Crusher Tanzing
“I felt like I had two lives competing for space in my head.”
(Part 17 of “The Misfits” series)
“Here we all are again,” I said, and I was saying it to all of them, though I knew Aballi and Verona didn’t want to hear it.
“Are you okay in there, Burch?” Rishi said over my coms. “You’re not making sense. You’re back in the artifact, back in our time. I’ll be in to help you back to the ship in a moment. I know it’s disorienting.”
“No,” I told her. “Stay where you are, Ship. I know what’s going on all right. We’ll be in as quick as we can.”
“We, Burch? You’re not making sense,” she replied.
“Yes, he is,” Verona said. “Clem is with us as well.”
“Verona? Clem is with you?” Rishi asked. “How did you two get back?”
“You killed us,” Verona answered.
“I killed you?”
“That part didn’t go as planned,” I told her. “We need to talk, Rishi.”
“That’s all going to have to wait,” Rishi said. “We have little time. I need you all to get in here right away.”
“Pardon me if I pass on that offer,” Clem said.
He was still on that private coms channel with me and Verona.
“Look, whatever happened back there, we can’t do anything about it now,” I told them. “We can figure out what happened back on the ship, together.”
“We’ll pass,” Aballi insisted.
Rishi must have been picking up my end of that conversation.
“If something went wrong with my counterpart, we have plenty of time to figure it out, you two. It’s still me in here, at least for the next couple million years or so. You need to get in here with Burch so we can record his memories, they’ll start to fade fast.”
And it did start to feel that way, like waking up and feeling a dream starting to slip away. I felt like I had two lives competing for space in my head. I figured if it was anything like a dream, I needed to get back to the ship and start recording everything before it was all forgotten.
“Does it feel like a dream to you two?” I asked Clem and Verona as we began to float our way through that inner cylinder of the artifact, back toward Verona’s ship.
“Our minds are different,” Aballi answered. “I’ll remember everything, just like it was here.”
“How do you know that?”
“This isn’t my first time coming back to the Battery, Burch. First time coming back like this, though.”
“Well, let’s go get this sorted out, and then we need to get you two back to Mercury Flats, I guess.”
“That’s not how it works, Burch. There’s no going back,” Aballi stated.
“I thought you said you’d come back before.”
“Not from there. That future’s dead to us now, at least from this artifact, anyway. Once the door closes to us, it closes for good. Whatever we do for them, we’ll have to do it from here.”
“Or some other artifact in the future,” Verona said.
“Damn,” I replied. “We never thought Rishi could have turned like that, not even in two million years.”
“You know what that means,” Verona stated.
“Means what?”
“It means we need to have a serious talk about your girlfriend, Burch,” Clem Aballi said. “And we all need to talk about the future.
We piled back into Verona’s ship, Cannon. Clem wasted no time cutting into Rishi once we got inside.
“You want them to record their memories, then you need to start talking about your actions the past few weeks, bipal,” he said. “I did everything to earn your trust like you said, for decades doing right by you, and this? This is how you repay us?”
“First, let’s not—” Rishi began.
“Rishi,” I said, sensing whatever she was going to say was about to set Aballi off. “We messed up. You don’t know what did or didn’t happen yet. Let’s get to figuring that out first before anything.”
“What happened is she killed us,” Aballi stated.
“No,” I said. “I sent Rishi back here before you two got killed. I know that for certain. It was the future Rishi. So let’s not confuse the issue or who did what to you. Our Rishi, this Rishi, she didn’t do anything to you. She’s just as confused as the rest of us.”
“I had no means to confer with my future self at all,” Rishi told them. “I simply had Burch awaken her in my body when he deactivated my processing core from that shell. There was no crossover between us.”
“It was extraordinarily irresponsible,” Verona said.
“We want to figure it out as much as you do,” I agreed. “Just, if there’s a time window on our memories, we need to get to work recording them. We’ve got plenty of time to figure out what happened, especially after everyone cools off a little.”
Clem shook his head.
“I’m not sure we feel so inclined to cool off,” Verona stated. “Clem was not exaggerating. We suffered very traumatic deaths at the hands of Rishi’s future self.”
“We’re sorry about that,” I told them. “Arch took good care of me this time. It was like floating out into the black. But I do know how a rough one feels.”
Kristoff was up front with a visor on, and he had been doing a pretty good job of ignoring the commotion to that point, but he’d had enough of our arguing.
“This is hard enough without people fighting in the background,” he said. “It only gets harder the longer you’re here, Burch, so you’d best get started. My memory’s already fading.”
I could feel it too, that competition for space in the mind. Images were among the most vivid. Our first moments on Murell, the bright pink moon over the deep blue of the city at night. The light through those ancient trees. The water. Then there was Mercury Flats, the faces of our friends there, the tall cylindrical caverns, the arboretum. And there were those last moments, I couldn’t forget, the ordinals’ home world—that techno-hell, the bright cold box I died in so far in the future. My aging face, I remembered it. I was young again now, I realized. I needed to see it.
It was almost unbelievable. A second chance at life. I had to force myself to slow everything down, to keep out the memories of this place of the present that wanted to come rushing back in. I looked at myself there in the sheer glass panel on the side wall between the flight deck and the aft holding area of Cannon. The scars, which had faded into my face in the future were prominent again, one on my chin and forehead—bright red, they seemed so fresh.
“I need to start recording,” I said, heading up front to join Kristoff.
I put on a headset and started thinking. Rishi came up beside me as well. I was getting nervous about losing memories. Anxious, unfocused. I didn’t want to lose anything.
“If I don’t record it, I’ll lose everything?” I said to Rishi.
“Not exactly, Burch. Relax. We can recover memories through hypnosis and other methods. The Athosian researchers got much of what they learned of Earth from the Kappa artifact that way. But I’d like you to try and focus on the really important things. Focus your effort there, and then we’ll move on to your personal memories.”
That put me at ease a little. It was like a dream, though. You could forget things entirely and never know it. I’m sure we’ll never recall most of what happened to us there. But talking out our recollections, that brought back the memories real vivid. Then after that, I could remember each event I’d recorded like they’d happened here yesterday.
I fell into this kind of zone that Kristoff must have been in when he’d yelled at us before. The band on the headset did a great job of capturing images right from my mind, which, for some reason, I didn’t expect, seeing as they were memories from a distant time and place. But I suppose if they were in our minds, they were in our minds.
At first, I started with the important stuff. Critical things I’d made sure I should never forget. Then I had a few beautiful memories I wanted to keep—times with Zii and Enga in Rechler City, Kirin and Leyra in Mercury Flats. I found it got easier to remember those times like a story—like the story about our first couple days in the future, getting rescued by Clem Aballi from the ordinals; like the time we first went to Rechler to recover the ancient primes, like the days leading up to our deaths. I tried my best to record them like I was giving my old log entries, even cracking a joke or two here and there.
Time was passing. Coffee, a little bit of water, more coffee. Even after I got a headache from all the thinking and recounting and talking, I didn’t want to stop. My voice got hoarse. I didn’t usually like to dictate thought-to-text, but my voice got so sore I couldn’t do it any other way after all those hours. Even as the day pressed on, I didn’t want to slow down or even think about sleeping for fear I’d wake up and have half my memories of that future gone for good. I think it was probably twenty hours before I came out of that trance.
By the time I finally did, Kristoff was passed out cold in the side sleeper in the back. Rishi was still waiting for me, though.
“Where’s Verona?” I said. “And Clem?”
“We talked,” Rishi said. “I can’t imagine what could have gone so wrong for my future self to kill them like that, Burch. Clem Aballi is so furious he can hardly form words. When he does, he can’t say much before flying into a rage and then going silent again. Verona can barely keep him calm. I’m afraid of what he might do.”
“Feeling’s mutual, I guess, Ship. That other you—she was different. Scared me a little, if I’m honest.”
“I want to talk to you about her.”
“I want to talk about you first,” I told her. “We put off a conversation back there that we should’ve had, fully fleshed it out proper. We need to have it here while it’s still fresh in my mind.”
“I heard most of your recordings,” Rishi said. “You’re right, Burch. We do need to talk, but Clem and Verona asked that you come over to his ship before you turn in. They said it was important and something they could only talk to you about.”
“All right, I guess.”
Rishi could tell I was exhausted. “They said it shouldn’t take long.”
I nodded and headed to the rear airlock. They were just a quick leap away. I put on a belt, flipped on my nanosheet, and headed outside. My head was just about swimming—two sets of memories marinading in exhaustion. And now that we were back, the one memory that didn’t seem to be anywhere was what the hell we were supposed to do now that we were back in our own time. If we had a purpose here, I couldn’t quite recall what it was.
I pinged Verona. It felt funny knocking on the door of Clem Aballi’s cruiser, here, so many light years beyond the farthest reaches of the Lettered systems. I suppose I should have been obligated to turn him in to the powers that be, or were, or had been dead two million years ago yesterday now. And it felt funny to me that Verona was over here, hiding out on Clem’s ship while we’d been occupying hers. Everything was strange. All jumbled up.
Verona opened the rear airlock. She saw me in.
The ship sure was different from her Trasp luxury cruiser. About the picture of what you’d imagine Clem Aballi’s spaceship to be—spartan, dark, cold, bare metal and noiseless.
“We don’t have a lot to say to you, Burch,” Aballi said as I took down my nanosheet. “This won’t take long.”
“What’s up?” I asked them, looking at Clem and then over at Verona.
“It’s about Rishi,” Verona stated. “We’re worried about her.”
“You didn’t have to call me over here in secret to tell me that, Verona. That’s pretty clear. I can’t say it’s unwarranted, given the circumstances.”
“That’s not it,” Aballi said. “We’re worried about her influence on you and Kristoff.”
“You’re worried about us? That’s touching, Clem. I didn’t know you cared.”
Verona looked concerned, I think about how Aballi was going to react to that, but I did remember having a bit of a surprising rapport with him back in the future. A lot of ball-busting and all that. It didn’t all have to stop now that we were back.
“I know it’s a little delicate,” Verona said. “I know you love Rishi very much.”
“That’s a fact.”
“Burch, we’re worried about your memories. If they fade and you forget, Rishi is the one who gets to fill in all the holes for you. We’re glad you’re recording them, but please, I hope you don’t forget that you can ask us too.”
“Real subtle, Verona.”
“We decided, Burch,” Aballi said, “I’m the subtle one now.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“If you’re so kindly willing to help me remember, you two, I do have something I’m not quite sure on,” I said. “We spent all our time and efforts there in Rechler and on Murell focused on those people. So what are we supposed to do now? Here in the Battery?”
“We’ve got a lot to talk about, Burch,” Aballi said. “Go get some rest. We’ll get together and talk it all through.”
“As long as Rishi’s part of the conversation,” I insisted. “You both trusted her for fifty years. That’s the Rishi who came back with us.”
“Of course she is,” Verona said. “Cooler heads tomorrow.”
“Yeah, tomorrow. All right you two. I’ll see if I can remember your names in the morning. You and you.”
I hopped back across the divide to Cannon and hardly said two words to Rishi before I was out cold.
Well, so anyway, I’m not sure how long I slept, but I woke up with a whole different mind from the one I went to sleep with. The process of talking through all that stuff from the future genuinely helped. My memory was like normal now, all those things I worked to keep filed away as another chapter in my life—like my time in the DG Guard, my days in rehab after getting wounded, all that time on the Yankee-Chaos—now I had this big new chapter out of time, two hundred million years in the future, Tranchera, Rechler, Mercury Flats.
Kristoff and Rishi and Verona were all up on the flight deck laughing and talking when I woke up. Rishi even had a coffee waiting for me. I felt decent. A few minutes later, Clem came floating in the back airlock, and even he seemed in decent spirits considering, which I guess meant that he wasn’t murderously angry anymore. I suppose I couldn’t blame him for being sore about the situation. Verona told us she and Clem really liked it there. Especially Clem. First bit of extended peace he’d had in a long while. And I suppose you could make the case he didn’t deserve it, but I had a pretty sizeable memory on file for the years he’d spent in that future, and most of it was filled with him working on behalf of others, for the people there. Not a whole lot of self-interest I could see. He’d found a way to put all that deception of his to work fooling the ordinals on behalf of humans. All in all, a good record by any keeper’s tally.
Eventually, we started discussing the now, you know, what was next here.
“We can’t go back,” Clem stated. “Like it or not, we have to accept it. That doesn’t change my goal any. The way I see it, we’ve got a couple million years to keep the ordinals and bipals of that future from coming into existence. A human destiny.”
“A noble goal,” Kristoff said. “As noble as any.”
I noticed it got a little awkward in the close confines of the flight deck, especially with Rishi. Nobody really wanted to look at her straight.
“I’m not opposed to all that,” I said. “It’s not the easiest thing to gauge, though, at least from here. What is it that’ll give rise to them? You and Verona probably have a better grip on that than I do, Clem, seeing as you spent so much time with Nilius and the Murell group. Those primes had the longest memory for such things. I’m open to helping out where we can, but I do have a ship to get back to.”
“And,” Kristoff interrupted, “we had a war to stop, as I recall.”
Clem Aballi looked over at Juice side-eyed, as though he might have something to say about that. Again, it got awkward, as the energy of the unsaid seemed to be floating over to that side of the room.
“I think we need to talk to him,” Aballi said.
“To who?” I asked him.
“Nilius.”
“Well, that’s the curious thing now,” Juice said. “Speaking for this half of the room—not sure about you and Verona—but I know for sure Nilius doesn’t have the first idea who the hell we are, at least in this time.”
“I wouldn’t be so certain about that,” Aballi stated. “There’s things you don’t even know you don’t know yet. About here, about the future.”
“Why Nilius?” Rishi asked. “Of all the primes you say Nilius. Not Kayella and Boggs, not Maícon, not Eddis Ali, but Nilius?”
“Like I said, there’s things you don’t know. He knows them.”
“It’s just occurred to me,” I said. “We’ve got a vague idea of where we can find one of the primes—Maícon—who also happens to be in the same place as our ship, by the way, but I’m not sure how we’d even go about finding any of the other primes, not unless they gave you their two-million-year-old calendars when we were in Mercury Flats, Ship.”
“Sadly, nothing that detailed,” Rishi responded. “I know where many of them are roughly. Saraswathi’s on Hellenia right now. Kayella and Boggs were in Trasp space for most of the war. Are, sorry. It’s difficult not to think of now in the past tense. Precops is on Charris, almost definitely. Nilius, I have no idea.”
“Do you know where to find him, Clem?” I asked. “Have you even met him? Or has any of us, for that matter?”
We all looked around at each other. Even Verona and Clem shook their heads in the negative.
“I could find Nilius,” Clem Aballi stated, nodding. “Plus, we gotta get back to the Letters soon anyway. We’re pretty far out, and some of us gotta eat.”
He looked over at me and Kristoff. I guess that was us mostly. We were fixed up enough on stores to get back to the outer Letters at least. The bigger systems were no problem from there.
“I know you well enough to know when you’ve got something in mind, Clem,” Juice said. “Eventually, I’ve got my own agenda beyond ours, but it’ll take me a while to get back Charris way, considering where we’re sitting right now. Pretty much any destination gets us closer to Charris, so I’m open.”
“Nilius is the key,” Aballi replied. “All the others will come around eventually, but Nilius has connections we need. We talked a lot in Mercury Flats.”
“And I know you well enough to know there’s a catch,” I said. “I can hear it in your tone of voice from a light year away.”
“You can?” Juice said, grinning. “I’m just happy if I can understand half the words when he talks, Burch.”
“Funny, funny, Kristoff,” Aballi stated, shaking his head. “The catch is that Nilius operated in different circles during the war. It shouldn’t come as a shock to any of you, least of all you, Burch, but war isn’t always fought or financed on the up-and-up. Nilius had all the wrong friends out in the Letters and the barrier systems—all the people with the connections that mattered.”
“Oh, great,” I said. “I know what that means. The Rexes. Haven’t even been back a day yet and we’re fixing to tangle with the cartel.”
“Prominent local business interests,” Aballi stated. “It’s not like I can get an audience with any heads of major governments, not unless they decided to come to my execution, that is.”
“So, in to the Alphas, I guess?”
“No,” Aballi stated. “Old Rex is past his prime. If you want to get to the real power in the Letters, it’s further out—Mu-Indirus, the outstation.”
“Are you kidding?” Rishi asked, “That system’s a wasteland.”
“Just my kind of town,” Aballi said, grinning. “It’s been a few centuries since I seen some real culture.”
I’d never been out to the Moos, as we called them. Rishi, neither. Fact, none of us had ever been there except Clem, and he said it’d been decades for him even before he left for the future, so he didn’t exactly know what to expect out there, except he understood that’s where the darker side of the Rexes’ network ran through, Garsin Rex, third youngest son of the patriarch Mirsong Rex. I’d never tangled with old Mirsong Rex myself, but everyone in the Letters knew about the cartel. It figured that Clem Aballi would be the one to introduce us, which wasn’t likely to be a neutral prospect. He’d either done right by them and would be valued among such friends or we were heading into some seriously hostile territory. Clem had just shrugged when I asked him about it. “We’ll be fine,” he told us.
Fine. His word.
So we headed for the Moos, which was only slightly off a course toward the inner Letters, where I figured Carolina and the Yankee-Chaos must be kicking around somewhere. I figured we should ping them on the network before jumping, on the off chance our call might catch them before we returned. Again, it was an odd sensation, looking forward to meeting up with our old friends we hadn’t seen for months but also for fifty years. We sure had a lot to tell them all, especially Maícon.
Verona traveled with Clem, which seemed odd—us taking her luxury cruiser while she flew in Aballi’s suck bucket, which is what we’d taken to calling his ship after Juice coined the phrase. Aballi didn’t seem to take offense neither, laughing it off, and when I asked him what its actual name was, he looked at me funny. “Who names a ship, Burch?”
“Everyone,” I told him. “About everyone in the galaxy names their ship except you, Clem.”
He shrugged.
I guess it didn’t matter so much when you run around like an outlaw without a transponder anyway. The more I thought about it, given our recent run of luck, I supposed we could take a lesson or two from him on that front.
Anyway, Rishi and Verona coordinated our jumps back, and given the time frame, we’d finally get to have the discussions we’d never had in the future about the past, or I guess the present day. It was confusing. In the future, we’d been so entirely focused on making sure the humans of that time and the ancient primes had the resources they needed to run the underground. Our lives had revolved around keeping the ordinals and the bipals ignorant of what we were up to, building a human resistance. I suppose if they’d known we were back here, about the worst thing they could’ve imagined would be a group like us back in the Battery getting ready to wipe them from existence before they even had a chance to get going. Where to begin, though? That was the trick.
On the way back, we would stop between jumps every couple days to exchange files, comparing our progress. Our goal was to solidify our objectives by the time we got back to civilization. It was an interesting way of running a slow-motion committee of sorts—the kill the ordinals committee, I guess.
I immediately noticed that Clem and Verona—and I’m not even sure they noticed this—but they had a way of talking about people, real humans like me and Juice, as though we were a different species, different even from the humans of the future. Their perspective was clearly a longevity issue, a bias, I guess you could say. And I suppose I could understand it, having just aged my way through an ordinary lifetime with my eyes fixed now on a second chance at life. I could see things I couldn’t have seen my first go-around. I guess I’d imported a little well-earned wisdom from that other life. But it sure did sound funny when Verona and Clem opened up about “them,” those pesky humans and their shortsightedness. What “they” were going to do.
Rishi picked up pretty quick that Juice and I noticed this, and then there was the question of Rishi. How was she seeing us now. I’d always only ever thought of her as one of us. That’s what my memory from this present galaxy told me. My memory of the future, though, I remembered different. And that—even between us—was still unresolved. I didn’t speak about it directly with her, and I didn’t really speak it into my records of that other life, but it sure was in the subtext. Rishi had just been a kid when I first met her, a twenty-something kid turned two-year-old spaceship. Now, she’d lived an entire lifetime, too, and meeting that ancient version of her had told me something. It wouldn’t be long by Aballi and Verona’s standards that Rishi was as seasoned as Maícon and the rest of the Ancients. She would outlive even Verona by a thousand-fold. That was something to think about, but I guess it wasn’t something to be discussed, because nobody ever brought it up.
The other thing Juice and I did on the transit was do our best to retrieve memories. We did what we could on our own, but after a couple weeks, it wasn’t much use anymore, even when the two of us talked together trying to recall our overlapping experiences. Then Rishi rigged us up a VR program—guided discussion of a hypnotic kind—a type of image-generating platform that allowed us to build out places, reconstitute faces, put people in motion, recreate scenes. And between the two of us, after a month or two, we’d reconstructed Mercury Flats almost in its entirety, and we had a good facsimile of Murell and Rechler too. The simulation was so realistic, I figured we could pretty much show Carolina and the others a damn accurate first-person perspective of the places we’d been and the things we’d seen and done—a good two-million-year preview of the worlds to come. What a thought.
Then, about the time the space boredom of another couple months was kicking in fiercely, we got close to the Moos. Clem had pretty much told us he wanted me and Rishi to come down to Mu-Indirus with him to meet Garsin Rex. He told us he almost always had an entourage with him when he dealt with these cartel types. Rishi, of course, could alter her appearance drastically to fit the circumstance, and with my spare parts and scars, I could also look the part. Verona and Juice, though? They were going to have to sit this one out. Too proper for Mu society, I guess.
I could see it.
We met before that one last jump to switch ships and get geared up and in proper disguise. So me and Rishi boarded Clem’s suck bucket. Aballi had an old jumpsuit for me that made me look far more like one of those old-time Trasp space pirates than a proper captain of the Letters Guard. And, damn, could Rishi pick a disguise. She morphed into this lady pirate of sorts with jet-black hair and all kinds of pock marks and facial tattoos. I guess the three of us, we looked like a bunch of tribal warriors kitted-out for Armageddon. Spikes and everything. I thought it was kinda funny, but Aballi told me people went for that sort of thing out here. Who knew?
One last jump, and there we were, officially back. That’s what it felt like, that the whole thing might have been a crazy dream. And this was reality? I had to ask myself—all dressed up like a space pirate crashing the cartel on Mu-Indirus with Clem Aballi? This second life of mine sure was shaping up to be something.
The Rexes’ outpost on Mu-Indirus looked about like what you would think. I guess having been to Alpha-Origgi enough times to have a picture for the markets the Rexes liked to run, you subtract about half the space, all the veneer of civilization, dim the lights, and forget about the multi-use service bots to keep the place clean, then you’ve got something approaching Mu-Indirus. Not sure what it was about these outer system Rexes, but you had to think it was a choice they were making about the types of business that gets done in the dark.
Out here, all of it was dark.
One thing nice, though, was the food market smelled like a proper place to get a meal. I could smell the soup halfway down the concourse. Not that Rishi and Aballi cared much about that, but damn, after a lifetime in Mercury Flats, and the long months in deep-space before and after that, I was trying to recall. I think the last proper meal I had was at Port Cullen on the way to the future. A lifetime ago. Damn, that soup. It was about to blow my cover. Hard to act like an outer system badass when you’re drooling over the very thought of a bowl of minestrone. And bread.
“Burch!” Aballi said, looking back at me.
He’d stopped walking.
“Huh?”
“Down here,” he said, shaking his head. “Could you at least act like you belong here for a minute, please.”
I nodded and followed them down an outer corridor. We may have been way out in the Moos, but all those trading posts sure ran the same. Public face, private hallways. You could just feel it in a couple steps. Might as well have had a sign in that hallway screaming “THIS WAY TO TROUBLE,” in capital letters.
And of course, there were the dark doors, the taverns, and the rooms where business got done. And, wherever business was happening, the management was never far off. Of course, Aballi knew just where to go.
It was classic. A busted up strikebot and there was even a man on this unmarked door. Yeah. That was the place.
“What do you three want?” the doorman said, staring at Aballi with a noticeably sharp disdain.
“We’re here to see Garsin Rex,” Aballi spat back at the guy. “What the hell else would we be doing at the door?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Tell him Murkist is here to see him.”
The doorman looked over at me. “He’s not Murkist,” then he turned to look at Aballi again, “and you sure as hell aren’t.”
Aballi went for the door, and the doorman put out his hand to brush him back from the entryway, and as soon as his palm hit Aballi’s chest, Clem reached up and grabbed the bouncer’s hand with his.
“Get your hands off me!”
“You don’t just walk through this door.”
“The hell we don’t!”
“I don’t know who you are, kid. I know you’re not the Murkist’s people. I’ve never seen you three before in my life.”
“You’re going to be sorry,” Aballi stated, staring the guy in the eyes. “You think the Murkist walks down a hallway we haven’t cleared first. This your first day?”
“That office is clear. The Rexes will vouch for that.”
“We’ll be back,” Clem said, gesturing for Rishi and I to follow him back out the way we came.
So we walked back to the end of the rear corridor, past the taverns and various other businesses of lesser repute, and stopped at the main concourse. Clem just stood there looking at us.
“Now what?” I said to him.
“Now we pretend to be having a conversation, we wait a few minutes, and go back and watch that mid-level tough guy shit his pants when he realizes he pissed off the Murkist’s people.”
“Wizard tricks, I guess,” I said to Rishi. “Who’s this Murkist guy anyway.”
“Bloody savage,” Clem said. “I’ll show you someday. For now, it’s more fun this way.”
Well, we turned right around and walked back down that hallway. And Clem wasn’t far off. You could see. That rather tawny-skinned bouncer damn near turned white when he saw us coming back again. That Murkist must have been damn near eight feet tall, because that doorman was staring up above Clem’s head like the face of the devil himself was floating up there. The bouncer couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.
And there were a few people inside that small inner lounge area, but I figured Clem had met them all before, because they all reacted the same.
“Go right in, sir,” a pretty but dark-eyed woman tending bar stated. “It’s an honor to have you with us again.”
Aballi nodded.
She gestured toward another set of doors that opened before us.
Inside, was Garsin Rex’s office.
There were two bots there, Letters issue, but nothing to trifle with. He was there behind a table, leaning back, a medium-sized guy in his mid-thirties, half the makings of a beard and long-ish dark hair, a little rough around the edges. His eyes got wide as we stepped in. He was toasted. The wider his eyes got the frostier they appeared. Not sure exactly what he was on, the red most likely, but he got up a big devilish grin.
“An unexpected but never unwelcome visit,” Garsin Rex said. “Come in, friend. Something to drink?”
Clem Aballi nodded and gestured for us to stand behind him, proper henchman mode for me and Rishi. I had to say, I was kind of enjoying the intrigue. I wasn’t sure I was getting out of there with my head on, depending on what this Garsin Rex thought of Aballi, or whether Aballi was just going to play himself off as this Murkist the whole time, but I had to say, I was at least having a moment.
“Miranish, bring us something good,” Garsin Rex said, presumably to his bartender outside, and then, after Clem had waited there in silence for a moment, Rex asked him. “What can we do for our honored guest today?”
Clem put up a finger. Didn’t answer.
“Of course,” Garsin Rex said. “First things first. We’ll toast our good fortunes. And such good fortunes to the both of us. These are such times.”
The bartender, Miranish, came into the room with two glasses—real glasses with some dark, amber colored drink in each. Whatever it was, it was clear the Rexes knew what it meant to be owed a favor.
Aballi nodded as he took the glass, watched, and waited patiently as Miranish handed the second glass to Garsin Rex. Clem followed her with his eyes as she exited the room and the doors closed behind her. Then he stepped forward to Garsin’s table, clinked glasses with the man, and without ever saying one word, drank the spirit in one quick gulp.
Garsin Rex looked up, frosty-eyed, and smiled. He took a long, slow sip and put the glass down on the table.
“Your eyes deceive you, Garsin Rex,” Clem Aballi stated.
“Is that a fact?”
“That’s a fact. I’m not who I seem to be.”
“Hard to mistake you with anybody else, Murkist, but because we so respect you, I’ll play along with your game. If you’re not the Murkist, who exactly would you be?”
Rishi and I could tell the second Aballi switched off whatever spell he was casting over the younger Rex’s mind, because his already wide eyes grew about two times wider and his jaw opened up. Garsin sat up straight, pointed, and nearly fell forward off his chair.
“A HA HA HA HA HA HA!” he laughed so loudly it seemed almost performative. “Clem Aballi, you slippery bastard! A HA HA HA! Welcome! A HA HA HA! Yes! What a fine day.”
Garsin Rex got up and came around the table, embracing Aballi like he was a long-lost friend. I couldn’t help but notice Clem wasn’t nearly as generous with the outward demonstration of friendship.
“The Wizard of Athos, they’re calling you,” Garsin continued. “We hadn’t heard a word of you except when the Athosians claimed they killed you. Then again, we all know the Athosians are liars. Beautiful. What brings you to Mu-Indirus?”
“I need to find someone difficult to find.”
“Who might that be?”
“The Bookkeeper.”
Garsin looked away. Then he looked over at me and Rishi. He stepped back around his table and sat, lifting his glass before making eye contact with Aballi again.
“The Bookkeeper is difficult to find.”
“A man of your talents could find him, Garsin.”
Rex looked to be thinking hard. He started tapping the rim of his glass with his index finger.
“Well, it’s not so much finding him that’s difficult. It’s the right price, with due consideration for the esteem of the petitioner.”
“Nothing’s for nothing,” Aballi stated, shrugging.
“Well said,” Garsin Rex concurred.
He looked over Clem’s shoulder at me and then back at Aballi.
“Your man there? He’s a cyborg, no? I almost missed it, but he stands too perfect, unless I’m mistaken.”
“He is,” Aballi stated. “War veteran.”
“A fighter. May I see?”
Aballi nodded and gestured for me to approach Rex’s table. The young boss came around to meet me, looking me up and down with those frosty eyes of his, glaring. He stuck out a hand, and instead of shaking mine, he pulled it in by the wrist, examining my prosthetic. He looked up at my face again and back down at the hand.
“What’s his name?” he asked Aballi.
“Burks,” Aballi stated.
“What’s your first name, Burks?” Garsin Rex asked, still holding my wrist in his hand, turning my palm over.
“Helicon,” I told him, not sure why I was using that alias.
“I thought this might be Trasp work. It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“What’s your interest, Garsin?” Aballi asked.
“We have an event coming up. Semi-professional. Our undercard is a little light, and Burks here, he looks like a fighter.”
I tried not to overreact, looking over at Aballi. He knew me well enough to know what I thought of that idea.
“He’s a fighter,” Aballi said, nodding.
And somehow, properly fried as Garsin Rex was, something of the family instincts must have resided in that man, because he somehow sniffed out the unspoken conversation going on among me, Aballi, and Rishi behind him, eyeball to eyeball in unspoken energy. And the young cartel boss joined right in, looking over at Aballi.
“We could, of course, negotiate something else, but,” Garsin Rex paused. “You’re not going to get a better price.”
It was clear at that point it wasn’t optional. Not if we wanted to get out of that room without a proper fight the and there, at least in some form.
“The opponent?” Aballi asked.
“Another mech. Etteran warborg with a bad attitude. He rarely gets the opportunity to step into the cube. We don’t get such talent out this way often.”
“One of your guys?”
Garsin Rex nodded. “Good fighter.”
“I’ll bet,” Clem Aballi stated. “Just that? One for one? Burks fights this cyborg and you get me the Bookkeeper?”
“I get you a location. I’m not bringing him in. We all have our limitations,” Garsin Rex paused again. “And ...”
“And what?”
“We have standards and rules, of course, same as in the inners. But if something should happen, on the off chance, to Burks here, and he doesn’t make it out of the ring ...”
“I’m listening.”
“I get the hardware.”
“You get the hardware? Hmm,” Aballi said. “That ain’t gonna happen. But, for the sake of argument, my man kills yours, what do we get? His legs and arms?”
Garsin Rex smiled. “Only seems fair.”
“He’ll do it,” Clem Aballi said, nodding, looking over his shoulder to get a read on Rishi, who hadn’t reacted in the slightest the entire conversation. I was looking over at her too.
“Splendid,” Garsin Rex said. “I will say this for you Clem Aballi, every time I see you something interesting happens. I expect no less of this visit.”
Rex smiled and looked at me.
“What do you say, Burks? Join us in a drink to celebrate?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Man of few words,” he said, smiling. “Good sign in a fighter.”
A few moments later, that bartender appeared again with three fresh glasses and more of the good stuff.
“To staying alive,” Garsin Rex stated as he toasted.
I raised the glass to my lips with my living hand.
“Holy hell that’s good stuff,” I said. Couldn’t help myself.
“Aged in real wood,” Garsin Rex said. “Real wood from a living tree.”
“My God, I’ve never tasted the like.”
I got the sense of the moment, that with a deal like that struck and sealed we weren’t meant to linger, so as much as I wanted to sit there savoring, I didn’t have the luxury of sipping. That damn whiskey was almost good enough to make me forget Clem Aballi had just entered me in a death match. The mix of adrenaline and fine wood-aged whiskey was like no taste I’d ever had in my mouth. Three of the finest sips of anything I’d ever tasted in my life. Damn it felt good to be alive.
We stepped outside and back into the hallway with hardly another word. Clem looked over his shoulder at me.
“Not here,” he stated. “The ship.”
So we walked back out of there in silence.
I was surprised. As reluctant as I was to do it, I was expecting Rishi to raise hell. She didn’t. She wasn’t happy. That much was clear. But her objections were muted and understated, considering the situation. I was more troubled by the prospect than either of them. Fitting, I guess, with my neck on the line.
“In the future there was nothing to fight,” Aballi said. “Not literally, anyways. Here, though? Different story. We should’ve talked about this ages ago, Burch. In a way, I’m glad this happened. It’ll be good for you.”
“Yeah, a death match. Good for the soul,” I cracked.
And still, Rishi was oddly quiet, even in the privacy of that suck bucket ship of Clem’s.
“Here’s the story,” Clem began. Then he offered me a psychological breakdown of yours truly. A deep one. I was biased, he told me, through little fault of my own. It’s hard to escape one’s own circumstances and see themselves in a sort of meta-psychosocial way—you know, what sort of human am I and why, and how do I fit into the whole grand picture of human civilization. Clem said he could see the blinders on me because he’d spent a thousand years trying to see it in himself. And well, he said, I’d gotten myself all wrong, purely through circumstance.
“You’re a stone cold badass,” he told me.
No lie. Clem Aballi said that about me.
“You just don’t know it yet, Burch. First, because you got blown up.”
People, though, can’t reckon with forces bigger than they are. They get hit by overpowering situations and psychologically go from damn near invincible—as I’d thought I was before I got wounded—to smaller than insignificant and helpless. Big swing, which was true for me as well. Both extremes, Aballi proclaimed, were always wrong.
Next, I suffered for a few years under the pain of inadequate prosthetics during recovery. We’d discussed that in Mercury Flats quite a few times, how for the longest time I couldn’t have imagined walking around as easy as I was now.
Then, immediately after getting liberated from that limitation, so to say, when I got my new legs from Verona’s wizards, I went right to the future where I had no cause to ever fight again, and then I grew old and frail. For a couple decades that’s what I was, especially being around all those passive people. An old, tired, sleepy brain.
“That became a mindset, solidified in your psyche, Burch,” Aballi explained. “Your body’s what, mid-thirties now?”
“Thereabouts,” I answered.
“Your mind is in your prime, you’ve got the wisdom of a centenarian, and you’ve got the legs of a Trasp strikebot, Burch. I feel sorry for the other guy. One week and we’ll turn you into a hard-oiled wrecking machine. A pure badass, through and through.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. As I considered it, the more plausible his perspective seemed. I couldn’t really see myself, so it took me a while to consider that he might be spot on. Rishi seemed to agree with him.
“Plus,” she said in a quiet moment together, “do you honestly think I’d let anything bad happen to you, Burch? Just stand by and watch you get pummeled?”
“I’m not sure what you could do about it, Rishi, apart from jump into the cage yourself.”
“If Clem’s right, and I think he is, Burch, we’ll never have to find out,” she told me.
So I got to training. Aballi found us an empty warehouse on the outpost with plenty of space to move around. The fight was in a week. Clem and Rishi told me they could help me re-train my mind.
It wasn’t all that different from the memory retrieval we’d just done coming back from the future. Here, though, I was going back further. Back when I was a soldier. I just had to dig deeper. And sure enough, I still had that in me. Didn’t even take the better part of a day. A sudden mindset. Hell yeah, I was a badass once. How did I ever forget that?
Before I almost knew it, a week had passed. It was strange, almost as if life was passing faster here now that we were in it again, or maybe it was just the circumstances. I felt ready, though. Last thing Clem Aballi said before we headed down to the outpost for the fight was, “Burch, I feel sorry for that other guy.”
I was oddly calm for a man heading into a potential death match. All that was meant to be was gonna be somehow. Imagine that.
When we arrived at the outer partition of the arena, from the outside, you could feel the place buzzing. Then the door opened.
The venue wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Mu-Indirus was this dark, dusty, shady place filled with rough-looking customers and cartel creeps. Everything was dark. This arena was bright, though—like blazing bright. Lights everywhere, all focusing down on the center of the floor.
My fight was the undercard, so it wasn’t as though the place was going wild when they announced me. I walked up to the open gate in the cage and entered, and with all those lights, it was hard to see anything but the ring. The rest of the arena just blinded out for me.
The cage itself was a surprisingly massive cube of chain linked fence on all five sides except for the floor, which wasn’t really even a mat, but a warehouse floor with a thin layer of synthetic sheeting that looked to be more important for the optics of the spectators than any other purpose—certainly not the safety of the fighters. That floor was hard as hell.
I was there, barefoot, shirtless, dark shorts so the crowd could see my tech-legs in all their simple glory. I probably didn’t look all that intimidating by the standards of this world. Just a guy with an arm brace and some facial scars.
Then, in came my opponent.
Hell, I thought, taking one look at the guy approaching the cage.
Not only was he giant—the original parts of him, I mean. But his prosthetics were built out to make him even bigger. Monstrous really. Two-plus meters tall—maybe the better part of three. Stout as hell through the midsection. He was a quad, his legs all metal, powerful, mechanized through like an industrial loader, and his arms he’d customized up like a strikebot, only with sharp metal runners spanning across the top of his forearms like little steel swords. The right arm itself, the more I looked, had come off a strikebot directly—Etteran, I thought—and worse than that, the shoulder carriage was mechanized too. A bot arm wielded by a human shoulder was tough enough, but that mechanized base was some other kind of tough. One good right and it’d be lights out Burch, I knew for sure.
They did introductions. Saying my name with all kinds of spirit: “The Trasp mech in black, Helicon Burks!” And the crowd started jeering, showering boos on me. I had no idea I was meant to be the heel. Didn’t figure they’d introduce me as Trasp, but I was using that Trasp name again, so I guess it made sense.
Then they introduced my opponent, giving about a life story of however many suckers like me he’d pummeled into spare parts and mush. Then the announcer finished it off by saying, “Thirteen knockouts and four fatalities ... Crusher ... TAAAAN-ZING!”
Well, he had the right name all right. Crusher Tanzing. All I could think about, though, were those four fatalities, shaking my head and praying not to be number five.
“Hey!” Aballi shouted at me from behind, calling me over to the fence. “Focus. Eyes. Feel out his movements. Then kill him.”
Clem Aballi pointed to his eyeballs with two fingers and then turned his palm over, pointing that forked hand on me.
“Eyes!”
Funny as that sounds, I suddenly locked in. I couldn’t see nothing but the other side of the cage and this Crusher, like he was the only thing in the universe. Then a horn went off.
That Crusher came after me like a lion, or maybe fiercer. Who knows what a lion could do on a mech or a strikebot? But I cut steady out of his way, dodging and dancing. That was the thing. I was lightning quick on my feet—inhuman quick. That week of training I’d learned that my eyes and instincts weren’t meant to run nearly as lightning fast as my teched-out feet. I had to almost shut out parts of my brain that anticipated movements and think my way two steps ahead instead of feeling. And even then, as I ducked and dodged Crusher’s arms when he advanced on me, I could feel him getting closer and closer, figuring me out, getting ahead of my best. Eventually, I was going to need to stand close enough to swing back. Then something funny happened.
I started feeling his movements in advance—faster than I could see it. I just felt what he was going to do. At one point, he lashed out with that big right hand of his, swiping at my knee, and without even thinking about it at all, I just felt the next thing to do—checking the blow with a lightning-quick half kick to the inside of his wrist, knocking the limb away as I flipped backward and rolled to the other side of the cube.
The crowd started to howl and hiss and boo at me for rolling out of there, but they didn’t have a Crusher in front of them bent on their destruction. “Boo all you want assholes,” I cussed at them under my breath.
When Crusher came in the next time, I had the answer in my mind already, like a vision of it coming in advance, and instead of checking the blow from the hand, for the first time in the fight, I moved forward, kicking his front knee with enough power that it knocked his legs clean out from under him with so much force he flipped entirely over. His rear leg came flying over his back like a scorpion, slamming into the mat beside his head, inches from caving in his skull; and I thought: wow, that was damn near one fatality for Helicon Burks, and I hadn’t even meant it.
I couldn’t believe, but Crusher got right back up instantly, rolling over to his knees and feet.
I looked him in the eyes. I felt relaxed. Zoned in. He looked back at me, and I could see it. Fear.
I’d been training all week, and it hadn’t ever been this easy. The movements were automatic and simple—coordinated. And that was the real funny part: my human parts were moving with such fluidity. I could feel my spine flowing up my back to my head and shoulders, down into my artificial arm, like now, for the first time, that limb was a part of me.
When Crusher came at me this time, I knew he’d figured out that he couldn’t out-fast me. He was going to have to hit me. And I put myself directly into that sweet spot of his monstrous strikebot right arm knowing exactly what he was going to do. And I had the perfect answer, catching the blow clean with my right arm as I rotated into this judo-type roll that used all his force to pull his punch forward and down to the mat in a thunderous crash that I somehow curled under and through, completely unscathed.
When I stood and turned around, I knew what I was going to see without even seeing it yet. It was still a shocking sight to the eyes, though.
There was Crusher, in a heap, bent up like a pretzel, the Etteran strikebot arm punched clean through his left leg and caught, squeezed between the frame and the actuating levers of the leg. He was proper stuck.
This fight was over. It was clear. But the crowd was hyped-up on some kind of bloodlust, exhorting me to cave in Crusher’s head like they were wishing he’d done to me. I knew I couldn’t leave the match like that, but, you know, in the moment, what to do? And again, the answer was obvious. I felt it. Just a sensation in my arm.
I walked over behind him. Crusher was panicking, trying to pull his stuck right arm out of his leg, writhing like a mangled-up warbot after a mid-yield drone strike. I scissored up his left arm with my legs, pinning his back to the deck and calmly putting my right palm to his neck. And with my thumb and forefinger, I delicately put his lights out with a two-finger blood choke.
While Crusher was out for those few seconds, I extricated that Etteran war-arm from his leg and laid the guy full on his back. Everyone could see him there, sucking wind, flat out like a starfish, and they were roaring.
“Burks! Burks! Burks! Burks! Burks! Burks! Burks!” they were chanting.
It was some kind of mix of confusing, awful, and invigorating. But it was over. I’d won the fight. So I figured I should act the part. I put my hands up in the air.
Then as Crusher came to, I went over to him, helped him up to his good leg, passed him off to his people. He still seemed a little too out of it to be gracious, so I asked his man if they had a good tech guy to fix up that busted lower limb.
“Oh, yeah, we got it,” he said. “Hell of a fight, Burks!”
Well, yeah, I guess it must have looked it, and that was what they were here for, after all, a good show.
So I chucked my hands up in the air again as I was leaving the cube, playing the part once more—Clem Aballi’s tough-as-bolts henchman Helicon Burks. Even the Murkist would think twice now. I almost felt a smile coming on, but there was something about the fight bothering me—again, a feeling, something I had to think through to know what was what. But more than anything, on the surface of things, I was feeling good to still be alive.
We had to stick around after the main fights to wait for Garsin Rex. He was in a hell of a good mood after the final bouts, which I think got better and better after the bots and mechs finished up. Humans have a unique mixture of size and speed and hard and soft that makes for the best genuine fights. My fight with Crusher, I was told, had been a rare entertaining spectacle in that division. Most mech fights turned into bloody disasters quick.
Rex’s man won the headline fight, bringing in a large pot and bragging rights to the house. Garsin Rex was so ecstatic he gifted Clem and me a bottle of that wood whisky to take with us for our journey. Then he gave us the coordinates Clem was looking for. A good haul, all told. All we had to do was put my neck on the line.
It was late before we ended up pulling out of Mu-Indirus.
Tau-Nira 6-B was the destination. That was a far cry from the Alphas and Betas, where I figured our compatriots on Yankee-Chaos were kicking around. Fact, it was a far cry from anything, that system. I couldn’t remember having met anyone who’d even been to the Taus, much less anyone who came from there, and I’d crossed paths with people from almost everywhere in the Letters Service. We used to joke about territories like that, calling them RSA & As, as in, all that was out there was robot ships, asteroids, and aliens. Some guy you hadn’t seen in so long you’d ask about, and instead of saying he’s dead or I don’t know, they’d tell you, “RSA & A, Burch. That Lieutenant’s out in the darkness.”
We discussed it and decided to head there directly. The Taus were about a week’s time from the Moos, and Verona opted to fly in her own ship with us this time, leaving Clem on his own. So here we were, back again, the four of us and Cannon.
That second day, Kristoff was admiring the bottle of whiskey, which Aballi insisted I take—my ass on the line, he’d said. Fair’s fair. Anyway, Juice looked up after sniffing the stuff, wide-eyed, and said, “So you won the fight, Burch, I guess. I might have fought a mech if this was the prize. Smells like pure enlightenment in liquid form. Can’t imagine what it tastes like.”
“You don’t need to imagine, Juice. It’s afternoon, right? Somewhere in space, I guess. Verona?”
“Read my mind,” she said. “Worth celebrating, you keeping your head in its proper place, Burch.”
“Damn straight.”
Rishi smiled but was quiet. She declined with a gesture when she was offered. That whiskey was too good to waste on pretense.
Rishi sat with us as we three sipped, though.
“Taste is dulled for us,” Verona said, referring to herself and Aballi—that wizard blood, I guess. “The flavor’s not as bright for me as it is for you two, but even I can appreciate this whiskey.”
“I mean ...” Kristoff went proper speechless, shaking his head.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Yes, indeed.”
“So, Rishi?” Kristoff said, turning to her. “I presume you have the fight, right? Recorded? I think I’d like to see it if that’s okay with you, Burch.”
“I’ve got no objection.”
So Rishi ran her recording up on the floatscreen as the three of us sipped our whiskey. All that turmoil in my mind, all the memories, and the whole thing start-to-finish lasted about ninety seconds. Rishi played it back three times before anyone said anything.
Watching it myself was shocking. It was hard to believe it was me.
After the third time through, Kristoff turned and looked over at me. “My God,” he said, shaking his head. “Terrifying. You’re deadlier than an Etteran strike bot. I’d always thought better of messing with Transom or Sōsh, but my God, Burch.”
“None of my friends never have anything to fear from me,” I told him. “Fear for those who aim to do them harm.”
“I guessed that you could hold your own if it came to it,” Juice said. “I never would have figured that.”
There were a lot of looks back and forth amongst Verona and Juice and Rishi, but I wasn’t sure what they were meant to convey beyond shock, maybe awe, and a little fear. My human eyes saw the same thing each time: It was hard to believe it was me.
The things I’d felt were there in the video too—that almost supernatural sixth sense of what was coming, moving before I could have known to move, a telepathic knowledge of what he was going to do. It tingled a little in my spine watching it over, my neural pathways remembering.
Juice and I had a decent Sabaca game that afternoon. We talked a lot about the future, the things we needed to do to save it.
Verona went off to meditate in the early evening, and Kristoff was in the middle of a novel, so that left Rishi and me alone together for the first time in a while. She was back to her regular self again, at least appearance-wise.
“As much as I got a kick out of you as a space pirate, I always like this look best,” I told her. “I love you, Ship. Haven’t said it in a while, but it’s still as true as ever.”
“Had to say it before we fight about something, Burch?”
“Well, we do need to talk. ‘I love you’ is as good a place to start as any.”
“I told you I wasn’t about to let you die. Nor was I even going to let that monster put a hand on you.”
“How, Rishi?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Back in the vault, when they installed my new legs, that doctor—Rispera—we had occasion to talk about a few things, not the doctorly details but some things.”
“It’s important to know how they changed your body.”
“Rispera told me that the main reason for my back pain came from how my old legs were attached. Those legs were clunky, but they did have some pop to them, and that force had a tendency to stress the spine more than human bones were accustomed to. Just walking around could cause an ache. That was part of it. She said this pair was overengineered to keep that type of stress from becoming a problem. When I asked her, Rishi, she just told me, more or less, it was nanotech. Highly technical doctor-type stuff. I asked Ren about it, and she waved her hands at me, asking what was bothering me, ‘Any pain anymore, Burch?’ I told her no. ‘Well, what the hell are you complaining about then?’ Ren says, shaking her head at me.”
“Sounds like Ren,” Rishi said, smiling.
“She’d listened to enough of my grousing, I guess,” I agreed, looking over at Rishi.
“Yes,” Rishi said, nodding before I even asked the question. “I can access the tech in you.”
“So you could always?”
“I never would without your say-so, Burch. Not unless your life was in danger. It’s not as if I can control your movements.”
“No, I felt it. In my spine, in my mind, and in my arm. That’s all the tech from my leg surgery, though?”
She didn’t answer, sorta grimacing.
“Aw, Rishi,” I said, realizing what it was. “Helicon Burch? The brain thing? That’s how I was feeling it?”
“Look, Burch, he’d have murdered you. Crusher Tanzing? Are you kidding me? I wasn’t going to leave you alone in there with that killer. Not you, my love. No. I’m not sorry. No. I’m not about to sit there and watch you get beaten to a bloody pulp. Never. And short of tearing the cage wall apart and jumping in there and breaking his neck, that’s what I thought the best thing was.”
“Telepathy?”
“It’s not telepathy.”
“How did you know what he was going to do? It was like I could feel how to avoid his movements before he even moved.”
“Movement analysis, kinesiology, and predictive modeling. After a few seconds it was obvious, his abilities, his limitations. It’s just computation. Then it was a matter of suggesting the obvious. I didn’t control your movements. Not one bit. I wouldn’t ever.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Rishi?”
She didn’t answer. I swear if she could have cried, she looked about as close to tears as she ever had in that body.
“Oh, Rishi, is that what you thought of me? That I’d somehow let my own ego trick myself into believing I was that good a fighter? That the crowd would what? Sweep me up in something and I wouldn’t notice?”
“I didn’t think it through that far. I just thought telling you in advance would add a layer of distraction you didn’t need. All I cared about was you, Burch. Surviving. Living another day. Not having to watch you get your head bashed in.”
“And damn the consequences?”
“You know, a thank you might be more appropriate than whatever this is, love. I don’t need one, but I don’t need this either—you, looking at me like I’ve done something wrong when I haven’t. I did it for you, Burch, because I love you. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s easy enough for you to sit here drinking your whiskey with all your parts and your pride intact, breathing, and say, ‘Bad Rishi; didn’t you violate my trust?’ That’s a luxury, and to my mind, it’s a far better outcome than Crusher Tanzing sitting at home right now cleaning pieces of your skull out of his boot heel. So okay, fine, Burch. Look at me that way. Go ahead.”
“How much tech is in my spine, Rishi? How much is in my cerebrum? How much more do I need before I’m something different?”
She shook her head at me. “You think you’re some kind of monster now, Burch? Is that it. You’re the same man you were yesterday.”
I sighed, considering that point. “Even though I was doing things I knew I couldn’t do, it felt like me, Rishi. It really did.”
“It was you, Burch, and it was me. Us. Together. I’m not going to apologize for that.”
“It’s all right, Ship,” I told her. “I’m not asking you to. I’m just asking. Trying to assess. We got time to talk. Time to learn.”
“I love you, Hale Burch. I’m only ever trying to protect you and our friends.”
“Good enough, ship. Good enough.”
And for the moment, it was. There was a lot to think about. Both of us. Sometimes it just took time to think these things through. The past, the future, the present. All of it was so much.
So I took a deep breath, lived to fight another day, and got on with the people I loved.
Tau was upcoming. Aballi’s ship was there waiting for us when we arrived at the rendezvous before the final jump into Tau-Nira.
“Ever seen this place?” I asked Clem over the coms channel.
“As new to me as it will be to you, Burch. Might as well be open space.”
“After you then, Clem,” Verona said, as the coordinates came through.
We watched him jump out, waited about a minute as Verona cleared the numbers on her second check. Juice and I looked at each other, I think both of us wondering whether Clem had something up his sleeve. I certainly didn’t worry about him the way I once would have. But at the same time, given where we’d come back to, who he was here before he left, I wouldn’t have been shocked to jump out exactly in the middle of empty space with him lost to the expanse of the Inner Battery, some unspoken trick up his sleeve.
But that last jump, a quick several hours, put us pin down on a tiny, beat-up station with a single dull orange top-light waxing and waning in luminosity, a minor beacon in the darkness of a dim, vacant system—hardly a planetoid to speak of on the scanner. And there, before us as promised, was Clem Aballi’s little suck bucket cruiser, pulling up on the sorry little station that looked more like a piece of space garbage than a hideaway for one of the galaxy’s most brilliant and ancient minds.
Rishi was flying, so we got fixed to the station a few minutes before Clem. She was so damn perfect a pilot, I couldn’t help but think about the fight again. Every perfect maneuver, step, bend, kick, drop. Poof. And we were suctioned onto the station with a hard seal, waiting for Aballi the superhuman to catch up.
We did wait so we could all go inside together. It wasn’t quite as exhilarating as a death match, but it was kind of exciting. Here we were in the past, meeting our old friend Nilius again for the first time. At least the four of us anyway. Something told me he and Clem had crossed paths, but for us it was the first time. I wondered what the hell he would say to our story, us meeting him in the future and all—how we could prove to him it was true.
There was no gravity at all in that station. Hardly a problem for a being like him. Not ideal for us, though, fumbling our way through dark corridors without much to pull on.
He must have known we were coming, because he put on some music. Some kind of fancy ancient opera, echoing down the long, arcing halls, resonating, ringing against the metal floors and doorways.
Then, we turned a final sharp corner to an opening. There was Nilius, floating dead in the center of the station, hooked up to about a thousand wires that ran out of every part of his android shell up to the ceiling, almost like his body was the main node in a vast network of computers all running through him—some futuristic-looking sea creature from outer space.
A few seconds after we got there, in a doorway across that vast, open room, Clem Aballi arrived, floating into Nilius’s inner lair without a moment’s hesitation. So we followed. We all met in the middle.
Excepting the wires, Nilius looked almost the same as he had in the future, only not nearly as fluid a body as the one Rishi had built for the ancient primes there. He looked like a prime of our time.
He opened his eyes, looking at each of us in turn, one by one, smiling just like those primes do. A perfect, calculated smile.
“Welcome friends,” he stated. “You’re here. You’re finally here. How I’ve missed all of you. No matter, though. It is time now. At last, it’s time. Let’s begin.”