“My shoulder will require a couple of biosynth replacement parts as soon as a residual infection is gone. But once those get taken care of, I’ll be as good as new.”
“Excellent.” Her lips pursed. “I expect you’ve heard, but due to your presumed death, Field Marshal Bastian was named AEGIS Fleet Admiral—”
“I did. It’s fine.” He nodded quickly. “Bastian should remain in the position, as I believe he’ll do a far better job than I did. Granted, all he needs to do to accomplish this is not run off on some ego-boosting ground mission like an idiot.” A shadow passed across his features, and he hurriedly sat up straighter. “In any event, I’ll be requesting an indefinite personal leave of absence, effective today. I’m sorry if this creates any sort of difficulties, but given that I was dead, I doubt you had me slated for any vital missions.”
She shouldn’t be surprised to learn the bizarre sequence of events his capture set off had left him shell-shocked and decidedly off-kilter. As such, she didn’t call him on the painful self-flagellation, instead studying him with empathy and a touch of sorrow. “You’re planning to search for her—for Mia.”
“Yes, ma’am. Everything she did, it was because of me. I can’t imagine….” He stopped, and his throat worked for a few seconds. “She’s not answering my messages. I’m not even sure if she’s receiving them. I have to make this right, however I can.”
“Forget making it right. You have to find the woman you love. I understand.”
“I realize this is a challenging time for Concord, and I regret that I can’t be here to help you fight these Rasu, never mind the Savrakaths and everyone else. I wish…well, I wish a lot of things at this moment. Relevant to you, I wish I could be on the front lines. Maybe…I want to say ‘maybe one day soon,’ but I can’t ask you to count on me, only to let you down yet again.”
Damn. She’d had a rough couple of weeks on her return to the world of the living, but if his mood was any indication, he was having a worse go of it so far. “You haven’t let me down, Admiral, and I respect your choice. If or when you find yourself ready to resume active duty, I’m certain there will be a place for you.”
He nodded tightly but stood, saluted once more and turned to go.
“Malcolm?”
He stopped and pivoted back to face her. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the regenesis?”
“It doesn’t affect my—I accept your position and your leadership. I’d never question either.”
“And I appreciate that, believe me, as not everyone feels the same way. But given your circumstances, I understand if you have a few questions. It’s okay if you don’t, but I don’t mind trying to answer even the difficult ones.”
He hesitated briefly, then dove in. “What was it like? Waking up? In an entirely new body, with a gap in your memories, being told you were dead but now everything was fine?”
“Terrifying.”
“And now?”
“Honestly? Still a little terrifying.” Her mind drifted to her nightmare victory a few hours earlier. “It is, however, getting demonstrably better.”
“Do you feel like yourself? Do you…know that you’re yourself?”
This was the true crux of the matter, wasn’t it? She’d spent every spare second for weeks struggling with these precise questions, but it could be that the sole answers were the ones she decided for herself. “When I woke up, I was simply waking from a good night’s sleep. I was exactly myself, and for anyone to suggest otherwise would have seemed absurd. It was only after they told me what had happened that the challenges and uncertainties began. Sometimes our mind can be our own worst enemy.”
“Of course. But what about…” he sighed “…I don’t know what it is I’m trying to say, and now I feel as if I’m being rude.”
“I don’t have any easy answers for you, Malcolm. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be asking questions.”
“Okay.” His brow furrowed up. “Would you do it again?”
“I suppose I do have one easy answer: without question. I’m alive, and everything flows from this one gift. I’m alive, and so long as this is true, any challenge can be overcome.”
Concord Residences
Conflict berated Malcolm’s thoughts as he headed for the apartment on HQ after leaving Miriam Solovy’s office.
He felt gratitude above all. He’d walked into her office expecting a dressing-down of epic proportions. The woman had mentored him and nurtured his career for decades, and today she hadn’t so much as expressed an iota of disappointment when he’d abandoned her, AEGIS and Concord at arguably their time of greatest need to pursue a personal cause. Renewed shame flushed his cheeks, but he had no choice and only one option.
She also hadn’t challenged him on his ‘no regenesis’ clause or his willingness to respect and follow her orders now that she was…what? Reborn? Resurrected? Reconstituted? Regenerated? A copy, a golem, a simulacrum? The terms ranged from reverential to offensive.
She had died, yet she was alive. If he mused on it too hard, her resurrection would do more to challenge his own beliefs on the topic than any other counterpoint, but for now he was glad she was present and guarding the gates. If she’d fallen permanently, he shuddered to imagine what would have happened to Concord, and humanity with it. The people needed her, now more than ever.
But they could do without him for a while longer.
He’d escaped captivity to find the whole world changed, from the politics of Concord to the rising menace of the Rasu, but nowhere so much as what he’d believed his life to be. What was most important, and what had fallen tumbling by the wayside.
All the ingrained honor in the universe wasn’t going to force him back into an admiral’s chair until he’d found Mia. Funny how, though he hadn’t died and been reborn a golem, he felt like he’d lost his soul all the same. He’d reclaim it when he found the woman with raven hair and jade irises and the most arresting smile in the cosmos.
The sterile silence of the apartment when he walked in hit him like a slap in the face. He told himself that it had only ever served as a functional place to eat, shower and sleep when he and Mia were working too many hours, that it wasn’t genuinely their home. But if he closed his eyes, he could hear her laughter pealing from the living room, could smell her perfume in the air and on the sheets.
What the Savrakaths had done in lying to the world about his fate was unforgivable. What Mia had done on believing him dead was nothing less than the Savrakaths deserved, but utterly heartbreaking nonetheless. It shouldn’t have fallen on her shoulders to punish them. She’d wrecked friendships, destroyed her luminary career and put her freedom in jeopardy. And none of it had to be, dammit.
Guilt and recriminations ate away at him as he ditched the BDUs and changed into khaki slacks and a dark brown collared shirt. He packed a bag with essentials, but most of his civilian clothes were on Romane or in Vancouver. He’d checked both homes the instant Presidio Medical had discharged him in the frantic hope that he would find her waiting at one, but both had sat as sterile and silent as this apartment. He’d check them both again this afternoon, and flesh out the contents of his luggage, before setting off on his journey.
On his way out he sent her another message, the forty-seventh by his eVi’s count. In a civilization spanning over fifty galaxies, there were literally thousands of places where she could have gone. He’d start on Romane.
8
* * *
PANDORA
IDCC
Milky Way Galaxy
Mia Requelme signed the lease to the retail space as Laisha Balente, a persona she and Meno had created out of whole cloth in the last twenty-four hours. The first name was a derivative of a part of her name she’d long ago dropped, but not so close to it for anyone to make the connection. The last name was a random assortment of consonants and vowels she’d scribbled out in her head while walking to her new apartment the night before.
She paid
the first two months’ rent in untraceable credits, thanked the realtor for her help and headed out into the madness otherwise known as Pandora.
The Approach was neither the nicest nor the sleaziest region on Pandora. Rather, it occupied the ‘quirky’ segment of the middle ground. Once upon a time, Noah Terrage had lived and worked here, and she’d visited the area many times during her troubled tenure on the colony. She could afford far better than The Approach, of course. She could afford to buy a penthouse high above The Promenade and live in splendid, desolate isolation for years.
But Meno’s gentle ministrations had penetrated the grief-stricken state of her mind enough for her to remember who she was and had always been: a survivor. Though a large part of her consciousness—the part currently stuck in a silent, never-ending scream of despair—badly wanted to curl up in the shadows and hide, she wouldn’t shrivel away to dust in a dark corner. She needed to keep going until she found a new path for herself. A way to forge a new life.
So she’d rented a small but clean apartment in The Approach and a small but clean storefront down the street from it. And if her life now felt suspiciously like it was on a loop, this was because it was. How did the old phrase go? ‘The past doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’ The new shop wasn’t on Romane, since even with a new haircut and color and new eyes, her face was too well-known on Romane for her to risk seeking refuge there. But it was a tiny consumer tech shop all the same.
She wasn’t above admitting that this wasn’t so much a fresh start as a retreat to the familiar. A tentative baby step into the future, while relying on the past for support. She’d done this before; she could do it again.
Three large boxes were waiting for her on the curb outside the storefront when she arrived—they must be the first shipment of her retail stock. Grateful to have something to occupy her mind beyond empty shelves that loomed like specters of an empty life, she toggled on the news feed screen on the wall and immediately opened up the boxes and began unpacking.
The form and function of commercial tech gear had changed a great deal in the twenty-plus years since she’d run the little shop on Romane. Now, everything was either impossibly tiny or monstrously large. Most of the tiny items revolved around enhancing cybernetics technology, which had advanced by leaps and bounds since The Displacement, while the larger items dealt with tweaking and modding quantum hardware. Hardware used to run Artificials. Around ten percent of the people she’d passed on the street since arriving were Prevos, so the market should be a hot one.
She picked up a tetrahedron-shaped, milky glass object, turning it over in her hands curiously as she carried it to one of the front-most shelves.
“An AEGIS spokesperson has confirmed to Galaxy First Communications that former Fleet Admiral Malcolm Jenner, believed killed in action during a mission on the planet Savrak, is in fact alive.”
The object slipped from her hands to clatter across the floor. Her legs insisted she join it there.
“Admiral Jenner escaped from captivity on Savrak during an attack by unknown perpetrators and has received treatment from AEGIS medical personnel for serious but non-life-threatening injuries. The AEGIS spokesperson indicated authorities will release an official statement on the matter in the coming days. In other news….”
The walls spun around her, zig-zagging left and right, up and down, then dipping into a few hidden dimensions. A fuzzy light prismed out from the milky glass object to drown her in a kaleidoscope of color.
Alive?
Mia, this is wonderful news. Allow me to slow your heart rate and counterbalance the neurotransmitters flooding your system, so you do not stroke out.
She blinked. Alive? Her stomach clenched into a prickly knot, and a wave of nausea sent her heaving up the glazed doughnut she’d had for breakfast. Captive on Savrak? Darhk had lied to her face! The things he’d said about Malcolm’s burnt corpse…all lies…. How much perverse pleasure had he taken in seeing her suffer?
She wiped her mouth clean with her shirt and focused on breathing. What had the reporter said about him escaping during a mysterious attack? Her throat convulsed anew, but nothing remained in her stomach to expel. In her attempt to exact vengeance for his death, had she nearly killed him instead?
But you also might have saved him. I am reaching out to sources and collating data as quickly as I am able, and it appears the attack the reporter referenced was a bombing of a prisoner exchange involving Torval elasson-Machim. Eren Savitas took the information you sent him and acted, and that action allowed Malcolm to escape his prison.
Killed him. Saved him. Dead. Alive. What was real? What had she done?
Meno’s behind-the-scenes efforts to calm her body’s system-wide revolt began to take hold, and the room gradually stopped spinning. She leaned against the wall behind her, letting the tears run free to stream down her face and soak her already ruined shirt.
He would have messaged her on his return. She’d shut down the address that belonged to her old persona and had never intended to so much as glance at it again…but of course she was still able to access it. Her hands trembled, palms pressed hard into the cool floor, as she back-channeled into the account.
Forty-seven messages. The last one sent a mere twenty minutes ago. He must have heard about her crimes by now, but he hadn’t stopped trying to contact her. Her limbs shook with urgency, begging to be set free to sprint down the street, to the spaceport, all the way to the Presidio and directly into his arms, for however long she managed to remain there until security arrived to arrest her.
A hand rose shakily from the floor to cover her mouth as she stared at the endlessly scrolling message headers…but she didn’t open any of the messages. She knew what they said, for she could hear his voice in her head as clear as day. Expressing his deep and abiding love for her, his sorrow over the pain he’d caused her, begging her to respond and tell him where she was.
Meno, scan the messages from Malcolm. Do any of them say he’s amending his will to remove the ‘no regenesis’ clause?
No. They do not mention either his will or regenesis.
Her chin dropped to her chest as an avalanche of renewed sorrow swept through to wreck the joy the news had kindled. He was alive today, but all her mind’s eye could see was him dead. Dead on Savrak, dead in a spaceship explosion, dead in a Rasu invasion, dead to a gang of muggers on the street. The pernicious lie of his death on Savrak had ripped the wool from her eyes and shown her the inevitable future. It had let her live that future for several horrifying, soul-destroying weeks before depositing her back in the present day and shoving her onward.
Without regenesis, one day—whether tomorrow, next month or next decade—the debilitating misery of these endless weeks was certain to return to haunt her future.
Her chest ached as surely as if it had been cleaved apart by a hatchet. She was not strong enough to do this again. Her survival instinct had seen her through a brutal childhood attack and escape from New Orient. It had seen her through years of indentured servitude to a violent and sadistic mob boss. It had seen her through a vicious attack on her and Meno, her near death and stubborn return to life. It had seen her through overcoming the full might of the Earth Alliance government, the Prevo revolution and the riots on Romane. It had seen her through the murderous retribution of Olivia Montegreu’s abandoned Artificial and the universe-destroying machinations of the Directorate.
But her survival instinct was not strong enough to shepherd her through Malcolm’s death a second time.
Mia, do you want to reply to his most recent message? I can route it so it can’t be traced back to you by the authorities.
Her voice trembled, even in her head. No.
I don’t understand.
Neither do I. Alice just tumbled down the rabbit hole. We’re all mad here now.
9
* * *
AKESO
Siyane
Alex reattached the displaced cushions to the couch’s frame, then nudg
ed the low table sideways until it once again lined up with the couch. The cleaning bot had scrubbed the Siyane’s interior from top to bottom in an attempt to clean up after the fifty-three guests she’d hosted for half a day when they’d evacuated Namino, but a bot could only do so much. A thousand tiny things on the ship were scratched up, knocked out of place or merely rumpled.
Cleaning up the house, surrounding property and landing complex after Akeso’s planet-sized temper-tantrum had taken priority on their arrival home, and only now was she finding the time to direct her attention to getting the Siyane back in proper shape.
She went over to the data center controls and immediately frowned. None of the settings were correct! Someone must have played around with the configuration while she and Caleb were fighting their way through the Rasu compound.
Ugh. A scowl took up residence as she dove deep into the menus to make certain nothing crucial had been altered or deleted. Despite her annoyance, though, touching the nuts and bolts of the Siyane to make things right again evoked a feeling she hadn’t often experienced in the last few months: peace. Serenity, even? She wasn’t convinced she had the capacity to feel true serenity, but this brought her damn close.
A heartbeat, measured and steady, gradually bubbled up into her conscious awareness. She glanced up from the control panel to find Caleb leading against the cockpit half-wall, one ankle draped across the other, a vague smile on his lips.
She instinctively returned the smile. He looked…good. Calm, confident, engaged, arguably displaying his own manner of peace. He also looked good, with his beard trimmed and his navy henley complementing sparkling sapphire irises. God, did he look good. This had never changed, but it was truer today than it had ever been.
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