Black Box (20 page)

Beckett’s choice had been made for him when
they’d decided to recruit his crew as assassins. “We have to
prevent Walker from launching his black box. I don’t know how it
happened, but somehow that black box reaches Earth before he even
lands here. They sent us here knowing that. Those logs that we were
given were doctored or maybe even falsified. If we’re here, there’s
a reason.”

“What reason? How can there be a reason?”
Cabrera exclaimed with disgust in her voice.

Beckett was going to answer, but he was
interrupted again by Bonamo. “They’ve split up.”

Beckett paused, listening. It was true. The
vibrations of the rumbler were growing more faint while the sound
of the air bike’s engine was getting closer.

“Someone’s coming here?” Burbank asked.
“Why?”

“It’s one bike,” Bonamo said and there was
no longer any doubt about his listening skills and the truth of his
Sight and Sound
score. “It’s moving fast.”

It was Rodrigo. Beckett was sure of it. She
was sending the others to finish Walker and his crew while she came
to confront Beckett. If she intended to kill him, he couldn’t say,
but he couldn’t let it interfere with stopping the rest of the
soldiers from butchering Earth’s greatest pioneers. He looked at
the three people with him. Two rooks and a doc. Not exactly the
best fighting force the UESF had to offer. But it would have to
do.

“I’ll have to wait here and meet her,” he
said, without bothering to tell them who she was. “Bonamo, you’ll
make all combat decisions, but Cabrera is the officer in
charge.”

“What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

“Save as many as you can. Stop Walker from
launching that black box. Shoot to kill.”

“No, Ted, no!” Cabrera cried. “I can’t kill
anyone, least of all people from our crew.”

“They’re not your friends, Samantha.”

“I’ve patched them up a hundred times, saved
their lives even. Now you want me to kill them?”

Time was growing short. Beckett grabbed her
by the shoulders and held her tightly. Their faces were so close
that she was sure he was going to kiss her again.

“You can either kill them or stand by while
they slaughter the crew of the
Einstein.
Either way, you’re
never going sleep the same again.”

She didn’t have a response to that. She
couldn’t look away from Beckett. Bonamo and Burbank, just children
really, were also staring at him. For a moment so brief that it
wouldn’t even register in his memory, Beckett understood what he
was asking of them and how it should have been impossible for them
to comply. Then Bonamo spurred himself into action and began to
double-time it through the jungle. Burbank followed immediately and
Cabrera, caught between what she had to do and what she wanted to
do, started after them.

Boone found Rollins sitting alone in the
mess. There were a couple of other people in there taking regular
meals. He was wary about confronting the computer officer in the
open. Not only didn’t he know who was on whose side, he was at a
complete loss as to what the sides were. He had worked some of it
out to the best of his ability. There were potential murderers and
there were potential rescuers, but he couldn’t figure out which was
which.

“Let’s take a walk,” Boone said to Rollins,
not even bothering to take a seat at the table.

Rollins looked up at him with a relatively
calm look on his face.

“Now,” Boone said in a very hushed tone.
“I’m armed.”

Without responding, Rollins stood up and
stepped away from the table. Boone motioned for him to leave the
room and he did. Once in the corridor, they began making their way
up toward Control. Boone probably could have chosen a more
clandestine place for their meeting, but he picked the conference
room. He had never been able to get a read on Rollins, not in the
three years that he had known him. He didn’t necessarily consider
the computer officer a physical threat, but he wasn’t taking any
chances. Lawrence Rollins was about forty five years old. He’d lost
most of his hair and his belly was small enough to be disguised by
a big shirt, but not by a uniform. He had round shoulders that
trailed away into this arms. Boone had never once seen him take
advantage of the ship’s gym, although it was so small that not more
than two crew members could work out at the same time. Still, men
like Rollins could surprise you in a fight.

The control deck was deserted, which suited
Boone. With Beckett, Tedesco, and Rodrigo off ship, there wasn’t
likely to be anyone to disturb them inside the conference room.
When he opened the door, though, he discovered Jack Tunsley and
Chief Hardy. Hardy was at the head of the table, with Tunsley on
his right. Their heads were leaned in toward one another in a
conspiratorial pose. They looked up as the two newcomers entered.
Panicked, Boone shoved Rollins inside and drew his sidearm. He
hadn’t been bluffing when he’d claimed to be armed.

“You see?” Tunsley shouted, throwing his
arms into the air. “I told you!”

“What’s this all about, Boone?” Hardy said
in his usual impatient tone.

“You tell me,” Boone countered.

“I’ll tell you,” said Tunsley. “It looks
like a mutiny to me. I have to admit, Bill, I would never have
pegged you for having the balls for it, but after the way you
rolled over to Rodrigo...”

Boone narrowed his eyes and squared his
shoulders. There were spies everywhere. “Is that what you think?”
Boone switched his attention. “Is that what he told you, Chief?
Well let me clue you both in. I was surrounded by a squad of
infantry with very clear intentions. I stumbled into them and I
think Rodrigo would have just killed me if she didn’t think it was
too messy. Instead she dangled a carrot in front of my face. I
pretended to take it.”

Tunsley blew a raspberry. “
Pretended
!
You think I’m going to believe that?”

“Tunsley, I don’t give a shit what you
believe. I’m tired of you.” He turned again to Hardy. “Chief, there
is
a mutiny on board. I’m not a part of it and, I guess,
neither is our dipshit engineer. But this bastard certainly is.” He
jabbed the barrel of the gun toward Rollins.

For the first time, Rollins sat up and took
notice. It was tough to match an emotion with his expression.
Rollins was so stoic that it was sometimes difficult to think of
him as being anything more than an automaton. Still, there was
something going on under the surface now.

“I assure you, Mr. Boone, I am not in league
with the mutineers.”

“Oh, bullshit, Rollins. I found the sensor
dump in the trash. I know
you
deleted it.”

“What sensor dump?” Tunsley asked.

“Shut up!” said Boone, then turned back to
Rollins. “You’re the only one who could have trashed it so you tell
me why you did that instead of reporting it.”

“Boone, what the hell are you talking
about?” Tunsley pressed.

This time, Boone answered him. “Something
made planetfall. After we did, something else came down. This son
of a bitch erased the records and kept it to himself. He was pretty
sloppy about it, too. How can you have been so sloppy, Rollins?
You’re the fucking computer officer.”

“That
is
difficult to explain,”
Rollins said, without saying anything at all.

“Was it an eXchengue ship?” Tunsley asked.
“A New Earth ship?”

Boone shook his head.

“It was a Ghost ship,” Tunsley suddenly
declared as if he’d completed a major feat of deduction. “Holy
shit, the captain was right.”

“Only in a manner of speaking,” Rollins
said, finally sinking into one of the chairs.

Boone was infuriated by Rollins’ attitude,
even more so because of his earlier inability to effectively
confront Rodrigo. “You seem pretty relaxed for a guy who’s been a
party to mutiny.”

Rollins considered his words for a moment,
then said, “Mr. Boone, I assure you that I am not part of
Lieutenant Tedesco’s mutineers. I’m a little surprised by you,
however.”

“You’re not the only one,” Tunsley chimed
in.

Boone wheeled on him. “I told you to
shut
the fuck up!
”

“He is what he is, Mr. Boone,” Rollins
said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tunsley
complained.

Rollins sighed. “He will never be different.
You, however, Mr. Boone, may represent the evidence that bears out
one of my theories.”

The way Rollins spoke gave Boone the creeps.
He seemed to know absolutely everything there was to know about the
situation and yet kept himself expertly detached from it as if he
was simply some scientific observer.

Boone was about to say something when
Rollins looked up at him. “Sergeant Rodrigo promised you a transfer
in exchange for you doing nothing. Mr. Boone, you’re supposed to
take that offer.”

“Says who?” Boone challenged, forgetting
Rodrigo and the threat for a minute.

Rollins looked around the room at the eyes
of the men gathered there. The gun in his face didn’t concern him
in the least. It would take much more than that to coerce him, yet
he felt that he had made a significant breakthrough in his
research. Talking about it might very well produce even more
enlightening results. “Gentlemen, what I’m about to tell you may
alter the course of history irrevocably. Since, however, that is
what Ghosts do, I don’t see the harm in it.”

The three men remained silent.

“The ship that entered the atmosphere and
landed at the
Einstein’s
landing site was, in fact, the
Einstein
. Because of a flaw in its drive, it made a time
jump. It came two hundred years into the future, where it
encountered us.
We
are the futuristic force that kills them
all.”

Boone hesitated, stunned by the impact of
Rollins’ delivery.

“Wait a minute,” Tunsley said, shaking his
head. “You’re crazy. Jesus Christ, Rollins, do really think we’re
that
stupid?”

But, Boone was less doubtful. He had seen
the satellite images. He knew that, at least, one piece of the
story was true. The
Einstein
was the ship that had landed
after the
Valor
.

“Did you ever wonder, Mr. Tunsley, where a
Ghost ship comes from or where it goes when it escapes?” asked
Rollins. “Of course you have. Everyone has.”

“Are you about to tell me that you’ve
figured that out?”

“Ghost ships travel through time,” Rollins
said. “That’s why you’ll never see the same one twice.”

“Bullshit,” Tunsley declared. “Time travel’s
impossible.”

Rollins shrugged. “How many times was it
stated that interstellar travel was impossible, and, yet, here we
are.”

“No one knows anything about the Ghosts,”
Boone said to him. “How could you possibly know that they’re time
travelers?”

“I know it because I am a Ghost.”

Tunsley snorted.

“You’re not a Ghost,” Boone said. “You’re
human.”

Rollins nodded. “So are the Ghosts. We are
humans from one of your distant futures.”

“You’re an officer in the Space Force,”
Hardy finally interjected, not even trying to hide his disgust.
Rollins was clearly trying to play on their paranoia to avoid the
repercussions of his actions, but Hardy knew everything there was
to know about the members of this crew. “You have an entire
history.”

“Fabricated,” Rollins answered with almost
no emotion. “I’m someone different every time.”

“Every time?” Boone asked. “What does that
mean?”

“Don’t you listen to him, Boone,” Hardy
said, his face reddening. “He’s been on this ship for four years,
or have we been working with a ghost of the Ghost?”

Rollins smiled. It was a tiny little thing,
clearly learned from Mona Lisa herself. “I’ve actually participated
in this event six times. It’s crucial to my research. Mostly I
manage to get onto this ship as a deck hand or low ranking crew,
but those positions have made it difficult for me to gather any
significant data. As a result, I decided that I needed to hold a
position of prominence. So I went back much further. I spent a long
time building a meticulous identity and getting myself transferred
to the
Valor
as computer officer.”

Rollins watched them carefully. At least
they had stopped accusing him of lying. “Humanity is doomed,” he
continued dramatically. “Before space travel, people were obsessed
with a worldwide apocalypse. If you read your history, you’ll find
that there was this planetwide fascination with it. There were lots
of stories of plagues and natural disasters. Zombies. Once we went
to space, that faded. After all, what was one planet in the grand
scheme of things? In the far future, though, there will be a
catastrophe so unstoppable that it will span
all
of the
worlds on which we live. Where do you go when you can’t even escape
to the stars?”

No one answered. They didn’t even realize
that the question wasn’t entirely rhetorical.

“Your only escape is back through time,”
Rollins finally said. “The Ghost ships are refugees from your
future.”

“Wait,” Boone said, not wanting to entertain
this fantasy, yet unable to stop himself. “If you can come back in
time, why not change the future, avoid this catastrophe?”

“Rollins, you’re full of shit,” Tunsley
echoed.

Rollins nodded solemnly. “That was the
intent at first, but try as they might, the early Ghosts couldn’t
break through the pattern. The truth, though, is that we have never
really understood time. You and your engineers believe that time is
linear. The people from my century knew better, but still felt it
fit some mathematical formula, a geometric pattern that might very
well have its roots buried in some higher math that we hadn’t yet
discovered. But I think they were wrong, too.