Science Fiction

The Time It Takes To Die

Chapter One-Part One from a current work-in-progress

The night was one of those rare clear and sweet-smelling London nights. Yianelle Shannon was enjoying the evening so much she couldn’t remember why she’d refused to date Leo for so long. But, he was quite a persistent and surprisingly charming man.

In her few months at Mirapac, he’d asked her out at least once every week. Then, he’d shown up at the door of her flat every day of the past week with flowers for her and expensive treats for Colby, her pedigreed black Siamese.

Leo, like most Mirapac employees, lived in the same building as her. In fact, all the employees who joined corporate headquarters from off-world were assigned flats there; it was required, but still an alluring perk of working for the far-reaching corporation.

Mirapac was one of the Mars-shot corporations begun during the Twenty-First Century push to permanently colonize the Red Planet. The corporation had diversified and integrated into virtually every peripheral industry around interplanetary travel and business.

When you were hired by Mirapac, they conveniently handled every aspect of a move; basic moves were standard in a contract. Extras were billed by ironclad clauses extending your employment contract if you couldn’t pay upfront; In Yianelle’s case, that included an entire extra year for Colby’s clearance through customs and quarantine.

Yianelle would likely have never socialized with Leo or ever spoken directly with him at work. She knew who he was, but could never have approached him there. She was just a peon-illustrator — a board-ape — after all. But, his flat was a few levels above hers, in the same corner of the building.

She’d often seen him, in the first few weeks after she arrived, as he jogged up and down the stairwell of that corner every morning before sunrise. She, herself, took the stairwell up the six flights to the company-airbus pad for the ride to work every morning. However, she’d never presumed to speak to him, and barely acknowledge his unfailing smile and nod as he would pass her in the stairwell.

On the morning Yianelle brought Colby home — leaving behind furious animal-transfer custodians nursing deep gashes where the unruly feline had made his displeasure known — the cat escaped from his carrier in her arms as she stepped off the lift, which she thought she must have been closed improperly. The cat made a yowling black streak, darting through the fast-closing door of the stairwell.

She raced after him and was brought up short when the door opened suddenly. There stood Leo, holding the cat firmly, but gently while making soothing noises at the wild-eyed animal. Colby was a known terror to anyone who tried to handle him who wasn’t Yianelle. Amazingly, Colby hadn’t clawed Leo.

“Oh! Thank you so much for catching him,” Yianelle gushed breathlessly. She wagged a finger admonishingly at Colby, scolding him, “Naughty, silly cat.” The cat responded by going limp in Leo’s arms, beginning to purr.

Leo, scratched where he held the back of the cat’s neck, and, in his lightly accented soft baritone, said to the cat, “You worried mummy running avway like that, mijn ebbenhouten krijger.”

Yianelle, who hadn’t heard Leo speak before, blinked at hearing his unexpected accent and unfamiliar old-world language. She smiled, mildly confused, and gathered the mass of cat into her own arms. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that, what’d you say?”

A slight smile on his lips, he replied in a studied, yet friendly tone, “It’s old Dutch for ‘my ebony vwarrior.’”

Yianelle laughed lightly, wagging a finger at Colby’s nose as she said, “Yeah, he’s a warrior right enough!” The cat ignored her finger with studied disdain.“His name’s Colby.”

Leo clicked his heels together theatrically, inclining his head in a brisk nod to Colby, “Pleased to make your acqvwaintance, Meneer Colby.”

When Leo took hold of the cat’s paw to shake in greeting, Yianelle expected him to draw blood, as was his wont toward anyone not her. She was astonished when the cat seemed fine with it. In fact, it almost seemed to her that Colby inclined his head in turn at Leo.

Speaking to the cat, Leo asked, “Meneer Colby, please permit me to introduce myself. I am Leopold von Münzhauser” To Yianelle’s ear it sounded like he pronounced his name, Leoh-po-ald vohn Moon-zchawz-er. Just as she was fretting she’d never pronounce ‘Leopold’ correctly, he looked up and met her gaze and continued with a disarming smile, “But, I hope you vwill call me Leo.”

Yianelle looked up at him and gave him one of her signature wide-eyed biting-lip smiles, “Hi, Leo. I’m Yianelle Shannon.” She could hear Anna at the back of her mind admonishing her about maintaining professional distance, especially with the higher-ups.

Leo stepped over the tumbled mess she’d dropped when Colby escaped, and began picking it up. She thanked him as she opened the door to her flat, just across from the stairwell door. She stepped back as he leaned inside to set her collected things on the floor next to her, just inside the apartment. He invited her to join him for tea at someplace in the old quarter.

Unable to shake Anna’s imagined disapproval, Yianelle declined. She stood in the doorway, holding the cat, and exchanged meaningless chatter a moment more, before disengaging with a polite, “Thanks, again. And, goodbye,” and then closed the door.

First Date

Leo… Leopold von Münzhauser… Yianelle played his name over in her head.

It was a name that stood out. It still seemed mildly exotic to her ears. She hadn’t really paid attention to the swirling rumors before. But, company scuttlebutt held that he had come from seemingly nowhere and in only a few weeks had replaced the division superior as senior vice-president of the Public Relations Division.

Leo had replaced the much beloved former VP, Michael, who lost his planetary work permit and was forced to return home to Mars Colony IV. The employees had been devastated when they learned the passenger cruiser, on which Michael had been traveling, suffered an “undetermined catastrophic systems failure” during reentry. The cruiser exploded in the upper atmosphere, killing all three hundred and seventy passengers and crew.

Rather unfairly, Yianelle thought, the staff in the division blamed Leo for Michael’s tragic end. Yianelle, herself from Delta Colony on Mars, had joined the graphics department at the height of the turmoil. Coworkers still grumbled that Leo had been given prejudicial preference because he was born on earth, instead of any of the Outer Colonies. When you looked at it on the surface of it, there did appear to be a definite skew at the executive levels to earth-born staff.

With deliberation, Yianelle dispelled these ruminations. She’d been in Old London for nearly four months already and tonight was the first time she’d seen any of the sights. It seemed odd that Leo, who had told her he spent his childhood rather isolated in the Oostvaardersplassen region of the former Netherlands, seemed to know everything about Old London.

“Leo, how do you know so much about London?” she asked, during a pause in his tour-guide oration, “I mean, you said you grew up pretty isolated in a rural area and you’ve only been here since you started at the office, right?”

“I attended boarding school here for a time, in the last years of my youth,” Leo replied in his polished Dutch accent.

“That must have been very lonely for you,”

“Perhaps,” he smiled at some private joke. “I never had a real home.”

There was a hint of something in his voice… or was it in his pale eyes? Something was suddenly very unsettling. Yianelle decided to change the subject. “Do you think the company is able to fight off this take-over bid?”

“Come now, Yianelle,” he admonished cheerily. “vWe agreed to put aside vwork this evening.”

He really did have the most charming smile. And, the small scar on the side of his cheek added an air of mystery to his otherwise bland features. It wasn’t that Leo was unattractive. He just wasn’t her ideal.

But, then, Yianelle reflected, So few are.

They stopped on the Commons in front of Big Ben to watch another busker — or street performer. It was then Yianelle noticed what a lovely head of thick dark curls Leo had, and his slender athletic body. He put his deceptively strong arm comfortably around her shoulder and pulled her companionably close.

The small crowd dispersed and the street performer moved on after collecting the few coins tossed out for her, leaving the couple alone. Yianelle, leaning against a tree trunk, allowed Leo to kiss her. There were no fireworks, but it was nice…

Nice enough to try again, she said to herself.

It is said Earth’s moon has always affected people that way. The ambiance was part of the reason she liked her job on Earth so much better than her last job on Grahams Colony, around Saturn. She distantly wondered what Anna would have to say when she told her about the evening.

Delta Colony — Mars

The interplanetary operator informed Anna Sinclair there was no answer on Yianelle’s line. Anna fretted as she cut the vid-call. She’d only asked the operator for assistance because there had been no answer the times she’d dialed direct over the past few days.

“Earth is too damned far away,” she announced to Brynn, her pedigreed Burmese, not coincidentally a gift from Yianelle.

Yianelle bought the cat with part of her wrap-up bonus when she had finished her contract on Grahams Colony. The cat, as usual, responded with a contemptuous flick of her tail. The Burmese never designed to open an eye. Anna resolved to board the first shuttle to Earth tomorrow if she didn’t reach Yianelle by then. She sighed and sank down at the table before her now cold dinner.

Yianelle had deeply worried Anna when she told her of Leo’s obsessive-seeming behavior. For her own peace of mind, Anna had decided to check up on him. Discovering that obituary had been sheer luck. The obit had only run in the local news of a rather small college in a tiny rural village near Oostvaardersplassen, of old North Holland, on Earth.

A “Leopold von Münzhauser” had lived in that tiny village near Oostvaardersplassen. That Leopold von Münzhauser had died fifteen years ago. He had died on the very night of his college graduation.

So, who is aggressively courting Yianelle in Old London? Anna mused.

Anna abandoned her dinner entirely, turned back to the vid-phone, and transmitted again. She was disturbed that there was not one picture of this Leo-person. That was strange in itself for a now highly-placed senior executive at Mirapac.

Okay, Annie, she warned herself, you’re being overly suspicious. Calm down.

But, if this Leo-person was involved in the take-over bid of Mirapac, what entity was behind it? And, what would happen to Yianelle? Would she be caught in the middle?

Was this an ordinary take-over bid? Or, was it another looming corporate war? It seemed like half the reporters in the Interplanetary Press Corp (IPC), where she worked, were covering the bombshell reports of Mirapac being the latest target of a shadow organization waging the corporate wars.

The wars always started as ordinary-seeming corporate leveraging but ended leaving a trail of violence and death. The culmination would be the breaking up or outright destruction of the target’s assets. Every hint of trouble lately had people talking in hushed, nervous tones.

The idea that Mirapac might be next had most folks thoroughly spooked. Mirapac was THE interplanetary corporation… the first, the biggest, and the most widely diversified. Mirapac owned interests too numerous to catalog — including the very news service for which Anna worked.

Anna mused, Is this Leo-person involved?

The more she researched and the more she thought about it, the more sinister he seemed.

Back on earth…

Later, Leo and Yianelle walked along the bank of one of the few natural ponds remaining in Old London. They walked and chatted under the clear starlit sky. He held her hand firmly in the crook of his arm and talked about his passion for flowers. He was an avid horticulturalist.

Leo talked for over two hours about the little garden at his deceased mother’s house in old Holland. “The garden is really the only reason I’ve held onto the house,” he told her.

Yianelle was surprised he could make gardening interesting enough to hold her attention for so long. She was equally surprised to find him such a warm and charming man. He was maybe one of the most interesting men she’d ever dated.

Oh, I haven’t had this much fun since college, she thought. She thought then of what her friend’s reaction would be. Anna’s not going to believe this.

She was so caught up in Leo’s tale of his antics at boarding school, that the man marching directly toward them barely registered at first. But, as he quickly drew nearer, she thought there was something odd about him… something wrong.

Three shockingly loud bangs rang out in rapid succession. Yianelle’s world narrowed to the three crimson stains spreading across Leo’s crisp starched shirt as he fell, and the hand now pointing the antique gun at her.

That’s what’s odd about him, came the thought, from some distant detached part of her.

She flinched at a loud pop, thinking the hand had fired the gun again. But the man at the end of that hand fell to his knees. It was his blood pumping across his chest and spilling from between his lips. He swayed a moment on his knees, blood pooling about him, then fell over, his lifeless eyes frozen in an expression of dismay. Yianelle swirled around in time to see a needler fall from Leo’s limp fingers.

Did he have that all this time? “Leo,” she pulled his head into her lap, unable to remember moving to sit on the ground next to him.

Oh, God! Her mind reeled, So much blood! Yianelle didn’t know why she was crying, only that she couldn’t stop.

Bystanders had stopped running and screaming and gathered around the stricken pair. What will Anna say when she finds out I was out with a man carrying a needler?

And then thought to herself, What a stupid thing to worry about.

All the while, she also heard herself as from a great distance, yelling in a hysteria-tinged voice, “Somebody get a med-evac!”

She didn’t know if anyone did so or not. Yianelle took off her peacock-blue sweater and as best as she could, covered Leo. He was shivering severely. His shirt was now a flood of red. He coughed painfully, sending a flood of red past his lips, into her lap, across the pale iridescence of her silken dress.

Her sweater, wrapped across his chest, was now blood-soaked. The brilliant blue and green beads in the intricate pattern on the delicate edging down the front of the sweater stood out rather bizarrely to her vision at the moment. Yianelle felt she was seeing and hearing everything from outside. She felt distant and detached. She knew it was happening, that she was living this nightmare even as she felt she was watching in some sense from outside herself.

Leo opened his eyes and met her tear-filled ones, briefly. “I alvways thought…” he said in a barely audible, rasping whisper, “…I’d die alone, unmourned among enemies. Thank you.”

She saw herself fretfully adjusting the blood-drenched sweater rather futilely. She heard herself yammer meaningless comforts to him, “Sh-sh, the med-evac is on the way. You’ll be fine.”

Raising his other hand, Yianelle saw he still held the packet of leftovers from their restaurant meal. “I think mijn ebbenhouten krijger vwill miss his leftovers,” Leo said, watching it fall from his grasp. He grasped Yianelle’s hand as he continued between ragged, rasping breaths, “Keep Colby vwith you alvways.”

What an odd thing for him to say now, she thought.

“Promise me,” Leo insisted.

“I promise,” she said in what she hoped was a soothing tone. “Just be still and quiet now until the med-evac arrives.”

He shuddered violently, his entire body wracked convulsively. Great large tears flowed from her eyes and fell on his cheeks. Leo looked into her eyes again and said, “I thank you for your tears.”

She cried all the harder. He reached up, brushing her red-gold tresses aside, and touched her wet cheek lightly with blood-stained fingers.

Will I ever be able to wash the stain from my face? she wondered.

Leo sighed a huge, rattling sigh and smiled up at her — Was that relief in his smile? — as he died, his vacant black eyes boring unseeingly into her memory forever.

Continues here:

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