Many Chambers
“Things never go like you imagine them.”
(Part 29 of “The Misfits” series)
One of the many things I liked about Omar Jemeis was that he was good company. It was something you wouldn’t necessarily predict for a Trasp officer, you know, being a decent, easygoing guy. Out in the Lettered Systems, the Trasp had a well-earned reputation for being notoriously hard bastards. In the weeks since we’d first met on Theta-Nikorla, though, where we’d tricked him pretty good and put him in a precarious place that easily could’ve seen him branded a traitor by the Protectorate, Omar didn’t seem to hold a grudge against us at all. And he must have felt ten leagues out of his depth with all the revelations we’d related about the war he’d spent his whole life fighting—how it wasn’t what it seemed and how it was some kind of fix from the start. Speaking from personal experience, that was the hardest part for me to question, having given up as many parts of myself as I had to the war. I’d spent many a painful night in recovery trying to soothe my wounded body and broken ego with the justification that at least I had been fighting for something. When I learned all the things I’d learned about the war, starting to question that once-solid foundation felt like opening yet another painful wound. At least the crew and I had all gone through it together—me and Sōsh and Ren and even Leda. And we’d done it over months, piece by piece. We’d briefed Omar Jemeis on all the things we’d learned in one weekend, calling the young man’s entire belief system into question.
It’s a tough sell. You, your society, even your belief in humanity—all those things—get pretty well shaken down to the bones.
Yet here’s Omar, all the way to the station at Talon Braithe smiling and sharing good stories from every part of his life as though nothing at all had been shook. Maybe it hadn’t. I don’t know. It’s hard to know exactly what another man thinks unless he tells you, but it seemed like he was just going along with things—part believing, but the other part I guess was waiting to see the truth materialize before his own eyes. And who could blame him? We’d said a lot of unbelievable things. If a society becomes a big enough lie, eventually you stop believing anything anymore. But I’d met plenty of people like that too, who’d stopped believing in anything, and they tended to be dark and cynical and downright unpleasant to be around. That was what seemed so remarkable to me about Omar Jemeis. He was a great guy to be around regardless of what was going on. Good storyteller. Good Sabaka player. Good company.
We had to ditch his ship at Talon Braithe and take a shuttle back through the astral corridor to Hoff Springs, and from there, Omar claimed he knew there’d be people at the station who could sneak us back into Trasp space. From Hoff Springs, he was certain he could get a message through to his mother to make contact with his sister.
So we slid into Hoff Springs on a passenger shuttle under dubious falsified identities. And from there, we ended up in a locked cabin on a smuggling freighter operated by a retired Trasp Lieutenant Colonel. His ship was staffed by financially-strapped enlisted soldiers taking side-work during their precious leave time—a crew of five very hardened fighters.
I asked Omar why he was so confident they wouldn’t recognize him and turn us in. After all, the Trasp were notoriously tough on anyone perceived as even remotely traitorous or deserting.
“I’m Aida Jemeis’ brother,” he replied. “The Protectorate can’t tarnish her. Even if I had done what they probably think I’ve done, Command will keep it quiet.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then maybe we got nothing to worry about.”
Omar laughed. “Unless somebody who knows what happened on Theta-Nikorla really does recognize me. Then they’ll make us both disappear, Burch. Whatever happened to Omar Jemeis?”
Then he shrugged and smiled.
“Right,” I said. “Reassuring.”
It didn’t seem to bother him too much. That was Omar. He had one cool head on him, that’s sure.
So anyway, this smuggling ship was going to leave us off in the heart of the Protectorate at a supply drop on a commercial cargo route. Omar said a former CO of his had arranged to have his ex-wife pick us up. She’d taken work as an operator for a civilian freight line when they’d split. We floated there in the cold interior of this cargo drop for two days before her ship finally made the route.
Omar seemed to think everything would be fine, only his friend didn’t tell his ex who she was picking up, and he certainly didn’t tell his ex I was going to be along with Omar. She picked me out right away for a foreigner. And Omar? Of course the ex ran in the same circles where Omar was known, and he’d been correct that word of his recent activities had been kept hushed up publicly, but that didn’t mean there weren’t rumors circulating amongst those officers and their spouses, who all knew who Omar Jemeis was.
“So my options are get roped into your treason by abetting,” the ex said as soon as she recognized Omar, “or I can take you both straight to the ISB and get a reward? Hmm. Let me see?”
“I’m just trying to get back home to talk the matter through with the ISB myself, Darsa,” Omar said. “We have coordinates to meet with my sister. She’s going to bring me in personally.”
“Aida is?” Darsa asked skeptically.
Omar nodded. “We’ve already been in touch. Same coordinates you were given by Adiss.”
I gathered that was the name of her ex-husband. Omar hadn’t told me much either.
“She’s going to pick you up, Aida is?” Darsa asked him again.
“One hundred percent.”
“So if I take you there, Captain Jemeis, is there any chance ... I mean, is there any way I can meet your sister?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course. She’ll be grateful to you for bringing me home. This whole issue is going to get sorted, Darsa, but only if Aida can take us both in personally.”
Omar gestured to me, the foreigner.
“So the rumors aren’t true, Omar? You’re not a traitor?”
“Not even a little,” Omar replied, bending the truth a bit there, at least by the letter of the law.
“You promise? I can get a picture with her?”
“Aida? Absolutely, Darsa. I promise. She’d be happy to take a picture with someone who helped out her brother in a time of need.”
“Do you know Aida too, Mister?” she asked me.
“Real good,” I said. “She once served under me out in the Letters. Classified ops. Best human pilot I ever flew with.”
Darsa’s eyes got wide. “I’m holding you to it, you two. No one will ever believe me unless I get a picture with Aida. I can’t hardly believe it myself.”
And that was the price—one picture with the smiling folk hero of the Protectorate, Omar’s sister and our friend Leda, Aida Jemeis.
That was the closest we came to getting pinched on our way in until we got to the rendezvous Omar had set up with his mother.
Of course, through all this, I had no idea where in the Protectorate we were. Stuffed into windowless berths in cargo ships and warehouse station dead drops, Omar negotiating with his own people in hushed tones, making a good show of keeping details clear of the outsider. These Trasp sure knew how to keep to their own.
I thought for sure we were well in the clear when we finally touched up and latched with the other vessel at Omar’s rendezvous. Darsa even confirmed that she’d ID’d Aida as the pilot of the little scout shuttle she’d locked up her cargo ship with.
But I started wondering, because the last time we tried to get close to Leda, she was being managed tight by the Trasp ISB, like she was some great commodity—a symbol of resilience and fighting spirit of the whole Trasp Protectorate. And hell, Aida’s story was some commodity. It got us our passage here with Darsa, after all. The prospect of one single picture with Aida Jemeis and Darsa had suddenly forgotten all about Omar and the rumors of his treasonous dealings during the Letters offensive. But I couldn’t help but have doubts. It hadn’t been that long since the ISB had been keeping a full security detail on Aida Jemeis every minute of every day. Now she was suddenly supposedly roaming around the Protectorate freely setting up clandestine meetings with her fugitive brother? Without anybody from Command keeping eyes on her? Omar had assured me, but I suddenly had an uneasy feeling about the meeting. And it turned out, I was right to.
Omar and I debated for a minute before having Darsa tell Aida to come over to the freighter, which Darsa was happy about. That’d make for a better picture, she said—Aida Jemeis on her ship! And if it had just been Aida herself over there it would’ve been simple and quick—come get her brother and ship home. Easy. Well, there was some delay in her coming over, which meant something was going on. And we found out soon enough.
Darsa got suspicious and a bit twitchy as I floated out of the little annex outside the airlock. I was hiding just out of sight so I could see what was coming over first. And damned if Aida didn’t come through the lock with her own personal ISB minder in tow, and not just any minder, but it was someone both Omar and I were far too familiar with. It was Hartline—that same ISB major who’d been on our tails back at Astor when Rishi and Verona and I had snuck into the Protectorate the first time we tried to get Leda back. Major Hartline knew my face—that’s certain.
“Your hands behind your back, Captain,” she said to Omar. “You’re under arrest.”
“Hartline!” Omar said loud enough to make sure I heard if I hadn’t already seen. “The whole point of contacting Aida was for me to come in!”
“Myrna!” I could hear the familiar voice of my friend Leda shout. “There’s no need.”
Poor Darsa had no idea what to do. That kind of chaos was not what she had in mind. She thought she was going to get her picture with a smile, and here was Hartline trying to arrest Omar single-handedly, in zero-G, no less. Darsa started looking to the side wondering about what I was going to do if Hartline actually did get the cuffs on Omar.
“Your hands, Captain!” Hartline shouted at Omar. “Now, please. I won’t ask again.”
“No,” Omar stated. “This is bullshit! I nearly got killed out in the Letters, abducted by spies, accused of being a traitor, and had to sneak back into my own territory. If you think I’m going to be treated like a traitor—”
It seemed a bit too performative for my taste, and maybe Hartline picked up on something, because she started shouting at Darsa. “You over there. I want to see your hands.”
“I didn’t know,” she replied, and she was tilting her head toward me.
Hartline was about two seconds from pulling her sidearm, pointing, shouting, thinking she’d flown into some kind of snare. It wasn’t our intention for things to get rough, but we had no idea she was even there in the first place. I had to put a stop to it.
I snapped back and sprung off the bulkhead with both legs and went flying across that annex faster than Hartline had time to react. I crashed into her hip before she could reach for her weapon and stripped her of it before we both landed against the wall on the other side. I was lucky enough to get a foot down before we hit the bulkhead. Hartline didn’t. What a noise she made, her back thumping hard against the hull as her lungs got forcefully emptied by the impact. But that didn’t slow that woman half a moment.
She started hollering and fighting, going right for my eyes with her fingernails. I had to snatch up her wrist with my mech hand, and I let her know just how much harder that prosthetic could squeeze. She yelped.
“Burch, no!” I heard Aida shout.
“I ain’t gonna hurt her,” I said back.
And there’s Omar, calmly snatching Hartline’s spinning bolt pistol out of the air like he was nearly enjoying himself.
“Hello, big sister,” he said. “I see you brought a friend.”
“Omar?” Aida said. She was exasperated.
“Darsa would like a picture with you.”
That poor girl was huddled in the corner thinking the whole thing had gone full-on sideways.
“This is off to a great start,” I stated.
“I thought I told you to stay home,” Aida said to me. “What are you doing here, Burch?”
Hartline had been looking over at Omar and Aida, trying to figure out what had happened. And when she heard my name out of Aida’s mouth that second time, Hartline’s eyes turned back toward me.
“I remember you,” she scowled at me. “What happened to your brain injury?”
Then she turned back to Aida.
“Don’t tell me you know this spy, Jemeis!”
“Well, Burch,” Omar said. “This is going to be fun.”
I suspect it wasn’t how Hartline thought this trip was going to go. She had to float and watch, herself bound up in her own handcuffs with Omar and I holding her back while Aida took a picture with Darsa. Then we let that poor woman loose, assuring her that we’d sort the whole mess out with the ISB. For good reason, she was pretty worried about what kind of trouble she’d be in if we couldn’t talk Hartline down. Myrna Hartline was a lieutenant colonel now, because the Protectorate had promoted Aida to major herself, and they couldn’t have Hartline on the same tier—at least that’s the way I figured it.
Hartline was livid. Sure she was mad at me and Omar, but whenever Leda opened her mouth, Hartline’s eyes near turned red. The fury in her heart practically boiled over. She’d thought they’d really made progress together, she and Leda. And Leda—well damn I couldn’t get her Trasp name right in my head: she was Aida now—but Aida kept telling Hartline they had made progress, that it was all real. But there were other factors Hartline couldn’t understand yet. She was seething.
That scout shuttle was small enough. Hartline was cuffed and strapped down in a jump seat behind the two captains’ chairs. Omar was beside her, and I was up front with Aida. And damn, it was hard to know what to call her. But that problem was far more trivial than what to do next. This Hartline problem was a real problem. And, Aida said, they had an event the following morning, fittingly enough, in Danby. And if Aida Jemeis didn’t show for a ceremony, the ISB and every other internal executive agency in the whole damn Protectorate would be looking for her and for Hartline. So, yeah, a problem.
“We need to get out of this ship,” Omar suggested.
“And do what?” Aida asked. “For you to come back without a halfway decent story is one thing, little brother. But, Burch? You’ve got no reason to be back in our space.”
“Sure I do, Leda,” I told her. “You just don’t know the reason yet.”
“What?”
I tried to look behind me toward Hartline, trying to ever-so-subtly indicate that I couldn’t tell Leda what me and Omar and all the others were up to with a high-level Trasp ISB agent there.
“You’re not going to hurt Myrna,” Aida stated. “She’s not just my superior. She’s a good friend.”
“Traitors,” Hartline half-hissed back at us.
“I got an idea, Burch,” Omar said, sorta grinning at me. “We needed a handful of useful people who understood the Protectorate.”
And then he looked over at Hartline.
“Are you crazy? You want to read her in?”
“I don’t just want to read her in,” Omar replied. “I want to take her with us.”
“Take her where?” Aida asked. “Burch, what is going on?”
“Remember that time we broke the universe, Leda? Well, we went back in—me and Carolina and Rishi and Kristoff and the others. We all went back in. There’s layers and layers to the what and the why, but the bottom line for us now is we need to do it again, and we need help from you and Omar. We need some good Trasp people for this mission. I can’t say I love the idea of bringing Hartline along, but if you say she’s a friend—”
“She is a friend.”
“Do you think she can ever calm down enough to listen to reason? We can’t run an op and watch our backs if she’s fixing to knife them.”
Aida looked back at her friend. She shrugged. “Myrna is very dedicated.”
“What if I told you there was something bigger than your war,” I asked, turning toward Hartline myself. I could hardly see her there behind me. “If we asked you to step outside your role for a minute and play a bigger part, not just for the good of the Protectorate but for the good of all people, could you do it, Colonel Hartline?”
“I don’t trust spies.”
“Do you trust your own eyes?” I asked her.
“Maybe,” she replied. “Every system can be corrupted, though, even biological ones.”
“Spoken like a true paranoid spy chief,” Omar quipped. “Look, Burch, how much damage could she do if we take her? She could sure do a lot of it if we let her go back to the ISB without a sense of our purpose.”
“That’s a fair point.”
“What are you two up to?” Leda asked. “Something with the artifacts, I’ve gathered. But what?”
“We need to go back to the start of the war,” I told her. “We can brief all the specifics on the way, but we need to figure out how we’re going to get out there.”
“What the hell is this gibberish?” Hartline said.
“We’re going to have to ditch this ship,” Omar stated. “I have a contact in Dern who can get us a ship for a few weeks.”
When we got to Dern, I stayed with Aida and Hartline to continue the briefing on their scout shuttle while Omar got us a ship. Then we met back up again in empty space to change ships. We set off for the artifact from there.
If I thought Omar had been skeptical, Hartline was on some other level. She looked at me with a mixture of dismissal and disdain for days on end, occasionally piping up with a scornful laugh followed by a comment about how ridiculous all these fantastic stories about time travel sounded.
Admittedly, the framework itself was one wild story with as many equally far-fetched chapters. Hartline really enjoyed the part about my going two million years into the future. Omar didn’t react much because he’d heard that part before, but Aida—well, Leda—my old friend, she wasn’t nearly so skeptical, because she was there at the start. She had it in her experience that the artifacts had the ability to twist our perceptions of reality. Granted, back then, we didn’t seem to be transported to a society millions of years advanced on a different timeline, but it’s not that big a leap from what happened to us back at the beginning and the prospect of sending us back to the start of the war.
Our destination in the here and now wasn’t nearly as far off as the string of artifacts we’d mapped out past the Letters or the lonely artifact all the way back toward Charris. This deep-space artifact was floating out in an uninhabited stretch of space somewhat between Port Cullen and Dreeson’s System. From Dern, it was about a week’s travel away. And that ended up being about a week full of stink eye from Hartline. She just kept getting angrier and angrier, promising the Jemeis siblings that she was going to make some spectacle of seeing them executed for treason in front of the whole Protectorate. Insubordination. Insurrection. Subversion!
“Yeah, yeah, lady,” I told her. “We heard you.”
It got old after a couple days. But eventually, even she got tired of her own act toward the end of the week and just sat quietly as the three of us planned.
And then, finally, when we suited her up to go in to that artifact, she started up scoffing at us again, as though the whole thing was some joke. “Yeah right, Burch, sure, we’re going back in time.”
But Hartline got in her suit anyway. I mean, even a proper skeptic had to be curious when we opened up a tunnel to the inside of an asteroid that had been floating around forever in the middle of empty space. That had to be at least a crack of doubt in her barricade of skepticism. And as we started floating in, and the interior was obviously a piece of technology that no one in our civilization could have built, Hartline got proper quiet about where we were going.
Finally, as we got into the interior of the cylindrical drum and headed toward the top of the scepter with Aida leading the way, Hartline said in a low voice, “You really believe this, Aida? We’re really going somewhere?”
“You better start believing too,” I responded. “It’s a hell of a ride.”
We’d talked about it in the briefing, before she had any sense of anything, but as we came to the end of the drum, I told her sincerely. “Colonel Hartline, this is really important, you need to focus your mind on following Aida. If you’re not serious and thinking straight, you could end up anywhere. These artifacts are fiercely powerful and not to be trifled with. Clear your mind and follow Aida. We can talk about your attitude when we get there.”
Then we all floated in front of that big blank wall. I didn’t notice it the time before, but as we were lining ourselves up, thinking about that time and place, the wall began to glow a subtle, dull purple abyss that looked for a moment like a warping spiral. Then, poof! My head was all wonky again.
I had to think about it for what seemed like half a moment. Slight confusion. Then after what felt like a few seconds, I clicked back into sensibility. I was in a kind of office with the others, or at least I thought it was them. There were two girls, young women I guessed, maybe early twenties, and they were splayed out on the floor out cold snoozing like some decent fighter had knocked them both good and clean on the chin. And then, there was a young man staggering in the corner, reaching up and trying to get to his feet, maybe like the same fighter had just stung him a bit starry-eyed.
“Is that you Omar?” I asked him.
“Burch? Where the hell am I? What happened?”
It took a few minutes to explain that one well enough.
Maybe it was the fact I’d gone through the transition before. Maybe it was just the luck of the draw. My first time through the artifacts I was the one who’d gone batty, and Rishi and Verona had to watch me and Kristoff until we got our heads straight again. This time it was my turn to keep my wits and watch the others, I guess. But I couldn’t believe our luck when the girls came to. Leda was first, and she confirmed it was her in that young lady’s body. And by the time we confirmed the other young woman was Hartline, Leda and Omar were coming around properly. I even had a sense of self for my borrowed identity: I knew the time, the place—everything. Leda had nailed the trajectory. We’d morphed into trainee logistics officers inside the headquarters of a private freight enterprise based in the outer boundary systems of the Protectorate. There was no war yet. And the most incredible thing of all was the location. We were in the Ariel system—Ariel-Cantor, to be specific, the colder outer planet of the two habitable worlds in the Ariels.
Maybe the others didn’t appreciate it, seeing as all three of them were Trasp themselves, but as an outsider, having been excluded from the entirety of the Protectorate for the whole of my life, I had no knowledge about the Ariels except for the legendary reputation. Ariel-Shrieve, the inner habitable world, had its own set of fables amongst the peoples of the Battery for a number of reasons. And then there were the megastructures in the system—three I knew about, and this mind I was occupying—some guy named Chambers, I suddenly realized I had all the details right at hand: Ariel-Hardy, a cylinder group with a population that rivaled the totality of Hellenia’s own armada of space cylinders all on its own; Ariel-Nestor, a ringworld encircling a rocky moon-sized body that served as a mine for the system’s other megastructures; and Ariel-Kōn, a single space wheel in the cold outer reaches of the system.
That’s the thing the people of our time had almost forgotten—the Trasp had been known for all of this, their engineering genius. I almost got lightheaded thinking about it. They’d spent a few thousand years earning the reputation as humanity’s greatest builders ever, and in six decades of war, the Trasp had become the Battery’s pugnacious cousin, famous for sneak attacks, picking on small defenseless outposts, and general martial assholery. It was no wonder I almost fell over, experiencing that entire precipitous decline in reverse order in the span of a few moments.
“You all right, Burch?” Omar asked.
It was just us in that room, so we didn’t bother too much with our new bodies’ identities.
“Hell,” I said. “You Trasp used to be something. This system alone is like a microcosm of the whole diaspora. The Ariels.”
“He’s all right, Omar,” Leda said. “That’s Burch, stating the obvious as though it’s profound.”
“What the hell?” Hartline stated, still not quite steady on her feet.
She was staring at the wall in that little office, dazed like somebody’d zapped her between the eyes with a shock box. And as she was staggering around like a housebot with its power source tripping, our training officer came into the room barking.
“What the hell are you four up to? You were supposed to be back in the loading bay fifteen minutes ago with your FC completed for review!”
At that moment, I figured I was the only one who really had my head about me enough to be doing business. And I figured that our mission, unlike the others, was destined to end at Veronia—going down with the ship, so to say. I didn’t reckon we should waste what little time we had playing around in some merchant warehouse trainee program for bored Trasp kids.
“We quit,” I told that supervisor.
I wasn’t trying to be rude or nothing, just frank and to the point, no messing about. At about that time Hartline, who had her arms out beside her like she was balancing on a wire, suddenly lost control of it and took about four uncontrolled steps headlong into the wall, collapsing into a heap again.
“Oh, I see,” the supervisor said. “What’s she on? Chartreuse? The red? Some kind of designer gank from the Letters?”
I motioned over at Omar to get Hartline up and see if she was okay. Then I smiled back at our supervisor as Omar was helping her to her feet.
“Nothing at all, sir. We’re just high on life here in the antebellum.”
“Antebellum? You four have lost your damn minds, Chambers, getting all whacked out in a loading facility! You can’t work with heavy machinery in a state! I’ll make sure you four never work again.”
“Oh, great,” Omar replied. “I think that was the objective.”
“I’m calling the CPDS!” the supervisor shouted. “You stay where you are.”
He went storming out of the room plenty angry. I decided at that juncture that it would not be a good idea for us to stay where we were. Fact, I made sure we stripped off all the externals—personal fobs and eyewear and anything keyed into the company’s system—before we dumped our uniform outers and went staggering for the facility’s main door.
It felt funny knowing the future coming. The person whose body I was wearing had been taking things so seriously, learning to move freight around the Protectorate like it mattered. These kids didn’t have the first sense of what was on the horizon.
“I’m gonna puke,” Hartline said as we were rushing her down one of the side corridors en route to the exit.
And she wasn’t lying neither. She’d barely got the words out before she did.
We quickly regretted dumping our coats. There was a proper atmosphere outside that some of the original settlers of these territories had terraformed. Like about half the systems out here that had a breathable atmosphere, the Ariels claimed it was Heder Floriston himself who’d settled the place. Here on Cantor and Shrieve, the Canalles, Carhall, and even Etterus itself. I was thinking that if I could take an artifact back and offer old Heder Floriston a bit of useful feedback, he could’ve upped the temperature by a good fifteen degrees, because the second we stepped outside the air was biting.
We couldn’t stay out long before we all started shivering. But the metro area of the city we were in, Huong, was a pretty remarkable sight. Ariel-Cantor didn’t have a properly developed residential ring like Nestor, but it had a line of space towers around it, as well as an orbital ring that was more like a transport vector for moving and sorting cargo and travel for people who lived on the surface, and like the legend about these Trasp engineers always bragged, the space tower in Huong was like nothing I’d ever laid eyes on.
It was segmented and held up by magnetics by the looks of it, like all the rest. But also, at increments that had to be twenty or thirty kilometers in between, it had these broad disks emanating out from the tower itself, stretching out several kilometers, so that they just seemed to hover there above the city, growing wider and wider each layer up the tower went. It was almost unbelievable to the eye. I turned to Leda and asked her to have a look, totally forgetting that she was now just as limited as the rest of us. Plus it was cold. Her borrowed eyes were all teared up and blurry. No more hyper-vision.
“Stuff that, Burch,” she said. “Find a picture and study it. We need to get inside.”
“I’m freezing my balls off out here,” Omar agreed.
Well, we had to get to that tower anyway to get off world. And then it occurred to me it might be a bit of a problem, as we’d just dumped our jobs, and with it our credit, and we were four pretty young people who’d arrived on Cantor with middling prospects at best, hence the freight rustling jobs in the first place. But we were too damn cold to be bleak thinking about it. We rushed back inside the city’s subsurface at the next ingress to keep from freezing. Then we decided to walk to the tower if for no other reason than to take our time and get our wits fully about us as we stepped onward.
It reminded me of the future—that day walking all over Murell with Verona and Kristoff and Rishi wondering where the hell we were and how things worked on that unfamiliar planet. I guess some things never change.
Underground, the city was another type of wonder. They had these walls and ceilings that fooled the eyes, so at intervals you would catch a glimpse of what seemed like a horizon, and it registered in the mind of my host that these were projections—later stages of the terraforming that would be a few thousand years in the future. It had that warmth I was pining for, plenty of trees and flowers, grasses and shrubs, and shining shapely towers encircling the city proper, which was more of a park marketplace than the urban hub of a district capitol. Of course all the ugliness of commerce went straight from the tower to the industrial space underground. And this primary subsurface layer, as now, would be a nice little retail and transport zone. All that seemed great, a fine vision, and then I caught wind of a heavenly odor. Somebody was cooking up empanadas somewhere near, not in the future but the here and now. And damn, I didn’t care how strapped we were in the finance department, my borrowed stomach needed replenishing.
“Hey, Burch,” Leda said, reading my mind. “You smell that?”
“Hell yeah, I do.”
“I thought you would. What do you say we stop and have a bite or two? Get our heads right.”
“Nothing better for it,” I agreed. “God damn, I missed you, my friend. Let’s have a drink to that while we’re at it.”
Once we ate and got ourselves right, we had a good talk about the plan. The goal was to bear witness to the West Battery War’s origin story as it unfolded on Veronia. Then we’d go home with the real story finally. To get us embedded on that massive building project, I had a secret weapon. The problem was that in this time, she didn’t know it, and she didn’t know me. I needed to find Verona—not to be confused with the outpost itself, Veronia—which was confusing enough even for Omar, who’d met Verona in the future as well, but Leda and Hartline hadn’t even met her yet. And neither of them had heard of Eddis Ali’s wizards before either. But that sect of tech wizards was here in the Protectorate, just like they were all over the Battery and back in Charris and everywhere else we knew humans to be abiding, and they were their own kind of immortal, which, I explained to Leda and Hartline, meant that our friend Verona was here in the Protectorate, because she’d lived through the era. I’d talked to Verona about her early life in Trasp territory before the war. I had a place to look for her and even a bit of coded information that she told me would immediately get her attention and trust, because she obviously couldn’t have known who I was back in this time, especially since I wasn’t even wearing my own face.
So we started to put that plan together with our fingers crossed that our shipping supervisor hadn’t yet put in a claim to freeze our credit before we jumped off world. We set off for the base of the space tower after lunch to hop a flight off Ariel-Cantor, and that plan blew right up before we even got off the ground level.
Hartline had gone quiet as a mouse—well, I hadn’t ever met a mouse before, but they say that about mouses anyway. Omar was starting to get worried during lunch. He had to wave his hand in front of her face while she chomped on her empanada. But she was just enjoying it, and when she did talk, all she could say was, “Amazing.” I guess when they say someone was speechless, in some cases they really are. I wasn’t complaining any. It was a good change. But Leda took Hartline with her to get us a fare up the elevator while Omar and I started looking for passage toward Heinan, which was where Verona should’ve been living at the time, if we got our times right.
There were the official commercial carriers and their kiosks and bots, but like most ports, there were also little nooks where you could find people hustling, and given our limited resources, we decided to poke around there for a bit to see if we could find a deal for passage that fit our budget as well as our needs.
And there were some funny looking people in there—not unlike the little side markets on Origgi, where people hawk all kinds of little statues and ornaments and religious relics, which was a surprise to both me and Omar, because the Trasp, at least in our day, didn’t seem to have a religious stripe about them at all. I guess a half century of war can take a lot of different kinds of beliefs out of a people.
Set amongst those purveyors of these interesting-looking little trinkets, her back up against a pillar between stands, there was an old woman with a loose hood over her head, and she was staring at me, following me with her eyes, but at the same time, I could tell she wasn’t actually looking at me. Her eyes were vacant, like she was looking past me or through me. I pointed her out to Omar, and he just said back. “I don’t know whether she’s got a ship, Burch, but I don’t think we want to take it if she does. Looks like a weird one in any time.”
“That she does,” I agreed.
But there was something about that old woman. And hell, weird was pretty much our signature dish. So I guess that was her way of calling to me just then.
“What are you staring at me for, lady?” I asked her from about ten meters away.
“You’re looking in all the wrong places, Hale Burch,” she replied loud enough even Omar could hear, and he was another few steps behind me.
“Did she just say that?” I asked him.
Omar nodded, his eyes popped-open wide in disbelief.
“Well, damn,” I said, walking over close to her. “I guess I’m the one at a loss here. Who the hell are you, and how do you know that name?”
She stared right through me and smiled about the broadest, creepiest smile I’d seen in a long while.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she replied. “I knew you had to come through here eventually. I hoped I would know you still when you did.”
“Yeah, funny. Happy day, I guess. Care to explain how that’s possible, old woman? My own mother wouldn’t recognize me as is.”
“The truth of who we are isn’t on the outside.”
It was weird the way she was looking at me like that. Omar waved his hand in front of her and she didn’t react.
“Are you blind?” he asked.
“In a way,” she replied. “In another way, I am quite the seer. You may call me Carmenta, and you are correct, Burch, I am an old woman, but the most interesting fact about my life is that I haven’t been born yet.”
“Carmenta? Oh, hell. That sounds like a damn wizard name if I’ve heard one. Tell me I’m wrong. So who sent you? Eddis Ali? Verona? Rishi? One of the prime AIs?”
She shook her head. She was grinning like she was so proud of herself.
“Someone else. Our faction is beyond your understanding yet.”
“That much is obvious,” Omar replied, growing impatient. “Why are you talking like that? Why don’t you just tell us what you’re about?”
“I can’t just give you the answers.”
Omar and I looked at each other before I said the obvious. “Why the hell not? You’re from the future. You’re some kind of wizard like Verona. And you came back here to find me—how you did is way the hell beyond me, but that’s another point. You obviously wanted to tell me something important. Now you want me to guess and get it wrong or something?”
“I am an oracle. That’s how we communicate.”
“Oracle, hell,” I told her, turning around. “Let’s go, Omar. We don’t have time for this.” And I meant it.
“No, wait, Burch! No.”
She could see I was fixing to leave her there, and even though I didn’t have my souped-up legs like I did in my own life, I had two good enough regular ones to walk clean away from a blind old woman with a funny way about her.
“Don’t go,” she shouted at our backs when we’d gone about ten paces.
I really didn’t want to turn around again, but Omar looked over at me, and I looked back at Omar. Her calling me by name like that? You couldn’t get a much more powerful sign that the universe meant for you to listen.
I turned around. “You came back to help me, did you, Carmenta? Or whatever your name is?”
“That is my name, and, yes. I endured centuries of hardship before returning here to help you prevent it all, Hale Burch.”
“Well, fine, I guess. But don’t talk to me in riddles. We don’t have time for any of that.”
“That is how oracles work, Hale Burch,” she said, affecting some kind of heightened tone in her voice.
Omar shrugged.
“Enough of that,” I answered her back. “I work pretty simple. Are you here to help or not, lady?”
That smile of hers disappeared. She looked so crushed that she didn’t answer. Then Omar put it even plainer.
“You can come with us and help, Carmenta, or you can spend another century standing between these religious relics till you become one yourself. Your choice.”
Compound interest. The wizards had that going for them. Carmenta had come back and taken up the body of a middle-aged woman a few decades prior. So she took what money her alter ego had, liquidated her assets, and put it all in an investment account. That was part of their wizard way—to get sneaky with resources wherever they went. So she had no problem getting us a ship. But she sure was awkward to be around, not like Verona. Part of their manner, and I guess this was how Transom was able to sniff them out by just looking at them, was that they lived so damn long they got funny. It’s a bit like those deep-spacers who go out solo for so long they come back with that distant look in their eyes. They go so long without a conversation with another person they start having conversations in their own head, and then, even though you’re talking one on one with them, it’s like there’s you and them and something else going on there too. Well with these wizards, imagine being alive so long that starts happening, and then on top of that you start to see generations come and go and all the people around you get fleeting. I could see how that would make it a little tough to care as much and connect with regular people.
Once we got settled on the ship she leased out of Ariel-Cantor, she told us she’d been waiting there for me for over thirty years. She had no idea when I’d be coming back, but she knew I had to be. Don’t ask me how she knew, because she couldn’t really explain it, but she knew. I think it was a bit like Rishi’s other future selves that talked to her through the artifacts. Only this Carmenta, she was a future self living out a pretty miserable future where the war had gotten out of hand. When we asked what that meant, thinking it was bad enough in our time, she explained just how bad it had gotten in her past. Athos and Iophos got involved—at first through the warring factions as proxies, Athos taking Etterus’s side and Iophos taking up with the Trasp. But it wasn’t long after their proxy war began that fighting broke out between the two ringworlds directly, a few years from our time Carmenta told us. Athos, the ring that is, not the planet, got cut in half and then swallowed by the planet herself with about four trillion souls riding the broken remnants of the once-magnificent megastructure down to oblivion. That unthinkable tragedy didn’t go unavenged and was followed shortly after by Iophos and every last resident there, and it was dark days for all of humanity after that.
The wizards of course knew about the artifacts, but most in her sect viewed them as forbidden territory—unhuman tech, beyond their purview. A few, though, took it upon themselves to explore that unhuman tech when it became clear that the future for humanity was bleak in their timeline. Carmenta meditated for centuries on them, or so she claimed, looking for the right moment to intervene and change the past—all the possible forks in the road. And somehow she settled on me, Hale Burch, not in my own time but in this time, not in my own body but this body, not on any other mission but this one. But she still couldn’t put it plainly. She’d say weird oracle wizard stuff that sounded deep but didn’t mean nothing. You’d ask her a plain question expecting an answer and she’d say something like, “Deep down, Hale Burch, all stones aspire to be sand.”
And I’d be tempted to say something like, “How the hell do you know that, lady? You been talking to rocks all these centuries?”
Hell. Some of these people we meet on these adventures.
Anyway, it took us a good few hours egressing from the Ariels before we got a proper story out of Carmenta and we could set a destination. She said we would meet up with Verona, but not for a while. We had to understand why the war started first before we could watch it unfold.
“That was the whole point,” I told her.
But then she made some good points, that Pitka Remera had been a close eyewitness to the war’s beginnings and seen nothing useful herself. Why did we think it would be so much different for us?
“But we know the war is coming,” Leda pointed out. “And we know the time and place and a lot of the early flashpoints.”
“Half the people in the Battery know the war is coming,” Carmenta countered. “One doesn’t need to be an oracle to see the conflict building.”
That was true too. A big chunk of the mission prep Rishi had given me and Omar was reading about the tensions leading up to the outbreak of the fighting. There were rumblings for decades about it.
“If that’s the case, then what are we doing here?” Hartline asked.
And it wasn’t clear if she was asking this oracle or asking in general, like asking me and Omar what the hell the point of this whole exercise was anyway.
“We all live two lives,” Carmenta told her. “The life where you learn your own futility and the life you live in spite of that knowledge.”
“Oh,” Omar said, shaking his head at that oracle talk. “I bet you feel stupid now, Myrna. That much was obvious to the rest of us.”
That was the first time I saw that spy chief grin through that fresh new face of hers.
But it was hard for old Carmenta to sift through centuries of thought and filter in the stuff we needed to know. I started to understand her a bit. She’d been sitting there waiting for me for decades on Ariel-Cantor, pondering in her head, over and over and over, just how that meeting with me would go down. She must have worked through that script half a million times, perfecting her oracle talk just so. I bet in her head she had a sentence or two that were perfect riddles, and she was going to say those things and smile, and I would walk away, slightly puzzled at first but intrigued. And then, those puzzling statements would unfold and expand like a virus in my mind. And that virus would act like a cascade of causality, and the clues would become clear at just the right moments. Behold the wisdom of the oracle!
And then there’s that funny moment when actual people get involved. Decades of pondering and planning and perfecting her script dissolved at about the point she finished saying “Hale Burch.” It must have been hard for her to see those fantastically intricate edifices of thought come crashing down. As I was thinking about it, I started to try to be more patient with her. Everything she’d figured one way for ages was going a whole different way.
Omar and Hartline and Leda were laughing at how she kept talking and couldn’t finish a point or zero in on what mattered. I think she was starting to get upset, but those wizards don’t really get too emotional, so it was hard to tell.
She was talking in a heavy tone, trying to get through to the others through their laughter. “All oracles are considered mad right up until the moment they are merely stating the obvious,” Carmenta told them. “The oracle never changes herself, though. It is the universe that changes, and with it, your perception of her.”
“I think I understand, Carmenta,” I said, taking a different tone. “So where do we need to go first? And what do we need to do?”
I think she got caught off guard by how earnestly I was asking simple questions. Not things like what the grand narrative of the war was or how we could stop the tide of the things to come.
Carmenta got really quiet, and then the others stopped laughing and got really quiet and thoughtful as well. Then she just answered plainly for the first time.
“One of my kind is here—Effelin Kal-Ennis is his name. He is working at the behest of Artemis. He starts the war. To know the way of it, we must steal his mind.”
“Up until that last bit, that was surprisingly clear,” I told her. “So we need to find this wizard, Effelin Kal-Ennis, you said?”
She nodded at me.
“Any idea where we can find him?” Omar asked.
Simple questions.
“He is the chief officer of a secret Trasp weapons program called Triantra. I don’t know the location.”
“I do,” Hartline responded. “Triantra was coded under the personnel labs—advanced exoskeleton development, battlefield medical interventions, air evasion and strikeback—things of that nature. My division knows of a few other things they’ve done. I’ve heard whispers.”
“I might’ve too,” I said.
“From Transom?” Leda asked.
Hartline shot daggers over at Leda and then me at the mention of that name. I’m not sure Leda was thinking when she let Transom’s name slip out.
Omar looked right back at Hartline with a look of his own. “You’re in it now, Myrna. You’re going to learn some things.”
“Plus,” I added, “every day he’s working with us he isn’t killing you guys.”
“Treason is still treason.”
“Well, hold off on that tribunal till we get back,” I told her. “You should have a full picture by then. For now, though, we need to find this wizard infiltrating your military research division.”
“Triantra moves,” Hartline replied. “But they didn’t until the start of the war. They hid in plain sight.”
“Where?” Leda asked her.
“Home, Jemeis. Their labs were subterranean, right on your homeworld in Dinat. Nobody had any idea it was there.”
“So we’re going to Carhall then,” Omar stated, tapping the control pane on the table. “I’ll get the Andrew to set us a course.”
I was curious. We were just trusting this old lady wizard. Calling my name out like that was some trick, and she did have some points about us four not knowing what to look for ourselves. I mean, we thought we did, but how could we really know if we didn’t know what started the war in the first place? Those were reasons to trust. But I did have some cause to wonder.
“This wizard Effelin? I’m curious,” I said to Carmenta. “If he’s supposedly a wizard like you, and your sect is dedicated to keeping species-ending tech from sneaking out and proliferating, then why would a wizard be at the heart of the war’s origin? Is there some tech angle we aren’t seeing? I could see one of you wizards joining up and infiltrating the research arm of the Protectorate’s military for the purpose of monitoring, but it sounds to me like you’re saying he’s responsible, like he started it.”
“Not all things are clear,” she answered. “These are useful questions, Hale Burch—”
“It’s just Burch,” I interrupted.
“Effelin Kal-Ennis is point zero. The war begins with him. As for our sect, I tell you this: Within my father’s house, there are many chambers.”
I shook my head at her.
“That clears that up,” Omar stated, setting off a peal of laughter around the table.
“More wizard talk. Within my stomach, there are no noodles,” Leda said grinning, affecting a nice lofty tone. “This stolen body needs sustenance for it to function, and the stars shall not speak to they who hunger for noodles and do not feed themselves noodles.”
Even I had to laugh a little at that. Damn. Even in another body she was still Leda. It felt good being around her again, even on this weird mission back in time. I could see Carmenta was getting aggravated, though.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “You’ll get used to having people around again after all these years. That’s just Leda and Omar having fun, looking forward to going home.”
Now, of course, Leda was the most serious operator of the bunch. She had a deep and heavy background running missions with the Trasp lunar rangers, and even though those days were wiped clean out by her memory loss, that way of thinking was in her bones. It didn’t surprise me when she started talking like a team leader, getting ready to run recon on the whole city to figure out how to track down the Effelin wizard, how to surveil and trace out his patterns, and from there, how to start planning a way to infiltrate the hidden R & D labs he was working out of.
The funny thing, I guess literally to Carmenta, was that the longer Leda kept talking about it, the harder that old oracle of the future seemed to be trying to suppress the laughter. Now, apparently, the joke was on us.
It wasn’t far to Carhall, so Leda and Hartline were already in that mindset that we had to be on point fast, ready to hit the ground running when we touched down in Dinat. But Carmenta was becoming a distraction, and the little minimalist jumper of a ship she’d hired wasn’t nearly big enough that she could be ignored for too long.
What’s so damn funny,” Leda asked her.
“You plan to infiltrate the R & D?” Carmenta replied.
“It won’t be easy,” Hartline stated, “but it’s not impossible. Triantra operatives lived in plain sight with normal covers. We just need to work to identify a few and trace the network back.”
“Yes, yes,” Carmenta laughed. “And then find a way in, and then find Effelin himself, and then find out where he keeps his top-secret data, and then figure out how to steal it, and then plot an escape. Not a problem at all for a quartet of high achievers like your alter egos appear to be.”
Leda looked over at me like she was going to brain that old woman. “I can’t decide which is worse, Burch, the wizard oracle version of her or this sarcastic one that reminds me of Ren.”
“Spit it out, lady, if you’ve got some idea,” Omar told her. “All five of us know when the war is starting, and we have to get that data beforehand.”
“There are, of course, easier ways,” Carmenta said.
“Please,” I told her in the calmest way I could muster. “Enlighten us, Carmenta.”
“I told you earlier, Burch, that I was tens of thousands of years old, did I not?”
“You did.”
“Do you know how big a human head would have to be to hold, say, fifty thousand years of memories, encoded as they are, biologically in your brain cells?”
It was a damned curious question. And suddenly, it dawned on me where the old woman was going with that curious line of Socratic inquiry. I knew from Verona and the others that Eddis Ali’s wizards spent over five centuries training before they even came out of the vault. Verona, when I met her in our time had been out two centuries more, give or take. And Verona’s head wasn’t seven times bigger than any of ours, to put it in the simplest terms possible. You could consider that the wizards would continuously overwrite their memory, using the same bandwidth as the rest of us, the way people tend to forget about things they don’t need to remember. But for these wizards? It would sure seem a waste to spend centuries acquiring knowledge if they had no means to retain it.
“You bastard wizards have a chip somewhere, don’t you?” I mumbled as I was pondering.
Carmenta nodded. This line of conversation was more her style—the Socratic. I was starting to get that too. The more we played along, the more we’d get out of her I could see. So I decided to treat her like a proper oracle for once.
“In all the time I’ve spent with Verona,” I said, “I suppose the reason I never heard anything about it is that it’s not something your kind casually lets slip in conversation.”
“Or under direct interrogation or even enhanced tactics,” Hartline added.
“So?” Carmenta replied. “Do you suppose it will be easier to infiltrate Triantra, or would our admittedly limited time be spent more efficiently?”
“Are we killing him and taking his head too, like the Etterans would do?” Leda asked. “Or do we stun him and just take the spare drive?”
“We did come to see the war unfold,” I said. “Best if it goes down closest to the way it did. Presumably it went off with this Effelin Kal-Ennis having his head attached, at least on the day of.”
“That is correct,” Carmenta replied, nodding. “He is alive in the timeline we both returned from.”
“Great,” Omar added, seeing the way the conversation was going. “So are you going to tell us where this chip is on his body and what kind of work it’s going to be to extract it, or are we going to have to play some sort of guessing game to get it out of you?”
“That wouldn’t be efficient,” Carmenta replied.
I couldn’t tell if that was her way of joking with us, but she wasn’t laughing.
“We have another twenty-nine hours till we hit Carhall,” Leda said. “I want a plan of action ready to go by the time we touch down.”
All three of our Trasp travelers knew Dinat well. Me and the oracle knew nothing about it. I had only been to Carhall City once before when I met Omar for the first time in a bar near the Jemeis home. That was a nice residential city where many of the Protectorate’s business leaders and government officials actually lived. Dinat was more of a megacity than the pleasant, parklike neighborhoods of Leda and Omar’s home town of Carhall City.
This made Dinat a nice place to hide an underground R & D outpost, while the scientists like Effelin Kal-Ennis could blend in pretty easily on the surface. It also meant that the entire city was overtly surveilled, and intricately so. That meant it was going to be tough to pull Kal-Ennis off the street and somehow steal that drive from his head without it becoming some kind of absurd scene. Sure, the Protectorate wasn’t a martial society yet, but you couldn’t just pull anybody off the street of a city like Dinat without drawing attention we couldn’t afford.
The spy chief in Hartline started to come out. Turns out babysitting the Protectorate’s most important propaganda piece wasn’t her life’s aspiration. She wouldn’t talk about her background one bit in front of me, but by the way she was starting to talk, it became pretty clear she was deep into covert actions. Whether it was in the Letters, in the Protectorate itself, or maybe even in the Etteran Guild somewhere as a proper foreign spy—it could have been any of the three or all of them—but she clearly had serious experience in that kind of work. You didn’t get to be as high in the Trasp ISB as Hartline was without those accomplishments.
When the ship dropped the five of us at the airfield outside the city, we all had a plan of operations, even Carmenta, whose job was to get us a place to stay somewhere. We figured her fat wizard wallet was going to be about all she was good for. She opened it up and bought everyone fresh eyewear and swatches and coats, sure, but it turned out that wasn’t all she was good for. The funny thing about funny people is that most people miss where funny people really shine.
While Omar and I were out looking for Kal-Ennis, the girls and the old woman were plotting a classic honeypot. Leda and Hartline were living in two young women who were attractive enough, given the right circumstances, that a regular guy could fall into that trap. And Hartline, you could tell, she was going to make sure that it sprung in just the right way.
Omar and I were prepared for it to be a challenge to locate this Kal-Ennis. Hartline knew where in the city the Triantra project was located, at least roughly. But beyond that, we figured that locating one specific person, especially one whose entire purpose was to hide and blend into a society the way Eddis Ali’s wizards did, would be one hell of a challenge. I sorta joked to Omar as we were scouting around that we should look up Kal-Ennis in the city’s directory. “What could it hurt, right?” I asked him.
Well, the answer to that question was that it could let him know that someone was looking for him if their sect had a way to monitor searches. But Omar didn’t take it as a joke, and we started talking the idea through. If Kal-Ennis was his name within the sect, then it was impossible that anyone in the Protectorate could know that wizard codename—the same way only we and her fellow wizards knew Verona as Verona. As far as the Protectorate ever knew, such a person didn’t exist. So why would anyone ever go looking for a person that didn’t exist?
“What if it’s not his codename, though, Burch? What if it’s his cover identity?” Omar asked.
And I started thinking about it. All the wizards I’d met had names that were symbolic of something. They were usually pithy, harkening back to something cultural or mythological. Effelin Kal-Ennis didn’t call anything to mind for me or Omar. So we thought what the hell. And Omar walked right over to a kiosk and queried the directory.
It turned out that Effelin Kal-Ennis wasn’t his wizard name at all. He came up immediately in the city directory with a complete professional profile. He was an engineering professor at the city university—a low-level instructor of basic classes. And this city university sat directly on top of Triantra if Hartline had her history correct. Like she’d said, they were hiding in plain sight.
Kal-Ennis even had his office location public with open hours posted for his students. Omar and I decided to take a walk by his office to see if we could lay eyes on the guy. We figured we were wearing young enough bodies that we could pass for prospective students, so we went into his building following a group of young people going for tutoring with their instructors.
Effelin wasn’t in the building just then, but he had a schedule posted for his students. It was almost unbelievable. I was beginning to doubt Carmenta’s story that this guy was anybody, because the board at his office had blocked out for the next two hours “Chess in the Park.”
“Chess?” Omar whispered to me. “The guy who triggers the West Battery War plays chess in the park?”
“I guess you gotta pass the time,” I replied shrugging.
So we followed the map on his board and found the guy sitting in the courtyard out behind the main offices playing a game of chess with one of his students.
Omar and I walked around for a bit, looking at the other tables and pretending to be interested in a game. Omar even sat for one two tables down so it seemed genuine. Then Kal-Ennis’s student got up and left, so I figured what the hell. I walked right over and sat down across from him.
“Do you need those?” he asked me.
I still had on the eyewear that had been guiding us around the city. It was a very polite way of telling me he didn’t care to play with a cheater.
“Oh, sorry,” I told him. “I’m not from around here and I forgot I had them on.”
“Oh, I can hear that now,” he said, referencing my accent. “It’s refreshing to see we’re drawing students from the outer colonies. You’re from the Alphas somewhere, I’d guess?”
“Farther,” I replied.
“Can you play?”
“I can play a bit,” I replied, selling myself a little short. I’d played plenty in rehab. I was one of the few who preferred chess to Sabaka.
The match lasted about twenty minutes. I was there long enough to tell he was a player, a genuine brain feeling around the edges of my mind. We talked a little about chess and a little about Carhall, but mostly I asked him questions about the university. I played it up like I was a prospective student looking to change my life course. I told him all about how my alter ego, young Chambers, had flamed out of shipping logistics because I had no love for it. I told him I wanted to get into engineering—building megastructures specifically. That was the future, I said.
“It’s also the present,” he reminded me. “There are nearly seven hundred megastructure projects in the Protectorate this day, and they’re always looking for qualified people.”
I got the feeling he toyed with me on the chess board just as long as he wanted to keep the conversation going.
What struck me as I sat across from him was what a decent chap he seemed like. Smart but decent.
“What are we on here, Burch, with this guy?” Omar asked me as we were walking away, heading back to meet up with the others.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe you build up these people in your mind as devils, like you should see it oozing off of him that he’s the origin for more future suffering than the mind can fathom.”
“Sure didn’t seem that, though,” Omar replied. “At least not from my vantage point.”
“Mine neither,” I told Omar. “Either that or he’s not the guy at all.”
Things never go like you imagine them.
That evening, we met back up with the girls at the flat Carmenta had hired out for the week. She’d disappeared somewhere. Leda and Hartline had been out scoping the city for clubs and different types of venues where we might run an op on our target. Omar and I showed them the pictures of our chess playing professor, and suddenly, the prospect of catching this guy out on a regular honey pot didn’t seem so plausible to any of us.
“He’s not dumb,” I told them. “And he doesn’t strike me as the type to be out at night around students. Or in with students for that matter. Plus, if he is one of Eddis Ali’s tech wizards, he won’t tick the same way ordinary people do. They’re not driven by the same things—hunger, sex, emotions, money. They got a way about them. I should have figured that.”
“Then what?” Leda asked.
“What about there?” Hartline suggested. “We know he goes to the park to play chess. We need to figure out how to get him from out in the open there to a closed room. And from there we need to disappear without disrupting his part in the start of things.”
“I don’t know,” Omar said. “Even if we manage to do this, to snatch this drive off him, how do we know that won’t change the whole course of everything? Even if he can’t exactly go to the authorities himself and report that we stole it, he’s certainly going to know about it, right?”
“It’s a fair question,” Leda said.
It was a fair point but I thought different. “Yeah, but if it’s true that he triggers the whole thing and it’s about what? A year away. Less even. Then something about what we need to know will be on that drive. We need to take that risk and see what happens.”
“I’d need about an hour,” Hartline stated. “I can get him into a state, but somebody’s got to sit with him and keep his focus for longer than that match you played with him, Burch.”
Hartline looked over at me scornfully as though to tell me indirectly that I was a shit chess player and a shit spy. I grinned at her. If I was such a terrible spy, then what did it say that I’d snuck back to Leda right under her nose twice and took them both with us back through an artifact? I was doing just fine.
“Leda’s an ace at chess,” I said. “She could do it.”
Leda looked back at me doubtfully. “I don’t know, Burch. I’m not sure I am.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like my eyes. You think of me as the person I was from the Yankee-Chaos, right? But I’m certainly not the fighter in this body that I am back home. This girl’s not enhanced. Back home, the Tressian doctors enhanced my entire body with nanotech to help me heal, not just my eyes. So I don’t know how much they had to do to fix my brain. I got irradiated. I might not be a decent chess player at all.”
I shrugged and put on my eyewear and gestured for her to do the same. We set a holo-board on the floor and started. Leda was apprehensive at first. I could understand why. It’s not a question every person would want an answer to—whether they actually were the person they thought themselves to be. If Leda was a terrible chess player, did it mean the person we knew as Leda was just the nanotech the Tressian doctors had used to cobble together a functioning mind from what was left of Aida Jemeis’ irradiated brain?
It turned out to be a very big question we never had to grapple with. This Leda in her borrowed body slapped old Burch around the same way she used to do aboard the Yankee-Chaos game after game.
We were far enough in to see the shape things were taking when Carmenta returned.
“Where have you been?” Omar asked her.
“Thieving,” she replied, flashing that creepy grin of hers.
She had a carrying case trailing behind her that she turned and clicked open with a gesture from her swatch. “Nobody suspects a blind old woman, especially not in a clinic.”
Inside that little carrier, there was a portable scanner, surgical instruments, bandages, all the accessories one could imagine you’d need to snip out a secret hard drive from beneath a wizard’s skin.
“You sly old devil,” I said. “I guess we should finish up this game and get prepared.”
The only person Hartline trusted to plan the actual operation on Kal-Ennis was Leda. They sent me and Omar out on errands to fetch things the rest of that afternoon and the following day. I couldn’t piece it together, but what I did understand went back to that comment Hartline had made when I asked her whether she’d trust her own eyes—all systems can be corrupted, she’d insisted, even biological ones.
We went out and picked up a few chemicals and a handful of regular pharmaceuticals. Then they’d sent us out again a couple times for tech. Occasionally, when we popped back in, Hartline herself was out somewhere. Leda said she’d promised Hartline she wouldn’t tell us what she was doing—sources and methods, Trasp spy stuff, something like that. I felt like I was being kept in the dark, but I suppose that was fair, seeing how we’d brought Hartline herself into this whole endeavor.
Then, when Hartline declared we were finally ready, we targeted a block in Effelin’s schedule in the afternoon of about two hours when he’d be playing chess in the park. It was me, Leda, and Hartline going down there together. I would introduce Leda and let Effelin know I’d brought him a player who likes a challenge. She would have to keep him engaged long enough for Hartline to get comfortable beside the board.
It was quieter in the park in the late afternoon—great for our purposes, but Kal-Ennis already had a game going with a student that lasted a good, long while. I was afraid he might be tired of playing by the time it ended. There were still a few more minutes left on his schedule. He looked at me and shrugged, but when I told him I wasn’t back for more myself, that I’d brought a friend, he grinned a little when he realized he’d be playing Leda.
“Do you mind if I listen to some music while we play?” Leda asked him. “It helps me to relax and focus.”
Effelin shrugged as he set the pieces back into place. And then they began to play.
It happened right in front of me and I’ll still probably never understand. “Entrainment” was the word Hartline used when she explained the use of music to Carmenta, but the whole thing looked more like hypnosis to me than anything else.
Leda kept the game going long enough that it started to get dark in that park. Hartline offered to let the professor use her glasses to see better. And I’m not sure what she did to gain his trust or what, but she put them on Effelin. Then something she’d done—laced the rim with chemicals, programmed some sort of subliminal visual cues into the display, I don’t know—but when Leda said some sort of code phrase: “Rook to C-5,” Effelin went from deeply engaged and hypnotic to completely catatonic.
From there, Hartline began issuing suggestive commands, and he complied like a dutiful housebot. There weren’t that many human eyes left in the park by that late hour, but they saw the same things the cameras did—the professor left quietly and agreeably with a group of three people who appeared to be students.
Effelin Kal-Ennis found himself alone at his table in the park the following morning in a daze, wondering how he’d gotten there and what had happened. I imagine it wasn’t unlike waking up after passing through one of the artifacts that had brought his mysterious assailants here from the future.
No harm had come to him, but after regaining his senses, I’m sure he noticed the small cut on his neck when he took off the bandage, and it probably wasn’t long after that before he must have realized what was missing.
We were already gone again, off to find Verona. We had in our possession a small metallic cylinder that looked, for all we knew, like it could be a data storage device. Our oracle was telling us that it contained hundreds of years worth of Effelin’s memories and could be read, and if anyone could help us figure out how to read it, Verona would be the one.
Our course was set for Heinan. It wasn’t a long trip, so another little private jumper like the one we’d taken from the Ariels seemed just fine. After staying up all night helping Leda and Hartline take that drive from Effelin’s neck, I thought it would be no time before I was asleep, but as we were blowing Carhall’s atmosphere I caught Hartline looking over at me funny, and by funny, I mean it was the first time she looked at me like a human and not a natural adversary. She seemed to be weighing me, as though it was possible one day we could be friends.
“I still don’t believe you,” she told me.
“I still don’t believe it myself,” I told her back.
“You think the answer to how the war began is on that little stick, Burch?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I keep thinking the next piece, the next piece, and then I get a look at it and still can’t see the full picture. All the pieces may add up to something one day when I see enough of them, but that’s hard to tell.”
“It seemed too easy. All of this seems too easy. These people, they let you do anything—take medical equipment from the hospital, quit your job and fly around freely without anyone checking your flight logs. I mean, Kal-Ennis is a top-secret researcher playing chess with students in the park, no internal surveillance on him, and no one to even tell him it was a stupid idea.”
“Things were different.”
“They’re about to get different,” she said, shaking her head. “What the hell did we do to ourselves? What the hell did we do? We were free.”
It looked like she was about to tear up, and then, to my shock, she did. Myrna Hartline began to cry.
“I hope you have answers, Burch. Something to explain what we did to ourselves and why!”
I couldn’t promise a thing. I almost wished I had a wizard’s mind at that moment so I could say something meaningless that sounded insightful, maybe take the sting off a bit while we all pondered. But there wasn’t a damn thing to say, just to keep going, finding that next piece, reading that next clue until we knew something worthwhile.
“I didn’t know,” Hartline said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t have believed it until I saw it here with my own eyes. We used to be free.”
We were floating again in our chairs, weightless and headed for deeper space. I was too far away to reach out and offer a hand to a fellow human in pain, so I did my best to reassure my fellow traveler with an empathetic eye. And I don’t know how long that went on, because before too long we got lulled into some rhythmic state by the hum of the engine on egress, and before I knew it, I’d shut my eyes.