October 30, 2361 AIA
The Golondrina
Reyer felt a cold wet cloth pressed against her forehead, then her cheek. The touch was tender and familiar. She was lying on one of the benches of the Golondrina. When she noticed the stillness and strange quiet of the ship, she forced herself to open her eyes.
“Where are we?” she muttered.
“Ah, there you are,” Vas said. “Your fever broke ten minutes ago. I figured you were pretending to be asleep so you could get more attention from me.” When she tried to glare at him, he leaned forward. “All you have to do is ask, Alix. You don’t have to be shy with me.”
There was a reluctant smirk.
Vas smiled when he saw it. “Do you feel better? A little bit? At least you can’t throw up anymore. Ciro says you left the contents of your stomach back on P41 as a commentary. Also, thank you for puking outside the ship. It takes forever to purge the smell once it gets in the air recyclers.”
“I’m mad at you.”
“Then why are you smiling like that?”
“Because for a total jerk, you’re really damn funny, Captain.”
Adan put a hand to his chest, opened his eyes with what he hoped looked like confused innocence, then shook his head. “You must be thinking of some other captain.”
“You didn’t have to do it, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I already knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep fighting.”
“You’re telling me that if I’d told you to go back to the ship with Lynx, you would’ve simply gone? Without argument?”
Reyer’s innate sense of honesty made her hesitate. For an answer, she settled on, “I would have gone. I’m not stupid.”
“Oh. Good. That worked out perfectly then, didn’t it?”
“Why the hell do you have an anti-Reyer program on Lynx? You don’t trust me?”
Vas took her hand and looked her in the eyes. “Alix, I would trust you with my life.” Then he pressed his teeth together in a grimace. “With your life? Ehhhh…not so much.”
“Are you ever going to let that go?”
“No. I almost lost you. It was traumatizing. So, naturally, I took measures to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.”
Vas waited for her rebuttal, but there was none. All she did was shake her head. The movement was weak. He placed his hand on her forehead to confirm the fever was gone. It was, but he noticed her breathing was still shallow and slow.
When he spoke again, all joking was gone from his voice. “Alix, are you okay?”
“I will be, Adan. I promise.”
Vas’s shoulders were tense and his neck was tight, but despite his best efforts, he only managed to refrain for half a minute. Then he blurted out, “Did you have to take the suicide-cocktail?”
“What do you think, Captain?”
Vas frowned, but after a short delay, he forced himself to nod. It was grudging, and his head moved almost as little as Reyer’s had.
Across the ship, tucked behind a wall of tablets and electronics, Gardner was sitting next to Ciro.
“A suicide-cocktail?” the general whispered.
Ciro was about to whisper back, but Lynx was one of the electronics nearby, and the bot had heard the request for information.
“A suicide-cocktail is the nickname given by Uprising soldiers to a mix of the pain-reliever Exlaudinum with any one of three common stimulates used on the battlefield.”
Adan and Alix looked over when the robot’s jarring voice filled the small cabin.
Gardner rubbed his hairline, trying to hide his mild embarrassment at having been found listening in to their conversation. “That’s not what I meant, bot. I wanted to know why it’s called a suicide-cocktail.”
There was a quiet veet-voo noise as Lynx raised and lowered his head. “I don’t know, General.”
The captain sat with his back to the bench so he could face Gardner. “It’s only used in the worst situations—the times when you’re already dying, but you still have to finish your mission.”
“And if by some miracle you live,” Ciro added, “it’ll make you wish you were dead.”
“Ah.” Gardner gazed around the ship. It was pathetically small. Then he glanced at the blanched face of Alix and noted how careful Vas was having to move. He lowered his head and said in a quiet voice, “Thank you for rescuing us, Miss Reyer.”
She said, “I’m just glad no one got hurt, General.”
There was a massive snort of laughter.
“Ciro—” Vas’s word of warning came too late.
“Your boyfriend did his best to get himself killed.”
“That’s a lie!” Adan looked over his shoulder at Alix. “My best would’ve been to stand still while they were shooting at me.”
“I notice that when he does something smart, he’s your brother,” Alix said, “but when he does something stupid, he’s my boyfriend. I wonder why that is.”
“I believe it’s an unconscious tendency stemming from one’s wish to disassociate themselves from embarrassment, shame, or failure—”
“Shut up, Lynx,” Vas said.
“Come on.” Alix tapped Adan on the shoulder. “Show me.”
The captain groaned as he leaned forward enough to lift his shirt and show off the bandage wrapped around his ribs. “It was from a weak e-blast. And there are some burns on my leg.”
“Oh, would you look at that! You’ll finally have a decent scar.”
“You mean like yours? Mine’ll be bigger.”
“I have more.”
“Ah, yes,” Gardner grumbled. “It’s been a while since I’ve been around infantry insanity.”
“You get used to it.” Ciro said.
“I assume it happened when you went back to find one of Melo’s gang?” Reyer said.
Adan pulled his shirt down. “Not exactly. We were leaving, but I went back to get my ID from the main lab.”
Silence.
“Ciro, your brother can’t be trusted alone. I recommend you delete the anti-Reyer program.”
“I didn’t think it was going to be that dangerous!” Vas cried. “The building was supposed to be evacuated, and I wasn’t going to leave it there.”
“Why not?”
“There might be people who remember I was with you, and Miss Bellerose turned out to be more useful than I ever imagined. If they don’t suspect me, they won’t suspect you.”
“You got shot in the side because you didn’t want to lose the identity of Alice Bellerose?”
“Grazed. I was grazed in the side. And, yes. You managed to organize and lead a Supremacy MP raid based on nothing more than a reputation Ciro made up for you in five minutes!”
When Alix spoke, her voice was quiet. “I didn’t organize the raid.”
“What?”
“How could I? Bellerose isn’t even in the military!”
“Then, how?”
“I had Ciro look up which agent was in charge of investigating drug crimes and called him with the information we gathered from listening to Melo’s conversation with her contact. He ordered a raid based off that information.”
“Then you—”
“I stole a uniform and infiltrated as an unknown grunt. It was Collier who organized and led the raid. It seemed easier to let him do it.”
“You were wasted as a sergeant.”
“No, I manipulated officers back then too. And stop looking at me like that! I’m pretty sure you’re breaking PDA rules.”
Based on Vas’s grin, Reyer knew he was resisting the temptation to say something wildly inappropriate, despite the fact Gardner and Ciro were listening to everything they said.
She hurried to add, “Did you get the chance to talk to someone in Melo’s gang before you had to leave?”
The captain stopped smiling.
It was Gardner who answered: “We found Daghar. He wasn’t able to help.”
There was no noise except the soft tapping of Ciro’s fingers falling on the surface of the tablet he’d set up as a console.
“We aren’t in velox, are we?” Reyer said. “This is a different kind of quiet.”
Vas shook his head. “We’re hanging about ten light years away from P41. We’re borrowing signal.”
“What’s going on?”
“We’re looking for someone,” Gardner said. “A man named Moric Sipos.”
“Was he the reason you had to go and talk to Melo?”
The general nodded.
“Who is he?”
Gardner leaned his head back against the bulkhead. “He’s one of the five people in the Supremacy hierarchy who were involved in the creation of Project 32. And he might be the only one still alive who knows how many human-xenos there could have been.”
Alix struggled to sit up. Vas saw it and put out his hand. She took it, and between the two of them, they managed to raise her up. When her head stopped spinning, she said, “All right, General, maybe you should tell us what’s been going on.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Gardner told them about the last call Fable ever made, his visit to speak to Dr. Sipos, and the assassin who interrupted their meeting.
“And you think the assassin was sent to you because of the xenos?” Ciro asked.
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know who sent him?” Reyer asked.
“No.”
The general told them how Sipos had betrayed and left him, and he repeated Daghar’s information about how Sipos had found passage off P41.
“And we’re trying to find him?” Reyer sounded incredulous.
Ciro glanced up from his screens to shoot his brother an I-told-you-so look.
“Miss Reyer—” Gardner said.
Alix said, “Do you have any idea how impossible that’s going to be, General?”
“Oh, I told him,” Ciro said.
“If he has no ID and he went with a smuggler—”
“That’s why we’re searching for any known smugglers,” Gardner said.
“But he’d have to be a smuggler who’s still in operation. Which means he probably hasn’t been caught!” She scooted forward on the bench. “You don’t know when Sipos left. You don’t even know if he has left! You’re combing information that’s been collected for over a week, trying to find a single ship which might be suspicious enough to follow? And follow to where? If someone is willing to lie on their manifest, why would they follow their plan—”
“I don’t care!”
Gardner’s shout seemed to surprise even himself. He took a moment to rub his forehead. It was still several seconds after his hand was back in his lap before he spoke.
“Fable was my commanding officer. We worked together for years. I followed him into MI, and he got me a position over planetary exploration and research. When I found out what Moric Sipos had discovered, I assumed we’d destroy them, but Fable stopped me. He said that the damage had already been done, so there was no point in killing them. He ordered me to hide the deaths and put Sipos away where no one could ever find him.
“Two months later he called me in and told me that I was to head up a new project—Project 32.” Emery took a deep breath and let out a sigh. “At first, when I saw the files, I thought it was another research project—it made sense given my position—but he was promoting me and moving me out of sensitive information, over to covert operations. We weren’t studying the xenos. We were going to be using them.”
Gardner lifted a hand in a meager shrug. The next few words unfolded slowly, one after the other: “I used those monsters as weapons in a war I didn’t think was worth fighting. I promoted Jack Harlan and gave him authority to issue orders to our”—he tried to smirk, but it was weary and humorless—“elite group of covert soldiers. Over time, I grew callous. Indifference made me inattentive, and I didn’t see what Harlan was doing.”
The general leaned forward.
“Miss Reyer, I’m old. I’m a thousand years older than I was a week ago. I know I’m going to die. If that assassin has his way, it’ll be sooner, rather than later. Before I die, I want to do something—anything—to stop this. When people learn what happened, I’ll always be remembered as the man that allowed this plague to occur. I can’t stop that. But I’m going to do this so that I know, that’s not me. Things were different. Things were complicated. But I’m not an evil man. I’m going to find Dr. Sipos, and I’m going to help you find and destroy any xenos that are left.”
Ciro had long ago stopped typing. The silence on the ship was complete except for the humming of the electronics.
“You sent them after the generals,” Reyer said. “Remember? You mentioned it the first time we met. It was eleven years ago. Infiltrate and assassinate. You never heard back from them, so you have no idea how close you were to succeeding.”
Gardner leaned away, confused by the change of topic.
Reyer continued, “General Ito Yuuna took me in when I was a baby. She and the Rising are the only family I have. I was out fighting in the war that you didn’t want to bother with when it happened. I had to wait days between calls back to Home Base to find out if she would live. They tried to take away my family, they cost me my home on Huegeh, they hunted me down, and I have scars from when they tortured me.” She paused. “You’re not the only person who wants to destroy the xenos, General Gardner. But impossible is impossible, and you’re wasting our time.”
“Then what do you suggest, Miss Reyer?”
“Who’re the other two?”
“What?”
“Who’re the other two who knew about the xenos? You said there were five. You’re with us. Fable’s dead. Sipos has disappeared. Who’re the other two?”
Gardner stood up. Ciro couldn’t catch the two tablets he shed before they clattered to the deck. The general ignored them as he extricated himself from the tangle of wires. He paced up and down the tiny aisle between the benches and grumbled under his breath. Then, louder, he said, “I could use a drink.” He turned to where Vas was sitting. The captain had been watching him pace without a word. “Please tell me you have scotch on this ship. Whiskey? Any alcohol at all?”
“Sorry, General,” Vas said. “I don’t drink while I’m out on missions.”
Gardner grunted. “And I can’t imagine you volunteer to stay on this ship when you have free time.”
Adan bristled at the implied slight to the Golondrina. He had to remind himself that Gardner was correct.
The general, in the meantime, brushed his hands over his short hair, rubbed his face and neck, and let out a massive sigh. “The senator who managed to push the project through the senate was Devi Kumar.”
Ciro stopped resettling the computers and sputtered, “Devi—Devi Kumar? Senator Devi Kumar from P5?”
Gardner nodded.
“The women who’s set up to become the next Senate Leader?” Vas asked.
“If she has her way, yes.”
“How is that possible?” Reyer asked. “Everything she does and says is scrutinized.”
“Fifteen years ago she was nothing more than an ambitious young senator from a central planet. But she was already a brilliant politician. When powerful people owe you favors, you can do almost anything. Classified projects only require three signatures. She arranged to be assigned the task of reviewing the proposal for Project 32, and I doubt the other two men even glanced at the first page before they added their names to it.”
“But…why?”
Gardner stared at Reyer, trying to understand.
“Why would she do it?” Vas clarified. “She’s theoretically pro-war, but she’s not a zealot.”
The general’s head jerked back. “A zealot?”
“She’s not pro-war because she believes that the Supremacy has a moral right to rule over all the planets or must rule over them for practical reasons,” Reyer said. “They’re the ones we know will never be willing listen to negotiations. Kumar is more moderate—”
“Fashionably moderate,” Adan grumbled.
“We figured she took her position because it was politically wise to do so. She’s tired of the war but won’t give in to…”
“Terrorists.” Vas finished Reyer’s sentence for her when she hesitated. “They call us terrorists. Never mind that we’re an organized body of soldiers and we’ve never targeted civilians—”
Alix put her hand on his shoulder.
The captain scowled but fell silent.
Reyer looked up at Gardner. “If she’s only moderately pro-war, why would she turn the xenos into weapons to use against us?”
When the former general finally spoke, his voice sounded dead and flat. “I doubt she cared. I don’t believe she thought about you at all. She probably got involved in Project 32 for her own personal reasons, and the fact they’d be used as weapons didn’t concern her.”
Gardner sat down on the middle bench, facing away from all of them.
He went on, “You have to understand, the war’s been going on for so long, it’s almost stopped mattering. Few senators visit the front-line planets, and it’s hard to remember something matters when the consequences are so far away. To a career politician like Kumar, the war is probably nothing but a tool for her to use.” He rested his forehead in his hand.
The silence seemed to stretch on to minutes.
“Is that how you see it?” Adan’s voice was stiff from trying to disguise his rage.
“No! That’s not how I see it!” Gardner yelled. “I was a soldier! I know what it costs to fight.”
“But you said—” Reyer started.
“Yes! I don’t think the war is worth fighting. You want your freedom so bad? You can damn-well have it! Leave us alone! You think it’ll be so great? So wonderful?” Gardner shook his head, and his lip lifted in a sneer. “I wish you the best of luck. Enjoy it.”
Then, in the unraveling emotions swamping the tiny ship, a mechanical voice said, “And the fifth person?”
Everyone stared at Lynx.
The robot turned his head to look at Gardner. “Sir?”
The general laughed. It started as a chuckled, but grew until it shook what was left of his generous belly. He put his head back in his hands, but his muffled giggling was still audible.
Lynx turned to Vas and Reyer. “Did I say something funny?”
Reyer was giggling too.
“It was unexpected, Lynx,” the captain said.
“Do humans normally laugh when someone says something unexpected?”
“Not normally.”
“Wasn’t that the next logical question, Miss Reyer?”
Alix almost snorted while trying to subdue her laughter. “I’m sorry. What?”
“You originally asked the general for the identity of the other two people involved in establishing Project 32, but his response was incomplete. In order to proceed with all possible lines of information, we would have to ask him for the last name.”
“Yes, Lynx. That’s very logical of you.”
Ciro was still grinning when he said to Gardner, “You heard the bot! Who’s the last person?”
“Captain, is there nothing on this damn tin can for a man to drink?”
Vas eased himself to his feet. “Certainly, General.”
While Adan headed toward the back of the ship, Gardner said, “The last person was a businessman by the name of Pace Cooney.”
The captain came back with four bottles of water. “Wait. I know that name.” As Vas handed out the water, he tried to goad his memory into working.
Emery Gardner frowned at the bottle Vas passed him, but he still opened it.
Lynx said, “Senator Pace Cooney represents P28 as the second most senior representative of three.”
Vas opened his water. “Yeah-yeah. I almost had it.”
“I thought you said he was a businessman,” Reyer said.
Gardner finished swallowing before he spoke. “I did. When I first met him, that’s all he was. Now things are different.”
“What’s his role in this?”
The general closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he forced himself to turn so he was facing the others. “He supplied most of the bodies. He runs a series of for-profit penitentiaries used by the Supremacy.”
Gardner knew when what he said had sunk in by the slow hardening of their expressions.
“They weren’t bodies,” Reyer insisted. “They were people. Xenos don’t take over dead bodies.”
“Yes, you’re right. They were criminals, but they were still people.”
“Gardner, who decided to create Project 32?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. What happened between Kumar and Fable was private.”
“But Fable wasn’t opposed to it?” Vas asked.
“No.” Gardner stared at his water and frowned. “Vincent Fable is—was someone you might call a zealot. It wasn’t from any moral or logical argument, but he was an intensely practical man.”
Reyer had to know. She could feel the question gnawing at her. “Did you do it? Did you make the human-xenos?” When the general didn’t answer, she raised her voice. “Did you put those criminals in the room with them? Did you have to strap them down to pour it over their heads?”
Gardner sighed. “No, Miss Reyer, I didn’t. If I’d been that involved in their creation, I hope I’d know more about their numbers, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I was only ever given them when they were deemed worthy of being tools for our covert operations.” He took a swallow of water. “Fable knew how to use me. He knew I wouldn’t do that.”
“I hope you don’t think we’re going to buy the idea you’re an honorable person, Gardner,” Vas said.
“I’m a coward, Captain. If you hand me meat, I’ll eat it. Don’t ask me to slaughter the animal.”
Adan and Alix looked at each other. When Adan nodded, Reyer turned back to the general.
“So we have Sipos, Kumar, and Cooney,” she said.
“And Sipos has well and truly disappeared,” Ciro said as he put the tablet in his lap down on the bench beside him. “I might be able to find him given enough time—there are any number of ways to try to track someone down—but it’ll take damn near forever.”
“And while you’re doing that, he’ll be slipping further and further away,” Reyer said.
Ciro nodded.
Vas caught sight of Gardner’s expression. The man seemed hurt—almost grieved.
“General?”
When Gardner raised his head, the expression was gone.
The captain continued, “You and Ciro have been looking for hours. I’ve given this a fair chance, but now we need to try something different. If we can’t find Sipos, we’ll have to try and get the information another way. What about the other two?”
“Getting to Kumar would be…interesting,” Ciro said.
“Considering the level of security and notoriety surrounding her,” Lynx said, “it would be extremely dangerous to try to get to Devi Kumar.”
“Would Cooney know how many human-xenos there were?” Reyer asked the general.
Gardner shrugged. “It’s possible. He would know how many people he transferred over to the project.”
“And he might have asked more questions than you did,” Ciro added.
“He might also be dead.”
“Don’t be such a pessimist,” Vas said. “He might be the one trying to kill you.”
“Yes. Thank you, Captain.”
Adan turned to his brother. “Ciro, can you try to find out where Senator Pace Cooney is and if he’s still among the living?”
Ciro picked up a discarded tablet and said to Gardner, “Do you know his personal number? His planet? Anything about him?”
“Oh, yes.” Gardner hauled himself to his feet and went over to Ciro. “Would you like me to call and ask if he’s home? Maybe he’ll put the kettle on.”
“Less of that, please,” Vas interjected. “Remember, he might order coffee, and he might bring in his assassin.”
As Gardner and Ciro got to work, Lynx walked over to where Vas was standing. “Captain, may I ask you a question about my earlier comment recalling the conversation to the relevant point.”
“Ah, yes,” Vas said. “Very logical of you.”
“Yes, sir. Was it tactful?”
A part of a laugh escaped with the word “what.”
“I’m still trying to understand why you all laughed. I have noted before that when I’m told I have been tactless, there are often people laughing for unknown reasons.”
“In this instance you might say it was both marvelously tactful and perfectly tactless at the same time.”
“Captain, that is a paradox. You are being nonsensical again.”
“Lynx, first of all, forget about it. That’s an order. I’m tired. If you want help with your human behavior programming, or emotional recognition, or whatever it is, talk to Ciro when he’s done. Second of all”—he smiled—“I hope you never change.”
“Sir, twice you have personally ordered Master Ciro to teach me tact.”
“All right. I hope you change a little.”
Before the bot could pursue the question any further, Ciro called Lynx over to him.
Vas sat down on the forward-facing bench that branched off the one Reyer was sitting on. He put his hand on her shoulder. She leaned so their heads were closer together.
“Adan, why aren’t we taking Gardner back to Home Base?” Her voice was quiet.
“I wondered when you were going to berate me about that. Never question the captain in front of his men, huh? Though, Ciro being there hasn’t stopped you before.”
“I’ve never worried about Ciro losing respect for you.”
“Because he never respected me in the first place?”
“I wasn’t going to question you in front of Gardner.” She paused before asking, “So what excuse do you have for disobeying orders this time?”
“Ah!” Vas raised a finger. “I’m not disobeying orders. I have a mission that says I need to bring Emery Gardner back to Home Base. They failed to specify how quickly that had to be done.”
Reyer shook her head. “You think they would’ve learned by now.”
“Apparently not.”
“But I’ll bet those mission directives implied something about keeping him safe.”
He looked at her. “Alix, be honest with me, do you think we should abandon all this and go home?”
Reyer broke away from the staring contest. “No. I needed this to be done.”
Vas put his arm over her shoulders and pulled her close enough he could rest his head on hers.