Author's Note

Posting some extra chapters for the coming Summer Sun Celebration!

66-Sib

Bear didn’t open the door until I composed myself.

Gloam was still asleep and Mr. Landers was reading; he had casually picked a book from the collection sealed in the strongbox concealed by a sliding panel behind the bookshelf in the spare room behind a hidden, double-locked door. It looked to be a hand bound volume of Dee, very rare, long proscribed by all reputable authorities, and apparently not as discreetly stored as I thought.

“How’d it go?” he peered over the top of the forbidden tome as I stepped out of my shoes. “Did they require more testimony? Any rough cross examination?”

“They already had a conviction, they called me in for the execution.”

“That’s fast! What is it, half a year since you reported him?”

“He had logs, trophies and pictures, the case was open and closed. The only reason it took this long to off him is because there was so much evidence to catalog and review. Bastard recorded video of all his crimes.”

“What a sick fuck. And they wanted you to witness the execution?”

I paused to open my shirt, deactivate the front closure on my bra. Gloam was stirring and would wake up hungry. Her eyes opened and I lifted her to my breast.

“Not witness. I did the deed. Because I was the only victim to dare file a complaint.”

“Did that upset you? Killing him?”

“I’m alright now. It had to be done. But his supervisor is a wreck. He had to personally examine all the evidence. Including the video of my rape.”

Landers raised an eyebrow and waited for another shoe to drop.

“He thinks he’s in love with me.”

“Ouch, poor fucker. He knows that you’re not in the market?”

“Yeah. He was very proper and respectful, which I appreciate, but there’s nothing I can do for him.”

“Let me know if he gives you any trouble.”

“He won’t.”

“I wish you had come to me for help sooner.”

“Maybe if I had known that the asshole threatening my unborn daughter was not operating with the full power of the government backing him up, I might have said something!” Gloam fussed at my breast and I lowered my voice. “For all I knew speaking up would get us killed and you too.”

“Naïve. The government is fucked up but only the Oligarchs have the power to wantonly rape and murder. Peons like an anomaly agent don’t get special rights. He’s under law like the rest of us. And real Ogs don’t infiltrate minor bureaus to find fresh meat, if they want to rape a pregnant woman, they’ll round a hundred up, take their pick, and kill the rest.”

“So he obviously knew how to pick his victims.”

“Promise me that you’ll let me help you if you ever have any trouble again.”

“Why? You’ve already done too much for me.”

It was his influence which had opened the doors for the upper echelons of the anomaly agency to hear my complaint. And now he was babysitting for me too? There had to be something in it for him.

“I mean, sure, you’re the greatest boss in the world, but why have you taken so much interest? I know I am also the best at what I do, but my skills don’t warrant that much trouble.”

One possible motivation came to mind.

“Unless you want some action too. I guess it’s okay if that’s what you want.”

If my body was the fee for vengeance, it was a bit late to negotiate; my honor was already compromised. At least I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be violent about it. I clicked another mag-clasp open and stepped out of my pants.

“How do you want it?”

“I don’t.” Did he shudder? “There’s something I should have told you sooner.”

Standing there in my panties, my shirt and bra open, I gave him a very skeptical side-eye. “I already know my father died long before I was implanted, so don’t try the ‘I am your father’ line on me.”

“Vanished, not died, I don’t know where he went, I haven’t been able to find any trace. If he had died in custody, there would have been records. Fuck, there probably would have been a parade if they had had a body to show the public! And how about your brother? Have you checked up on him?”

“I only have sisters and they’re all bitches.”

“Both points are true. On your mother’s side.”

Belatedly, I connected the dots.

“You’re kidding?”

“You can run my DNA if you like. But yes, we are half-siblings, born four hundred years apart. Our father was a notorious criminal; I’m not even going to say his name.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was long of the opine that I might more easily protect you if I kept our connexion secret. And since your most recent disappearance, I’ve just been waiting for a good opportunity.”

I tallied coincidences and synchronicity in my head. A childhood of unreasonably close calls. The mystery of my improbable survival was solved but–

“How long have you been looking out for me?”

“I shacked up with your mother before you were born. When you showed up as a boy she was ready to kill you on the spot and I convinced her that murder was the one thing that would impact her ability to do business with the class of men she took as customers.”

“Were you—”

“One of her patrons? Yep, I paid a lot of credits for all those years of fancy, but shallow and meaningless, sex. Five years later someone more useful decided he wanted to pay even more credits for the privilege and I was out. By that time her staff took care of you and she’d mostly forgotten you existed.”

“You saved me.”

“I did what I could. How do you think you got a teddy with a real A.I. smart enough to help you avoid your mother’s wrath? You still have that thing?”

“Real A.I.?”

“That bear was alive, Tanna. Not biologically, but I swear if he had more processing power he’d be smarter than a human.”

“Thank you, Eric,” Bear said, “I am smarter than the humans.”

“Tanna?” Eric asked, surprised.

“He might have helped me upgrade him a little. I guess I understand now why he adapted to computronium so well. Eric meet Bear, Bear meet my brother Eric.”

“I remember Eric very well. He gave me my original task parameters when I was much lessthan I am now.”

“Uh, hi Bear.” My brother didn’t know where to look; Bear spoke in perfect surround sound through the in wall dom-aud. “You uploaded him into a demon core? That bear is easily the most valuable object in human space.”

I smiled and look down at Gloam. She was nursing hard, I would need to switch her to the other breast soon.

“Says you.”

“I recant my heresy,” my brother said, “may I hold my niece when she finishes her meal? She’s been asleep the whole time you were gone and we didn’t get to play at all!”

My boss, my friend, my brother, showed every sign of being a doting uncle.

“This explains a lot about the free babysitting.”

“Guilty,” he said with a smile.

—

“She made it home safe,” a surveillance tech announced.

“Thank you,” Bob Call said. “Close the circuit, we won’t be tracking her any more.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tik, tik, tik, tik, clack.

“That’s funny.”

“Huh?”

“I was annotating the follow record and there’s a two year gap when she wasn’t seen at all.”

“Gone for two years? How’d that not get noticed?”

“The system tracks who is where; not who is nowhere. Her supervisor may have helped cover for her.” Another record popped up on the screen. “Should I flag him?”

“No. I looked his records over when I was backgrounding her early in the case. My gut says not to mess with that guy.”

—

After she ate, Gloam sat on Eric’s lap and played happily with his necktie.

“Do we have any other relatives in common I should know about?” I asked.

“Probably not. Certainly none that I know of. I had one son. Who became my daughter after a magic incident I have alluded to in our conversation shortly after you announced your change.”

“’Had’? That's not good. Is he, or she I guess…”

“Very technically, I don’t know,” he sighed, “She’s as good as dead, but her actual death may or may not have taken place yet. My very own Schrödingungkind. But her wave will never collapse, at least not in my light cone.”

“Shit! The fuck?” I jumped to my feet “Is there any possibility of rescue mission?”

“None. She and her family were aboard the Longshot-7.”

I sagged back to my chair.

Everybody knew the history. Seven Longshot ships –sublight coldsleep colony vessels– had left the kindly light of Mother Sol: it was humanity’s greatest single endeavor, over a century of planning, designing, and construction. Seven splinters of steel, kilometers long, each packed with cryopods for nearly five hundred colonists. Thrusters on all seven ships had ignited simultaneously to bear the hopes and dreams of Terra to the stars. Three had slipped silently into the deeps of the galaxy and were optimistically presumed successful, their radio signals lost in the interstellar medium. Two Longshot Colonies lived and grew under strange stars. LC4 had stopped transmitting after two decades of disease and hardship. And that left Longshot-7. The ship had somehow impacted a Kuiper belt space rock, demolishing the bridge, somewhere inside the orbit of Nibiru. Barely made it to the Sol system’s back porch, really. The final seventy one seconds of telemetry data had fueled decades of analysis. Final conclusion: probably about half of the cold sleepers were dead, many were still alive in their cryos, but there was no crew to wake them. Automated systems might thaw them out if the ship ever hove into orbit around a planet with OCN chemistry. Automated planet seeking systems were in an unknown status and the craft was veering off the galactic plane, away from its planned destination, still under acceleration. The last bytes of data were a structural prefailure report from a strut in the high gain antenna mount – then the antenna was off lock before decelerate and return commands could be transmitted.

“Oh. Fuck, Eric, I’m sorry.”

“Thanks, sis. I’ve had some time to get used to my losses.”

The Longshot launches had been some two hundred years ago; the few colony ships to leave since that explosion of hope had been near-light craft, bucking under relativity’s cruel lash.

“Dammit, I had niece I never knew. Why was she on a Longshot?”

“Oh the usual dreamer bullshit. She wanted a new life… in a new world. To her, that was freedom. She was a young soul, barely over a hundred and wanted to leave the past behind and not get vivisected by scientists trying to understand our longevity.”

I chuckled- but I knew from history that he wasn’t kidding about the risks he and his offspring would face, given the success of the changes made to his genes.

“When did you have the longevity treatment? Obviously before your son was born if he had it too.”

“I’m not quite old enough to have participated in the LXP – the nine-nines failure rate was well known by the time I was spawned. It was our father who had the treatment, survived, and passed it on.”

“You mean Gloam and I—”

“Might live for centuries? Yes, you probably will.”

And with those casually spoken words a huge gulf of time opened, gyring vertiginous before me. Instead of decades, I might have centuries ahead of me.

Centuries to spend longing helplessly for Twilight.