by Barry Kirwan
The looming towers brought his mind back to the present mission, and to Louise. He’d never known her so quiet.
"How’s it going with Micah?"
He noticed her almost shift position, restrain it, then shift anyway. The complex games we play.
"He’s getting there. Says he can extract more information from the data cube. I’m not sure how, and neither is he, but he’s proven resourceful."
Vince banked the aircraft towards the localizer and ceded control to the onboard computer.
"Are you two – getting on?" The dashboard flowed green, signaling it was now on auto-pilot and had captured the approach glide path.
She folded her hands in her lap. "You mean like we used to?"
Vince heard a tinge of bitterness. She’d never forgiven him."It’s been a long time, Louise. But yes, like that."
"You usually don’t take an interest in my methods, just my results."
He checked the docking doors were opening, and then turned to her.
"The stakes are high this time. Micah seems to be a key. I don’t–"
"Want him damaged."
"Exactly."
"You want me to stop fucking him?"
"I want you to stop fucking with him."
"Already done on both counts."
The hangar doors clanked shut behind them and the craft landed. The engines powered down.
She folded her arms. "Anything else?"
He studied her, remembering the good times, before he’d seen the chasm inside her, a sloping, bottomless pit where nothing other than increasingly violent sex could ever find a foothold.
"Are you okay, Louise?"
She threw her head back and laughed. "Like you give a shit?"
He did, unfortunately, and raised his voice. "I’ll be more precise. Are you okay with the Mission?"
Her face tightened. "You mean fighting the bad guys, and all that?" She shrugged. "Gets me out of bed."
She made to release her seat buckle, but Vince placed his hand over hers. "Answer the question, Louise. This is me you’re talking to."
She pivoted toward him, brought her face close enough to smell her scent. "Do you think we’re making any difference, Vince? Does the bad ever stop? We kill people we define as bad, but for who? Can you name me one of our chiefs you’d trust your life with? A President who isn’t corrupt or slave to shady business interests?" She removed his hand, snapped open the buckle, flinging the belt aside so that it rattled against the door.
He tried again. "You know that if we stop for just one day the Alicians – "
"The Alicians, what? At least they have an agenda, they’re unified."
Vince didn’t know what perturbed him most – what she’d just said, or that she’d said it so openly. He gripped her wrist hard. "If you were anyone else I’d take you down for profiling, right now."
She smiled, easing back in her chair. "You’re still sexy when you’re angry, you know."
His shoulders tensed; he wanted to slap her face to make her snap out of it. "This is serious, Louise."
She gave him a look he hadn’t seen in a long time. "You do care, don’t you? I thought you’d buried it – us – years ago."
Vince cursed and let go of her wrist.
"Vince, listen to me, just once. Just listen. Is humanity really worth saving? I mean think about it. If there were an alien race out there, what would they think of us? We kill and wage war on each other, love and torture each other in equal measure. If there was some kind of galactic society, what would they do if they found us?" She touched his hand. "Do you ever just wonder if we’re too fucked up to merit survival as a species?"
Vince heard her, but he wasn’t listening. He was there to do his job, and he did it well. Until now, so did she. He retracted his hand.
She sighed. She kicked open the door and leapt out.
He watched her go inside, and wondered whether, if he’d have kept their relationship going, she’d have stayed on the rails longer. Truth was she was scarred too badly to ever heal. He’d read her profile years ago – she’d been a ‘giver’ before the War, a teacher for Christ’s sake out in the Congo. In the early days he’d seen some of that re-surface, but now all he saw was a woman with the goodness ground out of her. Working for the Chorazin allowed her to vent her anger, but it wasn’t ever going to be enough. He’d have to watch her closely.
As he jumped down from the flyer he recalled one of the Chorazin guidelines about not having relationships with another agent, for the simple reason you might have to kill said agent one day. He stopped in his tracks, remembering the day his father made him – at age thirteen – shoot his own horse after it broke its leg during a cross-country tournament. "Why does it have to be me?" he’d pleaded. "You love him," his father had replied, "so you have to be the one to put him out of his pain." Vince could still see those great wild eyes as he pressed the large bore gun to his horse’s temple, stroking his sweaty mane with his other hand, pulling the trigger. The recoil broke his wrist, but something shattered deeper inside him. He’d killed a lot of people in his time, but he wasn’t sure he could kill Louise.
"Are you coming or not?" she shouted, holding a door open.
He followed her inside. Time to talk with Senator Josefsson and see what he was really up to.
Chapter 30
Final Mission
"He’s awake."
Gabriel heard the words as if through a thick block of ice. He felt as if his outer layer of skin was frozen, as if he was back inside the glacier. He tried to move, but although he could sense his body, it wouldn’t respond to his commands. He managed to blink – nothing else worked. He couldn’t move his head. All he could see was the ceiling above him – luminous white and non-descript. The sharp tang of disinfectant invaded his nostrils. He heard two voices in the room, one male, and one female. They were close, and from the lack of echoes he knew the room was small, probably an operating theatre: the table he was on was metallic and hard, with several creases and a footrest, so it could tilt in different planes.
The ceiling dazzled him. He felt no pain, but he was light-headed and nauseous. So, he surmised, they had probably not only drugged him so he couldn’t move, but maybe they had already performed some sort of surgery.
A face loomed: Sister Esma. From his vantage point, the shadows accentuated her harsh features – the long hooked nose, high cheekbones, and thick but not pretty lips. Eyes like black holes, not caring what they consume.
"Hello, Gabriel O’Donnell. That is your real name, isn’t it? So glad you could join us."
He noticed a slight yellowing of her incisors, and there was the smell of something rancid on her breath, like rotting onions. He began inwardly counting his own breaths, to distance himself from her. She was no doubt there to torture him.
"We have been watching you for some time. You seemed too good to be true: top of your class, ruthless with no trace of malice, obedient, fervently religious. A flawless performance."
She moved out of view. He heard metallic stilettos strut around the room. He’d lost his count. The drugs made it difficult. He started again.
"But then two months ago, your Master, Cheveyo, disappeared."
Gabriel ceased counting. She’d stopped moving and talking. Why did she pause? What was the other person in the room doing? Whoever it was, their breathing was slow, concentrated, yet deadened, so he or she was not facing him. The other person was studying something, but what? Was she looking at it too? Then he realized – they probably had him in a psy-net, watching changes in breathing rate, electro-dermal response – the full gamut of advanced lie detection parameters. He began counting his breaths again, trying to keep them smooth, to subdue the reactions. But whatever drug they had given him was making him emotionally labile. He could feel himself over-reacting, on the verge of panic, which he hadn’t experienced for a decade, though he’d seen enough of it in his victims’ pleading faces.
"We have since determined Cheveyo is one of
the last Sentinels. We exterminated most of them over the centuries. You were his disciple, his protégé. He told you about the ships, didn’t he?" She hovered close to his face, leering.
"No – he did more than that, didn’t he? He showed you a ship! You have been inside one!" She moved away again and laughed. "Such irony! And such control, Gabriel, you hid all this so well!"
Gabriel’s heart rate increased. He wanted to distance himself from the emotions, but it didn’t work. He fought to concentrate on a deep meditation exercise that would transport him into the recesses of his mind.
"He’s using the distance technique." A man’s voice.
She appeared above him again, and showed him a scalpel. It disappeared from view and then Gabriel felt searing, blinding pain in his left hand. His breath sputtered. He could not flinch, cry out, or even move his lips, but the pain skewered up through his arm into his head, behind his eyes. She held up his bloodied little finger, severed from his left hand, and waved it in front of his eyes.
"No, Gabriel, that won’t do at all." A drop of blood from his finger dripped into his left eye, so that half his vision turned scarlet, hot pain drenching his eyeball.
"Next time you try that, I’ll cut off something a little more personal."
His mind reeled with the pain and the frustration, anger and fear; unaccustomed emotions. For the first time in many, many years, he wanted to run, or curl up and hide. He tried to focus on the small filaments of anger lurking in his fear. If he couldn’t find his usual dispassionate equanimity, anger was preferable to despair.
"Now, Gabriel, we all know how brave you are. And this must be very distressing for you because we’ve injected you with negative emotion-enhancers, so I know you’re afraid right now. But, you see, I need you alive." She rested her head on her elbow placed on his chest. "Personally, I’d enjoy killing you slowly, here and now. But business comes first. There is one last task we need you to fulfill."
She disappeared from his vision again. Gabriel managed to breathe more slowly. He had to concentrate on her voice, because otherwise the pain in his hand was too much. He had to play this out: the emotional rollercoaster and the blinding pain would pass, one way or another.
"Now, Gabriel, I know what you’re thinking. That you will not do one last mission for us. That you would die first, sabotage the mission, kill me, etcetera. But, you know, you will carry out my command, even though it will kill you and many others."
He heard the rolling of small wheels, and then a vid screen appeared above him. It was playing a news pod. He saw a ship, like he’d seen years ago, but in water, the pictures taken from above.
"You see, you’ll do it, because if you don’t, we’ll kill her." The vid changed to a scene with a small crowd gathering around an open hatchway. A young female came into the frame, next to a large-girth man who talked and gesticulated with uncommon exuberance. The scene froze and zoomed in on the girl’s face. Gabriel’s breath halted, as if he was seeing a ghost – because it couldn’t be her. She was dead. She’d been in Dublin when three nukes detonated above the emerald city, flattening it before sucking out the oxygen into a huge firestorm. No one had survived in a twenty mile radius.
"It was filmed yesterday. You know her, of course, though you probably haven’t seen her for years. Possibly believed she was dead. Please breathe, Gabriel." She scratched the stump where his little finger should have been, causing him to intake a sharp, jagged breath.
"That’s better. Now, where was I? Ah yes, we were monitoring information from this site, and came across her genetic analysis, taken to confirm that both of them were human – since she and the Professor stepped out of something more sublime than human artistry could ever hope to construct – and you’ll never guess what, Gabriel. That’s right; she’s your little sister. Jennifer, isn’t it?"
Gabriel could only stare at the picture. He’d been sure she was dead, but it was definitely her. Not-quite-blonde, mousy disheveled hair, her slight ski-jump nose which she used to say saved her having to give the world the finger all the time, and the bottle green eyes that rarely looked forward, even now, because she never trusted anyone, except him and their father. He couldn’t help but notice she looked more cynical than when he’d last seen her ten years ago. And, as if to confirm it all, the necklace was still there, the one he’d bought for her fifteenth birthday. He could see the two gold links he’d inserted in the otherwise silver chain after he’d broken it during one of their last, terrible rows at the beginning of the War. He didn’t know how she’d survived – she must have got warning and escaped before the missiles detonated. And afterwards, straight after Dublin and the wiping out of his entire family – or so he had thought – he had gone into deep cover. If she had tried to find him, if she’d looked, she would have found no trace of him either.
He forgot the pain in his left hand. A tear built up, and even though he knew it was partly drug-induced, he didn’t care. She was the only person who had ever elicited tears from him. For a split second a tsunami of remorse threatened to rise up and engulf him – a crucifixion of angst for the lost time they would never recover, for the life he had chosen, believing her dead and so having nothing to live for. A chasm of regret opened up in front of him, beckoning. But he re-directed his thoughts – she was alive, that was all that mattered.
He knew Sister Esma had him. He would, as she had said, do whatever she asked, to keep his sister alive, though he wouldn’t see her again.
"Touching. Reunions can be so tearful. But we haven’t much time. Our schedule has been moved forwards by unexpected events, mainly caused by the Eden Mission. It seems the Ulysses made it to Eden after all. We cannot let them send a message back to Earth, and since we can no longer stop them sending a message, we have to make sure no one will be there at the receiving end." She shoved the video monitor aside and leaned over him again. "Which is why we need you to blow up their headquarters." She swept out of view again.
Gabriel’s mind raced – could he do it – could he make that trade? But he already knew he would. Of course they could kill his sister anyway, but if he was out for even a few hours, he could try to safeguard her.
She returned with a short needle and thrust it into his jaw; tiny stabs of pins and needles ensued, then fire, and then numbness. His jaw loosened.
"Some good news and some bad news, Gabriel. The good news is we inserted something into your skull. A chemical device with a twenty-four hour deteriorating casing around it. There is no way to remove it or stop it from releasing acid directly into your brain – such a death will be quite ugly, I can assure you, so it is best all round if you are in the building when you destroy it. The bad news is, I’m afraid, that we inserted it twenty-one hours ago."
She leant over him again. "I’ve released your mouth so you can say yes or no. And if you spit at me I will claw out your left eye with my bare fingers. So, what is it going to be Gabriel? The Eden Mission or your sister?"
Gabriel swallowed a few times, trying to lubricate his throat. There was something he wanted to know, a suspicion he harboured. "What about Micah?"
Sister Esma eyed him, her voice level. "What about him?"
Her look and tone confirmed it. He’d been tracking Micah’s progress via a bug in his Optron lab, wondering how Micah had been able to fathom so much of the Alician strategy in only a matter of days. "We know about the intelligence levels, Esma, how humanity is only Level Three; why we’re fit for culling by your masters, the Q’Roth."
Her face was stone.
"He’s Level Four, isn’t he? Must have slipped through your net. You’ve been killing off nascent next-evolutionists for the past two centuries, whenever you detect them – if you can’t recruit them. If a Ranger came now, he’d stop you and the Q’Roth, stop the invasion, because humanity is on the verge of elevation. We’d be protected –"
Her eyes leapt across the room to her colleague, who Gabriel heard stand up – of course, the man probably hadn’t known any of this. Sister
Esma’s right hand whipped out. A flash of silver left her palm, and Gabriel heard the sound of flesh puncturing, followed by a jugular squirt of blood, a groan and gurgling, and a body slumping to the floor. She turned her face back to him. "Now look what you’ve made me do. He was really quite useful."
"Micah doesn’t know, does he?"
She leaned forward. "Micah is in a coma, and I’m going to make sure he never comes out of it." She leant back. "Now, there’s no more time for this, particularly for you. And if you contact the Chorazin, I’ll visit your sister myself, is that clear?"
Gabriel let it go.
"It’s over, Gabriel. The ships will all be found shortly, and it will begin. You and your Sentinels have lost our little silent war. Your generation, so to speak, had its chance, but you squandered it. The Alicians will breed a new era of humanity, on a new planet. Earth’s days are numbered, and mankind will be slaughtered, except for the Alicians. But if you do this for me, we will take Jennifer with us. That is a promise, Gabriel. So, what is it going to be?"
Gabriel closed his eyes. Forgive me, Jenny.
"Yes."
She injected something into his neck. "I must leave now. We won’t be seeing each other again. The package you’ll be needing is in the adjacent room. We’re fifteen kilometers from the Eden Mission complex. This room is wired for an explosion in ten minutes." She held up his dead finger, in a small transparent plastic bag, for him to see. "A memento." The clacking of her stilettos diminished as she passed through successive sets of double doors.
