The lighthouse of kuiper, p.16
The Lighthouse of Kuiper, page 16
“As much as it pains me to say it, sir, she made her own choices.”
“Yeah, we all do, don’t we?”
For the Rossen, the Bill of Ratification mandated that he report his presence to the commander of whatever base he was stationed at. Sometimes, it was easy. The commander of the Turiel had shaken Caleb’s hand and told him he’d be treated like any other corporal. Major Lanin, who’d served as a lieutenant on the Turiel during Caleb’s first assignment there, had laughed his ass off and then asked if he could get Humphryes’s budget doubled.
Caleb hadn’t yet gotten around to reporting in to Captain Hinden.
Some men just couldn’t be trusted.
“What are you doing here, anyway, sir?” he asked. “I had the report classified.”
“HQs hold secrets like plastic retains atmo,” Lanin replied with a laugh, the way he always did when he was lying. “Thought I’d pop down and see if the weirder rumors bore out.”
Bullshit, he thought. “Morray tell you, then?”
“The lead doctor, actually. We’re classmates. He figured I knew her,” the major said without missing a beat. “I figured somebody should be here with her.”
Caleb shot him a look. “I haven’t written this kid off. I haven’t been ignoring her.”
“Wouldn’t think that you had, sir,” Lanin replied, dog-earing the open page in his Bible before shutting it and getting up. “You’ve got your responsibilities, just like she had hers.” He glanced back down into the vat. “Will that scarring come off?”
“Vat should take care of it. Mine stays because of whatever the fuck they did to me,” Caleb told him, and thought of something else. “I may need you to come back to Humphryes with me, Major. We need a decent officer there, with what’s coming.”
“Things that bad?” And, when Caleb didn’t say anything, his old commander nodded, slow, almost reluctant. “I appreciate the faith in me.”
“You came here to check on her, didn’t you?” the Landlord replied.
Caleb lingered, after Lanin left. Sat at the side of the tank in the half-lit room. Took in the sound of machinery beeping. Thought about what he was going to do about the whole ridiculous mess.
He liked to think of himself as a practical man, a pragmatic man. He wasn’t beholden to nostalgia; his last winter in the harsh storms of Wyoming, his years fighting a losing war for the planet, had been filled with too much horror for him to look back at his past with anything other than disgust. And he’d never indulged in false hope.
He held no illusions that humanity could ever achieve one of those perfect states that they’d all seemed to think the Landlords could create for them. Even Mars, which had been founded as a constitutional republic, as a safe haven from the machinations of the Euphemism, was a failure. His very existence invalidated such fundamental principles.
But at the same time, the Heliosphere was trapped, barely functioning. Nothing could change, nothing could advance, nothing could be different. The transhumanist movements had failed. In horror or despair or mule-headed ignorance, nothing new had grown. None of those loose ends of human nature had ever been tied up, no matter what the other Landlords pretended. No matter what the Arcna screeched, safe in her mystery kingdom.
While Caleb didn’t fully believe that the return of natural-state humanity would restore sanity to the Heliosphere, it had to be a step in the right direction. He’d grown up in the old world, and he understood that biology alone didn’t make a man human. But even he held out hope that the people who’d departed on the exodus craft could, upon returning, help. Pull their progeny out of this Tenancy-induced stasis. Maybe, if they came back, humanity could move forward again, without fear or hesitation. Remind everyone of who they were, who they could be.
The Heliosphere desperately needed that.
Get the fucking genetic code back too. Go home to Earth. Remember what it was like to live at the mercy of things bigger than oneself. Lose all this fucking pretentiousness.
And if the Flet, the Naven, were willing to trust Tharsis, he couldn’t do any less. Couldn’t afford not to. Not with the Eighth Propagation coming on. The ASDF had no chance of decrypting that signal until the Arcna wanted them to hear it.
But he couldn’t afford any more foolishness. Not like Ceres.
Even if that meant trusting a girl who’d killed a Landlord. One of the few he’d counted as a friend.
“Sorry, kiddo,” he murmured quietly. “Looks like you’re not getting off so easy as dying this time.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
After they washed the last of the biological healing gel off her skin and tossed a robe at her, Tharsis expected that the Rossen would show up. Condemn her. Rub her nose in all the scat the Wytt had pulled from her head.
But he didn’t come. Not right away.
They gave her a private little recovery room instead. Small and narrow, but quiet. No windows, no view of the home world, which she was grateful for. She’d never stand on its surface again. Seeing it would have been torture.
The one saving grace about Deimos was Major Lanin, still in the mandatory post-outwell recovery period before heading back down to the surface. His new posting. He gave no explanation for his presence when he showed up, offered no insight to her fate, but he was there. Wanting to know how she was feeling. How she was doing. If they’d taken care of the scarring from the injection, and how he knew about that, she didn’t dare ask.
He even brought her a couple packets of curried yam soup his wife had sent up in her last care package to him. “Better than hospital food,” he said, and there was something like pity in his expression as he passed her one. “How long were you in the void without your suit sealed up?”
“I don’t know.” Her stomach ached. The vat might have healed the worst of the dermal injuries, but she couldn’t shake the sensation of being lost in the void. Painkillers weren’t helping. “Doesn’t matter. I should have died out there.”
“You wanna go like that? A million kilometers from home, from your unit, from the people who care about you?”
“Who cares about me at Humphryes? Hinden? The rest of the fucking el-tees? Huh? You think that’s a place where anybody gives a scat about me? About anybody else? It’s not like this assignment must be for you, all nice and meaningful.”
“I’m going to be running a lot of drills, getting pissed on Fiveday nights. Pretty goddamn boring, if you think about it.”
“But it’s not pointless,” she said. “Right?”
Her former commander’s eyes softened. “Nothing’s pointless, Ambera. You gotta get over thinking that everyone’s out to get you.”
She stared down at the meal, ashamed by the kindness in the man. She didn’t know what to say. How to even start to explain herself.
She just kept seeing that little girl. That little hand, pushed through the hull. That tiny little hand, dissipating into red vapor, the entire world catching fire.
“Brought a uniform for you,” Lanin said, handing her a paper-wrapped bundle. “No patches, no name tag, but there it is. Best I could do for you in a couple of hours. They were out of stock on female grays, but the boots are your size. Shouldn’t be any seal issues.”
“Female,” she muttered, and didn’t meet his gaze. “Female. Not even good enough for a woman. You have any idea how wearing that gets?”
“Tharsis.” There was a hint of warning in his voice. “You need to let this scat go, or it’s going to eat you alive.”
She’d finished her soup and pulled the uniform on over the mess of her arm—swollen and blotchy, the Naven’s fingers still tingling as they dissolved against it—and settled in to wait.
“Evening, Lieutenant Chen.”
She’d fallen asleep, if that chronograph over the door was any indication.
Maybe it was a dream or something.
It wasn’t the Landlord standing at the foot of her bed, looking pissed as all hell, but her sergeant. Her asshole, AWOL sergeant. Hands in the pockets of void blacks, sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
The obvious question, the where the fuck have you been? died on her lips.
Wound around both elbows and pulling upwards towards his shoulders were indigo patterns. Intricate tattoos that weren’t tattoos at all.
Holy mother of god.
A quiet man with humble ambition, she’d always thought of Master Sergeant Olin.
Nothing like the Chief Ross from the stories. That proud, certain man who’d helped found the nation, who’d kept it together all these centuries.
“This is a fuckin’ joke, right?” she groaned.
“Let me put it this way, ma’am,” he said, unzipping the one-piece and shrugging out of the top, “I was eleven when I got these for Christmas, and I assure you, it was as far from funny as it gets.”
There was no mistaking what was there. The sergeant’s chest was completely covered in deep blue scars. Curling and winding and spreading. Across every square centimeter of skin.
Any schoolkid on Mars could have identified it. Dermal scarring from the old horrors, the bacterium of the Euphemism. The scat colonized under skin, releasing hallucinogenic toxins directly into the muscle and nervous system, permanently damaging the tissue above it. But the inoculations had taken care of that, wiping all but a few carefully cultivated strains out. Nobody had been scarred like that in over seven hundred years.
Tharsis felt faint. Of all the places that fucker could have been hiding, of all the lieutenants’ lives he could have been fucking with...
“Ambera,” he—Olin, Chief Ross, the Rossen, whoever the fuck he was—was saying as he pulled the blacks back on, “I move through this world as unobtrusively as possible. It’s the only thing that keeps Mars from descending into the same fucking mess as the rest of the system.”
“Right, and that works out so fucking well,” she grumbled without really meaning to.
He leveled a finger at her. “Stop,” he said, in a tone she’d never heard him use before. “Fucking stop. I’m not going to be lectured by a selfish little girl who let herself get sucked into this Nalatok insanity...”
The words stung, but Tharsis could feel the anger starting to build, and really, what difference did it make? He was going to execute her anyway. A man she’d worked with, liked, admired, relied on, trusted, was going to execute her. “Do you think I would have if I’d known what hen was trying to—”
“—like giving The Book of Shoals to some random asshole university brat from Iapetus because she fucked you! Are you that goddamn blue in the cunt that you’d—”
“Like this was about sex!” she yelled back, stung. “You, of all the goddamn people, ought to know that I wouldn’t do that!”
His eyes narrowed a bit, the way they did when he was tracing out a fiber path in his mind. “But you still knew. You knew something was wrong, that it was going somewhere wrong, but it wasn’t worth caring about. What difference did it make? What could possibly go wrong?”
“Right, and all the fucking stress of the last few months doesn’t have any part to play in this?” she protested.
He exploded.
“That’s voider talk, El-Tee!” His voice took on a mocking quality. “I’m no better than the sum of my parts. I’m just a machine that reacts to the environment. I can’t help anything I am. It’s all somebody else’s fault! But you know what? Other people’s mistakes are not an excuse for yours!” He roared the last sentence and slammed a fist on the table.
It popped her anger like a soap bubble. Tharsis sagged. “I...”
Drawing his uniform back over the legacy of a long-vanished world, her sergeant sighed. “I had Colonel Cambel explain a version of the situation to Hinden before we left. I told that fucker directly that I hadn’t had time to discuss it with you. But he probably thought he found a way to neutralize you, and he used it. I’m sorry about that.”
She closed her eyes, sinking back into the thin hospital pillows. “Fuck.”
“Put it aside, Ambera,” he said. “You’re better than this.”
The lieutenant rubbed a hand down her tingling arm. “What if I’m not? I’m a scat-stain of an officer. What the hell am I supposed to be better than? Who?”
“You know, I’ve heard this scat from somebody else,” he replied, letting his long frame in its unfamiliar blacks fall back against the nearest wall, scarred arms folded across his chest, very far away. “She was like you. Young. More focused, but we were a people in a world-ending crisis.”
There was something hypnotic about the story, the little singsong lilt in the words as he spoke. Reminiscent of the way he always was in the squadron, when he was shooting the breeze with the guys, giving her some casual advice about how to handle this or that problem. It hurt.
“Eliza Rallison, right?”
He nodded.
“The Rallarhu’s a fucking inhuman monster.”
“She was a fine woman, Ambera, and a fine officer. I would have done anything for her.” And he looked down at his arms. Sighed. “She threw herself into the uniform on the faith that we could still save our world. But she fell. She fell, Tharsis. I’ve lost the memory of exactly how, but,” and his eyes pulled up, locked with hers. “I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
Shame boiled hot in her blood, and she could feel herself shaking. “Jesus, Olin, it just... I killed a little girl. She was just a little girl, and she’s vapor now. She vaporized in front of me.”
The bed next to her dipped, a stiff-garbed arm wrapped around her shoulders. And for a few moments, Tharsis tried to fight off the tears, the wave of grief that was threatening to carry her out to sea.
For a few moments, it felt like sympathy.
Just a moment.
Then the tentative hug was gone. The sergeant was gone.
The Landlord spoke.
“You know what I’m supposed to do now, don’t you?”
Tharsis nodded. “I know.”
“Too bad. Dying’s easy, Tharsis. This is going to be substantially more complicated.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Checking the address for one last time on her palm, Tharsis licked the ink and rubbed it off on her cheap, borrowed leggings. Right around the corner, and none too soon for her still healing body. Her arm ached.
The Rossen—and she was struggling to think of her master sergeant as that rat-bastard—had been painfully blunt about how this was going to work.
“You get me the algorithms the Cronuan used to decrypt the message, any other intel you can manage. You’re on temporary amnesty only. Once you get what I need, you will report in to the nearest base, and I’ll deal with you from there. You fuck me over, and I will know. Your family’s service commitment will fall on one of your little sisters. You understand me, Lieutenant?”
“Clear as quartz, sir.”
After taking the grav boots Lanin had brought for her, Tharsis had scrounged a couple sets of civilian clothes from the clinic’s lost and found. She’d even found a tunic with a high neck on it. Not high enough to fully hide her rank—the damn things were purposely placed to avoid concealment—but enough to make it look like she was trying. The rucksack contained the only things the Rossen had been willing to issue her: fresh ENEX, grav bag, water decontamination tablets, a hand-forged combat knife in a flexible ceramic hip sheath that would get it past imaging equipment.
That last had given her pause.
“You don’t expect me to come back, do you?” she’d asked, rubbing her thumb over the dark, reflectionless surface of its Alban steel blade.
“We’ll get you home,” the Rossen had said, sounding more like her old sergeant. “This isn't about sending you out there to die. I need you to believe that.”
“I’m sorry, you know. About everything.”
“Yeah? Me too. Make it right. Okay? Go out there and make it right.”
“I won’t fail you on this.”
“Forget about me. Don’t fail yourself.”
The Rossen hadn’t given her a plan. Nothing workable. “The less I do for you, the better,” he’d said; but Landlord or not, she knew her sergeant. He hadn’t been sure what to say.
But she’d remembered one of the flyers from the messy bulletin board in New Stockholm; there was a Nighttrippers on Phobos. Just outside the library. She caught a civilian shuttle over to the other moon and went looking for the place.
An open-source research facility, the Phobos Library was an important node of Heliosphere academia. Originally created to house the Rossen’s Journal, it had expanded its charter over the past seven hundred years to include archives of nearly every book, poem, monograph, essay, news report, or thesis produced by Arran or pre-Euphemism Earth cultures. It was weak on foreign source material, though, and its religious archives were DNA keyed for Arran access only.
Beyond its walls, a tumble of private libraries and stores sold texts—most illegal outwell—from dozens of different cultures, supplementing study programs. Some were Arran-owned, but most were run by voider expats; the whole area was, therefore, a strange mishmash of different architectural styles and building-bound gravitational constants that levitated pebbles in the byways between. Tharsis found herself stumbling through it, until she felt the tug of the moon’s natural microgravity from a section that was purely international.
From there, it was a brief push to a raw rock doorway, carved into the top floor of a Jovian-style building. Nighttrippers was spelled over it in Standard English and Jovian scripts.
The lieutenant had no idea what to expect. The address in the clinic’s local directory had listed this place as a long-term researcher’s hostel, but there was none of the easy, comfortable familiarity of the New Stockholm branch. Instead, austerity ruled. Taking a turn that would have brought her to the common lounge area at her own hostel, she instead found herself in a wide, thick chamber, roughly spherical, with most of the internal surface covered with bookcases. The volumes were held in with small bars positioned on hinges across each shelf. At the bottom, a small flat landing held a cashier’s desk and lounging hammocks.
