by Mel Odom
“School,” Simon replied. “I’ve also been studying the subject on my own.”
“As a mercenary?”
“There’s considerable downtime. When you’re onsite, things aren’t always like they were when we rescued you.”
“I can still remember you breaking through that window and killing the woman that held me. I’ll never forget that.”
“You should try to forget that. It doesn’t do any good to hang onto that memory.”
She bit her lip and Simon’s attention focused on how the blood rushed back to the plump flesh. “Forgetting isn’t easy.”
“You can forget a lot. If you want to.”
“What have you forgotten, Simon?”
“A lot. You have to in this business.”
“Give me an example.”
“The face of the woman who was holding you hostage when I first saw you.” Simon smiled coldly. “She’s dead. She’s not coming back. No reason to remember her.”
“Have you forgotten that?”
“Not yet. But I will.”
She hesitated. “What about me?”
“What about you?”
“Will you forget about me after this assignment?”
Simon shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t forget about you.”
She laughed a little then, more at herself than at Simon. “Do I sound neurotic or pathetic?”
“No.”
“Good. Let’s change the subject.”
“All right.”
“Tell me how you became a mercenary.”
Her words echoed inside Simon’s head, and suddenly I wasn’t in that ship with Mara Parker anymore.
* * *
I was scared and alone and out of control. I had labels for those feelings because they were in my programming for use with victims I dealt with while working at the NAPD. I’d only had shadows of those emotions during my visitations to Simon Blake’s past. They had never been stronger and I almost fell victim to them.
On my knees in a darkened room, I stared at a pile of blood-covered rubble strewn across the floor. I was inside an envirosuit. The faceplate was cracked, obscuring my vision, but the suit’s atmosphere integrity hadn’t been compromised. The sound of my breathing rang loudly in my ears. I tasted salt and I knew it was my own blood.
“Over here. Help me.” A hand flailed weakly near the pile of rubble to my left. There, almost buried, a figure waved at me again. The effort was strained, almost more than the man could deliver.
I pushed myself to my feet, using too much strength because adrenaline was flooding my body and wreaking havoc with my control. I hurried over to the figure and gazed desperately at the rubble that covered the man.
Light flashed through the hole in the building’s roof, briefly illuminating the man’s features on the other side of the face shield. Like me, he wore an envirosuit, but his was no longer containing the oxygen he needed to survive.
“Dad!” The word exploded from my throat before I knew it was coming. Surprise and the sudden pain of impending loss almost shook me loose from the memory, but I held onto it tightly. I tried to peer into my father’s face shield, but his features were barely visible every now and again as lights flashed overhead.
I started pulling at the plascrete and rock that covered his lower legs. My muscles strained and even the largest rocks rolled away easily.
“Where…where’s your mother?” His breath fogged the inside of his helmet and I knew it was because the suit was losing air, losing heat.
“I don’t know.” Tears ran down my face. They felt strange. I had never felt them before, and hadn’t even known them for what they were until I spotted my reflection inside my faceplate when the lights flashed overhead again.
I was young, perhaps eleven or twelve, with a thin face, a shock of dark hair, and a nose the rest of my features hadn’t quite grown into. Curiosity filled me, but so did the need to free the man from the fallen rock—to free my father.
“Find her.” My father was gasping now in the thin air that remained within his suit. “Find your sister. Save them.”
“I will. After I get you out of here.”
“Son.” He put a hand on my shoulder, stilling my efforts. “Son.” His voice was so weak and strained I barely understood him. He took another rattling breath. “It’s too late for me. My legs are broken. I’ve got internal injuries. I feel all busted up inside.” He coughed and a crimson mist painted the inside of his face shield. “Please. Go.”
Instead, I worked harder, flinging the rubble from him. I didn’t understand how he could be so injured by rock and rubble I was moving so easily. But the part of me that was still Drake did understand. Gravity could be taken away, but the mass was still there.
My father coughed again a couple more times, and the blood inside his helmet obscured his face. His chest stopped moving and his hand dropped away from my shoulder.
“Dad! Dad!” I reached for his bio tab, but before I touched it, the tab flashed red, indicating that he needed life support, that he was no longer breathing on his own.
I shouted for him again and tried to pull him free. As I did, his body split in two, cut through by a fiber cable that had pulled out of the nearby wall. The fissure that it had ripped from ran around the room on two walls. The cable had been part of the home’s sensor array, and a main conduit for the heat we needed to survive the cold.
Crying, choking on my rage, pain, and fear, I forced myself to stand. My father’s blood stained my gloves. I swayed for a moment and the room spun around me. I thought I almost lost the connection, but then I realized that it wasn’t me, that the young boy I had been had almost passed out.
I checked my suit integrity, thinking that I had ruptured the envirosuit somehow. But the suit remained intact.
Where’s your mother? Find your sister. Save them. My father’s words rang in my head.
I turned and surveyed the room as a violent tremor shivered through the ground and almost caused me to fall. More pieces of the ceiling fell, stirring up clouds of dust that hung in the thin air. I put a hand against the wall, trying to make sense of my surroundings. The place looked familiar, but I couldn’t lock into it. I knew where I was, but I couldn’t name it.
The house was small, surrounded on all sides by blank walls, no windows. I knew I wasn’t on Earth from the way I’d moved the rock, and I didn’t think I was on the Moon because the rock hadn’t been that light. That meant I was probably on Mars.
The room was a boy’s bedroom. A small collection of toy soldiers sprawled atop a shelf. When the ground shivered again, some of the toys tumbled from the shelf and dropped to the debris-strewn floor. A battery-powered game deck lay on the twin bed. The holo of an alien world filled with strange creatures moved in the meter of space above the projector.
I lurched into motion toward a doorway, feeling certain that my younger self knew where he was heading. I focused on staying with him and remembering everything I could.
I found my mother in the next room. She lay in pieces against the room’s only standing wall, covered in dust and debris. Where the opposite wall had been, a crater now sat. My younger self didn’t know for certain what had happened, thinking that maybe a bomb had gone off.
I knew that the damage had been done by a ground burster delivered by a military hopper. That type of munitions had been developed for use against troops that had dug into mountainsides.
Not against civilians.
I walked over to the woman—my mother—even though I knew she was beyond help. I peered down into her vacant gaze through the shattered remnants of her envirosuit helmet, then gently reached in and closed her eyelids. The gesture came naturally. I had seen Shelly do that sometimes when we had a young victim, but I didn’t know where my younger self had learned to do that.
I turned and headed deeper into the house, looking for my sister. I couldn’t remember what she looked like. There was only a brief impression of dark hair and blue eyes, our father’s hai
r and our mother’s eyes.
I found her in her room, cold and still. She looked like she was four or five, lying so still and silent on the floor. She hadn’t been able to put her envirosuit on by herself. I finished putting her into her suit, aching at the time it took to do that but telling myself I had no choice, then tried to resuscitate her with the suit’s onboard systems.
I pressed her med-tab and pulled my hand back just before the suit delivered an electric jolt to her heart. Anxiously, calling her name—“Kiri, Kiri”—I searched the med readout and discovered she still wasn’t breathing. I triggered the electrical jolt again, but the results were the same.
After the fifth attempt, the suit would no longer deliver the charge to her heart. The readout crawled a message: NO REVIVIFICATION POSSIBLE. SYSTEM IS SHUT DOWN. NOTIFY AUTHORITIES.
I screamed and my voice vibrated inside my helmet as I knelt there and held Kiri’s limp hand in my own. Lights continued to strobe overhead, filling the outer room with illumination time and time again.
After a while, I didn’t know how long, I got up.
The part of me that was still wholly Drake felt uncomfortable with the pain I sensed within my younger self. I remembered how Shelly’s children had mourned during the funeral, how helpless I had been to offer them solace.
My younger self didn’t feel as helpless. Rage filled him as he walked through the ruin of his home. Intuitively, he stayed within the shadows as he made his way outside. Then he glanced up at the sky and spotted the twin moons, Phobos and Deimos, through the broken dome that had covered the ag fields.
My parents had been farmers. I remembered my father’s rough, callused hands, and I remembered the way my mother had schooled me in crop rotation and production variables and fertilizers. My father had provided the strong back and my mother had provided the technological know-how.
I hadn’t wanted the life of a farmer. I could remember that in that moment, but I didn’t know what I’d wanted to be. It didn’t matter anyway. Not anymore. Whatever that future might have been, it was gone, snuffed out just as surely as the lives of my family.
Above, a group of unmarked hoppers burned their jets and climbed through the broken hole in the dome.
Someone put a hand on my shoulder and I spun around quickly to face a boy only a little older than I was. He seemed calm on the other side of his face shield. He spoke but I had to read his lips.
Are you okay?
With shaking hands, I switched on my envirosuit’s comm. “I’m alive,” I replied. “My family…” My voice choked up and I couldn’t speak.
He put his hands on my shoulders. “It’s going to be all right. I’m going to take care of you. Do you hear me?” He crouched down so that our eyes were level. “Did you hear what I said?”
I nodded. “Who was that in the hoppers? Who did this?”
“Secmen from the corps. I don’t know which ones. Probably got a group together and hired the attack out to make an example of us. To let us know that we can’t live with them, and we can die anytime they decide they want us to.”
I shook my head. “That’s not going to happen to me. They’re not just going to kill me.” I looked up into the star-filled sky and swore by both moons that I would not die so easily.
* * *
I returned to the social room aboard the spaceship in a rush of unease that left me reeling for a moment. I tried to remember where I was. Part of me insisted I was on a mag-lev train on Mars headed into the fringes, but another part of me remembered I was sitting across from Mara Parker and headed back to Earth.
Concern darkened her eyes as she looked at me. “Simon? If the question is too personal, I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s all right.” I cleared my throat. “My family was killed on Mars. I got into the mercenary business to protect myself, and to protect other people.” And to get revenge.
She put her hand on mine. “Simon, remember, you have to rescue me. I’m depending on you.”
Chapter Nineteen
You don’t have to tell me about yourself. I’ve already figured out a lot about you just in this time we’ve been together.” The words were spoken by a man’s voice, not Mara Parker.
My vision blurred for a moment and I was back with Hayim in the dining car. Mara Blake’s final words haunted me. They hadn’t been part of the memory. They had been part of the directive that had brought me to Mars where I kept tripping over Simon Blake’s past.
“Just stay focused, partner,” Shelly said as she sat beside me. She wasn’t eating either. “You have a game plan. Just stay with it and adjust as you go. That’s all we ever do.”
Hayim finished his meal and pushed his plate away. June hurried over, appearing almost out of thin air, and scooped the dishes away.
“Want to know what I’ve figured out about you?” Hayim asked.
“Not really.”
He scowled. “What do you plan on doing once we reach the fringes?”
“I’m going to let you hook me up with a mercenary group as close to the Chimeras as I can.”
“What do you want with them?”
“It’s personal business.”
“If you told me what your personal business was, it might help me get you in with the right people. There’s a lot of bad ju-ju mixed up in the Chimeras.”
I made no reply.
After a moment, Hayim sighed in disgust, cursed, and drained the last of his cider bulb. “If you don’t want to talk, I’m getting a shower and hitting the rack. What are you going to do while I’m sleeping?”
“Meditate.” That was a response Shelly had given many times when she wanted to think and other detectives insisted on bothering her.
Hayim snorted and shoved himself to his feet. His left leg squealed in protest. “Meditate then. Try to stay out of trouble. With trouble behind us and trouble ahead of us, I’m going to rest up while I can.”
“Let me see your PAD.”
He hesitated, then reached into his thigh pocket and took out his PAD. I accessed it with my internal PAD and left my name, NORRIS 1JA5NU and Net code with all the log information he needed to reach me. I also coded it with a pingback subroutine so I could locate him as long as he stayed connected to the Net without him knowing I was tracking him.
“If you need me, contact me.” I handed the PAD back to him.
Hayim studied his PAD without a word, then stuffed it back in his thigh pocket, turned, and left the dining car.
I got to my feet and left as well, heading for one of the common cars where passengers rode while awake. No one paid any special attention to me, and I did my best to act like a Norris unit. Those models would not engage unless required to, which would be in response to a human questioning them or to make a sales pitch.
I took a seat by myself in the car near the window. The car I’d chosen was only half full. The passengers had quietly segregated themselves, dividing into seasoned travelers and newbies, into older and younger groups that shared superficial interests. Most of them talked about general things, where they were going and where they had come from.
The children played together at the back of the car, using uplinks to the Net to access gaming platforms on GameNet. Colorful figures—warriors, sports figures, and fantasy beings—moved in the meter high holo projections. One of the games they played was Fables of Uhrdona, a game created by Jonas Salter under the name Dylan Templeton.
I thought about him as I’d seen him in the game when we’d first met—at least, when he and Drake had first met. He’d been an elf, long-eared and carrying a magical staff, accompanied by a large bear as his animal familiar. That image was quickly replaced by the crime scene inside the utility closet on the Moon.
I gazed through the transplas at the stark iron oxide landscape. Dust whirled in clouds around us, occasionally obscuring the view.
“So,” Shelly said as she sat beside me, “Simon Blake had a family that was murdered. We didn’t see that one coming.”
“No,” I a
dmitted.
“How do you feel?”
I stared at her reflection in the transplas and she locked eyes with mine. “I do not feel anything. Any such empathetic response that may emulate that emotional state is merely a finely honed construct created solely for the purpose of allowing me to understand individuals we may encounter on the job.”
“Lie to me and you lie to yourself, Drake. You know enough about our situation to know that.” Shelly smiled at me. “Remember, I know what you know.”
“Then why ask?”
“So that we can talk about it.”
“I do not wish to talk about it.”
“You should.”
“If I should change my mind, I will let you know.”
“I’ll probably know before you do.”
I surmised that was true.
“The visions or dreams or whatever you want to call them are coming faster now,” she said.
“That’s because we’re getting closer to where this all began.”
“Do you think that Mara Blake is still alive?”
“If I have to ask myself that, what do you think?”
Shelly smiled and relaxed a little.
“She’s still alive,” I replied. “If she wasn’t, I’d feel it.”
Beside me, Shelly winked out of existence and the red dust clouds cleared enough for me to see the distant mountains.
* * *
For hours, I checked my meetbox account to find out if Floyd or Blaine had left a message for me. They hadn’t. I also monitored the vidcasts on the screens that folded down from the overhead storage bins to provide individual programming. Even out there in the deadlands between colonies, the train maintained a satlink to the satellites crisscrossing Mars in low orbit at the edge of the thin atmosphere.
Due to the colonization of the planet and ag-bubbles venting air into the Martian sky, the planet’s atmosphere had become richer and deeper. Many of the helium flotation satellites linked by casual Net users had drifted higher as the atmosphere expanded. Some theorists believed that a human sustainable atmosphere was only a few hundred years away, given the current growth on the planet. Others postulated that such an atmosphere would never occur because Mars didn’t have the gravity to hold onto it.