Fade Away and Radiate

Fade Away and
Radiate

By Michele Lang

Copyright 2013 Michele Lang

Artwork by Dara England

Smashwords Edition

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“
Fade Away and Radiate"
first appeared in the Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Running
Press, Robinson UK 2013). Please check out the other stories in the
collection!

The only woman on an uninhabitable
planet listened to the wail of the nightwind, alone in a research
hut in the dead of the night. She studied her data outputs, and
tried like hell not to think of Roberto. Because thinking of
Roberto got her thinking about why she’d come to this desolate
place. And thinking of her self-exile made her think of the man she
was running away from…

There was a knock on the
door.

It was the moment she had imagined a
million times with dread, and yet now that it had come, she wasn’t
ready. With a gasp, Anika Bowman jumped from her chair, but before
she could make any further moves, the door to her field lab swung
open.

She glanced across the hut, to where
her blaster lay hidden under her flat foam pillow. Her fingers
itched to grab it, but it was too late now. Anika had bet her life
on the simple fact that she was too far away from the rest of
humanity to be murdered. If she survived the next few minutes, she
would never make such a stupid mistake again.

Anika forced herself to look at the
hulking figure filling up her doorway. Far away, outside the
geodome in which she’d built the hut, the nightwind howled, hungry,
unrequited. The haunting sound still pierced her heart.

“
It’s me,” a muffled voice
said, crackling over the spacesuit’s interface.

For a single, agonizing moment, she
imagined it was Roberto, come back to her across infinity. That
behind that mirrored helmet, Roberto was speaking to her now, that
somehow he’d come back to her as he’d once promised.

A miracle. But, no.

Roberto was dead, just another casualty
of the Glass Desert war. Roberto hadn’t come back to her in a box,
or an urn, or even on a memory stick or a download with a farewell
message. He’d just gotten vaporized, as if he’d never existed in
the first place.

Whoever this warrior was, hidden in his
spacesuit, it wasn’t her husband. Roberto was never coming back.
She was sure of it.

Big square hands encased in spacegloves
reached up to remove the domed, mirrored helmet. She took a
half-step back, her heart pounding so hard in her chest it shook
her with every beat.

Anika saw the man’s face. She staggered
backwards in her shock. Roberto would have blown her away
less.

“
Billy Murphy, it’s you,”
she managed to gasp. “Never thought I’d see your face
again.”

Captain Billy Murphy grinned and looked
her up and down in a single glance. It was him: that thick,
uncontrollable black hair (much longer now since the last time
she’d seen him). The deep blue eyes, the spare, effective body.
That face, even more appealing for the marks inflicted by all the
trouble he’d survived.

“
Yep, me,” Billy replied,
and he laughed. “Took long enough for me to find you, amirite? Like
you didn’t want me to find you.”

She stared at him in wonder as he shut
the door behind him, clomped into the research hut, took a look
around. Didn’t take more than a quick scan for Billy to see all
there was to see.

The truth be told, she was relieved.
Her life in the hut was over, no matter what happened now between
her and this man, the last one to see her husband alive. And no
matter how much she’d once craved the solitude and the silence of
this stony, dead planet, Anika knew she couldn’t live in this
frozen hell forever.

“
How did you find me?” Anika
forced the words past the lump in her throat. She would rather die
than cry in front of Billy Murphy. She’d already done too much
crying in this man’s presence. She didn’t dare do it
again.

Billy laughed louder, and pulled the
fingers of his gloves one by one with his straight, white teeth to
get them off. “Bet you wanna know how I cracked your
code.”

He was like a tiger transformed into a
man, pacing the little room in his armor, sizing up her potential
as a meal. Both of them knew she was no warrior.

The floor shook under his boots as he
walked, cracked his knuckles, and wiggled his fingers to get the
circulation into them again. “Glad to see you’re still in one
piece.”

For now, Anika couldn’t help playing
out what was going to happen next, going at 100x speed in her mind
like an end-of-life experience. The return to Earth. Her attempted,
re-attempted, and then final resignation from FortuneCorp – that
place that had made her career, the place that wanted her soul
along with her employment. A world corporation that intended to own
this galaxy, that didn’t let the little cogs in its mighty machine
just break away.

So she would spurn the company, walk
unaffiliated, unprotected, in New York. And one fine afternoon,
walking along Broadway or riding the helobus, or reading newsfeeds
in Petraeus Park, the end would come for her at last. A murderer
would poison her, or kidnap her, or just wipe her out. It happened
to genetic and nuclear scientists all the time. It had happened to
Roberto. And if Billy was anywhere around, it would happen to him,
too.

His expression softened when he saw her
stricken face. “Listen, I made you a promise,” he explained. “At
Roberto’s memorial. I swore, and I swore it to Robbo first. If
anything happened to him in country, I was coming back after to
watch out for you. You and I ain’t got nobody else.”

“
I don’t need watching.”
Anika cringed inside at the huskiness in her voice. She cleared her
throat and stood straighter, not willing to yield to his charms. It
was the same way she stood up to the fears that still stalked her
every night. “I’m a big girl, and I’ve managed to survive just fine
on my own all this time. I don’t need your help.”

Billy crossed his arms over his big,
armored chest, and he shifted uneasily on his feet. It was as close
as she’d ever come to seeing him losing his cool. “You’re a good
girl, and I know why Roberto loved you so hard. But you’re lying to
me. You’re not surviving out here. You’re lingering.
Okay?”

The silence rose up like a ghost, and
they stared at each other through the suddenly too-little space
closing in between them.

Anika felt the damn tears coming, but
she refused to shed them. Instead, she walked across the little
room in three steps to her cot, and the blaster hidden
there.

“
I know you’ve traveled
pretty far just to get here,” she began.

“
That would be an
understatement.”

She couldn’t help smiling at that, at
the way Billy tugged at her heart. “Yeah well, I think the best
thing for you to do, Mr. Space Man, is stay the night, have some
grub and stock up on provisions. And head right back out in the
morning. I’m assuming there’s a craft in orbit waiting for you. No
way you could head out to this quadrant all alone.”

Billy laughed again, more gently this
time. His thick, black hair stood on end, all messed up from his
helmet. He pushed the buttons at his wrist points, and the
exoskeleton of his suit softened. He pulled the suit down and
stepped out of it, looking like a man now and not a robotic
killer.

He looked vulnerable.

But Anika wasn’t fooled. She knew what
Billy really was, what Roberto had been before he’d gotten
snuffed.

K-Ops. Genetically modified soldiers in
the United States Army, technology owned by FortuneCorp, the
soldiers serving their country. Sent by the US military to do what
regular soldiers didn't have the physical or mental stamina to
do.

Roberto never spoke of what he’d done
as a soldier out in the Glass Desert. He wanted to leave the war
behind when he came home to her, and she didn't need to know the
details of what he’d had to do. She wanted to love those memories
away until he had to go back and make more of them.

But the last time he’d come home, Anika
could tell something had changed. Roberto had changed. As if he
knew the next time he went back to the Glass Desert, he wasn’t
coming back.

“
I didn’t come all this way
just to say hello.” Billy broke into her thoughts, his voice a
little too calm.

A jolt of fear shot down the length of
Anika’s back. She didn’t want to hear any more, but she owed it to
Billy to hear him out. He had come to the edge of the known world
to find her.

“
Do you know how Roberto
died?” Billy asked.

Anika’s mouth was dry as sand. She
licked her lips and shrugged her shoulders. “It's war,” she managed
to say. “Soldiers die in war. You don’t need to tell me more than
that.”

He squinted at her, as if he was trying
to figure out how much she already knew.

“
But you need to know. If
you don't already.”

Anika tried to relax but couldn’t.
Billy took a seat on Anika’s desk chair, set in front of an ancient
roll-top desk that looked ridiculously out of place on an
uninhabitable planet at the back end of nowhere.

Billy’s hands rested on the arms of her
chair. She watched his strong fingers caressing the old-fashioned
realwood, and wondered where he hid his own weapons.

She knew he was armed. She searched his
spare, hard body for the weapons – traveling from those strong,
knowing hands, up to his muscular arms encased in dark blue flight
silk, across the defined shoulders, the curve of his
neck…

She realized, belatedly, that Billy had
stopped talking. Anika tore her gaze from Billy’s insanely
beautiful body and forced herself to stare right into his
eyes.

Eyes the color of midnight, of
desolation. He seemed to pin her to the cot like a butterfly. Those
eyes spoke of suffering she would understand, like Roberto’s. And
yet his voice, vibrating inside her chest, remained gentle,
kind.

“
Roberto didn't die in the
field, you know.”

“
I know,” Anika whispered.
Miserable now, remembering. Billy was the one who had told her,
after the memorial, in a low, quick undertone, far away from
everybody else. The details were dangerous, she knew.

“
Somebody got inside the
barracks, somebody who knew they wanted Roberto specifically. They
got past all of us – genmod soldiers – and killed him and escaped
before we could do anything. And, Annie. I didn’t tell you this
before. There was no investigation. Nothing. We were told to act
like it had never happened.”

Annie swallowed hard. “I figured he
didn't die the official way, the way the government told
me.”

“
What did you
think?”

She shook her head as if she could
negate the truth away. “Both of us worked for FortuneCorp, not like
you soldiers. He never told you, did he?”

“
Nope. As far as anybody on
the team knew, he was just another soldier.”

“
Well, he wasn't. We worked
together on genetic research, human and ecological modifications.
He was a geneticist, I'm a biologist. Together we worked on
ecotransformative research. How to mutate human beings, and
climates.”

Billy nodded, not looking too
surprised. “Roberto was way smarter than me,” he said. “A million
times smarter. But didn't have as much horse-sense. And you don’t
just need a killer instinct to survive the Glass Desert, Annie
girl. You need prey instinct, too. Roberto just wore his smarts out
in the open, and it cost him.”