All Chapters of Alien-Nation
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Ride Home
Continuing our top local story, hundreds of people report seeing a bright streak across the sky last night. The Shil’vati Air and Space Authorities deny responsibility for a strange meteorite that streaked across the sky. No response as to how it slipped past the defense net and the fleet, but they insist that it was a natural phenomena.
The meteorite slammed into a cornfield near Lums Pond, and the area is cordoned off due to ‘contamination’ by rare earth mineral dispersal. Experts speculate that a mining asteroid was knocked off-course, or a pre-invasion defunct satellite.
This forgotten stretch of Pennsylvania, an old refinery butted right up against the Delaware River, was so neglected that we wouldn’t even have to contend with border security before ending up in Delaware. After all, Delaware was a state with a severely depleted garrison, de facto run by insurgents. What did Delaware’s garrison care about what came from relatively peaceful Pennsylvania? What did Pennsylvania care about what was leaving their state for Delaware, when they could focus on what was entering from Delaware? As such, the coast was assured to be clear, and was confirmed to be so by Gavin.
Catching a ride sure did beat trying to catch a former SEPTA train after tiredly jogging through this mostly-abandoned city. I didn’t want to overtire myself, or lie in bed, paranoid that the spy was about to decide I was too much of a loose cannon and drone strike my house while I slept.
Tomorrow, after all, was supposed to be a big day. Vanguard beckoned, and I was fairly sure Amilita might’ve started growing concerned I wasn’t answering my omni-pad.
But ever since we’d walked out the front door and I saw his plastered smile drop, I’d had nothing to say for the first few minutes we’d been driving, and so far the trip was carried on in a very tense silence.
“You don’t trust me.” Gavin’s words were welcome, though they came weeks too late to have changed anything substantive. It made me wonder why he bothered saying them at all. I let his sentence rest while I finished constructing my thoughts.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to bridge things. Make amends. I’d shown him, hadn’t I? I could throw together an army with or without him, commit them to a brutal and necessary cause. I could wield the arms of my insurgency- get Pierce to throw together propaganda and disperse information ahead of time. Get word to the right people. Strike with lethal efficacy. Fly through the air, destroy what must be razed.
Except, I hadn’t done a perfect job. West Side could have been a costly mistake. What if my diversion of the three squads hadn’t paid off? What if I’d been stretched too thin after overextending to cover what Jacqueline had ended up covering? West Side might have fended them off, summoned help, any number of things could have gone disastrously wrong.
Gas was also the right call, and my troops hadn’t been trained in bio-chemical warfare, so my father hadn’t really been holding out on me.
From Gavin’s perspective, Jacqueline had come to bail me out of my own screw-up of failing to gather mission-critical information. I’d overrelied on Oscar and other local intelligence, which had been completely wrong through no real fault of his own. He was a part of their social experiment in an isolated human settlement, and I’d used him anyway to tell me what was around him.
I had needed Gavin, and my sister, and all the others to pull this off. Hell, I would continue to need them, and I could be mature about it and swallow my pride, or continue to sullenly stare out the window at nothing as we rolled past the old derelict city.
Still, he’d also kept me in the dark on some rather important matters, hadn’t he?
“Why her?” I asked. “Of all people.”
At least he didn’t play dumb as to who I meant. “Do you really think creating Jackal was my idea? I mean, I wish I could take credit for it. She’s working out fantastically, but no. No, that was all her and your father’s idea, and she caught word of what was happening independently of me. All I did was put the pieces together when I received the report she was on the move. I came to the obvious conclusion of what was about to happen and drove up here. Do you believe me about that, at least?”
No, not particularly.
But if he was being honest, then just great. My father had picked her, again, over me. Was it because she was older that he trusted her more? Was it really that she shared the right opinions privately, and knew how to play the game in our house better than I did? I supposed Elias’s apparent preferences and opinions hadn’t helped my case any. I was a risk to my father, not an asset.
Speaking of risks…
“I’m a bit young, but I like to learn from the mistakes of others through history. Many have walked a similar path as I intend, and have had a rocky relationship with your agency.”
“The Agency isn’t what it once was.”
“I’m sure your people say that to everyone they’ve ever worked with.” Okay, so my arms were crossed defensively. What of it?
“Fine.” He jerked the wheel toward the shoulder and the car rumbled over the warning strips, then slammed the brakes. The car rocked back and forth for several seconds after we came to a stop, headlights reflecting off the shimmering debris that gathered in the gutter. “You want answers, Emperor? Ask them.”
“Why don’t you wear a mask?” I went with what first came to the surface.
“I do,” he said levelly.
“Just not around me?”
“I am wearing one right now.”
“Is this one of those metaphors of ‘not all masks are physical,’ or ‘we carry our cages when we cannot escape our pasts,’ or…?” For all my joking, I let my right hand drift toward the knife as he took his hand off the steering wheel and brought it up to his chin.
If he starts peeling his face off to reveal purple skin, then I am going to have to walk home due to my driver suddenly experiencing an inexplicably bloody medical emergency.
Instead he just dragged them over his features once or twice, then showed me his hands. Something on the tips of his fingers glittered under the dome light.
“What is that?”
“Digital mask, dazzle mask, glitter mask, whatever you want to call it. Hides a face from a lot of different readers, scanners, that sort of thing. It’s not perfectly effective against all types or the naked eye, but it works on the vast majority of surveillance systems the Shil’vati are relying on.”
“What if someone just describes you?” I asked. “Dark ginger, scruffy, tan leather jacket.”
“With an incomplete database, it won’t get them very far. Besides, there are contingencies.”
“And you didn’t see fit to give me that tech?” I asked. “Didn’t think I’d find it useful?”
“You’re kind of too famous to not be spotted and identified at a meetinghouse, kid. We both know that. Besides, people who see you on the way or back might still ID you and then that’d raise questions of why you even have that. And then where you got it.”
“Wait, how is it that I can see you, but cameras cannot?” I tapped at the glowing eyes on my mask. He might have been lying, but then what was the glitter on his fingertips?
“Coincidentally, while this works against most human and Shil’vati surveillance equipment, the latest mask of yours is a purely original design, with ideas coming from both, plus a little, or a lot of extra inspiration from the Coalition exosuit. Any other questions?”
“Yeah. All you really gave me was a gravity harness and the bodysuit, and I think even those were mistakes, things I probably wasn’t supposed to even see or know about but you had to show me something. You withheld a lot.
“So did you! Zealot strike squads, trained, prepared and ready for your summons? Grouper’s alive? The Twins, too? Anyone else you’re going to spring on us when you next decide to go rogue? Tell me now and I’ll pretend to be surprised.”
“That’s at my discretion. We have a hole in our budget. What are you hiding, and why are you hiding it from me?”
“You’re going up there to do a high-risk mission. If you get captured- then what?”
“I’ll mention that you, ‘whoever you are’ are holding my saintly mother hostage, that I was threatened into doing whatever it is I get caught doing in this scenario. I’m likely off scot-free with enough waterworks, probably with another escort stuck on me who we whack over the back of the head, and then I am Emperor full time.” I felt nothing but disgust at his expression of pure wonderment, probably at how quickly I’d responded. That really hadn’t occurred to him? “Did you truly think I didn’t consider the risks and wouldn’t whip up some sort of a contingency plan?”
Rather than admit the low opinion he held of me, he simply leaned back, letting the leather of his tan jacket squeak against the dark plush seat. “The less you know, the less you’ll be able to spill if you are captured and if they crack you. And the better chance the movement has to survive a gaping hole in its side.”
“If.”
“If they find out, they will likely crack you and find out what we’re developing, and that would be nothing short of a disaster! They could form countermeasures, new tactics. That is not a risk we’re interested in sharing at this stage.
It’s because they still saw me as just some punk kid, wasn’t it? Though I forced myself to begrudgingly admit that if the aliens had more evidence than I knew connecting Elias to Emperor, or if they uncovered more in digging, then they mightpush for some rather aggressive interrogation techniques.
“Let’s say I accept that’s the reason why you insisted Jackal not tell me everything she was given access to before we left. And that the budgetary hole is indeed all spent on our research projects. I want…” ‘assurances’ were just words, and words were cheap. I could imagine myself kneeling handcuffed and blindfolded, the cold steel of a gun against the back of my head, and protesting exactly like the child he thought I was: But Gavin, you promised! “...support, in bringing the Brotherhood into the fold as loyal members to me, and to humanity’s broader goal of independence. I’ve done most of the legwork to onboard them, even bringing in a small task force to crash-course train them and help me coordinate the assault. Pierce is a miracle worker at crafting narratives, and with Radio’s help, it’ll already be everywhere.”
“Support? What do you think Jackal was there for? Let’s start with a little gratitude for bailing you out?”
We’d had a plan, imperfect though it was. It would have worked well enough to stop any meaningful intervention. Annoyingly, West Side’s complete annihilation was never an objective. If the new residents had gotten the hint that it wasn’t safe there after neighboring Bethlehem’s destruction and left to their homeworlds, then that would have been equally acceptable. As a result, I worried that the message I’d intended to deliver with Bethlehem’s utter destruction; that mind wiping would always engender this response, would be confused and muddled now. This was something I’d have to entrust Pierce and Radio to carefully avoid. Hell, they might just not even mention West Side.
“Thanks.” The word was bitter, and he cracked a teasing grin.
“I’ve never seen you so awkward as having to ask her twenty questions, and her first trying to flirt and then trying to sort out whether you were gay or if you were just put off by what she was clearly going for. Damn idiot girl practically threw herself at you so hard I’m sure Hex would have put a few bullets in her. She kept dangling answers for things you didn’t want to give up, like your face. At least you can be sure she has no idea who you are under that thing.”
“Yeah,” I grumbled dryly. “Laugh it up.”
“Hey, I robbed myself of some amazing entertainment for your sake. Let me relish what I got out of it.”
“Ah, yes, you’re so kind keeping me in the dark about my own family.”
His face lost all trace of mirth. “Would you rather there be no secrets in your family? None at all. No? Then you’re a hypocrite. I kept your secret, and I kept theirs. Would you rather employ a spy with loose lips?” He paused long enough to fish out a cigarette and crack the window, using the old car’s 12V electric lighter. The orange embers highlighted his face and exposed where he’d run his fingers over the glitter he’d used to obscure it from various sensors. “It ain’t exactly a leak if I tell you I’ve worked with your father for far longer than I’ve worked with you. Your father’s old case manager died, and he almost fell through the cracks until I tapped him as an asset. You’re welcome for the bread on the table and gainful employment while over half the state lined up for basic staples.”
“Worked with?” I quoted, slowly, and he seemed to belatedly realize his mistake as my anger finally cracked through the barriers I’d been using to keep it constrained. Maybe it was all the caffeine, but I had a sudden second wind that threatened to launch me across the center console and wrap my hands around his throat until Gavin looked me in the eyes. “I think we’ve come to the crux of our misunderstanding these past few weeks. You don’t work with me, Gavin, you work for me. Everyone does. The Field Officers report to me, including Jackal. Miskatonic reports to me. The Brotherhood reports to me. You report to me. You don’t like my upcoming mission? Send someone else.”
“Sullivan’s already annoyed and this close to yanking the plug on the mission to Vanguard and trying to send someone else, which is a seriously bad diceroll.”
“‘Bad diceroll’?” I quoted him again, eyes narrowing at his downright nerdy choice of words. “You rigged the process for me, so you can rig it for someone else. Someone less valuable to risk, who you can safely keep in the dark with minimal risk of exposure.” I didn’t like the way he’d accounted for my possible failure and capture. It was better to be his only option.
Finally, he hung his head and admitted something.
“The cold hard truth is we don’t have anyone else for the mission. Yes, sure, you did your legwork going up and down the state collecting signatures and endorsements, and that was good. Important, even. But what really mattered was what the Shil’vati thought of you, and we don’t have another ‘you’ who’s in our pocket that’s high enough in their standing. The Shil’vati will just move on to their Number Two guy if you cancel now, and we don’t have time to find who that is, let alone throw together the case for a number two guy. Even if we had a month, we might not pull it off, and it’d still be insanely risky.”
“And you didn’t think to have me blackmail the next guy in line?” I asked. “I have Grouper, and you still have Vendetta. Tell me who you have in mind and we’ll make it clear what the mission is, and as an addendum: ‘Or else your family dies.’ This isn’t that hard. You do that manner of thing all the time, do you not?”
“That’s Plan B, but that is one very, very distant second Plan B.”
“Why?”
“Do you have ties in Europe? How about Asia? Africa’s been green for over a year, recent events notwithstanding. What if they pick someone from there? I hate to say it, but America’s not the center of the universe anymore, and our once-global reach is now considerably more regional.”
“You really haven’t got anything that could do the job in a timely fashion?”
“Nothing reliable enough to make that threat credible to the target. What if they fold and go running to the Shil’vati once they’re up in space? Then we’d have handed them our mission requirements. The Shil’vati would know what files we wanted to pull,” he said, letting the smoke seep out past his stupid goatee. “They can prepare countermeasures before we’ve even deployed. So you see how there is no ‘less risky’ option. The information we’re after is everything from ‘feasibility study’ to ‘hey what did we just build? Is there a reason the Shil’vati haven’t made these things? Or is there a reason they make theirs that way instead of the way we’ve been doing?’ If what we are making is the sort of thing that scrambles the user’s DNA into a super-cancer, then we haven’t really made anything that useful at all.”
“That would be bad,” I conceded, and found myself staring into his face after several moment’s contemplation. “If we truly are that far along in our projects, why aren’t we field testing them the way we’d done with the railguns? That is half the point of the cell structure, isn’t it? Deployment, Experiment, Field Test, all at the same time.”
“I can’t explain it to you. Not without you knowing too much.”
“About my own research projects, within my own movement?”
“Something like that. It’s all- nevermind.”
I wanted to pry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to order him to tell me, but no, it really had to be this way. There was nothing to do but move forward with our plan. I looked at his face again, and wondered if I’d missed anything. Every instinct told me I had to check my work with Gavin, always with some vague sense that I was about to catch him in some lie. Maybe it was the swagger, the smile, the way he moved. His whole life was a lie. He’d broken from the government he’d ostensibly served, twice. He was stabbing in the back all the people he worked with daily. There were always things he wasn’t telling me. And God help me, I was putting my life in his hands.
“You’re not worried they’ll start digging, find you in their systems?” I asked. “Ginger, leather jacket, goatee?” I repeated. “You mentioned contingencies. That sounds handy.”
It took him a few moments, as if redacting anything that might threaten him if I was captured. “Well, for starters, I am in their system. Several dozen times, actually, under various disguises with pseudonyms that link to aliases and false home addresses, with a file system that alerts me if any of them get looked up and clicked on, and who does it. It will buy me time to either get them first, scramble the descriptors, hand a false lead, or a bullet in the back of their heads. That sort of thing.”
“How?”
Now came a heavy sigh. The kind of thing I got when someone was cornered and giving up information they did not want to, but felt they had no other choice.
“I started in the I.T. Department and kept my credentials. So a partial match lets me know I’m compromised, and by whom. My actual features are misfiled. I’ve taken precautions against that, as well. If I’m running out of secrets, that’s bad. In my work that is like running out of lives.”
I’d imagined Gavin as some cool under fire spy. Instead he was either just a nerd with nerves of steel, or someone too petrified to even show his fear. Moreover, it showed that what he’d said was true- he and Sullivan did not actually represent their agency as a whole. They’d truly gone rogue. Gavin ‘seemed to be everywhere’ as I’d put it, because he was one of the few reliable pieces they had for coordinating with me. When you were low on trust you had to do everything yourself.
“Alright. Your turn to answer a few questions. You owe me a few after the stunts you’ve pulled in the last little while.”
“Keep them short, and start driving.” I didn’t like sitting still in one place for too long, it felt like begging for a patrol vehicle to pull off and see if we needed assistance. Or for a bored weapons officer to test an orbital strike. “And consider it a professional favor, not my owing you anything.”
Slowly, the car pulled back onto the highway, steady clicks of a turn signal more a matter of habit than necessity at this hour.
“You really didn’t know?”
“About my father? My sister? My mother?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I sighed in resignation. “I should have. All the pieces were right in front of me. But no. And they’re not going to know about me.” I could only imagine how Jacqueline would take it. Worse, she was one of my only truly competent lieutenants, and her…devotion to Emperor was balanced only by her antipathy toward her little brother.
Two halves of a Uranium core, and they must be kept separate at all costs. God help me if I’m in the room when they touch.
“What are you going to do about it?”
I wanted to wash my hands of the situation. I, Pontius Pilate. Let my father’s judgment of my mother be the final one. But he’d never stood up to her, had he? Not once. The best he’d managed was a tie by drinking himself into an unresponsive coma by seven o’clock, and forgot all conversations entirely by the same time the next morning. Hardly a reliable watchman. His only salvation was that I held her son’s life in my hands. Considering our rocky past couple years, I doubted that amounted to much.
“I’m going to need you to assign someone reliable to watch over the house for a while,” I muttered. “I know resources are stretched thin but she cannot be trusted under any circumstance, nor can I trust him to control her effectively, especially not if he is to do his job. I can give you a short list of the people she still calls on the landline. Call it extra security against blackmail if you need to justify the tap, perhaps say that you heard something about that if questioned.” If I was caught up there at Vanguard, then maybe the spies could claim they’d seen some suspicious characters lurking around the house, lending credit to a desperate defense that I’d been blackmailed into smuggling the information out.
It might even be enough to swing things to my defense being plausible.
“Jackal’s the easiest to reassign for obvious reasons, but she’s also your most effective and competent field officer. She’s turned New York from almost-Green to red in a matter of weeks, part-time.”
“I assume you have other people you can count on.”
“It’s not so easy,” he muttered unhappily. “You’re the manpower outfit, the muscle. Who do you have?”
So that was the real reason he couldn’t get people into position out there. And what he really thought of me.
“She has social ties. Community obligations, too.” A real chatterbox to all her friends and helping manage town events. Could she slip out something subtly to one of them? Could she find a way to warn the Shil’vati that she had been threatened by proxy with my wellbeing? How could I turn that to my advantage? Something to ponder later.
“Then have Grouper put a bullet in her head and be done with it.”
“You want to lose Misktaonic?” I snapped, unhappy that I couldn’t see a clear path out of the dilemma. “They’ve had disagreements, but there is no line she can cross that would make him stop loving her. It’s irrational, it’s stupid, but it is the way it is.”
“I see ‘falling in love with the worst possible person’ runs in the family,” he sniped.
That stung more than it should.
Justice demanded she face the same methods she’d gleefully put to others. It would be hypocritical for me to be so furious at those who had them turn on their own family members- and then turn on my own. If that was my own free will, then I’d only be damning myself further- but no less culpable than the monsters, right? Or was it in fact lesser because they’d forced others into doing that horrific act?
Practicality demanded another approach, one that didn’t shatter my family into a million pieces.
I finally let my mask unclick and massaged my temples with a gloved hand, taking in my first breath of late summer air.
“It’s complicated,” I said, sliding it into my bag’s false bottom.
The final few turns into my neighborhood were ones I could navigate on my own. “Alright, let me out here. I’ll walk it home.”
“Don’t get snatched up, kid.”
“I won’t.”
“Yeah, sure. You got your gun on you?”
“And knife. Why?”
“A few superfans got let in on the latest batch of tourist permission passes you approved. I’m not saying they’ll jump at you from the bushes or anything, but now I know how Amilita feels, letting your most valuable asset walk himself home alone at night.” He squinted into the darkness where the headlights didn’t penetrate. “Can’t your town afford any streetlights?”
I opened the door and pulled my knife from the bag. “A wise man told me that sometimes it’s not about what you can afford to have, it’s about not needing something in the first place.”
“What’s that mean?” Gavin asked, and I just stared into the car cabin for a few seconds, and then slammed the door shut. I watched him go before I started on my way home.
The familiar terrain underfoot gave me time to myself.
Could I have become my mother, if I had been a bit older when the system flipped from hating the Shil’vati to loving them more than Earth’s native sons? I shuddered to imagine. If I’d instead grown old enough to despise my own people from boredom or disillusionment through more incidents similar to my expulsion, what would I have become?
Nothing. I am as I am. There is nothing else worth thinking about. I am me. I am here instead of a different egg and sperm from the same parents, which would have produced an entirely different me. Let alone the ‘me’ that might be if I was born elsewhere, be it in time or space, to entirely different parents. Such things are therefore not worth dwelling upon beyond advanced theory of mind strategizing. Let these emotions and ideas only let me see the world I wish to be built instead- one of consistency, honor and integrity. One that strives for independence, or at least self-governance rooted in its history with pride.
I thought of my mother.
She is a slave to a beast she cannot abandon. My heart wants nothing more than to despise her, and maybe I should, but what she deserves is pity above all. The Brothers spent years weeping for sinners, only for the sinners to finally take a step too far.
‘Honor thy Father and thy Mother’. I wonder if looking upon them and understanding I am born of them with the same weaknesses and proclivities is what is meant, and still finding room to love, or at least not loathe myself, and them by extension. I will mind my addictions, particularly to the bottle. As for gifts from my mother…I suppose I have her zeal. I must never let it turn on humanity. Though I curse my true enemy for this state of affairs, I should not excuse that humans are frequently caught in the crossfire. Hopefully, with the new technologies from Operation Prometheus, I hope to be able to prosecute a war against the Shil’ themselves.
I saw a light from our driveway, more blue than the warm garage external lights, and I slowed, crouching to get a better look, rather than freezing up.
It was a feminine figure, slender and slight of build. Her delicate face illuminated only by the screen of an omni-pad, flickering as she paged through where it hovered in front of her. At least I hadn’t frozen up, and when I saw it was Natalie I closed my eyes, let them readjust to the darkness, and blocked her out with my hand. I stared into the surrounding bushes, checking for hunched figures cradling rifles. I couldn’t make any out, and so I decided to swallow my fear and march up the driveway.
I had to hold my head high.
“Natalie,” I hissed, voice low. She jerked her head toward me and flicked the light on, then came bounding toward me. I sheathed my knife, and waited for judgment.
“Elias,” she breathed, squinting into the dark and flicking on a broad beam of light that zeroed in on me almost immediately, making me raise a hand to block it out until she switched it off. “What happened? Where have you been?”
“Bethlehem,” I admitted, lowering my hand. “I was there. It was me. The Mind Wipers were active in the area.”
“And now?”
“There is no more Bethlehem,” I said with a finality that I hoped she picked up on the meaning of. “My own mother,” I mumbled and my mouth went dry, forcing me to swallow. It tasted like ash. “She was involved.”
“What happened?” She asked, softly, pushing the omni-pad around with one finger so I could see what she’d been looking at.
It was a babbling patient, one of the ones I’d seen in one of the most dramatic records and marked for Pierce to disseminate, the image of his arched back as he pulled on his restraints, juxtaposed against the patient profile of him back when he was whole, before their involvement, with crimson words on a black background: THEY WILL COME FOR YOU NEXT. Then it was him, his back arched on the chair as technicians huddled around him, the mind-wiper scraping his mind and sensory organs all at once as he thrashed and tried to get the helmet off, mouth hanging open in a silent scream. ONLY WE CAN STOP THEM.
I knew just how we’d stopped them.
Both Larry and Verns had agreed that ‘tragic, but necessary’ was never an easy sell when a rival could just lie, and the handyman especially had emphasized that politics was ‘nothing but lying.’ Would the Governess insist that her people had done nothing of the sort, that we were just excusing a massacre?
The screen flickered again, and I reached to stop it so it froze at-
GET ORGANIZED.
Pierce’s propaganda reel was juxtaposed against a floating second window, the off-screen display that hovered in the open night was less bright. My reading was far less adequate than my conversational skills, much to Lady Rakten’s dismay, but I could tell it contained an alert to not visit Pennsylvania due to ‘a possible mass casualty report.’
“We did,” I growled. It had my blood boilingme baying for blood once more to see it all over again, and I was only soothed with the certainty that the same would soon be happening to the ones responsible.
“And where is your mom now? I’ve known since the bridge how much you hate Mind Wipers.”
I glimpsed at the windows through my mother’s beloved but dying boxwood, noticing how shadows shifted from the kitchen light over to the front dining room. Just like I thought, my parents were home, and I could just imagine the tension inside. Did I really want to walk in on that? Even dodging them in my usual way might no longer be acceptable, as each might try and pull me into their sphere of influence. I might once have longed to be wanted by my parents after years of feeling superfluous, but now the idea made me feel sick with how empty and self-serving it all seemed.
“She should be home now, inside. Safe, I think. I don’t know if I can bring myself to go in. I have no idea how I’ll look her in the eyes.” Or any of them, for that matter.
That thought threw me for a moment as I considered the inverse.
How would they ever look me in the eyes, if I removed my mask in front of them?
“What were you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Probably lay on the patio deck furniture, rest for a few hours. Get dressed in the morning before anyone else is up, get breakfast, and get out before anyone sees me off. Leave a note or something saying I am headed to the spaceport, throw a leg over the bike and ride down.”
“Is that what you’d normally do?” Natalie asked, golden eyes searching. “If tonight hadn’t happened the way it did, I mean.”
“No,” I admitted, looking away in shame of the truth. “I think…I’d hope for some admission of pride from my father.” How could I admit that my Dad had finally said he was proud of me for being all the things I wasn’t? Maybe I could play the inevitable morning nerves off as stress before ‘my big day,’ going to a space military academy only a couple months before my eighteenth. They would probably be committed to making staying focused on my mission difficult, which ironically would make completing the mission unwitnessed next to impossible.
She wrapped her arms around me. “I can think of somewhere more comfortable than the back patio. Come on, the car’s just around the corner. You can make a decision tomorrow morning.”
I smiled ruefully. “Don’t tell me your mom sent you here to make sure I didn’t get cold feet.”
“More like tradition. Spending the last night with your intended, before you go. Besides, where would you even lock the bike? At the spaceport?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t even thought to ask my parents or arrange transport.
Then she looked a bit nervous, revealing the slightly anxious schoolgirl I knew Natalie to be underneath all that bravado she’d been putting on the past couple months.
“Leave your night-mare behind, and let me have this night with my mare?”
I couldn’t help but snort. “That was terrible! And I’d be a stallion, thank you very much!”
“Terrible enough?” She asked hopefully, leading me by the hand toward the flying car. I had to fight the urge to bolt, to sprint just like the wild and frenzied stallion I imagined myself to be. To where, I didn’t know. Somehow this was more terrifying than the prospect of marching into Bethlehem, even though it promised me nothing but pleasure, relief, and release from the torture of the dying’s screams.
Maybe I felt like I hadn’t ‘earned it’, or certainly deserved far worse. Far be it from me to embody that joke of ‘I’ve been a bad boy,’ or whatever sick perversions people joked about, but I could also not shake the idea that there was something twisted to my living so well while I could play with perfect recall the screams of the dying I’d sent to Hell.
No, what I’d done was good, moral, and necessary. Pierce’s messages were filling the airwaves faster than the Shil’vati could even piece together what had happened. By tomorrow, no matter what evidence they gathered to the contrary, they’d be stuck using our version of events. We had the truth on our side, the crime. All they’d have is the aftermath, the punishment in kind for their great sins.
The car door rose, revealing the sumptuous passenger compartment laid out as a flatbed along the elevated floor. Natalie twisted and pushed herself onto it backwards, then beckoned me closer, until she leaned forward, grabbed me and pulled me to lay beside her, the door sliding shut behind us while she wrapped her arms around.
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