Secrets die only when those who know the truth pass beyond the world.

— Erich Quizibian, c. 5070 PD

5 Decem, 5249 PD

“Well Inspector, this is as far as we go.”

The station at Cassini VII was far busier than he’d expected it might be, considering how far out on the fringes of civilization it was.  Timrel Winston glanced back over his shoulder at his transport’s commander, a stocky man with the look of a long-term spacer.  “Of course,” he said.  “You told me that from the start.  I’ll still need to find a ride to the Colony.  Any suggestions?”

The Tania’s captain hesitated with a slight frown before he said, “You might try the Mission Systems office on the fifth ring.  Rumors on the newsvids are saying that they’re going to pull all of their ops out beyond the Whispers.  They might be able to take you as far as the Colony if you’ve got the credits.”

Credits I’m not worried about, Tim thought.  It’s getting out there and completing my assignment.  Finding out what’s actually going on this far out here—finding out what happened to the Whispers.

Who killed that planet and why?

His communicator shivered in his pocket, just once, signaling that he had messages that had come in while the Tania was in jump.  “Up on the fifth ring?  Hard to find?”

“Shouldn’t be,” the Tania’s captain said.  “I can send someone to show you the way.”

Tim stooped to pick up his duffle, shaking his head.  “No, if it’s not hard to find, I shouldn’t have a problem.  Thank you, Captain.”

“Always a pleasure to serve the Commonwealth, Inspector.  Have a safe trip.”

“I hope to,” Tim said with a smile.  The other man gave him one last nod and then turned and walked away, headed to oversee loading and unloading of cargo.  The inspector’s smile faded as he shouldered his bag and turned away, heading into the bustle of the Cassini VII station.  His stomach growled, half insisting on a meal sooner rather than later and he frowned.

I should probably grab a bite now in case I can’t later, shouldn’t I?  He shook his head at himself and started to hunt down one of the omnipresent chains that littered every spaceport from here to New Earth and out to the far end of the homosphere again.  He dug his communicator out of his pocket as he walked, tapping at it with a thumb as he wended his way through the station’s crowds.

The Inspector General sent me an eyes only priority one?  That never happens.  Frowning, he glanced around for the nearest patch of private space available, changing course from his initial hunt for sustenance.  Then again, I’ve never investigated something as big as this before—no one except the Inspector General has, and she wasn’t even lead on that case.

Frederick Rose was, and he’s dead.  Whoever killed Mimir killed him, too.

Tim shivered.  The Inspector General had warned him.  The full weight of that warning hadn’t quite sunken in by the time he’d left New Earth.  Now it was finally starting to.

He found the public baths, tended by a slender, black-haired girl with almond eyes.  She smiled at his approach, peachy pink lips drawing back from straight white teeth.

“Something I can help you with, Inspector?”  Her Universal was flawless except for the hint of a Chinasian accent.

He shifted his bag.  “Do the baths have private facilities?”

“We have public and private baths, sir,” she said.  “We try to cater to all cultural sensibilities.  More profitable that way.”

“Of course,” he said, eyes drifting to the menu.  He dug his credit tab out of his pocket and handed it to her.  “Just a private room, please.”

“Of course,” she said, her voice a purr.  She ran his chit and handed it back, fingers brushing almost suggestively against his as she did.  “Follow me.”

Why do I suddenly have a bad feeling about this?  He tried to ignore the nervous butterflies suddenly dancing in his stomach as he followed the woman through a shimmering privacy screen and into the baths.  Beyond the short hallway, Tim caught sight of some traveling businessmen who looked like they probably hailed from Idesalli or Quildana Corp enjoying the public baths with a few pretty girls who were as naked as the day they were born.  A shiver worked its way down his spine.  He’d never been a fan of being out in the open like that.

“Are you all right, Inspector?”

Damn.  Did she notice the shiver, or is the discomfort all over my face?  He smiled.  “Of course.”

She offered him another smile and ducked down another hallway, leading him past a series of smaller chambers.  She parted another privacy curtain and nodded down a third corridor.  “All of these are available in your price range.  If there is…anything…else that we can do to make your visit more pleasurable, do not hesitate to let us know.”

Her tone of voice made his stomach give an uncomfortable twist.  It’s not just a damned baths, it’s a whorehouse, too?  He smothered a grimace and nodded.  “I’ll be sure to do that, Miss.  Thank you again.”

She smiled and turned away, hips giving one suggestive little twitch before he turned away and let the curtain fall closed between them.

Damn.  He knuckled his eyes as he slumped against the wall.  All cultural sensibilities indeed.  I think every single one of mine was just offended by that.  I wonder if the owners tell al the women to do that?

Hell.  They’re probably hired for it.

Tim shook himself.  He wasn’t here to investigate bathhouses in the outer reaches.  He was here to find out why a planet had died.

He levered himself off the wall and headed partway down the corridor.  The room he picked was small and quiet with a large tub made of dark stone dominating the space.  He sealed the door and sank down on the edge of it, tugging his communicator free of his pocket again.

“Bloody hell,” he breathed.  “What was so damned important that it’s flagged P-1 and eyes only?”  Tim rummaged around in his jacket for his earpiece.  There wasn’t a point in those flags if anyone overheard what Sephora Damerian had to tell him.

He jacked the earpiece into the communicator and plugged the other end into his ear, tapped in his code, and waited for her message to come across.

He swore again when he realized that she’d used maximum encryption, too.  What the hell is this?

Then he heard the fear in her voice, buried beneath the steel, as the message filtered through.

“Tim, this is the Inspector General.  Listen carefully and destroy this message once you’ve listened to it.  Trust no one inside the confines of the Commonwealth.  Rose knew more than he ever told anyone here.  He had his reasons.  Find his friends on E-557.  They should help you.  You—and they—might be our only hope.  Find the man named Windsor.  Shoot a tight-beam to my personal line when you make contact.  Out.”

Trust no one?  Of course Rose knew more, but…no one?  And who’s this Windsor?  His jaw tightened.  Somewhere between here and the Colony at Eridani Trelasia, he was going to have some serious research to do.

He listened to the message a second time before he destroyed it and keyed in the tight-beam to the Inspector General.  What time is it there?  Hell, she said to tight-beam her personal comm as soon as I got the message.

Sephora’s voice was groggy as she answered.  “Damerian.”

Damn.  I woke her.  “Inspector General, it’s Winston.”

“Tim.”  She was instantly more alert.  “Where are you?”

“In a private room in a bathhouse at Cassini VII,” he answered.  “What changed between the time you gave me this assignment and now, ma’am?”

“I got a warning from beyond the grave,” she said grimly.  “I found something in the archive about Mimir.  You need to be careful, Tim.  Bloody careful.”

He grimaced.  “You already told me that.  You said it when I left.”  His brows knit.  “What did you mean when you said I can’t trust anyone inside the Commonwealth?”

“Exactly what I said,” she told him.  “Frederick Rose uncovered a conspiracy within the Commonwealth around the time Mimir died.  He didn’t get the chance to warn me while he was still breathing—probably because he uncovered it almost too late and didn’t want to endanger me any more than I already was.”

“A conspiracy?”

“Yes,” Sephora said.  “Look, Tim, don’t ask for any more details.  I will get them to you personally if I can.  I need you to find his friends on E-557.  I need you to find them and learn what they know.”

“What makes you so sure they know anything?”  Tim asked.  What makes you think that they didn’t have something to do with his getting killed, or what happened at the Whispers?  What makes you think I can trust them?

She exhaled a quiet sigh.  “There was no one in the universe he trusted more than a man named Adam Windsor,” she said after a moment.  “Not me, not even his wife.  If anyone knows anything about what happened that we don’t, then it’s him.  He’s on E-557, Tim, and I need you to find him.  Tell him that we know about the conspiracy and ask for his help.”

“Help with what, though?”

“Finding out who killed the Whispers,” she said.  “And who killed Mimir and is probably about to kill the Commonwealth from the inside out.”

No pressure, huh?  “You’re sure about this?”

“More sure about this than anything else,” she said.  “I’ll try to keep you in the loop and I’ll try to run interference, keep you safe, but out there…you’re on your own, Tim.  Be careful.”

“Always, ma’am,” he said.  “Will you be able to make contact again?”

“Not anytime soon,” she said.  “Any reports you have I want maximum encrypt and forwarded to me for my eyes only.  I meant what I said—don’t trust anyone else Commonwealth.  I don’t know how far the conspiracy goes.”

“Right,” he said quietly.  “I’ll do what I can, ma’am.  I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“Stay alive,” she said.  “You’re more use to me alive without having solved this mystery than you would be dead and having solved it.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

The channel died and he sat there on the rim of the tub, staring at nothing, for a long, long time.

Someday, there will be nowhere else to run.  Some will want to come.  Others will only be here because there’s nowhere else.  They will come here because it is the only place to go.

— Erich Quizibian, c. 5074 PD

3 Decem, 5249 PD

There were three children, two teenagers, and five adults, one a grandfatherly figure that for some reason reminded her vaguely of Freder.  They’d been seated around a table, a steaming kettle of tea sitting at the center of it, a loaf of bread settled in a basket, already sliced and still warm, homemade jam and sweet butter in bowls set near it with a pile of small plates and butter knives arrayed with the cups, spoons, honey and honey for the tea nearby.  Lindsay studied these ten for another moment before smiling at the youngest, a boy of about ten, who sat looking hungrily at the bread and jam so near to him.

“Here,” she said, picking up a slice and laying it on a plate.  She spooned a dollop of the jam onto the bread and slid the plate to him with a knife to spread out his jam.  The boy’s eyes lit up and he smiled shyly at her.  She smiled back, then let her gaze drift over to the adults.  “It’s not much, but I thought you might be hungry.”  She started pouring the tea and handing it out slowly.

“Thank you,” one of the men, young, in his thirties, maybe, said to her finally, smiling faintly.  “It’s very kind of you to see to us like this.”

Lindsay smiled wryly.  “I wish I could say it was for nothing.  I wanted to talk to all of you.”  She’d already been introduced as a member of the world’s governing council.  They knew that much about her.  A few had seemed surprised, largely due to her apparent youth.

She poured herself a cup of the tea and spooned in a little honey, taking a long, slow sip before setting the cup down again.  “The people from Mission Systems said they found you adrift over the Whispers.  Was that where you were trying to go?”

“Only to refuel,” the older man, the one who reminded her of Freder, said.  “We were on our way here, to E-557.”  He glanced at one of the teenagers, who stared down into her mug.  He shook his head a little.  “We heard it was safe for psychics here.  Like Mimir used to be.”

Psychics.  Lindsay hadn’t read them yet.  She wet her lips, rested her hands on the table, and extended her senses.  Of course.  Two of the children, both teenagers, and three out of the five adults were all psychic to varying degrees.  She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.  “I thought the Commonwealth protected psychics, too.”

“By law,” the old man said.  “They’re protected by law, but that can’t stop what happens on the streets at night, or in back alleys during daylight hours, or what happens in the most paranoid of small communities.  All it takes is one misstep, making the wrong person angry.  That’s all.  That’s all it takes.  You incur the wrath of one powerful person and everyone else who was even vaguely uncomfortable with your presence suddenly looks the other way, doesn’t care what happens to you.  Doesn’t care what the law says.  You are the Other, the outsider, the one that’s different, and different is wrong and cannot be tolerated.”

Lindsay sucked in a breath.  “You worked for the Commonwealth.”

The old man smiled weakly.  “For my whole life,” he said softly.  “I worked with the Inspector General’s office from the time I was an intern until six months ago, when I started planning this.”

Lindsay tilted her head slightly.  “This?”

“Our escape,” the old man said simply.  He smiled again at Lindsay and took a piece of bread, spreading a touch of jam over it and taking a bite, chewing and swallowing before he spoke again.  “The Commonwealth is very quickly becoming less and less safe, more and more unstable.  And there’s nothing any of us have been able to do to change that.  It’s been a slippery slope since the wars ended.  Everyone keeps jockeying for power even if they’re not shooting at each other anymore.  Sometimes I think it was better when everyone was shooting at each other.”  He shook his head sadly.  “I’m sorry.  I’m spouting all of this and I haven’t even told you my name.”  He extended his hand to her, smiling faintly.  “Carson Taylor-Monroe.”

Lindsay took his hand in her gloved one, shaking it with a faint smile.  The old man still wore a wedding ring on his left hand, silver polished bright but with tarnish buried deep in the knot-worked design.  “Lindsay Farragut.  Call me Lindsay.  No need to stand on ceremony in here.”  She squeezed his hand before she released it.  “Were there more coming?”

The old man took a breath and exhaled slowly.  “Another set in a couple weeks.  With my daughter.”

Lindsay nodded slightly.  “We’ll keep an eye out for them.  Do you think the bombing of the Whispers might change their plans?”

“I don’t know,” Carson said softly.  “I really don’t know.”

“It won’t,” the young man who’d thanked her said quietly.  “They’ll leave come hell or high water.  Ashley’s too terrified to stay, I know that for a fact.”

“My nephew, Paul Baylef,” Carson murmured quietly.  “The little boy is his brother, Peter.”

Lindsay smiled a little.  “It’s nice to meet you.  It’s nice to meet all of you.  Did you all know each other on New Earth?”

“Connected through a web of blood ties and friendship, but some of us had never met before we got on that ship and left.”  Paul wrapped both hands around his mug.  “You’re not going to send us back, are you?”

Lindsay blinked at him.  “Why would I do that?”

He shrugged slightly.  “There are some rumors that E-557 is closed to people who hadn’t been a part of the Foundation or the Psychean Guard.  I imagine that’s what keeps some refugees away.”

“No,” she shook her head slightly.  “We’re not closed to outsiders.”  Lindsay smiled.  “We just don’t take people who aren’t willing to adapt to our way of life here.  The sustainability clauses in the colony’s charter are gospel.  This planet won’t die the same death every other human inhabited planet is dying.  As long as you’re willing to abide by those clauses, everyone’s welcome here.”  She slowly sat back down in her chair.  “And the clauses aren’t nearly as hard to abide by as some might think, and we do have quite a few modern conveniences.  We just try to live as much with the land as we live on the land.”  Is it really so hard for us to do that?  Or is it that I’ve done it for so long it’s simply second nature for me?  “We try to be low impact.  It’s impossible to be no impact, but we try to maintain the land and its resources as best we can without living in tents and eating nuts and berries.”

“Then it’s like Quizibian wrote about?  In the codicil to Roots of Disaster?”  The blonde woman’s voice came softly as she looked up from her mug to Lindsay, pale eyes filled with a mixture of fear and hope.  “That the Foundation, for all its idealism, was simply an effort to live in balance with the natural world surrounding them?”

Lindsay nodded slightly.  “That’s exactly it.  Our forebears, the first Foundation colonists to come here, worked very hard to make sure that this planet was going to be a good home to humans but also to all of the species that were brought here to populate this planet.  Species that don’t exist anywhere else in the galaxy.  That’s part of their great legacy that they’ve left to us, that all the people who’ve come to E-557 and stayed here are the guardians of.  We’re the custodians of Old Earth’s wonders of evolution that without the Foundation and the Psychean Guard before them would have been lost forever.”

Little Peter’s eyes grew big and round.  “You mean like bears and lions and tigers and horses and deer and all the animals in Uncle Carson’s big books?  The things that are only in the virtual zoos anymore?”

I’d forgotten how much can’t live back in the Commonwealth proper anymore.  Lindsay smiled faintly and nodded.  “Yeah, we’ve got all those things.  There’s a pack of wolves that live in the woods up near my house.  They hunt the deer in the forest.  Sometimes in the winter, we see them down near the stream, waiting to see if any deer are going to come to drink.”

The boy’s voice was full of a hushed awe.  “Wow.”

The wonder in his voice brought a smile to her face.  “I’ll make sure you can see them sometime.  I promise.”

“It sounds as if this world is anything but sterile,” one of the other women said softly.  “It sounds amazing.  Looking at this place, though, you can tell that it’s anything but rustic, too.”

Lindsay shrugged a little.  “A lot of this was built before I came here.  I wasn’t born here, either—I was a refugee, too, when I was a little girl.  My aunt and I came here from Mimir.”

“You’re Guard stock?”

She nodded.  “Just like the three Marshals—the military commanders here—and a lot of other people.  There are thousands of psychics here and all over the world, and there are thousands and thousands of non-psychics.  Some of them are descendants of the Foundation, others are Psychean Guard refugees and descendants.  There’s a lot of people here living with the land and making lives that are in balance with the land and the rest of our society.”  Lindsay took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.  “Everyone helps each other where they can, supports each other.  Without that, everything would come apart.  We live according to the precepts set down by the founders and as egalitarian and self-sustainably as possible.”  She smiled faintly.  “Everyone supports everyone else.  We trade back and forth for what we need.  It all works out fairly equal in the end.”

“And you can support more people?”

“Of course.  We adapt, like everyone else does.  We just try to do it in ways that won’t eventually destroy us all.”  She looked toward Carson, brow furrowing slightly.  “You said things were getting bad on New Earth.  What’s going on?  I’ve only heard rumors and I’m not sure I can trust all that I’ve heard.”

Carson laughed weakly and shook his head.  “The conglomerates are growing in power and influence over the Commonwealth parliament.  Institutions that used to be sacrosanct are losing power and ability to carry out their appointed duties.  It’s only a matter of time before the Commonwealth is some sort of useless appendage with a flag.  A cardboard cutout.  It’s been a paper tiger for years, but no one challenged it for a long time because the peace the Commonwealth brokered benefited everyone.  It gave them a chance to lick their wounds and restore their internal power.  Now that they’re strong again, I imagine most of the larger conglomerates are thinking they don’t need the Commonwealth anymore.  All it is to them is a giant ball of red tape.”

“Some of the congloms have sent representatives before the parliament to complain about restrictions on their activities,” Paul added.  “They want more control in the areas where they have the strongest presences.  The Commonwealth hasn’t caved in to their demands yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”  He looked at the woman next to him, about the same age as he, with dark hair cut very short.  “Tell her about what’s going on in the Colonial Office, Kori.”

Kori took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.  “I was working in the Colonial Office main branch in Telanovus.  We’ve been seeing a lot of overlapping claims being filed with the Office by some of the larger and more powerful congloms.  Once upon a time, they would have just been quashed, completely rejected and thrown out, but now they’re starting to get past the clerks on the lower level and get up to the mid-level checkers.  I’ve heard rumors that some of them have even got past the mids and up to the final checkers before the claims go to the Office bigwigs.  It’s like we don’t matter anymore.”  She bit her lip.  “Three separate entities filed claims for the Whispers in the past two months.  They got quashed at the mid levels.  They shouldn’t have ever gotten that far.  They’ve tried to fire some of the clerks at the low levels that are pushing the claims through to the mid levels, but they always seem to find their way back onto the roster.  We don’t know what’s going on.”

Lindsay frowned.  If the Colonial Office is losing its ability to protect the claims made by organizations to worlds and systems, that could spell big trouble for all of the smaller congloms.  And us.  Thanks be to the powers that be that Uncle Adam’s getting us those warships from Mission Systems that the Guard commissioned before Mimir died.  “That doesn’t sound good.”

“No,” Kori said softly.  “Not at all.  Everyone’s pretty afraid.  It’s only a matter of time before none of us can do anything about it.  If Chinasia and the Compact and Idesalli get their way, the Colonial Office is just going to become one big rubber stamp for their claims and to hell with everyone else.”  She shook her head slightly.  “There’s people inside of the Office fighting it, but I think we’re all starting to realize that we’re losing ground.  Fast.”

D’Arcy didn’t tell us any of this.  Not about the psychics, not about the Colonial Office.  I refuse to believe he didn’t know.  “And the areas between Commonwealth and conglom territory?”

“They’re a mess,” Paul said quietly.  “Congloms are tightening their control over border regions and taking control of areas that they never held, taking over whole communities.  Sometimes the people are displaced, sometimes they’re just…absorbed.  A few escape when that happens, but it’s never many.  Never that many at all.  Some of the people just disappear and no one ever sees them again.”

Matches up with everything I’ve ever heard about the Compact and Chinasia, that’s for sure.  She took a deep breath an exhaled slowly.  This is bad.  Worse than I thought it was going to get this quickly.  At least they haven’t hit us here.  Not yet, anyway.  It was coming, though.  She could feel it.  “Well, I don’t foresee any of you having to worry about that here.”  She smiled a little.  “We’ll get you set up with somewhere to sleep the next few nights while you talk to Consul Watson and a few others about your futures here in the colony.  I’ll be around, of course, if you need to talk to someone.”

“Our futures in the colony,” one of the teenagers said, a question in his voice.  “I thought you said we could stay.”

Lindsay smiled weakly.  “I don’t see a reason Amelda would send you back, especially in light of what you’ve told me.  It’s mostly a discussion of where your strengths lie, what you’d like to do now that you’re here, that sort of thing.”  She shook her head.  “There are lots of things refugees end up doing, but a lot of their descendants—and some of the younger refugees—end up doing stints in our military.  It’s small, but it’s done the job so far.  Probably going to be expanding soon.”

“Did you?”

“Do what?  Do a stint in the defense forces?  No.”  Lindsay laughed a little.  “I’m not cut out for it.  My husband trains pilots.  He used to be a combat pilot from Chinasia before he came here.”

Kori’s eyes widened fractionally.  “You accept refugees from Chinasia?”

I’m shocked that’s so surprising.  It shouldn’t be the fact that we accept them is the surprising one, but the fact that anyone escaped to make it here in the first place.  “Brendan’s the only one so far.  He was a kid, probably about your age.”  She gestured toward the teenager who’d spoken.  “He was the only survivor of a landing here, off the coast.  The tides have erased pretty much all sign of it by now, though.  It was a long time ago.”  And he was the only survivor because Alana led the response team and had finished off almost all the others.

Carson smiled faintly at Lindsay.  “There’s quite a bit more to that story than you’re telling.”

Lindsay blushed.  “Maybe someday I’ll tell you.”  The door behind her opened, soft footsteps eased inside.  She glanced back to see Ezra easing the door closed behind him quietly.  He offered her a faint smile and she smiled back before she turned back to the refugees.  “Eat, drink, please.  I can’t imagine that it’ll be very long before we have a place for you to spend the night that’s more comfortable than those chairs.”  She stepped away from the table and walked over to Ezra, brow furrowing.

“Is something wrong?”

He shook his head quickly.  “No, no, nothing’s wrong.  Lots of injured, but Tiana’s got all of that well in hand.  She brought a couple of the interns she’s been working with along and they’ve been a huge help.” Ezra paused and smiled a little.  “Did you want to take Brendan home tonight?”

She started to laugh.  “You have to ask?”  Of course I’d like to take him home tonight.  I have no idea what we’ll eat, but I’d love to have him home.

“No,” Ezra admitted, smiling wryly.  “But I thought I’d make sure you weren’t tied up in something up here before I just…sent him home.”

She shook her head.  “No, it’s fine.  I’ll come pick him up on the way home.”

Ezra nodded.  “I’ll let you finish up.  I’ve got to get some of the injured prepped to move to the clinic.”

“Thanks, Ezra.”

He nodded again and slipped back out.  She turned back to the refugees and smiled, walking back toward the table.  They had begun to eat, now, though their nervousness hadn’t quite faded.

I’m thinking that won’t go away until Amelda’s seen to them.  She smiled at them anyway, reaching for one of the spare mugs of tea.  “Welcome to E-557.  Welcome home.”

Back in the days of the Guard, they invited all psychics from every walk of life, of every creed, to join them on Mimir and later in its allied systems.  Now, the colony at E-557 is the only haven left.  It’s not much of a choice.  But it’s a choice nonetheless.

— Padraig Danson, senior claims reviewer for the New Earth Commonwealth Colonial Office, interview by NewsWire, 20 Decem 5248

3 Decem, 5249 PD

Artificial wind lifted hair away from her face, worrying it free of the braid she’d pulled it into.  The ship landing was silver, emblazoned with the white and orange of Mission Systems along its flanks, sleeker than the heavier cruisers that plied the trade lanes.  It was clearly a ship meant for short hops at higher speeds than the usual craft built by Mission Systems.  Lindsay took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, glancing toward Marshal Aidan Church, a big, dark-skinned man, standing next to her and watching as the ship slowly settled down on the landing field at the air base at Nova Spexi.

“How many did they say there was going to be?”  She asked quietly.  She could feel a lot of people aboard the ship, feel the whispers of their minds, some dimmer than others.  “Feels like a lot.”

Aidan shook his head slowly, dark eyes narrowing as the ship’s engines whined for a moment before they shut down.  “Maybe forty.  Maybe less, maybe more.  Ship can’t hold that many and they haven’t been able to get an accurate count.  They had to turn back twice because they caught more signals from survivors in the system.”

Lindsay took a deep breath and eased her mental shields down slightly, rocking back against her heels and gasping a little at the feelings of desperation and fear coupled with relief and trepidation all at once.  “Oh,” she exhaled, squeezing her hands into fists.

The military commander touched her shoulder gently, voice softening.  “Are you all right?”

She took a steadying breath and nodded, easing her shields back up.  “I’m all right.  They’re just so afraid.  There’s so many of them, everyone’s thoughts and feelings are melting together.”  She looked up at Aidan and smiled.  “I didn’t pick up anyone that’s out to hurt anyone here.”  Her smile faded.  “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one among them.  There’s a lot of generalized fear in there.”

Aidan nodded slightly.  “That’s why you’re one of the ones working with them.”

“I know,” Lindsay said softly.  Lot of responsibility.  But what else can I do?  She wet her lips, crossing her arms.  “I’ll let you and your people secure the ship.  You’ll bring the refugees down to the community center?”

He nodded.  “As always.  Dr. Grace and Dr. Vilenauva standing by?”

“They should be, with some volunteers to do triage.  Marshal Windsor wanted to speak with the Mission Systems personnel once the refugees are unloaded and the ship’s secure.”  Lindsay didn’t turn toward the sound of familiar footsteps approaching her from behind.  She’d grown so used to Alana’s tread she didn’t even need to look anymore, and Alana had learned a long time ago not to sneak up on her.  “He said to bring them to him in conference three.”

“I’ll take care of that personally.”  Aidan glanced away from Lindsay toward Alana, inclining his head.  “Colonel Chase.”

“Marshal.”  Alana stopped and stood behind Lindsay’s shoulder, adopting a parade rest stance, feet slightly spread and her shoulders straight, hands clasped behind her back.  She was back in a fitted black shirt over baggy gray cargos and combat boots, her blonde hair pulled tightly out of her face.  “I take it I’m not late to helping you secure the ship and its passengers?”

“Not late at all, no.”  Aidan smirked.  “Do what do I owe the honor of your assistance?”

Good question.  Lindsay looked over her shoulder at Alana, arching a brow.

Alana’s shoulders rose and fell in a shrug.  “I thought it would be a good use of my time.  I have some capacity for being nonlethal when I put my mind to it.”  She held up her metal-sheathed hand.  “I’ve loaded sedatives, just in case.  Some of these people may be more than a little panicked, unless I miss my guess.”

Lindsay’s brow creased, now.  What’s gotten into you, Alana? Where are you getting all of this from?  “Alana?”

Alana smiled at her faintly.  “I’ve been reading, Lindsay.  That’s all.”

She nodded mutely.  I’m not sure what’s going on here.  Maybe I’m having some sort of crazy nightmare.  This isn’t like her.

Aidan arched a brow at Lindsay, then looked back at Alana.  “I’m appreciative of the offer, Colonel.  Wouldn’t dream of saying no, either.  Go see Michaelson.”

Alana dipped her head in acknowledgement, smiled at Lindsay, then stepped away, heading over at a jog to the trim man with graying brown hair that was Major Curtis Michaelson, one of the higher ranking infantrymen on E-557.  Lindsay frowned, watching her retreating back.

“Something wrong, Lindsay?”

“Maybe,” she murmured, crossing her arms.  “Alana isn’t acting like herself.”

Aidan frowned a little, following her gaze for a moment, then shook his head.  “Colonel Chase is an enigma, Lindsay.  She always has been.”  He crossed his arms as well.  “But she’s as good a soldier as I’ve ever met and your aunt trusts her.  You trust her.”

“I know I trust her,” Lindsay murmured.  “I just feel like she’s been acting a little funny the past few days.”  Maybe it has to do with whatever she and Dad talked about.  I never did get answers on that.  Or maybe it’s something about her arm.  Maybe they’re connected.  She blew out a breath through her teeth.

A clank echoed dully as the main hatch of the Mission Systems ship came open, a ramp slowly extending.  The first man out wore a Mission Systems jacket as he climbed out and exchanged a few words with Michaelson.  Even with her shields up, Lindsay could sense the man’s relief to finally be on E-557 safely.  A few moments later, the man started walking toward Aidan and Lindsay as Michaelson and Alana headed up and into the ship.

He cleared his throat, a trace of nervousness in his voice.  “Marshal Church?”

Aidan nodded.  “Mr. Tapas, I presume.”  He extended his hand.  “Marshal Aidan Church.  It’s a pleasure to meet you, though I wish it was under more pleasant circumstances.”

“So do I, Marshal.”  Tapas glanced sidelong at Lindsay for a moment, dark eyes raking over her in a look that was curious more than appraising, then looked back at Aidan.  “I take it that you’re going to be my point of contact for this?”

Aidan shook his head slightly.  “Just for this initial phase.  Marshal Windsor would like to see you and your crew at the command center once the refugees are unloaded and your craft has been secured.”  He crossed his arms, looking past Tapas to the ship.  “How many do you have?”

Tapas blew out a breath.  “Fifteen crew.  Thirty refugees, ten passengers.”

Passengers?  Lindsay blinked.  “I wasn’t aware Mission Systems was in the business of ferrying passengers, Mr. Tapas.”

He glanced at her again and smiled weakly.  “We’re not, Miss…?”

“Consul Lindsay Farragut.”  She extended one gloved hand to him, smiling faintly.  The thin leather didn’t seem like much to separate them, but it was enough to kill all but the strongest of touch-based visions of the future.  That sort of precognition had plagued her since she was a child.  It was only recently that she’d been able to bring it under tighter control, but more recently it had started to slip here and there.  She’d told herself it was due to the sheer weight of what was coming, of what was beginning to build around them.  Perhaps it was true.

Tapas hesitated a moment at the glove and then shook her hand.  “Are you any relation to the late Senator Farragut?”

“He was my grandfather, Mr. Tapas.”  Whatever powers that be safekeep his soul.  One of the first to die when Mimir fell.  That’s part of why the Commonwealth even gave a damn.  They’d lost one of their greatest reformers when he died.  “I never knew him.”

“My father met him, once.  Said he was a great man.”  The smile Tapas gave her was genuine.  “It’s good to know that his line hasn’t disappeared into the ether.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tapas,” Lindsay said, squeezing his hand slightly before she let go.  “Now, about your passengers?”

Tapas nodded slightly.  “Yes, the passengers.  We’re not actually in the business, but we picked up a group of ten adrift just out of orbit in-system near the Whispers.  They’d been inbound when everything happened.  From New Earth.”

From New Earth?  That’d be a first, I think.  Lindsay’s brow furrowed.

“Interesting.  I’m sure Consul Farragut would be very interested in speaking with them.  Our current intelligence on the situation in the Commonwealth has been sketchy at best.”  Aidan glanced at her for confirmation and Lindsay nodded slightly.

I’d be very glad to get information untainted by D’Arcy Morgause, yes.

Tapas nodded, smiling weakly.  “I’ll have one of my crewmen bring them to you as soon as I can, then, Marshal, Consul.”

“That’d be appreciated.  Do you have wounded?”

Tapas took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.  “We do.  One of my people was an EMT in a past life, so he’s been taking care of some of the worst of them.  Couple we weren’t sure were going to make it, but they’ve made it this far and he said they’re stable.  You have medics standing by?”

Aidan nodded.  “Two of our best.  Consul?”

Lindsay glanced at Aidan.  “Marshal?”

“Ping Colonel Chase and have her get the wounded off-loaded ASAP, will you please?  Ask her to escort them to Dr. Grace and Dr. Vilenauva immediately.”

Lindsay nodded and closed her eyes, though not so quickly that she didn’t see Tapas blink quickly, a look of shock crossing his face.  She was aware of him speaking as she mentally extended a tendril, seeking Alana’s familiar mind.

“Dr. Grace?  Dr. Ezra Grace?”

“You’ve heard of him?”  Aidan faked surprise rather well, all things considered.  That Tapas had heard of Ezra wasn’t surprising—Ezra Grace was well-known throughout human-controlled space.  He was near the top of the short list of doctors specializing in decyberization and reconstruction: removing cybernetic and biomechanical components from men and women who’d had them installed, willingly or unwillingly, often for years, and then reconstructing their bodies in the wake of the removal.  His advances in that field had won him a great deal of recognition.  That he was well-known was of no surprise to most of the men and women who knew him on E-557—he was one of the brightest stars in the Foundation’s constellation of brilliant minds—but most men and women from off-world thought that the denizens of E-557 lived in some kind of bubble, cut off from the rest of humanity.  It generally seemed safer not to disabuse anyone of that idea.

She felt Alana’s confusion and a sudden surge of concern at the touch.  Lindsay cursed softly under her breath.  ‘Lana, they want you to make sure to bring the wounded out first, and quickly.  Marshal Church wants you to escort them directly to Ezra and Tiana.  Personally.  She felt Alana’s confusion recede, replaced by understanding.  Lindsay withdrew back to herself with a slight shiver.

“Aye, I’ve heard of him.  My cousin was on a team working on a study testing some of Dr. Grace’s theories on tissue cloning methodology.”  Tapas looked a little abashed.  “He’s famous in the medical community.”

“Alana knows what you need her to do, Marshal,” Lindsay murmured.

Tapas took a deep breath, looking between the pair for a moment.  He focused on Lindsay fractionally longer and finally worked up the guts to ask his question.  “Psychic?”

She inclined her head and smiled faintly.  “A little.  Guard stock.”

Tapas nodded slowly, seeming to take the answer as it came, then turned back to Aidan.  Lindsay watched them but didn’t really listen, instead extending a thin tendril of her sixth sense toward Tapas, taking his measure gently, simply getting a feel for the man without reading his thoughts.  His nerves were clearly apparent, though that seemed to come more from dealing with new faces and the situation at hand than anything untoward.

He’s used to dealing with Uncle Adam, I guess.  Seeing me and Marshal Church unexpectedly is a shock, I suppose.  Lindsay withdrew slightly, feeling that Tapas was honest, if rattled by circumstances and situation.

“Well, I’ll let you get back to getting your ship squared away, Mr. Tapas.”

“Thank you, Marshal.”  He glanced toward Lindsay and inclined his head slightly.  “Consul Farragut.”

She smiled and nodded to him.  “Mr. Tapas.”

He withdrew toward his ship almost as Alana was following the first of the stretchers down the ship’s gangway.  Lindsay swallowed.

Kara hugged Ezra, tightly, murmuring something to him.  He laughed weakly, then turned to help with the stretcher Brendan was laying on, face pale, head bandaged, eyes sunken and ringed by strange colored bruises.  She started to step forward but her uncle touched her arm.

“Let them at least get to the ground, Linny-pie,” he murmured.

She bit her lip but slowly tugged her arm away from him.  “I promised him I’d be here the minute he got back.  I want him to know that I was here.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, watching the Mission Systems crewmen as the handed the stretchers over to elements of E-557’s small infantry force.  There was no one here waiting for these wounded, no one they were coming home to here.  Their families could be dead in the wake of the bombings.  They might have no one left.  It was a terrible thought made all the more terrible by the realization that this was only the beginning.

“Marshal, I think I’ll go with Colonel Chase and the wounded, if that’s all right.”

Aidan blinked, then nodded.  “Of course, Consul.  I’ll send Mr. Tapas’s passengers to you as soon as they disembark.”

“Thank you,” Lindsay said softly.  She turned to follow Alana across the landing field to where Ezra and Dr. Vilenauva had set up shop.

When Mimir died, humanity lost the knowledge of a thousand generations. Whoever killed Mimir killed our past and without that past, I fear for what our future might hold.

— Ardis Carlyle, commentator for Newswire, 4 Novem 5223

1 Decem, 5249 PD

“Will Alana be joining us tonight?”  Grant asked as he sat at Rachel’s kitchen table, watching his wife and sister-in-law hard at work on cooking dinner enough for six—or eight or nine.  It was hard to tell how many they were cooking for.  He was out of practice.

“I doubt we’re going to see her any night in the near future,” Rachel said dryly.  “Either before or after the reconstruction begins on her arm.”  She turned and pointed a spoon at her brother-in-law.  “There are a lot of things I could say to you, Grant Channing, about what you put her through without even being here, but out of respect for my poor sister, I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”

Grant opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again after America shot him a look that could melt steel.  Rachel glanced at her sister and shook her head before returning to her work at the stove.

“Right,” he finally murmured. “Though in my defense, I was only thinking of the safety and well-being of our daughter—you know, the one who holds two of the keys to that damned database we almost died to get off Mimir?”

“Three,” Rachel said.  “She doesn’t know that she’s got mine, but she has it.  Brendan’s idea.  Had it incorporated into a pendant she never takes off.”

He shot her a sharp-eyed look.  “Did you tell him what it was?”

“No, but I didn’t exactly have to.  He was bright even back then.”  Rachel turned away from the stove, drying her hands on a towel as she wandered over to the table to steal a sip of tea from Grant’s cup.  “He knew it was important and he knew that it was probably from Mimir, and he also knew that Lindsay was the most important person in my life, so he suggested that I have it turned into a piece of jewelry for her for her sixteenth birthday.”

“I see,” Grant said, leaning back and crossing his arms.  “What did Adam have to say about that?”

“I didn’t get a vote,” Adam said from the doorway, straightening from his lean to duck fully into the room’s cozy warmth.  “I wasn’t in the picture at the time.”

“I don’t know how you managed that,” America said, glancing at her sister.  “I mean, Grant and I were forced apart by circumstances, but I can’t tell you that I couldn’t sometimes catch glimmers of him at the back of my mind.  You and Adam chose to be apart.  I don’t know how you managed.”

Rachel looked at Adam.  He shrugged slightly and she shook her head.  “We were angry,” Rachel said after a moment.  “I was angry.  He was hurting for a lot of reasons I still don’t think we’ve fully discussed.  It…wasn’t the best time for us.”

“It was a long time to be apart,” Adam said quietly.  “There’s a lot of people who don’t know we were ever together.”

“My daughter’s husband being one of them,” Grant said, eyeing Adam.  “Is he as good a pilot as they’ve been saying?”

“As who’s been saying?”  Adam asked as he headed for the stove.  He pecked America on the cheek and reached past her for the still-steaming kettle of hot water.

“People,” Grant said, only half belligerent.  He’d been out and about, listening and watching and trying to learn as much as he could about the status quo without waiting to be informed by Rachel or Adam.  Frederick, of course, had been no help and Daci was downright surly when he started to press, so he’d given up on getting anything out of her.  “Are you going to answer the question, or are you going to be damnably evasive and vague, Adam?”

“Grumpy giving you shit, Grant?”  Frederick asked as he came in from the garden, eyes bright and hair windblown.  He looked younger and yet far, far older than he’d been the last time Grant had seen him before recently.  It was strange, he reflected for a moment, how one remembered the people important to them after a long absence.

“Other way around, Freder,” Adam said.  “You want some of this?”

Frederick settled into a chair, nodding.  “Sure, some tea would be nice.  How long until dinner?”

“At least another hour,” Rachel said as she took the mug that Adam offered her.  “More than enough time for Grant to get even more curious about his son-in-law’s skills as a pilot and the current state of our military forces here, since I’m sure that’s where the conversation was heading.”

“Sounds like I’m winning the bet,” Frederick said.

America laughed.  “We all knew it wouldn’t be long.”

Grant favored them all with another glare before he looked at Adam again.  “Well?”

The marshal shook his head slightly.  “I wish all of our pilots were half as good as he is.  That’s why he’s training them.  I’m not sure there are any in our forces that could beat him on skills and I’m not sure that there are many among the conglomerates that could, either.  Chinasia was wasting him as a dropship pilot.”

“I’d wondered how he was so easily able to infiltrate their installation,” America said, leaning against the counter and crossing her arms.  “It makes sense now that he used to work for them.”  She shook her head, eyes growing distant for a moment.  “You should have seen the way he fought.  Took down Taki like he was a sheaf of wheat to be harvested.  I’d never seen anything quite like it.”

Adam took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, glancing toward Rachel.  “I wonder if he’s learned more from Alana than we ever suspected.”

“More likely he remembered training from childhood,” Rachel said quietly.  “He likes to pretend he doesn’t remember a lot of it, but sometimes I can still see the ghosts of it in his eyes.”  She glanced at Grant.  “You were changing the subject.  Why’d you bring up those keys?”

His nostrils flared and he looked away, stared out the window at the gathering twilight.  “I shouldn’t have, but it slipped.  They’ve been on my mind for a few days now. The galaxy’s about to go to war with itself again and we’ve still got components of Mimir’s grand database hidden all over the homosphere.”

“Not to mention the keys,” Frederick murmured, swirling his tea in his mug.  He winced as Grant’s gaze immediately snapped to him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?  You don’t—Frederick, tell me you didn’t lose it.”

“I didn’t lose it,” Frederick said.  “I hid it, just like I hid the pieces of the database you gave me that last time I was on Mimir.”  His eyes half-lidded as he exhaled a sigh.  “My job was helpful in that regard, though it won’t be easy gathering up those pieces again.”

“Especially because you’re dead,” Adam said.  His brow furrowed slightly as he took a sip of his tea.  “How many pieces on how many planets?”

“Never mind that,” Grant said.  “What did you do with your key?  I thought we all agreed to keep them close.”

“Grant, if I had kept my key close, we’d never be able to access parts of that database ever again.  It would have been destroyed when someone almost killed me.”

His heart dropped to his stomach and Grant looked away, frowning.  Even as a prisoner of the Compact, he’d heard about his friend’s supposed death.  Seeing him alive and relatively well had been a balm for his soul, and America’s too.  He sucked in a deep breath, then asked, “So what did you do with it?”

“I left it with Sephora Damerian,” Frederick said.  “It was something that we did.  Whenever one of us was going into a situation we suspected was dangerous, we’d leave sensitive data with the other.  I’d never know what she gave me and she wouldn’t know what I’d given to her, but we’d do that just in case.”  He shook his head.  “Odds are that she’s never looked at any of it—anything I left her on the case, considering that it all evaporated after I was gone.”

“That was because you were the driving force behind the investigation in the first place,” Rachel said, her voice remarkably gentle, considering how much she’d wanted the people who’d killed Mimir found and punished.  “She might not have even had the option of continuing your investigation, Freder.  They might have shut her down intentionally.”

He gave her a weak smile.  “I have no doubt that they did, Squeaks.”  His shoulders rose and fell in a shrug.  “Either way, I’ve got every confidence that she’s still got it, though I know she doesn’t know what she has.”

“She’s the Inspector General now,” Adam said thoughtfully.  “And the Whispers just died.”

“What are you trying to say, Adam?”  America asked as she turned back toward her work on dinner.  “Or, more to the point, what are you implying?”

“That she might stumble over it and maybe realize its significance in the near future,” he said, frowning slightly to himself.

Frederick shook his head.  “She’ll be too busy trying to decipher whatever data I left her.  I don’t even remember what it was, other than it was a pile of possibly false leads that are twelve years cold now.”

“You two are talking gibberish again,” Rachel said as she joined her sister.  “Because I know you’re not saying that Sephora Damerian’s going to come across something that reopens the Mimir can of worms because someone just bombed the Whispers to bedrock.”

“No,” her husband said.  “Not at all.”

The look he gave both Grant and Frederick said that he thought that was exactly what was about to happen.

Frederick’s lips thinned and Grant shook his head slowly.

“We need to gather the database pieces before this war really gets started,” Grant said.  “We have to get them someplace safe.”

“What, like here?”  Rachel glanced over her shoulder at them.  “Nowhere is safe, Grant.  Not when the pieces are moving around like the endgame of a chess match.  We’re better off leaving them where they’re hidden and retrieving them if we all make it through this.”

“The survivors will need a map,” Frederick said.  “In case one of the people in this room doesn’t survive what’s coming?  We need to put something together so that whoever’s left will be able to put all the pieces back together again.”

Grant’s jaw tightened.  “That’s too big of a risk.”

“You don’t think the larger risk is the loss of the entire archive?  As much knowledge as the Psychean Guard could gather in a thousand years?  Three quarters or more of humanity’s collective knowledge, lost forever?”

“The galaxy already thinks that it’s lost,” Grant said.

“But it’s not yet.”  Frederick pounded a hand down against the table hard enough that the cups and spoons jumped and rattled. “Damnation, Grant, don’t be stubborn.  We need to tell them—your daughter, her husband, your niece, Dr. Grace, perhaps his sister.  It’s time we pass what we know about all of it down to a younger generation—down to someone who’s more likely to make it through all of this alive and be able to do something once the danger’s passed.”

Grant was silent for a few long moments.  “I don’t like it,” he said at last.

America turned from the counter, one brow arching delicately.  “But you’re not going to tell him no,” she guessed, her voice soft but firm.

He met his wife’s gaze, a muscle at the corner of his jaw twitching.  “No.  I’m not.”

“Good,” she said, then looked at her sister and Adam before glancing back to the men at the table.  “Then we start drawing the maps tonight and pray we haven’t waited too long for this moment to come.”

“We’ll have to find a way to get Frederick’s key from Damerian,” Grant said.

Frederick shook his head.  “I have a feeling it’ll find its way to us. Trust me in this. Once Sephora realizes what she has—if she realizes what she has—it’ll find its way here.  If it doesn’t, then all we have to do is send someone to pick it up.”

A wry smile twisted Adam’s lips.  “You make it sound so bloody simple, Freder.”

Frederick laughed.  “That’s because it is, Grumpy.  That’s because it is.”

Ghosts haunt our steps—ghosts of our pasts, ghosts of our futures—ghosts of our fears.  The trick is learning to overcome them.

— Ambassador Alexander Channing, Psychean Guard, c. 5203

1 Decem, 5249 PD

“Have they noticed that you stopped hanging around as much?”  Ezra asked as he handed Alana a glass of wine from the bottle he’d just opened.  It was a new vintage from last year’s crop at his sister’s vineyard on the capital’s outskirts.

“I’m sure they have,” Alana said, leaning against the deck’s railing.  “No one’s said anything, but I think they’re smart enough to realize what’s going on.”  She smiled as Ezra blushed.  She reached up, the fingers of her flesh and blood hand brushing against his cheek and jaw.  “And you shouldn’t be embarrassed about it.  I knew how you were looking at me a long time ago.”

Ezra shook his head with a rueful smile. “No one else did.”

“I think Rachel did,” Alana said softly.  She set her glass down and stepped into him, resting her head against his shoulder as Ezra slid his arms around her waist.  “She kept dropping hints that Lindsay was a grown woman and she didn’t need me hanging around and making sure she was safe.  She didn’t know about my promise to Commander Channing.”

“She didn’t know that Lindsay was the only family you had left,” Ezra said quietly.  He kissed her temple, his arms tightening around her.  “I don’t blame you.”

“It’s not about blame,” Alana whispered into his neck.  “It can’t be.  Self-recrimination would eat me alive if it was about blame.”

“‘Lana—”

She shook her head, straightening and looking at him.  “No, Ez.  At some point, I have to confess everything to someone and that’s going to be you if this is going to work.  If you and I are going to work.”

His expression softened and he cupped her face between his palms, thumbs brushing across her cheeks.  “I want this to work.”

“I know,” she whispered, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue.  “So do I.  I’ve already told you more than I’ve ever told anybody.  That doesn’t usually happen with someone like me.”

“Was it the way you were trained?” he asked quietly.

She nodded.  “They took me from my family when I was so small,” she said as she rested her forehead against his.  “I barely managed to figure out how to be human, let alone something close to normal.  To trust someone.”

“You trusted Commander Channing.  You trusted Rachel.”

“Not the way I trust you,” she said, swallowing hard.  “You’re different, Ez.  I want to tell you everything but I’m so afraid it’s going to scare you away.”

“You’re not afraid of anything,” he said, brushing hair back from her face.  She winced and looked down and he froze.  Ezra tucked his fingers under her chin and gently lifted her gaze to his.  “Right?”

There were tears in her eyes.  He didn’t think that anyone else had ever seen her cry.

“Alana.”

“The only thing I’m afraid of is losing you somehow.  Scaring you away.” She buried her face against his neck and held on tight, as if she was afraid he’d run right here, right now, before she had the chance to tell him anything beyond what he already knew.

He knew that the Eurydice Compact had taken her from what little family she’d had before her eighth birthday.  He knew that they’d trained her as one of their elite agents, as a killing machine.  She’d been good at it.  Then Grant Channing had found her when he infiltrated the Compact, hunting for his half-brother, Sandro.  He’d found Sandro’s daughter—Alana—instead.

Then she’d run from them and come here to safeguard Grant’s only daughter, Lindsay.  It was an all-consuming responsibility for the former conglomerate weapon.

And now they were here, and she was free.

“I waited for almost ten years for you,” Ezra said softly.  “Almost from the day I realized that it was okay to have a crush on someone.  There isn’t anything you could say or do that would make me run.”  He laced his fingers through her hair.  “I’ve already heard horror stories, ‘Lana.  I know about the pain and the blood and what they ask people like you to do.  But I also know that you’re not like some of the monsters out there.  Your father and your grandmother made sure of that before the Compact sunk their claws into you.”

“That’s the only reason I’m sane,” she said quietly, then managed a weak laugh.  “If you could call me that.”

“I do,” Ezra said.  “You’re as sane as any of the rest of us.”

“That doesn’t say much for our collective sanity, does it?”

He laughed.  “I guess not.”

Her arms tightened.  “I love you, Ezra,” she said into his neck.  It was the first time she’d managed to say it since she’d realized how she felt—how he felt.  Despite the past several days that they’d spent together, the nights when they’d been inseparable, she’d never been able to voice how she felt.

Now she had, and it sent shuddery butterflies racing around in her guts.

“I love you, too,” he whispered, then kissed her ear.  “Come on.  Let’s go inside.”

“It’s not even dark yet,” Alana said softly.

He smiled.  “That just means we’ve got more time.”

Alana laughed and let him lead her inside.

The greatest gift Sarah Farragut ever had to give was her love.  Her capacity for it was as boundless as her wisdom to know who deserved it and who deserved a swift kick in the ass.  Often, I found myself with the dubious honor of being the recipient of both, sometimes at the same time.

— Ryland LeSarte

29 Novem, 5249 PD

Cool fingers wrapped around his as he lay on his stomach, his head pounding dimly.  He could feel warmth wash over him and he took a deep, quiet breath before he opened his eyes, squinting against light that still seemed too bright even though intellectually, he knew it was very dim.  “Hi Lin,” he murmured softly, squeezing her fingers.  “When is it?”

Lindsay smiled down at Commander Brendan Cho, gently brushing the fingers of her free hand across his forehead.  “Nine days since you came home.  How’re you feeling?”

“Like I could take my head off and carry it around underneath my arm like a ball,” Brendan murmured.  “That’d probably be more comfortable.  Do I look as terrible as I feel?”

She laughed quietly.  “No.  No, you don’t, Brendan.  You actually look…well, pretty normal except for the raccoon eyes right now.”  She leaned in and kissed his ear gently.  He exhaled, slumping a little against the mattress and squeezing her fingers again.  “Ezra said you can come home in a few days as long as nothing pops up.”

“Nothing like what?”  He murmured.  “Infection?  Something else?”

“Maybe more like something else.  He wants me to mostly be around for the first few days, to keep an eye on you.”  She stroked his temple with the backs of her fingers, smiling down at him.  “They’ve spent the past week trying to keep me distracted and now they want me to turn around and think about nothing else.  Ironic, huh?”

Brendan smiled, bloodshot eyes glimmering.  “I wouldn’t mind a couple days shut away with you.”  He rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand.  “I missed you, Lin.  Was afraid I’d never see you again.”

“You promised me you’d come home.  I knew you wouldn’t break that promise.”  She leaned forward, crossing her arms along the edge of the mattress and looking him in the eye.  She ruffled his hair gently, expression softening.  “Things are starting to happen.  It’s all beginning.”

“What’s happening?  What you saw?  What we saw?”  He felt sick all of a sudden, bile rising as he thought of the visions that had knocked her flat for days, the visions that were the harbingers of war to come.  Not a good time for me to feel like shit on a cracker.  Can’t afford that.  Not enough combat pilots.  Not enough people to train combat pilots.

            Shit.  I’ve got work to do and I went and scrambled my own brains and now I can’t do it.  Not right now, anyway.

“Not yet.  But there’s rumblings.”  She brushed a fingertip along his jaw.  “Someone attacked the Whispers.  It’s…it’s just gone.”

The Whispers?  Who the hell would have it out for the Whispers?  The Wanderers never bothered anyone and the Whispers is barely worth the rock it’s carved from.  Brendan’s brow furrowed.  “Who did it?  Do we know?”

Lindsay shook her head slightly.  “We don’t.  Not yet.  Reports say there aren’t many survivors.  Some are on their way here, but we don’t know how many.  Initial reports were saying there weren’t any, but we found out that was wrong.  A Mission Systems ship headed in on a sweep of the system to try to corroborate the data that you guys brought back.  They foundsome survivors, but we’re not sure how many yet.  They should be landing soon.”  She continued to stroke his cheek gently.  “I’m probably going to help process them.  I’ve been doing that kind of thing lately.”

“Really?”  Brendan struggled to raise an eyebrow at her, feeling sluggish.  “Have there been a lot of refugees?”

“A shipload of Compact refugees.  A lot of kids, Brendan.  Maybe half of them were under fifteen.  Most of the rest weren’t much older.”  She sighed quietly, brow creasing.  “It’s hard, listening to them talk about what they were facing, what they ran from.  They want to be here, though.  Because it’s safe for them.”

“But for how long?”  Brendan whispered, brow furrowing slightly.  “Have you seen anything?”

“No,” she said softly.  “Not about a war.  Nothing like that.”

His brow furrowed.  “But you’ve seen other things.”

Lindsay nodded.  “Nothing that important.  Most of it’s already happened.  I saw them carrying you off the ship.  That was the one I worried about.  Because it was about you and I didn’t know…well.  I didn’t know what had happened or anything.”

Brendan nodded slightly and winced as pain spiked from the back of his skull straight through, like a spike shoved from the base of his skull all the way through to between his eyes.  “Ooh,” he hissed, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment.  “Remind me not to do that again.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.”  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.  “I just need to remember not to move my head for a little while, that’s all.  That hurt like a son of a bitch.”  He opened his eyes again, hand inching toward her face.  “Did he get it all?  I don’t have to go under again, do I?”

“No, he got it all,” Lindsay said, kissing his fingers as they quested near her chin.  “Like I said, you can come home in a few more days.  It’ll be nice to have you home. It’ll be nice to be home.”

His brow creased slightly.  “You haven’t been home?”  Why wouldn’t she be at home?

“No, I’ve been staying with Aunt Rachel and Uncle Adam.”

Uncle Adam…that still confuses me.  “Since when is Marshal Windsor ‘Uncle Adam,’ Lin?  I don’t get that.”

“Oh,” she said softly, the word little more than an exhaled breath.  “Yeah…I forgot.”

“You forgot?”  Forgot what?  That he was your uncle somehow?  Or that I didn’t know?  Or that you hadn’t told me?  “I didn’t know you were related to him.”

“Yeah.  He and Aunt Rachel…well.  They kept it a secret for a long time.  There was no way for you to know because no one talked about it.  They’ve been apart for most of my life.  They’re finally…not apart anymore.”  She brushed her fingers through his hair.  “I’m sorry I never told you.  I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Your mother told me they were married,” Brendan said distantly.  “I kind of thought she was joking.  It just…didn’t make any sense.  Marshal Windsor and Rachel.”

“They’ve been Bonded for thirty years, Brendan.  Since before we were born.  They kept it a secret from everyone.  I don’t know why they stopped being together.  I just remember him leaving to set up a new base and her being sad and cutting her hair and him not coming back.  It was before you crashed, though not that long.  After that, I just kind of stopped thinking about it.”  Lindsay shrugged a little.  “They’re back together, now.  They both seem a lot happier.”  She stroked his hair again.  “I’ve been staying there because I didn’t want to be alone.  Marshal Rose is staying with them, too.”

“And your parents, too, now?”

Lindsay laughed a little.  “Yeah.  It’s getting crowded, so it’ll be nice to get home.  With you.”

Brendan smiled a little.  “Ezra said a few days?”  It didn’t feel like he’d be ready to move in a few days, but Ezra wasn’t often wrong about these things.

“Yeah.  Did you want to talk to him about it?”

“Mm.  Later.  Where is he, anyway?”

“I think he’s checking on some batches of tissue he cultured for Alana.”

Tissue for Alana?  “Is she all right?”  As much as they didn’t get along most of the time, the last thing that Brendan ever would have wanted to see was the deadly blonde hurt.  It’s only been nine days since we got back.  Did she get hurt on the run and I didn’t know, or did something happen—

            Damnation, did something happen here?

“No, no, it’s nothing like that.” Lindsay smiled.  “She’s fine.  She’s just finally getting her arm taken care of.”

Brendan’s brow furrowed.  “Really?”  With a war coming?  She’s going to get that deconstructed?  He had no doubt that Alana would be as good as new by the time Ezra was done with her, but limb reconstruction took time, and Alana’s arm had been the way it was for decades.  Won’t make her that much less deadly to not have the neurotoxin injectors in her fingers, but still.

“Yeah, really.  I guess she’s finally tired of being a soldier.”

Brendan laughed weakly.  “She picked a terrible time to retire.”

“Or a perfect time.”  Lindsay smiled wryly.  “Too bad you’re too young for that.”

Brendan choked on his laugh, reaching up and combing his fingers through her hair.  “Would you really want me to retire, Lin?  I haven’t given nearly enough back to the Foundation for what it’s done for me.”  He rested his palm against her cheek.  “Besides, how am I supposed to keep you safe if I retire?”

She laughed weakly.  “Outside of a cockpit,” she answered, kissing his palm.  “But I think Uncle Adam might have a coronary if you retired.  He’s already antsy for you to get back to training pilots.”

Brendan snorted softly.  “That’ll happen sooner than I’ll get back into the cockpit,” he admitted.  “Has he complained at all about how the training’s been going since I was gone?”

“No,” Lindsay said.  “But I can ask him to come see you if you really want to know.”  She smiled a little, starting to stroke his hair again.  “He’ll probably yell, though.  Wonder why you wanted to talk to him instead of me.”

“Business and pleasure.”  Brendan smiled, closing his eyes for a moment.  “I’ve got a job to keep you safe and I can’t do that unless the pilots are good enough to not crash into each other while they’re shooting down the bad guys.  Hopefully they won’t have to be doing that anytime soon.”  Something tells me that’s going to be happening sooner rather than later, though.  He blew out a quiet breath and opened his eyes again.  “So they hit the Whispers, huh?”

Lindsay nodded slightly.  “Yeah.  Nothing else yet.”

“Hopefully they won’t hit anything else soon.”

Lindsay shrugged a little, resting her head on the mattress next to his.  “I don’t know, Brendan.  I know they’re going to hit something else, I just don’t know what or when or who’s doing the hitting.  I wish I did.  Maybe then I could make a difference in the outcome.”

His fingers brushed over her pale hair as he frowned a little.  “Don’t try to shoulder the universe, Lin.  Just because sometimes you see the future doesn’t mean that it’s your job to save humanity from itself.  No can do that.”

“The Foundation’s trying.”

“And look at about how many people are listening.”  He smiled wryly.  “You can save us, Lin.  But you can’t save everyone.”

She sighed.  “I know,” she murmured.  “I know that.  Intellectually, I know that.  But tell that to the heart of me, Brendan, and make me believe it.  I just keep thinking that I have this gift for a reason.”

“You do,” he said.  “You have it to help the people that are willing to listen.  Most of the people here.  You’re the Oracle because people believe you’re the Oracle, Lin.  Because they believe in you, believe in what you see and believe that maybe, just maybe, that with knowledge of what’s to come we can change it for the better.”  He ran his thumb along her cheek.  “You’re amazing and you have an amazing gift.  But you can’t save everyone by yourself.  Even Ryland LeSarte didn’t get believed by everyone, right?”

Her expression softened, brows knitting a little as she stared at him.  “I love you,” she whispered.

Brendan smiled.  “I love you, too.”

“Promise me you won’t leave again?”

He smiled a little wider and rubbed her cheek gently with his thumb.  “I promise.  Never again.  You’re stuck with me.”

Her lips brushed his and he closed his eyes.  He had no intentions of ever leaving the system ever again.

 Jerks. There’s always at least one in the mix.  Any group of more than three people has at least one.  Usually they’ll be working overtime to screw everyone else in the room.  Until you find a way to stop them, anyway.  Then woe be to everyone if you can’t stop them dead in their tracks and eliminate the possibility of backlash.  Usually, you can’t.  Then things go from bad to worse.

— Sarah Farragut, circa 4855 PD

27 Novem, 5249 PD

“I will have order in this chamber!  Sit down, Marshal Rose!”

Daciana Rose slowly sank back down into her seat, face still flushed with rage as she glared toward D’Arcy Morgause, then slowly turned to regard the aging Speaker, Sergei Petremoore, her expression softening only slightly as she curbed her tongue.  “I’m sorry, Speaker, but I cannot stand for having my late husband’s memory denigrated by a snake in a man’s skin.”

D’Arcy Morgause shot to his feet again.  “Speaker, tell me I do not have to stand for such slanderous language in this august chamber!  I demand an apology from the Marshal.”

Across the chamber from both of them, Marshal Adam Windsor looked as if he was starting to get a migraine.  He exchanged a veiled look with Rachel Farragut, a longtime member of the Rose Council and rumored to be the Speaker’s top choice for his own replacement when the time came—a time that was coming soon, if Adam could guess at it.

Rachel took a deep breath and stood slowly.  “D’Arcy, sit down.  The Marshal is entitled to her opinion of you and given your lack of forthrightness with this Council since her return from Urgarthe, I can hardly blame her for the opinion she’s formed.  Unless, of course, you have new intelligence to share with us that might cause Marshal Rose to reassess her opinion of you in the wake of your rather insulting comments toward the late and lamented Inspector Rose?”

That seemed to take the wind out of D’Arcy’s sails and he slowly seated himself again.  “I’m afraid at this time I have no further intelligence to share with the Council, no.  There is no new word from my agents at the Whispers regarding the disposition of the port or its inhabitants.”

“Its disposition is that it’s been completely destroyed,” Adam growled, straightening in his seat as Rachel sank back down into hers.  “It has no further disposition.  We are, however, expecting the first load of refugees within the next forty-eight hours.”  And once they’re here, they’ll be able to corroborate the images that the team brought back with America and Grant.  Their voices will tell the story that we’ve only got in images and video right now.

Amelda Watson tilted her head slightly, leaning forward against her elbows.  “Do we have an idea on numbers, Marshal Windsor?”

“Not yet, ma’am, but the ship dispatched by Mission Systems from the asteroid cluster can’t carry more than two hundred even if you pack them like cordwood.  We expect maybe half that, based on reports.”  Based on what Lindsay saw.

“Then we do not expect many survivors?”

“No ma’am, not many at all.  Reports have the place bombed almost down to bedrock.”  He didn’t look at Rachel.  He couldn’t without tipping his hand, but he didn’t need to look to know the look in her eye.  Sections of Mimir’s capital had fallen victim to similar attacks decades before.  His wife had never gotten over that.  Then again, no member of the Psychean Guard had truly gotten over that.

“And the Oracle?  Does this fit any of her recent visions?”  Amelda looked at Rachel.

“Yes, Amelda,” Rachel said softly.  “It does fit at least one of her visions.”

“Where is the Oracle?  She had been in attendance for weeks and now that the Whispers has been bombed she feels she no longer has to grace us with her presence?”  D’Arcy made little attempt to mask his contempt mixed with fear for the young psychic known to those who did not truly know her simply as the Oracle.

“I imagine she is reacquainting herself with her parents, Consul Morgause,” Daciana supplied in a clipped tone.  “They are only recently rescued, after all.  Seven days ago?”

Rachel inclined her head slightly.  “I imagine Marshal Rose is correct.  It will take some adjustment for Commander Channing and my sister to get used to being here on E-557.  They’ve spent a great deal of time in captivity in conglomerate space.”

D’Arcy arched a brow.  “I imagine that it’s more likely, Marshal Rose, that she’s spending time with that refugee pilot that brought them back to us.  The one Marshal Windsor has been championing for the past five years and who the Oracle Bonded without so much as a word to this council.”

Kara Grace arched an eyebrow delicately.  “The last time I checked, Consul Morgause, members of this council didn’t have to bring it to a vote if they chose to marry.”

“The majority of this council isn’t the Oracle, Consul Grace.”

Mugabe Zenak was rubbing at his temple, now, looking as if he was ready to just get up and leave whether the Speaker dismissed the council or not.  Aidan Church, the third of the Marshals, cleared his throat quietly.

“Speaker, if there’s no further business, perhaps we should adjourn for the afternoon?  There’s a great deal of work to be done tonight before nightfall for those of us of a more martial profession, I’m afraid.”

The Speaker nodded wearily, looking vaguely relieved at being offered an excuse to dimiss the Council for the day.  “I think that would be best.  Council is adjourned.”  He held up a hand to forestall further argument from D’Arcy.  “Save it for the next meeting, Consul Morgause, please.  As you said, you don’t have anything of import regarding the Whispers to share with us, so it can wait.  Marshal Rose is not the only one short of patience this afternoon.”

Daciana gave D’Arcy a look that could melt steel as she vacated her seat in the circular chamber and made her way over to Rachel and Adam, grimacing.  Kara joined them a moment later, her brow furrowed.

“How did he find out about Brendan and Lindsay, Rachel?  This is the second time he brought it up.”

Rachel shook her head slowly, expression tight.  “I don’t know,” she said quietly.  “But I’m not really sure it matters all that much.  It was bound to come out sooner or later.  They’ve been Bonded for years now.”

Kara shook her head slightly.  “Is she really with her parents?”

Rachel thought for a moment, then nodded.  “More than likely, yes.  Your brother was taking out the last fragments of Brendan’s implant today and he asked Alana to keep Lindsay away from the clinic until he gave her the all-clear.  She’s probably at the house right now with them.”  She smiled wryly at Daci.  “That means you were right again and D’Arcy was wrong.”

“Don’t encourage her,” Adam mumbled, shaking his head.  “I can’t take many more senseless shouting matches with him, Daci.”

“You heard what he said about Freder.”

“I know what he said.”  Adam sighed.  “But he’s an idiot, Daci, and idiots are entitled to their opinions, however misinformed they might be.  He’ll learn his lesson eventually about making enemies.  Of course, you will, too.”

Daci made a face at the more senior marshal and shook her head slightly.  “He’s going to learn soon.  One way or another.  If I’m going to be stuck here instead of at Urgarthe, he’s going to learn the lesson quickly.  Maybe violently, maybe not.  I’m not really sure yet.  Haven’t decided.”

“Hopefully you won’t be doing the teaching, Daci,” Rachel said, shaking her head.  “At least we know that he didn’t peg Freder for who he actually was when he was here playing Adam’s aide.  Come on.  Let’s go home.  I’ve got dinner to make.”

“Thank you again for those herbs, Rachel.”  Kara squeezed Rachel’s arm before she started to step away.  “I’ll send up a bottle of wine with Ezra the next time he’s heading up to your place.”

Rachel smiled.  “Send two.  Lindsay could stand to relax a little.”

Kara laughed as she headed up the short flight of steps and out of the Council chamber.  Rachel shook her head slightly and tucked herself under Adam’s waiting arm.  “Did you want a ride, Daci, or are you going to walk back?”

Daci shook her head.  “I don’t need to do that much head-clearing.  I’ll take a ride.  Gratefully.”

“All right.  Let’s get moving, then.”

 •           •           •

 The kettle whistled on the stove and Lindsay pushed herself up from the kitchen table to take care of it as the kitchen door swung open.  She smiled at her aunt, Adam, and Daci as they trooped into the kitchen from outside, bringing the chill of autumn with them.  “You’re just in time.  I was about to make tea.”

“Make the peppermint,” Rachel said, slumping into a chair.  “I think we could all use it.”

Lindsay’s nose wrinkled.  “It was that bad?  I’m glad I stayed here.”

America Farragut glanced from her daughter to her sister, then laid her hand over Rachel’s.  “You look as tired as Mom used to look when she came home after a long day dealing with the donors.”

“I wish this was that uncomplicated.”  Rachel smiled weakly, squeezing America’s hand.  “Where’s Grant?”

“He’s taking a walk.  He’s so tired of being cooped up he had to get out and do something.  I stayed with Lindsay and Freder.”  America glanced up toward Adam and Daci.  “He’s going to get on you two about letting him help.  I give it another two days.”

“I’d give it more like two hours.”  Frederick Rose limped into the kitchen and seated himself in the chair Lindsay had vacated when she got up to make the tea.  “You know him.”

Adam shook his head, frowning as he slowly seated himself next to Freder.  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for him to be jumping in with both feet this quickly.  He’s about eighteen years out of date.”

America smiled helplessly and stood up to help her daughter with the tea.  “You know that won’t stop him, Grumpy.  He won’t care, he’ll just want you to bring him up to speed.  And probably try to pull rank doing it.  You know him.”

The big man shook his head and sighed softly, leaning back in his chair.  “You’re right.  I do know him.  I’ll just have to impress upon him that he’s not the commander here.  That should take about three months.”

Rachel rolled her eyes.  “Is Alana taking a nap, Lindsay?”  She gratefully accepted one of the mugs of tea from her niece, leaning back in her chair.

“No, I sent her to follow Dad after I promised her about a thousand times that I wasn’t going to go anywhere.”  Lindsay smiled wryly.  “He doesn’t know his way around yet and the last thing we need is him getting hopelessly lost.”

“He probably would, too.”

“Freder!”

Freder grinned.  “He’s not here to nail me for saying it.  Got to get my cracks out of my system before he gets back.  I don’t want to get hit.”

“He wouldn’t hit you, sweetheart.”  Daci leaned down and wrapped her arms around Freder’s shoulders, dropping a kiss onto his temple.

“Wanna bet?  Cripple or no cripple, he’d hit me.”  Freder dipped his chin to kiss Daci’s wrist before taking a mug of tea from Lindsay with a grin.  He winked at the girl before taking a sip of the steaming tea.

“He’d get a rude awakening if he did.”

“Daci, you’d hit my father?”  Lindsay slid into one of the empty chairs at the table, reaching across to retrieve the book she was reading from in front of Freder.

“I’d hit anyone who hit Freder, Lindsay.  Doesn’t matter who they are.”  Daci grinned and stole a sip of her husband’s tea before straightening up.  “Though right now I’d like to string D’Arcy Morgause up by his balls.”

“Uh-oh.  Now what?”

Rachel waved a hand.  “More of the same.”

America frowned slightly, resuming her seat at the table.  “It sounds like he’s quite a problem for the Council, just from the way you’re all talking about him.  What does he do, anyway?”

Lindsay leaned back in her chair, cradling her mug between both hands.  “Purportedly he’s the Council’s spymaster.”

“Purportedly?”

“He keeps more information to himself than he shares with the Council.”  Adam tapped a fingertip against the tabletop as he settled in next to Rachel.  “He almost prevented us from going after you and Grant, Meri.  If we’d left it up to him, you two would be dead or worse.”

Lindsay winced and took a long swallow of tea.  “You wouldn’t have let that happen, Uncle Adam.”

Adam shrugged slightly.  “Probably not.  Your aunt would’ve killed me.  Luckily Ezra solved that problem for us after we dragged nominal confirmation out of D’Arcy.  We didn’t need him anymore.”

America shook her head slowly, frowning deeply.  “He doesn’t sound like he’s a good fit for his job.  How did he end up the spymaster for the Council if he spends most of his time keeping secrets from it?”

“He’s from old Foundation stock.”  Rachel shook her head.  “That counts for a lot around here, just like being old Guard stock counted for a lot back home.  The worst of it is, he’s the first bad one in the bunch.  His family’s been on the Council for the past three generations.  His father was wonderful.”  She took a long, slow swallow of tea.  “But the fact that his father and his grandfather were beyond reproach is going to make it very difficult for anyone to fire him.  I’m not sure Sergei has the energy to deal with that.”

“Sergei doesn’t have the energy to deal with the war, Rachel.”  Adam’s fingers wrapped around hers.  “He’s going to retire and he’s going to do it soon.”

Rachel grimaced and stared down into her mug.

America raised a brow.  “What’s that about?  I mean, you told me that Sergei’s the head of the Council.  If he retires, does this D’Arcy get to be Speaker, or what?  What does it mean?”

“Adam thinks that Sergei’s going to ask Rachel to be Speaker.”  Daci leaned against the back of Freder’s chair and brushed a few strands of dark hair out of her face.  “I’m not sure he’s wrong.”

Rachel shook her head again.  “It won’t be me.  It’ll be Amelda.”

“Amelda, for all of her strength, doesn’t have the stamina and doesn’t have the experience whoever becomes Speaker is going to need, Eaglet.”  Adam squeezed her hand.  “She’s the same generation he is.  He’ll choose someone younger.  You.”

Rachel sighed.  Lindsay leaned against her arms and watched her aunt across the table.  “Would it be so terrible?  I mean…I know what’s coming.  I’d rather have you running the Council than Sergei dying in the attempt.  I think it would kill him, Aunt Rachel, to try to run the Council in a wartime setting.  And if you say no, I think he’ll try.  And it’ll kill him.”

Rachel’s brow furrowed as she stared at her niece, the Oracle.  “Have you seen something, Lindsay?”

She shook her head.  “No.  But I have a feeling.  I haven’t seen anything since Brendan came home, thank god.”  Her fingers tightened around the mug for a moment before she noticed and she consciously forced herself to relax them.

Her mother smiled sadly at her.  “He’s going to be fine, Lindsay.  You’ll see.”

Lindsay’s smile was watery.  “I hope so, Mom.  He’d better be, or else I get to hurt Uncle Adam.”  The smile grew for half a moment, then Lindsay stood up, picking up her book and her mug.  “…I’m going to go lay down and read.”

“He said he’d let you know as soon as there was word, Linny-pie,” Adam said softly.

“I know,” she murmured.  “It’s the waiting that’s hard.”  She smiled tightly and slipped out of the kitchen.

Rachel sighed and shook her head.  “I never imagined that she’d go through something like this with him.  Even with him being a pilot and all of that, even though we knew that eventually something bad would happen back in Commonwealth space.  I never thought she’d have to go through this kind of hell.”

Adam squeezed her hand.  America smiled a little.

“You did a good job with her, little sister.”

Rachel blinked a little, looking at America.  “What?”

“Bringing her up for me.  You did a good job.”

Rachel laughed weakly and shook her head.  “How could I do any less?  Grant would have killed me.”

America started to laugh.  “Gee, somewhere along the line my husband got to be a lot more violent than I ever remember him being.”

Freder grinned.  “We were always familiar with different sides of your husband, Meri.  He could be downright brutally nasty when he wanted to be.  Didn’t make him a bad guy, just a mean bastard sometimes.”

“Casting aspersions on my character again, Freder?  Some things never change.”  Grant stepped into the kitchen through the back door, Alana trailing quietly in his wake.  He wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze and a kiss on the temple.  “If you didn’t look so damned pitiful, I’d do something about it.”

Freder’s grin didn’t fade one bit as he leaned back in his chair.

Alana frowned slightly.  “Where’s Lindsay?”

“Laying down, reading.  Something wrong?”

“No.  Not at all.  She just promised me that she wasn’t going to go anywhere and I was making sure she didn’t change her mind or something.”  Alana scratched the back of her neck with her cybered hand, one that once upon a time had made her one of the most deadly agents in the employ of the Eurydice Compact, one that she swore scared children these days.  “I’m going to go for a run.”

“Are you sure?  I’m going to start dinner,” Rachel said, despite the fact that she was making no attempt to get out of her chair.

Alana nodded.  “I’m sure.  Don’t worry about me.  I’ll take care of myself.”

Rachel arched a brow and nodded.  “All right.  Enjoy the run.  You going to come back here tonight?”

Alana glanced at Grant, then back at Rachel and shook her head.  “I don’t think so.”  She smiled a little and waved to the rest before stepping down the kitchen door.

Rachel looked at Grant, brow furrowed.  “What was that about?”

Grant attempted to look innocent and failed.  “I told her that it was time to start living her life for herself for a change.  All debts repaid.  I want her to be happy.  Sandro would want her to be happy.”

“That’s all?”

He nodded.  “That’s all.”

Rachel nodded thoughtfully and stared at the door Alana had just disappeared through.

Of course.

Ezra.

•           •           •

 Ezra Grace stepped quietly out onto the back porch of his house and clinic, staring out at the sun as it slowly started to go down over the hillside woodlands west of the small city’s center.  His breath steamed slightly in the evening chill and he crossed his arms, tucking his hands into his armpits to keep them warm.  He let his eyes relax and let the tension slowly drain out of the muscles of his shoulders and back.  It had been slow, tedious work, and more stressful by half than it ordinarily would have been.  Then again, he usually wasn’t operating on his closest friend.

“Ezra?”

He startled, then flinched, finally exhaling slowly as he turned toward the sound of her voice.  “Alana.  You scared me.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.”  She boosted herself up and climbed the railing on the porch to join him.  Her blonde hair was swept up into a tight ponytail, her clothing loose, arms bare despite the chill.  She wasn’t even winded, even though he knew she’d probably been running for hours.  “How is he?”

“Stable.  Resting.”  Ezra leaned against the railing and continued to stare out at the woods.  “I think I cleaned it all up.  He’s still going to want to take me apart with his bare hands when he wakes up.”

Alana eased close to him and shook her head.  “He won’t.  You’re his friend, and he’s yours.  He’s not going to be that angry.”  She smiled a little.  “After all, he doesn’t have that many friends in the first place, now does he?”

Ezra snorted a little.  “More than you do, ‘lana.”

“That’s because I don’t need friends.  He does.  He’s a social creature at heart.  I’m a heartless monster.”

The doctor glanced at the former black ops soldier and smiled faintly, shaking his head.  “You’re not a heartless monster.”

“Kind of you to think so, Ezra.”  She smiled and stared out at the woods.  “Lindsay will be happy to hear that he’s going to recover fully.”

“Is that why you came out here?  To find out how Brendan’s doing for Lindsay?”

“…no,” she admitted quietly.

“Then why did you come?”  Ezra straightened, stretching a little as he turned his gaze toward the sunset again.

Awkwardly, Alana settled her flesh and blood arm around his shoulders and leaned against him.  Ezra went tense momentarily, blinking, then looked at her.  She smiled at him, almost shyly.  “It’s time for me to start living my own life,” she said quietly.  “And letting go of the past.  Starting with me not holding everyone at arm’s length anymore.  Like you.”

Ezra slowly slid his arms around her, looking down at her with a creased brow.  “What brought this on?  Not that I’m complaining.”

“Commander Channing and I had a talk.  A long talk.  Lindsay’s fault, really.  I think she could tell that there was a lot of unfinished business.  So she sent me to keep an eye on him when he took a walk this afternoon during the Council meeting.  Probably realized that he’d notice me following him and we’d get to talking.”  She exhaled slowly.  “He forgave me.  For a lot of things.  And thanked me.  And then he told me that I deserved to be happy and I didn’t have to take care of Lindsay anymore, that she’d be fine without me now.  That kind of leaves me at loose ends for the first time in forever.”  She sighed a little, staring off at the trees behind his house.  “You’re the only one who looks at me and sees a person first, Ezra.  That’s important to me even if I’ve never said it.”

Ezra smiled at her a little.  “You didn’t try to make that easy, you know.”

“I know.  But I felt like I had to keep everyone at an arm’s length or more.  To protect her, to protect me.”  She smiled weakly.  “I carry a lot of guilt and a lot of regrets.  Mostly guilt.”  Alana took a deep breath and a measure of vulnerability vanished behind a veil of strength.  She smiled tightly at Ezra.  “Will you schedule it for me?”

His brow furrowed.  “Schedule what?”

She held up her cybered arm.  “Will you schedule it for me?”

It took a moment for him to realize what she was asking him.  She wants to get that undone.  Finally.  And I asked her to put it on hold when we went to rescue Grant and Meri…  He sucked in a breath quietly and prayed she wouldn’t hear it.  “Are you sure?  There’s still a war coming.  You’re one of the most deadly people I know.”

“Even without the enhancements, I’ll still be one of the most deadly people you know.  Cybernetics don’t make you deadly.  They just make you deadlier.”  Alana rested her metal-sheathed hand on the railing, staring at it for a few long moments before looking at Ezra again.  “Schedule it.  I’m tired of being a soldier.  I’m tired of being a killer.”

Ezra reached down and took that hand, squeezed it despite the coolness of the metal sheath over flesh and bone.  He knew that she’d feel it.  The metal was thin enough that it only muffled sensation.  It didn’t kill it entirely.

“Okay,” he said quietly, looking at her.  “When?”

“As soon as possible,” she murmured.  “The sooner the better.”  She smiled weakly.  “Just in case.  The sooner it’s done, the sooner I recover, right?”

Ezra’s eyes crinkled slightly as he looked at her and nodded slightly.  “Right.”  The arm around her tightened and she leaned into his chest, brow furrowing.

“It’s going to hurt, isn’t it?”

“Probably less than it did going in.”

She shook her head slightly.  “I barely remember that.  It was a really long time ago.  I was a child.”

Ezra’s stomach twisted as he imagined a young Alana being having cybernetics installed.  It wasn’t a pretty process at any age, and if they’d started when she was young, it had been just that—a long, painful process.  His arm tightened more and she turned toward his side, pressing her chest against his flank and sliding both arms around his waist.

“They just don’t care, do they?”  He murmured.  “They make you into what they decide they want you to be and damn the consequences.”

“It could have been worse.  I could have been sterilized and tossed to the scientists.  That’s what would have happened if they’d figured it out.  Or worse, not sterilized and thrown to the scientists.  I thank my lucky stars every day that they decided I’d make a good soldier.”

“You never manifested any ability.”

Alana shook her head slightly.  “No.  But it wouldn’t have mattered if I did.  I beat the tests because I knew what they looked for.  No one was going to take that chance if I’d scanned positive.”  She pressed her face into the crook between his neck and his jaw.  “I knew I had to run,” she murmured softly.  “I always knew I had to run.  Somehow get to the Guard.  I just never could until Commander Channing showed up and by that time, the Guard was dead and there was nowhere to go but here.”

“Do you regret it?”  Ezra asked, voice quiet.

“No,” she said softly.  “Not anymore.  I used to.  I used to resent it, but I resented a lot of things.  Then I got to thinking about it and I realized that everything happens for a reason.  Rachel’s good at helping people figure that out.”

Ezra nodded mutely, looking at her.  He reached with his free hand and gently brushed the hair away from her face.  His thoughts twisted as his stomach tightened.  Nerves.  Why?  She was here, arms around him.  He’d been imagining this for months.

Her brow creased slightly.  “What’s wrong?”

“What do you want for dinner?”  The words had been unexpected, but they kept coming, tumbling over each other.  “I haven’t eaten yet and I need to make something.  Do you want to stay?”

Alana smiled and nodded, expression soft.  “Yeah.  I’d like that.  I’d like it a lot.”

Ezra smiled, nodding back.  “All right.  Let’s go make dinner.  It’s getting cold out here.”

“Just one more minute,” Alana said quietly, arms tightening around him for a moment.  She stared at the sky, starting to turn orange and red at the lowest edges as the sun slipped past the horizon.  Ezra ran his fingers tentatively through her hair.  Her arms tightened again for a moment, then loosened.  She finally released him as the trailing edge of the sun faded from view.  “All right,” she whispered.  “Let’s go inside.  You’re right, it is getting chilly and I’m getting cold.”

“I’ve got extra blankets.”

She smiled at him as she stepped back.  “We’ll see if I need them.”

They were halfway into the house before he realized what she was implying.  By then, all he could do was smile.

We must look to the examples of the greatest among us, those who have always placed the lives of others above their own lives, whether in pursuit of justice, truth, liberty—those things that are the greatest of virtues that we as human beings can aspire to.  We must look to oftentimes the tragic memories of men and women who gave their lives for the sake of these things in order to find the greatest heroes of our modern times.  They are what we, as fellow men and women, should aspire to become when we talk about becoming better than what we are today.  My husband was an ordinary man who believed in truth and justice.  The pursuit of both killed him.  I pray that his sacrifice will not be in vain.

— Daciana Mason Rose, 25 Duodecem 5237 PD

26 Novem, 5249 PD

“Sephora.”

She froze, eyes widening at the sound of a voice she hadn’t heard in twelve long years.  Her heart began to beat a little faster as she slowly looked up from the files in her lap and at the flickering image of a man twelve years dead.

“Frederick,” she breathed.  He’d been everything then—friend, mentor, idol.  She had said more than once that without his tutelage, she’d never have become Chief Inspector for the New Earth Commonwealth.  Hell, the Office of the Inspector General might not exist anymore if he hadn’t become the legend—and the martyr—he had back then.

The image didn’t smile, but she wasn’t sure why she’d expected it to.  She caught her lower lip between her teeth, staring at the image as he paused for another beat and spoke.

“This message is meant for you and your eyes only.  I knew that eventually you’d go looking through our old case files for old time’s sake, especially if something happened to me.  If I’m not there with you, odds are something did.  Maybe it was a case that killed me.  Maybe it’s the one I’m about to tell you about.

“Or maybe I was wrong and they didn’t catch up with me and I’m showing this to you just to watch the look on your face.  I’ve got no way of knowing.  Either way, just in case the worst happens, I’ve got something you need to know.

“I still can’t quite be sure if it wasn’t more of them, but I know that there was an alliance between Idesalli, Chinasia, and the Compact that plotted what happened on Mimir.  That’s not the worst of it, either.  Someone in the Commonwealth knew, Seph.  I don’t know who and until I know who, I can’t be sure why they didn’t stop it, but I’m positive that there was more than one person that knew this was coming and didn’t raise a finger to stop it from happening.  That’s the worst of it.  All of those lives—millions—are on their head.”

His holographic image glanced away for a moment before it turned back to her.  “I wish I had more to tell you.  Find the green case.  In the lining is a chip that’s got a copy of all my research up until the night before I left for Eldas.  It’s everything, Seph.

“If I haven’t done it yet, use it to bury them.  No one—no like me, anyway—is going to be safe until it’s all unraveled.  I knew there was hate inside the Commonwealth, I just didn’t think it was enough to cause something like this.”

A shiver worked its way down her spine and she exhaled a shaky breath.  Freder…what did you unravel?  Why didn’t you tell me back then?

Maybe they wouldn’t have killed you.

“Good luck, Seph,” Frederick’s voice said softly.  “Be careful and good luck.  You always were a good friend and a sharp investigator.  You’ll do fine.

“Good-bye.”

The hologram sputtered and died.  Sephora swallowed against a lump in her throat.

“Good-bye, Freder,” she whispered softly.  “Don’t worry.  I’ll figure it out even if it kills me.”  Even if I have to burn the Commonwealth to the ground to get to the bottom of this, I’ll figure it out.  You deserve that much from me.

 •           •           •

 “Telly, has Winston already headed out?”

Her communications coordinator jerked his head toward her, blinking owlishly through his visor.  “The First Grade?  Yes, ma’am.  You told him immediately.  He’s already on his way to the far reaches.”  He reached over and tapped a few controls.  “Left this morning on the Tiana.  He’ll be making it out there by end of next week.”

“Damn,” she muttered under her breath.  “Have they cleared the system yet?”

Tellaris tapped a few controls, brow furrowing.  “Made the jump an hour ago.  Do you need a tight-beam?”

“Tight-beam, direct line, maximum encryption.  Headset?”

He handed her one, still frowning.  “Everything okay, Seph?”

“Not since Frederick Rose died,” she muttered, fitting the headset on, frowning darkly.  How do I tell Winston everything I need to tell him and make sure it doesn’t get back to someone in the Commonwealth who’ll find my words suspect?

Hellfire and damnation.

Tellaris eyed her for a moment, then shook his head slowly.  “Right.  Well, you’re rigged.  Go ahead and hit that green button there to record the message.”  He hesitated.  “You want me to stick around or beat feet?”

“Beat it,” Sephora said after a moment’s hesitation.  I don’t need anyone else getting deeper into this than needs to be.  Right now, Winston and I need to be—and whoever he finds to help him when he reaches E-557 is going to end up knee-deep in this, too.

Damn, what was the name of that friend of his?  Windsor?  Something like that.

She waited until Tellaris was gone and the door was closed behind him before she touched the control he’d indicated.  “Tim, this is the Inspector General.  Listen carefully and destroy this message once you’ve listened to it.  Trust no one inside the confines of the Commonwealth.  Rose knew more than he ever told anyone here.  He had his reasons.  Find his friends on E-557.  They should help you.  You—and they—might be our only hope.  Find the man named Windsor.  Shoot a tight-beam to my personal line when you make contact.  Out.”

Sephora cut the transmission and slumped in her chair.  She squeezed her eyes shut, knuckled her eyes and wished the stinging would go away.

Why didn’t you tell me that sooner, Frederick?

And why the hell didn’t I go looking at the files before now?

She’d just sent her best investigator out into what was about to become a warzone, she had no doubt.  All she could do was hope that Timrel Winston kept his head—and his life.

At the end of the day, that hope was all she had.