Arachne's Web

by Elizabeth Corrigan

  Roslyn laughed. “Ah, yes, exactly the cleverness I have come to expect from you. What are you doing hanging out back here?”

  “Why, waiting for you, of course. I wanted some alone time.”

  Roslyn pulled back a bit, the smile not fading from her face. “And you’re not trying to figure out who can get us real food on this rock?”

  Jack grinned. “Well, maybe that too.”

  “I’ll forgive you for lying if you get me some chocolate.”

  “Will you forgive me for lying if I…” He leaned forward and whispered delicious suggestions in her ear, the kind that were no doubt meant to set her body afire but filled her with solid contentment.

  We’re together. He cares about me. And maybe this time it will last.

  Chapter 22

  Twenty Years Ago

  Cobalt glanced around the utilitarian tent he was apparently sharing with Jack and Roslyn on the desolate moon. Great. I always love sharing quarters with them when there are no doors to put socks on. At least there are machines. The dig site had dozens of machines that needed to be fixed or maintained or tweaked to perform at maximum efficiency. He almost forgave Jack for dragging him to the misbegotten rock.

  “Okay, I talked to Hannah, and she has some assignments for us,” Roslyn said to him and Jack.

  Jack stretched in his chair, appearing to barely pay attention. Cobalt wasn’t sure who the show was for. Both he and Roslyn knew that Jack paid attention to details, no matter his outward appearance.

  “Remind me why you’re in charge again?” Jack asked.

  Roslyn made a noise of frustration in the back of her throat. “Because Hannah decided I was, and I didn’t want to argue with her. Neither did you, as I recall.”

  “Because she didn’t like him,” Cobalt said.

  Jack flashed him a grin. “I like a challenge.”

  Cobalt didn’t need to look at Roslyn to know she was cringing. He wanted to make a face as well. It was early in the Jack-Roslyn relationship cycle for him to be mouthing off to her and throwing other women in her face. Cobalt suspected his brother was acting out because Gavin’s presence made him insecure, but Jack was a little over four hundred years old in their current lives and should have been too old for that kind of crap.

  “Good, because Hannah needs help translating the runes,” Roslyn said. “I would do it, but Gavin’s afraid my head will explode, and I’m rather fond of my head. So, Jack, you’re on translation duty. Help Hannah with whatever she needs. As for us…” Roslyn gestured to herself and Cobalt. “The explorers have found only this one site of artifacts, and they suspect more may be on the moon. What they’ve found here isn’t enough for a proper settlement. So we’re on scouting duty.”

  Cobalt raised an eyebrow.

  “I think what my brother is trying to say is that he is a mechanical genius but not so much into the geographical speculation,” Jack said. “Why is he going out with you?”

  “Hannah said the terrain is rough out there,” Roslyn said. “She thinks we might run into trouble, and she wants someone with me who can repair the rover.”

  Cobalt nodded. That made sense.

  Jack leaned forward in his chair. “All right, fine. Leave me alone. I won’t get lonely or anything.” His tone was light, but he often whined about being abandoned whenever he and Cobalt separated. Cobalt suspected he had a deep fear of abandonment, though Cobalt had never left him for long, not in the thousands of years they’d been brothers.

  “Relax. It’s only two weeks,” Roslyn said. “Gavin’s here, and you’re sure to make friends with some of the other explorers. They’re all genius adventurers too.” Just stay away from the women, Cobalt suspected she wanted to add. “That’s all, really. Cobalt and I leave in the morning. Jack, you can report to Hannah whenever you feel like it. Just please feel like it sometime in the next couple of days, okay?”

  Cobalt got up to walk out of the tent. If he was going to spend two weeks alone with the rover, he wanted to check it out before he left. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jack approach Roslyn and wrap his arms around her. “If you’re going to be gone for two weeks, we need to make the most of our last night together.”

  “Really, Jack?” Roslyn managed to make her voice sound breathy with anticipation and sardonic at the same time.

  Cobalt sped away from the tent as fast as he could. He didn’t want to listen to what came next, be it an argument or something they enjoyed more.

  I’m going to be alone with Roslyn for two weeks. That should be interesting. Roslyn thought he hated her. He didn’t. In many ways, he loved her like the sister he didn’t have, but he didn’t understand why she let Jack treat her the way he did.

  Don’t I? After all, Jack treated Cobalt the same way, and part of his disagreements with Roslyn were that she made him look too closely at his relationship with his brother. Jack was more loyal to Cobalt, certainly, but Jack made all the decisions, no matter what Cobalt wanted to do.

  Cobalt walked a bit faster. He could spend two weeks in silence. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Present Day

  Cobalt woke to find his brother sitting at a desk, staring at his datapad, and checked the clock to make sure he had the time right then looked out the window to make sure he was still on Ariadne and hadn’t somehow ended up in Bizarro World. As he approached, he realized Jack had dark circles under his eyes. Either he had been up for hours, or he hadn’t slept at all.

  “What’s wrong?” Cobalt yawned.

  Jack didn’t look up from his datapad. “I’ve been doing some research.”

  “Roslyn again?” Cobalt moved to the coffee maker and turned it on. Within seconds, it was dripping a delicious steaming beverage into a cup.

  “Nah, I’m done with her. How much information can there possibly be about a slave who walks a dog, anyway?”

  After waiting until the coffee machine had filled two mugs, Cobalt handed one to his brother. “You seemed very interested in her yesterday.”

  “Eh. That was yesterday.” Jack flipped his datapad so Cobalt could see it. “Take a look at this.”

  Cobalt squinted, trying to make out whatever Jack was trying to show him. It looked like some kind of oddly put together spaceship. Then he figured out the problem. “It’s upside down.”

  “Oh. Here.” Jack handed over the datapad.

  The ship looked to be of an old design, and the words “Transcendent Spirit” arched across the hull. As soon as Cobalt read the words, a spark lit in his mind, and he could see the interior of the ship in its full glory.

  Glory? he thought. That’s a piece of space junk. Should have been replaced by a newer model years ago. Somehow, he could picture himself walking its corridors, upgrading its engine, and hanging out in its mess hall. But he wasn’t pulling up memories from a blueprint. He had the same feeling about the ship as he did about Roslyn and the blond woman hunting them, as if they were memories of a life he’d never had. “I wouldn’t buy it” was all he said as he handed the datapad back to Jack.

  “Well, of course you wouldn’t, but I think you’ll be very interested in who did.” Jack swiped on his pad a few times then flipped it back around. That time, it was right side up, and the image of the blond woman made Cobalt flinch.

  The grin fell from Jack’s face. “One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me why you’re convinced this woman wants to kill us. Anyway, her name is—”

  “Tegan O’Leary.” The name sprang into Cobalt’s mind as he stared at the brown liquid in his mug. Known to her friends as Cuttlefish.

  “You’ve been doing your research,” Jack said. “You want to tell me what you’ve found?”

  Cobalt didn’t say anything.

  “Okay, fine, be unhelpful.” Jack flipped past a few more pages on his datapad. “I’ve got a bunch of pictures of her. The weird thing is whe
n they were taken.”

  “Let me guess. Twenty years ago, and she looked exactly the same then as she does today.”

  “Well, yes and no,” Jack said. “I’ve found the registry for the Transcendent Spirit over the past one hundred years, and in every single registry, the license picture of one Tegan O’Leary looks exactly the same. She’s registered in a bunch of different places over the years, which is why it’s taken me all night to piece all this together.”

  “What do you plan to do with this information now that you have it?”

  Jack gave him a strange look, as if surprised he was so calm about everything. Cobalt didn’t know how to tell his brother he was starting to suspect that all of them—him, Jack, Roslyn, Tegan, and possibly others—were immortal beings who reincarnated. He wasn’t even sure he believed it himself, especially since Jack didn’t seem to remember any of it. If his memories were anything to go on—and he wasn’t sure they were—he and Jack had been as inseparable in their previous lives as they were in their current one.

  Eventually, Jack shook his head. “I’m going to go find her, of course.”

  Cobalt blanched. “You want to find the woman who wants to kill us?”

  “Blue, think about it. The woman has found the secret to immortal life. We could get it from her and either sell it for millions or use it ourselves.”

  Booming words rose in Cobalt’s mind, loud enough to make him flinch. “Above all rules, remember this: Let no one know we exist.”

  “What is with you?” Jack asked. “You’ve been jumpy all morning. No, since before that. Since we got arrested. It’s not like you.”

  “Getting arrested? No, it’s not.” Cobalt sighed. Being deliberately obtuse wasn’t going to solve the problem, but if Jack didn’t have the same memory flashbacks as he did, he wouldn’t believe them. Cobalt’s best plan was to behave as normally as possible. “Jack, we’ve got a good thing going here. A good job. A stable job. We don’t need to go mucking that up.”

  “What we need is a spaceship.” Apparently, if Cobalt behaved normally, Jack would go back to ignoring him.

  “I am not stealing a spaceship.”

  “Relax. We don’t need to steal one.” He gave Cobalt a beautiful, brilliant, terrifying grin. “We’ve got enough diamonds to buy one.”

  “This is not going to work,” Cobalt muttered.

  Jack sighed. Sometimes—almost all the time—his brother was so negative. “That’s a bad idea, Jack” or “That’s crazy, Jack” or “That will get us arrested or killed, Jack.” Doesn’t he trust that I would find a way out of any trouble we got into?

  He didn’t know why Cobalt was being so negative about the plan. It was simple—they would walk in, buy a spaceship, and fly out. From there, they could leave Ariadne and gather the information they needed about Tegan and the Transcendent Spirit. Cobalt shouldn’t be down on the idea, especially since he couldn’t suspect Jack’s reasons for wanting to get off Ariadne so fast.

  That Roslyn girl. She attracted him in ways no other woman ever had, and he couldn’t have that. He wanted to… No, he needed to remain loyal to his girl, and he knew if he stayed on Ariadne, he would keep seeking out Roslyn, and there was no way he would stay true. Going after a crazy woman Cobalt was convinced wanted to kill them seemed as good an excuse for leaving as any.

  The diamonds made a deep clanking sound as they knocked against each other in the backpack he carried them in. He had considered getting a case to protect them, but he concluded diamonds were unlikely to damage each other. Besides, he liked the idea of carrying a spaceship’s worth of diamonds in a simple rucksack.

  Jack let Cobalt look at the ships while he studied the people. He wanted the salesperson most desperate to make a sale and least likely to question two nineteen-year-olds walking in with a bag full of diamonds, so not the manager or the uptight brownnoser who was featured as salesman of the month. No, how about that guy in the corner? He looks a bit shy, but he’s definitely glaring at the employee of the month.

  Jack meandered over to the man. “Hey. My brother and I are looking to buy a ship. Can you help us?”

  The man looked around as if expecting to find another object of Jack’s address but, finding no one, shrugged. “Sure, I can help you.”

  “Awesome.” Jack gave his best grin. “Don’t worry. We don’t need too much in the way of information.” He jerked his thumb back toward Cobalt. “My brother knows everything there is to know about spaceships.”

  “I hope he’s not looking for a job,” the salesman muttered. He held out his hand. “I’m Dennis Weyover.”

  With a name like “way over” and an attitude like that, it’s no wonder you don’t make many sales, Jack thought, but he kept his smile up and shook the man’s hand. “I’m just waiting for my brother to pick the one he likes.”

  Weyover raised his eyebrows. “You don’t care?”

  “Oh, I have veto power.” Come on, Blue. Get back here. I don’t want to have to make small talk with this putz all day.

  As if he could hear Jack’s thought, Cobalt meandered in Jack’s direction.

  “Well?”

  Cobalt put his hands in his pockets. “I looked over the two-man vehicles. I think that one is our best bet.”

  Jack wasn’t surprised to see his brother had passed over the stodgy, cheap Aeon and the sleek speeder Elitu in favor of the practical, mid-priced Argon. “You sure? Not the Elitu? You know I like to go fast.” Translation: We might have to run away from the spaceship with the psycho that wants to kill us.

  “The engine on the Argon is more reliable. You can’t go fast if you can’t go anywhere. At least you’ll be happy to know that the only Argon they currently have with the specs I want is red.”

  Jack grinned, and Cobalt rolled his eyes.

  “We’re naming it The Rose.” Jack didn’t know where those words came from. He had envisioned a red speeder but hadn’t realized he’d had a name picked out for it. As soon as he said it, though, he knew it was the right choice.

  Cobalt blinked at him a few times then nodded, as if the name choice made sense to him. Maybe it did. Either way, a few signed papers and lost diamonds later, they had a ship, and they were off on the next adventure.

  Chapter 23

  Present Day

  Gavin waited while Archon slept, certain the guards would appear any moment. Nothing to be done about that, though. He skinned the trimper and cooked some of its meat over the fire he’d set up to sterilize his knife—no sense in wasting the meat or the fire.

  Maybe it’s better if we do get caught. Then Archon can get some real medical attention. Gavin had managed to staunch the bleeding and stitch up the wound pretty well, but the risk of infection was real. If he’d counted the days right, the contest was almost over. If Archon could make it to the end, he would probably be all right, but Gavin would rather not risk it.

  Archon stirred and groaned. “Something smells good, which I guess means I’m not dead. Also, I hurt too much to be dead.”

  “You’re not dead.” Thank God.

  Where did that come from? God is an Old Earth superstition.

  Archon tried to sit up, grunted, and lay back down. “The last thing I remember, the trimper was coming right for me. How am I not dead?”

  Gavin hated to lie with a passion he could never quite explain to himself, but he couldn’t explain the rush of memories that had flooded him when his friend nearly died. “The attack wasn’t that bad. Trimper only got you in the side. Field medicine training kicked in, and I was able to stop the bleeding.”

  “How did you get rid of the beast?” Archon managed to prop himself up on his elbows. “We don’t have the kind of equipment we would need to go big-game hunting. Cronos, I can’t believe they sent us on a survival mission somewhere with trimpers!”

  “They probably didn’t know it was here. It must have
gotten into the area when they weren’t paying attention. Trimpers can be surprisingly stealthy for such large animals.” Despite his words, Gavin agreed with his friend. He would’ve thought the people running the games would be more careful. He hoped they hadn’t let the trimper in intentionally in hopes of raising the vid ratings and, consequently, the money made. Don’t be cynical, Gavin. “As for killing it, that was a lucky shot with a knife. I figured it had a big fleshy part with an artery in its neck like most mammals do.” He shrugged, trying to appear more casual than he felt.

  “You threw a knife at a trimper and killed it?” Archon leaned his head back, awestruck by the act. “You are totally going to win this contest.”

  Gavin snorted. “Only if we don’t get caught, which I’m thinking we should. Field medicine can only do so much for your wound.”

  “No way, man. You are going to win this thing, and I am not going to stop you.” Archon cringed. “Don’t get me wrong. If I could get caught and still have you win this thing, I would be all about it. But I can’t, and I’m not blowing your chance. Help me up.”

  “It’s just a game. It says so in the title. And as I told you when you were spewing blood everywhere, I would rather lose and have you live.”

  Archon made a weak dismissive gesture with his hand. “I can survive for a few more days.” He deflated. “But maybe I should sleep some more now.”

  Gavin nodded. “I’ll keep watch.”

  The fire flickered as Archon slept, and Gavin realized he had been conscious for almost a whole day, and a stressful day at that. Even though he knew it was a bad idea, he lay down on the cold ground.

  I’ll just close my eyes for a minute.

  Twenty Years Ago

  “So tell me about this disease.” Gavin had learned his way around the small medical tent on Ariadne about as quickly as one would expect, given the size. Though I’ve worked in smaller buildings on Daedalus. And less well-stocked ones.

  “What disease?” Emerson Raring, the medic in charge, asked. He had introduced himself as “only” a nurse practitioner, though Gavin had thought that an unfair assessment. He had met many NPs who knew more than most doctors. Yet it took me longer to tour the tent than to realize that Raring is not among them.