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Contents

EPILOGUE

So that’s my story. I know it’s hard to believe, but every word of it is true, and a lot of it has been independently corroborated by now. Satellite footage of the Seraph rising into the upper atmosphere before vanishing has been all over the infostreams. The blast from its weapon kicked up enough dust that it disrupted the normal weather patterns of southwestern Hyperborea. The seismic effects of the blast were recorded for hundreds of miles.

If the government was ever inclined to cover it up, they never had the opportunity.

There’s more to the story, of course, but that’s the end of the interesting parts. A few miles up the highway we were picked up by a Commonwealth Defense Force aircraft and brought in for debriefing. Deitrik tracked me down after a few days, overjoyed to learn that I was alive, and dying to know what had happened to me. I was happy to see him, too. The Baron chuckled when I told him about Leonard Steinbeck’s claim that he’d been captured.

As for the Security Intelligence Service, holy hell did this incident make a splash. When the government of Nova Columbia learned that the SIS had sanctioned experimentation on alien technology without so much as notifying them, it became the biggest political scandal in the history of the colony. Nova Columbia expelled the SIS from the planet and even threatened to withdraw from the Terran Confederation if the matter wasn’t investigated thoroughly. That investigation is still ongoing, but so far Leonard Steinbeck hasn’t been found.

They never found Professor Zephram Farseer, either, and they think he probably died in the destruction of Site 471. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for from that incident, though many more escaped. Blanche Delacroix turned state’s witness and testified in exchange for a reduced sentence. Ascencion Planetary Holdings Group was bankrupted by all the fines and lawsuits, and their assets were auctioned off. Good riddance, I say. That damned company had too much of a hold on Nova Columbia even when they weren’t conducting illegal research.

For my part, I was offered a pretty substantial sum of money from the Commonwealth government if I agreed keep the details of the whole thing to myself for a set period of time. In twenty-five years or so they’ll declassify the details and I’ll be free to publish my memoirs. In the meantime, I’m keeping the agency open. I like what I do, and like to think I’m pretty good at it. Besides, it isn’t just my legacy, it’s Victor’s. Had he not talked me into coming to work for him all those years ago, none of this would have been exposed, and God only knows what would have happened with the Seraph. All the money I had coming in allowed me to not only give Lily a well-deserved pay raise, but to hire Dante on as a consultant as well. Those two make a good team.

There was one thing I decided to do, though, something that I hadn’t done in years. I took a long and badly needed vacation.

Six weeks or so after the incident, I was in a luxury hotel suite fixing two drinks. I’d booked two weeks at an oceanside resort a few hundred miles south of Epsilon City, on the coast of the Equatorial Ocean. Despite being the dead of winter, the weather was warm, the beaches were spectacular, and palm trees were swaying in the evening breeze.

The company was pretty easy on the eyes, too.

“Hey, beautiful,” I said, stepping out onto the balcony. “Come here often?” Dagny smiled at me and gave me a quick kiss. I handed her the cosmopolitan I’d fixed for her and kept a small glass of Darwin Ducote for myself. She was a knockout in the short, turquoise, floral-pattern dress she wore, standing on a pair of white stilettos. We’d been there for a week already and she’d gotten herself a nice tan. Night was falling and, as she often did, she was out on the balcony gazing up at the stars. “Thinking about Cassandra?”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I wonder where she is, what she’s experiencing now. I look out at all these stars and wonder if she’s visiting one of them right now.”

“It’s a lot to process,” I said. “You’ve been through a lot even without the business with the Seraph.”

She rested her head on my shoulder. “It’s not all bad. I found you.”

“I consider myself to be pretty lucky, too,” I said, and put an arm around her.

“You think we’ll ever see Cassie again?”

“I don’t know. She said she’d come back someday.”

“Wouldn’t that be something? An ancient alien returns with a human ambassador.”

“I’d say stranger things have happened, but honestly, I don’t think that’s true. That might be the strangest thing to ever happen in human history.”

“Here’s to Cassie,” Dagny said, raising her glass.

“Cheers,” I said. We clinked our glasses together and drank the booze. “Now . . . how about we head downstairs and find some dinner?”


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Framed