He sighed and nodded. “Something to think about once the wormhole generator is working again. Besides, I guess it's too much to ask to get an operator's manual, no one else is born with one.”
Alice couldn't help but chuckle. “Now you know how I felt for the first few months after making the transfer.”
“Sometimes I forget. Still feels like you're the daughter I was looking for while I made my way across the outer fringes most of the time.”
“I don't mind that one bit.”
“Good, it's a hard thing to shake. Still, it makes me wonder about what I did while I was a blank slate. My, I mean Jonas' psych professor at the academy once said that the true test of a person is what they do when they think no one's looking. When I had a completely blank slate the first thing I did after getting the Samson running was land her on Radic and start bounty hunting locally. After a month I had turned in about a dozen bail jumpers, debtors and I even trapped some kid, couldn't have been more than sixteen, who was trying to avoid giving testimony. Three months later I was taking jobs from Radic City's crime lord.”
“But you moved on.”
“Only after I had enough money, that's all it was. I did it all for cash, whatever was on the board and didn't involve outright slavery I would do. One hundred and forty one crew members were killed while I was running the Samson and after a while I was just numb to it.”
“Jake, Vindyne planted a directive in your head along with the databases they gave you. It was made to compel you to find work, to be someone else's servant. The system said that it would take a serious trauma to break you out of it. Somewhere along the line that's happened, and from what I've seen since I came aboard you're free.”
“That might explain some of the jobs I never wanted in the first place but took anyway. I could have found work hauling cargo, the Samson had the hookups for it and it would have taken me just a couple days to get the engines up to par. When I was left on my own, running without a moral compass I chose the most available route and didn't want to know the details behind the jobs. Now I have all these memories and the moral code that comes with it. Jonas wouldn't have taken half the jobs I finished, so many of those people had a good reason to run and I'm the one who brought them in, right or wrong.” he leaned on the thick transparent section of hull behind his desk. The nebula outside bathed the room in dim gold.
Alice watched him from where she sat. The security recordings of him capturing bounties came to mind, she had watched at least twenty of the ones that had surfaced on the Newsnets since he made his first recruiting speech for the Aucharians. She had never thought of who his prey was, what their crimes were. Most of the recordings had been stripped of those details, and the ones that did bear the identities of his targets made them out to be hardened criminals.
“Reconciliation,” Jake said quietly. “Jonas was a good man, better than I ever was. Ever since I found his memories in my head I've felt like I've been carrying this weight around and the thing I'm most thankful for inheriting from him is his ability to just bury it. I tell you that man must have been good at just pretending nothing was wrong even if the whole place was coming apart.”
Alice couldn't help but smile a little. “He couldn't hide anything from me or Ayan. She didn't know him nearly as long as I did, but she got him pretty quickly.”
He leaned his head against the window with his arm as a cushion. “Now that's something I'd never have seen coming. Ayan. When it comes to her and everyone from the First Light I feel exactly the same. I miss Oz, Jason, and especially Minh and Ayan. Then I try and remind myself that I'm Jake Valance, this black hearted hunter and it does no good.”
Seeing him so frustrated made her wish she could just pull the right thing to say out of the air or consult a few hundred interactive psychological texts as she would have as an artificial intelligence and just guide him to resolving his own issues but she only had one answer for him. “Time. You're grieving, it takes time.”
Jake sighed and turned around, leaning on the backrest of his desk chair. “You're right, but there is no time, not here. I wouldn't give up the Triton or the crew either, this is what I want to be doing.”
“What if you could have the best of both worlds? Maybe you could take one of those Uriel Starfighters for a test flight. I can hold down the fort, we're only training anyway.”
Jake thought for a moment, looking down at the dark, blank surface of his desk. “Maybe.”
She couldn't help but be surprised. Alice was sure he'd reject the idea immediately. A smile grew on her lips. “I'll get Laura to take your shift on the bridge, she was wondering if she could take one of mine for a while now anyway.”
“Well, Oz and Jason are still out there too. I'd rather be here when they arrive so I'm pinned to the deck for at least that long.” Jake took his gun belt from the peg beside the ladder and started putting it on.
“Not going back to bed?”
“No, I'm wide awake. Think I'll go down and work on the Samson awhile,” he said as he put his long coat on.
“I'd join you but I have department training reports to go through. Laura's going to be glad you're staying close to the bridge with Oz and Jason still out there. She doesn't let on much, but she's worried.”
“So am I. I'm just wondering if this idea for me to take a ride isn't some plot of yours to take the Triton for yourself.”
Alice flashed him a broad grin and winked. “There's only one way to find out for sure.”
Constructing The Needle
The mountain hangar bay had been repaired and the rear section, where most servicing and maintenance was performed, was opened up once again. The rush of attackers in the city at the mountain's foot had ground to a temporary halt, and after a well deserved night's sleep Terry Ozark McPatrick had gone to the hangar and taken a seat on an old antigravity tank. A large red sheet had been tied around its main cannon, marking it for scrap.
He reclined against its cannon mount, sipping his breakfast from a spill proof cup as he watched Minh and Ayan work with a repair crew to build something that was cobbled together from parts gathered from every corner of the hangar and beyond. It was a long, narrow ship with the guts of an old fighter cockpit at the front and seating for three passengers lined up behind. Aside from some cargo space at the rear, those were all the comforts that would be afforded Minh, Ayan, Oz and Jason.
The hangar deck personnel were building an encasement of heavy armour several centimetres thick around the seating space and installing inertial dampeners that were made for ships twenty times the small transports' mass. They were just finished lowering the Warpig's afterburners into place at the front of the small ship. It was a strange little flyer with no rear thrusters and very high powered solid fuel engines at the front, pointing away from the cockpit.
“This is the last place I thought I'd find you,” Jason said as he climbed up on the tank beside him and settled in to watch the team work under Minh and Ayan's direction.
Lalonde, Randolph
Spinward Fringe Frontline
Oz smiled at his long time friend and nodded. “I guess it would be, I'm no gearhead.”
“Seems like everyone else is though. You should see the rail cannon that's going to launch that thing.”
“I'll pass, this ship is scary enough. Besides, I think I'm here more to keep my eye on the people building it. I still can't believe Minh is here, let alone Ayan.”
Jason looked to where Minh was crawling out of an access trench under the ship and talking to Ayan. It was something neither of them could hear from where they sat, but it had the young woman laughing. “I know. What do you think of her?”