Unfinished Business
“Mistakes, missteps, and regrets. No one gets out of it proud if you get out at all.”
(Part 35 of “The Misfits” series)
Even though Transom had a tracer on Maícon’s ship, apparently, we weren’t going to get a fix on it right away. The way Transom explained it was that it had to catch onto a nearby comms network, and then another and another, and then, finally it would be able to chart a vector. And then maybe after that you could guess where the ship might be going, or more probably, where it had been weeks before, because by the time you got enough data points from the network, that ship was probably long gone and you were waiting for the next signal.
Well, I was angry enough. Furious would be a better word. I wanted another shot at Maícon, and I wanted Rishi back, and we sure weren’t going to get either outcome sitting on that broken-down abandoned colony of Lime Harbor. But there we were, waiting for the others to catch up, almost two weeks now.
I’d heard of it, sure. Who hasn’t heard of Lime Harbor. The stories they told about what it used to be—paradise of the Battery Systems. And yeah, if you imagined the place without the layer of dust, a good scrubbing, people around to care for the city, a few trees and potted plants here and there. I suppose I could see what the others saw, the potential of the legendary old city rounding back into form. But hell, I was in no mood for it.
And then, to top it all off, just like that, in the middle of the thirteenth night we were there, Nilius shakes me on the shoulder waking me from a dead sleep.
“Burch, old boy, I’ve got to go. I’ve left a crate of provisions for you and the others in the piazza where the ship was parked. I’ll be back around again soon.”
“Oh, hell. On your own time, I suppose.”
“As soon as possible. An urgent matter takes priority now, though.”
He pointed to those nodes on his forearm, as though to say some force in the deep time of the universe was compelling him to abandon us.
“What the hell, old man?” I said, not even sure myself what I was asking.
“No time to explain now, Burch. Your ship will be along.”
My ship. Carolina’s ship. Goss’s ship. All fifteen of us or however many we were stuffing on the old girl now. The Yankee-Chaos was sure getting her service as a transport like the old days. But she was still almost two days out.
I wasn’t sure whether I said anything back to Nilius or even whether he was still there anymore. I think I must have fallen asleep again, or near to it. I had that funny feeling where you sorta half wake up in a strange place and you wonder where the hell you are or whether it’s even real life anymore. I had no idea how long that was going on when I heard someone calling me again.
“Burch. Burch.”
“Nilius, I swear. I thought you said you were going?”
“Burch, wake up. You’re dreaming. It’s not Nilius.”
It was dark in that room, but I recognized it by the dusty smell of the place. I was in that kid Barlow’s house. The Riche house—the one where they’d all stayed before when Carolina and the crew came to Lime Harbor the first time. And the one barking at me ... well, whispering at me, I guess. I was pretty sure that was Carolina’s friend, the historian Carsten Airee.
“Is that you, Airee?”
“That’s right.”
“What the hell do you want? It’s the middle of the night. Isn’t it still?”
“Yes, Burch. That’s the point. Low radiation levels. There’s a moon out. Still a few hours before sunup. Perfect time to take a walk.”
“Fine. Go have a nice stroll, Airee. Leave me out of it. I’m sleeping.”
“Carolina thought I should take you with me. She said you’d be interested.”
“Oh, she did, did she?”
“Come on. Shake the sleep out and let’s go.”
“It can’t wait till morning?”
“Not unless you want to slog around the city for miles in a radiation suit, Burch. Come on.”
I realized he wasn’t going to leave me alone.
“Get the hell up and go with him, Burch,” I heard Omar growl from across the room. He was laid out on a field mattress over there in the corner. I thought we were whispering good enough, but I guess we’d woken him too.
“Fine, Airee,” I said, snorting as I sat up. I guess I was blowing the dust out. That old house needed a proper cleaning when Harold got there.
“That’s the spirit,” Airee whispered. “How many times in your life have you been in Lime Harbor?”
“One too many,” I replied.
“Shut the hell up, you two,” Omar grumbled.
I followed Airee down the creaking stairs, stepping as quietly as we could, down to the main doorway and then out into the small courtyard in front of the Riche house. I guess then I could see it—the stars, a glistening silvery moonlight illuminating the buildings along that stately old street. It was pretty enough to almost make me forget I should’ve been sleeping.
Take a deep breath, I told myself. This was my own life I was living again, and I guess as bad as the past couple weeks had been, I had plenty of reasons to be grateful for it.
I wasn’t sure just how long we’d been walking before Carsten Airee started talking at me. It was a while, because we’d swung through one of the main squares. The others seemed to know where everything was. But me? I was still just following people around, hiding from the sun mostly, as everyone did here. Not Airee, I guess. He had another way figured out.
He led us down to a road that overlooked what must’ve been a dried-out riverbed that had water flowing through it in the city’s heyday. Now, it served as a break in the city, and through that break you could see where the activity was—down in the industrial area where those engineers from Eden had been scaling up their operation. They’d gone from one warehouse when it was just Old Barlow Riche himself running the operation, and since Young Barlow—or Alex as our crew first called him—had returned to the city with his wife Sisco and the engineering group from Eden, they’d brought four more warehouses online. They had plans to open twenty more warehouses per year for the next ten years. Apparently, the math was sound. Those Eden engineers figured that if they could drop that much material into the star, the radiation levels would be safe again sometime in Young Barlow’s lifetime. Maybe Sisco and Barlow’s grandchildren would grow up in a world where this version of Lime Harbor was just an old story. Less dust, more trees, maybe even tourists again.
At night, now though, all you could see were the lights of the heavy vehicles transporting payload to the space tower, which would be going up and down all night, just like the daytime, for decades, doing the almost unfathomable amount of work it took to fix a star. Down by that empty river, you could hear the noises of it all too, echoing through the city. Engines, wheels, clunking, the whir of the industrial machinery making tools, mixing chemicals, all that.
Airee kept talking about the city’s history.
“How the hell do you know so much about Lime Harbor, Airee?” I asked him.
I didn’t know him that well, even after a couple weeks there waiting for the others. We hadn’t talked much.
“I enjoy that sort of thing,” he replied. “Learning about places. I came here before with Carolina, you know?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“So I got fascinated with the place. It’s almost exactly what I studied at university—how certain colonies out in the Indies and Letters succeeded and others failed. This was an extraordinary example of a failure, through no fault of the people, of course.”
“Maybe the stellar scientists for failing to predict it,” I said.
“Maybe so,” he replied. “I looked at the data when I was here, though, and there wasn’t much of an indication of change or irregularity, and I knew what was coming.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what, Airee?”
“I thought I told you about it, Burch. I came back here. In my other life. I went to Iophos and stayed for over three decades. And then I came out into the Indies and the Letters. I couldn’t miss that opportunity.”
“I guess I’ve had a lot on my mind. So you saw this place before?”
He nodded, and I could see him grinning ear-to-ear even in the dark. “There are reasons they told tales about this city, Burch. Good reasons.”
“I like the architecture,” I said.
“It was much more than that,” Airee replied. “Truth be told, as much as I wish Barlow and Sisco and these Edenites well, even if they fix the star, it’ll be a tall order to rebuild what was here before. More than anything, it was the culture that made this city great, and that culture was the sum of the people and the rules they lived by. There was just a vibrance about the place that was almost infectious. People on Iophos used to come back from a few weeks here and have a glow about them. Of course it would wear off again after a couple weeks back on Iophos, but it was almost palpable. I’m not sure how you put something like that back together.”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said. “Not for nothing, Airee. I’ll admit I’ve been a pain in the ass to be around these past couple weeks, for obvious reasons, but if this is Carolina’s idea of trying to soften me up or something—”
“Nothing like that.”
“So what’s this all about then?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, pointing up into one of the side streets, which all might have been the same to me, the same dead trees, the same abandoned shop windows, the same dust and detritus all piled up along the sidewalks. But I guess Carsten knew these places one from the other, as they used to be, unique life-spaces for well-lived lives long since passed.
He took me up another side street that ran parallel to the river. And then we walked a few more doors down to a building that had a long glass storefront with marble pillars carved into great dust-covered statues. He pointed to a sign above the main door on the corner of the block. It read: CHRYSALIS.
“Do you know what it is?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“Do you know the name n’Kedi?”
Again, I shook my head.
“She and her family built the most successful business ever launched on Lime Harbor. Have you heard of TechJools, Burch?”
That one I did know. “Swatches and jewelry and the like?”
“It started right here on Lime Harbor. They moved when the star cooked the city, obviously. This showroom used to have the most spectacular pieces in it. People would come from all over the Battery to shop here while they were on holiday.”
Airee pulled on the door. It didn’t budge.
“I figured this might happen,” he said. “While I was here, you know, in that other life ... I ran an experiment.”
“Experiment?”
“I’m going to need your help determining the results, Burch.”
“How so?”
He gestured toward the door. “I’m not sure the n’Kedis will mind if we break their door. They’re going to have a lot to clean up in three decades if they come back to reclaim their space. What’s one more door?”
“Oh,” I said, realizing why he’d brought me of all people.
I motioned for him to step away and had a look at it. It was metal for sure, fabricated to look like some fancy piece of finished wood. I didn’t want to just crack into it without knowing whether I’d be kicking what amounted to an immovable object. I looked at the keys on the upper corner too.
“Magnetically hardened,” I said. “The power’s off to this section of the city?”
When he nodded, I gestured for him to stand aside and planted a solid front kick just above the catch, maybe about a third power, just to get a sense of what I was dealing with. I felt the frame fold back and give a little.
“I still got some real bones in this old body,” I told Airee. “Can’t be too reckless.”
Then I took a step back, jumped forward, and gave the door a good pop. The thing swung back violently, and the top hinge broke off from the force of the door flying inward. I had to jump back to make sure it didn’t come back at me when it finally bounced back off the frame again.
Airee was smiling. “That must feel good, to be able to do stuff like that.”
“It’s all right, I guess. Small consolation for losing my real legs, but this set is a whole lot better than what the LSS fixed me with first off.”
“Did that hurt at all?” he asked me.
“Not me. Ask the door, Airee. What’s this all about, anyway? You have to figure they cleared this place out before they left. If this is your idea of a heist, you must not be as smart as the others all say you are.”
He was grinning. “Not exactly. I told you I was testing something.”
“Sure.”
“The artifacts. We’re all so certain the history in there doesn’t affect our world, right?”
“I guess that’s our assumption. But I suppose that’s been hard to test.”
“Exactly. History could change, and the history we thought we knew before might have shifted in our minds without our knowing it. A kind of blind paradox of sorts. We wouldn’t even know what we’d changed if we’d changed something.”
“Maybe. I guess. Those artifacts are confusing enough as it is without getting the mind all twisted trying to add paradoxes into the mix. Mostly, I’d just take Rishi’s word for how they worked. She’s better with that stuff than me.”
“I was really tall—my other self,” Airee stated. “Lorne was my name in that other life. And I used to notice things other people couldn’t see, like a dusty shelf that was above everyone else’s eye level.”
Airee started walking down through the front aisle of the showroom. All the cases were empty and open. He continued through the main showroom into a back area, where, he explained, they once held their most expensive pieces—a lot of happy wives and mothers walked out of that room. Now it was all dust. And to the side, there was a narrow hallway that led down to the store’s supply rooms and offices, and at the end of that corridor they had bathrooms, and between the two doors there was an enormous elegant statue of a half-naked Egyptian goddess with all kinds of jewelry etched into the stone and painted on her.
“Subtle,” I said looking at it.
“It looks a lot bigger than the last time I saw it, Burch,” Airee said. “I was damn near eye to eye with her last time.”
“The statue?”
“Yes.” He was looking up at the statue puzzled by something. “This lovely lady is Hathor. And she must be three meters tall.”
“So?”
“I bought a little bee to put in her bonnet,” he said, smiling like it was some kind of joke I didn’t understand. “If it’s up there, then we’ll know for sure.”
“Know what for sure, Airee? You lost me, man.”
“I put a little gold bee on top of Hathor’s head where nobody would ever see it. I was Lorne, so I could reach up there and just leave it there. I figured it was one way to test it: Did the things we experienced inside the artifacts actually happen in our world? If there’s a little gold bee up there, Burch, we’ll have a definitive answer.”
I thought about it for a moment. “How long ago would that have been?”
“A hundred twenty-five years, give or take. Something like that.”
“If it’s not there though ...” I was thinking it through. “That doesn’t necessarily mean ...?”
“That’s true,” Airee agreed. “Something could have happened. Maybe something knocked it off. Maybe some ambitious staffer decided to dust the statue’s head once every several decades. But if it is there, we would know for sure. I just can’t figure out how to get up there without risking toppling the whole thing over.”
I had a torch I was holding, which I thrust into Airee’s hand, gesturing for him to keep it pointed toward the head. I brushed him back. Then, I leapt right up, but I hadn’t fully thought it through. All I could see was the dark shadow of the statue’s head cast by the torchlight shining upward.
“I’ll need that back,” I said, taking the torch back and then jumping up again, shining the light down on the top as I peeked at it. I damn near hit my own head on the ceiling. I didn’t see anything.
On the third leap, I brushed my living hand over the top of the statue, kicking up a cloud of dust and nothing else. In the torchlight, that cloud looked like it was a blizzard of dust, snowing down on us.
Airee and I both rushed back out of there half-sneezing, blowing the dust out of our faces as we went.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said about halfway down that corridor.
“No,” I replied. “There was nothing up there, Airee. Just about a century of dust.”
“Oh, well,” he said, exhaling as we exited the showroom to the street. “It was worth a try. I didn’t ever know if I’d get back to Lime Harbor in this lifetime. I just thought, you know, maybe ...”
“It was a good idea, Carsten.”
He huffed out a puff of air through both of his nostrils. “Let’s get out of here, Burch.”
“That’s another good idea,” I replied, trying to keep from sneezing myself.
“I can’t help but think, you know. In some other universe, there’s a little gold bee sitting on that statue, just waiting for someone to find it.”
I guess that brightened my mood a little. I’m not sure why, but even as I was tired the following day from being up all night, I felt all right. Me and Carsten spent some time up on the roof when we got back, looking at the stars and waiting for that bright Lime Harbor sun to come back up. But we talked quite a bit, and it was enough for me to know I liked the guy. You didn’t need to talk to him long to know he had a good head and a good heart, and maybe if I thought about all the people in the galaxy I’d met that might be worthy of Carolina Dreeson ... well, I don’t know, but there weren’t a lot. And it was funny, because they both seemed to know it—that they were connected somehow—but I could see she was always just an arm’s length away. But he didn’t seem salty or impatient, just content to be here, back in this life.
He told me about all the places he’d been in that other life that he could never see in this one. Not just Lime Harbor. But he’d toured the Protectorate in the pre-war era, even some of the Guild. He never made it to Etterus, though. His one regret.
“I hope to get there one day,” he said. “Maybe Sebastian will take me.”
“I don’t think the Etterans would even let him go,” I joked. “Much less an outsider he brought as a guest.”
“Not today,” Airee agreed. “But someday maybe. That’s what this is all about, right? Carolina and her crusade? Ending all this madness—the war?”
“I wish I knew what it was all about right now,” I told him. “Just when I think I can see the whole picture, it loses focus.”
He nodded. “Rishi. She’s really something, Burch.”
“I know.”
“I’ve lived a full life now—and well, about what I hope is only a quarter of my real one on top of it—and I’ve got to say, I still don’t have the first clue about anything. You might be one of the few people in the galaxy who have any idea what I’m talking about.”
“I do,” I replied.
“I have a favor to ask of you, Burch,” he said, grinning as he looked up at the fading stars. It was starting to get gray out there, and we were going to have to go in soon.
“Let’s hear it, Airee.”
“When you get her back—and you will; I believe that—but when you get her back, I need you to get Rishi to record her account of her time on Earth. We have records, you know—contemporary accounts, autobiographies, pictures, footage, all kinds of records. But we don’t have any from our perspective, what one of our people would think and feel about their world. That’s what I’ve been dying to talk to her about, and she was always so busy to really talk, focused on the here and now.”
“She won’t talk to me about it, Airee. Not much anyway. It was really deep. I know that.”
“I can believe it.”
“Sunrise,” I stated, looking out at the orange on the horizon.
“Yeah,” he said. “I better get some sleep. I’ve been going the opposite.”
“You do your own thing,” I told him as we got up.
“It’s the best way to live,” Airee replied.
And that, I suppose, I could agree with. Anyway, he went for bed and I went for breakfast. I sat down with Sisco and young Barlow and told them all about Airee’s heist, where we’d robbed the famed n’Kedi showroom and came away with a grand total of two facefuls of dust as the spoils.
The following morning, the Yankee-Chaos arrived. They were all hopeful, of course, thinking that we might have caught up with Maícon in time to stop him from stealing the keys, and maybe that we might have been able to get Rishi back. We busted those hopes fast. We found out, though that there was plenty to catch up on.
Fieldstone had taken notes on my testimony from the trip back to Veronia at the start of the war, and that had inspired him to finally finish putting together his history. Carolina’s brother Goss insisted that we all had to sit down and take that in as soon as possible. He said it was important. Coming from somebody as even-tempered and serious as Mr. Head-Dreeson-in-Training, I figured it’d be some story. So I slotted in Fieldstone’s testimony for my afternoon’s activities.
They all knew Lime Harbor well enough to know how to deal with the radiation—suits at all times the sun was up and all that. We also had them park the ship right where Nilius had been, figuring that with the bots and engineers from Eden taking all kinds of gear and hardware up and down the space elevator at all times, we might as well just take the Y-C down the gravity well and skip the line. Plus it was another nice hardened shelter where we could get out from the sun without filling up Sisco and Barlow’s house with a million more visitors. And, to say thank you for their hospitality, as promised, I woke up Harold right away and put him to work cleaning the house. He remembered the place well enough to know right where to begin.
So after lunch, I watched Fieldstone’s report, some of which helped some pieces that didn’t fit to make a bit more sense. Some of it, though, quite frankly blew my damn mind. I didn’t know where to put those pieces. Like for instance, if something like that had happened as Fieldstone described, that meant there were two distinct lines of Maícons, a lot like what we’d learned at Veronia. And it could explain how Pitka’s Maícon had been jumping from platform to platform in ways we didn’t think our AIs could do. That was a new piece.
But on the other hand, the ordinals existing alongside us in our time—even back in the past, at a parallel human branch to ours, descending from the columns? I didn’t know what to make of that. And they didn’t have FTL yet? And I say yet, because they sure had FTL in the future when we were there. They had versions of it like Nilius’s ship. And they had a thousand other things we hadn’t figured out in our time yet. Or, maybe we had and Eddis Ali and those tech wizards had just suppressed it all.
And then that was another mind-blower: Eddis Ali making the first bipal, teaching Maícon, presumably, and now it wasn’t lost on me—oh, man—a Maícon turning my Rishi into a bipal, right on this very ship I was sitting on. And who was that Maícon, I wondered—the one that made Rishi? It was just like me and Carsten had been talking about: the more you learn, the more confounding the puzzle gets.
We were talking about all that, mostly in the atrium on the ship, relaxing as we did, some tea, Sōsh passing a drink or two around. There was me and Carolina and Airee, Goss, Fieldstone, Ren was coming and going, looking in on the people in the house for radiation and various checkups, and toward the evening, Omar came down too. Then sure enough, I’ll bet we were all thinking the same damn thing: Now what? And wouldn’t you know, at that exact moment, in walks Transom with that big shit-eating grin of his and starts talking.
“Hey, Burch.”
“Hey what, Transom?”
“I was just running the scan for the trackers through the Y-C’s comms unit and all the nodes it exchanged data with on the way here. I don’t want to get your hopes up or nothing, so first and foremost, I’ll say that there’s no hit on those asshole Maícons yet.”
“Great.”
“I found something else, though.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Before I tell you what, I want to ask you, Burch, sincerely—this is no joke, a serious question.”
“All right.”
“Present company excluded, of course, if there was one asshole in all the galaxy you’d like to square up and punch in the face more than anybody, who would that be?”
I looked at him funny. “You’re serious?”
Everyone around the table was grinning like it was some joke except for Transom. He seemed to notice, looking around indignantly.
“I said I was serious.”
“All right. Let me think.”
“Don’t think too hard, Burch. It’s not that hard a question.”
“I suppose there’s a couple guys back home I’d owe a good solid punch to the nose.”
“Think a bit more recent history. Someone I might have a tracker on.”
“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, almost involuntarily. “Sparrow Dreeson, that son of a bitch. Tell me you got a vector on him.”
“Better. I got a planet he’s been sitting on for two months straight.”
“Sparrow Dreeson?” Goss said, looking over at Carolina. “Does he mean Cousin Kenn?”
“Oh, yes he does,” I said. “And we’ve got unfinished business, big brother. Me and him. Omar, would you mind running up the Riche house and letting anyone up there know that them whose coming with us better get down here fast, because we’re going.”
Carolina looked over at her brother, and there was clear trepidation there.
I looked over at Omar. “You’re in, right? Might be a few Trasp ex-military spoiling for a fight when they see us coming.”
“I’ve got your back, Burch. Plus, he’s the one who sold out my sister, if I’m not mistaken.”
“No, you are not mistaken,” I said. “Fieldstone?”
“Sounds like fun, Burch. Just as long as you keep your cool long enough for me to get my wife back aboard before we blow out of here.”
That sorta stopped me in my tracks.
“Your wife?”
He shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s not official. At least not in this world, but yeah. My wife; your doctor. If we fly at all, we fly together. Plus, it sounds like somebody might need patching up.”
“Oh you got that right,” I replied.
“Burch,” Carolina said. “I know you’re mad at Sparrow—”
She looked over at me and I looked back at her. There was about five seconds of silence as we had an almost telepathic conversation before I finally said. “I’m not going to kill him, Carolina. At least not on purpose.”
“Yeah, Captain,” Transom interjected. “I said ‘punch in the face.’ We’re just going to track down old Cousin Kenn and punch him in the face.”
“How does this track with our current mountain of problems?” Goss asked. “The fate of the Battery? The future of humanity?”
I had an answer for Goss. “I’ll file this one in the log as ‘Slight Detour / Temporary Stress Relief.’ I’m Captain on this run.”
“You can’t hurt him, Burch,” Carolina insisted.
“I’m not going to hurt him,” I said. “When I was in basics, we used to call it an education. We’re just going to educate Sparrow a little. Isn’t that right, Sebastian?”
That shit-eating grin came right back as wide as ever. “Sir, yes, sir, Captain Burch. That was my first calling in life. Above all else, I am an educator.”
We didn’t run out of there as fast as I wanted at first notice. Ren insisted on following through on the promise she’d made when she landed—a thorough radiation check on all the Eden engineers. That took another ten hours, which allowed us to have a proper parting between us and Sisco and young Barlow Riche. Carolina insisted on at least sharing a meal with them, which was good, common courtesy after crashing back into their lives the way we did and staying for two weeks.
They were the type of people that reminded you what was good about people—dedicating themselves to something greater than their own needs and wants, building something multi-generational that would give joy to millions, and doing it all with a type of humility and openness you rarely see. It made me feel a little embarrassed that I was rushing off to get even with Sparrow finally.
I started thinking about that during the meal, though. Was I even hoping to get even or what? Get answers maybe was more like it. I definitely did want to punch him in the face. And after we said our goodbyes in the darkness of the early night, when the whole crew walked down from the Riche house to the ship, I realized just how big a party I’d be bringing with me.
For fighters, me, Omar, Transom, Fieldstone, and Sōsh were a damn good unit of professional operators. Ren, I heard, had learned to handle herself in the martial arts, but her combat skills were limited to what she’d trained to do as a combat medic. Then, we had a contingent of civilians: Kristoff, Draya, Carsten Airee, Carolina and Colin Dreeson, and I guess if you counted Harold, well that made for one crowded mid-sized ex-LSS transport ship. If we were out long, we’d be sleeping people in the engine annex.
I think the ridiculousness of that very point began to sink in as we took off, and, yeah, I couldn’t help but think the old girl felt a bit sluggish lifting us off from that old resort world. It wasn’t exactly a short jump either—three days from the Indies back into Lettered space—Omicron-313 to be precise. And if you thought the Deltas were sparsely populated, the Omicrons were nothing. Just rocks and stars and cosmic dust, mostly space lanes and a few useful mining sites, which we guessed was why Sparrow was out there.
Goss speculated that his cousin Kenn, as he called him, may have felt himself to be a likely target in the Letters Offensive. It sure looked like he’d gone into hiding, as there were some places out there to do it. Draya said she knew of some old tricks both smugglers and fugitives would use, either to hide themselves or stash goods they couldn’t move immediately.
People in her line of work called it “going trog.” You get a decent generator; a few nanosheet field units—the kind homesteaders would build their house inside; find a modest cave system; install heat and atmospheric control from a mid-size spacecraft; and you can set up a nice little temporary community on a totally vacant space rock, hidden in a cave. Come to think of it, it wasn’t too different from the abandoned Exos cylinders where we’d found Sparrow Dreeson and his clan hiding in the first place, just a bit farther out.
I spent most of those few days up in my old familiar seat, Captain of the Yankee-Chaos again after a lifetime and some change, and it took about ten minutes for it to feel like home. The big difference, was the obvious hole I felt every time I’d have needed something from Rishi—a course calculation, archived info of a system survey, projections on provisions, those sorts of things. The other main difference was that I couldn’t get a moment’s peace up there. I think it was because the ship was so damn overstuffed. People were sneaking away from the group that was always in the atrium, which I didn’t mind at first. I hadn’t caught up with Kristoff or Sōsh or Ren in what seemed like forever. But they would come up, and then Transom would come up with Fieldstone and a bunch of maps with probabilities, projections, plans to infiltrate and exfiltrate if said plans went badly. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to have that kind of lethal expertise to back us, but by the end of the day, I don’t think I’d had a minute alone all day up there. I hadn’t given a second thought about what the hell came the moment after that punch to Sparrow Dreeson’s face. We’d still have the same problem we had now: What next?
I was just getting to thinking about that when who should come floating into the deck but Carolina Dreeson, who smiled, said “Hey, Burch,” and strapped herself down in the officer’s seat.
I took a deep breath. “Hello, Carolina,” I replied. “Come to convince me to go easy on old Sparrow?”
“No. Not at all. I was just trying to get away from all the noise in the atrium. And I felt isolated in my quarters.”
And then she looked at me like that point might somehow be back in question with me back as well.
“It’s your cabin as long as you’re on the ship,” I said. “Always will be. You’ll always have a home here, even if it is your home away from your real home.”
She smiled. “My real home.”
“Yeah, that concept has always been a bit fuzzy for me too,” I told her. “That’s mostly because I don’t have anywhere to get back to. Last eighty years or so, chronologically speaking, it’s been wherever Rishi is. Same for her I think.”
“I don’t get the sense Maícon’s going to hurt her, Burch.”
“He’d better not.”
“Have you made any progress with all the files Kristoff brought?”
“What? All that Earth music? The novels and films and such?”
Carolina nodded. I shrugged.
“There’s mountains of that stuff, speaking figuratively of course. What I’d really need to make any progress is a technological mind to sort through it all and make connections. Too bad there’s not one around. Damn Nilius.”
“Did he give you any sense of what he’s up to this time?”
“Hardly ever does. He’ll be back in his own time.”
“I know Rishi was going through all those files heavily herself,” Carolina said. “From what I gathered, going back to Earth was a deeply spiritual experience for her. She mentioned it to me a few times, wanting to share it with you, Burch. But you were away.”
“Yeah, your friend Airee mentioned it to me too. It wasn’t just about Earth either, Carolina. She was alive again, human. That was a big part of it.”
I had a sudden realization, remembering something between us that went back to our earliest days together on the ship, Rishi and me.
“Hang on a second, Carolina,” I said, unstrapping and pulling myself over to the other side of the flight deck, reaching under the panel.
At that very moment, as it looked from behind very much like I had my face buried in Carolina’s lap, while I was reaching under the dash for a compartment in the panel, Goss and Airee floated into the deck. Carolina and I didn’t notice, she because she was holding my belt to keep my legs from swinging up in her face, me because my eyes were looking for that elusive catch in the panel.
“Uhm, are we disturbing you two?” Goss asked loudly. “We could come back later.”
I about lurched back, and luckily Carolina had her hand on my shoulders. Otherwise I’d have slammed my head on the underside of the dash out of shock. But she caught me.
“I got it,” I announced to Carolina. “Hang on a minute.”
I felt inside the compartment, and sure enough, there was a drive in there on top of Rishi’s box.
“We had a few little spots,” I explained as I pulled myself back, floating in the middle of the deck. “When Rishi died, she had her things on ship. Her clothes we had up in one of the storage lockers over the gear hall. But her personal stuff—we kept some of that in the locker in the Captain’s berth. But we used to keep her family pictures and other files she wanted backed-up in that panel there. I hadn’t been in there since she had her new body, but I guess she must’ve been using it recently.”
I held up the drive.
Carolina looked perplexed, tilting her own head to get a look under the panel. “All this time. All the hours I’ve spent on this flight deck, and I had no idea that was even under there.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I said, grinning. “I’m sure you got secrets we don’t know about tucked away around here somewhere.”
“Seriously, though,” Goss said. “Were we interrupting? I’d like to talk about getting back to Athos, Burch. I don’t mind this little detour with Kenn. But I do need to get back home afterwards. We’re going to need to formulate a strategy.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “That seems to be a common enough feeling. Pull up a seat, I guess. We’ve got a little time till we catch up with Sparrow.”
We had a few different tactical plans on Omicron-313 that largely depended on what we found out there. What we did find was about what we’d expected—a vacant ball of long extinct volcanic rock with no atmosphere or other useful features to recommend the place, just a tidally-locked, porous ball of rock floating through the cosmos. The tracker Transom had on Sparrow’s ship only had a fix on the planet, which meant it might not be easy to find him down there, hiding trog-style in one of those volcanic caves. Good luck, right?
Fortunately for us, he wasn’t trying too hard to hide—or at least if he was, Sparrow and his people weren’t that good at it. The scanners caught a curious formation of suspiciously-spaceship-sized boulders in an odd formation around a cave opening with a brighter than usual thermal signature. It wasn’t exactly a ‘Welcome’ sign, but to the even moderately discerning eye, it seemed to be a landing area with five ships covered by military-grade camo-sheets outside one of these trog-camps Draya was familiar with in these outer systems.
“What do you want to do, Burch?” Transom asked, inspecting the floatscreen above the nav panel. “We could come in low and try and drop in on foot?”
“I think it was Maícon Prime who called him at Exos,” I said. “We could try to ping them? See if they pick up?”
“You know,” Carolina added, “it is possible he might not even be down there. It’s the same ship maybe, but who knows if he was even on it?”
“You bring this up now?” Goss said, floating from behind her chair.
“He’s down there,” Transom declared. “I can smell him.”
“Aw, screw it,” I said. “We can sit up here hemming and hawing all damn day, or we can go see for ourselves. He knows this ship, and he knows who’s coming. He’ll either be friendly or he won’t.”
Goss got tossed a little as I nudged the ship down.
“Better find a seat, big brother,” Transom told him. “Burch is flying this bucket.”
“Damn straight,” I said, turning around and nodding.
I was no great pilot, but I was serviceable enough in a pinch. I wasn’t planning to land us on a tabletop or anything. There was a whole wide plain even I could hit without much trouble. So down we went.
When we landed, it was clear from the ground that all those boulders were ships like we thought they were—clean shapes with camo-sheets draped over the top, looking like out-of-place rock piles, and from where we parked, the rear airlock was just in view of the cave opening.
I pinged a broad spectrum. “Sparrow Dreeson, this is Hale Burch. We’ve come to have a word with you.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I just left it at that. And we waited. No response.
“Maybe they’re not listening?” Sōsh suggested. “There’s not a lot out here. Could be they’re not bothering?”
“Unlikely,” Fieldstone said. “They put up camo-sheets to hide and don’t set up a simple survey to track incoming ships?”
“He’s listening,” I replied.
“What the hell?” Sōsh said. “Does he think we’re going to just turn around if he ignores us, after coming all the way out here?”
“Let’s go find out,” Transom said, gesturing toward the back. “Gear up. I don’t trust his Trasp boys.”
“Yeah. Me neither,” I heard Omar’s voice from behind me in the forward corridor.
“They know I’m with Burch,” Transom explained. “And they don’t like me very much.”
“Yeah,” Omar replied again. “Me neither.”
That got a little laugh out of Transom.
Carolina and Goss were sitting in the atrium. “Do you want me to call him, Burch?” She asked. “He might answer me.”
“Just like he did back on Pax Heavy?” I replied.
“Well. Just let us know.”
So it was us five. Me, Transom, Fieldstone, Sōsh, and Omar. And we got geared up fast considering how crowded it was back there in the gear hall and the aft corridor. Maybe a few minutes had passed, and I told the guys I was going to ping them again directly from my helmet—see if Sparrow had changed his mind. Then we all clunked our way around the engine room to the rear airlock.
We waited there quietly for a response, and I could see Transom on his visor, looking at something, probably the same thing I was—the opening to that cavern or cave or whatever you wanted to call the hole in that planet’s surface Sparrow and his people were hiding in.
“Bolts!” he shouted. “Get back here.”
It sorta startled Omar, because he wasn’t sure what Transom was saying. But the rest of us had been around Transom enough to know he was calling for Harold, who came as called, stepping down the corridor to the lock door. Then we all crammed into the airlock as best we could, almost too many for a single cycle. There was hardly any air in there left to purge.
Once we all got our nanosheets up, Transom pushed Harold to the rear. “I’ve got a feeling,” he said, activating the outer door.
And then, as the hatch opened, Transom pushed Harold clean in the back, shoving him out onto the planet’s surface. And wouldn’t you know it. Those Etteran instincts.
No sooner had Harold’s feet hit the ground than he started taking bolts in his legs and his chassis.
“Stop shooting, you dumb assholes!” I shouted into my headset. “We didn’t come here to fight.”
Well, that was only partially true. But Transom had exhausted his patience. He dropped smoke as the frame of the airlock began to take bolts. They were spitting around in there. Poor Omar was getting crunched against the inner hatch as we all crowded back. And as that plume of smoke spread out into a cloud, Transom threw out a can of heat and gestured for us to take up positions behind the two nearest ships once we got out there. And before I could say a word about it, the two Etterans were out and Sōsh and Omar and I were out and suddenly we were firing back at them. Fair’s fair. All things being equal, I was fine with them putting dents in their own hulls and not the Y-C.
“Sparrow!” I heard Carolina’s voice come over the comms. “Stop it at once! We came to talk to you, not fight.”
By that time, we were putting a steady stream of bolts into that cave opening. Good enough to keep them from shooting back at us as regularly as they had been.
“Who is this?” we heard Sparrow’s voice finally come back.
“You’re damn cousin, you dumb asshole,” I said. “Who do you think?”
“Someone cloning her voice, that’s who!” Sparrow replied. “Carolina Dreeson is dead.”
I looked over at Omar who looked over at me, and we both looked at Sōsh, all thinking the same thing: Where in the hell did he get that idea? Transom and Fields were looking over at me, and I could tell through my visor’s rep they were just looking over for a nod from me to start advancing. They had a few heavier rounds and incendiaries, and that cloud was thick enough we could really start crawling down their throats once Sebastian dropped some more heat.
Then another voice piped up over the channel. “This is Colin Altagoss Dreeson, Deputy Minister to the Chancellor of Athos. Unless you want the entire weight of the Athosian government on your throats within a week’s time, you will cease all hostilities immediately and open your doors. No one will be hurt.”
“Goss?” Sparrow’s voice came back. “You’re not supposed to be out here.”
“I am wherever Athos needs me to be, Cousin Kenn. Stand down immediately. I want to hear the order on the open channel.”
“Of course,” Sparrow replied. “Is Carolina really with you? She’s alive?”
“She’s sitting beside me.”
They started a video stream that came over our helmets.
“Thank God,” Sparrow said. “You could have started there.”
“We tried to, Sparrow!” I shouted at him. “You were the ones started shooting at us. For what?”
“Everyone, stand down,” he ordered. “Weapons down.”
“Any injuries?” I heard Ren’s voice.
I did a quick survey. “None out here,” I reported, and then I saw the outline of poor Harold, hunched behind the ship with his head down.
“A scrape and a bruise and nothing more,” Sparrow replied.
“And a deviated septum,” I mumbled to our guys. “Soon as I get inside that cave.”
I told the others to wait on the Dreesons, inviting them to put a belt on and join us. Then I gave old Harold a hand up. His left leg got tagged pretty good.
“Go see Kristoff, old buddy,” I told him. “He’ll fix you up proper.”
“Who knew?” Transom stated, grinning. “Never would’ve figured an Athosian like Sparrow could understand us so well.”
By that time the smoke had cleared enough we could kinda see his outline in the fog, but Transom’s face was up big enough on our displays I could see him laughing.
“Not sure what you Trasp assholes call it, Omar. But for us, an exchange like that’s called an Etteran handshake.”
We did walk in there with a chip on our shoulder after all that, it’d be fair to say. Of course Sparrow tried to walk right past us to address his family, who tailed in behind us, and I was having none of that, stepping in front of him as he came toward the outer opening of the cavern.
“Hey,” I barked at him. “Remember me?”
He stopped just in front of me, looking perplexed that I’d have the audacity to interrupt a Dreeson in the course of his business. Then, before he could fully look straight at me to answer, I socked him good and clean in the nose with my left hand.
“Ow!” he shouted. “Bloody ... Ow!”
“That was for Leda,” I stated.
“I think you broke my nose.”
“Yeah. Be glad I wanted to feel it. Otherwise, I’d have hit you with my mech hand.”
He dropped to a knee, clutching his nose, and I could see those Trasp boys of Sparrow’s circling in. They were angry, but I suppose that made things even all around for the moment. They were just lucky I’d seen things through with Leda by that point and was satisfied that she was all right.
“It’s okay,” Sparrow grumbled. “Let’s just ... everyone keep calm. Are you going to hit me again, Burch?”
“He won’t,” Transom replied before I could. “But I might.”
“Well, that’s a given, isn’t it?” Sparrow stated, getting up to his feet. “I suppose I deserved that at least partly.”
He nodded, rubbing the bridge of his nose, which was dripping a bit of blood, and as it did, he began to pinch it. I recognized some faces from Exos, and sort of hiding behind a few shoulders in the back there was Reggie, the woman who’d actually sold-out Leda to the Trasp all those months back. She saw me seeing her and dropped her head a little. By that time, Carolina and Goss had made their way through the group of bodies there.
“Cousin Kenn,” Goss stated. “What a place to catch up with you.”
“I could say the same, Colin.” Sparrow looked down at Carolina, and to her shock, he embraced her, holding on for what seemed a long time considering the way they parted. “I thought you were dead, Carly. By Athos, it’s good to see you.”
“Why did you think she was dead?” Sōsh asked. “You didn’t get word? That attempt on her life at Alpha-Origgi was over a year ago now.”
Sparrow looked over at Sōsh funny—whether it was the statement or his metal half wasn’t easy to tell.
Sparrow shook his head at Sōsh. “You’d all been off the map for months—after getting caught up in that business at Enuncium, mind you—and then suddenly, in the middle of the offensive, the banking keys come back online just as rumors started to circulate that they’d finally caught up to you? I thought there was no way you’d have relinquished those keys unless you were dead, Carolina. And then rumors began to state just that. We do have to talk, but not here.”
Sparrow looked around, almost as though he was questioning which of his people he could keep in his confidence during such a conversation. I got the sense it wasn’t many. Apparently, Colin Dreeson did as well.
“Come then, cousin,” Goss said. “We’ll have Burch’s doctor take a look at your nose.”
Cozy as it looked, we spent all of about ten minutes in Sparrow’s cave. Then we all piled back into the Yankee-Chaos. And first-things-first, Ren did take a look at Sparrow’s nose, letting him know that it wasn’t properly broken, but she let him know he’d be wearing a pair of black eyes for a few days after that knock. I had to smile a little at that, even if it was a bit restrained for the sake of comity.
Then, when Ren was done slapping a cold splint on his face, he came out with a beak, took one look at the crowd in the atrium, and asked whether there wasn’t a place more private we could sit down.
“What can be said can be said in front of my people,” I told him.
“Who are your people?” Sparrow asked, gesturing toward Draya and Airee, who were quietly chatting on the bench at the far wall. That wasn’t even to mention all of us who’d been over in the cave, nor Kristoff, who’d taken Harold into the back room to patch the old boy up.
“They’re fine,” Carolina insisted. “Everyone on this ship can be trusted.”
“Except for Sparrow,” I replied.
“All right, Burch,” Goss said. “Let’s see if we can’t put all that behind us and discuss matters at hand.”
“That’s fine with me,” I told him. “I settled as much as I wanted already. Now, what the hell are you doing out here, Sparrow?”
“Taking cover,” he answered, turning his head toward Carolina, who’d just sat down at the head of the table, probably more out of habit than any symbolic gesture of authority.
Sparrow kept talking. “Ever since the Letters Offensive kicked off, it’s been one trouble after another in the Indies with little hope of reconciliation any time soon. So we’ve had to sneak away and find safety in seclusion, which is a barrier to the work we’d like to be doing, but, then again, so is dying. That is what we’re doing out here, Burch.”
Sparrow sat at the end of the table at the spot nearest Carolina and directly across from Goss. Omar and I sat down across from him and beside Goss. I guess nobody else really felt like the table was open for them except for Airee, who came over from the back wall and sat down beside Sparrow, introducing himself by stating he’d heard a thing or two about Sparrow from their first trip to Lime Harbor, which Sparrow visibly scowled at. But he politely shook Carsten’s hand. And then, once he’d sat down, Transom came over and sat beside Airee.
“Where’s Maícon?” Sparrow asked, and then, when no one answered directly, reading the reaction, he came to the correct conclusion. “Sore subject, I take it. All the same, I’d love to know.”
“He absconded with the banking keys,” Carolina explained. “We don’t know where he is presently.”
“Well,” Sparrow huffed. “And none too soon. I suppose I should thank you for this knock to the face, Burch. It seems to sting when I speak too forcefully. Otherwise, I’d be likely to lose my temper with my young cousin, who came to me in what I thought was good faith, looking for help on a family matter and then proceeded to touch off the bloodiest twelve weeks in the last three decades of the West Battery War.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Carolina asked. “Are you inferring I had something to do with the Letters Offensive, Sparrow?”
“I’m not inferring anything, Carly. I’m outright saying it. What the hell did you think would happen when you disrupted the investment channels of the Dark Bank?”
“The what?” Airee asked.
Sparrow closed his eyes and shook his head. “You absolute children. Did you not even understand?”
“You were the one who led us right down that trail,” Carolina stated. “From Pax Heavy to the Murder Mills, all the illicit accounts? Why would you show us the path if you didn’t expect us to walk it?”
“The Murder Mills?”
“I tracked your ship,” Transom stated. “How do you think we found you again all the way out here. We had a vector out to that slaughter factory that Maícon insisted was part of the puzzle. So we took their financials, and then Airee figured out the rest. That’s how we ended up pulling those keys off Lime Harbor in the first place. That wasn’t what you intended, Kenn?”
Sparrow scoffed. “To say the least. I have spent the last fifteen years of my life trying to keep something like the recent offensive from kicking off. Do you know about half the officers we’ve been cultivating on the Trasp side are dead now? Not to mention the death toll to every other soldier in the LSS, the Protectorate, the Guild. Civilian casualties in the hundreds of thousands at least. A nightmare!”
“How is that related to the keys?” Carolina asked.
“If you even have to ask the question, you’re in no place to be meddling.” He sighed.
“I didn’t meddle in it at all, Sparrow,” I stated. “Indulge me with a simple explanation, even if it’s not for your cousin’s benefit.”
“Those accounts were assets to be borrowed against, Burch. And when they were there and open and steady, both the Trasp and the Etterans understood that their future resources were fluid. In a way, that bank functioned like an infinite unknown variable. It made it exponentially more difficult for the other to calculate future resources that their enemy could stack against them. And, it was confidential. That was part of the structure. At first glance, yes, those accounts were owned by war profiteers, and you could certainly make a moral case—as I’m sure my young cousin did—for shutting off the funding with the hope that it would stop the fighting. But that only made the calculus that much easier for both sides, because it made it clear what sort of resources they each had at hand. When the entire board is visible, the game becomes infinitely easier to play. Then it becomes strategy, luck, and a little bit of the unknown; versus before when the unknown was the largest factor in the war’s unfolding over time. I imagine you meant well, Carolina, but, dear God, your best intentions ...”
Sparrow just shook his head.
“You said the accounts are back open now?” Goss asked. “Operating anonymously elsewhere?”
“Don’t you know that, Mr. Deputy Chancellor?” Sparrow said, huffing.
Goss’s eyes narrowed. He glared over at his cousin.
Sparrow closed his eyes and took a deep breath, apparently trying to summon his last bit of patience.
“I suppose it could be worse,” he said, his eyes still shut. “If they’d have clocked you dead at Alpha-Origgi, instead of just clipping you, Carolina, we’d be in a whole other layer of hell. Or more recently, my God. I did think you were dead.”
“Cousin,” Goss said, almost visibly trying to tamp down his ire, “I don’t delight in the thought of rebuking family in front of anyone, Athosian or otherwise, but I need to hear you say it. To what is your highest duty and obligation?”
Sparrow turned and looked at Goss, puzzled.
“It’s not a trick question, Kenn.”
“To Athos. Always. Did you come out here with the express purpose of burning me, Colin?”
“Don’t take that tone with me. Your cover is safe aboard this ship with every one of Carolina’s crew and friends. No one has an interest in burning you. I only ask to be certain, because the version of events I got—not just from my sister, mind you, but from everyone else involved—is that you abandoned her on Pax Heavy. The Chancellor’s daughter came to you for help and you allowed one of your operatives to double-cross one of her friends, and then you left my sister drifting in the breeze for weeks. Not days. For weeks. I demand to know what was so operationally pressing that you decided to take those actions?”
Sparrow looked around the table and tilted his head to Goss, as though signaling something.
“Don’t try to wriggle out of it like that,” Goss stated, growing even more visibly angry. “Tell me what higher obligation an Athosian intelligence officer has than the safety of Barnard Dreeson’s daughter.”
“I had to meet a contact.”
“Someone more important than Carolina? Yes?”
“It was an important source. I told her to wait right there at Pax.”
“Indefinitely?”
Sparrow shrugged.
“I bet you didn’t bank on her friend Burch beating you back to Pax with a story about her cousin’s people betraying his crew, her friends? That wasn’t in your plans, was it? Was she supposed to sit right there and wait for you to do the same to her as soon as you got around to it?”
“No.”
“And then you have the audacity to step foot onto this ship and lay the Letters Offensive on her after she walked right into your camp looking for your guidance?” Goss stopped talking for a moment.
I could see him breathing through both nostrils, his jaws clenched together.
“I am so bloody furious I could spit!” Goss shouted at him as he slapped his hand down on the table. “If you weren’t family, I’d let this crew draw numbers for which one of them got to split your head open.”
Sparrow sat there wide-eyed, like the rest of us. There sure was a fiery streak in those Dreesons. And Goss was doing every last thing he could to keep it in check.
He took a deep breath. “I need a minute,” he declared. “See this man off this ship.”
“With pleasure,” Transom stated, pointing at Sparrow to get on his feet.
“I’ll call for you when I’m ready,” Goss said.
And with that, Sparrow got up, and as rough as he might have looked getting popped in the nose like I’d done, I suspect he’d have preferred ten of those whacks to the verbal whipping Colin Dreeson had just dropped on him. And as soon as he’d disappeared down the back corridor with Transom, Goss put both hands down on the table as he stood, shook his head, and then walked up toward the front without saying a word to anyone, his face as red as Amos’s sun.
Everyone else just sorta looked at Carolina as if to ask whether it was okay to breathe. And she shook her head. No. It most certainly was not. Eggshells until further notice.
And I thought I’d been angry at Sparrow. Holy hell. I was sure glad these Dreesons weren’t my enemies.
I was sitting up on the deck, slowly going through that drive Rishi had left in our little hiding spot. There was some good music on there that I was surprised I liked. Most of the songs that had words in them and not just music I couldn’t understand a phrase of, almost like it was a foreign language. I’d catch a word here or there, but mostly, I was just enjoying the sounds, wondering what Rishi would tell me about those songs if she was there—something that happened to her on Earth or a story the song told that meant something.
Then Carolina popped in quietly. She sat and listened, offering a soft smile. I could tell she was sad for me, that Rishi wasn’t there to share the moment with us.
“We’re going to find her, Burch,” she said as soon as the song ended and it got silent.
“I know,” I replied. “I’ve got faith in that.”
“You found some nice music. Any clues yet?”
“Clues to what?”
“I don’t know. I guess what she was planning to share with you before ... well, Maícon ...”
“I wish I had a clue,” I joked. “How are you doing?”
Carolina sighed.
“That wasn’t right,” I told her, “the way Sparrow tried to put the offensive on you. It was good to see big brother had your back.”
“He may not be entirely wrong, though, Burch. Sparrow, I mean. I knew there would be consequences before we took the keys. What I can’t figure out is why Maícon would help me do it—encourage me even—and then go to so much trouble to steal them back and reactivate them.”
“One thing I learned in that other life in the future, living alongside Maícon and all those other prime AIs for decades, is that you can’t figure Maícon. He’ll do things just to see what’ll happen. That’s what I thought about Rishi too—about that Maícon who turned her into a bipal. I’d never have figured that, giving up his existence for hers. Then I heard Fieldstone’s story, and some of it is starting to make more sense—that there might be two types of Maícons maybe. And I bet that other kind shared what they know with Prime. Pitka’s Maícon certainly had plenty of opportunity. So how do you figure it? You all picked up Pitka’s Maícon after you stole the banking keysets?”
Carolina started searching her brain, scrunching up her face as she tried to remember. “Yeah. I think it was right after our second trip to Lime Harbor, right after we picked up Fieldstone.”
“They could’ve started talking in that way those AIs talk to one another. They think we don’t know they’re doing it, but they’re almost always talking—data streams, back and forth. There’s that, and, you know ... Maícon.”
“Somebody needs to stop this war,” she said, shaking her head.
“Hey,” I said, looking right at her as she started to drift, going to that place where guilt and self-loathing lived. “You did what you thought was best. What do these assholes think, setting up accounts to profit on all the regular people dying?”
I held up my mech hand.
“Nobody gets to blame you for disrupting the perfect order of their scheme. They’re the ones started the killing.”
“Maybe,” she replied. “Whoever ‘they’ is Burch. I’m not fully sure we know yet.”
“I got ideas. As good as it felt to knock your cousin on the nose, I think we need a better plan.”
“Got something in mind, Burch?”
“Yeah. As much as I hate the idea of another long transit, I think we need to go see Eddis Ali again. Omar and I have some questions for those wizards from our trip back to Veronia, about the rift in his sect.”
“Colin, Carsten, and Transom said the same from their time on Iophos.”
“Yeah. Plus, those wizards made those skin nodes for Rishi’s body. We’re going to need some of those nodes to find her somehow. I don’t know. Maybe we need another prime AI too, but I’m also going to need another body for Rishi when we find her core again. I doubt Maícon’s going to just give hers back. Plus, I’ve got questions about those Iophan Roughnecks the wizards hire to do their dirty work, and I got a hunch of who might know something about it.”
Carolina looked over at me skeptically, and I could tell what she was thinking.
“He’s going to find out sooner or later, Carolina. That brother of yours is no fool. We’ll have to tell him eventually.”
“Clem Aballi,” she muttered. “He’s there you think?”
“If Verona is still, yeah, he’ll be there. Last we heard from Nilius they were.”
“Back to the Vault then, I guess,” Carolina said.
“Whenever your brother’s done with Sparrow.”
They’d been in the captain’s quarters talking one-on-one for a few hours by that point.
“What do you think he’s telling him?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll find out later. You know, Burch, I didn’t have the slightest idea he was Athosian intelligence. I just thought he was this quirky cousin, motivated by conscience to stop the killing. I can’t help but feel like everything I’ve been doing is just one stupid mistake after another—naïve, thoughtless, bungling, presumptuous. Who the hell was I to think I could step in and solve the galaxy’s problems?”
“Is there a long list of people out there who were doing it already, Ms. Dreeson?” I asked her. “Plus, if I told you all the stupid stuff I did in my twenties, I’m not sure you’d have a bit of respect left for me. One bungling mistake after another, as you say. That’s about as close to a regular life as a Dreeson could live, I’d say. Anyway, want to put some music back on?”
“Sure, Burch,” she replied. “I can’t understand a word any of them are saying, though.”
“Right?”
“Especially that one with the gravelly voice Rishi likes so much?”
I shook my head at her. “Which one is that?”
“Transom thinks he’s hilarious.”
“Consummate art critic he is,” I replied, shrugging, displaying the list on the floatscreen.
“That’s him,” Carolina said, scrolling down. “Tom. Funny name. Tom.”
“Is that a band name or his name. Tom Waits?” I asked her. “I wonder what he’s waiting for?”
“That’s what I was thinking, Burch.” Carolina was laughing, which was good to see.
So I started playing one of his songs. And yeah, it was sure different. That was something Rishi liked, so we sat there listening for a while, and suddenly it got real heavy in there, like some kind of feeling Carolina and I didn’t share much.
We listened to a few songs like that before Goss came walking in.
“What in the name of Heder Floriston are you listening to, sister?”
“Earth music,” Carolina replied. “From the 20th Century, I think.”
“Interesting,” Goss stated. “Are those words or just noises?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you about Sparrow,” I said. “Any words or just more noises?”
“I’m going to need to get back to Athos, Burch. He had some very troubling updates regarding the issue with the keys. Carolina is very much in danger out here as well. So I think it may be best to bring her home with me for the time being, at least until things settle down. This business with the Iophans is extremely troubling. They are very much looking to pull us into the conflict, especially with the Trasp extended as they are now. That’s why Sparrow believed they may have succeeded in another attempt on Carolina’s life when those accounts came online again. We’re going to need to deal with Iophos directly at some point, the sooner the better as I see it. But I’ll need to discuss it with our father when we get to Athos.”
“Well, Ms. Dreeson?” I asked.
“We’ll see about all that, Burch. I’m not so easy to kill. And if you’re going to see Eddis Ali, there may be no safer place in the galaxy, Athos included.”
“Father will need to see you, Carly,” Goss said.
“Then to Athos, I suppose,” she replied. “If that’s okay with you, Captain Burch?”
“It sure is,” I replied. “I just got one more bit of unfinished business to take care of in Sparrow’s cave before we shove off.”
I had Sparrow Dreeson bring her up to the front of the cave. And she sure carried herself with some trepidation. Her body language was shouting it out. That Reggie.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m not going to hit you in the nose ... or anywhere else for that matter.”
“All right, Burch,” she replied. “What can I do for you?”
“This man with me,” I said, “do you know who he is?”
“That’s Omar Jemeis. Yes. I recognize him.”
“Omar’s my friend. He took me back into Trasp space to find Leda—or Aida. I can’t hardly ever keep it straight anymore.”
“Neither can she,” Omar joked.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” I agreed. “Seeing as I almost purged you out my rear airlock the last time I saw you, I figured it was only right I let you know that she’s doing well. Leda is.”
“I’m very glad to hear that, Burch.”
“So I guess your scheme worked, Reggie. And maybe with the passage of time and a cooler head, I’ve come to see it a little different, like maybe she was owed that after all. When I knew Leda, she had a lot of questions about who she was and where she’d come from, and well, you did help to give her those answers, and you did return her to her own proper family. I’m not going to say I’m sorry for how I reacted or say thank you, because it was deceptive and I still resent it. But I thought you should know where I stand. And I thought you should meet Omar. Regina Hoss Boggs, I’d like you to meet Omar Jemeis.”
She put out her hand. Omar put his arms right around her.
“Reggie,” he said. “I’d like to thank you, for our family—and for me—thank you for bringing my sister home again. We’re forever grateful to you.”
To my surprise, she started crying.
“I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t proud of what I did. But this war ... this war.”
I guess we were all feeling it in that moment. Mistakes, missteps, and regrets. No one gets out of it proud if you get out at all. But I felt good at least that me and Omar and Reggie got to close out that account. Same for me and Sparrow Dreeson. Next was next as they say in the Letters. So we said our goodbyes and pressed on again, back once more to Athos.