Authors: Manda Benson
Moonsteed (25 page)
“
Goodbye, Anthony
.”
“
Anthony
?”
Verity opened her eyes. The lander’s interior drifted into focus. She found herself able to inhale against the pain in her chest. She’d winded herself when she’d fallen on the hatch.
“
Verity
!”
Against the ringing in her ears, the voice seemed to come from inside her head.
“
Verity
!” It wasn’t Anthony’s voice, it was Vladimir’s. He reached over the back of the pilot’s seat and pulled her upright by the shoulder straps of her Sky Forces backpack. A stink of scorched electricals burnt her nostrils. “Verity, are you all right?”
“Uh,” she said.
“We need to take off. Now!”
Verity twisted around so her weight fell properly into the seat and pulled the straps over her shoulders. When she glanced up, the green light was already up on the airlock door. Vladimir must have closed it.
“
Anthony
?”
She took off her gloves and fumbled numbly for the controls. “
Anthony, I can’t remember the takeoff sequence
.”
“Verity, we need to go!”
Gyromag first, she recalled. The noise of the magnet rotating came into hearing. Now plasma thrust. Her hand found the control for it. The little craft gave a lurch as the gyromag levitator came online. Now the main fusion engine. This felt awkward, like something she’d never had any experience with. The force of the acceleration threw her back against the seat, and she gripped the steering bar, holding the lander’s course straight as it chased up from the ravine and the horizon grew curved and blue before her eyes, although her arms trembled and a deep feeling of shock paralyzed her inside. “
Anthony, I can’t do this without you
!”
The readouts and course schematics on the screens in front of her finally started to register, and the memory of how to operate the craft began to return to her and form sense. The autopilot would take over in a minute. She just needed to hold the craft still a little longer.
As soon as the autopilot came online, she tried to twist round to reach the bag, but the acceleration force and her seatbelt made it impossible. “
Anthony
!” Her mind was empty of all but her own thoughts. “There’s something wrong.”
“We’re nearly there. See, there’s the yacht.”
Verity looked where he pointed, to a bright star in the fore window. Nearly there. Nearly.
Vladimir had his seatbelt off and was standing in his seat before the craft had even finished docking. Immediately when the light came on the airlock door, he turned the wheel and threw it open. “Come on!” he said, maneuvering up and putting down a hand to pull Verity out into the yacht’s central bay.
She held on to the rail as she wriggled the bag off her shoulders. When she reached inside and pulled out the computer, a dark indentation had burned a ragged shape in the plastic close to one corner, falling into a hole that revealed warped metal surfaces within.
“We need to get into the centrifuge and find a screwdriver.”
“What are you talking about? We’ve got to radio Torrmede and tell them what’s happened. And you need to gimme that sample so I can put it in the freezer.”
Verity wasn’t listening to him. She pulled herself through the doorway to the centrifuge. She found a box of tools in one of the rooms inside, and she sandwiched the computer between her knee and elbow and the table as she took out the screws holding the casing together. Inside, where Farron’s shot had hit it, was a deformed rectangular object with its interior metal surfaces all melted. “We have to fix this.”
“That’s the hard drive,” said Vladimir quietly from behind her. “It can’t be fixed.”
Verity stared at the broken computer, and it blurred before her eyes. “Anthony’s dead,” she said, and it came out in a sob.
“What’s the matter? I thought you already killed him twice.”
“We were going to do stuff together. I was going to make it up to him for killing him.”
Vladimir put his arms around her, rather awkwardly without gravity to support them both. Verity put her head against his chest as her shoulders shook and her breathing broke into shuddering gulps.
“Look,” he said gently. “I’ll go and radio Torrmede for you, if you like. Would that be better?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. What do you want me to tell them?”
Verity swallowed and took a deep breath. “Tell the Magnolia Order we’ve got a sample and we’ve destroyed the illegal research, but we’ve failed to kill Lloyd Farron. And tell them we’re turning the yacht around. We’re going back to Torrmede.”
The blade of the shovel bit into the hard-packed earth and Verity had to step on the back edge and use her weight to cut the ground. The sun was warm, and after a few shovelfuls of earth she was already sweating. She grit her teeth and persevered with the digging until she’d made a hole a foot or so deep.
Verity straightened and arched her back. She dragged her sleeve across her forehead, and looked back in the direction of Torrmede House, the sun in the sky and the bright flowers of the rhododendrons that covered the grounds. A rectangle of lawn separated the house from the magnolia garden, where the trees surrounded the statues at the center. Normally, the general public wasn’t allowed in here, but an exception had been made in this case by the request of the Magnolia Order.
The statues stood on their plinths with their backs to each other, Pilgrennon with a noble expression and his right hand folded on his chest, Blake poised with her hand on the hilt of her katana and a keen intelligence on her face.
“Ready?” Vladimir said.
Verity nodded.
He held out the bag to her, and she slid her hands inside and took out the computer that had been the last resting place of the ghost of Anthony Cornelian, spy for the Magnolia Order. She turned the computer so its undamaged screen faced upward, and placed it in the hole she had dug.
“Goodbye, Anthony Cornelian.” She scattered earth over the dead computer. “No one will remember your name, and no one knew it, but you did as much for the Meritocracy as anyone ever did. You deserve to be buried here with its heroes.”
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, diodes to...whatever,” said Vladimir.
Verity finished putting the soil back, and smoothed down the surface with her palms. Vladimir put a slightly crumpled rhododendron flower down on the grave--white with a violet throat. Then they both rose and looked down on the grave. Verity turned to contemplate the statues.
“Farron said Blake hated Pilgrennon,” she said. “You think he lied to get a reaction from me?”
Vladimir shrugged. “He’s trained to get information out of people. He probably says whatever he thinks will get it.”
“I don’t think they hated each other.” Verity stared at the statues. They didn’t look like people who hated each other, but then they were only statues. “Perhaps they even loved each other.” Blake and Pilgrennon had been the first people to have had a Solar funeral. Was that merely because the Meritocracy felt the need to honor them in such a glorious way, or was it what they would have chosen? Would they have preferred their bodies interred in this warm red earth, in the place they loved, beneath the magnolia trees?
Was this the real Jananin Blake who scored her name into the history books in flames and slashes of Japanese steel, who left the old order trampled and broken in her wake, like the petals of spent magnolias, and forged the way ahead with her words and ideas? Verity watched her still, stone face, but she didn’t offer any answers. A drop of rain landed on the statue’s nose.
“Perhaps we should go and have a drink, or something, for Anthony.”
“I’m not sure he’d want to be remembered that way.” Vladimir exhaled and dropped his arms to his sides. His fingers touched Verity’s.
“How do you think he would like to be remembered then?” She glanced at him.
“Oh, it could be anyone’s guess.” Vladimir smiled ironically. “But I’d say he’d like people to enjoy the things he enjoyed in life.”
It started to rain harder as they ran hand-in-hand down to the edge of the rhododendron forest. Verity ducked inside the nearest bush. The smell of earth, leaves and rhododendron flowers was intoxicating. She grabbed the front of Vladimir’s shirt and ripped it open.
“Oh, look what you’ve done, again,” he exclaimed. Then he did the same back to her, and she laughed and pulled him close to her. Raindrops pattered on the canopy of leaves above. One of the leaves tipped under the weight of the rain, its waxy surface dislodging a heavy drop of water that landed on Verity’s throat, and slid down until Vladimir caught it on his tongue
.
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Manda Benson is an ex-research scientist who lives with a dog, an axolotl, a pink tarantula, and her two savage guard rabbits in a 100-year-old house that seems to exist in a constant cycle of repairs in the Midlands of England. Her other fiction includes a number of short stories plus two Galactic Legacy novels,
Dark Tempest
and
In the Shadow of Lazarus
;
a YA SF novel,
Pilgrennon’s Beacon
;
and two children’s books.
Manda‘s Website:
http://tangentrine.com/mandabenson
Reader eMail:
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