Excelsior

by Jasper T. Scott

  Alexander frowned, wondering how they knew the prisoners were here if they hadn’t even opened the bunker yet. He got on the comms to Vargas asking exactly that.

  The commander replied, “We have a short-ranged tracker implanted in the captain of the shuttle that went missing. His beacon is broadcasting from here.”

  Alexander grimaced, realizing that meant they didn’t know anything about who else might be with him, or even if the captain himself was still alive. Catalina might not even be here.

  High-powered lasers crackled and hissed. Alexander watched the SEALs trace a molten orange line across the door, and his visor auto-polarized to protect his eyes from the glare. The line became a closed circle and then the SEALs kicked in the door. The piece they’d cut fell inward with a bang, and the SEALs rushed through the gap.

  Vargas called out in an amplified voice, ordering everyone in the bunker to raise their hands and remain calm.

  Alexander felt himself carried inside by the press of soldiers behind him. A huddled, bedraggled mass of civilians with dirty faces and tear-streaked cheeks appeared all around the room, all of them highlighted yellow on his HUD to indicate that their friend/foe status was unknown. Then facial recognition took over and began painting them green one by one until all of them were identified as Alliance citizens.

  They’d found the colonists, and apart from how dirty they were, they all appeared to be fine. Alexander saw the soldiers around him relax their guard somewhat. Vargas walked up to one of the civilians, and Alexander saw from the HUD overlay that his name was Captain Fuentes. Scanning the crowd anxiously, Alexander read names in a hurry, trying to find one that read Catalina de Leon. She couldn’t have changed her name already… unless she’d filed for a divorce in absentia and remarried.

  Then he saw her. He didn’t even need to read her name to know it was Caty. Blond hair, blue eyes, high cheeks, small nose, full lips—and the baby boy sitting in her lap was added confirmation. Alexander ran toward her, his heart pounding and his veins buzzing with adrenaline. He toggled his external speakers and called out to her. “Caty!”

  She looked up suddenly, her eyes wide with shock. She saw him coming at her in full body armor and her surprise turned to fear. She curled protectively around her son. Then he mentally retracted his visor, allowing her to see his face. The smell of sewage and rotting food hit him like a punch in the gut, but he managed to smile for her sake.

  “Alex!” she screamed, stumbling to her feet. “Is that you?” Her face scrunched up and she began to cry.

  He stopped within arms’ reach of her. “Are you okay?” he asked, studying her from head to toe and looking for injuries. He reached out with an armored hand, as if to stroke her cheek, but stopped himself, and looked around suddenly. “Where’s… the father?”

  She shook her head and bit her lip, her tears coming steadily now. “David didn’t go with us. It’s a long story.”

  The boy in her arms began to cry, too, and Alexander regarded him with a sympathetic look. “Come on, we need to get you out of here,” he said. “We have air transports waiting.”

  Catalina nodded, and then Commander Vargas reiterated that, saying, “Let’s go everyone! If any of you is in need of assistance, check in with Corpsman Torres over there—” Alexander noticed Vargas pointing to where a huddled group of medics were already busy conducting first aid for injured colonists.

  People climbed to their feet, trading shell-shocked looks with one another. The reality of their rescue hadn’t set in yet. Not the welcome he’d expected. Turning back to Catalina he asked, “Did they hurt you?”

  She shook her head. “No, they’ve been protecting us.”

  Alexander frowned. “They who?”

  “The rice farmers. They hid us down here to keep Confederate soldiers from finding us.”

  Alexander remembered the dead farmers in the clearing around the entrance of the bunker and he grimaced. On the one hand the president was trying to convince the Confederate people that the Alliance wasn’t evil, and on the other hand, Alliance soldiers and drones were shooting first and asking questions later.

  “What’s wrong?” Catalina asked.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.” Looking away, he saw the other colonists busy shuffling toward the open door. A bright circle of daylight streamed in from the stairwell, illuminating drifting clouds of dust. Reaching out, he wrapped an armored arm around her shoulders and guided her toward the light. “Come on. It’s time to go home.”

  Chapter 51

  There was no concealing Catalina’s shock as they ran back to the quadcopters. The same farmers who had been protecting her and the other colonists had been gunned down without hesitation.

  Now sitting in the cockpit of one of the quadcopters, behind the pilot and copilot, Alexander leaned across the aisle between their seats to reassure Catalina that everything was going to be okay. It was almost impossible to hear over the noise of the rotors, but their headsets and microphones muffled the noise and enabled them to speak via comms.

  “What happened to… David?” Alexander asked, anxious to know why she was alone. “Why didn’t he go with you?”

  Catalina turned to him with a broken smile and shook her head. The quadcopter hovered up and away amidst an escorting cloud of drones. She began to explain, starting from the message she’d sent to him, where she’d asked him not to contact her again because contact with him was provoking David. Then she explained about the abuse, the alcoholism, and how helpless and trapped she had felt.

  Alexander felt himself growing progressively more furious with every passing second. He was horrified and seeing red. His stomach burned with an acid rage.

  He would hunt David down and make him pay if it was the last thing he did.

  Then Catalina got to the part about joining the colony fleet and going to Wonderland to start a new life. That was when she’d discovered that David was illegal in the northern states and he couldn’t go, and that was why he’d never changed despite multiple behavioral adjustments. He didn’t have standard gener implants to adjust. The adjustments reports were all forgeries.

  That revelation was one too many. The lies, the abuse… it was too much. David’s a dead man, he thought.

  “You’re very quiet,” Catalina said, reaching for his hand.

  He was still wearing armor, and he didn’t feel her touch for a few moments.

  “Alexander?”

  He shook his head, snapping out of it. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  “It’s okay. I wish you had been there, but I know it’s not your fault. You didn’t have a choice.”

  Alexander tried to process all of what she’d said to him, and suddenly he realized that if David wasn’t in the picture anymore, there might still be a chance for the two of them. “Caty…” He held her hand loosely in his. “I didn’t move on until you contacted me, telling me to stay away. And even after that, I never really moved on. I don’t know where you’re at right now, but if there’s any chance that we might still be together, I promise to make up for all those years I was away, and I promise that I’ll love Dorian as if he were my own son.”

  Catalina’s face crumpled; her blue eyes grew moist and sparkled like the sun shining on the deep blue sea below. Her lower lip trembled. “Oh, Alex.” She shook her head. “I must be dreaming.”

  He smiled back at her.

  “You’re done with the Navy now, right?”

  Alexander hesitated. “I signed on for another six months so that I could look for you.”

  Some of Catalina’s excitement faded and she nodded soberly. “And after that?”

  “After that I’m a free man.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Catalina unbuckled, leaning across the aisle, she kissed him. Despite the fact that she smelled terrible and her breath was no bouquet of roses, Alexander felt a familiar spark in that kiss, and a warm rush of hope, of everything that he’d been missing for s
o long. Dorian squirmed in her lap and began swatting their faces with his hands.

  Alexander withdrew and looked down on him with a wry grin.

  “Hey there little guy.”

  Dorian regarded him with lips parted and eyes wide, as if fascinated by him. Looking up at Catalina, he asked, “How did you get pregnant, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “My implant failed,” Caty explained.

  “And the father didn’t have one, so it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “I didn’t think of that…” Caty said. “That’s true.”

  “He’s going to pay for what he did to you.”

  Catalina’s expression became guarded. “What are you going to do?”

  Alexander felt a flash of jealousy and rage. Was she trying to protect him? “After what he did to you, what do you care?”

  “I care because I know you, and I don’t want you to go to jail, Alex. Revenge won’t fix anything.”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t about revenge. It’s about justice. By law, illegal immigrants are to be conscripted on sight. After that, if a stray bullet hits him in occupied enemy territory, you won’t see me crying.”

  Dorian fussed in his mother’s lap, and Alexander turned to look at him, forgetting for a moment to make a baby-friendly face. Dorian took one look at him and started screaming.

  “You’re scaring him!” Catalina said.

  “Sorry.” Alexander let his anger out in a sigh.

  Catalina shot him an accusing look. “Let’s not talk about this anymore. I’m sure David will get what’s coming to him without you to hunt him down.”

  Alexander nodded but said nothing, looking instead out to the horizon. He wasn’t going to leave David’s fate to chance.

  Justice would be done.

  *

  As soon as they reached the W.A.S. Hancock Alexander whisked Catalina and her son away to his quarters so that they could eat a hot meal and get cleaned up. After they both ate, he had the ship’s doctor come and check them out there so that they wouldn’t have to wait for hours while the doctor checked all of the other colonists.

  The doctor gave them a clean bill of health, but injected them both with nanobodies just in case.

  Now, as Alexander sat waiting for them to get washed up, there came a knock at the door, followed by a voice over the intercom. “Admiral de Leon, it’s Ambassador Carter.”

  “Come in,” he said, already sighing.

  The ambassador strode in wearing a heavy frown. “Have you heard?”

  Alexander shook his head. “Heard what? I just got back.”

  “Wilson’s confession.”

  Alexander remembered that had been the breaking news just before he left and he began to nod.

  “Right. What was that about?”

  “He’s claiming—posthumously—that the entire trip to Wonderland was a fake.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Exactly.”

  “People aren’t actually believing that are they?”

  “Even if people don’t fully believe it, hearing something like that from the man who used to be in command of the entire Alliance fleet is enough to make them wonder.”

  “Well…” Alexander considered that for a moment. “If I recall, during the first Cold War, some people claimed that the moon landing was a fake, too, and that was equally ridiculous.”

  Carter’s eyes lit up. “Exactly! I’d forgotten about that.”

  “There’s always going to be someone claiming some kind of conspiracy.”

  Carter nodded. “I agree, and since you led the mission to Wonderland you’re in a unique position to answer those claims. The president wants you to give testimony to everything you saw and did while you were on Wonderland. We were going to do that stateside, but since you ran off to be the hero, we’ve lost too much time already. I need you to go meet with the press right now.”

  Alexander ground his teeth for a moment. “And if I say no?”

  “Then you’ll be court-martialed and tried for treason. You’ll go to prison, Alex.”

  Alexander scowled and turned toward the bathroom, where Catalina was still washing up with Dorian. “Mi amor, este pendejo quiere que me vaya con el para defender el imagen publico de la Alianza. Ahorita vuelvo.”

  After a moment, he heard, “Esta bien. Cuidado con lo que dices. Te amo!”

  “Y yo a ti.” Turning back to Carter, he smiled thinly and said, “Let’s go.”

  “I’m an Ambassador. I understand Spanish, and I know what pendejo means,” Carter said.

  Alexander’s smile became lopsided. “I know, but it’s not polite to call a man a dumbass in his native language.”

  Carter glared at him. “We’re wasting time. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 52

  As they left Alexander’s quarters, Carter asked him, “You haven’t seen the confession yet, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’d better watch it with me now. If you’re only hearing about it for the first time when reporters interview you, you might be surprised by something. We need ready answers and confidence, not hesitation. We’ll go to my quarters and watch it before we meet with the press.”

  Alexander nodded. “Lead the way.”

  Carter’s quarters weren’t far from Alexander’s own—just down the corridor. Carter waved the door open and they breezed inside. “Sit down,” he said, pointing to the couch in the living room.

  Alexander angled for the couch and sat down facing the room’s holo projector while Carter configured it from his comm band. A moment later the lights dimmed, and an image of Wilson’s face sprang to life, larger than life, and staring at them with intense blue eyes that contrasted sharply with his military short white hair.

  “I’m recording this message in anticipation of the fact that I may be arrested when I return to Earth. I won’t try to defend my actions, only to say that they felt like necessary measures at the time. If you are watching this, it’s because I have become the Alliance’s scapegoat in this war. But if I’m going to be accused of wrongful actions, then it is only fair that the mastermind behind these actions be brought to justice with me. With that I am referring to President Ryan Baker. He was the one who dreamed up Operation Alice in the first place.

  “Operation Alice was a manned mission we sent to land on and explore an Earth-type planet on the other side of a traversable Lorentzian Wormhole, code-named the Looking Glass, but I’m here to tell you that all of that was a lie.”

  Alexander blew out an incredulous breath.

  Carter sat down beside him. “Wait,” he whispered. “It gets better.”

  The late Admiral Wilson went on, “I was only brought into the president’s scheme late in the game, but as all of you know by now, we fought a war over sole access to the wormhole, and many millions of people died in the nuclear strikes that followed. Those people all died for a lie, and that lie was what we showed the Confederacy through leaked intelligence information. We showed them that the wormhole was traversable and that it led to a habitable planet called Wonderland, but the truth is that there is no way through the wormhole and there never was.”

  “What?” Alexander shook his head, and Carter paused the recording with a gesture. “He lost his mind! We’ve been there and back again. We have reams of data. Even if we could fake such a thing, why the hell would we want to?”

  Carter nodded gravely. “Listen up.” He gestured for the recording to play once more.

  Wilson went on, “We lied and intentionally leaked falsified data to the Confederacy in the hopes that they would just take our word for it and fly headlong through the wormhole with everything they had in an attempt to beat us to colonizing what might be the next Earth. It wasn’t reasonable to expect them to do that based on probe data alone, so we organized a manned mission to Wonderland with a team of experts who could realistically invent the data it would take to convince the Confederacy that Wonderland was real. This had to be d
one without even those experts knowing the truth, because one of them would be a spy, standing ready to leak all of the mission data to the enemy. This crew member was a known enemy agent by the name of Commander Sirena Korbin.”

  Alexander’s eyes narrowed swiftly at that. They knew she was a spy?

  “We also needed a man on the inside to help her and guide everyone else through their virtual reality experience, making sure that no one got suspicious. That man was an Alliance ambassador.”