by Richard Fox
Without lifting his face from his hands, Nunez said, “Freaking wonders of modern medicine; we’ll make you better, but kill you in the process.”
If Nunez was in that bad of a shape, Carson wondered how much he’d had to drink. The leader in her made a note to take it up with West after this mission.
As if on cue, Master Sergeant Jason West, her team’s senior non-commissioned officer, moved around the large six-wheeled rover in the center of the bay. Immediately, Popov peeled off to busy herself with something as West angled toward Nunez.
“Are you dying?” West said, stopping a few feet from Nunez, crossing his arms.
“I think I might be, Sarge.”
“Sounds serious...”
Carson couldn’t help the grin forming at the side of her mouth as she saw where the sergeant was going.
“In that case, I guess we ought to send you to sick call, get you checked out by the colony, the doc—oh, wait, we’re not on Terra Nova anymore. Moretti, still have those needle injectors?”
Nunez jumped to his feet. “Would you look at that, it’s a miracle! I’m healed.”
“Ah, spectacular! Glad to hear it. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Now, since you’re in much better shape, perhaps you can assist Popov here with unpacking these void-suits and seal-testing them.”
Nunez’s expression turned from one of surprised relief to utter disappointment. “Yeah, but, Sarge, I…”
“You want to do them all yourself?”
Nunez seemed to recognize the writing on the wall and cut his losses. “I’d be happy to help Cherry, Boss.”
“Don’t call me that!” Popov shouted looking up from the crate she was unpacking.
Carson turned her attention back to her own void-suit, breaking apart the factory seal and pulling back the plastic wrapping. She took a long breath, taking in the new suit smell. It’d been years since she’d worn a fresh void-suit. Not since…
“You okay, Chief?”
West bent down next to Carson’s suit, concern spread across his face.
Carson nodded. “I’m fine.” She touched her temple. “I guess I had a little too much to drink too.”
“We all did,” West said. “But, then again, we all deserved it. Work hard, play hard, right?”
“If you say so.”
“Didn’t figure we’d be back in here so soon,” West said, looking around the Valiant’s bay.
“We’re not setting a very promising trend, are we?”
West chuckled. “Not at all.”
“Was your wife upset?”
“Oh, she’ll be all right.”
Carson raised an eyebrow at him.
“No,” West said, smiling and shaking his head. “She knows the deal. We’ve been together longer than I’ve been a military man; she’s used to it. It’s the kids that don’t appreciate it too much.”
“Sorry we had to take you away again so soon.”
“Eh, they’ll get used to it. I did.”
“Oh?”
“Dad joined the Strike Marines before the Ember War. He was always gone. It just becomes one of those things, I guess.”
“Well, hopefully, it doesn’t become a thing here.”
“Indeed. You need help with that?” West nodded to her void-suit.
“I think I can handle it; been a while.”
“As long as you’re not taking any wild jumps into open cargo bays, I think this trip will be relatively quiet.”
Carson grimaced and rapped a fist on the deck. “You going to jinx us? Never say a mission’s going to be quiet.”
West grinned and waved a hand through the air. “Never believed that old-wives’ tale. If it’s going to get crazy, it’s going to get crazy. No matter what I say.”
“You know, there’s a reason why traditions become traditions, right?”
Standing, West said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve created a number of them myself. Speaking of which…” He turned back toward the team and yelled, “Pressure loss! Emergency actions!”
Amongst a chorus of curses and groans, the four other members of Carson’s Pathfinder team struggled to find their protective masks and get them in place. Nunez knocked over a supply crate in his rush for his kit, forcing Moretti to jump away, cursing. Popov struggled to get her bag open, cursing as she turned it over in her hand. Alan Birch, the team’s drone wrangler, sat back against the rover and crossed his arms, his mask already in place.
After everyone else had their masks in place and hand lifted in the air, indicating they had a good seal, West checked his watch. “Horrible. Terrible time. I’ve seen navy pukes do better, by a wide margin. Looks like we have some training to do. Let’s get these suits unpacked and checked out. Then we’re going to spend some quality time in remedial.”
****
The guard saluted as Hale approached.
I wish they’d stop doing that, Hale thought, returning the salute. “I’m going to meet with the prisoner.”
“Of course, sir,” the guard said, unlocking the door, then pushing it open.
The woman, Shannon Martel, looked up from her steaming mug as Hale entered the room and smiled. She lifted the mug slightly and said, “I’ll give you Strike Marines one thing, you sure do know how to make a cup of coffee. You learn this from the navy?”
Hale nodded to the guard. “Thank you, soldier, you can wait outside.”
The guard frowned but nodded. “Yes, sir.”
As the door shut behind him, Hale turned back to the new arrivals. Shannon sat nursing a cup of coffee, a plate of crumbs sitting on the table in front of her. Her graying hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, strands of which framed her slightly Asian features. The other man was lounging back in a hard-plastic chair, his leg propped up on another chair in front of him.
“And the food’s not half-bad either,” Eric Knight said around a mouth full of food.
Hale crossed his arms. “I’m glad you approve.”
“It’s been a while since we’ve had genuine hot food in our diet,” Shannon said.
“I’m probably going to be stopped up for weeks now,” Knight said, swallowing the last of his sandwich.
Shannon rolled her eyes. “You’ll have to excuse my friend. He appears to have forgotten all his manners over the last couple of years.”
“Which is exactly why I wanted to speak with you,” Hale said. “You two are the only two adults that weren’t captured or killed when the Ultari overran Terra Nova. Why?”
Shannon shrugged. “Luck?”
Hale bit back his frustration, knowing it wouldn’t get him anywhere with these two. He nodded to Knight. “I recognize you from the Breitenfeld.”
The man smiled. “Ship’s Counter-Intelligence Officer. That was a great job.”
“You left right around the time the Toth were defeated at Earth.”
“Captain Valdar didn’t seem to care to have me onboard anymore.”
“Ibarra was involved,” Hale said, more a statement than a question.
Knight nodded. “He was the boss.”
“I can think of several different adjectives for that traitor,” Hale said.
“His methods were unorthodox,” Shannon said. “That doesn’t make him a traitor.”
“You’ve been out here a long time. A lot has changed back on Earth.”
Shannon motioned at him with her mug. “Well, you’re here now. I’m guessing that means we beat the Xaros. Took back the galaxy and saved humanity, yeah? That was pretty much Ibarra’s life mission.”
“We won,” Hale said. “But it cost us much.”
“War’s never pretty,” Shannon said, sipping her coffee.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Looks like we’ve got some catching up to do,” Shannon said.
“You’ll have plenty of time for that later,” Hale said. “Now I want you to tell me everything you know about what happened here. Where’d the Triumvirate come from? Why did they kidnap all the colonists? Why is my brother helping t
hem?”
Shannon sniffed, setting her mug on the table. She considered it for a moment, then said, “I told Morten to leave it alone. I knew it would only lead to trouble, but the old bastard couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.”
“What do you mean?”
Shannon leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. “About five years after we arrived here, some of our satellites picked up some strange signals coming from one of the outer system planets.”
“Negev,” Hale offered.
“Right. It was weak, and it was alien. We got the preliminary scans back and I could tell right away it was off.”
“What do you mean?”
Shannon shrugged. “It just did. I’ve seen plenty of prisons in my lifetime, and that damned mountain was built so that its occupants wouldn’t be able to escape, not without help. What alien race carves screaming faces into a mountain as a welcome mat? But Morten didn’t hesitate. Setting the trapped, helpless aliens free was his mantra for months. I told the council several times to leave it alone, but they wouldn’t listen.
“That I joined the mission as an education specialist and not as an agent made it hard to sell my area of expertise. They cut me out of the mission, didn’t think my negativity was good for the rest of the people working on the project. For as much good as it did.” Hale raised an eyebrow and Shannon shrugged again. “Old habits die hard, I guess. I hacked the colony’s secure system and watched the mission’s progress from my classroom. The colony’s IT guys weren’t that great at their job. Either that, or they were just naïve.”
“They were amateurs,” Knight said. “Thought just because we were alone out here there wasn’t a threat to their systems. Thank god for the dumb ones, as we used to say in the trade.”
“Yeah,” Shannon said. “They were hacks. Anyway, when I saw what they’d released from that mountain, I couldn’t just turn a lifetime of…behind-the-scenes work off and play school teacher while they set us all up for disaster.”
“You mean spying for Ibarra and assassinating innocent people,” Hale said, not bothering to keep the disgust out of his voice.
“Innocent is a relative term, Mr. Hale,” Shannon said. “Innocence really depends on who’s pulling the trigger, doesn’t it?”
“You’re a murderer, Shannon, plain and simple. I learned about all the work you did for Ibarra after you…not wasn’t you, precisely. I know what you are, a procedural, a human being grown in a tube and implanted with memories. Ibarra copied you, several times. Something he never did for anyone else, oddly enough. You may not be guilty of those crimes, but you’ve got all those memories of what you did for Ibarra. Part of me wants you to own up to those crimes. Especially after what you did to…no, wasn’t you.”
“Not much of a trial, if you’ve already determined I’m guilty,” Shannon said. She cocked her head to the side. “Incidentally, why wouldn’t you be able to have it your way? Aren’t you the one in charge of this whole damn planet now? I’d think you could do whatever you want.”
“Because I am the governor, not a dictator. And right now, I need information about what we’re dealing with out here, and right now, you’re the only person in this new galaxy that can shed any kind of light on the situation.”
“That’s got to eat at your pride a little bit, eh?” Knight said, picking up another half of a sandwich and taking an over-sized bite.
“I—” Hale caught himself. These two have made their lives deceiving and lying and conning people, Hale thought. He needed to stay on track; going down the path they were leading him would get them nowhere fast.
Hale took a deep breath. “What happened with the Triumvirate?”
Shannon considered him for a moment, then sniffed and sat up. “They’re bastards. I watched as Morten and his team opened the mountain and released the Ultari. It took a few days, but the linguists finally managed to work up an accurate translation device. That’s when the Triumvirate gave us their sob story about persecution and hundreds of years of exile and imprisonment and that they were eternally grateful for our help. Kyrios played his role perfectly, I’ll give him that.”
“Kyrios?”
“The Emperor,” Knight said.
Shannon nodded. “Kyrios, Cigyd, and Zviera; Emperor, Arch Duke, and Prince. It’s what they call themselves. According to them, they were locked away by a something they called the Sacred Intelligence—which had some kind of partnership with the Triumvirate before things went south—imprisoned for violating some unknown rule set down by the SI. They were vague on that part, which was the first of many red flags to me. I mean, if you’ve been locked away by an artificial intelligence for hundreds of years, you’re going to know exactly why you’ve been put away, right?” Shannon waved her hands through the air, rolling her eyes. “Oh, of course, everyone’s innocent, right? Everyone deserves a second chance. Well, you see where that got us.”
“So,” Hale said. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
“Worse. When Morten and Hale brought them back to Terra Nova, they tried to assimilate them into the colony, but there was a lot more resistance than they anticipated. Surprised the shit out of me, but there were more people apprehensive about the whole thing than weren’t. We shared information with them and eventually someone let slip we had doughboy tech with us. The Arch Duke was very interested; got into the system and made himself an army.
“They took Jared and the other leader, including their families, first, segregating them away from the rest of the population. They ran some brutal experiments, trying to find a way to make the doughboys obey the Triumvirate, but the doughboys were hard wired to obey Jared, so they bent Jared to their will and attacked the city. I took the two boys and left when the hammer dropped. Eric did too.”
“Why were the Netherguard after you?”
Shannon nodded. “Doughboy production and making procedurals have some similarities. Jared must have told the Triumvirate about the tech and they were interested. Very interested. Guess they weren’t happy with the robot bodies. But there was only one procedural on the Terra Nova mission.” She tapped her chest. “They needed my genome to recreate the process. That Arch Duke is talented, I’ll give him that. So the Netherguard were after me for a bit, but they degraded quickly and were useless trying to track me down without Jared holding the leash. Guess the Triumvirate decided to focus Jared to get their star ship built instead of finding me. They wanted to get home more than they wanted flesh and blood bodies.”
“You don’t seem too surprised that Ibarra had other copies of you.”
Shannon touched her right temple.
“I was having headaches not long after we first arrived. Docs found recording chips on my ocular and audio nerves, recording everything I saw and heard on a database implanted in my brain stem. Not great as a collection device, as it would take surgery to access. Docs did some more poking around and found that I had a good deal of plastic surgery to change my appearance that I didn’t remember and my genes matched for someone of pure Norwegian descent. I am half Korean, half Polish. At least, that’s what I remember.”
“Only logical explanation was that Ibarra really was a mad scientist all these years,” Knight said. “Back when the Ember War began and the Xaros wiped everyone out on Earth; I thought she was in Phoenix when it happened. I was surprised to see her after we re-captured the planet, but just chalked it up as Ibarra sneaking her onto the fleet that survived at the last minute.”
“That son of a bitch Ibarra swore that this—” she traced a hasty circle around her face “—was impossible. That he’d never make a…golem, or a ghola, I guess you could call me. A knock-off of a dead person.”
“Come on,” Hale said, surprised. “Did you really trust Ibarra 100 percent? You worked with him closer than anyone else, besides maybe his granddaughter. You knew the kind of man he was.”
“Never was one to throw away a tool he liked. Are there still copies of me floating around back home?” She sighed.
“
No,” Hale said. “There’s not. Your last copy was compromised in the naissance tubes by the Naroosha. That Shannon mortally wounded Ibarra’s granddaughter before it was destroyed.”
Shannon sat forward. “Stacy? She’s dead?”
“No, not dead.” Hale hesitated. “She survived. But how she’s still alive is a bit hard to explain.”
“We leave the boss alone for ten minutes and look what happens,” Knight said.
“But that you’re a procedural was vital to the Triumvirate,” Hale said. “They captured one of my Pathfinders on Negev; seems they found what they needed from her.”
“You brought proccies?” Shannon raised an eyebrow.
“Many. Ibarra wasn’t in charge of my mission. So, you and the boys,” Hale said. “You ended up at the data farm?”
“Right. You know, for how smart the Triumvirate is, they’re pretty freaking stupid. They made a couple trips out there, searching, but gave up after coming up empty-handed. It was actually pretty peaceful out there once you got use to the incessant humming of the server racks. Drove me crazy for the first few days….”
Hale turned to Knight. “And how’d you manage to escape the attack?”
The man smiled. “Hey, she’s not the only one with a sixth sense for these things. It’s not my first rodeo. I hid out in the city for a while, before the Netherguard started locking everything down. Once they repurposed the mining freighters as prisoner transports, I beat feet. I spent a few months playing cat-and-mouse, taking out one or two here and there. We kept in pretty regular contact.” He nodded to Shannon. “But I didn’t want to take the chance I’d lead those bastards to her and the boys, so I stayed away.”
“Must’ve been rough.”
“Actually, it wasn’t that bad until I got bit by a damn scrimshaw.”
“A what?” Hale asked, frowning.
“Scrimshaw,” Knight said. “Poisonous lizard. They look like a pile of rocks right up to the point it decide to bite the shit out of you. Took a big chunk out of my leg…”
Knight pulled his right pant leg up. The lower half of his leg was gone, cut off just below the knee. Jagged scars and mutilated skin looked like it had been pulled together with no thought at all to aesthetics.