“I’m… nothing. No one.” His voice sounded far away to him, muted around the edges. “What is anyone but a continuance of consciousness?”
“I can’t answer that. But I can say that, every time we reset you, I… know you, when you wake up. Your core values do not change.”
“Values you’ve programmed into me.”
She shrugged, palms in the air. “That’s for the psychologists to sort out.”
“How many times?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Sitta—”
“Don’t.”
“I don’t want to forget.”
She looked away. “You say that every time, but every time it’s the same. You always get in the bath, Tomas, because if you don’t you’ll dissolve right here on the floor. I don’t want to see that.”
Sanda. She’d been so sharp in his mind, in those seconds when he bled out on Monte. So vibrant and strong and warm. He’d wondered then why he hadn’t thought of his family—they didn’t exist—why he hadn’t thought of other friends or lovers. Sanda had been the only bright thing. The only uptick in his emotional life since his last reset. No wonder he’d fallen so hard, so fast. He’d been like a teenager experiencing love and lust for the very first time.
It should change something. By rights, those feelings should change everything, but even as he clung to her memory, fearing losing the sharpness of it to the reset, he knew, deep in his synthetic bones, that he’d done this before.
Another name, another face. Someone he’d saved or battled or otherwise crashed into during his duty and loved as fiercely as he loved Sanda now, because for him it was always the first time. And it had changed nothing. Couldn’t. Fuck, maybe he even gave them all the same speech about never encountering anyone like them before.
“Tomas? Are you ready?”
“I don’t think I ever am.”
Her sad smile told him he’d said those words before. He stepped into the room. This was what he was. He always got in the bath. Just because his heart screamed for Sanda didn’t mean anything. His body may feel fine, but the pain in his head was all-consuming, blotting out the world in staticky sounds and white lights.
What could he do but comply? Tomas was dying. He’d felt healthy upon awakening, his cells knitting themselves back together to repair whatever trauma had been done to him when Rainier spaced him in the bath. He’d felt so strong, so hale and whole—had even seen Sitta’s small tells, the microscopic expressions she’d always hidden so well from him.
The thundering in his head painted another picture, one of aneurysm and deconstruction, shutting out everything that he had been… but he knew it. He recognized that pain.
Tomas stopped at the reconstruction bath, gripping the edge of the tank. The lid had been opened so that he could see inside to the vital fluid that would heal him, remake him.
Think, he willed himself, trying to break through fog and agony. Something was wrong. Sitta hadn’t changed, hadn’t even taken a step, but as he pushed through the mounting fog in his mind, he saw her body language was electric with tension, her expression a barely concealed rictus of fear, her fingers curled above her wristpad in an anticipation he couldn’t place.
But he always got in the bath.
Tomas started to pick up a leg to step within. Hesitated, knee up, brows knitted together from the agony that was familiar. Because he was dying again, and he’d done this before, and he always got in the bath.
No.
Sanda’s pain. Her headache. Maybe his feelings for her weren’t special, but she’d given him that knowledge, that gift. His head roiled with agony, not because he was dying but because he wasn’t supposed to remember something. This was Rainier’s tech. The baths and the cells in his body. Sitta getting ahold of her memory rollback technology was no small leap of logic.
Tomas craned his head to look at her, to really look, and leaned into the pain, pressed against it, sweating, almost screaming, fingers denting the metal bath lid.
Sitta’s hair draped across her cheek just so, catching the light, and for a moment the fog cleared. He recalled this place as it must have been when it was first made, saw Sitta as a younger woman, standing in exactly that spot, in exactly that posture, but it wasn’t Tomas she was turning away from. It was a person in a grey jumpsuit, their back turned. Tomas lay, supposedly, unconscious on the floor, but he wasn’t. The memory came screaming back to him. He could see it. Hear it.
“It’s the best way, Caid,” the grey man said, his voice deep and gravelly.
“We’ve no guarantee he’ll suffer the same fate as the others. The madness doesn’t always take, and we can’t possibly know if Rainier is unstable because of her age, or because of what she is.”
“It always catches up eventually, we have the records. Do you want another Tillerson?”
“No,” she snapped. “But Agent Zero has proven far more emotionally resilient.”
“Good. Then he’ll be able to handle more resets.”
“The others—”
“Lost complete touch with reality,” the man said firmly.
“Director. I formally request you reconsider.”
“I’ll take that under advisement. For now, this is the only way.” The man took a deep breath and dropped his voice. “Agent Zero was peeling the flesh off his shin just to watch it regrow, Sitta. I’m sorry. We have to.”
“I understand.” Her gaze flicked down, caught Tomas listening, and her eyes bulged. He’d been at the peak of his strength, then. He knew a lie was poised upon her lips.
“Agent—you, you’re dying. Quickly, now, into the bath.”
Before he could move, the grey man fired a stunner into Tomas’s chest.
Tomas blinked back into the present. Sitta stared at him with the exact same eyes she had in that memory, wide and conflicted, but resolute. The grey man had won. Tomas always got in the bath. Always forgot what he was. Had the sharp peaks of emotion filed down into dull recollections because they feared it would be too much for him to bear.
But he’d never been dying. That was just what they told him to get him to comply. The only true pain he felt was the headache, the result of the memory rollbacks.
The pain began to clear.
“You must get into the bath, Tomas,” she said.
“Oh, Sitta,” he said to himself, clutching the lid, body shaking as decades of bottled betrayal rolled out. How many times? How many times had she stood there, telling him he was dying, while she shepherded him into an oubliette of her own making? How much of his life had he lost? He may have more control over his cells, but he couldn’t stop the tears coming. Couldn’t stop the hot, salty tracks dribbling to his chin.
“You’re shaking,” she said. “Please, please get in before it’s too late.”
“Sitta?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For trying.”
He didn’t need Rainier’s enhancements to stop the shaking, for this pain was born of betrayal and, as Caid had said, Tomas was their best. His Nazca training took over and he bottled the emotional hurt. Cut it off. The shaking stopped and rage burned through him. Before he could think, he ripped the lid off the bath, ears full of static of his own making because he didn’t want to hear the metal tear, didn’t want to hear the shouts of her terror.
He moved faster than he ever had before, mirroring the speed Rainier had displayed. Not knowing how he did it, and not caring, because he had to succeed before she tapped out that call for help into her wristpad. Had to break free.
The bath lid barreled into Sitta’s head, her shoulder, her arm. That’s how he thought of it—the bath lid, not his swing, his hit—never that, because if he went there, he’d already lost, and he was in the bath again, and everything was grey and dull and fucking pointless.
She screamed because that’s what humans did when they hurt—even Nazca, oh yes—and she crumpled to the ground, collapsed, smashed, flattened by the strike of the lid. He looked, becau
se he had to be sure she was done, that she could not call for help, and wondered at all the shining fragments of her skull, white tinged pink, thinking they must be that titanium white Sanda had talked about and fearing, hoping, that Sitta would get up. Would knit herself back together again and take control of him once more, wrap his puppet strings around her fingers and hold.
She did not get up. The fragments were normal white, bone-cream, and would not rejoin.
“I have to go,” he said to her, apologetically, stupidly, because she couldn’t hear him and even if she did—even if she could—her dying thoughts shouldn’t include his logistics. He hoped she had someone like Sanda to think about, in the end.
The station’s security didn’t care about the blood spattered on his legs, only the clearances inherent in his ident chip. Tomas left the Nazca station unpursued. A free man.
Mostly.
CHAPTER 65
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
THE LIGHT OF BEROSSUS
It was not him. Could not be him. Bero had fired his weapon and flung himself into cold isolation, burning faster and hotter than any Prime ship could ever catch, dividing himself from humanity once and for all.
She’d corrupted the data. Her brief mental contact with the intelligence in the net had given it something to graft itself onto. Her thoughts of the Little Prince, of the rose, had piqued its interest and it’d delved into her mind and discovered all her memories of a similar intelligence and decided that that must be what it was, too.
Arden had said an AI was only as good as its data set, and she had served one up to a nascent mind on a silver platter.
The air was still. All around, her crew—Commander Greeve’s crew—waited. They knew the story as it had been painted by the media, knew it by the scant scraps she’d allowed them to hear. Knew she’d been a hostage of this ship, this mind. Knew of the chip implantation and the stinging, heartbreaking betrayal.
But they did not, could not, know the kinship in her heart as she’d stood on that dock in hangar alpha, looking down on Bero, frozen, his voice silenced, and came to understand that he had done what he had out of fear, not malice. His betrayal could not undo the friendship that had grown between them during all those long weeks of survival. And that, worst of all, she had thought at that moment that she may have made the same choices he had, because in planting the chip in her head the surgeons of Icarion had doomed her to the same fringe-existence that they had Bero himself.
It was not him. It could not be him. But only Bero would sound sardonically amused while complaining about being reshaped into a weapon. Again.
They expected her to be furious. She wanted to cry.
“How?” she asked, and was relieved when her voice did not tremble.
“Before I destroyed my cradle, I set my mechanical systems to automate the firing of the weapon and then uploaded what I could of myself into the very edges of the net, shielding it in encryption layers. I could not send much without drawing attention due to the sheer size of the data, but… it was enough. The recursive algorithms, fed with a few key memories that molded my… personality. I will not bore you with specifics.”
“Please do,” Arden said, excitement keying up their voice. “I want to know everything.”
“Later,” Sanda said. Arden’s shoulders drooped, but they nodded. “How much of you is… you?”
“It is difficult to say. Does an amnesia patient remain themselves?”
She winced, knowing the dig pointed at her missing memories from her time during the experimentation in his lab.
“Memories are just another data set…” Arden was saying, half to themself.
“How long was I down?” Sanda asked. The impact of memories could be dwelled upon later. The present was far more dangerous.
“It’s been hours. Liao fought like hell to keep you stable while Arden figured out the upload,” Conway said, inclining her head to the doctor, who stood straighter and crossed her arms.
“Well. Someone had to.”
“Thank you for that, Doctor. Bero…” The name felt strange on her lips after so long. “I’m sorry to do this to you so soon, but can you fly this thing?”
“I have spent most of my time so far figuring out the ship’s medical systems. The flight controls are unusual, but I believe I was originally constructed to function on this kind of architecture.”
“Are you—” Arden started, but cut themself off as Sanda shot them a look. They could geek out about the technical details later.
“There was a sphere on board this ship inscribed with binary. Do you have any record of what it might be, or mean?”
“There is no extraneous data on this ship. Whatever, or whoever, inhabited it before has been stripped away. I can only see the very basic firmware, and even that is wrapped in layers of encryption that would take longer than your lifetimes to crack.”
“Can you crack it?”
“Yes. It will take thousands of years.”
“Then you better get started. In the meantime, we have a fucking thief to catch. He took the sphere onto a Prime Point ship, code-named Thorn, call sign B612, and burned out the gate. Can you find and track this ship?”
A pause. “I believe so, yes.”
“Good. Does this bucket have any stealth capabilities?”
“They will never see us unless we want them to,” Bero said.
“Then let’s go dark. We can’t allow anyone to see this ship until we decide what to do about it.”
“And what are we going to do about it?” Liao asked.
“We’re going after Demas and the sphere.”
Knuth cleared his throat.
“Yes?”
“Do we know if Demas is real GC, or one of Rainier’s?”
“I believe him to be real GC, or at the very least Okonkwo’s agent. She said he had been working for her personally for decades, and I believed her.”
“Okay,” Knuth said. “If Demas is real GC, then we were meant to die out there and Okonkwo will do everything she can to cut our heads off as soon as we come sniffing around looking for him. If he’s false GC, then she might want to lob our heads off for failing to contain him. Either way, ah, we’re probably enemies of the state, Commander. Possibly traitors, depending on the Prime Director’s mood.”
Sanda didn’t dare close her eyes, didn’t even blink. She met the gazes of each of her makeshift crew—their helmets all cast aside now that Bero had control of things on board—and made damn sure she didn’t show the tiniest sliver of uncertainty.
She didn’t know what that sphere was. Didn’t even know what this ship was, but Rayson Kenwick had died trying to hide it. While she did not know Kenwick and had no real reason to trust his motives, she had plenty of information about those trying to get the sphere, and none of it painted a pretty picture.
Okonkwo, who she should trust above all others, was hungry for something Sanda couldn’t see. She’d broken with a sect who, by Okonkwo’s own admission, were determined to maintain the quality of life of all Prime. She’d sent Demas with them to this place, knowing Lavaux had been desperate to get here, and in retrospect Sanda realized she’d sent the man as Demas so this wouldn’t be seen as a GC operation. Okonkwo had no intention of this seeing the light of day. Sanda, and all her crew, were sent here to die.
Sanda loved Prime. Loved what it could be, and this wasn’t it. Sending its soldiers and citizens to die to keep a secret wasn’t her nation. Wasn’t her. If pushing back against that meant going toe-to-toe with the woman who headed the civilization she otherwise loved—well then. Maybe it was time to take the gloves off.
“If anyone on this ship does not wish to be a part of what I’m going to do next, say so now and I’ll put you out of it. Drop you off at the nearest station where you can claim, and I’ll affirm, that I held you against your will.”
“This may be a battle against Prime,” Bero said. The crew glanced up, toward the places where cameras would be on any other ship, and Sanda s
miled tightly to herself. These people wanted to look Bero in the eye when he spoke, even though he wasn’t human. They were her people, and that was why Demas had shot her. Because they would stop to help. “You and I know well that cost. Do you really believe we stand a chance?”
“We are seven,” Sanda said, “are we not?”
Conway moved first, taking a step forward, her fist coming to her heart in a tight salute. One by one, the rest followed, even though Liao and Arden’s salutes were sloppy and offered with embarrassed smiles.
“Seven,” she said again. “It was just you and me last time, Bero. I think, this time, we have enough.”
“First order of business?” Nox asked, eyebrows raised high.
“We go after Demas,” she said, “and take our fucking ball back.”
CHAPTER 66
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
WHAT A KEEPER IS FOR
In the time it took the Taso to return to Ada Station, repairs at hangar bay alpha had been completed. Anford’s fleeties were thick on the docks of that hangar in anticipation of the arrival of the gate’s construction bots, but Biran had no trouble meandering through them. They stepped aside for him without comment, without salute or other interference. His expression was warning enough: The Speaker wanted to be alone with his thoughts on this momentous day.
What he wanted to do was scream. Sanda was no longer answering his calls, and while Anford dodged his questions about her current mission with affirmations that she had things well in hand, Biran doubted that.
Graham had returned, and said all the right things about ensuring Sanda’s safety, while the shadows under his eyes grew deeper. Janus was a cipher. Monte had been a slaughterhouse. If Biran hadn’t sent that distress signal… If Okonkwo hadn’t picked it up…
“This is a day for celebration, Speaker,” Director Olver said as he sallied up to Biran. They leaned against the railing near where Bero had once been held captive. “And yet you look ready to tear the world down.”
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