Ages in Oblivion Thrown: Book One of the Sleep Trilogy (24 page)

“
You’ll be under protection. Critical
areas of the station are already under guard.”

“
Us? Why?”

“
We have reason to feel that this was
not a random attack.” Tark looked over at Dmitry. The other man
shrugged. “We keep our ears to the ground when and where we feel
it’s prudent. I’ve had some information come to my attention. It
sounds as though, impossibly, you’re all on someone’s
radar.”

۞

Maeve drifted in and out of sleep
while present and past intertwined through her dreams. A sense of
dread had worked its way in; she was slipping closer to the abyss.
This time, though, there was an anchor. She could feel a tether to
reality that had not previously been in place. She did not care to
speculate as to its origins just yet. Rather, she needed to stop
fighting herself and finally deal with the past.

Her dreaming
mind walked along the edges of a black sandy beach. Bright blue
waves churned to her left.
Don’t hesitate.
Go.
She turned and dove into a tall wave.
Water closed in around her, and the instinct to fight the current,
to kick free, was strong. Instead, she let go, and floated away in
a rip curl of unconscious thought.

It was an unpleasant ride up and
over storm swells. She fought down fear, remembering that these
were only dreams. A paddleboard bobbed to the surface nearby. She
swam over, took hold of it, and kept going.

It was all there, on a distant
shore. She sat on the board, looking into the distance, where fires
raged. They’d been burning for some time, fueled by her inability
to face them. The daggerboard scraped sand; she stood and walked
into the flames. It was time.

۞

Wartime deployments had ended. It
was supposed to be a draw-down period. Gradually, it became obvious
that there were other reasons for withdrawing from foreign war
zones. Everyone laughed it off; they were just glad to be home.
Rumors persisted, and then a group of active-duty personnel were
arrested, charged with sedition, and then…nothing.

Nobody talked about it officially.
It was water cooler talk for a short time. Maeve hadn’t tried to
make sense of it. It had just seemed too fantastical, too
ridiculous. Besides, if something were truly on the horizon,
wouldn’t they have been training for it? There were other things to
worry about.

She was her brother’s legal
guardian, except he was turning eighteen, wanting to leave. Then
there was a boyfriend, who wasn’t really a boyfriend. She’d figured
that in order to be a boyfriend, one had to be semi-reliable, and
not dropping off the off the radar constantly.

Fergus fulfilled neither of these
qualifications. Not that she’d been overly concerned when she’d
gotten home after eighteen months from a blast furnace of a
deployment. It had been nice to have hot showers, carefree and
endless nights, as well as beer and bacon. She had wanted to care
about nothing. It should not have surprised her to see two little
lines on a stick, but it had. She had been knocked back on her
heels.

She looked into the fires still
raging on the beach. Through the smoke, a slight figure emerged.
Maeve swallowed, the smoke stung her eyes and lungs, but she knew
who it would be. It was a wraith. A ghost of a child who had never
come into the world. She remembered.

One night. One night had changed
everything.

۞

“On someone’s radar? You mean
besides the people who sent him here?” Leif jabbed a thumb in
Wallace’s direction.

“I think he’s talking about the
Mithraic Alliance.” Wallace was a little white around the edges.
His eyes were fixed on the table where Jemila Solomon lay. He felt
a sting of guilt at being relieved that they had not walked in to
find Jules.

“What are we talking about?”
Dmitry was watching Tark, trying to determine how much of this his
friend had already puzzled out.

“The new face of the group we were
originally meant to go after, am I right?”

“Yes. After everything that
happened, originally, they went deep underground, and didn’t emerge
until about ten years ago. That was why Ju…Ramirez and I were
pulled out. They wanted to find out if anyone was still viable.
They’d been looking for us for a long time, and now we’re supposed
to do what we were always meant to do.”

“Right. Wake up to die. Sounds
like a perfect day.” Leif ran his hand through his increasingly
long red hair. “This is jacked…up.”

“Wait a minute, who said anything
about dying?”

“Colonel, Major,
sorry, that’s the part you don’t seem to get yet. We were
meant
to be
disposable…no, that’s the wrong word. They spent a lot of money on
us, but we had an expiration attached, see? They didn’t want to
have to spend the money to deprogram us, so they built in
this…suggestion.”

“Uh, right, I’m not following at
all.”

“We were…I guess you’d call it
brainwashed. Or were supposed to have been. One of the researchers
realized what was happening and rewrote the programming, from what
we were told.” There was silence in the room, and Wallace realized
he and Jules hadn’t mentioned this to the others yet.
Crap.

“Excuse my
asking, but just how did this researcher figure
that
out, precisely?” Dmitry had a
feeling he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it out loud.
Wallace sighed miserably. Leif uttered the kind of noise one might
expect from a wounded bear. He already knew. Or had guessed as
much.

“Are you kidding me? That’s what
was going on? All this time, she’s been walking around thinking she
was crazy.” Antonio felt a pang as he considered all the unkind
thoughts he’d had about Maeve.

“I know, I know. They took her,
and….” Wallace shrugged.

“They said they took her to
Bethesda.” Leif was eyeing Wallace angrily. He didn’t like what it
implied that the other man knew all this.

“Who knows, maybe that’s where it
was in the beginning.” Dreams of explosions were fading into the
background. Grace realized that she was trembling at the thought of
having been so irritated at Jemi. Now she was gone. And Jules?
Where was she? She’d forgotten how fragile the threads of life
could be.

“That sounds like a marvelous
place to start.” Tark indicated to the M.E., who came over. “Doc,
sorry for the intrusion and all the noise. Let us know when you can
release her.”

Grace went over to her friend’s
still form, and gently smoothed the hair from her brow. “I can’t
believe this.” She fought through angry tears. “Please tell me we
are going to kick the shit out of the animal that did
this.”

“It’s a promise.” Dmitry took her
by the shoulders. Grace was startled by the rage in his own eyes.
“This does not happen on our watch.”

“Not again it doesn’t.” Tark
turned and stalked out, followed closely by security personnel.
Everyone else followed, submerged in varying degrees of shock,
grief, and anger.

“Here’s one question I still have,
people.” Tark spoke as he continued to walk, purposefully, toward
the lift that would take them to the operations deck. “Actually,
two. First, did anyone ever reverse what was done to Ms. Howard,
since you say it was discovered? And, since I suspect the answer is
no, then the obvious second question is, what happens if she goes
‘active’, as it were?” They all looked at Wallace. He
shrugged.

“Right now, it’s hard to predict.
I mean, they tried at the time, I guess. She was already…fragile.
That was supposed to be the ideal mind state. It’s not a pretty
chapter of history.”

“She was more than fragile, you
idiot.”

“I wasn’t there, I admit, but
she’d told me to go away. In a lot less polite way than that, too.”
He wasn’t ready to tell them where he’d gone to. They weren’t ready
to hear it anyway.

“I know. Problem
is, you never paused to ask
why
! You were so wrapped up in
yourself…and then you got Daddy to help you ease your troubled
mind, in whatever way you wanted.” Leif was struggling to control
himself, while Wallace finally let his emotions have free
reign.

“Let it go! My father didn’t use
any influence to help me. You know what, though, by the time I got
there, she…was…gone. I thought I could help, that’s all. That’s why
I kept looking.”

“Help what?”

“Fix her.”

“Listen, you can think whatever
you want, but it was pretty obvious what was going on.”

“Oh right,
that’s all that matters. Like you know what my life was like? I’m
not blind, Christensen, it was always really pathetically obvious
what
your
motivations were, too.” That was enough. Leif picked him up
two-fisted by the collar and tossed him into a
wall.

Dmitry dove in between them,
praying that he wouldn’t be mangled for his trouble. Leif was a
titanic bulk when enraged. There was no predicting an outcome. It
suddenly made sense for him to have been part of this strangely
pieced-together team. Dmitry looked at the others, seeing the same
logic for each of them, while they stood fast and did not
interfere.

“Wallace, you have no clue. None.”
This came from Josh.

“Naturally. That’s where you go,
every time. Predictable. I’m the bad guy, I get it. The dilettante,
the joker, the fool. It’s okay. I can admit it.” He pushed a finger
into Leif’s chest, reaching around Dmitry in the process. Dmitry
could only imagine that this was a dangerous action. “You’re the
one in denial. But go ahead, keep blaming me. Keep telling yourself
that I was the reason why, for everything, including your own
cowardice.” Dmitry’s eyes widened. Leif might be big, but he was
quick. Wallace was stumbling backwards with a bloody
nose.

“That’s enough!” Tark had been
willing to let them get whatever it was out of their system, but he
couldn’t have wholesale brawling in the corridors. Leif stormed off
down the hall, away from where they were meant to go. Josh
cautioned Tark not to stop him.

“He’ll be back. It’s a touchy
subject.”

“I can see that.” He turned back
around to face the group. “Mr. Wallace, I don’t know what that was
about, but I’d recommend you not repeating it again.” He got a curt
nod in reply. Blood continued to trickle down Wallace’s chin. Tark
handed him a handkerchief, and walked on.

۞

Josh held out an arm to keep
Wallace from following the others.

“It’s tempting to see him the way
you think he sees you. It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than
that.”

“Josh, he’s in love with her. We
all know it. That’s the only reason he’s so overprotective, and he
can’t see past the end of his nose because of it.”

“It’s not the only reason. You
know what happened with her brother, and what happened that night,
but we, well, we kept you out of the loop about something
else.”

“The only reason for doing that is
if it had to do with me, is that what you’re saying?”

“Like I said, it’s complicated.
She didn’t want you to know before, and so we kept our mouths
shut.” Josh twisted his mouth, searching for the right words,
hoping that Leif wouldn’t suddenly reappear at the wrong
moment.

“Does this have anything to do
with why she dumped me?”

“She didn’t dump you, dumbass. You
think she was kidding herself about a future with you? She was just
letting you go back to where’d you come from.”

Wallace took the blow, and
swallowed it down. It wasn’t an untrue accusation. Maeve had been a
complication that he hadn’t anticipted. He thought about the ways
in which he’d rationalized using her. She’d let herself be used
that way, he knew, because she wanted to have someone in her life.
It had been her doing the pursuing, tracking him down. Maeve had
been an easy refuge from reality. For a while, anyway.

He had decided that he’d give it a
try. That he’d give the two of them a shot. It had been against his
nature. Nights spent in the same place, over and over, in spite of
intimacy…bored him. Now, of course, he knew why she’d wanted to
stay rooted, why everything was always safe and secure. She’d been
desperately seeking a stable life. That last fight, though, that
had always stayed with him. It was like a small cancer in his soul,
and it would not let him be at peace again until he excised
it.

“I don’t know what else to say. I
was trying to put things right between us, but as you know, the
bezerker there wouldn’t ever let me near her.”

“She was pregnant.” Josh let the
words come fast, intending them as a blow. He struck home. For a
moment, the world reeled, and then Wallace remembered he was in
space.

“She…I, what now?”

“You heard me.” Josh stood
impassively, unmoved by Wallace’s shock.

“This isn’t some sick joke, is
it?” He was grasping at straws.

“No.”