When they come for me, I am alone in my room picking through a madman’s conspiracy. Shipping manifests, eyewitness accounts, email correspondence, hacked security footage. All the information I’d copied from the reporter’s datapad. Data that at first seemed completely random had, in the days since, started to make a lot more sense. Like one of those children’s puzzles, an optical illusion hiding a picture within a picture, the longer I stared at it all, the clearer everything became. The noise faded and, slowly, a pattern took shape.
The room fills with light. The brightness is overwhelming. Backlit by the stark, narrow-banded lighting in the corridor, three large shadows step through the opening door. I rub at my eyes. A thick, oily tear greases my face. Darkness leaks into the room, a roiling mass of black tar that comes bubbling through the walls, the floor, the ceiling. The men don’t seem to notice it. They keep on coming.
I try to blink away the liquid, and my eyelids almost stick together. I wipe at my face and my fingers come away black. I feel the tar ooze from my nose. I start to cough, hocking up thick fists of it. The darkness continues to rise, drowning the room in the tallow black of a thousand midnights. And through it all, they keep coming. The light from the doorway shrinks to a pinprick, and then everything is gone and I’m surrounded by nothing. Not for the first time, I throw up.
“Do you remember now, Traveller?” The voice is soft and expectant, almost pleading.
Fighting back the nausea, the smothering heat of this place. “What are you talking about? I know all of this.”
“Knowing is not the same as remembering.” Disappointment in the voice now.
Why is it so hard to think? Fuck you, fuck this place. I want out. By way of response I pull my sidearm and fire into the dark. It barely makes a sound and I keep pulling the trigger long after I run out of bullets. Somehow, somewhere in the dark I hear the soft plink of metal. I move towards it.
“Did you give them up willingly or did they take them from you?”
After a few steps I reload, fire until I hear the sound again, re-orient myself, and keep moving.
“You must remember.” Anger.
A lance of pain stabs behind my eye. The nail-scrape sensation of something fingering my brain drops me to my knees and, slowly, the memory puts itself back together.
A rust-red wall appears first, followed by a table, squat and square, and then floor panels smeared a darker hue than the wall. Dried blood, something in me intuits. Pieces continue to fall into place and the room starts to take shape. But even before it comes together it’s clear that this is not my room. Armed guards stand at attention around me. They wear the red and black trim and blank stares of special forces.
After the room, the next thing I notice is how badly my jaw hurts. I touch it and pain erupts across my face. I remind myself not to do that again.
“Sorry about that. But you can be a little stubborn.”
A voice behind me. Its owner leans into view. He is brown-skinned, black of hair and eye, with tectonic features that crack and spread awkwardly as he smiles.
“Vantus Torin,” I say.
“General Vantus Torin,” he corrects.
“You’re a general now?”
“And you’re a cripple.” For a Krusual, Vantus is unabashedly direct. He never tip-toes around the truth, which is why I’ve always liked him.
He smiles. “Come, I have something to show you.”
Glaring at the guards, wondering which one of them hit me, I guide the chair out into the passage and pull up alongside him. The passageway leads out onto an enclosed overpass, transparent sections of which give a spectacular view of the intra-station terminus below. Trams come and go as we walk in silence. Mostly, I’m trying to figure out how to get out of this alive. It is Vantus who speaks first.
“After what happened on Khabi VIII we thought we’d lost you. Then I read the report of the attack on the Ingress and knew it had to be you. So I sent some men to look into it.”
I punch the panel and the chair slams to a halt. Vantus steps briskly to the side to avoid tripping over it. “You ordered the attack? You’re responsible for putting me in this?”
“Yes. And no. That”-he points at the wheelchair-“you did all by yourself. The men we hired were under strict orders not to do any unnecessary harm to the people on board that ship. But then you show up and damn near wipe out half their team. I’m surprised they didn’t kill you.”
I wish they had. Something shifts in the mountain of knowledge I’ve built up over the last few days, collapsing under the weight of a hundred facts, the clear surface of understanding exposed beneath. “You stole your own shipment.”
To his credit, Vantus doesn’t deny it. “In a way, yes. What we took belongs to all Minmatar. Not just those who believe they make decisions for all of us.” He hesitates for a moment, chooses his words carefully. “They want to hide it away. Study it. I want to use it.”
“And what is it, exactly?”
His dark eyes shine. “Our salvation.”
“The Republic needs an army, Berlin. Now more than ever. And with this we finally have the means to create one. An entire army of immortals. An unstoppable force.”
He leans on the armrests of my chair, his face inches from mine. In it I see the haunted stare of a people, an entire nation’s pain bubbling under the surface. I think of Neera. Eyes moist with suffering and hardship so intense that it is carried in the DNA of each generation. And I wonder why I don’t feel the same way.
“We can save all of Minmatar. Us. Not Skymother. Not the Elders and their empty prophecies. With this we can lift our faces from the mud and shit the rest of New Eden has cast us down into.”
I finger the knife hidden in the smooth side-mould of the chair. Everyone underestimates the handicapped. I could kill him right here. Or take him hostage. Use him to get a ship and get the hell out of here. A tram zooms overhead, the muted rumble of its passing shakes the entire overpass. And go where? I’m tired of having to look over my shoulder. I see Neera and all her dreams and hopes for our people. I let go of the knife.
“Immortal soldiers, huh?” I say finally.
Vantus pushes off and steps back. He seems visibly relieved.
“I thought it would take more to convince you.”
“I haven’t said yes yet,” I remind him. “If you have all of this”-I gesture around myself-“what do you need me for?”
“We can create an army, but we can’t manufacture experience. You’re a decorated soldier, one of the finest I’ve ever worked with.”
“Ex-soldier. Last I checked deserters got a bullet, not a medal.”
Vantus waves it away. “As far as I’m concerned, Berlin Ansacre is dead. You no longer exist. But what you’ve seen, what you know, what you remember, that will live on.”
“And,” he says it almost as an afterthought. “We can give you your legs back.”
Thinking back, that was the precise moment Berlin Ansacre died and Balac was born.