by Smith, Glenn
Krieger leaned back again. “Yes I do,” he conceded. “But at this point your confirmation would go a long way toward strengthening my case against...her. Your executive officer is very adept at covering her tracks.”
Did he owe it to Liz to protect her? “And why should I help you strengthen your case against my executive officer?”
“Simple, Admiral. Because it’s the right thing to do, and you know it.”
Did he owe it to Liz to protect her? Hansen looked the impressive young investigator dead in the eye. He hesitated, but only for a moment. He could hardly believe it had come to this, but the kid was right. Things had gotten way out of hand. The time to face the consequences had come...for both of them. He knew what he had to do, and he knew that once he did it there would be no turning back.
“Mister Krieger, you are in fact looking in the right direction.” The words tasted bitter as they passed his lips, like poison on the blade of a dagger.
“Strictly for the record, Admiral, and so I can be sure I understand you correctly, are you telling me that your executive officer, Commander Elizabeth Royer, did in fact order the murder of Professor Loson Min’para, a citizen of the planet Cirra who was visiting Earth at the time?” he asked, doing a pretty good job of hiding the exuberance he almost certainly must have been feeling over having solved one of the most critical parts of his case so easily.
“For the record, Mister Krieger?” Hansen asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. For the record, I never heard her give such an order. For the record, no one has told me that she gave such an order. For the record, I have not overheard any talk of her giving such an order.”
“But you believe she did,” Krieger presumed.
“Yes, Mister Krieger, I believe she did. At this point I have little doubt.”
“And if in fact she did, she did so without your knowledge or consent?”
“Of course without my knowledge or consent!” Hansen barked, causing Krieger to draw back a little bit. “If she did in fact give the order at all.”
“No need to bite my head off, Admiral,” Krieger said. “I had to ask you that, strictly for the investigation.”
Hansen saw the truth in that easily enough. “You’re right,” he said more calmly. “I apologize.”
“Forget it, sir,” Krieger said, waving the whole incident aside, “but let me ask you this. Beyond just acting without your knowledge and consent, didn’t Commander Royer in fact give the order to kill in direct violation of your own explicit orders to the contrary?”
Hansen might have been feeling physically and mentally exhausted for weeks, but he wasn’t stupid. He was well aware that he’d already pretty much solved Krieger’s murder case for him, and he recognized that the investigator was throwing him a bone in return—providing him with a way out from under the conspiracy charge. The fact that the way out also happened to be the truth was just a bonus. The fact that Krieger had gone out of his way to bring it up, on the other hand, could mean only one thing. The ambitious young investigator wanted something more than he’d already gotten.
“Yes, she did,” he finally confirmed. “Again...if she did in fact give the order. I explicitly forbade the use of deadly force against Professor Min’para.” Might as well play it out and see where it leads. See what else Krieger wants.
“Why do you think she did it, Admiral? What might she have been trying to hide?”
“Don’t you mean, what might we have been trying to hide, Mister Krieger?”
“Do I, sir? Commander Royer was willing to kill to protect her secrets. You weren’t. And she thought nothing of taking about a half dozen of your agents down with her. Maybe she was hiding something more than you were.”
Try as he might, Hansen couldn’t figure this young investigator out. What was he doing? Was he trying to give him a way out from under even more of the charges that had been laid against him? If so, why? What did he stand to gain by doing that? What more could he possibly want so badly that he didn’t already have? For that matter, what exactly did he already have? How much did he know?
Hansen pondered those questions for several long seconds before he finally decided that it just didn’t matter anymore. He knew exactly what Royer had been trying to hide, of course. They’d both gone to great lengths over the last six and a half years, more or less, to keep it under wraps. But now several innocent people had lost their lives and many more had no doubt been seriously traumatized. And as far as he was concerned, as senior ranking officer he was every bit as guilty as she was, regardless of whether she’d acted on her own this time or not. The cover-up had gone on long enough. It was time to come clean and accept the consequences of his actions.
“You’ve got the professor’s records, Mister Krieger,” he pointed out. “You know as well as I do what she was hiding. What we were hiding. It was the first charge on the list.”
“Yes I do,” Krieger admitted. “You were hiding illegally developed cyberclones. A hell of a lot of illegally developed cyberclones, which was the first thing I wanted to talk to you about when we started this little conversation. You see, Admiral, there’s a lot of information in the professor’s records, but most of it’s kind of sketchy. Some of the details don’t seem to fit quite right, and others don’t appear to be relative at all.” He leaned slightly forward and added, “Still, there’s enough evidence in there to put the both of you away for a very, very long time, even without your cooperation. But, believe it or not, sir, I really don’t want to see that happen to you. I’d much rather hear your side of the story now, so I can tell the government’s attorney that you cooperated fully out of a great sense of remorse.”
That much was true. He was remorseful. Not necessarily for what he and Royer had done those years ago, or even for having probably stranded Günter in the past for the rest of his life, though he’d certainly never feel good about that. After all, they’d done all of that to serve the greater good—to protect and defend the Earth and her colonies. Günter included. No. His only real regret was that he’d misjudged Royer’s resolve so badly and that now, as a result of that poor judgment, lives had been lost.
So why not cooperate fully, as long as he didn’t compromise any classified information? He’d done the crime, so he deserved whatever punishment he might get, regardless of what his motives might have been. Besides, if the Timeshift mission was successful there was a chance, however slim, that none of this would matter anyway. He drew a deep breath, exhaled loudly, and said, “Make yourself comfortable, Mister Krieger. I have a story to tell you.”
“I’m all ears, Admiral, as long as it’s a true story.”
“It is.” At least most of it would be. “As you know, we’ve been at war with the Veshtonn for a very long time. About seven years ago, when things were looking particularly grim for our side—pretty much like they’ve been looking here lately—Commander Royer and I developed a plan to mass produce an army of cyberclone soldiers. We knew what we were doing was illegal, but a couple decades earlier, before the B-C-C-A banned breeding and enhancement programs, cyberclone soldiers had proven themselves superior to what we then called ‘true-human’ soldiers over and over again, and we desperately needed the advantage they could give us. Over a period of about three months we bred tens of thousands of them.”
“You must have had a lot of help,” Krieger commented.
“Not as much as you might think, but yes, we had some help.”
“Then how in God’s name were you able to keep your plan quiet for so long? It’s been my experience that most people who are privy to secret information can’t keep their mouths shut for very long.”
“Keeping secrets is part of our business, Mister Krieger.”
“I understand that, sir, but I would think the sheer enormity of such a program would make it especially difficult to hide.”
“And you’d be right. It has been especially difficult. But there are ways to do it.”
“Apparently.
” Krieger seemed to drift off for a few moments, appearing lost in thought. Then he asked, “So where are these tens of thousands of would-be cyberclone soldiers now?”
Hansen hesitated to answer that particular question, wondering if the clones might be better off if he didn’t say. But he also realized that those clones who hadn’t been sent back with Günter as embryos would be sought out anyway, now that their existence had been made known, and that sooner or later they’d be found. So perhaps it would be better for them that he reveal their whereabouts now—only their whereabouts, of course—and make an argument for their right to remain there if they should choose to do so.
“They’re settled on a small out of the way world of their own, code-named Charlie Colony. You’ll find everything you need to know about it in a secure file in my office. But before I provide the access code to that file I want to officially request that they be allowed to stay where they are in accordance with the Zephyrian Colonization Act, if that’s their wish. They’ve been there for several years now and have built lives for themselves.”
“Built lives for themselves?” Krieger asked. “They’re only children, Admiral. How could they...”
“They’re not children, Mister Krieger,” Hansen interrupted. “They’re full grown adults. Some of them even have children of their own.”
“I thought you said they were just bred seven years ago.”
“Closer to six and a half, actually.”
“Then how...”
“Artificial age acceleration.”
“Artificial age acceleration?” Krieger parroted, his voice filled with skepticism. “You know what, Admiral? This tall tale of yours is beginning to sound more and more like a science fiction novel. I thought you’d decided to do the right thing here.”
“That’s exactly what I am doing, Mister Krieger,” Hansen assured him. “This tall tale of mine, as you call it, happens to be the truth.”
“It seems pretty far-fetched to me, sir.”
Hansen shrugged his shoulders. “It is what it is.”
Krieger thought about it for another moment, then said, “All right, Admiral. Because you are who you are, I’ll accept that for now. Your request on behalf of your cyberclone colonists is noted. I’ll be sure to send it up the chain of command.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Now, let’s talk about Dylan Graves for a little while.”
“All right,” Hansen said, not at all caught off guard by the sudden change of subject. The best criminal investigators did that regularly when they interrogated suspects in order to keep them off balance and, hopefully, get them to admit something they might not have intended to admit. “What do you want to know about him?”
“First of all, as one of your newest agents, how exactly does he fit into all this?”
“Well,” Hansen began, thinking as he spoke, “in one sense he’s at the center of it all, but he’s more a victim than he is anything else. Back when he was a marine squad sergeant his unit was assigned a particular mission. I can’t go into the details because it’s still classified, but I can tell you that it got real ugly, real fast. There was a firefight, and during the battle Sergeant Graves encountered a...a Veshtonn blood-warrior that had been surgically altered. My agency later retrieved the remains of that Veshtonn and determined that the alterations were based on our own cyberclone technology. This was the first hard evidence we’d ever obtained that the Veshtonn had, in fact, gotten their claws on our technology and were using it against us. What was worse, some of what we recovered was based on advancements my agency had made in the technology just a few years earlier.”
“So there was little doubt that you and your people had somehow enabled the Veshtonn to get hold of our latest, most advanced cyberclone technology,” Krieger concluded. “Either through lax security procedures, or failure to identify a spy, or...”
“There was no doubt at all, Mister Krieger.”
“And because Sergeant Graves saw this altered Veshtonn...”
“We had a memory-edit done on him. Actually, on him and one other marine who also saw it.”
“Who was that?”
“A young woman by the name of Marissa Ortiz. A corporal in Sergeant Graves’ squad at the time. We altered her memories to match the ones we gave him and then implanted a strong desire to put the whole thing behind her and start a new life, which she has since done.”
“Then what?”
“Then we thought we were good. We thought we’d covered our tracks...until Sergeant Graves’ true memories started coming back to him in the form of nightmares. I personally didn’t know about that until much later than Royer did, and to this day I don’t know how or why that happened. I’ve never heard of a memory-edit failing before. But, for whatever reason, this one did fail. Sergeant Graves started experiencing two conflicting sets of memories of the same incident. Naturally, he wanted an explanation.”
Krieger snickered. “Can you blame him, Admiral?”
“Hell no. Of course not. If it were me I’d have wanted one, too. Anyone would have.” It was him, of course. His nightmares had played out the impossible time and time again. And yes, he did want an explanation. More than Krieger could possibly know.
“So he was given one,” he continued. “Post-traumatic stress. He’d been badly wounded. Damn near killed, in fact. Commander Royer arranged for him to get some counseling with psychiatrists, psychologists, post-trauma specialists... Eventually, he bought into the idea that his nightmares weren’t real, and apparently they stopped soon after that, at least for a while.”
“You say you didn’t know about any of that until much later, sir?”
“I had been informed of the battle and I authorized the memory-edits at Commander Royer’s request, but I didn’t know about Sergeant Graves’ nightmares until...until she filled me in much later.”
“I see. Besides the fact that Sergeant Graves is now Special Agent Graves of the S-I-A, what’s your current interest in him? If what you’ve told me is true, why did Commander Royer find it necessary to fill you in on all this so long after it happened?”
Hansen hesitated. That was one question he couldn’t answer truthfully, no matter how much he’d agreed to cooperate. For one thing, Dylan Graves’ identity as an S.I.A. Special Agent was classified. Despite the fact that Krieger had Min’para’s files, his references to him by that title might still have been a fishing expedition. Hansen hadn’t had the benefit of seeing those files for himself, so he had no idea what details they might or might not include. And he certainly couldn’t say anything about the mission he’d sent Graves on without revealing the existence of the Portal.
“Isn’t it obvious, Mister Krieger?” he asked, hoping to redirect the investigator’s line of questioning. “For some reason his true memories have once again started reasserting themselves. That’s why his fiancée introduced him to Min’para in the first place. The professor is a...was...a telepath. After they met we kept a close eye on the watched the professor. I put Royer in charge of the surveillance operation, and based on her team’s observations we knew that he’d not only figured out what we did to Graves, but had also put together the facts of what we’d done in regards to the cloning.”
“And in an attempt to keep all of that from coming out, Commander Royer took it upon herself to order the professor’s death,” Krieger concluded. “Yes, Admiral, we covered that. That doesn’t answer my question.”
Hansen’s gaze briefly fell to the tabletop, but then he looked Krieger in the eye again and said, “Understand this, Mister Krieger. Despite everything she’s done, with or without my knowledge, Commander Elizabeth Royer is a fine officer with whom it’s been my privilege to serve with all these years. Handing her over to you on a silver platter with my knife sticking out of her back is not an easy thing for me to do.”
“Nor should it be, Admiral. But it is the right thing to do, and right now you need to do the right thing. If you understand that, sir, and yo
u obviously do, then all of this will go a lot easier for you.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“I’m sure you do, sir.” When Hansen didn’t say anything more, Krieger shifted in his chair and said, “Tell you what, Admiral. We’ll leave the commander alone for the moment. We were talking about Dylan Graves. My office has been trying to find him since early this morning, but we haven’t had any luck. Would you happen to know his current whereabouts?”
“No,” Hansen lied, perhaps just a split second too quickly.
Krieger hesitated for the briefest moment, then simply said, “I see,” but that moment’s hesitation was enough to give him away. He did indeed see, Hansen knew. Gazing intently into his eyes, the admiral saw that Krieger didn’t believe his answer for a second. He obviously knew more than he was letting on, and that was dangerous. Hansen was going to have to knock him off his current line of questioning.
“If I did know, Mister Krieger...”
“What did Commander Royer do on the comm-panel in your office, right before the MPs subdued her, Admiral?” Krieger asked, ignoring Hansen’s attempt to expound on his previous answer.
Krieger definitely knew something. But what? “I thought you said we were going to leave the commander alone for now.”
“I did, sir, but if you’re going to start lying to me...”
“I’m not lying to you, Mister Krieger,” Hansen claimed, doing his best to sound both genuinely offended and a little perturbed by the accusation, hoping and doubting at the same time that it might rattle him a little.
“I think you are lying, Admiral,” Krieger contended, clearly not the least bit intimidated. “I think you know exactly where Dylan Graves is.”
Hansen fell silent. Of course he knew where Graves was. He just couldn’t say anything about it, and fortunately he didn’t have to. “You know what, Mister Krieger. I think I’d like to talk to my attorney before I answer any more of your questions.”
Krieger sat back in his chair and sighed, probably wishing he could kick himself right in the teeth. “All right, Admiral,” he said. “If that’s what you want.” Then he stood up. “Wait here, sir. Someone will get back to you in a few minutes.”