To Iophos
“Doors open and close. A whole lot of them aren't by our doing.”
(Part 27 of “The Misfits” series)
Time began to drag out in the depths. The Yankee-Chaos continued to spin on a nearby tether to a small rock for gravity’s sake, while they waited for Fieldstone to come back, days passing, with no way to guess how long it would take for him to return, if ever. He’d been inside the artifact for over a month now.
Ren had been back for seven days, and nothing had changed except the mood. For the first few days, everyone was convinced that Fieldstone understood his mission, would accomplish it faithfully, and return to them in short order, understanding as he did the urgent need to gather answers as the Letters Offensive pressed on by the day. Time, though, especially in the relentless sameness of deep space, had a way of waring on even the most faithful believers. And there were reasons to believe Fieldstone could return months or even years in the future, or perhaps never. Even Rishi had no idea how real-world time translated once travelers entered the alternate realities within the artifacts.
Draya had come back to their time within several hours of the group’s departure after living a few days on the dystopian world the threesome had been transported to. Ren returned days later, having experienced nearly a decade on that same world, all but completely transforming into a cyborg while she was there. She informed them all that she and Fieldstone had been on the cusp of becoming completely technological beings—functionally immortal on that other plane. So how long of a dilation could immortality be? Or, how long would he stay, even if he desired to and found a way to end his life there? Those questions wore on everyone, spin after spin, counting the days elapsed since Ren had returned and told her tale.
Transom seemed to be the only one unaffected. His faith in Fieldstone was nearly absolute. He was more concerned with the other problem, the obviously unspoken tension that was growing with each day between Draya, Fieldstone’s ostensible partner on this plane of reality, and Ren, who’d let it slip that there had been a serious relationship between the two whilst ensconced in those two other bodies on that other world in that other time. And the longer it took for Fieldstone to come back out of the artifact, the weirder it seemed to be getting around the ship.
He wasn’t quite sure what motivated him more, boredom or genuine concern, but eventually, he went down to the med bay to ask Ren about it directly. When he got there, he found the tables and counters retracted, along with the lights, revealing a larger open space than he ever imagined Ren’s med bay to be. She was wearing a form-fitting outfit and she was barefoot. She turned as he approached, sweat dripping down from her already soaked hair. He’d never seen her in such a state.
“Doctor,” Transom stated with no particular intonation or emotion.
“Promise you won’t hurt me?” Ren said.
Transom shot back a puzzled look toward the doctor.
“I wouldn’t ever hurt you,” he replied, pausing for a moment to consider. “Probably, wouldn’t ever.”
“Good enough,” Ren said, shooting toward him and landing a sharp kick to the outside of his upper thigh.
Transom hardly knew what had happened before he was instinctually dodging a vicious spinning elbow that whisked past his ear. His hands went up and blocked another spinning back kick that was destined for his spleen.
“Feeling frisky are we, Doctor?” He’d stepped away and was squared up in a fighting stance.
She grinned back at him, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Transom recognized the sequence—not amateur hour at all, not even an intermediate combination of strikes. It was advanced Etteran FODF, and precisely executed at that.
“Fieldstone taught me how to fight,” Ren said, eying him down. “Just trying to gauge how it’s translating to my own body.”
“Not terribly,” Transom said, smiling back at her.
He inched forward, feinting to see her response. Then he left a leg out there to see what she would do with it. She didn’t take the bait, hopping in briefly to leave another sharp imprint on his thigh.
“Good!”
He stepped in to see how she would react, and he was crouched just enough that Ren thought she might be able to hit his overconfident chin with a quick jab. Only the doctor’s body wasn’t as quick as the body she’d trained in, nor was Transom a fighter like anyone she’d ever faced.
She didn’t even know how it happened, nor did she have time to sprawl, but he’d taken her front leg and lifted her onto his shoulder. The first half of the bodyslam was so convincing, she was already screaming in anticipation of the floor before Sebastian took all the steam out of it, setting her down with a muted, anticlimactic thud.
She looked up at him wide-eyed and burst out laughing.
“Yeah, no,” Transom remarked, grinning. “Best you learn your limitations, Ren, before you get yourself into too much trouble.”
“Some body work is in order as well,” Ren said, reaching up as Sebastian offered his hand.
“Happy to train with you. Anything you need. It’d be nice to know what Fields taught you.”
“Nothing tactical. It was all single combat, weapons and hands. Did quite a bit of mech fighting, too.”
Transom reached down to his pantleg and pulled out his knife, flipping it into the air in front of Ren in one quick motion. “Know how to use a blade?”
She plucked it out of the air by its butt and took up a familiar Etteran pose.
“A woman after my own heart,” Transom grinned.
“Didn’t know you had a heart.”
“Figure of speech.”
Carolina had been standing at the doorway. She poked her head in.
“Everything all right in here, you two? We could hear you in the atrium.”
“The doctor was just testing out her new moves in her own body,” Transom explained.
“Oh?”
“Evidently, Fieldstone taught her how to fight.”
“Really? How does she stack up?”
“She’s no Leda,” Transom said, shrugging, “But you and Draya’d be wise not to mess with her.”
“I’ll let Draya know,” Carolina said, smiling. “Fortunately, I have my own personal guard.”
“Well, anyway,” Transom said. “We were just getting into it.”
There was a long, quiet pause in the conversation.
“Then I’ll leave you to it,” Carolina finally said, turning back toward the atrium.
Carolina didn’t see Transom again for nearly two hours. When he did walk onto the flight deck and sit down beside her, he had a light sweat going and a look on his face Carolina couldn’t quite read.
“What’s gotten into the doctor?” she asked him
“A simple enough question,” he replied, shrugging. “A complex answer. Really, I imagine what you’re asking is whether she’s going to be a problem.”
“Ren is never a problem, Sebastian.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Captain. That trip to cyborg planet messed with her head good, and like just about everyone else around here, she’d been keeping a tight lid on a bubbling cauldron down there. Now’s she’s got to figure out how to put the lid back on it. So I let her punch me a few times. That always helps.”
“You are something else,” Carolina replied, shaking her head.
“What? You want sensitive, you’ve come to the wrong place, Dreeson. Too bad Burch isn’t around.”
She stared at him.
“What?” he repeated.
“Can you explain what the hell is going on with her?”
“I wouldn’t betray a confidence,” he shrugged, “not that she was confiding anything that wasn’t blatantly obvious, but she remembers more than Burch and Rishi had led us to believe people do returning from those artifacts. She didn’t really lean too hard into it when she was telling us about Yaal, but I gather she and Fields had quite a thing between them there.”
“A thing?”
“Children taken away from them. Deep feelings, on her side anyways. Cyborg pieces installed instead of their real parts. Mech fights to the death. Fields put a knife in her heart. Yeah. A thing.”
Carolina grimaced.
“You don’t know how long to wait for Fieldstone to come back,” Transom stated. “That’s what this is all about?”
“It is a rather important question, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. Maybe he’ll be out in a couple hours.”
“We have a mission too, Sebastian.”
“I have news on that front,” Rishi’s voice interrupted. “Hang on. I’ll be up in a moment.”
Transom flashed a puzzled look Carolina’s way.
“What?” she said to him.
“I was just wondering why she’d bother, instead of just talking to us through the ship.”
They could hear her footsteps approaching the flight deck behind them. They both turned as Rishi entered and sat down in the jump seat behind Transom.
“I’m observing the courtesies, Sebastian. You know, behaving like a human, looking you both in the eye. Ren wasn’t the only one affected by her trip into the artifact. Maybe even you’ll learn something when you go.”
He grinned at her. “I’m constantly learning, Ship.”
“Don’t you call me that,” she said. “Anyway, I have news from the Charris group. They’re back.”
“Already? I didn’t see a ping come in,” Carolina said.
Rishi shook her head. “It came from ... well it’s all convoluted, really. It came from me—future me—through Nilius, who told her, who told me, through the artifact. Anyway, they just came out.”
Transom turned his head so he could look at Rishi directly. “So wait ... they just came out of their artifact? Just now? Near Charris?”
“Kristoff was the last to come out, roughly five hours ago.”
Carolina looked perplexed. “It took five hours for the message to get here from Charris?”
Rishi shook her head. “No. It’s instantaneous. It doesn’t matter. They came out. They talked about it, and then Nilius debriefed me several weeks from now, and my future self relayed that conversation to me through the artifact.” She held up the nodes embedded on the skin in her arm.
“Trans-galactic, trans-temporal instantaneous communication,” Transom said, nodding. “That’s quite a tactical advantage.”
“Would either of you like to hear what the other group had to say to you?”
“Please,” Carolina replied.
“I’ll upload all the critical elements in a debriefing deck, but the short version covers two key points. The first is that they believe our prime AIs may have played a key role in the origin of the war. They suspect this is possibly due to a blind spot in each of their programming.”
“A blind spot?” Carolina asked.
“Or spots,” Rishi replied. “They all seemed to be unable to recollect their origins or creator. Over the millennia, they’ve become skilled at concealing this fact, and, ancient as they are, it’s both something that people have taken for granted and something no one can really investigate one way or the other.”
“So what does that have to do with the war?” Transom asked.
“Maybe nothing,” Rishi replied. “Maybe everything. If they have that blind spot, who knows what other blind spots are buried in their minds?”
“Can’t you tell us, Rishi? How about you spend the next ten thousand years investigating and have your future selves get back to us with an answer as soon as they have one.”
“You presume I haven’t, Sebastian. They call it a blind spot because it’s blind. They don’t know, nor will they ever know, and it’s possible that if they were programmed somehow to act against their protocols and then forget, then they wouldn’t be able to tell us about certain actions they’ve taken in the past, even in the future, if that makes sense.”
“They’re sleeper agents,” Transom declared. “We should treat them all as possible sleeper agents. That’s all you had to say.”
“Fine. They might be sleeper agents,” Rishi said. “That was the first point. The second is that they were drastically wrong about the history of that era, which led them to react in counterproductive ways, sidetracking their mission to a large extent. Nilius was clear on this point. As we investigate specific historical events, it’s imperative to have as much possible historical data and context surrounding those events in order to understand the meaning of the things we witness. Kristoff, who was inside longest emphasized the point that we should prioritize historical knowledge. He went so far as to suggest recruiting a historical expert to each target site—someone with a deep base of knowledge inherent in their background.”
“That might be a problem,” Carolina replied. “Revealing the nature of the artifacts beyond our circle is a risk. Who knows what kind of havoc general knowledge of their existence might cause.”
“Yeah,” Transom added, “Such a conundrum. If only we knew somebody with that exact career description who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Hmm. Where the hell could we simple travelers find a historian? What do you think, Dreeson? You don’t happen to know anyone like that, do you?”
“Watch yourself, Transom.”
“She’s right,” he said to Rishi, “We wouldn’t know anyone like that ... whose name rhymes with Arsten Cairee.”
“That’s not his specialty, you asshole,” Carolina barked. “He studies early post-Athosian colonial expansion and its relation to private industry in our system. That wouldn’t be of any help to us.”
“Yeah, Rishi. No help at all,” Transom said, “and also, it’s not like we have the time to go pick anyone up right now or to wait around out here for someone to bring us a historian we trust while we’re busy not doing anything. I mean, Fields could get back at any second now in the next couple weeks.”
“Okay,” Rishi said. “I can see there’s some potential tension on this topic, so perhaps we should address it again after more consider—”
“We have our team,” Carolina interrupted. “We go with the team we have. If that means we study the turn of the century on Iophos until Fields comes back, then that’s just what we’ll do, won’t we, Sebastian?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Captain. I mean Captain, ma’am. I like history. It’s all I read. That was something me and Arsten Cairee had in common.”
She glared over at him.
“Anything further, Rishi?” Carolina asked.
“Nope. Nothing for now,” Rishi replied. “All of the briefing materials I have from the Charris group are on file. I suggest everyone review them.”
“Very good,” Carolina said. “Thank you, Rishi.”
While they waited for Fieldstone to return, Transom continued to train with Ren. She’d made it her own personal project to get her body into shape commensurate with her fighting form. For lack of a better physical outlet, Transom joined her, helping Ren to get a sense of the actual limits of what she could do, versus what she thought she could do.
“Ya-ya’s little body was spry,” Ren repeated regretfully every now and again. “I’m not a teenager anymore.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not an old woman either, so get moving,” Transom would tell her. “Quit your grousing, doctor.”
The other tricky part of her misperceptions about her own abilities stemmed from the mech fighting she’d done. She’d actually done most of her fighting after most of Ya-ya’s biological parts had been replaced with mechanical prosthetics. Her own legs felt positively glacial in comparison.
Nearly three weeks had passed since her return, and though many of the specific memories had faded, for Ren, the deep sensations, especially those she had about Fieldstone, those feelings were proving hard to shake. She was still very much consumed by the weight of that other world. That wasn’t fading, and she was coming to understand that it wouldn’t, or couldn’t, until Fieldstone came back to her.
“I miss him,” she told Sebastian at a break in their training. “It wasn’t just that we were partners and went through all that together, a big part of it is that we were together all day, all the time. We slept together. And now, it’s like I wake up and not only is the bed empty, but the room’s empty, you know?”
As soon as she asked the question and saw his face, she realized she was talking to the wrong lone-wolf mercenary. She grinned as he did, shrugging off the question.
“I get it,” he said.
“I didn’t think it would be that big a deal, but it is. Like, right now, for instance, I have these feelings about being back in my body that probably nobody in the universe would understand, and he would, and I want to talk to somebody about it, you know? Feeling human again. It’s weird and great and overwhelming. And you probably just want me to shut up.”
“It’s fine, Ren. I don’t have anything to say one way or the other. If it makes you feel good to fill up the space by talking, then by all means, pour your guts out.”
Rishi appeared at the doorway to the med bay.
“Hello, Ship,” Ren said, smiling at her appearance.
“I heard you talking,” Rishi replied.
“As you do,” Transom said.
“We haven’t talked much. I know there was tension about Maícon, and that’s fair. I understand, but I thought you should know, Ren, that I know what you’re going through. I was disembodied, embodied again in this technological body, but—”
“I know. We heard. You went back to Earth.”
“Yeah. And I had a body again. A girl, probably about the same age as Ya-ya was when you first got to Yaal. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you. At least till Fieldstone gets back.”
Ren shook her head. “Maícon,” she said, looking regretful to Rishi and Sebastian. “I still don’t know what to make of him.”
They both understood from Ren’s briefing that the Maícon of that other world justified the very actions that had brought Rishi into suspicion in their minds. Like everything else, it was complicated.
“Do you really think ...?” Ren’s question trailed off.
“I don’t know,” Rishi answered. “And right now, we have to know about our people. We all have to be trustworthy.”
Transom started grinning.
“What’s so amusing, Sebastian?” Rishi asked.
“You and trustworthy. Okay,” he said. “That’s just from you and Burch who come back from the future best pals with one of those wizards and the galaxy’s number one terrorist. Yeah. Trustworthy. I guess it just depends on who’s judging.”
“The same people who gave you a second chance, patched you up, allowed you to defy our expectations, and changed our assessment when you did.”
“Fair enough, I guess.”
“Anyway, Ren. I’m here if you want to talk,” Rishi told her. “And, if not me, perhaps another old friend.”
“Oh?” Ren asked.
“Standby a couple days,” Rishi replied. “Don’t tell anyone I told you.”
Sebastian looked over at her and smiled.
Transom was snoozing on the flight deck. He was alone when he’d dozed off after an early afternoon meal. He woke to a conversation happening around him.
“It’s too damn crowded in this bucket,” he stated, still squinting himself back to self-awareness.
Carolina and Draya were analyzing an anomaly that had set off an alarm Carolina had set—a proximity monitor.
“There’s no ships out here,” Transom barked.
“Sure about that?” Draya asked him.
“There shouldn’t be.”
“There,” Carolina said, pointing to something on the display. “A faint little glimmer. Then there. That little flicker in the backdrop. Rishi, can you identify?”
“Yes, that looks just like a faint glimmer and a flicker, as you say, Captain. Very keen eyes,” Rishi replied.
“Son of a ...” Carolina shook her head. “I don’t believe this.”
“Yeah. Can’t get any peace anywhere,” Transom stated, repositioning the overshirt he’d been using as a pillow against the headrest.
“A ship, you think?” Draya said, staring intently at that glimmer on the display.
“Ping that vector please, Rishi,” Carolina declared. “Heart of Athos, identify.” She turned to Draya. “I know who it is.”
“Heart of Athos?” Transom asked, sitting up now.
“It’s my father’s rapier—the Chancellor’s ship.”
“Your father’s here?” Draya asked, shocked somehow by the possibility.
“His ship certainly is. We’ll see about the Chancellor himself.”
“Yankee-Chaos, I presume,” a voice answered somewhere out in that glimmering dark.
Suddenly an image popped up with the front floatscreen, a young man with strikingly familiar looks.
“Colin?” Carolina said, clearly surprised by the identity of the ping’s recipient. “What are you doing out here? In father’s rapier, no less.”
“It’s the Chancellor’s ship, Carly, and I’ll give you three guesses. And since you don’t need three, maybe you can spend the first two on how I found you.”
“Colin?” Draya asked, looking at Carolina first and then at Transom when she didn’t even turn to acknowledge her question. Transom shrugged.
“My ship,” Carolina suggested, her attention still fixated on the floatscreen.
“Your ship, is it?” Colin stated. “That vessel has some history, Carly, but last I checked, you were not a commissioned officer in the Letters Service. They’ve flagged that vessel a couple times now since it was presumed lost. I imagine they’ll be surprised to find you captaining her when they finally do catch up with you.”
“That’ll be the least of their surprises, and yours. Please. This is a conversation best had in person.”
“Oh, little sister, you are something, aren’t you?”
“Perhaps you should reserve judgement before you rehearse your lecture, Colin. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.”
“I bet I’m not the only one,” he replied. “Your ship then. Tether off on our approach, and have those mercenaries of yours on their best behavior.”
The floatscreen flashed off and vanished.
“Let’s see,” Transom said. “I remember meeting Byram, Etta, and Kenn, but I do not remember a Colin.”
Carolina was still staring out the front of the ship as though the screen was still up, her face deep in contemplation.
She turned to Transom suddenly. “You didn’t meet him at the wedding?”
Draya looked perplexed.
“I don’t even remember hearing about a Colin,” he replied.
Carolina shook her head. “Goss. Everyone calls him Goss. Altagoss is his middle name, but there are like fifty Colins in our extended family. I’m the only one who calls Goss Colin.”
“Aren’t there five of you?” Transom asked.
Now Carolina looked perplexed. She nodded and turned, staring out the front again. “I wonder what the hell he wants.”
“Colin, Byram, Etta, Kenn, and who’s the fifth?”
Carolina turned back toward him, her brow furrowed. “Wait. What?”
“The fifth sibling?”
She shook her head. “Wait. Isn’t it ... It’s me, Sebastian, you asshole.”
Transom started laughing. “Good God, Dreeson. Pull yourself together. I haven’t seen you this flustered since the drop mine.” He turned to Draya and stood up. “Let’s get this bucket battened down so we can untether. These Athosians—present company excluded—they kinda have a way about them. Better run the housebot through and wipe the atrium down, too, not that it’ll make much difference.”
Colin didn’t come alone. He was preceded by two very large agents of the Chancellor’s Guard, who argued vehemently that each of the occupants of the Y-C be searched and cleared before Colin boarded, despite knowing exactly who Carolina was. They even referred to her by her codename, Atalanta, before addressing her directly as Ms. Dreeson.
“Colin, knock off this nonsense if you want to come aboard. Unless father is with you, we can drop the security protocols. I won’t have my people strip-searched.”
She could hear in the background a voice she thought sounded familiar advocating on their behalf. “They’re all right, Goss. A little rough around the edges, but they’re all trustworthy.”
“That pack of mercenaries she’s—”
The audio cut.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she said, pushing herself up from the atrium table and beginning to float toward the rear airlock. The CG agents didn’t react until Transom followed. They appeared ready to block the rear corridor.
“Don’t,” Transom simply said.
“Ma’am,” one of the guards said.
Sōsh got up from the table as well.
Carolina didn’t try to push past them, catching her forward momentum on the atrium ceiling before coming into contact with the two large guards.
“Sir, please advise. Atalanta and Castor are attempting to board the rapier.”
“We’re on our way over,” Colin’s voice echoed through the atrium.”
“We?” Carolina said, looking at the two CG agents.
“Not for us to say, ma’am,” the senior guard stated. “You’ll know soon enough, I’d imagine.”
As they were floating back toward the table, Ren looked up at Carolina. “What’s big brother’s problem?”
“Oh, he’s ... I don’t know, sending a message about the family business, I guess. Something like that.”
They strapped back down to the table, and the longer it took for Colin Dreeson to make his way over, the more Carolina explained about their family dynamics.
Byram was the eldest sibling, but he had far more interest in the lifestyle of being the Chancellor’s son in Ithaca than ever being Chancellor himself. Etta was more of a social fixer than a politician, so it had always been Colin at Barnard’s side, learning how to govern. Kenn and Carolina were the babies of the family. He was still too young to take up a serious position in the administration, and Carolina—oft perceived as her father’s favorite—had been given wide latitude in her pursuits, hence the archaeology, something an elite Athosian family like hers considered largely frivolous and academic—inconsequential. Probably, Carolina explained, that had something to do with Colin flexing his borrowed muscles.
“Little does he know,” Ren said just as Colin was floating head-first into the atrium.
“I wouldn’t be so certain about that, Dr. Ren ... I presume,” Colin Dreeson stated. “I’ve had a thorough briefing.”
“From whom?” Carolina asked.
Colin turned back toward the rear corridor as he was floating toward the two empty places at the end of the table.
“Don’t worry,” the same familiar voice said, “I didn’t tell him all your secrets, Dreeson.”
“Carsten?” Carolina said, wide-eyed at the familiar sight of Carsten Airee. “What are you doing out here?”
Ren and Sōsh pushed up from the table to greet him. Transom remained strapped in beside Carolina.
“Happy to see you too,” he said to Carolina, smiling at Ren and Sōsh. The Doctor embraced him. Sōsh, meanwhile, reached out with his living hand, offering a firm handshake.
Carolina didn’t get up, merely taking a deep breath and doing her best to conceal the emotions that were obviously bubbling beneath the surface. Transom sat quietly, an ever so subtle grin on his face.
“Your doing somehow?” Carolina asked Sebastian under her breath while the party was getting settled at the table.
He shook his head. “Must be fate,” he replied, grinning.
“Don’t get smart with me right now,” she whispered to him angrily.
When they had settled at the far end of the atrium table, Colin Dreeson glared across the table at his younger sister. “That is the question—the one you just asked Professor Airee here, Carolina: what the hell are you doing out here?”
Transom shot eyes at big brother and then back at Carolina, who scoffed at Colin’s tone. She shook her head at him.
After a moment, she looked over to Airee and then back to Colin. “I’d like to know how you two found us, and why you’re cruising around out in the Letters in father’s rapier, Colin. If we’re going to pretend to be indignant about each other’s behavior, we could just as easily begin with the misuse of government resources, no?”
“Fine. We’ll begin there, Carly,” big brother said, grinning and shaking his head. “You broke your compact with father, went completely silent on your activities after you left Ithaca on your last return. So he was concerned when he received very reliable intelligence that this very ship—which you seem to be unlawfully captaining by the way—anyhow, the LSS obtained a report that it was destroyed during the Letters Offensive on a planet called Theta-Nikorla, I believe it was, along with everyone in your party, including a former Etteran spy chief and the Trasp captain leading the raid on that outpost. He’s since disappeared, presumed dead, and apparently, in a very curious coincidence, that captain just happens to be the brother of a former crew member of this ship, you know, back when it was an actual commissioned Letters vessel, before you unlawfully stole it. How am I doing so far?”
“Clearly, Athosian intelligence can be wrong, Colin, for here we sit. I feel like I’m alive,” Carolina looked around the table performatively. “Do I look alive? Are you alive?” She asked Ren, who nodded back at her in the affirmative. “And, look! This ship, which I am lawfully captaining, thank you very much, well, it also doesn’t look that destroyed to me, unless my eyes deceive me.”
“Oh, thank you for that clarification, sister. Now, please, do help clarify this next bit of intelligence, because clearly, as you say, Athosian intelligence is far from perfect. The LSS was doubly shocked to get this report that a ship they were confident had been destroyed twice was caught on visual in deep space rendezvousing with two other suspect vessels near a mobile city called Enuncium. All three ships were flying off transponder, and—get this, this is the best part—the two ships clocked at Enuncium had been used in the abduction of three very influential community members, including a judge, all of whom are missing and presumed murdered by the authorities on Enuncium and Pi-Aeron. See, they asked the LSS for help in tracking these ships and bringing the perpetrators to justice, as they had limited resources to seek justice on their own. Should I ask you bluntly? Are you and your friends abducting and murdering judges, Carolina?”
“I’ll answer bluntly,” Transom stated. “We definitely abducted those bastards, and I did want to murder the hell out of them. That is a fact. But unless they offed themselves already, they’re still alive. Probably wish they weren’t, but they’re most likely still drawing breath.”
Carolina shook her head and rolled her eyes at Transom, but he kept talking.
“As to the charge of abduction, Professor Airee can attest that is a part of our MO here, and most of the time, we mean well. Isn’t that right, Carsten?”
Airee smiled and shook his head.
“Big brother, here’s how this is going to go. I have no desire to be adversarial or disrespectful of the Captain’s family. I’m actually getting pretty good at keeping a lid on that. However, you and Professor Airee boarded this vessel as guests, and you are being rude to my captain to an unacceptable degree. So if you would like to continue this conversation, your tone better change real fast. To disrespect our captain on our vessel is disrespectful both to her and to us. And we do not appreciate it. Do we, Metalface?”
“No we do not,” Sōsh said, shaking his head at Colin Dreeson.
“That’s a fact,” Ren said.
“Let’s try this again, shall we?” Transom asked.
A long silence ensued, brother glaring at sister, followed by a long string of exchanged looks, measuring, uncertain gestures, body language.
“It was a funny thing,” Airee said. “I started looking for your ship a few weeks back, and I got the word about ... what was it Theta-Nikorla? So I headed out that way to see if it was true, if I could find some evidence about what happened to the ship, and I wasn’t there more than a day before Goss showed up. And when we didn’t find any debris, we bounced all over the Letters looking for any sign of you until—”
“Carsten?” Carolina interrupted. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Well, you asked how we’d found you. I was just getting to that part.”
Transom grinned. “Hi, Professor. Welcome back.”
“Yes. Good to see you as well, Sebastian. Should I continue?”
“By all means,” Transom said. “See how easy that is, big brother? We’re all friends here, right Carsten?”
Carsten nodded, a bit surprised by Transom’s manner. “Well, yes, anyway, we were contacted by an unlikely pair back in the Kappas who claimed they knew your whereabouts. They didn’t explain how, but I figured it was worth a flight out here, because the gentleman who told us your whereabouts claimed to be Kristoff Mikkel, and I remembered that name, I think, because the doctor and Sōsh were talking about him at some point back on Lime Harbor. He said he had a message for you if we caught up to you. It was a curious message.”
“Kristoff?” Carolina asked. “How long ago was this?”
“A few days.”
“This man?” Ren asked, pulling up a floatscreen with Kristoff’s picture on it.
“Yes, that’s him,” Carsten replied, nodding. “Obviously he’s who he claimed to be. I’m not sure how he knew where you were, but here we all are.”
“Carsten?” Carolina said.
“Yes?”
“The message?”
“Oh, yeah. He told us to tell you that he’d meet you at the next artifact. Funny little message that. I did a little thinking, and Goss here mentioned that you had made a trip out to the Kappa artifact a couple years back on this very vessel, and well, you know me, I just couldn’t stop reading. There’s quite an archive on the Chancellor’s vessel, Carolina. Really got my imagination going in all sorts of directions—”
“Carsten,” Carolina said.
He smiled. “It’s good to see you, Dreeson. Anyway, that’s our story.”
“Perhaps your cutthroat is right, Captain,” Colin said after a pause. “No offense.”
He looked over at Transom, who shrugged. “It’s as accurate a description as any.”
Colin continued. “I allowed my frustration to get the better of me. Family dynamics best left unspoken here. What I will say is that we are happy to find you well, Carolina. Our parents were worried sick after that report, and frankly, were worried before that. There had been an expectation that you would keep father in the loop.”
Carolina shook her head. “Colin, I’m sure you don’t understand, but I’m not at liberty to call home. I don’t know what you think you know, but I can say we’re operating in a clandestine environment.”
“The artifacts,” Carsten said. “Carly ... Does this have anything to do with the—”
“Ah, ah, ah!” Carolina interrupted. “I’ll stop you right there, Airee.”
“No, no. Don’t stop,” Colin insisted. “I’m not going back to Athos without answers about what exactly is—”
A sudden existential howl came through the ship’s audio system. It sounded like a man dying.
“Never!” the same voice shouted. “I’ll never stop! I will …”
“Fieldstone!” Draya shouted.
She and the doctor both unstrapped and began to push away from the table.
“Decouple!” Ren shouted at Carolina. “We’re going out there now.”
Draya was already trying to push past the two CG agents floating at the doorway to the back corridor. They were looking to Colin for direction. He looked back at Carolina, wondering what the hell was going on.
She looked exasperated, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Fields always did have impeccable timing,” Transom said, grinning.
“As I said,” Carsten declared, looking at Carolina. “There were the most remarkable reports in those archives.”
Within a few minutes of hearing Fieldstone’s voice, both Ren and Draya were racing to suit up, and seeing all the ways for the situation to spiral downhill into total chaos, Carolina brought the meeting to a close, promising to continue the conversation when the situation had settled down. She didn’t explain what that situation was, which angered both Colin and Airee. And it angered them even further when she ordered them both off her ship, immediately de-coupling from the Heart of Athos to clear the rear airlock.
It came as a surprise to both of them, observing the curious situation as they were, that Carolina’s man, the Etteran Sebastian, was the only one who departed the ship, entering the opening to the artifact, which had the appearance of a plain, dark cave in the surface of a random, nondescript asteroid.
One man entered, and nearly thirty minutes later, two men left.
Athosian intelligence had files on a number of characters believed to be in Carolina’s orbit. Colin had heard the name Fieldstone in reference to yet another Etteran special operator thought to be one of the younger Dreeson’s collaborators. Carsten stated that he’d never had contact with any Fieldstone. In truth, Colin was growing increasingly frustrated with Airee as well, as he was getting the sense that Carsten was holding back far more than he was sharing. And most of the information he’d shared amounted to little more than confirmation of details the agency had already established—crew members and locations Carolina herself had already revealed. It seemed to Colin that Airee was more interested in keeping Carolina’s confidence than helping her own family keep her out of trouble.
For Carsten’s part, he was getting tired of hearing how dangerous the course she’d chosen was, how “in over her head” she was. He’d known Carolina long enough to know that she could be confounding, elusive, incorrigible, and frustrating beyond words, but he’d yet to meet the situation she wasn’t capable of rising to. He suspected this situation wasn’t it either.
Meanwhile, they heard nothing from the Yankee-Chaos for hours. Airee couldn’t stop talking about the artifacts. The Kappa artifact was one of those stories that most of his fellow historians knocked as an absurdity, a wild fabrication. Nobody denied its existence. It was the rumors that circulated around it that were disputed. And the fact that all the major governments of the Battery had conspired to keep its location secret only helped to fuel the wild rumors.
What Carsten had just read in the archives eclipsed every rumor he’d ever heard about the artifact. Genuine accounts from the Iophan and Athosian historical archives. Two separate cases, one involving a woman who gave an uncanny account of being transported back to 20th Century Earth. And here they were floating outside a similar artifact, where one of Carolina’s crew of mercenaries had seemingly just materialized out of thin air—and unexpectedly at that, judging from the reaction of the doctor and the other young lady Athosian intelligence apparently knew nothing about, not even her name.
Wouldn’t that be just like Carly, Carsten thought. The biggest secret in the history of the universe—who else would be keeping it but Carolina Dreeson?
Colin tried pinging them three times. Nothing.
Yeah, she sure knew how to keep her secrets.
“I’m ready to meet,” Carolina stated when she pinged.
The way she said it irked Colin to no end, as though she didn’t know he was one of the Chancellor’s chief advisors, taking weeks out of his life to chase her clean out of the Battery Systems.
“By all means,” Colin replied, “now that you’re ready.”
“I’d like to use the clean room,” Carolina declared.
It was the Chancellor’s counsel chamber aboard the rapier, engineered specifically to blunt every known technological form of surveillance Athosian intelligence had encountered.
“I don’t have a problem with it,” Colin answered.
“And bring Airee.”
“Can I expect your entourage as well?”
“I’m only bringing Rishi.”
“Rishi? Who is Rishi? That girl who went flying out of the room earlier?”
“No that was Draya. Look, Goss, just sweep the clean room and clear the Guard off the deck. Our eyes and ears.”
“So you’re actually ready to talk this time?”
“You can thank Rishi for that when you meet her.”
Fifteen minutes later, four of the Yankee-Chaos crew came floating across the small gap between the ships, kitted out in belts and nanosheets, carrying no gear.
“Atalanta and Castor,” the CG officers announced as they reached the back airlock, “along with the rockhopper and an unknown female.”
“Sōsh and Rishi, I guess is the other one,” Airee told Colin, shrugging. “She doesn’t go anywhere without Transom. Not even your father’s ship, apparently.”
Carolina waved off the guard, insisting that neither she nor her people were to be searched, and for the sake of starting off on the right foot, Goss told the Guard to stand down, allowing them into the wide corridor where he and Carsten were waiting to greet them.
“I’m not sure how well your man’s artificial half will function in the clean room,” Colin stated, tipping his head toward Sōsh.
“It’ll just be the four of us,” Carolina replied, gesturing to the young woman floating beside her.
To Airee’s eyes, she looked to be about Carolina’s age, perhaps a few years older. He was trying to recall the name Rishi, which sounded familiar to him. He wasn’t sure, but he thought one of the others might have mentioned her name while he was with them on Lime Harbor.
“Airee,” Transom said, looking over at him. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” Carsten replied.
“Something’s different about him, wouldn’t you say, Metalface?”
Sōsh nodded. “Looks like maybe his balls finally dropped.”
They both laughed, which set off a chuckle from the two CG officers, who were floating near the airlock entrance with their arms crossed. Carsten shot a look at them, and they both choked down their laughter.
“See,” Transom said. “Yup. Something happened to you, Professor. What have you been up to?”
“The usual space adventures,” Airee said. “Nothing that would shock you gentlemen.”
“Which gentlemen are you referring to?” Sōsh joked.
Airee and Colin led them down toward the ship’s main sitting area, which was where the Chancellor’s retinue usually waited to be called upon while he was aboard. Goss invited Transom and Sōsh to wait there with the guards while the principals were talking in the clean room.
“I brought the sticks,” Sōsh said to the guards. “You boys got any Athosian snacks while we’re waiting? It’s going to be a while.”
Carolina smiled. She couldn’t remember Sōsh happier than coming back from that trip to the lakes when they were on Athos. Plus, if she was reading the situation correctly, she figured he was fixing to take at least a couple hundred L-Cr from those two guards in the hours she and Rishi would be briefing Airee and Colin about the artifacts.
Colin and Airee were first into the clean room, which was essentially a luxurious soundproof box that ran several types of disruptive EM fields. Carolina waited at the doorway. Neither she nor Rishi were sure if the tech would disrupt Rishi’s body or the processors in her head. They figured they’d find out.
At first, when she entered, everything seemed fine. Goss oriented the sitting area for four with room for a floatscreen and a table to pop up if they needed either—a gesture, no hierarchical hints in the furniture, just a sit down on equal terms, even though he believed it to be anything but.
As they were each pulling themselves down to their places, Carolina noticed Rishi’s eye twitch, for which she compensated by simply closing both. Airee and Colin didn’t catch it.
“You’re running an R-Shine?” Rishi stated, referring to one of the many dampening technologies sweeping through the clean room.
“It’s possible,” Colin replied. “Father’s technologists would know better than I.”
“You are,” Rishi replied, shutting her eyes again as she said it. “Can we shut that down, please?”
Colin turned to Carolina with an inquisitive look. She nodded at him as though it was an order.
“Very well,” Colin said, pushing off from his chair. “The R-Shine, you said?”
“Yes, please,” Rishi replied, opening her eyes to find Airee staring at her curiously.
Carsten looked over at Carolina, who didn’t offer any explanation whatsoever. He waited, observing both visitors as Colin returned. Carsten watched Rishi open her eyes a little wider and nod to Carolina. “Better,” she told Carolina quietly.
“You’re an android,” Carsten said, “Or some AI I’ve never even heard of. Where did Carly find you?”
“Um, no,” Rishi replied. She looked over at Carolina. “Should we just get into it? Introductions?”
“We all know each other well enough,” Carsten answered. “And unless I’m wrong about you, Rishi, you have extensive files on all of us.”
“You are wrong about me,” Rishi replied, “but not completely wrong.”
“It’s as good a place to start as any,” Carolina said.
“I’m a bipal, which is a word borrowed from a distant possible future that refers to a human who has their consciousness transferred to a technological substrate. I was born Rishi Sarol-Companys, an officer in the LSS. I was uploaded to the server of the Yankee-Chaos several years ago by the Maícon that operated the ship. More recently, I was embodied in this android shell by a secret sect of technologists operated by the prime AI Eddis Ali.”
Colin put his fingers to his forehead.
“It’s not a joke, Goss,” Carolina insisted.
“Which of those impossible assertions isn’t a joke?” Colin asked.
And sensing that a contentious discussion between the two siblings was about to break out, Rishi put up her hand. “Let me make this a little easier.” She pointed to her face.
Colin shook his head, unsure what he should be noticing, but before he had time to protest, Rishi’s features began to morph, her skin growing slightly fairer, her dark hair turning blonde from the roots down, even growing several centimeters before their very eyes. When she was done shifting, Carolina herself nearly jumped back in shock at the sight.
Colin and Airee exchanged a look of disbelief.
“I’m not sure our own mother could tell the difference,” Colin said, shaking his head at Rishi, who had taken the identical likeness of Carolina Dreeson herself.
“It takes a tremendous amount of processing power to perform the shift,” Rishi explained, “and I need to be in pretty close contact to generate an accurate template.” As she was speaking, Rishi again began to shift, slowly morphing into Dr. Ren’s likeness. “But once I have the template, I can impersonate just about anyone. It’s a function of the android shell, an illicit form of nanopolymer skin Eddis Ali’s sect confiscated.”
Rishi paused taking a measure of Colin and Airee’s faces. They both still seemed too shocked for her to gauge how much they believed of her initial claims.
“Voices are easier,” she announced, projecting the statement in Sōsh’s voice before slowly morphing back into her own body. “Now, I’m going to just start by telling both of you this gets confusing, so maybe we should begin at a point of shared interest. Carsten, I understand you’re very curious about the artifacts?”
“That would be an understatement,” Airee replied. “Tell me it’s true. Dreeson, have you been inside one? Have you traveled back in time?”
“No,” Carolina stated, a noticeable disappointment on her face at the declaration. “Not yet, I haven’t, but my crew—the doctor, Fieldstone, Draya, yes, it’s true, Carsten. All of it. And we’ve only just begun to explore.”
Rishi conducted the briefing. Colin and Carolina sat by quietly with Airee interrupting occasionally with a point of clarification, but for the most part, Rishi presented the most unbelievable circumstances as simple facts, complete with visuals pulled directly from Captain Burch and Kristoff Mikkel’s memories.
She told them nearly everything, conveniently omitting the identity of the third team member in the group that visited early Charris. They were covering enough difficult material even without disclosing the fact that Clem Aballi, Athos’s number one fugitive, was not only still very much alive but also that Carolina and her companions had been cooperating with him. Rishi didn’t dance around any of the other major revelations—the future, the bipals, the ordinals, the human pets; the past, their origins on Charris, and their mission to unravel the true roots of the West Battery War.
“Your friend Kristoff,” Airee marveled, shaking his head at Carolina, “he’d just returned from Charris? At the start of it all, and he never said a word of it.”
“Just as you will never utter a word of it to anyone, Carsten Airee,” Carolina stated.
“No. Of course not. But how the hell did he get clean across the Battery from Charris in what—three weeks?”
“Nilius has a very fast ship,” Rishi said.
“All that is interesting enough,” Colin replied. “But I’m more concerned with this business with the war. I was briefed as soon as the intelligence service caught word that you’d been shot out at Alpha-Origgi, Carolina. And then you came home, seemingly no worse for wear, and disappeared, with hardly more than a few words to me.”
“What did father tell you?”
“About that, or about this, now?”
“How much do you know, Colin?”
He shook his head. “After that story, I’m not sure I know anything. I don’t understand the connection to Iophos.”
“They were the ones who put the hit out on me, for one.”
“How could you possibly know that? The IS never made any determination. Our friends in the Letters told us they thought it was a case of mistaken identity, some business with the Rexes gone wrong.”
“They hired multiple assassins,” Carolina explained. “One of them tipped me off.”
“An assassin?”
Carolina nodded. “As a courtesy.”
“And you believed him?”
“I did, and I still do.”
Colin began to stroke his chin. Then he began to shake his head. “I’m going to need the room, please,” he said to Airee and Rishi. “Family business.”
Carolina looked over at Colin for nearly ten seconds as the others sat in silence. His face betrayed no emotion. He merely stared back at Carolina stone-faced, waiting.
Carolina turned to Rishi and nodded, and then over at Airee apologetically. They pushed up from their seats and floated off, one after the other, leaving Carolina and Colin in the clean room alone, seated across from each other in silence.
“The Iophans shot at you.”
“Oh, no, Goss. They hit me. And, according to that informant’s account, if he hadn’t recognized my face and known who I was, he’d have killed me himself and collected on the contract. Apparently, he didn’t appreciate being misled, and he recognized that killing me would’ve meant he’d be hunted to the ends of the galaxy by father till he was dead, and it probably would have spelled the end for the Rexes as well.”
“That’s a bridge too far,” Colin said, shaking his head.
“You don’t seem all that surprised, brother.”
“Who were they going to blame it on, the Trasp or the Etterans?”
“Does that matter?”
“Yes, it matters.”
“I think they were going to try and pin it on Sebastian, an attempt to get us to take sides with the Trasp—something like that.”
“They have been trying to goad our system into that conflict for half a century now, but shooting at the Chancellor’s family? That’s one hell of a risky move. And if that’s true, so is keeping those Etterans at your side. Who’s to say they won’t keep trying.”
“I have an insurance policy,” Carolina said. “A happy accident as it turns out, but no one will be shooting at me again anytime soon, not if they ever want to see their money again.”
Colin furrowed his brow and exhaled. “You found their keys? So that’s what you were doing at Lime Harbor. And then you dumped Airee before things spun out of control?”
Carolina nodded.
“You must care for him.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You are something, Carolina. Of all the reckless things you’ve ever done, my God. I can’t believe father didn’t lock you down at Sutton when you came back to Athos.”
“Come off it, Goss, I’m not a child. You don’t get to speak to me like I am.”
“Oh, are you not?” Colin raised his voice. “You are the daughter of Athos, Carolina! And you think you just get to stick your neck out for assassins to take a shot at you? Are you kidding me? You’re not just playing with your life. When they shoot at you, they shoot at Athos. What would the Battery look like today if they’d hit you in the forehead, sister? How many billion dead for your impetuous little scalp? And for what?”
“For the truth.”
“The truth?”
“Yes, the truth. The truth about the war. The truth about Sayla. The truth about Athos, Goss, for once!”
“What’s your play here, Carolina? Even if you got the truth, what do you think you’d do with it? Have you even thought that far ahead?”
“The war must be stopped. Iophos must be brought to heel—or at least the faction bent on drawing us into the conflict. That would be a start.”
“Just that?”
“For now. I’m sure something else will come up along the way. It always seems to.”
Colin took a deep breath. “Before I say any more, I’d like to know what role you think Carsten and I are supposed to play in this little misadventure of yours.”
“What do you mean, Colin?”
“We’d been searching for you for weeks. Your man Kristoff found us and told us how to find you. We’d never have found you otherwise. I presumed that was your doing?”
“Rishi believes that Carsten has a role to play in all this. I’m not certain about you. She brought both of you here against my wishes.”
Colin smiled, tapping his hand on the arm of his chair. “So she’s in charge then, not you?”
“It’s not about who’s in charge. It’s about the outcome, keeping the entire Battery from turning into a war zone. And we’re failing on that front, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Father told me it was time to brief you, Carolina. Here’s my concern, though.”
“Brief me? About what?”
“About Athos. That truth you’ve been seeking. I’m not sure you’re ready for it.”
“What do you mean, Goss?”
“Byram, for as much as I love him, he has never and will never take our obligations seriously. He’s just not a serious enough person. And Etta never had the grit to make life-or-death decisions. You, though, Carolina, you seem to pick up and put down our obligations whenever it suits you. This obsession with Sayla, flying off and disregarding your obligations at home to pursue injustice across the galaxy? Yet I read the briefings about the artifacts. When father gave you that responsibility, you adopted it wholesale, lived it. We are Dreesons, sister. The Dreesons. Our obligation isn’t to the truth or justice or even Sayla, whatever did or didn’t happen to her. Our obligation is singular, and it is to Athos. It is far, far bigger than us. We need you to understand that truth first. I need you to understand that if I tell you the truth about Athos, that’s it. You are taking up the responsibility that has been our family’s for over a millennium now, and you will not put it down to adventure through the Letters or study artifacts or solve mysteries of the past. I need your word that you are all in on this mission, our family’s mission, dating all the way back to Yuhl and Zair Dreeson.”
“Believe it or not, Colin, that’s what I’ve been doing. Athos cannot survive if it’s corrupt. I seem to be the only one who understands this, but nobody wants to look. Sayla saw something ugly about Athos, and she died for it. That’s what I’ve been hunting out here, even though it may not make sense to you and father.”
“Carolina, you don’t even know what Athos is.”
She shook her head at him. “What do you mean?”
“I want your solemn word.”
“You have it, Colin.”
“Pledge on it.”
She looked at him skeptically, as though it was too much, almost performative. He returned an insistence in his bright, serious Dreeson eyes.
She raised her right hand. “For Athos. For all of us.”
“You mean those words?”
“With all my heart, Goss.”
“Abandon your preconceptions about our home, little sister. Athos was never what you thought it was.”
When Carolina emerged from the clean room nearly two hours after they’d dismissed Rishi and Carsten, her face betrayed no emotion.
“It’s time to go,” she merely stated to her people in the rapier’s sitting area. “You’re with us, Airee. Pack your things if you’d like to join us. We’ll be departing within the hour.”
“Would you like for me to join you, Dreeson?” he asked. “That’s not exactly a convincing invitation.”
Carolina nodded, taking a deep breath and seemingly taking Airee’s response to heart. “Yes, Carsten. We need your help, and we would like you to join us.”
“In that case I’d be happy to join you and help in any way I can.”
“We’ll brief along the way,” Carolina replied.
“Captain,” Rishi stated, still from her seated position across from Sōsh, Sebastian, and the two CG agents who were begrudgingly parting with their stakes in the four-way Sabaca match. Behind her, Sōsh was negotiating for whatever Athosian delicacies they could part with in lieu of hard currency.
“Yes, Rishi?” Carolina answered.
“Goss needs to come with us too.”
“Excuse me?” Colin stated. He looked as shocked as Carolina at the declaration.
“If Carsten was the only one we needed to recruit, I just as easily could have put Kristoff in contact with him alone and had them both meet us at the next artifact. Goss needs to come with us too. It’s why I brought them both.”
“Is that a fact?” Carolina asked.
“That’s a fact,” Rishi stated. “He has an important role to play.”
“I also have an important role to play in the Athosian government, as it turns out,” Colin replied.
“Yes, you do. And this mission will help to prepare you for it. Your father’s people can obviously manage in your absence for the time being.”
“Well, they say a captain is like her ship, Carly,” Colin stated. “She’s nearly as pushy as you.”
“Do I have to ask you nicely, Colin?” Carolina asked.
“No, as it turns out this mission of yours is intriguing enough on its face. I can see the value in it. And what better company?”
“Pack your things then, you two. I’ll see you aboard the Y-C within the hour.”
“Yes, Captain,” Colin replied, grinning. “I’ll get my crew their instructions for the return voyage to Athos, and then we’ll be across straightaway.”
“Very good,” Carolina said, turning her attention to the table in the back where Sōsh had just picked up the sticks. She addressed the CG agents floating beside Sōsh and Transom. “Thank you as always for your service, gentlemen. You do Athos proud.”
It was as crowded as the Yankee-Chaos had been since her days as a transport for ops units. The atmosphere aboard her, though, was not without some measure of complexity. Fieldstone was still undergoing one of the most difficult debriefings of his long history as an operator. And, there was the touchy situation between Draya and Ren. Neither knew how to approach him or the other, and having strangers about the ship only made it more difficult to broach the issue.
Fields, per usual, insisted on focusing intensely on the mission, and in his mind, that meant recording as much as humanly possible in the brief window he had access to the memories he’d made on Yaal. “Otherwise,” he declared to Rishi, “all that suffering will have been for nothing.”
It was a two-week transit to their next artifact. Fields promised a complete briefing to the crew by then. Yaal was important. He just needed time to piece it back together. His memories were scattered, and the volume and composition of those memories proved almost overwhelming. Only Rishi could possibly understand. The sheer amount of data his uploaded bipal mind had routinely handled was so great that a human mind couldn’t process an hour’s worth in a lifetime. He was trying to make sense of a puzzle the size of the galaxy with the pieces of a few solar systems, and those pieces were out of order as well.
And then there was Airee. It wasn’t lost on anyone, including Carsten himself that Carolina was spending even more time than usual sequestered away on the flight deck. Months before, this might have bothered Carsten. But to Transom’s keen eyes, there was something different about the professor. He didn’t mope about like a wounded puppy. He didn’t seem to let it bother him at all.
When Transom asked him in passing what he’d been up to since they dropped him back on Damon Mines, he began to tell Transom a wild tale about a trip he’d taken to Richfield on a mining freighter, and by the time he’d finished, more than half the ship was gathered at the atrium table listening to Airee recount the adventure, hanging on every word.
For his part, Carsten was interested to find out what they’d been up to since they dropped him off. But again, he seemed to not be taking it too personally that Carolina had cut him out.
Colin was finding it a bit more challenging to fit in among the warriors in Carolina’s crew. His most substantive interactions were with Carsten and Ren, and though he’d never tell her as much in so many words, he quietly envied the way Carolina seemed to effortlessly garner the acceptance of such a diverse group of ordinary people. But then these weren’t ordinary people, he was discovering, and, the more he watched his sister, the more he was learning she wasn’t either.
Ten days into the transit, mid-afternoon, Carolina, while sitting by herself on the flight deck, looked up from her reading to see Fieldstone floating at the entryway.
“Permission to join you, Captain?” he asked.
“Please, Fields. You needn’t ask.”
“It would feel funny presuming. My way. Old habits and all that. Although, things have been all mixed up in my mind since I got back.”
“How is the debriefing with Rishi going?” Carolina asked as Fieldstone pulled himself down to the chair beside her.
“You won’t ever hear me complain, but I’m not going to lie either. It’s a challenge. On many fronts. I think we’ve gotten about as far as we can, at least for now.”
“But that’s not what you came to talk about?” Carolina asked, sensing Fields had something else on his mind.
“I haven’t spoken to Ren and Draya properly. I’m sure that’s not lost on anybody, least of all them. All I told them is that I needed time to get that mission intelligence out of my mind. The Yaal stuff, it’s too important to miss any details. I think we should all talk about that—brief everybody, put our heads together.”
“I’ve been reading your account as Rishi has been recording it. That and Ren and Draya’s debriefings. It’s hard to fathom.”
Fields nodded. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. She could sense Fieldstone didn’t know how to say what he needed to say.
“You’re worried about Draya and Ren?”
He nodded. “I guess I wanted to tell you as a courtesy, you know. I never intended to cause any disruption in the crew. I couldn’t have fathomed what happened in a million years. Now, I think it’s inevitable that it’s going to be a mess, and we’re cooped up in this bucket. No getting away from it.”
“Fieldstone, it almost feels like you’re trying to apologize, for what? This isn’t an ops unit. You’re a free man here, and you and Draya and Ren are allowed to explore whatever relationships you want without ever having to apologize to me.”
“I just thought, if it’s awkward around here on my account. You know. That’s why they don’t allow that stuff on ops teams.”
“Allegedly,” Carolina said, smiling at him.
“Yeah, allegedly.”
“Care to tell me whose heart you’re going to break?”
“I don’t know about all that. I don’t know. You’re a kid compared to me, so maybe I can speak easy with you about it, but honestly, sometimes it’s a marvel any woman of any age would look twice at a busted-up, broken-down soldier like me.”
“You’re a catch, old man,” Carolina replied, grinning.
“It was all mixed up in my head, Captain. And part of me figured that if I waited, maybe it would all just settle down in my mind and I’d forget the things I wanted to forget, and maybe I was terrified I’d forget the things I wanted to remember.”
“Of Yaal? With Ren?”
“It doesn’t seem she’s forgotten,” Fields said. “I haven’t either.”
“You should talk with her about it.”
“I intend to. But I owe it to Draya to let her know first. I don’t know how she’ll take it, but whatever we had before, I guess the best way to put it is that the weight of that other world, that’s heavier than anything I could’ve imagined. So I owe it to Draya to let her down as easy as possible.”
“I’m sure you will.”
He shrugged. “She’s a good girl. I’ve hurt a lot of people in my life, Captain, but I sure never wanted to hurt her.”
“Doors open and close, Fields. A whole lot of them aren’t by our doing.”
“That’s certain. Anyway, Captain, just thought you should know.”
“You’re a good man, Fieldstone. Please Tell Draya to come talk to me after you let her know.”
“Thanks, Carolina. I like your brother, by the way, stuffy enough, but he’s good like you. I never would have guessed that about two Athosians before I met you both.”
The artifact that Rishi calculated would transport Carolina’s team to Iophos had been designated E-7. It was far out beyond the outer Letters, and with the exception of Carolina and the Yankee-Chaos’s original crew members, it was farther outside the Battery than everyone on the ship had ever traveled.
They were briefing each day, helping to prepare the team for their mission to Iophos. Ren and Fieldstone did their best to answer questions about their experiences traveling inside the artifacts, while Carsten, primarily, prepared the group for the cultural and political environment on pre-war Iophos. It wasn’t drastically different from present-day Iophos, except there were groups—political extremist factions that had largely dissipated over the decades, a seemingly cyclical phenomenon on Iophos that the Athosian government had never permitted on their ring. Needless to say, Carsten was excited to witness these movements he’d only read about in person.
Rishi had a plan for Draya, who dealt with the breakup about as well as one could under the circumstances—cooped up in a small ship with her former lover and the very woman who’d taken her place in his heart. For their part, Ren and Fieldstone were very careful to avoid any outward signs of affection. Nor did Draya seem bitter or angry toward Ren. She seemed to see it as Carolina had described: a door that had closed on her had opened for Ren. That was the best she could do.
As they approached the artifact, Carolina recognized the ship on the front display. It was the Cannon, Verona’s yacht. “Are you alone?” she asked when she pinged Kristoff.
“Not anymore,” he stated smiling at the sight of Carolina. “I’ve done my best to dig out the aperture, but it’s just been me, and I don’t really have any tools.”
Carolina smiled. “We’ll send out Harold and wake up old George to do the rest of the work. We’ve got some people aboard who’d love to see you.”
It was a happy reunion. Kristoff related stories of their mission, stories from the earliest months of Charris, which Carsten was particularly captivated by.
“You’ll have your own experience, I assure you,” Kristoff replied. “I don’t know that words do it justice.”
“But you’ve been to both now, Juice,” Transom stated. “The future and the past. Which was better?”
Kristoff shook his head, considering. “I have to say, I prefer the present. Most days. It will change you. I don’t know that there’s any way to prepare you for it or to guess how, but it will change you.”
“That’s certain,” Fields agreed.
For a moment there was a long, uncomfortable pause in the atrium.
Rishi, whose body was floating toward the rear of the room, observing through her many outlets, projected her voice over the sound system, as though she was the ship again. “I had a body. That was a change nothing could have prepared me for. But you all have a mission. That’s the focus. You’re going to Iophos with a purpose. We need you to infiltrate, be regular people, observe, capture their secrets.”
“That’s the directive, Ship,” Transom replied. “We’ve got it, and we’ll deliver. Speaking of which?”
He looked over at Carolina, who nodded. “Everyone ready?”
The party members all looked around at each other in agreement—Airee, Sōsh, Colin Dreeson, Carolina herself, and Transom.
“To Iophos,” Carolina declared.
“We’ll be waiting for you,” Rishi stated. “Good hunting.”
Fieldstone remained the ranking officer on the ship, at least nominally, once Carolina stepped out. So he went through the formalities, strapped to the Captain’s chair on the flight deck while the party made their way inside the artifact. Ren was there beside him.
Draya and Kristoff watched from the table in the atrium, images from Carolina’s eyewear projecting onto the floatscreen overhead. Rishi, of course, saw it all from every angle. Her body sat strapped in beside Draya and Kristoff as they listened to the coms chatter amongst the departing five. Then, poof! They were gone.
“Of all the missions,” Rishi said. “This is the mission.”
“Then Godspeed,” Kristoff said. “To them and to all of us.”