Bitter Angels (3 page)

The floors Hospital and its committees reserved for the
Security were not top tier, but they were comfortable. We got private rooms for sleeping, sitting rooms wired for entertainment, and small, well-catered dining areas to ourselves. The light was full-spectrum and steady, fading and brightening to give us a full day and a solid night that were comforting in ways I only understood in the wordless bottom of my mind.

Lounge 12 was plain but serviceable, and at the moment empty, except for a fragile-looking man whom I thought I might recognize from other times. A fair number of Oblivion’s children ended up permanently on Hospital. There were no gangs there, and plenty of food and water, which made it a good berth, even if you were only waiting on the medical personnel.

I took a corner booth. Because of our light gravity, we went in for fixed and solid furniture. The booths and tables, lounges and couches, were metal-framed with spring seats and thick cushions—all bolted to the floor. The man I half recognized hurried over with a teapot and a stoneware mug. He didn’t meet my eyes as he set them down, and he hurried away quickly after fulfilling my request for a second mug. I let him go. He didn’t want me to know him and I didn’t have any reason to go against his wishes.

Except for that shy man and the softly humming service drones cleaning the carpets and walls, I had the place to myself. I poured myself a mug of tarry black tea powerful enough to strip paint. I had drunk about half when Emiliya finally walked through the door.

“Hello again, Sister Emiliya,” I said. She slid into the booth beside me. I filled the other mug and pushed it toward her.

“Hello again, Brother Amerand. You’re looking well.” I suppose this was mostly true. I have enough hard work in
my life that my bones are strong and my body in proportion with itself.

“And you,” I answered politely. Actually, what struck me was that Emiliya looked halfway to wrecked. She wore the traditional white coat and trousers of her profession. Her gloves were spotless, but the rest of her uniform was rumpled. I’d have said it looked like she’d slept in it, but I was certain she hadn’t been anywhere near her bed for at least twenty-four hours.

“So, what’ve they got you doing?” I asked casually.

“What haven’t they got me doing?” she grumbled. Her sharp-boned face was drawn tight. Lines had etched themselves deep in her high forehead and between her brows. “There’s a whole lot of screech and clash about this new bunch of saints coming out of the Pax Solaris.”

“What, more charity workers?”
Why would there be any screech about Solaran charity workers?
But I didn’t let that question make it past my eyes.

Emiliya shrugged her bony shoulders, irritated. “I suppose. But in addition to my regular shifts, I’ve been in half a dozen different conferences about the new precautions and procedures we’re going to have for them. Orders from Fortress,” she added softly.

The only people of the Pax Solaris I knew directly were those who were permitted in to assist with humanitarian relief. We of Erasmus once were very rich, or rather, the free among us were relatively rich and the Blood Family was astoundingly rich. Since the invention of the internal drive for faster-than-light travel, however, there was much less
wealth to go around and the Blood Family had become willing to let other people feed and care for those they could not make money from.

Emiliya took another drink and pulled a face. “They’re shunting them all over to your lot on Dazzle…”

“Oh, joy.”

“And I’m in charge of ‘data acquisition.’” She softly smiled at me. “At least we’ll be able to see something of each other.”

“Data acquisition?” I said.

Emiliya nodded slowly. “Just bioscans and sample gathering, but it’s all fairly high priority.” Behind us, the cleaner drones hummed, gliding back and forth across the carpet, and back and forth across the walls. “It’s a great opportunity,” Emiliya added. “I’m really glad to have a chance to make the new program a success.”

We sat silent for a moment. As a Security captain, my clearances were higher than hers. Theoretically, there was nothing she could tell me that I couldn’t hear, but we both knew enough not to trust to that too much. The cleaner navigated the curve around our booth and drifted away, sliding under one of the empty tables, searching for crumbs.

Here’s the thing about constant surveillance—the question you must ask yourself is not “Am I being overheard?” but “Is anybody
paying attention
to me?” Emiliya was involved in a change of routine. She had very good reason to suspect that the Clerks were paying attention. She had to be very careful, and I had to respect that.

“How’s my mother?” Emiliya asked suddenly.

“She’s well, and Parisch sends his love.” I kept Emiliya’s family on my patrol schedule, whether I needed to or not.

“Can you take a letter for me?”

“Anytime. I’m here for at least another six hours. You can
leave it at Port 9 for me to pick up.” Screen calls home were expensive. The access fees would be added to what she owed Fortress, which—on top of the costs of her education, her housing, her board, her breathing—was quite a lot. Emiliya was grimly determined to pay her debt off. I wondered if this new duty might come with a bonus and if that was why she’d taken it on.

Emiliya nodded, gulped her tea, and looked toward the closed door for a long moment. The wall cleaner clicked across a seam and back again. The floor cleaner’s hum dropped a little as it bumped over the floor vent.

We talked of this and that, old friends catching up, nothing more. Every now and then we tossed in something positive about our missions and assignments for form’s sake, until finally Emiliya finished the last of her tea. “I’ll see you out there,” she said.

“We go where we’re needed,” I acknowledged.

I cleared the mugs and the teapot, handing them off to the kitchen man. Emiliya touched my arm in parting and gave me her softest smile. I covered her hand, a friendly gesture, nothing more.

Sometimes I wanted more from her, and sometimes, I thought, she wanted more from me. But those times had never seemed to synch up properly.

At least that was what I believed then. It was certainly easier.

We parted ways. She went to her duties, I went to my debriefing, which was no more unpleasant than those things ever were. The high-voiced Clerk played the record over for me, stopping at key points to ask questions, which I answered as briefly as I could.

In the end, she could find no reason to hold me and I
was released with permission to leave for Dazzle in nine hours.

Which left me with rather a lot of time to kill. I left a message for Emiliya and headed up to Port 9.

Port 9 was the biggest of the public ports on Hospital. It had an air lock at its entrance and orderlies who checked you through and scanned you thoroughly to make sure you were not walking off with any unauthorized cargo or walking in with unexpected microbial passengers.

I checked out clean and was allowed to enter. When the air-lock door wheezed open, a fog of odor and noise rolled out. In front of me spread a hive of motion and color packed into a cavern that was too big to take in with a single glance, but still felt too small to hold the crowd. The scent of hot oil wrapped the rapid clatter of conversation. Shouts of greeting or of winning gamblers rode waves of citrus and carbon grease. The black sky opened above the transparent ceiling. The gaudy spheres of the gas giants, and the gleaming white disk of Fortress, all ice and vigilance, looked down on us all.

I steeled myself against the black vacuum with its white eye and strode into the crowds.

Hospital was the one Erasmus moon that had never ceased to operate on a twenty-four-hour schedule, so the yard was crammed whenever you arrived. Its chaotic passthroughs were hemmed in by food and drink stalls or larger insulated structures where you could rent a bed for whatever you might need a bed for. There were entertainment stalls and cubicles, and screens for receiving news or sending messages, which, of course, recorded and stored everything that passed through them. There were even some legal gambling venues, always very popular. And as in any
port, there was a sort of floating hiring fair going on for those ships lucky enough to have trading licenses.

Despite the constant traffic, the port arcade’s carpets were immaculate. The polished walls gleamed from constant cleaning, but you couldn’t hear the drones’ hums and clicks over the rumble and rush of human activity. Which was part of the point. What with the food, games, and cheap drink, you were supposed to forget about them. I suppose it worked sometimes, because the Clerks kept the system rigidly in place.

I stopped at an information booth and my uniform got me instant access to a screen so I could check on the status of my ship and the whereabouts of my remaining crew. Leda and Ceshame had lost no time availing themselves of port privileges. As long as they turned up vertical and sober in six hours, I wasn’t going to complain.

I rambled through the port, browsing the goods, eyeing my fellow visitors. My uniform was looked at with a nod by some and a suspicious squint by others. At that point I was not paying much attention to either. I was puzzling out what Emiliya had said about her new assignment and trying to fit it in with what I knew about the Blood Family’s priorities, which were first, to survive, and second, to maintain their wealth.

I quickly tired of aimless rambling and turned my path toward a little stall near the center of the arcade. It had no sign, but everybody knew it as “Nana’s.” It was run in those days by a young woman who had grown up in the arcade and learned the secrets of cooking for its people from her mother, Nana, and her grandmother, Nana. The fish tacos and rice stew were the best you could get in the whole of Erasmus.

The flash of medical whites caught my eye as I chewed, and as I looked up, the crowds shifted again, and I caught a glimpse of Emiliya. My spirits lifted…and then I saw who she was talking to.

I dropped my plate on Nana’s counter and shoved my way through the crowd. Emiliya and the man both looked up, startled as I bore down.

We all stared at each other, and the man smiled, flashing an amethyst tooth in place of one of his canines.

“Hey, Brother Amerand.”

“Kapa Lu,” I whispered.

Emiliya yanked her arm out of his grip.

Kapa looked from me to Emiliya. “Well. This is timing.”

Kapa, Emiliya, and I had run the tunnels together as children and tried to lay claim to the streets of Dazzle after the Breakout. Together, he and I made it through five years of the Security academy.

Then Kapa disappeared.

“At least now I know where you’re getting your talk from,” Kapa said to Emiliya.

“Think what you want,” she muttered.

I finally found my voice. “How the hell did you get in here?”

Kapa rolled his eyes. “Like I was trying to tell
Dr. Varus
here”—he sneered her name and title—“I’m paid up. Clean
and legal. Check my records if you don’t believe me.” He nodded toward the info stall across the aisle.

“How’d that happen?”

“I have seen the light, Brother. Crime doesn’t pay and a heavy conscience is too high a lease for my life.” Kapa grinned, flashing that lavender tooth again.

I’d seen that carved on the tunnel walls near the Oblivion gates too. At least, I’d seen parts of it. Defacing the old signs was a popular pastime.

“So, clean-legal-and-paid-up, what’re you doing out here?”

Kapa looked to Emiliya, and Emiliya looked back, but only for a second before she turned her face away.

“I can’t,” she said, more to the crowd than to him.

Anger sparked in Kapa’s hard eyes. “You used to trust me.”

“Before you went into the shadows,” she said.

“Is that what this is?” They’d both forgotten me. Kapa stepped toward her, his body making a plea to her, even as his voice grew hard. “I’m sorry, Emiliya. Sorry my escape made things tough for you…”

She stared at him, slack-jawed. “I was locked up with the Clerks for days, and my records are permanently dinged. You left me to this, Kapa.
This
.” She held up her empty, too-thin hands. “For ten years!”

“I am sorry, E,” said Kapa softly. “You’ve got no idea what it took to get me in here even this soon.”

“You shouldn’t have come at all. I’ve got people paying attention to me now. I may have to explain this.”

She turned and strode away into the crowds. Kapa swore and made to follow, but I stepped into his path. He lifted his hand, a casual gesture from someone used to brute force.
But he took a second look at my uniform coat and lowered it again.

“What’re you really doing here?” I asked.

Emiliya wasn’t the only one who’d suffered for being Kapa’s friend. The morning after he vanished from the academy, I stood in the lineup and got grilled by the instructors and their Clerks. I told them he’d gone to join the shadows—the smugglers, thieves, and other chaos makers—because they already knew that. I didn’t tell them I had a feeling it was coming and, thankfully, they didn’t ask. I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell me, if they’d found the last letter, the one from his parents, the one that told him they were going to commit suicide.