Varken Rise (17 page)

“That’s because she watched the footage she gave you and saw nothing that made sense. So, by default, he must be crazy. If he’s crazy, then everything makes sense once more.”

“That’s if you don’t dig deeper,” Catherine murmured.

“You mustn’t mind Lilly’s narrow view,” he said quietly. “She’s distracted at the moment.”

“About you?” Catherine asked gently.

Brant gave her a stiff smile. “We’re working it out,” he assured her.

“Give her time,” Catherine said. “I’ve been where she is and I know how hard it is. The Ancient Terrans had ways to deal with permanent death that are lost to us now. It makes it much harder.”

Brant rubbed the back of his neck, shifting uneasily. “Did Arthur…did you ask him to regenerate? Before the end?”

Catherine tilted her head. “Has Lilly asked you to regenerate?”

“Not directly. Connell is insistent, though. He doesn’t understand.”

“Or perhaps he understands more than you think,” Catherine said quietly.

“Did you want Arthur to live?” Brant asked.

“Don’t be silly,” she said softly. “Of course I did.”

“Even if by continuing to live, he would not be the man you loved?”

“He
would
be the man I loved,” Catherine said. “By choosing to live, he would have compromised his principles, although he would have done it for the very best reason in the world.”

“Love,” Brant said flatly.

“By choosing to die, by choosing his principles over his love for me, Arthur told me that he wasn’t the sort of man I should have loved at all,” she added.

Brant’s eyes widened. “You rate love that highly?” He sounded winded.

She sighed. “Brant, I’ve seen so many principles and moral standards, that they range from one end to the complete opposite of each other at the other end. All principles are society-based values and if you give it enough time, they lose their meaning as culture shifts and values fluctuate. Love, though…it’s personal. It’s about individuals and it shapes individual decisions. It’s more powerful than any principle ever invented.”

“No matter how strongly a person believes in the goodness of that principle?”

“I loved Arthur himself, not his principles,” Catherine replied sharply. “They shaped him, yes, but they were not
him
. Dying at the end of your first life cycle when everyone in the known worlds gets to go on…it’s short-sighted.”

Brant just stared at her. “I did not know you felt this way.”

“Waste always offends me,” she said flatly. “Do you know how gate technology was invented, Brant?”

“I know it took a long time to perfect it,” he said slowly.

“It took two hundred and thirty-five years to get it right,” Catherine replied. “During all those years, do you know how many project leaders controlled the research and development?”

“One?” Brant guessed.

“Just one,” she confirmed. “One woman, Ammyn Heray, spent the better part of three centuries working on wormhole and black hole theories. She learned how to harness the holes to a fixed, known location.”

“I learned about this in school,” Brant growled.

“That she invented gate technology, yes. You’re missing the point, Brant. She controlled the project from start to finish. It took
centuries.
For that entire time, she was able to keep the project driving forward to meet her vision. She didn’t die and the project didn’t die with her. The project wasn’t handed on to a second-in-command who moved it in another direction because he thought he had better ideas. It didn’t founder because the heart and soul of the project wasn’t there anymore. Long life, Brant, has opened up science to generational research that remains cohesive, whole and directed throughout the life of the project. And that’s just one benefit of the extended lives we all enjoy.”

“That’s science,” he said dryly. “The human spirit—”

“Would have been extinct ten millennia ago if not for life-extending therapies and regeneration.”

Brant crossed his arms. “Transhumans would have killed us all,” he said flatly, as if in agreement.

Catherine shook her head. “No.
We
would have killed us. All of us. The local systems around Terra were so overcrowded and resources so depleted, that we would have all died off from starvation or some other complication from population pressure. That’s when the first long-range ships were built and people started pushing out toward the more distant stars. The first non-local star system to be colonized was five hundred light years from Earth and it took over seven hundred years to reach it. The people who set off in the ship were the same ones to step onto the new planet.” She looked at Brant curiously. “Did you know there had been generation ships sent out from Earth even before the local planets were colonized? Before life extension therapies were common practice?”

His mouth was set in a tight, hard line. “Let me guess,” he said. “They didn’t make it.”

“They did come across one of those ships, a century or two later,” she went on, ignoring his anger. Anger was a common reaction when someone’s beliefs were challenged. “The people on it were in-bred deviants bearing little resemblance to humans. They were abominations, as your Faith defines them. They had no idea why they were on the ship, or where it was going, or that eventually, they were supposed to find somewhere habitable and colonize. The knowledge had been lost as the generations succeeded each other. They wandered the galaxy and lived their very short and pointless lives on the ship.” She shrugged. “Long life is what let us escape the local cluster. It’s how humans avoided extinction. Surely, if the human race is the priority, as you say it is, then long life is a good thing?”

He pushed himself off the wall. “You’re distorting the principle,” he said flatly.

“No, I’m not the one distorting it,” she said quietly. “Time has done that. The pure human race you worship has moved on, Brant. Don’t you think it’s time you did?”

The lines around the corners of his mouth were white with fury. Wordlessly, he slapped the door control and left.

Catherine let out a breath that was unsteady.

Then she went back to picking through the feeds. Time was running out.

Mid-Transit, Shanta Gates, Shanta System. FY 10.092

Two hours later, Brant and Lilly found her at one of the big round dining tables, in the second dining room. This room, unlike the main dining room, was sectioned off into private booths and quiet alcoves. As the ship had still not left Shanta local space, there were no meals available, although the printers and dispensers were there for the hungry. Catherine was one of only five people in the room. The others had taken tables as far away from her as geography allowed, four at one table and a solitary tea drinker at the other.

Catherine looked up as they approached the table. Brant was in the lead. “I thought you might like help looking at what you scraped off the feeds,” he said diffidently.

“Is this your way of apologizing?” she asked.

“About your history lesson? No, I’m not ready to forgive you for that yet. Only, Lilly said a few days ago she questions everything now and it seems to me that’s a good basic approach to life in general. So I’m questioning what happened on Harrivalé.”

“You, too, Lilly?” Catherine asked.

She gave her an awkward smile. “Brant skewered me with it. I did say that, about something else. I had shut down on Bedivere, though, Catherine. I’m sorry.”

Catherine waved toward the benches, inviting them to take a seat.

Lilly smiled. “You bought yourself a reader. Finally!”

Catherine lifted the very new device in her hands. “I thought it was time I changed my ways. Besides, I wanted coffee and the terminal in my room doesn’t dispense until after the jump.”

“That’s what we discovered, too,” Lilly said. “Fifteen hours to a jump is stupid for a ship this size. I guess they’re used to shorter lead times.”

“It is what it is.” She tapped through the multiple views and screens, opening up the files for Lilly to see on her reader. “There’s a mountain of stuff to go through. It all happened in a high security area, so there were feeds upon feeds taking it all in, from every angle. As soon as the news broke, every single one of them was hacked and put out into the datacore.”

“Have you found anything?” Brant said, leaning over Lilly’s shoulder to peer at her screen.

“I’ve found out that Bedivere wasn’t shooting at unarmed bystanders,” Catherine said dryly.

“The footage I found in the feed had been tampered? Lilly asked.

“There’s a surprise,” Brant added.

Catherine threw the original footage file to her and Lilly opened it up and she and Brant watched the footage play out. It was an unedited view from a lens high up over Bedivere’s shoulder. He was nearly out of view at the bottom of the frame. Only his hand and the lethal rattler showed.

So did the guns the other men at the end of the drop shaft alley were holding and firing.

“They showed them pointing in alarm, in the footage that was first released,” Lilly said. “They took out the guns and the light from the bolts.” She looked up at Catherine. “Was Bedivere just defending himself?”

Catherine sighed. “He yelled at everyone to get out of the way. He was picking his targets. I just can’t seem to narrow down
who
his target was. He took out nearly everyone with a gun who was firing at him, yet there are a lot of bodies standing in between the two banks of drop shafts and none of the camera feeds is quite the right angle. I’m trying to make a composite image of the area between the drop shafts, in 3D, so it makes more sense.”

“We’re still in open space,” Brant said. “Why don’t you ask Connell to do that? He could do it quicker and better than you can.”

Catherine grinned. “He could.” She tapped the private communications code that Connell had generated for himself. When he appeared on the screen, she explained what she was trying to do.

He smiled in pleasure. “A few of us have been doing the same thing. Is there a tank display near you?”

“No, although this is a restaurant. There’s a heads-up flat display at the table.”

“Give me the code.”

She leaned over and read off the code from the display emitter and sat back.

“Watch this,” Connell said proudly.

“Just be ready to cut it if I say so,” Catherine warned him. “We’re in a public area.”

The display came up.

“Wow…!” Lilly breathed as the display formed.

Connell and his team had compiled the various feeds into a three dimensional display that the heads-up flattened to two dimensions. However, as the viewpoint moved around the edge of the area, the dimensions became clearer.

Most of the extraneous details had been stripped away, including the banks of drop shafts, leaving the big clutch of people trapped between them standing in the middle of open space.

Light had been added, improving clarity.

They watched the display turn almost a full circle.

“The ones with the guns…” Brant said. “Do you see it?”

“They’re guarding someone,” Catherine said. “That’s what Bedivere was doing. He was trying to reach the one they are guarding. So he was taking out the guards one by one, until he had a clear view.”

“Run the footage, Connell,” Lilly said. “Very slowly.”

“At twenty percent,” Connell said.

The figures in the static display began to move. The dazzling light from the rattler bolts had been edited until they were mere dashes across the screen. A lot of the smoke had been erased away.

“Three…four…five… and there’s the sixth guard gone down,” Brant murmured. “No civilians, though.”

“He really
was
picking his targets,” Catherine murmured.

“And another,” Brant added. “That makes seven.” Then he frowned. “And he stopped. There are three more guards, still, but he stopped.”

“Look,” Catherine said, pointing to the thick wad of bodies. “They’re about to step into the drop shaft. There’s a space between them, there. Connell, would Bedivere have been able to see who they were guarding through that space?”

Connell drew a line on the screen from Bedivere’s position, straight through the open space. He added a small “x” where the client would be standing. They lined up.

“He stopped, because he saw his target,” Brant said. “Why stop?”

“Surprise,” Catherine said slowly. “Whoever it was, he was not expecting them. And two seconds after this point, the house security guards started shooting at his back and he was forced to abandon his position.”

“Why did he start firing in the first place?” Lilly demanded. “If he didn’t know who it was?”

“We have been wondering that, too,” Connell said. “It’s possible that subliminal cues triggered him into action. A glimpse of his foe, a group of men who were acting like personal security, a voice, pheromones, there are any number of these hints that put together would add up to a conclusive force to act, even before he knew why.”

“So he guessed?” Brant asked dryly.

“No, he was quite certain,” Connell replied. “However, his human slow mind only put it together consciously much later. That is why he was surprised when he saw who it was.”

“And who is it?” Catherine asked. “Is there any image at all of the person standing inside that protective shield?”

“A partial image only,” Connell said, sounding apologetic. “The walls of the drop shafts hid most of his face because he was facing away from Bedivere.”

“He?”

“We have agreed that it is a man from the size of the face.” Connell swapped out the heads-up display and a grainy image appeared.

Catherine froze.

Lilly tilted her head, studying it. “There’s not much to go on. A crescent for a face and shadows. I don’t know…it still seems familiar.”

“Me, too,” Brant muttered, frowning as he studied it.

“It’s not shadow,” Catherine said. “It’s a beard.” Her voice was strained.

They both looked at her.

She made herself say it. “It’s Kare Sarkisian.”

“Of course,” Connell said. “Look….” He superimposed another image of Sarkisian, this one a full face image, over the top of the first, shrinking the second until it matched in size. Then he traced the matching lines and angles in fine red lines. “It is him,” he said conclusively.