by P. K. Lentz
Zerouali climbed next into her capsule. “I hope I’m not slated for jettison, too,” she said humorlessly.
“We’ll see.”
Thorien applied the hypo to her neck. Seconds later the woman fought to speak a few final words as she drifted off. “Don’t let me...sleep...too long.”
She slipped into unconsciousness. Kearn shut the lid and engaged her capsule, leaving her plea unanswered. She couldn’t have heard him anyway. Her body would technically be ‘asleep’ for only ten minutes or so. How much objective time passed during that nap was another story. Zerouali wasn’t slated for revival at Ona, which with any luck would be a mere refueling stop en route to some more palatable destination.
Thorien was last to go under, leaving conscious only those three of the crew who would spend their next few days, weeks, months--however long it took--purging Lady of Fyat’s sabotage. The job promised to be a tedious and frustrating one, but compared to the unbridled chaos of late the prospect of working with trusted crewmates toward an identifiable goal came as an absolute joy.
Kearn looked forward to a voyage decidedly lacking in fugitives, assassins, hijackings, ultimatums, hostages, military assaults or anything that remotely qualified as a surprise.
For a while at least, life might be simple again.
***
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I.0286.05.35 07:21
Commonwealth:BREAKING NEWS
CENTURIES OLD COVER-UP EXPOSED, TRANSLIGHT MONOPOLY SHATTERED
Following closely in the wake of reports of an illegal translight vessel evading two Fleet warships at Merada, an anonymous source within Fleet now claims that Interim officials have been aware since before the Founding of a potential threat to the translight monopoly.
In I.-00077, the civilian freighter Lucifer’s Halo discovered the alien site that yielded the technological basis for translight. Upon his return, Halo’s Reissan captain Mayweather Kearn turned over the contents of his holds to corporate authorities. The new leak within Fleet alleges that the subsequent Reissan expedition to the alien site in I.-00036 found thirteen gutted alien vessels whose translight cores were unaccounted for. The leak also alleges that these missing cores were secreted away by Kearn and that the authorities of the nascent Interim were fully aware of this fact.
Kearn himself perished in a hibernation mishap in I.0012, but any cores he may have stolen remain missing. Should the new allegations prove true, they could shed menacing light on the recent incident at Merada.
Coming on top of the loss of twenty-four voidships in seven days due to apparent terrorist attacks, the latest news is certain to have significant impact on Commonwealth politics. Extreme right wing factions such as the Stellar Union Party of retired Fleet admiral Karina Althauser have seen a significant upsurge in popularity in the wake of recent events.
[END]
***
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I.0286.06.04 13:02
Commonwealth:BREAKING NEWS
KEARN ALIVE?
Jan Bohringer, former captain of ISS Whisper of Death, currently in administrative detention awaiting court-martial, has smuggled out a startling statement regarding recent events at Merada. According to his account, the captain of the illegal civilian translight vessel discovered there, the first such ever encountered, was none other than Mayweather Kearn.
Kearn, as captain of Lucifer’s Halo, was the inadvertent discoverer of the alien translight technology more than three centuries ago. Recently an anonymous leak within Fleet alleged that Kearn might have withheld a number of critical translight components which were subsequently never recovered.
Kearn is officially believed to have perished in I.0012.
[END]
***
PART THREE: ONA
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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I.0286.11.38 15:08
Commonwealth:POLITICS
ALTHAUSER SWORN IN
Retired Fleet admiral Karina Althauser was sworn in today as First Secretary at the head of a new Stellar Union Party administration.
“We embark today on a new era in human history, an era in which we will secure the future for the peace-loving citizens of our Commonwealth,” said the 189-year old Althauser in a brief address following her inauguration ceremony.
The Stellar Union Party swept to power in elections earlier this year running on a security-oriented platform. Long an outspoken public figure, Althauser herself is an advocate of zero tolerance for non-Commonwealth worlds which might one day threaten the union. A widespread pre-emptive military campaign, while not yet part of Stellar Union’s official platform, is widely seen as the inevitable outcome of the party’s victory, especially given its selection of Althauser herself as First Secretary.
Months ago a high level leak within Fleet revealed that elements hostile to the Interim may well be in possession of translight technology. That revelation is widely credited with catalyzing public opinion just in time for Stellar Union’s massive surge at the polls. Opposition parties claim that Althauser, a retired five-bar admiral, exploited or even engineered those leaks and the subsequent paranoia for electoral gains. Earlier this year Stellar Union described the still-unexplained loss of sixty-two voidships, nearly one eighth of the fleet, possibly to sophisticated terrorist attacks, as a ‘wake-up call’ to the Commonwealth.
The votes for Stellar Union, which won an unprecedented sixty-six percent of Assembly seats, are seen as a strong public mandate for Althauser’s well-known positions. If so, the debate now is not about whether a military campaign will commence, but when and how.
[END]
***
Simon Ascher floated silently in his three-by-six cell aboard the Fleet prison transport Scalia. This was it, the end of the road. Or it would be shortly anyway, once Scalia dumped him on Frost--or home, as he would soon call it. The months of detention, the court-martial, the sentencing, all were a blur behind him. After a few months of constant solitude, one developed of sheer necessity a new outlook on life, a new perception of time. Often Ascher went weeks without speaking a word to anyone.
At first he’d thought he would never be able to handle it, that he’d have no choice but suicide. But eventually, as the days and weeks began to pass more easily and he learned to retreat within himself, he’d discarded that idea and made a surprising realization. That single hour of reckless rebellion aboard Hunter was the single proudest moment of his life. He felt more fulfilled now than at any other time in his life. Until Merada, he’d been going through the motions of life without ever really having lived it.
Far from regretting those actions that had landed him here, he embraced them. They represented the Simon Ascher that should have been.
Because of that man’s actions, though, the real Simon Ascher would now live the rest of his life at hard labor in a bleak maximum-security prison asteroid. Located in Reissa’s own system, Frost traced a cold and distant orbit where sunlight was a fond memory. Surprisingly, the prospect didn’t really scare Ascher that much. By all accounts, ‘the rest of his natural life’ wouldn’t amount to much there. The sentence would be short and brutal.
It was worth it. Given the chance, he’d do it all again.
A great deal of Ascher’s inner life was devoted to Serenity Martijn, even though he still had no idea who she was or what had become of her. As much as he’d have liked to believe otherwise, her fate could not have been a happy one. But regardless of his failure to rescue Serenity, what carried Ascher through these dark times was in part the knowledge that his actions had mattered. To her. Serenity’s final words to him echoed nightly in his head. I’ll never forget you.
The sentiment was mutual. Sometimes, despite himself, Ascher dreamed that somehow, someday, against all odds, he might meet her again.
He tried not to dwell on that fantasy often. It hurt to
o much.
Scalia’s crew didn’t bother to keep Ascher informed of how close they were to arrival. The voyage was sublight, of course. Why waste a translight vessel on criminals? For the duration of the trip thus far, Ascher had not seen a living soul. Food was delivered twice daily through a dispenser slot. If he’d been thinking, or if he’d really cared, he might have counted his meals so as to maintain some sense of the passage of time.
Ascher’s troublesome neurilace had been deactivated. It was now just a mesh of microscopic metal and organic matter lodged in his flesh. He was glad to be rid of it.
Suddenly, and long before Scalia began deceleration, Ascher found the door to his tiny cell opened for the first time.
“Out, now,” ordered one of the pair of armed Fleet crewmen who appeared.
Even though he knew better, Ascher began to protest.
“Quiet! Move!”
Wondering if perhaps someone had devised for him a fate worse than Frost after all, Ascher obeyed.
***
“Retrieval complete, Captain,” a voice reported over Daniel Sallat’s private encrypted comm channel.
Sallat gave no response. None was required. Success or failure in this mission, the kidnapping of Simon Ascher, had been written in the planning stages. The operation represented a tremendous risk for a completely unknown payoff, a desperate act in desperate times. It had required months of planning and careful placement of trusted operatives, operatives who were by far the most valuable commodity of the tiny, unnamed conspiracy--or rather, counter-conspiracy--in which Sallat participated.
The forces against which his secretive group conspired were largely unknown. The only certainty was that the so-called ‘Embassy’ neurilace virus that had swept the Commonwealth--nearly infecting Whisper of Death via the upgrade Sallat had stopped at Merada--was not harmless. No one had yet discerned in any concrete way what the virus’ effects were, but effects there were. In some very real, if inexplicable, way, Embassy was responsible for the sudden rise to power of the warlike cabal around the new First Secretary and her Stellar Union party.
The connection was vague, but it existed--Sallat knew it. The handful of uninfected engineers and programmers on Reissa and elsewhere who’d gone underground to become the core of the resistance knew it, too. That small cadre had managed to devise a silent comm handshake to distinguish infected from uninfected individuals. Using it they had expanded into the secretive network that had won over Captain Sallat and much of the crew beneath him on Whisper of Death.
But Sallat and his allies were a resistance movement in spirit only, for they possessed neither a plan of action nor the means to uninfect even a single individual whose neurilace had loaded Embassy. Their only achievement thus far was to have recognized the threat. Their hope was that Simon Ascher, the disgraced Fleet crewman who had tried to rescue Serenity Martijn, might tell them more.
Ten minutes from its report of success, Sallat’s retrieval squad confirmed a safe return from the prison transport Scalia to Whisper of Death. On his way down to the brig to interview Ascher, Sallat gave his bridge crew the order to take Whisper out-system on its official, Fleet-sanctioned voyage.
Sallat entered Ascher’s cell on Whisper’s detention deck accompanied by a single guard whose weapon remained holstered. Simon Ascher sat calmly but with obvious anxiety on the edge of his cell’s cot, eyes fixed firmly on the floor.
“Frost is an ugly place, Simon Ascher,” Sallat opened. “You’re fortunate never to have to see it.”
Though Ascher made an obvious effort to remain impassive, his features betrayed cautious interest. He seemed to want to speak, but opted instead to hold his tongue.
Proceeding farther into the cell, Sallat smiled with the deliberate condescension any Fleet officer could project at will. Even had Ascher not been seated, Sallat would have stood a full two heads taller than the little man. “Scalia has been destroyed,” Sallat said matter-of-factly, “and along with it sixty kilograms of Simon Ascher’s genetic material. To anyone who matters or cares, you are dead.”
A glimmer of hope flashed then faded in Ascher’s eyes. He wasn’t quite sure whether this revelation of his death came as good news or bad.
“You can start a new life wherever you like,” Sallat went on, putting an end to the man’s confusion. “All we ask in return is that you answer some questions.”
Ascher nodded, still wary but not so skeptical as to pass up what was sounding like a second chance. Even though the decision to rescue Ascher had been strictly business, Sallat couldn’t deny a streak of sympathy for the condemned man. As a pair of traitors, they had something in common.
“Defense counsel at your court martial argued that your treasonous acts were the result of temporary insanity brought on by the chronic malfunction of your neurilace,” Sallat said. “You acted under the delusion that the entire crew of your vessel had become infected with some sort of plague, a fact revealed to you by a phantom presence in the ship.”
Ascher confirmed as much with a slightly self-conscious nod.
“We need to know everything you can tell us about this infection, and your phantom. Every word it said to you, if you can remember.”
“Everything I know came out in the trial,” Ascher answered dejectedly. “You must have seen it all in the transcript. Anyway, Hunter’s logs didn’t show any trace of the messages I saw.”
“We have reason not to trust any of the official records. In fact they are almost certain to be inaccurate. So what do you say, Mr. Ascher? Will you help us?”
Ascher lit up. “You mean you believe me?”
“Suffice to say that your story warrants further investigation.”
Ascher bowed his head, looking stunned. “All I have to do is answer your questions and you’ll--do what? Where will you take me?”
“Any convenient destination you choose, although I would advise against a return to the Commonwealth.”
It took Ascher less than a second to decide. He nodded like a madman.
“Then I welcome you aboard Whisper of Death, Mr. Ascher. The guard will escort you to more comfortable quarters.”
As Sallat made to leave the cell, Ascher called out to him. “Excuse me, Captain,” he said humbly. “Weren’t there other prisoners aboard Scalia?”
It seemed a rather impertinent question for one in Ascher’s position, but its asking suited Sallat just fine. The convict seemed already to possess a good deal of healthy fear, but a touch more couldn’t hurt to jog his memory.
Sallat had taken no pleasure in sentencing Scalia’s other passengers to death, but the sacrifice was unavoidable. Their remains were required among the wreckage to complete the illusion of an accident. Simulating Simon Ascher’s dismembered corpse had been challenge enough. Too much tampering would have invited suspicion.
“In death,” Sallat told his fellow traitor, “they have served greater purpose than any they would have found on Frost.”
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nine long weeks it had taken to thoroughly purge Lady of Chaos of Fyat’s pervasive presence. Even once the tedious work was declared complete, Kearn couldn’t shake a nagging doubt that they’d missed something. The assassin had managed to subvert pretty much everything, from engines down to waste reclamation. In the course of the purge Kearn and his crewmates had lost some hardware and data to traps laid by Fyat, but fortunately nothing irreplaceable--precisely for fear of such booby traps they had chosen to leave the most vital systems for last, after practicing on less critical ones.
Despite the danger and tedium of the project, the relative downtime had given Kearn something of a recharge. The end of those nine weeks had left him almost reluctant to join the rest of the crew in hibe.
But joined them he had, and now, three months later, Kearn was once more Lady’s only conscious occupant. He’d programmed his own revival a week before the others, partly to confirm that the purge had taken but mostly just to spend some quiet time alone be
fore Ona.
After three days of quiet time, Kearn was stir crazy. He found himself fixating, not so much on the situation at hand--which actually wasn’t seeming so bad now--not even on Ren and her child.
It was Zerouali that got to him. Of all the many things that were new since Merada, she was the only one that didn’t make sense yet. She claimed that her only crime had been to reject some sort of retirement the Interim intended for her. Assuming that much was true, there was only one possible explanation for her pursuit--the one he’d guessed early on. She knew something that the Interim was desperate to avoid letting out.
What could that be? Rather than just wonder, Kearn decided he would pop Zerouali from hibe and ask. She knew all his secrets; now it was her turn.
With a faint hiss, Zerouali’s capsule unsealed. Kearn unhitched her restraint web and waited patiently for her return to consciousness.
After a few minutes her eyes fluttered open and fixed vacantly on his face. She blinked a few times and grew more lucid. With a deep breath, she asked dreamily, “Trouble?”
“What would make you say that?”
“Seems like a safe assumption.”
Zerouali braced her arms against the sides of the capsule and indulged in a stretch. Kearn indulged in watching her. He noticed her body as if for the first time, and not without appreciation.
When his gaze found her face again, Zerouali’s eyes had already opened. There was no telling whether she’d caught him or not, and quite characteristically she gave no indication one way or the other.
She glanced casually around the hibe vault, apparently noting the lack of company. “How long has it been?” she asked.
“Almost six months. We’re nearly at Ona.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Still in hibe. It’s just you and me for now.”
Mild amusement played over Zerouali’s fine features, a look that might easily be read as arrogance, and perhaps was. “Should I be flattered?”
