“Fucking Oliver’s idea of a joke. Take my gun and wait outside.”
Vasco raised one hand to my throat and reached to his waist with the other. As he lifted his hip to grab the pistol, I thrust my hand down into his pants, yanking at the softer parts at his groin. He gave a startled yell and dropped the pistol.
I wriggled out from under him and slid off the desk. The other guard grabbed for his own gun, but Murphy drove his foot against the guard’s knee. Crying out in agony, the guard folded to the floor.
Vasco, still groaning, sank down at my feet and started dragging me toward him. I kicked at him as I fumbled for the gun, finally getting my hand over the grip.
Twisting onto my back, I aimed between my knees.
“Slippery little bitch!”
He lunged for me and I pulled the trigger, Murphy’s cry of “Do it, Elizabeth!” ringing in my ears.
The gun jumped in my hand. The blast flung Vasco against the wall, blood pumping from a hole in his neck. His hand flew up to the wound. After a moment it dropped back down to his side, a glazed look of surprise frozen on his face.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the gush of blood.
“Elizabeth!” Murphy cried.
A man and woman, carrying big rifles, stormed into the shed. “Nobody move!” barked the man.
There was a flutter of motion on the other side of Murphy. The wounded guard had managed to get his pistol in his hand, and as he swung it toward the door, the woman fired her rifle. My whole body jumped, just like the pistol had.
I stared at the woman. She was gorgeous, with long dark hair, delicate features, and flawless brown skin. And she had just dispatched the guard like he was a mosquito buzzing in her ear. For some reason these facts were hard for my brain to reconcile.
Her dark eyes searched my face. “Sarah’s friend?”
I nodded.
“I’m Yasmina. Sorry we’re late.”
Her companion, a heavyset man with a long braid hanging down his back, had released Murphy’s restraints, and he crawled over to me. “You okay?”
I didn’t realize my shirt was hiked partway up until Murphy wiped a splatter of blood from my ribs with his sleeve and pulled the shirt back down over me. He scanned my face, gently touching my bottom lip, which stung.
I still couldn’t find my voice. He took the gun, setting it aside, and warmed my cold hands. “You had to do it, love. He didn’t give you a choice.”
He didn’t understand. I didn’t give a shit about the rapist. Or at least not much of a shit—I couldn’t imagine it was easy to shake off killing any kind of person. But that wasn’t it.
“They have ghosts, Murphy.”
He pulled me into his arms. “You had no choice,” he muttered fiercely. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it for you.”
“Collateral damage, angel,” said Yasmina. “It happens.”
But I knew it wasn’t as simple as that. “They’ve done nothing to me. Why do I deserve to live more than they do?”
The big man groaned. “Holy Christ, people. The point is going to be fucking moot if we don’t get on the transport now.”
Murphy and I looked at him, and Murphy said, “Do I know you?”
Yasmina rolled her eyes. “Oh, Garvey.”
He gave us a squinty-eyed grin. “Possibly by reputation.”
* * *
Outside the shed we found a cargo transport parked on top of the fern graveyard. We followed our new friends through the cargo door into a cavernous hold, empty except for a neat stack of what looked like sacks of grain. The deck felt sticky under my feet, and I noticed it was stained with various fluids—some chemical, and some looking more organic in composition.
At the far end of the hold there were two doors for accessing the passenger compartment, and we passed through one into the galley, and finally to the cockpit.
This was my first time onboard a cargo transport and the cockpit looked about like I’d expected—vertical window, panels of instrumentation, pilot and copilot chairs—with one exception. There were plants everywhere. Climbing vines shot from the seams in the riveted metal floor, attaching themselves to the walls and ceiling. Patches of moss and tiny succulents clung to horizontal and vertical surfaces. A fern had sprouted through a hole in one panel, where some instrument had been removed.
Garvey and Yasmina sank into their chairs, and the transport, which had been quietly idling, gave a wail of protest as it woke from sleep. I watched as Yasmina’s quick fingers worked over three separate keypads, while Garvey kept his eyes on a group of displays that were spewing lines of what looked like random letters, numbers, and symbols.
“Okay, Yas, looks like we’re clear,” he said.
Murphy found the jump seats along the back wall of the cockpit and we strapped in. The transport lifted smoothly from the pad, hovering and coughing a time or two before the thrusters kicked in.
“She’s geriatric, but she’s reliable,” Garvey murmured with affection.
“Asshole,” snapped Yasmina.
“I wasn’t talking about you,” he grumbled. “Touchiest fucking female I’ve ever known.”
“I don’t like people disrespecting my ship.”
“It was a compliment, Yas, Jesus! And since when has it been your ship?”
As the bickering continued, Murphy turned to me with a questioning look. “These are friends of your guard?”
I nodded. “I knew she was setting it up, but I didn’t know it was happening today until they showed up. I had to make a decision. I’m sorry I—”
“You did the right thing,” he said, raising a hand to my face. “Where are they taking us?”
“To a hidden colony—some kind of ghost underground. Sarah wouldn’t tell me much about them.”
“Did she say why she wanted to help us?”
“She said she was worried Mitchell might kill me. I couldn’t get her to say more than that.”
I didn’t realize the bickering had died down until I heard Yasmina’s silky laughter. “It’s what Sarah does, angel. Sends away anyone who might get too close to her. We should all start a support group.”
I blinked at Yasmina’s back as I processed this and filed it away for later consideration.
Garvey called her attention to something on one of the displays, and I bent toward Murphy, speaking low. “Sarah is only part of this. She said the people she works for know about me. They want me to help them work on ghost detachment.”
“That sounds like good news, love.”
“Yes, but it worries me she didn’t want to talk about them. She did say we’d be safe there, and that they wouldn’t hurt us.” I felt a surge of panic as I recalled she’d only said they wouldn’t hurt me. But they couldn’t hurt Murphy without hurting me.
No, they couldn’t kill Murphy without hurting me.
His thumb brushed the creases in my forehead. “It’ll be okay. Anywhere is better than where we’ve been.”
Garvey rose from his chair and shuffled over to us. “I imagine you two could use a drink.”
As we unbuckled our harnesses, Yasmina said, “Don’t let him fool you into thinking he cares. He’s just looking for an excuse to get drunk in the middle of the day.”
“My lifetime excuse to get drunk any time of day is sitting right there in my captain’s chair. Come on,” he said to us.
Murphy slipped his arm around me as we followed Garvey to the galley. He bent his head to mine. “You’ve done the right thing,” he repeated. “We’ll deal with the rest as it comes.”
* * *
Despite Garvey’s lethargic bearing, I was confident from the quick motions of his dark eyes that he missed very little. His features made me think he was Northwest Native American, maybe Alaskan.
“Hope you take it neat,” Garvey said, pouring whisky into three smudgy shot glasses. He wiped a drip from the sleeve of his ratty antique flight jacket.
Murphy and I perched across the bar from him on tall stools fixed to the deck to kee
p them from sliding in flight. Murphy gulped down his shot and plunked the glass back onto the bar. Garvey refilled it. I raised mine to my lips, but one whiff threatened to turn my stomach inside out. I recalled it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. I slid the glass back to Garvey, who’d been about to refill his own glass. He shrugged and tossed mine back instead.
“I’ve figured out who you are,” said Murphy.
There was a glint in the squinting eyes. “Oh, you have?” Garvey replied. I got the feeling he enjoyed the attention.
“Professor Everett Garvey, right? The American physicist? Everyone thinks you’re dead.” Murphy hesitated. “Are you?”
Garvey’s sudden bark of laughter made me jump. “Not yet,” he replied.
“So Yasmina’s your ghost?” I asked. There was nothing ghostlike about her. But then, these two clearly weren’t following the protocol.
Garvey gave a snort. “Yasmina is this lunatic planet’s idea of poetic justice.” Refilling his glass, he added, “Though I probably would be dead without her.”
“What do you mean?” asked Murphy.
Garvey rubbed his face with a beefy hand. “That’s a fucking long, tedious, and depressing story. You sure you want it?”
“Please,” I said. I had about a million questions for him, including why there was a terrarium in his cockpit. I had a strong suspicion there might be a connection to the clover under my bed.
“The short version is that I needed to disappear after my wife killed herself—I mean the ghost of my wife.” He shook his head and gulped his whisky. “Whatever the hell.”
Another ghost suicide. I thought about Ian and his ship of Theseus story. It occurred to me that it was an inadequate analogy. Did a ship have any sense of itself? Were there any real consequences if the Athenians didn’t accept the refurbished ship as the original?
“Do you know why she killed herself?” I asked softly.
Garvey grunted. “Because I’m a bastard. Though this fucking planet gets its share of the blame.” He looked at me. “See, I did what I was told when I relocated here—followed the protocol. Maybe not at first. When my dead wife showed up, I had sex with her. I mean, I don’t know what the hell else they expect.”
Again I thought about Ian and Julia. I shot a glance at Murphy, who was turning his glass in his fingers.
Garvey took another slug of whisky and Murphy did the same. Garvey emptied the bottle into their glasses.
“Pretty soon after that I slipped back into my Earth habits—women and drinking. When I wasn’t on the job, at least. For a while I still took that seriously. But physics research on this planet? We used to think quantum theory was spooky. But I’m not drunk enough to talk about that. Anyway, my ghost wife couldn’t take the neglect, along with the cheating and the drinking, and she killed herself—pretty much the same way my real wife did. Apparently some laws do apply to both universes. The very next day she was back, and I just couldn’t go through it a third time. So I tried taking us both out in a shuttle crash.”
I gaped at him.
“I walked away. She didn’t. I set the wreckage on fire, hoping everyone would think I was dead too. It worked. Nobody cared to investigate very thoroughly—I’d become a pain in pretty much everyone’s ass on both planets by that time. I went to work for Limerick Cargo, where it came to my attention that there’s an underserved market for discreet transportation services on this planet. So I kept at my job, ran a few side businesses, and pretty soon I had the money to buy a retired transport. Then I became self-employed. That’s about it.”
“What about Yasmina?” I asked, confused.
Garvey grinned. “My own private Dante. Instead of my wife again, I got her. I thought I had hit the jackpot.”
Murphy and I exchanged glances. “You didn’t know her before? On Earth, I mean?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not really. Back on Earth I got invited to some swanky dinners with really important people—people who knew my work but didn’t know what an asshole I was. She was an ambassador’s daughter, and a military pilot. After dinner I had one too many scotch-and-sodas and made a pass at her. She belted me. I never saw her again.”
Yasmina was like me—bound to a virtual stranger. I thought back to what Murphy had said the night of our dinner, about me replacing his aunt.
If the point of it is the bond, and if she and I were a weak pairing …
Garvey and his wife certainly seemed a pairing doomed to fail.
“How is she your own private Dante?” asked Murphy.
Garvey gave him a look of disbelief. “Can you imagine living with that, and never being able to touch it?”
Murphy gazed down at his glass, smiling. “I can, actually.”
His meaning took a moment to register, but when it did I flushed and gave him a sideways kick.
“Ow!” he protested. “Honestly, love, you have no idea.”
Oh, I had an idea. Flashing back to the morning I’d encountered his half-naked body on the sofa, I let my knee swing out to brush his leg. His hand drifted down to squeeze my thigh, and something combusted low in my abdomen.
Garvey was still snickering appreciatively when I said, “I take it you’re not Yasmina’s type.”
“Nope. Your friend Sarah’s more her type.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, ah. Don’t get me wrong, we mostly get along fine. She’s a terrific copilot, has a great sense of humor, really smart too. Makes a perfect martini and can shoot straighter than I can. Has to follow me everywhere, just like the rest of them, but won’t fucking touch me. Believe me, I’ve tried. Once when I was drunk and disorderly, she knocked a couple of teeth out.”
None of this boded well for our theory about interaction and detachment. This pair had been interacting on a regular basis. Maybe, as Murphy had suggested, something more was required.
But setting aside detachment—and Garvey’s sexual frustrations—there was definitely something interesting going on between these two.
“Garvey, I wanted to ask about the plants in your cockpit.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t ask me to explain that. I can’t.”
“Can you tell me when they started growing?”
“Pretty much as soon as we bought the ship. When they first started popping up we tried cleaning them out, but the cracks they left got worse and worse. I think they’re creepy as hell—I mean there’s no soil, no water. They’re growing out of metal and plastic and air. But Yas likes them. She said we should leave them alone.”
“And you did?”
“Yup. She was right. If we just live and let live, they don’t cause any problems with the ship. In the beginning it seemed like they were always in our way, but now we hardly notice them anymore.” He held up a pudgy finger. “That’s not true. Yas sings to them. Especially the ones over her bed. Crazy fucking bitch.”
There was so much affection in his voice as he said this it was impossible to hold it against him.
“Murphy,” I said, spinning my seat toward him, “I went looking under my bed for my shoe this morning, and I found a patch of clover growing right out of the floor. I pulled up some of it—it was definitely the real thing. Somehow I don’t think this is a coincidence.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I agree. You said under the bed?”
I felt the heat creeping into my cheeks. The bed, where we’d made love, but also where we’d discussed our ideas and plotted our escape. Where I’d lain night after night thinking of him. Missing him. Remembering our time together.
I thought about Gaia theory—the idea of a planet functioning like a single organism—and the environmental changes on Ardagh 1 since the ghosts’ arrival. Mitchell blamed the ghosts, but what if she had it backwards? Maybe it had come back to the Ghost Protocol again.
“Could it be there’s a connection between the ghost/host relationship and the planet itself?” I asked Murphy. “Maybe this cold war is rippling out and affecting the whole system.”
Thoug
ht lines creased his forehead. He began to nod. “Based on the idea that the spontaneous growth is a result of pairs in balance.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s an idea worth exploring. But most scientists view the ghosts and planetary instability as symptoms of the same disease. I don’t know how we’d get anyone to listen to us.”
“We need to find someplace where we can test some of our ideas.” I glanced at Garvey. “Maybe we’ll see more of this kind of thing in this colony we’re going to. There’s no Ghost Protocol there, right?”
“That’s true,” Garvey said, eyeing his empty glass. “But things are a bit different there. Which reminds me.” He looked at Murphy. “I recognize you too. Seen you on the news. You’re a shrink, right? Grayson Murphy. One of the protocol guys.”
Murphy had about half a shot left, and he tossed it back. “Yes, that’s right.”
Garvey clucked and shook his head. “Look at the pair of us. How the mighty have fallen, eh?”
Murphy replaced his glass on the bar and angled his body toward mine. “So it would seem.” But the way his hand came up to slide along the curve of my waist said something completely different.
I slipped my fingers into his hair, brushing it back from his face. The whisky vapors lost their noxious quality when filtered out through him. In fact, I was finding it incredibly sexy breathing his whisky breath. I leaned in and kissed him softly, and he gave a quiet moan.
“That’ll be my cue to go,” grumbled Garvey, turning toward the cockpit. “Couple more hours before we get to Devil’s Rock. The sleeping compartment is on the other side of that wall. Use my bed. I’m begging you.”
Murphy reached for my hand, raising my fingers to his lips. “What are you thinking about?”
“How much I hate your eyes.”
“Ah, that’s a shame.”
I ran my fingers over his lips. “And your mouth.”
“You’re wounding me, love.”
“And that adorable fucking accent.”
“You’re the one with the accent.”
I slipped off the stool and wriggled between his legs. He wrapped them around me.
“Well, mine’s not adorable.”
Ghost Planet Page 15