Terminus Cycle

by Dave Walsh

  “Oh, leave the kid alone.” The voice of Dumas boomed from around the corner.

  “Goddamn it, Dumas.” O’Neil laughed, happy to see his face. “You want to fill me in on what is going on here? I didn’t know that you were here already.”

  “Yeah, bright and early,” he answered as he motioned toward the office. “Let’s talk. I’ve got your speech prepared for you.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Yeah, real official and patriotic,” he said, closing the door behind him after they had entered the room. “Just like the admiral expects.”

  “What is going on out here, Jack?”

  Dumas shook his head. “None of us are really sure, all right? This place is a mess, though, Peter. I mean a real bona fide mess. The people are unhappy; they are restless. I feel like we’ve been thrown into the fire here.”

  “That’s what I feared.” O'Neil frowned, sitting on the chair behind his desk. “How long have you been down here? I only told you about this last night.”

  “Well, Admiral Navarro came to me yesterday afternoon and --”

  “The admiral went to you before he came to me?” he asked, raising his voice.

  “Yeah, uh, look Pete,” he began. He shook his head, sitting on the edge of the chair across from O’Neil’s desk. “I didn’t know, all right? He came to me, saying that we were all going to be coming down here, and he wanted to make sure that everything was ready for you. I had a few people get this office set up the way that you like it. We’ve got your quarters all ready to go. I don’t know,” he shrugged. “An order is an order.”

  “I guess it is,” O’Neil agreed, but he couldn’t help but feel uneasy. “What about Dr. Brandis?”

  “She’s here somewhere. She’s been organizing expeditions over the past few months since it was deemed safe to do so. She was down here on the first shuttle down after it was approved months ago. I’ve tried to get into contact with her about helping out here, but she claimed that she was too busy to do so.”

  “Oh,” he said, feeling a burning in his chest.” So did you transport?” He pointed at the Transporter Module on his lapel.

  “No,” Dumas said. “I didn’t know that we even had access to that stuff; only the guys in upper command have them.”

  “Well,” O’Neil said as he reached into his pocket and tossed a metal disc across the span of the desk. It slapped down and spun until it rested. “Now you do, so get used to it.”

  “Man,” Dumas said as he inspected the disc. “The whole transporting thing really gives me the creeps.”

  “You and me both,” he said. “But those are some of the, uh, perks, that we get now. If I have to wear one, so do you.”

  “Great, so they want us to be readily available to beam back and forth?”

  “Yeah.” O’Neil tapped his fingers on the desk impatiently. “Apparently so. I guess that we are important, Dumas,” he laughed.

  “Well, things could be worse, right?”

  “You tell me,” he replied as he motioned at the commander. “I’ve only been here for a few minutes now. Other than this ridiculous speech,” he said as he looked out toward the balcony, “What do you have to report?”

  “Things have generally been pretty quiet around here,” he stated as he pulled out his holoscanner, flicking it on and thumbing through reports. “Two guards who were patrolling in the wastelands haven’t reported in since earlier today; we have arrested two Helgean monks who were using stolen encryption codes to contact the Omega Destiny; there have been a rash of rad poisoning from what we suspect was tainted meat --”

  “Wait,” O’Neil interrupted, perking up. “Go back to the monk thing. Do we know who they were trying to contact?”

  “Let me check.” He scrolled through his holoscanner before studying it intently. “It looks like they were trying to call a Professor Julian Cox. They are just Helgean monks, though. They probably bought the codes off of the black market. We’re just having them questioned right now.”

  “Jack,” O’Neil said as he turned pale. “I want you to call off the questioning right now. Tell them to leave them alone for now. Do we have photos of them?”

  “Uh, yes.” He projected them onto the wall for O’Neil to see. “This is them right here, one in his mid-twenties and the other maybe 17 or so?”

  “Jesus Christ.” O’Neil turned pale at the sight of the older one. “Call off the interrogation right this moment!” he shouted. “I’m heading down there. Keep this quiet, okay?”

  “Okay,” Dumas agreed as he looked on, confused. “But sir, what about your speech?”

  “It can wait,” he said, storming out of the room before pausing. “Wait, where are they being held?”

  “Here, hold on.” Dumas flicked his holoscanner off. “Let me take you there.”

  * * *

  O’Neil stood outside of the interrogation room, looking over the files. The face was not only familiar but burned into his brain. This was Jonah Freeman, the kid who knew everything, the kid whom he had sent away two years prior. Everyone aboard the Omega Destiny had written him off as dead after he was accused of the murder of Jim Levine. It was with good reason, too, because O’Neil was on record as tossing him out of an airlock. Of course, it was in a life capsule that was small enough to avoid detection, but no one else knew about it, and he had timed it to go along with a trash dump in the same section.

  That decision had been haunting him for the past two years. Jonah Freeman was a kid after his own heart, only looking for the truth and worrying about what was best for everyone aboard. There was only one conversation between them, but it had stuck with him like an itch that he couldn’t scratch. In the past two years, things had gotten progressively worse; the fears that the two of them had shared were becoming a reality. There had been a few nights when O’Neil would find himself in bed, wondering whatever became of Jonah Freeman on the harsh planet they had been calling Omega.

  A part of him couldn’t see Freeman as a Helgean monk. Yet there he sat on the other side of the wall, wearing a robe and giving answers like he was one -- a convert -- but it didn’t feel right. He looked through the arrest record, skimming it and feeling a knot in his stomach. This was going to be an interesting conversation, that much was certain. He knew that he had to get them out of there, far away from Speera, before any of Admiral Navarro’s men found out who he was, where he was from or how he was still alive.

  “Jonah Freeman,” he greeted him as he walked into the room, closing the door behind him quickly. “I never thought that I’d see you again.”

  “What?” Jonah quickly turned around, his face turning as white as a sheet. “Oh my god, sir!” He sprang to his feet.

  “Sir?” O’Neil chuckled, pulling a seat toward the bench where both prisoners were sitting. “Formalities toward commanding officers can be dropped after death, at least from what I remember of code.”

  “Yeah,” Freeman said. He laughed uneasily, sitting back down on the bench next to the boy, rubbing the back of his neck. “I guess so, right? So I’m still dead?”

  “As far as anyone knows, yes.” O’Neil folded his arms and leaned back in the chair. “Tossed out an airlock for high treason and murder. I don’t think that anyone would expect to find you as a Helgean monk -- not even me!”

  “Oh, right.” He looked down at his robe. “The robe, eh?”

  “The story has everyone convinced,” he said. “But I’m not quite sure that I buy that the same Jonah Freeman who was so incensed over those issues aboard the Omega became a peaceful monk and watched this planet become host to a hostile takeover.”

  “I think that you might be onto something --”

  “Ingen!” Alva shouted. “No, do not tell this man anything! You’ll put us all in danger!”

  “Alva,” Jonah said as he looked to the girl, tears streaming down her cheeks. “This man saved my life; he is the reason why I’m here with you. I trust him.”

  “Ingen, eh?” O’Neil leaned over in the c
hair, resting his elbows on his knees. “Look, Alva,” he began. He paused at the name, assuming that it was a boy from the initial file, but it was clearly wrong. “I’m not sure why, but Ingen here is a guy whom I trust. We need more men of vision in this galaxy, less men like the ones that we came here with. Hell,” he said. “Probably less men like me. I’m still not sure how Jonah Freeman became Ingen the Helgean monk, though.”

  “He’s not Helgean!” Alva snarled. “He’s a Krigan warrior, like my father and like me.”

  “It’s okay, Alva.” Jonah grabbed her by the shoulders, turning her to face him. “He’ll protect us.” Jonah turned his eyes toward O’Neil, who was looking on patiently. “Like I said, I trust him.”

  “She’s right, you know,” O’Neil commented as he looked at Jonah. “If I were in her situation, I’m not sure that I’d trust me, either. I’ve already written this off as a misunderstanding -- you two are free to go whenever -- but I want some answers from Ingen here first.”

  “Okay,” Jonah agreed, swallowing hard. O’Neil made note of his body language. Jonah asked, “First of all, how did you...”

  “Know it was you?” He laughed, crossing his legs and tugging on the cuff of his pants. “Well, when I saw whom you tried to contact on the Omega, it became pretty clear to me that either some Helgean monk was looking to pick Professor Cox’s mind on physics, or Jonah Freeman was alive and in custody and that I had to hustle down here to clean this mess up.”

  “Ah, sorry about that. I didn’t think that they’d be able to trace it so quickly.”

  “Well, look.” He let out a sigh, taking his glasses off of his face, breathing onto them, pulling a rag out of his pocket and cleaning them off methodically before placing them back on. “Slattery’s death raised some serious red flags with the fleet. It was like his every move was predicted and that they knew exactly when, from what direction and what kind of force to expect from the attack. I assume that you were feeding some information to the Krigans then?”

  “I guess, in a way,” Jonah answered as he shifted uncomfortably. “I mean, the Krigans took me in, made me one of their own, took care of me. I’d see them go out, their trade routes plundered, innocent men coming back wounded or wheeled in dead on carts. These people did nothing to us! Nothing at all! They simply exist, they are here, they are an inconvenience.

  “Is that a reason for genocide?” He was on his feet now, pacing between Alva and O’Neil. “They made their mistakes in the past. You look around, and you can tell. You can see it everywhere on this world, but that’s their issue -- not ours! We are the strangers in a strange land, even if we are somehow related from past travels.

  “This is wrong, Captain -- you and I both know that. We both know that we could live peacefully on the planet if we wanted to.”

  “I don’t disagree,” he said as he furrowed his brow and nodded in agreement. This was the kid he remembered, all right. “I’m not saying that anything you did is wrong, Jonah. In fact, I completely agree with you. I’m not comfortable with any of what is going on.”

  “Then why be a part of it? Why be a part of the problem?”

  “That’s a good question.” He paused, looking off into the distance. He had asked himself this question many times over the past few years and was never able to find an answer that he was satisfied with. “I think it’s because I can’t find a way out. I can’t just toss myself out of an airlock.”

  “Okay,” Jonah conceded as he sat back down next to Alva. “That’s probably a good point. I can’t imagine how people would handle Captain Peter O’Neil disappearing like that. But you know, you could change things; people will listen to you.”

  “I’m not sure that Peter O’Neil, revolutionary, is really something that the admiral or anyone on Earth would let happen at this point. I’d be made an example of. They’d tell everyone that I had lost my mind, a victim of exposure, unable to cope with living outside of the ship. You, of all people, should be aware of how serious they are about spin.”

  “So -- what? You are just going to let me go, and this is all over? I clearly can’t communicate with anyone else on board the Omega Destiny. So now the Krigans have to roll over and accept the Earthers as their new overlords?”

  “No!” Alva spat on the cell floor. “We refuse. We’ll die before that happens.”

  “This passion doesn’t shock me; in fact, she embodies all that I’ve heard of the Krigans.”

  “The Krigans are proud people,” Jonah confirmed. “They are also intelligent people and willing to fight for what they believe in. This one here is even more deadly than you could ever imagine.”

  “Oh?” O’Neil raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes,” Alva nodded, staring at the floor. “You can ask the two guards in the wastelands about how innocent I am.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered under his breath, looking at Jonah. “That was you two?”

  “We had no choice.” Jonah hung his head. “We kept to our story, but they were going to call it in -- they were hassling us and going to blow the whole thing. There are lives on the line here, Captain. We did what we had to do. It surely wasn’t what we wanted to do, though.”

  “I understand.” He could only imagine how it went down, but Freeman never seemed like much of a butcher before. There was a good chance that life on Omega had changed him.

  “So what do you propose we do then, Captain?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted as he absently reached into his pockets. “I’ll find a way for you to safely go back, but I’ll have to put you up for the night until the heat dies down.”

  “I’m not going back to the Krigans without an answer, without a way for us to protect ourselves. You may know me as Jonah, but I am Ingen now, and I swore to do everything in my power to protect them.”

  “I understand,” O'Neil said. He nodded, deep in thought, as his fingers traced around the device in his pocket. He paused, pulling the Transporter Module out of his pocket and holding it in front of him. He was saving this for Sue, he told himself, but then again, things between them have been strained over the past two years. She didn’t want to go back to the ship anyway.

  “Look,” he said after a protracted pause. “Communications from Omega to the Fleet --”

  “Andlios,” Alva interrupted. “Omega is the Banished name.”

  “Right, sorry,” he said as he cleared his throat. “Communications between Andlios and the Fleet are going to be heavily monitored. There is just no way that you’ll be able to speak with anyone on board but...”

  “Fuck,” Jonah cursed, slamming his fist into the bench.

  “But,” O’Neil continued, undaunted. “This right here is something that very few people have access to. Only those in command have one, so there really isn’t any sort of way to trace them that we know of -- and hell, if there was, they wouldn’t be doing it because of how exclusive and difficult to use they are.”

  “Okay,” he said as he reached out, apprehensively taking it from O’Neil’s hand and holding it up to the light. “What is it then?”

  “It’s a Transporter Module.”

  “Which is?”

  “Something out of science fiction really.” He forced an uneasy smile. “I’m not entirely comfortable with it myself, but it somehow breaks us down on a molecular level and transports our pieces to a set location before reassembling us without a trace of anything strange ever happening. Instant teleportation.”

  The three sat in silence, Alva staring uneasily at the device in Jonah’s hand and Jonah looking on in disbelief. Humanity was capable of such beautiful, magnificent things, O’Neil thought while watching Jonah inspect it, only to turn its collective attention to the despicable.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Jonah asked.

  O'Neil shook his head.

  “So how do I use this?”

  “I’ll show you, but...” He paused, deep in thought. “You should save transporting between the ship and planet for when you absolutely need t
o, though. They can’t track what goes on here on the planet, but in the ships, it's a different story.”

  “How am I to get information back and forth then?”

  “Nobody said that my people and I can’t transport back and forth,” he stated, understanding the gravity of what he was promising.

  “You’d do that?” Jonah craned his neck, looking uneasy.

  “My people can report information to your people.” O'Neil realized that he was digging a deeper and deeper hole with each passing phrase, but he felt trapped in his role, powerless to do anything. At least these people were doing something. “So don’t use that just yet,” he said, pointing to the Transporter Module. “But I want you to have it, as a token of good faith.”

  015. The Runner

  Ingen the Krigan Warrior

  Ingen stirred in his bed just hours after they had returned from Speera, his head swimming with possibilities. Things had not gone according to plan at all, but things may have gotten more interesting.

  Could he really trust Captain O’Neil? He had spared his life once before and got both him and Alva out of that jam, but it felt strained for him to trust someone whom he had once wanted to publicly shame and humiliate like that.

  In a way, he felt that he and Captain O’Neil were kindred spirits of a sort. There was no good reason for O’Neil to listen to him, to humor him, yet he had done it and made a promise to do it again in the future.

  Ingen lay on his rough cot with the Transporter Module in his hands. He stared at it long and hard. It could be paired with a holoscanner and given coordinates to transport the owner to those exact coordinates.

  This technology was fascinating and horrifying at the same time. He imagined strike teams coming in the night, invading the Krigan homeland, and it being over in a heartbeat. Ingen lived underground in a bunker with Tyr’s warband, but a majority of the Krigans were simple civilians, living in cities to the west, by the ocean and away from the wastelands. There were series of caverns used as bunkers surrounding the Krigan nation, but eventually he had to wonder if the Earth Ministry could just bypass them altogether using this transporter technology.