by Medron Pryde
“Ah. Right. The weather.” Malcolm stopped by the limo, scanning for the car that was supposed to be picking them up. He didn’t see anything, which made him suspicious of John’s arrival. “Of course you’re not losing your hair,” he added in a sly tone, refusing to voice those suspicions.
“You still need to learn respect for your elders, I see.” John chuckled and opened the door. “Now get in. We’ve got places to go, right?”
“Right,” Dawn whispered and flowed into the limousine gracefully, bending down to step in before sliding over. She aimed a smile at Malcolm and patted the seat next to her.
Malcolm grumped as his suspicions were so quickly confirmed. Then he shrugged and slipped into the limo to take the offered seat, facing John as the door automatically shut. “Well, I know where I planned on going, but where are we going?”
John snorted as the limo shot up into the air. “Always so suspicious of helping hands.” The pastor sighed and placed both hands up as if showing he had nothing at all hiding in his sleeves. And one could believe as much of that as one wanted. “Well, I think we need to go talk to our mutual friends who don’t like commlinks. Am I right?”
Malcolm froze for a split second and turned to watch the landscape of Landing City flash by below and around them. As one of the oldest interstellar cities, Landing City incorporated many old, historic buildings of a dozen or so floors in height, which the limo flew over with ease. But newer gravtech towers less than a century old literally towered above the limo, their gleaming flanks stretching up into the sky above him. Some of them weren’t even proper buildings, floating in the air entirely on gravplating, anchored to the ground only for easy elevator access.
Malcolm wasn’t certain which he liked better. He loved the charm of the historic districts, including the seaside boardwalk, but the towering business and manufacturing districts were filled by an intense energy as New Earth struggled to match the ever-increasing demand for war supplies of all kinds. He took in a long breath, wondering what John knew, and leaned back in his seat as the beautiful buildings of Landing City passed by. Malcolm hadn’t told anybody who he was coming to talk to. Even the people he was coming to talk to. One never advertised that one was talking to them, after all.
“Excuse me?” he asked, his tone as innocent as he could manage.
“Please.” John aimed a paternal look at Malcolm. “I wasn’t born yesterday. And you never did get that innocent act down as well as you thought,” he finished with a raised eyebrow.
“Fine.” Malcolm shrugged and shook his head. “You got me. But what’s this about ‘our’ friends? I thought you found religion.”
A hurt expression took over John’s face, and wide, sorrowful eyes gazed back at Malcolm. “I found religion. I didn’t lose my mind.”
“Right,” Malcolm returned with a snort. “So why do you still deal with them?”
John sighed and relaxed back in his seat. “Well, Christ himself said that he came to walk with those who needed saving, not with those who were already righteous.”
Malcolm actually laughed at the pious statement. “And you really think these guys are open to hearing the Word of God?”
“You’d be surprised actually.” John aimed a sobering look at him. “They’re not all cold-blooded, hardened criminals. And some of them take the Confessional very seriously.”
The limo began to drop down towards the ground again, and Malcolm felt a scowl coming on. He knew the neighborhood. John really had known exactly where he was going. “One problem with that idea,” he growled. “You’re not a Catholic priest.”
John smiled as the limo slipped into the parking ramp, lights flooding on to fill the dim structure with light. “But I was one of them long before I met you. That makes up for a lot. Even if I became a heathen Protestant,” he finished with a chuckle.
Malcolm laughed and watched the limo prowling towards the end of the parking ramp. There’d been a time, he knew, when the difference between Protestant and Catholic had been death. Literally. But that was centuries ago. After Contact, the differences between Catholics and Protestants had become very minor indeed. The limo came to a stop and the doors opened, letting in a breath of fresh morning air.
Malcolm slid out first and looked at the open door that led down into the bar. Dawn followed and stepped up behind him with John on her heels, and Malcolm shared a look with each of them before walking towards the opening.
An alarm blared as they approached and a guard stepped out of a nearby alcove, hand rising to stop them. He looked straight at Dawn. “No personal computers in the club.”
“She’s a cyber, not a computer,” Malcolm corrected with an upraised hand.
“Doesn’t matter.” The guard shook his head, a mulish expression taking over his face. “We don’t serve her kind here.”
A hot anger flashed through Malcolm, and he glared at the guard. “Now just you see here,” he growled, but Dawn’s hand touched his shoulder and he turned to look at her. She shook her head in a movement so slight that the guard probably hadn’t even noticed. Malcolm suppressed a growl and turned back to the guard in silence.
“We don’t want any trouble,” John said in a calm tone, arms raised in a pacifying gesture. “So why don’t you go tell Mikey that Johnny and Mal are here to see him,” John continued, putting only the slightest of emphasis on the first name.
The guard’s eyes widened at the name, and John continued to simply smile at him. Nobody used that name casually, unless of course they could use it casually. Because if they couldn’t and they did anyways, they never did a second time.
“Go on,” John whispered, waving his hand towards the door. “You don’t want to keep Mikey waiting, do you?” he added, and despite the casual words, his tone left no question as to whether or not it was an order.
The guard practically scampered off down the stairs, obviously not wanting to get between anyone who thought they could call his boss that name and said boss without someone who had a lot more seniority to take the flak for him. The man disappeared into the heart of the club at the bottom of the stairs, and Malcolm grunted in approval.
John sighed and gave him a long look. “You really need to learn diplomacy.”
Malcolm glanced at Dawn and she cocked her head to the side, obviously waiting for his response. “Not sure I want to deal diplomatically with idiots like that.” She frowned at him and he stared right back at her for several seconds, making it clear that he wasn’t about to back down from that point. Then he turned back to John, fresh determination to get his suspicions answered filling him. “So, what are you really doing here?”
“What?” John asked, his eyes opening wide in an innocent expression that didn’t fool Malcolm for an instant. “I can’t be here just to see an old friend off to the stars one last time?” John added in a plaintive tone.
Malcolm’s eyes narrowed. They weren’t officially scheduled to launch for at least a few more days. John knew far more than anyone outside the Wolfenheim Project was supposed to know. “What do you know?”
John cleared his throat and waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Oh, nothing really.” John sobered when he saw Malcolm’s raised eyebrow. “Fine. The courier that arrived earlier today had a message for you, right? That’s why you’re down here?”
Malcolm sighed and nodded. He supposed it wouldn’t do any good to deny that fact at the moment.
“That’s what I figured,” John continued, his tone serious. “Charles sent me a message too. He said it might be best if I get off planet before certain people we all know come by with ill intent aimed at my person,” John chuckled then. “Not that I’d have any idea as to why anyone would want to do anything to a simple Man of God, of course,” he added with a wink.
“Right,” Malcolm returned in a doubtful tone and rolled his eyes at John. “So you know nothing at all?”
“Not a blessed thing.” John winked, and then gave Malcolm a helpful smile. “But if you and Charles are consp
iring here, and I know you are, it comes to mind that there may be others who would be…unhappy to find out what you’ve been doing. Or maybe that they had some role in contributing to what you’ve been doing, even if they had no idea.”
Malcolm grunted. He should have known that John at least would know enough about everyone involved to connect the dots even without being on the inside. “So I suppose you want in on the project?”
“Well, if this is as big as I think it is, I don’t want to be close to Earth when Charles’ father finds out,” he said, his tone very serious again. Then he smiled. “Besides, you need all the adult supervision you can get.”
Malcolm snorted, but before he could respond the sound of feet on the stairs caught his attention. An old man walked up into his view, grey hair and a wrinkled face telling the tale of a man that had lived nearly a century in one of the hardest businesses of all, even before Contact. Several guards moved in his wake, scanning for threats, followed by the single guard they’d met already, moving gingerly as if afraid someone would take his head off.
“Johnny.” The soft but firm voice came from the old man as he walked up and hugged the pastor in the way that declared someone a member of the family, whether or not they shared actual blood relation.
“Mikey,” John answered, returning the old man’s hug carefully.
“And Mal,” old Mike Callahan said as he stepped over to hug him as well.
“Hey, Old Man,” Malcolm returned, hugging the frail, old body back. As he pulled back, he saw a necklace twinkling in the dim light of the parking garage and focused on it. He recognized the face on the side of the coin facing him as Saint Connor, one of the Irish’s favorite saints. The other side would be Murphy, Connor’s twin brother, and fellow enemy of all evildoers. Malcolm smiled at the sight. Maybe John was right about the whole religion thing when it came to working with them.
“And my dear Dawn,” Callahan said as he opened his arms towards her. “How goes the mission?”
“He’s stubborn,” she answered and stepped into the old man’s arms. He kissed her on both cheeks, marking her as a trusted member of the family for all to see.
“Good,” Callahan said with a smile and turned to the nervous guard. “Get back to your post,” he ordered and the man scampered away, obviously happy to still have all of his digits attached, and Callahan returned his attention to Malcolm.
“Come in. Come in. If you came all this way, at this time of the morning, we must have something important to discuss,” the old man said as he turned to walk down the stairs. “Might it have something to do with the courier boat that just came in from Sunnydale?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Am I the last one to hear about that?” Malcolm grumbled, but followed the man down. A red light began to blink on the cuff of his suit, telling him that they were in a jamming zone, designed to stop anybody from listening to them from a distance. It was safe for them to talk.
“Not quite,” Callahan said with an elaborate shrug. “You probably knew before I did in fact. But computers are notoriously easy to hack. Hence our policy on them in this establishment.”
Malcolm studied the old man for over a second before responding with a simple “I see.” Then he shook his head as another suspicion arose in his mind. “Is that the only reason for your policy?”
Callahan met his gaze with calm eyes and shrugged. “No. I remember a time before AIs. Back when humans did far more of the work that maintains our civilization. We’ve become soft and lazy because we can rely on computers to think for us.” He turned to look at Dawn. There was no malice in his eyes, but there was also no give in them. “My policy forces my people to use their own minds.”
“You’re a smart man,” Dawn whispered. “I wish more of your people were as motivated.”
Callahan’s eyes narrowed and studied her carefully. “Do you? Really? Or do you wish we would just roll over like the Peloran?”
Dawn simply sighed and aimed a sad smile at Callahan. “That…is a very serious charge.”
Callahan pursed his lips and shook his head. “Yes it is. But you’ve become family. And sometimes family has to ask hard questions.”
Dawn returned his look for a moment, and then smiled. “We don’t control them. They do what they want. But they were never meant to be another Race of Humanity.” She sighed and looked away from them all. “The Albion genetically engineered them to be super soldiers who wanted nothing more than to live in peace. Tailored them to lack the dream of freedom that so many other humans have, so they would never consider rebelling.” Dawn snorted and shook her head. “The Albion gave them a single driving purpose, and they embraced that as their entire meaning for being. When the Albion died, most of them found the nearest planet and started grooming trees like they were programmed to.”
Malcolm’s mind actually recoiled at Dawn’s frank description. He’d never heard the Peloran described like that. They were super soldiers, with reaction times and senses far above the human base levels. But he’d never considered the Peloran to be victims of actual mental twisting before. They always seemed so calm and collected. Never victims of what Dawn made sound almost like mind rape.
“We did what we had to do,” Dawn continued as Malcolm’s mind raced through the idea. “We worked with the oh so very rare number of Peloran who had the…drive that you take for granted and built a society they could all live in. We gave the rest of them the peace they craved, literally on a genetic level. Can you honestly tell me that you would want to live a life like that? To have life itself provided for you? To never see something and think that maybe you could do it better? To never have the drive to try?”
“Some of us would love a world like that,” Callahan said in a hard tone, and Malcolm nodded in understanding of what the older man meant.
He’d read a book as a kid about a man who invented a time machine and went far into the future. He found a world exactly like what Dawn described. And the people of that time had been helpless. They had no reason to fight, even to defend their lives. Since everything was free, nothing had value. None of the Peloran he’d met acted like that, but there weren’t many genetic Peloran in Terran space. Maybe she was right that they were simply the few who rose above the rest of their kind.
Dawn met Callahan’s questioning gaze and answered it with a calm smile. “And that is why we never choose to be the partners of such people. We will never do to you what the Albion did to the Peloran,” she finished, her tone that of a woman making an unbreakable oath.
Malcolm considered her words, everything she’d said in answer to Callahan’s question, and wondered at the possibilities and ideas that they brought to mind. He looked into Dawn’s wide-open eyes and saw her hesitation. She’d never said anything like this before to him, and he’d never once considered any of it. But now that he thought about it, he could see what she meant.
He saw the life he’d live in over a century, and the life he’d lived in the last five years. He’d done so much more in the last five years than he’d ever imagined doing. And he really had done it. He saw many of the times she’d nagged him into doing it, too. Well, maybe nagging was unfair. It just felt like it some mornings. But for the first time, he saw what she meant with that oath and recognized what she was doing. He could live with that. He smiled, and she let out a long, relieved breath.
“I see.” Callahan’s words pulled Malcolm’s attention back to the older man as he started walking down the stairs again. “Then it really would appear we have much business to discuss today,” Old Man Michael Callahan added and guided them into the bar he’d owned for nearly two hundred years.
Just about everyone’s heard of the First Battle of Epsilon Reticuli. The greatest Alliance defeat of The War. Over three hundred warships lost in a few hours. First use of gravitic jammers. No survivors. History says a lot of things about that battle. Most of it isn’t true. You see, there were survivors, and some of them came to the Wolfenheim Project, looking for work. That’s wh
y I know the truth of what happened there. And why it left such deep scars.
III
The Peloran construction yard seemed to grow larger as the shuttle approached, main engines firing at near maximum power. The blue glow of fusion-powered engines swept space in the shuttle’s path, decelerating her to match the station’s slow orbit around Alpha Centauri A. Explosions of white-hot light betrayed the existence of dust particles and larger debris in the shuttle’s path, while objects caught in the edges of the four fusion torches burned orange or red. Other colors flared into existence for a second from time to time, only to fade back to black again as whatever strange elements existed in that particular speck of dust burned away. As Malcolm McDonnell watched, the engine wash created the closest thing to true vacuum he would probably ever see so near a working shipyard.
Wolfenheim floated above the yard, the over six hundred meter length of a modern Class One Colonization Ship barely visible in the pale sunslight of the Alpha Centauri trinary star system. She was everything a new colony needed, from the hibernation systems that could keep ten thousand people asleep during the trip to the literal hundreds of modular sections that would separate to become buildings when they reached their destination. The ship had a single mission, one that would be accomplished only by the effective dismantling of the colony ship herself.
Malcolm’s eyes strayed to the ships whose mission it was to make certain Wolfenheim finished that trip alive, no matter what hazards they met along the way. He scowled as his eyes found only eight ships. There should be nine. He sighed and scanned the eight he did have, happy to at least have been able to find them. He counted five frigates, the oldest over a hundred years old. The youngest was a true whippersnapper of a mere eighty-three years, having been retired only twenty years before The War began. The two destroyers hadn’t fired a shot in anger in over fifty years, but at least they’d been able to make the trip to New Earth under their own power.