by Bruns, David
Kwazi nodded, unsure why he was doing it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, take your seats, please,” Braxton said with the deep authority of his stage voice. “We need to get started.”
Abrams clapped Kwazi on the shoulder. “You’re a hero, man. Remember that.”
Jesus, why do people keep saying that?
Braxton caught his eye and motioned him to the stage end of the converted arena. Kwazi made his way through the crowd, sliding between densely placed chairs. A few of the people he didn’t know placed a hand on his shoulder as he passed. Some offered kind words, others oo-rah sounds of pent-up excitement. All of it began to feel like a surprise party would to someone who hates surprise parties.
Kwazi shook Braxton’s hand when it was offered, and it felt odd and put on for public display. Braxton motioned toward one of the chairs facing the long room. Kwazi sat, taking in the now-seated crowd of enthusiastic Soldiers he’d just passed through. All of them were looking at him.
“This day has been long in coming,” Braxton said. “The end of the Syndicate Corporation is at hand.”
Spontaneous applause.
“Today we implement Operation Trojan Horse. A brilliant plan, designed by Cassandra herself. Today we wrest the symbol of Company authority away from the oppressor. It will serve as our platform—both literally and symbolically—as we complete our mission to liberate the solar system from the tyranny of SynCorp’s control.”
Calls of approbation. Abrams and a few others cupped hands around their mouths and whooped.
Braxton waited patiently for the cheerleading to pass. Kwazi tried to get ahead of him in the front-channel of his brain. This was what his training had been leading up to, obviously. This was the big day. But he had no idea what Operation Trojan Horse was.
“Let’s get to the details,” Braxton said. The screen above and behind him came to life. “Three fire teams of six Soldiers each will board the Pax Corporatum , secure engineering and the bridge, and take the ship.”
They were going to take Tony Taulke’s flagship? With just eighteen Soldiers?
How could eighteen Soldiers, no matter how well trained, take an entire starship of elite Taulke Faction loyalists?
“Once the ship is secured,” Braxton continued, “we’ll embark the rest of our troops and phase two will begin. The taking of Valhalla Station and Adriana Rabh’s head!”
Laughter and shouts erupted from the room. It took longer than before to die down.
“How?” Kwazi asked before realizing he’d even spoken. Braxton turned to him. The whole room was looking at him again, in fact. Kwazi cleared his throat. “How?” he asked a bit louder.
“The plan couldn’t be simpler,” Braxton said, smiling at him. It was the friendliest expression Kwazi had ever seen on the harsh taskmaster’s face. Red flags went up in the back-channel of his mind. “You’re a wanted man, Mr. Jabari. And we’re turning you in.”
What? What had he just said?
Braxton winked. “Don’t look so concerned.” A few Soldiers laughed. More and more, this was feeling like an unwanted surprise party.
“Sir, you should tell him.”
Abrams’s voice.
“I will, but…” Braxton stepped away, and the screen came alive. Gasps went up from the briefing room. After turning to the screen, Kwazi stopped breathing.
“Assembled Soldiers, welcome to this day of destiny.”
The woman behind the coup of Tony Taulke’s reign sat in a chair on Earth: Cassandra herself, the queen of the revolution. The background of blue sky shone in the clear, crystal windows behind her, though that could have been skinning tech adorning the walls. But Cassandra had taken her mother’s office—and her mother’s head—when she’d risen to power, and that office had been in the penthouse of the former UN building in old New York. Her mother’s head rested in front of Cassandra’s elevated chair, staked on a pole. Its mouth hung slack in death. The silver tresses of Elise Kisaan’s once-shining hair dangled around the stake, stringy with the mottled brown of dried blood. Gravity and decay had dragged the skin downward on the skull.
“Today! Today, we take away the power of those still in power,” Cassandra said with the cadence of a preacher in the pulpit. The camera eye zoomed in. Her golden-almond eyes seemed to glow from within. “Kwazi, our story is your story. You are the symbol of our revolution. And your story is going out to the masses right now.”
Her image faded, replaced by Kwazi’s face.
“I’m Kwazi Jabari, and this is why I fight.”
The Kwazi on Callisto stared at the Kwazi onscreen. It was his face he was seeing. It was his mouth working. The voice even sounded like him. He heard it speak words he’d never spoken.
“I worked hard on Mars,” the image said. “And the Syndicate Corporation took everything from me…”
The video played for two-and-a-half minutes. The Soldiers in the room sat, quietly and respectfully, watching Kwazi tell a story he’d never uttered before. His trials on Earth, losing his parents to the Drought Wars in Africa. His dedication to hard work in the mines of Mars for SynCorp’s Qinlao Faction. The murder of Amy and Aika and Beren to create the fiction of the Hero of Mars.
When it was over, Kwazi sat in shock, unable to speak. When he’d been Helena Telemachus’s spokesman, he’d felt trapped by destiny—a mouse in a maze directed right and left and forward and back. He’d been a symbol for her, too.
The walls of the maze felt near again.
The Soldiers sat unmoving in their chairs as Cassandra’s face reappeared. A few of them wept.
“Today! Today, we take the starship that sailed the system as a symbol of Tony Taulke’s power. Today, it becomes a herald of freedom!”
The briefing room erupted with enthusiasm. Every person in the room stood. Some wiped their eyes. Others began a chant, quickly adopted by the others.
“Free-dom! Free-dom! Free-dom!”
The Soldiers exchanged handshakes and embraced. The positive energy washed over Kwazi, and the walls seemed to recede a bit. If this is what it took … if the lie he’d just witnessed onscreen led to a greater truth, the truth of retribution for how the Company had murdered Amy and his friends, well … so be it. And was the story he’d just seen really a lie? It was a kind of truth, wasn’t it? The truth of his experience. Even if he hadn’t said the words himself, he’d lived the life they’d spoken of. Their truth was his truth. They could have been his words.
Braxton moved to stand in front of him, once again offering his hand. Kwazi stood slowly and took it. The man who’d once threatened to kill him with his bare fists pulled Kwazi into a bear hug.
“First Taulke’s flagship, then we take out the old lady,” Braxton whispered into his ear. “Now you’re our hero.”
• • •
Two shuttles climbed high over Callisto headed for the Pax Corporatum . One contained Kwazi, Braxton, and four Soldiers dressed in Rabh Regency uniforms. The other carried the remaining SSR troops from the briefing, disguised as Taulke supporters in black uniforms with the Taulke Faction logo prominent on their chests.
When Helena Telemachus had been informed that Rabh troops had found and taken Kwazi Jabari alive, she’d demanded immediate extradition to the starship. Adriana Rabh complied, seemingly happy to be rid of him. Kwazi had monitored their exchange via comm lines tapped by the SSR. Seeing the hungry smile on Helena’s face had been particularly satisfying. He couldn’t wait to wipe it off.
“I still don’t see how we can take an entire starship with only eighteen guys,” he said.
Braxton nodded, happy to explain. “For one thing, they won’t see it coming. But we’re not just eighteen guys.”
The shuttle bumped them in their seats, and Kwazi clutched the arm rests until the turbulence passed.
“You’ve kept me in the dark on the details,” he said. “I get that. After what you saw on CorpNet, when I was Tony Taulke’s spokesman. But now we’re entering the lion’s den. Think you coul
d share?”
“Well,” Braxton said, teasing, “what do you think’s gonna happen?”
Kwazi turned his head. “I looked it up.”
“Looked what up?”
“‘Trojan Horse.’”
“And?”
“It’s how the Greeks took Troy. For ten years they’d besieged the city, but they couldn’t breach the walls. One night, they left a huge wooden horse outside the gates and sailed away.”
“So far, so good,” Braxton said.
“The Trojans, so full of pride in their apparent victory after such a long war, pulled the trophy horse inside the city. In the middle of the night, thirty Greeks leapt out and opened Troy’s gates. The Greeks, who’d sailed back to the beaches in the night, flooded the city with soldiers and overwhelmed the Trojans.”
“Right,” Braxton said. Then, almost wistfully, “Humans never learn the lessons they teach themselves, that’s what Cassandra says.”
“You’re taking advantage of Telemachus’s ego,” Kwazi said. He could hear the admiration for the plan in his own voice. It was simple, elegant, and relied on the foibles of human nature for success. Telemachus was so desperate for a public relations win, dangling Kwazi in front of her had been too much for her to resist. That it could be a ploy to take Tony Taulke’s flagship—would she even have considered that? “They’ll bring our shuttle aboard Taulke’s flagship, already tasting victory,” he said. “Just like the Trojans.”
“See?” Braxton said. “You didn’t need me to tell you the details. You figured them out all on your own.”
“Not all of them.”
“No?”
“Eighteen guys…”
Kwazi waited. The Pax Corporatum loomed in the forward window of the shuttle, still docked with Rabh Regency Station. The amber light of Jupiter lent the starship’s skin a golden hue. Though it was only her hull shining with dust and distance, the ship seemed to ripple with power.
“The other shuttle’s carrying two fire teams in Taulke uniforms. They’ll board as part of a shift rotation. They’ll be in place before we even get there. Besides, like I said, we’re more than eighteen guys.” Braxton smiled. Then, “Where do you think Dreamscape comes from, Kwazi?”
The Pax Corporatum drew nearer. The front-channel of Kwazi’s mind dawned with what Braxton was suggesting.
“Invented by the SSR?” he asked.
“Cassandra invented it.” Braxton’s tone was almost reverent. “To liberate human minds from the shackles of SynCorp’s brainwashing.”
A curious kind of certainty sank into Kwazi’s gut, a queasy concoction of thankfulness and caution. It was a déjà vu ghost of how he’d felt in the briefing room after seeing his doppelgänger share his, Kwazi’s, story with the billions of humans inhabiting Sol. He felt excited and just a little bit afraid.
“You’ve got hackheads on the ship,” Kwazi said. “You’ve got control of them through Dreamscape.”
And control of me .
Braxton nodded.
“They’ll fight for us?”
“No, Dreamscape isn’t that developed yet,” Braxton said, his tone musing. “But they’ll be otherwise—occupied.”
Otherwise occupied .
Not that developed—yet.
“The whole ship’s complement?”
“No, there’ll be resistance,” Braxton said. “But don’t worry. Cassandra’s mapped it all out. First, we cut off Tony Taulke’s giant, floating space dong. Then we cut off the old lady’s head.”
Those walls felt near again. Claustrophobically so. How many minds across the system could Cassandra now control through Dreamscape? Or if not control exactly, nullify to her advantage? And yet Dreamscape had given him back Amy in a way he’d never had her in the so-called real world. How many others’ dreams had it made come true?
“Approaching the Pax Corporatum ,” the pilot said. “Docking protocols initiated.”
Braxton turned to Kwazi, who jumped when the fire team leader rapped him on the shoulder.
“Buck up, buckaroo,” Braxton said. “The ship’s as good as ours.”
Chapter 9
Milani Stuart • Aboard the Pax Corporatum
How many days had it been? Milani had lost count.
After Helena Telemachus switched off Milani’s implant, cutting access to CorpNet, time had become a homogeneous, vanilla thing. A concept without meaning. Before Kwazi had jumped ship, day and night aboard had been shaded in regular, circadian cycles approximating Earth norms. But now, held as a prisoner in her own quarters, light was constant—sometimes dim, sometimes bright, but never absent. Time ran together, a principal weapon in the arsenal of sleep deprivation. Overwhelming the senses and denying the mind its ability to recharge and reboot were common torture techniques, unproven in their effectiveness. In her more lucid moments, Milani remembered this from her medical training.
Telemachus was nothing if not a perfectionist.
Every time Milani’s eyelids began to droop, the thrash music blared from the walls. Or the temperature in her quarters rose to sweltering. Or the lights would briefly brighten to sunspot brilliance, then return to nominal. Or the rotting smell of days-old, decaying organic material would be filtered through the air vent. Randomly but regularly, her five senses came under assault, especially when she tried to sleep.
During her internship at Wallace Med, when half the point seemed to be simply surviving thirty-six hour shifts without killing a patient through fatigue or incompetence or incompetence bred of fatigue, Milani had learned to day-sleep with her eyes open. To catch a few minutes of zombie wakefulness here and there when real, REM sleep wasn’t an option. She revisited that inner island now, when she could. Recalling that skill was a tiny victory on a tiny battlefield in a multi-front attack on her sanity.
It was getting harder to concentrate, but if the music was absent, she could still achieve a semblance of cognitive focus. When the music assaulted her eardrums, when Milani could no longer hear the thoughts in her own head despite screaming them, she’d turn her focus to something simpler. Her mother had taught her their family’s ancestral hobby of cross stitching. She’d hated it as a child, but now Milani used the stitch counting and pattern recognition to anchor her mind. Sometimes the repetition worked against her and lulled her exhausted mind to sleep. Then the harsh, clashing music would boom again, begin the cycle again.
Convinced Milani knew where Kwazi had gone, Telemachus blamed her for aiding Kwazi’s escape. Milani had become convinced that only Telemachus’s obsession that Milani knew Kwazi’s whereabouts—and the testimony of the colony’s med-tech, Drake—had saved her from summary execution. Kwazi had acted on his own, Drake had said, citing the choke marks on Milani’s neck as evidence.
Damn him , Milani would think, when she could think. Goddamn him . Then: Goddamn you! I hope you’re all right …
The emotion wheel inside her would turn and rest its pointer on anger , and she’d curse Kwazi and remind herself what a dupe she was for ever having cared for him at all. Then the wheel would turn again and point to concern , and Milani would wonder where he was, if he was safe. Had Telemachus or Adriana Rabh caught him and locked him in a cell? Were they torturing him too? Keeping him alive with protein hypos and water?
No, that didn’t make sense. If they’d found Kwazi, captured him, Telemachus would have no reason to torture her.
Or keep her alive.
When the emotion wheel stopped on empathy for Kwazi, Milani fretted over his addiction to Dreamscape. It wasn’t a jealous thing, she’d tell herself—not envy of a dead woman who still held Kwazi’s affection. That was mostly true and partly untrue. But Milani’s real concern, her worry and fear, centered on Kwazi losing himself permanently in a fantasyland that kept him from eating and caring for himself. She’d seen it happen already, when they’d discovered him and the others in Engineering, lost in Dreamscape without regard for food or water, or personal hygiene. The basics of life, ignored and neglected, in favor
of a heaven that shone with its own artifice.
How long ago had that been? How many days? Weeks? Surely, not years.
The light normalized. The door to her cell opened.
Helena Telemachus stepped through.
Milani had the fleeting thought to attack her. Not like a human being, not like a trained physician, but simply to launch herself off the bed, fingernails extended like claws, her teeth ready to sink into Helena’s neck before she could react. But she had no strength. And she wasn’t sure if it was really Telemachus or just her brain, helping her survive again. Giving her an image to anchor her sanity to something hard and unyielding, like hate.
“You look like shit,” Telemachus said. The words ran together, sounding to Milani’s calloused eardrums like language submerged in liquid. She turned her head, willing her ears to focus. “But no matter. Your time here is done. We’ve got him.”
It took a moment to register. Milani tried to interpret the words through a deaf fog.
“Kwazi?”
Telemachus moved closer, a satisfied expression on her face. “Yes, dear doctor, Kwazi. His little escapade is over. And now that we have him, we need you cleaned up.” She turned and motioned behind her. Milani recognized the ship’s medical staff who’d helped her care for Kwazi a few years ago. Days ago?
“The enemy is using his image to whip up rebellion in the system,” Telemachus said. “We’ll use the real thing to counter that. With your help.”
The medical staff pulled Milani to her feet. It was like she was outside her own body, watching this play out like those stories of people who die on the operating table and float above while the surgeons fight to save them.
She smiled. But from Telemachus’s reaction, it wasn’t a pleasant thing to see. A rasping, grating sound came from a sandpaper throat. A generous description might have called it laughter.
“You want me to help you?” Milani asked. “After this?”
“You’ll be helping yourself, Dr. Stuart,” Telemachus said calmly. “You’ll be helping Kwazi, too.” She jerked her head, and to the attendants said, “Clean her up. Pump her with stims and saline to hydrate her. I need her presentable ASA—”
