Finally he ended his conversation and turned to me. “The birthday boy. Did you get my gift?”
“I did,” I lied. There were a pile of gifts stacked up in my entrance hall. I hadn’t opened any of them. “Thank you.”
“A man can always use a new jacket. Did it fit properly?”
“I haven’t tried it on yet.”
“Well, it’s from Strain & Sons. They’ll make any modifications you need.”
I didn’t say anything. Just fixed a non-committal smile on my face.
“Good, I bet you are curious about our next job.”
I remained silent. Long ago, I had realized that it was best to just let my uncle speak until he stopped.
“Close the door, will you?”
I did so.
“This very well could be Beck Salvage’s final job.” He let the words hang there, expecting me to react.
I kept still. Eyes ahead. Interested but not giving anything away.
“The Shima have come to us,” he said. “Finally.”
I leaned back in my chair. The Shima were a humanoid race with a long history. Very wealthy and very insular. It was surprising that they would be interested in hiring Beck Salvage. “What do they want?”
“They need us to locate a particular religious object called the Kryrk, and they are willing to pay a lot for it.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Let’s just say that our fee from this one job would exceed what the company has earned from commissions over the past decade. Combined.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why so much? And why us? We have no history with the Shima. No one does.”
“That’s true enough,” Wallace said. “But we do have a particular advantage in this situation. One that the Shima are willing to pay dearly for.”
“Which is?”
“The place where they believe the Kryrk is located…we’ve been there before.”
I wracked my brain. Beck Salvage normally completed a dozen jobs a year. All over the galaxy. The company had been to hundreds of different star systems. Off the top of my head I couldn’t connect any to the Shima.
“They want us to go back into the Fountain.”
His words hit me like a punch to the gut. The Fountain. That was where my father had died.
The Fountain was an astronomical anomaly. The Empire’s scientists didn’t understand its exact nature. The best description that anyone could come up with was a traversable wormhole held open by negative mass cosmic strings. But that wasn’t completely correct. It was a portal through dark space that led to the Hodierna galaxy—but only every once in a while. The last time it opened, my father headed up a seven-person mission to retrieve the Tabarroh Crystal for the Dodelan Alliance. Only six of our crew made it out alive. And my father wasn’t one of them.
Wallace quickly controlled the situation, locking down information flow, and spiriting me to Tor-Betree spaceport where I posed as a seriously-injured Sean Beck.
And that was the beginning of a seven-year deception.
Appearance-wise, my father and I were nearly identical—thanks to some heavy-handed DNA manipulation. Although I was biologically thirty-two years younger than him, my father underwent regular cosme treatments. To me—and the rest of the galaxy—Sean Beck was eternally thirty-something years old.
The challenge had been in aging my appearance, but my cousin Gemma was somewhat of a prodigy when it came to that sort of thing. Between her facial artistry and interminable sessions at the gym that bulked me up, I was able to pass for my father within a year. The bigger effort was learning to speak like him.
Beyond his speech patterns and vocabulary, I basically had to learn everything he knew. At least well enough to fake it at meetings. That was a lot more difficult, of course, but Wallace seemed up for the challenge. He hired a small army of information scientists to collect and organize a mountain of data: personal history, missions, general knowledge, interpersonal relationships—basically everything needed to recreate my father’s life.
I had to learn it all. And I hated every minute of it. But I had no choice. If I didn’t cooperate with my uncle’s plans, I’d be cut off. Completely and utterly.
At first I called his bluff. From an estate standpoint, I couldn’t believe that my father wouldn’t provide for his only child.
We had never been close, and I know that I disappointed him in just about every way a son could disappoint a father. But Sean Beck was a man of tradition. And tradition mandated that some portion—even a small portion—of the Beck empire should pass to me.
So I hired my own team of attorneys and they scoured the volumes of legal documents, both personal and corporate, and then reported the sad truth back to me. There was no provision for me in my father’s will. Upon his death his personal assets and debts would be assumed by the company.
I also learned that the credits that appeared in my account every month were not from my father at all. It was Beck Salvage that provided me with my stipend. And my lawyers discovered that the company provided this stipend at will. That basically meant ‘at their own whim’ with no obligation to continue it. So they could stop it at any time. In addition, the company owned my domus, all my vehicles, including my ’57 Swallow XK hover-jet, my clothes, and basically everything else of value that I possessed.
When I confronted Wallace about this, he basically shrugged and said that it had been my father’s wish that I make my own way in life—just like he had.
But Wallace told me that he was sympathetic to my plight. He’d offer me an employment contract with a salary and even some ownership in the company.
All I needed to do was to pose as my father at a handful of sales meetings and press conferences a year. No missions. No follow-up. I’d be a well-paid figurehead to be trotted out when necessary.
So I agreed. I didn’t
