by K. M. Ruiz
Terror filled her mind, worry for her daughter an almost overriding partner to it. Sharra glanced down at where Lillian lay on the ground. She was a small thing, skinny, like her mother. Lillian was going to grow up beautiful, if she grew up at all.
“I wanted a life for her on Mars Colony,” Sharra said desperately. “That’s all I ever wanted.”
“A mother’s instinct and a mother’s love. I can honestly say I’ve never felt either.”
“That’s because your mother was a monster.”
Sharra remembered Marcheline only too well, remembered the paralyzing fear that always wracked her whenever the woman entered her prison cell in the Serca Syndicate all those years ago. Freedom from the streets meant wearing a golden collar in a gilded cage. City towers weren’t all that much better than the gutter. Mars Colony was supposed to be the answer. Maybe it wasn’t.
Gideon had never cared for the human side of his genes. It stood to reason he wouldn’t care about his half sister. Sharra didn’t want to lose Lillian.
“One of the few things we’ll ever agree on,” Nathan said. “I don’t expect you to care about Gideon, but I know you’ll care about your own life. Keep Gideon with your retinue until I get up there. Don’t let anyone put you or him into cryo sleep.”
“I wasn’t planning on going through the procedure until Erik arrived on the Ark.”
Nathan’s smile was slight and condescending. “Keep being that dutiful wife, Sharra.”
She jerked her chin up, finding a sense of defiance from somewhere. “I never regretted becoming this.”
“No, you just regretted never knowing if Erik loved you. Would you like to find out?”
“Damn you.”
She had always wondered—would always wonder—if it was Erik’s own feelings or Nathan’s psionic interference that existed in their marriage. The kind of courage it took to claw her way out of the streets of London was different from the strength it took to tear apart her carefully crafted second life.
Sharra was brave, but she wasn’t stupid.
“Live with what you’ve made,” Nathan said, taking a step back. “And get my son off this planet.”
All Sharra could do was obey.
“Dalia,” Nathan said. “Make sure they get on the next space shuttle.”
The uniformed woman with an unremarkable face only nodded. “Of course, sir.”
Nathan teleported out, the only one to leave. Those people rendered unconscious during Nathan’s arrival snapped back to awareness, none the wiser of their brief blackout. Neither did they ask questions of the two newest faces in the room, Nathan having erased their curiosity and implanted new memories. Lillian stirred at Sharra’s feet, and Sharra bent to pick up her daughter and pull the girl onto her lap.
“I fell asleep?” Lillian asked, yawning through the question. She rubbed at her face with one small hand, looking and sounding grumpy. All her toys were packed away and she was bored.
Sharra tucked Lillian’s head under her chin and closed her eyes. “Just for a little while.”
She rocked her daughter in her arms, thinking about what it took for her to reach this moment. From the streets of London to the isolated glitter of The Hague. From the launch out of Paris, then the flight to the moon and the colony ship there by way of space shuttles painstakingly reverse engineered from those left behind after the burgeoning age of space was destroyed by bombs.
For far longer than the length of Sharra’s life, the government had been making careful forays into space to hone the skills needed for this venture and to bring the Ark back online for their escape. So much effort, so much deceit, so much hope placed over the decades for the safety and survival of the human race onto the shoulders of the men and women who ascended to the World Court.
All of it useless in the face of the Serca family’s machinations and desire for the same freedom Sharra and those like her wanted.
“Sharra.”
She grimaced at her name coming from her son’s mouth. “What?”
“I’m not going with you.”
She opened her eyes and lifted her head in shock. “But Nathan—”
Sharra never finished her sentence, much less her thought. A foreign telepathic touch invaded her mind, ignoring the risk of being discovered by the bioware net. It didn’t matter anymore. Her orders didn’t matter because she no longer remembered Nathan delivering them.
Sharra blinked, staring dazedly around the room, wincing against the tension headache that pounded through her head. The woman charged by Nathan to look after them approached and nodded down at Sharra and Lillian. Dalia looked how Sharra felt. “Let’s get you on a space shuttle, Mrs. Gervais.”
Sharra nodded and stood with Lillian in her arms. It took several minutes for everyone to get organized and leave the room. The small group was met in the hallway by a scientist who took them to the ready room being used for the more important transfers. They were helped into space suits by a dozen workers, bodies wrapped in an enclosed environment that made Sharra feel claustrophobic. She held Lillian’s hand tightly in hers and followed every order given to her.
Dalia walked them to the small dock shuttle and helped them get settled before letting the pilot know they were ready. The jaunt to their assigned space shuttle was short. The dock shuttle locked into place against a shielded transport tube and the hatch opened. Sharra took in a heavy breath and undid her harness, then Lillian’s. One step, then another, took her closer and closer to an escape she wasn’t sure would save them.
“Mama?” Lillian said as they were escorted into the space shuttle by its crew. “I’m scared.”
Sharra knelt in front of her daughter and framed the child-size helmet with her hands. She managed to dredge up a smile from somewhere. “I know. But everything’s going to be fine. Be my brave little girl, darling. I’ll be right here with you.”
“Promise?”
“Always.”
They were strapped into their assigned seats so tightly it hurt to breathe. Sharra held Lillian’s hand in her own as hard as she could and didn’t let go.
Erik, she thought. I’ll see you soon.
Sharra would remember leaving Earth in flashes, not whole memories. How the space shuttle’s engines roared in her ears and shook her bones. How the g-forces flattened her body against the curve of her seat. The way her breath was forced out of her lungs as the pressure got worse down the two-kilometer-long, curved launch ramp before they were flung into the sky. The sharp pop of her ears over and over as the space shuttle gained altitude, struggling to break orbit on a one-way trip to a new life. The way she never let go of her daughter’s hand.
Left behind on the ground, Gideon watched the space shuttle until he couldn’t see even the spark of it anymore. Beside him in the viewing room, Hu watched Gideon with a frown on his face. “You should have been on that shuttle.”
Gideon pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead. “I don’t need you questioning my actions.”
“I shouldn’t be doing this, Gideon. Nathan wanted you on the Ark.”
“Nathan needs to learn I’m the only one he’s got to rely on. He can’t do that with me in space.”
Hu let out a heavy sigh. “Then let’s find a private room to wait. It’ll give me time to sort out your mind.”
Gideon turned away from the window and the view stretched out beyond it, no longer interested in what it had to offer.
PART SIX
Salvation
SESSION DATE: 2128.04.09
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 308
“You broke it,” Aisling says as she tugs on the short sleeve of her yellow dress. A wire is caught in the fabric and she frees it with careful fingers. She kicks her feet where they dangle in the air.
“We didn’t break anything,” the doctor replies, not looking up from the datapads on the table.
�
�Tell that to the people of Río Gallegos.”
The doctor’s head snaps up, face turned toward the two-way mirror near the door. She makes a gesture with one hand, one she has made before.
“Too late,” Aisling sighs. “You’re always too late. Bombs away.”
The doctor slams her hand against the table, shaking it. “We wouldn’t still be in this situation if you helped us!”
“If I could help you, I would, but you would still be in this situation.” The girl slides a little in her chair, her small head tilting back. She stares at the ceiling, with its bright lights, and doesn’t blink. “Please don’t be mad. I’m trying to fix this.”
“How? How are you trying? You’re not giving us the information we need.”
“I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t understand.”
THIRTY
SEPTEMBER 2379
TORONTO, CANADA
The Strykers Syndicate was pared down to a skeleton crew over the course of hours. Every Stryker was ordered into the field to deal with the escalating riots, including those who were still recovering from wounds incurred in Buffalo or elsewhere. To stay behind meant dereliction of duty and the promise of instant termination. That was the order of the World Court, and Ciari heeded the warning. Their absence meant Lucas’s small group had far fewer people to run into and risk tipping off the government.
They gathered in a debriefing room, standing around a large conference table that had the small carrying cases stacked neatly across it. Everyone’s attention was on the vidscreen embedded in the wall.
“This isn’t going to trip an alarm, is it?” Jael asked.
“I know government code and I learned a few new tricks while on the run,” Jason said, never taking his eyes off the vidscreen. “They won’t know we’re hooked up where we’re not supposed to be.”
“Will it last?”
“Longer than the measures you’ve got running in Ciari’s office to hide your activities.”
The vidscreen showed a view none of them had ever before seen. A hazy, ethereal blue glow seemed to smudge the center, dividing black from a curve of gray-blue. The cloud formations were gray and thin over a murky blue ocean. The darkening shape of a continent moving into night seen from space was unfamiliar. The old satellite they were using didn’t have the best focus capabilities after decades of floating through space without upgrades. Still, Lucas knew what was happening when he saw it.
“There,” Lucas said, leaning forward, eyes on the grainy picture.
A tiny, brightly glowing dot was lifting off the planet, rising into space. It grew larger, the satellite bringing the shape into focus. It was a space shuttle, the first of many, and no one could look away as it left Earth behind and disappeared offscreen. More space shuttles followed the first.
“That’s the start of it,” Lucas said. “We’ll only have so much time left now. A few days at the most.”
“With the amount of people they need to move, I’d think it would be longer,” Keiko said.
“The launch site was built to house space shuttles, not people. It’s a bottleneck in terms of movement. It’s why the government wanted to do this over the course of weeks, not in the middle of a panic. They can’t hope to ship thousands and thousands of people into space, then put them all into cryo on the colony ship quickly. Cryo is complicated and there are only so many doctors on board the Ark who can oversee the process.”
“Which means a lot of people won’t make it,” Ciari said, staring at the vidscreen.
“If a registered human misses their shuttle to Paris, then there’s no chance for them.”
“And the ones in space?” Threnody said.
Lucas shrugged. “I’ve seen the schematics of the Ark. It’s mostly storage space, bays and bays of cold boxes for cryo sleep and storage units for supplies. Easier to pack bodies in as cargo than as passengers. You use up less space if you don’t have to factor in living quarters for anyone but the crew.”
“Will that ship make it to Mars in one piece?”
“It’s survived over two hundred and fifty years cold-docked in space. It’ll survive a few more.”
Ciari stared across the table at him. “You don’t want it to.”
“I thought we could let them go, let them fly to some uncertain future.” Lucas ran a hand through his hair, nails scratching against his scalp. “We’d have Earth, which is all I ever wanted, but they would return.”
“Are there Warhounds on the space shuttles launching right now?” Quinton wanted to know.
“There will be Warhounds on every single one until Nathan has transferred them all.”
It went unsaid that when the Ark returned from a failed colonization on another world, it would arrive bearing humans and psions beholden to Nathan, who would fight for his rightful place in society. The world didn’t need another war.
“What now?” Kerr said. “You want to stop the launch? How do we do that and save the Strykers as well?”
“Distributing the virus has priority. We’re going to need everyone free to help fight, because we won’t be enough on our own, even merged,” Lucas said.
“Can you be sure they won’t run away?” Samantha said, not looking at her brother. She hadn’t looked him in the eye since letting Gideon go free. “If I was a Stryker and no longer had a neurotracker in my head, I’d go to ground in an instant.”
“When I give an order, Strykers obey,” Ciari said. “You weren’t trained how we were. Don’t believe all of us will abandon our posts. Freedom won’t mean anything if we don’t have a place to stay and live.”
“Speaking of living,” Keiko said. “The government only has half the supplies from the seed bank in the Arctic. I helped Nathan organize the transfer of everything left. If that’s what they were using to replenish the SkyFarms over the years, we’re going to need the rest of it. Where did you take it, Lucas?”
Lucas smiled at the question. “I see someone found my little message in the wall.”
“Your damn message got a Stryker killed. Where’s the rest of the seed bank?”
“Safe. You don’t need to know where.”
Keiko opened her mouth to argue, but Ciari interrupted her with “That’s all we need to know, Keiko. Leave it be.”
Threnody spared a glance at Jael before saying, “If we want the Strykers to believe what we tell them about the virus, they’ll need to hear the reason from an officer.”
“That’s why Keiko will be with Jason and Quinton to administer the virus,” Lucas said. He cut off Quinton’s protest with a look and a warning touch against the pyrokinetic’s mental shields. “I’m sending Threnody and Kerr on a different mission that requires their powers. Aidan will monitor Keiko’s progress, and when she returns, I’ll teach her the basics of merging.”
“What about them?” Aidan said, pointing at Lucas’s sisters.
The permanent smile on Kristen’s face was half covered by one hand, which she used to prop up her chin. She was seated next to Samantha, tapping her fingers against the edge of the table. “We’re going to the City of Lights.”
“Where is that?” Jason said. “I’ve been to almost every city that’s left in this world. I’ve never heard of that one.”
“Paris,” Samantha answered in a clipped voice. “We’re getting Lucas a sitrep on security at the launch site. No one will question us Sercas being there if humans discover our presence.”
“Is that safe with the amount of Warhounds that will be around? Not to mention the toxicity of the surrounding area.”
“The radiation won’t be as high as it was in the past, but it’s still intolerable, especially if you’re human.” Samantha shrugged. “We need to know what’s happening in Paris now that we no longer have people providing us inside information.”
“It’s been so long, you’d think the radiation would fade,” Jael said. “But it doesn’t. It just gets in your cells and lingers.”
“Sounds like everything’s been decided,” Quinton said, tu
rning his back on the room and the space shuttles on the vidscreen that were still launching. “Come get me when it’s time to go into the field.”
He left, ignoring Threnody when she called out his name. Sighing in frustration, she shoved away from the conference table, calling over her shoulder to the room at large, “I’ll be back.”
Jason’s careful, meticulous hack of the security system that spanned the Strykers Syndicate had been limited. Quinton couldn’t go far. Threnody found him in a room that held rows of empty research terminals, the people who would have manned them currently reassigned. Quinton didn’t immediately look up at her arrival.
“Hey,” Threnody said, putting her back against the door.
“You could have argued,” he said after a moment, letting his hands rest on the edge of a terminal as he glared at her. “You could have done something other than accept everything that comes out of Lucas’s mouth.”
“Where would that have gotten us? This is the only course of action. If it means we have to work apart, then we work apart.”
“You don’t know if this is the only way.”
“Yes,” Threnody said quietly. “I do.”
She had faith in a child that no one alive had ever met, that no one ever would except through saved encrypted files. Maybe Threnody didn’t trust Lucas, but she trusted in his goal, and Quinton couldn’t doubt that, because it meant he’d be doubting her. Quinton shook his head and tried to smile, but it came out wrong, crooked. She saw it for what he meant it to be.
“Damn it,” he whispered. “Why can’t I ever argue with you?”
Threnody shrugged. “Maybe you should have. I’m the reason why we got sent to the Slums in the first place, remember? Maybe if you reminded me to toe the line growing up, fulfill our contracts without arguing, and do as we were ordered, we wouldn’t be here.”
“It wasn’t my place to tell you how to do your job, Thren. It was my place to follow where you led.”
Threnody pushed away from the door and went to his side. She adjusted the flak jacket he wore, settling it more evenly on his broad shoulders. Threnody let her hands rest there, thumbs pressed against the bare skin of his neck. She could feel the electric pulse that ran through his body, a thing she knew just as intimately as she knew her own.