But Annie reached for Billy’s hand and squeezed, and despite the terrible urgency that they get off AlphaZed3 now, he waited for her, the way he always had.
Annie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and saw with her inner sight the place where Billy spoke to her. And she saw that in truth three of them walked in the jungle at dawn.
Goodbye, Roberto, she said inside of her, knowing that Billy could hear her too. I will love you forever.
Adios, mi corazon, Roberto replied. Anika will stay with me, Annie goes with Billy. You go on, and I will too. We will meet again, in that place beyond the edge of forever.
Annie kissed Roberto in her mind, and finally let him go. The whisper of his goodbye echoed over her as he faded away, speaking into her for the first time, and the last.
She watched him go, blinked the vision away, and took a look around. Only a moment had passed, but all had changed.
She was still in the clearing. Billy still waited for her. For the first time, Annie believed she could be free. Free of FortuneCorp, free of the past, free of herself and her fears.
“I never spoke with Roberto like that, you know, in the soul,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I really want to say goodbye to him.”
She waited for the faithful tears to appear, but for the first time, they didn’t come.
Billy spoke out loud, gently, with a sort of reverence. “Aw, you spoke to him without words, always, Annie. You have the soul of a healer. A grower of seeds, right? Anybody who could grow a world like this has the power to whisper into a heart. And what I heard was Roberto saying goodbye to you. He let you go, he wants you to go, you’re free. He still loves you.”
He took her hand and quietly pulled her forward through the little Eden she had cultivated. And she only paused to pull the Bowman eco-drive out of the ground. To take it with them, to grow a new world.
And they came to the perimeter, behind the research hut, where Billy had moved through the barrier between her fledgling paradise and the ice.
“I don’t have a cold-weather suit for you,” Billy said. “You can’t go out there yet.”
They stared beyond the clear barrier between Annie’s warm, unfurling garden and the frozen hell howling outside. Dimly, she could see the landing pod Billy had used to come down to her. It was already half-buried in the swirling snow and clouded ice of the native world.
And then she saw it. The rebel ship breaking through the ice planet’s orbit, hovering over the frozen surface. She read the words painted crudely on the battered hulclass="underline" The Sullivan.
A warm cascade of light shot from the belly of the ship to Billy’s landing pod, then traveled along the ice to the permeable plexisurface of the geodome, seeking Billy. His soul.
The light poured through the clear membrane, warming her like the sun of her childhood. Annie put her hands up against the plexi, feeling the cool membrane yielding to the pressure of her fingertips.
And then right before Annie walked through into the protective light of The Sullivan’s waybeam, Violet rose up from underfoot. Beating her wings into the ground, like a homicidal mechanical hummingbird with a hypodermic needle for a beak, stabbing Annie’s shoe again and again and again.
Her poison vial, now empty.
Billy looked down, then scraped Violet off her foot with his boot, and stomped until the AI was no more than a cluster of crushed gears.
“I bet the beacon inside the AI still works,” Billy said. “We’re getting out of here, just in time.”
With that, they pressed through the membrane and walked up the pathway of light and into the belly of the ship that waited for them.
And Annie looked back one last time, to the garden she had grown, to the illusion of safety she was leaving behind. The dome glowed in the morning sunlight, iridescent as a soap bubble, the blasted frozen whiteness surrounding it.
Roberto wasn’t there.
A huge weight suddenly rolled off her shoulders, a burden she’d never realized she carried, until it was released. After a long, barren season, she was ready. It was time for Annie to let the grief move through her, radiate and fade away, though not the love, never the love. She’d never forget him, would love him always, but now she knew she was strong enough to carry the loss forward into the future.
Annie turned, kept walking into the light. And Billy Murphy walked beside her. She’d never run away again.
New Earth Twelve
Mandy M. Roth
One
Delta Quadrant 2948, on board Expedition Vessel Rhea Olivia Blu punched the last sequence of coordinates into the ship’s control panel. She double-checked her course, waiting for the display screen to give her a visual of the destination of her choosing. As her destination appeared, a level of enthusiasm that couldn’t be tempered rushed through her. Olivia’s gaze went to one of the many cameras mounted throughout the huge transport vessel. The camera made a tiny noise and zoomed in on her. She smiled, obviously pleased. “That’s it. Twelve is less than a week away.
We did it.”
“No,” a deep, totally masculine voice said from the communication unit in the bridge. “You did it, Livia.”
She snorted, pushing her long dark hair back from her face. She tied it in a loose bun and ran her fingers over the display screen showing the planet they were approaching. As a Goldilocks planet, it was situated among the stars in such a way that it could possibly support human life. Its atmospheric pressure was within the necessary range to be able to hold water, and by all accounts and probe readings, it had breathable air and everything needed for survival. The only thing they didn’t have were clear images of the entire surface. The series of probes they’d launched over the course of the journey had malfunctioned mysteriously, giving only half the data required. Like the recon team sent over thirty years ago, the probes had vanished.
It wasn’t the first planet humans had tried to colonize. She doubted it would be the last. The first eleven tries had been met with one failure or another. Sickness. War. Alien races that were unwelcoming. The list went on and on. The twelfth try would be different. She was sure of it. It had felt like this day might never come. But there it was on her screen – planet Twelve.
“I was thirteen when I woke up. I think we both know that without your guidance and help I’d have been put out an airlock long ago,” she said casually.
The man controlling the cameras was quiet for a moment. “I wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.”
“Cam,” she said respectfully, her attention still pulled to the sight of Twelve. “Let’s be honest here.
Quincy would have found a way to override your control of the vessel, and he’d have ejected me out an airlock had you not been there to walk me through what to do, and had you not activated all the androids on board to assist.”
“I wasn’t there, Livia,” he said, sounding overwrought. She wondered if he had as much remorse as it sounded like he did. “I’ve never been able to actually be there.”
“In physical form, no,” she agreed. It was true. He’d been a voice for the past ten years of her journey – a guiding voice, but a voice all the same. “Cameron, you’ve been there in all the other ways that matter.”
She touched the image of Twelve on the screen. She didn’t want to dwell on the negative, on all that couldn’t be altered. She wanted to try her best to focus on their future, even though it meant changes on the horizon. “We did it. In less than a week we’ll be in Twelve’s orbit. A lot of things will be different, won’t they?”