“Feck!” Shamus exclaimed, pounding his fist against the wall beside the door controls. “She's all dressed ta trot out right after our row.”
“We should go before security gets here,” Price said, putting his arm back on Frost's shoulder and trying to steer him down the hallway.
Around the corner came four security guards in their heavy black vacsuits.
“Oi! Look 'ere, her boys!” Frost exclaimed loudly with a mock welcoming gesture. “Well, let's 'ave a go then! One up, keep it level!”
“Sometimes I wish he came with a dictionary.” Price said as he shook his head, cringing at what he knew was about to happen.
“All right, just relax. We can either take you somewhere where you can sleep this off or give you an injection that'll help you sober up. It's up to you.”
Frost steadied himself a little and stepped away from the doorway. “Those shots're nothin' but instant hangover! Ye'll hafta take me down th' hard way afore I let ye hit me wi' that! Come on then you chancers.”
The first two guards stepped towards him, one with an injector in his hand, the other with hands open, ready to subdue the drunken Chief. As soon as the first was in striking distance, Frost grabbed the arm with the injector in it and pulled the man off balance before pushing him into the other guard. Shamus couldn't steady himself as the pair collided, and was pulled into the mess which ended with all three of them in an awkward pile on the floor.
Frost was facing upward by the time the other two approached, ready to pick him up and drag him off. “You too eh?” he exclaimed before punching the nearest in the nose so hard he was flung back into a man behind him.
Both Price and Finn cringed as they watched the guard's nose start bleeding in a gush. The rest of the guards took a few seconds to seal their face plates. It only took that long for Frost to roll to his feet and stand squarely, fists at the ready. “Ye march off yer own way lads an' I'll forget this ever 'appened,” Frost slurred.
“You're coming with us to the brig, Chief,” replied one of the guards getting to his feet. He took two steps towards Frost before he was punched fully in the face. The stout Gunnery Chief put so much weight behind his blow that he was nearly thrown completely off balance. The guard's head bobbed backwards, if he wasn't wearing his faceplate something would have been broken, but the transparent metal stopped any damage from being done.
Price and Finn couldn't help cringing. They knew that the guard would be fine, but Frost's hand was another question entirely. “Go with them Frost, you should sleep it off,” Finn half heartedly tried to convince him as he squared up again, getting ready to slug the next guard.
The Gunnery Chief turned towards Finn and Price to wave them off and in that moment the nearest guard stepped forward and injected Frost right below the ear with a tranquillizer.
The look of surprise on the drunken fellow's face was priceless as he fell back to the deck. “Ye shitehawk bastard! If it weren't fer yer faceplate I'd find out who ye were and come after ye sober!” he managed before passing out.
The guards rolled him onto a stretcher from a nearby emergency medical station once they were sure he was fully unconscious. “Thanks for watching him,” one of the guards said over his shoulder as they walked off.
“Where are you taking him?” Finn asked.
“The brig.”
Finn and Price shrugged and decided to follow.
Ashley and Stephanie had watched the whole thing and when the security personnel were down the hallway and in the lift Ashley turned to her best friend. “You're taking him back, aren't you?”
Stephanie sighed and smiled. “He's a big thug, but he's my big thug. I understand if you don't get it.”
“Oh, after seeing you two together when you're not fighting, I get it. Well, I sort of get it. You two seem to fit.”
“I wouldn't have imagined back on the Samson. ”
“Me neither,” Ashley said as she put her hand on her friend's arm. She looked tired, and after the couple of days they had had after Frost had captured and tortured Burke to within a second of his life, she understood. “Don't feel like going out?”
Stephanie looked so apologetic; “I'm sorry, I'm just tired. If he wasn't all liquored up and just came to apologize we'd probably be going to the club night as a double date.” She recognized uncertainty in her friend right away; “things aren't going well with Finn?”
Ashley tried to lighten up her expression, feigning optimism; “we're good. There's just no…”
“Sparks?” Stephanie finished.
“Yeah, there's just a piece missing. He's nice, and he listens, but I just don't know what to say, what to do. I don't know.”
“Well maybe the away time you two are going on will change that. It might be that you just need time away from the ship with him, you know, no distractions, no one watching you. After you visited him every day in medical, people are watching to see how things turn out.”
“That's probably it, too much pressure,” Ashley agreed. “Now let's find a couple movies and have a night in.”
“You don't mind? We could still make an appearance.”
“It's all right, you and Frost tired me out.”
Resolution
There were two objects that distracted Ayan. The first was the bag with all the data collected from her personal files, the ones that the Judiciary Council had claimed she had no rights to but was left instead to her mother, who passed it on to her. The second was a metal case containing a drug cocktail given to her by Doctor Anderson.
When she woke up that morning, she decided to take care of one of the two objects, and after several moments of thought over coffee she opened the black bag and poured out the three dense data chips into her palm. The only thing left inside the bag were her old favourite chokers. One white, one black and both made from genuine silk. The blue gem cut in the shape of a circle and sword, the symbol of Freeground was back in storage with the rest of her old things. At least it's safe there. She thought as she took the black choker out of the bag and put it on with one hand.
Ayan opened her other hand to look at the three dense silver surfaced data chips there once more. She was looking at a kind of inheritance, even though its passing was in a backwards fashion, from her predecessor to her mother then back to her.
She pressed the first chip to her command and control bracelet and it transferred the contents in seconds. It was her personal journals and progress logs. That was what she was really looking for. She always kept her more private journal entries behind a password and if she was lucky her former self hadn't changed it.
She put the chips back in the bag and drew her knees up, so she was entirely in the cradle of the copilot's seat. Using a holographic menu she navigated to her private journal directory and entered in the password. It opened.
All the entries she'd made over the course of her life were there, most of which she remembered, and the five she didn't recognize stood out right away. Four were unlabelled, the first of them was marked; Second Chance.
She rested the wrist with her command and control unit on one knee while she wrapped her other arm around her shins, holding her knees close. “Playback quietly please,” Ayan requested of the unit politely. It was one of the old habits she carried with her, being polite to machines.
The face that appeared looked tired, thin with sunken eyes and cheeks. Thus far Ayan hadn't seen images of her previous self when she was very ill, and the sight was at the same time saddening and frightening. “Hello, if you're watching this that means that someone, probably Doctor Anderson, used the scan results to try and recreate me. It's good to meet you, it really is,” that simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar face smiled warmly before going on. “I'll start with what I hope you already know. The scan can only be used to full effect once. After a digital system has accessed it the the memories contained inside begin to fragment because they reorganize themselves to conform to a digital environment, that means you're probably the only attempt
they had using my mental template. At the time of this recording it has been almost four years since Doctor Anderson disappeared in a ship with a dynamic wormhole compression drive, so I'm assuming he's using some kind of quantum compression wormhole to make time pass faster inside and create you using less or no growth acceleration therapy. I hope his experiment works, because if it does that means you probably have more than seventy percent of my memories, maybe all of them.”
“I have all of them,” Ayan whispered to herself.
“You do? Fantastic!” said the recording in response. “Do you want me to go on or would you like to ask questions instead?”
Ayan checked the activity level on her command unit and saw that the system wasn't using enough processor power to indicate that an AI was operating. “Are you an artificial intelligence?”
“No, I didn't have time to create one so I made a recording with a response matrix instead.”
“Okay, go on please,” Thank God, having an artificial intelligence based on myself would be creepy. Ayan said, extending her arm out and resting her chin on one of her knees.
“I also thought having an AI based on myself might be a little creepy.”
Ayan rolled her eyes and shook her head. Well, now I know for sure this isn't a fake.
The small holoprojection went on. “Now for the things you probably don't know. The Special Projects Division was something Laura and I were handed because we had the most intimate understanding of the technology we brought back with the First Light. Over the last three years we've also been using it to keep in contact with crew from the ship, to search for Jonas Valent and keep tabs on Vindyne. With the widening rift between Freeground Fleet Command and Freeground Intelligence the Special Projects Division has been allowed to grow however we like. We were almost able to reach out and touch Jonas Valent, but we were blocked at the last minute. He goes by the name Jacob or Jake Valance now, and I suspect he doesn't remember his past, not enough to find his way back to us anyway. Tomorrow I'm taking a prototype ship, the Silkstream Four to the Enreega system, his last reported home port, and I hope to make contact.
I don't know when you'll be watching this, but I'm certain that I will have died before then. I'm sorry I couldn't have met you face to face, because I know you'll have some guilt over continuing my life for me. I know what I'm about to say won't change that at first, I'm talking to myself after all, but you have to know that the life you're living is your own.
To me this is like talking to my past self. As though I'm contacting myself before the sickness, before getting tied down to an ambition that went awry. I just won't suffer the same consequences the messengers who sent warnings to themselves using the first time machines did,” she recognized her own smile, even through the damage caused by years of decline. The concept of time travel and the forces involved was always something Ayan had difficulty with, that was more Laura's department. “The warnings I have for you are so simple in hindsight, but so important. I wasted a lot of time at the crossroads. Special Projects was a good excuse to stay in the same place and convince myself I was following my heart for a while. After about a year of using Intelligence ties to look for Jonas and developing technology from the First Light into something everyone could use, we started working on the dual drive technology. That is, balancing and confining a hyperspace field so tightly to the hull of a ship that it could travel through a wormhole without the exotic particles interfering with the compressed space around the vessel.
It took Laura two years to tell me I was really yearning to be out there, and even though it was true I denied it for a time. When I finally started pushing Fleet Command to let me get out there and look for Jonas with the Sunspire or any other ship, Regent Galactic stepped in and prevented us from contacting him. Even with the help of my mother and someone who pretended to be Doctor Anderson, something I never figured out by the way, we couldn't get past the fear Fleet Command had of Regent Galactic. That's why I'm spending my last days reaching out to him myself. I hope I don't have to go alone, but anyone who accompanies me will ruin their career. I can't expect them to make that kind of sacrifice.
My real message to you is to follow your heart. Don't compromise like I did or it'll be too late when you realize what it is you really want. I needed to know what happened to Jonas, wanted to tell him there were people who loved him and see if I could remind him of who he was. Instead I followed another path, developed so many technologies into working, useful models that anyone on Freeground could use to improve their quality of life in one way or another. Most of that technology was never shared, Fleet Command didn't apply anything to the purpose of improving life for the common citizen despite the fact that everything we completed was ready for immediate integration.”
Ayan nodded. She remembered a conversation between Laura and herself on that very topic just a couple weeks before. Only her memory was from several years ago, it was something she had to keep reminding herself of. “So none of our work helped anyone,” she whispered in conclusion.
It triggered a pre-programmed response. “It might in the future. Pressure on the military from the House of Commons may force them to integrate some improvements. All the technology from the Special Projects Division is detailed under this private message, by the way, so it could be useful yet. Just a little gift from me to you. Remember that place we used to hide near the port observation lounge? That's the pass code to get into that section of the file,” her counterpart smiled mischievously. The image twitched and continued on with the original message. “Follow your heart, even if it leads you to the impossible. In the end that's what I did. One more thing. Don't you dare feel guilty about having my memories, despite my envy of your future, you're a continuation of me. You remember what our fifth grade teacher told us? Be yourself, and if that's not to anyone's liking, bow out gracefully and find new people.”
Ayan couldn't help but shed a tear at the sight of herself so ill, longing for another chance and chuckled at the memory despite her sympathy. “Miss Albinson, I remember.”
“Good, now go out there and follow a dream. I know for a fact that Galaxy hasn't had enough of you yet,” the hologram winked and disappeared. It was replaced by a pass code request.
“Alcove four.” Ayan whispered to the command and control unit. A holographic directory appeared and began to slowly rotate, showing the hundreds of entries. There were incomplete projects, discovered technologies from Vindyne, Gai-Ian and other databases, and completed technologies ready to be put into use. The amount of data was staggering and Ayan just shook her head and whispered; “wow.”
Minh entered the cockpit quietly, his classic electric guitar slung behind his back, and looked at her. “Hey, are you okay?”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Fine, just watched a message from myself before I ran off to find Jonas.”
“I heard about that. It was the big news item before I was discovered. There was a big security leak and the media was all over it. Between her stealing the Silkstream Four, me being found by Lorander and then you being born out of a time compression wormhole, I think we've been the top story for a month.”
“Did the media get access to you when you came back at all?”
Minh sat down and absent mindedly checked if his strings were in tune. “Only when I first landed. Veteran Services took me from there though and no one could get through them. Having all those people right there when I landed was more of a shock than I thought it would be.”
“I could just imagine.”
“How about you?”
“The media? Oh, they wanted in, but the section of Freedom Tower the Doctor had me set up in was like a fortress.”
“Oh? I didn't notice. They let me just walk right in.”
“You were on the accepted visitor's list,” Ayan said with a smile as she took a meal replacement bar from a box wedged into a crevice in the dashboard. It was brown, thick, and chewy. He had only brought the chocolate fudge flavour, but she didn't mind.
Lalonde, Randolph
Spinward Fringe Frontline
“Aw, you're making me feel all melty inside.”
Ayan laughed then shrugged. “It was more of a wish list. I even had Jonas' name on it. When I wrote it I hadn't seen the Newsnet, I didn't even know they had recovered you.”
“Still, feeling melty over here,” Minh teased. He looked at the directory listing projected above Ayan's bracelet command unit. “What's that?”
“It's only everything Special Projects ever touched. It came with the personal data my mother gave me.”
“Wow, they were busy.”
“Freeground gave Laura and the Ayan before me a whole staff and from what I'm seeing they kept on applying for more people. They took on everything but backwards time travel from the looks of it.”
“Well, no one bothers with backwards time travel. Something to do with the radiation and exploding.”
“That would do it. Nature doesn't much like people going back and changing things.”
“So, what are we doing today?”
Ayan turned the display off and smiled at Minh. “I'm starting with yoga and moving on to infantry fitness training. I want to try to get in shape without the regeneration and fitness meds Doc Anderson gave me. They're non-genetic treatments, but I want to see how I do without them.”
“Well, I'll help as long as you don't try to keep up. I'm pretty pumped,” Minh said as he posed and flexed, making exaggerated strained faces to match.
Frost's Morning After
Cold drool had pooled on the brig bunk and Frost groaned at the sensations of dry mouth and his throbbing head. He was still tired, wished he was still drunk, and knew by the bright lights that it was five in the morning, time for the inmates to wake up for morning inspection.
“Good morning.” Captain Valance's amusement couldn't be missed.
In that instant Frost hated Jacob Valance more than anything or anyone he'd ever met. He sat up, wiped his cheek and mouth then glared at the Captain. “For some, aye.”
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