Gemina Read online

  Donnelly, H: Don’t write checks you can’t cash, handsome…

  Merrick, J: I’ve Made Arrangements. That’s all I’ll say. Now you’d better let me get back to it before your dad fires me and I’m reduced to dealing dust for a living.

  Donnelly, H: I hear that’s a great way to meet girls.

  Merrick, J: Touché, mademoiselle. Touché.

  Donnelly, H: I’ll see you in a few hours.

  Merrick, J: Counting the minutes.

  PERSONAL MESSAGE: PIRATE IM SYSTEM-HEIMDALL

  Participants: Niklas Malikov, Civilian (unregistered),

  Ella Malikova, Civilian (unregistered)

  Date: 08/03/75

  Timestamp: 18:02

  NikM: sssssshhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

  Pauchok: ttttttttt?

  NikM: dingdingding winnerrrrrrr

  Pauchok: what news, my cuz

  NikM: ****

  Pauchok: ya u said that twice now

  NikM: because i’m covered HEAD TO FOOT IN IT

  Pauchok: you’re covered head to foot in ****???

  Pauchok: is it saturday night already?

  NikM: o hilarious. stand-up comedy genius, right here

  Pauchok: now if only I could stand up ;)

  NikM: :P

  Pauchok: so what’s with the dookie and y r u covered in it

  Pauchok: god did I rly just type the word “dookie”

  NikM: your dad and his brilliant ideas

  Pauchok: o riiiiight, you were on clean up duty today, how’d it go

  NikM: like u don’t know

  Pauchok: hate to shatter that ego, cuz, but I’ve been too busy to watch ur comings and goings. We gonna be on skeleton crew come TerraDay and I’m kiiiiiinda busy.

  Pauchok: So how are our little visitors anyway?

  NikM: “visitors” my ***.

  Pauchok: i would like to keep your butt out of this conversation if at all possible plz

  Pauchok: i hear enough about it from zoe

  NikM: They’re COWS, Ella.

  NikM: u hve any idea how much **** the average adult cow makes?

  Pauchok: 30.48kg per day. Approximately.

  NikM: …

  NikM: u such a smart***

  Pauchok: smart AND hilarious? omg how fierce is this fem get these boys all OFF OF ME

  NikM: 30.48kg per day. I know that shovel better than I’ve known most of my girlfriends.

  NikM: Almost makes me wish I was back in slam.

  Pauchok: though few, there are advantages to being stuck inside Anansi all day. I keep a list. I’m adding “never having to wade knee-high through cowcakes” to it right now

  NikM: This is all going to go horribly wrong, u know that rite?

  Pauchok: relax, dad knows wut he’s doin

  NikM: wanna bet? 100ISH says this all goes balls up by november

  Pauchok: 100ISH no way. Lookin this good don’t come free, u know

  NikM: Why the hell we gotta keep them above the hermium reactor anyway? It’s sweatier than the new Elizabeth Andretti sim in there

  Pauchok: poor cow cows :(

  NikM: U worried about the cows? What about me? I STINK

  Pauchok: so go have a shower god

  NikM: I CAN’T DOUBLE G IS IN THERE GODAMMIT

  Pauchok: OMG ALL CAPS INCOMING SHIELDS TO FULL

  Pauchok:

  NikM: i hate u so much

  Pauchok: o lies, u luff meeeeeeee

  Pauchok: ok if it makes u feel better, ur an 18 yr old boy

  NikM: …so?

  Pauchok: so u always stink, Nik

  NikM: >_>

  Pauchok: when’s dad implanting the larvae?

  NikM: next couple of days, iirc. bad biz, cuz

  Pauchok: poor cow cows :(

  NikM: speaking of biz, u got that palmpad hooked up for lil ms Donnelly like I asked?

  Pauchok: god cuz, why do this to yourself?

  Pauchok: I grant you do the smoldering stare thing very well, but Donnelly’s got a bf

  NikM: he’s a tosser.

  Pauchok: Nik, Jackson Merrick is SO FINE he’s illegal in seventeen systems. Zoe got me to dub a mix of his daily personnel announcements so she could listen to them as she goes to sleep.

  NikM: wtfffffff

  Pauchok: Hanna Donnelly’s a spoiled little rich girl. Private tutors. Designer space booties. A bf who raises the ambient temp by 2° when he enters the room. You are NEVER getting into that

  Pauchok: you remember that time she broke your arm?

  NikM: she didn’t break it, it was just sprained

  Pauchok: god that was funny. i laughed so hard i can’t use my legs anymore

  NikM: I see what u did there

  Pauchok: did it hurt? I’ve never had a broken arm before

  NikM: I wouldn’t know because it wasn’t BROKEN

  Pauchok: it kinda looked broken

  Pauchok: you were in a cast and everything

  NikM: **** ME SHE DIDN’T BREAK IT IT WAS ONLY SPRAINED

  Pauchok: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

  Pauchok:

  NikM: look, just make sure u got the palmpad set up before the 15th, ok? Because if your dad finds out I’m dealing there, I’m in more trouble than his ****ing cows

  Pauchok: ok. fine. but do me one favor.

  NikM: wut

  Pauchok: When your brain gets back from vacation, lemme know. I need to have a stern word to it about letting little nik drive the bus while it’s away

  NikM: “little” nik? wtf

  Pauchok: There are worse words i could use for it, believe me

  NikM: ok double G’s done in the shower. u coming 2 dinner tonite?

  Pauchok: ehhhhh

  NikM: u know ur dad. “the family that eats together maintains a successful interstellar criminal organization together” and it’s last night before most of the crew head home for Terra Day.

  NikM: special menu planned

  Pauchok: wut r we having

  NikM: three guesses

  Pauchok: …

  Pauchok: steak?

  NikM: dingdingding winnerrrrrrr

  Pauchok: poor cow cows :(

  HEIMDALL CHAT: HANNA DONNELLY

  Guest389: Hey what kind of flowers you like?

  Donnelly, H: Zn…gkk.

  Guest389: Is that even a word?

  Donnelly, H: …Nik?

  Donnelly, H: God…what time is it?

  Guest389: I dunno. Night time?

  Guest389: What kind of flowers you like?

  Donnelly, H: Flowers?

  Donnelly, H: What does it say about you that I’m trying to work out how you’re going to twist my answer into something really inappropriate?

  Guest389: No, for real. What kind?

  Guest389: I assume you like ’em. You have those ovary things. Goes with the territory, right GOD PUT DOWN THE KNIFE I’M KIDDING.

  Donnelly, H: Jasmine. I like the scent.

  Donnelly, H: Inappropriate joke in three, two, one…

  Guest389: Jasmine, huh? Not roses?

  Donnelly, H: I have nothing against roses. But you asked about my favorite.

  Guest389: ****. Okay.

  Donnelly, H: Is there a reason we’re discussing this in the middle of the night?

  Guest389: Sorry, am I interrupting? Is Sir Poshly there?

  Donnelly, H: No, he’s working.

  Donnelly, H: I mean, don’t call him that.

  Guest389: So you’re alone?

  Guest389: Well, that’s a goddamn crime.

  Donnelly, H: I’m fine. I leave the crime to you.

  Guest389: Oh, burnT.

  Donnelly, H: Are flowers our new code? Did I miss a memo?

  Guest389: No, I was just gonna get you some.

  Guest389: I know a guy who knows a guy. But getting them out here would cost, like, my right testicle and stuff, so if yo
u’re not down with roses I’ll just keep everything where it is.

  Guest389: For later.

  Donnelly, H: Soooo much later.

  Guest389: Who likes jasmine, anyway? I don’t even know what that is.

  Donnelly, H: You ever notice my perfume?

  Guest389: Maybe.

  Donnelly, H: That’s jasmine. Now you know.

  Guest389: Ah, right. His Majesty the King buy that for you?

  Donnelly, H: No, my prince did.

  Donnelly, H: Nik, it’s really late.

  Guest389: You in bed?

  Donnelly, H: And I’m going to sleep.

  Guest389: Can I come?

  Donnelly, H: Night, Nik.

  Guest389: Night, Highness.

  HEIMDALL CHAT: CHARLES DONNELLY

  Donnelly, C: Isaac.

  Grant, I: Boss. Help you?

  Donnelly, C: Three things.

  Grant, I: The elevators, right?

  Donnelly, C: We’ll get to that. First, I need to bump our maintenance debrief. I’ll be stuck on this report for WUC HQ until 18:00. They’re demanding an update on the UTA presence in the Kerenza Sector and want to know why the hell that warship hasn’t left yet.

  Grant, I: It’s a damn good question. Shutting down access to Kerenza is costing us a fortune.

  Donnelly, C: It’s the way it has to be. We can’t risk the Alexander spotting our hermium operation there. I know a lot of people are keen to get in touch with the colony, you included.

  Grant, I: I’d rather wait to talk to Helena than risk prison. Radio silence is preferable to conjugal visits. What else?

  Donnelly, C: Traffic has delayed all remaining inbounds from other sectors until after Terra Day. So once the last shuttles depart on Friday, you’ll have a clear window if you need to take the wormhole offline.

  Grant, I: Shouldn’t need to, but nice to know. Maint’ is on schedule, all looking good.

  Donnelly, C: Excellent. Second matter—I’ve had pushback from upper management on the overtime hours your department is clocking and your expenditure forecasts for the wormhole maintenance period.

  Grant, I: Are you serious?

  Donnelly, C: Calculations for cosmic string manipulation alone have taken a combined total of over four thousand man-hours. The bean counters are howling, Isaac.

  Grant, I: They do realize what we’re doing here, right? Do they understand what could happen if something goes wrong with the wormhole? Quantum displacement, continuity collapse, geodesic distortion, temporal disruption—

  Donnelly, C: They’re accountants, Isaac. They don’t want to hear about theoretical disaster scenarios. They want to hear “black bottom line.”

  Grant, I: Quantum displacement isn’t hypothetical. Remember the Scylla? Whole station disappears with nothing but Schwartzchild particles to show for it. Reappears ninety-two weeks later, crew acting like they never left. We’re not playing patty-cake here, Charles. We’re orbiting a seven-way puncture in the fabric of the ****ing universe. We screw this maintenance up, Christ only knows what happens.

  Donnelly, C: Just…try and keep the overtime to a minimum, all right? We’ll go over your projections at 18:00.

  Grant, I: [sighs.] Fine.

  Donnelly, C: Now, on a slightly stranger note…

  Grant, I: The elevators.

  Donnelly, C: Yes. I couldn’t help but notice a rather obnoxious pop song playing through the elevator PA on the way to my meet with strategy this morning. Now, my daughter insists on informing me daily that my taste in music is not exactly “chill.”

  Grant, I: Ha! My daughter says the same to me.

  Donnelly, C: But then I noticed the same song playing when I got on the elevators to Reactor Control twenty minutes ago.

  Grant, I: Yeah. It’s playing on all the elevators.

  Donnelly, C: It’s playing on all the elevators, Isaac. Constantly.

  Grant, I: Yeah, I know. It’s a new Lexi Blue single. Kady loves her.

  Donnelly, C: What the devil is it doing playing on my elevators?

  Grant, I: One of the maintenance guys got sent some malware. It’s a marketing ploy from Blue’s recording company. Erases any audio file data it can find and implants the new single instead.

  Donnelly, C: Don’t we have defenses against that kind of thing?

  Grant, I: Yeah. It’s one of these new-wave Trojans. Mutating virus. Kind of clever, actually.

  Donnelly, C: Have you listened to the lyrics? I couldn’t understand half of them, but the bits I caught sounded a little…risqué.

  Grant, I: Um. Yeah. The title kinda gives it away.

  Donnelly, C: Dare I ask?

  Grant, I: Let’s just say it has to do with lollipops. And the licking thereof.

  Donnelly, C: Jesus Christ, Isaac. I know you’re under pressure, but—

  Grant, I: I know, I know.

  Donnelly, C: Please see to it. I’m losing enough sleep over my daughter dating one of my junior officers without overhearing her singing about licking lollipops in the shower.

  Grant, I: We’re on it, Charles.

  Donnelly, C: Thanks. Donnelly out.

  So this footage made me lose my lunch. Be warned, okay? I’m a high-on-life kind of guy, and the things some people do for a buzz kinda dunk my head. Just saying.

  Footage is taken from a personal cam, fitted to safety goggles. Camera operator is one Soraya “Juliet” Een Hajji (a convicted thief and drug trafficker whose three husbands all disappeared under questionable circumstances). Other participants are the leader of Heimdall’s House of Knives contingent, Mikhail “Handsome Mike” Malikov (assault, various narcotics possession and distribution charges), and his nephew, our “hero,” Niklas Malikov.

  Location is an auxiliary venting and storage room situated above Heimdall’s hermium reactor (these rotating stations make up and down a little counterintuitive, but basically, when you look “up,” you’re looking toward the wormhole at the center of the station’s ring). Pipes all over the ceiling. Soundproofing on the walls. It’s hot in there—moisture dripping off the glass, steaming up the camera lens. The Malikovs are naked except for their shorts and safety goggles, and a single cigarette is tucked artfully behind Nik’s ear. Hold yourselves back, ladies.

  Both men are sporting tattoos on their bare torsos and arms. Someone ought to write a book on the hidden language of House of Knives ink—it’s pretty interesting stuff.

  Handsome Mike has flowers tattooed on top of his hands (denoting a drug-trafficking conviction), a fan of knives snaking down his right arm (full membership in the Dom Najov), chains of varying thickness around his waist (prisons he served time in) and a padlock over his heart (he’s withstood torture and not ratted on the cartel). He’s mid-forties, built like a heavy freighter made of beef and beaten with the ugly stick. Solid muscle topped by a faceful of scars not even a mother could love.

  His nephew Nik is leaner, good-looking. Dark hair and darker eyes. Dimples. The kind of abs you get from around five hundred sit-ups a day. There’s not much else to do in prison, after all. The kid has the HoK full sleeve of blades on his arm, single chain at his waist (time spent in a juvie facility) and an angel with wings spread across his throat (the meaning of this one isn’t in any of our reference libraries, but Jesus, getting inked there must have hurt).

  The physique and those dark, dreamy eyes of his are ruined by all the cow **** he’s wearing. Both gangsters are smeared in it. Heimdall gets its gravity from the centrifugal forces generated by its constant rotation. In the fancy-pants parts of the station (the Outer), the grav is normal, but on the levels closer to the axis (i.e., the seedier parts colloquially known as the Hub), the gravity is lower. Which means all the poop generated by all the cows they’re standing among has a tendency to move around.

  Oh yeah, didn’t I mention that?

  The room is full of cows.

  Twenty-three of them, in fact. Big, brown-eyed dairy cows. Mooing like a spotted choir. They’re used to the reduced grav by now
and tend not to move much, but when they do, they bounce across the pen in big low-gee strides. The ladies look like they enjoy it udderly.

  Yeah, awful pun, I know. I’m just trying to lighten the mood, okay?

  Handsome Mike is talking to the camera. They’re obviously recording this to educate other Dom Najov cells setting up similar operations.

  “So, we’ve tried this with a few different hosts, and cows work best if you’ve got the space for ’em. They’re not exactly ecologically friendly, and they cost a ****load to keep. But you’re not gonna keep ’em long, and your returns on a good crop will triple your overheads.

  “Keep your larvae at thirty-seven degrees Celsius and eighty percent humidity. Six days before implantation, start dropping that temp by half a degree per day and increasing humidity until you’re at thirty-four and one hundred, which will match the body temp and humidity of your hosts. You don’t want your babies stressed from the climate change.”

  He turns to Nik.

  “Okay, give me the first one.”

  “This is ****ed up, Uncle Mike,” the kid says. “Double true ****ed up.”

  “Aw, poor Nikky. You fall in love?”

  Nik looks around at the cows. “No, just…it’s a little cold doing them like this, yeah?”

  “They don’t feel a thing if we implant our babies right. And afterward, they’re happy as pigs in ****. Besides, where you think that steak you ate for dinner came from?”

  “Dinner’s one kind of biz. Sticking one of those things into Lucy here is another.”

  “Lucy?” Mike laughs aloud. “You give them names, malchik?”

  “I been cleaning their pen every day. ’Course I gave them names.” Nik scowls. “And you call me a boy again, you and me go round and round, feel me?”

  Handsome Mike squares up to his nephew. He outweighs the kid by at least thirty kilos. Still, Nik doesn’t blink. Dead-eyed stare. Little Nikky’s got balls, I’ll give him that.

  “Get the babies, Killer,” Mike says. “You’re my brother’s last son, and I respect your papa. I took you in when he asked. But we’re a long way from New Petersburg.” He shrugs those massive shoulders. “Don’t push it.”

  Soraya speaks from behind the camera: “Are you two going to kiss and get it over with?”

  Nik ponders, but his uncle is captain of the Dom Najov on Heimdall, and the kid knows his place. He stares a little longer to save face, then wanders off camera. Handsome Mike busies himself by cozying up to one of the cows (Lucy, as it turns out) and stroking her brow, speaking in soft, reassuring tones. The lady in question is chewing her cud, doesn’t bat an eye.