by Alex Lamb
Will could hardly believe their good fortune when the ship that finally descended upon them was the Ariel. It flashed in under stealth, swung up on its torches to meet them and cradled the shuttle to its massive belly.
As soon as the docking pod was extended, Will and the others made for the habitat module with all speed. Will tumbled through the opening door into the familiarly cramped cabin like a shipwreck survivor reaching dry land. He breathed in the familiar smell of recycled air with a grateful gasp.
Ira was waiting anxiously for them just inside the doorway, his face lined with worry. The last two days of sitting and waiting had taken a visible toll.
‘Where’s John?’ he said.
For a moment, no one said anything. Then Rachel spoke.
‘John’s dead.’
Ira’s face grew solemn. ‘How?’
She set about explaining what had happened on the planet. Ira absorbed the news gravely, showing about as much emotion as a rock. When she’d finished her breathless account, he spoke again.
‘Not good,’ was all he said.
‘Captain!’ called Amy from her bunk. ‘We have six Earther pursuit ships closing on us, fast.’
Will’s heart sank. It appeared their escape hadn’t been quite so complete after all.
Ira grimaced and looked at Rachel. ‘Were you followed?’
Rachel shook her head vehemently. ‘No, sir. There was no sign of enemy activity at any point before we docked. They might have tracked the shuttle from a distance, but there was no sign of a tracer scan.’
‘All right, everybody,’ said Ira, ‘it’s time to use up what little antimatter we have left. You three get to your stations. This is going to be rough.’
Rachel nodded and did as she was told.
Will yanked off the gloves from his suit. As the second one came free, a peculiar puff of smoke rose from the fitting.
Suddenly, Will discovered he couldn’t breathe.
‘Ca—’
That was all he managed to say before a black tide of nausea overwhelmed him. Then there was only darkness.
13.2: WILL
Will woke to a sense of profound discomfort. His skull felt horribly compressed, as if from the world’s worst head cold, and his limbs were leaden and shot through with pins and needles. He opened gummy eyes and found himself sprawled out on a plastic floor, looking at several pairs of brightly coloured boots.
‘Awake already?’ said a voice. ‘Sit him up.’
Two pairs of boots strode forward. Will was grabbed by the arms and hauled upright. For a moment, his vision narrowed again into nauseous darkness. He groaned. By the time his senses cleared, he’d been propped against a wall like a rag doll. He blinked hard and took his first focused look at his surroundings.
He was in a windowless room of lifeless beige. It could have been in any one of a thousand habitats across the human galactic shell. Four members of the Protectorate Police stood on either side of a plump man dressed in gold, red, yellow and black. His soft, round face and coffee-coloured skin were at odds with a pair of shrewd, pale-brown eyes. He looked inordinately pleased with himself.
‘I wouldn’t try to move if I were you,’ the man said, bouncing on his toes.
That was the last thing on Will’s mind. He was still reeling from being manhandled.
‘You’re recovering from a disabling immune response,’ the man explained. ‘I recommend remaining still and taking shallow, even breaths.’
Will attempted to voice his contempt but his throat was both constricted and raw. All that came out was a harsh wheeze.
‘I expect you’re wondering where you are,’ the policeman said. ‘The answer is the Protectorate Command Station in orbit around New Angeles.’
Will shut his eyes in misery.
‘Ah!’ the man said enthusiastically. ‘Your associates are beginning to recover. Galatean physiology is a remarkable thing. Put them against the wall, men. They’re not going anywhere in a hurry and I want to see their faces while I talk to them.’
Ira was dumped up against the wall beside Will.
‘Let me introduce myself,’ said the soft-faced man. ‘My name is Civil Coordinator Enrique Chopra, and I’m the man who caught you. Who’d have thought it: a ship full of pure-bred geniuses captured by a peasant from the prote-farms. Where’s your racial pride now, I wonder?’ He chastised them with a wagging finger. ‘You geniuses should have taken a closer look at your environment suits before you got back into your clever little shuttle. Once we received the tip-off that you were here, it was relatively easy to work out how you’d arrived. Just a process of simple deductive reasoning.’
It sounded as if he considered the reasoning anything but simple.
Chopra watched as Hugo, Amy and Rachel joined their crewmates in the line forming against the wall.
Will tested his limbs. He could move them a little if he tried hard. And it was getting easier to breathe, thank Gal.
‘However,’ said Chopra, ‘I do have to congratulate you on the ingenuity of your security systems – Galatean software is indeed as good as I’ve been led to believe. Without the comms leeches I had attached to your shuttle’s hull, we would never have been able to get into your habitat sphere to rescue you. However, you should feel fortunate that I took the steps I did,’ he said with a grin. ‘Without an antidote, the toxin you inhaled is quite fatal.’
He waved a hand. ‘But here I am, talking about myself when I couldn’t have done it without the help of our friend.’ He surveyed the Ariel’s crew with a kind of hungry curiosity. ‘So which of you do I have to thank for this moment? Which one of you is Will?’
Will’s blood ran cold.
‘No reply?’ said Chopra with a cocked eyebrow. ‘Well, I imagine it’s still a little hard to talk, isn’t it? Sergeant Wu, why don’t you give them each another dose of clarifier.’
One of the police officers stepped forwards and started administering a hypodermic gun to each of the Galateans’ necks in turn.
‘Come now,’ said Chopra. ‘It must be one of you? Who sent us the tip-off with the rendezvous coordinates?’
Will was appalled. He didn’t understand. Why would someone do such a thing and claim it in his name?
‘Will, what’s going on?’ croaked Ira.
‘I don’t know,’ Will gasped back.
‘Ah!’ said Chopra gleefully. ‘So we have a face for our friend.’ He fixed his gaze on Will.
‘Fuck you,’ said Will. ‘I sent nothing.’
Chopra rolled his eyes in amusement. ‘Well, we received a tip-off from someone.’
‘Traitor!’ Hugo hissed. ‘He betrayed us, Captain. I knew he would.’
Will felt a fresh surge of hatred towards Hugo. Suddenly it all clicked together in his head – Hugo’s bitterness, his cryptic smiles, his urgent desire to get out of the car the moment they were captured. He’d thought it was safe to sell them all out to save humanity from his imagined alien menace. But he’d reckoned without the resistance and their inside knowledge of the police. No wonder the poor bastards didn’t feel they could trust the Galateans any more.
‘You did it, didn’t you, you stupid fuck?’ Will grated. He tried to turn his unresponsive head to look Hugo in the face, without success. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘Because you couldn’t bully me into talking?’
‘Me?’ sneered Hugo. ‘I never touched a keyboard the whole time we were there. You were the one with the data link on your neck.’
‘Well, isn’t this nice?’ said Chopra with a gleaming-white smile. ‘It’s refreshing to see such a team spirit at work among the most highly evolved people in the galaxy.’
Will ignored him. ‘Captain,’ he said, ‘you have to believe me. I sent nothing.’
Ira remained silent.
Chopra pointed at Will. ‘Separate him from the others,’ he told his men.
The guards picked Will up. He struggled feebly and, for a single horrible moment, got to gaze upon the faces of his shipmates, who were
all staring at him. Their expressions revealed their opinions of him with awful clarity. Only Rachel’s was free from doubt. Hugo’s was red with hate.
In the next second they were gone and Will was being carried, helpless, along the gently curving corridor. They took him to an interrogation room and propped him up in a plastic chair on one side of a scratched and dented table. Chopra seated himself with some decorum in the chair on the other side.
‘Leave us,’ he told the guards, shooing them away with his hand.
‘Sir—’ started one of the guards.
‘I said go.’
For a moment, Will glimpsed the hard man beneath Chopra’s soft exterior. The last guard shut the door behind him.
Chopra arranged himself slowly, sitting at an angle to the table, his legs casually crossed, one elbow braced on the tabletop.
‘It’s okay now,’ he said with a conspiratorial smile. ‘You can drop your little subterfuge. No one believes you anyway, and nothing you say here will go further than these walls.’
‘Fuck you,’ Will growled.
Chopra sighed. ‘Then you still claim you didn’t send us the tip-off?’
Will glared at him.
‘It will go easier for you if you confess,’ said Chopra, ending his sentence on an expectant rise, but Will gave no reply.
Chopra looked genuinely confused. ‘Why else was a note sent to us on a private channel identifying you as a willing defector?’
Will would have liked to know, too. Why had he been picked out to look like the traitor? Hugo’s spite was the most obvious answer. However, the only reason Will could think of to explain why Hugo might betray them was if he believed the Transcended posed a greater threat to humanity than the Earthers. That certainly fitted the pattern of the man’s behaviour, but it required him to have engaged in some very subtle spy work. Will tried to calculate when and how Hugo could have informed the authorities without the rest of the Ariel’s crew noticing.
Another possible culprit was the resistance. They’d provided him with the incriminating data link, and their animosity had been clear from the outset. But why would they have chosen to give his name in particular?
The last possibility was that Hugo was right, and Will had sent the message himself. Or rather the Transcended had, via Will. But he didn’t believe they’d bother doing something as petty as that. They’d had plenty of chances to directly intervene in his actions before and taken none of them.
Whatever the answer, Will would certainly look like the guilty party to the others. And he’d further reduced his credibility with his crewmates by accusing one of his own people without thinking. Not that it mattered much now. The Kingdom of Man didn’t have a great track record for human rights when it came to dealing with prisoners.
Chopra sighed, bored with the silence. ‘I don’t really know why you’re here,’ he said, ‘but I can guess that it probably has nothing to do with assassinating the Prophet. Am I right?’
Will regarded him with confusion.
‘I thought not,’ said Chopra sitting back. The civil coordinator pondered for a moment, a hand over his mouth. Then he leaned forwards, steepling his fingers. ‘I shall speak frankly,’ he said. ‘I represent the local authorities in this star system. Administering the police here requires a careful hand and a relatively … flexible outlook. We Sons of Mao are far more easy-going than most subsects – and certainly more generous than the High Church.
‘However,’ he said ominously, ‘we have received strict instructions not to interrogate any of you before representatives of a certain branch of Military Intelligence arrives. Their stated reason: that the information you hold could compromise the security of the Prophet.’
Chopra offered Will a wry half-smile. ‘Needless to say, whatever the real reason, it might be to our mutual advantage if you voluntarily divulge what you know to us instead. You and your associates would then avoid the somewhat … heavy-handed methods Military Intelligence employs. And being privy to such knowledge would increase my own standing, and that of the Sons of Mao, immeasurably. By speaking of your own free will, myself and my associates would be free of blame.’ He turned his hands upwards, as if to prove them empty. ‘I might even be able to put in a good word for you when they arrive. I am a strong believer in a civilised approach to law enforcement.’
Will remembered the scenes of ugly revelry he’d witnessed on the planet below. They hadn’t looked particularly civilised to him.
Chopra waited for an answer, his impatience growing visibly. He tried one more time. ‘I assure you,’ he said, ‘I am a much gentler man than those currently on their way to see you.’
Will considered telling Chopra everything. He had nothing to say that the man would enjoy hearing. He’d gain some small measure of satisfaction watching the policeman’s face as he explained about their impending extinction and the church’s lies to its own people. Unfortunately, the truth was so inimical to his enemies that he doubted Chopra would believe it.
‘No thanks,’ he said. Even if his crewmates would never know it, he intended to remain true to his Fleet and his mission to the bitter end.
Chopra frowned and sat back. ‘Perhaps I have misjudged you,’ he said. ‘I did wonder why you would send us a message giving us details so precious as the rendezvous coordinates for your ship, but lacking enough information to help bring you in alive. Perhaps you are a lunatic. You want to die, and that is why you refuse to speak now.’
Chopra got to his feet. ‘I assure you, death at the hands of Military Intelligence is neither swift nor pretty. Tell the guard if you decide to talk.’ He knocked on the door and was let out.
Will slouched in the chair, immobile. Chopra’s ignorance of their mission had bought them a little time, but Ulanu and his people couldn’t be far away. Will didn’t doubt that, in contrast to Chopra, Ulanu would know exactly what questions to ask and have the means of extracting the answers.
How long would he be able to keep his mouth shut when they started torturing him? He shuddered.
13.3: IRA
Ira, Rachel, Amy and Hugo were thrown into a large bare room. As he began to recover the use of his body, Ira examined the walls and floor. There were no obvious means of escape. He noticed security cameras positioned in the room’s upper corners. They were too high to reach and screened over with some kind of glass. Ira doubted there’d be much to gain from trying to damage them. Although at first glance the situation appeared hopeless, Ira was not the sort of man to give up.
Unfortunately, Hugo did not take their incarceration so stoically. Ira had forgotten what a pain in the ass the man could be.
The scientist propped himself up against the wall and shouted his rage at the top of his lungs. ‘Stinking traitor! If I get my hands on him, I’m going to kill him! I tried to tell you. Ever since—’
Ira quickly interrupted him. ‘Enough!’ he barked. ‘There’s only one good reason I can think of for why we’ve been left together, and that’s so the Earthers can listen to us. I don’t want anyone discussing the mission. Is that clear?’
Hugo fell into sullen silence.
With some difficulty, Ira pushed himself upright. ‘Let’s use this opportunity properly,’ he said. ‘First, we take stock of our situation. One of our crew is dead. We’ve lost our ship. And someone has betrayed us, though we don’t know for sure that the traitor is one of our crew.’
He looked at each of them intently and hoped they understood his meaning. The resistance could easily be responsible for their predicament, but even so, Ira didn’t want to bring them up as a topic of conversation. The less the Earthers knew of their operation, the better.
‘What are you talking about?’ snapped Hugo. ‘Of course it’s Will.’
‘Bullshit!’ Rachel snarled.
‘Oh, it’s bullshit, is it?’ the scientist retorted. ‘He had the motive, and he had the means through that interface thing. He must have sold us out the first time he used it. No wonder the resistance turned on us
.’
And there it was, out in the open: their connection to the resistance, exactly as Ira hadn’t wanted.
‘Hugo, I said shut up,’ Ira growled. He wondered if he was a fool for even trying. Hugo wouldn’t last long under proper interrogation anyway.
‘Or what, Captain?’ Hugo sneered. ‘What are you going to do now? You don’t have a ship to throw me out of any more. Or are you going to walk all the way over here and hit me? Care to give it a try?’
Ira glared at him and drew breath to speak, but Rachel beat him to it.
‘You’re an asshole, Hugo. Can’t you see you’re being manipulated? Blaming Will is exactly what they want you to do.’
‘Bullshit!’ he said, mimicking her voice back to her.
‘Why did he take us to the safe house if he was trying to betray us, idiot?’ said Rachel. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Will saved your life back there.’
‘Only because the alternative was exposing himself,’ said Hugo. ‘He’s been lying to us ever since he was compromised. We’re not dealing with the same man we flew out with.’
‘That’s enough!’ Ira roared. He drew the line at Hugo revealing their mission before they’d even made a stab at escaping. ‘You’ll shut up right now or I’ll hit you so hard you’ll wish you’d never been born.’
Summoning his strength, Ira clenched his fists and took a couple of unsteady steps towards Hugo. Hugo blinked in surprise at Ira’s rapid recovery. He appeared to have forgotten that Ira’s metabolism was designed to handle the worst rigours of spaceflight. A few Earther drugs weren’t going to bother him for long.
‘I don’t want to hear another word from any of you,’ said Ira. ‘We’ll stop bickering right now and start thinking up ways we can get out of here. But for God’s sake, if you come up with one, don’t say it out loud.’
At that point, two large Earthers tramped in and grabbed Ira’s shoulders.
‘What’s this?’ Ira said mockingly. ‘Am I spoiling your little fact-finding effort?’