by Rachel Bach
There were a lot, I realized dimly. Thanks to the blindly bright medical lamp, I hadn’t noticed before, but now I saw there were dozens of phantoms floating above my bed, watching me with that eerie stillness, their little tendrils waving. I stared a moment longer and then closed my eyes against them, turning my head away as the drugs snuffed out the last of my consciousness.
Coming back the second time was a lot harder.
I opened my eyes with a heavy gasp, my lungs thumping and shuddering like an old engine as my head reeled from the sudden, stabbing pain at the back of my skull. Sadly, this was actually the highlight. The rest of me was even worse. Everything hurt. I felt like I’d just fought a ranked gladiator match without my armor. My skin was tender as a bruise, my tongue swollen, my joints stiff. I couldn’t move my legs or my arms, couldn’t even shift my weight to take the pressure off my throbbing back. All I could do was lie there and try to breathe through the pain, staring up at the beautiful lights moving across the ceiling.
There were so many, it took me about thirty seconds to realize they were phantoms. I dimly remembered seeing them on the ceiling before I’d gone under, but this was another level. The room was packed to bursting with the little glowing bugs. They were crawling across the ceiling, up the walls, and bobbing in and out of the light fixtures. Still more were hovering in the air all around me, twitching their little tentacles like they were waving hello across the empty space that always separated me from them. I had the distinct feeling that should creep me out, but I was in too much pain to care. And anyway, they were beautiful, their blue-white glow shining down on me like summer moonlight.
Well, I thought, staring up at the beautiful moving lights, at least I wasn’t naked anymore. They must have redressed me while I was out, because I was now wearing a loose set of beige medical scrubs with what felt like a whole lot of tape underneath. Probably sensors, or another IV. There were a ton of tubes running out of me, so I had no idea. For all I knew, I didn’t even have blood anymore.
Given my general hatred for all things medical, I probably should have cared more about this, but I kept getting distracted by the hair that kept falling into my face. Even in my pain-induced haze, that stuck me as wrong. Rupert had braided my hair so carefully; nothing should be drifting—
Clarity came back in a rush, and I jerked on the table, shoving painfully against my restraints. I tried to lift just my head next, but it was caught by wires. Someone had glued a whole network of neural leads to my skull, and they’d unbraided my hair to do it.
Rage hit me like a spark to dry tinder. I’d never felt anything like it before, but the idea that some random Terran had handled me while I was asleep and vulnerable to take away the last thing I had of Rupert mashed every button I had all at the same time. I was so furious I didn’t even care that this would flare the virus. They wanted it? They could have it. I would kill every last person on this goddamned boat. And when the lelgis came, I’d kill them, too. I’d—
A wave of pain sent me back to the bed like a punch, knocking my plans for vengeance right out of me. It was like someone had thrown a switch and given me twenty-four hours of the universe’s worst migraine all at once. There was no breathing through this pain. I couldn’t even think beyond it. All I could do was wait and hope that it would fade and something would be left when it did.
And then, while the shock was still working its way through my system, the pain left as suddenly as it had come. I collapsed back onto the mattress, sputtering and confused. A quick check confirmed all the pains I’d woken up with were still there, though they felt like nothing after what I’d just been through, but the headache from hell was completely gone. I looked up at the swarming phantoms, my mind spinning over in hopeless confusion. What had just happened?
“Well, well,” said a gruff voice that put me right back on the edge. “Up twenty minutes before you should be. Why am I not surprised?”
The flash of anger I felt at hearing Caldswell’s voice brought another stab of pain so intense my eyes watered. Now that I’d experienced it once, I could actually feel the headache rushing toward me like a freighter, and I forced myself to be calm out of self-defense. Usually, such a thing would take me a bit, but that sort of pain is a hell of a good teacher, and I got myself back down to manageable anger real quick. Like it was rewarding me for my good behavior, the pain retreated, and I let out a relieved breath before I tilted my head to see my guest.
Captain Caldswell was sitting in a tiny plastic folding chair at the end of my bed, his feet propped up on my armor case, which he’d leaned against the opposite wall. That sight nearly made me lose control all over again, but I managed to catch my anger before the pain slapped me by focusing on the fact that my Lady was safe with me rather than locked up in some Terran armory. The relief I felt at that was almost enough to excuse the boot the captain was resting on her control panel. Almost.
“Would you get your damn feet off my baby?” I asked, far more politely than I would have if I wasn’t strapped to a bed and having weird, anger-induced flash headaches. Despite the relative politeness of my request, Caldswell didn’t remove his feet. When I looked at his face to see why, I wished I hadn’t.
Unlike Rupert, Caldswell had never been any good at hiding his emotions, and right now he was radiating anger like a furnace. Being in the same room with that much raw fury while tied down on my back was enough to make me sweat, but that still didn’t stop me from demanding, “Where’s Rupert?”
Caldswell tilted his head back, resting it against the wall. “You really don’t want to ask me about him right now.”
No, I really did. “What did you do to him?” I said, pushing up as much as the restraints allowed. Talking must be helping, or maybe the migraine had made everything else seem trivial, because I was shaking off the stiff pain quickly now. There was still plenty to go around, but I could work though it, and I wasn’t going to stop until I had some answers. “Where is he?”
“He’s already been moved to Dark Star Station,” Caldswell said, pulling his feet off my baby at last as he sat up. “And trust me, that’s a mercy. Martin was going to execute him. It’s not often done, but seeing how he helped you fight, kill, and then escape an Eye team, the top brass felt an example needed to be made. If I hadn’t interceded, he would already be dead, but I pulled some strings and managed to convince the Scientific Council that killing such an old and well-adapted symbiont would be an unforgivable waste. He’s a test subject now, their own private symbiont lab rat. Maybe after a decade or so, they’ll let him out of solitary confinement, but he’ll never be an Eye again.”
I took a deep breath. A test subject? Death might have been kinder. I closed my eyes, trying not to think about Rupert in solitary, Rupert suffering because of me. Trying not to cry. Fortunately, love hadn’t made me weak enough to bawl in front of Caldswell yet, though it was a near thing. I kept myself together by remembering the bleak despair in Rupert’s voice when he’d talked about how much he hated being an Eye. He might be a Terran lab rat, but at least he’d never have to shoot another daughter. That was some comfort.
“I’m glad,” I said at last. “He hated working for you.”
“You don’t get it at all, do you?” Caldswell snapped, glaring at me harder than ever. “You don’t even understand how much damage you’ve done.”
I opened my mouth to shoot him down, but Caldswell cut me off. “Let me tell you a little story about Rupert Charkov. Do you know where his accent’s from?”
“It’s Svenyan,” I said slowly, buying myself time to spot the trap I knew Caldswell was leading me toward.
“That’s right,” Caldswell said. “We’ve recruited several agents from the survivors of Svenya, and all of them lost their accent within a decade of working for the Eyes. All except for Rupert. No matter how long he worked or how many languages we made him learn, his Svenyan accent never faded. Not because he couldn’t lose it—Rupert can speak perfect Universal if it suits him—but because
he wouldn’t. That’s what Charkov does. He clings. He holds on to what’s important tooth and nail. No matter what we asked of him, he did it perfectly. He never argued, never abused his power, because all he cared about was clinging to what he’d lost and making sure no one else ever suffered that way again. That was his purpose, his all-powering drive, and it allowed him to do anything. He was the best of all of us, and then he met you.”
Caldswell stood up then, looming over me until I was pressing myself into the bed to get away from his fury. “You ruined him,” he said, his voice shaking with rage. “You did more damage in three months than I’ve seen him take in sixty years. I would know, too. I’ve been watching over that boy since he was eleven years old. I was the one who got him out of that prison of a refugee camp, who got him his training. And whenever I got sick of running this circus, whenever the Republic bureaucrats stuck some new idiot like Martin, who’d never even fought a phantom, above me, I’d look at Rupert and remember, aha, that’s why I put up with this shit. Because that little boy lost everything, and he’s still fighting. Forty-three years now he’s been fighting with us, and then you came along and broke him.” Caldswell bared his teeth. “You snapped him up and refused to let go of your prize for anything, even when his hand was wrapped around your throat.”
I swallowed before I could think better of it. Caldswell caught the motion, but if anything, his eyes only grew more disgusted. “Don’t worry, Charkov didn’t tell me that one. I figured it out for myself when Hyrek reported the black market patch job on your neck.” He shot me a bitter sneer. “Your trained love bird wouldn’t say shit about you even when I was saving his goddamn life.”
I’d had about enough of this. “What did you expect him to do?” I shouted, ignoring the growing pain in my head. “Throw me over and beg your forgiveness?”
Caldswell gave me a warning look that I ignored completely. “You’re not his father! And even if you were, Rupert’s a grown man. You can blame me all you like, but this isn’t my fault and you know it. He made his decisions himself!”
“And I’m happy to blame both of you for being goddamn idiots!” Caldswell shouted. “We had a deal, Morris. Your deal. I would have thought you’d be more committed to it, seeing how you put a gun to your head, but I leave you alone for four goddamn days and you manage to piss off the Paradoxian Home Guard, beat up your retrieval team, kill two Eyes in the process, and then you run to Ben, who no one is supposed to know is even connected to us, and—”
That last one threw me. “Ben?”
Caldswell rolled his eyes. “What, you didn’t think he was born Nebulon Starchild, did you? When he worked for me, he was Dr. Ben Strauss, and if you’d only waited for me to get back, I could have told you he was too busy navel-gazing to help anyone and saved you a trip.”
“We didn’t know if you were coming back!” I shouted, slamming my fists on the bed. My anger was rising to match Caldswell’s, and though I couldn’t blow up like I really wanted to before the pain took me down, I was determined to go right up to the edge. “You were lost in hyperspace! For all we knew, you could have been in there forever. Did you forget I was on a very limited timeline? No one even thought to tell me about Dr. Starchild until Rupert. I wasn’t trying to run out on our deal. I just wanted a second opinion.” And for all that I hadn’t agreed with a word he’d said at the end, Dr. Starchild had given me some very useful information. “Anyway, I refuse to apologize for exploring my options since this is my death we’re talking about.”
“When are you going to get it through your thick Paradoxian skull that this isn’t about you?” Caldswell roared, making me wince. “The virus in your body could save trillions of lives. Trillions, and you nearly wasted it. You could have gotten yourself shot on Kessel by some drunk pirate and we’d have lost everything.”
“I didn’t get shot,” I said, though my voice sounded sulky even to me. “Look, I’m not saying I did the exact perfect right thing attacking the Eyes on Kessel, but they came at me like a crash team trying to bag a fugitive.” And I took getting jumped on and shot at very personally. “I didn’t know when you’d be back and I didn’t trust the Eyes without you there. What was I supposed to do? Roll over and let them lock me in a lab?”
“Yes!” Caldswell shouted in my face. “Because this isn’t about your death and your demands and how you got shot at. This is about doing what’s best for everyone, and that means getting into a lab as quickly as possible before you start a disaster.”
I looked away with a disgusted sound, but Caldswell wasn’t finished. “That wasn’t even the worst,” he said, his voice thick with rage. “The worst, most selfish thing you did in all of this was taking Rupert off the edge with you. I wasn’t surprised to hear you’d gone rogue again—you go crazy every time I turn my back—but Charkov was one of us. When he knocked out Natalia, he doomed his career. You made him a traitor because you were too damn proud and stubborn to surrender to any situation where you weren’t in charge and getting everything you wanted. All of his suffering from here on is your fault.”
I didn’t need him to tell me that. I wished like hell I’d been faster on the draw outside back at Dr. Starchild’s. Rupert would have been furious with me when he’d woken up, but at least he’d be free. Guilty as I felt over it, though, I wasn’t about to let Caldswell twist this entirely around on me.
“They shot him,” I said. “His own people shot him in the back on Kessel. They didn’t even give him a chance—”
“Eyes don’t take chances!” Caldswell roared. “Because unlike you, we don’t gamble what we can’t afford to lose!”
“You’re one to talk!” I screamed at him. “You don’t have anything left to lose!”
The headache was bearing down on me now, but I didn’t give a shit. My anger had me tight by the throat, and I didn’t care if it ripped it out. I was going to speak my piece.
“If you really cared about Rupert, you would be happy that he’d let go of his past and started looking ahead,” I snarled. “But you don’t care about him at all. You’re upset that you lost your cold killer, your damn perfect Eye.” I wrenched myself up off the bed as far as I could go, almost spitting in his face. “I didn’t break Rupert—you did. You knew the kind of pressure he was under his whole life. Are you really so shocked that when he found something that wasn’t horrible and bloody, he ran with it? Tried his best to protect it? Damn you, Caldswell, you had a family once. You were in love. Have some compassion!”
The moment I said it, I knew I’d gone too far. If Caldswell’s anger had been a furnace before, it was a nuclear explosion now. I could almost feel it burning my skin as he stared down at me, and I braced for a tirade. But when he spoke at last, he didn’t shout. Quite the opposite, his words were calm, clear, and deadly, which was much, much worse.
“Compassion,” he repeated, looking down at me with such old, bitter anger that I dropped my eyes. “It’s because of what I did that—”
He broke off with a ragged breath. “It’s because of what I did that I can’t have compassion,” he continued. “You think I don’t understand what was going through Rupert’s head? Trust me, I know. I’ve felt all that and more, because whatever lust-fueled infatuation you and Rupert fell into over the last few months, it can’t possibly be greater than the love I had for my wife of seventeen years, than the love I had for my daughter.” His voice broke, and he shot me an angry look. “Rupert told you what happened to them.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded all the same, and Caldswell closed his eyes. “I’d heard all the warnings,” he said quietly. “At that time, though, they were just military safety write-ups. Drab language, no punch. They were easy to dismiss. I was a full commander then, and I thought I was better than the usual soldier who grappled with the symbiont. I thought my love was so great I’d never do anything like the stories, but I was wrong. Terribly, unforgivably wrong, and they were the ones who paid.”
He sat back down in the chair then, collap
sing into the plastic seat like his legs had given out as he dropped his head to his hands. “Nothing can bring my girls back, Morris,” he whispered. “They’re gone forever by my own hand, and you want me to have compassion? Sympathy for Rupert for making the same mistake?” His head shot back up, glaring me down. “Why the hell do you think I told him that story?”
I swallowed. “But—”
“But nothing,” Caldswell snapped. “There is no room for error in what we do, no margin for forgiveness. Rupert knew that. I told him, I warned him over and over, but still he followed you like a lamb to slaughter, and now that it’s all gone to hell, you have the gall to ask me for compassion.”
He heaved a huge sigh, and I could almost feel the rage leaving him like steam. The sudden change took my own anger with it, and I shifted awkwardly on the bed. I was starting to realize that I wasn’t the only one who’d lost Rupert today, and to my surprise, I felt sympathy for Caldswell. I wanted to say something, to offer some kind of comfort, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t even know if there was comfort for people like us anymore. I was still trying when Caldswell took a deep breath.
He filled his broad chest with air like he was trying to force himself up with it. When he managed to stand at last, he didn’t look angry anymore. Just bone tired, staring at me like I was his death and wasn’t sure if he wanted to shoot me dead or welcome me with open arms.
“Dammit, Morris,” he whispered, scrubbing his hands through hair that had been graying for longer than I’d been alive. “You never make anything easy, do you? Everything would be so much simpler if I could just hate you, but I can’t seem to manage it. I know you mean well, and though I still think it was stupid, I understand why you acted as you did. You don’t trust the Eyes, and frankly, I don’t blame you. We’ve never given you much cause to trust, but you can’t forget that we’re all on the same side here. We all want the same thing.”