Dreamspinner Press Year Five Greatest Hits Page 5

  God, his body ached. It felt as though all of him had taken a beating, and not just his throat and his rectum. He made his way through the house and opened the front door to the bridge console, a few feet away. He could hardly look Kate and Bobby in the eyes as he took his place up in the front of the shuttle.

  “Oh God,” Kate hissed as he sat down, and he looked away.

  “Kate, I don’t want to talk about it,” he murmured, checking readings. Hyperspace had ended the year before, leaving them with coordinates to an occupied space station and a whole lot of space debris to pilot through. Kate had been studying her piloting and navigation while Anderson and Bobby had still been in school, a program they’d had to cancel not long after Alpha had joined them. That had been a good time, actually—they’d been optimistic that they could find a closer space station and pilot their way to it. When Anderson realized that they’d taxed their fuel reserves too much to bring the ship out of hyperspace, change directions, and then make the jump again, the good time had ended.

  They’d progressed on their original heading, the one programmed into the ship by people long dead, and continued the awful balancing act of life versus bare survival—a balancing act that had lasted nearly five years. When they’d gotten the warning that hyperspace only had a few months to go, Kate had given Bobby and Anderson a crash course in steering and navigation, and they’d been learning by doing ever since.

  It had been easier in that first year, before they’d been forced to cancel programs and make hard decisions. In the first year, it had been like a real relationship—Alpha hadn’t been as controlling, and Anderson’s free time had still been his own.

  Now, things were not so easy.

  Bobby tugged at the neck of Anderson’s regulation orange and gray jumpsuit, and it ripped a little, even as Anderson recoiled with a shouted, “Hey! Give me some space here!”

  “Space?” Bobby snapped. “Space? That’s all Alpha’s been making us give you. How long since we had a movie night, Anderson? Read a book, threw a disc, went to the park together?”

  “The school program,” Anderson mumbled. “We canceled it, and he felt… you know… superfluous.” That had actually been a long time ago—and it hadn’t been Alpha’s trigger by a long shot—but it was easier to say.

  “Look at yourself!” Bobby shouted, and Anderson cringed.

  “Shhh… Bobby! If you’re not careful, he’ll come up front!” Mostly, Alpha was kept in the house or in the backyard by Anderson’s directive—it was the one thing he had stood absolutely firm on, and the other holograms had backed him up. But there was nothing physical keeping Alpha from interfering with engineering or programming, and Anderson wondered daily if he should change that.

  Bobby shook his head, carefully tracing the bruises at Anderson’s throat. Six years ago, the touch would have made Anderson blush. Now, it just made him want to cry. Anderson captured Bobby’s fingers against his skin and said, “It’s okay, Bobby. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. He knows my limits, right?”

  “God, I hope so,” Bobby snapped, yanking his hand away to dash at his eyes. “Dammit, Anderson, if he kills you, he kills us all, you realize that, don’t you?”

  Anderson nodded and swallowed. “I get it. He gets it. He wants to live as much as you do.” He wasn’t sure if it was true or not. He thought it might just be a hope living in his own mind.

  Suddenly Kate surprised him by going over his back for a hug. “What about you, Anderson?” she asked, rubbing her cheek against his. They’d experimented some more with scent on the holodeck a few years back, right after Alpha had been introduced, in those heady first few months when Anderson had been trying to make an impression. He hadn’t been able to make anything that smelled real for Alpha and had given up. Kate had kept up with those experiments, and she smelled like something yummy—jasmine and vanilla, maybe—and she was suddenly inexpressibly dear.

  “I want to live too,” he said softly, and her cheek rubbed against his.

  “We want you to want to,” she told him, and he nodded and tried hard not to bawl like a baby, there on the bridge of the shuttle, as they tried to figure out how to keep the shuttle from going up against some minor planetoid and completely bursting into powder.

  “Wait,” Anderson said suddenly, something catching his eye. “Wait. Oh shit. Bobby, is that what I think it is?”

  Bobby turned his fulminating gaze from the bruises on Anderson’s throat and the one on his cheek—Alpha did like to slap—and actually looked at the readouts on the screen.

  “Oh God,” Bobby said, and for a moment, Anderson’s shitty relationship was completely forgotten, and it was all about the beeping on the screen.

  “Hermes-Eight. Christ. That’s the star system with the station. It’s got three occupied planets and a goddamned space station! We can dock there. Oh… oh, God. How long?”

  Anderson’s heart was beating faster, and his mouth was dry. People. Other (not real, other) people. For a moment, just a moment, he felt the excitement of a little kid. For a fraction of a second, he remembered what it was like, hand in hand with Melody, pushing the baby in her stroller and talking to Jen as Mom and Dad took them for ice cream.

  His hand rose to the swollen bruises on his throat, and that moment died, just like they had, and he was suddenly very much afraid. “Should we go?” he asked, wanting Alpha there to ask. Alpha’s not here. You’ve managed to keep him off the bridge. That’s probably a good idea.

  Bobby gave an exasperated snort. “Are you insane? Of course we should go!”

  Anderson swallowed and looked at him, trying to find words. “But… Bobby. You and Kate… do you think they would understand? They… they might try to….” He couldn’t say the word, and Bobby frowned.

  In the past six years, Bobby’s chest and face had filled out, but he’d remained fit and wiry. In spite of the deterioration of things with Alpha, in spite of the strain Alpha kept putting on Anderson’s relationship with… with anybody else on the shuttle, Bobby’s primary emotional reaction was joy, and Anderson loved him for that. It showed in the way his eyes crinkled and his soft, full lips quirked up. It showed in the looks he sent to Kate on an almost minute-by-minute basis. A frown was still an unlikely expression on Bobby’s smiling face.

  “Might try to delete our programs?” Kate asked bluntly. She’d moved and was sitting in her console chair, the one in the center. Her no-nonsense scowl was aimed out of the shuttle, and she deftly steered them around some space debris that might have hurt, bouncing off their hull shields. Many holodeck programs had been sacrificed to maintain those shields after they came out of hyperspace.

  “Yeah,” Anderson whispered, looking at her apologetically. “They can’t. You guys… you’re my family.”

  Kate’s primary expression was the scowl, and now she leveled it at Anderson. “You’ve got two choices, baby. You can dock at that space station in…”— she looked at her console and did some mental calculations—“seventy-two hours and give fighting for us a shot, or you can stay in this shuttle until all life support systems deteriorate in forty-three Earth days and we all go under.”

  There was a terrible pressure on Anderson’s chest, the kind he felt when Alpha wrapped those strong, brutal hands around his throat while buried deep inside his body. He struggled for breath, and the now-familiar sensation of oxygen deprivation brought black spots in front of his eyes. A decision. The horrible kind. Who should stay and who should go? Which holograms would stay in the program, which ones would be canceled? Which songs could they keep in data banks to represent the mining colony; which ones would they have to hold up in painfully transcribed form on a tablet and let the holodeck recorders imprint? Which photos should he keep, as the data banks filled slowly with his day-to-day life aboard the shuttle? Which ones would he have to eliminate? Which days of his and Kate’s and Bobby’s life should he get rid of (if they could!) so he could keep the memories of people long dead?

  His vision got darker an
d darker, and he was aware that the sounds he was making weren’t entirely sane.

  It was Bobby who snapped him out of it. “Anderson… Anderson! Breathe, dammit, just fucking breathe!” He punctuated the scream with two fists in the front of Anderson’s jumpsuit and a hearty shake. Anderson found himself breathing by reflex, by necessity, by the goddamned will to survive.

  Yes. He still had that. The will to survive.

  He must still have that. It was why Alpha stopped every night, just when he lost consciousness. It was why Kate and Bobby were still there, in spite of Alpha’s insistence that Anderson cancel their programs, and why Henry and Risa were there, too, running the synthesizers, and maintaining the data banks, and rotating on pilot duty.

  “I want you to live,” he said now, his chest moving, his breath evening out. “I want you to live. I want to live.”

  Kate was on the subspace frequency before the words were out of his mouth. He looked at her in surprise, and she glared at him. “Do you think I’m going to give you time to take it back?” she asked, and to his mortification, she was a little bit tearful.

  “I wasn’t going to,” he said quietly. “We’ll live, okay, Kate? I swear.”

  Kate wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Anderson, it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said softly, then, into the subspace radio, “Attention space station Hermes-Eight, this is space shuttle Cancer-Prime K-3-458, requesting permission to enter your space and dock. Please reply.”

  Anderson listened to her, grateful, as ever, for her practicality and acceptance, no matter what the circumstances. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was right. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, he would have blown up with the rest of his colony, and this ship and its crew would never have existed at all.

  SOON ENOUGH the debris was gone, and Kate left the bridge to Henry and Risa, which always felt better than leaving it on auto-pilot these days. They were both given the firm instructions to call Kate, Bobby, or Anderson to the bridge in case anyone replied to their message, and Henry’s excited cackle at the news made Anderson feel better still. Risa actually beamed, clinging to Henry’s hand in tense excitement. Anderson bussed her cheek, ruffled Henry’s hair, and joined Kate and Bobby in their favorite scenario these days for small celebrations—the Frisbee golf throwing park for a quick game.

  Bobby was right: it had been a while since Anderson had been there. He felt the strain in his back from throwing and in his legs from walking before they were even halfway through the course. The simulated sun made his cheeks feel pink and raw, and they had even engaged the wind program, now that they knew it wasn’t just pulling fuel they didn’t have, and even that made his skin feel tender and fragile.

  But he kept at it. For once, he didn’t run back to his quarters early under the guise of “Alpha needs me.” For once, Bobby and Kate didn’t mention Alpha’s name with venom and self-loathing for even introducing him. This time, in celebration, it was as though Alpha didn’t exist, and they were free and happy and engaged in the joy of some physical activity, which they hadn’t done in too long a time.

  It had to end, though, and unlike their journey, it wasn’t a happy ending.

  They walked the program distance on very carefully maintained belts beneath the holograms that Anderson thought of rarely, if ever, and Bobby slung a casual arm around Anderson’s shoulders. Anderson could smell the wind on him, and the sweat, and the soup he had spilled on his coveralls during lunch, and see the crinkles around his eyes that indicated he was in his twenties now and not his teens. In spite of their experiments with scent, he had long since stopped asking himself which of these things were real and which things were in his imagination, filling in the gaps. It didn’t matter anymore. His mind had sanded away the edges of real and pretend, blurred them gently, letting him focus on what mattered.

  What mattered was that he could feel the squeeze around his shoulders when Bobby said, “You can bunk with me and Kate for the next few days, you know that, right?” and the tense hope with which Bobby held himself, waiting for an answer.

  “Yeah, Bobby,” he said softly, treasuring a friend’s touch on his shoulders. “I know. But I owe it to him, you know?”

  “You don’t owe him anything!” Bobby hissed, and Anderson leaned his head on his friend’s shoulder.

  “He kept us alive,” he apologized, and Bobby shook his head.

  “You kept us alive,” he said with feeling, and Anderson sighed and accepted his words quietly. It was true. Bobby was right. But so was Anderson.

  Like with everything in this world that Anderson had created, there was truth and there was truth, and one truth couldn’t be spoken and the other truth had to be felt, and everything in between was despair, grief, and violence.

  And that, Anderson thought now, as Bobby and Kate clung to him and whispered words of love and healing, was what had happened to him and Alpha. It was the reason why, when they arrived at the dorms under a passable facsimile of a fading twilight, he disentangled himself from happy Bobby and maternal Kate and strode to his own quarters, well aware that this night could be the night on which Alpha snapped, forgot what was real, and finally killed the man he claimed to love.

  THINGS HAD been good when Aaron “Alpha” first showed up in Mr. Kay’s classroom. Bobby and Kate had both done their “research” into the romance novels and the vids and all of the wonders opened up by the health and hygiene files that had so intrigued and titillated them in those first giddy days after Anderson’s sixteenth birthday.

  Aaron seemed to have studied the playbook, and Anderson, so very, very lonely by that time, was happy enough to run the game to the exact mark on the field.

  Alpha had started out simply talking, both to Anderson and Bobby. He’d cracked jokes, praised their work (which didn’t do anything for either of them initially, since they sort of felt like they were cheating—after all, they’d accessed all the material that went into the curriculum anyway), and sat down and ate lunch with them.

  His first pass had been a touch on the back of Anderson’s hand, a very deliberate brush with his thumb. Anderson had walked home with Bobby that day practically ebullient, translucent with anticipation, with arousal.

  Their first kiss had been at sunset, and Alpha had touched his face, softly, and then framed it in his long, confident hands before pulling him in and ever so gently brushing their lips together. Anderson had opened his mouth, allowed Alpha in, and the kiss had gone on until the last light of the sun had turned to darkness.

  Making love had been tender, exploratory, filled with laughter and excitement. Alpha’s skin was flawless, and his high-cheekboned, patrician features were intense when he touched Anderson with his smooth, dry hands. There had been a moment, more than one, actually, when Anderson had thought, His skin is too perfect. His kisses are just right. He’s exactly what I want. He’s not real. He’d kept those thoughts very carefully hidden, deep in the center, surrounded by his flesh, and continued the dance of seduction and surrender until the end.

  And in the end, he’d been so grateful, so goddamned grateful, that it had been another touch to bring him to completion, and not his own hand, that he had been content.

  That contentment had lasted for a year, maybe more.

  In that year, though, a number of developments came to light.

  The first was the fuel consumption. They were consuming too much. It should have been a simple matter of physics—Anderson’s lone body instead of the thirty bodies that were expected to be there. But Anderson had amplified the power use of nearly every fiber optic and electronic device on the ship when he’d converted the entire shuttle into a flying holodeck. If the ship was going to stay in space long enough to get them all to another space station, they needed to cut power to programs they didn’t need.

  That was the year that Bobby, Anderson, Henry, and Risa graduated from school, and that Alpha lost his job as a teacher’s aide.

  Anderson and Alpha had been lo
vers by then, and Alpha had been the one who’d insisted that the school program took too much fuel. Anderson had retorted that if they were going to close down the school, they would have to cancel the programs for Mr. Kay and the other students who had kept Anderson and Bobby company for nearly four years, in effect, killing people he had created.

  Alpha had insisted, without mercy and without remorse.

  Anderson had refused at the beginning, and the argument had escalated.

  “I can’t! Don’t you see, Aaron, they’re my friends!”

  “They’re programs! We’re talking about our survival here, Anderson!”

  “They’re more than programs! Dammit, don’t you understand? They think and feel and talk. They’re more than just data I put into the ship by now. They’re real!”

  Aaron’s crack across Anderson’s cheek slammed Anderson against the wall of his quarters, and he was still seeing spots when Aaron held Anderson’s face roughly in his hands. “Did that feel real?” he growled, and Anderson was so shocked that all he could do was nod and feel helpless.

  “Then I’m the one you have to worry about. Now you cancel the programs you need to cancel in order to get this piece of crap to safety, do you hear?”

  Anderson didn’t mention the first bruise, and after a moment of supreme unhappiness, neither did Kate or Bobby. They’d been trying to get him to cancel the school program for a week, and they were just so grateful to hear his final decision that they’d been eager to work on it with a clear heart. The work had taken all six of them—Henry, Risa, Bobby, Kate, Anderson, and Alpha, over a month, because they’d been cataloguing and documenting all of the collected data and personal archives, and that was when the second development had been discovered.