“Never heard-”
With all the shocking impact of a dam bursting, memories exploded inside Michael’s head, a torrential, confused kaleidoscope of people, places, and events, a churning mess of sensations that Michal struggled to make sense of. His heart lurched as he remembered with an awful clarity the moment when the prison guard had slipped the mask over his face.
“I’m alive,” he whispered. He felt stupid the instant the words came out. Of course he was alive. That had been Colonel Kallewi’s promise to him. He’d wanted so badly to believe the woman, but he never had, not even for a second. Throughout those last awful days, he had convinced himself the woman had only wanted to make the inevitable less terrible. But she had been telling him the truth.
“You sure are, spacer,” the medic said with a cheerful grin. “Now, let’s get you hydrated,” he went on, handing Michael a beaker of pale blue fluid. “Get that down you.”
All of a sudden aware of how thirsty he was, Michael took the beaker and drained it in one long swallow. “Thanks, Corporal,” he said. “Any chance of another one?”
“As many as you like,” the man said. “I’ll go get a refill.”
“Thanks,” Michael said. He put his head back and closed his eyes, happy just to luxuriate in the sudden rush of energy surging through his body.
The door opened.
“That was damn quick, Corporal,” Michael said. He opened his eyes and looked up, and there she was, a tall, spare figure in Fleet black. “You,” he hissed at the sight of Admiral Jaruzelska. “What are you doing here?”
“Hello, Michael,” Jaruzelska said, closing the door behind her. “Welcome to Karrigal Creek.”
“I am going to kill you,” Michael shouted, fists clenching and unclenching as rage surged hot through him, “and that’s a fucking promise you can depend on.”
“Hold your horses,” Jaruzelska said, a trace of iron in her voice. “There’s a lot you don’t know, so you need to listen before you kick my head in.”
“Why the hell should I?” Michael shouted, his voice hoarse. “You lied to me, and then you betrayed me. Do you have any idea-” He tried to sit up, hands reaching out for Jaruzelska. “-what I’ve been through? Well, do you? No, you don’t, you callous bitch! If it’s the last thing I ever do, I will kill you.”
Jaruzelska said nothing. Michael, unable to hold himself upright any longer, collapsed back onto the bed. “Everything that’s happened has happened for a good reason,” she said.
“So you say,” Michael said, his face twisted into a furious mask.
“I do say. Now I’ll stand here as long as you like, but in the end you’ll have to hear me out,” Jaruzelska said, her voice all steel now, “so stop wasting my time. Believe me, I have better things to do.”
“Go fuck yourself,” he muttered.
“Last chance.”
Unwilling to trust her, Michael hesitated. His body trembled as he struggled to regain his composure. “Okay, I will,” he said at last, unable to find enough energy to be angry anymore, “though it had better be damn good.”
“Oh, it will be. Right, we’ve a lot to get through, so let’s get started,” Jaruzelska went on, brisk and businesslike. She pulled up a chair and sat down. “First, I would all like to apologize for what you have been put through. It was as unforgivable as it was necessary, and I’m sorry.”
“Keep talking,” Michael said, grim-faced.
Jaruzelska sighed. “Okay, bear with me as I do this one step at a time,” she said. “First, have a look at this holovid clip.”
A wall-mounted holovid screen burst into life. It took Michael a few seconds to work out what he was seeing: a flame-shot pillar of smoke that climbed from the blazing wreckage of what looked like a suborbital shuttle. “What’s that?” he asked.
“That’s all that’s left of the shuttle taking your body from Farrisport Island after your execution. As you can see, there could have been no survivors, and your mortal remains are now well and truly incinerated. In fact, my people tell me that the fire was so intense that the recovery team will be lucky to find anything more than a puddle of molten slag.”
“But why … Ah, right, I get it,” Michael said. “Okay, what’s next?”
“Watch this.”
The holovid came to life again. It juddered and jumped. Michael struggled to work out what he was watching because the image was so poor, so unsteady. Then it clicked. He was looking at a heavy cargo shuttle, its flame-scorched skin free of any identification markings. The camera moved toward a loaderbot trundling a gray shipping container out of the shuttle’s cavernous cargo bay. The letters on the side of the container said: government of the pascanici league. The camera continued on to where a man in a coldsuit stood, his face thrown in harsh relief by overhead lights.
There the vid paused to leave the man’s mouth frozen half open.
“What the hell was that about?” Michael asked. “That’s the worst vid I’ve ever seen.”
“It came from dustcams.”
Michael frowned. He’d never heard of dustcams.
“And before you ask, dustcams are low-res speck-size cameras that record three-sixty-degree vid before squirting it back to us via a microsat. We dropped millions of them over a lump of rock on Commitment the Hammers call Hendrik Island. We got plenty of vid, almost all of it useless. But some came through for us, and this is best we have. The analysts think it settled on someone’s jacket as he walked past that shuttle.”
Michael sat up. “So he tells us something?” he said, studying the man’s face with care.
“That piece of slime,” Jaruzelska said, pointing a finger at the screen, “is Professor Arnoldsen, and he is the Pascanicians’ best magnetic flux engineer. He’s probably the best in humanspace as well.”
Michael’s heart tripped over itself; now he knew why Jaruzelska was showing him the vid clip. “Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Antimatter production is all about magnetic flux containment.”
“It is.”
“Which makes Hendrik Island the Hammer’s new antimatter manufacturing plant, and the fact that Arnoldsen is there proves that the Pascanicians are helping them. Looks like the NRA’s intelligence reports really were on the money. But how did you know about Hendrik Island?”
“We analyzed Commitment’s orbit-to-earth and suborbital traffic for the last ten years.”
Michael turned to stare at Jaruzelska, wide-eyed. “You’re kidding me. That’s petabytes of data.”
“Exabytes, actually.”
Michael shook his head; he still didn’t understand. “But how?”
“After you and your dreadnoughts destroyed the Hammer’s antimatter production plant at Devastation Reef in March ’01, we all knew the Hammers had to replace the plant. The problem was figuring out where they’d put it. After a lot of debate, our intelligence guys decided that the Hammers would have to locate their new plant as close to home as possible-”
“Of course!” Michael blurted out. “Where the defenses are most concentrated; that way we couldn’t take it out again.”
“And you can’t get much closer to home than dirtside on Commitment.”
“So you looked for changes in their traffic patterns,” Michael said; over and over, his forefinger stabbed out in his excitement. “You looked for shuttles. Lots of shuttles, all going somewhere they’d never gone before!”
“And that somewhere was Hendrik Island. When we crunched the data, it stuck out like the proverbial dog’s balls. Hendrik Island was home to a small research station; it used to have one shuttle a month, if that. Now it’s getting hundreds, many of them from the Pascanici League. So now we have hard evidence that proves what the Hammers are up to. That’s the good news. The bad news is that none of what you’ve seen made the slightest impression on the government. Moderator Ferrero and her Worlds First Party always wanted a peace treaty with the Hammers, and nothing was ever going to stop them from getting it.”
“I know,” Michael said, stony-faced. “I watched the holovid of the signing ceremony. It’s a disaster.”
“More than you know. One of the terms of the peace treaty was that both parties would halt all antimatter research and production. We, of course, complied. As we now know, the Hammers did not.”