by S. A. Lusher
“No, it’s fine,” Greg replied, walking past him.
He felt weird as he walked across the sun-drenched parking lot. There were a few SI personnel out and about, coming and going, and they glanced at him in the same way the first guy had. Jeez, did he really look that dangerous? He suppose it was a good thing. The average person wouldn’t bother you if you looked dangerous. Of course, it did attract a certain kind of asshole that had to prove how tough they were.
Right now, Greg just wanted to be left alone.
He made his way in through the front doors and into the lobby, scanning the immediate area. He sighed when he realized he was looking for threats. Force of habit that was extremely useful in his line of work. As he crossed the room, approaching the front desk, he suddenly wondered what the fuck it was he thought he was going to do if this actually worked out. Join SI again? It seemed to have worked for Kyra.
“Hello, sir. I understand you’re with Special Operations,” the man behind the desk said. Well, it made enough sense that the kid had called ahead. Everyone covered their ass. “We were not informed of your arrival. What can we help you with?”
“Oh, I’m not here on, uh, business. I need to speak with someone. Kyra Mercer.”
The man began to respond, but stopped as an all too familiar voice cut through the air. “Greg?” He slowly turned to his left.
There she was, suddenly, maybe fifteen feet away. It looked like she was just passing through the lobby, but now she stood frozen, staring at him with those blue eyes of hers.
“Greg...what are you doing here?” she asked. He had honestly never seen her look so surprised or at a loss for what to say.
“I...need to talk to you,” he replied cautiously.
She blinked several times, then looked around quickly and started approaching him. “Um...fine, come on,” she replied.
He turned and followed her across the lobby, through a door, down a hallway and through another door. They came out to a brick path that led away from the building, into a fenced in area, a garden, complete with flowerbeds, trees, a little pond with koi fish and a small stream that wound its way through the area.
It looked empty at the moment and they walked over to a bench. She sat down and he sat down beside her.
“I’m sorry to just show up like this, I...haven’t been having the best time. And I needed to see you,” he said.
“I...it’s okay. I’m just surprised. What...what happened, after I left?”
He laughed. “Well, that’s a long, classified story. The short version is we shut down Rogue Ops, saved the galaxy and then formed up a special division to deal with unique threats, like the shit we were dealing with. I faced down the same things we fought on Dis. Trent and Enzo are dead. We’ve added some new players into the mix...” he trailed off, having a hard time getting around to why he was here. Instead he tried to delay it.
“What about you? What happened to you after you left?” he asked.
“I...god, this is a lot. Trent and Enzo are dead? How’s Drake handling it? What happened?”
“Enzo betrayed us, Trent got killed as an indirect result of it. Drake...is managing. He’s managing better than some of us, surprisingly.”
“Fuck...” she whispered. “I, um...I came here, after I left. I had Hawkins ship me here. I’d always intended to get transferred here. Everyone kept talking about it, but I got shipped out to Dis instead. Um...Hawkins pulled some strings, got me a job here. I was Security for the first couple of months, but I felt like I could be doing more, so I switched over to Investigations. And that’s...basically been my life ever since. What happened? Obviously something happened, otherwise you wouldn’t be here like this,” she asked.
Greg sighed. “This is going to sound insane, but you’ve trusted me before, so I’m just going to say, I’m telling the truth. Due to a really, really unique situation, I got my head cut off and remained conscious during the entire event. Hawkins managed to get to me in time, before the...unique situation keeping me alive came to an end, and reattached it. I’ve been going through therapy and surgery over the past month or so.”
“How in the hell...nevermind, I don’t want to know. I believe you,” she murmured. “And I’m sorry. I can’t...I don’t even know what to say to that beyond, I’m sorry you had to go through that. But, that still doesn’t answer why you’re here,” she added, cutting to the meat of the situation as she always had before.
He chewed on his lip for a moment, suddenly nervous. More than nervous, seriously afraid. Now was the moment of truth.
“When you left, you told me that because of my addiction to dangerous situations, we couldn’t be together. That it wouldn’t be fair for either of us to ask the other to stay. And you were right. But, I...I’m not sure I could go on another mission like that again, and you know I don’t have anything else. Without my memories, the only two things in my life I’ve ever given a shit about are my life with my friends there and...you.”
A slow, dawning kind of realization spread across Kyra’s face. “Oh, Greg...you don’t...” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, let it out. “You came here to get back together with me.”
“Yes...Kyra, I never stopped loving you. I want-”
Kyra opened his eyes. “Greg,” she said, raising her hand, “stop. Just stop.” She turned her hand around and for the first time he noticed it. She had a ring on her third finger.
“I’m engaged,” she said quietly.
Greg felt his self control slip a notch. “You’re...engaged?”
“Yes. We met a month after I started working here and started dating and...he proposed to me just last month.”
“But...” Greg stood up suddenly, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. “Kyra, I love you! I came all the way here-”
She shot to her feet and stared directly into his eyes, her gaze hard and flat. “Greg, I know you and I know you’re better than this. Stop being a selfish fuck,” she said, her voice calm and somewhat dangerous.
“Selfish!? What the fuck-” he began.
“What did you expect me to do, Greg!? Did you expect me to just stay single for the rest of my life on the fucking off chance that you’d get tired of your job and show up here and pronounce your love?! Did you do that?! Did you wait? Don’t answer, because it doesn’t matter. Something goes wrong and you just decide that you’re going to come find me and hook back up? Greg, I know you probably didn’t mean it to be like this, I’m sure you didn’t, and I’m sorry for what you went through, but that’s incredibly selfish.”
“Kyra-”
She shook her head angrily. “Nowhere is it written in the stars that we were destined to be together, Greg. We aren’t soul mates, you aren’t the only one for me, I’m not the only one for you. We met, we fell in love, it didn’t work out. That’s not our fault. It’s not your fault or my fault, that’s just the way the chips fell. But you know what would be our fault? If we tried to force the relationship to work. That would be our fault.”
Greg didn’t know want to say.
Her words were like a cold splash of water across his anger and hurt. She was right. She was right about everything.
Her features softened and she lowered her voice. “Greg, I really am sorry that you’re in this situation. I never wanted you to be hurt. Don’t think this is easy for me. Leaving you was...it was really difficult, and it hurt like hell, but it was the right thing to do. I still believe that, and I think you do, too. But I can’t help you. I had to move on, and you need to do the same thing.”
He still didn’t know what to say. In a way, it felt like his life was falling down around him, turning to ash in his hands.
Kyra stepped forward and hugged him, just briefly, then stepped back. “Goodbye, Greg…and good luck.”
She started walking back towards the SI Headquarters. Greg watched her go, still feeling the phantom impression of her hug.
He stood there for a long time.
He was lost.
* * * * *
Awake again.
Allan felt like he was lost in a sea of groggy, incoherent confusion. He couldn’t move, not an inch. His whole body was numb, like he’d been put on ice for several days. It was a struggle to open his eyelids and his senses were feeding him distorted bits of information. He was moving, he could at least piece together that much.
Around him, he saw metal and bleak, bright lights.
He was strapped down to something, lying on his back, being rolled somewhere.
The sensations began to slip away and he was thrust back into a world of darkness.
CHAPTER 02
–Bleak Horizons–
It was still raining.
Callie watched the speedship come down from dark, gray skies. A cold dislocation had settled over her since putting the call in. It was the same feeling she’d endured when watching that strange silver ship disappear into the far horizon with Allan onboard. A kind of frantic mania had taken over not long after that, forcing her to move through the corpse-strewn corridors of the black castle, digging for intelligence on where that fucking AI might be going and how to stop it. She’d found that data, what little of it there was to find, and had put in the call to Hawkins to come get her, updating him on the situation.
Unfortunately, he was still twelve hours out.
So she’d dug through the database as much as she could, but it had hardly yielded anything at all. The information was too corrupted, both by time and poor maintenance. All she’d been able to pull out was that Erebus had two more facilities even deeper beyond the Far Reach. All she had for them were coordinates. No idea what was out there, what kind of environment they might be built in, what kind of forces might be guarding them, local wildlife, atmosphere, gravity. Nothing. All she had were some coordinates.
But it was enough.
The speedship settled down in one of the courtyards big enough to support it. Callie started walking towards it, her whole body feeling sluggish and heavy. She felt like she could sleep for years and honestly, part of her wanted to. The situation she found herself was so stressful that some of her just wanted to shut down. She didn’t want to face it. But the rest of her forced her on. She knew that she couldn’t do that.
She had to keep going.
Callie cycled through the airlock, listening to the sounds of it as it matched atmospheres. When the inner doors opened, she stepped out into the small receiving bay beyond and patched her comms into that of the speedship’s.
“I’m in, we can go,” she said.
“Got it. Are you okay? Are you the only one?” She recognized the voice of Amy Weller.
“I’m the only one. I’m physically undamaged,” Callie replied.
It wasn’t technically true. She was bruised and some of her joints felt pretty strained and she had an awful headache, but all of that was nothing compared to some of the injuries she’d endured before. Or how she was feeling right then emotionally.
“Okay...I’m taking off now. Come up and see me,” Weller said.
“On my way.”
Callie made her way slowly through the small vessel. There was a lot to do: brief Hawkins, visit the infirmary to make sure she didn’t have any serious internal injuries, prep for the next mission, shower, inventory her supplies, somehow find time to eat a huge meal because she was fucking starving…
Too much to do.
As she came onto the bridge, she felt the ship shuddering as it lifted off and began exiting the planet’s atmosphere. She came to stand beside Weller, staying silent as she worked the controls and guided them offworld.
“What happened? Where the hell is Allan?” Weller asked. “Hawkins didn’t tell me anything, just that I had to come down here and pick you up.”
“The others are dead, Allan was captured.”
“Oh fuck,” Weller replied. “We’re going after him, right?”
“Yes,” Callie said firmly, staring at the thinning atmosphere beyond the windows of the cockpit. “We’re going after him.”
* * * * *
Hawkins was waiting for her at the airlock.
“What do you have for me?” he asked, turning and leading her out of the receiving bay. The pair of them strode quickly through the network of corridors.
“Not a lot,” Callie admitted. “Two locations. Two places beyond the Far Reach. As far as I’ve been able to determine, they’re the only two other bases that Erebus has access to. It’s obviously going to take Allan to one of those two.”
They came into Hawkins’ office.
“We need to leave right away,” she said.
“Shit,” Hawkins muttered, sitting down and firing up his personal terminal. “Greg’s missing, Genevieve and Jennifer and Eve are all away on missions. Drake and Eric just left for another one. They’re investigating another break-in at a top secret research site...”
For a moment, the man looked lost, indecisive.
Callie felt a bolt of fear shoot through her as she suddenly wondered if Hawkins might consider Allan expendable.
She leaned forward. “Hawkins.” He looked up at her. “We’re going after him. We have to. We don’t have an option here. Recall them.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then slowly nodded. “Okay. Eve and Genevieve and Jennifer are too far out, we can’t wait for them to get here. But we can get Drake and Eric back. But Greg...he left yesterday, Callie. I don’t know if he’s going to come back.”
So he had gone through with it. She felt a twinge of guilt at the thought of asking for his help, but it was immediately extinguished by the knowledge that Allan was in an insane AI’s clutches. She would use every tool, every person at her disposal to get him back.
“I’ll talk to Greg. You get Drake and Eric back now,” she said, then hesitated, suddenly feeling weird that she was telling Hawkins what to do. He at least seemed to be humoring her and of a similar mind on the situation.
“We can’t leave him out there, and we can’t let Erebus run free,” she added, trying to take a few steps back.
“I know,” Hawkins replied. “I’ll call them back. And I’ll hunt down Greg’s current location and link him to your personal terminal.”
“Thank you.”
She turned and left his office, pushing away her hunger and her lethargy as she hurried through the corridors. Every single second that she spent preparing for the mission was another second that Allan was getting farther away from her, that Erebus was doing who knew what to him. She pushed herself faster, breaking into a light jog until she reached her quarters, sat down at her desk and fired up her personal terminal.
The chair groaned under her and she realized that she hadn’t even taken off her armor. Sighing, she stood up and finished bringing the terminal online. Activating the comm unit, she waited for Hawkins to finish tracking him down. A minute passed by. Callie began to pace around her room, the only sound was the distant hum of power, the soft respiration of oxygen being pushed in through the vents and the clanging of her boots.
Images began to fill her mind. Visions of Allan being tortured and maimed and flayed and cut open. She tried to push them out, tried to tell herself that something like this had always been a risk. Given the shit they normally dealt with, it was surprising that this kind of thing hadn’t actually happened before now.
But none of it helped.
None of it changed the fact that he was gone and she was about to go out of her fucking mind because of that.
Suddenly, her terminal came to life. Callie spun, marched across the room and hit the reply button. The screen cleared to show Greg’s face.
He looked like shit. He was pale, gaunt. There were deep bags under his eyes and they were bloodshot and puffy, like he’d been crying.
“Callie...what happened?” he asked. He looked exhausted and worried, like he’d just been woken up. “Hawkins told me there was some kind of emergency. What happened?”
“Allan’s been captured, Greg. By Erebus.”
Gr
eg was silent for several moments, staring long into the camera with wide eyes. Finally, he blinked several times and slowly shook his head. “No, that’s impossible. Erebus died. I saw to it personally. Well...I was there when it happened.”
“It’s not dead, Greg. It’s alive. Part of it escaped. And it has Allan. And...I know it’s so much to ask, but Greg, please, I need your help. We’re mounting a rescue mission and there’s already not enough of us. We need your help.”
He closed his eyes, reached up and massaged his temples for a long moment. She saw that his hand was trembling. “Okay,” he said, dropping his hand and opening up his eyes. “I’ll do it. I’ll come back. Tell Hawkins to get me to the Dauntless as fast as possible.”
“Thank you, Greg.”
“You’re welcome...try not to worry too much, Callie. We’ll get him back. We’ll stop Erebus. I’ll make sure of it. I promise.”
* * * * *
“So who do you think’s doing this?” Eric asked.
Drake glanced over from the pilot’s seat. The speedship was in FTL flight now and there was essentially nothing for him to do. Since they were running short on pilots just recently, Drake had taken the time to learn how to fly a speedship. Really, it wasn’t all that different from a lot of the other things he’d piloted.
“If only I knew the answer to that question, we wouldn’t have to waste time dicking around out here, dealing with these fucking government agents,” he replied, rolling his eyes.
Eric laughed. “Come on, I mean, theories. You guys were always going on about Dark Ops. Or I guess Rogue Ops.”
“No, they’re dead and buried. Whoever made it out alive from that thing is either in jail, in hiding or scattered to the solar winds doing grunt work. I feel pretty confident none of the brains survived that disaster.”
