Spin the Sky (22 page)

She talked about all the places she wanted to visit, all the sites she wanted to see and sounds she wanted to hear, all the experiences she wanted to have. He talked about all the things he wanted to do and to be. Penelope never could remember what she actually said or what they really talked about, she only remembered marveling at the eloquent arguments and the insightful monologues that their unfulfilled attraction inspired.

Perhaps it was like that for everyone.

She didn’t know.

When it was far past the time she should have gone back, they decided to walk instead of take a drone cab home. They took advantage of every possible dark corner and private nook on the way. And, of course, they wandered all night, got lost, and eventually called a drone cab. Penelope knew she would be in such incredible trouble when she got home. She didn’t want to go, but every moment she avoided it was another day she’d be grounded or worse.

“I probably won’t be able to see you again,” she whispered as Cesar held her close.

It was a typical San Antonio night, sticky and hot. All she wanted to do was crawl out of this close little car, shimmy out of her scratchy dress and lie, naked and panting, on the cool grass that rolled past the window.

“No,” Cesar insisted, wiping sweat from his brow and folding her hands into his sweaty ones. “I’ll talk to your father. I’ll apologize for keeping you out so late. I’m here with my dad for another week. We can spend it together.”

Penelope gave a short laugh. “A week? That’s all? Then what does it matter if I see you again or not? Next week, you’ll be gone and it will be like we never met at all. Better to end now than prolong the agony.”

She smiled to take the sting out of it. Kissing her palms, Cesar shook his head. “We’ll be together for as long as we have. And then I’ll come back for you. You’ll wait for me. You’ll wait for me, right?”

His eyes went adorably puppy-dog big, willing her to believe that it would be like that. It sounded so very right and yet so much like every pathetic teen love story on the Ether. The ones that never ended well for the girl.

Penelope shook her head. “You won’t come back.”

Pushing away from him, Penelope smoothed her hair and took a deep breath, trying to end this dream without tears and also trying to brace herself for the coming fight with her parents. Cesar wouldn’t let her. Pulling her back into his arms, his eyes blazed.

“Then I’ll take you with me,” he declared.

Even at the time, it sounded like so much stupid teen drama, but somehow it hadn’t been. He’d been totally serious. Penelope never could quite understand that part.

Somehow, instead of dropping her off at her house to face the wrath of her father, Cesar came in with her and had taken the brunt of it. Somehow, they’d spent the next week together and at the end, they were standing in front of a clerk signing a marriage license.

Of course, as soon as she told her family and her father stopped cursing and her mother stopped weeping, they prevailed upon the Vaqueros to extend their stay another two days. Then there was a hurried little wedding in the church that every member of her family had been baptized in since they started building churches in this part of the world. Penelope wore one of her cousin’s old wedding dresses and almost tripped over it when they walked down the aisle. Her cousin was four inches taller, but there’d been no time for alterations.

Penelope really had no idea how all this had happened. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time even though it felt like she was playing a part in an Ether drama more than it felt like her actual life. Cesar seemed so sure about everything, so sure that this was what they should do.

Penelope admitted only to herself that she wasn’t so sure, but she couldn’t seem to stop, couldn’t bear not to reach for this dream she suddenly desired so desperately. Thus she found herself sitting next to Cesar, her brand new husband, and his highly unimpressed father, Larry Vaquero, on a shuttle bound for the stars.

Cesar swallowed three blue pills and fell asleep. He’d offered some to Penelope but she wanted to watch their escape from Earth through the tiny window.

“We’ll visit every star in the sky,” Cesar whispered to her drowsily. “I’ll take you everywhere you ever dreamed of going. Together we’ll see more than the world, we’ll see the galaxy.”

“Do you really think we can?” asked Penelope for the fourth time that day. “It seems like it ought to be impossible to actually do the things you dream.”

“Not for us,” slurred Cesar, puffing out his chest to make her laugh. “For you, I can do anything. Anything in this galaxy! For you, I can spin the sky.”

Then Cesar squeezed her hand, closed his eyes and began to snore.

Penelope figured most of what he said was drug-induced euphoria, but she found that she liked him saying it anyway. She had no idea she would be such a sap about all this romantic stuff. Penelope watched Cesar doze for a while and then turned to see how his father was doing.

“My wife is gonna kill me,” the old man kept muttering while taking swigs from a flask and tucking it back into his jacket.

Penelope wanted to soothe him but she’d never reassured an adult in her life. She gave it her best shot.

“My parents didn’t kill me,” she pointed out.

Larry Vaquero looked at her, really looked at her for the first time in this whole crazy week.

“Honey, you may come to regret that,” he said. “The sad truth of it is that your parents are much nicer people than my wife. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. But sudden changes make her cranky. So she may not be her normal sweet self when you meet her or for a few months after that, frankly. And I apologize, but this shuttle ride is gonna make you wish you was dead.”

Penelope shook her head and chirped, “Oh, I’ll be fine Mr. Vaquero. Don’t worry about me.”

Cesar’s dad held out the flask. Seeing the expression on his face, Penelope took the flask and swallowed as much as she dared. It felt like someone was dry-cleaning her lungs.

Coughing, Penelope asked the old man, “What was that?”

“It’s really better not to think about it,” Larry said.

She did keep thinking about it, but it didn’t matter. After five minutes in the air, whatever Penelope swallowed from that flask was spewed inside the vomit bag she clutched like a lifeline. In another five minutes, Penelope became convinced that she must be a dangerously unstable moron to ever think that this was a good idea. Circumstances since then tended to support that conclusion.

•

Penelope blinks away the memories of yesterday and tries to go to sleep. She knows it’s silly, but she keeps waiting for the door to creak open, revealing the shadow of her mystery man intent on ravishing her all night long. Turning over, she tells herself to relax and go to sleep. Nothing that interesting is going to happen tonight.

As it turns out, Penelope is wrong.

A mere ten minutes later the door flies open to reveal shattering plates and pictures. The ground beneath her shudders and shakes. Penelope lurches into the hallway to find Trevor already running for the front door.

They bolt to escape the swaying house as the whole orbital makes a horrible crunching sound.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“S
o, now I’m having an affair with my own wife,” Cesar tells the ceiling. The ceiling is unsympathetic.

Cesar Vaquero stretches out on the stiff mattress of his tiny bed in the bunkhouse sickroom and sighs. Looking at the ceiling, he seeks to sum up his current situation in a way that sounds more mature and understandable.

Sighing again, Cesar says aloud, “I am an idiot.”

He can’t help laughing at himself and then he keeps on chuckling quietly. The residual joy from an afternoon spent in unexpected intimacy with Penelope comes bubbling to the surface at the slightest opportunity.

Then the ceiling drops on him.

Cesar is momentarily stunned, first from the fleeting feeling that the room is passing judgment upon him and then from the sharp pain of having the roof cave in on his face. After a dazed moment, Cesar realizes he is bruised but otherwise unhurt and also that the colony is in serious structural peril.

Crawling out from the rubble, Cesar sees the silhouettes of screaming people running through the night before the ground gives another terrific heave and throws them all down. Cesar has never heard or felt anything like this.

It is like Ithaca is tearing itself apart.

Staggering towards the house, he sees Trevor and Penelope streaking towards the private elevator, both carrying more ammo and guns than they can really handle. Penelope has a comm unit and is shrieking orders into it. Cesar bolts after them. He isn’t the only one. Argos and the cowgirls are following close behind.

“We’re under attack,” Trevor tells him when he catches up, passing him a gun without slowing down. The boy’s lips are white with worry.

“Invasion?” asks Cesar tightly, ripping off the gun’s faceplate and cranking up the stun settings to a lethal dose. He’s seen slave ships before. His family isn’t getting on one today.

Penelope answers Cesar on the move, “No. Thieves. Someone is trying to steal the herd.”

“The herd?” Cesar cries, disbelief making him hoarse.

“Yeah, that’s what they are telling me,” she replies over her shoulder, waving at her comm unit meaningfully. Penelope turns to look at him, bewilderment and shock all over her face.

Argos has been following them closely. He calls out, “So, wait. If they are just trying to steal the cows, what’s happening to the colony?”

A huge mirror comes crashing down much too close for comfort, spraying shards of glass and leaving Argos and several of the cowgirls with bloody gashes.

Penelope cries in frustration, “Don’t know. I guess they did something to mess us up good. Let’s hope it’s fixable.”

Trevor shouts, “Maybe they sabotaged something to keep us busy while they steal the cows?”

“Maybe they sabotaged something to kill us while they steal the cows,” Penelope replies grimly. “The engineers say they have everything under control up there. They say whatever the problem is that it’s coming from the Ag Level. They think something is attached to one of the walls down there. So that’s where we’re going and you all better hope we can fix this because there aren’t enough vacuum suits down there for all of us.”

They reach the elevator before the cowgirls can really get over the shock of the situation. The women look around in a daze while Cesar, accustomed to dire circumstance, keeps scanning the ceiling for more falling debris. When Penelope gets to the elevator, she immediately pushes the button to lock it in place so they won’t have to worry about it squashing them. Then she pulls ropes and harnesses out of the emergency closet next to it and starts passing them out.

Cesar has lost count of the times his father drilled him on how to use rappelling ropes down the elevator shafts during emergencies. So he remembers how to cinch the belt and thread the rope even though he’s never actually done it during a real live emergency. Penelope obviously kept up the drills because they all start strapping in without comment.

Cesar briefly wonders where his father is right now. Probably drunk in his little cabin. Hopefully not smashed to death by a falling mirror. If he survives this, Cesar is going to check on his father as soon as he can.

“Have they breached the vacuum seal?” pants Trevor.

“No, thank God. Not yet, anyway.”

“Are they still here?” questions Argos. “Maybe they haven’t got the herd yet.”

Penelope throws her hands up. “I don’t know. How about we focus on fixing the stationquake issue before we all die?”

Cesar hopes the thieves are still around. He’d love a chance to punch someone right in the mouth for this assault on the safety of his family. Except that would mean the bad guys are still around to do more damage. Cesar moves to help Penelope get the rest of the crowd ready to jump down to the Ag Level.

In a low voice, he asks her, “Shouldn’t you stay, you know, up here with the boy?”

She gives him a quizzical glance without slowing down, “I assure you, we can handle this.”

Cesar wants to stuff her in the box next to the elevator and sit on it until the danger is past. Trying to think of something that might convince her to stay, he barks, “During a battle, the commander sends in the troops while he waits in safety. Shouldn’t you be safe? The boy?”

Penelope gives a short laugh. “Nice try, but you aren’t getting rid of us.”

She clips her belt into the loops on the elevator and turns to face him with an impish grin. “I bet you thought life on a farm was dull, didn’t you?”

Then she steps into the shaft and starts falling two miles into the darkness. Cesar hopes there is something down there when they get to the bottom and promptly flings himself after her.

The ropes keep them from killing themselves, but they fall nonetheless. Cesar swallows the urge to scream, but Argos doesn’t. Listening to the man screaming like a little girl for ten minutes has the rest of them tittering.

They fall forever, it seems. He begins to worry that there really is no Ag Level left and they’ll fall right out into void space, but then he sees light and feels the harness pull on the ropes as it slows them down.

Staggering out into the sunlight, Cesar follows Penelope as she coolly strips off her harness and begins scouting the landscape. Cesar hurries to catch up, but he sees that the rest of the group isn’t quite ready yet.

Argos flops onto the ground and lays there, breathing heavily. Trevor leans against the elevator shaft and groans, “I think I threw up.”

Shani, the blond cowgirl, wrinkles her nose, wipes her pants and snaps, “Next time, be a man and swallow it. Gross.”

A low rumbling thud and distant gunfire bring everyone back to fight-readiness. Penelope quickly explains where the engineers said the disturbance is coming from. Cesar grabs Argos and a dark-skinned cowgirl whose name he can’t remember and announces they’ll be scouts. He bolts off towards the disturbance, pushing the other two in front of him before Penelope can protest or Trevor can try tagging along.