by Rick Partlow
“And who said they’re human?” Pris shot back.
This is a dream, Sam told himself. I’m back on Gateway Station in bed with Pris, sleeping, and this whole last month has been a dream.
If it was, he wasn’t about to wake up.
The Martian said nothing either to deny or confirm Pris’ assertion, just watched her through deeply-nestled, dark eyes and…was that a smile? Or were the shadows in the darkened chamber playing tricks with his eyes? If it was a smile, who was smiling at him? What was smiling at him?
“Why don’t you ask him?” Telia wondered. The Earth-woman was still motionless, face still impassive, but her eyes had settled on Pris. At her questioning glance, Telia clarified. “If you believe that’s true, why don’t you ask him?”
Pris seemed to consider it for a few seconds, but she shook her head.
“Not yet. Right now, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is, I believe him.” She nodded to the Martian. “If you know it wasn’t you, can you tell us who did send the transmission?”
The Martian seemed to nod with his whole body and the motion made Sam fear he’d topple over like a tree struck by lightning.
“Indeed. We can show you.”
He touched no control, spoke no order, yet one of the display screens lit up, bathing the office suite with a soft, white glow.
They do have neurolinks, then, or something like them.
“The antenna is rented out to offworlders for message delivery, but this transmission was not among the regular batch of pre-paid recordings. Someone penetrated the system from an external maintenance port, illegally and subtly enough to avoid our computer watchdog systems.” That quirk of his lip again in an almost-smile. “Which are quite sophisticated. This was captured by a security drone at the Communications Center.”
Sam recalled seeing the facility on their last visit, conspicuous by the gigantic dish at its apex, but from the look of the holographic video, the maintenance port was tucked away in a shadowed alcove somewhere around the back, away from public view. The access hatch was propped open, partially obscuring the dark-clad figure huddled over it.
“No one came to investigate this?” Telia wondered, disapproval strong in her voice.
“She was somehow able to acquire the correct clearances for a contract repair technician,” the Martian told the Earth-woman, “probably from an accomplice.”
“She?” Pris asked, the word sharp and clipped off. “So you got a better look at her than this?”
By way of answer, the Martian tilted his head toward the screen and the video feed went into fast forward, evident from the furtive, jerky movements barely visible behind the cover of the access plate. After a few seconds of the sped-up footage, the frame rate slowed again to normal speed as a hand reached out and shoved the access door shut. Sam could see her short, dark hair now, but her face was still to the ground as she pushed herself to her feet, and he thought that might be the best look he was going to get. Then her head came up and she looked from side to side carefully before moving out of the alcove, and the camera froze on her visage.
“No fucking way,” Devon murmured.
Sam didn’t place the face at first, until he remembered where he was and the last time he’d been on Mars. She wasn’t a young woman, but neither did she look unabashedly old, the way Gage or other Earthers would, or even Belters with their less-than-equitable sharing of advanced medical technology. Instead, hers was the agelessness of unfading vitality, yet arranged in the set of maturity and experience, the look anyone raised in the Resolution came to recognize in their elders.
He had to imagine her in the pragmatic brown work clothes of a shopkeeper before he remembered.
“Jeddah Valley,” he breathed the words, voice heavy with the disbelief he felt.
“Who is this woman?” Telia asked, glancing between them with what Sam thought was irritation at being the only one not to understand the significance of the name.
“It was before we met you,” Sam explained to her. “She was a Resolutionist expatriate running a craft kiosk here in Tarshish. She had a hand-made tapestry in her shop with an image of the ramship worked into it…”
He trailed off, getting that surreal, hair-standing-on-end feeling again as the implications of what he was saying finally penetrated.
“But she’s one of us,” Devon said softly, a horrified whisper.
“Perhaps some people in your Resolution are not so happy with the idea of saving my world,” Telia proposed.
“No, it’s worse than that,” Pris assured her. Gone was the self-satisfaction, the Eureka smile, the fever-brightness of her eyes. Fear had replaced them, fear of not just what they knew but of all the sudden unknowns. “She showed us that tapestry and she was behind the attacks as well, or in league with those who were. This whole thing has been a charade, an attempt to manipulate us.”
“Manipulate us into what?” Sam wanted to know.
Pris shook her head, but didn’t answer him.
“Where is the woman?” Telia asked the Martian. “Is she still in the city?”
“She boarded a shuttle shortly after this video was recorded.” He went on before any of them could ask the obvious. “It was registered to an independent freighter, which left orbit immediately after she boarded.”
Sam waited, scowling when he realized the towering Collective representative was going to make them work for it.
“Do you know the freighter’s destination?”
“We did not track it the entirety of its course,” the Martian admitted, “but before it departed our local sensor screen, its acceleration and trajectory seemed to be in keeping with its stated flight plan.”
The Martian spread his hands almost apologetically at the dirty looks Sam and Pris gave him.
“It was heading for Earth.”
Chapter Twenty
“She could still be a Naturalist,” Sam insisted with the mulish devotion to the ideals of the Resolution that had so attracted her once. “Just because she told us…”
“It’s possible,” Pris told him, unsure if she was being honest or simply trying to mollify him.
She was going to leave off the questions the idea raised, but Devon Conrad wasn’t so circumspect.
“If Jeddah Valley was a Naturalist plant,” the Captain of the Raven wondered, “what did they have to gain by trying to make us think they already knew about the ramship?”
Pris bit back a curse, knowing how honest with himself Sam generally was, and how the idea would eat at him once he adequately explored it. She masked her grimace with a sip of tea, sitting back in the chair. It wasn’t entirely comfortable; she didn’t think much of Collective furniture.
If they are a hive mind, whoever it is has horrible taste.
The Collective representative had dropped them at the same guest quarters they’d stayed in over three years ago, then accompanied Telia Proctor to the Communications Center. And that had been…she had the answer immediately from her implant computer, three and a half hours.
And that’s going to be a damned long conversation with a twenty-six-minute turnaround time between Mars and Earth. She’s a more patient woman than I.
Devon had kept her people with the ship, probably to give the rest of the crew as much plausible deniability as possible if and when the shit hit the fan, so it was just the three of them gathered in the formal dining room, huddled around one end of the grand table. She longed for coffee, but all they’d found in the cupboard was some sort of herbal tea that tasted like drinking a bush, but at least it was something different than shipboard fare.
Sam hadn’t touched his cup, still very clearly disturbed by the idea of a Resolutionist being involved in the plot…more disturbed than she was, which might, she thought not without some bitterness, be a statement about how much she’d changed in the last three years.
Or how far I’ve fallen, as Mother would be more likely to put it.
“I don’t know much about the politics back in Da
uphin City,” Sam admitted, staring at something light years away, fingers tapping idly on the china of the tea cup. “Is it possible there are factions there the same way the Consensus has the Naturalists and Reformists?”
He was asking her, pleading with her really, as if she knew the truth and were keeping it secret. She sighed and finished off the last of the tea.
“Not openly.”
That brought his eyes back to focus, hearing the implications in her statement.
“The Resolution government isn’t run by men,” she went on, shaping the words carefully, both for Sam’s feelings as well as to keep certain things from Devon that the woman didn’t need to know. “The final decisions on large matters are made by Mother. As such, dissenting opinions are not…cultivated.”
“You mean ‘tolerated,’ don’t you?” Devon Conrad asked, disdain in the sidelong glare she gave Pris.
“When did you get so cynical?” Sam asked her, shaking his head.
“I’ve always been a bit cynical, sir,” the woman confessed. She offered an apologetic shrug. “My parents were involved in the planetary government on Hephaestus, and there’s always been a bit of tension between Aphrodite and us…things are wilder and woolier there. Mom and Dad had the typical politician’s view of politics, at least in private. Mother has done great things for us,” Devon hastened to add, “but hers is an iron fist in a velvet glove, and anyone who speaks the wrong kind of truth suddenly finds themselves being transferred somewhere unpleasant and lonely.”
“To the point,” Pris interrupted, treating the Patrol Captain with a dirty look, “there is no official opposition party in the Resolution government system. Any group who disagrees with Mother’s decisions would likely be underground and very good at keeping their mouths shut.”
Sam looked horrified and Pris sighed heavily, covering his hand with hers.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she assured him. “You know Mother’s decisions are based on what’s best for us. She has no allegiance to any party or philosophy, she’s totally objective.”
“That’s what everyone says,” Devon countered. “But the only ones who get to talk to her are the Whitesuits like you. How do we know they aren’t the ones making all the decisions and just saying it’s Mother?”
“I know,” Pris told her, her tone as cold as her eyes. “You can choose to believe me or not, but I know.” She turned back to Sam. “You trust me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” he said, perhaps a bit too quickly and automatically.
But he didn’t, she thought. How could he when she’d told him she didn’t trust herself? She wished there was something she could tell him, something to convince him, but the words wouldn’t come no matter how badly she wanted them to.
She was saved from trying when the front door to the guest house creaked open. No doorbells here, everyone knew who was coming and when.
They probably don’t believe me about that, either.
“I was able to contact Minister Gage,” Telia Proctor declared without preamble, striding into the dining room.
The cyborg didn’t get twitchy---Pris wasn’t sure if it was even possible for her, physiologically---but there was impatience in the set of her jaw, in the restless way her eyes jumped from one of them to the other.
“What did he say?” Sam prompted, coming out of his chair, the legs scraping against the stone floor. “Is he going to clear the Raven to approach Consensus territory?”
“We will be allowed to dock at Fortuna Station,” she announced, “under careful observation by the orbital weapons platforms. He told me he’ll send a representative to meet us there.”
Pris let out a relieved breath. She’d had no backup plan if Gage had turned them down; they would have had to head back to Aphrodite and try to explain things to Mother…if she would have even spoken to them.
“I’ll tell Arvid to prep for takeoff,” Devon said, slapping the table like she’d just won a pot in a poker game, then pushing herself up.
“You sure about this?” Sam asked her, touching her on the arm to pause her on her way to the door. “You can maybe get away with stopping here at Mars, maybe justify it to Admiral Anton. But going back into Consensus space, to Earth orbit…” He shook his head. “You’ll be court-martialed. They could take your ship.”
“It was your ship before it was mine, Sam,” she reminded him. “You gave it up because it was your duty. This is mine.” She waved at the door. “Come on, let’s go see if we can still save the Earth.”
***
Fortuna Station wheeled silently across the face of the Earth, winking faceted reflections in the light of the sun as it turned slowly and purposefully. Telia had always thought it was the most beautiful thing made by human hands, a jewel hung in the sky to celebrate the return of the people of Earth to the larger universe. She’d heard those very words in lectures in school as a little girl, carried them with her the first time she’d left the gravity well and seen the giant orbital commerce center with her own eyes.
It loomed ahead of them now, growing frighteningly close; it seemed to jump forward at them with every disquieting bang of the maneuvering thrusters, a smooth gleaming white transforming into the tiny, ugly details of a working station as they approached the docking bays at the hub.
“This is the closest I have been to Earth in nearly ten years,” she said softly, quietly, as if she hadn’t wanted anyone to hear. But then why had she said it aloud?
She saw Sam Avalon’s glance, knew he’d heard. He didn’t respond, perhaps because he didn’t wish to discuss her private matters in front of the Raven’s bridge crew, or perhaps because there was nothing to be said.
They were so close even the details were lost, swallowed in the shadows of the yawning docking cylinder. Gateway station had been so small, its docking umbilicals little more than exposed ports on the exterior of its central hub; Fortuna’s bay was huge, hundreds of meters across, large enough for cargo shuttles and smaller freighters to take shelter inside the hull. The Raven slid inside without any sense of the encroaching bulkheads, just a smooth, clear path to their berth, a concave niche waiting for them with open grappling arms to pull them into a tight, secure embrace.
Mawae… Her gut clenched at the thought of his name, but she forced her way through it. Mawae had told her once about Resolution space stations, how they used magnetic grapplers for securing docking vessels and magnetic fields to hold in the atmosphere instead of keeping the bay in a vacuum. It sounded magical, something from a movie, yet she trusted his word it was true. Mawae never lied to her; he never lied to anyone. It was one of the things she’d loved about him.
Clunks and bangs and jarring vibration and the patrol craft was pulled into the docking port with all the gentleness and subtlety of a suspect being handcuffed by the police. She was used to reading people, something else she and Mawae had held in common, and she noted the tension in the bridge crew, even Captain Conrad, who took pains to seem cool and unaffected by it all. It was subtle, just a flexing of the fingers here, a repetitive rubbing of the eyes there, but they were worried.
They should be. I am.
Priscilla and Sam Avalon padded silently out of the cockpit, their sticky pads scritching softly against the deckplates. Devon spoke the usual redundant, commanding phrases as a comfort to her crew, then moved to follow them. Telia had only spent a total of a few weeks on Resolution ships, yet she knew from just the limited experience they were not so different from Consensus crews. Less talking perhaps, due to their neurolinks, but the talking there was remained the same, meant more as a tradition, something always the same to maintain their sense of being in control.
The Guardians were waiting for them just outside the airlock, as she’d guessed they would be. A half a dozen of them stood anchored with magnetic boots, fully armored, faces covered by visored helmets and hands filled with pulse rifles.
Not even non-lethals, she noted grimly. Someone really doesn’t want us here.
/> One of the Guardians stepped out from the rest, his magnetic boots click-clacking loudly. The rank chevrons on his chest-plate declared him a Guardian Prime, equal to her, though the hash marks of time in grade marked him senior. He reached up and twisted a knob on the side of his helmet, and the visor rotated upward to reveal the blocky, unpleasant face beneath.
“It’s been a long time, Proctor,” Adrian Fellows said, mouth twisted into his default sneer. He held his carbine loosely, casually in his left hand, his right resting on the butt of his holstered sidearm. She wore her own weapon at her waist, but she endeavored to keep her hands well clear of it.
“Are you stationed here, Guardian Fellows?” she wondered. “Or did you make a special trip just to meet me?”
“Every time I meet you it’s special, Proctor.”
If he had anything else to say on the matter, it was lost in the huffing and puffing of the woman hustling up behind the half-squad of infantry, squeezing through the crowd of onlookers gathered to see the show. She was middle-aged and overweight and crammed into a badly-tailored duty uniform proclaiming her Deputy Commander of Fortuna Station. She moved awkwardly in magnetic boots that seemed oddly out of place with the black slacks of her uniform and she was perspiring far too much for her to be used to it.
Probably never leaves the spin areas if she has any choice.
“Who’s in charge of you lot?” the woman asked, her face flushed, her tone sharp and impatient.
Sam and Pris looked at each other for just a beat before answering, and Telia recognized this was a shift as well. There’d been a time when Priscilla would have taken the lead automatically, but gradually, as their time at the station had dragged on, their roles had become more equal.
Still, it was her who spoke to the station officer.
“I am Priscilla of the Resolution Diplomatic Corps, and this is Captain Samuel Avalon of the Patrol. We were the commanders of the Gateway project before the attack.” She motioned behind her to Devon. “This is Captain Conrad, commander of the Patrol ship Raven.”