by Paul Teague
‘My dear brother over there knows the truth about you two. I take it he hasn’t chosen to share it with you yet?’
I looked at the other Doctor Pierce. He appeared concerned – I sensed we were nearing the truth now.
‘Did you know that you’re not even human?’
We’d had a hint of this from Xiang, but this was getting interesting.
‘You know you are adopted, but did anybody ever tell you about your mother?’
Nat and I were hanging on his every word. The Doctor Pierce at my side started to speak.
‘You don’t have to do this, Henry. Have some compassion, for goodness’ sake—’
On a nod from Henry Pierce, a trooper struck his twin with his weapon and he collapsed on the floor beside me. I was shaken by the violence used to hit him. I’d never seen aggression like it – I was scared, but angry too.
‘Your mother was from another planet, the lovely planet of Zatheon, which you won’t know about, of course. The reason I’m so pleased you’re alive is that it gives us a chance for a final deal, a little arrangement that will save your lives. I told my friend Zadra Nurmeen here that you’d never take up my offer, but he’s the psychological expert and he disagrees. So here’s my offer, Nat and Dan ...’
He was enjoying this. He paused for dramatic effect, as if he were about to reveal the winner of a TV talent contest.
‘Your real mother is still alive. Her name is Davran Saloor and she’d dearly love to see you again. You were both torn away from her in the first place – she screamed for days when she was separated from you.’
He had our attention now. We looked at each other. Of course we wanted to hear more.
‘Here’s the deal,’ he continued, his eyes narrowing now.
‘You get to live and meet your real mother—’
‘And we have to do what?’ Nat spat at him.
‘In return, you have to help me to kill her planet.’
Chapter Eight
Vengeance
* * *
Amy allowed herself a moment to grieve over James, but knew she didn’t have the luxury of time. She held his hand and her eyes began to well up with tears. As she looked at his lifeless body she started to experience another emotion, one which quickly overwhelmed her – anger.
Her kids were at risk, her friend had been killed, and a bunch of madmen were trying to destroy everything. If there had been anything left of the victim in Amy, it was gone now. For many years she’d been tamed by her experiences in the army, frightened off by such a near miss, and had been happy to settle for a life of domestic simplicity. Of course she’d loved it – the kids, Mike and everything – but in her working life she’d compromised. She’d never really fitted in to the nine-to-five office routine.
Amy picked up her laptop and popped out the SD card she’d so nearly missed. She put it safely in her pocket, placed the trooper’s helmet back on her head, picked up her weapon and the laptop, and steeled herself for what was going to happen next.
She was blasting her way out of this corridor and getting back to Quadrant 3. And as sure as anything she was taking down some troopers on the way.
* * *
Crime
* * *
The reason for Davran Saloor’s sudden and abrupt fall from grace was totally predictable. Her contribution to the early terraforming plans for Earth had been considerable. Without her knowledge and experience, the work would never have got off the ground in the first place.
Which is why so many efforts were made on Earth – and on Zatheon – to try to plead her case, to save her from the strict consequences of breaking the agreed protocols within the Covenant. The rules were there for a reason – they had been agreed by all twelve planets within the Off World Federation. Earth and Zatheon were two lone voices among those clamouring for punishment.
Yet Davran’s crime was not one of evil or malice, it was a crime as old as time itself. She had simply fallen in love while on Earth, with a human who was not directly connected with the Genesis 2 project. So much of Earth and Zatheon biology was similar. There were just a few crucial evolutionary steps which made the difference.
Davran looked completely human, so it was no wonder that when she accidentally bumped into one of the military personnel at the high security facility in the UK where the Genesis 2 project was based, a connection was established and a friendship followed on from it. Locked away at the camp, so far away from her home planet and her sister, spending many hours with the rude and arrogant Zadra, the two Doctor Pierces and the other Genesis 2 personnel, it was inevitable that she’d crave new company. And she was a scientist too. Regardless of the rules, she was keen to learn more about this planet which was so similar to her own, yet with a population so much more fragmented and violent.
As her friendship with the guard – Jeff – grew, they took greater and greater risks. In fact, many people knew what was going on and turned a blind eye to it, such was Davran’s invaluable contribution to the project, but when it became clear that she was carrying a child, a rapid intervention took place. At the time it was suspected that it was Zadra Nurmeen who had tipped off the Off World Federation, but nothing could be proven, and shortly afterwards he too was banished from the project.
With Davran pregnant and the Off World Federation now party to that information, the legal process had to be seen to be applied. The elders on Zatheon shook their heads in despair. They knew and loved Davran. She was not only a highly respected mineralogist, but also a well-liked colleague and adviser. A friend. Yet they understood it could have been anybody on any one of the twelve planets who had made this simple error – it was hardly a crime, but it could not go unpunished.
Davran was not carrying a single child, she was carrying twins. All Zatheon females gave birth to twins, it was part of what made their species unique. An evolutionary step on their planet had determined that twins sharing certain genetic traits were stronger physically and mentally than infants born alone. Zatheon twins had a symbiotic relationship – they were deeply connected from the moment of conception. As they grew from infants to adults, that connection became stronger, ultimately resulting in the ability to communicate telepathically. Their knowledge and wisdom were shared and each sibling could give strength to the other, so in times of illness the healthy twin could assist in the regeneration of the other. In evolutionary terms it had made the Zatheons a stronger, wiser and more temperate people, and in turn, their progression and achievements had soared.
It was already known that Zatheons and humans were capable of successfully procreating. In fact, an incident during the late 1960s was one of the reasons why the interplanetary legislation had been tightened up in the first place. It was untenable that more advanced technology and learning should be permitted to permeate other planets, allowing them to accelerate their progress at greater than natural evolutionary rates.
Davran and Jeff knew the rules. They understood the risks and they were compelled to accept the punishment. But when retribution came, it would have devastating consequences for both of them.
* * *
Rage
* * *
I slowly got up from the floor, trying to work out if anything was broken. For a man who’d just offered us a deal, Henry Pierce wasn’t much of a diplomat. Nat, Harold Pierce and I had been thrown into a meeting room and given fifteen minutes to think through the proposition. To save our lives, would Nat and I agree to help destroy another planet? He’d included his own brother in that offer too, in spite of having beaten him up pretty badly.
Doctor Pierce wasn’t looking good – he was still out cold. Like me, Nat was shaken by such brutal treatment. We looked at each other. I knew what she was thinking. The funny thing was, I really did know what she was thinking. That connection we’d lost when we were parted, well it seemed to be getting stronger the more time we spent together. She was experiencing it as well.
We nodded in agreement before saying anything. Of course we were
n’t taking up this offer. We desperately wanted to meet our birth mother – Henry Pierce couldn’t have dropped a bigger bombshell on us if he’d tried. The fact that we weren’t strictly human made sense. I wasn’t particularly shocked – I felt exactly the same as I’d always done, when I didn’t know my mum was from another planet. I was who I’d always been, but it just happened to be part human, part alien.
I’d known something was different about me ever since Nat and I were torn apart by the accident. My trouble at school wasn’t only a strong reaction to death, it was always something more than that. It wasn’t just grief either, it meant something much bigger to me when Nat was in the accident – it was a physical reaction for me, not only an emotional one. Now we were together again, we could both feel the strength of the bond between us. I could actually feel her anger and hatred towards Henry Pierce. It was unnerving – I’d never experienced such powerful emotions myself. I sensed it would burn her up if she didn’t control it, it was clouding her judgement. If Nat didn’t get a grip on this, she could make a bad decision – and considering where we were right then, it might destroy us all.
* * *
Target
* * *
Viktor recognized Magnus for the man he was. Highly intelligent, innovative and a collaborator. A man he felt he could trust, one he could do business with.
Together they hatched a plan and the deal was done. With no world leaders to sanction their actions, they were the planet’s protectors, its sole custodians. But Viktor always had a backup plan. Sure, he’d made this agreement with Magnus over the nukes, and they’d need Xiang to sanction it too, but in matters of conflict and war he’d always found it best to have a Plan B.
So while Magnus fixed in preliminary strategic coordinates for the jointly controlled nukes, Viktor was plotting out his own strategy for the fifty nuclear weapons under his sole command, lying in wait beneath the cold waters of the Black Sea. These nukes, if they were needed, would be going somewhere completely different.
At that moment Viktor would not have been able to contemplate that within the next two hours he would be setting in the coordinates to deliver this nuclear payload to a destination in his own country.
Chapter Nine
Exiled
* * *
Many Zatheon elders would have been happy for their people to integrate with humans, but if the rules were changed, less socially evolved planets such as Helyios 4 would have been able to play the same game.
Several elders felt that increased interaction with Earth would bring a new dimension to their planet, one of greater passion and emotion, elements which some felt were lacking in their ordered world. It was a widely held belief among the majority of the Off World Federation members that Helyios 4 was best left to develop at its own slow rate. The less impact from that particular planet the better, but their voice still had a right to be heard within O-Fed itself. So it was that Davran found herself banished to an ISOCell in space. This was a humane punishment – she was fed, clothed and permitted to live in relative comfort. But all communications with her own world – and Earth – were broken off. She was to remain in isolation indefinitely.
At the insistence of the Helyions she was not permitted to keep her babies. They were taken away from her as part of the punishment, to be resettled in a manner to be determined at a later date. This left an uneasy feeling among the Zatheon elders, but like the other members they were bound to the Covenant which had maintained peace among the twelve planets for many years now.
After much argument, and a delay of almost three years the children were moved from their high security nursery and settled with new parents on Earth. Davran had a twin on Zatheon and it was felt to be too much of a risk to let the children stay on that planet. There was a precedent here too – it had worked well before during the first incident in the sixties and it would surely be fine a second time.
So the twins were settled on Earth where their presence would go undetected. Doctor Harold Pierce took the lead on this, and quickly sourced a couple who were childless and seeking to adopt. They were delighted to be allocated twins. A boy and a girl. As the result of an accident five years earlier, their new mother had been unable to have children of her own, so she and her husband Mike were ecstatic to be offered orphan siblings, a ready-made family. They named them immediately – Dan and Nat – and they lived happily and undetected on Earth until the day on which it all began to unravel. The day when Henry Pierce violently entered their lives and took away the daughter – and sister – they had all loved so much.
* * *
Prospecting
* * *
Mike was spoiled for choice. The files opened one by one – he didn’t know where to start. He called over the team he’d been assigned to work with and talked them through how he’d managed to break through the encryption. If he hadn’t felt under such pressure to find any scrap of information which could save Nat and Dan, he might have taken a moment to bask in the glory. After so long away from the workplace and looking after Dan at home it felt good to have the admiration of his colleagues once again. He checked his ego quickly, knowing there was no room for this now, the clock was ticking. Dan and Nat were relying on him and Xiang – they were their only two sources of hope in this terrible situation. Either Xiang would find a medical solution or he’d find the cause – or the cure – or at least some clue as to what was happening to them. A bit of basic data on the nature of the nanovirus would help everybody gain some ground.
He quickly allocated the files to his team members. They’d work through each of them swiftly and methodically, reporting anything that looked significant. But it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The files seemed to hold every memo, note, observation or finding that had fed into the Genesis 2 project since the early 1990s. Mike tried to search on key terms, entering ‘Dan’, ‘Nat’, ‘Troywood’, and any other word or phrase that he could think of to try and collate the information. But the data was not indexed in a way that he could quickly grasp. It reminded him of the Dewey Decimal system they used in libraries. It probably made sense to somebody, but it certainly made no sense to him. There was only one thing for it, he’d have to go one file at a time. They were prospecting for gold, eventually one of them would find a nugget.
But would it be in time to save Dan and Nat?
* * *
Prisoners
* * *
Harold Pierce was stirring at our side. He was badly bloodied and bruises were starting to show where he’d been so violently beaten. At least we now knew why Doctor Pierce seemed to have been acting like two people. It was because there were two Doctor Pierces – twins, just like us. Well, not exactly like us – they were identical, which of course Nat and I couldn’t be.
I had never particularly warmed to Harold, who must have been the twin who came to help me through my ‘difficulties’ at school. That made sense – he knew more about me than I did myself. I suppose he’d have been the first person to be called in when the alien kid started playing up in the classroom.
It was strange – I’d received life-changing news in the past half-hour, but it was just making me feel calmer. In many ways, it explained who I was. I felt more comfortable in my own skin. Before these events I’d wondered what was wrong with me.
Harold lifted his head and began to speak.
‘Dan … are you kids okay?’
He seemed to be getting his priorities a bit wrong – if he could see what we saw, he’d be thinking more about himself. He was in a right state.
‘I’m so sorry it’s come to this. I thought I could protect you from what’s happening. I had no idea my brother was planning these events, I should have known ...’
His voice trailed off, he looked broken. Nat chimed in to fill the silence.
‘That guy outside – and his sidekick – they’re the ones who took me.’
She paused, thinking back to what had happened. I got a glimpse of it in my own mind, a terrib
le image of her pain and loneliness – it shocked me. For a moment I was overwhelmed as I began to comprehend what she’d been through.
‘He must have been the guy I saw when you were hit by that car, Nat,’ I picked up. ‘I was sure I’d seen you move when they put you in the ambulance. He was there when it happened.’
It was beginning to make sense now, the disparate pieces were coming together. Henry Pierce must have engineered the accident to get his hands on Nat. Maybe he wanted both of us, and perhaps if I hadn’t stepped back it might have been me who’d disappeared for three years. I felt a surge of gratitude towards Nat, like I owed her one for what she’d been through. It might just as easily have been me. It was a safe bet that the nanovirus which was about to destroy us both was engineered via the experiments that were carried out on Nat.
Doctor Pierce started to talk again. He was in pain and it was difficult for him to speak, but he was determined to get the words out.
‘I need to tell you some things before they come in here to get us again. If my brother is involved, it’s very unlikely that this will end well for me. You know that you’re twins and that your mother was not from this planet. Her name was Davran and she was a wonderful and intelligent woman. It broke her heart when she lost you children. I promised her I would take care of you both.’
He was getting quite emotional talking about this woman who was our mother and I sensed a lot of water had gone under the bridge to get everybody to where they were now. He talked about Amy – our mum – the only mum we’d ever known. He explained that we were symbiotic, which accounted for the connection I felt with Nat. As we got older, he said we’d become even more closely connected and develop a telepathy between us. He was a bit late with that one, it was happening already. This symbiosis was how Henry Pierce managed to infect Nat with the virus and spread it to me. It was like a virus passing wirelessly from one computer to another. When Nat and I met up again the reconnection took place and the destructive genetic process began. To be active it needed both of us together – alone it was completely benign.