In retrospect, thought Desh, it wasn’t entirely surprising that Jake was tapped to be part of Copernicus. He reported to Dutton, who was Frey’s puppet. And Frey would want to be sure he was represented on the luxury cruise ship. He had no way to know what alien secrets might be found, so he would want his proxies to have a front row seat. Still, Kira couldn’t possibly have counted on this complex web. “But it was just dumb luck that it all worked out,” he pointed out. “Dumb luck that you had planted the seed. And dumb luck that Jake was tapped to join Copernicus?”
“Not at all. If Jake wasn’t on Copernicus, we’d have had some of our people try to institute a contest to decide who ran the nanite team. If that failed, Matt could just contribute from Kentucky. Remember, anyone could study the nanites. They were everywhere. It wouldn’t have taken long for Matt to make more progress than anyone else in the world and establish his credentials. He would have ended up on the Copernicus no matter what. It just would have taken longer. But that wouldn’t have mattered. Because time zero wasn’t real. He programmed time zero to be five or six hours from whenever he had the nanites reveal their true purpose. Which he wouldn’t do until he had established himself on the Copernicus.”
Desh thought back to his friend’s activities on the massive cruise ship and shook his head in wonder. “Matt’s performance was flawless,” he said. “Truly genius. The big guy should win an Academy Award.”
“I have no doubt,” said Kira proudly. “Although he really was enhanced when you thought he was. That’s one thing that can’t be faked. And he needed to impress everyone enough to believe he was orders of magnitude beyond them. But he had the hardest job of all. You and I didn’t know what was going on—well, half of me didn’t. The two halves only became fully integrated again once the news hit that we had pulled it off. But Matt knew the truth from the beginning. And most of the time he had to keep us both in the dark. Although on the infrequent occasions when my other half took over, he was able to confide in me then.”
Desh knew he now had the entire story. Not that there wasn’t more to discuss. But it all fit so beautifully together. Kira’s plan was like a work of art—an exquisitely designed watch.
Desh unbuckled from his seat as he contemplated the true enormity of what had been accomplished. A herd of elephants had just stepped off his chest and the relief was indescribable. He turned to the woman he loved—who he had been right to still love—and tears began to run down his face. The emotional pressure of the end of the world, which he, like the masses, had absolutely believed, combined with believing he had been betrayed by a woman he loved with every fiber of his being, finally ended.
He felt euphoric.
He leaned forward and held his wife for several minutes, and tears began streaming down her cheeks as well. Finally, the embrace ended, and they kissed each other passionately, tasting a hint of the salty tears that had run down their lips as they did. Finally, Matt Griffin unknowingly ended their embrace when he applied the van’s brakes fairly suddenly, probably at a stoplight, and Desh was thrown to the right, almost tripping over the still unconscious Ross Metzger.
Desh took this as a signal to return to his seat and buckle in once again.
Kira let out a heavy sigh while he clicked the belt into place. “I’m so sorry I had to put you through this, David,” she said. “But transcendent Kira made that choice. After that there was nothing I could do. She put the clueless half of me through a lot of turmoil as well.”
Both of their tears had stopped flowing, but they were now on the giddy side. Desh gave her a lopsided smile. “So you only found out about all this yourself when you knew Matt had succeeded?”
“Yes. It was quite a shock, I can tell you. Memories that had been walled off, memories of actions I’d taken but didn’t know about, came rushing back to me like a dam had burst. First I was stunned. Then I was actually pissed at myself for keeping it from me. And finally, I was euphoric. It had worked. Nuclear weapons had been disabled and global tensions were about to recede rather than advance. Hopefully becoming a thing of the past forever.” She gazed lovingly into Desh’s eyes once again and smiled. “But what made me the happiest was knowing I could finally tell you about the plan. As an integrated personality again. That we would be back together the way we had always been, before the plan put a strain on our relationship.” Her jaw tightened. “But I never suspected Dutton would have the audacity to whisk you and Matt off Copernicus long before the dust had cleared.”
Desh nodded. He had to admit that Dutton had done a good job of justifying the need for Matt to leave the ship immediately.
“When Jake called I was frantic,” continued Kira. “It was supposed to be time to finally celebrate. Not to be fighting for our lives once again.”
“Well, you came up with a brilliant strategy to get us back.”
“Which couldn’t have gone more wrong,” noted Kira.
“You made the mistake of thinking that Eric Frey would be rational. Matt’s story about the scorpion and the frog was exactly on target. But your plan to get us back was still brilliant. Like you said, it still would have worked, despite Frey’s ambush, if he wouldn’t have added hidden snipers to the mix. There’s paranoia and then there’s ridiculous.”
“Well, given everything that blew up in our faces in the last month, figuratively and literally, there is a silver lining. Jake is now on our side. When we get back to headquarters, and Matt has recuperated a little longer, he can restore Jake’s good name. Undo the evidence Dutton planted against him, and replace it with evidence against Dutton.”
“When you say Jake’s on our side, what does that mean? That he’ll stop hunting us or actively help us?” At minimum, Desh was hopeful this would mean Seth Rosenblatt’s family could return to their lives, along with the rest of his hexad.
“Actively help us. He practically loves you and Matt. I don’t know what happened on the Copernicus but he raved about you both. I think he went from trying to kill the two of you to being willing to take a bullet for the two of you.”
Desh paused to let this soak in. “Will you tell Jake the truth about the aliens?”
“No. No one can ever know. Ross, Matt, me, and you. That’s it. At least for the next thirty or forty years. Hopefully someday the world will be more enlightened and we can think about revealing this as a hoax.”
Desh’s thoughts turned to Kira’s encounter with van Hutten. “Anton kidnapped you because the alien ship was on its way. This was what finally tipped the scales for him. So when he had you in a straightjacket, weren’t you tempted to tell him the truth?”
Kira shook her head. “I didn’t know it myself at the time. My hidden personality monitoring the situation didn’t see the need to fill me in. The plan was too important to jeopardize by disclosing to anyone who didn’t need to know, including me. Even when my life might have been on the line.”
Desh digested this sobering thought. “But what if you had been killed?”
“At that point the plan still would have succeeded. Matt and Ross would have seen to that.”
Desh considered this. She was right. At that point she truly was expendable. Thank God it hadn’t come to that. “And Jake is really willing to help us?”