“Well, I’m not that kinda boss. ‘Way I was raised, you don’t ask others to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. So, I’m dropping with you. Anything happens to me, Gareth is designated to take over. We set?”
“How long until we get there?”
“Just under a week in the black,” Gareth said. “Two days travel on impulse power, then we hitch a ride on a jumper. Three more days after that, and we’re on Eolous prime. Questions?”
#
There wasn’t a word to be heard around them. The night sky over the city continued to be cloudless, colored only by the white steam escaping from the snapped hoses and other vaporizing fluids leaking from the broken transport.
The oblong metal craft was crushed like an accordion where its heavier, front end had hit the ground. Its back end was cracked open like the midsection of a dropped metal egg, and the single light left unbroken on the machine illuminated the two broken young men inside.
“Austin?” croaked a voice from inside. “Austin?”
Pause. Silence.
“Austin!” shouted the voice now, stronger but still sounding like it’s owner was trying to yell while gargling something.
“Wha-?” answered a voice, more an irritated grunt than a word.
“Austin, you- are you ok?”
“I think s- ow, fututus! My arm hurts like the hells.”
“Heh. Which one?”
“I wish the ninth. That was the frozen one, wasn’t it? Huston, I- I don’t think I can move from here.”
“Me, neither. Hurts too much.”
“So- they’re gonna catch us again?”
“Yep.”
In the otherwise silent distance, they heard the growing hum of a ‘horse’s hover engine as it neared them.
“Are they gonna patch us up?”
“Doubt it. Know why? Look at that MessBoard.”
Above the wreck, on top of a nearby building, a large advertising/message board beamed proudly a picture of a smiling Viscount Moreded, waving his right hand in victory. It was juxtaposed next to a frowning picture of their pater, red glowing R.I.P. letters stenciled over his face. Both pathos had a single large caption flowing left-to-right below them: HEROIC VISCOUNT MOREDED EXPOSES WIDESPREAD CORRUPTION, INCOMPETENCE IN MORGAN RULE! BEGINS NEW ERA OF PROSPERITY AND COOPERATION WITH FORMER ADVERSARIES! A small red star followed the escalation point at the end of the sentence while the waving/reading sequence began again on its repeated loop.
“That’s pater!”
“Gee, Austin, and they used to say I was the smart one.”
“Shut up, asino.”
“You conjugated that wrong.”
“I said shut up! How did Moreded do this so quick? We were beating him in the click-fight!”
“He’s gotten himself support. A lot of it, the kind that doesn’t care about public opinion.”
“Who?”
“The kind that put a red star at the end of a sentence.”
Austin paused. The sound of the ‘horse engine drew closer. “Moreded? He made a deal with the Red Stars?”
“Makes sense. The language of the ad follows their pattern, and they always prefer lightning armed-coups to the whole hearts-and-minds approach. Speaking of approach: If we can’t get free somehow, I think our executioners are getting closer.”
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“They’re gonna kill us?”
“Oh, no. If this is Red Star work, we’re going to be shot trying to escape, after we shot an killed a number of gendarmes, and maybe drowned some baby kittens. They’ll put it al up there- we’re gonna be famous, little bro.”
“No tech tricks?”
“That was my last one…”
The ‘horse landed, a dozen feet outside the broken transport.
It was white, with a red cross and double-snake-headed caduceus staff emblazoned on the side. The words Prius non nocebit were written in bent, stylized lettering below the cross, and the “Joe & Zeke” were written in a similar style above it.
“Well, well, well,” said Zeke as he exited the ambulance, “looks like we’ve got us another set of refugees! Hey, Joe? I think we’re gonna need the…”
“Jaws o’life an’ death, commin’ up!” Joe said, pushing a button on a controller. A loud set of monotonic beeps sounded as the side of the white ‘horse slid open, and a pair of large, robotic pincer arms reached toward the edges of the twisted metal and began peeling it back to reveal both heirs of the House of Morgan.
Joe and Zeke looked at each other, then back at Austin and Huston. Zeke whistled low. “You know whut this means, pard?” he said.
“Yep,” said Joe, “We just started the resistance!”
#
ONE WEEK LATER
Dallas sat on the hard plasteel chair in the back row of the makeshift chapel. Up front, a pair of spare beams had been hastily fused together with a cold-welder to form a cross, and a stick-figure Jesus had been inexpertly painted on it with long, white stripes and circles. An altar made of a few piled-up packing crates covered by an off-white blanket sat quietly a few feet in front of the makeshift crucifix.
Dallas sat without a sound or thought. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out. At some point, he’d gather up enough odds-and-ends to make a rosary, a set of prayer beads his mother had taught him to use when he was a child. He wished he had the set he’d been given on the occasion of his Confirmation, now seven years past.
“I’ve…I’ve messed up a great deal,” he said. “I’ve gone from Mass in our neo-Cathedral in the upper levels to the cramped space of Father Chow at Saint Barbara’s to this. But…this is all- I’m overwhelmed by it all, and I need help. I’ve been lousy at asking you for it. Lousy at talking to you in general. But I’m asking you to help me, here, where I need it.”
He heard the auto door slide open behind him, and tried not to say anything as another person entered the chapel.
He tried to keep his thoughts pure, too, when he saw it was Anja who’d come in.
She knelt on one knee, curled her fingers into what looked like a half-fist, and then touched her forehead, gut, right and left shoulder.
“Gospodi, spasi, e sohrani,” she said, inserting one of the words in between each of her movements. She then stood and took a seat a few chairs down from Dallas and looked at the crucifix beside him.
“Roman?” she said, without looking at him.
“Yep,” he said. “You?”
“Russian Orthodox,” she said. “You were close, but no cigara. What gave it away?”
“You crossed yourself right-to-left. Roman Catholics do it the other way.”
“Ah. For me, it was complicated, growing up. May I talk, by-the-way, or are you here seeking silence?”
“Talk is fine, so long as we don’t shout. Sometimes discussions between Catholics and Orthodox go that way, I’m told.”
“Indeed. As I said, growing up, it was complicated. My mother was raising me herself in a colony where every other family but ours had a father at the head of the table. We went to a different church than most, one where the Patriarch had suddenly decided to reunite with the Pope on Old Earth.”
“Hm- I bet that made things- complicated?”
“More than you’d guess. My people, on Old Earth? Yours came from a place- warm. Mine? Cold. Hard. Inflexible. We had no friends, very quickly.”
“I wondered why you might have come out here, out in the black.”
“I loved my Mamatchka, my mother. And my brother and sisters. But I wanted to be out there. I signed on with the army when I was of age, and learned to pilot machines of war. If- well, if you find things are- how do you say- too much crazy when we get down there? I can take over. I won’t be angry with you. None of us will.”
Dallas looked back at the front of the makeshift chapel and sighed. “Thank you for that, Anja. But I think we’ll be able to handle this little-”
The intercom bleeped. “Attention- everyone,” Gareth’s voice spoke from every cieling on the ship, “we are in visual range of our destination. All hands to station. All mech pilots to the bays for preliminary checks. It’s time, people.”
Dallas looked at Anja again. Long red hair, slender figure, lovely smile, and shining green eyes…
Don’t, he heard Gareth’s voice in the back of his head, unless she starts things.
Did this count as her starting something? No time now to think about that; time to focus.
“Time for us to go,” Dallas said, standing. “Good talk, Anja.”
“Off course,” she said, suddenly bursque as she stood, her face now as all-business as a sheet of rock on a mountainside.
Into the hall, as crewmen ran from their bunks to their stations, whooping and cheering at the thought of getting paid and seeing a fight.
The mission was underway.
#
TO BE CONTINUED...