The lighthouse of kuiper, p.11
The Lighthouse of Kuiper, page 11
“Like that’s actually true,” she replied, not in the mood for one of Olin’s spider scat lessons. “It’s just a story that fits, makes dogs more important to Arran society.”
“If you think dogs aren’t critical to our military forces—”
“What the fuck are we talking about?” she blurted out, cutting him off. “What is any of this? You talk like you know these guys, they tell me there’s probably a,” he held up a hand, and she caught herself, voice dropping, “a big fucking problem, and now you’re acting like everything’s normal. What the fuck?”
“I do know them,” he replied.
It deflated her rising ire. “What?”
“Yip and I were corporals together. My first assignment was the Turiel.”
Dots connected in Tharsis’s mind. “He’s the one you called about the signal.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew I was seeing stuff?” she pushed.
Eyes hard, caught up in studying the night sky above them, he didn’t answer. “We can leave the report until later this morning. We’ll work out a story, okay?”
She sighed, pulling her arms tight around her chest. “What kind of story?”
“One Hinden’ll believe.”
“I’d like to know what’s going on.”
“I’d like to know what you’re seeing,” Olin shot back, commanding in a way she’d never heard him before, and it took her aback.
“I’ll see you at work, Sergeant,” Tharsis replied as dismissively as she could, and strode away.
She still had a few hours before she had to report in for work. The thought of waiting it out in her office was highly unappealing.
Humphryes, for all its artless corrugation, still had a decent little chapel. It was a rambling construct of pointed arches and heavy stained glass and shelves of half-melted beeswax candles, built into a false hill and turfed across the roof. Expeditionary-style, the kind built during the first days of Mars by the first settlers, much like the one in her own parish. A comfortable place, she’d always found it, and that was where she headed.
So early in the day, before Mass, one solitary single oil lamp, burning in Michael’s alcove, flickered in the space. A flame, lit from the Vatican’s military chapel, the same flame that burned on a thousand bases across the Heliosphere. A flame, legend held, brought down from the slopes of Olympus Mons by Father Golan, given to him by an angel during his war against the umbran that rode the oceans back from the depths.
She didn’t know if she believed that story. Not anymore.
Sinking into a pew, Tharsis folded up on the kneeler, head in her hands.
She had no idea what to do. No training, no wise words, no prayer came to her. Her feeble prayers, for Michael, for the saints, for God, died unformed on her lips.
Maybe there was no peace to be had.
Not if those things were coming from Noqumiut.
The shining spires of New Stockholm stood empty under the false dawn, as she left the chapel hours later. Hollow forms, shells without yolks.
How do they live like this? Tharsis wondered, bathed in synthesized sunlight that offered no warmth at all. How do any of us live like this?
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
The Barachiel departed Twoday. The moment it left radar range, Hinden dropped a cubic meter of paperwork on Tharsis’s desk. Dragged her into his office that afternoon and explained everything he wanted done with it, in excruciating detail.
“... and I want it by the end of the day,” he concluded smugly, and pointed to some poster he’d tacked up on the door. Stylized drawing of a piss chute. Are You a Floater or a Sinker? It was the kind of thing he found funny, inspirational.
She loathed that poster. But Hinden had it there for a reason, and the next person in her chain of command was stationed half an AU away, so she took the point. Ate lunch at her desk. Wore out a stylus. Didn’t make her usual daily round to her work centers. And still had to go back to Hinden at 1700 to ask for more time.
Tharsis felt like she’d been contaminated somehow, the way he smirked at her.
Sliding back into Nighttrippers that night, ignoring the happy chatter from the common areas, all Tharsis could think of was taking a shower. A hot shower. She needed it, to step into the uncertain heat of water and scrub the top layer of skin clean off.
After a stop at her room to throw on her ancient, Academy-issue robe and grab her shower kit, Tharsis could smell the harsh chemical undertones of bathroom cleanser flooding the hallway. About that time of day, she remembered, cleaning time.
Scat.
But it was just tDaer in there. On hen’s knees in the shower bay, scrubbing away at an ancient stain in ancient grout that was not going to come up.
The lieutenant watched her friend for a moment, thought about what it would be like to live like that; nothing to her name but a backpack. No tattoos. No family. No responsibility.
But no amount of wishing was going to cancel out the service she still owed, promises she’d made. Everything on Mars boiled down to duty. When she was a girl, she’d thought it’d be grand. As a woman, it was just suffocating. At least a husband and children would have loved her. To Hinden, she was just something to help further his tin-pot ambitions.
“You alive in there?”
She startled and found the Iapetan staring at her with those inky eyes, neck pulsing faintly. “Pardon?”
tDaer sat back over hen’s heels, stripping gloves off, tossing them away to squelch wetly against the shower wall. “I said, you alive in that skull of yours? You look weird.”
“Don’t you have a master’s degree?” Tharsis interrupted, not in the mood for whatever it was tDaer was about to say. That darkness, that sound, was still there. She couldn’t get it out. Couldn’t understand the look in her friend’s eyes. “Didn’t you tell me that?”
“I have two, actually. With honors. About average for the Daer line, but,” and tDaer cocked hen’s head, “you want to know why I choose to scrub fungal growths in some scatty hostel? Instead of doing whatever one’s supposed to do with one’s academics?”
Tharsis bit her cheek. “I don’t know, I guess.”
“Everything back home is all theory, talk,” and it sounded honest, in a way in which tDaer wasn’t ever honest. Liked it pained hen. “Works for most of us and that’s fine. It’s not my place to judge what somebody else derives meaning from, but it doesn’t work for me.”
“So what, you’d rather be scrubbing showers?”
“I’d rather be doing something that matters.”
“They told me I’d be doing something that matters,” Tharsis said slowly, and sank down onto the bathroom floor, dirty water immediately soaking into the edges of her uniform. “But I go to work and I try, but it’s all just, I mean, what difference does it make if Humphryes is here? If I’m here on Humphryes? It’s fucking useless.”
tDaer was quiet for a moment. “Means something to your family, doesn’t it?” And for once, there was no judgment, no condescension. Just honest curiosity.
Tharsis thought about the Barachiel, and her brother, and laughed a hollow, empty laugh. “I’m talking about me.” She let her head fall back against the wall, sighing. “You give up your whole life, and this is all there is.”
A shifting noise and a soft touch on her knee pulled her eyes down. “This is all there ever is,” tDaer replied quietly, so close their noses brushed. “There never can be anything else. And that’s by design. It’s all lies, Tharsis. Fucking lies. They lie and they fucked it up and nobody’s where they should be and it’s not fucking fair.”
Something in tDaer’s words set off every alarm in Tharsis’s head, as if Mars itself was screaming at her to not listen. But all Tharsis could think about was the stench in the darkness, the war that was coming, how pointless it all seemed.
And, seized by something she didn’t understand, Tharsis pitched forward and sealed her lips against tDaer’s. Her hands grabbed for purchase on threadbare work clothes as thinner, longer ones twisted into her uniform.
She hauled them both up to their feet, pushing tDaer back against the shower wall, kissing hen with all the desperation welling up inside of her. tDaer went with it, let Tharsis lead for the moment, lips and tongue and teeth submissive.
For a moment.
Before hooking a leg around, flipping, pressing pelvis to pelvis, back to wall, as hen started working the uniform’s zipper down. Tharsis didn’t even have time to shrug out of it, either, before a hand slipped down. Up.
“Jesus, tDaer,” she gasped, those fingers hitting the wetness building there, sliding into her. Her head hit the tile, cushioned by her hair, falling from its bun.
“Calm down, it’s okay, I’ve got you, go with it, come on, just go with it.”
Dimly, Tharsis realized with a flush—tDaer chuckling, kissing her again—she had no idea what she was doing. But her body seemed to understand what tDaer was doing to it, manipulating it with the same intensely bored focus hen piloted the divedrive with, and she could feel her own response growing in her belly. Hotter and brighter and more.
Until it hit her. Full. Blossoming in the uncolored glory of a magnetic explosion.
Her knees gave out under the force of its blast.
tDaer was right there, as she hit the shower room floor, holding her as she drifted back into herself. The lieutenant blinked, hearing a laugh that could have been hers, far, far away.
“You needed that,” tDaer observed, smug and sweet.
Tharsis nodded, a little breathless. It never felt like that when she did it herself. Not that she was going to admit that to the voider. “Yeah, yeah, that was good.”
“Just good?” tDaer sniffed and ran those impossibly thin fingers back through the Arran’s tangled dark hair. “I’ll have to try harder next time.”
“Next time?”
“Fuck yes, next time. Right?”
“Sure,” Tharsis said, not sure at all what she was feeling, eyes firmly on the ceiling. Mold up there, she noticed. As if cataloging it would somehow make the rest of this make sense. She wanted a shower. She wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t Humphryes. “If you want.”
“Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I?” tDaer shifted, eyes glowing like the black heart of a neutron star. “Why do you keep throwing that scat out there?”
The lieutenant sighed. “Arran men don’t… they don’t like us.”
“Fuck them and their stupid opinions. It’s disgusting,” hen said, and moved back into Tharsis’s space, swinging a leg up over hers, straddling her, pressing a hand to her belly. “That whole planet is fucking slavery. To dirt. It’s insane.”
At those words, home, home sprang to Tharsis’s mind. The red dust of the planet, the wild storms that battered the shutters, the snow and the seas and the struggle to eke out the most spartan of livings from it all. The need to protect it. The fanatical pride most took in the task.
“This is freedom,” her father had told her once, on a campout in the high slopes, before she’d left for the Academy. “This is freedom. And this kind of freedom is what keeps us human, Ambera. Don’t forget that. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”
“I’ve got something I’d like to show you,” tDaer whispered in her ear, breaking through those memories. “I need your help.”
“Sure,” she whispered.
But when tDaer took her back to hen’s room to show her what hen had been talking about, Tharsis wished she hadn’t asked.
Tharsis found herself at the Wardog that evening. A quiet seat, far end of the bar, as far away from the few other officers that were in here on a weekday night. The radio was up—rugby season had started back home—but conversation was subdued.
The place hadn’t been the same since Major Lanin left. Nothing had been the same. It all felt very distant, like it belonged to another life.
A life where one Lieutenant Ambera Chen hadn’t heard what was in tDaer’s grainy recordings, squirreled away in the mess of hen’s tiny dorm room as if precious.
Quiet, at first. Almost silent. A whisper, rising to a plea, to a whining scream, one word contained in it all, echoing coldly around the spare little dorm room.
... come... come to me... you must...
It was the voice from the past. From the darkness.
Everyone in the Heliosphere knew that voice.
“I picked that up about a year ago, while I was working on my doctorate at a Tethyan campus,” tDaer had explained. “Took me forever to decrypt it, but I could see the source of the signal. Knew I had to keep trying. And there it was. There she was. The Arcna.”
“This is new?”
“I need something,” tDaer had pressed.
“What?”
“A complete copy of The Book of Shoals.”
The enormity of that request went through Tharsis’s mind again, there at the bar, and she had no idea what she should do about it.
Another Propagation. Another fucking war. Coming. Proof of it coming, right there, on some Cronuan grad student’s tablet. A Cronuan who wanted Tharsis to violate the Accords for hen.
It was probably the reason for hen’s interest in her, that scat in the showers, which was an infuriating thought.
Tharsis knew she had to go back to base. Report it. Confirm Colonel Cambel’s suspicions. Get it up the chain as fast as possible before things started blowing up. But then Hinden would get the credit for it. Promotion, decoration, bragging rights.
That thought was inexcusable pettiness, and Tharsis knew it. She knew better.
She didn’t know what the hell to do.
“Anything else you need, El-Tee?” the owner asked, swiping his cloth in front of her half-eaten basket of yam chips, ordered an hour ago. “Another cider, maybe?”
Tharsis tipped the empty glass in front of her with a tired finger. She didn’t remember finishing it. Didn’t even remember how many it was.
Getting drunk. With a Propagation starting.
What the fuck was wrong with her?
“I’m fine, Chris.” Her whole body ached. “Just tired.”
The expat leaned in, glancing at the radio. “I’ve been seeing a lot of that these days with you military kids. Since that Hinden took over up there.”
“Major Lanin was a lot better,” she agreed, silently wishing the gregarious man away.
“Commanders come and go, El-Tee. I’ve seen oh, eight of them pass through Humphryes since I opened this place. Good or bad, they all try to change everything, but the system trundles on. Always does. You younger officers are too young to know this yet, but Hinden ain’t the end of the world.” He nodded. “Don’t get caught up in it.”
Tharsis scrubbed a hand across her face. He wasn’t leaving. Why wasn’t he leaving? “It’s my first assignment. I guess I thought it’d be, I don’t know, different?”
“Especially stop worrying about it if it’s your first assignment,” he told her, and then chuckled a little. “Keep yourself attached to a good NCO, and you’ll be fine. Like that one man you’ve got, Olin.”
She snorted. “Hinden doesn’t like him any more than he likes me.”
“Good NCOs usually piss officers off. It’s their job to let you wing-necks know the difference between what can be done, what’s being ordered to be done, and what should be done,” Chris said. “If Hinden knew what an asset he had in that man, he’d lay off.”
Tharsis ran a finger around the rim of her empty glass. “What do you mean?”
“I was stationed out here at Humphryes, you know, a decade or so ago. Did my six, met a nice local girl, liked the ʼroid and decided that was it for me,” Chris replied. “But Olin there, he had drive. ‘This is my life,’ he used to say, ‘there’s nothing else for me.’ I tried to tell him otherwise, but he’d started out on the Turiel, and I guess that set it for him.”
Tharsis tried to fit that in with the man she knew. Blacksuiter, like the boys off the Barachiel. Serving with clear-eyed honor and distinction. No sarcasm, all duty.
It didn’t seem to fit.
“He’s a good man, kiddo. Listen to him.”
“Yeah, but—” she began.
But at that moment, the radio went dead, the news feed cut off the monitors, and Humphryes’s Big Noise, pumped into the bar courtesy of the same ASDF-issued speaker stack located in every Arran establishment, household, and craft on 4Vesta, crackled to life.
On automatic override.
<—We have confirmation, I repeat, we have confirmation that Lecides Base in the Hilda Archipelago is under active fire from unidentified enemy forces. Casualty reports will be provided as known. We repeat, Lecides Base is under attack—>
The quiet of the room that had descended with CP’s words was shattered by the sound of falling glass. Tharsis turned to see Chris’s daughter struggling to pick the pieces up and put them back on her tray. Nobody moved to help.
Chris turned up the volume.
<—We repeat, Lecides Base is under attack. An official statement from HOMECOM is expected shortly. Lecides Base is under attack. Conventional explosives only at this time. No green smoke observed. No evacuations ordered. Tok activity not confirmed, repeat, Tok activity not confirmed—>
Tharsis thought about the divedrive, and the Barachiel, and tDaer’s recording. The first words of the Eighth Propagation, calling somebody, something, out to Noqumiut.
And, leaving a twenty-five MSD coin next to her half-finished glass, she left for base.
Whatever the consequences for herself, HOMECOM needed to know.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
“We’re at WARNCON YELLOW now, but the moment HOMECOM declares RED,” one of the technical sergeants, Winters, was explaining, “even an insignificant little place like Humphryes is going to get turned upside down.”
Under normal circumstances, Tharsis had no business being in the command post. Under crisis conditions, her presence was actively interfering with the more classified reporting operations. But the CP held the radio terminal that could talk to the Barachiel, and so that’s where she had gone.
