by Ron Collins
They had always been there for him.
They had given him solace.
They gave him a sense of self.
They gave him a place to retreat to when the girls came—Mercedes first, then Eliana—and he proved beyond doubt that he was awkward as a father.
The files were something he could control when everything else was elusive. Even after all these years, he could plug them into his system and listen to the pops and hisses of the music they contained. Of course, that was probably why Marisa finally gave up on him again.
Torrance had never been a very successful family man, even when he was trying, and you can only retreat from problems so many times.
Now he studied them out of habit more than anything else.
They were familiar.
They stayed by his side even after the scientific community had laughed him out of their inner circle. Nothing, it seems, ostracizes a man so fully as thinking outside the accepted.
Still…
Too much of his life was tied up in these files. The fact that the scientific community hadn’t accepted the idea of life on Eden couldn’t force Torrance to give up.
Now the icon was flashing on his personal comm system.
“Thomas,” he answered. “How good to hear from you.”
“LC,” Kitchell replied.
Even with just those two syllables, the tone of Kitchell’s voice was odd. It reminded Torrance of the time when Kitchell was a teenager. He half expected the word edge to come out soon.
“I need you to check your secure data server,” Kitchell said.
“Tell me more.”
“No time now. But I need you to look at something.”
* * *
Bypassing breakfast, Torrance accessed his home unit. The screen changed to a familiar interface panel. He pulled reports and examined Kochi extracts. Automatic sorting routines charted key graphs. The passage of time faded to a blur. An hour later Torrance sat on the edge of his bed, deliriously dizzy.
A new signal had been received.
It would have been just a ball of noise to most observers, but Kitchell had pulled it apart and placed it against the data from Eden.
The correlation was solid—full-spectrum frequency matches in nearly every frame. They had no idea of what the signal said or meant, but the two had matches at almost every frequency. Same power densities. Same peak-to-peak gaps. These signals made a strong case for the idea that they came from the same source.
This was no storm.
This was a created wave.
A message transmitted by a machine.
A machine built by someone capable of building machines.
The world was suddenly small but expansive, understood but unfathomable.
It would take weeks of hard work to make the data presentable to anyone else, but Torrance understood the massive truth embedded here like it was a block of granite sitting on his chest.
Life existed outside the Solar System.
The kid had done it. Thomas Kitchell had proven the fact of some form of intelligence on Eden.
His heart burst. He wanted to cry, wanted to hug someone, wanted to run into the streets and shake people by the shoulders or kiss them on the cheeks or just hold them tightly and howl at the sky like the crazy old men in the Arazorn colony.
He wanted…well. Mostly he just wanted to tell someone.
But the room was empty and quiet.
The heating system kicked on.
The bed sat unmade, sheets wadded and rumpled at the foot.
He rubbed his eyes and closed his system. His lips were dry and parched. He glanced at his watch. Forty-five minutes to get to Pinot’s office.
He picked up his hat from the dresser and checked the mirror. Crisp. He smiled and gave himself a salute. He looked crisp.
Politics be damned, there wasn’t a thing in the world Willim Pinot could tell him today that would get him down.
CHAPTER 13
Arlington, Virginia
Local Date: June 3, 2252
Local Time: 0700
Torrance took the underground walkway to the monorail transfer and got off at Arlington. The bioscanner allowed him to take the purple line from there. This was Wilson Cross—a shelter dug deep under the eastern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, a place where every door warranted a security code and every wall was made of reinforced concrete that had been lined with radiation-hardened composites. His lighthearted mood gave the process of navigating checkpoints a feeling more like playing secret agent than its usual baggage of paranoid scrutiny.
Everything seemed so real—the smell of his escort’s boot polish, the echoes of footsteps in the underground hallway, the dryness of cool air, the escort’s name spelled in clean white letters on a black badge. The corridors were tight and brightly lit, the walls painted standard-issue beige. Image projectors at regular intervals gave the area a professional flare. Even the metallic clangs of tri-level stainless steel security doors could not dampen his spirits.
They came to a doorway. A crimson laser flashed his optic nerve. The door slid open.
“Good morning, sir,” Torrance said as he stepped forward.
“Good morning, Ambassador,” Pinot answered in a graveled voice, motioning to a padded blue chair without looking up from his desktop screen. “Have a seat.”
Willim Pinot had grown up inside the intelligence office, and was arguably the most powerful man in the Solar System. He sat in his chair, but Torrance could still tell he had a gawky height to him that made him more imposing. Black eyes sat like a pair of polished marbles above rounded cheekbones, and his nose was upturned and flattened. A scraggly, gray-laced goatee grew in a sprawl around his lips. His shirt was white and open one button at the collar. It was early, yet already rings of sweat darkened the area under his armpits.
Torrance sat while Pinot marked something on his screen.
Pinot’s dress coat hung from a rack in the far corner. Paperwork cluttered his desktop. The leather chair squealed as the CIO put his stylus down, sat forward, and clasped his hands together.
“Can Tailor get you coffee?”
“That would be good, thank you.”
Pinot spoke to the computer. “Coffee, please. Sugar.” He paused and looked at Torrance. “Cream?”
Torrance shook his head.
“No cream.”
Pinot smiled.
“I suppose you wonder why you are here.”
“The question has crossed my mind.”
“I need you to kill a man.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me.”
“But…” Torrance squirmed in his chair. “I’m not an assassin.”
“Correct.” Pinot nodded matter-of-factly. “You are a scientist—an engineer, actually, but close enough for government work, right?”
Torrance frowned.
“I am in the unique spot, you see, of needing someone who is both a scientist and an assassin. Since I have no time to train an assassin to be a scientist, I think it wiser to go the opposite direction. Don’t you agree?”
“I…guess so,” Torrance heard himself say.
The door opened and Pinot’s aide entered with a coffee service.
An edgy Colombian aroma filled the room. The sound of liquid flowing over china was ritualistic in the silence. Pinot motioned the aide to ignore his coffee cup in lieu of the double-sized mug on his desk.
The aide left.
Torrance lifted a cup and cradled it in his palm. The coffee warmed the thin cup quickly. He sipped, blowing briefly to avoid scalding. He wished he had eaten something now.
“The Galactic Council on Wormhole Physics is being held next week,” Pinot said simply. “You will attend, and you will kill Emil Pentabill.”
“Oscar?”
“Yes, that is, I suppose, what his friends call him.”
“I can’t kill anyone, better yet a friend.”
“Yet, that is your job.”
“
If I refuse?”
Pinot gulped his coffee, then set his mug amid loose paper on his desk. “I’m certain neither of your ex-wives will care one way or the other. God knows I can vouch for the disinterest of ex-wives. And I know you’re not really close to your daughters, but surely they need their old man around, don’t you think?”
Torrance squeezed his lips into a tight line. He loved Ana and Mercy. But something had always gotten in the way while they were growing up—a conference to attend, or a seminar to facilitate.
There was a war on, after all.
Despite the expansion they had been able to achieve, there was always a war on, anymore. People were always dying in faraway places, sometimes as fast as they could be shipped out.
He had never had enough time.
He had lost Marisa just as he had lost Adrienne before her. And he was gone while his daughters went from crawling to kindergarten to high school to college to careers of their own.
Pinot’s threat, however, was clear and direct. Kill or be killed.
“Why Pentabill?”
“The man is a confirmed traitor.”
“I’ve known Oscar for years,” Torrance said. “I find that very hard to believe.”
“Yet still true.”
Torrance shook his head.
“You want evidence?” Pinot pointed to a brown data cube on the corner of his desk.
Torrance picked it up. The cube was small, its edges sharp and prickly.
“Read it at your leisure.”
“What’s on it?”
“Proof that Universe Three got to him years ago—before, even, your cruise with Everguard. Standard espionage stuff. Find a source, start early and small until they’re hooked, then raise the ante. By the end, Pentabill sold them the Star Drive, and several techniques for manufacturing exotic matter—specifically including solutions to throat tensors, I might add—and, of course, Kransky-Watt.”
Torrance grimaced outwardly.
Kransky and Watt were the first to demonstrate that the kinetic flow of a star’s energy could be fed back into a wormhole’s gate fields, thereby providing traversable stability. The throat tensors were needed to understand and build the most critical juncture in the wormhole system. It was this technology that had allowed the engineers to draw energy from the interior of Alpha Centauri A to power Star Drive engines, and hence open up the galaxy to faster-than-light travel.
Without the information Pentabill had sold, Universe Three could not have developed their own wormholes. Without those wormholes, they could not have sustained a galaxy-faring fleet. And without a galaxy-faring fleet, they could not have waged the war that had killed so many young men and women over the past four standard decades.
“Oscar is a very bright man,” Torrance said.
“All the more reason to make an example of him.”
“You want me because you think I can attend the council without arousing suspicion in advance of the strike.”
“A good assassin blends in.”
“You’re overestimating my status considerably.”
Pinot gave a sarcastic huff. “You don’t have to explain to me that you are no longer one of the scientific elite, Captain. I know this.” He raised a pointed index finger. “But this is an advantage for you with regard to this mission. Your compatriots will accept your attendance, but will keep you at arm’s length. It will be quite easy for you to fade into the woodwork at an appropriate time.”
Pinot’s straightforward dissection of Torrance’s standing stung.
“So I’m a Trojan horse?” Torrance said. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
“Trojan horse,” Pinot said as he rubbed his goatee. A smile creased his cheeks with a series of abstract folds that made him look like a washed-out coconut. “I like that.”
The concept of killing in cold blood was suddenly very real.
Torrance drank coffee and put the cup back on the tray. The liquid ate the lining of his stomach and did nothing to help his dry throat.
“I can’t do it,” he said. The pleading quality in his voice made him feel weak and somehow ashamed.
“Men are always capable of more than they think.”
“It’s not like that,” Torrance lied too quickly. He thought about the signal he had received this morning. “I’m not afraid of it. It’s just…I have a new project I need to look into.”
“Really? I reviewed your assignments with Ambassador Cash yesterday. She made no mention of new projects.”
“It’s…” Torrance looked at Pinot. The CIO was enjoying himself. He was playing a game, a fisherman who had set his hook and was now letting Torrance run but keeping the line taut.
“She doesn’t know about it,” Torrance finally said.
“Then it can’t be too important, now, can it?”
“Only discovery of a new life-form.”
Pinot sat back in his chair. “We’re not going through this again, are we?”
Talking about the signals here felt wrong, but he couldn’t help himself.
“We’ve confirmed cohesive signals from Eden. No mistaking it.”
“Don’t trifle with me, Captain. Universe Three is nearly done, now. They aren’t rich enough to support spacecraft development at the rate we can, and they’ve stretched themselves so thin that they are now scattered into little pockets of resistance with little chance of succeeding. After fifty years of bloodshed, we are winning. Very close to wiping the galaxy clean of them—too close to the ultimate victory to allow me any leeway in letting you shirk this final duty.”
“We’ve only been at war with U3 for thirty-seven years,” Torrance said, feeling spiteful joy at being able to correct the administrator.
Pinot’s smile was gruesome as it was sadistic.
“What?”
“You don’t think this war started with the Cassiopeia incident, do you?” Pinot chuckled and sat back with his intertwined fingers lying over his belly. “Let me ask you a question. Were you aware that Everguard sailed without a ship’s intelligence officer?”
Torrance thought of Government Security Officer Casey. A government security officer was not an intelligence officer, and vice versa, and he knew that Casey did not originate from Pinot’s office.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t that strike you as odd?”
“I never thought about it. I figured Admiral Hatch or Captain Romanov forced him out or something else political must have happened. I didn’t think it was a big issue, though. After all, we still had a government security officer. How many enemies would we expect to find in the Alpha Centauri system?”
“Obviously more than you would think.”
Torrance gave a dry swallow, but he wasn’t lying when he said he had never considered the situation on Everguard before.
“Do you really expect this office would allow a ship as important as Everguard to sail without an SIO merely because a simpleton admiral thought he could do a better job of it?”
Torrance thought back, his memory fogged by time. Pinot was right about the strength of the intelligence office—even back then. If they wanted an SIO aboard, it’s almost certain they could have had one.
“So the intelligence organization left their guy off on purpose?”
“That’s true.”
“But if you suspected the ship would be the target of an attack…” An idea struck him so cold his fingers felt charged with electricity. He felt his face blanch.
Pinot cocked his head and arched an eyebrow.
Christ. It couldn’t be. Could it?
“You are catching on, aren’t you?”
“You knew Everguard was going to be attacked.”
“Of course we did. Or, at least we knew it was likely.”
Torrance pressed his fingers hard into the armrests of the chair. “Why didn’t you stop it?”
“The intelligence office has been at war with Universe Three since the day of U3’s inception, Captain. It is our job to control these groups. Bu
t the sorry truth of the matter is that our system makes it very difficult to be as aggressive as we need to be without an obvious political reason.”
“So you stood by and watched as Universe Three destroyed Everguard?”
“It is an unfortunate truth that sometimes people have to be sacrificed to the greater good.”
“Sacrificed?” The word felt sharp.
“As an ambassador, you understand this better than most.”
“If Everguard hadn’t been attacked, U3 wouldn’t have been flushed,” he said, beginning to understand fully.
“When a cancer is in your body, it is best cut out before it grows malignant.”
“But it backfired, didn’t it? The government was going to give U3 their independence…until Orion’s mission failed.”
Pinot laughed. “I wouldn’t say Orion failed, Torrance—at least not completely. Thanks to you, anyway.”
Torrance stared at Pinot. “Douglas and Yuan were the fall guys.”
The CIO smiled. “Not everyone who works in our organization wears our stripes, Captain, but many do.”
“Jesus,” Torrance said, swallowing hard again against anxiety. “Anyone else?”
“The intelligence office is full of invisible heroes.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“You need to understand that this mission I’ve assigned you is merely one small piece in a very large puzzle, Captain. I want you to see how much has been on the line. And I want you to understand that I will not stand idly by and see any part of the operation fail and imperil the final success of the entire effort.”
Torrance clenched his jaw.
The words you can’t make me nearly came off his tongue. But that was wrong. Willim Pinot’s entire career was about making people do things they wouldn’t normally do.
Their meeting was done.
The parameters of his choice lay before him.
Torrance looked across the table and saw confidence and certainty unyielding like an undertow.
Kill or be killed.
As he prepared for bed later that night, Torrance tried to convince himself that his decision to take the assignment hinged on the belief that he had more to do in life, that it was the only way to save Eden. But Torrance had never been very good at shielding himself from what he truly thought.