The Madman's Clock

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

"What do you remember after that?" Admiral Bishop asked me, as I lay in Port 25's sickbay.

I shook my throbbing head.

The pain had been pulsing in my head for a week, every since I awoke in the escape pod with David, Kyle, and Raj. It hung there as we drifted outside the Saturnus, watching quietly as the Edra squid ship detached from the derelict vessel and disappeared into the distance. David had said something then, but I hadn't heard it. I drifted in and out of consciousness.

The medics on the UES Grover pumped me full of pain killers, and when that didn't work, they sedated me. I only half-remembered the voyage back. I remembered David visiting, and later on Kyle and Raj. They spoke to me, but their words were a dull hum in the background.

The headache was a constant, throbbing companion inside my head. It was there even when I slept. My dreams were nightmare flashes of the crew of the Saturnus, and the Edra. Explosions, bodies, fires sweeping through decks, and shivering, blank-eyed crewmen. For the first few days of consciousness, those images haunted my waking hours as well.

At least they faded away after a while. Now the only image to haunt me was Admiral Bishop, but he wasn't a ghost. He was very real.

"I don't remember much, sir," I said.

I sipped on the cup of ice water on the tray in front of me. The food had been taken away by the nurse, untouched. I didn't have much of a stomach for food, and they had to feed me intravenously. The doctors said that my appetite would come back eventually.

"I am sure your men will give you all of the details when they visit later today, Captain," the admiral said. "In the meantime, I want you to know that you did a good job under hellish conditions. You completed your mission as best you could. Ultimately, you did exactly what you were sent out to do."

"What was that, sir?" I asked.

"I beg your pardon, captain?" Bishop said, glaring at me.

"What did you send us for?" I repeated. "I mean, you knew how things would end. You knew we couldn't actually stop the experiment."

The admiral sat quietly for a moment, looking me over, considering his words. He turned away, looking to that far off place of his.

"There were two transmissions from the Saturnus, which I heard before we sent you," he explained. "The first one we played for you. The second transmission was made some time later, by Sergeant Forres. He explained the events following your earlier message. His voice was not the only one in the transmission, though."

"Who else?" I asked, already suspecting that I knew the answer.

"An Edra commando named Esaal," he replied.

I tried to sit up in my bed, but my arms simply wouldn't lift me. I gave up trying, as the thumping in my head and the weakness in my body got the better of me. I hated feeling weak. I felt more like a corpse than a marine.

"Sir?" I prompted him.

The admiral reached into his pocket and took out his small jammer. He turned it on, and looked across the otherwise empty hospital ward toward the guard at the door. He nodded, and the marine guard left the room.

"Everything I tell you is classified," he said flatly. "Nobody outside of you and your men ever hears this. Is that clear?"

I nodded. 'Yes, sir."

"Several hours before I paid your men a visit in the locker room," he said in a hushed voice, "I received a coded transmission from a contact that I will not discuss here. That contact alerted me to a visitor I was about to have. An hour later, that visitor arrived aboard a civilian freighter registered to the Enles system."

The Enles system belongs to a neutral race which traded all over this sector. Sometimes they acted as go-between in negotiations. I had heard of diplomats using them to move unseen between worlds, usually when matters were sensitive. I had even heard rumors of our diplomats using them to arrange truce talks with the enemy on Alpha Centauri.

"The Edra," I said.

He nodded. "First Soldier Esaal, in fact."

Bishop stood up, and stretched his back. He looked sore from having sat there for the past hour, getting my story. I heard his back crack, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He started slowly pacing at the foot of my bed.

"Esaal came to me with verifiable proof of events aboard the Saturnus, events that had yet to occur." The admiral shook his head. "We didn't receive your first transmission from the Saturnus, captain. The Edra did, over a year ago. A temporal echo, they called it."

"That's why they objected to the project," I added.

"One of the reasons, yes. Add to that our appropriation of their neural interface technology. Ultimately, the Edra could not convince the government on Earth to back off of the project, even with the evidence in hand."

"So why did you believe them, sir, if the experts on Earth didn't?"

The admiral nodded knowingly. "Captain, I did not get this far by trusting politicians to always do what is smart. I was brought onto the project for security reasons, because the government was worried that the Edra would try to interfere and they thought I could stop them. I have more than a little experience with the Edra, and while my superiors thought I would use that to protect against their interference, what that experience really did was convince me to listen. So, when Esaal contacted me, I listened. I do not think the government expected me to do that, but then they do not have my experience."

"What made you believe them?" I asked again.

"At first, I did not," he replied with the slightest smirk, "not until I spoke to you."

"Okay, sir, you've lost me," I said, my exhaustion starting to get to me.

He kept silent again, with only the slight buzz of the lights in the ceiling to listen to as I waited for him to continue. The small hospital ward was empty, but even with all of the empty space, filled with seven other beds, and shelves filled with medical equipment and drugs, the room felt very small. The admiral's presence seemed to fill every corner of the room, as if he was carrying secrets and burdens too large to bear. I wonder how many of them had been used to propel him to the rank of admiral.

"Do you remember our conversation in the locker room, Captain?" he finally asked.

"Yes, sir," I said. "You asked me about Alpha Centauri, and then you," I stopped dead.

Bishop finished for me. "I asked you if you and your men did what you are accused of. You said that you did not do it. I believed you."

My mind seemed to spin inside my skull. The pieces of the puzzle started to come together. His question that day, our assignment to this mission despite being under suspicion of war crimes, and Esaal's odd familiarity with my men and I, all of it suddenly made sense. I understood.

"You said you needed to be sure," I said with a nod. "You had to look me in the eye and hear it from me."

"The Edra commando, Esaal, did not just come with evidence of the accident on the Saturnus." Bishop waved his hand in the air as if he were dismissing someone. "Yes, he had everything I would need to see. Transmission recordings, temporal readings, everything like that. What made me believe him was that he also brought surveillance data of a small, unimportant village on the Alpha Centauri western continental front."

I felt my eyes go wide. "He said it on the ship," I gasped. "He said that it was different seeing me up close than it was observing me."

"He was there, Captain," Bishop explained. "His team was deployed to Alpha Centauri, and he saw your team enter the village. He watched you sweep through the building, interact with the refugees, and then leave an hour later. He saw the enemy bring down the building a few minutes after you left. He came to me with that, hoping it would help prove that he was telling the truth about the Saturnus."

"Which is why you asked me about what happened," I finished for him.

He nodded. "I am a very good judge of character. Once I was sure you had not done it, I knew that his surveillance data was real. Based on that, I decided to trust the rest of his data. The Edra, after all, are not our enemy. I decided that they had more reason to tell the truth than to lie."

"Don't you think it was kinda lucky that he happened to be there, sir, and see us in the village?"

Bishop shook his head. "Captain, no ,it was not luck. He did not stumble upon you. He was following you. He was observing you, because a year ago his people intercepted two messages from the Saturnus. Your message and the second one from Sergeant Forres. They did not share the details of those transmissions with the government, so when Earth ignored their warning, they decided to act on their own. They assigned Esaal's strike team to observe you, gather data, all in preparation for the Saturnus accident, which they knew would occur."

"Why not tell Earth about my transmission in the first place?" I asked.

"They did not want us to know that they could cut through our codes so easily," he replied. "The Edra are not known for explaining themselves. They are also not used to be being told 'no'. They decided to take matters into their own hands. Knowing as much about you and your men as possible was part of that plan."

"So, again sir, why did you send us?" I was tired of asking the question. Every time I asked it, he threw more information at me, but not the answer I wanted.

Thankfully, this time he answered. "The Edra have a much greater understanding of temporal mechanics than our best scientists. Esaal explained to me that it was essential for things to play out as they were supposed to. He said that if we tried to change the events surrounding the accident, we could cause more trouble than we would solve. That is also why they did not approach me until after the Saturnus launched. I think they were doing some guessing of their own, but they still had a far greater handle on the problem than we did."

I put my head in my hand. The headache was getting to me. The crush of information was too much, and it wasn't helping my head. I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I said as much.

"Do not let it bother you, Captain," Bishop said. "You are a good marine, and you carried out your orders. Beyond that, let people like me worry about the big questions."

"What about the crew of the Saturnus?" I asked.

Bishop frowned. "I think you know the answer to that."

"They're still out there, aren't they, sir?" I said, a pain forming in the pit of my stomach.

He nodded.

"What happens to the ship, now?"

"Yesterday, after further consultations with both myself and the Edra, and based on the reports of your men, there have been some changes. The area of space around the Saturnus has been declared off limits to space travel. The Edra will see to it that the quarantine remains intact. Nobody will ever get near that ship. Then, in one hundred and eighteen years, they will move in and destroy the Saturnus."

I nodded. "Just after we pass through the core."

"Correct." He picked up the jamming device, and turned it over in his hands. "Everything ends the way it is supposed to."

"He said he would evacuate the crew," I said. "Esaal lied to me."

"He said whatever he had to, to get your cooperation."

"What about us, sir?" I asked. "What about the charges?"

He nodded. "Evidence, scrubbed of Edra involvement, will be leaked. The charges will be dropped soon after. Then, once the doctors are sure the temporal psychosis you and your men suffered from is gone, you will be released from sickbay. You suffered a mental collapse brought on by the psychosis, just after the death of Captain Paetkau. We need to be sure you are fit for duty before we send you out again."

"Sent out again?" I asked. "Right back into the fight, sir?"

He looked away, his eyes finding that faraway place again. "That is what soldiers like you and I do, Captain Mallory."

"Where?" I asked.

"I think you have some unfinished business in a small village on Alpha Centauri," he said, putting his jammer back in his pocket. "Do you agree?"

I felt the fatigue start to fall away. My headache suddenly didn't seem so smothering, and I sat up straight in my bed. I could feel the energy starting to come back to me. I looked around instinctively for my uniform. It was hanging on a rack in a corner of the room.

Suddenly the last mission didn't seem so frustrating. That was yesterday. Tomorrow would be different. It wasn't how you played the game. It was whether you won or lost. It was time to f**k something up.

"Yes, sir," I said with a grin.

THE END