Ja’Na laid back on the mattress and pulled a wool blanket up tightly under his arms. He folded his hands over his chest, confident in the knowledge that his purpose in the world was finally fulfilled. Perhaps when he next opened his eyes, he’d be surrounded by all those he had seen leave the world over the last hundred years.
Doctor Harold Brown
“What have you done?” he asked as he paced back and forth next to a row of cabinets in his lab.
Paul replied with a question, “Rhetorical?”
Doc ceased his pacing for a moment to stare back at the image of Paul Chen standing before him, complete with his deck uniform and boots, a stark contrast to Doc’s red cotton button-up shirt and black jeans. He almost shouted, “No, it’s not rhetorical. What the fuck have you done?! Why are you even here?!”
“You know the answer,” Paul replied smugly.
Doc stormed over, balled up his fist as tightly as he possibly could and threw a punch at the commander. Unfortunately for him, he was a scientist, generally a nerd his entire life, and physically fighting someone was not really part of his repertoire. Paul merely stepped backward once, and the massive, haymaker uppercut missed completely, throwing Doc off balance terribly. One well-placed hand on his shoulder from Paul with the slightest of pushes sent him sprawling on the peel and stick tile floor.
“Go fuck yourself,” Doc spat as he used a nearby countertop to climb back to his feet. “You know what? It doesn’t matter, anyway. Zheng got what he needed.”
“No, he didn’t, and you know it,” Paul replied. “Cor couldn’t heal me. The powers don’t work on people who aren’t from here. Whatever he thinks he’s getting by cloning Cor’El won’t do anything.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out of here soon, and that’s more than can be said about you.”
“I think you may be surprised,” Paul said, and he still wore that God damned cat ate the bird smile. “I’m going to go, but can I ask you something?”
Doc had turned to walk away from Paul when the question was asked, a purely symbolic thing to be sure. He only needed to boot the man from his vault, but he hadn’t yet for some reason. “What?”
“There’s one thing I can’t figure out. Why did you block Cor’El’s ability to find his parents?”
Doc stopped dead in his tracks, and he slumped as he stared down at his patent leather shoes. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
Doc lifted his eyes to stare straight ahead, to stare at an old style computer monitor which he hoped would blink to life any time with the admiral’s face. He turned back toward Paul, hoping his face denied it but knowing that his eyes would betray him. He pushed his hands into his jeans and balled them up, brushing backward a long, white lab coat.
“Leave me alone,” Doc said. He locked his vault and turned back to the computer to await contact.
* * *
A cosmic ballet played out just a few hundred thousand kilometers away from Arcturus V, and Doctor Harold Brown watched it with interest. Zheng’s ship, the fat and bloated bitch that she was, blinked in and out of normal space as she tried to avoid the three smaller Beagle-class vessels that pursued her. They were agile and faster, but they had less weaponry, none of which mattered as the ships bounced in and out of Steingartner space. Doc began to wonder how Zheng actually thought he could evade the other ships long enough to come retrieve him. Surely, they would either just blast the admiral out of the sky as he tried to land or bombard Lin Zexu from above while Zheng’s men came to the station to retrieve him.
Doc felt his hope begin to fade away when the unforeseen happened. Lin Zexu jumped away, nearly an entire astronomical unit away, and the other ships followed her after about a minute’s worth of calculations. He was sure he was doomed, but then a second Lin Zexu, absolutely identical to the other, exploded into view in a low orbit already piercing the atmosphere. It was a most dangerous move, requiring the utmost in calculative care; one simple arithmetical error, even in figuring out the planet’s mass, and the ship would have either burned up immediately upon hitting the atmosphere or been smashed to bits by the planet’s gravity well.
Doc’s computer screen abruptly changed from a running barrage of winged, flying toasters to display a notification window. One simple line of text read, “We’re nearly there, Doctor.”
“Yeah!” Doc shouted to the ceiling of his lab with a pump of a fist as if his team had just won a major sporting event, for he knew this would be the last time he ever saw this God forsaken place. He thumped down into a high backed office chair and kicked his feet up onto one of the counter tops, the wood and leather soled shoes clopping on the formica.
He watched Lin Zexu lower her bulk through the atmosphere and down into the clouds, perhaps only five or six miles above the ocean as she headed for the coast and a suitable landing site. He wished he had champagne to drink in quiet celebration, but somehow he knew it would taste like blood. Soon enough, though, he would have whatever he wanted, and hopefully, Admiral Zheng even had something aboard his ship. Realizing that he’d taken his eyes off his savior, he cut his musings short when he noticed something was wrong. Lin Zexu began to disappear, piece by piece, slowly starting at the ship’s extreme ends.
“No!” Doc screamed in anguish as a blood red rain colored the western edge of a vast ocean.
Commander Kristine Dixon
“It’s gone, sir,” Liu reported, his tone full of confusion.
“What’s gone?” Dixon asked as she came up behind him to look over his right shoulder with a hand on his left, her thumb slightly brushing against the back of his neck. She saw his eyes cut toward her for just a second, and she realized the familiarity of the action, immediately dropping her hand to her side. Though she had never had the relationship with Paul Chen that she’d wanted, Dixon had felt the need for some sort of companionship since losing him those four months ago, and Liu had been an excellent choice. She had to be careful, though, lest the relationship which was purely physical to be sure, appeared to interfere with her command. She thought she had been discrete enough that only her marine commander, the unflappable Schmidt, noticed, and he had her back in all things so long as it didn’t threaten the ship.
Four months… to Paul it had been fourteen years.
“Lin Zexu,” Liu said, bringing her mind back to the moment, and then he clarified, “I mean the other Lin Zexu, the one that dropped in behind us and attempted to land. She’s just gone.”
Dixon whirled toward the marine, “Schmidt, can you confirm?”
Lieutenant Schmidt strode over to an interface from his place by the exit hatch. Much like his captain, he chose to stand his entire shift on watch, something that the doctors had been telling him for years was a bad idea due to the varicose veins in his feet and legs. He ignored them, fully intending to die on his feet long before old age. He was two meters and one hundred ten kilos of pure German-Irish descended muscle, and as he activated the display, Dixon wondered if she had chosen the wrong lover. No doubt the marine would be… vigorous.
“Confirmed, sir. The ship is gone.”
“She bounce out?”
“Negative, sir,” Schmidt replied as he turned to face her. “It looks like she just broke apart in the lower atmosphere.”
“We’ll recover what we can later,” Dixon decided, and she turned back to Liu, “Chief, are we ready to jump after Lin Zexu? The first one?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Start her up,” she ordered.
Dixon accessed the ship-wide intercom on her universal link device installed in her skull just behind her left ear. They were all the rage now that doctors were able to program and install them safely thanks to the technology found on the station on Arcturus V. With the damage they had sustained in their last encounter with Zheng, she ordered the fleet home to Aldebaran Gateway Station, and there she had it installed while repairs were underway. She could access a number of ship functions
with it, and the doctors and programmers promised that software modules would soon come allowing one person to basically run an entire Beagle-class ship with the proper automation. She didn’t care for the crew reduction this would cause, but it would help expand the fleet and SACA’s reach into space. She also didn’t care for how unsightly it was, and she rarely now wore her blonde hair in a ponytail, leaving it to hang freely to cover the metal and plastic implant.
“All hands, engaging Steingartner drive,” she echoed through Guangzhou as the singularity formed that would pull the ship through curved space at many times the speed of light, relatively speaking.
“Sir!” Liu nearly shouted. “Lin Zexu is bouncing again!”
“Dissipate singularity,” Dixon commanded calmly. “Is she gone?”
“Yes, sir. Calculating relative direction now.”
“Mass of her singularity?”
“Approximately six kilos times ten to the forty fourth, sir,” Schmidt’s voice answered from behind her.
She turned toward the marine and couldn’t hide her satisfaction with the man. He was an old grunt of almost forty that had excelled so long that they pushed him into OCS and Special Fleet Ops. When Dixon had tried to arrest Zheng four months ago, she excused the marine from the bridge because she didn’t know where his loyalty laid – to her and SACA or Zheng. The Iron Chinaman had his tentacles in someone at every level of the authority it seemed, but Schmidt wasn’t the guy. The marine had turned out to be a steadfast officer, a true believer in SACA’s mission. It seemed he was also a pretty damn smart guy for a grunt, pushing an intelligence quotient over a hundred forty, allowing him to learn almost every function on board the ship in almost no time.
“Stand down,” Dixon sighed as she calculated that so much mass would take Lin Zexu well out of the system in mere seconds relative to her own crew. “Calculate a bounce back to Arcturus V. We have an old friend to collect.”
* * *
About two hours later, Dixon stood with two marines and a medtech named Johnson in the control room of the underwater facility on Arcturus V. Schmidt was still topside searching, but they found no debris or remnants of the “other” Lin Zexu, the one that had pierced the planet’s atmosphere. It was a conundrum that she would ponder later, but she faced a completely different problem now.
The message they had received when bouncing through the system in their futile game of cat and mouse with Zheng told her to come find Paul and to be quick about it. She’d calculated that only about ten local days had passed since he had sent it, with another three or so in the time they had been chasing the admiral. And Paul Chen was already dead, his emaciated body lying on the cold, metal deck. Why did he want her to come here? Just to retrieve his body?
And then there was the one watching them, the local that stared at them through his steel gray eyes and said nothing to them at all. He had near black hair and a skin tone the likes of which she had never seen on anyone except the recently dead stored in a refrigerator to avoid decomposition. He didn’t move, of course, as he was connected to the station through that infernal chair, the one that she had not seen before this, the one she had read about in the reports, the one that Paul had felt some inexplicable need to sit upon.
She approached Paul’s corpse, for she neither needed the medtech to check it out, nor needed to examine him herself to know he was very much dead. She knelt down next to him and caressed his cheek with the backs of her fingers, his cold, unfeeling skin startling her for a moment. She felt suddenly foolish for the reaction, for how else should his skin have felt? She sighed, stood and looked at the man in the chair speculatively.
“So, what now?” she asked him, though she received and expected no response. “He told me to come here to get him. You know that. Why?”
The man’s face, the Chronicler she believed he was called by the Arcturans, simply stared back at her with an occasional blink, lack of comprehension upon his face. If one could look past the fact that his skin looked every bit as cold and dead as Paul Chen’s, he was actually a good looking guy, with a strong jaw and cheekbones and a nose that was both well-defined and not overpowering. His black tunic hid a powerful torso she was sure, as she could just barely make out the muscles underneath the wool.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and they jerked rapidly back and forth behind his eyelids as if they read something written there. Or perhaps he dreamed. His eyes opened again, and he stared pointedly off to his right. Dixon followed the stare toward a computer interface or maybe a corridor leading from the control room. Unsure, she placed her face near his in the hopes of matching his gaze, now fairly sure he meant the computer. She stepped over to the interface but hesitated before sitting before it.
“Is this what you want me to see?” she asked, pointing at the terminal. In answer, the Chronicler only blinked, then smiled. A smile – a display of happiness or approval, somehow universal among all human civilizations and cultures; a sign of predisposed genetic programming, perhaps, but by whom? God or evolution? This was a discussion Paul would have loved to engage in.
“I’m here, Dix,” a spectral voice said through the intercom’s speakers hidden in the ceiling above.
The computer’s holographic interface acted seemingly on its own accord, and Dixon found herself faced with an apparition, the ghostly face of the dead man on the floor. He looked young and healthy like he did after graduation, his eyes full of the undiscovered wonders that he hoped the galaxy would soon reveal to him. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she knew he wasn’t there.
“You don’t want to talk to me?” Chen’s hologram asked.
“What?” she almost whispered.
“This isn’t a recorded message, Dix. I’m in here, stored on one of a million terabyte hard drives. Everything that made me me is right here. I can point you to it; all you need to do is download it.”
“How?” Dixon breathed.
“It would take a long time to explain, and I don’t even completely get it. Zheng developed this ages ago. He uses it, along with cloning tech, to make copies of himself, keep himself young.”
“The other Lin Zexu.”
“Exactly,” Paul’s ghostly head nodded. “Dix, it’s all here. All the information on the cloning technology, how to build it, how to make me a body, how to put my mind back in it. Everything. It’s all here.”
“It’s against the law,” Dixon replied absently as she fell into a chair near the workstation.
“All of this was against the law. It’s all Zheng’s making. This should have never happened to any of us. I’m here because of him.”
“What if SACA command doesn’t see it that way?” she asked.
“Then we’ll run away, just you and me. Maybe we’ll even run here to Arcturus. I doubt Cor,” Paul said with a look at the gray skinned man, “would have a problem with us living out our days here, as long as we don’t make any trouble.”
“I,” Dixon began, but then she stopped. It was all so fantastic and hard to believe, but then she had just seen an exact duplicate of Lin Zexu literally disappear into thin air. The idea of the two of them, Kristine Dixon and a resurrected Paul Chen, running through the cosmos pursued by a vengeful admiral and a law book thumping command brass tugged at her inherent sense of romanticism. It sounded like a story out of the old American west.
“It could take me months to wrap my brain around the tech, maybe even longer to build it,” Dixon said as she checked her link device’s connection to Guangzhou’s computer. She then paired it up to the station’s computer so that she could transfer the data.
“Dix, I have time,” Paul replied, with a very slight and wry chuckle. “I’ve got everything all packaged up and ready to go. Just press the red button.”
A rectangle of incessant blinking red appeared just below Paul’s image. It certainly wasn’t a button in the traditional sense, but when one sat at a computer that used a holographic interface, it was as close as one would get. As the red brightened and
darkened, Dix saw a single word in white print contained within it. She would have expected it to say “BEGIN” or “DOWNLOAD” or “ENGAGE”. She was completely unprepared to read the word “PLEASE” within the brilliant red glow. As she moved to touch it, it almost seemed like one of the old twentieth century horror films when the main character’s actions were suddenly in slow motion while the rest of the world continued at normal speed.
“Lieutenant Schmidt are you there?” she asked into the air, having pinged the communication protocol in the former marine’s own link device.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, the answer at once sounding in her mind and yet miles away as if he were speaking loudly through a long tunnel.
“Any sign of Lin Zexu?”
“No, sir. We found a few bodies in the ocean. Seems some sharks found them, too.”
“All right. Call it off. I’m processing a data transfer to the ship now. It’s going to be a couple of hours. We’ll lift off as soon as we come back up.”
“We’ll make ready, sir,” Schmidt replied. “Do you need any assistance?”
“Negative,” she replied shortly, and she cut the line. Dixon slumped back in the chair, her blonde hair hanging down toward the floor as if reaching for it longingly. The two marines still stood at near attention where the corridor from which they entered met the control center, while the medtech knelt next to Paul’s corpse as if he needed to confirm that it really was such. She said to them, “Get Commander Chen’s body ready to go up, and then you three either go up with it or make yourselves at home. This is gonna take a little while.”
Cor Pelson
Blood Betrayal Page 27