"Don't you talk about Mom!" Bastian said. No—shouted. He was trembling now.
The memories flooded him.
His mother—packing her suitcase, leaving home.
Gone for weeks.
Bastian, only eighteen years old, flying to Prague. Entering that little hotel room. Seeing the blood. The bodies.
He closed his eyes, his throat locking up. He was thirty-three now, a captain in the Alliance Marine Force. But often he still felt like that boy, that scared teenager making that horrible discovery.
For another moment, King was silent. Then the commander spoke in a soft, grainy voice. "I just want to fix things, Bas. Come to the Freedom for Christmas. Bring Rowan, if Stacy lets you. We'll have a nice dinner. We'll be a family."
Bastian placed his fist on the wall. He wanted to punch through the concrete. "You don't want me on the Freedom, Dad. I'm just a grunt, remember? A dumb marine. I flunked out of your fancy flight school."
"You know I don't care about that. I'm proud of you, son. No matter what your career is."
Bastian snorted. "Bullshit. You were a fighter pilot. Your dad was too. And his dad. I'm sorry to be such a disappointment."
"Stop sulking like a little kid!" King said, anger filling that grainy voice. "You are an officer of the Alliance Defense Force. Act like it!"
Bastian laughed. "That's all you care about, isn't it? Your precious Alliance Defense Force. That's why you drove Mom away. That's why—"
"Bastian, stop it."
"That's why she left! That's why she ran to Prague, and why …" Bastian couldn't say any more. The words caught in his throat.
For a moment neither man spoke.
Finally King growled, "Merry Christmas."
The commander hung up.
Bastian remained standing there, facing the concrete wall. Words appeared on his minicom.
CALL TERMINATED
"No kidding," Bastian muttered.
He returned to the hallway. Alice was waiting. She looked at him with soft eyes.
"You okay, boss?"
"Fine," Bastian said. His throat felt tight. He could barely speak. Maybe that was how his father felt all the time.
Alice put a hand on his arm. "You wanna talk?"
"I said I'm fine." He marched toward the exit. "Come on, Alice, move your ass. Let's go check on your grandfather. We'll kill that giant spider for him."
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Starship Freedom
High Earth Orbit
10:40 Christmas 2199
The words echoed in King's cabin.
"Merry Christmas."
Harsh words. Bitter words. King still clutched the phone, though he had already hung up on his son.
It took a long moment for King to relax his hand, to release the phone. He took a deep breath.
It hurt. It hurt so goddamn bad.
King had fought wars. He had charged into enemy lines. He had held dying soldiers, and he had lost his wife. But this pain, in many ways, was worse.
I'm leaving the Freedom, he thought. All I had left were my son and granddaughter. And I've lost them too.
King knew that Bastian still blamed him. And maybe he was right to.
"Maybe it was my fault," he said to himself. "Maybe I drove Diane away. Maybe I drove my wife into the arms of a killer. Maybe—"
He began to cough. He was talking too much today, straining his broken throat. Dammit, he needed another drink. He reached into his cupboard, pulled out the bottle of Martian ale, and drank deeply. Right from the bottle. It burned his throat, but he didn't care. Physical pain was good. It drowned the emotional pain. King would gladly suffer the pain of ten thousand bullets to forget the pain in his heart.
He put down the bottle.
He stared into a mirror.
"Look at yourself," he growled at his reflection. "You've gone soft in old age. Whining about problems at home. Pitying yourself. Drowning your sorrows in a bottle. It's pathetic. Stop it! You are a soldier."
He straightened. He raised his chin. He stared at his reflection with hard, dark eyes. Yes, there he was again. The soldier. The tough guy. The commander who felt no pain, who could fix everything. Who could win world wars.
That's all he knew how to be. The other James King, the man outside the uniform, the man with vulnerabilities and fears, well … he didn't know how to be that man.
He would have to learn. He had the rest of his life to figure it out.
Hopefully Rowan would be part of that life.
Maybe he had lost his son. But goddammit, King would not give up his granddaughter. There was at least one little girl in the world who loved him. And that mattered. She mattered. Right now Rowan mattered more than anything in this universe.
He returned to his desk, a heavy piece of furniture carved from real oak. Yes, it was his last day, but he had work to do. In a few hours, he would be hosting the annual Christmas dinner. Until then, he had paperwork to catch up on.
Literal paperwork.
As promised, Mimori had prepared a report on the Rubicon, printed it, and placed it on his desk in a neat binder. People thought him crazy to still read on paper—like some old sea captain from a bygone era. But paper books filled the shelves in his cabin, and paper reports covered his scarred oak desk. In the age of telepathy, he relished the physical feel of the world. And it wasn't just that. Something about paper reminded him of home. His father had collected paper books.
King leaned back in his seat. The leather creaked. He placed on his reading glasses, another anachronism in this era of bionic eyes, and began leafing through Mimori's report.
He leaned forward. A frown creased his brow.
"What the hell?"
He flipped a page, and his frown deepened. A chill flooded his belly.
He reached for his comlink. He held the device to his mouth.
"Mimori, report to my office please."
She answered at once. "Be right there, sir."
They could, of course, have an entire telepathic conversation over the MindWeb. King could hallucinate the android right in front of him. No need for her to walk over. King snorted. Let the kids use that tech. He preferred to speak to his crew face-to-face. Hell, if they were all going to live in a virtual world, why even build an android in the first place?
A moment later, a knock sounded on his door.
"Enter," King said.
Mimori stepped into the office, snapped her heels together, and saluted. The android was wearing her parade whites, a finer uniform than what the crew normally wore aboard the Freedom. Her outfit included white gloves, a black bow tie, and a golden aiguillette. King himself still wore the simpler service uniform of the Alliance Fleet, the fabric blue, the buttons brass rather than gold.
King glanced at the pin on the android's lapel. It marked her as Mimori Unit 1. There were seven Mimori androids aboard the Freedom, serving different parts of the ship. Three androids worked here in the prow. Two supported the midsection, and two more worked the great engine rooms in the stern.
Each Mimori was ostensibly the same. They certainly all looked the same—sweet young women with Japanese features. But over time, King had noticed differences in their personalities. The three prow Mimoris were prim and professional; they were used to dealing with senior officers. The midsection Mimoris tended to smile shyly, to lower their eyes, even giggle; they were used to handling tourists. Meanwhile, the stern Mimoris loved to complain, crack sarcastic jokes, even curse. It came from so many years in the greasy engine rooms, no doubt.
Each Mimori connected wirelessly to the starship Freedom's central computer system. When King spoke to this Mimori unit before him, he was conversing with his starship. Mimori was simply a friendly interface. At least that's what the engineers said. But over his years here, King had seen each Mimori develop as an individual. Perhaps they were the Freedom's multiple personalities.
"Can you explain this report?" King said. "In plain English. If I'm reading these numbers right
, a catastrophic explosion struck Rubicon station yesterday."
Mimori nodded. "Yes, sir, that was my conclusion as well. ATLAS has picked up traces of the blast. But it's more than that, sir. ATLAS also detected too much gravity at Rubicon. The graviton count around the space station skyrocketed. As if thousands of asteroids were flying there. Asteroids the size of towns."
King stared at the numbers on his report, then into Mimori's eyes.
"Could asteroids have destroyed the Rubicon? We should have seen a cloud of asteroids approaching from a mile away."
Mimori frowned. "A mile, sir? ATLAS sensors can detect asteroids several trillion kilometers away, with the observable distance depending on the asteroid's mass and surface reflectance."
"A figure of speech," King said. "So something big is at the Rubicon, maybe an asteroid cloud, and it's generating gravity. Why didn't we spot it coming?"
Mimori never lost her composure. "I don't know, sir. Whatever we're detecting at the Rubicon, well … it simply appeared. Overnight. Blinked into existence. I admit, sir, the numbers don't make sense."
King rose to his feet. He paced the cabin. "Well, we certainly have a mystery on our hands. A space station seems to disappear. And strange unidentified objects, big and heavy, appear at the same time. What about incoming transmissions from the Rubicon? Are they still radio silent?"
Mimori smiled sweetly. "Sir, may I direct your attention to the last chapter in my report?"
In other words: Read the damn manual, asshole.
"I'm sorry, Mimori." He opened the binder again. "I called you before I finished reading your report."
"You tend to do that, sir."
"Hey!" He pointed at her, glaring over his reading glasses. "Watch the attitude."
Her smile widened. "It's all right. I'm flattered. It means you miss me."
So much for the prow Mimori units being prim and proper. This one could have come up right from the engine room. Sassy little machine.
Yes, I do miss you when you're away, he thought. And I'm going to miss you on Earth.
Mimori didn't yet know that he was retiring. He hadn't told many people yet—just Jordan, who was like a brother, and Spitfire, who was like a daughter.
But Mimori … Mimori was somebody special. She was his closest confidant. His hope in the dark. She was the Freedom herself, a goddess of the stars. Android and starship were one woman, and she was the great love of King's life. He didn't know how to say goodbye to her.
It's no wonder I drove Diane away, he thought with a sudden pang of guilt.
Well, enough sappiness. He was still a soldier. He still had a job to do. Starting tomorrow, he could spend the rest of his life relaxing on the farm, waxing poetic about grand ladies of the stars and lost loves.
He flipped to the last few pages in Mimori's report. He stared at the words, scarcely believing.
"A dark blot in space." He looked up over his glasses. "That's what it says in your report. What do you mean by a dark blot in space, Mimori?"
"Just what I wrote, sir. A dark blot in space."
"I read that," he growled. "Elaborate."
"Space isn't nearly as empty as people think. Human eyes can't see everything that's out there, but I can. First of all, space is full of radiation. It's mostly just random chatter. Distant pulsar stars, nebulae, supernovae, and so on—they all release a lot of electromagnetic noise. And the cosmos, of course, is still awash with radiation from the Big Bang. Then there's solar wind, solar dust, neutrino showers, Higgs boson particles, magnetic fields, cosmic rays—"
"I get the idea," King said. "Space looks like a Pollock painting. Get to the point."
Mimori nodded. "Sorry, sir. Anyway, when I aimed the ATLAS sensors at the Rubicon a second time, an hour after the first event, well … I detected nothing."
King placed his hands on the desk and leaned toward her. "What about the first chapters in your report? All about the gravitational fields and explosions and general mayhem at Rubicon?"
"That's the thing, sir. It all suddenly vanished. One hour ATLAS saw chaos. The next? Nothing. Not even cosmic radiation. Space appeared empty. It's as if somebody took a giant eraser to space and simply wiped away the Rubicon."
"Or somebody is jamming their signal," King said.
Mimori nodded. "That seems to be the more likely explanation. Somebody might be intentionally blinding us."
The temperature in the cabin seemed to drop ten degrees. King struggled not to shiver.
"What the hell is going on here?" he rasped. "I don't need this on my last day."
Mimori tilted her head. "Your last day, sir?"
King cursed himself for his slip. "Ah, hell. I wasn't going to tell you until dinner."
The android frowned. "Tell me what, sir?" She took a step closer to him. "Are you all right? Are you …?" She gasped. "Are you ill?"
He groaned and rolled his eyes. "For chrissake, Mimori, I'm not dying, if that's what you mean. I'm retiring!"
Mimori froze. She stared at him. Then she whipped around the desk, grabbed King, and pulled him into an embrace.
"Sir, you can't!"
He stood stiffly for a moment, then embraced her too. "It's time, Mimori. Beyond time."
She looked at him. Her eyes sparkled with actual tears. Yes, she was an android. But the starship Freedom had real artificial intelligence. True emotions. The ship felt pain. And Mimori felt it too. Her makers had given her the ability to feel, to love, even to cry.
"You've been my commander for many years, sir," Mimori said. "But you're more than that to me. You're a friend. My best friend."
"Ah, hell," King said. "Don't make an old man cry on his last day as a soldier."
Mimori grinned. "Oh, I will! Because you have to say goodbye to the other six Mimoris too. In person. One at a time. One of us will get you! You'll shed tears yet, old man. We know that deep down you're a softie." Then the android shed her own tears and pulled King back into a tight embrace.
"I wish I could take one of you seven with me," he said, holding her.
But of course that was impossible. The Mimori androids had personalities of their own, some individuality. There were computers inside their skulls with some basic artificial intelligence. But the androids were tethered too strongly to the starship Freedom herself. To remove a Mimori android from the ship, well … that was like removing a whale from the ocean. Over time, trapped in an aquarium, the whale withered and died. The android would too.
Maybe that's what happened to me, King thought. They took a soldier. They stuck him in a museum. And I've been withering.
Suddenly he wanted to say to hell with the report, to let somebody else handle it. He would head to the bar and get good and proper drunk. How about that for ringing out a career?
But the binder, lying on the desk, haunted him.
Somebody had erased a blob of space. Somebody was hiding something going on at the Rubicon. That was not normal. King would normally bounce this up the chain of command, but everyone was off for Christmas.
And this felt important. King had never seen anything like this. Not in all his years in space.
"Mimori, I have an idea," he said. "Have you pointed ATLAS at Pluto?"
The android frowned. "No. Should I have, sir?"
"Indeed you should have," King said. "The Alliance maintains several telemetry satellites in orbit around Pluto. They point toward deep space, then relay the data back to Earth. They're purely there for scientific research. The astrophysicists down on Earth use the data."
Mimori's eyes widened. "And Pluto is significantly closer to the Rubicon! One of those satellites might have seen something."
King nodded. "Get ATLAS on it."
"I will right now. Pluto is five light-hours away from us, so I can't get you any real-time data. But if those satellites are regularly transmitting, I can get you a transmission from five hours ago." She winked. "For a human, you're not too dumb."
"For a fancy toaster, you're not too bad yours
elf."
Mimori got a faraway look. She seemed to be gazing past King. She raised her arms, held out her hands, and closed her eyes. Gently she swayed, pirouetted, and moved her arms. A soft smile touched her lips. She looked like a mad conductor with an invisible orchestra.
Deep inside the starship, motors rumbled. Gears turned. Machinery hummed. The deck vibrated beneath King's feet.
King hesitated for a moment. Then, reluctantly, he turned on his MindLink. What the hell. One last time for the road.
With a thought, he summoned a hallucination of the Freedom's schematics. A translucent diagram of the starship hovered before him. It looked like a hologram, but he was hallucinating it. His implant connected to the ship's computers, pulled the data, and painted the image directly into his brain tissue.
King saw glowing yellow parts moving inside the Freedom schematic. Parts of ATLAS were rearranging themselves. The telemetry system spanned several decks in the prow. Sensors extended from the ship's hull. Radio plates turned. Sensor panels unfurled like great sails. Freedom was a museum, a retired warship, but also a scientific station. The instruments were decades old. The technology was obsolete. But ATLAS still did its job.
Mimori, controlling the machinery from her trance, was gazing toward Pluto.
For a moment she just listened.
Then she gasped.
The android screamed and grabbed King's arms.
"Mimori!" King said, turning off his MindLink. The hallucination vanished. "What is it?"
Her eyes snapped open. They were pure white; they were rolled so far back the irises were gone. She clung to him, trembling. King knew that androids had emotions, but not that they could feel terror. And there was no misreading Mimori's body language. This was sheer terror.
"I hear it," she whispered, voice trembling. "The signal from the Rubicon. Most of it was erased. Blotted out of space. But some radio waves reached Pluto. The satellites heard. They are afraid too. They can feel fear."
King gripped her arms. He shook her. "Mimori! Look at me. Look at me, dammit."
Her eyes rolled back down. She stared at him, face pale.
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