Honor Bound

began to swing, she halted it in mid-motion by digging her left thumb into his triceps. Liam gasped with pain and surprise and then her right hand darted up, wrapped around a small, cylindrical object that could have been mistaken for a stylus. The tip of it jabbed unobtrusively into the bare skin of his right biceps, and instantly the man staggered slightly.

“Ari,” Roza said quietly, moving in to support Liam as he nearly collapsed. Ari turned back, saw the hypo in her fist and saw Liam’s dazed expression and he moved to the other side of the redhead, putting a supporting hand under his arm. “Now Liam,” Roza said, “you’re going to be a good boy and do exactly as I say, aren’t you?”

Liam grunted assent, his eyes glazing over.

“Good boy, Liam,” Roza whispered soothingly. “Now just walk, Liam… walk with us and you can rest very soon.”

Ari’s eyes scanned the crowd, but no one gave them a second look as they guided the drugged Liam through the tram station and out onto the sidewalk. They headed away from the rows of restaurants, past street vendors selling ice cream, drinks and anonymized ‘links, till they came to a flyer pad, where a handful of the ducted fan helicopters were parked. Most were empty, stored on the lot by businesses, but one was occupied, its turbines whining as they idled, its clam shell doors open.

Ari and Roza walked Liam up the steps into the flyer, sitting him in one of the vacant seats and strapping him in. In the pilot’s seat, Tom Crossman twisted around, noting Liam’s dazed expression and wandering eyes.

“Plan ‘B,’ huh?” Crossman commented with a grin. “You owe me ten bucks, Captain.”

“Just close the doors and get us out of here, Tom,” Ari said. “I want to get this loser back to the safe-house before the drugs wear off.”

Ari settled back into the chair, buckling his safety harness and sinking in with a deep sigh. He could feel Roza’s eyes on him and he knew what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. He’d hardly been able to think of anything else in the last couple days. The Patton. The manifest. Major Stark had looked it up after Lee had received the message. Arvid Patel had been the ship’s Captain, Hellene D’Annique the First Officer; and among the many distinguished passengers had been then-Senator Xavier Dominguez… and then-Colonel Hikaru Kage of the Colonial Guard.

They all knew what that could mean, but none of them had been willing to discuss it, least of all Roza. There was no point, until they could find out what had happened on that ship. They’d thought about grabbing D’Annique, but she was too high profile-people would notice if she went missing. And then, they’d dug up the medical files on one Liam Bryant…

“So,” Shannon said, watching Tom and Ari strap the insensate Liam into the chair at the center of the mostly bare room, “this is our guy.”

“Yeah,” Ari grunted, tightening the straps across the man’s chest. “:And he’s nuttier than a cage full of squirrels. I hope this isn’t a waste of time.”

“If he weren’t nutty,” Shannon pointed out, “he would be a waste of time. Give him the stimulant, Ari.”

Ari took the hypo off the small tray table next to the chair and carefully injected Liam in the neck, then stepped back cautiously. The man jerked slightly, his eyes popping wide open, and he began to pull against his restraints, panting with exertion and fright as he looked around the room in a blind panic.

“What the fuck is going on?” He demanded loudly. “Where am I? What the hell are you doing with me? Who are you people?”

“If I might answer those questions in reverse order,” Shannon spoke up and he stared at her in wonder, as if he were just noticing her. “I am Major Shannon Stark of Fleet Intelligence.” His mouth started to form a question and she interrupted him. “Yes, that Shannon Stark. We have you restrained to prevent you harming yourself. You’re someplace safe and private just outside the city. As for what the fuck is going on… well, we were hoping you could help us with that.”

Liam tried to say about a dozen different things at once, but finally managed to sputter out: “Help you?”

“Mr. Bryant,” she said, pacing in front of his chair, hands clasped behind her back, “five years ago, you went out on the cruiser Patton for a political mission to survey the damage done to the Aphrodite colony by the Protectorate invasion there. Within a month of returning to Earth, you’d had a psychotic break, assaulted several medical technicians and wound up in a treatment facility for a year. You kept insisting that no one except you was real… that they were all copies.”

“I had some problems,” Liam said helplessly. “But they were able to treat me… they gave me some drugs that helped me to get better.”

“Yes, I know, Mr. Bryant. And no one is asking you to go back to how you were behaving. But here’s the thing: we think that your psychosis was triggered by an actual event during that trip. Other people who were on that mission have shown… significant personality changes.”

“Was there some kind of chemical contamination?” Liam asked, fear in his eyes.

“We don’t know, Mr. Bryant,” Shannon admitted. “But from what we’ve seen… we think it was deliberate, whatever it was. We need you to try to remember what happened on that ship.”

“I can’t,” Liam insisted, yanking at the straps on his wrists in frustration. “I haven’t been able to remember any of it for the last three years, since the treatments.”

“Yes, I know… I read your records. That’s why we want to do a hypnoprobe on you to bring them out.” She nodded to Roza, who stepped out into the hallway and came back rolling in a cart laden down with an interface helmet and the hardware to support it.

“No,” Liam pleaded hoarsely, shaking his head. Ari frowned as he saw beads of sweat streaking down the man’s forehead. “No, keep that fucking thing away from me!”

“Mr. Bryant,” Shannon tried to comfort him, “there’s no danger. It’s completely safe; you must have used one before, when they were trying to defuse your violent behavior?” She shot a look at Ari and he pushed the tray back and went back out of the room.

“Don’t bring that goddamned thing near me again!” Liam screamed, going from terror to fury now that the machine was farther away. His face was beet red, his breath coming in strained gasps. “I’ll kill you! I swear to God I will!”

Shannon didn’t reply to him, just stepped out into the hallway to meet Ari, who had retrieved the tablet with Liam’s medical file. The hallway was as sparse and utilitarian as the room: the safe-house was a converted warehouse rented out by Fleet Intelligence via several layers of shell corporations.

“It’s right here,” Ari said grimly, holding up the tablet. “I had to dig a little deeper… it was in the detailed daily reports, not the overall summary. They tried to use a hypnoprobe on him initially, but he reacted violently to every attempt so they were forced to use psychoactive drugs instead. They never could get through to his actual memories of the trip, though… he kept repeating the paranoid fantasy about everyone on the planet except him being copies, fakes. Finally, they resorted to memory suppressants to get rid of the fantasies.”

“Damn,” Shannon muttered. “The hypnoprobe won’t work if he goes psychotic every time we try it, and If we can’t use it, we’re not going to be able to get to those memories either… he can’t even remember the fantasies any more. Maybe he is a waste of time after all.”

“There still might be a way,” Roza said, coming up behind them. “In the GIS, we don’t often have access to a full hypnoprobe machine when we do field investigations, so we use a drug instead. It was developed over a hundred years ago to fight a disease called Alzheimer’s, before genetic surgery put an end to such things. It is designed to restore neural pathways to the memory centers… when used in conjunction with psychoactives, it can basically make people remember things they had forgotten and force them to tell them.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” Ari commented. “What’s the downside?”

“Yes, that is the problem,” she admitted, cocking an eyebrow. “The drug by itself is not a bad thing. At the most, you would find yourself remembering things from the past very clearly for a while. I have heard there is a black market in it for that reason, though not a large one. But when you use the psychoactives with it, well, you run the risk of seizure and possible brain damage. We didn’t use this method on people we liked.”

Shannon took in a deep breath and sighed it out heavily. “Go tell Tom the name of the drug. He can get it for us. Tell him to bring back a trained medic with a portable kit.” Roza nodded and turned to find Crossman. At Ari’s look, Shannon shook her head. “I know… he doesn’t deserve it, but it’s his welfare against possibly billions.”

“We’re also breaking quite a few laws and violating the Republic and the US Constitutions,” Ari pointed