by David Ryker
Drake nodded. “All you need to do is say publicly, as Foster Kenya, that you were brainwashed into believing the Jarheads, and that you regret helping them. And also that you don’t believe there is an alien threat to Earth.”
“To lie, then.”
“It’s that or chaos,” said Drake. “I’m working on plans to ensure the coming war is brief, with as little destruction and loss of life as possible, but without a clear, solid government in place, there is no way this planet can deal with an alien armada. Surely you see that.”
“What about me?” asked Gloom. “You don’t need me for that, so why am I here?”
“I’m glad you asked, Ms.—uh, I mean Gloom. Your intelligence gathering and cyber warfare skills are unique, and I believe that, with them, we stand a much better chance of achieving my goal of the shortest, least destructive war in the history of mankind. When the dust settles and the new global government is consolidated under one faction, we can begin to actually address the greater threat, which is the armada that you people say is inevitable.”
“We?” Jakande frowned. “Are you saying the other tribunes are in on this plan?”
“Of course. The only way to keep this war contained is to make sure all sides are communicating with each other. If we were to head into another bitter conflict like the last one, we could end up destroying the world, and we’d essentially be doing the aliens’ job for them.”
Jakande drew a breath and ran a hand through his dreadlocks while Gloom simply hunkered down in her seat and frowned. It was a better than response than Drake had braced himself for, because it didn’t involve anyone flipping the bird, at least not yet.
“That’s a lot to process,” Jakande said finally.
“And we’re not the only ones you need,” said Gloom.
Drake nodded. “You’re right. The third piece of the puzzle is obviously Sgt. Schuster.”
“You mean Inmate Schuster,” said Jakande. “Dev was on the bus with the others when you dropped us off at the UFT Tower. He’s in New Alcatraz with them, isn’t he?”
“In a separate suite, yes. He’s been kept in luxurious isolation, much like you two, for obvious reasons.”
Gloom snorted a derisive laugh. “Obvious reasons. Yeah, so that he isn’t getting the shit beat out of him in general population like the others no doubt are. You don’t need them, so you just abandoned them.”
She was even more clever than Drake had given her credit for, and he had to come up with a quick lie or risk his narrative unravelling.
“That was for the benefit of the public,” he said. “They needed to see that the Jarheads were being punished for their actions, after everything they had done. Now that public attention is off of them again, I’m working to get them moved to a better section of the prison. Obviously release is out of the question for now.”
“Right.” Gloom shook her head. “It’s getting hard to breathe in here, being surrounded by all this bullshit. Do the other tribunes know that Frank King is actually Zero?”
“Yes,” said Drake, making sure to watch his words. “Obviously, they were upset over being fooled, but they quickly saw the benefit of my scheme.”
“How have you been explaining that to the public?” asked Jakande. “The guy came back from the dead.”
“We told them that he’d been held prisoner by people working for Quinn, and that the details were classified. King—I mean Zero—has obviously endorsed me since that initial appearance, and he’s stayed largely out of the media eye.”
Jakande cocked his head. “And what’s to stop us from telling people the truth? All we have to do is go public with the fact that he’s not really King, and that everything they know is a lie, and that you’re colluding with the other factions to start another war. You know we could find a way to do it.”
Drake sighed and shook his head, but Gloom answered the question before he could.
“That was another reason for discrediting us when we got back,” she said, her tone acid. “To stop us from doing something like that. If we tried, we’d be lucky if anyone listened to us outside of the conspiracy theory crackpots who believe aliens already took over the world a hundred years ago, and that everyone in power is actually a humanoid lizard. If anything, we’d be harming the cause, not helping it.”
“Exactly,” said Drake. “Unpleasant, to be sure, but absolutely necessary.”
Jakande let out a sigh. “I have to say, Drake, you really did think of everything. If I wasn’t so appalled, I’d be impressed.”
Drake shrugged. “You do what you have to do. The question now is, will you two do what I ask of you?”
“Yes,” Gloom said immediately, prompting a look from Jakande. “Get Schuster here with us and we’ll get to work.”
“We will?” asked Jakande.
“Yeah.” She turned to face him. “That’s an order.”
Jakande shrugged. “All right, then. I guess we’re in.”
“One condition,” she said. “Get the surveillance equipment out of our suite. I don’t like being watched.”
“Consider it done.” Drake was surprised at the quick answer, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Excellent,” he said, rising from behind the huge, ancient desk. “I guess we’ll start with allowing you limited network access, and I’ll let you know when and if Sgt. Schuster agrees to go along with this.”
“He will,” Gloom said without hesitation.
“From your lips to God’s ear,” said Drake. He led the pair to the door and the waiting guards on the other side, wondering if the people who had made history ever realized that was what they were doing at the time.
He realized it, and he was proud of that.
“Don’t do that again,” said Ben as they arrived back at the Tower suite they had been sharing for the weeks since they arrived back on Earth.
“Do what?” Gloom asked distractedly as she scanned the room’s supposedly hidden recording devices. All of them appeared to be powered off; Drake had kept his word.
“Speak for me. I mean, I know we’re friends, and I owe you a lot, but I’m my own person.”
“Were you going to agree eventually?” she asked, dropping onto the sofa and calling up the terminal that was built into the coffee table. A holographic display appeared in the air in front of her, confirming that they did have network access, though they could only receive, not send. She’d expected as much.
“Well, yes, but—”
“And were you going to keep him there talking even longer before you finally agreed?”
Ben glowered. “You know, sometimes you make it hard to be your friend.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.” She scanned the news feeds, gleaning what she could and moving on, in an attempt to catch up on everything she’d missed since their access had been cut off. “I don’t use that word very often and I mean it even less often, so be thankful.”
“Only you could make an apology sound like you’re doing the recipient a favor.” He sat down beside her. “Are you looking for something?”
“Drake is right,” she said, her eyes flitting through data and video as it appeared in the hologram. “There’s going to be another war.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“Well, if he’s right, then I suppose what we’ve agreed to is the only way we can proceed if we want to get to the point where we can actually stop the Gestalt. We both know that Kergan is still out there, and now he’s pissed.”
“It’s not just Kergan,” said Gloom. “I’m pretty sure that Toomey is with him.”
“You think?”
She nodded, eyes still on the feed.
“Well, that confirms it, then. We have no choice but to go along with Drake.”
Gloom took a deep breath and shut off the holofeed, then slouched back into the sofa and crossed her arms over her chest.
“We’ve always got a choice, Ben,” she said. “And right now, I think going along wit
h Drake is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing. We’ll play along for now, but the second we see a way out of this, we need to take it. If we keep doing what we’re doing, I think we’re going to fuck something up that can’t be unfucked.”
Ben gave her a sidelong glance. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I can’t explain it,” she sighed. “But you’ve trusted me this far, right?”
He snorted a laugh. “Exactly! And this is where it got me!” Then he saw the look in her eyes and his tone softened. “Wait a minute, are you actually scared? I’ve never seen you look like this before.”
“I’ve been scared plenty,” she confessed in a low tone. “I just don’t let on. I can’t put it into words, but right now I think we’re headed toward some sort of crossroads, one that has bigger consequences than we can even see.”
“What do you mean?”
She plucked a pillow from beside her and stuffed it into her midsection, hugging it like a child would a teddy bear.
“I mean that I can’t shake the feeling that what we do next is going to decide the fate of humanity forever.”
5
Dev Schuster was walking along a beach made of red sand, looking out at an ocean that seemed out of place somehow—out of time, his mind told him, not place, whatever that meant. He just found it pleasant, strolling under the stars and revelling in the peace and calm.
How long had he been walking? He couldn’t remember. Hours, maybe? Longer?
Eons?
He couldn’t remember seeing anyone else on his walk before this point, though. He couldn’t say how long the man ahead of him had been there, just that he hadn’t always been there. He’d arrived at some point after Schuster had, and Schuster had been following him ever since. Not out of any desire to catch up, but simply because they were both walking in the same direction.
What direction? Schuster asked himself. Where am I going?
He looked back up at the stars. The constellations were wrong here. Well, not wrong, per se, but not the same as they would be on Earth. Like his time on Oberon One, when he would gaze out of the tiny portholes at the distant balls of light, using his limited network access time trying to figure out which stars they were according to their position in the sky. It was a pointless pursuit, obviously, but it was a way to while away the hours of his hundred-year sentence for treason.
And something about the position of the stars overhead made him feel like they weren’t where they were supposed to be. Not that shouldn’t be there, but that they shouldn’t be exactly where they were right now.
“Time,” said a voice ahead of him, startling him, at least as much as he could be startled in his current peaceful state. It was the man he was following—he was closer now, but still facing away from him.
“Time?” Schuster asked. “I don’t understand.”
“This place is out of time,” said the man. Why was his voice familiar? “The sands are red, but the oceans are still here. The oceans of Mars had dried long before the surface turned red. It was iron oxide revealed by erosion from the arid winds that produced the color we see now.”
That made sense in Schuster’s mind. He’d read about the theory, developed in the early 21st century.
“That’s why the stars seem strange,” he replied, looking up again. “Their positions are from a time long before the dinosaurs.” The idea that different time periods could coexist in the same space didn’t seem strange to him at all; if anything, it was comforting. Reassuring.
When Schuster looked down from the sky again, the man was standing directly in front of him, his back still turned.
“When the oceans still flowed on Mars, it was already ancient,” the man intoned. “It existed before this galaxy. Before this universe. It was here before space and time created here. It has always been, and always will be. It was never born. It will never die.”
Schuster nodded, again, filled with a sense of rightness. All was as it should be. This man spoke the truth, and Schuster was glad to hear it, glad to know someone understood as he did.
“Eternal,” he said simply.
“Eternal,” the man agreed.
“Who are you?” Schuster asked. It seemed like the natural thing to do, now that the gap between them was gone.
“Dev,” said a voice from somewhere else. “Don’t.”
Don’t? Don’t what? He looked around him but saw nothing besides the ocean, and the red sands, and the stars. And the man.
The man who was beginning to turn toward him. And as he did, the ocean suddenly began to roil and shrink and dissipate. The stars overhead shifted rapidly, so fast that they turned into white blurs against the blackness of space.
I shouldn’t have done that, Schuster thought with rising unease. This wasn’t right, this was wrong. This was all kinds of wrong.
“Dev!” The voice again, more urgent this time. “Look away!”
But he couldn’t—he was transfixed by the man who was turning to him amid the maelstrom of time crashing into itself around him. And from everywhere, a white light began to sing its way into everything. Wait, that wasn’t right—sing its way? That wasn’t possible; light didn’t sing. But even as the thought emerged, he knew he was wrong. Light could sing. It was the most natural thing in the universe…
“Dev!”
The man had turned to the point where Schuster could make out all the sides of his face.
What? All the sides?
The man continued to turn, and suddenly Schuster realized he was looking at three faces in the same space. One was a blank space, a hole where a face would be. Another was alternately an old man and a young man, and Schuster instinctively knew the man had two names. One was Grigori. The other was…
Oh shit—the other was Toomey.
A smile began to creep across the three faces, and that was when Schuster saw it. The beard was new, but there was no mistaking the cold grin below those crazy eyes.
Butch Kergan was looking directly at him.
“Hey there, fuckface,” Kergan said amiably. “Good to see you again. Tell your little girlfriend Quinn that I say hi.”
Schuster couldn’t feel his pulse in this place that wasn’t a place, but his fear manifested as ice crystals overtaking everything around him. Everything became soul-numbingly cold as Kergan began to laugh; first a giggle, then a chuckle and finally a hearty belly laugh. And it filled Schuster with dread, until he felt something akin to panic.
“Dev—” he heard the voice say, but by then he was already instinctively raising his hand in front of himself, the only shield he could think of.
“NO!” he screamed, and the sound seemed to fill the entire universe.
He tried to close his eyes, but he had no eyes. Instead, he saw the ice all around being engulfed by fire—molten, raging fire, like the heart of a star. It flowed over the dead beach and engulfed the sky above them, before finally reaching the Kergan thing. The last thing Schuster perceived before it, too, went up in flames was the look in Kergan’s eyes. It was fear.
“DEV!”
Suddenly he was floating in the warmth of the silent astral realm where he conversed with Kevin Sloane, the passenger in his mind. Gone was the panic he’d felt earlier, the raging red chaos replaced by the soft, radiant green of peace. The threat was over. Sloane floated in the space in front of him, now a fully formed avatar of the man Schuster had come to know as a technician on Oberon One, and who had ended up as something else entirely.
And then, of course, at least part of him had ended up inside Schuster’s mind. Schuster and Sloane. It sounded like an old comedy duo from the early days of television a hundred and fifty years ago.
“Whoa,” he said. “What—what just happened?”
For the second time since the two had merged, an image of a little old Japanese man and a teenaged boy appeared between them.
“Okay, I get it,” Schuster sighed. “First time you, first time me.”
“I think it may ha
ve been a dream,” said Sloane.
“Sometimes I really don’t like this situation. I didn’t even know I was asleep. Just like that time in the asteroid belt, right before we got the fast-track ticket to Uranus. One minute I’m dreaming, the next you’re there and weird stuff is happening.”
A symphony of discordant music filled his virtual ears to underscore the confusion he felt. Schuster had been taking advantage of his solitary confinement since he and the other Jarheads landed in New Alcatraz to commune with Sloane, but spending that much time on the astral plane was playing with his sense of—well, time.
“I believe the image of Mars is significant,” said Sloane. “It may, in fact, symbolize the asteroid belt. Our calculations have indicated we were near the dwarf planet Ceres when the God Element reached out to us on our journey. It may mean the element itself is trying to reach out to us again.”
“But why? And why would Kergan be there? And what was with Kergan’s face?” He didn’t want to ask the next question, but it wasn’t like he could truly hide his thoughts—if Sloane wanted to read them, he could. “And if we could see him, could he see us?”
“I can’t say why Kergan would appear in the vision,” said Sloane. “But the three faces means our suspicions about what happened on Oberon One are true. Kergan must have attenuated Dr. Toomey before he left. The same thing has happened with them as happened with us.”
“Why were there three faces then? And why was one blank?”
An image of the shifting three faces appeared in the void between them. It didn’t seem quite as frightening now as it had earlier, but Schuster still had to force himself to not look away.
“The blank face is his aspect of the Gestalt,” said Sloane. “You should always remember that what we thought of as Kergan was actually the hybrid of Kergan and the aspect that emerged into this universe with my own aspect, as a result of the meteorites striking the surface of Oberon and disturbing the element there. I would appear the same way to you if I didn’t actively try not to.”
