this is just a lot of guessing. I’m not solid behind the idea that Fergus Wallace is or was some kind of spook. He’s just too much of a….” Leif had stopped cold.
“You see? You see what you did there? You just blew up your own argument against.” Boom. Grace sat back in satisfaction.
“I don’t get it. What did he do there?” Antonio was beginning to have a frantic edge to his voice. There was far too much crazy stuff going on of late. He supposed it was too late to finally tell them that he’d only volunteered because of the pay rate it had promised. His plan had always been to use it to finance his own internet startup. The internet was probably long gone by now.
“He’s playing the Scarlet Pimpernel.” Josh smiled. Then he shook his head and stopped.
“Playboy millionaire.” Grace tapped the table in further satisfaction. Josh waved her off.
“He’s not butch enough for that kind of acting.”
“Please. Don’t go giving me visions of him in any kind of tights. Let’s get back to reality. Or unreality.” Julieta was annoyed by all this talk. Wallace was anything but complex. He was an infant. Grace looked at her with a little bit of sadness.
“Yeah, sure. Reality is this: she is going to come looking for us soon. He is playing us all. We are going to get our asses handed to us.”
“We’re not going to let that happen. We’ll split up, like he says. Leif is more than capable of handling Wallace. The rest of us will go back and try to get the truth out of your Master Kun.”
“Whoa, Josh, who says Kun knows any of this? We’re taking some pretty big leaps of logic, as far as I can see.”
“Jules, I understand that you don’t want to go down this road. Maybe his intentions have been honest, but we’re going to have to realize that he might have his orders too.”
“And us? Our orders? Why are we going along with any of this anymore? Any orders we had died with the guys who gave them!” They were losing Antonio to panic. This was the problem with civilians….
“Or the girls. Don’t forget them, Tonio.”
“Could you stop fooling around, Grace? Just tell me why the hell I should be going along with this?”
“I’d be happy to.” Julieta gripped the arm of the chair she was perched on. “If we don’t do something, this whole system will be at war, very shortly. We’ve been seeing it coming for a while. Oh, maybe Warden has told his investors and cronies that he wants only to go so far as shutting the borders. But we have seen what is coming. If I’d doubted it, Boko put those doubts to rest.” She stood, and began to pace, hoping it wouldn’t be difficult to convince them. “Warden plans on extermination on a mass scale, as a means of luring in outside worlds to open war. War is big business, but more than that, he wants to push the human race as the dominant species as far out as he can go.”
In reality, they were only theorizing this. Julieta felt that it was time to lay it on the line, though. Grace frowned. There was probably something to say that was both wise and reassuring. She just couldn’t summon it up. She preferred being a wiseass.
“Suicide mission, yay!”
“I think we pretty much knew that already.” Julieta sighed and fell back into a nearby chair.
“I know.” She frowned. “It just sounds less doom and gloomy when you say ‘yay!’ at the end.”
Josh waited for a few moments to sidle up to Leif. He was hoping to talk some sense into his friend, though it was unlikely.
“Hey.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Maybe I should go with you. Girls can handle themselves. They’re not headed into the kill box.”
“What are you worried about?”
“You destroying Wallace springs to mind. As does you not having a ton of perspective.”
“He was never really interested in her. It was a scam. How did I miss that?”
“I can think of a few reasons. The better question is how did she miss it? Anyway, if what you told me is true, there must have been more than a job on his mind at one time.”
“Right. Getting laid. Like that means a damn thing.”
“Maybe it does. But that’s not my worry. She is. Her altered mental status, if you will. I’d equate what she’s going through to something like a fugue or dissociative state.”
“I’m sorry, none of that means a thing to me.”
“Both of those are events that occur after trauma or…something so psychologically stressful, that the brain physically tries to protect itself from further harm by creating a break, a barrier.”
“So, you’re saying that the programming she was given….”
“It created an artificial fugue. It’s would be easiest way of brainwashing. Put the individual through a prolonged period of chaos and tension. And as we figured, while the person is in a sleeping state, that’s when suggestion becomes possible.”
“I don’t know if I like the implications of ‘prolonged’. How is that treated when it happens…not on purpose?”
“Ah, well, that depends on the individual. I don’t think you can find a one size fits all for that, but this isn’t an ordinary case. If it was an organic onset, I’d say therapy of some sort. But it isn’t. It’s a…surrogate personality, one that was put in place, which means she’s probably somewhere in there, screaming to get out.” It was obvious that Leif hadn’t considered this possibility.
“What?”
“Well, think about it. This is a persona that has nothing to do with Maeve. It’s like having a…parasite, or a tiny robot controlling her. The likeliest means of keeping Maeve out of the way, not cluttering up the process of the mission assignment, is to trap her somewhere. If we can get at her when she’s in a sleeping state, or even put her under hypnosis, we can try to get her back.”
“And you know how to do that?”
“Ah, no.”
“So it has to wait.”
“I’d say so. But I’d be willing to bet that our odds will improve if we finish up on that island and get her to someone who’s an expert in meditative states.”
“The old guy. Kun.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“So we just have to keep from getting our asses shot off until then.” They nodded in unison, unwilling to think too far into the future on that count.
۞
Bijul was ready to fly. Her new ship was ready to leave the docks and head back to Earth. She’d made some interior modifications. Her cockpit had been reconfigured the way she preferred, and she’d carefully stowed an assortment of weaponry inside a bulkhead. These items were chosen with a specific intent.
Her goal was to prevent these people from carrying out the mission that Colonel Tarkington claimed they were going to do. They were supposed to prevent a war, he’d told her. She needed war to come. It was the only way.
Men like Tarkington didn’t understand what conflict could accomplish. He saw it as a last resort, something terrible and ruinous. Bijul knew that war could open the floodgates to so much more. It always brought innovation, invention, and opportunity. The last would be hers, if she could grasp hold of it.
She knew now that the group was going to split. She would be piloting one portion of it to Peru, onto a mountainous plateau. The other half would be headed to a sheep-populated island in the Mediterranean. Somehow, she knew she would have to deposit her passengers and try to reach that island as quickly as possible.
۞
“I don’t know why I’m agreeing to this, but Captain Petrovich concurs with your assessments.” Tark chewed on his lip, feeling the sting of a bad habit indulged far too often of late. “You realize I could not only be removed from command, but probably get shot for this?”
“You’re not going to be shot.”
“Dmitry, neither of us can predict what’s going to happen.”
“You’re going to stay here. We’ll figure out how to deal with personnel later. I’m going to follow behind with…certain numbers…but if you’re here, you’ll be safe. You can always l
ock this place down.” They were quiet for a moment as ramifications began to imagine themselves.
“I should do that now.” Tark brought up a schematic of the station. He stared at it, unable to think further than the sheer numbers of living creatures on board.
“Colonel, Major, I appreciate your anxiety over all this. You don’t know me from Adam, as the saying goes, but you can trust me.”
“Sorry, Mr. Wallace, I doubt that’s a selling point for us.”
“Dmitry….”
“No, it’s alright. I know what he wants to say. It’s the same thing everybody wants to say about me. They think I’m a flake, a…cad, I guess. I couldn’t ever tell them the truth.” Wallace fidgeted uncomfortably with his stylus pen.
“What’s the truth?” Dmitry could feel dread settling down all around them.
“I was a recruiter. Maeve was my assignment. My agency had followed her career for a while, she fit all the qualifications, they wanted her.” He felt lightheaded, and realized he hadn’t eaten in hours.
“You let her go through the brainwashing thing?”
“No, Major, you don’t get it yet. I hit a snag.”
“A snag.”
“I kinda got in too deep, if you follow me.”
“You fell for her.”
“Sort of. We got a little involved…my agency dragged me back, reamed me out, and sent me back to bring her in ahead of schedule.” Wallace seemed to grow more and more pale as he sat in front of them.
“They wanted to kidnap her?”
“Something like that. I definitely failed on bringing her in. We didn’t know that we had somebody else watching the watcher. There was a secondary agency feeding off our intel. And…when they saw me hesitate, they moved in.”
“This doesn’t sound like a very great platform for trust.”
“I didn’t want to see her get hurt. We had no idea that anybody else was interested.”
“So this other agency grabbed her and did the initial programming that you talked about.”
“Oh, it was way worse than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“The other agency was the nascent beginnings of the Mithraic Alliance. They waited until she was out running a night exercise with her company…she and Christensen were the only two who survived.” Dmitry and Tark exchanged a look.
“I take it that this is why you’re eager to see the destruction of the Alliance.”
“Definitely up there on the list.”
“Why did Leif live through it? Did they want him too?”
“No, not at first. He came onto my agency’s radar because he kept looking for her. He was dogged. So we sent him to Norway to keep him out of trouble until we could find her. At that point, I got some help in getting reassigned to being a handler.”
“You didn’t answer the question.” Dmitry was beginning to see why Christensen didn’t like the guy.
“Leif lived because she sent him back to base. Something tipped her off. He said so himself in his report. Against his better judgment, he said he turned around and went back. Someone had to go, though, because all their radio equipment was dead. She must have known that he would do anything for her….”
“He’s in love with her.”
“He was. I can’t speak to that now.”
“Except he almost ripped your heart from your chest when you said something to that effect.”
“Who knows. He was, and still is, incredibly protective of her.” Wallace looked over to Dmitry sympathetically. “Sorry, Major. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think she ever felt the same.”
“Nope. Not much help.”
“Thank-you Colonel, though, for helping us.” On that count, Wallace was completely sincere.
“You still plan on departure tomorrow, early morning?”
“Yes. We’ll try to time it so we’re entering atmosphere at a heavy traffic timeframe. Our ships are small enough to pass for tow-alongs, if we can slip behind something larger.” At least, this was what Captain Nandra had told him. He’d have to trust his piloting abilities to keep them out of