by L. K. Rigel
Char had always found children obnoxious and demanding or meek and depressing. This attitude was a flaw in her character, and she always felt vaguely guilty in their presence.
This one was irritatingly enthusiastic.
Rani came down the cargo ramp, a towering Amazon followed by five more young girls. When the girls saw Char, their eyes widened. Rani glanced at Jake and then to the girl hugging Char. "What is this, Durga?"
"What?" Char threw up her hands in exasperation.
"Exactly," Jake said. "What did you do to your hair, Meadowlark?"
"Asherah did it." The girl stepped back, preternaturally self-confident. "Asherah said I would soon meet my sister."
Shibadeh. A chill ran down Char's spine. She pulled a strand of her hair in front of her eyes. It was the bright red color of blood when it first hits the light, before it mixes with air and darkens. The same color as the girl Durga's. The same as the goddess's.
Durga hugged Char again. "Asherah told me I would have many sisters, and I would know them by her mark."
DOGs Don't Need No Stinkin' Data Links
"DOGs don't need no stinkin' data links." Jake mimicked a classic holofilm. "They'll breach the hull and salvage what they can. We have to get off the annex."
No argument against that. Char had already seen it happen. "And go where?"
"Corcovado," Mike said.
"Not Corcovado." Rani had murder in her voice.
Char didn't blame her. Corcovado meant Reynaldo and Geraldo. After the one meeting in the Blue Marble, Char would be happy if she never saw them again. Unfortunately, the goddess had other ideas.
"I can't stand the 'aldos myself," Jake said. "But outside of their presence, I hear the air is breathable in Corcovado."
Mike dropped the subject and the administrator in him took over. "Char, can you and Rani deal with the crops?" He turned to Durga. "Run and get the others to come help. They can sleep later."
"Not the matriarch," Durga said.
"Not the matriarch," Mike agreed.
Durga ran to the back of the Junque, barking out orders before she was half way up the loading ramp.
"I should discharge the electric blankets so the DOGs can't have them," Mike said. "Jake, the energy drive in the com center pulls from the photovoltaic net. We can use it to recharge the Junque while we're in orbit."
"Good thinking. I'll get it."
It was good thinking. Mike was useful in a crisis, and he cared more deeply about his friends than Char had believed. She still wished she hadn't kissed him.
When Durga returned with the other girls, they all headed into the corridor leaving Mike to deal with the blankets. At the first Ppod, Char set the compad for the pallet rooms.
"The crops are on this side of the annex." She handed the compad to Rani. "This will show you the way. The rafts and buckets are on rolling plats, all automated and designed to move easily to the cargo bay. I'll join you after I take Jake to the com center."
Rani set off following the wall lights with the girls trailing behind. Char gasped when she counted the girls and stopped Durga. "Are there any more of you on the shuttle?"
"No, my sister," Durga smiled. "This is everybody."
"I see. Go on, then."
They will be as holy chalices, and you will shepherd nine from the stars.
In the Ppod, Char and Jake grabbed the rails. Her hair floated in the weightlessness, and as they both stared at the shocking color their eyes met. He looked away and said, "So what happened?"
There was a wall between them now. He must believe she was with Mike. Jake liked her. But he had no passion for her, she could see that.
"What do you mean?" She suddenly felt incredibly lonely.
"How did your hair change?"
"Oh, that." They entered the com center. "I haven't looked in a mirror since yesterday." When we took a shower together. "I didn't even know about it."
The annex had gone to nightside and was over land. There was no light on the surface that wasn't made by fire. Geraldo had said Corcovado was clean and safe. Why did the gods favor the 'aldos, as Jake called them?
Jake wasn't finished. "Durga insists she's been talking with the goddess of life and fertility. It's starting to not sound completely insane."
"I don't know what happened, Jake. It was as real as my talking to you right here, but I know how insane it sounds. Earlier today, I was inspecting the strawberries. A strange woman with red and silver hair appeared from nowhere."
Char decided to leave out the Empani for now.
"She said she is a goddess. Her name is Asherah, and she gave me a revelation which I am to share with the world. And then she was gone."
"Let me guess. We're all going to die unless we submit to the gods."
Of course it was possible that they were all going to die. Likely, even. This must be what the apocalypse looked like. Nuclear strikes. Hyper-polluted stench in every city swallowed by sea level rise. Skyrocketing infertility. Giant raptors preying on humans.
They'd better shibbing hope the gods were real. It could be their only chance.
"Asherah doesn't like the other gods. She mentioned one she's having a feud with. She wants us to submit to her, which will involve lighting a lot of candles and having a lot of sex."
"Her will be done."
"Yeah, well. It's not going to be all fun. She says some women will be chosen to be fertile again, able to carry to term."
"That's good, isn't it? Bagging isn't working out so great."
"She says if we keep using artificial gestation, the human race will go extinct and the material world will no longer exist."
"That doesn't make sense."
"I know it doesn't make sense!" Cripes, she sounded like Asherah. She should stamp her foot to go with it. "She said we don't need to understand, we just need to submit. She will reveal more as necessary. The world is being re-ordered -- re-imagined was the word. That's why so many strange things are happening. Giant raptors. Ghosting. Eyes like Rani's. More new species are coming."
I think I saw a shapeshifter.
"Then natural fertility is a godsend." Jake shook his head. "Godsend. I never thought I'd use that word literally."
"Not for the woman who has to go through it. My mother said it was horrible. She thought she was going to die."
"Magda said it was no big deal." Jake's eyes twinkled. "But I'm sure they gave her a full load of opiates."
"We'll have to grow poppies in Corcovado."
"You're for Corcovado?"
"Not me." Char wrinkled her nose. "Asherah. She called the fertile females her chalices. She told me I would bring nine chalices to Corcovado from the stars."
"Durga and the others? They're just little girls."
"The 'aldos were talking about building a safe haven for fertile females, remember? If it's as clean as they say, it could be Asherah wants those girls and more like them to live there in safekeeping."
Jake looked at his abdomen as if imagining what pregnancy would be like. "Praise the gods for the y chromosome."
"Look at that." Char's heart jumped. Lights! A massive grid of unbroken, orderly, dazzling electric light came up on the horizon. "Is it Garrick?"
"We'd better get to work." Jake went to the console where Mike usually worked. While he removed the e-drive, Char found the ISS shades and put them in her pocket.
In the next minutes the dark outline of the Garrick Sea rolled up on the horizon. It wasn't fair. The corporation that had contributed the most to the environmental cataclysm had escaped its consequences.
"That was easy." Jake zipped the e-drive into his flight pants. "Let's go."
They collected food that was harvest ready and a hundred pounds of seed. The fogging system was state-of-the art. Char ripped out several modules to add to the haul. Durga had the idea to look for the infirmary with the compad. They found a cache of saline solution and antibiotics and a cabinet full of protein packs.
Within half an hour, they'd load
ed about five percent of the annex's produce, the agronomist's protein packs, the seed, and five hundred gallons of water. Plenty to sustain them in orbit until they found safe harbor.
As they neared the docking bay Durga ran ahead to see the matriarch. She came back immediately. "It's gone, it's gone! The little space ship."
"There." Jake pointed at the air above the Space Junque.
Mike had the orbit runner up inside the docking bay. He flew it behind the Junque, and they all ran around to watch him put it down neatly in the hold. Because of the Tesla power source, there was no heat or exhaust.
Mike popped the canopy and jumped out. "You never know. We might need a runabout. The photovoltaic net can power this little ship too."
They rolled the plats into the hold and secured the supplies in storage bins.
"You should ride with me like before." Jake's face turned red the minute he said it. "I don't mean like before. I mean would you please ride in the cockpit and tell me more about what this goddess wants."
Char wanted to say she wouldn't at all mind riding with him like before.
"I forgot the compad." Durga ran past them out to the control room. As she retrieved the compad, her head jerked around. She peered down the open corridor then dashed back to the docking bay. "They're coming! The bad people are coming!"
As Durga reached Char's side, two men in space suits entered the docking bay. Their helmets hung from their belts and they carried guns. Char put her arms around Durga.
"Look what we have here," said the shorter guy. A sunflower patch was stuck off-center on the chest of his space suit. Must be stolen. "The Space Junque, complete with Imperial links, I do believe. Supplies already loaded, I take it. Very accommodating."
"There's only two of you and twenty of us," Jake said. A lie, but who cared?
"You and nineteen girls?" The big DOG laughed. Then he was on the ground, his body jerking in agonized spasms.
"A girl can aim as well as the next fellow." Rani had come around the back side of the Junque with Jake's stunner. She kept it aimed on the little DOG and moved between him and Durga.
Without warning, the little DOG shot Rani and she fell to the floor with a sickening cry. The sound of movement came from the corridor, and the DOG smirked. "There's twenty more of us, mate. Twenty men." He seemed to think better of his brag. "Mostly men."
"I'm only one man." Mike came down the cargo ramp with another stunner. "But I can take you out before your twenty get here."
The DOG held steady, but he didn't fire.
Rani groaned.
"Here's the choice," Jake said. "We can all die or we can all live. My friends and I were just leaving. You can have the whole place to yourselves."
"We already have the whole place, and we'll have your ship too." The DOG's smirk turned to a grimace, and it was his turn to fall down.
While gloating over being such a manly man, he forgot to keep his eye on the little girl. Durga had fired Rani's stunner.
Jake and Char helped Rani to her feet. Her eyes looked like they were on fire, but Char couldn't see any wound.
"Let me take her." Mike hoisted Rani over his shoulders. She was a foot taller and heavy with muscle mass, but his enhancements were for performance as well as cosmetic. "Get us out of here, Jake. This is just a graze."
Rani's barely suppressed whimper sounded worse than screams of pain.
Durga picked up the weapons without being told and followed Mike up the ramp. It was a mistake to see her as a child. She had the heart of a warrior.
"Let's go, Jake." Char was already at the galley lift. She hit the button to close the loading ramp as Jake jumped on beside her. Waist high into the galley, she heard yelling in the cargo bay.
The instant the Junque had airlock, Jake opened the docking bay doors. The shuttle was evacuated into space with everything that wasn't anchored down.
The DOGs were sucked out too, and Char wasn't sorry.
Emperor Augustine
The Space Junque drifted with the DOGs' bodies and unsecured rubble that had spilled out of the annex like scattered toys. Jake called up life support and the artificial gravity, but he didn't touch navigation.
"Don't we need to get out of here?" Char asked.
"Let's wait until Mike does some scanning on the subnet before we make any noise."
Mike. The mention of the name resurrected the wall between them.
Jake avoided eye contact. "I'd like to know how things lie before going any further."
How things lie. He could be talking about Char and Mike as much as orbital hazards. How obtuse she had been. Jake needed to know how things were before going any further.
Char had never been aggressive in love. She'd expected love to find her, choose her. Mike had come to her with love -- with desire, anyway. But she didn't want Mike.
She and Brandon fell in with each other in school and found it easier to stay together than not. Had he lived and the world not imploded, they'd be married by now. Happy enough. No idea of anything missing.
She had loved Brandon, if not with any great passion. She'd been surprised how much his death hurt. After losing Sky so quickly afterward, Char had hidden away in her apartment and become a kind of ghost herself.
Now she was coming back to life, and the whole world was dying. She wanted Jake, and there wasn't time to wait for him to figure things out.
With the AG on, he released his harness and left his chair. At the cabin door he hesitated, and the sign above the galley lift caught the corner of Char's eye: Mind the Gap. That's exactly what she had to do, mind the rift that Mike had created between her and Jake.
She followed Jake to the door and put her hand on his arm. He didn't say anything. He just looked at her with a mixture of pain and desire -- or was she reading her own emotions in the mirror of his eyes?
"I kissed Mike,” she said. She couldn't deny it, and Mike would probably tell Jake anyway.
Jake didn't look surprised. He sighed and held her gaze. "Well, that makes me feel bad."
"I'm glad it makes you feel bad." There was no way to explain it. "It was an accident."
"I'm glad it was an accident." There. The beginning of a smile.
"Yeah." Now she was babbling. "It was."
He faced her squarely and put his hands on her shoulders. "I'm going to kiss you now. It won't be an accident."
His voice was warm and his eyes were kind, and he was real. So what if it was the end of the old world and there was only a minuscule chance of a new world to come. As long as she could stand in this galley with Jake's arms around her and his lips on hers, none of it mattered.
She wanted nothing. She had everything.
Jake was some long-missing part of her that had been restored. This wasn't a bad time to fall in love. It was the best time. Love was more necessary than ever. To make life bearable. To have hope without feeling ridiculous.
She could live in Corcovado. She could live anywhere as long as Jake was in her life.
"I need to check on Rani." Jake let her go. "But once I've got my Junque in order, I want to show you the captain's quarters."
His stupid joke sent a tingle of anticipation through her. How strange and unexpected to feel so happy.
Jake almost ran into Mike standing at the door. It had been ajar, but Mike seemed to have just arrived. He showed them a drive in the palm of his hand. "I copied the subnet protocols from the runner to install in the Junque's com system."
"Great minds think alike." There was a hint of triumph in Jake's comment. Men could be so territorial, but it was kind of nice when you wanted them to feel that way. "Let's know what's out there before we make ourselves too obvious."
"I'll install it now and search after we eat." Mike stepped through into the cockpit. "The old lady suggested we all sit down together for a meal, and now Durga is insisting on it. That one is a natural leader." He didn't hide his admiration. "An irresistible force."
That sounded good; Char couldn't remember when s
he last ate. Dessert in the captain's quarters sounded even better.
--o0o--
"Corcovado is desecrated ground." Rani popped a few more blackberries into her mouth. "When I left, I made a vow never to return." She pointed to her chest. "A vow to myself."
They were all sitting around the table in the dining room. Char had forgotten the Junque was a commercial shuttle that offered meal service. They'd prepared the food -- fruit salad, vegetable salad, and protein packs -- in the modest but well-outfitted kitchen.
Mike sat at one end of the table. He'd just reintroduced the idea of going to Corcovado.
At the other end of the table the matriarch said, "Then we must consecrate the ground. We will rededicate it to a higher purpose and drive out the demons that haunt you."
Rani's eyes widened. Now that Char was used to those irises, she thought they were beautiful and intriguing. She'd noticed they changed color slightly when Rani felt strong emotions. The phenomenon was barely noticeable -- except when Rani got mad and they seemed to light on fire. Char had only seen that once, and it was pretty scary.
"You think I'm afraid?" Rani said. "No. I am appalled. The 'aldos destroy whatever joy could be in the world. Your girls won't change them. But they will change the girls."
Durga scoffed. "What are two men when the world is full of monsters?"
The other girls all brightened and looked at each other like they were bursting with a secret. Chita said, "Durga killed a monster once."
From the satisfied expression on Durga's face, Char believed it.
"A giant bird came when we were on a picnic. Durga stuck it with a knife."
"Girls, don't tell stories." The matriarch sighed as if she'd stopped the telling of this tale a hundred times. "There is no such thing as giant birds."
"She cut out its heart," Chita added.
Durga didn't correct the matriarch, but she didn't stop the girls talking either.
"It was exgusting." The youngest girl, Maribel, grinned and wrinkled her nose. The others laughed and said eww and made noises in keeping with their gleeful approval of the "exgusting" deed.