Dirk’s men shoved Remy into the chair facing the desk in that administrator’s office. It was difficult to believe the administrator kept this office in such a state with discarded equipment and parts collecting in every corner. The desk was a mangled mess with dents on this side from previous visitors who must have kicked at the front. Two of its legs had been replaced with piles of books. The top had been chipped away at the center where the administrator would have worked. It should have been easy to scramble up a new desk.
Behind the administrator’s chair were three filing cabinets, displaying the same level of abuse as the desk. Why they still kept hard files when Earth long ago abandoned the practice was yet another mystery on this world of horrors. Remy wondered if it wasn’t some office staple the truly prestigious administrators refused to let go of. It wasn’t what was in the cabinets; it was the quantity of cabinets making you look busy and important. He would have to remember this tactic if the UN ever gave him an office, so he could show any visiting dignitaries how important he was to the cause.
That would be if the guns in his face had peaceful intents. Dirk dropped into the chair on the other side of the desk, disappointed. It wasn’t so much in his guest as it was his own man. This was their fight and he didn’t want the kind of help Remy had offered. He made it clear before how the UN’s representative could help him.
They had flooded two more trenches and divided the army outside. The gun batteries took care of the forward forces, while the chaos forced those to the rear into a brief retreat. He knew it was only a matter of time before the opposing commander had to call for more supplies, and his scrambler was ready and the operators waiting for the moment those inhibitors came down to fill that order.
“Escalation has never worked,” Remy pleaded. “Even if you stop that army and destroy the Freedom, they’ll send more ships and more men. The only way this will end is with your annihilation unless you negotiate peace.”
“Bah,” Dirk dismissed the talks of peace and negotiation. “There is no negotiating with these governments. They can take whatever they want, and Ares already showed you how they don’t consider us men.”
“I don’t understand this, Dirk! You have no plan. You’re putting so much energy into fighting, but you have nothing to fight for. I don’t see the endgame here.”
“You don’t understand? Then let me tell you something. Two months ago, a Confederation ship came by to resupply. They had some interesting programs to trade, including some new recipes. Magnus took those recipes to upload to the blenders in the mess, but one of the data discs wouldn’t upload. He loaded it into a proper terminal and found the Confederates had mixed up the recipes with their recent mission logs.
“Their last stop was another Republic mining colony. They recorded interactions and trade with a number of the personnel, all of which happened to share names with members of our own crew. A few of us broke into this office while the administrator was asleep and went through his computer files. We were able to confirm that a number of colonies were manned by duplicate versions of everyone here.
“The Republic doesn’t need us. They have our original patterns on file somewhere. They can start the next colony with new versions of us and they don’t even need access to our computers to do it.”
Remy began to understand this man’s sense of hopelessness, but it didn’t explain the invasion. His story didn’t explain Colonel Fortune’s mission. “If they don’t need your patterns, then what do they want with your data stores? I sat in on the mission briefing. One of the primary objectives of this mission is to retrieve those files.”
Dirk waved his hand dismissing the notion of hope Remy was fighting to hold onto. “Our doctor was running experiments. They’re after his data.”
After witnessing the results of their technology, Remy needed to know what kinds of experiments were so important. Though Dirk wouldn’t tell him, he had gotten admission that they were conducted in the secret extra-dimensional room, troubling him further. He wondered about Dr. Sadile. The man was always overly pleasant. Remy found it a tad creepy though he had dismissed it as a personality quirk. What Dirk had just told him about their doctor invited suggestions that Sadile was conducting his own secret experiments.
His first priority was this conflict with the miners, and Dirk may have finally given him the first idea how to settle this: the data stores. If that’s all the Republic leaders wanted, they might give up and go away if that data were to vanish. Remy understood the value those stores held for him as well and feared offering the suggestion to Dirk. If he could get his own hands on that data, he might have inescapable evidence of human rights violations. That data would be embarrassing enough to force a stronger UN presence among the space programs.
Remy suggested the destruction of the data, and with a bit of relief, the idea was dismissed. “Those data stores contain information valuable to us,” Dirk explained. “They contain our most recent life patterns. If we lose those, we lose all the memories stored in those patterns. We lose all the knowledge we’ve accumulated during this siege. We lose all knowledge of the tactics that were successful against the Space Force.”
So they were afraid of death! His hopes for a negotiated peace rose with every word Dirk voiced. “If you lose that lifeline,” Remy reminded him, “then you are no worse off than you were before you left Earth. Back home, we don’t have saved life patterns to fall back on. If we get hurt or die, we can’t just reload ourselves and start over. We don’t get another chance if we make mistakes or decide to waste our first life. Your government, like the other three out here, they haven’t shared this technology with Earth. Their own people back home don’t even know the miracles that have been discovered among the stars. They also have no idea about the abuses and horrors those miracles have unleashed.”
Dirk grew silent once again showing Remy he had dug a chink in his defenses. It was a chink he had to widen somehow if he was to negotiate a peace for these people before Colonel Fortune’s men broke through the defenses outside.
“Assuming that data was destroyed and the Republic left you alone, what would you do? I mean you can’t stay on this planet.”
Dirk didn’t have to think about that answer too hard. He had an endgame to this mess after all. “We have enough raw material in storage. Our final orders were to create one last ship. We were then supposed to scramble the entire complex into the ship’s storage pods. When we got to the next planet, we were to reverse the process to build the next colony.
“Our plan was always to get away on that ship, but none of us know how to overwrite the navigational preprogramming.”
“So you’re not looking to die after all,” Remy realized. “You holding out until someone can crack it.”
“And we need the data stores because they hold the plans for the ship. They have the star charts we need to navigate. They even hold the programming necessary to make the technology work once we find our new home.”
Confident he had Dirk’s attention, Remy nudged the rifles away from his head. Dirk nodded to the men as a signal to leave them alone.
“Let me offer Colonel Freedom a deal. You can trade those data stores for your freedom. When I go back to the ship, you copy every bit of information to data disks and hide them. That way you can hand over the data stores while keeping all the files you need.”
Dirk considered the offer. How nice it felt to think he could lead his men out of this nightmare, but this notion was pure fantasy. The Republic could never allow one of their copied people to roam free in the galaxy. The risk of them returning to Earth and telling everything was too great. It was just as he tried to tell Remy from the moment he stepped into the complex: there was no way out of this for them.
However, it didn’t have to end for the well-intentioned UN inspector. If he had someone aboard the Republic ship waiting to bring down the inhibitors for his trans
port, then it was a safe bet those military leaders didn’t know he was a threat to their secrets.
“The only thing you can do for us,” Dirk relented, “is to survive and get back to Earth. That is the only way people are going to know what’s happening out here. If you try to mediate this conflict, you’re only putting yourself in danger. Once they find out what you know, it is game over for you as well.”
Remy tried to protest, but whatever door he had opened in Dirk’s wall had been shut, locked, and bolted. It wouldn’t be long before Fortune had regrouped his army and discovered a way over the rivers of lava.