Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 12 / Chapter 14 –>

The podship scuds against atmosphere, triggering a battery of deceleration thrusters; but this is a fine ship, not a minimum-contract drop can. She rumbles, sending a perceptible shiver through the hull plating, but then it’s just like dropping into a vat of molasses, a sense of pressure and a slight tilt forward. She rights herself almost at once, recalibrating her systems for a smooth, stressless entry.

Ray is awake again and grateful for it after muzzy dreams. Even more grateful for the fact that it was Emma, splendid and winking who shook him out of his nightmares rather than a bloated and inkstained Amah, who probably would have sent him into fits of screaming. As it is, he’s just pleased he didn’t snap out of the couch and belt Emma across the chin before he knew what he was doing.

Messed up, that was what it was. Bad dreams. A combination of horror and exhaustion and guilt…and maybe the fact that he went to sleep with a supernatural being fluttering around in his breast pocket.

It is a messed up world in which a man has so many other things going on that he forgets about a demigod.

Oh, he’s solved that problem now.

Ray takes his eyes off the control panels in the pilot’s cabin (panels that he wouldn’t touch if his life depended on it) and gives Nomar a sidelong glance. The rat is hopping along on his hind legs, exploring the scatter of lights across the boards as various systems spring to life, perform whatever tasks it is they were created for, then click themselves off again.

Nomar took the ring from his fingers with an avid interest when he offered it. Rolled it around between shining paws, blinking at it with red eyes. He snuffled it with his nose, detected God only knows what, then at Ray’s request, dumped it into the secure compartment Nomar used for storing hazardous materials, assorted explosive or unstable elements or radioactive curiosities. It was the safest place Ray could think of.

Now, the podship thunders across midnight terrain he can’t see in the darkness. A poor 3-dem rendering on one of his display screens–all amber lines and topographical banalities–suggests water below, or extremely disinteresting and featureless land. It reminds him vaguely of skimming over the desert in a Predator on late night combat raids, visor on his command helmet down while he takes one final look at the mission specs. The desert was largely a loose, roughly concentric mishmash of curved lines on his display then, too, with the Predators replicated as amorphous blips zipping across it.

“Okay,” Lieutenant Kato says to him over the radio. “We’re tracking you coming in at just over a thousand knots. Your angle is good; deceleration tubes are operating in the green; all of your systems read normal. Hull shielding and heat dampers are functioning as advertised. You’re just over five hundred kilometers out, Ray, so we’re going to shed some velocity over the ocean, then roll you inland a grid or two and bring you in under impulse midway between the tower and the Whiston hangar. EED has shut down traffic in and out of the field while we collect the podships, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“You keep saying that,” Ray answers. You keep saying it, but you have no idea.

“I just want you relax a little. We’ve got things under control.”

“I’m hoping so. There are lots of lights and switches and levers up here. It’s a little disorienting, frankly, so if you’re expecting me to push or tug anything, you’re going to have to give me plenty of notice.”

Nervous. “Um, we’d really prefer it if you didn’t touch anything at all.”

“I’m glad we agree, then.”

“Our plan is to acquire control of your shipboard systems at the two hundred kilometer marker, where we’ll start your swing around. I’ll let you know when that happens.”

“Really, no. Thanks, but don’t. I’ll be happy if you just let me know when we’re on the ground.”

Kato barks with laughter. “I thought you Marines were supposed to be intrepid.”

“We are. On the ground.”

***

Lieutenant Kate stops chattering at him as they make their final approach, skimming in low over thick stands of timber. Fast growing, oxygen rich pine, he’s been told, planted by the first settlers nearly a hundred years ago to augment New Holyoke’s breathable, but thin atmosphere. From the viewing port, it’s just a blot of darkness pierced in spots by eruptions of stone like islands in a vast sea.

Ahead, Ray can see the white glow of Blackheath Grange, a sprawling tumble of incandescence that casts a gray haze against the clouds gathered thickly overhead. This is what human beings do, he thinks. They drop themselves on a virgin world, and the first thing they set about doing is throwing up a mantle of light pollution against the stars, closing off the vault of the sky as if they seek to forget how small a thing mankind really is. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man as a blow against insignificance. And humanity never forgot the power of its illusion. Like ostriches, burying their collective heads in the glittering sand.

For just a moment, looking at the undifferentiated shine and glare of a new, alien city, he gets that old thrill, a sort of swelling in his chest. This is the way he felt the first time he climbed off the plane, heavy rucksack in tow and rifle slung over his shoulder, and touched his feet to New Mesopotamian sand. Or his initial visit to Bangkok for his first real military leave. Something akin to the raw sensation that accompanied his first glimpse of Stratiskaya Daransk and Castor’s Nuvex City and even the distant, holo projected glimpse of long-abandoned Archae Stoddard. New worlds, strange locales and exotic experiences, ripe with possibility or adventure, even with peril. This is impressive currency for a man who did his growing up in small town Indiana where things never change and you grow old with the kids you went to kindergarten with. There’s always the sense that even looking out on these places that you’re not really there, that it isn’t your experience, but a body and thoughts and sensations that belong to someone else and which you are just borrowing for a few, precious instants.

A tap, and the cabin door opens. Ray cranes his neck to see, but the back of his seat is too tall, and before he can get out of his restraints, Emma is beside him. She leans down beside the flight chair, between its padded arms and the nav panel to his right, sharing his view through the nose of the ship.

“You’re supposed to be strapped in,” he says, though he isn’t sorry she has come. There was something inevitable in her arrival, and he’d just as soon get things out of the way now as wait until later, when New Holyoke embraced her again, immersing her in complications. “We’ll be touching down in a few minutes.”

She turns her face partly toward him, as though to acknowledge the fact that he has spoken to her, but keeps her eyes on the horizon. “You worry too much.”

“There are a million things that could go wrong. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Now you’re insulting my family. This is a Whiston Corp Sanctuary Model podship. The best emergency craft ever designed by human engineering and computer augmentation. It’s guaranteed not to tolerate malfunctions.”

He shrugs. “Accidents still happen, especially when EED ground control overrides the splendid engineering of your autopiloting systems. I’d feel better if you were strapped in.”

Emma groans, but instead of leaving, she drops onto his lap, scoots provocatively up the curve of his thighs so that her legs dangle part over his, part between them. She drags his arms around her shoulders and holds them there with her hands on top of his. She leans against him, her head against his cheek. Even for Emma, this strikes him as a bold maneuver. A statement so profound it sucks the breath from his lungs.

“There,” she says. “You can hold me until we’re on the ground. Safe enough?”

“Sure. No complaints from this peanut gallery.”

“I didn’t think so.”

For a time, they continue their long glide in, and Ray watches in silence, enjoying Emma’s glow and presence. He picks out the gradual swell of the terrain, down from the gritty highlands where the groves of trees march across virgin fields like kudzu. In the dark and at their altitude, the irregular undulations of terrain block his view of the sea beyond the Grange, but he thinks at times that he can find the narrow gorge where the river runs down from the mountains he cannot name to the bay. He doesn’t remember what Kato called the river, either, though they paralleled its course for a few kilometers.

Eventually, when it becomes clear that nothing exciting is going to happen outside the viewing screens, but that something either exciting or annoying is going to happen on this side of them if he lets the silence linger, he says, “How are you doing?”

“I wanted to ask you the same thing.”

“I’m fine,” he says, dismissive. “I’ll be better when we’re finally down.”

He tries to smile for her, but wry is the only expression he has handy. “Now, how are you feeling?”

“Strangely.”

“Not exactly revelatory, but I understand.”

“Is it wrong to feel ambivalent about a homecoming?”

“I couldn’t tell you if it’s wrong. I can tell you that it’s normal, at least the way I mean it. What feels so strange to you?”

“I don’t know, honestly. Part of me is joyous, bursting–despite everything else. The ship, your friends, all of that.” She shakes her head, as though she can jar the memories of Kilgore and blood into a darker corner where they can be forgotten. “Whatever it might lack, Blackheath Grange is home, and I’ve been gone what seems like forever. It is much more a home to me than Terra. I don’t have any connections to the planet where I was born. Father insisted that we be born Terran, for the citizenship, so the Board couldn’t use our extra-terrestriality against us or our descendents. He was sensitive to that, you know, because he felt like he had been cut off from proper succession by his Holyokan birth.”

“I didn’t realize such things mattered.”

“In some circles, Ray, where you’re from is paramount. What do you think the Lilaikens are going on about? Terrocentrism is the new class system.”

“And that’s why you’re not completely happy? Because New Holyoke is a backwater frontier world and now you’re stuck here again? No matter how much it might feel like home.”

She’s silent for a time, like she’s agreeing with him. Then, in a small voice, she says, “It wasn’t New Holyoke I was running away from.”

Because it’s on his mind, he responds: “I won’t let Frederick hurt you any more, Emma.”

But she shakes her head fiercely, violently. “Not Frederick, either. It’s…complicated, idiotically complicated sometimes. Because I love it here, Ray. There’s that large piece of me that can’t wait to get on the ground, to stroll down the Rue de Saxon, where all the fine shops are, peering into windows at new dress designs. To climb the spanning arch of the Ten Founder Bridge over the Coda, down near the bay where it becomes wide and shallow. From the height of the bridge, you can see all of the Grange, from cliffs to harbor. There is so much here, Ray, so much life and potential and interest. Intelligent, vibrant people defining themselves and our future every day, with small steps of creativity and ambition, each one a new thing, a new identity that takes us that much farther from the cultural juggernaut of Terran influence. With each day that passes, we become less Terran and more Holyokan.”

“But?”

“Yes, but. I’m not a little girl any more. I don’t have time for wonder and awe and potential. I have responsibilities and expected contributions and reporters who will follow me with Eyelenses and flotillas of digital recorders. Always wanting to know where I go, what I buy, who I visit, as though they can scry the economic and social future of the colony from my spending habits. It’s too heavy, Ray. It’s too much to bear. I don’t want my life to mean anything more than anyone else’s.”

“You ran away because you wanted to be normal,” Ray says gently. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think anyone comes pre-programmed to be a celebrity–or in your case, an icon.”

“Did I tell you that when I was on Strat, I could go for weeks at a time without anyone recognizing me? I went to restaurants sometimes, or libraries. I sat in the Student Commons. I struck up conversations which strangers. No one knew me.” But she shakes her head again, this time wearily. “You don’t understand what it means to be a Whiston. Not a corporate, Terran Whiston, but blood and bone and root Whiston. That’s what I didn’t want. As I said, it wasn’t New Holyoke I was fleeing. It was destiny. The destiny the great Whiston clan has defined for me. I just didn’t run fast enough.”

“And instead, you found me.” It was an outrageous thing for him to say.

“I found you, yes.”

Ambivalent, even about that, he thinks. He doesn’t know how to decipher her mood.

“Don’t sound so excited about it, Miss Whiston. You’ll give me a big head.”

But there’s no banter in her, no play. She scans the shimmering horizon with something like dread in her eyes and a thin crease to her lips. It’s more than just family ties and responsibilities, he suspects. She’s touched on this before, obliquely, bitterly even, but never this way, this intensely.

Maybe it’s a matter of proximity, of perceived reality. The old life and its patterns were still just a memory aboard Paraclete. Vague threats that still had no actual substance. Now the duration of her fleeting escape could be measured in minutes, seconds, like the end of a dream.

Or more likely, he supposes this could be a delayed expression of her own horror over the Paraclete disaster, but he knows better. Just as he feels it, Paraclete is still too big for her, maybe will always be too big. She comes from a frontier colony, for God’s sake, has never thought about population on a Terran scale, where twelve thousand deaths are a tragedy, but a small thing in the grand scheme. One minor neighborhood in a your average Eastern seaboard megalopolis.

Someone whose entire world runs less than a million people–hell, probably less than five hundred thousand–couldn’t even begin to grapple with a disaster of Paraclete’s magnitude.

“You’re angry with me,” he says at last.

“Yes.”

“Because I lied to you when I said I was a systems vet. And because I kept lying to you. You have every right to be angry, Emma. I’m sorry.”

It would be a petty thing to explain further, to blame the job and duty and codes of silence, so he doesn’t.

Quietly, she says, “I don’t know who you are.”

“Yes, you do. I’m exactly who you think I am, just the details are different.”

“You came to my room with guns, covered in blood.”

Those are, he must admit, pretty significant details. “I am a Commander with a special unit of the FSA known as the Criminal Investigations Unit. We covertly infiltrate EED starships and FSA Security installations in an attempt to combat terrorist organizations like the Lilaiken movement, to neutralize them before they can cause any harm. That was my assignment aboard Paraclete. That’s what I was doing when we met that evening outside Madame Trusseau’s theater. When Micah was murdered, I assumed control of the investigation at the request of Security Chief Becker and Commander Sorensen.

“Part of those duties involved performing significant surveillance on your brother, who we felt was a reasonable suspect given his connection to the victim. It was the Captain’s contention that at the very least, it was our also our duty to seek to provide evidence of his non-involvement because of the potential political ramifications.”

He kills that thread there, before he’s tempted to lie to her, and hopes she won’t ask for more. There’s nothing else he can say without destroying her or expecting her to believe him solely on his word alone, right after he’s finished apologizing to her for weeks of lies.

So he doesn’t try. It’s better this way, at least for now.

“And that’s the truth?” she says archly.

“Yes.”

“You track down terrorists and you kill them. That’s your job.”

“Yes.” On the plus side, this does not seem to disturb her.

“So did you think I was a terrorist, Ray?”

“Um, no.”

“Then you thought I might be Micah’s murderer.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then why couldn’t you just have told me the truth? Maybe not right away, but eventually. Before you showed up at my door covered in blood.” She glares at him, chin elevated, primed for offense. “Unless you just didn’t trust me.”

“Because it isn’t done, Emma. It’s not the way the business works. I had your brother under surveillance! There was more to consider than just my personal feelings.”

“But certainly not my feelings. That wasn’t part of your investigation, I take it.”

“The job had nothing to do with the reasons why I kept coming back to you.” Which is a nice thing to say, he realizes, a true thing, but there’s no way he can make her believe him. He shrugs, frustration or surrender. “Does that sound pathetic?”

“Complicated,” she answers. “Not pathetic. And it doesn’t make me any less angry.”

“I wasn’t trying to use our relationship to further my investigation.”

She exhales sharply. “But you weren’t above such things, either.”

“No.”

“You’re a very bad man.” He’s afraid she’s going to leave it there, just condemn him and be done with it. It’s what he deserves. “But you’re forgetting two vital points, Ray. I was the one who sought you out, if you’ll recall, so saying that you may or may not have exploited our burgeoning relationship for your own ends is at the very least inaccurate, and may, in fact, be more than a little chauvinistic. Secondly, the end result that you’re losing sight of is that what you really were attempting to accomplish with all your sneaking around and backroom dealing was the protection of the Whiston family interests. You were protecting me, however obliquely, and that has got to be worth something.”

Except for the fact that he’s done no such thing. Other than realize that he’s impotent. Well, I was going to shatter the world as you know it, but Amah convinced me that it was a bad idea. Oh, and that I didn’t really have a choice in the first place. Thanks for thinking so well of me, though.

But she smiles, a sort of grimly satisfied little smirk that is neither completely pleased nor totally unhappy. Complicated. “Not to mention, of course, that your elevated rank will make much more acceptable tabloid fodder for those people who obsess over the identity and credentials of the man who appears with me socially. Averaging your good intentions and your bumbling execution together, I’d say we come out just about even, if not a little ahead.”

“A little ahead?”

“As long as you promise me that there will be no more lies between us.”

He sees it, tracks it, watches the last decent opportunity to drop the bomb of truth pass him by.

“I don’t understand you at all,” he says.

“I told you, Ray. I have, in fact, told you repeatedly–I am beyond your comprehension.”

“No. You’re perfect.”

“And you’re just saying that because you believe I’ve let you off the hook.”

“Maybe.”

She laughs at him, and this time, finally, there’s nothing but pleasure in the clear tones of her voice. “You’re not off the hook at all, but the remaining questions are things we don’t have time for at the moment. But you should be thinking about your answers, because I will most certainly consider them to be part of your final examination.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Like why your young Marines were both wearing rings like the one you gave me, and what that has to do with the disaster aboard the ship.”

He swallows. “Fair enough. But you’re right, we don’t have time for that now.”

He glances at her fingers, and for the first time notices that they are bare. “You’re not wearing it now.”

Emma sucks in a breath, embarrassed. She reaches up and pulls a fine, gold chain from around her neck, where it had been tucked into the front of her shirt. The ring dangles from it like a pendant.

Ray says, “I told you to wear it.”

“Amah wouldn’t let me. She said it wasn’t proper; that I should give it back to you.”

Screw Amah, he thinks. He has a sudden sensation of dread, of a disaster narrowly averted. It makes him want to vomit.

He says, “What else? What are the other questions?”

“There will be the matter of your future plans, now that you’re adrift on the frontier. That is an issue of some importance.”

“I’m working on that, though I’m sure EED will have some input in the decision-making process. Is that it?”

She tosses her head, mimicking frustration. “That, darling, is just the beginning.”

“Of course it is.”

Then she’s serious again, lower lip caught up between her teeth. “I shouldn’t be like this, Ray. It’s selfish and shameful to be thinking about New Holyoke, about you and me, about petty things.” She looks down at her hands, as if she still expects to find blood on them. “I haven’t even told you how sorry I am about your friends. He saved my life–Kilgore, I mean. And then there was nothing I could do for him.”

“He knew what he was doing. They both did.”

The podship banks right, a gentle shift that presses them together, and the airfield heaves into view just beyond a regimented line of tall pines, marking the boundary of the forest. It perches atop the broad cliffs that hold Blackheath Grange in their embrace, an expanse of glare and tarmac, concrete and glass. Aircraft cluster beneath the open sky like sleek insects crowded around the fat curve of hangars, squat maintenance buildings, administrative terminals. Runways, glideways, momentum strips poke the scrubby flatlands like obscenely appendaged extra limbs. Elevated launching pads sprout around the tower compound like toadstools basking in the sun. Everything is light, white constant and red blinking, sterilizing metal and stone, plastisheen and concrete.

“There,” Emma says, pointing to a gathering of bubble-strobed emergency vehicles, skittering pedestrians, flashbulb Eyelens monitoring devices that erupt at the sight of the podship like bursts of gunfire. “Already waiting for us. You’ll stand close to me, won’t you, Ray? When we disembark, I mean. Keep the predators at bay.”

“I will.”

The distinct sense of trepidation returns, knotting her shoulders. She grips his arms as though she’s on the verge of panic. “I should tell you, before it becomes impossible. I’ve spoken to Amah, and she agrees that you should plan to stay in our guest house for the first several days. It will spare you the attentions of the media for a time. That is, assuming you have no other place to go.”

He hadn’t even thought about it, but the offer doesn’t surprise him. Amah wants to keep him close, where he’s more easily observed, maybe more readily controlled. “Okay. I mean, I’m grateful for the offer, but I don’t know that your brother will share your enthusiasm.”

At least that’s honest.

“He will if he knows what is good for his reputation. It will spin like a display of gratitude to our noble rescuer. That’s the least that will be expected of us, believe me.”

Spin. She’s already thinking about the tabloids. Just like Amah.

For himself, Ray is just happy for the excuse to be near her.

He looks down on the congregation awaiting them, their cameras and questions, microphones and listening devices, thinking that it is indeed a different world to which he has just been invited.

<– Chapter 12 / Chapter 14 –>

Filed under: A Vessel for Offering Tagged: | A Vessel for Offering, blog novel, Darren Hawkins, science fiction