by Rick Partlow
"You should have let me do it," he told Murdock.
"If you had been capable of doing it," the General said quietly, lowering the little pistol, "you'd have done it already."
"Then why bring me along at all?" Reggie snapped, hands clenching into fists. "Why call me here all the way from Highland?"
"Because you needed to see. You needed to hear her admit it, before you'd be ready to help me do what comes next."
Reggie let out a breath. "I thought you were going to take care of this part of it."
"I said I'd take care of the investigation," Murdock corrected him with his schoolteacher's tone. "The investigation is over. Now comes the action."
"I assume we're not talking about Senate hearings," Reggie said, with a sardonic edge to his tone.
"The government would never admit that personnel this high up the food chain were replaced with imposters," Murdock said, shaking his head. "This all happens in the shadows, Reginald." He paused, smiling slightly. "Sorry...Reggie."
Reggie looked at him sharply, suspecting he was being mocked. "This isn't exactly some backwoods colony, General. These people will have better security than..." He jerked his head in a gesture indicating the small apartment Billy had rated as an Intelligence staff officer.
"Yes, they will," Murdock admitted. "That's why I need your help."
Reggie gave one last look at what was left of the thing that hadn't really been Wilhelmina Forrester. Her partner would be devastated, wouldn't know that the real woman had died long before.
He sighed in resignation. "Let's get to work."
* * *
"Well, the message is out," Deke said, the words leaving in an exasperated sigh. "For all the fucking good it'll do."
"We had to try," Cal told him, one hand anchoring him to the back of the pilot's acceleration couch as he floated above it in the Aurora's cockpit. "At least now Earth Defense Command knows what's coming."
Deke barked a humorless laugh. "Yeah, they know a ship that's going to have the proper clearances and a spoofed registry is going to be in orbit sometime in the next few weeks. All they gotta' do is blow up every military ship that comes within a couple AU's of the planet for the foreseeable future, right?" He hissed out a breath. "That's if whatever duplicates Cutter left in place don't just quash the message before it even gets out."
Cal didn't respond. He knew what was upsetting Deke, and it wasn't the danger to Earth. "If there was a way to get to them," he said instead, "you know I'd be there with you."
"We send Savage's ship to the Centauri gate," Deke said after a moment's hesitation, his voice less angry and more decisive. "That's the last wormhole jumpgate before the Sol system on the most direct route from Tahn-Skyyiah to Earth, so they'll get any Instell messages Kara might send."
"Makes sense," Cal said with a nod that sent him bobbing slightly. "What about the Aurora?"
"We take the Aurora and follow the most direct Transition line to Earth," Deke said, fingertips drumming on the console in front of him. "And we drop out of T-space every twelve hours to take gravimetic readings. If they manage to take the ship out of T-space, we'll find them. If they take it over, we'll get their Instell message at the next jumpgate." He looked back over his shoulder at Cal, his face attempting a cold mask, but a quiver in his cheek betraying him. "I'll contact Savage. Get everyone ready for immediate Transition."
"Will do, Deke," Cal said quietly. He put a hand on his old friend's arm for just a moment before heading out of the cockpit.
He found Pete and Rachel in the small galley next to the ship's utility bay, strapped into the couch there and talking quietly. They looked around as he came in, and he could see the emotions warring on Rachel's face.
"Pete," he said, "we're going to be Transitioning in a couple minutes. Could you go to the cockpit and back up Deke?"
His brother looked like he wanted to argue about that, but something in Cal's expression changed his mind and he nodded instead, loosening his restraints and pushing out of the room. Cal strapped in next to Rachel, slipping an arm around her. She wrapped one of hers around his waist, pulling him closer.
"How's Deke holding up?" she asked him.
"He's still thinking straight," Cal told her, "but I can tell this is tearing him up. He knows he basically sent her on a suicide mission."
"He loves her." It wasn't a question. Maybe a realization, he thought.
"I'm not sure if he's ever actually loved anyone else," Cal told her. "Not like this. I mean, he had a couple girls during the war he talked about maybe settling down with, but I don't think even he took that seriously." He chuckled, remembering. "I know the girls didn't, especially after they found out about each other."
"She's been good for him," Rachel admitted. "I feel bad for hating her for so long." She sniffed. "Almost."
Cal sighed. "You're good at holding a grudge, Rache," he said.
"She got my arm blown off," Rachel ticked off quietly but firmly, "got our house blown up, got a lot of people I knew killed, got me kidnapped by the Corporate Council, and then while you thought I was dead, she had sex with you. I think I've got plenty of grudge to hold onto."
Deke chose that exact moment to send the ship into Transition Space, but Cal wasn't sure if it was the jump out of the universe and the sudden return of gravity that caused the lurch in his stomach or if it was Rachel's casual announcement that she knew he had slept with Kara five years ago.
"How long...” he began, but she interrupted him.
"I've known the whole time, Caleb," she said, eyeing him askance. "You may have been a top-secret super-commando, but you're no spy and you're a lousy poker player."
"Why are you angry with her but not with me?" Cal asked, mystified.
"Honey, I know you," she said, patting his cheek softly. "When you heard I was dead, I know you would have been just about out of your mind. The only way you would have been with someone else is if she took advantage of your state of mind at that time." She scowled. "That's not something a decent person would do."
Cal wanted to argue with her, to tell her that Kara hadn't been raised with the same cultural mores and traditions as people from Canaan, but he didn't think it would be a good idea. Instead, he asked: "Are you angry that I didn't tell you?"
She cast him a glance that a parent would use with a wayward child, which he suddenly felt like. "Caleb Mitchell, why would I want you to tell me that?" She shook her head in exasperation. "It's not as if I asked you and you lied to me. If you had told me, I would have thought you were trying to brag."
Cal opened his mouth, then closed it again, hunting for anything intelligent to say. Finally he gave up and changed the subject. "Well, whatever you or I think of her, she's all he's got to hold onto right now; and if he loses her, I don't know what it'll do to him."
"Cal, I need you to be honest with me," Rachel said. She was looking into his eyes with an earnest clarity that nearly scared him.
"Okay," he said readily. "What is it?"
"When we're done with this," she said, "whatever winds up happening, I need to know: are you going to be able to leave this behind and go back to the way things were? Living on our farm on Canaan? Raising a family there?"
"Of course," he said, almost without thinking. It was all he'd wanted since the war had ended. Things had just kept getting in the way: his job as Constable, the Corporate Council mess, now this business with Cutter...
"Are you sure, Cal?" she asked him, her eyes spearing into him. "Because honestly, I don't know if I can."
Cal leaned back from her, feeling as if the deck were shifting beneath him...or perhaps falling away. "What?" he asked, feeling as if his expression was as vapid as his words. "You...you," the words stumbled running out of his mouth. "You don't want to have a family?"
"No, I still want a family," she said, putting a reassuring hand on his arm, and he felt the deck settle a bit. "Maybe now more than ever," she added, a bit of sadness in her eyes. "I just don't know if I want to go b
ack to the farm, to Canaan." She shook her head. "I feel like there's too much history there, too many bad memories that we can't move past. Do you know what I mean?"
"I think so," he said, feeling a deep sadness settle somewhere inside his chest. "I'm going to miss Jason." He met her eyes. "Where do you want to go?"
"I was telling Pete that I wouldn't mind settling on Anansi," Rachel said, brightening. "But that's the thing, honey, we can go anywhere, you and me and Pete. We can go anywhere we want, and if we don't like it there, we can go somewhere else." She squeezed his shoulder. "As long as we're together."
"We can go anywhere we want if we win, Rachel," he reminded her soberly. "If we don't..." He motioned expressively. "If that ship takes out a whole city on Earth, we're going to be at war. There are enough Tahni colonies out there that it won't end quickly. It'll take years and it'll get as ugly everywhere as it's been on Tahn-Skyyiah." His expression darkened as he thought back to the squad of Marines dying one by one in the streets of Tahn-Khandranda. "There'll be enough bad memories that we couldn't run far enough to get away from them all."
Interlude:
Balder System
Commonwealth Inner Frontier
The blue-white star was unremarkable, the planets that orbited it equally lacking in note. It had a single habitable world that called it home, a planet the humans had named Freya. The Predecessor vessel drifted slowly in the space just outside the orbit of the planet's lone moon, unobserved by the Commonwealth spaceships that entered or exited its atmosphere periodically.
It looked cold and unwelcoming to Trint, so unlike his homeworld, but he was elated at the sight of it, nonetheless. He'd been alone in the endless void with no planet, no star, nothing but darkness and the alien presence of the Predecessor AI for company for months now and he had come to think it would drive him to madness.
"When we began this journey," he said aloud to the computer---it could hear his thoughts without vocalizing them, but he much preferred it didn't, "I very much believed the experimental drive would wind up killing us. A few weeks into our trip, I began wishing it had."
"Are all Tahni so impatient?" the AI asked him, petulance in its voice.
"We are a short-lived race," Trint said with a noncommittal gesture. "The humans were too, until recently. They may be immortal now, though it is too soon to tell; but their character has not yet evolved to reflect this."
"And why do your people not use technology to prolong their lives?"
Trint considered this for a moment, not giving the pat answer that it was against their religious beliefs. Many other religious beliefs had fallen by the wayside since they'd lost the war. Why had this one stuck in place like a string of food in their teeth?
"I can only guess," he responded, "but I think it is because we are lost. We're adrift on a sea of uncertainty, so we cling to whatever bit of flotsam and jetsam we can reach to stay above water. When we lost the war, so much of our identity was lost with it..." He trailed off, unsure what else to say.
"I have been monitoring the current events broadcasts coming through the wormhole jumpgate at the edge of this system," the computer informed him abruptly. "There are some things happening on your homeworld that you may wish to know about."
Trint frowned, an expression he'd learned in his years with the humans. There was something in the machine mind's tone that worried him.
"Show me."
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tyya-Khin pulled his head back sharply behind the edge of the hatch as a burst of laser pulses vaporized polymer and metal from the bulkhead on the other side of it. He pictured how the human firing at them must be hanging half-in and half-out of one of the access tunnel hatches, waiting.
Awkward with the gravity activated, he thought.
"They've been waiting for us ever since we opened the emergency seal on this level," V'tar-Chal told him, purposefully casual and unaffected by the enemy fire to better keep his squad from becoming too worked up. "They've sabotaged the lift station above Level Four, as well, so we can't reach them that way either." He made a noncommittal gesture. "We could still push through this way, of course, especially if we have the squad come up from Engineering simultaneously...but we'd lose quite a few troops, and we take the risk of one of them slipping through, with the seals both open."
Tyya made a motion of assent. "All right, Squad Leader, you've made your point. We'll close the seals and evacuate the atmosphere from those levels." He fought back an expression of distaste. It felt cowardly and dishonorable to kill them that way; they were obviously courageous and devoted to duty, to board this ship by themselves. But the mission mattered more than his personal honor. Or their lives, but that went without saying.
* * *
"This is fucking insane," Holly said again, tightening the straps of the emergency air supply across her chest. "You know there's a reason why people don't do this, right?"
"Not like we have an alternative," Kara replied with a shrug. She already had the one-size-fits-all transplas bubble fitted over her head and was cinching the yoke to the harness strapped to her shoulders. It was standard equipment for the emergency suits kept in the lockers near the lifepod stations on every deck. The pods were long gone in the evacuation, but the airlocks were still there. The one on Deck Six seemed cavernous and dark without the bulbous pod that had once occupied it.
"They're going to flush the atmosphere on this deck any time now," Kara went on. "We can stay here till our air runs out or..."
"Or take a fucking walk on the outside of a starship in Transition Space," Holly finished for her, snorting.
"I thought..." Jose Velazquez' voice caught and he cleared his throat then tried again. "I thought anything outside the ship's drive field would pretty much cease to exist in T-space." He pulled on the vacuum suit's gauntlets and sealed them.
"Drive field extends a good three or four meters out from the ship," Kara said, a studied lack of concern in her voice that Holly knew was a show for the younger man's sake. "Keep close to the hull and you'll be fine."
"Of course, the ship's gravity field is activated," Holly pointed out, slipping her helmet on. Her augments gave her a limited extra oxygen supply, but it wouldn't last long enough for what they had in mind. "And it propagates with the drive field. So we're basically going to be climbing down the side of the ship at one gravity."
"The magnetic plates in the suits should keep us attached," Kara said, testing the one in her left boot by attaching it to the deck briefly.
"And if we get to Engineering alive," Holly went on, smiling inside her helmet, "and get in through that escape pod lock, we get to take on a whole squad of Tahni insurgents for the honor of disabling the drives and stranding ourselves somewhere in realspace that could be light years from any inhabited system."
Kara glared at her balefully. "Are you trying to scare the man?"
"It's okay," Velazquez said, buckling on the pulse pistol Kara had given him. Holly glanced at him sidelong and saw that he actually looked more confident. "I'm more comfortable knowing what I'm up against."
An alarm sounded, a warbling tone intentionally nerve-grating, and holographic warnings appeared in the air above the line of the chamber's entrance hatch announcing that their section of the ship was depressurizing. Holly sighed and finished sealing her suit around her, languidly self-assured by the knowledge she could live without atmosphere for a few minutes. Kara was more methodically quick buttoning up, twisting the control to start the air flow into her helmet, while Velazquez' motions were not quite frantic but definitely racing, hands touching each connection to check it before he activated his own air flow.
Holly could hear the vents in the overhead beginning to suck the air out of their compartment with a faint whooshing hum. It would only take a few minutes before the whole deck was in vacuum.
Velazquez, she transmitted over her neurolink to his helmet 'link, you copy?
"I read you, Commander Morai," he said, nodding inside his helme
t.
Then let's go, Kara said. She touched a control and the inner door of the airlock hissed open. A yellow light was already blinking inside the chamber, warning about the atmospheric venting, but they ignored it as they stepped inside.
Holly had to watch her footing; the rounded lock was ringed by railing that usually held the escape pod in place, and it wasn't intended for use by personnel in EVA suits, particularly not under gravity. It didn't take as long as usual to cycle through the lock; most of the atmosphere was already gone. When the outer door opened, Holly could hear Velazquez gasp. She couldn't blame him; everyone did when they first saw T-space with the naked eye.
There was no good way to describe it in words, simply because it had no frame of reference. The best way she'd heard it put was by her Academy physics professor, who was himself half crazy.
"You know how you think you see something out of the corner of your eye," he'd said to her class, his dark eyes flashing manically, "but when you look, there's nothing there? Transition Space is that nothing."
And it was nothing, but it was a Nothing that pretty much was a whole universe. Human eyes hadn't evolved to make sense of it, so they slid off of it without seeing it. That wasn't a huge problem when you only had to not see it through the exterior cameras of a viewscreen, but when it was all around you...
Velazquez, she snapped, slapping the man on the shoulder. He blinked, shook his head, looking over at her still partially in a daze. Don't look at it, she told him harshly. You stare into it, your brain will go into a closed loop and you'll pass out. We need you conscious and lending a hand, and we definitely don't need to be carrying your ass.
"Aye, ma'am!" he said smartly, keeping his eyes on her or the bulkhead---anywhere but the Nothing.
I'm going first, Holly told him. You're next, then Major McIntire.
