Samael's Fire (5 page)

Char had quit the university and found work online for corporate lawyers, vetting the science parts of their legal briefs. She bought produce at the farmers market. Grew sprouts in vials in her kitchen. Took the zephyr to Tahoe to see clean water and pretend things weren’t so bad. Something about Geraldo and Reynaldo shattered her illusions.

Reynaldo licked his fingers and shrugged his shoulders. “Sanguibahd is also sanctuary from raptors.”

“Raptors? But that’s just a rumor!”

Jake shook his head and Reynaldo chuckled.

Geraldo said, “If you don’t see it on the television, it must not be real?”

Char was beginning to feel hopelessly naïve.

Mike’s com sounded in his ear, so loud she could hear it. His self-important vibe put a stop to the group’s conversation. While he listened, his face lost its color.

“This is something I have to deal with.” He stood up. “Reynaldo, Geraldo, you need to go back down. Keep away from the Pacific Zone. In fact, stay completely south of the equator.”

So her guess had been right. IHS was going to quarantine the Pacific Zone.

“Char, I’ll contact you after I take care of this. We’ll go see the hydroponics annex.” He left through a side door followed by a security detail that must have been watching them the whole time.

The station had gone into nightside over an unlighted, uninhabited stretch, but now the dark blank below gave way to a jewel-like phantasm of light. Char had no idea which city they were over or if they were north or south of the equator. This was an entirely new way of being alive in the universe. Night and day changed every ninety minutes.

The light reached up into the Blue Marble’s nooks and crannies. With Mike and the Blood City boys gone, the open groping in the bar was harder to ignore. Jake didn’t seem to care for it; he was playing with the origami from his empty drink.

“You said you
 
like
 
this place?”

“No. I said it was interesting.” He displayed the paper figure on his flat palm. “I do like the dragons.”

Until today, she hadn’t been with anyone since Brandon. The sex with Jake Ardri had been a one-time thing. That’s what she’d told herself. She never expected to see him again. Now she found herself thinking about how good he had made her feel.

Jake handed her the origami dragon and stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”

In truth, she was very glad to see him again.

Below the window to infinite space, Jake was spread like a feast on Char’s bed. Maybe the erotic activity in the Blue Marble had stirred her up. Maybe all the talk about fertility. But evidently her long self-imposed celibacy had come to its end.

Or maybe Jake alone had brought her out of it. Sitting between his legs, she ran her hands over his thighs and leaned forward to kiss the skin below his navel. He fondled her breasts, and she reached up to his shoulders, stretching alongside him like a cat. She inched up to nuzzle his neck and pressed her naked skin against his.

She slipped under him and pulled him over. His warm strength poured into her, filling her with a sense of well-being. He was melancholy and grateful—or she read her own bittersweet pleasure in his sad groans. She pulled him in, arched her pelvis, and urged him to the deepest place he could find.

When they were exhausted and satisfied, Char lay quiet on Jake’s chest. She listened to the strong bu-bump of his heartbeat and the air moving through his lungs. He needed a shave. One of her favorite things about a man, that stubble at the end of his day.

He was easy to be with. He didn’t want anything from her. Not like Mike—not that she had feelings for Mike. Cripes.

She liked Jake’s independence. Sex usually complicated things with men. Either they couldn’t wait to get away from you afterwards, or they wanted to keep you in a pumpkin shell. Jake promised neither.

“I have a confession to make.” He kissed her forehead. “In the
 
Junque
 
on the way up, I
 
did
 
want to go for your precious parts.”

“I knew it.”

They took a shower together. “Twice in one day,” she said. “My life is suddenly the picture of luxury.”

“Oh, you mean the shower? I thought that smug look was on my account.”

“Well, it
 
has
 
been a while since I’ve been with a man.”

“Um, not that long.”

“Oh, that didn’t count.” She blushed at the reference. “That was chaos sex.”

“And this was on purpose?” He looked hopeful. How sweet.

“Definitely.” She kissed him and stepped out of the shower.

She headed for the closet but changed her mind and put on the same outfit. Silly, but she wouldn’t want Mike to notice that she had changed clothes.

Then she noticed her other flight pants out the corner of her eye, the ones she wore on the ride up. She uttered a little cry and snatched them off the floor. Trembling, she unzipped the pockets until she found it.

“Char?” Jake was at the bathroom door, his stubble half gone and her razor in his hand.

“My necklace.” How could she have forgotten? It was like forgetting Sky. She wrapped the black satin cord around her neck and kissed the silver half heart. “My sister wore the other half.”

“Sisters are good.” He popped into the bathroom and back out again with a clean face. “I love all my sisters. Well, that’s not true.”

The Emperor had a hundred concubines. An exaggeration, but Jake surely had more sisters than he knew about. Char had only the one, living or not.

Watching Jake dress, she remembered something from the Blue Marble. “Jake, tell me about the raptors.”

“It’s true.” He pulled on his boots. “I’ve seen eagles and peregrines myself. Rani saw ospreys, and I’ve heard about vultures.”

“How is it…”

“Possible? How is any of this possible? It’s all part of the big contamination, I guess. Every species is vulnerable to mutation. The bees dying off. Hairless humans with metallic eyes. Birds transformed into giant monsters.”

Bing-bong.
 
A gentle alert chime rang with a message on the room’s compad. It wasn’t Mike.
 
Special Bulletin. Please access Channel One
.

Jake continued. “When I dropped Rani at the V, a guy in the bar swore he saw someone disappear right in front of him. I mean, teleportation is one of the ludicrous ones, but some of the rumors are going to be based in fact.”

“How big was the raptor you saw?”

“They fly in pairs. The bald eagles were the largest. I’d say their wing span was close to thirty feet, tip to tip.”

“How is this kept secret?”

“No reporter will touch the story. They’d lose access to everything else. But it’s not so secret. There’s plenty of chatter on the grid.”

“Whack chatter.”

“Exactly how the Emperor wants you to think of it.” He certainly had no love for the Emperor.

“What about on Vacation Station? The observation deck.”

“It seems their telescopes have been broken for some time.”

Shibad
. Raptors had mutated, truly. Even so, the stories had to be embellished. She’d heard the birds fed humans to their chicks, ripped the intestines from people’s bellies while they were still alive.

Bing-bong.
 
The chime rang again, and this time the message on the compad flashed continuously:
 
Special Bulletin. Please access Channel One
.

The monitor in the sitting room covered three quarters of one wall. The picture came up split into four sections, each showing a mushroom cloud and the name of a city: Montreal, Houston, Redmond, Mexico City.

“Those aren’t dirty bombs,” Jake said. “This is real.”

It took Char a few moments to realize the disaster unfolding was a live feed and not some computer-simulated war game. “But all the nukes are gone.” This couldn’t be happening. With the Treaty of Pyongyang, the world’s nuclear stockpile had been destroyed. That was before she was born.

“Someone didn’t get the memo,” Jake finally said, his voice barely recognizable. He pulled out his com. “Damn them to the last circle of hell.”

Beneath the mushroom clouds, the crawl continually updated:
 
Defenders of Gaia deny nuclear strike. Estimated 10 million dead. EU on alert. Pacific Zone quarantine delayed due to North American strike.

On a repeating loop, a pleasant artificial female voice droned. “For your safety, please remain in your quarters.” They were far above the range of any effects of a nuclear strike on earth—the unacknowledged reason so many Imperial offices had relocated off planet—but all over the station people had to be watching. And panicking.

“Do you have a com signal?” Jake muted the monitor. “I can’t get through to Rani.”

Char fooled with her com. “I’m powered up, but I can’t send or receive.” A new headline crawled over the monitor:
 
Emperor and family unharmed in Machu Picchu.

Jake snorted. “Ten million dead, but the important thing is the asshole who created this mess is just fine.”

The crawl changed:
 
All ISS arrivals canceled until further notice. Departures advised to confirm at assigned docking station.

“I’ve got to go, Meadowlark.”

“Rani?” She was his crewmate. Maybe more than that.

“The V is going to be invaded by ships getting off planet. The Imperial will be fine. No one will be able to dock without authorization codes, and its data links are too hard counterfeit.” He kissed her—with intensity she didn’t expect.
Shib,
he was afraid. “If things get too weird, stick with Mike. He’s a survivor. And he cares about you.”

And he was gone. The feeling struck her that she’d had about the Pacific Zone, that same sense of finality. Jake wasn’t coming back. The gaping hole in her life, the one ripped when she lost Brandon and Sky, tore open a little larger.

The monitor went blank and a different artificial voice said, “Incoming message, priority one.” Mike’s avatar appeared in the lower portion of the monitor. Char touched it and his face filled the screen. “Mike, what’s happening?”

“So far it’s only four cities, all on the one continent. The DOGs are denying everything, o course, but they’re behind it.” He was calm and precise, as if he were performing on stage. The strong leader. “The Emperor is coming up. Just as a precaution.”

That was big. The Imperial press secretary was always making noise about not being terrorized by the terrorists. That the media just wanted to scare people to drive up ratings, and the Emperor had no plans to go into orbit for his safety.

“Jake’s gone to Vacation Station to get Rani,” Char said.

“Good. Now listen to me, Char. I’ve sent directions to your com. I need your help with something before the Emperor gets here. Please come. Right now.”

Please. A word not usually found in Mike’s vocabulary. “Sure. I’ll be right there.”

In the corridors the friendly green lights blinked like little pixies beckoning her on. After several passages and two Ppods, the voice said, “You have arrived at your destination.” Char was in a docking bay with one aircraft, a hybrid runabout, part personal jet and part old-fashioned racer. Mike waved to her from the pilot’s seat.

She climbed in beside him. There was room behind them for four more, but Mike sealed the bubble canopy before she had secured her harness.

“What about your bodyguards?” she said.

He winked like he was getting away with something. “There’s no security risk.” The racer lifted off without noise or force, and they floated toward the opening bay door. “We’re going to check a glitch at the hydroponics annex. It’s completely automated, but we’re picking up some odd readings. The agronomist has gone down to the planet, so you’re really helping me out here.”

The runabout broke free of the station. Char felt like a mosquito compared to the massive complex. It was huge, really, an actual city in space. Ships hovered about its perimeter, from passenger shuttles to cargo transports, and more kept coming.

They were dayside now, but from where she sat she couldn’t see the earth. Four nuclear bombs wasn’t the end of the world, right? A hundred and fifty years ago, the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs in the eastern hemisphere. The world recovered.

The world was already adjusting to this. The Emperor would relocate. She would help Mike take care of glitches in the hydroponics annex. Fertility entrepreneurs would avoid the northern hemisphere.

But god.
 
Ten million people in a matter of hours.
 Ten
million were annihilated by the TU in LA/San Diego, but it had taken months to a year for the deaths to add up from fallout sickness. This was a new standard. Another degradation of civilization. Now we would count mass murder by the tens of millions.