Randoms (43 page)

“You never let me down,” I told her. “Never.”

“I did,” she said. “I failed you.”

She let go of me, and then the black-clad peace officers were holding her arms, trying to lead her away. She fought them at first, but they gripped harder, and I think Tamret did not want to be bound or shocked, so she stopped struggling. She looked up at me.

“I'm so scared,” she said.

I watched, powerless, as the peace officers led her across the expanse of the terminal and through a gate. Then the gate door sealed and she was gone.

There was so much left unsaid between us, and that her last words to me were about her fear filled me with sadness and anger and the searing, almost unendurable, pain of helplessness. I thought that she was right. I really never was going to see her again.

Dr. Roop now approached me, with Charles, Nayana, and Mi Sun trailing him. They looked like they were in shock, and when I went to meet Charles's gaze, he turned away.

They held back, but Dr. Roop walked up to me holding a black box, about the size of a hardcover book, made out of something like stiff cardboard. “As you
know
, this is yours,” he said. “I forgot to pack it up and put it in your bags.”

I had never seen it before, but I could tell by how he looked at me that he wanted me to have it, and that he was afraid if we said anything else, the peace officers might notice. So I took the box and held it with both hands.

“Thanks,” I muttered, too distracted to make sense of what the box meant.

“I am very sorry, Zeke. You did everything I could have asked of you. All of you were what we hoped for, and that this should be your reward is so unjust. I will do what I can to reverse things from here.”

“Do you think you can?”

“I don't know anymore. I just don't know. But I can promise you I will help your father.”

Hands were on me now, leading me and Charles and Mi Sun
and Nayana toward our own shuttle. Everyone's eyes were cast down. We were sad and angry. Maybe they were angry with me. Maybe they had every right to be.

A quartet of peace officers approached us, each of them holding a black injector cylinder. This was it, then. They were going to neutralize our improvements. They were going to turn us back into ordinary people.

The three other humans presented their hands for injection, but Dr. Roop blocked the peace officer heading to me. “He's my friend,” he said. “Please allow me to do it.”

The peace officer nodded and handed him the cylinder.

Dr. Roop then gestured, waving someone over. It was Captain Qwlessl, followed by Urch. The two of them came over.

“Excuse us, Captain,” said one of the peace officers. “He needs to be injected and removed from the premises.”

“Will you prevent me from saying good-bye to my friend?” she asked.

“Briefly, then,” the peace officer said. “There is a schedule.”

I looked at the captain. “Don't you let them return those Phandic ships.”

“No, I won't.”

Urch reached out and took the black box from my hand. My first instinct was to snatch it back, and he must have seen my alarm, so he met my gaze as if to steady me. Then he gestured toward the captain with his head, as if I should continue the conversation. He, meanwhile, was running one of his sharp fingernails along the bottom of the box. Carving something? I had no idea.

I looked at the captain. “My father's worried about the Phands looking for Former tech. He thinks it might be some kind of specialized military skill tree. Talk to him about it.”

She nodded. “I will.”

I said, “Thank you for everything. When I get home, I'm going to tell my mother about you, and she's going to be so glad you were here to look after me.”

“I think I'm the one who should be glad there was someone looking after me,” she said, and she took me in her arms and gave me a huge hug, She felt warm and safe, but I knew it was all being taken away.

“Can you help her?” I asked. “Tamret?”

She looked over at the data collectors, who were recording all of this, every word we spoke.

“I'm sorry,” she told me. “She's outside Confederation space. There's nothing I can do.” The words were harsh and cold, but there was something about her gaze when she spoke that made me wonder if she was trying to tell me something. Was that too much to hope?

“Time to go,” the peace officer said.

Urch handed the box back to me and then put a hand on my shoulder. “Safe travels, my friend.”

The two of them walked away. Dr. Roop shook my hand, human-style. He looked down at me with his big yellow giraffe eyes, and I felt sure he was trying to tell me something, just like the captain had been, but I could not read it. Then he put one of his hands to my face, a curiously tender gesture, one I hadn't anticipated. “Remember,” he said.

I wanted to ask what it was I was supposed to remember, but I couldn't make the words come out.

“I need your hand,” Dr. Roop said.

I held it out.

“Your father used to say that there are always possibilities.”

“Yeah,” I croaked. “He would say that, wouldn't he?”

“Have a safe journey.” Then he pressed the injector to the back of my hand, and I began the process of turning back into someone of absolutely no importance.

•   •   •

Wordlessly, Dr. Roop shook my hand again, and then the four of us were led to our gate. We passed through the door, and then through a tunnel, and then onto a shuttle. When it launched, we would leave Confederation Central, and we were never to return again.

A peace officer stood by the shuttle door, making sure we strapped in. “In a few minutes your nanites will dissolve into harmless organic matter that will pass safely through your system. This means that your translators will not function. The crew on the ship taking you home know this, and they will do their best to communicate to you what you need to know.” He then held out his hand. “I need your data bracelets.”

Once he had them in hand, he stepped outside, and the shuttle door whined closed.

My three companions sat, all of them looking down. I wanted to say something, but what was there to say? I looked at the rest. Charles's face was set in stony resolve. Nayana was crying. Mi Sun looked like she wanted to kill someone.

•   •   •

My fellow humans said nothing during the voyage. I sat still, not looking out the window, feeling myself diminish, become something less. My sight and hearing were the most obvious, but I had less power, less energy. My muscles seemed to work differently. I was like a deflating balloon. I was now simply Zeke Reynolds. Nothing more.

When we reached the ship, a stick-insect alien led us to our quarters with a series of gestures. It made an eating gesture and pointed to a door down the hall. And then it left. It had nothing more to say to us.

I turned to go into my room.

“No one blames you.”

It was Mi Sun. She stood there, still looking furious, with her arms folded. Her English was heavily accented but quite good. “We are all angry, but not with you. We chose to go with you because it was the right thing. We all did the right things.”

“Thanks,” I told her. “I appreciate you saying so.”

“They punished us,” she said, “but that doesn't change the fact that we did something important. We made a difference for trillions of beings. Thank you for letting us do that with you.”

I was too stunned to speak, and so I simply nodded.

“You probably wish to be alone,” Charles said. “I understand that, but if you want company, we'll be in the common room. If it's the same layout as the other ship, it should be that one there.” He pointed.

“Thanks,” I said again. “But I'll just lie down for a little while.”

“If you change your mind, you know where to find us,” he said.

Nayana, who had said nothing, now gave me a very quick and awkward hug.

I turned away from them and went into my cabin.

•   •   •

I sat alone, looking out the viewscreen, holding the dark cardboard box in my hand. I could not bring myself to lower my eyes, and so the station receded and I watched the swirling clouds of the great gas giant, their beautiful hues as they wound their slow way across the planet's vast surface. The station grew smaller until it was hard to see the details, until the dome was indistinguishable from the metal, until it was no more than a tiny disk, a slim coin cast against the vastness of nothing and everything.

Finally I found the nerve to face the black box Dr. Roop had given me. I took off the lid and saw that the box contained two pieces of paper—one small and one large—and a black cylinder, like the one that they used to inject nanites.

The small paper contained a series of blocky hieroglyphs, all straight lines and right angles, printed by hand with a thick red ink. I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut. What was the point of giving me a note to read when I was not going to be able to read it? Still, the script was beautiful, and it was a message from my friend, even if I could not read it.

I opened my eyes to look at it again, but this time the sharp script was gone. It had changed, in those few seconds, to English. I didn't know how, but for the moment I didn't care. It said,
This was in Tamret's room, addressed to you. Your friend, Klhkkkloplkkkuiv Roop
.

One last message from Tamret. I held the paper in my hands for a long time, fearing what it might say, savoring the thought of one more communication from her, and dreading the knowledge that it would be the last. Most of all, I feared I would be unable to read it. Finally, I summoned my courage, and I unfolded it and saw that my translator was still working.

Zeke,

If you are reading this, things have gone badly, and I am sorry for that. I wanted, more than anything else, for us to be together, but if you are looking at these words, then it means we won't be. If you need what the box contains, then your planet has not made its way into the Confederation. If I am not giving it to you myself, it means that I am dead or gone against my will.

You probably never noticed that the locket your mother gave you disappeared one night. I needed the genetic information in her hair to hack into the medical database and make what is inside this injector—the nanites that will repair her cells and cure her disease. It was so easy to do, it's shameful they did not offer to do it themselves, but they have their rules. I have mine.

I did not tell you I was doing it because I care so much for you, and I want you to care for me—for who I am, not because I did something for you. Maybe that makes me selfish, since I could give this to you anytime and ease your mind. I am sorry for that, and I hope you will forgive me.

I'm crying as I write this. It's crazy, I know. Nothing bad has happened. Maybe nothing bad will happen, but I've seen too much to believe that. If you ever read these words, and I pray by the
[coalition of revenge deities]
you don't, please know how much you have meant to me. If I am dead, my ghost will haunt you, and if you even look at another girl, I will make you miserable, and I will torment that girl until she throws herself off the nearest cliff.

Tamret

I was crying now, and I was not trying to hide the tears, nor did they fill me with shame. I was crying because of what they had done to Tamret. They had taken her fearlessness and made her afraid. They had taken her unbreakable spirit, and they had broken it. Tamret was the most daring and dauntless being I had ever known, and they had condemned her to prison and torture and perhaps death, and the vastness of space made me powerless to prevent it. Yet she had found a way to cross that distance and give to me the thing I'd been seeking most when I left the Earth.

I sat there like that, tears running onto my lap, my shirt, not bothering to wipe them, and then I remembered what Urch had done. I turned over the box and looked at the bottom. There, in its papery softness, Urch's predator's fingernail had carved nine simple words:
It was fun. We should do it again. Soon.

Something escaped from my throat. Not laughter, but something grimly like it. I studied the words until they became like an icon, like a symbol of all I had been and so desperately wanted to be again. Urch's words were not a promise, and they were not a plan, but they were a cause for hope where there had been none before. My friends, the friends I had always longed for, had not forgotten me. That was reason enough to take comfort, but there was something else, too. I
read
the words. They had neutralized my nanites, and my translator had vanished, but now it was back. Was that why Dr. Roop had insisted on injecting me himself? Had he switched cylinders? Had he hinted at some plan? Was that what he had wanted me to remember?

I didn't care how it had happened, only that it had. I understood these messages, written in scripts I could not have imagined in languages I could not comprehend. I could feel that my strength and agility and hearing and sight and all the rest were no more than when I had first come to the station, but I could still translate. Maybe other skills would return. Maybe I could somehow unlock them. Maybe I could go back to leveling up once I got home. Perhaps I was not as powerless as they had intended to leave me.

I looked out the viewscreen again, and the great ringed planet was now itself a tiny disc against an endless canvas of blinking stars and swirling gases. I kept my eye on it until it was nothing but a memory, and I continued looking as if somehow I could have one last glimpse of the place from which I had been exiled. I was not ready to let it go. Not yet.

Then came a recorded announcement—in words I could understand—telling me to prepare to exit normal space. This was soon followed by that familiar disorientation, and up became down and in became out and I was flying and falling and spinning, but it was only an instant before the sensation was gone. The window, too, was gone, and my eyes fell upon the blank wall of my cabin, bland and gray and meaningless. The ship had begun to tunnel through space, and though I could feel no movement, I knew we sped past stars and planets and across the infinite emptiness between them. We had ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe, and we tumbled down its great and impossible slide, racing toward a world that once, not so very long ago, had been the place I called home.