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Chapter Twenty-Seven

Thomas Stade strolled down the sidewalk of New Frontier’s Shelf One, his new face shadowed under a black hoodie. A car drove past, as oblivious to the temporal intruder as all the others, and he kept walking toward the Oasis apartment complex at the end of the darkly lit street. His attack virus swept ahead of him through the infostructure, purging his image from any recording devices.

He put his hands in his pockets and wrapped his fingers around the textured grip of the PA20N “Whisper.” Unlike most Popular Arsenal weapons, the Whisper fired silent, subsonic darts that injected the target with neutralizing microbots. Once his victim was paralyzed, it wouldn’t take Stade long to chop him up for disposal.

Disposing of the body would present a challenge, but Stade had plenty of time. No one would ever suspect the victim was dead, because Stade intended to take his place, and he’d transport the body to his shrouded v-wing one piece at a time before consigning the remains to Saturn’s depths.

No one would ever know.

It would be the perfect crime.

Yet, he felt no elation. None of this should have been necessary!

You fool, he raged in his mind. You damn fool. We almost had it. Almost had her again! We were so close!

How had it all come apart? How had he been reduced to this? To nothing more than a common criminal with access to uncommon tools? The job had seemed so simple at the start. Build the time machine for Trinh and use the maiden flight to collect his “payment” before the syndicate took ownership. That was all he had to do, and he’d done it, by God! He’d fulfilled his end of this Faustian deal.

But that fool ruined everything.

Anger simmered in his mind, but he wrapped it up tight and kept walking. There would be time to vent later. Now, he had yet another distasteful task to do. The plan was in shambles, his coconspirators were both dead, and this was his last chance to shake SysPol off his trail. If he failed now, it would all be for nothing. All his sacrifices, all the stains on his consciousness.

All to see her again.

All for nothing.

He reached the Oasis cul-de-sac and took the path on the right to the second building. The doors split open, and he rode the elevator up to the fifth-floor balcony. His attack virus reported in; the apartment’s surveillance systems were as brain-dead as ever, and he walked around the fifth balcony until he came to room 516.

He sent the keycode, and the door slid open. He stepped in, locked the door shut behind him, and drew the silenced pistol.

A part of him considered what he was about to do. The black thought weighed down his feet, and he hesitated in the living room, pistol aimed at the floor. Yes, he’d killed before, but this was different in so many ways, and so very, very personal. The victim slept just around the corner, and circumstances demanded he bloody his own two hands this time.

It mattered not. Death was death, and his hands were already caked in blood. This time would be no different.

Any price for her, he thought again, letting his mantra from the last two months gird him with strength, fortify his will.

He strode into the bedroom and raised the pistol until the barrel came level with Delacroix’s slumbering form. His aim shook, and he braced the pistol with a second hand. His vision blurred as tears welled up in his eyes, draping the dark room in a watery haze.

“This is all your fault,” he choked, and pulled the trigger.

The subsonic dart shot out of the barrel, but it never reached the bed. Instead, it flattened against an unseen shape and dropped to the carpet.

Stade caught the briefest impression of sudden, powerful motion, and the pistol flew out of his hands. Light refracted around a humanoid shape between him and the bed, and the ghostly image coalesced into a lithe humanoid machine with light blue armor and a broad door shield attached to one arm.

Something struck him from behind, and he pitched forward, unable to escape the grasping prog-steel arms looping around his limbs. He collapsed to his knees, metal binding his arms and legs. The naked core of a LENS floated in front of him and shined a bright light on his face.

Delacroix cast the sheet aside and stood, but it wasn’t Delacroix at all! It was that SysPol detective! The STAND combat frame stepped aside and allowed the detective to approach.

“We finally meet in person, Stade,” Isaac Cho said, hands clasped in the small of his back. “But that isn’t your real name, is it…Joachim Delacroix.”

“You know!” Stade gasped.

“Indeed, we do. I’m afraid the past version of yourself received an urgent message from Negation Industries, calling him back to the factory. A fake message from us, of course, but his presence here might have been…problematic with you trying to kill him.” The detective nodded to the LENS. “Cephalie, take him away.”

The drone core rejoined Stade’s bindings and injected his body’s circulatory maintenance loop with powerful microbots that consumed his own onboard colony and disabled his data connections. He still had the attack virus, but it was useless to him now. The LENS’s graviton thrusters powered up, lifted him off the floor, and hauled him toward the exit.

He hung his head in acceptance of utter defeat. And in an odd sort of…relief. This wasn’t the end he’d wanted, but at least it was all over now.

* * *

Isaac checked on Stade through the virtual window. The prisoner sat at a table in a makeshift holding cell on board the Kleio, head hunched and limbs bound by the ever-vigilant LENS floating behind him. He gave the impression of a broken man who no longer cared what happened to him, but Isaac wasn’t about to take any chances. The Kleio had imposed strict data isolation on the room, and Cephalie continued to monitor the microbots she’d injected into his maintenance loop. He wasn’t simply a prisoner on the ship, but a prisoner in his own body.

The Kleio had returned to the True Present, and they would arrive at Kronos Station soon to off-load the criminal, but Isaac had unfinished business to see to first.

“Shall we?” Susan asked, back in her regular synthoid now that the Kleio had completed its repairs for her.

“Let’s.” Isaac palmed the door open and took one of the two seats opposite Stade.

The criminal never looked up.

“Hello, Stade,” Isaac began. “Or should I call you Delacroix now?”

“Stade will do. I’m…not that man anymore.”

“Suit yourself.” Isaac opened his case file and scrolled down to his prepared questions.

“What do you want?”

“To wrap up the loose ends. We know the basics of what you did, but I have a few lingering questions I’d like you to answer. Given the weight of evidence against you, your only hope is to throw yourself at the mercy of the court, which means it’s in your best interest to start cooperating with us.”

“Who cares? It doesn’t matter anymore. I lost and you won. Isn’t that enough?” Stade shook his head. But then he paused and looked up. “Except for one thing.”

“What would that be?”

“How did you catch me?”

“Answer my questions, and I’ll tell you.”

“Fine.” Stade sighed and lowered his head again. “Ask your questions, Detective.”

“Let’s start with the most basic one. Why?”

“For Selene.”

“Your dead wife?”

“Yes. I did it all for her. Have you ever been in love, Detective? Ever known someone who fits you so perfectly you believe you were destined to be together? Ever loved someone who filled your days with so much joy, you realized you were living a stagnant half-life before you met her? That’s what it was like with me and Selene. Before her, I existed. After I fell in love with her, I lived.”

“And then she was killed in the Dynasty attack on the L5 Hub.”

“I couldn’t accept that. Not when I knew a way to bring her back to life. It’s so simple. ‘Temporal replication.’ Go back in time, pick up the past version, and bring it to the True Present. That’s all you need to do to rewind a tragedy like Selene’s.”

“Possible,” Isaac said, “but illegal.”

“The Valkyrie Protocol be damned!” Stade spat. “Mark my words: Schröder, Andover-Chen, and all the others will use temporal replication if they have to. They may sit in judgment over me now, staring down at me from their ivory towers, but they’ll break their own vaunted law when the time comes. You just wait and see.

“You know how I know this? Because they’ve done it before. We didn’t have time to finish the c-bomb, and so what did that hypocrite Schröder order us to do? He had us replicate the weapon over and over again until we fatigued the outer wall of our own universe!”

“Ah,” Isaac remarked. “The doctor mentioned having to ‘cheat’ during the Dynasty Crisis. This must be what he referred to.”

“The lunacy of it all! That’s when it became clear to me. The Gordian and Valkyrie Protocols will only be enforced when it’s convenient. Why shouldn’t I be able to save my wife—an action with almost no risk—when Schröder can march all of us up to the very edge of doom?”

“And based on that belief, you decided to bring back your dead wife. What then?”

“I knew I couldn’t use any of the Gordian Division time machines. Everything is too closely monitored back at Argus Station. I’d never get away with it. That’s when I decided to look elsewhere for assistance. Fortunately, I was heavily involved in the development and construction of Gordian’s next-generation TTVs, and the bidding process brought me into contact with individuals who possessed…flexible outlooks on the law.”

“Such as Melody Quang.”

“Our deal was a simple one. I would provide the technical expertise needed for Trinh to build a time machine in secret, and I would use the maiden flight to travel back in time to just before the Dynasty attack on L5, rescue Selene, and bring her to the True Present. In the end, both Quang and I would have what we wanted.”

“Then your sexual relationship with Quang was…?”

“A fabrication. We knew we would need to stay in regular contact, which involves a certain degree of risk if people became suspicious and started snooping around. We decided to use the guise of her preying on the ‘poor, vulnerable widower’ to mask our communications and meetings in the event someone nosed around.”

“Did you receive support from other Trinh employees?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. That’s not to say others weren’t involved, but I worked exclusively with Quang.”

“I see.” Isaac made a note. “How did your deal with Quang proceed at first?”

“Well enough, though I had my work cut out for me. I needed to be in two places at once in order to avoid suspicion from my colleagues in the Gordian Division, and the easiest way for me to do that was to illegally copy my connectome.

“About two months ago, I took a ‘vacation’ to the Atomic Resort, though my real purpose was to establish my illegal copy. Quang provided me with the Thomas Stade alias and put me in contact with Adrian Kvint. The Oortan sold me a copy-protection codeburner, which I used to break the protective locks around my own mind and copy it. One of the resort brothels constructed my new synthoid, and with that, ‘Thomas Stade’ was brought to life.”

“So, that’s why you couldn’t meet Adrian Kvint in person the first time,” Isaac noted. “You didn’t exist yet, and you wanted to avoid Kvint meeting Delacroix in person. And afterwards, as you said, you could literally be in two places at once.”

“A useful talent when breaking the law,” Stade said. “The original Delacroix kept up appearances at Gordian and waited for an opportunity for us to grab some exotic matter, which Negation Industries provided with that marginally failed impeller. Quang bought up the exotic matter and had it shipped to me at Kraken Mare, where I handled the time machine’s fabrication using Trinh’s construction drones. I kept in touch with both using another alias—Ōdachi—as an added layer of protection, much in the same way we used the fake relationship with Quang.”

“It sounds like you almost pulled this off,” Isaac said. “What went wrong?”

Delacroix went wrong,” Stade growled. “The original. The idiot got cold feet. Started talking to Andover-Chen about the dangers inherent to temporal replication. Ridiculous! We weren’t talking about large-scale replication industry like the Dynasty had. This was just one person! Barely fifty kilograms of matter!”

“Did you explain this to him?”

“You better believe I did! We met in Free Gate right before he was due to transmit back to Earth. I tried to talk some sense into him, but the idiot wouldn’t see reason! Kept going on about how frail the SysGov outer wall is and how the Valkyrie Protocol needs to be followed as strictly as possible.

“I explained to him we were in too deep. We needed to stick to the plan. Trinh expected a time machine from us, and if we didn’t deliver, they’d throw us to the wolves! And then where would we be? In jail or worse, with Selene still dead! I couldn’t let that happen!”

“So, what did you do about it?”

“I lied to him,” Stade said. “I put on a kind act and told Delacroix we should both try to calm down and think it over. We’d see each other again when he returned for the inspection rounds. We could talk it over then, but it was absolutely critical neither of us did anything stupid before then. He agreed, and we went our separate ways on seemingly amicable terms.”

“But you had other plans.”

“Of course I did. I knew I couldn’t risk Delacroix blabbing to Gordian. He was always the weak link in our scheme. It was his job to keep up the normal act while I got to spend the rest of my life with Selene. He would carry the burden to the end of his days while I reaped the reward of our crime. I should have known he—I—would find that hard to swallow. His focus on the replication dangers was simply how his doubts manifested.”

“When did you decide to kill him?”

“Right before I told him to calm down. After I logged off Free Gate, I arranged another meeting with Kvint, traveled to the Atomic Resort, and purchased the deadliest attack virus he offered. A transceiver accident seemed the cleanest, most deniable way to proceed, and the virus would handle most of the heavy lifting, keeping me clear of the crime. Fortunately, the timing of DescentCon this year provided me with numerous suitable candidates to serve as the vector. I narrowed the list based on public records of future guest appearances and eventually settled on an artist named Neon Caravaggio. I met the man at his booth and infected him. The virus did the rest.”

“Did Quang support your decision to kill Delacroix?”

“She didn’t know until the deed was done. After that, she had no choice but to support me.”

“What about the infosystems in Delacroix’s apartment?”

“I couldn’t risk him leaving evidence behind, intentional or otherwise, but I also couldn’t move on his property too quickly. I had to wait until Delacroix was dead because if gangsters cleaned out his apartment while he was away, he would have been notified. That might have made him suspicious, which could have led to him changing his transit schedule or even canceling it entirely. I needed him back on Janus, so I had no choice but to wait.”

“It seems your caution was justified,” Isaac said. “Delacroix changed his apartment keycode before he left. He may have already suspected you were lying to him.”

“But he wasn’t suspicious enough,” Stade pointed out. “Quang tidied up Delacroix’s files on his syndicate desk, but there was nothing I could do about the local files at Negation Industries. Delacroix was supposed to keep our business off those towers, but we had no way to verify this. We simply had to risk it and hope for the best. After the virus took out Delacroix, I used the Ōdachi alias to mobilize the Fanged Wyverns, and they emptied the apartment while making it look like a petty, unrelated crime.”

“And then we came into the picture,” Isaac said.

“Yeah,” Stade breathed. “You did. I had a program searching for news on the case, and Quang kept me abreast of developments on her end. For a while, I thought we’d stumped you, so imagine my surprise when I learned your partner would star in an exhibition match at the Atomic Resort.” He chuckled sadly. “I mean, really! You weren’t there to compete! You were wheeling and dealing with the Oortans, and I needed to put a stop to that.”

“Did you provide the combat frame schematics to Thorn?”

“Yeah, that was me. I figured the death of an Admin officer would trump my case and bury you neck deep in unpleasant politics, providing the delay I so desperately needed. But Thorn didn’t have the balls to go through with it, so I knew it was only a matter of time before the noose tightened. Quang visited Kraken Mare during her Titan trip, and I infected her with the virus there and set it to deploy when she tried to leave the spaceport.”

“Then it was you who killed Quang.”

“That’s right.”

Isaac made a quick note. “We suspected as much but hadn’t confirmed it yet. What happened after you eliminated your partner?”

“The rest of my time was spent finishing the time machine as fast as I could. Any drones I didn’t need, I set up as a makeshift speed bump for when SysPol and SSP inevitably came knocking.”

“And that might have been enough,” Isaac noted, “if we hadn’t called in the Kleio for support.”

“That was another shock,” Stade confessed. “I figured they’d be over a million kilometers away when I phased out, which would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to track me. And even if they knew I’d left, the baffles would mean they’d never find me. Should never have found me. But instead, they were right next to the plant when I phased out!”

“And the rest was you trying to give us the slip one last time.” Isaac made one final note, then closed his interface. “Thank you, Stade. That was most informative.”

He rose from his seat.

“Wait,” Stade said. “I need to know. How did you figure out I was Delacroix? How did you know where to find me on Janus?”

“Agent Cantrell?” Isaac asked. “Would you like to do the honors?”

“Crumbs,” she said simply.

“What?” Stade asked.

“Prog-foam crumbs. You have a bad habit of picking chunks off your chairs.”

Crumbs?

“Once we knew you were a copy of Delacroix,” Isaac elaborated, “your plan to hide on Janus seemed obvious. You were going to replace Delacroix, the one person in all of Janus you could emulate the best. Because, ultimately, all you’d be doing is retracing your steps.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Stade stared blankly at the table. “That’s how you found me?”

“Why don’t you ponder this—and all your other bad habits—while you await your trial?”

Isaac and Susan left the room.

“You found me because of fucking crumbs!” Stade blurted as the door slid shut.


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