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.”