by Jack Colrain
“How long will that take?” Daniel asked.
“Oh, I should say ten minutes or so,” Wilson said confidently. “Call it a maximum of fifteen, if you’d like to factor in a safety margin.”
“I would.” Daniel thought for a moment. “Can we hole up in here for that time, and then all go through the gateway?”
Wilson’s hesitation was most of the answer Daniel needed, but he let Wilson continue and give him the rest. “Mostly, but not quite. The gate here in the research facility will be inoperable. Furthermore, we can’t run the program or override the safety protocols remotely. Someone needs to stay in the facility to work the computer. And, frankly, I’d much rather do that than murder untold billions of sentient lifeforms.”
Daniel sighed. “I’m guessing the Gresians won’t be happy about letting us do that.”
“I would presume not.”
“OK...” Daniel thought of Hope, without thinking to her, though he was sorely tempted. He had wondered many times which meeting, which glance, might be their last, and now he was beginning to realize, with his heart’s heaviness pulling it down into strange depths, that maybe the only way to settle the question was to make the decision himself. He looked around the remaining Hardcases, nodding half to himself. “We should make use of the gateway first,” he said at last.
“I agree,” Wilson said briskly. “Certainly, Lieutenant Torres, at the very least, should be removed to safety since, like myself, she doesn’t wear an Exo-suit.”
“Ideally, I want to send everybody through. Bring what’s left of my team home.”
“So do I.” Wilson allowed himself a crooked smile. “Myself excepted, of course. I can’t kill the gateway system from Earth. Only from here. So, I’m afraid I must stay. And you should take your people home.” Daniel couldn’t fault the man this time, nor deny his courage.
“It’d still be more efficient to complete our orders, Wilson.”
Wilson merely replied, “Yes it would.”
“Daniel,” Lizzie said, having to repeat herself a couple of times to draw his attention. “Wilson may be more of a douche than you are, but he’s not wrong about this. Genocide is not necessary.”
“I’ve been fighting them so long—”
“A couple of years, Daniel. I’ve been fighting them for two and a half thousand years…. If you won’t take it from Wilson, will you take it from me? He has a point. You don’t need to commit genocide.”
“You’re the one who was programmed to do exactly that!”
“Yes, I was programmed to do that. You were not. And if I, who was designed and programmed to do it, can see that it’s not necessary, then why can’t you, who were never programmed to wipe out an intelligent species?”
Daniel could feel an itch on his shoulder, as if something was crawling there, but he didn’t have to feel around with his hand to see if it was some local bug under his digies. What was crawling on his right deltoid was a date: 11/23/01. The date his sister Elizabeth had been killed in a school shooting.
The tattoo had been turning to gooseflesh since the moment he’d recognized the Gresian cubs and teacher. Since he’d known that he’d killed who-knew-how-many others already when he’d brought the tower down.
He shivered involuntarily, knowing he should just say ‘flip the kill-switch’ and remaining unable to form the words. He could hear Wilson’s heartbeat, the sounds of the machinery all around, and the yells and sounds of battle from above. The shooting and explosions showed no sign of stopping. There was only one right thing to say, he knew.
“Break the gates.”
Twenty-Six
Shaldine Gateway, Firebird.
“Hardcases, this is Gre— This is Daniel,” he said. “Set up the last claymores and nanocharges at the choke points, and fall back to gateway room via the lab. I repeat, fall back to the gateway room via the lab. We’re leaving this planet.”
Doug closed his eyes, and a set of symbols appeared hanging in the air in front of him. Images flashed past until one froze that Daniel recognized instantly: a display of Earth’s Solar system.
The team began to rush into the room as a strangely unreal gray disc popped into being in the center of the room, opposite the huge array of mechanisms. Bailey skidded to a halt, eyes wide. “Whoa, what the hell is that?”
“That, Superman, is a gateway to Earth,” Daniel said. “Time to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Sounds good to me. It’ll be good to be back at the Farm, right?”
“It would be, yeah.” Daniel paused, and saw their faces fall. “Look, the gateway’s open, and you’re all going through it. That’s non-negotiable, a direct order.”
“We’re going home?” Bailey echoed.
“That’s right.”
“I don’t see much reason to waste any time,” Torres agreed.
“Wait a minute,” Hope said. “What do you mean ‘you’re going home’?”
“Exactly what I said,” Daniel replied.
“What’s wrong, Captain Ying?” Svoboda asked.
“What’s wrong is, he said ‘you’ not ‘we’ are going home...” She speared him with an accusatory look that stung deep. ‘Daniel—’
“Are you saying you’re not coming?”
“He doesn’t want to have to say that,” Doug interjected in a surprisingly kind and understanding tone. Daniel winced at how accurately Wilson had him pegged, and was glad he didn’t have to say anything like it himself. It was difficult enough to say a goodbye as it was. “But it’s an unfortunate necessity. Daniel and I are staying to overload the gate system and destroy it.”
Hope lunged forward. “Staying without us? I don’t think so!”
“Someone has to watch his back,” Daniel said bluntly. “Somebody has to buy him the time to get the job done, and that means keeping the Gresians up there on the surface levels.”
Hope shook her head determinedly. “If you’re staying to fight, then I am, too.”
“No.” he said, not unkindly.
“Daniel, you don’t control me, I’m neither under your orders, nor—”
“I can’t, Hope. No. I love you. And in some ways, that’s a bad thing, because while another gun might help, I love you far too fucking much to let you sacrifice yourself for nothing. And I love you too fucking much to watch you die for no reason. The corridor is a choke point with multiple barriers. I only need to hold off the Gresians for a few minutes.”
“Respect the chain of command,” she snarled. “I’m not under your command. I outrank you in military terms, and in a different branch of—”
“You’re right. I can’t order you to go, either as an officer or as a friend or lover or as a man.”
“Good.”
He turned away from her. “Beswick, Kinsella, place Captain Ying under close arrest, physically restrain her, and escort her back to Earth. There, you can release her on her own recognizance.”
“That’s an order I can give.” He stood to attention and saluted each of them individually. “It’s been an honor.”
They all returned the gesture, and then Palmer and the others stepped through the gray disc, dragging Hope with them.
The gray disc vanished.
“I’ve already started working on the program. Fifteen minutes till the gate system disappears.”
Daniel nodded, though his attention was many light years away. He could still feel Hope, and the emotions that were coming through thick and strong were heartbreak and rage. He wished he could get out of his own skin, he felt so repulsed by how he had betrayed her, but reminded himself that it just showed she was probably better off without him.
Just because she was the right woman for him, that didn’t mean he was the right man for her. He tossed a walkie-talkie to Wilson, which was keyed to his own Exo-suit comms.
‘I’m sorry,’ he sent to her. ‘I’ve…. You’ve no idea how sorry I am, but… I had to. I can’t let you die for me. You have to live.’
‘We both belong togethe
r, live or die! You don’t get to decide—’
‘Then I’m not the man you deserve. I’m sorry.’
His tears came then, as he filled every clip he could find and picked up as many grenades as he could comfortably carry and still fight with. As he heard an explosion rock the far end of the corridor to the elevator vestibule, a thought struck him, and he turned to Wilson. “The Gresians have proved a lot more familiar with utilizing the gateway technology than we have. If we shut down the system, what’s to stop them simply repairing or rebooting it?”
“A couple of things,” Wilson answered rather distractedly. “Firstly, I don’t believe they can access the core programming of the Shaldine system, or interact with its AI. It’s specifically designed to deny access to anyone or anything with Gresian DNA.”
Daniel didn’t believe a word of that as he pounded along the corridor and drop-slid behind the last nanowall between himself and the Gresians. Sparks were already shooting back from it as they burned their way through. At least, he believed Wilson was being honest, but thought that this state of affairs was probably outdated. He answered belatedly, “They’ve had thousands of years to figure out a work-around. Sooner or later, they might still succeed.”
“They won’t,” Lizzie interrupted him. Her expression was different than any Daniel had seen on her before; calm, somber, determined, and a little sad. He didn’t like the look of it at all, not any more than he had liked losing Hope through the gateway. A chuck of barrier exploded at last, the blast hurling it through Lizzie, who turned to face the Gresians with a look of sheer venom. “Motherfuckers,” she snarled, as viciously as any of the felinoid creatures could have managed. Daniel opened fire with his railgun, spearing them as they piled through the opening they had made.
“What makes you so sure?” he demanded of the AI.
“The Sydney didn’t make it back through the gate when the fleet pulled out. It was too badly damaged by the Gresians, and was abandoned by her human crew.” Daniel felt a pit open in his stomach, instantly knowing, instinctively, where she was going to go with this. At the same time, a searing plasma blast vaporized several Gresian corpses in the choke point and threw him back against the next nanobarrier. “It has no life support, weapons, or shuttle launch or retrieval capability, but I still have full control of the ship’s maneuvering systems, and she has twelve percent engine power remaining. I’m going to bring her down on this building as soon as you and Professor Wilson are either dead or through the gateway, whichever comes first.” As she spoke, Daniel ducked low to avoid a barrage of plasma fire and tossed grenades back towards the seething mass of clawed, armored creatures swarming down the corridor towards him.
He wasn’t sure why he wasn’t afraid, even as the stink of them filled his mouth and nostrils, and the electric heat of their fire singed his clothes and hair. Weren’t people supposed to fear death? He wondered, as he ducked back behind the next barrier to grab a moment’s respite.
Daniel half thought Lizzie might even cry, or at least give the image of it. He had no idea whether she was really feeling the emotion, but he knew that this mission was the culmination of what she had been programmed to do. After this, she must have known or thought she would have no purpose. Maybe it was the same for him, he thought, as his railgun ran dry. Hope was safe, though; that was what mattered. That and Wilson completing the mission. Their own survival was irrelevant.
He picked up a flamethrower and sent a jet of molten, golden fire over and through the Gresians who had paused for cover at the nanobarrier he’d just vacated. He had once thought on Lyonesse that dying while protecting innocents was a fair trade. His mind hadn’t changed on that—it was merely a question of the number of innocents. How many people were there on Earth anyway, he wondered, as a grenade bounced towards him. His suit gave him the reflexes to scoop it up as it landed and hurl it back. Two more Gresians fell, and shrapnel cut though his biceps and cheek like hot ice.
Lizzie went on, “My first choice would be to seed the brown dwarf gas supergiant with nanites that could convert the heavier elements into ones dense enough to collapse and trigger nucleosynthesis. The ignition of a new star in the system would destroy this planet.”
“Then why not do that?”
“It would take at least two years, and I can’t trust the Gresians to not find a workaround before that.”
Plasma explosions and lightning flashes spat and sparked up and down between the nanowalls, and then Gresians began to spew forth again. The flamethrower poured fire overt them, caressing several with its scorching embrace, while other Gresians threw grenades. The grenades caught in the sheets of fire airburst, exploding in mid-flight, and Daniel had to turn away and squeeze his eyes tight shut in the hope of not being blinded by shrapnel while a couple of the mirrored faceplates on the enemy cracked, making them tear the helmets off to clear their vision.
Now he could see their fanged, burning-eyed faces as they led their armored comrades down the corridor towards him. Daniel opened fire, pouring deer slugs into the tight mass of aliens. Some went down, but the rate of falling Gresians was a lot slower than the rate at which his shell casings tinkled and clattered to the floor.
“Will the Sydney do enough damage this far underground?” Wilson asked over his comms.
“The ship is much larger than the nickel-iron meteors used to destroy your cities, but less dense and with less impact velocity,” Lizzie answered. “But, you know what, it’ll still be more than sufficient to destroy this building and gouge out all of the Shaldine complex beneath it, with perhaps a mile or so of the surrounding area, especially when the main reactors detonate upon impact. Which they will. I figure that to be a good forty megatons at least.”
Daniel wanted to know only one thing more. “What… what happens to you?” He limped backwards, shooting from the hip with one hand and feeling for the next barrier behind him with his other.
She hesitated. “Yeah… I cease to exist. This iteration of me, the one who controlled the Sydney and is connected to you, and can coordinate with any Mozari ship in the galaxy…”
“You’ll die?”
“I’m not alive.”
Daniel blinked. “But you’ll be gone.” Like Hope, he thought. No, like Elizabeth, he realized, and then he remembered that Hope had once called her that. Lizzie, Liz, Elizabeth… Hope looking at the old photo of Daniel and Elizabeth when they’d been kids, and then calling Lizzie ‘Elizabeth’…. And now he saw it. Now he saw the familiarity. She must have plucked the image from his memories, and projected the adult appearance to make him more comfortable than a satanic-looking alien would have. “Again,” he said in a half-sob, reloading his shotgun with its last drum magazine.
“Other iterations of me in other Mozari vessels will survive, but they are… not quite like me; they’re more concerned with their own individual vessels.”
“More like the Librarian?” He was staggering backwards now, his legs aching with the effort of keeping him upright, and firing single shot after single shot, letting the Gresians get close enough for a single deer slug to be effective before popping out from behind the barriers to shoot them in the face.
“Yes.”
“They won’t be you.”
“There’s only one me.” She shrugged. “There only ever was one, same as everybody else.”
“No, there wasn’t, was there?” Daniel asked. “You’re the second Lizzie, really.” He struggled to catch his breath, and noted he had barely a dozen slugs left. “Don’t go.”
She waved a hand with a smile. “Technically, the range of space-time coordinates in which I exist are a permanent fixture, when viewed from a four-dimensional viewpoint, just like everyone and everything.”
The shotgun ran out, and Daniel drew his Desert Eagle. ‘I love you,’ Daniel sent to Hope as he fired at the Gresians as they came around the next corner, and he felt the emotion and the words flowing over and around her pain like breakers on rocks. ‘I love you. I love you.’ Over a
nd over, with every shot, with every plasma burst that got closer to him, with every splash of bronze blood, and every Gresian death. ‘I love you… I love you...’
He wasn’t sure whether he was thinking it to Hope, to Elizabeth, or even to Lizzie, and it didn’t matter; it was his mantra, it was what kept him standing, what kept him firing, and what kept him alive.
Then, Doug Wilson shouted, “Done! Daniel, run!” Daniel ran, leaving his last two claymores set out as Wilson hurriedly said, “The program is done, and injected into the Shaldine core.. We’re ready to execute the cascade failure.”
Daniel closed his eyes for a moment, telling himself that his decision would be the right one. It wasn’t that he knew it would be right, but he was ordering himself to be right. “Bring the cascade on. Bring it right down on the Gresians’ heads. And ours.”
The whole facility suddenly rumbled, and dust and rubble fell from the ceiling. As Daniel ran through the outer lab where the security computers were, he saw them crack and tumble, some of the taller and less balanced ones falling from their plinths. Instruments all around sparked and burst into flames while a deep booming alarm began to ring out. There were explosions behind him, but he couldn’t tell which were caused by the overload and which were the claymores. All he knew was that the Gresians would be past the claymores by now, and he had little more than a plasma bolt in the back to look forwards to.
Dying to protect people was better than living with having committed genocide, he reminded himself.
‘Daniel!’ Hope’s thoughts came.
‘I’m sorry, Hope, I could die to protect people, but not live with genocide. Tell them that when they ask why I didn’t kill them all.’
“Sydney entering atmosphere,” Lizzie announced.
‘Daniel, I know why you did what you did. I know...’
Lizzie had turned to face the corridor through which snarls and hisses were approaching. “Sorry you can’t hear me, but I’d love to see your faces when I say ‘Time to Impact, four minutes.’ I’d run like hell if I was you!”