Crescent (30 page)

Kendall had all but forgotten about the
rockstar’s
upcoming concert on Crescent. Kendall had agreed to host the final performance of
Haddyrein’s
outer rim tour months ago. It was to be good publicity for Crescent—a revitalization of the station’s image. Kendall didn’t realize the date had almost arrived.
You can’t pay for timing like this,
Kendall thought. The station’s complete disarray would be broadcast across all the seventeen systems. Kendall took a deep breath. It would be far worse to cancel the concert.

“The concert will go on. You get the station running in top shape again. Do you hear me? Work with Vegan. Pool any and all resources you need to. And make sure we have more than enough security at that concert. I don’t care if you get people from off the streets.”

“Yes, Mayor.”

“Clean up this fucking mess,” Kendall commanded.

Albin
stepped aside and opened the door for the security captain. After Benedict took his leave,
Albin
closed the door and resumed his casual lean. He dropped the cigarette he had been smoking and crushed it out beneath his boot.

“What did I tell you about that?” Kendall said. He was not in the mood. A small, flat circular robot exited a mouse-hole in the wall and scooped up the discarded cigarette butt. It vacuumed the portion of the floor where the cigarette had been extinguished and then disappeared back into the wall.

“Things are falling apart around our ears,
Albin
,” Kendall said and slammed his fist down on desk’s dark surface. The
LCDs
were blank; Kendall had disabled the feeds as soon as he heard about the riot and ensuing bloodshed. “
Swaren
is
comin
’ after me. By now, he’s ready to make his move. You keep a close eye on him. That means, don’t get drunk, you fool. We need our wits about us. We are at a crucial time here.”

“Why don’t we just get rid of him, Ezra?”
Albin
lit another cigarette.

“It’s not easy to make a Core Sec auditor disappear.”

Albin
shrugged and said, “Matter of opinion.”

“Go drink some coffee or something. Sober up, for god’s sake.”
Albin
smiled around the filter of his cigarette and left the room.

Kendall was alone.

“We had a deal,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “You’re
my
fucking station and we had a deal.”

The office was dead silent.

“You still have no words for me?
After all these years?”
The mayor activated the door lock; the bolts clacked into place. He leaned back in the consuming leather chair and closed his eyes.

“Then perhaps,” Kendall said, “I still have a chance.”

(•••)

The conical speakers in the cell block screamed for two straight hours. When the alarm finally stopped, Gerald’s ears rang with a persistence that was almost as bad as the sirens.
Almost.
Gerald stopped combing the cell for sharp objects to shove in his ears, and thanked every god he could think of for the silence. He even made up some gods to thank. Whatever the hell was going on in the outside world, it must have been a big deal.

Not long after blessed silence had fallen, people were deposited into the holding cells around him. Shredded clothing hung on bodies that had clearly been involved in some brand of violence. If his new neighbors had been a fighting bunch earlier, all the fight had gone out of them now. Gerald wasn’t sure if he was glad to have the company. It had been quiet earlier when he was all alone—that silence had been unsettling. Now, Gerald was surrounded by people and it was still dead quiet. The variety of silence freaked him out even more.

“Hey,” Gerald said in an attempt to get the attention of the opposite cell’s occupant. A fat man in a stained shirt—it had to be blood—and torn khaki pants lay on his side on the cell’s metal cot. The bed was far too narrow for the man’s substantial girth. He didn’t respond, so Gerald called him again.

“Shut the fuck up!” someone shouted from down the row.

“Mister,” Gerald called, a little softer this time.

“Please. Leave me alone,” the fat man said. “I just want to sleep and forget that anything happened. They promised me they’d let me go tomorrow if I kept my mouth shut. I just want to get home to my family. I just want to make sure everyone is okay.”

Gerald leaned against the bars and remained silent. He looked down at his bare feet. Suddenly, the floor didn’t seem so cold. Or rather, Gerald just didn’t care anymore. He felt bad for the guy. The sound of defeat was thick in his voice. But, Gerald couldn’t keep his curiosity at bay any longer.

“Look. I’m not trying to be insensitive. I can tell you’ve had it rough. I’ve been in here all night. Do you think you could tell me what happened out there?” Gerald asked.

“What’s your name?” the fat man said, but didn’t change positions.

“Gerald.”

“Gerald. I’m Bob Parks.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Parks.”

“Gerald. Do you have a family?” Bob asked.

Gerald thought of Liam then. He tried to picture his older brother in the same situation, and could not.

“Not really, no,” Gerald answered.

“Consider yourself lucky. Something really bad is going on around here. No one is safe anymore,” Bob said.

Gerald didn’t have the stomach for anything cryptic. He grimaced, but bit his tongue before he could lash out at his neighbor. The pilot took a deep, measured breath before he spoke.

“Bob. Mr. Parks. With all due respect, please don’t get all preachy-creepy on me, here. I’ve got people that I care about on this station too, and I want to make sure they’re okay.
So, please.
Cut to it. What the fuck happened out there?”

 
Silence grew between them. Gerald had all but given up on Bob Parks when the man finally started speaking.

“There was a fight in Heathen’s.
Turned into a brawl.
Turned into a riot.
And then…
 
it happened.”

“What happened, Bob?” Gerald insisted.

“I…
 
I don’t know. Horrible colors…
 
a lot of blood and a lot of screaming. I hit the floor and started crawling. I remembered something I had learned once, in an emergency, you should crawl to safety,” Bob said.

“That’s if there’s a fire, Bob.”

“Right.
Yeah. Okay. I’m lucky I didn’t get trampled. But people…
 
” Bob’s voice trembled with a sob. “They were getting torn apart in there.”

“
It’s
okay, Bob. I think I’ve heard enough.” Gerald sat down on the cold slab of a bed. He propped his chin on his hand. He was sure Bob was exaggerating a little bit, but judging by the man’s appearance and the quaver in his voice, Bob wasn’t exaggerating by much. No doubt Nigel was having a field day. Gerald looked at his toes and wiggled them. He told himself the riot had nothing to do with all the other weird shit that had been happening. The wrong combination of people in the wrong place at the wrong time, that was all. But that wasn’t all, and he knew it.

A prisoner several cells down started muttering. The
piss off
guy yelled at him to shut the fuck up and he went silent. Gerald stretched out on his cot and yawned. Now that the alarm was silent maybe he’d get some sleep. The muttering started again. The pissed off guy was screaming for quiet again.

Maybe he wouldn’t get any sleep after all, but he was damned if he wasn’t going to try. What the hell else was he going to do?

(•••)

“Dad?”
Ina stepped into the apartment and the door whispered shut behind her. The unmistakable thundering bass lines and enthusiastic “Uh
huhs
” of Charles
Mingus’s
Old Earth Jazz drifted from the back of the three
bedroom
flat. Dimmed halo-globes rendered the lines and contours of the living room furniture soft. Ina pulled off her shoes. The white soles of her sneakers were caked with dried blood. She tossed them aside. Exhaustion came over her in waves. The thick carpet pushed between her toes as she walked. If she stepped hard enough, maybe she could sink into the material and melt away. At that moment, that was what she needed—all she needed.

She found her father sitting up in bed. Donovan’s features were still ashen, but there were two rosy circles of color on his cheeks. He had a plastic tray folded out over his blanket-covered legs, holding a steaming bowl of soup and a portable terminal. He studied the terminal screen and adjusted his glasses. The frames had become slightly bent and refused to sit straight.

“Hi dear,” he said, and smiled, but did not look up at her.

Ina echoed the smile. Her already fragile mind had been stretched to the breaking point, and while the term of endearment from her father made the tension scale back some, she still trembled in the aftermath of the violence she had witnessed. The small taste of affection had her suddenly starving for more. The realization of it—of just how unloved she had been feeling lately—made her want to cry. She placed a hand on her stomach and wondered if it was hormones making her feel that way.
Hormones,
and exhaustion.

“Feeling better, Dad?” Ina asked, forcing the wave of emotions back.

“I’m feeling much better. It’s amazing, really. I feel more myself than I have in days.” Donovan took a big swallow of soup. Ina wondered if the riot had been the space station’s way of feeding—the underlying form of life gathering strength for its final push to freedom. That the force was getting stronger could not be denied. Crescent was unstable and changing, and with each catastrophe—the floods on L Deck, and now the riots—the Three needed Ina and Marisa less to exhibit its presence. Maybe it was almost done with them.

“Something happened tonight, Dad.”

“What something?” Donovan asked.

“Did you watch the news at all?”

“No. I did not,” Donovan returned his focus to the terminal. “There’s been nothing but bad news lately.
Murders.
Abductions.
Fighting in the colonies…
 
All hard to stomach when you’re not feeling well. Do you want to know what
Murhaté
means?”

“There was a brawl at Heathen’s and I was there to see it. It got out of control fast. The fighting spread out to Main Street. There was a riot,” Ina said.

“Are you okay?” He asked and finally looked up at her. He didn’t react to the blood stains on her clothing and Ina was taken aback. She had to gather herself before she started speaking again.

“Yes. I’m fine,” she said at last and then added, “A lot of people are not.”

He smiled then, and she wasn’t sure if he was smiling at her reassurance or at the fact that a lot of people were hurt. Either way, his response to the news that his daughter had been caught in the middle of murder and violence was lacking. Ina wondered much of her father was present behind that familiar face. She couldn’t see the purple light swimming in his eyes like she had before, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. She knew it was.

“I’m glad you’re okay, Ina. It’s not safe out there,” Donovan said, though his words carried like an after thought. There were several seconds of quiet as Donovan returned his eyes to his terminal screen.

“Do you want to talk about what I told you yesterday?” she asked, breaking the silence with the sudden impulse to get an emotional response out of him.

“About…” he hesitated and looked up at her. His eyes flitted to her belly before returning to the terminal’s display. “No.”

Ina was disappointed, and a little relieved. She was physically and mentally unable to have a discussion about the tiny life growing inside of her. She was quick to change the subject.

“What are you doing, Dad?” She sat at the foot of the bed.

“A bit of research on the
Anrar
III mining colony.
Formerly dubbed Outpost 13—the residents renamed it Outpost
Murhaté
.”

“Oh.” She glanced at the open bedroom door.

“As far as I can tell,
Murhaté
is the name of the
final
home. According to one line I read in some fragmented correspondence between miners,” Donovan read directly from the terminal screen, “
There can be many vessels, but
Murhaté
is the omega
.”

Ina nodded and studied his face.
Vessel,
she thought. Another conversation she didn’t want to have. She kissed her father on the forehead and left him there.

Ina took a long, hot shower, wary that at any moment the water pressure would drop or the temperature would flare too hot or cold. She couldn’t remember the last uninterrupted shower she had taken. Nothing was constant on Crescent anymore. But water pressure and temperature remained steady for the duration, and she was thankful.

After, Ina padded barefoot across her bedroom floor, slipping out her robe as she went. Naked, she crawled beneath the
bedsheets
. The light panes on the walls, fashioned to look like frosted windows, began to blanch with daylight. Was it really only morning? Nausea fluttered in her belly.