Exile: Arc Read online

  "Interesting...." Jayne said, while playing with the links in the fencing with her tiny fingers. "Another coincidence."

  "Surely not..." Thom said turning to her and leaning his wiry body into the fence. "I cannot believe that you killed one person let alone en mass."

  "There were a few charges linked together for me. Mainly hacking. Big time hacking."

  "Hacking was on my rep too, I had to hack an intergalactic traffic relay. I doubt you did anything larger than that."

  "A solar defence grid. Cequodus colony. So yeah, it was bigger..."

  "That'll piss them off alright." Thom said looking at the side of her face. "I'm amazed they didn't execute you or something. In secret of course."

  Jayne sighed and looked down at her shoes and said "Maybe they did, ai?"

  "Too many coincidences." Thom said and looked away at the factories. "I shouldn't be here, it was all a mistake. I was a science student, for fate sakes. So close to graduation, space meteorologist I would have been..."

  "A weatherman! Haha!" Jayne laughed out suddenly.

  "Hey don't joke. I could have been..."

  "Oh, I'm sorry." she said putting a hand over her mouth comically to stop herself laughing, before laughing again a little more.

  "You're a bad girl, aren't you? Weather can be an interesting subject. It shows the real beauty of science and the universe." he smiled at her and reached to take her hand. "Let me show you."

  Instinctively she let him hold her hand, then looked at it wondering what she was doing.

  Thom pushed from the fence loudly and walked with her to the door and then down past the others in the living quarters. As they watched them with a few twangs of jealously, Thom guided her around to the corridor then around to a back door leading to a large clear roofed hall that hadn’t been converted as with the rest of the factory. There were still textile mills here and there collecting rust, with just enough of them cleared to make room on the smooth stone floor for them to skate.

  Thom let go of her hand and released the skates from his training shoes. He skated away from her in the dusty old place as if her were on ice, and turned around to look at her as he glided in an S-shape the rest of the way to the far wall.

  "I think fate brought us together." Thom’s words echoed back to her from a distance.

  "Oh really?" she said, and walked casually the rest of the diagonal of the hall to where he was waiting for her.

  He had his leg half inside a hole leading through the bricks of the wall.

  "We ran out of landscaping dust before we could open this hole properly." he said while hitching himself inside.

  "I can fit through there." she said as Thom nodded and moved backwards through it.

  She followed more easily than he seemed to have and came out at the opposite side in time to watch Thom dropping a good five feet to the start of a curving channel, designed for the storm drainage waters. He skated to the opposite side like a half pipe and began lessening his speed as he snaked along the channel way.

  Jayne was wearing a long dress and her best blouse with a long woollen jacket that she also was quite fond of. Not wanting to look unfriendly though she decided to try to hang down from the ledge and then drop to the smooth incline of cement.

  Her dress was thick enough to slide against the stone and her bum was big enough to cushion the fall.

  She sat for a moment on the dry stone watching this boy she had become strangely entranced by skate a little along the outer dome wall and then skate aside into what looked like a dark opening into it.

  Thom had disappeared into a hole beneath some of that meshwork of rigging that seemed to encircle the factory districts. As she walked closer she saw that the hole was an overflow system designed to channel water from the outside into sluices within the thick dome shell.

  Jayne looked around for a moment, and then over her shoulder at the top of the factory beyond the towering outer wall. There was a hollow horn from somewhere in there, from some part of a factory's routine, and then Jayne turned away from the mushroom clouds of pollution and stepped through the heavy duty vertical grating covering the hole.

  Sighing to herself she carefully stepped down the slopes that would siphon off the excess from the river, and moved through to a huge pool room just beyond it. There was a broad pipe dangling from above and another larger opening running from the pool at the back, sloping away into darkness. The pool was overflowing out that way, being fed by a constant waterfall from the pipe in the ceiling.

  Still in his workpants, Thom dived head first into it, then emerged and shouted “It’s the storm drain. Fed by the melted snow.”

  Jayne swaggered along the poolside then nodded slowly, and sarcastically said “Pure as the driven snow. Just like you ai?”

  Thom got out at the other side, and reached to take her by the elbow. They looked at each other in the low light, with Thom now showing his senseless wildness, maybe even madness and in a strange way Jayne mirroring it in her own dazed situation.

  They smiled gently, and then Thom took a few steps down the dry side of the pipe at the back. Stepping across to the other side of the trickling water Jayne walked beside him on the opposite ledge. She could see now that the huge pipe led down for a long stretch into the dome shell, fading into an envelope of pitch darkness.

  She walked down into it, holding Thom’s hand over the trickling water between them. In the darkness Thom’s hand and his footsteps stopped, and she waited as her eyes adjusted to the light.

  She heard Thom’s feet wading through the water then began to see the layout form in her night eyesight.

  They were at a point where the pipe twisted on itself and downward in a drop that was too steep to pass. After a moment searching she saw there was a tear in the side of the pipe large enough to fit through, and now Thom was entering it without waiting to see if she would follow. She entered too, trying not to cut her head on it's jagged edges.

  There was a warm draft within, which she assumed was the atmosphere regulator tunnel, as there wasn’t much else this deep into the dome wall so far a she knew. It was a hollow network of chambers on each level, controlling the temperature of the quadrants of the biosphere, in this case the tropical zone. She found herself standing on the damp, black floor of a tall chamber that reached far off to the left and right, curving around the dome as far as she could see. Huge oval windows were set into the wall on the opposite side, looking outward from the outer wall of the dome.

  “Come up here.” Thom said, climbing up a short ladder in a wall opposite, that led to the inner sill of one of the huge windows.

  “There’s no maniacs in here, right?” she shouted up at him.

  “Only us.” he smiled over his shoulder.

  She considered turning and going back to her bed for a moment, then followed for no particular reason.

  She carefully climbed up to the curved platform, cut into this outermost part of the dome wall. Once she'd straightened up she walked to Thom who was looking out through the huge shape of glass at an endless snowscape of mountains and jagged valleys. Three moons of Narcosia could be seen above in the night sky, although the magnificent gas planet was out of sight. She noticed above the silvery glistening of a shooting star as it passed into the atmosphere.

  Just then there was a gust of warm air through the vent channel behind them, pulling at her woollen jacket and tugging at the flat bag hanging from her fingers.

  “A beautiful alien world.” Thom said as it passed. "For a beautiful alien girl..."

  "Do you always say the right thing?" she smirked up at another shooting star on it's path.

  "To the right people, yes." he said, and reached up to touch the side of her face.

  There was a shyness in Thom that pulled it away again, and made him close up slightly as he watched the cold reality through the glass.

  Jayne dropped her case on the floor at her feet and sighed, and sat down on the left curve of the oval platform.

  “Oh G
od, I’m spaced.” she said, and watched Thom walk across to the far side of the window and lie back on the upward curve there.

  He lay staring at her and she stared back, with a glazed and exhausted look in her eyes.

  More shooting stars were passing down through the sky and she vaguely registered that this may have been what he brought her here to see. Her homeless situation and the shock of the ongoing reality of her life dumbed it down however.

  "Well weatherman, you were right about the weather." she said slowly. "Maybe this place isn't so bad after all."

  "Yeah?" he chuckled. "Was I right about Fate? Maybe that crazy old church is right and people are thrust together by forces unseen. But I don't believe in coincidences."

  After a moment of silence, Jayne simply said "Agreed."

  "You don't think that cop played some trick on us? I've been running it through my mind how we met. It seems totally coincidental to me, but what if it wasn't. What if someone paid that gang to harass you? Any why were you wondering around alone in the outskirts?" Thom said, and then looked down as he fiddled with his fingernails.

  "I think my friend told me to go that way. She got it wrong. It might have been that ugly boyfriend of hers."

  Thom looked up at her and locked eyes with her momentarily.

  "If he needed a hacker or a brain why didn't he just ask me? I was the smartest of my generation back on the colonies. He knows who I am. Why spend all this time and trouble roping you in?"

  There was a tension in the air now, and Jayne wished maybe that there wasn't, but the fact remained that Thom had nailed something here, and it wasn't going to go away.

  "Maybe he fancies me." Jayne shrugged lazily in her woollen shawl. "I seem to have become quite popular recently."

  "It could be that, who knows. Or maybe something else... I don't like this game he's playing, if that is indeed what is happening."

  They lay staring at each other as if in a trance or dream. They were so well suited, Jayne knew maybe they could even be close friends, and maybe that was something that Bailey hadn't accounted for.

  “You think you've got it all worked out, don’t you? You're almost as naive as me. You should be more careful of someone like this.” she said sarcastically and lay on her side to look out over the landscape.

  “Well I’ve done alright so far, and against the odds in this place.” Thom mused, as if to himself. “I like it when the odds are against me. I'm thinking... maybe he can be played at his own game.”

  Jayne lay watching the snow drifts, and the ice glaciers grow and shrink on the jagged mountains, that stretched away to the distance, along the top rim of the crater. Their shape changing was small but visible to the eye, and gave away the intense cold of the Narcosia winter, that lay just beyond the dome.

  She didn’t hear Thom walk up to her, but heard him sit down, and looking she saw him sitting cross-legged while fishing through her bag of paintings. He brought a couple out and lay them on his lap.

  “So this is what you do?” he muttered. “I love all art. I’ve got quite a nice collection myself, gathered from empty houses around the prison. They just leave those houses empty after the folks die. Bit of a racket maybe but better we get it than the city waste disposal."

  Jayne rolled her eyes and looked back out over the mountains.

  “You’d enjoy perusing it. You can keep anything you fancy.” he said, and let her think about it for a while.

  Thom placed the paintings around on the floor at their feet and shifted to lie beside Jayne.

  She realized he had come beside her and froze up slightly, then rolled over and looked at him.

  They lay on their sides staring at each other, their pale skin glowing in the star and moonlight.

  “Thom Gubichayan.” she said. “This isn’t why I came here.”

  Thom reached in the space between them and pushed his fingers between her fingers.

  “I just want to hold your hand.” he said.

  She looked at him, and his large but tired eyes. “Is that all you wanted? Really?”

  “What is it that you want?” he asked. “You can go anytime you want.”

  Jayne leaned over Thom, and pushed his shoulder down firmly as another gust of warm air charged through the channel. Still not really sure what she wanted to do, she leaned down to him and kissed him through her whipping hair. She smiled as they kissed, and held him down until the wind passed.

  When she leaned back and stared at him, Thom smirked and put his arms around her gently and moved her onto her back. As they gazed into each other’s eyes in the quiet he slowly leaned over her and lay on her slightly.

  She rested her head back and said “Oh God. Please be careful with that thing.”

  After making love, they lay naked at strange angles with him on his front and her in almost a foetal position resting her head on the small of his back. They fell asleep there under the motions of warm air flowing in tides through the place.

  As she opened her eyes she saw another shooting star streak the night sky and smiled "Oh."

  She hitched up slightly and looked through the window over Thom's feet, seeing it was still night outside, that didn't actually reflect the time of day within the dome. It would be morning now, and she felt like she had had a good rest, and the first in a long while.

  She sighed with a childish satisfaction as she looked down at her glowing body, and then that of her new lover. Still unsure of the time, she lay forward beside Thom on her elbows and held a hand in front of her face, and looked at it as she flexed it like a claw, then buried her face in it.

  Snow was falling near and far to the distance at their side. It was silent within the place but beyond the dome it would be furious with the frozen storm.

  “Good morning, sweet maiden.” she heard Thom’s voice and looked at him from her palm.

  He sat up over her and bushed her disgruntled hair back from her face. They couldn’t stop grinning as the saw one another, and almost laughing Thom kissed her back and bit on her behind.

  She cried out in the place, and soon later they had gone.

  They ate eggs for breakfast, which Fenn had cooked by the time they got back, sitting on high stools along the breakfast bar to eat. They ate in silence as the others played around while getting ready for their job at the factory, Fenn was visibly making himself useful washing dishes from what they had already eaten.

  After they had finished Jayne left the two men, not liking the atmosphere they had come back to. She walked out to near the door and began rearranging items in her woollen jacket pockets.

  After a while of sitting and playing with his leftover egg, Fenn broke the silence.

  "So you..." Fenn said but was interrupted by Thom.

  "Yah."

  "You took her down to your little hideaway then?"

  "Oh, give it a rest Fenn." Mach's voice pierced from the far side of the hall, making Jayne look up from the coat stand.

  "I can't come to work this morning." Thom raised his voice to them all. "I need to head into town. Try and get Jayne some work the same way we did with Randall. Bailey's still recruiting right?"

  "That's right." Fenn said, looking a little red.

  "Well if there's no problem..." Thom said standing up and spreading his hands slightly. "Thanks for the breakfast, and good morning to you."

  Thom backed away keeping eye contact with Fenn for a moment before turning and joining Jayne to leave.

  The lads stopped what they were doing and listened as the new couple left through the large doors. They listened to Jayne petting the bloodthirsty dogs outside having been pheromone tagged in her food as was necessary to live within their grounds safely.

  The larger gates slammed shut and Mach shouted at Fenn "What the hell is wrong with you anyway? You fall in wuv or something?"

  Fenn stood up from the bench and grunted "No. Not at all I just think it was a bit..."

  "I never was sure about this one you know." Mach said to Sorbe and Allstar.<
br />
  "Oh fuck off, psycho." Fenn shouted at him, and Mach ran across to him for a fight.

  They grappled in the kitchen, the smaller but faster figure of Mach and the slower but more muscular stature of Fenn. Mach landed a few choice punches and they both slipped and fell against the dishwasher.

  "I'm glad Jayne didn't see this shit." Allstar said up to Sorbe, who had an old, worn down look about him now, as if five centuries of his life had led to this depressing moment.

  "Play ball. Just ignore them." he said and they played on in the court while the two boys fought beyond anything resembling a friendly spar.

  Above them at the tram station, Thom and Jayne entered a carriage and travelled away from the outer districts. They moved through the city and all of its twisting towers and chambers before ending their trip in the metropolis at a tram station just above the parking hollow of Sagar Warehousing.

  The lights were out there and in need of repair, but for the lamp near the stairs and elevator. Some light came from the bright hollow below, but barely seemed to penetrate the platform.

  Thom walked toward the light, and said "So we have a plan right? You get into... uh!"

  Thom's words cut short as Jayne tugged on his grey stoneskin jacket and dragged him back to her. Before he could get his senses she was kissing him, and so he half melted into it.

  When they had stopped she said "That's my plan!"

  Still clasped in her apparently strong hands he let out a nervous breath of a laugh and said "Ah! Ok I see... now."

  Jayne walked past him toward the light and said "I get this personal assistant job and then see what's going on from the inside out."

  "Correct!" Thom said walking beside her. "I've sent him the memo. He usually starts his day down in Club Bethlehem, a watering hole for Sagar management."

  "Isn't that club a franchise. What's it doing here?" she said and pinched her nose against the fumes as they began descending a square spiralling staircase into the glow of the parking hollow.

  "It's not a real Bethlehem." Thom said. "It's a bit too 'Sugalectric' for me."

  "Awwr. You'd look good in a miniskirt!" she laughed and kicked his hip.