Damn your secrets.  It’s time for the truth.

— Beyond Lies, Willow McLeod

14 Decem, 5249 PD

“Forgive her,” Ezra mumbled into the sudden silence.  “She’s…medicated.”

Brendan looked askance at his friend, eyes widening slightly.  He actually said that?  I don’t care if it’s true.  He’d better hope that she doesn’t hear that he’s said that.  She’ll kill him.

“No,” Winston said slowly.  “No, there’s nothing to forgive.  She’s right.  I didn’t know and I should have.  There’s a lot more going on in the Commonwealth than the Inspector General’s office can address—or dare address, I guess.”

“It was always a struggle,” Frederick said, his voice soft and expression slightly distant.  “How much good could we do without stepping on too many toes, without getting the organization disemboweled, dismantled.  If we pressed too hard, if we tried to do too much, that was the very real risk.  We lived on the whim of parliament.”

“We still do.”  Winston massaged the point between his eyes, as if he felt a headache forming, then exhaled sharply.  “We’re still bound by what we’re allowed to do, what we can risk doing.  It’s not right, but it’s the way things are.”

“The way things are,” Lindsay echoed, toying with her mug.  “Just because they’re the way things are doesn’t make it right for things to be that way.”  Her lips thinned.  “That was the point that Alana was making.”

“She was right to do it,” Winston said again, palms pressed flat against the tabletop, fingers splayed.  It was as if he couldn’t meet any of their gazes.  “We’re a paper tiger.”

“The whole Commonwealth is,” Adam said.  “You’re just beginning to realize that for the first time.  Is this the first time you’ve been out of the core?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Winston nodded.  “I’ve been on the very inner edge of the Rim, but never anywhere near this far out, and never on a world that’s considered—no offense intended—a backwater frontier outpost.”

Frederick’s lips twitched into a smile.  “You should visit them more often, it seems.  You learn a great deal more that way about how the whole apparatus works—or fails to—by doing so.”

“Apparently.”  Winston sighed and shook his head.  “But this discussion doesn’t bring me any closer to the reason I came here.”

“I suspect the reason you came here isn’t precisely what you think it is.”  Frederick reached for the teapot and filled his mug, apparently marshaling his thoughts before he continued.  “Sephora gave you your orders directly, didn’t she?”

Winston nodded slowly.

Fingers tightening around Lindsay’s hand, Brendan frowned. He makes it sound like that’s significant.  She’s his commanding officer, for better or worse.  Doesn’t he usually get his assignments from her?

“Not just loaded in.  You got an actual briefing.”

Winston’s brows knit.  “After I was off-world, but yes.  She sent an eyes-only message to me that I got after my transport dropped me out on the frontier.”  His eyes narrowed slightly and he leaned forward.  “What are you getting at, Inspector?  You’re hinting at something that I can’t quite catch just yet.”

“Bear with us,” Frederick said.  “It’ll become clear quickly enough.”  He straightened slightly.  “Sephora and I are old friends.”

“I knew that,” Winston interrupted.  “She was your partner.  You’ve mentioned her a couple of times in the hour that I’ve known you.  The significance of the connection there isn’t entirely lost on me.”

“Settle down,” Aidan rumbled, crossing his arms against his broad chest.  “Bear with Inspector Rose, as he’s asked.”

“Are you implying that my being sent here has less to do with what happened at the Whispers and more to do with what happened to Mimir?  Or are we talking about something else?”

“Something else,” Frederick said, “but no less massive in its import.  The Commonwealth is dying, young man.  It’s about to consume itself.  Humanity is about to consume itself.  Sephora Damerian sent you here because we are the only people who can help any of you save what’s good and right and wonderful about the human race while the rest of our fellows devour each other like some kind of ravening horde.”

Winston stared at all of them for long enough that Brendan’s heart began to pound painfully against his breastbone.

He thinks we’re nuts.  He’s about to bolt.

“You people are insane,” Winston said, though his tone lacked the conviction that one might expect.  “Humanity’s survived the loss of two homeworlds already.  What’s to say that—”

“You said homeworlds,” Rachel said, her voice quiet as she interrupted him on the beginning of a tirade.  “We said the Commonwealth was dying.”

“You implied that—”

“That humanity would destroy itself, yes.  Eventually, it will, and perhaps sooner rather than later.  But we’re talking about the Commonwealth, Inspector.”

“No,” the young man said, eyes bleak and voice hollow.  “No, we’re talking about humanity.  The Commonwealth is the only existing brake on anything that’s happening inside the homosphere and even the Commonwealth can’t stop most of what’s happening back there.”  His fingers curled back, tips scraping against the smooth wood, hands curling into fists.  “The attack at the Whispers was a symptom of a much, much greater disease, one that we’ve been impotently fighting for decades, maybe more.  Maybe since the Commonwealth was born.  I don’t know.  I’ve got no way to know.”

“We do,” Frederick said, eyes gleaming.  Brendan’s stomach did an uncomfortable somersault.

I don’t like that look.  That’s the same look that Marshal Windsor gets when he’s about to ask me to do something that I’m going to question the wisdom of.  Now he knew where Adam had learned it—or perhaps Frederick Rose had learned it from Adam Windsor, sometime in their misspent youth on Mimir.

Winston just stared at Frederick, more than half dumbfounded.  “I beg your pardon?  How would you be able to know that?”

“There are histories,” Frederick said.  “Histories that the Commonwealth—indeed, humanity as a whole—believe and fear and perhaps even hope are lost forever.”

“What are you talking about?” Winston asked, his frown deepening.  Brendan could almost taste the young man’s confusion coupled with discomfort.  “You’re not making any sense.”

“The libraries of Mimir held all of the human knowledge that was ever salvaged from our past homelands, from past societies,” Frederick said, as if that explained everything.

But those libraries burned.

Winston shook his head.  “I thought those were destroyed in the bombings.”

“Some of the physical archives were, yes,” Frederick said, emphasizing the some. “But those physical archives were digitized more than a hundred years ago.  It was part of our mandate in the Guard—the protection of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

“But weren’t the digital archives lost with Mimir?”  Winston’s voice was a bare whisper as he looked at the Marshals, at Rachel and Frederick, as if he absolutely couldn’t believe that he was hearing what they were saying.  “All reports said that it was destroyed with the grand library.”

Frederick glanced toward Rachel and Adam.  Rachel exhaled softly and shook her head.

“Steps were taken to secure the archive when it started to become clear that action might be taken against Mimir,” she said.  “There had been rumors that something might be happening and the Senate saw fit to make backups of all of the data.  Those backups were entrusted to a half-dozen individuals—several of whom are in this room as we speak.”  Her fingers knit together in front of her on the table and she leaned back in her chair.  “The database is hidden, but the keys—and the database itself—can still be retrieved.  The history of humanity isn’t lost, it’s just been hidden and forgotten.  Now that we’ve rescued my sister and my brother-in-law, all that remains is a few loose ends—like retrieving a key that was entrusted to Sephora Damerian.”

Winston sat bolt upright, as if someone had replaced his spine with a rod of titanium.  “The Inspector General—”

“Never knew that she had it, I suspect,” Frederick said, shaking his head slowly.  “But she sent you here, which means she’s starting to sort something out.  She may have found everything that I left for her in the days since you left.”

Winston’s mouth worked but no sound emerged for a moment.  Brendan cleared his throat.

“Why didn’t anyone say anything about this sooner?” he asked, eyeing the Marshals.  Lindsay’s fingers tightened around his hand beneath the table, her senses pulsing a warning that he was pointedly ignoring.  There had been too many secrets lately, too much happening.

What if something happens to one or all of them, Lin?  We never would have known any of this.

Her fingers tightened one more time, then loosened slightly, her warning starting to subside.

Adam met his gaze for a moment, then shook his head.  “There wasn’t a point when we wouldn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle.  Grant knows the location, since he’s the one they detailed to hide it.  The rest of us only had hints and clues.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Frederick said.  “I know where it is.”

Adam’s gaze snapped toward his old friend, who sat impassively back in his chair, meeting the Marshal’s sharp look with a bland one of his own.

“But,” Frederick continued, “as you said, Grumpy, there was no reason to bring it up because I didn’t know that we had America and Grant’s keys all along.”

“So many bloody secrets,” Winston said, shaking his head.  “How do you people function?”

Kara snorted softly.  “Usually, there aren’t this many.  Rest assured, we’re not typically this secretive.”  She stood up and walked around to where Winston sat and leaned against the table next to him.  “You have to understand, things are changing here rather rapidly—old secrets coming up because it’s finally safe to reveal some of them.”

“And the Whispers?”  Winston asked.  “What about that?  What secrets are there?”

“None,” Kara said, glancing toward her brother, as if to invite him to speak.

Ezra took a breath and exhaled it slowly.  “Just that we got there at the wrong—or perhaps the right—time.  America Farragut had the presence of mind to rig our sensors to record everything we saw.  Marshal Windsor has had some of our top technical personnel reviewing the footage and trying to identify the ships that we were able to make out.”  The doctor’s lips thinned.  “There were a few ships, though, and they were firing on the planet.  We could see the explosions and feel the psychic ripples from the planet.  So many—”  He broke off for a moment, then sucked in a breath and forged onward.  “So many people dying.  There wasn’t even time for distress calls.  We saw a few ships that look like they managed to escape—I can only imagine that they must have been Wanderer ships, but who knows what safe harbor they’ve fled to now.”  He shook his head slightly.  “It was awful, Inspector.  I’ve never seen anything like it before and I pray to never see anything like it again.  Not ever.”

Winston nodded slowly, then looked at Adam.  “I need the footage.”

“You’ll get it,” Adam said quietly.  “You’ll get it.  But will you help us?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Winston nodded.

“Aye.  I will.  We will.  The fight for the soul of humanity sounds like one that the Inspector General’s office—and the Commonwealth—should have been fighting or generations.  I don’t know why we’ve abrogated that responsibility…but we have, and it’s not right.  Something has to be done.

“I’ll help you do it.  No matter what.”