by Smith, Glenn
“Dulled his sense of judgment!” Dylan exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night? He’s dead, Commander! And so are a lot of other people! Their lives were wasted! And for what?”
“All right, Sergeant, you’ve just stepped across the line,” the admiral said, surprisingly calm, considering Dylan’s sudden behavior. Perhaps the fact that he agreed with the sergeant’s sentiment had something to do with it. “I suggest you sit down and shut up.”
Dylan glanced at the admiral briefly and hesitated, but finally did comply—the guy was an admiral, after all—still glaring at the commander.
Royer grinned. “See what I mean, Admiral?” she said, studying Dylan’s glare. “There’s one hell of a fire burning in there.”
“I see it, Commander,” Hansen replied. Then, to reinforce his previous warnings, he added, “And it had better stay in there where it won’t get him in trouble.”
Dylan took the obvious hint to heart and reined in his temper, but his words still came forth with a razor’s edge. “Why the big charade, Commander?” he asked. “Why did you go through all that trouble to get me to watch her in the first place? You could’ve come to my home again, armed with your recruiting speech. Why didn’t you just do that?”
“As I recall, my recruiting speech wasn’t any more effective than Ensign Pillinger’s was, and the one time I did go to your home you refused to answer the door. But your service record, on the other hand, speaks for itself. You were decorated and promoted for your actions on Tamour while technically still just a recruit. You earned your Security Forces skill designator and graduated from the Military Police Academy at the top of your class. You’re a qualified expert with every weapon you’ve ever tested with. You’ve earned something more than half a dozen different medals, not to mention an assortment of service and professional development ribbons. And, in addition to all that, you’ve joined the Marine Corps, made it through Ranger training, and served with distinction in Special Operations. Is that enough, or shall I go on?”
“Please don’t,” Dylan practically pleaded. “I’m well aware of my own record. Though what it has to do with your choice of recruiting methods, I have no idea.”
“I was also well aware of your record,” she explained. “O’Donnell had been dealing with some seriously bad individuals for a while to get what she’d gotten, so we knew she might be in some danger even before the station commander got word of the leak. He planted agents in the area just for that reason.”
“The other dead and wounded with government-issued weapons,” Dylan concluded.
“Uh...yeah, that’s right,” Royer confirmed hesitantly. “At any rate, based on your record I gambled that you’d try to help her if anything happened before we decided to pull her out. Obviously, I was right again. But even if nothing had ever happened, I was still going to...get another crack at you, as you so eloquently put it, one way or the other.”
One way or the other? “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Face it, Sergeant. Peeping through open windows at naked women isn’t exactly the kind of conduct we approve of.”
The frank directness of her answer totally blind-sided him. As obvious as it should have been, he hadn’t seen it coming. “You intended to blackmail me into the agency?” he asked.
“If necessary, yes. But I’m just as glad we didn’t have to.”
“Oh, well, that makes all the difference.”
“Spare us the sarcasm, Sergeant,” Hansen said.
Dylan glanced at the admiral, but continued to address Royer. “Why me, Commander?” he asked. Then he looked at her again and continued, “A lot of Marines have records that are a lot more impressive than mine. Why were you so intent on recruiting me?”
When Royer didn’t answer, Dylan looked back at Hansen and sighed, shaking his head. “Granted, I’m an outsider, sir, and maybe there’s more to all this than I can see right now. But I can’t believe you approve of her methods.”
“First of all, Sergeant, you’re not an outsider. Not anymore. You’re one of us now. You’re an agent.”
“But I’ve only just finished the academy, sir.”
“And secondly,” Hansen continued, ignoring that apparently insignificant detail, “what I don’t approve of is a peeping tom.”
“She set me up, sir.”
“Yes she did, Sergeant,” the admiral freely admitted with a single nod of his head. “But you did it, nonetheless.” A slight grin found its way to his face as he added, “But, just so you’re aware, while it’s true that I don’t always approve of the commander’s methods, I’ve always found her personnel choices to be sound.”
“With at least one notable exception, sir,” Dylan pointed out. “Of course, he’s nothing more than a sofa stain now.”
“That’s enough of that, Sergeant!” Hansen barked, pointing a stern finger at him. “Any more comments like that out of you and I’ll drop a general reprimand into your record so fast you won’t have time to read it before your stripes hit the deck! Do I make myself perfectly crystal clear, Sergeant?”
“Yes you do, sir,” Dylan answered with a heavy swallow, thoroughly intimidated now by the half dozen golden starbursts that were glaring at him from both sides of the admiral’s burning stare. No one had ever been able to do that to him before, and he didn’t like how it felt.
With an instantly calmer voice and without the emphasis of his pointing finger, Hansen explained, “Commander Royer didn’t choose that agent to bring the girl out. The local station commander did. Commander Royer’s choices of personnel have always been sound, just as I said. And that’s never been truer than it is in your case.”
“Which leads me right back to my original question, sir,” Dylan pointed out calmly, all evidence of that ‘burning fire,’ as Royer had put it, now thoroughly internalized. “Why do you want me? I mean, I just graduated from the academy for God sake. Why am I the right choice for this mission, whatever it is?”
Hansen sighed as he adjusted his position and looked at Royer. “Whatever happened to the good old days when we handed an assignment to an agent and he just took it and ran?” he asked rhetorically.
She grinned and answered, “I thought that was still how we did it, sir.”
He looked at Dylan again. “Why are you the right choice for this mission? Partially for one of the same reasons the commander wanted you watching over your neighbor. Your service record. But mostly because of the specifics of the mission itself.”
“And they are, sir?”
Once again, the admiral leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. Then he said, in a very matter-of-fact manner, “Very simple, Sergeant. We want you to travel back in time to the year twenty-one sixty-eight and prevent the destruction of the Excalibur at Caldanra.”
Dylan drew a breath to respond, but he didn’t have any words. Then, certain that he couldn’t possibly have heard the admiral correctly, he simply said, “Excuse me?”
“More specifically,” Hansen clarified, “we want you to pose as a Security Policeman, infiltrate the staff of the Martian Orbital Fleet Yards, and take whatever actions you determine necessary in order to ensure that the starcruiser Albion remains dry-docked there at least until the time that our records indicate the Excalibur was destroyed.”
Time-travel? But that was just science-fiction. How was he supposed to respond to such a suggestion, especially when it came from a flag officer? And even if it were possible, which he believe for a second, what about the unpredictable consequences that all of the most popular theories on the subject warned about? Which ones were right and which were wrong? According to everything he’d ever read on the subject, even the most knowledgeable scientists couldn’t agree on the answers.
“Sergeant Graves?”
Dylan raised his eyes to the admiral. He was waiting for a response.
“Do you understand what it is we’re asking you to do?” he asked.
“I uh...I think
so, sir.”
“But?”
“But...uh...forgetting for a moment that I don’t happen to own a time machine, sir, if the Albion was taken out and used in the attack on Excalibur, and if I somehow go back and keep the Albion in dry-dock so that can’t happen, won’t I be changing history?”
“Obviously. That’s the whole idea.”
“No, sir, I mean...wouldn’t I be changing more than just that one detail? Wouldn’t I be changing everything?”
Hansen sighed. “I’ve sat through this discussion several times already, Sergeant, and I really don’t want to sit through it again. What you say is a possibility, yes, but changing history is the whole point of the mission.”
“But isn’t that supposed to be dangerous, sir? If I understand the theories correctly, those changes would include our present reality.”
Hansen drew a deep breath and bowed his head as he slowly exhaled, then looked up at Dylan again and said, “Sergeant Graves, our present reality is that the Tor’Kana will become extinct when the current generation dies out, and the rest of us probably won’t last much beyond that. Altering that reality is precisely what we’re trying to do. It’s the whole point of the mission, as I said. And we think that by saving the Excalibur we might just accomplish that.”
“How so, sir?”
“Those details aren’t important to your mission.”
Dylan gazed at Hansen, at Royer, and back at Hansen again, but got only stern blank stares in return. “You’re really serious about all this?” he finally asked.
“We are absolutely serious about all this,” Hansen assured him. “If we weren’t serious you wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Dylan thought it over, but he still wasn’t completely convinced. “Okay. All right. Let’s just say for argument sake that I can do this—that I can somehow go back in time and save my father’s ship. Do we really want to alter the course of our history, sir, based on one remote possibility? I mean, what if preventing the destruction of my father’s ship still doesn’t save the Tor’Kana and I end up making things even worse for the Coalition? What if we all end up dead? How do we know for sure what’s going to happen?”
Hansen looked at Royer and asked, “Remember the same good old days when you could give an N-C-O an order and he’d run with it without having to analyze it with you first?” Then, without waiting for Royer to answer, he looked back at Dylan and explained, “We don’t know for sure. We can’t. All we do know is that we have a chance to make things better. If you succeed you’ll undoubtedly save a lot of lives, including your own father’s.”
“That’s why you chose me, isn’t it?”
“That’s exactly right, Sergeant,” the admiral confirmed. “That is the one specific detail that pointed us right at you for this mission.” That wasn’t the entire truth, of course. There were also his nightmares, but his nightmares were none of the sergeant’s business. “The fact that the captain of the vessel we’re trying to save is your father.”
“Was my father, sir,” Dylan amended.
“Twenty-two years in the past, he still is your father,” Hansen reiterated.
“Twenty-two years in the past, Admiral, I’m still a six year old boy,” Dylan parried. But beyond that he conceded the point without further debate.
Long moments crept silently by while he thought over all that he’d just been told. They were offering him a chance to save his father’s life...in theory. It made some sort of sense...in theory...though the whole idea of time-travel and multiple histories was so extraordinary that he could hardly conceive of actually participating in such a feat. But now that the possibility that he might be able to save his father’s life had been specifically pointed out, he was, for the first time, actually considering accepting the assignment.
Assuming, of course, that it really was possible.
There was, however, still one more very important point they hadn’t yet addressed. “How would I go back, sir?” he asked, still not really believing that he could. “And more importantly, how would I come back home?”
“Sorry, Sergeant,” Royer said, answering in Hansen’s place. “We can’t tell you that until you agree to do it.”
“Oh really?” Dylan asked sarcastically.
“Yeah, really,” Royer answered in kind.
“And what if I agree, only to have you tell me that it’s a one way trip?”
“It’s not a one way trip,” Hansen assured him. “The plan includes a way home.”
“And if I refuse anyway, sir?”
“Due to the unusual nature of this mission, that option does remain open to you,” the admiral told him. “If you refuse then you’ll be taken from here directly to Medbay, where all memory of this entire briefing will be erased from your mind.” He glanced at Royer briefly—if she’d done something to attract his attention, Dylan had missed it—then looked back to Dylan. “Then you’ll be given another assignment.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, we’re continuing our search for your former neighbor. Assuming she’s still alive, perhaps there’s something more she can tell us that might turn things to our advantage, although that seems pretty unlikely. We already have a dozen agents searching for her, but I guess one more wouldn’t hurt. If and when we find her we’ll send a SpecOps team in to get her.”
A rescue. Now there was a mission he could go for. A mission right up his alley. But a memory-edit? He didn’t like the sound of that at all. The thought of someone walking around in his brain playing with his memories was even scarier than the thought of traveling back in time.
Perhaps there was a way to avoid both. “I’ve already given you my word not to repeat any of this, Admiral,” he pointed out. “A memory-edit...”
“Under the circumstances, Sergeant Graves, your word isn’t good enough. Don’t take it personally, though. In this particular case, no one’s word would be good enough. If you refuse this mission you will undergo a memory-edit.”
Royer cleared her throat, seemingly a little louder than should have been necessary. “Tell me, Sergeant Graves, do you still see those creatures in your nightmares?”
“There was only one creature, Commander,” Dylan reminded her without looking away from Hansen, “and no, not for the past several weeks now.”
Hansen, whose eyes had narrowed at the commander’s question with what looked to Dylan very much like suspicion, straightened slightly in his chair and asked, “What creature is that, Sergeant? What’s the commander talking about?”
“As you may recall, Admiral,” Royer began before Dylan could answer, “the sergeant was involved in that mission to rescue the Cirran Crown Prince and his consort from the C-U-F a few months ago. In addition to the terrorists, they ran into a couple platoons of Sulaini Army regulars and a detachment of Kree-Veshtonn blood-warriors. He lost most of his squad on that mission and had nightmares about it for some time afterward in which he reported seeing what, as I understand it, he was only recently able to describe as some kind of horrible, acid-spitting serpent-like creature. For a while he thought it had really been there, even though his conscious memories told him otherwise. His doctors described it to me as a classic case of post-traumatic stress, but if he’s not having the nightmares anymore I guess they were finally able to help him sort it all out.” She looked to Dylan to give some sort of confirmation.
“Yes, ma’am, they were,” he said.
“I see,” Hansen said, glaring at Royer.
Something was wrong. There was something Hansen wasn’t saying—something between him and Royer—and whatever it was, it was troubling him. A lot.
Hansen looked at Dylan and said, “Well, Sergeant Graves, it seems you won’t be facing a memory-edit after all, no matter what decision you make. An episode of post-traumatic stress in your medical history precludes that possibility. So I want your word that you will not repeat anything that’s been said in this briefing.”
No memory-edit due to post-traumatic stress? That didn’t mak
e sense. On the contrary, it seemed to him that a memory-edit would be a good way to cure post-traumatic stress. Was that really all that was bothering the admiral? Possibly, but somehow he didn’t think so. He strongly suspected there was something more, though he couldn’t venture a guess as to what that something might be.
“I’ve already given you my word, sir,” he pointed out.
“And I’ll damn well hold you to it, Sergeant.” His eyes drifted back to Royer again, but his words were still directed at Dylan. “So it seems you still have a choice,” he said. Then his gaze shifted back to Dylan. “Help a dozen other agents to locate your former neighbor, then step out of the Special Ops team’s way when you find her so they can go in and rescue her, or accept the mission we’re offering you. Go back in time and save your father’s life, the lives of his crew, and hopefully the entire Coalition at the same time.”
The admiral fell silent, finally, giving Dylan time to think. On the one hand he could help try to find his neighbor, although the admiral had just made it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t be allowed to take part in the rescue if they actually found her. And, if they were successful, there was no guarantee that she’d be any help in the overall scheme of things anyway. The Tor’Kana and the Coalition might still be doomed. On the other hand, he could accept the time-travel mission and potentially save them all. That was clearly the more important of the two missions. His actions would have a much larger impact on the galaxy. Compared to that, finding his neighbor two months after her abduction was little more than busy-work—the kind of cold-trail mission usually reserved for below-average agents who couldn’t be trusted with the truly important assignments. But according to all the theories, history would be drastically altered, and not necessarily for the better. Did he really want the weight of all that responsibility resting on his shoulders?
And there was one more thing to consider. Rather, one more person. Beth. As of last night they were engaged to be married. What if he accepted the mission and succeeded, then returned home afterward to discover that in the new reality he and Beth weren’t a couple? What if she didn’t even know him? Or worse yet, what if she ended up married to someone else? He might lose her forever. Was he prepared to face that?