by Rob Boffard
And then, a little less than ten years after the war had ended, a man named Richard Hayes had knocked on his hotel room door.
He was down on Earth, in the Philippines, taking a few days off from the loading dock job – which, somehow, he’d managed to keep. The room stank of sweat and semen. An ancient ceiling fan rotated, doing nothing to disperse the heat, and every few minutes the room would shake from a launch at the nearby spaceport, the windows rattling in their rotten frames.
Roman knew Hayes by reputation, even if he hadn’t thought about him in almost a decade. Hayes wasn’t in uniform – he wore a crisp shirt and slacks, seemingly untroubled by the heat – but he told Roman he was a commander now. Roman said that was excellent, good for him, but if the commander didn’t mind, he had a monster hangover and he didn’t really feel like catching up on old times.
That’s when Hayes had removed a signal blocker from his shirt pocket – a tiny, black cube, which he’d activated and set on the splintered dresser. That had got Roman’s attention. And then Hayes had asked him if he still wanted to take the fight to Talos-18.
There were others, he’d said – soldiers like Roman, others who had lost friends and family and lovers, and who wanted payback. Not many, but enough. With his eyes glittering, Hayes had told Roman that he was one of them. The Colonies, as far as he was concerned, were unfinished business.
Roman was nodding yes before Hayes had even finished speaking. He wasn’t stupid – he knew that someone like Hayes would never be doing this for revenge, or so a bunch of tired old soldiers could have theirs. There were bound to be ulterior motives. But he found, to his surprise, that he didn’t care what they were. If there was even a chance that Hayes could put him back on a new frontline, let him finish what the damn treaty stopped him from doing, then he could have all the ulterior motives he wanted.
He and the commander had shaken hands under the creaking ceiling fan. And then later, in a quiet conference room in New York, he’d met the others.
Rodriguez was there – his fiancée, a Scorpion pilot, had been lost at Bellatrix. And a man named Jacobs from another unit, who he’d once spent a night training with in the gym on the Titan base. Roman didn’t know what had happened to Jacobs – not then, anyway – but the man’s eyes glittered with excitement as Hayes rapped on a table, calling them to order.
Two things quickly became clear. The first was that what they were doing was illegal. Treason-illegal. They would have to exist, Hayes said, through mutually assured destruction: if any one of them turned on the others, they would be killed. That included him.
When he explained this, Roman felt the atmosphere in the room go from interested to locked in. Give Hayes credit: he’d picked his people well, and he knew exactly which buttons to push.
The second thing, Hayes told them, was that it would have to be something big. An assassination could be blamed on a rogue element. Ditto for taking hostages. They’d have to do the job in such a way that there could be no doubt that it was an official, sanctioned Colony attack, with the kind of firepower that only an interplanetary government would have access to. That meant mass casualties – the kind of thing that would force the Senate to dissolve the treaty. He needed to know that they were OK with that.
Roman looked at Hayes for a long moment. Then he, along with a couple of the others, stood up and walked out.
He half expected Hayes to stop them, but the commander didn’t. Roman had looked back at him just before he stepped through the door, and saw that there was something in Hayes’ eyes. A look that said, think about it.
He didn’t need to. What Hayes was suggesting was beyond the pale – and not what he’d agreed to when he’d shaken the man’s hand in Manila. Roman had thought many times about hurting the Frontier, but this …
Not even he would do this.
As he walked through the 5th Avenue Tunnel, he couldn’t help but take in the faces of the people around him. The couples, strolling hand in hand. The food vendors. The group of Muslims, praying on the corner, bending in the direction of where Mecca used to be. The office worker, puffing on a NicoStick.
Later, drunk in his hotel room overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, he kept seeing them. And he couldn’t help but wonder about their lives. What would any of them have said if he told them about Cassiopeia? Would they have done what everyone else did? Tell him how sorry they were for his loss? Say how at least the war was over now?
He kept coming back to the office worker. An older guy, in a rumpled suit with the jacket slung over his arm and the hunched shoulders of a corporate lifer. What, Roman wondered, would he do if he found out that killing the man would get him what he wanted? Just him. Just that one lone office worker, leaning against the wall, ignored by everyone around him?
He’d kill him. He wouldn’t even have to think about it. It’s the kind of truth that, had it occurred to him when he first enlisted, he would have recoiled from. Denied outright. But it’s been a long time since he enlisted, and he knows exactly what he’s capable of. And what he’s done.
How would killing that office worker be any different from what Hayes was proposing? Really? Wasn’t it, when you came down to it, a question of numbers? How many was too many?
By now, he was on his second bottle of whisky, sitting on his bed, the view outside his window swimming in front of him. Somewhere, a small part of him was stunned that he was still capable of rational thought. He tried to hold onto it, telling himself that there’s no way he can agree to what Hayes is asking.
But then he’d started remembering the people he had killed, on the missions he and his squad were sent on. The scientist who walked in on them on that covert job on Hawking-8 – he remembered her startled face, right before the puff from his rifle that erased her from existence. The security guards at the facility in Proxima orbit, who his squad had taken down without thinking about it. Had their deaths made anything more than the tiniest ripple in the universe?
The office worker again, his face appearing in front of Roman, clear and detailed, as if he were standing in front of him. Roman looking up at him, blinking, long and slow. How many office workers would he be comfortable killing, to correct the greatest injustice he’d ever known? A thousand? Ten? A hundred thousand? Where did you stop? Where was the line?
And even if it was a few thousand … what was that, measured against the billions and billions of people across the galaxy? A blip. A single drop in a thunderstorm. And they wouldn’t die for nothing. Their deaths – unlike those of the scientist and the security guards and everyone else – would mean something.
In his drunken stupor, his grief returning – fresh and sharp, a blade that never loses its edge – Roman clung to this thought. The people they’d be taking out were the real reason the fighting had stopped. They were the activists and lobbyists and campaigners, and, even if they weren’t, they’d sat like a herd of cattle, letting it all happen.
Perhaps they were just as much to blame as the Colonies for what happened. And perhaps it was time for them to feel what it was like, when all hell came raining down and there was nothing and no one coming to save you.
The still-lucid part of his brain told him he was drunk. That he’d feel differently the next morning.
He didn’t.
Hayes showed them the tech – a whole orbital warehouse of black-bag gear that he was charged with overseeing. And he’d shown them the extended-pulse jump drives, which could blink a ship from here to there in an instant, no matter where here and there happened to be. No wormhole needed.
The Frontier Senate might have stopped researching the tech – why keep at it, when there was a perfectly good network of jump gates? – but Hayes hadn’t. He’d funnelled every universal dollar from every off-books budget he could find, and he’d made it happen. The drives weren’t perfect. They were unstable, even dangerous to use, and good for exactly two hops before they had to be replaced. But they made jump gates obsolete.
That’s when Roman really sta
rted believing it might actually work. By the time anybody figured out what had really happened, the treaty would be in pieces, and Frontier forces would be advancing on the weakened Colonies.
Over the next few weeks, as they prepped for the mission, he got to know the rest of the soldiers. Heard their stories. Like him, they’d all lost people – friends, sons, daughters, wives, husbands, commanding officers, comrades. They were all in the right place. Exactly where they needed to be.
They wore the old patches from their units when they suited up for the mission. No one suggested it – it was something that all of them, without speaking to each other, knew to do.
He can’t tell Corey or Malik any of this, and not because he wants to keep them in the dark. It’s too painful. Even after all this time, he has absolutely no idea how to start. But as he looks at Corey, at this kid with his busted leg and his grimy T-shirt and his absolute refusal to quit asking questions, a realisation hits him so hard that he almost gasps.
Corey is wrong.
Sure, maybe he’ll fly ships. Maybe he’ll build his company with his friends. But that’s not all he’s going to do. Roman has spent a long time around different kinds of people – sometimes, it seems that’s all being a soldier was – and he realises he can see Corey’s story, all the way to its conclusion. Corey might do all the things he wants to do now, but in the end, he’s going to be …
Madhu.
Or someone like him. He might not be terraforming planets, or taking in kids from across the Frontier who don’t have anywhere else to go. But he’s going to end up helping people – maybe a lot of people.
Like Madhu, he was curious, about absolutely everything. Like Madhu, he desperately wanted to understand how things work.
No. Corey isn’t Madhu. That’s crazy. It’s just the stress, finally getting its teeth into him after all this time, making him see things that aren’t there.
Except that’s not true either. He can see the path Corey will take far too clearly.
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change anything.
But it does. God help him, it does.
His mission is to eliminate Corey – there’s no prettying it up, not any more. No getting away from it. And he can’t help thinking: what would have happened if the Colonies had decided to hit Cassiopeia sooner? Before Madhu and Brigita took him in?
He’d never have gone there. Never have had the childhood he did. Him, and everyone else who they took in. And the Colony soldiers who ordered the nuke fired at the planet’s outpost. Did they know what they were doing? Would they have followed that order, if they’d sat with Madhu at the big table, if they’d talked with him?
He clenches his teeth, refusing to look at the two boys. No. No. He’s wanted this. For twelve years, he’s wanted a way to hit back, and now he has it, and he’s about to let it go because of some kid. All those nights, all that endless training, his waste of a life, and now he finally has a chance to make things right, and –
It wouldn’t be right. You know it wouldn’t.
Because even if he goes ahead with this – even if Hayes somehow doesn’t betray them, which is something he’s becoming less and less certain of with every passing minute – he knows what’ll happen. He’ll get his revenge. He’ll take Talos, crush the Colony forces. But to get it done, he’ll have to kill Corey.
Destroying Sigma was different, somehow; there were other soldiers on the ship, and they all had a role to play, and all of them shared the blame. But this? It’d be on him. Every single second of it would be his to own, forever.
And everyone who Corey might have helped, in the same way Madhu helped him, would be his to own, too.
Like a machine switching into an old, well-worn gear, he reverts to problem, solution, action. Problem: he’s about to fail his mission. He’s about to betray the people who raised him. Solution …
Deep inside him, the little core of hatred he’s spent years holding onto pulses. This can’t be it. It can’t end here. There’s so much blood on his hands already, thousands of people, so why’s he stopping now? It’s absurd. Solution: just tell the kid, yes, have them set you loose, then finish the job.
But he can’t.
“So how about it?” Malik says, leaning forward, putting his elbows on his knees and crossing his arms. “You gonna help us? Or you just gonna sit there?”
“Nobody else has to die,” Corey says. “Not us. Not you. Nobody.”
Roman can barely speak. “It might not even work. Even if they knew I was alive, they might just destroy this ship anyway. And I don’t even know how you’re planning to actually get everybody on board in the first place.”
Corey nods, eyes shining. “I don’t know either. We’ll figure it out.”
What he’s about to do will change everything. There’ll be no war, no attack on Talos. No victory. He’ll have to disappear, because Hayes will never let him live.
The thought terrifies him – not the steps he’ll have to take, because he’s been trained to vanish, to blend into a crowd. But he’ll have to live with having turned his back on the mission.
Which means that Corey will get to grow up.
Madhu would have wanted that.
And maybe that’s enough.
“I’ll help you,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.
“What’d you say?” asks Malik.
“I said I’ll help you.”
“For real?”
“… Yeah.”
“Then you need to promise.”
Roman inhales through his nostrils, long and hard. “You have my word. I’ll help you.”
“You promise? You have to promise. And you can’t break it no matter what.”
“Yes,” Roman says, after another beat. “I promise.”
Corey and Malik exchange a look. Malik raises an eyebrow, questioning.
“Hey,” Corey says, speaking so the others can hear him. “Can everybody come down here for a sec?”
Chapter 55
They come, one after the other. Lorinda, wrapped in her foil blanket. Jack, his face and shirt still crusted with flakes of blood, his nose swollen. Anita and Everett. They’re not holding hands, not walking with arms wrapped around each other, but they’re moving together. Close enough for their shoulders to touch.
Hannah brings up the rear, arms tightly folded. Her mind feels like it’s trailing three feet behind her, pulled along like a balloon.
Corey waits until everyone is there, and then he tells them what Roman said. In that moment, he looks a lot older than his ten years.
Hannah gapes at him. Jack looks completely astonished, too, as do Everett and Anita. Only Lorinda is smiling, nodding slowly, the blanket hanging off her bony shoulders.
“I don’t like it,” Anita says, gnawing on her bottom lip.
“He promised,” says Corey.
“I know, but a promise isn’t like what you think it is. People can break them.”
Corey looks at her like she’s just told him that they’re in space.
“And we have to let him go if this is going to work,” Everett says. He looks around at them. “We absolutely sure we wanna do that? You heard what he said. If the kids are wrong …”
“We aren’t wrong,” says Malik.
Roman looks up. When he speaks, he sounds resigned. “God knows how you’re going to do this, but the jump unit on the Victory can take the ship anywhere.”
“The Victory?” says Hannah.
“The other ship.”
“Other ship singular? Just one?”
Roman shrugs.
“What’s the first ship called?” Corey asks. “The one we … you know.”
“The Resolute.”
“And how do you mean anywhere? Like, anywhere anywhere?”
He nods.
“Then what stopped you from going straight into the Colonies?” Everett says. “Just jumping in with a bunch of ships, and—”
“We don’t have a bunch of ships. They’re expensive. And
they have limited power – you can only jump twice before the particle core needs to be replaced. Downside of the new tech.”
“And they’ll have already made one jump,” Hannah says, almost to herself. “Anyway, we’d need to go somewhere friendly.”
“That’s another problem,” Roman says. “You need coordinates to jump. You have to input the destination manually. If you don’t have coordinates, you can’t go anywhere.”
“So we just input the ones for Bishop’s Station,” Malik says. “Or close to it.”
“Do you know what they are?” says Roman.
“No, but …”
“We had two sets of coordinates for our mission. Here, and our command outpost. There was no point having any others.”
Malik’s shoulders sag. But Corey’s eyes are bright.
“Do you use ULCs?” He can’t keep the excitement out of his voice.
Roman’s eyes narrow, and Hannah gives Corey a confused look. “ULCs?”
“Universal Location Coordinates. They use them to map quadrants in space. Does your ship use them too?”
“It could,” Roman says slowly.
Corey turns, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Eight Six Six One Zero Eight Nine by Nine Nine Three Two One Five Seven,” he says.
Nobody says anything for a few seconds.
“How did you …” Hannah begins.
Corey’s smile gets bigger. “It’s what we’re gonna name our company. Jamie and Allie and me. 866 Industries – we’re naming it after the coordinates for Austin. We could warp right above the city. We could warp right in over our house!”
“Are you sure?” Malik says.
“Of course I’m sure!”
“Wouldn’t we like warp into the house, then? That can’t be good.”
“We can change the coordinates a little. I know how they work.” Corey looks delighted. “There’s all those mine dumps! Those big piles of dirt. We could come in right over them. Even if there’s like a boom of energy, it won’t hit anything. And if we can jump when we’re just drifting, there won’t be any real momentum. As long as we’re not too high, we could land OK.”