Up Against It - M. J. Locke [159]
“I hope you realize,” Glease went on, while she climbed down, “this is nothing personal. I’m a company man. I have a family back home and we do cookouts on the weekend with our neighbors.” He spread his arms. “If I could have done this without resorting to these more extreme measures, I would have gladly done so. But you have left me with little choice.”
She alighted next to the memorial wall. He grabbed her by the collar. “I have big plans, Commissioner. And I’m not going to let some used-up, tight-ass old bitch with a messiah complex, in a rinky-dink rock in the middle of fucking nowhere, mess up those plans.” He gave her a rough shake with each insult. “Just saying,” he finished, and released her.
She eyed him, panting with despair and rage. She had no way to protect Phocaea. She couldn’t even protect Xuan. They would kill him, her, everyone who got in their way.
She had barely escaped Vesta with her life. The memories were something she never talked about, had forced herself to forget. But they surged up now, unstoppable.
She had been the one to find Vesta’s resource commissioner dead in his office. Poison. She never knew for certain whether it had been murder or despair. She remembered seeing the pills floating before his swollen, purple face. She remembered the bloody handprints on the bulkheads, as friends smuggled her and a handful of other, low-level officials to a freighter. She had spent seven weeks in an icy hold, and had emerged half starved, frostbitten, on Phocaea … only to find that no one cared. Vesta was a small cluster, millions of kilometers from anywhere. Everyone was busy and had their own problems.
So many friends and coworkers had died there. And it was not the work of an uncaring universe. No. It was the work of evil men.
An that hadn’t even been the worst of it. The worst had been those who had helped the Ogilvies do what they had done. Among them had been her own coworkers and friends. They had betrayed their fellow Vestans to the mob to save their own lives, or save themselves from humiliation, or to earn a troy. They had seen no reprisals. They were powerful people now; wealthy, connected. They keynoted Upside conferences and published papers. She sometimes saw their names in the news.
When she had returned to Xuan, all those years ago, he had loved her, held her, and comforted her, helped her to heal. He had given her every microgram of love and empathy a life partner could summon. He had nagged her for working too hard, for driving her people too hard, for being too inflexible with herself and others. But he had never reached this part of her. Not really. He had never understood why she drove herself the way she did. She had turned her own gaze away because she couldn’t bear to keep looking. The truth was too awful, too intractable.
It was simple, though, of course, now that she faced it. All these years, as Phocaea’s resource commissioner, she had been trying to outrun her own horror at what people were capable of, when they were greedy enough, or frightened enough, or broken enough. When no one was watching.
And it’s happening again.
Glease shoved her along. Their movement awakened the wall’s holographic ghosts, who whispered greetings and bon mots as Jane passed by. At the very end, Carl Agre’s ghost awakened. He grinned. “Air kiss…”
Carl. Her eight dead. Her friends and family. Her fellow Phocaeans. A weird calm settled over her. I’d rather be a bloody smear on a bulkhead, she thought. I’d sooner even give them Xuan, God help me, than help them butcher anyone else.
Glease took her to a secluded space behind the wall, near the bulkhead. There he spoke a password and presented his retina to a panel that revealed itself. A hatch opened up. He forced her down into it, and she found herself in a hidden room. Three armed men stood there. Glease locked the hatch and pulled his weapon out again. Jane eyed it in distaste. “The one you used to kill Marty, I take it?”
“The very one.” He displayed it, laying it out on his palm, and stroked it lightly with his fingertips. “You like it?