Spin the Sky (41 page)

Cesar’s head moves like he’s just shrugged his shoulders.

“Yeah, sure,” says Penelope. “Let’s hear the hail.”

Cesar flicks it on.

Uri Mach appears on the main screen. “Whoever you are, you ruined a perfectly reasonable plan to put Spacers in control of the human race. I was going to be a benevolent dictator, but you screwed it up,” he screams. There is another seven minutes or so of cursing and ranting. Penelope and Cesar trade bemused smirks.

Mach froths and rages, but then pulls himself together at the end to wrap up with, “Well, you might have blown up billions of credits of equipment and killed half my people, but at least you killed that moron Asner before I got my hands on him. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be able to start over anywhere with my brand new herd of cows.” The man winks evilly at the screen and the message ends. The screen blinks off.

Penelope and Cesar stare at the empty screen wordlessly.

Finally, Cesar asks, “Did you kill Asner?”

“I don’t think so. I beat him up pretty good, but he was mostly alive the last time I saw him. Maybe I did, though.”

Cesar looks her up and down like that’s the hottest thing he’s heard a woman say in years. “Huh. Well, good riddance.”

“So, is Uri hanging around to shoot at us some more?” asks Penelope.

“Looks like he’s pulling away,” replies Cesar.

Then after a while, he follows that up with, “Yeah, he’s definitely headed out. There are three large ships moving off together.”

“I can’t believe he left a gloat message.”

“Yeah. That’s so lame,” agrees Cesar. “He might as well have cackled like a bad Ether drama villain and threatened to make us rue the day we crossed him.”

Penelope smothers a giggle, before worry sobers her. She blurts out, “He is, though. He’s threatening our Trevor. We have to get back right now.”

“We are going as fast as we can,” Cesar says grimly as the ship pulls away from the cover of the broken dish.

Penelope digs her fingernails into the chair cushions and asks urgently, “You know that’s where Mach is headed now, right? He’s off to meet up with his men on Ithaca and take off with the herd. Can we catch them?”

Cesar turns to her with anguish written all over his face.

“We can’t.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“W
hat do you mean we can’t catch that ship?” cries Penelope, pulling herself out of her chair.

Cesar shrugs, his eyes on the comm screen. “That hit we took damaged the main thruster. I can get us up to about sixty percent capacity, but that’s it. We’ll get back to Ithaca in about fourteen hours. Mach will get there in less than eight hours.” His voice is glum.

Penelope starts pacing. “There must be something we can do.”

Cesar shrugs and sits back in his chair, staring despondently at the comm screen. “Even if we had full power, we’d have a hard time catching him. I guess we ran out of miracles for today.”

Penelope throws her hands up in the air. “But Trevor!”

“I know.”

Penelope looks at the slumped figure in front of her. He looks deeply depressed. That is no good. She needs him in top form so he can save Trevor.

“Did you set the course for Ithaca already?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

Penelope paces briskly some more. “Well, then you look like you could use some food and I could use a vat of coffee. Is there food on this thing?”

Cesar looks momentarily distracted. “You know, I have no idea.” He gets up to go investigate.

Down in the tiny kitchen, they rummage around and find a few packets of noodles and some instant coffee, the kind that will last until the sun goes nova. To pass the time, Cesar tells Penelope about the origins of the ship. Then Penelope grills for details of Trevor’s encounter with the pirates and he tells her as much as he can remember.

Blowing on her boiling coffee, Penelope mutters, more to herself than him, “So Trevor’s been on Lazar House these last few days and he was fine the last time you saw him.”

Around slurps of noodle soup, Cesar replies, “Yes. Don’t you remember? I told you all this a few days ago in the kitchen back at the ranch. Did they knock you around that badly?”

Penelope waves her hand, dismissing the question. “No, I remember that talk. It’s just that I thought you were some poor wandering nutjob with delusions then. I wasn’t paying too much attention after about ten minutes.”

Cesar sits back. “Delusions?”

She shrugs, looking only mildly apologetic. “Well, you have to admit it all sounded pretty farfetched and you dumped a whole lot on me all at once. Don’t worry. I’m over that. Now I
know
you are a wandering nutjob with delusions, dear husband of mine.”

Cesar looks offended for about half a second before he snickers. “And here I was telling myself you took it so well. I should have known better.”

Penelope sits up straight, outrage lengthening her spine. “And what does that mean?” she demands.

Cesar just shrugs and goes back to his noodles. He hunches slightly and keeps darting looks at her like he expects her to throw her coffee at him and he is trying to finish the noodles before she gets to that point.

Penelope feels her temper flare as she watches him. Just like a man to overreact like this. Her temper isn’t so bad. And he provokes her severely.

“Don’t just sit there,” she snaps. “We’ve got to find a way to save Trevor.”

Cesar sighs, “If I could make this bucket of bolts go any faster, I would.”

“This defeatist attitude is starting to seriously irk me,” she grumbles. Penelope stands up and begins pacing again. “Then… Oh, I know! What about the Ether? We can call for help. At least we can warn Ithaca that Mach is on his way and in a murderous mood.”

Cesar blinks in surprise. “I didn’t think of that. Good idea.”

“Men,” she says, snapping her fingers. “They never think about calling for help.”

Now Cesar looks annoyed. “Maybe I didn’t think of it because the ship only has a short-wave comm and there’s nothing down this close to Earth except that Moon Base we just destroyed. They probably won’t let us tap their Ether connection.”

Penelope pinches the bridge of her nose, trying to focus. “Well, then, we can use the short-wave to send out a distress call. At least we can try to let someone know what’s going on.”

Cesar shakes his head. “If any of Mach’s men are still around, they’ll hear it and come shut us up.”

“We have to try,” she insists.

Cesar finishes his noodles, wipes his mouth, and then says, “Yeah, I guess we do.”

She follows him back to the comm screen. They record a message explaining about Mach and the Moon Base and the attack on Ithaca. The message ends with both of them begging.

Cesar clears his throat a few times before he states, “I am Cesar Vaquero, sometimes known Jonas Ulixes. My son is Trevor. Please go now and help my son. Save Ithaca. Stop Uri Mach.”

“Please help us. Please, if you can hear this, go to Ithaca and save our colony. Help our son,” adds Penelope desperately.

Afterwards, Cesar is very busy programming the comm and clearing his throat. Penelope decides it’s better to leave him alone for a little bit. They send out their message on every channel and every wavelength, knowing it will probably go unheard.

Then they have nothing to do but stare at each other and hope for another miracle. Cesar sets the ship to spin just slightly to give them a little bit of gravity. Small thrusters on the hull of the ship spin like them bullet out of a rifle. This is another trick Cesar personally built into the little ship. It only got up to half Earth gravity and they both have on anti-grav boots, but he wants Penelope to be as comfortable as possible.

After that he prowls around the cabin restlessly. Leaning against a wall, Cesar eventually asks, “Well. What do you want to do now?”

Penelope decides she wants to pace some more. Her head is pounding and it feels like her stomach is trying to digest itself. How in space will she be able to wait fourteen hours? She will go mad.

Cesar spends some more time on the comm. Penelope assumes he is checking over the ship to make sure it is fine. Then he flops into a chair and watches her pace.

“Wearing a hole in the floor isn’t going to help,” he says gently.

Penelope scowls at him. Rage floods through her, impotent rage boiling through her bloodstream. “Like you’d know anything about what would help,” she snaps.

Cesar’s face takes on a strange expression. It reminds her of the time she watched Argos crawl into a steam tunnel to find out what was blocking it. She was watching from above the tunnel when he discovered the blockage was a huge nest of blood wasps. Cesar’s face has the look of a man who has just realized he is in a confined space with something very dangerous. He scans the room like he is looking for an escape route. It really pisses her off.

“Where the hell have you been, you bastard?” she yells. “Do you know your son still asks every damn person he meets for stories of you? As soon as he was old enough to talk, he started asking where his daddy was. And where were you, you useless jerk?”

Penelope slowly advances towards him. She knows she is not looking her prettiest right now. Her face is red. Her eyes are bloodshot and leaking tears of powerless rage. She doesn’t care. Cesar opens and shuts his mouth a few times, but makes no sound.

“He keeps a file of all the stories people tell him, you know. Do you know that? I listened to all those stories of you traipsing all over the place,” Penelope says, her voice rising.

Cesar starts to look like a kicked puppy. It makes Penelope feel mean, but she can’t stop the words pouring out of her. “That’s what was so important? Saving other people’s families? Having mad adventures with exotic women? But could you even call once in a while? No! You have never been there for us once. Not once!”

Cesar scowls and takes a step towards her. Penelope feels an odd sense of satisfaction at having finally succeeded in making him mad too.

“Are you kidding me?” he bellows. “I demolished an entire country for you. I dropped a bomb that made Hiroshima look like a cow fart and killed millions of people just to keep you and Trevor safe!”

Penelope jumps to her feet. “Oh yeah? Big whoop-de-doo, asshole!” she screams back. “Where have you been since then? You left me there! I put up with your insane family! I changed Trevor’s diapers! You owe me at least five thousand diaper changes. And don’t get me started on lost hours of sleep spent with a sick kid. And vomit! Who knew one little kid could be full of so much vomit?”

“Oh. Right,” says Caesar, his righteous indignation momentarily derailed.

He flounders here, but then he thinks he might still have a chance at regaining the moral high ground. Drawing himself up, he screams back at her, “Then that… makes us even! So stop bitching at me!”

Penelope blazes. She looks like she might tear his head off and eat it. Caesar experiences a moment of genuine fear before she does the utterly unexpected.

She laughs.

“I’m so angry at you I could bite your head off, you stupid jerk,” she giggles helplessly, covering her mouth with her hand, but laughter escapes between her fingers.

Caesar finds himself suddenly and inexplicably exhausted. He still feels like screaming but all enthusiasm for this fight is gone. In the back of his head, Cesar is still holding out hope that there is some way this scenario plays out to end in passionate make-up sex. That’s how it happens in the Ether dramas and every time he played this scene out in his head.

Cesar has no idea how you get from here to there, but he can’t help being an optimist. So he does the only thing he can think of. He kisses his wife.

Penelope stiffens when he first pulls her close, but then she slowly melts into his embrace, letting him gently kiss her.

“You are not even remotely forgiven,” she whispers against his lips, but she also doesn’t stop kissing him.

“That’s fair,” he murmurs back.

The kissing takes a long time. Cesar is starting to have ideas about what they can do next instead of fighting when the alert on the comm starts pinging loudly. Against all odds, someone has replied to their distress call. Both heads swivel in the direction of the alarm. Penelope glances at Cesar to see if he wants to go listen to it, but he is already moving in that direction.

When Cesar taps the comm, the face of a tall, beautiful Asian woman fills the main comm screen. She looks practically luminous with joy. She is wearing a plain gray jumpsuit and holding the biggest gun Penelope has ever seen. Penelope doesn’t understand how someone so thin can even carry that monster. There are streaks of white in the Asian woman’s hair but her pale face is smooth and unlined except for the tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Oh Captain. My Captain. I am coming.”

That is the whole message.

Penelope turns to Cesar. “Who was that?”

He runs a hand through his hair. “It’s a long story.” He doesn’t continue, but Penelope sees the tension drop from his body. Whoever she is, Cesar is very relieved that she is coming. It gives Penelope hope.

“How did she find our message so fast?” she wonders. “How was she able to send back a message? You said we shouldn’t be able to get anything out here.”

Cesar holds his hands up to show he has no idea.

The comm pings again. Another message.

The jovial face of Mr. Finomus fills the screen while he twists his hands anxiously. “Penelope, I hope you get this soon. I am so sorry. I had no idea what Asner and Mach were up to. I am so very sorry. Ithaca is fighting back. They were holding their own when I left. I am on my way back there with troops right now. I was able to get out and let people know what was going on there, so the other colonies are sending help. Your distress call is all over the Ether. It’s on every channel. It’s everywhere. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Penelope breathes a tiny sigh of relief. She only wishes Finomus had said something about Trevor. At least Ithaca is getting help. Cesar hugs her. Over the next few hours, they get a steady stream of messages.

For the next message, the screen is filled with a face that looks as though it was carved from ebony. Hundreds of intricate braids fall down his chest over a colorful woven shirt.