Trident's Forge (38 page)

T
he trip
back from the Dwellers' city to Kexx's village was considerably shorter than the six-day march Theresa's husband and his new partner had endured to get there. Once everyone was secured in the shuttle, the flight took less than an hour.

“You don't look as nervous as I expected you to.” Theresa squeezed Benson's wrist as the shuttle began its descent.

“I'm much too tired to care about flying.”

Theresa giggled. “I'll bet. Some of our new friends don't look so good, however.” She looked over her shoulder to the row of surviving Atlantians, each a little too big for the human-sized chairs they were strapped into. She'd only seen her first alien in person less than a day ago, but even she could tell from their pale skin and wide eyes that they weren't terribly happy.

“Can you blame them,” Benson asked. “They're the first Atlantians to fly. Ever. I'd be shitting myself.”

“Are we sure they aren't?”

“Trust me, that's not a smell you can overlook, or forget.”

Theresa wrinkled her nose. “Thanks for that tidbit.”

“You asked.”

“I suppose I did.” Theresa sighed as the seat harness pressed into her chest as the shuttle decelerated, transitioning to hover mode. They'd arrived, but wouldn't be sticking around for dinner. As soon as the Atlantian survivors of the Battle of the Black Bridge were offloaded and their goodbyes said, they'd be dusting off and headed back to Shambhala.

There was another fight to finish back home.

The warrior called Kuul was still strapped into a stretcher, owing to the spear that had traveled all the way through his hip preventing him from walking under his own power. Benson and Kexx insisted on being the ones to carry him back into the village. Typical Bryan, making new friends almost as easily as he made new enemies. People always ended up with strong opinions about him, in one direction or the other.

After making sure the survivors were settled and leaving some fresh supplies and replacement equipment for the Unbound encampment, they turned for home. Even fighting against prevailing winds, the flight would take less than three hours.

Theresa'd left Shambhala only twelve hours earlier with her shuttleful of greenhorn soldiers. Now she was returning to the city with humanity's favorite hero returned from the dead to confront two of the most powerful men alive. She distracted Bryan during the ascent phase of the flight by bringing him up to speed with the investigation on her end, Hallstead's confession, Alexander's arrest, Merick's attempted interference. Bryan listened intently, glad for something to focus on. By the end of her debrief, his eyes were drooping.

A call routed through the shuttle's com system and into her plant. It was Feng on the Ark.

kilometers
in the air.>

She smirked.

Theresa looked over at her sleeping husband and shook her head.

Theresa asked, referring to a method of direct imaging system that had replaced the polygraph but was only legal for use on crew members because of the obvious privacy concerns.

Feng confirmed.

Theresa reclined her seat the miserly fraction it would allow, and settled in to listen in on the most rewarding gossip she'd ever heard. Much to Theresa's surprise, Bryan actually slept for most of the flight.

T
hey landed
on Shambhala's rough and tumble runway a few hours later. Theresa shook her husband awake.

“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” she taunted. “We're home.”

His eyes fluttered open, then looked out the artificial window to familiar surroundings. It was just before dusk. “I fell asleep?” He wiped a bit of drool on his shirt sleeve.

“And stayed asleep through the whole flight, descent, and the landing.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Believe it, and wake up, unless you want to miss Gregory Alexander's interrogation?”

That woke him up for real.

“That's what I thought.” Theresa unbuckled her harness. “Let's go.”

They grabbed a cart and Lindqvist and made tracks for the station house. She'd left Korolev in charge while she'd gone. He'd fought to be included in the rescue mission, but someone needed to keep watch over their prisoners, and Theresa simply didn't trust anyone but herself or Korolev to do the job.

Gregory Alexander was waiting for them inside, sitting in the same interrogation room Hallstead had occupied that morning, hands cuffed to the uncomfortable metal chair. His bespoke synthetic spidersilk suit was a bit worse for wear from his apprehension, with dirt on the knees and elbows, and even a ripped seam on the left shoulder. The man himself was in a similar state, his normally perfectly groomed and coiffed hair gone wild, his cheeks red, and his ample face sullen. He also had a rather impressive shiner over his left eye, and a slight swelling on his jawline. Mementos of a very brief fight with Korolev as he was taken into custody.

“Greg,” Bryan said as he slid into the chair behind the L-shaped desk. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks to the brutality and unprofessionalism of your constables. You'll answer for that, and the rest of this farce.” He held his head high as he said the words, but even as he said them, they lacked a certain conviction.

“Oh, they're not my constables, Greg. They're hers.”

Theresa took her seat directly in front of the prisoner. “Yes, they are. And Constable Korolev wouldn't have needed to get physical with you if you hadn't used an illegal plant mod to disable his stun-stick function. Why might someone want to do that, I wonder?”

“Fear of a fascist police force trampling our civil rights, for starters.”

“Of course. Nevermind your earlier enthusiasm for drastically expanding both the size and combat power of exactly that police force,” Theresa said.

“Thanks, by the way,” Benson added. “They came in very handy.”

“I'll save us all some time and cut right to it, Mr Alexander. Your associate, Yvonne Hallstead, has flipped on you.”

“Never heard of her,” he said reflexively.

“No?” Theresa stood up and flipped a switch next to the mirror that made up the back wall. It turned transparent, showing Hallstead sitting cuffed to a chair and under guard in the next room. She looked up and immediately made eye contact with Alexander.

It was not a pleasant look.

“She seems to know you,” Theresa said.

“Everyone knows me.”

“She worked for you. We have records of Alexander Custom Buildings hiring her to do app development.”

Alexander snorted at this. “Everyone works for me, too. Or close to it. ACB employs a full sixth of the workforce down here, and again that many independent contractors. I can hardly be expected to keep track of everyone. That's why I have managers.”

“So, one of your managers hired Ms Hallstead to develop illegal apps, one of which wound up inside your own head? Think a jury will believe that whopper?”

“This is ridicul–”

Theresa rolled right over his objection. “But that's not the only app she wrote, is it? Turns out she figured out a way exploit an old line of plant code to induce heart attacks. Heart attacks that killed Administrator Valmassoi, Captain Mahama, and, temporarily, a certain Zero Hero sitting to your right.”

Her husband smiled and rapped his knuckles on his ribcage. “Didn't stick, in my case.”

“This is simply absurd. I had nothing to do with her criminal behavior.”

“Really?” Theresa said. “So you didn't work with then-First Officer Hitoshi to get Hallstead's security clearance reinstated after her dishonorable discharge, restoring her access to the plant's original source code?”

“Of course not!”

“Oh, just tell him, sweetie,” Benson said.

“Tell me what?” Alexander shouted, his whole face turning red as his breathing quickened.

“Hitoshi's been arrested and subjected to a BILD scan. We know, Mr Alexander.”

“From who? That traitor, Feng?”

“He's really come around,” Theresa said. “Here's what I think happened, Mr Alexander. Tell me if I miss any high points. Over the course of the last few years, you've built up your own little independent reconnaissance system by paying Ms Hallstead there to hijack satellites and other colony assets like drones, rovers, and so forth. You discovered a fortune in precious metals, minerals, basically everything a new world industrialist could ask for in Atlantis. So you bribed people to change the data, replace the survey maps with fakes, and started building a network of coconspirators so that everything was in place once you were ready to cash in.”

“I don't have to sit here and listen to this.”

“Actually, sitting here and listening to this is all that you
can
do, presently. Anyway, you brought in Hitoshi when he was still first officer, promising him a cut and giving you access to the Ark's resources like the linguistics lab to work on the Dwellers' dialect. You brought in that little weasel Merick to handle things dirtside. And you even convinced a tribal chief that you were the voice of their god–”

“Xis,” Benson added helpfully.

“Yes, thank you dear – and convinced them to start a war with the Atlantians living on the land you intended to strip-mine to either drive them off or wipe them out entirely.”

“That last part is spectacularly narcissistic, by the way. Actual, legitimate god complex stuff.”

“Do you have a shred of evidence for this incredibly detailed and vivid delusion, Constable Benson?” Alexander asked.

“I wasn't finished yet,” Theresa said coolly. “But then, your timeline was upended by the discovery of the Unbound, alive and well–”

“Most of them, at any rate,” Benson said.

“Honey, could you not for a minute?” Theresa said sweetly. “Alive and well living on Atlantis, forcing us to launch the first contact mission. But, like any savvy businessman, you saw opportunity in upheaval and threw together a plan to trigger your war between the natives by attacking our delegation, simultaneously eliminating the handful of people in positions of power who would oppose your land grab, installing your puppets in their place, and even priming public opinion for punitive measures against our new neighbors.”

“It was a good plan,” Benson said. “It would've worked, too, if only I'd been a little less difficult to kill. That's something like six legitimate tries people have made now. They keep coming up just a few millimeters short.”

“We already have Hitoshi's confession, Mr Alexander. And now that we're fresh off the shuttle from Atlantis, we also have this.” Theresa stood and opened the door. Korolev and another constable walked into the already crowded room, carrying a disabled quadcopter survey drone.

“And what is that supposed to be?”

“This,” Theresa knocked on the carbon fiber fuselage, “is the hijacked drone you used to con the Dweller under chief. She–”

“Ze,” Benson corrected.

“What?”

“Ze. Their genders are… they take getting used to.”

“Whatever!
Zeee
… was none too happy when we explained what actually happened. Ze was only too eager to give this back so we can do a nice, deep, thorough forensic investigation of its drives. And I have a pretty good idea of what we're going to find.”

“Son,” her husband said, “you're in a whole reclamation vat of trouble.”

“It'll be better for you if you just confess now before I have to confirm all this for myself,” Theresa said. “And I
will
confirm it. Make no mistake.” Theresa motioned for Korolev to take the drone back out, then returned to her seat. The seconds stretched out between them.

“Your choice, Mr Alexander. The last choice about your future you're ever going to make. Choose wisely.”

The older man sighed heavily, signaling defeat. “You've got it almost entirely right, Chief Benson. Except for one detail. I was not the mastermind. That honor falls to Administrator Merick.”

“Merick?” Bryan said. “That little shit couldn't find his ass if it was on fire in a dark room.”

“That ability to make people underestimate him is one of his more cunning attributes. No, he had learned of the mineral and metal deposits. He was the one to have the maps altered originally.”

“But he wasn't even a crew member,” Theresa said. “How the hell would he know how to do that?”

“He recruited Hitoshi first. He then approached me with a proposition on how to acquire them.”

“Which you only too gleefully accepted,” Theresa said.

“Well of course,” Alexander puffed back up a fraction. “Do you have any idea what those materials are worth, young lady? And I don't just mean monetarily.”

“Then what do you mean?” Benson snapped.

“Time,” Alexander said forcefully. “Those resources buy us the one thing money can't. More time. Mining them today, on the surface, saves us years off our development projections. Years we can use instead to build our new generation of ships faster, to return to space faster, to start developing the next wave of planets faster. The longer we sit here idle, the more time we give whoever destroyed Earth to adjust their aim and do it all over again.”