Chapter Twenty Eight
“How are you feeling about last night, this morning?” Beck asked as he tossed things around in the kitchen. He was wearing a pair of track pants he’d thrown on as he passed through the closet. He’d left his shirt off and was strutting as he worked to get them a breakfast Hessia hadn’t brought them.
Lisbet smiled and walked her fingers up his bare arm. “Good.” She was wearing the bathrobe from the night before.
“Good,” he said with a dopey smile on his face. “I’d bet my life that my parents locked the doors on us when they left. So, you’re stuck with me till death do us part.”
Lisbet groaned, still a little too loose from the cigarette she’d been smoking. “The tension is killing me. Are we gonna die? Are we going to escape?”
“We would be stupid if we didn’t try to escape. I can’t hear my father’s conversation with Vantz, but I don’t really need to. I can run the simulation in my head and the results are not pretty. My father will think that Vantz is bluffing to the bitter end.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think my father would ever fold if he were playing poker. I think he’d always just hang on until the end and wait to see everyone’s cards. Even if he lost, he’d win the next time, but that kind of strategy won’t work this time. One strategy is a terrible way to play.”
“So, we’re not going to count on Carlos to give in and put us into orbit?”
“We’d die if we did.” Beck paused and looked around the ceiling thoughtfully. “There are a few escape routes that I built into this place when I was a willful teenager. The problem isn’t getting out of the palace. The problem is the suits we wear when we leave. The suits that you and I wore when we came in are designed to be worn in conjunction with a land rover, or a helocarrier, or a solarship. No one would ever advise someone to go out walking on the surface of Mars with those suits on for an extended period of time.”
“What can we do?”
“I have one,” Beck said as he popped open a bottle of preserved apple juice. “I have one heavy-duty suit that I stored under the floor in the garage. It should be easy to open the flap and get it out since the garage is empty. It’s so heavy that it mostly does the walking for you because if you were walking without any help, you’d never get anywhere because you’d only go the measly five kilometers an hour everyone walks. We need to use it to get us to my father’s garage so we can steal a better vehicle.”
“What could we steal from him? A solarship?” Lisbet wondered wearily under her breath.
Beck smiled and took a drink before offering her some. “We wiped out all but two of my father’s solarships in the first space battle ever. I don’t know if either of them is skyworthy, but one of them could carry hundreds of slaves off-world. I’d hate to deprive him of the opportunity if he had a change of heart. I’d rather get a helocarrier. To be specific, I want the one that fired at us.”
“We’re not going to try to convince your father to evacuate anymore?” Lisbet asked, drawing her eyebrows together.
“We already did,” Beck said with a scornful laugh. “We already said everything we needed to say to him.”
“Are you sure there isn’t something more we can do before we run away?” Lisbet asked, hating to leave Tiffania and the slaves she’d seen at the party without deliverance if the Voynich crews weren’t going to empty the palace.
“Let me think.” Beck walked around and noisily shot off another idea. “I could try to get in touch with Shattern again. That guy is so resourceful, he might be able to act as an intermediary. But he wasn’t at the party last night. He may have evacuated already.” Beck stood next to Lisbet and let his hand slide under the robe she had wrapped around her.
“I wish there was ice cream,” Lisbet whined.
“There probably is,” Beck said, as he turned around to get into the cold pantry. A moment later, he was back. “It isn’t ice cream. It’s sherbet. Will that do?”
“Sure,” she said before he produced a spoon and let her eat straight from the container. It was blackberry flavored and so sweet, it made her stick her tongue out.
“It can’t be that bad,” he said, pulling her to him and tasting what she had in her mouth with a sloppy convenient kiss. He pulled away. “Okay, I would never tell you that you tasted bad, but this stuff should have been rotated. That’s my fault.”
Lisbet laughed. “Is there anything we can eat?”
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He chuckled. “There are oatmeal bars. There are always oatmeal bars.” He gave her one.
Biting into it was a jolt back to reality. They tasted normal and had a shelf-life of fifty years. “That’s good,” she praised as she took another bite. “You know, I feel a little uncomfortable waiting here alone while you go to steal a transport. If I’m left unprotected, I…”
“Might have a similar fate to the other little slaves kept down here?” Beck supplied for her.
“Yes. What about cryochambers? Do you have one down here?” Lisbet asked, thinking the plan over. “If you leave me here alone while you’re out, I’d be a lot more comfortable if I was unconscious and locked up tight. What if your father came back while you were gone, convinced that I was the perfect tool for bending Vantz to his will, and took me?”
Beck nodded in agreement. “I have one. That’s not a bad idea, but trust me, if my father really wanted to move you, he’d move you inside the cryochamber even if he couldn’t open it, bones and all. But it’s still not a bad idea. If the cave collapses, you’re safer in a cryochamber than out of one. Not that a cryochamber can withstand unlimited pressure put on it, but it provides reasonable protection against falling debris and it can be programmed to send out a signal alerting the authorities of a functional cryochamber for months after a collapse. It’s actually a shame I didn’t have two.”
“You can’t put two people in the same cryochamber?” Lisbet wondered. She never knew that much about them.
“You can, but… you shouldn’t,” he replied vaguely. “They make double-wide cryochambers. I should have ordered one when I was rolling in money. The one that’s here is… not something I ever thought I’d use. You can put two people in one, but the resources that are used for keeping a person asleep have to be divided between two people. That makes the box last less than half as long because the cryochamber isn’t running at optimal efficiency.”
“So we couldn’t both get inside and let the world burn?” Lisbet asked, trying to sound like that wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever heard of.
He smiled darkly. “As tempting as that sounds, it goes against my system of belief. I have to keep trying to save us. I can’t give up until the moment when the bombs go off. You know though,” he said, pausing and thinking. “The cryochamber we left at the rocket site was a newer, fancier one than the one I have here. The one I have here is almost a trinket case compared to the one Sleeping Beauty Inc. sold me with you inside.”
“What’s the one you have for?” Lisbet asked, completely unaware that she had stepped on a minefield.
“It was purchased to preserve a dead body,” he said, his expression returning to the dead-boy expression he usually wore. “But I didn’t put the body inside. I buried her in the sands of Mars instead of keeping her like a red jewel in a box. The bubble had already broken.”
Lisbet hesitated. “Are you ever going to tell me what really happened?”
He took a new cigarette out of his pocket and flicked it on. “My first slave girl died after I’d had her for a month.”
Lisbet’s gasp was involuntary. She should have known that was what happened. She just didn’t like to think that the story was about Beck.
“She was pregnant when my father bought her,” he carefully continued. “She was little more than a child. None of us suspected she was pregnant. She told me she was uncomfortable. She told me she didn’t feel well. I took her to the closest thing we had to a doctor in my father’s pleasure palace, but he didn’t know what was wrong with her. He was a dolt because he wasn’t a real doctor. He wasn’t even a certified nurse. My father might have many faults but a child her age had never been pregnant in our palace before. Tragically, her baby died and she hemorrhaged during the birth and died too… on my bed. What happened was not my fault, but the people down here show such a grand carelessness toward life that they didn’t care about her life. Her dying in my arms changed me forever.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” she said softly, again feeling shockingly inexperienced next to him.
“My mother changed the mattress and the sheets…. My real mother—the maid. But I couldn’t sleep in that room again. That was what led my father to build this pleasure palace for me. I needed a place away from everyone where I could feel safe from their carelessness. He also gave me a cryochamber to house her dead body.”
“But you didn’t keep her body? You buried it?”
He nodded, exhaling his smoke and then coughing on it. “What is this? Red licorice? Agh! It’s been in the pocket of these pants for four years and a decade,” he complained before he put his head under the kitchen tap to rinse out his mouth.
“I guess you don’t know who was responsible for her condition?” she asked him.
“I have already been through the washing machine on this subject,” he said bitterly as he wiped his mouth on a tea towel. “Who did what where? This is the worst place in the universe to find someone and make them pay for what they did. The only thing to do is to drag all the miners out at once and let the slaves who are still alive tell their stories. Maybe one of them will know what happened to that girl.”
The way he said ‘that’ instead of giving her a name told Lisbet that he was done telling her about the bubble girl. That was the end of the story.
“Thank you for telling me. I’m so sorry things went sour. You were supposed to marry her when you grew up?”
He blinked and turned to face her. “Lisbet, please don’t think that I bought you as a replacement for her.”
“I wasn’t. That was a long time ago.”
“I can’t tell you what last night meant to me,” he said, growing more reflective. “I didn’t think you would ever ask me to do all that.”
“Whenever anyone does anything particularly naughty in a pleasure palace, the only thing is to do it again,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. She was still nervous around him.
“Come here,” he said, pulling her toward him.
Her heart jumped up in her chest.
Then there was another sound out from the living room. It was not a ‘yoohoo’, but it was a woman yelling.
Lisbet and Beck left the kitchen to find a bruised Tiffania huddled on the floor in an angry heap.