by Hugo Huesca
Clarke shook his head. “You’ll fail, Antonov. Earth will never let you get away with your revolution. Push them, and they’ll destroy Jagal and take its oryza. You’re dreaming if you think the Mississippi is the only dreadnought they have.”
Antonov’s eyes shone with anger. “If you believe that, why help us at all?”
That was a great question, but Clarke wasn’t sure of the answer himself.
It is my only chance to make things right. The least I can do.
“Because we owe it to him,” he said as he stopped his flight at the doorway, “we owe it to him to save his daughter…whatever small chance we have. Because it wasn’t Tal-Kader who killed him, you know? We did. When we placed the weight of the Edge on his shoulders and asked him to do the impossible, he tried to make good on our trust. And it killed him.”
The anger evaporated from Antonov. He seemed to regard Clarke in a different light. “So, turns out that, in the end, you are as idealistic as any of us. For a moment, I thought Tal-Kader had broken your spirit.”
Clarke had nothing to say to that, so he left.
I’d thought so too, he told himself.
11
Chapter Eleven
Delagarza
Delagarza awoke to find Nanny Kayoko standing guard over him. He tried to speak, but a spasm shot through his body and clenched his throat shut. He struggled and moaned, with the glare of the white LED above him leaving a burning imprint in his head, like a constant flash-bang.
In his dream, a man had talked to him about an escape route. But this room wasn’t guarded.
The world had an unreal tincture, like an old movie exposed too long to space’s background radiation.
He tried to speak again. This time, there weren’t any spasms. “What happened? Where am I?” he asked.
“What’s your name?” Kayoko asked, in that raspy voice of hers, barely rising above a whisper. She shone a tiny flashlight at his pupils, making him wince.
“My name…? Samuel Delagarza, Nanny. You think I’m in shock?”
She frowned. Whatever the nature of her examination, he was failing it.
Nanny Kayoko’s age had passed a hundred years old long before Delagarza arrived in town. She was a living example of what money and access to illegal life-extension technologies could do. Her wrinkle-free face had the texture of waxed paper, with a complexion to boot. Her hair was artificial, poly-plastic designed to her DNA signature. Same deal with her teeth. Her brand new eyes glinted with something that tried hard to be youthful liveliness, but came short enough to be uncanny.
With her standing over his bed, Delagarza almost deluded himself into thinking he’d died and she was a ghost. But ghosts didn’t drink tea, did they? She reached for a tray next to the bed and poured a brownish concoction into a ceramic mug.
“Drink,” she ordered him, still frowning. “It’ll calm your nerves.”
Delagarza didn’t want his nerves calm, he wanted to know what had happened. His memory was hazy, coming to him in pieces and without order. Taiga Town. Krieger’s naked breast under his palm. Major Nicholas Strauze. The Shota-M. The fractal inside the single non-encrypted file.
“What happened?” he repeated. It was the best question he could manage under his current state. Against the wall, a holographic monitor displayed his vitals next to a serum array. Delagarza traced the plastic tube to the vein of his forearm. He was naked under the white sheets.
“Do you know what a memetic virus is, Sam?” Kayoko asked while he sipped weakly at his tea. It tasted like grass and medicine.
“No.”
“Do you know what a Quail-class meditation is?”
“Sounds like pseudoscience.”
Again, that frown. She glanced at the door. Was it Delagarza’s imagination, or was Nanny Kayoko, underworld lady, scared?
“A memetic virus is a neural exciter delivered through sensory channels and designed to overwhelm your nervous system,” Kayoko said. She took one look at Delagarza’s confused face and changed her explanation. “It’s an image or sound that triggers a seizure. In some cases, it can induce an aneurysm and kill you. It’s rarely encountered by civilians. The SA guards its existence zealously, and for good reason. Knowledge of the existence of memetic virus helps them propagate.”
“Shit,” said Delagarza, “and I got bombed by one of those things?”
Talk about a shitty day at work.
“Cronos boy found you,” Kayoko said, “laying in a pool off your own secretions and screaming your throat hoarse. He brought you here, to one of my safe-houses, and we’ve been looking after you ever since. You’ve slept for three days.”
“What?”
“Most of that time we had you sedated—for your own good. Your brain activity was too high, and you’d have had more seizures otherwise.”
“Shit,” Delagarza said.
Seizures? What kind of fucking computer image caused seizures? He passed a hand across his face, like trying to wash invisible mud.
“What about Krieger and Cooke?”
“We sent your apprentice back to the surface, Delagarza. I’m sorry to say he’s not cut for your lifestyle. The woman left on her own before Cronos had a chance to reach you.”
That’s nice of her, thought Delagarza. He recalled how she’d stood over him, the expression of horror in her face, and the way she’d kicked the monitor away.
Kayoko took away his empty mug. “Enforcer Krieger only followed standard procedure. Upon encountering a threat, she was to secure the Shota-M and return to base,” she said.
The tea had calmed his nerves, now that Delagarza thought about it. He could think now. And something in Kayoko’s words caught his attention.
“How do you know that?” he asked.
Kayoko winked at him, a gesture out of place with her aura of ancient wisdom. “I’d be a lousy Taiga overseer if I didn’t know basic enforcers’ procedure. Here, have more tea.”
Delagarza accepted the new mug with an automatic gesture. His mind was working at overtime, like trying to fill the details of his blackout.
Whatever had been in that Shota-M was dangerous. And the enforcers wanted to find whatever hid inside the encryption so much that they’d risked hiring a planet-side contractor—him. And like many times when enforcers were involved, Delagarza had allowed himself to be blinded by the promise of money and forgotten that, many times, people that dealt with Tal-Kader didn’t live to enjoy the payout.
At least that’s it, he thought. I’m done with this shit. As soon as I can stand, I’ll return to my apartment and forget about this.
His bank account still had half the enforcer’s payment, right? He had a mind to keep it as compensation.
Nanny Kayoko regarded him with disapproval. “Are you out of questions, Sam? So many asked, yet none of them was the right one. Don’t you want to know what was inside the computer that almost got you killed?”
He almost asked her if she had gone insane, which would’ve been a stupid way to antagonize her. Instead, he took a deep breath, and said, “Sounds like enforcers want to keep that a secret. I’d prefer to keep them off my back, Nanny. The computer is none of my business.”
“On the contrary,” Kayoko said, “it has all to do with you.”
Before Delagarza could complain, she gestured at her wristband and transmitted a data file to Delagarza’s address. Then, she opened the file on her own screen, and showed it to him:
“This is what’s inside the Shota-M, once you get past the encryption and the virus.”
Delagarza almost jumped out of the bed, like the screen was a live grenade. If the enforcers figured out the information had leaked…
But he didn’t jump, nor did he avert his eyes. He stared at the flood of spreadsheets, travel logs, deep space coordinates, oryza expenditure, old camera feeds, and news reports. A familiar feeling of distortion overwhelmed him. It was the sense of doom that filled him after one of his nightmares.
But also yearning. He needed to know.
>
Kayoko didn’t keep him waiting. She examined his expression and flashed him the faintest nod of approval. “Fifty years ago, an SA battleship named Monsoon suffered a reactor overload while in deep space. Among the Monsoon’s casualties were President Reiner, his cabinet, and his family. During the chaos that followed, Tal-Kader rose to power and gained control over the Systems Alliance. Five years ago, a small team arrived at Dione and contacted a certain resistance group to whom I may or may not be related. They claimed that Reiner’s daughter and mother hadn’t been aboard the Monsoon at all, and that a remnant of Newgen had hidden them and smuggled them to the Backwater Systems. The team’s leader had followed Newgen’s trail to Dione and eventually put together the files you’re seeing here. Then, two years ago, Newgen’s data was leaked and fell in the hands of the enforcers. We lost contact with the team after they tried—and failed—to stop the enforcers from using the data to reach the same conclusions they did. I believe Major Strauze found that Shota-M only recently, but it’ll point them in the direction of Isabella Reiner before long.”
Delagarza clutched at his head. The feeling of distortion intensified, becoming a skull-splitting headache. If any other person, at any other point in his life, had told him such a story, he’d have reported them for insanity.
But he knew, right to the very core of his being, that Kayoko was telling the truth. It was like he’d heard that story before.
Isabella Reiner.
“Why tell me this?” he whispered. Every word he said felt as if signing his own death warrant.
Nanny Kayoko gestured at the screens and the data vanished. She grabbed at Delagarza, her eyes burning with an intensity unlike anything he’d ever seen.
“You’re the one who gave me the files. Sam Delagarza does not exist, he never has,” she said. “Your real name is Daneel Hirsen, and something has gone terribly wrong.”
12
Chapter Twelve
Clarke
Free Trader Beowulf approached planet New Angeles at five percent of the speed of light, with the ship’s torch aimed toward the planet and its nose directly away from it.
The same amount of fuel used to accelerate Beowulf to such speeds would be used to decelerate it before reaching the planet. In practice, this meant the crew had to spend another couple of days strapped to their seats while the ship accelerated in the opposite direction from their current vector.
Clarke spent the first day in the Beowulf’s bridge. Since he was now, officially, part of the EIF’s suicidal mission to rescue a woman straight out of history books, he had no reason left to avoid the rest of Antonov’s team. Next to his g-seat, Julia and Pascari avoided visual contact with him. The three tried to burn as many hours as possible on the media systems of their g-seats without having to interact with each other.
For what the ship’s contractors had told Clarke, Julia and Pascari had slept together recently. Although he didn’t expect the news, Clarke was surprised by how little he cared after he found out.
Julia and Pascari lacked his zen-like approach to the situation. Julia wouldn’t hold his gaze, and Pascari’s anger at him had only intensified.
Antonov, on the other hand, didn’t care about the team’s emotional tribulations.
“When we arrive at New Angeles’ spaceport,” he told them over a private channel that included Captain Navathe, “there won’t be time for a long leave. The Independent fleet is a mobile force, never hidden in the same coordinates, so I must contact them by special means, in-planet. After the rendezvous is scheduled, the EIF will bribe the starport to get Beowulf’s altered flight plans past customs. Once that’s done, we’re out of here. The Independent flies straight to Dione. God willing, Daneel Hirsen will be waiting for us with Isabella Reiner.”
Clarke welcomed Antonov’s explanation. Anything to get his mind working in real problems.
“What about the Sentinel fleet?” he asked. “They’re headed for Dione too, sir.”
Fighting a planetary garrison was one thing. In fact, Clarke had the certainty he could get the ships planet-side to surrender without spilling a drop of blood.
The Defense Fleet was another matter entirely. Unless your name was Mississippi, there was no winning against the Edge’s SADF.
“Yes, but we have the lead on them,” said Antonov, “about ten cycles, give or take, more than enough to beat them to Dione and be long gone before they arrive.”
And then, a lifetime of running away from the SA, always in hiding, fearful of every shadow.
Clarke grinned. Everyone died. He refused to face the music while shivering in fear.
“Understood, sir,” he said.
A part of him was jubilant. He was back in a chain of command, he had a purpose, and it was a good one. Another part of him wanted to bang his head against his headrest. The EIF and the SA should be united against Commodore Terry and Earth. Not wasting lives and ships fighting against each other.
Captain Navathe’s voice interrupted Clarke’s ruminations. “We have a problem,” she said.
Nothing good ever came from that phrase. The problem never was something trivial, like having forgotten to fill a landing application. This time wasn’t the exception.
“We’re being hailed by a merchant freighter five hours away from us. It’s an emergency signal, they claim to be in trouble. An engine malfunction.”
Clarke winced. Engine malfunctions could be a death sentence, even in a star system.
“You trust them?” asked Antonov.
“My CO ran the freighter’s ID on our database, but found nothing.”
It wasn’t damning evidence. Ship’s databases were limited by the speed of light, same as all information. If they hadn’t been in a system’s starport in a while, it could mean the database was merely outdated. Many corporations used couriers to keep their ships’ databases updated, but Free Traders lacked those kinds of resources.
The freighter could simply be a newer model, recently put in circulation.
It could be a Tal-Kader black flag operation waiting for them.
If the EIF has spies in Tal-Kader, for sure there’re spies in the EIF, Clarke thought.
He ran the numbers in his head. A spy in Jagal warns Tal-Kader about the EIF’s intentions. They send a courier vessel to New Angeles. They own Jagal, so they can get the courier out faster than Beowulf. Since couriers are tiny, their Alcubierre Drives are faster than other ships. So, they arrive two to three days before Beowulf.
If Tal-Kader had a patrol near that sector of space, yes, it could be done. The freighter could be an ambush.
Probably a frigate, used to protect corporate traders from pirates.
But in that case…
Clarke used his wristband to connect to the ship’s systems. As a member of Antonov’s team, he had access to Beowulf’s systems. He sent a request to the Communications Officer to send him all the data on the freighter.
“The risk is too high, then,” said Antonov. “Claim we’re having a malfunction too, and we can’t change course.”
“It’s Tal-Kader,” proclaimed Pascari. “I know it. Let’s blast the fuckers apart before they have a chance.”
That’s a terrible idea, thought Clarke.
“That may be a good idea,” said Antonov. “We strike first, disable their systems, and get away.”
To Clarke’s dismay, Antonov and Navathe paused to consider it instead of instantly dismissing the point.
“Sir,” Clarke said, “the Beowulf is armed with four defensive turrets that have never been fired during combat. If that’s a Tal-Kader frigate, it’s equipped with a single cannon that can deliver a personalized nuclear winter to our doorstep long before we get our turrets into effective fighting range. If you really believe it may be a Tal-Kader ambush, the best course of action would be to accelerate past New Angeles and hope we reach an Alcubierre point before they think to fire a torpedo at us.”
“Spoken like a true fucking coward,” came Pascari instant response.
“You think a revolution is won by avoiding risk and hiding from every tiny danger out there? Antonov, sir, let’s show this snot how real men fight.”
There’s fifty innocent men and women aboard this ship, you motherfucker, Clarke thought. For a second, his vitals flashed a warning in his g-seat display, alarmed by his sudden blare of rage.
But rage wouldn’t get those sailors out of this mess. Clarke made an effort to steady his voice and said:
“If there was a frigate set against a free trader, only an idiot would fight it head on. But that’s not a Tal-Kader frigate.”
“The fuck do you know—” started Pascari.
Antonov dropped him from the channel. “Explain, Clarke,” he said.
Clarke could hear Captain Navathe ordering her CO to delay Beowulf’s answer to the supposed freighter. Smart officer, and efficient. She’d have done alright in the Defense Fleet.
“Look at the readouts, sir,” Clarke said, and connected the data to Antonov’s wristband to save time. “The map of the freighter, and the radiation leaking from the drives—”
“What about them?” Antonov snapped. Clarke didn’t blame him, the longer they waited the more they exposed themselves to an attack. But Clarke needed to make sure he was crystal clear. He drew a marker on his screen, which would appear on Antonov and Navathe’s too. He focused on the part of the freighter underneath and behind the red cloud of radiated heat.
“This is the cargo deck,” Clarke pointed out. “In a commercial vessel, cargo bays are stacked parallel to the keel since that’s the most efficient way to load cargo under gravity.”
“That’s correct,” said Captain Navathe, “but how do you know it’s the cargo hold?”
“Military vessels are rectangular in shape, there’s no part of the hull protruding away from the drives. All ships bigger than a corvette are limited to space operations only, so their decks are stacked perpendicular to the keel, one on top of each other, like a pile of coins. This allows the ship’s acceleration to work as an artificial gravity of sorts, and the crew can function during normal acceleration. In short, our friend’s over there have the wrong shape for a military operation.”