by Richard Fox
“If you turn me orange, I’ll be very upset,” she said.
“Don’t tempt me…There, all done.”
He handed her a small mirror. Her reflection was a bit darker, as if she hailed from New Iberia. The dark brown hair didn’t match with her green eyes, and she felt wrong about whom she saw.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“It has to work, not be liked. Our tube leaves soon, come on.”
Cosima’s feet hurt a bit less than before, but walking was still miserable.
“And where are we going?” she asked.
“Back to Sidonia City. Stolzoff set an all clear message on one of our dummy websites, the palace is safe again.”
“I’ve heard that before. What if something else happens?”
“Then we lay low. I have access to an off-the-books bank account the Guard uses for operations we need to keep quiet. We’ll be fine for a while.”
Cosima laughed. “So we’re like spies, or something? We’ll need a cover story.” Her eyes glinted with mischief, and she rubbed her hands together. “We came to this town for a weekend getaway, far from our boss who disapproves of office romance.”
“I think you’re going a little too far with this,” Remi said, deadpan.
“Not at all. You’re my boyfriend, and I call you…honey. And you call me pumpkin. What do you think, honey?”
“I am not calling you ‘pumpkin.’”
“Oh, has our romance fizzled so quickly?”
“Maybe we should take our chances in the woods for a few more days,” Remi said.
“No! Fine, we’ll be Paul and Cosima. You have no passion, I’m just going to have to appreciate you for your body.” Cosima slapped a hand over her mouth in shock at her words and sped ahead of Remi.
****
The train station overlooked the bay, where small boats fished for squid and crab. Most were robotic, but a few had actual humans moving about their decks. Marquees flitted between different ads for hunting lodges and nature excursions based out of Port Kenyon. A signboard with tube arrival and departure times clicked as it updated.
Cosima sat at a bench, looking up at the board. They could go almost anywhere on Sidonia from here; the tube network stretched to every major city, shuttling personnel and goods through the vacuum tubes with speed and efficiency unmatched by any other form of transport on the planet. The original tube line ran from San Francisco to Los Angeles, cutting the travel time between the two cities down to a mere forty-five minutes. The first planet-wide tube system had been built on Mars, where it took two hours to travel from Elon to Hellas Planitia on the opposite side of the red world.
Remi sat down next to her, a white paper bag in his hand with steam rising from within.
“Hungry?” he asked.
She smelled fresh dough and something sweet coming from within the bag. Inside was a small pile of pastries shaped like, and almost the size of, a walnut. She plucked one out and sniffed it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Hodugwaja, walnut cakes. The baker is from old Seoul on Earth, nice lady.” Remi looked at her expectantly.
She popped the pastry into her mouth and bit into it. It had a gooey center mixed with tiny bits of nut.
“Since when are walnuts sweet?” she asked, her fingers over her full mouth as she spoke.
“Red bean paste.” He shook the bag for her to try another.
“Since when are beans sweet?” She took the bag from him.
Remi sat up, ramrod straight. His glance moved from entrance to entrance, scanning every person who came into the train station.
“You need to relax,” she said. “You need to act like my boyfriend, not a pit bull on a short leash. Now put your arm around me.”
Remi did as ordered, his arm stiff as it went over her shoulders.
Cosima squeezed his knee and gave it a little tickle. Remi bit his lip and shook his knee from her grasp. Cosima chuckled evilly.
“You’re enjoying this far too much,” he said.
“Maybe you aren’t enjoying this enough.”
****
Nate Thomas, of the Sidonia Enquirer, lounged against his bench in the train station. He checked his watch again: four hours. Four hours he’d been waiting for the Duke of Swabia to arrive with his mistress for yet another one of his trysts. That the duke kept a number of mistresses around the planet wasn’t much news anymore, but which one he decided to entertain this weekend would move copies.
Another starlet or model from Sidonia City was practically a nonevent. If he got a photo of the duke with the wife of another noble, then Nate could count on a bonus big enough to finally pay off his transit to Sidonia.
His snitch in the duke’s entourage swore Nate could catch him here, he just didn’t know when the duke would arrive.
Nate stretched his arms and checked the arrival board: nothing for another half hour. He smacked his lips and glanced at a young couple sitting on a bench against the wall.
No. It couldn’t be.
He scratched at his temple to activate the camera in his fake eye. He zoomed in and took several pictures of the girl, then ran color filters across her image to cancel out what looked like a reasonable melanin coating. With strawberry-blonde hair and pale skin, it had to be Princess Cosima. He ran the girl’s face through a facial recognition program, matching the distance of her eyes and twelve other points of reference against photos of the future queen. She came back as a 99.999 percent match. It had to be her.
Nate’s mouth went dry as his camera captured her digging into a bag of food, then popping a little cake into the mouth of the man with his arm around her. To hell with the duke, Nate’s bonus for these pics would be enough to buy an island.
He tapped a quick message out to Mickey Papadopoulos. He got a response back almost instantly that read FOLLOW THEM.
An announcement for the next tube to Sidonia City came over the PA system, and the couple stood up. Nate raced to the ticket kiosk.
****
The hyper loop passenger tubes rode atop the cargo line. Cars, each sealed against the vacuum within the tubes, sat several dozen passengers each. Traveling from Port Kenyon to Sidonia City would take less than three hours, short enough that the cars’ only amenities were the restrooms and an overpriced vending machine.
Holo panels served as faux windows, showing the view outside as if they really were windows. The holo panels kept the passengers from getting restless and allowed for stronger, easier to maintain tubes.
Cosima looked out the “window,” watching the coastline blur past as they zipped along. There was an emptiness in the pit of her stomach; the thought of returning to Sidonia City and the palace was anything but comforting.
“Paul, why am I going back?” she asked.
Remi, sitting next to her, kept his attention on the other passengers more than the view. “For your protection,” he said.
“What if I went to the spaceport in Franconia, took a shuttle up to my station? Maybe book passage off world and far away,” she said. “You could even come with me.” She watched his face in the reflection off the holo panel as he considered his answer.
“What would happen to Sidonia if you did that?” he asked.
He said “you,” not “we,” she noted. “Francis would find someone else to marry. Maybe even my sister.”
“Your sister will never be queen, sorry to say.”
Cosima sat up and frowned at him. “And why is that? Francis seems to like her.”
Remi coughed and looked away.
“King’s orders,” he said.
“Elaborate. Now. Or we will have a very loud argument about text messages you’ve been getting from your ex-girlfriend,” she said. When Remi didn’t respond, she raised a finger and took in a deep breath.
Remi grabbed her hand and put it against her armrest.
“Fine. About a year ago, she went to the Hotel Schwartz to…have dinner with Francis.”
“‘Have d
inner’? Are you euphemizing?”
Remi tightening his lips into a thin, pale line.
“That slut.” Cosima crossed her arms. “Continue.”
“She acted strangely during her security screening, and one of the Guards found narcotics in her purse. She was arrested and questioned. She claimed the drugs were for her alone, but King Rasczak suspected she would have shared them with Prince Francis.”
“What kind of narcotics? Theresa was always a party girl, but I didn’t know that sort of thing was even on Sidonia.”
“Heroin. A group of smugglers from Pashtunistan on Earth set up poppy fields in the unpopulated mountains around Landsduhl. They charged quite a bit for the drug, which kept the users among Sidonia’s richest, those with enough money to keep things quiet if they were caught. Your sister aided in the investigation, and the Guard dismantled the entire network.
“I was on the raid to burn down the poppy fields. That was a good day,” he said.
“And then what?”
“Your sister agreed to a dopamine reset for treatment and was put on a blacklist on the king’s orders. All the users we tracked down were sent to treatment. Everyone involved in the sale, distribution, and manufacture was hanged.”
“Bit strict, are we?”
“King Rasczak has no mercy on those that profit on the suffering of others. That is why we do not trade with any planet that allows slavery.”
Cosima shook her head and watched as their tube banked into a thick forest.
“That idiot druggie slut. If she hadn’t been such a piece of garbage, she’d be the one marrying Francis right now, wouldn’t she?”
“That’s above my pay grade,” Remi said. “But I think you’ll make a much better queen than she ever would.”
“You really know how to charm a girl, Paul.” She lifted the armrest between them and nuzzled against him. She tapped his arm, and he draped it over her.
“You ever get tired of this Guard thing,” she said, “you could find work as a pillow.” She yawned and closed her eyes.
CHAPTER 11
Spillover South, as the town outside of the walls of Sidonia City was called by the locals, was an industrial area. Most of the workers tended to the spaceport and the loading docks both on the water and for the void. Longshoremen and their families lived in prefabricated homes packed together like cordwood.
Cosima had never seen so many bars, cabarets, and tattoo parlors before, most on streets leading from the army base that sprawled beyond the edge of Spillover.
Remi led her down a sidewalk, the adjacent street a slow-moving chaos of beat-up ground cars and uneven asphalt. Tired-looking men in dirty coveralls stepped into bars, their preferred haunts after a hard day’s work on the docks.
Cosima got a couple looks from dockworkers and a few whistles from across the street.
“Why are they doing that?” she asked. They passed a food stall hocking plates of noodles and warm beer.
“They think you’re pretty,” Remi said.
“Do I need this kind of attention right now?”
Remi held her hand and entwined his fingers with hers. “Now they’ll only whistle if they want to fight me.”
“Great, does the winner get to drag me back to his cave by the hair or something?”
“So you know where we’re going?” Remi asked.
“Wait, what do you mean?”
“Here.” Remi pointed to a bakery. A few sourdough rounds and French loaves still lay in the window. They went inside. The place was plain but for mostly empty baskets and a glass case with a smattering of doughnuts. The baker, an ogreish man with a too-small paper hat on his head and skin that seemed to be impregnated with flour, grunted when he saw them.
“Half off everything, come back in the morning for the fresh stuff,” the baker said.
“Do you have any kaiser rolls?” Remi asked.
“Sold out.”
“Glenn said you might have some in the back.”
“Yeah.” The baker looked Cosima over, his eyes growing wide. “Yeah, maybe I do. Come with me.” The baker lifted a wooden plank and pointed to an oven around the corner. His feet thumped against the bare concrete floor, hard even for a man his size.
Cosima looked at the baker. His legs were mechanical from what she could see beneath his apron, his feet three-toed and clawed like a bird’s.
The baker put his hand atop an oven, and a metallic clink sounded. He grabbed the edge of the oven and pulled it aside, revealing a hole in the ground beneath a false panel. A ladder descended into the darkness.
“Here, Your Highnessness.” The baker pressed a greasy twist of bread covered in cinnamon and sugar into her hands. “My abuela’s recipe.” He smiled, showing several teeth missing.
“Light?” Remi asked. The baker found a flashlight in a toolbox and handed it over. “Thanks. We were never here.”
Remi went down first. His light snapped on and shone on the corrugated metal rungs that made up the ladder.
The baker snatched his hat off his head and held it to his chest as Cosima lowered herself down, struggling to hold on to the ladder and the pastry at the same time.
The oven slid back into place, and Cosima found herself in a concrete passageway barely wide enough for Remi’s shoulders, a tiny yellow beacon far away.
“There are emergency passageways in Spillover North and South leading into the city. If we’re ever attacked, the civilians will use them to get inside the walls and under the dome for shelter. This passageway is off the books, used to get into and out of the palace without notice,” Remi said. “The Guard puts veterans like Raul in charge of the end points, men and women we can trust.”
The passage smelled of mildew and dirt, and the walls felt slick with condensation.
Cosima looked at the pastry in her hand and frowned. “What is this?”
“A churro. Raul really does make the best ones in town.”
Remi took a few steps down the passage. Cosima caught up and grabbed him by the hand.
“Cosima, that’s not necessary.” He tried to pull his hand away, but she wouldn’t let go.
“Please, Paul. I might be…scared, a little,” she said.
Remi relaxed and held her hand tight. “When we get to the palace…we can’t have any more of this.”
“I know.” She reached for his face, but he turned away before she could touch him.
They went down the passage without another word.
****
Smoking jackets and brandy snifters were standard for evening drinks in one of the palace’s many smoking rooms. A quartet of noblemen smoked cigars rolled from tobacco that had just arrived with the trade fleet and was imported from the Cuban plains. The nobles laughed at each other’s jokes as they drank more brandy.
Well-appointed bookshelves held a trove of books bound in true leather and protected by climate-control force fields that kept dust and moisture away from the plastic pages. Each book was a cleverly disguised electronic reader. The pages were designed to look and feel like real paper, but each book contained tens of thousands of works within. All the reader had to do to switch from the ancient poetry of Abyssinia to the latest literary fiction coming out of New York that everyone pretended to read was say the name of the author or topic, and the book’s pages would display the new text.
“So then I said to her, ‘We best ask the other lady if she’d like one too’!” a noble with jet-black muttonchops said. Rancorous laughter filled the room.
“If she’d like one too!” a fat man belted out, bending at the waist as his face turned red from laughing so hard.
The sound of rapid footfalls echoed down the hallway. The door to the library burst open, and a SWAT team of Guardsmen in full armor came into the room, rifles ready.
The nobles put their hands up, the joke teller sneaking a sip of booze and a puff from his cigar.
“I dare say the joke wasn’t that funny,” one of the nobles said.
A bookshelf s
wung open, and a gust of stale air blew into the room.
“Identify yourself!” a Guardsman yelled.
Remi, his hands up, leaned into the room. “Remi, Paul H., India-Mike-3-7.”
“You have her with you?” the same Guardsman asked.
“I’m here,” Cosima said from behind Remi.
“Stand down.”
The Guardsmen lowered their weapons. The nobles turned around and watched, dumbstruck as Cosima walked past them, waving her hand across her face to avoid the smell of cigar smoke.
“They’ll take you back to your quarters,” Remi said to her. “I have to find Colonel Stolzoff and brief him.”
Cosima couldn’t get out of the smoky room fast enough. She gave Remi a second glance as she followed the armed Guardsmen out of the room.
“Well,” one of the nobles said.
“My word,” said another.
“Drink?” A third poured two fingers of brandy into an empty sifter and offered it to Remi.
Remi raised the glass in a slight salute and took a sip.
****
The Enquirer’s newsroom stood in rapt silence as Mickey Papadopoulos swiped through Nate’s photos on a slate. The staff of twenty had only an inkling of what Nate had brought back, just that he’d caught a royal off the reservation.
Mickey stopped at the photo of Cosima feeding something to the Guardsman who had snagged him at the ball, and at another of her sleeping against the Guardsman’s chest on the tube—all the smiles and laughter between them. The vast majority were of Remi as alert as a hawk, seemingly on the edge of committing violence to anyone who got too close or threatened the princess.
As a newsman, he could paint the story of the two of them on a romantic getaway on the eve of the royal wedding. The photos and just the right innuendo and everyone on Sidonia would think exactly the way he wanted them to think.
Mickey turned the slate over and rubbed a knuckle against his tired eyes. He’d just been released from the Guard’s not-so-tender mercies. He’d given up every single detail they demanded on how he’d snuck into the palace and been told that if it wasn’t for Princess Cosima’s mercy, he’d be in a cell for so long children wouldn’t recognize him by the time he got out. One more violation of his parole and Stolzoff swore he’d carry out the original sentence personally.