by Nick Cole
“So Dragon gets wind that most of the prisoners in the next tribal province over are being moved deeper into hostile territory and that any window of the Legion being close enough to extract them and get them back to our lines is closing. So he goes for it. All on his own. Executes a raid after a three-day march deep into a territory swarming with Red Bands. If half the stories are true about what he did to the dobies, then he’s not so much a legend as a nightmare.
“Anyway, at oh-dark-nothing he hits the camp hard, again, all by himself, and the doros think it’s a whole battalion of legionnaires coming through the wire to get their buddies out. Except it’s just him. And get this: according to Chappy, he wasn’t even using a blaster. Not until later. Not until it got real hot. Nah, he’s in and among them and carving them up with a knife. Moving like a ghost. He’s even using a—and I kid you not here—a bow and some arrows.
“Within a few minutes, the dog-men are shooting at each other. So. Dragon gets Chappy and three others out of there. All of them are half-starved, but somehow he gets them down the mountain in what turned out to be an all-night running gunfight in the jungle. How many, Chappy?”
Chappy studies the blaster he’s been cleaning. Or at least it looks like he’s studying the weapon. There’s a faraway look in the operator’s eyes. Rechs guesses that Chappy is somewhere—somewhen—else.
“Two, maybe two-fifty that night. Can’t take credit for but a few, myself. We was all but useless by then.”
And that’s all Chappy says about being a prisoner of war for two months and then a long night of death coming down the side of a steep jungle mountain pursued by vicious caninoids baying for his death. As if anything else that happened in those mist-shrouded highlands was beyond the ken of words to convey.
“Long story short, General,” continues Doc, “the Dragon is the target. That’s who the House has everyone chasing down. Crimes against humanity, supposedly. That’s why Chappy and I are here, and everyone else is somewhere else. Because the Dragon the House is describing, the HVT that they want more than any other… that ain’t the Dragon Chappy says pulled him out of that lice-infested jungle hellhole. And if Chappy says the Dragon is square, then he’s square. And we aren’t tracking him down.”
“Nope,” mumbles Chappy to himself quietly as he stands and racks his blaster. He returns to Rechs and Doc. “Not gonna happen.”
[redacted]
To: [redacted]
From: [redacted]
Re: Letter of Reprimand for Operator 901, codename [redacted]
On [redacted], Operator 901 disobeyed direct orders and undertook an unauthorized mission against Allied Forces in the region of [redacted].
Immense damage was done to the ongoing indigenous diplomatic efforts within the region, and it is conceivable that Operator 901 has aided the enemy war effort by deciding for himself how that war should be prosecuted.
House of Reason officials have asked that Operator 901 be court-martialed and reduced in rank. They have further indicated the need for a five-year sentence on Herbeer to dissuade other members of the Phoenix program from conducting operations that are at cross-purposes with the House of Reason’s goals.
I, Legion Lieutenant General [redacted], having the sole prerogative in this matter, have declined the House of Reason’s request and instead am issuing this letter of reprimand as a written warning for Operator 901’s offenses.
As none of this can ever enter the official record, both parties have decided that this letter will serve as the only record of this incident.
[redacted]
Project Phoenix
12
Rechs had time to think on the long walk back to the Crow. To decide what should come next. To search his head and try to put the long unused pieces together. With its gathering gloom, its rusting bits of metal singing in the strange breezes, this salvage waste seemed made for contemplation.
In a way, Rechs’s mind was like this place. The wrecks of two thousand years of galactic travel, spreading away in every direction like some cosmic car crash that never seemed to be finished with its destruction. Every bit of it washed and scoured by countless sandstorms.
Rechs watched as an old salvage marking pennant picked up and began to shift. There was another storm coming in.
Project Phoenix.
The Durance.
After the hell of that world, he’d been lost for two long years. Two years when the Republic, and the Legion, needed him most.
Lost on a planet called Raven.
“Curse you,” muttered Rechs at himself as he approached the looming Crow among the piles of junk and wreckage. The coming storm was already sweeping lost bits of paper and trash this way and that. The old metal creaked and keened in the breezes that whipped frenetically along the worn paths.
“Everything is just a picture.”
A picture of a field of ravens and children, thin, dark, and strong. Streaking out through a forest in the rain on a gloomy afternoon. Causing those ravens to suddenly take flight. Except they weren’t ravens. The birds were indigenous to that world. Like ravens, but with larger wings. And their eyes… almost intelligent. Almost knowing.
That was the image of Raven.
And when he thought about the Durance…
That was one of the few places Rechs didn’t like to think about much. But the Durance, and his absence from the galactic scene… that was the reason for Phoenix.
For the children.
The landing lights of the Crow were on, made misty by the flying grit of the storm and turned yellow by the tired atmosphere of the place. They beckoned Rechs to the boarding ramp of an old freighter that had gone far across the reaches of the galaxy. It had not been his only ship. He’d had others. He thought he could still remember most of them.
Rechs climbed the ramp, feeling tired but knowing he wasn’t. It was just the memories of old times best left forgotten. Coming to stand around him like mourners at a grave. Coming to remind him how truly ancient he was despite all the outward evidence to the contrary. Coming to taunt him with the concept of time passing faster than anyone ever thinks it will.
That was why he felt tired.
The memories.
He shrugged out of his armor and told Lyra to start pre-flight.
“Is something wrong… Tyrus?” she asked. Not merely as the ship, but almost as the girl he’d once known. The girl the AI was based on. The girl becoming a machine. “You seem bothered.”
How does she know?
“It’s nothing.”
He stepped into the shower and stayed there for a long time.
When he came out, the Crow’s engines were warm. He could feel them through the deck plating, through the superstructure of his ship.
“It’s nothing?” she asked, picking up the conversation as though no time had passed. She sounded disembodied, almost ethereal. Like a ghost.
Because she was.
If a ghost is a memory, then she was a ghost. Except that the AI speaking to him didn’t know that it was a ghost. Or a memory. It only knew that it existed. Like some child that can’t picture the world as any larger than the field it plays on in the afternoon. Thinking that such is the size and shape of all that the world contains.
Tyrus threw on a pair of cargo pants and a tight-fitting shirt. He’d be flying now. Making the jump to light speed. Another long one. Days in that howling darkness. And then he’d have to break into a place the galaxy didn’t know about. A place called the Graveyard.
A place of truth, where the records of what really happened lay buried.
Rechs needed the file on the Dragon. Needed to read about all the things and incidents that had made him who he was. Needed to know what had turned him into something that needed to be hunted.
Taken out?
Or…
Saved?
Or
both?
Rechs needed to know where he could find that little raven from Project Phoenix. After the Durance. On a dark planet in a lonely forest long ago. When a child had come into the forest dark and had seen Rechs watching. Standing among the trees. Watching them play their games.
A lost ball had only been his interaction with them. And only one of them at that. Rechs had picked it up and given it to the silent, large-eyed child. And then the boy had run to tell the others of his… tribe… about the man in the forest.
The man watching in the rain.
***
Graveyard 13 was what some deep inside the Galactic Republic called the lonely, nearly undetectable station out in a no-name system conveniently left off most stellar charts. But Doc had pointed Rechs in the right direction. And according to Doc, it was a place where the Republic buried the truths they didn’t like. Because even the House of Reason with their constant revisionism knew that the truth needed to be kept around somewhere… just in case it could one day be of use.
Occasionally, according to Doc, Dark Ops broke into a Graveyard to poke around for background information on ops they were supposed to pull. Ops called for by the House of Reason. It wasn’t unusual in the least for the House to want something done, but be unwilling to tell everything they knew to the people they were sending into harm’s way.
There were several Graveyards. To the extent that they were recorded on stellar charts at all, they were known by mundane monikers.
Signal Array Tk-247.
Emergency Repair Facility Alpha Nine.
BM-32904.
Sensors would have detected that these stations were unmanned. Bot-run stations that served some useless function across the reaches, byways, star lanes, and even the edges. Little would anyone realize that they were vast storehouses of a precious resource. More precious than synth. More precious than all the highly sought-after commodities that people of a hundred different socio-political elements would be glad to knife each other over on any given day.
The truth.
The Graveyards guarded the truth. The uncomfortable, and often unfortunate, truth.
Doc had pointed the way to this particular Graveyard because it was where the Project Phoenix records were stored—and thus where Rechs believed he could find information on the individual codenamed the Dragon. There was a connection there. The Dragon. Project Phoenix. Rechs knew that much. But little more.
His memory was yet another graveyard.
Doc also claimed Graveyard 13 had proven vulnerable to a certain type of infiltration. Ironically, Nether Ops considered this Graveyard one of their most secure, and had given such assurances to the House of Reason.
Graveyard 13, officially designated Tracking Station Delta-309, was hidden inside the ring of a super gas giant in an uninhabited system. Deflector shielding allowed the station to remain inside the maelstrom, swimming through a sea of cosmic dust that blocked its external communications and prevented it from being detected unless you knew exactly where it was. Once a week, the station had to surface in order to send and receive traffic requests for information from those with the proper security clearance, but otherwise it remained shrouded in the protective guardianship of the gas giant.
The station was actually little more than a massive hard drive. It consisted of three concentric hab rings and two major information and data centers constantly rotating along the rings and interlocking at random points in order to physically access some of the more secure deep core memories. In other words, the station had to physically configure itself in order to get at the more protected truths. This was thought to be an additional security feature.
The first trick, according to Doc—and there were two tricks to infiltrating Graveyard 13—was getting the station to give you clearance to land. That could be accomplished only during the weekly surfacing operation, when the station popped its broadcast array up from the ring for twenty minutes of reception. Dark Ops had planted a worm that would allow Rechs to put the station in a secure access mode, as opposed to the denial configuration it kept itself in most of the time.
The second trick was going to require G232.
“We used a repurposed THK we weren’t supposed to have,” Doc explained. “You got one of those, General?”
“I’ve got a service admin protocol bot,” said Rechs without sarcasm or irony.
Doc chuckled before realizing his former general was serious. “Then I guess that’ll have to do.”
Now Rechs was flying the approach through the ring’s dust storm. The Crow broadcast a signal that activated the worm the Dark Ops infiltration had left behind on one of its first visits. Essentially, the worm ran a maintenance failure hack that would require the station to allow outside access to attempt to fix the bogus malfunction. In this case, it created the appearance that the main gravometric compensators were falling within warning fatigue parameters, thus necessitating a system diagnostic and a repair team to make a call on the station. The AI that ran the station would assume that an automated repair report had been filed, and therefore any ship showing up broadcasting the correct credentials from Repub Navy Maintenance and Repair must be there to perform the necessary operations to restore the gravometric compensators to maximum operation.
G232 was not thrilled with his upcoming role in this. “Though I have indeed enjoyed your illegal exploits as an outlaw bounty hunter, master,” the bot began hesitantly, while Rechs was busy trying not to hit the two large asteroids he’d decided to thread the gap between, “I am quite sure I am not suited to this type of operation.”
“Rechs or Captain.”
“Ah yes… Captain. Shall I restate my concerns again using your preferred title?”
The Crow, miniature compared to the two looming asteroids that seemed hell-bent on smashing into each other, shot through the rapidly closing window. The lumbering space rocks smashed into one another, exploding in an almost slow-motion spray across the yellowish dust field.
Rechs shook his head. That was a close one. An unnecessary risk? Was he too distracted with all these thoughts about the Dragon and Phoenix?
The small station appeared ahead, its deflector shield a protective bubble against the hostile field. Rechs reached up to his overhead console and signaled the station.
The Graveyard’s AI responded immediately. “Freighter approaching Delta-309: abort course. This is a restricted access signal array station currently experiencing a Class Seven plague warning. Repeat, abort current course. Do not attempt to land at this time.”
That was the standard warning the station AI used to keep away curious travelers or salvage pirates. Not even the space brigands who were looking to prey on any one of the hundreds of thousands of automated stations the galaxy kept along the star lanes were willing to risk exposure to a Class Seven plague. That was a death sentence.
“Three-oh-nine,” replied Rechs, whose skills as an actor were non-existent, “this is a maintenance call. We understand you have some bad compensators. Repair code Blue Six. Sending our authorization to repair now.”
There was a long pause as the Crow closed in on the deflector bubble, a normally invisible shield made crystal clear within the sea of floating dust.
“You are cleared to land,” announced the AI. “Landing pad three. Warning! No biologics permitted beyond the designated landing zone. You may exit your ship only to effect necessary repairs and inspection. Please confine any biologics to the landing pad.”
“Roger that,” said Rechs, hoping he sounded as tired as he felt. He may not have been a good actor, but he knew how he should act. Like everything was routine and nothing was all that exciting. Bots and AIs liked normal typical biologic responses. Anything out of the ordinary might set off their sensors and get them asking questions or seeking permissions from predetermined authority firewalls. Sometimes that meant contacting another AI with different decision param
eter matrices; sometimes it meant consulting with a living tech in some cube light years away.
Either way, Rechs didn’t need that. He needed this to be in and out.
The AI gave a final instruction. “Have the maintenance bot ready to board the station once you touch down.”
“That’s where you come in,” Rechs said to G232, never taking his eyes off the approach to the landing pad. The Crow flew in under one of the station’s rings, currently in rotation as it moved a massive memory core to connect it to a new part of the rings. Ahead, pad three lit up, and the Crow flared, pivoted, and dropped her gears to touch down on the forbidden station.
[redacted]
From:[redacted]
To:[redacted]
Cc:[redacted]
Subject: News on what’s got [redacted] so sick.
Hey [redacted],
Just a quick note to fill you in on what the docs said about all those guys from the project getting sick at once. Don’t worry, it’s not that bad. But it isn’t good either.
Basically, the root cause of the problem, or at least this is what they’re speculating, goes back to when the project docs were trying to replicate [redacted] and they weren’t able to get everything to copy perfectly. There were some gaps, and of course we knew about those when the AIs would run simulations based on the embryo’s DNA pathing. So by splicing some [redacted] into the [redacted] they figured they’d get the same [redacted] outcome that the Savages did with [redacted]. Pretty sure you know all this, I’m just telling you because I’d forgotten some of those details from early on and I wanted to refresh. So don’t get pissy with me if I’m repeating what you already knew.
Anyway, until now it looked like it was working fine, for the most part. Specimens—especially [redacted]—were showing rapid healing and, obviously, weren’t aging once we switched on the splice. It was a good thing [redacted] pointed it out when they were going to activate the splice when the subjects were children. Can you imagine how ballistic [redacted] would have gotten if they were stuck as kids? Haha!