by Ron Collins
“What?”
“I asked if you participated in the attacks on Sunchaser…et al.”
“Is this a joke?”
“The twelfth wormhole pod had a failure. Did you use that pod to transfer information that might have made it easier for Universe Three to sabotage our spacecraft?”
“No!”
“Do you have any alliance or other association with Casmir Francis or any other member of Universe Three?”
“Seriously,” Torrance said, his brain clutching at straws. “What is this? As you suggesting I’m a traitor?”
“I asked if you have had any alliance or other association with Casmir Francis or any other member of Universe Three. Have you had any association with him at any time of your life?”
The sound of random white noise of the office outside seeped into the suddenly quiet room. Status lights flashed in the background of Torrance’s vision, and a canned voice message about the ventilation cleaning schedule spoke in the haze. His staff was aware that Casey was in his office, and was probably able to hear the interrogation.
“All I know about Casmir Francis is that I hope the UG has already hunted him down and ripped apart everything the man holds dear.”
Casey looked at him sideways. “That’s harsh for you, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Torrance said.
Casey raised his eyebrows just a bare notch.
“All right,” Torrance continued. “Maybe it is harsh. But it’s how I feel right now.”
“So you have not had any contact with Universe Three?”
“No.”
“How can I believe you?”
“I don’t understand.”
But Torrance was beginning to understand something. He had made a career out of seeing things in people that they didn’t even know themselves, and right now he saw a man who was as defeated and as powerless as Torrance was feeling. The difference between them was that Casey was beholden to a certain hierarchy, and that this hierarchy had expectations of a shipboard officer that had nothing to do with their stated mission. Add that Casey was paid to have a predilection to paranoia and conspiracy theory, and it added up to say that Government Security Officer Malcolm Casey was worried about his job.
It was possible Casey was acting on orders. It was also possible he was working on his own in anticipation of those orders, or just working his way down on his own personal warpath because he realized that if he didn’t do the footwork someone else would. It was also possible Casey was just angry, and that searching for enemies, saboteurs, or spies let him take out his frustrations.
Regardless, there was no doubt that Casey would eventually use any information he could find to save his own neck.
“I’m thinking,” Casey said, “it might be best if you volunteered to come to security bay and subject yourself to some testing.”
“You’re just out hunting, aren’t you?” Torrance regretted the question even as it left his lips.
Casey’s forward lean was barely perceptible.
“Why do you ask it that way?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“Yes, you did.”
Torrance stammered.
“You think I am on a wild goose chase, is that right?”
The security officer waited. The fire in his eyes took Torrance’s breath away.
“I don’t know enough about anything to have an opinion, sir.”
Casey sat back.
“This is my job, Lieutenant Commander. I am responsible for protecting the United Government, and I am responsible for protecting its assets and its people. While you are busy fixing heaters and changing the toilet tissue, I am busy finding spies and searching for truth.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I will expect you in security bay at 1530.”
“I haven’t done anything, sir.”
“That means you will pass.”
Torrance pressed his lips together.
“If you do not appear at your allotted slot,” said Casey, “I will have you placed under arrest and held until such a time as we can find another suitable slot.”
“I’ll speak with the captain,” Torrance said. “If he agrees, I’ll be happy to arrange a session with you.”
“The captain has the 1700 slot.”
Casey stood, brushing a nonexistent speck of lint from the elbow of his uniform, then glancing up to watch the expression on Torrance’s face.
“I understand,” Torrance said as he, too, stood. “I assume that will be all.”
“Yes,” Security Officer Casey said. “I’ll see you at 1530.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The security officer stepped out of the room, and his two goons followed him without a word.
Torrance stood alone in the silence.
Outside in Systems Command, news loops ran on screens that usually held rows of data from the ship’s central systems. The staff glanced at him from the corner of their eyes. Torrance shut down his display and stepped onto the gunmetal platform outside his office. He leaned on the rail, watching his team work with silent professionalism.
Normally a steady echo of voices would fill the open space, or the sounds of bumps and crashes of equipment being moved would be ringing out from below, or the flickering shine of some system being tested would be coming from a lab room. But now everything was muted, as if the pit was more graveyard than system center.
Several of his team stared absently at their displays, doing their best to get on with their jobs. The cleaning station was unattended.
Three more years, Torrance thought. More than that, in reality. The mission had nearly three and a half more local years to finish its travels home.
He wondered what else had already happened back in the Solar System that hadn’t yet traveled the proper distance for them to discover.
Did the UG even exist now? Did Earth exist?
Were his family alive?
Had U3 done permanent damage?
He thought about Marisa, and realized how much he missed her.
She had been right, of course. Given their different paths, there was no way they could be together now. But he liked her. He respected her dedication, and that she was true to her mission. He wanted to be like her, but of course he wasn’t.
He thought about the Eden files.
Torrance had last picked through them only two hours ago. He hadn’t discovered anything new, of course, but they helped him get his mind off the moment.
Would Casey’s inquisition discover them?
Probably. He had been “lucky” enough once, but the game had changed. Casey’s approach would be much more pointed now. If Casey found him lying about the files this time, he might as well go straight to the brig. The security officer was already trying to link the lost pod to some arcane concept of communication with the Universe Three terrorists. If he discovered the truth about the files, what would he twist their existence to mean? Nothing good, he was sure.
He didn’t know what to do.
If he talked about them outright, he could probably never work on them again. But if he didn’t say anything, it would be even worse if Romanov give him up an hour later.
Casey was like a bulldog that suddenly found a bone in his mouth and the scent of blood in his nostrils.
There was really only one answer.
He was going to have to stop studying the files.
He was going to have to tell Casey the truth and let the facts speak for themselves.
Beyond having the files destroyed and losing his access, he would be chastised for wantonly destroying the twelfth wormhole pod and be ridiculed for thinking life existed on Eden. He would almost certainly be discharged, too, but better to be a ridiculed fool with a discharge than a railroaded traitor who spends his life in the brig.
He sighed.
He would have to cut Kitchell off, too, of course.
&nb
sp; That would kill him a little, too. In the time they had been working together young Thomas had brought a whole different energy to the process. They had created a completely new filtering system together, and had even managed to make something that looked like a cohesive signal out of the mess—though none of the linguistic routines or other pattern-matching algorithms they had onboard were able to make it mean anything.
He would miss working with the boy, if you could call the young man a boy anymore.
Malloy came up the steps and stood at the rail next to Torrance. Like the rest of the crew, he was anxious.
“Some day, huh?”
“Yeah,” Torrance replied.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Think of all those people.”
“Shame.”
Torrance nodded, but didn’t say anything more. They stood like this for several moments, silent and gazing over the command because there was nothing else to do.
“Are you okay, LC? Can I do anything for you?”
“I’m fine,” Torrance said. “Why do you ask?”
“I figure it’s never good to see the government security officer in your CO’s office.”
Torrance nodded. Until now he thought the pallor across the team was completely due to the news, but Malloy brought up a good point. He needed to consider the affect Casey’s presence would have on them. He looked at Malloy and realized Malloy had the crew’s ear.
“I’m fine,” Torrance said. “It’s nothing, really.”
Malloy raised one eyebrow. “Need to talk?”
“The GSO is just doing his job.”
“Will we all get visits?”
Torrance smirked. “I don’t know, Karl. I suspect Casey will stay at the command level to start with. But he’s UG all the way through, you know? If he thinks he’s got a mole somewhere, I suppose he’ll start digging.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Tell the folks it’ll be okay, though, all right? Tell them I said to just do the right thing and keep their minds on the work. We’ve still got a long ways to go. Everything will work out.”
“All right,” Malloy said, staring out over the team. “I’ll let them know.”
“Thanks.”
They stood for another moment.
“Guess I should head on to Forward,” Malloy finally said.
Torrance nodded. He was doing a lot of nodding today, it seemed. It helped him avoid talking.
Malloy left and Torrance immediately felt better.
He wrapped his hands around the rail. The clock on the wall displayed shift time.
Three and a half years, he thought.
That was a suddenly a very long time.
He turned and went back to his office.
“Abke,” he said, “please ask Thomas Kitchell to come here.”
CHAPTER 26
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: September 30, 2207
Ship Local Time: 1945
“You called, sir?”
It was Thomas Kitchell. He was tall and still borderline thin, still growing into his body despite crossing out of his teens. He would be eligible to formally enter the service when they arrived home, and Torrance knew he had plans to do so. “I want to run big shipboard systems,” he told Torrance a month ago. “And it seems like that’s the best path.”
Torrance hadn’t argued with him.
“Yes,” he replied. “Come in. We’ve got something to talk about.”
Kitchell entered and came to stand beside Torrance at his desk. There was a practiced ease in the way he looked over Torrance’s shoulder to stare at the code.
The hooded projection display carried a fractal image that shifted in a strange loopy wave that seemed to almost have a rhythm.
“What is this?” Kitchell asked.
“Abke,” Torrance said. “Please shut the door.”
“What’s wrong?” Kitchell said as the door shut.
“This is your own master systems security key.”
The boy looked at him with the obvious question clearly etched on his expression. “Why are you showing me this?”
“I had a meeting with Officer Casey this morning.”
“So?”
“He’s looking for things he can find to connect our mission to the U3 attack. I’m afraid of what he’ll do if he finds I’m hiding files from him, so I’m going to tell him about what I’ve been doing.”
“But…he’ll stop you.”
“Yes, he will.”
“We’re so close. We can’t stop now.”
“No,” Torrance said, looking to the display and the shimmering security key. “We can’t.”
Kitchell gave Torrance a quizzical glance. “I don’t understand.”
“I have to stop working with these files. But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t keep going.”
“You can’t mean …” Kitchell glanced back at the key.
“You’ve earned my trust, Thomas. I’ve put this key in your private memory space. I want you to find a quiet place. There’s not much time, so it has to happen now. Copy everything into a separate storage. Don’t tell me where. I don’t want to give it away. When you’re done, save it using this key.”
Kitchell was silent. His gaze flickered to the screen, then back to Torrance.
“They’re going to strip your space.”
“Right.”
“What happens if the GSO comes after me?”
“If you do what I say, I think my confession, combined with Romanov’s word, will give Casey a complete story. No one else knows you’re involved. Casey will probably take the files for evidence before he has someone kill my space. If he’s got the files and his people tell him they cleaned my space, I think that will be enough to shut the door on any further investigation.”
“And if not?”
Torrance shrugged. “Just do it.”
Kitchell nodded.
“Can we still do the work together?”
“Maybe,” Torrance replied. The mere fact that Kitchell asked made him feel good. “In a while, anyway. Maybe after the heat dies down. Or maybe not. Maybe it’ll have to be you working alone. I don’t know.”
“Take a chance, right?”
“Say that when you’re the one talking to Casey.”
Kitchell pulled his lips into a frown.
“Right now I think we focus on saving the data in a place you can access it.”
“All right,” Kitchell said.
“You know how to use the key?”
“Yeah,” the boy replied with a grin that made him look twelve. “I know how to use it.”
CHAPTER 27
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: September 30, 2207
Ship Local Time: 1530
Government Security Officer Casey’s office was cold, as always. But that wasn’t why Torrance shivered as he sat down.
The chair was comfortable, but arranged to face into a rounded “corner” of the room. The electromagnetic scanners had already been placed on stands and focused on the area where his head would be. Sensor pads were already affixed to areas his hands would rest.
The scanners would let the interrogators watch Torrance’s brainwaves fire as he responded to the security officer’s questions. The sensor pads would provide fine resolution to the vital sign data that was already coming from the e-lint systems.
“You don’t really have to go to this extent, sir,” Torrance said. “I’ll tell you the truth regardless.”
Casey smiled, but directed the secondary officer to sit.
By regulations, no full scan could happen without a secondary officer in the area to confirm proper procedure—as if the secondary officer would actually say anything if Casey went out of bounds.
It didn’t matter, though.
Torrance had decided to tell the truth, so that’s what he did.
For sixty minutes Torrance responded to questions, and for sixty minutes he dug his own grave. When the examination
was complete, he didn’t need Malcolm Casey to tell him that his career was officially over.
He would serve out the mission, then he would be discharged without comment—which is not really different from being discharged dishonorably, except employers needed to create a different reason to not hire you.
“Thank you for your time,” the Security Officer said when he was finished with the examination. “You can return to your post.”
Arrival
CHAPTER 28
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: September 14, 2211
Ship Local Time: 1015
Aldrin Station
Local Date: December 21, 2214
Station Local Time: 1941
A lot changes in fifteen years.
Everguard had finished its deceleration, entered the Solar System, and looped its way over the asteroid belt. As the craft taxied closer to Luna’s Aldrin Station, Torrance found more of his time taken up monitoring the shield that protected the ship’s ancient hull from the millions of bits of space debris that littered the area.
Tomorrow afternoon Everguard would dock, and the crew would formally cross the three-and-a-quarter-year relativistic date line it would take to rejoin society. Eighteen Sol standard years would have passed in Luna Local rather than the fifteen they had experienced in local time. There were people to see again, places to visit, and politics to catch up on. War was raging, if such can be said about interstellar warfare with a small guerilla-style enemy.
But first there was a party to attend.
Romanov delivered the after-dinner keynote address, wherein he said all the right things and thanked all the right people. The lights dimmed and a documentary of their mission played, complete with the trumped-up drama of the launch failure. Then the festivities began.
The music blared so loudly that dancers had to yell into each other’s ears.
Being that it was Earth standard Christmastime, Santa hats were suddenly the fashion of choice, and couples made liberal use of mistletoe that hung from the rafters. The aroma of liquor and human exertion heated the darkened hall to the point where Torrance found it hard to breathe.
