Honor Bound

white…

Chapter Nineteen

“That’s him,” Ari nodded to Roza as the man emerged from the Veterans’ Clinic. He looked much as he did in the video they’d reviewed from the Republic Veterans’ Resources file: average height, almost painfully thin, with shoulder-length red hair and a sparse, half-hearted mustache. He walked with a disinterested shuffle, eyes on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets.

Ari and Roza rose from the bench where they’d been waiting and followed him, maintaining twenty meters’ separation. It was almost an effort for them to walk slowly enough to stay at his pace: he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. Ari made an effort to keep his eyes moving, both to avoid the man turning around and seeing him staring and to have a sense of their surroundings.

It was an indecently sunny afternoon in Houston ‘plex, without a shading cloud to be found in the blue sky. Over the last few days, Ari had developed an intense dislike for the megacity. It was open to the sky and as crassly commercial as a strip mall; the weather was relentlessly humid even in early spring, and the public transportation system was brutally inefficient and dirty. And they were about to have to ride it again to follow this guy.

The neighborhood around the Veterans’ Clinic was on the shabby side: not dangerous, but just… apathetic was a good word. Here and there were cracks in the sidewalk or peeling facing on buildfoam barriers or dying bushes untended in roadside arboretums; evidence of lack of care in all senses of the word. In Capital City, such things were fixed as a matter of course. In London, they were fixed as a matter of pride. In Paris they were ignored as a matter of style.

Here they seemed to be a matter of no one bothering to report them or no one caring enough to fix them.

Cracked sidewalk led to the cracked and peeling walls of the tram station, where the lower class employed shuffled from one job to another, hoping to make enough to become taxpayers and thus become eligible to vote in the Republic elections. Most of the working class didn’t care, Ari knew, preferring to enjoy the benefits of comfortable living provided by the government, those that thought about politics at all satisfied with being able to vote in the local and national races.

If they weren’t required to work to keep their government housing, most of them wouldn’t ever leave their apartments, Ari thought cynically. With raw food stock delivered daily to their kitchen processors and entertainment provided free 24 hours a day on their consoles, there was no reason to. It was an environment like that back in Tel Aviv that had driven Ari to enlist in the Marines to begin with. He wanted to do something, not become a fucking mushroom.

What he’d wanted to do, however, was not ride the fucking tram in Houston ‘plex all day long. They watched the redhead board a car bound for a slightly more upscale neighborhood and slipped through the doors behind him just before they closed. The car was nearly empty, occupied only by the three of them and an older man who was sitting in the back, leaning his head against the wall with his eyes closed, catching a nap on his way home. The redhead took a seat near the middle of the car and Roza sat next to him, while Ari sat across from him.

The redhead eyed them suspiciously, glancing around at the nearly empty car as it began to pull away from the station.

“You’re Liam Bryant, aren’t you?” Ari asked the man, painting a friendly smile on his face.

“Do I know you?” the redhead asked, confused. His voice was hesitant and timid, without a trace of confidence.

“We have some mutual friends.” Roza told him, patting his shoulder. “From the Patton.”

“That was a long time ago…” Liam began, starting to get up from his seat… before Roza’s surprisingly strong grip on his shoulder pulled him back down.

“But you’re still going to the clinic once a week, after all this time,” Ari observed. “Even after spending a full year in the Behavioral Ward at the Richmond Veteran’s Hospital. I suppose you’re lucky they ever let you out of there after you attacked those medical techs at the Fleet Outprocessing Center.”

“I… I’ve just had some problems adjusting,” Liam said, looking away from Ari’s stare. “That’s all behind me now. The doctors say I’m over that, that the treatments worked fine.”

“Except you and I know, Liam,” Ari shook his head sadly, “that the problem never was what you did… the problem was what happened to you on the Patton, on that trip to Aphrodite just after the war.”

“No!” Liam exclaimed and tried to rise up again, but was again pushed back, this time by Ari’s hand on his chest. Roza quickly checked the other occupant of the car, but he hadn’t stirred. Ari put a shushing finger to his lips, his eyes giving an implicit warning. “That never happened,” Liam insisted, voice still strident, though lower in pitch and volume, his pale skinned face growing red in the cheeks. “I was… I was sick. Delusional. They… they fixed me.”

“No, Liam,” Roza countered softly. “Something did happen on that trip. Whatever it was, your mind tried to suppress it and you wound up delusional, paranoid. But something happened. We know that because other people who were on that mission are acting different.”

“Who… who are you two?” Liam asked, confusion and fear in his eyes.

“Liam, we’ll tell you who we are and what’s going on,” Ari offered, “if you come with us and answer some questions. It won’t take more than a couple hours, and just maybe you can actually get better. But it’s now or never. Whoever did this to you is monitoring you through your ‘link.”

Liam fumbled at his belt for the device, looking at it in alarm. “Right now?”

“No, not right now,” Roza assured him, “because right now this,” she produced a small black box from her shoulder bag, “is jamming the ‘link and all other electronic monitoring in this car. But once you leave this car, whoever is monitoring you is going to know something happened because of that jamming. And they’re going to come for you.”

“If you come with us,” Ari promised, “we’ll protect you. And you’ll find out what happened to you. If you don’t…” He shrugged. “Maybe we’re bullshitting you, maybe it’s a con… but really, what do you have to lose? You sit in your apartment all day long, never talking to anyone except for your therapist, except for a couple hours a night when you go to the anonymous terminals at the cafe across town and cruise the conspiracy communities.”

Liam’s eyes snapped up, a horrified expression on his face. “Yeah, that’s right ‘Knowledge-Seeker,’ your account isn’t quite as anonymous as you thought,” Ari sneered. “And if we know, you know that they know.”

“All right,” Liam said shakily, “I’ll go with you. What should I do?”

“Leave your ‘link here on the tram,” Roza instructed him. The man hastily yanked it off his waistband and tossed it on the seat. “When we reach the next station, we’re getting out. Walk quickly and keep your head down.”

The next stop came up swiftly, the holographic advertising on the tram walls advising them that it had easy access to several reasonably priced restaurants and personalized fabrication shops. When the doors opened, they all rose from their seats and stepped out of the tram into a small crowd waiting to board-the post-lunch crowd, Ari estimated from the time. Roza kept a guiding left hand on Liam’s right shoulder as they wound through the throng, with Ari in the lead.

Roza could feel Liam’s shoulder tense up and knew the move was coming: it was the logical place to try it, in the middle of a crowd of people in a public place, where they couldn’t pursue. So by the time Liam twisted around to get the torque to swing an elbow at her head, she already had her hand in her shoulder bag, and when the elbow