Spin the Sky (29 page)

Asia got a faraway look. “They are all giants. If it were me, I’d set the computer to look for short people. I don’t think they are sure how many of us there are.”

And that’s why we jumped the first giant we saw and wore him like a backpack. It wasn’t the most pleasant experience.

He was heavy and he smelled.

It was lucky these guys favored large loose clothes. I was down one pant leg and Asia was down the other. Captain was on his back, under his shirt.

At first, the plan was to knock him out, but he started crying and we just couldn’t do it. Actually, Asia tried to wallop him anyway, but I stopped her and Captain didn’t stop me stopping her.

Our giant was kind of on the slow side, mentally speaking, but once he figured out what we wanted to do, he played along like it was a funny game. He complained an awful lot about us pulling his leg hair and the Captain digging boots into his back hair, but he didn’t stop going where we wanted him to go.

We tromped along like that for a while before the giant rumbled, “Look, what is it you are trying to steal? Let’s just go get it and then you can leave me alone.”

“We aren’t trying to steal anything,” I protested. “You guys jumped us. We’re trying to get out of this asylum.”

Captain filled the giant in on what had happened.

The giant let loose a huge sigh, and muttered, “The Brick and his boys are such a pain in the ass since the funk struck us blind last year, but what can you do? The whole colony is falling apart and we don’t have the money to pay for a real medical team. How about I take you to the ship bay? Steal something in there and get out of here.”

That sounded like a fine idea. We worried about a double-cross, but didn’t have a better plan. Twice the giant ducked through a door to hide from a gang searching for us. Lucky for us, there were a lot of bathrooms in that joint. We had to go through the docking bay, so we saw what happened to the rest of our crew.

Apparently the giants had anger management issues because bits of our crew were smeared all over the place. After Asia said it looked like they’d been eaten, I stopped looking. We finally got to a ship bay and with a little work, I managed to hotwire a small ship.

The giant waved to us sadly.The Captain asked him, “You want to come with us?”

It wasn’t my favorite idea. The ship we were taking was going to be mighty cramped with just the three of us and I didn’t know how to rig any of the larger ships in that bay.

The giant looked like he was thinking it over, but then shook his head reluctantly. “I got family here and those meds you guys left may help.”

Captain shrugged and turned back to the little ship. Asia paused in the doorway and then told the giant, “The bug is in your water supply.”

She told him how to shock the water using sheep urine as a basic homemade bleach to kill the bug. I was itching to shut the door and get out of there, but experience taught me to let Asia do whatever it is she wanted to do.

Finally, she stopped jawing and came in. Right before I closed the door, the giant asked Captain, “Who are you?”

Captain gave him a pitying look and said, “Jonas Ulixes,” because that’s the fake name he always gave to people when he didn’t want to say his real name. Your dad always was shy about his past.

What’s the matter, kid? You just got all green and queasy looking. If you have to be sick, do it in that bucket next to your bed.

Anyway, I slammed the door shut and we got out of there, only to find the rest of the crew didn’t wait for us. They’d taken the ship and hightailed it. I never did find out what happened to them, our ship and all my stuff. I had the most wonderful pillow I lost on that ship. Sometimes I still dream about that pillow.

I heard through the local Ether that the giant’s colony eventually got help, but most of them were permanently blind and stupid afterwards. They might have been stupid before. You never know. It seemed that a benevolent dictator set up shop and taught them all to play Spacerbase and they’ve been dominating Spacerbase League ever since. They even have their own dedicated reality site on the Ether. Last season, it was more popular than mini-pig racing.

It was hard times for us, though, getting that little puddle jumper to a real port, but we made it. We were definitely a few pounds lighter and a lot scruffier by then, though. Eventually, the three of us cobbled together another ship and started tinkering again.

I rode with your dad for almost another year after that, until we got separated in the uprising on Alpha Seti Six, but that’s another story.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I
f Mike hoped for applause at the end of his tale, he is sorely disappointed. Trevor stares at nothing, meditatively chewing a thumbnail. Cesar is memorizing his shoes while feeling his stomach digest itself. He wonders if he will finally get an ulcer from everything life keeps throwing at him. The grin slides off Mike’s face as he looks from Trevor’s ghastly expression to Cesar’s discomfort.

Cesar knows it is time for him to do something.

Drawing himself up, Cesar gives Mike a grin and a firm handshake. “It’s good to see you again, Mike,” he says, clapping him on the shoulders. It is, too.

Mike grins back at him uncertainly as Cesar says smoothly, “As you can guess, we are in a bit of trouble which, I promise, we will not bring down on you. You certainly saved our bacon today and I thank you for that. You always were a good man, Mike, and I’m happy to see you so settled. I’ll be happy to fill you in on the details and figure out how to get out of your hair without putting you out any more than we already are, but first I need a few minutes alone with my son.”

“Of course, of course,” Mike says jovially. “So glad to know you’re alive and your boy there! Well, he’s the spitting image of you, sir.”

Mike allows himself to be guided out. Cesar shuts the door firmly behind Mike. He suddenly realizes that no matter how absolutely horrible it made him feel to disappoint his parents, that is nothing compared to disappointing his son. Given the choice between getting boiled alive in hot oil and turning towards his son to see the rejection and disappointment he knows is on that boy’s face, he’d rather strip down and deep fat fry himself any day.

“Stories about my dad never have happy endings, huh?” Trevor asks quietly.

Cesar looks at his son. Trevor picks lint off his blanket with the kind of concentration usually reserved for brain surgery or advanced mathematics or video games.

“I didn’t mean for you to find out this way,” Cesar stammers. “I didn’t mean for things to be like this.”

Trevor frowns, gulps and switches his attentions to prodding the burn on his arm. How can he ever apologize? Cesar sighs. What can he say? There are no excuses for being a terrible dad.

“So you’re my dad?” asks Trevor slowly, his eyes on the burn. Cesar thinks his heart might break, hearing the pain in the boy’s voice.

“I thought about you every day,” Cesar finally says. “Every day I thought about you and your mom. I just couldn’t come back. You’ve heard the stories. Death, destruction, violence. That’s all I ever had to offer. I couldn’t bring that home to you. I’ve been in your life a few days and look where we are, for God’s sake.”

Cesar slams his palm into a wall to relieve his frustration. It doesn’t help.

Trevor smiles wryly. “Well, I guess that’s why you keep hugging me,” he says with a quick glance at Cesar. “That’s good. I was starting to worry you were like the guys from Lavender Lambda Orbital and had a crush on me.”

Cesar laughs, “Ah, no. Definitely your dad. Definitely not gay. Got a serious crush on your mom, though.”

It is Trevor’s turn to laugh and the awkward tension stops sucking all the air out of that room.

“Good luck with
that
,” he chuckles. “She was planning to boot you out, you know, and that’s before she knew who you were. She’s gonna be so pissed at you. It’ll be nice to see her mad at somebody else for a change.”

“Yeah,” replies Cesar, running a hand through his hair. Penelope is one too many problems for right now. Holding her in his arms seems like eons ago. “Fortunately for me, we have more pressing issues just now.”

Cesar starts talking. He methodically goes through everything he remembers from the pirate ship. He has to go through it a few times before he gets it straight in his mind. Adrenaline isn’t the best thing for the memory. He mumbles through the part about Julia.

Trevor swallows hard with Cesar watching him anxiously. He doesn’t know how hard the boy will take it.

“They killed her?” Trevor asks in a small voice. “You’re sure? Maybe they just captured her? Maybe there’s a way to save her?”

Cesar shakes his head grimly. “No, they killed her. Then they dumped her body out an airlock. I’m sorry, son.”

“But it’s not right,” Trevor mutters, looking as though he is trying to find some solution, some way to undo the girl’s casual murder. Cesar has been down that road many times.

“Son, uh, Trevor. Sometimes people we really like die. The worst is when they die suddenly and terribly for no reason. You keep thinking that it’s wrong. That there is some way around it, but there isn’t. The best way to mourn them is to survive and win, to try and find a way to make their death meaningful.”

Trevor looked down at his thumbs and nodded sharply a few times. “Yeah, I guess,” he muttered, grief putting the years on his face, making him look more like a man than a child. “In those stories people tell me about you, lots of your friends die and, most of the time, it happens quick and brutal and you don’t have a chance to stop it or say goodbye or anything. I just thought it was part of how stories go, but it sucks. I forget that they are real people in those stories.”

Cesar patted his son’s head gently. “Real life usually sucks, kid. But it beats the alternative. So let’s figure out how to get out of this mess and get back home.”

Trevor swallows a few more times, but then he asks Cesar to continue. Cesar is happy to talk.

He rambles on; trying to describe every detail and not notice while Trevor sniffles and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. Cesar wants to rip Mach and Asner apart, not only for killing Julia but also for making his son so sad. Cesar’s memory is blurry and the conversation he thought he heard seems so unlikely as he recounts it now.

“So Uri Mach from Seven Skies Trading and that Asner guy from EEC are trying to get the herd for some sort of lubricant for a laser that can fry a whole Earth city,” Trevor summarizes.

“Yeah, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” replies Cesar, feeling old and tired. “No one is going to believe us.”

“They might believe you,” Trevor suggested. “You are Cesar the Scorcher. If you worry about some guy with a big laser, other people will probably worry about that too.”

Cesar gives him a sour look. Then he remembers dimly overhearing Asner and Mach talking at Penelope’s party. He hadn’t been paying too much attention because Penelope was entirely too distracting, but he remembered one thing.

“I overheard them another time talking about a Moon Array. So, a laser that needs lots of grease on the Moon? That sounds even more bizarre, doesn’t it?”

Trevor’s brow furrows. “That would have to be a really big laser. They couldn’t hide a laser like that, could they? I mean, someone would notice that, right?”

Cesar didn’t have an answer.

Trevor points out, “It does sound crazy, but on the other hand, we just escaped from their pirate ship and we know for a fact they were trying to steal the herd. I’ve heard Mach trying to convince my mom to sell him a thousand head before. Then there are all these attacks on Ithaca, ever since she refused to sell. It’s crazy, but maybe that’s what they are up to. They are up to something, at any rate.”

“If they need a thousand cows worth of grease, that’s a really big laser,” comments Cesar, still mulling it over, looking for the best answer to this riddle. He is pretty stumped, though.

“They think I’m dead,” Trevor points out.

“And they don’t know about me at all,” says Cesar. “There’s got to be a solution to this problem in there somewhere.”

Trevor sighs, “Like what?”

“Well,” Cesar says, clearing his throat. “First, we’ve got to decide where to go next. I know your mother wouldn’t like this solution at all, but I think it’s better if you don’t go back to Ithaca right away. Let the bad guys think you are dead a while longer. It will give us some time to figure out what our next move is.”

“You’re right,” laughs Trevor. “My mom would hate that idea.”

“Yeah, she would,” agrees Cesar, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “It just seems like we don’t really know what we’re up against so we should exploit what few advantages we have. If you have a better idea, I’m open to it, but otherwise I’ll go talk to Mike and see how far he’s willing to take us.”

“Sure. Whatever,” says Trevor, lying back, exhausted from the effort of deciding what to do next.

Cesar reaches out to hold Trevor’s hand, but the boy turns onto his side, away from Cesar. Cesar pulls his hand back and looks at his son for a long minute. Straightening his slumped shoulders, he says quietly, “You get some sleep. I’ll go talk to Mike and see where he can drop us. Sound good?”

“Yeah, sure,” Trevor says without turning.

As Cesar opens the door to leave, Trevor turns to Cesar and calls, “Hey, uh, Dad?”

Cesar tightens his grip on the door but keeps his voice level as he says, “Yes, Trevor?”

“It’s nice to meet you.”

Cesar feels tears in his eyes again. Fatherhood is turning him into a big weepy baby. Clearing his throat, he looks at the tentative smile on Trevor’s face and feels like singing. “It’s nice to meet you too, son. It’s… very nice.”

Then Cesar flees the room before he starts crying or singing in front of his son. The poor boy has enough to deal with already today.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

P
enelope is rethinking that whole “
resist the urge to despise all men”
resolution she made. She was young and naïve when she thought that a Y-chromosome couldn’t really negate all possible redeeming qualities in a human.