Infinity's Prism

by Christopher L. Bennett

  4

  “Shaun,” said O’Donnel, gripping his shoulder tightly. “We need to talk. Right this second.”

  Instinctively, Christopher glanced up from his work at the environmental control console and looked to see where the troopers from the Defiance were standing. Two of them were across the cryo-chamber at the main hatch, like black-clad sentinels either side of the steel door. He hadn’t seen them speak, not once since they had come on board. The thickset men looked like thugs with a molecule-thin layer of respectability sprayed on over the top. Shaun couldn’t help but wonder what kind of space vessel—scratch that, starship—would need men like that in her crew.

  “Hachi,” he said, turning to Tomino. “Shannon and me are gonna take a look at the regulators. Keep an eye on the gauges here, will you? Sing out if the needles start to twitch.” He tapped the panel and gave the man a nod.

  “Gotcha.” Tomino’s look in return showed he understood exactly what was going on.

  Shannon moved to the snarl of cryo-tank ducting between the first and second sleeper bays and ducked down into a narrow maintenance crawlway, making a play of using her penlight to examine the tubes. Shaun crouched and joined her, examining a perfectly serviceable joint for a fault he knew wasn’t there. Among the hissing, grumbling pipes it would be difficult for anyone to hear them talking, and the captain had the certain sense that everything they did was being scrutinized by Bashir’s crew.

  “Where’s that doctor of theirs?” he said quietly.

  She pointed at the floor. “On H Deck with Reggie and Rudy, checking the tube seals. He said he wanted to make sure we weren’t going to lose any more.”

  Shaun nodded. Along with himself, Rain, Shannon, and Hachi, Warren and Laker had been woken up by the DY-102’s auto-revival sequence before Amoros had been able to deactivate it. At first, Christopher had thought the Defiance crew might be responsible for the deaths of the five whose pods were found dark and lifeless, but soon he realized that the ones they had lost had been through systems malfunctions, through normal wear and tear along the course of the ship’s voyage.

  One death for every seventy or so years we traveled through the dark, he mused. Was it worth that price?

  Brown. Tyler. McShane. Summerfield. Jones. He’d known them all. Everyone on Botany Bay was like family—that was what a crisis did to you: it made people forge those kind of bonds—but for now they couldn’t afford to mourn. Not until they knew what the hell was going on.

  Shaun sighed. He wished Jack were here. He could have used his old mentor’s guidance right about now; but Jackson Roykirk had stayed behind, given up his seat. He was centuries away from them now, gone behind a veil of time and space that left Christopher feeling more alone than he had ever thought possible. He realized Shannon was waiting for him to speak. “What about Rain?” he asked.

  “She went over there.” O’Donnel jerked a thumb at the hull. “To the Defiance.”

  “What?” He glanced over his shoulder, to see if his reflexive snarl had caught the attention of the guards. “You let her suit up and walk over to another ship? Is our atmosphere gear even still viable?”

  “Didn’t exactly have much choice,” she snapped back at him, nodding in the direction of the big men. “And she wanted to go.”

  “Yeah, of course she did.” Shaun shook his head. “Dammit, that girl treats everything like it’s some kinda game. What if Bashir decides he doesn’t want to let her come back?”

  Shannon frowned. “Likely, judging from the way he was looking at her. But that’s not the thing. She didn’t use a suit, Shaun. None of them did. They didn’t EVA over from their boat.”

  “What are you talking about?” He knew for certain they hadn’t docked with the other ship.

  “I don’t know what it was they used, but Bashir just talked into that headset of his and the pair of them…disintegrated. Right in front of me.” She shook her head. “That blond bruiser, Tiber? He laughed when he saw the look on my face. Said they were teleported back to the ship.”

  “That’s impossible,” he retorted, but O’Donnel’s hard gaze said otherwise. “Holy Hannah. What’s that thing that Professor Clarke said?”

  “Any technology sufficiently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic.”

  “Ray guns. Aliens. Matter transporters. What else?” He shot a look at the guards. “Mind readers?”

  “I’ll admit, that Bashir looks like he can see right through me…” Shannon shook her head grimly. “But I’d say not. If they knew what we were thinking, we’d be dead.”

  Something in her words brought him up short. “Why would they do that?” He leaned closer. “Shan? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Rain blinked and did a double take as the doors slid back into the walls to reveal a striking desert landscape of towering rust-red buttes and canyons. “Whoa.” She stepped through, under an arch of pale metal, and walked slowly forward. The doorway appeared to have deposited her on the flat top of one of the mesas, the level crown of the mountain the size of a basketball court. With the bowl of a sharp blue sky above, it was almost like riding among the clouds.

  “I could do that for you, if you wish it,” Bashir said, pouring a glass of wine.

  Rain colored slightly, realizing that she’d been thinking aloud. “Really?”

  “Oh yes.” The Defiance’s commander stood by a small table covered in cutlery and glassware that seemed to have been transplanted from some upscale restaurant. “This is a synthetic environment, completely malleable, completely adjustable. I can program it to reflect the real or the unreal.” He looked up. “Computer? Nighttime.”

  Instantly the blue sky became a black curtain dappled with stars. Candles solidified on the table, issuing a warm glow. “That’s pretty cool,” Rain said, attempting to hold in her instinct to gawk. “Do you get ESPN on this thing?”

  He gave her a curious smile. “I do not understand.”

  “Never mind.” She approached the table, expecting him to seat her—she’d dated guys who did the ‘gentleman’ thing before and she knew the drill—but Bashir didn’t. He took his own chair and nodded at hers, as if he expected her to automatically know her place.

  Rain sat, keeping her face neutral. “I’ve gotta say, I’m surprised you asked me, uh, over.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yeah. I was worried the age thing might make it a problem getting dates. Not many guys go for women in their late three-hundreds.” The glib comment tripped off her tongue, but to be honest, she was nervous in the extreme. The humor was a defense mechanism.

  Bashir chuckled and placed the glass of wine in front of her before pouring one for himself. “You are here, Ms. Robinson, because you are the only person from the Botany Bay who did not look at me with outright suspicion and fear. Has that changed?”

  “That…teleport thing of yours was a bit of a shock,” she admitted, not wanting to say that the stark transition had almost made her throw up. “But I’m not quaking in my boots, if that’s what you’re asking.” She sipped the wine; it was a heavy red with a thick, caramel aftertaste to it. “I’m a scientist,” she continued. “The unknown is my business. I guess right now, that’s you.”

  “And your companions? Captain Christopher and the others? Do they feel that way as well?”

  “Doubt it,” she replied. “Don’t get me wrong, Shaun’s a stand-up guy, and he knows his stuff. But he’s military, you know? A bit stiff.”

  Bashir raised an eyebrow. “What does that make me, then?”

  “You’re different,” Rain admitted, unsure where her words were leading her. “You’ve got more of an aristocrat thing going on. It’s cute.”

  He helped himself to food from a cluster of silver servers and Rain followed suit, careful to pick things that seemed familiar. “Captain Christopher and his crew have been very guarded about the origins of your voyage,” Bashir continued. “Why is that?”

  Rain shrugged the question off. “Like I said. Military. Shaun
, Reggie, Rudy, they’re all ex–air force or navy, all NASA monkeys. Astronauts,” she added, seeing a flash of confusion on the man’s face. “You know the kind.”

  “I do,” he admitted. “But you are not like them. You are a…civilian.”

  Bashir leaned forward, and Rain was struck by just how much bigger he was than her. Not just taller or broader, but denser. It was odd; it seemed like the Defiance was run by a crew of line-backers. She nodded at his statement and went to the wine again, barely wetting her lips with it. Careful, girl, she told herself. He’s charming, but you know next to nothing about him. “How about your ship?” she asked. “You have civilian staff on board?”

  “In a manner of speaking. There is a contingent of helots on board to assist with the minor duties.”

  “Helots? I don’t know what that means.”

  Bashir paused. “I suppose you could call them auxiliaries. Servants, that sort of thing.”

  “Right.” Rain sounded out the word, uncertain of how to take his explanation. Maybe she had been closer to the truth than she realized when she called him an aristocrat. Maybe the Earth of this era had some kind of feudal government system. Bashir could be a lord or a baron. Robinson didn’t want to dwell on what deeper meaning that might have.

  “I have been giving a lot of thought to you,” he went on, nodding to himself. “I want to know more about you, about your time. To be honest with you, I am going against protocol just having this conversation…” He gestured with his wineglass. “But I have read as much as I can about twenty-first-century history. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by that era. And now, to actually meet someone who lived there…” Bashir broke into a boyish, incongruous grin. “I have so many questions.”

  “You and me both,” Rain admitted.

  The Defiance’s commander nodded. “Yes, of course. I can only guess at how you must feel at this moment. Dislocated, adrift in time.” He put down his glass. “I want to help you.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  His grin widened. “You have lost centuries, Rain, but I can give them back to you. I can show you what happened while you slept.” Bashir got to his feet and spoke to the air again. “Computer? Run program Bashir Iota One. Historical database tie-in.”

  Rain flinched as the mesa melted away and re-formed, the sky lightening, the rusty stone morphing into gray skyscrapers and city streets. “This is New York,” she gasped, recognizing the location. They were sitting in Grand Army Plaza, looking out across the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. It seemed so real, she could barely grasp the idea that this was all an elaborate simulation.

  “These events took place two years after you left Earth,” he told her. “The holo-program was constructed from surviving archive footage.”

  The buildings were as she remembered them: striking and bold, but still a shadow of their former glory, with many windows boarded up and dark. There were no gunships overhead though, not like there had been the last time she had visited the city. And no smell of smoke in the air, no trace of the grim texture of a metropolis on the edge of war. Where were the checkpoints and the police patrols? There were no food lines choked with tired people, none of the street-screens showing endless cycles of footage from CNN’s embedded crews on the Eurasian and Mexican fronts.

  But there were cheering crowds lining both sides of the street. Many of the people waved pennants that seemed blurry and indistinct. Not American flags, she thought.

  “Here he comes,” said Julian. “Look!”

  Rain got to her feet and stared in the direction Bashir was pointing. Rolling steadily up the avenue from Midtown came a line of heavy armored vehicles in urban camouflage, troop carriers, self-propelled guns, and main battle tanks. Each of them bore a symbol across its hull, a crescent moon crossed over a circular sun picked out in yellow.

  Ice formed a hard ball in her stomach, and Robinson heard her blood rumbling in her ears. She reached out a hand to grab the table for support; Bashir didn’t notice. He was too engaged by the sights around them.

  No, her mind echoed the denial, no, no no no no…

  She couldn’t look away. She wanted to, but it was impossible to turn her head. The big tanks parted to roll past them, going onward in the direction of Harlem, and the rolling murmur of the excited crowd surged like a tide as one armored personnel carrier, bristling with communications antennae, grumbled up the middle of the avenue. Standing proudly atop the roof of the vehicle was a man in a bright red tunic and trousers, his dark face turned imperiously to the people, greeting them with waves and fatherly nods. In one of his hands he held the Stars and Stripes, cradling it in a gentle, respectful fashion.

  “Dear god.” The words fell from her lips. “He won.” She couldn’t take it in. As an astronomer, Rain had seen stars millions of light-years distant, galaxies and supernovae, cosmic sights on a massive scale, and held them all in her thoughts; but this sight was beyond her. The enormity of it was just too much.

  Unable to take her eyes off Noonien Singh’s face, she was dimly aware of Bashir nodding at her side. “This is the beginning of his victory march to Washington, D.C., where he accepted the surrender of the president on the White House lawn,” he told her. “The Khan chose to land in New York, because that was where those who had come to America in the past had landed when they sought a new future…But instead, he brought a new future to America.”

  Khan’s vehicle passed them, and the man in red spared them a glance and a smile.

  Bashir returned it. “He freed the American people from a cruel and callous government, and in doing so he laid the last stone of his foundation for a better world.” He looked down at Rain and smiled sadly. “If you had not left, you could have seen this with your own eyes.” He looked away, shaking his head. “But I understand the choice you made. Two years before this…it must have seemed as if the world was shrouded in a darkness that it would never escape.”

  “Yes,” she managed, forcing out the word through a wall of shock. There was darkness, Rain recalled, the memory chilling her, and Khan Noonien Singh was the one who brought it down on us.

  Shannon spoke slowly and carefully, her voice carrying no further than Shaun’s ears. “I tried to get some more information out of Amoros. He’s not easy to have a conversation with, but he opened up when I worked the idiot angle a little.” Her lip curled. “These folks seem to respond well to that, thinking they’re the smartest guys in the room.”

  Christopher nodded absently. Bashir’s people wore their arrogance plainly, it was true. “Go on.”

  “He told me they’re bolting an engine sled to the spaceframe. FTL drives capable of pushing us to, get this, hundreds of times light velocity.”

  “That’s imposs—” He halted. “Okay, I keep forgetting. Three and a half centuries of technological advancement, right. Plenty of time for them to learn how to twist the laws of physics into a pretzel.” Shaun sniffed. “Nice of Bashir to ask before he let his goons start messing with our ride.”

  “Forget that, the engines thing is just for starters. It gets worse,” Shannon insisted, her eyes hard.

  “It usually does.”

  “Amoros told me that Defiance isn’t just a starship, it’s a warship. They’re out here protecting Earth’s interests. Showing the flag.”

  “A hundred light-years away from Sol?” The concept of such a distance pulled at Christopher’s reason. “Who the hell are they protecting Earth from all the way out here?”

  “I asked him the very same question. ‘The enemies of the Khan,’ he said.”

  “Khan?” The air in the cryo-chamber was bitter, but the chill that ran through Shaun Christopher’s body at the sound of that name was far deeper, far colder. He grabbed her and pulled her close. “No,” he insisted, “that has to be wrong! Three hundred sixty-two years, Shannon! He can’t still be alive! Not even him, he can’t be alive!”

  “He isn’t,” she replied, with some slight relish in her voic
e. “But what he left behind is. We thought he’d kill himself, that those augmented freaks would rip each other to bits…” O’Donnel shook her head. “Seems we were wrong.”

  Shaun sagged against the pipe work, the cold leaching the heat from his skin. “Noonien Singh,” he said to the air, “you son of a bitch. You couldn’t let us get away, could you? After everything we gave up, everyone who died…You still couldn’t let us go.”

  Bashir showed Rain moments from across the next ten decades, skipping over the years in blinks of holographic pixels. She saw gaudy renditions of Khan leading from the front against the warlords of China; Khan liberating orphans in Yugoslavia; Khan dissolving the United Nations amid a storm of cheers; Khan setting foot on Mars and Europa; Khan breaking the light barrier aboard the experimental starship Morningstar; Khan and Khan and Khan…

  She sat on the chair, her hands in a tight ball as Bashir talked her through each scene. He was absorbed in the display, unaware of her silent disgust at it all.

  The images were so sanitized, so blatantly false that she wanted to scream. Each holograph made Noonien Singh appear as a benevolent leader, a warrior-king who showed both nobility and compassion in addition to his battle prowess. The Khan was cast like a colossus, striding the Earth and freeing it from a series of oppressors. The people in every program were always happy and joyful in Khan’s presence, as if he illuminated them just by being there.

  It sickened her, the great monstrous falseness of it. Where, she wondered, were the scenes of the “containment facilities” where Khan sent his enemies and those his ethnic profilers felt unsuitable to remain in the gene pool? Where was footage from the cities and civilian targets obliterated during the bloody advances across Europe? There was nothing about the terror attacks, the secret murders, the biological experimentation, the conspiracies and pacts of a dictator with his claws about the world.

  And Bashir was part of it. He could see the glimmer in the commander’s eyes, the need to believe the brilliant, stunning perfection of the lie.