by Nick Webb
Oh goody. This should be fun.
Wait, there’s more—
“And if you face resistance, or fear that your numbers on board your ship are too few to successfully carry this out, you are hereby ordered to take any means necessary to neutralize your rogue captain. To any who do, we offer immediate promotion, a one-time bonus of ten times your current salary, and a permanent doubling of your salary.”
He’s basically offering bounties on the heads of anyone who sides with you. Doubled salary, promotions, bonuses, that sort of thing.
My god, we’re in the middle of a galactic war of survival against a foe from outside our universe, and our enemy is talking salary bonuses. The administrative state never rests, I suppose.
Danny chuckled in the face of his aunt’s stoicism and dry wit. Aren’t you worried?
Of course I’m worried. This changes a few things, but not important things. I need to have a talk with my crew before this hits the meta-space airwaves. Say hi to Fiona for me, I’ve got to go.
Roger that, Aunt Shelby. Let us know next steps. We’ll keep our eyes on Talus and Oppenheimer as best we ca—
“. . . and the reward is tripled for the officer who turns over renegade Captain Tim Granger. Not only that, but the hero that turns him in will also find himself in possession of the grandest oceanside estate on New Dublin, owned free and clear, with no taxes, in perpetuity. And furthermore, whichever ship Granger is usurping will fall under the command of this hero, who will be promoted to captain from whatever rank they currently are. This applies to enlisted as well. Good day.”
My God, Aunt Shelby, he sounds like a used car dealer.
How so?
But wait! There’s more! Act now and you qualify for ten easy payments of twenty-nine-ninety-nine, and we’ll throw in a brand new coffee maker!
What are you talking about?
Talus. He just upped the ante on Granger. Offering a whole bunch of incentives to anyone that turns him in, from an oceanside estate to being captain of their own ship. Open to enlisted too. Imagine your galley chef taking over the Defiance.
He could almost hear her sigh in his head. Luckily Tim’s lightyears from any IDF ship. I hope. Didn’t exactly say where Vestige HQ was. Well, let’s hope the galley chef has a better memory than old Tim. We still know next to nothing about the Findiri and the Quiassi, and they’re right in front of us. Dammit, we need answers. That’s your mission Danny. Get me some answers. Asap.
On it, Auntie.
CHAPTER THREE
Irigoyen Sector
San Martin
Ciudad Libertador
“Sir, I must say again, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be flying down there with just a kid you only barely met a few days ago, in an old corvette that couldn’t outrun the slowest destroyer in IDF.”
Lieutenant Commander Tim Rice’s face looked almost comically young for someone complaining about Granger entrusting his safety to a kid.
“You’re practically the same age, son, so knock it off.”
“Still—”
“Are you going to lodge a formal protest with IDF command? Yeah, didn’t think so. Imagine how Oppenheimer responds to that one.”
Rice shook his head. “We’ve been through this, sir. Your memory is still unstable, and we just got that news about the bounty on your head—”
“How big was it again?”
The worrywart shrugged. “I don’t know, ten-fold salary bonus? A ten-million-coin beachfront estate?”
“I’ll be impressed when it’s a billion. Cut the crap, Commander. The Findiri rule Earth. The Swarm is back. Rules are out the window.”
“This isn’t a rule, sir. It’s common sense.”
Granger chuckled. “Common sense is for the common, son. I hope you have better sense than merely common. You’re going to need it to stay alive in the coming weeks.”
Rice sighed, clearly knowing his arguing was hopeless. At least the kid had the balls to argue with the Legend. The Hero of Earth. He shuddered thinking that term to himself. Damn Grangerites. “Very well, sir. Just please be careful. And take your meds.”
“Yes, Mom.” Granger held his thumb above the terminate transmission button. “You have your orders, Defiance. Get out a hundred thousand kilometers from San Martin and engage the stealth. Standby for emergency extraction, otherwise meet you at the rendezvous point. Granger out.”
From ahead of him in the cockpit Jasper snorted. “You let all your officers talk to you like that?”
“Like I said, kid, rules are out the window. When we’re safe again we’ll have the luxury of etiquette. What’s our progress?” He glanced out a viewport to see that they’d entered the atmosphere.
“Another few minutes to Ciudad Libertador, and the Vestige landing pad there.”
“Private landing pad? What’s up with that? I thought the UE aviation and space commission—”
“San Martin is a GPC world, sir, and UE only has nominal control, governing in name only. You’ll see that the GPC is a little more . . . freewheeling than UE. Everyone and their dog has a landing pad.”
Granger shook his head. “Lot’s changed in thirty years. Ain’t no GPC around when I was a young buck of the tender age of sixty-eight.”
“I imagine lots has changed in a few billion years too.”
Granger fell silent at that. It was such an odd feeling, straining under the weight and burden of billions of years of existence, and yet remembering next to nothing of it all. Just images of things, people, and events he had no context for, some of which he wasn’t even sure were his own memories. But one face—one face stuck out to him. Especially since he just saw it again on the wall of the office in Vestige’s Bern HQ.
Reah. He’d forgotten about her. For billions of years, it felt like. But seeing her face in that photograph brought it all rushing back. Their brief, passionate affair. Her asking him to stay. Him kissing her goodbye that final time, saying that he was already married. To his ship. A goddamn ship.
“Sorry, sir,” said Jasper.
“For what?”
“I forgot old people hate age jokes.”
“Who the hell are you calling old?”
“Dammit.” In the past few days, Jasper had transitioned from an awestruck twenty-something to something of a jokester, treating him almost like family. It felt nice, actually. To be treated like a human again, after so many long eons of time. “Hold on, about to land.”
The kid could land a corvette admirably well, and within a few minutes they were walking off the pad and into the building Jasper said was Vestige’s headquarters off Earth. It was actually an office building that appeared to house a think tank, but that was just a front, and a way to place Vestige members across all levels of society, should the need arise, at least according to Jasper.
Given the size of the building—it was easily twenty stories tall—it was surprising to him how deserted the place was. He supposed that was by design, as a secret society becomes less and less secret the more people are in it.
But behind a desk in a nondescript office, seated in the chair, patiently waiting for him, was the biggest surprise.
“Captain Granger,” said the old, handsome, white-haired man waiting for him, his hands folded neatly on the desk. “I’ve been waiting for you to come out of that damned black hole for thirty years. Welcome home, sir.”
“Lieutenant . . . Diaz?” Granger stuttered, hoping he remembered the name. The face he remembered clearly. The assistant XO aboard the Constitution, and then the Warrior. The man who kept the ship running when Shelby was off doing her Swarm matter research down in her lab.
“Rear Admiral, actually. And retired. Once Shelby stepped down and Oppenheimer took over, well, let’s just say me and that little asshole didn’t see eye to eye, and my Montana cabin looked a lot more relaxing than getting an earful every other day from our favorite former comrade.”
“You look well,” said Granger, extending a hand.
&nb
sp; Diaz shook it with both of his. “Glad to hear, considering I haven’t slept a wink since Britannia—”
At the mention of Britannia Granger winced, and Diaz could see. “I’m sorry. I know that’s probably a sore subject for you.”
“It is for all of us.”
Diaz nodded, and bowed his head. “Unthinkable. It’s been two months, and I think I’m still in denial about it.” He looked back up. “But what’s done is done and in the past. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. Namely, the Findiri, the Quiassi, and the Swarm, and figuring out how to stop all of them before dinner.”
“The question is, are they even beatable?” said Granger.
“Hard to say. But from everything I’ve read that you left us, you had a plan up your sleeve.”
“I left you? My god,” he rubbed his brow. “Look, Diaz, this is all so . . .” He trailed off. Disorienting was what it was.
“I know. It must be hard. I’ve been told most of your memory is gone. Perhaps we can help you.”
Jasper pulled a chair over to him, and he gratefully took it and sat. “Well, for starters, I don’t even remember your first name.”
“Joachin.”
“Joachin,” repeated Granger. “Lieutenant Joachin Diaz. Yes. I think that rings a bell. Lieutenant Joachin Diaz. No, Admiral Joachin Diaz. Congratulations, by the way. Wish I could have been there to see you in action.”
“In a way, you were. Ever since I joined Vestige, I’ve been studying everything there is to know about you, Tim. When I took over about ten years ago from the last Warden, well, let’s just say that I was the first Warden to actually know you. I mean, ever since the very first Warden.”
“And when was the first Warden alive?”
Diaz looked up at the ceiling and around at the walls of the office. “Died around eleven ninety. Right in Bern, Switzerland. Our HQ there used to be an abbey. Warden Andros was a monk, and right under the Friary’s noses converted the abbey into Vestige’s base. And since him, Warden after Warden has kept Vestige secret from broader society, and even infiltrated many other organizations. The Knights Templar had a few Vestige members. Masons. Illuminati. Order of the Golden Fleece. Several European courts. Hell, Thomas Jefferson was drinking buddies with the twenty-seventh Warden when he was ambassador to France. We came pretty damn close to being wiped out, too, during the reformation. But we survived. Long enough to be prepared for this moment. The moment you returned.”
Granger rubbed his eyes and forehead. “Joachin. What the hell is Vestige?”
“According to what Warden Resnick told me when I joined, you started it as a failsafe. Like a plan B, for when the Findiri and Quiassi started rising up again after the Swarm’s final defeat.”
“So at least I planned on defeating the Swarm, if I was giving a thought to what would happen after.”
“Indeed. Back during the recent trouble there was despair all around that we’d fail, that the Swarm would win.” He grinned. “But not here at Vestige. We knew you’d come out the other end.” The grin faded. “But what comes after? That, I’m afraid, we have far less confidence in.”
“I— I have so many questions,” said Granger. “I don’t even know where to begin.” So many details didn’t seem like they added up. At any moment he half expected the walls to drop away to reveal a live studio audience of a prank show on one of the entertainment networks.
“I have a few answers.” Diaz opened a drawer and pulled out an envelope. “Not many, but some. And I have my own questions for you. I imagine in time you’ll be able to answer them.” He opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was a page of handwritten notes, like bullet points. “Sorry, this is just to keep a senile like me on task. My predecessor made me memorize some things to tell you. I wrote it down just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“My death—we didn’t know which worlds the Swarm would strike. San Martin came damn close to being slagged at one point. Ahem,” he put his reading glasses on. “Number one. You’ve got that little sphere that Jasper gave you?”
“Yeah. Looks remarkably similar to the memory core that Shelby used to bring me back.”
“It is. And you’re going to have to use the equipment back in that same room on the Skiohra ship if you want to access its contents.”
Great. “I have to go back to the Skiohra? They’re not exactly social butterflies these days. Their homeworld is basically off-limits to anyone but Skiohra, on pain of blowing up.”
“I’m just the messenger, Tim. Number two. That memory core is going to be useful in restoring part of your memory, but only to a point. There’s only so much of thirteen billion years of the universe’s history you can cram into a human brain. There’s highlights, broad brushstrokes, that’s it. Very little situational memory, rather like an index, or a table of contents, if you will. It will be helpful, sure, but it is not the solution you think it is.”
“Okay. How do I fill in the details?”
Diaz shrugged. “From what I understand, you don’t.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I mean, would you want thirteen billion years worth of memories? I mix up the names of my grandkids all the damn time. Times that by a few billion.”
“Fair point,” said Granger. “Okay, next?”
“Three. Some of the exact memories are rather critical to stopping the Findiri. But you couldn’t risk them falling into their hands before you could retrieve them. So you left yourself—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know about the manuscripts.”
Diaz’s eyebrows perked up. “Oh?”
“Ran into one on a planet called IXF something-rather in the Poincaré sector. Some kind of copy of the Voynich Manuscript, right?”
“Right. There are three more. You need all of them to unlock the cipher—it’s encrypted, obviously. And you placed each with a different race.”
Granger rubbed his forehead. “See, this is what makes no sense to me at all. Why was this even necessary? I came back as that ship. The old ISS Victory. Fused into its computer system somehow. My memory seemed fine then. And before that? We’re piecing together here that I was on Earth in the middle ages, supposedly as myself in a good old fashioned human body. Again, presumably, with a fairly decent memory. And now? I’m a wreck. What gives? What the hell was I thinking? Why go through all this?”
Diaz nodded along. “I wish I had more answers for you. I admit, it makes little sense.”
“Try none.”
“I’m sure you had your reasons, Tim. Damn good ones given that the survival of our species is at stake.”
Granger was silent for what felt like a long time. When he was reincarnated in that room on the Skiohra ship, he’d been so sure. Confident. He knew, somehow, that the path he was on, that the plan he’d made, was a good one. Few memories of the details of the plan—apparently by design, for whatever reason—but he was confident.
Now? He was a fucking wreck.
“And Vestige is yours, Tim. And, believe it or not, the Grangerites. You’d be surprised at the amount of organiz—”
He held his hands up. “Now wait just a damn minute. Let’s be clear here. I want nothing, nothing, to do with this group of fanatics. Worshiping a human fucking being. My god, what have we come to? I want none of it. And Vestige? Great. Fun little secret society we’ve got here. Teach me the handshake later. I’ll accept the help in defeating the Swarm and the Findiri and God-knows-what-else is lurking out there just waiting to destroy us, but lead you? Join you? Do anything more than just accept some temporary assistance to save the world again? Fat fucking chance. I feel like I deserve a retirement. Maybe even a nice death. Permanent this time.”
Diaz looked stunned into silence.
Jasper was looking at him. Very intensely. “They said you were a gruff, crotchety asshole. Damn. They weren’t kidding, were they?”
He should have blown up. Part of him wanted to. Throw a chair. Throw a punch. Instead, he chuckled. “I’m just getting
started, kid.”
Jasper smiled. “Glad I’m here to see it. They promised me. But I half didn’t believe them.”
“Who’s them?”
Jasper nodded in Diaz’s direction. “You know. Vestige. And my mom, before she died, was in Vestige, and she told me a lot. In any case, I’m just thrilled to be along for the ride and help how I can. At your service, as they say. So what’s the next step?”
“You’re asking me?”
Jasper shrugged, and stood up. “You’re the boss, boss.”
Granger glanced at Diaz, who held his hands up as if to say, he’s your problem now.
He had a decision to make.
He could give up. He could go find a nice exciting cliff to jump off. He could go lay on a beautiful beach until the tide came in.
He could fight. He could lead. He could advise. He could run. He could hide. He could get to the bottom of this whole Vestige thing. He could continue interrogating Diaz and pump him for every last detail possible. He could go back to Earth and punch Oppenheimer right in his dick. He could find the Skiohra and get this memory sphere downloaded. He could save the whole damn world, the whole of humanity, again.
But after a minute, it became clear that there was only one next step that made sense to him. At least from a sense of honor.
“We’re going to Earth.”
Both of them did a double take, Diaz’s brow furrowed up, and Jasper looking shocked. “What?” they both said, simultaneously.
“You heard me.”
“But Tim, there’s an astronomical price on your head. Even on San Martin I can’t guarantee your safety. Earth? Forget about it. And heading back there on your IDF ship? They’d have you before you even landed.”
Granger stood up and pushed his chair back to the desk. “That’s why we’re not taking my ship. We’re taking yours. I assume you have one with a q-drive?”
Diaz shrugged, but nodded. “We have several. A whole little fleet, in fact, just waiting for you to—”
“Good. Only need one.” He pointed at Jasper. “Then let’s go. Time’s a wastin’.”