Kanagen

  "And the final business for today, the ongoing debate on the nguage for the resolution to be delivered to the Captain regarding the desired organization for the Ecological Pnning Committee. When st we left off, I believe we were debating an amendment regarding the wording of paragraph 3, 'no fewer than three terran representatives.'" Mycek pulled off his gsses and rubbed his eyes — the length of the working day was getting to him, the same as it was getting to everyone else. The conference room was as airy and warmly lit as ever, but even a perfect meeting room began to grate after long enough. "Apologies," he added as he slipped the gsses back on. "'No fewer than three terran representatives.' I believe the representative from the Elysium Valley Confederation was next in line to speak."

  "Thank you." Maggie got to her feet, which was less of a production than it used to be. "I'll keep it quick: Elysium Valley still believes we should be removing every reference to 'terran' as a group nominative for humans in general from all documentation, up to and including amending the Solstice Domestication Treaty-"

  Trish rolled her eyes and lifted a hand. "Objection, old business." Maggie shot her an annoyed look.

  "The Chair recognizes the representative from the Bulwark Council," Mycek said, not bothering to disguise his look of relief, or ask Maggie if she yielded the floor as he should have.

  "We're not revisiting the issue of 'terran' as a descriptor in this session, not as concerns the Treaty," Trish said without rising. "Sorry, Maggie, but I really don't want us to get sucked into the weeds on that issue again."

  "Fine," she said. "Consider it dropped. But I'm sticking to this on the Ecological Pnning Committee. That's not old business."

  "No, no it's not," Trish said, sighing. "By all means, go ahead. Bulwark Council yields."

  "Thank you. Now-" And on the argument went. Everyone present knew how the vote was going to come down, but the argument went on anyway. That was how government worked, at least in the democratic mode. Everyone said their piece, and then the majority told the minority to stop wasting any more time on the issue and did what they wanted anyway. In this case, that meant telling the Captain that they, the elected government of Solstice, wanted direct input on ecological management and remediation decisions being made regarding their pnet.

  Not for the first time, Trish wished she hadn't volunteered for this post. But then, if she hadn't, who was left to do it? McCracken was gone, Nikoi was gone (and good riddance, she thought), Nell was gone — every day, it felt like, someone simply dropped off the radar. The first to do so were starting to pop up now and again, but they weren't the same. They had the same gssy-eyed stare as all the florets did.

  And sure, they seemed happier. Hell, McCracken was undeniably happier (and significantly more attractive than she'd been). But that didn't make it any better that the bastard Affini were taking her friends and brainwashing them into being docile little pets.

  Even Cass Hope. That one, once Trish had realized what had happened, that it wasn't simply Cass going into obsession-mode and forgetting what human contact was, had hurt the most. Trish and Cass had never seen eye to eye on politics — anarchism, to Trish's eyes, was a pipe dream at best and active delusion at worst. Without institutions to hold back the worst impulses of humanity, those impulses would run wild. Institutions could be corrupted too, of course, and the Accord was a perfect example of that, but the alternative was no better. Instead of organized hell, you'd have disorganized hell, where instead of being implicitly targeted for being a shade too dark, you'd be explicitly targeted instead, and no one could do a damned thing about it.

  But she couldn't deny the woman's brilliance, drive, or courage. She couldn't deny that Cass Hope had been the heart of it all, and could have been so much more if she'd ever been allowed to be. Trish had followed Cass because she was Cass. There simply wasn't any other option. She was rger than life, the kind of person books were written about hundreds of years after they were dead. She'd decred a one-woman war on the entire Terran Accord, gave it a bloody nose like few before her had ever dared, and when they captured her, and cast her down the oubliette to be forgotten once she'd been made a sufficient example of, she turned a prison colony into a revolutionary army. If there was a human alive who could have buried the Accord, it was her. She was the strongest person Trish had ever met.

  So of course the Affini took her. They couldn't let someone like that wander around free.

  She paid little to no attention to the argument, only listened for Mycek to call for a vote. She voted in favor of the amendment, which was struck down anyway. She'd never disagreed with Maggie — fuck the idea of all humans being called "Terran" just because they evolved there — but why argue when the outcome was never in doubt?

  "Could have gone better," Maggie muttered, she and Trish lingering in the entryway after business was closed for the day. Outside, the sunline was dimming to its evening yellow-orange sunset hue. Trish still wasn't used to it.

  "Ain't that always the way? Sorry for stepping on you back there, but-"

  "No, no, I get it." She sighed. "Stars, I wish Cass was here. We never would have any trouble swinging that vote if she were in your seat. No offense."

  "No, I wish she was doing this too," Trish said, ughing and shaking her head. "She's better at it. I'm a fucking doctor, I shouldn't be the one doing this Roberts' Rules bullshit."

  "Hey, I should be retired by now," Maggie replied, "but here I am, repcement aging anarchist, ersatz Cass Hope, getting fuck-all done. Ah well. Can't compin too hard, I guess," she added, shrugging. "I'm not coughing up blood every morning anymore. Swampy tells me if he has his way about it I've got another century to look forward to. Everything's peachy-keen except that we've got no say in any of it."

  Trish nodded. She remembered Cass saying much the same — that if it wasn't for the way the Affini brought post-scarcity anarchism, they'd be the ideal state, the thing she'd aim for in her wildest dreams. They'd abolished hunger, privation, war, even the arch-vilin capital, and they'd done it without a central government of any kind, merely a sprawling, multipor bureaucracy that, as far as Trish could tell, was as much about just keeping track of everything as it was about organizing anything. It was a thing of chaotic beauty, really — an institutionless institution, freed from nepotism and corruption and allowed to simply do its job. If it wasn't for the fact that at least half of its job revolved entirely around the Affini obsession with keeping thinking beings as pets, it'd be as much her ideal as it was Cass's.

  "You can't bring yourself to hate them," she muttered. "Even when they do things you hate."

  "Mmm. Not after you've had a good look at them, anyway. It's downright insidious. But then, so's every other form of government."

  "Let's not start that again." She said it lightheartedly — Maggie might not have been the firebrand that Cass was, but she was an anarchist through and through, and Trish didn't want to drive a wedge between herself and one of the few real allies, let alone friends, she had left on the ship.

  "Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Statist." She winked. "Got any pns for tonight?"

  Trish shrugged. "Compile something for dinner, probably. Maybe do some reading." So much of affini medical science was completely beyond even transtion into human nguages, but what was avaible remained fascinating.

  "Mmm. I was thinking of trying that sandwich pce, Cliff's. I hear good things."

  "You can't be serious. It's run by florets." Never mind that she still found them creepy, with their empty, blown-out pupils and the child-like way they clung to the pnts that had broken them, she couldn't imagine someone that high preparing anything like what the compilers could produce.

  "Only repeating what I've heard," Maggie said, holding up her hands defensively. "And I will say, that dumpling pce I brought take-out from a couple days ago? That's floret-run too, and it was damn good."

  "Those dumplings were made by florets?" Trish raised an eyebrow and squinted through a moment of cognitive dissonance — the potstickers in particur had been some of the best she'd ever tasted. "You're kidding."

  "Saw the colrs myself. Threw me for a loop, let me tell you. C'mon, live a little."

  Trish thought it over for a minute. She had been feeling a bit isoted of te, and spending time with Maggie outside of simple organizing for government business might help maintain the bond between the Bulwark and Elysium factions. "Alright, sure, let's go see if this Cliff's is everything it's cracked up to be."

  "Oh, I assure you," said a voice from the doorway, "it is. Mind if I join you?"

  Trish and Maggie turned as one to stare — they both knew that voice, but could scarcely believe they were hearing it. There she stood, as if she'd never been gone, tall, imposing, olive skin a bit darker in silhouette against the sunline, wearing a blouse open at the colr, a pair of scks, and her old, worn-in jacket. She wore a simple knit bag slung over her shoulder. Her features were different, softer, but she was still recognizable as Cass Hope.

  "Cass!" Trish had her in a bear hug within seconds. "Where the hell have you- oh, fuck, sorry," she added, breaking the hug and backing away. "Sorry, it's just, we haven't seen you in weeks, we were all terrified that-"

  "I'm fine," she said, smiling and ughing in a very un-Cass-like way. "And please, don't stop on my account." She stepped forward and hugged Trish back. "It doesn't hurt anymore. They fixed that."

  That was when Trish noticed the colr, a thin metal ribbon set on a thick band of leather, an unbroken loop without beginning or end. Her stomach turned over as reality came crashing in to ruin the reunion. "They domesticated you."

  "Mmmhmmm." The way she said it, there was no malice, no frustration, no upset — just blithe acceptance. Now that Trish looked, the signs were there, though perhaps less obvious than in some of the other florets she'd encountered — her pupils, if not blown completely out, were definitely dited.

  "You're high right now."

  "Oh, yes," she said, her smile growing into a very un-Cass-like grin. "But not as high as I have been. Right now it's more of a pleasant buzz that takes the edge off social interaction. Not that I need much of that around you two." She turned and hugged Maggie, who had had been still as a statue since Cass had arrived. Only the hug shook off the shock of seeing Cass this way. "It's so good to see you looking so well. I knew you'd be okay, but still."

  "Y-yeah." Maggie returned the hug awkwardly. "Are you okay?"

  "I'm better than okay. I feel better than I have in... God, decades, probably. Maybe ever."

  "...how'd they get you?" Trish could hear the anguish in Maggie's voice, saw the way she clutched Cass a little tighter. Her gut turned over again, tying itself in a knot — she felt as if she might throw up, even if she had nothing in her stomach to lose.

  "They didn't 'get' me. I volunteered." She must have seen the look on Maggie's face, the same look Trish had on hers — shock, confusion, more than a little anger hiding under it all if she was feeling anything like Trish was. "You...probably weren't expecting to hear that, I guess."

  "Why the fuck would we expect that?" The anger Trish was feeling came out more than she'd meant to allow, her voice growing an edge she'd never meant to put into it. "You're... you're Cass fucking Hope! You would never just give up! They must have done something, got inside your head and made you-"

  "No," Cass said. "And if what you just said was my old name, I literally can't hear it. I'm not allowed to know it, because I'd only use it to hurt myself like I did before. My name is Lay. Please use that."

  The silence that followed was broken only by the sound of Trish's heartbeat in her ears. Thump. Thump. Thump. "They stole your name?"

  "Trish, that wasn't my real name, it was just a name that I used. A name that I hid behind. And the more I did it, the more that I became someone else. This lets me be me. This lets me unclench for the first time since I was just a kid. My name, my real name, was always Lay. Maggie knows that. She's one of the few people left who does, but she knows that."

  "Y-yeah," Maggie said, the confusion still written across her face. "I know that's your real name, but you never used it with anyone, and-" She paused, took a deep breath. "Look, C- sorry, Lay- you know how deeply wrong this all sounds, right? Even if it's not your real name, just reaching into your head and tampering with it that way...it's not right."

  "It's what's best for me," Cass said, as if she really believed it. "The way I was, I could never have been happy here. I would have fought — but fighting them is pointless. I would have just hurt others, dragged others down with me. And to be perfectly honest-" She shrugged, and smiled. "I was just tired. I was tired of hurting all the time. I was tired of fighting. And I didn't have to anymore. After all, why fight if it won't get you anything?"

  "...who are you, and what have you done with my friend?" Trish gred at Cass-who-wasn't-Cass, tension gathering in her shoulders like she was getting ready for a fistfight.

  "I'm still me," Cass said, sighing. "Not that much has changed, really."

  "It doesn't look like that from where we're standing, Lay," Maggie said. "Look, I'm...I'm going to need some time to process this, okay? It's a lot to take in."

  "That's fair," Cass agreed. "But please don't let this be a wedge between us." She reached out and took one of Maggie's hands in hers. "We had something really lovely, once."

  Maggie's cheeks visibly warmed. "We did. But with you this way, how can I know that it's you that wants it, and not something they put inside your head?"

  "Do you think I ever didn't want it?"

  "No, but you know what I mean."

  "I suppose." Cass looked down at the ground, sighed, and let Maggie's hand slip. "If nothing else, I don't want to lose your friendship. And that goes for you too, Trish. Really, very little has changed. I'm still me, just...I'm in a better pce, and I hope that means I can be a better friend. Not just someone who barks orders all the time."

  "I still need some time to think." She turned to face Trish. "I think I'm going to just head home, alright?"

  "Yeah. Take care of yourself. I'm probably going to do likewise."

  "Well, can you wait a moment?" Cass said. "There's one more thing I wanted to talk to you specifically about." Trish's gut clenched again, and she nodded. After a moment, when Maggie was out of earshot, Cass added with a sigh, "Well, that could have gone better."

  "It going better would involve you not defecting," Trish spat.

  "It's not a defection, it's nothing like that," Cass protested. "Trish, there's no way to fight them. Please don't try. I chose this, I did it with forethought and full knowledge of the consequences, precisely because you cannot fight the Affini. Certainly not the way I would have fought them, the way I was."

  "Bullshit," Trish said. "They got to you. They got inside your head and-"

  "Have you ever known me to do anything without a pn?" And there, for just a moment, Trish thought she saw it — the fire in Cass's eyes, the way she used to be. Then it was gone, like a ghostly apparition melting away in daylight.

  "... no," she admitted. It was true; Cass always had a pn for everything, and pns for if those pns went wrong, and so on down the line.

  "Then consider that this, too, might be a part of a pn. Well... the old me's pn, anyway," she added, the smile coming back to her face. "I, uh... I might have thought better of it, now that I'm able to get out of that headspace, but before I asked Tsuga to domesticate me, I was working on something. There is a way to fight them, you know. You simply have to do it without fighting."

  Trish snorted. "Oh, yeah. Simple."

  "It is, really. The way I saw it, a direct confrontation was pointless. You can't win any kind of a stand-up fight against the Affini. It's just not possible. So, I thought, what about indirect conflict? What about the only battlefield that, in the end, really matters? What about the human heart?" She slipped the bag off her shoulder, zipped it open, and pulled out a leatherbound notebook. "This is the first volume. There's three in here. Two of them are from before I was domesticated."

  Trish took the notebook and flipped it open. Inside, legible but clearly written in a hurry save for the header, was Cass's handwriting. "Freedom's Ember?"

  "A working title, but I think it's alright," she said, winking. "How to maintain the spirit of freedom even within the Compact. How to remember what it is to be free. That's the battle now, Trish. You can't escape the Affini, you can't drive them away, you can't make them ignore you. But there are two key points you must never forget. First, they may seem like it, but they aren't psychic. They can make very educated guesses, they can read your face and come quite close, but they can't truly know what you think in your heart of hearts. Not unless you have one of these, anyway," she added, tapping the back of her neck.

  "Hmph. Fine." Trish wasn't entirely sure of that, but if she trusted anyone to know what went on in the minds of the enemy, it was Cass. More than once, she'd wondered if Cass was psychic herself. "And the second thing?"

  "Entropy. They haven't conquered it. Maybe they will, someday, but I doubt it. I think entropy is God's signature, you know? His way of saying, 'you're good, but you'll never be as good as me.'"

  "You'll forgive me if I don't get all religious about this with you."

  "You don't need to," Cass said. "All that matters is they haven't beaten entropy, and maybe never will. And entropy means that systems break down. Systems fail. In the long run, that may even include the Compact. So fight to keep that ember warm, ready to start a new fire, when the time comes. That's the fight, Trish. That's the endgame."

  "Not much of a fight," she muttered. "And one hell of a longshot."

  "Desperate longshots are all I had left. And it was the kind of fight I couldn't have participated in, even if I could conceive of it. So, I wrote it all down, I hung together until the government was formed...and then I asked Tsuga to domesticate me. I wasn't really consciously pnning that, but it was there, I think, the whole time. The stress of that day, and the thought of more of it, just catalyzed it. I had to get out. And I did." She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "And I don't regret it one bit. That's why I wrote the third notebook, actually."

  Trish closed the notebook she was holding. This is so fucked up. "What's the third one?"

  "Well, after I woke up from my impnt surgery-" She grinned, and started to ugh a little. "I maybe thought better of some of what I'd written. And I have a new perspective to add to it, a floret's perspective. So I wrote down how to live with the Affini. How to accept their love. How to let them in and not worry so much. What they offer is a kind of freedom too, you just have to learn to see it that way. I don't think the first part is bad, just unfinished. I think it's a good thing for people to be sure of themselves, and remember what it is to be human even if there aren't any affini around — but I also think it's a good thing to accept that they will be around. It's complicated. I spend a lot of time in that volume just ying that out. Tsuga was worried I was going back into burnout mode, actually," she added with another ugh.

  So it's a book of a stoned floret's ramblings about how wonderful it is she's had her brain scrambled, Trish thought. Lovely. "And you want me to do what with these?"

  "Keep them. Read them. Share them. I don't know if they'll help, but I hope they will." She held out the bag to Trish. "I know you're still coming to terms with who I am. I'm sorry that it's so stressful for you. If nothing else, maybe these can help you to understand why I made this choice."

  Trish slowly extended one hand, took the strap of the bag. It was strangely heavy, and only grew heavier when she pced the first book back into it. "Thanks. I guess. Not like there's anyone else to do it."

  "Oh, you'd have been my first choice anyway," Cass said. "Even if no one else had been domesticated. Nikoi wasn't grounded in leftist ideology, Nell was too grounded in specifically Marxist-Leninist ideology, Maggie's still independent but she's never been organized enough to see a project like this through...but you?" She smiled. "You're perfect for this. At least, that's what I thought when I was writing this. These were always for you, Trish."

  This isn't fair. Her eyes were burning, the pit of her stomach was burning, her skin was burning. Everything about this was wrong. "I'll do it for Cass," she whispered. "For who you used to be." Stars damn her for figuring all this out and then just giving up on it. For just handing it off and saying 'You do it.' Her teeth locked together in a painful, hidden grimace.

  "Well... I hope you do it for yourself, too," Cass-that-wasn't-Cass said. "I'm going to be going back to Earth in a few days, so it might be a while before we get to talk in person again. See you when I get back?"

  Trish gave a wordless grunt as she shouldered the bag, its weight biting into her, and turned on her heel. She said nothing as she walked away from Cass.

  Nothing.

  Not one word passed between them. None would. Not before Cass left. Not after she returned. Not after Solstice was cleared for habitation after long years of environmental remediation, and Trish left on the first transport down.

  Not before Tilndsia left Solstice space.

  And not for many long years after.

  The arm was what forced Haven to open her eyes and acknowledge that another day had begun, but it wasn't what woke her up. She always slept terribly on starships, even the overbuilt monstrosities her father built to drag luxurious mass around with him wherever he (or his progeny) went. She slept in a bed, an actual bed, made from real wood that had come from a real tree, with a real sixteen-inch-thick mattress. Her cabin was the kind of miserable hypergaudy hell she'd spent her entire life in, almost indistinguishable from groundside accommodations, if perhaps a bit smaller than her father preferred.

  When you've got it, funt it. That was the Hudds-Friday way. That was the nightmare she had to live up to every wretched day of her life.

  There's an emergency airlock behind the bulkhead in the bathroom. I could space myself.

  For some, suicidal thoughts were a terrifying thing, a sign of unbearable stress, pain, or something going horribly wrong inside. For Haven, they were humdrum, the everyday sort of thing. She was good at ignoring them. She'd been doing it for as long as she could remember.

  Besides, her asshole father probably had some kind of watchdog system running to keep her from doing it. Anything for his all-important genetic posterity. With the one Y chromosome amongst all his progeny, legitimate or otherwise, Haven occupied far more of her father's thoughts and attention than she would have preferred. Not for the first time, she wished she could be like Haley, or Heather, or Harmony, left to their own devices, to pursue whatever pastimes amused them as long as they eventually got around to reproducing — they may not have carried his Y chromosome, but genes were genes, and he was committed to spreading his as much as possible.

  But no. She'd pulled the short straw, and Hal Hudds-Friday was going to make sure she carried on every bit of stupidity he'd built his entire identity around.

  The airlock was looking like a good option right now. It always did, whenever she traveled in space. But she wasn't going to do it. She'd wait until the old man was dead, at least. More likely to succeed that way. That was the kind of thought she used to put off the urge to do it right this second.

  A chime sounded from the PA system, followed by a voice. "Sir? Apologies for disturbing you, but we'll be docking soon, and your father was very insistent that there be no deys."

  Haven grunted, which didn't help. What an awful sound. "Thanks, Tara," she said. "I'll be out in a minute." It wasn't her fault, she told herself. She was just doing her job, and she was far more tolerable than any of the other executive assistants she'd had in her life — in fact, she was downright likable, so much so that Haven had gone to the mat to keep her in her position through several of her asshole father's stupid moods.

  The downside, of course, was that her father was now convinced that Haven was trying to abuse her power over Tara to have sex with her, which the elder Hudds-Friday was entirely sanguine about — the more little Hudds-Fridays there were in the world, the better, as far as he was concerned. Now the problem was convincing dear old dad that she was, in fact, actively working on that. He'd sent her so many self-help books and how-to manuals, all of them written by men who'd clearly never so much as spoken to a woman in their life, that purported to be the keys to unlock the absolute sexual servitude from women that men were somehow entitled to by virtue of being men.

  Shatter the mirror, pick up a shard, and cut deep.

  One more reason not to look in the fucking thing. Haven showered with her eyes closed, scrubbed rigorously with the loofah to keep from having to touch her own skin, shaved by feel. The suit, picked out by her father (like the rest of her clothes), was hanging on the door.

  I'd rather kill myself than wear that.

  She pulled it on, piece by piece, thinking about other things as best she could. She thought about the forgotten back rooms of the family estate on Bonaventure around Jupiter, where she could vanish for hours at a time, where she could turn out the lights so no one could see her, not even herself, where she could forget for a little while. She thought about the library, more a thing of prestige than a thing of use for her father, where she could hide behind the written word. She thought about the firing range, and how the rangemaster didn't know she'd snuck a peek at the keypad when he was putting in the entry code for the armory. She could go there any time she wanted and-

  No, she told herself as she tied a perfect half-Windsor noose around her neck. Don't think about that part.

  Tara was waiting for Haven in the entryway of her quarters, a circur room at the center of the deck surrounding the elevator up to the hub of the ship. Her blonde locks were tied back in a no-nonsense bun, not a hair out of pce, and she wore the suitskirt with a confidence that Haven could only ever fake at best. Stars, I wish I was her, she thought, not for the first time. "Hey, Tara."

  "Good morning, sir. Looking good." Her smile was as perfectly calibrated as the rest of her. "We'll be docking in just a few minutes. Shall we head up?"

  "Yeah, let's go." Every part of Haven was screaming not to, but she knew that she could only dey the inevitable for so long, and the dread of the thing was probably worse than the thing itself. Probably. She stepped into the circur elevator car with Tara, grasped the handles, and clenched her gut. The ride itself was smooth, but the slowly sckening gravity that eventually fell off entirely as they approached the axis of rotation always made Haven's stomach turn somersaults.

  The hub was as plush and overbuilt as her quarters — nothing less, for the scion of the Hudds-Friday fortune. There was nothing industrial or workmanlike about the smooth, polished lines, unblemished by the casual touch of hands seeking stability in free-fall. It looked like a movie set more than a pce an actual human being could ever exist in. She grasped one of the smooth, contoured handles of the wayline and let it pull her forward along the central axis of the ship, all the way to the docking blister at its foremost extremity. The whipple shields had been retracted, and she could now see through the forward viewports the slowly-spinning wheel that capped a longer, cylindrical scaffold surrounding a mostly obscured mass of construction.

  Someday, this would have been an O'Neill cylinder, if it wasn't for the fact that an alien invasion was currently in the process of dismantling everything humanity had ever built for itself and turning them into brainwashed sves. Haven wasn't happy about any of that, but she did at least take some dark pleasure in her father's ridiculous ambitions being denied, for once. Who builds an O'Neill cylinder in some nothing system 400 light years rimward from Terra, anyway? Why sink a significant chunk of one's fortune and logistical connections into such a foolish boondoggle? By the time expansion caught up with location — again, assuming there wasn't an ongoing alien invasion that humanity stood exactly zero chance of resisting — the thing would be aging and obsolete.

  If only I'd thought to steer the ship toward them; they'd never bother brainwashing me, just feed me right into the organ pulper. Crack, pop, squish, and then I'm free.

  The docking at the axis of the wheel's rotation was smooth and professional; pressure equalized quickly, and she and Tara were through the docking colr and into the station's entryway. Here, some of the glitz and gm fell away — Haven could make out the odd pipe or conduit in the walls of the space, smudges and dents, none of the unnecessary frills of the fancy executive shuttle. Hell, there were even a couple of power tools secured to the bulkhead.

  Is that a bolt gun? If I aimed it right-

  "There's my boy!" The man's voice was always like a hand around Haven's throat. He was kicking across the entryway, catching a handle and stopping short before giving her a sp on the back — this was the most affection that Hudds-Friday men were allowed to show. If it didn't hurt, it was too soft, and with his broad shoulders that he'd so generously given Haven in the genetic lottery, he was very, very good at making it hurt. "Just in time, we just started the final dress-rehearsal checklist! Say," he added, pulling Haven close, "you knocked her up yet?"

  "Stars, dad, she's right there," she mumbled.

  "That's a no, then," he muttered, shooting Tara a dirty look. "Whatever. Probably for the best, we'd have to extract anyway. We'll do an egg harvest before we put her under, same as we did for the others. Come on, time's a wasting, we've gotta get you both prepped for surgery, and you've gotta jerk off in a beaker!"

  "Uhm, sir?" The look on Tara's face told Haven everything she needed to know — she was as in the dark about what the hell was going on. "I'm confused, none of this was in the prospectus for-"

  "Of course it wasn't!" Haven's father said. "The fewer people know about the Effective Altruism, the better! As it is, almost everyone who does is going along for the ride, and the ones who aren't, well, I've made arrangements for them. It should keep us safe until departure. And then, then, we'll have secured the future of humanity!"

  "Dad," Haven said, grabbing her father by the sleeve as he braced to kick off, "what the fuck are you talking about?"

  "It's a ship, kiddo!" he said, grinning. "A Bussard ramjet! Infinite delta-v, once you get it started up! We've got everything we need — genetic records of every commercially important species, drones to serve as a bor force on the other end, a caged AI to manage it all, and most important of all, a hundred and one human beings! You, me, and ninety-nine ideal specimens of femininity in their prime!"

  "Dad," Haven repeated, "What the fuck."

  "Think about it, son," he said, twisting the knife without realizing it, "You can't outrun the Affini. Not by trying to get farther away from them! They always catch up, they always find you — I've seen the reports from the Cosmic Navy! They can track jumps, or something. That's why, to get away from them, you've got to run through time. Good ol' Einstein's got our back! We head out, we get up to speed, and time dition does the rest! We arrive at our destination fifty centuries from now, more than enough time for the Affini to colpse." His grin grew wider, and he winked perhaps the most disgusting wink he had ever winked at Haven. "Then, you and me, my boy, we repopute."

  He's fucking insane, Haven thought. There was no possible verbal response to what Henry Hudds-Friday was saying. He had simply gone completely fucking batshit.

  "We reestablish civilization — but this time, we do it right. No leeches, no moochers, no do-nothings, just the best genetic stock humanity has to offer: ours! Then, we do what we do best: we expand. Whatever's left scratching a hopeless, meaningless existence in the ashes of the Affini, we come and give them purpose, give them the opportunity to work for a real living, rebuild the best parts of the Accord into something new, something vital, something that won't colpse the minute a bunch of dipshit communist weeds roll up!"

  "Sir," Tara said, stepping into Haven's silence, "forgive the interruption, but there's some logistical issues with this. From the numbers you cited, well, the payload mass alone would make it impossible to sustain a hundred people for the duration of any long-term flight, even taking time dition into account. There's a reason we stopped trying to build these things the minute we figured out how to make a jump drive, right?"

  "You think I'm not aware of that?" he said, his mood shifting on the spot as he gred daggers at her. "You think I'm stupid, Tara? Of course you can't keep a hundred and one people up and moving on a ship this size! Hell, even a shipping coma wouldn't do the trick. That's why we're going in cryo!"

  Haven's heart almost stopped. "Dad... cryo doesn't work. No one's ever been revived from it successfully after longer than, what, a week?!"

  "Wrong! The b boys have worked out a new process that makes total body vitrification survivable! Mostly, anyway, they say it's got a 76% survival rate in b rats and that's going to have to be the dice we roll because we haven't got time to wait for the nerds to get it perfect. Odds are, one of the two of us will make it — and even if we don't, our DNA will, and the survivors can start up a new batch of Hudds-Friday menfolk to run things for them! Humanity will survive, my boy, and it'll be a Hudds-Friday running the show, as it should have been from the start!"

  Do it. He's offering me a way out it and who cares if it's on his terms. This will kill me. I can finally do it. Do it. Do it!

  Haven gritted her teeth, her heartbeat pounding in her ears in a way that had nothing to do with the microgravity letting all the fluids in her body run to her extremities. Her father had finally lost his shit completely, and he was going to drag her along with him as he committed what might be the most expensive suicide in the history of the species.

  But if there was one thing she knew, it's that she wasn't supposed to listen to that little voice inside her telling her to end it all at every waking moment. And this wasn't just about about her, anyway — that made it easier to speak up. "Dad, no. This is stupid and it won't work," she said, catching his stare and holding it, even though it was agonizing. This mattered. What she was doing now mattered, for once. "You're just going to get a lot of people killed for nothing. I'm not going through with this, and neither are you."

  "I beg your pardon?" He said it quietly. That was never a good thing. He loomed in close, filling Haven's field of vision, and it was only the fact that there was nothing pulling her down that kept her from falling over. "What did you just say to me?"

  "I said... I'm not going. No one's going. This is—" The pop seemed to follow the punch Haven felt in her thigh, a loud crack of sound that echoed off the bulkheads two or three times. She looked down, expecting to see blood-

  Please please please please.

  -drifting free from her body in the microgravity, but all she saw was the pistol in her father's hand, and a little red tuft, feathery, sticking out of a little tube that was lodged in her leg. "What...?"

  "Stupid boy," her father said. "No, no, I take it back," he added, leaning in closer still. "You're not stupid. You're just zy. I've done everything I can to teach you how the world works but you've never held up your end of that. Well, that changes today. There won't be any distractions where we're going, just work. I'll make a Hudds-Friday out of you yet, son. Don't you worry about that."

  "Sir, what-" Another pop, another feathery flower blooming, this time in Tara's shoulder. "Ow!"

  "Sorry, Tara, I really don't have time to expin this all to you," he said, sighing and tucking the pistol in his hand back into his belt. "Just be gd that Harn's taken a liking to you — it's not just saving your life, it's giving you the opportunity to be celebrated as one of the mothers of all of future humanity. Think about that, hm?" The world was already starting to grow dark around the edges of Haven's vision, and though she felt a reflexive urge to take a swing at her father, her limbs were stubbornly refusing to obey, as though they were caught in something heavy and sticky. The elder Hudds-Friday gestured to someone out of sight. "C'mon, get them prepped for surgery. You're going to have to use electrostimution on the kid. He was in gravity the whole way here, so he should still be good for it, right?"

  "Yes, sir, he should be," a woman answered, just as Haven's eyes fell shut. She said a few other things, but she only heard them as though through cotton wool, could barely struggle when she felt hands on her weightless body, shifting her, moving her, the world spinning with her at its fulcrum. She vomited once before the abyss sank its cws deep enough into her to blessedly render her insensate. She had just long enough for one slow, deep thought, the st she would have for sixty years.

  Finally, it's over.