Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) Page 25

  "That's what I thought," she said, touching his mouth with her fingertip, before kissing him suddenly. "Men," she said, after the first kiss.

  "It's all we want," he whispered, and then they didn't say anything more.

  Until the comm chimed.

  They paused, looking at each other. His hand was poised over the front of her shirt. Julie started to giggle, then stopped. Bandicut shook his head, thinking, it's never going to happen, is it? Julie turned slightly to touch the buttons on the comm. She killed the sound, and activated the message receiver. "There," she murmured, turning back to him. Her eyes, her smile, her tousled hair dazzled him. "Now...tell me again what men want?" she sighed, touching his hair.

  "I think you should tell me what women want," he murmured, touching her lips.

  She pulled him down, a slow slide in the low gravity. "An honest man who knows how to treat knuckles," she murmured, kissing his hand and then his ear and then his mouth. "And ears. And...lips." His hand moved and settled on her right breast. "And...I think you've...mmmm..."

  He was aware, as Julie pressed close to him and he smelled the warm musky scent of her arousal, of the quarx stirring unhappily in its corner of his mind. But if it said anything, he didn't listen, and he certainly didn't answer.

  Chapter 24

  Afterfugue

  As they lay together in silence afterward, he gazed over the contours of Julie's body, admiring the silhouette of her shoulder and arm and stomach against the flames of a holocampfire flickering beneath a tree canopy. He stroked her skin gently, touching the perspiration on her breasts, thinking that there was something magical about this moment that he would never feel again. Julie was still, her dark eyes gazing into the fire, only occasionally shifting to look at him. She touched his nose, smiled faintly, then turned to the fire again.

  He felt the quarx coming out of hiding, like a frightened animal.

  /// Is it safe? ///

  Bandicut chuckled to himself. /Safe to look, but don't touch. What did you think of all those pheromones?/

  /// Ugh... ///

  Bandicut squinted into the fire. /If that's all you can say, you may return to your hiding place./

  /// Well, you asked. ///

  /Well, maybe I didn't really want to know. If you'd like to take the rest of the night off and get some sleep, I'll call you in the morning./

  "Anything wrong?" Julie asked, her gaze shifting to study his eyes.

  He shook his head as the quarx vanished back into seclusion. "Just a little internal dialogue I have every time I make love to a beautiful woman. Very boring stuff."

  "I'll bet," she said, rolling toward him with a laugh. "You don't look bored to me." She reached down and stroked him, and he felt himself rising with unexpected excitement.

  Not again! he heard a distant, muffled voice cry. Then the voice was gone, and he heard only his own heartbeat and Julie's murmurs as they pulled each other close once more.

  *

  There was a frantic desperation to their lovemaking this time; and when it ended they fell, entwined together, into silence. Within minutes, Julie had fallen asleep, and he found himself alone with his thoughts, musing over the woman at his side.

  Would he ever see her again? he wondered. He was astonished by how powerfully he felt drawn to her. The thing was, he genuinely liked her, and not just because of pheromones or hormones or raw animal passion. He liked the way she talked and walked, the excitement with which she seized upon thoughts, the way her eyes blazed, the way she looked when she made love. When was the last time he had felt that way about a woman? Maybe never. It was a wonderfully satisfying feeling—and it was about to be ripped from him, probably forever, if he did what Charlie asked. What would Julie think, if she learned that the man she had just made love to had, hours later, gone out and stolen a multimillion-dollar spacecraft, in some insane messianic pursuit? Would he return a hero or a criminal? Would he return at all? He wondered if Charlie even cared about the price that he would be paying for this crazy mission...

  This mission to save the Earth.

  He felt a disjointed sense of urgency, as he was brought back to the decision he had to make. It was almost as if the quarx had reminded him with a stern warning; but it wasn't the quarx's voice, it was his own. He knew that if he didn't make his decision tonight, it might be too late to make it at all. How far did he trust the quarx? What he had seen of the translator's powers suggested that it all could be true, and probably was.

  But what if...Charlie were lying, for some unfathomable reason? What possible motive could he have for tricking Bandicut into stealing a ship? To get to Earth? There were easier ways to do that. Besides, Charlie wasn't even talking about flying to Earth, merely to its defense, on the far side of the sun.

  No, the lying scenario just didn't make sense. Even as he contemplated it, he waited for the quarx to leap forward with an indignant defense. When he heard only silence, he grunted to himself and turned his head to study Julie's sleeping form again, silhouetted against the flickering flames. What a thing to think about, so soon after making love! But there was no stopping the train of thought; Charlie had set it in motion, and there would be no stopping it until he had made his decision. But it seemed unlike the quarx not to be right there trying to convince him.

  Still there was no response—and in fact, no stirring of the being at all. Charlie seemed to have completely isolated himself, leaving Bandicut to work things out for himself. Which was okay, except that with Julie asleep, it seemed a little lonely just now. Lonely...

  Just himself and the flames, flickering...

  And EineySteiney balls careening through space, and colliding, and flames consuming them...

  He felt the silence-fugue creeping over him like a whispering fog, obscuring his vision of the world that lay before him, and superimposing another view, a sense of invisible shapes and presences and forces. He felt a great awareness of gravity, of the shaping of space by the presence of mass and gravimetric fields; he felt as though he were becoming space, his mind and spirit stretching out into emptiness, but that emptiness was being warped and twisted by the presence of objects hurtling through it. Then, moments later, he felt himself transformed into one of the objects, a comet, and ahead of him now was the fantastic blue and green and white form of the Earth, and he was plummeting toward it...there was no stopping him, the Earth was growing, swelling before him...he saw death rising up to greet him like a leering specter, not just his own death, but the death of a planet's civilization...

  The feeling of horror within him swelled like the Earth, until he could no longer breathe—

  And then the fugue-nightmare snapped away, and he was floating in darkness, gasping for breath. A broad array of information slowly came into focus surrounding him. Elements of it gleamed faintly in the darkness like toy soldiers creeping silently out of hiding in the night to surround and capture him. His heart beat rapidly, anxiously, until he realized what it was. It was a summation, awaiting his inspection.

  He had warned the quarx not to trouble him about it anymore tonight, and Charlie had obligingly vanished inward. But he had left behind the answers to many of the questions that Bandicut might ask, if he were of a mind to.

  He wanted to flee, to avoid the questions. But he was penned in by an army of information: gleaming datapoints that revealed the evolution of the quarx's plan. He saw, without real comprehension, the threading of space that would speed him across the solar system; and he saw the breathtaking simplicity of the translator's power to intercept the comet and destroy it. He even saw the numbers, the probability that the maneuver would cost him his life, the one-in-two chance that he would buy Earth's life with his own. And he saw what was perhaps the greatest uncertainty in the plan: the actual theft of the ship, because that involved human unknowns that even the quarx and his translator's science could not clearly fathom.

  Not for the first time, he found himself wondering, what's in this for Charlie? Why does he care so mu
ch? Why's he willing to take this risk for Earth?

  And the questions floated away over a windswept plain, and he caught glimpses of Charlie's past lives like luminous ghosts in the night, trying to help hosts with whom Charlie had found himself partnered. And he glimpsed Charlie himself at times wondering, how did this come to pass? There again was that murky sense of loss in Charlie's past, the sense that he was somehow in search of...what? Answers? Redemption?

  Bandicut felt a heady, rushing dizziness as the fugue-images vanished back into the darkness; and he struggled for breath again, and found a moment of quiet and peace, a feeling that he was floating on calm, lapping waters in the gentle darkness. He gathered his thoughts there, thinking of Earth, thinking of obligations and responsibility, thinking of young Dakota hunched over edu-sims beyond her age level because she so desperately wanted to go to space, thinking of a rain of death that only he had the power to stop. And he thought of Julie, with a bitter ache, almost wishing that he were angry with her instead of feeling what he felt, because if he were angry, it would be so much easier to leave...

  *

  His eyes opened, as the last waters of the fugue ebbed away. His gaze drifted from the ceiling, to the fire, to Julie's partially naked form. And he knew, not logically, but in his heart, that the quarx was telling the truth and that he had, really, no choice.

  For a few moments, he just gazed at Julie and let his troubled feelings revolve through his mind. Finally he sat up and climbed carefully over her to stand beside the bunk. He checked his pants pocket and made sure that Charlie's stones were still there; then he went to Julie's comm terminal and began quietly typing.

  *

  "...I am telling you all this because I desperately want someone to know the truth of what I have done. And because I trust you more than I trust anyone on this godforsaken moon—or maybe anywhere else, for that matter. And because...I'm so sorry that I have to leave this way. Julie.... If only I had time to know you better, I think I might just..." What? Fall in love?

  He hesitated, trying to decide how to finish. He didn't want to sound like an idiot, after all. Was it just infatuation, or need, or was what he felt the beginnings of the real thing? Anyway, he was leaving, perhaps forever, so what difference did it make if he made a fool of himself? A stray thought occurred to him and he wondered, if Charlie could still communicate with the translator, whether it might be possible to arrange somehow for Julie to be the one whom the translator allowed to find it. It would be nice if he could leave her that much as a parting gift, at least.

  Finally he typed: "...well, I think a lot of things, and there's no time now to tell you about it all. Too little time, too little. Please trust me, even if you're shocked—even if you're angry. You can tell anyone you want, after I'm gone. Please be well, Julie. And do go and find that alien device! It's out there! Love, John."

  He felt that it was a pretty ineffectual close, but he couldn't think how to say it better. He saved the letter to Julie's private files and tagged it to be sent to her on the day after tomorrow. He was tempted to let her see it sooner—it tortured him to think of keeping the secret from her even that long—but he didn't dare. Julie might wonder, for a day, just what sort of monster she had slept with, but she would find out soon enough. He hoped his explanation would salvage her opinion of him.

  He gazed down at her and ached to climb back into the bunk, to wake her, to make love to her again. Reluctantly, instead, he answered the powerful urge that was building somewhere deep inside him, an urge that he had no doubt was a signal from the quarx. With a sigh, he picked up his clothes and began to dress. Julie stirred in her sleep and mumbled something inaudible to him. He bent and whispered, "I have to go now. I have urgent things to do." He kissed her on the forehead, and her eyelids fluttered for a moment. "I think you're wonderful," he whispered, so softly he could scarcely hear his own voice. And before his resolve could vanish altogether, he straightened and hurried from her room.

  On his way to the comm booth off the lounge, he spoke to the quarx with mounting anxiety. /All right. Now please tell me—how do you propose to steal this ship?/

  Charlie had given no indication of his conscious presence for some time now, and several seconds passed before he responded to Bandicut's question. When he did speak, it was in a distant whisper, as though he had buried himself so completely that he had to call up out of a great depth.

  /// I am pleased by your decision.

  We must use the datanet,

  and hope that it is restored enough

  to do what we must do. ///

  Bandicut nodded. That much he had assumed already.

  /// First we must

  change your job assignment

  to Triton Orbital Station.

  Then we must look carefully into the

  scheduling of ships... ///

  /What, are we going to get ourselves a reserved seat?/ Bandicut asked doubtfully, adjusting the headset on his temples.

  /// Something like that, ///

  Charlie murmured, and as he spun out the connection to the gleaming points of energy in the neurolink, he seemed to Bandicut to be humming with anticipation.

  Chapter 25

  Final Preparations

  The morning came too soon, and not soon enough. Bandicut woke up restless and nervous, at once wishing he had spent the night with Julie, and wanting to get on with Charlie's scheme before he lost his nerve altogether.

  /// You still have the stones? ///

  Charlie asked, as Bandicut dressed.

  He felt in his pants pockets and drew out the three tiny stones: a glinting ruby, a tiny coruscating diamond, a fleck of coal. /Okay?/

  /// Okay. ///

  Bandicut replaced the stones in his pocket, and suddenly felt lightheaded as he realized: I am leaving Triton today. I am going to attempt to steal a spaceship. /I suppose I should pack a bag./

  /// Okay.

  But travel light. ///

  He scratched behind his ear. /What time's the shuttle leave?/

  /// Oh-eight-hundred.

  That doesn't give us much time. ///

  Bandicut grabbed his travel duffel and stuffed it with clothes. He hesitated, thinking of Julie, and felt a large lump forming in his throat. He felt an urgent nudge from Charlie—quickly tossed in some books, holos, and other personals, without sorting. He paused in midmotion, remembering last night. He wished that there were some way...but no. /Charlie,/ he murmured almost plaintively, /is there any chance we'll...make it back here?/ He already knew the answer.

  The quarx seemed to draw a deep breath, and seemed very far away as it answered,

  /// The chances are...slight, John.

  I wish I could say otherwise.

  I will miss the translator, too, you know.

  But it is the sacrifice we must— ///

  /Okay, okay,/ Bandicut muttered in annoyance. /You don't have to go on and on about it, for Chrissake./ He zipped his bag and blinked a few times, trying to clear his eyes. He turned away from his bunk.

  "Hey, Bandie, what is this?" Krackey demanded, walking into the room, waving his hands in dismay. He pointed to the duffel bag. "You aren't leaving, are you?"

  "I, ah...actually, yes," Bandicut stammered. He thought frantically. He'd hoped he wouldn't meet anyone else he knew on his way out. "I'm glad I...didn't miss you, Krackey. I just got new orders. They're shipping me right off for some orbital work—Lord knows why." He tried to grin, and felt the effort failing.

  "C'mon, Bandie. I saw the orders on the system board this morning, too," Krackey said. "Obviously it's a screwup. Did you talk to anyone in person?"

  "No, but—"

  "Well, check it out before you go all the way up, man!"

  "Well, I can't just—" Bandicut's breath caught. "I mean, it's—" He felt his face reddening. /HELP!/

  /// I don't know... ///

  Krackey scrutinized his face, as though wondering at Bandicut's mental competency. "Let me check into it, Bandie. Hell,
here you are just getting back into the groove. I'll bet I can straighten this out in no time. I mean, what would Cole Jackson do without you?"

  Groaning silently, Bandicut turned away.

  "Bandie, come on! Let me fix it for you! The datanet's still screwed up, that's all. If you take the shuttle upstairs, you're just going to have to come right back down."

  "Krackey," he said, mustering the only excuse he could think of, "I'm sure you're right. I'll probably be back here tomorrow, and we'll all be laughing about it." He gestured casually. "So, I'm going to have a holiday in orbit, for a day! One mokin' day! Don't you ever want a change of scenery?"

  Krackey's face changed from a look of bewilderment to one of suspicion. Suddenly he grinned wolfishly. "Why, Bandie, you old son of a gun—you didn't rig this to give yourself a day off in orbit, did you?"

  "For God's sake! No, I didn't rig the thing!" Bandicut protested. "I wouldn't know how, even if I wanted to."

  Krackey grunted and eyed him doubtfully. "Well, I believe you. But if you were to try something like that, lemme just tell you, you'd get yourself in some pretty deep shit."

  Bandicut shrugged, wanting desperately to leave the room before he erupted with any more lies.

  "Oh well, enjoy yourself." Krackey clapped him on the shoulder and chortled.

  "Yeah. Say, look—Krackey." Bandicut swallowed, realizing that he was about to say good-bye to Krackey for the last time. He started to stretch out his hand, but quelled the impulse. "Listen, if anything—well, what I mean is—you take care, okay?"

  Krackey peered at him oddly. "Yeah, I'll take care. You just get back down here soon."

  Nodding, Bandicut picked up his duffel and hurried from the room. /Charlie, I hope I don't run into anyone else. I don't think I can stand it./

  /// Let's just hope you don't run into Julie, ///

  the quarx said, naming the one person Bandicut desperately hoped he would run into.

  /// I sense your feelings.