by Rick Partlow
“Honestly, I don’t trust him.” His voice was unperturbed, relaxed despite his words. “I do believe it’s possible that he believes it,” Chang allowed. “But you and I both know from personal experience that often the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing when it comes to Gregorian.”
“True,” she said, closing her eyes and stifling a yawn. “There’s another possibility though…and I can’t stop thinking about it.”
That, at last, interrupted Chang’s routine. He straightened, turning to face her, curiosity in his dark eyes.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice suddenly flat and businesslike.
“It’s going to sound crazy,” she warned him.
His lip quirked at that. “My favorite kind.” He grabbed a towel from a bench and wiped the sweat from his forehead, then waved a hand for her to go on.
She shook her head, hesitated for a moment. “Whoever did this had to have the resources to acquire a Predecessor ship and the intelligence assets to know everything about us, including where you had relocated to, and when Deke and I were going to be returning to Inferno.”
“That’s a rarified list of suspects.” He tossed the towel down and picked up a bottle of water from the same bench, taking a swig. Then he poured some of it over his head, shaking the excess free of his short-cut hair with a motion that brought back a flash of old memories to her. “There’s Gregorian of course…but you don’t think it’s him?”
She shrugged diffidently. “It could be. That’s the easiest thing to think, isn’t it? But dammit, Robert, I knew him. He’s insanely ambitious and amoral, but I don’t know that he has the balls to pull off something like this. Nouri was right about that…why would he attack the base on Inferno? It was like he was daring the Fleet to come after him.”
“Then who?” Chang asked her. “Who else could pull it off?”
“General Murdock,” she said, almost having to push the words out.
Chang’s eyebrow rose in surprise, and he grinned slightly. “Well, that’s not what I expected from you, Kara. I thought you liked the man.”
She snorted. “Like him? I don’t know that anyone likes him. Do you like gravity, or the inverse square law? They just are and you have to plan accordingly. I just know that he’s the only other person I can think of that has the power and resources to pull this off…and the only one who has a motive.”
“What motive?” Chang shook his head. “Why in the name of Vishnu would General Murdock want to kill you?”
“He wouldn’t,” she said, grinning slightly. “But that’s the thing…he didn’t kill us. Any of us.”
“He killed me,” Chang objected mildly. “Well, someone did, anyway.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “And you’re the one who would have meant the least to him on a personal level. The rest of us…would anyone who knew Cal think a single Titan would be able to take him out? That’s been bothering me since the moment we arrived on Canaan.”
“A Predecessor ship destroyed half the Tartarus military base,” he argued. “There’s no way he could be sure you’d survive that!”
“We shouldn’t have survived.” She slammed a fist into the bulkhead. “That thing knew where we were going to be, it had some way around the automated security systems, and yet it always managed to just miss us.” Her face tightened into a frown. “I wonder, if the defense laser hadn’t disabled it, would it have let us get away…”
“I know I’m the last one to lecture anyone on the dangers of paranoia, Kara, but aren’t you going pretty far afield?”
“Once you eliminate the impossible,” she countered, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Quoting Sherlock Holmes at me doesn’t strengthen your case,” Chang responded dryly. “But I guess I see what you’re saying.” He sat down heavily on the bench, clasping his hands in front of him. “Why would he do it, though? If he wanted Mitchell and Conner to go after Gregorian, well, you already had Conner by the balls and Mitchell mentioned that he owed Murdock a service anyway for allowing that Tahni cyborg to go free.”
“I can’t say for certain,” Kara admitted. “But if I had to guess, it’s because he didn’t want the military involved in this. And he knew if he made it personal, we’d go after Gregorian ourselves. Maybe he doesn’t trust anyone in the military to get a hold of Predecessor weapons without using it to pull off a coup. I don’t know.”
“I might agree with him there,” Chang allowed, nodding. He looked up at her. “Have you told anyone else about this?”
“Not yet,” she said. “I don’t think Caleb would believe me, and it might be worse if he did: he’d turn around and head home with his family, and we need him. Deke would buy it, but it would make him so paranoid he wouldn’t trust anyone, including me.”
“Then why tell me?” he wanted to know.
“In case anything happens to me,” she said, shrugging. “If it does, tell Cal and Deke. They need to know who they can trust.”
His eyes were fathomless dark oceans that threatened to pull her in as he stared at her, his face unreadable.
“You trust me that much, Kara?” he asked, voice quiet, reflective.
“You’ve always been there for me, Robert,” she told him, laying a hand on his shoulder and leaning down to kiss him on the top of his head. She could taste the sweat in his hair. “You even died for me, once.”
“I got better,” he assured her, putting a hand over hers on his shoulder and squeezing it. “You know, I could do it for you, too, Kara.” At her confused look, he elaborated. “I could store your genetic material, back up your memories…make a copy of you ready to go if anything happened to you.” He smiled, an almost beatific expression on his face. “It’s liberating, not being afraid of death. It allows a sort of perspective on life that you can’t imagine, being able to truly think in the long term.”
“If it’s so great,” she asked him, trying to deflect his question, “why haven’t more people done it in the last few years? You can’t be the only one to figure this out.”
“Oh, come now, Kara,” Chang reproved, shaking his head, “you know very well why. Your office has been quashing every attempt to commercialize this procedure.” He snorted derisively. “It won’t work in the long run, of course: the Commonwealth is just too big, and money talks. I’m sure some of the more wealthy and influential citizens have begun experimenting with the idea already. But for now, it’s underground.”
He moved her hand off his shoulder and grasped it in both of his, looking at her with uncharacteristic earnestness. “So why not let me do it for you, too? It’s immortality, Kara. And you’re the closest thing I have to family.”
“The thing is,” she said, trying to figure out how to say it without hurting him, “I’m not sure it is immortality, Robert. Yes, it’s a perfect copy of you, with your memories…but is the material all we are?”
He laughed at that, still holding her hand. “What, you don’t think I have a soul?”
“Of course you do,” she replied, smacking him on the arm. “But is it the same soul, or are you a different person? One who looks like Robert, has the same memories, but isn’t quite the same?”
“Are you the same person you were ten years ago, Kara? Twenty? Does that mean you’re not still Kara McIntire?”
“Even if it would be the same as I would have been,” she went on, “wouldn’t the original me still be dead from my point of view? I mean, I won’t be seeing through her eyes; she’s effectively another person, right?”
Robert Chang shook his head, an amused, almost patronizing air to his tone when he answered. “Kara, you’re proceeding from a false premise to an erroneous conclusion. You think that there is some ephemeral ‘you’ beyond the chemical reactions in your brain, a little homunculus looking out from behind your eyes. But there isn’t…there’s the arrangement of cells in your brain that make you the person we know. If the physical copy of that arrangement that I’m talking to now dies and
another wakes up in a lab, with the same memories, then it is you, just as sure as if you’d never died.”
“You’re probably right,” she told him, hissing out a sigh. “I don’t know…I guess I’m just afraid.”
“What’s to be afraid of? If I’m right, you live forever. If I’m wrong, you’re dead and won’t care.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be the same,” she answered. “I’m afraid the new me will do things that I wouldn’t…and that’s how people will remember me.”
“There’s your problem, then,” he told her, standing from the bench and stepping towards the hatchway to the corridor. “You want to be remembered.” He smirked at her as he paused, looking back. “I don’t care about being remembered because I plan on living forever.”
Then he was through the hatchway and gone from sight.
Chapter Fifteen
Conner:
“Doesn’t look that different,” Kara said softly, as if she was worried about being overheard. “Just another star system.”
“From out here,” Deke agreed with a noncommittal shrug, staring at the shuttle’s sensor readout over her shoulder. It bothered him to not be in the pilot’s seat, even if he trusted Caleb to man it. It bothered him still more that Kara was in the right hand seat, but this was her show…and he was stuck backseat driving.
She was right about the system though. When they’d emerged from T-space, he’d expected something momentous, something worth all the struggle and death. They’d all been gathered on the bridge of the lighter for the Transition, even Nouri, and they’d emerged not too far from the orbit of an outer ice giant.
“I’m reading two ice giants,” Kara had reported for the benefit of those who weren’t neurolinked to the sensor systems, “plus a good-size gas giant further in…maybe a couple terrestrial planets but it’s still too far away to tell for sure.”
“Any sign of habitation?” Pete Mitchell had asked, the eager wonder of the young and naïve shining in his eyes. He looked as if he would have been crowding her shoulder if he hadn’t been strapped into his acceleration couch.
“I’m getting some electromagnetic signals from the vicinity of the larger moons of the gas giant,” she’d told him. “But I can’t say for sure that it’s not the planet’s EM field.”
“We’re getting a message from the flagship,” Cal had warned them. “The fleet is going to jump in closer to the gas giant. They want to check out those signals, I’d guess.” He’d shrugged phlegmatically. “I’m sending a response using the ID spoof we worked up. Hope it stands up to scrutiny.” He glanced at Chang. “You should drop that message buoy and let your people know where we’re headed.”
Yeah, that was the part that Deke had his doubts about.
“Timing on that’s going to be tricky,” he had said again, feeling like a broken record but also feeling like the only person willing to tell the Emperor he was naked. “If Chang’s ships don’t show up before they figure out who we are…”
“We’ve been over this,” Kara had sighed and he’d heard the tone in her voice he’d learned the hard way meant strained patience. “This is the only way. We can’t take their fleet in a straight up fight, not with that cruiser.”
“Besides,” Cal had pointed out with infuriating reasonableness, “we can’t just destroy the cruiser even if we had the forces to do it. General Murdock is probably on board and we need to get him out.”
Deke had taken a deep breath and held onto his temper as he tried one more time. “Sure, I see that. But the thing is, they came here to explore…” he’d stopped, shrugged and corrected himself, “…sorry, to loot if you want to be honest. So eventually they’re going to send a substantial landing party wherever they find some Predecessor ruins. Why not wait till they do that, when a good part of their crew is off the ship?”
“We’d be taking too big a risk they’d find out we aren’t the real crew,” Cal had declared. “I know you’ve got some concerns about this, but it’s the best option we have.”
And of course, that had been the end of it. Just like twenty years ago, no one argued with Caleb once he’d made up his mind. Which was how they’d wound up in the lighter’s short-range shuttle, headed for the docking bay of the Naga cruiser and hoping like hell that Chang’s ships showed up in time.
“I wonder,” Trint spoke up from his acceleration couch behind them, “why the only signs of civilization are on the two moons of this gas giant when the second planet out from the star seems to be habitable?”
“Good question,” Deke said with a nod. “But you know, I think I’d rather just find Murdock, kill Gregorian and then leave instead of sticking around to figure that out.”
“What?” Kara asked him, her tone lightly mocking. “You don’t want to go explore the galaxy? This is the Northwest Passage, Deke! You can go anywhere from here!”
He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind doing a little exploring. But this doesn’t feel like exploring, babe; it feels like an op. And getting in and getting out fast and clean is what you do on an op.”
“Can’t argue with that,” she admitted.
“Besides,” he said, trying to give word to the itchy feeling between his shoulder blades, “there’s something about this place: it doesn’t feel like the wide-open universe to me. It feels…claustrophobic.”
“You sure that’s not just the size of this shuttle that’s making you feel that way, partner?” Caleb asked him, grinning slightly.
“At least you get to fly it,” Deke muttered sourly by way of a reply.
“In a few seconds,” Caleb told him, “I won’t be flying it anymore.” He nodded at the grey, monolithic bulk of the cruiser looming ahead of them in the viewscreen. “They will.”
“And then it’s just the four of us against the whole fucking crew,” Deke said. “Fifty of ‘em, and ten of those are former DSI cadre, if Nouri wasn’t lying.”
“I wish we could trust him enough to bring him along,” Kara agreed.
“I’m still not crazy about the idea of leaving him back there with Pete and Rachel,” Caleb told her, mouth tightening into a frown.
“That’s why Robert’s back there, Cal,” Kara assured him. “He won’t let anything happen to them.”
Deke didn’t say anything, but reflected once more that they were depending on “Robert” for a lot. If his ships didn’t show up at just the right time, they were well and truly fucked.
“And there it is,” Cal said, waving a hand at the control board. “The cruiser has taken over control for docking.”
Deke could feel a jolt as the shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters fired, nudging the transport more into alignment with the cruiser’s docking bay. The bay seemed impossibly small, a narrow slot in the huge expanse of grey metal that was the nose of the cruiser; but it suddenly grew into a gaping maw as the main engines ignited once more, kicking them forward.
He flinched unconsciously as they seemed to jet towards the bay at a reckless speed, but then the braking thrusters ignited and they were all thrown forward against their restraints.
“Fucker needs flying lessons,” Deke commented softly.
“Naw,” Caleb said with a snort, “he knows how to fly, he just doesn’t care about us passengers.” He looked away from the bay as it became close enough to see the details of the ships already nestled inside it. “Gear up. We have less than five minutes.”
They were taking a risk going in loaded for bear, Deke thought as he retrieved a pulse carbine from the shuttle’s small gear locker. If the ship’s security saw it on the monitors, they could seal them off before they could reach the bridge. On the other hand, there was no way they were going to be able to take on that many Gomers without some serious firepower.
“Take it easy,” Kara said softly in his ear, reading his mood so easily it scared him. “With any luck, Robert’s ships will attack and give us the distraction we need before they realize what’s up.”
He glanced back
at her, anchored to the deck with the sticky plates in her boots, a pulse carbine nestled in the crook of her arm.
“Don’t get killed,” he told her, trying to make it sound light and humorous and failing miserably.
He saw a slight crack in the self-assured façade she was putting on, a hint of disturbance but also a hint of a smile.
“You too,” she said, squeezing his arm for just a moment.
Oh shit, he thought as he slipped a bandolier of magazines over his neck, what the hell am I getting myself into?
“Remember, don’t get sidetracked and don’t get bogged down,” Caleb was saying as they clustered around the airlock, letting the automatics handle the docking. “Primary objective is the bridge…secondary is Gregorian, if we can find him. We can hunt for General Murdock once we have the ship secured.”
“Are you going to try to penetrate the security systems?” Trint asked. “That could buy us some time.”
“I’m going to give it a shot once we’re inside,” Caleb told him. “If they kept the original Fleet security systems, it won’t be too hard. If not…” He shrugged. “Kill everyone you see and keep moving.”
“Story of my life,” Kara said under her breath.
“Keep tight,” Trint cautioned. “Do not allow yourselves to be split off or cornered.”
“You know,” Deke told the Tahni, “you’re the ugliest babysitter I ever had.”
“Your pardon, Captain Conner,” Trint dipped his head apologetically. “I have become accustomed to looking out for Captain Mitchell’s wife and brother.”
Deke chuckled at that, but his attention was drawn to Caleb; his eyes were losing focus and Deke guessed he was already trying to penetrate the cruiser’s security software via his neurolink.
“He’s got new firewalls in place,” Cal reported, sweat beading on his forehead as he concentrated. “I think I can get…yeah.” He relaxed, eyes refocusing on the people around him. “I couldn’t get control of the systems, but I managed to spoof them a little. I think I can avoid a security alert from our weapons.”
