Below the pilot’s feet was the lighted flight circle, and below Meyer’s nothing but a light gray fog.
He felt nerves, decided they’d serve him. Part of Meyer’s mind made the adjustment perfectly because he’d been in shuttles and motherships untold thousands of times, but the more pressing part insisted he’d flown a scant few. He was Meyer Dempsey, wasn’t he? Meyer had grown up on Earth with his feet on terra firma. He’d flown in hulking metal beasts with floors that mimicked ground.
He allowed himself to feel jitters. Allowed himself to sweat. He looked up and watched the hole form in the mothership, watched the area darken from the top in a spreading circle as they eased up inside it. But before the mothership’s floor irised closed below the shuttle, Meyer looked down and let the fear of falling surround him. Let it radiate from him so the pilot could feel it.
The pilot gave Meyer an easy smile. Pacifying.
“I don’t love heights,” Meyer said.
The pilot held the same smile. Lowered her hands. The circle of light below her bare feet dimmed, and the shuttle’s outer hull reappeared, now solid from the inside. This was all for his benefit, Meyer could sense. In order to see a door form, the human would need to first see the wall in which it would appear.
He exited. Below him was a gantry, smooth and gray, without any features. If he was barefoot — Meyer knew from experience he shouldn’t have been — the surface would feel soft and gently yielding as if walking on firm rubber. Below the gantry, there appeared to be nothing but Heaven’s Veil. But if he fell — which, of course he wouldn’t thanks to correction fields he knew were around him without being told — he’d strike the ship’s one-way transparent hull rather than plummeting to his death.
The Titan, now a guide instead of a pilot, gestured for Meyer to proceed. It was unnecessary on two levels, but Meyer pretended it wasn’t.
He could hear the groupspeak urging him forward, as if he’d still be able to hear it — which, he felt quite sure, he wouldn't.
And secondly, he knew the way. Of course he knew the way.
Meyer looked down at the long white arm, draped with its robe, and walked in the indicated direction. He took a wrong turn deliberately then allowed himself to be gently corrected. The Titan remained a silent presence beside him, shepherding Meyer toward the medic able to easily heal the viceroy’s very important hands.
There had been no questions about his injury. Why would he not smash his hands? Humans were irrational. That’s why the Astrals were necessary. Humans had done many, many, many irrational things in the past two years, and well beyond that according to their history texts. Surely, there were many other irrational t
hings (and surely some wonderful ones; humans were their children, after all, and not beyond goodness by any stretch) done in the last epoch.
They couldn’t verify any of it yet thanks to the delay. But that would be over soon. Now that the Apex was charging and prepared, that would change.
Meyer sensed great conflict on that last point — both native and exacerbated by the aberrations within the collective that hadn’t, it turned out, been fully purged. It was unfortunate, what would need to be done. But there was no progressing without it. The end, in the end, was always the ultimate decider. And in that end, the humans had made it necessary by their own shortsighted hands.
Not their first time, of course.
Meyer saw it all as he walked. As the Titan led him to the medic. He must be generating feedback — more of those troublesome outputs that would, to anyone with a bit of groupsense in their groupthink — indicate that the viceroy heard more from the Astral collective than he was strictly supposed to be feeling.
But Meyer had figured that out, as well. Astral minds could (via certain tools or when a mind was half-connected like Meyer’s) hear human emotion when it was loud. Like his almost-slip, thinking about Trevor on the ride up. But they didn’t usually hear quieter emotions, as Meyer’s were now.
Not because they couldn’t hear those emotions and thoughts from halfway-connected minds. It was more that they wouldn’t. They refused, closing their collective minds to human pollution, like that coming off Meyer. If they didn’t, the collective might become infected, then a Gathering would happen, discursive thoughts expelled in a Pall, purged like pus from a wound.