“Be with your people,” the monk said. “At peace. A warrior in life, rest now.”
Wilco’s grief turned to anger. He aimed it at Hep. “What are you doing here?”
“Me? What are you doing here?”
Noticing Wilco’s fingers tense around the handle of his sword, Mao stepped closer, within striking distance. “We came to rescue Delphyne, like we originally planned before you stole my ship.”
Wilco scanned the room. “Unsuccessfully?”
“She’s on the ship,” Hep said. “The Bucket.” He pointed the name at Wilco’s throat. “Because you stole my ship. Now, tell me what you’re doing here.”
“Came to kill Tirseer.”
“You launched a full-scale invasion of Central to kill one person?” Mao said.
“I came to kill Tirseer,” Wilco said. “Ayala came to do something else entirely.”
Mao and Hep both went rigid. “That is the second time someone mentioned her name,” Mao said. “Tell me what that means. She’s dead.”
“She isn’t,” Wilco said. “But she isn’t altogether Ayala anymore either. Like Sigurd isn’t Sigurd, and I’m not altogether me.”
Frustration tightened Mao’s throat. “That does not mean anything to me. Speak plainly.”
“There is nothing plain about any of this,” Wilco said. “If you want answers, help me get to Tirseer, and, if you’re quick enough, you can ask her your questions before I stick my sword in her throat.”
Hep and Mao consented with a silent nod. The assembled group walked over the dead bodies, tracking blood across the once-shiny floor. They reached a small lift at the far end of the massive room. One last door that would bring them to the lofted office of Maria Tirseer, her seat of power.
The door opened to a scene none of them had expected. Even Mao, a long-serving Navy captain, had never seen the control center. It was not a place where one entertained guests. To Mao’s surprise, it was nothing special at all, just a large office, complete with mundane office furniture and décor. The one thing that did surprise him was that there was no security detail, no private army of highly-trained operatives ready to cut them down. Just Tirseer, sitting at her desk.
“Welcome,” she said, her voice cold and harsh. “There are few things in this universe that can still surprise me. I must say, this is a surprise.” She pressed a button on her desk, illuminating a massive, wall-sized monitor. The screen was divided into multiple sections, each showing different areas of combat around Central, some of the space battle outside, some of the ground battle inside. “Organizing an attack on Central with a private army. Surrendering yourselves as a means of sneaking into this station. All to what, rescue a friend and kill me? So ambitious and shortsighted at the same time.”
“Satisfying nonetheless,” Wilco said, scraping the tip of his blade across the floor as he walked toward her.
“You,” Tirseer said. “You don’t surprise me. You disappoint me.”
“To no one’s surprise, I don’t much care.” Wilco raised his sword, now just feet from his goal of ramming it through Tirseer.
“To think I wouldn’t be prepared for an occasion such as this.” Tirseer shook her head. She pressed another button on her desk, and several auto-turrets emerged from previously-unseen compartments on the ceiling. “To think I wouldn’t be prepared for your treachery specifically.” She pressed another, and Wilco went rigid, as though a jolt of electricity had just shot through his body.
The others froze under the sights of the turrets.
Tirseer rose from behind her desk. She moved around the front of it at a leisurely pace, seeming to take pleasure in knowing her guests had no choice but to watch her. “What was your endgame, I wonder? Even if you killed me, which I assumed was your goal, what hope did you have of leaving here alive?”
“Maybe I didn’t,” Wilco said through clenched teeth.
Tirseer scoffed. “Please. You forget how well I’ve come to know you, Wilco. I know you’re not the sacrificial type.”
“How do you know him?” Hep said. “What did you do to him?”
“You’ve not told him?” Tirseer said. “Your closest friend?” She smirked at Wilco as she walked in front of him. “Again, I’m not surprised. People of your ilk don’t keep friends beyond necessity. Don’t confuse that for a criticism. It’s one of the few strengths you possess. But it requires intention. Throwing partners away when they could still be of use is just poor planning.”
“You’ve started all of this,” Mao said. “Everything. From the beginning. The massacre of the Rangers, starting a war with the Byers Clan, turning Sigurd into that thing. What else have you done? And why? To consolidate power?”
Tirseer walked around Wilco, fearlessly turning her back to him. The turrets ignored her when she walked into their field of fire. “I’ve done so much more. Power was never the end goal; it was a means of reaching that goal. My only goal was to fulfill the true potential of the United Systems, to establish and maintain order. Because it is only through order that we achieve peace.”
“Peace?” Mao scoffed. “You started a war.”
“I’d thought spending as much time under the command of Drummond Bayne as you had would have culled such naivety out of you, Captain Mao. Nothing of value is achieved without blood, and there is nothing of higher value than peace. I will start a multitude of wars if it means, one day, there will be no more war. Before the United Systems, the galaxy was divided between warring factions, warlords who served only themselves and fought for nothing more than keeping power. Their defeat led to a time of incredible promise and volatility. Chaos is not quelled with the signing of a treaty. It is not molded into order with a single vote. It requires shepherding.”
“And you’re that shepherd?” Mao asked.
“I am. If not for my efforts, the United Systems would have crumbled long ago. From inception, the ideology of the systems needed to be uniform. The structure was fragile. Any deviation would have set the whole experiment on fire.”
“The Rangers,” Hep said.
Tirseer stood in front of him, so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. “Yes, the Rangers. And the New Vikings. And countless other tribes and syndicates and religious orders and pirates and prideful people who would not come into the fold. Their defiance threatened everything.”
“They were free people,” Hep said. “I thought that’s why the United Systems was formed—to allow people to live freely, on their own terms.”
She laughed in his face. “Now you, you have an excuse for your ignorance. Youth. Adorable. Your definition of free is one degree shy of chaos. What you call free is anarchy, people doing whatever they please, serving themselves, no common purpose to drive them forward, no shared motivation to improve. The purpose of a united form of government, a collective, is so people can live free of fear. Mutual protection. Mutual success. Working together for the common good. Now, tell me, how did I become the villain in your story? What did I do to welcome this?” She pointed to the screens, to the carnage happening all around them.
Hep was saved the burden of responding by a sudden and unexpected chirp in his ear. “Hep, Mao, you copy?” It was Delphyne speaking into their comms. “Don’t answer, I can tell by the looks on your faces that you can hear me. I’m on the Bucket. Byrne and I hacked into Central’s closed-circuit system and set up an encrypted shortwave comm channel. We can see you and talk to you without Tirseer knowing.”
“What do you want?” Mao said.
Tirseer looked disappointed. “Have you not been listening? Order. Peace. Those are the only things that matter, and there is only one way to get them. By fighting for them.”
“She’s about to do something stupid,” Delphyne said. “You have to stop her.”
“I think that’s what they’re doing,” Hep said, pointing to syndicate forces fighting on the monitor.
Tirseer turned to look at them. “They aren’t fighting for ideals. They’re fighting because Compton Elmore
is a weak, little man who feels slighted. He didn’t have the stomach for this.”
“She’s going to order a counterattack,” Delphyne said. “The Navy has regrouped. They’re going to wipe out the syndicate.”
“And that’s bad?” Hep said.
Tirseer looked at him with a mix of pity and confusion. “Claiming to have conviction but not the backbone to act on it? I can think of nothing worse.”
“If they die, then Ayala is going to take over this station.” Delphyne’s voice was frantic.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Hep said. The quizzical expression on Tirseer’s face told him that he’d made a mistake.
“What do you mean?” She looked to be calculating something in her head. “You aren’t speaking to me, are you?” She moved closer to Hep, breathed in his ear. “You’ve an angel in your ear. Delphyne, is that you?” Delphyne cursed in Hep’s ear. “It’s a shame she couldn’t be made to see sense. She would have been an incredible asset.”
Delphyne’s voice jumped from Hep’s ear to the sound system in Tirseer’s office. “If you really think that, then you need to listen to me. You can’t launch the counterattack. Let the syndicate retreat.”
Tirseer scoffed. “Perhaps I was wrong about you. Why would I let an enemy go when I have them dead to rights?”
“Because she wants you to kill them.”
“Who?”
“Ayala.” The name rang out like a prayer in church, full of hope and fear and confusion. “She wants you to kill them. She’s seeded them all.”
“Impossible,” Tirseer said. Her confidence cracked. “Dr. Elias was never able to successfully seed one patient from another.”
“Maybe he wasn’t,” Delphyne said. “But he’s not in control anymore. Neither are you. This has gone way beyond you.”
“What are you talking about, girl?”
“I read the files on the Void. And Dr. Elias is very talkative. I pieced some things together. I know what Ayala is doing, and you’re helping her do it.”
“Don’t be idiotic,” Tirseer said. “I created Ayala. She does nothing without my—”
“She’s here,” Wilco said, straining to make his muscles move. “I didn’t break free of her. She broke me free of you.”
Tirseer’s confidence fully crumbled now. The implications of Wilco’s revelation seemed to hit her in the gut and rob her of breath. Mao and Hep watched, hoping for some sort of clarity.
“You lost control of her a long time ago,” Wilco continued.
Tirseer walked back to her desk. With the press of a button, a door slid open on the wall to her left. Through it walked Dr. Tobin Elias, escorted by the soldier who dragged him away from Hep earlier.
“Could this be true?” Tirseer asked Elias.
“There were always so many variables,” Elias said. “So many unknowns. I was basically working in the dark half the time. That’s what made it all so exciting.”
“You told me you created a failsafe,” Tirseer said.
“I did.”
“Then enact it.”
“It’s offsite, I’m afraid.” Elias didn’t seem afraid at all. He seemed to relish the uncertainty.
“Call off your troops,” Delphyne said. “You know what will happen if the Void spreads. It will swallow everything. All that you built will burn overnight.”
Whatever threat loomed over her, it pressed Tirseer into the ground. Suddenly, she was not the omnipresent threat Hep had always thought her to be. She was just afraid. She reached for a control panel on her desk. Before she could issue an order, regardless of what it was, several text boxes appeared on the monitor, one in each arena of combat. They were all confirmation that they were about to commence attack.
“What did you do?” Mao said.
Tirseer spun around and saw the messages. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t issue the order to attack. I was about to call it off.”
“It’s her,” Wilco said. “Ayala is in the system. She’s taken over.”
“That’s impossible,” Tirseer said, trying to convince herself. “We’d barely conceived of that capability in the testing phase. We were nowhere near reaching the output.”
Wilco smiled. “Like I said.” With a low moan and a high-pitched whine, the auto-turrets shut down. “You’ve lost control.”
A flash of realization lit Tirseer’s eyes, making them look like icebergs in a white sea. Then they narrowed with dread before shooting wide with pain. Wilco closed the distance between them in the blink of an eye. Hep didn’t even see him move. He only saw the black blade protruding from Tirseer’s back, shoved through her gut up to the hilt. Hep didn’t even have time to yell, to protest. Though, with a second to reflect, he wouldn’t have. Maria Tirseer needed to die.
Wilco held firm to the handle of his sword, holding Tirseer upright when all her strength had left her. With his other hand, he removed his mask. It was only the second time Hep had seen him without it since Wilco first put it on. His skin was shiny where it had been burnt in the explosion of Ore Town. What hair grew on his scalp looked like straw that had been left too long in the sun. His eyes were bloodshot. Veins of blue glowed beneath his tortured skin.
“She will erase your name from history,” Wilco said to her. “Everything you accomplished will be dismantled until it was like you were never here.”
Blood spilled from her mouth and ran down her chin, painting the bottom half of her face red. She looked like she was wearing a different version of Wilco’s mask. Of Bayne’s mask. “I fought…for…peace.”
She twitched one last time as her body gave way completely and all of her weight came down on Wilco’s sword. The blade cut up until it hit her ribcage. Maria Tirseer, manipulator, would-be despot of the United Systems, died as so many had at her hands—in agony, without dignity.
“You fought for yourself.” Wilco let her slide off the black blade and land with a thud on the floor. Those gathered formed a circle around her, looking down at her like observers in a zoo. Each had reasons for wishing her dead. Half the galaxy had reasons. She was a specter looming over them for so long, a ghost story that they always thought would end with them in prison or executed. Now, she was a mangled mess.
A flurry of activity drew their attention to the monitor. The Navy had launched its counterattack.
13
The comm channel flooded with screams and blaster fire. The sound of success. As Ayala stood on the bridge watching the chaos unfold, a memory flashed in the back of her head. A memory from her past life, when she was Admiral Ayala, Commander of the United Navy, most respected officer of the fleet.
It was the early days of her appointment, just weeks into her tenure as admiral. She was called to attend a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, the top brass whose responsibility it was to manage the security of the entire United Systems. Representatives from the civilian government, the business sector, and the military all had seats. The makeup was decided in the infancy of the United Systems. Ayala was the one who advocated that every sector be represented. She argued that only then could the systems be successful in achieving everything they fought for during the warlord campaigns.
She greeted them all when she entered the conference room, cordially enough, though she loathed these sorts of gatherings. So much pomp and formality. When it was strictly military, the proceedings clipped along at a brisk pace. The private sector loved to debate and prove how important they were.
But this meeting was different. It was not on the regular schedule, but was specially requested by Colonel Maria Tirseer, the overseer of the black ops arm of the Protectorate and Director of Central Intelligence.
She had a man with her. A squirrely-looking man who seemed to absolutely radiate arrogance.
Tirseer’s reputation had been widespread among the upper echelons of the military for years. By design, very few outside of the military knew who she was. She operated in the shadows and preferred to stay there. Standing at the head of the table, eyes on her, she seem
ed uncomfortable. Ayala took some pleasure in seeing her squirm. The two were not friendly.
“Thank you all for coming on short notice,” Tirseer said. The business folks grumbled. They resented having to leave their offices and profits. Cantor Byers was the exception. He was always the most attentive and involved among the business types. He took the most active role among them, more so than any of the civil society types even. That didn’t sit well with Ayala. She didn’t trust him. He was a philanthropist but made a big show of it. He knew how to curate his image, so Ayala never knew who he really was.
“But I think you will be glad you did,” Tirseer continued. She gestured to the squirrely man. “This is Dr. Tobin Elias, my top researcher. We’ve been working on something extraordinary and have just had a breakthrough.”
“Couldn’t you have just submitted your findings?” someone grumbled. A round of subdued laughter followed.
Tirseer cleared her throat. Her cheeks flushed red. “This is not something that gets submitted to committee to be reviewed when the time becomes available. This is something that takes priority, that will change the course of the United Systems.”
Several dismissed her claims as hyperbolic.
She cleared her throat again. “I’m not naïve enough to think you all would accept my claims without proof, but I’m confident you will be receptive once you see what we’ve accomplished. Dr. Elias, please.”
She stepped back, and Elias took her place. “Thank you all for taking the time,” he said. “You’ll be glad you did.”
Ayala instantly disliked him. He struck her as the sort of man who played at humility well when it suited him.
Elias launched into his pitch. “The single greatest impediment we face in securing the continued safety and stability of the United Systems is distance. The worlds under our influence are spread lightyears apart. Central is nowhere near the center, despite its moniker. And our sphere of influence is only going to increase with further exploration of the Deep Black. Managing all of the space will prove increasingly problematic. There are already reports of rising pirate activity in the outer reaches.”
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 65