“My research indicates that funerals are for the mental and emotional well-being of the deceased’s loved ones. We have a great deal to do, Sanda. There is no time.”
“There’s time enough for this.”
“The chances of this man’s descendants ever being made aware—”
“This isn’t about telling the family a nice story if I ever come across them!” The strength of her shout echoed against the lab’s walls. She closed her eyes. “This whole star system is a graveyard. I can’t do anything about that. But I can do this. Help me do this.”
A soft whirring sounded in the floor of the lab, a subtle series of clicks. The fluid drained, flushed out through a vent in the floor. The head shivered, pushed by unseen currents, but remained stationary.
It would take a while for that fluid to drain. Unable to watch, she stepped away, dragging Grippy along with her, and grabbed another tablet from the table nearest her. Her first instinct was to throw it, to shatter it like the previous, but she took a breath. Tried to steady herself. Breaking useful materials wouldn’t help.
“Sanda,” Bero said, his voice a warning.
“I need to know.”
The tablet flicked on at her touch, Icarion’s flame-orange logo filling the screen. She swiped it away, and friendly black letters read: Welcome, Dr. Pilar Seco, with a profile image of said Icarion scientist hovering in the corner. She had long brown hair, a white lab coat, and friendly, hazel-green eyes that scrunched when she smiled. Hard to believe eyes like that could flay a human head and keep it on display.
Sanda tapped continue and the screen filled up with icons. No concern for passwords on this ship, then. That suited her just fine. She found an icon labeled TESTINGNOTES and pressed it. Text filled the screen.
Third month of testing, day six.
Kenwick has been, as expected, resistant to our requests to image his password. Even throughout advanced interrogation, he falls back onto his cover story that he is not a Keeper. That the chip in his head—so obviously a Keeper chip!—is some other type of memory bank. Which, of course it is, but he insists it has nothing to do with building the gates.
Even so, all his talk of memory has intrigued Dr. Crannic. His specialty being memory recall, he seeks any opportunity to insert his research into his current project. Annoying and pompous, but in this case useful. He has devised a way to roll back the Keeper’s memories by approximately thirty minutes. It’s a rudimentary thing, but it makes our questioning more efficient, as we can retry question trees without the contamination of Kenwick’s previous experience.
Third month of testing, day twenty-three.
Kenwick has become a liability. Crannic doesn’t want to admit it, but his memory rollbacks have been too much. Kenwick’s head is constantly aching, and he now claims to be a survivor of the Imm Project! Ridiculous. He babbles half the night, and becomes deeply unsettled when confronted with things he experienced during the memory rollbacks. Which is quite a lot, as we did not limit his environment during first testing.
To make matters worse, the damage is mounting. To avoid the discomfort he experiences when confronted with these things, he simply ignores their existence. As I questioned him before the first rollback, I could stand in front of him, screaming, and he’d look right past me. The Light believes that, with some adjustments, these techniques will prove more fruitful next time around.
Crannic is a fool. I pray the next subject will prove more robust.
Sanda flicked the tablet off and set it down, fighting back the thrust of a headache. There was no point in going through those files, they’d just sicken her. Whatever had been done to poor Kenwick was over now, the perpetrators long since gone to dust.
When the fluid finished draining, she could see fine filaments reaching from the grotesque trophy to the walls of the pillar, holding it in place.
“How do I open it?” she asked.
“Just a moment.”
One side of the pillar squealed, shuddered, then retracted slowly into the ground. It stopped when the top of it was just below Kenwick’s remains. His hair plastered around his head, the flesh flaps the researchers had opened to display their nightmare token dangled and swayed. She rummaged through the lab’s supply bins until she found nitrile gloves and a beaker large enough to contain the head.
With Grippy’s help, she fumbled the head into the beaker. The flesh dented beneath the press of her fingers; the eyes took on a cloudy sheen. She pulled the pins from the lids and brushed them shut, then tossed the cruel instruments into the pillar’s empty center.
“Rest well, Rayson Kenwick.” She capped the beaker, tucked it beneath her arm, and headed for the command deck.
Bero was under thrust, gunning for the debris field they’d marked as likely for salvage, so an EVA was out of the question. Sanda placed the beaker in the good airlock and, on a whim, pulled a marker from her jumpsuit and sketched a quick bouquet of flowers on the side of the beaker. It’d have to do.
She retreated into the safety of the command deck and shut the interior ’lock door. He drifted in there, on the other side of the tiny viewport, his cheeks and nose pressed up tight against the glass. Wasn’t a dignified experience by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a lot better than spending eternity as a gruesome trophy.
Sanda pressed her palm against the viewport. She should say something. Some words of farewell, of remembrance. Something warming and comforting for the deceased, though he could not hear her. He had been a Keeper, a bastion of her society. His had been the only human face she’d seen—would see—for hundreds of years.
She’d never been one for religion.
“You deserved better.”
She slapped the button for the exterior door. It whooshed open, delivering Rayson Kenwick into space for his final rest. Using the wall and ceiling grips, she pulled herself across the command deck and back to the ladder, regretting the g’s as they pulled her back down, anchored her to her body’s new reality.
Sanda set her lips in a grim line as she climbed up the ladder. The last thing she wanted to do was spend any time in that hellish lab where people from another world had cracked open the head of her brethren and attempted to puzzle out its secrets.
Grippy took her hand at the top of the ladder and helped her back down the hall. Her muscles ached, her joints protested every step. Her breath came hot and sharp between parted lips. Twenty days until they reached the debris field. She had time to lie down. To rest. To let her body recover its strength.
But if she didn’t step foot in that lab now, she never would again.
The door dilated, sanitized air brushing the hair from her cheeks. The empty pillar stood in the center of the room, but the edifice was hollow. Whatever had been done here, this was her space now. Her ship. Her lab. Her rules. And she would bring it all together. Turn Icarion’s tech into a force for good, and her own survival.
“Sanda, are you all right?” Bero asked.
“I’m about to be a whole lot better. Grippy, you know where the servos are around here?”
Two chirrups, and the little bot nudged her toward a wall of shelves. She tugged a drawer open and grinned down at the contents. Servos, indeed. But actuators, pneumatics, and chipsets as well. She had only a vague idea how to use the lot. She’d done the usual maintenance courses required of every recruit, but she had a hell of a lot of time to learn, and Bero and Grippy to fill in the details.
Twenty days until she could scavenge for pod supplies. In the meantime, she was determined to get on her feet again.
“Come on, Grippy, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
CHAPTER 12
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
DAY TWO BRINGS CONSEQUENCES
Zip ties bit into the meat of Biran’s wrists, raising red welts across skin that, if he were being honest with himself, had never seen a hard day’s labor. Those ties would probably leave scars, but he didn’t complain. He kept his mouth shut after Hitton had him cuffed a
nd his wristpad cut from the net. She’d grown tired of hearing the ping and vibrate of messages flooding to him.
If Biran were going to have scars, he would be proud to wear these.
The guardcore’s van bounced along the road toward the Cannery, its mirrored windows blocking out intrusive eyes. If Biran craned his head just right, he could make out the glint of drones in the air—civilian drones, press drones. A wide variety of eyes watching the Keeper neighborhood, reporting on his whereabouts. Hitton could not make him disappear.
He told himself that every time the ties bit deeper.
As the truck drew close to the Cannery, it turned down a side path, angling along a narrow lane that Biran had always assumed maintenance and supply deliveries used. A road Keeper Hitton shouldn’t have any business down. His life, up until this point, had existed in a bubble of safety. Blissful ignorance. It had never even occurred to him that there might be roads and rooms in the Cannery kept from him for reasons other than the mundane.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Hitton arched a carbon-black brow at him. With her hands folded lightly in her lap, and her grey hair wrapped in an embroidered purple scarf, she looked the perfect picture of the disapproving grandmother. As far as the public knew, Keeper Hitton was a kind woman. A stately woman. She’d manicured that image well.
“To be disciplined, Keeper.”
Before this morning, discipline had meant extra homework—scut work around the Cannery, if he’d been particularly contentious. Now, the word carried a weight he wasn’t familiar with. Though the incision where his chip had been inserted was healed, the slot itched. Reminding him. Telling him, with its presence, that his life was no longer his own. It was committed, wholly and irrevocably, to the cause of the Keepers.
Removal of the chip—disentangling the fine circuits from the body’s central nervous system—was not unheard of, but rare. The Keepers claimed it was possible to survive such a procedure, that even those who deserved to have their chips removed did not deserve death. But those few who had had their chips removed had never been seen again. Exiled, was the general thought. Gone into hiding out of shame.
The whispers, of course, said otherwise. Dead. Or practically so, as the chip removal was no less a gentle procedure than a nineteenth-century lobotomy.
Death didn’t faze him. It couldn’t, really. Having never considered the option, dying at his age was so foreign a thought, Biran couldn’t wrap his mind around it. But brain death, or someplace in-between, made him cold to the core. His mind was all he had—all he’d ever been praised for, all he’d ever been recognized for. Now, it hung on a razor’s edge. Who was he, without his brilliance? Without his so-called potential? What would he become?
The guardcore brought the van to a neck-aching halt and jerked his door open. “Out, please,” one faceless mask ordered.
Biran slid out as best he could, finding the movement awkward without the use of his arms, but his head was too full of heart-racing what-ifs for him to be embarrassed. He’d told himself he was prepared to face the consequences. That anything was worth it if only it would bring Sanda home.
Problem: He’d never actually faced heavy consequences before. But they were facing him, and there was nothing he could do but put one foot in front of the other and follow his guards, Hitton’s scarf-softened shadow rearing up behind him. He hoped his fathers wouldn’t be too angry, whatever the outcome.
To keep his mind from spinning away into a chest-constricting panic attack, he tried to figure out where he was. Somewhere around the back of the Cannery, walking down a long hall lit with the grungy hum of faint fluorescence. Woefully outdated, they’d installed those lights with a message in mind: Safety’s gone, now. The kid-glove hands of modernity are off.
Sweat beaded between his shoulder blades, ran along his spine to settle uncomfortably in the crack of his ass. The fine fibers of his suit wicked the moisture away, but his body was heating up now, heart thudding so loud he couldn’t hear his own footsteps over the frantic thump-whump. The sweat kept coming.
A door to his right opened, and the guardcore ushered him inside, shaking, blinking sweat from his eyelashes into stinging, bleary eyes. Nothing existed in that room except a narrow table, steel-blue walls, and a lone chair across from a sea of sour faces.
Those faces: Keeper Director Olver, Keeper Lavaux, General Anford, Keeper Vladsen, Keeper Garcia, Keeper Singh. The Protectorate. The highest of the seniors. No Shun to defend him, not a pair of friendly eyes in the room. He’d never even met the general. Hitton moved around the table to join them, and the guardcore pushed Biran gently, but firmly, into the solitary chair.
The director spoke first. “Biran, what have you done?”
His mouth turned into a desert. “What I believe is right, Director.”
“What I explicitly forbade you to do.”
As the director’s anger washed away his disappointment, Biran sat straighter, felt on firmer footing. He squared his shoulders, rallying his mind for a fight.
Keeper Lavaux snorted a laugh—a genuine, rolling chuckle that drew all eyes to him.
“Is something funny, Keeper Lavaux?” Hitton asked.
Lavaux wiped his eyes and shook his head. “This, all of this pageantry. Tell me, Director, were you going to tell the boy he was right? That you’ve had your people jamming the signals from the evac pods to keep up your little narrative that all was lost?”
Biran’s heart hardened, the sweat on his back turned icy, his fingers curled into fists though the zip ties cut even deeper from the pressure. “Is that true, Director?”
The old man’s face flushed. And then—a paradigm shift in Biran’s mind, in his perspective. Old man. The director was just an old man. Elevated to power, yes, a man to be feared for many reasons, but a man all the same. Not an entity, not an institution. In the cheap lighting of the room, even his wrinkles lacked dignity. An old man, and old men could make mistakes as easily as young men.
“Whether or not it is true, you disobeyed my direct order, Biran.”
“Keeper Greeve,” Lavaux corrected with a snap. “He is Keeper Greeve, though it be only a few days old. He is our peer, Director. Tell me, would you handcuff me and place me in that chair if I did something you disliked?”
“If you broke our laws—”
“He broke no law.”
Hitton scoffed. “He distributed classified information without consent.”
“Did I?” Biran pressed. “Because the data I broadcasted is freely available to anyone with the willingness to look.”
The general cleared her throat. “He is correct, that information was not classified.”
Biran’s head whirled, sensing the powers at play but not understanding. As a student, he’d glimpsed the alliances among the older members of the Keepers. The Protectorate kept to its own, though it seemed fractured now, and the teachers had their own pecking order, the research staff even more hierarchical. But despite that pecking order, or perhaps because of it, all bowed heads to the director. That Lavaux was challenging him—and that the general was—tipped Biran’s world.
“Nevertheless,” the director said with the breeziness of a man used to taking hold of the conversation, “I ordered him to ignore that information. I think we can all agree he disobeyed that order.”
Silence.
“And disobeying the direct order of a Keeper’s director is grounds for removal.”
“If,” Lavaux said, “a majority of the Protectorate votes to agree with removal. And we are an even number, as the general here so likes to remind us—making the good General Anford the tie-breaking vote. Would you care to risk this again, Director?”
Something Biran was only just beginning to recognize swelled within him, some change-state behemoth that had his lips moving before his mind had caught up.
“Try it,” he said.
“Excuse me?” The director’s gaze finally focused on him—it’d been bouncing from member to member,
studiously avoiding the face of the man he was planning to bring to a death vote. Those eyes, which once Biran had found wise and awe-inspiring, seemed pale and baffled now. Confused. Doddering.
“Vote to have my chip removed.”
Lavaux leaned back, muttering “interesting” so softly under his breath Biran was certain he was the only one who heard him.
“Do you have a death wish?” Hitton asked.
“Nothing of the kind.” Biran leaned forward, not daring to break eye contact with the director. “Vote. Vote to remove the chip of the Keeper who ushered the citizens to safety as the bombardment warnings blared. Vote to kill the Keeper who informed the populace that their heroes—their friends and family, their soldiers—lived, and that their survival was being hidden from them. Vote to kill me, Director. And then go explain that decision to your people. I suspect you’ll find the problem you’re facing now will not go away.”
General Anford whistled low. “Wish you’d joined my side, kid.”
“You got better than me,” Biran said. “You got my sister.”
In that moment, Biran didn’t recognize the director. Or maybe the truth was he was meeting him for the first time. A desperate man clinging to power and import, a legend in his own time, but worn away from relevance now. Teetering on some precipice that Biran could not see, nor understand, nor probably would until he was much, much older. If he made it to be older.
“You are beholden to this council,” the director grated the words out.
“And you are beholden to the people of Prime. I do not mean to be antagonistic, Director. I believe my scholastic record will make it clear that I am not the type to push against power for pushing’s sake. But I brought this to you first. I showed you what I had found. You rebuked me. I had no choice.”
“And who gave you that information?” General Anford pressed.
An innocent question, spoken without malice, but it made Biran’s stomach drop anew. He may be difficult for the council to punish—he’d pushed himself too far into the public eye—but Anaia didn’t enjoy the same protection.
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