The Apocalypse Ocean (12 page)

The door slid open and Kay watched the woman limp into the apartment with narrowed eyes. Outside, the insanely packed streets of Gateway’s Port Ahbed leaked a cacophony of sound into the apartment, most of which Kay couldn’t even interpret.

She was well out of her comfort zone.

The invisible technology, the people staring off into other worlds while bumping into her. It all rankled. But even in Port Ahbed they understood gold. And there were shady people in shady places.

She might have sailed through wormholes to travel to an entirely new world. But there were still thieves, pickpockets, and criminals to be found.

The woman turned on the lights and jumped when she saw Kay.

“Hello Avris,” Kay said from her perch on top of the wooden crate she’d hauled between worlds, from Placa del Fuego to the planet of Gateway. She stopped peeling the orange in her hands. “I need your help.”

#

Avris steadied herself against a counter and stared at Kay. “I looked for you,” she said. “After the riot. I took leave and fought to find you.”

“But you didn’t find me,” Kay said. “I would have remembered that.”

The side of Avris’s face twitched slightly. “When the camp told me you had been transferred I sent a message asking if you were okay, and found out you’d never made it. There were so many being moved. I tracked the transport ship’s transponder, but it was shut off – they claimed it died two worlds back from Gateway. I took a gamble and came here. I spent two weeks searching for anything, but had to go back.”

“And you came back after the war,” Kay said.

“I kept looking.”

Kay watched her intently, reading the fleeting expressions. Relief, guilt, frustration. “And then?”

The guilt settled back in for a second. Good.

“And then?” Avris looked up at her.

“You’re still here,” Kay noted. “In a nice apartment. With a nice job. But I actually ended up on Octavia. Placa del Fuego. No technology. No camps to help me out. No one to help explain a strange new world to me. Surely you heard that many people from my world were being dumped there. There’s quite a community huddled there.”

“I’ve heard,” Avris said. “I planned to go there. Next.”

“Next,” Kay said flatly. “Or are you starting to make friends and settle into the community here. A year is long enough. Been on a date recently?”

Avris flinched.

Kay folded her hands together and sighed. “I used to blame you,” she said. She was hitting Avris hard, knocking her back verbally. “Those first nights on Placa del Fuego, when the burning rain would sear my skin and I huddled where I could. I hated you for putting me in the camp.”

Avris bowed her head and her shoulders slumped slightly. She didn’t say anything.

The tiniest smile quirked the corners of Kay’s lips. “Despite all your magical technology, the beating from that riot never left me fully healed. I still ache at nights. Some worse than others.”

Now Kay stood up and walked across the tile floor, watching her prey very closely.

“There were long nights. Hungry nights, on that rundown island. Nights where I hated it all and wished I’d just died back at the pit,” Kay continued. She stopped in front of Avris and took her chin in a hand. She forced Avris to look her in the eye. “But here’s a simple truth: I forgive you.”

Avris slumped forward even more. She would be feeling even guiltier now.

“I was dead in that desert, and you saved me,” Kay said. “So every day after that was a gift that you gave me. I sought you out not because I want revenge, or out of anger. I came here because you’re the only person I could think of that can help me right now.”

When Avris looked up, Kay smiled sadly. The woman was all but in a trance of gratitude and grief.

“What do you need?” Avris asked.

“I need help defecting to the League,” Kay said.

“The League?”

“You think of them as the enemy,” Kay said. “But they do understand one thing better than your Xenowealth. They understand that aliens cannot be trusted. They purged them from their worlds, isolated them, and in some cases, killed them. And they’re right. On Placa del Fuego the aliens cluster in their districts and plot against us, plan to return to the dominance they once held. Like on the world you found me.”

“We’re no longer at war,” Avris said, fumbling. “The League doesn’t fight us anymore. And in the Xenowealth we expect all species to work together. But we prosecute the individuals who did those horrible things.”

“Well, on Placa del Fuego there is at least one alien that plans to rule over us again,” Kay said. “It is more powerful than anyone in the Xenowealth can handle. Ignore it, and soon that world will be no different than the place you found me. You know my history. You know why I will fight this alien threat.”

Avris folded her arms and crumpled in on herself slightly. And then she stood up straight. The soldier in her coming back to the forefront with a grim, clenched jaw. “You’re not a child. I guess – according to what they told me about you, you never really were.”

Kay’s eyes glinted. “I was never given the option,” she said.

“You’re manipulating me. That’s what you were bred to do.”

Bred. Kay curled her lip. “I
am
manipulating you. But I haven’t lied to you. I came to you for your help. I need the ability to change gold to currency, to use computers, and to get to League territory. I could do it alone, but it’ll be faster with your help. And while I could hunt someone down and turn them into an ally, you did leave me in that camp after I begged you not too. I don’t blame you, but you do owe me a big favor, don’t you, Avris?”

The pilot nodded. “Okay. Okay. I’ll help you.” She looked at the crate Kay had dragged into her apartment. “But what’s that?”

Kay turned back and looked at it.

“Nothing you need to worry about just now,” she said.

The plans were still a bit hazy in her head. She knew she needed to bring both the Xenowealth and the League into Placa del Fuego in full force. Right now, both parties kept the area a neutral zone. Which was nice, but it created a vacuum into which the Doaq operated free of consequence.

In fact, she had realized while sitting in the dark waiting for Avris, that was a sign of the Doaq’s weakness. If it were as powerful as she had feared, would it have appeared in a neutral zone out of reach of both the Xenowealth and the League?

No.

She wouldn’t believe it more powerful until she saw the full attention of both the Xenowealth and the League turned to the creature.

Kay needed to bring war, on the scale that she’d seen when her world was liberated from the Nesaru, to Placa del Fuego.

And a Xenowealth-designed and built dirty bomb might well do just the trick of getting the League to pay very close attention.

The streets of Trumball baked in the hot sun. This was League territory, in practicality. Technically, Octavia was neutral, another buffer area agreed on by the League and the Xenowealth. Here politicians could meet. Citizens could migrate off to other worlds. But Trumball was the League side of the neutral area.

Trumball’s floating docks and structures were concrete, square, and practical. There were no gardens or greenspaces like Reception. No trees lining the canals leading to the wormhole.

Military police in olive uniforms patrolled the streets, and people avoided your eyes.

The only chaos allowed to proceed in Trumball was near the docks, where orderly markets allowed by the Governor’s Council occupied pre-built concrete table slabs to sell their wares.

Small black spheres sullenly regarded the world from scattered perches on building corners, lamps, and eaves. Just like on League planets, the Council here watched everything. And the Governor’s Council reported everything back through the wormhole upstream to the League.

Not a good place, Kay thought, to be on the wrong side of the law. Which was exactly where she stood right now. Or at least, planned to stand. 

“Relax,” Kay told Avris, who kept staring at every single uniformed goon that meandered by. “You’re too nervous.”

They sat by the docks in a tiny bar, watching ships load, unload, or head up the canal towards the Trumball wormhole. Like the other floating cities of Octavia, the black disk of the wormhole sat right in the heart of the city. Everything here had started out built near it, and then slowly crept outward.

“I’m nervous because our guy’s late,” Avris said. “You know how risky trying to smuggle yourself into the League is?”

“Relax,” Kay repeated, and stilled Avris with a hand on the wrist. The physical touch was all that was needed. Avris visibly deflated.

Kay pushed the small mug of mead on the table closer to Avris. “You got me all the way back here. You contacted the people we needed to find. We’re doing fine. Drink some of the mead, if you need it. We can get another. And relax.” Kay couldn’t communicate through invisible networks. She couldn’t even understand what she was looking at when Avris put the glasses on her that let her see lamina, a universe of data laid over everything you could see.

It was overwhelming.

Kay had no doubt that, in time, like learning how to read, she could master it. But she didn’t have another two years to invest in mastering this new concept. The Doaq would own the island, if not more, by then.

She sighed and eyed the mead. She wanted to feel the extra warmth and calm that would come from a long sip. But that would break the illusion she was creating with Avris.

Knock back mead, and Avris would remember the reality: that Kay was not some broken child turned up on her doorstep. 

No. She was something else entirely.

#

An old woman in a tattered, grease-streaked gray uniform sat down at the table between Avris and Kay, as if she had always known them.

She picked up the mead. Sipped it. With the mug over her mouth she asked, “Are you ready?”

Kay rubbed Avris’s shoulder. “Relax,” she repeated. “Let’s go.”

“Follow me,” the woman ordered.

She moved quickly. Lean from years of working on the docks with machinery and manual labor. Avris limped, struggling to keep up, and Kay eventually gave her an arm to lean on.

“What happened to your leg?” Kay asked. “I don’t remember a limp.”

Avris didn’t answer, but squinted up at the road ahead. They walked past the busy market and toward a more modern shopping district. Cold air wafted out from storefronts.

They cut through an alley and back to an old warehouse.

The old woman waved them through a rusty old door and inside, where the tall expanse was filled with plastic storage crates. A large robotic claw hung from chains in the roof.

There was a shed in the back, playfully decorated with bright, colorful landscapes on the roof and walls.

“In there,” she ordered.

Now it was Kay’s turn to tense. She stopped and looked at the shed.

“What’s wrong?” Avris asked.

“There’s someone waiting for us in there,” Kay muttered. She took half a step back, and the woman whipped out a tiny black pistol.

“Inside,” she ordered.

Avris gave Kay an I-told-you-so look, and grimaced.

“It’s okay,” Kay said, continuing to stare at the woman. “We’re not in physical danger. But we don’t have a choice.” She looked around the warehouse. She couldn’t see them, but she sensed that the woman knew there were others out here, watching them.

They would be armed as well.

The woman waved them inside. From the door, Kay could see shelves packed with what looked like technological junk. Broken computers, cables, fiber optics, chips, old fabrication machines, and more that she couldn’t guess at the functions of. 

Avris stepped through first, and Kay followed.