Three Zero

By Georgia Knight

This is the second book in the Hadrian’s Gate series.

Whilst enjoyable in its own right, it is recommended that you first read the previous episode, available to download:

Episode One:  The Cairo Accord

Chapter One

Four years before…

Terror does not stop.  It never will.  In paradise, where everything is as it should be, and where harmony reigns, there is still the capacity for fear.  And when it is not expected, when fear sneaks up on those who have peace in their hearts, its bite is the most ferocious.

When he stood to one side to let the Union security officer into the lift, Clayton Wright had no idea what had just happened at the other end of the space station, where his wife was dropping their son at school.  No idea.  The sound of the initial explosions did make it as far as the commercial compound, but barely, and the whirl of the closing door drowned them out completely.  No one in the lift heard them, not Clayton, not the teenage boy, not the woman with the holdall, and not the officer who nodded at each of the others as he joined them in the metal cage.

It was a large space and with the four occupants shuffled to opposite corners, it seemed cavernous.  No one spoke.  All of them expected the lift to move up, and when it changed direction to move down, still no one said anything. Clayton met the gaze of the Union officer and offered a bemused but relaxed frown.  The green arrow indicator on the wall by the woman started to drop towards the lower storage levels.

It was the boy that broke the silence, inadvertently scuffing his shoe on the metal floor as he shifted his weight.  The two men looked at him.

“You thought it was going up?” the officer smiled.  “So did I, but let's guess again!”

“They are always going wrong, these things,” added Clayton.  It was a lie, he had never known any problems with them, and for one to change direction mid-trip was inexplicable.

“Huh,” managed the boy.  Nervously, he toyed with the identifier on his wrist.  He was about fourteen, with a mop of black curly hair, and dark, soon to be handsome features, if he ever made it that far.  In the gloomy days that followed, Clayton would ponder if the boy had survived, but had eventually, reluctantly, concluded it unlikely.

The woman, uninterested in the exchange, had lowered the holdall to the floor and was kneeling beside it.  It was the wrong type of bag.  It did not match her official, business-like look.  Whilst that seemed strange to Clayton, he did not register it as a concern.  Perhaps there were other distractions.  A tight pencil skirt pulled up as she knelt, showing off pale, shapely, long legs.  All the others, even the boy, stole an admiring glance.  As she reached into the holdall, she glared up at them disapprovingly, singling out the man in the uniform.  Clayton would later reflect that this was all part of the plan.

“See anything you like?” she challenged the officer.

The officer did not shift his gaze.  There was tension between the two of them which led Clayton to briefly wonder if they knew each other.  That thought was interrupted as the lift came to a halt.  They were several storeys below ground level.  There was nothing down here but storerooms.

A deafening crack suddenly reverberated around the lift.  Clayton recoiled, instinctively raising his arms in defence.  It sounded like an explosion, but there was no blast and his feet stayed firmly beneath him.

Across, the boy had dropped to the floor and was cowering.  His feet scuffed again as he desperately tried to push himself back through an immovable wall.  Two terrified eyes peered out from beneath the mop of curly black hair.  He was looking beyond Clayton, to the woman.  She was no longer kneeling by the holdall.  She was now stood, with something small and black in her hand.  It was pointing and drew Clayton’s attention towards the Union officer.  At first, all he saw was a confusing mess, with some kind of gunk splattered everywhere.  Then he saw the officer amongst that mess, leaning ungainly.  The back of his head seemed misshapen.  Correction, the back of his head was missing.  And the mess - a ghastly splatter of red, peppered with lumps of white and grey - was the remnants of the officer’s now half-empty skull.  Immediately behind the mortally wounded man, blood and brains spread out like a vile peacock’s tail.

Clayton realised what had happened, and as the gun in her hand swung round, seeking a new target, there was barely time to consider his actions.  Family flashed into his thoughts as the weapon stopped on the curly haired teenager.  His own son was a similar age, a similar build, a similar look… This boy’s own father was out there somewhere, waiting for him to return home.  Clayton did not make a choice, for there was no real choice to be made.

“No!” he shouted, moving in front of the gun.

The officer’s body gave up and began to slide sickeningly down the wall.  The identifier embedded into the dead man’s wrist no longer glowed green; there was no one left for the device to identify.

Seemingly ignoring Clayton’s obstruction, her aim was still on the boy.  The gun levelled, her finger tightening on the trigger.  It seemed inevitable she was going to fire and right then, right there, all Clayton could see was that black barrel.  He waited and he prayed.  That wait grew.  Eventually, he managed to draw his eyes upwards, to look at the killer.

Wiry, red hair fell either side of an elegant, long face.  A roman nose marched up between well pronounced cheeks, climbing to shaped, ginger brows.  Narrow, pursed lips, made fuller by striking crimson gloss, emphasised a determined, stony expression.  The rest of her freckled face appeared free from make-up.  She was in her early thirties, he guessed.  A pink flush touched her pale complexion, betraying a nervousness.

Clayton courageously met her stare.  There was fear glistening in her eyes; it was the watery glaze of someone close to tears.  He found hope in that.  Perhaps he could appeal to whatever turmoil was going on inside and prevent more bloodshed.

“He's someone's son!” he yelled, his words barely audible above the shrieks coming from behind.  They were the screams of a very scared teenage boy.

She faltered, the aim of the gun briefly wavering.  The eye contact did not break as Clayton spread himself, trying to block her line of sight on the boy.  Her finger still rested on the trigger and the tiniest increase in pressure would see it fire.  To the side, the guard lay slumped in a growing pool of blood, as his killer looked straight at Clayton.  She blinked repeatedly, perhaps pushing away the tears.  She seemed to refocus.  Where Clayton was sure he had seen sorrow, perhaps even regret, now there was only cold steel.

Suddenly, the aim of the weapon subtly shifted and there was another deafening discharge.  Clayton expected half his side to be torn away, but he felt no pain, no push, nothing.  The change in the boy’s screams told him his human shield had failed; she had shot the poor child.  The gun shifted again.  It was now brought to bear directly on Clayton.

He backed away.  The shot was still reverberating in his ears and his nostrils were full of a burning, metallic smell.  Fear like he had never known gripped him as he stared at the barrel.  Again, he could not see past that black, terrifying object.  Any sorrow or fear in her eyes was forgotten, there was no space for such sentiment now.  This woman was a killer and, tears or not, she planned to kill again.

In another place, the husky voice of a teenager cursed and called for his mother.  In that same place, a man, who only moments before had courteously nodded at the others in the lift, now lay in a pool of his own blood.  Clayton was not with those victims, though, his mind in panic.  Paralysed, he was unable to even conjure up the simplest of actions or thoughts.  There was nothing but an oppressive certainty he was going to die.  This was a terror no man should ever face.

Clayton Wright did not die that day, but he would often wish he had.  It would take a long time for him to come to terms with the woman lowering the gun instead of firing, especially when he came to understand the full scale of the dreadful events that were unfolding.  As she had lowered, there was a moment he actually thought himself dead.  In his confusion, he thought perhaps she had fired at him after all, and he was standing there as the officer had, his body refusing to fall despite the fatal wound.  Soon he would be lying in his own insides too.

There was no stumble back though, and his mind, as shaken as it was, remained intact.  He was fine, unlike the teenage boy, who was screaming.  With the gun lowered, Clayton managed to drag his eyes away from the freckled face of the woman, to look behind.  The shot had hit the kid high on his right leg and he was bleeding heavily.  It had made quite a hole.  Writhing in pain, his face red and distorted, the boy was making no attempt to stem the flow of blood.

“You have your hands full,” the woman said.  The voice attempted to be strong, but it did not ring true.  She was faking it, struggling to hide her own fear.

“You have a choice,” she continued.  “If you stay and pack the wound, you might save the boy.  Or you could try and stop me, and risk saving no one.  Or, with all hell breaking loose above us, you can run, and try to save yourself.”

With the sound of explosions having still not reached the lift, he was confused by those last words, but it was obvious what the gun-toting maniac had meant about the boy.  If he was going to live long enough for medical help to arrive, Clayton had to slow the bleed.  Her words had also made it clear that she was not going to shoot him. Whatever the reason for leaving him unscathed, Clayton gratefully snatched at it, and his thoughts turned to the survival of the wounded boy.

In that moment, a thunderclap erupted overhead.  It rumbled for what seemed an age, the lift shaking. ‘All hell breaking loose’, she had said… What was going on?  No sooner had the first subsided, than there was a second loud crack, followed by what he took to be blaster fire.  Having only heard the sound of such weapons in games and movies, he could not be sure, but it matched the woman’s narrative.  Recent unrest in some of the outer systems sprang to mind, but surely not here, not in Earth’s backyard.  Ten minutes before he would have believed that ridiculous, but with a dead Union officer and a maniac shooting at young boys, it now seemed distinctively possible.  Were there more murderers like her above? Were terrorists running amok across the station?

The woman, the gun still menacing, picked up the holdall and slung it over her shoulder.  Her nervous fear remained, in the way she moved, in the awkward swing of the bag.  Any bravado displayed was a charade, designed to intimidate.  The lights flickered at another roar overhead and she visibly jumped.  The explosions seemed to be getting closer and she was clearly desperate to leave.

“I’ll be going,” she said, her voice shaking, “this is not a place to hang around.  You have been lucky so far today.  Whether you choose to be a hero-man, or you choose to run, do not run after me or I will kill you.”

Of that, he had no doubt.

The lift doors were open.  She swept past him, into the service corridor beyond.  There was haste in her stride.  Half-walking, half-jogging along the corridor, her pace increased as she got further away.  He watched until she merged into the shadows and then the screaming of the teenager burst back into his conscience.

Time to be a hero-man.

Squatting to avoid kneeling in the growing pool of blood, he went to the boy.  At first, his hands just hovered, comforting words stuck in his mouth.  He knew what he wanted to do, knew what he ought to do, but the horrendous noise and the vile stink pushed Clayton towards panic.  Another loud bang overhead and self-preservation almost took over.

On the brink of fleeing, he thought of his own family, of his wife and son.  They were up there somewhere, still in the education section most likely.  Anxiety floored him.  He almost screamed himself, joining the hollering of the boy.  How did he get to his loved ones?  How did he protect them?  From this end of the station, if they were in danger, he would never get there in time.

Clayton could not leave the boy, not yet. He had a mum and dad too and, just as Clayton was now relying on others to keep his family safe, this kid’s parents were relying on him for the same.  Somewhere, they would be holding out that hope, that there was someone to look after their boy.

“You’ve been shot, but you are going to make this,” he said, managing to drag a reassuring voice from somewhere.  “She's gone, it’s safe, there is just us here now and I will get help, but first you have got to listen to me.”

The boy looked up at him, but it was not clear if the words were landing.  A blood-covered hand desperately grabbed hold of Clayton’s arm.  For a boy so young the grip was remarkably strong; there was fear in that hold.  It took all of the man’s effort to prize the fingers free, and he had to drop to his knees to do so.  By the time he held the boy’s hand in his own, there was blood everywhere, and any sense of disgust had been pushed to one side.

The vile liquid pulsed.  Each heartbeat pushed a dreadful surge through the gaping, seared hole in the boy’s jeans.  Clayton was shaking so badly that he struggled to remove his jacket, but he knew he had to stem the flow.  The garment was already soaked red and damaged well beyond repair.  Its ruin was of no concern, not here, not now, with the sound of explosions reverberating overhead.  Trying to stay calm, Clayton folded his jacket into a square, and shoved it on to the wound.

The boy screamed, a scream riddled with curses.  Huge, loud, obscene words, mingled with hysterical hollering for his mother.

“We will get you back to her soon,” calmed Clayton, the fake strength in his voice holding for now.  “What's your name?  I'm Clayton, I have a boy about the same age as you, he’s called Conner.”

The boy seemed to connect: “Rich,” he gasped.

“Right Rich, I need you to try lifting your leg, it will hurt like hell, but you've got to go with me, okay?”

There was some head movement that could have been a nod.

“Here is what’s going to happen.  This jacket has to be held tight, as tight as possible.   You have got to keep pressure on that wound.  I'm going to tourniquet your thigh.  I need you to cross your injured leg over the other one and lift it as high as you can.  It's going to hurt, but you have to be brave.  Can you do that?”

The green light on the teenager’s identifier flashed and caught Clayton’s attention.  He briefly glanced at his own.

“Then we both need to activate our distress beacons,” he said, “you have yours set up I take it?”

Again, Rich struggled to a nod.

The boy did his best, he really did, when he must have been in agony. On the many future occasions that Clayton would reflect on these moments, he would curse that courage.  Curse it because it made his decision to leave the boy seem even more cowardly.  He tried to justify it as a husband and father; he had a responsibility to survive this mess too.  That was not enough, though, and the torment of leaving Rich alone with his only hopes an identifier and medical drones, would haunt many nightmares.

Clayton stayed for about two minutes, holding the jacket in place, his shirt forged into a makeshift tourniquet.  After triggering the injured boy’s beacon, he activated his own, tapping the images projected on to his forearm until the indicator light turned a flashing red.

He would never know if the drones responded to Rich’s call.  His own would go unanswered, but he would not need it to be his saviour that day.  Instead, his survival was down to luck, pure luck.  For so many on Three Zero there had been no chance of escape, but fortune cut Clayton a break.  He tried to remind himself of that, when he thought of the desperate, agonised face of the boy he left behind.

He had just been lucky.

It was not his fault.

What he felt was irrational survivor’s guilt.

Over ten thousand souls were lost on the Fossae station, and he was not one of them.  That was not right.  It was not deserved.

The security officer did not make it.  Rich did not make it.  The dozen or so he saw burnt alive when a shuttle crashed a few feet away did not make it either.

Ten thousand other souls.  All dead.

Everyone remembered where they were when they heard the dreadful news from Fossae Three Zero, but not many had stood amongst the carnage and survived.  Clayton Wright was one of the lucky ones.  Well-wishers liked to tell him that at every opportunity.

Yeah, he was lucky.

He was lucky enough to lie awake in his bed every night, a photograph of his dead wife and son on the pillow beside him.

Chapter Two

Three years later…

Official figures recorded four hundred and twenty survivors.  Over ten thousand were lost.  It was the event that could not happen. It was an act of terrorism so catastrophic, so brutal and effective, that it overshadowed the legacy of the Twin Towers of 2001, and the Ramadan Massacre of 2246. For such an atrocity to be perpetrated in Earth’s own orbit was unthinkable.  Unthinkable.

But it had happened.

As much as he wished, it was not just the cruel conjuring of his nightmares.

Clayton Wright’s life changed that day, as did the lives of many across the solar system.  Never before had the peace of near space been violated in such a way.  The shockwaves of Three Zero rippled out across the explored galaxy. Safe, idyllic lives in the heavily populated inner systems were suddenly overshadowed by a threat not seen for centuries.  Stories of uprisings in the frontiers were common, and civil unrest close to home was not completely unheard of, but an act of terror on this scale was incomprehensible.  It marked the dawn of a new age of fear.

Three years on, and Clayton was a prisoner in his own home.  He rarely ventured out and spent most of his days and evenings on the porch.  It was not the same home shared with Olivia and Conner; the bank had taken that one back a while ago.

In all the time since the atrocity, he had not worked.  His job in finance had gone with the destruction of Fossae Three Zero.  With normal functioning a struggle, getting another job had proved impossible.  Even finding the motivation to look for one was difficult.  The company’s insurance had taken care of him to a certain extent, but they had not acted quickly.  Ten thousand dead people were a lot for the insurers to handle.  By the time the funds had finally hit his account, his debts were already astronomical, and the bank at his door.  When push came to shove, they had showed no more mercy than the assassin he had encountered in that lift.

So here he sat, on a different porch to the one he had shared with Olivia, but watching the same moon glow through the dusk.

Each year the night sky seemed brighter, as more orbiters and huge freight ships filled the sky.  There were different stars up there every night.  It was impossible to identify which were the celestial bodies now, the view confused by the coming and goings along the highways between Earth and her colonies.

No doubt, some of the lights were ships travelling to the Fossae cluster of stations.  They would pass the monument to the fallen, which orbited in the same location as the disaster had unfolded.  From there many would head out much further, deeper into the solar system, or, if powered by jump technology, to other systems light years away.

Life carried on.  Deep space explorers continued to push the boundaries of the human race.  Scientists continued to expand the human intellect, discovering new ways to manipulate the atoms of the cosmos, conquering the building blocks of existence.  Teachers, his long dead wife’s noble contribution to humanity, continued to teach, their words a legacy carried in the next generation.  Farmers and miners continued the constant drive for improving yields, to feed and fuel an ever hungrier and expanding empire.  Retailers and innovators continued to churn out new products and fashions for the masses to spend their hard-earned dollars on.  With over three hundred billion people now buzzing around the near galaxy, ten thousand deaths were never likely to hold back progress for long.

Life carried on.

Whilst everyone remembered where they were when they heard about Three Zero, no one remembered where they were when their lives just popped back into place.  Some were gripped by the news stories for several more weeks, wrapped in tearful sympathy, tinged with anger.  Then came the raids and the arrests, followed by public trials, all of which played out relentlessly across the channels, poking at the public consciousness.  Throughout that media glare, most lives carried on.  Routine returned and sympathy lost its tearful salute.  Not, though, for those who mourned loved ones.  For those, life would never move on, and the comfort of routine was gone forever.  The survivors, injured or otherwise, could never contemplate normality again.

Three years.  Three long years.  Why had time slowed down, when those wonderful years before had passed by so quickly?

News from the dreadful event still ticked over.  A few weeks ago, on the anniversary, all the channels had been full of self-indulgent remembrance.  Although such intense coverage was not now the norm, on a regular day there were plenty of updates on the aftermath if you wanted to find them.  Stories on smaller channels covered the continuing forensic investigations, the ongoing recovery of bodies, and updates on the hunt for suspects.  They were all there if you sought them.  Clayton often did.

The larger media agencies now gave more prominent airtime to the clamp down on dissident movements by the Union, but that was of little interest to him.  President Chilake could make all the promises he wanted on rounding up the forces of evil, but it would not bring back Olivia or Conner.  It would not bring back Rich or the dead officer either, or the many others he saw perish that day.

The moon was exceptionally bright tonight.  There was a time when he had regularly marvelled at the lights up there, sparkling away, a mixture of human achievement and further aspirations.  It was like a huge tapestry of humanity’s progress.  ‘Marvelling’ was lost to him these days, though, in much the same way that ‘normal’ was.  Excitement at his great grandfather’s tales of pioneering adventures meant nothing now.  With the loss of his wife and child, any zest for adventure had been lost too.

Another light, the amber one on his wrist, caught his attention.  It took him back to that lift, and he recalled how the officer’s identifier had turned dark. He remembered too the vivid chaos on the wall behind the shattered skull, the bloody mess spreading out like a peacock’s tail.  It was not the only head damaged that day.  All these years later, Clayton’s brain remained stunned.  That delicate organ had been through so much, and the shambles left was barely recognisable to the sharp mind that had been there before.

In the early days, there had been no chance for it to recover.  It was less than a week after the rescue from Three Zero that the interrogations had begun.  They were all above board, of course, all in line with whatever council regulations covered such things.  It had still been brutal.  They gave him the time it took to get back from space, a day re-acclimatising, a day with the doctors and psychologists, and a day to start sorting out the mess that was his life.  That was all, four days, and then they were straight into the aggressive questioning.

Initially, his employers had tried to protect him, even if later they would foreclose on his job.  With no living relatives and in a sorry mental state, they helped to sort out his affairs along with those of his dead wife, who had also been a Fossae employee.  However, despite their vigorous protestations, they could not keep the authorities at bay.  After intensive hounding of the company and his lawyer, on day four they were unable to resist any longer.  It had become a matter for the courts.  The Union, it seemed, was able to impose special measures when interplanetary security was at play.

Clayton could not remember much of it.  It was like looking back into hallucinations following a bad dose of food poisoning.  He could remember being there and answering questions, but he saw it all through a daze.  The only strong recollection was the fear and panic felt throughout.

At some point during, he had provided a description of the female assassin.  With security drones on every corner, it was unusual for there to be no actual images from the scene of the crime.  Those drones, the cameras, the images they captured, and the data clouds holding them all went up with the rest of Three Zero.  It seemed incredible in this age, that there had been no remote backup, but that was what it was.  So, they had relied on the face created from his description.  The woman from the lift was one amongst dozens of such faces circulated by the authorities and the media. But other images, particularly those of known outlaws, grabbed far more of the public’s attention.  The faces of terrorist Malcolm Gomez and his known associates hogged the airwaves, the red headed assassin from the lift barely featuring.

It frustrated him that she had never been found, but at least the Special Forces had managed to bring most of Gomez’s group to justice.  That was something, he supposed.  There had not been the slightest sniff of his terrorist, though, the one who haunted his dreams.  The poor likeness of the image he provided had probably not helped, but in his heavy grief, it had been hard to draw forth a detailed recollection.  When he looked at that media release again, years later, it bore little resemblance to the woman.  There were not enough freckles, for one, and the face was not oval enough for another.  The nose was too broad too, the image adding several pounds.  But the most obvious difference of all were the eyes.  Rather than the two sorrowful pits he now recalled, he had drawn them angry and aggressive.  Hatred and spite had no doubt led to that distortion, making her features harsher than they were.  Or was it the other way, and had the passage of time moderated his memories of the woman?  He doubted that, and he certainly hoped not!  He hoped the hate was still there!

The obsession had eased; he was no longer thinking about the assassin every day.  He had realised that there was no value in wasting energy like that.  After three years of sleepless nights, he had no energy left to waste.  She was gone.  Even if she had survived, and all the evidence suggested that was probably not the case, then it was unlikely she would surface from whatever hole she had hidden in.

Union Special Forces had succeeded in arresting or killing many on the wanted list.  Others were identified amongst the dead, supporting the intelligence that it had been a suicide attack.  With so few escaping the destruction, it was likely the rest of the perpetrators were amongst the unrecovered bodies.  He hoped the lift assassin was floating in the cold void, her shrivelled cadaver distorted by the pressures of space.  It would not be justice, but it would be something.

It was a chilly evening.  October this far south usually felt mild, but there was a cold winter blowing in from the north.  Scotland was already seeing single figure temperatures during the day, and Kent’s elongated summer was similarly under threat.  Calls for increased climate control were surfacing again, but the ecologists were out in force warning of impending doom.  Senator Lazarou argued that with half of humans living in artificial climates away from Earth, was it not time that the mother planet caught up?  With such a prominent figure behind the campaign, it would no doubt happen sooner or later.

Clayton quite liked the chill, so thought that would be a shame.  The cold air tested the senses; boy did he need that.  His life was one long string of numb days and fretful nights.  At least a shiver focused the mind.  The same shocking sensation went into his daily shaving routine, a routine avoided for the first few months following the incident.  Now it was always ice-cold water to wake up the face, and a bare blade to chop away the previous day’s growth.  A shower with the temperature barely beyond the blue followed, and he edged it even cooler on mornings when the dark hours had been their most arduous.  These nips at the senses brought him back into the world.  They brought him back from a dreadful place of nightmares and desperate thoughts.  They kept him from the suicidal moments the psychiatrists had accurately predicted.

What did he have to live for, though?

He shivered again as the distant orange glow of thruster engines pushed a large vessel up into the night sky.  What exactly was it, the thing that kept him alive?  It was not love, for he had no one.  It was not answers, for he believed there were no more to be found.  It was not for justice, as he did not believe that would ever be served.  And it was not revenge, for he saw no solace in such hollow victory.

The only reason he did not find a tall building to jump from, or a heavy transporter to throw himself in front of, was because he did not deserve to get away that easily.  He had not earned the right to escape this hell.  Ten thousand had died and he had survived.  Standing in the lift, she had blown the officer’s skull apart and put a hole in the leg of a teenage boy, yet Clayton had escaped unscathed.  In a dazed horror, he had watched a dozen burn alive in the upturned wreckage of a crashed shuttle, only to find himself, seconds later, on an identical craft, firing along a launch tube.  From the safety of space, he had watched the station rip apart, explosions dancing into the darkness, each one claiming more lives than the last.

How had he survived?  Why had he survived?

He had abandoned Olivia and Conner.  He had abandoned poor Rich.  Whenever he thought of his lost family and that young boy, all he could see was that terrible image from on board his rescue shuttle as Three Zero broke along its axis, a huge fireball tearing it in half.

In the vacuum of space, the fires of the explosion quickly subsided, but the force was nonetheless destructive, throwing out a million pieces of debris at frightening speed.  The hurtling shrapnel caught many escaping vessels.  For some, and for their terrified cargo, the debris would inflict mortal damage, claiming more victims.  Other stricken ships would limp along until help arrived in the hours that followed.  Once boarded, some of those vessels were found with survivors, some with nothing but the dead.  Yet amongst all that, the shuttle Clayton was on managed to escape.  It flew through a field of debris completely unscathed. A thousand to one shot.

Again, his luck had held out.

Again, he had not deserved that break.

Riddled with guilt, he came to sit here, watching the myriad of lights in the darkening sky.  He had sat here yesterday, and he would tomorrow too.  There was no wife by his side.  There was no son in his room, studying and chatting to his friends.  When Clayton ate, he ate alone.  When he drank, he drank alone.  When he eventually retired to his bed, forced by the chill of the night and the heaviness of his eyes, he would sleep alone.

This was the reward for running out on Rich.  This was the payment for letting down his family.  It was a loneliness that knew no limits, and pain that burnt like hell.

+     +     +

This far out, there were few places left to run.

Secreted in the lining of her jacket was a microscopic beacon that could have summoned help, had security screening not wiped it.  The organic circuitry was invisible to sensors, but it was fragile.  Too fragile.  So, stuck on this freighter, the only way she could reach anyone was through her identifier, and activating that would fire a thousand alarms across the net.  What could she do?  There was too much at stake to let it end like this.

From her hiding place, tucked behind a container, she could see the length of this huge vessel.  Well, in theory she could, but she could not actually penetrate the shadows beyond a few hundred metres, where they all merged into one.  The rest of the mile-long interior, although mostly empty and free from obstructions, was just darkness.

She would see them coming, though, when they eventually did.  There was no way to escape that inevitability.  Soon, she would have to activate the identifier, there would be no choice.

In the palm of her hand sat a tiny clear tube.  Inside, an even tinier nano-chip, impossible to see with the naked eye.  She knew it was there though, for she had put it there several weeks before.   The tube had been with her since.  The files stored on the chip were a culmination of years of investigations.  She had gambled everything to compile this information.  Now it seemed wasted effort.  The dice had rolled against her, and it was all over.

The final throw was the rendezvous on one of the Rhea Orbiters.  The plan had been to hand over the chip, but it was abandoned when her contact got cold feet.  Unhelpfully, he had waited until she was at the end of the six-week journey before pulling out.  With no rendezvous, her credentials quickly started to fall apart.  The chain of false identifications began to unravel.  Fleeing Rhea, she had managed to sneak on to this vessel, bound for Titan, knowing that they were now on her tail.

It had been an uncomfortable journey.  Supplies were low, and the living accommodation left a lot to be desired.  She was limiting herself to one Vita-tab per day now, washed down with water taken from a hole she had drilled into a pipe.  Having not eaten properly for three weeks, energy levels were seriously depleted.  It was getting to the point that if they did not find her soon, they would likely later find a corpse.

As desperation neared, it was time to open the curtains on that final act.  She would drop the chip through the hole in the water pipe.  Hopefully, it would just wash away and be lost forever.  Too many lives depended on that information staying out of the wrong hands.

If this were to be the end of the line, though, she could not just let all her hard work go to waste.  There was a lot resting on her shoulders and all her efforts had to have meaning.  What she knew could not die with her, it had to get out there, into the public domain.  Without the chip, that would be hard, but if there was any chance of bringing those behind the atrocities to justice, she had to take it.

As she contemplated what came next, there was little doubt death would not be far behind.  After years hiding, activating her identifier and connecting to the net would blow her cover wide open.  Every surveillance subroutine in this solar system, and some beyond, would wake up to her presence.  Soon, the spies would locate her.  But trapped here and unable to survive much longer, there really was no choice.

The light on her wrist appeared amber, but despite fooling security check after check, that identifier was fake.  She reached into her bag and pulled out the real one.

“Time to light the fuse,” she sighed, disgusted by the stench of her own breath.

As soon as she plugged in, and her body’s signature triggered her account, someone, somewhere would notice.  The freighter captain would likely be first, the life-sign detector suddenly having a plus one.  Whilst the crew might arrest her for trespass, they would not kill her, but out there, much bigger alarms would sound.  Those alarms would quickly bring others to this location in vessels far faster than this giant hulk.

She pulled at the band half-circling her wrist.  It came away easily and she tossed the decoy to one side.  From her bag, she retrieved a similar looking device; it was twice as heavy and the light on top did not yet glow.  The hole sunk into her wrist was about a centimetre across, the skin around rising to accommodate a small mount.  Inside was a simple latch, and beneath were a myriad of micro-fibres that connected to her nervous system.  The identifier took no time at all to click into place.  A second later, the light began to flash amber, before settling to a steady green.  That was it; she was online.  In her mind’s eye, she could hear all the servers kicking to life, the search software honing in.

She opened a new message and began to type quickly.  This would be a poor substitute for the damning files on the nano-chip, she knew that, but it was the only way left open to her.  She had to get the allegations out there, to stoke the fire under the conspiracy.  There was a lot to get down and she had no idea how long she had before security arrived.  Dictating the message might have been quicker, but her voice would carry far in this empty hold and only bring them sooner.

Fingers played her wrist like a mini piano, and the message grew.  At times, it rambled.  No attempt was made to correct the grammar or spelling; there was no time.  After about five minutes, her fingers froze, and she looked at the last sentence:

“Please, please make sure you tell them all, get this on every channel that will take it, the future of humankind depends on it.”

It was a bold statement, but she believed it to be true.  If there was one thing the events on Three Zero had shown this unlikely survivor, it was that there were elements out there who would stop at nothing.  She hoped and prayed that the info in the message was enough to send others along the same paths she had walked.  Maybe those who followed could bring the murderers and conspirators to book.  Maybe they could succeed where she had failed.

From the directory, she selected an already saved list of contacts and added them all to the message.  Without any flourish, with a deep heart and a horrible sense of foreboding, she hit ‘send’.

That, she thought, would be her last meaningful act.

Then she remembered.

Quickly she re-opened her identifier.  The content of this message would not draw attention and would hopefully go below the radar of those who hunted her.  She was taking a chance, meddling in someone else’s life, playing with their head.  It was a long shot, but one she had to take.  Besides, what did she have to lose?

Her wrist showed just three simple words:

“Always there, Con.”

Send.

+     +     +

It was shortly after nine that Clayton Wright’s identifier illuminated.  He frowned; he had a message.  The days when such things had brought any joy were long gone. Then, the idea it might be Olivia had excited.  It might have been a flirt, an innuendo, a hint at getting together later.  Even though the heady days of early courtship had faded, her messages had always given him a buzz.  Over time, the content had become less adventurous and far more functional, but he had still known the woman on the other end was his special person.  Now, it was likely just unscrupulous and unwanted advertising.  If it were for him at all, it would be his lawyer, she was the only person who ever made contact.

“Fuck off, Sammy,” he said as holographic words appeared on his forearm.

It was not Sammy.

He read the text, the furrow of his brow deepening.  It was not unscrupulous advertising either.  It was a simple statement; three very specific words that made his heart jump.

Clayton stared at his arm for several seconds, initially in disbelief, then shock.  How could someone do this to him?  This was a wicked trick.  Whoever had sent this must have known the impact it would have.

Snapping free of the shock, he twitched his index finger and the words disappeared to be replaced with a menu.  He selected “Sender”.  The word “Unregistered” met his action.  Initial upset moved towards anger and he checked himself; that would not be a helpful emotion to feel.  A clear head was needed.

It could have been co-incidence.  Three words, all commonly used, jumbled together and thrown out on a massive fish to the wrists of a billion random people.  This was not targeted at him.  The sender did not know that these words would hurt.  It was just a line, cast into the vast ocean of communications, hoping for a bite.

Clayton had never been a big fan of co-incidences although he knew the universe was full of them.  This human race owed its existence to a huge series of chance events, he got that, but this was not what this was, it could not be.  This was his identifier, embedded in his wrist, on his porch, in his little part of England, displaying three words that meant so much to him.

“Always,” he mumbled thoughtfully.

His mind was a mess of emotions now.  Having been numb for so long, he found a glimmer of relief in those feelings.  Night after night he usually lay awake, staring into the black, thinking about nothing much at all.  These three words, just like the chill of the October evening, were able to stab at his senses, proving he was still alive.  He brought them back to his forearm.  Bright yellow letters about five millimetres high jumped out of the darkness.

A moth buzzed the identifier.  He wafted the insect away.  At some point, he would stop attracting the wildlife, but he just wanted to look at the message a little while longer.  The words hurt and provided comfort at the same time.  They pulled at his heart and yet soothed his painful memories.  They brought a simmering rage that someone could intrude this way, but they brought gratitude too, that they had chosen to give him this moment.

Clayton’s thoughts were fired.  For the first time in a long time, he was using his brain.  There were no complex calculations to perform or business results to analyse, this was simple stuff by comparison, but it was ‘stuff’ nonetheless.  He fell back to the past, digging out whom he might have shared those words with.  He jumped ahead too, to how this message might impact the days yet to come.  The future had been impossible for him to consider since the station, but those three words were like a bolt of adrenalin.  They kick-started that future, made him think beyond the here and now.

He would sit pondering what to do for another hour.  All that time his identifier stayed on, continuing to attract the insects.  Eventually he left the porch, went indoors, and locked up the house. More tired than he had been in a long time, he went to freshen up before bed.

As he squeezed paste on to his tooth cleaner, he looked at himself in the mirror.  Red eyes stared back.  At some point, he had been crying.  The emotions felt good.  In the weeks that followed, as he tried to discover who had sent him those words and why, there would be more emotions, and many would hurt like hell.  But he had hope.  For the first time in a long time, he had hope.

+     +     +

Reckless was not the best name for a lawyer.  The times she had been asked if she had changed it, to suit the job, were numerous.  Of course, she would explain, because ‘Reckless’ is perfect for someone with whom you plan to trust your most private affairs.  Sammy was British, and her local clients would smirk at the sarcasm.  Those from overseas, especially the Americans, did not get it.  She would never bother to explain.

In the wake of Three Zero, Clayton Wright had not chosen Miss Reckless.  She had been appointed by his employer, but he had no issue with the company’s choice, he could not have found better himself.  Not once had she made him feel her efforts were for the fees, although undoubtedly those were large.  When the company decided to turn their back on their employee, Sammy had offered to stay around, on call and on significantly reduced rates.  Nothing as traumatic as this had ever come across her desk before, and she wanted to stick with it and stick with him.  She had, and he trusted her implicitly.

Sammy was arriving for a rare day in the office when she took his call.  A click of her fingers, her chosen initiation action, and the call channelled directly to her ear.

“You okay, mate?” she asked in her usual thick cockney accent.

A couple of her colleagues nodded as she walked through the open office. She gave the same courtesy back.  Large in bulk and large in character, she was a popular woman, with a heart and passion that matched her magnificent intellect.  After a heavy, alcohol-fuelled night, she gratefully plucked a creamy coffee from the grasp of a service drone.  A quick flash of the wrist, and payment was taken.  Seemingly delighted to have pleased, the machine whirled away, leaving Sammy to focus on the call.

She listened intently as her client explained the situation.

“Yeah,” she said, “that is out of the blue…”

The lawyer ducked into an empty side pod, blocking out prying ears.  The pod thanked her for choosing it, and confirmed it was now booked out for the next thirty minutes.  She ignored the automated voice and continued her conversation.

“… and how am I meant to do that?” she asked.  “Yeah, yeah, I know people, of course I do, but I also have this little thing called ‘professional integrity’ and data snooping is illegal.”

She listened more.  Her face was straight; no frowns, no smiles, just a face that was thinking.  After hearing him out, Sammy Reckless shook her head.  There was a sip of the coffee before the reply.

“You are asking a lot, Clay,” she said. “I am not saying no but let me think about it. I need to figure out if this is something we should do… yes I get that, I realise how important it is, but I'm not going to do anything that will put you or me in jail.  Let me think about it.”

The conversation ended with the usual pleasantries, but boy was she feeling rough by the end of it.  She found a chair and sat, her head thudding, the dehydration following last night’s exploits not helping.  This drinking had to stop.  She might be able to afford the best in medical restoration treatment, but like the weight control, it only worked so many times.  Eventually it would catch up on her.

Exhausted, she would flop here, drink the coffee, take a couple of cleansing pills, and try to reflect on the conversation with Clay.  It would be a hard headache to shift, and he had not made it any easier.  His request was ridiculous.  Not in any condition to argue, though, she had let him finish.  What she found most concerning was the bizarre reason for the request in the first place.  He had not sounded confused, but she feared he had to be.  Three years of post-traumatic stress had possibly got the better of him, three years of mourning perhaps pushing his sanity over the edge.

She needed a clear head before dealing with this.  It was a dangerously sensitive situation, her client precariously balanced.  A simple three-word message, apparently from nowhere, and now he was convinced his son had miraculously returned from the dead.

This could not end well.

“Oh boy,” she sighed, and took another sip of the coffee.

Chapter Three

Present day…

Twelve light years from Earth, the Tau Ceti system had the luxury of three habitable planets.  The most populous of those was the garden world of Meridian Rise.  There, cities clustered in the northern and southern temperate regions, away from the desert that cut across the centre of the single continent.  From space, this huge belt of parched plains was a harsh contrast to the green lushness towards the poles.  From the ground, the harshness was even more severe.

Felipe Victor shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun.  This side of the planet had just left a ninety-hour night.  Tau Ceti was rising in the sky and the temperature was starting to climb.  In a few hours, he would not be able to handle the heat, with it set to soar above seventy degrees centigrade.  Already over thirty, it was barely tolerable, although the dark suit was not helping.  Tools of the trade though.  He had to look the part.

With the heat, winds would often build, whipping up the sand into fierce storms that could tear at clothes and flesh, as well as playing havoc with equipment.  The base would be locked down before those extreme conditions arrived, but hopefully, if all went to plan over the next few hours, Victor would find a launch window to get away from this planet before the worse of the storms hit.  This assignment had not been a pleasant one, and he would be glad when it was over.  Once done, and once back to civilisation, he would take some days to rest and relax, enjoying the benefits of his hefty salary.

Damn, it was hot.

He put a hand to his forehead and felt the clammy perspiration.  It was best to go inside before the sweat erupted around his collar.  A wet shirt could counter the confident and authoritative persona he had over the team, and he did not want to threaten their good work.  The prisoner was squealing like there was no tomorrow and throwing out strong leads.  There were new names and new locations, and special forces were already searching, following those leads, hoping that they took them to the fugitive McGann.  There was nothing on her yet, and that was what his bosses would ultimately require, but the subject was beaten and a breakthrough inevitable.

With a small salute to the sun, he headed inside, a heavy-duty door slamming shut behind him.  The entrance was cut into the edge of a rock face and, unless you were right on top of it, it was almost impossible to see.  Hidden inside, was a well-equipped Union base.  The complex was top secret, its existence not even known to the planet’s government.  A worm secreted in the programming of satellites hid the surrounding few square miles from view, allowing for stealth flights in and stealth flights out.

Once Victor was away from the heat, the climate-controlled interior chilled the perspiration on his face and neck.  It was a delightful feeling.  As unpleasant as this job had been, Victor was satisfied with the efforts so far.  The operation had started with a perfect sting, the subject recovered from a crowded location with the minimum of fuss.  Any collateral had been swiftly disposed of too, with all loose ends tied up and solid cover stories in place.  An excellent job.  The only annoyance along the way had been the infuriating doctor and her pathetic excuses.  He had been warned she was slippery and mischievous and would try to delay the programme.  There was a lot of ego in the small, twisted, old witch, but there was a lot of genius too.

No one was blind to her science being perverse.  It was widely known amongst the rank that all but the most hard-line on the council thought Project Indigo unethical.  It was accepted, though, alongside other similarly dubious initiatives, because it served a purpose by helping to keep the Union strong.  In doing so, it also kept planets like this one, with its botanical parks and eco-cities, safe.  Thanks to Indigo, the citizens of Meridian Rise and hundreds of billions like them across these inner sectors, could merrily go about their lives oblivious to the threats out there.

Victor was firmly of the view that he and his service colleagues played their parts well.  They kept the secrets for a reason.  Humankind needed protecting from the likes of the prisoner and his associates, and the dangers they posed.  If that meant accepting the twisted science of a mad doctor, so be it.

There were a couple of guards at the top of the corridor that led to the holding cells.  Although they were dressed in identical suits to his own, they were very different to him.  These were androids, sometimes referred to as mock or faux agents, although a casual observer would have struggled to identify them as such.  The signs were there for the initiated, but they were incredibly subtle.  When their eyes went to meet Victor, there was a slight delay in the pupils adjusting.  When they spoke, their voices, although well engineered, had an eerie quality, as if thrown by an exceptional ventriloquist.  But, with interplanetary laws that limited the use of organic materials in the building of robots ignored, they looked incredibly human.  There was no point being a secret service, though, if half your workforce stood out like a sore thumb.

“Is the subject back in the interrogation room?” Victor asked the first.

“He is,” came the reply, “they have cleaned him up and he has had another injection.  It seems to have calmed him down for now.”

“He knows who he is again,” said the other android, “and that is a start.”

Victor frowned.  Although acutely aware that Doctor Schmidt had warned him that Luca might have challenges regarding the split personality, he stood by his decision to ignore her.  With time of the essence and pressure building, there had been no choice.  Perhaps a stable subject might have heralded that crucial information by now, but there was no way anyone could be certain of that.  Personally, he doubted it.

The breaks afforded to the prisoner for medical treatment were frustrating though, as Victor wanted to get on with it.  Plenty had been extracted, information seemingly not recovered during Luca’s first period of interrogation, some four years before.  The commander-in-chief would not be happy, though, until those new names, new locations, new snippets of intelligence led to McGann.

Taking on this assignment, Victor had dug out the records from the last time Luca had been in custody.  Stored under the highest levels of security, the files had taken some locating.  Despite the importance the council placed on this job, he had struggled to get them released.  Bureaucrats.  When he had finally managed to review them, it was striking how little they contained.  They stank of a time when perhaps motives differed, when perhaps it made more sense not to clamp down quite as hard as they could.

Malcolm Gomez and his gang carried the blame for Three Zero, others were not needed.  Gomez’s death and the parading of his girlfriend satisfied the baying politicians and the angry masses.  Back then, not adopting a policy of vigorously pursuing all the dissident groups had served a purpose.  Instead, by seeding fear that other terrorists were still out there, they had strengthened public support for the council, giving the president the freedom to introduce new security measures.

But now was different.  The escape of McGann from her high security prison was a game changer.  The mystique built around the woman before and during her trial made her far more dangerous than she had ever been as Gomez’s sidekick.  Now, her name alone could galvanise entire systems, bring forth the many groups opposed to the Union, and tear apart the uneasy peace that rested across parts of the galaxy.

It was a good job that some insightful high-ranking officer had conceived Project Indigo.  With subtle face reconstruction, altered memories, and a new identity, they had placed the man who knew everything in cold storage.  Victor wondered if anyone had ever really believed that Jed Luca would be needed again, but it was irrelevant now, circumstances dictated that he was.  So, it fell to the secret service to get into the mind of a man who, for the last four years, had believed he was someone else.  It was their job to remind him who he really was, and what he knew.  With two personalities in there, though, that was not as straight forward as hoped.

“How much did they give him?” Victor asked the faux agents.

“Two hundred milligrams,” one of them replied.  “Double the dose of last time.  It should keep him stable, but he is very weak.”

“Yeah,” said Victor, knowing exactly how weak the subject was.  That was deliberate.  As well as stabilising the mind, the drug would help to draw out the truth from the subdued subject. “He’s just the way he needs to be.  There is more in there, I know it.  He has not given us the key to McGann yet, but he will.”

“The directive is to keep him alive,” the android reminded.

Victor frowned and glared at the agent.  It was programmed to recognise frustrated facial expressions and responded appropriately, averting its gaze.  Such human traits made it even more difficult to identify them as machines.  They even suffered annoying habits, such as pointing out the obvious, and it was hard to resist punching them in the face at times.  Of course, such an action would have likely broken Victor’s hand.

“I know that,” he hissed, “you do not need to remind me!”

He pushed between the androids, the door beyond sliding open to let him through.  Another short corridor led to the interrogation suite.  His identifier flagged his approach to hidden security sensors, opening the door at the other end.  It ascended slowly, beeping as it went.  He impatiently stooped under before it reached the top, the desire for a breakthrough fuelling his urgency.

Half a dozen black-suited agents were gathered in the antechamber.  One by one, they turned and acknowledged the arrival of their leader.  He nodded back.  There was a surprisingly sombre mood and suddenly Victor felt the pressure ramping up.  The optimism that he might make a flight out of here in the next couple of hours started to fade.

With low lighting in this outer room, the bright light coming from the viewing windows dominated.  These one-way portals allowed the agents to watch the sorry figure in the interview room beyond. Before going in, Victor briefly paused to observe.  Luca was hunched at a table, his hands wrapped longingly around a beaker of water.  He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, running from his ankle to his neck.  It was grubby and covered in stains.  A shaven head betrayed several red lesions on the scalp, where a myriad of needles and probes had been inserted into his skull.  Although the subject’s face was partially hidden, marks and bruises were visible on his forehead and nose.  These testified to the abuse the man had suffered at the hands of agents, keen to learn his secrets.

The prisoner was a dreadful sight.  Victor felt no glee or triumph in seeing him that way.  There was a job to be done, there was a galaxy to protect, this was not personal.

“He’s ready for you,” prompted one of the agents.

Felipe Victor looked at her.  She was smiling and he did not like that.  Dell was young and new, and this was one of her first postings.  By the time she got to her third or fourth that smile would have wiped itself.

“He’s not ready for this,” Victor said, “and neither are we.  For this kind of crap, no one should ever be ready.”

+     +     +

Bruised hands toyed with the beaker, turning it, rolling it, the water occasionally splashing over the side.  Round and round it went, click-clicking on the table.  Round and round.

Victor found it incredibly annoying.

“Do you still hear the buzzing?” asked the agent.

Jed Luca paused the beaker.  Without raising his chin, he lifted his eyes to look at Victor.  There was nothing in that gaze but the glassy fog of the drugs.

“The buzzing has gone,” the prisoner slurred, “at least for now.”

Click-click, round and round, the eyes fell back to the spinning beaker.

“Have you thought any more about our conversation?” the agent pushed.  “You’ve had time to reflect, time to consider.  What have you decided to tell us?”

“How long have I been here?”  Luca asked.

“Four days.”

“You’ve tortured me for four days.  You’ve beaten me, shocked me, drowned me, deprived me of sleep, hounded me with questions over and over again… for four days?”  His words were laboured, slowly stumbling out of his mouth.  “And you think there is more to come?  You think I’m holding out?  How much have you pumped into my veins?  Am I superhuman, able to withstand the effects of Midazolepine?”

Click-click, round and round.

The complex name of the drug had been nothing more than a drawl of barely recognisable consonants, but Victor had understood, and it was a good point made by Luca.  Right from those early sessions, even before that first dose of Midazolepine, the subject had imparted lead after lead.  He had given them names, locations, net encryption passwords - everything had flowed freely.  But then the well had dried up.  Perhaps Luca had revealed everything he knew?  Or perhaps he was now holding back and there was still more to come.  Was it worth the agent’s throwing the bucket down the well a few more times?  With no solid breakthrough, with no lead on McGann, the interrogations had to continue.

Before detention, Jed Luca had lived as Pike Macey, with all knowledge of his terrorist past lost.  Project Indigo, and the twisted science of Doctor Schmidt, had now restored the former personality and those memories.  The restoration, however, was far from perfect.  The drugs, designed primarily to weaken the resolve to resist interrogation, did help to suppress the ghost of Pike, but the ghost still lingered.  With another two hundred milligrams coursing through his veins, Luca seemed as lucid as he had at any point during his imprisonment.  If there was more information to come, the extra boost of Midazolepine would surely help.

“You know where Kayla McGann will run,” said Victor, his tone low and threatening, “and you know who she will turn to.  You will help me, even if I have to personally remove your teeth to make you.”

“It will be hard to talk with your hand in my mouth,” muttered the subject.

“Oh, it will not be my hand.  I’ll use a laser scalpel and burn them out one by one.”

Luca showed no sign that the threat bothered him.  Still the beaker rotated, kicking out its endless rhythm.

“I’ve told you,” the prisoner implored, “and I keep telling you, Kayla was a loner.  You killed whatever family she had at Haram Galt.  Before Malcolm, before us, she had no one else.  We were her only friends - that was it.  We were her entire social network.  That was the way she wanted it to be.  Wherever Kayla is now, she will be alone.  Whatever she is doing, or planning, she will be doing it by herself.”

“It’s a persistent lie, I’ll give you that.”

Still staring at the table, Luca smiled.  It was a pained expression, his face swollen from his captors’ brutality.

“There is no point in me lying now,” the prisoner reflected.  “I am way past the point of no return.  You have beaten me, both physically and mentally.  I have told you everything I know, and I have betrayed them, so many of them.  No doubt, Union forces are out there rounding them up even as we speak.  It will be like Haram Galt all over again.  Massacres, murders, and all because of me.  I am beaten.”

Victor did not reply.  Central Intelligence had advised that many of the locations extracted were already known or long since abandoned.  Many of the individuals identified had, it seemed, disappeared with no trace.  Only one or two of the leads were proving promising, but nothing had yet resulted in the necessary success.

The resigned disappointment in the prisoner’s words were genuine though, that much was obvious.  Luca believed he had betrayed his former associates.  Perhaps there was no more to come after all.

“You can carry this on as long as you want,” the prisoner continued, wincing from the pain in his mouth.  He paused to gulp back saliva and blood, grimacing at the taste.  “But I can only take so much. Increase the beatings, electrocute me, rip my teeth out - do as you will.  Chop off my balls and make me eat them, if that turns you on.  But I will end up dead, and you will end up with no more, because I have nothing more to tell.  I do not fear death, Agent Victor, not now.  What hope do I have of ever being released?  I know I can never leave here.  Even if I did somehow walk free, there would be a price on my head greater than any the Union could offer.  I would be a dead man walking – a grass, a snitch.  You do not betray the kind of people I have betrayed and get away with it.  So, torture me all you want, I am dead whatever, but be assured there is nothing else to learn from me.”

Victor stroked his chin.  Two days’ worth of stubble grazed his fingers.  As a fair-haired man, it was barely visible, but he could certainly feel it.  He wanted to shave it off, right that minute.  He wanted the feel of cold, fresh water on his cheeks, washing away the stresses of this situation.  It really was a quandary, this interrogation.  There was real credibility in the words of the prisoner and that made this job difficult.  The mission brief could not have been clearer, though.  Break Jed Luca, the instruction said, and through him find Kayla McGann.  The breaking bit was easy, but getting information that would pinpoint a fugitive on the run somewhere in the vast galaxy…?  That was a nigh on impossible task.  It was like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack many countless light years across.  Her known haunts or hideouts would have been a good start, but Luca had revealed none, claiming he knew of no such places.  Victor could not help but feel the prisoner was telling the truth.  And therein lay a real quandary.  Victor could not allow himself to believe Luca.  To do so would be to admit defeat and the mission a failure.  As long as there was even the smallest chance that the subject was keeping something back, this had to persist.  Not only did the stability of the Union depend on what Luca knew, the stability of Victor’s future career did too.

Click, click, click.

The agent leapt forward, swiping at the prisoner’s hands.  He struck them hard, knocking the beaker clear, sending the receptacle and its contents into Jed Luca’s lap.

“I’ve given you every opportunity to co-operate,” Victor hissed.  “You are a fucking idiot, holding out like this.”

Luca, expressionless, stared back.  Blank.  Numb.  Beaten.

“Get him out of my fucking sight!”  Victor screamed at an agent by the door.  “Take him down and give him more of the same.  Next time I see this piece of terrorist shit I want him begging to share, begging to tell us everything he knows!”

Now the prisoner’s face did falter, his mouth starting to quiver.

“I’ve told you everything,” he sobbed, “please, everything.”

Felipe Victor met the pathetic man’s tearful eyes and for a moment they locked.  ‘Forget it,’ the agent wanted to say, ‘leave him, he has told us all he can.’  But that was not an option, there was a job to be done.

The agent tore his gaze away, pushing up, shoving the chair from beneath.  He turned his back on the prisoner, unable to look at the wretched soul any longer.  Other agents were arriving in the room, moving to restrain the terrified man. They did not need to, there was no fight left in Jed Luca.  They had beaten him to the edge of his endurance, and now they were about to beat him again.

Felipe Victor felt grubby; he needed that wash and shave more than ever.

+     +     +

Time was lost.  In such terrible pain and fear, there was no concept of before or after, only now.  Gripped with panic, his heart was beating at an alarming rate, and his head, clouded with confusion.  There was no room in there for any rational thoughts.  There was no capacity for planning or working things out.  Even the most basic concept of memory, or the ability to predict what might come next, were beyond him.  There was just now.  There was just this.

The water burned.  It was cold, yet still it burned.  When he drew breath, water tore at the inside of his nostrils and mouth, burning that delicate place at the back of the throat.  It was agony.  It was terrifying too, fearing each gasp of air would be his last.  Every painful inhalation made him think he was drowning, but there was not quite enough water to do that.  More than enough, though, to make him cough and splutter, and then wait for the next excruciating pain.

He wanted it to stop, all of it, and he did not care how.  If the only way for this to end was with his life, then so be it.  He could take no more.

Another breath, another burn, another moment in which he thought his days were over.  Then, a tug on his arms, pulling him back and up.  The pressure on his head from the flow of blood suddenly eased, so suddenly it nearly caused him to pass out.

There was no water now, it was gone.  He frantically gulped at the air, rapidly drawing it into his body along sore tubes.  No sooner had it reached his lungs then back it came in a fit of razor coughing.  It was so painful, but it was breath all the same, and he was liberated from the drowning sensation.

Now there was a new agony.  With arms drawn painfully behind him, stretching the shoulders in unnatural angles, his back spasmed.  Beneath him, legs flailed.  They eventually found purchase, allowing him to stand and ease the pain.  With his body restored to a more comfortable position, his breathing gradually began to regulate.

“Had enough?” a female voice screamed.  “Had enough?”

Oh yes, more than enough, they had long since passed that point.

Moments before, he had prayed for death, but now relief swept over him.  He was still alive and, for now, they had paused the torture.  An awareness of the surroundings crept back in, and he recalled where he was and how he had come to be here.  This wave of recollection was familiar now, he had felt it many times, on each of the occasions they had dragged him to his feet.  He looked down on the water-trough through blurry, stinging eyes.

“Names?” the interrogator insisted, “Places?  Where will McGann be?  Where is she hiding?  Who is hiding her?  You can stop all this by telling us.”

“I want to,” he gasped, still recovering his breath, “I want to.”

A heavy blow struck him low on the spine.  If they had not held him tight, he would have gone to his knees, but instead he just screamed out, writhing in their grip.  Another blow, and then another.  Eyes closed against the pain, his head flopped forward.  With each moan, snot and spit dribbled from his nose and mouth.  The mucus was tainted red.

“Tell us!” the woman screamed.

“I want to,” he sobbed weakly, “but I don’t know, I have no idea.”

There was another blow, this time across the shoulders.  Those who held him now stood aside, letting go of his arms.  He felt himself starting to fall and a vague memory popped into his thoughts, of a busy restaurant, of a bee sting to the neck, and of men in suits crowding around him.  There was a strong smell of garlic.  As he tumbled another blow reigned, this one hard across the back of his head.

The world went black.

+     +     +

It was several hours before he came round.  The unconscious darkness had been full of vivid, terrifying dreams and on waking, they lingered.  As he lay on the bunk, he took a moment to gently massage an aching forehead, before opening his eyes.  The reality of the prison cell flooded in, but it did not immediately take away the confusion.  He was sure the water had been reality, and he could feel the beatings all over his body, so there was little doubting they had happened.  But the greenhouses and bee stings?  Were they glimpses into the past, or an imagined alternative existence?  He thought back to Haram Galt, which in his memories had only been a few weeks before.  How did these confused recollections fit in with that timeline?

He tried to move.  The resultant shockwave rendered him immobile.  His entire body was gripped with agony.  Had they broken his back?  Was he condemned to a life in this cell, lying paralysed?  At least, he was horrified to find himself thinking, that might stop the beatings.

It was a tiny room.  The only item of furniture was the simple bunk; there was no space for anything else.  From where he lay, it was less than two feet to the door.  Cut into this exit, at eye-height, there was a grill.  Although he could not be sure from this angle, the grill appeared closed.  A single panel in the ceiling provided illumination.  With the excruciating pain across his temples, he was thankful the lighting was weak.  There was enough, though, to glint off a beaker on the floor.

Water.

He was thirsty as hell, but there was little desire to drink.  The pain in his head and back was only matched by an equally ferocious sore throat. The water might have soothed, but he feared it might burn too.  He was dry, so very dry.  A remnant from his recent dream floated to him, and with it came the subtle aroma of a well-cooked meal.  More specifically, it brought the smell of garlic.

Leah.

Ouch, that hurt.  Wherever that had popped from, and whoever she was, the name was enough to sink his heart.  The restaurant, the smell of garlic, Leah - they all belonged together and meant something, but he could not remember what.  Although Haram Galt and McGann dominated his conscious hours, he recalled there had been other moments like this.  In amongst the hell of the torture and the pain, these bizarre feelings kept emerging. With them came an encroaching anxiety, swamping him with a sense that something was missing.  It was something that should be in plain sight, but he could not see it.

Who the hell was Leah?

And then a face; fair, pretty.  A face topped with light, wavy hair.  A smile so kind, so loving, so sexy.  Who was she?  Who was she to him?

He covered his head with his arms, cutting out the light, trying to block out the images.  When his thoughts had previously ventured to these places, things had become emotionally tough.  Even his captors had noticed.  They could ignore his usual screams as they tortured, but the desperate cries brought about by these tormenting fake memories were a whole different level.  When the agents heard these anxious, desperate cries, they came with their needles to inject away his madness.

There was just such a tidal wave on the horizon.  If he removed his arm and opened his eyes, the light would amplify those painful thoughts and what was now a trickle would gush through.  It would flow into his nostrils, rushing into his mouth, burning at the back of his throat… except this was not the same.  This flow was not just water, this was his life.  These were things that all mattered, but only in another time and another place.

“Midazolepine,” he moaned, the croak of his voice startling.

Leah.

Louder.  His throat hurt like hell as he forced out the words: “Midazolepine, please.”

The tidal wave was here.  His bicep squeezed across his forehead, trying to distract the growing anxiety, but it was futile.  Here it came, forcing its way through.  A heavy weight pinned him down, crushing his chest, amplifying the agony in his back.  He could not stop it.

“No,” he pleaded, “I don’t want this!”

There was nothing he could do.  He needed help, he needed them to take this away.

“Midazolepine!” he screamed, his throat ripping apart.  “Midazolepine, please!”

Chapter Four

Loyalty, that famous one-way street.  Trust, that precious vase, so easily smashed.  Two men, coffee between them, glared at each other with the rage that destroys planets.  Thankfully, neither were warriors, both being men of diplomacy and measure, of influence and negotiation.  President Chilake, Head of the Union Council of Planetary Systems, seethed that his trust had been broken.  Ryn Grayling, a president of a different kind, Head of Grayling Media Corporation, was appalled that his loyalty was even questioned.  The coffee, served by one of Chilake’s aides, sat untouched and going cold.  The aide had scurried away, hoping she had not been noticed.

It started small; these things often did.  A flash release from one of the more obscure news agencies, dropping on to the ticker tape of their few million followers.  Other eagle-eyed reporters spotted it though, spotted the words trending, spotted the significance, and the whole thing was starting to explode.  Grayling’s own cliché: the cat was out of the bag and about to scare the sparrows.

This meeting had been scheduled a while; the two men were friends and regularly met socially.  Their jobs routinely placed them light years apart so coinciding the busy diaries was not easy, but they managed to get together every three months or so.  Always, they would meet when both were back in the Sol system, perhaps, like today, on Earth.

Arranged long before Chilake needed assistance with the emerging crisis, this get together presented an opportune moment to discuss the Kayla McGann problem further.  It had not gone as expected, and stern stares and angry exchanges ensued.

“Saturation levels are now in excess of ten percent and growing,” Chilake said, exasperated.  “Ten fucking percent.  It’s growing by the hour.  It is already out of control, we know that.  It is out there!  Growing exponentially!  Agency after agency are waking up to the story, system after system hearing the news!”

The president’s identifier reflected off his annoyed face, and he turned a chart to show the media mogul.  An aggressive finger jabbed at a particular point on the floating image, to highlight the increasing trend from the live data stream.

“At this rate, it will be less than three hours before the whole fucking galaxy knows!” said Chilake.

Grayling was not a man who took criticism easily, especially when he felt it unjustified.

“You need to look closer to home,” Grayling said, ignoring the pointing finger, “before you start throwing allegations in my direction.  You asked for a news blackout, I gave you one.  No one at Grayling Media ran with this story.  None of our distribution channels are carrying it.  If it’s out there, it’s come from a different source.  We are on clamp down!”

“The senate was told this was a privileged matter…”

Grayling scoffed, “Oh don’t be so naïve, Denvour, five thousand politicians asked to keep a secret?  Come on!”

“But they know the gravity of the situation!” Chilake exploded.  “The inner sectors know the panic this could bring, and the outer sectors, as questionable as their loyalty to the Union can sometimes be, do not want to light the fuel of rebellion and topple their governments.  There is so much at stake.  They were all briefed on the importance of…”

“Five thousand,” interjected Grayling, “five thousand.  It only takes one.  You think you are the only politician who can influence the media?  You think you are the only one with your own agenda?  Five thousand of them trusted with a ‘secret’.  No way could you trust them all; it was foolish to ever think you could.”

The president slammed off his identifier and slumped back in the large chair, dejected and furious.  He glowered at the media executive.  Grayling was leaning forward, floppy black hair concealing his brow.  The face below that over-confident fringe was impassive and indignant.  It was the face of a man who was used to calling the shots, whomever was paying for the coffee.

“All the independents will run this now,” Grayling asserted, “regardless of whether it is verified by senate or council sources. As you said, it is out there.  It will not be too long before we have to report it too, we will be forced to, we cannot remain quiet whilst all the other media corporations are chanting it from the minarets.”

Chilake watched as the cocky bastard finally took a sip of the tepid drink.  He showed no reaction to the temperature.  Of course not; a grimace would not have sat well with his arrogant persona.

“This is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it?” the president asked.

“Ridiculous suggestion,” rebuffed Grayling, “of course not.  I promised you a blackout and for three days we have kept it so.  Your gullibility in assuming the discretion of the senators astounds me.  We have had at least five approaches with the story, five.  Via third parties, granted, all hush-hush and no names mentioned, but all quoting sources close to the president, and all referencing your briefing to the senate a few days ago.  But we kept it quiet, as promised…”

“And now you want to publish it too, and make a hero out of Kayla McGann again,” Chilake said bitterly.  “Just like last time.  It sells the advertising, right?”

Grayling glanced around before replying.  They were alone apart from the security officers stationed over by the lounge entrance.  The aides and other staff were all out of earshot.  Just to make sure, though, he leaned in closer.

“That’s out of order,” the executive hissed, “very out of order!  Not only have I tried to keep the lid on this, but I did exactly what was asked of me four years ago too!  That was your misjudgement, not mine.  You cannot play games with the public, I warned you of that at the time!  And who sorted it out when the rogue journalist tried to spread her poison last year?  Who cleaned that up for you?  Who got the messages deleted?  Who got it wiped off the net?”

“She was your fucking journalist!”

“She’d not been on my payroll for years, as you well know!”

The escalating voices now reverberated around the lounge without a care.  Nervous shuffles and deliberate coughs of the security officers reminded the two men of the dangers of being overheard.  Both let out exasperated huffs and shook their heads, more at the situation than each other.

“The coffee is cold, isn’t it?” the president asked.

A smirk from beneath the fringe.

“Yeah,” Grayling said, “ridiculously so.”

Chilake smirked back.  He caught the eyes of one of the officers, pointed to the cups, and held up two fingers.  The officer returned a polite nod, opened the door, and spoke to someone outside.  Warmer drinks were on their way.

“This whole situation is ridiculous,” sighed the president.

“It is,” agreed Grayling, “and taking it out on me is not going to help.  I did not open the door and let McGann escape.”

“No,” Chilake reflected, “I know you didn’t.  You did not start the fire, as they say.  The problem is, it’s never clear who did.  All we do know is that we have to do something about the flames.”

The two men fell silent.  Outside the door there was a chink of traditional ceramic pots.  The president often chose to relax here when in New York.  The owner was particular about creating the right ambience, with touches of classical luxury and coffee served in the traditional American way.  Shallow ceramic cups, however, were not particularly good at preserving the heat.

“What do I do, Ryn?” Chilake eventually asked.

“Depends on your priorities, Den,” said Grayling.  He had known eventually it would come to this; the media mogul was always the one with the solutions.

The president asked him to expand, “Go on?”

“Are we in damage limitation, or are we on the attack?  Do we want to quieten the masses, or make it so McGann has nowhere to hide?  We can play this ‘nothing to worry about, folks’, or go all out on a manhunt?”

He wanted it all to just go away, that was what Chilake really wanted.  He wanted the sordid affair to just evaporate and never to have been.  There was a time before Three Zero when being president had been fun, when they reserved all the pressure and scrutiny for the high-profile celebrities and sports stars.  Politics just happened and for the most part the people just let it.  Three Zero changed that.  Every system now knew who he was, every planet, every citizen.  President Chilake, the man who had risen from the ashes of the destroyed station, the man who had galvanised the Union in its pursuit of the perpetrators, the man who had looked terror in the face and stared it down.

Now, he would just be known as the man who had let Kayla McGann escape.

“She needs to be found,” he said coldly, “I want her back, dead or alive.”

Ryn Grayling nodded, a smile flickering across his lips.

“We will get her,” he said, “but I hope you can afford it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You will not find her alone, not even with all the Union forces at your disposal,” Grayling explained.  “We need everyone looking for her, everyone wanting to be the one who finds Kayla McGann.  Every criminal, every militia, even her own associates, hunting her down like the dog she is.  Get your money together, Mister President, we are going to offer the largest bounty humankind has ever seen.  The price on her head needs to be astronomical.  Ten million.  Trust me, find the funds, Den, and we will smoke the bitch out.”

“Ten million,” Chilake chuckled incredulously.  “Yeah, right.”

“You want the meanest, the greediest and, frankly, the most powerful criminals out there to take note.  You want to grab their attention.  You want the whole galaxy obsessing over it.  It has to be an obscene amount to do that.  It has to be enough for the criminal elite to risk blowing their own cover to join the hunt.”

The president was struggling with this, knowing how hard it would be to secure council agreement on a figure that large.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said.  “I couldn’t get approval.  If Union forces cannot flush her out, no one can.”

“Commander Meyer has tried, has he not?”

He had, and he had failed, although there was some doubt as to how thorough the search for McGann had been under Meyer’s command.  Chilake was acutely aware of Meyer’s ambition.  The commander often played by his own rules.

“A large bounty,” insisted Grayling, “and something else, something which will get a response from McGann, something that will make her pop her head out of the hole she’s run to.  Grab her attention, entice her into making a mistake.”

A gentle knock on the door indicated fresh coffee.  The two men sat in silence whilst it was served.  As soon as the aide had disappeared, and the security officer had closed the door, the president leant forward, excited to share an idea.  The ten million was a frightening number, and he would have to work on that, but building on Grayling’s theme, he had hit on a gem.

“I have the perfect bait,” Chilake said.

Grayling smirked, “Give me the bait, Den, and I’ll dangle it out there.  I can feed it to billions of viewers and readers across all thirty-two sectors.  We will have McGann hooked, I’m sure of it.  Then we can reel her in!”

A knowing smile passed between the two as they simultaneously reached for their coffee.  Where only moments before there had been discord, now there was harmony borne from their mutual scheming.  When men as powerful as these plotted, someone, somewhere was in trouble.

+     +     +

As they headed away from Meridian Rise, there were a couple of things about Doctor Schmidt’s situation that particularly annoyed her.  Alongside the eternal frustration and simple inconvenience of not being able to go where she wanted, when she wanted, those two things were really getting on her nerves.  All the years of house arrest had not dampened her internal rages, and right now, there was a hurricane brewing.

The first of those annoyances was the constant flow of new faces.  It was an insult.  As they shifted her from outstation to outstation, shuffled along like the embarrassment she clearly was, it was always by juniors in fresh uniforms.  Did she not justify experienced officers to keep watch?  New recruits all looked and smelled the same, and often got a little queasy during and after a jump.  The two escorting her from Meridian were definitely in that queasy category.

The second thing that infuriated her was the small metal hole in her left wrist.  It was cruel to deny a woman with her intellect the wealth of information an identifier could afford.  Her detention was hard enough, and new recruits as escorts an added insult, but the suppression of her mind was the greatest blow of all.  Sitting behind the two troopers in the cramped cockpit, she jealously observed them scrolling through their devices.  It was rubbing salt into the wound.  From her position, Schmidt could most easily see the co-pilot’s.  With the pacer in jump, neither of the crew had much to do, so he was catching up on mundane messages from family, friends, and colleagues.  If the doctor had cared, she could have learnt a lot about the young man’s life from reading over his shoulder.  She had no interest.  People were not her thing, especially Union people.  But when the co-pilot had finished his domestics, he took to more general browsing, and that grabbed her attention.  Since being dragged from her hide-hole a few days before, her mind, often starved of stimulus, had been racing.  Alongside the complexity of her work, the reason behind the sudden resurrection of Project Indigo had been distracting.  What had caused the project to become live again, and prompted her sudden, if not short-lived, recall into service?  Heavy in controversy, Indigo would have only been triggered for something big.  The Union had to have a compelling reason for trying to get back inside Luca’s head.  The doctor had her suspicions and hoped that the co-pilot’s browsing would provide confirmation.

Distractingly, in the next seat, the pilot was humming.  It was a tune Schmidt could not place, other than in a box with the other annoying things.  It could have been an old classic or a recent hit; the doctor had no idea.  The gentle bopping of the pilot’s head, though, suggested she was a fan.  Schmidt wanted to yell at her to shut up so she could focus.  The doctor’s anger was growing, and she wanted to let the pent-up hurricane loose.  She had a lot to be angry about, not least how she had ended up with her life this lonely mess.  That was down to Chilake and the Union machine, whether that was the secret service back on Meridian Rise or the two troopers with whom she shared this pacer.  And then there was the frustration that the culmination of her life’s work, as hampered as it had been, lay back there, damaged, and incomplete.  Why had they not given her the time she needed?  If they had allowed her more, then the reversal would have been perfect, and Schmidt’s place in scientific history secured.  The fury continued to build.

Forcing herself to ignore the humming imbecile, the doctor refocused her attention on the co-pilot’s feed.  He was flicking through numerous news channels.  Sitting about a metre back, and restrained by the safety harness, it was difficult for Schmidt to see everything his identifier projected, but she could make out the headlines.  They were wholly unremarkable and no different to the diatribe of celebrity and gossip she recalled from her days of freedom.  The media had clearly not improved.

The co-pilot scrolled up, scrolled down, played a few clips, read a few articles.  He paused on a fashion piece longer than expected, but only because of the nearly nude models.  Unabashed, he perused the moving three-dimensional holograms that accompanied the piece before moving on.  Eventually, he switched away from the mainstream channels to the smaller independents.  Schmidt was glad to see the back of that parasite Grayling’s filth.  His sensationalist rubbish had contributed to her own downfall, and she recalled how they had branded her and sought to ruin her name.  Doctor Death.  The influence that one organisation had over the hearts and minds of the populace was astounding, and Grayling’s condemnation had made her a pariah.  Nothing his channels broadcast was worthy of her attention, hopefully the independents would throw up something more interesting.

They did not disappoint.  Moments after the co-pilot switched, an attention-grabbing headline and a three-dimensional image popped up.  The doctor saw who it was before the trooper’s gasp alerted his colleague.  It was just as Schmidt had suspected.  The image was of a young woman, with her dark hair tied back.  Striking facial features leapt forward. This image had once so dominated the airwaves that even Schmidt, in whatever hellhole she was stowed in at the time, had seen them before.  It was Kayla McGann.  Of course it was, and it all made sense now.

The co-pilot rolled the video and a disembodied voice filled the confines of the small vessel:  “The reports have not been confirmed by any Union official, but speculation is high and we have it on good authority from a credible source close to the president…”

The doctor could not help but chuckle.  Oh, how stupid President Chilake was looking right now.

“… that the terrorist McGann orchestrated a daring prison escape in which several officers and fellow inmates died, and is now on the run…”

The pilot had stopped humming and was leaning over her colleague, keen to see the article.  “What channel is this on?” she asked.

“It’s one of the outer-system ones,” the co-pilot replied, “not sure if it’s true or not, but…”

“Oh, it’s true,” cackled Schmidt.  “Why else do you think they got me out of my tomb?”

They both turned to look at her, surprised that their forgotten cargo had chirped up.  As far as they were concerned, she was just some old dissident on route to a remote outstation where the local authorities could keep an eye on her.  They had asked no questions as to who she was, that was not their place.  They had no idea about Project Indigo, or indeed Jed Luca’s interrogation, and they knew nothing of Doctor Schmidt and her work.

“Kayla McGann,” the doctor mused, rolling the name around her dry mouth, and enjoying the taste.  “It all makes sense now.  Everything falls into place.  It explains why they wanted me to restore him, and why they wanted to question him.”

She laughed again.  It was an awful laugh, one with little mirth but oozing resentment.

“It is probably not even true,” said the pilot.  “It is probably just a rumour put out there by revolutionists.  That will be why none of the major channels are running it…”

“… or the president is manipulating the press,” interrupted Schmidt, “just like last time.”

The troopers exchanged a glance before the co-pilot snapped off the newsfeed and put his identifier into standby.  He glared back at their cargo.

“Our instructions are to deliver you alive,” he told the doctor, “but it was also made clear to us you were a piece of low-value, low-life scum.  I’m guessing you are a terrorist, just like McGann, right?  Only you are too old and decrepit now to offer any threat, so they are just shuffling you about until you wither away.  But alive, that was the instruction, we are to keep you alive.  No one said anything about bruises, or broken bones, and we all know how easily old women can fall and hurt themselves…”

His voice was feeble, and the flow to his words unnatural, betraying an impotence in his threats.  The doctor smirked; he was not very good at intimidation.  He was trying to impress his female colleague by showing he could be a menacing trooper.  Schmidt did not interrupt again but left the smirk to show her contempt. In all those years shuffling between remote bases, she had learnt when to be silent.  On many occasions, idiots like the boy in the co-pilot’s seat had been left in charge.  Their instructions were always the same – to make sure the old woman knew who was boss. They could push her about a bit if necessary, but not mess her up.  But these fresh recruits were easier to manipulate for a wily, wizened senior citizen, than she ever would be by them.  Silence was a useful tool when it came to such mind games.  And listening was a powerful weapon.  His words, and the manner of delivery, showed her just how weak he was.  He was not the kind that would readily turn tough.  It was also obvious that the apparent link between the old woman and the notorious terrorist unnerved him, and the pilot too for that matter.  When the time was right, Doctor Schmidt knew she would be able to turn that fear to her advantage and gain the upper hand.

Through her silence, they soon forgot about their cargo.  They wrongly assumed that the threats had intimidated her back into compliance.  They returned their attention to McGann’s escape, but this time they each read about it discretely, on their own identifiers, with no volume and no projected displays. The doctor did not need to know the detail; she was more than satisfied with the knowledge that President Chilake was humiliated.  Hopefully, McGann would wreak havoc on all the politicians that had imprisoned her, and on all the scientists who had betrayed her.

Soon, the pilots turned their attention back to the navigation panel to check the jump was progressing smoothly.  Still in silence, Schmidt listened, and it was this conversation between the Union crew that was the most revealing of all.  It left her with an even broader smirk and a plan began to formulate.

For too long the Union had treated Schmidt like a criminal instead of revering her genius.  Her advancements in the field of memory transformation were astounding and deserved plaudits, not icy planets, and shoddy laboratories.  And she did not deserve the indignity of being wheeled out every time Chilake needed a problem fixing either, only to be shuffled away again once that purpose was served.  It boiled her blood.

Back there, on Meridian Rise, Luca’s restoration had presented the opportunity to complete her work and prove that she had perfected the process.  Success would have meant that the science community that had shunned her, especially fellow neurosurgeons, would have been compelled to take note. They would have been forced to acknowledge her brilliance and allow her to take her place amongst the scientific elite.  But that had been stolen from her.  They had forced her to work too quickly and snatched away the subject before she could complete the process.  There would be no more chances now; that was it.  The game was coming to an end.  Her only legacy would be a confused and damaged subject, if indeed he survived at all.  It was all gone, her life’s work in tatters, unless…

Unless the plan formulating in those angry thoughts offered her an extra life. It was a ridiculous plan, but she had nothing to lose.  The best courses of action, she considered, were often conceived in a seething rage.  Only then, were thoughts unconstrained by fear of the consequences.  In the half-crazy mind of the bitter, old woman there was confidence that she could do this.  She could have her revenge.  She could right the insults suffered.  She could grab one final chance.

Schmidt would not fail, because Schmidt had listened.

+     +     +

The Union craft passing through the atmosphere of Meridian Rise had all the necessary authentication codes and all the appropriate protocols were followed.  If the controller authorising its descent had bothered to check, she would have identified that the same ship had departed the planet less than twenty hours before.  That fact alone would have been unlikely to trigger suspicion, but combined with the high-level military coding, it might have raised an inquisitive eyebrow.  As it was, the pacer navigated the planet’s defence systems unnoticed.

Once inside the atmosphere the glide path was handed on to the air-traffic computers, which in turn passed it to the Paris spaceport.  The ship would never make it to Paris, however.  Instead, a classified priority code would excuse its sudden re-ascent and disappearance.  The monitoring systems assumed a legitimate call to action for the military vehicle.  It was not in their programming or authority to pry further.

Less than a minute after disappearing off the Paris systems, the pacer returned.  As it sped towards the equatorial desert, with stealth mode on, it encountered no other traffic.  Approaching its destination, it suddenly descended at a dangerous angle, the ground rushing up to meet it.  Metres from impact, the ship’s nose finally lifted, but too late to avoid the heavy landing. It bounced across the sand, careering out of control, rocks ripping great gashes into the vehicle’s under-belly.  Inside, the co-pilot desperately tried to keep the craft straight, attempting in vain to guide what was now unguidable.  Beside him the pilot lay dead, shot in the back thanks to a holster foolishly left unfastened.  The two troopers had never expected the old woman capable of such a swift and murderous act.

As hard as he wrestled with the controls, it was impossible for the trooper to fight the momentum of the pacer.  Repeatedly it struck the ground, each bounce violently shaking the ship.  There was no sign of slowing, as the craft groaned and creaked, threatening to fall apart.  Terrified, the co-pilot was buffeted wildly in his seat.  He struggled to keep hold of the instruments, his head jolting back and forth.  At his side, the corpse of the pilot was thrown around too, lifeless in the constraints, limbs and head lolling horrifically.  He tried not to look at his colleague’s body, focusing ahead, wincing every time the ship’s hull hit the ground.  Finally, the ship started to slow and the beige blur outside began forming into dunes and basalt outcrops.  As they slid across the desert, he prayed that they avoided those rock clusters.  Pacers were well built and tough, but they were not invincible.

The ship finally came to a halt and the sound of the hull twisting and tearing subsided, only to be replaced by the cackle of the old woman.  Any hope the co-pilot had harboured that the crash landing might have knocked the doctor unconscious was lost.  Maybe the jolts had shaken the gun from her grasp, but he doubted his luck on that one too. It was likely the weapon was still held firmly.  He might have survived the crash, but there was still the doctor to deal with and she was in a homicidal frame of mind.

A couple of hours before, after killing the pilot, she had forced him to turn the ship around.  The old woman rebuffed his initial attempts to deny he could fly the craft by replaying an earlier overheard conversation.  Bravado-fuelled claims over his piloting prowess at the academy were mockingly repeated back to him.  Despite trying to brush them off as idle boasts, the gun in his back insisted he do as she asked.

Following her commands, he brought them back to Meridian Rise, executing the correct protocols to satisfy planetary defences.  The crazy velocity and altitude, designed to avoid subsequent detection on the re-entry, were on the instructions of the doctor too.  The threatening gun only allowed him to reduce speed when approaching the sensor blackout zone surrounding the secret Union base.  It was not clear if the crash landing had been part of her plan, but the suicidal nature of the approach was never going to end well.

The pacer had come to a shuddering, dusty halt about a mile from where it first slammed into the ground.  With life support and temperature controls severely damaged, the heat of the day was already bursting through.  They would not have long before conditions inside became intolerable, almost as intolerable as those outside.

“How far are we from the base?” the doctor asked, the cackle replaced with a calm but stern voice.  It was the one with which she had given him orders as the body of his colleague bled out beside him.

“Too far to walk,” he wheezed, slightly winded by the ferocity of the crash.  He was shaking too, scared witless not only by the battering of the pacer, but more deeply by the murder of the pilot.  It was his first dead body.  Looking at it made him faint, and the stench of blood was nauseating.

“How far?” the doctor asked again.

“About two miles, we could possibly make it half that distance in the combat suits, but no more.  They will only offer limited protection in this and then we will fry.  It’s over seventy outside and the sun here will cook you alive.”

“Can you communicate with the base?”

Flustered, he waved his arms over the smoking console.  “You’ve seen the damage…” he stressed.

“Can you communicate with the base?” she asked again, an element of impatience injected into her otherwise composed tone.

“No!” he quickly replied.

“I take it your identifier has a honing beacon, or some other panic facility?  You can call your military buddies that way?”

He nodded, the action jarring a neck already in pain.

The doctor had not really thought this far ahead, but now back on Meridian Rise and within a short distance of Jed Luca, her mind was racing to the next phase.  A short distance, yes, but an incredibly hostile terrain to traverse.  The temperatures near the equator were soaring, but heat was not the only challenge.  The distance of the planet from the sun and the composition of the atmosphere meant radiation levels were high at the equator, and they would rise as the sun climbed further, making the desert all the more dangerous.  The intense thermals could whip up fierce storms with little notice too, storms that would cut a person down.  Stepping out unprotected, they would be lucky to survive ten minutes, and the base was twenty-five minutes away.  The military combat suits stored at the back of the cockpit had inbuilt heat and radiation protection, but it was minimal.  The audacious rapid descent and crash landing had somehow worked, now she needed another equally outrageous solution to get back to the base alive.

With nothing to lose, and the heat inside the pacer climbing rapidly, she hatched another plan.  Just like the preceding one, it was unlikely it would work, and, like the crazy landing, would certainly be dangerous.  Having already resolved that it was better to try and die than continue her pitiful existence, the odds did not put her off.  All she wanted was to complete her experiment and make Jed Luca whole again.  Her hopes rested on the identifier of the frightened co-pilot.  His fears would compel him to do exactly as he was told.

Chapter Five

Whilst the galaxy’s biggest and most powerful cat hung in the sky, the mice hid in their holes.  It had been four days and there had not been a squeak.  Nothing.  In the comms suite, a team of technicians monitored every frequency and waveband around the clock.  Sensors were focused on nearby space as well as the planet below.  If a mouse moved, Porthos would know.

With its five thousand strong crew, the mighty battlecruiser was here to ensure Kamdo compliance in the search for Kayla McGann.  That was the official line anyway; the truth was somewhat different.  Although unlikely to ever be discussed openly in the corridors of the senate, the ship’s most senior officers understood that the fleet had been despatched to intimidate the hell out of the enemy. Of course, the Cairo Accord, the fourth draft to be precise, prescribed a state of peace between the two peoples.  Nowhere did it refer to the Kamdo as ‘the enemy’.  But that treaty meant nothing to Commander Ana Cholewinska.  Indeed, if she owned a printed copy, she would have pissed on it.  In her mind, the Kamdo were scum, and not a people to make peace with.  They were a scourge that needed eradicating, and she hoped that this intimidation would prompt an incendiary response.

The silence from Eropidous was therefore maddening.  Cholewinska wanted to get on with it and grew impatient.  She also grew frustrated, but that was for an altogether different reason.  Her lover was commander of the sister ship, Artemis.  That vessel was parked in the same system, a short shuttle ride away, and she longed for their next opportunity to get naked.  Four days before, he had invited her over, hosted a dinner in her honour, and then fucked her.  Now he shunned contact, denying her that pleasure, insisting that their presence was required aboard their own ships. It seemed a feeble excuse, and she thought it more likely that she had served her purpose and he had enjoyed his fix.  His lust was probably now occupied with a new younger member of his crew.  Although Ana Cholewinska would never have admitted it, even battlecruiser commanders suffered relationship anxiety.

Likewise, she would have never admitted that the spontaneously arranged evening entertainment was more about lifting her own spirits than those of her officers, although undoubtedly the distraction would benefit many.  After the collective excitement of the urgent deployment to the Dark Zones, the last few days had driven the crew to distraction.  Although accustomed to long mission in far-flung places, where regiment and routine were the order of the day, this assignment had promised far more excitement.  So far, it had failed to deliver.  The officers in particular, the commander believed, felt this most acutely.  Perhaps she was to blame for setting high expectation through her adrenalin-pumped briefings when, apart from the buzz of a few interceptors on first arriving in the system, there had been nothing.  No aggressive communications, no weapon systems locking on, no military movements on the ground.  Nothing.

With neither sex nor conflict to give Ana Cholewinska her excitement, holding an event in the cargo bay would provide her with the much needed stimulus.  Branding it as a reward for her officers, concealed the selfish motivation.

The bay was huge.  Although two thirds full of equipment and provisions, there was still plenty of space available for the crew to entertain themselves.  A minimum complement of officers had volunteered to stay on duty.  Others had elected to keep clear heads, so they would be fit to relieve in a few hours.  The rest were in the mood to party.  Serving droids dipped in and out of the chatting throngs, and, as the music steadily ramped up, the alcohol flowed.

Commander Cholewinska had lost track of time and her jacket.  She was not worried about either; both would be returned at some point.  It was getting late and the mix of alcoholic beverages she had consumed was enough to make most of life’s concerns disappear.  The crowd was thinning, but there were still plenty of her command remaining, mostly in similar inebriated states.  Dancing had erupted sometime earlier and loud beats vibrated through the deck of the bay.  Slurred conversations could only be heard when the mouth was close to the other person’s ear.  That brought opportunity to get up close and intimate.  For Cholewinska, a small but perfectly formed engineer, First Officer Safinn, was the target.  The height differential was a challenge, the commander almost a foot taller than the other woman, but the additional stoop just brought them in tighter.

At first, the words exchanged were pleasantries - boasts from the senior officer, talk of career progression, gossip about other members of the crew.  As the dancing continued, confidence grew, bodies bumping into each other, the shouted ear-whispers turning flirtatious.  To the commander’s surprise and delight, it was Safinn who made the first move, a bump becoming a lingering contact, hips pushing forward, urging the taller woman nearer.  Words turned into kisses, first on the earlobe, then a teasing tongue, running down the neck where Cholewinska tasted perfume.  Wanting to be closer still, their hands began to explore, finding each other’s hips.  They reached further, round to the rear, each relishing the sensual feel of the tight officer-issue trousers.

After several moments like this, gyrating with the music, kissing necks, pulling their hips together, they broke.  Oblivious to those around, they were unaware of the smirking glances, unaware their every move was being watched.  It was doubtful they would have cared.  They were too wrapped up in each other to let the fear of scandal distract them.

Now standing apart, mutual desire sat heavy in their seductive eyes.  Each swept their gaze down the body of the other.  Both had the admirable, honed physiques of soldiers: lean, muscular, vibrant.  Cholewinska paused at the younger woman’s breasts, taking in the pert magnificence beneath the thin white shirt.  She wanted to take them in her hands and knew she soon would.  Safinn brushed her long blonde hair away from her eyes and returned the tribute, hungrily examining the curves of her senior.  Ana briefly recalled Commander Meyer ripping just such a shirt from her back, but quickly cast any thoughts of that man to one side.  She was hungry for this new plaything.

Without speaking, Cholewinska led the engineer through the throng of drunk colleagues.  Sensibly, any knowing nudges were held until the couple had left the dance floor.  They headed out of the bay, in the direction of the commander’s quarters.  After exchanging shrugs, the personal guards followed at a respectful distance.  It seemed, Cholewinska had found a way to relieve her boredom.

+     +     +

At twenty-one, Andrea Pedros had bounded down the corridors of Adelaide University with all the excitement of a first-year student.  Spanish Literature had been her subject, the works of Leone Siglar a heavy focus.  Such a bright girl, everyone had said, but such a limiting choice, those same people had whispered.  That choice was undoubtedly made even more limited by a second term affair with her lecturer, a man twice her age.

The pain caused by the way the relationship ended was still felt today.  Not the sudden heart-breaking wrench, for although that had been brutal, it had soon faded.  She no longer felt the stretched torment of being single either, and the subsequent long period of enforced celibacy was now just her way of life.  The pain still suffered felt physical, although her doctors told her it was psychosomatic.  There were things they could prescribe to help, but she did not wish to face a lifetime of addiction.  The surgeons had indicated that the re-wiring of the nerves in her shoulders had gone well, and that no pain should remain.  She guessed there was probably truth in that, as real as the pain sometimes felt.  There was bound to be trauma echoes.  What she had been through would have shaken the strongest of souls.  The agony of those moments when her lover’s wife had held her arm in a pan of boiling water would never leave her; how could they?  Being forced to watch her own skin bubble and melt, the pain overwhelming every sense, until eventually she fell unconscious… that was always going to leave mental scars.  The surgeons could weld on a synthetic limb and mend all the ganglions, but they could never take away that anguish.

Andrea was now a different person.  She was ‘Technician’, ‘Operator’, or ‘Pedros’.  The degree in Spanish Literature had never been finished, but a change in direction and a focus on linguistics and physics had brought her to where she was now.  Instead of prose and poetry, she had channels and waves, and a posting to the communications corps on board the battlecruiser, Porthos.  Above a civilised planet, this job was endlessly fascinating, listening in to a world of chatter.  Here, above Eropidous, it was mind-numbingly tedious.  Four days she had been doing this now.  Four ten-hour shifts listening to mostly nothing.  Every couple of hours a freighter from one of the nearby mining asteroids would engage in some benign dialogue with the surface, and then there would be more silence.  Nothing to report, commander, nothing to report.

Whilst that mundane pattern continued, this fifth shift did have a different feel to it.  Staffing in the comms suite was reduced, with the two officers, who usually took the compliment to five, enjoying themselves in the cargo bay.  Short-staffed and leaderless, the atmosphere was lighter, and she was not sure she liked that.  With no traffic to focus on, concentration was already a real struggle.

And it was in that bored and distracted frame of mind that she almost failed to notice the signal.  Low on the scale, barely audible, there was a steady tick-tick-tick.  It only reached her attention when she absent-mindedly began to click her tongue against the top of her mouth, mimicking the rhythmic beat.  At first that seemed like just a new, spontaneous way for her body to occupy itself, but then she found herself wondering why she was doing it.  That moment of consideration allowed the small spikes on the display to come to her attention, and the faintest of sounds to register.

“Oh hello,” she said.

Reaching into the display, she fine-tuned the receptors, trying to pick out a cleaner signal.  The volume of the ticks increased, before fading again.  She brought them back, louder, focusing on that wavelength.  The sound became crisp and more distinct, but there was still no indication as to what it was.

“Where are you coming from?” she asked.

Her colleagues heard her mumble.  Sensing that maybe there was something that could break the tedium, they got to their feet and crossed the room.  Whatever she had, no matter how run-of-the-mill, it was bound to be more fascinating that their nothing.

“What have you got?” one asked.

“I don’t know,” Pedros mused.  She went to open the communications channel and broadcast it to her colleagues but then froze.

“Are you okay?” one asked.

“Yeah,” she said, a confused expression on her face.  “It’s gone.”

“What was it?  A freighter transmission?  Something else?”

She was double-checking the readings, desperately searching for something meaningful.

“No, the sensors could not lock on, too faint, but I am pretty sure it was not a freighter.  It was the strangest of sounds, a repetitive beat, very faint, like a tap dripping.”

“That lot are all holed up in their caves,” one of her colleagues unhelpfully chuckled. “You are probably just imagining their war drums!”

The other colleague joined in the laughter: “Yeah, or it’s the music from the cargo bay.  Is it getting to you, the bosses having fun whilst we have to work?”

“That will be it,” Pedros rolled a false smile.  “Wishing I was the one drinking myself stupid!”

They offered more words of humour, which she took in good spirits, and then they went back to their stations.  Pedros returned to her work, perplexed.  She had heard something; she was sure of it.

+     +     +

The intensity of the training had been relentless.  Nickel ached from the exertions; his muscles strained to the extremes.  It was uncomfortable to move, but he could push through that.  Pain did not matter where he was going.  Once induced, only his mind would be needed, his body could rest.  He hoped they had trained him well, he hoped he could serve his purpose.

Resting in the bunker, alongside another six hundred warriors, he was ready.  These were the chosen ones - the strongest, the sharpest, the ones who could best yield a weapon.  They were motionless, laid on row upon row of beds.  Above them, a framework of metal racking covered the ceiling.  From those girders, thick cables descended, erupting into a spaghetti of fibres as they neared the bed.  The fibres reached out to the bodies of the soldiers, attaching to their heads, torsos, and limbs.  This bunker, and the neighbouring computer room, were hidden from the prying eyes of the Union by metres of re-enforced concrete dashed with glauconite. The threat the warriors offered was hidden too.  Outwardly, they slept deeply, allowing their bodies to recover and their minds to refresh. But when the time came, the mainframe would wake those minds and the warriors would step forward.  It would be glorious.

The Ultimate Commitment.

The Ultimate Sacrifice.

Chapter Six

Months after the call from Clayton, Sammy had forgotten all about it.  Life had moved on, as it inevitably did.  Other clients stole her focus, fee-paying clients, ones who cleared her bills and kept the alcohol flowing.

At the time, she had done what she could to help trace the message, but to no avail.  At one point, when one of her contacts seemed to suddenly go incommunicado, there had been a worry that the snooping had brought unwanted attention from the authorities.  No officer came knocking, however, and the contact came back blank a few days later.  Eventually, Clayton reluctantly accepted that there was nothing more that could be done.  The grieving father had not managed to shake it, but for Sammy it fell from her thoughts, and she returned to her working and drinking routine.

Until, that was, she heard about Kayla McGann’s escape.

It was just before lunchtime when a colleague passed on the news, unconfirmed, but reports breaking on most of the media channels.  The notorious name drew an obvious connection back to her client, and Sammy recalled their last conversation.  His pain flooded her conscience and tweaked at her guilt; how had she so easily forgotten?

Sammy had always been single and was now something of an evangelist for the loner lifestyle.  Leading others to believe there was a sour past relationship had once been the norm, but she no longer rolled out that lie.  The reality was that she had never found anyone who wanted to be with her, and eventually gave up on the charade, deciding to be a proud singleton.  At fifty-five, her lack of sexual encounters, the fact she had never even come close, no longer bothered her.  In maturity, the lies of her youth were no longer necessary, having parked any sense of shame.

Now, firmly on the side of relationship cynicism, she carried a belief that single was actually best.  With her own feelings boxed off, the emotional turmoil of others often bemused her.  She saw the futile efforts to please, the unnecessary rules and commitments, the eternal pressure and guilt, and the hurt and pain when it all went wrong.  Most acutely, she had seen that pain in Clayton.  If anything, his tragedy only served to confirm that her path, albeit forced, was the right one for her.

That did not prevent empathy with others, far from it, especially when it came to Clay.  She felt bad that she had forgotten the level of his anguish.  She felt guilty over not being able to provide the answers, leaving him still clinging to the hope offered by that random message.  As she walked out into the chilly day and saw the robot peddling heart-shaped balloons on the courtroom steps, her thoughts were with her client, and how doubly hard the news of McGann’s escape would be for him.

The balloon seller was talking to a man she had seen earlier, sitting waiting to enter Courtroom Three.  That was where they usually scheduled the short cases: divorce, child custody, traffic offences.  He was buying with enthusiasm and a huge grin.  She guessed the divorce was final, and the balloon one of many gifts for his new lover.  She did not judge.  Good for him, life was too short to spend it being miserable.  Smiling was important and it was infectious.  Sammy would make sure she caught that smile later, at her favourite bar, with a whisky over ice, whilst trying to ignore all the smooching couples.  Perhaps she would message Clayton then.  Perhaps he needed to hear from her.

This was a busy part of town most days. A few years before, the whole area had been modernised and was now a draw for workers and tourists in an ever-expanding London.  Crowds swelled around lunchtime, many choosing to make the short trip from the old town, to enjoy the new restaurants and social hubs this district offered.  In the other direction sat the Spaceport at Aveley, easily reached in ten minutes using the over-ground tube, or even quicker in a personal taxi-pod.  Dozens of those small torpedo-shaped vessels hovered overhead, and the man, with his newly acquired balloon, was flagging one.

Distracted by him, and still pre-occupied with thoughts of her heart-broken client, Sammy did not notice the figure approaching her.  When she felt the gentle tug on her sleeve, she nearly dropped her coffee on to the pristine pavement.

“I'm sorry to startle you,” said a humble female voice.

The lawyer forgot all about Clayton and the balloon’s onward journey.  She looked along the arm of her suit to a tall, hooded figure.  From her shorter perspective, Sammy could see beneath that cowl, to a pale, wide-eyed and apologetic face.  The stranger’s skin was grubby, matching the strong stench of stale body odour.  Her clothes were a mess too; the green overcoat tatty and soiled with stains.

“Sorry,” the stranger said again, “I am hoping you can help me.”

“Not today, I have nothing on me,” Sammy replied, frustrated by the constant flow of such approaches on the streets of Greater London.

“No, no,” the stranger clarified, “I am not begging!  I need to talk to you about an important matter.”

There was an accent in there, but it was faint, and Sammy could not place it.  The lawyer frowned.  The stranger had caught her off-guard and she was running late for her next client.  Keen to get on and keen to drink her coffee, today was not a good day for this.

“Well, you don't look like you can afford to hire me,” Sammy snapped.

The apologetic expression faltered, and Sammy glimpsed a different person. Something else crossed that pale, dirty face.  Was it a flicker of anger?  Maybe.  Or maybe it was just determination that showed, for the woman clearly had no intention of backing off.  She actually moved closer, the vile aroma intensifying.

“We cannot discuss it here,” the stranger said in hushed tones, “there are too many people about.  This is a sensitive matter.”

Instinctively, the lawyer backed away.  The need for personal space was exaggerated by repulsion to the sickly smell.  The stench was reminiscent of those that wafted up from urine-stained doorways. Closer now, the film of muck on the woman’s face was even more evident; she did not look like she had washed in weeks.  Everything about the stranger, from the reek to the soiled clothes, yelled ‘tramp’.

“I am not going anywhere with you,” Sammy grimaced, obvious distain in her tone.

The same hand that had initially tugged her sleeve, now suddenly grabbed the older woman’s jacket.  This time it held firm, the material bunched in a closed fist.  Sammy tried to break free, but the stranger did not yield, shuffling even closer.

“You should listen,” the woman insisted.  “I have come a long, long way to be here.  I've been shot at, punched, locked up, burnt and worse.  I have been waiting for you to show for days.  I would really like you to give me the ten minutes of your time I deserve.  You will want to hear what I have to say.  Your friend will want to hear it even more.”

“You can get off…” the lawyer started, venomously.  She was faking rage to hide the fear building inside.  In all her years in the profession, she had represented some bad people.  On more than one occasion she had been assaulted, but always in cells or courtrooms where she knew there was help nearby.  Here, despite all the people around, she felt very alone.  At first glance, this stranger might not appear intimidating, but standing several inches taller and considerably younger, she was quite a presence.  That look glimpsed in the woman’s eyes was back too.  If it had been determination before, now it was definitely anger.

Then, as fear began to take over, Sammy found a possible harbour, replaying the words of the young woman.  They still hung there, like the foul breath that carried them.  Years of interviewing told the lawyer every word was important, so she tried to rationalise why one particular word was there, what purpose did it have?

‘Friend’, the stranger had referred to a ‘friend’.

Which one?

There were very few to whom the lawyer would give that noble label and even then, she would be stretching the boundaries of professional relationships to make such a claim.  She was intrigued as to how this woman could know one of her friends, when she did not really have any to start with? That intrigue only went so far, though, there was a far more pressing need to get out of this unexpected situation.

“Get off me,” Sammy snapped, fear giving her the courage to challenge back.  “Take your hands off me now!  You've nothing I want to hear.”

The young woman did not let go.  Instead, she nodded knowingly.  Eyes narrowed and lips pursed as she stood forward with more venom.  With surprising strength, she pulled the older woman towards her.  Their faces were now only inches apart and the stench was overpowering.

“I have come a long way,” the stranger hissed.  “I have been to Hell and now I am back, and it has not been an easy journey.  You know about the message, and I will not let you hide from it.  You will listen to me.  Your friend will listen to me.  The whole fucking galaxy will listen to me.”

“What message?” scoffed Sammy.

“‘Always there, Con’,” came the show-stopping reply.  “Do you want to listen now?”

Chapter Seven

It was impossible for Victor to accept that this whole expedition was a disaster, but the facts were stark.  After a promising start, there was no way it should have gone like this. It was bad luck and felt grossly unfair.  Despite the services of some of the most sadistic amongst the Union ranks - and that was a large pool to fish from - he had failed miserably to deliver on the mission.  The consequences were not worth thinking about.  As a minimum, it would result in a cessation of his progression through the ranks.  Quite possibly, it could even lead to a demotion away from a field role.  An operative with nearly twenty years behind him, the idea of a job away from the front line horrified.  Felipe Victor was not cut out for a lifetime of research and admin.

Neither, it seemed, was he cut out for these interrogations.

Another Earth day ticked to a close and he had made no further progress with Jed Luca.  The water treatment and beatings had yielded no further intelligence.  Whilst accepting that it was his responsibility, Victor could not help but feel the original objective undeliverable.  Everything had been thrown at Luca, everything, yet he had not produced the gem that would lead to Kayla McGann.

On that first day, with the prisoner lucid, information had flowed freely.  None of it was the diamond they searched for, but there had been plenty.  As time dragged on, still looking for that elusive gem, the flow became drier than the desert outside.  It was not a failure in interrogation; the subject could not reveal what he did not know. With all the drugs pumped into Luca, and the weak mental state the doctor had left him in, there was no way he was holding back, no way.

However, this was not the time for excuses.  Victor could not allow the spectre of self-pity to consume, and any hint that the expectations placed upon him were unfair would guarantee that desk job.  This service was not the place for wimps.  He was a field agent.  He had to be tough, uncompromising and most of all, resilient.  He would take any criticism coming and swallow it whole.  In the meantime, he would get his head back on his shoulders, shrug off the failure, and move on to the new task in hand.

As he strode purposefully towards the holding cells, however, he did so with a sense of relief.  Whilst no doubt his seniors would still reprimand him when the time was right, the worst of the shit-smear was now wiped away by a welcome change in instructions.  The indiscretion of the officer passing on the new orders revealed they came from the very top.  The Commander-in-Chief was taking a personal interest in this one.

For the past hour, his agents had worked on Jed Luca, not with water and batons, but with cleanser and makeup. There was now a different role for the prisoner to play and it was a starring role; he needed to look his best.  Given the state of him, that would not be easy.  Whilst Victor may have had some of the most effective interrogators at his disposal, he feared that their cosmetic skills might fall short.  Relieved at this lifeline, he had to get this right.

Resilience.  A shrug and on with the job.

It was thirty minutes until broadcast.  He could not afford any more failures, even if that meant he had to pick up the brushes and apply the finishing touches himself.

+     +     +

The hatch opened onto the scorched desert.  A wall of heat swept into the pacer, hitting the two figures at the top of the exit ramp.  Already light-headed from the temperature inside the protective suit, Doctor Schmidt staggered back.  The co-pilot made no attempt to steady the old woman.  She was, after all, pointing a gun at him.

“You can climb down first,” she said, composure regained, “and take the body with you.”

He did not like his murdered colleague referred to as a body, but there was not much he could do about that.  He had no choice but to listen to the doctor’s vile words, and to do as she bid.  No doubt, she would happily make him her second victim if he did not.

The ramp was too badly damaged to deploy and the sandy ground sat five feet beneath the hatch ledge.  He contemplated the drop, and then his colleague’s lifeless mass.  There was only one way to get her down, as undignified as that was.  She deserved better, but the weapon trained at his midriff urged him on.  He dragged her to the edge, leaving a trail of blood behind, and pushed her out.  With a thud, she hit the ground, legs twisting gruesomely beneath the torso.  The co-pilot looked away in disgust.

From beneath the protective visor, the doctor was impassive.  There was no sorrow or remorse for her victim, or indeed guilt for her intentions towards the other trooper.

“You’re next,” she said, signalling him forward with the gun.  “Any attempt to run and I’ll blow a hole in your back.”

He was visibly shaking, even under the suit.  For a moment, he went to say something and then thought better of it.  The gun waved again, and he stepped forward, moving away from the place where his colleague’s blood smeared the ledge. Awkwardly, he jumped.  His feet landed beside the body and stumbled forward, but he managed to stay upright.

Doctor Schmidt did not follow.  She cautiously sat on the edge of the hatch, her legs dangling.  Taking the weight off her feet eased the heat’s burden, and the shade provided by the pacer further relieved the light head.  She had no intention of joining the co-pilot on the blistering desert floor.  Keeping the weapon trained, she scanned the terrain.

“Over there,” she said, pointing with her unoccupied hand. “The dune.”

He turned to see where she meant.  It all looked the same, mile upon mile of dusty, sandy earth.  Much of it was lost to the shimmer of heat distortions.  The only features were the smouldering chunks of metal and plastic ripped from the pacer.

“There!” she insisted.

Straining, despite the visor, he looked again.  There was an incline in the direction her gloved finger was pointing.  At the base of that incline, a surf of sand swept upwards to form a crest.  The co-pilot would not have called it a dune, but he assumed it was where she meant.

“Drag the body there!” the doctor barked from her vantage point.

“She had a name!” he bravely hollered back, angry at the disregard for his murdered colleague.  “Trooper Klein, Trooper Lola Klein!”

“Do you think I care?” the doctor snarled.  “I had a name once. I had a job, a home, a garden.  I had a fucking garden!  Your kind took all that from me, took my science from me, and stole all those years!  I’m taking it back, all of it.  Starting with her miserable hide and, if you don’t start digging, yours will be next!”

The young man lowered his head, not wanting to look at anything.  He wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere, but no amount of hoping and praying would provide deliverance from this terrible place.  No rescue was coming.  When he lifted his head, he knew the old crow would still be perched on her branch and the so-called dune would still be his destination, encouraged there by the threat of his own gun.  He would have to take hold of his dead colleague and drag the body twenty metres to where the tormentor demanded.

“We will never make it to the base,” he sobbed.  “We need to activate the beacon and find shade.”

He had only been outside the ship for less than a minute and already he could feel the heat sapping his energy.  If she had not made him put his identifier in standby, it would be beeping like crazy.  But those warning alerts were not needed to know just how dire this predicament was.  To drag that dead weight across that distance in these conditions would not only be exceedingly tough, it would be suicide, but with the threat of execution his only alternative, there was no choice.

“We will find shade once you are done with the body,” the doctor insisted, nastily stressing the last word.

On these desert plains, shade was unlikely.  The old crow had the only cover for miles around, but even on the pacer, with the boiling sand acting like a hotplate beneath, any relief would not last long.  The only consolation in facing his own mortality was an expectation she would die out here too.  Resigned to his fate, he decided he may as well get it over and done with.

It took him about five minutes to drag Lola Klein.  Under normal circumstances, he could have hoisted her onto his shoulder and taken a tenth of the time.  With air this hot, when even regular breathing was difficult, vigorous activity would have been impossible.  The exertions in simply dragging her were far beyond anything he had experienced before.  When finished, despite the mask over his face, the burn in this throat was severe and he was gasping in pain.  With his heart beating in his ears, he looked down at the crumpled corpse of his colleague.  The moisture now all stolen from his own body, he cried dry tears.

“I’m sorry,” he mouthed silently, “so sorry.”

Over his shoulder, the doctor had not moved, and the gun was still trained.  He considered running.  With twenty metres between them, how good a shot would she be?  It was a shot a trained soldier could easily make, but the feeble doctor?   She was old, her eyesight probably fading, especially over distance, and the heat must be getting to her by now.  Realistically, though, how fast would he be able to run?  It was not like there was any cover to seek either.  She might well be a lousy shot, but that laser pistol was capable of discharging a deadly bolt every other second.  That was far too many shots to dodge.

“Bury her!” the doctor called, her voice distorted by the face visor.

She could not be serious, could she?

“What?” he called back.

“Bury her!” the voice louder this time.  “And do it quickly!”

Any thoughts of running were dispelled as the old woman steadied herself and fired the gun.  A bolt of energy ripped into the earth beside his boots, throwing up sand and stone fragments.  When the dust settled there was a two-foot gash scorched into the ground.  Next time, that could be his chest.

“Bury her!” This third time the command was shrill, almost screamed.  Clearly, the old woman’s throat was not hurting like his own.

More toil.  The bank was much higher than it appeared from the pacer.  In places, large masses of sand gathered, presumably blown here in the storms.  Thankfully, those winds had not yet arrived.  He had heard that when they blew, the sand cut like razor blades.  The combat suit would offer some protection, but sand had a habit of finding its way into any weakness and exploiting it.  He hoped the winds would stay away until this dreadful deed was done.

Despite the jeopardy of his current situation, eyes stinging, horrendous pain across his forehead, each breath an agonising draw, there was enough hope that he could get through this if he just did as she commanded.  The potential lifesaver sat on his wrist.  Denied the interface that would have connected the identifier to the visor, he would have to un-glove to use the device.  It was his only way out of this predicament, but it was also the old woman’s only way to survive too.  So long as she wanted to call for help, there was always a chance.

Time was running out though.  He could not afford to take long in burying his colleague.  The further that pushed his exhaustion, the smaller that chance of survival also became.  Reluctantly, he stooped and grabbed Trooper Klein’s boots.  It would have been easier to hold and drag under the shoulders but that meant getting close to the hole in her back and he did not want to think about that.

As he heaved, more partly congealed blood oozed from her wound, adding to the trail leading from the stricken pacer.  It was only two metres to the base of the mound of sand, but the effort was immense.  With the dragging over, he dropped her legs and bent double.  His head swimming, he felt faint.  The one thing he could not afford to do was pass out.  In these conditions, it was unlikely he would ever regain consciousness.

After a moment, the world swam back, and the co-pilot was able to continue.  With no implements to dig, there was only one way to bury his dead colleague.  Gloved hands clawed the sand, dragging it onto the body.  The first few scoops made little impact, but by taking from higher up the drift, he got the sand to flow by itself, and soon her first arm and leg were covered.  He moved along the bank, towards the head.

So far, he had avoided looking at the face of the dead woman, but now he peered down.  Only hours before, she had been sitting alongside him, bopping as they had jumped through space.  She had been fresh to the service, and eager for what seemed such a straightforward mission.  Transport an old woman to a moon base out on the edge of the Dark Zones, they had instructed.  It sounded easy enough.  She is grumpy, they had warned, and prone to rants and moans.  A little bit crazy, maybe, but she is harmless.

Harmless.

The face of Lola Klein did not read harmless.

Forever frozen, those gruesome features now read shock and horror.  Could he bring himself to cover the face of this young pilot with the burning sand of the desert?  Open eyes regarded him vacantly and he tried to cry again, but the last of his moisture already sat in salty streams against his cheeks.

A glance back at the pacer.  The gun was still trained.  Again, he spoke a silent apology, his parched lips barely able to move.  He clawed at the sand hill, pulling more of the fiery grains over his former colleague.  Some fell into her open eyes, but she did not blink, she did not clamp them closed to protect the precious orbs within.  Just a shell, he told himself as he continued to bury, just a shell.

+     +     +

Doctor Schmidt estimated she would last another fifteen minutes before the heat and radiation got the better of her.  By the stagger of the co-pilot, he had far less.  With no identifier and the computers in the cockpit offline, there was no way of verifying those time estimates, but like everything in this plan, she just had to go with it, on a wing and a prayer.

Back there, mid-jump, the doctor had figured it was gamble or bust.  She was not returning to the life of a prisoner.  Oh, they called it something else, they told her house arrest was different, but it did not feel that way.  Within weeks of Chilake coming to power, scientists had started to disappear, their laboratories closed down, their families and friends silenced.  Schmidt had been one such practitioner.  Taken in the dead of the night, she had not been allowed to gather belongings or say any goodbyes, and then her tour of Union hellholes had begun.  That had been a long time ago.  For decades she had been in the wilderness, desperate to complete her work, with just the bones from the captain’s table with which to continue her experiments.  She had had no fellow scientists to work with, no journals or resources at her disposal, and only the ignorant guards to talk to.

For a time, the inception of Project Indigo had promised her more.  But no sooner had she served her purpose, then they had her back in hiding.  A few days ago, the need for her services had seen them call again.  This time, the doctor was determined she would not be returning to purgatory.  She wanted to complete her work and would have her freedom, and she was willing to gamble her life to achieve either.

“Get up!”  Schmidt hollered at the co-pilot.  “If you want to survive then get up!  The ground will cook you alive.”

With Tau Ceti high in the sky, the flesh of the buried pilot was probably already turning crisp under the burning sand.

The male trooper heard the doctor’s calls.  His first attempt to stand resulted in him falling back against the incline.  After a brief flail of arms, he managed to find purchase and push himself up.  From twenty metres away, his sway was noticeable.

“The blood,” the doctor called, “the trail of blood.  Walk back towards me, covering it with sand.  Use your boots.  We don’t want the scavengers finding her, do we?”

In a daze, he did as she asked, staggering towards the pacer, sweeping an unsteady leg as he went to scuff up the sandy earth.  When he was a few metres away she told him to stop.  Compliantly, he froze.  With hunched shoulders, awkwardly leaning forward, he peered up at her hopefully.

She raised the gun and despatched another bolt into the ground.  A grunt of surprise came from him, but nothing more.

“Do you want to be rescued now?” she mocked.  “Do you want to activate your beacon?”

The zombie-like creature nodded.

“Before you do, I want to see your face,” she said.  “I want to see that you are truly sorry for what your kind have done to me.  Take off your helmet, put it on the floor, and then I will let you activate the beacon.  After that, you can kneel and apologise.  You can do the begging for the President.  You can do the pleading for all my lost years.”

Struggling with the clasps, it took the co-pilot an age to remove the helmet.  The head revealed was a red, swollen mess.  His hair was plastered with sweat, his skin was starting to blister, and there were white salt stains all around his eyes and mouth.  From her resting place, protected from the worst of the heat by the shade of the vessel, she had mercilessly watched him labour. The exertions had edged him close to death, just as she had expected.  She needed him to activate that beacon, it would not work for her, so it had been a fine judgement as to how far she could push him.  As he lay the helmet to one side, and wrestled with his gloves, she thought she had judged it perfectly.

Protected by the clothing, the identifier still worked fine, a green light signifying it was now online.  His shaking hand tapped at the wrist, once, twice, a third time.  The green light turned to a flashing red.  She hoped that was enough.  She hoped the nearby base was listening.  With his identifier now openly communicating he could send all sorts of alerts, but by the defeated way his hand fell back to his side, she doubted he would even try.

The sun beat relentlessly on the top of his unprotected head.  Without the helmet and breathing aids, he would not last long at all.  She took aim and blasted the helmet twice, the first shot cracking the visor, the second blowing it apart.

Almost casually, the dying man glanced down at the shattered last hope and then back at the hatch ledge.  Schmidt stood now, shuffling into the dark and slightly cooler interior.  His eyes could barely make her out.  Without the heavy tint of the visor, the sun was blinding.  The heat enveloping his body was overwhelming.  Exhausted and beaten, he fell to his knees.  Seconds later, with his consciousness swimming away as organs began to fail, he flopped forward, face down, into the scorching sand.

Chapter Eight

She knew that the road back was going to be a long one and that it would start with small steps.  Her body and mind both needed soothing and carefully rebuilding.  Seven days after escaping Petang, Kayla McGann was starting to feel physically stronger.  Mentally, though, it would be a harder journey.  She had taken plenty of baths, but she could still not face the shower.

The Noche on which she had fled the prison was originally designed as a one-system planet hopper.  Through some miraculous engineering, it had been converted into a craft capable of interstellar travel.  The man who had rescued her, piloting them to safety, was as modest and surprising as that ship.  Messiah Ainge had described their destination as a ‘camp’, suggesting it was somewhere he had established many years before.  It was just a stopover, he had said, somewhere to rest when he got tired of living on the Noche.  Just like his ship, the ‘camp’ was not at all as it first appeared.

Although from the surface of the asteroid it did look like an old, abandoned base, the complex beneath was incredible.  It comprised of three levels of modern, luxury accommodation and was in stark contrast to the dark, cold lump of rock in which it hid.  Already exposed as a gunrunner, she presumed that was how he had funded this lavish abode.  What else had he not told her?  There was so much more to Messiah than met the eye and so much more he was not sharing.  But then, she guessed, there was plenty she had not told him too.

A week before, Kayla had stood in the bedroom on board the Noche and regarded her naked frame in the mirror.  In the complex, in the room she had chosen to make her own, she now did the same.  This most basic assessment of her state of health was a regular routine.  She turned this way and that, examining her body.  A simple balanced diet, a boost of protein, vitamins, and minerals, and sleep the likes of which she had not experienced in years, had all made a difference.  Steps, small ones, in the right direction.  She was still incredibly pallid, but all the extra fluids brought a little glow to her skin and its youthful elasticity was coming back.  She was still gaunt, although now eating well, the scales registering two kilograms heavier than when she had arrived.  And the bruises were still there too, but they were fading.

After four years of captivity and abuse, there was the need for patience.  She was getting better.  It was important to temper the determination to return to her former physical peak.  She could not put too much pressure on the body, or, indeed, the mind.

Patience.

The pain in her lower abdomen remained and that was a worry.  Urinating still hurt and now that her stools were healthy, and not the runny mess she had become accustomed to, passing could be agony.  Those prison guards had certainly done a good job at fucking her over.  She pushed those worries away; hopeful things would get better in time.  More small steps.  More patience.

As Kayla continued to study her body, the light caught the metallic device on her wrist.  It had taken a few days to get used to having an identifier clipped in.  She barely touched the thing, leaving it on amber standby most of the time.  Occasionally, her host mentioned it, keen, perhaps, that she returned to normality following her incarceration.  There could be no normality.  He was a fool to think there ever could be.

The amber light felt safe.  The version of the device provided was secure and could not expose her location, but she still felt more comfortable being offline.  She did not want to reconnect with life, not yet.  She did not want to know how messed up they had left her either.  Health diagnostic tools were to be avoided like the plague.  Amber was safe.  Amber was good.  There was a long road to be walked, for sure, and she was not yet ready to see all the hurdles along the way.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, the mirror still reflecting her naked image.  She clamped her knees together.  It was time to think about something else.  Flopping back onto the soft sheets, she closed her eyes, hoping everything would disappear and give her a moment of peace.

That was not the way it was going to be though, was it?  It was not in her destiny.  Being born in the wrong place and to parents with ideals that did not suit others, had led to isolation her entire life.  Those parents were cruelly taken from her, murdered by Union forces.  Ever since then, normality, such as moments of peace on a comfy bed, had been pipe dreams for Kayla.  In the game of life, turbulence and trauma were the cards she had been dealt.  She could not walk away from the table.  She could not stop playing the game.

At times over the last few days, the luxury of this isolated abode had cruelly fooled her.  Thoughts of turning away from the past teased.  Messiah’s offer to stay for as long as she wished tantalised, encouraging her into thinking this could be forever.  Was that possible?  Could she do that, and just leave the past where it was?  Could she hole up on this barren lump of rock in an uninhabited system and simply hide?  Until the day she died?  Could she actually do that?

No, she quickly concluded.  She had not escaped one prison to find herself stuck in another.  It was not the need for people that would pain her if she chose such an isolated life.  Maybe at one time, she had needed others, but the Union had taken all those away.  Nor was it a fear of being stuck in one place, or any particular desire to travel or explore.  If there was one thing this life had shown her it was that no matter how different a place was, that no matter how unique a sight, it was still just another shithole in this shithole of a galaxy.  She had no need for excitement either.  She had no need to feel the exhilaration of doing new things or pushing her spirit in some daring deed.  Excitement left bruises.  Excitement left her scared to take a shower.

Kayla had not longed for liberty to fill her life with any of those things, and there was only one reason why she did not intend to spend her days in this luxury pad.  That one thing above all others had stayed with her during captivity, driving her forward when everything felt lost.  Sure, it had, on occasions, buried itself deep.  It had hidden beneath the hunger, the pain, and the degradation, but it had always been there.  Waiting.  Waiting for an opportunity to present itself.  Waiting for that chance to strike for freedom.  And when she was in that chair, with the sirens blaring, it had leapt forward and got the Kayla show back on the road.

That one thing was anger.

And oh boy, was she angry.

The rage was the culmination of years of unadulterated hell.  It was aimed at those soldiers who had slew her parents and those others, different faces, same insignia, who had murdered her man.  It was at all the injustices heralded from a thousand systems.  It was at a corrupt media and legal system that conspired to re-write history, framing innocents so that the truth remained hidden.  It was at those untouchables, those with too much power and wealth, who sat by and watched frontier worlds starve.  And it was at all the hypocrites who preached about liberty and human rights whilst brokering deals with barbarous regimes.

Her anger was at all those things, and much, much more.  And it needed an outlet.  It needed a vent, a mechanism by which she could let it spew forth.  She could pretend it was a desire for justice that would provide that release, a hope she could justify her rage through the wicked behaviour of others.  But that was only a half truth, the real vent was far more primeval.  It lurked in its most basic form; a raw, pure emotion.  She needed revenge.  It really was that simple.

A deep sigh escaped.  What had she become?  What had they made her?  All she had left was the burning.  All there was to keep her going was the fire.  A life fed by the fumes of rage, drunk on the desire to settle old scores.  What kind of life was that?

The only kind she had.

The complex, like the Noche, had a gymnasium.  That had come as a surprise, although she was not sure why.  Messiah Ainge was not a big man, standing only a few inches taller than Kayla at about five seven.  What there was of him, though, was lean and well maintained.  He had a tidy physique and the tight shirts he wore clung to decent muscle tone.  The rigours of artificial gravity required extra effort to prevent the muscles from fading, so, of course, he had access to gym equipment.

She had spent a lot of time in that room herself since arriving, desperate to beat some fight back into her withered body.  Desperate to beat some of the rage out too.  Taking it steady was the best way, whilst the good diet and supplements also helped to build her back up.  Some exercises had proved off limits, her lower belly screaming at her if she tried them.  Most pulled one way or another on the abdomen and she could tolerate some discomfort, but not the pain.

Having only recently woken and fresh from the bath, morning exercise beckoned.  Her head needed it.  The clothes printer had produced several garments to her size, including body-moulded exercise outfits.  She would dress in one of those and pop along the corridor.  Yes, he had a clothes printer.  He also had food producers galore.  There were various bits of impressive tech spread throughout multiple rooms across this three-floor complex, as well as an external pad and an underground bay for the Noche, all air-locked and hidden from the rest of the galaxy.  There was no right for this luxury this far out, in such an isolated system.  Who the hell was Messiah Ainge?

Since arriving they had not spent much time together.  His secretive life suggested he was a private man, and Kayla was just too damaged to be around others.  But cooped up together as they were, that probably needed to change, even if only to satisfy her curiosity.  She also needed him; he was her only way off this asteroid.  And the time was coming when she would want to leave, her need for revenge would insist on it.

After the gym, she would go find him.

+     +     +

The middle level of the complex, above the Noche bay, was a huge open plan expanse.  Messiah called this his working floor, the upper designated as the living quarters.  Although you could see from one end of this hundred-metre long chamber to the other, it was in fact a series of distinct spaces.  As Kayla descended the spiral staircase that cut through the centre of the complex, she spotted the black face of her host, illuminated in the glow of his identifier.  He was sitting some distance away, over towards the doors leading to the stores.

In the cushioned footwear of the gym, she made no sound as she descended.  He did not look her way, oblivious to her presence.  The stairs corkscrewed majestically, ornately shaped in a black material to make them look like ancient metalwork.  They even had the same cold touch of iron, although they were certainly not made from any such substance, the energy required to cast just too great for off-world production.  Like most of the complex, from wall tiles to water nozzles, the staircase was produced using polymer printing.  A similar process had also put the now sweat-stained clothes on her back.

Reaching the bottom, she paused, staring across at the man who, despite her coming close to killing them both, had shown her more trust than anyone else had in a long time.  It was trust she did not deserve.  Why had he taken her in?  As the Noche sat stranded in deep space, he had threatened that once they got moving again, she would be dumped at the nearest base.  Yet here they were, seven days later, cohabiting.

All he knew about her, she wrongly assumed, was what she had told him.  He knew her first name, that she had been imprisoned unjustly, and that her escape had been opportune and unplanned.  That was about the sum of it.

Would Kayla have trusted someone on the strength of so little?  Would she have slept easily a few doors down from a stranger who had nearly blown her arm from her shoulder shortly after first meeting?  She doubted it, but then she was not the trusting kind.

Approaching him from behind and on soft feet, she considered coughing to reveal her presence.  Instead, she chose to take the opportunity to observe him.  From behind, she noted his neatly cropped hair, shaven to the nape of his neck, probably shaped by the same smart sheers that had helped tidy her unruly mop.  His black neck was in stark contrast to the brilliant white of the t-shirt he wore, and the wide collar allowed a glimpse of the tops of his muscles.  They were square shoulders, strong, broad, but he was a fool to think they were broad enough to carry the troubles of this woman.

When just a few feet away, the projection from his identifier dragged her admiring gaze from her host.  She froze.  An emotion not felt in many years erupted deep within.  If asked to name that emotion, she would have struggled, and with so much anger coursing through her veins this new sensation felt alien.  Reading the headlines and seeing the projected images took the wind from her.  Messiah had caught her out.  He had trusted her, and she had failed him.  When the opportunity to share her story had presented, she had declined, choosing instead to conceal it, choosing to ride roughshod over the faith he had vested in her.  As Kayla McGann saw her own face on that projection, her heart sank.  How had she expected not to be found out?  Why had she thought she could keep a secret this big from him?

Whether he heard her or just caught sight of a reflection, Messiah was suddenly aware of her presence.  He turned his head.  Kayla, wrapped up in remorse, did not see his nervous shuffle or the way he went to close down the identifier before realising it was too late.  She was oblivious to the signs of awkwardness he displayed, too pre-occupied in how badly she had failed him to see that he was feeling the same.

“I… I…” she started, but could not find the right words.

Messiah took over the reins.

“I figured it,” he said, “I put two and two together and worked out who you are.”

Kayla stared at the three-dimensional image of herself, slowly shaking her head from side to side.  It was frightening to see it again.  The Union-appointed legal team, as useless as they were at defending, had kept her abreast of all the media developments.  Prior to the conviction, access to several channels had also been available in the holding compound.  This image had filled the airwaves and christened her with a hundred new names, few of which were complimentary.  It was too good, too glamorous, too well made-up.  It was an image stolen from her personal files, taken in happier times.  It looked nothing like the face that had looked back in the bedroom mirror that morning.

“That’s me,” she said solemnly.

“Kayla McGann,” he sighed, “partner of the notorious Malcolm Gomez, the mastermind behind the Three Zero atrocity.  Ten thousand people died on that day.”

Not taking her eyes off the projection, she perched her bottom on the back of a sofa.  Suddenly, her legs felt weak.

From a similar sofa, Messiah continued:

“I’m sorry I did not say sooner,” he apologised, “but I realised way back, before we even arrived here.  When I did, we almost changed course, we almost went to the nearest Union outpost.”

Now she broke away from the projection, fixing Messiah with pointed eyes.  Had he just suggested he had almost handed her in?  Was this a chink in the armour of this incredibly trusting soul?  A part of her, the part that rejected any kindness, wanted it to be so.

“Why didn’t you?” she asked.

“Ten thousand people,” he mused.

“Why?” she pushed.

Messiah tapped away the projection and returned to the main news stream.  It was just a constant ticker of McGann articles, recollections of Three Zero, and analysts suggesting what the next moves might be.

“I have no idea,” he frowned, “and I keep asking myself the same question.  On Spirit, when you blew a hole in the flight console, I saw a killer, a woman capable of the things you were convicted for, but I’ve also seen other things in you, things I can’t explain.”

“Are you looking for me to deny it?” she asked.  “Are you looking for me to tell you Malcolm, me, the others had nothing to do with Three Zero?  That we were just convenient patsies?  That the real culprits are still out there?”

“You won’t tell me that,” he said, “because you know there is no point.  Guilty or not, you would deny it either way.  So, it all comes down to how I feel, what I see, who I think you are…”

“Ask me,” Kayla demanded sternly.  Her hands were by her hips, fingers angrily clawing at the sofa.  “Ask me.”

“Half of the galaxy is looking for you,” Messiah said, continuing to flick through the various feeds.  “It took a while to break, but once it broke… you are big news again, lady.  Big, big news.  And I’ve got you holed up here.  Aiding and abetting the Union’s most wanted was not my smartest move.  It certainly puts a hole in any hopes I had to run for the senate…”

He cast one of his trademark broad smiles her way, brilliant white teeth as always.  It was a shallow smile though, and he did not get one back.

“It’s probably taken Spirit out of general circulation,” he continued.  “‘Has anyone seen a Noche matching this description?’  Thankfully, Kamdo tech is not the best; grainy stills from the loading bays, the Noche’s registration from the base’s log, that is all they have.  There is much speculation as to whether the unknown pilot was hijacked, a willing party, or even the brains behind the whole thing.”

He paused, scanning another feed.

“Oh, and the escape was all planned.  You triggered the riot, apparently.  All staged.  You are credited with personally killing seven during the escape.”

At his last sentence, she snarled.  One dead, sure, and another deprived of part of a limb, but not seven.

“That is not the story you told me,” he said, “not at all.  But you were covered in blood so maybe…”

Her body rudely cut through the identifier projection.  She glared down at him, her tense hands now squeezing at air.

“Just fucking ask me,” she hissed.

Retracting back, Messiah left the images playing.  Words danced across Kayla’s torso, scrolling over the gym gear.  A window featuring survivors’ stories opened on her chest.  These were bit part players in the grand opera, and Messiah did not recognise the face of Clayton Wright when he appeared in the survivors’ roll call.  Even if he had ever seen Clayton before, he could be excused for not identifying him, placed as the video was, directly on to the heaving, angry chest of the young woman.

The aggression prompted Messiah to play the game, if that was indeed what this was.  She wanted the argument, it seemed, she wanted to let it out.  He would let her.

“Were you in any way responsible for the destruction of Three Zero?” he asked.

A series of menu options illuminated her flaring nostrils.  The text continued down over her pursed lips, ending just above the neck of the body-fit top.  He was relieved to note that her expression was not one of outright rage; it was more one of frustration.  The reply startled him.

“I do not fucking know!” she screamed.

With the expectation of an outright denial, he was surprised she offered something that inconclusive.  What did he make of the answer?  Surely, she knew one way or the other?

“I have spent four years with that question buzzing around my head,” she explained, calmer, “four fucking years.  You start out convinced of your innocence, convinced you played no part.  I was convinced of the innocence of others too.  Then all the interviews and interrogations, looking for you to confess, looking for you to crumble.  Hours, days, words being fired non-stop.  Words that accuse, that make you feel bad, that confuse and hurt you.  Evidence slapped on the table, irrefutable proof, they say, and you laugh it off, you throw scorn on their integrity, but that evidence still sits there… and once they stop, and you’re alone and thinking, those niggles of doubt start to creep in.  I know I was not at the station when they claim I was, and neither was Malcolm.  We were together.  I do not think it was plotted in our circles either, or I would have known!  Malcolm told me everything, I think, but… there have been four years for certainty to turn into uncertainty, for tiny seeds of doubt to blossom into a forest.”

She paused, sweeping hair away from her face.  It was no longer the black mess from their first encounter.  Several washes later and hints of dark brown shades were revealed.  Chopped and straighten and left to hang at the shoulders, it curved in against her cheeks.  As she swept it aside the scar above the left eye was briefly exposed, reminding Messiah of the physical traumas this woman had been through.

“I do not know anymore,” she said, dejected, “I really do not.  Four years of thinking has done that.  Four years of not knowing if Malcolm had their blood on his hands.  Four years of not knowing if it was on mine too.  As you helpfully pointed out, ten thousand souls, ten thousand innocents.”

She stepped out of the identifier’s light show and he saw her face more clearly.  It was riddled with sorrow.  Shuffling up, he tapped at the seat beside him, suggesting she sit.  She took up the offer with an unhappy flop.

Messiah had heard the admission that, for all she now knew, she might have been complicit in the murder of all those people.  He had heard it, but he did not believe it for one moment.  Surely, with a crime so grievous, any involvement or prior knowledge would sit heavily on someone’s conscience.  It was the sort of thing clearly remembered.  Kayla’s uncertainty was enough for him, uncertainty where the guilty would have held no doubt.  He did not want to think she had been involved either, he wanted to believe she was innocent.  Framed, scapegoated, set-up, whatever word fit, he did not believe this woman responsible for Three Zero.  Her confusion was understandable from the years of abuse.

She nearly killed you, an inner voice told him.  She blew a hole in the control panel and nearly killed you both.

Setting aside Three Zero, this was still the former partner of the once most feared terrorist in the galaxy. Undoubtedly, she was a killer.  During her escape, she admitted to shooting dead one guard, proof she was a woman capable of taking life.  There was plenty of bad in Kayla McGann, and he was an idiot to think otherwise.  Whatever pedestal he was placing her on, he needed to make sure he did not build it too high.

“There’s something else you need to see,” he said calmly.  He called up a video watched only minutes before Kayla had joined him.  The contents of it were still sinking in, the ramifications running around his mind like scared children, looking for a responsible adult, seeking reassurance that things were going to be okay.  There were no such adults here.

The dozens of tickers and news articles disappeared and only one remained.  At first there was no volume, and the familiar image of the fugitive McGann played over a backdrop of stills showing the destroyed Three Zero.  Messiah turned up the volume just as that piece was coming to an end.  The floating face of Kayla was replaced by that of a man.  His image had similarly hit the airwaves back in the aftermath but had not gained the same notoriety.

“Jed,” Kayla breathed.

The sound of the reporter cut in: “… capture and arrest of Jed Luca in what authorities are claiming to be a major breakthrough in the on-going war against terror…”

“I saw him taken at Haram Galt,” Kayla said, confused.  “I thought he was dead.  This cannot be today’s news.  Is this an old story?”

“No,” said Messiah, “it’s just breaking.”

The reporter continued: “The timing of Luca’s arrest could not have come at a better time for the security forces who are facing heavy criticism following Kayla McGann’s audacious escape.  Several strong leads had closed the net on Luca in recent weeks and yesterday, forces stormed his hideout on Meridian Rise in the Tau Ceti system…”

Kayla shook her head in disbelief.  “This is all wrong,” she breathed.

“… captured in a poor state of health, he surrendered to authorities without a fight, although he did sustain some minor injuries from the small explosive devices used by Union forces to gain entry.  Luca was, by all accounts, pleading for forgiveness and full of remorse…”

“Reports began circulating just over an hour ago,” explained Messiah, “but this next bit only aired moments before you came down.”

A couple of taps and the archived photo of Jed Luca was replaced with the perfectly pretty face of a female news presenter.  She was broadcasting from a studio somewhere, a blue backdrop behind her.  Looking down at her wrist, she was reading off her identifier, her flow of words broken as fresh information dropped.

“Just getting reports…” the presenter said, “… er… sorry… please bear with us.  This is live!  This is breaking!  We are just trying to establish connection…”

There was a pause whilst she read more, and then she looked straight into the camera.

“We can now go over to Meridian Rise where an urgent press conference has been convened by the lead officer in the capture of Jed Luca.  Just bear with us please, this is live, this is breaking, we are trying to get the feed on air.”

To her ear: “Are we good, yes?”

Then back to camera: “Going over now!  Live! We will be hearing from Special Agent Victor and then – this really is quite a story, viewers – we will be hearing from the captured terrorist!  From Jed Luca!  This is live!  This is big!  Remember which channel you saw this on first.”

The studio image faded, replaced by a far less pristine looking set.  It featured a long table with various pieces of equipment strewn across it, and three sombre looking men seated behind.  The two on the flanks both wore black suits of a cut all too familiar to Kayla; her own interrogators had worn the same.  Jed was sitting in the middle.  He was clad in an orange jumpsuit, the typical garb of a Union prisoner. Again, Kayla recalled just such clothing.  She had endured an identical outfit until it was replaced by the even less appealing rags of the Kamdo prison regime.

It was disturbing to look upon her friend again, disturbing in so many ways.  She never knew for sure what happened to him after the raid at Haram Galt.  Her last sighting was seeing him being dragged off.  During her confinement, when her legal team updated her on developments, his name never emerged.  She had asked, but they drew blanks from the investigation team.  Jed Luca disappeared that day.  Kayla assumed, perhaps with some justification, that the murderous Union Special Forces had claimed another victim.  Although consumed with grief for her dead lover, she mourned for the others too, and Jed Luca had been foremost amongst them.

Yet here he was, recently broadcast live, the report claimed, all the way from Meridian Rise.  Live in one sense, but barely alive in another.  It was definitely him, but he looked a shadow of the man she had known.  His face was different, and not only in the downcast, sombre expression, with his chin lowered, eyes staring at the table.  The difference was not the woollen hat either, strangely covering his head, giving the distinct impression of baldness.  Her Jed held such a vibrant head of hair.  There was something more, something different in that face, something she could not initially identify.  Perhaps that was not surprising given this was a man she long believed dead.

“I was certain they had killed him,” she told Messiah, “I saw them take him away.”

“Maybe he broke free somehow…?”

She shook her head, but not to contradict Messiah, it was more a reflection of her bemusement.  She was numb, her mouth agape, amazed by what she was seeing.  Fingers absently clawed again, this time at the sofa seat.  Messiah placed a hand on hers and gave it a little squeeze.  She showed no reaction to his gesture, but the clawing stopped.

The agent to Jed’s left was speaking.  His words were mostly lost on Kayla, but she would watch again several times in the coming hours and in the end, she would know his lies by heart.  Agent Victor was proclaiming Luca a broken man who hid away for four years, riddled with remorse.  The full powers of law would be applied to this former terrorist, who admitted his crimes and asked for forgiveness.  There would be none, Victor explained, and justice would take its course, but the prisoner remained determined to make amends and had agreed to speak at this press conference.  It was an unprecedented move, the journalist voiced, sure to raise eyebrows over the fairness of any future trial.  Kayla flared her nostrils at the very suggestion there was such a thing as justice under this regime.

The initial shock was starting to fade now, but Kayla’s eyes never moved to Agent Victor, even when he spoke, frozen instead on her old friend.  When Jed Luca started to read the pre-prepared text, she pinpointed the difference that had so far eluded her.  On this realisation, her confusion only grew.  She listened intently though, listened to every word, her heart racing.  This was wrong, so very wrong.  By the end of Jed’s monologue, anger had replaced her confusion.  Messiah would want to talk to her, no doubt, and she had things that she needed someone to hear.  As Jed fell quiet, though, her rage was too great, and she was unable to speak.

Messiah killed the feed and put his identifier into standby.  They sat there in silence.  Seconds turned into minutes, the only sound their breathing and the constant whirl of the generators that kept the complex alive.

“His nose,” she eventually said, “it’s different.”

With a furrowed brow, Messiah glanced to his side.  “What?” he asked.

“His face was swollen too,” Kayla considered, “and his complexion not quite right.”

“Well I guess you knew the man,” said Messiah, more than a touch of doubt in his words.

She turned to meet his gaze, those green orbs fixing him with a no-nonsense scowl that told him not to question her.  Those eyes held a powerful grip over Messiah.  They had since that first meeting back in the loading bay on Petang Base.

“They have beaten him,” she said.  “His face was swollen, and heavy makeup applied to cover the bruises.  They darkened the image toom, with the lights kept low so the viewers could not see it.”

“But you did..?”  Messiah noted.  Later that day Kayla would make him watch it back and point to the tell-tale signs.  Even then, although she was right about the lighting and the unnatural colour of his skin, he could not make out the swelling.  Instructed by her transfixing eyes, however, he believed what she was saying.  It made perfect sense, if the rest of her take on the story was to be believed.

“His nose though,” she returned to that point, “that’s much harder to explain, but it is definitely different.”

“Cosmetically altered?  Weight loss thinning his face?  Broken, maybe?”

“Altered,” Kayla nodded.  “And why would a man who lacked vanity and who had a perfectly good nose change it?”

Messiah huffed, “It’s been four years.  Lots do.  It is so easy and affordable…”

“To hide,” she concluded, “to avoid face recognition devices and escape detection.  He must have altered it to throw them off his trail.  Somehow, he got away at Haram Galt, and now the bastards have him… and he’s betrayed us.”

“If they beat him…”

There was venom in her response.

“Do you think I was not abused?” she spat.  “Did you ever see me sitting compliantly between two Union agents, begging for forgiveness?”

Messiah offered no reply, not wishing to further fuel her growing spite.  The masses would surely see Jed Luca had been forced to read the apology.  It was also clear that Luca’s direct appeal to, in his words, ‘my one-time friend, Kayla McGann’, was disingenuous too.  Not once did the man lift his sorry head whilst speaking.  Not once did the viewer see the whites of his eyes.  The words were spoken with no conviction, yet Kayla seemed to offer her former comrade zero leeway.

“I cannot stand this!” she shouted.  The gravel voice brought with her from the prison mines had faded in the last few days, but on raising the volume, it came back harshly.  The tone served to emphasise her annoyance. Messiah was relieved the anger was not directed at him.

“I can’t stand watching him like that!” she expanded.  “That is not the Jed I know.  He would never talk like that!  He looks half the man he was.  Even that stupid hat, it makes him look bald, no way would he go bald.  What have they done to him?  How did they get him to say those things?  He accused me, you heard him.  He accused me!”

It was worse than that, Luca had blamed her.  At that point in the video, when her former associate suggested she was guilty of direct involvement in the atrocities, her hands had begun to tug at the sofa again.  In a way, that direct blame proved this was all a sham. Her memories were polluted by both time and interrogation, yes, but not to the extent where she would have forgotten such a lead role, and those had been his words.  Jed spoke the script of others, of those who conspired, of the Union, of the politicians, of the media.  It was all a charade.  He would have never called her out in that way.

Even more significantly, Jed Luca would never have told her to hand herself in.  ‘Run,’ he would have shouted at the camera.  ‘Run, Kayla, and keep on running.’  Just as he had told her back at Haram Galt, in the seconds before the forces had overwhelmed the base.

Messiah saw the angry clawing return and again went to place his hand on hers.  This time, she snatched it away.

“They will pay for this,” she cursed, “I will make sure of that.”

Chapter Nine

Despite the amount of alcohol consumed, the commander had felt fine on the walk back from the cargo bay.  Those corridors were brightly lit, and the ability to focus on the other officer easy.  Once in the darkness of her private chamber, shadows had begun to swirl and play with her head, and she realised just how drunk she was.

“Give me a moment,” she mumbled to the younger woman, seeking to steady herself against the edge of the bed.

First Officer Safinn, though, was having none of it.  On the way back, all the backside groping had served to light the fire and she had no intention of letting those flames dampen.  Alcohol-fuelled and horny, she pushed her superior officer on to the bed and jumped on top, seeking out her lips.  Rank was lost beneath the powerful urges of lust.  Moist mouths met in a hard and passionate kiss, tasting the food and drink on the other.  Their tongues danced, jaws straining as they pushed together, eager hands clawing at clothed bodies.  After a time, Safinn drew back.  She sat astride Cholewinska, lips tingling, breathless, her chest heaving.

“Lights,” the commander groaned.  The darkness was swimming even more now, but the lights flashed on far too brightly, forcing her eyes closed.

“Dim!” she quickly added.

They lowered to a brown hue, far more conducive to both her sensitive head and the mood of seduction.  Ana Cholewinska gazed up at Safinn, marvelling at her striking hair, a similar blonde to her own, and the youthful beauty of her features.  Slowly Safinn unfastened her shirt.  She paused one clasp from the top, with her navel and the sensual gap between her breasts on show.  Teasingly, she pulled the garment down one arm and then the next, before releasing the last fastener and casting the shirt aside.

“Fantastic,” the commander gasped.

Safinn giggled: “They should be, for what they cost.”

Perspiration glistened provocatively off the perfectly formed breasts.  Cholewinska raised her hands and cupped them, just holding at first.  With their eyes locked, urgency began to build, and the commander gently squeezed, enjoying the gasps from the young officer.  Pulling Safinn closer, and lifting her shoulders to meet, Ana brought her mouth to bear. She kissed one nipple and then the next, letting each kiss linger, letting her tongue tease, letting her teeth threaten to bite.  Wrapping several blonde strands in her fist, she pulled Safinn’s hair, as she let those teeth nibble.  The first officer moaned.  Fired on by the sensual sound, the pull on the hair strengthened.  Hips gyrated together as their passions mounted.  Cholewinska tugged at the waistband of the other woman.  Those trousers had to come off, she needed the rest.

“I think you should be on my face,” she told Safinn.

“Oh, commander,” the young woman replied, “I think I agree.”

+     +     +

Waking up to the flurry of news coverage had initially thrown Clayton into turmoil.  As the day wore on, he had managed to calm himself down, but anxiety levels were still high, his identifier occasionally bleeping a blood pressure warning.

The unease was understandable; Kayla McGann’s escape had come at him like a brick.  Her face popping back on to the airwaves after all this time was unexpected and unwelcome. His personal battles in the weeks immediately following Three Zero had revolved around the woman from the lift, but it was the face of McGann that had become synonymous with the terrorist attack.  He had found some solace in justice being served on McGann, even if the assassin he encountered, who was never mentioned by the media, remained at large.  At least they had caught one, the big one.  Well, until they let her escape.

Damn Chilake.  Damn the council.  Damn the whole bloody Union!  They should never have let Three Zero happen, and now they could not even contain the galaxy’s most notorious extremist.  He was perplexed by their incompetence.  Kayla McGann should have never been incarcerated in the first place.  It would have been better to mow her down when they had the chance.  She should have died with her boyfriend.

Clayton casually stroked his identifier, remembering his blood pressure.  He needed to stay calm.

Conner was thirteen when caught in the horror of Three Zero.   It would be weeks before he was officially declared dead, but his father had known his son was gone from the moment he witnessed the station exploding.  Sinking into a blind shock, Clayton’s first thought of any clarity, the first where he could comprehend anything approaching ‘normal’, occurred a few days later.  He was waiting in the interview room in the Union compound when it struck.  It was one of savage regret.  Clayton’s work had consumed during much of his boy’s childhood and now that came back to haunt, and he wished he had been around more, to see his son grow up.  Something else to add to his survivor’s guilt.

There had been good times, though.  On Conner’s twelfth birthday, Olivia made Clayton take the day off.  Now, reflecting, he was appalled with himself that she had needed to do that.  It had been a special day.  Zero-G games at the recreation centre, food at Jada’s, and then finishing at the cinema. It had been a day when Con had known his dad, and the dad had known his son.  Olivia happily stayed on the side-lines, watching them from the viewing platform, enjoying seeing them bond.

That evening, Clayton had gone into Conner’s room as he settled to sleep.  The room had been decorated since he had last entered; he had no idea when that had happened.  Sitting on the birthday boy’s bed, the two had re-lived a day well spent.  At the end, the son asked if they could do it again soon, explaining he missed his father when he worked such long hours.

“I'm always there,” Clayton had said. “Even when I seem busy, I am never too busy for you.  Always there, Con.”

Thankfully, over the next year, the one leading up to the terror attack, they had tried.  That phrase ‘Always there, Con’ passed between them on numerous occasions.  It was their reminder to spend time together or at least it served as an acknowledgment they should try.  As the teenager grew his own wings, it became even more difficult, and their reliance on the comfort of those three words became much heavier.  Three words that reconnected both with that special twelfth birthday.  Three words used in humour, and moments of sentiment and warmth.  Three words that showed a father’s love for his only child.

And then, years later, those three words would coldly project from his identifier, to torment him and the moths alike.  A harsh reminder from an anonymous source of just how much he had lost.

When Sammy had subsequently informed him that she could not help trace the source, and that all her associates had turned up nothing, he was heartbroken.  He had held it together until he had gotten off the line, but was tear-strewn the moment the call terminated.  Accepting the loss of any loved one was hard, accepting a child was gone, incredibly difficult.  Without a body, that acceptance was impossible.  Of course, in the cold light of day, he knew Conner was not coming back.  He knew that there was no conceivable way to survive that blast and the cold vacuum of space, but those three little words had brought him the shallowest of hopes, they had made him wonder…

As an intelligent man, when the rational thinking took over, he could replace the hope with a desire to know who had sent the message, and why.  If the message were not from Conner, and obviously it was not, then what motive could someone have for sending him such a painful reminder?  And how could they know those words would have such an impact on him?  There was someone with malevolent intent behind this.

With Sammy unable to help, he was left clueless where to start finding answers.  He took it to the police a week later but drew nothing other than blank faces and a lack of interest.  The media were another option, but he was not sure he would have been able to cope with that spotlight, had they taken up the story.  His former employers, when approached, were clearly bemused that he had even considered they might have any clue as to where the message came from.  Freelance investigators were probably the only other course of action open to him, but he had no funds to pay for such a service.

So, he did the only thing he could.  He thought about the message day and night, adding it to the mountain of similar painful things that ran through his mind as he sat on his porch and watched the universe go by.  Mostly, that was fine.  Mostly, he was able to hold back that mountain.  But when the news of McGann’s escape reached him, that mountain had erupted like a volcano, pushing him to a state of blubbering hysteria.

Several hours later, with the worst of the emotional outburst passed, Sammy had called him unexpectedly, to suggest she needed to come see him.  The fact she had used the phrase ‘needed’ rather than ‘wanted’ did not escape him and had compelled him to agree.  She had not elaborated why, and he suspected she would conceal the reason behind a professional excuse.  Possibly, she would claim there was something that needed clearing up on the case records, something minor, something they could have done without a face to face.  He suspected her true motivation was the news on McGann.  She was coming as a friend, conscious of the impact the escape would have had on him.  She was coming to offer support.

Or so he thought.

There was no mention she would be bringing another.

At this time of year dusk fell early, and he was already inside, preparing dinner.  As usual, his culinary choice was limited to something he could muster in a few minutes; cheese on toast was today's delicacy.  Since losing his job he could not afford expensive generators, but his kitchen was still full of useful devices.  Many of them spoke, pleading with him to use them, but he seldom did.  The simple grill never tried to get his attention.  It left him alone, and he liked that.  He had become such a recluse that even the artificial intelligence of household labour savers intimidated him.

Through the kitchen window, he saw the lights of a taxi-pod descending gracefully to his drive, beams dazzling. He slowly chewed on his snack, not even tasting it; like the rest of his life, it held no flavour.  As the vehicle came to a halt, the side panel opened, and a bulky figure stepped out.  Although the headlights made it difficult to see, he knew that was his lawyer.  A moment later, a second figure emerged.  This figure stood taller, and far slenderer.  His jaw froze mid mastication.  Who the hell was that? The company of his friend was welcome, the company of another was not.

The pod gently lifted back above the trees and moved away, leaving the silhouetted figures to approach the house.  The dazzle was gone, but in the growing dusk, it remained impossible to discern any features. Despite asexual clothing, he judged the stranger to be female; the curve of the body and her gait gave that away.  He contemplated not answering the door, but, framed in the light of the kitchen window, it was likely he had already been seen.  Besides, on many occasions since Three Zero, Sammy had proved to be the only person he could turn to.  Even in his darkest hours, she had never hidden from him.

He finished chewing and went to the door, waiting until he heard their footsteps on the porch before opening it.  Sammy was reaching to knock, her knuckles left hanging in the air.  She smiled up at him, warmly.  It was the smile of a friend.

“Hey, boss.” A puff of chill breath met the autumn evening.  She seemed nervous.

“Hey,” he said back, his voice was hoarse.

Behind the lawyer, a step lower, the other visitor shuffled.  She was indeed female.  Although a cowl hid her face, wisps of long, feminine hair poked out from beneath the hood.  In the light of the porch, the fine strands were illuminated copper red.

“This is…” Sammy did not finish her sentence.  “Could we come in?” she asked instead.

Clayton stood aside.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “of course, come on in.”

The two women entered his home.  Sammy brought with her the familiar aroma of fruity perfume, but this was quickly overpowered by the strong smell of soap, so strong it made him want to sneeze.  Someone had recently washed, and quite obsessively.  There was another smell too, an unpleasant musty odour, like you might expect around a farm.  He noticed that the taller lady’s hooded garment was damp where it hung over her buttocks.  It was that garment, he thought, that carried the worst of the aroma.  If that was the case, and the dampness was from it being recently washed, he was thankful not to have smelt it before.

It was many months since he had hosted any kind of company.  He felt uncomfortable.  When he offered them coffee, the words came out almost like an awkward boast, an announcement that he possessed such delicacies.  He did not drink it himself, but there was some somewhere, Olivia had drunk it by the bucket.

“Coffee would be good,” said Sammy.  When the other woman said nothing, Sammy made the introduction.  “This is Roan Siyankova, we met earlier today.”

The stranger showed no signs of lowering her hood.  She did look at Clayton, however, shadowy eyes peering from beneath the fabric shelter.  It was a young woman; a pleasant face from what he could see.  There was no smile, though, and her eyes looked tired. He had no idea what had brought her to his living room; if he had he would have understood that weariness.  As it was, combining the cheerless expression with the unpleasant aroma, he could only regard her with suspicion.

He grumbled a kind of hello; she solemnly nodded back.

“Miss Siyankova…” Sammy began.

“Roan,” the younger woman corrected.

Sammy placed a hand on her client’s forearm.  Her eyes were wide and sympathetic, a face he was all too familiar with.  “Roan has something to tell you,” she said, “and it’s not going to be easy to listen to.  You might want to sit down.”

Clayton took a deep breath and looked between Sammy and the stranger.  He did not say anything.  Outwardly, he projected calm, inwardly, his heart was racing.  Since Three Zero, there had been many hard things to listen to, and every time he dared to hope he was over the worst, something else hit him.  There was no reason to suspect things were getting better anytime soon.  It came as no surprise that this visitor was going to be bad news.  When a man had lost everything he ever desired, when there was a hole in his heart as big as the hole in the space station, nothing was ever likely to be good again.

Clayton was intrigued, despite the terrible sense of foreboding.  This had come out of the blue, dumped on his porch like an unexpected parcel.  In a life full of nasty surprises, he fully expected to tear off the paper and find shit with a bow wrapped around it.  It was one more thing to beat him down.  Kayla McGann this morning, and now this.  Beating after beating.

“I do not need to sit,” he said, coldly.  “There is not much left that can knock me over, you know that.”

Yeah, Sammy knew that, but she also knew this would.

The hood was still raised, but Roan had lifted her chin and her face was now fully visible.  She stared at Clayton, examining him.  The lawyer observed this, and it made her uneasy.  The stranger had made her feel that way from the first moment on the courtroom steps.  She had been anxious with the woman in her apartment too, using her shower, washing until the soap dispenser ran empty.  Despite cleansing and some new clothes, the aroma of a tramp still clung.  That was because the stranger had insisted on keeping the stinking top.  She had seemed obsessed with having something to cover her head.  Now, finally, she took the hood down, and a striking mass of red hair cascaded over her shoulders.

“I was not ready to come find you,” said Roan, her faint accent creeping into the words.  Clayton looked at her, emotionless. He took in the tired and thin face.  He took in her long hair, glorious in colour, but unkempt, with torn and damaged ends.

“I needed more time, but the net was closing, so I had no choice but to break cover.” Grimacing, she leaned to the side, a hand going to the curve of her back.  Clearly, she was easing an ache, again emphasising that this stranger was not in the best of conditions.  As she stretched, the new jeans pulled on her thighs, and something tripped in Clayton’s memories.  The shape of her legs tugged, the brilliant red hair tugged, he snapped his gaze back to her face.  When she straightened the grimace fell away and he saw that strong nose, those narrow lips, and the rush of freckles.

His world stopped.

“You…” he mouthed silently.

“You know this woman…?”  Sammy was alarmed by Clayton’s obvious shock.

“If I could have avoided this,” the stranger sighed, “if I could have found another way… but there is too much at stake, hero-man.  You got my message, I know you got my message, I am sorry for that, but I had no choice.”

Clayton could feel his legs weaken.

“You,” his voice shaking and unsure. “You killed them…”

Roan shook her head, “No, I am no murderer, I did what I had to do.  I came here to find you because you were the only one.  You are the only one.  You are the connection to the truth.  I need your help, desperately need your help. You are the only one.”

“Olivia…” Anger rose, tears in the corners of his eyes.  He was not hearing a word she said.  “Con…” His fists clenched and when Sammy went to him, he aggressively pushed her away.  “Conner!” he screamed at the stranger.

Roan looked unmoved.  She had been expecting this kind of reaction.  She shook her head again and repeated, “I am no murderer.”

“I saw you shoot them!  I saw you kill the guard in the lift!  You! That was you!”

Sammy was horrified.  She grabbed for a nearby chair, dropping into it to avoid falling.  What had she done?!  Why had she brought this woman here?  She had had no idea it was the woman from the lift.  She had had no idea it was the terrorist Clayton had obsessed over, the one missing from the crime files, the one the authorities had never identified.

“You should listen to me, hero-man,” Roan said calmly.

“Do not call me that, bitch!  Do not dare call me that!  You have nothing I want to hear!”  He lunged at her, grabbing the stinking top, digging his fingers into the damp cloth.  “Why did you do it?  Why did you kill them?”

“I am no murderer,” she repeated, the phrase practised like a good politician.

With faces only inches apart, he glimpsed the nervous assassin of yesteryear.  That icy exterior was betrayed by wavering eyes, just as it had been on that fateful day four years before.  Then, like now, he had seen uncertainty, a crack in the confident facade.  And, also like before, it tried to fool him, to make him believe she did not want to do this, that she did not want to hurt. It was a trick. In that lift, he had hoped that the hesitation in her eyes would lead to her veering from her destructive path, but ten thousand deaths were testimony to the fact she had not.  With so much bloodshed on her hands, there was little room for doubt that this woman was the devil.  All the mourning since had only strengthened his belief that the sadness in her eyes was a show, and that was the case now too, just as it had been back then.

Although violence was alien to him, he was ready to tear into her.  He held her hooded top, feeling no shame as his knuckles dug into her chest.  It was coming easy and he had no compulsion to hold back.  He wanted to take his fists and smash like some great ape, pounding and pounding until her rib cage exploded.  He was so close to doing just that, so close, but then she spoke again, and the words she uttered stopped him dead.

“Always there, Con,” Roan said, the words slicing through his rage.  “He told me to pass it on.”

“What?!”  Clayton bellowed.  The distraction was enough for her to shake herself free of his grip and take a step back.

“She says Conner is alive,” said Sammy. “That’s why I brought her here… I did not know she was the one from the station, I would have never brought her if I had!  She told me she had proof Conner is alive!”

Clayton shook his head, taking a couple of paces in one direction then changing and pacing in another.  Mumbling incoherently, occasionally putting a palm to his forehead, occasionally slapping at his identifier.  He could not comprehend what he was hearing, and he could not comprehend that the assassin from the lift was standing in his living room.  After a few moments, he stopped and rounded on the redheaded woman.  Where there had been rage, now there was only confusion.

“What are you saying?  What are you trying to tell me?” he asked in utter disbelief.  “It makes no sense!”

“I have seen him,” Roan Siyankova explained.  “It was a year ago, but I have seen him.  Your son is alive, Mister Wright. Conner is alive!”

Chapter Ten

Hours after the party had finished, with many of the revellers sleeping off the alcohol, Andrea Pedros was coming to the end of her shift.  The strange, unidentified signal from earlier had perplexed for a while, but she had soon forgotten all about it.  Instead, her attention turned to counting down the minutes until she could lay her exhausted head on her own pillow.  It had been a draining shift, made even more tiresome by the unwelcome ridicule of her colleagues.

There were fifteen minutes to go, that was all.  She was desperate to clock off.  If she had known that the communication suite would soon become one of the safest places on the ship, she might not have been so keen.  The secure confines of that room meant she would not die that night when many others would.  It also meant she was on hand to hear the signal when it did return, and those who survived would be thankful of that.

When the sound came back, just as before, it was so quiet and unobtrusive that she unwittingly found herself listening to it again before realising.  When it did tap its way into her conscience, she resisted the temptation to outwardly react.  Although light-hearted in nature, her colleagues mocking of the previous false alarm had cut.  Pedros was not one who enjoyed being laughed at; a psychiatrist would have no doubt linked that to the horrendous attack suffered as a young woman.  This time, she would analyse, record, and pinpoint the source of the signal before alerting others.  That would save her from the need for the false smiles and pretend indifference.

She kept listening.  Her replica arm adjusted the instrumentation to try and isolate the wave, as she sought to focus on the sound.  This was unlike any other signal she had ever detected; the patterns it created on the scopes were bizarre.  It sat within the radio spectrum but oscillated in an unusual and erratic manner, jumping all over the place.

“Computer, analyse,” she instructed quietly, keen not to alert her colleagues, keen to avoid further embarrassment.   A display confirmed what the artificial voice in her ear had already advised.  The diagnostics computer had cut through the noise, slicing it different ways, measuring the wave far more accurately that the human auricle ever could.  Simple signals were easily extracted, but this one was clever, hidden away in all the background static.  It was somehow mixing with the ancient waves that had bounced around the universe since the dawn of time.

“Origin unknown,” the computer told her earpiece.  “There is less than a five percent probability that it is human-made.”

She did not like that answer; it did not feel right.  It did not sound right.  This wave did not sound like those eon-old ripples from across space.  It was different.  She was not sure how, but it was definitely different.

“Trace the source,” she told the computer, her voice still hushed.

“Source unknown,” the computer replied immediately.  “The wave is not recognisable; there is no corresponding wave type in the database.  It is irregular and fades between frequencies.”

“I can hear that,” she said, frustrated. “Re-run the analysis, identify the nature and source of the selected signal.  Isolate the frequencies.  I need a lock.  I need to know where this is coming from.”

Whilst the computer carried out her instructions, she was alone with the sound.  It was fading in and out more regularly now and was no longer the clean tap-tap-tap she had heard before.  Where was it going when it faded?  Between frequencies, the computer had advised.  When it fell silent, those gaps between the taps were the moments when the frequency slipped beyond her auditory range.  She frantically switched up and down the bands, but she could not follow its movement. The analytical powers and data in the mainframe were the culmination of millennia of human technological advances; they would be able to track it, surely?

“Source unknown,” the computer repeated.

She frowned, exasperated.  Where there had been intrigue, now there was concern.

“Probability analysis.  Where is it most likely coming from?” she asked, desperate for some tangible clues.

“The planet Eropidous,” was the reply.

“On what basis?”

“The sounds in this sector of the galaxy have been extensively mapped, and there are no previous records of a wave pattern of this nature.  It is therefore unlikely to be natural.  If not natural, then the logical conclusion is manufactured.  With a limited number of settlements in the vicinity, and the limited numbers of vessels and stations, it can be concluded that the most likely source is on the planet below.”

“Make your mind up!” she scowled.  “A minute ago, you said it was unlikely to be human in origin!” The computer offered no reply.

“Keep the analysis running,” she instructed, “and put all available resources on it.  Capture and record everything.  We need to know what it is, who is sending it, and its target destination.”

After that earlier embarrassment, she was now sure she had not imagined the sound.  Moreover, she was right to be worried. Andrea Pedros recalibrated the listening devices and concentrated, searching for anything the computers had missed.  Tap-tap and then it swam away, only to return a second later.  She swore those taps were getting shorter.  Their pitch was getting higher too, building a sense of urgency.  She should check that with the computer, but so far, the state-of-the-art listening technology had failed miserably, so she would trust her own ears on this one.

How did the computer not know what this was?  How had it not flagged the signal in the first place?

Pedros was an expert in her field, as befitted her well-paid position on this Union flagship, and she was well read on the phenomena of deep space waves.  There were many signals and traces from out amongst the stars that remained unexplained, some so ancient in origin that they pre-dated humankind’s previous understanding of the age of the universe.  Others were hailed as signs of intelligent alien life, so much so that alien civilisations from the distant past were now held as science fact, not science fiction.  As the sons and daughters of earth continued to spread out into the Milky Way, eventually they would come across an intelligence rivalling, or even surpassing, their own.  That was a founding principle of the Union; humankind needed to remain united against any threat hidden in the stars.

Was she listening to alien signals?  The initial assessment was that they were unlikely to be made by humans; the next obvious question was who?  The wave was unique, operating across a myriad of frequencies simultaneously.  It almost seemed as if it were trying to hide.  This evasive quality made it impossible to pinpoint the source.  Nothing like it had been seen before.  Unique.  The Kamdo were surely not capable of generating something like this, were they?  And if so, to what purpose?  She dared not allow her mind to wander to that possibility of an alien tech, capable of bamboozling the Union’s most advanced monitoring equipment.  That was a frightening prospect.  Whatever this was, though, it was way beyond the realms of a false alarm.  She had to bring it to the attention of her colleagues.

As she opened her mouth to call them over, something inexplicable happened.  All the volume controls seemed to simultaneously and spontaneously ratchet up, way beyond safe levels, firing a bolt of incredibly loud noise into her earpiece.  As she screamed, jumping to her feet, so too did her colleagues.  With hands clasping at the sides of their heads, they looked at each other, confused and in pain. One of them tried to speak, but that only served to intensify the discomfort.  He clawed at the earpiece and was horrified to see it come away covered in blood.  In disgust, he tossed it across the room.  Pedros did the same, hers thankfully showing no sign of bleeding.  It felt like she was submerged in a pool, the sounds around her distant and distorted.

“What the fuck was that?” she asked, unsure of her volume controls, suspecting she was shouting.

“No idea!” winced the colleague with the blood trickling down his neck.  “But I think it’s just blown a hole in my fucking eardrum.”  He flicked on his identifier, scrolling to the health diagnostics application.

Pedros returned to her console, acutely aware of the tap-tap and that she had not managed to inform her colleagues before the loud blast.  Now, she was worried that her failure to share would be seen as incompetence.  Back at the computer outputs, she was desperate to find answers, desperate to be able to explain.  Instead, what she found was a series of red lights and warning messages erupting across the displays.  The whole room was becoming alive to sirens.  They floated through the depths of the sound pool to where she was submerged, ghosts of their true, shrill selves.

This was bad, very bad.

“Get the bridge!” her non-injured colleague barked.  “Find out what’s going on!”

Pedros tried, but all the channels were blocked.  Intercoms across the decks were lighting up, as crew everywhere seemed desperate to use the systems.  Fingers danced through the vibrating air, looking to isolate one channel, to bring up one voice.  She managed; it was from a lower engineering deck.  A panicked plea flooded into the communications room.

“They are on board!” a terrified Union technician shouted down the channel.  “They are here!  We need help, we are getting over run!”

Then there was the sound of blaster fire, and the channel fell silent.

Andrea Pedros hung her head.

+     +     +

The corridors of Porthos were quieter than usual that morning.  With so many officers distracted by the impromptu party the previous evening, many of the troopers and technicians had chosen to take advantage of the situation.  The off-duty crew, with no officers to worry about, had held their own get-togethers in the communal areas.  Many were now in the same hungover state as their superiors.

Commander Cholewinska had underestimated the threat and lowered her own and her crew’s vigilance.  When the ship was stormed, they were not ready, not even close.  The nature and magnitude of the attack could not have been predicted, but the amount of alcohol in the blood streams of those on board played into the hands of the Kamdo.

As the sound blast tore at the ears of the communications team, so too it temporarily disrupted the force field enveloping the ship.  The disruption was not enough to allow enemy vessels to fire, but there were none nearby, and that had not been the intention.  It was enough, however, to allow the strange wave Pedros had observed to squeeze through.

Seconds later, across the ship’s miles of corridors and rooms, tiny, brilliant dots of light began appearing.  They started at floor level, rapidly expanding into shimmering patches of air.  Most initially went unnoticed.  Only when they reached several feet high did the distortions grab the attention of nearby crew.  Confused, they regarded them with wonder.  Was it a figment of their imagination, their eyesight playing tricks?  Or perhaps it was some strange spatial anomaly? Even when the shimmer reached six feet tall, and a familiar-shaped outline started to form, few did anything other than look on.  It was only as the shimmers took on colour and solidified, and the incredible sight of a human body forming from thin air greeted them, that they started to see the threat.  Their reactions were far too slow.  By the time they recognised the danger, the light distortions had become soldiers, and those soldiers were bringing weapons to bear.  All over the ship, the crew began to fall, cut down by this invading force.

As the sound of energy bolts reverberated around the corridors, the rest of the crew woke up to the attack.  Communication channels became flooded with accounts of enemy sightings.  As news spread, suspicion now greeted the shimmers, and some of the forming figures began to attract gunfire even before fully solid.  Within minutes, gun battles were raging across the battlecruiser.  The crew were slowly beginning to fight back, but the element of surprise had cost the Union dearly.

On the bridge, the commander’s chair sat empty.  The most senior officer on the floor, Lieutenant Engels, was overwhelmed by events.  Reports were flying in thick and fast and he was trying to make sense of them.  There had been no indication an attack was coming.  There were no enemy vessels nearby and no reports of suspicious launches from the surface.  The early morning had been quiet and uneventful right up until the point that all hell had broken loose.  There was nothing to explain this.  Blaster fire.  Fallen troopers and technicians.  Enemy combatants all over the ship.  None of it made sense.  It could not be happening.  The soldiers were seemingly appearing from nowhere!

Engels watched on as the crew busily tried to assess the situation.  Video flashed up from every console, feeding them live images from across the decks.  Union personnel were in many of the shots, fleeing, cowering, dying.  Kamdo fighters, clad in brown tunics and light body armour were everywhere.  Armed with hefty blasters they were mercilessly gunning down anyone they came across, attacking a crew that was completely unprepared.

“Secure this room!” the lieutenant screamed.

Several technicians ran to the weapons rack and took up arms, whilst another, the one nearest to the entrance, thumped hard on the emergency locks.  Heavy doors slammed to the floor, sealing in the dozen occupants.

In the confusion, no one saw the shimmering light by the huge viewing window that looked out across the dark landscape below.  When the Kamdo soldier suddenly appeared and started opening fire, those present assumed she had somehow gained access before the lock down.  Her angry blaster killed two technicians before those by the weapons rack were able to respond.  A barrage of shots and the enemy was down.

“How the hell did she get in here?”  Engels screamed.

He looked at the smouldering, bloodied bodies of the dead crew and a wave of nausea and panic swept over him.  He had to keep it under control.  As it stood, he was the most senior person on the bridge and, for now, that put him in charge of the operation to defend Porthos.  It also made him responsible for all the lives of the crew, all five thousand of them.

“Battle stations!” he ordered.  “This is a code red!  All crew to be alerted, I want them all up, armed, and defending this ship!  And get a distress call out now!  Advise the Artemis we have been boarded by numerous hostiles and require assistance.  Code red!  I want everyone awake and kicking this Kamdo scum off our ship!”

With a barrage of affirmations, some set about his instructions.  Others tended to their fallen colleagues.  Perhaps they clung to hopes they would find signs of life, but those hopes would be cruelly brief.

By the window, enveloped in the distant glow of a new dawn, the body of the Kamdo soldier sprawled.  Engels furrowed his brow, screwing his eyes to help improve his focus, disbelieving what he was seeing.  Was his vision confused by all the visual displays flickering throughout the room, or perhaps the sudden change in lighting as the red emergency protocols kicked in? As he peered closer, though, and took a few steps towards the viewing window, he realised that his eyes were not deceiving him.  Where the blast holes had struck the Kamdo soldier, the body was shimmering.  Where there should have been blood and burns, strange, circular voids were opening, holes into nothingness.  To his amazement they spread, consuming the armour, tunic, and body.  As he watched, The Kamdo soldier was disappearing.

Barely able to contain his panic, Engels put a clenched fist to his mouth.  Others had seen the inexplicable phenomenon too.  Most of those on the bridge had stopped what they were doing to stare in disbelief and horror at the place where the body and blaster had been.

“Carry on!” the lieutenant ordered.  “Get on with it!  We have a ship to save here!”

They all looked at him, their faces questioning, seeking out answers.  He had none to offer.

“And find me Commander Cholewinska!” he barked at them.  “Pissed or not, her crew need her on deck!”

+     +     +

The sirens shook the commander awake.  There was the briefest moment where she believed they were part of a dream, and then the awareness of her surroundings flooded back, and she snapped open her eyes.

The lights were no longer dim, they were blazing and interspersed with red strobes.  Blinking away the discomfort, ignoring the headache and parched throat, Cholewinska forced herself to sit. Safinn still lay beside her, also naked, also stirring.  The faint aroma of sex danced into the commander’s head, before being beaten out by the announcement screaming “Battle stations.”

“Shit,” she moaned, “fucking hell.”

Of all the times to choose…

There was no panic; she was too well trained for that.  Whilst peacetime did not lend itself to real experiences like this, there were regular exercises.  Given she was always forewarned of any such drills, she knew this was for real.  She assumed that the Kamdo had broken their silence and had launched some sort of attack.  They did not have the firepower to threaten Porthos, but something had stirred.  Perhaps it was an audacious missile launch, or maybe they had scrambled a few combat vessels.  Whatever the situation, it would be dealt with swiftly.  They had no real threat to offer.

Cholewinska cursed again.  An overwhelming sense of duty swept in to remind her that if ever there was a time Porthos needed its commander, this was it.

Both women were off the bed and searching for their clothes.  There was no time for morning-after embarrassment, if morning had indeed arrived.  The commander had the luxury of dragging a new set from her rack, her unanticipated guest did not.  The first officer would be reporting for duty late and not in full uniform.  It would be a disciplinary Ana Cholewinska would unfortunately have to insist was applied.  Discipline amongst the ranks was critical on a well-run ship.

With both now dressed, the women were preparing to leave when the first officer let out a sudden gasp.  Cholewinska turned to see the younger woman backing away from the side of the bed, her mouth gaping in astonishment.

“What is it?” croaked the commander.

Safinn did not get to reply, for no sooner had the commander spoken than the answer to her question became more evident.  The air between the edge of the bed and the engineer was shimmering, initially like a heat haze, and then in a more determined, invasive way.

“What the hell is that?” the commander asked, visibility of her lover now obscured by the distortion.

The air took on a brown, muddy hue.  The strange intrusion could have been some sort of space anomaly.  From time to time, reports filtered through of new cosmic phenomena.  With alarms ringing in their ears, however, and the ship on a state of high alert, this unusual occurrence was viewed with suspicion, not wonder.  Whatever it was, it posed a danger.

The commander touched her hip; her holster was empty.  Not wanting to look away from the apparition for long, she stole a brief glimpse behind.  Her laser pistol sat on the charging pad.  It was two or three steps away.  It would take no more than a couple of seconds to reach and be ready to fire.

“My god,” gasped Safinn, from behind the now bulky, tall, and clearly human shape.  It was still forming, but the brown was starting to solidify into a uniform and a head was now visible.  Arms were springing out of the pulsating mass too.  They were reaching forward, holding something, pointing it towards the commander.  A face, distinctively Kamdo, bearded, unsmiling, unfriendly, was glaring straight at Cholewinska.  That object in the arms was almost fully formed too, with the deadly barrel of a blaster aiming at the commander’s chest.  In that moment, everything seemed to slow.  Time stretched as the final atoms of the man fell into place.  The shimmering ceased and the full dreadful spectacle of the armoured soldier now confronted her.

There was time enough to consider both the gun pointing at her rib cage, and her own pistol, stored a few feet behind.  One weapon might be her saviour, the other would, from this distance, tear her body in half.  Was he going to pull that trigger?  The answer was in his eyes.  They were full of hatred.  His lips said it too, curled into a cold, evil smile.  His fingers were twitching as the tendons in his hand flexed ominously.  She had no option but to go for the pistol and to go now.  It was her only chance.

The commander had forgotten there was a third person in the room, and the Kamdo soldier, facing Cholewinska, was unaware of Safinn’s presence.  That was until she struck, with all the prowess of a well-trained Union officer.

The kick was impressive for quite a short woman, taken from stationary, twisting and arching her foot towards the target’s head.  The sudden impact jerked his entire body sideways, and his fingers, already primed, instinctively squeezed the trigger.  A red glow erupted from the blaster, discharging a deadly bolt of energy.  Too fast to be observed, the commander was relieved to hear the crash as it tore into the wall panels behind.  That could so easily have been the end.

Not downed by the first blow, he sought to bring the blaster back under control.  It was swinging round towards Cholewinska when Safinn struck again.  Shifting her footing, she reached further, this time her boot striking him square in the face.  His grip on the blaster was lost.  It remained around his neck courtesy of the shoulder strap, but dazed, his face bloodied, those hands were not going to recover their grip any time soon.

Safinn was merciless; she knew she needed to be.  Still from behind, a knee hammered heavily into the man’s back, finding a gap where two pieces of armour met.  She felt the impact reverberate through her leg, but that was nothing compared to the pain the soldier experienced.  He staggered forward, colliding with the edge of the bed.  He reached out to stop himself tumbling forward, but the young engineer was on him, literally on his back, tearing at his neck, trying to find an asphyxiating grip.

“Stand clear!” hollered the commander.

The intention was obvious and Safinn fell away quickly, releasing the man and retreating.  A moment later, the soldier was lying at her feet, thrown there by three rapid discharges from Cholewinska’s pistol.

The commander went to holster the retrieved weapon and then changed her mind.  Her thoughts were racing; what the hell had just happened?

“How?” Safinn gasped.

Cholewinska shook her head.  She had no idea.  As deep as she dug into her knowledge, there was no explanation for an enemy materialising out of thin air, in the middle of the most fortified space vessel ever built.  It could have been a new type of stealth technology, but the Kamdo had no access to such science.  There was nothing that could rationalise what had just happened, nothing.

Further confounding their disbelief, the two officers watched aghast as the soldier, that had incredibly appeared, suddenly started to disappear.   A couple of seconds later, the body and accompanying blaster were gone.  Even the blood spilled from his wounds vanished.

“A hologram?” clutched the commander.

Short of breath from her exertions, the engineer gulped back a couple of mouthfuls of air before speaking.  Even then, her voice was unsteady, clearly shaken.

“That was no hologram.”

Safinn could still feel the soldier in her foot and knee.  Projections did not tend to hurt when you hit them.  Looking at the now empty floor, though, it was hard to know whether it was her eyes, or her pain receptors, playing tricks on her.

“This is fucking crazy,” said the commander.

The shrill voice declaring battle stations brought her focus back and she mentally shook herself down.  Now was not the time to worry about how the ship was under attack, only that it was.  She needed to get to the command centre, she needed to be on the bridge.

“First Officer, have you no firearm?” she asked the younger woman.

The formality of the question pushed away any residual vapours of confusion for Safinn, snapping her back to the situation, and the need to remember her training.

“No, ma’am,” she said, “it is back in my quarters.”

Of course it was.  They both knew that.

“We need to get you armed,” said Cholewinska, “and then we need to get to the bridge.”

Cautiously, the commander went to the door leading to the next chamber.  Once activated, the door would open quickly, so there would be no chance to sneak a peek at what lay beyond.  A finger raised to the lips indicated that the engineer should stay silent, and another gesture told her to stay back.  The commander crouched low, weapon ready.  A gentle touch on the panel triggered the opening mechanism.

Having been in combat situations before, Cholewinska knew the first moments of any encounter were vital.  There could be no freezing, no indecision.  When the door sprang up, she was ready, primed to respond to any threat.  She quickly scanned the chamber beyond. This was the rest of her living quarters, a lounge area.  It was full of comfortable seating, a workstation, and randomly sprawled media and gaming tech.  There were no Kamdo.

Across the lounge was another door, leading into the boardroom, and then beyond that lay the corridors of the ship.  Usually, personal guards would stand inside that boardroom entrance.  In red conditions, that complement doubled, and two should have come to collect her.  They were nowhere to be seen.

If the materialising soldier had not unnerved enough, the absence of her guard now added to that worry.  Something big was going on here.  As unthinkable as it was, she could not help but think it: Porthos had been boarded.  She had no idea how, but warriors like the one just killed were possibly all over the ship.  Had they taken down her guards?  Was the enemy close by?

“Clear,” she said quietly, “but we need to proceed with caution, come on.”

They moved into the lounge.

On the wall to the right, behind a high-backed leather sofa, were hidden a bank of concealed controls.  Colloquially referred to as the ‘Doomsday Panels’, they represented the commander’s final retreat.  Whilst protocol envisaged the commander would be on the bridge during a heavy battle, or if the ship encountered a cosmic disaster, the vessel designers had recognised she could not be on the bridge around the clock.  From these panels, in her own private chambers, she could communicate directly with the bridge, the Union, or with the president himself.  In unthinkable circumstances, she could even launch a final suicidal offensive, with coded script to detonate the warheads on board and flip the engine into an unstable over-drive.

Also hidden away in the panels, there was an advanced medi-kit and an emergency capsule, should the abandon ship command ever be necessary.  This situation was dire, but surely a long way from requiring those things.  The last panel, though, was far more useful in the current situation.  Cholewinska presented her identifier and the panel whirred back.  A series of pivoted arms emerged from behind, each holding a weapon.  With her pistol now holstered, the commander plucked a large blaster from the rack and offered it to Safinn.  The young officer frowned and reached past the commander, taking a less bulky gun instead.  It was still a shoulder arm, but the lighter-weight design perhaps more suited to her smaller frame.  Cholewinska shrugged and lifted the strap from the larger weapon over her own neck, reassured by the weight and the power it packed.

“We need to find out what’s going on,” the commander said, “and get this ship back under control.”

Behind her, First Officer Safinn was busy with a belt and holster, choosing to mimic the other woman’s range of arsenal.  Her fingers, blighted by nerves, struggled with the clip.  Peering down, her loose blonde hair was hiding a frightened face.  Cholewinska watched impatiently at first, but then placed her hands gently on Safinn’s.  Calmly, she helped fasten the buckle.  The younger woman raised her head in gratitude, their eyes briefly locking.

“You took him down back there,” the commander softly told the junior officer.  “And you did it expertly; he never stood a chance.  You are a Union officer.  You are well trained, well prepared, and more than a match for any Kamdo scum.”

Leaning towards the shorter woman, she planted a forehead kiss.  There was no passion, but a kind, warm affection.  It was just what was needed.  Their hands squeezed reassuringly before parting.

“We can do this,” the commander said, “yes?”

The engineer managed a smile.  “Yes,” she replied, “for the Union.”

Suddenly, an explosion ripped through the door where the security should have been stood.  The metal entrance was shredded, blown inwards, large chunks of shrapnel slicing into the nearby furniture and opposite wall.  Thankfully, the funnel of the explosion was narrow and the two Union officers, whilst thrown to the ground, avoided the worst of the blast.  They were enveloped in the heat of the explosion, their throats filled with smoke.  Briefly they were disorientated by the smack of energy, but, spurred on by the threat, they both quickly shook it off and clambered to their feet.

Coughing, Cholewinska looked at her colleague, whose clothes, hair, and face were all covered in dust.  Thankfully, there was no sign of injury, and the commander quickly checked herself too.  It looked like they had been lucky, but they were not out of this yet.  There were voices coming closer, speaking in a harsh, foreign tongue.  By virtue of its heavy construction and the bolts holding it to the floor, the large sofa had remained upright.  The commander grabbed Safinn and dragged her behind it.

Slumped, breathless, they both knew that hiding would not be an option for long.  A check of their blasters assured them that they were primed.  With the enemy heading this way, it looked like they would have to shoot their way out of this.

The dust had settled, and the clatter of falling debris had given way to an uneasy silence.  The voices sounded again, a couple of them, muffled, coming from the next room.  Perhaps the Kamdo soldiers were waiting too, waiting to see if any enemy emerged from the ruins.  The Union officers would not be falling into that trap.

The commander crouched and carefully peered over the sofa, the smell of singed leather hitting her nostrils.  Although standing intact for now, a couple of direct hits from a powerful blaster would rip the piece of furniture apart.  There was no choice but to hold tight and wait for the Kamdo to emerge, but as soon as they did, they would need to grab the upper hand, or they would end up sitting ducks.  She raised her weapon, resting the barrel on the leather back.  Beside her, Safinn did the same.

The voices continued.  There seemed no attempt to be discreet, perhaps not worried by what lay beyond their explosion.  Cholewinska wondered if they knew the layout of the ship, and knew they were in the commander’s chambers.  Such plans were classified, but in an age of infinite data, nothing was easy to keep secret for long.  If they knew the landscape, maybe they had assumed the chambers would be empty when blasting into this inner sanctum.  Maybe they were not expecting any resistance to be waiting, perhaps assuming the commander was on the bridge.  That was, after all, exactly where she should have been, not here, the taste of her lover still on her lips.

The two women exchanged a knowing glance and then rolled their gaze back to the hole in the wall.  Jagged edges jutted into the room like the teeth of some alien creature.  It was a fearsome sight, a sight of destruction and, when Cholewinska noticed the blackened shape in the doorway, she recognised it was one of death too.  The shape was unquestionably human, but the body so badly disfigured and charred.  She knew it was one of her security guards though, she was sure of it.  She deliberately avoided thinking about who might have been on duty; that would not have helped, not one bit.

Lights from the boardroom cast shadows through the alien’s torn mouth.  Silhouettes danced in the light as the soldiers moved around.  Their voices were still confident and seemingly shuffling closer.  The Union officers both tensed, fingers poised over triggers.

As soon as one of the brown tunics stepped into view, Safinn fired.  Too soon, the commander thought, but instinctively she tugged on her own trigger too.  The first bolt of energy hit the enemy on the shoulder.  The impact jerked him back, exposing his torso for the second shot, which blew a hole in his stomach.  The soldier fell against the jagged edge of the door and just stood there, his mouth aghast, his torso on fire.  Panicked shouts came from his angry comrade and the other shadow came closer, moving towards the mortally wounded man.

“Come on,” the commander breathed, “come on!”

Despite the fearful tone of his calls, the second Kamdo seemingly had enough presence of mind not to show himself.  As his comrade slipped to the deck, life fading away, the shadow cautiously moved back.  The dying man’s moans were woeful, but they were quickly coming to an end.  The rulebook was clear on mercy killings, so Safinn eased her finger off the trigger.  Cholewinska, however, had been to a different school and despatched another bolt at the head of the wounded soldier, killing him instantly.  For the commander, there was no mercy in her actions, but there was a touch of pleasure.

More shouting in the foreign tongue came from the next room.  They could not understand the words, but the anger and upset was clear.  There was panic in that voice.  The soldier was scared, the fear fuelled by the knowledge that his comrade was dead and that he might be next.  As the dead body disappeared, just as the one back in the commander’s chamber had, the ranting of the other fell quiet.

The silence stretched.  Cholewinska and Safinn kept their attention focused on the doorway.  Any moment, they expected a suicide assault from the remaining Kamdo soldier.

After what seemed an age, there was movement.  An arm suddenly flashed into view, hurling an object towards them.  They watched in horror as the tossed grenade banged against the black sofa, rebounded, and came to rest a few feet away.  There was no disguising the explosive device; it was one of their own, the Union markings clear.  There was no hiding from what it would do either; it would explode with enough force to rip the entire room, including any occupants, apart.

“Ten seconds,” gasped Safinn, recalling from her training how long after activation it took for such a device to blow.  Except most of that time was already lost, was it not?  How long had the soldier held it before tossing it?  How long had it taken to bounce to its eventual resting place?

When the two women looked at each other this time, there was no affection, no lust, no simmering desire.  Events of the previous evening were forgotten.  All they had was those last few seconds to contemplate the end.  They were held in the grip of fear, certain they were about to die.

Chapter Eleven

They had stayed up late but now Kayla had finally gone to bed, frustrated, angry, and self-destructive.  It was not good to see her that way.  Whilst it exposed the fierce warrior in her, it also revealed a very different side, a side wrapped in emotional angst.

The images of her associate, a friend she had believed dead, brought her much pain.  The words from Luca’s mouth, albeit clearly scripted, hurt to the core.  Messiah had no idea how close Kayla and Jed had been, whether they were just comrades-in-arms or dearest friends, but he guessed that did not matter.  Her reaction was one of genuine outrage.  The angry woman who blew a hole in the flight desk of the Noche had re-emerged.  In such a frame of mind, she was dangerous to herself as well as others.

At least in the complex he hoped he could keep her safe.  He feared she might do something stupid, but her options were limited.  Short of physical violence towards him, or self-harm, there was little she could actually do.  The complex was riddled with safety mechanisms, from system cut-outs to secure lockdowns.  Authorisation protocols were restrictive, and he was confident she could never find a way around them.  Even something as routine as changing the temperature in her room would be flagged and subject to his over-ride.

At the heart of this, though, he cared little about keeping the complex secure or himself safe.  This was all about the mystery that was Kayla McGann.  It was all about her pain.  Since being consumed by those powerful green eyes back at Petang Base, it had been about no one else.  He was so used to being alone, and so broken by his own past, yet here Messiah was, easily swallowed in by this young, intriguing woman.

He was such a fool, such a damn fool.

There was no desire to change that, and he was in too deep to reverse, even if he had wanted to.  What would happen if he turned her in?  How would the authorities treat him, having concealed her for days?  He could argue it was under duress, but in all likelihood that claim would seem incredible and the Union would dismiss it.  Worse, they would not care for the truth.  Whether he believed Kayla the scapegoat for four years before or not, he had endured enough in dealing with the Union to know they were often happy to turn their backs on justice.

The moment he let her on board Spirit, he had become as much of a fugitive as she was.  They would throw the book at both of them, if they were allowed to survive capture.  Not for the first time in his life, Messiah was a hunted man.  He had hoped this was all behind him.  All the efforts he had put into disappearing, all the funds he had diverted to building this place and setting up his secret life, were all now at risk of unravelling.  It scared him, it frustrated him, but he had not felt this alive for a long, long time.

It was so late that it was almost morning.  The lighting in the complex was set to a twenty-four-hour cycle, as it was on many human settlements.  This remote asteroid was a long way from a weak sun, and it sat in a permanent night, but in the base, he lived the life his kind had evolved to live.  He needed to get some sleep, to prepare for what the new day would bring.  He hoped tomorrow they could talk, and then maybe talk some more.  Even with all her angst and all the trouble she brought, talking with Kayla was something he would look forward to.

+     +     +

In the depths of space, light years from the nearest star, was a ship as dark as the void around it.  The vessel had not moved in days.  An observer, had there been any this far out, could have been mistaken for thinking it was abandoned.  It was not.

There were six crew on board.  Four were in deep stasis, resting their bodies, cleansing them of the drugs that beset their hedonistic lifestyle.  The other two lounged on the flight deck, high on some new narcotic acquired during their last job.  As far as illegals went, it was pretty tame, a few hallucinogenic qualities early doors but they had quickly tapered.  Now the duo was left with a calm, mellow glow, and a need to drink carbonated water.

“Hey, you know this,” one said to the other.

Slouched in reclining chairs, reclined to almost horizontal, their boots rested on dimmed instrument panels.  They did not plan to go anywhere soon, laying low after the raid.  In a day or so these two would swap with others and drop into their own slumber.  It would be weeks before they left this safe place, or at least that had been the intention.

“What’s ‘this’?” asked the other, her eyes clasped shut, enjoying the last embers of her mind’s psychedelic ramblings.  She could still see the bright colours and strange creatures, all perversions of her travelling companions.  She thought she preferred these new versions.

Arsan Graham tried to sit.  His head swam a little, but it was his bulk that really hindered the change in position.  There were very few muscles under his expanded gut.  Flailing his arms and pushing from his elbows was the only way to get himself moving.  He eventually sat upright, cutting through the projections from his own identifier.  He peered down at his fellow reveller.  They had enjoyed getting high earlier and had made a real party of it, giggling for hours.  Nazia had even flashed him her breasts.  That was not the first time; it was something of a habit.  He had comically growled like a dog at the sight of her glorious brown skin, far too stupefied to be aroused by her show.  Now, though, their suppressant effects had pretty much worn off and his ardour was high.  Looking down at them, still magnificently domed despite lying flat, he wished they were still uncovered.  He leant across and grabbed one through her t-shirt.  For a moment she let his hand sit there, laughing inside at the fat oaf, but then she decided that was enough treats.

“I’ll break every one,” she said.

“Huh?” he asked, confused.

“Every one of your chubby, stumpy fingers, Fatboy,” she explained, “I’ll break them.”

“Oh.”

He withdrew his hand.  Hung-over and horny, his uninvited grope had seemed like a good idea.  No regrets though.  It would all be forgotten once they were sober, and he had enjoyed the moment.

Returning to the issue, she asked again, “What’s ‘this’ you refer to?”

Arsan tried to remember and then the projections caught his eye, and it came back to him.  “Oh,” he said, “this news report.”

That got her attention.  The last of the psychedelic creatures faded and her eyes popped open.

“We’ve made the news?  What are they saying?”

“No, no,” he corrected, “not us.  No one cares about a few pirates this far beyond Hadrian’s Gate.”

Nazia was relieved: “What then?”

“This,” he said, picking up the projection and dragging it over the top of the slouching woman.

“Oh, her,” came the dismissive response.  Nazia screwed up her nose at the face of Kayla McGann.  “What about her?  Recaptured?”

“No, no, no,” Arsan shook his head in beat with each word.  “She’s still on the run.  More news breaking all the time, though and they’ve offered a huge bounty, dead or alive.”

“That will not work,” she scoffed, “they never do.”

“Ten million…”

That got a raise of her tattooed eyebrows.  Unlike her out of shape companion, Nazia sat up with ease, her muscular stomach doing all the work.  She passed through McGann’s face as she rose, but Arsan respectfully retracted, taking the image with him.

“Ten million?” Nazia repeated incredulously.  “Wow.”

“Wow, indeed,” slurred Arsan.  A faint nausea wafted over him, but he was quickly able to wrestle it away.  The aftershock of the drugs, no doubt.  Once composed, he continued: “There’s more.  Footage of her escape is doing the rounds.  It’s not the best, poor lighting, old tech, but look at this…”

He pulled up a still image.  It was a grainy shot from inside what looked like a large cargo bay.  Two figures could be seen standing beside a ship, the craft itself mostly obscured by shadows.  At first, the image of the figures appeared only two inches in height, but Arsan zoomed in.  As the image grew, the poor quality became more obvious.  When the figures had doubled in size, the blur made them indiscernible, so he went back out a little and the focus improved.  The image showed a woman in a green sack-shaped tunic, a mop of hair topping a slight frame.  She appeared to be in dialogue with a dark man, his back to the camera.

“And?” Nazia asked.

“Look at this one,” her companion said.

The image faded and was replaced with another.  The position of the two figures had shifted and the man was no longer facing away.  Again, Arsan zoomed in, this time the pixilation was slightly better.

“What am I looking at…?” her voice trailing off, her eyes narrowing.

“See it?” Arsan was excited.

She shook her head, slowly.  It was not a convincing denial because there was something there, something familiar.

“What about this?” his pitch rose, sensing that his friend was now reading the same page in the same book.  Those cogs of recognition that had stimulated his memories were now also turning in Nazia’s.

The third image was taken from yet another camera.  It showed the side and rear of a spacecraft moving through an air lock.  The vessel was a typical planet-hopper, with the classical bulbous shape of a transporter.  There was nothing unusual in a supply ship departing the cargo hold of an asteroid base.  Except with this one, there was, and she saw it straight away.  She was looking at a Noche Pygmalion Three, with, most importantly, a rather unusual aft.

“It cannot be...” she gasped.

“How many Noches have a back end like that?  How many Noche’s are equipped for interstellar?  You recognise those engines, don’t you?  You know what they are capable of because you helped to build them.”

“No…”

“And the man in the bay?” he flicked back to the previous image.  “Look familiar?”

“No…”

“Ten million dollars,” he teased, “ten million.”

“Go back to the Noche,” she demanded.

Arsan did as she asked.

The finger-length, slightly blurry image of the man stayed in her mind as she checked the engines again.  The hallmark signs were there, she knew what she was looking at.  This was the work of a clever man, a man she had assisted, a man she had known well.  The stance of the figure, despite being only inches tall and out of focus, was familiar too.  It fit with the ship.  She recognised him, of course she did, it was someone she could never forget.

“We should wake the boss,” Nazia said, “he needs to see this.”

“I am right, aren’t I?” asked Arsan.

“Yes, you are, Fatboy,” she nodded.  “And I can think of ten million reasons why it’s time we paid our old friend a visit.”

Continued in…

Episode 3:  The Voice