“They are both off system as well,” he finally reported. “You were right, they probably got hit by the gas. By the time you got there it must have dissipated enough so that you didn’t go down right away.”
“At least they’re not hurt. I’m going in to investigate,” Gavin informed him.
“Wait until I get there. I don’t want you going in alone. It could be dangerous,” Dillon warned.
“Fine, but hurry.”
Gavin stamped his tingling feet, trying to get them to wake up while he waited for Dillon to arrive. How had this happened? He ran through possible explanations in his head. A massive fluctuation in the energy levels would have done it, something similar to what happened when Adan used it in Oasis the first time. But Gavin had put in failsafes since then. Maybe the algorithm generator had gone bad, or maybe the celerium was acting up again. It could have been one of a hundred other things as well.
Eventually, he grew so frustrated churning over hypothetical scenarios that he decided to check the logs. He started searching for any clues as to why Halerin had gone off system. The only detail that stood out as unusual was the fact that he had gone to the cargo bay to check on some problems the technicians were having assembling one of the new vapors. He could have done that from the Command Center, but Halerin liked to interact with people face to face as much as possible. He said it made him feel more like a Sentient, more human.
Unlike the esolace in Oasis, the Maven’s logs were not exhaustive. They did not record Halerin’s thoughts, but they did record his words and what he saw. The last thing he laid eyes on was the hallway between the cargo bay and the Command Center. Gavin checked to see if any other Sentients had been present, anyone who might have seen what happened to him, but the passage had been empty; he had been alone.
Three microslices passed before Dillon arrived. Two new technicians trailed behind him as he exited the ramp. Both of them wore cutter gloves and held oscillathes. Gavin thought it a bit unnecessary, but it was probably best to err on the side of caution.
When they arrived at the door, Gavin saw the other technicians lying stretched out on the floor. The room looked the same as he remembered it except for several empty tubes on top of a table. Those must have been the ones filled with namarin. He was about to check the labels when he noticed the celerium core in the corner of the room. The chronotrace that was supposed to be on top of it was gone.
He rushed over to see if it had fallen behind the column. Splotches of dark red blood glistened on the floor at the base of the core.
“No…” the word escaped Gavin’s lips as he went around the back of the column. The lifeless body of Halerin lay slumped against it.
Twenty-Nine
A Hard Decision
Gavin leaned over the table. A dizzy spell came over him, but it wasn’t the namarin gas this time. It was the sight of his dead friend.
He didn’t bother looking up when Dillon and the others rushed over. There were gasps, confused questions, but Gavin barely heard them. He wandered inside his own mind, spinning in a gyre of despair. What had happened? What had gone wrong?
By the time he came out of his mental and emotional spiral, the cart carrying the body of Halerin was floating into the hallway, accompanied by the technicians. Anders and Quinn, who had first arrived on the scene, were revived and sent on their way after some brief questioning. Gavin and Dillon were left alone in the lab.
Though Dillon had purified the air in the room, nothing could expunge the intangible dread which hung over it. It was tasteless, odorless, and invisible, but it made Gavin’s skin pale and his heart beat slowly and painfully. It was the emptiness and enduring chill which comes from death, like wind rushing through a hole in his stomach.
Dillon’s stare bored into the empty tubes, an angry light smoldering in his eyes.
“How could this happen?” he asked. “We’re all Sentients here. Anyone on this ship would give his life for anyone else. It doesn’t make any sense. Could it have been one of the Waymen?”
Only some of the Sentients knew about the Waymen before they came on board and Dillon wasn’t one of them. Even so, he didn’t pose the question in an accusatory manner. Like Gavin, he was just grasping for answers. But why would the Waymen attack Halerin? What did they possibly have to gain by doing so?
While Dillon struggled through his own mental fog, Gavin began to come out of his.
He used the esolace to bring up the lab records. It only took a moment to find what he was looking for.
“I just checked the portal access history, Dillon,” he reported. “There is no record of Halerin entering the lab all day.”
“Do you think he was killed before he came in?” Dillon wondered.
“No, there’s no sign of blood in the hallway or anywhere else in the lab for that matter. I think he was killed in this lab.”
“He must have disconnected his bioseine from the esolace. That’s the only reason I can think of why the system doesn’t record him entering. But why would he do that?”
“Maybe he was forced.” As thoughts flew between them, Gavin’s intuition latched onto something. “And there is only one person who would have done something like that, and he’s not a Sentient or a Wayman.”
It took Dillon a moment to catch on. “Wait, Kelm? But why? Do you think he got in another fight?”
“No, I’m guessing he brought Halerin in here on purpose. Kelm was desperate to find out about his past. Maybe he decided to take things into his own hands. He could have forced Halerin to use the chronotrace and then killed him after he got what he wanted. He might have taken the chronotrace so that no one would find out what he discovered.”
Dillon ran another mental check through the esolace.
“Are you sure? Halerin’s mental signature doesn’t show up on the Maven’s system as accessing the chronotrace either.”
“You see these tubes left out on the table? Whoever opened them didn’t even bother tampering with the labels or removing them. Only two of them were filled with namarin. The other three, when mixed together, form vexam, a hypnotic, hallucinatory drug. It can be used to implant suggestions in the mind of someone affected by it. Kelm said he was some sort of scout in an army. If so, he might have known how to create vexam. If he drugged Halerin, he could have convinced him to connect directly to the chronotrace without using the esolace and we would never know about it.”
“Do you really think Kelm was capable of something that meticulous? He didn’t seem like his mind was all that together.”
“Sometimes madness conceals extreme cunning. And who knows just how much of his instability was feigned and how much of it was real,” Gavin conjectured.
“But he saved your life, didn’t he? Why would he turn around and kill Halerin?” Dillon gripped the edge of one of the tables so hard his knuckles turned white. Halerin and Dillon had been in the same Sentient cell together after the fall of Oasis. The memories of their time together flashed through Dillon’s mind. Halerin had saved Dillon’s life on more than one occasion and now his friend was dead.
Gavin couldn’t help but feel that he was to blame. He had promised to help Kelm, but have gotten wrapped up in rescuing the Werin and finding Adan. If he had never mentioned the chronotrace to Kelm in the first place, maybe this never would have happened.
Now Halerin was dead because of his mistake. It should have been Gavin lying with his head split open against the core, not Halerin.
“Security, there’s been an incident in the cargo bay,” came a message from one of the technicians, shattering the morbid stillness of Gavin’s thoughts.
Dillon and Gavin shot out the doorway, starting to run before even answering back. The cargo bay was not far, at the opposite end of the hallway from the lab.
“What is it?” Dillon asked.
“I just came in with another technician to take over for one of the night shift teams and we found all four mechanics passed out. They seem okay, but they won’t wake up.”
Dillon and Gavin picked up their speed. A quick mental check of the system showed traces of namarin in the air supply in the bay.
“We’re on our way, but you should get out of there for now. There may be an enemy in that area,” Dillon advised. “We’ll meet you outside the main entrance.”
The gas had probably dissipated by now, but Dillon accessed the vent system in the cargo bay and set it to recycle just to be sure. He also called for a security team of six Sentients to head to the bay, but he and Gavin got there first.
They met the men who had sent the initial alert as they left through the main entrance. A zoetic scan of the area through the esolace, as well as a more rudimentary physical search, failed to detect the presence of anyone else inside the bay beyond the four unconscious technicians.
They called in some medical personnel to revive the mechanics. While they waited for them to arrive, Gavin went out and questioned the two men who reported the incident. He learned nothing more during the brief interrogation other than that one of the citus’ was missing from the cargo bay.
He called up to the Command Center and had them scan to see if there were any ships in the area. They reported the departure of a citus a full slice earlier speeding northwards, but it was out of scanning range now.
“Did you try to make contact with the ship as it left?” Dillon asked Nance, who, since his return from captivity on the Persepolis, had been assisting Halerin in the Command Center.
“Yes,” Nance replied. “But he wouldn’t respond. We did get a visual though. It was Kelm. We didn’t think it was worth risking one of our ships to go out after him, though, especially since he was on a citus. We’d never catch him.”
“I see,” Gavin answered. “Thank you for the information.”
Dillon shook his head. “He’s gone for good, isn’t he?”
“There is a way we can find him,” Gavin came back.
“How?” Dillon looked over at Gavin, his eyes blinking rapidly.
“The chronotrace.”
“But Kelm took it.”
Gavin smiled, renewed hope taking the edge off his numbness. “Yes, but the chronotrace is still inside my head. I can build another.”
Halerin’s death cast a shroud of darkness over the Maven, but the rescue of the Welkin lessened it somewhat. The operation into the Catacombs went better than expected. That part of the Viscera had suffered only minor quakes and the Welkin living there had all been brought on board, eighty-five more people joining the ship’s population. Though frightened and confused at first at the sight of the enormous praxis cruiser, being reunited with their friends and family helped make it easier to adjust to life in the floating fortress.
Now Gavin sat in the commissary, surrounded by friends at the end of a savory dinner of mosh, atol, and a tangy, stringy dish the Welkin called asada. This was the first time he had been able to share a meal with Senya and her children and he took great delight in the lighthearted interactions between them. Despite all that had happened to Senya’s boys, Jarem and Halel, and her daughter Lila, the children still held on to a settled innocence which Gavin found both remarkable and comforting.
Little Lila, who barely came up past her mother’s waist, had not seen her family for many days, living with family friends in the Catacombs. Yet she remained a bright-eyed, bubbly little girl who winked and made faces and snorted atol out her nose when overcome by fits of giggling.
The boys were a little more dour, but, in spite of having been pressed into hard labor, processing scrap for the Waymen in Hull, their eyes glowed with the embers of an unbroken spirit. Being reunited with their family was all they cared about. And their confidence in themselves and in their leaders to overcome any future threats to that union seemed unshakable.
“Numinae has protected us this far,” Jarem said at one point during the meal. “He will see us through to the end of days.”
“We can carve out a new home quickly in the Viscera with these machines, right mother?” Halel added.
“Oh, if we do, can I have my own room this time?” Lila piped up, her whistle-like voice rising above the noisy room.
Even Malloc was affected by the general mood pervading the celebratory dinner. In honor of Gavin’s role in rescuing his knit, the big man had deigned to share a table with him. He had yet to grumble or say a harsh word, though his face often clouded in a scowl whenever the children got too carried away. At any other time the Welkin leader would have reprimanded them for their lack of dignity, but today he let it pass.
Perhaps the presence of the Maneusis, the diminutive, wrinkled Welkin who shared the table with them, was another factor in Malloc’s docility on this occasion. This bent old holy man was short on stature, but long on the respect he commanded among his people. The twinkle in his eye hinted that he perceived far more than he let on and that eye seemed to be upon Gavin every time he glanced his way.
The few times the Maneusis did speak, his words were full of wisdom. Gavin thought he heard echoes of Senya in his speech, or perhaps it was the other way around. Gavin drank in the words, finding them more fulfilling than anything that had been served at the meal. More than anything else that night he was looking for guidance, looking for some indication as to whether he should go through with what he had planned. And yet he could not confide in anyone about what those plans were. He knew what they would say if he did. He was a memorant, after all. Still, he wished he could tell someone.
Three days had passed since Kelm escaped and it had been a day and a half since Gavin had rebuilt the chronotrace. The trace of Kelm’s past was complete and now Gavin had the answers he’s been looking for, though they weren’t anything like what he had been expecting.
“Gavin, I think it’s time we retire to our rooms,” Senya’s voice spoke into his musings. He realized that he had been quiet for some time and that the celebration was winding down around him.
Senya rose, along with her three children, and made her way towards Gavin on the opposite side of the table. He stood to see them off.
“All right, then,” Gavin muttered, recovering his senses enough to go through the motions of returning their embraces.
Malloc had actually left a little earlier, after having eaten three times more than anyone else at the table and claiming the need to ‘walk it off.’ Only the Maneusis remained seated, gazing at Gavin and Senya as they exchanged their goodbyes.
“Do you have any games we can play in this big metal ball?” Lila asked. “It gets kinda boring around here, you know.”
“Lila, shh,” her mother chided. “If you need something to do, I’m sure Gavin could find some work for you.”
Gavin gave a distracted smile in their general direction. “I’ll see all of you again soon,” he said, his eyes glazing over.
Lila’s eyebrows squiggled across her forehead. “What’s the matter with you, Mendigo? You look sleepy. Or maybe just woozy. You got too much mosh sloshing around in your belly or something?”
“No, no. My mind is just on other things,” Gavin said hastily, acutely aware of the odd looks the others were giving him. All, that is, except the Maneusis, whose expression rarely changed.
“He’s worried about Adan, Lila,” Senya said, touching his shoulder. “Do not worry, Gavin. Take your concerns to the Everlord. He will take care of Adan better than any of us ever could.”
“I hope so,” Gavin said, trying to sound optimistic. “It was a wonderful meal, Senya. Go enjoy your family.”
“I have you to thank for that.” She embraced him tightly one last time, then she and her children bowed respectfully to the Maneusis and made their way towards the exit. Lila gave Gavin one last mischievous wink before her brothers dragged her out the door.
The moment the door shut, the Maneusis rose and stood in front of Gavin.
“You have dark thoughts swirling around in that head of yours, my son,” said the elder, speaking in the Welkin tongue. “I have seen that look before.”
“Are you
saying you can read my mind?” Gavin asked, trying to make light of the man’s comments.
“I cannot read minds, but the well of the eyes rises up from the heart. It is not difficult to see the truth if one keeps his eyes open,” the Maneusis answered in his raspy voice which, if it were skin, would have been as wrinkled as his face.
Gavin hung his head. If anyone could give him advice about what he should do, he sensed that it would be this man. And yet, he dared not mention his plans.
“So when did you see this look?” Gavin asked.
“Before you left us the last time,” the man said softly.
Gavin could not bear to meet his eyes for fear he might give too much away. Though the Maneusis was certainly no memorant, he was in many ways just as perceptive.
“Well, times change,” he said, hedging his words, trying not to reveal too much.
“But the heart of a man does not. Not when it is set on a given path. And I believe you have been on this path ever since you left the city of your people.”
There was a long silence in which Gavin wished he could think of something to say, but all he wanted to do was leave. The Maneusis was right. The decision had already been made and every moment he stood there only delayed the inevitable.
“Go and do what it is that you must do,” said the Maneusis, his voice losing its rasp and becoming strangely resonant. “And may Numinae ever be your guide.”
The words of this shriveled little man somehow set Gavin free to make his decision. Even more than that, the fierce compassion in his eyes told Gavin that at least one of his worries, about who would take care of Senya and her family, could be laid to rest.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 92
