Chapter Seven

Lisbet was back in her VR cage listening while Vantz gave her a sliver of his mind.

“Beck mentioned that you went to visit him regarding a digital rendering of your body. You should know that everything he said is true. It’s a waste of time. However, he raised an important point about your understanding of the part you’re going to play in all this. I think I ought to explain it more thoroughly,” Vantz said with very little emotion.

In the VR world, Lisbet looked at Vantz from her chair which felt less comfortable by the minute. He looked like a cross between the hunter and the hunted while she still looked like a crash test dummy.

He continued. “The phase we are in right now is the one where we’re pretending to still be working on the magnetic towers. They’re finished. Right now, we’re placing bombs all over the planet and pretending that the movement of materials is associated with the building of the towers. You’re my alibi while bombs are being placed and known pleasure palaces are being dismantled. We’ve started various evacuations, most of them are classified because they involve removing people from underground fortresses against their will, but now that we have enough cryochambers, it’s time to get to work.”

“I can’t wrap my mind around how expensive a hundred thousand cryochambers would be,” Lisbet said, rubbing her forehead.

“The cryochambers intended for the slaves and the general population of Mars are not like the one you woke up in. They don’t have sweet little leather chairs inside though there is a little padding. It’s just a box with a few restraints and filled with the necessary gasses to put a person into cryostasis. They don’t even have clear lids. You’re a princess. Your chamber is different. You should know that Sleeping Beauty Inc. has had quite a lot of their models go missing on Mars, and where they’ve gone is not a mystery.”

“They’re underground,” Lisbet supplied.

“One of the regular locations where we’re leaving bombs is in dismantled pleasure palaces. If anyone touches one, it will go off. Mostly the explosion will be a warning to other pleasure palaces and to everyone that it is time to get off world—that we’re not messing around—if the battle in space didn’t teach them that. Once the bombs start going off, people will start evacuating in greater numbers and you’re going to be the face of that operation. All you’re going to need to do is read the cue cards. You’ll be in the third wave of evacuations. We’re only doing four waves, so you’ll be with the second to last group. Your leaving should scare more people and be the push some of them need to get on pods. Obviously, we weren’t going to allow the general population to goof off in our space station as governing them while we’re working would be a pain. But I wasn’t planning on putting you to sleep with everyone else. I was planning to send you back to your parents on Earth, but after seeing that you’ve made no transmissions to them since your arrival, can I assume you’d rather not go home to them?”

“Uh… yeah. I don’t want to go home to Earth. I have been reading about the newly finished space station that’s been built to orbit Mars. I’d like to go there. Surely, I wouldn’t be hard to govern and you still might be able to use me as a spokesperson.”

He cocked his head. “That’s a fairly grand gesture, but it would be even grander if you went to sleep with everyone else.”

“It would probably be hypocritical of me to convince everyone else to go to sleep while I wasn’t willing to,” Lisbet conceded.

“Hearing that you are going to go to sleep along with all the ordinary citizens of Mars will boost morale and probably convince more people to do it. Thank you. But are you sure that is what you want?”

She nodded, but completely out of place in their conversation, she chuckled. She couldn’t help it. “This is bizarre,” she chortled, finally losing a bit of the composure she’d tried so hard to keep steady.

“What is?”

She laughed outright. “You’re this fabulous trillionaire. You know what women think of trillionaires?”

“What?” he challenged.

“They think they have this huge stack of sexual fetishes and that they’re hiring a slave girl to satisfy their secret desires so that she can’t talk to the media and smear their image. When I signed the papers, I thought you bought me for sex and you liked the idea that I was watched so carefully by my parents so that you could have a silent virgin all to yourself.”

“Is that so?” he said, his expression as unreadable as any stag’s.

“Yeah. So, I get here and it turns out that you are using me as part of your exceptionally noble goals.” She giggled like she was about to hyperventilate.

“Noble?” Vantz repeated, his voice round and low. “This is not noble because there is no noble way to get Mars terraformed. The mining companies will not empty out their pleasure palaces if we merely ask them to. When the bombs go off, it will be because someone messed with them. People will die. The mines will collapse and we will not know how many people will die or in what way they will die. Some of them will be crushed and others will merely have their supply routes cut off and who knows what madness will ensue underground when that happens before they die en masse? A lot of people will lose their lives in this operation. I can’t predict how many.”

“Then why are you terraforming Mars this way?” Lisbet asked bitingly, stopping her laughter and replacing it with sobriety.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“There isn’t another way,” he said harshly. “There have been more than five attempts to get Mars terraformed. Everyone who can has been making plans, trying things, making proposals. The only plans that have been tried have been the top ones, but they have been thwarted by the mining companies and that is what will happen every single time. Every effort is being put into mapping the underground canals. We’re trying to find the pleasure palaces, but new ones are being made all the time. We aren’t going to find all of them. I will be a mass murderer and you, and every other woman who dreams of being splayed out on a silk bedspread by a rich madman, have no idea what life is like for those poor wretches trapped underground. Those slaves would rather be dead than continue to satisfy the warped needs of their masters who can electrocute them for noncompliance.”

Lisbet held up her wrist. “So, you trap me with the same trap, and you think you’re different from them because you won’t take me to bed?”

He looked at her and breathed deeply. She hadn’t put his head on a wall with that comment. He was merely giving her a moment to think about what she’d just accused him of. When he finally spoke, he said, “I’ve lived on Mars all my life and I know a lot about bloody hands. I don’t think my hands are clean and I no longer care if they’re clean or not. The only thing I know about myself that matters anymore is that I am going to be the figurehead who changes all this. It’s like putting my head in the guillotine with the rest of the aristocracy and dropping the blade myself. I am giving this project everything I have. I have thirteen dollars in my bank account and it doesn’t even belong to me. I’ve sold and traded everything at my disposal to transform Mars into a planet where the air can be breathed and the mines collapsed. I am willing to ruin myself utterly for Mars.” He breathed deeply as his eyes wandered the space around them, the surface of Mars that was still unchanged. “Is there anything sexier than that?”

Lisbet couldn’t answer. A man like him was ignoring her? For a moment, the idea burned her like fire. She reminded herself to breathe, but the blaze inside her kept burning.

Vantz turned his black eyes back on her. “And what about you? You were willing to ruin yourself utterly for your family's fortune. Your father’s business was diamonds. His business will be closed by this time next year. Diamonds are rocks in outer space. My understanding was that he was merely trying to square off his debts and he was willing to sell you to save his own skin. For someone that empty, that shallow, and that self-serving, you were willing to sell yourself.”

Lisbet crushed her eyelids together in pain as the burning inside her turned against her. What he was saying was undoubtedly true. She bit back her emotions and managed to choke out, “You must think I’m a fool.”

He stood up. “On the contrary, I think you’re lovely. If only I had one person I was willing to ruin myself for. I think that would be the greatest height of magnificence a human could achieve. You’re exactly my type of woman. Even if you look like a crash test dummy here because that is the default, I still think you look beautiful.” He reached out for her.

She took his hand. It wasn’t much like touching a real person because she could only feel pressure through the VR gloves, but it was something. She stood up next to him.

“This is all a tragedy of ruin and despair. I’ll be ruined at the end of this. Shall we dance? Dance through the tragedy?” he questioned before he initiated a twirl.

Turning her body in a circle was weird on the round treadmill, but Lisbet managed to stay standing. She steadied herself and turned to look at him. “And we’ll never meet?”

“It’s in both of our best interests if we don’t. When this is over, there is a strong possibility that I will be charged with dozens of crimes for all the things I destroy and all the dead bodies they find. I’ll be sent to jail forever or to the gallows. The fact that I bought you, but have become a prisoner myself will release you from our contract. The divorce will be quick. You will be free and I will be caged if not killed. Try to be steady and if you find yourself shaking, please get Beck to give you a cinnamon stick. Those things do wonders.”

“Do you smoke them too?” she asked, happy for any new piece of information about him.

“I live on them. All the people in the tensest positions use them.”

Lisbet sighed, trying to move with him to music that wasn’t there. There was a feeling in the air that Lisbet had never felt before, like love was something different than ever before. “You’re comfortable with the idea of killing people?”

He smacked his lips. “This is a war, a war like never before. We’re trying to get as many people into orbit as we can, but we’re not going to be able to get them all. For the few people who will die in collapsed caverns… it’s a shame, but it would be a bigger shame to leave them to serve their warped masters until they finish their lives. I was trapped in an underground pleasure palace once. I escaped with my reasonable knowledge of science, of Mars, and my silver tongue, which has saved me many times. I know the majority of the slaves want what I’m doing to happen, whether they died or not. They want it more than anyone. It’s scary. The whole thing is bone-rattling, but… if I hide my identity, I can hide my intention. After the fact, almost everything I’ve done can be turned against me. By then, it won’t matter. People will be breathing on Mars, water will be flowing, and the face of the planet will change. If I can accomplish all that, what happens to me is the least important thing in the world.”

“And I have no chance of meeting you in person?” Lisbet asked again, suddenly feeling like she’d never met anyone so grand in her entire life.

He turned her around and whispered in her ear, “Why do you want to meet me? What do you want to do?”

“Well, I don’t think all sexual experiences are bad,” she said without a blush on her test dummy face.

“I do,” he replied. “If you’re not in love with me…”

Lisbet couldn’t say that she was in love with him. They had only spoken through VR a few times and only for an hour at a time. She couldn’t tell him she was attracted to him. She’d never seen him. She couldn’t tell him that her heart was beating like a hammer and she wanted him to hold her at night so she could feel safe in his castle. She couldn’t even remind him that they were married and that all necessary obstacles to two people getting together had already been overcome.

That was all because there was so much that she did not know about him.

She was romanced by him because she knew nothing about him except that he had more nerve than anyone she’d ever met before. That excited her so much it hurt.

Except, he knew something she didn’t.

He was going to keep her at arm’s length. He’d warned her he would do that. They were not together as they danced. She had to remind herself of that. She was standing alone in a room with a cage and a treadmill and he was far from her rigging bombs. It was a surreal statement. Could it even be true?

“I have to go,” he whispered, letting her hand slip away and stopping the pressure in her gloves. “There’s business I have to attend to. We can talk about this more later. Good night, Lisbet.” He bowed, but he had to stand quite far away from her so that he didn’t hit her with his horns.