“Hey, you used my first name again. And a moniker at that.”

“Well, this is social. But…” she leans in, “don’t spare the details.”

I laugh and tell her what she wants, which isn’t as much as we both might hope.

We brought the Feds in but kept our promise to Hernandez to keep the rogue A.I. bit out of the papers. The Feds, of course, shut Maytime down. Their stock plummeted, and rumors went wild. But they must have known that would happen and I think they’ll rebound just fine. Big company like that can bide their time, grease some political palms, and be right as rain in a few months.

Not so much for Officer Hannah Shepard or a certain Mr. Jonathan Lee. There was no coming back from what ailed them, and I feel like hell about getting that officer killed. Every damn day.

Vanguard is the wild card, obviously, but once the deck was handed over to the Feds and went national we were cut out of the deal. Captain says an inside man at the Bureau tells her it’s a military outfit, some sort of dark division that even the Feds don’t have access to.

I keep this tidbit out of Rose’s ear. It’s dangerous information, and the last thing I want to do is put this woman in danger.

I watch her sip her gimlet and we order another round, a couple of steaks, potatoes, and greens. It’s been a long time since I’ve had such pleasant—and if I may say—attractive company. Something an old guy like me could certainly get used to.

Later that night we step out into the rain, giddy and just the right amount of drunk. I yell for a cab, and he does one of those daring maneuvers cabbies sometimes do, crossing a couple lanes before pushing a puddle up and over the curb, splashing my shoes. I laugh at myself like a schoolkid and open the door for her.

Neither of us want to go home, but the idea of us going to one place or the other seems forward. She watches me, waiting, and I look to the cabbie.

An old guy in a beaten-to-hell flat cap turns around, face grizzled with white whiskers, eyes a bright, dancing blue. “Where to, Romeo?”

I glance through the windshield, happen to see a red car go by. I point at it.

“Follow that car, will ya?”

He clocks the one I’m talking about, then nods. “Sure mac, whatever you say.”

I lean back as we pull into the street, overhead lights smearing across the rain-swept windows, bright neon signs prancing beside us on the sidewalks as we pass by.

I lean into Rose, her eyes pulling me like magnets. Or strings.

I kiss her and she laughs. “Dixie, who are we following? Where are we going?”

I smile and put my arms around her, pull her close.

“I got no idea, baby,” I say. “Ain’t it grand?”

THE REJECTS

1

BLAKE HATED THE DARK. A minor phobia that NASA turned a blind eye to in order to keep him in the fold of their “specialized employee” pool. He thought himself a scientist first, an astronaut second. A distant second. But there were moments, jobs like this one, that required, well, extensive travel. Required him to enter the darkest void known by god or man. Space. The endless nothing.

He considered the contrast between one dark and the other. The one out there and the one he found himself in right now, hurtling downward at a speed most humans without his unique training would have likely found nauseating.

The elevator was large, a service lift for techs and mech. A twenty by twenty, black pressurized inch-thick carbon box speeding into the depths of the moon. They’d been traveling nearly three hours, belted into galvanized chairs. A lot of seats were empty. A VIP trip. Regardless of his status, Blake was getting fidgety.

“Heard it was hollow,” he said.

Barbara gave him a sidelong glance. “What?”

“The moon,” he said, smirking. “Heard it was hollow. Didn’t you know? Whole damn thing is a Martian spaceship, created to keep an eye on us Earthlings.”

Their guide, an uptight tick of a man named Norris, slid his attention over to him. His features came in flickering bursts of light as the speeding elevator passed line after line of embedded cathode tubing, spread every fifty feet or so. They were blipping by at a rate of about one per second. Norris adjusted his wire-frame glasses.

“Just kidding, Norris.”

“I was just going to say,” he said, glancing from her, back to him, as if careful how much to say in advance of the big show, “that you are closer to the truth than you realize.”

Blake swallowed, nodded. Didn’t care for the geeky little man. Thought he was peevish and petty. The kind of guy who’d cheat at chess. He looked back at her.

“Kinda far from the jungles, aren’t ya, doc?”

Barbara looked at the darkness of the hard floor beneath their weighted boots. He suddenly felt like an ass without fully understanding why.

“I had to leave a very important project for this,” she said, throwing a steely glance at Norris, who noticed but simply turned away. “Years of work to be finished by someone else.”

“The Africa thing. Eve,” he stated, knowing very well the project she’d been heading up. The hunt for the Mother of us all. The DNA string that tied us all together. Scientists universally mocked the idea, but she was a follower. A leader, rather, he thought.

Norris snorted.

Blake’s brow bent and a muscle in his jaw twitched, but Barbara just sighed, as if relieved to have it out in the open. The hostility.

“I assure you, doctor,” Norris said, looking straight ahead, the pulses of light making him shimmer, “this is more important than any project you’ve ever been part of.”

She shrugged. “Well, whatever it is I’d like to get to it already,” she said, not bothering to look at either of the men riding into the moon with her. “It’s been a damned annoying six weeks.”

Barbara. It had been a few years since they were together, but Blake throught she looked exactly the same. Maybe even better. Kind of hard to tell in the space jockey suits they were all sporting, but at least they were able to ditch the headgear at the top. She was right. Six weeks isolated on this rock. Cut off from everyone, everything back on Earth. Protocol, they said. Top Secret. Until now. The secret was buried deep, whatever it was and whatever clandestine lair they were being asked to opinionate upon. And based on their light gear, it was air-tight.

Blake watched the flickering lights glance off Barbara’s cheek. He didn’t wonder if she still thought of him that way. Waste of his brain’s oxygen.

He knew she didn’t.

“I second that,” he said. “We’re gonna hit Earth pretty soon.”

“Not quite,” Norris said under his breath. It was a quip, but there was something in Norris’s tone that straightened Blake’s smirk. He was getting the feeling this expedition was not of the “pleasant discovery” or “scientific breakthrough” nature he was usually called in for. This felt like something else.

A turbine blew out like a jet engine winding down and the elevator slowed as if riding a flattening bubble of pressurized air. The trap came to a soft stop, there was some loud machinery, a rush of air that mussed his hair and made even Barbara run a hand through her own blond mane, smoothing it down and making him think about her that way all over again.