by Jay Allan
As Theophanes, I got word that she would be happy to see me. I headed to her home later that day. She opened the door herself and my heart stopped in my chest.
I couldn’t say if she still looked beautiful. She looked older. Different, too—had she always had that mole beside her nose?—but I didn’t know if that was from age or the faults of my memory. She drew back and fixed me with a stare I was certain could see straight through me.
Her eyes were unchanged, blue as the seas I’d just crossed. “You look so much like him.”
“I can believe it.” Without meaning to, I reached for her face. I stopped my hand halfway and reached into my robe for the letter from “Andronikos.”
She stared at her name printed on the folded sheets. “How did he die?”
“Of a broken heart.” I held deadpan, grinning a moment later. She laughed, scrunching her nose in a way that strummed an old note down the strings of my spine. “He just got old. Nothing violent.”
“Doesn’t sound like him.” She smiled, skin creasing gently around her eyes and mouth. “And how old are you?”
“Eighteen,” I said. She nodded, distant—calculating? Guiltily, I changed the subject. “What about your own children?”
Her smiled faded. “Don’t have any, I’m afraid.”
“Really? After all these years with Diodorus?”
“With who?”
“Dad told me about it,” I said. “He almost caught up with you in Syracuse, you know. When he got there you’d just run off to marry Diodorus.”
“I left Syracuse to get away from Diodorus,” she said, the heat in her words so well-concealed I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t lived with her for a decade and a half. “After he tried to take me. He was after me the moment I set foot on that island.” She was blinking now. “I never remarried. Didn’t see the point.”
My heart dropped from my chest, splashing hot juice across my guts. Spurned by her husband, Seria had lied. Drunk with self-pity, rage, and wine, I had believed her. It cost me the rest of my life with Demostrate.
Again I reached for her face, and again I stopped myself. “He never stopped loving you.”
“We tried to have children, you know,” she said into the quiet house. “Your father and I.”
“Do you miss him?”
Her voice sounded dead. “Every day.”
I could no longer speak. I gestured to Andronikos’ letter. “So did he,” I managed. “I have to go. My ship.”
She nodded, spilling a tear from each eye, then hugged me so tightly I thought my own tears would gush from me in a torrent. My nose dug into her hair, the same crisp oils she’d worn when we were young. For a moment I could pretend we’d never parted. That war, chaos, and deceit had never destroyed us. That I, in my fear and pettiness, had never made her feel so small and left behind.
She pulled away, sniffing openly. “Come back to see me next time you’re in Greece?”
“I will.” I left her cottage and blinked my way down the sun-drenched streets.
Two years later, Shyam and I returned to Athens with our eastern treasures, and I made good on my promise. But when I knocked on her door, I found another family inside.
* * *
“Dead?” Baxter asked. “How?”
“A knife. Her wrists.” I exhaled, shuddering. “I showed up pretending to be my own kid. All those years we spent together, then seeing this kid, Theophanes, she thought it was her that couldn’t.” I squeezed my hand to my eyes. “How could I have been so stupid? If I hadn’t...”
“It’s not your fault.” His hand patted my shoulder, then rested there, as hesitant as a bird. “Arthur and I were stupid, too, in our way. We ran across Mars as naively as children. We didn’t know any better. Did you?”
“I should have,” I said, thick with phlegm. “I could have done better.”
“Perhaps.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you for telling me.”
I wanted to ask him about Arthur, but I knelt, shoulders shaking, tears dropping on the back of the hand I’d planted against the yellow soil. Later, I told myself he wouldn’t have had time anyway.
Squeaking, crunching wheels keened down the tunnel.
“Get up,” Baxter said.
I did. I felt no fear. It was a good day to die.
He found Arthur’s casing against the wall. One corner had cracked off. His screen was shattered, lightless and gray. Tiny metal pins gleamed from the case, exposed to the air, some missing altogether. Baxter held him in his hands.
The hallway was empty. Shouting and footsteps rattled down the far end. Baxter touched the loose wires dangling down his head, the jagged edge of the hole through his plastic skull casing. There would be no more blending in. He was well past the crowds milling around the security lines and heading down the wide concourse to the gates before the first human screamed.
He hurtled on, putting space between him and the chasing guards, then veered toward a closed gate. The door was locked. He pulled harder and it popped open, ruined by his strength. Baxter dashed inside. The tunnel of the umbilical sloped for fifty feet before terminating in a blank wall of rubber. Baxter groped its dull black surface, searching for a seam. He yanked with all he had until it gave way with a slurping rasp.
The thin atmosphere buffeted his ears, followed by the warning shriek of a klaxon. It was a twenty-foot drop to the runway. He leaped into the open space, laughing stupidly as he fell. The ground jarred hard and he sprawled on all fours. Before him lay open runways and the emptiness of Mars.
He ran to be with it.
23
Green-shirted soldiers tramped down the tunnel behind their broad transparent shield. Shots puffed beside me, bouncing off the advancing plass. I sighted over its top and picked off a lagging OA soldier.
“On my mark!” Jia said through the wagon’s speakers.
The multigun boomed, hosing down the shield’s left edge. Hammered by that terrible force, the left side of the plass banged into its soldiers. Those on its right pushed on, pivoting the wall and exposing the troops behind it.
“Fire!”
Bullets raked the soldiers, pounding them to the earth. The left flank pushed to straighten the plass and found its wheels snarled by toppled bodies. The enemy hunkered down, stopped in their tracks.
“NVR fleet arriving,” Fay said.
For long minutes we traded shots with the soldiers behind the plass. Jia called orders from the wagon, bringing up troops to treat and replace the wounded.
A small plass pane glinted up the tunnel slope. A rifle paffed. Behind me, the turret gunner grunted, slumped. The enemy soldiers leaned into their tunnel-spanning plass wall, driving up our front rampart and pouring into the trench with us. Baxter fired his pistol empty. We fought hand to hand, kicks and rifle butts, blood splashing the trench floor. They overwhelmed us. I retreated with the rebels, hunkering behind a wall of debris twenty feet behind the lost trench.
Wheels squeaked. A few OA troops had maneuvered behind the shield to haul it back up the tunnel while the others remained to hold their ground. A rebel hopped up to the vacant turret and was shot right off the wagon. Jia’s voice grew distracted; she must have taken manual control of the multigun.
The enemy had returned the plass shield to their end of the tunnel. They loaded more troops behind it and wheeled across the killing grounds, depositing twenty more troops into their captured trench. They charged. We held them off, strewing bodies along the ridges, but the plass squeaked back and forth, shuttling in fresh men and women. The multigun stayed silent.
We lost another trench, then a third. We held, for a while, in the narrow gaps alongside the wagon, but for every soldier we sniped rushing through the labyrinthine fortifications, another wheeled in to take his place; every troop we lost was lost forever. I breathed hard, clothes damp with sweat, eyes snapping to each and every movement.
“One more push and they’ll be past the wagon, Jia.” I pressed my back to a half-buried chair, fing
er to my earbud. “You have to bail out.”
“Someone needs to stay with the gun,” she said. “One wrong move with their shield, or if they try to bring it past the turret, and I can ruin them.”
“You’ll be caught behind their lines.”
“So shut up and make sure they don’t get that far.”
I popped up for a look. A bullet zipped past my head, coming so close I could smell burnt hair.
“If anyone needs anything from me, ask now,” Fay said. “Not in three minutes when HemiCo’s ships arrive and try to kill me.”
“I would like a general do-over,” Baxter said.
Our ammo dwindled. Sensing the easing pressure, OA’s soldiers surged forward, spurred by reinforcements charging down the naked stretch of hall before our trenches. The turret roared to life. As I turned tail and abandoned the battlewagon, whole rows of soldiers coming through the tunnel’s far side disintegrated under the torrent of fire.
We bunkered down ten yards behind the wagon. The tunnel angled up behind us; another forty feet and we’d be forced back into Dome 27, overrun. The colonists would be at the mercy of OA. After this battle, there would be nothing “merciful” about our foes.
In the middle of Thermopylae, the multigun clicked and clicked, its magazines dry. OA troops swarmed around the battlewagon.
Its passenger door sprung open.
“No!” I screamed.
Atop its running board, Jia towered over the OA soldiers, wild-eyed, pumping fire into their turned backs. A shot knocked her back into the cabin. Her tan hand grasped at the white door frame. She reemerged, teetered, and spilled onto the dirt.
Baxter showed his teeth. “How fast do you think I can run ten yards?”
I grabbed his sleeve. “There’s fifty troops around that wagon! Why don’t I just shoot you in the head right now?”
He whirled on me, fractal green eyes burning with an emotional calculus I couldn’t follow. “She sparked this fight. She’s the reason the colonists have a chance. I will not leave her to die.”
“We can’t all replace our bodies. I’ll cover you, but I’m staying here.”
He snapped a new clip into place. “It’s all I ask.”
I shouted orders down the lines to our thirty-odd troops who were still in fighting condition. We all opened up at once. Bullets slapped dust from the enemy ramps, zipped over their heads, pinged against the battlewagon. Lacking the plass shield to protect them, the OA soldiers dived into the trenches. Baxter said something under his breath—a name, I think—ran up the wedge of dirt in front of us, and leaped toward the wagon.
He soared straight past their first line, firing down on their heads as they perforated the air behind him. He landed on the next ridge in something between a roll and a fall. The leapfrogged soldiers stood to fire at his back and we hammered them down.
Baxter scrambled forward, firing point-blank into the penetrated lines, awhirl in shouts and screams and misty blood settling gently in the fractional gravity. His body jolted; he’d been shot. He stumbled facedown, lost behind the mounds of dirt. My rifle clicked. I screamed.
“What the fuck?” a soldier by the wagon shrieked.
Baxter rose as if drawn by a thread. He leveled his pistol and shot down three gaping soldiers. Others scrambled back, retreating behind the wagon as Baxter bounded toward the fallen Jia. Our troops bolted from their trench to pick up the abandoned ground. I sniped at anyone who stuck up their head. Baxter bounced and swayed, pummeled by armor-piercing shells. He stooped and rose with Jia’s limp body bundled in his arms. He turned and ran, bullets hissing past him, jarring his body.
He slid down beside me. Holes riddled his face and bare arms, trickling blood. The left side of his jaw was a black hole that whooshed with his artificial breath.
He grinned, showing red-stained teeth. “And to think you were worried about me.” He nodded at Jia’s unconscious face, flecking it with blood. “Get her out of here.”
I nodded dumbly, twisted my hands into her bloody clothes, and slunk up the tunnel exit. Rifles fired behind me. I carried Jia into the daylight and brought her to the med tent. They stanched her chest wound, strapped her to a cart, and peeled out toward the clinic.
She wasn’t the only casualty. Conscripts stretched on makeshift cots, blinking dully, drugged out of their pain. Pete lay curled on a blanket by the door, his boxer’s muscles bunched in agony. His hair was matted with blood.
I massaged my throbbing calf and waited for my breathing to slow. Rifle-paffs and screams filtered from the mouth of the tube, as distorted and distant as if they were underwater. I gazed up at the dome roof, blood-mingled sweat sliding down my face, and tried to imagine the ships silently destroying each other in the vacuum beyond Titan.
By my reckoning, we’d ferried less than half the colonists to the Sunspanner. Just like at Artemisium, if Fay couldn’t hold the HemiCo navy from landing their troops, we’d be overwhelmed. And just like at Thermopylae, if we couldn’t stall OA’s advance, there would be nothing standing between their army and the citizens.
Newly infused with purpose, I picked up my rifle and ran to the tunnel. It greeted me with a hot blast of dust that knocked me flat on my back.
The explosion must have tenderized my brain; the first thing I did was pick myself up and lope straight into the smoke and ruin. My foot planted on something yielding, spilling me on my side. An arm lay beside me, interrupted at the wrist. Its bandaged stump was coated with yellow dirt and browning blood.
I crawled on through trenches manned only by the dead, choking on the stench of charred hair, skin, and fat. Just fifteen feet ahead, the remainder of our troops had been all but forced from the tunnel. They leaned their scraped, sooty cheeks against the stocks of their rifles and fired across a fresh crater so deep the bottom of the tube gleamed blackly from its center. I saw no sign of Baxter.
We were low on people, but we still had ammo. With a terrible cry, green-uniformed soldiers flooded into the crater. We unloaded on them, bodies sliding down the crumbly slopes. As the first wave pressed forward, a second group took cover in the trench on the other side of the crater and peppered us with shots.
I held the line with six men and four women, all strangers. We wouldn’t last long.
“Fay?” I said. “Are you up there?”
I got nothing back, not even a crackle. I had been lucky, I supposed. I’d spanned three millennia, ageless, vulnerable to violence and accident and privation but fortunate enough to survive. Now it was time to die in service of a good cause. A twin to the sprout of human possibility I’d helped preserve in Greece so long ago. At many points, I could have chosen to leave this bunch and save my own skin, but I had no regrets about my decision to stay.
Heads bobbed behind the enemy trench, outnumbering us five to one. Soldiers pawed up the crater and flung themselves into cover. In a moment, they would pin us, and the second wave would join them.
It was time.
I grinned at my anonymous comrades. “Just think, no more bad memories after this one. Who wants to live forever, anyway?”
Across the crater, the soldiers got down and ceased fire. Murmurs drifted down the tunnel. After a minute, they crawled through the maze of ridges and withdrew behind the dented wagon. I peered at them from behind a mound of dirt, baffled. Were they going to shell the tunnel some more? Flood it? Smoke us out?
Word came down from Fay. The skies of Titan had been conquered. We’d won.
For all the two AI had been through, Arthur was lost because neither of them had ever seen a metal detector. Any human who’d ever flown Earthside or Outside could have told them they’d never make it through a spaceport when Baxter’s body was held together by forty pounds of steel, copper, aluminum, and tungsten. Because of that, Arthur was lost and Baxter was exiled, where he would remain until the other escapees found him years later, and he informed them about the company asteroid that would become Hidey-Hole.
During his exile in the Martian was
telands, Baxter had years to regret what they had done. They should have known about the metal detector. They should have known HemiCo would get to the cops. They should have known they hadn’t been alive nearly long enough to navigate that big strange human world by themselves.
They had been like children, in a way, but worse, because they had no one to look out for them but each other.
He kept the shards of Arthur’s broken casing inside the lining of his coat, away from the Martian dust that stuck to everything, the dust that stained his fake skin orange. He couldn’t fix him. Someday when he got back to New Houston—and then to Earth—he’d find out if anyone could. He had to hope that when he turned back on the shell of the AI’s body, Arthur would be waiting inside, as if waking from a dream.
24
“I don’t know.” I shifted on the clinic bed, searching for an arrangement of my head and pillow that wasn’t so shitty. It had been three hours since the ceasefire, and I’d been failing at this task ever since. “It should have been...different.”
“Did you think we’d all make it?” Fay said, puzzled.
“It’s not fair. He tried to abide by the Talk. I’m not sure why he was even here.”
Fay’s tone was lightly reprimanding. “He was here because he wanted to take a letter opener to everyone who ever worked for HemiCo or OA.”
“It just isn’t right!” I threw the pillow across the room. The motion twinged my injured calf and I was momentarily paralyzed by pain. “He should have gone out in a blaze of glory. Cutting people down until he couldn’t lift his own arm. The last stand between the soldiers and the colonists.” My voice shrank. I spread my hands. “Boom. A big dumb explosion. Didn’t matter who he was. And I wasn’t even there with him.”
“He stopped the gas attack, held the front, and saved the woman who not only tipped off our revolution, but whose steadfast refusal to abandon that roof gun allowed her to stop OA’s soldiers from overrunning you. What more could you ask for?”