part0007

The endurance training he’d undergone after signing his contract to work in the Qinlao mines on Mars hadn’t been this rigorous. Then again, it’d been in a point-four-g environment, not the variant half- to one-and-a-half g’s Carl Braxton was inflicting on him. His stomach felt loose, suspended on rubber bands. Braxton appeared to take a grim delight in literally jerking him around by varying the gravity in the training room without warning.

“Tell me again why this is necessary?” Kwazi asked, standing up.

“Need to know. And you don’t. Not yet, anyway,” Braxton said, arms crossed. “But I’ll tell you this much: you never know when artificial gravity will fail. Grav-reaction skills are good to have. I’m training your body to keep you from losing your lunch. It’s like riding a bike on Earth. Once you muscle-memory VG, you never forget.”

Braxton leaned against the padded wall of the training arena, his magnetized boots firmly clamped to the metal floor. A permanent expression of distrust painted his face. “Now, back on your feet, Hero of Mars. Back to first position.”

Don’t call me that, asshole .

Kwazi resumed his place at the start of the obstacle course.

“Course setting: alpha-two,” Braxton told the tech outside the arena. Then, to Kwazi: “Don’t try to anticipate. You can’t. That’s where you’re going wrong. That’s what the pads are for.”

“Ten second warning.”

Kwazi adjusted the strap of his left elbow pad, trying to cinch it tight without cutting off his circulation. Either he’d master the course without the pads eventually, or he’d be off the strike team. Braxton had made that much clear. What he hadn’t made clear was the target of their strike.

The lighting changed from the amber of Callistan norms to the shadowed crimson of a starship on alert. Kwazi didn’t fall for it this time—Braxton’s “Go!” and its implied start to a race. Instead of sprinting forward, he moved at a measured pace toward the first small shipping container along the course track. His step was light but cautiously so, and for good reason. The half-g gravity doubled suddenly, making his extremities feel thirty pounds heavier. It was like the weight of the iron in his blood was being dragged downward.

Expecting another gravity shift at any moment, Kwazi knelt behind the container, ready to adjust. He reconned the corner to clear it, then rose. The shift came and his limbs lightened, his stomach floating like a suspended balloon, a fluttering giddiness tracking up his gullet. He leaned into the feeling, didn’t fight it, like Braxton had taught him. Turning the nearly non-existent gravity to his advantage, Kwazi stepped quickly, springing upward to launch from the top of the container. Twisting to redirect his momentum, he caught the wall with his right kneepad, wincing as the shock reverberated up his leg. Bouncing off, he redirected toward the course’s center, propelling upward with near weightlessness. Using his arms to deflect the ceiling, Kwazi angled back to the floor.

Gravity reengaged, and the shift snatched him from the air, but once again he embraced the pull instead of fighting it. Drawing his limbs in, Kwazi angled toward the cover of a second cargo container. His feet touched the floor and he rolled, halting only when his back flattened against the crate’s hard edge.

Now, that’s the way you do it .

“Better!” Braxton barked, sounding almost impressed. “But you’re dead anyway.”

The momentary heat of joy at finally besting the course evaporated, becoming instead the familiar blanket of Braxton’s disappointment. Kwazi stood and turned to see his trainer pointing at a console jutting out from the wall at the eight o’clock position relative to his own. It wasn’t really there of course, just an optical illusion painted by the skinning tech onto the wall. But in the training scenario, it was a 3D reality Kwazi should have seen easily when he’d gained enough height to deflect from the ceiling.

But he’d been so intent on performing the low-g maneuver, he’d neglected to clear the area hidden by the corner of the console. The jutting shadow created by the faux alert’s red lighting was a dead space where an enemy could easily hide. In a real action, Kwazi could very well have been shot in the back while he congratulated himself for conquering the demands of gravity manipulation.

The arena’s illumination snapped back to Callistan norms. Kwazi met Braxton’s eyes. For once, they were surprisingly non-judgmental.

“Maybe I should go in the second wave,” Kwazi said.

“Stow that,” Braxton said, cutting a thumb across his neck at the tech outside. They were done for the day. “No time for tiny violins. You’re the face of this thing. You won’t be point guard, but you’re going in early. And going out live on The Real Story .”

The face of this thing .

That had a familiar ring. But at least this was a choice Kwazi was making. Fighting with the troopers of the SSR—this was him, taking back his ability to make choices. This was him making a difference.

“You’ve earned some downtime,” Braxton said. Attempting to sound empathetic was strange coming from him. Like a boxer quoting poetry. “Get some food. We go again in eight hours. No pads, then.”

“Okay. I’ll be in my quarters for a bit, then.”

“Set an alarm! We’ve got priorities here, Jabari. I don’t want to have to pull you out of Dreamscape again.”

Kwazi gave a lazy wave of acknowledgment, already anticipating his time alone with Amy.

Entering his temporary quarters beneath Loki’s Longhouse elicited, as usual, mixed emotions in Kwazi. Braxton’s bar, like the rest of Valhalla Station’s Entertainment District, was built over the remains of the graveyard of Earth’s first attempt at domesticating Callisto.

That early base had been carved right out of the moon’s surface. The first expedition to Jupiter’s least-radiated moon had ended tragically when an uncharted asteroid impacted Callisto’s surface. The rock missed the colony by half a lunar diameter, but the resulting moonquake had fractured the plastisteel dome. Earth’s first humans to venture beyond the Asteroid Belt had perished without so much as a goodbye to their inner system relatives.

The people had died, but the buildings survived. The dome had been rebuilt with new tech from the Erkennen Faction that could autoseal minor cracks. A heavily reinforced, rapidly deployable testudo shield—named for the ancient Roman formation of overlapping shields overhead, tortoise-like, to protect soldiers from enemy arrows—could be erected in under sixty seconds. The testudo had certainly proven its worth a couple of weeks ago, when a shuttle smashed into the orbital ring around Callisto, raining debris down and threatening to repeat history by destroying the colony’s three domes.

Below the Longhouse, that first, doomed group’s storage units now served the Soldiers of the Solar Revolution as quarters, meeting rooms, and training grounds. Whenever Kwazi entered the oversized closet that housed his bed and a lone nightstand, he discovered both relief from Braxton’s arduous training schedule and a sinking sense of depression from the close confinement—every time.

The room, windowless being underground, was cramped. Even at his modest height of five-foot-eleven, Kwazi had to stoop. Entering the small space reminded him of working a double shift in the Martian mines—eventually the rock felt too close, the air smelled too recycled. You got tired of seeing rusty-red dust everywhere, and a feeling of claustrophobia set in. Your life felt too dependent on technology you couldn’t control. Paranoia, a racing heart, a short-fused temper—Miner’s Mania, they called it.

But that was the downside. The upside was that, once the SSR cut him loose, Kwazi could do whatever he wanted, as long as he did it below the surface. Away from the eyes of Callistans who would no doubt recognize him from SynCorp’s propaganda broadcasts. And away from Adriana Rabh’s faction agents, searching for him high and low on Helena Telemachus’s orders.

He sat on his cot and stretched upward, luxuriating in the simple act of extending his neck. Calling up Dreamscape in his implant, Kwazi lay back against the chilly wall of his quarters. Before losing himself in the program, he set the alarm Braxton had requested. He couldn’t risk being denied Dreamscape again.

The reality of his dark quarters disappeared, replaced by a sweeping vista of the Martian surface, muddy crimson and stretching to a semi-blue horizon, the color the result of the setting sun’s rays dancing along the thin atmosphere’s edges. He’d always hated having to wear a vac-suit during his walkabouts on Mars, but here in Dreamscape, breathable air was a given. Food and water—no need to worry about either. Dreamscape was about experiencing the unexplored limits of imagination, not attending to life’s mundane necessities.

The flat disc of Olympus Mons stretched to the edges of his vision. It seemed to comprise the entirety of the Red Planet. The highest point on Mars, Olympus Mons appeared from orbit as a cloudy plateau with a single eye stamped at its center. But the eye was really just a depression, and the plateau’s contours the ancient engravings of the largest volcano in the solar system. A favorite thing to do when vacationing from his work below the surface had been to sit on a cliff’s edge of the grand plateau, marveling at Mars’s endless emptiness.

Amanda Topulos sat there now, her back to him. The light, Martian breeze played with her blonde hair, the reddish haze highlighting its hint of strawberry. Kwazi thought it complemented her cheeks, which seemed just a tad bit windburned. So odd, seeing her without her vac-suit out here. Odd and wonderful.

“How’s the training?” she asked without pulling her eyes from the view.

Kwazi walked to the edge of the outcropping and sat down next to her. The wind tasted gritty, but it was more a sensation than dust entering his mouth. On Mars, everything felt gritty, all the time. That was one detail Dreamscape always fashioned exactly right from the fertile plains of his memory.

“Painfully,” he said, a touch of wryness in his voice. “But better.”

“That’s good. Better is good.”

He glanced over at Amy. Kwazi still felt self-conscious sometimes about staring at her, like he hadn’t yet earned that intimate privilege. But he so enjoyed the simple pleasure of watching her admire the view he’d never had the chance to actually see with her when she was … but no, he wouldn’t think of her that way. She was alive to him, still. More alive, in some ways, than ever before. So he enjoyed watching her enjoy the view.

From orbit, Mars could seem uniform and homogeneous and featureless and cold. Up close, especially from the heights of Olympus Mons, it was anything but. The wavy, red dunes gave the landscape character. Randomly scattered, innumerable rocks hinted at a past with a story behind it—a story of building and breaking down and rebuilding. Uniformity became consistency, reassuring in its predictability. Like the mild smile tugging at the corners of Amy’s lips now was predictable, but not boring for being so. Quiet and comfortable. Kwazi thought it was his favorite of her expressions.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

Her smile ticked up a notch. “How lucky I am,” she said. “To be here with you.”

Kwazi snorted. “You’re the lucky one? You have no idea how long I wanted to ask you out. To spend time with you like this.”

“Like this,” Amy repeated, gazing across Olympus Mons. Her tone—it was odd, he thought, as her gaze remained fixed on the horizon. It was almost like she was trying to avoid looking at him.

“Something wrong?” he asked in the way you ask a question out of obligation. In here, nothing was supposed to be wrong. Everything was supposed to be exactly, unbearably right. Shaped from the perfection of the dreamer’s own desires for what they wanted the real world to be. What they wanted their relationships to be.

Amy placed her hands on the dusty rock and adjusted her seat.

“Well, we could have pillows,” she said.

The relief rolled out of Kwazi as nervous laughter. He reached over and placed his hand lightly on the rock face, his fingers extending, shy and tentative, over hers. Being able to touch Amy in a way he never had in real life had proven something to Kwazi—that it was Dreamscape that was real, not his life outside it. Out there he’d been a miner, a mouthpiece for SynCorp, and now a member of the SSR. This was where he chose to exist as himself and not the Kwazi Jabari everyone else expected him to be. He merely walked through a door and found Amy, alive with her half smile.

She rotated her hand, intertwining her fingers with his in a grip that was as human as any he’d ever felt. Fleshy and soft in the palm, bony and harder near the knuckles. He could feel the tendons working when she squeezed his hand. What wasn’t real about any of that? And when she turned to face him, her strawberry smile warmed him from his core like a tiny sun; the heat, the feeling of life moved outward along his limbs. Kwazi wondered if she felt the same life force pulsing through his palm, his fingers. If she felt the same sharing of togetherness.

“I love you, Kwazi,” Amy said. The breeze snatched a length of blonde hair across her eyes, and she reached up to brush it aside. She turned to face him, the view seemingly forgotten. “I don’t know how you did this, but I love you for it.”

Her voice was like a scream heard from miles away, a reminder that this was other .

“You don’t…”

But before he could finish his thought, Amy reached over and caressed his cheek with her thumb, wiping away the Martian grit. Then she leaned in and kissed him with lips he’d only ever imagined kissing before. The substance of this reality was overwhelming, and Kwazi forgot the scream of doubt and surrendered to this singular, perfect moment on Mars he was sharing with the woman he loved.