by Rick Partlow
“McKay, this is Podbyrin,” the former Protectorate Colonel said to him over the communications link. “I’ve been doing as you asked and watching Mironov over the monitors in the auxiliary control room.”
McKay studiously avoided looking at Mironov, who was still strapped into the acceleration couch next to him. “Yes, I understand. Go ahead.”
“Something is…” The Russian struggled for a phrase. “Something is not right about him, McKay. I am watching him and I see that he is too… too comfortable. This is very unnatural for him; he should be more out of place, more nervous. Instead, he looks as if he is on vacation.”
“Mmm-hmm,” McKay replied ambiguously. “So, why do you think that might be?”
“I can only think of two reasons. Either he is playing you… or he’s gone over the edge and he’s mentally unstable. Neither of these are a good thing.”
“Well, I find the former difficult to believe, given our precautions,” McKay said carefully. “As for the latter… we don’t have much choice than to just deal with it. Thanks for letting me know, I’ll get back to you later.”
He ended the call and shrugged an apology to Admiral Patel but his stomach was roiling and his head was pounding. He knew that Podbyrin was right and he’d been thinking the same thing himself: it was too easy. But there was no way Mironov could be a plant, he was certain of that: how the hell would Antonov have known the man would survive and be captured? Which left the possibility that the man was bat-shit insane; that, unfortunately, McKay could readily believe.
I guess all we can do, McKay thought, is hope he’s crazy but not stupid. God, I wish Shannon were here. She’s so much better at reading people than I am.
“All right,” Patel announced finally, “that’s enough time. Helm, open the gate and take us through. I want the drive field reactivated the moment we are through that gate. Tactical, sound battle stations.”
McKay had a knot in his stomach as the wormhole expanded. If they were guessing wrong, they could be jumping right into a fusion missile, with their shields down. They would all be dead before they knew what hit them… or worse, they would see it coming but not have time to do anything about it. The thought of dying didn’t scare him so much as it frustrated him. There was just too much left to do for him to die now.
“Engaging plasma drives,” Sweeny said. “We’re entering the wormhole now…”
Jesus… McKay had been so worried about what they would find on the other side of the gate that he’d forgotten how much he hated transitioning through the damn things. His brain yanked itself back into reality with the whooping of alarm klaxons and his eyes snapped to the viewscreen. Before he could make sense of what the Tactical officer was saying, he could see that the Sheridan had jumped into a binary star system with three gas giants and two terrestrials and he could also see the representation of the Protectorate lighter a light second away from them.
“I think she’s heading for the next gate,” Pirelli said. “She doesn’t seem to have seen us.”
“Make sure she does, Commander Pirelli,” Patel instructed with a predatory grin. “Deactivate drive field and target her forward weapons pods with the Gauss cannon.”
“Aye, sir, targeting weapons pods and firing.”
The ship shuddered ever so slightly as a pair of tungsten darts, each the size of a groundcar, shot out from it at thousands of meters per second. They crossed the distance between the ships in minutes and smashed into the bulbous weapons pod that jutted from the port bow of the lighter. The pod was ripped from its stanchions in a glowing cloud of burning oxygen, floating away with the kinetic energy imparted by the impact.
“Weapons pod destroyed,” Pirelli said with a nod of satisfaction. “Doesn’t seem to be much secondary damage… she still has hull integrity. She’s still firing her drive; I think she’s increasing acceleration.”
“She has to do a turnover soon,” Sweeny said, frowning. “Unless the next gate is still pretty far away.”
“They are never more than a few light-seconds apart,” Mironov corrected him. “He is, I think, going to try to make the transition at high acceleration… he is, what you say…” He exchanged Russian with McKay, then nodded. “He is scared shitless.”
“There it goes!” Pirelli said, pointing at the screen, where the explosion of the fusion trigger was almost swallowed up in the ship’s drive flame. The wormhole entrance barely had time to expand before the Protectorate ship was through it.
Sweeny looked to Admiral Patel. “Do we wait or follow him through, sir?”
“Stay on his ass,” Patel urged. “Re-open the wormhole and take us through now, before he has the chance to think up something clever. I want him with only one option: keep running.”
“Aye, sir,” Sweeny nodded. “Opening the gate.”
McKay tried to control his breathing and relax this time, but the transition was like riding a roller coaster with a first drop infinity deep and he still found himself feeling like his body was turning inside out. He blinked his eyes hard and gripped the arms of his couch, forcing himself back to coherence. He looked up at the viewscreen as it flickered back to life, seeing stars returning to the screen, seeing… was that the drive tube of the Protectorate ship?
Oh shit!
“Activate the drive!” He screamed the order at the same time as Admiral Patel, but then the Protectorate ship’s drive fired; a focused fusion blast ignited less than ten kilometers ahead of them and everything went white…
Chapter Nineteen
“That’s him,” Ari nodded to Roza as the man emerged from the Veterans’ Clinic. He looked much as he did in the video they’d reviewed from the Republic Veterans’ Resources file: average height, almost painfully thin, with shoulder-length red hair and a sparse, half-hearted mustache. He walked with a disinterested shuffle, eyes on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets.
Ari and Roza rose from the bench where they’d been waiting and followed him, maintaining twenty meters’ separation. It was almost an effort for them to walk slowly enough to stay at his pace: he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. Ari made an effort to keep his eyes moving, both to avoid the man turning around and seeing him staring and to have a sense of their surroundings.
It was an indecently sunny afternoon in Houston ‘plex, without a shading cloud to be found in the blue sky. Over the last few days, Ari had developed an intense dislike for the megacity. It was open to the sky and as crassly commercial as a strip mall; the weather was relentlessly humid even in early spring, and the public transportation system was brutally inefficient and dirty. And they were about to have to ride it again to follow this guy.
The neighborhood around the Veterans’ Clinic was on the shabby side: not dangerous, but just… apathetic was a good word. Here and there were cracks in the sidewalk or peeling facing on buildfoam barriers or dying bushes untended in roadside arboretums; evidence of lack of care in all senses of the word. In Capital City, such things were fixed as a matter of course. In London, they were fixed as a matter of pride. In Paris they were ignored as a matter of style.
Here they seemed to be a matter of no one bothering to report them or no one caring enough to fix them.
Cracked sidewalk led to the cracked and peeling walls of the tram station, where the lower class employed shuffled from one job to another, hoping to make enough to become taxpayers and thus become eligible to vote in the Republic elections. Most of the working class didn’t care, Ari knew, preferring to enjoy the benefits of comfortable living provided by the government, those that thought about politics at all satisfied with being able to vote in the local and national races.
If they weren’t required to work to keep their government housing, most of them wouldn’t ever leave their apartments, Ari thought cynically. With raw food stock delivered daily to their kitchen processors and entertainment provided free 24 hours a day on their consoles, there was no reason to. It was an environment like that back in Tel Aviv that had driven Ari to enl
ist in the Marines to begin with. He wanted to do something, not become a fucking mushroom.
What he’d wanted to do, however, was not ride the fucking tram in Houston ‘plex all day long. They watched the redhead board a car bound for a slightly more upscale neighborhood and slipped through the doors behind him just before they closed. The car was nearly empty, occupied only by the three of them and an older man who was sitting in the back, leaning his head against the wall with his eyes closed, catching a nap on his way home. The redhead took a seat near the middle of the car and Roza sat next to him, while Ari sat across from him.
The redhead eyed them suspiciously, glancing around at the nearly empty car as it began to pull away from the station.
“You’re Liam Bryant, aren’t you?” Ari asked the man, painting a friendly smile on his face.
“Do I know you?” the redhead asked, confused. His voice was hesitant and timid, without a trace of confidence.
“We have some mutual friends.” Roza told him, patting his shoulder. “From the Patton.”
“That was a long time ago…” Liam began, starting to get up from his seat… before Roza’s surprisingly strong grip on his shoulder pulled him back down.
“But you’re still going to the clinic once a week, after all this time,” Ari observed. “Even after spending a full year in the Behavioral Ward at the Richmond Veteran’s Hospital. I suppose you’re lucky they ever let you out of there after you attacked those medical techs at the Fleet Outprocessing Center.”
“I… I’ve just had some problems adjusting,” Liam said, looking away from Ari’s stare. “That’s all behind me now. The doctors say I’m over that, that the treatments worked fine.”
“Except you and I know, Liam,” Ari shook his head sadly, “that the problem never was what you did… the problem was what happened to you on the Patton, on that trip to Aphrodite just after the war.”
“No!” Liam exclaimed and tried to rise up again, but was again pushed back, this time by Ari’s hand on his chest. Roza quickly checked the other occupant of the car, but he hadn’t stirred. Ari put a shushing finger to his lips, his eyes giving an implicit warning. “That never happened,” Liam insisted, voice still strident, though lower in pitch and volume, his pale skinned face growing red in the cheeks. “I was… I was sick. Delusional. They… they fixed me.”
“No, Liam,” Roza countered softly. “Something did happen on that trip. Whatever it was, your mind tried to suppress it and you wound up delusional, paranoid. But something happened. We know that because other people who were on that mission are acting different.”
“Who… who are you two?” Liam asked, confusion and fear in his eyes.
“Liam, we’ll tell you who we are and what’s going on,” Ari offered, “if you come with us and answer some questions. It won’t take more than a couple hours, and just maybe you can actually get better. But it’s now or never. Whoever did this to you is monitoring you through your ‘link.”
Liam fumbled at his belt for the device, looking at it in alarm. “Right now?”
“No, not right now,” Roza assured him, “because right now this,” she produced a small black box from her shoulder bag, “is jamming the ‘link and all other electronic monitoring in this car. But once you leave this car, whoever is monitoring you is going to know something happened because of that jamming. And they’re going to come for you.”
“If you come with us,” Ari promised, “we’ll protect you. And you’ll find out what happened to you. If you don’t…” He shrugged. “Maybe we’re bullshitting you, maybe it’s a con… but really, what do you have to lose? You sit in your apartment all day long, never talking to anyone except for your therapist, except for a couple hours a night when you go to the anonymous terminals at the cafe across town and cruise the conspiracy communities.”
Liam’s eyes snapped up, a horrified expression on his face. “Yeah, that’s right ‘Knowledge-Seeker,’ your account isn’t quite as anonymous as you thought,” Ari sneered. “And if we know, you know that they know.”
“All right,” Liam said shakily, “I’ll go with you. What should I do?”
“Leave your ‘link here on the tram,” Roza instructed him. The man hastily yanked it off his waistband and tossed it on the seat. “When we reach the next station, we’re getting out. Walk quickly and keep your head down.”
The next stop came up swiftly, the holographic advertising on the tram walls advising them that it had easy access to several reasonably priced restaurants and personalized fabrication shops. When the doors opened, they all rose from their seats and stepped out of the tram into a small crowd waiting to board-the post-lunch crowd, Ari estimated from the time. Roza kept a guiding left hand on Liam’s right shoulder as they wound through the throng, with Ari in the lead.
Roza could feel Liam’s shoulder tense up and knew the move was coming: it was the logical place to try it, in the middle of a crowd of people in a public place, where they couldn’t pursue. So by the time Liam twisted around to get the torque to swing an elbow at her head, she already had her hand in her shoulder bag, and when the elbow began to swing, she halted it in mid-motion by digging her left thumb into his triceps. Liam gasped with pain and surprise and then her right hand darted up, wrapped around a small, cylindrical object that could have been mistaken for a stylus. The tip of it jabbed unobtrusively into the bare skin of his right biceps, and instantly the man staggered slightly.
“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 flyer 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 flyer, 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 squirrel
s. 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.”