The results wouldn’t be polished, but they would make writing a third feature in my ongoing series a lot easier. After all, I didn’t know how much time I’d have to write. Even with Vermier dead I couldn’t assume that Raeburn would extend the eight-hour window I’d asked for.
Tomorrow I may not be alive.
It sounds macabre, I know. And I won’t try to justify my feelings at this point. Maybe it was sheer exhaustion mixing with the steady-stim in my bloodstream to play havoc with my emotions. Maybe it was the fact I’d just assassinated a Marine Corps colonel. Maybe it was Ivy. Somehow the thought of dying didn’t horrify me as long as she was with me when it happened.
At any rate, what really seemed to matter right now was finishing the story I’d come to write.
Soon the connection to Command and Control would open up again, and I wasn’t about to waste that opportunity because I’d been hoping for the right moment to get the words out.
So I wrote.
Step by step, word by word, until we emerged from the canopy of trees into a clearing at the top of a low hill just outside of Seranik.
A pair of grendel rangers met us, materializing from the ground almost as mysteriously as Ulles had, and I knew we had reached their inner perimeter. His Gracious Excellence G.A. Hayan may have intended to bring only four bodyguards to the planned meeting at the compound, but his military escort would not be so modest. He probably had a full platoon of rangers in the area, which meant Raeburn’s team would be outnumbered ten to one.
And why not? The Alliance was risking more than the life of a single ambassador. They were gambling with the safety of a brand-new J-class frigate.
And she was gorgeous.
The Takwin perched at the far end of the long clearing, her main engines sealed in massive cowling covers, her sides bulging with weapons pods, her con domed in mirrored triangles that caught the starlight as if yearning to swim in it once again.
“Mr. Dahl,” one of the rangers said. “Lieutenant Fjorde. Thank you for coming. Follow me, please.”
Ulles left me without a word, and I shadowed the lieutenant to the loading ramp.
Up the ramp and through the cargo platform to an airlock-elevator.
Out the opposite door and down a narrow hallway to the door at the end, which dialed open as we approached.
Fjorde motioned me into a small conference room dominated by a smooth white table floating in the center. There were only two seats, arranged opposite the narrow width of the table. This was to be a face-to-face negotiation. “Have a seat, please. His Excellence will be with you shortly.”
The door closed behind him, leaving me in a room swirling with off-whites, as relaxing as a cup of warm milk.
A moment later a steward entered carrying a covered tray. He removed the cover, set a glass of water in front of me, then one in front of the empty chair across from me, then a bowl of assorted pastries and fruits. He left as silently as he had come.
Apparently they weren’t going to search me. Weren’t going to put me through a decontamination chamber or even pat me down for hidden weapons. Then again, I thought, maybe they don’t need to.
I pulled up the mission file and scanned through the relevant protocols for this meeting, as well as the concessions Sterling had been authorized to make on behalf of the United Colonies. Every facet of the meeting had been prearranged in meticulous detail, including the short prelude reserved for refreshments, which were to include “chilled pure water and organic fruits and baked goods.”
I downed most of the water and nibbled on a croissant while the timer in the upper left of my vision ticked down silently. With my eyes open, the white numerals were barely visible against the cream-colored wall pattern, but I hardly needed them. I’d been running the numbers internally since I left Vermier and the MADAR team. Only five hours, eleven minutes, forty-two seconds remained till Raeburn could legally fire the hammerhead.
I thrust the file aside and pulled up my story. Selected my most recent text. Scanned for placement.
It was garbage, of course, but there might be something useable there, if I had time to polish it. Just now the feature needed a unifying title. Something worthy of inclusion in a great war story.
The last two titles had been easy. “Grendels Invade Quelon!” was shocking, attention-grabbing, and newsworthy across the entire republic. It was emotive and didn’t compromise Fleet in any way. Moreover, I suspected it was true.
“Why It Had to Be Done” offered consolation, the one thing both the core systems and the edges would be looking for. Actually, the title promised a hundred different things all at once. Most of all it acknowledged the monstrous waste of life that was two empires throwing spears at each other from unimaginable distances.
But what was my third feature? A rite of passage? A graduation? A surrender to something awful and magnificent at the same time? Where was the title for that?
“Mr. Dahl.”
I blinked away the notes and turned to the door at the far end of the room.
The kid looked different in a green robe, but even without his Rostram University shirt and white trousers, I would have recognized that perfect smile anywhere. He still wore the Divanese Special—if that’s what it was—and the shimmering fountain encircling his wrist would have given him away regardless.
I’d been right. Trevalyan didn’t have children. That’s why his file omitted them. Back at the compound I had simply seen what I expected to see. A young man, a son of privilege, an arrogant fool who had stumbled into the wrong place at the worst possible time.
Inexcusable, since I had not realized I was assuming an emissary would by definition be older, a person of tact, a man of dignity.
For that matter, a man.
But there was no reason the enemy wyrms couldn’t use a young man in his early twenties as their mouthpiece.
Always a plan, I thought. The grendels always have a strategy, even when it looks random.
The laughter escaped before I could throttle it back. “Mr. Ambassador.”
“Thank you for meeting me here,” Hayan said. “I’m sure your journey wasn’t easy.”
“My pleasure,” I replied, and the title for my third feature appeared in my mind as if by magic: “Slave to a Quantum Master.”
What other title could it be?
All at once, Ivy left me.
The shock of it sent a jolt of panic through my gut. One moment she was there in the back of my mind. The next moment she was gone. Without even the whisper of a warning.
Unconsciously I grasped the comms on my left wrist, enclosing it with my right and searching to make sure the tab-lock was still in place.
Nothing had changed. My grid was still there. The timer was still ticking down. I even had access to the mission file. All that was missing was Ivy. The subtle, welcoming aroma of her presence, now a blank space outlined in chalk.
Ambassador Hayan sat in the other chair and sipped water while the barren loneliness of my own mind began to manifest itself as an echoing silence. It was like walking alone through a big house just up for sale. No portraits on the walls, no coat rack in the foyer, no sofa in the den. Everything swept clean and in order.
And empty.
[Ivy,] I called.
She didn’t come.
I’d have been okay with no answer—if only she hadn’t left me. Or if she had needed to leave, she should have told me first so I could have prepared for the shock of it.
Hayan popped a berry in his mouth and rolled it into one cheek.
I glanced down at my hand covering Sterling’s comms, saw the futility of the gesture, as if I had just caught myself trying to catch a handful of smoke.
Nothing radiated from the bracelet. Not even the tingle of awareness against my skin. Might as well have been dead metal.
Hayan was staring at me as if he knew something I was only beginning to guess. It was too old an expression for someone his age, and I wanted to wipe it from his face. “Shall we get st
arted?” I asked.
He gave a little shake of his head, so slight I might have imagined it. “Protocol requires the full ninety minutes. Eat, please. Or if you prefer something else—”
“No, thank you.”
He nodded. Showed the barest hint of a smile. “I’m afraid it gets more difficult the longer it continues.”
“Pardon?”
“The feeling of emptiness when a builder evacuates.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You call her Ivy, correct? The builder we installed on your bracelet? And now she’s gone. Our doing, not hers. She actually wants to be with you.”
Builder.
A chill went down my spine, but I kept my face frozen. Over the years I’d grown good at wearing masks.
Whatever doubt I’d had about Ivy being a wyrm disappeared.
So many questions answered in a moment. So many new ones raised.
I wanted to believe him when he said that she wanted to be with me, that it was someone else’s decision to keep us apart. But was that really how it worked? Or was it just part of the story they were telling me?
“We call them wyrms—with a y,” I said.
Hayan stroked his chin. “A kind of dragon, yes? Powerful and clever. I suppose that fits. And from your perspective, quite sinister.” He popped another berry in his mouth. “But I wonder if you still feel that way now. Is Ivy evil, Mr. Dahl? Has she brought you to ruin?”
I turned a slow circle in my imagination, searching for some trace of her in the emptiness, some hint that even now she lurked in the shadows. “Remains to be seen. Do you really mean to sit here for more than an hour and discuss nothing?”
“I do,” Hayan said. “Protocol is what sets us above the beasts.”
Meanwhile, the timer in my overlay would count down the seconds till Raeburn ran out of patience. For the first time I wondered if he would wait longer than I had asked him to. He may have been MADAR, but that didn’t mean he was heartless. It’s always the people who have never seen a bombing who are quickest to call for one.
“Animals have protocol,” I countered. “It’s called instinct. What they don’t have is opposable thumbs, or language, or abstract reasoning, or something like, I don’t know, call it moral compulsion.”
He laughed. “All right, Mr. Dahl. I will play along. Let us say protocol is an oversimplification. Maybe we can agree on this. What sets humans above the beasts is the capacity to enter into a story.”
I took another drink. “And this little break is part of the story?”
“It is.”
I saw it then. The answer crinkled the corners of his eyes, as if he were fighting the urge to smile. “You want to break me down. As if I’m some sort of addict waiting for a fix.”
“Something like that, yes.” He shrugged. “We have nothing to lose.”
“And if I cooperate, Ivy comes gliding back into my life? Permanently, I assume?”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
He was right of course, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. “And what do you want, Mr. Hayan? What are you asking in return?”
“Nothing much. Just that you open the last door into your mind. Let Ivy see all of your memories, learn everything in your past, understand all of your motives. Give us the truth. After all, we do not really know who we are dealing with, Mr. Dahl. You are not the person we have been expecting. We need to know if we can trust you. And there’s nothing to fear. We simply want to know who we are dealing with. We want to understand you.”
I took a drink, partially to buy time to form a response, and partially to hide the fact that I was seriously considering his offer. I knew I’d give in eventually, but if I opened that door too soon, what motivation would Hayan have to release my completed story to OrbSyn?
“That’s protocol for wartime negotiations, is it? Both sides confess their sins before talking shop? Cause I didn’t read that in the file Sterling left me.” Hayan hadn’t offered to reveal any secrets of his own, so I slipped the suggestion in to let him know that I’d noticed. “Of course, I’m just a dumb reporter working my own angle for a series of features. What do I know?”
Hayan gave that irritating half smile again. “We are not the ones who altered the meeting arrangements.”
“Really?” I gave him a condescending shrug. “Pretty sure cutting New Witlund’s satellite link wasn’t in the fine print, Mr. Hayan. Or launching viruses at a UCMC base. I’ve looked. And Ivy hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about her identity. So nice try, but I’ll keep my embarrassing teen years private. And if you want me to swear on a stack of Bibles that I don’t know any launch codes or secret facility locations, I’m happy to oblige.”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Dahl.” He rose and placed his fingertips on the surface of the table. “Your presence here is enough. I shall return in seventy-two minutes. If you change your mind, just, um, call my name and Ivy will attend to you.”
He left, but his words lingered: Your presence here is enough.
Even as the door dialed closed, I could feel the truth of it.
My presence here. Alone.
Being alone in the room wasn’t really the problem. The white walls and silent emptiness simply mirrored the reality in my own mind. I missed her. And there was nothing to fill the vacuum.
I didn’t think I could go on missing her for another seventy-one-point-two-six minutes. It might as well have been seventy-one years.
Minutes passed. An eternity.
Then Mother shuffled into the room and sat in Hayan’s chair. “Hello, Ray-Ray,” she said, her voice cracking with age. “Miss me?”
I closed my eyes. “Not really.”
“Of course you wouldn’t remember. I did love you. I still love you.”
Love me? She hadn’t loved me, or she wouldn’t have abandoned me. “You’re not real.”
She laughed. “Of course I’m real. Look at me.”
I opened my eyes.
She was old and thin and frail, but her hair hung in the same swirling black flourishes of my childhood memories. A golden symb-collar circled her neck just below the chin.
“It isn’t you,” I said.
“It is me.” She placed her hands on the table and massaged the swollen knuckles. “Not in person, of course. I went over to the Alliance, and returning isn’t allowed. But when they told me I could see my Raymin!” She beamed. “Look at you! They tell me you’re a writer.”
She stared at me with those imperious dark eyes. The high cheekbones and narrow jaw, now draped in sagging skin, nonetheless fitted what I remembered of her, but were different enough to be believable.
Yet it wasn’t her. I knew it. Beyond any doubt, I knew it. She couldn’t be my mother, even via quantum relay.
She was just a bit of manipulation. A PSYOP. Another form of lipstick snouting a pig.
“Reporter,” I said.
“Always telling stories, even as a boy.” She dug at the knuckles of her left hand. “They tell me you’re making a new peace treaty between the Alliance and the republic. You. My Raymin. Saving lives. Oodles and oodles of lives. And I wanted you to know I couldn’t be more proud.”
I believed that, at least. Not that she was real, but that she was proud of me.
“Why’d you do it, Ma? I was just a kid.”
“It was terrible, Raymin. The hardest thing I’d ever done. But there were things—” She stopped pressing against her knuckles and her hands froze in terrible motionlessness. “Things I couldn’t tell you. About David.”
So it was Dad’s fault? Dad, who was always there?
The accusation made my stomach lurch. The unfairness of it. Because she wasn’t real. She was just making this part up. Even if the allegation was true, she was making it up.
“How dare you,” I snarled. “You abandon a four-year-old to defect to the enemy and then have the nerve to say that you love me?”
She looked like I’d just slapped her.
Good.
<
br /> I reached for one of her tiny wrists, but my fingers passed through them.
“Raymin, you don’t understand. Your father—”
“Don’t bring him into this,” I said. “You don’t have the right.”
She looked down at her hands. Her mouth opened and shut. “I thought, after all this time.”
“That I’d care what you think?”
“That you’d want to know. David was—”
“Commander Dahl!” I said. “His name is Commander David Dahl!”
“—he was very angry sometimes, and—”
“And at least he was also there sometimes,” I said, cutting her off. “Sometimes he was there.”
She seemed not to hear me, as if determined to get her side of the story out. “He was an officer. A veteran. Everyone called him a hero. Bought him drinks. And when he came home—”
She let the implication hang there, and all of my certainty evaporated.
“I remember shouting,” I said.
It wasn’t exactly a lie. Whose childhood doesn’t include shouting?
“I had a chance to make things better,” she said, an old woman who had made peace with her past and now just wanted to relish the tiny fragment of good in her present. “I didn’t want to leave you, Raymin. But I couldn’t take you with me. I wouldn’t have made it past the checkpoint. So I left you with David. I knew he would take care of you. He adored you.”
Adored me. That fit, I supposed. Favored military brat, the only son of a multi-star combat vet, runs as far away from his father’s legacy as he can on a world where military service is the only real option for the desperate. And who does every soldier, marine and Fleet, hate more than the grendels?
Journalists.
“Yeah,” I said at last. “He took care of me.”
“So it worked out?”
Almost a statement, but she was looking at me with a question in her eyes, so I nodded. Gave her what she needed. “It worked out.”
“You’re in their story, you know. We both are.”
“I know.”
“And it would be easier if—” She started digging at her knuckles again and looked at me pleadingly.
“If I let her in?” I said.
“It would be easier.”
Operation Grendel Page 17