Katy just looked at Greeley. She didn’t have to ask.
Greeley rubbed his hands over his face and fiddled with a strip of plastiskin covering a shoulder wound. Finally, he looked at her and she knew she wasn’t going to like it.
“We were in a bad way there and had it comin’ from all angles. And one of the BG boats was nearly dead but it limped its way over the mall and it just stopped there. Then George started running for it. But Hazuki got him. That wounded ship disappeared. Then another near dead BG boat comes along and stops right over the mall and Jolo runs right up under it.” Here he stopped for a moment, rubbed his hand over his eyes. “And then,” he stopped and just shook his head. “And then he was gone. Just disappeared like the ship before.”
“The Queen said I would never see him again.” And Katy started to cry and Greeley gave her a hug.
“We’ll find him. He shut down the power source somehow.”
“It was some kind of portal,” said Koba.
“Why didn’t he tell us?” said Katy.
“You wouldn’t’ve let him go,” said Greeley. “Though I figure George was supposed to go.”
“I wouldn’t’ve wanted him to go either.”
“He had to do it. He saved us all,” said Riley.
Katy sat in the corner of the med bay next to George waiting for the nightmare to end. Barth, George, Hurley. And now Jolo. It was too high a price to pay. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Jolo still there, still stomping through the Argossy. He’d yell at Greeley, then when the big man wasn’t looking, he’d grin at her. There was always energy when he was around. Always hope.
Katy held George’s limp, android hand. The med bot would do what she could. She plugged him up to the charging cell, but he was unresponsive. Wires ran out of his head into the computer but there was no communication. There was a bandage over his face where the bullet went in. Usually his skin would repair itself almost immediately, but the wound remained open, exposing the fiber wires and electrical bits. Katy couldn’t look at it.
George needed Merthon.
For the next few days Katy stayed right there in the med bay. She slept on a cot and Koba brought her food from the hotel. They found a stash of slightly out-of-date Fed rations and Koba said everyone was working together nicely. He was going to break into the vault soon and Riley and Risa were working on getting one of the freighter haulers from the junk pile working so they could carry the weapons back.
But Katy didn’t really want to go anywhere. Here was the last place Jolo was and this is where she wanted to be. How could she leave him?
……
Ten days after the final fight on the ice over the city known as Atlanta, three ships broke through the atmosphere and headed home. It was the first time in a hundred years that a ship had left jump point one. Riley and Risa piloted a large freighter filled with kinetic weapons from the stash in the downtown Atlanta annex building. Risa’s Greenback was in one of the fighter bays of the freighter.
The other ship, a Fed transport, was piloted by three of the women rescued from the breeding program. There were twenty-seven boys all told, and nine girls liberated from the upper floors of the hotel. Of the twenty-eight women rescued from the breeding program, five women fell in the final battle.
Greeley found the old woman that took care of the pregnant women but she refused to come with the survivors. Hazuki’s body was not found, but Risa claims an ion cannon blast from the Greenback killed him.
Katy piloted the Argossy as usual. Jolo’s chair remained empty, but everyone looked to Katy for leadership. Greeley stuck to her like glue, bullying anyone who did not carry out her orders immediately and with the deference and respect reserved for high ranking Fed officers. Eventually she had to pull him aside and tell him she was okay. After that he backed off, but only a little.
Katy told him she was fine, but that was a lie. She sat in her chair and ran the numbers: Two dead, one near dead, if an android really died, and Jolo missing. But they had rescued sixty humans.
Sixty souls doomed to die on Earth were coming home. Home to what? No one knew. But they got the weapons that would help the core. Would Jolo be happy with that?
There were moments when she got angry and had to go to the storage bay and yell as loud as she could, her screams echoing off the hull of the ship. And then she would go to Jolo’s room and lie in his bunk and cry. Why did he have to keep giving so much to these people who would never fully accept him?
One evening three days out from Earth, Katy was in her bunk, her hand over the small bump in her belly. “You’ll see your Daddy soon enough.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I hope you see him. He loves you so much.”
“Cap’n Katy.” A small boy name Chuck was standing in her door with no shirt on.
“I’m not the Captain,” she said.
“Who is?”
“Jolo.”
“The man wid da gun? He gone.”
“He’s coming back.”
The boy stared at her blankly. “Who you talkin’ to?”
“My baby.”
“Ain’t s’pose to tell nuttin, Cap’n—I mean, Katy, but Korley done brought a cat named Richard on board.”
Katy smiled.
“You wanna play wid us?” the boy said. “We in the big play room.”
He grabbed her hand and they went down to the storage bay and Katy watched the boys and girls play. They laughed and yelled, their voices echoing off the hull of the Argossy. They ran and jumped and fell and cried. They ate Fed rations and dropped the wrappers, crumbs on their smiling faces. And not a care in the world. Like everything was okay. Like there was no war. Like Jolo was still there.
……
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About JD Oppenheim:
My name is JD Oppenheim and I live in Japan with my wife and two kids and write sci-fi novels and teach English. I studied fiction writing at the University of Florida in the late 80s, back when an IBM 286 was a fast computer. I thank you for reading my novels and I hope you enjoy them.
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Thank you!
—JD Oppenheim
The Cold Dead Earth (The Jolo Vargas Space Opera Series Book 3) Page 22