you were going to say something else. Besides, we only came to get them,” Julieta indicated her friends, “and we were going to leave anyway.” She tried not to let on that she’d failed to calculate weight load. It was embarrassing.
“Your plan lacks several key factors, fervor notwithstanding. You’ll take one of ours.” He held up a hand to quiet them. “It’ll have the benefit of being registered legally, and your pilot will be one of my people. She’ll be able to slip past the watchful eyes that seem to be everywhere right now.”
He’d thought this through now about seven or eight times. It made sense. There were plenty of men and women he trusted wholly, but he’d picked Bijul Nandra to pilot. She was the best, most resourceful, wiliest he had. She’d trained as a fighter, moved to blockade running, and when that had died out, she’d settled in as a trainer.
۞
Bijul Nandra was in the hangar bay, staring at the container, or what was left of it. Colonel Tarkington had given orders for it to be dismantled and scrapped. The engineers team had happily taken plasma torches to the thing and reduced it to three neatly stacked piles of metal. Soon, it would become something else, and disappear entirely into the station. The rest of the massive bay housed craft that were in need of repair, or like her own, used as training aids.
After a few minutes of contemplation, she left the scrap heap and walked over to her personal craft, a Harrier Armour-class. She ran her hand over her call sign, “Bijoux”, wondering if she’d ever get to fly it again, much less see action. Captain Nandra, best-ever…it was meaningless in these times. Everyone wanted peace.
The colonel was one of these. He didn’t have the temperament for making ugly decisions. He wanted to trust, to see the light at the end of the dark expanse…to Bijul, she already understood these things to be unknowable. Trust was worthless. Hope was for the weak. She had been raised to be a warrior, in spite of her family’s history. War was the great equalizer, the cleansing force that could destroy the old and usher in the new.
Colonel Tarkington might not understand that now, but he would, eventually. He’d asked Bijul to help prevent war, to keep the status quo intact. If she understood the situation correctly, she was to deliver a group of individuals back to Earth, that they might fulfill just that mission. Her blockade running tactics were what recommended her for the task, of course.
The other concept that the colonel could not grasp was that not everyone had a charmed existence such as his. Bijul had fought all her life for every rung of the ladder she’d climbed. From her father’s mother, Bibi, she’d listened to stories of the caste system, of which her family had once been in the lowest rank.
Only willingness to do battle had freed them of low-caste status, while a larger-scale fight had broken the caste system entirely. Bibi was the one who had told her all the stories of long struggles and persecutions. It had been she who had given Bijul an engraved gold bracelet with the words of Guru Gobind Singh carefully etched on the inside.
‘When all efforts to restore peace prove
useless and no words avail,
Lawful is the flash of steel,
It is right to draw the sword.”
۞
Maeve continued over the vast, rolling prairie-scape, not knowing when she might encounter what she expected to be there. She sensed that she was putting it off, trying to erase it in spite of herself. The moon was now a thin sliver, as it had been that night, and the wide Missouri was barely tangible.
There was nothing. The earth was devoid of those fearsome memories. It was emptied of the dead. She had been so certain that they would still be here. That had been the reason why she’d avoided sleep for so long, but now…nothing.
She squinted into the distance. There was an inky shape, its form pricked out by tiny lights. It was a bunker. Her breath caught in her chest. This did not belong here. It was not of her making. And yet, she knew it was where she had to go.
Cold air knifed at her as she walked blindly in the dark. Every step confirmed that it was not of her making; she could not affect it. She could not change it, nor draw it nearer.
It waited, willfully. She began to truly feel its magnetic pull on her, and realized that she had felt it all this time. It had been pulling on her for hundreds and thousands of nights of sleep. Maeve knew, once she entered it, she would be under that influence. A foreign control, something that had been placed in her mind without her consent.
She endured the uncomfortable twinges and prickling of anxiety. It was difficult to discern whether this was the result of her unconscious mind trying to protect her. Perhaps it was only the same weakness that had assailed her that night. She willed her mind to be still; this was an order it was used to defying.
Without warning, she found herself inside. It was brilliantly lit, impossible to see. Everything was blindingly white. She felt that it would be impossible to ever see again. Gradually, though, the glare began to subside. The room she found herself in was empty, aside from a dentist-style chair in the middle of it. A female figure was reclined in the chair, wearing headphones and an elaborate pair of dark glasses. Maeve looked more closely. Not glasses. Some kind of visor, really, that covered the woman’s eyes completely. She felt the ground shift under her feet, as though a minor earthquake had just grazed them.
She walked closer to the chair. The female did not move. Only by the rise and fall of her chest did Maeve know that this was meant to be a living person. Now only mere inches away, she looked over this prone form and saw what she had been hoping not to see. A tattoo on the inside of the left wrist. It was normally covered up by a watchband or bracelet. The walls heaved and rumbled. She could not tell from where this seismic activity originated.
As if guided by a directive, she saw herself reaching for the unmoving body stretched out before her. The shaking of the beneath her feet began to intensify, but she could not divert her hand. Only slightly did she touch that wrist, to see if the image of a world tree could be smudged away.
But on the moment of that contact, the woman sat upright, and the tremors swelled in earnest. The bunker began to disintegrate around them. Maeve looked down; the other woman had a fierce and painful grip on her. Images began to flood her mind. Unreality fell away. And she arrived back where she had started.
۞
Dmitry had been sitting in Maeve’s room for several hours. She was out cold, which was both deliberate and a blessing. Medicine being what it was, she’d be back on her feet in a day or so, no worse for wear. But the fact that she was unaware of what was going on…that was the lucky thing for right now. He was having difficulty imagining what her reaction would be to the news that her friends had chosen to go back planetside. Even more difficult, they’d be preparing to see through some mission that he still had trouble believing was plausible or logical.
He’d thought it up, down, and sideways, even taking Tark’s confirmation into account. Secret societies were not something he’d spent much time worrying about before. Sure, he’d heard stories now and then. It was hardly a new concept. In fact, having looked at the origins of the Mithras cult, it was probably as old as humanity itself.
Tark saw in this an opportunity to nip a problem in the bud. He had convinced himself that this was a matter of preventing something worse down the line. Dmitry was having trouble getting his head around the idea that a shadow organization was planning on starting some, what, galactic war?
The Terran system was dependent on a lively trade interaction. He couldn’t see it. Now, civil war, on the other hand, that made perfect sense. Get rid of opposition, isolationism settles in, tyranny rules…he smacked a hand to his head. The Mithras thing had its roots in Roman culture. Romans had loved to kill their own citizens, hadn’t they? Had even given it a nice official name. State approved murder, proscription.
It was a popular tactic throughout history. Wipe out those who oppose, control through fear and ignorance. He tried to think of an old quote that niggled at the back of his memory, though
he could not remember its source. “War is peace.” Tark was so set on preventing a larger scale calamity that he had missed the more reasonable scenario.
Dmitry thought it unlikely that he would be swayed to change his mind now. Too many others believed the same thing to be true. It just made more sense. The doctor and all her ranting, what had she been ranting about? Outsiders, non-humans. They didn’t want to destroy other species. They wanted to pull back to a time before there was intermingling, maybe. They could push everyone out, keep trade regulated at the boundaries of the system….
On the surface, it sounded far too complex, Dmitry realized that. Enacting such a plan would be far more difficult than open hostilities, but the end result was far cleaner. There were too many fronts to consider for large scale war, at least from a control perspective. Control was the end result; Dmitry felt that this had to be true. Otherwise, why wouldn’t have there already been bombings, attacks, acts against non-humans? No, it had remained under the surface, if all this Mithraic Alliance talk was to be believed. To him, that pointed far more readily to the preparations for an internalized plot.
He went back to watching Maeve. This cloak and dagger sort of thing was not his milieu. Paranoia was a destructive force, along with its companions of doubt and fear. He could see the façade of peacetime duty rippling, showing what was hidden behind. What would the Nimitz resemble in a time of war? Or a worse scenario, under martial law? It was a massive hulking presence in the system, a symbol of prosperity and stability. Would it be used as a tool for propaganda? Would it become a contention point, at which time its destruction would be inevitable?
Dumbly, Dmitry realized that he had debated himself into belief. He took in a lungful of air and puffed his cheeks out as he exhaled. Maeve slept on. Distraction was the only option left, so he devoted his attention to studying her. Her hair was completely fine, each strand so thin he could hardly see just one. She’d braided it, the results of which still lay in a thick plait over her shoulder. Long bangs covered her ears. He carefully tucked the hair away, smiling at tiny bright purple hoops through her lobes.
Wherever she was in her dreams, she was not completely at peace. This did not surprise him. She was not a restful sleeper, by her admission and his own observations. Now that he knew what had been done to her, it seemed a small miracle that she could ever rest at all.
He took her hand, shaking his head at the hematite-colored varnish on her nails, and the stack of multi-colored string bracelets around her wrist. Absently, he pushed these around in a circular motion, and then paused. Curious, he pushed the bracelets apart. Funny that he’d not seen it before. She had a tattoo of a small tree. He wondered what it symbolized.
۞
Tark was on the observation deck, trying to find some center of calm. The windows where he stood overlooked the civilian traffic areas outside the station, normally incredibly busy. At this time, it was completely still. He looked out, beyond the edges of the Nimitz, into the still untamed reaches of space. This was the calm he wished for. For nothingness to occupy his mind, to stare into the heart of eternity, and be at peace.
It was a dangerous desire. He realized this. After fifteen years in space, he’d seen his share of crack-ups. They all had. Places like the Nimitz weren’t as challenging to the psyche. It was the deep space duty postings, or as had been the case with Dmitry, the endless patrols. Dmitry hadn’t cracked up, he chided himself. He’d self-destructed. There wouldn’t have been a place for Dmitry to come back to if