He Got Your Girl
I’m alive, thought Pierce, then did a double take.
I’m alive? Everything was black, and he
couldn’t tell which way was up. There was a metallic taste in his
mouth, and he ached everywhere.
“Where am I?” he
asked.
“You’ll have to wait
while we cut you out of that,” said a stranger. Their voice sounded
oddly muffled, and he realized with surprise that it wasn’t coming
from inside him. “You took an EMP that fried your suit. You only
just made it out in time—you took several sieverts. We’ve got a bed
waiting for you.”
Something pushed at
his side, and he felt a strange tipping motion. “Am I in free
fall?” he asked.
“Of course. Try not
to move.”
I’m not on Earth, he realized. It was strange; he’d
effectively visited hundreds of planets with ever-shifting
continents and biospheres, but he’d never been off Earth before.
They were all aspects of Gaia, causally entangled slices through
the set of all possible Earths that the Stasis called their
own.
Someone tugged on his
left foot, and he felt a chill of cold air against his skin. His
toes twitched. “That’s very good, keep doing that. Tell me if
anything hurts.” The voice was still muffled by the remains of his
hood, but he could place it now. Kari, a quiet woman, one of the
trainees from the class above him. He tensed, panic rising in a
choking wave. “Hey—Yarrow! He’s stressing out—”
“Hold still, Pierce.”
Yarrow’s voice in his ears, also fuzzy. “Your phone’s off-line, it
took a hit too. Kari’s with us. It’s going to be all
right.”
You don’t have any right to tell me that, he
thought indignantly, but the sound of her voice had the desired
effect. So Kari’s one of them too. Was
there no end to the internal rot within the Stasis? In all honesty,
considering his own concupiscence—possibly not. He tried to slow
his breathing, but it was slowly getting stuffy and hot inside the
wreckage of his survival suit.
More parts detached
themselves from his skin. He was beginning to itch furiously, and
the lack of gravity seemed to be making him nauseous. Finally, the
front of his hood cracked open and floated away. He blinked teary
eyes against the glare, trying to make sense of what his eyes were
telling him.
“Kari—”
The spherical drone
floating before his face wore her face on its smartskin. A flock of
gunmetal lampreys swam busily behind it, worrying at pieces of the
dead and mildly radioactive suit. Some distance beyond, a wall of
dull blue triangles curved around him, dish-like, holes piercing it
in several places.
“Try not to speak,”
said Kari’s drone. “You’ve taken a borderline-fatal dose, and we’re
going to have to get you to a sick bay right away.”
His throat ached. “Is
Yarrow there?”
Another spherical
drone floated into view from somewhere behind him. It wore Xiri’s
face. “My love? I’ll visit you as soon as you’ve cleared
decontamination. The enemy are always trying to sneak bugs in: they
wouldn’t let me through to see you now. Be strong, my lord.” She
smiled, but the worry-wrinkles at the corners of her eyes betrayed
her. “I’m very proud of you.”
He tried to reply,
but his stomach had other ideas and attempted to rebel. “Feel. Sick
. . .”
Someone kissed the
back of his neck with lips of silver, and the world faded
out.
Pierce regained
consciousness with an abrupt sense of rupture, as if no time at all
had passed: someone had switched his sense of awareness off and on
again, just as his parents might once have power-cycled a balky
appliance.
“Love?
Pierce?”
He opened his eyes
and stared at her for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. It
felt oddly normal: the aches had all evaporated. “We’ve got to stop
meeting like this.” The bed began to rise behind his back.
“Xiri?”
Her clothing was
outrageous to Hegemonic forms (not to say anachronistic or
unrevealing), but she was definitely his Xiri; as she leaned
forward and hugged him fiercely he felt something bend inside him,
a dam of despair crumbling before a tidal wave of relief. “How did
they find you?” he asked her shoulder, secure in her embrace.
“Why did they reinstate—”
“Hush. Pierce. You
were so ill—”
He hugged her back.
“I was?”
“They kept me from
you for half a moon! And the burns, when they cut that suit away
from you. What did you do?”
Pierce pondered the
question. “I changed my mind about . . . something I’d agreed to do
. . .”
They lay together on
the bed until curiosity got the better of him. “Where are we? When
are we?” Where did you get that
jumpsuit?
Xiri sighed, then
snuggled closer to him. “It’s a long story,” she said quietly. “I’m
still not sure it’s true.”
“It must be, now,” he
pointed out reasonably, “but perhaps it wasn’t, for a while. But
where are we?”
She eased back a
little. “We’re in orbit around Jupiter. But not for much
longer.”
“But I—” He stopped.
“Really?”
“They disconnected
your phone, or I could show you. The colony fleets, the
shipyards.”
He blinked at her,
astonished. “How?”
“We all have phone
implants, here.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement. “This isn’t the
Stasis you know.”
“I’d guessed.” He
swallowed. “How long has it been for you?”
“Since”—her breath
caught, a little ragged—“two years. A little longer.”
He gently trapped her
right hand in his, ran his thumb across the smooth, plump skin on
the back of her wrist. She let him. “Almost the same.” He swallowed
once more. “I thought I’d never see you again. Anyone would think
they’d planned this.”
“Oh, but they did.”
She gave a nervous little laugh. “He said they didn’t want us to,
to desynchronize. Get too far apart.” Her fingers closed around his
thumb, constricting and warm.
“Who is ‘he’?” asked
Pierce, although he thought he knew.
“He used to be you,
once. That’s what he told me.” Her grip tightened suddenly. “He’s
not you, love, it’s not the same. At
all.”
“I must see
him.”
Pierce tried to sit
up: Xiri clung to him, dragging him down. “No! Not yet,” she
hissed.
Pierce stopped
struggling before he hurt her. His arms and his stomach muscles
felt curiously strong, almost as if they’d never been damaged. “Why
not?”
“Scholar Yarrow asked
me to, to intercede. She said you’d want to confront him.” She
tensed when she spoke Yarrow’s name. “She was right. About lots of
things.”
“What’s her position
here?”
“She’s with him.”
Xiri hesitated. “It took much getting used to. I made a fool of
myself once, early on.”
He raised a hand to
stroke her hair. “I can understand that.” Pierce pondered his lack
of reaction. “It’s been years since I knew her, you know. And if
he’s who—what—I think he is, he was never married to you. Was
he?”
“No.” She lay against
him in silence for a while. “What are you going to do?” she asked
in a small voice.
Pierce smiled at the
ceiling. (It was low, and bare of decoration: another sign, if he
needed one, that he was not back in the Hegemony.) For the time
being, the shock and joy of finding her again had left him giddy
with relief. “Where are the children?” he asked, forcing himself:
one last test.
“I left Liann with a
nurse. Magnus is away, in the ship’s scho lasticos.” Concern slowly
percolated across her expression. “They’ve grown a lot: do you
think—”
He breathed out
slowly, relieved. “There will be time to get to know them again,
yes.” She reached over his chest and hugged him tight. He stroked
her hair, content for the moment but sadly aware that everything
was about to change. “But tell me one thing. What is it that you’re
so desperate to keep from me?”