The Second Star, page 31
“And where would Lily Mae fall on that spectrum?” Martin questioned, dangerously softly.
“She has… aspects of all of that,” Stella said. “If you are asking me if she can function by herself out in this strange world that she has no real true ideas about, not any more—all I can tell you, she’s doing very well so far. She hasn’t let the culture shock throw her off. She seems to have the ability to focus, and to accomplish what she sets out to do.”
“And what,” Martin asked, “do you think she set out to do?”
“She’s free,” Stella said simply.
Martin shook his head, as if in pain. “They are not being kept—”
“Tell them that,” Stella said grimly. “I think you’ll find it hard to convince them. For heaven’s sake, Martin, one of them was content to put herself through the appearance, at least, of death in order to get herself out of there. What does that tell you?”
“You said the others could find her?”
“I have no idea,” Stella said. “I said that it is possible. Perhaps even likely. Someone who has spent time with her—like myself—could try and predict which way she’d jump—but obviously I didn’t do that successfully. It just wasn’t enough. But…I don’t know how else you’d go about looking. She’s a little drop in a big ocean now.”
“She has no papers, no legal standing,” Martin said. “It will only take a single mistake, and she will make one, sooner or later. You already said that she was in a strange world unfamiliar to her. Her picture is already disseminated—in a discreet way, of course—to security personnel in the city. She could…”
“She’s already out of the city,” Stella said. “Any one of those trains, she could have been on.”
“Or she could have wanted you to think that.”
Stella snorted. “We’re being a little conspiracy-theory here, aren’t we? I told you she apparently functioned in this strange brave new world she found out there—but that doesn’t mean she can negotiate it with that kind of finesse. You yourself said that it’s only a matter of time before the first mistake—but you think that she thought this part out so carefully?”
“Maybe she got lucky, here. But she’ll make that mistake.”
“Martin… what are you going to do…?”
He began to answer, and then caught himself, and roused up to his full height.
“That is no longer any of your concern, Dr. Froud,” he said. “I told you what the consequences would be the next time you discarded the rule book, and now you have, and I am standing by what I said. As of now, you are no longer a part of this team. You have an hour to pack your bag and you will be escorted off the premises. Please ensure that you take nothing with you that has any bearing on this project. Your baggage and your electronics will be subject to search. You are not to contact the Parada crew again in any way, and it may not be necessary for the two of us to speak again. Am I being perfectly clear?”
She had known this was coming, but it still kicked her in the gut like a mule. Suddenly short of breath, she could barely muster enough of it to utter a single word.
“Perfectly.”
“Dr. Froud.”
Stella turned back from the door of the office, to which she had taken the few steps after turning her back on Martin.
She turned now to look at him, her chin on her shoulder. Voiceless, her hands gestured the question What?
“Do not fail to remember,” Martin said, his voice flat and edged with a dangerous steel, “the agreement that you signed upon entering into this project. Make no mistake, you will be monitored. And there will be zero tolerance for any flouting of either the spirit or the letter of that document. Again, am I being clear?”
Stella nodded, turned away again, and stepped through the door as it opened for her. She stood for a moment just outside it, as it closed behind her, aware that tears were streaming down her cheeks although she could not remember starting to cry.
She could only hope she hadn’t given Martin Peck the pleasure of having seen her do it.
10.
Stella found that she had very little to pack. She stripped off her Parada unit gear and left the tunic and the pants on her bed—she didn’t bother checking if her ID plate was still showing as valid—and changed into her own clothes, stuffing the things she wasn’t wearing willy-nilly into her small suitcase. The base-issued tablet she left on the desk in her quarters, retrieving her own personal phone which she had not been using since she had got here and slipping it into an outside pocket of her bag—they said they would search her tech, but they wouldn’t find anything of interest on that phone. She contemplated calling Philip, on the institutional tablet, to bring him up to speed, but in the end refrained from doing so—she had nothing new to tell him, anyway, and it might not be helpful to have calls from the resident persona-non-grata on his record right now. The secret personal email address he had given her she had already memorized, and the little slip of paper it had been written on had been ripped up into pieces and flushed down the toilet. She contemplated making her way to the library, to see if she had left anything there, but she figured that there was nothing in that place that she would have been allowed to take. She would have liked to have been allowed copies of the drawings from the Children’s Collective, the ones that had precipitated her insights about Boz, but she doubted that Martin would see fit to allow that.
In the end, the hour she had been given to pack proved to be entirely too much time. Stella wondered if she should take her small suitcase and make her way to the security checkpoint, and wait there for whatever was supposed to happen next, but Martin had said that she would be ‘escorted’ off the premises and Stella refused to escort herself. If they wanted her out they would have to come and get her. And so, her bags full, her soul empty, she sat down on her bed and waited for the people bearing her marching orders to arrive.
She did not expect to have her door chime at her to announce a visitor. That did seem rather more polite than necessary under the circumstances. She glanced at the bedside clock, noted without thinking too much about the situation that considerably more than the allotted hour had gone by, and then slipped off the edge of the bed, her legs feeling stiff and leaden, and made her way slowly to the door, toggling it open.
Of all the people she might have thought she would see standing there, Martin Peck was perhaps the very last. She stood and stared at him owlishly for a long moment, in absolute silence; there was something about his face that was strange, a new line etched deeply into his forehead and another slashing down from his nose to the corner of his mouth, but it was his eyes that held Stella. There was something in them that she wasn’t expecting. A tinge of resentment, yes, but that would have possibly been the last vestiges of the fury he had rained on Stella earlier—but over and above that, there was… defeat.
“May I come in?” Martin asked at last, breaking the silence.
“I thought you had rendered that question rather obsolete, earlier,” Stella said. “I am hardly in a position to invite you… but, hey, sure, yes, of course.”
She moved aside, gesturing him into the room and Martin stepped across the threshold. The door closed behind him. The two of them stood there for a moment, with Martin half turned away from Stella so that all she saw was one rigid shoulder and the tight jawline of a face mostly turned away from her. And then Stella sighed, and crossed her arms across her chest.
“Did you come to make sure I left without making trouble?” she asked.
“No,” Martin said.
“In that case, what can I do for you…?”
He turned, at last, and faced her. Stella’s eyes widened a little at his expression, but she stood her ground, and in the end he echoed her sigh with one of his own.
“We have to talk,” he said. “Sit down.”
He reached for the chair tucked under the desk, turned it around, and collapsed into it. Stella found a perch elsewhere and folded her hands in her lap, waiting.
“Did you know that Father Carter…?” Martin began, glancing up at her, and then his lips tightened. “Of course you know. I just want to know how he got around the… never mind. Either way, he’s gone.”
“Gone? Already?” Stella blurted. She hadn’t quite got that far in her planning. Philip’s absence was not something she had thought about as yet; she was still in the Parada base, and because he had always shared it, had always been right there and beside her, had shared all the revelations, the fact that he was gone and she was suddenly on her own here felt as if she had stuck her tongue into a tooth with a raw and open nerve. Even if it had been partly her idea that he should go, she could not help but feel briefly abandoned—and very, very alone, sitting there under Martin’s scrutiny.
Her choice of words had betrayed her prior knowledge of Philip’s departure, however, and Stella curled her fingers against her palms in her lap. Tactical error. Martin’s presence here in this room at this moment had unnerved her more than she had realized. She braced herself for an attack on this point, but it didn’t come. Instead, Martin reached up to drag one hand through his hair in a gesture that Stella couldn’t begin to interpret.
She took the initiative instead.
“How is the crew?” she asked. “Did Philip, at least, manage to say goodbye to them, even if you won’t let me speak to…”
“Oh, he managed,” Martin said, and there was something raw and savage in his voice.
Something had unraveled—something big—something that Philip’s departure had precipitated, or been an inadvertent part of, something that had been happening during this last endless hour that Stella had spent cooped up in her quarters waiting for her ejection from the habitat.
She bit her lip, waiting. Martin was going to have to spill this one on his own terms, in his own time.
“They called me,” Martin said abruptly. “Jerry Hillerman just… stood up, and looked straight up at the camera, and demanded that I come and see them. It’s as though he…”
It’s as though he was suddenly in control, Stella thought. You’re not used to being summoned to explain yourself, not by people you consider to be below you on the totem pole. Chain of command, eh…?
Martin shook himself. “I didn’t watch the surveillance footage before I went in,” he said stiffly. “Mistake. I would have not been blindsided by it if I had done so. But there was no time—everything just happened at once, and I was still too damned angry.”
“At whom?” Stella asked, unable to help herself.
“You. Then the good priest. Everybody.” Martin buried both hands into his hair at the sides of his head, in a gesture that was pure frustration.
“What did they want?” Stella asked, after a beat.
“What?” Martin said, dropping his hands back down and looking briefly disoriented, as though he was startled at his surroundings.
“You said they called you, the Parada people,” Stella said. “What did they want?”
Martin bared his teeth in a feral smile. “You, actually.”
Stella sat up, astonished. “I beg your pardon?”
“Philip Carter had got there first,” Martin said. “If it had been up to me—well, they didn’t know about Lily Mae. What had happened. Not yet. I would have chosen a better time to tell them—to explain—you can imagine, the news landed like a hand grenade.”
“That she was alive? That she was out there?” Stella inquired. “I would think so. Who talked to you?”
It was an odd question, but in the Parada context it was always an appropriate one. Martin took it in stride. “Han dithered between Hanford Millgar himself and the Cap alter ego,” he said. “Alaya… was Susan, I think. I don’t think I have met Jerry’s current persona before. It has aspects of Loki, as we have charted that persona, but it wasn’t quite that. And Rob didn’t say much at this point. He could have been anybody.” He sighed. “That was when I got there. And then… and then they all went into the children.”
“The Children’s Collective? Again?”
“It is damnably difficult to deal with a bunch of seven-year-olds,” Martin said sharply. “They don’t…”
“They don’t respond well to military bullying techniques,” Stella said.
Martin shot her a look. “Give it up.”
“Never,” Stella said softly. “So. What did the children want?”
“I told you. They wanted you.” Martin threw his hands up in the air. “You had to tell them, didn’t you?”
“Me? I was sitting in this room,” Stella said primly.
“You sent your minion,” Martin said savagely. “Don’t think I don’t know that the two of you are always whispering something. You and that priest.”
“I would hardly call a Jesuit priest my minion,” Stella snapped back, “and I think the Church might take a dim view of that too. What did Philip tell them?”
“What you told me,” Martin said. “That you couldn’t find Lily Mae, not alone… but that they can possibly help. And…”
“And what?”
“And they’re willing to help,” Martin said. “But… you. They’ll only work with you. If not you, then…”
“Then what?” Stella said, her heart thumping against her ribcage and a flush rising to her cheeks.
“They’re basically giving me an ultimatum, the lot of them,” Martin said. “And I’m supposed to sell this to my superiors. The fact that a bunch of children have me backed into a corner and demanding I countermand orders or they will suspend all cooperation. What they are basically threatening is that from here on they intend to speak to nobody, on absolutely anything to do with their situation. The… children… told me that they couldn’t help it if we sat there watching them all the time… but that they’ll just stop playing with us at all in any other context. It was the equivalent of name, rank, and service number. Unless you were our representative.”
“But I am not,” Stella said, far more calmly than she felt. “You asked me if you made yourself clear, and you did. Crystal. I don’t have it in writing—yet, anyway—but my verbal marching orders were unequivocal. What are you telling me now?”
Martin leapt to his feet again and prowled the small sitting room like a caged tiger. “Damn it,” he snarled. “Damn you, for being apparently far too good at what we brought you here to do—get their confidence, get their cooperation. And now here I am—and I have to—” He appeared to literally choke on his words, the lines on his face etching even deeper.
“What do you want me to do, Martin?”
His head snapped up and he stabbed her with a sharp gaze from bloodshot eyes. “Ideally? Go tell them not to be a pack of juvenile…” He stopped himself, but not before the word got out, and Stella had to bow her head to hide a quick smile. “You know what I mean,” Martin snarled. “I want them to behave like adults, like people I can communicate with—”
“People you can give orders to and expect them to be obeyed,” Stella said.
“I never demanded that!” Martin said. “I am a doctor too, remember? Medically trained? These people were my responsibility as much as they were yours. But more than that—”
“More than that, they were cogs in a military machine,” Stella said. “And they knew it, Martin. They are hardly stupid, any of them. You kept on trying to pull the wool over their eyes, spinning the story they were told, but all that collapsed when the Juno people left. They got the message—those people got to leave. They didn’t. And then Boz. And then… what Lily Mae pulled off. And now they’re done pretending to believe that any of this is for their benefit. Am I close?”
Martin stopped abruptly, and turned around to face her. She had never seen him look more haggard, more trapped, than in this moment. Despite herself, she felt a pang of something almost like pity for him. It was difficult to see any place where he could jump and salvage the operation, at least from his point of view. It was almost certain that this turn of events had sabotaged his own military career irretrievably. Anyone who had lost control of the situation as comprehensively as Martin seemed to have done would be extremely unlikely to be considered for a command post in the future.
“Will you help me?” Martin said hoarsely, his hands hanging helpless by his sides.
Stella stood up, and was astonished at how absolutely calm she felt.
“Of course,” she said. “Let’s go talk to the Collective.”
The Children’s Collective was still out when Stella and Martin returned to the habitat, sitting around the table, disconcertingly quiet for self-identified seven-year-olds, but Stella could read their presence from the posture and the attitude of the four adult human bodies who literally occupied the seats.
“Hello, Stella,” Glory said, the youngest of the ones remaining in the Habitat, the least inhibited. The smile the little girl put on Han Millgar’s chiseled face lit up his eyes, and Stella instinctively responded with one of her own.
“Hey,” she said.
“We’re glad you’re back,” Momo said, with an engaging dignity.
