Day of Deception
“This model space society, in Effelin Kal-Ennis’s twisted mind, had become the perfect opportunity to create a superweapon ...”
(Part 30 of “The Misfits” series)
By the time we got to Heinan, the war was about six weeks away by our count. But reality was funny in these alternate universes. Kristoff and Verona and Clem Aballi had gone back thousands of years to Charris and found everything different—or at least different from how our history had recorded it. This history, the start of the West Battery War, which we’d come to witness for ourselves, was far more recent, about seventy years from our time, and it was recorded by a solitary primary source, who told her story to the galaxy and then disappeared. Our history was Pitka Remera’s history, recorded from her own mouth to everyone’s ears in an effort to keep herself from taking the blame for starting the war. I suppose some people believed her—Etterans certainly. The Trasp probably had their reasons to doubt. I guess people like me from the Lettered Systems were fairly neutral, or maybe agnostic would be a better word. I’d listened to Pitka Remera’s story maybe a hundred times, starting in school of course, but a lot more recently, trying to memorize every key detail that could shed light on the start of the West Battery War. Six weeks away now.
I was thinking about Pitka Remera’s story on the transit from Carhall to Heinan. And then it hit me that even then, even as we were speeding toward the outer planets on the Trasp Protectorate’s eastern flank, Pitka Remera was out there. She was there somewhere in the Etteran Guild, going about her business as a doctor, just day-in-and-day-out with no clue as to what was coming, both personally and galactically speaking—the infamy, the slaughter, the inability to escape the eternal association she would forever bear with the worst events in the history of humanity. God. When she talked, she sounded like such a regular girl. Then I started wondering if we were bound to meet her, but we had other connections to make first. Verona was here on Heinan somewhere.
I knew she was some sort of government functionary back in this time, and she’d told me in passing a few times that they always had people in the registry, issuing IDs and recording births and deaths and all that. Carmenta agreed that was a decent place to start poking around, given that it seemed like a low-level position for one of Eddis Ali’s junior acolytes. I made a composite image of Verona’s face using the ship’s image generator when we landed. It brought up about fifteen faces that could match of the million or so people in Heinan proper. And sure enough, there she was—government functionary in the records office, Lin-Lee Eros was her cover, but it was Verona. One hundred percent.
So I thought, maybe it would be best if all five of us fellow travelers from future realities didn’t crowd inside her office to meet her all at once. Instead, me and Leda volunteered to go down there and make that awkward introduction: Hi, I’m Burch. You know me from the future, but you don’t know me yet, and I need you to put your life on hold for a moment while we handle some galactically-important business. Step into my spaceship with all my weird friends, will you?
I didn’t really have a plan for it, just a whole bunch of bizarre knowledge nobody else could have but me and Verona. I started talking about it with Leda on our walk into that records hall.
“I guess you know how Carmenta felt approaching you, Burch,” Leda said. “I mean, what would you say if somebody came along and told you they were here from the future and knew you from ...”
Leda stopped talking as she realized that’s exactly what had happened with that old wizard.
“I figure if anyone should be open to this kind of stuff it’s those wizards and people like us. Just when I think I’ve seen it all—people turning into spaceships, artifacts that move people through space and time, Trasp and Etterans breaking bread at the same table—then something even crazier is bound to turn up.”
“You haven’t seen a giant space octopus yet,” Leda replied. “There’s still time, though, Burch. Don’t say it can’t happen.”
“Nope. Won’t catch me saying nothing like that.”
So we went down into this great deep vault of a building that housed a whole host of Trasp servers that kept memory records of all kinds of things about their society. Verona, though, from her public description was some sort of identity security agent—keeping people from changing their legal identity through illicit means or having their rightful identity stolen or borrowed upon. Real thrilling stuff. We didn’t really have much of a cover story. We just figured we’d start down the lift and get as close as we could until we got to Verona’s desk—no time to waste and all that. Six weeks to the war.
Sure enough, it was like Hartline had said back on Carhall—these people were free: nobody was suspicious of anything really. We got all the way down Verona’s level without anyone so much as suspecting a thing, everyone all smiles.
We found her desk. Apparently, she was back in the server stacks archiving slats or something. I was wondering if she had a little bell to ring or something like that in old times.
“May I help you?” Verona’s voice echoed into the room.
I looked at Leda and shrugged. “Is there any way we could talk face to face,” I asked her. “I have a bit of an odd request that’d be best handled in person if you have the time.”
“What’s this request regarding?”
“Matters of galactic importance,” Leda stated before I could reply. She was grinning as she said it.
“Oh, great. That’s our specialty here in the IDGC. I’ll be right out.”
It sounded like she was being sarcastic, but also, it was Verona. She didn’t do sarcasm all that much—certainly not in the time I’d known her.
When she got to the public-facing office, it was a bit surreal to see Verona standing there and know that it was her. And she was here, sure, but I’d also just left her back in our time seventy years from this very moment, and she looked the same—minus the annoyed look she was carrying off quite convincingly, apparently on account of the highly important and engaging work we’d interrupted.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said back.
Leda looked around the office. “Don’t get that many visitors down here, I guess.”
“Most of them make appointments and have specific business to address.”
“Oh, we do,” I told her. “You’re just not going to believe it probably.”
I looked over at Leda, who simply gestured with her head for me to get on with it.
“My name’s Burch, and I’m good a friend of yours from about seventy years in the future. We pulled this data storage device out of a tech wizard name Effelin Kal-Ennis a few days ago. We need help reading it, and we figured if anyone could help us out, it’d be you.”
I showed her the little data stick that had formerly been embedded in Kal-Ennis’s neck.
“You figured? Friends, you say?”
I nodded.
“I don’t think it’s possible I’ll have quite that much patience in seventy years,” she said, shaking her head at me. “I think you should find another place to lodge your query, Mr. Burch.”
I was about to tell her.
“What place do you reckon would be more appropriate?” Leda interjected. “For example?”
“Reggia,” Verona replied. “Apple Bar, third floor, sometime after six. Don’t bring that.”
She glared down at the data stick in my palm. She was shaking her head still. “You people.”
She looked at me like she was disgusted.
“All right,” I said to Leda. “I think that went about as well as it could have.”
Leda nodded, and back out we went to wait for Verona to get off work.
Well, Verona kept us waiting just to let us know how salty she was about us showing up like that. It was hard to remember just how one-sided things were. I’d known Verona as a close friend over that lifetime we spent together in the distant future at Murell and Mercury Flats. So she felt about as familiar to me as any person I’d ever known. This Verona had about two minutes of me, and there was really no way it could’ve been two of my best minutes. No. She was none too impressed.
She tore in to me and Leda about showing up like that and potentially blowing her cover. She was kinda prickly about that I remembered from our first trip into Trasp space, ironically enough to get Leda back. Now here was me and Leda trying to get Verona back on our team again. And at first, she was having none of it. She knew we were something by the fact we had that data stick in our possession. That was wizard-only confidential type stuff. It opened the door for me to start explaining things, like that I knew who she was and who her sect was and that we’d had proper decades worth of adventures together under our belt. I thought it would put her at ease to tell her some of the things I knew would verify the fact I knew her well. I told her I knew her name.
“I swear,” she replied through clenched teeth, “if you keep trying to blow my cover—”
“Not that name,” I whispered, referring to her wizard name. “Your real name. The one your parents gave you half a millennium ago on Charris—Anatalia Gomes. You had a sister named Danissa. There’s also someone out there in the galaxy right now you’re destined to meet again in the distant future, named for a man and a city on Charris. You last met him in a pool. You and me go way back, and we’re coming to you for help, not to annoy you or disrupt your quiet times doing whatever it is the Protectorate is wasting your talents doing all day.”
“That piece,” she replied, inhaling deeply. “What do you suppose I can do with it?”
“Help us read it or something,” I told her.
“I could,” she replied. “Doubtless, I could rig something. But what you don’t appreciate Mr. Burch is that it’s liable to get you nowhere unless you have an AI you can trust with the information on it, which is to say one of the primes who has knowledge of my sect.”
“Why’s that?” Leda asked.
“Because there’s probably—well, I don’t know who this Effelin Kal-Ennis is, at least in our ranks, as I’d need to know the name we use for him—but I’d imagine there’s at least three millennia worth of memories on there, and you’ll need a superior, intelligent processor to find the key elements you’re looking for.”
I looked over at Leda.
“Maícon?” she suggested.
“He’d be on Athos,” I replied. “I don’t know. It’d be a couple weeks travel to get there, a couple weeks back, time to track him down?”
“Cuts it close,” Leda agreed.
“Kayella and Boggs are in the Protectorate,” I offered. “Any chance you could track them down?”
Verona grimaced. “Would you like my left leg too?”
I looked over at Leda and grinned. “How’d she know?”
“What is this all about?” Verona asked. “You said galactic importance but you haven’t said how yet, Mr. Burch. You two are going to have to read me in if you want my help.”
“Well, the thing is, we don’t expect to live past the next six weeks, and whatever happens, one thing I know for sure is that you do. We need you to live. You know, for the future to go right, at least in your timeline that is.”
“I haven’t met you yet in the future,” Leda stated, stepping into the conversation. “Thing is, I do know a few things, though. One thing I already know about you is that you won’t be missing anything happening back in that archive.”
Leda paused, looking Verona dead in the eyes.
“Look at those eyes, Burch. This one was meant for the dead center of the action. She’s a fighter, like me. So let’s drop the pretense already, Verona, and pack a bag.”
Leda stood up and finished her drink in a single smooth gulp.
“We’re going for those primes. We’ll meet you at the port asap. Burch’ll tag you with our ship’s berth. The rest we can talk about on the way.”
Verona looked at me like she was wondering who was in charge of this whole misadventure. Man, if I only knew.
I suppose it was too much to ask to think that Verona, this Verona, had her little luxury yacht for us to commandeer and cruise around on. No such luck at this time, of course. So as we were all cramped in our little rental ship hopping around the outer Trasp systems looking for Kayella and Boggs, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were on some kind of time loop and this moment, or one just like it, was the one that had inspired our Verona to buy her stylish little spaceship Cannon in the first place. Thinking like that, though, could mess with the mind and get to distract you from the task at hand, which was, at that point to get that little data stick opened and processed. That would, we all hoped, reveal the secrets of Effelin Kal-Ennis and how those secrets related to the start of the war.
It took us another six days to finally make contact with those two elusive primes. They were always on some sort of secret mission in the Protectorate. If these primes had territories, the Trasp territories had come to be theirs. Kayella and Boggs—the patron AI saints of the border systems, I guess. And they were real reluctant to stop whatever it was they were doing to come talk to us, but eventually, with all the strange characters in our little brigade and all the curious stories we were able to tell them, we started sounding like the one thing those primes couldn’t abide: an anomaly. Plus, we told them plain answers to what they’d been hunting for years—there was a war coming soon, and we knew exactly where and when it started, even if we didn’t yet know how.
They were kicking around on a Trasp frigate called the T.S.P. Tusk, which was a surprise, since most of the primes didn’t directly intervene in military matters. And anything that had them working hand-and-glove with the Trasp military, especially pre-war, had to be of the highest importance from their perspective.
So add two more old friends who didn’t know us yet to the mix—or at least me anyway. I’d known those two primes well from the future. But this Verona, she hadn’t gone to the future yet, so she didn’t know them. And, of course, neither did Hartline, Leda, or Omar. So I guess I was the only one surrounded by old friends.
Aboard the ship was the slightest of skeleton crews. It was the two primes, about a dozen or so multi-use models—mostly Albas, Andrews, and a Harold or two—and there were two human command crew, Eady and Del Brindar. I wasn’t sure who exactly they were, seemingly police or military of some kind, but nobody was being too open about what they were up to out there. We opted to keep those two in the dark about what we were doing despite their protests to the primes. Their relatively vacant frigate was a nice change, though. Everyone but the Brindars met up in one of the Tusk’s cavernous briefing rooms. The ship even had halfway decent coffee, not that I had much time to enjoy it, as I was doing most of the talking.
I did my best to start the story at the most logical place, and who knows what that actually was. But I started by telling Kayella and Boggs about Pitka Remera and how the war between the Trasp and the Etterans had started in our history. And I tried to anticipate as many questions as I could and fill them in with my story, finishing up by telling them all how we’d stolen Effelin Kal-Ennis’s memory drive and needed Kayella and Boggs to help us process the data once Verona got it open. And then, depending on what we found out, I and the others were heading to the Trasp outpost where the fighting would start to get ourselves situated in key positions before the events leading up to the war unfolded.
All that went well enough, the million and a half questions everyone had notwithstanding, but during the whole thing, I couldn’t help but notice Verona. She was looking at me with a set of peculiar eyes I’d only ever seen from her a few times over our decades together. And I imagine she had no idea I was reading anything from her aspect, as those things were so subtle in her kind, but I could tell something was bothering her to her core. She didn’t say what exactly it was she was thinking during the meeting, which ended after about seven hours of catching everyone up and convincing and hole filling and doubling back and retelling before everything made sense. Everyone left with the gist of the plan—Verona and Kayella and Boggs would decrypt and process that “memory well,” which was what Verona called it. Then we’d all debrief again and formulate a plan.
I pulled Verona aside after everyone else scattered to other conversations on other parts of the ship.
“You claim we’re friends in the future, do you, Burch?”
“It’s true,” I told her, and she looked back at me angrily, shaking her head.
“Of all the crazy, unbelievable things I heard uttered in that room, that was the one I had the most difficult time getting my head around.”
“Why’s that?” I asked her.
“You go to the future and help those people there. Then you return to your time and struggle to help everyone there. Now you show up here, knowing that the war you’re fighting so hard to stop is about to break out, yet your objective here is to standby and watch it happen? What about us? What about the millions of people in the Protectorate and the Guild we could save right now by stopping the whole thing from breaking out in the first place? I can’t help but think you’re worried about yourselves, about your lives being ruined or erased by the meddling you’re doing here in our time.”
I didn’t know which of those points to even think about first, much less how to respond.
“It doesn’t really work like that, Verona,” I said. “What we do here won’t affect our world.”
“It’ll sure as hell affect us,” she replied, and then she flew off angrily, and I mean about the angriest I’d ever seen her, leaving me no time or inclination to try and convince her otherwise.
It was a hell of a thing to think about.
It didn’t take Verona long to crack that memory well of Effelin Kal-Ennis, and once Kayella and Boggs got in there and started processing, the things they revealed blew everyone’s mind.
The first thing they spoke about was a genuine and longstanding rift in Verona’s sect. This wasn’t a revelation to the venerable wizard in our company from our arrival in this time. Carmenta had pretty much said as much in her own way—many chambers in her father’s mansion or some words to that effect. But the schism was so deep that by Kayella’s estimate, nearly a third of the made wizards who’d left the vault after their training period had drifted away from Eddis Ali’s authority, and from the information they’d synthesized from Effelin Kal-Ennis’s memory, they believed that many of those defectors were operating as a sort of shadow organization, some entirely disconnected, while others kept in touch with the sect as double agents.
That revelation came as a complete shock to me, but it was next to nothing compared to the piece that came next. This was the big one—the piece that Carmenta had alluded to when she insisted that Effelin Kal-Ennis would start the war. And when the primes put the details up on the briefing room’s floatscreen, I don’t imagine any of us could believe our eyes.
At Veronia, publicly at least, the Trasp Protectorate was engaged in the construction of Sternwheels. That was the Trasp name for a space wheel of a certain size and dimension where they built a wheel-shaped superstructure in space, which they populated with “pegs,” which were essentially supermassive sky-scraping towers, each of which was capable as a self-contained space environment. Each of the pegs had its own environmental controls, power generators, food production—all that. The result was a space-based society with incredible resilience and redundancy. Power, atmosphere, food, resources, labor—anything needed for the smooth functioning of their society could be evenly re-distributed if any of the pegs ever fell short. Likewise surplus could be shared. But just as any tool can be used to build, something as brilliant and seemingly wholesome as this model space society, in Effelin Kal-Ennis’s twisted mind, had become the perfect opportunity to create a superweapon more diabolical than anything any of us ever could’ve conceived in our most twisted nightmares.
You have to stretch the imagination to even go to such a place when someone like Kal-Ennis brings you there. The thing about these pegs—thousand-story towers that all slotted perfectly into the space-wheel, ten per kilometer, meaning one thousand self-contained space-cities, each of which had its own fusion generators, three of them to be exact. And the Trasp didn’t mess about engineering everything. Those generators all operated well beneath capacity, such that if any generator had to be taken offline, the others could easily pick up the slack without even a blip to the daily operations within the peg. Seems ideal, and hell, it probably is ideal unless you’ve got a mind to turn a neighborhood into a weapon of war. The thing about these three thousand fusion engines that differed from any other collection of fusion engines in the Battery Systems, was that they could all be oriented to a single focal point—the center of the wheel. This was part of the design of each peg as well—a powerful laser, in theory to have the flexibility to detach from the wheel and power land- or space-based arrays. And, for the defense of the colony—this was where things got particularly crazy—the hub of the wheel was fitted with some sort of mega-convertor or mega-reflector or something that could channel all the incoming beams into one supermassive energy beam. It was the type of thing you would see in comic books. And man, I loved my comics as a kid, and sure you’d see the bad guys building superlasers to blow up planets, but it was usually by harnessing the power of some dark, volcanic hell-world or a mega-black-hole or something, not a colony of well-meaning, innocent Trasp people just trying to build a good-looking outpost.
So the primes got through describing how Kal-Ennis and his weapon designers had designed this hyperlaser to be covertly constructed in the foundation of this upcoming Trasp outpost, and then they said, “and now you must prepare yourselves for the truly terrible part.”
“That wasn’t it?” I asked Boggs.
“That is merely the beginning, Burch,” he said
“Can we take a break for a few minutes? I think I need a cup of coffee and a minute to process all this before you tell me whatever’s coming after the Trasp community hyperlaser or whatever you call it.”
“That’s a good idea, Burch,” Kayella answered. “Perhaps we should push through, though. We have but a few minutes more to share, and then we should all break and process the information as each of us will. All of it in its totality. Boggs and I will be here to help as need be.”
“Whatever you say, I guess.”
“Time is of the essence.”
So Kayella kept talking—the next level of horrible.
“This,” she continued, “is something Kal-Ennis called the Stern-Die, a rather appropriate double-entendre, encoding meaning from its shape—that of a six-sided gaming die—while certainly also encoding the obvious fatal consequences for anyone on the wrong end of its deadly payload.”
Kayella put up a diagram, explaining how it all came together. What the Trasp engineers hadn’t been told about Veronia was that the planetary outpost where they were constructing the pegs was purposed not just for the construction of the two Sternwheels that were publicly slated to be put together there. Kal-Ennis had convinced parties within the Protectorate’s defense administration to back the continuation of construction beyond two. Five was the number they needed to reach. Five sides of a six-sided die. When all five Sternwheels were in alignment, just like each of the individual pegs, the five Sternwheels could focus the energy of their hyperlasers onto a single point at the center of the Stern-Die. This was the top-secret piece of tech that was hidden from public view. Kal-Ennis had been designing a central reflector that took in energy from five sides and focused it out the sixth, where instead of a Sternwheel, there was a vacant aperture that functioned as a target sight so they could aim all that energy with mathematical precision at great distances.
Kayella and Boggs started doing math—three thousand generators times five: X-amount of giga-pascals to the quadrillionth power and all that. For me it was gibberish. Once math got more letters in it than numbers it might as well have been magical incantations. But when the big brains had finished their maths jazz and everyone had wide open mouths at the outcome, it was time to explain it in plain words to the rest of us. The centerpiece of the Stern-Die would be capable of focalizing all the energy of those fifteen thousand fusion engines into a single gamma burst that could render a planet completely lifeless from thousands of kilometers away.
I think we were all a bit speechless in our own different way. I found out later that Hartline was fully supportive of the whole operation up until that point. A thousand super lasers? Yeah, why not? “How many rail guns, nukes, and gunships, do you think Athos has at its disposal, Burch?” And, fair enough, the more people a civilization has to protect, the greater the firepower. So these Trasp were building a hyperlaser to fire at any major threats coming into their system. They saw the war on the horizon like the rest of them.
But then, as those primes were standing there as though they were waiting for us to catch up, and taking Hartline’s point into consideration, I started thinking about it. So what? You fire a great big gamma burst from Veronia at your Etteran enemies? Let’s be generous and say you could actually do the math perfectly and hit your target—what, four hundred light years away, give or take? So maybe you wipe out Etterus half a millennium after all the people you feared are long dead and you are too? That didn’t make sense.
“So Boggs,” I said. “Who exactly do these weapons designers in Kal-Ennis’s lab intend to kill with this Stern-Die. Sure, maybe you can aim it and fire it, but are they going to wait around for a gamma burst traveling at light speed to take centuries to hit their perceived enemies or what? The Greater Battery itself is thousands of light years across. They couldn’t hit Athos for a millennium if they wanted to.”
“The cleverest humans, I’ve found,” Kayella said, “are the ones who have the courage to ask the right questions.”
“Thanks, I guess. But the cleverest primes, I’ve found, don’t hold back the answers.”
“This is the threat that must be stopped,” Boggs stated, raising yet another slide—this one the big one.
At first glance, the bullet in the Stern-Die’s deadly gun had the look of a simple torpedo. But it was bigger—big enough that it was a ship unto itself.
Then they put up more impenetrable mathematics on the screen, but rather than thinking that the human mind could parse it, Kayella and Boggs explained as they went. Effelin Kal-Ennis had designed a radiation-hardened automated FTL ship to fly in front of the firing superweapon and open an FTL window ahead of the Stern-Die’s gamma burst. All the maths the primes displayed—completely theoretical in nature, mind you—governed the integrity of the pocket of affected hyperspace as it transited across normal space-time. And, of course, I was the one who piped up again with the obvious question.
“So what the hell happens when they fire that much radiation into a pocket of hyperspace, do you figure?”
“Opinions vary,” Boggs replied. “Of course, there probably aren’t many people or thinking machines smart enough to have a genuinely educated opinion on the subject. But—”
“Well, I got one,” I interrupted. “And it’s that I’ll bet one of those opinions is that it’s a very bad idea. Kind of a universe-rupturing idea? Anybody think there’s a zero-percent chance of galactic catastrophe firing that much energy into an open FTL window?”
I looked around the room.
“Common sense,” I stated. “Don’t need advanced degrees in physics or mathematics to know that. Fact, sometimes all that science in the brain gets in the way of the obvious.”
“Yes,” Boggs replied. “Obviously, this needs to be stopped from coming into being.”
“Hell. Heeelllll!” I shook my head at the layers of insanity that had to be piled on top of each other to create the images and mathematics we saw before us on that floatscreen. “So, Verona, allow me to apologize and be the first to volunteer to help destroy that thing before it ever comes into existence. And maybe we’ll stop the war.”
“Or maybe that’s what starts it, Burch,” Omar stated. “We didn’t know. We never knew, most of us Trasp. Not us. Not our grandparents, not the people on those Sternwheels. Probably not even the Etterans.”
Well damned if Kayella wasn’t right about one thing. I needed a good long break to think all that through. Stern dies? Radiation-proof FTL torpedoes? Firing superlaser-radiation into hyperspace windows? God damn the diabolical mind of man.
Verona, for as angry as she’d been about our callousness to this timeline of hers, she was just as fiercely angry at her own ignorance of the shadow-sect, which was what she started calling Effelin and whoever else was working with him. The tech, she declared, had to have come out of her sect’s vault. And certainly, it hadn’t come out with Eddis Ali’s blessing or even knowledge. Nobody in the sect would’ve knowingly unleashed it.
For those of us who planned to die in the first days of the war, our objective was clear. Effelin Kal-Ennis’s memory well contained the location of the bunker planetside where the Trasp’s secret weapons program—Triantra—was developing the superweapon. Breach and destroy. Not a molecule of that place could remain when we were through with it. Give four fighters like us an objective like that and a free pass at dying, and you could be sure that bunker was destined for perdition fast.
But Verona and the Primes had an expiration date that extended beyond the start of the war. The Primes started talking about supporting roles, and again, I could see by the look of disgust on Verona’s face that she had something different in mind. So I asked her.
“Effelin,” she said. “That memory well of his has plenty enough in it to justify raining hellfire on that planet. But he has information that isn’t in it. And I’m going to get it out of him.”
“Yeah,” Leda replied. “Take his head, like the Etterans do.”
“I’m not sure they do that yet,” I added. “But I can’t say it’s a bad idea to interrogate him if we can catch up with him again.”
“I know enough of the contacts in that shadow-sect of his that I’m confident I can get to him before the war kicks off,” Verona declared. “And, no, the Etterans didn’t invent that technique of data retrieval. I’ll get every last bit of data out of that head of his if I have to do it myself.”
That was a side of Verona I’d yet to see in over a lifetime. Raw fury.
Since the Brindars were largely in the dark about what was going on, except that the Primes were gravely concerned and that a very weird group of people had secured their trust concerning a cataclysm on the horizon, Kayella suggested that Verona take Del and Eady Brindar back to Carhall with her as support. Verona seemed happy to have the ride and the Tusk’s firepower if anything came to that.
“I can do little in a battle,” Carmenta offered. “I may, with my knowledge of the sect, be of some help to this young acolyte in her interrogation of Kal-Ennis.”
Verona didn’t seem to care one way or another. But it was a fact that a blind old woman wasn’t going to be of much use in a tactical operation on the surface of Veronia. So it was decided that Leda, Omar, Hartline, and I as well as the Primes would handle the destruction of the superweapon.
“It’s funny,” I told Verona as I was preparing to debark the Tusk. “I’ll see you soon enough, I’m sure, but that version of you won’t remember this. And you, well, you won’t see me again for a little while—at least by our scale anyway.”
“Oh, I won’t forget this, Mr. Burch. I certainly won’t forget you. I never asked, but I am curious as to how we meet or met, I guess.”
“Seems like forever ago now,” I answered. “But we really got to know each other first beside those waters in the pool where your kind is made, inside the vault. You were helping me to deal with the loss of someone very close to me. Everything turned out fine in the end, but I was afraid I was going to lose her—Rishi is her name. You and I meditated together over her.”
“I’m glad you’re familiar with our ways and with me as well. An ordinary person might expect me to make some sort of a gesture after such harsh critique, but I’m not sorry I got short with you earlier. Unfortunately, sometimes one has to be harsh with others. It seemed you needed direction.”
“And I’m grateful for that. In any time, Verona, one thing I’ve always been able to count on is that even when I don’t understand why, I always understand that you’re pointing in the right direction.”
“For my part, I’ll be glad to see you again in seventy years or so,” she told me. “And, if I do, I’ll have good cause to thank you for keeping the galaxy alive so long. Kill that weapon for us.”
“If it’s the last thing I do,” I replied with a nod.
Carmenta floated up awkwardly beside Verona in the annex to the Tusk’s rear airlock.
“Hale Burch,” she said. “Very few men live up to expectation. The problem is usually not the men but the expectations.”
“You can’t even leave without drowning me in more oracle talk,” I joked. “The way things go in my life, though—and I’m going to do some oracle talk now—it wouldn’t shock me if we saw each other again.”
“We will not. Nor will either of us ever live to know whether we changed our respective worlds for the better. What we will know is that we tried at every turn. I have one final message for you. I need you to promise to remember it through your transition past your upcoming death to your real life.”
“What can I do but try?”
“The bird is concealed above the king’s hand.”
I shook my head at Verona, who looked back at me with a look just as perplexed as mine. “Good luck decoding the musings of this old bird,” I said to Verona. “Do you have any idea what the hell that means?”
“Of course she doesn’t,” Carmenta replied. “It was meant for you, Burch. Not today, but at a time when the universe has changed. At that moment, I won’t be a crazed old woman any longer but an oracle, just as I always have been.”
“Hey! You finally got it right, oh great oracle—Burch, just Burch. Just for that, I promise I’ll find your bird someday,” I said. “Good luck, you two.”
As I floated into the lock, I heard Carmenta say to Verona, “No. That’s wrong. He’s got it all wrong, Verona. It’s his bird, not mine.”
“My bird,” I shouted when the door shut, just to reassure her. I guess she didn’t come all this way through time for me to get the wrong idea.
Now tell me, how’s a guy supposed to make any sense of that with a superweapon and a war on his mind?
There was some debate amongst us. Hartline was quick to point out that things were vastly different here. In our time, someone like her could’ve pinged a full colonel in that area’s fleet defense force and secured an arsenal that could put a crater in Veronia the size of a small moon. Here, though, we were going to struggle to put our hands on decent tactical gear, especially seeing as we were civilians, and very young ones at that.
Boggs promised that he had contacts who could help get us gear, but logistically, even if we were well equipped, the mission was going to present challenges.
Kayella and Boggs had located the bunker where Triantra was developing the weapons components. There were the five reflectors that focused the energy from all those peg hyperlasers. Then there was the centerpiece of the Stern die that wove those five beams into a single outgoing pulse. Finally, there was the FTL ship that Triantra just called “the slug,” which had already been designed according to Boggs. The rest of the components were still in development down there.
I thought we could hit them early—knock out the superweapons before Pitka Remera’s day of deception, and then we’d still maybe stand a chance of stopping the war after. Boggs and the others, though, thought that would be unlikely, perhaps even impossible. They might not have been a nation at war yet, but in the Trasp Protectorate, if they took anything deadly serious, it was engineering projects. There was proprietary engineering information being guarded carefully on that outpost, and in addition to that, they were reeling from strikes from increasingly more organized pirate fleets, something Kayella and Boggs seemed to know a lot about.
So it wasn’t going to be possible to simply approach the outpost, land, step out our rear airlock, and run a tactical op to bust up that bunker. Relative to the scope of the space habitats they were building, there were not many people on the planet’s surface—hundreds according to Pitka Remera’s testimony and the primes’ research. Most of the work was being done by joiner bots and automated mining convoys. So both the people and the bots were going to want to know what we were up to if a ship approached carrying four humans who had no business on Veronia, along with two prime AIs. If we got there early, it was going to be complicated, especially in light of the reality that hundreds of those pegs were already occupying the space around Veronia. One or two of those peg lasers wouldn’t be a threat to a planet, but it would sure make for an interesting ride if anyone was watching and didn’t approve of our approach.
The other problem was the bioweapon Pitka Remera reported in her testimony—a nano-pathogen that was somehow disseminated across the entire colony, only to be activated by an EM frequency.
While we had the primes with us, they were able to put together a decent reconstitution of the main suspects. That bioweapon was never collected from the planet’s surface following the liquidation of Veronia in our history. Whoever had destroyed the outpost—the Etterans, the Trasp themselves, some other independent entity—they’d made certain the planet was a radioactive sheet of glass to ensure no trace of that nano-weapon ever got examined. In fact, the only account of it was in Pitka Remera’s testimony, but she didn’t include any evidence to corroborate her story, which had been purposeful, according to her Maícon, who’d personally examined the blood samples himself. He’d told Carolina in our time that Pitka had feared making the pathogen or the frequency public knowledge, worrying that it might have touched off an escalation or normalization of the use of such weapons. Dr. Pitka Remera preferred to be called a liar and a traitor falsely if it meant that it was more likely those nano-scale weapons would never be used again. And it seemed to have worked.
Unfortunately for us in the future, though, with Pitka already deceased and her Maícon destroyed during Omar’s raid on Theta-Nikorla, we weren’t able to get any information more specific than that before coming back to this time.
We spent days going through different scenarios with the primes, figuring out how to best attack this Triantra superweapon bunker. We must have explored ten different overarching strategies and ten different variations of each before settling on the plan that Kayella and Boggs both agreed offered the highest percentage chance that we’d be able to breach the bunker and destroy it. I almost couldn’t believe how simple it was.
We were already too late to stop whoever it was who’d spread the nanites all over Veronia. That part of the treachery had been put into action weeks or months before we arrived, according to our best guess. We couldn’t save any of them. But we could wait until that frequency went off and killed all the humans on the outpost, leaving Veronia completely undefended by the innocent Trasp engineers. If we showed up then, we’d either get a clear run to the bunker or we’d find our perpetrators on site. If we found no one, then we’d turn that bunker and everything in it into an underground pocket of rubble. If we found our perpetrators there, we’d fight them until we were dead and very likely go home with the identity of the war’s direct progenitors. And if we won that fight, we’d get both—a blown-out bunker and an answer. Finally, an answer.
We went deep into planning for several weeks while the day approached. We jumped around the outer systems in Carmenta’s little rental ship while Kayella and Boggs attempted to secure us a proper ship and tactical gear. We corresponded with Verona, who’d arrived back at Dinat on Carhall to find that Effelin Kal-Ennis was nowhere to be found, predictably. My best guess was that we’d meet him again in that bunker. Hartline was adamant that we should’ve dropped someone on the ground at Veronia immediately to at least attempt to track whether they were moving the superweapons lab. Triantra, according to Hartline’s expertise, became extremely adept at moving and concealing their operations early in the war. When one of the chief officers of the program has his memory well stolen and decrypted, well, that would be a good time to move, one would think.
It wouldn’t have been a bad idea to get someone on the ground there, and sure, Hartline would’ve been a great operative to have on site, but it was such a small outpost in terms of personnel that neither Verona and her people nor the primes had any pull with the project’s managers. So we jumped around, picking up a little bit of gear here and there until the day approached, and, without any success securing a fighting vessel, Kayella and Boggs finally came clean.
“We have a ship,” Boggs confessed. “Part of our understanding with the Protectorate, similar to Maícon and Precops in Dreeson’s system or Saraswathi in Hellenia, is that all agency in the governments of the territory shall be human agency. We help when requested, and one of the unwritten agreements has always been that humans hold the monopoly on military might. We would never think of securing a cohort of strikebots, but we do own a fast-attack stealth cruiser. We consider it a tool of self-defense and preservation, should we be required to flee the Protectorate for any unforeseen reason on short notice.”
“I mean, really, Boggs,” Hartline replied, frustrated from weeks of being cooped up in that rental ship. “You could’ve just said you’d been holding out on us. We didn’t need an essay on the topic.”
Hartline was pretty damn fierce. She was laser-focused all day every day on the mission planning when we were on ship. Then there were the training days we’d gotten our feet down on a few different planets and moons to run AR sims of scenarios for Veronia. She and Leda were like some other level—steel spitters. Omar was cooler, more like Sōsh, I guess. I figure I was in between. But if anyone joked around for a minute, Hartline would bite your head off—even through your helmet.
So we had our scenarios; we’d drilled and planned; and now we had our ship. All that was left to do was to show up when Veronia was about to pop off and hit that bunker, in the meantime taking as much data as we could about what was really happening on that outpost.
On the jump out there, Omar confided to me that he didn’t think much would come of it. And it wasn’t just this part of our grand strategy.
“Don’t get me wrong, Burch, I like you and your friends. And, on balance, I think you mean well. But I’m not sure you know what you’re doing.”
“That’s fair enough, I guess. But who does? We’re trying to get answers to a lot of questions very powerful forces don’t want answered.”
Omar just shrugged. “You’re going to need to be more ruthless—like your Etteran. Do you think he’d have blinked if Verona gave him that crap about protecting this timeline? He might have lied to get what he needed out of her, but he wouldn’t have altered his objective the way we did. We should’ve been on Veronia weeks ago setting ourselves up to be in the best possible position to gather the intelligence we need.”
“Why didn’t you speak up before?” I asked Omar.
He shook his head. “This was never my show, Burch. You, Aida, Carolina Dreeson, these prime AIs—as I said, you all mean well, but I think that’s why whatever disaster is coming will still hit just as hard. You all want to stop it the right way, even if it means not stopping anything at all. As long as you can all look at yourselves at the end of it and be okay with the decisions you made. You can talk people out of a lot of things, but you can’t talk anyone out of that. Believe me. It’s been a problem for me too.”
Omar didn’t elaborate any further then and there, but I guess he’d said his piece. And we were already at the point we couldn’t turn back the clock and do it over again, ironic enough as that was on the way to watch history unfold for the second time. We were about an hour from dropping out at Veronia at the very moment this universe would never be the same.
I don’t know how long she’d been thinking about it, but the second we dropped out at Veronia, Myrna Hartline unstrapped and flew a steady line up to the front of the ship. Kayella and Boggs were already in the process of making the ship and its intentions known to the outpost’s central controller’s office—our bullshit cover story about safety inspections—something that was likely to buy us time while the various people under the directors double-checked schedules and confirmed with their superiors that nothing was in fact scheduled. Veronia wasn’t that big an outpost, though. There was a chance we’d be on the ground already before they figured us out, but just a chance.
Hartline said something I couldn’t hear to Kayella and then turned back toward us in the passenger compartment.
“Get up here, Jemeis,” she said, before realizing and then specifying. “Omar, I need your voice.”
“What should I say?” he asked as he unclipped and floated his way up there beside Hartline.
“Tell them to stand down on clearance. I’m going to give you a Triantra access code, and you’re going to relay it to them in an authoritative tone, like you were giving orders to your lieutenants and sergeants. Really bark it at them.”
“But there’s no way those codes are valid. They’re probably not even in existence yet.”
“The engineers on the other end don’t know that. They don’t know anything. These people aren’t at war yet. They’ll take one look at the shape of this ship and shit their pants. You’re going to repeat every word I say.”
I couldn’t see them looking at each other or anything about their body language. Really, I was just looking at the soles of their floating feet. But I could sure hear Omar belting out those codes, and for good measure, after they cleared us through to land, Omar told them to take our contact right off their board and erase the logs. Super-secret stuff.
Fifteen minutes later, after a hellacious atmo-entry only a prime or someone like Rishi could fly, we were sat down right at the bunker aperture getting ready to breach the outer door. The four of us humans, once we were on the ground, soldiers all, began acting just like we were trained—blinders on. First objective, second objective, third objective, and before we knew it, we’d blown three outer doors to gain entry and were waiting for Kayella and Boggs to access the command infrastructure, which should have positioned us to have total control of the bunker’s systems.
Superficially, things seemed like they couldn’t be going any better. But Kayella and Boggs had something going between them. I’m not sure they appreciated how much time I’d spent around primes in the future—themselves included—but I could tell when they were doing that thing when they communicate directly by EM signals so the pesky humans couldn’t hear what they were up to, and I could see them doing it.
“What is it?” I asked them. “Something’s up.”
Boggs looked at me like I was the one with telepathic capabilities. And I looked back at him like I knew him far too well to get fooled by any nonsense.
“We came in much too fast for you to monitor from your visor displays, but the surface of Veronia was not as we expected it to be.”
“What do you mean by that?” Hartline asked.
“The position of ships. The location of certain pegs as they were spoken about in the report Burch gave about Dr. Remera’s account. It appears we may be early.”
“Early? Late? What difference does it make as long as we blow the bunker?” Leda said. “How are we doing on those controls?”
“Our early arrival raises the possibility that if we can blow the bunker quickly, we may be able to reposition to observe the destruction of the outpost,” Boggs explained. “It appears to be several hours from now at least.”
“We’re in,” Kayella added. “Steady on. Door opening.”
We got our backs straight and our weapons sighted, and then Kayella opened the door. Omar and Leda were on point down the long stairwell. It was a straight drop down what had to be two hundred meters of steel-grated stairs. It was the kind of place you might see leading down to a vein of rare minerals or metals that were getting stripped from an otherwise useless landscape somewhere out in the Taus or Sigmas where nobody had ever lived.
About halfway down, I had a few thoughts as I was sucking in rebreathed air. First, well, hell, this stairwell wasn’t pressurized, which was sure odd for a place sophisticated enough to put a lab at the bottom of. Second, what the hell kind of brainy weapons scientists were going to go trudging down about a thousand stairs only to have to turn around and come back up? Where the hell was the lift? So I asked the primes.
“Another oddity,” Boggs stated. “The lab’s footprint is miniscule.”
“Meaning?” Hartline asked.
“Meaning that unless there’s a secondary control network for the lab at the bottom that is not connected to the surface, it appears that there may be nothing down there.”
“Well, shit,” Omar said. “I thought we were going to get to blow something up today.”
“Day’s still young, little brother,” Leda stated. “Only one way to find out.”
We were down about three quarters of the way before Boggs looked over the side of the rail and said to Kayella, “We are within tolerance range.”
“After you, love,” Kayella replied.
We were still a good fifty meters from the bottom, and Boggs just goes bombing over the middle rail like he was hopping a garden fence. We stopped and a few seconds later, we heard. BOOM! Boggs sticking that landing made a noise that shook the rocks.
“Hold,” Kayella commanded us humans. “Just for a moment.”
“Is he all right?” I asked.
“Quite fine. He is assessing the situation down below. There doesn’t appear to be anything but a door. Boggs is exploring whether the door may be a decoy. The control mechanism doesn’t even appear to be encrypted. However, the door won’t open, nor does it connect to a larger inner compound. One would expect more electrical activity from a weapons development lab.”
“One would,” Omar agreed.
“Boggs has an idea to confirm these initial findings,” Kayella stated. “You four may continue down, please.”
I shrugged and gestured with my head for Omar and Leda to continue down the stairs.
“Look alive,” Leda stated. “We’re moving.”
That was Leda’s way of reminding us this was still an op, one that seemed to be a larger deception, and she was right to call out that complacency. We still didn’t know the nature of the deception yet, but looking up that deep pit and the thousands of stairs in it, I had the feeling we were descending into some kind of rat trap. I just wasn’t certain whether we were the rats yet.
When we got to the bottom, Boggs had Hartline take down her nanosheet. He didn’t bother to explain, but he pressed her suited body hard up against the rock wall and then put his head to her belly like he was a doctor listening to her bowel sounds with his ear. We were all looking at each other like Boggs had lost it.
“You three get back on the stairs,” he stated, before shouting, “Now, love!”
I was just barely back to the rail and had half a heartbeat to look up and see Kayella thundering downward, and—KABOOM! She slammed into that solid rock floor so loud it was a good damn thing we all had helmets on.
“Excellent data set,” Boggs proclaimed, straightening up again. “Thank you, colonel Hartline, you may raise your nano-sheet again.”
Then he projected a sonic map of the rock on our faceshields—a makeshift penetrating radar of sorts using Hartline’s body as a contact buffer. Pretty damn clever if you ask me. And that one percussive burst from Kayella’s landing confirmed it—no pockets of space behind that false door, just solid rock all the way around that hollowed out pit to nowhere.
“It appears we’ve been tricked,” Kayella stated. “I suggest we return to the surface and assess the situation there as quickly as possible.”
Then those two primes and their mech shells went charging up the stairs at pace, leaving us four humans to climb our asses out.
“Well, they may be shitty exos,” Omar stated, referring to the capability of our borrowed pre-war suits, “but at least those two got us exos.”
Leda took a deep breath and grumbled. “Look alive, and let’s climb the hell out of this rat trap, double time.”
It’s hard as hell to think straight when you’re sucking wind. Exo or no, a thousand stairs is a thousand stairs. And, damn, we were sucking wind by the time we’d climbed back out of that hole and onto the ship.
I half expected some sort of clue from the primes when we got up there, but by the time we got our helmets off and started barking at them for some answers, all Boggs could say was, “We believe we received faulty intel.”
“Well, no shit, Boggs,” Leda said.
She was proper hot.
“Oh, please,” Hartline yelled. “That blind old bat made a fool of all of us, you especially, Burch.”
“Damn. It’s no good to point fingers now. We’ve only got a couple hours before things get hot here. Let’s just get ourselves situated and figure it out later.”
“We were supposed to bite it out here, remember?” Omar answered me. “So what, you want us to debrief back in our time when we have no source material to examine?”
“Burch is right,” Leda stated. “Next objective.”
“Damn blind oracle from the future,” Hartline grumbled. “From Etterus more like.”
“Like hell she’s Etteran,” I said. “What are we still doing on the ground?” I barked at the primes.
“We are examining all the pertinent data to select the best course of action,” Kayella replied. “What destination do you suggest, Burch?”
“The 804 peg, obviously. That’s where the whole thing touches off. Pitka Remera’s there right now, I’ll bet.”
“Unless she lied about everything,” Omar suggested. “I didn’t say anything out of respect, Burch, but you Letters folks have always put a lot more stock in that Etteran’s tale than we Trasp do. That’s for sure.”
“Oh, shut it, Omar,” I said. “None of us knows what the hell’s going on right now. That’s why we should be flying,” I barked even louder. “The 804! Let’s go.”
The primes fired up the engine, and soon after we were in the air. But damned if what Omar said hadn’t got stuck in my head good and deep. I’d read Pitka Remera’s testimony a hundred times at least. And how many times had I given it the proper skepticism it deserved, not only from the Trasp perspective even. Fact, that testimony came to everyone via a transmission encoded to obscure its origin. Ostensibly, that was to keep Pitka’s location hidden. But that meant she didn’t sit at the dashboard and read it in directly. That message came through Maícon—the same Maícon Rishi had declared so trustworthy that she’d taken him clean off the board as a player.
From the beginning, I’d been thinking about this moment, my ship flying up on the 804 peg to see Dr. Remera there walking through history. And Omar Jemeis had me doubling back on the historical record and my own beliefs about the galaxy I inhabited. What the hell would it mean if Pitka Remera wasn’t there? What if she never was?
These damned artifacts sure could mess with the mind. Day of deception indeed.
“Who’s this?” the woman’s voice came back over comms when Kayella pinged.
“Let me,” I said, unstrapping from my jump seat.
“With that damn Lambda-Tau accent of yours from halfway across the galaxy?” Hartline spat back at me.
“I’m from the Deltas. And that’s Deb Collison,” I replied. “It’s gotta be. I know what’s going on better than anyone. Let me talk to her.”
“I’ll talk,” Hartline stated. “You tell me what to say. No Trasp is going to trust a word out of that far-flung mouth of yours right now, Burch. Trust me.”
“Fine,” I agreed.
“Stay where you are,” Boggs told us. “We’ll patch the comms to your seats.”
I told Hartline to make sure it was Deb after all—the poor medic from Pitka Remera’s account, who’d had to respond to the sudden deaths of five colleagues with no way to explain a thing. Talk about being in over your head. Well, I guess we all were, come to think of it. Hartline asked for Deb specifically, and the woman on the other end confirmed she was, in fact, Deb Collison. It was our first kernel of information authenticating Pitka’s story.
Then Deb confirmed the rest of it herself. Five dead. Some kind of mysterious blood-borne pathogen. I told Hartline to inform Ms. Collison we were from the Trasp emergency management agency—or whatever they called it—and that we’d come with Kayella and Boggs Prime to see Pitka Remera to consult on the situation.
“Tell Deb that the cavalry has arrived to relieve her.”
“Oh, thank God,” Deb responded, as loud and blunt as could be.
Gotta say, that sounded funny coming from a Trasp.
“Dr. Remera flew out with Mercedes a couple hours ago,” Deb Collison continued. “I don’t know when they’re going to be back. I think they went to meet with the mission chief at the 1 peg.”
“We’re going to land right at the door and drop the primes to review all the data,” I told Hartline to tell her. “That way we’ll be ready to work with her right away when Dr. Remera returns.”
“They’re going to blow that entire 804 peg to hell,” Leda reminded me, as though I didn’t know.
“Then they better be quick about getting in and out, wouldn’t you say?”
Leda shrugged, and Boggs looked back at us, giving a firm OK with a gesture. They were willing to go in there to collect that data first-hand.
I told the primes we would land far enough outside the blast zone the ship would be safe from the explosion when the 804 peg came down.
“Leda is your pilot,” Kayella asked in a tone that indicated it wasn’t exactly a question, more a demand. “There’s an HSBA mode in the combat settings. Use it. Do not set this ship to the ground.”
“Aye, aye,” Leda replied.
Then those primes brought the tail of their ship right down on the 804 peg’s front door. I could hardly believe any of it was happening.
Kayella and Boggs got in and out of that peg about as fast as I’d ever seen a prime AI move. Brave as they postured, they had no desire to go up in a conflagration any more than I did, even though I knew I’d be snapping to in my own rightful body the moment this one got snuffed out. But then there were instincts—bodily instincts I couldn’t do much to shut off. Overpower, maybe, but not without every last ounce of self-preservation in the body telling me otherwise.
I expected a firefight—small arms. Us versus the strikebots Pitka had described in her account. Then we started talking about it.
“She gets away, right?” Omar said.
We were setting up on the plain at a large enough distance we’d be clear of the blast zone. Leda was piloting our air cover, a good couple kilometers out and up—finally, once again, she had the best view of anyone.
“I guess she does get away,” I answered Omar. “Pitka and Maícon got out in our history. Well, we know Maícon did for a fact. Carolina met him ... if Maícon Prime is to be trusted about it, that is. Nobody did lay eyes on Pitka, I guess.”
“We should just watch, Burch,” Omar suggested. “I know Verona put it in your head to intervene. But we don’t have any idea what good that’d do at this point anyway.”
“It’s a thought,” I said.
“It’s the right one,” Hartline added from her position.
“Watch and trust the universe for once,” I mused.
But as much as I sounded like I was agreeing with them, I had something in the back of my mind I couldn’t quite let slide. And if she was the author of her own account, I had a question I had to ask Pitka Remera. So I told the others I was good. I was going to sit tight and watch from my scope and do nothing. And for most of it, that’s what I did.
We watched their ship approach on our face-shields—along with Pitka Remera, Scarla Liseria-Lee and Mercedes Davor were aboard that shuttle Leda was tracking from the air. They were already dead, those two. But Pitka, who was traveling in that shuttle with them, didn’t have the nanites in her blood. She was destined to live through the blast.
We watched as they landed, at which point, we knew to brace for the explosion. And sure enough, just as she’d reported it, the three of them—Pitka, Mercy, and Scarla Liseria-Lee—were hardly clear of their shuttle at the landing pad outside the staging area when the whole sky lit up a bright white for a split second. And action for action, almost word for word, Mercedes jumped on Pitka, pinning the Etteran doctor to the ground right as the blast wave burst over their bodies.
It hit me like a kick to the chest a good kilometer farther out.
“Everybody good?” I asked as the tremendous tower teetered above the blazing orange flame at the base of the 804 peg.
They all reported in. Leda took a knock from some shrapnel however the hell far away she was hovering—far, that’s sure. The rest of us dodged everything. And we kept eyes on the site as that tremendous tower came down, toppling in a heap, mostly in the opposite direction to us and Pitka—probably the only reason she survived. The fate of our universe, once again, down to dumb luck.
Then, once that tower had fully fallen and had gone from blazing, to burning, to smoldering, I knew it was my chance. I began to creep up on the site toward the last place I’d seen Pitka go down.
“What the hell are you doing, Burch?” Omar asked.
“Research,” I replied. “Sit tight and have faith in the universe I told him.”
“That’s not what we agreed,” Hartline stated.
I could tell by her tone she was fuming. I didn’t say nothing else though. It did cross my mind that she might put a bolt in my back at that point, even if I didn’t antagonize her.
I was crouched behind a smoking piece of scrap metal near that shuttle of theirs. I could see Pitka’s ship in the distance. The scene was different—the same, but somehow different from how I’d pictured it in my mind a hundred times. Darker. Much darker.
I knew she was somewhere there in the rubble, but I couldn’t see her until finally, after what seemed like ages, Pitka started moving. I saw her helmet. I heard a muffled howl—a sound like nothing I’d ever heard. She sat there for the longest time before she started moving again.
Then I watched it unfold like she’d said, almost word for word. Except this time, with my own eyes, I could see the things Pitka couldn’t as she hid away, tucked in that trench, hiding, scurrying just out of sight to save her life.
I saw the strikers coming in, and as I watched, I heard Leda going back and forth with the primes about the data stream coming through the ship. The pegs were going up all over Veronia. Thousands of them, burning up like thousand-story candles illuminating the entire little rocky world.
My jaw almost dropped when I got a clear sight of that first strikebot. Hell. I’d seen that exact model before. Undifferentiated. Before it was customized to be Trasp, Etteran, or Letters issue. Buffed, shined, and dressed to kill; I’d seen those bastard bots at the Murder Mill.
I was in such a state looking at those strikers I lost track of Pitka for a moment. It took every ounce of self-control I had to keep from opening up on those damned murder machines. And suddenly, there she was, I saw her helmet flying over a pile of debris, like a shadow in the night. There was a cacophony of shooting through the piles of rubble as Pitka Remera dashed toward that busted-up shuttle.
I had the advantage of knowing what happened next. I put my head down and made a sprint of my own—a direct line for Pitka’s ship. I had to get there before Maícon pulled her out of the shuttle—before they had a chance to leave.
As I ran, I could see the shuttle take off, barely hovering at first, then up, floundering, as unsteady a flight as I’d ever witnessed. How that shuttle stayed in the air as long as it did, I’ll never know, but I watched it slam back to the ground maybe a hundred meters from Pitka’s ship, which itself was covered over in debris and ash but still looked like it hadn’t taken too much damage for space flight.
I couldn’t see anyone else out there. Not those strikers, nor her Maícon. I went diving through a window-sized gash in the side of the shuttle’s hull.
And there she was, that face, that infamous face. The real Pitka Remera in the flesh. Her eyes were closed, but it was her, breathing, hardly a scratch on her under that nanosheet.
I shook her.
“Pitka. Wake up. I need you to wake up.”
“How?” she asked.
I don’t think she knew what to ask.
“This is important,” I said. “The fate of a whole other universe may be in the balance.”
“Wha- what is going on?” she asked, her eyes zeroing in on my face. “Who are you?”
“I can’t tell you how I know what I know. Maybe this moment is just a crazy dream. But I need you to answer something. Can you do that for me?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s happening.”
“You’re going to survive. And you’re going to write your account of what happened here these past few days. I can’t tell you how it’s possible, but I’ve read it. I’ve read your account.”
“What? I don’t understand?”
“You talked about your Maícon. How he descended from the original Linden Maícon. What did you mean by that? Is that Maícon Prime?”
She looked at me like I had three heads, probably like one would when her entire universe was blowing up around her and I came out of nowhere asking stupid questions.
“The prime? Yes. What does this—”
“Linden, Pitka. I don’t know what that means.”
“Linden? Linden Column. That’s where Maícon was made.”
“In the columns? He goes back that far?”
“Of course. He’s one of the ancient ones, almost as far back as Earth.”
I was shaking my head. I’d never heard of no Linden Column before, but that was a mystery for another time. I could hear something outside, a thumping about. Speak of the devil, I thought.
“One more thing,” I said. “Who is Artemis? You spoke of a prime AI named Artemis. A keeper of forbidden history?”
Again, she looked at me like I was mad.
“I’ve never met her. I don’t know. Maícon told me she’s his sister. One of the ancient ones.”
I heard a banging on the mangled mess that was left of the shuttle’s rear ramp.
“Pitka!” I heard that unmistakable muffled voice shout through the hull.
Somehow, he’d missed the hole I’d scurried in through. Maícon was tearing at that ramp. I knew he’d have it opened in seconds. There was more here, I thought. I couldn’t die yet, though, and it was likely enough that Maícon might kill me on sight to protect Pitka, no questions asked. So I said thank you and told her she was going to make it as I was diving back out that hole in the hull.
A few moments later, as I was ducking back into the darkness, I saw him—that unmistakable outline of a Maícon shell, carrying off his mistress to that life of infamy we’d all imagined but no one knew anything about.
“I got pieces,” I told the others over comms. “Things to debrief.”
But there were no damn answers, certainly no answers to make sense of who’d done it—who’d made a hellscape of Veronia. It was bothering the shit out of me. I was walking in the darkness to the point Leda had set as the exfil spot.
“We’re not done here, damn it,” I said. “This can’t be it.”
“If you want to hang around and get nuked, Burch, you have our blessing,” Hartline stated, only half joking. “That’s what’s coming. We all know it.”
“There’s something more here. I can feel it.”
“Just get on ship and we can talk about it,” Leda said. “I know better than to talk you out of something, but Pitka and Maícon took off already, Burch. The 804 is ashes. Everyone here is dead. Whatever it is you’re after, it’s not out there.”
And that was true enough.
When she picked us up, Leda kept the helm. She took a good look at me when I boarded. She could tell I was disappointed, but she could tell it was more than that, even wearing that other face it was obvious. We could see each other, borrowed bodies and all.
“I’m going to set her down in the black,” Leda declared. “We can see what’s coming well enough to get off before they light up the whole rock.”
“That’s if it comes from the sky, big sister,” Omar replied.
“I’ll take that chance,” Leda said.
“We have information, Burch,” Boggs declared. “And since we don’t know how long you’ll be here, we’ve decided to share it even though we haven’t fully processed our findings yet. We can update as we discover more.”
“Good enough, I guess.”
Leda gave us all a gesture to get properly strapped in for flight.
Once we were in the air, Boggs explained what they’d learned out there. They had senses we didn’t. Sure they could see a lot better and hear everything, but they could also track EM signals, and some of the signals they knew best were their own.
I’d flagged the two peculiarities I’d noticed in Pitka’s account that had bothered me—about Linden and Artemis. Well, Kayella and Boggs had their own too. Initially, they’d chalked it up to either the stress of the moment making for an inaccurate account on Pitka’s part; or the other possibility was simply a faulty retelling on my part on account of the fundamental flaws of human memory—especially across two different brains and interdimensional time travel. I guess I hadn’t thought much about it myself, but once they pointed it out, it had seemed strange that I’d never really questioned it.
In Pitka’s account, her Maícon was able to project his consciousness from his personal shell to a Trasp shell, and she claimed he could jump into a bracelet of hers at a mere glance.
“We’d accounted it as hyperbole and nothing more,” Boggs said.
“Or a mistake,” Kayella added.
I suppose I didn’t question it much because I’d seen it. I’d seen him project his consciousness from his body to our ship aboard the Yankee-Chaos often enough.
“It’s not that, Burch,” Boggs insisted. “We do that as well. When we project ourselves, we remain at the source with our main processor. In the case of a ship, it’s similar to how you might control a drone from a headset. Your consciousness never breaches the drone’s processor.”
“This Maícon is different,” Kayella stated. “He leapt. The signals were clear. Even in the heat of battle Boggs and I could see him clearly, moving from her bracelet to joiner bots to the shuttle and then back to his original shell.”
“We have no idea how he could be folding the entirety of his consciousness into packages that should never be able to house a sophisticated AI,” Boggs added. “This probably doesn’t solve your mystery, but we thought you should know before you return, if it is your plan to return.”
“Yes, about that plan,” Kayella continued. “If you wish to be on the surface when the nukes go off, that would seem an efficient way to effectuate your deaths and return you to your time; however, we would prefer to avoid unnecessary damage to our shells, our ship, and potentially even our processors.”
I had to laugh. “I ain’t trying to get you two nuked. I ain’t even trying to get us nuked. I just have a sense of it.”
“A sense of what?” Omar asked.
“That it’s not over. It’s not. It doesn’t make any sense that it is. We have so many of the pieces, and they don’t fit. Nothing fits. I’m telling you. We’re missing a piece—the big one. And it has to be here. It has to be.”
“So we sit,” Leda stated. “We sit until the captain says go.”
We parked out in the darkness for hours, no one talking, just thinking. I was, at least. I was going over it again and again in my mind—the things I’d seen, the things Pitka had said. But it wasn’t anything about what she’d said to me that got me. It was her story again, that comment about the age of deception, how she didn’t know how to live in it. Well, she hadn’t lived in it, but I had. My entire life was in it. My childhood, how I’d got burned bad by my own community, my family, and then when I’d taken what I saw as the best out, the LSS, they’d thrown me to the dogs like I was one myself and then told me they were going to fix me up good. Then I got a good long look at reality ever since I took the Yankee-Chaos. Everything had been one layer of deception piled on the rest, and here I was, still standing so to say. I started thinking that the only reason I still was standing after all that was that I’d learned to listen to my instincts when they were talking. And they were telling me as loudly as ever that Veronia was not over. Pitka’s day of deception was just the beginning. It had to be.
We were sitting there parked for long enough, I thought. Whatever happened would have to come from off the planet, and I had a sense that it had something to do with that decoy bunker—the rat trap. If we’d been the rats, it would’ve sprung. That had been meant for somebody else. It had to be. It took me hours to figure it, but I finally did.
“Get the ship up, Leda,” I told her. “Hug the deck. I want you to hide us in the thermal signature of the nearest burning peg to that bunker. We’re going to hover in it for a spell.”
“Aye, Captain,” Leda replied, getting the ship up.
I had the primes monitoring comms and deep-space arrays for anything coming in.
We’d tucked in behind one of the piles of rubble, hovering amid the smoke for a good half hour. I could see the faces of the others. They had their doubts. In the past, that might’ve made me doubt. Not anymore. I just sat there resolved.
“The longer we remain, the more likely it is we get nuked, Hale Burch,” Boggs stated, as though I didn’t know that.
“The cost is the cost,” I replied.
And then it appeared—a distant signature, a ship dropping out. One single ship.
“She’s a mid-sized vessel,” Leda said when Kayella flashed the data to the pilot’s floatscreeen. “If I were going to nuke a planetary body the size of Veronia, it’d require a bigger payload than that ship’s. Unless she’s got friends on the way, it’s probably something else.”
“Watch her,” I said. “I’ll bet my right hand they make a line for that bunker.”
“Why?” Omar asked. “There’s nothing in there.”
“Those rats don’t know it yet.”
Sure enough, the ship swung hard around in a counter orbit a full quarter turn before making entry.
“Damn,” Leda said.
She didn’t even have to say it. We could all see the vector on our screen in the back.
“Can you hide a drone in the smoke cloud?” I asked Leda.
She just turned around and looked at me.
Omar laughed. “She could hide a drone under your chin if you forgot to shave for a couple days, Burch.”
“Wait till they touch down,” I said. “I want eyes on their every move. I need to see them.”
Well, we waited, and that ship touched down, dropping a tactical team of humans. Kayella and Boggs could pick out the difference from that distance—humans with exos versus strikebots.
Their ship took off again and flew a ranging tactical perimeter—to be high enough to cover and watch the skies yet close enough to exfil at a helmet’s drop.
“Are we going?” Hartline asked. “When are we going, I mean?”
“When that tactical team is about as far down those stairs as we guess they can be. Ten minutes or so.”
“Burch?” Leda asked.
She knew my mind.
“Watch its flight pattern. Hit that transport at its ripest.”
Boggs piped up. “Allow me to suggest a strike pattern. I know our ship’s offensive capabilities best.”
I nodded to Leda.
We sat for a few more minutes, watching the transport ship buzzing around like a fat, bumbling target just waiting to get slugged right out of the sky. We saw the long curve of its flightpath on the floatscreen.
“Standby,” Boggs said. “She’s coming around again.”
When he signaled, Leda lit that thing up with an excessive number of hypersonics so there was no doubt. They never saw it coming.
“Okay, Leda,” I told her. “Give the ship back to Boggs and get your gear ready. We’re going to hit them when they come out that bunker door.”
“We aren’t going to blow it?” Omar asked.
“No. We’re going to shoot us some rats. Wing ‘em if you can. Hopefully, we’ll have enough time to interrogate a few of them before the hellfire comes.”
The others couldn’t see it. I could read the skepticism on their faces. I even knew why. I’d already thought it through in an instant, though.
This pack of rats, whoever they were, they couldn’t get caught down there. They were there to blow the same Triantra bunker we’d gone after. Same damn strategy—down the stairs, blast that superweapons lab to hell, and back out, leaving no trace.
Whether they knew we’d blown up their air cover or not made no difference. If they ran back down into that bunker, they were getting buried alive.
I had Boggs drop us at four decent positions around the bunker’s aperture.
“Stay as long as you can,” I told the primes. “I expect you’ll be able to decrypt their comms once the fighting starts.”
Then Kayella gave me that same look Leda had given me earlier—child’s play for a prime AI.
We each loaded up with as much small arms and short-range gear as an exo could carry. Then we jumped out.
By the time I got out last, Leda had spotted movement at the door. Kayella got the ship to a safe distance and dropped another drone out.
“Let them stick their noses out,” I told Leda. “On my call.”
We’d counted the rats going in—twenty-six—which told me they weren’t just there to blow the place. They were hoping to gather as much intel as they could from the lab. Imagine their surprise at the bottom of that pit. Then again, it probably didn’t compare to their surprise at the top of it when their ship didn’t answer. They were stepping real light and cautious.
I counted about twenty before they started getting too close to Hartline and Omar’s positions for my liking.
“All right,” I declared, “Skin ‘em but don’t spin ‘em.”
And then we lit them up.
In that first minute, I was pretty sure I winged three or four of them myself. But it hardly seemed to faze them.
“Well, damn, Burch,” Leda said. “These boys don’t flinch.”
She’d hit her share too.
“We gotta win this fight,” Hartline added. “I’m passing on headshots.”
“Take ‘em!” I shouted. I was taking bolts around my position from about three of theirs.
Four versus twenty-six. We had a drone, better positions, and the element of surprise. Plus, there was that free pass at dying. I liked our team’s chances. But hell. They were real fighters. I wasn’t expecting that before the start of the war.
“Patching their comms through,” Kayella announced a minute or two into the fight.
That’ll help, I thought.
“We’re pulling back to the door,” I heard the first bit of chatter come through.
“No! Get outta there. We need cover fire on that second position.”
“Holy hell,” I said, thinking it was obvious enough who was talking.
“Etterans,” Omar grumbled. “Just like we said all along.”
But it wasn’t Etterans. It was an easy enough mistake to make if you didn’t know both accents.
“It’s not Etterans,” I told them. “I’d know that accent anywhere. That’s old Iophan roughneck, sure as I’m from the Deltas.”
I was listening for one voice in particular but I never heard it.
We kept the heat on them, but those roughnecks were fierce. It became clear in the fight that they were working to keep their commanders alive. There were three of them, and with Kayella and Boggs helping parse through the comms and monitor the battlefield, we were able to identify which figure was which. And sure enough, they were the toughest fighters too. Over comms they were calling them Rook, Knight, and Bishop, and those three, when they talked, didn’t sound like Iophan roughnecks or Etterans or even Trasp. None of us could place them.
After the initial flurry, fittingly enough by their codenames, the firefight turned into a chess match of sorts. We had them down to about twelve or thirteen by our best count, but it was dark enough, and they were good fighters too.
“It can’t be a stalemate,” Omar stated.
I could see his line. He didn’t wait for my say-so. Nor did Leda and Hartline think twice before turning and laying down a fierce barrage of crossfire so he didn’t take a bolt to the head the second he exposed himself.
Within thirty seconds Omar, the Rook, and the Knight were all dead, and Boggs had taken my order to hit the bunker door with a hypersonic.
In the aftermath of the blast, we were able to shift positions and get the upper hand on the rest of them.
While we were mopping up, Hartline took a bolt through the helmet and went silent.
“You have maybe fifteen minutes,” Kayella announced as she flashed up her display on my visor, an armada of ships bearing down on Veronia.
“Right. Thanks, you two,” I said to the primes. “Don’t risk yourselves any more than you have to. The Battery needs you.”
“We look forward to meeting you again, Hale Burch,” Boggs said, “whenever that may be.”
“Hey, can you patch me to that Bishop before you go? Leda and I got him pinned down, but I’d like to have a proper talk with him before the light show.”
“We can see the battlefield,” Kayella answered, as though to say she already knew what was what. “Good luck, Burch.”
I don’t know exactly how well she could see their positions and how much of a risk it was for them, but those two primes took the ship overhead in a single pass at speed illuminating the battlefield for a split second to make sure it was clear for us. And then there was just that Bishop.
“I’m going to propose a truce,” I said into that dark Veronia night. “Simple and easy. No more killing. We’re all dead anyway in a few minutes.”
I waited. I could hear him breathing. Grunting really. He was hurting. I imagine he’d probably used up a couple patches on that suit and was wishing he had a similar treatment for his leaking skin.
“Well,” he finally replied. “Present your proposition.”
“We meet each other face to face.”
“Why would I care to do that?”
I turned to Leda, shaking my head. “I swear I’ve heard that voice before. I just can’t place it.”
“Don’t you want to know why we were shooting at you?” I asked him.
“I know why you were shooting at us. You’re tactical defense force. We attacked your territory.”
“That’s at least the second time you’ve been wrong today,” I replied. “Don’t take it too hard, Bishop. That bunker got us too.”
“You’re not Trasp security forces?”
“Do I sound like a Trasp to you?”
“It’s easy enough to throw on an accent.”
“What? Like your Iophan muscle? Don’t tell me. They were really from Moses-Mesui. Right. Tell me you’re not the least bit curious to know who killed you and why you’re dying?”
There was a long pause.
“It’s not like you have anything more to lose,” Leda stated.
“She’s Trasp,” the Bishop replied.
“Fifty-fifty,” I told him. “I’m coming over. Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you.”
“Burch?” Leda whispered.
I flashed her a look. Same thing she said was true. What more did we have to lose, except what was left of the little time we had to sort this mess out?
I saw the Bishop there lying on his back when I cut over the crest of the little ridge he was taking cover behind. He was flat out looking up at the sky. Couldn’t have killed us if he tried from the looks of things. I waved Leda closer as I approached him.
Then I flicked on the light above my faceshield as a courtesy, so he could see my face as I stood over him.
“I don’t recognize you,” the Bishop said as I got close. “Who do you fight for?”
“That’s a question. I suppose the answer’s something like humanity writ large, I guess. What would you say, Leda?”
“Sanity,” she quipped.
“Hmm,” the man replied. “If that’s true, we may be on the same team.”
At that moment, he did me the reciprocal courtesy of flicking on his own visor light, and almost before I had a chance to see the outline of his face and let it register, it had already hit me—his voice. I did know that voice.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You may not recognize me, friend, but I know you sure enough.”
“Who is it, Burch?” Leda asked.
“Your name’s Bashi, isn’t it? Bashi-something?”
“Bashi-Omo,” he answered, a look of utter disbelief on his face. “How do you know me, Burch, is it?”
“That’s right. Hale Burch. You couldn’t know me. I met you in the future. I’m sure that sounds impossible, but it’s true. I met you in the vault the same night I met Verona—acolyte Verona. We were just with her a few weeks ago. She doesn’t know anything about this, does she?”
“No. This is a compartmentalized covert op. Highest clearance. How do you know of our sect?”
“Oh, hell,” I exclaimed.
In that instant everything clicked into place. “Within my father’s house, there are many chambers. You came here to blow it up, just like we did. You had intel on a superweapon, am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Eddis Ali sent you? You’re working to keep this tech from getting out, right?”
“Yes. That’s our imperative. How do you know this?”
“Well, there it is, Leda. We’ve been deceived, all of us, by the shadow-sect of Eddis Ali’s wizards.”
“What do you mean, Burch?” Leda asked.
“There was never any weapon. Kal-Ennis just made it up. Maybe that superweapon is plausible, but it’s not real, and Triantra never had any intention of building it; that’s if the Trasp even knew about it. But Effelin Kal-Ennis knew he could trick Eddis Ali’s loyal followers into destroying the outpost to start the war.”
“A war?” Bashi asked. “This wasn’t supposed to start anything. It was a small targeted op, designed to destroy that weapons lab before it had a chance to end human civilization as we know it. I still don’t understand. Eddis Ali—how do you know that name?”
“One night long ago now, in the future, you sat for dinner with me and a friend of mine, Kristoff Mikkel. You were back in the vault briefing Eddis Ali and the sect’s leaders. You’d spent time among the pirates along the boundary. They were moving stolen military tech from the war for the cartels, mostly the Rexes. I met you long enough to know. You’re a good man, Bashi-Omo. And in this world, you’ll never make it there, not to that future. You’re going to die with us, here.”
“And the war goes on anyway,” Leda added. “We’ll blame the Etterans and strike them in retaliation; and they’ll have no idea why, and then they’ll strike us back.”
“It’s more complicated and convoluted than that, Leda, of course,” I said. “But I can see it all now. I see it. Nobody was ever supposed to get off Veronia. Pitka was never meant to be here. They couldn’t account for her complicating that simplest of stories.”
Bashi was running out of time. We were running out of time here as well.
“I don’t understand,” Bashi-Omo said, wincing from the obvious pain of the physical wounds, but also, there were other wounds cutting just as deep. “A shadow sect? It wasn’t supposed to end like this. I wasn’t supposed to die. What hell is this?”
“It’s not hell, old friend,” I told him. “It’s just as real as this world gets.”
“I hope they heard all of that,” Leda said, gesturing toward the sky where the primes had just flown out of there.
I nodded. Then I turned to Bashi one final time.
“Don’t despair, friend,” I told him. “This isn’t the end. What you’ve done. It’s going to ripple out over time—much, much farther than you can possibly imagine. Be at peace.”
He wasn’t gone, no. Not yet. But his eyes had that look, as though he was staring a deep hole through the night sky. And I wondered, as the firmament lit up for all of us in a blinding flash of light, what that final sight must have meant to him, whether in that one ultimate moment of clarity his faithful soul somehow unwittingly pined for that approaching light.