Mirrors

Maria

Jocelyn awakened abruptly, and blinked a few times as the brilliant Earth sunlight stabbed her eyes through the window. She wasn't fond of this planet, and was determined to leave just as soon as she could give the Brotherhood the slip. She was uncertain what had awakened her. Or perhaps not.

"Ros..." she said irritably. "You might only need two hours a day but it's my body."

I know, came the response, as if spoken from behind her. Jocelyn had thought she'd grown used to Rosalia's quirks since their merge, but some things her sister did were annoying. Like waking them up before Jocelyn even hit REM sleep.

Rosalia had been downloaded into a Cybrid computer system while she was imprisoned. After several years she managed to reunite with her sister, and since having two Rosalias around would draw the Brotherhood's attention, they had decided to combine each other’s consciousnesses when Jocelyn's cloned body was ready. Now, both inhabited Jocelyn, and sometimes Rosalia needed some reminding of who was in charge.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

Let you sleep while I'm driven nuts by boredom?

"Meditate or something."

Ugh, Rosalia said. She appeared to think it over. Well, I could always sleepwalk...

"Don't you dare!"

Yes, sleepwalk on down to that little bar on the Southside, and find me something to do...

"Ros...!"

Anyone I find, we can share.

Horrific, horrific... Jocelyn rubbed her eyes tiredly. "Ros, we're going to have to find you a new body... we'll both go mad otherwise."

The only way that'll happen is if we die.

"The bridges here are pretty," Jocelyn muttered darkly. "And high."

Lighten up, sis. I'm sure we can work out a schedule. You get the daytimes, I get the nighttimes, and--

"No, Ros," Jocelyn said firmly. "We will do nothing to draw attention or suspicion to ourselves, and that includes man-hunting..."

Do you know how long it's been since I've been without?

"Probably about as long as I have," Jocelyn muttered. "But that's beside the point."

Okay, okay, I get the point. Neither of us get any until you get around to it.

"Ros..."

Which is nuts. Look in the mirror. You could have your pick of anyone on the planet...

"Ros..."

I think I'll shut up before you pop something.

Very good idea." Jocelyn sighed. "Now, I'd like to get back to sleep."

At this hour? Rosalia harassed. Jocelyn rolled her eyes. Okay, okay, I'll let you sleep this time.

"You do that. Sit there and read or something." Rosalia muttered something about her taste in reading materials being incompatible with Jocelyn's library. Jocelyn snorted; her sister only read books that could be judged by the covers.

-----

"This is a condition Red," the computer system said that afternoon when Jocelyn was eating lunch. She froze with a fork halfway to her mouth, and stared at the monitor as the city broadcast system took it over. "All civilians should retire to underground bunkers at once. All inactive military and paramilitary forces should report to their duties stations at once." The screen shifted to a map of the city, showing a flashing red triangle approaching from the northeast.

Cybrids. You kick the crap out of them once, and they reboot and come back.

The screen shifted again. "Personal message for Rosalia Perez and Jocelyn Perez," the thing said, and Jocelyn touched a control on the table. She stood instantly as the symbol of the Ghosts of the Antipode appeared briefly, then was replaced by Maria's face, static.

"Ros!" Jocelyn called. "Comm from Maria!"

Her sister-- the one in her own body-- appeared at the top of the stairs instantly. "Play it!"

Jocelyn pressed the control to play the message. The image began to speak. "Jocelyn, you must return to Titan. At the south pole, there is a small structure. There are computer records there, a set of instructions you must follow to the letter... if you ever want to see me again."

Jocelyn's eyes widened with horror. What the hell? Rosalia demanded, sufficiently shocked that she caused Jocelyn to verbalize the comment. "Rosalia, remain where you are... and if you receive further communications from Mercury, do not despair: they will be inaccurate." Maria paused. "As for the other Rosalia..."

"How did she know?" Jocelyn demanded. Rosalia shrugged helplessly.

"As for you... you will be needed to keep Jocelyn safe from the Cybrids on Titan. And when she decodes the records... you must be prepared to take over."

"Now wait just a minute," Jocelyn said, then cursed as she remembered the thirty-minute time lag.

Maria continued. "Remember this, sisters. We have found each other in the past when all seemed darkest, and the future will seem darker still. But we will find each other again. Be patient, and never forget that I love you. Farewell..."

The channel winked out, and the sisters looked at each other in shocked silence.

-----

Date: 20 May 2834

Titan was ice. It had been ice since Saturn cooled down from the incandescence of Saturn's formation some four billion years ago, and it would remain ice until a temporary respite from the cold when old Sol went red giant some four billion years hence, and after that, when Sol went to a carbon-oxygen white dwarf, it would be ice again forever.

The south pole was, as Jocelyn expected, cold and icy. This did not exactly set it apart from the rest of the planet; the distinguishing characteristic was not the ice but the composition thereof. Farther from the warm (relatively speaking) equator, the ice was less pearly ethane slurry and more clear, reddish methane. The dark orange sky was lit only by the lights of the Talon and Seeker parked at the base of the frozen cliff, and the four small circles of light overlapped at a hatch in the ice.

"This is it, I guess," Rosa's voice was flat over the suit's comm. Her suit, a brilliant emerald green with bands of white representing her Knight rank, was a dark gray nearly black in the discolored light. Jocelyn looked back at her with a shrug, her lighter, pale gray suit catching much more of the light and making her slim figure a white beacon against her sister's darkness.

"I don't suppose you have the access code?" Jocelyn muttered as she typed a few commands on the ice-encrusted panel covering the door. Rosa snorted, her breath blowing a cloud of white frost against the inside of her helmet that quickly melted as the heating elements there sparked briefly. "It isn't locked...?"

The light in the center of the panel flashed red, then yellow, then white, and the hiss of escaping air sounded. The door popped open, revealing a yawning blackness.

"Well well what have we here?" Rosa muttered as Jocelyn waved her helmet light around in the opening. A black shaft beckoned in the floor, the lights reflecting off gleaming ice for a few meters before giving up entirely against the darkness. A ladder grew from one side of the shaft, encrusted with ice but not badly. Jocelyn gave a shrug and descended, leaving Rosa to mutter things about black maws and bad ideas for a moment before she too gave up and followed her sister down the tunnel.

They reached bottom a minute later, some fifty meters down. The chamber was black when they entered, but as soon as Rosa released the ladder, the spherical chamber lit up with the violet-gold flash of sodium lights, in a small, spherical bulb in the center of the chamber, dangling from a spiral-wound cable.

"Wow," Rosa muttered.

A table seemingly carved of green jade and polished gold sat in the center of the chamber, beneath the light. All around, computer terminals, flashing with yellow standby lights, were arrayed in concentric circles around the central table. Two chairs, one of jade and synthetic oak and the other of vacuum-protected fiber in grayish yellow, sat on either side of the table.

A monitor screen rose from the table as they watched, and on the black surface the words "Welcome sisters" formed, blinking in gold and green light.

They went to the table, jumping back reflexively as Maria appeared abruptly, hovering in space above the table. It was a hologram, as evidenced by the transparency of the image. The holo-Maria gestured to the chairs with a grim smile, and the sisters took them.

"This is the further data you were desiring," the recording began without preamble, and Maria shook her head with a sad smile. "I'm sorry I have to give it this way. But I am currently, well, dead I guess you would say but we know how reliable that is eh?" Rosa snorted at that, and Jocelyn grinned ruefully. "Anyway... in a few days, Mercury is going to disappear from the solar system, replaced by another planet that you may call 'Copycat' if you like." Jocelyn and Rosa frowned, puzzled. "Mercury is going to be transported to the general region of the eta Carinae Nebula." Jocelyn gasped. The holo-Maria smiled. "I'm sure you, Jocelyn, are currently calculating distances and such right now, I'll save you the trouble: six thousand one hundred light years. And I will be going with it."

Rosa bolted to her feet with the obvious intent of arguing with the hologram, but even as the futility of that exercise registered on her face the hologram turned toward her. "But we'll be fine, and we'll survive. In a few hundred years, say 3400 or so, the human race will happen across the Hyperweb, a system of cross-dimensional gates that will allow access to the stars. While you have no knowledge of this planet now, around this time you will find yourselves on a planet in the inner Scorpius Association, and there we will meet again."

"How can you know this?" Jocelyn whispered, knowing it was futile.

"She knows things," Rosa murmured. "Once when we were on Venus... she predicted a volcanic eruption. It would have killed us if she hadn't steered us clear of it."

The holographic recording continued, and began walking around the room, stepping carefully on the computer terminals as it walked. "These computers contain certain data you will find interesting if you can believe it. For example, detailed here are records as complete as I could come up with about the history of the Starsiege over the next six years... and suffice it to say Madrid will be liberated on the tenth of September of this year." Rosa and Jocelyn exchanged a glance. "Other interesting tidbits are also recorded, such as a complete history of my life..." and here the hologram paused and looked away into middle space, blinking as if to avoid tears. "And all the things I never said to you that I should have."

The hologram flickered. "You should transfer all you can to your HERCs' computers at once," Maria said, talking rapidly now. "My time grows short, as does yours. Cybrids will know of your presence soon enough; I set it up ten years ago but I know they must have found it and bugged it by now. And you will need to go to Triton, which is explained in the archives. Rosa, the Rosa inside Jocelyn, your knowledge of the Cybrids will be needed to help you avoid Cybrid patrols in Neptune space. And when you leave Triton, go to Kuiper Belt Object-- damned solar flares--"

The hologram vanished, and did not return.

"Let's get a datalink run," Rosa said quietly.

I agree, said the other Rosa.

Jocelyn merely nodded.

----

Date: 10 September 2834

Heart's Blood burned its primary fusion torch at the highest acceleration it could manage, and the small, needle-like ship was barely able to escape the horde of Cybrid spaceforms on its tail. The higher g-tolerance the two Immortals enjoyed was the only reason they had not been captured; acceleration trauma was limited to their skeletal systems, and this was fortunately minimized by the tractor webs inside the cockpit of the vessel.

Triton was a white speck next to the small blue lump that was Neptune. The flashes of fusion explosions close to the planet told of the ferocious battles being waged there to wipe the region clean of Cybrids presence, and while the cybernetic beings were suffering heavy losses, the human space fleets would not turn the tide for another six months, if Maria's archives were to be believed.

According to the comm link to the Omniweb, Madrid had driven the last Cybrids out and into the southern plains earlier that morning, so at least somewhere there was a victory recently.

"Let's... burn sideways a bit," Jocelyn gasped as she fought to breathe against the five-g acceleration, repeating her internal sister's words. "They won't... expect us to veer from a straight-line flight, thinking we will allow our superior acceleration to take us away from them..."

"What's wrong with that?"

"They think we're just... running scared."

"Aren't we?" Rosa muttered.

"But if we were to angle sixty degrees or so... they'd overshoot. Their sensors at this range... suck..."

"Got it. Changing course."

The acceleration couches swiveled on their mounts, following the new vector of force, and Jocelyn moaned.

"Pericelestion with Triton in six minutes..."

"We need to... get close to the surface... take some inertial neutralizers and just drop onto the planet..."

"Take the HERCs?"

"On... foot."

"We'll be sitting ducks!"

"We already are... but the Cybrids will never see us. Program the ship... to loop around and land on auto on the other side of the planet... or on Proteus or something."

"It'll be destroyed!"

"Better it than us... and we can find a human habitation and arrange transport off this iceball..."

"If they don't think we're glitches ourselves," Rosa muttered. "Alright. Cutting accel. Intercept with Triton at lowest-lowest in four."

The ship lurched, and the sisters went flying out of their seats. The jolt was nearly as painful as the acceleration had been.

A few minutes later, the sisters were in their suits holding a Banshee's inertial damper between them, and Jocelyn shook her head. "We're certifiable," she muttered.

Rosa shrugged as the doors opened and they tumbled out into space.

Triton blew by beneath them at five thousand kilometers per hour relative, and only that slowly because the Heart's Blood had been decelerating in a stepladder orbit ever since they had approached Triton's atmospheric limit. Jocelyn suppressed the urge to empty her stomach as the planet whizzed by beneath her in a blur of pink, white, and blue. The mottled ices were bad enough, but the dark smudges of geyser plumes looked like fat worms writhing as they passed.

The inertial damper flashed a warning, and the sisters shook their heads as they recalled Maria's words. "Triton seems to incite one to do suicidal things," she'd said. "Terran Defense Force ships land there and create colonies under the Cybrids' noses. I myself went swimming in liquid nitrogen. People parachute into the thing from orbit. The thing ought to be taken out of the Solar system before someone gets hurt."

The damper came to life as the sisters blasted their backpacks' maneuvering thrusters, straight backward, cutting their speed as much as possible. This translated to fifty kilometers per hour lateral and several hundred vertical. They fired the thrusters downward as they fell, cutting as much off their z-speed as possible. A kilometer above the surface details in the ice became visible as plates and shelves of glitter against the flat surface, and they let go of the damper.

"Five hundred four three two one--"

The sisters released each other's hands and stiffened their bodies, striking the ten-centimeter-thick ammonia ice sheet above the center of an imminent geyser at some two hundred kilometers per hour.

The stiff joints of the suit saved their legs, and they knifed through the thin sheet with a splashing, shattering spray of various states of volatiles. The geyser exploded around them as the heat of their passage boiled a huge bubble of gaseous nitrogen which escaped through the new hole, and the upwelling combined with the friction with the liquid slowly robbed them of their speed.

Their massive suits with their built-in fusion heaters bubbled more nitrogen in big waves, bubbles that rose and escaped through the hole a few hundred meters above them as they gently bumped the bottom.

"We started a volcano, sis," Rosa muttered as she allowed herself to collapse to the thick, hard, solid water ice at the base of the nitrogen ocean.

"We survived?" Jocelyn asked, perplexed, then looked around at the blackness lit only by crisp beams from their helmets. "Weird."

Please don't do that again. The internal Rosa was even more shaken than the other two. Jocelyn conveyed heartfelt agreement.

"So what do we do down..."

Rosa shined her light around again, wondering what the beam had struck a moment ago. "What is it?" Jocelyn asked.

"I saw something."

Jocelyn activated a radar map in her HUD. It seemed that the surface was remarkably flat, nearly a perfect sheet of glare ice beneath the nitrogen sea. The reflectivity of the ice scrambled her radar to hell, but there was indeed something...

Jocelyn shined her light in that direction. There was a large bump on the ice, and it seemed something was frozen in it. She approached it, and stumbled as the shape became apparent.

Rosa whispered a curse, even as Jocelyn stumbled backward, her eyes wide and reflecting the helmet lights like a scared cat.

"It's a human," Rosa muttered. "Was."

Jocelyn tripped and fell backward on her suit's backpack, and made no move to get up. Her suit whistled an alarm as it began dispensing medication to her to counter the shock.

Rosa examined the body, encased in the white spacesuit of a Naval officer. Rosa fired a quick burst from her arm thruster at the lump, melting it free of the ice.

The faceplate was clouded, frozen solid. Rosa could tell from her radar map that the oxygen in the suit had frozen solid. But it was not necessary to see through the faceplate, not necessary to see more than the tip of the nose that touched the transparent material, peeking through the ice.

The suit's nametag was cracked with cold, but quite legible. It said "Captain Maria Perez, IN."

-----

It took several days for Jocelyn to recover, several days during with Rosa paced around the bottom of the sea trying not to sleep. When sleep did come, nightmares interrupted quickly and she awakened screaming. So she maintained watch over her sister and swam around in the liquid nitrogen, sucking nutrient from the tube in her helmet and trying not to imagine the death Maria must have suffered.

"Her brain is still there!" Jocelyn awakened screaming one day, her hands tapping frantically on the controls for the multi-spectrum scanner. Rosa frowned and ran a quick scan... and found she was right.

"But if she's here..."

"Who did we see on Mercury last year?"

-----

Date: 01 January 2866

Jocelyn blew out the birthday candles that lit the bar, trying to put aside thoughts of her missing sister, her presumably dead sister, and her definitely dead sister. She was the last Perez still around, she knew. Rosa would not miss her birthday, not this one, her three hundredth. The patrons of the Tequila Tortoise Tavern, one of the main businesses in the new Eskandani, were nice enough, but they didn't know her, and she had no family left. She had a different face now, a different name, and a different life, but her sister still knew where she was... and were she able to come, she would have.

Jocelyn, known nowadays as Jennifer Garin, a lady of some forty years employed as a systems analyst for the new Titantronics Corporation, fought back a tear as the forty candles puffed out in a cloud of smoke. Clapping sounded from around the bar, and she forced a smile. She'd (so the cover story went) purchased the Tavern from Jocelyn Perez ten years ago, adding new tequila tortoise facilities and even coming up with a good replicator pattern for their feed so they could generate fine wine. Her job with Titantronics paid well but it was erratic, while ownership of the bar had raked in the credits daily for decades. She was quite successful... and didn't care.

Rosa had taken the Heart's Blood out to the Kuiper Belt five years ago and had not returned, nor even sent a message. They had arranged to contact each other three years ago, and when Rosa had missed both that transmission and the next one, Jocelyn had to accept that she was gone. The Kuiper Belt was being developed, slowly, by the big corporations with interest in the Objects' isolation from the rest of the system, and the secrets they kept there Jocelyn knew they would kill to keep. Rosa must have run afoul of one of the bases and been blown out of space.

And she would never even know.

Jocelyn viciously suppressed these thoughts, as she had for the last two years, and tried to concentrate on the party her patrons had thrown for her.

Only one person knew of her real identity, and she exchanged a knowing look with him as he handed her a small box. She unwrapped the holographic metaplas and opened the box with a lift of one eyebrow.

She stared at the object as if not recognizing it. The object was a code key used to hardwire old Imperial HERCs in mothballs. She activated it and forced herself not to react as she recognized the vehicle. "They're decommissioning this class of vehicle," her friend said conversationally. "They found this one out on the ice on the continent, and I know you're a good pilot... and interested in antiques." He winked.

The schematics for her Danger Dancer walked slowly in place in the center of the screen.

"Thank you," she whispered. "This means a lot to me."

Her mood was improved to the degree she actually managed to appreciate the rest of the gifts. When a certain patron she didn't know handed her a large box and grinned, she frowned slightly as she saw the man's amused expression. She gazed at him for a moment, wishing she had not lost the Rosa inside in her last Transfer; she would have found the fellow quite attractive, and she would have agreed to the point she may have considered... sharing the gentleman with her.

Inside the box was a jade statue of the Emperor Caanon. Jocelyn gave a puzzled smile and thanked the man, who only smiled mysteriously, waved, and left.

-----

Later that evening Jocelyn was in her quarters regarding the Emperor Caanon sleepily when the door chimed. "Enter," Jocelyn muttered, drawing the robe up higher as it was in danger of slipping.

"Like it?"

It was the same man. Jocelyn turned to stare at him. He really was quite handsome, with intense black eyes, a shock of unruly black hair, and a strong physique visible through the uniform of one of the larger corporations. Perhaps something interesting was going to happen tonight.

The man moved faster than Jocelyn knew anyone could, and the blue bolt of an empistol struck Jocelyn square in the chest. With a startled gasp she fell back in the chair as the man tucked the pistol away and approached her.

Her muscles would not respond, acting as though they had suffered a nasty electrical shock. Her attempts to move even her fingers to reach the emergency alarm in her chair were met with agony, and she cried out. The sharp exhalation hurt enough, as her diaphragm screamed protest of the motions of breathing. The man loomed over her, without expression, lifted her effortlessly, and tossed her on the bed.

He caught the sleeve of her robe as she fell, and ripped it off to throw it on the floor. Jocelyn's eyes were wide with terror as he reached for the collar of her robe, grabbed it, and ripped it off her body.

"So... this is the kind of man you are..." she gasped, fighting off her terror with fury. He snorted and threw the shredded robe on the floor beside the bed, climbing over her nearly-naked body.

He pressed his hands and knees into the blankets beside her and got up, picking her up as he did so. "Come on," he muttered, throwing her over his shoulders as he reached for the Caanon statue, picked it up, and carried it and Jocelyn out the door.

Outside in the corridor to the apartment block, he looked around. The hallway was deserted, and Jocelyn's attempt at a scream met a piece of tape as the man reached back and covered her mouth with the sticky metaplas. "No screaming. It's supposed to look like your average rape, but I don't need to see any attempted rescuers."

With this, he stepped back into the room and grabbed the code key, stuffed it in a pocket, and carried the helpless Jocelyn down the corridor to the nearest lift.

-----

A few minutes and two more emp bursts into Jocelyn's stomach later, she found herself in the cockpit of her own Talon, watching helplessly as the man used her code key to power it up. She tried unsuccessfully to scream through the tape as the man got clearance from the traffic control and took the Talon out into the cold Titan night.

When they were well out of range of the city, He sighed, turned, and ripped the tape off with a mercifully quick yank. "I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am, Jocelyn," the man said quietly, and began dismantling the statue of Caanon.

"Perhaps..." Jocelyn gasped, furious. "Perhaps you can tell me who you are."

The man grinned and gave Jocelyn a quick kiss on the cheek. Jocelyn's muscles had still not recovered enough to allow her to spit in his face.

"You're so cute when you're pissed," the man said. "But anyway..."

The man twisted Caanon's legs off and popped the chest and back panels off the statue's armor. He held the resulting rectangular object up to Jocelyn.

It was another code key, this time to an old, old Gorgon.

"It's me, sis," the other said, ignoring Jocelyn's gasp. "Rosa. And I'll be damned glad when I get back to base and put on something more feminine."

Jocelyn's mouth worked like that of a fish out of water.

"Really... I like to be in bed with a body like this, not inside it."

Jocelyn had to admit that sounded very much like Rosa.

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