That moment had ended her childhood, and it had destroyed Nisreen as her mother.
Grinding her teeth, she swallowed a wave of frustration. She turned and looked back across the empty spaceport concourse. Since the quarantine, none of the Mars Colonies had a need for a spaceport, but still the bots maintained the space. No one had re-purposed the machines, so they trundled around the waiting areas, looking for things to clean. Carpet to vacuum, dust to collect.
It was pointless. A sad epitaph to a day that would never come again.
Hope without reason when no one could ever leave.
A flash of light danced across the chrome and polished wall surfaces and she twisted back to look out of the dome. Off in the distance a shuttle arced through the almost dark night sky, coming in low and fast over the mountains. Its hydrogen fusion engine kicked out a blue-white flame that sent twisting shadows across the narrow valley.
The main dome of Bradbury sat on the edge of the Libya Montes Region of Isidis Planitia, but rather than approaching from across the much safer open plains, the pilot skimmed the surface, barely clearing the crest of the lower foothills.
The wrong direction. She felt it, even before her mind explained why. He was trying not to be seen. Images from her past surged up again.
She’d been here before, waiting for a shuttle with her mother.
It was after everything had gone wrong, and her father had gotten sick. Along with almost everyone else. Looking back on it now, she knew that the memories of a seven-year-old refused to see the reality. It was when he had died.
Nisreen had been a doctor and one of the first to evacuate to the Twin Cities. They’d squeezed into a loop car with so many people that her mother tied a tether around her to keep her from being lost in the crushing press of bodies. She’d stood, very near to this exact spot eleven years ago, staring out at the same red horizon and watching Phobos rise in the west and swim slowly into the sky. Her mother stood behind her with her hands pressed against the plasglass dome and her arms locked to hold back the wall of people behind them.
She remembered crying. So much crying. Children. Women. Even men. Sobbing.
But not Nisreen Sokat.
Her mother stood strong and unwavering while the ground shook as the huge passenger shuttle swung in over the top of the dome, overwhelming the sounds of the people with the boom of thunder. Strangely, it was the details of that moment that she remembered. Watching the flames of the shuttle engines splashing wide as they pounded into the hard polycon tarmac of the landing pad.
She was too young then to understand what was happening around her, so she just watched things and clung to the tether that kept her with her mother. She trusted that Momma would keep them both safe until Papa could find them and rescue them.
The shuttle had taken them away from Mars and dropped them in Stickney Commons on Phobos, but the nightmare had chased them there. Millions of refugees squeezed into a dome only big enough for twenty thousand. They slept on the floor in a corridor for weeks, eating stale yeastcakes and drinking barely reprocessed water. She could still remember the taste of the water. Brackish and acidic.
Finally someone had tracked the records down and realized that her mother was a doctor. The next morning they moved into a single room of their own in the back of a medical center. Little more than a supply closet, it was small and had no furniture, but it was out of the hallway and the continuous jostling and endless moaning and crying of starving people.
Her mother worked all day, sometimes not coming home for days at a time, and Arika slept on a pile of rags, alone and never sure if her mother had forgotten her. She cried herself to sleep more nights than she could count. Somehow every day, a small box sat inside the door and she had food. Not a lot, but enough to keep her alive.
When she left the room to use a hygiene center, a nurse or doctor would always ask her if she was supposed to be there, and she had to explain that she and her mom lived in the closet out back. After what might have been months, one of the nurses asked her if she wanted to help clean MedBays by carry things, since she was always around, anyway. She wasn’t sure how her mother would feel about her doing it, but even though she was only eight, she knew that she should help out.
If for no other reason than it meant she didn’t have to sit in the room and stare at her hands all day.
Lilith Torrance was the nurse who’d lifted her out of her prison and given her a purpose. She remembered her better than she remembered her father, or her mother, most days. Lilith would sneak her extra food when she could. Sometimes it was a small piece of dried meat protein but once in a while it was even something sweet.
More than one night, Lilith carried an exhausted Arika home to her closet and tucked her into her bed.
It was hard, because somewhere during those days, the child she had once been grew up. She moved from running supplies to helping clean up …after.
She had been in the room with hundreds of people as they drew their last breath. Arika had no way of knowing how many died, or that most of them had lost the fight to simple starvation, but she understood what it meant to fade into the dark. Forever.
One day, after months of helping in the ward, her mother had come looking for her. She’d been working with Lilith and the orderlies when Nisreen found her. She was carrying sheets and helping to wrap another one who didn’t make it.
“What are you doing?” Nisreen asked.
“Helping, Momma,” she said, looking up at her mother’s face and hoping to find approval reflected there. All she could see in her eyes was sadness.
“You know we cannot make this better,” her mother said.
Arika looked down at the floor and nodded. “We have to try,” she said. “Lilith told me it’s better to fight for what we know we need to do, than to give up and do nothing.”
“Lilith is a smart woman,” her mother said.
Turning to face the orderly who stood back while the two of them talked she asked, “Is she done here?”
He nodded. “I can finish up.”
“Then please let the head nurse know I am taking my daughter with me,” she said, reaching out and grabbing Arika’s hand.
“I did not know you were helping here,” she said as they walked out of the ward and down a long corridor. “How long have you been doing this?”
“A long time,” she said. Her mother walked fast and she almost had to run to keep up. “I don’t know how many days, because I work when I’m awake, and then sleep and come back to help more.”
“Do you know how long we’ve been here?”
She shook her head. “A long time,” she said again.
“Almost a year now,” her mother said. After they walked for a while in silence, her mother turned loose of her hand and stopped, kneeling down on one knee. “You help now by taking care of people who are dying. Do you know what that really means?”
Arika looked into her mother’s face and nodded. “I do,” she said, swallowing hard. “I know that Papa is dead and he won’t be coming back for us.”
Nisreen nodded and bit down on her lip. “No, he won’t,” she said. “But he didn’t die like these people are dying. He died quickly.”
“I know,” she said. “I remember.”
Her mother looked at her. “Do you know how many people have died here?” she asked. “Slowly. Like the people you try to help?”
Arika shook her head.
“I want to show you something that is important,” she said.
“What is it?”
“They call it the morgue,” she said.
“I know what that is,” Arika said. “It’s where they put the people that die.”
“Yes, but I want you to understand something I am about to do,” she said, standing back up and walking through a set of doors into a tunnel.
Up ahead Arika could see sunlight and there were people walking back and forth, some wheeling carts, and others just standing and looking off to the sides. When they steppe
d out of the tunnel, they entered a clear tube that ran over the surface. Mars hung in the sky above them and everything glowed red in its reflected light.
Arika stopped and stared. Row after row she saw lines of sheets, all the way to the edge of the horizon. They were just like the ones she helped wrap around the bodies when they died in the ward.
All the dead lay in the open across the hard frozen surface of Phobos. In the vacuum of space. Far too many for her to count.
The child in her died that day.
Nisreen walked slowly down the tube letting Arika stare out across the field of corpses.
“So many,” she whispered, tears filling her eyes.
“Too many. Millions,” her mother said. “We have to go home, or there will be more.”
She blinked away a single tear as she tore herself from that memory.
Arika knew in hindsight that Nisreen Sokat, the loving mother, had traded her love for her child for a shroud of harsh, uncompromising bitterness. Yet now that she was at an age where she could have reached back across the divide, she realized it didn’t matter. Her mother had become exactly what she had felt in her for the first time that day.
The edict her mother passed condemning her own daughter to exile from her home, destroyed any chance of the two of them ever reconnecting.
Emotionally and literally.
They had not endured those horrific days together, but each in their own way. As the child grew with each experience, her mother had withdrawn.
The small shuttle dropping toward the landing pad pulled her back into the present. As she watched, rather than the flames splashing out as they had eleven years ago, a wall of dust billowed up, hiding the landing from view. She was sure no one had used the pad for years and the red powder that the Martian winds had left behind in a thick layer confirmed that reality.
The glow of the ship’s plasma fire flashed and then everything fell to darkness for several seconds. A small set of lights came on and the boarding tube crawled out into the dust cloud to connect to the hatch of the ship. Several utility rovers shot out of the dark and a set of cargo doors opened, spilling hazy light onto the ground. In the distance several dozen people in EVA suits jumped out and started unloading crates.
She snorted. Never waste resources because efficiency trumps everything.
“Beat it down,” the pilot said as he came through the inner doors of the boarding tube.
“Excuse me?” she asked, turning to face him as he walked toward her.
He was a tall man with short cropped hair and flashing green eyes. His angular features would have been unpleasant, except for the animated way he moved his face when he talked and smiled.
“Phobos,” he said, pointing out the window to where the moon was easing into view. “They keep an eye on you folks down here, and it’d be bad for them to catch me snaking through the hills. Would make it a might-bit nasty on the way back.”
“I never thought about that,” Arika said.
“Are you my passenger?”
She shrugged unable to find her voice. She was trying to hide how she felt but her eyes burned and she knew he could see it before she looked away.
“I understand,” he said quietly. “Leaving home is never easy.” Arika could feel the weight of his words in his tone.
She nodded and glanced around the empty passenger area. She wanted to say something but couldn’t force herself to speak.
“I’m Nathaniel Walker, Commander of the Wolf.” He held his hand out and smiled.
“You’re not the pilot?” she asked, grasping at the possibility of small talk, like it was an escape pod from her emotional hellscape.
“Nah, I wouldn’t ask my pilot to risk a run like this. The less people who know I’m here the better. I take all the runs over the red wall,” he said.
“This isn’t your first time? You’ve been to Mars before?”
“I’ve been back a few times,” he said, winking as he sat down on one of the seats in the boarding area. “I was born in Burroughs and was running construction crew shuttles to Robinson when everything went sidewise.”
“I was born there, too,” Arika said.
“It’s probably best to forget that,” he said. “Not many of us made it out, and with you going over the wall, I’m sure nobody should ever know.”
“What happens if somebody finds out?” she asked. “Would they send me back here?”
He shook his head. “Last time someone got caught, I think they sent him to prison in a mining colony somewhere,” he said. “It was harsh because they wanted to make sure nobody tries it again.”
She dropped down on top of one of her two small bags, suddenly realizing another crushing reality of what was happening to her. “Yah, I’m being exiled,” she said.
He laughed, shocking her with his reaction. “Strange, I never thought about it from that side,” he said. “Out there, people look at you all in here as exiles.”
“But I can never come back,” she whispered.
He shrugged and then nodded. “Probably not.”
“What’s it like out there?” she asked, looking down at her hands in her lap and trying not to make eye contact.
“Big and small at the same time. There’s all this huge open space between everything, but everyone lives in tiny, crowded, dirty holes. It’s not pretty, and it’s never empty like this,” he said, waving his arm to include the waiting area.
“Yah, empty,” she said, following his gesture around the room with her eyes. She’d been ordered not to tell anyone she was leaving. Not even her friends. So there was no one to send her off. Nobody knew. I wonder what they’ll all say when I’ve disappeared tomorrow.
She took a deep breath and let it out in a blast. “It sounds awful. I read about it, but I’m sure it’s not really like what I saw.”
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his legs. “Our deal was kept way down low, so all I know is that after we layover for a week at the Twin Cities, I’m personally supposed to make sure you’re on the first passenger run to the Aldrin Cycler. Do you know where you’re heading after you get off in Zone One?”
“I don’t know. I only found out I was leaving last night. My mother made all the arrangements.”
“That’s foobed,” he said.
She nodded. “That’s how she swings.”
“Well, the cycler will drop you either at New Hope City or the LEO Colonies,” he said. “For your sake I hope it’s NHC since the colonies are fracking shit holes.”
“She told me she got me into med school,” Arika said. “That’s all I know.”
“Then you’re probably headed for New Hope since WellCartel runs the university there.” He smiled. “At least that’s good.”
She nodded again.
“Who’s your mom?” Commander Walker asked.
“She made the arrangements with you didn’t she?”
“It was all handled by voice and I got paid in papercred. No questions and no tracks that way. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s alright too.”
“Nisreen Sokat,” she said, shrugging.
He let out a slow whistle and nodded. “Now I understand why it’s swinging so low.”
“I don’t,” Arika said
“Your mom’s pretty famous for sticking her thumb in the eye of the Cartels,” he said.
“My mother tends to do that to people,” she said.
“Got it.” He nodded, his wide eyes making sure she knew he’d not make that mistake again. “So where is she?”
“She said she’d be here with the rest of my stuff, and that I had to wait for her to show up. She was in Robinson yesterday and the loop isn’t working all the way out there yet. I guess she’s rovering over the gap.”
He pulled out his thinpad and scrolled through the screens for several seconds. “We’ve got about four hours before we have to be gear up. I hope she hurries.”
“She’s never late,” Arika said. “The world would end if she were.”
He laughed. “I’ve heard that about her,” he said.
Commander Walker was easy to talk to, so she spent the hours trying to get over her fear of leaving. She asked him everything she could think of about what it was like in the rest of the Union. She wanted to know about the places he’d traveled and what he’d seen.
He shared stories with her and even one about an idea of starting a small farm on the slopes of mount Olympus. Once when he’d been a shuttle pilot, he lost power and had spent the night out in the open waiting for rescue. He said the dawn over Olympus was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen, and he still hoped that if the quarantine ever ended, he’d get the chance to follow that dream.
The hours passed as they talked, and on the threshold of a world-ending cataclysm, the almost late and nearly legendary Nisreen Sokat finally made her appearance.
Commander Walker excused himself to go check on his shuttle, or so he said. Arika suspected that after several hours of listening to her describe what life had been like with Nisreen as a mother, he seemed rather less impressed with the leader of the Mars Colonies and wanted to make his escape.
I’m glad you waited,” her mother said, coming up and taking the seat he’d just vacated.
“We didn’t have any choice,” she said. “Phobos is still in the sky.”
“That’s true,” she said. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Something you missed? I’m surprised,” she said, struggling to be civil as her anger fought its way back to the surface. “I thought you had everything under control. It’s obvious that you’re almost late because you didn’t want to make this into a long goodbye.”
“I got here as soon—”
Arika shook her head. “I should probably thank you.”
“Ari, please,” her mother said. “This is hard on both of us.”
She shook her head. “If it’s so hard on you, why are you making me do this?”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 88