Bitter Angels (2 page)

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“There’s no…”

But I switched it off and turned away. My whole family was staring at me.

My family. My life and heart distributed among four separate lives. Dark, intense Allie, home tonight for the family celebration and out tomorrow with her friends doing things I suspect I wouldn’t want to know about. Jo, our middle child, had dyed herself white to stand out in our little crowd. Dale, my youngest, my son, the earth-brown image of his father with the same eyes set in his handsome young face.

His father, my husband, David stood up and walked around the table.

“What’s happened? Who was that?”

“They want me to go in tomorrow,” I said.

“Will you?”

I nodded.

“Terese…” He drew my name out into a warning.

I tried to dismiss it. “Misao won’t let me alone until I hear them out, David. The sooner I do, the sooner I can tell him to…bugger off.” My voice was far weaker than I wanted it to be, a fact that David did not miss.

“What else did he say?”

I met his gaze, oddly helpless. “Bianca.”

He saw the tears at the corner of my eyes, and he knew the rest.

David folded me in his arms and rested his hand on the back of my head. I closed my eyes, breathing in his scent, willing myself to sink into his warmth and remain solidly in the safe, whole present. But my mind wouldn’t let go. I kept seeing Bianca: dark, stout, stubborn Bianca, with her gleaming eyes. Smart, fast, ruthless, fearless. Canny in ways I couldn’t begin to match. Where had she been deployed? I didn’t know. I’d lost track.

“Come on.” David kissed the top of my head. “We haven’t cut the cake yet.”

“Right. Right.” I wiped at my eyes and attempted to smile at my children, none of whom smiled back. I sat down at our table and handed Allie the knife. But the party was really over, and we all knew it.

I rubbed behind my ear; the very bottom of the curve between my skull and my neck. There was nothing but smooth skin there now, but I still carried the harsh memory of the wound and the pain, where they’d cut out my Companion.

The Companion is the tool and backup each field officer in the Guardians is given just in case they are captured in a war zone. The Companion is a friend, a reminder, a helper, and, if you’re extremely unlucky, he or she is the witness to your death.

They are also one of the few secrets the Guardians actually keep. I should say kept. They’re certainly not a secret anymore.

During the Redeemer Uprising four decades ago, I was captured. I was tossed in a dark cell and dragged out on occasion so I could be made to experience a lot of pain. My captors managed to detect my Companion and when they did, they cut it out of me, quickly and brutally. Then they tossed me back into the dark.

It was Bianca who rescued me. She pulled me out of that black hole.

That was what made this so bad. Bianca was dead, and not only was I not there to save her, I hadn’t even known she was in danger.

The sound of Dale’s snoring cut through all my heavy thoughts, accompanied by the soft breathing of the heat pump. Something beeped in the kitchen. In the living room, something else pinged in answer.

Night noises. Home noises.

This wasn’t the first place David and I lived together, or even the third. We’d bumped up against each other occasionally over the years before we got married in the middle of what you could call unsettled times in our lives. We were well into our third centuries then—that time when most people had officially launched from their second families and were starting to build their third. David had left his birth family and tried a marriage family, but it hadn’t gone anywhere and he hadn’t tried again. I was trying to create something I could call normality as fast as I could. He found me fascinating, in a wounded-bird kind of way. I found him wonderful, in a lifeline kind of way. It was mutual need that passed for love, and we got married.

Under those conditions, we moved around a lot. Bangkok. Moscow. San Francisco. We had an apartment up the Adas Apaba cable for a while, and then there was the year down in Marianas. It was there, we, or rather I, hit bottom literally as well as figuratively. David threatened to leave, which finally got me into the kind of treatment, both mental and physical, that I’d been refusing for years.

When I got out, we found this place in the middle of Lake Superior. Whitecap was a new, small town on a new, small
island. We both craved peace and quiet, but we believed it was just for a little while.

Instead, that desire broadened and deepened. Against the odds, our tumult turned into real love, for this place and for each other. We built and added and accumulated and stored. We found out which restaurants we both liked and where the good doctors and stylists were. There were more exciting places to be, and some even more beautiful, but we were settled. Settled enough that the morning the house-doc put up the flag that I was carrying our first child, we did nothing but celebrate.

I heard a step on the bare floor and straightened, instantly alert. Some instincts do not go away. David’s reflection moved to join mine in the black glass, getting closer, until I could feel his warmth against my skin.

“Do you think it’s because of the Erasmus System?” His breath stirred my hair. Picking conversations back up, even after hours of silence, was something he’d always done.

“It’s got to be. That’s the only one I’m doing analysis on right now.”

We were silent for a while. There was only one question in his solemn eyes, and I waited for him to ask it.

“Why are they calling you in? You could give them all your current analysis over the set.”

“I don’t know.” What I didn’t say was how much it scared me that Misao had called at all. If the Guardians were calling in thirty-year retirees, it meant one of the dozen hot spots I knew about, plus any new ones I might not, was close to exploding into actual war.

War. The ancient, perverse, pervasive nightmare we’d banished from the Solar System with the Pax Solaris, the Common Cause Covenant, and the Laws of Humanity. I’d
dedicated my life to preventing its return as human beings spread themselves out into the galaxy. The effort nearly took my sanity and my life. I’d tried to retire, to enjoy the peace I’d helped to keep, but it seemed war had come down to find me. I looked up at the clouds and wondered what was behind them.

“You could refuse,” said David. I didn’t even have to respond to that. David’s mouth twisted up. Distaste, or just frustration? I couldn’t tell, and that bothered me.

“I’m sorry, David.” Sorry for being what I was. Sorry for not having worked harder to crush that last little stone in my heart that still had the word DUTY carved on it. It hurt, that stone, and I wanted it gone.

I faced David, putting my back to the darkness outside the house and inside my own thoughts. I had to tilt my head far back to look into his eyes and my chest constricted.

“Maybe it was always borrowed time anyway,” I murmured. “Maybe we should just be grateful for what we’ve had.”

“Don’t say that,” he whispered fiercely. “We did not borrow our life together. We earned it. We fought for it.”

He wrapped me in his arms and I leaned against him so my ear pressed against his heart. It beat in a soft, steady counterpoint to the rhythm of the waves outside.

“Come back to bed,” he breathed in my ear.

“If I haven’t slept by now, I’m not going to.”

“So we won’t sleep. Come back to bed.”

I let him steer me back to our room, past the sounds of our sleeping offspring. I let him thumb the privacy screen into place, turning the threshold opaque and soundproof, and come to me. I let him peel my robe slowly off my shoulders and send it whispering down to the floor so we could
be skin to skin with the sound of the wind and the waves all around us. I let him stroke me and touch me until I didn’t care what was waiting on the other side of night’s darkness, as long as I had this moment and David’s warmth beneath my hands.

And in the end, I did sleep.

I was in bad shape when I arrived on Hospital, one of the Erasmus System’s inhabited moons, named, like the others, after its purpose. Most of my fuel and ballast were gone, burned up during a run after water smugglers. Somewhere in the excitement, a safety belt broke, sending our third, Marko Keich, careening across the cockpit. He now had a gash in his head, another on his hand, and a vague look in his eyes that made me suspect major concussion.

We had to drift into port on inertia and minuscule readjustments. Emiliya was there waiting for us at the bottom of the elevator.

“Hello, Brother Amerand,” she said as she shoved the gurney forward so Ceshame and I could lay Marko out on it.

“Hello, Sister Emiliya.” Emiliya was no relation to me that either of us knows, but this was the polite greeting between Oblivion’s children.

She bent over Marko, probing the scabbing wounds with her long, pale fingers. She had inherited pale skin, light hair, and blue eyes from her long-absent father, but her delicate frame was a consequence of our environment. Strength and fitness training were mandatory for medical personnel, as they were for the Security, but no matter how hard she worked, her build remained slender, almost attenuated.

Marko screamed as Emiliya’s long, sharp fingers hit a
particularly sore spot. My second, Ceshame, rolled his eyes to Leda, who’d come out of the elevator behind us with the ship’s official record in her hand. I took it from her, noted that the seal was intact, and passed it to one of the Clerks waiting behind Emiliya.

The First Bloods, the family who ran and owned the Erasmus System, did not like electronic networks. They were too easy to turn against those in power, so they developed something more in keeping with the Erasmus System in general, a network of dedicated bureaucratic spies with a truly banal name.

The Clerks came out of the military academy, just like the secops did. They were, in fact, what the majority of the cadets there turned into. Almost nobody actually wanted to be a Clerk. Almost nobody liked them. But then, how do you like the person whose job it is to hold you hostage?

“You will report for debriefing in four hours, Captain Jireu,” the Clerk said. Her voice was thin and high, and poked uncomfortably at my ears. I bowed. She signaled to her colleague, who pushed past us and disappeared into the elevator. “You two can come with me now.” She crooked her finger at Ceshame and Leda. My crew kept their faces strictly neutral as they followed after her around the corridor into the main hospital complex. Standard Operating Procedure; do not give us any more time to coordinate stories. Who knew? We might have somehow been in league with the smugglers whose ship we’d just hulled.

Emiliya was sponging the blood off Marko’s face. He lay still on the gurney, eyes shut and face relaxed. I guessed she had given him a sedative. She lifted her eyes to meet mine.

“This is minor, Amerand,” she told me. “Painful and inconvenient, but minor. We’ll put the patches on and install
him in observation, just to make sure everything takes. All right?”

“You’ll do it?” Emiliya Varus and I grew up together. When I got put into the Security, she got put into the Medical. She not only survived the competition in that academy, she made it all the way through the university, not at the highest level, but she did reach the rank of General Physician. This qualified her to work on temporary and sudden conditions, things that didn’t involve tinkering on the cellular level. Breaks and burns, cuts and tears, were specialties of hers, as were a whole host of things she called “inorganic alterations,” which, as near as I could understand it, primarily involved people trying to smuggle contraband under their own skins.

As a result, she saw a lot of the Security, and we saw a lot of her. I didn’t owe Marko much, but he was one of my people, and I wanted him in the hands of someone I trusted.

“I can. It won’t take long.” Emiliya considered. “How about I meet you up in Lounge 12?”

“All right,” I agreed as she got behind the gurney and started pushing. “See you in a few.” I made a half bow as she steered Marko around the corner, taking the left-hand branch. I took the right, moving into the pastel-and-silver complex that was Hospital.

With exceptions in a few dormitory areas reserved for paying patients, Hospital was not made to imitate a surface city. The shafts, train chutes, and pedestrian corridors all had an enclosed feel to them. There were few places you were permitted to go, and no arrangements made for relaxation or entertainment once you got there, unless you went up to the public port yards.