Steal Across the Sky (38 page)

Cam knew now who she was and what she wanted to cause. The men she’d sent onto the second road were now beyond kulith, out of the game. But Cam was not and the Atoners were not—alike in that if nothing else—and Cam was going to win. She took a deep breath and stood up straighter.

Fuck the script.

“What I learned on the moon was that the United States government possesses the seeing-the-dead genes
right now
and will not release them unless we all demand it!”

The tarmac erupted into shouting, into official fury, into just the beginning.

CASE:
Olenik v. United States
, 2022

 

United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

 

PLAINTIFFS:	Francis Michael Olenik
	Camilla Mary O’Kane
	American Civil Liberties Union

 

DEFENDANTS:	Thomas Sean Corino, Attorney General
	Linda Amanda Molsky, Director, National Intelligence Agency
	Colonel Thomas Shoniker, USAF
	Special Agent James F. Thompson, NIA
	Joel Simon Farrington
	Terence Gary Siekert

 

Appeal from the United States District Court for Eastern Arizona

 

Argued January 3, 2022, Decision for Defendants

 

Reargued March 13, 2023, Decision for Plaintiffs

 

PRECIS: Olenik et al. brought an action challenging the right of the NIA and the U.S. Justice Department to confiscate, on grounds of national security, material of which the plaintiff claims personal ownership, said material consisting of hairs conveyed by alien shuttle by Olenik from Susban to Luna.

 

CURRENT STATUS: On Supreme Court docket for 2024

 

Information last updated: July 17, 2023

THE CHOPPER FROM LAGUARDIA
settled onto the hospital roof. Maduro security personnel jumped out and began their preliminary sweeps. Soledad and Lucca sat quietly, knowing the wait was inevitable, Lucca pulling at the collar of his shirt in the summer heat. She smiled at him.

“You could have let me come alone, you know.”

“No. I could not.”

“An Italian Galahad,” she scoffed.

“An American Boadicea.”

She laughed. Lucca’s security chief opened the door and said, “
Prego, Signora Maduro
.” Soledad let him help her down and followed him through a doorway leading to the elevator.

Lucca watched until the door closed. He didn’t want to be in New York—no one not insane wanted to be in New York in July—but even less had he wanted Soledad to make the flight from Italy alone. Once he had lost Gianna. He would not lose another wife, even if that meant dying with her.

Dying
. Lucca scowled at the city sweltering below. How many of those poor steaming souls had been caught by Cam’s nonsense? She was a huge international star now, more beautiful and flamboyant than ever, her lawsuit the cause célèbre of the century. And still a complete idiot. At least Soledad was too intelligent to talk any longer about Cam’s “afterlife”; Soledad hadn’t even mentioned it in over a year. Pure wish fulfillment, complete pathetic illusion. To think that once, on the voyage out, Lucca and Cam had—

Lucca pushed the thought away, as he routinely pushed away thoughts of Cam, of the Atoners, of everything that had happened three years ago. An aberration, a boil on his life. That life now was rooted where it belonged,
in Tuscany with Soledad and little Angelina, now at home with her grandparents. His daughter was a perpetual astonishment, a miracle. To think that once Lucca had thought he didn’t like children!
Che cretino
.

“Aldo,” he said in Italian to the pilot, “there is no way to turn on AC without starting the chopper?”

“
Non dire cazzate
,” Aldo said amiably. Lucca, sweating, turned on his handheld. He got a children’s program in which cartoon animals named “Ready Freddy” and “Hurry-Up Hannah” jumped around with typical American frenzy. Ready Freddy was a scrawny chicken and Hurry-Up Hannah a rabbit in a purple hat. Lucca found a newscast.

“. . . marked the anniversary of the so-called ‘preggers murders,’ in which three young women in three different cities were simultaneously killed while in the shower,” said a blue avatar with macabre cheer. “All three women were pregnant at the time of the slayings, all three were recent brides, and all three were undocumented aliens whose entry into the United States has not been traced. Debio Stevenson, Falewithozkith Stein, and Hrill DiPetrio were in different trimesters of pregnancy, but none of their unborn infants survived the grisly shootings. One husband, American Jon Stein, also perished in the attacks. Law-enforcement agencies in New York, San Diego, and Topeka are sharing information on the three cases. Said Topeka Police Chief Darryl Mendon earlier today, ‘The similar pattern suggests the same killer or killers for all three women. We
will
get this guy!’ Nonetheless, no arrests have ever been made in any of the tragic murders.

“Now, turning to that wildfire still burning in Colorado . . .”

Lucca flipped his wrist. The local police never would “get this guy.” Possibly the federal government already had, just as they had gotten Carl Lewis with no one ever learning what had really happened in Brooklyn. A drug deal gone bad was the official story, an undercover agent did the shooting, an ongoing internal investigation . . . What was it Soledad said? “Blah blah blah.”

Soledad had taught Angelina to say that phrase, too. On her, it was very cute.

A sudden powerful longing to be home with his daughter took Lucca. Tuscany, with the dusty vineyards and soft blue hills and red poppies . . . And yet, strangely, when he thought of peaceful Villa Maduro, he also
often thought of that peaceful frozen town on Kular. Chewithoztarel would be a young woman now. Was she married? Was she pregnant?

He sat in the chopper and sweated and waited for his wife.

ACCOMPANIED BY BOTH HOSPITAL
and Maduro security, Soledad moved quietly through corridors cleared for her. She nodded thanks at everyone and slipped alone into the room at the end of a hall devoted to terminal patients.

She barely recognized him. Three years in a coma had reduced his already small stature to that of a child. He lay on his side, hooked to tubes and more tubes, his mouth slightly open. His gums had receded around his teeth. His bones looked like an underfed bird.

Carefully she took his hand. “Hello, Fengmo.”

Hello, Ladybliss
. But she would never hear that again. This was her last trip to New York.

“Fengmo, it’s Soledad. I’m here.” She paused, wondering what else to say, shocked that she didn’t know. After all those years of telling each other everything . . . but that was the past, a different place with a different geography. Then, all at once, she found what she wanted to say.

“I still don’t know if there’s life after death, Fengmo. I don’t talk about it anymore with Lucca, but I still don’t
know
. Maybe he’s right and it is stress- induced telepathy in the presence of death. Or maybe Cam’s right and it’s a real perception of something we’ve lost. Whatever it is, it’s coming back to us. The Atoners did atone, after all. But—and here’s the big ‘but,’ dear heart—
it doesn’t matter
. What matters is—”

She stopped, appalled. She’d been going to say,
What matters is life here now. That’s what we should give our souls to
. But Fengmo had no real life now, and perhaps no soul left, either. She could not say those words to him. She had so much of everything now—Lucca and Angelina and their sweet life in Italy—while Fengmo had lost everything, and for her sake.

So she said instead, “What matters is that I will always love you,” kissed him, and left.

Security waited for her. As she left the corridor, they admitted a woman who’d been waiting patiently to come in. She held a toddler by
the hand. The two women smiled at each other, the young mother looking sympathetically at Soledad’s tears.

THAT ONE
, she lost a person to death
, the young woman thought.
Perhaps I will be so lucky and that horrible old man will die.

She was visiting her father-in-law, a duty visit. She had not wanted to go, nor to bring her son, but her husband had insisted. “It’s Dad’s only grandchild,” he’d pleaded, and she had given in.

Now she held the child up for the dying man to see, and he smiled at the boy. He never smiled at
her
. Once she had heard him call her a “dirty foreigner.” Her English was not good, but it was good enough for that. She set the child on the floor and sat in a chair, determined to stay the entire half hour she had promised her husband, even if the old man never looked at or spoke to her. He had no manners, that one.

They sat in mutually stubborn silence. After five minutes, the woman dozed off. She was pregnant again and always tired.

The child gazed at his mother with big dark eyes and toddled out the door.

FENGMO STOOD
, bewildered, by a bed with a wizened body in it. Where was he? How had he gotten there?

A child staggered into the room, a small brown boy with lively eyes. He stared up at Fengmo.

“Hi, you Weady-Fweddy, you twaveler-on-the-second-woad,” he said, and smiled like sunlight on blinding snow.