Star's End

  “Except for you,” I said, and I thought of all the things I refused to ask my father, things that were more important than why he was drinking in a bar. Like what had happened to Isabel on Catequil. My cheeks turned hot with embarrassment, and I took a long drink of water.

  “Except for me.” She laughed. “I went right up to him, sat down, told him he was going to pay for my drink.”

  I smiled. “What did he say to that?”

  “Nothing. He just looked at me.” Harriet gestured between her eyes and mine. “Just stared at me. I stared right back. We were both waiting to see who blinked first.” Harriet grinned, jabbed her thumb toward herself. “It wasn’t me.”

  A woman who beat Dad at something, even if it was as stupid as a staring contest. I wouldn’t have expected that to be an attraction for him.

  “We started talking after that. Turned out he’d come to the ship ’cause he wanted a drink. Said merc ships have the best bars. At least, that’s what he told me.” Harriet shrugged. “He was probably spying on us; that was my guess. I didn’t much care at the time. We talked a bit about the mission.” She stirred her fish around on her plate, and I wondered again what exactly that mission had been. I could look it up in the files, if she wasn’t going to tell me. She was probably contracted into silence, anyway. “Then he invited me to spend the evening at Star’s End. Rest is history.”

  “And you actually said yes?” I said.

  Harriet laughed at that. “Hell yeah, I said yes! I told you he was handsome. I’d been off my birth control—I made the mistake of thinking he was fixed, which was damn stupid of me. Six weeks later, I was puking as we flew out of the Coromina system.” She looked up at me, and there was a sadness waiting behind her eyes. “I couldn’t bring myself to have an abortion—here was my one chance to bring in a life; I didn’t want to give that up. But I couldn’t keep you with me, either. They don’t let us raise merc babies anymore.”

  I stared at her. I didn’t have words.

  She rubbed at her forehead. “And that’s probably for the best. Mercing’s a hard life. A violent life. And you can’t just leave once you’re in it. Not a lot of job options for you outside of fighting. That’s why I had to give you up. There just wasn’t any other choice.” She sighed. “I’d gotten a taste of what Philip’s life was like, what it was going to be like, a big orgo-built house in this tropical paradise he was creating. And I thought—Shit, I thought, this won’t be so bad for her, will it? But some days, I wish I’d said fuck it to the whole system. Some days—” She looked away from me, out in the jungle. “Some days, I wish I’d kept you with me. That maybe—” She shook her head. “That maybe it would have been better.”

  Tears prickled at the corners of my eyes. All the china and silverware laid out on the table blurred. I wiped at my face, trying to be discreet. I didn’t know if Harriet noticed or not. She was staring out the window, out at the jungle. The rain had stopped and the windows steamed up, blurring everything into streaks of green.

  “Are you happy?” she asked me. “Here? Are you happy?”

  Under the table, I twisted my napkin up into knots. She was still staring out the window, and her expression was so mournful that I couldn’t tell the truth.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “I’m happy.”

  • • •

  After lunch, I asked John to drop Harriet off at the base. It was burrowed even deeper into the woods than the Veiled Garden was, although it was guarded not by a holographic facade but by soldiers with light rifles. It had been erected only two weeks before by the same terraforming technology that had built the Coromina Group offices. And so it had an eerie, organic look to it, like the buildings might start breathing, like their doors might open up into cavernous jaws and eat you alive.

  The car drove under a sensor to confirm our identities, and I shivered as that imposing light passed over me and through me, digging down deep into my cells. It was unnerving, like finding a patch of cold water in a warm ocean.

  John glanced over his shoulder at us as we made our way into the interior of the base; I hadn’t bothered activating the privacy screen in the car. “Where should I drop off Sergeant Oxbow, Ms. Coromina?”

  “The loading zone will be fine,” I said, feeling awkward that he had asked me instead of Harriet, as if I were Harriet’s keeper. But she only leaned back in her seat like she didn’t care.

  “That was quite a meal,” she said. “I hope we can do it again.”

  I wondered if that would actually happen. Maybe, before the war started. But nobody knew when the war was going to start—nobody but Dad, anyway, Dad and his inner circle. And I wasn’t a part of that.

  “Once the war gets going, we’ll be on lockdown. Hell, I’ll probably be up in the black most of the time. Usually the way it goes with these things.”

  I hated how calm she was about that fact, like she didn’t even care that she could die out there. It felt like our roles had switched; like I was the mother, and she was the daughter.

  “If nothing else, we should be able to talk on CG’s Connectivity.” I glanced at her sideways. “If you wouldn’t mind, I mean.”

  “Of course not!” Harriet beamed at me. “I was going to suggest the same thing myself.”

  The car arrived at the loading zone, pulling up behind an unmarked transport vehicle I recognized as a Coromina design. Harriet unlocked her seat belt and reached out for the car handle. It was happening too fast. One lunch wasn’t enough to ask her everything I wanted, and CG’s Connectivity wasn’t the same, especially during wartime, when it would be monitored and recorded and sifted through for signs of treason.

  “Wait,” I said, just as Harriet pushed open the door. She glanced over at me, eyes bright. Kind.

  “I’m sorry, I just—I had one last question. Before you go.”

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  The sweetheart stung me. I wondered if she said that to everyone. She didn’t seem the type, but then, I didn’t really know her, did I? Maybe I was the only sweetheart in her life. I took a deep breath.

  “Your holos,” I said. “The ones you sent me when I was a little girl.”

  Harriet’s kind expression didn’t flicker.

  “I saw something in them,” I said. “Or thought I did. A pattern.” I laughed a little. “I was always too afraid to ask about it. Afraid it would get me in trouble.”

  “Well, isn’t that odd.” Harriet laughed. “Must be space static or something.”

  I smiled, even though I burned with embarrassment. Space static. Just like I’d thought. But part of me had stayed convinced that I’d found something about her, this tiny clue that she was leaving behind just for me. And it was nothing. Just a bit of debris caught in the transmission.

  “Would you mind helping me with my trunk?” Harriet said. “Not sure I’m going to be able to lug it out of there after that big meal.”

  She was looking at me, not John, and so I nodded and slipped out of the car into the muggy, damp air. Harriet walked around to the trunk of the car and I followed her. I felt silly. I shouldn’t have asked about the pattern. All children have overactive imaginations. I wasn’t any different.

  I reached in alongside Harriet and tugged on her trunk. It hardly weighed anything. She didn’t need my help. But I was touched, too, that she had asked.

  The trunk thudded on the ground and Harriet looked at me. “Can I give you a hug?” she asked.

  My heart fluttered, and I nodded. Harriet wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in close—it was a real hug, a mom’s hug, and I sank into it. For half a second, I felt like a little kid again.

  And then Harriet’s breath was tickling my ear, and she was speaking, low and throaty, and my whole body went rigid at what she had to say.

  “The patterns weren’t your imagination,” she murmured. “I wanted to tell you the truth. But I can’t say anything more. Look again.”

  She pulled away and grinned. “See you on the Connectivity,” she said, and
the transition from the frantic whispering was so seamless, I almost though I had imagined it.

  “You’ll do what I said, yeah?” she said, and something in her eyes glinted, and I knew she wasn’t talking about the Connectivity at all.

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  She picked up her trunk and studied me. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “Proud of what you’ve become.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. So, I ignored it.

  “Stay safe,” I said.

  She smiled at that. Inside my head, I thought of the pattern, the slow slow slow quick quick slow rhythms that had thumped behind her voice all those years before. And then I thought of her riding in a shuttle up into the black to go to war.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, and I hoped it was true.

  • • •

  I told John to take me back to Star’s End instead of the office. I didn’t have any meetings scheduled for the afternoon, and the rest of my work I could do from home. But there was one thing I wanted to do first, and I couldn’t do it anywhere near the Coromina Group headquarters.

  I went straight up to my suite and shut the door behind me. My heart was fluttering fast inside my chest. The exchange with Harriet had happened so quickly. Keep looking. But for what? And how? And what was the truth? About Dad? About me? Or was it larger than that—about OCI? The war? The company?

  The patterns had been a game when I was kid, and a way for me to find a connection with my mother. Now they felt serious. Life or death.

  I dragged the lockbox out of my closet and flipped it open. The datachips gleamed up at me, and the holocube was nestled in the corner of the box. I picked it up first and switched it on. My mother flickered into view, shockingly young—she almost didn’t seem like the same person I had just eaten lunch with. I held the cube to my ear and listened beyond her words.

  The pattern was still there, faint but steady, the rhythm the same as I had remembered. I tapped it out on my thigh.

  When the holo looped, I paused it and grabbed a handful of the datachips. I plugged them one by one into my lightbox, listening for the pattern. The ones that didn’t have it, I set back inside the box—but the ones that did, I piled up neatly on my sofa. There were thirteen holos total that contained the pattern, including the big holocube.

  I played the holocube again, this time with my lightbox screen lit up in front of me so I could scribble out the pattern. Slow slow slow quick quick slow quick, on and on, a system of binary that should have been easy for me to work out. All my childhood notes had been lost, but bits and pieces of them came back to me as I worked. I had thought it might be Morse code, from Earth, which the militaries still used from time to time, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t digital binary, either.

  I played through each of the datachips. It was the same pattern every time. Thirteen separate patterns, repeated. I counted the number of occurrences in the pattern before it repeated itself—seven. I briefly considered taking the pattern to my assistant Miguel, to see if he could have it analyzed by some of the experts employed by the Coromina Group, but I dismissed the idea almost immediately. This wasn’t my PM secret projects. This tied back to Harriet, and this was a warning.

  I switched off the currently playing holo and slumped down on my sofa. I suspected the key to breaking the code was in the numbers, thirteen and seven. As a kid, I’d assumed the pattern hadn’t been in every single holo because Harriet couldn’t put it in every time. Now, I was starting to think it was on purpose.

  The breakthrough should have made me excited, but instead it left me frustrated. Harriet had sent this to me when I was a child, and yet I couldn’t even solve it as an adult. I rolled the two numbers around in my head. Seven and thirteen, seven and thirteen. Both odd numbers. Both numbers that couldn’t be divided evenly. Easy math. Math that a kid could do.

  I stood up and paced around my room. The rain had cleared and I shuffled up to my window to look down at the garden. Everything sparkled in the sunlight. A figure moved in the distance—one of the soldiers walking the perimeter.

  I froze.

  This whole time, as I struggled to figure out the pattern, I’d missed the most obvious clue: Harriet herself. Harriet, and her whole reason for giving me up. She didn’t want me to become a war child. Because Harriet was a soldier. And all the militaries had their own methods of communication, their own secret codes so that they could communicate with each other and only each other.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered, and then I grabbed my lightbox and opened up the scribbled pattern again. This was an Andromeda Corps code, specific to that military. Something the Coromina Group was contractually obligated to ignore. Which meant I couldn’t take it to the Andromeda Corps CO and demand to have it translated. They would never agree. It was a breach of contract. But it did give me a lead on how to crack it.

  I paced across my room, pressing the holocube between my two palms, like I could squeeze its secrets out. I could go to the Star’s End soldiers, but this wasn’t exactly like the favors I’d asked of them when I was younger, sneaking out to the beach to see my friends. And this close to wartime, I shouldn’t ask them to keep secrets from Dad and the company anyway. Adrienne might be able to help; out of all of us, she’d been the best at computer science. But I was hesitant to involve one of my sisters, not just because of the security issue but because my mother was one of those topics we never discussed.

  I sighed, slumped down on my couch, and sifted idly through the notes on my lightbox. I was getting nowhere with this. I needed someone else.

  I didn’t want to burden Adrienne. I didn’t want to burden any of my sisters. But surely, Adrienne could understand why I wanted to break a code from my mother.

  I grabbed the lightbox and the holocube and slipped out of my room and down the hallway. Adrienne’s door was cracked open. Not a surprise there; most of the internships had been cancelled in preparation for the war.

  I knocked on the door lightly and called out her name.

  “Yes?” she sang out. “Daphne, if this is you, I told you, I’m too busy—”

  “It’s me,” I said, and slipped through the doorway. She was sitting in front of her own lightbox, the holoscreen shining. Whatever she was doing, she looked completely absorbed.

  “Don’t tell me you’re working,” I said. “You aren’t a fulltime employee yet. This should be a vacation for you.”

  “I was reading the newsfeeds.” She turned off her holoscreen and looked over at me. She frowned when she saw the holocube. “What’s going on?”

  I shut the door behind me and moved quickly across the room. “I need your help,” I said. “I have a code here. I can’t break it.”

  Adrienne’s eyes widened “Is it related to the war?” She snatched the holocube away from me and turned it around in her head. “My God, Esme, this thing’s ancient.”

  “No. It’s personal.” I pulled a chair over to her desk and sat down beside her. She kept puzzling over the holocube. “You have to promise not to tell anyone about this, though.”

  “Wait, what?” She looked up at me. “What’s going on?” Her eyes narrowed. “This isn’t about Isabel, is it?”

  Isabel. I felt a pang in my heart at the memory of her refusing to call me her sister. I shook my head. “It’s something from my mother. It’s a code, hidden in with her holos from when I was a little girl. I tried to figure it out as a kid but I never could.”

  “Your mother?” Adrienne looked down at the holocube, her expression flat. “Your mother left you a secret message.”

  “She’s military, remember?” I said it quietly, thinking how my mother and Adrienne’s mother couldn’t be more different. “She’s planetside. Because of the war. And she told me—apparently the code means something. But that was all she told me.”

  Adrienne looked up at me. Her eyes were like dark pools. I couldn’t see anything in them. “Oh, Esme,” she said. “This really is important, isn’t it?”

  For
a moment, I was breathless. Of course it was. But to hear Adrienne say so aloud caught me by surprise.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It really is.”

  “Well, then I have to keep it secret, don’t I?” She smiled brightly. “If you thought you could trust me with it.”

  “Of course I could trust you with it.” I returned her smile. “You’re my sister.”

  A beat passed, a moment of something shared. Then I took a deep breath and said, “Here, just listen to it.”

  I activated the holocube first. As soon as it began to play, my mother’s voice drifting through the room, I felt a surge of dizziness. I’d never shown these holos to anyone else before.

  Adrienne listened, her head tilted. My mother’s familiar words filled up the room.

  When the holo shuddered and began repeating, Adrienne said, “The pattern was in there three times.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you play the others?”

  I did, one at a time, in the order that Harriet had sent them to me. I sat at Adrienne’s desk and relived my childhood thirteen times over. Each holo brought with it a memory. Meeting Laila for the first time. Swimming in the ocean during one of the hottest, driest dry seasons I could remember. The flu sweeping across the Four Sisters.

  Adrienne, though, just took notes on her lightbox. She was counting—I could see the numbers floating on her holoscreen. These holos didn’t mean anything to her. She hadn’t even existed when most of them were recorded.

  The pattern repeated itself in clumps of threes and fours. Adrienne drummed her fingers against the desk.

  “I think the code is specific to the Andromeda Corps,” I said. “Mr. Garcia talked to you about military codes, right?”

  Adrienne gave me an exasperated look. “Of course he did. We even practiced breaking some of them. I was the best at it.” She laughed at herself, tossed her hair over her shoulder. I’d never done that, but then, my tutoring had been different. Much more business-focused. I had been groomed in a way my sisters hadn’t. “We didn’t do any AC codes, but I think I can see the pattern.”