No Going Back

by Mark L. Van Name

  I walked through a doorway into the back portion of the cottage. The door was withdrawn into the left wall right now. It was metal, solid and thick and completely out of character with the rest of the house. It was probably the simplest way to turn the back room into a prison cell.

  This final third section of the cottage was its biggest part. A small bathroom filled the right side. The larger part of the area was the bedroom. A huge bed, easily three times as wide as my cot, dominated the space. Its dark wood frame matched the wooden dresser and wardrobe that stood against the opposite wall. There were no closets, no built-in storage, no nods to space efficiency. More pictures, more carvings, the measured use of art as planned decoration consistent from room to room. The entire space was intentionally built like something on a frontier world. I checked the dresser and wardrobe, under the bed, and in the bathroom, but I found nothing.

  Schmidt’s staff may not have cleaned up after their prisoner to the satisfaction of the food conveyors, but I found no personal possessions, nothing that didn’t look built-in except the flowers.

  If the prisoner, Jennie or anyone else, had been left alone and unmonitored enough, she might have been able to hide something in the walls or under the floors, but it was unlikely that the security systems wouldn’t have reported such modifications to the room. In addition, nothing I saw appeared to have been marred by tools.

  Time was passing, and I still had found nothing. Everything that remained in this place appeared to have been part of it by design.

  I ran my light again across the bedroom walls, checking for any signs someone might have hidden something, but I saw only the art. Each picture showed either something from nature or a building. When I looked closer at them, they had small tags identifying them and tying them to the estate in some way: a garden fifty years ago, the first guest cottage, and so on. History fans sometimes added guest-activated commentary to their displays, so I ran my fingers along the frames of a few of them. Nothing happened. In case they were heat sensitive, I took off my gloves. The pieces depicting trees and flowers and gardens did nothing. Those showing buildings, however, glowed softly and began to provide information on their topics, their batteries still working.

  The carvings were all animals. Nothing happened when I picked them up or ran my hands over their surfaces.

  I checked the art in the kitchen. More of the same.

  I moved to the front room and checked its art. Also more of the same, except one piece on the front wall, in a corner no chair faced, that caught my eye. It was a picture of an island, an island with a mountain in its center. Rocky terraces jutted out from the mountain here and there all over it. Grass grew on the rock. A small village sat at the base of the side facing the viewer.

  The picture wasn’t very good, the artist’s technique primitive, but I didn’t care about that.

  I knew this island.

  Its name was Pinecone, and I had grown up on it.

  I lifted it from its hanger and examined it carefully.

  Nothing.

  I removed the backing of the frame and studied both it and the back of the picture.

  Again, nothing.

  The paper, though, was thick and heavy. I felt it carefully and found that it was thickest in the center and slightly thinner on the edges. I pulled it out of the frame and ran the light along its edges.

  On the left side as I looked at the back of the sheet, I spotted what might have been a seam. I pulled out my knife and used its point to very gently poke at the side. The paper parted into two sheets. I moved the blade gently up and then down the side of the sheet, widening the hole. Inside the two sheets was another, much smaller sheet of paper. I shook the paper gently with one hand until the smaller sheet came free and fell into my other hand. I put everything down on the nearest chair except the small piece of paper that had been tucked inside the picture.

  The part of the paper facing the back was blank.

  I turned it over.

  Written on its front in fading black letters done by hand was a note.

  “I’ve left these pictures where they’ve kept me, whenever I could. If you’re reading this, I hope it’s because you recognized the island. I hope it’s because you’re my brother. Know that I am alive but trapped, as I have been all these many years.

  “Find me, please.

  “Jennie”

  My hands trembled.

  I read it again.

  Jennie was definitely alive, and she had been trying for over a hundred and forty years to contact me.

  I put the note carefully into my pocket. I smoothed the picture closed, reassembled the frame, and hung it back where it had been.

  I stared at it again. It was always possible this was a coincidence, that whoever had decorated these cottages had picked up this picture in a shop somewhere, but that wasn’t likely. The art didn’t fit with the rest of the decorations, and a woman with characteristics like those of my sister had been in this very cottage.

  No, the conclusion was clear.

  Jennie was alive.

  When I’d escaped from Aggro, I’d told myself I would find her one day. I spent a lot of the following years simply hiding out, saving, learning, and living. Over the many decades that followed, my resolve waxed and waned, until I realized that I was slowly abandoning hope.

  Now, that resolve was back. With luck, I would be able to stay on Haven for a while, pick up clues as to where they had taken Jennie, and spend more time with Zoe.

  No matter what, though, I would track Jennie until I found her.

  I crawled through the hole in the cottage wall.

  “Get back here now!” Lobo said over the comm and on the machine frequency simultaneously.

  I ran for him. As I did, I said over the machine frequency, “What’s happening?”

  “Six men, all trying to look casual, are converging on me from the house,” Lobo said.

  “Take off and come here,” I said.

  “I can’t,” Lobo said, “without trapping Zoe. She’s inside me.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Jon Moore

  I altered my course so I was running at an angle away from Lobo and, I hoped, from the view of the attackers. I was tracing a big loop so I could approach him from behind. I used the machine frequency instead of the comm because that way, I didn’t have to waste breath talking.

  “Plot sightlines,” I said. “Can the men see me?”

  “No,” Lobo said, “but they’re still advancing.”

  “Tell Zoe to leave.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Obvious,” he said. “I did. She won’t.”

  Damn.

  “Will I or the men reach you first?”

  “You will, but they’ll see you as you enter. Some definitely are carrying weapons.”

  I switched to the comm. “Patch me to Zoe,” I said, my voice coming in gasps.

  “Done.”

  “Zoe,” I paused to breathe.

  “Jon, what’s going on? Why is Lobo telling me to leave?”

  “Armed men are about to start shooting at Lobo,” I said. “Leave.” I sucked in air. “Now.”

  “Jon—”

  I cut her off. “Leave now! I’ll explain later.”

  “She’s going,” Lobo said over the machine frequency.

  I heard shots.

  I switched back to the machine frequency to save breath. “Zoe?”

  “She’s okay,” Lobo said. “I closed the hatch at the first shot, which fortunately missed her.”

  I reversed course and ran as fast as I could away from the house. “Come to me, but take off quietly,” I said. “If they didn’t get a good look at her, they might believe she was me, think I’m on board, and slow down to fire at you. Come alongside me, and I’ll jump in.”

  “On my way,” Lobo said.

  “Can you identify any of the men?” I said.

  “Randar and Shin,” Lobo said.

  I heard more shots, a lot of them.

  “That worked,�
�� Lobo said, “but it bought us only a few seconds. The men are running again.”

  I pushed my legs to go faster, so I could put as much distance between them and me as possible.

  “On your left in three seconds,” Lobo said.

  Shots rang out again.

  Nothing hit me, but I had no way to tell how close or far away they were.

  Lobo, his hatch open, pulled up on my left and matched my pace.

  I angled toward him.

  He came closer and slowed a tiny bit so I didn’t have to make the jump at full speed.

  More shots.

  I leapt inside him, hit the far wall, and bounced back.

  I hit the hatch wall.

  My body ached from the two impacts, and I couldn’t speak clearly yet for lack of breath. I focused, told the nanomachines to block the pain, and gasped for air. They couldn’t do anything about that.

  Zoe ran to me and knelt beside me. “Jon, what’s going on?”

  “Not now,” I croaked.

  I stayed on the machine frequency with Lobo and said, “Head for the jump gate.”

  Something bothered me. Why hadn’t the men stopped running when they saw Lobo take off? They had to have spotted me, but they shouldn’t have been able to see me. Schmidt could have used security systems on the grounds, but if he had, they would have spotted me earlier. Only when Lobo took off and came for me did the monitors see me.

  “I think they have a ship in the air monitoring us,” I said to Lobo. “Check for it, but keep on for the gate, as fast as you can legally go.”

  A few seconds passed. My lungs filled with air. Zoe stayed beside me.

  “Found it,” Lobo said, still on the machine frequency. “A small executive security vehicle, hovering above the other side of the Schmidt estate, is tracking us.”

  “Can we out-run it?”

  “Yes, but its sensors will still track us.”

  “We could try hiding again on Haven,” I said, “but they have huge resources here. I still say we jump out of here.”

  “Jon!” Zoe said.

  I realized that it looked like I was staring into space stupidly. I held up one finger.

  “Agreed,” Lobo said, “but what about your mission?”

  “I’ve gotten everything I can,” I said. I switched to voice. “Zoe, we can talk in one minute. Lobo, how much of a lead do we have?”

  “Another ship is landing on the Schmidt estate, presumably to pick up Randar, Shin, and their men. Between that delay and my speed advantage, particularly once we leave the planet’s atmosphere, we should have an hour or more.”

  “They’ll know where we jump,” I said, “because finding us in the jump records will be easy, particularly given Kang’s power and our lack of time to create a cover.”

  “Yes,” Lobo said.

  “So we run, we jump out of this system, and we hope we can go to ground in our safe spot on Studio.”

  “I agree with the plan,” Lobo said, “but they will find us. Kang will enable Shin to use Studio’s jump gate records to track us almost all the way to the planet. We have to assume, given how easily he beat the charges there, that his power extends to local authorities. By merging the jump gate and Studio navsat data sets, they will find us.”

  Zoe stared at me.

  I ignored her while I thought through the possibilities.

  “They won’t, though, involve the Studio place. Kang’s influence is with the people in power. The police can’t like that he got off, and they wouldn’t help him.”

  “So they’ll come after us with their own ships,” Lobo said.

  “Yes,” I said, “and they’ll find us, and we’ll have to fight.”

  “It’s about time,” he said.

  “Jon!” Zoe said. “You can clearly talk now, so talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

  I faced her. “Here’s the short version: A group of men backed by Kang, the man I told you about, attacked us. They have his resources behind him, and they are intent on capturing me. I was talking to Lobo instead of you because we had to make plans. Lobo is faster than their ships, but they will track us, as you heard, and they will find us.” I took a deep breath. “When they do, we will have to surrender or fight them. I will not surrender to them, so we will fight.”

  “All of this because of what you did to that child abuser, Kang?”

  “Basically, yes.” I didn’t want to explain about Omani. “He said he would track me down and make me pay, and now he is doing just that.”

  “And I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said. “Lobo told me to leave because he saw those men were coming and you told him to warn me.”

  Over the machine frequency, Lobo said, “Must I endure these insults? How stupid does she think I am?”

  “Let it go,” I said the same way. “We’re safer the less she knows.”

  To Zoe, I said, “That’s about it.”

  “Oh, no, it’s not,” she said. “Where were you when I came back here early from the party to surprise you?” She studied my clothes, the activecamo trying to decide between blending with Lobo’s pale metallic walls and matching the bright blue dress she was wearing. “And why are you dressed like that?”

  “I was trying to gather some evidence that might help us.”

  “From Schmidt’s estate?”

  I nodded.

  “And that evidence would be?”

  I put my arm on her shoulder. “Zoe, please believe me that the less you know, the better off you will be. Truly. No one can make you tell something you do not know.”

  She stared at me for a second, and then her eyes widened.

  “You were planning to leave even before this happened. If I had stayed at the party for as long as I was supposed to, you would have been gone when I came looking for you.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She stared at me for a few seconds and then punched me in the stomach.

  I saw it coming, so I tensed my stomach and took it without showing any reaction.

  “Why?” she said. “And don’t you even try to tell me that you were just using me, because I know better. I know you care, and if I’d waited for you, we would never have made love.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “So why?”

  I couldn’t tell her the whole truth, so I told her part of it. “It’s not safe to be around me for long.”

  “So we deal with Kang,” she said, “and then life goes on. What’s so hard about that?”

  “First,” I said, “dealing with him means an armed fight that we might not win and even possibly might not survive. Assuming we do win, we can’t go back to Haven any time soon, maybe ever, because that’s where he lives and where his power is strongest. Plus, if they remember you from when you stuck your head out of the hatch, then they’ll think you’re part of this. They’ll be watching Passion. If you were to stay with me and then go near her—”

  “—I’d be putting all three of us at risk,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  “So what are you planning to do?”

  “I’d hoped to run away before things ever got to this point,” I said, “but that didn’t work out. Now, I’m reacting and adapting. The basic plan is what you heard: We lure them to a remote location we scouted earlier, one where no one else is likely to be around, so no one else gets hurt. If we win, we drop you somewhere you can make your way back to Haven, and we move on.”

  “And that’s it?” she said. “That’s it? You drop me off, I go back to Passion and the show, and we never see each other again?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Because it’s not safe to be around you.”

  “Yes.”

  She thought for a moment. “What if I gave up the show and stayed with you?”

  I shook my head. “There are two reasons that won’t work. First, the show is your life. You and Passion are a team, and without each other, you’d be lost. Second, you still wouldn’t be safe.
Kang is not the only person with a score to settle with me.” And, I thought, when I start searching for Jennie in earnest, things are likely to get even worse.

  “I don’t like this,” she said. “We’ve only just found one another. I want more of you, not less. We’ll never get to learn what we could have been.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry. I never meant to fall—” I stopped myself. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, looked around for a few seconds, and faced me again. “We’re heading to the jump gate, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In space?”

  “Yes,” Lobo said. “We are well beyond Haven’s atmosphere now.”

  “But you’re not piloting the ship,” she said to me. “So Lobo is also something different than I thought.”

  “Rather considerably more than you thought,” Lobo said, “if I may be permitted a moment of both honesty and pride.”

  “What exactly is this ship—sorry—what exactly are you, Lobo?”

  “Remember,” I said, “when I told you that the less you know, the safer you are?”

  She nodded.

  “What you know right now,” I said, “is that Lobo is an executive transport with the ability to fly to jump gates as well as around Haven. That’s plenty.”

  “Do you have any sense,” she said, “of just how hard this whole situation is for someone like me to deal with? I’m accustomed to managing a very complex world, but not this one.”

  “I probably don’t,” I said, “because this is the world I normally live in. I know it’s a lot.”

  “So what do we do now?” she said.

  “We,” I said, “do nothing. You pack all of your things up front, plus all of your possessions from your quarters, into as few bags as possible. Leave anything you can possibly replace. Then, you do whatever Lobo or I tell you to do, and you do it as quickly as you can.”