by Glenn Smith
What the hell was wrong with these people, anyway?
One more stop. Then he could go shopping for some clothes, assuming any of the stores were still open. Otherwise he’d have to wear the same underwear tomorrow morning that he’d been wearing since he got dressed back on Window World. That had been roughly one entire day ago, plus whatever time he’d passed... in transit... between time periods, if any at all. Not a very pleasant prospect, regardless.
He stopped by the Billeting office to arrange for guest quarters for the two nights he’d be on station—finally, a squared-away troop who looked and acted in a professional manner—then rode a tram to the Mandela Rotunda, the station’s central shopping district. He found a few all-night shops open and bought a couple pairs of jeans, a few shirts, some underclothes and socks, and a pair of sneakers, and then bought a travel bag large enough to carry them all.
When he’d finished shopping he went back to the military billeting wing and grabbed a quick bite to eat at one of the dining facilities. They were significantly less crowded than all the touristy all-night restaurants at the Rotunda had been, just as he’d figured they would be, and the food, of course, was free for all military personnel. After he ate, he took his purchases to the quarters he’d been assigned to and put them away—a bit smaller than the ones he and Beth had stayed in, but good enough for him alone for two nights. He skimmed over the welcome letter he found on the desk and then took a long, warm shower—fortunately a wide assortment of hygiene and toiletry products came with the room, because he hadn’t even thought to buy any.
Then, finally, he went to bed.
Chapter 10
Friday, 13 May 2191
Having discarded his pajamas—even with the heat off and the window open the bedroom was too warm for to keep them on, but Heather was sleeping in the smaller bedroom across the hall and tended to get cold easily, so he’d resisted turning on the air conditioning—Former Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen lay on his back atop the blankets in his briefs, unable to sleep, hands folded behind his head atop the too-thin pillow, eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling. Not that he could actually see the ceiling in the pitch dark. The room was certainly quiet enough for sleep. So quiet, in fact, that he could actually hear the silence ringing softly and steadily in his ears. He felt tired enough, too, but his eyelids hadn’t begun to grow heavy and his mind was still racing full speed ahead—still filled with images as random and confusing as they were fleeting. And every time he closed his eyes to at least try to go to sleep he saw that holophoto plain as day in his mind, as though he were looking right at it, right there in front of him, and all the possible scenarios started flashing through his thoughts all over again.
Something told him he wasn’t going to be falling asleep anytime soon.
He looked over at the clock in the wall. 0137 hours. Great.
‘Lt D-G, 21 Mar 2168.’ Lieutenant Graves had actually made it. He’d actually traveled twenty-two back years through time and arrived in the year 2168. Alive. Even now, more than twelve hours after learning that, he still could hardly believe it, though it certainly pleased him to know for sure. Finally, after almost five months of wondering but not knowing, to know for sure. He and Liz had sent her brother Günter back what... seven years ago now, more or less?... and had never heard from him again. Eventually they’d been forced to accept the fact that they had lost him and... Well, he at least had accepted the fact. Liz, on the other hand, had never really come to terms with it and had continued to hold out hope, right to the end. Maybe she’d been right all along. If Lieutenant Graves had arrived alive, then maybe Günter had as well. Maybe he was back there right now, decades in the past, pursuing his mission—developing his cyberclones and preparing them for war. Maybe there was still a chance that he might make a difference.
But none of that had anything to do with him any longer, at least as far as the fleet was concerned. He wasn’t Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen, Chief of Solfleet Intelligence anymore. He was Mister Icarus Hansen now, Solfleet Vice-Admiral, retired. He was Nick, and all he could do was wait. Wait and continue to hope. In the meantime he certainly had enough to occupy his mind and his time in the here and now. For example...
Who had kidnapped Stefani O’Donnell and why? When he’d called Vicky after dinner, she’d told him that as far as she’d heard, no one had identified any suspects yet. Nor did anyone know if the young woman was even still alive. But Vicky wasn’t an agent. She was an executive secretary. More than that, she had been his executive secretary and everyone in the agency knew that. She held a high-level security clearance out of necessity, as in her position she had routine access to the most sensitive classified information, but no one was going to go out of their way to tell her anything she didn’t need to know. As a matter of fact, the agency as a whole would likely put additional measures into place to ensure she didn’t learn anything that he might be interested in finding out. If roles were reversed and he were the new agency chief, he’d make sure that was done. Vicky was a valuable employee. They would hold onto her and continue to trust her, but only up to a point.
Stefani O’Donnell. Who had abducted her, and assuming she was still alive, where were they holding her? And where was her father... assuming the man who’d recorded that message really was her father? The message. That unexpected message that had taken them all by surprise and had served as the seed that eventually grew into the Timeshift Resolution. Was he truly still alive or was the whole thing some sort of elaborate hoax? Had he really died with his crewmates when the starcruiser Excalibur was destroyed twenty-three years ago, or were the Veshtonn truly holding him captive somewhere deep inside their space?
The Veshtonn. What had driven the Sulaini to ally themselves with their old enemy? Did their hatred for their Cirran cousins really run so deep? Veshtonn blood-warriors and a Vul on the surface of Cirra. Who would have believed that such a thing would ever happen again? How had they made planetfall without being detected, and why had Lieutenant Graves’ memory-edit failed? Liz had taken all the proper steps to see to it that his memories of his and former Corporal Ortiz’s encounter with the Vul-Veshtonn on that dark, remote Cirran island had been removed and replaced with those of a more typical, less incriminating scenario. Ortiz’s edit had held—at least his best intelligence still indicated that it had—so why hadn’t Graves’? What was different about him? Why had his memories of the Vul-Veshtonn returned to him in his nightmares?
And, on the subject of memory-edits, had he undergone the procedure himself as well at some point in the past? It seemed likely, and he certainly couldn’t think of any other explanation for the discrepancy between memories and nightmares that he had experienced, logical or not. He alone had survived that horrible attack on Vice-President Harkam’s ship twenty-three years ago. That at least remained a well-documented fact. He knew that for sure. He’d checked. But when his nightmares had returned last year, Graves had appeared in them as the security police sergeant and second survivor, even though the SP sergeant who had really been there had been killed in action along with everyone else onboard. Two divergent sets of memories—a disparity identical to the one that Graves had had to deal with. Surely both sets of memories couldn’t be right. Those in which Graves appeared had to be artificial. He wasn’t thirty years old yet and that incident had occurred twenty-three years ago. He was only six at the time! But what were the chances of two memory-edits failing at the same time when there wasn’t a single reported case on the books of that ever happening before? Ever.
And finally, why? If he had undergone a memory-edit—and the longer he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he had—then why? What memories had been altered? Certainly not those relating to the Harkam incident. Not on purpose anyway. No one could have planted memories of an adult Dylan Graves into his mind intentionally. No, that was incidental. An unintended and unforeseen side-effect. So which of his many assignments had been targeted? Which mission? What had he ever been involved in tha
t might have motivated someone to want to remove all memory of it from his mind?
No. Somehow it had to relate to Graves. The coincidence was just too much.
Still so many questions.
He really needed to speak with Mirriazu, but after he’d lied to her and violated her orders behind her back, speaking with him likely didn’t sit very high up on her list of priorities. Back at the courthouse she’d graciously accepted his gratitude, but her response to his invitation to visit had been to turn her back on him and walk away. He couldn’t blame her for that. He could only hope that the agent who’d shown him the holophoto would have his supervisor get word to her as he’d said he would, and that she’d ultimately agree to meet with him. If she didn’t... If she didn’t, then he wasn’t going to be able to do anything about anything.
A rumble broke the silence and then fell quiet after a second or two. No, not a rumble. It hadn’t really been as loud as it had sounded, he realized. Nor as deep. More like... movement. Something sliding or rolling. Something rolling across the floor, perhaps. Or in a track, like... like the small rollers on the bottom of a sliding door. Like the door that led outside onto the small plasticrete balcony, actually.
He rolled off the bed and walked to the window, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out to find Heather standing on the balcony in her robe with her back to him, gazing out over the quiet base. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping. It was an inappropriately short robe for a girl of fifteen, he happened to notice without consciously looking, its hemline less than halfway between her hips and her knees. And it was obviously an expensive one, made of jade-green Japanese silk with a classic oriental-style image of a prowling tiger embroidered on the back, much like one he’d once seen hanging in Liz’s quarters. She must have seen it, too, and taken a liking to it. He only hoped she’d paid for it rather than stolen it.
At least she’d covered herself... somewhat. That was progress, he supposed.
He pulled his pajamas back on and slipped his robe on over them and tied it off—just an everyday bathrobe for him—stepped into his slippers, left his bedroom, and then joined his daughter on the balcony. The air outside felt a little cooler than that in his room, but it was still plenty warm. Were it not for appropriate modesty’s sake, he could have done without his robe.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked her as he stepped up beside her at the waist-high wrought iron railing, wondering what she was looking at. There wasn’t very much to see from their guest suite on the third floor—a few other buildings locked up for the night, their security lights glowing dimly through the windows. Empty parking lots, a couple of quiet streets illuminated from both sides by rows of ground-level white-light street lamps embedded in the curbs, some trees and grassy areas that significantly improved the aesthetics of the area. The more interesting parts of the base, such as the flower gardens and the aircraft displays and the monuments, were all over close to the center of the base where they couldn’t be seen from this side of the visitor suites.
“I can’t stop wondering what’s next,” she replied without looking at him.
“For us, you mean?” he asked her as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on the railing, bringing his eyes down to her level. “For our lives moving forward?”
“Yeah.” She looked at him. “Where are we going to go? We’re not staying here, are we?”
“You mean here on the base? No,” he answered, shaking his head. “No, of course not.”
She exhaled audibly with obvious relief. “Thank God.”
“This is only for a few days, until I decide... until we decide where we want to settle.”
“We? You mean... you’re giving me a say in where we’re going to live?”
“Except for the last several months, and those six or seven months you spent at Westcott in eighth grade, you lived on Mandela Station your whole life. The station’s gone now, we’re both lucky to be alive, and I’m retired from the service. I think I owe it to you to give you a say.”
She smiled. “Thanks, Dad.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied, returning her smile. Then he asked her, “So, any thoughts on where you’d like to live?”
She gazed back out over that small part of the base that lay before them. “I haven’t really thought about it,” she told him. “I assumed you’d decide that on your own and move us wherever when the time came. Do you have any places in particular in mind?”
“A couple,” he admitted, “but they’re not the only options by any means.”
“Where?” she asked him as she turned her eyes to him again.
“West Chester, Pennsylvania, where I was born is pretty nice. There’s a big old house for sale just north of town. It’s not that far from Philadelphia, where I’m sure you’d probably spend a lot of time enjoying the shopping on South Street... or from the New Jersey and Delaware shore points, which I’m pretty sure you’d enjoy just as much.”
“Where else?”
“Our old family home outside Colorado Springs, just east of the Rocky Mountains’ front range. Our tenants took real good care of it while they were there, so it’s in great shape.”
“They moved out?”
“Yeah, they bought their own home and moved out a couple months ago. There are lots of hiking trails in the area, mountain lakes, campgrounds. I think you’d like it there, too.”
“Oh.”
Unsure as to what exactly her rather non-committal ‘Oh’ might have meant, he reminded her, “Like I said, Heather, those aren’t the only options. I meant what I said about giving you a say in the decision.”
“I know you did, Dad. I just need some time to think about it.”
“No hurry. For the first time in our lives we have all the time in the world.”
She smiled at him again. “That’s a nice change.”
“Indeed it is,” he agreed, smiling back in kind. Then he suggested, “In the meantime, why don’t we both go back to bed and try to get some sleep.”
“Okay.”
He straightened, put his arm around his daughter and kissed her on the top of her head, then said, “Good night, sweetheart.”
“Good night, Dad,” she replied. And then they returned to their rooms.
Chapter 11
Tuesday, 22 March 2168
It dawned on Dylan that at some point in the last few minutes, although he couldn’t recall exactly when, he’d started hearing the soft, rhythmic thump-thump of his heartbeat in his right ear as it kept time with his exhales’ gentle whispers drifting one after another across the surface of his soft, thick pillow. He continued listening and eventually came to realize that the fact he was hearing it could only mean one thing. He was awake.
He turned onto his back and rolled his head across the pillow, and winced when the back of his neck cracked, though it felt pretty good afterwards to stretch the muscles on the right side. Then he opened his weary eyes, slowly, blinking several times before he managed to keep them open.
Except for the corner of his pillow, which rose skyward just inches before his eyes and shone beneath the faint blue-green glow of the headboard clock like a miniature snow-covered mountain peak reflecting the ghostly aurora borealis, total darkness still blanketed the room. It reminded him of the small cabin on the lake in Maine that his grandparents had owned—his father’s parents—seemingly lost on a moonless summer night in the haunted darkness among the birch trees that surrounded it, its lacquered cedar walls invisible to him as he lay there, a small child wide awake, listening fearfully to the mysterious creatures that ruled the night.
What was the name of that lake? He hadn’t been there in so long. So many years. He could picture it all in his mind as though he were looking at a painting. The small cabin standing among the white birch trees. The lake, calm and quiet, it’s surface as smooth as glass. The small dock reaching out into the water, his grandparents’ small canvass-topped motorboat tied to it. His grandmother had helped him catch his first
fish there. He’d learned to swim there. His baby brother had sat outside in his highchair and washed himself in his first chocolate ice cream cone there. What a hilarious spectacle that had been. But Dylan couldn’t remember the name of the lake. Nor could he remember exactly where it was. No matter. That was all part of the past. Part of his past.
He craned his neck to get a look at the small digital display, then relaxed and exhaled a disappointed sigh. 0857. Almost nine o’clock already and he was still in bed. The welcome letter he’d found on the nightstand had mentioned something about the room’s environmental controls including a circadian rhythm program that would slowly illuminate the room at the appropriate hour each morning, simulating the effect of the sun rising in the east and shining in through a bedroom window. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten to turn it on, and now half the morning had already passed him by.
He couldn’t complain too much, though. After all, for the first time in quite a while he’d slept peacefully through the night, free of the haunting nightmares that had been robbing him of so much rest lately, and that was a welcome change. He felt refreshed, though he did have a little bit of a headache. Whether that was a result of his head injury or just from sleeping too long he didn’t know, but that didn’t really matter anyway. He’d just pop a Liferin when he got up and the pain would fade away before he knew it.
He sat up and waited for the sudden wave of dizziness to pass, which it did quickly, then tossed the blankets aside and dropped his feet to the thinly carpeted floor. He yawned and then dispensed one of the Liferin the doctor at Drexel had given him, tossed it into his mouth, and swallowed it dry. He gave it a minute to start working, then stood up, reached for the ceiling, and stretched as far as he could, producing a regular symphony of cracks and pops. Then, finally, he sauntered into the bathroom to shave and take another nice long, warm shower.
