by Ralph Kern
Cheng didn’t respond at first. Man, but he was a sorry state: One arm snapped—he actually had dents in his chest from the blows that Frain had given him. His subdermal combat armor had taken a hell of a fender bending. But his neck was the real worry. The final kick Frain had given him had caused something the doctor called an atlanto-occipital dislocation—or more simply, an internal decapitation. His neck had been so badly broken, it had snapped in two.
Cheng opened up one eye and grimaced. I was told that he wasn’t in any pain, but he must have been frustrated not being able to move a single muscle below his chin, not to mention scared of what that would mean for his future. He would be dead right now except for his combat enhancements and the life-support machines he was hooked up to. They were doing everything they could to keep him alive—regulating his heartbeat, breathing for him, and doing what they could to repair the damage. His odds of ever regaining control of his body were roughly fifty percent. I didn’t like the odds.
All this, I thought as I looked at Cheng, was just that much more harm that Frain had caused on his rampage. That he was responsible for the Io attack, I knew. The whys still eluded me, but the questions played on my mind. If Frain had been a callous murderer, why wasn’t I dead right now along with a dozen JAS agents? He had only done Cheng such horrendous harm because the MSS agent was the only one who could truly stand in Frain’s way.
“Erebus?” he croaked.
I shook my head, then realized he couldn’t move his to see me. “We don’t know. He could have taken control of her the same way he did Concorde, but until we can get a systems forensic team onboard…” I let the sentence go unfinished. That wasn’t going to be happening any time soon.
Cheng gave a snorting grunt, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
Cerise’s face appeared on my HUD. “Gagarin is back. She’s inbound to dock now.”
“Thanks, Cerise,” I replied.
“Trent,” Cheng coughed, an odd hacking noise. “Layton. Have you decided?”
Floating in the zero-g of the clean, white room, I looked out of the window at the once beautiful vista of Concorde. In a way, it still was. The gentle upsweep of the habitat ring was now filled with strange clouds. Soil still floated around, and huge bubbles of water that were once lakes and streams stretched and shimmered. The light streaking through the debris created dusty beams. I realized I had come to a decision.
“I have.” I turned and looked at the equally shattered wreckage of Cheng. All of this ruin—Io, Concorde, Cheng, and Dev—had been caused by one man. Just what he was, I didn’t know. A criminal? A terrorist? A soldier? “I’m going.”
“Who would’ve thought,” Cheng croaked. “Layton Trent, space explorer.”
Yes indeed. That had been all we had been able to think and talk about for the last two days. Finally, authorization for a pursuit had come through—volunteers only. I had done a hell of a lot of soul-searching before putting my name down. Crossing Sol was one thing, following Frain to Sirius, quite another.
“We’ll find him, Zao.”
“Good. Wish I could come.” Cheng sighed then gave a slight cough. That twinkle appeared in his eye, the one he could switch on and off. I got the impression he had done it for my benefit. “Then maybe by the time you get back, I’ll be back in my dancing shoes. We can go out, paint the town red. Joke about all this.”
“You can count on it. I’ll see you in sixteen years. Maybe bring your kid along. He’ll be old enough by then.”
“My kid,” Cheng coughed. “I doubt I’ll have one now.”
I hadn’t liked what Cheng had done, but within his own moral structure, he felt he was doing the right thing. I couldn’t find the anger within me anymore for his actions or his little lie.
“I’ll be seeing you, Zao.”
Cheng closed his eyes, clearly exhausted. His breathing became regular as he drifted off to sleep.
***
Erebus and Gagarin weren’t built off the same plans, but explorer ships tended to be much of a muchness—a long spine, a habitat ring somewhere near the back next to the A-drive. Like Erebus, Gagarin was modern enough to have an antimatter torch and a nano-fabricator.
We were lucky. When we had dispatched Gagarin to go look for Magellan, her flight plan had meant that she had dropped out of A-drive every couple of hours for up-to-date positioning fixes from the deep space arrays. She had been just over a day out when we recalled her. It was clear to us that Magellan was the lesser of our leads. We needed to get through the gate and fast, and the Gagarin was the only available ship in range. The Magellan would have to wait for another team.
“Captain,” I nodded at the unnecessarily prematurely balding man in front of me. I was eternally grateful to be off Concorde and aboard the spinning habitat ring of the sleek ship.
“Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen,” Captain Arkady Vasily said with a smile and a thick Russian accent. He seemed far friendlier than Tasker had. “Interesting times, no?”
“Only if you mean in the sense of the old Chinese curse,” Vance replied testily. She was as bruised as I was.
“Quite,” Captain Vasily said with a nod. “We have a solution. We’re heading straight to the Earth-moon system. As you can imagine, they are going—how do you say?—ballistic back there.”
Yeah, we had all had an ear-bashing over the last couple of days. Fortunately for us, the “keep them on the job” crowd had won out against the “string them up” faction. Just barely, though.
“The Interstellar List has been polled. We will be picking up an attachment of soldiers on our way through,” the captain said, dropping his smile. “We won’t be too tightly packed, though. I’m going to off-load all nonessential crew. They didn’t sign up for Sirius.”
My stomach gave a little nervous lurch as he said it. None of us had signed up for a sixteen-year round trip at the start of this—assuming we survived whatever the hell Frain could come up with on the other side. Some analytical part of me thought the only reason I was going along with it was because it hadn’t really settled in yet. Everything had moved so damned fast.
“While we’re picking them up, I think we have a few questions for Red Star. Don’t you, people?” Vance asked.
That was for damn sure.
CHAPTER 33
GAGARIN
“Ms. Hanley,” I nodded at the powerful woman in front of me.
Vance had introduced us all. We had set up Gagarin’s mess as a virtual conference room. We had some pointed questions for Kara Hanley, but that didn’t necessarily mean that we could afford to piss her off.
“Ladies and gentlemen, call me Kara, please. This is my head of legal, Grant Jonas,” she said in a flippant manner. To be fair to her, by all accounts, the CEO of Red Star was a very nice woman. She was a philanthropist and spent half of her Christmas Day spooning out dinners to orphans. The thought did occur to me, however, that she was one of the true powers of Earth. Each of the massive corporations, Red Star, Helios, and many others, held as much sway as a nation-state. She could quite easily click her fingers and I would find myself on welfare for the rest of my natural life.
“Kara,” Vance started, gazing at the middle-aged matriarch in front of her, “we have subjects we didn’t want to discuss over open link or conventional communications, hence the request for this holoconference once we got into Earth orbit and laser-link range.”
“I must admit, I have been waiting on your call,” Hanley said from her office. Behind her was the picturesque skyline of Montreal, dozens of miles-tall superscrapers visible, stretching into the red sunset-lit sky. It looked like a window in the hull of Gagarin’s mess. “I presume this meeting has something to do with Io?”
“Your presumption is correct,” Vance said, leaning back in her chair. “Let me cut to the chase. We know about your Eston Mons facility. We have a survivor from there.”
“Eston Mons? Remind me? We have a lot of facilities in Jupiter space,” she said. She was pumpin
g us. I knew it, my colleagues knew it, and she knew that we knew it.
“Your secret facility on Io. The one where you found some kind of alien artifact,” I prompted. Then I couldn’t help myself. “Ring any bells?”
Her man Jonas gave a cough and leaned forward. Their side of the conference room froze.
“Oh…that facility,” she finally said a minute later, the conference unfreezing.
“Yes, that facility. That place is the reason why Io is currently smashed to smithereens and at least eighty-seven people who were on that rock are dead, not to mention many others caught in the EM radiation pulse from the explosion as Magellan hit. Whatever was going on there has a causal link to the emergency de-spin of Concorde and many related injuries of civilians and personnel aboard. Oh, and not to mention the incident at the gate arrays,” I said.
“The test firing of the space-defense network, you mean?” she asked with a wry grin. That was the cover-up line that had been issued. I didn’t know whether it would hold water; Sol is a leaky place. Thankfully, the Io Incident itself provided a decent cover story. After all, the public would want reassurance that Earth’s defenses would prevent anything similar happening there. The de-spin incident? That was just a malfunction that was being investigated as far as it had been put out to the public. Apparently the Linked command had been doing a hell of a lot of unprecedented vaulting from the Consensus.
“I’m sure Mr. Jonas here can remind you of your obligations under the Outer Space Treaty as amended in 2145,” I continued, gesturing to her unflappable sidekick before starting to quote from the legalese that I had set up and ready on my HUD. “Article VI is the relevant one. It states, ‘Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer or interstellar space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or nongovernmental entities.’” I looked at Ms. Hanley. “That’s you, by the way. And for assuring that ‘national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty,’ Subsection C continues, ‘any governmental agencies or nongovernmental entities bear a binding obligation to declare the finding of any life, signs of intelligence, or artifacts to the state parties of the treaty.’”
“I am well aware of the relevant legislation,” Jonas said with a slick smile.
“So you are also aware that covering up a major archaeological find would leave Red Star vulnerable to some pretty harsh sanctions?”
“Red Star is a vast organization. No one person can know every little nuance of our business,” Jonas said, his oily demeanor not slipping for a second.
“Grant,” Hanley held her hand up to Jonas, “you are quite correct; however, to clarify, we considered that we had an obligation to give full disclosure of just what we had found, which, of course, is impossible until we could figure out exactly what it was we had.”
I could see the loophole they were going to try to exploit here; it was the same one we were using for not providing full disclosure of the same artifact to all and sundry. She was telling us she was going to let us know—but only after they had extracted every advantage they possibly could out of whatever the hell it was.
“The courts can decide later whether you fulfilled your obligations or not,” Vance took over. “Right now we have a fugitive on the run who is responsible for the destruction of the artifact and the moon it was on. We need to know why.”
Hanley leaned back in her chair. She steepled her fingers, and a considering look drew her face tight. She pursed her lips, then looked at Jonas, and nodded.
“Red Star is willing to fully cooperate and disclose what we know,” Jonas said smoothly. “We would consider that the fulfillment of our obligations under the OST. The question is, would you?”
The double-talk was obvious. They wanted a deal. Red Star would cop to what they knew if they got immunity from prosecution for any breaches of the treaty.
“We’ll have to get back to you on that one. Perhaps while we’re ruminating about that, you can start by telling us about Sonia Drayton?” Vance said. “Let’s call it an act of good faith.”
“Sonia Drayton?” Hanley replied, the flicker of confusion that broke through her mask was just that, a flicker. She covered it up quickly. “She’s with you. I understand she was the Red Star operative we assigned to the task force.”
“She was,” I took over again. “That was before she decided to run off with our chief suspect.”
“I see,” Hanley pursed her lips. “That is…interesting. Grant?”
“What can I say?” Jonas said then cleared his throat, a confused look on his face. It just might have been genuine. “Drayton’s a fixer. She’s been corporate all her working life. She spent her first few years on the Helios graduate-entry scheme. Our HR department headhunted her after spotting her at a futurology symposium where she postulated some ideas that fit in with work Red Star was doing at the time. She’s worked through various departments. High corporate loyalty, hence her assignment on oversight of the Eston Mons facility. She was destined to go places.”
“Well, it seems she had a better offer from somewhere,” I said. “Well, that or—” I began.
“Inspector, that find was the mother lode. Why would we ever want to destroy it?” Hanley asked, her voice hard. “If that’s what you’re implying.”
“Not at all,” I smiled. “Yet. Perhaps when you send up the information on the facility, Drayton’s full dossier wouldn’t go amiss either.”
Hanley’s eyes were locked on me. She wasn’t a happy woman. She gave the slightest of nods.
“Right,” Vance said, standing up. “I think I have some calls to make pertaining to your full disclosure and legal obligations.”
***
The bridge looked dull to me: a central holotank surrounded by chairs where her crew members worked, manipulating consoles and controls that would appear only to them. Captain Vasily generously allowed me to slave my HUD to his briefly, and the bridge came alive.
The torrent of information was unbelievable. The plain surfaces of the bridge became awash with information. Status displays and readouts of every description were everywhere. God knows how the crew managed to interpret it, but I guess that was why they were the dashing crew of an explorer vessel and I was a cop. In the end, I shut down the link, contenting myself with the image in the holotank.
Gagarin shot toward the rendezvous over Earth. She was going to loop around our home, picking up her new cargo, a detachment of soldiers, all of whom were on the Interstellar List. This was a list of highly trained volunteer troops from treaty nations who had committed to undertake interstellar missions at a moment’s notice even though such missions would probably skip them forward decades into the future.
I watched on the holotank as two sleek, deadly looking assault shuttles rose up to meet us. Each of those Hawk-class shuttles was armed to the teeth and had been configured for “opposed space boarding” operations. They were what we were going to use to take back Erebus. They spun deftly, thrusters firing, and clamped onto Gagarin. I heard the faintest of thumps reverberate through the hull.
“Layton?” Captain Vasily called, looking at me through the holotank. “Would you care to come greet our new crew members?”
“Of course.”
***
“Fancy seeing you here,” Ava Phillips said, the slightest of smiles on her face.
“You, too,” I replied. She looked as good as ever, and I noticed new rank slides on her fatigues. Someone had decided to give her a well-deserved promotion to major. “And nice shiny new crowns, by the way.”
“Finally.” She gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “I passed the board a year ago and have been left hanging ever since. After Sahelia, someone thought they should rubber-stamp it. Not that I get to enjoy the position, of course. You’ve roped me into another job, one involving aliens and conspiracies at that.”
“Ha,” I snorted. “Well
, Major, you volunteered for the list. Don’t you be blaming me. Why the hell you would put your name down in the first place anyway is beyond me.”
“Ha,” she scoffed back at me with a casual shrug. “I just wanted the three weeks continuation training in orbit every year. Who knew they would actually send me anywhere? Anyway, maybe us lonely old spinsters and lifelong bachelors appreciate that we are going to get paid, what? Sixteen years’ salary?”
“Yup, sixteen,” I nodded, my stomach giving another lurch.
“Sixteen years’ salary for a few days’ work.”
She was both right and wrong. If this job went smoothly, subjectively for us, we would be simply nipping through the gateway, boarding Erebus, apprehending Frain and Drayton, and then coming home, this time with a bunch of commandos. Each and every one should be a match for Frain, and we had ten.
The problem was that the gateways didn’t work quite that simply. We would fly into one and be digitized. Then, by some process to do with quantum physics, which was best described as magic by a layman like me, the gate would literally beam us as information to the other end of the gateway eight light-years away. The problem was that information could only be transmitted at light speed, so objectively, we would be gone for sixteen years, there and back.
“Yeah—speaking of which, I think I need to transfer my meager savings into a high-interest account. I here compound interest is akin to magic,” I replied.
“A good idea.” She smiled warmly at me before taking a serious look. “How have you been, after Sahelia?”
“I’m fine,” I responded.
“It’s always hard losing someone on a job.”
“Yeah. First time for me,” I said.
“If you need to talk about it, Layton…”
“Thanks, Ava, but I’m good.” I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to find Frain and figure out why.
“Right,” Major Phillips nodded, her concerned tone slipping into a more authoritative voice. “Anyway, to business. I need you to send any data you’ve acquired on what you think this Frain’s capabilities are. I’ll also need you to send HUD playbacks from anyone involved in engaging with him. I want to know what we’re dealing with here and—”