“How did I get here? Last thing I can remember was dying in front of Radovan’s house.”
“We carried you.”
“Why?”
“Seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Guess it’s lucky for me I didn’t kill you all those times.”
Kettle smiled. “Come with us.”
“No thanks.”
“I’m serious. You keep beating on them and they’re eventually going to bring out the big guns, like the ones Janx and Seventy-two had. Not even you could dodge those forever.”
She looked at him more closely. “But why should I come with you?”
“Well, together, maybe the five of us can get some answers.”
“And then?”
“Then hopefully we’ll figure out a way to get home again, and if not, we’ll decide what to do with our lives.”
1.3 KETTLE
The conference room was a lot cozier this time around. It was also rife with palpable feelings of confusion, embarrassment, anxiety and disbelief.
Quadrant Manager Dakkaron Brennov sat at one end of the table. He was ensconced in a very big chair, commensurate with his status. To his right sat Commander Saris and Radovan Mozik. To his left sat an insufferable looking man with a stern expression that was undermined by an absurd white handlebar mustache and chin puff. He looked like Ben Kingsley in Hugo, but with constipation.
Kettle had to take a moment to remind himself that judging people on first impressions was not his strong suit. Back on Diego Garcia, he had labeled Dallas as an alpha male jarhead. Now he hoped to call Dallas his friend. Still, Kettle was pessimistic regarding this new guy. I bet he says something daft, he thought. I bet the first thing he says will be daft.
Behind him stood two individuals, a man and a woman, who were apparently not important enough to deserve chairs. The man also wore a beard, but it was a more respectable, well-trimmed affair. Both were staring at the other end of the table.
In fact, everyone on Brennov’s side was staring at the other end of the table. More specifically, they were looking at Saeliko.
The ex-harker of the Epoch had parked herself directly opposite the QM. She was still wearing her hospital smock and hadn’t bothered to clean the dried blood off her face. When Saris had offered her the chance to change into a fresh set of clothes, she had declined. And, so, she sat there in her chair with long strands of blood-caked hair draped down over one eye.
Saeliko’s pipe was placed on the table in front of her. There was dried blood on that, too. Her trusty table-shield was leaning up against the nearest leg of the conference table. Her taser remained in her belt. Her attention was square on the man in the big chair.
Dallas and Soup sat on Saeliko’s left; Haley and Kettle on her right. Kettle couldn’t speak for the other three, but he was enjoying the discomfort that Saeliko was causing.
“Well,” QM Brennov started, his eyes locked on the Saffisheen. “I’ve been in this business a long time, and I can’t say I’ve ever had a high-level meeting with a pipe-wielding pirate in a medical gown.” His tone was refined with a hint of humor. It matched his appearance, which was masculine yet manicured, intimidating yet approachable. Kettle judged him as the equivalent of the elite, Wharton-educated, groomed-for-success CEO type, just as comfortable closing billion-dollar M&A deals as he was playing eighteen holes at the country club with senators and sultans. This man was a corporate shark. “Now, Miss, Saeliko, is it? How much of that blood is yours, I wonder?”
“None,” Saeliko said.
“Commander Saris.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How much damage did she do?”
“Twenty-three casualties. No fatalities, although four of her victims will require significant surgeries. Plus some minor property damage.”
“She did all this with a pipe and a piece of table?”
“Yes, sir?”
“And no shoes?”
“That’s right.”
“Extraordinary.”
“That’s not the word I would have used,” Saris offered.
Brennov disregarded the comment and shifted his gaze. “And you must be Miss Yoon.”
“Yes.”
“Would you prefer I call you Hyeji or Haley?”
“Haley is fine.”
“Very good. And you three must be Merrick Kettle, Supra Bell and Dallas Stalock.” He nodded his head politely at each of them as he made his way through the roll call. “Pleased to meet all of you. I hope that our medical team has been of adequate service to you. I understand that all of you suffered injuries during your time in the Sollian, and I also know that not everyone from your group made it out alive. I’d like to express my deepest condolences. If any of you feel the need, we would be happy to make our counselors available to you.
“I believe Commander Saris and our friend Radovan have debriefed you on the multiverse and the verse gates. I also understand that you were disappointed when they declined to explain why exactly you were brought here and why it is currently not possible for you to return home.
“To that extent, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the gentleman sitting to my left. His name is Dr. Leecius Vonell, and he is presently Chief of Medical Research for the Southern Quadrant, which is comprised of VGCP Ten, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen and Sixteen. Behind him are two of his senior staff members, Dr. Svos Mallik and Dr. Eliska Tannishoy. Finally, before I turn this meeting over to the kind doctor next to me, I would like to kindly point out that everything said in this meeting is confidential. While I wish to assure you that you are not our prisoners and you have free roam of this facility, I would strongly advise you against repeating any of this discussion with anyone outside this room. Is that clear?”
Kettle and his three Earth companions nodded. Saeliko did not.
“Well, Dr. Vonell, I believe the floor is yours.”
The doctor immediately pointed a finger at Saeliko and said, “I want that woman punished for what she did.”
I called it, said Kettle’s inner monologue. His brain high-fived itself.
“That won’t be necessary,” Brennov stated.
The doctor glared at the QM. “My son will be physically fine after the surgery, but the psychological ramifications induced by the trauma will take a lot longer to repair. I demand justice.”
“Doctor, we discussed this already.”
“She’s a savage. A barbaric thug. She needs to understand that she can’t go around torturing people in a civilized society. I want her put in solitary confinement.”
“She woke up confused and tied to a table. Her reaction was reasonable, in its own way.”
“Beating people senseless with a pipe is reasonable? I can’t believe . . .”
“Which one was he?” Saeliko asked, cutting him off.
Dr. Vonell looked insulted, as if it were beneath him to communicate with his inferiors. “This is what I’m talking about,” he said to Brennov. “She has no respect.”
“Which one?” she repeated, this time asking the QM.
“That’s irrelevant. Now, it would be best to leave this matter behind and return to the task at hand. Doctor, do your job and tell our guests why they are here.”
“I will not. Not until I receive assurances that she will be locked up and punished.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Your son is a doctor, too, isn’t he?” Saeliko said, the corner of her lips curling into the beginnings of a macabre smile. “The young one. The one who found me when I first woke up.”
“Damn you!” His mustache was quivering, and his face was flushed.
“He squealed like a rat.”
“You are a foul-mouthed . . .”
“You should have seen his face. All tears and snot.”
That was it for Dr. Vonell. He stood up and slammed his right hand down on the table in rage, and then promptly stormed out of the room. The two standing doctors looked both startled and afraid, uns
ure of what they were supposed to do now and fearful that this was somehow going to come back on them. The man began to follow after Vonell but stopped in his tracks when QM Brennov pointed at him and said, “You stay here or you’re fired.”
“Well,” Dallas chimed in, “this has been the most entertaining meeting I’ve been to in a long time.”
Brennov spun toward the US Marine and pointed a finger at him. “Technically speaking, Mr. Stalock, you, Saeliko and Mr. Bell are not entirely necessary for what comes next. Don’t tempt me to have you removed.” He then shifted his finger to Saeliko. “And you. You are sitting here only because what happened earlier was a misunderstanding. You woke up in a strange place and you perceived a threat. I can appreciate that. But if you so much as scratch someone in this facility from here on out, I will take Dr. Vonell’s advice and have you locked up. Are we clear?”
Saeliko stood up and put a hand on her pipe. “Try it.”
Commander Saris pulled out his weapon and pointed it at her chest. “Sit down!”
The Saffisheen jumped onto the table and stalked forward, twirling the pipe once in her hand.
“No!” Kettle shouted and leapt to his feet. Haley was even faster, clambering up onto the table in an effort to block Saeliko’s path. Dallas and Soup weren’t far behind. It was all in vain; Saeliko was too quick, easily sidestepping outstretched hands and accelerating across the smooth surface of the conference table.
The commander tracked her with the gun as she sped up, but he refrained from pulling the trigger. Kettle immediately sensed something was amiss – something other than the fact that a pirate harker was attempting to clobber the upper management of an interplanetary corporation with a metal pipe. The series of events was unfolding at lightning speed, but his brain had ample time to note that neither Saris nor Brennov looked nearly as concerned as they should have. Whether Saeliko noticed, Kettle couldn’t say.
She performed a graceful tuck and roll designed to evade any defensive gunfire, but rather than coming back up onto her feet, she torqued her body into a lateral sliding position. She looked like Alex Rodriguez in his prime sliding into home plate. Kettle saw the strategy. Her left foot was going to strike Sarris hard right across the jaw while her pipe was swinging around in a wide arc, aimed right at Brennov’s chest.
Both strikes would have been extremely painful, if they had landed. They never did. Her foot came within six or eight inches of his face and came to a sudden stop with a sickening smack. The air in front of Saris’ face shimmered greens and blues as the force of the impact sent ripples across an invisible barrier.
The exact same thing happened in front of QM Brennov. The pipe slammed into a barrier that only became visible on impact. Brennov’s face was expressionless.
Saeliko let out a pained grunt and slid to an undignified stop at the corner of the table between her two intended victims. She had just enough time to look at Saris as he shot her in the chest. Her back arched and her arms splayed out sideways as the electricity jolted through her body, and then the Saffisheen harker closed her eyes and went limp.
“Welcome to modern technology,” Brennov told her.
Saris turned the gun toward the others. “Anyone else want to have a go?”
“We’ll pass,” Dallas said on everyone’s behalf.
“Good,” Brennov said. “We’ve already lost two people from this meeting. I’d hate to lose any more.”
The doors opened behind him and two men walked in. They went straight to Saeliko’s prone form and picked her up, one holding her legs and the other with his hands under her shoulders. They awkwardly carried her out of the room and closed the doors behind them.
While this was happening, Kettle contemplated the fact that the two men had come in without being called for. Either someone else was monitoring the meeting via cameras, or one of their hosts had been able to call for them without vocalizing it. An emergency button under the table? Something more futuristic? An implant of some kind? That last one wasn’t such an outlandish idea. Whoever these people were, they had technology more advanced than Earth’s. The other obvious piece of evidence for this was the shielding devices that the two men had used.
“What are you going to do to her?” Kettle asked.
Brennov arched an eyebrow. “Put her in a secure room, for starters. But we won’t hurt her, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“She’s not a bad person,” Haley added. “You just have to understand where she came from. She was a pirate captain; showing weakness or backing down from a fight was tantamount to career suicide.”
“She’d make a good quadrant manager,” Brennov commented, which Kettle thought both odd and revealing. “In any case,” he continued, “you have my word that we won’t hurt her. Will that be satisfactory?”
Nods all around.
“Right then. Given that we’ve lost Dr. Vonell, we’ll have to rely on someone else for today’s meaning. Dr. Mallik, please come forward.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come on, don’t be shy. Sit down. That’s right. Now, Doctor, I trust that you’re aware of the gist of what your boss was going to say.”
“Ah, yes, that’s correct.”
“Very good. Please remember that our guests are from VGCP Seven, which at last survey was estimated to be approximately forty to sixty years behind us in terms of development, so I’ll ask you to avoid overly technical or scientific explanations unless otherwise asked.”
“Umm, yes, sir. That’s fine, sir.”
“All right, let’s get on with it.”
“Sure. Well, umm . . .” He cleared his throat noisily and scratched his beard.
“Perhaps you should start with the VGCP Zero and the virus.”
“Certainly.” Another clearing of the throat. “Well, as you know, there are eighteen planets connected by verse gates, each planet in a separate universe. The planets are named in the order we found them in. For instance, we designated your home world as VGCP Seven because it was the seventh planet we discovered. However, this is not entirely a factual rendering of the order of events. Earth was in fact the eighth planet we found, although it would be fair to claim that it was the seventh living planet. This is because the third discovered planet was, for all intents and purposes, dead. We designated it VGCP Zero. Are you all, ahhh, with me so far.”
“Yep.”
“Yes.
“Yeah, brah.”
“Uh huh.”
“This was about seventy years ago, so it was well before my time, but the first people – mostly military personal and scientific observation teams – who got to Zero figured out pretty quickly that although it was devoid of plants or animals, it had once been a thriving world. To make things more interesting, the original humans that inhabited it were far more advanced than we were then, and even now seven decades on.
“The ruins and artifacts they found were scant, mostly because the surface of the planet was scorched and radioactive. We conjectured that the whole world had been nuked about two hundred years ago, although we didn’t know why. And I’m not talking about a few bombs going off here and there; I’m talking about a systematic, planet-wide nuclear annihilation of every last microbe of living material. Nevertheless, we were able to find a few sites with retrievable data caches, and from those, we . . .”
“Data caches?” Dallas asked.
“Right, sorry. Basically, we found data storage devices that hadn’t been completely destroyed. You’re from VGCP Seven, so . . . ahhh . . . let’s see.” He scratched his beard again while he put his thoughts together. “Okay, imagine if an office building on your world took a direct hit from a big fat missile. Total structural collapse, nothing but rubble, that sort of thing. No way of knowing about the work that went on in there, right? But then you sift through the remains and find a portable hard drive. It’s singed, dented and bent all to hell, but if you use the right tools, you can take it apart and try to recover the data that was stored on it. Maybe you don’t ge
t all of it, but you get enough to start drawing hypotheses about the employees and the jobs they did.”
“Gotcha.”
“That’s a simplification of the techniques we used on Zero, but the results are the same. From the scraps we could pull, our people gradually learned about the languages the Zeroes used, which, by the way, are extremely complex examples of human syntax and phonology; we still don’t have a usable Zero language pack available for the decoders. And we began speculating about the various cultures and value systems on the planet. We even learned a few new recipes. The technologies they described were particularly mind-blowing. Stuff we couldn’t have dreamed of. Far more advanced than any of the other seventeen worlds.
“But most importantly, we discovered the nature of the tragedy that befell them, which is the reason we’re all here in this room today.”
“A virus,” Kettle said.
“The virus,” Dr. Mallik corrected. “The only virus that matters.”
Kettle put his hand up. “I’m a bit confused about that. If the Zeroes, as you call them, were so advanced, how could they have let a virus get the upper hand. You’d think they would have had the medical know-how to get that under control.”
The doctor opened his mouth to reply, but Haley spoke first. “It’s a matter of evolution,” she said, looking at Kettle and then across to Dallas and Soup. “Humans have been locked in an arms race with viruses for hundreds of thousands of years. Every now and again, an especially nasty virus will come along and kill off a bunch of humans, but the survivors will develop a resistance, which they pass on to their descendants. The virus will respond by mutating, or shifting. The next time humans are exposed, their bodies don’t recognize the new virus and don’t know how to defend against it. On and on goes the arms race.”
“That’s another simplification,” Dr. Mallik stated. “But it’s close enough. Where things get really interesting is when human societies gain enough knowledge to start developing vaccines and virus-targeted medical treatments. The optimism derived from eradicating the threat of specific viruses soon fades as further discoveries regarding viral evolution are made. Viruses can achieve remarkable mutation rates, you see, often exceeding one point mutation per replication round. How many enthusiastic scientists and doctors have treated patients with cutting-edge antiviral drugs only to discover that the virus has spawned drug-resistant mutations? How many doctors have had to tell patients that all of their feasible medical options have been exhausted and the virus wreaking havoc on their bodies is simply indestructible?
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