She turned and flew back through the hole she'd created in the doorway, wondering if she'd ever be back in this part of the space station.
She floated along at a much slower pace than the frenetic escape velocity that saw her burst through heavy doors on her way out. Her senses remained on high alert for any capture attempts via netting or some other, unknown means.
But nothing of the sort happened.
As she entered the core with far more cubic space than the modestly-sized spoke corridor, she relaxed, but only slightly. She floated above the ground, beyond where the residents might capture her by intent or accident and watched the unfolding scene from the safety of the ceiling. Oswald Silver, looking much younger than she'd ever seen him, even with flattering makeup and scripted camera angles, directed workers as they pulled the control server—now nothing more than an old computer—from the damaged piping. They couldn't close the trap lid any longer. Her exit had somehow warped the storage and venting pipe such that the lid no longer fit over the open end.
She couldn’t help but smile at that unintended consequence.
Oswald maintained his ongoing dialogue with the workers, but Sheila noted that his eyes remained on the move, darting left and right, glancing down and peering up, alert to anything unusual to suggest a return of the one who’d caused such damage and killed three of his people. She thought she detected the words “take it to my quarters” and, more interestingly, “my ex is going to kill me.”
He must be referring to an old girlfriend or mistress, Sheila decided. The entirety of the Western world knew his wife had died decades earlier, and they’d not been separated at the time of her demise, so he couldn’t mean her. But she still found the phrase interesting, and a cruel smirk curled the corner of her mouth as she imagined an unknown woman berating a cowering Oswald Silver, and the whimpering as the man pleaded for mercy at the gun suddenly aimed his way.
It might be worth being trapped here just to see that. A prison sentence on this floating city would be a minor price to pay to watch the evil bastard learn the meaning of the word justice.
Surprised at her enmity toward the man, Sheila turned away and located the more familiar looking portions of the core near the spoke she'd used for her initial entry, scolding her mind and consciousness. She didn't want to become the type of person who willingly committed murder, or wished it upon another. It might be naive, it might get her killed… but she couldn't justify such an attitude. And she wouldn’t let herself and her actions fall prey to such emotions.
She started up the spoke but found the way partially blocked by additional workers heading toward the core. Given that they carried what looked to be medical kits and—she swallowed hard—body bags, she could only guess they’d be performing the unenviable task of carrying the bodies of the deceased to their final resting place.
More critically to Sheila, though, was the fact that she couldn’t squeeze by them and continue her journey out of the spoke and back to the storage room with the portal door. There were too many people, and one of the men—perhaps the tallest she’d seen—stood in the center, stealing even her chance to float by above the moving crowd.
With a silent sigh, she turned and floated back into the central core, hovering just above the doorway joining spoke and core, and periodically dipped the tip of her head down below the top of the entryway until she saw no one else on the way. She dropped down, ignored the ongoing loud shouts from those working to disconnect the ancient server and the pronouncements “death by blunt trauma,” and floated up the tunnel. As she moved, she offered a silent prayer that no one else started down this spoke.
If they did, she ran the risk of being silently trapped between those entering and exiting the central core.
Her prayer was answered, though. She reached the doorway without incident.
Then she waited. She couldn’t burst through another set of doors—best if they thought she remained on the other side of the station—and couldn’t risk opening the door here and seizing the attention of the guards, who were no doubt on high alert for anything unusual. Instead, she waited for nearly an hour until the medical crew worked its way back up the tunnel and exited in the traditional manner, unaware that the woman responsible for the condition of the men inside the body bags they carried floated above the deceased as they exited the core doors silently.
Once free of the constraints of travel in the narrow spoke tunnel, she flew at the highest speed she dared, slowing only to ensure she didn’t generate any type of breeze as she passed above the milling crowds of people. With all the chaos inside the core and with Micah's dramatic death and… well, his disintegration… earlier, she wouldn’t do anything to spook the imagination of the rattled residents of the space city. Or give her location away.
It didn't take long for her to see the familiar door, and her heart raced as a small smile of relief crossed her invisible face. She’d be home, back on the tranquil, beautiful island, in just a few minutes now.
She froze in midair.
The man who'd entered that door just as she’d arrived aboard the station earlier was back, returning the supplies he'd checked out during their earlier near miss.
Damn. More waiting.
She slipped inside the door he'd left ajar before it snapped shut, and if he noticed that it took that door a split second longer to close after bouncing slightly off her foot, he didn’t show it.
The man deposited his supplies.
Sheila moved toward the back of the room, to the area where she'd masked the door with extra nanos that made it look like nothing but a smooth wall behind a rickety metal storage shelving unit.
The man started toward the door… and then seemed to think better of it.
He turned and began marching up and down the aisles, eyes flicking side to side, as if looking for something.
Sheila felt her pulse race. What was he doing? Why couldn't he just leave… and allow her to return home in peace?
The man reached the aisle furthest from the door and nearest the portal. He marched along the aisle, eyes still patrolling the shelves on each side.
He stopped near the hidden portal door and frowned, then stooped and picked up a slip of paper. “What's this?” He flipped the paper over, then turned it around before reading the inscription Sheila could just make out as she hovered as close as she dared. “Em jay to ess see eh eh two three at two one zero zero.” His lip curled in confusion. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” He shook his head. “Too many strange happenings lately. I guess our rogue warrior isn’t in here, but maybe this is evidence of what he’ll do next? Guess I'll take this to the boss and see what she wants to do with it.”
And then he walked toward the door and left.
Sheila's heart pounded in her chest. “Em jay to ess see” written on a slip of paper right by the portal door? “MJ to SC… Micah Jamison to Sheila Clarke.”
She didn't know what the rest meant. She didn't know what “eh eh two three” or “AA23” meant, but she could find out. There was something critical about AA23 happening at 2100, or nine o'clock in the evening. She glanced back at the door to ensure she was alone, then dissolved the invisibility suit around her left hand and side. She pulled her communicator from her pocket and checked the time. Still early in the morning, so she'd either missed the time sent by Micah, or she still had just over twelve hours to figure out what—or where—“AA23” was.
It didn't matter, though, she realized, nearly laughing at herself. Her eyes moved in the direction of the hidden door. She could just ask Micah for the explanation when she got back. Perhaps it was a note he'd left for himself that he needed her to repeat to him, something he'd figured out before he'd been “killed” earlier. That made sense.
She slid around the back of the shelving unit and reached the portal, dissolving the illusory sheath of nanos masking its appearance to the outside world. She grabbed the handle and let the nano shroud dissolve around her as well, opened the door to paradi
se expecting to see and be seen by the reanimated robot she knew as Micah… and stopped.
There was nothing there. Nothing. Just a metallic-looking wall.
Shocked, she closed and reopened the door to the same result. She felt no humor in the fact that she was shocked that opening a door didn't lead to a spot thousands of miles away.
Something was wrong.
She closed the portal door again and stepped back, looking up at the door frame.
The truth hit her like a punch to her gut, and she felt a reaction not unlike she’d experience after such a blow.
The light was off.
The portal was dead.
Her breathing seemed to stop, as if all the air in the room had suddenly vanished, as if she’d been suddenly dumped into the void of space.
With no active portal door, she was trapped here.
And that meant she'd be dead all too soon.
—3—
DEIRDRE SILVER
IF IT WASN’T FOR the fact that she’d learned her mother remained alive, Deirdre would have spent the day following her capture believing that a dissolving death by Ravager would have been preferable to the living nightmare she’d endured instead.
No, she decided, not a nightmare. She wasn't technically treated poorly. She was treated as an unwelcome guest, to be sure, given only the barest necessities, denied the niceties of life she'd grown so accustomed to over the course of her pampered existence.
She traded the clothes donned after the decontamination shower for plain gray smocks and wore only thin slippers on her feet. They let her take a shower—a regular one this time—but she didn't get the exotic soaps and shampoos she'd enjoyed until a few days earlier. Her hair was clean, but as she rinsed the cleanser from her hair, she knew the strands wouldn't brush out to the usual sheen and shine.
Which was just as well, because they denied her a hairbrush, let alone any styling products.
Or makeup. What kind of monsters were these people?
She stared at her reflection in the dimly lit mirror, barely recognizing the face that so dominated fashion magazines and video screen shows weeks earlier. It left her wondering just how much she’d relied upon her looks at every moment to get all she wanted. When they’d taken her from that disinfecting shower, she’d noted that the few people they’d passed paid her little notice, disinterested in the newly captured woman. It was a far cry from the blatant ogling her appearance typically triggered. Annoying though it could be, she knew that eyes and faces morphing and changing in certain ways meant she held great power to control the victims of her breathtaking beauty.
She now knew she had no such power here. Or any power at all.
Nobody here cared that she was the daughter of Oswald Silver, the most powerful man in the West.
Actually, that wasn’t completely true. There were clearly at least a few people here who knew who she was, and knew who her father was. The trouble was that those people considered her identity and parentage a negative.
And so, as her ego took blow after blow, she retreated into her mind, dredging up and reliving the few memories she could find of a mother she’d long believed dead.
Most of her memories came from pictures and videos taken of her parents' courtship, wedding, and her eventual arrival, the princess of the economic monarchy that was Oswald and Delilah Silver. Her mother had been quite beautiful, and wore her incredibly long hair in all different manners and styles. She found peace and enjoyment in holding her infant daughter, dressing young Deirdre up in exotic costumes, and for her part, Deirdre—only a few years old—enjoyed that form of mother-daughter bonding as well, giggling and smiling, dancing and singing to the best of her infant abilities, all to her mother's obvious great delight.
But not all her memories about her mother were good ones, and the one she recalled most vividly was from the worst day she’d ever experienced.
She remembered the horrible day all too well, though she'd been only four or five at the time. Her father came into her room, his generally relaxed face tight with pain and worry, and he told young Deirdre that there had been a terrible accident and that her mother was gone and would never come back. She barely understood death at that age, having only just begun to understand what it meant to be alive. She waited for her mother to come home, to tell her that Daddy had just been playing a silly joke… but Delilah never returned.
It had crushed her young spirit in a way nothing else ever could. She’d lost her best friend, and she’d barely even gotten to know her.
When she'd gotten older, she found news reports as, of course, her mother's death had been a huge story. Delilah had been traveling to another cityplex via one of the tracked ground cars used to ferry supplies and finished goods and food back and forth between the fortresses protecting humanity. She’d been one of only a few people aboard. A recent storm had left a pile of huge old trees across the tracks near a bridge, a fact that the driver of the tracked ground car didn’t know. Combining the rate of speed and the curve leading to the bridge, and the placement of the downed tree jammed between the tiles, the ground cars hopped the safety of the track and dropped down the rocky slope to the river below. When they finally convinced enough people to mount a rescue effort—nobody wanted to go out into the Hinterlands and walk around, of course—they found only the half-submerged wreckage of the car split open and a handful of the passengers still inside and dead. The others, including her mother, were presumed to have been thrown from the car into the raging waters.
They’d never found her mother’s body.
She'd been devastated when she realized that her father's tale wasn't some cruel joke. And the true pain came as she grew older and realized that her mother, her hero, her best friend… her mother's last living moments had been full of such unimaginable horror, knowing that death was imminent, that she’d have no chance to offer even a simple goodbye to the daughter she so loved.
Deirdre wiped a tear from her eye, pushing a clump of hair away from her face, the emotions of that loss coming back. She felt it no less now than she had before, and even knowing that, somehow, her mother had survived it after all.
She glanced around her cell.
It wasn't like the prison cells she'd toured on occasion. Those had been hard, dark, cold places for the criminals of society. Her bed was comfortable if not plush; the blankets were clean and warm but not soft. She had a sink and a toilet with the most basic supplies to handle her hygiene needs. But she'd tested the door, several times already, and found it locked from the outside.
It wasn’t harsh by prison cell standards. But she remained a prisoner here nonetheless. And the door—locked from the outside—was a fire hazard.
For her.
They probably considered that a feature, though. Not a flaw.
She'd been sitting on the not-plush bed, back against the wall, knees pulled to her chest and chin resting on her knees, sulking in silence, thinking it all through.
What did her captors want from her?
They'd told her enough. She'd be a pawn in the power struggle yet to unfold, one that would begin after the surface had been Ravaged, as the terraforming and repopulation efforts begin in earnest. There’d be a struggle, a war, one being waged in relative silence right now, one in which the only real rule was that the principals couldn’t achieve their ends by killing the others. But the stakes were real, for those who won the battle would exert control over the most profound and extensive decisions in the new world. They’d decide which areas they'd rebuild first, where people got to live, who got to live as neighbors. They’d determine type of governance structures they'd employ in the new world built upon the ashes of the old, and, far more critically, how they'd choose the women and men who'd lead those entities. It was this last point that was considered the crown jewel, the queen of the chessboard, the one that crushed other major decision points to the status of irrelevancy. The one who controlled governance structures controlled the new world. They all knew it, too;
after all, the thirty had controlled the now-Ravaged world from behind the curtain of governance for decades.
Her father, of course, was one of them. He’d be part of those machinations, as her captors noted. She’d thought him already in control of the future world, scheming and plotting in space in a floating city she’d managed to largely avoid. Yet her captors here, far more informed on such secretive items than she’d expect for someone who ought not to be part of the group, suggested someone more powerful than Oswald Silver, someone she knew… or thought she had.
Her father wasn't the most powerful among the thirty in the current pecking order of the new world. Her mother was.
She considered that they might be lying, might be bluffing as to Delilah’s survival to gain some critical piece of intel from her in a moment of weakness. But nothing in their tone or body language suggested they believed their words to her to be wrong.
And if they weren’t lying, it meant there was something else she had to realize about her parents. They weren't working as a team, but for their own individual interests.
And the value of her capture now became far more clear.
Her captors would dangle her release to both parents, pitting them against each other to drive up the price of her release, drawing influence away from one parent to enhance their own status. She didn’t know how that could be; unless her captors were members of the thirty in some powerful disguise, they couldn’t negotiate at all. Were they agents for someone on the inside?
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