by M. R. Forbes
"It's okay, Thomas. I'm sure she hasn't done any damage. Let's just try to find her. She came to see me for a reason."
"Yes, sir."
"I'll start at the top, you start down here," Tio said. "If you find her, don't let her into my study." He hadn't closed his work, and he didn't need her stumbling across it and learning anything he didn't tell her personally.
"Yes, sir."
He took the more public lift to the top of his home, stepping out onto the floor. Everything was quiet.
Why had Admiral Narayan come? And why hadn't she stayed put in the library? Was she trying to spy on him? Their trust for one another was tenuous at best, but he didn't think she would go that far.
He made his way across a hallway, listening for motion from any of the rooms. The top floor of his home was composed mainly of staff quarters. It was also where Min's room was located, kept close to the nurses who cared for her.
Tio paused. Would she? He growled as he hurried his pace, traversing past a number of rooms before closing in on Min's room. He didn't hear any voices here either. Maybe Thomas would find her wandering around on the ground floor?
Xin stepped out into the hallway. She smiled when she saw him. "Good morning, sir."
"Good morning, Xin. Tell me, have you seen a woman with a bionic hand wandering around up here?"
She nodded. "Yes, sir. She told me she was an acquaintance of yours, and that she had offered to sit with Min for you."
Tio's hands clenched into fists at his sides. "She told you that?" he said softly.
"I'm sorry, sir. Was she lying? You don't-"
"It's okay, Xin. It isn't your fault."
He didn't let people into his home he couldn't trust to at least be honest. He should have known better. Now that he knew the Alliance wasn't seeking to seize Asimov, he had let his paranoia slip a little too much.
"How is she?" he asked.
"Min?"
"No, Admiral Narayan."
"Oh. She's very nice. She's so gentle with Min. I think Min likes her."
Tio's emotions ranged from angry to excited. "Likes her? Did she wake?" He was hopeful. Too hopeful.
"No, sir. I just mean, she seems to be comforted by her voice. Maybe it reminds her of her mother."
"Perhaps," Tio said. How Min could want to hear anything that sounded like her mother after what her mother had tried to do was beyond his understanding. "Thank you, Xin."
She bowed to him and went on her way. Tio stood outside the door for a moment composing himself. Storming in and chewing the Admiral out for showing compassion would be foolish. Even so, he wasn't sure about her true motives for the visit. Was she confirming that he really did have a sick child? Did she think he had made it up to explain his long absence?
Was it possible she was simply being kind?
He had read her report. He doubted kindness was the only factor driving her visit.
He entered quietly, standing off to the side where Millie couldn't see him. She was sitting on the stool, her robotic hand running along Min's arm. It vibrated softly against the skin.
Min was smiling.
He had been prepared to yell at her when he saw the mechanical hand touching his child. He had gone to great lengths to set up her treatment so that she wasn't covered in robotic equipment. So that she could maintain as much dignity as possible. He had been ready to storm in right after he had decided to be calm, ordering her to remove the cold metal from his daughter and get out of his house.
Instead, he froze, standing out of sight and watching her move her hand slowly up and down Min's narrow arm while she sang softly to his child. It was a simple song, an old lullaby that he had heard somewhere once.
He felt the tears warming his cheeks. There was a part of him that still held the warmth of humanity. It threatened to overwhelm him, and he clenched his eyes tight while he fought to return it to the depths. He had a job to do.
He took one last breath, wiped his eyes, and moved into the room. Millie looked up as he entered, but she didn't immediately stop singing or stroking his daughter's arm.
"Tio," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't stay in the library. I wanted to meet Min."
He struggled to stay calm as he spoke. "I was angry with you, Admiral until I saw her face."
"I know what you think of me, Tio. And you know what I think of you. I want to call a truce between us, for the sake of what is really at stake in all of this. This isn't just a war to save humankind. This is a war to save our humanity. I realized that last night as I fell asleep. Why else would the fate of our civilization come to rest in the hands of killers, rapists, addicts, and failures? Why else would it all be in the hands of the broken?"
"That's a very emotional perspective, Millie. Unfortunately, that makes it inherently flawed."
"How so?"
"For one, Mitchell isn't truly broken. The system around him is, and it was that system that created his position. For another, the Tetron are also just as broken. Their interest in humanity is purely self-serving."
"A very analytical perspective, Tio. Maybe there's a space in between where the truth sits."
Tio nodded. "I'll accept that. And your offer of a truce."
How could he not, with the way Min was responding to her? His heart was melting despite itself, and he had to remind himself not to let it thaw too far. It would put everything he had worked for, everything he wanted, in jeopardy. Let them have their peace for now. He would do what he had to do when the time came.
Millie held out her human hand. Tio took it, and they shook.
"Since you're here," Tio said, "there is something you may be able to help me with."
It wasn't the truce that had him reconsidering his earlier position regarding Katherine Asher. It was the sheer volume of the data he had recovered, and the amount of man-hours it would take to sift through it all.
"How can I help?" she asked.
"Follow me."
54
"This is an impressive setup," Millie said, standing in the center of Tio's study.
"You haven't even seen it yet," Tio replied. He moved his hands, and the projectors and lasers turned on.
"Unidentified user detected," the system said a moment later. "Please authorize."
Tio approached a touchscreen and entered his command keys.
"User authorized."
"Resume session," Tio said.
Two folders appeared in front of them, one labeled "No," the other "Yes."
"What is this?" Millie asked, marveling at the system. It was like being inside a p-rat, instead of standing on the outside and looking in.
"Katherine Asher," Tio said. "I used the images of her your team discovered to search my bigger data stores. These are the hits the query resolved. I've already started going through them, but I need help."
Millie moved her hand, opening the "No" folder. The system was similar to the projection table on Goliath, making her use of it intuitive.
"That definitely is not her," she said, pausing on the image of the sexual encounter. She laughed as she closed the folder.
"I still have quite a number of unsorted images and videos to sift through. Shall we?"
Millie nodded. "Let's do it."
They began looking through the data, Tio facing one-half of the circle and Millie facing the other. Tio resumed his machine-like tirelessness in reviewing the images and video, moving the media to what he believed was the proper location. He lost track of the time once more, only pausing when they had finished emptying the result set into one folder or another.
He checked the time then. Four hours had passed. It would have taken him at least eight on his own.
"Do you want to stop to eat?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Time's wasting."
"Agreed. Let's add another level," Tio said, creating two new folders. "Very Likely" and "Not Likely."
"One more folder," Millie said, creating one of her own. "Unsure."
"Yes, you're right."
<
br /> They picked up the work again, taking a second pass through the potentials. Now that they had narrowed down the original query, the work went much faster. They were half an hour into it when Millie tapped him on the shoulder.
"Tio, take a look at this."
He turned around to see her side of the projection. She had brought a video front and center. It was dim and grainy, but there was a clear shot of Katherine's face in the frame, along with a second woman who looked nearly identical to her.
"That's Christine Arapo," Millie said.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. Absolutely."
"What is this video?"
"A security camera at an underground parking garage. This was recorded before repulsers were in common use, see the wheels on the cars."
"Interesting. What's the date?"
"May nineteen, two thousand fifty-five. Only a few months before Goliath launched."
"Good find, Admiral. Play media."
The recording began to play. It started with a car driving down into the garage and moving past the camera. The faces of the two women were blurry in this shot, but still recognizable.
The car vanished out of the shot. A minute had passed before a second car moved past the camera. A few more minutes passed, and then both Katherine and Christine came back into view.
"Wait, go back," Tio said. "Pause and reverse two seconds, step frames point five delay."
The video went back and then flipped through each frame one at a time.
"What are we looking for?" Millie asked.
"You didn't see it?"
"No."
Katherine's eyes shifted directly to the camera.
"Pause," Tio said.
Millie smiled. "She put them in the view of the camera on purpose."
"Yes. Resume playback."
The scene continued. A few moments later a man appeared opposite the women. He was thin, with a hunched posture and a messy appearance. He glanced around nervously while he reached into his pocket and took out what appeared to be a badge of some kind.
"Pause," Tio said again. He moved his hands, focusing on the badge and taking a shot of it. "I'll run that through a cleaning algorithm. We may be able to get the text off it."
"It looks like it has a picture of Katherine on it."
"Or Christine." They were almost identical.
Katherine reached into her pocket and retrieved something for the man. Tio recognized it immediately. A payment card, used to transfer large sums of money in private.
"They paid him for the badge," Tio said.
The man took the payment, handed over the badge, and backed away from the camera. Katherine and Christine stood there while the second car passed by again, exiting the garage. A minute later the car they had arrived in came into view. It stopped for them, and they climbed into the rear. The car drove away.
"Stop playback," Tio said.
"Someone else was with them," Millie said. "Someone who was hiding from the other guy."
"Yes. It would be interesting to know who."
"How long will it take to get information on the badge?"
"Not long. Let's look through the other media. Perhaps there is something that will reveal who the third party is. If they are with Katherine and Christine, they must have some knowledge of Goliath and the Tetron."
"That isn't necessarily true. We can assume for now that it is."
They returned to the task at hand, continuing to sort through the images and videos. The badge information came back before they had discovered anything else of interest.
"I have the results on the badge," Tio said, sliding the enhanced version between them.
"Nova Taurus," Millie said. "It looks like the name of a company." She looked under the photo. "Kathleen Amway. Science department."
"It's an access card. They bought their way into Nova Taurus."
"Whatever Nova Taurus is."
"Yes. An interesting, and likely important discovery. Let's put this into a new folder." Tio created it, calling it 'Verified.' "We can go deeper into the branches once we've finished with the trunk."
"Yes," Millie agreed.
They spent another hour looking through the remaining files. There were only four left in Tio's stack, and he was beginning to wonder if the single surveillance recording would be the only clue they would find. Not that it was a weak clue. In fact, it provided a third name, a name that may have been used by Christine Arapo, Origin, in the years following the launch of the Goliath. Searching the name Kathleen Amway the way he had Katherine Asher would take time they didn't have. He still needed to help Bethany and Watson dig into the trove of data to locate his brother.
He was about to open the last file when he heard Millie gasp.
"It can't be," she said.
He turned his head to look at her. She was frozen in place, her face pale, her hand quivering. He turned his attention to the projection. She had paused another grainy video on a single frame. Christine Arapo was in the foreground, again clearly looking up at the camera.
"What is it?" Tio said.
"A video," Millie replied softly. "It was captured on the street in New York City, near Times Square. She walks right past it, and you can see she's looking at the camera again."
"It almost seems like she's looking directly at us with the way she tilted her head," Tio said.
"Yes."
"Does anything else happen?"
"No."
"Then what has you so out of sorts, Admiral?"
Millie looked at him. Then she moved her hand, zooming in on a face in the crowd behind Christine.
"This is bad, Tio. This is really bad."
Tio stared at the face, feeling his stomach begin to churn. All of his security measures. All of his efforts to stay hidden. All of his concerns about the Tetron finding Asimov and ruining everything he had worked to build. All of the time they had spent working to preserve his massive archive of data.
Was it all for nothing?
The face in the crowd was following Catherine. Watching her. Keeping its distance, though he had a feeling she knew the man was there, and that she had crossed the view of the camera to warn them, here and now, hundreds of years in the future of a loop in time that wouldn't occur for her for a number of years too great to count.
A heavy face, with small eyes and a mop of unruly hair. A face that wore an expression Tio couldn't even imagine seeing on Corporal Watson in his current incarnation.
"We need to handle this quickly, without revealing what we know," Tio said, forcing himself to approach the revelation with procedural calm.
The projection turned off.
All of the lights went out.
"I don't think that's going to happen," Millie said.
55
The universe expanded in front of the Avalon, stars spreading wide and revealing a smaller dwarf a million kilometers out ahead of the ship's bow.
"We're here," Germaine said.
Mitchell watched the screens, his hands tense on the controls for the cruiser's weapons systems. There had been no way to ensure the Tetron didn't know about this location, and they couldn't afford to take chances.
The screens were mostly clear. Three ships were already there, floating in the space around them. The Avalon's computer picked them up as Tio's.
The Goliath wasn't here.
"It's been ten days," Mitchell said. "They should have been here."
"Maybe it took longer than they thought? Anyway, six days to exit followed by a three-day jump. I think it's too soon to worry."
"Avalon, this is Concord."
Germaine smiled. "Concord, this is Avalon. Sammish, am I right to assume you got Mr. Tio's message?"
"Germaine? Yep, we got the message. From what I know, the whole fleet's going to be gathering here."
"That's right. Everyone who can get here in time. We've got work to do."
"You bet. Is Tio with you?"
"No," Germaine said. "He was on his own
to leave Asimov and meet us here. I take it you haven't heard from him?"
"I didn't expect to. I guess there's nothing for us to do but wait. I can't believe we're siding with the frigging Alliance on this operation. Those worthless pricks can't do anything without someone to hold their-"
"Concord, this is Colonel Mitchell Williams, Alliance Space Marines," Mitchell said, cutting Sammish off before he could say something he would regret.
Germaine laughed into his hand while the other man froze.
"We have some wounded," Mitchell continued. "Do you have a Medical module on board?"
"Negative, Colonel," Sammish replied. "I think Dervish might."
"This is Dervish," a new, female voice said. "Colonel, we have a module. It's three generations behind, though. Is the injury serious?"
"That depends on your definition. One of my soldiers had half their face shot off."
There was silence on the channel.
"Kylie, this is Germaine. Do you mind if I bring Avalon around to your docking bay?"
"As long as you're being literal I'll prepare the interlock. If this is another one of your lame innuendos you can go to hell."
"Heh. I just came from there. I'm not eager to go back." Germaine manipulated the controls, turning the ship in the direction of a larger, more chunky trawler.
"Kylie's a good captain," Germaine said, shutting off the comm. "She's got a chip on her shoulder, though. Something to prove. You know the type. Anyway, we had this thing this one time. We didn't sleep together. Well, we almost slept together. I was this close." He laughed, spreading his fingers apart. "Tio called her away right before I made my move."
"So you're saying you were about to ask her to have a drink with you?" Mitchell said.
Germaine shrugged. "What? She might have said yes. A couple drinks, some good conversation, a little extra Germaine charm, you never know what could have happened."
"I can guess."
"Shut up."
"It'll be nice to get Cormac into a medi-bot, and to get cleaned up a bit."
Germaine turned his head, sniffing himself. "Yeah. I reek like last century's dirty laundry."
Mitchell slid out of the co-pilot seat. "I'll go get Cormac ready to move out. Don't hit anything."
