Chapter Forty-Three
R’Bak Island, R’Bak
Chalmers wasn’t sure how to react to what had just emerged from the radio.
Apparently, no one else was either. When the silence dragged on for a three count, Tapper’s voice returned. “Is everyone there?”
Moorefield, who’d been called from a “situation” he was handling in the downport, mumbled, “Affirmative.”
Jackson was so distracted he responded by nodding, then remembered that only Mara Lee and Chalmers could see it. He leaned close to the big tactical set that had been secured to the deck of Mara’s command bird. “Jackson here.”
“Chalmers.” He looked at Mara, who’d grabbed him away from a perfectly good card game when the all-hands call had come in.
Now, her eyes were shut tight and her face was alarmingly red. She was breathing as heavily as a prizefighter between rounds. She stopped abruptly, sucked in a lungful and yelled, almost shrieked, “What the fuck?”
Tapper’s voice was unusually cool. “I could ask you the same thing, Major.”
Her eyes opened sharply: hurt, surprised, angry. “What the hell does that mean, Harry?”
But it was Vat—apparently on the same shuttle as Harry—who screamed back. “Just when were you going to tell us that Murphy has fucking multiple sclerosis, Mara? I thought we were friends.”
“We are. But I made a promise to that other friend to keep my mouth shut. Which seemed like a pretty good idea, what with him working 24/7 trying to keep all of us from getting pushed out airlocks. And then . . . ” She drifted to a halt. When she resumed, it was in a disbelieving, even horrified whisper. “Damn it, this is about him looking for a cure, isn’t it?”
Tapper’s voice had not warmed up much. “So you knew about that, too?”
“Jesus, Harry: if Murphy’s gone hunting for a cure down here, how the hell do you think he got the intel except through my ‘family connections’?”
“So Healer Naliryiz knows, also.”
“Yeah, and so did the first Matriarch, Kelrevis, who saw it almost right away. Her sister Shumrir and Naliryiz have been working in secret to unearth an old pharmaflora remedy. Frankly, it was looking pretty grim; everything in their archives just pointed back down here—and Murph was fighting to hold it together.”
“How bad were his symptoms?” Moorefield’s voice sounded broken with—what? Regret?
“So bad that it was only a matter of months, maybe weeks, before someone tweaked to it.”
Vat seemed to be spitting at the audio pickup. “Yeah, and then the SpinDog genetic purity league would have thrown their hands up, accused Anseker of having known it all along—which he couldn’t deny without throwing Naliryiz under the galaxy’s biggest bus—and we’d be lucky to avoid a civil war.”
Jackson nodded. “Yeah, and even luckier to make it alive out the other side.” His voice had a slow, graveyard pace.
Chalmers let the silence run to a three count before asking, “Major Tapper, you sound like you’re pretty close to R’Bak. Hardly any delay.”
“Grabbed Vat and got on this bird right away.”
Moorefield’s question was almost clipped. “Where’s Bowden?”
“Still recovering. He was tilting toward hypothermia when they finally got to his ship and his wound hasn’t fully healed yet. He’s holding the fort with Makarov. Which buys us some time: the Hound-Dogs are deeply impressed by victors who return bearing scars and tales of imminent death. So they won’t press Bowden too hard on why the rest of us are ganged up near R’Bak. While we’re taking attendance, any news of Cutter’s whereabouts, Bo?”
“Nothing useful. So far no signals for emergency supply or extraction. And Murphy gave him orders for radio silence and to break squelch infrequently, except if at need.”
“Of course he did,” Vat muttered. “That way the guy who saw him last, and who we can trust, is the one guy we can’t talk to.”
“And since R’Bak Island hadn’t been secured yet,” Bo added, “it made sense. Hell, we still have no track on almost a third of the surveyors we know were planetside when the shit hit the fan.”
“Okay, but what do we do?” Mara said loudly, before glancing at Chalmers. “You’re a damn good investigator, I’m told. Where would you start looking for Murphy?”
Chalmers sighed; he knew he’d have to say it eventually, but he’d been in no rush to do so: “With respect, Major, I don’t think that’s the right question.”
She glared at him, then must have seen the regret in his face. “Okay, then what is our first question?”
Chalmers mentally girded his loins for the shitstorm he was sure to summon. “The first question we have to ask is, ‘what happens if we find Murphy?’ And everything about how he pulled this off tells me that he wants us to ask that question: first, last, and foremost.”
Tapper’s voice was serious, collected, slightly encouraging. “That’s an interesting question, Chief. So what do you think was going on in the colonel’s mind, if that’s what he wanted us to ask?”
Jesus, isn’t it obvious? But Chalmers calmly replied, “The best way to understand what the colonel was thinking is to step back and look at what he did—what he actually did—while setting this up.”
Moorefield sounded uncertain. “You mean arranging to be in a shuttle that we couldn’t find immediately?”
“No, sir,” Jackson answered before Chalmers could. “The chief means that since the day we came back from the mission to grab the lighter, everything the colonel has done was to make his disappearing act possible. From the moment we arrived back at Spin One, he knew that unless someone found a cure for his MS, he wasn’t coming back.”
Mara shook her head. “Are you saying he’s been lying about everything? That he was spinning some kind of fantasy for us to believe in?”
“No, ma’am,” Chalmers jumped in, fearful that Jacks was close to corking off. “I’m saying he did everything with not one purpose, but two. And he took steps to make sure we’d never notice that.” Although maybe if I’d been in the inner circle . . .
Vat saved him the trouble of being tactful by being painfully blunt. “Look: hindsight makes it pretty clear what he was doing. He had all of you running around like long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs. Bowden had a fleet to build so he could go fight the Harvesters. Major Moorefield was assigned an extra-credit project on the whinaalani while also confabbing with Mar—Major Lee on the ground campaign. Of course, that’s when she wasn’t keeping the Otlethes Family onside. Major Tapper here was working on his super-secret project to handcraft our very own new and improved Constitution under the secure file ‘Lawful Lawless.’ And when he walked into my recovery room he was there to dangle the bait of an ancient mystery in front of me—and in five minutes’ time, I’d taken it hook, line, and sinker and began figuring out a dozen dead languages in the deepest dive of my life.
“Of course, it didn’t stop there. He had Bowden recruit Makarov into becoming an AWACS artiste, with Timmy Uggs as his loyal, red-haired sidekick. He sent Cutter and Moose planetside—different times, different missions—as we started coming down to the finish line. Hell, he even got his bodyguard Janusz to outfit him from the goddamn impounded goods locker by convincing him that he was gathering evidence for a hush-hush investigation into black marketeers. With my name at the top of the list, no less.”
Vat sighed. “Murphy not only kept us all crazy-busy, but kept us working on separate tasks, because that way, we’d never catch him out.”
“What do you mean?” Moorefield muttered.
Chalmers stepped in before Vat went too far and tempers flared. “Vat means that Murphy kept maximum control by interacting with us one at a time. And if any of us worked on related tasks, we never had to meet the colonel in a group.”
“Yeah,” Vat summarized, “that way, he only had to manage one con game at a time. Mark of a promising amateur: he avoided his weaknesses and played to his strengths.”
Chalmers heard Moorefield mutter irritably. Time to save you again, Vat. “It was a pretty clever plan, actually, particularly since he was able to conduct his own part of the charade not only in plain sight, but because with the exception of the trip to the evidence locker, everything he did was something that had to be done.”
Jackson’s patience once again ran thin when Chalmers’s explanation met with uncertain silence. “Damn it, it’s just like every assignment the colonel gave all of you; every action he took was a logical step toward our greater objectives. That was the elegance of it; there were no extraneous activities, no unexplainable actions. Everything that he did was actually necessary for what we all accomplished three days ago. He just found a way to build his own preparations into them. Seamlessly.”
Lee nodded. “But by gathering all the information he needed to go on this suicide walkabout, he’s also left a trail of clues that tells us where he’s trying to go, and maybe why. That should give us a way to follow him, or at least pick up his trail.”
Chalmers sighed, shook his head. “I’m not sure it does, Major. See: Murphy didn’t gather just the information he needed; he gathered all the relevant information for every one of the operations he was overseeing. He assessed all the ports, all the tunnels, all the whinaalani trails and watering holes, all the rumored sites of alchemical knowledge. And because he did, we can’t even begin to guess which of the various pieces of information he actually used.”
Lee flung up a hand—not at Chalmers, but at the impossibility of the situation.
Moorefield’s voice was flat and devoid of patience. “Look: we’ve got everyone we need to mount a search either here on R’Bak or inbound. We’re the ones who know Murphy best, who knew exactly what he asked us about. If anyone can reconstruct the full scope of the deck he’s playing with, it’s us. And with your shuttle, Harry, we’ve even got our own, very private ride. We should start looking for him right now, before the trail gets any colder.”
“Except . . . ” Mara’s slow start indicated she was conceptually pivoting even as she spoke. “Except that brings us back to Chief Chalmers’s first point: about Murphy wanting us to ask these questions and to realize that he doesn’t want us to go looking for him.”
Chalmers nodded.
Moorefield was clearly working at keeping his reply less than extremely clipped. “Okay: I’m listening.” He didn’t succeed.
Mara felt her way along, Chalmers agreeing with his eyes. “Murphy knew that if we stayed down here, the Hound-Dogs would want to know why.”
“Yeah,” Vat muttered, realizing where Lee was heading. “And half of them will be convinced that this was our play all along.”
Jacks nodded. “I’ve gotta agree. They’re likely to figure that we planet-born folk were looking to become the new masters of R’Bak. Wanted to turn the tables so that all the space folk have to kowtow to us. But especially the SpinDogs, since they’re the ones with the most to lose, genetically.”
Moorefield scoffed. “They can’t be that stupid.”
Tapper sighed. “Actually, that line of thinking probably doesn’t come from being stupid as much as from being panicked. Consider: if Murphy, the very embodiment of all our gambles and theirs, doesn’t show up, that will be bad enough. But if we don’t show up to tell of triumph and lead the conga line at the victory dance? Then what might they think?”
Moorefield’s even greater sigh indicated he’d seen the way the dominoes would fall. “They could think all sorts of things, particularly the ones that hate us already. Maybe they’ll figure that Murphy was in earnest about working with them but we bumped him off to grab the brass ring of planetary control. Or that he’s alive and well and we’re faking his disappearance and maintaining close security so no Hound-Dog operatives can find and liquidate the mastermind who orchestrated their now-inevitable fall from ‘dominion.’”
Vat muttered. “Great. Screwed no matter which way we face. So what do we do?”
Mara looked at Chalmers and they nodded in slow unison. “We do what Murph realized we’d have to do for the safety of all the Lost Soldiers. We go back and report him missing. Some of us come back to look for him.” Her eyes seemed to swim with light. “And either we find him cured and he’s a homecoming hero . . . or what we find doesn’t come back with us, ensuring that his MS is never revealed.”
Jackson leaned toward Lee with a sudden rush of compassion. “Don’t you blame yourself for saying that, Major. You’re just following the script Colonel Murphy wrote. It’s pretty clear it wasn’t just his plan to get us to head back to the spins. He gave us zero trail to follow quickly and left us in a bind where we can’t ask too many questions without tipping our hand.” Jacks shook his head. “He made sure that there was no way that staying behind would do any good. And that would spare us having to decide between that and going back—which he knew we’d have to do for the good of all the Lost Soldiers.”
Chalmers nodded and hoped his eyes were not, as his mom had said, gateways to his soul and his thoughts. Because by the time we get back, Murphy will either have found a cure or died on the search.
And he knew—and intended—that, too.
High Desert of the Sub-Hamain, R’Bak
Rodger Murphy came to another forking branch in the tunnel that led away from the first oasis into which he’d emerged. The one advantage traveling underground in the desert was that the passages were a comfortable temperature and unusually dry, compared to other caves.
Not surprisingly, other creatures had learned to take advantage of its respite from the lethal heat of the surface. Most of them fled the moment they saw his light, particularly when he held it high. Of the two species that had proven more aggressive, the most active resembled beetle-spiders about the size of a lean dachshund. Called zartzhu, they were actually mammals and individuals were barely more dangerous than a large rat. Unfortunately, they usually appeared in what the ancients had referred to as clutches. Fortunately, they were both very stupid and very flammable and having read about them, Murphy had taken special care to have a reasonable supply of willie petes and camp oil.
The other dangerous species was a reclusive creature that resembled a hybrid between a snake and a millipede. Happily, it was reclusive and only wanted to be left alone to hunt its rodentine prey in peace. Less happily, its hide was natural camouflage in the tunnels and its venom was usually fatal—which was why Murphy had equipped himself with a sawed-off shotgun that had been cut-down to the size of an overlarge pistol.
Checking both branches before entering the T-intersection, he spied sigils on the far wall. Murphy hurried to study them—and barely caught himself against the rock as his left leg spasmed and failed to respond, even though he could still feel it. The MS had been getting steadily more pronounced, but if he could just get into the deep desert where the alchemists were known to gather the chyrsalises of Catalysites, then maybe—
He felt metal under the hand holding him up. As his leg began responding again, he staggered back from the wall and shone the light full upon it.
A map, its key points marked by knob-headed metal spikes. It was surrounded by the initials and advice and graffiti of untold millennia-worth of wanderers, black marketeers, and seasonal traders who had hazarded this very path.
He pulled the first copy of his binder out of his knapsack and commenced to reproduce the map in detail. With any luck, the stylized trees clustered off to the left, or east, indicated that the same passage would lead him to the second oasis. If not directly, then, eventually.
Rather like his search for a cure: a winding path without any surety of survival at its end.
Murphy repacked the binder, checked that only one of the gun’s two hammers was cocked, and set off toward the east and whatever fate awaited him there.