The Changeling Game, Chapter 58

58.
No Name but What They Call Her

For several hours, she didn’t do much more than sit quietly.

Comms were out, all the civilian frequencies co-opted for emergency use. All flights, both air and space, were either grounded or rerouted. Everyone who had been at the spaceport and had a nearby home they could return to, and hadn’t joined the relief efforts, had been asked to check in as safe and go home. Tents had been set up on one of the runways for stranded passengers. She had been among the first sent to a tent, once a medic confirmed that none of the blood on her was her own.

She sat, unmoving, unblinking, unthinking, for a while as other people filed in and joined her, some of them dusty, a few bloodstained, but many of them not even slightly disheveled and expressing insensitive irritation about the delays to their schedules.

She couldn’t get mad at them, though. They weren’t the ones who had caused this.

Sometime after her arrival under the tent, a harried mother had come in with two small children who were crying and whining about being hungry. The three shawarma wraps in her pack were still warm at that point, and she’d handed them over to the mother, shrugging and saying that she had no appetite anymore when asked why she didn’t want them. Another group of fretting children got Lalla’s snack bag a while later.

She was exhausted, but too afraid to sleep. Nightmares would be waiting for her if she ventured out of the Apeiros starfield. And if she stayed there, she would have to explain to them what she had done.

The events played out over and over in her head as she picked apart everything that she had done wrong, hating herself even more with each repetition.

She’d left too soon, before she saw the exchange of weapons case and briefcase, before she’d known that there was deadly arsenal at Makarov’s disposal. But even so, she should have realized that he would be armed, dangerous, and willing to kill anyone who stood between himself and freedom. She had known he was a monster.

It wasn’t like she was new to being around dangerous men. It wasn’t like he was the first monster in a man’s body she’d ever encountered.

Would Riddick have done the same thing in Makarov’s place? He’d been ruthless and deadly in the docking bay of the Kublai Khan, although the only civilians in the place had been Imam and her, and his violence had been at least partly in their defense. If someone had cornered him in a public spaceport, with children and families all around him, would he have surrendered… or gone down shooting, without regard for collateral damage, like Makarov?

There had been a time when she had thought she knew the answer to that.

Had she expected Makarov to act like her childish fantasy version of Riddick? Was her crush on one killer what had led to her fucking up so spectacularly when trying to lead authorities to another?

I should’ve called General Toal…

She’d had the emergency comm number. He’d only just given it to her that morning-day. And while he probably would have never anticipated her needing to use it quite so soon, Makarov had been high-profile enough to warrant it. Toal would have known how to apprehend him without anyone getting hurt. Why hadn’t she just called him?

Because I’m no good at any of this shit. I was wrong to ever think I was.

She’d let herself get an inflated head about her successes, but how much of those were really hers? What had she really done that was so great?

Kyra and Tomlin had rescued the Scarlet Matador passengers. She’d just been dead weight for most of the journey after overexerting herself moving the shuttles around.

She’d acted like a brain-dead fool when Pritchard invaded the apartment. Kyra and Sebby had saved her, and Kyra had almost been killed.

Ewan was probably the only reason she’d come back alive from the morgue heist. She’d very nearly stranded him in a whole other universe as thanks.

She’d gone off half-cocked chasing down the apeirochorons and had almost been caught stealing the boxes’ contents. Then she’d very nearly broken her leg escaping. Not to mention that her thieving had somehow led to a Star Jumper getting imploded.

General Toal had orchestrated the release of Pritchard’s files. Left to her own devices, she would have undoubtedly fucked that up as well.

Her brilliant idea for taking Sebby home had been for Kyra and her to walk their youngest sister back up into the New Atlas foothills, on foot, carrying an olive tree to plant along with all the gardening tools needed to plant it. Burdened like that, they’d never have made it out of the New Marrakesh suburbs. Sebby’s reunion with Mommy Ree had only happened because the Meziane family took over with a much better plan.

All of her so-called brilliant ideas, she decided, had been half-baked messes. It had been the intervention of others—Kyra, Tomlin, Ewan, General Toal, the Mezianes—that had saved all of them from failure. Hell, in just a few hours, Izil and Tafrara had already become better at manipulating the threshold between U1 and Elsewhere than she’d been until weeks had passed.

Everything she’d patted herself on the back for had been someone else’s achievement.

No wonder Riddick turned his back on me. She was glad he’d run out before she could accidentally engineer his destruction.

It was, she thought, dangerous for anyone to be around her. She invited calamity, and she’d been dumb enough to believe she could handle it. That was probably the real reason General Toal had begun rushing her offworld. She was a danger to everyone around her.

It was a miracle that the ait Meziane house had still been standing when she’d left it.

News slowly filtered into the tents about the calamity. Twenty-three confirmed deaths, sixteen people missing, fifty-four injured, six of them critical and not expected to survive. Javor Makarov and his hostage, a young mother from New Isfahan named Nadia Heydari, were among the missing and, given what the last few seconds of security footage showed and their immediate proximity to the blast, were presumed dead. There was probably nothing left of either of their bodies to find.

She had no idea where Nadia’s son and mother had been taken. They weren’t in her tent. She didn’t think she could have kept it together if they had been.

It was her fault that a little boy would never see his mother again. Her fault that an old man had been torn to pieces by Marakov’s bullets… and that another man had been crying for his mother while dying slowly… her fault dozens of more times over…

She was the monster in all of this.

Although only one concourse had been damaged, the whole spaceport was provisionally shut down for the next full Tangiers day while a thorough search of the entire facility was conducted. Makarov was a known terrorist, after all, who had already leveled part of another spaceport and might have been intending to do the same in New Casablanca; every corner and niche of every room and hallway was being checked for explosives. Limited service would resume once the search had been completed.

She would never reach the Nephrite Undine in time for its planned departure window.

Part of her, the cold part she suddenly hated with a passion, reflected that she would need to come up with a new plan, and soon, if she intended to stay ahead of the Operatives on their way to Tangiers Prime, who would now be interested in more than just the events that had transpired in New Marrakesh. She would need a new destination, a way to break her trail again, and then a new route back to Deckard’s World under a new identity, once she was sure her trail was broken.

Maybe, she thought with a brief flash of bitter humor, she’d manage to return to her mother’s house before her sixteenth birthday…

I fuck up everything I touch.

Someone finally brought food to the tent as the shadows grew in length. By then, although she still felt queasy and hollow, she was able to choke something down and was aware that she needed to. It wasn’t anything fancy, but she doubted she’d have been able to tell, or enjoy it, if it had been. It did its job.

Shortly after that, the comms came back for a few minutes.

Her comm and tablet both chimed, signaling the arrival of dozens of call notifications and messages. Everyone in the Meziane family had tried to reach her during the last few hours, asking if she was all right and if she had been anywhere near the new disaster. The messages grew more and more frantic as the hours passed. Ewan had left several, the suppressed anguish in his voice tearing at her so much that she couldn’t listen past his first.

How was she going to explain this to him? To any of them? Once they knew what she’d done, what she really was, would any of them ever want to see her again?

Finally she sent one text-only message in answer, to Ewan’s normal comm number. She could never use the emergency number, she told herself. Not ever.

This is my fault. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt. Please forgive me.

The comms went out again right after she hit send.

Sighing, she packed the tablet away again, keeping her comm out as she lay down on the cot she’d been assigned. Suddenly she wished she could delete the message. There were no words in the ’verse that could undo the damage she’d done, or even apologize for it. Forty-five people were dead or dying, another forty-eight maimed. Her body count exceeded Kyra’s.

As dusk fell, she tried to sleep.

Audrey? The Apeiros were waiting for her, agitated. Are you well? What has happened?

“I can’t… I can’t talk about it…” she told them, struggling to find her voice even in her bodiless form.

How can we help? What can we do?

And suddenly, undone by their concern, with any need to hide her secrets stripped away in their space, it all flooded out.

In that strange place, the tears she hadn’t managed to shed for hours and the screams that she’d been bottling up burst loose, jarring the spangled darkness of their starfield. She felt them listening, their agitation only growing, until she had exhausted the flow and it finally stopped. She had managed to contain it to their world-between-worlds; back in the physical world, her body had stayed still, her voice had remained silent, and no tears had escaped.

Still… while it had been cathartic for her, how terrible it must have been for them to witness.

“I tried to get a dangerous man captured,” she finally explained once she had the energy to speak, wondering how she could still float in their space when she was so heavy. She was a black hole. “He had killed a lot of people, and everyone was looking for him. I found him and I tried to… get him arrested… but…”

Apparently she hadn’t worked through all of the tears or screams yet.

What happened with him? they asked when she calmed down again.

“He killed more people, so many people…”

We are sorry.

“You don’t understand. It’s my fault he killed them. They died because of me.”

They still didn’t understand.

The conversation circled, she wasn’t sure for how long. They tried to reassure her that all her broodmates still lived, that Kyra was well and dreaming of a world with three suns, and that the new larvae that she had seeded herself into were strong and growing—

…the what?…

They weren’t sure what that left that she could be upset about. Had the one she wished to mate with been among those who had died?

When she told them that no, he was fine, none of the people she’d counted as family on Tangiers Prime had been in harm’s way, they only became confused again.

The conversation circled. Once they understood that all of those who had been killed or injured were strangers, they perversely treated it as an admirable thing that she cared so much about their fates.

“You don’t understand,” she told them again. “It’s my fault any of them were hurt at all, I wasn’t careful enough, I wasn’t thinking enough about others—”

A rapid succession of soft chimes by her ear brought her back to wakefulness.

The comms were working again. Messages to her were pouring in.

Other comms were chiming in the dimly-lit tent. She sat up and opened hers. More than a dozen additional messages had arrived during the second outage, and even more were arriving.

Oh fuck.

Sudden dread suffused her. She didn’t want to read or hear any of the recriminations that must have been sent by now. She powered the comm down without reading or listening to any of them. Then she did the same to her tablet, shoving both devices deep into her pack. According to the time on the comm before she shut it off, it was an hour after local sunset, almost time for dinner in New Casablanca and lunchtime in New Marrakesh. If disaster hadn’t struck—

Disaster didn’t strike. I did.

—if she hadn’t fucked things up, she would have been finding something to eat and then going to her departure gate to await the arrival of the shuttle to the Sirius Shipping HQ, after a carefree day of people-watching and window-shopping—

“Something’s landing,” a neighbor said, and almost everyone in the tent hurried to the open side so they could see. She joined them a moment later.

It looked like a slow-moving falling star, heading for the spaceport. They watched as it descended, resolving into a small spacecraft that touched down on a landing pad a few runways over and began rolling away toward one of the undamaged concourses.

The people around her began speculating about who was on board. Someone important enough to be able to land even though the spaceport was closed, clearly. Soon everyone had a theory. She wondered if it was Federacy investigators arriving onsite. Who else would be able to come in during a total lockdown?

Food arrived soon after. She overheard one of her neighbors telling everyone that restaurateurs across New Casablanca were sending meals for stranded passengers and relief workers. Additional aid was flying in from other cities and would begin arriving soon.

She could still barely taste the maakouda and harira she was given, but everyone else seemed to be enjoying it.

Copters began to arrive not long after the meal ended, touching down on different runways but staying a good distance from the spaceport. She could see different aid groups setting up bases around their transports. The spaceport had yet to be cleared as safe, and anything potentially combustible—including aircraft and spacecraft—was being kept far away from it until it was.

“We’re looking for Marianne Tepper. Has anyone seen her?”

A severe-looking man in an expensive suit, accompanied by several others in the uniforms of spaceport security, had entered the tent. He looked around.

“Has anyone seen Marianne Tepper? She’s listed as having been sent here.”

Her heart was dropping as she stood up and lifted her hand. “That’s me. I’m Marianne Tepper.”

“We need you to come with us, please.”

She’d been found out.

Taking a deep breath, she picked up her backpack and made her way over to the group at the tent’s edge. There was no point trying to run or deny anything, even if she had wanted to.

Honestly, it was a relief.

“Your ID?” he asked her as she reached him.

“It’s in my money belt. I need to reach under my shirt to get it. Is that okay?” She didn’t want the armed officers with him to panic at her movements after everything that had already happened. Nobody in the tent deserved any more terror.

He nodded. She retrieved her ID and handed it to him.

The man looked it over and nodded. “This way, please.”

The spaceport security officers formed a phalanx around them as the man escorted her back into the spaceport. No one spoke. She hadn’t really expected they would. They were probably glad she was cooperating and not forcing them to make a scene in front of all the traumatized people in the tent. She’d let things stay that way.

What, she wondered, had tipped them off? Had a security camera caught her isomorphing without her knowledge? Maybe the fact that she’d been on the train, but had never passed through a security checkpoint after getting off, had raised a flag. There were a dozen ways that she could have blown her “cover” that she hadn’t even thought of until this moment.

Just more proof that I am no good at all at this cloak-and-dagger shit…

And now they had her.

She would cooperate, she decided. She’d answer most of their questions as honestly as she could. The only lies she would tell would be about her abilities and where they had come from… and how she had gotten to Tangiers Prime in the first place. Marianne Tepper had supposedly arrived half a Standard year before the Scarlet Matador accident, and had been backpacking around the New Atlas Mountains for a few months after graduating college and before applying for a job with Sirius Shipping. She remembered all the details, and she would stick to them. They would never know she had any connection to the Meziane family, to the Scarlet Matador or the Hunter-Gratzner, or to Audrey MacNamera… but she would cooperate with whatever else they wanted from her.

And, if they had figured out that she was an esper and were turning her over to the Federacy for Quantification, she would let them. The worlds might be a lot better off, she reflected, if she was on a tight leash.

That made her wonder, abruptly, if the man in the suit was an Operative. Had he been homing in on her? She couldn’t bring herself to reach out and try to touch his mind to see. Instead, even though she was telling herself to surrender peacefully, she found herself practicing the “tricks” she and Kyra had learned not long before, to try to quiet her mind into a baseline pattern. Not that she was especially good at that… and it was probably too late.

It was a long walk. The spaceport was enormous, huge corridors branching off in multiple directions, and none of the moving walkways were operational. She could see different crews—bomb squads—at work as they walked past, checking for explosive devices in various locations, leaving small bright green tags on everything they had vetted as safe. They had started with the concourse that the standoff had unfolded in and were moving outward to cover the undamaged parts of the spaceport.

As her escort led her through the enormous main terminal and toward one of the other concourses, she saw General Toal standing among a group of high-ranking military officers. For a moment, their eyes met. His widened as he took in the armed guards surrounding her, and he took a step toward her.

She lifted one hand slightly in a staying gesture and shook her head. Don’t stop this. I deserve whatever’s going to happen.

He paused, frowning, and the security detail swept her away, into the concourse and over to a side hallway.

She didn’t realize she was being taken to the control tower until she stepped out into it, a short elevator ride later. Only four of the security officers had accompanied her and her escort up; the elevator didn’t have room for the rest.

“Is this her?” a man asked as they entered the control room. He sounded angry. Of course he’d be angry, given what she’d done.

“It is, yes,” her unnamed escort replied. “I appreciate your cooperation.”

“Appreciate…” the other man, clearly one of the flight controllers, scoffed. “Try appreciating this. We have a disaster on our hands and you come in here throwing your weight around like it’s just another day in your cushy office—”

“You need to understand the urgency of the situation,” her escort snapped back, his own voice sharpening. “A great deal is at stake here. You can’t possibly comprehend how much. We need her on-site as soon as possible—”

“Yeah, all hail our exalted puppet-masters,” the controller growled. “I’ve been ordered to cooperate, and I am cooperating, but you could show a little fucking humanity about what we’ve been through. You don’t even know how bad it is here.”

“He may not know,” a familiar voice said off to the side, “but she does.”

Captain Bevan emerged from behind a partition. He looked like he’d slept in his uniform and had only recently awakened. Both men frowned at him.

“Right after the explosion, I found her trying to dig one of your security guards out of the rubble,” he said, glancing at the controller. “That Idrissi fellow. How’s he holding up?”

“He’s still in surgery, but they now say he’s expected to live. I thought you saved him.”

“She was with him when I arrived on the scene, and she had already gotten most of the debris off of him.”

Two of the guards began whispering to each other. The coldness on her escort’s face had vanished when he looked at her again. “I didn’t realize you were part of the search and rescue effort.”

“I wasn’t—”

“She was in shock. I escorted her out of the blast zone and turned her over to outside personnel for treatment. I had no idea who she was at the time.” Captain Bevan took her hand. “I’m sorry you’ve had to go through all of this.”

Wait, what? He was sorry? What was happening? With one small gesture, she no longer understood any of what was going on.

The controller sighed. “Okay. You’ve made your point. Take her and go. And no more of the whole ‘we appreciate your cooperation’ bullshit. I’ve heard it before. You’re cleared for launch.”

“Will you be joining us?” her escort—she focused on his name tag, which identified him as H. Abecassis—asked Bevan.

The Captain shook his head. “I’m going to stay with the Jewel. We haven’t taken our passengers out of cryo yet, and they’ve asked us not to until at least tomorrow. I want to be there when they wake up. They’ll have a lot of questions. Milliken will handle the launch, and we do…” He glanced pointedly over at the controller. “…appreciate the aid supplies you brought down with you, Mr. Abecassis.”

The controller sighed and gave a curt nod of his head.

Abecassis nodded. “Please come this way, Miss Tepper.”

Misstepper… mis-stepper… Miss Tepper… Her brain stuttered over the name for a moment and then she nodded, following him in confusion. She glanced back at Bevan, still bewildered. He raised his hand in farewell and she raised hers back.

Back down the elevator and through another corridor… to a departure gate?

The rest of the security detail was waiting there, now augmented. They nodded at Abecassis and moved aside from the gate to let the two of them pass. But none of them moved to flank her again, or follow them.

Abecassis, alone, escorted her down the boarding ramp and through the doorway of…

What was this? It looked like the interior of a fancy private plane from a twentieth century movie.

…the fuck?

He handed her back her ID. “I really do appreciate your cooperation, Miss Tepper. We’ve been trying to reach you for hours, but I know the comms system has been down for most of the evening-day. I’m to take you directly to HQ and the Nephrite Undine.”

…oh.

She wasn’t being arrested. Far from it. Sirius Shipping had sent a shuttle just for her…

She had to throttle the impulse to burst out laughing… or burst into tears.

“Sorry, I… I’m still a little in shock, I guess.” She was struggling against the sudden need to blurt out that she was a fraud, an impostor, and so much worse than that.

“Understandable. Our Chief of Operations lent us the use of his personal craft. Please feel free to make use of any of its amenities.” Abecassis gave her a thin but warm smile. “For now, though, please strap in. We’ll be launching shortly.”

The seats were luxurious, she realized as she strapped into one of them after stowing her pack. Everything around her was top of the line, the height of opulence.

Perversely, she felt she’d have been more comfortable in a holding cell.

I don’t deserve this, she thought, as the craft rolled away from the gate and prepared to launch her, and her alone of all the people stranded at the spaceport by her colossal fuckup, into the night.

I don’t deserve this at all.