Chapter 25
Kwazi Jabari • Aboard the Freedom’s Herald
, Approaching Saturn
They were nearly there.
Kwazi didn’t understand the specifics, but he knew they were headed to Titan so Elinda Kisaan could hand Cassandra a clean victory. The battle over Callisto had certainly not been that. Adriana Rabh was still at large. She seemed to have disappeared into the ether of space itself. And Valhalla Station was already pushing back against SSR occupation, though the colony wasn’t yet in a state of open rebellion.
As they neared Saturn, Kwazi wondered if that cycle would start all over again. They’d liberate Masada Station and Prometheus Colony as they had Rabh’s headquarters and Callisto … with smiles and assurances of new liberties and an acceptable casualty ratio. But might not the citizen-workers under Gregor Erkennen’s rule simply follow the example set by their Callistan cousins?
Kwazi didn’t understand their resistance. Didn’t they know what SynCorp was? Didn’t they care about living a life in freedom?
He’d hardly been able to sleep since they’d departed Callisto. His mind kept racing, infected with a kind of self-imposed, impotent responsibility for managing events beyond his control. And even when Kwazi found snippets of sleep, he’d awake in a cold sweat, the same image branded on his brain: Carl Braxton, sighting down his rifle barrel at Kwazi on Rabh Regency Station.
He needed a distraction, if only for a little while. He needed the blanket of serenity Kwazi felt laid over him that was spending time with Amy.
He engaged Dreamscape, and Olympus Mons unfurled in front of him, a painting in dusty reds stretching across the canvas of Kwazi’s mind. Just viewing it calmed his breathing. Puzzle pieces of the idyllic view fell soothingly into place. The bluish horizon of the Martian sunset. Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars, sinking slowly in its orbit. And Amy sitting on the rocky outcropping they’d claimed for their own.
“Hi,” he said, approaching her. Amy glanced over her shoulder and smiled. The light breeze teased a strand of her hair over her eyes. She brushed it away.
“Hi.”
Kwazi sat down beside her, taking her hand. The thin powder of Martian sand felt gritty through the worker’s coveralls he wore. It literally, he thought with a light laugh, made him feel grounded. Yes, this is where he needed to be. Where he wanted to be.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Amy said.
The sound of her voice was like cool water.
“What’s weird?”
“The sunset.” She pulled her hand away and gestured at the horizon. “It has that bluish tint. Kind of ironic for the Red Planet, don’t you think?”
“It’s the dust in the atmosphere,” Kwazi said. “It’s so fine, it allows blue light through but not colors with longer wavelengths.”
Amy nodded. “It’s just not what you’d expect, you know?”
“Yeah.”
He edged closer to her on the lip of the overlook. Rather than take his hand again, as he hoped she would, Amy brought her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
Kwazi shrugged. “Fine.”
“I mean, about the battle on the station. About what happened to Beecham and the others.”
The wind blew cooler. It was almost chilly.
“I’m fine,” he said again.
Amy turned to him with an unsatisfied expression.
“Well,” Kwazi began, not wanting to get into it. He hadn’t come here for this. He’d come here to get away from this. “I mean, I’m sad, of course.”
“Sad?”
“I regret that Monk and the others—”
“You regret
…” Amy sighed, laying her chin on her knees. Her gaze returned to the horizon. “You sound like you’re reading a prepared statement.”
Kwazi blinked once, twice, while staring at the side of her face. Her profile was beautiful, crafted with Dreamscape perfection. But the peace he’d sought in coming here seemed a distant, foreign thing now. Replaced with irritation and defensiveness.
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t answer at first, squinting at something distant—the white and pinkish pitted surface of Deimos sinking lower in the sky, maybe.
“I just wonder sometimes what happened to the miner from Mars who was so afraid to ask me out,” she said, turning to face him again. “You were happier then. You seem so different now. When did the Kwazi who loved it that I loved it when he spoke French become a sleepless soldier?”
He withdrew from her. The harsh Martian surface dug into his bony frame.
“When the Company murdered my family!”
Amy wiped dust from the side of her face, then reembraced her knees and returned her gaze to the darkening Martian desert. “Some of your family,” she said.
“What?”
Her eyebrows arched curiously. “Helena Telemachus ordered my death. And Beren’s and Aika’s.”
“Yes.”
“But it was Cassandra who killed Max and Mikel in the mine, right?”
Kwazi thought he must have misheard. It was like the needle playing the thoughts in his brain had skipped out of its groove.
“And almost
killed me and Beren and Aika, for that matter. In the mine.” Again her eyes found his. “And you.”
“I suppose,” he said. What the hell was this? Kwazi was tempted to grab Amy by the shoulders and kiss her to force an end to the conversation.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “You’ve changed.”
“I’ve
changed?” Her response was nearly offended.
“Look, times are more complicated, I know.” He wasn’t sure where her attitude was coming from, but he wanted it to go back there. This was his
fantasy, damn it. She was his
Amy. Maybe if he reasoned with her, he could redirect the conversation. Bring her back to being the Amy he’d created in Dreamscape. “But it won’t be like this always.”
“Just a little death for a little while,” she said in a way that seemed to be tasting the concept. “Then it will all be better.”
“War requires sacrifice,” he said. He could hear the testiness in his own voice. The anger at having to defend himself. And Cassandra.
“For the greater good.”
“Yes! Exactly!”
Amy nodded. Deimos had almost disappeared entirely below the thin blue line of the planetary horizon.
“So, if you think about it,” she said, “all those events—the sabotage of the mine, deposing Tony Taulke, killing those atmo-miners on the station—it’s all part of a larger, necessary plan. The Greater Good Plan.”
His brain was starting to throb. “I suppose,” Kwazi said.
“Even me dying. When Cassandra bombed Facility Sixteen.”
The anger built inside him, and Kwazi almost let it out. “No,” he said at last, forcing himself to remain calm. “You died because Helena Telemachus—”
“—murdered me, yes. Just as Cassandra murdered Max and Mikel.”
“Stop saying that!”
Kwazi put his hands against the gritty cliffside and pushed himself to his feet. The breeze and altitude made him feel lightheaded. His legs felt weak. His thoughts seemed half a step behind his emotions. Most of Mars had fallen into shadow. The stars shone in their thousands.
“Monk Beecham died for the greater good,” Amy continued. “Maybe I did too.”
“No!” He backed away. Amy was a shadowy form sitting on the precipice of Olympus Mons. “SynCorp murdered you!”
“As Cassandra murdered Max and—”
“Stop it!” Kwazi pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead. “Stop it!”
Amy rose to her feet, swaying in the wind on the edge of the cliff. She moved from darkening dusk toward him.
“Leave me alone!” he shouted.
“Kwazi, I just want you back,” she said. Words recalling his own weeks before, when he’d been mourning the real Amy Topulos. The red dust crunched under her boots. “I just want us back the way we were.”
Amy stepped toward him, one hand reaching. Her eyes shimmered in the fading light of Deimos. Only they weren’t Amy’s blue eyes … they were a luminescent gold.
“Kwazi, I’m sorry,” Amy said with Cassandra’s eyes. “Don’t listen to me, I’m just—”
“Quit program,” Kwazi said, calling up his sceye. “Quit program!”
• • •
He sat up quickly. His quarters were the dark of shipboard night, but the red capital-D shone brightly on his sceye display. The side of his mouth was wet. He wiped the sleep drool away.
The door chime sounded again. It had been chiming for a while, Kwazi realized.
Sleep? Had he been sleeping or lost in Dreamscape? Had Amy—or her doppelgänger?—been real or just the fatigued fantasy of a weary mind?
In the darkness of his quarters, Kwazi had the sudden gut-memory of staring at a half-opened closet door as a child on Earth. He’d cried out, and his grandfather had come running with anxious questions. He’d sworn he could hear whispers or claws scratching. As he’d clung to the old man’s arms, Young Kwazi had been certain that something waited inside the restless shadows of his closet. Something conjured by the fears of his imagination, the darker Dreamscape of his childhood. Something that professed goodness behind a fake smile hiding evil intent.
The Amy in his dream … or his fantasy … the Amy he’d created. The words she’d spoken, the truths they’d contained that he’d never faced before. Cassandra’s complicity in the deaths of his crew-family. They were his truths, yes? If he’d created Amy and she’d spoken them, the truths must be his truths too. But then she’d become…
…a fake smile hiding evil intent?
A fist pounded on the door to his quarters.
“Kwazi? Are you all right?” The door chime rang again. “Kwazi, answer me!”
“Open,” he said. “Lights.”
Milani Stuart stood framed in the doorway, her fist raised. Worry lines painted her face.
“I was stopping by to see how you were doing, and I heard you shouting,” she said, entering his cabin. The door slipped shut behind her. She stood awkwardly for a moment, then walked to his bedside and knelt in front of him. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. When Milani took his hand, Kwazi almost pulled away. But he had a sudden craving for the contact.
“The dream again?” Milani asked. The weight of his disclosures to her since leaving Callisto—about Braxton and how Beecham had died—filled the spaces between her words. He could hear the probing concern of the counselor in them.
Kwazi considered telling her the truth about what had just happened. But did he even know himself? And if he’d actually been in Dreamscape instead of merely dreaming, he feared seeing disappointment in her eyes. The physician’s judgment that a hackhead who’d had a bad trip got what he deserved. Lying was just easier.
“Yeah,” he said. “The one where Braxton…”
Kwazi shifted on the bed as Milani moved to sit beside him. The dream-memory arose of sitting side by side with Amy on the Martian cliffside. Viciously, he pushed it away.
“You know, as your counselor, I’d probably suggest something like, those dreams represent your anxiety about what’s happening,” Milani said. Her voice was contemplative but caring. “But what you described on the station—Braxton turning on you, aiming his gun at you—”
“He said Beecham got in the way. That a miner was about to split my spine.”
Why was he rationalizing for Braxton? He already knew the story was a lie.
“I know,” Milani said. “But it feels right to me. Your impression that he might have been trying to kill you, I mean.”
It does?
“I appreciate all you did—all the Soldiers did—to rescue me,” Milani said. “Telemachus…” The doctor shuddered. “I still have nightmares myself.”
Kwazi squeezed her hand, as much for himself as for her. Feeling the soft warmth of her skin against his was reassuring. Something real. And Milani’s eyes were brown, he noticed for the first time. Not gold.
“But I feel like…” she began.
“Yes?”
“I feel like I’m in velvet shackles here.” It was like Milani had lifted a flue, allowing a reservoir of secret thoughts to tumble out of her. “Like I’m supposedly free to do as I wish, but not really. Like Cassandra’s promises are all crap covered in cake icing. But once you take a bite…”
Her words resonated like a bell ringing. They penetrated Kwazi’s bones. First, he’d been the symbol for the Company. Then, Monk had called him the face of the revolution. Saying others’ words for one side or the other, and all of it feeling false. Neither side more real nor more genuine than the other, so it seemed.
“I’ve always wondered why they accepted me so easily into the SSR,” he said. “After only a few days. Now I think I know.”
Milani squeezed his hand.
“I think, eventually, they meant to kill me all along,” he said. The way Telemachus killed
… he suddenly realized. “Dead or alive, I’m propaganda they can spread. And they’ve got that avatar now, the one in the video—it’s not perfect, but … will anyone know who doesn’t know me?”
He looked to Milani and noticed her nearness. Her eyes were fearful and full of concern. “Would they even care if they did?” she whispered.
What was real? What was false? Amy had seemed real, so very real, but now…
“Part of me is asking,” Milani said, “what’s the real difference between the SSR and SynCorp? At least under the Company we had peace. And now the SSR and Cassandra’s promises… I mean, who blew up the mine on Mars in the first place?”
It startled him, Milani asking the very question he’d pondered in his dream—or in Dreamscape through Amy? Milani’s eyes searched his, looking a sympathetic soul maybe, or at least someone else who harbored doubts about Cassandra and her promises.
But Kwazi’s brain was too tired to make sense of it. Reality, fantasy, truth, lies. It was all melting together, becoming muddled and monochromatic in his head, a white noise of confusion.
“Do you really want to kill Helena with your own hands?” Milani’s gaze was piercing and fierce.
“Yes.”
“Really?”
Here too, the doubts crept in.
You died because Helena Telemachus—
—murdered me, yes. Just as Cassandra murdered Max and Mikel.
“I—I thought I did. Now … I’m not sure.”
Her face offered him a small smile.
“You don’t know how happy I am to hear you say that! Oh, Kwazi, I was so worried I’d lost you to—”
“General quarters.”
The red alert blasted from the speakers. “All crew to general quarters. Fire teams prepare for station assault.”
Their eyes locked. Milani pulled him to her, their lips mashing together. Her arms hugged him hard against her. Kwazi melted into the kiss, surrendered to its human connection. And, more than that, to its connection with Milani Stuart.