Ages in Oblivion Thrown: Book One of the Sleep Trilogy (26 page)

No one spoke right away. Clearly
something else was on their minds.

“We’re leaving. Forty-eight
hours.” Julieta was grim, determined.

“Now, how the hell are you going
to do that? That little skiff of yours will hold four, five max.
You can’t do atmospheric reentry with an overload.”

“We’ll buy something. We’re
prepared for that eventuality.”

“Give me a break. You might as
well do low orbit parachuting. Which, I have to imagine, none of
you is trained for.”

“Staying here is out of the
question, you know that, Colonel. Don’t try to tell me you were
going to say something else. Besides, we only came to get them,”
Julieta indicated her friends, “and we were going to leave anyway.”
She tried not to let on that she’d failed to calculate weight load.
It was embarrassing.

“Your plan lacks
several key factors, fervor notwithstanding. You’ll take one of
ours.” He held up a hand to quiet them. “It’ll have the benefit of
being registered
legally
, and your pilot will be one
of my people. She’ll be able to slip past the watchful eyes that
seem to be everywhere right now.”

He’d thought this through now
about seven or eight times. It made sense. There were plenty of men
and women he trusted wholly, but he’d picked Bijul Nandra to pilot.
She was the best, most resourceful, wiliest he had. She’d trained
as a fighter, moved to blockade running, and when that had died
out, she’d settled in as a trainer.

۞

Bijul Nandra was in the hangar
bay, staring at the container, or what was left of it. Colonel
Tarkington had given orders for it to be dismantled and scrapped.
The engineers team had happily taken plasma torches to the thing
and reduced it to three neatly stacked piles of metal. Soon, it
would become something else, and disappear entirely into the
station. The rest of the massive bay housed craft that were in need
of repair, or like her own, used as training aids.

After a few minutes of
contemplation, she left the scrap heap and walked over to her
personal craft, a Harrier Armour-class. She ran her hand over her
call sign, “Bijoux”, wondering if she’d ever get to fly it again,
much less see action. Captain Nandra, best-ever…it was meaningless
in these times. Everyone wanted peace.

The colonel was one of these. He
didn’t have the temperament for making ugly decisions. He wanted to
trust, to see the light at the end of the dark expanse…to Bijul,
she already understood these things to be unknowable. Trust was
worthless. Hope was for the weak. She had been raised to be a
warrior, in spite of her family’s history. War was the great
equalizer, the cleansing force that could destroy the old and usher
in the new.

Colonel Tarkington might not
understand that now, but he would, eventually. He’d asked Bijul to
help prevent war, to keep the status quo intact. If she understood
the situation correctly, she was to deliver a group of individuals
back to Earth, that they might fulfill just that mission. Her
blockade running tactics were what recommended her for the task, of
course.

The other concept that the colonel
could not grasp was that not everyone had a charmed existence such
as his. Bijul had fought all her life for every rung of the ladder
she’d climbed. From her father’s mother, Bibi, she’d listened to
stories of the caste system, of which her family had once been in
the lowest rank.

Only willingness to do battle had
freed them of low-caste status, while a larger-scale fight had
broken the caste system entirely. Bibi was the one who had told her
all the stories of long struggles and persecutions. It had been she
who had given Bijul an engraved gold bracelet with the words of
Guru Gobind Singh carefully etched on the inside.

‘When all efforts to restore peace
prove
useless and no words avail,
Lawful is the flash of steel,
It is right to draw the sword.”

۞

Maeve continued over the vast,
rolling prairie-scape, not knowing when she might encounter what
she expected to be there. She sensed that she was putting it off,
trying to erase it in spite of herself. The moon was now a thin
sliver, as it had been that night, and the wide Missouri was barely
tangible.

There was nothing. The earth was
devoid of those fearsome memories. It was emptied of the dead. She
had been so certain that they would still be here. That had been
the reason why she’d avoided sleep for so long, but
now…nothing.

She squinted into the distance.
There was an inky shape, its form pricked out by tiny lights. It
was a bunker. Her breath caught in her chest. This did not belong
here. It was not of her making. And yet, she knew it was where she
had to go.

Cold air knifed at her as she
walked blindly in the dark. Every step confirmed that it was not of
her making; she could not affect it. She could not change it, nor
draw it nearer.

It waited, willfully. She began to
truly feel its magnetic pull on her, and realized that she had felt
it all this time. It had been pulling on her for hundreds and
thousands of nights of sleep. Maeve knew, once she entered it, she
would be under that influence. A foreign control, something that
had been placed in her mind without her consent.

She endured the uncomfortable
twinges and prickling of anxiety. It was difficult to discern
whether this was the result of her unconscious mind trying to
protect her. Perhaps it was only the same weakness that had
assailed her that night. She willed her mind to be still; this was
an order it was used to defying.

Without warning, she found herself
inside. It was brilliantly lit, impossible to see. Everything was
blindingly white. She felt that it would be impossible to ever see
again. Gradually, though, the glare began to subside. The room she
found herself in was empty, aside from a dentist-style chair in the
middle of it. A female figure was reclined in the chair, wearing
headphones and an elaborate pair of dark glasses. Maeve looked more
closely. Not glasses. Some kind of visor, really, that covered the
woman’s eyes completely. She felt the ground shift under her feet,
as though a minor earthquake had just grazed them.

She walked closer to the chair.
The female did not move. Only by the rise and fall of her chest did
Maeve know that this was meant to be a living person. Now only mere
inches away, she looked over this prone form and saw what she had
been hoping not to see. A tattoo on the inside of the left wrist.
It was normally covered up by a watchband or bracelet. The walls
heaved and rumbled. She could not tell from where this seismic
activity originated.

As if guided by a directive, she
saw herself reaching for the unmoving body stretched out before
her. The shaking of the beneath her feet began to intensify, but
she could not divert her hand. Only slightly did she touch that
wrist, to see if the image of a world tree could be smudged
away.

But on the moment of that contact,
the woman sat upright, and the tremors swelled in earnest. The
bunker began to disintegrate around them. Maeve looked down; the
other woman had a fierce and painful grip on her. Images began to
flood her mind. Unreality fell away. And she arrived back where she
had started.

۞

Dmitry had been sitting in Maeve’s
room for several hours. She was out cold, which was both deliberate
and a blessing. Medicine being what it was, she’d be back on her
feet in a day or so, no worse for wear. But the fact that she was
unaware of what was going on…that was the lucky thing for right
now. He was having difficulty imagining what her reaction would be
to the news that her friends had chosen to go back planetside. Even
more difficult, they’d be preparing to see through some mission
that he still had trouble believing was plausible or
logical.

He’d thought it up, down, and
sideways, even taking Tark’s confirmation into account. Secret
societies were not something he’d spent much time worrying about
before. Sure, he’d heard stories now and then. It was hardly a new
concept. In fact, having looked at the origins of the Mithras cult,
it was probably as old as humanity itself.

Tark saw in this an opportunity to
nip a problem in the bud. He had convinced himself that this was a
matter of preventing something worse down the line. Dmitry was
having trouble getting his head around the idea that a shadow
organization was planning on starting some, what, galactic
war?

The Terran
system was dependent on a lively trade interaction. He couldn’t see
it. Now, civil war, on the other hand, that made perfect sense. Get
rid of opposition, isolationism settles in, tyranny rules…he
smacked a hand to his head. The Mithras thing had its roots in
Roman culture. Romans had loved to kill their own citizens, hadn’t
they? Had even given it a nice official name. State approved
murder,
proscription.

It was a popular tactic throughout
history. Wipe out those who oppose, control through fear and
ignorance. He tried to think of an old quote that niggled at the
back of his memory, though he could not remember its source. “War
is peace.” Tark was so set on preventing a larger scale calamity
that he had missed the more reasonable scenario.

Dmitry thought it unlikely that he
would be swayed to change his mind now. Too many others believed
the same thing to be true. It just made more sense. The doctor and
all her ranting, what had she been ranting about? Outsiders,
non-humans. They didn’t want to destroy other species. They wanted
to pull back to a time before there was intermingling, maybe. They
could push everyone out, keep trade regulated at the boundaries of
the system….

On the surface, it sounded far too
complex, Dmitry realized that. Enacting such a plan would be far
more difficult than open hostilities, but the end result was far
cleaner. There were too many fronts to consider for large scale
war, at least from a control perspective. Control was the end
result; Dmitry felt that this had to be true. Otherwise, why
wouldn’t have there already been bombings, attacks, acts against
non-humans? No, it had remained under the surface, if all this
Mithraic Alliance talk was to be believed. To him, that pointed far
more readily to the preparations for an internalized
plot.

He went back to
watching Maeve. This cloak and dagger sort of thing was
not
his milieu. Paranoia
was a destructive force, along with its companions of doubt and
fear. He could see the façade of peacetime duty rippling, showing
what was hidden behind. What would the Nimitz resemble in a time of
war? Or a worse scenario, under martial law? It was a massive
hulking presence in the system, a symbol of prosperity and
stability. Would it be used as a tool for propaganda? Would it
become a contention point, at which time its destruction would be
inevitable?

Dumbly, Dmitry realized that he
had debated himself into belief. He took in a lungful of air and
puffed his cheeks out as he exhaled. Maeve slept on. Distraction
was the only option left, so he devoted his attention to studying
her. Her hair was completely fine, each strand so thin he could
hardly see just one. She’d braided it, the results of which still
lay in a thick plait over her shoulder. Long bangs covered her
ears. He carefully tucked the hair away, smiling at tiny bright
purple hoops through her lobes.

Wherever she was in her dreams,
she was not completely at peace. This did not surprise him. She was
not a restful sleeper, by her admission and his own observations.
Now that he knew what had been done to her, it seemed a small
miracle that she could ever rest at all.

He took her hand, shaking his head
at the hematite-colored varnish on her nails, and the stack of
multi-colored string bracelets around her wrist. Absently, he
pushed these around in a circular motion, and then paused. Curious,
he pushed the bracelets apart. Funny that he’d not seen it before.
She had a tattoo of a small tree. He wondered what it
symbolized.

۞

Tark was on the observation deck,
trying to find some center of calm. The windows where he stood
overlooked the civilian traffic areas outside the station, normally
incredibly busy. At this time, it was completely still. He looked
out, beyond the edges of the Nimitz, into the still untamed reaches
of space. This was the calm he wished for. For nothingness to
occupy his mind, to stare into the heart of eternity, and be at
peace.

It was a dangerous desire. He
realized this. After fifteen years in space, he’d seen his share of
crack-ups. They all had. Places like the Nimitz weren’t as
challenging to the psyche. It was the deep space duty postings, or
as had been the case with Dmitry, the endless patrols. Dmitry
hadn’t cracked up, he chided himself. He’d self-destructed. There
wouldn’t have been a place for Dmitry to come back to if he had
lost it completely. He found himself wondering about Maeve,
though.

Had she come back from a place
like that? Self-destruction? It was certainly possible that she
had. He had some doubts about how far she might have come, how far
from the edge she truly was. At the moment, Maeve was unaware that
this Wallace fellow and his partner, or whatever she was, were
there. Nor did she know that there was a plan in progress to return
them all to Earth, much less to enact some mission.