Bitter Angels (6 page)

Families are not the only ones who can communicate without speaking.

“And David’s still a Van Helsing?”

I put on an offended air. “Immortality Infractions Investigator, if you please.”

This apparently confused Vijay. His forehead bunched up. “I.I.I. is better than Van Helsing?”

He chuckled. “Welcome home, Terese.”

Misao had a garden office. At the moment, he had the shields up to keep in the heat and keep out the wind of the Chicago winter. The effect was that of walking into a peaceful, well-tended courtyard, with a large desk and several comfortable chairs in the middle. The branches of winter-naked maples made charcoal sketches against the grey-stone walls. Evergreens spread dark canopies for the scarlet-berried hollies. Even under the leaden sky, it looked festive.

As Vijay pushed open the door, Misao glanced up from his active desktop and touched the OFF command with a short, blunt finger. The desk went dark before I was two steps into his office space and my ex-commander stood up to acknowledge me.

Guardian Marshal-Steward Misao Smith had most emphatically not been optimized. He looked up to every one of his team, except me. This had earned him the nickname of “Little Big,” of which he was perfectly aware. He still had the smooth, round face that belonged to a man on the threshold of his fifth decade and the fireplug build of someone who had kept himself fit all his life. His ruthlessly slicked-back hair was solid black and the awareness behind his green eyes still knife-sharp.

“Thank you, Agent Kochinski, Coordinator Baijahn.” Misao sat back in his leather chair. Vijay nodded and looked to Siri. The look she shot back toward him was almost a challenge. But they had been dismissed, and they walked out, letting the door swing shut.

Misao, unperturbed and perfectly patient, looked me up and down just like Vijay had.

In an instant, I realized how futile my little attempt to
discomfort my former chief by making him wait was. I grew smaller as I settled into the visitor’s chair, my defenses slipping from me like the flimsy constructs they were. Trying to reacquaint myself with my own backbone, I silently told Misao to go to hell in every language I knew.

This changed nothing. I hadn’t said a word, and I had already blinked.

“How are you, Field Commander Drajeske?” Misao inquired as he reclaimed his own chair.

I matched his cool gaze and pulled out my best office manners. “Fine, thank you, Marshal-Steward Smith. And yourself?”

One finger on his right hand twitched. “I am terrible,” he said. “And I expect to be worse in the very near future.”

“I am sorry to hear that, Marshal-Steward.”

Formality makes a kind of lacquer for the soul. It is beautifully slick and impossible to see through. Lacquer is also watertight. Nothing gets out, and nothing gets in.

I couldn’t let
anything
else get in. It had been too easy to fall into the old talk with Vijay.

“Perhaps you would like to know why I have requested you share this very bad time with me.”

I didn’t answer him. Overhead, the clouds shifted. Shadows rippled over the stones ringing the holly beds.

“You’re here because Bianca Fayette asked for you to replace her.”

My lacquer shattered. I stared at Misao, and I knew my face had gone white. Misao, on the other hand, did not move.

It’s one of the many unusual traditions in the Guardians. You can, if you want, name your own replacement. It’s not official, and it’s fairly easily overridden, but it can carry
some weight. My replacement, Caesar, got my job on my say-so.

“She died in the field. Her body was recovered on Moon-four in the Erasmus System. Her Companion’s record indicates that her last instructions included making sure that you personally came to Moonfour to take up the mission.”

This was why he hadn’t been impatient or angry. He knew that however I’d come in—whether red-hot or ice-cold—this would undo me.

I remembered the cell where I lay on harsh stone in that unending nightmare darkness. I remembered the beam of white light. I squinted in bewildered pain to see the neat, square hole getting bigger and bigger where the wall was methodically dismantled. I remembered how I shrank away from the silhouette that catapulted toward me, how I couldn’t comprehend it could bring anything but more pain.

I licked my lips and I hated Misao with everything I had. But that flame burned itself out in a couple of heartbeats.

“What…what was she doing in Erasmus?” Moonfour, that was the one called Dazzle. Once it had been a pleasure palace the size of Mars. Now it was the crumbling and violence-prone home for a jumbled and repressed population without options.

Misao’s mouth straightened into a hard, thin line for a moment before he answered. “She was completing a grand tour with Captain Baijahn. Our ambassador in the system, Philippe Diego y Bern”—he paused, and I nodded, acknowledging I knew the man—“asked her to stay behind to help
with what he felt was soon going to become a major refugee situation.”

That wasn’t too surprising. The situation on Erasmus had stabilized for the moment (as far as I knew), but for a lot of the people there, life was eked out on the barest margins.

“How…how did Bianca die?”

“It seems she found her own way out.”

Tremors traveled up my right hand, little butterfly wings brushing against my bones.

“She was…captured?” Harsh, cold stone, the stink of my own blood, the hole, the black, silent hole brimming over with pain…

“Abducted at the very least.”

“How?” I asked hoarsely. “Who did it?”

Anger flickered across Misao’s tightly controlled features. “We don’t know.”

“But you retrieved her Companion…” The Companion should contain a complete record of her doings, whom she’d met with, where she’d gone. Everything since her last download.

“The Companion was damaged.” Misao’s words made me go cold. “Her body had been left to rot, Terese. We got back bones and putrefied flesh, and not a lot of that because the rats had been at it for at least a week.”

Leaving no witness to the reasons that drove her to take her own life. No one to bring her justice or redemption. There wasn’t enough anger in the world to adequately answer this.

I looked into Misao’s tired, grieving face.

“Can I talk to it?”

“Are you coming back?”

I couldn’t answer. The words dried up in my mind. His
question blocked off my thoughts. I had to clear my throat, shift my weight before I could jar some syllables into place. Misao, of course, missed none of that.

“Misao, you cannot possibly want me for this, for whatever it is. I’ve been gone thirty years!” I was pleading now, and I hated it, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Bianca was watching me. I could feel her, right at my back.
Get me out of this, Misao. Please. Tell her I can’t do this
.

“I don’t want you,” he said flatly. “But I have very little choice right now. If the current data is correct, we are probably one year away from the Erasmans launching a war on the Solar System, and the Guardians are stretched so thin across so many hot spots we are in danger of disintegrating. If I have to bring back every discharged officer who still has a pulse to prevent that, I will.”

Misao’s steady silence told me I was wrong. Dead wrong. I felt the blood drain slowly from my face, leaving me cold. “What have I missed?”

“Are you coming back?”

I stood. I met those icy green eyes. I felt Bianca behind me. He knew she was there. He knew it and he was not going to give me one ounce of relief.

“I promised, Misao,” I whispered. “Before we ever got married, I swore to David I was retired.”

“Then you do not have the clearance to be briefed about the current situation on Erasmus. Good-bye, Mrs. Drajeske.”

“Just tell me,” I croaked. My throat was sore. How had that happened? I felt like I’d been shouting, but I hadn’t raised my voice since I came here. “Did Bianca really say she wanted me out there?”

Misao laid his hand flat on the desk. “Come here, Jerimiah.”

The opaque shield that covered the door to the corridor cleared. The door behind it opened, and a young man seemed to walk up the hall and stand framed in the threshold. He was lanky, with copper-brown skin and coffee-brown eyes that drooped in the corners. His straight black hair flopped into his eyes so that he had to keep pushing it back. It made him look boyishly handsome. He probably had a mischievous smile when he wasn’t looking so solemn.

Once our Companions are installed and established, we meet with an artist for several sessions to describe our impressions of our Companions. A VR portrait is made and stored with our files. This allows for interactive sessions in the real world to reinforce and refine the “relationship.”

Many of us have good-looking Companions, or at least cute ones. I know one Guardian whose Companion was an eight-year-old girl, and another who had an angel, and yet another who’d had Coco the Wonder Dog. That your Companion appears as someone you’d want to love and protect is part of the point. It helps you fight to stay alive longer.

My own Companion, Dylan, was taller than I was and older than I was, with rich brown eyes that crinkled up in the corners when he smiled and cinnamon-brown hair he wore in a ponytail. He had a Celtic knotwork tattoo around
one biceps, and on his forearm was a set of plain black letters proclaiming enter here for full explanation. I had been surprised at the ink. I never liked it. I’d asked him to get rid of it once, and he just looked wounded. I chuckled and let it go.

“Hello, Marshal-Steward. How can I help you?” Jerimiah’s voice was light, in keeping with his appearance. It didn’t sound quite right, somehow. The accent…something…it wasn’t what it should have been.

“Jerimiah, can you tell us how Field Coordinator Fayette was captured?”

I thought Jerimiah hesitated a little as he looked toward me, but I told myself that was my imagination. This was no thinking creature. The mind behind it, Bianca’s mind, was dead. This was an illusion created by a delicate web of chips and artificial neurons.

“I don’t know how we were captured, not completely. I am damaged.” Jerimiah spread his hands. His fingernails were chewed down to the quick. I guess a lifetime in Bianca’s head could make you nervous.

In front of me now, the Companion Jerimiah kicked at the carpet. “We were…waiting for someone. There was an appointment Bianca needed to keep, but not on Dazzle. We were on Dazzle, waiting for someone to take us to see…” He shook his head. “I am sorry. That’s gone. But she was very concerned about the refugee problem, or wanting to create the refugee problem or…” His hands with their chewed-on nails curled into fists. The artist had done a good job with the detail and definition of Jerimiah’s face. I could see the sorrow in the drooping corners of his eyes. The mellow voice hesitated just a little, a fine simulation of feeling. It made me want to reach out to a hand that wasn’t there.

When I woke up in my Redemption cell with the crusted bandage behind my ear and no Dylan in my head, I tried to kill myself. My captors had found the suicide switch too, but I kept trying.

I’d almost succeeded by the time Bianca took apart the cell wall and pulled me out. I hadn’t, even then, stopped to think what Dylan felt in his last moments.

“Word had been spreading about the Pax Solaris’s open-border policy,” Jerimiah was saying. “Moonfive, Oblivion, attempted a large-scale diaspora once before.”

“I know,” I cut him off.

“Bianca was afraid they might try a diaspora again, to reach the Pax worlds, and that there might be a large number of deaths if that happened.”

“Why were you in Erasmus?” I asked Jerimiah.

“We were finishing off the Grand Tour. Bianca wanted to make the rounds, to see if she still wanted to remain a Guardian.”

A hundred years ago she’d done the same thing, with me.

“Was she the one who discovered Erasmus was a hot spot?” I asked.

Jerimiah nodded. This time he was looking at Misao. Misao looked back, closed-off and impassive as ever. “She believed it was going to blow soon.”

“Did she have proof?”

Jerimiah shifted his weight, displaying a kind of uncertainty I had never seen in a Companion. Dylan had never acted like this. “She was looking for it.”

Jerimiah bit down on his lower lip and shook his head hard. “I don’t know. I was damaged. We went to Market. We went to Fortress. We went to Fortress a lot. We talked to the ambassador and to the Erasmus
Saeos
.” The title was a corruption of the old corporate title,
CEO
, firmly marking Erasmus’s origins as a for-profit colony. “She made friends with them. I have some records of this.” He pressed his hand against the threshold and Misao’s desk lit up to show the crosslooks. I could easily believe Bianca had made friends with the Blood Family. She could charm anybody if she really wanted to, and she was not above using that talent for work…or for play.