He suddenly remembered Zhukovski’s recounting of his conversation with Reza, recalling how long-lived had been the Kreelan civilization. Over one hundred thousand years since the current Empire’s founding, he thought. And how many of those thousands had they been in space? Or developing weapons, a worthwhile pursuit for a race that thrived on warfare? How many planet-killers might the Kreelans have? And what other hideous weapons of mass destruction might they possess? The thought sent a chill up his spine. Glancing at Zhukovski, L’Houillier could see that his intelligence officer had come to similar conclusions. His perpetual scowl was deeper than usual. He was practically grimacing.
Laskowski was waiting with barely contained excitement for what L’Houillier would say about her plan. She had taken certain defeat and turned it into victory, coming up with a plan that dealt a massive and mortal blow to their enemy. While it was really more a consequence of the weapons she wished to employ than some kind of grand master strategy, the thought that humans could pay the Kreelans back in blood for human lives lost in the century-old war was one that she relished. Vengeance, she thought, would surely be sweet.
“Admiral?” she asked finally, becoming annoyed at L’Houillier’s extended silence.
“It is impressive, Yolanda,” he said finally, “and I wish you to pursue detailed planning along this line as a contingency–”
“As a contingency?” she blurted, unable to restrain herself. “Sir, with all due respect, this can give us victory! We have the opportunity here to destroy the Empire! We–”
“And that,” L’Houillier said firmly, forcing himself to forgive – this once – her near insubordination, “is why you are to prepare contingency plans for an offensive. However, I think I see potential risks here that you may not have taken into account. For example, what happens to the scenario if there is a significant influx of Kreelan ships into the fray? Or if the target system is protected by automated defenses that do not rely on this ‘psychic link,’ as Admiral Zhukovski has related to us from Reza Gard, and is therefore not subject to whatever has caused their state of confusion?”
“But sir,” she said, shaking her head, “the Kreelans could not possibly have more ships than I calculated into the probability matrix. And as for automated defenses, we’ve never seen any evidence of–”
“You are not answering my questions, admiral, unless you know for certain the size of the entire Kreelan fleet, which I doubt anyone does,” L’Houillier said coldly. “The question, admiral, was, what if? That is the purpose for a scenario in the first place, is it not?” Laskowski, belatedly realizing her error in trying to tap-dance around L’Houillier, nodded sheepishly. “I ask you again: what if?”
“The operation would fail, sir,” she said quietly.
“Casualties?”
“Depending on when the balance of forces shifted against our fleet, up to ninety-nine percent of the attacking force that had been committed to battle would be lost.”
Which would be the entire human fleet, Zhukovski thought bitterly. Every armed vessel that could be gathered together in a forty-eight hour period, as Laskowski had put it.
“Repercussion extrapolation?” L’Houillier asked.
“Based on what little we know of their psychology and motivations, anywhere from fifty to one-hundred percent.” Laskowski took a deep breath. She had not expected this… inquisition. “Using the Hallmark case as a benchmark, the matrix yields a minimum of twenty colonies destroyed in toto within six months.”
“And what is maximum?” Zhukovski growled.
Laskowski looked at her feet. “All human inhabited domains: planets, moons, asteroids, orbital and deep space stations, and any surviving ships.” In other words, the Kreelans were expected to destroy humans anywhere they lived, breathed, and used technology that could be identified and tracked. Any survivors would have to live at not just a pre-atomic level of civilization, but pre-electricity.
“Lord of All,” someone whispered.
L’Houillier looked up at her. “I know you were given this task on the side, Yolanda, unofficially,” he told her, “and you did an excellent job. But we must have another option. That is your task from me now. Find me that option, one that does not leave the fleet open to destruction and our homeworlds utterly defenseless if something goes wrong, as it inevitably does in such matters.”
Making one last try, Laskowski said, “But the negative angles are all at the extremes of the matrix, admiral. I admit that the probabilities are not negligible, but the potential gain is more than worth the risks involved.”
“That is not for us to decide,” L’Houillier said. “That is for the Council and the president.”
“Yes, sir,” Laskowski responded tightly. You fool, she thought sullenly. Your only viable option is right in front of you. And if you won’t listen to me, I know someone who will.
Forty-Two
Jodi smelled a rat, and it smelled suspiciously like Markus Thorella.
ACCESS DENIED.
The study cubicle’s main screen displayed the words in blood red letters. Those two words had become her constant companions during the last half-hour of her informal – and strictly unauthorized – research.
“Eat me,” she murmured, glaring angrily at the terminal. Had she bothered to look at the local time display in the lower right margin of the screen, she would have noticed that almost nine hours had passed since she left the hospital after Thorella’s intrusion and Reza’s mysterious fainting episode. And that was why she was here. It was just too convenient, she had told herself as she stalked out of the hospital, almost unconsciously heading for the General Staff HQ research center where she had spent most of her waking hours the last few months, studying for her doctorate in applied military theory. Reza was probably the most superb physical specimen the human race had ever known as far as endurance, strength for mass, and sheer toughness. He had only very recently awakened from a coma, true, but that did not seem enough to her to explain the spell that had visited him the moment he demonstrated aggression toward Thorella. And Thorella’s own behavior: it was if he had been taunting Reza, deliberately trying to provoke him, to see… what?
“To see if something would work,” she had thought aloud to herself as she strode into the building, startling the guard at the entrance. Working on the theory that Thorella was somehow exerting an unnatural influence over Reza, Jodi had begun to dig.
And, hours later, the gems she had found. She glanced down at the tiny storage card that now held all the information she had retrieved in the course of her travels through the center’s vast databases. She had not hit the mother lode yet, had not found the answer to her underlying question, but she had discovered a cornucopia of “nice to know” items.
“Know your enemy” was the route she had initially taken in her quest, and Jodi had begun prowling for any information she could find on one Thorella, Markus Gustav.
At first, she had been disappointed. Born into a wealthy Terran industrialist family, Markus Thorella had been an excellent student in his primary and secondary schools, and quickly demonstrated his prowess at team and individual sports, as well. He was never in trouble with the law, attended church regularly with his parents, and even worked frequently as a volunteer, donating his time to a local hospital as an orderly. On the face of it, he looked like every parent’s dream: bright, almost brilliant, physically superb, and selflessly dedicated to those around him.
That person, Jodi told herself, was definitely not the same Markus Thorella that they all knew and loved.
Then she found out about the crash. For Markus’s fourteenth birthday, his parents took him on a cruise to the Outer Rim, to a group of worlds that had been – for the most part – free of Kreelan attacks over the years, a place where tourism was still a thriving industry. In a freak accident while departing Earth orbit, the starliner had somehow collided with another ship that had been inbound. While such collisions were extremely rare, they did sometimes happen, and when th
ey did, they were disastrous. Over fifteen thousand people lost their lives that day. Only eighty were finally rescued from residual air pockets in the shattered hulls; the collision had occurred so suddenly and unexpectedly that none of the passengers or crew of either vessel had been able to reach a single lifeboat.
One of the survivors had been Markus Thorella, who had been terribly injured. According to a subsequent press account of the incident, the body that bore the clothes of Markus Thorella had been reduced to little more than a pulsating lump of flesh.
And that is where Jodi began to run into dead ends. Curious as to what happened afterward, during his physical reconstruction and therapy, she could get no closer than a hospital record certifying his release more than a year later. Everything in between, everything, was either barred from her or listed as “information unavailable.” That is when her unofficial research methods began to pay off. Using an unlocking program she had acquired from a young graduate student eager to impress her (too bad it had to be a guy, she lamented sourly), she began to worm her way through the passages that blocked access to Thorella’s past.
The program finally turned the key to the information she wanted, and she was literally deluged with data ranging from Thorella’s daily urine tests to the books the nurses read to him during the early phases of his recovery when his eyes were still regenerating in their sockets. While a medical student might have found interest in such things, the only thing she cared about was the DNA fingerprint.
The results, when she found them, did not surprise her as much as she would have liked. According to the official records, the DNA sample could not be firmly identified as belonging to Markus Thorella. The reason, she found out after doing some backtracking through press and a few restricted government files, was because all of Markus Thorella’s previous medical records – from his schools, the two hospitals he had visited since he was born, and the Thorella family physician – had mysteriously disappeared. However, since the boy had been in possession of Markus Thorella’s identity card and other personal effects when he was found in the starliner’s wreckage, everyone assumed he was Markus Thorella. On top of that, no one could positively identify him physically because his entire body – including fingertips and teeth – had been damaged beyond recognition. When the surgeons rebuilt him, they used some old holos that the schools were able to provide. When they were finished, he again looked like Markus Thorella.
But was he? Jodi asked herself. Had the physical and emotional trauma of the crash altered his personality? Or had he always had a sadistic streak that never showed up in any of his early psychological profiles? Or was there something else?
As she followed the history of the “new” Markus Thorella, she discovered that he had become incredibly rich after the death of his parents. Since they had died and he had no surviving family members to contest the estate, he was awarded the entire Thorella inheritance. He was instantly worth hundreds of millions of credits. But in Earth’s jurisdiction, he still had to have a legal guardian at that age.
The guardian’s name turned out to be Strom Borge. The name rang a bell with her, but she could not quite place it. She knew she had seen or heard that name before, but where?
Running a search, it did not take long to find out. Strom Borge was a Terran Senator to the Confederation, member of the Confederation Council, and chairman of a dozen major committees within the government. The hairs at the back of her neck tingled.
“Now I remember you,” she murmured to herself. He had been the leader of the group opposing the confirmation of Reza’s citizenship after returning from the Empire, and had been in favor of the radical psychotherapy procedures demanded by Dr. Deliha Rabat, another of Jodi’s personal favorites.
But there was something else. She had seen that name earlier this evening, during her research. Running another search on Borge, Strom Anaguay, she excluded all references after the crash and before Markus Thorella was born, limiting the search to the first fourteen or so years of Thorella’s life. In but a few seconds, she had her answer.
“Jesus Horatio Christ,” she breathed as the information scrolled up on her screen. Borge had been on the starliner with the Thorellas. He had been a friend of the family for some years, or so the records indicated, and he was frequently to be found in their company. Along with his son, Anton Borge.
Twenty minutes more of digging through increasingly compartmented files in the research center’s data network for Anton Borge’s DNA fingerprint confirmed what she suspected: “Markus Thorella” was Strom Borge’s biological son.
She sat back, imagining to herself what must have happened. Borge, an aggressive and ruthless politician, had received the support and friendship of the Thorella family, who themselves had much to gain from Borge’s rapidly growing political influence in the defense sector, since the Thorellas owned one of the largest shipbuilding firms on Terra.
But the genial relationship between the parents was not shared by the two boys, who apparently loathed each other. Not surprising, since psychologically Anton Borge was the complete antithesis of the Thorella boy: while they were in fact similar physically, Anton was arrogant and hateful, never failing to make those around him miserable. Arrested on a dozen charges ranging from petty theft to sexual assault against a seven year old boy, he always managed to avoid punishment because of his father’s influence.
When the collision occurred, Strom Borge probably acted with his noted ruthlessness to take advantage of the situation. As evidenced by the hospital records, Borge’s son must have been hideously injured in the crash. The question then, was what really happened to the Thorellas? Did Emilio and Augusta Thorella die outright, or did Borge murder them? Their bodies were never recovered. And what happened to the real Markus Thorella? If Strom Borge was able to somehow put the Thorella boy’s clothes (what was left of them) and his identity card on his own mutilated son, Markus Thorella’s body must still have been on the ship and more or less intact. Again, was he already dead, or did Borge kill him, perhaps tossing the body into a blazing compartment on the ship to hide the evidence of his crime?
Another thought nagged at her: how had Borge and his son managed to keep their true relationship a secret? Borge had obviously gone to great lengths to conceal the true identity of “Markus Thorella” by somehow destroying or confiscating all of the Thorella boy’s medical records (and, she found out, the records of his parents, too, to prevent any DNA tracing). Not surprisingly, the official investigation into the disappearance of those records ended rapidly and prematurely, no doubt under the shadow of Senator Borge’s influence.
But aside from all the possible paper trails that he had deftly covered up, how had his son reacted to suddenly becoming someone else? The boy was certainly old enough to know that he was not Markus Thorella, and all it would have taken was for him to call Borge “Dad” in the wrong company and someone might have become suspicious.
The answer was in a name that Jodi knew all too well: Dr. Deliha Rabat. Jodi reviewed the medical records again. She was looking for some clue as to why no one had suspected that Strom Borge and Markus Thorella were really father and son. Borge’s wife wasn’t part of the equation, since she had been killed in a Kreelan attack on a colony world not long after Anton was born. But then Jodi discovered that “Markus Thorella” had undergone psychotherapy at the hands of the young and ambitious Dr. Rabat, who treated him for emotional trauma. The reports showed that the newly reconstructed Thorella boy was having delusions that he was actually the son of Strom Borge.
Imagine that, Jodi thought acidly.
While she did not understand all the technobabble in the reports, she did see the effects of Rabat’s treatment: the “delusions” rapidly disappeared. In the end, the boy retained all the awful traits of his true self, but came to believe that he was the sole survivor of the Thorella family and heir to all its wealth, and whose best friend in the galaxy was Strom Borge.
Not surprisingly, the young Dr. Rabat soon lef
t the hospital for her own research lab, funded entirely by the Thorella estate and endorsed by Senator Borge, the estate’s executor until Markus Thorella’s coming of age.
“How very, very convenient,” Jodi muttered. She hated Thorella, despised him, but she saw now that whatever evil had been in him before had been twisted even more by his scheming father and his sycophants. With the unwitting help of the hospital and the conniving of Dr. Rabat, Borge had transformed his own son into an incidental fortune that had financed his own interests. By the time Markus Thorella was handed the papers for the estate, he was already two years in the Marine Corps and safely out of Borge’s hair. The good senator was left to oversee matters while the “son of his dear, departed friends” went off to war.
“Fucking bastard,” Jodi hissed as she continued her scanning.
She discovered that their relationship did not end there, by any means. Reading over the official military records that mentioned Markus Thorella – she had not been able to gain access to his actual Marine Corps personnel files – she soon came to see that he had acquired a reputation as a hatchet man, as ruthless or more so than his secret father. And the enemies he was sent to fight did not have blue skin: not one single time in his career was the unit in which he was serving sent into the line against the Kreelans. Instead, he spent his service time engaged in police actions on various worlds, bashing in human heads in places like Erlang that had somehow earned Borge’s ire.
That information, in turn, led her to discover the connection Borge had with those places. Millennium Industries – which originally had belonged to the Thorellas, but had long since come under Borge’s control – had holdings or interests on every one of the planets where Thorella and his goons had been deployed: Erlang for precious and strategic minerals; Kauchin in the Outer Rim for cheap, undisturbed, labor; Wilhelmstadt for high tech items; the shipyards around Manifest. And a dozen more. From what Jodi could tell, every ship, weapon, or defense system built in half the Confederation contributed to the senator’s coffers. If he wanted, Jodi did not doubt that he could build his own battle fleet; he already owned a sizable portion of the merchant marine. But all of it fell under the ownership of Millennium Industries, and any investigation short of the outright data penetrations that Jodi was conducting (which were completely illegal) would show Borge only as a minor shareholder and acting chairman of the umbrella company.
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