FIC: Last Call
Mar. 28th, 2006 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalA sequel to my earlier "Opening Shots", set in chaypeta's Terinu universe.
Notes: PG-13 for language, and unfair intimidation of geezers.
NOTE: Terinu and related characters and situations is copyright Peta Hewitt and used here without permission.
Standing outside the door of the small cabin in South Dakota, the Alliance Navy officer realized that Hell wasn’t a searing inferno, it was a numbing winter cold that surely no human being could be expected to survive without wearing a space suit. In the thirty seconds it had taken him to walk from his rented ground skimmer to the front door, his lungs had gone cold and bone dry, the snot had frozen in his nose, and the wind had made a cheap laugh of his supposed heavy weather duty coat. He could only pray that the evening weather forecast had been a sick joke. Surely it never went below minus 50 C anywhere at night on the Earth except in the Arctic.
He pressed the enunciator by the door, and a drawling female voice answered, “Is that you, Margie?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered. “I’m Captain Erwin Blake, Alliance Naval Security. May I speak to Mister Washburn, please?”
“You’re who?” the woman asked. “I’m sorry, but Mister Washburn isn’t expect--“ Blake heard a reedy male voice say something unintelligible in the background, and then the woman said, “Sorry, come on in.”
The door clicked open, and he was met by a middle aged woman wearing a pink cardigan with a red cross clipped to her pocket, and a medical monitor display strapped to her forearm. “Sorry about that, Captain,” she said. “I’m Elizabeth, Mr. Washburn’s day nurse. Come on in.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Blake said. He stepped inside in cabin’s mud room, which served not unlike a starship’s airlock, giving him a chance to transition from the cold outside to the warmth of the cabin. He hung his coat on a rack and followed the nurse to the back of the cabin. It was a compact home, but to the rear it opened up into a cheery day room, made up of wide, insulated window panels that curved overhead, giving a fine view of the plains below and the mountains some twenty miles distant. In the greenhouse-like room it was notably warm, and Blake felt himself begin to sweat.
Mister Washburn was sitting in a reclining medical chair, which could have passed for an ordinary piece of furniture, if you hadn’t noticed the ports on the back which led to hidden monitoring equipment, and an oxygen line that led to a nasal feed clipped to his nose.
Washburn himself was a man seemingly shrunken by the weight of his years, laying back in the chair, his blue eyes rheumy, his mottled skin almost translucent, like ancient papyrus. But his hand was steady as he worked the controls of small, radio-controlled telescope that sat beside him, which was focused on the mountain range in the distance.
“This is Captain Blake, Mister Washburn,” the nurse announced.
“Thanks, Elizabeth. You can leave us be,” Washburn said, not turning away from the telescope’s display screen in front of him. “Ever see Mount Crazy Horse, Major?” he asked.
“Captain, sir,” Blake corrected. “And no. Some kind of memorial, like the original Rushmore, right?”
“Heh,” Washburn wheezed, then coughed, spitting up something brown and nasty into a tissue, which he threw into the trash bin by the chair. “Crazy Horse makes Rushmore, Old and New, look like a kid’s clay model. See?”
Blake sat down in a chair beside Wilson and obediently looked at the display. He could see the image of a great stone statue, a Native American chieftain on a horse, pointing at something in the distance. Blake blinked when he looked at the telescope’s range display. At that distance, at that small of a magnification, the statue had to be the size of… well, a mountain. “What on Earth?” he asked, startled.
“It’s carved out of a whole mountain, in the round, not a bas relief like Rushmore,” Washburn said proudly. “Started by Korczak Ziolkowski in the 1950’s, as a memorial to the one Native American chief who never gave in or made peace with the United States. Ziolowski didn’t live to see it finished, didn’t expect to, but his family kept at it and completed it the next century, just before the Varn hit us. How’s that for irony?”
“Very. I’m surprised the Varn didn’t trash it just for spite,” Blake said.
Washburn shrugged. “Who knows what they thought?”
“I think you do, Mister Washburn,” Blake said. “Better than most anyone else these days.”
Washburn blinked. “Eh? I’m no… xenopsychologist… that’s the word, right, Major Blake? I’m just an old man.”
“I think you’re a bit more than an old man, sir,” Blake said, not bothering to correct him this time. “And I think you’ve got more knowledge about the Varn than anyone else alive, Mark Wilson.”
“You’ve got the wrong fellow, Captain,” the old man said. He touched a control with suddenly palsied hands, and his chair pushed him upright. “My name is--“ he paused to cough again, “--Michael Washburn.”
“That’s what it says in your birth database,” Blake agreed. “Michael Washburn, survivor of the New Hong Kong Dome Crack, which killed five thousand people and also destroyed the colony’s databases. Very tragic. And very convenient for people wishing to launder their identities. Which is why Naval Security took it upon itself to do an extensive cross-check of all known New Hong Kong survivors, trying to ferret out pirates or other criminals attempting to escape the law.”
“I’m a bit old to be running around wearing an eye patch and shouting ‘Yo, ho, ho!’, Captain,” Washburn or Wilson said.
“Or to be a figure key to Earth’s history, particularly from over four hundred years ago,” Blake agreed. “But an inquiry to the Comprehensive Human DNA Archive came up with some interesting results. Needless to say, your scan coming within ten decimal places of the boy who inspired the Human Resistance got my attention.”
“You aren’t serious, Captain?” Wilson tried to laugh, but only set off another coughing fit. “Me, over four hundred years old? Ridiculous!”
“I thought the same thing, but gene logs don’t lie. Especially when they belong to someone as famous as you,” Blake noted calmly.
Wilson sagged further back into his chair, seeming to want to disappear from sight. “Damned doctors. Told them I didn’t want my cells added to the damned thing, but they didn’t listen.”
“Can’t blame them, sir, for following the law. Unlike yourself.”
“So what now, Captain Blake?” Wilson demanded. “Your superiors want to talk to me? Maybe trot me out for whatever damned xenophobic crusade the Conservative Party wants to start now? I won’t do it.”
Blake snorted. “I don’t care about politics. My only concern is about Earth’s security. If you really are Mark Wilson, that begs a question. How can you possibly be alive, especially after that oh so dramatic speech you gave? The Varn would have never let you live after that.”
Wilson let out a long, heavy sigh. “Oh, I’m Mark Wilson all right. Martyr to the Resistance. Hero of the Earth. The boy who stood up to our Varn conquerors and spat in their eye.”
“How?” Blake demanded.
Wilson closed his eyes, remembering. “The Gene Mage was there, waiting at the door after I finished my little speech. He was angry. He didn’t raise his voice to me, but you could tell he was utterly furious with what I had done. Told me that I had maybe doomed millions of humans to their deaths if my speech inspired a resistance.” The old man let out another laugh, bitter and cracked. “He always did have a habit of underestimating things.”
Who could blame him? Blake reflected. The final toll was more like one and a half to two billion souls dead. Between human stubbornness, a boy’s inspiring speech, and Varn planetary bombardment, Mark Wilson was indirectly responsible for more deaths than anyone else in the history of the Earth. How do you sleep at night, old man?
“The Gene Mage didn’t execute you?”
“Waste not, want not,” Wilson said. “He wasn’t in the habit of throwing away potential tools. Ari and I were tossed back into our room with the door sealed shut. We didn’t see him for weeks. Didn’t see anyone, except for the servants who delivered our food.”
“What happened to the girl?”
Wilson’s eyes began to tear up. “I don’t know. When the Gene Mage brought me back into his lab, the tube where he had kept Rachael’s body was preserved was empty. I don’t know if he moved her, or dumped her, or anything. He’d never tell me, no matter how much I begged him he would never tell me.”
Relentless, Blake pushed on. “Why are you still alive? Four hundred and fifty odd years on and you’re still alive. Why?”
Wilson wiped his eyes and coughed up more brown gunk. “The Gene Mage, he… he changed Ari and I. Flipped a switch in our DNA. Slowed it all down.”
“As a reward for being a good little collaborator?” Blake demanded.
“No!” Wilson shouted, and coughed again, so hard the Blake briefly feared for the old man’s heart. Elizabeth stuck her head into the room, worry on her face, but Wilson waved her off and she retreated. He caught his breath and continued. “Never that. Not after he took away Rachael, not after… not after… we saw what he had done… done to our poor Earth.”
“But he kept you around anyway, you and Suhayar. Kept you safe. Why?”
“I don’t… I’m not sure… I think he used Ari and I as… sort of humanity barometers. Whatever new policy or plan he came up with for the Occupation, he’d run past us, to see whether humans would swallow it or not. When things got bad, and then really bad, he listened to us less and less. Eventually we were just put away, like equipment that was no longer needed.”
“And he just let you go?”
“Not exactly,” Wilson said. “We were dumped into a labor camp. This was… seventy-five years on, while the Rebellion was in full swing. Two generations grew up in that camp, and Ari and I were older, at least a little. No one knew who we were, no one cared. And we didn’t want to bring any attention to ourselves. They did horrible things to people in those camps, that they suspected of collaborating with the Dominion.”
Suspected hell, you were a collaborator. “And you survived?”
“The war was almost over at that point. A couple of years later Vulpine transports landed at the port,” Wilson wheezed a laugh. “That poor captain’s face, when he and his crew came to unlock the gates. He didn’t know what to make of us, men, women, children, all skin and bones, starving because the guards had fled and we couldn’t maintain the hydroponics. Just kept saying he was sorry, so sorry that he hadn’t come sooner.”
Blake hmphed. “Vulpines. They always love playing the heroes to the rescue.”
“Ari and I didn’t say a word. We just stayed with the flow. Gave false names and histories, and accepted transport back to Earth.” Wilson’s face grew distant. “It was so beautiful. Pristine. Like the Varn had never even been there.”
“Should think so. The bastards terraformed it to repair all the damage they’d done, not to mention removing all the pollution from the ground and atmosphere,” Blake noted. “I expect they thought we should be grateful for that.”
“You’d be right,” Wilson agreed.
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you and Suhayar reveal yourselves? You were heroes of the Resistance!”
Wilson shook his head. “We were old men, in mind, if not body. The idea of being thanked for getting so many of our fellow men killed sickened us.”
And no one would ask difficult questions about what you’d been doing all those years, either.
“Satisfied, Captain?” Wilson asked, closing his eyes. “I’m an old man, of no use to anyone, and I’m dying inside. Let me go in peace, and let history remember all the lies it wants.”
“I’m not through yet,” Blake said. “Where’s Suhayar?”
“Don’t know.”
“You two are the oldest living humans in the universe, and you don’t know?”
The old man opened his eyes and looked up at Blake in evident annoyance. “We lost track of each other about a hundred and fifty years back. Had a falling out, actually.”
“Over what?”
“Nothing that’s important any more.”
Blake pushed on. “About what you two did?”
Now Wilson looked troubled. “No, about what we think humanity did, to defeat the Varn.”
Finally. “Tell me about it.”
“Not your business.”
Blake rested a hand on the old man’s medical chair. “I’m in Naval Security, Mr. Wilson, talking to what might be the last man alive to ever see a Varn face to face. That makes it my business. Now, you can tell me what’s on your mind here, in your nice comfortable home, or I can call in a sweeper team to overturn everything in this cabin of yours, and drag you off to spend a long, cold night in a military interrogation cell to answer whatever questions I want, for as long as I want. Do we understand each other?”
Wilson began shaking with anger. “You can’t arrest me!”
Blake starting ticking off charges on his fingers. “Creation of a false identity. Lying to government officials. Receiving unsanctioned genetic therapies. Collaboration with enemies of the Alliance. War crimes.”
“Goddamn you,” Wilson hissed.
“Just tell me what I need to know, and I’ll leave you be to hack yourself to death while you look at your big stone Abos, eh?”
“Goddamn you,” Wilson repeated, but there was no heart behind it, and Blake knew he had won.
“Now then, Mr. Wilson, what could humanity have done to the Varn that’s so much worse than what they did to us?”
“Not to them, at least it wasn’t done directly to them,” Wilson said slowly. “You’re a spacer, Captain, right? You’ve traveled to other ports, far from Earth?”
“Yes,” Blake agreed.
“Did you ever hear the stories about the Varn’s servants? Little grey creatures that served them directly, closer than any Creo or Galen could even get?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about them. Urban legends mostly. Figured they were just moddies created from Creo children or something like that. Sick bastards.”
“Not moddies, not moddies at all. They were real, and they were called the Ferin. The Varn Gene Mage created them, uplifted them from some poor forest creature they found on another world. They were custom made to serve the Varn, and were utterly, unquestioningly loyal.”
“So, they had their very own race of servitors. That just shows the Varn were a bunch decadent conquerors.”
Wilson shook his head. “The Ferin were more than that. They weren’t just servants. Hell, the Gene Mage could have diddled with the brains of any of the other Dominion races to get that. But the Ferin were special, you see. There was nothing like them in the universe.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Ferin, in their natural state, could produce a sort of bio-electric energy, like an electric eel. Except they didn’t just shock you with it, they projected it, like a ray beam.”
“Cute party trick,” Blake allowed.
“More than a party trick,” Wilson continued. “They could keep it up at energy levels that made no sense. With the Gene Mage’s tweaking, their little grey bodies were almost literally total conversion power plants, able to convert ordinary proteins and sugars into a harvestable energy source.”
“Harvestable? You mean the Varn used them as power sources?”
“You remember the Crust Breaker from your history books, Captain Blake?”
“I’m not likely to forget it. We’ve never been able to figure out what kind of power source the Varn used to create a gravitic tractor that could effect plate tectonics like it did.” Blake paused. “Are you trying to tell me that the Varn used these ‘Ferin’ to fire that thing?”
Wilson looked grim. “Ten of them, all hooked up into a single unit, tubes sticking into them, feeding them what their bodies need to produce their energy. I saw the Gene Mage prepare them. I saw the looks on their faces. They just went along with it. Not because they were taught to worship the Varn as gods, not because they were patriots, or believers, but because they literally could not think of anything else to do but obey their master’s orders. They just weren’t capable of it.”
“’I saw some examples of the kind of obedience that the Varn like, and it scared the hell out of me,’” Blake quoted softly.
Wilson nodded. “I was talking about them. Just the ten of them, and they powered the weapon that destroyed Earth’s civilization.”
“So where did they all go?” Blake asked. “Why aren’t there any Ferin in the GSA? They couldn’t have all gotten out with the Varn.”
“I think they’re all dead,” Wilson said, his face empty. “I couldn’t understand where they all went either, so I asked some military pilots who’d flown strike missions during the war. Some of them got orders, very hush, hush orders, to use nuclears when they were attacking Varn power installations.
“There’s no record of nuclear weapons being used on planetary surfaces during the war,” Blake objected. “Those damned idealistic Vulpine would have had kittens, pups rather, if that were true.”
“No record, sure, but it’s the truth. That’s why you won’t find any remaining examples of Varn power installations on the worlds the Rebellion took back. They’re all radioactive craters now.”
“Residual radiation effects from conventional bombing and cracking open fusion reactor cores,” Blake countered.
“No,” Wislon objected. “The Varn didn’t have fusion power, the Varn didn’t need fusion power, because they had the Ferin, who were more efficient in what they did by at least two orders of magnitude.”
“That doesn’t explain where all the Ferin supposedly went. Surely the Varn had protected breeding facilities.”
Wilson was laughing again, his eyes watering in either mirth or despair. “Oh, yes I’m sure they did. But they’re gone now. Dust and gone. We killed them, you see. Humans and God only knows who else in the GSA killed every Ferin they could find. Killed the little grey children who wouldn’t have even known how to fight back if they could.”
“They can’t all be dead,” Blake insisted.
“I searched for three hundred years, trying to find any sign of them, Captain,” Wilson argued. “They’re gone. Dead. Every single one of them, along with the Varn. And we are responsible for it. Responsible for wiping out an entire race.”
“Forgive me if I don’t cry too hard. The Bloody Plagues almost wiped us out towards the end.”
“Maybe we deserved to wiped out,” Wilson said bitterly. “Maybe we don’t deserve a pure blue and green world to live on. We didn’t know how precious a gift we had before the Varn came, and it took them invading us to make us realize it.”
“They can’t be all dead,” Blake said. “The Varn retreated across Ardactavian space, and we couldn’t follow them. They must have had some examples of Ferin with them.”
“A handful of Varn ships, less than a half-dozen in the final retreat,” Wilson noted. “Less than a dozen Ferin could have powered them. You think you could restart the whole human race with only a dozen people, Captain?”
“I can’t count on the Varn not pulling off the trick,” Blake said. He straitened up in his seat. “They’re still out there you know.”
“Who, the Ferin?”
“No, the Varn,” Blake said softly. “They’re out there, and they’re watching us, I’m sure of it. We destroyed their Dominion, took their slaves away from them, showed them to be the false gods they really were. If I were them, I’d hate humans for doing that. I’d be planning to come back, someday when the GSA is old, soft, and complacent. I’d come back and hammer down on humanity just as hard as we hammered them. Nobody else in Security takes me seriously, but I know I’m right.”
Wilson was staring at up at him. “So what would you do to stop them?”
“Anything,” Blake answered. “Anything and everything, no matter what.” He stood up, and nodded to Wilson. “Thank you for your time.”
The old man blinked, confused. “What are you going to do to me now?”
Blake smiled. “To you? Nothing. You’ve given me a lead on the Varn’s weakness, and maybe their strength, and I thank you for it. Your reward is that you get to live out the rest of your traitor’s life, however long it might be, alone and untroubled by me. Congratulations.” He turned and started to leave.
“Wait!” Wilson cried out. “What are you going to do?”
Blake turned back towards him one more time. “Whatever I have to do.” Then he left without another word.
He set his ground skimmer on auto-drive, heading back towards Rapid City Shuttleport, then leaned back and closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he fished out his headset from his pocket and set it on his ear. “Home,” he ordered, and waited for the connection to be enabled.
Erwin, you got any sense at all? his sister’s voice answered. It’s six in the bloody morning!
“Sorry, it’s the afternoon where I am. Is Leeza up yet, Vonnie?”
She’s just having her first tea of the day now, the little caffeine addict.
“Put her on, please.”
There was a short pause, and then he heard his daughter’s voice pop on with a high-pitched, Hi, Da!
“Hello, Leeza,” Blake answered. “You being good for your Aunt Vonnie?”
Yah! We’re buildin’ a bridge out of toothpicks, and then later Auntie says we can go t’ the War Museum and look at the ships, and then we’re gonna…
“That’s good, Luv. You doing your homework like you should?”
Yeah, Leeza answered reluctantly. You comin’ home soon?
“Soon, Luv, but not yet.”
Oh, she said, sounding disappointed. You savin’ the world again?
“Yes, Luv. I think I am. I really think I am.”
The End
Notes: PG-13 for language, and unfair intimidation of geezers.
NOTE: Terinu and related characters and situations is copyright Peta Hewitt and used here without permission.
Standing outside the door of the small cabin in South Dakota, the Alliance Navy officer realized that Hell wasn’t a searing inferno, it was a numbing winter cold that surely no human being could be expected to survive without wearing a space suit. In the thirty seconds it had taken him to walk from his rented ground skimmer to the front door, his lungs had gone cold and bone dry, the snot had frozen in his nose, and the wind had made a cheap laugh of his supposed heavy weather duty coat. He could only pray that the evening weather forecast had been a sick joke. Surely it never went below minus 50 C anywhere at night on the Earth except in the Arctic.
He pressed the enunciator by the door, and a drawling female voice answered, “Is that you, Margie?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered. “I’m Captain Erwin Blake, Alliance Naval Security. May I speak to Mister Washburn, please?”
“You’re who?” the woman asked. “I’m sorry, but Mister Washburn isn’t expect--“ Blake heard a reedy male voice say something unintelligible in the background, and then the woman said, “Sorry, come on in.”
The door clicked open, and he was met by a middle aged woman wearing a pink cardigan with a red cross clipped to her pocket, and a medical monitor display strapped to her forearm. “Sorry about that, Captain,” she said. “I’m Elizabeth, Mr. Washburn’s day nurse. Come on in.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Blake said. He stepped inside in cabin’s mud room, which served not unlike a starship’s airlock, giving him a chance to transition from the cold outside to the warmth of the cabin. He hung his coat on a rack and followed the nurse to the back of the cabin. It was a compact home, but to the rear it opened up into a cheery day room, made up of wide, insulated window panels that curved overhead, giving a fine view of the plains below and the mountains some twenty miles distant. In the greenhouse-like room it was notably warm, and Blake felt himself begin to sweat.
Mister Washburn was sitting in a reclining medical chair, which could have passed for an ordinary piece of furniture, if you hadn’t noticed the ports on the back which led to hidden monitoring equipment, and an oxygen line that led to a nasal feed clipped to his nose.
Washburn himself was a man seemingly shrunken by the weight of his years, laying back in the chair, his blue eyes rheumy, his mottled skin almost translucent, like ancient papyrus. But his hand was steady as he worked the controls of small, radio-controlled telescope that sat beside him, which was focused on the mountain range in the distance.
“This is Captain Blake, Mister Washburn,” the nurse announced.
“Thanks, Elizabeth. You can leave us be,” Washburn said, not turning away from the telescope’s display screen in front of him. “Ever see Mount Crazy Horse, Major?” he asked.
“Captain, sir,” Blake corrected. “And no. Some kind of memorial, like the original Rushmore, right?”
“Heh,” Washburn wheezed, then coughed, spitting up something brown and nasty into a tissue, which he threw into the trash bin by the chair. “Crazy Horse makes Rushmore, Old and New, look like a kid’s clay model. See?”
Blake sat down in a chair beside Wilson and obediently looked at the display. He could see the image of a great stone statue, a Native American chieftain on a horse, pointing at something in the distance. Blake blinked when he looked at the telescope’s range display. At that distance, at that small of a magnification, the statue had to be the size of… well, a mountain. “What on Earth?” he asked, startled.
“It’s carved out of a whole mountain, in the round, not a bas relief like Rushmore,” Washburn said proudly. “Started by Korczak Ziolkowski in the 1950’s, as a memorial to the one Native American chief who never gave in or made peace with the United States. Ziolowski didn’t live to see it finished, didn’t expect to, but his family kept at it and completed it the next century, just before the Varn hit us. How’s that for irony?”
“Very. I’m surprised the Varn didn’t trash it just for spite,” Blake said.
Washburn shrugged. “Who knows what they thought?”
“I think you do, Mister Washburn,” Blake said. “Better than most anyone else these days.”
Washburn blinked. “Eh? I’m no… xenopsychologist… that’s the word, right, Major Blake? I’m just an old man.”
“I think you’re a bit more than an old man, sir,” Blake said, not bothering to correct him this time. “And I think you’ve got more knowledge about the Varn than anyone else alive, Mark Wilson.”
“You’ve got the wrong fellow, Captain,” the old man said. He touched a control with suddenly palsied hands, and his chair pushed him upright. “My name is--“ he paused to cough again, “--Michael Washburn.”
“That’s what it says in your birth database,” Blake agreed. “Michael Washburn, survivor of the New Hong Kong Dome Crack, which killed five thousand people and also destroyed the colony’s databases. Very tragic. And very convenient for people wishing to launder their identities. Which is why Naval Security took it upon itself to do an extensive cross-check of all known New Hong Kong survivors, trying to ferret out pirates or other criminals attempting to escape the law.”
“I’m a bit old to be running around wearing an eye patch and shouting ‘Yo, ho, ho!’, Captain,” Washburn or Wilson said.
“Or to be a figure key to Earth’s history, particularly from over four hundred years ago,” Blake agreed. “But an inquiry to the Comprehensive Human DNA Archive came up with some interesting results. Needless to say, your scan coming within ten decimal places of the boy who inspired the Human Resistance got my attention.”
“You aren’t serious, Captain?” Wilson tried to laugh, but only set off another coughing fit. “Me, over four hundred years old? Ridiculous!”
“I thought the same thing, but gene logs don’t lie. Especially when they belong to someone as famous as you,” Blake noted calmly.
Wilson sagged further back into his chair, seeming to want to disappear from sight. “Damned doctors. Told them I didn’t want my cells added to the damned thing, but they didn’t listen.”
“Can’t blame them, sir, for following the law. Unlike yourself.”
“So what now, Captain Blake?” Wilson demanded. “Your superiors want to talk to me? Maybe trot me out for whatever damned xenophobic crusade the Conservative Party wants to start now? I won’t do it.”
Blake snorted. “I don’t care about politics. My only concern is about Earth’s security. If you really are Mark Wilson, that begs a question. How can you possibly be alive, especially after that oh so dramatic speech you gave? The Varn would have never let you live after that.”
Wilson let out a long, heavy sigh. “Oh, I’m Mark Wilson all right. Martyr to the Resistance. Hero of the Earth. The boy who stood up to our Varn conquerors and spat in their eye.”
“How?” Blake demanded.
Wilson closed his eyes, remembering. “The Gene Mage was there, waiting at the door after I finished my little speech. He was angry. He didn’t raise his voice to me, but you could tell he was utterly furious with what I had done. Told me that I had maybe doomed millions of humans to their deaths if my speech inspired a resistance.” The old man let out another laugh, bitter and cracked. “He always did have a habit of underestimating things.”
Who could blame him? Blake reflected. The final toll was more like one and a half to two billion souls dead. Between human stubbornness, a boy’s inspiring speech, and Varn planetary bombardment, Mark Wilson was indirectly responsible for more deaths than anyone else in the history of the Earth. How do you sleep at night, old man?
“The Gene Mage didn’t execute you?”
“Waste not, want not,” Wilson said. “He wasn’t in the habit of throwing away potential tools. Ari and I were tossed back into our room with the door sealed shut. We didn’t see him for weeks. Didn’t see anyone, except for the servants who delivered our food.”
“What happened to the girl?”
Wilson’s eyes began to tear up. “I don’t know. When the Gene Mage brought me back into his lab, the tube where he had kept Rachael’s body was preserved was empty. I don’t know if he moved her, or dumped her, or anything. He’d never tell me, no matter how much I begged him he would never tell me.”
Relentless, Blake pushed on. “Why are you still alive? Four hundred and fifty odd years on and you’re still alive. Why?”
Wilson wiped his eyes and coughed up more brown gunk. “The Gene Mage, he… he changed Ari and I. Flipped a switch in our DNA. Slowed it all down.”
“As a reward for being a good little collaborator?” Blake demanded.
“No!” Wilson shouted, and coughed again, so hard the Blake briefly feared for the old man’s heart. Elizabeth stuck her head into the room, worry on her face, but Wilson waved her off and she retreated. He caught his breath and continued. “Never that. Not after he took away Rachael, not after… not after… we saw what he had done… done to our poor Earth.”
“But he kept you around anyway, you and Suhayar. Kept you safe. Why?”
“I don’t… I’m not sure… I think he used Ari and I as… sort of humanity barometers. Whatever new policy or plan he came up with for the Occupation, he’d run past us, to see whether humans would swallow it or not. When things got bad, and then really bad, he listened to us less and less. Eventually we were just put away, like equipment that was no longer needed.”
“And he just let you go?”
“Not exactly,” Wilson said. “We were dumped into a labor camp. This was… seventy-five years on, while the Rebellion was in full swing. Two generations grew up in that camp, and Ari and I were older, at least a little. No one knew who we were, no one cared. And we didn’t want to bring any attention to ourselves. They did horrible things to people in those camps, that they suspected of collaborating with the Dominion.”
Suspected hell, you were a collaborator. “And you survived?”
“The war was almost over at that point. A couple of years later Vulpine transports landed at the port,” Wilson wheezed a laugh. “That poor captain’s face, when he and his crew came to unlock the gates. He didn’t know what to make of us, men, women, children, all skin and bones, starving because the guards had fled and we couldn’t maintain the hydroponics. Just kept saying he was sorry, so sorry that he hadn’t come sooner.”
Blake hmphed. “Vulpines. They always love playing the heroes to the rescue.”
“Ari and I didn’t say a word. We just stayed with the flow. Gave false names and histories, and accepted transport back to Earth.” Wilson’s face grew distant. “It was so beautiful. Pristine. Like the Varn had never even been there.”
“Should think so. The bastards terraformed it to repair all the damage they’d done, not to mention removing all the pollution from the ground and atmosphere,” Blake noted. “I expect they thought we should be grateful for that.”
“You’d be right,” Wilson agreed.
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you and Suhayar reveal yourselves? You were heroes of the Resistance!”
Wilson shook his head. “We were old men, in mind, if not body. The idea of being thanked for getting so many of our fellow men killed sickened us.”
And no one would ask difficult questions about what you’d been doing all those years, either.
“Satisfied, Captain?” Wilson asked, closing his eyes. “I’m an old man, of no use to anyone, and I’m dying inside. Let me go in peace, and let history remember all the lies it wants.”
“I’m not through yet,” Blake said. “Where’s Suhayar?”
“Don’t know.”
“You two are the oldest living humans in the universe, and you don’t know?”
The old man opened his eyes and looked up at Blake in evident annoyance. “We lost track of each other about a hundred and fifty years back. Had a falling out, actually.”
“Over what?”
“Nothing that’s important any more.”
Blake pushed on. “About what you two did?”
Now Wilson looked troubled. “No, about what we think humanity did, to defeat the Varn.”
Finally. “Tell me about it.”
“Not your business.”
Blake rested a hand on the old man’s medical chair. “I’m in Naval Security, Mr. Wilson, talking to what might be the last man alive to ever see a Varn face to face. That makes it my business. Now, you can tell me what’s on your mind here, in your nice comfortable home, or I can call in a sweeper team to overturn everything in this cabin of yours, and drag you off to spend a long, cold night in a military interrogation cell to answer whatever questions I want, for as long as I want. Do we understand each other?”
Wilson began shaking with anger. “You can’t arrest me!”
Blake starting ticking off charges on his fingers. “Creation of a false identity. Lying to government officials. Receiving unsanctioned genetic therapies. Collaboration with enemies of the Alliance. War crimes.”
“Goddamn you,” Wilson hissed.
“Just tell me what I need to know, and I’ll leave you be to hack yourself to death while you look at your big stone Abos, eh?”
“Goddamn you,” Wilson repeated, but there was no heart behind it, and Blake knew he had won.
“Now then, Mr. Wilson, what could humanity have done to the Varn that’s so much worse than what they did to us?”
“Not to them, at least it wasn’t done directly to them,” Wilson said slowly. “You’re a spacer, Captain, right? You’ve traveled to other ports, far from Earth?”
“Yes,” Blake agreed.
“Did you ever hear the stories about the Varn’s servants? Little grey creatures that served them directly, closer than any Creo or Galen could even get?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about them. Urban legends mostly. Figured they were just moddies created from Creo children or something like that. Sick bastards.”
“Not moddies, not moddies at all. They were real, and they were called the Ferin. The Varn Gene Mage created them, uplifted them from some poor forest creature they found on another world. They were custom made to serve the Varn, and were utterly, unquestioningly loyal.”
“So, they had their very own race of servitors. That just shows the Varn were a bunch decadent conquerors.”
Wilson shook his head. “The Ferin were more than that. They weren’t just servants. Hell, the Gene Mage could have diddled with the brains of any of the other Dominion races to get that. But the Ferin were special, you see. There was nothing like them in the universe.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Ferin, in their natural state, could produce a sort of bio-electric energy, like an electric eel. Except they didn’t just shock you with it, they projected it, like a ray beam.”
“Cute party trick,” Blake allowed.
“More than a party trick,” Wilson continued. “They could keep it up at energy levels that made no sense. With the Gene Mage’s tweaking, their little grey bodies were almost literally total conversion power plants, able to convert ordinary proteins and sugars into a harvestable energy source.”
“Harvestable? You mean the Varn used them as power sources?”
“You remember the Crust Breaker from your history books, Captain Blake?”
“I’m not likely to forget it. We’ve never been able to figure out what kind of power source the Varn used to create a gravitic tractor that could effect plate tectonics like it did.” Blake paused. “Are you trying to tell me that the Varn used these ‘Ferin’ to fire that thing?”
Wilson looked grim. “Ten of them, all hooked up into a single unit, tubes sticking into them, feeding them what their bodies need to produce their energy. I saw the Gene Mage prepare them. I saw the looks on their faces. They just went along with it. Not because they were taught to worship the Varn as gods, not because they were patriots, or believers, but because they literally could not think of anything else to do but obey their master’s orders. They just weren’t capable of it.”
“’I saw some examples of the kind of obedience that the Varn like, and it scared the hell out of me,’” Blake quoted softly.
Wilson nodded. “I was talking about them. Just the ten of them, and they powered the weapon that destroyed Earth’s civilization.”
“So where did they all go?” Blake asked. “Why aren’t there any Ferin in the GSA? They couldn’t have all gotten out with the Varn.”
“I think they’re all dead,” Wilson said, his face empty. “I couldn’t understand where they all went either, so I asked some military pilots who’d flown strike missions during the war. Some of them got orders, very hush, hush orders, to use nuclears when they were attacking Varn power installations.
“There’s no record of nuclear weapons being used on planetary surfaces during the war,” Blake objected. “Those damned idealistic Vulpine would have had kittens, pups rather, if that were true.”
“No record, sure, but it’s the truth. That’s why you won’t find any remaining examples of Varn power installations on the worlds the Rebellion took back. They’re all radioactive craters now.”
“Residual radiation effects from conventional bombing and cracking open fusion reactor cores,” Blake countered.
“No,” Wislon objected. “The Varn didn’t have fusion power, the Varn didn’t need fusion power, because they had the Ferin, who were more efficient in what they did by at least two orders of magnitude.”
“That doesn’t explain where all the Ferin supposedly went. Surely the Varn had protected breeding facilities.”
Wilson was laughing again, his eyes watering in either mirth or despair. “Oh, yes I’m sure they did. But they’re gone now. Dust and gone. We killed them, you see. Humans and God only knows who else in the GSA killed every Ferin they could find. Killed the little grey children who wouldn’t have even known how to fight back if they could.”
“They can’t all be dead,” Blake insisted.
“I searched for three hundred years, trying to find any sign of them, Captain,” Wilson argued. “They’re gone. Dead. Every single one of them, along with the Varn. And we are responsible for it. Responsible for wiping out an entire race.”
“Forgive me if I don’t cry too hard. The Bloody Plagues almost wiped us out towards the end.”
“Maybe we deserved to wiped out,” Wilson said bitterly. “Maybe we don’t deserve a pure blue and green world to live on. We didn’t know how precious a gift we had before the Varn came, and it took them invading us to make us realize it.”
“They can’t be all dead,” Blake said. “The Varn retreated across Ardactavian space, and we couldn’t follow them. They must have had some examples of Ferin with them.”
“A handful of Varn ships, less than a half-dozen in the final retreat,” Wilson noted. “Less than a dozen Ferin could have powered them. You think you could restart the whole human race with only a dozen people, Captain?”
“I can’t count on the Varn not pulling off the trick,” Blake said. He straitened up in his seat. “They’re still out there you know.”
“Who, the Ferin?”
“No, the Varn,” Blake said softly. “They’re out there, and they’re watching us, I’m sure of it. We destroyed their Dominion, took their slaves away from them, showed them to be the false gods they really were. If I were them, I’d hate humans for doing that. I’d be planning to come back, someday when the GSA is old, soft, and complacent. I’d come back and hammer down on humanity just as hard as we hammered them. Nobody else in Security takes me seriously, but I know I’m right.”
Wilson was staring at up at him. “So what would you do to stop them?”
“Anything,” Blake answered. “Anything and everything, no matter what.” He stood up, and nodded to Wilson. “Thank you for your time.”
The old man blinked, confused. “What are you going to do to me now?”
Blake smiled. “To you? Nothing. You’ve given me a lead on the Varn’s weakness, and maybe their strength, and I thank you for it. Your reward is that you get to live out the rest of your traitor’s life, however long it might be, alone and untroubled by me. Congratulations.” He turned and started to leave.
“Wait!” Wilson cried out. “What are you going to do?”
Blake turned back towards him one more time. “Whatever I have to do.” Then he left without another word.
He set his ground skimmer on auto-drive, heading back towards Rapid City Shuttleport, then leaned back and closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he fished out his headset from his pocket and set it on his ear. “Home,” he ordered, and waited for the connection to be enabled.
Erwin, you got any sense at all? his sister’s voice answered. It’s six in the bloody morning!
“Sorry, it’s the afternoon where I am. Is Leeza up yet, Vonnie?”
She’s just having her first tea of the day now, the little caffeine addict.
“Put her on, please.”
There was a short pause, and then he heard his daughter’s voice pop on with a high-pitched, Hi, Da!
“Hello, Leeza,” Blake answered. “You being good for your Aunt Vonnie?”
Yah! We’re buildin’ a bridge out of toothpicks, and then later Auntie says we can go t’ the War Museum and look at the ships, and then we’re gonna…
“That’s good, Luv. You doing your homework like you should?”
Yeah, Leeza answered reluctantly. You comin’ home soon?
“Soon, Luv, but not yet.”
Oh, she said, sounding disappointed. You savin’ the world again?
“Yes, Luv. I think I am. I really think I am.”
The End
