Honor Bound

out.

“If we don’t stop what’s coming,” Shannon pointed out, “none of that will matter. I take full responsibility. Go check on Bryant. If he’s still panicking, give him a sedative.”

Ari nodded and headed back into the room. Shannon waited till he was gone, then cursed softly, slamming her fist into the bare buildfoam wall.

Dammit, Jason. Why’d you have to go off and leave me to handle this shit?

Because he trusts you more than anyone else in the world, she answered herself. In any world. Which means you can’t let him down.

“Liam,” Shannon repeated, snapping her fingers, “can you hear me?”

The man’s eyes were unfocussed, his head lolling, his breath coming in shuddering gasps. The Special Ops medic Tom had brought back with him looked worried, but didn’t say anything as she lightly slapped Liam on the cheek.

“I… hear you,” Liam answered, his words slurred.

“Liam, tell me what happened on the mission to Aphrodite,” Shannon instructed. “Tell me what happened on the Patton.”

“Please don’t make me,” Liam whimpered pitifully. “It… it hurts.”

“Liam, if you tell me, if you get it out, the hurt will go away,” Shannon promised him, feeling like a total shit. “Tell me what happened on the Patton.”

“It was…” He grimaced at the words, as if they were a bad taste in his mouth. “It was just a few months after the war, and we were shuttling some VIPs to Aphrodite. We were bringing some relief supplies too… small stuff like medicines, a couple portable fabricators, along with some techs to fix up their solar powersat rectennae. It was a bitch getting the shuttles rearranged to carry all that shit down.” His voice was becoming easier, more conversational as he talked.

“Aphrodite was boring as shit,” he went on. “I had to stay with the lander the whole time and even if I hadn’t, there wasn’t a damn thing to do anyway. We were all unloading supplies or running the buildfoam dispensers, building temporary shelters, repairing the buildings left standing, while the politicians and the brass gave speeches at each other. I couldn’t wait to get off that damn rock.

“Then, after staying there a month, we shipped out. Except… when we stopped at the antimatter factory out near the system’s primary, there was a ship there. Someone told me it was a cargo ship sent after we left. Uncrewed, automated. They thought it had come to the antimatter satellite to refuel for the trip back to Earth, but something was wrong with it. It wasn’t moving. Captain Patel, he sent a work crew over in my lander. They had to wear suits… the freighter wasn’t pressurized. We had telemetry with them through their suitcams, but when they boarded the freighter, it got staticy… there was some kind of interference. After a few minutes, I got a transmission… voice only, but they said they had found the problem. The AI had a bad cooling core and they needed to take it back to the Patton for repair.”

Liam was getting less at ease now, his brows furled, nostrils wide as he took in labored breaths. “They came back on board carrying it… it was pretty big, like two meters long, a meter wide. They stayed with it in the hold, said they would get it stabilized and ride there with it back to the Patton since they were already suited up. I… I didn’t know these guys, you understand? I barely could have recognized them with their suits off and they were in helmets the whole time. It wasn’t my fault!”

“It’s okay, Liam,” Shannon said soothingly. “No one’s blaming you. Go ahead, tell us the rest.”

“We… we got back to the ship,” he continued. “And they carried the core into the docking bay, put it on a maneuvering sled to take it through the cargo lock and into the ship’s engineering section so they could work on it. I locked the lander down and headed back to the ready room for some downtime… and then… I was in the corridor, just heading for the ready room and I felt something. Like a sound, but not a sound, like it was in my teeth, in my gut.” He winced, fists clenched, arms tensed against the straps that held him down. “It hurt… it felt like every bone in my body was going to explode, then nothing. Not like going to sleep, more like someone switched my lights off.” He moaned softly, a trickle of spittle running down the side of his mouth.

“When I… when my brain switched back on, I was somewhere else. I was lying in a room with a dirt floor, and there was gravity. Not Earth normal, but close. There were a few other guys in there with me, guys I knew. Sanchez from the bridge crew, Gradkowski from maintenance and Dalton from engineering. We all came to at the same time. Dalton… he told me what happened. He said that the work party that came back from the freighter… they weren’t our guys. He said they came into engineering and gassed everyone, but before he went out, he heard them talking Russian.”

“Oh, shit,” Ari muttered from behind her.

“He figured that there was something in that fake core that knocked everyone out. He said subsonics or something. Something that could conduct through the ship, wherever there was atmosphere. I don’t know where they took us or how long we were out… there was no way to tell. All our ‘links had been taken, we didn’t have anything-we were even wearing different clothes. After a few hours, they hit us with the whatever- it-was again. When I came to, I was in some sort of laboratory, strapped to a chair…” His voice was becoming more and more strained and his face was covered with sweat.

“They… they used that thing on me,” he said through clenched teeth, jerking his head toward the door, obviously referring to the hypnoprobe. “There were others in there with me, being made to forget. I don’t remember anything after that until we were on our way back to Earth on the Patton and by then no one remembered anything.” He shook his head, face screwed up in agony, muscles spasming against the restraints.

“There’s something else, Liam,” Shannon said, taking a step toward him. “What is it?”

“No… no…” The words were an agonized plea. “I… they… they told me…”

“If you tell us, the pain will go away,” she insisted. “It will all go away…”

“Before…” he grunted the words out like they were poison. “Before they started with the machine… I saw something. These things… vats? Tanks? I don’t know… they were shaped like nothing I’d seen before. They didn’t look like any human thing. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. They had someone over there, at the tanks… one of the politicians. That Senator guy. They pulled him out of one of the tanks and he was like drugged or something… and then… they…” He groaned as if he were in physical pain and squeezed his eyes shut. “And then they pulled him out again. There was two of him!” He screamed the words out and began sobbing cathartically, tears pouring down his cheeks. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” he moaned. “Then they put the machine on me and tried to make me forget everything, but Jesus Christ! How could you forget that? How could anyone?”

“Doc?” She looked to the medic. The man held a monitoring device to Liam’s temple for a moment, then nodded.

“He’s okay,” the medic told her. “I don’t think there’s any damage and he hasn’t seized. His brain waves are looking good.”

Shannon let out a relieved sigh and patted Liam’s shoulder as the man continued to sob. “Ari, Doc, unstrap him, give him a sedative and put him in one of the holding rooms. You stay with him there Doc, make sure he doesn’t lose it again. Hopefully remembering what actually happened will get rid of his delusions.”

“What actually happened?” Ari repeated. “Ma’am just what the hell did actually happen? Is he…” Ari shook his head in disbelief. “Is he saying what I think he’s saying?”

“If you think that he’s saying that the Patton was hijacked by the Protectorate five years ago,” Shannon said calmly, looking him in the eye, “and that the entire crew was brainwashed, and that our current Vice President was somehow copied using alien technology… then yes, he’s saying what you think he’s saying.”

“So, the Protectorate is behind the coup?” Tom Crossman asked, his eyes wide.

“I wonder if the others who are involved know just to what extent then Protectorate is involved,” Roza mused.

“Ma’am,” Ari asked as he began taking off Liam’s restraints, “what the hell do we do about all this?”

“That’s not our decision, Ari,” Shannon told him, rubbing the back of her neck tiredly. “What we do now is take what we know to the President.” She shook her head. “And hope we can make him believe any of it.”