Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  But yeah, I’ll tell you this one story. It kind of accounts for all the rest, if you know what I mean. And if you don’t know what I mean, well, listen up. Maybe you will. Once I’m done.

  Cleone Station was old. It rode the L1 point between Earth and Luna, millions of tons of refined regolith and boosted homeworld exotics hammered into a space station with sufficient power and majesty to control high orbit and the Earth-Luna trade. It spun as all stations must, maintaining sufficient semblance of gravity for human survival. Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact.

  Trieste Maria Kaolung Delgado-Richter de Cleone, Heiress-Apparent of Cleone Station and sole child of her mother Stationmistress Grace, raced through the ten percent ring. She liked it down near the core where few people bothered to go. Her tutor Gouvernaile had been pestering her for an analysis of Marshall Kutuzov’s tactics at Borodino, and she simply wasn’t interested.

  Exercising her fighting skills was a lot more fun than focusing on history. Her arms and legs had finally grown into themselves since she’d turned sixteen. Trieste could move for the sheer joy of the machine her body was becoming.

  She’d set herself to racing along the eleven-hundred meter axis of Cleone in a sort of real-world obstacle course. Her route was circuitous enough to send her through most of the different structures the station’s engineering had to offer.

  Gouvernaile straggled after her far behind. Years in low gravity had slowed him too much. Guilt briefly panged Trieste, then there was a confluence of cold air return ducts to dive between.

  She tumbled out moments later in the blue zone near the vacuum-rated pressure doors of frame one hundred and forty. The main companionway was two meters wide and tall there, rated for equipment movement. Plenty of room of bounce and roll. Trieste checked her wrist strip and grinned—she was almost six seconds ahead of her best time for the route.

  Someone grabbed her arm.

  Trieste’s own momentum swung her in a short, sharp arc against the bulkhead. She slammed hard into the exposed metal. A big body pushed against her, breath hot against her ear.

  “Think you’re cute, do you?”

  Shocked, at first Trieste did not fight back. The idea that anyone on Cleone would touch her without permission was so far beyond comprehension—

  Intruder!

  A hand pushed upward between her body and the bulkhead, grabbing for her breast. Trieste had never been so glad for her small, boyish chest as at that moment.

  “The old man won’t help you now,” growled her attacker.

  Trieste found her training and jammed her right elbow into her attacker’s ribs. She pushed off with his pained recoil, kicking off from the bulkhead to bounce away from him. Her left hand bent at his fingers until his grip broke. He held on longer than she’d intended, and Trieste found herself in the middle of the wide corridor moving with agonizing slowness in the reduced gravity.

  Then she got a good look at her attacker. Overmuscled and already going to fat, with the bristly hair of someone too long out of a pressure suit. Green eyes, flat face, dirty gold hair.

  Recognition set it even here, badly out of context. It was her step-father.

  “Philip?”

  “Shouldn’t have seen my face, girlie,” he said, drawing a needle-gun. The weapon was essentially a tight-spread high velocity variant of the common flechette pistol. Still not powerful enough to punch through vacuum-rated bulkheads, it fired a narrow stream of needles at short distances that were excellent at punching through human bodies.

  The weapon of a murderer. Or an assassin.

  Her feet found the floor. The friction-textured surface gave Trieste purchase. She watched Philip’s eyes, not his weapon. The needler would fire where he was looking.

  Philip was looking past her.

  Trieste dropped and rolled toward him, pushing with the sinuous flex required for low-gee combat. She aimed for his knees—the weakest critical joint.

  “Hold!” shouted Gouvernaile.

  Her tutor might have been too damned old for a bodyguard, but he’d once commanded troops in open air down the gravity well. His voice carried even through her rage. She went flat, twisting until she could watch both directions along the companionway with only slight movements of her head.

  Gouvernaile had his own flechette pistol braced in two hands and was advancing on Philip in a stable low-gee lope. “Weapon down, Consort,” her tutor said in a quieter version of that same commanding voice.

  Trieste shifted her gaze. Philip was backing, bouncing too high with each step. The needler was in his hand but she could see fear in his eyes. “A mistake, Gouvernaile. Nothing more than a game gone wrong.”

  She watched Philip’s face. That she didn’t try to meet Gouvernaile’s eye would tell the old man everything he needed to know.

  “You cannot kill us both.” Gouvernaile sounded almost like he was tutoring right then, interested in how his student would work their way out of a particularly difficult problem. “But you cannot afford to have us carry this tale to the Stationmistress or the senior crew.”

  “Keep your mouths shut, nothing’ll happen to either of you,” Philip answered. The quaver in his voice gave the lie to his words.

  Then he turned and ran, still bouncing too high in the ten percent gravity. Trieste followed her step-father’s path until he vanished beyond the hatch at frame one forty-five.

  “No troubles, I trust,” said Gouvernaile behind her.

  “I wish to speak to my mother.”

  “That might be wise.”

  Trieste stood at attention in station ops up on the seventy percent ring. The Stationmistress and two of her senior crew stared back at Trieste while the dozen or so techs on duty kept their heads down and their ears open. Gouvernaile waited close by with his hand upon the worn butt of his flechette pistol.

  “I will not hear you speak against your father so.” The Stationmistress’ voice was as cold as a cargo airlock. Grace had been a famous beauty in her youth, the toast of New York, Shanghai and Luna City before marrying into orbital royalty. Years in the partial-gee of spinning habitats had not aged her well. In the face of Trieste’s persistent emotional awkwardness and lack of interest in high culture, her mother’s hopes for a new era of social triumph had faded along with her beauty.

  Trieste would rather have her fingers broken fighting in the low-gee dojo than attend any party ever thrown.

  “My father is lost to us,” Trieste told her mother. “The man you married last year tried to lay his hands on me. When I refused him, he tried to kill me.”

  “She speaks truly, Stationmistress,” echoed Gouvernaile.

  Grace’s glare at the old man etched her words with acid. “I have not yet asked for the testimony of servants.” She returned her gaze to Trieste. “I rule here, daughter. Justice on Cleone belongs to me and me alone. That you should carry tales against the Consort Philip is a serious offense to my dignity.”

  One her senior crew, Doctor Morgenthau, stirred uncomfortably.

  “Assault upon the person of your heiress-apparent is a serious offense to your dignity. Mother.”

  Grace’s eyes narrowed as she made a showy sigh. “You are at an impossible age. I herewith banish you from Cleone Station for a year and day. Perhaps your Uncle Marcus will grant you asylum on Truro Station.”

  “I . . . ” Trieste had not imagined her life would come to this, so suddenly. Tears stung her eyes as she fought to keep them from her cheeks. She knelt on the deck. “Mother, I—”

  Grace interrupted her. “And take your servant with you. He has outlived his usefulness here on Cleone.” The Stationmistress turned away from her daughter and drew her advisors into close conversation.

  Trieste stayed kneeling, staring at the worn carpet until Gouvernaile tugged her elbow. “Come away with me now, mistress.”

  “We’re stayin
g locked down and out of trouble, damn it.” Gouvernaile glared at the security feeds floating in projected windows before his face. Trieste watched in turn with fond worry as the old man ran fingers through his thinning hair, then flicked away a status display from the insubstantial array. “Your mother will never forgive me,” her tutor-bodyguard continued.

  Trieste stretched on the tiny bunk, knees bent to fit herself in. Her Uncle Marcus being the Truro Stationmaster, Trieste and Gouvernaile had their own cabin complete with the supreme luxury of not being required to split the living space with alternate-shift hotbunkers.

  “Gouve, this isn’t right.” They had fled Cleone Station only to land in a greater security crisis. She practically quivered with frustration. “I’m certified for stationside and zero-gee combat. Holing up in this coffin waiting to see if Uncle Marcus’s security can trump Brigante’s is just nuts. We should be doing something.”

  Gouvernaile recascaded his data windows. “What we should be doing is staying alive. Brigante has sent someone who can slip the security nets like a lunar ice-jumper at middark. That assassin is either wired from here to Hellas Basin, or they’re a God-damn psychic. You’re a lot more use as a live heir to Cleone’s Stationmistress than as a dead redshirt.”

  An audible alarm chittered with a low fractal noise. “What’s—” Trieste began as the cabin lights flickered out. Their room became space-quiet, not even the click-wheeze of emergency blowers. “That’s torn it,” she whispered as she slipped out of the bunk. “I’m going to run this guy down.”

  “Tri,” said Gouvernaile quietly. He sighed. “I can’t stop you from going out there. But be careful. This bastard’s invisible. Maybe in every sense of the word.”

  “Mmm.” Working by feel, Trieste slid her combat knife from her ready bag, dialed it up to maximum sharpness, grabbed the crash bars by the cabin hatch and scrambled up the wall so she was at the top of the doorway. Muscles strained against Truro’s ought point eight gee pull as Trieste reached down and yanked the panic lever. The hatch groaned open to the hiss of the reserve pressure cylinder.

  The corridor was as dark and silent as the cabin. Stealth lost in the noise of the opened hatch, Trieste dropped and spun so her body exited well above the level of an ordinary person’s stride. Nothing moved outside, no combat trip-sensors flashed.

  She struck the opposite wall of the corridor, tucked into a roll, and found her footing three meters away from her own cabin. The darkness remained still as Trieste wished mightily for optic enhancements.

  Was an invisible man any harder to hunt in the dark?

  Trieste scuttled toward the bulkhead dividing this frame of Truro Station from the next frame spinward. She fetched up next to the sealed vacuum door. It must have closed with the power failure. Trieste popped open the control panel. The dim bioluminescence of the unpowered failsafe readouts indicated both pressure and power in the next frame.

  Wrong way, she thought.

  She turned, bouncing to the other side of the corridor as a faint breeze touched her cheek. Behind her, something rattled against the bulkhead like pebbles in a sample case. Flechettes, coming from up the corridor. In her current position she was good as dead, so she sprinted antispinward toward the shooter with her head tucked down and combat knife held forward—a meat-powered missile.

  The next round of flechettes tore into Trieste’s left arm, shoulder and chest, enough to hurt like hell but not to stop her run. “Damn,” she hissed, a bad loss of control as her voice would give another aiming point. The invisible man had to be dead ahead in order to shoot just off-center to Trieste’s body in the narrow corridor. If the attacker had been offset to the left, the flechettes would have struck closer to Trieste’s center of mass. And the bastard had to be within the station’s curvature.

  Imagining her opponent stepped to one side to avoid her plunging charge, Trieste swerved sharply to her own left, back across the corridor. Another flight of flechettes breezed past her face as the tip of her combat knife caught on something with a shower of blue sparks. A man-shaped figured flared blue in the darkness, limned in bright netting. Then the fight was close and personal.

  Trieste pushed the knife, twisting the blade and turning her body to slam into the enemy’s right side. Long hours of training blended with sharp fear to produce her tactics. She desperately wanted to pin the flechette pistol against the assassin’s body. She had to keep the weapon from gutting her where she stood. As she slammed to the left, the combat knife snagged on something stiff, snapping the blade tip. Then Trieste found the smooth ceramic bell of the flechette muzzle at her throat.

  The two of them paused like lovers just before climax. The enemy’s breath was hot on Trieste’s cheek, the muzzle chilly against her throat. Trieste in turn hugged her enemy with her left arm, knife in her right hand laid flat against the other’s chest. A few blue sparks erupted from the enemy’s wounded shoulder. An electronic suit, Trieste realized in a sudden burst of irrelevancy, stealthy to oblivious station sensors. She slid the broken knife upward toward the other’s throat.

  “Trieste, exiled heiress of Cleone Station,” said the enemy in a quiet voice. He was male. “You are not my quarry.”

  “Still you sought my life,” whispered Trieste. She continued to move the knife as slowly as she could.

  “You exited your cabin into my fire zone. Now drop your knife and step away, and I will not kill you.”

  “But you . . . ” Trieste began with a whine even as she arched her spine back as far as she could to bring her head away from the flechette muzzle. She grabbing at the enemy’s weapon with her wounded left hand while stabbing upward with the combat knife.

  Flechettes rattled against the ceiling to ricochet along the corridor. The enemy groaned and slid down Trieste’s knife. His lifeblood poured across her arm. The corridor lights flickered back on to show a matching pool of blood leaking from the open hatch of the cabin where she had left Gouvernaile behind.

  Trieste dropped her kill and leapt for her cabin. The sight of Gouvernaile’s shredded face and chest sucked the air from lungs. She stood balanced on the edge of that airless scream of grief and rage until it seemed her heart would burst.

  I know there ain’t been no kissing yet, but listen up. You cop those flechettes infected Trieste with a virus slotted spot-on for her Uncle Marcus, right? Trieste’s genome was tight enough to her Uncle’s to crash her immune system but loose enough not to de-rez on the spot.

  Marcus shut down that war between Truro and Brigante, bargaining hard for the right proper treatment for his niece. Along with a bunch of other concessions he had to give himself up to a marriage alliance to buy Trieste’s life back. You might reckon both sides wanted an excuse to stop killing each other. She was a good one.

  Cleone’s heiress, she was packed up and shipped off to Brigante Station to meet their Biomistress—the only one who could undo what the virus had done. Trieste brought with her the corpse of Morholt the assassin in trade for Marcus’s new bride. The plan was for Trieste to escort the young woman back once she’d been recovered. A motivational thing, you might say. Such a trade, a moldy old assassin for an orbital princess.

  Yep. Now we’re getting closer to the kiss.

  Aixelle was a beauty by the standards of any age. She had hair to her waist—an obscene luxury in a place and time where everyone shaved their scalps to fit pressure suits. That hair was the color of sunlight to accent the dancing water of her eyes. Her long fingers had never borne a callus.

  In addition to being Marcus’s betrothed, she was Biomistress of Brigante Station.

  With her servants, Aixelle met Trieste’s shuttle as it docked at cradle seventeen-B in Brigante’s highest security zone. Trieste was debarked into the echoing cargo bay strapped to a zero-gee biocontainment gurney. She lay there and stared at the girdered ceiling, wondering how the Brigantes could afford the cubage. Behind her Morholt’s corpse trundled along in a cryogenic chamber. The assassin had been stripped of his electronic
stealth suit but otherwise undisturbed in death, even to the sprayed blood frosted upon his neck and shoulder.

  “Well,” Aixelle said as she leaned over Trieste, steadying herself with one hand on the rail of the gurney. Her long hair eclipsed the ceiling lights of cargo bay in billowing clouds of gold. Her stationsuit was closed high on her neck. “So you are the hero of Brigante Station, come to carry me home to Truro.”

  Her mind fogged with drugs and bioengineered disease, Trieste struggled for words. “Marcus . . . Stationmaster . . . ” No one had warned her of this girl. Trieste’s heart was stricken by this woman’s beauty, jealous that Aixelle should be the province of another. Even her own beloved uncle.

  Love should not be like this, she thought in a moment of clarity. It had come upon her as another plague.

  Aixelle glanced away from Trieste toward Morholt’s cryochamber. “You voyage for life and for death. Let us see if we can repair you.”

  It was, after all, Aixelle’s DNA sequencers that had brought Trieste to this weak stead in the first place.

  The next time Trieste was sufficiently conscious to recognize the Biomistress, Aixelle walked into the single-bed isolation ward with a datapanel under one arm and a crooked smile on her face. She wore a loose robe suitable for the rotational-gee sections of Brigante Station. A dull pendant dangled from a silver chain to rest upon her chest. Her hair was pulled tight, woven with black ribbons of mourning for Morholt.

  Aixelle was still the most beautiful woman Trieste had ever seen. She opened her mouth, struggling for words.

  “It’s been almost a week,” Aixelle said before Trieste could find her voice. “Our tailored virophage has been effective, but reversing the immune damage is taking a while.”

  Trieste struggled to remember that it was this woman’s work that had rendered her ill in the first place. The inner battle was lost in the glow of Aixelle’s smile. “And now . . . now I am whole once again,” Trieste said as she found her voice, “only to find my heart pierced anew.”