James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 09

by Gethsemane

  Diamnodback pointed this out.

  “Incendiaries,” Herrald suggested.

  “You want to burn them up?” Riddle was shocked at the suggestion. Diamondback was considering the logistics.

  “Nay, we’ll set them a half kilometer away, smoke them out of their hidey-holes,” Herrald explained. “We can shoot them as they come out of the jungle.” Diamondback stroked his chin. “We’ll have to make sure they run to the beach and not deeper into the jungle. We would have to set the incendiaries in a wide semi-circle around the tree houses.”

  “We would have to destroy almost the entire jungle,” Riddle observed.

  “In five days, the jungle is being blaster to space-dust anyway,” Herrald argued.

  “Set the incendiaries,” Diamondback ordered Herrald. “The rest of us will fall back to the beach.”

  Pegasus – Main bridge – David Alkema had command of the bridge as the second full day of rescue operations was winding down. Since Anaconda Taurus Rook had moved medical screenings and provisioning to the surface, throughput in the Hangar Bays had become much more rapid. By the end of his watch, the 2,000th child would be processed and assigned to quarters in the Tertiary Inhabitation area.

  By his own calculation, they would have to process at least that many in one day tomorrow in order to keep pace with the rescue operations on the surface. The logistics projection in the forward Bridge showed the 32 locations on the surface where rescue operations were currently in progress.

  “Aves Linus is inbound with 37 children,” reported Flight Officer Kyle McCormick from the Flight Control station.

  “So close,” Alkema commented. This load would still leave them short of the 2,000

  mark. Hopefully, the next ship would have more passengers.

  He had a report from Hardcandy Banks who was monitoring gate activations from a special telemetry laboratory. She and Toto had been ejected from the Gateway facility after the confrontation with Hildegard Kahn, but were continuing their work aboard Pegasus.

  She had collected data from two activations in the past two days and was working on building an energetic model of the Gateway.

  “What’s the situation at the Abaddon Site?” he asked one of the Mission Controllers.

  The woman answered him. “They are still under storm conditions, and the conditions are intensifying.”

  Alkema frowned. He would have to do something about that.

  He paused for a moment to check another display, the trajectory of the Rogue planet.

  Aside from a minor gravitational perturbation, it remained on course for its cataclysmic rendezvous. The Maud team was exploring some ruins in one of its surface craters, but they were so badly damaged it could not even be determined if they were human or alien in origin.

  COM officer Lewis alerted him to a transmission from the surface. “It’s on a non-standard frequency… carrier-wave,” she announced. “It’s Hildegard Kahn.”

  “Give me a display,” Alkema requested.

  A projected holographic rectangle showed Hildegard Kahn sitting behind her Presidential desk. Alkema recognized the gold and burgundy trappings of her office. She looked livid.

  “It has been brought to my attention that you have disregarded our orders to leave our children alone. Furthermore, in contravention of our planetary sovereignty, you are continuing operations to remove our children from their home planet. You are ordered to cease such operations immediately and return the children you have stolen.” Alkema was surprised to hear her speak for so long without a curse word. He was about to explain that operations would continue, but she didn’t stop speaking long enough for him to do so.

  “We were generous enough to allow two of your people through our Gateway. They were to have been returned to you earlier today. They have not been. I alone have the recall codes necessary to bring them back. If you do not cease operations immediately, and return our children, we will leave them in the Afterlife, and you will never see them again.”

  Her face disappeared, the rectangle went to static. “Transmission ends,” Lewis reported.

  Alkema drummed his fingers against the arm of his command chair. “This just got more interesting.”

  Chapter 11

  Keeler – Tolkien Xerox brought round one of the estate’s larger hover sedans and chauffeured the three Keelers toward the city. Pegasus Keeler placed a call on the car’s COM Link. “Bettilu, it’s Bill again. We’re going to Zorg Patterson’s. It’s about seven hours into the evening, and we would love it if you would join us. Call me.” Sapphire Keeler snorted dismissively. “Why do you want her to join us? She’s about as fun as a night at a Panrovian Accordion Opera.”

  Pegasus Keeler replied. “I left her and went to the other side of the galaxy, and all that time I’ve never sent so much as a natal anniversary greeting. Since getting here, I’ve realized all the chances I’ve passed up… that you’ve passed up also.” Sapphire Keeler shrugged. “I’m comfortable with my decisions.” He paused. “Except for buying the fur-lined sink. In retrospect, I’d take back that one. Probably.” They passed through one of the checkpoints on the road that led off the estate. It was unmanned. Sapphireans were not a people who cared much about celebrity, and Keelers were not people who cared much about strangers driving by to see the legendary estate, so long as there weren’t too many. Pegasus Keeler was surprised when they came to a second checkpoint that was manned by a team of Ninjas. “That wasn’t there before,” he noted, out loud.

  “What, that? We put that in three years ago,” Sapphire Keeler informed him. “Some pro-election nut-jobs from Republic broke into one of the estate houses and broke some of our stuff. We thought we should keep some security nearby, at least for a while.”

  “I would have put Trauma Hounds in closer to the estate,” Pegasus Keeler said.

  Sapphire Keeler wiggled his eyebrows. “What makes you think I didn’t?” A speedy drive down “Lake of the Loons Parkway” took them into downtown New Cleveland, which was dominated by the sprawling university complex and the colorful office towers of businesses the university had spawned. These followed along the path of the Super Freeway and MagLev Express lines, spreading out at the tip, giving the downtown area a shape like a giant hammer.

  The Avenues downtown were very wide, and traffic was very light, it being the end of the week and long past the end of the workday. To the west, Sapphire’s sun was disappearing below the horizon, leaving red rippling reflections on the lake and a warm glow in the darkening sky.

  As they passed by the central campus area, the sedan was slowed by foot traffic.

  Something noisy and obnoxious was going on, and it annoyed Pegasus Keeler. “What the hell is going on? Why is our path toward booze being delayed?” Tolkien Xerox answered, “Pro-election demonstrators, sir. The New Democratist movement. They’re demonstrating in favor of abolishing the lottery, and replacing it with elected representatives.”

  “The fools!” Pegasus Keeler spat. He turned to Sapphire Keeler. “Why aren’t you having them beaten and jailed?”

  Sapphire Keeler rolled his eyes. “Because I’m not the Chancellor, Mary Jane Watson is.

  And she thinks sedition against our planetary government is cute.” Tolkien Xerox added, “The government of Republic has been aggressively supporting the pro-democracy militants ever since they added a Coordinating Committee to the Five Houses to their planetary government. Twelve members, two from each of the five legislative bodies and two from the Executive Committee now coordinate all of the activity in the legislative bodies, to make Republic’s government more efficient.”

  “Bo-ring,” Sapphire Keeler proclaimed.

  “And dangerous,” Pegasus Keeler added. “The last thing anyone should be cheering is an efficient government.”

  “It’s worked quite well, so far,” Xerox protested. “Bills are passed in a fraction of the time it used to take. The Ministries have been streamlined…”

  “Blah blah blah,” Sapphire Keeler
interrupted, waving his hand. “We should have taken one of the trucks, I believe at least one of them has a large snow-plow attached to the front.”

  “Snow? In New Cleveland?” Pegasus Keeler was skeptical.

  Sapphire Keeler shrugged. “You never know, do you?”

  Pegasus Keeler looked through the rear window at the students and locals streaming by.

  He didn’t get a “revolution” vibe from the chaotic scene in the vast lawns that fronted the university’s north side. To him, it looked like a street party. It was typical for a Firesday night in New Cleveland for students to be all over Lex Keeler Memorial Park, listening to music, drinking, socializing… later throwing up maybe, or waking up next to someone unacceptable. Sapphire Keeler guessed the “democracy” radicals had piggy-backed their protest onto the normal festivities to make themselves look more substantial. He couldn’t see anyone in the crowd who looked like they were adamant about replacing Sapphire selective service lottery with an electoral process.

  The sedan paused at a traffic control signal. Keeler’s eyes lingered over a tall, handsome student engaged in conversation with two laughing females. The male had the confident look of someone who was going to get laid that night, and Keeler felt a pang of anguish.

  He felt pain for the loss of youth, when such a little thing as hooking up for the night mattered so much. At the same time, he felt sorry for the student, because someday he would know that sense of loss as well.

  Then, Xerox accelerated though the crowd and the street party disappeared behind them.

  Redfire – After Gabrielle took their orders for the dinner meal, Redfire A recalled. “Just before Lexington Keeler launched missiles to blow up the sun at 255 Crux, the Tactical crew was monitoring unusual movements in the alien fleet. I’ve heard people talking about it in the bar. That must have been because of you, destroying the capital ship. If you hadn’t distracted them, they would have attacked before we discovered them.” Redfire B beamed. “How about that, honey? We made a difference after all.” Redfire A asked in all seriousness. “So, is this where you are, for all eternity?” Halo Jordan smiled. “Neg, we’re just here to visit with you.”

  “Where are you the rest of the time?” Redfire A asked.

  A moment of something, maybe regret or resignation, shone on the faces of both Redfire B and Halo Jordan. Then, Redfire B spoke. “We are… we’re learning.” Halo Jordan added, “Our souls are too immature to go on to the real world.”

  “What do you mean ‘the Real World?’” Redfire A asked.

  Halo Jordan tried to explain. “What you think of as the material world, what you think of as reality, is just an illusion… like a holo-projection. Matter, gravity… they’re just illusions created by manipulating cosmic strings.”

  Redfire A gestured around the Celestial Café. “Is this real?” Halo Jordan smiled. “This is just a more self-evident illusion, albeit, one with excellent cheeseburgers.”

  “Here, here!” Redfire B agreed.

  Redfire A had to ask, “So, what is reality?”

  “Reality is the Allbeing,” Redfire B answered. “We’re all a part of the Allbeing. We came from the Allbeing. But we chose to separate ourselves from Him, and now we can’t return to the Allbeing until we’ve learned enough about truth, and faith, and the nature of our own selves. We can not survive in His Presence otherwise.

  “Unfortunately, Halo and I got too caught up in the details of our temporal lives. If we approached the Allbeing in this state, we’d be consumed and destroyed by the light.

  Maybe that’s what Hell is… people approach the Allbeing before they’re ready, and it destroys them.”

  Redfire A chewed on that. “That’s somewhat different than how I thought it worked.”

  “Someday you’ll understand,” Halo Jordan assured him. “It’s nice enough, where we are, but Phil and I still have a lot to learn before we can progress to the next level.”

  “It’s not too late for you, though,” Phil said. “You can avoid this, and go on to the next level if you choose another path.”

  Finally! They were getting to the point. “All right then, once and for all, who am I?” Redfire B smiled. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  “Most definitely,” Redfire A assured him.

  “Gabrielle, can I get a glass of water over here,” Redfire B called out. Gabrielle brought a single glass of water on a silver tray, which Redfire B immediately splashed in the face of Redfire A. To Redfire A, it felt like a lot more than one glass of water. It felt like a wave washing over him, and almost drowning him..

  A series of images came to him, as though unlocked from inside of him.

  He was running through a field in Graceland province, toward the house he had grown up in.

  His mother was standing there with her arms wide open.

  He was in a room inside the house. Other ginger-haired children were around him, and some others. They were being taught about mathematics.

  The morning of Christ-Solstice Mass. He was opening a gift, a colorful shirt he did not like.

  He was in a city. He was standing outside a bar, and he was crying. A woman had just left him.

  He was in a ship, a great, dark, and silent freighter piloting the dark cold channel between the Sapphire and Republic Systems.

  He was holding a molecular integration tool, working with a team of fabrication robots attaching bulkheads to the interior of a great ship.

  He was running through darkened passageways, chased by men almost invisible in their shadow armor, firing weapons at him.

  He was sick, and he was walking through fire, to a cave.

  Redfire A stammered. “I remember everything. I was sick. I jettisoned myself in a lifepod. I homed it in on the landing party beacon. It landed hard. Skidded into the river. I pulled myself onto the shore, but there was a firestorm. It was all hurricane-force wind and fire. Before long, my clothes were burning. I stripped them off, but by the time I got to the redoubt, the heat burned off my hair.

  “I’m John Hunter… neg, I’m John Philip Redfire… I’m…”

  “My twin brother,” Redfire B finished for him. “I got picked for the Pegasus mission, you stowed away on board the ship.”

  “We’re telepathically bonded, that’s how I could know how you escaped,” Redfire A stammered. Halo Jordan passed him a napkin so that he could mop the water from his face.

  “Exactly so,” Philip John Redfire smiled. “And when you were working on Pegasus during construction, you tampered with the programming in the BrainCore and the Medical Database so no one could ever detect you by DNA or electromagnetic imprint. As far as the ship was concerned, you were me. That’s part of the reason you outlasted all the others in the UnderDecks.”

  “What about Ghost… my lover… is she?”

  “You’ll see her again,” Halo Jordan promised.

  Redfire A – John Philip Redfire sighed in relief, feeling as though for the first time, he truly knew himself.

  “Now, are you ready for the bad news?” Philip John Redfire began.

  Keeler — Zorg Patterson’s Pub had a prime location on the New Cleveland waterfront. It was far enough off the beaten path that tourists didn’t know about it, and it was expensive enough that the freighter crews from the docks didn’t bother with it.

  Zorg Patterson had knocked down a three-hundred-year-old boarding house to build his bar. He had brought slabs of lake granite from the quarries north of the city to build the floors, put huge windows on the upper deck to look out on the lake and the city, and built the walls from solid black brick. Its simplicity made it one of the least ugly buildings in New Cleveland, but it was the hearty food and vast collection of imported ales that made Zorg Patterson’s Pub the place for New Clevelanders to have a good time and not be seen.

  Pegasus Keeler charged up to the young woman at the reception pedestal. “Get me a table now! I’ve just dropped in from an alternate universe, and I want to drink!”

  “Lik
e I haven’t used that line before,” Sapphire Keeler quipped.

  The night was early, but already the place was crowded. Pegasus Keeler insisted that someone pay the maitre d’ an enormous bribe to secure a table on the deck with a view of the lake. Zorg’s was laid out in the form of very large table-bars arranged throughout the main section, with more on the deck out back. On a Friday night, even the largest bribe Delia could manage was not enough.

  They had all but resigned themselves to an inside table when Sapphire Keeler excused himself, went out to the back deck, and a few moments later appeared in the doorway of the lake deck, gesturing for them to join him.

  Sapphire Keeler had found that one of the tables in back was, as he suspected it would be, occupied by the USNC’s Friday Night Faculty Meeting. There were nearly two dozen professors there already, most of whom were reliably smashed. Procuring four additional chairs for their large table was not a problem.

  Maynard M. Menard, the Professor of Quality Writing for Fiction Dramas, goggled at the two Keelers that stood before him. “Am I seeing double? You haven’t gone off and cloned yourself, have you old boy?”

  Sapphire Keeler wiggled his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” He threw an arm around Pegasus Keeler. “This, apparently, is my doppelganger from another parallel universe.”

  “What a hackneyed plot device,” muttered Maynard M. Menard.

  “In his alternative timeline, I left on one of the Odyssey ships, I can’t remember which.” He added in a stage whisper. “I strongly suspect he is evil. Let’s get him drunk and find out.”

  “Alternative universes,” chuckled Professor Clara Kent, a theoretical physicist specializing in Hyperspace Mechanics. “I personally debunked that entire theory last year in the Spring Issue of Theoretical Physics Journal.”

  “I remember that,” said Professor Bryce Wayne, Professor of Running Large Companies.