It wasn’t enough that the convoy hear her. Nika wanted them to see her. And she would give the announcement live, not from the situation room or her office on Aesop, but from the shuttle bay on Mira.
Two security officers helped her scramble up on top of a shuttle. The vantage point gave her a broad view of the crowd. Everyone currently resting or working on Mira had come, and the place was packed. Presiding from on-high let her see all of their upturned faces in full.
She noticed Reggie Straifer standing left of center in the throng. Nika picked him out easily, though she wouldn’t admit to herself why she’d been looking for him in particular.
I.C.C. gave a soft chime, which let her know it was time to begin. At the sound, her nerves steadied, and a wave of calm sloshed through her body.
“Convoy Seven, Komið þið sæl og blessuð. I greet you today in our parent Icelandic, to remind you of where we came from. Earth. Space may feel like home. The void of SD travel is our comfort zone. We explore, we journey, we investigate. That is our norm. Wandering has always been our familiar.
“But, like any person who has rushed into the freedom that comes with maturity, we must eventually acknowledge Responsibility. We cannot remain an independent agent forever. Though the launch afforded us the opportunity to visit Oz, to see the wonders beyond our native lands, we were not launched without a purpose. We had a task, to visit LQ Pyx, to discover the truths behind its mysteries—and we have done that.”
A cheer burst out of the crowd and echoed off the bay’s bare metal walls. Nika let it roll through the room, to make sure everyone was touched by the sense of accomplishment the noise represented, before holding her hands up for silence.
“And like Dorothy, the completion of our task allots us the right to return home. To tell our tale to those who could not see the wonders with their own eyes. Our journey was not for us, it was for Earth—for all of humanity.
“Now, back in Kansas, we can embark on a new quest. We can rediscover our brethren. They are different in unexpected ways. They may not appreciate our point of view. We might frighten them, or bore them, or make them uncomfortable. This does not mean we should go away. We completed our task, which gives us the right—the mandate—to return home.”
Vague applause followed this time. She knew her words were confusing. She’d meant them to be.
“The current leaders of Earth have not told us where to land. They have not even given permission for us to do so. But nor have they ordered us away. Clearly they want us to choose.” That wasn’t clear at all. Nika thought they wanted the “problem” of the convoy to take care of itself. Essentially, if we ignore them, maybe they’ll go away. But the convoy would not let itself be so easily swept under the rug.
“And we choose to stay,” she said boldly. “We choose to reap the rewards of our labor, to experience Earth—a place that until now has seemed legendary.
“We have found clear allies on the southernmost continent. They welcome us. Because they have extended a friendly hand, we shall return in kind by landing in Antarctica. It is a small nation we choose to align ourselves with, which signals our disinterest in Earth politics. Though we rejoin Earth, we do not have to abandon our own ways. We are a nation of ourselves, and shall remain autonomous in all things. May Convoy Seven live on forever.”
Another unanimous shout of approval rocketed from their throats. The security guards helped Nika down. The historians of Earth might not mark her words, but those of the convoy would. This was her “one small step.”
This was her “give me liberty or give me death.”
A strange feeling swelled in her chest. Her heart beat boldly against her ribs, and her finger twitched with eagerness. She had to find Reggie. She didn’t want to fool herself anymore—and now that she’d found something akin to courage she had to act immediately, lest the feeling fade.
People jumped and jostled around her, hugging each other. Nika was sure they hadn’t fully comprehended her speech yet, which was fine. Let them dwell on the finer implications later. Pushing her way through, she aimed for the section of the crowd where she’d seen Reggie. Hopefully he was still around.
Someone’s hip bumped her rear, propelling her forward with a jolt. She fell into a man’s arms. “I’m sorry,” she apologized with a nervous chuckle.
“It’s all right, Nika,” said Reggie.
“Oh, hi.” She straightened herself and brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “I was looking for you.”
His cheeks turned a baby-pink. “Yes?”
“Would you like to go for a slice of pie or something?”
“Right now?”
She nodded eagerly. “Right now. A date.”
His eyes widened. “But I’m—”
“Someone I’d like to get to know better.”
Reggie nervously offered her his arm, and the two of them struggled out of the masses together.
Nika hummed “Over the Rainbow” as they went.
Chapter Nine
Esper: Return Through the Wardrobe
Thirty-Five Years Later
January 27, 4136 CE
Esperanza Straifer was drunk again, and she didn’t care.
Her best friend was of a different opinion.
“What are you doing in here? I thought the emissary said if he caught you in a pub again he’d cancel the talks.” Tall Toya Kaeden leaned next to dumpy Esperanza at the bar, scanning the dim room.
“His Excellency wouldn’t be caught dead in this part of town. Plus, he refuses to speak to me like a real person, so talks is a bit misleading. He says the government gave me implants for a reason.”
“Is that any reason to risk it? To risk the City?”
“Ship City’s not at risk. I think everyone can rest assured that the status quo will be preserved.”
Toya bent closer, lowering her voice, her braided pigtails swinging with every punctuating jut of her jaw. “They don’t want the status quo. You need help, Esper. Or else you won’t be able to transform us back into a convoy.”
Esperanza lifted her scotch glass and swirled the amber liquid, enjoying the tinkle of the ice. “What would we do up there, anyway?”
“More than we’ve done in the last thirty-five years down here.” Toya signaled to the bartender and asked for a carbonated tea. It wasn’t so much an order as a series of archaic hand gestures. But it did the trick. “We need to get our sense of purpose back, have a direction again,” she said as a glass of tea slid smoothly down the wet, polished wood and into her outstretched fingers.
The ‘tender hadn’t even asked if she wanted it in a “drip bag”—a barroom fad at which both Toya and Esper turned up their noses. Other patrons sat with faux medical equipment strung up around them, periodically opening the ends of plastic tubes to take deep drags from the high-mounted drink sacks. Toya would have refused had a bag been offered, but the omission highlighted how other they were, how noticeably different.
Esper tallied it as the latest in a long line of offences.
“To put it bluntly: we’ve got to get the hell off this rock,” Toya concluded. “They don’t want us here anyway.”
A couple sitting nearby shot the convoy women dirty looks. Not because they could understand the conversation, but because they could hear it. Other than their chatter, the room sat silent.
“It’s not that they don’t want us here,” Esper said. “It’s that they don’t want us in Ship City. They want us to conform. To integrate. They want to stomp out our culture—modernize us and civilize us. They figure if we’re forced to disperse and dismantle the ships, we’ll just fade away.”
“That’s why we can’t let them. You’re Nika Marov’s daughter. You can be as smooth and skilled as she was.”
“And as easy to manipulate?”
“She did her best for us. Everyone’s hoping you’ll do the same.” Toya grabbed for Esper’s glass just as it touched her lips. She set it down with a plunk on the opposite side of the tea. “And that
means you have to see a counselor.”
Esper didn’t fight in the moment—she never did. It was easier to give people what they wanted when they asked for it, and subvert their opinions later. She let Toya take the glass away with a shrug, and imprinted her ID on the bartender’s mental checkout pad—she could always come back here later. She paid for Toya’s tea as well. “You know, Mom wasn’t very good at dealing with pressure either.”
Esper spun on her barstool, then stepped unsteadily onto the resin-covered plank floor. “I’ll see the dumbass counselor,” she said, leaning into Toya, never one to stand on her own if she thought it too much effort. No one could accuse her of an excess of pride.
“Good. Now let’s get you back home and hope no one official spots us on the way.”
“Let ’em,” Esper said, sniffing. “All these people think we’re freaks already.” She made a broad swoop with her arm, encompassing all of five patrons in the bar. “You see?” she said to them, raising her voice. “You see my lips moving? That’s how you’re supposed to communicate, you jacked-in idiots.”
“Shut up,” Toya ordered, unamused. “You’re an ambassador, act like it.”
“Not by my choosing,” Esper countered.
The board had tried to offer the Node a more suitable candidate when Nika passed away—but Earth wouldn’t have it. “We must follow the proper genetic line, we must have someone who possesses the genes of Nika Marov.” The Node claimed they were trying to respect convoy ways, but Esper thought it a blatant ploy. Earth could only benefit from her lack of skill.
After all, besides Toya, no one had ever accused Esper of being her mother’s daughter.
Esper was harsh where Nika had been level-headed. Esper lived in the moment, whereas Nika had always planned twelve steps ahead. Esper was quick to pass judgment at times when Nika would have been neutral.
Some people in the convoy liked to blame Esper’s weaknesses on her father. “If someone of Marov’s stature hadn’t stooped to getting herself knocked up by a discontinued . . .” Never mind that Esper’s parents had been happily married for decades before her father passed away. Never mind that it was Nika’s fairness and acceptance that let her jump social boundaries to be with the man she loved.
“Maybe dad should have left with the other white-suits,” she mumbled as Toya pulled her through the bar’s double doors and out into the darkened street.
Toya didn’t say anything. She knew not to interrupt Esper when she went on a tirade—especially if the subject was her parents.
“He didn’t deserve all of the abuse he got for staying. For having a baby naturally.” She patted Toya on the back. “I know your parents stayed, too, I know. I know you were born the old-fashioned way too,” she said in a trivializing tone. “But they were both white-suits. They weren’t allowed clones anyway. If they wanted babies they had to do it the dirty way. But my mom could have gotten special permission. Could have ditched that messy business of getting all big and having her vagina blown out.”
Toya winced.
“You know what the rumor was about my dad, right?” She paused, sincerely waiting for an answer.
“Yes.” Toya had been aware of the rumor for over twenty years.
“Said he forced himself on my mom. That was bull. My dad never laid a finger on my mom. He loved her. Real love. Something those ass-wipes who spread shitty rumors wouldn’t know anything about.”
She didn’t need to go to a counselor to sort out her problems. Esper was self-aware enough to know why she behaved the way she did. She knew why she had so much pent-up bitterness toward her mother: because everyone expected Esper to live up to Nika’s successes, and Esper knew she was not the spectacular emissary her mother had been. She did not possess the skills, nor the temperament. It was the expectations that she resented. If her mother hadn’t been so damn good at her job . . .
Yes, she knew why she was the way she was—she just couldn’t bring herself to change.
Telling her that people were counting on her to do better only made things worse.
The false Milky Way shone brightly overhead. Esper had never asked exactly how high the underground city’s ceiling was. It looked nonexistent, but could be a mile high or just inches above the tallest building’s roof.
She had an urge to request a visit to the next underground city over, just to compare skies.
The dive she liked to get her drinks from wasn’t far from the elevator that acted as the city’s only non-emergency exit. She’d heard stories about the giant freight-like cars waiting patiently on high-speed rails, ready to whisk the city’s six thousand occupants to the surface should their stone bubble decide to burst. In the hundred and fifty years it had been continuously inhabited, The UG had never had a scare (the city had a name, of course, but it was some ridiculously long abbreviation with no vowels. So, the convoy just called it The UG, short for Under Ground). Many of the residents had never even been topside.
Xenophobic was the word. Not only did it apply to most of the people who called Antarctica home, but to a majority of the population around the world. Tourists were a rare sight, as travel for any other reason than work or permanent relocation was practically unheard of.
Esper blamed overpopulation, as well as the Planet United Missions.
Several convoys had been scheduled to return to Earth before Seven, but none of them had. They’d been lost, poof, gone without a trace. And the planet-wide response, apparently, was to give up on space travel, which eventually led to the abandonment of explorative travel of any kind. Going places was dangerous, man. When you can visit a far-off destination just by tapping into a local’s public ocular feed, why go there yourself? It was safer, cheaper, and less stressful to stay home.
It was the earthling’s aversion to space that really irked the convoy members, though. The colonies on the moon and Mars were, luckily, self-sustaining, having been abandoned by the home planet centuries ago. Most Earth officials hadn’t even realized they were still viable—that there were people actually living in those colonies—until the convoy had entered their flyby observations into their reports.
Apparently, Earth had abruptly decided to stop communicating with the colonies, assuming them lost causes like the rest of the convoys.
It wasn’t just the transition to communication-via-brainwaves that had cut their convoy off from Earth. It was Earth’s sudden and unexpected shift in opinion: if it wasn’t happening within their atmosphere, it wasn’t worth paying attention to.
And once they’d given up on the Planet United Missions, they weren’t too thrilled to have them back on the radar again.
“They don’t give a shit,” Esper said to Toya. “So why should we?”
“Some of them give a shit,” Toya said. “Ephenza, Caznal—”
“They don’t count.”
The two women passed through the stone tunnel and into the elevator. Toya pressed the appropriate buttons and sighed, taking Esper’s meaning. “Fine. Then that’s exactly why we have to care. If Earth-at-large doesn’t care what happens to us, why should we be forced to stay? That’s why these talks are so important, Esper. Forget about renewing our land lease. We don’t want to sit on our slabs of permafrost anymore. We want to go to the stars. And you’re the only one who can convince them to help us.”
“One thing hasn’t changed in two thousand years,” Esper said with a cheeky smile. “Everyone’s still just as tight with their pocketbooks.”
“I know. That’s why they have to be made to see that giving us the resources we need is in their best interest. We can’t leave without retrofitting the ships for full redundancy; we can’t let another accident cripple us. But they don’t care about that, they care about what’s in it for them. And since they’ll only talk to you . . .”
“Maybe they’ll wait for us to grow another Mom.”
“Very funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be.” She shivered. The air in the elevator turned chilly—the top had to
be near. After another minute the arrival bell dinged.
“Stay here, I’ll get our snow gear,” said Toya, leaving Esper to lean against the metal wall.
“You’re a good friend, Toya. You don’t take any of my bullshit.”
Toya came back with her arms piled high. She tossed various items to Esper. “Are you kidding? I’m the only person who can stomach your bull for more than five minutes. That’s why I’m a good friend: I take it all.”
“You don’t deserve it,” said Esper, fighting with her jacket. Why were the sleeves sewn in the wrong place? It wasn’t like that when she’d taken it off.
“No,” Toya agreed, snapping earmuffs onto Esper’s head and squashing her carefully styled faux-hawk. “I don’t.”
Flurries assaulted them as they strode out into the night. In the distance, floodlights illuminated the entrances to the various ships. The convoy sat like a huddle of great, elderly beasts, pricked through with lights—windows—of life, but too heavy to move. Gravity was strangling the metal creatures to death. In order to survive they needed to float again, to be free.
At the moment, Esper wasn’t sure if she cared whether they lived again or crumbled into dust.
When they returned to Mira, I.C.C. addressed Esper before the bay doors had shut. “Ms. Straifer? There is a data packet waiting for you. You may access it in your office on Aesop or in your quarters.”
“Who’sfrm?” she mumbled. It was her day off; why couldn’t the diplomats leave her in peace?
“Alt. Norkal, a Node member from North America.”
“What does he want?”
“I do not know. I was instructed not to access the data packet. It is encrypted, and I assume only someone who can interpret brainwave data will be able to integrate the information.”
“Wonderful,” she mumbled, taking her arm from around Toya’s supportive shoulder, deciding it was best if she stood on her own feet again. “Why didn’t they send me the information directly?” She poked herself in the temple. “Was there an explanation?”
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