Thursday, December 31, 2009

Conversations on the Fortune's Fist: Sixteen

"I've fucking seen him," Erin Tan snapped, "And don't you go saying I haven't!"

Helmi Alpassi didn't sigh or roll her eyes, although it took fairly heroic self-restraint. Ancestors spare me. 

Not that they ever did, in Helmi's experience.

"Erin," she said reasonably, scraping the last forkful of beef-flavored protein off her plate. "You saw your grand-dad in the engine room and some woman made of fire down by cargo. Maybe - "

Erin turned sharply enough to set her sleek black hair swirling out around her shoulders. "Yes! I did see them. And I saw the Chief too! Clear as I see you, Helmi, clear as I see you right now!"

"All right."  Helmi leaned forward and rested her elbows on the mess table. "Say you did see the Chief. What was he doing?"

"He was adjusting the enviro controls."

Helmi grinned.  "Well, that explains why it's been so spirits-damned cold around here lately, anyway."

"No!" Erin dropped onto the bench opposite Helmi and leaned forward. "He was turning them up. You know, it's cold because Pilot's always telling us to set them down further. And the Chief was putting them back to normal!"

Helmi pushed her plate away. "Uh-huh. So ghosts can change the settings on things?"

"Sure! Like, there was that one on that ship, the frigate, that kept setting the autopilot to the old pilot's home world? And the one that - "

"Erin."  Helmi rubbed her forehead. Ancestors and spirits spare me from superstitious fools, if you would be so fucking kind. For once in your afterlife. "Those are just bar stories."

Erin folded her arms and set her chin. "You don't believe me."

"I've never seen a ghost, I've never seen any proof of a ghost, I - "

"What about the ghost ships, the - "

"It's a big black Deep out there, Erin. You don't need ghosts to have a reason for strange stuff happening."

"You believe in spirits, though, don't you?" Erin asked. "Dead people, protecting you?"

"It's not exactly the same thing," Helmi said.

"Well, why not? If your ancestors can watch over you, why can't the Chief be watching over the ship?"

"Well, they don't follow me around fiddling with enviro controls, for one thing!"

"Then what do they do?"

Helmi thought about the low table in her quarters, the little figurines worn featureless and smooth with years of handling. "You know what? I'm not going to get into it. Religion is religion, and it's private."

"Well," Erin said stubbornly, "What I believe is private too."

Helmi shook her head. "No, not so much. Not when you're going around telling people that dead people are hanging around. Then it's ship's business. And - " Helmi held up her hand as Erin drew an angry breath to reply "And, if you think I'm wrong about that, then just think about what the XO would say if she heard about it."

"I'm not going to pretend that - "

"Don't be a fucking fool!" Helmi snapped, and got wide-eyed silence from the engineering ensign at last. "You can't be stupid enough not to realize what's happening to this crew! Sarge is gone. The Doc's gone. The  Chief's dead. Pilot's in medical every day and she never was exactly proactive, was she?"

"So?"

Helmi sighed. "Ship's more than steel and engines, Erin. Maybe being engineering makes that hard to see? But look around. Hear what people are saying. Place is coming apart at the seams.  You think telling ghost stories is going to help that?"

"Um ..."

"Um is fucking right."  Helmi picked up her empty plate and stood up. "So do us all a favor, okay?"

"What?"

Helmi tossed her plate in the 'cycler and turned to the door. "Keep what you see to yourself."

"Don't you think it would help?" Erin asked.  "People knowing ... that the Chief was still looking out for us?"

Helmi stopped at the door. "The dead don't look out for us, Erin."

The dead look out for themselves.

In that way, at least, they're just like everybody else.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Four Bells

Luisa shuffles the cards.

She can't send them shooting from hand to hand in a flashy waterfall like Nerila, can't cut them one-handed or flip them over her fingers. Can't palm an ace the way Nerila did.

Wouldn't if I could.

She shuffles, unfancy, precise, no Spirits-lost Gallente foolishness.  

Deals in a circuit, two cards, one, two more.


Five cards face down in front of her.


Five face down at each of the three empty places around the table.

You're a stupid, sentimental old woman, Lulu Kamajeck.


Fisk Hurun wasn't about to pick up the cards at the place to her left, his big hands dwarfing them, handling the squares of pasteboard with the exaggerated care of a man whose augmented strength could rip a door from its hinges in a moment of inattention.

No, he's off somewhere in that fancy battleship he flies these days, or living the highlife with that little Vherry girl he's taken up with. 


Nerila Janianial wasn't reaching for the cards to Luisa's right, either, long dark fingers deftly rearranging them and maybe slipping in a high card as she did it. Gone, without a word. I told Pilot not to hire a fucking junkie, but no. 'Everyone deserves a second chance, Luisa.'


Well, shit. Only people asking for second chances are those already proved themselves untrustworthy.


As turned out to be true. 


And Michael Mitcheson wasn't sitting across from her, playing footsie with his wife as if none of us noticed and watching the bottle go around the table with just a little bit too much interest.

And one thing you can say for that over-sexed, over-charming Gallente son-of-a-bitch, he's the only one of 'em hasn't left the ship.


No. Downstairs, is where Mitch is.  Cold and stiff in one of his wife's morgue drawers, waiting for someone to track down his junkie bride so the decencies could be done.

Luisa sweeps up her own hand and tosses it face up. Two acorns, four leaves, six and seven of hearts, ten bells.


Handful of trash, is what I got. 


Handful of trash.


There's still an inch left in the bottle of Invelen's fine Pator vodka. Luisa hooks it out of the cupboard and pours herself a careful quarter of that last inch, caps it and puts it back.

Better than I'll ever afford, that's certain.


And when it's gone, that'll be that.


Gone.


She toasts the empty chairs around the table and tosses the vodka back. The burn makes her eyes water and she blinks hard as she sweeps up the cards and begins to deal them out again, seven stacks in front of her this time, one, one two, one two three.


Five of acorns on the six of bells. Nine hearts on ten leaves.  Turn over eight acorns and move it over.

You can fool yourself into thinking poker's your game, Lulu. But in the end ... 


In the end, it's always solitaire. 

Friday, December 18, 2009

The Lighthouse

In the months they were together she mapped his body with a surgeon's knowledge and a lover's touch.


The serratus anterior originates on the surface of the upper eight ribs at the side of the chest and inserts along the entire anterior length of the medial border of the scapula.

Bones, muscles, ligaments ...  the machinery of the human body, her expertise, her specialty, the one thing she can always rely on. She knew every joint and every hollow of his body, from textbooks, from a thousand operations, before the first time she lay down beside him.

Discovered them anew, in the miracle of Michael Mitcheson stretched out beside her.

The levator scapulae arises from the transverse processes of the first four cervical vertebrae and inserts into the vertebral border of the scapula.

"You have a beautiful sternocleido mastoid."

"A what-which-now?" Mitch asked, grinning.

"Here." Nerila ran her fingers along the muscle. "From the medial portion of your clavicle to the mastoid process of your temporal bone."

"That's a fancy way of saying neck, then?"  He wrapped his arms around her and rolled them over, bent his head to kiss her throat. "You have a beautiful stern-cled-mast-thingie too, sweetheart."

She giggled. "That's my hyoid bone."

"And a very pretty hyoid bone it is."

"Like you care what it's called!"  She tangled her fingers in his hair, her other hand flat against the smooth plane of his left latissimus dorsi. 

"Like you care if I care..." 

The pectoralis minor arises from the third, fourth, and fifth ribs, near their cartilage and inserts into the medial border and upper surface of the coracoid process of the scapula.

"From the pectoralis minor to the biceps brachii ... " Her fingers found the small nub of bone on the hollow of his shoulder. "That's your coracoid process.  We call it the Surgeon's Lighthouse."

"Why?" He turned his head to grin at her. "It flashes on and off in the dark?"

She smiled back. "A lot of nerves and blood vessels in there. This little bone tells us where they are, if there isn't time for a scan. Shows us where to cut, to be safe."

"Keeps you off the rocks?"

"Exactly." Nerila traced the fragile wing of his clavicle with one finger.  For whole moments of time she could forget that body beside her, warm and strong and by a process no science could explain containing a mind and soul unlike any other, was as fragile and as vulnerable to steel and blast-caps as any other bleeding on her table. "Exactly."

On the lateral angle of the scapula is a shallow pyriform, articular surface, the glenoid cavity, which is directed lateral and forward and articulates with the head of the humerus.

She is up to her elbows in blood, which makes it an ordinary day for her, now.

No scans, no fancy equipment. Those who can, go to station medical. Even here, in the heart of the Syndicate, there's quality medical care - for those who can afford it.

Who can afford to answer the questions that come with it.

Who want doctors who can afford to answer questions themselves.

Nerila has no scans, no machines. She has scalpels and sutures and bandages. She has a table scrubbed with disinfectant in a dingy back-room that's as clean as she can make it.

She has two steady hands and a knowledge of the human body that no scanner could match.

There is blood everywhere, sharp red arterial blood pumping from the jagged hole in the shoulder of the man sprawled on her table. His friends are standing by the door, big men with hard faces, and Nerila is under no illusion that her life depends on how well she does here.

There's too much blood to see the bleeder, and she has no med-tech to suction out the wound.  She feels for it with fingers slippery with blood, knowing where it has to be, the dorsal scapular artery just where it emerges from the superior angle of the scapula ... there.


She pinches with two fingers, follows along them with a clamp.

The bleeding stops.

Now her time is measured in seconds, before she has to choose between saving this man's life and saving his arm.  The round is still in the wound, she can tell.  No way to get a grip on it with forceps - she'll have to cut.

There's a lot that can go wrong for her patient, if she cuts into the mess of nerves and blood vessels in his shoulder, without a scan to guide the knife.

There's a lot that can go wrong for her personally, right now, if she doesn't do what the men by the door want and fix him up, fast.

Nerila puts her thumb in the hollow of his shoulder, by the wound, finds the hook of bone that she knows will be there, measures by eye from the Surgeon's Lighthouse.

Cuts.

The flesh parts beneath her blade.

Her hands are steady, and fast, but her eyes don't see a bloody wound, ragged flesh, clean incisions.

She has relearned her anatomy, and every body on her table is the same body, now.

Nerila cuts, stitches, bandages.  Takes the money and the threats designed to keep her mouth shut. Scrubs blood from the table and from beneath her nails.

Afterimages linger on the inside of her eyelids, even though she knows the table is as empty as her bed.

The coracoid process, a small hook-like structure on the lateral edge of the superior anterior portion of the scapula ... serves to stabilize the shoulder joint ... palpable in the deltopectoral groove between the deltoid and pectoralis major muscles.

In her dreams, she traces the spot, leans over to press her lips to it.

The lighthouse that used to keep her from the rocks.


Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The Stone Dancer

 She is
                                         between the earth
                                                                                              and the sky.


The drums roll endlessly through the low hollow of the earth.


                                                                      She stands
for the people
                                         and their place.


Hiri waits.


Everything she sees is very sharp and small. The last food she had was two days ago, on the evening she arrived here, in this place, this sacred place. Three days of walking beneath the sky, three nights of sleeping on the earth, made her ready. She rose the next morning and began to prepare.

See her

                                             she is dancing
                                                                                     on the edge of the world.


For two days she has been sweeping the dancing ground, mixing the mud, chipping flakes of flint to make the knife.  She coated her body with mud, pouring handfuls of it over her head until her hair was plastered back with it, until  there is not the slightest fleck of her skin that shows brown through the pale grey mud.  All the while she chewed the dulai leaf, and now her lips and tongue and throat are slightly numb and tingle.

                                               Watch her
dancing.
                                                                           Watch her!


Back in the city, Hiri knows that the dulai leaf has mildly narcotic properties, that it contains a compound used in pain medication. Back in the city she thinks of the people here today as the Salaajo Clan


She is dancing 
                                           beneath the sky.



Here, she has no words except those spoken by her mother's mother's mother.  She chews dulai because it is the dancer's plant. The people around her don't have a name given to them by their neighbours out of the need to diferentiate one group of people from another, salaajo, the grass-burners. They are only the People.

                                                                               She is dancing
                          upon the earth.



The other dancers have started. This dance is too important for one dancer, even one older and more experienced than Hiri. The man they are dancing for is very sick. He killed a man, in a fight, when they were both drunk. It will take all their strength to bring him back to the dance.

Between sky and earth
                                   she is dancing 
                                                              in the wind.

Hiri is neither waiting nor expectant, but when the moment comes, she knows. Without thinking, she moves. The lines of dancers open for her and close around her.



Dancing 
                                     on the earth 
                                                                         beneath the sky.

The drums grow louder. They drown out the sound of the dancers' bare feet on the bare earth, but Hiri can hear it anyway, hear it through the soles of her feet as they strike the ground in unison with the the other dancers.  They are twenty dancers. They are one dance.

                                                   In the wind                
dancing                                                
                                                                              below the sky
                             dancing.

Sweat washes the mud from their bodies, acrid with the dulai they have all been chewing. Dust rises from their pounding feet, clinging to their skin.  They look like they have been carved out of the ground, rocks given life, stone, dancing.

Between the people
                                                                                            and their past
                                                  stone dancing.


One by one the other dancers whirl to a stop, sink to their knees, panting. The drums fade. Hiri leaps and turns alone, the knife held high.  Each circuit brings her closer and closer to the reason they are all here today. The sick man stands still, waiting. He is afraid, Hiri knows. He said so, in the long hours he spent with Hiri and the other shamen as they prepared him for this day. He is afraid, but he wants to be well. Wants, again, to be part of the People and their dance.

After the future
                                                                behind the dawn
                                                                                                          the dance.


Hiri reaches him, and he meets her gaze.  She can see in his face that in this moment they want the same thing: that he be made well, and that he live through the healing.

She takes a deep breath, and raises the knife.

Impossible

Hurts.


She needs to think.


Think.


But she can't. There's pain, pain of a kind she's never felt before. There's the knife.


She's pretty sure she's in shock. 


Knowing doesn't help. 


She stares at the knife. It's a big one. Her mother gave it to her when she moved here to Urbald for college. Every kitchen needs a good knife, Hiri. Now give me a zat.  A knife can never be a gift. Give a knife as a gift and it cuts love. 


Hiri thinks that maybe she didn't give her mother enough money. Maybe if she'd given a difar instead of a zat ...


She knows every contour, every flaw, of the handle. She's seen that knife every day for a year and a half.


She's never seen it before. 


Have to think.


It's not possible.  It is, quite simply, impossible. The knife her mother gave her is stuck upright, tip wedged firmly into the top of the kitchen table.


Between the hilt of the knife and the tip is her hand. 


The knife is going through my hand.


It's impossible. 


It's even less possible that Jemadar put it there. 


Not by accident.


I had to tell him I was leaving. I needed my ID, my bankchip.


The keys to unlock the front door.


All those things are lying an inch from her fingers, just where he put them, just where they were when she reached for them and Jemadar picked up the knife ...


Not possible.


And yet.


There is the knife. There is her hand. 


Have to think.


Thinking is something else that is impossible. 


She can sense an idea looming at the edge of her mind, an idea that she can't bear to have, an idea she pushes away as hard as she can.


The only way I'm getting out of here is if I pull out the knife.


The thought makes her retch. She can't, she won't, she can't touch the knife. Pull it out of her hand?


Impossible. 


Hiri is still staring at the knife when Jemadar comes back. 


There isn't a single word inside her that she can speak to him. 


He doesn't say a thing.


He spills something on the floor. It smells tangy, ozoney, like the fumes from the shuttlebus. 


He has a match.


It's not possible. Impossible. 


Unpossible.


She wonders why there's no such word as unpossible.  There should be. It's a good word.

It's unpossible that the floor is in fire. It's unpossible that he's leaving.It's unpossible that she can hear the key turn in the lock as he closes the door behind him.


Her keys are still on the table. 


The knife is still in her hand.


Impossible.


There's a new smell, along with the mechanical odor of whatever is running in rivers of fire around her. It smells like the smoke that drifts from the roasting pits in the camps after the dances.


It's not a calf on a spit that she can smell.


It's her.


Impossible.


She reaches for the hilt.


The world is full of flame.


Im - 


Possible.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Conversations on the Fortune's Fist: Fifteen

Nerila didn't hear him the first time.

The thoughts that raced and crowded and tumbled through her head, pushing each other aside before she could bring them in focus, Pilot's tests - Crew - pod maintenance - need to make that bed - hire new medtech - stove needs cleaning - check Alpassi's scans - inventory assessment, drowned out Mitch's voice until he took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him.

"Talk to me. Sweetheart. Please."

Her heart did a little double thump at what she saw in his face, and her thoughts went straight to the glass vial tucked down at the bottom of her pocket. Hidden. Hidden well enough? Safe? "Nothing, nothing's wrong, I'm just distracted. Too much to do, you know?"

"Sweetheart," Mitch said softly. "Don't take me for a fool."

The lie was ready on her lips, rehearsed. Hells, rehearsed. Because she'd been ready for this moment, not knowing who it would be, but knowing it would come. Like it always does. Like it had last time, time and time over. She knew how to handle it, had handled it a dozen times before. 

First denial. No, of course not. Perhaps with a touch of outraged anger. How could you think that of me? If that didn't work, carefully calibrated admissions. I did try it. I know it was silly. Or I do occasionally, yes. Not more than once a month.

All of it, tried and true strategies.

She looked into his eyes and realized there was nothing in her that could lie to this man, not this man, not Michael Mitcheson, not her husband.

"I'm sorry," she said, instead. "I'm sorry."

"How much?" he asked. "For how long?"

How much? Enough. Isn't that the only answer? "Too much," she said at last, looking away from him. "Too long."

"Sweetheart." He tightened his grip a little on her shoulders. "You have to deal with it. Get clean. Time off, whatever."

"I know, I know.  When I get this last lot of tests through for Pilot, I'll - "

Mitch shook his head. "No. It won't ever be the right time, sweetheart. There'll always be something else. Another reason."

Nerila bit her lip. "I can't, not yet, not right now..."

"You can. You have to."  He folded her in his arms, whispered to the top of her head. "I'm here, sweetheart. We'll get through this. We will."

Then she could lie to him, look up and meet his gaze and smile and say "I know. I know."

Because there was no we. In everything else, maybe.

Not in this.

After that, it was easy, so easy it felt inevitable.  I'll put in for leave. Today. This is it. 

It'll be hard. I'll need you.

She watched him leave for his duty shift.

She packed a bag.

Not with much. A couple of changes of clothes.

She left her wedding ring on the dresser.

The transport hub was crowded. Old men walking with sticks, children clinging to parents' hands and gazing around wide-eyed, sullen teenagers with too much makeup.

Everybody trying to get to somewhere that isn't where they are.

She picked a destination. Pochelympe .  Nowhere she'd ever heard of. She liked the name, liked saying it over to herself as she waited in line to buy a ticket. Pochelympe. Pochelympe. Pochelympe.

Pochelympe.

A simple transaction, which she found a little disappointing. Moments like this should have some sort of complicated rigmarole attached. Maybe a ritual.

No ritual. Just pushing her bank chip across the counter and the clerk pushing it back with a ticket, not even looking up from the holonovel he's watching beneath the desk.

And then she's taking the short walk to the Interbus, pushing her way through the mass of people, all trying to be somewhere or someone they aren't.

The crowds close around her.

And she's gone.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Ghosts

The Void. The Black. The Deep Beyond. 


Every culture has its own term for the infinite darkness out between the stars.

The Big Empty. The Widow-maker. The Endless. 


Space isn't all dark, of course, and it isn't all empty. There are stars boiling with furious light, comets streaking  their way through long orbits around their suns, planets spinning lazy ellipses with their own followers of moons and ice.

The Vast. The Big Null. The Ship-Eater.

There are the defiant lights of the people of the Cluster, too: stations with their docking beacons and every window shining; the Gates flashing a blaze of color every time a ship jumps through; ships of every shape and size, from shuttle to titans, plying their busy way between the stars.

But space is big, and the lights are small, even the incandescent furnaces of the stars.

In between them is the dark.

And the dark, as any child can tell you, is where the ghosts live.

The Cold Hereafter.  The Infinite Sea.The Forever Night.


There are a lot of ghosts in the dark between the stars.

Some pilots say they hear them, half-asleep in the pod, in the blink between here and there of the jumpgate. Voices.  Whose voices, well, that's a different question. The dead. The damned. The unborn.

Some engineers say they can hear them in the hum of the engine and the whine of the capacitor: the ghost of the ship, the spirit of the steel around them. Singing. No, I don't know the tune. 

There are stories of ships that have particular ghosts: a rifter that always set its own autopilot to the homeworld of the previous captain, who'd died on board but not in pod; a myrmidon with a guardian spirit that appeared as a woman made of flame to lead crew trapped by an explosion safely through corridors choked with smoke.

Some less harmless, like the freighter whose crew, stranded in slow orbit by engine failure, drew lots to see who would survive on the limited life support and the flesh of their colleagues, and which, repainted, renamed and relaunched, was halfway through its next voyage when the ship's cook woke from a strange dream to find herself preparing a fricassee of the first mate.

Ships that cry and ships that bleed, ships that send their crew mad and ships that set course for the sun of their own accord and will not answer to the helm. There are stories about all of those, told in the crew bars along the dockside, late in the evening.

Spend a few weeks on a ship, any ship, and its easy to see where the stories come from.  Dopplered static on the comms, signals caught and echoed and distorted by any one of a thousand kinds of interference, voices from the past, half-heard, a quarter-understood.  Ships found drifting, empty, ownerless: sometimes with a gaping rent in the hull to show what happened; sometimes with the escape pods missing and all the signs of an orderly evacuation; sometimes with the crew still at their posts, white and stiff and rimed with frost.

Sometimes, most unnerving, ships in perfect working order, with no sign of any emergency - a pot set on a cold stove, spoon still propped across it, as if the cook had stepped away from a moment and would be right back; a coffee cup on the captain's desk and just one bed in the crew quarters unmade. Coming across one of those ships gives the disturbing feeling that the crew have simply, and only seconds ago, vanished.

Or that they're still there, unseen, unheard. Waiting.

Ghosts.


Signals skipping across the interface, ending up in places they were never meant to go. Drifting hulls. Ships slipping on and off the registry lists, undocking here and sliding out into the dark to disappear until the crew disembarks there off a different ship with a different name. The Bright Spark; the Sapphire Star; the Magpie.

Ghosts.

Every faction and corporation has its ships that can run silent and lie hidden off the grid, for all intents and purposes just another piece of space-junk until the systems fire up and the guns go live.  Not every war is declared.

The Kogaru Io; the Felton May; the Toshkaiska.


Ghost ships fighting ghost wars.

The official response to any question is laughter. Ghosts? You know how superstitious spacers can be! No, we certainly don't employ any 'ghosts'.  There's no such thing!


Everyone knows there's no such thing as ghosts.

Except out in the Void, the Vast, the Deep Beyond, at the back of the Big Empty, wrapped up in the Endless, and the mercy of the Infinite Sea.

There's no such thing as ghosts, except where the ghosts live.

In the dark behind the stars.






Friday, November 27, 2009

Reflections

"Oh, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend of Pilot Roth's."

No.

Helmi Alpassi closed her eyes for a second, blew out a short breath.

"Oh, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend of Cia's."

She smiled, studied the smile in the mirror. Too cold. Fake.

There was a picture tucked into the frame of the mirror and she studied it for a moment.
A family group, all with the same fair hair, all grinning at the camera. Mother, father, brother and me.

Helmi looked from the picture to the mirror, pulled the corners of her mouth a little higher, squinted her eyes a little. Better.

"Hi, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend of Cia's."

Good.  The smile looked natural. Her voice sounded normal, casual, to her own ears. To be sure, she flicked a button on her comm and listened as the recording played back. Yes. Normal.

Looking down at herself, she smoothed her hands over her shirt. She'd chosen it carefully, taking so long with the catalogue that the XO had said dryly No-one needs you to be a fashionplate, Helmi.

Looking in the mirror again, Helmi thought it had been worth the time. The light blue made her look younger, and gave an innocent tint to her grey eyes. The cut was long and loose, covering the sidearm nestled in the small of her back. The fabric was heavy, its stiffness disguising the light body-armor beneath.

"Hi, I'm Helmi, a friend of Cia's?"

Perfect.

She'd practiced with the shirt and the holster a hundred times, but she made sure again now. Her fingers flicked the hem of the shirt up and away with the beginning of the movement that brought her hand to the butt of her sidearm. Yank and drag, barrel to the ground.  The gun came around her body angled so she wouldn't shoot herself with a misfire and snapped up to level on the mirror.

Over the fat black muzzle of the gun, her eyes held no innocence at all.

It was hard to tell just how fast she was, subjectively. Sarge said fast enough.

Fisk Hurun wouldn't have said it if he hadn't believed it.  No way he'd let anything slide on Pilot's security.

He didn't draw that detail himself, anymore. Helmi could guess why. She wasn't the only one who'd seen him, when Pilot was out in Rens Bazaar or on the Interbus or where-ever, muscle jumping in his cheek, looking at little old ladies like they were about to jump Pilot and beat her to death with their string bags full of oranges.

It was understandable, she supposed. More than.

But it was a liability, too. A weakness. In a man she hadn't been used to seeing weakness in, not when she'd been a raw cadet in Peace and Order's junior team at the Haadoken Summit and he'd been the last man down in Home Guard's final match against Ishukone, not when he'd been the first through the door into the disabled transport full of Peace and Order marines expecting Blood Raiders rather than rescue, not when ...

But she didn't know if she'd seen weakness in him, that time.

He remembered.

She didn't.

Helmi holstered her gun and ran her fingers down the edge of the mirror.  The edge of firmcopy was barely detectable, even knowing it was there. She scraped at it with a nail until she could prise it loose.

Not that I don't know it by heart.

A letter she would never have seen, not in this body, if her mother hadn't been concerned enough to write back.

A letter she couldn't remember writing, but that she had no doubt she had.

About plots and treachery, about danger to Pilot, about no-one to trust.

Sent from her account in that blank space between the land-car accident and waking up in the cloning vat to hear that she and everyone else on her team had been killed in action when Pilot was abducted.

They'd known it had to be an inside job, but no-one had known who, or how. Rumors of TCMCS, but who had fired, how it had happened ...

Helmi still didn't know how.  The letter in her hand, with its insane conviction that Pilot was in danger from someone, maybe everyone, on her crew, and its veiled references to someone who can help...

The letter didn't tell her how. But the woman who'd written that letter, the woman completely certain that the only way to keep Pilot safe was to get her away from her crew and her guards and her friends ... the letter told her who had pulled the trigger.

Me.


She folded the letter back up and slid it back into its hiding place, met her own cool grey gaze in the mirror and tested that thought.

Not the sharp edges of it, the fruitless speculation, the what-how-when.  That was there, yes, but it was irrelevant.

As irrelevant as understanding why Sarge had become a liability to knowing that he was.

No. She tested all the places the knowledge of that letter ran to, checking to make sure that what if it happens again and why didn't I know and did Sarge see me shoot him stopped where they should.

Stopped short of the job.

Yes.

The woman who had done that hadn't been her, in any way that she could tell. Had looked and sounded and walked and talked like Helmi Alpassi, no doubt, but the TCMCs had made her someone else.  If it was me, Sarge would never have let them tap me for this job. He knows it wasn't me. Knows it was someone else.


And now she's dead. And I'm here.  

She knew who she was, who she wasn't. What she had and hadn't done.

She wouldn't hesitate. Wouldn't overcompensate. Wouldn't think, when the time came.

Whatever the letter said.

Helmi looked at herself in the mirror again.

Smiled.

"Hi, I'm Helmi. I'm a friend, of Cia's?"

Perfect.


Tuesday, November 24, 2009

This Is Love

His name is Jemadar Abrastin, and he loves her. 


She knows he loves her because he can't stand being apart from her, not even for a little while, not even while she takes her classes at Urbald University.  He's not a student there but he comes with her anyway, sits up the back of the hall so they're together, every minute of every day. That's what love is, wanting to be with someone every single second.


That's what love is in the holos. 


Her name is Valhiri Akell. She is eighteen years old, a pre-med student with the shaman's mark curving over the top of her right foot and down to the arch, and she loves him. 


She knows she loves him because when he comes home after another fruitless day searching for work, downcast and sullen, she can't concentrate on the assignments on her desk or the dinner on the stove until she's managed to lift the frown from his face.  It weighs on him, the fact that he's not able to bring any money into the house, no matter how many times she tells him it doesn't matter, her scholarship is almost enough to pay the bills.  She's there for him. Finding ways to make him feel better becomes the most important thing in her life. That's what love is, when someone else's happiness is more important that your own.


That's what love is in the holos.


She's been Hiri since the day she was born, to her family. The first time he called her Val she corrected him. He said that nobody knew her as well as he did, and he could tell her name was Val. It's her special name, that only he uses, like she's a different person with him than anyone she's ever been before. It's romantic.


He's very romantic.  He wants to protect her.  He doesn't like it when she wears skirts that are too short, tops too low cut. You should have seen the way those guys were looking at you, he tells her. Dressed like that, you're telling the whole world you're available. 


She picks pants and loose, baggy tops, instead. It's romantic, knowing that no-one but him knows about the curves underneath the folds of fabric.  She's his, his only. That's what love is, when your body belongs to only one person, even to look at. 


That's what love is in the holos.


He hates it when people try to come between them. Her classmates, her family: he says they're always trying to interfere. It's better that she doesn't see them, certainly not without him there to make sure they don't try meddling. 


She misses sitting in the back row of the holotheatre with her sisters, the three of them giggling as bad actors pretend to be frightened of computer-generated monsters, but it's important to him that he knows he can trust her not to do something when he's told her not to, so she doesn't sneak off to meet them even when she could.  


He wants them to be together, even if her friends and family disapprove. That's what love is, isn't it? Defying everyone in order to be together.


That's what love is in the holos.


He worries that she'll leave him for someone better-looking, more educated, employed.  She tells him over and over again that she'll never leave him. He doesn't believe her. If you leave me, Val, if you ever leave me, I'll kill myself, you know I will, don't you?


One of her tutors puts in an application for her to a college on Pator, as a surprise.  It's a good scholarship, better than the one she has here, and it'll take her all the way through medical school, unlike her pre-med bursary at Urbald. She's still wondering how to persuade him to move with her when he finds the letter of offer tucked away in the back of her desk drawer.


I knew you were going to leave me! I knew I couldn't trust you!


She doesn't see the blow coming.  While she's still lying on the floor trying to work out what happened through the ringing in her ears, he slams into the bathroom and locks the door.  She can hear him through the door, swearing he's going to take every one of the pills in the bathroom cabinet. She begs and pleads and promises that she isn't going to leave him through the closed door for two hours. At last he says that if she can prove it he'll unlock the door. Feverishly, she scrawls a letter turning the scholarship down and pushes it under the door. 


He's sorry, extravagantly so, when he opens the door and sees her eye swollen nearly shut. It's because I love you so much, Val. The idea of losing you makes me crazy.


He posts the letter for her the next day.


She understands that it's hard for him to trust her after that, and so when he tells her that she has to give him her papers, her ID, her keys and her bankchip, she does. He gives her enough money from her scholarship to buy groceries, so long as she gives him the change and the receipts when she gets home. He buys her tokens for the shuttlebus so she can get to class, and gives her one on those rare mornings he can't come with her to the university.  If he's late meeting her afterwards she waits outside the library at the university, in the spot he's picked, careful not to speak to anyone in case he arrives and thinks she's flirting. 


He wants her, all for himself, forever. That's what love is, isn't it? Getting jealous when you even think the person you love is too close to someone else. 


That's what love is in the holos.


She keeps making mistakes. Sometimes she's not sure what they are, even afterwards, only that she did something wrong and he couldn't help getting angry. He never means it. He's always sorry. It's just that he loves her so much, he can't help it.


He always promises it will never happen again. She always forgives him. That's what love is, isn't it? Unconditional. 


That's how love is in the holos. 


One night she dreams that she is walking.  There's nothing around her but an endless plain of long grass, rippling away to the horizon in every direction. 


There are no landmarks, but she knows exactly where she is. 


She is on the first day of the three-day walk that will take her to the furthest of all the dancing grounds. The pack on her back holds enough food and water for the trip. She will sleep on the ground beneath all the stars in the Cluster at night, and walk all day, until she gets there. 


Hiri laughs aloud in her dream. A bubble of happiness fills her at the anticipation of the long hours of walking ahead, the dry rations for every meal, the blisters on her feet and the aching exhaustion she will feel by the time she arrives. She tilts back her head and looks up at the cloudless sky and for a moment feels dizzy and weightless, as if gravity has lost its grip on her and she is soaring up into the endless blue above her. 


Then she loses her balance and falls.


She lands, not among the tall, tufted grass, but in her own bed.  Jemadar is breathing beside her in the dark. Her mouth is dry, but he doesn't like having glasses of water by the bed and she can't be sure that slipping out of bed to go to the kitchen won't wake him. She chews the inside of her cheek to start a little saliva, enough to fool her body into thinking she's no longer thirsty.


In the dark, she hears a voice, a woman's voice, clear and soft as the wind rushing over the grass, a voice she has never heard before.


This is not love.


Her first thought is that the voice is too loud, loud enough to wake Jemadar.  She holds her breath, waiting, her heart hammering in her chest.  


He doesn't stir. 


The room is dark, and close, but she can feel the sun on her face and the great vaulting arc of the sky above her, the wide empty plain of the grassland and the breeze whispering against her skin.


Hiri, says the voice, a voice she has never heard, a voice she recognises, after a moment, as her own. Hiri.


This is not love.



Sunday, November 22, 2009

Chemistry

It's only chemistry.

............................................
... neurotransmitters are endogenous chemicals which relay, amplify, and modulate signals between a neuron and another cell ...
............................................

It isn't Nerila's best subject, but that's just compared to anatomy.

She's still the top of her class.

And it's only chemistry.

............................................
... such as dopamine, a chemical messenger heavily active in the mesolimbic and mesocortical reward pathways ...
............................................

There are three spots in the program and fifty students who want them. Nerila's a scholarship student and unlike her classmates waits tables four nights a week to make up the difference between her stipend and her rent.

She can't afford to skip study sessions for an extra few hours sleep.

She can't afford to be too tired to concentrate on rounds, either.

And after all, it's only chemistry.

............................................
...the anatomical components of these pathways—including the striatum, the nucleus accumbens, and the ventral striatum - have been found to be primary sites of action ...
............................................

Nerila has good surgeon's hands, not too big, not too small, long-fingered and deft.

They've held thousands of scalpels, knotted tens of thousands of sutures, cupped at least two dozen beating hearts.

Four months shy of being finally, totally, qualified and licenced, she's had a lot of practice.

At cutting, at stitching, at finding a nicked artery by touch and instinct.

And she's had a lot of practice at something else, too.

The top of the vial pops off with the pressure of her fingernail, a flick of the wrist tips out exactly the right number of grains. It's gone again before anyone could possibly see it, even if they were looking right at her.

She splashes water on her face, hopes the chill will take some of the red from her eyes.

Looks in the mirror and tells herself this is the last time.

It's only chemistry.

............................................
... the interaction with serotonin is only apparent in particular regions of the brain, such as the mesocorticolimbic projection ...
............................................

Nerila curls into a ball on the narrow jail cot, shivering so hard the frame rattles against the wall like her own personal percussion section. Her cellmate mutters something about 'fucking junkies' and pulls the pillow over her head.

Nerila tells herself that she won't die from this. The jail medics know that, it's why she's been tossed in here rather than taken up to the infirmary.

They're not trying to kill her, or even torture her.

They just don't give a shit.

Not about one more fucking junkie.

Her stomach cramps agonisingly and she clamps a hand over her mouth to stifle a groan, swallows bile. If she throws up now there'll be no way to clean it up before morning, and she's determined not to spend the third night in a row lying shivering in her own vomit.

Each reaction of her body is predictable. She even got an exam question on it, once.

She knows exactly what's happening, and why.

She's not dying. A few more days and it will be over.

It's only chemistry.

............................................
... triggering the release of dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine, increasing pulse rate, reducing appetite and causing insomnia ...
............................................

He's late.

Nerila fidgets with her hair even though it's been a long time since it occurred to her to wonder if she looked all right. Her heart is beating so fast she's surprised the people at the next table can't hear it. She picks up an olive from the dish the waiter brought with her drink, puts it down again.

She fiddles with her hair again, doesn't look at the door.

Looks.

Feels a wave of relief so intense she's dizzy at the sight of him.

It's crazy, and she knows it. There's no way not to get caught.

She's absolutely, unquestionably old enough to know better.

And catches his eye anyway.

It's just once more. She can stop anytime she wants.

After all, it's only chemistry.

............................................
... is believed to depend on specific phosphorylating kinases. Upon phosphorylation, there is an observable conformational change that results in the transportation of dopamine from the extracellular to the intracellular environment ...
............................................

Nerila locks the door and checks it once, twice, three times.

A fourth.

The vial, the cap, the grains: none of it takes conscious thought. Her long fingers find the tiny glass shape in her pocket without her even willing them to.

She doesn't think about the vial, the cap, the grains, as she pops the cap off and shakes out just exactly enough.

She doesn't think about the fact that she doesn't have to think for her hands to know what to do.

She thinks about how many research papers she has to read through tonight, tomorrow, the day after. About the deadline that nature's set her, about how apt that particular word is.

She thinks about the monitor in the corner of the room and the alarm she's always waiting for.

And then, for three blessed seconds, she doesn't think about anything at all.

When the room comes back, it's all manageable: the papers, the DNA analysis, the monitor. It's under control.

Whatever fatal flaw is coiling through Pilot's DNA, there's an answer to it.

It's only chemistry.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Conversations On The Fortune's Fist: Fourteen

She has him pinned.

Arm around his throat, knee in the small of his back.

It's as close to an embrace as makes no difference.

She increases the pressure, cuts off a little more of his wind. If he doesn't tap out soon, she'll strangle him. She knows he knows it.

"Guess this isn't the kind of wrestling you're used to these days, is it, Sarge?" she whispers. "Do you miss it?"

He can't even breathe, let alone answer her.

She doesn't feel even a flicker of guilt at the fact that she has an unfair advantage.

There's no such thing as an unfair advantage, in the rule-book they both play by.

"Does she know you miss it?"

He won't give in.

She feels him shifting, trying for leverage. Forestalls him, once, twice.

The third time he flips her. They come down still locked together, her beneath him now. He's heavy, and she'd have to let him go to break her fall.

She doesn't.

Sees stars as his weight drives the breath from her lungs.

Holds on.

He lifts them up a little and drops back down on her. Something gives in her side with a stomach-turning crack. His hands are on her arm, waiting for his opportunity, waiting for her grip to ease.

She holds tight.

He taps her forearm, twice, lightly. It takes her longer than it should to feel it, and when she lets him go he rolls away from her and lies, heaving for breath. She stays on her back, looking at the ceiling, tasting blood and wondering how much it's going to hurt when she moves.

A lot, is the answer, as she discovers when she tries to sit up.

"You're fucking crazy, Alpassi," he says at last, not looking at her. "Fucking crazy."

She grins at the ceiling. "I won, didn't I?"

He gets to his feet and holds out his hand. "Fucking crazy," he says again.

She lets him pull her to her feet, chokes back a curse at the pain. "Takes one to know one, Sarge," she says. "Takes one to know one."

It really hurts. For a second her knees buckle, and he grabs her other arm to hold her up. Her eyes are watering, from the pain, that's all. Just from the pain.

She presses her face against his shoulder to hide the moisture on her cheeks.

It's as close to an embrace as makes no difference.

And she won't give in.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

The Arderonne Resistance

I had to use both hands to hold the gun. 

It wasn't a very big gun, not as big as some I'd seen in holovids, but it was made for a grown-up with grown-up-sized hands.
 

I'm eleven years old. My hands are eleven-year-old size, and I had to use both of them to hold the gun, even though they said it was
 my gun now 

It was dark in the forest. Somewhere above the treetops the moon was just shy of half-full, but no light penetrated the thick pines. The man beside me held a hand-torch, and its pale yellow beam made the night around us seem even blacker.
 

He shone it across the prisoners' faces, one by one.
 

"She is a collaborator," he said matter-of-factly. "She consorted with the Caldari soldiers. This one told the Caladri where one of our people was hiding. This one helped them rebuild the shuttleport after we bombed it. This one - "

"They were bringing food!" the man who'd been third on the list burst out. "It was for the Sisters to land, with
 food! What do you - "

The light swept wildly over the tree- trunks and up into the branches as the man beside me brought the torch up, then down. It hit the shuttleport man's temple with a kind of crunch I'd never heard before. He went silent, sprawled.
 

"And this one helped them draw up the lists for their work projects." It was as if nothing had happened, except now there was a little patch of red in the pale yellow light, and a gap in the row of people in front of us.
 

There were ten, all up, including shuttleport man. None of the other nine tried to defend themselves against the charges. They knelt silently, hands tied behind their backs, squinting against the light as their crimes were explained.
 Collaboration ... cooperation ... failure to resist ... treason .... betrayal ...

The eighth was my father.
 

"He's a traitor to the Federation," the man beside me with the light said. "He was heard by a neighbor listening to State broadcasts."

I could guess who that neighbor had been. Giassa Lorgiana, who'd been glaring at me over the fence for as long as I could remember. My mother said it was because the council had approved Papa's application to build a deck at the back of our house despite Giassa's objections that it would block the light from her favorite flowerbed. Maybe that was true. It was definitely true that she'd been bearing a grudge about
 something since just about forever. 

I opened my mouth to tell the man with the light all about it, to tell him that Papa wasn't a traitor, and in the pale, red-tinted light Papa shook his head, ever so slightly.
 

The man with the light started telling me about the crimes of the last two people in the row. I should have been listening, but I wasn't. I was staring at my father.
 

My father, who was now a traitor, because the man with the light said so.
 

Papa stared at me, and then he cut his gaze to the left. Stared again, and again looked to the left, at something behind me, off in the trees.
 

I turned a little bit so I could look too. It was hard to see anything the light wasn't pointed right at, but I narrowed my eyes and concentrated and made out tree-trunks and some big gnarled roots in the soil and ...

A foot.

A foot, a leg. Not very big.
 

About my size.
 

I recognized the shoe. It was the same as mine, it was the kind of shoe we all had to wear to school, it was the kind of shoe we'd all been wearing when the men and women from the resistance came in to the classroom and told us that the time for learning was over, it was time for
 doing now. 

Told us our world needed us, the Federation needed us.
 

Vive la Arderonne libre, they said. 

I'd been second, tonight, when the man with the lamp asked us to line up and told us we were going to have the chance to prove we could be brave fighters for the resistance.
 

Niarrette had been first.
 

Niarette was lying under the tree. 


My face went cold and my hands got so sweaty I nearly dropped the gun. For a minute the ground went back and forth under my feet and the trees turned round and round. 

I realized the man with the light was talking to me.
 

"How much do you love the Federation?" he asked.
 

There was only one right answer. "With all my heart!" I said. "Vive la fédération!"

He shone the light over the prisoners, one by one. It stopped on my father's face. "Prove it," he said.
 

I looked at Papa, and Papa looked at me.
 Not my Papa! I wanted to say. 

But Niarette had been brought up the path first. And Niarette hadn't given the right answer, because Niarette was lying under the trees.

Papa smiled at me then, and it was awful, the way his lips shook and his face twisted as he tried to make a face like he wasn't afraid. Like nothing was wrong. My throat got tight.
 

I thought about using the gun on the man with the light. But he had a gun, too. And he was in the resistance, and if I shot him I'd be a traitor, a traitor to the Federation, to Arderonne.
 

I looked at the man with the light and I could see in his face that he knew what I was thinking about. And I could see that he knew that Papa was my father.

Then I wondered which of the people there was Niarette's Mama or Papa.
 

"It's all right," Papa whispered. "It's all right, darling. Do as he says. I love you. It's all rig-"

The flat crack of the gun was very loud. After it, the sound of my father's body falling made no noise at all.

I expected to start crying.
 

I didn't.
 

"Good girl," the man with the light said. "So perish all enemies of the Federation. What do we say?"

"So perish all enemies of the Federation!" I said, and he smiled.

He took the gun from me, and turned me towards the path back down to cave where the resistance was hiding tonight.
 

On the way, he taught me some more things to say, to be a proper brave resistance fighter like him. I listened, and repeated them, all the time being amazed that my voice was steady and my eyes were dry. I waited to start crying for Papa, and I didn't.
 

I waited to be sad, and I wasn't.

I wasn't sad. I was just on a path in the forest at night with a man with a light and two guns.
 

Vive la résistance, I repeated to myself. Vive la arderonne libre!

Vive la fédération.