He would give anything to experience it all once more. For that to happen, he needed to live to see a new day.
“I want to survive,” he said quietly.
“That’s all I want,” said Hirsen, matching his tone. “Samuel, your memories may be fake, but we’re the same person. The only difference between us is, you care about surviving the day to day. That’s by design, I need you to be a survivor. I’m different. If Newgen’s DNA strand keeps working, I’ll live for a long, long time. I have to think of the future. And the only way I get to survive in this Edge, long term, is to destroy Tal-Kader and replace it with something else. A new ruling class that at least won’t hunt me to death for the accident of my birth.”
And for being designer-made to be the perfect, merciless assassin, Delagarza thought.
Hirsen shrugged. Semantics, he seemed to say.
“I think I understand now,” Delagarza told his other self. “All this time, you’ve acted only for your own self-interest. Finding Isabella, hiding here…You know, Kayoko thinks you’re this hero of the resistance.”
“Heroes don’t live very long.”
Delagarza agreed. “Survival, huh? I can get behind that. I feared Daneel Hirsen, rebel hero. This real you, the egotistical asshole…I can work with you. What happens when you don’t need me anymore?”
“You return to my subconscious,” said Hirsen. “I’ve never used the Quail before, so I’ve no idea how little of you will remain.”
“But I won’t die?”
“No,” lied Hirsen, without trying to hide it. Semantics, he seemed to say with his apologetic shrug. “Your personality is built of my own, so your core, your values and interests, will continue.”
“Fuck you, man,” Delagarza told him, without animosity.
So, Hirsen did think Delagarza would end up dying, one way or another. He’d jump that metaphysical trap-hole when it came to it. He needed Hirsen’s help to survive Dione’s following months. The man had saved his life already, maybe he’d do it again. But Delagarza wouldn’t go quietly either way.
“What’s next?” Delagarza asked.
Around the both of them, the Japanese hotel slowly faded, gaining the texture of an old photograph. Hirsen’s own voice had difficulties reaching Delagarza’s ears.
“We need three things. We have to kill Strauze before he sniffs us out. We have to collect Isabella by the time the EIF arrives. And we must find a way to leave Dione’s orbit without getting shot down by its defenses.”
“Sounds like a cakewalk,” said Delagarza, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “How do we do it?”
“First step is learning to walk again,” said Hirsen.
As suddenly as the dream had arrived, it vanished. Delagarza was carried by the tornado of reality back into the pain, drugs, and confusion of the waking world, with the piercing lights of the operating room and the loving caress of the scalpel.
20
CHAPTER TWENTY
CLARKE
Task Force Sierra was the reason Clarke and the Beowulf survivors hadn’t starved to death in the middle of nowhere. The task force consisted of five EIF destroyers and their slew of escorts and auxiliaries. Fast and flexible, Sierra was an scout force. Its mission involved returning to previous locations of the main fleet and scouting for enemy presence in case their codes had been compromised. The Task Force never remained in a location for long.
When the tiny scout ship found Beowulf, its commander had assumed an SA trap waited inside. The scout almost returned to Sierra to warn them. Only after taking a closer look at Beowulf’s ID had they realized it was a ship marked in the Independent fleet as allied to the Edge Independence Front.
After hearing this from the apologetic scout commander, Navathe offered a silent prayer to one of the many gods of her ancient religion. Pascari’s reaction was the opposite. He retreated to himself (as there was no personal space in the cramped scout) and refused to say a word. Clarke knew what the man thought as he had heard the same argument before. If the gods—or destiny—had deigned to help them survive the New Angeles ambush, why hadn’t they deigned to save Julia and Antonov?
Clarke had lost people before. A part of him knew she wouldn’t be the last, either. He grieved the best way he knew: by doing his job as best as he could.
And his job involved getting to Dione before the Sentinel arrived to finish what Tal-Kader had started on the Monsoon.
The Beowulf’s crew barely had time to pass a fast medical examination when the Sierra commander summoned them to an emergency meeting.
“You think they’ll listen to us?” Navathe asked Clarke while the corvette traveled from one destroyer to another. The meeting would take place in the Hawk, the command vessel of Task Force Sierra. From what Clarke had heard, the courier ships were already on their way to the main fleet, carrying the news that Antonov hadn’t lived to tell.
“They have to,” said Clarke. With Vortex and Captain Riley heading to Dione ahead of Sentinel and Admiral Wentraub, the only hope they had of bypassing the planetary garrison was to match their firepower.
Hawk approached on the corvette’s screens. The destroyer, the smallest ship of the line, was a sight to behold. A cylindrical behemoth of metal, it represented the philosophy of space conflict in every area of its design. At its most basic, a destroyer was a tube of metal welded to an engine and an Alcubierre Drive, with an array of sensors in the other end and the crew hidden as close to its center as possible, protected by many layers of armor and redundant life-support systems. Even the humblest of its weapons became a weapon of mass destruction if aimed toward a populated planet. A destroyer belonged to an entirely different food chain than any civilian ship, and a single destroyer’s mere presence in a system was enough to deter piracy and make every colonial citizen glance nervously at the domed sky, knowing their lives could end in an instant with the push of a button.
Such power came with a trade-off. Due to its size and design, a ship of the line was limited only to space operations. Hawk would only ever cross a planet’s atmosphere if something went catastrophically wrong. Given the oryza reactor that powered it, it also meant something would go apocalyptically wrong, in short order, for the unlucky planet that stopped the ship’s planetfall.
Clarke wondered which massive corporations were rich enough to sponsor the EIF’s fleet, but weak enough to risk fighting against Tal-Kader. The presence of Hawk told much to anyone looking past its amazing display of power. It was a history lesson. Had the EIF been comprised of poor revolutionaries leading a heroic fight against tyranny, they could never have afforded a single destroyer, much less an entire fleet of them, along with cruisers, battle cruisers, battleships, and the swarm of auxiliaries required for its day to day function.
The amount of money the Independent consumed in a single cycle could bankrupt a nation.
Tal-Kader’s private navy was big enough to engulf Independent in any direct confrontation.
The Defense Fleet’s own ships of the line were numerous enough to defeat the both of them without leaving any of the SA worlds undefended.
Earth’s navy had defeated the Defense Fleet with a single ship, the Mississippi. Earth’s inner systems were defended by four dreadnoughts of the Mississippi’s weight category, to deter the SADF from any suicidal attacks against mankind’s motherland.