Jodi Scarfield sat back from the glowing screen in front of her and sighed with satisfaction. Some days she was good. Other days she was very, very good. Today was one of those.
“You’re looking a bit too smug, Daughter. What’s going on over there?” Marilyn Scarfield looked up from her book and raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing very quickly on this dopey old computer.”
Her mother chuckled. “You’ve spent so much time on that one, nobody here knows what colour your eyes are. Anything newer and you might disappear into cyberspace altogether.”
“As opposed to disappearing into real space? Cyberspace is nothing.”
Amid their déjà vu moment, Marilyn skipped a beat, a fraction of a second when her face drew tight and serious. She hadn’t left the medicentre for a single one of Jodi’s waking moments. Anphobos didn’t have real hospitals and it certainly hadn’t had an operating theatre designed for the reconstructive surgery Jodi had needed. What it had possessed, in overwhelming abundance, had been scientists, medical practitioners and technogeeks. All those people in the one sterile room had resulted in an amazing recovery process.
There had been bone grafts using Mary Forbes’ latest nanotechnology, specifically designed not to disturb her natural immune processes. Surgery to remove a haemorrhaging kidney had concluded with the introduction of a new implant, one that now presented ‘self’ receptors and functioned as though it had always been part of her body. In short, miracles had been worked to ensure the girl almost killed by a Martian fanatic did not die.
Lots of bad press and nasty political repercussions had been avoided, simply by the fact that Jodi had chosen to live.
The door to her room slipped open. Only the inrush of air announced Astrid’s arrival. Today was a big day for all of them and she arrived wearing her usual outfit. Sleek and black, she carried her customary air of composure, and a tiny posy of flowers which she presented with some flourish to Marilyn, who couldn’t help but like the stunning girl.
With a quick squeeze of Jodi’s shoulder, she looked her friend dead in the eye with her assessing, hazel gaze. “Ready?”
Jodi nodded, licked her lips and flicked her thumbnail against her middle finger, trying not to chew.
“Vision,” Astrid commanded the room. Ever the Anphobosite, she had no need for ‘pleases’ and ‘thankyous’ when dealing with technology.
On the wall beyond the foot of her bed, the news piece coalesced into a bright action scene with surround sound. It was late news, of course. Satellite orbits had again slowed transmission. But late was better than never. Especially now.
An ash-blonde woman was being led from the embassy building in handcuffs. As Anphobos had never before experienced crime, the embassy had become a makeshift courthouse. This woman would make history for all the wrong reasons.
Haughty and cool, she stopped to look down the camera as one reporter caught her attention.
“Have you anything to say, Ms Yantar, about your role in your own son’s death?”
Jodi gave in and chewed her thumbnail.
“Yantar. I didn’t even know his last name.” Without her permission, memories of Jules flashed round and round in her head. The gentle kiss, the taste of blood, the shape of his smile … and the madness in his eyes. This woman had those same eyes.
Cool and pale, she raised an eyebrow to sneer at the reporter. “My son is a martyr. He died for Martian independence. The people who killed him are the traitors, not him. Without his death there would have been no attention paid. Anphobosites would have railed and cried and eventually have been crushed by the taxes and the bans while the politicians kept talking. At least my son had the will to act. I am now, and always will be, proud of how Jules Yantar lived and died.”
Marilyn choked and spluttered on her drink. “Don’t listen to her, Astrid honey. You’re the hero.”
Astrid sighed and shook her head. “She could be right. Without him drawing attention to us, nobody on Earth would have known we were discontent. You think about it. No one in Anphobos knew anything about Jodi’s friends until it was all over. We would have been up here holding demonstrations and yelling at diplomats, but no one down there would have known a thing. Unless it’s spectacular it doesn’t get on the news. No news, no knowledge. No knowledge, no action.” She shrugged, “Maybe he is a martyr.”
Jodi took her thumb out of her mouth and glared at Astrid.
“I don’t care what he is, as long as it’s dead.”
Astrid’s laughter broke the tension in the room. “This whole Mars-god-of-war thing is really rubbing off on you, isn’t it?”
Jodi ignored the comment and inspected her thumb. “What did she do, anyway?”
“Security,” came the droll reply.
“You’re joking.”
Astrid shook her head. “No joke. She used to be one deadly spy chick. Wanted to get out of active service so applied for a job here, where nothing ever happens and nobody wants to invade. News has it that while she was ‘home schooling’ Jules, she was teaching him all her nifty spy ways.”
Bile rolled around in Jodi’s stomach. “So she trained him to do this from the day he was born and nobody knew?”
Her mother patted her shoulder and Astrid shrugged.
“What was to know? We may all live in a bubble but we value our freedoms. If she wanted to home school, she could. Lots of people do here, especially since school isn’t full time anyway; they figure they may as well.”
“Weird isn’t it?” Jodi watched the screen through the tears blurring her eyes.
“What?”
“That we never get it right.”
… Ms Yantar has been found guilty of attempted murder by endeavouring to cause the migration shuttle Homeros to crash. Travellers on the shuttle included Dominic Rabana, who has recently been stood down as the Minister for Martian Diplomacy, and Jodi Scarfield who is due for release from hospital within the week. Ms Scarfield left Earth the same day she and her colleagues …
“Mute!” Marilyn’s voice cracked through the room. Jodi’s mother patted her leg. “You got lots of things right. And I think that’s enough of this rubbish. Go get dressed. You need to look your best for the UN.”
Jodi laughed. Anybody not ‘in the know’ would have thought she’d meant United Nations. Jodi and Astrid both knew she meant ‘Universal News’. And her mother was right; she did want to look her best.
Her stomach lurched. For weeks now she’d been conducting phone interviews, writing statements, answering emails and generally doing her best to make everybody happy without actually seeing anyone. At first it was because she looked awful with a bruised, swollen face, a missing tooth and tubes hanging everywhere. Then it was because she didn’t want to think anymore about what had happened, or how she was now: part human, part bot. Between counselling sessions and her parents, she was done re-living every moment.
But today was the day, so she left Astrid and her mother to watch the silent screen while she showered and changed. Her father would be waiting in a shuttle pod for them all when they got downstairs. Jodi washed her newly healed skin gently, still subliminally worrying that she might wash off or somehow ‘break’ her grafts and implants. Her parents had decided that a trial separation was in order, and her mum was talking about returning to Earth. Maybe it had been the pressure of the recovery process, or maybe it was just because she had become so different from her husband while they’d been separated by so much distance. Whatever the case, they each seemed happy with the decision.
The shower shut off at her legally allocated water limit, and she smiled. It would be good to go home.
Dried and wrapped in her towel, she returned to the main room, opened her cupboard and slumped. Shame she hadn’t considered ‘wowing’ Universal News when she’d packed her clothes on Earth.
“Don’t worry about that. I bought you a present.” Astrid drew a white cloth bag out of her backpack. The bag dangled by drawstrings from her fingertip.
Jodi knew instantly what it contained and flicked her eyes up at her friend.
“Go on. You know you want to.” Astrid stood up, grinning. Her raven bob swung to sit just above the neck of her clinging black suit.
Jodi nodded and slipped the cool, white, Martian-made fabric over her head. The pants, when she pulled them up, hung in soft folds and swished as she walked. More comfortable than pyjamas and without the memories an ‘Astrid’ suit would have brought.
“Right, well, I’ll see you girls out the front. I’ll slip down to the carpark and get your father organised. Jodi, don’t worry and don’t panic. Just smile and be polite. Your father and I’ll be waiting.”
Jodi nodded, kissed her mother on the cheek and let herself be engulfed in a giant, comforting hug.
They gave Marilyn a good three minutes headstart, sitting on the bed and flicking through channels.
“I’m sorry I took so long to get to you, you know.” Astrid didn’t look away from the muted screen.
“Are you kidding? You saving me was the best returned favour I’ve ever received. You’re actually my hero!”
Astrid shrugged. “If I’d kept a better eye on you in the beginning it probably wouldn’t have happened. I just didn’t think you’d go with him. I told you to be careful of him.”
Jodi rolled her eyes. “Yes. From ‘be careful’ I got, ‘he’s a psychopathic maniac whose kisses are poison’. Please can we not go there again?” She’d heard all Astrid’s story in bits and pieces. How, while under lock and key at the embassy, she’d heard about Jodi going missing. About how telling Jules’ absence had been. Then she’d had to convince security guards and technogeeks to let her reprogram a police bot.
Mars alone knew what kind of fast talking she’d needed to explain how she knew to do that. She probably owed her diplomat father some serious payback. Her catlike blink and her black swishy bob wouldn’t have hurt, either. Dads will move mountains, and planets, for their daughters, and everyone knows that men are suckers for women like Astrid.
Jodi grinned at the thought. Of course those men hadn’t truly believed she could help. They hadn’t known about the massive brain beneath Astrid’s pretty bob.
The reprogramming had taken longer than Astrid would have liked but it had worked. However she did it, whoever she’d conned, bribed or begged, Jodi would never be anything but grateful.
“Let’s just agree that I’m an idiot and move on.”
Astrid giggled. “Sure. An idiot who taught me life-saving hacker skills. You kind of saved yourself, you know.”
Jodi threw her hand up in a stop sign. “Can we not over-think?”
Astrid laughed, took her hand and led her to the elevator. “Sure. Anything else?”
“Do I look alright?” Despite her sweaty palms, Jodi still held Astrid’s hand in one of hers and brushed at her white pants with the other.
“You look great. All your little Earthbound friends are going to be green with envy. We’ll make a great still shot.”
She was right.
Headlines the next day read “WAR AND PEACE” under which there followed a stunning photograph of pale, catlike, pure-Martian Astrid, who stood beside a tanned, blonde girl, all clad in white. The articles that followed generally highlighted how the ongoing negotiations between Earthen and Martian diplomats had been pushed forward by the action recently taking place on both planets. More often than not, they ended with Astrid’s quote, “We don’t need to be the same to be equal.”
Whether or not Astrid had practised the quote, or manufactured the event, no matter how much forethought had gone into it, Jodi didn’t care. Astrid had done well to be prepared.
After all, bad things happen when people stop paying attention.