by Jael Wye
“There’s no need for you to make an early return to Mars, Da. You can stay on Earth and finish work on the new elevator, like you planned. Victoria has already caused enough trouble. Don’t let her ruin this project too,” Bianca said.
With a quick tap, she sent the com. There would be a three-minute lag before her message got through the satellite relay to her father’s ship, and another three minutes before his reply got back to her—making an already difficult conversation that much harder. She sat back, studying Max’s image on the vid as she waited for his com.
Bianca couldn’t help but be shocked by what she saw. Her father looked like he had aged decades since he had left Eris. There were dark shadows carved under his bright blue eyes. His shoulders were bowed, as if dragged down by a heavy weight. The self-assured, preoccupied man she knew was gone, and a broken shadow of him had taken his place.
The summary of events she had sent him had affected him terribly. But she couldn’t regret the decision to do it. He needed to know. It couldn’t wait until they were together in person.
Finally, his answering com arrived. “Dust the Earth elevator. And dust Eris. I nearly lost you. I was blind. Irresponsible. And it nearly cost me my daughter. I failed you. I...” His voice broke, and he buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking slightly.
“It’s all so unbelievable. All the terrible things she did. All those people she... How could I not have known?” he whispered.
Bianca stayed silent, not knowing what to say in the face of her father’s helplessness and guilt.
After a minute, he raised his head. “As soon as my ship docks on the Moon, I’ll turn around and come back. I have to fix this.”
There was no fixing it, she knew. The damage had been done long ago, and now they could only push on from where they were. Bianca opened her mouth to try to tell him that. But then she stopped herself.
Perhaps Max did need to come back to Mars. Not to save the elevator, or to straighten out the political mess Victoria had left. Bianca could handle that and more on her own.
No, her father needed to return home for his own sake, she realized. “All right, Da,” she said gently. “But I don’t want you to worry about me. I’m going to be just fine.”
She signed off soon after. Leaving the control center, she floated aimlessly through the passages of the car, her head full of unsettled thoughts.
She had assured Max that she had the elevator running normally, and she did, but she still felt slightly unsure. Like she had ventured into unfamiliar terrain and hadn’t quite found her footing yet. And no wonder. Running your own little world was an intimidating job.
Eventually, she found herself in front of the door that led to Cesare’s habsuite. She paused, drifting uncertainly in midair.
In the chaotic hours that followed the capture of the elevator, she had moved Cesare to a habsuite on the opposite side of the car, trying to get him as far away from Victoria’s lingering presence as possible. She had managed to conduct most of her business from his bedside, where she could watch over him as he recovered from what had been done to him.
She touched the door to the room where he lay sleeping, the metal cold under her fingers. Right now, the thing she wanted more than anything in the Sol was to talk everything over with Cesare. She wanted to tell him her hopes and plans for the future of Eris, get his thoughts, and let his easy laughter put it all in perspective.
Or else, just toss it all aside and make love with him again, until all the Sol had gone away, and there were just the two of them. But she fought the impulse to open his door. He had enough to deal with as it was.
Victoria had told him that his mother and brother were dead. In the brief periods when he was lucid, he had spilled out the incredible tale to her, and then to Angelo when he and his team rejoined them and rushed to Cesare’s bedside. She remembered the terrible look that had haunted his eyes as the broken sentences poured out of him, and she winced. She didn’t know if Victoria was telling the truth, but if she was... No, she couldn’t burden Cesare with her troubles.
And she couldn’t burden him with her emotions, either. With the love she wasn’t sure he would welcome.
She drifted back down the hallway. She needed to think everything over, alone.
* * *
His hands moved restlessly, searching for the sweet shape of a woman beside him. She had kissed him, given herself to him. She had said she loved him. Or was that just a dream? He opened his eyes slowly. She wasn’t there. He was alone.
No, not alone. There was a small, dark form a few meters away in the habsuite’s sitting area, webbed into an overstuffed chair. “Mehmet?” he said, his voice rough with sleep.
The old Earther looked up from the data pad in his lap, and smiled, his face creasing into a thousand wrinkles. “Ni hao, Cesare.”
“Where’s Bianca?”
“A com from her father came in. I’m under strict orders to sit with you while she’s away answering it.” He extracted himself from the chair and pushed himself a bit awkwardly across the room to Cesare’s bedside. “How do you feel?”
“I feel...” He paused to take stock. “...good.” Surprisingly good. The residual pain from the shocks was long gone. He reached up and felt the topical near his hairline. The gash from Victoria’s teeth was nearly healed.
Strangest of all, he didn’t feel the usual gut-twisting vertigo of zeegee. He loosened the bed net and sat up carefully. Ay, at this moment, the sensation of weightlessness was...well, not pleasant, but bearable. It was astonishing.
When he was certain he was steady, he looked over at Mehmet. “How about you? How are you and the others?”
“Excellent, thank you. The boys are having the time of their lives floating about up here. As are Iqbal and Han. I haven’t seen much of Bo and Milla since yesterday, but I assume they’re keeping busy.”
“And Angelo?”
Mehmet’s smile faded. “About as well as could be expected. Bianca opened up Victoria’s chambers in the Cloud to him. He’s been scouring them all for references to your mother and brother.”
Mum and Leo... Cesare felt something twist inside himself.
No. Victoria had lied to him to feck with his mind. That’s all it was. Mum and Leo were fine. They had to be.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told him what Victoria said about that Eldorado shite,” he muttered. He pulled up a hazy memory of Angelo looming by his bedside, rage and anguish on his face as Cesare spilled the whole wild tale. He had been half afraid his brother might blast off to the Belt without another word.
“That cracked huli was a liar with some serious delusions of grandeur,” he said firmly. “I don’t believe a word that came out of her mouth, and neither should Angelo.”
Mehmet shrugged noncommittally. “Perhaps he may find some useful information in her caches anyway.”
Cesare shook his head and set the problem aside for later. It was one among many crises clamoring for his attention, like RedIce and his father and those MarSec feckers who betrayed him. But all of that could wait. He had something he had to do first. He unfastened the bed net, cautiously pulled himself out of his bunk and took stock. A bit of dizziness, but no serious vertigo. Amazing.
He turned toward Mehmet. “I don’t think I said thank you yet,” he began.
“No need,” the old Earther immediately said. “What we do, we do in accordance with Heaven. Besides, Mars is my home now, and I must say I find it a much better place to live with you and Bianca in it.” He clapped Cesare on the shoulder and bounced away through the air toward the door. “There’s a new c-suit for you in the clothes press, in case you would like to get dressed.”
“Wait, Mehmet, where did you say Bianca was?”
“She said she would be in the control center, but that was a couple of hours ago,” he called bac
k over his shoulder. “She could be anywhere by now.” With a last smile sparkling in his black eyes, he was gone.
So. He was going to have to track her down again. He grinned and pushed himself toward the clothes press.
A few minutes later, he was carefully making his way down the car’s tall, narrow corridors. Napped sole pads on his boots held him to the floor, which—thankfully—was designed to allow people to walk in a somewhat normal fashion instead of flying about. His footsteps were a quiet zip-zip-zip as he moved through the silent car.
Where would he find her? he wondered. In the control center, clever fingers flying over the consoles? In the dining common, sipping a tube of tea?
He passed a few hab doors, turned a corner into a new corridor. Ahead of him, through a tall doorway, he caught a glimpse of a star field. It had to be the car’s two-story viewing blister, he realized. He hadn’t been inside one during his two previous trips. He zip-zip-zipped toward it, suddenly certain of what he would find.
A vast darkness spread out before him, and there, drifting in the heart of it, was Bianca. She had programmed her c-suit red, the bright color rippling over her like living fire, and she was swaying gently in midair, as if she were dancing. Mars was a ruddy half-circle drifting beneath her feet. Her face was turned toward the stars, an eternity away.
She was so beautiful it hurt. Like a piercing ache in his chest. He had to have her, for good. But how could he hold on to a woman as elusive as a dream? What could he say that would keep her? He cursed himself silently. He never was any good at this.
Then he saw a tiny spark held between her fingers. His diamond. He suddenly knew exactly what to say to her.
* * *
“I found you again, Spacebabe.”
She started, spinning toward the doorway where the deep rumble of his voice had sounded. “Cesare!” She clenched her diamond in her hand. He stepped through the blister entrance, moving gingerly. “What are you doing out of bed? Are you all right?”
“Ay, I am.” He nodded toward the ocean of stars beyond the diamond lattice. “Nice view,” he said with a grin.
She felt a smile tug at her own lips. “Ay, it’s not too bad.” She made a move to push herself down to where he was standing.
“No! Stay there.” He slid his feet out of the napped soles of his boots, and then awkwardly pushed himself up into the air.
“You did it,” she whispered as he floated up toward her.
He came level with her, and caught himself against the viewport, flailing a bit. He kept his eyes fixed on her. “Your immersion therapy worked wonders,” he said. He looked a little pale, but he was still smiling. He was even giving her the Look again. His eyes roamed hungrily over her body in her new red c-suit. Then they suddenly dropped to her cupped hand. “You kept it. The diamond.”
She couldn’t quite meet his gaze. “Ay.”
“You know, back on old Earth, blokes used to give diamonds to chics they wanted to marry.”
“Oh,” she said.
“So marry me.”
Her lips parted.
“I can learn to like space,” he said hurriedly. “I can live on Eris. I’ll go anywhere in the Sol if you want.”
She couldn’t make a sound. She looked into his long, tilted eyes, dark with intensity and...nervousness?
He said, “Did you mean what you told me yesterday? That you love me? Because...because I love you.” He stumbled over the words, as if he had never spoken them to any woman before.
She launched herself toward him, and he caught her, spinning in midair. “Yes. I love you,” she said, kissing him. “I love you. I’ll marry you. I’ll be with you, wherever you are.”
“You’d come down to the surface for me?”
“Mars, Eris, anywhere in the Sol As long as I’m with you, I’m home.” She kissed him again, with all her heart. His arms bound her to him like metal bands. They turned and turned through space together, as if they were one body that nothing under heaven could sunder.
“You’re mine,” he said between kisses.
She smiled against his lips. “As long as you can catch me.”
“Always, then.”
“Ay. Always.”
* * * * *
About the Author
Jael Wye grew up on the American Great Plains, went to school in the Midwest and now lives in beautiful New England with her family and her enormous collection of houseplants. For more of Jael’s unique blend of futurism and fairy tale, don’t miss her ongoing series Once Upon a Red World.
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ISBN: 978-14268-9642-2
Copyright © 2013 by Jael Wye
Edited by Meredith Giordan
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