He snickered. “She might do that anyway.”
“That she might,” Webb said. “So let’s not give her any more ammunition, ok? Do as Commodore Hugo says and bring us this stranger when he turns up, then you go home and stay there, ok?”
Tag stuck out his lower lip but he nodded. “Fine,” he said.
“Good,” Hugo said, rooting through the holdall and pulling out a small comm link. He pushed a few buttons then handed it to Tag. “When this man shows up, you push this red button in the middle, ok? I will come and follow you, to make sure it’s safe. But don’t tell him I’m there.”
Tag’s eyes brightened. “Ok.” He pocketed the comm link. “I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t,” Hugo said and Webb thought he saw warmth creep into his features.
Webb ruffled Tag’s hair. “Now, scram, kid, before your mom notices you’re gone.”
“Don’t worry, I can handle Ma,” Tag said, scrambling to his feet.
“Then you’re even tougher than we thought,” Webb said, but Tag was still gazing at Hugo who’d crossed the room to open the hatch.
“Good luck. Be careful,” he said.
“I will, sir,” Tag said, beaming, then scurried away.
“This is crazy,” Dana muttered. “We’re getting help from children and mystery old men.”
“And psychopaths,” Webb said waving a finger in the air. “Don’t forget the psychopaths.”
Dana rolled her eyes and sat back down on the floor, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes. Hugo retrieved the computer panel and went back to his corner and set to work again. Webb sighed and lowered himself carefully onto the piled sacking and closed his own eyes.
For the first time in a long time, he fell into a deep and restful sleep.
*
Webb felt his strength return the more he rested and ate, but with it came impatience. His injury at once itched, ached, stung and throbbed and Dana’s snapping at him to stop whining did not improve his temper.
Hugo had stopped pacing but this just meant there was room in the chamber for Webb to start pacing himself. Hugo’s other comm link was sitting on a shelf where they could see and hear if it went off but it didn’t stop them checking it every few minutes.
The hours and shifts rolled by, broken only by Dana making a trip for more charges for the lighting pole. Nothing more turned up on any of the sites and networks Hugo checked so religiously. Webb refrained from telling him again that it was useless to check them anyway. He knew Hugo was only doing it as a way to keep his mind off everything else and Webb bitterly wished he had something similar to do.
So he slept and ate and complained until one quiet hour, like the dozens preceding it, was broken by the bleeping and flashing of the comm link on the shelf.
All three of them stared at it a second before Hugo shut it off. “Arm yourselves. Be ready.”
“Get on your wrist comm if anything goes down,” Webb said as he shambled after Hugo toward the hatch.
“Likewise,” Hugo said and was gone.
Webb stopped himself from pacing with an effort and took up position in one corner as Dana did so in the other. She had a knife in her hand and her eyes locked on the hatch. The wait might have been one hour or ten but when they heard Tag’s voice and footsteps in the corridor, his heart hammered against his ribs and he willed himself to be calm and ready.
Dana’s grip on her weapon tightened and she shut off the lighting pole, plunging them into pitch blackness. Webb pulled out a lenslight and they heard the hatch open.
“Webb?” Tag called. “You in here?”
Webb flicked the lenslight on and shone it toward the hatch. Tag blinked and threw his hand up to shield his eyes as did the man behind him.
“Alright,” Dana said, coming forward from her corner. “Tag, go. Go now.”
“But - ”
“Now, Tag.”
Tag and the man jumped at the sound of Hugo’s voice behind them. Tag peered into the light a second longer then nodded and slunk out. They heard his running footsteps fade away.
“Get in,” Hugo ordered and the man, who was still shielding his eyes, shuffled further into the room and Hugo shut the hatch.
“You wanna get that out of my face, lad? You’re gonna blind me.”
Webb lowered the light, gaping. “Mac?”
Dana turned the lighting pole back on. The man looked between them all, a wary look on his face. It was the lined face and white beard Webb remembered from the cottage in the highlands, but there the similarity ended. He stood differently, looking taller and his ice blue eyes, always piercing, were now also measuring, taking in their hiding place, their weapons and their expressions with a swift, assessing glance. He was dressed in combat trousers and military issue boots, a black cap pulled down low on his face and a long black coat over everything, concealing a belt that held no weapons but lots of empty clips and sheathes.
“I’m unarmed, lad,” he said, pulling back his coat to show the rest of his empty belt. “I ain’t here to hurt you. You should know that.”
“You know this man?” Hugo said, frowning hard at Mac’s face.
“Yeah,” Webb said, coming closer. “What in the name of Christ are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
Webb opened and closed his mouth a few times, “Don’t say that like it’s no big deal. Let’s forget the giant fucking how and start with the giant fucking why?”
Mac shifted and glanced at Hugo and Dana who were both still stood, weapons in hand, staring at him like they were trying to figure something out. “Can we talk in private, lad?”
Webb blinked. “Uh…sure, I guess.”
“No, Webb,” Hugo said.
“Relax, Hugo,” Webb said, limping to the hatch. “He’s not gonna hurt me.”
“Wait,” Dana said as Webb pulled the hatch open. “Who the hell is he?”
Mac slid a glance Webb’s way and raised his eyebrows.
“It’s a long story,” Webb said. “I’ll explain when I get back.”
Mac stepped into the dingy corridor and Webb pulled the hatch closed with a curse as his injury strained. He almost buckled but Mac caught his elbow.
“God, lad,” the older man, said, helping him straighten. “What’s happened to you?”
Webb frowned, the emotion in Mac’s voice firing his confusion. “Same old, same old, Mac. You wanna tell me what’s going on here?”
Mac’s face was pained as he looked him up and down. He stared hard at his face then released his elbow, hesitated, then put a hand on his face. The roughened skin of his palm was warm on Webb's cheek. “What have they done to you, boy?” he breathed. “And it’s not…it’s not even really you, is it?”
Webb quailed. “What did you say?”
Mac dropped his hand. “I know what you are.”
Webb couldn’t untangle his tongue to ask any more than, “How?”
Mac shrugged one weary shoulder. “You were all over the newsreels after your little Resolution stunt. I recognised you as the lad I’d caught stealing apples from my kitchen and looked you up using certain…unofficial channels.”
Webb leant against the wall, pulse thundering his ears, trying to pick apart the sorrow and regret he could read in the older man’s face.
“You know what I am?”
Mac nodded.
Webb rubbed his temples. “Ok then. Let’s skip over what a mind-fuck that is and get to the real issue. What are you doing here?”
“Like I said,” Mac said with a drab smile. “To see you.”
“Ok look, old man,” Webb managed. “I admit, yes, you saved my bacon after the whole cloning thing and I’m grateful. It’s actually kinda touching you’ve taken such an interest in me. Really. Slightly obsessive and a little creepy, maybe, but, yes, still…nice, I guess. But, seriously, guy…we only met once.”
“Twice, now.”
Webb rolled his eyes. “Ok, twice. But even so. You trailed me t
o Haven? What in the Orbit for?”
Mac heaved a huge sigh. His broad shoulders rose and fell and he slumped a little more. He stared at his boots, seemingly chewing over something, then raised his head and looked him in the eye. “I’m yer daddy, Ezekiel.”
Webb blinked. It was all he could think of to do. In the light from the lenslight a sad smile played on Mac’s weathered face. Webb shook his head in an attempted to get some thoughts moving again.
“Ur…” He made a sound, something between a laugh and a snort. “Look, fella. I don’t know who you’ve been talking to…or what you’ve been smoking. But you’re not my dad. Trust me.”
Mac looked around. “Shall we get out of this corridor? Then I can explain.”
“No,” Webb straightened up, flinching and staggering as the stitching in his side lit with flame. Mac reached for him again but he pulled it away. “No more talking. I’m sorry you’ve come all this way and I’m sorry you’ve got this ridiculous idea. But my dad…he was…someone else. Now, if that’s everything, you should go. Now. We’re kind of in the middle of something.”
“Ezekiel.” Mac hadn’t moved. Webb stood staring past his shoulder, waiting for him to move. “Ezekiel,” he said again, quieter. “It’s me. I’m…him.”
The rushing in Webb’s ears got louder and louder until it seemed to fill his head. His vision went blurry. It was almost a conscious effort to pull his breath in and out. It felt like the colony was crumbling apart around him.
He brought the light up again. Mac allowed himself to be examined. Now he was thinking of it…the set of the jaw was familiar. Take away the beard and a few decades from his face…replace the weary sadness in his eyes with the determined fire he remembered from the newsreels.
“Shit a brick,” Webb breathed.
Mac snorted. “Well, it’s not what I expected you to say, but, frankly, it’s better.”
“You’re…you’re Duran McCullough.”
Mac winced. “That used to be my name. I’ve kinda gotten used to Mac now, if you don’t mind.”
“Mind?”
“Listen, lad -”
“No, no, no,” Webb shouldered past him. “No, you don’t. I’m not listening to any more of this.”
“Ezekiel, wait.”
“No,” Webb snapped. “This is…just…” he made a wordless exclamation. Mac’s heavy expression and pleading eyes swam in and out of focus. He shut his eyes and took a breath, forcing his coherency together. When he opened them again Mac was still there, still looking sad and questioning. “Get your ass back in here. Now.”
Mac shrugged and reached to help Webb with the hatch. Webb shouldered him out of the way, heaved it open, ignoring the flare of pain it caused and flung himself in.
“Hugo…Hugo,” he said. Hugo was stood in the middle of the room, clearly broken off mid-pace.
“What is it?” Hugo said, taking in Webb’s manic air and the tense look on Mac’s face as he came into the room.
“He’s…fuck…he’s…”
“Now, lad,” Mac said. “Just hold on a sec before you blow a blood vessel.”
Webb slammed the hatch closed and pointed a finger in the old man’s face. “You…you…”
“Webb,” Hugo said, looking alarmed. “Calm down. What’s going on?”
“He’s Duran fucking McCullough.”
Hugo’s mouth opened, Dana scrambled to her feet from her spot in the corner.
“What?” she stared at him. “Webb, have you been at the painkillers?”
“It’s true,” Webb said. He clutched at his head and took a couple of deep breaths. “Just look at him. Look at him!”
Hugo and Dana stared at Mac, again, like wheels were turning in their heads.
“I can’t…” Webb fumbled, turning away. “I can’t even…”
A warm hand rested on his back. “It’s alright, lad.”
“I respectfully disagree,” Webb said. He didn’t want to, but he turned and looked at the older man’s face in the light from the light pole. Now he knew, it was impossible not to see.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Hugo said.
Mac tore his focus from Webb and smiled. “Not just a pretty face, eh, Commodore? Glad someone here’s keeping their head.” Webb sputtered but Mac talked over him. “In all seriousness though Commodore Hugo, I feel I need to say, that whatever Pharos was wrong about…and she was wrong about many things…she was right to invest in you. Probably more than she knew.”
“Did she know?” Webb asked, voice gaining pitch. “Did she know you were alive and hiding in the Highlands?”
“Yes. It was her idea.”
“Highlands?” Dana said, coming forward. “What do you mean?”
“That’s where I met him,” Webb said, still staring at the man’s face and trying to pull himself out of the sucking vacuum of confusion and anger that had opened inside him. “Before I knew anything…when I woke up in the Medic Centre, I ran away into the woods and he saved me.”
“I swear, lad, I didn’t know anything then.” He lifted his hand as if to touch Webb again and then dropped it. “I had nothing to do with Pharos’s plan. She…she didn’t even tell me.”
“She said…” Webb felt his mind reeling back to the Resolution and the image of Pharos glowering at him down the barrel of his gun rose in front of his eyes. “She said it was her idea to hide me…the real me… on Lunar 1, but your idea to bring me back?”
Mac nodded. When he spoke again his voice was thick. “You were our lad. I wanted you watched. I’d never even seen a picture of you…” Mac’s eyes began to swim. “When I thought I knew you…at the cottage. It was because you reminded me of a younger me. I should have known then. I should have thought…”
Webb took a shuddering breath, reached inside past the seething emotion he didn’t want to think about, but all he found was more questions. “The Zero was your idea?”
Mac rubbed his bearded chin, looking at the wall. “No. The ship and the assignments were not my plan. I just didn’t want you left unguarded on Lunar 1. I was afraid of what might happen if anyone found out who you were. It was my idea to keep it a secret from everyone, including you. But she just said she would take care of it and I was better not knowing the details. I agreed, though I never stopped thinking about it. But I never dreamt… I never even thought that she’d…”
“She killed him.” It was Hugo that spoke. “She had your son killed because he wouldn’t dance to her tune. Your tune.”
Mac didn’t flinch. He didn’t shift or start. His face didn’t move but Webb saw a gulf opening behind his eyes. “She did.”
“Then I killed her,” Webb said.
Mac nodded. “I know.”
“How, exactly, do you know all this?” Dana said after a long silence in which Webb’s head span and his eyes stung.
“I still have contacts,” Mac replied smoothly. “And ways of finding things out. They couldn’t cut me off completely.”
“And who exactly is ‘they’?” Dana asked with folded arms.
“The Service Commanders that know about me. Pharos arranged the cottage for me in the Highlands. She arranged that I be watched and not let near the spaceport in exchange for their silence, though very few involved knew the whole truth. I was just a political prisoner with some benefits. After the first war had burned on for so long, she convinced me that a staged assassination was the best way to end the crushing reprisals the Service was laying on the Lunar Strip.”
“A staged one? Why not a real one?” Dana drove on mercilessly.
“Because she loved me,” Mac said. “She believed in me. She was the only one in the Service that had the chance to influence me and she did. She convinced them to let me live and she convinced me that the revolution had failed and to let it die.”
“Your revolution,” Hugo said.
Mac met Hugo’s black glare with a calm one of his own. “Yes, my revolution. I was a different person then. I believed things could change.”
<
br /> “You should have listened to Doll,” Webb said. He had balled his fists to stop his hands shaking. “She was your wife and a better person than Pharos ever was.”
“I know,” he replied. “There’s many things I know now that I didn’t then.”
“Including that your psycho lady-friend killed your kid because he wouldn’t play Happy Rebellion Families, then had him cloned to take your place?” Webb wasn’t sure who his anger was truly aimed at, but he couldn’t staunch the flow. “Oh, and that that experiment fucked up and now this poor bastard has to live with all this in his head, knowing it was all for nothing?”
Mac’s face bled pain. “Yes.”
Webb’s shaking limbs suddenly stilled. The tearing war of emotions dissipated to a grey, shapeless nothing. He groped about inside him for anything at all, some of the anger, resentment or self-pity that had threatened to pull him under and drown him before Jazz found him. But there was nothing there. He turned his back on the three of them, hobbled to the wall, slid down it and sat on the floor, staring at nothing.
“Why have you come after him now?” It was Hugo’s voice. Webb closed his eyes, trying to believe he still wanted answers to the remaining questions but all he could think about was the ache in his head and the burning wound in his side.
“Or at all?” Dana said. Her voice dripped acid. “Too little too late doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
“I have not come for forgiveness,” Mac said, squaring his shoulders. “I have come for you. For him.”
“Explain.” Hugo again. Webb looked at him. He stood with his head up, arms at his sides, back poker straight. Even with the dust and grime of Haven caked into his skin and clothes, he was still every inch the Service commander. But what was flaring in his friend’s face was anything but professional.
“When I saw the three of you flag up on a Haven blacklist I thought well, what links you three and this colony?”
“Ariel,” Dana said, stepping forward. “You know about Ariel?”
Mac inclined his head, face grim. “I know the Lunar Independence League hired him during their last revolt. And I know what he did.” He looked at Webb who repressed a shiver as imaginary fire burned along the scars. Mac turned back to Dana. “You’re right, lass. ‘Too late’ doesn’t even come close to what I am. But I want to help.”
Haven (The Orbit Series Book 2) Page 25