Jitterbug, p.16
Jitterbug, page 16
I left Kiki and the parrot to supervise the purchase and loading of supplies, and Amber Roth and I walked away from the settlement, into the flat fields. Around us, the terrain stretched away, seemingly perfectly level, until its details became lost in the purple blur of distance, beyond which the upward curve of the segment caused the landscape to rear up like an impossibly distant mountain range.
We held hands and just kept walking through the waist-high corn until the improvised little town lay far behind us. Then, in an unspoken agreement, we lay down in the dust between the rows of green stalks and, still clasping hands, gazed up at the sky.
Roth said, “This is huge, isn’t it?”
At first, I thought she meant the field. “First contact with an alien species?”
“Yeah.”
“Massive.”
Having grown up beneath the grey metallic ceilings and bright sunlamps of the Lunar domes, I could feel the sky’s endless azure replenishing some deep, neglected part of my soul, and I understood why people might be willing to throw in their old lives to come out here and surrender to a life of toil in return for so much open space.
“Are you as frightened as I am?”
Surrounded by pithy, fibrous stalks, I turned my head to look at her, feeling dirt crunch into my hair. “Of course I am. I’m a bounty hunter. This is way above my pay grade.”
“And yet, here we are.”
“Here we are.”
“Representatives of humanity.”
“No.” I squeezed her hand. “No, Danielle Lanzo is our representative. She’ll do the talking. We’re just—”
“Chauffeurs?”
I smiled. “I guess so.”
“And Kowalski?”
“I don’t know. Hired muscle?”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Neither do I. He’s a spook. In fact, he’s king of the spooks. He’s the one that knows what all the other spooks are up to.”
She levered herself up on her elbows. “He tried to kill us.”
“And now we’re working with him.”
“It’s fucked up.”
“It’s politics.”
“Same difference.”
A bee droned overhead, and I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t realised there were insects in the Swirl, but I guessed I should have expected they would have been imported. After all, crops need to be pollinated, and there would be no sense going to the trouble and expense of trying to develop a drone to do what Mother Nature could accomplish more efficiently, and for a fraction of the price.
I closed my eyes and raised my face to the Sun. “I’ve missed this.”
“Politics?”
I laughed, and slapped my free hand against the dry, packed soil. “No, this.”
“I never had you figured for a farm boy.”
“You’d be surprised. My mother was a botanist, and I spent the first twelve years of my life working the Lunar agricultural domes.”
“Seriously?”
“Hey, if you want to know the difference between wheat and barley, I’m your guy.”
“Damn.” She shook her head. “Botanist to bounty hunter. That’s quite a journey.”
“How about you? Where are you from?”
“There’s not much to tell.”
“Well, apparently you’re a pirate queen. So, I’m guessing there’s at least some backstory there.”
Roth slumped back. “Nothing that would be of interest.”
“Are you kidding?” I rolled onto my side to face her. “I want to know everything about you.”
“No.” She kept her eyes on the heavens. “No, you really don’t.”
“You won’t even tell me where you were born?”
“What difference does it make?”
Silence lay around us, waiting to push its way into the conversation. No birds, no wind. Only the occasional hum of a bee.
I said, “I don’t know, I’m just trying to find out more about you, because…” I tripped over my words. “Because you’re becoming important to me.”
She gave me a long sideways look. “That’s why I don’t want to wreck whatever this is that we have right now.”
“So, we do have something?”
She let out a resigned little sigh and turned her face in my direction. “Let’s just take it one day at a time and see what happens, okay?”
I smiled. “I can do that.”
* * *
By the time we got back to the ship, Ulf and Kiki were stowing the last of the supplies and Lanzo’s bodyguards were trying to talk her out of leaving them behind.
“For fuck’s sake,” she was saying to them as we entered the crew lounge, “we’re going to meet a technically superior race. If they decide to kill us, I don’t think your sidearms are going to make much difference.”
“But Madam Deputy—”
“I have made my decision.”
Across the room, Kiki was trying to hide a smirk as she stuffed emergency rations into an overhead locker.
Lanzo dismissed her unhappy guardians and turned on me. “It’s about time you showed your face.”
“I was just—”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what you were doing.” She glared at Roth. “Or whom, for that matter. The fact is, you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest.”
“Me?”
“Thanks to your transmission, everybody in the system now knows there’s an inbound alien vessel, and some of them aren’t handling the news very well.”
“You mean the transmission that saved our lives?”
She ignored my comment. She pulled out a data tablet and checked the readings on its display. “Over the past two hours, four ships belonging to various Earth governments have altered course. Another six are being hastily prepped for departure. Not to mention a veritable armada of smaller vessels belonging to corporate interests and private individuals.”
“Everybody wants to be first to meet the aliens,” Roth said.
“Or blow them up.” Lanzo handed me the tablet, and I studied the projected vector lines of all the ships known to be heading in this direction.
“We’re still the closest,” I said, running some quick calculations. “If we leave now, we’ll be able to stay ahead of the pack.”
“Then I suggest we get the fuck on with it.”
PART TWO
THE UNKNOWN, REMEMBERED GATE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AMBER ROTH
After negotiating the minefield of Copernicus’s well-meaning questions and enduring Lanzo’s palpable dislike, it was a relief to escape back to the engineering decks. At least down there, Ulf remained gruffly reluctant to talk about his feelings and every problem confronting us had a straightforward technical solution—even if that solution was simply to hit it with a wrench. The power relays and fuel containment systems didn’t care about the details of my shady past.
It wasn’t that I wanted to hide that past from Copernicus; I just didn’t think the time was right for him to find out about all the sketchy shit I’d done. You don’t get to be a pirate queen without racking up a fairly sizeable body count, and I certainly had my share of ghosts. I knew that if I laid it all out for him now, he’d freak out. Beneath that bounty hunter exterior beat the heart of a principled man—a man who’d lost his father to a pirate just like me. Right now, things were good between us. That wouldn’t last if he knew the whole truth. Maybe if we survived the coming encounter, I’d figure out how to explain it all to him in a way that wouldn’t make him hate me. For now, it would have to wait. For now, I had a job to do.
“Five minutes until departure,” the Jitterbug squawked over the intercom, and we strapped into our chairs.
Down here, the roar of the fusion motors, transmitted through the bulkheads and deck, sounded much louder than elsewhere in the ship. As we rose into the sky above Bradley’s Lookout, I kept my eye on the engineering console, but all the telltales were green, and all systems seemed to be operating well within acceptable parameters and safety tolerances.
Held in place by my harness, the vibrations shook me like a child going over rough ground in a pushchair.
After the wide expanses of the Swirl, it felt like coming home.
At eighteen, I had command of my first ship. She was a 100-ton picket used to carry light cargo items and small groups of passengers. I renamed her Slinky Lynx, and used her to terrorise the civilian ships passing through the remains of the Asteroid Belt on their way to a new life in the off-world colonies.
Despite the urgings of my mentor, Cerberus Venn, we weren’t bloodthirsty murderers, and I always tried to keep casualties to a minimum. But sometimes, operations didn’t go to plan and examples had to be made. And occasionally, some asshole killed one of my crew and I got angry, slit his throat, and then kicked him out of the airlock, just to see whether he’d freeze before he drowned in his own blood.
Like I said, Copernicus would have a hard time accepting some of that stuff.
I had committed atrocities.
In a court of law, I could have made a case that it wasn’t my fault. Since losing Mica, everything I’d done, I’d done in the name of survival. But I couldn’t use that line of reasoning on Copernicus. For one thing, it wasn’t entirely true. My circumstances had been a factor, to be sure, but they weren’t the whole story. To say that would be to deny myself any notion of free will or moral agency. I had known a lot of the things I did were wrong, and I did them anyway. At any point, I could have said no. I could have quit. Venn would almost certainly have killed me for doing so, but I could have made that stand. Instead, I let others pay the price of my continued survival. And I’d had to stay tough and project mercilessness in order to keep rivals at bay. In the end, I’d even turned my back on the Slinky Lynx and her crew, hoping the data crystal might be my ticket out of that life. And of course, it had been, but it had only led me into a whole new world of trouble.
The one hard truth I’d learned about the past was that it couldn’t be changed. It couldn’t be edited or rewritten, only lived with. No matter how hard you wanted to, you couldn’t fix days that were dead and gone. All you could do was try to make sure the days to come were better.
And maybe, just maybe, I could do that.
Perhaps Copernicus and I could find some way to do it together.
If we survived.
* * *
MESSAGE BOARD
POLITICS. First Speaker Alvarado faces vote of no confidence in Solar Assembly.
[Click to Read More]
* * *
WANTED: $150K USD for apprehension of Big Jim Sullivan, wanted on charges of larceny and public inebriation. Considered armed and dangerous.
[Click to Read More]
* * *
INVASION? Swirl communities on high alert.
[Click to Read More]
* * *
MARS: Disintegration reaches critical point. Experts say total planetary collapse expected within hours.
[Click to Read More]
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
DANIELLE LANZO
War was coming. As I flicked through the news feeds, I could feel it in my bones the way I could sometimes sense an approaching summer storm.
I should have been asleep, but at my age, hot flushes, a cantankerous bladder, and aching joints made an uninterrupted night’s sleep a rarity. I tended to doze an hour here and there, and nap during the day whenever my schedule allowed. So instead, I watched distance-delayed live pictures as the First Speaker appealed for calm and stressed the need to keep the Solar Assembly united in its response. But even as he spoke, reports were coming in from the expeditions that had already been launched, and others that were being prepped—many of which were heavily armed. The Council of Ceres announced that it intended to close its ports and fire on any alien ship that tried to approach. From Earth, I saw footage from inside Switzerland’s reopened Cold War bunkers, and the announcement of civil defence drills in Japan and Korea. Pictures of burning cars and police with shields and batons showed that the riots in Paris and Athens were entering their second day, and a terse Russian ambassador read a statement declaring that the Russian Federation had closed its borders for the duration of the ‘emergency’. From New York came images of frantic stockbrokers as the market went into freefall. Tanks on the streets of Rio proclaimed that the president of Brazil had been overthrown in a military coup, and two of the larger Swirl settlements—Barter Town and New California—were refusing to refuel any expeditions not sanctioned by the Assembly.
I turned off the feed and massaged my temples.
“Fucking idiots.”
My Spanish grandmother used to say that fear makes people stupid. There were some very scared people out there right now. The solar system was an oil spill awaiting a discarded match. Eventually, someone was going to do something careless or stupid, and the whole of humanity would be engulfed in conflict at the very moment we most needed to pull together and speak with a single voice.
Well, I’d be fucked if I was going to let that happen on my watch.
I changed the screen to an external view as we passed back through the gap between the Swirl segments. The edge of the nearest was a knife-sharp boundary between the light of the Sun and the darkness of interstellar space. Kowalski’s ship was a firefly spark off our port side. And somewhere close to us both, the stealth vessel was, of course, invisible.
Once we were through, I watched the stars. They shone brightly out here. Thanks to the Swirl, two generations had grown up without an unfettered view of the night sky, denied all but a fraction of the splendour their grandparents had taken for granted. A few days ago, I would have considered myself privileged to enjoy such an unspoiled vista. But tonight, all I could see was a potential battleground. How many of those distant pinpricks of light had already been colonised by our approaching visitors and their godlike technology, and how many more played host to other unimaginably advanced civilisations?
As a politician, I had a reputation for remaining resolute and composed in the most challenging of circumstances, but right now I felt infinitesimally small and alone, and I needed to talk to someone.
I put in a call to Kowalski.
After a few seconds, the screen switched from the outside view to a close-up of his face. He was in his cabin aboard the Sol-Sec corvette, lying on a bunk and wearing a rumpled white T-shirt.
“Madam Deputy.” He yawned, and I derived some satisfaction from the realisation I’d awoken him.
“Director.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“I hate being out of touch with home,” I told him.
Now we were outside the Swirl and moving around its outer edge, all contact with the inner solar system had been cut off, blocked by the mass of the segment between us and them.
He sighed. “How can I help?”
“I want to know what’s happening in the Assembly. It’s driving me crazy. The last we heard, Alvarado faced a vote of no confidence, and I don’t know how it turned out. For all I know, I might be Acting First Speaker right now.”
Kowalski raised an eyebrow. “And what makes you think I know?”
I wasn’t in the mood to fuck around. “Because you’re the head of Sol-Sec. You make it your business to know these things. You live and breathe intelligence.”
He thought that over for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Fair point.”
“So, do you know anything.”
“I might…”
“Listen, Sebastian. If you have any way to know…”
“Theoretically, we could have left a relay satellite above the gap we came through.”
I gave a thin smile. “And did you?”
“Trust me, if you were First Speaker, I would tell you.”
“Oh.” I experienced a sudden feeling of deflation. Not disappointment, more a release of tension. Maybe some relief. “I see.”
“Now, I’ve been up half the night, so if you’ll excuse me, I need some sleep.”
“Well, thanks for the update.”
“You’re welcome.” His eyes narrowed slyly. “Madam First Speaker.”
I almost ended the call before the words sank in.
“What?”
He broke into a smile. “Alvarado lost. You’ve been promoted.”
“You’re shitting me?”
“God’s honest truth. The media outlets are going frantic trying to work out where you are.”
“Oh, my God…”
“I guess congratulations are in order, and I look forward to this next phase of our working relationship.”
“Thank you.”
“Only until the election, though.” His smile widened. “At which point, I very much plan on taking the job for myself.”
“Naturally.”
I took a moment to calm my racing heart. I was Acting First Speaker for the Solar Assembly, and here I was, riding into the unknown in a souped-up jalopy of an old space freighter with only my heavily armed political rival for company. Wherever Samuel was right now, I imagined he’d be shitting an octopus.
The thought made me smile, and I had a sudden urge for a glass of fine shiraz and a plate of ketchup-smothered fries.
“We are doing the right thing out here,” I said, “aren’t we?”
Kowalski’s eyes widened. “You’re having doubts?”
“Don’t look so surprised. Of course I’m having fucking doubts. Nobody in the whole history of the human fucking race has ever been in this situation before. How can we possibly be sure if we’re handling it right?”
He thought about that. Then he said, “Listen, we’ve known each other for almost ten years now. In that time, we’ve occasionally butted heads. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about you, it’s that you always, and I mean always, put the good of the Assembly first.”
