On Sunday, April 29th, 2170, Emily opened her eyes at 04:59 AM. Gina was fast asleep with her mouth open next to her. The door was closed, which was new. Since Emily's birthday a couple of weeks ago, they were both sixteen. Their parents' rule about open doors at sleepovers (to keep them tame) had been dropped, which was why both girls were naked under their thin sheet. For once, Emily wanted to stay in bed, but she remembered to swat her alarm just in time. Even though they had slept together every weekend for almost a year, Gina still couldn't cope with five o' clock starts. Emily turned carefully to watch her for a while.
Sophia's condition was now very poor. Her memory was shaky, and she had lost the use of several critical internal organs. She spent most of her time asleep, but she had talked all yesterday morning about what came next once Emily passed the degree in June. The subject of moving to Earth came up again, and Sophia took pains to explain that nobody who lived on Mindoir would ever gain the kind of influence Emily would need to become an explorer. "Everyone here," she said, "with the best will in the world, will only hold you back. And I mean everyone, Emily."
Emily knew she was right. From now on, a year wasted on Mindoir would take two years on Earth to recoup. She would go nowhere while her mum was alive, but one day soon she would have to make her impossible choice before time made it for her. Emily touched Gina's hand wistfully, and slid out of bed.
She quietly dressed, sloshed water down her throat, grabbed a handful of fruit from the bowl on the table and went outside. It wasn't raining yet. In "dry" season, it only rained for an hour or two in the afternoon. The air was damp with the usual warm morning mist.
Elijah was already sat on the edge of the roof, watching the sunrise. "Heya killer," he said. His quiet voice carried on the still air. The distant hiss of the falls could even be heard when the morning conversation of the creatures in the fields paused. "In the mood to shoot s***, or workout?"
"Workout. At least until I get my head in gear." Emily replied as she climbed the ladder.
"Fair do's. Wanna talk while we train?"
Emily shrugged and answered, "Not sure."
Elijah stood up. "Well, let's just warm up and see how you feel once you sweated the sleep off." A few minutes later, he asked, "This about what mom said yesterday?"
Emily grunted out, "Yeah."
"So, I guess the real question is would you buy Gina a ring one day?"
Emily put one arm behind her back and carried on with her push ups.
"Point taken. Watch your form there, killer."
An hour later they took a quick break for some water. Emily ran her fingers through her wet hair. "Why the f*** did you have to say that about a ring?"
Elijah nearly spat his water. When he recovered, he grinned and told her, "Because I'm a rotten tease. I didn't think you were anywhere near that serious. Honestly. That was my point."
Emily frowned and picked up her gun.
"You finally gonna shoot me over my bad jokes?"
"Maybe." She waited for him to grab his gear and then said, "It depends how you answer my next question."
"Uh-oh."
"If I knew what she wanted, I'd choose right now. She just – she holds back. I know she's shy, but it's not only nerves. She loves being "us"; I think it means a lot to her, but – I feel like she… If I asked her, now, to spend the rest of our lives together, she would freeze. Maybe she'd say yes, but I wouldn't know if she was just giving us a shot, or if she meant it."
"Sounds tricky. What's the part you need my worldly wisdom for?"
Emily gave him a look and shrugged. "What if I give up my dreams for a relationship with her, which I would do today if – oh f*** off, dad." She shook her head at his teasing and went to sit with her feet over the edge of the roof.
Elijah immediately regretted his poor humour and sat next to her. "Sorry, Em. You were saying you'd give up the career dreams for her if…?"
"What if she's thinking she wants to find someone else? We're only sixteen. Maybe she's not sure about me in the forever way; just for friendship and – stuff that's none of your business. She's always wanted kids, so what if she quietly wonders about finding a man to start a family and be normal? How do I know?"
"Contrary to popular belief, and you're not gonna believe this, but I actually do not have a crystal ball up my behind. I will say, all of this would be easier if you told her exactly what you just told me. It might scare her off, or you might have to wait years for an answer, but that just means she wasn't ready to commit yet, which is fair enough at your age. Question, because like you said, you are only sixteen. Are your feelings "I'd change our baby's nappies, raise our children, suffer through our differences and live through arthritis and dementia with you," real? How rosy are your spectacles?"
"I'd conquer f***ing hell for her. I – Stop laughing. For f***'s sake!" He controlled himself, and Emily decided to trust him, mostly, to keep it that way. She said, "If we're gonna talk, will you promise not to laugh? Please?"
"Cross my heart."
After giving him a warning with her eyes, Emily almost whispered, "I nearly bought her a ring the other day." She dared to look at him, and was encouraged by his intent gaze. "No joke. She's a b**** occasionally, and she's about as decisive as a doormat, but – I can't stay mad at her. I know where to find the white strands in her hair, what she cries over, what vexes her, what makes her laugh, what she dreams about. I know what memories she loves to remember and which ones she'd love to forget. We share half of them. Hell, I go to mush just thinking about her, and I can't imagine anything without her. I just don't know if she'd be honest about her feelings with herself, let alone with me, because she's too nice."
"You're not using the big L word anymore. You used it quite a bit last Christmas."
"What, love?"
"Yeah," he replied. The fact she stopped using the word as she learnt more about it probably meant she needed to slow down. While she mused on that, he wondered how he got to this rooftop. Twenty years ago he was an assassin, a good one with more skeletons than clothes in his closet. Now his little girl, remarkable statement in itself, trusted him with her deepest insecurities as she grew into a woman. The emotion in that knowledge was indescribable. He felt grounded and alive.
Emily breathed deeply and gazed at the volcano in the west, now lit by the early dawn light. "That s*** can't be unsaid," she commented after a long while.
Elijah's eyebrows shot up, and he reined them in to keep his surprise to himself. Her voice was thick with unspoken emotion that meant he was wrong. She stopped using the word because she meant it, and she was afraid to own it only to lose it. He pondered. Emlyn's feelings often ran passionate and deep; they'd often led her into trouble. Emily and Gina had literally spent more time together than apart, excluding night times, and even then they seemed to sleep over with one another at least once a week. It wasn't hard to see how she came to feel so strongly so young, though he did wonder how it snuck up on him. In the end he just said, "You should go with your gut on this one; whichever way you feel does what's right by her. And that probably includes talking to her. Then if you find out you made a mistake at least you made it together, so neither of you blames yourselves or each other. Talking with me's not good right now though. You'll talk yourself into something you don't believe."
Emily brooded most of the morning away. Sophia was with Gina's mum for the day, shopping and gossiping. Elijah was working. The gang hung out at Gina's house. Emily took her earphones and pretended to be busy, but for once the drone of lecturers and alien dialects felt sour. When Gina cuddled up with a look that said, "I know you're upset about something, and it matters," Emily's chest ached and her eyes watered. She could not, would not, say goodbye to Gina. By lunch, she was wondering how she would tell her, and starting to wish they had the afternoon to themselves to buy the ring.
It was just about five o'clock when the shuttles, lots of them, started roaring past overhead. The air tremored they were so close, and there was a different tone off the engines than colony shuttles. Emily followed the others to the window. Seconds later, Emily heard a gun go off in the distance, silenced by a long blast from something much heavier. She hit the deck, pulling Gina down with her.
"Down!" she screamed at Alice and Fiona as she scrambled back up to shut the window and the blinds. They hesitated. Gina's dad burst in with a face as pale as milk. "Get down, girls! Stay down until I come back. Emily, where do you keep your hunting rifle?"
"Under the bed in a crate with the rest of my gear, but it's locked up," she answered over the second wave of shuttles. "What's happening?"
"The keys, where do you keep the keys?" he begged as heavy gunfire erupted from the centre of the colony.
Down her top on a neck chain, as always, so she took them off and held them out. "Who are they? What about the forest? They wouldn't find us there," she suggested. Emily was afraid and it tightened her voice, but she remembered to breathe. She finished shutting the blinds and turning out the light.
Gina's Dad commanded, "No. You stay here until I come back. I'll get your mums from the shops and we'll go to the forest together. You stay down. I'm counting on you, Emily. Keep my girl safe."
He left.
The sounds of battle became erratic, interspersed with screams. Emily saw from a slit in the blinds that hostiles had landed in the fields and started picking off anyone who tried to flee. They weren't human, were they – batarians? She cursed and glanced at Gina and the others on the floor, all watching her.
She got down with them again and whispered, "We have to go, now. There's too many, and they're batarians."
"What, the pirate aliens? With four eyes?" Fiona whispered harshly back. "Why would they come here?"
"Not just pirates," Emily replied. "Slavers. We have to go, now, before it's too late."
"What about the garrison?" Alice demanded. "Won't they defend us?"
Emily shook her head no, and said, "There's only twenty of them, and six are at the mines. There were more batarian shuttles than that, probably all with a few troopers. Come on. If we don't go now, we'll never make it!"
Gina was trembling head to toe, just staring at nothing.
"Gina!" Emily whispered urgently. "Gina!"
She snapped out of it, but her eyes were like saucers, and one look told Emily why.
"Gina, there's no time. Any minute now, they could come for us. I can't risk losing you. I won't. Gina, look at me. I'm coming back for them, ok? My mom is at the shops. I'm not going to let those f*** heads touch her, or your mom and dad either, but I've got to get you out first. You hear?"
"No," Fiona said. "We should wait. Gina's dad said he'd be back."
"I told you, it's too risky," Emily insisted.
Gina grabbed Emily's hand and said, "I'm not leaving. Not without mom and dad. Please, Em."
Emily saw Gina's soul through her eyes, and couldn't tell her no anymore, but the parents never came back, and most of the shooting stopped.
"Have they killed mom and dad?" asked Alice after a while. Alice lived close to the centre of the colony. Fiona put an arm over her and squeezed. Fiona was trying to be brave, but her eyes had been streaming with silent tears for a few minutes already since she made the same horrible realisation about her own step mom and step dad.
Emily said nothing. Everything she knew about batarian culture came from an introductory study on their main language, so she didn't know much, but she knew they didn't kill healthy people. Thank goodness her mum was sick. She tasted bile at that thought, but she remembered to breathe as she planted a kiss on Gina's head. Her ears strained for nearby trouble. She watched from the window. A batarian crew unloaded battle mechs and a searchlight in the field. She was trapped now. Her heart felt like a fist slamming into her chest from the inside.
How to get out? There was a stream that ran through a storm drain nearby. The grate was close. They could hide in there for a while. She tried again to persuade the others, but Gina wouldn't move. She didn't want her Dad to get back only to have to search for them. Emily even offered to stay behind while they hid in the stream. That persuaded Alice and Fiona, but Gina wouldn't have it. So Emily made sure they all knew the way to the grate and told them that was where they were going if anyone came close.
Then she focussed on her omni, and tried to send a message to her dad. The batarians had a powerful jamming frequency up. It took a her an hour or so to find the frequency protocols the batarians were using. She was about to send a message, and then realised that everything on that frequency would be picked up by the batarians too. So she worked on the next best thing. If she could decrypt the batarian coms, she might figure out a way past the patrols. She became more convinced they'd need to as the clock wound on. If she hacked the batarian coms before her omni crashed under the calculation demands, they were leaving whether Gina liked it or not, but she had no proper software for this. All she had was some thoroughly unsophisticated code from her educational software, and her ears. She was making progress, but without a breakthrough soon…
Hours went by. It went dark. Shuttles came and went. Emily had to give up at about eight o'clock before her omni gave out. She wished her Dad was there.
He was closer than she thought. When the attack came, he had tried to ping the extranet, and discovered off world coms blocked. Not dead, which would raise an alarm, but really, really slow. Without Alliance help, Mindoir was screwed. He trusted Emily to be in the forest already, and Sophia would understand, so he snuck through to the coms array. There were several dead batarians in bins and alleys before he got there. He finally sent the SOS, and then went to find his girls.
After a gruelling search for Sophia, he double checked the house through his scope, and was horrified to see four girl shaped thermal signatures in Gina's room. Now he was almost there to extract them. The path to the forest was temporarily clear, thanks to him. The pirates were too close though. They were going house to house rounding up colonists, just as they had been ever since they set up their pens in the centre of the colony. They'd almost got to the girls. They stacked up outside the doorway, and Elijah was forced to open fire in the hopes Emily would hear it and flee. He took two of the eight down, but they returned fire. Elijah dodged and took down another as he ran closer to get in cover.
Inside the house, Emily finally convinced the others to run as the gunfight continued. They were all getting to their feet when a storm of bullets ripped through the room. Red mist. Sick thumps. Gina staggered upwards somehow and Emily couldn't stop her from the ground. Two more shots pummelled Gina back and blew holes in her. Blood. Gina's blood. Gina was dead. Gina collapsed awkwardly. Gina was dead. Breathe. Gina was dead. Alice and Fiona were eerily still, where they had fallen.
Then someone kicked in the front door, and there was nowhere to hide. While the batarian thug ransacked the kitchen, Emily prepared to play dead, but her heart rate wouldn't come down. Gina was dead. This – thing – Gina was dead. She arranged herself on the floor and hoped he wouldn't see how much her pulse shook her body.
He came in. He kicked her feet. He moved to Gina and flipped her over with his foot. He bent down. No. He grabbed Gina's wrist. No. Emily got up soundlessly behind him while he struggled to steal Gina's bracelet. Then Emily grabbed his knife from his belt and he span right into her thrust. It pierced his chest. She whipped it out with a vindictive twist and he stumbled forward to grab her, but she stepped back and slashed the knife across his throat before his knee touched the floor. His four black eyes blinked wide and stared at her. He clutched his throat. A few jets of blood pulsed out between his fingers. He fell.
The batarians laughed at something out on the street.
"Survive," her mind said in her dad's voice. "Breathe, that's all. Every breath is a victory, use it, fight for it. Nothing else matters, not me, not thirst, not pain, nothing. Just breathe. Whatever it takes, you hear me? Look at me, Em! While you breathe, you can still fight, and you can always win – understood? – They're here. Look at me. You got this. Breathe!"
Emily breathed. She went to the window to peek out through the cracks in the blinds. She saw her dad crumpled almost at her feet, disfigured except for his open eyes. Rage, terror and sorrow paralysed her, until one of the aliens came to shoot her dad in the face. She screamed then. He looked up and saw her and she had to run. She stopped to rip the dead batarian's rifle off him and fled into Gina's garden.
From there, she vaulted the fence towards a manhole behind the neighbour's shed where the stream ran through a concrete tunnel under this part of the colony. She got it shut just in time, and froze in silence until they passed on, shouting and jeering to one another in batarian. Then someone yelled. They'd found the dead one.
She shuffled through the water, glad for the dry season. It came out twenty yards into the field. The patrol ran right past to help the other ones find her. They had two evil looking things that looked like dogs with giant heads, no fur, an under bite, and fangs as long as her arm. They were varren, according to her omni. She pressed on, keeping low and never touching anything outside the banks of the stream. She'd hunted all her life. She knew every trick, she knew the land, and there was a half decent hunting rifle kept in a cache about a mile into the forest for farm hands to use in emergencies. These bastards wouldn't get close.
At some point they found the stream channel and came back into the field, but by then she was beyond the floodlights and sprinting down a row of tall crops. That very row ended by a hole under the boundary fence that pests reopened every time it was filled. She heard someone shout, and she immediately got low and changed direction, aiming for a spot where a lichen like growth covered the electric parts of the fence, allowing her to climb it.
They tracked and chased her for a long time, and she evaded them. It took every ounce of her willpower to keep her heartbeat steady, and all her father taught her about hunting to outwit the varren sent after her. One of them got caught by a carnivorous plant analogue when it followed a scent trail she left on purpose right over the trigger roots. She shot the other at its masters' feet from more than three hundred yards. The batarians freaked and took cover. No doubt they called for reinforcements, but Emily was long gone when they arrived.
Later, shuttles came over the hills. The engines sounded like colony shuttles, only bigger. Then guns started going off, lots of guns. When Emily crept back to the forest's edge, she saw muzzle flashes light the dark sky and heard the thunder of machine guns. Through the scope, weak as it was, she saw the batarian turret emplacements pinning down alliance marines.
The batarians withdrew eventually, but the battle went on into the small hours, hidden behind the colony. Emily lay and listened. A squad of marines patrolled by her, but she was too scared and too well hidden to let them find her.
Then another group of soldiers on patrol tripped over her in the dark in a new hide by the road. Emily sprang up face to face with the man who fell and aimed to kill with the fiercest roar she could manage, but she couldn't do it. She expected to die. The soldiers surrendered, and tried to talk to her, but she couldn't think.
An officer came, and removed his helmet. Emily was afraid. Her blood was ice. She needed to fight. She needed to live. She kept the trigger depressed just a hair away from firing. What the officer was saying she did not know, but he was calm, and she didn't want to shoot him. Her finger ached. She had to relax or she would kill him. He carefully took the gun out of her quivering grasp.