Chapter Seventeen

Lisbet ended up not being able to sleep after Beck left. It wasn’t his fairy tale by itself that caused her to twist sleeplessly on her mattress. The day had simply been too full to process. When she closed her eyes, she saw things coming back to her in a blundering mess of flashes. Tiffania was smiling like she didn’t know a knife was hanging over her. The rogue transport ramming into Lisbet’s empty one and pushing it down the tunnel with a sound like thunder cracking. Beck tasering the reporter. Beck pulling the buttons of her shirt open on the examination table. He looked at her with such an odd expression on his face… like seeing her hurt and uncovered did something unpleasant to his insides. The reflections in his eyes changed… became dark.

That was when she opened her eyes in the half-light of her room.

If she was honest, Beck hadn’t seemed very much like a little boy when he’d tasered the reporter, nor did he seem very childish in the way he looked at the circular bruises that made her look like she was part leopard. Exactly the opposite actually. The way he looked at her was not even a little bit like he got his jollies from looking at a naked woman. Granted, she wasn’t that naked (she was still wearing her bra), but she had responded very differently when she saw him with his shirt off later that night. She was a hundred times more bashful than he had been.

Mars, huh?

Suddenly, she realized that Beck was far more experienced than her in every way. Loneliness ate people on Mars, so he’d had much more sex than she’d ever had the chance of having. But more than that, Vantz wasn’t using her for her physics degree. He was using her physics degree to prove that she wasn’t a bubble brain when she spoke to the public. She had never been asked to help Beck with the terraforming project and even though he was much younger than her, he was her boss.

She toyed with the wedding ring on her finger. Vantz hadn’t given it to her specifically. He hadn’t even told her she had to wear one. It was a ring she’d found amongst the jewelry in the dressing room. She’d put it on herself the morning when she went to The Boiler Room for the first time. It didn’t mean anything. What mattered to Vantz was that she kept her promise to him regarding the stories she told the media.

That was all.

And the prince with the bubble girl was afraid he’d break another girl.

Who was that story actually about?

Lisbet wanted to think about it more, but at that very moment, a knock came at the door followed by two figures in the dark. Lisbet didn’t have to wonder who they were. Beck turned the light on immediately and showed himself and Invocation.

“Good, you’re awake,” he said swiftly. “We need to go.”

“Where?” Lisbet asked, pushing the blankets aside and rushing to put her slippers on.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Beck said, grabbing her elbow and pulling her toward her dining room. “You have a servant entrance in here. We’d better take it and we have to hurry.”

The servants' entrance was a cleverly hidden door in the wall behind a vending machine. Beck popped it open with a thud on the right spot.

“Have people been coming in through here?” Lisbet wondered, the thought giving her the creeps.

Beck and Invocation grabbed both her arms and pulled her through the door without a word. Invocation snapped the door shut while Beck hurried Lisbet up a staircase.

“We’re on the seventy-fifth floor!” she whispered shrilly. “Shouldn’t we go down?”

Beck swatted at her to help her hurry up the stairs. “Obviously not. Castle Ares has fallen. It turns out that over seventy miners died in that explosion earlier and a mob has taken all the bottom levels. There’s no way we can go downstairs. We have a solarship waiting on the roof. We need to get into space because there is no down that is safe right now. Haul!”

Needing no further encouragement, Lisbet put some heat in her muscles and raced up the stairs.

When they got to the roof, Lisbet was surprised by how much her legs hurt. Gravity was less on Mars than it had been on Earth. She should have done better.

When Beck said ‘on the roof’, what he meant was a warehouse on top of the roof. Mars didn’t have a breathable atmosphere. The warehouse was very sleek. The ship waiting for them was not. It looked old and a little like a bomb shelter someone had unearthed, but Lisbet didn’t have time to question it.

Soon they were aboard, strapped down, and Beck was taking the flight controls.

“Why did I think you’d be flying it?” she asked Invocation.

“Because I look older and more sophisticated than Beck, so you’re looking to me for guidance,” he said, giving her a patient glance over his shoulder. “But that is nonsense because he is higher up on the food chain than I am.”

Lisbet gave him a dirty look and craned her head to see if Beck had heard them. His seat was ahead of theirs on the flight deck.

“Relax. He didn’t hear me. Besides, it’s a normal reaction. People are always turning to me thinking I’m the answer,” he said with a wicked grin. “It’s good Beck isn’t too proud to drive a dumpster fire like this into orbit. Anything flashier would probably be noticed next to the debris.”

Lisbet had traveled from Earth to Mars, but she hadn’t known anything about the time she’d been in space. She’d been asleep. Escaping the planet’s gravity was less vomit-inducing than she expected. She held onto the armrests of her seat and looked out the window next to her. It was a rare treat watching the horizon turn as they gained altitude and evened out. Soon they were hovering in space. Beck navigated their ship through old satellites and the discarded rubble of the first battle in space to hide their ship under the wing of a ruined vessel.

“This is what the space around Mars is like? A graveyard?” she asked, looking ahead through the window on the flight deck.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg. Yes, this is the remains of that fight, but it was a little bit of a junkyard before you came. There’s junk everywhere on Mars,” Beck explained looking through the window with her. “You’re not ruining anything no matter where you dump it. The land is uninhabitable. It’s not like you’re going to drop something on your neighbor’s lawn. The same goes for the satellites. We need information transfer a hell of a lot more than we need clear skies. There are no oceans to damage. Nothing. It doesn’t matter where you dump things on Mars. Littering is part of the culture.”

The air hung on those thoughts while Lisbet saw the whole of the red planet for the first time. It was more black than she expected. The mountains were clearer. There were no heat waves or cloud cover to obscure the view.

Beck turned in his chair to face her. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to wait here.”

“For what?”

“Invocation has a job to do. A ship will meet us here and we’ll transfer him over. Once he’s left, you and I have a different job. Remember the bomb that went off accidentally?”

Lisbet nodded, feeling tense. She wished she’d had the presence of mind to grab the rhubarb pie cigarette Vantz had sent her.

“As I said, the casualties in the explosion were significant. The government is trying to track the mining corporation that was on site. There was equipment left in the area, but suddenly no one can find anyone to talk to. They’re all fleeing underground, getting into their hidey holes. So, no one is taking responsibility for being in a place they should not have been. Vantz has been making public statements in your place.”

“I’m sorry. I should be the one doing that,” Lisbet said, feeling like she’d dropped the ball.

Beck waved away her concern. “He had to take over because he simply cannot send you out to make a statement immediately after the drive-by shooting. He can’t seem like a loving husband if you make a statement now. We’ve told dozens of lies to cover the movements of our operation, but now that we’re nearing the end of the project, we’re not telling lies anymore. He straight up told the media that it was a bomb planted in an evacuated pleasure palace and that anyone who’s thinking of looting an abandoned palace should think twice because those are the perfect locations for the bombs intended to terraform Mars. He’s going to warn people that Mars is no longer safe in the zones where you’ve claimed the people have been evacuated. As a side note, he’s publicly turned on the artificial magnetic field. That way, if someone else sets off a bomb by accident, we won’t need to replace it.”

“Great,” Lisbet said in little more than a whisper. “Are you guys leaving valuables inside emptied pleasure palaces? Is that why people want to loot them?”

Beck shrugged his shoulders. “No. The palaces are being dismantled. The palaces are being smoked out with sleeping gas, the people are being removed, and everything of value is being removed.”

“What happens to those things?” Lisbet asked, always curious to follow the money.

“They’re given as prizes to the crews that empty the palaces. They’re the guys we played Emerald War with. They’re wrecking crews and followers of the Church of Voynich. Surely, you saw their black skin and green hair.”

Lisbet scratched her skull. “I didn’t put that together when I saw them in VR, but I should have. They hate slavery and… is Benediction himself here working with Vantz?”

Invocation chuckled. “She doesn’t know much about the Church of Voynich from Io, but she knows about Benediction?”

“Why is that funny?” she asked, not getting the joke.

“That’s his church,” Invocation answered blankly.

“He has a church? I knew he was a member, but I didn’t know he was the leader. I thought he was a model–”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

That was when Invocation lost it. He laughed outright. “He would cry tears of blood to hear himself reduced to the influence of a model. Obviously, he’s not a model. He’s the prime minister of Io, so not only is he the head of a church, but he is also the most important government official on the entire moon. His church hates slavery and they’re here helping us dismantle the pleasure palaces. His people are the people coming to get me, but not Benediction personally. He’s on Io, arranging for all the treasures unearthed from Mars to be used to pay for the raids to free the slaves, but he’s using the leftover profit to give to the freed Martian slaves, so they never have to come to Mars again.”

Lisbet swallowed. “That’s very good, but isn’t Io a stinkhole worse than Mars?”

Beck and Invocation nodded and shook their heads in unison.

“Yes, it stinks on Io. Even though you can breathe the air there and it’s warmer than it is on Mars, they haven’t been able to curb the sulfuric stink, but to people who have suffered under Mars sands, it’s probably heaven,” Invocation explained simply. “They say you get used to the smell if you live there without nose plugs for a year.”

“Mars can be pretty smelly too if you’re in areas without proper air purifiers just because people without proper access to water stink,” Beck added before snapping the conversation in a different direction. “Lisbet, after the Voynich guys pick up Invocation, you and I need to replace the bomb that went off,” he explained, pulling a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and flicking it on.

“How are we going to do that?” Lisbet asked, eyeing his cigarette enviously.

“You aren’t going to need to do anything. I’ll handle all of it. There’s a discarded rocket in the same area that has one remaining engine that can fire. I’ll set it to explode on activation.” He took a puff on his cigarette before generously handing it to Lisbet.

She took it without question and inhaled. She breathed in the apple pie like it just came out of grandma’s oven.

“You two are close, eh?” Invocation said, looking at the two of them. “All alone in Castle Ares must have turned you upside down.” He gave them an envious look before announcing, “I’m gonna go to sleep. I was trying to sleep when all this went down. I’m gonna take cabin number one.” With that, he disappeared into the guts of the ship.

Lisbet turned back to Beck. “What happened to the other people in the castle?”

“There weren’t any. Anyone who didn’t have a job to do went into cryostasis soon after the Mammoths arrived.”

“Weren’t they worried that the ships might be attacked again?” Lisbet asked seriously.

“No. We wiped out the vast majority of the miners’ ships. As soon as that danger was removed, our people went to orbit and were put to sleep. Anyone else who has a job to do is off doing that job. By today, only the three of us were there. Robots were doing all the jobs. That’s why we lost control of the castle so easily. Not to worry. We knew that might happen at some point. Charcoal and Tavis have already been sent to the Saturn region. I initiated the self-destruct sequence on my equipment. I got Invocation and we left. Not to worry. All my equipment would have fried itself before we got to the roof.”

“What about my room?”

“There was nothing among your things that we would have minded being destroyed or pawed through by the enemy. At least not to my knowledge. Why? Is there something you’re going to miss? Please tell me you didn’t keep a paper journal.”

Lisbet dropped her head. “No. I didn’t. I guess I had nothing there that mattered. But now that we’re here, what are we going to do for clothes, for food?”

“There’s food aboard the ship. It’s not great food. It’s emergency rations, but if you pop into the kitchen, you can pour boiling water on one of the food packs. It’s not awesome or appetizing, but we’re not likely to be in space for longer than forty-eight hours. Not that I can promise great food wherever we end up after that.”

“Clothes?” she prompted.

“Forty-eight hours. You’re going to have to make do with what you’re wearing. At the rocket site, a crate will be waiting for us with necessities. Vantz is taking care of it for us.”

“What will happen after we finish there?”

“I don’t really know,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Is there a place I can sleep?”

“Cabin number two.”

“You get cabin number three?”

“There is no cabin number three,” he replied humorlessly.

“Oh, that’s why Invocation was so hot to say which bunk he wanted,” Lisbet concluded. “Where are you going to sleep?”

Beck shrugged. “I wasn’t going to. I was going to stay out here and see if anyone tried to contact us, or if anyone noticed us. There aren’t many threats out here, but someone spiteful could hit us from the surface if they were determined. I’ll rest in cabin one when Invocation wakes up and he can take over the watch.”

“What about me?” Lisbet asked, annoyed that she could only help in The Boiler Room and nowhere else.

“You should rest. Cabin number two isn’t as good as your bed back in the castle, but I suspect it’s a good deal better than the chair you’re sitting in.”

“Uh…” Lisbet hesitated. Suddenly, she felt unsure of herself as she looked into the shabby innards of the ship. “Could you come with me? I know you’re working every second of every day, but could you spare a minute to walk me to the room and see that it’s okay with me?”

Beck nodded. “Yeah.”

He went first, showing her the door for cabin one. The hallway of the ship was so cramped that Lisbet couldn’t see anything around Beck’s lanky skeleton. Had he always been that tall? Had his shoulders always been that wide? She couldn’t see the letters on the doors until after he gave her room to step into the cabin.

Tentatively, Lisbet went inside. It was less than a prison cell, in that it didn’t have a toilet or a sink. It was just a twin bed next to the wall with a little space next to it to walk.

“I’m sorry,” Beck said breezily. “I realize this isn’t what you’re used to, but I bet there’s a better blanket in the cupboard.

Lisbet hadn’t recognized that the panels in the walls could be concealed cabinets. Beck snapped open the first one and found a few vacuum-packed packages of folded clothes. He shut it impatiently and tried the next one. There, he found a comforter. It was blue with white stars on it. Behind it, he found a pillow. Spreading the blanket wide, he and Lisbet made the bed. She clutched the pillow to her chest.

“That looks like everything,” he announced. “I hope it will be good enough that you’ll be able to sleep. Do you have everything you need?”

Lisbet crawled to the head of the bed and shimmied under the covers. “I… uh… I feel really weird about this.”

“Yeah. I know you weren’t expecting to hang out in orbit on the underling’s ship. The sight of it doesn’t inspire much confidence, but this ship was purchased like this on purpose so that it could do these kinds of maneuvers. It’s called the Buckshot 2.0 and it was never a well-known model. The miners of Mars are proud and their vehicles look like the exact opposite of rust buckets. They would always think that something that had a red tinge to the metal was below their notice. If anyone is coming after us, and it’s safe to say that the mob that stormed the castle is looking for us, they won’t look twice at this vehicle. We knew all this was coming and we made plans to counterstep their moves. It will be alright.” Beck held the cylindrical cigarette between his teeth.

Lisbet looked at him with her big violet eyes.

“Still afraid to stay alone?” he asked with his hands in his pockets.

She nodded.

“Okay,” he said, sitting at the foot of her bed. “I’ll stay for a minute.” He handed her his cigarette.

She took a puff of it. “Is this how you stay so calm? When you smoke these you don’t let anything break your cool composure?”

He spread his hands. “Nothing breaks my composure because I want everything that’s happening to happen. I’ve been waiting for it to happen. Even though there have been hiccups… Obviously, I never thought you’d get hammered with rubber bullets. How are you feeling?”

She let her eyes roll up in her head for a second. “I don’t know. I don’t care. I feel like I’m falling through space and I can’t stop.”

“That’s true for everyone all the time, whether they’re on a spaceship or on a planet. We’re all falling through darkness all the time and none of us can stop,” Beck said.

“Yeah, but I feel directionless. I want you and Vantz to succeed, but I want to see further into the future,” Lisbet said, trying to explain herself better. “I want something more in the future. You have your plans mapped out on a bulletin board in your mind, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Lucky you,” she said wistfully.

“Give me that.” He took his cigarette back. “I’ll tell you story number two and then I’ve got to get back to the controls. Vantz could be trying to contact me.”

Lisbet silently agreed to hear the story.

“I’m sorry if it doesn’t help you sleep,” he said stiffly as he drew breath to begin the story. “Once, in a land shrouded in darkness, there lived a cruel king. There were no jewels in his crown. Instead, the crown on top of his head was made of the sword tips of vanquished warriors. He lived on the surface of his world in a castle befitting his grand station, until his wife unexpectedly passed from life into the shadowland, leaving the life she led with him behind. In the moments before her funeral, he stood over the grave she was about to be placed in and looked down into the hole. The cruel king knew a great deal about holes and would not place his beloved in such a place. Suddenly, he had a plan, a terrible idea that made his skeleton shiver and his mind race. He would not say goodbye to her if he didn’t want to.”

Lisbet felt a quaver in her heart. It was a Mars fairy tale, not an Earth fairy tale.

“In a frenzy, the cruel king had the queen’s coffin emptied,” Beck resumed. “Her body was placed on her bed in a position of repose, but only temporarily. Once the coffin was buried and no one suspected it of being empty, the king had a plan. The funeral went on as expected, mourning and grieving as was never seen before. They cried because they saw his queen as the only barrier between them and their cruel king. Once alone, the power to keep his dear wife with him was in his grasp. There was magic to keep her like a jewel in a box forever. The cost was high, but our cruel king did not care. He took his dear dead wife, his daughter, and all their servants deep into the ground, deep into the mines. Once everyone was there, he did the unthinkable. He caused the tunnel to collapse, trapping everyone underground in a grave for all of them.”

“Did they die?” Lisbet asked, worried about the people in the story despite what she already knew about pleasure palaces.

Beck did not smile. “Of course not. The king’s plans were perfect. They went on living, away from everyone who would disapprove of a man spending his days in the pleasant company of his departed wife.”

Lisbet suddenly felt sick, wondering what that meant.

“The princess, kept underground, was the daughter of the cruel king to begin with, but underground, she found the key to extending depravity beyond her previous imagination. Her servants were the tools of her witchcraft. One servant was a fire, another a cauldron, another a spoon to stir the mixture, boil the pot, let the mixture ooze.”

“Wait. You have to stop,” Lisbet suddenly said. “You’re not talking about something fictional, are you? You’re telling me the story of Mars. You are talking about real people.”

Beck shrugged in affirmation.

“Why are you doing this? I’m in a cold clammy sweat. Aren’t fairy tales supposed to put people at ease, so they can sleep? What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to teach you about Mars,” he said dully. “I could have Vantz send you another information packet if you’d prefer.”

“He already sent me one. Almost everything was redacted. What about the other story?” Lisbet demanded. “The other story about the prince and the girl who burst like a bubble? What was that about?”

He smiled weakly and stood up. “It’s probably better if you don’t know the details. When you tell me you’re ready, I’ll tell you the last story.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever do that,” Lisbet said haughtily with her nose in the air.

Beck turned to face her at the door. “You just go ahead and tell yourself how much more of an adult you are than me. Tell yourself that over and over again. It won’t make it true. I can see now that I can never make you feel whatever you’re supposed to feel for me in order for you to give me a chance.” His eyebrows were pulled together like the wings of a black bird that had already taken flight. He was impatient. He was stressed. He was hurt and he could no longer hide it with a puff of smoke, but he continued talking. “I can’t decide if your refusal to be with me makes you a good person or a bad one. However, it doesn’t matter now. We are too far along in the plan for us to enjoy what the two of us could have had. I hope you enjoy what Mars has made of you.”

He closed the door between them with a snap and took his pain elsewhere.

Nothing Beck had done made sense to Lisbet except this one thing. From the look in his eyes, to the way he held his mouth, to the stance he took, the words he spoke, and the way he spoke them. It came home to her like never before.

She had broken his heart.