by R. A. Nargi
“How was the party, JB? Did you get into any wáwás?” Lim was one of a handful of Beck Salvage employees who called me by my real name.
“Not quite my style,” I said. “The Stones played at the Wardley O2. It was a good show.”
“I can’t believe you even know who the Rolling Stones are.”
I shrugged. “Legends.”
“That’s debatable.”
I didn’t want to get into it with him. Lim’s taste in music ran in embarrassing directions. Viva Scar. Little Namatto. Boinchi. Stuff like that.
“Is he expecting me?” I motioned to my uncle’s office door, which was shut.
“He is indeed. We got a good one coming up. This could be a game changer. Big.”
Yeah, right. They’re all big jobs.
I pushed open the door and stepped into my uncle’s office. He was in the middle of a conversation on his overlay, but he motioned me to sit down.
Wallace Beck didn’t look anything like his younger brother, my father and—by virtue of some expensive genetic manipulation—me.
My uncle was a few inches shorter than me and appeared to be in his mid-40s, although that was certainly due to some conservative cosme treatments. Wallace’s biological age was 68, three years older than my father—if my father had still been alive. My uncle’s face was thick and ruddy and his eyes deep-set. They had been balanced and his nose had been sculpted, of course, which gave him a hawkish appearance. He wore his salt and pepper hair cropped close to his skull. The overall effect was that of a military general from a bygone era. A master tactician. A trusted commander of men. And a paragon of virtue.
None of which reflected the reality of Wallace Beck.
As he finished up his overlay conversation, Wallace’s eyes darted around the room tirelessly, not resting on anything in particular. Just taking everything in. Checking for disruptions in the patterns of his surroundings. I knew from experience that my uncle was a creature of habit and everything had to be just so.
Finally he ended his conversation and turned to me. “The birthday boy. Did you get my gift?”
“I did,” I lied. There were a pile of gifts stacked up in my entrance hall. I hadn’t opened any of them. “Thank you.”
“A man can always use a new jacket. Did it fit properly?”
“I haven’t tried it on yet.”
“Well, it’s from Strain & Sons. They’ll make any modifications you need.”
I didn’t say anything. Just fixed a non-committal smile on my face.
“Good, I bet you are curious about our next job.”
I remained silent. Long ago, I had realized that it was best to just let my uncle speak until he stopped.
“Close the door, will you?”
I did so.
“This very well could be Beck Salvage’s final job.” He let the words hang there, expecting me to react.
I kept still. Eyes ahead. Interested but not giving anything away.
“The Shima have come to us,” he said. “Finally.”
I leaned back in my chair. The Shima were a humanoid race with a long history. Very wealthy and very insular. It was surprising that they would be interested in hiring Beck Salvage. “What do they want?”
“They need us to locate a particular religious object called the Kryrk, and they are willing to pay a lot for it.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Let’s just say that our fee from this one job would exceed what the company has earned from commissions over the past decade. Combined.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why so much? And why us? We have no history with the Shima. No one does.”
“That’s true enough,” Wallace said. “But we do have a particular advantage in this situation. One that the Shima are willing to pay dearly for.”
“Which is?”
“The place where they believe the Kryrk is located…we’ve been there before.”
I wracked my brain. Beck Salvage normally completed a dozen jobs a year. All over the galaxy. The company had been to hundreds of different star systems. Off the top of my head I couldn’t connect any to the Shima.
“They want us to go back into the Fountain.”
His words hit me like a punch to the gut. The Fountain. That was where my father had died.
The Fountain was an astronomical anomaly. The Empire’s scientists didn’t understand its exact nature. The best description that anyone could come up with was a traversable wormhole held open by negative mass cosmic strings. But that wasn’t completely correct. It was a portal through dark space that led to the Hodierna galaxy—but only every once in a while. The last time it opened, my father headed up a seven-person mission to retrieve the Tabarroh Crystal for the Dodelan Alliance. Only six of our crew made it out alive. And my father wasn’t one of them.
Wallace quickly controlled the situation, locking down information flow, and spiriting me to Tor-Betree spaceport where I posed as a seriously-injured Sean Beck.
And that was the beginning of a seven-year deception.
Appearance-wise, my father and I were nearly identical—thanks to some heavy-handed DNA manipulation. Although I was biologically thirty-two years younger than him, my father underwent regular cosme treatments. To me—and the rest of the galaxy—Sean Beck was eternally thirty-something years old.
The challenge had been in aging my appearance, but my cousin Gemma was somewhat of a prodigy when it came to that sort of thing. Between her facial artistry and interminable sessions at the gym that bulked me up, I was able to pass for my father within a year. The bigger effort was learning to speak like him.
Beyond his speech patterns and vocabulary, I basically had to learn everything he knew. At least well enough to fake it at meetings. That was a lot more difficult, of course, but Wallace seemed up for the challenge. He hired a small army of information scientists to collect and organize a mountain of data: personal history, missions, general knowledge, interpersonal relationships—basically everything needed to recreate my father’s life.
I had to learn it all. And I hated every minute of it. But I had no choice. If I didn’t cooperate with my uncle’s plans, I’d be cut off. Completely and utterly.
At first I called his bluff. From an estate standpoint, I couldn’t believe that my father wouldn’t provide for his only child.
We had never been close, and I know that I disappointed him in just about every way a son could disappoint a father. But Sean Beck was a man of tradition. And tradition mandated that some portion—even a small portion—of the Beck empire should pass to me.
So I hired my own team of attorneys and they scoured the volumes of legal documents, both personal and corporate, and then reported the sad truth back to me. There was no provision for me in my father’s will. Upon his death his personal assets and debts would be assumed by the company.
I also learned that the credits that appeared in my account every month were not from my father at all. It was Beck Salvage that provided me with my stipend. And my lawyers discovered that the company provided this stipend at will. That basically meant ‘at their own whim’ with no obligation to continue it. So they could stop it at any time. In addition, the company owned my domus, all my vehicles, including my ’57 Swallow XK hover-jet, my clothes, and basically everything else of value that I possessed.
When I confronted Wallace about this, he basically shrugged and said that it had been my father’s wish that I make my own way in life—just like he had.
But Wallace told me that he was sympathetic to my plight. He’d offer me an employment contract with a salary and even some ownership in the company.
All I needed to do was to pose as my father at a handful of sales meetings and press conferences a year. No missions. No follow-up. I’d be a well-paid figurehead to be trotted out when necessary.
So I agreed. I didn’t have any other options.
3
“Everything came together very quickly,” Wallace explained. “The Shima
had won an expedition through the Fountain when it next opened. Seventy-two hours ago they were informed by the Rhya that the opening was imminent and they needed to have a ship ready at Tor-Betree or they’d forfeit their position.”
“I still don’t understand how we came into the picture,” I said. “The Shima have their own ships and their own archaeologists. Why do they need us?”
“They won’t say, of course, but our people think that the Shima were either caught unaware or had some kind of internal breakdown. Our models had the Fountain re-opening in 2363 at the earliest. Maybe the Shima made the same assumption. Now they can’t get a ship there in time. That’s one hypothesis.”
“What’s the other—the internal breakdown?”
Wallace leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. “I don’t know. It’s just a rumor. Power struggles. They have a new chancellor. Qa’Ammit. He’s a hard-liner. Hates the Mayir even more than old Tanedj.”
“The Mayir? What do they have to do with this?”
“They won a slot as well. Along with the Faiurae. Stiff competition.”
I knew a fair amount about the Mayir Crusader party. They had roots going back several hundred years to the early 21st century’s neo-fascist “Greatness” movement. The Mayir had a disturbingly large number of supporters who all opposed egalitarianism and advocated the doctrine of human supremacy and the ejection of all non-human races from the Empire. For some reason that wasn’t entirely clear to me, they had singled out the Shima as their first target, claiming that they were “parasitic” and their presence within the Empire led to moral degradation.
I wondered if their presence had something to do with the fact that we were a Shima-backed expedition.
Wallace didn’t have the answers. But the Beck Salvage team had been scrambling.
“It’s between us and Allegro,” Wallace said. “We have our final presentation tomorrow morning at Tor-Betree. That’s where you come in.”
“Tomorrow morning? That’s not enough time to prep, you know that.”
“That’s what we’ve got, Jannigan. We’re leaving immediately. Piettow will run AL on the journey over. Gemma’s coming as well. She’ll make sure you look good for the meeting.”
“I can’t believe this.”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Believe it. We get this contract, we’re set for life. It’s what your dad would have wanted.”
It was midnight before we got to Odiaatha, the spaceport orbiting Anglad. There we boarded the company’s liner and set off towards the jump point to the Endilon system. While most of the other members of the team relaxed and had a nice drink or two, I was rushed to a stateroom that had been converted into a knowledge tank. Dr. Aman Piettow was there with a few assistants who had been set up with portable AL workstations.
I looked around the crowded room. There wasn’t even a proper cradle here. “Is this going to even work?” I asked.
“We’ll be fine,” Piettow said. “Voss ran some tests already. Almost set.”
Piettow was a tall man, a bit thin and somewhat stooped. In his mid-50s, I guessed. And he looked it. No cosme for Piettow. Not his style. The doctor was strictly a behind-the-scenes type of guy. But he knew his stuff.
Wallace had lured him away from an educational think-tank shortly after I was “hired,” and within a year Piettow had created and staffed Beck Salvage’s brand-new accelerated learning department. It was mostly to support me in my new role, so Piettow and I ended up spending a fair amount of time together.
He checked a datapad. “When was the last time you were in? April? Does that sound right?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, we’ll overlap March. Just a little. We’re only going to do high-level ambience. We don’t have time for much else. We need to get into the meat of the briefing.”
What Piettow called ‘ambience’ was topical knowledge that someone like my dad would pick up on a day-to-day basis. Some of it was work related, but a lot of it was just things like sports scores, current events, and pop culture knowledge. There was a lot of overlap with what I knew anyway, but Piettow’s data was skewed towards someone of my dad’s age, social position, and history. I didn’t give a shit about cloud polo, for example, but my dad was fascinated by it.
Instead of a cradle, I had to stretch out on the stateroom’s bed. It was comfy enough, but all the bio interfaces were a hodgepodge of fiber and cable running out of portable equipment boxes.
“Hey, Jannigan.”
I turned to see Essida, Piettow’s young assistant, a redhead with a lot of attitude. One of my favorite people at Beck Salvage.
“They dragged you out on this fire drill too, Ness?”
“I heard it was a big deal,” she said.
“It is a big deal,” Piettow said. “And we need to get started. So, Jannigan, if you please…” He motioned to the bed.
I leaned over to Essida and whispered, “Any chance I could get some whiskey or something? I know Wallace must have some Aberlochy stashed around here somewhere.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I’m not sure that would go too well with the neurocrene cocktail you’re getting, but I’ll think about it.”
“You’re no fun.” I winked at her.
Ness finished hooking me up while some of the other techs completed the diagnostics. They all worked quickly without the usual banter or chit-chatting. Even Ness seemed much more serious than usual. I could feel the tension and sense of urgency.
One of the techs used some sort of imaging device to take my body measurements. Apparently, while I was getting facts stuffed in my brain Gemma’s team would be doing some final tailoring on the outfit they had for me.
“You ready?” Piettow asked. He had a weird look on his face.
“Let’s get it over with.”
Piettow nodded to Essida, who touched a few commands on her datapad.
“Sweet dreams,” she said.
Piettow’s AL drugs always made me feel cold. Physically cold, I mean. Back at the knowledge tank at Beck Salvage headquarters, they usually cranked the heat up in the cradle for me. Here on the liner, I had to make do with a thin blanket. Still, I didn’t have to endure being chilled for too long. I was out within a few minutes.
I wish I could describe what an AL session felt like, but other than some residual memories of flashing lights and weird low sounds, I couldn’t recall much of the process. Piettow once described it to me as akin to force-feeding someone. But instead of liquid food being pumped into my gullet, liquified knowledge was being pumped into my brain.
Honestly, it could have been anything. For all I knew, Piettow was teaching me how to fold origami—or make a soufflé. I had no idea.
When I awoke, Essida administered some more drugs, including a blast of hydria, which cleared my head immediately—and then some.
“You did great,” she said. “I think we set a new record in terms of how much info you took in.”
“How much time until the meeting?” I asked.
“Two hours or so. Gemma needs at least an hour with you, so Dr. Piettow’s just going to do some spot checks real quick.” As she started unhooking me from the sensor rig, Piettow came in and started barraging me with questions. I answered everything correctly, but I’d need to work on my delivery. It’s definitely unsettling when you say something without really grasping how you know what you are talking about.
After fifteen minutes of interrogation, he pronounced me ready to go and wished me luck. Ness walked me down the hall to another stateroom where my cousin Gemma had set up her own gear.
“Dynark’s Blood!” she exclaimed when she saw me. “What’s that jungle growing on your face? Please tell me it’s fake!” She tugged at my beard.
“Oww!”
“Ugh! Into the shower with you!” She shoved me towards the bathroom. “Let’s soften it up before I hack it off.”
“Have fun!” Ness called as I disappeared into the bathroom.
“I could use a little he
lp in here,” I said.
“In your dreams!”
Even though Gemma said she’d need an hour to work on my appearance, she was done in forty-five minutes. I was shaved, my hair cut, stranded with a hint of gray, and styled. My skin was marked with some temporary and very subtle age spots, and some of my wrinkles were retouched—both on my face and hands. Finally, I was dressed in a very expensive suit that fit me perfectly.
When I looked in the mirror, I was staring at Sean Beck.
I hated what I saw, and looked away.
Gemma noticed my expression and smiled faintly. “I guess I did my job.”
“You certainly did.” Wallace stood in the doorway, looking me over. “Well done, honey. Did you check him against the aging projections?”
“Of course I did.”
“Terrific.” He took one last look at me and then motioned me to follow him. “We’re actually a little ahead of schedule, so we have time for a quick briefing session with Sainecourt. It’s all in your head, anyway. But it can’t hurt, right?”
“Whatever you say.”
“It just makes you look like you’re even more on top of things,” Wallace said.
I knew what he meant. Piettow had implanted all the pertinent information into my mind during the AL session, but it was all under the surface. A briefing session would get me thinking about the mission and bring it top-of-mind.
As we walked down the hall I caught a glimpse of a spaceport wall through a porthole.
“We docked already?” I asked.
“Yes. The Shima are coming to us. Two of them. Junior representatives of their trade council, based out of Lussix.”
“A job this big and they’re not even sending the big guns?”
“The big guns are three months away. That’s why they’re even talking to us.”
“Right.” The Shimese home world, Sekhbet, was on the far side of the galaxy, 150 light years away. Lots of hops.
Wallace led me into the liner’s conference room, finely appointed with an impressive carved lo’an table, wormcloth upholstered chairs that looked like they should be in a museum exhibit, and thick Palanese carpets that seemed to muffle all the sound in the room.