by Tim C Taylor
The Council leaped into animated debate, as they often did. They were talking over each other, but Arun let them be. He’d learned it was a phase they had to work through. He declined to join in, instead watching his daughter arguing with the Tallerman General Graz.
“Sorry to interrupt, General.” It was Greyhart who’d snuck up behind him and rested a hand on his shoulder. “But have you by any chance encountered an Earth native? Male, short by your standards, and late middle age by now. Possibly goes under the name of Sergeant Bashiri Bloehn of the 163rd Brigade, International Federation Defense Force?”
“What if I have?”
“Well, I bloody well hope you have. I went to a lot of trouble keeping him alive so that you two could meet. Did he mention the Battle of Cairo in 2717AD?”
Arun gave up. It wasn’t clear how he could keep secrets from a man such as this. “Yes, I met Sergeant Bloehn. Cairo was a failed uprising. It was launched too soon.”
“A failure, was it?” Greyhart’s raised eyebrow spoke otherwise. “Too soon?” The other eyebrow lifted. “That remains to be seen. And just to be clear, this isn’t me interfering. I’m just offering a little advice. Perhaps you should speak with Bloehn again before you make a decision.”
“What is your deal?” said Springer. “You tell us to tread lightly or we’ll frakk up the future, but do whatever you want and I’ll back you. It’s far too dangerous for me to tell you what to do, but, hey, do you remember that Bloehn guy? You really need to speak with him.”
The smile left Greyhart. “I envy the mundanes who imagine they stumble through time on a steady speed and heading,” he said. “Being attuned to the true nature of reality is difficult and painful. Believe me, Lissa – it is Lissa at the moment, isn’t it? – your own experiences are nothing more than glimpses of the terrifying truth of reality, and yet I know how much hurt they have caused you. Oh, yes, I know more about you than any of the others. How to explain my actions? I cannot, except by analogy. Imagine, if you will, a circus performer spinning plates. I cause dozens of plates to spin, and if any should fall to the ground, it would mean catastrophe. Yet I cannot spin the plates myself because if I should touch them, they would shatter. The plates must be nudged and coerced, but they must spin themselves.”
“Why must you spin so many plates?” asked Springer.
Greyhart gave a sheepish grimace. “It is conceivable that in the course of my duties, I may have interfered a tad too much.”
“No kidding,” said Arun. “And if we’re one of these spinning plates. We have to go back in time, because from Greyhart’s point of view, we’ve already done it. The Bonaventure incident warned us when we were still kids. We’re locked into this. All of us. Even Greyhart.”
“I can say no more.”
“And I don’t want to rush into this,” said Arun, “especially since I think Tawfiq could have her own ability to move across time.” He peered at Greyhart. “Does she?”
Greyhart made a zipping gesture across his lips.
“We have Night Hummers serving aboard our ships as FTL data transceivers,” Indiya pointed out. “Perhaps we should put Greyhart and one of our Hummers in the same room and see what happens.”
“That would not work well for anyone,” said Greyhart petulantly.
“I don’t know,” said Arun. “I’m going to have to think on this before we can proceed. Indiya – and Grace if you’re willing – I suggest we go away and put our heads together before reconvening.”
“No, no,” Greyhart protested. “Thrice nay. Stay a little longer. You can’t leave now.”
Arun peered at Greyhart. “Now? Why does now matter to a man who can travel through time? You’ve lured us to this precise place and time. What happens next?”
From the ring of Gliesan Marines, Arun caught the faint whine of portable railguns charging.
Greyhart bowed. “Indeed I have, sir, but only to gratify my warped sense of occasion.” He ignored the guns aimed at his heart and head and looked meaningfully at Indiya.
Arun followed the time traveler’s gaze and noticed Indiya’s face go vacant for a few seconds.
Greyhart gave a knowing grin. “History calls,” he says.
“I’m receiving a communications hail,” Indiya explained. “Claims to be from the Voice of the Resistance.”
—––
Fleet Admiral Indiya
Gymnasium, Deck 23, Legion destroyer Pavonichi
Hating the feeling that she was no longer in control of her own destiny, Indiya routed the incoming feed to the speaker in her wrist block. Hell, it was hardly worth keeping anything secret from this Greyhart character who seemed to know what was going to happen in advance.
“Who is this?” she queried.
“The Voice of the Resistance,” replied a neutral voice devoid of any accent or gender cues that Indiya could detect.
“Go ahead.”
“Do not listen to him.”
“Don’t listen to who?”
“He has many names. The last he used was Greyhart. You alone among your people perceived the damage done to reality by the Bonaventure all those years ago. He will entice you to destroy the fabric of the universe. Send him away. His words are dangerous. Don’t listen to them.”
“Bonaventure? How could you possibly know that? You… you aren’t even human, are you?” And there was that idiot, Dock, thinking the Voice of the Resistance had been Romulus. “Why should I listen to you?”
“I gave you Tawfiq’s shuttle. Learn from it, and hurry! Tawfiq will unleash new forces in ten days. If she succeeds, she will be unstoppable. Your species will be eradicated. And so will mine. But you must beat Tawfiq your way, not his.”
“Mader zagh! You’ve seen this outcome, haven’t you? You’ve seen the future. You’re a Night Hummer.”
But the transmission from the Voice of the Resistance shut off abruptly.
Greyhart glowed with smugness but said no more.
“Find the Earth soldier, Sergeant Bloehn,” she ordered Caccamo over a private channel she’d set up with him in advance. “Send him to me. And while you’re at it, ask the captain of this ship to supply food and drink. We’re not leaving this spot until we’ve made a decision.”
— Chapter 10 —
Present day
Fleet Admiral Indiya
Admiral’s Quarters.
Legion flagship Holy Retribution
Flag Lieutenant Hood was giving Indiya an update on the Karypsic via one of her secondary cognitive threads. The dropship had lost a third of its mass, hull armor had been penetrated and partially sealed in several locations, and the ship was radiating significant thermal energy that hadn’t been there seconds earlier. It wasn’t an elaborate deception. The Karypsic really had been in a fight, and it looked like some of Grace’s team hadn’t made it back.
“Hello?” Grace was saying. “Can anyone hear me?”
A sudden realization slapped Indiya out of her stupor. Grace’s broadcast was so unconventional, that possibly Indiya was the only one to have noticed it. She was detecting no replies from Xin or the Far Reach Fleet.
This woman needed her.
“I hear you,” Indiya replied. “I’m sending medical teams. You are not venting atmosphere, but I can see the interior of your craft through your hull. Do you require damage control teams or engineering assistance?”
“Negative, Admiral. But we do need medevac.”
Indiya organized the assistance while simultaneously relaying Furn’s message of treachery to Finfth – the only other surviving augment in the fleet. She wanted an outside opinion she could trust, and Finfth didn’t share the same hatred of Xin that she and Kreippil felt. Rational analysis told Indiya that there were many candidates other than Xin who might be secretly communicating with the outer Solar System.
“What I need most of all,” Grace was telling her at the same time, “is to talk with my father. He needs to know what we encountered.”
“Grace, your father
hasn’t come back.”
“Dad?” Panic gripped the daughter of Arun and Xin. Then, without warning, Karypsic’s full comms started up, and amid busy signal traffic between the damaged dropship and both Legion and Far Reach ships, Grace found time to adjust a nearby camera to focus on her face. “Admiral Indiya,” she said, “are you seeing me?”
The girl’s panic had been brief. While Grace stared into the camera with the antagonistic jut to her jaw she’d inherited from her mother, she was also issuing instructions to the incoming medical teams and was organizing her own damage control.
Indiya was seeing her all right. When she’d first appeared out of the blue, the irreverent optimism that had shone from the girl’s cheeky smile was exactly like her father’s. Indiya had almost been charmed. Now there was a focus about her that was almost cruel in its intensity. Just like her mother. Indiya realized she could never trust this woman, no matter how much she might admire her.
“Admiral?”
“I see you, Lee-McEwan.”
“I know precisely what Greyhart told us,” Grace said. “If my father’s team didn’t make it back then either they were unable to activate the return mechanism, or they did but it failed.”
“I’m sorry, Grace, but I agree. We’ve lost him. It would be cruel to hope.”
The younger woman hardened her expression, and Indiya saw the ruthless determination within her that would stop at nothing to achieve her goals. Grace’s hair was matted with blood and dirt, and an unidentified fluid had spattered over her face and then been wiped away from her eyes. In stark contrast, the smartfabric of her uniform had cleaned itself. It was a pristine example of the simple black with gold insignia of the Legion Navy, the same uniform Indiya wore herself, as indeed did Kreippil. Indiya didn’t consider Grace to serve in the same navy as her and Kreippil, whatever lies Xin might spin.
“You misunderstand,” Grace told Indiya. “My mother often told me what attracted her most to my father.” The girl spoke as if she were a parent soothing a troubled infant. “He’s a survivor. Even as a cadet, he kept bouncing back, no matter what he did. No matter how risky his plans.”
Indiya blinked. She didn’t want to remember that far back. Too many memories lay buried there.
A change came about Grace; she softened and flashed her father’s smile. “You didn’t hear this from me,” she said quietly, “but ever since my earliest memories, whenever Mother faced a hard choice, she always asked herself, what would Dad do?”
“Arun’s gone,” Indiya said firmly.
“And yet he always bounces back. Hey, maybe Greyhart has been rerolling the dice for Arun all these years until he lucks out enough to survive his mission. Maybe he’s already made his killer roll, but it hasn’t caught up with us yet. Or maybe your Littorane goddess wanted to keep playing with Dad for a little longer in her divine games. You can believe whatever you want, Admiral Indiya – I don’t give a frozen frakk – but you should believe in him. Wherever he is, Dad will be fighting, trying to get back to you, and grumbling all the way. Don’t give up on him.”
Kreippil began bathing Indiya in a soothing flow of water from his tail sweeps. “The young human is correct,” he said. “McEwan usually flounders, often in dark abyssal depths, and yet he always regains the surface.”
“Stop saying that!” Indiya screamed. It was bad enough that they were trying to soothe her, but she could read the Littorane like a book and knew he was being deceitful. She knew why too. Oh, now it was becoming clear! Kreippil was glad to be rid of Arun. Indiya clamped her mouth and gills, and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to confine the rage within her.
These idiots who surrounded her could only see Arun as an icon, an idea – and maybe, in Kreippil’s case, a rival – but Indiya had stuffed Arun’s seventeen-year-old body into a cryopod and flushed out his blood to replace it with preserving fluids. She had seen him wither over the decades into a pain-filled old man, lonely and tired of life. Having been inside Arun’s mind to help him out of the planning trance in which he’d determined the targets for Karypsic and Saravanan, Indiya suspected Lissa was really Springer back from the dead. Whatever physical comforts those two might offer each other, Arun and Indiya still relied on each other. The two of them had supported each other for so many centuries that they were like ancient lightning-blasted trees that had grown together, each needing the other to stand upright.
“He’s gone,” Indiya whispered and then the full horror of his loss slammed into her like a punch to the gut.
She bunched her fists, but that only seemed to focus and intensify the rage which spread through her and out into the world, haloing her in a flame of anger.
She felt her gills burn and her flesh boil.
Suddenly, she realized her physical pain was real, and reason reclaimed her sanity. Without daring to open her eyes, she connected her mind to the camera looking into her quarters, the same view shared with Grace. Indiya saw a distorted figure, clenched inwardly, but mercifully half concealed within a glistening shell of bubbles as her anger physically manifested to boil the water around her.
Kreippil was flapping his tail as hard as he could to circulate cooler water, and within seconds the water had shifted from dangerously scalding to merely hot. “Goddess protect us,” he chanted. “Goddess protect us.”
Indiya was okay. She’d lost her composure for a moment, that’s all. Maybe it had been for the best, because she had no idea that the ever-present cloud of nanobots around her could produce such an extreme effect on the physical environment. Maybe she could use that as a weapon?
Arun was dead. Perhaps he’d lived his days out in the past with Lissa-Springer, but he was never coming back to the war. Indiya didn’t have to pretend to anyone that surviving without him would be easy. All she had to do was lead the Legion to its final victory. Then she could fade to black.
The mental connection to the camera feed slipped away and she was forced to open her eyes.
“Admiral?” Grace’s image was still there, displayed on the bulkhead, her face a mix of concern and alarm.
The woman’s image flickered just long enough for Indiya to see a frown appear. Grace’s mouth seemed to extend, her face grew hairier. Then Grace disappeared altogether, replaced by someone else.
Three eyes peered at Indiya down a jaw filled with fangs. “Goddess protect you?” sneered the Hardit. “Not this time, Kreippil.”
Tawfiq!
— Chapter 11 —
Twenty-two years earlier. 2717AD.
Grace Lee-McEwan
Flight Deck.
Far Reach Dropship Karypsic.
Near Mars orbit
The stars changed.
It was almost disappointing. The last time she’d traveled back in time, Grace had been frozen in cryo. And this time… she’d felt nothing. Not even a tingle in her stomach.
Which is good, she told herself, because we’ve got a job to do.
“Jackson, spool up the stealth engines and make us vanish pronto. Francini, using passive mode only, I want you to take a good, hard look at Mars. We just swapped a Human Legion fleet for a scattering of New Order bases.”
She willed away the knot of tension she found in her shoulders. By her estimate, this was the most dangerous part of an audacious mission. If they lived through the next five minutes, they would have a fighting chance to get through to Tawfiq.
In order to blend into the surrounding environment, the stealth field generator needed to first be in that environment. And that left them vulnerable and visible while the systems reset themselves after the 22-year jump.
The other two flight crew, Jackson and Francini, went about their duties with calm professionalism, even though only Grace knew the nature of their mission, the need for secrecy having been paramount. No way in the world was she going to let herself be the only one who couldn’t keep her cool.
Nonetheless, she had to take a deep breath to steady herself before asking, “Anything?”
“Stealth e
fficiency ten percent and rising,” reported second-in-command, Ensign Andy Jackson. “We’ll be like ghosts in twenty seconds.”
“I’m getting low-level energy readings from beneath the Martian surface,” said Petty Officer Massimo Francini from his station. “No spikes or pings.”
“Good enough, thank you. Captain Lee-McEwan to all hands. I repeat, this is the captain to all hands. We have left Mars orbit in 2739 and emerged in the same position and velocity, relative to Mars, in 2317. The Legion Fleet we have left behind in the future, commanded by Admiral Indiya and General McEwan, has been heavily compromised by the New Order. They’re riddled with some kind of surveillance nano plague they called the Blood Virus. That’s why operational security has been so tight. None of you know what we’re here to do, so listen up, because this is the big one. In four days, the survivors of the Earth Defense Force will rise up and make a strike against a key New Order facility in a city called Cairo. Our intelligence is that this will cause panic in the New Order high command who will be caught completely unprepared. Tawfiq will lock herself in her bunker while dispatching New Order reserves to meet the threat at Cairo. With communications severely disrupted by the attack, and rumors of uprisings, invasions and coups spreading like a virus, this is a unique moment of vulnerability for Tawfiq. Our task is to drop a strike team into the New Order capital of Victory City, where we shall take advantage of the confusion to kill Tawfiq Woomer-Calix and wipe out as much of the New Order high command as we can. If the situation permits, we shall wait and observe, to aid a general uprising should it occur and if we can make a material difference.”
