No Going Back Read online

  I shook my head to clear it.

  “Now I understand what you meant,” I said.

  “And was I right?” Lobo said.

  “That we should leave here and jump to some planet far, far away? Yes.”

  “No,” Lobo said. “Was I right that we won’t?”

  We should leave. I shouldn’t take the risk that Kang had been blustering when he threatened me. If he wasn’t, if he was seriously going to send people to find me, jumping to his home world was a very bad choice. I also couldn’t let Omani see me as I am, because what was once a small age difference was now so huge that she would realize immediately that I did not age.

  She was right, though, that I owed her. I had loved her, the only time I’ve ever let myself love any woman fully, the only time I ever could have done that. I could make up a story that would help a dying woman feel better. It would be a lie, but it would also be a kindness. I did owe her that.

  I nodded my head. “Yes,” I said, “you were. We’re going to Haven. Spend the next day gathering what you can on Pimlani and jumping us to a lot of different worlds. Change your look and our registration as often as you safely can. Let’s make our path difficult to follow.”

  “One last time,” Lobo said. “You know this is a bad, dangerous idea that could put us both at great risk. Heading to Haven is a bad plan.”

  I chuckled. “Well, the last time you told me something was a bad plan, it resulted in us saving ten children from slavery.”

  “And in one of the richest, most powerful men in the oldest planetary coalition enraged at us and possibly hunting us.”

  “We won’t stay long,” I said. “I just owe her one visit.” I stood. “I’m going to sleep.”

  “Will you at least tell me how you know Pimlani?” Lobo said.

  I wanted to, but I couldn’t explain it without giving away my most dangerous secrets.

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to bed, and I’m going to sleep.” I thought but did not say that I’m also going to figure out how to approach Pimlani so safely that she won’t be suspicious and no one else on Haven, including Kang, will notice we were there.

  I started for my quarters. As the door to them slid open, I said, “It’ll be fine.”

  “Nothing in our experience,” Lobo said, “suggests that will be true.”

  “Just take us to Haven.”

  124 years ago

  York City

  Planet Haven

  CHAPTER 14

  Jon Moore

  The day I first saw Omani Pimlani, I was digging a hole.

  I was working with the same type of wood-and-metal shovel I’d used on Pinkelponker as a kid twenty years earlier. No one needed to have people dig with shovels, because modern tools would do it themselves with only a little guidance, but the fashion of the day in York for the very wealthy was to use humans to do as much as possible. Anyone moderately well off could afford a smart tool or two; you had to be obscenely rich to pay giant staffs of human help.

  The Pimlani family was more than obscenely rich, one of the twelve original families to settle Haven and possibly the wealthiest; no one knew for sure how much money each of those families had. Consequently, laborers like me were working in twos and threes and fours all over their property.

  The situation suited me well. For the past fourteen years, since I’d escaped from Aggro, I’d stuck to the simplest, lowest profile jobs I could find. I worked enough shifts to keep the job and pay for someplace cheap to live, and I saved all the money I could. In all my spare time, I read and watched videos and listened to music and generally enjoyed my ability to learn. I didn’t expect anyone to have survived Aggro, and from what I’d gathered since escaping from there, no one had. I still worried, though, that some records of me might have persisted, and that someone might one day revive the Aggro research program, so I made sure to draw as little attention to myself as possible.

  I also didn’t mind the work. You did what someone told you to do, put your back into it, got some exercise, and then did it all again the next day. The nanomachines in my body healed me as I slept, so I awoke fresh and without any trace of soreness each morning.

  Lately, though, I’d been questioning whether I needed to live this way. No one had seemed interested in me since my escape. I was bored and knew I could do more. Boredom entered when the work stopped, but I thought more and more frequently about doing something that might engage my brain. I was also attracted by all that the city of York had to offer—attractions that were, for the most part, available only to those with a great deal more money than I had.

  The hole I was digging was to house a tree that sat a few meters away, ready for planting. A guy I barely knew, Liam, was working with me. We were on opposite sides of the hole, widening it and deepening it to the target specs: two meters in diameter, a meter and a half deep. We could have fit the tree in a smaller space, but our orders were for a hole this size, so that’s what we were digging.

  “Break time,” Liam said.

  All the workers I could see were stopping, so I figured he was right. I thrust the blade of my shovel hard into the earth, climbed out of the hole, spread my arms wide, and stretched.

  That’s when she came running around the corner of the main house. She wasn’t jogging, she was running, moving out fast, her arms and legs pumping hard, her mouth closed, her expression focused and intense. Some sort of bright blue exercise specialty garment—I knew nothing about them—held her breasts in place so they didn’t move at all, and she wore matching bright blue shorts. Sweat glistened on every part of her exposed skin, which was as dark brown as the trunk of the tree we were planting. A thick braid of black hair hung to her waist and flapped occasionally as she ran.

  At the peak of my stretch, she glanced my way, made eye contact, smiled, and then faced forward and ran quickly out of sight along the long driveway that led to the front of the property.

  I heard Liam laugh. “Don’t even think about it. That’s the boss’s one and only child. There’s no jump gate in the universe that can leap the gap between them and us.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  He laughed again. “You didn’t need to. She and I and, well, anybody else who was looking heard you loud and clear.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “I’m not responsible for what you think.”

  “No,” he said, “but you are responsible for what you do. You just be careful.”

  * * *

  The day I first spoke with Omani Pimlani, I was reading.

  I had developed the habit of shopping after work in a local market, buying fresh bread, meat or fish, and cheese, and making myself a few sandwiches. I’d carry them, a bottle of fresh juice, and a reader to a nearby park that occupied two square city blocks and was filled with fountains. Each of the fountains was a miniature of a waterfall back on Earth. I didn’t care at all about Earth, so I never bothered to learn their names, but I found the sounds of rushing water soothing. It wasn’t the same as the ocean back home on Pinecone Island on Pinkelponker—the waterfalls, even in miniature, were forceful, insistent, like the waves during a storm—but still it relaxed me. I would find a place to sit in the warm sun of the summer late afternoon, eat my food, and read.

  Other folks, children and old people and every age in between, walked and ran and played and talked and cuddled all over the park, but none of them bothered me. I felt a part of humanity without having to interact with others, an easy, comfortable feeling for me.

  I was sitting on grass that looked almost blue in the soft light, leaning against the wall that ringed the park, reading and listening to the nearest waterfall. Its initial cascades hit many ledges on their way to the bottom, each ledge spraying a fine mist into the air, so I sat back from it a few meters so I wouldn’t get wet.

  I saw the shadow of a person approaching and looked over the top of the reader to see who was coming.

  “I thought I recognized you,” a woman said at the same moment that I realized wh
o it was.

  Her appearance was completely different this time. She wore purple pants of a material so fine that I marveled that I couldn’t see right through it. Her shirt was a lighter purple that clung to her frame. Her long black hair hung loose down her back. She stepped into the mist from the fountain, stopped, and stared at me, either unaware that she was getting wet or unconcerned about it.

  I recalled Liam’s advice and said only, “Have we met?”

  She laughed, a good, full-bodied laugh, nothing held back. “Is that really how you want to play this?” she said. She studied my face for a few seconds. “I know you remember me, because you couldn’t take your eyes off me when I ran by where you were working a few days ago. We stared at each other long enough that I sure remember you, even though now you’re clean and not sweating. So, my guess is someone told you it was dangerous to talk with the boss’s daughter.”

  I put down the reader and stood. I realized now how tall she was, only a hand’s-width shorter than I. She was gorgeous, and she knew it, but as near as I could tell, her comments didn’t come from ego; she remembered when we made eye contact.

  I smiled. “Good guess.”

  “Was it the old ‘Don’t risk your job over a girl’ advice?”

  I shook my head. “No. It was the equally old ‘The rich aren’t the same as the rest of us’ advice.”

  “That’s a better and more accurate admonition,” she said, “but I think you should ignore it all the same. I’ve heard similar sentiments from my father, and I plan to ignore them now.”

  “Why?” I said. “You know almost nothing about me. The one thing you do know is that I do the lowest jobs at the lowest pay on your father’s estate. That’s not exactly an advertisement designed to attract someone in your position.”

  “Oh, I know more than that,” she said. “I know that when I’ve watched you work, your eyes never stop looking around, as if you’re always preparing for something bad to happen. I know you sit alone when you eat, preferring reading over talking. I know you don’t notice when women around the place notice you. I know you’re pretty and well built but don’t realize it.”

  I looked at the ground and shook my head, my face hot as I blushed. I rarely spoke to women outside of work, and none had ever talked to me like this.

  She laughed, but this time it was a smaller, kinder, softer laugh. “And now I know you blush, which is also completely adorable.”

  I appreciated her compliments, but I was also beginning to feel like she was playing with me. I forced myself to look her in the eyes. “The way you’re talking about me, I sound more like a pet than a man. I’m not sure I like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s not my intent. As you can probably tell, I’m used to saying whatever I want, getting whatever I want, and not encountering much resistance in the process. So let me try again.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Omani Pimlani. I’d like to get to know you. If you don’t want that, too, then say so, and I’ll leave you to your reading.”

  I shook her hand. Her fingers were long and thin, her hand soft. I was conscious of how large and rough mine must have felt to her.

  Screw Liam; I could always find another low-end job, and this one was doomed to end anyway when the Pimlanis finished their renovations.

  “I’m Jon Moore,” I said. “I’d like that.”

  24 days from the end

  In orbit and in York City

  Planet Haven

  CHAPTER 15

  Jon Moore

  We spent a day and a half making our very winding way to Haven. In the course of that trip, we jumped to a dozen different planets, occasionally leaving the jump gate area to go down to a planet’s surface, have Lobo reconfigure himself as a different type of ship, and then jump again with a new name and look. By the time we were departing the Haven jump gate for York, Lobo was a specialty transport ship bringing gems and other rare stones to a list of legitimate stores in that city.

  “Is Pimlani still alive?” I said.

  “To the best of my ability to tell,” Lobo said, “yes. That is largely a deduction from the absence of any signs of her death, however. I cannot find any evidence of her doing anything outside her home for more than two years.”

  “Her family is too important for her death to go unreported,” I said.

  “Agreed,” he said.

  We flew toward a public landing area on the westernmost edge of the city, turned, and ran around the southern part of York as Lobo transformed his logo and some of his exterior features so he resembled a tourist shuttle. We joined in with the other shuttles cruising half a kilometer off the coast on the eastern, oceanfront side of the York. Unless someone had been carefully tracking us the entire time, we should now be as anonymous as we could reasonably be.

  “There used to be a large outdoor market in the southwest area of York,” I said. “Is it still there?”

  “Yes,” Lobo said.

  “There also used to be a big park not far from the market, a park filled with fountains. Is that still standing?”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “From what I can gather from the historical records, the huge percentage of this city that is, was, and always has been under the control of a relatively small number of people has let them keep it roughly the same for quite some time, certainly for the short amount of time since you could have last been here.”

  I ignored his unspoken question. We couldn’t address my true age without also discussing my nanomachines.

  “Is the location Pimlani gave us near those two?”

  Lobo threw a holomap into the middle of the front room, where we were talking. Labels highlighted all three locations. “Yes, as I expect you knew it would be.”

  I nodded. “Just making sure.”

  The park was smaller than it had been. The market, though, was vastly larger, easily four or five times the size it had been when I’d lived here. That was good news, because the larger it was, the more likely it was to have a broad range of vendors.

  The safest path into Omani’s estate was to have Lobo land me there, but I couldn’t take Lobo with me. I couldn’t visit Omani looking like I did. I had to look the age she expected me to be, and to do that, I would require specialized help. I had no way to explain to Lobo why I needed to look ancient.

  “Put us down in the busiest public landing site near the market and the park,” I said. “I haven’t been here for a long time, so I want to wander around a bit before I call her and then visit. In fact, I’ve been living inside you so long that—no offense—I’d like to sleep on a full-size bed and eat a few meals prepared from fresh food. So, I’m going to stay the night somewhere nearby, then probably see her tomorrow.”

  “And while you’re walking memory lane,” Lobo said, “exactly what am I going to be doing?”

  “Initially, nothing,” I said. “As I’m about to enter Pimlani’s estate, I’ll let you know I’m on the way in. From then on, I want you watching my back from above and standing by to come get me, just in case.”

  “In case of what?” Lobo said.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him that if by some chance Pimlani knew I still looked the same age as the day I met her she might well want to know how that was possible and whether the knowledge could help her. “I have no clue,” I said, “but because I agree with you that simply being on this planet is a risk, and because there’s no way her family and Kang’s don’t know one another, I’d just as soon err on the side of excess caution.”

  “The best way to do that,” Lobo said, “would be not to visit her in the first place and simply to leave Haven now.”

  I sighed. “We’ve been through all that, and I’m not changing my mind. So, why don’t we instead study what data you can get on her property and work out my exit options.”

  It was Lobo’s turn to sigh. “It’s your life,” he said. “I’m just along to die supporting you.”

  I laughed. “Please. If anything were to happen to me, you could get
away easily.”

  “But I wouldn’t,” Lobo said, “as you should know.”

  He was right. I was being unfair. “I do,” I said, “and I’m sorry. And, I truly appreciate it.”

  A holo of the Pimlani estate appeared in the middle of the round.

  “Before you turn all weepy and start trying to hug my walls,” Lobo said, “let’s go over this place.”

  * * *

  I left Lobo in an outdoor space at the far rear of the public landing zone he’d chosen. We’d discussed putting him in a hangar but ultimately decided to leave him in the open. Anyone looking for us would expect us to hide him under cover, but with the most recent set of mods, no one from Kang’s team should have been able to recognize him, so leaving him outside seemed the best overall choice. Plus, he could leave quickly if need be.

  I set off on foot. Should someone track us to that area, I didn’t want any immediate taxi records. I carried a pack with a change of clothing, as well as a wallet that gave me an ID that should hold up for at least a few days and that had a rather substantial money balance. I don’t generally spend a lot, and over the years I’ve landed quite a few large scores, so I normally have no problem bearing the costs of small missions like these. I always tried, though, to bring far more money than I should ever need to spend, because sometimes extra money provided the best path out of a difficult situation.

  I’m going to see an old friend, I realized, and I view it as a mission. I shook my head. Normal people didn’t think that way.

  On the other hand, it could be a mission, because it could be a trap. When I knew Omani, she was brilliant and beautiful and fun, but she also possessed more than a little of the drive and ruthlessness that had made her family rich and powerful. I had no doubt that if she knew I didn’t age, she would lock me in a cage until either scientists she would hire had figured out what made me that way or she died.