by Jason Letts
That was all Rion needed to hear to light a fire in his heart that could’ve burned all of Pluto into ash. Verche cleared her throat.
“Let me make this simple for you. Report to our base near Uranus, fight with us on the front lines, and everything will be fine,” she said.
“Can we take the veil off these threats and dispense with the dark implications?” Lena said. “I’ll show you how it’s done. Let them go immediately or I will kill you where you stand.”
Rion had already been concocting a plan to sneak back to Pluto to stage a rescue, but Lena’s brash threat made flying anywhere near there a certain death sentence for Bailor’s parents.
“Why don’t you let your friend make his choice,” Verche said. “After all, he’s got more to lose than you do, pretty-faced girl from Neptune who never cared about her parents. You and the strapping young man you keep in the doghouse don’t have anything to leverage against, since you said the chancellor murdered his parents long ago. I would’ve thought that’d be motivation enough for him to want to wipe the Alliance out of the galaxy completely, but I guess not. If you’re not concerned about Bailor or the lives of his parents, you can continue roaming around. But ignoring his wishes on this might make things on your ship very awkward.”
“That’s not true. I cared about my parents!” Lena shouted.
Rion cast a long look at Bailor, who’d been caught in a bind worse than anything he’d ever seen. They were so far away from being able to do anything to help, and Bailor’s eyes made it seem like he was burning alive. Rion had to admit Verche had him too. He’d do whatever Bailor wanted. He waited for a sign and nodded in hopes that it’d give Bailor the freedom to speak his mind.
“We’ll go to the front lines,” Bailor said reluctantly.
Closing his eyes, Rion saw the painful road ahead of them, one they might not ever reach the end of.
“Excellent,” Verche said, and the sound of clapping hands—hers alone—came over the speaker. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Live up to your promises. With that ship of yours, the Alliance won’t know what hit them. Once their fleet is in tatters, it would be my honor to facilitate the kind of reunion that would make grown men weep. Any final comments from the lovely couple?”
“We tried so hard to get you back. You have no idea what I went through trying to come up with the charges,” Bailor’s father said.
“I’m glad to know you’re still alive. Stay alive no matter what,” his mother said.
“We’ll be expecting you at our base near Uranus immediately,” Verche said. “It’s been nice chatting with you. Your full cooperation is something we cherish.”
The light switched off, signaling that the line went dead and preventing Rion from making the kind of cutting remark he’d imagined. It was for the best he hadn’t had the chance. Sooner or later she’d pay for what she’d done. The only question was how long they had to wait for it.
“So…Uranus then,” Lena said, setting her hands on the console and beginning to set a new course.
“Absolutely not,” Bailor said, making Rion raise his eyebrows. “I’ll never lift a finger for her and only said that to buy time. We’re going to Pluto.”
Seeing Bailor hungry for revenge was a special kind of awesome that Rion wished he could store in a bottle. Grinning, Lena punched the command into the console.
“Ultima Verche is about to meet her ultimate end,” Lena said. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad a line. All right, how about this one? The leader of the Marshall Force is about to be forced into early retirement. Give me a break. You guys are hopeless.”
“It’s a good thing this ship doesn’t run on good one-liners or we’d never get there,” Rion said. “And from the sounds of it, we don’t have a minute to lose or else they’ll notice we won’t be arriving to fight at the front lines.”
Taking a direct trip to Pluto gave them a scant couple of days to prepare for what was likely to be their most dangerous mission yet. Flying straight into the Marshall Force’s base inside the heavily populated and armed construction zone was a daunting task to begin with. Getting Bailor’s parents out of it and making an escape without being blown up and killed seemed like a farfetched fantasy.
“Well, we can modify the shape of the ship and switch up our heat signature to help make it to the central checkpoint,” Rion said.
“But that’s as far as we’ll get without a good excuse for being there in the first place,” Bailor noted.
“What would actually allow us to dock, and how could we get to them unnoticed? Obviously we don’t know where they are inside other than possibly around Verche’s office,” Lena said.
Rion breathed deeply and glanced over all of the switches and levers in the cockpit. Many of them hadn’t been used and some of them were of the type that could only be used once. He’d imagined that they’d need to save their best tricks if the day came to take on the chancellor, but his mood grew darker as he contemplated what they’d need to do to pull off this rescue.
“We need to come up with an alias to get through the checkpoint, try to pass ourselves off as an entirely different ship out for sightseeing or trading or something. Sure, if we get exposed before that we can say that we had to come in for supplies before heading to the front lines, but as soon as they find out, it’s us they’ll be laser focused on.
“We can’t let that happen. A phony call sign won’t be enough. We need to make sure everyone has something else on their minds. I know we have precious little time, but we have to fly wide of the planet to create a diversion around this side. If we deposit all of our satellites spaced generously apart and have them creep toward Pluto, it could give them the impression that an Alliance fleet is invading their territory.”
He watched Bailor’s eyes shift, imagining the details.
“Creating that kind of a signature will burn out the satellites after a half an hour,” he said.
Rion nodded.
“We won’t be getting them back anyway, but they’ll have served their purpose if they can terrorize the Marshall Force’s home base. They’ll probably rush everyone in the perimeter or take only a cursory glance at entrants as they prepare their defenses and rush whatever ships they have on hand to meet the intruders. We dock, find your parents, and then get out fast. As long as we prevent anyone who sees us from triggering any alarms, we have a shot at clearing out without much organized interference,” Rion said, trying to sound confident but knowing it was really wishful thinking that it would work out that way.
Lena zeroed in on the hardest part.
“That’s going to get bloody and messy fast, and the more bloody and messy it gets, the harder it’ll be to contain, requiring more blood and mess. I’m not saying that to suggest we shouldn’t do it. We’ll need to get acquainted with some of Reznik’s handheld weapons and leave any hesitation about using them behind,” she said.
Together they left the cockpit to dig into some of the deepest storage containers on board the ship, ones they hadn’t even gotten to with Heath. All three of them had to strain to pry open a rusty lid to reach the implements of death on the inside.
“She really had a fondness for air guns,” Lena observed.
“That barely scratches the surface of what’s here,” Rion said, rolling up his sleeves and reaching into the tightly packed unit. “Knives, old pistols, tasers.”
He pulled out one weapon that looked like an injector with some red dye in a tube and held it up to the light. Lena placed her hands around it and took it from him.
“This is Brain Candy. You don’t mind if I take this, do you? I’ve still got the dagger I took from Regent Kline’s office, but this could be useful. I’ll leave the shooty weapons to you two. Let me know if you see anyone who needs to have their memory wiped and be left in a babbling stupor,” she said, wrapping a finger around the trigger.
Rion would hate the thought of having those two little needle points sinking into his neck. It was easier to turn his attention to
Bailor to see which weapon he took a fancy to.
“I’ll put my trust in Rez and grab an air gun,” he said. “Keeping things quiet seems the best attribute.”
After they’d gone through and picked out one in good working order, Rion scanned the crate and picked out one of the tasers. Wiping some dust off of the battery pack, he wondered if this would end up being the difference between life and death.
They continued to prepare and turned their attention to the satellites, which needed some work before they’d be ready to head out for their last hurrah. Without them, the Assailing Face would lose one of its best trapping mechanisms. As they worked to allow a heat and light surge that would imitate a much larger ship, Rion kept thinking about the chancellor and where his mysterious station might be. Flying back to Earth to hunt through his past certainly was off the table now.
“Do you think Yetrue’s station would still be close to Earth, or at least roughly that distance from the sun? What I’ve seen over and over from Kline to Verche to Hobart with his belt buckle is that no one really wants to have left Earth behind,” Rion said.
“There’s so much traffic in that area,” Bailor pointed out, “that it’d be impossible to stay hidden. I’d be fascinated if the station was hidden in plain sight somehow, but I don’t think so. A more likely guess for me would be that he’s hidden himself away in the direction of some favorite constellation or zodiac sign.”
It was an interesting thought, and they could look in those directions leading away from Earth, but without something more substantive than his birthday to go on they’d be shooting in the dark.
“If it were me, I’d be so far outside of the solar system that no one would ever go that far. I’d still be able to send messages, but no ship would ever be able to get to me for the sheer distance of it,” Lena said.
“Let’s hope he’s not like you,” Bailor said.
“If he’s somewhere that’s taken him years to get to, it might really be a lost cause,” Rion said.
“I don’t have any idea,” Lena said dismissively. “For all I know he could have a station built that was able to orbit right around the sun. We wouldn’t be able to get there either.”
The puzzle was starting to take its toll on Rion, who felt like all he needed was something as thin as a single strand of silk to be able to start reeling in his target. But when most everyone thought the chancellor was sitting atop the Vestige, strands of silk were hard to find. Only Hobart knew otherwise, and he didn’t say much on the subject.
“Well, at least we know he’s human,” Rion said, taking a lighthearted chuckle about it.
“I have to say I’m glad a robo isn’t running the Alliance,” Bailor added.
“Yeah, that would be weird,” Lena said. “Although a robo chancellor probably wouldn’t care much about the quality of people’s lives either. I won’t believe Hobart until I see it for myself.”
Rion’s mind started spinning with what a robo chancellor might do and how that would differ from a human counterpart. His smile faded and his pondering opened upon a new path.
“Think about it though. Maybe saying he’s human wasn’t such a throwaway comment. What if saying he was human was supposed to be a clue that would lead us to him,” Rion said.
“If he breathes air and goes to sleep at night, I don’t know how that’s going to help us. What do you think it means?” Bailor asked.
Lena gasped and grabbed their sleeves.
“It means he’s going to die. That’s what people do, they die. It might not be the kind of revenge we want, but it’s something to know that he can’t escape death. It’s sort of like the saying that anyone who touches the inside of this ship will die. In one sense it’s true, even if none of us die as a direct result of piloting it.”
Rion took a deep breath, wondering if they’d live long enough to see the other side of their journey aboard the Assailing Face.
“Or another possibility would be that it means he can be killed. If we get to him, blow up his station or puncture his body, he’ll die because he’s not the invincible, omnipresent figure he’s made himself out to be. That’s something to take comfort in. There’s reason to hope that we could win.”
Their work continued and the time ticked down toward when they needed to get to work launching the satellites. The anticipation of whether it would play out like he imagined it kept him awake after they’d turned out the lights and climbed into their bunks for a chance to sleep. Infiltrating both the Vestige and the Marshall Force’s most heavily guarded structures might be a trick no one else had ever managed.
Weariness overcame him, and he finally fell asleep only to get jostled out of it a short while later. Something jabbed him in the shoulder. When he opened his mouth to say something, a hand lightly covered it. The faint glow escaping from the cockpit was enough for him to see a finger over a mouth wreathed in perfect darkness.
Lena had woken him and was urging him to get up.
Luckily his bunk was on the bottom and he didn’t need to climb over Bailor, who was at the top. Lena led him to the cockpit and pulled the thin sliding door closed behind them. He looked at her expectantly, wondering what this was about and at the same time having a good guess. All of the things he’d thought to say to her couldn’t be dredged up through the cloud of sleepiness filling his mind.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. The only hints of fatigue on her face were some darkness under her eyes and a little redness in them.
“No, not at all,” he said.
She crossed her arms over her stomach and looked through the windshield. When he decided to take the initiative and start the conversation he’d been dying to have, she cut in. He’d barely had a chance to open his mouth.
“I was really hurt by what Verche said, which I know sounds ridiculous. Who would ever let a comment from an enemy get to them? But her saying that I didn’t care about my parents made me realize I hadn’t been clear about how I felt and why I left. I cared about them, but I knew that they had done something painful to me that could never be reversed and we were better off if I found my way without them. I hate people and want to be alone, but that’s because of their carelessness and savagery and mediocrity, plus my own feeling that I’m tainted and different from everyone else,” she said.
“The distinction is a fine line that can look a lot like contradiction,” Rion said.
Lena cracked a wry smile.
“Those contradictions are just layers in a larger truth,” she said, making Rion shake his head.
“Reznik would be proud. You didn’t miss a single word she said.”
Despite the confession, Rion sighed and looked back at the thin door providing them private space and wondering if this was all it was for. She touched his arm to draw his attention back and then glanced down demurely. He didn’t think Lena could be embarrassed by anything, but this must’ve been it.
“I wanted to ask you about that thing that you said. Did you mean it?”
“Yes,” Rion said without a moment’s hesitation. “I’ve always felt this way about you, even when I was too young to know what it was. If something happened and you were gone, I don’t know that I could live without you. The world that I’m fighting for has to have you in it.”
She shook her head and furrowed her brows in what looked like a mix of confusion and sympathy.
“But why? I’m a terrible, morbid person that no one should be forced to put up with.”
The way she said it made Rion laugh so loud that he was worried it might disturb Bailor.
“That right there! That’s exactly why. If everyone else was that honest and candid, especially about themselves, we wouldn’t need to be doing what we’re doing. All of the lies and treacheries and deceptions stringing these planets together would vanish. But since they’re all here, at least I have you here to inspire me to do incredible things. Just by being yourself you’ve accomplished the rare feat you’ve always been searching for.”
Len
a nodded slowly and brushed some hair away from her face. She was beautiful in every moment, but rarely did he have a good opportunity to enjoy it for such an unbroken stretch. Her thin lips, high cheekbones, and soft skin that begged to be touched all entranced him.
“I think you’d be better off with someone else, someone better suited to you. It’s tempting to try to write off how you feel as a product of being stuck on this ship for long periods with me—no other girls around—but I’ll give you more credit than that,” she said.
“Is there anything else you’d give me credit for?” he asked, tossing out a line and wondering how much she’d take. Lena stepped back and set her shoulder against the frame of the cockpit, closing her eyes for so long she might’ve been trying to get back to sleep. But she shrugged her shoulders and lifted her eyelids.
“I give you credit for staying true to our deal. I let you be you and you let me be me. Without you we wouldn’t be where we are, doing this, and we certainly wouldn’t have gotten this far. You’re someone who won’t give up and knows how to fight for something he believes. You don’t get credit for this because you’re not responsible for it, but you’re a very good-looking man as well,” she said.
“Sort of like how you’re not responsible for how you look?”
Lena laughed despite herself.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I guess so.”
Rion took a step closer to her and looked into the black pools in her eyes.
“If you look at it that way, you’re not tainted or different or alone. Besides, when I look at you it’s not the Midnight that I’m looking at in your hair and your eyes. You still come through with every motion and movement. I can’t get enough of it.”
Lena seemed to blush a little, emboldening Rion. Whether it was what he said or how much he meant it, something was getting through to her.
“I’ve learned a lot from you,” she said a whisper.
“Is there any room in how you feel for us to be together?” he asked.
Lena leaned forward in an unconscious way, like she was about to fall into a dream. There was no doubt she was about to say yes, but something caught hold of her and she recoiled.