Hell's Jesters, page 10
“From there, it’s only a short flight, with the finest of dining and distractions, to Whetstone, with a scenic fly-by of the ruins of Old Sol, a glimpse of our shared heritage and—”
>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 666789 – NOVA TERRA – GOVERNMENT SPONSORED>>>RECEPTION>>> “—that’s about enough, Assemblyman Levine!” Alexi Noovin strikes his armrest in exasperation.
“I was merely asking why the Committee for Naval Oversight is being denied a fact-finding expedition to Gallaton!” Levine snarls back, his normal poise shaken as he whirls to the dais of the High Council.
“The quarantine is for your own safety,” Admiral Harrison points out with calm all the more a contrast for Levine’s agitation.
“And why would that be?” Levine snaps. “Is it because there is still fighting?”
“Mister Levine—” Noovin is rising from his chair.
“It is because we lost a ship, Assemblyman,” Harrison replies to gasps from the Assembly. “We’d planned to keep the details from the public until now, until a full inquiry was complete. But since you’ve insisted and I have the permission of the Admiralty: the light carrier Razor was crippled fighting the Jesters and broke up in orbit. Pieces of it rained down all over Gallaton.”
Levine pales, at a loss for words or outrage for the first time any can recall.
“The damage to the planet has been catastrophic. Casualties, for everyone—” Harrison grimaces momentarily “—have been heavy.” He takes a breath. “Would you care for me to detail the results of several large bodies striking a world at re-entry speeds?”
Chastened and beginning to sweat, Levine shakes his head wordlessly.
“I think we’ve had enough,” Noovin says in a throttled voice. “Please, Assemblyman Levine?”
>>>SCANNING>>>SCANNING>>>HYPER-CHANNEL 5172384>>>RECEPTION>>> The nubile girl with the designer teeth sweeps her hair back again. “If it was more than a game I’d feel sorry for the others, really I would. But they’re so damned stupid...”
>>>SCANNING>>>CONNECTION TERMINATED>>>
TIM WATKINS DEACTIVATED the ether-tenna feed to watch the blue-green orb of Loudon swell into a horizon below his Hellhound. A current that was both melancholy and relief churned in his stomach. He hadn’t seen home in nearly three standard years. Watching swirls of cloud, glimmering expanses of ocean, and irregular lines of land masses, it almost seemed nothing had changed.
But he knew it had. Hell, I’ve changed...
“The others will be wondering after us,” Jeanie noted primly.
“The others are human beings, Jeanie,” Tim snarled, “and would understand a man wanting to take stock of things after what we’ve been through.”
The AI offered no reply.
“Sorry.” That was stupid—the machine didn’t have feelings—but Tim was in a place where apologies seemed in order. “Our countermeasures are working?”
“I’d be more confident if we hadn’t jettisoned the ECM pod.” Tim could’ve sworn there was petulance in the computer’s tone. “But yes, I’d say we’re not being observed from the surface.”
Not that there was a lot of traffic, orbital or otherwise. Loudon was a “core world” of the Outregion sectors, thanks to relatively-developed industry and robust agricultural exports. It boasted an inner-system militia of armed merchants and out-dated light capital ships bought from the Alliance scrap yards. But it was still a backwater by galactic standards.
“Good,” Tim said. “It’s not exactly unfriendly ground, here, but...I’m not sure someone like me is exactly going to be welcomed.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
Tim didn’t answer, pointed instead to the planetary map projected to his left, at the largest inhabited continent, Sylvania, an irregular, serpentine-shaped mass running north from the equator to the snowy white expanse of the polar region. He touched the hologram and pinpricks of cities sprinkled the display. His fingertip slid to one icon, denoting a small town nestled hiding in the shadows of foothills carved into a low, sullen range by seasonal rains that made the region rich ground for farming.
“There. That one.” Tim’s mouth went dry. “Johnsville. Set us down outside it, to the northwest. Check the recent Census records. There’ll be a hill and cemetery there. Use the mountains to mask our approach from visual observation. Find a spot where no one’s likely to look.”
“I’ll do my best. Records show an agrarian community, hardly a thousand citizens. What’s there?”
“It’s where I was born, Jeanie.”
The AI didn’t pursue its question further. Tim felt the controls slip in his hands as the machine took over. He let his body settle back in the flight couch as the fighter began to quake with reentry. Visual display took on a red tinge as atmosphere bit. Part of him wondered if the Hellhound could take it, after all the punishment.
Part of him wondered if it wouldn’t be better if it couldn’t.
For minutes that seemed to drag, he let it all go, let the sensations of vibration, heat, and flutter of readout holograms steal away all thought. But as the ship sliced through the upper atmosphere and the passage became increasingly smooth across a blissfully clear sky, he couldn’t keep the thoughts—the memories—from cascading into his mind.
Mom, Dad...Niccole. He grimaced as a face he could barely remember frowned from the past, long auburn hair, flashing blue eyes, a biting smirk. Three years is a long time for a spouse to wait. I’d be mad. Would I have waited?
Relieved of the tremors of reentry, the Hellhound sailed across the heavens of Loudon, leaving rich blue behind and approaching the rosy hue of a sunset just starting to touch the horizon in gold. Tim loosened his restraints and turned in the seat to reach into the compartment to the rear, where his private possessions waited in a small locker. He undid the clasps and fumbled around, finding a small sack that he pulled to the front. He took a deep breath and dipped a hand in, found what he sought instantly.
Nikki... He drew out a slim-banded wedding ring of white gold, pocked from toil at the helm of an inner-system flitter and discolored from neglect, dangling from a chain. His finger ached for its old, familiar pressure, but something kept him from sliding it on, forced to instead drape the necklace over his head. It seemed unnatural, slapping against his sternum.
So did coming home.
“I’ve got the spot,” Jeanie announced as the Hellhound nosed down through a thin veil of cloud. Mountains rushed by below, smoothed and rolled into hills of thick wood and dark ravines. “It’s coming up now. Sensors indicate no contact and no detection. I can’t promise we haven’t been observed by more organic means, though.”
“There’s hardly anyone up here.” Tim smiled a little. “There are a handful of odd types, skulking in the hills, but they trust no one, would rather hide than report a sighting. And the Johnsville folk—” the smile hardened “—they keep to themselves too.”
“Here we go.”
Tim put his hand on the throttle, but didn’t interrupt Jeanie’s landing pattern. The Hellhound decelerated with a squall of stressed grav drives. For a moment, they hung in midair with dusk crimson and brown around them. He caught a glimpse of Sentinel Hill before the grav fields shifted and Jeanie brought them down vertically, settling into a narrow hollow carved by a creek long-gone dry and flanked by dense thickets.
“Pop the hatch.” Tim undid his harness. “And power down.”
“I can monitor you by your nanno-tags.”
“Full power down, Jeanie. No sensors, passive or otherwise, and no electronics.”
The AI seemed to hesitate. “With the route I took and the place I’ve found, no satellites are likely to see our—”
“Ready your Discovery Protocols.” Tim reached for the personal affects locker and pulled out a gun belt. He slid his blastpistol, a bulky B-5 Street Special, from its holster and primed the charge pack. “If I’m not back in two days, run them. Do a full wipe of yourself and your databanks. Leave nothing.”
“Tim...”
“Don’t make me tell you again, Jeanie.”
The Hellhound canopy cracked open with a hiss of equalizing pressure. Tim’s ears popped as he stood. So did joints left immobile too long. Grimacing, he worked muscles, pivoting and stretching before strapping the blastpistol to his hip.
The air smelled green and heavy, scents of forest, of wild grass, of damp earth and late summer flowers filling the early evening air with a last, heady redolence. Familiar humidity pressed against his flesh and the curiously-soothing racket of insects and night creatures greeted his ears. Faintly, he caught the livestock tang of manure and the farm.
“Two days, Jeanie.” Tim leapt from the cockpit and slid down the starboard wing. He hit the ground with a soggy thump of boots on night-dewed heather and started off. The canopy whined shut behind him.
He looked back once, as he reached the woody rise overlooking the hollow. The Hellhound was barely visible, a faint, avian gleam in the deepening shadow. Two days. When he didn’t come back, Jeanie would vent the fusion bottle in a blast certain to draw attention and equally certain to leave little evidence. A flitter crash, they’d eventually call it. Eager to avoid attention, the clannish, insular folk of uplands Sylvania would forget, would settle for simple lies rather than ponder more dangerous truths.
Tim had told so many lies.
One more would hardly trouble him.
THERE HAD BEEN SOMETHING of an exodus from the cities of Loudon, several decades after its colonization. When interstellar trade picked up, the original towns became minor metropolises, complete with star ports and the bustle of galactic society. Uneasy with an Alliance that so many of original colonists had fled in the first place, many took to the wilderness, making the long, often deadly trudge across untouched expanses to found new, semi-autonomous settlements.
Johnsville was typical of these places, connected to distant neighbors by only a single tenuous road that ran into a sparse downtown. Small farms radiated out into the rolling grasslands from its developed heart. Strangers were rare, opportunities even more so. There was the toil of the field or there was the road out.
I took the latter, Tim thought as, sweating, he mounted Sentinel Hill. First there was the factory, then the city and the meat-packing plant, then the flitter business, then finally...the road taken to the stars.
He paused atop Sentinel’s bare, grassy rise, looked down across the unassuming glitter of Johnsville’s nighttime lights. Other glimmers shined, solitary pearls in dark of the surrounding countryside, the lanterns of farms. Distantly, he picked up the lowing of hybridized cattle. Otherwise, silence blanketed the land.
God, the quiet, Tim thought. I hated that once, figured it would drive me mad. But after the shrilling of tactical computers, the snarl of terrified voices in ear buds, and the maddeningly muted nature of destruction in hard vacuum, the stillness of home was as warm and welcoming as a mother’s arms.
Mother.
Tim turned from the overlook of Johnsville to the cluster of headstones crowning Sentinel Hill. With his right thumb hooked into the belt at his hip and fingers playing at the weight of the holstered Street Special, he approached the crumbling stone wall around the cemetery and paused. Wind tickled his face, sent a chill rippling through flesh and nerve. Oh come on...just wind. Tim nudged the rusting, wrought iron gate aside and moved in amongst the dead.
Age and the elements had left the headstones nearest the entrance pocked and faded, monuments to the first families who’d scraped Johnsville from the earth with bare hands, burying their past here as the generations came and went. Younger families and newcomers didn’t haunt this place often, preferred newer plots, closer to their homes. As a child, Tim and others had come here for ghost stories and thrills. But his parents had always revered the Hill, had always insisted they’d rest here together, some day.
And so they did.
Tim paused before them, near the back of the cemetery, twin headstones gleaming ivory under the dark of a drooping Loudon oak. He’d only seen them once, months after their passing, paying a last respect and thanking the locals that had seen fit to carry out their final wish. He knelt before the graves, brushed some deadfall from the unpretentious granite of his father’s marker.
Thaddeus Carlton Watkins and Jeanine Eunice Watkins-Walker...both, 2962 – 2304 AD...
“I’m not sure what I should be saying here, Ma...Pop.”
He’d been with the flitters when he found out. He’d been shuttling a pair of fat land speculators and their girlfriends up to the orbital platform to meet with Fringe World investors and taste a bit of the galactic lifestyle. They’d kept him up there weeks, giving them system tours, listening to them party and screw each other in the back of his craft, before he got a chance to get planet side again. It had been too long and too late by far.
“I’ve done bad things, really bad. I don’t know if any of it even mattered. I thought I’d be making you proud, thought I’d be settling scores for you.”
They’d been working a petrochem plant when it happened. Hard seasons and a bad crop had bankrupted the farm, left them seeking work in Loudon’s growing industrial centers. They’d stayed together, at least. They’d been side by side when an explosion at the plant took them. Later, when the smoke cleared—literally and politically—it went public that the catastrophe had resulted from lax oversight and safety shortcuts. Of course, by then the worst culprits were long gone to new markets and new profits, leaving only a few, ham-handed clerical staff to answer and the bereaved to do the burying.
“There’re no scores to settle out there.” Tim glanced to the sky. “There’s nothing. I found Death, and it started to look like it’d be my own.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and wiped away a single tear. “You were right, I guess. You said it would be better to move on and make something grow. I’m going to try and do that, now, like you said.”
A flying reptile burst from the oak above and fluttered into the night with a screech, left Tim spinning to his feet with blastpistol drawn. Breathing hard, covered in sweat, he forced himself to relax, forced shaking hand to holster the weapon. Screams distorted by static echoed in his skull, flashes and fire scrawled across remembering eyes. The still night seemed to have gone ugly, and he out of place in its midst.
“I’m sorry.” Tim set his hand on his mother’s headstone, the lifeless chill. “I wish I’d been there for you, when it counted. I wish I had listened to you. But I’m going to make you both proud, I promise.”
Tim moved away, crossed the cemetery. He halted at the gate to take in the lights of Johnsville again. His gaze drifted from the town, tracing the path of remembered dirt roads that couldn’t be seen in the gloom but his mind recalled as clearly as if it were daylight. A lone lantern winked from the dark, would illuminate a small farmhouse. Inside, he hoped, he’d find one more person who deserved his apologies.
“I love you both very much,” Tim called over his shoulder and strode into the night.
TIM CROUCHED AMONGST hybrid Loudon corn stalks in the darkness, light from the farmhouse shafting through to settle hot on his face. Something scuttled in the field nearby, one of the odd, cat-sized reptiles that filled the ecological niche of scavengers in these parts. He tried to ignore the way his hand clenched about the blastpistol. That kind of reflex would have no place here.
The Avertine family had given Tim and Niccole the house after their wedding, a single-bedroom structure perched at the edge of their own property. With help from neighbors, Tim had patched the roof, replaced windows, packed insulation, and generally busied himself with making a home. Nikki had seemed happy, even more so when Tim had given up his staring into the stars to take work on her father’s estate. But it had never been enough for him.
His parents warned her.
The back door opened with a creak and a soft voice humming a tune. Tim tensed and lightning jolted through his veins.
Nikki stepped into the night, carrying a bucket. The harsh electric lamp caught auburn highlights of hair shorter than he remembered, bouncing about her chin line. Shadow hid her face but silhouetted her body, still slim at the waist but tending towards meatiness that a dress cut tight and just above the knees accentuated. That had always set Tim’s pulse to hammering, the way she straddled the conservative upbringing of her parents with an inner fire she hinted at but revealed to few.
He slid silently amongst the corn, ghosting her course as she carried the bucket around the side of the house to the compost pile. A deep voice shouted something from the back door—one of her brothers or her father perhaps, helping keep a household afloat that hadn’t seen a man’s presence in years. She laughed at whatever was said in a husky contralto that was as familiar to Tim as if he’d only just heard it.
Tim’s nose wrinkled at sweet-rot scent as he settled onto his haunches amongst the crops. He watched as she cast the bucket of leavings onto the compost, swooning suddenly with fear and desire. He saw her face now, the rounded chin and sarcastic half-smile, blue eyes with the beginnings of wrinkles in the corners, a hint of strain that hadn’t been there when he left.
He wanted to rush out and grab her, crush her to him, tell her everything. But he owed her a little more than that.
He rose and stepped out from the corn behind her. “Nikki...”
She gasped and jumped back from his voice, the bucket dropped and a tendril of slop dashed out to speckle a white calf.
“Don’t go.”
She began to turn into flight.
“Niccole, it’s me. It’s Tim!”
She froze. Tremors spread to her shoulders then stilled. A deep breath seemed to give her strength to turn back to him, slowly. Her eyes held not welcome or relief but the blank shock of a sleeper jarred awake from a nightmare.
