Star Carrier (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 3) (16 page)

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Having nowhere better to go, I headed to Lady Astra’s house. I’d considered returning to my parents, but the last time I’d gotten near them they’d seemed so put off I didn’t feel like going back. Chloe at least put our relationship above matters of state whenever she could.

She met me at the door with apprehension in her eyes. She could tell I’d had a rough few days. She fell against me and put her face into my chest. That felt good.

“I missed you,” she said. “I read about the attack on CENTCOM, and I feared the worst. The stories were vague, but it sounded terrible.”

“It was,” I said.

She pulled away from me and stared up into my eyes. She searched my face.

“You were involved, weren’t you? Directly involved!”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Tell me about it.”

“I can’t,” I said, and that was the truth. I couldn’t tell her what had actually happened without endangering her life—or at least her memories.

She made a sound of frustration.

“I’m a Public Servant, William,” she said. “I can get it out of the government if I must.”

I felt like releasing a bitter laugh but managed to avoid such a catastrophic move.

“If you must.”

“Damn you. CENTCOM is so paranoid. They won’t tell their own leaders what they’re up to half the time.”

“Don’t you think they have good reasons to be concerned?”

“Yes… I guess they do.”

At last, she relaxed and guided me into her home. After freshening up and recharging my uniform, I felt human again. Imprisonment hadn’t been a pleasant thing. My disconnection from the rest of the planet still lingered.

In the back of my mind, as she spoke of recent events, I noticed inconsistencies. They were small things but critical ones.

For example, she was convinced the attack had happened on Thursday when I knew it had occurred on Friday. I was quite certain on that point as I’d led the attack myself.

It took willpower not to correct her. The feeling this gave me was an uneasy one. I felt fearful of talking about any number of common topics as I felt uncertain that her recollection of recent events matched mine.

Soon we were having dinner, and I felt better. After our meal, we avoided the net entirely and retired early to her chambers. There, events proceeded as I’d hoped they would.

She had a large bathing facility just off her bedroom. It was big enough to jump into, and the water was steaming hot.

We bathed together and made love in the bubbling tub. Afterward, we stretched out on her bed, and the sheets dried us meticulously. Soon, we were holding one another in in her dimly lit bedchamber.

“Are you leaving again soon?” she asked in a small voice.

“I don’t know.”

She lifted her head to look at me. “You don’t? What about the new battleship? Isn’t she replacing
Defiant
as Earth’s watchdog?”

“Doubtlessly she will when she’s completed. I would expect that to be in a month or two.”

She frowned at me. “That’s not how I understand it… Is CENTCOM keeping such things even from their own officers? The ship is finished.”

I realized then that things
had
changed while I was in prison. It had only been a weekend, of that much I was certain, but events had progressed more rapidly than I’d realized or someone had edited them to suit their own timetables.

Recovering as quickly as I could, I smiled. She smiled back—worriedly.

“Ah…” I said. “I meant the ship might not be ready to take over
Defiant’s
mission. After all, there are trainings and maiden voyages. Star Guard can delay anything for months if they want to.”

It was a half-lie, but she accepted it and relaxed again. Soon, she was sleeping on my chest.

Unfortunately, I was unable to sleep so easily. What else had changed about my world while I’d rested in prison?
 

* * *

The next morning I left Chloe and headed up to
Defiant
. She wasn’t at all surprised to learn I’d been reassigned to active duty.

Once aboard, I felt more in command of my immediate destiny. I headed to the command deck where my executive officer greeted me with enthusiasm.

“Welcome back, sir!” Durris said. “We’ve been worried about you for days.”

“Didn’t CENTCOM tell you where I was?” I asked as innocently as possible.

He looked confused for a moment. Perhaps his mind was accessing newly implanted thoughts for the very first time.

“We knew you were involved in that terror-attack, but we didn’t know if you’d been injured or not. I’m very glad to see you weren’t.”

“Well, I’m back and fit for duty. Let’s see the patrol roster.”

His face flickered again, as if confused. “Patrol, sir? We’re preparing for a deep space voyage.”

I froze, working hard not to react. “Of course,” I said. “That’s what I meant—a deep patrol. Have you got the coordinates for our first destination?”

“No sir… We were told you were bringing up these details from CENTCOM personally. Were we given incorrect—”

“No,” I said, “I have them. I wasn’t sure if they’d been sent on ahead or not.”

To distract him as much as anything else, I produced the computer scroll and put it into his hand. He looked at it in surprise.

“You’re making a physical transfer? Not electronically uploading it to
Defiant’s
computers?”

I shook my head.

Durris had always been a man who fussed over details too much. He was a classic over-thinker. Even now, I could see the wheels in his mind turning.

“I get it. That’s why you asked me if anyone had sent this up from CENTCOM. It was a test—because they weren’t
supposed
to do so.”

I maintained a noncommittal stare.

“I’ll get to work on these immediately, sir!” he said, rushing back to his station.

After a few more hours, I learned more details about various new fictions I had to uphold. The hardest of these was the absence of Zye—in fact, there never had been such a person.

Almost as difficult to swallow was my new status as a hero, rather than a villain, for my actions at CENTCOM. It all took some getting used to.

The one thing that puzzled me was the status of my own implant. Had they corrected it? Had they updated
me
in some fashion?

The concept was alarming even though I didn’t think they could have. If they had, wouldn’t I be as unaware of the real events of recent days as my crewmen were?

After thinking about it, the implant rooted at the base of my skull began to itch abominably. It was a nerve-related phenomenon, I knew. It was commonly suffered by people who were new to the symbiotic growth and had yet to adjust.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I gave Durris the helm and went below, signaling Yamada that she should follow me.

“Lieutenant Commander,” I said once we were in private. “Do you recall helping me with my implant?”

She looked confused, and for a single sick moment I was convinced they’d gotten to her, too. Could her memory of developing an interface-wrap for my implant be missing from her consciousness?

She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “I
do
recall helping you during your refit. Why, is there a problem?”

She gave me a wink, and I smiled back in relief. She knew what we’d done together. The scrawny gray arms of the Council had limits to their reach.

“I need help again. A diagnostic.”

She shrugged and accompanied me to the labs. An hour later, I felt assured my alterations remained intact.

I wasn’t sure why the Council had decided to allow me to retain my independence, but I was glad they’d done so. Perhaps they thought a renegade officer such as myself was a tool worth the risks. Or possibly they had no easy way to correct me as they didn’t know what I knew and what I didn’t know.

Yamada herself had no idea she’d been updated, that her mind had glossed over certain recent events. I considered telling her to hack her own implant to shield herself from updates, but I didn’t want to jeopardize my chances of getting out of this star system with my own mind intact. There was no point in alerting the Council again.

“Oh Captain, there’s one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Director Vogel is waiting for you down in his lab. He’s been there for several hours, brooding. He won’t leave you a message, and he refuses to talk to anyone else. Should I tell him you’re too busy for a personal visit?”

“No,” I said evenly, “I’ll see him immediately.”

I left her presence and marched directly for Vogel’s chambers. My situation had me off-balance, and I felt as if I were an imposter aboard my own ship. Everyone else possessed a slightly different version of reality in their minds than I did. I had to keep reminding myself of this. It wouldn’t do to show surprise when I learned information everyone else aboard took for granted.

My impression of Director Vogel wasn’t good. He’d turned positively paranoid over the last several days.

“Do you
know
what they did to me?” he asked in a hissing tone. “Or what they planned as my final punishment?”

I nodded and met his eyes seriously.

“Is that even possible?” he demanded. “I know you talked about changing people’s mental outlook, but—”

“You saw it yourself,” I told him. “We barged into CENTCOM and destroyed the lobby. When we were finally allowed to leave, everyone there who’d survived our attack remembered only a raving pack of phantom Stroj.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “It was very strange to witness their delusions. I’ve been aware of the updates for some time, you understand. Phobos personnel had a hand in developing that technology long ago... but I had no idea they’d begun using such a powerful tool so ruthlessly.”

I glanced at him. “Just how old are you, Director Vogel?”

He ruffled slightly before he answered me. “Direct questions concerning a person’s age are considered rude.”

Crossing my arms, I maintained my sideways glance and waited.

“A citizen of Earth has no true chronological age,” he insisted in a huffy tone.

“Nonsense,” I said, “how old you are matters a great deal. In this case, it will help me piece together a puzzle.”

“Very well… If you must know, I’m one hundred and seventy-two. I know that’s older than most, but younger than some.”

I whistled, impressed. “You don’t look a day over sixty,” I said. “They really do give the lab people better drugs.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “No, not exactly. We keep the best for ourselves.”

Nodding, I conceded the point.

It was clear that when he’d said the labs had developed the implant-update technology
a long time ago
he’d probably meant more than a century back. That’s how oldsters typically spoke of the past. Any event that was a distant memory to them was at least a century gone.

In any case, it mattered little when they’d started. The updates were real, and the fabrication of my society’s
reality
was a fact. The political spiders on the planet below us had ruled Earth from their quiet shadows for an amazingly long time.

After we’d checked the manifest and all my crewmen had boarded—save for Zye—I ordered
Defiant
to leave orbit.

I didn’t like doing it. I felt I was abandoning Zye to a terrible fate. When I’d first met her, she’d been imprisoned for years in an automated cell. She’d stayed alive, but she’d lost hope. Despite the mental resiliency of all Betas, she’d been affected. She’d clung to me at times as her rescuer.

Now I was leaving her behind. It was a hard thing to do. I thought of drastic options, but none were practical. Could I have ordered my ship to attack CENTCOM? Or threaten to do so unless Zye was released?

Impossible. My crew wouldn’t have obeyed such orders, thinking me mad. To them, Zye didn’t exist. She was a figment, and I was the only madman who could remember her at all.

And so, with a heavy heart, I watched as we pulled slowly way from Araminta Station. Even as we did so, our replacement vessel arrived.

“What’s her name again?” I asked. “The battleship?”

They all looked at me oddly again, and I made an effort not to meet their eyes. Probably, in their minds, the answer had been broadcast far and wide.

“That’s the
Resolution
, sir,” Durris said. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

He shut up, and that suited me well. I watched
Resolution
dock at the station, taking our spot.

The battleship’s captain might not even be aware that his ship had been finished ahead of schedule. He might not remember that according to briefings I’d received a month back, his ship had not yet even been named.