by Barry Kirwan
After some pained pleasantries, they talked, over cups of tea. The talk had been mainly one-way, her talking, him listening. It had reminded him of a painting he’d seen somewhere in a virtual museum showing a saint tied to a tree, with many arrows sticking out of his body…
“I just don’t think you’re the right one to lead us if there’s an attack,” she said.
First arrow, a light one. He took a sip. “Of course not; there’s Blake, Vasqu–”
“But you’d be commander-in-chief. You’d make the final call.”
“I’m not sure I see –”
“You don’t have the killer instinct, Micah. If Sister Esma attacked us again, and you had the chance to blow her to smithereens, would you?”
“Well, that would –”
“Thought not. You’d hesitate, she’d recover, and then come back better prepared next time, and we’d all pay the price for your decision.”
Second arrow. He took another sip.
“And what about Louise?” She folded her arms.
Micah’s breathing slowed. He felt he was turning to stone. He put down his cup. “What about her?”
“Well, if you’d screwed a hundred women, it wouldn’t be so bad, but Louise – was she your first?” That arrow narrowly missed. His thirst deserted him. He shook his head.
“Let’s be honest, Micah, you’ve probably had very few lovers, and Louise was one of them.”
Another arrow. “Once,” he said quietly. “We had sex once.”
“So, here’s my point. Look me in the eye and tell me you’ll kill her.”
He looked her in the eye. “I’ll kill her.”
She shook her head. “You’re lying and you don’t even know it. Do you know what your problem is Micah?”
He had a few ideas.
“You’re too compassionate. You care too much about others, to the point that you’re self-deprecating. That’s okay if it only affects you, but when you’re leader of the human race…”
He couldn’t take any more arrows, and got up and left. That evening he resigned from the Presidency.
The next day Sandy came by his house, a first, but he refused to answer the door. She talked to him through it for two hours, saying it had all been displaced anger, that she’d been worried about Gabriel, that she hadn’t meant him to resign. Micah didn’t say a word, and eventually she left.
Antonia took over for two years as President before Kat came and told him it was burning her out, and persuaded him to take back his job.
He thought he’d be free of Sandy after that whole episode, but each time he heard about her his ears pricked up. She’d been well-respected amongst the outer communities, and especially with the Youngbloods, not only because she was married to Ramires whom they practically worshipped, but because she counselled them on a range of social problems, helped the fast-growing Genner kids deal with their Steader parents, relate to them. She’d worked unseen for a decade, creating a much-needed social glue that kept a fractious society from flying apart, though she never once appeared in or before Council, never took any credit.
He glanced at his watch. Five more minutes.
He knew why Sandy was angry with him, it wasn’t just about Louise. There’d been Hannah, too.
Most people couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment their lives took a course for the worse, but Micah could. On board a stolen Q’Roth vessel, roaming the Grid with Sandy, back when they’d been friends and on the cusp of becoming more, Sandy barely pregnant with Gabriel. Late at night they’d been talking, she’d come to see him, but he’d misread the signs, only realising it later. Unfortunately, the Alician Hannah called on him later that night while he was asleep, and crawled into bed with him; on top of him to be precise. Hardly awake, he’d thought she was Sandy. Then, fate being not merely cruel but vicious as it sometimes was, Sandy had arrived, and found them together. From that point on Sandy turned away from him, and towards Ramires, and Micah did nothing to stop it, confirming her later assessment of him.
Zack once told him that the whole point of life was to overcome your main flaw, which, funnily enough, could also be your strength. Micah hadn’t thought too much about it until now, because of Plan F. Plan F would spill blood. He would have a lot of blood on his hands. Had Sandy been right about him? Was his compassion going to stay his hand when it came to the necessary, or if he was faced with Louise? Had he lied to Sandy and to himself on that day?
It was time, and he was out of time. He headed to the bridge, determined to be the man that the situation – and the whole of humanity – demanded him to be.
Micah sat in the command chair, Vashta at Tactical behind him. He replayed the scenario in his head again. Plan F– Ash’s strategy. When he’d first heard it, Micah had winced, but it made sense, though he’d had a hard time hearing such an aggressive manoeuvre coming from someone as philosophical as Ash.
The Alician space station, a gleaming crystal city, lay ten kilometres dead ahead, hanging in space like a jewel, a marvel of engineering. Four Q’Roth battleships were docked there, while two Marauder Class vessels patrolled the perimeter. He checked the ship’s chronometer.
“Fire,” he said.
There was no recoil, no sound as the intelligent missile Shiva called a Bleeder shot like a flare towards its target, not seeming to be in a hurry. Micah counted down. Ten, nine, eight… A Q’Roth Marauder jumped into its path, pulse cannons blazing, lighting up space. The Bleeder punctured the ship’s shields and hull. The Marauder’s on-board lights flickered then went out, the vessel suddenly inert, adrift, all its energy haemorrhaging into a subspace rift left by the missile. The Bleeder emerged from the other side, homing in on its prize.
Five, four, three… It breached the space station’s translucent shield, which flashed silver once, then vanished.
One.
There was no explosion. The only noticeable change was that lights began to fade and go out all over the space station. Two of the Q’Roth battleships had managed to detach before the Bleeder made contact, and tore towards Shiva’s position, which hadn’t deviated a centimetre.
Micah touched a panel. “Approaching Q’Roth ships, break off immediately or be destroyed.”
The screens in front of Micah stuttered white and yellow as Shiva was bathed in plasma fire.
“Final warning,” he said, not bothering to check Shiva’s hull integrity.
The larger Q’Roth ship fired an anti-matter projectile; it was relatively small, but then if it had been even medium-sized, say twenty kilograms, the backwash from the energy release would have fried the Q’Roth ship. Micah tapped a remote cam and watched the illegal weapon scorch all the way around Shiva’s elliptical shield, space dust erupting like fire-crackers around the hull before evanescing into gas, giving the impression Shiva had been dropped into boiling water flashing to steam.
“Take them out, Vashta.”
It was like watching two trucks race headlong into a giant hammer swinging the other way. He’d heard about gravity weapons, but never imagined what they could do; this one had been Hellera’s gift, an upgrade for Shiva.
The two battleships were first flattened, then turned inside out, as if a giant arm had reached down their throats, grabbed their tails, and pulled hard. Amidst the carnage, hundreds of Q’Roth warriors, most of them unsuited, flailed their limbs in cold space. Vashta targeted all of them with a dazzling shower of laser fire. In two seconds they were all dead.
Micah closed his eyes. “Was that necessary?”
Vashta spoke, the sound of her voice an unholy choir of out-of-tune fingernails scraping down an antique blackboard. “Better for them. Dying in space is agony.”
He glanced back at the display. A single Marauder was intact. He touched the pad again. “Q’Roth vessel, the people aboard the station are still alive, but all power is gone, including life support. You may proceed to rescue –”
The ship jumped out of the system. Micah scratched his chin. The Marauder had gone for
reinforcements, for sure. The whole point of Plan F, Ash had said, was brutality, creating shock in the enemy, to throw them off-balance, to make them realise you meant business. But Micah was at the helm, not Ash, not Ramires. He stared at the city, imagining hundreds of Alicians and Q’Roth beginning to chill, local gravity nullified, oxygen recycling ceased. They’d all be dead in thirty minutes. His earlier self-debate about compassion versus the killer instinct arose in his mind. The station was incapacitated, he’d sent a message. There was a difference between spilling blood and creating a bloodbath.
“Switch it off, Shiva.”
“Are we on a new plan, Micah?” Shiva’s voice often had an aloof, slightly mocking tone.
“No. Switch off the Bleeder. Now.”
A few lights flickered back on inside the station. Vashta arrived next to him, her voice grating louder than usual.
“Do you wish me to take over? You have reinstated a threat. If you feel unable to execute the plan –”
He tapped another panel while he looked Vashta in the eye. “Aramisk, blast the base of the tether.”
Vashta’s fast-moving quicksilver eyes stilled for a moment, then she returned to her station.
They waited ten minutes before seeing a wave like the curl of a whip travel up the tether. When it reached the orbital city, it snapped clean off, shunting the city out of orbit. The two Q’Roth ships powered up and undocked from the station.
“Your orders, Micah?” Shiva asked.
He imagined Vashta’s eyes lasering into his back. And Sandy’s.
Micah stared at the vessels, recalling the final battle for Earth, when he’d watched from a distance as the Q’Roth slaughtered billions.
“Ram the closest one.”
Shiva’s inertial dampers were so good that he felt nothing, simply watched the screen show wild movement as Shiva, a Scintarelli Scythe-ship, lived up to her name. Shiva tore away from the closest ship before looping back at terrifying speed. Micah barely had time to register the Q’Roth ship rushing towards him on the screen, then there was a flash of grey followed by open space again. The aft screen showed the two halves of the guillotined ship careening away from each other, internal explosions sputtering briefly before both halves grew dark. Micah doubted there would be survivors.
The last ship had moved off but had not yet jumped out of the system. Its commander hailed Micah.
“Enemy ship, identify yourself.”
Micah and the others had discussed this at length. Technically humans and the Q’Roth were on the same side – Kalaran’s – in the war against Qorall. But certain Q’Roth tribes had allied themselves with the Alicians. Micah didn’t see any point in subterfuge.
“We are humans. This is a private matter between us and the Alicians. I suggest you stay out of it; you have seen what this ship can do. Return now to your Queen. Tell her that Kalaran favours us rather than the Alicians, and that she must choose her allegiances carefully. You can return for your colleagues tomorrow.”
“Your name, human?”
“Micah.”
The battleship jumped out of the system.
Micah relaxed a little, then took a breath. He’d spilled blood. But he knew it was one thing to do it from a ship, using superior firepower, and quite another to kill someone right in front of you. He had a nasty feeling that fate would test him, presenting him with the question Sandy had asked years ago. He felt certain he would face Louise.
“Take us down, Shiva. Prepare for ground assault.”
Ash wondered why he was still alive. He couldn’t feel his head, and could only see out of his right eye. What he saw was Louise. She hadn’t spoken for ten minutes, just perched on a stool alternating between watching him and a screen to her right. He was strapped down to a semi-reclined operating chair; the restraints seemed unnecessary given that his muscles had been anaesthetised. He presumed they were there for another reason: Louise had operated on him, on his head. But he felt calm. He was more than prepared for death.
“I didn’t recognise you at first, Rashid; or should I call you Ash? What’s with the Mannekhi eyes, anyway?” She glanced at the screen. “No matter, the procedure is finished.”
Curiosity got the better of him. “Call me Ash, please. What procedure?”
“I’ve split your brain, blocked the corpus callosum that joins your two hemispheres, so I can interrogate you. I perfected this approach a few years back; nice to have an opportunity to use it again.”
That was why he could only see out of one eye. The right one. So, his conscious mind was active – the left hemisphere connected to the right eye. The analytic, linguistic half of his mind. The rational one. Which meant she was going to access the right hemisphere, the creative part, the truthful half that did not know how to lie.
“Actually, your two names make it easier to do this. I’ll call you Ash, and the other one Rashid. Let’s get started, shall we? What is your crew complement, Rashid?”
Ash heard his mouth list Shiva’s crew. It was startling to hear his own voice as if spoken by another person. He tried to think of some way to stop this, to stop telling her everything.
“Good to know Micah’s coming. Also, Kat owes me an apology. And another Ossyrian doctor might come in handy.” She crossed her legs, leaning forward with her forearms atop her knees. “What is the plan, Rashid?”
Ash tried to stop talking, to hold his breath, to stop his mouth working, but to no avail. At least his right brain gave only the broad brush strokes, no details. But it was small comfort. During their travels together, Kalaran had once offered him a mental trigger, a way to think a series of thoughts that would initiate neural shutdown. Ash wished he’d accepted the offer.
“Ash, this Plan F, destroying Savange if you can’t release the captives… it’s a bluff, correct?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because your alter ego doesn’t seem to be clear about it.”
Ah, of course. Plan F was complex, and that wasn’t the domain of the right hemisphere. “It is not a bluff.”
She got off her stool and walked closer to him. “Bring the woman,” she said.
Ash hoped it would not be her, but sure enough, Sonja was marched in by an Alician male.
“I believe you two know each other?” Louise went back to her seat, and crossed her legs again, looking relaxed.
Ash stared at Sonja, whom he’d not seen for a year of his time, eighteen of hers. But she hadn’t aged appreciably, except that her short afro had touches of grey here and there. Her eyes were the same, but her expression was one of shock, presumably at seeing some contraption strapped to his head. Seeing Sonja rekindled emotions he’d convinced himself were long dead.
“Rashid,” Louise said, “how do you feel about this woman?”
Ash heard his alter ego confess thoughts and feeling he’d denied for a long time. Yet despite the anger at Louise for this gross violation, Ash was surprised at the passion in his voice as he professed love for Sonja, and watched a tear trickle down her left cheek. Eventually his counterpart grew silent.
Louise stayed quiet.
Sonja’s head bowed, then lifted, proud and honest as he remembered. “Is it true that you love me? Louise explained what she’s done to you. I want to hear it from the other side, I need to know, Ash. Is it true?”
“We must not entertain Louise’s games, Sonja. You know –”
Sonja stamped a foot. “Is it true? All these years while you were gone I’ve been wondering and waiting. Answer me, yes or no!”
She looked as if she might shatter. Eighteen years for her, one for him, unfair to the point of being tragic. Was it true?
“Yes,” he said.
Louise got off her stool and moved behind Sonja, locking an elbow around her neck, her other hand on the back of her head.
“So, Ash. Is Plan F ultimately a bluff?”
Ash stared into Sonja’s defiant eyes. He realised he no longer wanted to die, that he did have something to live for. Lou
ise had outplayed him.
He closed his eyes. I’m sorry Micah.
“It’s a bluff.”
Shiva burst through the cloud layer, and raced down towards the purple savannah studded with green pines that led to Savange City. Micah found himself edging backwards into his chair as the tree-line rushed upwards.
“Er… Shiva?”
At the last millisecond, Shiva pulled up and cleaved a furrow between fir trees, bolting forwards at an altitude of twenty metres and a speed of five hundred kilometres an hour. The aft screen showed pine trees ablaze.
“Was that necessary?”
“I needed to verify certain subsystems were functioning optimally.”
“Of course you did,” Micah said, trying to breathe normally.
To the East, the orbital tether continued to fall from orbit, coiling giant loops that pummelled into the ground, flattening trees, sparking fires, and shattering boulders into plumes of dust. The city was to the South, so the natural spin of the planet meant the tether fell away from the inhabitants; Micah presumed they’d planned it that way, just in case.
“Kat,” Micah said. “Are you in position?”
“Almost,” she said, panting.
He looked at the timer. Ninety seconds. “You have –”
“I know!”
He leant back, tried to slow his heart rate, which his resident was inconveniently displaying in the corner of his right eye. “Vashta, you have all their life signs and locations?
A display next to Micah opened up: the terrain ahead, the city, and beneath, where all except Kat were. There was something wrong with Ash’s signature: it was slightly out of phase, presenting a double image on the screen.
“Where’s the Spider? I don’t see it.” This was the added complication to their mission – to recover or destroy the Spider at all costs; it must not fall into Qorall’s hands.