by S A Asthana
“Almost there,” she mumbled.
A cavern came into view. It loomed large at the end of the passage, its interior lit brightly by four floodlights. The space appeared manmade with dirt flattened into a level floor, and smoothed rocky walls curved into a dome. A small spacecraft sat at the center. The dull blue metal glinted brilliantly under the lights and the words Nissan Kitsune One stood out clearly. It was similar in build and controls to the 1.V4s. The only real difference was its ion propulsion drive was layered under the hull, unlike its Martian counterpart. It made for a slower flight but was nothing that couldn’t be handled.
Marie stood without assistance. Looking at the craft, she said, “Standard Nipponese vehicle used for—”
“Water hauls,” Bastien cut in. “I’ve seen these delivering up at Port Sydney. The question is how do you happen to have one?”
“A gift.” Marie’s body radiated under the lights, beads of sweat sparkling over its curves. Knotted hair fell haphazardly around the shoulders. Both breasts and thighs, full and soft, were inviting despite the blotches of paint and blood. A cut ran the width of her breast. If there was pain, she didn’t let on. In her weakened state it would be easy to end her.
“You either want to kill me,” Marie turned to Bastien, “or fuck me.”
He looked away. Perhaps his stare had lingered too long.
“Fucking would be fine, but now is hardly the time.” Marie took a step towards him. Gone was the softness. She seemed back to her normal wicked self as if out of habit. “But killing is out of the question. No matter how much you might want to, you can’t.”
She was pressing his buttons. His rifle’s trigger could be squeezed so easily. Bang and done.
“The only reason you didn’t kill me back there was because you needed help escaping.” There was bitterness in her words. “Now, you’re thinking ‘hey, I’m a lieutenant general, and I can fly standard crafts myself, so why do I need this bitch?’”
Bastien locked eyes with her. His jaw clenched. Yeah, why do I?
“But where would you go, lieutenant general?” She circled him. He was prey once again. “Who would take you in? I don’t know how you’re still alive, but I do know nothing has changed for you.”
She was right. Nothing had really changed for him. If he shot her now and left in this craft, Port Sydney would not be an option. It could never be, especially, not after all that had happened. Neither would Nippon One. A Martian criminal manning a Nipponese cargo craft wouldn’t sit well with lunar port authority. He’d be arrested on the spot.
Nowhere left to go.
He was back at the round table in the waiting room with Marie, a lone light bulb illuminating his precarious circumstance. She stopped in front of him up on her toes, her lips an inch from his. “I can get us into Nips. You need me still.” The ugly truth. It was hard to admit, but the fact stared him in the face unabashed—she had connections he didn’t. “The real question is whether I still need you, mon amour.”
Her audacity was unbelievable. A hot burning swelled his chest.
“You think very highly of yourself, don’t you?” he spat back.
Her left eye twitched.
“You think yourself a god,” he pressed, “but that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“Careful.”
“I just saved your life! You’d be dead if it weren’t for me.”
Her tentacles shot out. A sharp tip hovered an inch from his nose, the smell of cold steel strong. Her ego had been bruised.
Time to enlighten. “You need me more than I need you.” It was his turn to circle Marie. “You are now marked. Just like me. But you are a much bigger target.”
She lowered herself and let her heels feel the dirt again. Her tentacles retracted.
“Once the Martians realize you’re alive — and they will realize that when they recover Cube’s data and optic feeds — what do you think is going to happen?”
She was a statue now. The thin veil of confidence had ripped and her doubt stared through.
“With New Paris gone, they will look to Nippon One for your whereabouts. They’ll realize the Emperor is harboring you.”
“How do you know I was going to him?” Marie interjected, her eyes lowered.
“Oh, come on.” Bastien threw up his arms. “This cargo ship, that solar farm, the electricity — everyone knows of your special relationship with him.”
Marie sighed.
“Can you trust him?” he whispered doubt into her ear.
She nodded. It was subtle.
“Really? You sure about that one? He’d protect you even if it meant putting Nippon One at risk?”
She searched the ground at her dusty toes as if for answers. “Akiyama wouldn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t do that to us.”
“Harboring a wanted criminal, which is what you are now, would mean he’d be breaking the treaty. And we’ve seen what breaking treaties can lead to.” Bastien pointed back at the tunnel as if the Parisian ruins lay just within. “You need me because I’m all you can trust now.”
Time to play his ace. “Plus, between us two, I’m the only one who can fly this damn craft out of here.” From what he’d seen of her, she couldn’t possibly fly a spacecraft. Marie had had servants for every trivial task. Flying a Nipponese cargo hauler wouldn’t have been an exception.
He had the upper hand. Marie’s face went long and she glanced at the craft, then back over at the tunnel. Her eyes widened. “Fog!” Jade swirls floated into the cavern.
The bickering, the powerplay—the time for all that was over. “Move, now!”
They ran to the craft. Her fingerprint on a pad unlocked the door.
He studied the ceiling. “Tell me the dome above us opens too.”
“Of course,” Marie said. “A button in the cockpit.”
Bastien stepped into a narrow cargo bay. It was much smaller than anticipated. Stacks of plastic crates lined the walls and littered the middle, all tethered in place by thick cloth belts. Marie caught his raised eyebrow, and answered, “They’re leverage.”
It made sense. Of course. Euphoria held high value in Nippon One.
“Strap in,” he said, looking around the two-seater cockpit. It was tin can claustrophobic, its monitors and multi-colored buttons jutting out as if wanting to smother him.
CHAPTER 27: CRONE
The recovered video feed played in a darkened briefing room. Frank’s stare darted from one point on the screen to another, his fingers rapping the conference desk all the while. His lips hurt—he couldn’t remember how long he’d been pressing them together. The images were hard to make sense of. Flames, explosions, grunts—warfare didn’t make for easy viewing.
“What exactly am I supposed to be seeing here, Smith?” Frank leaned back in the leather chair and sighed. “It’s been six minutes of nonsense.”
The ponytailed blonde officer sitting to his left instructed the room’s computer, “Fast-forward one minute and thirty-three seconds.”
The screen blinked and then displayed a woman standing at the center, ready for battle. Her features were difficult to discern on account of the feed.
Frank leaned forward, his elbows on the conference table, his eyes narrow in concentration. Those strange appendages on her back—must have been six of them.
“That’s Marie, right?”
“Yes, General. This is where Cube faces off with her.”
Frank’s thick fingers curled into fists. “Tell me she dies at the end of this?” Frank turned to Alice and barked, “Tell me she dies.”
“S-sorry, General. It’s hard to objectively prove her death.” Alice folded her arms while her eyes remained fixed on the screen. “Cube has Marie on the ground at one point, but then this happens.” The feed flashed white twice as if the robot’s optics were interrupted. The line of sight swiveled to the left, and a man came into view. He was holding a rifle.
“Is that…?” Frank strained his eyes. A vein throbbed on his neck.
“It can’t be.”
“It is,” Alice confirmed, her voice solemn. “I ran a facial recog suite with over a hundred passes. Bastien seems to be helping her.”
The screen turned black abruptly. “It’s done?” Frank stood, his silver locks askew.
Smith nodded.
“Tell me there’s more in the data recovery, Lieutenant General.”
A pile of papers was pulled from a black briefcase. Alice placed it on the desk and pushed it towards Frank. “This is a small portion of the logs. I was only able to recover an hour’s worth. Nothing else was salvageable.”
Frank studied the first page. The same piece of code repeated itself from top to bottom:
>PLAY {Beethoven.Fur_Elise.mus}
!FILE NOT FOUND
>EMOTION = anger.dat
Every page had the same command lines. They repeated over and over. There must have been thousands of loops in all.
“I… don’t understand. What is this?” Frank let the pages slip from his fingers.
“There’s another pile just like this,” Alice added.
Banging the conference table with a fist, Frank shouted, “I don’t care about that other pile. I want to know what this one means?”
Taking a deep breath, Alice explained, “Cube’s code was corrupted. Somehow… perhaps, when I did the first data recovery, pieces of it became jumbled during the process. By the time the operation was underway, those erratic pieces got caught up in a loop.”
“To this extent?” Frank picked up a paper and looked its length up and down. “What the hell is a Beethoven, anyway?”
“He was a classical composer from—”
“Silence!” He crumpled up the paper and threw it to the side. Leaning forward on his knuckles with eyes unseeing, he said, “Cube’s dead. Again.”
“Affirmative. There is no signal.”
“The rest of the unit – the hundred soldiers and the gunners for the three tanks – they are all dead, too?”
“Affirmative.” Alice nodded, her glance darting from Frank to the conference table and back. “Their trackers have been either sending back flat lines for multiple hours now, or no signal at all.”
“And the 1.V10?”
“No signal from it either, General. It seemed to have died right at landing.”
Frank caressed his temples. He cleared his throat. “Okay, so… let me get all of this straight. We have definitive proof of death for our entire unit, every single one of them, but we don’t have any definitive proof of Marie’s death.”
“Nor Bastien’s.” She winced. Frank shot her a glance, a look that screamed to shut up.
“General Crone?” A voice, melodic and pointed all at once, interrupted on the earpiece. It was familiar. A pit formed in Frank’s stomach.
“Yes?” he managed to ask. All the saliva drained from his mouth.
“The High Council would like an update on Liberate New Paris.”
Frank nodded, his eyes wide. “I’ll be over at once.” He took several deep breaths. Nothing was said. The dull din of electronics seeped through the walls. His glare worked from paper to paper on the floor. Cube had lost its damn mind. That was infinitely clear. The operation had been doomed from the start. Smith might have been a better choice to lead the assault, after all. The situation was spiraling out of control. It needed to be reined in before it got worse—much worse.
Something clicked in Frank’s head.
“Computer, delete conversation history for past hour.” He broke the silence. A couple of beeps signaled the instructions had been processed. “Computer, delete current video, and stop recording conversation.”
For the High Council—perhaps, not.
Turning to Alice, Frank raised a pointer finger and ordered, “This conversation, that video – it never happened.”
She blinked several times as if processing the words.
“The High Council cannot know the truth,” Frank spoke in a near whisper. “As far as they are concerned, the operation was a success. Sure, our troops were killed, but Marie was also killed.”
“And Bastien?”
“What about him? He died in the crash with Cube days ago.” Frank stood. “We never saw him on this video.”
He paced the room back and forth with hands clasped tight behind his back. Chess pieces moved before him.
“Let’s play this out. Marie either finds a way to escape Earth, or she dies there,” Frank started, sounding more like a professor than a General. “There’s nowhere left to go since New Paris is destroyed, so, if she wants to live, she will head to Nippon One. And Akiyama will provide her cover given their… ties.”
He nodded as if satisfied with his train of thought thus far.
“Now, Akiyama is a political chess master so, he won’t advertise any of this. He wouldn’t want to come across as someone who harbors criminals. Marie did break the treaty multiple times—no one would want to give her asylum publicly.”
“But he’d still be breaking the treaty,” Alice said. “He should be confronted, and Marie extracted.”
“Absolutely not.” Frank pounded a fist into his left hand, the General in him punching away the professor. “We have strong trading ties with Nippon One—water, aluminum, magnesium, titanium, the list goes on and on. The last thing we want to do is affect them because of this mess. Don’t be a machine. Don’t be the High Council, thinking in right and wrong, in bits and bytes. There is a lot of grey here to be considered.”
“But—” Alice raised a finger.
“Silence!” He walked over to Alice and stared down his nose at her. “No more arguing with your superior.”
Her eyes remained low as she nodded.
“There is going to be political fallout with Nippon One because of our assault on New Paris.” Frank was talking more to himself than Smith. She was nothing more than a prop. “The two were trading partners, after all. We would have to figure out how to pacify the situation. I will work with Akiyama directly on that one. He is a sensible man. He will understand why we did what we did. The Trilateral Treaty is not just some useless document.”
“What about Marie?” Alice stood, emboldened by her counterpoint. “She’s an unpredictable variable.”
“Point?” Frank’s sneer spoke volumes. She wasn’t following instructions.
“Point is that… what if she gets to Nippon One and then publicly blasts you for invading New Paris. Everything, including her being alive, and perhaps even Bastien being alive, would come to light, and that after you have informed the High Council she was killed in the attack. Your lie would be found out.”
Blood drained from Frank’s face. Everything had been airtight, but Alice found the seam to burst the bubble. She was good at that. One of the reasons why the doe-eyed girl had risen fast and become a ranking officer before twenty-five. More than a mere prop, after all.
Taking a seat, Frank leaned back and rubbed his temples again. “Damn.”
“We should…” Alice paused, “…tell the High Council the truth.”
The words seemed to suck the artificially pumped oxygen out of the room. Frank locked eyes with her. A part of him wanted to rip Alice to shreds for even suggesting such an option. Despite the rank, she was still naïve. A fawn doing a lion’s work. He switched his tack. Something more direct. “Do you want blood on your hands, Alice?”
“I’m not sure I understand, General.”
“Allow me to help you understand, then. There are two certainties.” Frank’s face was grim, the bags under his eyes bloated and sagging. “If we tell the truth, the High Council will purge me. That is the first certainty.”
The High Council had warned him to do this liberation swiftly and efficiently so he could redeem himself in their eyes. Fail, even partly, and there would be consequences.
“Then, they would want Marie hunted down,” Frank continued. “The treaty is hardcoded within them, and they’d stick to it no matter what. If it came down to it, I suspect Akiyama would protect M
arie. You know what that means, Smith? There’d be a trade war with them. Then… there’d be an actual war. That is where all of this will inevitably lead! The war to end all wars. War between the last two colonies. Humanity’s end. No more you. No more me. That is the second certainty.”
There they were—the truths behind all the jumping, twisting, and bending. The reasons he wanted to perform his magic act. Frank, the grand illusionist. He almost smiled in self-pity. The diminishing of food rations, the stasis of fetuses, the purge, the destruction of New Paris—all those times he’d towed the line, shut away his doubts, and turned a blind eye in favor of orders, never did he ever think he’d be in this position. Frank, the guardian between man and destruction. Frank, the twisted nail amongst a series of straight ones.
For the High Council, a maxim of the past. Their true colors were now all too clear. Logical, efficient, yes, but also indifferent towards humanity. Capable of shifting the line further and further down. Till when? Nobody knew. This is a slippery slope, Bastien had said. Maybe the righteous buffoon had been correct after all.
“General Crone,” the sing-song voice stabbed his earpiece again, “they are waiting.”
“Coming.” Frank pursed his lips. “Coming, now.” His heart beat like a drum. Telling the truth was not an option. No, not at all. The stakes were too high.
He pulled Alice toward him by the collar. “Figure out if Marie is alive.” The rip of fabric pierced the room. “Find someone local in Nippon One and have them take care of her before she becomes the reason for mankind’s end.”
“I-I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with this.” She was denser than he’d thought. Too much time in the bowels of servers and data had made her forget there was blood flowing through her veins, not code.
“You’re an accomplice now.” Frank’s jaw clenched. “A companion in my hell. You must do this. Or we all die. There will be consequences for us all.” Releasing her uniform, he stormed out of the room.
CHAPTER 28: BASTIEN
“Estimated time of arrival thirty minutes,” the Kitsune’s computer announced. Bastien and Marie jolted awake. The craft had triggered its autopilot once manually flown out of Earth’s atmosphere, leaving the two passengers to focus on pressing matters—their respective injuries and sleep. Regenerator paste, the standard store of first aid kits in cargo crafts’ medic compartments, soothed their wounds some, ultimately allowing for a slumber borne of exhaustion.