I interrupted. “I know this story. They all disappeared, hundreds of them.”
“Yes, no one knew where they went. Until now.”
“Is everyone else back on Wandering Star?”
“No,” Angela answered, I’m still here and Jake refused to leave without you and I didn’t have time to argue with him. And Alice. I can’t find her. She’s been spending all of her time with the colonists, I mean clan members,” she corrected herself. “She’s not answering.”
“I’ll be there as quickly as I can. Is Velena there with you?”
“No, I want as few people on the surface as possible. The Bovita don’t know we suspect anything yet but I don’t know how long that will last. Star was not able to identify any place a shuttle could land near you. Did you see anything she may have missed?”
“No, it’s too rough here. I’ll let you know when I’m getting close.”
I consulted the route Star had laid out for me and veered west. The Tarakana blocked me, wrapping tentacles around my legs.
“You’re crazy,” I told them, “this way will cut a half a kilometer off the trail between here and the bridge. I pushed past them to the top of the rise and understood.
“Go east you told me. Stay south.” I looked down into a slot canyon that broadened out across the desert floor. There were too many openings in the rock walls to count, structures built on the canyon floor and green fields stretching out into the valley. Artificial light filled the windows and there were Tarakana everywhere.
“You did a good job hiding this from us. I’d like to know how.” I came back down from the rise letting them lead me along their path to the bridge, my mind numb. I reached the ridge above the bridge about an hour later. I could see the town a couple of kilometers away, the lights from our lab glowing bright. One of Star’s shuttles circled the landing pad settling with a swirl of dust. About the same time a thick plume of black smoke rose over the town square followed six seconds later by the distant sound of the explosion. The sound of gunfire followed, the flashes of plasma rounds visible in the streets.
“Jake?” I called. No answer. “Star?” Nothing.
I started to run, the Tarakana easily keeping up. I was half way across the bridge when six of them blocked the far side, more crowding in behind them. I could feel that they were determined to not let me pass and I knew there was no way for me to force my way through them.
“My friends are down there, you have to let me go to them.” The tentacles waved and the tips rotated and they did not move.
I turned to go back the way Star had originally mapped, far to the east. Three Tarakana entered the bridge on that side, advancing toward me with more behind them. I backed up, knowing that they were driving me into the others but unable to stop myself. Emotions washed over me and I couldn’t tell which were mine and which came from the Tarakana. Fear, anger, frustration, compassion, friendship, love all mixed together.
“Please let me go,” I whispered. I felt tentacles wrap around me from behind, around my head, around my chest making it hard to breathe. I felt myself collapse to my knees. They were inside me now, poking gently at my thoughts and I wanted to scream but couldn’t.
Then the three Tarakana in front of me changed. In an instant they were transformed and I was looking at three women, beautiful and naked. The thought filled my head, almost in words.
“You don’t have to be afraid. We will protect you. You are safe here.”
I forced the words out, like trying to speak in a nightmare. “No, you can’t hide what you really are. You can’t fool me, I’ve seen you. You are monsters.”
“Monsters? We are not the monsters. Our shapes are fluid but no matter what shape we take it must always reflect the beauty within us. It is you that use your hard shapes to hide the monsters inside you.”
“Why won’t you let me go?”
One of the women knelt and put her hand on my cheek. The illusion was perfect, the feel of her fingers and the look of compassion in her eyes. But the voice when she spoke was in my head and her mouth did not move.
“There are pieces of you dying, several are already dead. We can keep you safe here.”
“Pieces?” I felt the Tarakana thinking together.
“We are one, with many pieces. It is more difficult with you. You are both one and a piece which makes no sense.”
The other two woman put their hands on me and I closed my eyes. “Why did you take this shape?”
“In your mind this is beauty. We thought it would calm you.”
When I opened my eyes the women were gone. “Will you please let me go? If you see my thoughts, you know I must.”
The Tarakana backed away from the bridge and I felt sadness from them and regret. I ran, calling for Jake and Angela and Star. Still no answers. The shuttle that was on the pad took off and was replaced with the other one. It stayed only a few minutes before leaving. I was still a kilometer away when the two shuttles returned and then quickly left again.
I ran into the town, not knowing if it was safe, not knowing what I would find. There were bodies in the street in front of the courthouse. Hetman Skorzeny was there along with his first wife Lana and pregnant third wife Tirana, their bodies torn apart by plasma blasts. The guards lay nearby. There may have been more inside the courthouse but what was left of it was still burning. I continued on to our lab where I found Jake sitting leaned up against the wall by the front door. I knelt down next to him.
“How you doing, Jake?” It looked like he had been hit in the shoulder and blood was soaking his shirt and left sleeve.
“About damn time you got here. Been waiting.”
“I see that. You’re an idiot. You should be on Wandering Star right now.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t want you to have an adventure without me again.”
“Let me look at your shoulder.” I reached for him but he shook his head.
“Don’t bother. The one on my back is worse.”
I sat down next to him. “What happened here?”
“We lost the ship. There was a firefight between different factions of the clan, I don’t know where they got the weapons, but we lost the ship.”
“Angela and Alice?” I asked.
“I don’t know about Alice but Angela is dead. She was standing by the ramp from the landing pad when the first shuttle came in. Hit in the chest. I saw her fall and then she was hit again and again, maybe eight or ten more times. I was running around the corner toward the sound of the gunfire—”
“Because you’re an idiot.”
He smiled, “Yeah. I came around the corner and someone yelled ‘not him, we need him’ but they killed me anyway.”
“You’re not dead yet.”
“Don’t try to pretend it’s going to be OK.”
I sat with him for a while, listening to him breathe. It seemed to be getting harder for him.
“Ted, you know how they were able to take the ship, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
“There’s only one person that could defeat all of the safeguards that are built into her. You know that.”
“It could have been something else. It must have been something else.”
“Now who’s the idiot?” He paused, his eyes looking at the sky as the first stars appeared. “Ted, I keep thinking about my folks. They worked really hard to get me through the Academy, to help me reach this dream you and I shared. When you tell them about this—” He paused again, finding it hard to finish.
“I’ll tell them how much it all meant to you.”
He shook his head. “Don’t tell them that. This is going to be hard for them. Just tell them that I love them. That will be enough.”
I sat holding his hand for a long time and then, sometime after it was fully dark, I reached over and closed his eyes for him.
I was still sitting next to him when Alice found me. I watched the beam of her light moving down the street, shining into the buildings as she searched, but I didn’t call out to her.
“Ted, are you all right?”
I nodded and stood up. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. Jake? I saw him get hit but I hoped it was minor.”
“He’s gone. Where were you when all this was happening?”
“I was in the lab when it started. I saw Angela get hit over and over again. There’s not much left. And then Jake was hit and I ran.”
“Away from the gunfire.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I let this happen. I let my friends die and our Wandering Star get stolen while I hid and did nothing to stop it.” I could hear the disgust in her voice, the cold, pitiless self-hatred. “I’m a coward.”
I held her against me, feeling how thin she was under her coat, her forehead cold when I kissed it.
“If you had fought against them it would have been just one more grave for me to dig, one less friend for me to hold.” I held her for a long time, not wanting to do anything else, not wanting to face what I knew had to come next. In the end, Alice said it.
“We need to move Jake and Angela. I’ll get a couple of blankets. There’s not much more we can do tonight.”
I helped her wrap the bodies and we carried them to the base of the ramp by the landing pad. She prayed over them and we returned to the lab.
The rooms were dark and cold. Wandering Star had been powering all of our lights and other systems remotely, now we had the batteries in our lights and not much else.
“We should eat,” Alice said.
“I’m not really hungry.”
“That’s your heart talking. Your stomach knows better.” She handed me a plate with synthetics of some kind on it and we sat at the long table in the middle of the room and ate by the light of the stars coming in through the shattered windows, saving the batteries in our lights.
Alice talked while we ate. “This stuff won’t last more than a day without refrigeration, but we have some packaged food that will. I imagine the batteries will last a month or more if we’re careful. The solar power system that was on top of the courthouse has been smashed. It will be awfully dark at night. And cold. Cold all the time.”
She was suddenly overwhelmed by it. “Ted, what will any of it matter? It could be years before anyone comes here again.”
“Have I told you about the Tarakana?”
“Those big chameleon things with the tentacles on their heads?” She waved her hands by her head. “The folks here told me that we can’t eat them, they’re poisonous.”
I smiled. “I’m not talking about eating them.” I told her everything I knew about them, how they trapped me on the bridge to protect me and the massive city built into the cliffs that Star had been unable to see from orbit or with her local sensors.
“Are they safe?”
“Safe? I don’t think so. When I looked down into their city I was terrified. They are intelligent, but not like us. We overlap in some areas. In others we will probably never understand each other. They seem to have perfect communication between all of them all the time, so they are kind of like one big mind, maybe one big distributed organism. What we would call an individual is just a ‘piece’ of that whole to them.”
“They seemed to understand what you think is beautiful.”
I felt myself blush in the dark. “Yes and no. Beautiful yes, and unbelievable in how perfect they looked. But they thought having three women in front of me like that, in that situation, would be calming. Not so much. I think it was more terrifying than seeing the city that they had kept hidden from us.”
“Will they help us?”
“I think so. They viewed the Bovita clan that was here as monsters and I can’t disagree with their assessment. They seem to like me, though.”
I helped Alice clear our plates and set them by the non-functional recycler.
“Thank you for making me eat,” I told her. “I feel a little better.”
“Sure.” She looked up at me and I could see her shivering.
“Are you cold?” I looked at my watch. “I hadn’t realized how late it is. We should try to get some rest, although I don’t expect I’ll sleep much.”
We walked into the dorms and I helped her find extra blankets for her bunk. She dumped her coat on the floor and slid between the covers still fully clothed. I sat down next to her.
“Ted?”
“Yes?”
“Please take this at face value, I mean nothing else by it. I don’t want to be alone here tonight. Will you please lie down next to me?”
“Of course. I don’t want to be alone either.” I took off my coat and slid in next to her. She pushed up against me and put her head on my shoulder.
“Tell me about Jake.”
“Jake.” It was surprised how hard it was to say his name. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to hear stories of the two of you growing up. Funny stories.”
“OK. There’s a lot of them. I hope you don’t need to be anywhere else for a while.”
She smiled. “Not for a while.”
I tried to tell them in order but one story would remind me of something that happened years later and that one would bring me back again to when we were little. After an hour or more I noticed that Alice had stopped responding. I looked at her asleep on my shoulder. I put my arms around her, closed my eyes and we slept together that way on the first night.
I felt Alice stir and looked at her, pale light visible in the windows.
She looked at me and said, “I don’t like God very much sometimes.”
“Oh?”
“I love the Lord and always will. I respect him. I fear him. But this morning I don’t like him.”
“I understand.”
“No, it’s not what you think. I don’t blame God for the horrors that we create for ourselves. You and I will be burying friends today but that’s not God’s doing.
“I had a teacher at seminary,” she continued, “who always told us that we should be careful about continuing to pray for something after God had told us ‘no’. He said that we risked God becoming tired of us asking, that he would relent and give it to us and that we may not like it. ‘Here, Alice, here’s what you prayed for. Is this really what you wanted?’ Sometimes the way prayers are answered seems so cruel.”
I held her a little tighter. “What did you pray for, Alice?”
“You know what I prayed for,” she whispered.
“Tell me anyway.”
She sighed, a ragged sound, and said very softly, “To have you in my bed and to wake up in the morning with your arms around me.”
“That’s an interesting thing for my chaplain to be praying for.”
“Hush. It was a long term goal. I have been married and had my husband taken from me. I want that intimacy again that comes from sharing your life with another person not just the physical ecstasy that comes with sharing your body with someone you love.”
“Alice…”
“You don’t need to say anything.” She pressed on my chest with her hand. “I have no claim on this heart. I know who owns it and there is no situation I can imagine that would lead you to forsake her. I would still like to be your friend. When I die, I want you to have as many good stories with me in them as you do with Jake. That’s my new prayer. It’s probably just as dangerous as the last one.”
“There’s already a few I could tell.”
She smiled. “I need to get up.”
“Yeah, me too.”
We got ready for the day, ate a cold breakfast and stepped out onto the street. The smell of smoke from the courthouse still lingered.
“There are tools in a shed by the farms,” Alice said. “There should be sh
ovels.”
We walked there together, the depth of the catastrophe making the morning sunlight seem unreal.
“We’re the only ones here.”
“Yes,” Alice replied. “The Hetman’s inner circle are all dead and the rest are on board Wandering Star with all of our team. I pray for their safety.”
I looked at the hills around us, the abandoned fields and decaying building. “On the whole planet, just us.”
Alice stopped. “Don’t do that. You’re about the only thing holding me together right now. If you start to slide you’re going to take me right along with you.”
“I’m sorry.” I looked around at the horizon again.
“What are you looking for?”
“The Tarakana. I thought they would be here this morning.”
Alice looked at me like she was starting to doubt what I had told her the night before.
“I’m sure they’ll be along, Ted.”
We dug two graves near the bottom of the ramp leading up to the landing pad. It seemed appropriate to lay them to rest there. Alice and I prayed together when it was done and I captured an image of it with my display pad to show to Jake’s family whenever I might see them again.
“Are you close to Jake’s family?” Alice asked while we were walking into town, shovels over our shoulders.
“My mom died when I was eight, about the same time I met Jake. His Mom became my mom, his Dad a second father to me.”
“Your father never remarried?”
“No, my sisters and I would have been OK with it, we even encouraged him. But he was busy with work, busy raising three kids. My mom left a particular shaped hole in his heart and he could never find anyone else that could quite fill it.”
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