by James Peters
“Marco! Hold on Marco!” Maven said.
“Is he going to die?” I said as she worked on him.
“Not if I can help it. Give me the extractor,” she said, staring at me.
I stared at her blankly.
“In the kit, a clear tube with a metal ring on top. The ring has a standard control interface. We’ve got to get the bullet out.”
I handed her a device matching the description. “You idiot, this is a specimen bottle. I need the extractor!”
I handed her something else that looked nearly identical. “Right. Now stand back as I… Oh gods no.”
“What is it?”
“The bullet. It is too close to his heart. He won’t survive removing it,” Maven said as a tear ran down her cheek.
“With all the tech in the Empire, you’re telling me that you can’t save him? He saved my life, and you shot him. Why did you have to do that? Why Maven? We could have all escaped together, but you, you have trust issues!”
“I can’t trust any of you. You would have shot me, given the chance!”
“No, Maven, we wouldn’t have. I know you were the one selling the Empire tech, and I know you had a past, a past that you won’t talk about. But Nicholai and I were willing to come get you, and take you with us to save this planet. You’re the one with Marco’s blood on your hands.”
She broke down in tears, sobbing uncontrollably, her face covered with blood as she wiped her eyes with her hands, making her look like a demon crying in shame and agony. “You could have really forgiven me?”
“Yes, we could have. But you tied us up, beat us, and now you’ve killed Marco.”
“He’s not dead yet. There is one chance.”
“One chance? You said if we remove the bullet, he’ll die.”
“If I remove the bullet without…”
“Without what?”
“Without injecting him with the nanobots. If I were to do that, I could set the extractor to slowly remove the bullet as the bots repair the damage. Marco will die if we don’t.”
“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! Why is it always like this? What gods did I piss off to make my life a series of crap like this?”
Marco raised a hairy hand up to my face and wiped away a tear making its way down my cheek. He made a shaking motion with his finger that I recognized as ‘no’, then made the sign of a heart; the sign he used when he referred to Gina.
“Marco, what are you saying? Fix your heart or fix Gina?”
Marco’s eyes fluttered and rolled back.
“Fuck! Maven, do you know what you’ve done?”
“Yes, damn it. I know. We only have one injection of the nanobots. They are yours now, Raka. You tell me what you want me to do with them. Decide quickly. Marco won’t last long.”
“Maven! I can’t stand here watching him die. But if I save him, Gina will die.”
“But not today,” Maven said.
“No, not today. But not long. Maybe a year.”
“A lot can happen in a year,” She said, pulling the sealed packet for the nanobot injection from the kit. “It’s your call.”
“I can’t watch him die!” I said.
She opened the packet and injected the contents into Marco’s chest. She worked the controls of the extractor and let it sit. Marco’s breath fluttered as the needle worked through his flesh; he gasped as the injection started.
Maven’s voice sounded disconnected. “It’s done. The extractor communicates directly with the ‘bots. The bullet will back out slowly as the ‘bots rebuild him.”
I walked away, into the shuttle to the area I briefly called home. “You’ve sentenced Gina to death!”
***
I don’t know exactly how much time passed. Hours, days, weeks... time didn’t seem to matter. I had fallen into a pit of despair and self-loathing. Like a zombie, I’d get up to use the restroom or drink some water. Occasionally I would eat a bite or two when I felt faint. I watched with disinterest as Maven and Nicholai did something in preparation of the shuttle. Marco eventually came to me, yelled at me in pantomime and stormed off. I simply didn’t care about anything. Someone could have put a gun to my head and I wouldn’t have even flinched.
Finally, one day Nicholai came to me and offered me a drink. Without thinking, I took a healthy swallow of the liquid, then felt the burn of strong alcohol. I coughed and swore at him. He refilled my glass and left a fresh bottle on the floor, then he wandered off without saying anything. I drank some more. The glass he brought me could have held half the bottle, and the drink tasted better with each swallow. For a moment, I wasn’t in pain. I heard someone approach. I recognized Maven’s feet.
She said as sat down next to me. “Hey.”
I took another drink. “Hey.”
“Do you mind?” she said, motioning to the bottle.
“Go ahead.”
She popped the top and took a swig. I didn’t look at her; I didn’t want to look at her. This woman had caused so much pain and suffering for me and so many others. She sat next to me. I wanted to hurt her somehow. Instead, I just tried to ignore her.
She refilled my glass; she drank straight from the bottle. “You have every right to hate me.”
“That’s likely the first honest statement I’ve ever heard you say.”
“I understand how you feel.”
She took a drink; I did the same. A warm sensation expanded throughout my body.
“My life is,” she said. “Complicated.”
“Mine hasn’t been simple. I’ve traveled across the entire galaxy, from one end to the other, and I fall out of a ship to land on this planet. Then I find one person. One, in all the galaxy that accepts me for what I am and loves me.”
I tried to keep from getting too animated, but I realized my arms waved wildly as I talked. “In all the Empire, nobody. Then I fall to this ‘barbarian’ planet and I meet someone, Gina, and she loves me, and I love her. Now I’ve failed her, and she’s going to die.”
I angrily drank another swallow from my glass. “It’s not fair!”
“You’re right, Raka. It’s not fair. I should have trusted you, but I couldn’t. Not with everything I’ve been through. I never wanted anyone to die, but there are some things I’m willing to kill for.”
“Apparently. How do you live with yourself?”
“Every day I remind myself of why I continue. I have a score to settle, let’s just leave it at that.”
We both took a drink in silence, then she added. “I envy you, Raka. Against all odds, you found someone. Someone that loves you. Regardless of what happens, you had that. I’ve never had that.”
“Never?”
For the first time in the discussion I looked at her face, and I saw long tears streaming down her cheeks. I sighed. My anger swam with sympathy. I fondly remembering what it felt like to be happy. “Surely you’ve had…uh, lovers?”
“Not love.” She dropped her head into her hands. “Nobody could ever love me.”
“What do you mean by that? You know what your problem iz?” I took another sip of the booze and noticed that with each swallow, it tasted better, and the pain crept back into the recesses of my mind. “Your problem is trust. You have to trust to feel love.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” She lifted the bottle to her lips. “You were famous, I bet girls were falling all over themselves to get…”
“To get away from me!” I said, then laughed. I hadn’t laughed in a long time. It felt good, but guilt washed over me.
“Nonsense. A handsome and famous guy like you? I bet the girls chased you.”
“Not exactly. But what about a pretty girl like you?”
Her eyes went from looking at the floor to staring deep into my soul. “You think I’m pretty?”
At that moment, with the warmth of the drink in my belly and staring at her like that, I said something stupid.
“Yes. I’ve always found you beautiful.”
Before I could even react, she had cl
imbed on top of me, her lips pressed against mine, and with the moves of a gymnast, she pushed me to the floor. She had me pinned to the floor like a wrestler pinning an opponent; her kisses passionate, almost desperate. I struggled with my emotions and desires. I worked my hands loose and pushed her back, she pushed harder, countering my every move. As each second passed I wanted to struggle against her less. I took a deep breath and worked one hand on her arm and I reached the other one down to grab her to push her off of me. My hand ended up under her short skirt, and I grabbed a handful of man-junk. I flung her, him, it, whatever off of me. “What the actual fuck?! You’re a guy?!”
I briefly fought the urge to vomit, but then something inside me said ‘why bother?’ so I puked on the floor. The tale of Cam and the Singapore whore flashed through my mind, and I puked again.
“See why I can never find love, and why I can’t trust anybody?” Maven sobbed while I retched. We both rolled away from each other.
“How the hell do you expect to earn my trust when you surprise me with that, I mean, like that?”
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and felt some level of sobriety come back to me. “You’re a guy?”
“Not exactly.”
I stood up and took a step back. “Well, you have the equipment. What the fuck does ‘not exactly’ mean?”
“Raka, it’s a long story. I’ve never told anyone, but I might as well tell you.”
“I’m all ears, sister, er, brother.”
“Just call me Maven.”
“Okay, Maven, tell me your story.”
Maven took another drink and motioned me to follow her to a table with a couple chairs in the shuttle’s galley. We sat down and took a deep breath. “My father was in the Special Forces; my mother worked as an auditor for governmental services. We had all the conveniences of a well-to-do family in the Empire: Servants, luxury living arrangements, and vacations on the finest pleasure cruisers. Dad was away for months at a time and always came back with a nice bonus and some souvenirs from the furthest corners of the galaxy. I had everything I could imagine as a child. I was happy, and I was a boy. When I was ten, my dad came home one night well after my bed time. It was clear that he was upset and something had gone terribly wrong. He gave me something I had never seen before. It was rectangular, and fit in my hands. It had a hard outer shell, and inside it were thin sheets of paper, each page painstakingly filled in by hand. It was my father’s journal, and it detailed everything he had done and what he had seen while in service to the Empire. Even at ten years old, I recognized that possession of media not controlled by the Imperial Data Service was a crime punishable by death. I remember staring at it as he gave it to me. He told me to keep it hidden, in a place only you will be able to find it. You’ll need to find it and reread it several times, after each treatment.” Maven stared at the floor for a moment, breathed deeply, then continued.
“I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time, but now I do. Something had gone horribly wrong on one of his missions, and he was being purged. All traces of him were being removed from existence. As I was genetically one-half of him, I was to be cleansed of his tainted DNA. They’d wipe my memories of him and replace his DNA in me with a donor. I was born male, and the donor was female. Combine that donor’s DNA with my Mother’s DNA, and I was to become female.”
“The treatments were horrible. There was a psychological part where they blasted my mind with random memories and cleared out the real ones. It’s called a mnemonic scrambler. I have memories and I’m convinced a lot are completely false. As bad as the scramble was, the genetic alteration was worse by an exponential factor. They can’t change all your DNA at once; they do certain organs one time, others at another. Bone marrow and blood are one session, nerves and muscle tissue another. While undergoing the treatments, your body wants to simultaneously reject and multiply the new DNA. I remember returning home, every nerve on fire, my mind a blur, knowing that they’d be back a few weeks later. Each time, I’d find that journal and read it. It explained what had happened to my father, who I was, and what I was going through.”
Maven stopped and stared at me.
I thought for a moment. “If you have false memories, how can you be certain that the journal wasn’t also a lie?”
“I can never be certain. But the journal gave me information that the Empire wouldn’t have wanted me to know, like how to sabotage a medical Executioner. Dad had obtained backdoor access codes for most Imperial equipment. He wanted me to avenge him, and that’s what I’ve been doing. At my seventh treatment, the doctors left me alone while another patient went into cardiac arrest. I held my breath while they administered the gas, and as soon as they left, I accessed the Executioner’s controls with the codes Dad had left me. That day, the name of that machine was never more appropriate. I feigned unconsciousness as the machine brutally killed the doctors. It was a work of art; macabre, morbid, and magnificent in its movements. The doctors fell to the floor, organs splaying across the room, blood slickening the floor. I escaped and had directions to an underground movement. I was on my last treatment, and I was about ninety-eight percent female by that time. Genetically, physiologically, and emotionally, I was female. All except for one thing. That day’s treatment would have remedied my problem, but I escaped when I had the chance. I’ve been on the run ever since, and working with an underground outfit.”
“So this underground outfit. What are they about?”
“Justice,” Maven said.
“By whose definition? One person’s justice is another’s persecution. How do you know you are on the right side?”
“I know I’m not on the side of the Emperor. The Empire that is so corrupt with dark money, lies, murder, not to mention what they did to me. My goal was clear, to bring down the Emperor. I was close, very close. Had I another few weeks, I would have gained access to all his files. I nearly had him. Then you came along and screwed everything up.”
“I had no idea. I was just working on a story.”
“I know that now, Raka. I no longer blame you for what happened. Besides, the years I’ve spent here in Montana have made me think differently. I wanted to bring down an Emperor. But what happens when an Emperor dies?”
“He gets replaced by the next in succession. It’s always been that way.”
“Right. So, we remove one cancerous tumor, and it immediately gets replaced by another spoiled child of the Empire, equally corrupt, and ready to make a name for himself. Nothing ever changes, just names, not atrocities. The next guy will be equally immoral, evil and fat as the one currently in place. Absolute power corrupts...”
“Absolutely,” I said. “So you decided to just stay here and forget about the Emperor?”
“No, not at all. I decided to stop worrying about bringing down an Emperor. I’m going to bring down an Empire.”
A headache came on. “An Empire? This is treasonous talk, you know that, don’t you?”
“If we’re captured by the Empire, we’re dead anyway,” Maven said, calmer than I expected.
“So you think that you and this underground movement can take down the entire Empire? What, have you been smoking Nicholai’s ganja?”
“I have no delusions about the underground being able to take on the Empire. We’re a few thousand at best. The Empire would crush us without hesitation or even raising taxes.”
“Good. You had me worried there. At least that nonsense about taking down the Empire is over.”
“Oh, it’s not over. I just have a better plan now.”
“What plan? You just said the Empire would crush your underground without hesitation. What weapon could you possibly have against the Empire?”
I looked deeply into Maven’s eyes, fearing the answer.
Maven faced turned from defiance to deceit, then to shame. “Earth.”
I could feel my blood boiling; my pulse racing. We stared at each other in silence, a noise came from one of the cupboards in the shuttle. Without a word, we
both stood up and approached the door. We flung it open and jumped back in startled shock as Marco fell out.
“Fuck, Marco!” I said, as my pulse raced and instinctively raised a hand to my chest. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. Why don’t you go play with Nicholai or something?”
Marco scurried off as we let out a nervous laugh of relief. “Back to our discussion. Earth is only a few thousand years advanced out of caves and clubs. What possible use could this planet be to you? They’re like mice to the machines of the Empire.”
“That’s why I’ve been assisting them.”
“You mean you’ve been leaking Empire tech.”
“Yes. To advance them along. So they’d be prepared for the Empire.”
“To be prepared, or to be used as a weapon? There’s a big difference there. This isn’t right. This planet was so…”
“Primitive?” Maven said. “They were, and when the Empire finds them, they would be destroyed. But I’ve been nursing them along, advancing them to develop—”
“Unnaturally develop technology,” I said. “You’ve changed the entire development of a planet. Don’t you see that’s just wrong?”
“It’s wrong if the Empire comes here and destroys them all in a single volley. Is it less wrong if I help them defend themselves? What about a preemptive strike to prevent the complete annihilation of a planet? This planet you claim to love so much?”
“Don’t pretend to take the moral high-ground,” I said, grinding my teeth. “This planet could have remained hidden for decades, if not centuries, had you not interfered. Now we have little choice, we have to try to protect it. Did Nicholai tell you our plan?”
“Yes. While you were detained, he and I found the beacon on the shuttle. I was able to access its memory. Earth timekeeping is cumbersome; suffice it to say the transmission started roughly upon our arrival. It shut off three months ago.”
“Good,” I said.
“Not good. Why do you think it would shut off? A beacon programmed to broadcast its location until it is answered or recovered? The message was received, and a message to remain quiet returned. I’d be making a lot of assumptions to say when, but they are on their way, and it won’t be long.”