by Rick Partlow
“Ari,” Roza said quietly, moving in to support Liam as he nearly collapsed. Ari turned back, saw the hypo in her fist and saw Liam’s dazed expression and he moved to the other side of the redhead, putting a supporting hand under his arm. “Now Liam,” Roza said, “you’re going to be a good boy and do exactly as I say, aren’t you?”
Liam grunted assent, his eyes glazing over.
“Good boy, Liam,” Roza whispered soothingly. “Now just walk, Liam…walk with us and you can rest very soon.”
Ari’s eyes scanned the crowd, but no one gave them a second look as they guided the drugged Liam through the tram station and out onto the sidewalk. They headed away from the rows of restaurants, past street vendors selling ice cream, drinks and anonymized ‘links, till they came to a flitter pad, where a handful of the ducted fan helicopters were parked. Most were empty, stored on the lot by businesses, but one was occupied, its turbines whining as they idled, its clam shell doors open.
Ari and Roza walked Liam up the steps into the flitter, sitting him in one of the vacant seats and strapping him in. In the pilot’s seat, Tom Crossman twisted around, noting Liam’s dazed expression and wandering eyes.
“Plan ‘B,’ huh?” Crossman commented with a grin. “You owe me ten bucks, Captain.”
“Just close the doors and get us out of here, Tom,” Ari said. “I want to get this loser back to the safe-house before the drugs wear off.”
Ari settled back into the chair, buckling his safety harness and sinking in with a deep sigh. He could feel Roza’s eyes on him and he knew what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. He’d hardly been able to think of anything else in the last couple days. The Patton. The manifest. Major Stark had looked it up after Lee had received the message. Arvid Patel had been the ship’s Captain, Hellene D’Annique the First Officer; and among the many distinguished passengers had been then-Senator Xavier Dominguez…and then-Colonel Hikaru Kage of the Colonial Guard.
They all knew what that could mean, but none of them had been willing to discuss it, least of all Roza. There was no point, until they could find out what had happened on that ship. They’d thought about grabbing D’Annique, but she was too high profile---people would notice if she went missing. And then, they’d dug up the medical files on one Liam Bryant…
“So,” Shannon said, watching Tom and Ari strap the insensate Liam into the chair at the center of the mostly bare room, “this is our guy.”
“Yeah,” Ari grunted, tightening the straps across the man’s chest. “And he’s nuttier than a cage full of squirrels. I hope this isn’t a waste of time.”
“If he weren’t nutty,” Shannon pointed out, “he would be a waste of time. Give him the stimulant, Ari.”
Ari took the hypo off the small tray table next to the chair and carefully injected Liam in the neck, then stepped back cautiously. The man jerked slightly, his eyes popping wide open, and he began to pull against his restraints, panting with exertion and fright as he looked around the room in a blind panic.
“What the fuck is going on?” he demanded loudly. “Where am I? What the hell are you doing with me? Who are you people?”
“If I might answer those questions in reverse order,” Shannon spoke up and he stared at her in wonder, as if he were just noticing her. “I am Major Shannon Stark of Fleet Intelligence.” His mouth started to form a question and she interrupted him. “Yes, that Shannon Stark. We have you restrained to prevent you harming yourself. You’re someplace safe and private just outside the city. As for what the fuck is going on…well, we were hoping you could help us with that.”
Liam tried to say about a dozen different things at once, but finally managed to sputter out: “Help you?”
"Mr. Bryant,” she said, pacing in front of his chair, hands clasped behind her back, “five years ago, you went out on the cruiser Patton for a political mission to survey the damage done to the Aphrodite colony by the Protectorate invasion there. Within a month of returning to Earth, you’d had a psychotic break, assaulted several medical technicians and wound up in a treatment facility for a year. You kept insisting that no one except you was real…that they were all copies.”
“I had some problems,” Liam said helplessly. “But they were able to treat me…they gave me some drugs that helped me to get better.”
“Yes, I know, Mr. Bryant. And no one is asking you to go back to how you were behaving. But here’s the thing: we think that your psychosis was triggered by an actual event during that trip. Other people who were on that mission have shown…significant personality changes.”
“Was there some kind of chemical contamination?” Liam asked, fear in his eyes.
“We don’t know, Mr. Bryant,” Shannon admitted. “But from what we’ve seen, we think it was deliberate, whatever it was. We need you to try to remember what happened on that ship.”
“I can’t,” Liam insisted, yanking at the straps on his wrists in frustration. “I haven’t been able to remember any of it for the last three years, since the treatments.”
“Yes, I know; I read your records. That’s why we want to do a hypnoprobe on you to bring them out.” She nodded to Roza, who stepped out into the hallway and came back rolling in a cart laden down with an interface helmet and the hardware to support it.
“No,” Liam pleaded hoarsely, shaking his head. Ari frowned as he saw beads of sweat streaking down the man’s forehead. “No, keep that fucking thing away from me!”
“Mr. Bryant,” Shannon tried to comfort him, “there’s no danger. It’s completely safe; you must have used one before, when they were trying to defuse your violent behavior?” She shot a look at Ari and he pushed the tray back and went back out of the room.
“Don’t bring that goddamned thing near me again!” Liam screamed, going from terror to fury now that the machine was farther away. His face was beet red, his breath coming in strained gasps. “I’ll kill you! I swear to God I will!”
Shannon didn’t reply to him, just stepped out into the hallway to meet Ari, who had retrieved the tablet with Liam’s medical file. The hallway was as sparse and utilitarian as the room: the safe-house was a converted warehouse rented out by Fleet Intelligence via several layers of shell corporations.
“It’s right here,” Ari said grimly, holding up the tablet. “I had to dig a little deeper; it was in the detailed daily reports, not the overall summary. They tried to use a hypnoprobe on him initially, but he reacted violently to every attempt so they were forced to use psychoactive drugs instead. They never could get through to his actual memories of the trip, though. He kept repeating the paranoid fantasy about everyone on the planet except him being copies, fakes. Finally, they resorted to memory suppressants to get rid of the fantasies.”
“Damn,” Shannon muttered. “The hypnoprobe won’t work if he goes psychotic every time we try it, and If we can’t use it, we’re not going to be able to get to those memories either: he can’t even remember the fantasies any more. Maybe he is a waste of time after all.”
“There still might be a way,” Roza said, coming up behind them. “In the GIS, we don’t often have access to a full hypnoprobe machine when we do field investigations, so we use a drug instead. It was developed over a hundred years ago to fight a disease called Alzheimer’s, before genetic surgery put an end to such things. It is designed to restore neural pathways to the memory centers; when used in conjunction with psychoactives, it can basically make people remember things they had forgotten and force them to tell them.”
“Sounds too good to be true,” Ari commented. “What’s the downside?”
“Yes, that is the problem,” she admitted, cocking an eyebrow. “The drug by itself is not a bad thing. At the most, you would find yourself remembering things from the past very clearly for a while. I have heard there is a black market in it for that reason, though not a large one. But when you use the psychoactives with it, well, you run the risk of seizure and possible brain damage. We didn’t use this method on people we liked.”
>
Shannon took in a deep breath and sighed it out heavily. “Go tell Tom the name of the drug. He can get it for us. Tell him to bring back a trained medic with a portable kit.” Roza nodded and turned to find Crossman. At Ari’s look, Shannon shook her head. “I know…he doesn’t deserve it, but it’s his welfare against possibly billions.”
“We’re also breaking quite a few laws and violating the Republic and the US Constitutions,” Ari pointed out.
“If we don’t stop what’s coming,” Shannon countered, “none of that will matter. I take full responsibility. Go check on Bryant. If he’s still panicking, give him a sedative.”
Ari nodded and headed back into the room. Shannon waited till he was gone, then cursed softly, slamming her fist into the bare buildfoam wall.
Dammit, Jason. Why’d you have to go off and leave me to handle this shit?
Because he trusts you more than anyone else in the world, she answered herself. In any world. Which means you can’t let him down.
“Liam,” Shannon repeated, snapping her fingers, “can you hear me?”
The man’s eyes were unfocussed, his head lolling, his breath coming in shuddering gasps. The Special Ops medic Tom had brought back with him looked worried, but didn’t say anything as she lightly slapped Liam on the cheek.
“I…hear you,” Liam answered, his words slurred.
“Liam, tell me what happened on the mission to Aphrodite,” Shannon instructed. “Tell me what happened on the Patton.”
“Please don’t make me,” Liam whimpered pitifully. “It…it hurts.”
“Liam, if you tell me, if you get it out, the hurt will go away,” Shannon promised him, feeling like a total shit. “Tell me what happened on the Patton.”
“It was…” He grimaced at the words, as if they were a bad taste in his mouth. “It was just a few months after the war, and we were shuttling some VIPs to Aphrodite. We were bringing some relief supplies too…small stuff like medicines, a couple portable fabricators, along with some techs to fix up their solar powersat rectennae. It was a bitch getting the shuttles rearranged to carry all that shit down.” His voice was becoming easier, more conversational as he talked.
“Aphrodite was boring as shit,” he went on. “I had to stay with the lander the whole time and even if I hadn’t, there wasn’t a damn thing to do anyway. We were all unloading supplies or running the buildfoam dispensers, building temporary shelters, repairing the buildings left standing, while the politicians and the brass gave speeches at each other. I couldn’t wait to get off that damn rock.
“Then, after staying there a month, we shipped out. Except…when we stopped at the antimatter factory out near the system’s primary, there was a ship there. Someone told me it was a cargo ship sent after we left. Uncrewed, automated. They thought it had come to the antimatter satellite to refuel for the trip back to Earth, but something was wrong with it. It wasn’t moving. Captain Patel, he sent a work crew over in my lander. They had to wear suits…the freighter wasn’t pressurized. We had telemetry with them through their suitcams, but when they boarded the freighter, it got staticy…there was some kind of interference. After a few minutes, I got a transmission…voice only, but they said they had found the problem. The AI had a bad cooling core and they needed to take it back to the Patton for repair.”
Liam was getting less at ease now, his brows furled, nostrils wide as he took in labored breaths. “They came back on board carrying it…it was pretty big, like two meters long, a meter wide. They stayed with it in the hold, said they would get it stabilized and ride there with it back to the Patton since they were already suited up. I…I didn’t know these guys, you understand? I barely could have recognized them with their suits off and they were in helmets the whole time. It wasn’t my fault!”
“It’s okay, Liam,” Shannon said soothingly. “No one’s blaming you. Go ahead, tell us the rest.”
“We…we got back to the ship,” he continued. “And they carried the core into the docking bay, put it on a maneuvering sled to take it through the cargo lock and into the ship’s engineering section so they could work on it. I locked the lander down and headed back to the ready room for some downtime…and then…I was in the corridor, just heading for the ready room and I felt something. Like a sound, but not a sound, like it was in my teeth, in my gut.” He winced, fists clenched, arms tensed against the straps that held him down. ”It hurt…it felt like every bone in my body was going to explode, then nothing. Not like going to sleep, more like someone switched my lights off.” He moaned softly, a trickle of spittle running down the side of his mouth.
“When I…when my brain switched back on, I was somewhere else. I was lying in a room with a dirt floor, and there was gravity. Not Earth normal, but close. There were a few other guys in there with me, guys I knew. Sanchez from the bridge crew, Gradkowski from maintenance and Dalton from engineering. We all came to at the same time. Dalton…he told me what happened. He said that the work party that came back from the freighter…they weren’t our guys. He said they came into engineering and gassed everyone, but before he went out, he heard them talking Russian.”
“Oh, shit,” Ari muttered from behind her.
“He figured that there was something in that fake core that knocked everyone out. He said subsonics or something. Something that could conduct through the ship, wherever there was atmosphere. I don’t know where they took us or how long we were out…there was no way to tell. All our ‘links had been taken, we didn’t have anything---we were even wearing different clothes. After a few hours, they hit us with the whatever- it-was again. When I came to, I was in some sort of laboratory, strapped to a chair…” His voice was becoming more and more strained and his face was covered with sweat.
“They…they used that thing on me,” he said through clenched teeth, jerking his head toward the door, obviously referring to the hypnoprobe. “There were others in there with me, being made to forget. I don’t remember anything after that until we were on our way back to Earth on the Patton and by then no one remembered anything.” He shook his head, face screwed up in agony, muscles spasming against the restraints.
“There’s something else, Liam,” Shannon said, taking a step toward him. “What is it?”
“No…no…” The words were an agonized plea. “I…they…they told me…”
“If you tell us, the pain will go away,” she insisted. “It will all go away…”
“Before…” he grunted the words out like they were poison. “Before they started with the machine…I saw something. These things…vats? Tanks? I don’t know…they were shaped like nothing I’d seen before. They didn’t look like any human thing. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. They had someone over there, at the tanks…one of the politicians. That Senator guy. They pulled him out of one of the tanks and he was like drugged or something…and then..they…” He groaned as if he were in physical pain and squeezed his eyes shut. “And then they pulled him out again. There was two of him!” He screamed the words out and began sobbing cathartically, tears pouring down his cheeks. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” he moaned. “Then they put the machine on me and tried to make me forget everything, but Jesus Christ! How could you forget that? How could anyone?”
“Doc?” She looked to the medic. The man held a monitoring device to Liam’s temple for a moment, then nodded.
“He’s okay,” the medic told her. “I don’t think there’s any damage and he hasn’t seized. His brain waves are looking good.”
Shannon let out a relieved sigh and patted Liam’s shoulder as the man continued to sob. “Ari, Doc, unstrap him, give him a sedative and put him in one of the holding rooms. You stay with him there Doc, make sure he doesn’t lose it again. Hopefully remembering what actually happened will get rid of his delusions.”
“What actually happened?” Ari repeated. “Ma’am just what the hell did actually happen? Is he…” Ari shook his head in disbelief. “Is he saying what I think he’s saying?”
�
�If you think that he’s saying that the Patton was hijacked by the Protectorate five years ago,” Shannon said calmly, looking him in the eye, “and that the entire crew was brainwashed, and that our current Vice President was somehow copied using alien technology…then yes, he’s saying what you think he’s saying.”
“So, the Protectorate is behind the coup?” Tom Crossman asked, his eyes wide.
“I wonder if the others who are involved know just to what extent then Protectorate is involved,” Roza mused.
“Ma’am,” Ari asked as he began taking off Liam’s restraints, “what the hell do we do about all this?”
“That’s not our decision, Ari,” Shannon told him, rubbing the back of her neck tiredly. “What we do now is take what we know to the President.” She sighed. “And hope we can make him believe any of it.”
Chapter Twenty
“Looks pretty bad from out here,” Esmeralda Villanueva radioed, gently nudging the controls of her shuttle to send it slowly floating across the nose of the Sheridan. The bow of the massive cruiser was armored with a solid meter of nickel iron melted off an asteroid…not even the directed fusion blast of the Protectorate lighter’s main drive had been able to penetrate that, though it had re-melted and vaporized several centimeters of it.
What the blast had penetrated was the much thinner armor over the gravimetic emitters in the nose that were the key to the ship’s long-range sensor array. Without them, the ship could still use optical, radar and lidar to scan her surroundings, but when she went FTL via the Eysselink field, she’d be flying blind.