That Human Flame
“There is no larger truth than the one you are destined to find here, starting now, with these very people beside you.”
(Part 22 of “The Misfits” series)
To trust somebody you’ve got to hand over a part of yourself to them. You have to be willing to look foolish if they burn you. And if somebody trusts you, it’s your job to not burn them. That’s what they’ve put in your hands.
Faith and trust. We were going to need both in spades to figure out how to set things right. There was a lot to set right, that’s sure. The future. The war. Maybe even the present. The problem with that, though, is that the thing that most often gets in the way of trust and faith is the past. Things that happened. Things that made us who we are today.
Today, we were dropping out in a familiar place again—familiar at least to me. I thought about it again for a minute—all these people I’d trusted, most of them on a very deep my-life-in-their-hands type level, and every single one of them now were going to have to believe our very unbelievable story. We were about an hour out from Nilius’s station in Tau-Nira, and I was running out of time to prepare Transom.
Rishi and I had talked about this. There can’t really be a good way to break something like that to a man like Transom. “Yeah, sure, we’ve been working with your deepest immortal enemy for the last fifty years, and we’ve sorta become friends.” Well, as close to friends as one can get with a being like Clem Aballi, or Transom for that matter. It was touchy enough to risk exposing Transom to Omar Jemeis and asking him to not murder the poor kid, just on the principle of Omar being Trasp. We weren’t sure there was a thing anybody could say to keep Transom from at least trying to murder Clem Aballi on sight.
With an hour left to go, I figured if there was anyone in the galaxy who could pull something like that off, it was Carolina. The thing was, after that whole Wizard of Athos stunt Aballi pulled, I wasn’t sure I could give Carolina a good reason not to let Transom murder Clem Aballi on sight. I guess that’s the opposite of trust—burnt bridges, or something worse.
It turned out, though, I didn’t even have to convince her.
“Aballi?” she said. “You and Rishi and Clem Aballi?”
“Yeah, well, mostly it was Verona breaking the ice. There was a lot of ice to get broken in the beginning.”
“But you’re working together? Allies?”
“I don’t know what you call it,” I told her. “But I know we need him.”
“And you’re worried about Sebastian, what? Pulling out his knife and trying to gut him the second he sets eyes on him?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll have a word.”
“Will it do any good?”
“I’ll have a word,” she insisted.
“Would you like me to stay and explain?”
“Unnecessary, Burch.”
“The flight deck is yours then, Captain.”
We dropped out right at that moment, which was always visually disorienting, even when you knew it was coming, so both our eyes went batty for a few seconds as we adjusted.
“Here we are, I guess,” Carolina said. “Where are we exactly, Burch?”
“We are exactly, Ms. Dreeson, right where we are supposed to be. Tau-Nira. You’ve been looking for Nilius. Well, you’re about to meet him.”
“Are there any of our enemies you haven’t been fraternizing with, Captain Burch?”
“That’s just the start of it, Carolina. Wait till we tell you what we learned about those artifacts of yours.”
I undid my straps and pushed back, floating out of the flight deck.
“The artifacts? Burch, the artifacts? What about the artifacts …?”
I made like I couldn’t hear her as I was drifting away. Then I flew back to knock on Transom’s door. One little step at a time was the way.
Rishi programmed the ship perfectly, no surprise. We auto-docked and I briefed them all on the station, what it was to the best of my knowledge—Nilius’s deep-space information hub. I hadn’t told them anything about the time travel stuff yet. I figured Nilius and Rishi could explain that better. It was still confusing enough for me. I expected I’d learn something from them telling the others.
Carolina had talked with Transom, and I was still nervous for all the talking something could go sideways, and not just with Transom, mind you. Aballi himself might take a stare the wrong way and do something to set off Transom on purpose. I guess we were relying on Verona on that end.
It was certainly the busiest that little station had ever been. We’d just docked the Yankee-Chaos; Verona’s cruiser, Cannon, was still parked outside; Clem Aballi’s suck bucket was floating there; and tucked in tight along Nilius’s space station was Omar’s Trasp ship, which I had to figure Rishi and Maícon had disabled the transponder on before heading out here to the Taus. It was a proper convention for this system.
So in we went. It was quiet in the station itself, unlike the last time we showed up here and Nilius was playing some weird ancient opera. This time we floated along, a pretty big group, eight of us, and that was without Rishi and Maícon, whom we expected inside. Aballi, Nilius, and Verona were already in there as well, as far as I knew.
I led the way, keeping Carolina close beside me, two abreast along the walls as we projected our weightless selves along the corridors leading to the central room of the station. I didn’t know what to expect this time when we entered.
As we slowly filtered into the main room, Nilius started speaking right away—a decent idea, something he and Rishi probably thought up to prevent any chance of the tensions building at the outset. He just went right into it.
“Welcome, friends,” he began. “Though I’m sure you may be wondering, are we friends, really? I am Nilius, the Prime. We may not have met. You have never seen clones of me like the AI you have encountered before. Who am I then to claim friendship? Even more, there are some you have, in the past, reserved the role of enemy for. Trasp and Etteran. Wizard and Warrior. Yes, you have all been on one side in many battles, and some of you on opposing sides. Despite that, you are all here, brought together in unity for the same cause.”
“What cause is that?” Transom asked.
“Survival,” Nilius answered. “The oldest cause.”
“Whose survival?”
“Ours,” Nilius continued. “Humanity’s. Even we AIs who live alongside you, our existence and way of life will be irreparably altered if we do not prevail in the struggle before us now.”
“Pardon our skepticism,” Carolina said. “We have good cause to believe that you have been engaged in crimes against humanity yourself, Nilius. So it’s a struggle to see perhaps the prime architect of the most destructive war in the history of humanity as our defender.”
“A struggle, you say, Ms. Dreeson. An honor to make your acquaintance finally, by the way. I would put to you that humans do not fully understand their struggle—or more rightly, many struggles. But chief among them is your need to make sense of a universe that is far too complex for the sense-making tool you have—the human brain. There is simply too much data and there is far too little time for you to process it. I mean this not as a slight but as a point of fact. You will always be blind to far more than you can ever see. And you are blind to your true struggle. If you would allow, I and your friends Rishi and Burch will do our best to enlighten you to the struggle here. Burch, Rishi, Verona, and Clem Aballi have witnessed much of what we will speak about now.”
“You can speak all you want, but don’t think that the questions we have about the war will go away,” Carolina insisted. “There will be no misdirecting us.”
“You are passionate, Ms. Dreeson,” Nilius replied, “there would be no sense in trying to divert your attention. We do, however, need to broaden your scope.”
“Have you told them anything yet, Burch?” Rishi asked. “About Murell, Mercury Flats?”
“I thought we decided against it?” I answered her.
“It was a long enough flight. It could’ve come up.”
“Something like that’s not really a topic that comes up in everyday conversation, Ship. So no, we haven’t talked about it. Plus, I figured you and Nilius could explain it all better.”
“Actually, Burch,” Nilius replied, “we thought that you would be uniquely positioned in this group to be believed.”
I looked around that room. It seemed a little like a much smaller version of the amphitheater at Mercury Flats. And here was everyone, all staring at me, floating to my left and right, in front of me, behind me. I shrugged and did my best to reposition myself so everybody could see me talk.
“Well, I’m not sure exactly how to begin to tell a story like this.”
“I’ll help,” Nilius interjected. “Don’t bury the lede. This man, Hale Burch, has been to the future.”
“That is the headline, isn’t it?” I said. “Okay, how did we get there? It’s like this. That first time we met Ms. Dreeson—Carolina here—she was after these ancient space artifacts. And we followed up on them with one of her professors, had a proper adventure of it, and then I suppose we all got scared off when it put us into this inexplicable time warp.”
“You went back?” Carolina asked me.
“I’m getting there.”
“I knew it,” she said, shaking her head.
“Yeah. You were right, Carolina,” I concurred. “Let’s see. Well, after we went into Trasp territory looking to get Leda back—that’s Omar’s sister Leda for the record, case anyone doesn’t know Omar there,” and I kinda gestured to Omar, who just then seemed to acknowledge Verona again for who she was. “When Leda didn’t come back with us, Verona asked us to help her go after Clem here, and well, he was in the future—brought there by one of the same artifacts we’d inspected all those months before. Took us two million years into the future. Me, Verona, Rishi, and Kristoff too. We all went, and we found Clem, and we lived a lifetime there—for us it was fifty years. Clem had already been there some four centuries or so before we got there. That’s why it was a little strange to see you all again. It seems a bit like it was just two years gone, but at the same time it also seems like a half century, because I grew old and died there. A proper other lifetime. And then, when we all died, we came back here.”
“Like the Iophan woman,” Carolina said. “The one who got sent back to Earth.”
“Actually, Rishi’s gone back to Earth as well,” I said. “And Clem has been a few other places too.”
“Well isn’t that great for Clem,” Transom said, glaring across that amphitheater at Aballi, who looked right back and scoffed.
“Pardon,” Carolina stated. “That all sounds miraculous and very interesting, but Burch, I’m still struggling to understand why any of this is more important than the war that’s been tearing the sector apart for the last sixty years.”
“It is the scope of things, Ms. Dreeson,” Nilius answered. “To us, the tragedy of the Trojan war or the World Wars of Earth are features of history, literature, and drama. They only matter to us inasmuch as they convey truths about civilization and humanity we can learn from now. The West Battery War in the future your friends experienced was completely irrelevant, forgotten. Please tell your friends about the humans of the future, Burch.”
“Yeah, Burch,” Transom echoed, growing impatient with the conversation, “please, tell us about the humans of the future.”
“They’re different,” I tried to tell them all. “It’s tough to explain without your seeing it for yourself, but they’re … I guess the best way I could put it is spiritless, docile. The technological beings of this future we went to, they controlled the society. The people didn’t know their history. They didn’t make the culture they lived in. Even the sports they played and songs they sang were from the schools and lessons the ordinals prepared for them. The technologicals only kept the people around as a sort of biological information repository, collectively storing data the or—”
“They were pets,” Clem Aballi interrupted. “And they didn’t have the first idea of doing anything about it, because the ordinals had bred the human spirit out of them over millions of years.”
“You knew these people?” Omar Jemeis asked. “You talked to these people, Burch?”
“We all did. Had some real good friends there. And they were genuinely some of the sweetest creatures ever to walk and talk and breathe air. But they weren’t … It’s almost as though they were people but not people.”
“Human but not Human,” Rishi added.
“Exactly,” I said. “So the war, it is important. That’s sure. But it also doesn’t mean anything if we can’t ensure there’s a genuinely human future to remember it.”
“Well said, Burch,” Aballi stated.
“Two million years from now?” Carolina asked. “I heard that correctly?”
“Sure,” I answered. “You did.”
“Burch, this all sounds very interesting, but I’m wondering what you expect us to do about something that’s supposed to happen two million years in the future. And frankly, I can’t see how that is more important than the present war going on right in front of us.”
“This future they visited is not inevitable, Ms. Dreeson,” Nilius stated. “In fact, their knowledge of it has already made its eventuality less likely. However, this place—this very room, right here, right now—is a pivotal moment in the history of humanity. Just as much as the Founders departing Earth was a pivotal moment. If not for them, we would not be here now to discuss it. Humanity is only humanity insofar as it is a self-determining force in the universe. Your war is merely a tiny point on a long, long timeline. Every human has a part to play in their time and place. A vanishingly small number have names like Lincoln, Caesar, Alexander, Isabella, Napoleon. Look around you now at the faces in this room. At some point in the lives of those leaders, they existed in rooms like this, albeit in gravity. But they were surrounded by others, remarkable to the last one, yet almost nobody knows any of those names.”
“What’s your point?” Carolina asked, her tone growing increasingly more impatient.
“One among you carries such a name. The actions of this group will reverberate long after the West Battery War has been forgotten. What will remain is the name and the fight. And that fight is for eternal vigilance of the human spirit. You must wage that fight now and inspire it in others, or you will be pets—docile, directionless creatures who make no art, take no chances, invent nothing useful, forge no new paths, and find no meaning in the galaxy around them, and worse, they are too content to bother to look.”
“If we have two million years, Burch, you and your new friends here can ping us when we’ve stopped the war, okay? Until then, I’m committed to the here and now, as much as it’s tempting to explore the past and future with you.”
“Ms. Dreeson,” Nilius replied, “respectfully, it is as I said at the outset, a myopia of the human condition. You must be open enough to pull yourself away from the here and now to see the moment for what it truly is. You came searching for truth. Above all else that is what you sought. There is no larger truth than the one you are destined to find here, starting now, with these very people beside you.”
Carolina looked around at the faces of her crew. They looked as confused and reluctant as she was.
“I’m going to have to decline,” Carolina stated. “We have obligations, commitments to people here and now—to stop the war that he started,” she pointed at Nilius. “I have an obligation to my father, to my family. They have an obligation to their systems, and Burch, as much as I adore and respect you, I have to say, I think you’ve made some very poor decisions in your choice of friends.”
“Perfect,” Clem Aballi said. “What a perfect Athosian attitude. Nothing’s bigger than Athos and her priorities today.”
“Can I murder him now?” Transom asked. “Just say the word.”
Clem Aballi spread his arms as if to invite the attempt.
“People!” Verona shouted. “Carolina, none of what Burch says is an exaggeration. If anything, he doesn’t go far enough. Also, you presume you can stop the war, that it doesn’t have a momentum of its own that may be far beyond any of our control. We’re asking you to trust us. Me, Burch, Rishi—you know us. Kristoff would say the same if he were here.”
“Speaking of which,” Ren interrupted. “I’m sorry, but Rishi, where is Maícon Prime? You two were supposed to meet us back here together, right? That’s what Burch told us. I’d like to hear what he has to say about all this.”
I had to look around for a moment. The room had been so crowded to begin with that I didn’t notice the old prime AI’s absence. And then I noticed Clem and Verona looking around the same way, Sōsh and Transom, Carolina, Fieldstone, and Draya. Even Omar was looking up at Rishi confused.
“Ship?” I asked her.
“He couldn’t be trusted.”
The room got dead quiet. I could feel everyone get damn uncomfortable real fast, like instantly.
“Rishi?” Verona said. “Where is Maícon?”
“Maícon’s body is probably on its way to Trasp space, and when it gets there, they’ll scan it and realize it isn’t Akop Hernan’s corpse. Then, I imagine Verona’s sect will intervene when they hear about the nature of the advanced technology in the android body they’ve recovered.”
“They were not asking you about Maícon’s technological shell,” Nilius stated. “We are now all asking you about Maícon Prime.”
“His mind is in the safest of places,” Rishi stated resolutely.
She held out her arm. The sleeve of her flight suit, which was a mere technological façade, faded into the composition of her arm proper. Then her skin appeared to split open, and within, a compartment revealed itself, and in it, resting there, was that same round processing core we’d pulled off the floor of that desert world all those months ago—Maícon’s mind, captive in the arm of the most powerful being in that room, in that galaxy perhaps.
There was a moment, a long cold moment where we all took a single breath.
Then all hell broke loose.
I couldn’t say exactly how that revelation of Rishi’s affected everyone else there, but for me, I know I was plenty conflicted about it, and it’s safe to say I was heavily biased to take Rishi’s side by default. I imagine they all felt similar to how I did when Nilius knocked Rishi out against her will right in this very room a few weeks back, and I’d gotten pretty hot about that at the time.
Verona and Clem started shouting at me. Carolina and her crew started shouting at Rishi. I was yelling at Nilius, asking him what he knew about all this. But probably most concerning of all was that the warriors—the real fighters—Transom, Fieldstone, Omar, Sōsh, they were dead silent as everyone else raised hell at each other. And that caused me to get quiet. I was watching Transom’s eyes, and then, as though he could feel my gaze hitting him, he looked back at me. And then he was scanning the room, taking an account of things, and the fighter in me knew that when the assessing phase was over, the action phase would follow.
“Everyone take a breath,” I suggested with a loud shout.
“Were you in on this, Burch?” Fieldstone asked.
“I’m as shocked as anybody here.”
“Maybe not as shocked as you should be,” Verona stated.
Transom pulled Carolina by the arm lightly enough that his meaning came across. She nodded, and though no word was given, with Fieldstone acting as anchor by the outer wall, one by one, he pulled them out of there—Carolina’s crew—Captain Dreeson herself, Ren, Draya, Fieldstone, and lastly, Sōsh, who turned to me as he left.
“Sorry, boss. Maícon was one of our crew the last two years. That’s overstepping. All this talk of time travel, the artifacts, a higher mission, it’s all interesting. Rishi, you don’t get to take a player off our team without our say so, never mind his. That’s not ever been what we’re about.”
And then Sōsh left.
Omar didn’t know what to do. But he didn’t leave, owing to the fact he’d met me and Verona first probably, I guess. Plus, his ship was parked outside and unless he had another way, Rishi still had the keysets to it.
“Now what, Ship?” I asked her. “This is some fine mess. We come clean across the Battery to rescue them and now every last ally of ours is leaving.”
“They’re not going anywhere,” Rishi stated. “We will work through this. It’s too important.”
“What do you mean they’re not going anywhere?” I asked. “They just left.”
“Do you really think I’m going to let them fly out of here in our ship, Burch?”
Clem and Verona looked over at me, and I knew about that look. It was thick with the worry and concerns they’d laid out for me in plain language when we came back from Murell, from the future. Rishi the bipal, the one who’d knocked them both off and gone batty. They’d warned we might be seeing signs of it. Well, even as inclined as I was to take Rishi’s side, I couldn’t deny this was some sign.
“I would like an explanation please, Rishi,” Nilius stated.
“I second that,” Aballi agreed.
“Me as well,” I added.
“Wait for the others,” Rishi said. “They need to hear this too.”
I just sorta looked at her and then around the room, as though to remind her that they’d all just floated back out to the Yankee-Chaos. Then she looked at me like I was the dumb one, as though she couldn’t control every system on that ship with her mind. So I imagined as soon as they found out they wouldn’t be flying out of there, Rishi was going to force up every floatscreen on the old girl so they all had to watch as Rishi said what she had to say. No interruptions—not from that crew anyway.
The whole situation had been such a shock that I hadn’t properly registered it for what it was in the moment. This was Maícon Prime, maybe the oldest AI we had in all these Battery Systems. My knowledge didn’t go that deep, but this wasn’t him getting blown up in a shipwreck or taken offline in some accident. This was another being more or less deciding to switch him off and just doing it.
In the moments we were waiting for Carolina and company to get back to the ship, it also occurred to me that the only reason that very tenuous situation didn’t devolve into violence was the cool heads of our Etteran contingent reading the room and realizing how much of a potential death pit it was. Rishi herself and her technological body. Nilius and his. Two immortal wizards. And then there was me, half tech myself. And who knew which side anyone would come down on.
“The time is now,” Rishi stated in just such a way we could tell the Yankee-Chaos’s crew was listening in. “The time is not to fly away to any other mission, however important it is. History pivots here, right now, in the Battery. And it does it with or without our help. Those humans of the future, pets of their technological overlords had forgotten what they were. The human light had gone out of their hearts. To light another’s candle, yours must stay lit. That is the highest task of each human generation. And we must guard that flame here, because everything we saw in that future began here.
“We must be unrelenting and unapologetic about our defense of humanity. Maícon was a problem. He could not be relied upon. He sowed chaos all too often. If she were still in the room, I would ask Carolina whether she thought it was a coincidence that Pitka Remera’s Maícon was present at the war’s precipitating incident and that another Maícon clone was the cause of my own transformation from human to bipal? I would also beg those of you who didn’t see the future we speak of to ask those who have seen it, which of those two incidents is the greater shift in the course of humanity, great as the West Battery War may be?
“However deep the roots of this current war go, I guarantee there will be a few Maícon clones at the bottom of them, probably for no other reason than to witness something unpredictable unfolding.
“This group here changes the future. And we cannot do it without trust that each of us have our vision and goals oriented in the same direction. Maícon could not be allowed to steer us off course.
“I have not harmed him. His core is in the safest place in the galaxy. Once we have secured the future of humanity, I will personally restore him. But he cannot be allowed to disrupt this mission.
“Settle in out there, Carolina. You and your crew aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the people in here, not until we all understand our roles.
“Our mission is to safeguard humanity. It’s time to settle our differences. That’s all I have to say for now.”
My instinct after Rishi had finished talking was to pull her aside and speak in private. This whole encounter had been so radically different from what I’d envisioned that I had no idea how to react. About the only positive that had come out of it, as far as I was concerned, was that it hadn’t come to blows or worse—knives, bolts, or full-blown space battle. I didn’t get a chance to ask Rishi if that was the strategy—build a bond among unlikely allies by becoming the common adversary. That was the most noble interpretation I could possibly credit her with.
Omar didn’t know whether to whisper as he addressed me. Similarly, Verona and Clem didn’t care to say much, and even the looks they exchanged with me and each other were restrained. I knew them both well enough to know that. They were all wary of saying and thinking what they had to say and think in front of Rishi.
Rishi and Nilius locked eyes in the same way the ancient AIs did in the future. It was a sure indication those two were having a conversation of their own, likely a contentious one would be my guess of things, considering the duration.
“Let’s go back to the Cannon,” Verona stated. “We should talk.”
Rishi looked over at me and nodded so subtly I wasn’t sure if anyone else saw it.
“You coming, Omar?” I asked him.
He looked at me reluctantly. Then it dawned on me—Leda. He’d heard her stories. No doubt the respect and gratitude he’d shown Transom for saving his sister wouldn’t extend to Clem Aballi, the one who’d nearly killed her in the first place. Clem didn’t seem to have the first idea who Omar was either. Every direction we turned there was some kind of feud itching to flare up.
Verona’s ship was close confines to bring those two into, but I thought Verona and I had a good read on Omar, that he wasn’t a hothead and certainly not a fool. If he’d heard the stories from Leda—or even what was generally known about the Wizard of Athos—he wouldn’t do anything foolish like taking on Clem Aballi in a closed combat environment in zero-G. Of that much I was confident.
Once we got strapped in on Verona’s flight deck and she’d offered everyone something to drink, Omar did address the issue with Aballi directly, stating in plain language that he knew Clem had tried to kill his sister. For his part, Clem shrugged, stated that he’d done a lot of things to a lot of people over almost two millennia of living, and that it wasn’t personal. She and Transom had put him in a tough spot. I had too for that matter. That part was true from his perspective. And, after all, nobody died. Past is past and all that. It was as close to an apology as Omar was going to get. The conversation ended with him neither satisfied nor hell-bent on vengeance.
That cleared the air enough for Verona and Clem to start in on me about whether I was ready to re-evaluate my position that this Rishi was still the old Rishi. Was she turning? I didn’t know. It was tough to say. One thing I did say though was that her goals seemed as clear as ever—she seemed singularly determined to orchestrate a human future.
Something had changed since Nilius zapped her. That was obvious. But she hadn’t shared the exact nature of that change with me. I didn’t say much, so Verona kept talking.
“What shocks me almost more than her sudden turn on Maícon, Burch, is the way she’s seemed to accept Nilius after what he did to her.”
“What did he do to her?” Omar asked.
I tried my best to explain, as none of us fully understood the mechanics of that trip Nilius had sent Rishi on.
“It has something to do with this station and the artifacts,” I said.
“Do you reckon something happened on Earth to change her perspective, Burch?” Verona asked me.
“Oh sure,” I answered. “Something happened, but when I brought it up on the way out to Theta-Nikorla, all I got was pensive looks and an unwillingness to say much more than vague descriptions—the beauty of the planet, how everyone there took things for granted that would be miraculous to us. It was the little things. But whenever I tried to talk specifics, she’d tell me she’d share more when she was ready.”
“Earth?” Omar asked. “You think she truly went there?”
“Yes and no,” Verona answered. “It’s difficult to explain until you experience it. The artifacts seem to send you to another time and place as surely as you believe you are here right now talking to us.”
“She sure reacted like she’d been there,” I told them. “She sure did.”
“She’s not wrong about Maícon,” Clem stated. “His presence complicated matters. Always.”
“That doesn’t excuse her actions,” Verona stated.
“I didn’t say it did. But working with that AI always meant that at some point you’d be dealing with some complication he created totally out of nowhere. In Mercury Flats, he was either making the perfect move nobody else would do or upending a useful longstanding plan. In some ways I could see what she did, as a tactician.”
“I still trust her,” I insisted, “if that’s what you both are driving at.”
Those two looked at each other.
“Jury’s still out for me,” Verona said.
We all looked at each other simultaneously, sensing something had shifted in our surroundings—a sixth sense about something.
“Burch?” Rishi’s voice piped in through Verona’s flight deck. She hadn’t even pinged.
“Ship,” I said back. “You been listening in?”
“No. I trust you’re in my corner doing your best to convince our friends there with you to work together toward our shared mission.”
“I’m not sure it was all so direct as that,” I answered. “We were just talking.”
“Fine. Would you be so good as to accompany me to just talk with Carolina and the crew. We need to prepare them.”
“Prepare them for what exactly?” I asked her.
“Time travel. Or artifact travel. Whatever you want to call it.”
Omar shot me a curious look, and if I was interpreting it correctly, it seemed he was itching to ask whether he was going too.
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I think Omar would like to know if he’ll have the pleasure as well.”
“Everyone is going except myself and Nilius. Not the same places, but you’re all going, Omar included.”
“I think we should have led with that back in the main room, Ship. You know? A time travel adventure is something everyone can get behind.”
“Yeah, amusing, Burch. I’ll see you on the Y-C in fifteen minutes, okay?”
“All right,” I answered, exchanging looks with Clem and Verona. “Should I bring the others?”
“I suspect it will go more smoothly if it’s just us two. I’m sending Nilius to brief Clem, Verona, and Omar. I’ll see you shortly.”
“I guess we’re all business now,” Verona stated.
“Is she still listening?” Omar asked.
“Assume as much,” Clem stated. “Even if she tells us otherwise.”
I didn’t contradict him any.
“Well, Burch,” Verona said. “It seems our fates have been decided.”
“I would like you to think back to when we first met you, Carolina,” Rishi suggested. “Please, everyone, join us if you’d like. This conversation is for you as well.”
The rest of the crew was floating about, commissary, back hallway, Ren was gazing out the atrium window above the table, not eavesdropping exactly because we knew she was there, but listening.
“When I first met you, Rishi, you were pretending to be a spaceship,” Carolina said.
“I was. I was also stuck inside one. My mind was playing tricks on me. I couldn’t remember the things I’d lost. But that’s a story for another time. This is about now, Captain Dreeson. You and your crew are important. Not just to us but to everyone.”
“Everyone?”
“All of humanity,” Rishi paused as the others floated toward the table, getting situated on the same level. Ren, though, just kept floating up there like a levitating, weightless, human-shaped chandelier.
“What were you doing when we first met, Carolina? You and your professor?”
“You know that, Rishi,” Carolina said, rolling her eyes.
“Please enlighten the others who weren’t with us—Draya, Fieldstone, and Transom.”
“We were investigating the deep-space artifacts, like the one at Kappa-363.”
“Why?”
“We believed they were communicating with each other somehow.”
“Your theory was that they were constantly barking out their times and positions, keeping a temporal net of sorts across the galaxy, correct?”
“You know it is.”
“Would you believe it if I told you that Nilius had cracked it, that he’d figured out how to listen?”
“I’d like to know about that, sure. Does he know anything about that alien intelligence we encountered, or whatever it was?”
“No more than I could tell him, which was very little.”
“You knew, though, Rishi? You always knew back then, and you lied to us about it.”
Rishi agreed, nodding her head. “I kept things from you, yes. At the time, I believed I was protecting you. In some ways, I still think I may have been. We were always going to be called back together, to here, to now.”
“What’s this all about, Rishi?”
“You still haven’t asked Burch and me the question I would be most curious about if I were in your shoes, Carolina. It must have occurred to one of you to think to ask?”
“This whole scenario is so strange, I think we all have a million questions.”
“How the hell did you and Burch know we were on Theta-Nikorla?” Transom said. “At first, I figured, maybe you came for the ship, but then, how could you know exactly where we were, hiding in the lava tunnels, trying to flee the Trasp?”
“That’s the one,” Rishi stated. “I knew, because all of you and Akop Hernan and his entire family perished in those lava tubes. And I knew this because I heard it from my future self. History recorded that all of you were casualties of the Letters Offensive, put down by the drone fleet sent to acquire Chief Akop Hernan.”
“Wait,” Ren stated, turning upside down to face the table. “So you can talk to your future self, Rishi? What the hell is that like?”
“It’s more like I can listen.” Rishi displayed the node Nilius and the Wizards had installed in her technological body’s outer layer—that shape-shifting nano-skin. “This is how we receive the signal. Nilius has far more nodes. He designed the station to process hundreds of streams. This space station is more a supercomputer than anything. His body has far more processing power than mine will ever be able to handle. But I could add a few more streams. Time was an issue, though. We had to stop all of you from dying first.”
“Because we’re important to the future, or because you really care about us?” Transom asked.
“Both, Sebastian,” Rishi said. “You can joke about it all you like, but we do care about all of you. And, yes, you are important.”
“So this news, what? Obliges us to follow you?” Carolina asked. “If not for you we’d already be dead, therefore we drop everything and do what you want of us?”
“That’s not it,” Rishi insisted. “I wish to convince you of the gravity of the situation. Of all the things my future self could have broadcast back to me in that moment, it was that news, that mandate, to keep you all alive. To her, it wasn’t any special personal loss. All of you had already been dead for a few thousand years. It’s the calculation of the gravity of the moment. The Trasp had no idea you were in those caves, Carolina, not until they assessed the casualties to confirm the kill on Hernan when he refused to surrender himself. The fallout brought Athos into the war against the Trasp. That put Iophos against Athos in your own system. That civil war was the war that ensured everyone missed the real war until it was too late.”
“It is Iophos, though,” Carolina said. “I was right about that.”
“Yes and no,” Rishi said. “There are no easy answers here.”
“If that’s the case, that your future self can talk to you, then why doesn’t she just send a message back farther, stop the war altogether?” Draya asked. “I know I’m not as well versed in this crazy stuff as all of you, but if our war is a distraction from what you say is the real war, then why not stop it entirely before it starts?”
“It’s an astute question,” Rishi answered. “The first answer is that I only just began listening to the stream from the artifacts several weeks ago. And Nilius has only been engaged in this work for a few years now. But that’s not the real answer. The real answer is more complex and has to do with time. The simple version of that answer is that only this, only now, this time we’re experiencing, this is the real time. The past has already happened. Those future versions of ourselves calling out to us from probable futures, those are outcomes that may never exist in this real universe. I know it’s confusing.”
“It’s some story,” Transom said, shaking his head and scoffing at the prospect. “You’re buying all this, Burch?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I answered him. “We were clear across the Battery when Rishi woke up and told me exactly where you all would be and the exact kind of danger you were in. Sure enough, we found you right where she said you would be. I don’t have an explanation for it that sounds any less absurd, especially having seen the things I’ve seen.”
“I think we should discuss it amongst ourselves,” Fieldstone stated. “No offense intended to you two, but I joined this crew, this captain. I turned my back on the Guild for our mission. I think we need to have clear mission objectives from you two and Nilius, Burch, and then I want to hear what our crew has to say about it.”
“Carolina?” I asked her.
She looked around the table, and the looks she got back pretty much confirmed that Fieldstone had captured the mood of the group.
“You heard the Major,” Carolina stated. “I’d trust you to give us our privacy while we deliberate, Rishi. As an act of good faith, I’m asking you not to listen in on us.”
“All that sounds fair,” Rishi stated. “I’ll leave you a file with the details. Shall we, Burch?”
“I suppose we shall, Ship,” I agreed, unstrapping myself from the table.”
Ren was still floating there over the table. She smiled at me as Rishi and I were about to push off.
“If I have a say in the matter,” she said, grinning down at us. “I’d rather see the past than the future. But that’s just me.”
It wasn’t a short wait to hear back from them. Rishi and Nilius had an outline already prepared to send to Carolina, but without Maícon there to help them go through it all, Rishi figured it would take them at least a few hours to get through the main thrust of the plan.
Rishi and Nilius both believed that the Letters Offensive, if left unchecked, would be the catalyst for the war spreading across the whole of the Battery Systems. So our objectives crossed with Carolina’s on that point. We needed to stop it. That much we figured she’d agree with.
There were other parts, though. Things we didn’t know. Like how the war had started in the first place or how the Iophans tied into everything. Then there was the Trasp Protectorate and the Etteran Guild. In order to stop them fighting, we needed to know the real reasons they started fighting in the first place, and we didn’t. Rishi and Nilius theorized that the artifacts would. They believed there were things that our history was blind to. The artifacts seemed to recreate the past with a clarity of vision that was impossible for us to replicate.
That was the first part of the plan. There was more, and there were far more specifics than that. But after about ten hours of waiting on Carolina and the crew to reply, I decided to find a quiet corner and get some sleep. We could find out where they stood in the morning.
Rishi woke me up some hours later. It was impossible for me to tell how much time had passed, floating out there in the open with no light cues to tell me what time of night it was and no clock. It didn’t feel like morning, though, that’s sure.
“They want you to be there, Burch,” Rishi said. “Much to discuss.”
“So there is,” I agreed, and we headed that way.
Rishi told me that despite their reservations about her Clem and Verona were on board with the plan, provided they could stick together as a team. Nobody had any objections to that. Fact, I tended to think Verona was the perfect iron to smooth over the rough patches in Clem’s personality, and for his part, Aballi seemed to fill some sort of unspoken need Verona had in her heart or mind or whatever wizard part was yearning for his company.
Me, of course, I would go to the ends of the galaxy and back for Rishi and for our friends. Stopping the war and changing the future was icing on that cake.
So there we were. It was down to Carolina and company. When we sat down at the atrium table aboard the Yankee-Chaos again, this time, the conversation was more negotiation than explanation. Carolina had a list of demands. Her crew would operate under her first—their insistence. If they did split up, it would only be by their choice, and their group reported to nobody but Carolina, again at their insistence. Lastly, this was an alliance and partnership, so no major decisions in the direction of the partnership got made without their consent. Nothing behind anybody’s back. All of that was easy to sanction.
And just as it seemed that we were all in agreement and wrapping up, a look came across Transom’s face, an outburst of disgust.
“Screw this,” he stated.
“Yes, Sebastian?” Carolina asked.
“Boss, I don’t ask for much, and it’s fine to be building alliances with people we think can help us achieve our objectives. But you tell me to sit and make nice with a Trasp, and fine, he happens to be Leda’s kid brother, so I probably wouldn’t have murdered him anyway. Then you say Clem Aballi’s on our side—whatever that side is. And I don’t like it. But I’ve definitely gone to battle with people I’d just as soon not make it out the other side, because that’s the way. I understand, so I don’t murder him on sight, though for the record, Burch, I damn well reserve the right to kill him whenever this ends. But I don’t see why our group is making all the gestures here. We’re taking everything on faith. What’s your gesture of good faith here, Burch? Rishi? What about Nilius? What’s he willing to put on the line for us?”
“I don’t understand,” Rishi replied. “Sebastian, we’re willing to put everything on the line for everyone. That’s the heart of the agreement—us for everyone, for all of humanity.”
“We came this far,” Transom said, shaking his head and pointing to the crew. “We made the gesture. We walked into your little space-station deadfall, and Rishi closed the lid over us. I won’t be satisfied until you lot make a gesture. This is my demand. You want a partnership? Well, I want level footing—first. Not just for me, for all of us.”
“Do you have something in mind?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Nothing specific. I didn’t really think this through till now. Gut feeling. Let me think about it.”
“Would you like us to give you some time?” Rishi asked. “The fate of the galaxy is kind of at stake here.”
“Two million years,” Carolina stated coolly. “Sebastian has a point.”
“We’ll come back,” Rishi said. “Take the time you need.”
We were just about to push off from the table again, when Transom had a devilish look and a grin come across his face.
“Since you all won’t let me murder Clem or Omar, here’s my price. We run a POTT together. A real fat one.”
“Come again?” I asked.
“A POTT,” Fieldstone answered. “Primary Operational Tactical Test. It’s our word for a field test of a new team. Usually, a nice ripe, easy Trasp target that you wouldn’t normally waste a good ops team on. We try to send fresh ops units on missions like that to evaluate cohesion. Get feedback on how the unit operates with minimal risk of loss.”
“A live trainer, basically,” Transom added.
“What’s the objective?” I asked him.
“Here’s how it’s going to go. I’m going to give you all three names, and you are going to go get these people, no questions asked. Then I’m going to murder them.”
“Transom?” Fieldstone asked.
“That’s my price,” he stated to the room, then he turned toward Fieldstone. “How often do we operators get to call our shots? I owe a debt, and we’re going to clear it.”
“Could I have a word please, Sebastian?” Carolina said.
“Absolutely, boss,” he answered.
They floated off toward the flight deck. I looked around the table at our friends—at Ren, at Sōsh.
“Is he serious?” I asked them.
“Did he sound like he was joking?” Fieldstone asked.
“No he did not,” Rishi said.
“No he did not,” Fieldstone echoed back.
I looked over at Sōsh, and he shook his head and shrugged. Then Carolina and Transom floated back into the room.
“Are you going to sanction this?” I asked her before she’d even pulled herself back down to the table.
“Yes. I am,” she replied. “And I’m going to add a few more demands. We give you the names and you do this blind—no background checks, no backstory from us—as Sebastian said, no questions asked. Once we have them aboard the Y-C, you will have no say in the fates of these men.”
“I’ll give you a hint,” Transom said.
“Yeah, we got it,” I interrupted him. “You’re going to murder them.”
“I’ll save you one if you want, Burch. You can crush him between your thighs.”
He was still floating there near the head of the table. He hooked his ankles to each other and made a proper crunching noise as he brought his knees together. Fieldstone was shaking his head, and Sōsh started laughing.
“The other demand is that everyone takes part,” Carolina said. “Verona, Aballi, Nilius. Everyone has a part in it.”
“Mine is the actual murdering part,” Transom stated.
“What about Omar,” Rishi asked.
Carolina looked over at Transom, who shrugged.
“Send him back over if he’d like to rejoin us,” Carolina said. “He can take part as much or as little in the operation as he likes. I’d be happy to brief him. He’s taken enough on faith, I’d reckon.”
“I’ll let the others know, I guess,” I said. “Three random lives is a high cost to pay.”
“All depends on how random they are,” Carolina said. “We’ll await your response.”
Omar stuck around with us on the space station while we were deliberating. The debate, if you could call it that, didn’t last long.
“Three lives?” Aballi stated. “Even if they were the most innocent men to ever draw breath, weighed against the future enslavement and diminishment of all humankind? Sorry, boys, have a nice death.”
“I just don’t know what they’re playing at,” Rishi responded. “Yes, of course, if it’s the cost we have to pay, then we pay it. We can’t exactly replace them. It just strikes me as a kind of needless retaliation.”
“Yeah, shocking. So out of character for an Etteran,” Aballi stated.
Omar laughed, but then interjected. “I will say, as someone with the least amount of capital in this group—all borrowed capital at that, from my sister, I welcome the opportunity to ante up. I will be joining you to put in my stake. Ms. Dreeson strikes me as a circumspect and fair person, and I know I haven’t known her long, but I don’t believe she would sanction this mission if the names she intends to give us were unworthy of the fate that awaits them.
“At the cost of the universe and the human race, does anyone object?” I asked the group.
“Protocols prohibit me from direct participation in a murder conspiracy of one human, let alone three,” Nilius stated.
“Then I guess Rishi’s flying,” I said. “Where are we headed?”
“I’ve just pinged them,” Rishi replied.
It was a few moments more before Carolina must have sent the names back to Rishi directly.
“Okay, that’s interesting,” she said as soon as the names came back to her. “One of them is a magistrate. Another is a local businessman … a paltry reach. Very small time. And an even less significant … I don’t know what you would call him, a nobody? There’s no strategic interest here.”
“We weren’t supposed to go digging on their identities, Ship. That was the deal. Where are we headed?”
“The fleet city. Enuncium. Looks like they’re in transit between Pi-Kirea and Pi-Aeron. It’s a pretty quick jump that way.”
“Set a rendezvous, and then let’s go get these poor bastards,” Clem Aballi said. “Let’s clear this so we can get started on the real work.”
“These poor bastards may very well have it coming,” Omar said.
“Oh, they definitely do. Of that I have no doubt,” Aballi agreed. “But whatever they did to piss off that Etteran, well, they’re going to regret they were ever born. That’s for sure.”
It was a quick jump out to Pi-Aeron. The fleet city had only just arrived earlier in the day themselves and were still in the process of self-assembly after their transit. I’d never seen Enuncium before. We caught the end of the assembly process, as the ships were clamping together magnetically—a properly impressive feat of spacefaring, what seemed like a thousand ships all fitting into place and forming a lattice-like cylinder, that once assembled, began to spin as one tremendous unit.
“That’s quite a sight,” I remarked to Rishi and Nilius.
“That’s it right there,” Rishi stated. “The human flame. Genius idea, the creativity to build it, the engineering mastery, the logistical demands to keep the city moving in a direction that’s profitable.”
“And yet,” I added, “some three people in that mess of ships are about to have a very bad week.”
“Clem and Omar will be along shortly,” Rishi stated. “Let’s try and keep the editorializing to a minimum and get this done, Burch. I’ve already got a decent research file going. Everything public facing in their profiles still seems clean.”
“Not too many people have scumbag preprinted in bold lettering on their business profile, though, Ship. I’m sure we’ll figure it out by the end of this little operation.”
According to Rishi, the names all clustered together around one of the Enuncium ships—Radial-Helix N. Nilius refused to take part in any speculation about the operation, so Rishi and I strategized as we waited for Aballi, Verona, and Omar to show up.
The fleet city of Enuncium was a proper closed loop in there, city-wise, which meant there wasn’t a step we could take without being monitored, so when these fellas disappeared, whatever reach their law had, there’d certainly be a trail that led back to us and our ships.
“So they’re going to pick up Clem the second he tries to board, right?” I asked Rishi.
She shrugged and then shook her head at me. “You don’t think the Wizard of Athos has a trick or two for a scenario like this?”
“I know he can fool people,” I said. “Cameras and AIs, though, I’m skeptical.”
“I can fool either,” Rishi said confidently. “And with a disposable persona if need be. We should have a walk around, Burch, get a view from the inside.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was strange how normal the place seemed from the inside. After that display of almost magical astronautics when the fleet merged together, you almost expected a miracle around every corner once you got inside. Instead, the interior seemed utterly normal. Perhaps the only exception were the trams running down the central causeways of each ship. You don’t see that every day in a spaceship—even great lumbering vessels the size of interstellar freighters. Other than that, though, the place reminded me of every other port city in the Alphas or Betas. There were restaurants, grocers, tech distributors, and clothing outfitters—shops of all kinds. Rishi said there was supposedly a pretty good nightlife—lots of bars and clubs.
We didn’t talk much relating to strategy or anything, how best to pinch these guys or what have you. That was for after our little walkabout.
The one target we knew how to find for sure was the city magistrate. Rishi and I walked past the court wing—small on a ship of that size. We even got a look at the guy through the glass in the city offices. John Cole was his name. There wasn’t anything menacing or otherwise off in his outward appearance. He looked like a regular guy, but then again, you can’t always tell a true bastard by looking him in the face. But seeing his face like that made it real, that’s certain. John M. Cole, City Magistrate, Radial-Helix N. So read the lettering on the wall.
Rishi had a location on the offices for the businessman, a man named Marshall K. Stricha. We didn’t go in there, though. Rishi didn’t say anything about why not. She just shook her head at me and that was enough to indicate that something about that approach was ill advised. So we walked back to Nilius’s ship.
When we got back, Rishi got to work. She’d more or less figured out the whole operation while we were over there, even though she hadn’t said more than two words to me.
“Get some sleep, Burch,” she told me then. “I’ve got some work to do before the others arrive.”
It had been a long day, so I took that suggestion to heart, and by the time I woke up, both Clem and Omar had docked their ships, and Verona was shortly behind.
“What’s my role here, Ship?” I asked her, as it seemed she had already prepped the others for action on the plot before their arrival.
“I need you to deliver a crate, Burch.”
“A crate? That’s all?”
“That’s all for now.”
“What’s in the crate?” I asked her.
“Racing gear, or more properly, dummy gear.”
“Counterfeits and whatnot?”
“Exactly. Then, if all goes well, you’ll meet this Peters guy. He runs security operations for the businessman.”
“Am I supposed to get pinched and go before the judge or something?”
“No. Nothing that elaborate. Just don’t react if you recognize Clem.”
“Oh, I get it. We get into an altercation and Clem comes and touches him, does the old mindwarp on him, leads him back here?”
“To Verona’s ship, actually, but you’re getting the idea.”
“What about the others?”
“I’ll worry about them. You deliver the crate and argue with Peters. You’re just delivering goods. You don’t check the cargo. That’s all. Tell him that and leave the crate when Clem arrives. Then come back here. We’ll be long gone before anybody comes looking for you.”
It was a little less than two hours after that conversation before the whole operation began. I delivered the crate to this Stricha’s distributor, who asked me to wait. His job was to be suspicious, I guess, which was one of the troubles of doing business on a mobile city—suppliers who figured you were just making a single stop before pushing off again were apt to try and rip you off. I just shrugged at him while he disappeared with the crate. He came back a few minutes later scratching his head.
“That was supposed to be design specs and models for us to print,” the guy said. “You brought us a box with near a hundred copies of the same model. What do you expect us to do with that?”
“Sell them, I suppose,” I told him. “I don’t know. I just got told to deliver the crate.”
“My intake app didn’t even recognize that lading code, fella. I need to clear this with my boss. There’s something strange about this whole thing.”
“It’s Pi-Aeron. It’s the standard coding system, but whatever. You take all the time you want busting my balls about what’s in the crate. How the hell should I know?”
“Just wait,” the guy said.
Sure enough, that Serra Peters guy showed up a few minutes later. He and the first guy started having a conversation about me, just out of earshot, and the second they turned back toward me, Clem showed up. He was wearing a slightly different face, but I knew it was him by the eyebrows. When Serra Peters came over, I told him he could talk to my boss. Clem shook the guy’s hand, apologized for any confusion, and gave me a look—the get the hell out of here, Burch, look. So I did.
Fifteen minutes later, back on Nilius’s yacht, Rishi came down the top hatch wearing the guise of a teenage sex worker, and who should come stepping down cavalierly right behind her but City Magistrate John M. Cole. And by the time he got to the bottom of that hatch, I had a pretty good idea of what sort of men these three were.
He took one look at me and went white.
“Who are you?” he huffed at me. “Young lady—”
“She only looks young,” I said. “You know what they say about looks, though.”
“I don’t know who you think you are, fella.”
I knocked that judge clean out on the floor there. One good punch with my mech hand.
I didn’t know whether he deserved to die, but looking over at Rishi’s disguise, that little body she was wearing couldn’t have passed for much older than fourteen. He sure deserved the knock on the chin I gave him. I knew that much.
“I wasn’t going to listen to him yap,” I told Rishi, who morphed right back to her normal self. “How are the others doing?”
“On target. Secure him if you will, please, Burch. I’ll get us underway.”
A few minutes after we’d pushed off, Rishi got word that Omar had Serra Peters on his ship inside that crate, and Clem had delivered Marshall K. Stricha to Verona in about the same condition as I’d left the judge. I wasn’t entirely sure of the As and Bs of the deception they’d leveled on those guys, but I guess Clem must have disguised himself as Peters to Stricha or something like that. Regardless, Transom had given us three names, and we were en route to deliver him three very sorry-looking future corpses. That thought got me to thinking I’d done that judge too much of a favor knocking him out.
Then again, I wasn’t going to listen to that weasel yap for one second.
Our next rendezvous was another sixteen hours after we left Enuncium. Not a lot was said. We were comfortable with the assumptions we’d made about those three, based on what Rishi had figured out about the judge. I could tell she knew more, but she wasn’t sharing.
For their part, none of Carolina’s crew had much to say either. It was all coordinating the delivery of the three condemned.
When that was done, Carolina pinged us. We weren’t sure how she knew—guessed probably—but she knew that Nilius hadn’t taken part in the abductions. So she demanded to see him. The agreement had been that we all had to pitch in—put something on the line. Nilius was over on the Yankee-Chaos for nearly eight hours after that. We didn’t press them for any updates either, just figuring we’d best let it play out.
When he finally returned, Nilius told us that Carolina had set another rendezvous. Rishi wasn’t happy about it—another delay. But the meetup was about as central a spot in space as it could have been, seeing as we were all going in different directions afterward. Where Carolina and Transom were taking those men, Nilius wouldn’t exactly say. Transom must’ve had something much more elaborate in mind than just spacing those bastards, though.
“We’ve got a fast ship,” I suggested. “We could get a stop in at Port Cullen and still make the rendezvous.”
“We could also stand to be discrete, Burch,” Nilius said, “considering our recent activities.”
So we headed in the direction of the next rendezvous instead, lying low, making stops at several systems along the way to take in as much news on the Trasp offensive as we could. They were hitting systems as deep as the Kappas and Gammas, which was pretty much unheard of to that point in the war.
“Are they trying to get the Letters in against them?” I remarked to Nilius during one update.
“I suspect they’re more interested in the next few dominoes after that,” he replied.
I spent a lot of the time that week reading about the various attacks and counterattacks. Many of the systems in the Alphas and Betas had put up a nasty defense. They’d bloodied some Trasp noses was the common theme—way worse than usual. I had to say, it was good to hear from my perspective as a Letters man.
I didn’t hear anything about the Deltas, which meant they were probably leaving all those vacant systems alone, which was all right by my reckoning.
Rishi, during all that time floating and waiting, still wouldn’t tell me what the plan was for when the others got there. No special treatment for Burch, I guess.
Omar was the first to arrive at the rendezvous, which was a relief, seeing as he was flying a Trasp ship—pretty much shoot on sight if he got sighted. Shortly thereafter, Clem and Verona jumped in. And finally, the Yankee-Chaos arrived and pinged us all. They were minus three passengers.
“Enjoy your murdering, Sebastian?” I asked him.
“Burch,” he said back over the open channel. “I never thought I’d say this, but some things are just as—no, scratch that—some things are nearly as satisfying as murdering a bunch of degenerates who have it coming.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked him. “You didn’t kill those guys?”
“Talk to the robot,” he suggested. “All that’s in the past, though. We’re all square. I think Captain Dreeson would like to put that business behind us.”
“Very well,” Rishi answered. “Let’s talk next moves. I’ve prepared briefing packets for everyone. We’ll be splitting up as soon as we’re done here. Standby for the details.”
It was a lot of dead time for me and Nilius, as Rishi was really the architect, answering questions as they came in. I had half an ear on those conversations, but mostly, I was satisfied that Rishi had put me on the right path.
“So, old man,” I asked Nilius at one point, “what’s your role in all this, would you say?”
“Spark,” was all he said back.
I thought he might say something further, but instead we just ended up floating there in silence for a while before I couldn’t take the silence.
“I got the impression that Carolina didn’t let Transom kill those men after all. And since he said to ask about it, I’m guessing whatever did happen had something to do with the time you spent over on the Yankee-Chaos before they split with those creeps.”
“Ever perceptive, Burch,” Nilius replied.
“So what were you doing over there, old man?”
“I suppose you could say I was engineering false hope. It was Ms. Dreeson’s belief that karmically speaking, a triple homicide was not the appropriate way to christen this endeavor of ours—seeing as our goal here is to keep the human spirit burning perpetually bright.”
“Sensible enough,” I said, nodding.
“Quite right. She has an able mind, like her father. And, well, it’s an attribute that runs deep in that family—roots all the way back to Charris.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Sebastian agreed with her. He felt that killing those men was too quick and too lenient a punishment for such awful humans, who were, as you suspected, trafficking young girls and indenturing them into the sex trade. Vile men, all three of them. So he devised a different torture for them than the usual clumsy hammer to the knee or lopping of parts that Major Pollack would usually employ.”
“You better just give me the details, old man, because now I have no idea what to make of that.”
“Of course, Burch. It happened that Transom knew of an ice planet so teeth-chatteringly cold that humans can hardly breathe the air there without a helmet or a rebreather. Apparently, it was a former outpost in vacant territory past the outer Alphas and the boundary systems on the far side of Etteran space.”
“Basically nowhere.”
“Correct,” Nilius agreed. “Simply dumping those men there would have been a punishment, no doubt. But had they simply dumped them there, those men wouldn’t have made it very long before giving up hope and simply walking out onto the ice sheets to put an end to their misery. There was a ship down there. Sebastian thought it might fly with a few months’ work. And there was enough power from the base’s generator to charge up the transceiver aboard it to call for help. Sebastian employed my services to turn both pieces of technology into unsolvable puzzles that would never seem obviously unsolvable.”
“What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“Both the ship and the transceiver will seem fixable, Burch. If those men have any technological capability at all, they will sink all their efforts into repairing a ship that will never fly and a communications module that will never ping another soul. False hope.”
“While their frozen nuts chatter together all day and night.”
“A colorful way of putting it, Burch.”
“Hmmph. How long you reckon the food’ll last for them?” I asked Nilius.
“Sebastian thought the outpost was built to house a twelve-person unit. He thought if all three held out hope, they could last at least a decade on what was on the shelves in the outpost. That’s if their quest to repair the ship doesn’t drive them mad first.”
“I do not know what to say about that, old man. It’s like …” I couldn’t find the right way to describe it. “Who the hell would come up with a thing like that but Transom?”
“Indeed. That is not the end either. I didn’t tell you what the planet’s name was, Burch.”
“No, I don’t think you did.”
“Priam. The name of the Trojan king from the Iliad. Poetic, mythical, and ruthless from every angle. I do believe your Etteran friend is some form of sadistic genius.”
“That human flame,” I quipped.
“Certainly one shade of it.”
“Well, all this talk of starvation and freezing to death got me thinking about a cup of tea and a pouch of noodles,” I told Nilius.
“We are well provisioned, Burch,” Nilius replied. “Well stocked for the road ahead.”