The front door creaked open. Apparently she was back for the wallet.
Cassandra would accuse him of snooping, he was sure of it. He had to make a decision quick. The star-shaped earrings sat in a box on the nightstand. They were the perfect target. If Cassandra ever got rid of them it meant that whatever feelings she had for him were gone forever. Cassandra with no earrings meant that he had truly lost her. He quickly targeted the box. Joe then grabbed her wallet and turned to see her standing in the doorway.
“You forgot this,” he said. Had she seen what he had done?
Without a word, she snatched the wallet from his hands and stormed back out.
It was a few weeks later that Joe found himself moving out for good. He had refused to go with the flow. The fact that she had slept with Jonathan and Joe retaliated by shtupping a barista on one of his smuggling missions probably hadn’t helped matters.
As he got into his newly purchased Crown Vik, with the last of his boxes, Cassandra said something that had been stuck in his crawl ever since.
“You know, Joe, you don’t really love anything or anyone. All you love is the feeling they give you.”
Joe wasn’t sure if she meant him specifically or people in general. In the end it didn’t really matter.
He flew off and went to work for Alma until she was arrested for her smuggling ring. It was Joe’s fault, he had left one of her business cards in a shipment of Colonial furniture that was seized by a Border Patrol. Instead of facing the music, Joe ran off.
Alma managed to avoid jail time, because she had a pretty good lawyer, but had to set up shop on the opposite end of the galaxy where her name was, as of yet, unknown – Falsterboo.
Joe was in dire need of work, having just put down all his cash in the Crown Vik purchase. After reading in an online magazine how desperate they were for police officers in the outer rim, he decided to apply for an easy sheriff’s gig. He checked which sector had the lowest crime rate and 121 was at the top of the list. To his surprise, he got the job. It shouldn’t have come as a shock to him, he had been the only applicant. Apparently the position didn’t require much more than a pulse, a means of transportation and the ability to use a firearm. Joe lied about the last requirement, figuring he could learn that on the job.
It wasn’t until he reported for duty did he realized that Sector 121 was the Talashaa Dyson Sphere sector.
Years passed and the next thing Joe knew he has in a sheriff’s uniform, listening to Tammy talk about her video game tournament.
Life was like that sometimes.
Time moves fast, faster than we even have the ability to comprehend, and the years drift past like fireflies in the night.
All this trickled through Joe’s mind as he rewound to the present, in search of Cassandra once again.
He stared at the compass’s arrow as he flew faster than light through subspace. Hopefully he would have enough gas to make it the whole way. The compass brought him to the Bengali system. That seemed like an unlikely place to hide a secret science facility.
When he dropped out of warp he was met with quite a bit of fanfare surrounding the small moon that was seemingly sitting there in the middle of nowhere, not orbiting anything at all. Emergency space vehicles and police cruisers overlooked the tugging rigs that were connected by large chains to the moon.
That’s when Joe recognized it. Bolstra 5’s old moon. It had drifted through space all the way here. The locals were evidently trying to figure out a way to tow it out of their system before it screwed up any more of their tidal cities.
On the southern half of the moon was one lonesome building. Moana’s Secondhand shop.
“Oh no...” Joe muttered.
Unless Cassandra herself was for sale, which was highly unlikely, it meant she had sold the earrings.
Joe considered just flying off into space, to the nearest space bar and getting absolutely hammered. But something told him to at least see the earrings one last time. Maybe even buy them back as a keepsake. Why he would want to be reminded of his life’s greatest failure, he didn’t know. Nonetheless, he dropped the ship down to the parking lot, got out and went inside the shop.
The old lady behind the counter, presumably Moana herself, nodded a greeting as he entered. She was smoking and reading from the local Bengali paper.
‘Jolly Moon Now Part of the Bengali System,’ the headline read. ‘Property Taxes Expected to Rise’.
Judging by the smell of the place she probably out-smoked her profit margin.
Joe nervously followed the compass along the shelves of trinkets and forlorn shoes, past the used blasters and antique comics, before finally coming to the used jewelry. There sat the very same box he had once smuggled all those years ago. It looked like it had just smuggled itself across a border one last time.
There inside the box sat one star-shaped earring. One. Lone. Earring.
What was that supposed to mean?
He searched the immediate area for the other. Had it been stolen? Or perhaps dropped from the box and tumbled beneath the shelf? That was when he noticed that all of the earrings for sale had only one of each pair on display. It was evidently a shoplifting deterrent.
Accepting his defeat, Joe took the box to the counter. “Is there another one of these?” he asked the old lady.
She nodded and went to a drawer.
Joe stood there staring at the one lone earring. What would he do with them now? It didn’t matter much anymore – Cassandra and no earrings meant that she didn’t love him any longer. All that seemed to pale in comparison with the fact that her life was in danger. The only thing that mattered to Joe in that moment was making sure she was safe. But even that seemed impossible now.
A distant third in his list of concerns was that of his own and humankind’s future.
The woman behind the counter returned with a hand scribbled note. “This particular earring was sold all by its lonesome,” she said. “And I can only sell them to a Joe. Are you a Joe?”
“I’m a Joe,” he said. “Can I see the note?”
She handed it to him.
“Are you ready to say sorry?” it said, in Cassandra’s distinctive boxy handwriting.
“Good news?” the old woman asked.
“I’m not sure,” Joe said. He went to his wallet to pay for the earring when he realized that he had no money to speak of. “You wouldn’t be willing to just give this one away? I mean, since there’s only one person you can sell them to and that person’s me?”
“I can’t do business like that, honey.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
He ran back out into the Crown Vik and looked around for anything of value that wasn’t bolted down. When that proved fruitless he turned his attention to the things that were bolted down. In the end he decided on the video display in the kitchen. He undid the screws and lugged it inside.
“I can give you the earring and 500 bucks worth of store credit,” the old woman announced, filling out a red paper voucher with a 500 on it.
“Can’t you give me cash to make up the difference?”
“I can’t do business that way.”
“Of course,” Joe said, looking around the store. “And you have so much that I’d love to buy...”
With a nod he left the video display and the voucher sitting on the counter and took the earring out to his ship. He sat down at his kitchen table to think.
It only seemed logical that Cassandra had kept the other earring, maybe even with her. He glanced at his compass. The needle remained firmly pointed at the earring before him. Perhaps this particular piece had received most of the targeting. Was there a chance that the second earring had received a portion of the targeting as well?
Joe took the gun from its holster and smashed the earring with the bottom of the grip until it broke into pieces on the table. He looked at the compass and paced around the room. The needle remained pointed at the broken bits before him. They needed to broken down even more. The gar
bage disposal!
Joe swept the earring pieces into his hand and dropped them down the drain in the sink. With the flip of a switch, and some particularly concerning sounds, the processor ground the earring down to dust. He looked back to the compass. It pointed towards the sink. He shook it. The needle wavered, but still remained aimed for the drain.
Joe removed the trap and poured the damp dust from the disposal out onto the table. Was there a way to get the pieces even smaller? He’d need to do it chemically somehow.
That’s when Joe remembered what he still had in the ship… that is, if Halle had gotten every detail just right. He went out and opened the door to the cargo hold and to his delight there sat a crate of Bezreal fruit. He grabbed one of the gray lemons and ran back up to the kitchen. Once he got the cutting board ready and a winter glove on his hand, Joe took a knife and cautiously cut the fruit open. The knife’s blade began to melt. He was dealing with some pretty potent stuff.
With great care he squeezed the juice onto the earring dust on the table. Drip. Drip. Drip-drip. Drip. The acid sizzled as it made contact with the aluminum, sending little puffs of steam into the air. The fumes gave Joe an instant headache and he put his face into his shirt. The metal was melted down into a mineral puddle.
Success!
But then the acid began to eat through the metal table. Joe had a brief anxiety attack as it dripped its way down to the floor.
Fortunately, the acid lost it’s potency and Joe breathed easy once again. He stared at the compass. The needle stood pointing at the table before slowly turning and pointing in a completely different direction entirely. Joe went and plugged it into the ship’s computer. Geez. It was all the way back near Deniz’s system. He zoomed in. The coordinates were at a junkyard.
Oh no.
Cassandra at a junkyard could only mean one thing.
17
“We have her whenever you’re ready, sir,” Saburo said.
“And she’s still turned off?” Applebottom asked, getting up from his desk and approaching over the carpeted floor to where he’d be conducting the interrogation.
“Of course, she’d be too dangerous otherwise. You know, it’s the strangest thing, she has a pleasure-bot design, but with assassin droid upgrades.”
“What do you make of that?” Applebottom asked, he had never heard of such a thing.
“Either she did them herself or…”
“Or she specializes in a very specific fetish clientele,” Applebottom wondered aloud.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“No, nothing, never mind. Bring her in.”
One of the petty officers wheeled the android in on a chair. The Kevlar restraints around her wrists, waist and ankles were approved for industrial mammoth farming. The girl wasn’t going anywhere.
Applebottom excused the officer and once he was alone he used his tablet to activate the android. Her eyes opened quickly and scanned the room.
“Good morning,” Applebottom said.
The girl didn’t say a word. Instead, she was looking for a way to escape. Her arms flexed as they tried to lift – looking for weak spots in her restraints, in the room, in the ship, in him.
“They wanted to disable you, you know?” Applebottom said. “Permanently. Scan you for information and then disintegrate you.”
“And you didn’t?” she asked.
“Only so I can collect as much information as possible, beyond the ones and zeroes.”
“Such as?”
“Why were you after the artifact?” Applebottom asked.
“Why should I tell you anything?”
“You don’t have to, I suppose. But since I have the power to either save or destroy you, it would only make sense for you to go with the flow.”
The android nodded. “Why are you after the artifact then?”
“We intend on using it as a weapon. See, honesty isn’t so hard. So why...”
“But the thing is, I can tell that’s a lie. Why are YOU after the artifact?”
Applebottom was quiet for a moment. Somehow she had sensed that his reasons for being in the game were different from everybody else.
“There are few things that I truly respect,” Applebottom said. “And curiosity is one of them. Since we’re going to disintegrate you anyway, and no one here seems to understand my point of view, I’ll humor you, but only if you promise to answer me back.”
The robot nodded.
“The strange thing about the artifact is that when people get a hold of it, all they can see is what is they want to see – what they crave the most. If they want power, a weapon, money, proof of the spiritual, regaining a good name – that’s what they’ll see. Even Halle saw what she wanted to see, I presume. Probably a way to be left alone.”
“And what is it you see?” the droid asked.
“I want to go down in history as a the greatest scientist who ever lived.”
The droid stared at him, perplexed. “And how would you do that with a weapon?”
“You’ve heard of the Nobel Peace Prize?” Applebottom asked. “You know who Alfred Nobel is? He was the man who invented dynamite. They thought that he had discovered something so destructive and terrible that it would, in effect, prove to be a deterrent to war forever. Time proved that wrong, of course. But they came to the same conclusion when they invented the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb and planetary bombardment system after that. Do you know why we stopped making bigger bombs at the PBS? Because we couldn’t make bigger bombs. Explosions can’t travel through space. It seems in the same way that the void of space kept life from spreading from planet to planet, it did the same with death and destruction. And since we all are spread out over the galaxy there is very little that can actually scare people away from killing each other. Do you know how many military conflicts are going on right now? I just looked it up. Nine hundred and forty-seven. Not to mention all the famine and rape and torture that goes along with it. We need a more destructive weapon. The CGE want to hack the artifact to target only our enemies. I’m not entirely sure that’s possible. But at the end of the day, what’s a better deterrent to war than an entire species exterminator? Nothing. It’s the last logical step. The ultimate aversion to war.”
“What makes you think that will change anything?”
“It has to. The super-powers are gearing up for a conflict we’re not likely to recover from.”
“We’ve survived in the past,” she said.
Applebottom admired her optimism, and the fact that she considered herself part of ‘we’. “But this time round we can avoid all the trouble.”
“By threatening to extinct ourselves...”
“Either way, no more war,” Applebottom said with a grin.
The android nodded and sort of scoffed to herself.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“It’s just... my ex. He always believed we would destroy ourselves eventually. I just never thought he’d be right.”
“Your ex sounds like a smart man,” Applebottom said. “Any-who, since all of this is top secret, I’m going to have to turn you off now.”
“So this is it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And I’ll be disintegrated?”
Applebottom nodded.
The girl’s eyes grew big. She was sincerely terrified.
She tried one last time to get out of the restraints. When that proved fruitless, her body slumped down into acceptance.
“In that case, could you send a message to a man named Joe Corbit?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Tell him… that I loved him. I really did. But he never believed it.”
Applebottom pretended to write this down on his tablet. He had more important things to do than to deliver love notes across the galaxy. “Anything else?”
Tears began to swell in the girl’s eyes. She couldn’t tell he had no intentions of sending the message, could she?
“Thank you for the conversation,”
she said, her voice cracking the tiniest bit. “I hope you get everything you hope for.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” Applebottom said. “Goodbye now.”
And with that he shut her down with his tablet. The android’s head drooped and her eyes closed. She sat there, so helpless. She could have told him off, or cursed him or spat in his face... but she didn’t. Instead, she accepted his awfulness and wished him well.
He ordered the petty officer back into his office.
“Eject her from the ship,” Applebottom said. “Carefully.”
“So we’re not incinerating her?”
“No, we’re not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. You can blame it on me if you want.”
Applebottom turned back to his circular bay window overlooking the stars. Perhaps there was hope in the universe after all.
Cassandra was ejected from the ship and floated aimlessly for a while. Outer space is so wide open and huge that you could safely float for a million years without ever even coming close to hitting anything. Take a football stadium and toss a marble out there, except in this situation there’s no gravity to speak of, so the marble will simply float where it pleases. Now put a blindfold on and spin around a hundred times and fire a bullet from a gun. How many times would you run this scenario before hitting the marble?
Space is like that, but times a billion. The stadium is unfathomably bigger, the marble and the bullet infinitely smaller.
Luckily for Cassandra, the marble only floated for a half day before being hit by the bullet, or in this case, a scrap team headed for the Atari system. Unluckily for Cassandra, they intended on melting down her skeleton for it’s valuable metal.
The Talashaa were a peaceful people. All their national disagreements were handled in their religious courts. It is unknown whether or not they actually believed in any Great Specter, but it seems that religion continued to play a role in their daily lives right up until their extinction. There was no distinction between priest and scientist. In fact, most individuals of that occupation would have performed tasks both religious and scientific in nature. It has been theorized that they saw the universe as the handiwork of their gods and they as mortals were simply trying to figure out the mess their deities had made.
The Star Collector Page 17