After he’d been given an eyeful the door slid shut again.
“Kind of a letdown,” Collin muttered as he turned his attention back to the Alpha Slayer.
Some time passed.
“You know . . .”
When Collin spoke again, everyone perked up in the hopes that he had something new to contribute. “I wish we could go back to when Jonathan just asked us off the cuff questions about Sci-Fi movies.”
“Why?” Jonathan asked.
“It’s a lot easier to think when the stakes are hypothetical,” Collin said.
Hayden nodded slowly, his expression nostalgic for a simpler time.
Seven chairs sat in front of the pedestal. Heyer and Jonathan, having laid out the dilemma again, were silently waiting for their input.
Hayden turned to Leah. “So, yeah . . . welcome to the war council.”
“I really don’t know why he thinks the Pervert would have something meaningful to contribute,” Paige said half under her breath.
Strangely, Leah seemed unperturbed by the ‘pervert’ epithet. Though perhaps she considered it a step-up from Paige altogether ignoring her existence.
“They’re either being incredibly immature, or they’re not telling us everything.” Leah said. “I know you’ve made harder decisions than this.”
The last statement was clearly aimed at Jonathan and Heyer.
“I hate to agree with the Pervert,” Paige said. “But she’s not wrong.”
“Alright, be mature, what do you two think we should do?” Collin asked, looking hopefully between the two women.
“Didn’t we just have a meeting?” Sydney asked upon being summoned to the armory.
As they finished listening to the pros and cons of the decision at hand, they looked at one another somewhat reluctantly. “Perhaps something isn’t apparent to me, as I’ve never actually had any personal interactions with Mr. Morgan,” Sydney said.
“That’s why we called you two,” Hayden said.
“We all have reason to be biased,” Leah interjected.
Sydney nodded.
“Well, my initial thought is that there is considerable danger to Mr. Morgan. He might not even come out of the procedure with his sanity fully intact.”
“Yeah we weren’t sure if that was a pro or a con,” Collin said.
There was a considerable number of shrugs and a few scoffs from the six already sitting around the pedestal.
Anthony frowned. “I think what Sydney is getting at, is that unless we are discussing forcing that implant on Mr. Morgan, this is all void. Perhaps simply ask if he’s willing to go through with it before we spend any more time judging if we should.”
“Assuming you mean we tell him the risks as well?” Paige asked.
Everyone eventually nodded, except for Jonathan, who didn’t seem to think Grant’s wishes were a relevant factor until everyone’s eyes were focused on him. Only then did he somewhat sourly force out the words. “Oh sure, let’s let Grant be the guy who gets to volunteer. Wouldn’t want the world to be unfair to the psychopath.”
“Right, well . . .” Sydney’s voice gave away that she hadn’t quite felt out the history between Grant and the others. “Which of us should approach him?”
“Well, we’ve seen firsthand how talented the Pervert is at manipulating people,” Paige said.
Again, Leah choose not to react to the new nickname, nor the backhanded compliment. “I don’t think I’m the right fit.”
“Oh?” Paige asked.
Mr. Clean chimed in before Leah could. “Grant’s psychological profile was contained on the server files we stole from The Cell. Olivia took numerous notes that indicate he’ll react with suspicion to a woman. That said, she indicated he would react quite differently to a father figure.”
The entire room turned to Heyer.
He sighed. “Based on the shadow’s behavior, there might be some truth to that.”
“More than you might think,” Collin said. “When we were cell mates and he thought Heyer might be dead, he seemed pretty upset.”
“We still haven’t decided if it is worth the risk,” Heyer said. “Even if he agrees.”
“If he does, I have a thought on how to minimize the risk,” Jonathan said, then he looked at the alien. “And no, you’re not going to like it.”
CHAPTER FORTY
THERE WAS A reason only two brothers survived the Borealis extinction.
Heyer had been too young to have memories of his father. What he knew of the man was found in the records of his extinct species.
His name was Prahcer.
The nature of Borealis economics was as nuanced and complicated as one would expect from a highly advanced species. But the surviving brothers knew it would be accurate to say that their parents would have been considered destitute while they lived.
Perhaps, that circumstance left Prahcer few easy choices. That was the part of the story Heyer would never know—their time in life didn’t overlap enough for Prahcer to ever tell his side of the story.
Throughout all his time amongst humanity, he had never told anyone about his father. When he first realized how averse he was to discussing what he knew of him, it had been a clarifying moment. What he believed to be true about the man suddenly so certain. Should Malkier and he die, the story would essentially be lost, and Heyer would prefer it that way.
The brothers’ survival seemed an ironic twist of fate. How else could he describe it when a betrayal is the reason you lived and so many billions of others died. When Heyer tried to see the story through a more positive lens, he’d think, Our father gave us to science. When he didn’t have it in him to think kindly, he’d think, Our father sold us into slavery.
Either way it boiled down to life trafficking. Either way, Prahcer had gambled with their lives.
The implants that resided in Heyer and his brother’s chests were experimental. Prahcer had volunteered his children as lab rats. Heyer was no stranger to difficult choices, knew the reality could very well have been that Prahcer was choosing between his children dying in an experiment or from one of the other various horrors that follow poverty. It was also entirely possible that Prahcer would have volunteered himself, but the lab testing the implants would only take children of a certain age for subjects. They were far more generous for newborns. Those doing the testing were hardly innocent, but they also weren’t his father.
How Prahcer was approached, neither brother knew, but what was clear was Malkier and Heyer would be the first ever to test the safety of the new implants. And it was all that simple. Had anyone taken their place, they would have been the only ones to survive.
When they were young, Malkier spoke of being taken to the laboratory. The worry on their father’s face as he gave them over. Malkier believed that his father somehow knew something. That their father hadn’t feared the chance he was taking with their lives but knew he was saving them. Had known that he knew he would never see them again.
When Heyer was old enough to think on it, he realized his brother had been far too young to see the truth. Malkier may have known Prahcer, but only as well as a child of five can know a parent. Heyer had no soft memories of his father to blunt the hard edges of the facts. There was just no evidence for what his brother wished to believe. They had never found anything to indicate that Sayira, their mother, had even known where Prahcer planned to take them that day.
The brothers hadn’t discussed the matter for centuries. They disagreed—they reached an impasse. Neither could be proven right or wrong. So, in the end, it didn’t matter.
That said, it had always been Sayira, and not Prahcer, who Malkier chose for Cede’s avatar. The costume he wanted the AI to wear.
Whatever Malkier’s opinion, Heyer’s was summed up easily enough. There was once a man named Prahcer. That man was supposed to love him more than any man ever could, and that man had dropped him into an experiment for which he could not possibly know the risks.
It was no surp
rise, that while Heyer seldom thought on the man any longer, as he stood staring at the locked door to Grant’s prison, Prahcer rose to the surface of his mind.
He could assume some of how this conversation would go. He’d already lived through a version of it once on the Feroxian Plane—albeit the circumstances had been somewhat reversed. Heyer the captive.
Grant’s shadow had believed Heyer owed him a debt. Well—the shadow believed he was owed a father. The alien inside Jeremy Holloway’s body was the closest he could get. Such logic generally held up fine for a shadow once far enough along in The Never’s mental degradation. Heyer knew firsthand how unfair it was to hold the actions of a shadow against the man himself once the deterioration set in.
Yet, he was certain that the actions of the shadow still came from underlying truths. The actions of his own shadow had disgusted him. At the same time—he couldn’t say he’d been surprised by them.
Grant’s shadow had been willing to trade the fate of humanity for the chance to spend whatever time he had left in a position of power over them. To be fair, the shadow seemed to desire the fantasy of being a superhero that walked among them. Still, it was power, and what the shadow would have done when things didn’t follow the story he wanted to live—Heyer didn’t want to imagine.
But . . . that wasn’t all he had learned from the man’s shadow.
There was no denying that had Heyer never come to Earth, Grant would likely be a very different person. Heyer had not killed Grant’s father. That said, if blame for the death could be divided up, Heyer was certainly due the largest share. When Holloway died, he had never even known he was a father. Had he lived to learn of Grant’s existence, there was just no way to know how things may have been different.
As Heyer stood outside that door, what troubled him was just how much Grant’s shadow had wanted to look into his eyes and see his father looking back at him. Heyer wished he could give that to him, but it wasn’t in his power.
The day Grant’s shadow died, Jonathan had said the man acted like he was performing for an audience only he could see.
What might happen? What harm was there if Heyer let Grant believe there was a chance his father saw him? For the alien it was a completely theoretical question. But Jonathan said, sometimes, just the idea that his father was watching kept him on his feet when he thought they would give out on him.
Was there a chance that even a man like Grant Morgan might be a little more than he was, if the person he put on a pedestal would simply bear witness?
Grant sat up from the bunk along the back wall. When he saw who had walked into his cell, the nasty remark he’d readied fell dead on his tongue.
“You . . . you’re here.”
Jeremy Holloway was alive. He stood in his cell no more than a few yards away. He was just studying him—waiting for him to speak.
“I . . . I searched for you,” Grant said.
Holloway took a long breath. “I know.”
The answer hung in the air between them. Grant’s eyes seemed softer than usual. Almost as though they pleaded. “Why didn’t you want me to find you?”
“I believed it was safer, for both of us, if that never happened,” Heyer said. “I did not understand just how far you were willing to go.”
An awkward silence followed, neither seeming to know how to fill it.
“Your hair,” Grant said. “In the pictures it was darker. But your face hasn’t aged a day. You . . . you look younger than me.”
His father took a long breath, then took a seat on the bench along the wall opposite Grant’s bunk. He took his hat off and set it down beside him.
“I am not who you believe me to be, Grant,” he said. “I am not Jeremy Holloway, and while I know it will be hard to understand at first, this will not be the first time we’ve had this conversation.”
Heyer was in Grant’s prison cell for hours. To Heyer, the dialog they exchanged was not that different in substance from the exchange he’d had with Grant’s shadow on the Feroxian Plane.
While the facts exchanged did not change, Heyer didn’t feel a prolonged sense of déjà vu.
If anything, Heyer began to suspect that the amount of awfulness in Grant’s shadow may not have all originated in the man sitting across from him. The shadow had been quite vulnerable, experiencing the mental degradation of The Never, when he came in contact with Malkier’s influence. While there was no way to know how much poison the shadow took in while he learned of events from the perspective of his brother, the real Grant was not as quick to anger as his doppelganger.
Heyer explained it all.
I’m sorry, I know you were looking for Jeremy Holloway. This was his body, but I am not him. No, I am not human. Holloway’s body became a vessel for me roughly two decades ago. I took his body because I had no choice at the time. My previous host was damaged beyond repair in the same explosion that led to Holloway’s head trauma. I did not kill Holloway, but had I not taken this body it would have died twenty years ago in a Libyan Desert. Normally, I can communicate with my host if I choose to, but no, I cannot speak to your father. The brain damage that occurred was beyond my technology’s ability to heal. The body is functionally repaired, but the damage to Holloway’s consciousness could not be reversed. No, I never—really—met your father when he was alive. No, I did not impregnate your mother. You had already been conceived.
The questions took a familiar but somewhat different direction after that.
“So, you’re just the husk, he’s completely gone?” Grant asked.
Heyer turned to hold Grant’s eyes for a long while before he spoke. “Sometimes . . . when I sleep, I see things I believe to be memory fragments. But they feel more like dreams.”
“He dreams?” Grant asked.
Heyer closed his eyes and chose his words very carefully. “I cannot say for sure if that is the case.”
Grant heard him but his interest didn’t waver. “What are the dreams about?”
Heyer shrugged sadly. “Finding meaning in a dream is difficult enough when it is your own; the dreams of a man I never met are almost a complete mystery to me.”
“But, does nothing stand out?”
Heyer studied the desperation in Grant’s eyes, something the man had always made such effort to hide. While he wasn’t lying to the man, there was a belief he was letting Grant cling to hope by telling him these selective truths. Heyer had lived thousands of years and he didn’t know if what he did was cruel or merciful. What he did know, was that they were getting very close to the questions that the doppelganger had been unable to come to terms with.
“Fishing. Camping. I think he may have greatly enjoyed the outdoors,” Heyer said. “He often dreams of walking along streams in the woods. Casting his line into the water. Sitting around campfires with people he knew. Most of the faces are strangers to me.”
“Most?”
“Sometimes I recognize other Rangers from his time in the service. People he worked with,” Heyer said.
“Douglas Tibbs?” Grant asked.
“Yes, yes he is amongst them,” Heyer said.
“They were friends, Douglas and my father?”
“I do not need the dream to tell you that was so.”
Grant was quiet for a while.
“Douglas was there,” Grant said. “He lied about what happened.”
“Yes,” Heyer frowned. Was this the reason? Was this why Grant was so predisposed to hate Tibbs and his son? Up until a moment ago, Grant only knew that the last day his father led a normal life was the day Douglas Tibbs walked out of the desert telling lies about what happened.
“It was not his fault, Grant. He lied to cover up what he had seen that night. But he did everything he could to save Holloway. And after he understood what my purpose was in that desert, he agreed to tell a lie. The truth was not really much of an option. You can imagine how such a story would have gone for him. Instead, he said Holloway died and that there was nothing left of the body. Years later,
I removed any records of his account.”
Grant considered that for a moment. “Will you tell me what really happened that night?”
Heyer took a long breath. “Twenty years ago—I went looking for your father in the Libyan Desert. There was, something I intended to give him but nothing went as planned.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
JONATHAN LISTENED TO Heyer recount the night he had met their fathers. He’d already heard the story from the alien’s point of view. Well—his father had, and so Jonathan knew it from inherited memory.
He suspected that once Grant heard it all for himself, he was going to ask the same question Douglas had before either of them had been born.
How did it go so wrong?
When a human asks a being like Heyer such a question, there are really two things being asked at once.
What is the explanation for the sequence of events?
What is your excuse?
If you were Jonathan Tibbs or his father, you’d already come to terms with the second of these questions. The answer was simple. The Borealis were no better than mankind. Of the two living Borealis the younger accepted this and the older raged against it. It was why one sought humility and the other proclaimed himself a god.
The thing was, few men who learned of the Borealis ever saw the trail of failures left in their wake. Those that did were—disillusioned to say the least.
Heyer and Malkier’s initial attempts to keep the Ferox species alive were never perfect. When Heyer arrived to implant Holloway, the Ferox’s arrival was the first thing to go wrong.
Heyer had knelt over the unconscious Holloway and activated the Alpha Slayer implant. Unbeknownst to him—or her, at the time—a gateway carrying a Ferox opened the moment the first thread of alien tech reached for the open wound Heyer was cutting into Holloway’s skin.
The Never Army Page 40
