The Voice

By Georgia Knight

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

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

Episode One:  The Cairo Accord

Episode Two:  Three Zero

Chapter One

Defying gravity, the metallic spheres spun their way through the Eropidean morning.  Like insects swarming across the rocky terrain, they moved at an incredible pace.  A hundred pinballs, flying fast and low.  Up, down, they maintained a steady height, matching the undulations of the landscape.  With the sun glistening off silver, smooth surfaces, they hurtled towards their destination.  Farmers and kinsmen heard them whisper by and saw shadows dance across the pastures, but when they peered up the spheres had already passed.  A split second later, explosive sonic booms sent onlookers cowering to the ground.

Two miles from Porthos, they began their ascent.  Communication circuits sprang to life, announcing the anticipated arrival.  Protocols were sent, received, and verified, all in the time it took to blink.  Instructions acknowledged, permission overrides confirmed, Porthos was compelled to comply.  Soaring upwards the spheres left the pastures behind.

In no time at all, they were upon their target.  As they headed towards the loading bays, the battlecruiser’s energy shields dipped to allow them through.  Slowing on approach, they were still moving too fast for a controlled landing, but that had never been the intention.  The bay doors opened to welcome the visitors, and the small vessels hurtled through, slamming into the deck, bouncing high off the tough surface. It was a chaotic scene, with several of the spheres colliding with cargo, tearing straight through the crates, debris flying everywhere.  Others ripped into parked vehicles, causing small explosions that were soon lost in the vastness of the cavernous chamber.  The majority, however, bounced safely, their advanced navigation systems keeping them out of harm’s way.  And one bounce was all it took for the automatic landing mechanisms to deploy.  The spheres cracked open like eggs and grappling legs emerged.  When they hit the deck for the second time, those legs clawed at the surface, gouging great tears as they clung on, bringing the silver balls to a halt.

As the debris settled and the explosions turned to flames, the silver orbs rested in silence.  Then, gradually, sphere by sphere, they adjusted their position, jostling until they stood with feet either side like an unhatched chick, legs poking from the protective shell.  The front of the spheres now peeled back to reveal two large, protruding blasters.  Beyond a heavily tinted screen, sat the shadowy heads and shoulders of a Union trooper.

The Mariner Attack Orbs were in place.  The battle to take back Porthos was about to begin.

+     +     +

The Kamdo arrived in waves, each one as murderous as the last.  With only a few minutes between them, the onslaught was relentless.  An unprepared and largely unarmed crew were mercilessly pursued and by the time the fifth and final big wave arrived, hundreds of Union troopers and technicians lay dead or dying.  Hundreds more, unable to get to weapons and mount an effective defence, were forced into hiding.

The spread of the enemy added to the devastating impact of the attack.  Around every corner stood a new combatant, and barely a room or corridor escaped the inexplicable, lethal apparitions.  In a few places, the crew did manage to gather themselves and try to fight back, but it was futile, the element of surprise providing a huge advantage.  Union forces, unorganised, fearful, panic-stricken, could do little more than hold positions and defend the main control centres whilst the enemy ran amok elsewhere.

Nickel arrived in the third wave, deposited in a dormitory.  The first sight to greet him was that of a comrade gunning down two fleeing females.  Shot in the back, neither were armed, neither were in uniform.  It mattered not to the attacking Kamdo soldier, who whooped in glee through a crooked smile.

“Spitak!” the soldier cried.

“Spitak!” Nickel instinctively yelled back.

With the bodies still twitching, the soldier cast his comrade a hysterical grin and then dashed from the room.  It was the grin of someone trapped in the moment, gripped by a nervous energy, fuelled by fear and excitement in equal doses.

A calmer Nickel quickly checked his kit and weapons.  All was in order and as expected.  Only seconds before, or so it seemed, he had laid down to sleep in very different attire.  With various fibres and devices attached to his body, a machine-induced coma had taken away his consciousness.  They had explained some of the science, which was far beyond his understanding, but as promised, he soon awoke to find himself on the enemy ship.  Like the grinning comrade, Nickel was ready.  The Kamdo were born for this.  Propagated by stories and legends, fertilised by generations of seething hate, this moment ran like a golden thread through the fabric of their culture.  This was his commitment, and it would be his sacrifice.

Now, he would pursue his own kills, but first he took a moment.  Deep breaths filled his lungs with different air.  It was strange; dry and scentless.  The temperature was wrong too; cool but with no chill.  A low rumble in his ears matched the strange vibrations felt through his feet.  He took a couple of steps, having been forewarned that it might feel different.  It did, his boots snapping back to the artificial gravity and alien floor surface.  The technology he did not understand, but he was here, as planned, and that was all that mattered.  Here to do a job, to cast aside the strangeness of the surroundings and to serve his kin.

Leaving the room, he stepped over the bodies of the two women.  A whiff of charred meat hit his nostrils.  It was the smell of a roasting pig, but he could not escape the horror that this was cooked human flesh.  Mistakenly, he looked down.  The blaster shots had hit both square, their backs a hideous mess of black and red.  On one, white lumps protruded from the gaping wound.  It was her spine.  Nauseous, he stepped away quickly, almost losing his footing.  Forgetting all the training about proceeding with caution, he burst through the door and into the corridor beyond.  Thankfully, apart from another couple of bodies in the distance, the corridor was empty.

The sirens were louder here, and this artificial world was bathed in red.  Nickel was suddenly scared.  The sight of the bodies had shocked him.  Sweating profusely, his heart pumping in his head, he felt a growing panic.  He tried to push that feeling away and blame it on the transition from the planet below, but he knew these feelings were fear.  In alien surroundings, a heavy gun slung over his shoulder, the terrible sound of blaster fire, the sight of the two dead women - there was a lot to be scared about.  Now, he was expected to add more dread, he was expected to kill.  Kill the betrayers.  Kill the Spitak.

Leaning against the wall, faint from the pressures building inside, he saw the object twice before even registering its approach.  Luckily, his own lack of movement delayed the defence drone identifying his threat.  Only when Nickel realised that the black object was heading straight for him, travelling at about head height, did he finally react.  These small machines had featured in the short, rushed brief received by the Kamdo faithful before entering the transition chamber.  On the face of the drone, a single dial-shaped eye peered at its surroundings.  He knew this was where the sensors resided.  As he moved to bring his weapon to bear, the dial sprung to life, spinning, flashing, and targeting the enemy.

Despite his nausea, he was quick, but the instant response of an electronic mind was even quicker.  Luckily, he dodged in time for the laser fire from the drone to just sear his shoulder armour.  With only the sharpest chosen for this offensive, Nickel’s reaction and his aim were impressive.  In this first encounter, both served him well.  Despite his shaking hands, when he pulled the trigger, he was confident that he would strike the bullseye.  The powerful blast of energy threw the drone up into the ceiling and back along the corridor.  It fell in a mangled heap twenty metres away.  The dial flickered and then died; the threat eradicated.  An easy first kill, but it was not human, not like the women back in the dormitory.  This was just a machine, without a spine to poke through its bloodied and charred back.  The next target might be the living, breathing kind.  They might not be armed, or threatening either, they might be cowering and terrified.  He was still only feet from the door and the two casualties that lay back there.  Could he kill like that?  Could he mercilessly end the lives of others?

“Spitak,” he mumbled.  “Spitak, Spitak, Spitak.”

It did not matter how many repetitions of that bitter word passed through his lips, the deadly blaster still weighed heavy.  The morning that Porthos appeared in the sky his kin had gathered, to collectively curse the Union invaders.  The first pledge was given then, in the gathering place and in his home.  At the military compound the following day, it was repeated before the officials, proud words from a proud son, standing alongside his proud father, amongst a proud people. The pledge was to fight to the end.  He would fight to repel the imperial aggressors, and he would do so until he could fight no more.

Whilst he had known the reality of combat would be tough, those two fresh corpses had shown just how great that horror could be.  No amount of oaths would soften the harsh reality of death, but he had not expected to feel fear like this.   It had not been in his father’s eyes, nor indeed his own, when they had parted to undertake separate training.  Then there had only been belief, courage, and determination.  Those brave feelings needed to be rediscovered, and fast. This was real now and the scorch marks on the shoulder of his combat suit a reminder of how easily it could all be over.

He took a final look at the smashed-up drone, tightening his grip on the blaster - one hand on the butt, the other on the barrel.  With a determined shake of the weapon, he forced the expression of dread from his face.  Go away, scared young boy, arrive, the angry man.  How dare this enemy come to terrorise his world?  How dare they threaten his people?  It was his duty to stop them.  If he died in the battle ahead, so be it.

“Spitak,” he hissed, this time with venom.

As terrified as he was, there was no choice.  It was time to fulfil those pledges; it was time to honour his kin.

+     +     +

The Kamdo grip over the loading bays was all but gone.  With their blasters unable to penetrate the shells of the formidable killing machines, the attack orbs had located and destroyed the insurgents with ease.  Inside one of the orbs, the officer leading the assault calmly rolled his heads-up display from left to right, the sphere rotating as he did so.  A curved screen rose high and enveloped him on both sides, providing him with an almost three-sixty panoramic.  As he turned, impotent gunfire from the last few remaining Kamdo danced off the screen.  Focused on the targeting displays, he searched for the next victim.  Amongst the carnage, a red icon flashed over a figure off to his left.  With a tap on the fire control, the Kamdo fighter was blown away.  This was a cold-blooded, virtual game.  The targets never stood a chance.

Despite the impersonal nature of the combat, the kill still gave the officer satisfaction.  Reportedly, hundreds of Union personnel had perished; this was time for payback.  Six of this assault team were dead too, their protective balls smashed apart on landing.  It had been an unfortunate necessity to come in so quickly; they had known the risks.  A couple more had managed to crawl free from the wreckage, but the Kamdo scourge had also murdered them.  Now, every time a red icon appeared, the thrill of vengeance flowed into that finger as he tapped away another enemy life.

Within five minutes of their arrival on board Porthos, the assault squadron had lain waste to dozens of the enemy.  The bays were almost clear of the Kamdo, those not blown apart fleeing in fear.

“Blue team, green team, with me,” instructed the leader.  “It is time to take this ship back!  Yellow team this floor is yours.  Mop them up!  No prisoners!”

A mumble of affirmation flowed into his earpiece.  The scanners cast another hunter’s eye around the near vicinity but found no combatants.  The area was clear.

“Open her up,” he told the computer, “time to stretch the legs.”

The sphere stopped rotating, its search for Kamdo at an end.  There was a satisfied hiss as it settled down on the deck, the protective screen rolling back into the ball.  Straps around the officer’s body retracted and the blaster between his legs popped out of its clasps.  Snatching up the weapon, he stepped forward, out of the vehicle.  The heads-up display automatically transferred from the cockpit to his helmet visor.  He was ready to respond to any threat.

A few feet away another soldier emerged from her cocoon.  Beyond that, another, and another, metamorphosing into dangerous warriors.  Somewhere in the distance, loud gunfire cracked through the steady din of sirens.  This was an unthinkable mess aboard the Union’s flagship; it should not have happened.  This strike force, despatched from Aramis, should not have been needed.

“Blue team,” he said to the squadron, “we are going to head for the bridge.  Green, I want you to get to the engine room and make sure it remains secure.”

More affirmations.

There was one final check for combatants.  With none found, he glanced over to his last kill, looking for the charred remains of the enemy.  Strangely, there was nothing to see but a scorch mark on the deck.  He frowned, but concluded he had probably just made a mistake in the heat of the battle and was looking in the wrong place.  The attack orb had confirmed the kill and that was all that mattered.  No doubt, playback of the recordings would identify another location and show he was just confused.  A body to gloat over would have been satisfying, but there would be plenty more corpses ahead.

One by one, the troopers peeled away from their vehicles.  It was a dash of two hundred metres across the open bay to get to the edge, leaving them exposed to any hidden snipers.  As they ran, they activated their blast shields - tiny wrist-mounted plates designed to disrupt incoming charges and deflect from the main body of the combat suit.  These were the ultimate in body protection kits, expensive, and worn by only elite forces.  With several hundred more similar-suited soldiers on their way, the troop carriers having already entered the atmosphere above, the battle would soon swing decisively.

Since first hearing of the boarding of Porthos, an intense fury had not left the leader of this advance force.  Barely believable reports were now evidenced with his own eyes; how the hell had this happened?  Confusion reigned as to how the Kamdo had arrived onboard the battlecruiser, scans confirming that there were no enemy vessels in the vicinity.  It was bizarre!  But there would be plenty of time to find answers to the unfathomable questions later. For now, all efforts would focus on cleansing Porthos of the vermin.

Safely across the chamber, he was standing by an exit, taking a moment to steady his breathing after the dash.  Next to him was a short, female trooper.  On her helmet, just below the Union insignia, were her name and rank.

“Trooper Santana,” he panted, “are you ready for this?”

“Yes, sir!” came the snappy reply.

“Then let’s do it, soldier,” he said, “let’s go kill the Kamdo scum!”

+     +     +

Nickel advanced deeper and deeper into the ship, and closer and closer to hell.  It was a bloodbath, the corridors littered with the dead and dying.  Almost entirely, the casualties encountered were Union.  There was no surprise in that; he knew where his own kind went when they perished.

When he did come across one fallen comrade, the soldier was alive, but barely.  A severed arm laying nearby betrayed the grievous nature of his injuries.  There was a terrible wound in the man’s chest too, and the soldier gurgled and rasped, spraying spots of blood on to his face and the surrounding deck.  Pained eyes desperately sought Nickel as the young man knelt by his side.  The eyes were pleading for help, hoping the agony would soon end.  Judging by the injuries, it would.  The Kamdo leaders back on the ground had promised that relief would be swift if the time came.  They had promised they would terminate the programme promptly when needed.

And perhaps that was happening, for the wounds on this fallen comrade were not the same as the ones witnessed on the Union bodies.  They were still dreadful to see, but instead of a sickening bloody mess, here, sinister voids were consuming the man.  It was as if space itself was stealing away his body, the hole in his chest a cavern of nothingness.

In his native tongue, Nickel said, “They will take you soon, comrade.  Stay strong.”

A feeble moan was offered in response.  More of the man’s torso was disappearing into the void and where the arm was severed, the shoulder seemed to be fading too.  This generated body was dying; they needed to take him now before it was too late.

Remembering he was in a battle, Nickel cautiously looked both ways along the corridor.  It was clear.  Gunfire and shouts continued to sound through the sirens, but none seemed close.   At any moment, he could be called to action, but for now this comrade was more important.  He placed the man’s hand in his gloves, offering whatever reassurance he could.  It was a gesture of brotherhood, a bond of kin.

“Take him,” Nickel breathed, “please, take him.”

And then they did.  The man’s face gradually grew translucent until the deck beneath peeked through.  There was relief in those eyes, maybe, or maybe Nickel imagined it.  Either way, the anguish was coming to an end for the wounded soldier; his rescue was here.  Moments later, he was gone, snapped out of existence, leaving nothing behind, not even the sprays of blood.

His hand now empty, Nickel stood, but transfixed by the corridor floor, it took more nearby shouting to drag him back to the battle.  There was no time to mourn the fallen warrior, self-preservation jumping to the fore.  Could he survive this assault? His instructions were to last for as long as possible, and now, there was an added incentive.  He did not wish to experience the dreadful demise he had just witnessed.  His own chances of surviving were wrapped up with the Kamdo’s chances of victory.  A certainty this operation would lead to success had been instilled through the pre-attack training, and the large number of Union casualties suggested the generals’ predictions were becoming reality.  The surprise nature of this attack could well be pushing the Kamdo forces towards triumph.

So far, except for the drone, he had not fired a shot at the enemy.  It was time for him to play his part.  As the klaxons oscillated, other sounds found their way through and the patchy, indistinct shouting was getting closer.  He thought there were two or three voices, but it was hard to tell.  Although the words were not in his language, the tone of panic was universal.  Suddenly, where the corridor curved to the left, shadows rounded the bend, forewarning of imminent arrivals.  Nickel steadied, planting his back foot, and raising his blaster.

The first to come into view was a woman, the second a man.  Looking back over their shoulders as they scurried towards him, neither saw the young Kamdo soldier.  The woman was armed with a small side weapon.  Perhaps woken unexpectedly, she was only partially uniformed.  She had managed to drag on combat boots and trousers, but only a vest covered her chest.  The man was even less prepared; he had no weapon, bare feet, and was clad in a white t-shirt and shorts.  Blood splattered his clothes and legs, and an expression of abject terror was spread across his face.

This was it.  Spitak.  The Ultimate Commitment.  It was time to come of age and avenge his kin.

The gun weighed heavy.  For this strong young man, who had come through the physical trials with flying colours, the blaster should not have been the burden it was.  He could barely keep it level, the muscles in his arm shaking like he was holding a thirty-kilogram sack of grain.  It weighed less than half of that, at most.  This weakness was not in his arms, it was in his head, and as the barrel bore down on the approaching woman, he wondered if he was going to be able to do this.

Then she saw him, and the decision was taken away.  He was a raw recruit, with just hours of training.  Trials, a few sessions of hand-to-hand combat, instructions in weapons and assault tactics - that was it.  She, on the other hand, was a veteran soldier with many years of experience.  Well-trained, with honed firearm skills and enviable reaction times.  Nickel would never know her background, but he would know the pain of the laser beam fired from her small pistol, slicing through his combat armour and into his thigh.

He managed to suppress an anguished scream, the urgency to react to the situation clamping his mouth.  There was no thought when he squeezed the trigger.  There was no moment to check his aim or assess the movement of his target.  Was it luck?    Perhaps raw instincts had pointed the barrel for him. Perhaps an innate need to survive had been his saviour.  It was irrelevant.  All that mattered was the powerful bolt struck her high, blowing out her throat and lower jaw.  She flew back, lifted off her feet.  Her colleague’s attention snapped forward as he narrowly avoided colliding with her body.  His awkward sidestep prevented him from tumbling over, but it could not protect him from the shower of blood thrown from her gaping, fatal wound.  His t-shirt and shorts now even more stained, the man stopped running.  He looked at his fallen colleague in stunned disbelief.  Slowly, he raised his head to the Kamdo soldier.

“No,” he said quietly, far too low to be heard over the sirens.  “No, no, no,” just that one word repeated, each time with escalating distress.  The man’s knees threatened to buckle but somehow, he managed to stay upright on jelly legs.  There was a half turn, to run, but then he remembered there was something back along the corridor, beyond Nickel’s vision.  Presumably, it was whoever they had been running from.

Still mouthing the single word of denial, he turned back to the young Kamdo soldier.  Two shaking arms reached out in an open, pleading stance.  Tears poured from a screwed up, hysterical face.  Way beyond any sense of shame, the front of his shorts turned dark as trails of discoloured water ran down his legs, turning blood splatters into red streaks.

Then suddenly, in a blind panic, he ran towards Nickel.  The Kamdo soldier, himself in shock and distracted by the pain in his thigh, did not immediately react.  He saw the man coming, arms flailing, bare feet slipping, and just stared.  The gun was aiming straight, and it would only take the slightest squeeze on the trigger to bring the dash to an end, but Nickel froze.  He had killed the woman.  Flesh and blood.  He had blown out her throat and sent her to the afterlife.  That, however, had been an instinctive reaction to being shot himself.  This was different; this required a conscious decision to kill.

“Spitak!” he screamed, suddenly hating the sound of that word.  “Spitak!”

The panicking man faltered, his bare feet slapping the deck awkwardly as he considered stopping.  He gave up on that idea quickly though, his feet skipping on the shiny floor as he regained momentum.  In that moment, two more figures appeared round the bend in the corridor.  These were Kamdo fighters, weapons ready.  Taking aim at the fleeing man, they seemed about to fire when Nickel’s presence stopped them.

With the pressure of comrades looking on, the young conscript now had no choice.  Had these newcomers held their shots to avoid catching their comrade in the crossfire?  Or was this, in their eyes, Nickel’s kill?  Either way, Nickel had taken that oath and the pressure of expectation sat heavy on the trigger finger.

Boots planted, lowering his aim, Nickel fired.  The advancing man doubled as the blast struck him in the abdomen.  The weapon was coded with the same programme script that magically placed the Kamdo soldiers aboard Porthos and its power was beyond his expectations.  The impact was devastating.  As the Union trooper tumbled forward, his innards ripped apart, the electrical charge from the blast careered around the rest of his body.  He was dead before he hit the ground.

Nickel lowered his weapon.  So much power in one device, so much power in his hands.  It was the power of the Kamdo, derived from those green crystal veins in the soils of the planet and neighbouring asteroids.  This rarefied form of mineral was born from the fires of the ancient cosmic events that spewed forth this branch of the spiral arm.  It was the product of an ancient collapsing star, perhaps, an explosive event that had thrown debris into this part of the galaxy, the Kamdo part, to serve their weapons and their future.  He knew little of how the crystals worked, only the snippets gleaned from village elders.  Legends had long since spoken of the incredible technologies developed on other Kamdo worlds.  Now, that power had brought him to this enemy ship, and it sat in the weapon he held in his hands.

As the two others approached, he recognised both from the training camp, although he had spoken to neither.  Much like the first warrior encountered back in the dormitory, one was grinning ear to ear.  Even though he was now part of this murderous gang, with two kills to his name, Nickel felt no compulsion to act like such a fool.  He found more affinity in the sombre expression of the second man.  Although the grinner was much older, it was the younger who betrayed the higher wisdom.  Jubilation at killing did not sit easy, even if it was Spitak.

“Betrayers, comrade!” the older man exclaimed in their harsh native tongue.  “In different circumstances, they would have happily destroyed your home, killing your mother, killing your brothers, raping your sisters.  Spare not a single tear.”

“I will not,” said Nickel, indignant that the other should suggest he would be upset, “but nor will I celebrate their end.”

“We will celebrate when this ship is ours,” spat the grinning soldier, hatred in his tone, “and we shall toss their corpses across the plains below, so the carrion can tear the flesh from their bones!”

Nickel’s eyes were back on his victims.  Where the blasts had struck, there was no void forming, only gore and despair.  It was necessary, he told himself, it was them or us.

“We must keep moving,” said the more sombre soldier, “keep moving and keep mopping them up.”

“How many?” asked Nickel, still not raising his head from the gruesome sight of his victim’s intestines.

The question was ambiguous and encouraged the more enthusiastic of the two to excitedly wave his arms, expressing an equally ambiguous sense of magnitude.  The other regarded both his comrade and Nickel with impatience.  As part of the first wave, these two soldiers had already been on board twenty minutes, and it had been twenty minutes of hell.  They had killed many and had come close to death themselves on several occasions.  With more drones now mobilised, and more and more of the enemy now armed, it was far too dangerous to be standing around.

“How many have we killed? Is that what you wish to know?”  the soldier clarified.  “Two dozen, maybe more.  Death does not come easy to them, just as it will not to us.  We must keep moving.  We have to continue to fight, until we are victorious.”

The older man nodded enthusiastically, obviously keen to add to his tally.  His strong indoctrination was something Nickel had shared, right up until the point he saw that young woman’s spine protruding from her back.  That horror had started to disturb his faith, and now, with two lives taken, it was shaking.  But his boots were walking the path of a warrior and it was a direction, he feared, from which there was no return.

“The Ultimate Commitment,” he mumbled, “the Ultimate Sacrifice.”

This is where that pledge would be honoured.  The bodies were nothing but Spitak and he could not lose sight of that.  He had to keep moving and keep attacking, until every single enemy lay at their feet.  The rise of the Kamdo started here, with this battle.  It started here, on this fortress in the sky.  They had stormed the ramparts, and now it was a battle to the death.

Nickel lifted his gaze from the worthless corpses and nodded to his comrades.  It was a gesture that showed he was ready and that he was willing to fight alongside them.  It was kill, or be killed.  Together, with their eyes peeled and weapons primed, they set off in search of the next targets.

+     +     +

With a plan of Porthos projected across their vision, they made their way through the corridors.  Connected to the mainframe, the visors of this elite force offered a distinct advantage over the enemy.  Although the troopers still needed their wits about them, intelligence, fed from sensors, cameras, and drones, calculated the enemies’ movements, and displayed them as targets on the maps.

Fanning out from the loading bay, the thirty or so soldiers of Blue Group worked their way deeper into the ship.  Corridor by corridor, they broke into smaller and smaller teams.  Passing bodies of fallen colleagues without comment, their focus was on the job in hand.  On encountering the wounded, a quick triage and the injuries were fired back to the control room, helping to prioritise the despatch of medical drones.  Waiting with the injured, though, was not in their mission brief.  It was more important they clear the corridors so help could safely get through.  Log.  Move on.

Their primary objective was to secure the critical zones.  The loading bays had come first, and with that achieved, they now headed to other key locations, picking off any enemy in their path.  There were plenty of dots on the map to choose from.

In one part of the huge vessel, a barrage of blaster fire erupted.  Moments later, the leader of the squadron emerged from a side room.  Flanked by two other troopers, he was en route to the bridge.  With the need to move with speed, no sooner had they despatched one enemy than they were checking their visors, plotting their path, and seeing where the next kill crossed it.  With such haste, they were not around the bodies of their victims long enough to see them start to fade.  On one occasion, the leader had glanced back along the corridor and, much like back in the loading bay, he could have sworn a previously shot insurgent had disappeared.  He put it down to nothing more than confusion in the heat of battle, or perhaps the bend of the corridor taking the body out of sight.  He shrugged it off.

The Union soldiers carried on their sweep.  The corridor ahead branched left.  With an outstretched arm, the leader brought the team to a halt.  Their pupils dilated as they focused on the diagrams on their heads-up displays.  Three raised fingers indicated what they could all see for themselves; there were more enemy nearby.  A glove jabbed in the direction of the left turn.  The others gave a thumbs up and a tap of their blasters to indicate they were ready.

They edged forward.  Sirens covered their footfall, but the recent gunshots could have alerted the enemy to their presence, so caution was necessary.  On reaching the junction, they stopped, and pushed tight to the corridor wall.  With the help of a periscopic device, they peered around the corner, feeding the image to each trooper’s visor.  Just as the sensors had suggested, shuffling towards the junction, stooping, their weapons poised, were three Kamdo.  No doubt, they were hunting for new victims.  They probably expected to come across more terrified, unarmed prey.  It had been too easy for them, far too easy.  That was about to change.

The Union troopers stepped into the junction, fingers already squeezing their triggers.  Blasts of energy struck the advancing enemy before they had chance to react.  Two went down straight away.  The third stumbled, clutching at his stomach where a large red hole had suddenly appeared.  The man’s fingers briefly explored the wound, before he dropped to his knees.  The troopers took aim and steadied, ready to finish him off.

“No,” their leader’s voice stopped them, “he’s going nowhere.  Let the bastard suffer.”

The previous day, this wretched Kamdo soldier had stood with his kin and stared in hateful awe at the vessel above.  Now he knelt on that same ship, life pouring from his stomach in a vile river of blood.  There was no pain, just a stunned horror at the mess on his hands.  He had only been aboard for a few minutes, claiming a couple of kills.  The fight had been ripped away from him far sooner than expected.  With death approaching quickly, his battle was coming to an end.

Three blurry shadows moved closer.  Even in his shocked and confused mind, Nickel recognised these figures as the enemy.  There was a glimmer of hate beneath his shock; he knew they were the ones responsible for his dreadful predicament.

“Spitak!” he tried to say, but there was nothing.  No word, no sound, no air, nothing.  Dead men do not speak, he realised.  Dead men just die.

The instruction to hold off finishing the job confused the Union troopers.  Their leader was right in that this mortally wounded man was going nowhere, but it seemed a waste of valuable seconds.  Their previous orders had been clear, and time of the essence, so why this change in tactic?  In answer to their questions, the leader stepped forward and violently smashed the butt of his blaster into the kneeling man’s face, sending him sprawling.  Under their visors, the other Union troopers winced.

“Sir…” one of them began, but then thought better of it.  Such behaviour was not right, but in the heat of the battle, questioning a superior officer, especially this one, was not a wise move.

With the Kamdo soldier writhing in pain, blood flowing heavily from his stomach, his assailant loomed over.  Contrary to protocol, the Union officer removed one of his protective gloves and knelt.  A quick tap on the collar released the officer’s visor, revealing his face.

Behind their own dark-tinted masks, the other troopers exchanged a nervous glance.  Removing the visual aid and the protection the visor offered was foolhardy.  Conscious more enemy could appear at any moment, the soldiers positioned themselves back-to-back.  Between them, they could see along all three stretches of corridor that met at this intersection.  Half an eye remained on their leader, both fearful and intrigued as to what this notorious man would do next.

In his pained stupor, Nickel could see the face of his attacker.  He did not recognise him, but many across the galaxy would have.  Amongst the military, the more knowledgeable civilians and, indeed, many of Nickel’s own kind, this man symbolised the might and ambitions of the expanding human empire.  Staring down at the dying Kamdo youth were the steely eyes of Commander Elliot Meyer, Protector of the Dark Zones.

“You think you can board a Union vessel?” snarled Meyer.  “You think you can kill Union troops and murder Union technicians?  You think your dirty Kamdo hide is worthy of that?  You think your filthy Kamdo hide is worthy of anything?”

Meyer reached forward, his bare hand closing around Nickel’s throat.  Under pressure, blood began to gargle from the dying man’s mouth.  The young soldier knew what was happening, but he was powerless to fight back.  Already aware that the wound in his gut was too traumatic to survive, this additional indignity brought more confusion to his anguished mind. Why this, when he was so close to death?  Why this humiliation in the final moments?  One look into Meyer’s hate-filled eyes provided the answers.

The sensation of warm blood spluttering on to his forearm excited the commander.  Taking this wretched man closer to that final moment, that final breath, brought a sick satisfaction.  All that power in his grasp, the power to end a life.  He would be snubbing out the spark that launched every living organism, the spark that fired the soul into existence.  He squeezed harder, feeling the thick pipes in the young man’s throat, closing them with his grip. He could bring that spark to heel, he could extinguish it at will. Scared eyes peered up at him, pleading, but to no avail.  The hand squeezed tighter.

Distracted by the nervous shuffling of his soldiers, the commander lifted his head, taking his eyes away from those of his victim.  He did not get as far as the troopers, drawn instead to the bodies of the other two Kamdo.  Transfixed, he watched as a shimmering blackness consumed them.  Where previously there was the brown of their suits, now there was nothing, a hole, a void.  Where their blood had spilled, now there appeared a dark abyss.  As he watched, the bodies began to fade, their shadowy shape lingering long after the floor beneath was visible.  Moments later, all trace had vanished, including their weapons, uniforms, and even the spillages and splatters from their wounds.

“What the hell…?” one of the troopers gasped, his words irritating the commander’s earpiece.  Meyer’s eyes narrowed, returning to Nickel.  He was seething.  How had that just happened?  How had the enemy appeared from nowhere and now, it seemed, returned to that same place?  He could not comprehend the technology that could do this, and that enraged him even further.  How dare the Kamdo have weaponry that was not in the Union’s arsenal?

All his efforts went into that grip.  Tighter, harder, his shoulder aching as he bore all his crushing weight on the young man’s throat.  When Meyer felt his hand suddenly sink further, he thought he had forced his way through the trachea and oesophagus, smashing through the cartilage and muscle.  Then, unfathomably, his curved fingers painfully bashed into the deck.  One moment he was glaring into the eyes of the enemy, watching the last embers of life fade, and then those eyes were gone, replaced with the silvery gleam of the floor.  Just like the bodies of the Kamdo comrades, a shadowy haze hung for a second or so, and then disappeared too.

Three shocked Union soldiers were now alone in the corridor.

“What just happened?” one of them asked.

Commander Meyer got to his feet.  With a bloody hand, he snapped his visor back into place and then turned to face the troopers.

“They just signed their death certificates,” he hissed, “the whole fucking lot of them.”

Chapter Two

If someone had told Lieutenant Engels that this shift would finish with the infamous Commander Meyer storming on to the bridge and relieving him of duty, he would have laughed it off as a ridiculous scenario.  How could that ever happen?  What bizarre chain of events could lead to such an eventuality?  For starters, Meyer was millions of miles away in another part of the system and this vessel had its own very competent and formidable commander.  And what could possibly go so terribly wrong that Engel’s would need to be relieved?

Prior to the inexplicable attack, the Kamdo had been docile.  Since the arrival of Union forces, there had been nothing from them; no communications, no unusual vehicle movements, no demands from their High Council.  Not a squeak.  It had seemed like they were hiding down their mouse holes, fearfully peeking out at the irrepressible battlecruiser menacing their heavens.  And even if they had dared to engage, there had been a solid belief that they could offer no threat to this immovable beast.  Nothing could go wrong.  Nothing.

Except, it had.  A series of events so crazy, so downright unbelievable, had transpired to throw everything into turmoil.  No one could have foreseen the storming of the Porthos, no one.  Apart, he guessed, from whatever technical genius was behind their method of arrival.

Even though he had seen it with his own eyes, Engels was struggling to accept that the enemy had appeared out of nowhere in the way that they had.  And crazily, they were then disappearing in the same way they had arrived. It was like some bad nightmare.  Soon, it would come to an end, and he could wake.  Surely.  Hopefully.  Only he knew none of this was drawn from any sleepy imagination.  This was happening.  The apparitions were real, and they were deadly.  Room after room, corridor after corridor, was filled with gruesome testimony to that.

In attempting to explain the situation to the Aramis, the lieutenant had sounded like a bumbling fool.  Only by allowing the sister ship to access the Porthos’ mainframe, giving them access to all the video and data feeds, was he able to convey the gravity of the situation.  That had been fifteen minutes ago, having made the declaration of battle stations ten minutes prior to that.  Since then the full gravity of the situation had become increasingly obvious, and the enemy was still coming.  The unprepared crew were unable to get a grip of the situation without help.

With large sections of Porthos in total lockdown, Kamdo soldiers wandered these decks unchallenged.  A few of the ship’s company had engaged the enemy, but too many were unarmed, trapped in dormitories and recreational areas.  It was a confusing scene.  Sensors struggled to keep track of both the crew and the infiltrators.  Identifiers gruesomely advised on the condition of their wearers and the death toll rose rapidly.  Less than thirty minutes after the chaos began, over four hundred lay dead.  Hundreds more were illuminating the medical emergency panels, drawing on the dozens of drones dispatched to their aid.

The arrival of the crack force from Aramis was much needed.  The deployment of attack orbs, designed for air to ground offensives, was a masterstroke, Meyer showing his tactical ingenuity.  Firing the orbs straight into the bays, placing them in the heart of the ship, saw a shift in the balance of the battle.  These elite troops, with superior weaponry and the impressive firepower of the orbs, had paved the way for larger troop landing crafts that were only minutes behind.

No one, though, had anticipated that Meyer would lead the assault in person.  When the troops marched on to the bridge, it was not obvious who was under the armour.  But on removing his helmet and releasing that flop of black hair and his bronzed, clean-shaven face, he was instantly recognisable to all those present.  Whatever they were doing in that moment, they froze.  Apart from the sirens sneaking in through the open door, a silence fell over the chamber.

Commander Meyer and his entourage surveyed the scene, the door behind sliding back into position.  Sentries at either side were the first to react to the senior officer’s presence, both snapping to attention, their boots clipping the deck.  Meyer did not acknowledge them.  He briefly observed dawn breaking over the planet, and the two dead crew, neatly laid out under the large viewing window.  Angrily, he turned towards the commander’s post.

Engels felt the full force of his glare and for a moment forgot the rank.  When he did remember, his salute was nervous and awkward, the timing of the stamp out of synch with the hand to his forehead.

“W-w-we were not expecting you, commander,” he stammered, “w-w-welcome on board.”

It was not the smartest thing to say but the lieutenant was lost for words.  The last half hour was the worst of his life.  His usual swagger lay crushed under all the horrific death and destruction.  Like most on this mission, the potential for conflict was anticipated, but never in this manner.  It was on his watch too; the burden of being at the helm weighed heavy.  Rationally, as a last-minute stand-in for the partying officers, he should have felt no responsibility for the current situation, nor for the inexplicable events leading to it.  That rationality, though, had died the moment the Kamdo warrior had appeared on the bridge, waving her blaster in the direction of technicians, and taking their lives right in front of his nose.

“Where is Commander Cholewinska?” Meyer asked coldly, already knowing the answer.

Engels, on initially raising the alarm, had explained that data feeds had tracked Ana Cholewinska’s last whereabouts.  Clearly, this commander wanted to hear it first-hand, perhaps wanting the lieutenant to squirm.  Engels could barely bring the words forth, his throat dry, sweat erupting across his brow.

“Missing in action,” he said, weakly.  It was a limp phrase, one often used in military parlours to voice the unspeakable.

Meyer cut straight to the chase, “Dead?”

Engels nodded, “Her identifier went offline shortly after the code red.  She was in her quarters.  All readings from that section of the ship were subsequently lost.  We despatched a reconnaissance drone…”

“I have seen the images,” the commander interrupted, putting the other man out of his misery.  They had been transmitted to his visor whilst he sped across the system in the attack orb and Meyer had viewed them several times. No body had been located and the drone had been taken out mid-surveillance, but the carnage was conclusive.  No one got out of that alive.

Despite his close relationship with Ana, Meyer had flicked through the destruction of his lover’s quarters with callous disregard.   The woman with whom he had enjoyed many exciting clinches had been blown to pieces and yet, on viewing the carnage, a smile had crossed his lips. Likewise, as the lieutenant tried to explain what had happened, Meyer still took a sadistic pleasure in Engels’ obvious discomfort.

Stepping down to the main deck, the commander scanned the crew.  As each fell under his gaze, they paused to salute, before returning to their stations, busy with the urgent defence of the ship.  The Kamdo’s cards were now in play and it was a far stronger hand than anyone had expected, but for the commander, the bigger the challenge the better.  The time would soon come for the Union to declare their own hand, and in leading the assault on the loading bays, Meyer was now on the front line, exactly where he needed to be.

“In the Mon Roi system, twenty years ago,” the commander proclaimed, “there was an uprising against the Union.”

As he spoke, he turned slowly on the spot, booming his words around the chamber.

“When the first shots were fired, there were less than fifty personnel on the ground, and most of these were diplomats and administrators.  The Union compound was stormed, the security butchered.  Eighteen survived that initial attack by holing themselves up in a residential block, with only rudimental weapons at their disposal.  It was two days before help arrived.  Two fucking days!  Do you know what the rescuing forces found?”

No one dared to lift their heads.  Their focus remained on the display panels, making sure they kept busy, avoiding the domineering stares.  After what seemed an age, Meyer settled his glare on the man stood at the commander’s post.

“Do you know what we fucking found?” the senior officer bellowed into the face of the lieutenant.  Globules of angry spit sprayed the trembling man and he retracted as far as he could without daring to shift his feet.

“Do you?”

“No, sir,” Engels said hurriedly, “no, sir.  Sorry, sir.”

“Of course you fucking don’t, you shower of shit.  Those eighteen brave men and women had not only survived the attack, by the time we arrived the compound was back under their control and secure.  You have five thousand!  Five thousand!  They had eighteen!”

Engels wanted to make excuses but realised that was folly and remained silent.  There was no point in arguing the suddenness of this attack.  There was no point highlighting the unprecedented arrival method, or the fact they had not just appeared in one place, but all over the ship simultaneously.  Feeble.  The vessel should have been on a war footing.  The crew’s inability to mount an effective defence showed a distinct lack of preparedness.

Meyer removed his seething face from that of the junior officer.  “Stand down, lieutenant,” he said, “Porthos is now under my command.”

Those words brought both relief and foreboding.  Engels was happy to have the responsibility lifted from his shoulders but now he faced the full weight of what had happened on his watch.  The growing list of casualties was terrifying, and the decisions taken over the last half hour would live with him forever.  In the aftermath, there was little doubt he would face horrendous scrutiny.

With flaring nostrils, Meyer took over the commander’s console.  He pulled up the crew manifest.  It showed a long list of names, many of which were highlighted red with the letter “D” appended.  It was “D” for “Deceased”.  He exhaled with a low growl, making his feelings clear.

After a moment, Meyer calmly asked, “Okay, who is going to update me?”

The bridge remained silent.

He tried again: “Come on!  How are they getting on board?  I want ideas, I want theories.  We need something to work with here.”

One of the technicians hesitantly caught his eye with a half-raised hand.  The sleeve of her uniform was stained with the blood of her fallen colleagues.  Narrowing eyes bore down as she spoke:

“They seem to be appearing out of nothing,” she said, stating the obvious, “and when they die, they disappear again…”

“I’ve seen that,” the commander agreed, “dead or badly injured.”

Injured?  This was new information and briefly threw the technician.  Did it change the theory sat on the tip of her tongue?  No, she did not think so.  There were already too many holes in her theory for another twist to add any more doubt.

“They are some sort of hard hologram,” she said,  “being transmitted through our defences.  The communications team report a strange signal, source unknown, identified shortly before the first attack…”

“A hologram would not feel pain,” said the commander, recalling his hand around the throat of the Kamdo soldier.

“No…” she frowned, dropping her head, turning back to her console.

“Name and rank?” Meyer asked.

“First Officer Tamar Ben-Amir, sir,” came the cautious reply, “navigation technician, alpha grade.”

“Alpha grade,” he mused, “good.  All the data that we have on that signal and any visual and sensor recordings of these… teleportations… we need to get back to Union Central Command.  I presume they are being kept abreast of the situation?”

That question was directed at the shrinking Lieutenant Engels.  He shrank further, unable to even look at Meyer.

“Unbelievable!” the commander bellowed.  “Cholewinska’s death might excuse her the humiliation of a court martial, but others will be left to explain!  What a shambles!  Ben-Amir, take responsibility for letting Central Command know what is happening here!  Someone else get me a channel to the Oracle, we need to let the president know too.  Unbelievable!”

He angrily pointed to another technician.

“You,” he barked, “is the communications suite secure?”

“Yes, Commander!” came the swift reply.

“Well that’s something!  We need to get a fix on that signal.  And keep the battle vitals on this display, I want to track progress.”

The bridge started to move again, returning to the hive of activity it had been prior to Meyer’s arrival.  Only Lieutenant Engel seemed at a loss what to do, relieved of duty, unsure whether he should assume a position or skulk over by the door.

With his own troopers in the mix, and more soon to arrive, Meyer was confident the ship would soon be back under control.  He was disappointed with Ana Cholewinska; he had held her in such high regard.  The lack of battle readiness was shocking.  She was dead now, so she mattered not, and inside this cold bastion of a man, there was not a morsel of sadness at the loss of his lover.

As he waited for the communication suite to respond, the corners of his lips turned up once again.  No one observed this fledgling smile, but he was not trying to hide it.  His focus was not with the past, and he did not spare Ana another thought.  Instead, he imagined the panic in Union Central Command when the news reached them.  He visualised that moment the president first got wind too, the exact second Chilake’s heart sank.  The old fool would not have a clue what to do next.

But Commander Meyer did.

This was beyond his wildest dreams; it was the incident he had hoped for.  A missile launch or hostile interceptor sorties might have been the expectation, but this?  This was much better!  Hundreds of Union personnel killed in an unprovoked attack.  Excellent.  Excellent!  This was the beginning of the end for the Kamdo regime, and he was centre stage, in command of the whole show.  Once Porthos was clear of this invading scourge, and that would be soon, then the real slaughter could begin.

Commander Meyer’s smile widened.  Off to his left, First Officer Tamar Ben-Amir did now notice.  She tried to concentrate on the task at hand, but the commander’s presence was overwhelming.  The young officer was ashamed to realise that she was getting excited.  Where there had been fear and panic, now she felt in control.  She opened the channel to Central Command, exhilarated by the responsibility, keen to show this new leader her worth.

+     +     +

Throughout her teenage years, Pedros was bullied.  Initially, it had been the flat chest and geeky looks.  Later, it was her relationship with a much older, married man.  She would come to discover that those scandalous whispers behind her back had been far more vicious than the earlier, innocent, childish taunts.  These more deceitful, two-faced sneers, originating from those who pretended to be friends, had been far more hurtful.

When the relationship went disastrously wrong, to the point of losing her arm to the vengeful wife, the nastiness had not stopped.  Those friends she had foolishly held close abandoned her in her hours of need, choosing instead to share spiteful judgements between themselves, mocking her injuries with tasteless private jokes. Once the sordid tale reached the governors, her former lover was removed from his employment as a lecturer.  The University offered to keep her place, so she could resume post the operations, but the bullying made that impossible.  Those intercepted messages, sent to her by mistake, caused too much damage.  Her trust had been ripped apart by their wicked words, and whilst the wounds would be fixed, she did not think that betrayal ever could be.

Living in Australia, safely snuggled in the technologically advanced inner sectors, she received fast and excellent medical care.  Only a few days after the attack, a robotic arm was fused with her nervous system.  A series of cell regenerations over the following weeks repaired the other injuries, as well as creating the flesh receptacle in which the robotics now resided.  It was an amazing piece of engineering, but it was not her limb.  Although the doctors said it was psychosomatic, she was sure she felt aches in her shoulder, and it smelled all wrong.  She was also sure that in certain lights, it was tinged green.

Many years later, in the communications suite, the insecurities of the past were still present.  On first identifying the strange signal, she had immediately shared it with her colleagues, only for it to frustratingly fall silent, leaving them with nothing to hear.  They had laughed at her for jumping at shadows, mocking her for the false alarm, ridiculing her as the woman who cried wolf.  So, when she had heard it again, there was hesitation.  The fear of more ridicule had been overwhelming.  Had that fear clouded her judgement?  Had it prevented her from raising the alarm sooner?

Rational thoughts told her that only a couple of minutes were lost, and besides, even an earlier warning could not have prevented the enemy boarding.  Louder thoughts, irrational ones, feared the blood of many fallen colleagues was on her hands.  She had let the team down in the most grievous of ways.

Of course, no one was aware of the delay and probably never would be.  That left this brilliant technician with a choice.  She could wallow in self-flagellation, fearing repercussions that might never come, or she could buckle down and do something to fix this situation.

Andrea Pedros had no doubt this dreadful onslaught started and would end with that signal.  The bridge were coming round to that idea too.  Somehow, the signal had penetrated the shields of the battlecruiser allowing the enemy through.  There was no scientific basis for that belief, and she had no idea how physical form travelled on a signal, but she was convinced.  Desperate for answers, she searched on, keen to redeem for those earlier delays.

“We have to trace the source!”  Pedros insisted.  “We have to trace the source!”

In all that time since the explosion of sound, her two colleagues had said nothing.  They looked stunned, one still stood with his hand firmly clasped over a bleeding ear, his drum ripped apart when the signal burst through.  Perhaps it was understandable that they were shell-shocked with the barrage of sirens and the desperate cries of the dying filling the internal channels. Constantly, though, she reminded them of their duties and their need to focus.

In here, where listening was paramount, the sirens had now thankfully been silenced and they had turned off the open channels.  The cacophony of screams had been replaced with a chilling calm.  The quiet, interspersed with her vocal desire to trace the signal, had not helped solve the riddle.  The source still eluded.  The computer had come up with the rather pathetic suggestion that it came from the planet below; an assumption a child could have made.  Beyond that, it had nothing helpful to offer.  The planet, sure, but where?  She needed something far more specific.  She needed a location, so she could focus the tech and lock on to the source.  Then, hopefully, a precision strike could take out the transmitter.  Short of blowing up the whole planet, there seemed no other way.

“Come on guys,” she sighed to her stupefied colleagues.  “I need your help here!”

“They are coming,” the one with the ear-bleed said, confusion obvious in his monotone.  “They will get in here.”

He was a technician, sure, but he was also a trained soldier.  In pain or not, this was not the way he was meant to respond to a crisis.  Pedros was scared too and no doubt so were the rest of the crew.  To be faced with this situation and not be drenched in the waters of your own mortality would be inhuman, but the training taught you how not to drown.  Clearly, this injured man was barely keeping his head above the surface, and the other technician looked equally dumbstruck.

“This is a primary room,” she explained impatiently.  “The doors are impregnable.  The Kamdo seem to be riding on the back of this radio wave, they have to be, but this room is lined, and transmissions cannot get through the walls.  If the signal cannot get through, neither can the Kamdo.”

She tapped at the display, cursing under her breath, burying her own fears beneath a blanket of frustration.  Why could she not fathom this?  Like many recruited to crew this new fleet of Union flagships, Pedros was an exceptional individual.   Top grades in the academy and a proven record of accomplishment in her field.  Why could she not figure this out?  Why could the highly advanced computer equipment, armed with the most sensitive monitoring equipment ever designed, not provide the answers?

“Make yourself useful, at least!” she spat at the colleagues, the frustrations bubbling over.  “Monitor the long-range traffic, see what else is going on in this sector, make sure there are no other surprises heading our way!”

They moved off to busy themselves.  Their distraction gone, her focus increased, determined to solve this riddle.  Pedros knew her success or failure would be decisive in this battle.  She had to locate the source of that signal and eradicate it.  It was a threat not only to this crew, but also to the security of the whole of humanity.

Chapter Three

After the failed rendezvous on the Rhea Orbiter, Roan Siyankova had believed it all in vain.  Huddled against the cold, a stowaway on a freighter, she had stared over the cliff edge and seen the abyss open before her.  Baying dogs at her heels, there was only one way that it could end.  Desperate, the one-time journalist had fired off a message to hundreds of contacts, her last attempt to share shocking discoveries.  The content would light up the net like New Year’s Eve fireworks.  With the end looming, this was the final hope that her efforts would not go to waste.  Revealing the truth would be her legacy.  The dogs could do their worst, but the lies would be exposed.

Only…

Those dogs had never caught her, and she had the bravery of a stranger to thank for that.  It was a big thank you too, for if it had come to an end that day, then all would have been lost and her life wasted.  Somehow, every last message she had sent was intercepted and wiped, and the dogs would have won.  Hundreds of servers were hacked, all the copies snatched.  There was not a trace of them left.

A year on, she was still not sure how they had managed it, disbelieving they could thwart her so completely.  She knew some were read, a handful of contacts had replied, but they too were located, wiped, silenced.  Many off that distribution list had fallen quiet, too quiet, and she worried what had happened to them.  How many unfortunate incidents stemmed from her message?  How many more names were added to the list of the Union disappeared, a list already far too long?

Back before, when life was normal, her journalism was more attuned to attracting readership than seeking justice.  Then, Roan had bounced from one day to the next, a tall, fun, redheaded, powder keg.  She still possessed that energy, but now focused it on her contempt for the Union and those on their payroll.  The fun was gone though.  That left the day she killed a man and seriously wounded an innocent boy.  She could not recall a single happy moment since.

The stranger who had helped her escape from the freighter was now helping again.  He sat a few feet away, strapped in, as was she, waiting for Earth’s air-traffic controllers to grant the jump window.  It was a nervous wait.  Of the four on board this small intergalactic cruiser-class passenger ship, three were travelling under their own identity, the manifest correlating with their identifier registration signals.  The fourth, Roan, carried false credentials.  They were good fakes, a robust full history backing up the imaginary person she had become.  False histories, though, always ran the risk of unravelling and it would only take a random DNA scan to throw open her far more controversial identity.

With her on the ship were Clayton Wright, Sammy Reckless and Roan’s freighter saviour, the pilot Ocean Massri.  Here was a man to whom she was eternally grateful.  Ocean’s willingness to believe her story when the dogs were at her heels had thrown her an unexpected lifeline.  His bravery in concealing her from the Union agents had kept her desire for justice alive.

Syrian by birth, Ocean was the third son of the shipping magnate, Ahmed Massri.  When he had first encountered a cowering Roan out at the edge of the solar system, it was on one of his father’s freighters.  In his seventh decade, Ocean had grown tired of the constant pursuit of profits and often joined the crews for long haul trips.  It was a way of avoiding the business side and escaping the pressures of family expectations.  On that trip, he had been the vessel’s captain, a role that gave him far more of a buzz than the wheeling and dealing.  There was nothing quite like space travel to get away from it all.

Of course, not all trips offered relief.  On this cruiser, sat alongside the fugitive, he was risking a lengthy prison sentence, and that brought a whole different kind of stress, one with which he bizarrely found he had an affinity.  When last with this woman, bidding her a rushed goodbye, the adrenalin pumping through his veins had sent his identifier into overdrive.  Like a bad hangover, he swore never again, never would he risk so much for a stranger.  Yet here he was, re-living the excitement as pilot of this much smaller vessel.  Damn, it felt good!  His adrenalin flowing again, the presence of the fiery, dangerous redhead thrilled him to the core.

When he had first discovered the wretched, emaciated creature amongst the crates, he had no idea why he had leapt to her cause.  He had found it easy to believe what she told him, but she probably could have told him anything and he would have still stuck his neck out to help.  Was that the desire for excitement, or was it a particular type of thrill, one that a captivating younger woman could easily draw from a lonely, older man?

Whatever the reasons, two weeks after that first encounter, as she disappeared into a crowd at the spaceport in Damascus, he held hope their paths would cross again.  His head had been thudding, his pulse sky high, and yet, like an alcoholic, he immediately hankered after that next fix.  And when her message had popped on to his wrist a couple of days ago, he had had no hesitation in re-opening the bottle and pouring himself a big glass of trouble.  She needed him and he wanted her to need him.

Roan had not revealed where she had been since Damascus.  Her messages had been coy, her replies curt, and any hope that she might share her adventures were now resigned to a later time.  Ocean was a little disappointed on learning she would be accompanied on this trip too, but now, sat alongside her, his excitement was undiminished.  A year earlier, whilst he had provided the safe passage back to Earth, this intriguing woman had divulged snippets of her history.  He had learnt enough to explain her dishevelled state at the time, but mostly, he remained in the dark.  She did not look in much better condition now.  Whatever mud clung to this former journalist, clearly it was still clinging, weighing her down as she fought her way through the murky mangroves that she seemed to frequent.

Behind the pilot and Roan, were nine further seats.  Only two of these were taken, both on the second of the three rows.  Clayton sat at one side, his lawyer at the other, a spare place between them.   Usually rich holidaymakers occupied all the seats, jumping to distant worlds, their faces painted with happy expressions, eager to see the sights the galaxy had to offer.  No such expressions were present on this flight. Clayton’s, in particular, was one of abject misery.

He had no idea why he was doing this.  He had no idea how the redheaded devil had made it out of his house alive, let alone why he now sat in the same cabin as her.  Four years.  Four long years that murderous face had tormented both his waking and sleeping thoughts.  Many times, he had imagined coming across her, and many times he had imagined ramming a knife between her ribs.  Yet when, against immeasurable odds, the devil turned up at his home, he had managed nothing more than a few screamed insults and a bout of hysterical tears.  Oh, and the vomit, how could he forget the vomit.

Her arrival had hit him like a brick, and then her revelations hit him even harder.  They were ludicrous, unbelievable, hurtful revelations.  They took him back there, to those desperate days, the ones immediately following Three Zero.  All that panic, all that fear, all that utter despair, had smashed its way back into his consciousness, crashing back into his life.  It was the darkness, lurking in bathroom mirror reflections, or creeping in the shadows on the porch, or stalking as he ate his meagre dinners.  And he had let it in.  He had opened the door to it, allowing it across his threshold, sending him reeling in fear, for his last meal to end up spewed into the sink.

Always there, Con.  Always there.

So why was he doing this?  Why was he sat on this ship?

He looked across at Sammy, who was peering out of the cabin window.  And what reason had she to be here, too?  Perhaps, that one he could answer.

Up front, the pilot was speaking to the disembodied voice of an air traffic controller.  If Clayton had wanted to hear the words, he probably could have, but with the engines cranking up, it did not seem worth the effort.  In a few moments, jump would be engaged.  The exchange with air traffic suggested there was no difficulty with the credentials of Clayton’s nemesis, more the pity.

Having never left the system, this jump would be a first for Clayton.  It would be for Sammy too, who had earlier nervously proclaimed she had never left the comfort of Earth’s blissful atmosphere.  Their combined lack of travel experience brought added anxiety to this unexpected trip and made it even more remarkable they found themselves strapped to these seats.  They did not even know where they were heading.

“To find my son,” Clayton mumbled, too low to come to the ears of the others.

Roan’s claims were utterly ridiculous, of course.  Three Zero had been ripped apart, the force of the exploding fission reactors destroying the whole station in seconds.  Clayton had watched it happen.  No one still on the station at that point could have survived.  Of the few who did get away before the blast, all were identified, there were none still lying confused or comatose in hospitals.  His family was not amongst those who escaped.  His wife and son had died that day.  He knew that now just as solidly as he had known it for every second of every day of the last four years.  There had been no bodies, but that lack of physical evidence meant nothing in the wake of such absolute devastation.  They were gone.  They were never coming back.

Yet, here he was, and Sammy too, somehow finding credence in the assassin’s unlikely claims.  Hope?  Crazy hope, perhaps, driven by a foolish desire for history to be re-written.  How could he believe her?  How could he countenance even a single word spoken by the merciless killer?  It was insane.  He was insane.  He had witnessed her mow down a Union guard.  He had seen her fire the shot that spread the man’s skull all over the wall of the lift. With his own eyes, there, in that confined space.  There had been no magician’s trick, no optical illusion, it had been real.  Sometimes, in his dreams, the reverberations of that shot still echoed in his ears and the stench of the gunfire still burned in his nostrils.  Yet he was sat on this cruiser, about to embark to some distant destination, his life in the hands of a wanted criminal.

Both Clayton and his lawyer had considered Roan’s story, Sammy riddled with her professional scepticism. They had scrutinised it for flaws, and there were many, the biggest being that the whole tale was totally unsubstantiated by anyone or anything other than Roan’s own testimony.  And yet… here they were.  Had his desire for her words to be true outweighed basic common sense?  Had he let the stranger’s crazy testimony find a foothold despite the overwhelming narrative to the contrary?

In truth, Roan had played him well.  She had sown the seeds of belief a year before turning up on his doorstep through that encrypted message, those three little words, projected on to his identifier.  Those words that had instantly added to the chill of that evening on his porch, making the moths dance and his heart jump.  Over the intervening months, his conviction that those words had to mean something had grown, even after Sammy’s failed attempts to help him.  So, whilst the arrival and revelations of Roan had sent him heaving to the sink, it had also played to that conviction, rekindling his hope, and stoking his desire to believe.

This was another chance, a last chance.  Faced with an empty future, what choice was there other than to give it a go?  He was young enough that the rest of his life would seem like an eternity if he did not pursue this.  He could not live forever wondering, not knowing, regretting this passing him by.

So here he was, about to jump across the galaxy to some unknown destination, his safety in the hands of a murderer.  In trusting her word, he was like a desperate man clinging to driftwood, willing it to take him to dry land.  Was this dangerous woman his salvation?  Was the woman who he watched blow a hole in the leg of an innocent teenage boy, going to be the one who fixed the unfixable?  Rationally, he doubted it, but sometimes rational thoughts did not say what the thinker wanted to hear.

For Sammy Reckless, this whole space thing was terrifying.  She had taken a similar leap of faith to that of her client, in giving Roan’s tale some merit, but Sammy did not have the incentive of finding a lost son.  Her motive for braving this trip was loyalty, nothing more.  Like everyone else in the inner systems, she remembered where she was when news of Three Zero filtered through.  She equally remembered how the tragedy had heralded in a huge payday for her profession.  It was a time when charging went through the roof and many of her colleagues had greedily rubbed their callous hands in glee, but as soon as she had met Clayton Wright and felt the unbelievable burden of his grief, her own thoughts of blossoming bank balances had taken a back seat.

As a lawyer, lost souls were an occupational hazard.  She often saw clients at their lowest, but she had never seen a person quite as destroyed as Clayton.  In the devastating grip of shock, the poor man had been catatonic and hysterical at the same time, flipping between the two.  The humanity in Sammy had stepped forward, as it would do many times thereafter.  She had tucked in by his side and shuffled along with him, bearing some of the weight of his cross.  No one could do that, of course, no one could take away any of his pain, but she tried, and his cause had become hers.  Now, this spider’s thread of hope he clung to, was her hope too.  They were in this together.

When the stranger had first approached the lawyer and insisted that she needed to see her client, Sammy’s natural caution had kicked in.  The stench and dishevelled state of the hooded woman had brought immediate distrust.  Roan had gotten the airtime, however, and that had brought them to this point.

It all made no sense; how could it?  Conner Wright died alongside his mum in the huge explosion that ripped apart Three Zero, there was no doubt in that.  Four years was plenty of time for conspiracy nuts to emerge, though, and many had.  Some spoke of Union cover-ups and council involvement.  Others pointed suspicious fingers at the president.  Some even believed the atrocity never happened.  The stinking woman’s story read like one of the conspiracies, with miraculous escapes, illegal detentions, cover-ups and scapegoats.  And it told of a lost boy, trapped in a distant system, scared and alone.

The engines of the small passenger cruiser suddenly fell silent.  There was a flash of light outside the craft and an invisible force pushed the passengers back in their seats.  Minutes later, as the small rip in space knitted behind them, they left Earth’s solar system.  The stabilisers steadied, preserving the molecular integrity of the hull, allowing those on board to be gradually released from the grip of acceleration.  Soon, inside the cabin felt much as it had when the ship sat stationery, despite the forces exerted on the exterior.  Jump technology at its finest.  This was a luxury pleasure cruiser; one of the best in the Massri fleet.  When Ocean played out, he did so in style.

In that moment, however, Sammy was not appreciative of the stable, luxury interior.  Instead, she considered how the lush upholstery would look should her overwhelming urge to throw up come to fruition.  Thankfully, she kept the vomit down, but nausea would blight the rest of the journey.  Prolonged bouts of sleep would be necessary to combat the sickness.

As she danced in and out of full consciousness, her mind wandered.  She continued to think of the boy.  Many images of Conner sat in her files, shared by the client across the numerous days and nights they had worked together.  Not once did she ignore Clayton’s messages, no matter how out-of-hours they were.  Not once did she ignore his cries.

Absorbed in the Three Zero case, many other clients came and went, dropped because she could not fully support them.  Even after the inquiry closed and the judges ruled multiple murder by an act of terrorism, she continued the daily dialogue with the poor man.  These engagements were on a dramatically reduced rate, if she bothered to charge him at all.  Occasionally, Sammy wondered how many jobs she had turned down or lost, and how lucrative they might have been.  Rather than being her gold mine, Clayton had cost her many thousands in fees.  It mattered not.  All that mattered was this special client, and all she could do to ease his pain.

That, she reminded herself a dozen times a day, was not the job of a lawyer.  There were people trained for that, and there were drugs and other medical interventions that could help too.  She was about facts, and arguments, and details, and fees.  She was not, or so her professional colleagues often told her, there to fix the broken.  Before Clayton, she would have never dreamed of trying.  Her career had groomed a classic heartless lawyer.  Right up until Three Zero.  Right up until this poor lost man entered her life.

With her eyes closed against the nausea, she found a safe place to reflect.  There was a haven just there, behind those eyes, where thoughts could sit in peace and maybe, just maybe, logic could step forward.  Already shooting across the galaxy, it was perhaps a little late to finally allow this powerful ally of hers, that sharp legal mind, to join the party?  Logic should have been with her on the steps of the court.  It should have been with her back in her apartment, with the smell of soap filling the bathroom.  And it should have been in the home of the mourning father when she had let him listen to the fantasy story.  It was better late than never, she told herself, as she walked over and over the stranger’s tale.  But as hard as she tried, that sharp focus refused to come to bear, and the foolish hope refused to budge.

“You okay?” Clayton asked, quietly, not wishing to wake her if sleep had taken hold.

Sammy opened her eyes and turned his way.  His safety belt unbuckled, he sat crossed legged, his body turned towards her.  Two rows away, the pilot and stranger talked in hushed tones too.

“I think I’m a little travel sick,” she said.

“I don’t feel great either,” he replied. “I’ve never jumped before; that was something else.”

She nodded; it certainly was.  Her whole body felt like it was three foot to the left of where it was meant to be.

“Why are we even here?” Clayton asked, exhaling hard, exasperated.

The corners of his mouth hesitated upwards, but it was no smile, merely an attempt at offering comfort.  Quite whether the comfort was for himself, or offered to his friend, was unclear.  Either way, it helped neither.

“I don’t know,” Sammy said, “it felt like the right thing to do…”

“Back there it did.  It felt like the only thing to do.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, clocking the starry void through the windows.  “Now we are out here, I am not so sure…”

“On the strength of a few ridiculous claims,” he said.  “Nothing more.  Ridiculous.  To suggest Con is alive.  To suggest a cover up, and that somehow the disaster was not what it seemed…”

“The ultimate conspiracy theory.”

Clayton leaned across the seats, checking the two up front were still engrossed in their own conversation.  They were.

“It’s not the first time we have heard this one,” he said.  “A couple of years ago it was popular amongst the attention-seeking cranks.  We never believed them, remember?  No one with any intelligence did!  I went through a phase where they really got under my skin; they upset me, really made me mad.  But you managed to talk some sense and help me to see them for what they were, and I managed to block them out.  They became background noise.  I’ve not heard any new ones for months.”

“That’s just the passage of time,” said Sammy, “they have become yesterday’s news.  They are all still out there, but they do not make the headlines now, the channels have stopped reporting them.  You can find the same vile nonsense still being churned across the social channels though, but I know you avoid those forums like the plague.”

He did.  Delving into that deprived world had burnt him once; he had not been near it since.  The rest of the galaxy might live their lives through such mediums, but his solitary life made it easy to cut them out completely.

“So,” he raised quizzical brows, “I ask again, why are we even here?”

Was he trying to put the blame on Sammy?  She did not think so, or at least hoped not.  Having brought Roan to his home, it might have been justified, but that was not the tone of Clay’s question.  Instead, he was searching for reason to this madness.  The lawyer could not give him an answer, especially with the nausea clouding her thoughts.

Clayton unfolded his legs and stuck them out, his feet touching the seats in front.  A deep sigh reflected his melancholy mood.  It was, what it was.  They were here now.  No amount of wishing he were back on his porch would take him there.

Was there a positive in that?  Four years after the death of his wife and only child, finally he was away from that sorrowful, mourning place.  How many days and nights had he wasted on that porch, staring at the trees and the garden, and seeing none of the beauty?  He would have sat there another four, or another forty, wallowing in that comfortable pit of sadness.  The sadness was still with him, of course it was, no amount of jump technology could catapult him away from that cloud, but at least now, he was moving.  At least now, he was doing.

Stretching, he pulled up his toes, the muscles in his calves tight.  On Three Zero, the artificial gravity had demanded some sort of daily workout, but since being back on Earth, exercise had become a rare event.  The pull of the planet’s gravity on his human body had fit like a lazy old shoe.  It was too easy to ignore the muscles when the whole world played along so nicely.  The stretch brought rare tension and the need to stretch further was overpowering.  In fact, he wanted to run.  He wanted to get those muscles pumping and his heart beating.  He no longer wanted to just hide.

“I don’t believe her,” he declared, loud enough that the subject of his comment stopped the conversation with the pilot and peered over her shoulder.  She did not turn far enough to meet Clayton’s hostile gaze, but he knew she was listening.

“I do not believe her at all,” he repeated.  “This is some game, of course it is, and it’s probably going to end up with us all dead.  I know she’s a killer, I’ve seen her.  She’s taking us into trouble, it’s obvious, and we are fools.”

Then, to Sammy, with dry eyes, alive eyes, eyes more determined than they had been in a long time.

“So why are we here?” he asked again, now choosing to answer his own question.  “Because how could I not be?  How could I spend any more time wallowing when offered this chance?  Even if I think this expedition is just pissing in the wind, it still offers hope.  That’s why you brought her to my door; you feel the same, I know you do.  There is that one in a million chance she is actually telling the truth.  I’ve got to chase this, you know it, she knows it; I have got to go after my son.”

His lawyer and friend nodded: “You do.”

“Always there, Con,” he said, solemnly, “always there.”

Chapter Four

At sixty-two, Councillor Lana Steph was one of the youngest in the upper house, although she did not feel it.  She was tired, exhausted from the pressures of the post.  Hardly a day went by when the weight of responsibility on her shoulders was anything less than overwhelming.  She longed to get away from it all, to take a break, to visit a luxurious location and pamper away those heavy problems.  It was ironic, therefore, that it was not relaxation but was the heaviest burden of them all that brought her to the Silver Bird, a luxury resort orbiting Agaric B, deep in the Pavo sector.

Long since identified as habitable, the barren terrain of Agaric B itself remained undeveloped.  Funding shortfalls and a successful legal challenge against the contractors had led to years of delays and ultimately, the monies had been diverted elsewhere.  Although not far from Sol in cosmic terms, the closest point only twenty light years away, the systems that made up the Pavo sector were cash strapped.  An historic insistence on self-governance and a series of ridiculous grandiose developments were to blame.  That was all before Councillor Steph’s time, she was quick to point out.  Indeed, her rise through the political ranks came on the back of the resultant austerity cuts, which saw her surf to power on the wave of public anger.  As an outspoken collectivist, she was determined to stabilise the finances and grow the inward investment, but it had been hard, hard going.

Now, her time was heavily devoted to council business, but she kept in touch with as many of the system and planetary administrators as she could.  Today she was doing just that, or more precisely, a former administrator, although that had been a long, long time ago.  The location, the Silver Bird, was home and employment to fifty thousand, and attracted millions of visitors each year.  If all went to plan, perhaps Lana might kill two birds in one visit and squeeze in a massage or spa, although her social conscience might find that a challenge.

The station was a decadent example of the excesses of previous government and offered stark contrast to the austerity experienced since.  Lavishly large, it was a small moon of plastics, metals and glistening synthetics, circling a dead planet.  It was designed with aesthetics trumping practicality, and this was no more obvious than in the energy-hungry gravitational system needed to support the spectacular curved inner world.

A frequent visitor, Lana Steph had long since become accustomed to looking up and seeing distant structures arching into the artificial heavens.  First time tourists, however, were often observed craning their necks to take in the physics-defying views.

There were many such visitors around that afternoon, her walk through the gardens hampered by a constant need to side-step to avoid them.  On other occasions, Steph would have likely taken longer, marvelling with the sightseers, pausing to take in the beauty of the gardens.  With work preying on her mind, and a fixed timeframe in which to dash through the park, such wonders were just a pleasant backdrop.  If there was a good place to feel stressed, this was probably it.

Every career, she supposed, had ups and downs.  Whatever profession someone fell into, no doubt all experienced periods when they wished their path different.  The councillor was still young enough for a change in direction, barely half-way through her working life.  Sometimes, though, paths become too well trodden, the direction too clearly set.

Traversing the park, she pondered uncomfortable truths.  One, she knew nothing else, politics was her only option.  Two, her academics were not fantastic, and she questioned her own mental capacity to succeed in another career.  Three, she was a politician for all the right reasons, and to walk away would kill her.  Things were broken and needed fixing.  This was her calling, her gift, her only way.

The actual path, the one her feet presently walked, branched like the prongs of a trident, left or right or straight ahead.  The symbolic irony was not lost as she chose the middle, the directional choice that matched her politics, the inevitable direction of her future.

Ah, the future.  Someone had once told her that today’s stresses are tomorrow’s strength’s, or some similar philosophical nonsense.  It did not feel like these stresses could ever result in a positive outcome.  The bullish behaviour of other councillors in respect to the Dark Zones alarmed her no end.  She understood and held sympathy with the urgency to recover the fugitive, and she recognised that the Kamdo could not be allowed to stand in the way, but the aggressive posturing was too much.  The despatch of not one, but three battlecruisers was outrageous.  It was deliberately provocative, and she saw only one outcome.  The galaxy stood on the brink of war.  With thirty-two in the council, her single vote was impotent against all the others, unless she could garner support.  Alone, she could do little to change the course of events unfolding hundreds of light years away. Delaney, Estevez, and the other belligerent cronies were mongering a conflict that could kill billions.  Whilst Kayla McGann sat centre stage in this show, she wondered how much those bulls really cared about the fugitive.

Ahead, a small group of tourists stopped, excitedly pointing fingers at the buildings hanging a mile above them.  Not wishing to alter her speed, she plotted a route between the main group and a man stood slightly apart.  They paid little attention as she approached.

Despite her important position, the councillor’s staff did a good job of keeping her out of the public eye.  Occasionally she would be recognised, but not here.  The Silver Bird was far from her regular haunts and political corridors, and dressed casually, she merged into the background well.  Besides those she planned to meet and the two personal security officers who tracked twenty meters behind, no one was aware of her visit.  As she neared the group, assuming her anonymity intact, she confidently stepped into the gap, never expecting that the man would suddenly block.

To avoid a collision, she slammed on the brakes.  A half apology was mumbled from her lips, and the same came from the stranger.  There seemed no threat, just a misjudgement on his part, perhaps seeing her late.  The undercover security officers saw nothing untoward either, and when the man raised a hand to the councillor, they took it to be an apologetic gesture.  No one noticed the flick of his finger, projecting a tiny cylinder.  Amongst the many bugs, she did not spot the fly-sized object despatched in her direction.  She felt nothing either, when it attached itself to her shirt, just beside the collar.

The man offered a firmer apology and then stepped to the side, clearing the path.  Pleasant smiles were exchanged, and she continued on her way.  Moments later, as he watched the councillor exit the gardens, the smile slipped, his face turning from warmth to hate.

“Keep it safe,” he mumbled, too low to be heard by those around, “keep it safe.”

The councillor headed on to her meeting, unaware she was now being tracked.  In a system sympathetic to her own political stance - the councillor’s back yard - she had the right to feel safe, but that complacency would cost her dearly.  She was here to see an old adversary, seeking an unnatural alliance in a desperate desire to avoid war.  If knowledge of this visit were to leak beyond her inner circle, the threat to her reputation was one thing, the threat to her life, quite another.

+     +     +

A handful of light years away, Sol beat down on the bare chest of another member of the council.  Sprawled on a lounger, the president was enjoying the rays of humanity’s first sun, on their first planet.  Most things across the sprawling human empire were measured in decades or centuries, but not here on Earth, where this ritual was ancient.  For two million years, species of the homo genus like this one had drawn pleasure from the heat rays of this familiar star, the only solar god known for most of that time.  Why, in the last few centuries, had humanity gone and made things so complicated?

The sunbather, eyes clamped shut against the brightness, could hear the giggles and splashes of children in the nearby pool.  Another simple pleasure.  His own offspring, shifted by a couple of generations.  He had sixteen great-grandchildren, three of whom were visiting today.  It was an absolute delight and much needed distraction to have them around.  However short-lived these moments of peace were, he was determined to soak them up, and restore some calm to his chaotic life.

As noble as that aim was, he was going to fail.

In the moments where he was lost to the sun and the sounds, his mind drifted to a smoothing, tranquil place.  Here, childish play mixed with the chirp of birds, and the rustle of wind through tropical branches.  In this glorious place, the scent of skin oils calmed, and consciousness easily slipped to blissful dozing, escaping the rigours and torments of everyday existence.  No sooner had he began to nap, then the curse of an old man’s nasal cavity struck, and a loud snore jerked him awake, the stresses of his arduous life flooding back.

Arduous was the right word, it perfectly summed up his lot. President Denvour Chilake lay an arm over his eyes and sighed.  As Councillor Steph mused over her political challenges in another part of the galaxy, here Denvour did the same.  He had a remarkably long career.  A steady climb through the different tiers of government, from the Nigerian parliament, up to the African Congress, then the United Earth Senate, the Union Senate, and three decades ago he had been selected as sector representative on the Union Council.  Looking back, it was quite a journey, none of it particularly planned.  Oh, he had always harboured ambitions, craving power and influence but at no point had there been a map or a plan to get to this place.  It happened, that was all, it happened, and here he was, President, Commander-in-Chief, El-Supremo… top of the political pyre.

How the hell..?

He wanted to scream.

One of his beloved great grandkids was calling.  He pulled up his old bones, snatching shades from beside the lounger.  The Caribbean sun briefly spanked his retinas before he bathed them in the brown filtered lenses and the world took on a lovely hue.  All three of the children were looking his way, but it was Shola atop the slide, waving excitedly, keen that he watched her descent.  He found a smile and waved back, even managing a cheer and a clap as she splashed into the pool.

Bravo, beautiful Shola, bravo.

It was a short-lived moment of joy.  He longed to return to his doze, escaping to that better place - the calm, soothing dreamscape - but already stress upon stress was beginning to layer into his thoughts.  He sat atop a wobbling pyramid, a chaotic political hierarchy covering the expanse of the explored galaxy.  It all panned out beneath him.  Billions of partisan voices shouting up, telling him their woes, demanding actions, decisions, funding.  It was only ever the negatives, only ever the complaints, only ever delivered with venom and spite.  He sat astride a rotten mountain of bitter shit, with all the problems of the wretched human race stinking beneath his backside.

Bravo, Denvour, bravo.

Never had he imagined that one day he would be president.  It was never an ambition, never dreamed, never hoped, never chased, but who would not seize the opportunity when presented?  His predecessor had been weary, the galaxy weary of her too.  It was a time desperate for change, desperate for a new leader, and he fit the bill.  Fresh, radical, and, most importantly, not the incumbent.  On taking up the post, he did so with vigour and passion, full of ideals and beliefs to pursue.  Time had changed that, like it changed everything, sapping his enthusiasm, draining his desire and drive.  It was the eternal entropy of existence.

Was he now the weary one?  Was his time coming to an end?  He could choose to quit, if he wished, sat here, alongside the pool in his private Caribbean retreat.  He could fire up his identifier, open up a mail, and dictate his resignation.  Send.  Done.  He could even get Chef to do it for him.  Maybe it was time for someone else to take all the stress, time for someone else to climb on top of the pile of shit.

Who, though?  Who else could lead the human race?  Who would be chosen?  Were there any who could effectively manage the threats humanity faced?  A sensible head like his good friend, Councillor Bahir, perhaps, but the risk of a hot-headed fool like Delaney was high.  What a disaster that would be!  How unstable would the galaxy suddenly become?

So what?  He had served his time, who succeeded him was not his problem.  Retire.  Do it.  Open that mail and do it.  Leave humanity in the hands of someone else.  Let humanity take their chances on the roulette wheel of ego and megalomania.  The galaxy may well destabilise.  Rebellions may well find new energy.  Inter-planetary wars may even ensue. But the fires would not reach this deep into the empire.  The Dark Zones would burn, nearby sectors might singe, but Sol?  Earth?  This Caribbean paradise?  Never.

Was he forgetting Three Zero?  Wars, causes, soldiers, terrorists - history had proven that even the most distant of troubles were capable of landing on local doorsteps.  He could not leave the galaxy to the likes of Delaney.  There was too much at stake.  Besides, the promises he had made in coming to office were not fully delivered.  He had offered ‘A safer future’, long before Three Zero had shaken the galaxy.

That attack had been an attempt to destabilise the president and his government in their own backyard.  It had failed, with the inner sectors rallying to his battle cries.  Three Zero had handed him the mandate to tighten the grip on frontier settlements and he had taken it.  In the months that had followed, many dissidents had been rounded up, many rebellions, quashed.  Terror would not win.  The Union would not let it, and, moreover, he would not let it.  A safer future had been the promise and a safer future the empire would have.

The aftermath had also enabled Chilake to push on with huge investments in space and defence research.  Throughout his tenure, one eye had always remained fixed on the depths of the void, looking further, listening harder, seeking out the alien threat many believed inevitable.  With the budget secured, he had upgraded the military with the building of the four irrepressible battlecruisers, a new front line in the protection of humanity.  If there was anything that symbolised the president’s time in office, it was those magnificent ships.

He could have walked away the day they launched Aramis.  He could have left on a high.  There were times since too, when honourable salutes and gratitude from the media could have provided the perfect retirement accompaniments.  Now, had he missed that chance?  With instability hanging over the Dark Zones, any attempt to quit would lead to allegations he had left the Union in a mess, abandoning a sinking ship.  Even his friends at Grayling would struggle to publish anything positive.  He was not willing to leave to such a bitter fanfare.

And it was all because of one woman.  It was all because of Kayla McGann.  Damn her to hell and back.  His legacy lay in tatters because of her escape.  He needed them to find her.  He did not care if she ended up back in a cell, or returned as a corpse, she just needed to be found.

Under the brilliant sunlight, the grandkids were calling again.   He managed another smile and a feeble wave.  As he brought his arm back down, a vibrating pulse shook his wrist and the identifier flashed for attention.  Was this the news he was waiting for?  Was McGann back in custody?

He tapped the device, a low static buzz instantly in his ear.  A message was waiting.  Another tap and it started to play.  It was official, spoken in an artificial voice only ever heard by council members.  It was the same voice that guided them through council business, laying out the agenda, capturing all the decisions and actions.  Today though, it was fulfilling a different purpose.

Feminine soft tones spoke in his ear.  No matter the subject, no matter the issue at hand, the voice carried such a calm and reassuring air.  Taken in by the lullaby, he listened, his brow creasing in confusion, unsure if he had heard correctly.  Shola was persistent with her yelling and it took all his willpower not to scream across and demand her silence.  He could not do that, however worrying the serenade of the Council Oracle.

He felt the stress explode.  Somewhere in his identifier’s neuro-fibres the jump in blood pressure registered, but it was too busy replaying the message to flag.  The president took it back to the beginning five times before he finally accepted what he was hearing and the gravity of the news.  Once, four years before, sat in a civic reception on the distant ocean world of Ambula Blue, this same voice had interrupted.  Then, as now, his heart had leapt, realising he was living through a dreadful day, a day that history would grab hold of and never let go.  Three Zero had ripped at humanity then, threatening to tear apart not only his presidency, but the Union too.  The news delivered today, at this Caribbean poolside, was of equal magnitude.

Shockwaves were about to erupt across all the inhabited systems.  Thoughts of legacy rushed back, worries of how he would be remembered, worries of how the media now and in the future would depict him.  Just like Three Zero, in that moment, he had no idea how to act.  What did he do?  How did he make this go away?  He could not click his fingers and make it better, even though it was his job to fix it.

“Papa Denvour!” called his beautiful little girl.  “Look, Papa, look!”

He did, he looked.  Whilst watching her slide into the sun-warmed pool, he summoned up Chef, the other voice fading from his ear.  His break was coming to a premature end, and more suitable clothing would need to meet him on the shuttle.  Move over Papa, there was a frightened politician coming through.  It was time to retake his unenviable seat on top of the stinking heap of shit.

+     +     +

Of all those who received the Oracle’s call to council, there was one for whom it was not a surprise.  In anticipation of its arrival, he was already en route to Earth when the message came through.  Many of the thirty-two would not travel, choosing to appear as holograms, but this councillor wanted to make sure he was there in person.  He wanted to see the president squirm from up close, not some impersonal projection of discomfort.  It was a moment he would enjoy immensely.

First Kayla McGann’s escape, and now this.  No one would have predicted a surprise attack by the Kamdo, nor the scale of their success.  It could not have turned out better.   The enemy getting aboard one of the president’s beloved flagships was excellent news.  Porthos ‘compromised’, the Oracle had declared, with high casualties anticipated.  His years of scheming were finally reaping their rewards.  It was all coming together nicely.

His lover was with him, the two were inseparable now.  To onlookers this younger man, a hundred years his junior, was just another member of staff, their relationship kept away from the attention of others.  He could not allow an intrusive media to make him the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons.  Whilst Kurt shared his bed, the councillor kept his scheming plans away from him.  It was not just a matter of trust; the magnitude of what lay hidden within the councillor’s devious mind would have also been too great for the boy to handle.  There were very few knew, only those others who had as much to gain or equally lose as he did.  The Guild were very tight lipped, he was confident of that.

As the Oracle played in his ear, he compared the content to that of a call he had received twenty minutes earlier.  Although different in style, the basic substance was the same.  Unlike the unemotional Oracle, the message from Meyer had been riddled with all the energy and vigour of a man keen to get on with the job.  The commander was already aboard Porthos, having assumed command, the whereabouts of Ana Cholewinska a mystery.  Although the councillor could not have gleaned this from the factual Oracle, Meyer had spoken of a turning tide, and his words had held confidence.  Soon, the vessel would be back under Union control.  The damage was done though, and it was so, so beautiful.  Payback was inevitable, for both the despotic regime and for the failing president.  Both had been a long time coming.

Chapter Five

The winds were getting up now, but most inside the base were oblivious to their growing ferocity.  Not Agent Victor.  He was leaning against the surveillance room door, watching the sandstorms brew on the external cameras.  They could get up to ridiculous speeds, heated by the sun, whipping up those tiny beads of grit until they could cut a person down to size.  The diminutive and frail Doctor Schmidt was lucky to be alive.

At the consoles, two operatives were busily carrying out their routine visual sweeps of the base.  The old woman did not pop up on any of the displays so, not wanting to disturb their work, Victor fired up his identifier and connected to the system.  He quickly found her, but it was hardly worth the effort.  She was still sleeping, an agent sat alongside, monitoring equipment attached to the empty socket in her wrist.

The medics had described her condition as ‘generally okay’, which he had not felt particularly insightful.  When pushed, they had clarified that she was suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration but was going to be fine.  It was amazing really, considering the state of the pacer and the dead co-pilot.

They had found Schmidt just inside the entrance to the battered ship.  Nearby lay the half-baked body of the man whose beacon had brought the rescuers to the site.  It was a mystery as to why he was out there, exposed to the extremities, his helmet damaged in the crash.  The pilot’s whereabouts were a mystery too; she was nowhere to be seen.  Confused testimony suggested Trooper Klein had gone to find help, but that was against all the protocols.  There was little doubt Klein had perished, just like her colleague.  With no time to hang around, the storms moving in, Victor had ordered the rescue team to return, bringing an unconscious Schmidt with them.

Back at the base, the doctor was safe but still unresponsive.  Her vitals were good though, for a woman of her age, especially given her lack of any previous stem cell refresh.  The medics were confident she would fully recover.

Meanwhile, this terrible assignment stumbled on, tripping from bad to worse.  Jed Luca was back in the holding cell, doped up on Midazolepine.  The drugs had calmed his screaming fits for now, and he had been in a reasonable state for the broadcast earlier.  Having watched that video back, however, the subject was hardly convincing in his confession.  This was a view frustratingly echoed by Victor’s superiors.  What did they expect, given the treatment of the prisoner over the previous few days?

Beatings, near drowning, and a high dependency on the drug all contributed to his current state.  Despite the training, Victor could not enjoy this part of the job. There was no satisfaction in seeing this hardened terrorist destroyed, whatever his past crimes.  Others lapped up the role of torturer, but his humanity would not let him.  It was even harder to stomach when it did not reap the reward.  Having so far failed to deliver on the primary objective, the end had not justified the means, which probably meant goodbye to any hopes of a juicy next assignment too.  Victor saw a future of tedious surveillance jobs panning out before him, with a soul-destroying spell away from operations a likely outcome.

Damn this job.  Damn McGann.

Bored with the patient, he closed the transmission.  He was thankful the doctor was still alive.  Losing a valuable asset as well as failing to deliver would have been a double blow to his career.  He did not care for her wellbeing, only her value to the Union.  The doctor was difficult to work with.  She was a cantankerous bitch who offered no loyalty and garnered none in return.  He held growing suspicions that the work carried out on Luca was deliberately substandard.

The version of Jed Luca she had returned was not the full one, the legacy of Pike Macey still present.  According to the Project Indigo files, the process was expected to be completely reversible, and that was without the use of Midazolepine.  Something had gone wrong, and this agent’s eyes were firmly fixed on the doctor.  He could not outrightly accuse her of sabotage, not yet, not without any evidence.

The surveillance operatives were still going through their checks, so he left them to it, leaving the room.  On the corridor, two faux agents passed by, their android features almost impossible to spot.  They saluted, he saluted back.  Why did two human troopers have to die with these mechanical freaks going spare?  It came down to cost, he supposed, all about balancing the galactic books.  Manufacturing to this quality was incredibly expensive.  Sadly, human flesh was worth less than this synthetic kind.

As the androids passed, Victor’s head was awash with more questions.  Why had the pacer crash-landed?  What was it still doing hanging around this system when it should have left hours before?  Flight path records, obtained surreptitiously from Paris air-traffic control, showed a sudden re-entry several hours after embarking on its interstellar journey.  Why?  The subsequent erratic flight patterns threw up even more misgivings.  There had been no comms over any of the Union channels either, no request to return, no authority to change the journey, and no mayday.  What had caused a reliable, well-maintained craft to fall from the sky like that?  And why this sky?  Why had it come back?  He did not only need the doctor awake to work on Luca, but he also grew impatient for answers on the crash.

Ten steps beyond the faux agents, Victor stopped, pondered for a moment, and then turned.

“Agent Sapphire,” he said.

Both androids paused, but only one, the female, spun to face him.  Her movements were so impressively human that Victor even found himself admiring the curve of her backside and hips as she turned.  Apparently, they possessed very realistic genitalia too, but that was something he had no desire to confirm.

“Yes, sir?” she asked politely.

It was impossible to tell her voice was artificial.  Damn, the technicians behind these were good.

“Drones,” he said.  “What drones do we have?  Any capable of withstanding the conditions outside?”

Her eyes blinked.  Just a tiny bit too slow, slightly unnatural, but not enough for someone unknowing to pin her with the android badge.

“We have numerous service and military drones at our disposal,” she replied.  “Current wind speeds and the density of the storm would render them all inoperable.”

Not the right answer, he needed that crash site investigated.

“And I suppose it’s too much for your kind, suited up?”

“In those temperatures we too would overheat.”

That was a flaw directly linked to their appearance.  The androids only looked so human because of the similar physiology, from the synthetic skin to the blood-like fluids running through the veins.  If that fluid overheated, it would boil, and damage the delicate organic circuitry it fed and cooled.  Victor had known all this; his question had been clutching at straws.

He frowned at Sapphire.  Annoyingly, she mimicked his expression.  So expensive, yet these minor programming flaws seemed to sneak through occasionally.  The other android turned now, far too late, to react to his companion’s conversation.

“Anything else, sir?” Agent Sapphire asked.

Felipe Victor shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I suppose not, but can you monitor the external situation and as soon as conditions improve enough for the drones, let me know?  That is all.”

The androids saluted in unison then turned away and continued about their business.  He watched them for a moment with particular focus on the pants of Sapphire.  Frowning, he carried on along the corridor.

After initially struggling to get their release, a copy of the scant Project Indigo files sat in his secure archives.  Although there were definitely gaps, they did contain numerous resources on Doctor Schmidt, or, as the media had affectionately labelled her, Doctor Death.  Many articles, particularly those from the time of Chilake’s Ethical Cleansing programme, used that harsh pseudonym.  Those stories touched lightly on her work, but mostly they just sensationalised.  A couple of scientific journals provided a more balanced read and, although Victor was no scientist, he was able to obtain a rudimentary grasp.

Her work involved masking the electronic signals of memory, replacing them with fresh ones.  It was not one technique, but many, complicated by the way that longer-term memories formed fixed pathways in the mind, whilst shorter-term ones remained simpler pulses.  In order to fully render a subject’s memories inaccessible, all the links had to be found and blocked.  This was an immeasurable number of transactions and only after clearing them all could any consideration be given to supplanting new ones.  The locating of those impulses was controlled by an advanced computer system, which then created the subsequent implants, changing the subject’s whole history and personality.  The doctor was not only a brilliant neurosurgeon, but she was also a programming genius.  It was quite a combination.

It had taken the Union Council’s authority to release the data files from Jed Luca’s original procedure.  Those files had been waiting for Doctor Schmidt on her arrival on Meridian Rise, so she could immediately set about reversing the work of four years before.  With time precious, Victor had applied pressure from the outset.  The old woman had warned that rushing could damage the restoration.  Her results had not been perfect, but she had dispelled Pike Macey, forcing him to lurk in the shadows.  Luca was back but he was far from complete.  Had her assertions being correct?  Had the pressure to speed up resulted in an imperfect restoration?  Were the gaps in Luca’s memories there because Victor had rushed the doctor?  Or was it all just a mischievous sham, a premeditated act of negligence by a very clever woman?

And now, she had unexpectedly returned to the base in a dramatic fashion.  Whatever the reasons behind the pacer’s crash landing, it brought with it that second chance, an opportunity for Victor to redeem himself in the eyes of his superiors.  He needed the doctor awake and he needed her back in there with the subject.  If there were memories that would unlock the location of McGann then he wanted them found.

One more bite at this apple, one more chance to save his career.

+     +     +

Tall stalks of emerald leaves reach skywards.  Five feet up, they open into fine yellow blooms, a globe of pollen-rich stamens in the centre.  Flower after flower, a golden field stretches on forever.  A rippling wind floats across this blanket, creating a transfixing illusion of waves on water.  The whole field is alive, pulsing and bubbling as thousands of giant insects dance.  Bees the size of field birds, play amid these oversized chrysanthemums.

He walks among the beasts, fearless, safe in the knowledge genetic modifications render their stings harmless.  These placid creatures, beautifully elegant, jump from flower to flower.  Each time they move on, their leg sacks are heavier.

This vast farm sits beneath a pink sky.  That is wrong, but he does not care.  These creatures would send most running in panic, but not Pike, he is happy here, this is his life.  His work helps keep this planet fed and helps to make sure equilibrium is maintained.  Those delicate scales, balanced over eons, were disturbed by the human invaders, so he adds new flora and fauna into the native mix, carefully chosen, monitored, adapted.  An eco-system created this way, rather than by millions of years of evolution, is always fragile, but Pike is an expert and knows what he is doing.  He can maintain that harmony.

Except… why the pink sky?

That is not right, his home sky is a faint blue.  Where is this?  He has never left his world, happy to stay in his part of the galaxy until he dies, so where can he be?  It is just confusion, a momentary turmoil of the brain, nothing more.  A sky taken from an image, perhaps, a fiction, a fantasy glimpse of some other place.  So he checks, but it is still pink.

Oh no, not this.  It is happening again.  He keeps having these moments of aberration, with strange sensations and things not quite how they should be.  What is causing it?  Blind spots, lost memories, different coloured skies?  It is a mess, a jumbled mess.  His mind is playing tricks, he knows that much, worrying tricks that are starting to scare.  Perhaps he needs a doctor.  If he tells Leah she will be straight on to it.  Forget the self-diagnostics, she will tell him, identifiers have limitations, he needs expert consultation.

Leah, his beautiful Leah.

Where is she?  Not here, among the tall flowers and the huge bees.  She cannot be here because she sits in the future; she is part of events still to come.  So how can she help him?  How is he able to think about her, to see her face, to smell her perfume?  Events still to come, paths still to walk, love still to feel.

The sky is darkening.  The bees rise, sensing the coming storm, the buzz of their wings filling the air.  He winces against the noise, but it is not right that he does, not when he has spent his whole life around such creatures.  Their hum should not bother him, not now, in this field, below the blue sky.

Pink.

“Leah?” he calls.  “Leah?”

There is no call back.  Nothing.  But she cannot possibly reply because she is in the future.  So much of this is not possible, though, and he wants her by his side.  He needs her by his side.

“Leah?” he bellows, fighting against the buzz, trying to be heard over the bees.

“Leah?!”

And then it stops, and the world falls silent.

A room.  Small.  Cold.  Empty.  On the floor by the bed sits a beaker of water.  It is unbreakable, that beaker, but god help him, he has tried.  He wants to drink the water now, but it lies as a puddle on the floor.  That other one, the one lurking in the shadows, had swung out a leg and kicked it over.

“I wanted that,” he grumbles.

“It was never yours,” comes the curt reply.

“But… I wanted it.”

“Stay with your insects,” the shadow snarls.  “Stay with your bees, you freak.  Stay with your daisies and cucumbers.  Stay in that place, this place is mine.”

He knows that to be true.  This place is not a good place; he does not belong here, and nor does he wish to.  This is not his home, with the manicured lawn and his yoga-practising neighbour.  This room has no temperature control, no soft background music, and no mood enhancing fragrance.

It is cold.

No bees.  No Leah.  No garlic.

“Please, I need water.”

It is a feeble request, one streaked with desperation.  The shadow pays no attention, ignoring, shunning, blocking.  He is not welcome, and he must go.  This is not his place.  He should head back to the golden field, with the pink sky.  There, he will find refuge.  There, he will find a place where he still exists, where Pike can see out the rest of his days.

Alone. Scared.  With only the bees for company.

Chapter Six

An eerie green glow sat across the underground chamber.  The shadowy shapes of slumbering soldiers lay in the row after row of beds that filled the cavernous space.  Hundreds of small holographic displays broke the darkness, tracking the vitals of their hosts. From some, there was a gentle rise and fall of the chest, from many, nothing but a deathly stillness.  An hour before, all three hundred, and many more in similar chambers, had taken to their beds to fulfil their duties.  Some still battled on, their sleeping thoughts miles above the planet, engaging with Union troopers aboard Porthos.  For those who had perished up there, there was no consciousness to return, and the body left behind would remain an empty casket for eternity.  Every now and then, somewhere in the chamber, a scream or moan would rise above the steady hum of the equipment.  These were the death throes of someone saved, but too late.  They were brought back, but their minds had wandered too far along the path for recovery.

For a few lucky ones, those rescued before their vitals had flatlined, consciousness would return to these sleeping hulks.  Waking, suddenly, these saved souls might cry out too, anguished by the horrors they had left behind only moments before.  With pain receptors still on fire and their hearts full of anguish and fear, these returning minds would initially cling to the belief they were dying.  Only after minutes of lying in the green glow would they calm enough to realise they had been recalled, as promised.

Nickel was one such survivor.  The programs feeding his alternate body had registered the signs of near death and had successfully snatched him away from danger.  The pressure on his throat travelled back with him, and as his body jerked back to life, he still felt those attacker’s hands around his windpipe and the knee still pushing down on his chest.  It was darker now, with the red flashing lights of the corridor replaced with a faint green glow.  He thought his vision was failing as his consciousness was squeezed away at the hands of his attacker.  There was so much pain too.  His entire body was swamped in agony.  He wanted it to end, he wanted his life to be taken so the anguish would stop.

When the blaster charge had struck, tearing the hole in his gut, it had also ripped away any strength and ability to move.  Yet now, suddenly, he could feel his arms.  Where they had lay useless at his sides, now they were free and alive.  Desperately, he clawed at his throat, grabbing for the hand that was throttling him.  It was gone.  Fumbling fingers searched but there was nothing.  Somewhere, in his confused mind, synapses connected with pain receptors and the pressure around his neck eased away.  Brave fingers explored further, expecting to find the edge of protective headgear, but instead they found a soft, spongy material.  Something was covering his mouth.  The horrid metallic taste of blood started to fade as the artificial flavour of manufactured fibres crept through.  And with this new flavour came the weight of something on his tongue, and the sensation of the mouthpiece entered his consciousness.

Confused, he still searched for his attacker.  Arms reached up, stretching out, trying to find the enemy.  There was no one there.  Stretching even further, he realised that the wound to his stomach was no longer restricting his movement.  There was still a dreadful pain, though, a cold, searing agony.  But when his hands dropped back, gently touching the wound, expecting the gooey warmth of his own blood, all he found was the fabric of is shirt.

More nerves connected in his conscious mind.

He was back and he was safe.  When that realisation kicked in, it did so quickly, and the shadow of his attacker faded.  So too did the rest of the pain.  The aftershocks would echo around his body for some time, his memory clinging to the horror of his near death, but physically, he was unimpeded by the dreadful ordeal.

Grabbing at the facemask, he pulled it away, keen to breathe unassisted, keen to taste fresh air.  It was anything but, a depraved stench sweeping over him.  He gagged, flipping on to his side to avoid vomiting.  Many of the fibres attached to his head and torso were torn loose by the sudden movement, whilst others stretched tight.

What was that vile stench?

Death was what it was.  Not the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh, the demise of his comrades had been far too recent for that.  This was the stink of evacuated bladders and bowels as gases escaped the corpses like lost souls.  He needed to focus, to ignore the fear and disgust, to accept he was back and safe.  There was no threat here, not from the dead soldiers, as horrifying as their presence might be.  They were just like him, and he could so easily have been amongst their number.  Gone for ever, lost, remaining only in the memories of those who knew them.  He owed it to them not to carry fear, and to embrace his second chance.  He had not died on the ship, he had escaped back to this place, and now he had to find his way out and arm himself ahead of any offensive from the enemy.

But he was unable to shake the terror.  Panicking, Nickel snatched at the remaining fibres, yanking them clear of his body.  A heavy boot kicked out at the crowding medical equipment, sending it careering into a neighbouring bed.  He had to get out of here, away from the dead.  He needed to see the weak Clintos sun and breathe the toxins of his home world.  Only then could he be sure he was free of that murderous grip, crushing his windpipe, stealing his life.

Swinging off the bed, he kicked out again, cursing the abhorrent technology.  It sickened him to think what had just happened to his being.  Sure, he had willingly taken part, but to have his essence shifted into a fake vessel in such a way now seemed horrific.  And he had died up there.  He had felt it; his life had slipped away.  It was not right that he was back when so many others could not return.  It was not right that so many comrades had died in such an unholy way, removed from their bodies, to never be re-united.

Standing uneasily on shaking legs, his knees and hips initially seemed unable to work.  It was like learning again, rebooting his brain, trying to convince his limbs it was okay to be here and okay not to be lifeless.  All those thoughts panning out from that moment that the bolt from the Union blaster had struck were not real.  The fear felt as his attacker tried to throttle him, that was not real either.  All that pain, telling Nickel how badly injured he was, telling him his time was up and that his life was slipping away – none of it was real.

And he was no longer on that ship.  He was no longer in those alien corridors.  Instead, he was bathed in the eerie green light of the military complex beneath the surface of his planet.  This body had never been aboard that monster in the sky, these legs had never walked there, this torso had never bled there.  This was what he needed to get his head around.  His mind was back where it belonged - here, now, his home world.  He was back, he was safe, and he needed to park the fears.

When last here, this chamber had been crawling with technicians and soldiers.  The atmosphere had sizzled as he and his comrades were put to sleep.  Now it was quiet and still.  A distant moan briefly disturbed that, and he jumped.  Was that another comrade dying, or a lucky one waking?  If death, it added to those noble heroes, those honoured by the Ultimate Sacrifice.  So many of his kind had fallen, but they had taken many Spitak with them.  His people had spoken, the Kamdo had found their voice.

Not Nickel, though, he was still here, trying to make out the shapes hiding in the shadows.  His focus found the next bed and the comrade who lay there, his face contorted in a frightening mask of death.  It was a dreadful sight and enough to encourage Nickel to get moving.  He needed out.  The chamber was poorly illuminated but with several exits dotted around the exterior, he was confident that provided he headed in one direction, he would eventually find a wall and escape this hell.

He set off gingerly at first, trying not to look at the beds as he passed.  Willing his legs to hold him, he focused on each footfall until he had built the confidence to step up the pace.  With shadows closing on all sides, he managed to keep the panic under control, until he was about two-thirds of the way to the wall.  Then, as he passed a particular bed, there erupted the most inhuman wail.  Like some great beast caught in a trap, the cry was riddled with anguish.  Nickel recoiled, his own terrified howl escaping in response.

He tried to avoid looking, but it was too late, his gaze falling on the wretched figure on the bed.  The green lights cast their sinister glow over the shape of a young woman.  Like Nickel, she was dressed in brown shorts and a simple brown shirt, very different to the battle armour of the displaced soldiers.  Her chest was rising, but failing to fall, her back arching as she sucked in gasp after gasp of air.  He knew what was happening, it was obvious, and when an ear-splintering scream burst out from amongst the gasps, it signalled the end for this comrade.  The poor woman’s body smashed back to the bed and then lay still.  She was dead.

“Nach,” he mumbled, “nach!”

Shaking, whimpering, he recoiled, the top of his legs striking the bed behind.  Reaching back to steady himself, his fingers touched the clammy skin of another body.  This time he did not look, and he managed to wrench his gaze away from the dead woman too.  His fear was intensifying, building in his stomach and chest, forcing sweat from every pore.  He had to get out of this place.

His previous hesitant style was cast aside as he started to run, his boots thudding their way between the rows.  It was a staggering, fearful sprint, his shoulders frequently clipping the equipment, snapping fibres from the bodies of comrades.  He was oblivious to that, oblivious to any damage he may have been causing, his focus solely on getting to an exit.  His imagination was going wild, feverish terrors building, threatening to burst through and knock him off his stride.  Another moan rose loud above the sound of his boots and his panicking mind conjured up the woman back there, no longer dead but her body still arching, as she clambered off the bed, angry he had left her.  She was coming after him, her distorted figure shuffling along the rows.  He should not have abandoned her when she needed him.  They all needed him, these displaced soldiers, they needed his help to get them out.  In that moment, he could not accept any of them were up on the ship above, how could they be?  He could see them, hear them, smell them.  They were all here, some alive, like him, but mostly they were living corpses, furious at what had been done to them.

Nickel was relieved to see the wall ahead.  Made from a dull grey stone, it reflected little of the green, absorbing the eeriness, presenting back a looming, dark barrier.  He could not see an exit.  As he neared, the panic intensified and now he could hear a terrifying panting from behind.  Despite the inevitable clash with the wall, he could not slow, fearing the grasping claws of the pursuing woman.  Fright increased his pace, his legs pumping faster and faster.  The panting was close, so close.

And then he saw the door, a couple of aisles to the left.  He had to slow now, but his pace still took his shoulder into the wall.  He absorbed the blow, bounced off the stone, and lurched towards the exit.  A few strides and he was there.  He feared clammy hands would grab him at any moment, and the door sensors seemed to take an age to register his presence.  Then they saw him, and the door snapped open, bathing him in bright, artificial light.  He hurled himself through, spinning to face the malevolent soldier.  His movements were too quick, and his legs became entangled with each other, sending him crashing to the floor.  Panicked, he shuffled away from the chamber, his feet scuffing on the deck, his arms up, protecting his face.  Eventually, he found himself pushing up against the opposite wall with nowhere else to go, and he was forced to open his eyes and look for his pursuer.

There was no monster.  Quivering uncontrollably, he peered into the chamber.  The light from the corridor penetrated the green space a little, but it was still difficult to see more than a few feet into the darkness.  Fearfully, he waited, expecting a zombie to stagger out at any moment.  Seconds turned into minutes.  Nothing came.

Eventually, he lowered his arms.  The door still sat open; it would only close when he moved away.  With the panic starting to dip, he could rationalise that the panting had been his own.  There had been no corpse lurching after him, it had all been in his imagination.  Now, he needed to turn his thoughts to getting out of the complex, but as he went, he knew his mind’s eye would be back here, imagining the door open, listening for the dragging carcass on his trail.

With his heart no longer thudding, the sweat that soaked him began to cool.  It was a welcome sensation.  He clambered to his feet and looked around.  As with the chamber, this place had swarmed with activity before the attack on the battlecruiser.  Now, it was similarly deserted.

Spitak.

He guessed everyone had done their job.  The enemy had come and the Kamdo had responded, and now many lay dead on both sides.  Having left the battle, he had no idea how it was going, but after that last one-sided encounter he was not optimistic.  The equipment of the group that had taken down his comrades and nearly claimed him too had been impressive.  And if the attempts to take the ship had failed, what then?  What retribution would the Union rain down on his people?

Nickel knew he should re-join the fight.  In the levels above, other forces were no doubt being prepared, getting ready to repel any ground invasion.  Many of his own kin, including his father and siblings, were amongst them.  It was his duty to join them, to continue with the Ultimate Commitment.

But he would not, he could not.  He had seen enough killing, enough death, enough blood and guts.  It was time for this young man to go back to his village.  It was time to go home.

+     +     +

The battle for Porthos raged on.  The onslaught from the assault squadron was merciless and effective, breaking the back of the Kamdo attack.  With fewer apparitions now appearing, the Union forces were able to sweep and secure an area before moving on to the next.  Having regrouped, the ship’s own troopers were now fighting alongside the reinforcements.  Their superior firepower, equipment and training was now winning the day.  Gradually, the combined forces were taking back the battlecruiser.

The death toll was still rising on both sides but the pace with which fatalities were being captured on the manifest was slowing.  As Commander Meyer scrolled, the names of his own troops were adding to the tally, but these were few and far between.  Any Union death, though, was nonetheless an outrage.  At least now, each trooper taken down acted like a lure, indicating an enemy combatant nearby.  The computers were able to quickly pinpoint and despatch drones or other troopers to that location to seek and destroy.  Where previously hundreds of enemy combatants registered on the sensors, now the readings were down to double figures.  They were still coming, but in much smaller numbers, and any advantage from the element of surprise was well and truly lost.

Now the ship was coming back under Union control, there was more time to speculate and theories were awash.  On the bridge, Meyer encouraged the crew to bring forth their ideas.  He wanted as many as possible to be aired, hoping that amongst them, there was at least one that made sense and helped to find a solution to this conundrum.  Where were the enemy soldiers coming from?

“Hard hologram?” a technician ventured.

It was an idea that had already been offered a number of times.  It was obvious, but unscientific.  A hologram was a projection, the subject was not present, and the subject could therefore not be hurt.  These attackers were dying, even if they did then disappear seconds later.  This was a new technology, not some theoretic twist on an existing one.  As unlikely as it seemed, the Kamdo possessed something beyond the Union’s own knowledge.  Also, incredibly, the many Union spies who infiltrated this regime had not identified and flagged it.  How was that?  How had the intelligence agencies failed so badly?  It made Meyer fume.

“A teleport of some sort?” another suggested.  Again, obvious, again, impossible.  Such science had been heavily researched by the Union in numerous expensive programmes over many years.  They had had no success.  The Kamdo could not have stolen the march on this, could they?  With trade restrictions in place, how could they even obtain the equipment necessary to pursue such research?  Blockades across the vastness of space were impossible to enforce and there were always black marketeers willing to risk their liberty and lives to make a fast dollar.  Still, surely not?

Teleport remained the holy grail of science but only a few hundred years before, traversing the galaxy at speeds quicker than light had seemed equally unobtainable.  Throughout the centuries scientist after scientist had theorised superluminal travel impossible, so much so that it became the accepted default of the scientific community.  But theories only last as long as it takes to disprove them, and all it took was that one breakthrough; a single atom forced through a fold in space, projected to an unknown destination.  Gone.  Jumped.  And all those obstacles previously championed by the scientists had tumbled like a house of cards.

Was this the same?  Had the Kamdo found a way to jump human cells without the protection of a ship’s stabilisers?  For the sake of the civilised galaxy, he hoped that was not the case.

“Teleport,” mused the commander.  “But where do they go when they die?  Why does the body disappear?”

He thought of the young soldier whose throat he had crushed.  He had vanished before Meyer could finish the job. How?

“Something is sending them here,” another technician commented.

Meyer almost condemned her for stating the obvious, but as harsh words hung on his lips, he paused, reflected, and sucked them back.  The technician made a very good point.  Although several universal laws were undoubtedly smashed by the enemy’s arrival on board, one remained intact.  Whatever tech was behind this invasion, unless the galaxy was suddenly creating Kamdo out of nothing, something was shifting energy from one place to another.  What was doing that?  What was the power source?  It had to be on the planet.  And they had that signal too, heard by the communications suite only moments before the first of the enemy appeared.  Technicians were still desperately trying to establish the source.  That signal had to point to where these apparitions were coming from.

He moved to the edge of the room where the deck gave way to expansive views out over the planet.  From this height, mile upon mile of the dry and barren land stretched away, the green tint of glauconite evident in the soil.  In the distance the planet curved, the rest of Eropidous lost beyond the horizon.

Much closer, but still several miles away, sat a city.  It was not the kind of city the commander was used to.  The metropolises of the inner sectors were huge by comparison and glistened under their own neon glory.  Sunlight would enhance such places, creating bright stars on the taller buildings, and casting rainbows across succulent garden promenades.  Here, the weak dawn sun was absorbed by the stone constructions.  This urban sprawl just sat there, glum, grey and uninspiring.  But was there anywhere else that signal could be coming from?  He doubted it.

Many decks below the commander’s feet, a formidable assortment of missiles and other munitions lurked.  These powerful, explosive arms were complimented by a host of laser and energy weapons, which protruded from dozens of locations across the hull of this beast.  Meyer longed to test a few.  The city could be flattened in minutes.  Then the signal would surely stop, and the Kamdo would realise the consequences of their impudent attack.

He needed proof, though.  The onboard computers were recording every instrument reading, every instruction, every word spoken on the bridge.  Ultimately, even the commander was subject to rules and restrictions and answered to others.  The delegated authority from the Commander-in-Chief allowed for retaliation, but he could not be indiscriminate.  Proportionate was the flavour, and whilst Meyer would happily look to stretch the boundaries of ‘proportionate’, any actions taken would be subject to subsequent scrutiny.   Much to his delight, he was assured that many hundreds of Union deaths would justify a significant response.  If he could pinpoint the enemy base, the source of the attack, then any strike on that location would be legitimised.  Until confirmation of that source, however, he was wise to hold fire and wait for that justification.  For now, President Chilake was still in charge, and Meyer had to stay measured until such time as the power shifted.

“Come on,” he mumbled, frustrated, “where do they go?”  Then, louder, to the rest of the bridge, “Come on!”

The crew shuffled nervously, none more so than Lieutenant Engels, still tucked away in the shadows.  Meyer briefly looked in his direction.  It was a fleeting glance, but it conveyed all the anger of the senior officer.  The commander cut an intimidating figure and his reputation went before him.  Even First Officer Ben-Amir, who had previously received his praise, was noticeably uncomfortable.

“Can no one give me any answers?” the commander bellowed.  “No one?”

Silence.

With the planet’s vista spreading out spectacularly behind him, Meyer again singled out the young Ben-Amir with an angry, pointing finger.

“That signal, I want it isolating,” he told her.  “Find out what the hell is going on in comms!  I have had enough of waiting, I want answers!”

The first officer immediately stopped what she was doing and opened a channel.  On the other end was a distressed Andrea Pedros, increasingly fraught at the failed attempts to isolate the source.  This new pressure from the bridge was not helpful.  A hushed conversation between the two women went unheard by Commander Meyer, who stood motionless, looking out across Eropidous.  That ramshackle city bothered him.  It was grey and uncivilised, but mostly, it was ugly.  Everything about the Kamdo was ugly.  He wanted the whole lot of them dead.

The inexplicable technology had cheated him of the satisfaction of throttling the life out of one of them, spiriting away the vile creature in those crucial final moments.  Where was he now, that animal?  Wherever, with half his guts ripped out by the blaster fire, he would not have survived, but that did not ease Meyer’s annoyance.  A corpse lying in one of those drab buildings hardly matched the pleasure he would have extracted from feeling that life slip away.

Soon, the evidence Meyer needed would be found, and it would point to only one place.  Then that Kamdo bastard’s corpse would turn to ashes, along with the shed that housed him, and all those who mourned over his body.  Porthos would light up the skyline, and the city and all its stinking inhabitants would cease to exist.

Chapter Seven

There was no security on the front entrance; of course not, that would make her presence too obvious.  Her own guard had their instructions and as she crossed the foyer a glance back confirmed they were inside, discretely seated by the toilets.

It was an impressive museum, but there was no time to enjoy it.  The foyer gave way to a great marble hall where two wide aisles of ancient human artefacts stretched away.  A striking fighter plane was the most notable, suspended over the mingling visitors, a relic of an ancient war.  She was unsure if it was an original or a replica; either way it was impressive.  Twentieth century, maybe twenty-first, but there was no time to log on to the almanac and check.  Councillor Lana Steph planned to spend as little time in these open public places as possible.

“Down to the first blue sign, take the door into the chamber tucked behind the tour guide.  Once inside, look for the giant insect exhibition.  It’s dark in there, but you will see a red light over an exit.  Ignore the ‘emergency only’ notices and go through, but make sure not to be seen.  There will be someone on the other side to meet you.”

These instructions were stored in her head and had been shared with no one else.  Her guards were to sit and wait; this was a private audience.  As bid, she followed the path, into the side chamber and on to the exhibition.  Huge butterfly-like creatures pinned in glass cases greeted her.  The incredible spectrum of colour across their wings was tantalisingly illuminated by carefully placed lighting.  They were beautiful, but at about a metre across, she was happy to have never met a living specimen.  These were probably from a local system and it was likely they were a genetic modification of an Earth species.  On migrating them to the new worlds, such perverse modifications had once been allowed purely for human gratification.  More glass cases, more specimens.  Moths, beetles, ants, and a variety of other pollinating flying insects, several so bizarre she had no idea what they were.  Most were the result of those scientific practices now outlawed.  Perhaps the president had gotten a few things right.

She tried not to look at the hideous creatures, focusing on her destination.  Life was stressful enough without adding those monsters to the things keeping her awake.  Soon she was at the emergency door and immersed in the red light from the panel above.  The museum was quiet, this side exhibit empty.  A quick check confirmed there was no one around.  On pressing the exit button, an automated voice began a low volume warning, but it was cut dead before completing the first word.  The door slid open and she stepped through.

A mountain of a man greeted her.  He nodded, affirming she was expected.  At nearly seven foot, he dwarfed the diminutive councillor, but his demeanour was not in the least bit intimidating.  If anything, the slump of his shoulders made him look nervous and unsure.  When he spoke, his tone was surprisingly light and not what she would have expected from such an imposing figure.

“Welcome Councillor Steph, we trust your journey was comfortable.”

There was no ‘we’, there was only him.  With the small corridor empty, she presumed he was taking her elsewhere in the building to meet the others.  With her security back in the main foyer, the vulnerability of her position was obvious.  Yet she had to trust, she knew that.  Trust was the only way this clandestine meeting could happen.  It was on their terms, in their safe haven, and without any of the usual protections afforded to the councillor’s office, but she had to go with it.  Desperate times called for desperate measures.

“Yes,” she said, “it was a good journey, thank-you, and there are worse places to visit.”

“Indeed,” the man smiled, “I will be needing your bracelet.”

It was a strange choice of word, and it took a moment for Steph to work out what he was referring to. He glanced at her wrist and she understood.  He wanted her identifier.

“Why?” she asked.

No reply was offered and nor was one needed.  The answer to her question was obvious.  She was about to meet someone who had spent thirty years in hiding, concealing their whereabouts from the galaxy.  It was perfectly reasonable all measures were taken to protect their location.  Again, she had to extend that trust.  Steph felt embarrassed not to have offered the device up, but now she did just that, unclipping it and handing it to the man.  There was an undeniable wrench in doing so.  She could not recall the last time it had left her.  She felt naked.

“Through there, if you please,” he said, his tone still ridiculously light.  He was indicating a door at the other end of the corridor.  It seemed he was not coming with her.

Steph looked longingly at the device now held in the man’s fingers.  She did not like the idea of leaving the identifier behind one little bit.  It was ridiculous; what would she miss before it was back in her wrist?  Like so many across the galaxy, she was conditioned to being in frequent contact with others, and constantly updated on the news.  It was irrational; nothing of significance would happen whilst she was offline.  Nothing.

She shuffled the short distance to the second door.  It opened on her approach, revealing a mat and a perch seat in the centre of the otherwise empty, cylindrical room.  She rolled her eyes to the ceiling; how had she not seen this coming? This expedition had been too easy.  Whispered approaches from aides, coded messages, encrypted calls, and this secret trip – all too easy.  To think she could arrange a face to face with this elusive figure had been foolish, and she saw that now.  No one would be joining her in this room, it was a virtual reality chamber.

The door closed without a sound.  Smirking at her naivety, Steph took up her position, resting her backside against the perch.  There was nothing she could do about the deception now other than play along. It was still a meeting, just not the one she had been expecting.

This technology was common in many adventure parks and she knew what to expect.  As she relaxed, a gentle buzz began to shake the air and the walls pulsated from grey to blue.  Shimmering, the room reached forward, consuming her in dancing colours and soothing sounds.  This was an unexpected step of the journey, but it was not an unpleasant one, and she would accept it for what it was.  Her only frustration was that all the efforts and worries about getting to this place unspotted had been unnecessary.  This virtual journey could have been taken from a thousand locations, many much closer to her home.

Of course, the privacy remained of paramount importance.  Although there was nothing illegal in this meeting, acting against the will of the president was never a good idea.  Even as an elected member, with the weight of her party behind her, Chilake could still hold sway over her future.  He was only too happy to clamp down on those who opposed him, his ideals, or his grip on power.

Soon after taking up office, his authoritarian rule had become apparent through the dramatic shifts in policy.  In the early days, archaic laws had placed limitations on many groups, political and otherwise.  Science was the first victim, with many radical programmes stopped under his “Ethical Cleansing”, and several prominent scientists had inexplicably disappeared.  Certainly, there had been some questionable research initiatives and she had not been sorry to see them go, but several progressive studies had also suffered.  There were rumours that some of the more controversial research continued unabated in secret Union establishments.  Steph would have hoped, given her position, that if there was any truth in those rumours she would know, but with each passing year, dealing with this administration had become murkier and murkier.  Undoubtedly, if Project Indigo was anything to go by, Chilake had secrets.  She questioned his motivations on most things.  He was capable of anything if it suited his agenda.  He was a dangerous hypocrite.

So, she would perch in this virtual reality theatre, resting on the courage of her own convictions.  Years of frustration and increasing concern at the aggression from within the council had brought her to this point.  It was foolish, but she needed help.  Indeed, the whole galaxy needed help.  How had it come to this?  Steph was about to speak to a much maligned figure, a pariah from a past that many had almost forgotten.  Never would the councillor have believed she would turn to this woman, someone with whom there was little common ground and whose policies she had found detestable.

The room swam with a mist of images.  She closed her eyes, knowing that when they opened again, they would feast upon a different world.  She would not leave the security of this room, but this trip was taking her a long way from safety.  There was no coming back, not from this dance with the devil.

+     +     +

It did not feel virtual.  Within seconds of the programme kicking in, it felt like a new reality.  What had been an empty chamber was now a ramshackle hut and so complete was the illusion, that it confused her mind into forgetting the museum and the insects, making it seem so natural for her to be in this new place.  There was no sense of unusual and no concern over how she had arrived.

The hut was constructed from pioneer-grade materials and belonged to a by-gone age.  This was a frontier post, an old one at that.  She briefly considered if the hut had been delivered in kit or printed on location, but that was pointless conjecture.  It mattered not.  It was just what it was.  The surroundings were real, they were here, and that was that.

Two large overhead vents whirled away delivering heat that was just a few degrees into uncomfortable.  They brought an unpleasant aroma too; the organic filters needed cleaning out.  One of the vents was directly over the councillor’s chair.  For now, she could cope, but if the dialogue became animated, the warmth would only add to her stress.

The other person was here.  They had just appeared, added to the programme, but Steph had not noticed their arrival.  The reality room created an illusion of normality through the subtle hypnotic effects of clever lighting and imagery.  Anything that changed instantly blended.  The room could promote strong emotions through its conjuring – fear, panic, joy, sexual arousal – but it would never seem out of the ordinary.  For maximum excitement and experience, the integrity of the fake reality was paramount, completely immersing the subject.  In an entertainment park, this kept the sales ticking, but for the purposes of this conversation, it was somewhat extravagant.

“Ah,” the newcomer said with a smile, “you made it then?”

Yes, to this cluttered old hut.

Sat in a similar chair to Steph, the woman’s posture was remarkably straight.  She was leaning slightly forward from the upholstery, with her frail legs resting unnaturally, the knees at right angles, a two-foot gap between them.  It was an awkward position, one showing the woman’s old age and weak joints.  Tight trousers gave away just how thin those legs were, and her torso was equally skeletal.  One emaciated arm rested on a bony knee, the other held on to the cone-shaped top of a walking cane.  Damn, she had aged.  Councillor Lana Steph did not do particularly well at hiding her shock at the other woman’s appearance.

“We all grow old,” the woman said, “everything does.  It’s the way we roll.  Ashes to ashes.”

A traditional way to respect the dead in these parts, the councillor responded, “Ashes to ashes.”

The other chortled, seeming to mock the councillor’s reply.

“You look so different,” Steph ventured, ignoring the old woman’s jibe.  The physical appearance had changed, the mutual loathing had not.

A grin of brown teeth, “Thank-you, nice of you to notice.  Is it my hair?  I had it done especially.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why so old?  You cannot be much more than a hundred…”

The grin shrank back, and the wizened figure lowered her gaze, “What have I to stay young for?”

The councillor remained silent.

“They took it all and left me with nothing.  No power.  No money.  No friends.  No dignity.  Why would I regen? I would struggle to afford it anyway!  And where?  I do not want anyone to know where I am, so I could hardly walk into a clinic.  Time will take us all.  I have had enough of this shit, so it can take me early.”

“Yeah, that figures,” huffed the councillor. “Mohan Sigmus, the biggest shirker in the history of the human race.”

The old woman shuffled her feet.  Even that slight movement brought a grimace.  There was a reply coming, but first she needed a moment to calm the pain.  Short of breath, she eventually gasped, “Lana, it is obvious your hatred for me is undiminished, despite all the years that have passed.  Our political battles are legendary and for you they still rage on.  I follow the news.  I see how you still add fuel to my legacy and how you corrupt the truths of the past.  You have allowed your own lies to distort your previously held views and they have twisted your noble cause.  You should drop the animosity, it will eat you up, and besides, it was you who sought me.  Why should I give you my time if you bring me nothing but spite?”

Councillor Steph held her tongue.  This audience was far more important than satisfying the years of bottled-up rage; that hatred would have to simmer some more.  Sigmus was wrong to think the spite was only fuelled by past battles, however.  This sector was still on the brink of bankruptcy, hugely in debt to an unsympathetic Union, paying the price for the crazy policies started under the old woman.  They had only served to feed the pockets of tycoons and moguls, the weight of their greed slowly crushing the hopes of the masses.  The impact had flowed like rivers through the decades, with new streams of corruption still pouring into the main body.  Eventually, the river was sure to break its bank.  Mohan Sigmus had a lot to answer for.  When the flood arrived, and that time was close, it would drown those unable to get out of their way.  Perhaps this old, frail body was her attempt at atonement.  Lonely and broken, she had trapped herself in a self-imposed, self-flagellating, exile.

“Why are you even here?” the old woman asked.  “The last time we saw each other was at the senate.  You threw scorn at me then too, remember?”

“Of course.  That was the day you disappeared,” recalled Steph.  “I do not regret what I said.  I hoped you would remember it, remember it word for word.  I will not deny feeling pride that my words hurt you.”

Sigmus managed another chuckle; it brought her obvious discomfort.

“I do not believe you mean that,” she said, “and besides, the media had turned on me long before your pathetic little outburst.  Your spiteful rant was nothing compared to the pillaring I suffered at the hands of the press.  Public opinions shift, that’s politics, but losing the support of those who put you in office hurt me more than you ever could.  I reconcile myself with the knowledge that sometimes the right decisions are not always the popular ones.”

“Millions on the outer worlds were dying, starving to death…”

“And billions more were thriving, the human race expanding rapidly, technology taking us further and further.  We were on the edge of so many breakthroughs, so many wondrous advances that would have eradicated starvation, that could lift us above the challenges that face us now…”

“You ignored the needy.  You worried more about the wealth of the few, allowing corporations to exploit the systems of this sector and beyond…”

“Those corporations were moving us forward.  They were funding the developments we needed…”

“Who needed?” challenged Steph.  “Who?”

The old woman rolled her eyes away from her guest.  For a while, save for the wind outside and the whirl of the vents, a silence lingered.  Sigmus was seemingly deep in thought, her focus on a place where natural light crept into the room through a crack in the rickety shell.  Eventually, she said:

“You know what, Lana?  We want the same things.  We want peace.  We want the citizens of this world, the next, of all the worlds, to have good, happy, safe lives.  We want full bellies, of course we do, of course I do.  We want our children to grow up with opportunity and without any fears.  But humanity’s spread is too far.  The human race ran to the stars and we kept on going.  Jump technology continues to push us further.  We can live over a century and a half if we so desire, and we can spawn numerous children, dozens of grandchildren, hundreds of great grandchildren…”

Councillor Steph found herself gently nodding.  She wanted to hold the head still, rigidly defying what her heart told her, but that was not the right thing to do.  This old adversary was looking back, sorrow in her eyes, and Steph was moved.  That final confrontation decades before had been vile, the words rancid.  All this time later, even though she tried to deny it to herself, Steph felt guilty.  That guilt had partly fuelled this trip, bringing her here today.

Sigmus wheezed, catching her breath, and then continued:

“You can condemn my economic policies all you like, but productivity increased significantly in my years.  We made more, we fed more, but it was impossible to keep up with the growing demand.  Our politics differ, we are the opposite end of the spectrum, but our aims will always be the same.  Your socialist ideals would have no more satisfied the expansion of the human race than my capitalist ones.   You called me a greedy whore.  You accused me of lining my own pockets and being complicit in the deaths of unfortunates.  Evil, you said.  Nasty, you said.  Oh, I can be, but so can we all.  I did what I thought was best, always, I could not predict the future.”

Her words were weak now, the effort taking its toll on her withered body.  Another wheeze, this time accompanied by a clenched fist raised to her chest.  Despite a narrow cuff, her arm was narrower, and the sleeve gaped to reveal a small plug just beyond the empty identifier socket.  Steph recognised the medical device; it was used for regulating the release of drugs.

“I’m dying,” Sigmus said, following the other woman’s eyes.  “Slowly, but I’m definitely dying.”

This was not good news.  Lana Steph felt a shiver of remorse.  On many past occasions, she had wished an end on this adversary.  Now, though, she saw the galaxy differently.  Thirty years of Chilake had turned the passionate, young idealist into a seasoned, wily realist.  Humanity was on the brink of war and in the grip of megalomaniacs happy to let the chaos loose.  Gone were the days where social and economic policies were the things that mattered.  With the fear of large-scale death and destruction now to the fore, the more benign aspects of politics took a back seat, and so did the old divides they fuelled.

Councillor Steph needed this old woman, as vile as she had once found her.  She needed help, the galaxy needed help, but this was not what she had expected to find.  This fragile figure was a shadow of the once formidable politician.  Could this skeleton be of any use now?  Did she have the strength for the battle ahead?

“I’m sorry,” said Steph, “surely you can get treatment or…”

“Regen?” the old woman managed to smile.  “Hardly.  Like I said, I want to stay out of the public eye, and I do not have those kinds of funds.  Look where all that lining of my own pockets you accuse me of, got me… The disease has gone too far anyway, I am beyond repair.”

Months ago, in deciding to enlist this woman’s help, Lana Steph had considered Sigmus’ age.  One hundred was not young, most people in this part of the galaxy would live decades beyond that.  Indeed, several currently in the council were older than the figure sat in the chair.  Did the old woman’s condition change things?  It certainly did not help.  But after months of searching and secret liaisons, she was not going to let her efforts go to waste.  Those restless nights, lost to anxiety attacks and migraines, were not going to be for nothing.

Steph was terrified at what the future held.  Peace hung by a thread and the aggressive posturing of the president and others had to be stopped before it led to war.  Any protracted conflict would create power vacuums across inhabited space, and there were plenty of factions only too happy to fill those voids.  War would tug at the Union’s fabric and any loose fibres would lead to chaos.

There were others in the senate who would support her cause, and even possibly a couple in the council, but any alliance she could muster would lack the bite.  It needed that voice, that figurehead.   That was why she was here today and what she hoped to gain from this meeting.  Here sat the perfect foil, her rickety old legs awkwardly spread.  This woman could shake the establishment to the core and galvanise a movement against Chilake.  If only she could bring Mohan Sigmus back from the wilderness, with all the tenacity and fight of yesteryear.  That had been the hope.  A last hope, perhaps.  As she looked at the frail figure before her, she realised how foolish placing all her hopes on this one had been.

Leaning forward, her hands resting on her cheeks, fingertips rubbing tired eyes, Steph looked dejected.

“I don’t know what to say,” she sighed.

“No,” said Sigmus, “this is not what you expected, is it?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

Steph managed an exasperated smile.

“And I’m sorry you are going through this,” she said.  “It is sad to see such a powerhouse reduced to… are you in pain?”

Sigmus nodded, “Far too much.  I have relief if I want it, but it clouds the mind.  Your vigorous pursuit of me, and the determination you have shown to get this meeting in place, deserved the alert me, not some spaced-out version.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Why did you come, Lana?  Why come to me, of all people?”

“I need a voice.  I need to be heard.”

“In what way?”

“I have information,” the councillor explained, “information that could bring down the president.  A year ago, it landed in a secure inbox.  It is explosive.  It could tear the senate apart.  It could tear the galaxy apart!”

“You want that?”

“No, far from it, but we have to bring about change.  This file shows just how corrupt the Union has become, how rotten so many of the top officials and bodies are.  We have to act against those who would bring us war.  We have to force them out of power.  I cannot do that alone.  We cannot do that alone.  We need someone who will make them listen, someone to who the media will flock, and who will get the people to sit up and pay attention.”

The frail woman narrowed her gaze, intrigued by the revelation.

“But why me?” she pressed.  “Why do you think I can help?”

“Who else can grab that audience?” implored Steph.  “Who else but a former commander-in-chief?  Who else but President Sigmus?”

+     +     +

“Wake up Schmidt, you’ve had long enough now, time is pressing.”

He knew she could hear him; the way her arm was covering her eyes against the bright lights were a giveaway.  It was three hours since her rescue from the downed pacer.  According to the guards, she had twice stirred previously.  The first, there had been nothing but a few incoherent and pained moans.  The second time, she had managed a string of seemingly random words.  This time, though, he would force her back to full consciousness.  There were questions to answer.

The heat had taken its toll, but the doctor’s temperature was back to normal and she was well on her way to a full recovery.  Thankfully, she had stayed on the crashed pacer.  In doing so, she had avoided any serious burns and any damage to those precious, wrinkly hands.  Now, he needed those fingers to get to work.

The doctor had worn the same clothes for the last four days and the stink of her stale sweat filled the detention room.  On entering, Agent Victor and his accompanying colleague had both uttered their disgust.  The android guarding at the bedside showed no signs of repulsion, but they could choose to turn off their smell receptors.

“Wake up Schmidt,” Victor repeated, “I’ve no time for your games.”

She issued a pitiful moan, but he was not buying it.  He had stood here calling her for the last two minutes and the change in her breathing in that time was obvious.  This woman was awake.

“You fucking stink,” he said callously.  “You smell like a sewer, one full of dead things.  Why didn’t you get a wash?  They offered you a shower before you left.”

Now there was a deep sigh as she blew air against the inside of her arm.

“They never offered me a shower,” she croaked.  “You are a fucking liar.”

Victor smirked, “Hello, Doctor, welcome back.”

She huffed, shuffling across the bed to get as far away from him as she could.  It was narrow, so that was not very far, but it was enough to show her contempt for the agent.

Whilst the unexpected and unfathomable manner of the doctor’s return presented another problem for Victor’s mission, he was not thinking about that now.  Sure, the downed pacer and two dead troopers would require a lot of explaining, but that could wait.  More immediately, an opportunity for career restitution had presented itself, and he was determined to make the most of it.

Something did not quite stack up with this mission, though.  Right from the start, it had felt rotten.  The initial difficulty in getting hold of the archives had first triggered his suspicions, and there had to be more to Project Indigo than he had extracted from the files.  It did not make sense that Luca, an architect of the biggest peacetime atrocity in history, was not imprisoned after his initial interrogations.  Why would they put him out to pasture, in a lovely little backwater of the galaxy?  Even though his mind had been altered the way it had, what kind of punishment was a cushy suburban life on Meridian Rise?  They must have assumed he knew something worth keeping on ice, so why was that not now coming to the fore?  Agents had elicited some information from Luca, but nowhere near the heavyweight intelligence that justified this operation, and there were no tangible clues to help the search for McGann.  Unless Jed Luca had remarkable resolve and the ability to resist the drugs, everything he knew had been extracted.

Everything?

No!  Victor had to believe there was more.  The Union devised Indigo as an insurance, the memories hidden behind Pike Macey as a back-up.  It seemed to Victor such insurance would have been better stored on file rather than wandering around in the head of a man who could have fallen victim to all kinds of disease or accident, but clearly others had seen things differently.  Why?  Why so much effort?  And if key intelligence was secreted in the subject’s brain, where was it now?  Where was the insurance that the Union had expected to find?  It did not make any sense!  The never-ending questions dancing around his mind would send him into a panic if he thought about them too deeply.  He had to put them to one side, stay calm and plot a way through this.  There was logic to be found somewhere.  He had to believe that, and just get on with delivering the objective.  That meant seizing on the second chance presented by the return of the stinking and loathsome woman.  Focusing on Schmidt was the only way to rectify the failures to date.   Having sent her away previously, frustrated by those failures, he could now see that she had played him.  They had not found what they were looking for in the restoration process because she had fallen short, and she had done so deliberately.

Detained in hellish locations at the whim of others, and branded Doctor Death by the president and media alike, her belligerence was perhaps understandable.  Why would she willingly co-operate with the Union?  What was in it for her?  They allowed her to carry on living, sure, but in poor conditions and with no liberty.  He doubted self-preservation was enough to motivate Schmidt to comply, it was more likely she was fuelled by her utter contempt for her captors.  It was obvious now; she had sabotaged the whole mission to make Victor and his masters look like fools.  She was a vile woman, riddled with bitterness.

All the irritations of the last few days were bubbling, and it took all his resolve to keep them under control.  The temptation to smash his fists into the cranky woman’s flat chest was overwhelming.  He would get away with that too, of course he would, it was a free hit.  After overseeing forty-eight hours of torture, beating on an old doctor was unlikely to raise many eyebrows.  As angry as he was, though, Schmidt offered him the only chance of rescuing his career.

“You can shower when you are fully awake,” he said calmly, his tone conciliatory.  “We will get you a change of clothes too.  Our printers are rudimentary, but I am sure we can make you something suitable.”

Despite the loathing, he would keep this woman on side.  Not only would she try again with Luca, but he also needed to understand what had happened on that pacer.  With no sensible explanation, culpability for the crash would fall heavily on Victor’s shoulders.  There had been enough cockups on this mission already; there was no space on the report card for more black marks.

“What happened on the flight?” he asked.

“Are the others okay?” It was a disarming question for her to come back with, her concern for the troopers unexpected and almost certainly fake.

“Both are unfortunately dead,” Victor said.  “We have located one body not far from the ship.  Drones will be out to continue the search for the pilot as soon as conditions allow, but there is no way she could have survived out there.”

With her face still covered, Schmidt groaned.  It was a sorrowful sound, but he struggled with the idea she was bothered by the loss of two Union troops.  It was possible that the traumatic return to Meridian Rise could have forged an unexpected bond, the desperate events having brought the best out of her, but he scolded himself for even considering such an idea.  The doctor did not have a ‘best’, he was not buying this charade.

“That is sad,” the doctor said.  “How long before you can get out to her?”

“It will not be for several hours.  We cannot afford to write off any more equipment alongside the cost of the pacer.”

Schmidt removed the arm, squinting against the bright light.  Her face, ravaged by the conditions inside the downed pacer, was red and blotchy.  The temperatures inside the ship had soared to dangerous levels and she looked and felt terrible, and severe dehydration had left her with an intense headache.  But inside that over-heated skull, that twisted brain had a plan that no amount of pain was going to confuse.

“What happened?” Victor asked.  “What made them turn back?  You must have been light years away…”

Schmidt closed her eyes again, grimacing against the sting of her tight skin.  “I was sleeping,” she said.  “The first I heard was shouting; the crew were in a panic.  Alarms were going off and they were frantically trying to get the ship back under control.”

Shaky fingers rubbed at the bridge of her nose. She played out a pitiful whine and a desperate shake of the head before continuing.

“I thought I was going to die,” she sobbed.  “It was awful.  Flashing, shaking, screaming, smoke – there was smoke everywhere.  And it was so dark!  Then the light burst through the cockpit windows, blinding.  I thought the re-entry was all wrong, it was burning red, we were going too fast.  And then, all I could see was the desert, coming towards us fast.  There was this huge bump, and the shell crumpled – it felt like we were being crushed.  A couple of panels snapped loose, and the ship bounced, and kept on bouncing.  Every impact shook hard, my head banging against the seat… It was awful!  I lost consciousness, I do not know why, but I presume it was all those whacks to the head, or maybe it was all the pressure, fear, panic… I don’t know.  When I came too, the pacer was empty, there was just me.  It was so, so hot.  And then your troopers turned up… and here I am.”

Still rubbing those saggy old eyes, her chest was rising and falling rapidly.  Sobbing, with weak breaths, she was doing a good job of sounding feeble and fragile.  Her impression of a distressed woman, one who had been through hell, ate away at the scepticism of the trained agent.  Victor cursed his own weakness, but it did not stop him being drawn in.  Perhaps keen to find answers, he made a conscious decision to believe her story.  It stacked up with the chain of events his own reasoning had pieced together.  An emergency – likely a technical issue - so they tried to return, presumably worried about calling elsewhere with the exiled doctor on board.   That convenient explanation was good enough for now, they could investigate further once the storm had passed.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She gave a little shrug.  With nothing more forthcoming, Victor looked to the faux agent at the bedside.  Agent Sapphire drew the patient’s vitals from her memory banks.  “The temperature is back down to normal,” she said. “Several bruises were sustained during the crash landing, and there is heavy inflammation around the back and neck.  She will be in pain for several days, but pain suppressants will help.  There are no major injuries, and the light burns to the skin are only superficial.”

“She is good to go, then?”  Victor smiled.

“I am in pain,” groaned the doctor, “won’t you allow me to rest after such an ordeal?  Surely I can stay here until fully recovered…?”

“Yes, yes,” he interjected, “of course, I have no intention of shipping you off again so soon.  You need to rest, but in return I need your help.”

“I told you not to rush me,” she said, “I told you what would happen.  Am I to surmise the subject is experiencing psychosis?  Is he unable to function properly?  Panic attacks?  Mental breakdowns?  Self-harm?  Catatonic?  Worse?”

Yeah, you told me, Victor thought, not willing to admit it aloud.

“He is experiencing some psychotic episodes, yes.  He has incomplete memories too, and that’s the bit of him I need the most.  I need his head to be full of Jed Luca and no one else.  Rest, but then I need you up and about as quick as possible, back working on the subject.”

“This time, Agent Victor, can I have a little more respect please?  A bit more dignity?  A shower, a change of clothes, and something to eat?”

“I am sure we can manage that.”

“Thank-you,” said Schmidt.

A smirk creased the tight skin of her face.  This was playing out perfectly.  Soon she would be able to complete her work and more, much more.  Inside her impressive mind, further plans were formulating, ones that would ensure her genius received the recognition it deserved.  She would make President Chilake know her name again, and he would curse the day he had locked her away.

Chapter Eight

Apart from a few minutes at altitude, as the rapid transit vehicle crossed Cuba, most of the journey to New York was flown low over the ocean.  The small vessel raced just metres above the waves, cutting across the flat expanse at five times the speed of sound.

It was mid-afternoon.  The sun was in full glory and glistening off the water.  They travelled parallel to the American coastline but there was not a single glimpse of land through the tinted windows.  Not that the president was looking, he was far too pre-occupied.  For the entirety of the short journey, his mind was in turmoil, gifting him a thudding headache.  On the desk, the snack presented on departure remained untouched.  Beside it sat a small pool of spilt water where his shaking hand had tried and failed to lift the beaker.

Less than an hour after collection from his holiday home, President Chilake arrived in New York.  As the small craft touched down on the roof of the senate building, an entourage of advisors and security were waiting.  It took several moments for the president to appear at the top of the ramp and when he did, he looked a worried man.

A young woman stepped forward to meet him.  Her crisp white suit was striking and official, and her credentials were projecting from her identifier.  He thought she was a new face, but in his distressed state he would have failed to recognise anyone but his dearest.

“Welcome, Mister President,” she said.

All he managed back was a lacklustre nod, which totally failed to match the effort she had put into preparing for his arrival.  Despite the gravity of the situation, she had hoped for a little more warmth and sparkle.  This was not the man anticipated, not at all.  He hardly seemed like he could lead a march, let alone the human race.  He looked ill, faint, like he was about to vomit.  She cast a quick glance at a nearby colleague, seeking assurance, but found an unhelpful shrug.  There was nothing she could do but carry on.  Despite the pitiful demeanour of the man presenting, she was determined to hold on to the confidence in her voice.

“The emergency protocols are in place, Mister President,” she informed the commander-in-chief.  “The Oracle has summoned the council, and all but two have acknowledged.  In line with your orders, military leave has been cancelled and Union forces across the galaxy are on high alert.”

He managed another nod, this one slightly more energetic.  Despite every attempt to grab hold of his panic, he was far from calm.  During the short journey, the self-diagnostics tools had beeped his wrist several times.  Chef had rustled up appropriate drugs to settle him down, but they had barely touched his anxiety and he was still close to the edge.  On Ambula Blue, on first hearing of the attack on Three Zero, he had experienced a similar uncontrollable hike in angst.  From relatively early on, though, it had become obvious that incident was isolated.  Today felt bigger. The attack on Porthos could well herald a much broader conflict.

The bottom of the ramp was as far as his legs would take him.  Already beyond the point where the briefing officer had instructed her not to pass, the official advanced still further.  Usually security would have nervously intervened, but on this occasion they hung back.  They were also distracted by the state of the president, who stood there like a frail old man, scared, uncertain, with the weight of the Union on his shoulders.

“Mister President?” the woman in the white suit ventured.  “Are you okay?”

His chin was resting solemnly on his chest.  She stooped to look up at his downcast face.  He was clearly weighed down by all this, and she got that, she got why he looked so beaten.  The pressure had to be immense.  But on this roof, there were dozens of eyes watching him and they needed their figurehead.  The hour of crisis was here; the president had to step up to the challenge.  She was at a loss what to do next other than to help him find a way through this, and to get him away from their glare.

“We need to go inside, sir,” she said.

His lips dared to curl.  Much like a baby with a full belly of milk, it was unclear if it was a smile or some other involuntary reaction.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, his words far from re-assuring, “I don’t think I can.”

In that moment, the only place he wanted to be was back at the side of the pool.  There, he could sip blue lagoons and watch his great-grandchildren at play.  Those joyful cries were precious at any time, but even more so now.  “Papa, watch me Papa.”  The little angel was nearly two thousand miles away, and his chance of relaxation even further.

“I’m here to escort you to your private suite,” the official explained, “Councillor Bahir is waiting for you.”

He seemed to perk up a bit at that.  “Ah, my friend Iqbal, my good friend.”

The official closed her credentials, the image snapping back into her wrist.  The president had not even looked at them.  This moment, her opportunity to make a good impression, was lost to his stress.

There was growing chatter amongst those gathered and she saw the security guards were exchanging words.  On waking today, the young woman had never expected to play such a significant role and on such a large stage.  She felt all their eyes on her back.  Here she stood, with the leader of the human race, providing the only barrier between his credibility remaining intact and the presidency falling apart.  She had to protect his reputation.

“Councillor Bahir is there to help,” she said, improvising.  “He has pulled together the best advisors and speech writers, and he seems confident he can get you through this.”

Chilake perked up a little more.  Now their eyes finally met.  In his, she saw fear and despair.  In hers, he saw concern and nervousness.  Her credentials were gone, but her name and post were emblazoned on her jacket above the Union crest.  Mitchel.  She was a junior rank; no doubt all they could muster at short notice during the holiday season.  Here the poor woman was, not only thrust into the undoubtedly daunting role of greeting the president, but she found herself faced with a feeble man, crumbling under the pressure.  That was not fair on her, not fair at all.  He gave himself a mental kick.  He had responsibilities, to the galaxy, to the council and senate, to his family and friends, to his granddaughter, to Bahir, and to this low ranking official.  Mitchel’s career could not be ruined tonight, and neither could her faith in the president.  It was time to pull it together.

“Three Zero,” he mumbled.

“I’m sorry?” she asked, just making out his words, confused by what he said.

“Three Zero,” he repeated, “we survived that, didn’t we?”

Hesitantly, Mitchel nodded.

“I was at a reception when that news came through,” he said, “sat next to the Prime Minister of Ambula, chatting about the flower displays.  Beautiful blue blooms – I cannot recall the species - but the prime minister was still talking about them in one ear, whilst Loff, my aide, whispered in my other.  At first, I tried to shoo him away…” Mitchel was nodding along, she had seen the footage, “… but then I realised what Loff was saying.  The Oracle was calling.  An incident at Three Zero.  Thousands feared dead.  That is what he kept repeating, several times, more and more urgent, trying to get through to me.

“It left a galaxy in chaos,” he sighed, “the press said the government was in a mess, that I was indecisive, that the council were clueless how to react.  They said we were on the edge of collapse, that we were losing the Union.  But we didn’t, did we?  We did not collapse, we did not lose the Union, we took action and we sorted it.”

“You led us magnificently, sir,” she complimented.  “Your leadership got us through the mess.  Your leadership was what we needed, what the Union needed.”

A smile teetered.  Yes, he had, hadn’t he?  Within days, a series of rip-roaring speeches and promises had seen his support rally.  “Terror will not win.”  “We will bring the terrorists to justice.”  “We will make dissident planets heel.”  His finest moment.  His words had spread across the galaxy, putting fire in the hearts of ordinary folk and fear in the heads of the Union’s enemies.  Could he do it again?  On the brink of war, could he once more rally the masses to the cause?

‘War’ was such a frightening word.  There were frontier skirmishes, but never wars, not for hundreds of years, not since humanity had first ventured beyond their own solar system.  Much as the nuclear threat had loomed over Earth for two centuries before it finally reaped havoc, he guessed that eventually threats always came home to roost.  It was inevitable.  Peace, as history repeatedly proved, never lasted forever.

And was this the day the peace ended?  Were the actions of the Kamdo going to be the trigger for a full-scale conflict?  Was he going to have to tell the gathered press that the scourge that had not plagued humanity for generations was back?  On his watch?  God help him.  God help them all.

With flared nostrils and gritted teeth, he fought the anxieties that were weighing him down.  Whatever lay ahead, whatever action the council concluded, now was not the time to show such emotion.  He, above all others, had to stay strong.

“How long until the council meeting?” he asked, calmer, more confident.

Mitchel was reassured by the shift in his tone and demeanour.  “On the hour, you have forty minutes to prepare.”

The council session ahead would be unpredictable and rough with the other members likely to throw everything at him.  It was impossible to prepare for that, but time alone with Bahir would at least allow him to gather his thoughts.  The encouraging words of a friend would also be most welcome.

“Will you show me the way?” Chilake asked, finally managing that smile.

The young woman in the white suit cautiously smiled back, then clipped her heels and saluted.

“Yes, Mister President!” she snapped.  “Please, follow me.”

As they crossed the landing platform, the gathered officials dutifully parted.  With security falling in behind, the president stayed close to Mitchel, her strong scent tantalising his nostrils.  It was a pleasant distraction from all the shit in his head and took him back to his wife in her younger years, and to his daughters, now grown into women.  Inevitably, those thoughts transported him to the holiday retreat and his great grandchildren splashing in the pool.  Shola.  There were, he reminded himself, many things worth fighting for.

+     +     +

Under the pretence of needing the toilet, he left the rest of the councillors deep in debate.  Security guards accompanied him as far as the restroom door, but once he was inside, he heard those guards stomp back towards the main chamber.  Good.  He had privacy.

With a few taps on his identifier, the councillor was connected.  Earlier, not long after the summons from the Oracle, he had made a call that had stretched the length of the colonised galaxy.  This call was to someone much closer, someone only a few hundred yards away.  It was to someone in the same building.

“Chilake has arrived,” said the councillor, “so your boy had better be ready.”

His volume settings were already low, but now he edged them down even further.  He could not risk this conversation being overheard.

“Just have him in position - he will be needed.  There is no way this feeble council will move towards war without his intervention.  If we are to take back those Kamdo worlds, and their treasures, then a few more sanctions and strongly worded protests will not suffice.”

“They stormed a Union vessel…” came the reply.

“Yes,” agreed the councillor, “it is a serious violation, but the ship was inside the territory they falsely claim under the terms of the Cairo Accord.  I fear even such a brazen act will not be enough for this bunch of weak-willed patsies to take decisive action.  The appeasement will go on.  We need your boy to stoke this further.”

There was no reply, just the light buzz of the open channel.  The councillor grew nervous; silence was bad.  With only minutes until the plan was due to be mobilised, he wanted to know his trusted soldiers were at his side.

“Tell me again,” he breathed, “that the boy is ready.  Tell me you are confident he will do as instructed.”

“He will,” the other replied, “he loves his family too much to do anything else.”

In the privacy of the toilet, the delighted councillor clenched a fist.  It was coming together.  Neither the council nor the Kamdo would know what had hit them, but even more satisfyingly, neither would the president.

Strength and unity, long live the union.

+     +     +

There was a strange aroma in the auditorium.  The splendid floral scents emanating from the numerous colourful alcoves tried to overpower it, but the nasty smell lingered.  It was pungent, like sweat-ruined footwear.

The boy looked around nervously, conscious that the awful stench might be him.  No one was paying him much attention, thankfully, and he hoped it would stay that way.  He did not want to go unnoticed entirely, far from it, but now was not quite the time.  But that time was rapidly approaching.  Then, he would share with them his plight.  Then, they would know of his suffering, and they would feel his pain.

Quite why the vile aroma hung around him, he was not sure, but it carried a suspicious familiarity. Perhaps it was the product of the stress he was feeling, which was beyond his worst nightmares.  He was soaked in heavy, nervous perspiration, the most noticeable of which sat in dark patches on his shirt, two beneath his arms and another below the chest.  The back of the garment was drenched too, he could feel it sticking to his skin.  Others were now starting to see it, and probably smelling it.  A couple nudged each other and smirked as the boy made his way through the crowd.

Despite his recently acquired friends labelling him ‘boy’, he was a fully paid-up adult.  Indeed, he was a father, albeit a young one.  This was not his city, it was not his world, it was not even his solar system, and his home, which lay hundreds of light years away, had quite a different gravitational pull and lower oxygen levels.  That resulted in his somewhat stunted growth and his boy-like appearance, but it was not the only reason his legs felt heavy as he pushed towards the front.

As it was not his world, some might have thought it was not his battle, but his new acquaintances had shown him the truth.  They had drawn the lines and connected the dots, showing him why he had to act.  And he had bought into their stories and believed their promises.  They had brought him here, to this place, to this point in time, to this act.  It was too late to change his mind now; they had made doing so impossible.

Back on his home world, he had made choices, laid out a path and began a journey.  That path ended here, in the heart of legendary New York, the most well-known city in the galaxy.  He was here with one purpose, to carry out one noble act.  These were the final few steps of that heroic journey.

There were doubts, many of them.  There were fears too, far too numerous to count.  He could see that not all the choices made had been his own, but there was no way to escape the inevitable.  The tiny explosive device tucked into his belt was going off, one way or another.  If he did not do as agreed, following through on the deal, then others would detonate it remotely.  And if he forced them to do that, then his death would be pointless, and his family would not receive the relocation and funds promised.

Trapped.  There was nowhere to turn.

He cast his thoughts to a field back home where a rich grass crop grew in shallow, cool waters, their roots teasing the toes as you walked amongst them.  He took his boy there often, to play, to adventure, to enjoy the simple pleasures.  It was another world.  It was another life.  How had it come to this?  How had he let this happen?

Sweat was pouring off his brow, running either side of his nose.  It mixed with the residual of tears, rendering those trails invisible to onlookers.  No one saw his anguish as he pushed past.  They saw the shirt and the glistening face, but it was the height of summer and the air-coolers were struggling to cool the growing crowd.  To onlookers, he was sweaty and uncomfortable, nothing more than that.  He was just a young man, short, likely off-world, but he carried a valid press identification, and all was fine.

The device secreted in his belt was tiny, but it felt like it weighed a tonne.  When the time was right, he would do what was agreed and he would unleash merry hell on the auditorium.  With fear in his heart, the boy edged ever closer to the lectern and his place in history.

+     +     +

The council meeting had gone as well as the president could have hoped, and now he was heading towards the auditorium.  He was relieved that the messages he was about to deliver to the waiting press were not as drastic as feared. The events unfolding beyond Hadrian’s Gate were dreadful, but they were contained.  In the meeting, with the pacifist Lana Steph unexpectedly absent, Chilake had feared the voice of the bullish Delaney and Estevez would carry the council to war.  Thankfully, other views had balanced their blood lust and now this briefing, whilst still full of firm words, fell short of such a declaration. Back in the offices, his speechwriters were busily putting the last few edits to the script that would soon fill his retinal feed.

The situation was unstable and unpredictable, and war might still be around the corner.  He would tell those gathered, and the billions watching at home, that there was room for negotiation and still the opportunity to resolve this without further escalation.  But hostility from the Kamdo had to cease immediately for there to be any hope of a peaceful resolution, and for the Kamdo to avoid what would surely be their annihilation.  The next few hours and days terrified Chilake but at least they were allowing themselves the time for proper deliberation on the next steps.

Four members of the council would be stood at his side on the platform, two in person, two as holograms.  In the heated discussions just concluded, a suggestion from Delaney that he would join the small press delegation was withdrawn at the last moment.  Chilake was thankful of that.  He did not like that man one bit.  He trusted him even less.  The last thing anyone needed was for such as he to blurt an incendiary comment out across the galaxy, with the soul aim of antagonising the Kamdo regime.  It was better Delaney stayed well away from any microphones.

Councillor Bahir had also declined to join him.  Reluctantly, the president had accepted this. Bahir was a modest man, often avoiding the media spotlight, but the reassurance given to the president by this trusted friend in the run up to the meeting had been invaluable.  As the hour mark arrived, Chilake felt prepared and confident, very different to how he had felt on landing in New York.  He was ready for this.

As the entourage approached the auditorium, the buzz from the gathered journalists steadily grew louder.  By the time the open door to the side of the platform was visible, there was little doubting the intense atmosphere that waited inside.  The media being summoned like this was unusual, and rumours were running amok.  Something big was going down.  Was it the re-capture of Kayla McGann?  That was the favourite amongst many of the agencies, but for those less sympathetic to the current leadership, there was hopeful speculation of a presidential resignation.

Leading the way, heavily armoured Special Forces entered the room and ascended to the platform.  They spread out across the stage and turned to face the packed gathering.  With lightweight blasters held close to their chests, they were an intimidating sight.  Their eyes never settled as they watched for any sign of threat.  The highest levels of clearance were required to enter this space, but no one was taking any chances.

Chilake’s close personal guard were also present, flanking him as he walked up to the lectern.  Their weapons were holstered, but their hands were poised on the butts of their sidearms as they too scoured the crowd.  One guard looked straight into the eyes of a sweat-covered young man, noting his surprising youth, but paid him no more attention than that.  She was trained to spot anything out of the ordinary, and yet she passed the boy by.

Looking resplendent in his ceremonial gown, Chilake was every part the powerful president.  His confidence rose even higher as he took up his place.  The debilitating panic experienced on the rooftop had well and truly left him.  As he looked out across the gathering, he spotted the familiar face of Mitchel, the one who had helped him overcome that panic.  She was at the front.  It was her striking white suit that initially caught his attention, before her reassuring smile leapt to the fore.  In response, a flutter crossed his own lips.  It was barely there, but she saw it, and it was enough for her to recognise his appreciation without presenting the media with a commander-in-chief inappropriately smiling moments before delivering worrying news.

With the councillors alongside, President Chilake took a deep breath and prepared to address.  The speech, on its umpteenth and final edit, rolled into his field of vision. Although he had had limited time to prepare, the words were already familiar.

“This grand office I hold,” he began, “brings with it immense responsibility.  Four years ago, I stood in another part of the galaxy and broke the terrible news of the atrocity at Three Zero.  Today, I bring you equally grave news, and ask that you all – leaders, soldiers, journalists and citizens – show the same resolve that you did then.”

There was a noticeable shift in the mood of the room.  The president’s new friend in the white suit frowned.  Beside her, a young man with a sweat-soaked shirt shifted nervously.

“Less than two hours ago, the Oracle activated her crisis protocol, summoning the council for a classified briefing.  Obviously, for security reasons, I cannot disclose all the content of that briefing, but I can inform you that we have received disturbing news from the Clintos system.”

With expressions of dawning astonishment, many of those on the floor turned to neighbouring colleagues.  A low chatter sounded as they started to predict what their president was about to convey.  One large man near the front could be seen to mouth “aliens”, initially garnering a look of horror from a friend, but that quickly turned into a headshake of disbelief.

“You are likely aware,” Chilake continued, “that two Union battlecruisers are currently stationed in Clintos.  At approximately two forty-five New York time, we received reports that the cruiser Porthos was under attack.  It is unclear how defences were breached, but Kamdo forces managed to board the vessel.  Although the attack is now mostly repelled, the assault has claimed the lives of many brave military personnel.”

There were gasps from the auditorium.  A single shout of “how many?” sounded, followed by a grumbling disquiet.

“Commander Meyer and the sister ship Aramis were on hand to offer assistance, and Meyer has now assumed command of the fleet.  He is confident the situation is now under control, although a mopping up of enemy insurgents continues.”

Mouths aghast, those gathered looked at each other in shock.  Some busily tapped away at identifiers, others held up video facilities, capturing the moment.  The full gravity of the news was starting to sink in.  Kamdo forces had not only shown the audacity to attack a Union battlecruiser, but they had also managed to board.  It was unheard of for The Union to come under attack like this.  It was totally unprecedented.

At the front of the crowd, Mitchel was seeking to reassure others.  She had been informed of events shortly before the president’s arrival, but the intervening couple of hours had done little to take away the sting of the news.  She had scant comfort to offer, but she tried, turning to calm those expressing horror and outrage. Everyone looked shell-shocked.  Everyone, that is, except for one young man.  She was already acutely aware of this boy’s presence, having tried her best to ignore his unpleasant aroma.  Now, though, his behaviour was difficult to ignore.  Whereas everyone else was buzzing, the boy was not engaging with the situation.  Instead, his face glistening with sweat, the boy continued to stare straight ahead.

What was he up to?  Why was this man so fixated on the president?  Obviously, everyone in the auditorium was here to listen to Chilake, but this boy was not listening, he was just staring at the president, unblinking, seemingly unphased by what had just been said.  He was here, right at the front, his press credentials proudly displayed, the biggest story of his life, and he was not even paying attention.  And why was he sweating so profusely, what was all that about?  Mitchel suddenly felt very uneasy indeed.

Only feet away, Chilake continued, “I am assured that the situation is under control, but clearly this outrageous and barbaric act of aggression cannot be tolerated…”

Mitchel squinted to read the business card projected from the strange man’s identifier.  What she read only added more concern.  She had heard of the organisation he represented, but barely.  They were based in a distant sector and did not have a permanent office in the Sol system.  So why was he here?  How was he here?  Even if his agency had received the call to attend, there was no way he could have gotten to Earth in such a short time.  And his age was a problem too, although she had no way of knowing he was older than he looked.  But most of the faces around she recognised, they were seasoned pros, older faces that had been around the circuit a while.

“Since first founded, the Union has never faced an attack of this nature,” the president’s voice grew in volume and determination.  “Such a blatant act of war from an enemy regime has long since been feared, but never realised.  Until now. And I must tell you, peoples of the civilised systems, that today we stand on a precipice, we stand at the edge of conflict, we stand at the brink of a galactic war…”

Chilake’s eye danced to the woman in the white suit.  If he sought further assurance from her winning smile, he failed to find it.  She was no longer looking at the stage, her attention seemingly on someone beside her.  The words of his next line flashed impatiently in his field of vision, but he hesitated, suddenly unnerved.  Like a cold breeze through an open door, something bad had swept into the auditorium.  Whatever had brought that breeze was lost to his five senses, but he could feel it with his sixth, and what he could feel was fear.

Both saw it at the same time, the president and the official.  Their eyes fleetingly jumped to each other, before instantly snapping back to the boy.  Others began to notice the leader had paused, and as that tiny gap in the flow of words stretched, it quickly became an awkward chasm.  On the stage, confused councillors and guards followed the president’s worried eyes, just as he had followed Mitchel’s, to the sweaty, out-of-place man at the front.  He was reaching for something under his belt.

The Special Forces, with their guns glued across their chests, were not quick enough to react.  The president, a warning cry stuck in his throat, was not quick enough to react.  And Mitchel, the official in the white suit who had helped Chilake in from the roof, was not quick enough either.  She bravely lunged at the boy’s hands, but it was all too late, and she was unable to prevent the carnage that followed.

The wretched soul, brought to this place by those proclaiming friendship, held the tiny device in his fingers.  There was no choice, those friends had seen to that.  Shaking, not even sure he could hold it steady enough to twist, there was the briefest instance in which to consider his fate.  He thought of his family, and he hoped his martyrdom served them well.  Then he saw the lunging figure to his side, and he prayed it was a swift end.  The button sized tab snapped in his fingers.  There was a moment of nothing, in which the official started to scream, and then the auditorium exploded in a fireball.

The deed was done.

The pitiful boy had served his purpose.

Chapter Nine

From the first shimmering appearance until the last shots were fired, the battle of Porthos would last for nearly two hours.  For most of that time, the bridge would remain on lock-down, but as the battle entered its final stages, with enemy numbers dwindling towards single figures, Meyer declared the bridge open, and announced he was going to tour the ship to see the devastation for himself.  First Officer Ben-Amir was instructed to accompany him.  She did so with apprehension and a shot of excitement.

Thirty minutes before, the waves of Kamdo fighters had stopped almost as suddenly as they had begun.  An inexplicable ceasefire, perhaps, but more likely they had run out of re-enforcements.  It had then become only a matter of time before the tide turned.  With the addition of more battle-ready troopers from the nearby Aramis, and Porthos’s own crew now having finally woken up, the invading army were quickly overpowered. The Kamdo were beaten.

Still, the heavy spectre of fear sat over the crew, and Ben-Amir was not immune to that.  Although the feeds to the bridge had brought plenty of images of the dead and dying, walking amongst the carnage was a new horror.  Remote viewing brought you the visuals, but it did not fully convey the sounds and certainly not the dreadful smells.  In contrast to the jumpy young officer, Meyer remained calm and perversely upbeat as they walked the corridors.

At the last roll call, taken by the commander just before they left the bridge, the number of suspected dead had reached four hundred and thirty. Two hundred identifiers were also showing their owners as injured, fifty of those flagging critical.  It was a horrendous casualty list.  Another thirty-six were unaccounted for, their identifiers offline.  There were a whole host of reasons why that might be, but most likely it was catastrophic damage to the device itself.  In all probability, those missing were going to turn up as corpses.

Others, much to the annoyance of Meyer, had fled in escape pods.  There had been forty-five launched.  The location of most were known, and there were traces of identifier activity near to some of the landing sites.  The pods were not designed for use inside a planet’s atmosphere and would have had little chance to slow before hitting the surface, so the fact there were survivors was testimony to the brilliance of the design engineers.  For those who had made it, they would find their luck short-lived.  No doubt, Kamdo forces were out looking for them, homing in on those same identifier traces.  Protocol dictated the securing of Porthos before any rescue attempts, but Meyer was so angered at the notion that any crew could abandon ship, that it was unlikely he would ever issue the order to search and recover.

With sirens now extinguished, there was an eerie quiet.  The occasional moan of victims and the chatter of rescuers cut through the chilling calm, but the chaos of the onslaught was gone. Amongst the shock and anguish, confusion still reigned as to how the Kamdo had gotten on board, and how their injured or dead had subsequently disappeared.  Technicians continued to paw feverishly over the data, desperate to find answers.

Not far from the bridge, Meyer and Ben-Amir came across a woman, half dressed in a red-stained uniform, lying on the deck.  A colleague was with her, offering comfort and applying pressure to a severe leg wound.  The bare thigh was open to the bone and shreds of charred flesh hung loose.  A medi-bot busied itself with the injury, but it looked a futile effort.  As the bot worked, a drip extended from one panel, pumping heavy painkillers into the victim.  They seemed to be having little effect.  The poor woman was writhing in agony, her colleague trying to cling on.

“Oh, hell,” breathed Ben-Amir, nausea sweeping in.

The smell of burnt flesh was foul and seeing another human in such a bad way turned her stomach.  She had trained as a soldier but, as with most of the Union’s armed forces, she had seen little in the way of action.  Apart from quashing the odd rebellious skirmish in the outer sectors, there was never much expectation military personnel would encounter such hostility as this.  Mostly, they were peacekeepers, there to prevent conflict, not to become embroiled in it.  This incident went way beyond anything she had ever imagined she would experience.  This was supposed to be a steady, safe career, with good pay and the chance to travel the galaxy.  It was not supposed to involve such perils or coming face-to-face with such gruesome injuries.

For his part, Commander Elliot Meyer was unmoved.  Of course he was; why was she surprised?  He knelt by the wretched trooper, studying her, but saying nothing.  The trooper did not react to his presence.  She was lost to the pain and not even aware he was there.

“Keep applying the pressure,” the commander advised the makeshift first-aider.  “Medics are swarming the ship,” he said, “and more from Aramis are on their way.”

“S-s-she doesn’t have long,” the colleague sobbed.  “I found her, I don’t know how long she has been here, but the blood loss…”

Yes, the blood loss.  A large, growing pool seeped beneath the injured crewmember, swirling around the knees of her desperate companion.  The medi-bot would have lowered the heartrate and steadied the vitals, but the blood kept on coming.  Nanobots, injected into the body, were working to fix the damaged vessels, but with a wound that large, there was just too much for them to do in too little time.  This trooper needed to get to a medical suite fast.

“First Officer,” Meyer called.

Ben-Amir did not hear the commander, fixated with the edge of the growing scarlet pool.  Although stood back, she irrationally feared the blood reaching her boots.  The thought repulsed her.

“First Officer!” he repeated, sterner.

“Yes, sir?” she snapped.  “Sorry, sir!”

“Get on to control and get this trooper attention, shuffle her up the triage list, she needs help now, my orders.”

“Yes, sir,” Ben-Amir confirmed, “I’m on it.”

And she was, stepping away and firing up her identifier.  She pulled up the ship’s directory and layout.  There were medics nearby and they could be here quickly.  The officer set about advising them of their new priorities.

Still kneeling by the moaning woman, his knee perilously close to the blood, Meyer stroked the young soldier’s face with the back of a gloved hand.  The soft touch alerted her to his presence and her scared eyes looked to the newcomer, pleading for salvation.  She still did not recognise the notorious commander; she would not have recognised her own mother.

“You will make it,” he told her, “and we will rebuild you.  Then, you can join me on that front line, because, brave soldier, that front line needs you.”

She was oblivious to the meaning of his words.

“Mark my words,” he continued, “I promise that the Kamdo pay for your pain, and the pain of every other Union soldier gunned down today.  The Cairo Accord is violated, it is no more.  Peace is over, brave soldier, and now is the time for war.”

+     +     +

It had not taken long for Andrea Pedros’ relief at the signal’s termination to become buried under a mountain of frustration.  She sat there for several minutes, stunned, as word filtered through from the bridge that no new Kamdo soldiers were appearing.  Then, she began to curse, banging her hands against the consoles.  She had fully expected the boarding to end when the signal did, but that news had not brought her the euphoric release and vitriolic high fives that her fellow technicians were enjoying.  Instead, she felt all the weight of all the death and destruction.  It had been horrific, and she had failed to find the signal source and stop it sooner.  There could be no celebration, only fear, anger, and an overwhelming sense of guilt.

So, what came next?  It was perhaps too early to look to the aftermath with gun battles still raging across the ship, but her thoughts could not help but jump to a future inquest.  Her actions would come under scrutiny and any incompetence be brought to the fore.  If any blame were attached to her, the consequences would be severe.

She should stop that train of thought right there, before panic or anxiety set in.  There was still a job to do.  The signal was gone, but what if it returned?  What if this was just a pause in the attack?  She needed to stay focused.

Frantically, she closed the current feeds and connected the diagnostics computer to the logs.  It was all recorded, over an hour’s worth of the dancing signal.  With the data already scrutinised millions of times, running more analysis was unlikely to reap any new reward, but she had to keep trying.  If the signal came back then the Kamdo onslaught could return, leading to more casualties.  No matter how remote her chances of making a breakthrough, she would not give up, lives depended on it.

+     +     +

Tears, tantrums and several moments of absolute despair had left her almost beaten.  She flopped back in the chair, her face damp with emotion.  The other two technicians stayed away, focusing on longer-range transmissions at her suggestion.  As news of the attack spread, there was now a hell of a lot of traffic out there.

Andrea Pedros did not care about any of that.  She was lost in her own dark thoughts, wallowing in equal measures of self-loathing and self-pity.  If only she had acted sooner!  If only she had found the skill to decipher and trace!  How many were dead because of her incompetence?

Angry, shaking, she snatched at her earpiece and slammed it on the console.  Her colleagues looked at her, but only briefly, exchanging lowered brows of ‘let’s just ignore her’ before returning to their own work.  They were acutely aware that Pedros’ signal was now the focus of the controllers and the commander himself.  Beyond this communication suite, other technicians were adding their brainpower to the problem, but their companion was obsessed with finding the source.  They understood why, and were relieved that come the investigation, they would be able to say it had been nothing to do with them.

Pedros clamped her eyes with her sweaty palms, deliberately applying pressure until they hurt.  For the umpteenth time a self-written diagnostic was running but she held little hope it would succeed.  She had lost.  They had all lost, and hundreds of Union souls were no longer of this life.  Failure.  Abject and complete failure.  This moment was worse than her lover’s partner holding her arm in the boiling water.  The pain now even outweighed the agony of that dreadful event.  After the surgery, it had taken a while for her to accept the bionic replacement, but eventually she had.  Not this time.  There would be no way back from this, no way to ever accept her failures.  Her arm had been fixed, but there was no fixing the blood and guts spilled all over the ship’s corridors.

Jumping back across the decades, Pedros tried to recall her times with the therapist.  The memories made her cold, so cold, and she felt herself starting to shake.  These were dangerous recollections and she had to get a grip.  Perhaps if she could conjure up her old meditation exercises, she might be able to restore some calm.  Digging deep, she managed to relax the tension behind her clenched eyes.  For a moment, there was relief, as she reached out to the extremities of her body.  Focusing on her feet, she managed to stop their nervous tapping on the floor.  It was a small victory.  She tried to do the same with her hands, resting them on her knees, trying to focus on each finger in turn.  This time, though, her digits refused to listen, and she felt panic starting to build.

Frustrated, she snapped open her eyes and glared down at the offending appendages.  She was distracted by the unusual colour glowing from her identifier.  She squinted and saw that the light was not coming from her bracelet, but was a reflection catching the corner of her vision.  It could not be, could it?  Against all the odds, surely not?  She lifted her head quickly.  All thoughts of therapists and meditation evaporated as her incredible brain ratcheted up a gear.  There it sat, levitating at eye-level, a blue-green neon glow, two words, a centimetre high:

SUBROUTINE SUCCESSFUL

“Damn, damn, damn, damn,” she muttered repeatedly as she reached forward.  The words disappeared as her arm moved through them.  Rapid fingers, miraculously cured of their shaking, reached into the programme files, pulling up the streams of data, scrolling, plucking out the results.

“Computer,” she said excitedly, the raised pitch of her voice attracting the attention of the other technicians, “confirm the findings of sub-routine delta zero zero eight three zulu tango.”

Silence.  Of course, her earpiece was lying on the console.

“Again,” she said, “to the room.”

The artificial intelligence of the computer sounded frustrated in repeating the information, but it did as it was asked.

“Sub-routine delta zero zero eight three zulu tango completed successfully.  The source of the designated signal has been located.  The signal is emanating from a location on the surface of the planet Eropidous.  The distance from this vessel is measured at approximately eight point one kilometres.  Co-ordinates are confirmed and loaded.”

“Give me visual!”  Pedros gasped, barely able to contain her excitement.

Where the blue-green words had sat, a still image now appeared.  The technician leaned back so she could take it all in.  It was a cluster of square, simple buildings built from grey stone.  There was no architectural flair, the constructions cold and functional.  In the centre of the image, one flat-roofed structure was illuminated.  Figures danced in a targeting circle.  With a deft flick of fingers, she fired these co-ordinates through to the controllers.  It was too late for the hundreds who had perished, but now the weapons systems knew where to target, that signal would not be returning.

Andrea Pedros sat back and took a long, deliberate breath.  She had done her job. Off to the side, her colleagues were chattering, having registered her relief.  The one who had suffered the ear injury when the signal originally burst through, was unnaturally loud.  He needed medical attention and would soon be able to receive it, along with all the others in desperate need.

“Computer,” Pedros said calmly, “to confirm, the signal has been isolated, and the controllers advised accordingly.  Let the log show I found it, I fucking found it!”

Chapter Ten

The questions lingered in the back of Agent Victor’s mind, but he chose to ignore them.  If he allowed them to, they would generate immense pressure that would prey on his rational thinking and push away any common sense.  His whole career, and the financial security it provided, hung on this mission and the fear of failure weighed heavy.  He could not worry about things unanswered, not yet.  The pacer’s return had unexpectedly brought him a lifeline, and he had to focus on milking that luck, and on getting what he could from the decrepit, old shit-bag of a doctor.

Schmidt was washed and in new clothes; she had chosen a style identical to her discarded black frock.  One shower was not enough.  She still stank.  It was a strange, dank aroma and every word she spoke filled the air with the pungent smell of gum disease.  It made him want to retch.  Trying not to cause offence, he subtly covered his nose and mouth, and made sure he did not get too close.

It seemed an age since he had first stood in this room, shortly after his arrival on Meridian Rise.  By that time, the local agents had already recovered Pike Macey, and Victor recalled looking through this same one-way viewing window, and gazing upon the stripped and shaven man, strapped to the bed. Now, Pike’s alter-ego, Luca, was similarly strapped down and similarly unclothed.  Apart from several days beard growth, the subject’s body remained devoid of hair.  There were pads, pipes, wires attached all over, but most notably on the head, where a myriad of fibres made Luca’s skull look like a pincushion.  Everything was ready for the scientist to continue her perverted work.

“How long will it take?”  Victor asked.  He tried not to sound impatient; that had gotten him nowhere last time.

“It takes as long as it takes,” she shrugged, “all depends on how messed up he has become.  You took a split personality, a man with shadow memories, and you tortured him.  There is no way of yet knowing quite how big a screw-up you have managed to make in there.”

The doctor took a step closer to the glass, her foul breath creating a misty circle on the cold surface.  That pointy witch-like nose almost touched the window as she peered intently at Luca.

“Is he drugged?” she asked.

“Only lightly,” the agent lied.

“What have you given him?”

“Two hundred milligrams of Midazolepine, six hours ago.”

“It will still be in his system,” she frowned.

“Not much.”

“Enough,” Schmidt snapped, firmly reminding the agent who was the doctor.

“Is it a problem?”

She took a step back and turned her red, puffy face towards him.  Her angry eyes fixed his own and he recoiled slightly, expecting a tirade of abuse.  None came.  Instead, she let the glare slip and replaced it with a frown of indifference.

“I’m not sure, possibly not,” she said.  “I will know once I get in there and see how receptive the synapses are.  Hopefully, the drugs will have no adverse effect.  I need to get my hands on him though to be sure.”

That was music to Victor’s ears.

“No time like the present?” he prompted.

On the outside, the doctor appeared serene, but inside, her heart raced, and her stomach churned with excitement.  She had not risked her life and endured the heat of the desert, which she could still feel in her taut skin, for nothing.  It had been for this moment.  In that dynamo of a brain, her scheming continued, as she figured out the next steps of her plan.  She was getting closer to satisfying her burning obsession and finishing her project.  Then, the galaxy would see her worth.

“Yes, Agent Victor,” Schmidt said, “I too am keen to start.”

+     +     +

Deep in the Kingarlan Sector sat the star designated Skalgen.  It was a powerful beast, with a thousand times the energy of Earth’s sun, pumping out it’s rays across a rich, vast system.  Rich, that was, in terms of planets, with thirty in total, and over five hundred moons between them.  It lay towards the edge of the human empire, but it was still home to millions, with millions more arriving each successive year.  Skalgen was becoming a popular frontier, not necessarily for all the right reasons.

Amongst Skalgen’s treasures, four planets and fourteen moons had so far been designated fit for human life.  Others would follow, but the terraforming demands were extreme.  It would take many years for the local economies to grow enough to consider further expansion.  For now, it was not necessary.  There were sufficient resources on the worlds already habited to sustain the burgeoning populations.

Where, three decades before, the first small settlements had been established, now sat towns.  Some of those towns were swelling into cities, and some of the burgeoning cities had even grouped themselves into nations.  What had been advance landing parties, had formed communities, and those communities had grown into clans, and now the creeping human plague of nationalism and xenophobia were starting to take root.  Wherever humanity went, that same pattern followed.  Leaders, politicians, soldiers.  Hunger, greed, exploitation.  It was always the same.

In one corner of the largest populated planet, Skalgen C, was the settlement - now a town - Kragenfeld Mass.  Twenty years before, most of the first inhabitants of Mass had unexpectedly perished, poisoned when a herd of indigenous carnivores had swamped the camp.  The beasts were savage, with jaws capable of ripping a human apart, but it was the venom their bites injected that finished off most of the victims.  As was the way with humans, that animal species was now eradicated, another extinction on another world.  The town had rebuilt since then.  An influx of migrants had swelled the population and brought with them an influx of problems.

A few survivors of that original group of pioneers still lived in Mass, and amongst those were the Kragenfeld twins.  Whilst their mother and father had perished to the beasts, the daughter and son had survived and were now in their thirtieth year.  With no formal records of their birth, and their ancestry gone, not even they knew when that notable anniversary fell.  Even if they had, no one would have helped them celebrate.  Mass was not that kind of place.

One of the twins, the girl Rastan, had inherited her father’s dare and guile.  The other, the boy Gagan, had not.  The girl had risen to be the almost universally revered leader of the clan that controlled Mass, whilst her loser brother had become nothing more than a thorn in her side.  Yet, much to the consternation of her followers, and the amusement of her enemies, their sibling bond remained strong.  It was the kind of bond only twins really understood.

The last census, taken a couple of Earth years before at Rastan’s request, had recorded a population of just over two thousand.  The turnover of residents was always high, with troubles and threats leading to regular departures, but for everyone who left, there was always new off-worlders ready to call it home.  Those new arrivals were generally drawn by the town’s growing reputation as a lawless hellhole, so they were hardly the sort of citizens to enhance the value of the real estate.  The inhabitants of Mass were okay with that; it was the fabric of their town.  This place was as much their home sweet home as any other.

Whilst rebel skirmishes and terrorist cells blighted other parts of the region, Mass just simmered in its steady glow of organised crime.  For the less gifted of the Kragenfeld twins, that meant days spent slumped across a beer-drenched bar, drinking himself into oblivion.  Today, he was mourning his losses, big ones, gambled away.  Even by Gagan Kragenfeld’s standards, that last flutter had been a monumentally stupid bet, the worst of all time.

The rickety, old, robotic bartender did not care less what the motivation behind this drinking spree was, it just served as requested.  It did not care that he lay across the bar either and its programming did not even notice.  Twice it had hit him across the head with its unrealistic claw.  The first, merely a brush, the second, something of a whack.  The drunk had reacted to the firmer contact with a pained “oofph” but did not lift his head and the bartender continued to collect the drinking vessels around him.  The high levels of alcohol flowing through Gagan’s bloodstream were way beyond the levels at which his identifier would have flagged its concerns.  That was why the device had been placed on standby.

This was a terrible day, even by his standards.

The worst.

A day?  Who was he trying to kid?  It was a terrible run of three days with every likelihood it would become four.  And then onwards, to five?  Ten?  Twenty?  Eventually, his sister would rescue him, she habitually did.  On her return home she would find him in the proverbial gutter, as always.  She would lecture him, maybe even slap him around a little, and then force him sober.  That was the regular pattern of things.  He was killing himself, she would say, but he was not worried, there was not much to live for.  Besides, if he needed a replacement organ, be it synthetic or the real deal, there was always someone who owed his sister a favour.

The bartender accidently banged two vessels together, their resin hulls resonating.  It was years since a decent programmer had tapped into the robot’s software and an overhaul was long overdue.  It could still do its job but with regular collisions and the odd overflow when it poured the drinks.  The clientele did not mind; they were hardly discerning.  Gagan was known to occasionally lick up a spillage when it tempted him.  At present, though, he was in no position to do so.  Having been asleep for a good twenty minutes, the previous overflows had formed a delightful tacky bond between his cheek and the bar.  Woken by the smack on his head, he made no attempt to lift his face, and would have quickly dozed off again and been there until morning, if not for the arrival of Prosecutor Hohepa.

The prosecutor was not here to enforce the law.  Around these parts, that would have been an impossible duty.  Indeed, what may have once constituted the law in Kragenfeld Mass was long since forgotten.  Instead, Hohepa and his associates did their best to act as peacekeepers.  They were here to help in the brokering of deals and to settle feuds with as little blood loss as possible, maintaining a kind of order amongst the chaos. They also tried to keep the town’s worst reprobates in check, and Gagan was one of the biggest reprobates of the lot.

“Do not serve him anymore,” Hohepa instructed the bartender, “he needs to sober up.”

The robot’s one functioning eye zoomed in and out, trying to identify who was speaking.  Eventually, it found the emblem on Hohepa’s lapels.

“Yes, prosecutor,” the robot grated, the voice box another part in need of a major overhaul.

“Come on, Gagan,” Hohepa sighed, patting the drunk on the shoulder.

There was no response; one had not been expected.  The identifier was the next option, but when the prosecutor tried to fire up Kragenfeld’s device, so he could use it to jolt him awake, the security settings got in the way.  Given the reason Hohepa was here, there was more than a touch of irony in that.  It seemed this irresponsible loser cared about some things, at least.

When there was no easy way to stir the drunk, Hohepa quickly lost patience.  With a sideswipe of his boot, the prosecutor knocked the stool from under the slumping man, sending him crashing to the floor.  As he fell, Gagan’s nose cracked against the bar.  It was unintentional but the exasperated Hohepa felt zero guilt; it was the drunk’s own fault.

Gagan sprawled on the floor, arms flailing, squinting against the bright lights.  Angrily babbling, his words were not clear, but there was the odd obvious curse amongst them.

“Stop your moaning!” the prosecutor shouted.  “You need to sober up quickly!  Big sister is coming back to town and she is not fucking happy, not at all.”

“She is not my big sister,” the drunk slurred, “she’s my fucking twin.”

“If she were five years younger than you, she’d still be your big sister.  You are an embarrassment and you have really let her down this time.  You’ve let down the whole gang by breaking the code.”

The flailing arms eventually found the solid floor and Gagan pushed himself up into a half sitting position.  One leg remained stretched out awkwardly, whilst the other bent beneath.  It was the kind of position only a child, or someone incredibly inebriated, could get into.  But it worked, providing a swaying but stable platform to glare up at the prosecutor.

“Lies,” he said, “I have not broken any code.  All lies.”

“You can tell her that, but you need to be sober before you face her.  She will not be alone and the allegations against you, and against that woman, are out there, amongst the clans.  They are baying for your blood.  Rastan might have her hands tied on this one.”

“What woman?”

Hohepa shook his head in dismay.  He was a huge man with an impressive build and cast an imposing shadow over the drunk, but there was no menace.  Despite the way he had woken Gagan, the prosecutors were the only vestiges of civilised behaviour in this part of the galaxy.  Large and imposing, yes, but he was here to help this pathetic man.  He held out a hand.

“Come on,” he said, “stand up.”

The drunk reluctantly accepted the assistance, the strength of the prosecutor impressive as he pulled him to his feet.  Gagan was upright but his legs wobbled left and then right.  Hohepa held on until they began to steady.

“I’m okay,” slurred Gagan, “I am, I’m okay.”

“You are far from okay; you are in deep shit.  You know how they are going to react, and you know what they might do.  What did you tell the woman?  What possessed you?

The bartender clunked another couple of vessels, more dregs of pungent ale splashing on to the counter.  This whole establishment stank of that liquid and it was the answer to the prosecutor’s last question.  It was obvious what had possessed Gagan, the same toxin that always possessed him.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” the drunk belched.  “What woman? I don’t know any women?”

“That’s hardly surprising, the state of you, but this one you definitely knew.  I recall her hanging around.”

In contrast to Hohepa’s own crisp appearance – tight, blue trousers and a crisp, ice-blue collared shirt - Gagan looked particularly unkempt.  A loose, grubby t-shirt hung scruffily over a pair of ripped khaki shorts, and two dirty feet, stained red from the soil outside, poked from open-toe footwear.  They were a perilous choice given the nip of the ground dwelling bugs that frequented this planet.  Gagan looked down at his attire, not an easy achievement in his current condition, the swaying growing as he did.  When he looked back at the prosecutor, his expression was one of incredulity.

“There is nothing wrong with me,” he snarled, “nothing at all.  Women love me… they do!”

“We are not going there,” said Hohepa.  “I do not give a damn about that right now.  I am here to try and save your skin.  You need to sober up and tidy up, and then maybe when your big sister arrives, she might be able to convince herself and others that you are not a worthless piece of shit!”

Anger was creeping in now; Hohepa was furious at this fool.  Gagan’s betrayals could be catastrophic for the clans, and he seemed to have no regard for the damage he could have done.  These communities did well in keeping the Union at a distance, but this could bring them flooding into the system. He was such a fool, such a stupid, pointless buffoon.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” huffed Gagan, “no, you cannot.  My sister will not…”

“She is on her way here and the other clans are watching.  She is not happy.  They are not happy.  Do not over-estimate your worth to her, not this time.  Your sibling bond will not earn you much leniency, not for this, not after what you shared with that woman.”

“What woman?!”

Gagan was swaying less as a growing dread helped to sober.  He rubbed at his eyes, trying to focus, trying to wipe away the blur.  Suddenly he could see the gravity of the situation.  He was in big trouble, and he had no idea why.

“What woman?  I don’t know who you are talking about?”

“A year or so ago!  The redhead!  She claimed she was passing through and every night for a couple of weeks she was in here, stuck to you.  She never left your side.  And you were warned then about her - I remember, I did the warning!  You drink too much, and you let your lips run away with themselves.  Always!  You cannot help yourself!  Your sister is a powerful woman, and you abuse that.  You forget your privileged position.  How many times have you been warned about mixing with strangers?”

“I-I don’t remember her,” Gagan moaned, but he did, how could he forget?  Two weeks.  Two weeks of obsession and passion.  She was so tall, so elegant, so willing to spend time with him.  So willing to be naked too.  Alcohol was still clouding his memory and her name was lost, but he could clearly see her face.  It had offered him nothing but smiles and warmth, a stark contrast to the derision he received from others.  Initially cautious, it had not taken long for his guard to drop.  Once past the disbelief that a woman such as her could be into him, then he had quickly opened the gates and let her in.  In sharing that time, and sharing his life, what else had he shared?  How much had he confided before her sudden disappearance?  Hurt, angry, and embarrassed, he had quickly forced her out of his thoughts, and had barely left this bar since.

“I don’t remember,” he repeated, his words a mumble, his eyes looking to the floor.

“They will be here in three hours,” the prosecutor sighed.  “If you want to get through this then come with me, and let’s see if we can get the alcohol out of your system.  A sober you will present a better front.  They will be looking for answers and they will want to know how much that woman knows.”

Gagan’s recollections were clouded by emotions now, as well as the drink.  There was little recollection of what he had shared with the stranger, but he did recall the sense of guilt in the weeks following her departure.  There had been fear too, fear that his indiscretion would be discovered.  Now, it seemed, the moment to face the consequences had arrived.

Humbly, almost sobbing, he pleaded to the larger man.  “Help me.”

“I will try my best,” said Hohepa.  It was a grave situation; his best might not be good enough.  The prosecutor had messaged ahead, and a trusted colleague was preparing the drugs to help break down the alcohol.  That would be a start and offer a tiny glimmer of hope for this contemptible man.  Sober or not, though, the allegations emerging were of the highest order and not even his twin, the head of the most powerful family in the Skalgen system, could excuse such a major transgression.  There were no laws, but there was the code, and the code was everything.

Gagan Kragenfeld had begun this terrible day losing a small fortune on a foolish wager and then falling into yet another drunken stupor.  He would be lucky to finish it with his head still attached to his shoulders.

Chapter Eleven

News spread fast.  Throughout the inner systems, there was barely a home it had not reached within that first hour, and the big media channels splashed it gratuitously across the large public viewing areas too.  In the outer zones, the news also found the audience quickly, but here, where Union control was weak and support for the president questionable, it was a cause for celebration.  In places, crowds even took to the streets, cheering their support for the barbaric actions of the lone bomber.  The president would bravely address the empire only minutes after witnessing dozens of people ripped apart, but even that would mean nothing to those who despised what he represented.  They would see no strength in his words, choosing only to see defeat.  And through that defeat, they would claim a small victory for their ill-conceived causes. It was a divided galaxy, a galaxy of haves and have nots, where ignorance and bitterness fuelled the politics of greed and envy.

Whilst Chilake was a devil to some, he was a hero to many.  Across the first worlds, empathetic tears would flow for their leader’s obvious sorrow. His words would stir a patriotic fever, moving hearts with his rallying cries for justice.  They would find comfort in his promise that the death of so many would not go unpunished.

He was defiant.

He was strong.

He was their president.

But, as Chilake had steadied himself to deliver that speech, he had been inwardly distraught.  Terrible images of gruesome deaths sat heavy and he had not been able to rid himself of them.  So much suffering, so harrowing to see.  And the worst of it was that poor young official, Mitchel.  How well she had handled his arrival, kindly and professionally propping up his crumbling resolve.  Moments before the hell, she had been there, at the front of the auditorium, offering him more support with a warm smile.  In her splendid white suit, she had been the embodiment of authority and control. And then he had watched the explosive blast engulf her, seeing the force ripping at her body, tearing it apart, witnessing the skin contorting as it was stripped from her face…

It had all happened so quickly; all those lives destroyed in an instant.  A split second before, Chilake had spotted Mitchel looking at the nervous young man with the small object in his hand.  In that same moment, there had been sudden movement to the president’s side, and then a flash of light so bright he had thought it marked his end.  Incredibly, it had not, and instead he had a horrible panoramic of the deadly explosion.  Quite how his personal guard had managed to smash down the security grenade, throwing up a protective dome in the face of the imminent detonation, was beyond the president’s comprehension.

The explosion had lashed at the force field creating a spectacular light show and sending those inside crouching in fear. Outside that protective shell, there was only death and destruction.  A wall of flames had engulfed the whole auditorium.  Those at the back had enough warning to scream, and their dreadful, chilling swansongs had pierced the roar of the firestorm.  Eventually, the flash of flames retracted leaving carnage behind.  Smouldering, twisted, and torn bodies lay all over the floor.  Attempting to avoid the horrors, Chilake had forced his gaze to the fore, but a piece of white cloth had caught his eye.  It was part of Mitchel’s suit.  That kindly woman who had helped him find his courage was now nothing more than bloodied parts.  It was his fault.  How could it be right that he, as the target, had survived when she had been so cruelly taken?  As his legs threatened to buckle, one of his personal guard had hooked him across the chest and shepherded him away to safety.

“Your leadership got us through the mess,” Mitchel had told him as they had stood on the roof.  “Your leadership was what we needed, what the Union needed.”

He would not let her down again.

Only thirty minutes later, and he was in a different room, in a different building.  He had been whipped from the auditorium and shuttled away from the scene under the tightest security.  He was safe here, they had reassured him, although his own safety was the last thing on his mind.  Those with him on the stage had all been replaced, and he recognised no one in this new entourage, but he knew the procedure and was thankful at the rigour with which the Special Forces had implemented it.

Still shaking, he waited to start.  To hide his hands from the cameras, he dropped them below the table.  On his lap, they continued their dance, nervously inter-twining, each one trying to hold the next steady.  Calm was needed.  Events were moving at a million miles per hour and only a composed, measured mind would get him through this.  Amongst all the chaos and amid his own panic, the needs of others were paramount.  His aides had offered reassuring messages to his wife, his children, and his friends.  Soon, they would need to hear his voice just as he would need to hear theirs, but there was a wider audience to be addressed first.  If there was a silver lining in all this, there was at least more encouraging news from the battlefront, although it was hard to see any positives with so many lost.  And, of course, now there was a new front, right here on Earth.  Too many deaths, far too many.

The speech was loaded, and he was ready.  Much of it was the one prepared for the auditorium, cut, spliced, and updated in the last half hour.  These were frightening times, times when the president could only do one thing.

Your leadership got us through the mess…

“And it will again,” he mumbled.

“Sorry, Mister President?” an aide asked.  “Are you okay?”

“Yes, yes,” he replied hastily.  The first words of the speech now sat in his field of vision.  “All good.”

“Ready to broadcast?  The networks are online, and we are all set to go live.”

“Yes, let’s get on with it,” Chilake nodded, knowing the sooner this started, the sooner it would be over.

As the aide counted down from three, the president brought the image of that charred white cloth and its gruesome contents into his thoughts.  He needed the anger.  He needed to feel that pain.

“Citizens across this great and glorious galactic empire,” he began, “this afternoon, terror was brought to New York, the very heart of the Union.  An unidentified assailant stood amongst a crowd of journalists, delegates and officials and detonated a powerful explosive device.  The intention was clear, to strike at the office of president, and to strike at the soul of our civilisation.

“At this stage, the number of casualties is unknown, but we should prepare for grim news.  This attack was an affront to humanity.  It was an attack that will sicken all right-minded people, wherever they live, whatever their religious beliefs, whatever their political persuasions.  It strikes at the freedoms and liberties of all.  It places fear in the hearts of all our children.

“But we shall not let that fear consume us!  We cannot let it!” he roared.  “To do so would be to allow these mongrels to win.  To do so would allow these evil criminals to validate their actions and draw others to their violent, misguided causes.”

Nostrils flaring, he glared into the camera: “My thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by this atrocity.  May the souls of those caught up in this madness rest in peace…”

Again, the white suit danced across his thoughts, bringing emotion that briefly clouded the words and threatened to overpower him.  He recalled Mitchel’s confusion as she had looked at the young man beside her, and then that dreadful realisation dawning on her face, all far too late.

“To friends and family desperately trying to reach loved ones, we ask for your patience, as hard as that may be at this time.  Our brave security services are mobilised and working through the scene.  Already, hundreds of medical staff are seeing to the injured and we should thank all those first responders for their professionalism in what is a horrendous task.  Good people, all of them, good people who will work around the clock to save those they can and mend the broken.

“And a personal thank-you to the member of my security whose quick thinking undoubtedly saved my life, and the life of several others.  I shall forever be in his debt.  The guilt at surviving when so many perished shall not sit lightly, and I promise, here, now, that I will work tirelessly with every remaining day of my life to bring those responsible to heel!  They will be brought to justice!

“Once before, this system suffered an atrocity at the hands of callous terrorists.  You will be aware that the fugitive McGann, who was serving a full-life term for her part in Three Zero, remains on the run.  Whilst there is no clear intelligence to link McGann to today’s events, we cannot rule out a connection, and we must remain vigilant to the threat she brings.  But our pursuit of this criminal has been seriously impeded by the Kamdo regime.  Indeed, the very press conference attacked today was called to issue the council’s response to the Kamdo attack on the Union battlecruiser, Porthos.  You may now already know some of the details.  The sheer brutality of that attack casts a shadow over events in New York.  It is difficult to see how these two simultaneous acts of aggression, these two acts of war, can be unrelated.

“The executive powers granted to me by the council bring with them great responsibility.  As commander-in-chief, I carry the ultimate responsibility for the protection of you all.  It is every government’s primary role, be they planetary or intergalactic, to defend its people, and we cannot, we will not, I will not, standby and watch our citizens, my citizens, and our armed forces murdered.  It is therefore, with a heavy heart, I must inform you I have issued executive orders and as of now, we are at war with the Kamdo regime.”

He paused deliberately, dramatically.  The viewers needed a moment to let that revelation sink in.  As did he.

“Make no mistake, and let the records reflect, that this decision was not taken lightly and is as a direct result of the attacks witnessed today.  Never, in the history of interplanetary humanity, has such a war been necessary, but I was left with no choice.  We are entering a period of great uncertainty and I call on all citizens to face that uncertainty with courage, confident in the knowledge that the might of the Union will prevail.  Right is on our side.  Justice is on our side.  We will fight to rid this galaxy of the Kamdo scourge and to restore peace.  Military command is in communication with Commander Elliot Meyer and our response will be swift and decisive.  That evil regime shall feel the full force of the Union.”

The president paused.  Despite make-up, a light perspiration on his forehead glistened under the lights, but he looked calm and in control.  Here was the leader Mitchel would have hoped for.  He had stared his own mortality in the eye.  He had faced the flames of death and had emerged shaken but brimming with anger and determination.  Despite being scared to the pit of his stomach, he was resolute.  Others would pay for what had happened in this city today.  In giving the green light to Meyer, he was unleashing merry hell on the people of Eropidous and beyond.  The Kamdo suffering would be immense, the death toll high.  In this rage, with the charred remains of Mitchel firmly planted at the front of his thoughts, and the shock of his own near death still burning at his soul, Chilake did not care.

“When I came to office,” he continued, “I inherited an empire in chaos, pre-occupied with perverse research and on the brink of economic collapse.  Humanity’s expansion had stalled, allowing the outer sectors to hide dissenters and terrorists.  The destruction of Three Zero showed that the threat of these groups is real, and today shows our vigilance and vigour in tackling this cancer must continue.  Wherever you are, wherever you hide, there will be no refuge.  Today, we not only declare war on those who attack us, but also on those who seek to threaten our way of life.”

He paused and looked around the room, from the cameras to the gathered few.  Some were nodding, showing their agreement and appreciation for his words.  He glowered back at the camera, ready for the crescendo.

“And I send this clear message to the enemies of the Union,” he hissed, “make no mistake, if you harbour such criminals, you are my enemy.  If you fund such criminals, you are my enemy.  If you do not unreservedly condemn such criminals… YOU… ARE… MY… ENEMY!  And you will be found, and you will be destroyed!”

A defiant snarl and narrowing eyes.

“That,” growled the president, “is my promise.  Strength and unity, long live the Union.”

The recording ended and the lights in the room dimmed.  No one spoke as they shuffled away, leaving their leader staring straight ahead, breathing deeply.  Only one aide remained, standing in silence, waiting for the president’s rage to subside.  After a couple of minutes, when there was no sign of that anger easing, the aide finally spoke.

“Can I get you anything, Mister President,” he ventured.  “Water, perhaps?”

Chilake exhaled deeply.  He did not shift his gaze.

“Yes,” he finally said, “you can.”

“Water, sir?”

“No, not that.  The official who greeted me when I arrived in New York, she met the transit shuttle.  Mitchel.”

“Sir?”

“Find out who she was.  Find out her birthplace, her parents, her partner, find out if she had a family.  I want to know everything there is to know about her.  I want to know who she was, what she enjoyed, who she loved.  Everything.  I am not letting her life just end like that, I want to know who died in my name.”

The aide was confused but dutifully replied, “Yes, sir.”

Chilake closed his eyes, blocking out the tears.

“That,” he said, “is the least I can do.”

+     +     +

The sense of panic on the bridge was at an end.  The bodies of fallen colleagues had been removed and the roll call of dead was static, much to the relief of the technicians, who could now work without those morbid distractions.  An hour had passed since the last incursion.  Porthos was Kamdo free and the corridors were clear of the fallen crew.  The unfortunates were either bagged, or triaged and receiving treatment.  Most were still aboard Porthos, but others were on route to Aramis.  Things could not be said to be returning to normal, they never would, but gradually order was falling over the ship.

Commander Meyer was back at the helm, an exhausted and emotionally weary Ben-Amir at his side.  Several of the faces at the other consoles were different, with relief technicians drafted in.  No one had escaped the horror of the attack, however, and this new batch looked equally drained.

For his part, Meyer was resolute, a sinister half-smile now a permanent feature.  Ben-Amir, press-ganged into joining his reconnaissance of the decks, felt both unnerved and impressed by his calm.  He had maintained a remarkable serenity when coming across the fallen, some living, some dead, but she had struggled to remain composed.  Avoiding eye contact with the victims, her attempts to also avoid the horrific wounds was thwarted by the commander’s insistence she assisted up close.  It had been a dreadful hour, the worst.  She could have never imagined how mangled and damaged a human body could be whilst still managing to hold on, desperately clinging to life.  The shrill screams and agonised moans would never leave her.  Returning to the sanctity of the bridge had been welcome.

Whilst out around the ship, Meyer had taken a couple of calls.  With the first, as he had started to speak, his tone hushed, he had moved away from the first officer and directed the feed from his identifier into his auditory cortex so he could listen in private.  Ben-Amir had watched him discretely, not wishing her interest to be observed.  His words were low, but his hand gestures and expressions spoke volumes.  There was anger in there, frustration, perhaps.  She had been unable to lip-read, his face partially turned away, but venom showed in the way the words formed, his snarl obvious.  Someone was on the receiving end of his wrath.  Even whispered, she suspected it stung.  When he hung up, he took a moment, resetting his manner to the usual domineering calm.

For the second call, he felt no need to step away.  This one, she gleaned, was from none other than the president.  There was no denying her excitement was triggered by that realisation, despite the gravity of the situation.  Goosebumps erupted on her bare lower arms at the thought she was in the presence of such greatness during such historical events.  The president’s words were not audible, but she could listen to the commander.  As Meyer spoke, his eyes never left her.  His stare was mesmerising, seducing.

There was agreement and decisions made that pleased Meyer.  His delight at the end of the communication was obvious and the gleeful look he shared with Ben-Amir electric.  It left her elated and anxious at the same time.  In her short experience of this man, his manner had been mostly cold, matching his reputation, and this sudden positive shift in his mood was unexpected.  The words spoken during the conversation had suggested agreement to escalate the conflict with the Kamdo, and sure enough, with Meyer keen to implement the next phase, they had immediately headed back to the bridge.

Now, perched in the centre of that command centre, the commander surveyed his adopted crew.  Few met his gaze and any who did, quickly looked away.  With Andrea Pedros having confirmed the source of the signal, most had worked out what would likely come next.  The bold arrogance of their leader’s stance suggested now was the time.

“Do you see them down there?” Meyer boomed, his gaze on the viewing window.  “Do you see those fleas scurrying across this godforsaken planet?”

A solemn silence greeted his words.

“Today, those fleas dared to jump,” he continued, “they dared to cross from the back of their mongrel to try and infest this fine vessel.  They brought with them death and suffering.  You all witnessed the horrors out there, you all lost colleagues, you all lost friends.”

He paused to stroke his chin, considering how to deliver the next message.  Their silence did not worry him, although he might have preferred more enthusiasm.  He put the apathy down to their collective shock, but they were soldiers and when the order was given, they would act like soldiers.

“You were let down,” he said, “let down by a commander who thought it more important to have fun than to remain vigilant.  Cholewinska’s failures have cost the Union dearly and she paid the ultimate price with her life.  But those failures are behind us, and never again will the Kamdo set foot aboard this vessel, or any other Union ship!  And no more of your colleagues will die at their hands!  Those fleas will not return, and now it is time to show them that the Union will not sit back and tolerate such insolence.  We shall exterminate those creatures in the name of our fallen friends!”

First Officer Tamar Ben-Amir found herself nodding, hypnotised by his words.  Guilt pricked her conscience.  His vengeful utterances were walking towards one conclusion and she should not have enjoyed such a prospect.  Those poor souls on that dreadful roll call required retribution, but was it right to feel excited at the inevitable death of others?

Defeating the enemy was ingrained into her soldier psyche but in training the foe had always been some fictional faction.  This adversary was real; it was flesh and blood, it had a face, it had family.  But it was also a murderous enemy that had appeared out of nowhere and could do so again.  Even if the commander’s words were uncomfortable to listen to, he was right, it was this crew’s duty to strike back and to do so quickly.

“Bring the weapons systems online,” Meyer instructed.

“Yes, sir!” a technician replied.  The panels nearest the commander and first officer lit up with an array of controls and instruments.

“Do you know how to use these systems, Ben-Amir?”  Meyer asked.

“Aspects of them, sir,” she replied.  “My specialism is navigation…”

He interrupted her explanation: “Do you know them well enough to fire?”

Unfortunately, she did, and she told him so, fearing where this was taking her.  The earlier courage to speak up above her colleagues now sat tinged with regret.  The commander had worryingly signalled her out for attention, and she was powerless to change that.

“The accelerator cannon,” he said, “which one?”

Reluctantly, she pointed.

“The co-ordinates of the source,” he said to the wider bridge, “bring them up.”

Dutifully, someone complied, and an image of the nearby city appeared.  A red flashing beacon rested over a particularly large building with a flat roof.  It was in the middle of a densely built-up area, with a whole variety of drab buildings adjacent.

“Set the targeting computer,” he told the first officer.

She looked at him, not questioning the instruction, but questioning ‘why her?’  Beneath piercing eyes, his half smile was still there.  She knew there was little point in trying to negotiate or avoid the order, he was not going to have a sudden change of heart.  Recalling the shirking figure of Engels reminded her what it was to be out of favour.  She leaned forward and did as commanded.

“Target confirmed,” another voice announced.

To the side of the weapon’s controls a power slide flashed repeatedly.  Ben-Amir adjusted it down, reducing the force of the accelerator cannon to minimise the impact on surrounding buildings.  A hand grabbed her wrist, and she instinctively clenched into a fist.  Meyer was crowding her, his breath on her neck, his body touching hers.  Fear gripped Ben-Amir and she dare not look back, instead lowering her eyes to where his fingers pressed against her skin.

“No, no, no,” he sighed, squeezing her wrist.

Amongst the fear, there was an electric tension.  His body being so close to her own brought excitement.  His squeeze on her arm, tantalised.  She knew what he wanted, and she compliantly extended a finger.  Firmly, he guided her hand forward until the finger intersected the slide.  Under his control, she moved it up to maximum.

“That will destroy the whole city,” she gasped.  “Non-combatants, innocents, the death toll...”

“There are no innocents,” said Meyer, “only fleas.”

She wanted to argue but could not.  The grip on her wrist was strong, painful.  He moved even closer, his groin pushing against the seat of her trousers.  Sickeningly, she could feel he was aroused.  With all the eyes on the bridge on her, she dared not react.

“Computer,” she said, her voice shaking, “population within one mile of the target.”

“Computer,” he hissed, his body tense, his anger apparent, “ignore that request.  It is irrelevant, First Officer.  The president has ordered immediate retaliation, we will strike, and we will strike hard.  Bring the cannon online, Ben-Amir, bring it online.”

Fifty thousand?  A hundred?  A quarter of a million?  The officer had no idea how many.  So many innocents.

“Bring the cannon online,” the tone was now more demanding, the close proximity all the more menacing.  “Do it now!”

He released his grip, but only after thrusting her arm further forward, towards the controls.  The emotions now running through the first officer were intoxicating, and she reached forward with a heady mix of adrenalin and fear.  Every path she had taken since childhood did not lead her here.  All those adults and educators who had shaped her had not taught her this.  All the media influences, the cultural norms, the religious legacies… they all told her this was wrong.

And still…

...she reached forward, not only driven by the menace alongside, but because part of her wanted to.  There was a yearning desire inside, twisted, corrupted, making this evil act feel so good.  On her left were the pious texts and righteous words, but on her right, a carnal pile of demonic mischief.  She wanted this.  She wanted revenge.  She wanted to impress.  And she wanted the man pushing up against her.  Feeling his excitement had aroused something inside her too.  She inhaled slowly and then exhaled deeply, the breath leaving her lungs in a sensual sigh.  Two outstretched fingers engaged the canon.

“Good girl,” he teased.  “Now fire.”

“No,” she gasped, her thoughts ablaze with feelings she could barely contain.

“Fire,” he breathed again.

A trembling hand edged forward.  The control flashed from grey to red; all primed and ready to go.  An extended digit paused a centimetre from the bright light.  There was so much power, so much destruction at that fingertip.  All those souls. In that moment she could taste revenge and it tasted good.

“Fleas,” she whispered.

“Fleas,” he repeated.  “Do it!”

“And later?” she breathed.

Her desire intensifying, his body tight against her own, his touch, warm and exciting.

“Yes,” he said, “later.  Now fire.”

A smirk danced on to her own lips as she pressed the control and lit up the planet below.

Next:  Kayla McGann returns in…

Episode 4:  Broken Bottle