Chapter 33
John Doe
With the fires of determination burning deep within, John had gotten to work. He often had a reputation for being merciless, obstinate, and incapable of letting go. John liked to think his actual personality went deeper than that. He was only merciless when he knew what the costs of standing by and doing nothing would be. He believed in compassion; even if he had forgotten that lesson during his life in the slums, it was one he constantly reminded himself of as an adult. But that did not mean he stood by and watched as pirates assailed transports, as factions ripped into colony worlds. John acted when he had to. If the difference between someone living and someone dying was shooting the pirate in the middle, then you did it. You didn’t hesitate, because hesitating cost lives. Yes, not having blood on your hands sure did feel good, but it was no indication of moral superiority. If you lived in an ivory tower, never went outside, and never had to get your hands dirty, then you could convince yourself that an ethical life was one free of violence. If you were thrown into a war, and someone had pressed a gun into your hand and told you to go and protect people, then the reality became gritty. Because killing a man surely was just as bad as letting another man die.
So yes, at times John was merciless, but he never lost the heart behind his decisions.
‘I really don’t like it when you get that look in your eyes,’ Foster said as he turned around in his chair, grinning wildly, ‘it tends to mean we get shot at a lot.’
John was sitting in the command chair, his elbow rested on his knee, one hand idly playing with his chin as his eyes locked onto the holographic feed before him.
He’d heard Foster, but he wasn’t going to bother answering.
He was fixated, completely concentrating on the scene before him.
It was a replay of that woman falling into the snow and salt of Orion Minor. The exact moment where she had pushed herself up only for the holographic feed to cut out. It was playing on a loop.
Occasionally he would progress the recording, watch her walking through the snow with her body huddled into itself, that hood of hers never moving.
‘It must be Old Tech, you’re absolutely correct,’ Evelyn said from his side.
It almost made John want to jump. Again he’d completely forgotten about her. The specter of that woman walking through the snow had closed off his senses and mind to everything else.
Evelyn walked forward slowly, bringing up her hand carefully as she touched the hologram. Without telling the computer to make the light darting around solid, Evelyn’s fingers rushed straight through it.
She had such an incredible look of concentration on her face as she assessed the hood that just for a second it made John forget the situation. He straightened up, maybe he allowed himself a short smile, but it was one he quickly stifled when Chado caught his gaze. His XO was standing beside him, hands tucked behind his back as he relayed commands to Parka.
‘I’ve never seen anything like this, but I have heard of them,’ Evelyn said as she turned sharply to John.
‘We checked the databases,’ Foster turned around in his chair again, ‘there’s no mention about magical hoods in the Old Tech catalogue.’
Evelyn clasped her hands together demurely, and offered him a nod. John noticed as Foster’s cheeks grew hot at the move.
‘I have access to a slightly enlarged database,’ she said softly.
That was the nice way of saying that her privileges went way beyond Foster and that he was out of his league lecturing an Aurora Project member about Old Tech.
‘What can they do?’ John straightened up, dropping his hand from his chin and facing Evelyn in full.
‘They allow the wearer perfect vision, but they stop anything, including recorders or scanners, from penetrating under the cloak.’
‘So she could see out of it,’ John confirmed.
Evelyn nodded. ‘But Commander, you must understand that while these cloaks are mentioned in the database, no one has ever seen one. We have only inferred their capabilities based on cross-referencing with other sources.’
John’s eyes narrowed so far, his eyebrows plunging down against them, that they practically closed. ‘So how would a woman from the slums of Orion Minor get her hands on one?’
‘Precisely. I think it is evidence enough that she is not from Orion Minor. Have you considered the fact she is a pirate assassin?’
John had considered every fact, every bloody possibility. Because the lists of incredible things about this woman didn’t just include her hood, after all. The number of attacks that she had survived, the fall, even what had occurred to the transport beams the two times she had been stuck by them . . . John had no idea what he was dealing with. But he very much doubted a simple explanation like a pirate assassin was going to cut it.
The secrets here drew much deeper than that.
Straightening up in his chair, the fabric creaking underneath him, John rested his hands on the armrests. ‘What else can you tell me about this cloak?’
‘Not much more than I’ve already told you. Commander,’ she began.
‘You can call me John, like everybody else on the ship,’ he said with a smile.
She looked uncomfortable, but in another second she smiled too. John was starting to get used to that smile, used to it in the kind of way where it would send a particular kind of tingle through his stomach.
‘Thank you. I was going to suggest that if you allow me access to your ICN, I will download the specs on that cloak from the Aurora Project Database.’
John nodded, typing something on his personal panel just as he did.
Out of the corner of his eye John saw Foster make a face. And John could appreciate the expression. Here they were in one of the most advanced vessels in the fleet, meant to be going on one of the most important missions in history, and apparently they didn’t have full access to the database they were meant to be researching for. Because the Rim mission was all about Old Tech, and John had been forcing himself to trawl through the Union Old Tech Database in preparation. But if Evelyn was to be believed, then there were still aspects of it that even John was locked out of.
But right now that was not his priority. Finding out as much about that cloak and about the woman was.
Leaning forward in his chair and waiting for Evelyn to finish, John eventually cleared his throat.
In seconds Evelyn waved her hands towards the holo emitter, and the sophisticated machine picked up on the movement, immediately getting rid of the image of the hooded woman and replacing it with a direct feed from the Aurora Database.
A hood similar to, but not exactly the same as, the one John had seen, floated over the floor as information about its specifications played along the sides.
‘It seems to suggest this is very ancient Old Technology, dating from the earlier periods of the Old Ones,’ John spoke aloud as he figured that out for himself. ‘So how does it still work?’
There was a pause, and all attention on the bridge focused in on Evelyn.
She looked embarrassed for a moment, but she never lost the length to her back, or that particular, beautiful angle to her neck. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was somehow shielded from energy loss. It all depends on where that woman found it.’
John nodded. It sounded plausible, but something about it didn’t sit well with him.
Forcing himself to stand, patting down his uniform as he did, he walked up and straight towards the cloak. He lifted a finger, making the exact motion the holo emitters would require to solidify the image before him.
And then John Doe did exactly what he had wanted to do so much on Orion Minor. He picked the cloak up. He brought his hands up, rested his fingers on the fabric, and he moved it around, manipulating it back and forth.
There was silence on the bridge as everyone watched him, but as John studied that thing in his hands, he became less and less aware of everyone else.
He remembered so distinctly leaning down on that securi
ty transport, locking his fingers over the hood, and trying to tug it back. The woman had leant her face into him, her cheek brushing up against his fingers, but that was it. She hadn’t pushed him back, she hadn’t yanked her head away; the impediment field had been in place, after all.
But no matter how hard John had tried, he had not been able to shift the fabric.
‘It must be running out of power,’ he said under his breath, repeating that one age-old fact about Old Tech that every single citizen in the Union knew off by heart. ‘Even if it was somehow shielded from energy loss over the years, surely it will be running dry.’
He turned on his foot, facing Evelyn.
He really needed her to say yes. He needed Evelyn to say that the next time John met that strange woman, the cloak could easily fall from her eyes, revealing what was underneath.
But Evelyn did not confirm anything. She looked intensely uncomfortable for a moment, then she shrugged her shoulders. ‘Everything I have been taught tells me to say yes to that, Commander. But I have to be honest, I wasn’t expecting what I saw on that footage. It just doesn’t . . . make sense.’
John felt cold at her words. Because he understood them perfectly.
Finally letting the cloak fall from his fingers, the holo emitters turning off as he did, he walked back to his chair. He did not sit down however, instead he turned slowly on the spot, surveying his crew.
‘Watch out, here comes a chest-thumping, patriotic speech of encouragement,’ Foster said quietly under his breath.
John didn’t pull him up on it. Because Foster was absolutely right. It was time for John to rally the troops. He had no idea what he was dealing with, but the more the specter of that woman ran free in John’s mind, the more he knew this was a mystery he had to solve.
It seemed impossibly important. Every intuition he had told him that there was no simple explanation to be had in this situation. She was not a pirate assassin, she was not a robot, she was not an Ionian jumper.
She was something else entirely. Some possibility that he hadn’t even thought of, beyond imagination and reason for now.
But not forever.
And that would be when John remembered.
Playing back the first time he had seen her in that corridor in the slums, he ran through the entire event in his head. And he stopped, he stopped as his eyes drew wide.
The node.
When she had jumped over that railing and John had been so stupid to follow her, he had thrown a node onto her.
A simple but impossible-to-detect method to gain a transporter lock. It did not have a signal, it was not a bug or some kind of transponder; it was simply a unique molecular signature. One that the Pegasus computer had been specifically trained to hunt for.
Unless somebody who had been laced with it did a full chemical analysis of their body or clothes, they would not be able to pick it up. And that was the beauty of it.
It was also, quite possibly, John’s only lead.
Not even bothering to turn around to tell his crew what he was about to do, he marched towards the elevators.
They knew his personality; they’d been working with him for years.
He was off to track down his clue.
When he entered engineering, practically at a run, he looked up to see Parka drumming her fingers on a console and staring right at him.
‘What is it? You've got a particular look in your eye,’ she pointed out as she drummed her fingers faster.
‘The node,’ he said in a snap, his voice clearly excited.
Because he was excited. If he could get the computer to find a lock on it, then he could finally figure out where that woman was.
‘What about it?’ Parka did not suddenly drop what she was doing, slam all 20 fingers over her mouth, and tell John how brilliant he was.
So John slowed down, some of his enthusiasm waning. ‘The node that I laced the woman with on Orion Minor when we were both falling down from Block Alpha. Presumably it's still on her unless she has had a complete sonic clean, that is.’
‘Which she might well just have done, or something a little better,’ Parka said, her lips pulling thin.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I've already thought of the node, John, I am your brilliant Chief Engineer, after all, and unlike you I haven’t been distracted by Aurora Projects and Rim missions over the past several days. As soon as I figured out the woman might have slipped on board, I did a scan for the trace, but I didn't come up with anything . . . concrete.’
‘What do you mean?’ John asked quickly.
‘What I mean is that if, somehow, that woman managed to get close enough to the omidium core, then the radiation would've scrambled the molecules of the node.’
John let out an unhappy breath. This was not the news he had been looking for.
He was back to square one.
Maybe Parka noticed his disappointment, because she put up one of her hands, her ten fingers waving in the air. ‘Not so fast. Don't give up hope yet. I said it scrambled it, but it didn't get rid of it completely. I've been trying to beef up the system, getting it to run through a simulation of just what that much radiation would do to one of our node signals. Hopefully it will be able to filter through the millions of possibilities, and start scanning the immediate area for them.’
‘How long will that take? How many resources do you need? Feel free to make this a system priority,’ John said with a strict, curt nod.
‘I did feel free, I've already done it. Because believe you me, John, I want to track that woman down just as much as you do. Not only did she rip holes in my elevator shaft, but I want to meet a creature that can stay that close to omidium.’
‘We don't know that for sure,’ he hazarded.
Parka looked up at him sharply. ‘Don't you dare pretend you're not intrigued as all held by this. And yeah, sure, I know we shouldn't be jumping to conclusions here, but John, seriously, I have never seen anything like this.’
As the Chief spoke, some of her enthusiasm began to reignite John’s interest. It made him stand a little straighter, his heart beating faster, his hand slicking with sweat.
‘If you're happy for me to shut down lighting to half, stop some of the other maintenance tasks, I can give this everything we've got. And we might just be able to get a signal in the next five minutes,’ Parka offered.
John didn't even have to think about that. He gave her the immediate go-ahead. And then he waited, a full five minutes, not moving from his position, watching Parka intently as she worked.
As time drew on, his Chief Engineer became steadily more excited; John could see it as her purple eyes widened, her fingers darting around quicker, her tongue sticking out from between her lips and teeth.
Then it happened. The computer gave an electronic chirp, and its voice confirmed they had a successful lock on the target.
‘Bring it up on holo feed,’ John and Parka snapped at once.
The computer did not hesitate. And in an instant John saw her. The woman.
He didn't have a direct visual yet; the computer was going off the blueprints of the docking ring, imposing the woman as a red flashing dot in one of the upper levels.
‘Call the local authorities,’ John said as he started to back off, ‘phone this into the Union Forces. We have to be so careful,’ he said as his jaw began to stiffen around his words.
He had to be so careful. He'd stuffed this up once before, and he was not going to do it again.
‘Oh, don't you worry, Commander, I am going to get the cavalry in full. But I suggest we don't do anything until we have a proper plan. I've seen footage of how that woman can move, and I don't want to take any chances.’
Neither did John. So for the next hour and a half he worked closely with Parka as the two of them informed the relevant authorities, gathered together the necessary forces, and planned their mission down to every last detail.
When it was over, and John was finally ready to p
ut it into effect, he did something he hardly ever bothered to do. He told the computer to give him a maximum upgrade. To make his armor as sophisticated as the Union Database would allow. To do so it would have to draw on the Pegasus's supply of rare elements, taxing it by a half, but John knew what he had to do.
He also knew what he was up against. He could remember how swiftly and easily the woman had knocked him off his feet.
And that was not going to happen again.
Rubbing a hand on his chest, John got ready.