Haywire (8 page)

“
No. Alex is the Twain aficionado. He mentioned the quote to me one morning and it stuck in my brain.”

A sudden series of thoughts erupted in Shawn’s head about why his mother would be talking to a man in the morning, and he quickly pushed that train of thought off the tracks before it led him places he didn’t want to think about, especially without a cup of coffee in him first.

“
Alright alright,” he said. “I’ll get up. There better be something other than frogs for breakfast though.”

His mother laughed softly, backed out of the doorway, and left him alone. “I’ll see if I can find something more palatable,” she replied as she descended the stairs, the wooden steps just barely groaning as she walked down them.

Shawn stretched under the covers, his arms and legs trembling as he worked all the sleep out of his limbs, then he got up and ambled over to his backpack on the dresser. After unzipping it he turned it over and gave it several rough shakes. Clothing tumbled into a heap on the dresser top. Once it was empty he tossed the backpack into a corner.

He didn’t care much about fashion. Unlike most of the people he knew, he didn’t keep track of what was popular. When people asked him why, he told them it was because he was a rock star, and rock stars set the trends, but inside he knew it was because he was lazy and cheap. He didn’t see the point in spending money or time on something that was strictly utilitarian. It therefore didn’t take him long to pull out a crumpled t-shirt and tattered pair of jeans and put them on. The only article of clothing he always made sure to pack plenty of was socks. He couldn’t stand having cold feet.

As he stepped down to the ground floor of the townhouse, the scent of coffee grew stronger, and was quickly joined by eggs and ham. His dad, despite all his other successes as a parent, was not a good cook. Were it not for his step-mother Patricia, the only meals served in their Martian home would have been those brought in from restaurants and take-out places. His mother, though, had kitchen skills.

“
I hope this is satisfactory,” she said as she sat a plate down on the counter located between the kitchen and living room. On it were two eggs just the way he liked them – the whites firm and crispy along the outside with the yolks jiggling in the middle, ready to burst and cover the plate like slow-flowing sunshine – and a neat pile of thickly sliced ham, the pink meat lightly browned on the edges. Next to the plate was a mug filled to the brim with light brown liquid, the steam rising from it reminding him of the garden in his backyard after a good watering. His stomach growled like an angry bear when he sat on the stool in front of the counter.

His mother refilled her coffee and then sat on the stool on the other side of the counter. After blowing across the top of her mug she took a quick sip. “What are your plans for today?”

Shawn grunted and shoveled half a fried egg into his mouth, the warm yolk thick and creamy on his tongue, then chased it with a slice of salty-sweet ham and washed it down with a swig of coffee. The combination of flavors was heavenly in his mouth. “The band has a big gig coming up, and we need to practice.”

“
I see.” She coughed into her fist and settled into a straight-shouldered position.

He recognized that as her
‘I need to talk to you about something serious’
posture and groaned silently.

“
I hate that I have to go to the museum on your first day here and leave you on your own, but the arrival of the new acquisitions just couldn’t be put off. But, I would love it if you’d meet me for lunch.”

She’d mentioned the acquisition delivery in an email the week before, so that wasn’t a surprise. Planning a lunch date, though, was. “Lunch? That’s the best time for me to get together with my band. We have to practice. Badly. I don’t really have time for lunch.”

His mother lowered her head, and her upper body shrank in on itself like all the air had been taken out of her, but Shawn barely had time to feel bad before she looked back up and gave him a somber look. “Then make time. I normally wouldn’t ask you to take time away from your friends, but this is important.”

The back of his neck grew hot, and he struggled to keep from kicking the wall beneath the counter. “Lunch is a meal, Mom. It’ll come around again tomorrow. Playing at Minerva’s Den might happen once in a lifetime.”

He braced himself for her to dig her heels in, escalate her gaze from somber to stern, but instead she sighed after a few seconds and shrugged her shoulders.

“
Fine. I wanted you to meet Alex today, but with that attitude perhaps it’s best you didn’t.”

Shawn stopped moving, a forkful of egg hovering in front of his mouth. Before that moment he hadn’t realized just how much his mother’s feelings about her new boyfriend were more than she’d let on the night before. He still wanted to stay home and practice, but he was also curious, ready to see a side to her never open to him before.

“
Really? That’s… Huh. No, I can put practice off until later. The guys will be pissed, but whatever. Do I… uh… need to meet you at the museum?”

The lines around his mother’s eyes softened. “That would be good, yes. Come to the museum, and then we’ll go to this little Turkish place Alex likes to go to downtown. He’ll meet us there.” She looked away for a moment, her fingers playing with the handle of her cup. After a few seconds she took a deep breath and said, “In fact, you could come with me to pick up the new acquisitions if you’d like. These new items will make wonderful additions to our collection, and you could be one of the first to see them.”

He shook his head quickly, his curiosity about her boyfriend withering away when her work entered the picture again. “Yeah, no thanks. I didn’t come all this way to look at dusty old Titan stuff.”

She clicked her tongue at him again. “I really don’t know how you can find the Titans anything less than fascinating.”

He shrugged and scarfed down another fully loaded fork of food. This was an old source of contention between then, and the last thing he wanted was to get into it over breakfast. “Do we have to do this, Mom? The Titans are your fascination, not mine. I have a hard enough time dealing with crap that happened yesterday. What that mad man and his crazy inventions did over a century ago doesn’t mean anything to anyone but you.”

“
Don’t call Dr. Groesbeck a ‘mad man,’ “she replied, her tone turning cool. “He was troubled, yes, but he was also a genius, and his Titan project was the only thing that stopped the Hezrin from destroying us and taking Earth.”

Shawn knew the Titans were important to his mother, knew it better than anyone else in the universe aside from his father, and in the dark reaches of his mind he thought they were more important to her than he was. Because of that his feelings about them were less than biased. Had there been a religion built up around the Titans, he was sure she would have been the High Priestess. Her focus on them to the detriment of everything else angered him more than he usually let on.

“
Oh please. We didn’t need them. We could’ve just nuked them to death. It worked on Charon didn’t it?”

She tilted her head in what he thought of as her professor pose. “Charon was an outlying colony, Shawn. Barely more than a dozen people were stationed there. When faced with an invading alien species, the math was obvious.”

He rolled his eyes. “Right. Didn’t they also bomb Triton too?”

“
Sadly, yes.” She finished her coffee and set the empty cup down with a hard clank on the counter. “It was their only option though, despite what the revisionists want you to believe. When the Hezrin attacked, they did it in numbers we couldn’t hope to match. They were too many and too powerful. Our only option was to use the most devastating weapons we had. Anything less would have been meaningless. Worse than that – it would have been suicidal. We couldn’t let the Hezrin take the colonies and use them against us. We could not let ourselves become their slaves.”

“
Better death, huh?”

She didn’t respond to that at first, but after several deep breaths said, “It’s hard being cavalier when talking about the deaths of thousands. Back then it was probably even harder. But the American Alliance and the Eurasian Systems Union knew, in the final analysis, that the choice was clear.”

A swell of anger washed over Shawn’s face, warming him against the townhouse’s chronic chill. “Until Earth, that is, right?” He tried to keep the scorn out of his voice, but he knew he’d failed when his mother shook her head.

“
Don’t let those colony propagandists fool you, Shawn. All the settlements we’ve established are valuable, but none of them – none – is as important as Earth. Even Luna would have been destroyed if it meant keeping Earth safe. Earth is where we came from. It’s our home.”

Shawn rolled his eyes. He’d been born in Seattle, Washington, but he’d spent most of his life living on Luna and then on Mars, so for him Earth wasn’t all that special. It certainly wasn’t his home. His friends were even less charitable, especially those whose parents had lost their jobs. Whenever the economy got tight, everyone suffered but Earth. That was where the money always flowed to. He knew he didn’t understand the intricacies of interplanetary economics, but he saw the big picture as clearly as everyone else. Earth came first. Everyone else fought it out for a distant second.

“
Luckily that was when Dr. Groesbeck stepped forward and unveiled his plan for stopping the Hezrin,” his mother said. “The Titans. Who would have thought that something as tiny as nanites could come together and make something so powerful?”

“
Groesbeck, I guess?”

It was a poor joke, but his mother patted him on the arm and laughed anyway.

“
Exactly. Only someone brilliant or insane could have conceived of them. Nanites had been used before across a wide variety of applications, from medical probes to starship construction, but no one had ever thought to use them to rebuild a human being into a god.”

Inhaling sharply, Shawn sucked a lump of egg into his throat, and he had to cough several times before it cleared. When he had his breath again he said, “A god who abandons the people they swore to protect? Doesn’t sound all that divine to me.”

Scorn covered his mother’s face like a cowl. “That’s your father talking.”

“
He might have a point.”

“
That would be a first.”

Shawn’s eyes hardened. He didn’t like anyone speaking badly of his father, especially her. Before he could say anything, though, she waved her hand.

“
I’m sorry, that was glib, and I didn’t mean it. But your father’s wrong. The Titans didn’t abandon us – they saved us.”

“
Maybe, but ‘god’ is still a little over the top. They didn’t stop the Hezrin with bolts of lightning, did they? As strong as they were, they still had to fly ships and shoot guns. They didn’t pull those from their own bodies.”

His mother nodded, a small grin on her face showing she was enjoying the back and forth. “No, but even then it was Groesbeck’s genius that made it come together. He made the Titans, and then he showed the military how to make weapons that would integrate with their nanite-enhanced bodies. Without the Titans in control, those ships and guns would have been as useless as every other weapon we’d thrown against the Hezrin. The Titans were the key to all of it.”

Knowing he was getting nowhere with that line of discussion, he tried changing tracks. “If they’re so damn heroic, then why do you always speak about them like they’re tragic figures?”

She tilted her head again, and he could see words churning behind her eyes. “You have to understand, they gave up their normal lives, maybe even their humanity, to become something greater, and I think that sacrifice gets lost in the stories and history books. Groesbeck remade them from the inside out. He might have made them more than human, but in some ways he made them less, too. If they were gods, it’s a rather tragic sort of divinity. They were forged into the ultimate weapon, and all they would ever know again was war.”

Shawn wasn’t convinced of that, not even close, but the way she spoke made him reconsider his feelings a bit. “I dunno, maybe. But if they were such great warriors, why did they run off and leave us?”

“
I… don’t know,” his mother replied with a heavy exhale. “No one does. After they forced the Hezrin from Earth and chased them back into space, the records get muddy. Warships were everywhere, messages were flying back and forth; it was chaos. The only clue we have is a short message that said, ‘More are coming.’ After that a team of Titans boarded a Hezrin ship that was still functioning and used it to lead the rest of their forces into unknown space. They were never heard from again. To their credit, neither were the Hezrin.”

He couldn’t argue that point, but he still wasn’t ready to worship them the way his mother did. “Well, they still left us defenseless and sifting through rubble. Hell, Mom, it’s been a hundred years and we’re still rebuilding.”

“
Just be glad we had something to rebuild.” She offered him a partial smile and stood up, her cup in hand. “These are all just words though. Perhaps if you came to the museum and saw some of their history for yourself you’d see things differently. “

“
I don’t know, maybe tomorrow,” he said before he picked his plate up and pushed the remainder of his food into his open mouth. Over the plate’s rim he saw his mother’s eyes open wide in disgust, but he didn’t stop pushing until the plate was empty.