by E. R. Torre
“Yeah. You've more than proven your effectiveness in that regard.”
“Fuck you.”
Stephen Gray laughed. He eyed Maddox and shook his head in mock sympathy.
“Imagine all the pain he's suffered. You think you could take it?”
“More than any of you.”
“Maybe, just for the hell of it, we'll see if that's the case.” Stephen Gray pressed the gun's barrel against Francis Lane's left cheek. “I'm in no hurry.”
“Are you trying to scare me, Stephen? What is it with you capitalists? Winning the game isn't good enough. You need your opponent to grovel before you as well? You'll make an excellent dictator. Up until the day someone puts a bullet through your skull.”
Stephen Gray slammed the gun against Francis Lane's cheek. She fell against the corridor wall. Her lower lip quivered and when her teary eyes opened, they stared into Stephen Gray’s cold blue eyes.
The Epsillon Industrialist saw her pain and fear and let out a bitter laugh.
“That’s better,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss a second of this.”
The Epsillon Industrialist kept his gun on Francis Lane and reached down to grab Maddox’s weapon. His hand touched the corridor floor and sought out the weapon, but it was just out of reach. For a moment, only a moment, Stephen Gray looked away from Francis Lane, to see where it was.
It was all the time she needed.
With a bloody yell, the gray haired lady drew her knife and slammed it into Stephen Gray’s right cheek. The blade tore through the Industrialist's flesh and smashed against something very hard. The blade snapped inside Stephen Gray’s mouth and blood gushed out of the wound.
Stephen Gray stumbled back.
“You want pain?” Francis Lane yelled. “I'll show you pain!”
Stephen Gray tried to lift his gun, but the attack against him was so sudden and the pain so extreme he was paralyzed. Francis Lane was on top of him. Her fingers clawed at his eyes.
Stephen Gray feebly lifted the gun. Its barrel was pointed at Francis Lane's stomach.
“Fuck you,” he muttered. The words sounded like they were coming from under water. Blood and torn flesh dripped from the Epsillon Industrialist’s mouth and wound and down his neck. He pushed the barrel of the fusion gun harder, until Francis Lane let out a yelp. She no longer struggled, and instead took one deep, last breath.
A fusion blast reverberated like thunder through the corridor. For several seconds, Francis Lane was frozen in place. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t feel. And then she took one more breath and realized, with a start, that she felt no pain. For several more seconds she didn't move. How could this be? Her hands balled into fists, and very, very gingerly she moved her legs. She was still standing. She didn't feel any pain.
Francis Lane opened her eyes.
She stood only inches away from Stephen Gray. In his eyes was the fear she felt. He tried to say something, but the blood in his mouth choked off any sounds.
The Epsillon Industrialist slid to the floor. There was a large black hole in his right side, a fatal fusion blast delivered at very short range. On the left side of his body was a gaping hole. That side of his body was almost completely vaporized. Burned organs spilled from his wound and onto the floor. The wall next to him was charred black.
“Maddox,” Francis Lane whispered.
The bartender held the still smoking gun. He aimed it at Francis Lane and tried desperately to take one more shot. He couldn't. The gun slid to the floor. Maddox's eyes once again closed.
Francis Lane leaned against the corridor wall. Tears ran down the side of her face.
“Thank the Gods,” she said before savagely wiping them away. She stood over Stephen Gray’s corpse and spat on it.
“My lucky day,” she said and approached Maddox. She kicked the gun from his hand before leaning down close to him.
“Wake up you son of a bitch,” she said. She held Maddox by his collar and pulled his face close to hers. “I want to personally thank you for saving my life.”
Francis Lane slapped Maddox until his eyes opened.
“You hear what I said?” she yelled. “You saved my life you stupid bastard. You saved my life and ended yours. How does that make you feel? How does that make you feel?!”
Maddox stared into the face of rage and madness. There was nothing he could do.
“You’re going to wish you never heard of the Argus,” she continued. “You're going to wish—”
Francis Lane’s words abruptly ended. Maddox looked at Francis Lane but thought he was staring at a hideous nightmare. In what to him appeared like slow motion in an action vid, Francis Lane’s head expanded like a grotesque balloon. It expanded until her flesh could stretch no more. Skin ripped and her head exploded in a mist of blood and flesh.
Maddox closed his eyes as the remains of Francis Lane's face sprayed him. The woman's grip on his collar loosened and he fell heavily back down to the floor.
When he stopped shaking, the Titus bartender opened his eyes.
Francis Lane’s headless body lay crumpled on the floor. Blood spurted from her torn neck and drained onto the corridor floor. Like her still pumping heart, her body twitched. Slowly now. What little life remained in the husk faded. Maddox looked past Francis Lane's corpse and at the door leading to her room.
Little Nathaniel stood there, holding Maddox’s fusion gun. Somehow, he got a hold of it after Francis kicked it from his hands. The boy appeared both shocked and relieved, and for a moment Maddox wondered if he was next.
They watched each other for what Maddox felt was a very long time.
Finally, Nathaniel dropped the weapon and slid down until he sat on the corridor floor.
“You saved my life,” Maddox said.
He crawled past Francis Lane’s body and to boy’s side. He took back his gun and tucked it into his belt holster. When he looked the boy over, he realized the child was missing a pinky finger. Blood still dripped from the wound.
“She...she didn't.”
Maddox gently grabbed Nathaniel’s hand. Along with the missing digit, he noticed the fresh scars and burns on the boy's upper arm, as well as the yellow torture disk.
“What did she do to you?” Maddox said. Despite the visual evidence, he couldn't believe Francis Lane's cruelty.
Maddox removed the disk from the boy's arm and violently threw it away. The little boy started to cry and Maddox held him tight.
When the boy was done, his eyes were sharp and alive. This Nathaniel wasn't the same lifeless boy Maddox knew from Titus until now.
“Who are you?” Maddox asked. He didn't expect any answer, which made the boy’s answer all the more amazing.
“My name is Nathaniel Torin,” the boy said. “I am the Captain of the Epsillon Royal Fleet starship the Argus.”
CHAPTER SIXTY THREE
Maddox was stunned.
“You...you speak?”
“Despite Francis Lane's best efforts, yes. She kept me drugged through most of this trip. I tried stopping her from finding the Argus as best I could, but I...I wasn't always sure if what happened around me was real or not. I fought them as best I could. I'm sorry about your leg.”
Maddox held his tongue. He was sorry too, sorry for the deaths of Janet Donaldson and Rasp. Was the boy aware of those actions, too?
“What do you mean you're Captain Nathaniel Torin?”
“I may not inhabit the body of the man who commanded this ship into Erebus two hundred years ago, but I am Nathaniel Torin, nonetheless.”
“Explain yourself. Slowly.”
“I don’t know who this body belonged to,” the boy said while pointing at his chest. “Most likely an orphan Francis Lane and her group picked up, someone nobody would miss. She used Captain Torin’s mental recording—”
“The Project Geist cube?”
“Yes, the Project Geist cube,” Nathaniel repeated. The ball he played with during the trip lay on Francis Lane's night table. Nathanie
l left Maddox's side and retrieved it. The Geist Cube was inside. He held it in his hands for several seconds before dropping it to the ground and crushing it under his foot. “She used it to make me.”
“She transferred Nathaniel Torin's memories to a child's body? How is that possible? I thought the only reliable way to access the information on a Geist cube was through the machine that created the cube. The one on board the Argus.”
“Accessing the information via computer is, as you say, difficult without using the original Geist machine that made the recording,” the boy said. “But the moment the cube was first discovered there were those in your group who were desperate to find a way to access that information. The fact that they had this in their hands may well be the reason they were originally corrupted. For years they conducted experiments, almost all failures, in their increasingly desperate attempts to access Nathaniel Torin's thoughts. They realized that while computer to computer links were extremely unreliable, there was a way of imprinting pieces of Geist information on living organisms. By the time Francis Lane became a member of this group, they knew their best hopes in accessing the cube's information lay in transferring it to a human host. An infant. Preferably a newborn.”
A chill ran through Maddox’s body.
“They didn't discover this on the first try?”
“No.”
“How...how many experiments were conducted?”
“I don't know. But given the many decades they worked on it...”
“What happened to the...to the subjects of the experiments that failed?”
“The children's minds were wiped or... worse. The Gods alone know what they did with the bodies. Each failure, however, produced some small results. They continued their work.” Nathaniel’s voice trailed off. “I was the last, and only, success in transferring Captain Nathaniel Torin’s complete thoughts into another human being. From infancy until this age, I was a blank. My developing brain worked on the memory imprint until it finally took. At that moment, I awoke. I was Captain Nathaniel Torin in everything but body. That was five months ago.”
“How...how did you feel?”
“Confused. I recalled Captain Torin's childhood and his training and his personal and professional ups and downs. I love...loved his wife and was incredibly proud of my command.”
Nathaniel lowered his head.
“When I came to, the first face I saw was that of Francis Lane. She said she was my distant granddaughter, and that the Erebus War ended two hundred years before. The information was extremely difficult, to say the least, to take. She feigned sympathy and allowed me time to assimilate to this new era, at least within her palace and while under her supervision. She explained what I was and how I came to be, but left out all the brutal experiments and failures that preceded this one success. She tried hard, too hard, to act nice. I knew she was holding back, that there was too much desperation behind her questions and an unusual thirst for knowledge that I swore would never fall into anyone's hands. So I feigned difficulties with my memories and didn't tell her everything I knew. This worked for a while, but like I did with her, she saw through me. Eventually there was a confrontation, and all her pretenses of being a sympathetic relative from the far future were gone. Francis Lane turned on me, and that's when she started using drugs and torture. But she couldn't take things too far. She knew the memory imprint was delicate and there was danger I could be damaged. Had she the time, I would eventually have given her every bit of information she wanted. By the greatest stroke of luck, word came down from you and your group that the first solid evidence of the Argus' survival, and along with it a strong theory as to where she may lie, was found. Francis Lane and I were off to Titus.”
“Two hundred years have passed, Nathaniel. Why put yourself through all this? Why not simply tell Francis what she wanted to know?”
“I sacrificed my ship, its remaining crew, and myself for one cause: Peace. Why would I risk that sacrifice by giving anyone, even a distant, distant relative, the means to resume this terrible war?”
“You still want to destroy the Argus?”
“I made that decision centuries ago.”
“Then let’s finish what you started.”
Nathaniel helped Maddox to Francis Lane’s bed. The rugged bartender winced in pain when he sat down. He eyed the small computer Francis Lane used to access the Argus’ main computers.
“She was using this computer to download the plans of the Charybdis device.”
“Everyone...everyone was in this for themselves. All but one.”
“One?”
“Yeah, B’taav. You...you remember him?”
“Vaguely. The blond haired man with the dark eyes? The one who took the gun from my hand when you were—”
“Yeah. We...we picked him up on Titus. He saved my life, but...but it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re all dead. All—”
The communicator suddenly came to life, and the two heard Inquisitor Cer's voice.
“B’taav, do you hear me?”
Inquisitor Cer listened for any response. After a few seconds, she thought she heard some words amidst the static.
“—tor Cer?”
Inquisitor Cer increased the volume to maximum. Painfully loud pops and hisses filled her ears.
“I hear you, B’taav. I’m at the Xendos. Stephen Gray is inside. He locked the decompression doors and I cannot enter the craft. Do you read?”
There was more static.
“B’taav, do you hear me?”
Nathaniel was at the room's window, looking outside.
“Someone’s out there.”
Maddox leaned forward until he too could see out the window. A person stood on the landing deck beside the Xendos.
“Could it be Inquisitor Cer?” Nathaniel asked.
“It's possible,” Maddox said. For a second he saw a face through the glass at the front of the person’s environmental suit helmet. “It...it looks like her. Raise the volume. Let's hear what she—”
“—go help you?” Inquisitor Cer voice echoed throughout the room. “B’taav, do you need help? Should I go help you?”
She received no reply.
B’taav was near death and he knew it.
As the Independent did to the Merc, Balthazar cut his oxygen supply until he could barely breathe. The Merc then threw B'taav around as if he were a useless rag. He slammed B’taav’s body against the uneven hull surface or any jutting pieces of metal with incredible force, only to pick him up and start the process all over again.
B’taav felt his ribs fracture. His mouth filled with blood.
The Independent was near death and he knew it.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
Inquisitor Cer’s voice came to him as if from a different reality. The Independent focused hard on her voice, but even as he did, Balthazar grabbed him by the waist and spun him around. When he was done, he thrust his bloated face at the Independent.
Despite his rage, the Merc wanted B’taav’s death to be slow and painful.
Balthazar shouted at B’taav and laughed and shouted some more. When the Merc’s rant was over, he again flung him.
B’taav’s limp figure flew many meters before touching ground and sliding into a wall. The Independent came to rest facing Balthazar, now a small figure in the distance. The Merc was laughing and drinking in every bit of the sadistic pleasure gained from beating another man to death.
B’taav turned away, to look at the trail his body made through the asteroid dust. The dust was brushed away, revealing glass paneling below.
“Tinsel glass,” B’taav muttered. The Independent reached forward and wiped more dust away. The tinsel glass was at least three meters thick. By shining his light on it, the Independent could just make out a series of frozen stalks and withered leaves.
The hydroponics level, B’taav realized. He was on top of it.
Despite his pain, the Independent forced himself to his feet.
“Inquisitor Cer,�
� B’taav said. “You’ve...you’ve got to order the central computer to...to jettison the hydroponics paneling.”
Inquisitor Cer could barely hear, much less understand, B’taav’s words.
“You want me to get to the central computer and do what?”
“—etison the hydroponi— paneling.”
Inquisitor Cer considered B’taav’s request. It was a very long walk back to the Argus' central computer. Would B’taav still be alive when she got there? Were there any other alternatives?
As if to answer her question, B’taav’s said, “It’s—only way.”
Maddox listened in on the conversation and shook his head.
“That sounded like B’taav,” he said. “But...but they said he was dead.”
“I’ll go,” Inquisitor Cer said over the speaker. “Hang on, B’taav. I’ll get there!”
“I don’t understand,” Maddox said. “They sent Inquisitor Cer out to kill B’taav. Why...why are they talking to each other?”
“They’re working together,” Nathaniel said.
“How is that possible?”
The boy shrugged.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Inquisitor Cer took two leaps toward the exit of the Argus' landing bay when her communicator came alive.
“This is Maddox on the Xendos, calling Inquisitor Cer and B’taav. Do you...do you read me?”
Inquisitor Cer abruptly stopped.
“Maddox? What is your status in there?” she asked.
“I’m...I’m in control,” Maddox said. “Stephen Gray and Francis Lane are dead.”
“And Saro Triste?”
“Unknown. But I don't think he's here anymore. What about B’taav?”
“We disarmed Balthazar but Stephen Gray found him and sent him after us. B’taav and I split up. He took on the Merc so that I could get to the Xendos.”
“For what purpose?” came a child’s voice.
“Who's that?” Cer asked. “Nathaniel!?”
