Occupied Earth Page 24

  “Hello?” said Jemma. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

  “No!” Scud-re snapped.

  Jemma realized he hadn’t told Hux about her pregnancy and was afraid to tell him now. Her immaculate conception had become their dirty little secret. Scud-re was treating her like some dumb high school girl who’d gotten knocked up under the bleachers, and she didn’t like it.

  “Your Senate of Commanders can eat shit,” she blurted. “I’m already pregnant.”

  Scud-Re looked like he’d been shot in the stomach. For a moment, time seemed to stop.

  Then Huxen-Ra’s pupils exploded in a virtual fireworks display. He wheeled on Scud-re and shouted, “You keep your mouth shut and terminate this pregnancy today!”

  Long-buried beliefs overwhelmed Jemma like zombies leaping from their graves. Abortion is murder. Mortal sin leads to Damnation. Christ is our Savior.

  “No fucking way,” she said. “I’ll die before I let you kill my baby.”

  Dr. Huxen-ra was astonished at the nerve of this uppity human. “If you insist,” he said, and stormed out.

  Jemma leapt off the table, primed to bury her nails in Scud-re’s bleary pupils, a lioness rearing to defend her cub.

  “Do you honestly think I would hurt you?” said Scud-re. “We need to get out of here.”

  They managed to sneak out the back and she took him to the only place she knew where an MR and a human could sit together without drawing attention: Parker Center. The lighting was dim, allowing MRs to remove their glasses. Most of the women were dressed to reveal their wares. Jemma felt like the only female in the room who wasn’t trying to peddle a happy ending. The bar was raucous, befitting an inter-species meat market, but the back of the place was quiet as newly-paired couples sought private tables to conduct soto voce negotiations.

  Scud-re and Jemma settled into a back booth and Scud-re’s eyes scanned the room. A human waitress approached and leaned in to give Scud-re a good look down her blouse as she took their order. Jemma remembered being coached to show “tits for tips” at Melonz. That seemed like a lifetime ago.

  After the waitress left, Jemma said, “I guess I can kiss my ninety thousand dollars goodbye.”

  Scud-re looked up with tremulous waves in his pupils.

  “You’ll be lucky to live through the night.”

  “They wouldn’t dare. Even MRs have laws.”

  “This isn’t the local cops,” he said. “The Senate of Commanders makes the law. They enforce the law. They are the law.”

  “You’re going to let them murder our baby after you felt him kicking?”

  “Of course not.” Scud-re looked miserable. “But that doesn’t mean I can stop them.”

  Then he saw something over her shoulder and the turbulence in his pupils receded. Jemma turned to see a young woman crossing the room, barely five feet tall and skinny as a stick figure. She had striking blue eyes and jet-black, bowl-cut hair except for a braid that hung down past her shoulder.

  The woman slid into the booth beside Scud-re and stared at Jemma.

  “This is the womb?” she asked in an unpleasantly high-pitched rasp.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Jemma.

  She turned to Scud-re looking surprised. “Didn’t you tell her?” She had a scar across her throat--maybe a knife wound--and Jemma wondered if that explained the annoying voice.

  “Jemma, meet Valerie,” said Scud-re, then whispered, “Red Spear.”

  Jemma was stunned. The Red Spear were the planet’s most violent, radical anti-occupationists. How could Scud-re be involved with these human resistance terrorists? He read her expression.

  “I’m Mahk-Re,” he said. “The Mahk-Ra have oppressed us for centuries. I know what you humans are going through. So I help where I can.”

  “He’s been feeding us intelligence,” said Valerie.

  Jemma felt a budding admiration for Scud-re, but she still didn’t trust Red Spear.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we humans are at war,” said Valerie.

  “I’m not,” said Jemma. “I don’t even vote. And I don’t believe in terrorism.”

  Valerie guffawed.

  “They’re not terrorists,” said Scud-re. “That’s just MR propaganda.”

  “That’s why we need baby Jesus,” said Valerie. “So he can grow up spreading the gospel of humanity and proving the absurdity of MR accusations. With Christ as the face of Red Spear, the world will rally to our cause.”

  “You think I’m going to let a bunch of armed revolutionaries raise my child?”

  “You’ll never survive without us,” said Valerie. “No one else has the resources to keep you safe.”

  “Safe? Running from MR Nazis in some underground netherworld? How am I supposed to raise two kids on the run?”

  “I know this is all happening fast,” said Scud-re, “but your old life ended the second you told Hux about the clone.”

  “You’ve got a propaganda bonanza in your belly,” said Valerie. “And your other son is in grave danger.”

  “Why would anyone hurt Ozzie?”

  “They’ll grab him to control you. It’s what they do. Like it or not, you’re an outlaw now.”

  JEMMA RUSHED into her apartment, relieved to find Ozzie drinking a glass of tomato juice while actually doing his homework. His implanted temporal node glowed through the skin of his temple as algebra formulas from the middle school satellite streamed into his memory. She could see him straining to understand.

  “Ozzie, we have to go.”

  He roused himself out of in-load mode. “What?”

  She snatched the tomato juice out of his hand. “Go pack a bag. Now.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll explain on the way. You’ve got five minutes to throw some stuff in an overnight bag. Take what you care about, we may not be coming back. And wear your gym shoes; we may have to do some running.”

  “But…”

  The front door slid open, despite redundant security locks, and two MR shock troopers rushed in. The glass slipped from Jemma’s hand, smashing on the floor, sending tomato juice spewing like blood. The first MR was a good seven-three or four, wiry and nervous. Jemma could see red sparks in his pupils even through his dark glasses. Behind him came a female, a few inches shorter and thicker in the torso. Her glasses revealed nothing. Both were heavily armed and wore their storm-trooper jumpers with the Mahkanese symbol for “overlord” emblazoned on their collars like silver Omegas.

  Ozzie stood up, eyes glued to the intruders.

  “Get out of here!” screamed Jemma. “You have no right!”

  “Where is Dr. Scud-re?” said the tall one.

  “I don’t know,” said Jemma.

  “All right, we’ll do this the hard way,” he said. Then, to the thick one, “Get the boy.”

  Ozzie took off. The tall one raised his pulse rifle, but Jemma lunged, knocking his aim off. A blue burst singed through the wall leaving a hole the size of a grapefruit. The other soldier swung her arm into Jemma’s brow, slamming the back of her head into the wall. Jemma struggled to stay conscious as Ozzie fled through the back door. The mocks, with their heavy body armor, would never catch him before he disappeared into the streets of the human ghetto. Jemma’s last thought before she blacked out was, Thank God, Ozzie listened for a change.

  JEMMA WAS floating in deep space, her thoughts erupting like popping corn. Would the baby Jesus worship his older brother as younger sibs were wont to do? Would he crawl after Ozzie like a little duckling? Would Ozzie turn the Lord into a video-game addict? Or teach him to hate school and disrespect his mother? Would her new son be able to perform miracles? How does a mom survive the terrible twos with a toddler who can move mountains? How absurd it seemed that she, a woman who couldn’t even survive Melonz, was chosen to carry the Holy Embryo.

  She woke hard, trying to feel her womb to reassure herself that her baby wasn’t hurt. But her hand wouldn’t move. J
emma realized she was spread-eagled in mid-air, suspended and immobilized by some sort of force field. She looked around but couldn’t see much of the room. The dim lighting implied that she was in an MR facility.

  Jemma wondered where Ozzie was. How would he feed himself? Where would he sleep? Not counting his virtual world, he had little experience interacting with strangers. He would be easy prey for the black marketeers and outcasts who roamed the streets. As her fears approached panic, the door slid open and a short MR, barely six-three, walked into the room. He was portly, wearing a dark gray suit buttoned up so tightly that Jemma could see his shirt through the straining seams. His gray hair was close-cropped and he had bushy black eyebrows, below which one of his pupils was cloudy, like a giant cataract.

  “Where am I?” she said.

  He ignored her. “You can call me Mr. P. That’s ‘P’ for pleasure or ‘P’ for pain. Up to you.”

  His speech was precise, unnaturally formal, no accent.

  “What do you want?”

  “Your clone, of course. After that, you are nothing but an empty vessel to me.”

  “My baby’s not up for grabs.”

  “Of course he is not up for grabs; he is mine. He is my baby now. My little god. My little guinea pig.”

  The pressure of the force field amplified the shudder of terror that coursed through her. “What are you going to do to him?”

  “Nothing that’s not typically human. His formative years will be spent in a string of abusive foster homes. I will ensure he is addicted to drugs by the time he is fifteen. Then he will be incarcerated for an extended stay in an underfunded, understaffed juvenile RZ camp where I will allow him to ripen to the point of rot. Around age seventeen, he will be squatting in a rat-infested vacant hovel in a gang neighborhood where he can make new friends and harden his criminal skills. He’ll be arrested and sentenced for a few years in a maximum security penitentiary for an immersive education in racial hatred. I will be his guardian angel through all this to make sure the prodigal Son survives being beaten, sexually abused, overdosed with street drugs, shot in a drive-by and shivved in prison.

  “By his twentieth birthday, the Divine Jesus will be a depraved, violent, depressed, ex-con junkie bigot, ready for his grand global debut. I will present the Son of God to you pitiable Earthlings with so much fanfare that every human on the planet will be forced to see how pathetic the false idols you worship are, how wretched they are in the shadow of the glorious Mahk-Ra.”

  Jemma felt herself being sucked into a black vortex of doom. She made a desperate grasp for one last flicker of faith.

  “Jesus won’t fail us,” she said. “He shall overcome. And everyone, no matter what their religion, no matter what their planet of origin, will witness the miracle and lay down their arms.”

  Mr. P burst out laughing. “Bravo, Ms. Haley. Très amusant. But, in the face of an undeniably fallen God, clear evidence of the absurdity of all human religions, do you really expect any intelligent being, or any human for that matter, to choose faith over what they can see with their own eyes?”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “Be that as it may, His alleged son is already mine. That is not why I am here. There is something else you’re going to do for me.”

  Jemma’s heart sank. She’d heard this come-on at Melonz. The thought of having sex with this fat, weasely, Cyclops of a Mahktard….

  “You’re going to tell me where to find Dr. Scud-re.”

  She felt awash with relief, her predicament notwithstanding. They still hadn’t caught Scud-re. He must have blown his cover and gone underground with the Red Spear cell. Why else would they be so intent on finding him?

  “I have no idea where he is,” she said.

  Mr. P’s face scrunched into a frown without the help of his dead eye. Facial paralysis should have been a simple fix for MR doctors, but Jemma suspected his was an intentional affectation to rattle his victims.

  “I’m giving you a choice,” he said. “I can keep you here in comfort until you give birth and then I’ll set you free to go find your teenaged boy and live out your pitiful life as best you can, or I can bind you in the force-field until the progeny arrives, then dump you on a garbage heap, immobilized but fully conscious to savor the sensation of rats slowly gnawing their way through your flesh and into your organs, till death does you in.”

  She never imagined she could feel so much loathing for another being.

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  Mr. P moved his finger to describe an arc in the air and she felt the force field follow the shape, bending her back into an unnatural curve like a bow being drawn to the breaking point. She shrieked as her vertebrae stabbed into her sciatic nerves, sending an excruciating pain down her spine and into her legs. Mr. P waited a moment, then relaxed the force field.

  “Torturing humans is so boring,” he said. “Please don’t make me do it all day. Just tell me how you were supposed to contact him.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  He sighed with mock-sadness and rebent the field.

  Every nerve in her body felt like it was being shredded by a dull handsaw. Jemma thought her spine was going to snap. She started to weep.

  “I guess we’ll have to do some permanent spinal damage,” said Mr. P, raising his hand like an orchestra conductor.

  Jemma clenched her teeth, steeling for the worst. Then an explosive blast knocked a chunk out of the exterior wall. Mr. P turned, surprised. Automatic fire burst through the hole and severed his head from his neck like a scythe. Jemma watched in shock as his head bounced off the floor before his body had time to collapse. She gagged but managed to keep the contents of her stomach from erupting.

  Four more explosions simultaneously pierced the wall, then laser torches finished cutting through it, outlining a rectangular hole from floor to ceiling, about the width of a one-car garage. The torches snapped off and the circumscribed block of three-feet-thick fortified wall started to inch into the room. It made a horrendous din as the weight of steel and granite scraped across the rough concrete floor, pushed from behind by a tremendous force.

  Jemma heard alarm sirens wail, then the door to the room burst open and MR security guards streamed in, faces hidden behind protective uberglass shields, pulsing blindly through the breeched exterior wall. From outside, the invaders perforated the wall with return fire and the room reverberated with the pulsing force of the bleaters being used by the MRs. Jemma screamed in the crossfire, but the energy field that encased her also protected her from the fireflak.

  The massive rectangle was finally forced all the way into the room by a robotic ram, creating a passage to the outside. A gas grenade went off. Red Spear invaders, wearing gas masks and headlamps, stormed in through the passage, some armed with pulse-weapons but many firing Uzis and even handguns. The MR guards, despite superior weapons, were badly trained, outmanned, unmotivated, blinded by the high-intensity lights and overcome by gas. They retreated from the room, presumably to regroup. An eerie silence ensued.

  Jemma scanned what rebel soldiers she could see without moving her head. Only two of them were tall enough to be Mahk-Ras, so Jemma assumed the rest were humans. She yearned to see faces, to make human connections, but they all wore gas masks.

  One of the rebels keyed something into a touchscreen on the wall. Jemma felt the force field gently lower her to the ground and then shut down. As the field dissipated, residual gas hit her throat, squeezing it closed like a sphincter. She clutched her neck, feeling death closing in fast. She wrapped her arms around her belly, frantic to protect her fetus. Then someone stuck a gas mask on her face and life flowed back with a rush of air. Her panic seemed to disappear into a black hole as her mind slowed to a workable pace.

  She looked up at the MR who’d attached her mask. Despite their two faceplates, she recognized Scud-re. He lifted her in his arms and carried her out through the hole in the wall. She’d never before felt so free.


  JEMMA LAY in a hospital bed, hands resting on her swollen belly, thumbs nervously twiddling.

  “Relax,” said Scud-re. “It’ll be over in a few minutes.” He took her hand.

  “The pantoscan said I’m not due for three weeks. Why can’t I just wait?”

  “Natural childbirth is too risky. Pre-due C-secs are virtually foolproof with MR surgical apps. Don’t be scared.”

  He bent over and gave her a gentle kiss on her furrowed brow.

  She squeezed his hand. “I love you, Scud-re.”

  She doubted he understood the human implications of her words, but she hoped he’d learn over time.

  Valerie wheeled Jemma’s bed into the delivery room. The walls were lined with empty safe-deposit box compartments, their doors hanging open. The abandoned bank vault was brightly lit and furnished with the best medical equipment the black market could supply. Everyone wore surgical gowns and sani-filters over mouths and noses. Three obstetricians were in attendance along with a team of nurses.

  A short Asian man with long red hair leaned over Jemma. “I’m Dr. Nyne. I’ll be your primary physician.”

  “This place isn’t much of a hospital,” said Jemma.

  “Beats a manger.” He smiled. “Now don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.”

  He nodded to a nurse who injected some smart anesthetics into Jemma’s bicep. She would remain conscious and mobile but the anesthesia controller would monitor her nerve activity and block any pain.

  Scud-re watched with an expression of fatherly pride as Dr. Nyne booted the C-section Bot, initializing the automated procedure. The bot hovered above Jemma’s belly, ready to lase.

  “Halt!” The voice was booming, startling.

  They all turned to see a woman, the spitting image of former Vice-President Angelina Jolie. She stood in the doorway, a gold crucifix tattooed on her forehead, a six-inch gold cross on a choker around her neck.

  “Reverend Paylon,” said Dr. Nyne impatiently, “we’re trying to perform a birth here.”

  “This is not just a birth, Doctor,” she said. “This is a holy event that shall change the course of history and be remembered for millennia. It is the Second Coming of He who is destined to save Earth from the plague that has rained down upon us from the skies. And that creature,” Paylon pointed at Scud-re, “is a heathen from the enemy’s ranks. For all you know he is here to make sure the baby Jesus never sees the light of day.”