Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 5 August 2014 Page 2

  "Ms. Oaks, if you want to stand out, bright is in."

  Lauren closed her eyes. She'd never much cared for shopping. Sure, she'd always liked to look nice, and kept herself in shape, but give her a flight suit and a knee-board and she stood out in the only way she cared to.

  Unfortunately, her exile had left her in painful ignorance of the latest styles. Her recent outing for dinner had proved such. Her clothes had been just long enough out of fashion to stand out, yet not of significant duration to be retro. She had looked and felt quite out of place.

  Lauren said, "Orange. Sure. Why not?"

  "O-kay," the girl said, a dollop of market-research backed exuberance on the second syllable. "Here's another one that will have you stopping them on the street."

  #

  "Are...are those your kids?" Lauren's voice stuttered despite her weak efforts at nonchalance with the question.

  "Yes," Martin said. His hard drive sat on her coffee table, piping the video to her wall-screen." That's Peter. And the girl is Maya."

  The boy, who looked to be about six or seven, ran around a faux-grass covered yard. The girl, who was much younger, attempted to give chase on wobbly legs. Stars twinkled in the night sky above them.

  Troubling scenarios raced through Lauren's thoughts. Beginning benign, each escalated as she considered. A divorcee. A still married man. A love nest beside her apartment. Its occupant looking for a simple fling. His bizarre behavior coupled with the gleeful children on the monitor struck panic in her thoughts.

  She reached for a glass that wasn't there, an instinct that persisted despite her recent, baby-step vow of drinking only after dark.

  Martin said, "The world doesn't long dwell upon calamity." He looked toward her blinds. "Those of us left behind are forced to remember when others forget."

  With a wave of his hand he ended the video. He stood and pocketed the hard drive before extending his hand to Lauren. Her mind still reeling with possible explanations, she took his hand. He squeezed it for just a moment. "Whatever has shut you in this apartment, know you're not alone." He dropped her hand and made for the door. He opened it, and, as if just remembering something, turned and said, "I like your outfit."

  She poured a drink despite the sunlight still glowing behind her blinds.

  #

  "No, the pink one," Lauren said.

  "You're really after that pink, huh?" Kimber, the sales associate once again filled Lauren's wall screen. "Oh, well. Let's give it a try."

  She had another date. Martin had finally invited her to his place. She would have been embarrassed at how giddy the invitation had made her, if she hadn't been so thrilled. Seven years of solitude will do that, she supposed.

  The revelation about his family had sold her. He hadn't once pressed for details on what she'd done, nor swamped her with his own sorrows. They both knew the other had suffered, and that was enough.

  "Hey," Kimber said, "that's not bad."

  Lauren was sliding white, patterned sweaters over the pink shirt that was displayed on the screen.

  "That one," Lauren said as a sleek, blue, argyle pattern on white landed on the model onscreen.

  "Look at you go, Ms. Oaks."

  "Never doubt the argyle," she said. "I want to try it on." With a few waves of Lauren's hand, a representation of herself replaced the model on the screen.

  Something had brought Martin to her. It was time to stop being a child. The world had forgotten Destino. Had moved on. Lauren wasn't some spinster locked away in this apartment. She'd been a pilot once. One with promise before the accident. And even though she felt she might not deserve to, it was time to live again.

  "I need shoes," Lauren said. "And a belt. I'm thinking black."

  "I'm thinking you're right, Ms. Oaks."

  #

  Lauren entered Martin's apartment with a smile. A sofa sat beside a coffee table. A dining room set with chairs beneath the long window that looked out on the same view as Lauren's. But where her apartment lacked clutter, his teemed with it. Books, papers, hard drives; every surface boasted some pile or stack.

  It took a moment to register through the disorder before her breath left her like she'd been punched. The door clicked shut behind before she understood what it was she was looking at.

  Photos. Physical ones behind lighted frames. News stories printed and blown up to the size of posters. Archives of the event flipped and scrolled on numerous tiles on the wall-screen. A single theme permeating them all.

  "I must apologize, Lauren," Martin said. "I haven't been completely honest with you."

  Her voice had fled, and she could barely breathe. A thousand images from that day surrounded her. Bold headlines screamed condemnations in enormous fonts. The faces of victims, tucked away in various corners of newsprint, spat silent curses at her. She caught her own face amidst the detritus. The same photo that had peppered a hundred news feeds that day. Her young, smiling face after graduating flight school.

  "I had to meet you first, you see," he said, looking out his window. The apartment was identical to hers, but in reverse. Every room and hall on the wrong side. The memories of that day surrounding her twisted the space into a nightmare image of what had been her own sanctuary for so many years.

  "I know what it's like to lose everything," he said.

  Lauren edged towards the door, her new shoes giving away her intention with every clacking footstep.

  "Do you know what the odds of that happening were?" he said. "Literally in the millions. One second sooner or later and the shock-wave would have barely jostled Destino, or missed it altogether. It would be difficult to reproduce such a series of events if one were trying to do so."

  He was still looking out the window. Lauren was almost at the door. She wasn't sure why she hadn't simply ran. Why she felt the need to sneak out. The door was close, the handle almost within reach.

  "You saved us, you know."

  She stopped. "Us?"

  Now he looked at her. "Yes. Had you not skipped when you did, the shear would have snapped the keel, tearing the ferry in two."

  She'd known that. Had always known how close they'd all come to dying.

  "What do you mean, us?" she said.

  "Destino was only a three day trip from the departure lanes at Sirius. My family was on the station. I was going to meet them."

  The door was behind her. She could exit in seconds. Before he could act. But she lingered.

  "You were on the ferry?"

  He nodded.

  Lauren said, "So now you've found me."

  "I wish there were some other way. I've tried everything. This is all I have left." He stepped towards her.

  "I had to meet you first," he said. "To make sure. I see now. They were right. There is no other way for me to be free."

  The moment spread before her like a spilled drink, escaping from the broken shards of a dropped glass. She'd hoped for so much since meeting Martin. Dreamed. Wondered about this man who'd appeared in her life and ended her exile.

  And she'd been right all along. Closing out a world that sought only vengeance against her for what she'd done. Vengeance flawlessly served by this man who had lulled her out only to strike when her hope reemerged.

  A calm washed over her. Its source unknown, she relaxed against the door. Perhaps it was for the best. He'd come this far. Maybe it was time to let go. Time for him to do what she'd only tarried at doing herself through drink. Perhaps he'd end what she'd been too weak to do herself.

  "I'm so sorry for all of this," he said, moving towards her.

  "So am I," she said. She felt soft. Helpless. Her outfit, an object of such personal progress now seemed ridiculous, only adding to her vulnerability. Despite feeling so exposed, she was ready to submit. She hoped whatever he planned would be quick.

  "I forgive you," Martin said.

  Lauren waited.

  "It was a terrible accident. Something unthinkable. I hated
you for so many years. I resisted any thought of forgiving you my family's death. Until I saw there was no other way." He looked at her. "I swear, I forgive you, Lauren."

  She was still. Unsure if this was simply prelude to whatever violence he had planned.

  "You didn't look at me the day they removed you from the ship," he said. "I saw you. You didn't see me."

  "There was nothing to see." Her voice was quiet. "You got the better bargain. A pittance of survivor's guilt your only fee. Not bad considering the deal I got. A world's worth of hate for saving my ship."

  He took her limp hand in his.

  "That's a really nice outfit."

  "I know. I picked it out."

  "I'm not going anywhere," he said. "I found you."

  Did she share such feelings? An easy question only an hour prior. Now, what did she want?

  "A rescue for a rescue, then?" she said. "I get you out of that corridor alive and you get me out of my apartment and the bottle?" She pulled her hand from his and looked at the floor. Saw her face reflected in her shiny shoes. "I don't know," she said. "I just don't know."

  She left. Back in her own apartment, she didn't bother with any lights. She retrieved a full bottle from her kitchen. It thumped to the floor as she wedged open the front door with it.

  She went to the closet of one of her unused rooms. In the dark, she rooted through first one, then a second box of clothes until she found what she wanted. She knew it by touch even without the lights. She returned to the living room, placed it on the coffee table, and sat on the sofa.

  Martin joined her after only a few minutes. He slid his hand over the dimmer panel, bringing the lights to a glow no stronger than a single candle before sitting beside her.

  "I never washed it," she said. "Just threw it in my duffel when I departed the ship."

  Martin ran his hand over the bloodstained jump suit. "You were wearing this that day," he said.

  She traced her hand over the stitching of her name on the left pocket. "It was easy for me to hide. Just lock myself away and never deal with anyone. It's not like people were beating down my door to offer assistance."

  "I don't suppose they did." He took her hand. "I used to think I wanted to die," he said. "I didn't think there was any other way. I realized I wanted to live, but I didn't know how. In one of the many counselings I attended, someone mentioned a story from over a hundred years ago in South Africa."

  Lauren looked at him and cocked her head. "What was it?"

  He shook his head. "It's not important. Not now. But I learned that sometimes, forgiveness is the only way to truly move on." He moved closer to her. "I meant what I said, Lauren. And I hope you can believe this, but I truly feel like something has been lifted from me."

  "Forgiveness," she said. "Maybe I'll try it sometime." She touched the bloodstained jumpsuit. "But it may be awhile."

  Martin stood and picked up the flight suit. "I suppose there's no rush. We've both waited this long."

  "Is that a souvenir?" she said, flicking the dangling leg of her old uniform.

  "No. This is going in the garbage."

  Lauren nodded. She wanted to sleep. "See you tomorrow, then?"

  "Yeah," he said, "I think so."

  ###

  Clint Spivey spent eight years as a meteorologist with the U.S. Navy. After finishing grad school he is currently teaching English part time at two Japanese universities. His work has appeared in The Lorelei Signal, Perihelion, and Liquid Imagination.

  Zip

  Emma Osborne

  One hour and six minutes until his boots crunched into the soil of a disputed planet. Lieutenant James Kent sat on the floor of his bare room and field-stripped his blaster methodically, relying on his years of training to find the oxygen-boosting cartridge, to correctly grease the release points, to stay steady and not look up at the empty space above his rack where the photo of his former captain and lover had been.

  The mission destination flashed up on his comms tablet: a deserted jungle planet with a low combat risk rating, but all the same, the Allied Planet Military was going in with fingers on triggers. Prudent. Nobody had forgotten the Ba’Tooth scandal: two full squads bleeding into black mud under the shadow of a traditionally woven peace tapestry.

  Captain Simon Albright had been assigned to that ill-fated mission and Kent had wept with relief in his rack when the zip had come through from him. Before that final message, Kent had thought him dead, but Albright had been switched out from the squad at the last minute to make room for a linguistics expert. The news of the raid had been all over the base-wide feeds. Albright found out from the feeds that it had been his squad shredded planet-side, his brothers and sisters who caught the fallout from a generational hive-war. He took it hard. I should have been with them. The last line of the zip had been free from Albright’s usual sign-off, a coded blip of love that could wriggle around a censor’s scrutiny. It should have been me.

  Kent figured that Albright had found someone else to numb the pain after receiving that last, lonely message. The silence had stretched and thinned until nothing remained but a wisp, coupled with the pervasive feeling that nobody would ever speak to him with love in his voice ever again.

  The LT finished up with his blaster. Every piece of Kent’s equipment was maintained and prepped: steel-silk rope coiled in its pouch, boot-toes sharpened for kicking into rock, face-shield programmed with thousands of languages and ready to take on dust, ice or jungle-sweat. Kent carried everything he needed to command the base raid—everything except the certainty that he would be mourned by the one he loved if he spun out, ate dirt, was blown away, baby. It doesn’t matter, he thought, breathing deep. I gotta go. No matter what he’d lost, he always had his squad, and their mission. They were the only two things that could get him out of his rack.

  A short melody bleeped through his tablet. Time to report to the transport. The commanding officer was always first aboard, last to depart. Kent locked his face-shield into place and tucked a dog tag into the pocket on the left side of his uniform. A blank zip-film poked out from under his thin pillow. He’d figure out what to write if he lived.

  #

  Everything felt wrong in a flash. It was a teeth-grating feeling, a shiver that didn’t stop or show in gloved fingertips that gripped the handrails tight. The scientists called it transport displacement and lectured them about the shifts that occurred at a sub-atomic level. But it was perfectly safe, they said, scrawling absently onto erasable clipboards. Perfectly safe.

  It was best if you rode the flash with your eyes closed. He couldn’t see shit through the view-plate anyway, just grey half-space: the in-between of things. The screaming slip through space manifested in fireworks that sparked behind his eyelids. Kent always saw green-blue ripples that once reminded him of a show he’d seen about Aurora borealis. But that was before the mission that he and Albright had teamed up on, under the icy crust of the moon Europa. They’d been tired, cold and so far from home, in both time and space. Kent had been astounded when Albright had wrapped his hand around the back of Kent’s neck. He remembered the taste of that first kiss and the scrape of Albright’s stubble as they both gave into something that had been brewing for months. Now, every flickering light reminded him of the play of the waves above their heads and the close huddle of an anchored tent.

  Flames silently bloomed around the view-plates as Kent and his squad descended through the atmosphere of the planet Kelvin. The twelve of them opened their eyes and watched the view-screens, watched one another, sending silent promises of solidarity around the interior of the shuttle. The tongues of fire were as chaotic and vibrant as the tropical flowers that had once grown around the windows of Kent’s parents’ house. Both the flowers and his parents were long dead and crumbled; they had both stubbornly clung to Earth as if it would somehow heal itself one day.

  Dex, their droid, gazed at the display impassively. Corporal Sowell’s silver whiskers prickled out from
the grim set of his jaw. The veteran knew better than to trust the official reports. He scowled as Malik and Hughes began to throw up roughly. Lombardi looked on, smug. The three of them, always mischievous, had been up all night drinking and playing cards. Lombardi always held her booze better than any of them. Goddamn genetics.

  The squad shared a battleground comms matrix that worked like an extended warning system; a tremor of nerves that shot around emotional flashes. No secrets—nothing so well formed—but between them flooded a sense of danger or apprehension that twined around the regular comms. It could mean the difference between breathing and choking to death on your own blood.

  Kent took a moment to once again mentally run through the mission stats. His orders were to land, trek to the base, and capture it. Each base, each planet was a crucial part of the Allied Planet network. Since the mass departure from a sun-blasted Earth, the military was constantly on the lookout for planets with terraforming potential. Regaining even one would be a coup.

  The base on Kelvin was supposedly abandoned by the Kee, but Kent’s squad hummed with the caution of veterans. He checked the reads. The atmosphere would be negated by the bionics of their combat suits but the acidity in the air would wear them out in under twelve hours. Uncovered skin would melt down to muscle in minutes.

  They landed in a patchy clearing. The automated hatch hissed open and the squad bounced out, Kent on point. He’d insisted. He barked out formations and as one, the team slipped through the black, sticky jungle that rotted around them. The planet had been torched in the Inferno Wars between the rock-like Kee and the delicate, merciless Alalani birds who were capable of flying between worlds on their smoking scarlet wings. Kent flipped himself sideways to avoid trampling a patch of green moss that marked the start of a grow-back. However hot the flames, something always grew back.