he had lost it completely. He found himself wondering about Maeve, though.
Had she come back from a place like that? Self-destruction? It was certainly possible that she had. He had some doubts about how far she might have come, how far from the edge she truly was. At the moment, Maeve was unaware that this Wallace fellow and his partner, or whatever she was, were there. Nor did she know that there was a plan in progress to return them all to Earth, much less to enact some mission.
It was true that he wished to avoid, or at least forestall, violence and war. Tark had joined the military believing that it was possible to function as a peacekeeper. He was fully invested in the philosophy of offering protection, aid, and comfort to those who could not defend themselves. This had been his guidepost along the length of his career; to which he suspected his posting to the Nimitz had been due in part.
Now, he looked into the distance between the Nimitz and Earth. He did see war looming. What bothered him was that he could not put his finger onto it precisely. It was difficult to determine from what quarter it might arise, and to where it might spread.
He’d never been skilled at ground tactics; a failing he was more than willing to admit. That was Dmitry’s area of expertise, and he was more than happy to let his friend run that end of things. Tark was actually a bit surprised that Dmitry hadn’t come looking for him to dissect the latest developments. Perhaps things were moving a bit too swiftly, even for Dmitry’s quick mind.
“Jorge?” A quiet voice broke into his ruminating. He turned around to find Sa’andy. She was standing with her hands clasped behind her back, a sheepish look carefully arranged on her pretty features.
“You don’t need to apologize anymore. I think we pretty well covered apologies last night….” He smiled tiredly and put his arms around her.
“If I had told you everything, this might not have happened, though.”
“We can’t undo what’s been done.” Only to Maeve, he thought. Jemila Solomon was lost to time; snatched up by the desolate jaws of death.
“I know this. It’s just that it seems for every bit of information we do not see how to interpret, something goes terribly wrong. Perhaps I ought to ignore my directives from now on…that’s all I meant.”
“How did you know?”
“The general’s aide de camp is one of the resistance. We…um, they, try to have someone with every senior official, if possible. We have to imagine that the other side is doing the same.”
“This sounds like the lead-in to a complicated joke: ‘We know that they know, that I know’.”
“It does get a bit tangled at times. Don’t even get me started on how hard it is to make sure we don’t have someone working both sides.”
“Sa’andy.” His voice was calm, but she recognized the edge to it and winced.
“Yes?”
“Just how involved are you? Miss I’m-not-read-into-everything?”
“I might be in a little tiny bit deeper than I said I was.”
“Are you my shadow? Is that why you came here?”
“No! I was sent here, it’s true, but you have someone else. Not me. It never had anything to do with our relationship.”
“Who is my shadow?” He pressed a little harder, knowing it was pointless.
“I can’t tell you right now. It would compromise everything.”
“Do you suppose that Hawke was theirs, then?”
“We never determined that to a certainty. She didn’t seem to be what I would call…bright…enough? If they do have someone aboard already, they’re heavily invested, and that’s why an outside operative was sent in to clean things up.”
“A sleeper? You think there might be a sleeper agent here?”
“At a minimum. I’m sorry, Jorge, any timeline or idea of what we thought might come to pass has pretty well blown up in our faces.”
“Merde. And here, Dmitry and I were just commenting on how the Nimitz is a safe haven.”
“My love, if a move is made to begin hostilities, I think we can expect the Alliance to attempt to acquire this base as rote.”
۞
Maeve looked down at her hand and wrist, which was a mirror of the one holding her. She pulled to no avail. The tremors all around them rose and swelled in a concerto of destruction. The bunker continued its collapse. Suddenly, Maeve realized her hand was freed; she covered her ears to the deafening roar that swirled all around, only to cry out in pain a moment later. Falling, helpless, she found herself pinned under the rubble that had been a building. She knew it was something in and of her mind, but she could not shift any of it.
A scrabbling noise caught her attention. The other woman…the other her…was standing up out of the dust, pulling off the mask and headphones. It was her, but not her. Like a sketch of her, a Maeve replica, smudged around the edges and incomplete. This other Maeve was a two-dimensional manikin, a golem created from mud and terror. She came close to Maeve, staring into her with brackish eyes that would not focus, burning between them like wet wood instead.
“Mission initiation commenced. Activation complete.” Maeve was afraid to respond. She didn’t understand what was happening. She was trapped still under the debris, paralyzed by uncertainty. The golem scowled at her, pressing a strange, too-long finger into her shoulder.
“Owner: confirmed. Incapacity: confirmed. Mission initiation complete.” The false Maeve stood back up, and turned to the direction from which the true Maeve had come. She was going to go back, and leave Maeve behind. Panic crept in.
“Wait! Stop, deactivate!”
The false her turned her head back, slightly.
“Command not recognized. Password not given.” She moved away from Maeve as if she had taken flight. An instant later, she was a speck in the distance. Maeve was alone in a dark wasteland; the stars had all blinked out and the crickets had deserted her. She could feel a scream rising, powerless against it; she let it out until she felt it exhaust itself.
۞
Dmitry yawned and stood. Maeve was still swaddled in her drugged cocoon, so he decided to go off to find Tark. A great many thoughts had been pushing their way past any sleep he might have otherwise got, anyway. He leaned over Maeve, and gently kissed her forehead.
“Happy healing. I’ll be back soon,” he whispered in her ear, wondering whether he was actually telling the truth. He turned to walk out, leaving her lying still. The door clicked softly shut, so softly it was barely noticeable, but her eyes flew open.
۞
It seemed that sleep was not going to cooperate with any of them. Mrs. Han had opened her doors to Leif, Grace, Antonio, and Josh, hoping to offer some comfort. Instead, they had all sat in utter silence for approximately three hours before trickling down to the street outside. Unspoken consensus led them to a rowdy Irish pub, fish and chips, and plenty of beer in which to cry.
“This has pretty well gone to shit.” Leif was staring at a plate of haddock. Josh leaned over.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Not that, you idiot.”
“Oh, right. Well…she’s going to be okay. The rest…I don’t know. Of us all, I never expected Jemi to be the one….”
“She was a civilian.” Leif shrugged under the weight of responsibility, misplaced as it was.
“She was not a civilian. She wasn’t like us, but…well, she wasn’t just your average college recruit either. The CIA had found her, brought her in, and trained her up. I guess it didn’t go too well. She wasn’t really happy with the spook lifestyle, you know?” They all stared at Grace, who was mashing her chips with a fork.
“When the hell did you find that out?”
“Um, like the second day I knew her. What? Y’all were a little preoccupied.” She pointed her fork back and forth from Leif to Josh to Wallace.
“I second that. Sorry, I know I came in late to things, but some of us were doing things that didn’t involve babysitting a catatonic chick.” The steely look in Julieta’s eye didn’t invite argument.
<
br /> “We had our reasons.”
“Such as?”
“I’m not going to sit around trying to rationalize what I did or didn’t do. We were all trying to survive, if you recall.” They did recall. At least from the time they’d come into the project, they’d all been trying to get by. Leif jabbed his finger into the tabletop between them all. “That’s what we ought to think about. How many times have we been targeted? We didn’t even really know what was going on.” He heaved a huge sigh and rubbed his forehead vigorously.
“He’s right. Imagine where we’d be if they’d managed to carry out the rest of the conditioning process?”
“Aside from dead?”
“Yeah, but we got pulled out, told we were ‘safe’ from the bad guys, and given a new mission. Here’s what I have to wonder…do we think that the quote-unquote bad guys never went back to try again?”
“You think this alliance group is them? The baddies?”
“I don’t think so. It wasn’t really clear who was trying to carry out that original programming. Nobody would tell us anything. They just told me that they’d ‘found’ Maeve in a tiny facility in the middle of nowhere, and rescued her. They basically dumped her through the door, and left. No medical treatment, no nothing. All I had was their word to go by.”
“You never told us that.”
“Gracie, we were in the middle of nowhere ourselves…the Arctic to our right, our own devices to the left. Just like an experiment.” Leif paused to let that sink in. “I had a strong feeling that if I shared my suspicions around, things might get worse. I…didn’t want them to take her again.”
“What made you think it was an experiment?” Antonio tried to laugh it off, but he felt a cold stone of doubt slither through his gut.
“Aside from being trapped in an icy hellhole?” This theory was nothing new to Josh. He and Leif had sorted out their thoughts on it some time ago.
“We were handpicked. Sent to an isolated location. There were cameras everywhere.” As Leif spoke, Grace sat back in shock. Apparently she had never noticed. “But it was what went on at night that really convinced me. I never dreamt, not once, while we were there. I’d put my head down and come to after what seemed like five minutes, every night, like clockwork. Tell me any of you had a different experience.” No one said anything.
“We couldn’t figure it at first, and we didn’t want to say anything. It was too chancy. The best we can figure is that we were being drugged or put into a hypnotic state. Maeve was the only one who never was affected. She’d already been through the whole process, which of course, we didn’t know then either.”
“You’re implying that we’ve all been fully programmed. How would that work, especially now? Any trigger has surely got to be long lost by now.” Antonio felt both relieved and unsettled by the thought.
“Maybe. Unless someone has that information. It’s probably not that Alliance bunch they were telling us about, though. Otherwise they would have just flipped the switch and used us.” A million thoughts were running rampant through Leif’s mind. He was worried about their end of things, obviously. No denying that they might be in danger, even if the reason for it seemed a little loopy.
The real concern was the unknown. He’d never managed to figure out what had actually been done to Maeve. That had been part of the reason why he’d never wanted to talk about it to everyone else. Insofar as most of their group had disliked Wallace, they’d been uncomfortable with Maeve. She’d been like a worrisome thorn in their collective paw.
Even he had been worried, afraid of what she might do, but only because he had seen first-hand every stage of her unraveling. He’d been the one to pick her up out of the dirt and carry her back. It had been into his ear that she had spoken all her secrets. When she’d disappeared, he had gone looking for her. Likewise, when she had