Chapter 25
Keltie never thought she’d be so happy to hear a thunderstorm. Rain fell on her parent’s car in drenching needles as lightning struck just off the living platform, over the sea.
“It’s like God knew you were coming home today,” her mother, Samantha, said. She had long hair like Keltie, and she wore thick makeup. “A thunderstorm is always good luck.”
Her father adjusted the rearview mirror. He wore glasses and a trench coat. “You’re awfully quiet back there.”
She glanced out of the window, over the stormy sea, and rested her head against the window.
“I’m just tired, Dad.”
“I’m tired too,” her dad said. “I’ve been saying for years that your company doesn’t care about its employees. They should have provided a security force.”
“Not now, Bill,” her mother said.
“Yeah, not now,” Keltie said.
“You should sue. At least consider it. Hell, you might end up owning a wing of that company if you do.”
“Bill!” Samantha shouted.
Her dad sighed.
They entered the city, a metropolis full of rain-slicked buildings. The rain formed large beads on the windshield just before the wipers brushed it away.
“You’re not thinking about going back to work tomorrow, are you?” her dad asked.
“I haven’t thought that far into the future,” Keltie said.
The last thing she wanted to talk about now was her career choice.
Not. Going. To. Happen.
Her dad pulled into a parking garage of her condo complex. Her condo was a tall, aquamarine tower shaped like a Crystalith. A valet parked his car, and they took the elevator to the sixth floor, where her condo was located.
“You don’t need to stay with me,” Keltie said as they walked down the carpeted hallway to her condo. “I’ll be fine.”
“Let us stay for a little bit,” Samantha said, wrapping her arm around Keltie’s.
Wishing she didn’t have to, wishing that her parents’ pain wasn’t as great as her agony, Keltie nodded. She couldn’t deny them some time.
They came to her door and she placed a finger in her fingerprint scanner. The door opened into her dark condo.
She saw several shapes and her body tensed.
Someone was inside.
Instinct struck.
She flinched, pushing her mom aside, starting for the hallway.
Then the lights flicked on and a group of people jumped out of hiding.
“Surprise!”
Her father caught her. “Welcome home, sweetie.”
Her sister, Elynn, blonde-haired and skinny and unlike her in every way, hugged her, crying.
A little girl wrapped her arms around Keltie’s waist. “Welcome back, Aunt K,” she said.
Tears came to Keltie’s eyes as she hugged her sister back and bent down to kiss her niece.
Everyone clapped.
Her condo was sparsely decorated; it had a wine theme, with wine bottles from all the planets she visited ranged on the kitchen walls. Hardwood floors. A holographic television. Two bedrooms; one with a California King that she’d wished for desperately.
The smell of home calmed her as all of her friends and family greeted her.
She had never felt more missed.
She glanced out her balcony window. The storm was relentless. Below, the highway was lit with its neon streetlights, and a traffic jam backed up for miles, a string of white and red lights.
On the holographic TV, a news story about her played. Photos of her stepping off Grayson’s ship scrolled across the screen. Then, a statement from her boss, a plump woman with silvery hair wearing a gray suit.
“We’re just so glad to have Keltie back,” her boss, Sheila, said. “Everyone at Macalestern has been worried nonstop. We all celebrated when we heard she was alive. I can’t wait to welcome back her myself.”
Oh, Sheila…
Then she glanced at the second bedroom.
Claire’s bedroom.
The tears came immediately and her mother consoled her.
“It’s not your fault, Keltie,” her mother said.
Everyone hushed, talking in whispers.
She knew they were talking about her.
She couldn’t. Not now. Not now!
No judgment.
No judgment!
And then with an anger that surprised her, she turned around and screamed.
“I can’t do this!”
Her mother grabbed her, but Keltie brushed her arm away.
“I just can’t. I can’t!”
Her father approached. “We understand. It’s the condo. Claire’s room. Come home with us tonight.”
“No.”
Her father was speechless.
“I want to be alone. Now.”
The room was silent.
“Now!” Keltie screamed.
Her niece began to cry.
Elynn sister picked the little girl up. She kissed Keltie on the cheek.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” Elynn said. “I told Mom and Dad it was too soon. Don’t apologize. It’s okay.”
Everyone filed out of the apartment. Her mom and dad were last. They wore sad yet relieved looks on their faces.
Her dad rubbed her mom’s shoulder.
“Call us when you’re ready,” Bill said.
“Welcome home, honey,” her mom said, blowing a kiss.
Keltie waited until they shut the door.
She clapped twice and the lights went off, submerging the condo in darkness. The only sounds she heard were her parents walking to the elevator and the low hum of the air-conditioner.
She stumbled into her living room and dropped to her knees.
It was so good to be home.
Yet… it didn’t feel like home. This place just wasn’t the same, and she didn’t know what to do to make it feel like home.
She felt like an alien.
She glanced back at Claire’s room and suppressed a knob in her throat. Then she looked out the window where the rain poured down on the courtyard below. She could see the ocean from her condo, far off in the distance.
She lay on her carpet, curled into a ball.
Coil shots.
Claire screaming.
“No!” Keltie screamed. “No!”
Faces from the voyage flashed across her vision. Alistair. Emina. Kamala.
She watched again in high-definition as the aliens devoured the luxury cruiser.
Again, she felt her body surge forward as the ship jumped into hyperspace.
Her heart sank again as the lights in the ship went out…
And then she saw Grayson’s face.
Her whole body was soft and numb.
And then she thought of the exchange on the Atomos. How she could have kissed him.
Maybe it was her fault.
Maybe there was something wrong with her after all.
Maybe she did need help.
No! She didn’t need counseling!
She balled her fist and punched the carpet. The impact stung her knuckles and she rubbed them.
She didn’t sleep.
Instead, she watched the thunderstorm rage until dawn.
Chapter 26
The sun rose in the rainy sky the next morning, but the rain did not stop.
Keltie picked herself off the floor and managed a cold shower.
She was not hungry so she didn’t eat breakfast. She’d emptied the fridge before leaving for Kepler, so there wouldn’t have been anything to eat, anyway.
She didn’t even feel like brushing her hair, so she tied it in a frizzy ponytail.
She glanced at her watch.
Seven o’clock.
Her sister might try to call any minute. Or stop by.
She couldn’t deal with her right now.
She had to give a briefing to her boss about everything that happened.
She didn’t want to go to the home office, but she was going to have t
o some time, so she thought she might as well get it out of the way. Then she’d figure out what to do next.
On the kitchen counter, her computer blinked at her.
She touched the screen, unlocked it with her fingerprint.
A desktop image of a sunset on Kavios II appeared: a beach full of colorful seashells, and a brilliant orange and magenta sunset with two suns sinking into the horizon. The water was reddish gray. A vacation she’d taken years ago with Claire.
An envelope icon flashed on the left side of the screen. An email.
She opened her email app. She had hundreds of missed emails.
Most of it was corporate junk.
But at the very top was one with a red exclamation mark next to the subject line—marked for urgency. It had been sent an hour ago.
She was going to turn away, but the subject line caught her eyes.
You are not safe. Please open this email.
She received virus emails like this all the time. It was usually hackers trying to phish her banking information, a practice that never seemed to disappear despite humanity’s thousands of years of progress in space.
But there were no attachments on the email. It was text only. The sender’s name was blank.
She clicked.
Welcome home, Keltie. There’s no denying that you’ve been through a lot.
But unfortunately, this is just the beginning.
Your emails are being monitored so I cannot tell you very much.
But I know what you saw. And there will be more of them.
What you did at Regina VII was wise and heroic, but do not think for a moment that the military will save us.
They will not.
You, however, can help.
I know that this email is strange, but it will make sense in due time.
If you believe, meet me at the western dockway.
If you do not believe, delete this email, return to your job, to your family, to the life that you left behind.
But if you think the aliens you saw were evil, they are nothing compared to what is on its way for you. It may very well be on Macalestern, searching for you.
You don’t know it, but you have already exposed secrets that are too dangerous for the public to know.
Step forward into uncertainty and you will learn the secrets of this universe.
Step backward into safety, and well… I wish you the best of luck.
You don’t have to be an alien on your own planet anymore.
There was no name signed.
She squinted at the email and read it again. As she did, the email’s text began to self-erase.
“What the?”
The last lines turned bold before disappearing letter by letter:
You don’t have to be an alien on your own planet anymore.
And then the email deleted itself.
Keltie went into her trash, but the email was gone.
What was going on?
She remembered corporate policy: always report strange emails to the IT department.
Yet this didn’t seem like the usual suspicious email.
Her eyes burned. She couldn’t think.
She had things to do.
She shut off her computer and hurried out of the condo.
Chapter 27
She walked through the rain without her umbrella. Two blocks to the light rail station, where she caught it to work. She dried herself off in the raised train platform that stood two stories above the street. She paid a few dollars to stand under a hair-dryer-like light that dried the rain from her in two minutes.
The sleek, bullet-like train slid to a stop on the platform, and she joined the throng of people piling into it.
There were no open seats.
But an old man recognized her face and gave up his seat for her. She thanked him with complete neutrality and sat, staring out the window and staring at nothing at the same time.
The train whistled through the rain, between the rectangular office buildings and up, up into the air before descending again, down, down into a covered tunnel.
An automated voice spoke.
Next stop, Macalestern Headquarters.
People crowded around the doors as the train bulleted into a beautiful gardenscape. Peonies of all colors lined the grass—magenta, pink, white, yellow, purple. They were everywhere. She could smell their strong, rain-kissed verdancy from inside the train.
And then she saw it, a sight that she’d thought she’d never see again: the triple towers of the Macalestern Corporation, white and black and blue and resplendent in the rain. They stood like monuments, the tallest buildings on the life platform. A flock of seagulls flew past the white, center building, cawing in the storm.
She’d never forget the first time she arrived here.
A job interview.
Intern. Insurance.
She’d ridden this same train to the complex, and excitement had flowed through her as she saw it for the first time. She’d watched the people eating in the courtyard, taking after-lunch strolls, and even working from handheld screens while sitting on benches. It made her second guess choosing a lifestyle where she controlled her destiny. Everyone looked so happy—how could you not be happy working for a place like this, with your own office and a gym and health insurance and a courtyard so delightful…
She bombed her interview. She forgot her résumé. When the hiring manager asked her what she could contribute to the company, she didn’t have an answer.
“You… can’t answer what you can contribute to Macalestern?” the manager had asked.
“I guess I blew this interview, didn’t I?” she said.
They didn’t call her back. So she delivered pizzas for a while.
That’s when she met Claire. She was a bright-eyed, high-maintenance blonde who ate her pizzas with a knife and fork. She’d been repulsed by Claire at first. The wannabe-rich type. Exactly the kind of girl that would work at Macalestern. Claire came to the pizza shop every Friday—the days when Keltie worked the cash register. During checkout one day, Keltie learned that they were taking the same classes their senior year of high school. The same “advanced” classes that their parents had forced them to.
In a strange twist of fate, they became friends.
Best friends.
And when Claire told her about Macalestern’s up-and-coming real estate program, how it was nothing like the typical office experience, they enrolled together.
Keltie glanced up at the tall, white building where she was headed. She suddenly didn’t want to go in.
But she pulled herself off the seat and followed the crowd of people onto an escalator feeding onto the first floor.
***
The Macalestern Corporation began as a small office in the middle of a galaxy far away. What started as a real estate company selling homes and commercial properties on an Earth-like planet one thousand years ago bloomed into an intergalactic mega-corporation, the dream of a woman who was hell-bent on building a successful business because her ex-husband had told her she could never do it.
Bessie Macalestern built the biggest business that ever existed, certainly in Keltie’s part of the universe. She grew a ten billion dollar, middling family business into a ten decillion dollar business, spread across tens of thousands of cities, thousands of planets, and hundreds of galaxies. If it weren’t for her, Macalestern would have almost surely died as an unremarkable real estate business. But Bessie grew it in ways that didn’t immediately make sense, but paid big dividends.
Keltie idolized Bessie—she was a woman who stood up for women everywhere and built the most successful business ever. She was the first women who ever owned a planet, and boy did she make headlines! Even though she was in her old age now, her influence remained.
The Macalestern Corporation eventually branched into insurance, banking, employment staffing and investments. It employed millions, with the slogan
Helping you make sense of this big wide universe.
/> In way, the company had helped Keltie make sense of things.
She’d embarked on a two-year training in which she learned the ins and outs of interplanetary real estate, astronomy, basic spaceship mechanics and navigation, sales tactics and negotiation, customer service, extraterrestrial relations, and of course, interpersonal communication. It was more rigorous than any class she’d taken. The Interplanetary Real Estate Certification was a designation held by only a very few. She was part of an exclusive club that promised unlimited riches if you worked hard.
She’d worked hard.
So hard.
What for?
She swiped her ID badge in the grand lobby and walked the edge of the sprawling, indoor pond. A giant, fifty-foot tall Christmas tree sparkled in the center of the room. She rode the escalator up to the coffee shop, where men and women in overcoats carried cups full of steaming hot chocolate and egg nog lattes.
The cheerful smell made her realize how close Christmas was.
It didn’t feel like it.
On Macalestern, snow didn’t fall until August. Christmas was just wet. And when things did go white, it wasn’t like the Christmases she read about on Earth, where snow piled up on the ground, ready to be admired and sculpted.
Snow on an ocean planet sucked. The skies just dumped and dumped snow on the life platform.
She thought of Christmas.
Her mom had probably decorated their apartment. It probably smelled of pine and cookies and hot chocolate…
She just didn’t feel anything. No emotion.
She rode the elevator up to the thirtieth floor, then transferred to another elevator that took her to the eightieth.
Her old floor.
She sighed as the doors opened into a sea of another kind—cubicles.
***
“Keltie, I’m so glad to see you!”
Sheila McNulty, her boss, embraced her. Her fruity-floral perfume choked Keltie.
She took Keltie by the shoulders.
“What you did is amazing,” Sheila said.
The cubicles were made of touchscreen glass that held photographs and work applications. All over the floor, everyone stood.
“Way to go, Keltie!” someone shouted.
Phantom Planet (Galaxy Mavericks Book 2) Page 11