“So what now?” Ethan said. “Are you going back to space?” His voice sounded cautiously neutral.
I would have thought I’d had enough of Earth. Ghosts, people trying to kill me, unpleasant memories.
On the other hand, I lifted my face to the sun, its warmth giving me strength and energy. Maybe it was time to stop running from memories and face them head on, the way I had always prided myself that I did. I had ghosts to lay to rest after all, or at least one small ghost. It was the least I could do for Bianca Fermes, who had been one of my grandfather’s victims long before I was born.
Space had been a respite, but it wasn’t home. Even gravity no longer felt burdensome, as if my muscles were eager to regain strength. It helped that Ethan’s arms around me felt good and strong, a reminder that gravity didn’t just hold us down, it held us together, too.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I think I’ll stay awhile and see if I can get used to one-g again.”
His response was to give me a kiss, one that was neither kind nor comforting, but hungry and passionate. He broke off to whisper in my ear.
“Welcome home, Captain Sabatini. It’s about time you came back down to Earth.”
Fade Away and Radiate
Michele Lang
The only woman on an uninhabitable planet listened to the wail of the nightwind, alone in a research hut in the dead of the night. She studied her data outputs, and tried like hell not to think of Roberto. Because thinking of Roberto got her thinking about why she’d come to this desolate place. And thinking of her self-
exile made her think of the man she was running away from . . .
There was a knock on the door.
It was the moment she had imagined a million times with dread, and yet now that it had come, she wasn’t ready. With a gasp, Anika Bowman jumped from her chair, but before she could make any further moves, the door to her field lab swung open.
She glanced across the hut, to where her blaster lay hidden under her flat foam pillow. Her fingers itched to grab it, but it was too late now. Anika had bet her life on the simple fact that she was too far away from the rest of humanity to be murdered. If she survived the next few minutes, she would never make such a stupid mistake again.
Anika forced herself to look at the hulking figure filling up her doorway. Far away, outside the geodome in which she’d built the hut, the nightwind howled, hungry, unrequited. The haunting sound still pierced her heart.
“It’s me,” a muffled voice said, crackling over the spacesuit’s interface.
For a single, agonizing moment, she imagined it was Roberto, come back to her across infinity. That behind that mirrored helmet, Roberto was speaking to her now, that somehow he’d returned, as he’d once promised.
A miracle. But, no.
Roberto was dead, just another casualty of the Glass Desert war. Roberto hadn’t come back to her in a box, or an urn, or even on a memory stick or a download with a farewell message. He’d just gotten vaporized, as if he’d never existed in the first place.
Whoever this warrior was, hidden in his spacesuit, it wasn’t her husband. Roberto was never coming back. She was sure of it.
Big square hands encased in spacegloves reached up to remove the domed, mirrored helmet. She took a half-step back, her heart pounding so hard in her chest it shook her with every beat.
Anika saw the man’s face. She staggered backwards in her shock. Roberto would have blown her away less.
“Billy Murphy, it’s you,” she managed to gasp. “Never thought I’d see your face again.”
Captain Billy Murphy grinned and looked her up and down in a single glance. It was him: that thick, uncontrollable black hair. (Much longer now since the last time she’d seen him.) The deep-blue eyes, the spare, effective body. That face, even more appealing for the marks inflicted by all the trouble he’d survived.
“Yep, me,” Billy replied, and he laughed. “Took long enough for me to find you, am I right? Like you didn’t want me to find you.”
She stared at him in wonder as he shut the door behind him, clomped into the research hut, took a look around. Didn’t take more than a quick scan for Billy to see all there was to see.
The truth be told, she was relieved. Her life in the hut was over, no matter what happened now between her and this man, the last one to see her husband alive. And no matter how much she’d once craved the solitude and the silence of this stony, dead planet, Anika knew she couldn’t live in this frozen hell forever.
“How did you find me?” Anika forced the words past the lump in her throat. She would rather die than cry in front of Billy Murphy. She’d already done too much crying in this man’s presence. She didn’t dare do it again.
Billy laughed louder, and pulled the fingers of his gloves one by one with his straight, white teeth to get them off. “Bet you wanna know how I cracked your code.”
He was like a tiger transformed into a man, pacing the little room in his armor, sizing up her potential as a meal. Both of them knew she was no warrior.
The floor shook under his boots as he walked, cracked his knuckles, and wiggled his fingers to get the circulation into them again. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”
For now, Anika couldn’t help playing out what was going to happen next, going at a hundred times normal speed in her mind, like an end-of-life experience. The return to Earth. Her attempted, reattempted, and then final resignation from FortuneCorp – that place that had made her career, the place that wanted her soul along with her employment. A world corporation that intended to own this galaxy, that didn’t let the little cogs in its mighty machine just break away.
So she would spurn the company, walk unaffiliated, unprotected, in New York. And one fine afternoon, walking along Broadway or riding the helobus, or reading newsfeeds in Petraeus Park, the end would come for her at last. A murderer would poison her, or kidnap her, or just wipe her out. It happened to genetic and nuclear scientists all the time. It had happened to Roberto. And if Billy was anywhere around, it would happen to him, too.
His expression softened when he saw her stricken face. “Listen, I made you a promise,” he explained.
“At Roberto’s memorial. I swore, and I swore it to Robbo first. If anything happened to him in country, I was coming back after to watch out for you. You and I ain’t got nobody else.”
“I don’t need watching.” Anika cringed inside at the huskiness in her voice. She cleared her throat and stood straighter, not willing to yield to his charms. It was the same way she stood up to the fears that still stalked her every night. “I’m a big girl, and I’ve managed to survive just fine on my own all this time. I don’t need your help.”
Billy crossed his arms over his big, armored chest, and he shifted uneasily on his feet. It was as close as she’d ever come to seeing him losing his cool. “You’re a good girl, and I know why Roberto loved you so hard. But you’re lying to me. You’re not surviving out here. You’re lingering. Okay?”
The silence rose up like a ghost, and they stared at each other through the suddenly too-little space closing in between them.
Anika felt the damn tears coming, but she refused to shed them. Instead, she walked across the little room in three steps to her cot, and the blaster hidden there.