by Dan Schiro
Orion rubbed his hands over his face, then let them wander up over his rough scalp. “And the general public, they still think this is Dawnstar?”
Mervyn shook his head. “No, that veil has been pulled from their eyes.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Koreen muttered.
“The Mad Thinker has made himself known,” Kangor explained. “He released a holo-clip to the datasphere, taking credit for the attacks and dragging the Union’s treachery into the light.” He glowered at Mervyn. “Now everyone knows who’s responsible for the genocide of the vycart people.”
“It’s a real problem,” Mervyn grumbled, shaking his head. “People are scared, even rioting and looting in some places. They trust the Union less than ever now.”
“As they should,” Kangor said, folding his arms across his chest. “Who knows when the government will decide another race is… inconvenient?”
“You’re right, Kangor,” Orion said, gripping the bridge of his nose. “And it’s a black mark the Union will never be able to wipe away. But that doesn’t change the fact that Typhus still has Project Cleansweep and a small army of super-soldiers. Whatever he’s planning, he’s a threat to billions of innocent people.”
Mervyn nodded. “Well, son, the truth is I’m not here to check on your health.” His face fell into familiar lines of determination. “As soon as you’re up and about, which I hope is very soon, I’ve got a job for you.”
Orion laughed and leaned back in his bed. “So, now that it’s hit the fan, Zo’s decided I’m back in?”
Kangor looked around the room. “What fan?”
“Zovaco never wanted you out,” Mervyn said, tamping his cane. “You should have seen how he fought the other MPs on your behalf. And in any case,” he said with a shrug, “you’re not back in, at least not with the Union. This is the blackest of black book operations.”
They stared at each other for a moment, the silence drawing out before Orion caved. “Fine. I’ll do anything to take this bastard down.” He rubbed a hand over his shorn skull. “But why me? Why not a company of Legionnaires armed to the teeth?”
“Besides the fact that Zo believes in you?” Mervyn scoffed. “Zovaco’s informants in the Independent Kingdoms have spotted the suspicious comet he’s asked them to look for. But Zovaco can’t take this to Parliament. If he tells the Grand Chambers, it will be impossible to keep an incursion into non-Union space quiet.”
“And then,” Orion said, biting his lip, “we’ll miss our chance.”
“Precisely,” Mervyn said with a tamp of his cane. “We need to move, strike, and get out.”
Orion took a deep breath and reached for the crook of his arm. Carefully, slowly, he removed the IV pumping saline and rejuvenating ultra-grade consulin into his veins. Then he pushed himself up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and planted his bare feet on the cold floor. He stood stiffly, taking a moment to flex his knees and elbows. Koreen gasped and clucked, and Kangor reached out a thickly muscled arm to steady him, but Orion waved away his friend and turned to Mervyn.
“So… where am I going?”
Mervyn grunted. “I think the appropriate euphemism for an orbital whorehouse is a ‘pleasure station.’ Our analyst thinks Typhus’ men might be there for some kind of night of revelry before they mount their final assault. If you can spot them, they could lead you back to the Mad Thinker.”
“Definitely sounds like a job for me,” Orion said, mustering a smirk. “What’s the name of this place?”
“This particular bastion of interstellar disease is called Romp.” Mervyn grimaced. “And it’s a very, very dangerous place.”
Chapter 21
“Dressed in the forest-green scrubs and slippers Koreen had stolen for him, Orion moved through the clean hospital corridors with care. From his glimpses into rooms and administrative offices, it seemed the hospital fell well short of half-full. Yet he still glanced over his shoulder or coughed into his hand to hide his face as he passed fellow patients, orderlies or the button cameras perched at every corner. He assumed it was only a matter of time before a nurse or doctor checked his hospital suite and found him missing. Then they would track him down and drag him back for dozens of tedious tests, and that was a delay he couldn’t accept. He only had to scurry by one more nurses’ station to reach the gravity lift.
“There you are,” said a sturdy great ape as she darted out of the glass-walled office.
“We’ve been searching up and down for you,” said a male mystskyn, his hands on his hips as he followed her out.
Orion raised his hands in surrender. “I know, I know, I’m not supposed to be up and about without the doctor’s say-so, but…”
“Darlin’, you got bigger problems than that,” said the great ape with a warm chuckle. “Your family is here to see you.”
Orion hesitated for a moment, unable to comprehend what she could possibly mean. “My… family?”
The great ape and the mystskyn hustled him through a maze of hallways and gravity lifts, and soon he saw that the impossible, the unthinkable, was true. The nurses led him into a beige hospital lounge where he found his father waiting with his half-siblings, Owen and Olivia, the offspring of his father’s second marriage.
“I hope I’m still hallucinating,” Orion muttered as the door closed behind him.
His father turned from the round windows, and Owen and Olivia glanced up from their datacube interfaces. Orion Grimslade Jr. looked as debonair as ever, his eyes bright blue, his white hair sharply groomed, his snow-white suit without wrinkle. As Owen stood, Orion saw a thicker, tanner version of himself, with sparkling blue eyes that half matched Orion’s own. Since Orion last saw him, he had padded out his gut sitting behind a desk at Grimslade Interstellar. Olivia — a tabloid cover girl and datasphere “personality” — was much as Orion remembered: heavily made-up, genetically modified and dressed in a golden cocktail dress she probably considered demure. She looked slightly tanner, thinner and somehow harder behind her painted face. Olivia, of course, ran to him first.
“Big bro,” she bubbled as she wrapped him in her noxiously perfumed embrace. “I was so worried. Those idiot doctors made it sound like you were half-rotted through.” Her tembu nubu gene implants gave her a fabulous mane of pink hair, and the Transéance pills she downed like candy expanded her pupils to huge dark pools surrounded by blue beaches.
“Little sis,” Orion said, tolerating her hug. “No more sex vids on the ‘sphere since I saw you last, I hope?”
“That was a one-time thing,” she scoffed. “Brand-building. But I’ll have you know, I had to post a very emotional byte on my datasphere portal when I heard you were hurt. Did you see it?”
“No, I guess not.” Orion laughed uncomfortably and wriggled out of her grip. “Must have missed it, with the coma and all.”
“You look good, Orion,” Owen said as he extended a beefy hand. “That’s, uh, that’s great!” He shifted his eyes down and left. “I, um, I knew that vycart animal couldn’t take down a Grimslade boy. Union had the right idea with those savages, you know?”
“Oh?” Orion narrowed his eyes as he shook his younger brother’s sweaty hand. “That’s one point of view.”
Orion’s father strolled up with a disappointed glance at Owen. “So, you’re breathing,” he said as he took Orion by the shoulders and gazed at him, their heights exact and their profiles mirror images. “You’re upright. Apparently, you’re escaping from hospital rooms.” Orion Grimslade Jr. took a deep breath. “In light of this close call, I have to ask, son…”
“Don’t do it,” Orion warned with a tilt of his head.
“Son, aren’t you ready to give up this nonsense?” His father gave him an imploring look. “You aren’t meant to be mucking about with weapons of planetary destruction, fighting mutants from the stars. Don’t you see that? Come home, come back to Mars. You can
make a real impact with Grimslade Interstellar, I know it.”
“Make a real impact?” Orion flung his father’s hands off with a quick sweep of his arms and stalked away. “Don’t you think our family’s made enough of an impact already? What with churning out weapons for the First Contact War with the hivers, then strip-mining every planet and moon we could get our hands on.” He stood with his fists clenched, veins surging on his high forehead. “Maybe I’d like to make a different kind of impact. Have you ever considered that?”
“Are you really that naïve?” Orion Grimslade Jr. chortled with mocking laughter. “Still?”
“Bro,” interjected Owen, “it’s not like that. We come from a line of pioneers who—”
“Owen, shut up,” snapped Orion Grimslade Jr. without taking his eyes off his first son. “If you come home, you have the chance to build someth—”
“I am building something,” Orion spat, his manacite symbiote itching to be free. “I’m building something special, something good.”
Before his father could reply, the door to the posh hospital lounge opened. A beautiful young human woman came through with a baby in her arms, the child perhaps a little more than a year old. Both she and her babe were dressed in fine clothes Orion recognized as D’Aroq’s latest collection. Orion gave her a confused stare, as if she had wandered into the wrong room. Perhaps she was some galactic representative’s mistress stopping in for an augmentation? Then it hit him like a clout from Kangor’s heavy hand, and he realized the auburn-haired human woman was his father’s third wife. She looked a few years younger than Orion himself.
“Valerie,” Orion said, the name tumbling from his mouth. “I mean… Valeria.”
“A fine way to greet your stepmother,” she said with a nervous smile, her sharp hazel eyes turned down.
The fury drained out of Orion as he approached them. “This is,” he said, pointing at the infant boy, “Stephan?” Seeing her shake her head, he stammered, “I mean… um…”
“Sinjin,” she said quietly.
Orion peered at the boy. “Well, he’s — whoa.” He started back when he saw the boy’s eyes. One was blue, the other green, like his. Young Sinjin smirked at Orion, and Orion whirled to gape at his father.
His father shrugged, suddenly looking truly old. “Some things run strong in this family.”
Orion turned back and touched the boy’s soft cheek, smiling at Sinjin and Valeria. Then he sighed and faced his father and the twins once more. Despite all their differences, despite all the disdain Orion had shown for their opulent lifestyle, they had come when he was fighting for his next breath. And where was his mother?
“Listen,” Orion said, his hands open in front of him. “I know I haven’t been in touch, I haven’t been around.” He swallowed hard against the words. “But I’ll change that. You’ll hear from me more. I’ll visit, I promise.” He looked sharply at his father as the old man was about to speak. “That’s all I’ll promise, that I’ll be part of the family — not the business. There’s just something I have to do first.”
Chapter 22
There we have it,” Orion sighed as the starry black field of space resolved on the viewscreen of his Prodigal Star. “We are officially out of Union territory and in the Independent Kingdom of Morella.”
“Sailing off the edge of the map,” Kangor mused from the crash couch. “The ancient vycarts believed that the water worms would swallow you.”
“On old Viridia,” added Aurelia from her seat next to him, “they called unexplored territory the Land of the White Fairies.”
Dalaxa ignored the exchange of lore and manipulated the controls at the ops station. “Looks like a 12-planet system with about twice as many inhabited moons, lots of traffic.” Her voice was emotionless and her face stoic, constants since they had snuck her out of the psych ward. “Plenty of hotspots in orbit, strong radioactive energy signatures.”
“Nuclear drives in their own system?” Aurelia scoffed as she unbuckled her harness and stood. “They really are backward in the Independent Kingdoms.”
“We’ll try to get in and out without anyone growing an extra limb,” Orion said as he reached into Memory’s Prism and fished out the coordinates Zovaco had given him. When the ship was pointed toward a faint glimmer orbiting a saffron gas giant with white stripes, he flipped on the automatic pilot and swiveled his chair to face the cabin. “Okay,” he said with a clap of his hands. “Let’s get into costume.”
Groaning, Aurelia and Kangor opened the crate they had brought with them and pulled out bright garments. “This is ridiculous,” Kangor scoffed as he unfurled a gold-embroidered robe and retrieved a handful of jewel-encrusted chains. “Truly ridiculous.”
“All clothing is truly ridiculous,” Aurelia said as she lifted out a short dress and held it up to her curvaceous body. Colorful stones stitched into the shimmering fabric caught the light to a dizzying effect. “Why you lesser carbons insist on hiding your flesh is beyond my comprehension.”
“All part of the job, my friends.” Orion picked out a gaudy color-shift suit cut for the human form and slung it over the back of the captain’s chair. While Aurelia and Kangor continued to complain, he went to the ops station and leaned down to Dalaxa, who hadn’t yet moved. “Talk to me,” he said in a low voice. “Are you ready for this?”
“Of course I am.” She glared at him, the first hint of emotion since they had freed her from suicide watch. “I have to be.”
Orion glanced up at Aurelia and Kangor to find them bickering over the clothes. “You don’t have to be. You don’t have to do anything. The three of us can—”
“No,” Dalaxa snapped, so loud Aurelia and Kangor had to pretend they weren’t eavesdropping. “No, I have to do this. For S’ai, for the s’zone. And like it or not, I’m your best chance of spotting one of Typhus’ thugs, even with my broken-glass memory.” She stood, a defiant sneer on her small mouth. “Now help me get dressed up like a whore.”
“The cover is ‘wealthy sex tourist,’ okay?” Orion said with a wince.
Orion squirmed as Aurelia and Dalaxa teamed up to cover his naked head with a henna-like design, and he popped in a pair of flashy violet contacts to hide his mismatched eyes. Kangor chafed under the weight of many gaudy chains, rings and piercings, and Aurelia attached extensions to her short head tentacles and applied fake ridges to her smooth forehead. Even Dalaxa agreed to a set of profane temporary tattoos sleeving her supple arms and pale legs. With some of D’aroq’s most ostentatious clothing the four of them were nearly unrecognizable, or at least wrapped in enough decadence that no one would see through to the people beneath. Orion looked around the cabin and couldn’t help but feel Bully’s absence, but neither pets nor weapons were allowed through the door at Romp.
Miles disappeared by the thousands as seconds passed. Soon the great spinning top of a space station appeared on the viewscreen, its hull gleaming metallic purple and glittering with bands of gold. Bright holographic advertisements on the side proclaimed, “Orgy $pecials,” “Fantazy Packages” and “Pleasure & Pain: Sess 4 Less.” As he watched relatively microscopic freighters, yachts and warships pull in and out of the station’s many ports, Orion had to admit Romp was not the backwater whorehouse he had expected. It looked as large and sophisticated as the Union’s most popular pleasure stations, and he would know. Flipping the Prodigal Star’s shift-skin to neon green, he piloted them into a port between the great golden bands.
His team walked down the dropship’s rear ramp to find themselves in a pristine private hangar. Already Orion smelled musky perfume in the cool recycled air. The deck gleamed with a mirror-like polish, and a short set of stairs carpeted with white shag led up to a spacious platform. Orion ascended with his crew behind him, and the four of them met a tall humanoid female from Morella. The mor woman had muscular long limbs, deep-green skin, a ridged forehead and long, dark dreadlocks. She wore a sn
ug purple dress slitted to reveal her sculpted legs, and a golden choker encrusted with jewels circled her neck. Orion honestly didn’t know if all mor women had three breasts like her, or if she had modified herself to turn heads.
“Welcome to Romp,” she said, opening her hands with a small gesture. “I am Dormia, Hostess Prime.”
Orion steeled himself. He had to play the part he could have ended up living had he not walked away from his father’s lifestyle and business. “Well, well, well,” he said as he approached and circled her, ogling her up and down. “They certainly know how to welcome a guy here, don’t they?”
Dormia offered a coy twist of her plump lips, and her four-fingered hand reached out to catch Orion’s lapel. “It’s our first priority to make you feel welcome,” she said as she caressed the slick fabric.
Dalaxa stepped forth from Orion’s clustered comrades in an electric pink minidress, the many tiny diamonds of her elaborate necklace clinking with every step. “And what’s your second priority?” she said with the edge of a jealous paramour.
“Our second and only other priority is your pleasure.” Dormia sauntered across the white shag and touched her fingertips to Dalaxa’s cheek. The spark of subcutaneous stimulation nodes glowed blue in Dormia’s fingers, and Dalaxa shuddered.
“Ya feel that, baby?” Orion said, suppressing the impulse to break the mor woman’s arm. He threw an arm over Dalaxa’s shoulder. “I told you this place would blow your mind, didn’t I?” He laughed and reached out his hand to touch Dormia’s fingertips with his own. “Now about that second priority… pleasure… or whatever…”
“All of the galaxy’s pleasures will be at your fingertips in a moment.” Dormia gave him a teasing taste of her built-in enhancement and sashayed to the interior airlock, cycling it open with a touch. “If you will follow me, Siban the Magnificent likes to greet our VIP reservations personally.”
“Nah, no need,” Orion said with a cool shrug. Had they been made already? He didn’t expect the ether route collapse and his personal disgrace to be big news in the Independent Kingdoms, and their disguises were at least passable. “We just want to get down and dirty, you know?”