Star Carrier (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 3) (17 page)

Only I remembered those details. I felt I was now informed enough to calculate what may have happened. After all, the Chairman was smart enough to use his greatest power only when he had to.

The oldsters must have panicked when
Victory
had appeared. They’d realized
Defiant
might not be able to stop the battleship.

In order to protect Earth—and themselves—they’d ordered the construction of Earth’s next battleship to be sped up to get it finished at all costs.

There was only one way Star Guard could have accomplished such a task: by employing variants. That meant there were variants operating on Earth right now. They were no longer stationed only on distant Phobos.

Since the timetable for
Resolution
’s production had been well-advertised, the Chairman had probably updated the citizenry to believe the battleship was due to come out earlier. They’d given her a name in the same action. A name which everyone on Earth now recalled having heard before—except for me.

So strange… To know the real sequence of events while everyone around me saw only what their rulers wanted them to see.

Was this what madness felt like?

-28-

Every million kilometers I put behind us made me feel better. Onboard
Defiant
, I was in control of my own destiny. I felt like a starship captain again.

When off-duty, I spent my time going over the ship’s historical repository. What I found there, seen with newly educated eyes, was revealing.

The past hadn’t been altered wholesale. As far as I could tell, only surgical details had been edited. Inserted news stories about the accelerated progress of
Resolution’s
construction timetable, for example, had begun to appear approximately two months ago.

These stories were fabricated. I would have been aware of them, and I would have read them if they hadn’t been inserted into the public’s consciousness and assorted documentation very recently.

After a thorough examination, I determined that the Council operated as gently as they could on our memories. They did it, apparently, through the insertion of certain “stories” and the deletion of others. These actions usually came in the form of news articles. Rarely was there any vid evidence to back up claims in these new written reports.

Vogel’s lab was a large chamber, but today it was empty. Only equipment stood here and there, along with the two variants who’d survived our attack on CENTCOM. They were dormant now, their eyes dark and their bodies motionless.

“So, that’s what you’ve been doing?” Vogel asked me when I brought my findings to him. “I’ve been monitoring your browsing history…”

“Why have you been doing that?” I demanded.

He shrugged. “I have a government clearance. I’ve served alongside many agents of the Internal Affairs Office. Didn’t you know?”

My gaze had turned unfriendly. “That wasn’t what I asked,” I pointed out.

“Well… Captain… you have to understand. I have certain responsibilities aboard this ship. I represent our government.”

“Have you forgotten? I’m an officer in Star Guard. Since we’re in space, my authority supersedes yours.”

If there was one thing my Aunt Grantholm had taught me during our preceding voyage, it was that the chain of command had to be clearly hammered out from the outset.

Vogel dipped his head. “I understand, Captain.”

“Good. See that you don’t do any more snooping, or I’ll have Yamada remove your net privileges.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Not really, it’s just a beginning. Stay out of my affairs, or you’ll learn how harsh I can be.”

“My apologies…” he said. “But on to another matter, what did you discover? What is it that I don’t remember?”

“The exact details are unimportant, but the methodology is interesting. We’ve all been updated with stories. Written articles for the most part. They circulate online until the origin is unclear. At that point, they become part of the group knowledge we all share.”

“Fascinating…” he said. “They do it with precision, then. They plant certain stories—your word—and remove others. The human mind is well-conditioned to operate in terms of stories, you know.”

“Yes, it all makes sense.”

“Right,” he continued, the look on his face becoming distant. “Think about what you remember from the events of your life, or what you
think
you know about other people’s lives. Do you remember the sequence of motions you took this morning while cleansing, dressing and feeding yourself?”

“I—” I began, but he cut me off.

“No, you don’t,” he continued, “but you might remember a chance meeting, an event that was unusual or something that involved another person.”

He was quite correct. I saw what he meant. I could recall talking to my aunt, but nothing about what I’d done prior to her visit.

“So, rather than entirely rewriting our memories, they’re editing out some but inserting new ones too—perhaps replacing longer sequential passages?”

“Exactly,” Vogel agreed. “The stories not only give us information they want us to remember, they also cover up the gaps. When we think of a deleted event, the details escape us. Through the artful insertion and deletion of details, what we recall is a complete, self-contained story.”

I nodded slowly. The process was simple but diabolical.

“Do you think we’re out of their effective range?” I asked.

“No. Not while we’re in this star system. Now, let me ask you, do you recall gaps when first reentering the Solar System after your last voyage to the stars?”

I thought about it, and I shook my head.

“No…” I said, “but they might have been there. When we’ve first returned to the Solar System, CENTCOM has always transmitted an update.”

“Naturally,” Vogel said. “Things would have likely changed after a long voyage to the stars. Changed, that is, for everyone on Earth. That’s the moment when they’ll seek to insert and delete memories of their choosing.”

Straining mightily, I couldn’t recall anything like that happening to me. But that didn’t mean that it
hadn’t
happened. I found the process of second-guessing every event in my lifetime aggravating.

But then I had a sudden thought.

“That’s why they don’t want starships coming and going!” I said with sudden clarity. “That’s why they shut down the ER bridges in the first place—to maintain complete control.”

Vogel stared at me. “They? Who shut down the bridges? What are you talking about?”

“Forget it,” I said. “You probably already knew but forgot the truth. There are some things best left to the past.”

“What you suggested in those few statements… I’m disturbed.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “and I’m sorry if I seem short with you. Let’s just say that there’s more going on in my mind than I can discuss.”

With that, I took a deep breath and headed for the exit. But I found his thin fingers wrapped around my elbow.

I paused and looked down at him.

“I’ve earned your help,” he said. “Don’t leave me in the dark like the others. I know my mind is their toy, and I don’t like it.”

“Then rip out your implant,” I said. “It’s a simple matter.”

He shook his head. “My career would be at an end, if not my life. I wish I could be like you, Sparhawk—to walk the Earth like a spirit, seeing the truth. Is there any other way you could help me?”

I considered his request. The idea had merit. He was already my confidant, and he’d proven he was willing to risk everything to help me.

“I’ll help you after we get through the first bridge,” I told him. “When we’re beyond their reach, it will be done.”

He smiled faintly. “Excellent. I’m not sure it will make me any happier, but I can’t live with their tampering another day.”

At the doorway, I paused and I pointed to his creations, the dormant variants.

“You know,” I said, “I could use some help from you and your team as well.”

“What kind of help?”

“Could you get a fresh contingent of variants aboard—as workers?”

“You mean as troops, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

He sighed and looked at K-19. “That’s a disturbing development. My variants were never meant to kill. I didn’t want that when I developed them.”

“It’s all too common that we don’t have full control of the consequences to our actions.”

He produced a bitter laugh. “That’s very true. All right, Sparhawk. I can contact Phobos and ask for them to send out a tug pulling a cargo module.”

“A cargo module full of variants? What of weapons?”

“You’ll have to provide those. I can retrain them while we travel.”

I nodded. “All right. I’ll try to get the request through CENTCOM. It’s logical enough. We’ve lost all our Stroj-made repair bots in battle.”

Then I left him and moved to the command deck. There, my team was plotting our first jump out of the Solar System in months.

“Captain,” Durris said, calling me to the tactical table, “where did you get these coordinates, exactly?”

“I didn’t say.”

“Right… Well, as best we can figure, they’re written in terms of given stars. The first references a small breach that leads to a system we know well.”

“Which is?”

“Gliese-32, sir.”

My face flinched. I’d wondered if I’d ever meet the Connatic again. Apparently, I was going to be provided the opportunity.

“And the next?”

“We’ve traced that one too. It should take us to the Beta Cygnus system.”

I looked at him sharply. “Not the Crown System?”

“No sir, this is definitely Beta. We’ve mapped it. Helping us a great deal are the star maps the people of Gi provided. Some of them correspond to that data.”

“Excellent, please continue. Where do the last jumps go?”

He shook his head. “We have no idea after that. They’ll be blue-jumps, sir.”

Blue jumps.
The term was enough to turn any spacer’s stomach. In the past, all jumps had been into the unknown. A significant number of such jumps were apparently deadly as no one had ever returned from them.

I comforted myself by recalling that blue jumps were simply unknown. They weren’t necessarily dangerous. It was a matter of playing the odds.

“Very well,” I said. “Rumbold? I can tell you’ve been listening. Have you got our destinations clearly plotted?”

“Yes sir. The jumps are in my navigational software. But sir, if we’re to hit the first breach and have a clean breakthrough, we need to increase speed. Shall I?”

“No, not yet. In fact, I want to slow down. I’m arranging a rendezvous with a very special package.”

“A package? From where, Captain?”

“Phobos.”

At the mention of Phobos, Rumbold and Durris exchanged glances. They were both unhappy, but they seemed resigned.

By this time, they were used to having their commander withhold interesting details about their mission plans from them.

-29-

Before we left the Solar System, we managed to load a full cargo pod of dormant variants aboard the
Defiant
. Something about that fact gave me pause. Just how many of these things had they manufactured on Phobos?

The breach into hyperspace turned out to be an easy transition. The ship wasn’t battered or warped by the process, and once inside the wormhole we didn’t find its space to be too cramped or too huge. As best we could tell with the nebulous readings from our sensors, we were in a pocket continuum approximately the size of the Solar System.

According to CENTCOM’s calculations, we were headed to Gliese-32. That didn’t mean the trip would be smooth sailing, however. The bridges between star systems were inherently unstable. Like taking a voyage on rough seas in the past, you never knew exactly how any given bridge would look on any given day.

After spending a full duty-shift in this particular stretch of hyperspace, I headed back to the command deck to see if my navigational people had worked out a course.

“The general shape is oblong,” Durris said, using measured intervals from various returning pings to support his point. “We’ve been here for ten hours, and we’ve only got one axis where we haven’t hit a wall yet.”

My XO was using the term “wall” loosely. The edges of any organized region of hyperspace were, by definition, indistinct and immeasurable. After all, at what precise point did any reality end? Beyond good reference points, it was all conjecture.

Instead of concrete dimensions, we measured such variable spaces in terms of their coherency. Rather than a wall, then, the limits of the pocket we were currently plunging through were defined by borders where the laws of physics began to warp and shift.

“Have you found any solution for the exit?” I asked.

“Negative. We’re in a bumpy zone, here. We’re getting an irregular curve, and the pods we’ve dropped are still shifting positions behind us as far as our readings are concerned. This ER bridge is unstable today.”

“Hmm. Typically unpredictable, just our luck.”

Travel between the stars had become possible using two methodologies. There might be others, but we’d yet to discover them.

The first method was extremely direct. One simply aimed their spacecraft toward the star in question, applied thrust to the opposite end of the ship, and rode the momentum to the finish line. The downside of this approach involved the distances between stars. Even at an achievable speed of around twenty percent of light, a short trip took decades.

Fortunately, a second approach had been discovered. By entering Einstein-Rosen Bridges—otherwise known as wormholes—we were able to cheat on our math. The distance traveled was immaterial as it was inside a different
type
of space.

But performing such a trick had its own negatives. Each hyperspace we entered followed slightly different rules, even from one trip to the next. Therefore, all of them were inherently unstable, and our ships often had difficulty finding their way out of a pocket universe once they were inside it.

To solve the problem, we dropped probes to the aft of the ship and observed their behavior. In most cases, the exit to any ER bridge was directly ahead of the ship when it entered—but due to space-time warping, “directly ahead” wasn’t as easy a place to find as it should be.

Fortunately, the warping effect for each hyperspace could be modeled mathematically. Watching the behavior of the dropped probes was our critical tool. If we could create a model that would place every probe we dropped into a straight line, the far end always aimed at the exit. That was exactly what we were working on now: finding a way out.

At length, I became satisfied that Durris had the matter in hand. He would eventually solve the equation, and we’d have our destination pin-pointed.

Leaving the command deck in his capable hands, I traveled the length of the ship to Vogel’s lab.

His staff was there going over schematics. They jumped in a guilty fashion when I arrived, and they looked at me in concern.

On the table in their midst was a variant. The thing was open, both its metal case and its fleshy interior. As they moved away, I could tell they were performing surgery.

“Something wrong with this unit?” I asked.

“No, Captain,” Dr. McKay answered, pushing strands of red hair away from her face. “We’re performing an alteration.”

Eying her for a moment, I realized I hadn’t seen her pay any attention to Rumbold since she’d boarded my ship. Had that been due to her earlier state of intoxication back on Phobos? Or had she only pretended to be interested in him in order to get herself a ticket aboard
Defiant?
Time would tell.

“An alteration?” I asked. “I see… for what purpose?”

The team looked at me for a moment, and McKay removed her dripping gloves and stepped around the mess on the table to approach me. She reshaped her face into a false smile.

“We’re very busy today,” she said. “Perhaps I can find Vogel to help you.”

“Is this a private meeting?” I asked.

“No, not at all—but it can be if you wish. Will you excuse us, staff?” she said, looking expectantly at the others.

Without a word, they put down their instruments with various clattering and splashing sounds, then walked out.

“Now, Captain, what can I do for you?” she asked, turning on her considerable charm.

“You’re operating on this variant to alter its programming, aren’t you?”

She winced. “Such an inappropriate way of expressing the situation… The variants aren’t programmed—not exactly. What we’re doing is installing an experimental governor in the thorax.”

“Hmm. What’s the purpose of such a device?”

“It’s rather like your implant, but it’s designed to alter behavior rather than serve as a communications tool.”

I chuckled briefly. “Some would say the true purpose of our implants is to do precisely that.”

“Well… this is a more direct application.”

“What kind of behavior does this governor alter?”

“Violent tendencies.”

My eyebrows raised high. “I thought we wanted them to act as troops. To perform as an assault team if needed. Why make them less aggressive?”

She blinked at me in confusion then laughed. “No, no, Captain. You misunderstand. These alterations are designed to
improve
their performance in combat.”

“Are you saying it’s sub-optimal now?”

“Yes, exactly. The variants were designed for construction, not destruction. They’re fast and accurate, but not informed soldiers. A vanilla variant doesn’t come with an innate knowledge of weakness in a target’s anatomy, for example.”

Beginning to catch on, I felt disturbed. Walking to the mess on the table, I stood over it, staring. “What anatomy are you talking about? Human, or…?”

“Stroj, human and variant,” she said. “We thought it would be best to cover the bases.”

“Quite… You’re telling me this thing will be an even more effective killer than K-19 and his crew proved to be at CENTCOM?”

“Definitely. In fact, we used a download of K-19’s experiences in the formulation of this upgrade. I’m so glad you’re pleased.”

I glanced at her thoughtfully. “I’m not sure that
pleased
is what I am. But it’s what I asked for, so I suppose I can’t complain now. Carry on.”

Leaving the lab, I suppressed a shudder when I heard squelching sounds behind me. McKay and the rest of Vogel’s team had gone back to work.

Over the following four days, we finally found our way out of the hyperspace bridge. When we broke through into normal space, we all felt relief.

The feeling was short-lived however. The system we found ourselves in wasn’t quite the same as when we’d left it.

“Radiation levels are high, Captain,” Yamada said, “even for Gliese-32.”

Gliese-32, known as “Gi” to the locals, was an orange-colored star about thirty-five light years from Earth. We’d been here before and interacted successfully with the inhabitants. As best we knew, our armada had passed through this system on its maiden voyage.

The breach came out quite near Gliese-32, and the system was high in gamma radiation anyway. We found ourselves maneuvering for several tense minutes to evade the gravitational pull of the central star.

It was only then that we turned our thoughts to Tranquility Station, the home of the Gi people. There were no inhabitable planets in the system, and all life resided inside an artificial polyhedron built by the original colonists long ago.

Or rather, all life had been located there. We stared in stunned silence at the dead wreckage that had once been an impressive human achievement.

Today, Tranquility Station looked like a crushed, burned Christmas ornament hanging in space. Fully half its mass had been blown away. The powerful shielding it had once used for a defense was gone. The fighters that had no doubt defended the station were drifting about, destroyed and useless.

“I’m sorry sir,” Yamada said, her voice emotional. “I’m not getting any life readings. It appears as if the variants have killed everyone.”

I nodded, unable to speak.

The Connatic, a woman I’d once made love to, was clearly dead.