by Hugo Huesca
When their wristbands marked the end of the work cycle, Pascari would stand watch at the bridge while Navathe and Clarke slept, and then the day would start all over again.
They kept careful track of time. A week passed without contact. Their air supply would last for another three.
The air would last longer with less people on board. Clarke, without telling anyone, decided he’d jump out of an airlock after two week’s time. Perhaps Pascari would get the idea and follow him.
The day he made that choice, Captain Navathe found him in the med-bay. He was in the process of injecting a pack of stim juice to reverse the effects of prolonged zero g exposure. He greeted her while clenching his teeth. Stim juice felt like mixing his blood with liquid fire.
Navathe floated to the crate of juice and took a pack for herself. “I wouldn’t overdo it if I were you, this shit is so cheap that starport rats won’t look at it twice. I’m sure the company who made them went bust a while ago.”
“Well, storage’s filled with the stuff,” Clarke pointed out.
“Yeah, we bought them in bulk, so…” Navathe shrugged.
Clarke flashed her a humorless smile. “My kidneys are troopers, Captain, they’ll hold on a bit longer.”
“Long enough for us to run out of air?”
“At the very least.”
There was a pause while Navathe pressed the auto-injector against her neck. There was a pneumatic sound. The woman winced, but didn’t complain.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking. About Antonov.”
“Yeah?” Clarke wasn’t in the business of speaking of the death. His opinions of Antonov had died with him.
“Yeah. His certainty always scared me…the way he spoke of ‘having to do what it must be done.’ I knew many sailors in the Defense Fleet, you know?”
“Because of your husband?”
She nodded. “They were good people.”
“I don’t know how many of those are left,” said Clarke. “After Tal-Kader took over, they’ve been steadily replacing the old guard with their cronies.”
Like Admiral Eustace U. Wentraub and Captain Riley Erickson. Yes, Clarke recognized the affectation in their manners and speech. It was corporate lingo, not navy.
Where had all the veterans of Broken Sky ended up? Same as Clarke, drifting from place to place, sometimes stuck in a colony or a startown, with no way of leaving. Used and replaced, like cogs in a machine.
“Some may remain,” Navathe said. “And even if there weren’t, if all the SADF new blood flowed from Tal-Kader…there has to be someone among those sailors that’s just a normal guy, like us. Someone with a family, who is trying to survive the day to day.”
“Yes,” Clarke said.
“We’re bringing war to them.”
Clarke made an effort to follow her train of thought. It was clear her ideas weren’t in order, but in fact, he knew where she was going because he’d thought about it himself, several times.
“Antonov wouldn’t have had any trouble destroying Defense Fleet ships. You aren’t sure if you could do the same.”
“Exactly,” she said. “You know, my plan was the same as yours. I brought the EIF to the Independence, then I returned home and forgot all about it. Now…I’m not so sure. I don’t know if the EIF would have me, but I can’t stop thinking about returning Vortex the favor.”
Strange how fast people could change. When he was younger, Clarke had itched to fight for what he believed in, to protect the Edge and its values. He wasn’t ready to renounce that fight.
“The EIF will have you,” he said. “From what I know of them, they’re in desperate need of experienced officers.”
“What about you? Will you join up?”
“I’ll go to Dione,” Clarke said. “If we survive. Then…I’m still deciding.”
“What will you do when you’ve to decide if you’ll kill an enemy soldier? A fellow SA citizen?”
“That,” said Clarke, “is what I haven’t decided.”
At that point, his wristband buzzed with a message from Pascari. Navathe’s did the same. They exchanged a glance and read the news in silence. Navathe flashed a wolfish grin, just an inch away from madness.
“You better decide soon, Clarke.”
Clarke entered the bridge, using the handholds around the walls and ceiling to vault himself from place to place. He and Navathe found Pascari waiting for them with a visible frown behind his visor.
“What took you so long?” he asked them. Since his message and their arrival, less than two minutes had passed.
“You recorded it?” Captain Navathe asked him.
“Yes, Cap. Here, hear for yourself.”
He opened up a display with a series of files and opened up the most recent:
“Free Trader Beowulf, this is scout ship O-223. We’ve heard your emergency transmission. Any survivors still on board? We’d like to confirm your credentials. Acknowledge.”
“I told them to wait until you got here,” Pascari said. “I have no proof of their identity and no way to attain it, though. Our sensors are busted.”
“At this point,” said Clarke, “even if it’s Vagn Mortensen himself, there’s nothing we can do.”
Pascari gave him an acidic look and said nothing. Coming from him, it was as close to an agreement as Clarke was going to get.
“Patch them through,” said Navathe.
When the TRANSMITTING holo was ready, she said:
“O-223, this is Beowulf, Captain Navathe. There’s three of us, and we have an emergency message for EIF command. Our credentials…”
She repeated the code the three had memorized from Julia’s wristband. When she was done, the three waited for the answer.
Depending on the distance, it could take hours to reach them.
Maybe O-223 changed its mind in the meantime…
Keep it together, Clarke told himself.
They waited for two hours until the answer arrived:
“Confirmed. Hang in there, Beowulf. The scout ship can’t tow you, but we’re coming to extract you. Can you hold on for one more day?”
“Yes, we can,” Navathe said.
Even Pascari seemed relieved. They had come very close to giving up on hope.
“I could kill for a shower under gravity,” he said.
Any shower would do, Clarke thought.
After another couple hours, they received a second message:
“Hang in there, Beowulf. Welcome to the Independence fleet.”
19
Chapter Nineteen
Delagarza
The waking world was a miasma of constant pain and confusion. His bloodstream carried painkillers at pretty much every hour of the day. As a result, Delagarza took refuge in dreams.
He sat at the edge of a stone fountain in the middle of a hotel with Japanese architecture, bathed in soft golden light. Red and black fishes swam under the fountain and through canals under the floor panels. He had no idea what they were named. Hell, he hadn’t been in this hotel in his life.
Judging from the blue sky outside, he was dreaming of Earth.
“I was here once, for a job,” a man said behind him. Delagarza turned around to meet himself face to face. “Before the Commodore and his dreadnought strolled through Asherah.”
Daneel Hirsen’s wore a dark, executive suit, like those in Earth’s movies. His haircut was short and modern. His tan added a dark gold tint to his skin. Any onlooker would’ve thought the man was a native, not a tourist from one of the Edge’s colonies.
“You,” Delagarza said. He didn’t like the man in front of him. Something about his eyes was different. The same color, but the difference between those grays was like the difference between sharpened and blunt steel.
The gray of Daneel Hirsen could’ve cut air by frowning at it.
“Is this what I saw in every nightmare I couldn’t remember?”
Hirsen shook his head. “Those were subconscious adjustment sessions.
They are, by their very nature, not pleasant.”
“You were toying with my mind?”
“I toyed with my mind. To make sure everything ran smoothly. You weren’t supposed to remember them, at all, but as time went on…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. The meaning was clear. The longer the personality split went on, the more his brain overworked.
“You could’ve told me,” Delagarza said. “I almost died back then.”
Hirsen sat next to him by the fountain and gazed at the fish. “They’re called Koi. I heard you wonder about it. Yes, Samuel, I could’ve told you, but that would’ve defeated the purpose of developing a split personality with fake memories. It’d be a lot of wasted effort for nothing.”
“That didn’t stop you after Krieger shot me.”
“I had to. You were freaking out and blocking me away from slowing my heartbeat.”
The way Hirsen talked about Delagarza’s heart made him get up and punch the agent in the face. It was like hitting the wind. His hand passed right through. Hirsen didn’t even acknowledge the attempt.
“What was the purpose of that?” Delagarza asked. His rage quickly transformed into tiredness. He wanted to sleep without dreaming, but the medications wouldn’t allow that.
Hirsen gave him a look that Delagarza couldn’t decipher. It irked him. He wasn’t used to people who were able to hide themselves to him like that.
“Don’t know, Samuel? C’mon, I gave you all the tools you need to figure it out by yourself.”
Delagarza thought of trying to hit him again. Instead, he said:
“The loyalty test?”
“Those nanobots are part of it,” Hirsen said. “The other is Strauze himself. Remember how you disliked him since the beginning?”
“Another prim and proper asshole, yeah.” Now that he thought about it, Strauze and Hirsen had a lot in common. Hirsen lacked the shark-like smile, but the same impression of danger barely contained under the surface was still there. Delagarza only had to look harder.
“He’s the Tal-Kader version of the Newgen agent model,” Hirsen said. “Cheaper to train, physically stronger, less versed in ancient mental disciplines. Minor genetic enhancements—”
“Genetic enhancements? You’ve got to be kidding me, are you saying Tal-Kader is following Newgen’s footsteps? Wait—you’re saying I’m genetically enhanced?”
Delagarza looked around, like he expected an enforcer squad to break into his mental landscape to execute him on the spot. Genetic enhancement and smart AI, the two capital crimes that not even corporations dared defy.
Well, most of them. Newgen’s experimentations had remained secret for the better part of the Edge’s period as an independent entity. Right after Tal-Kader had replaced the elected SA government, Newgen’s experiments had been leaked.
The purge that followed was immediate and total, and still the stuff of legends today.
“How long do you think I’ve been thirty five? Ah, don’t answer that. Yes, Samuel, Tal-Kader has been performing experiments of their own for quite some time now. Who’s going to stop them? The enforcers are theirs, as is the Defense Fleet.”
Delagarza passed a hand over his forehead. It was burning.
Outside, in the real world, Jamilia Charleton stood over him while a black-market doctor operated on him. What’s on the menu for today, doc? Last time, they had replaced part of his stomach and his lower intestine.
“So, Tal-Kader gets away with it?” Delagarza asked Hirsen.
“Oh no,” said Hirsen. He grinned, briefly. “That they don’t. Why do you think I’m here, on Dione?”
“To save Isabella Reiner.”
“That’s only a part of it. See, Tal-Kader is seeding the Edge with people like Strauze. They are loyal, cheap, easy to control. Their enhancements lets them sniff Newgen’s agents better than anyone else, and it shows. They’re not as good, but they have resources we don’t, and they’ve hunted us down for years. I think I’m among the last survivors.”
“So you fooled him with the…quail meditation?”
Hirsen nodded. “I bought you a fake background from a man not unlike your ATS friend. I gave you a subconscious impulse to remain in contact with allied resistance groups like Kayoko’s. I made sure you were close to Isabella and jumped on the chance when the enforcers tried to recruit you. The plan was to lead them into a wild goose chase, not get shot three times in the stomach. Still, it worked. They think they killed her, and we’re alive. When the EIF arrives to extract me, I’ll be ready.”
“Is that right?” A chill traveled down Delagarza’s spine. He remembered the nightmare he had the night he got the enforcer’s offer. How he had changed his opinion all of a sudden. At the time, he’d thought he understood his reasons. Now, seeing Hirsen calmly refer to his other self as a piece of software, that certainty vanished.
Delagarza was a man who suddenly realized he wasn’t the master of his own fate.
“You’re going to all this trouble…for what? To avenge a corporation that killed thousands to advance their genetic experiments?”
“No. I don’t care about Newgen at all. Let me ask you something, Samuel. What do you want? More than anything else in the world.”
Delagarza thought about it. It wasn’t as hard a question as he expected. He remembered dining greasy food with Nick Cooke while his apprentice told him all about his homeland. Jamilia Charleton grinding her warm skin against his, her ragged breathing next to his hear. The sensation of triumph after cracking a particularly challenging piece of ‘ware.
He would give anything to experience it all once more. For that to happen, he needed to live to see a new day.
“I want to survive,” he said quietly.
“That’s all I want,” said Hirsen, matching his tone. “Samuel, your memories may be fake, but we’re the same person. The only difference between us is, you care about surviving the day to day. That’s by design, I need you to be a survivor. I’m different. If Newgen’s DNA strand keeps working, I’ll live for a long, long time. I have to think of the future. And the only way I get to survive in this Edge, long term, is to destroy Tal-Kader and replace it with something else. A new ruling class that at least won’t hunt me to death for the accident of my birth.”
And for being designer-made to be the perfect, merciless assassin, Delagarza thought.
Hirsen shrugged. Semantics, he seemed to say.
“I think I understand now,” Delagarza told his other self. “All this time, you’ve acted only for your own self-interest. Finding Isabella, hiding here…You know, Kayoko thinks you’re this hero of the resistance.”
“Heroes don’t live very long.”
Delagarza agreed. “Survival, huh? I can get behind that. I feared Daneel Hirsen, rebel hero. This real you, the egotistical asshole…I can work with you. What happens when you don’t need me anymore?”
“You return to my subconscious,” said Hirsen. “I’ve never used the Quail before, so I’ve no idea how little of you will remain.”
“But I won’t die?”
“No,” lied Hirsen, without trying to hide it. Semantics, he seemed to say with his apologetic shrug. “Your personality is built of my own, so your core, your values and interests, will continue.”
“Fuck you, man,” Delagarza told him, without animosity.
So, Hirsen did think Delagarza would end up dying, one way or another. He’d jump that metaphysical trap-hole when it came to it. He needed Hirsen’s help to survive Dione’s following months. The man had saved his life already, maybe he’d do it again. But Delagarza wouldn’t go quietly either way.
“What’s next?” Delagarza asked.
Around the both of them, the Japanese hotel slowly faded, gaining the texture of an old photograph. Hirsen’s own voice had difficulties reaching Delagarza’s ears.
“We need three things. We have to kill Strauze before he sniffs us out. We have to collect Isabella by the time the EIF arrives. And we must find a way to
leave Dione’s orbit without getting shot down by its defenses.”
“Sounds like a cakewalk,” said Delagarza, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “How do we do it?”
“First step is learning to walk again,” said Hirsen.
As suddenly as the dream had arrived, it vanished. Delagarza was carried by the tornado of reality back into the pain, drugs, and confusion of the waking world, with the piercing lights of the operating room and the loving caress of the scalpel.
20
Chapter Twenty
Clarke
Task Force Sierra was the reason Clarke and the Beowulf survivors hadn’t starved to death in the middle of nowhere. The task force consisted of five EIF destroyers and their slew of escorts and auxiliaries. Fast and flexible, Sierra was an scout force. Its mission involved returning to previous locations of the main fleet and scouting for enemy presence in case their codes had been compromised. The Task Force never remained in a location for long.
When the tiny scout ship found Beowulf, its commander had assumed an SA trap waited inside. The scout almost returned to Sierra to warn them. Only after taking a closer look at Beowulf’s ID had they realized it was a ship marked in the Independent fleet as allied to the Edge Independence Front.
After hearing this from the apologetic scout commander, Navathe offered a silent prayer to one of the many gods of her ancient religion. Pascari’s reaction was the opposite. He retreated to himself (as there was no personal space in the cramped scout) and refused to say a word. Clarke knew what the man thought as he had heard the same argument before. If the gods—or destiny—had deigned to help them survive the New Angeles ambush, why hadn’t they deigned to save Julia and Antonov?
Clarke had lost people before. A part of him knew she wouldn’t be the last, either. He grieved the best way he knew: by doing his job as best as he could.