The Unincorporated Woman (63 page)

“Stop it,” she repeated, only louder.

The silence descended with a swiftness that seemed to make the normally forgotten background noises of a properly functioning command sphere seem deafening by comparison.

“Those are human beings who have made despicable choices and are now paying a horrible price. I will not have my crew or any crew under my command rejoice when the pain and suffering of other human beings has been forced upon us.”

It was then that the crew saw that J.D. had toggled the fleetwide communication mode. Her words were being heard by every person under her command, from the flagship to the shuttles.

Brother Sampson moved through the sphere until he was standing next to J.D. He began to administer last rites.

J.D.’s response was swift. “Stop that, Brother Sampson.”

His eyes grew concerned. “But Admiral, you just said—”

“That I would not have my crew descend to their level. And I will not. But those crews committed unpardonable transgressions against innocent human beings, and for that
they are to be cursed
.”

Brother Sampson bowed respectfully and slid quietly back to where he’d been standing.

“Cursed,” insisted J.D. in a voice full of loathing and anger, “to inhabit their ships, always knowing fear and desperation; attempting escape only to fail; living every minute of every day of every year with the terror that they unleashed and the pain that they willfully caused … for as long as the winds of Jupiter howl.”

Silence reigned throughout the fleet at J.D.’s conclusion. She then shivered violently, and her eyes went wide as if she’d awoken from a spell. The sudden movement sent a wave of fear through the crew of the command sphere.

“I want the fleet spread out over a vector covering ten percent of the surface of Jupiter from the point of the UHF fleet’s insertion,” barked J.D., now firmly back in command of her senses and her task force. “If any UHF ship does somehow manage to escape Jupiter’s gravity well, they are to have their propulsion systems
and only
their propulsion systems disabled. They are then to be gently pushed back into the atmosphere of Jupiter.”

Jasper Lee, J.D.’s second officer, found his voice. “And what about any jettisoned escape pods?”

“There
were
no jettisoned escape pods,” J.D. remonstrated, sealing forever the fate of the 122 pods whose 413 occupants would soon be escaping Jupiter’s fury. Twelve ships out of the 327 that were pushed in by the force of the initial blast made it back out. They were all heavy cruisers or larger. They were all horribly damaged by forces they were never designed to withstand. And per J.D.’s orders, they were all disabled and forced back into their unholy graves. Of the personnel that came to Jupiter as part of the UHF fleet, not one survived.

Long after the war was over, the “curse of the Blessed One” was known to those humans who would later settle the Jovian subsystem. The curse was scoffed at in groups, in the light, and while in high orbit. But there were always those who thought differently, especially anyone who worked the lower orbits, extracting hydrogen or tending to their experiments. They’d swear to anyone willing to listen that if their radios were set to broadband, they could sometimes almost make out human voices in the static. Voices filled with fear and desperation crying out for help. Cries that were cursed to go unanswered until the winds of Jupiter too ceased their endless wail.

Moon of Titan, Capital of Jupiter subsystem

It had been only four hours since the destruction of the last UHF ship, but it felt like forty. J.D. had been doing what she could to help the survivors of Fleet Order 8645, but there were so many refugees and so few resources. The permanent death toll was now estimated at over 170 million and still rising, but fortunately rising more slowly. It would have been much worse, but Gupta’s odd early issuance of the order had given the inhabitants of the asteroids enough time to evacuate to Jupiter’s moons. Sadly, there simply was not enough life support to sustain eight hundred million people. Nor were there enough suspension units to freeze them until help could arrive. And the horribly imperfect option of freezing them in space was no option, given Jupiter’s poisonous effluence.

The last communication from the Secretary of Relocation actually had within it a good idea, but it was one that Cyrus Anjou could find no purchase with. So J.D. had to take her shuttle to the governing complex in order to do something that even the late Justin Cord had trouble doing from time to time—get Cyrus Anjou to budge. The complex, J.D. saw, had suffered little interior damage and was remarkably intact. The only obvious indication of the tragedy was the large mass of people crammed into every corridor and room of the complex. J.D.’s progress was slowed not by people gathering to see the mysteriously disappeared now miraculously appeared defender of the Alliance, but rather by the inimitable fact that there was simply no room to move. Entire worlds had disappeared under the blazing cannons of Fleet Order 8645, and there were precious few spaces still available to sustain for long those lucky enough to have survived.

The air was too warm and unbearably stuffy. J.D. did a quick scan with her DijAssist and noted that the CO
levels were dangerously high. Nothing she could do about that. She, Fatima, and her crew of ten assault miners worked their way through the crowd toward Cyrus’s office, sidestepping around and sometimes even over bodies—many not moving at all.

About halfway to Cyrus’s office, J.D. felt a light tug on the pant leg of her uniform. She was irritated that some
one
or some
thing
had impeded her forward progress—if such a word could be used for so circuitous a route. J.D. spun around to see the object of her annoyance and was met by an unexpected surprise. First by the fact that there was no one there—that is, until she looked down. Second, by what she saw when she did—a young girl around six years of age staring up at her with two of the darkest eyes she’d ever recalled seeing.

The girl had a mane of thick black hair expertly woven behind her head into a beautiful French braid. The weave, noted J.D., was quite intricate; the strands were snug but not too tight—someone had clearly put a great deal of time and effort into creating it. J.D’s anger abated instantly as she knelt down to greet the young waif.

The child was clearly malnourished but not terribly so. Although her clothes were unsoiled and would stay that way, thanks to sonic cleaners, J.D. was aware that the girl and the crowds around her smelled musky, almost like assault miners who’d been in combat for too long.

It struck J.D. that it was the first time she’d ever been with civilians who smelled bad—miners and spacers, yes, but not run-of-the-mill civilians. J.D. tried to soften her features by putting her left hand over the scarred left side of her face. If the old wounds, still evident through J.D.’s fingers, bothered the child, she certainly wasn’t showing it.
Probably seen a lot worse,
thought J.D.

“Can I help you, little one?”

The girl grabbed the hand that J.D. was using to cover her face, pulled it gently down, and folded it tightly into her small dark hands. She looked directly at J.D. with no trace of fear. “Are the monsters gone?” she asked in a soft quivering voice.

J.D. was taken aback, unable at first to answer. She’d always thought of herself—her own face, at least—as monstrous. And yet here was a child looking directly at her—at
it
, as she’d often referred to her own grotesque mien—a child’s vision of a monster if ever there was one, not seeing a monster but rather a person. A person who might provide solace, even. J.D. had been asked for many things—support, inspiration, determination, but only one other human being had ever asked her for solace, and that person was long dead, murdered in a gray bomb attack all those years ago.

“Yes, my…” J.D. choked on her words as the memory of Manny Black suddenly overwhelmed her. Though for years J.D. had tried, she could never replicate the feelings she’d had for him,
with
him, with anyone else and had resigned herself to the cold solitude that her status as the Blessed One seemed to have cursed her with. She had never felt Manny’s presence as she was feeling it now.

The girl, sensing J.D.’s confusion, touched her soft little fingers to the left side of J.D.’s face and ran them over the gnarled grooves.

“Yes, my child,” confirmed J.D. as a single tear escaped and ran down the marred flesh of her face and onto the child’s fingers, “the monsters are gone.”

“You killed them?” the child asked hopefully.

J.D. was now crying openly. “Yes, little one,” she assured, covering the child’s hand with her own. “Every single one. And if any more
ever
come back, I will kill those as well.”

The girl eyed her suspiciously for a second, as if appraising her honesty, and then unexpectedly pulled J.D. into her tiny little arms, hugging her so fiercely that J.D.’s breath was almost cut off. She instinctively put her arms around the child but had no idea what to do after that—not ever really having interacted with children before. Again, only this time stronger, she felt the presence of Manny, and then she knew, felt, burned with what she had to do. Tentatively at first and then almost too fiercely, J.D. hugged the little girl back, tears now flowing freely down her face and onto the little girl’s shoulders
. It feels so good,
she thought,
to hold this child
.

When moments or minutes later—J.D. couldn’t be sure—she was finally able to let go of the girl and have the girl let go of her, she saw that all the bustle of the overcrowded corridor had come to a stop, with everyone focused on the most feared woman in the solar system and the little girl who’d so completely subdued her.

She looks hungry,
thought J.D. “Child, when was the last time you ate?”

The girl held up three fingers.

“Three days?” J.D. asked with a look of dismay.

The little girl flinched at that, which made J.D. immediately contrite. “Don’t be afraid, little one,” she comforted, smiling. Her right hand moved behind her back and snapped its fingers. In an instant, Fatima had a fleet ration chocolate bar slapped into it. “I’m sorry that I don’t have anything better,” she started, but the child’s wide-eyed look at the bar in her hand drowned out anything anyone might have said from that point. As the child devoured the bar, J.D. stood up and looked around. “Where are this child’s parents?”

There was no response.

“Are you going to bring me to Mommy?” asked the little girl between bites.

J.D. looked down and brushed the girl’s soft hair. “Hush, little one, eat more slowly.”

A young woman bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the girl timidly raised her hand.

“Are you this child’s mother?” Though she wasn’t sure quite why, her heart sank a little at the asking.

“No, Admiral,” the young woman almost gushed. “Her name is Katherine. I think her parents call …
called
her Katy.” J.D.’s left eyebrow twitched slightly at the young woman’s use of the past tense. “I was a neighbor, new to the rock,” she related, “on D Level. When the evacuation order came, I ran like everyone else. I grabbed the girl when I saw her all alone crying in a corridor.”

“Her parents?” J.D. asked more softly, already knowing the answer. The young woman gave a brief shake of the head, eyes flittering nervously between J.D. and the child.

“Anyone?” J.D asked. No one from the now riveted crowd replied.

“I do remember,” noted the woman, “that her parents said they had relatives … but they’re all on Earth. For all I know, some of them were in the fleet that mur—” She quickly closed her mouth.

“How come this child has not eaten for three days?” J.D. asked.

“None of us have,” muttered the woman. “What little we had we gave first to the children. Most of the adults have not eaten in over a week.”

A chorus of protests arose. Cries of “no food” and “feed us” could be heard from the large, desperate crowd in the corridor. The assault miners, who hadn’t taken their fingers off their triggers, looked about nervously.

Before it could become a wail or, worse, a riot, J.D. used the stridency of her combat voice to cut through the noise. “Enough!” she yelled. The protest stopped as suddenly as it had started. The girl too stopped eating, looking up, worried but again, not fearful. “Lieutenant Awala, what is the state of our food stores?”

Fatima took only a moment to consult her military-grade DijAssist. “Admiral, we have full combat provisions for three hundred and seventy-five thousand personnel for one month. Of those, half are in packaged form and half are in vats waiting to be prepared.”

J.D. snapped her fingers again, and Fatima, understanding instantly, took out her four remaining ration bars and handed them over. J.D. added the five bars she had on her to the five Fatima had just given her and then dumped them into the arms of the lady who’d rescued Katy. She then commanded the miners to throw theirs into the growing pile as well.

“One is for you; distribute the rest as you see fit.” Before anyone could comment on the fact that there wouldn’t be enough bars to feed the hundreds crammed into the wide corridor, J.D. added, “Lieutenant, inform the flagship that all provisions that can be shipped are to be sent to this complex immediately. No matter what, everyone in this corridor is to receive at least one ration bar.” At the first sound of clapping and cries of thank you, J.D. raised her hand for silence. “I will not be thanked for my failure. If the fleet had done its job properly, you would not be refugees. Please accept what I can give now and will continue to give later, for what it is: an apology.”

J.D. looked at the woman who had been watching Katy. She looked down at the girl who was just finishing the ration bar, having followed J.D.’s order to eat it slowly. Somehow the woman understood and nodded. J.D. got down on her knees, facing the little girl again. “Katy … It is Katy, yes?”

The girl nodded.