Heretics (Stars Edge: Nel Bently Book 4) Read online

  “No, more like if you’re scared, then you’re breaking new ground in here.” She tapped Nel’s chest with one long finger.

  It had been a long time since Nel broke new ground without a trowel and shovel and work boots. She tucked her head against Lin’s shoulder, feeling the adrenaline of waking transform into exhaustion. Maybe the first time ever.

  *

  Soft blooming light woke Nel. Her whole body ached from sleeping on the cot and her left arm was numb from the pressure of Lin’s head on her bicep. The weight of her every molecule seemed to press down, down. Guess we’re docked now. Wincing, she extracted her arm, replacing it with the thin pillow they had discarded earlier. She rolled her wrist, listening to the bones pop. The sound was visceral against the mechanical aural backdrop. Whatever number cubical she had been assigned was a mystery, and she wasn’t about to try to discover its whereabouts in the middle of the night. What time is it, even?

  She tapped her comm, hiding the bloom of cold light as it awakened, casting 0417 across the floor. The light reminded her why she woke in the first place. A tiny icon popped up in the corner.

  SENDER: Picklestein’s Monster

  SUBJECT: safe keeping

  Adrenaline splashed her tired brain. A glance at the closed bathroom door told her she was alone enough to read it. The name was obviously an alias, and equally obvious was the fact that it was Phil’s.

  There was no message, only a single, massive attachment: polyana.thk

  Nel didn’t know what a “thank” file type was, but it seemed like Phil neither needed nor expected her to. Frankly, she was more concerned with the fact that a massive supercomputer needed to send her something for “safe keeping.” Phil controlled every system on the space station without a second’s thought. So what was he afraid of?

  Further speculation would require caffeine and a notebook. She flicked the display away and donned her suit in the dark. It was too late to bother going back to bed, with the reentry that morning, and too early to risk waking Lin. Nel’s brain was loud enough without the emotional chatter the other woman’s presence caused.

  She slipped into the makeshift corridor, padding barefoot through the ship. Whirring engines. Whispering air. Cycling systems. She wondered briefly whether a senti-comp piloted Le Fe De Amor. The ship seemed to breathe. Not in the way Odyssey did, massive mechanical lungs in place of Phil’s meat and bone. Does he think of them that way?

  She turned a corner and was met with a clear acrylic door. Within, bright, warm lights cast a sun-like glow over hundreds of planted tanks. She nudged the door, half expecting it to deny her access. Instead, it slid open and she stepped inside. Fish meal and the bite of running water greeted her nose. She bent over, peering into the tanks. Through the cloudy depths a tan face appeared, distorted by acrylic and water.

  Nel shrieked, stumbling backward into another bank of tanks, sending water sloshing. Anger flashed in the wake of fear. “What the fuck!”

  Emilio raised his empty hands as he straightened, a faint frown flitting across his features. “Bently. Just me.”

  “You scared the shit out of me! Your face in the tank, I thought—” she cut herself off. What had she thought? That someone had left Emilio’s body bobbing in the ship’s hydroponic system? Get a grip.

  “It’s alright, I was down here fiddling with one of the filter valves. I didn’t mean to startle you.” His face eased into a cautious smile, though whether he was afraid of her or that he might upset her further, she didn’t know. “Ships get, ah, fantasimal?”

  “Spooky.”

  “Spooky at night.”

  “Yeah. Whole new set of sounds too. From the station. I was just trying to figure out if this thing had a computer like Odyssey’s.”

  “Ah.” He looked back down at the hoses in his hands. “It doesn’t.”

  “I didn’t think so. It doesn’t feel—”

  “Alive?”

  She grinned. “Aware. So you know about the senti-comps?”

  “Oh, that old puzzle.” He shook his head. “I know enough to be certain my hang-ups with IDH’s ethics are fully justified. I mean, really now: heads in jars?” He squinted at her. “You knew that bit, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And where does Dr. Bently sit on the matter?”

  “Iffy would be an understatement. But not like, at them. I mean, they’re already here so we can’t debate whether we should have done it in the first place. I can’t decide if I pity or fear them.”

  “Pity?”

  She shrugged. “That existence. I like Phil, actually, as a person. It’s just a bizarre idea. How do you get from AI to sentient pickle?” She shuddered, head tilted to see the naked underside of a plant. “So, explain this to me?”

  “I assume you don’t mean the hydroponics.” His eyes lighted on her, steady, stern.

  She glanced up, then straightened. “I mean, that’s cool and all. But no. I mean the ship. The fleet. Showing up out of literally nothing while the planet imploded. I can barely wrap my head around the fact that it took a moment but for you it was weeks.” She shook her head. “I never had the brain for physics.”

  He chuckled, brown fingers cupping a delicate leaf. “If you were one of Los Pobladores, then you would know the whole story. We didn’t forget, you know, when the Teachers arrived and promised everything, when they took our people from us in the name of altruism. Those stories lasted longest of any of ours.”

  “How did I study you for years and never hear about it?”

  “Because you found what we wanted you to find. That’s very colonial of you, by the way, to think you could possibly know our deepest history, our most sorrowful secrets after studying a handful of years where you were most likely equally, if not more, intrigued by the backside of the student in front of you.”

  “Nah, it was my teacher’s, actually,” she joked, but her voice grew quiet. It was easy to think she was a hotshot when an intergalactic organization asked her to run their space dig, but she’d be fooling herself if she thought it wasn't just cosmic nepotism. “You’re right.”

  “I know.” His tone held little judgement. “We knew our cousins would return, knew when they did, they would be as if gods. And if they held the violence of their teachers, then we wouldn’t stand a chance.” He peered into one of the tanks of plain fish. “So we advanced too. It’s easy to focus on IDH. They’re sparkly, flashy, filled with hubris and gleaming determination. But just as they have fingers in every organization from NASA to the former Soviet government, so do we.”

  Nel’s brows rose. “So the vandalism on Los Cerros Esperando VII—”

  “Was stamped in three nations and sanctioned by a member of the UN.”

  The laugh that barked from her mouth held more incredulity than mirth. “Holy shit, man.”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “You seem surprised. More than when you learned about IDH?”

  She looked away. “I would have pretended to believe anything Lin said for a night. You know that. By the time I could critically evaluate the mess, I was racing the feds through New England wilderness with a reticle on my back. Didn’t really have time to question whether it was the most plausible action-movie plot I’d ever heard.”

  “And now?”

  “I think you could rip your head from your neck and show me you’re actually an alien named Blergh and I’d hardly bat an eye.” Nel returned to the issue at hand. “I’m more surprised that IDH didn’t know.”

  “Oh, they did, here and there. They’d catch us, just as we would them. A space race between paleolithic astronauts and those they left behind.” He grinned, nudging her with his round shoulder. “C’mon, even you’d watch that blockbuster.”

  “Maybe,” she teased. She moved down the line of plants, examining the delicate roots reaching for moisture. “So tell me how you got here.”

  “We’d been building a station for years, completed a few months after you left for S
amsara. My contract was bought out from IDH by the Founders—their Egyptian branch, actually—around that time and I was transferred here.”

  “Fuck, man.” Nel shook her head. “And they’ve got you fixing goldfish tanks?”

  “They’re catfish. I helped grow half the food at my restaurant back home, you know. So now I help out with the food production here. It’s what I did before I was a liaison. We knew open contact with IDH was only a matter of time.”

  “Everything seems to be going smoothly,” Nel observed.

  “I suppose.” His mouth quirked. “I prefer the fish.”

  “I would too.” She watched the sleek brown bodies glide for a few more moments. “I should get my things in order for the landing. Reentry. Whatever you people call it.”

  “Homecoming?” Emilio suggested. When their eyes met again his smile was gentle and as sad as she imagined hers to be.

  “I suppose,” she echoed. Raising a hand, she slipped back out of the room. Flight crew and those who were, judging by the grease on their faces, mechanically inclined, were beginning to stir. Nel floated along the hall, now understanding the ridged design of most spaceships. You need something to propel from in zero-G. Lin was awake by the time Nel returned to the tiny cubby where they’d spent the night.

  Her face brightened when Nel poked her head inside. “Was wondering where you got off to.”

  “Just insomnia. Had to snoop around in the dark like usual.” She grinned. “Be happy I came back, usually when I take off in the dead of the night, I don’t even leave my number.”

  Lin scoffed and nudged Nel’s elbow with hers as she fiddled with her electrosuit. “I guess I’m special then.”

  Nerves shot a chemical command to run up the small of Nel’s back. She fished her bag from under Lin’s cot with a tired laugh. “Guess so.”

  A knock pounded on the door. “Oi! Letnan, we’re strapping in. Bently with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No!” Lin answered simultaneously.

  Whoever was knocking paused, probably to stifle a laugh. “Whatever, both of you need to be ready in five!”

  An alarm blared and Nel’s shaking hands dropped her bag. “Fuck!”

  “Just the minute warning. Better get moving.” Lin dropped a kiss onto Nel’s mouth. “You alright?”

  Nel barely heard her through the buzzing in her ears. The alarm weaseled through her head, almost drowning the echo of screaming. “Get it out!”

  “Nel? Nel!”

  She blinked and looked up into Lin’s concerned face. “Sorry. Hey.”

  “You alright?”

  “Just the alarms. Makes me jumpy.” She drew a breath. “What’d you say?”

  “I asked if you were okay. I’d like to talk about last night. Your feelings. Breaking new ground. Once you have time to adjust and we’re back on Earth.”

  “Yeah, for sure,” Nel lied. She flashed a smile and hastily did up the throat of her suit. “See you in the shuttle!” She was out of the door before Lin could pry any more.

  The raw emotions nagging at her for the past week were gone. Sated perhaps with their arrival or maybe just muffled by adrenaline. One thing was for sure: landing brought far bigger concerns than having The Talk with Lin.

  She jogged down the corridor, raising an apologetic hand at the tech who tossed her a full space suit with annoyed impatience. Thankfully, he had the sense to remind Nel how to fasten the ports properly.

  Once her suit was on and locked, she clomped into line with the rest of the passengers. She caught a glimpse of Zach’s towering silhouette. Virtually everyone from Samsara was clustered in the corridor, weaving from the space station to the waiting shuttle. She found herself counting breaths, counting steps, picking out every hose and wire trailing along the rounded halls. The suit’s insulation turned her heartbeat to thunder in her ears. Man, if someone wanted to blow us up and cover their tracks, this would be a great opportunity. She hated that the thought popped into her head, but it was there now, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  The view from a small porthole to the left brought a distracted smile to her face. The shuttle was docked at a right angle to the rest of the massive ship, which was in turn docked onto a space station. Nel’s thoughts were too disorganized to recall whether it was one of Los Pobladores, and her memories of the ISS were too fuzzy for her to be able to recognize it.

  Nel tilted her head, peering at the waiting shuttle’s lines. “That could be from the planetarium.”

  “Don’t fix what’s not broken,” a tech remarked.

  “Oh for goodness sake, even our cloud-jumpers have reusable heat shields. This is…is just a controlled bonfire plummeting into the sea.” Lin’s voice was pitched high with nerves.

  Nel slowed her pace and reached a hand out. “Well, considering, we have a pretty good track record.”

  “Yeah, Nalawangsa.” The tech winked at her. “Let’s see you fly a controlled bonfire without killing anyone.”

  “I’d rather not fly at all, thank you very much.”

  For a moment, curiosity distracted Nel enough to ignore the deceptively thin joints of the docking mechanism as they crossed from ship to shuttle. “You’re afraid of flying?”

  Lin’s lips pursed in discomfort. “I just find the cavalier attitudes of most pilots disconcerting in the best scenarios and disastrous in the worst.”

  Recalling Bavin’s boisterous nature, Nel grinned. “Yeah, I’d agree with you there. I love flying, but this is a bit different now.” Now that technology and audio can kill us in seconds. Voicing that to the rest of the passengers wasn’t fair, so she bit the words back.

  Nel tugged Lin onto the gangway, blocky, padded hands bumping into one another more than interlinked fingers. Banks of seats filled the shuttle’s narrow belly. “So where are we landing again? Canaveral?”

  “Spaceport Bakjeeri.”

  “Right.” Nel frowned, then shook her head. “So spaceports are a thing now?”

  “Two are—this one’s just best timed for weather and orbit.” Lights danced over the smooth surface of her space helm, like a halo of manufactured stars. Nel suppressed the urge to tap their glass domes together in a helmed good luck kiss. “Once we land I guess we’ll have a briefing on the situation.”

  The craft lurched and Nel gripped the arm of the chair. Lin chuckled, then tapped the helmet. “No sound once we uncouple. I’ll miss you.”

  Nel snorted and fingered the lock of the suit around her neck. In the space of every blink her vision flickered with Paul’s blood splattered over her face. Glass or no, she swore she could feel the heat of it. She squeezed her eyes shut, grasping for some prettier mental image. Someplace safe. Maybe the hot flash was just nerves and not some violent echo.

  When she opened her eyes again the window was filled with the hazy blue-black rind surrounding Earth. It was horrifyingly fragile. Climate change is a small wonder. They twisted in the air then, though she could only tell by the view spinning outside. Now they were belly down, she supposed. Then the roaring started.

  Rumbling shook the seat beneath her, as much a sensation as a sound. Muffled howling took over, searing flames spouting along the windows as the heat shields did their job. Weight pressed on her chest, pushing her back. If she could have lifted her hand, she would have linked fingers with Lin. The other woman’s eyes were closed, lips thin and tight in fear.

  Atmosphere burned away their shields, enveloping them with vicious welcome. Juddering continued, increasing. If alarms sounded, Nel didn’t know. Then the fire was gone and the window cleared. Nel’s heart faltered. Home. G-force dampened her cheeks and her heart thundered with relief. For the first time since arriving on Odyssey, her mind was quiet. Outside the air was hers, the ground was the same she had first crawled on, first shoved into her mouth with a baby-fat fist, the soil she dug her first trowel into. The soil that held Mikey’s remains, her father’s remains. Most of them.


  Another minute of shuddering and the shuttle leveled. Below, clouds cleared and the brilliant green of the Sanjay Gandhi jungle appeared. Nel could not tear her eyes away. Even from the height of however many thousand feet, the Himalayas were massive. Everything else might have been softened by the sheer scale, but not the crags. To think, I crossed star systems before I ended up in India.

  With the lessened pressure, she turned to look at Lin. The woman was peering out the window too, but her dark eyes flicked to Nel’s. Her smile was small in her nerve-pale face, but genuine. Though Nel couldn’t hear her, she recognized the words the woman mouthed: “Welcome home.”

  Nel spent her adolescence running. Running from home, running from bigotry, running from anything that tried to pin her down. University, from undergrad to doctorate, was one big race to being the best, the most interesting, the most qualified. Now, she realized, all she was racing toward was home. Mindi. Whatever was left of her battered life. A holographic sign flickered onto the bare white surface separating them from the cockpit:

  WE HAVE SUCCESSFULLY ENTERED TERRESTRIAL ATMOSPHERE. OUR CURRENT ALTITUDE IS 19 KM. WE WILL BE LANDING AT SPACEPORT BAKJEERI IN ABOUT THIRTY MINUTES. LOCAL TIME IS 1837.

  Nel’s tears began in earnest. In thirty minutes she would be on proper soil. She didn’t care for IDH or the Founders, frankly, but tomorrow she would commit everything she had to helping them protect this blue rock. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

  Lin’s hand rested on hers. Maybe, if it weren’t for leaving, for Lin, for meeting Phil, she would never have known how much there was to love about Earth. Or all the precious, insignificant assholes down here.

  FOR THOSE OF US TRAVELING FROM LE FE DE AMOR AND ODYSSEY OF EARTH, WELCOME, WE HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY. FOR THOSE OF US FROM EARTH: WELCOME HOME.

  FIVE

  The shuttle alighted with a screech on a swath of bright black tarmac. Heat haze thickened the air, and the plump peach of the sun hung above the western horizon. Bundled in her suit with several layers of aluminum and insulation separating her from proper air, Nel still swore her blood sang with familiarity. The shuttle taxied to a halt at a causeway. Her heart pinched, wishing for once to climb down onto the runway. Gotta take advantage of the rare occasion when kissing the ground is justified.