A Memory in the Black (The New Aeneid Cycle) (33 page)

Michael knelt beside Diomedes and strained
to hear as his former mentor pressed the access cards and the strange rod device into his grip. Even without seeing Diomedes's wounds, the gesture held an unmistakable air of finality. Everything had happened so rapidly and Michael was still reeling, struggling for what to do or say. Michael pocketed the items and tried to make out what the dying man was whispering.

Moments later, after the life
left Diomedes's eyes, the elevator came to a stop.

"What'd he say?" Marc asked just before the guards rushed forward.

"I don't know." Michael shook his head. "I couldn't hear."

Ondrea was going to kill him, Beck thought, if the doctors were right that she'd live.
What kind of psycho pulls a gun on a space station and just starts shooting? She'd called Beck with just enough strength to whisper where she was and that she'd been shot—enough to let him and D.K. find her as they were rushing her to the station's infirmary.

Gideon was with her, babbling like a madman about someone named Isaac and talking about Felix Hiatt and the woman Caitlin like he'd just seen them.
Wherever he thought he was, his memory was breaking, and with Ondrea shot it was enough to make Beck tell Mr. Tseng everything. That, and the fact that Mr. Tseng nearly bit his head off right through the screen demanding answers.

The old man wasted no time ordering the
m to sacrifice Gideon's engrams to save the ones they needed. It was a shame that keeping them both hadn't worked, but that was over now. With Ondrea shot, Mr. Tseng told him more about the project's timeline. There was no way for "Gideon" to survive before he got back. Ondrea would skin Beck alive if she pulled through—if Mr. Tseng didn't can her first.

Hell, maybe the old man would can him too, once this was over, even if he was just following Ondrea's orders
. It wasn't his fault! All he could do now was make sure the project succeeded.

D.K. had helped Beck subdue Gideon so he could make the ad
justments. Now the two watched the shuttle carrying Gideon's container leave for the Moon.

"Well," D.K.
said, "Now we wait."

Beck nodded.
It would be days before Gideon would return. Gideon. They would need to find something else to call him. From everything Ondrea said, Beck didn't think he'd remember enough to think he was anyone at all unless they told him. Poor Ondrea. She'd lost the same brother twice now, hadn't she?

A bead of sweat ran down his back
. Beck wished to God he didn't have to be the one to tell her.

If someone told Felix a month ago that he would witness a shootout on Sunrise Station before the month was out, he'd have— Actually, Felix figured he probably just would've offered to buy the person lunch just to hear the story.

I
t took a lot fewer things than a company forcibly extracting an experimentally augmented, formerly-dead man from his girlfriend's house to sustain his curiosity. Even so, once he and Caitlin managed to half-follow, half-trace them to an orbital flight, he likely needed all of those details to make him buy a ticket with Caitlin that would let them follow. He'd hesitated—it wasn't exactly bus fare—but not for very long. Caitlin had a need to go after them, likely propelled by both concern for Gideon and simple anger at the invasion of her home, and that was enough to persuade Felix.

Besides,
experimentally augmented formerly-dead guy, here. Caitlin's involvement really only served to make it a no-brainer.

Caitlin returned to where Felix sat waiting for Marc and Flynn to be released.
Her eyes were downcast, her frown twisted in frustration. "I went and lost him, Felix."

He gave a sympathetic smile, unable to think of what to say before she went on.

"I followed them as far as the infirmary. They took Ondrea into surgery, but in the confusion I lost Gideon. I think he went in with his sister but they wouldn't let me follow. I didn't see him leave, but by the time I managed a way in, there wasn't any sign of him." She slumped down into the chair beside him. "Ondrea herself will be all right. Or so I heard. I don't know quite what's become Gideon, only that these two blokes were talking about him having left already."

"They say where?"

"They didn't. Not while I was eavesdropping, anyway. And don't think I didn't consider trying to get it out of them directly, but there wasn't any chance. I do know where they're staying here, though I don't know that it will do us much good. If he went somewhere from here, I expect it will be much harder to follow."

She massag
ed her temples with one hand, looking defeated. "I did manage to hear that they'd be waiting for him to come back—and before you ask, I get the impression that it was at least a day, if not more. So I decided to come back here, check in with you, and perhaps apologize for taking you along on a wild goose chase—"

"You don't need to apologize for that," he said, shaking his head. He was poised to say more when she cut him off with a hand to his mouth.

"—despite," she continued with traces of a smile, "your assurance that you wished to go anyway."

"Well, still,
it has been interesting."

She chuckled softly at that.
"Ducks, you threw up in orbit and we both could've been killed earlier today."

"Ah, you know. Life experience
?"

"Speaking of which,
Marc and Michael still in there, I suppose?"

He nodded.
"I haven't seen them since Dio was killed."

"Bollo
cks of a thing to find him here. There're some rather odd linkages, Felix, even with what we know. And," she added with a probing look, "with what you've told me, and haven't told me."

He squeezed her hand on impulse.
"Caitlin, I can't say more than that Marc works for a group with ties to ESA. I would if I could, believe me, but it's not my place to tell. I know they were looking for Dio. Obviously they found him. But I don't have a clue how Gideon fits."

"Perhaps two brains can work on it better."

He smiled. "Trying to make me break my promise?"

"If it involved Gideon, would you?"
It was hardly off her lips before she shook her head. "No, forget I asked that. We've enough to think about."

Felix chuckled a
nd pondered the answer anyway. "Too late."

He hated that he couldn't tell her
—or felt he shouldn't tell her. Felix had hoped Marc and Flynn would get out before she got back so he could have a freer conversation, but maybe it was better this way. He probably couldn't tell her, but he could allow her to figure things out. Moral ambiguity? Who, him?

Felix's hearing picked up a conversation between two security personnel within the office and he cocked his head to make sure Caitlin knew he was listening.

"What is it?"

He held up a hand for a moment and gave her a wink as he listened, hoping for some
useful news and ultimately being disappointed. "Mm. False alarm. Just idle security-folk conversation about hologram projection. Did you know they're still working on technology to make it feasible to project a super-realistic 3-D image that'll stand up to close scrutiny?" He grinned with what he hoped was appreciable cheese.

"Really, ducks. That's terribly fascinating."

"Well your tone says otherwise, but thanks for playing." He winked. "Oh, hey, I think I hear Marc."

It wasn't long before the two men showed up, and Felix and Caitlin stood at once to catch them. They looked no worse for wear, at least.
Felix wondered how Flynn was doing with Diomedes's death.

"Hey," Felix offered.
"Everything okay?"

"Hey, they let us go, right?" Marc returned, quickly steering them away from the security office.

"Mainly just asked us questions," Flynn added. "You know, about how we knew the shooter."

"And what'd you tell them?"

"The truth," Marc said. "That we'd never seen the guy before we stepped onto the elevator."

"Mm," Felix grunted with a glance at Caitlin.
Obviously they didn't want to say too much so close to security. He shelved his question about how Flynn was doing for later. "We should find somewhere we can talk."

Flynn and Marc exchanged a look, and the former said, "Ah, we're kind of in a hurry for the moment, Felix."

"But you can walk with us to the flight deck," Marc added.

Felix frowned.
"Anyway, for what it's worth, I'm sorry. For what you went through, I mean."

Flynn only shrugged at that.
Either he didn't want to talk about it or he wasn't sure how he felt. Felix wasn't sure how he'd be feeling in the kid's place, himself. Heck, he wasn't sure he knew how he felt in his own place.

"Where're you blokes off to, then?"
Caitlin had asked the question before he'd thought to.

"WSC base," Marc told her.
"What about you? I thought I was seeing things when you two showed up."

"Yeah, we're like a bad penny."
Felix grinned. "Well, I am. She's worth considerably more."

"We're
here after Gideon," Caitlin said.

"Gideon?"
That got Flynn's attention. "It's really him?"

"Pretty much."

"Mostly," Caitlin added. "More or less."

"Probably," Felix went on.
"It's complicated."

"Sounds par for the course," said Marc. "What's he doing up here?"

"What are you doing up here?" Caitlin countered with a cagey grin.

"It's complicated, too."

"All the more reason to find somewhere to talk."

Flynn
shook his head. "Sorry, we're really already late as it is."

"I'm sure we'd indulge your curiosity if we could, Felix," Marc agreed.

"We've the time until you get where you're going yet," she tried. Marc and Flynn both looked uncomfortable at that, but said nothing. After a beat, Caitlin went on instead. "Did you know Diomedes was shooting at Gideon before? Or his sister?"

"More likely Gideon," Felix said.

"Who's his sister?"

The ring of Felix's phone interrupted them.
Despite not recognizing the caller, he answered it near immediately.

"
This is Felix Hiatt?
"

"Well,
this
is, yes," Felix answered. "And you are?"

"
You're still on Sunrise Station?
"

With a concerned glance at Caitlin, he held up a hand to quiet the others.
"Everyone's got to be someplace, right? Who wants to know?"

"Mr. Hiatt, my name's Beck
. I work with Ondrea Noble. She's in the infirmary and wants to see you." There was a pause, and Felix could hear a woman's voice, indistinct, in the background. "As soon as possible?"

Ondrea lay propped up in the infirmary bed
and watched the clock tick away Gideon's time. The blocker they'd put her on spared her from the feel of her healing bullet wound (the nano-surgeon pack that weighed her chest down mostly just tingled as the tiny robots worked at rebuilding her flesh and bone) but it did nothing to dull the fear of losing Gideon, or the pain of knowing he was so likely lost already.

But for a chance.

Felix and the woman (Caitlin?) entered the room, expectantly taking in the sight. Beck led them. He, on the other hand, could hardly look her in the eye. Only urgency and being recently shot had kept her from tearing into him the way she wanted to when he told her what he'd helped them do to her brother.

"You can get out now, Beck,
" Ondrea told him. She had no time or energy for more. He skulked out again without a word and closed the door behind him.

Ondrea took a deep breath and turned to the other two.
"Thank you for coming."

"You are all right?" It was Caitlin who spoke first.

"I'll live."

"Then you owe me a new front door,
" she continued, eyes narrowing. "Among other things."

"There's no time for all that.
You have to listen to me."

"Oh?" Caitlin asked.
"You've hardly proven trustworthy, have you, Ondrea?" Felix stood beside her, watching them both.

"Gideon will die if you don't!"

"Where is he?" Felix asked.

"On his way to the M
oon." Ondrea couldn't tell if they were surprised at her answer or just that she'd answered at all. "But there's a lot more than that."

"We appear to be listening."

She focused through the haze of the blocker and began without further preamble. "You seem to know quite a bit about Gid already. You probably know he had a twin brother?"

"Isaac," Caitlin said.

"We didn't know the twin part," Felix added. "Er, well I didn't."

She nodded. Her mind floated
. "Isaac went out one night and didn't come back. Kidnapped. We could afford the ransom but they killed him anyway and got away with the money. We both took it hard. Our parents had both passed away by then so it was just the three of us. Gideon took it harder. He kind of snapped, turning vigilante like something out of a comic book."

The blocker was making her ramble. There was so little time, though maybe they'd be more likely to help if they understood better. "I didn't like what he was doing
. I tried to stop him, but when it was clear he wouldn't listen, I focused on keeping him alive any way I could. Hardware mostly, equipment and repairs. I was terrified of losing him, too. That's why I had to lie to him at your house, and to you. For his own good. If I hadn't—"

"Why you
had
to lie?" Caitlin shot. "Why you had to pulverize him with that thing in his neck and have soldiers haul your own brother off? You say you care about him and you don't even tell him what—"

"I did what I
had to! I'm walking such a fine line with Marquand you don't even know! How'd you like it if they'd just stormed the house outright and took him by force like they wanted?"

Caitlin said nothing to that, slowly steaming,
her arms crossed.

Ondrea went on.
"When Diomedes—when he shot him, and I know you were there for that, that you left him—"

"We were certain he was dead!" Caitlin blurted.
"If there were any way we thought we could have. . ."

Felix put a hand on the woman's forearm
after she went silent. "We did what we could. We called an ambulance. But Caitlin's right. By all rights, he was dead."

Ondrea closed her eyes, hating to even say it.
"He was dead. Gid had a mic on him rigged to transmit back to his place. It shorted out soon after he—" She swallowed. "It was enough to tell me who'd done it."

"Diomedes.
He's— He's the one who shot him, I mean."

Ondrea nodded and blinked
to clear her head. "Before Gid died, he volunteered with one of the projects I'd been hired for at Marquand. It's more accurate to say that I involved him in it. This same project is based on one that Mr. Hiatt himself participated in some years ago."

Felix's face
lit up. "Marquand! I knew it'd been sold to someone! What'd you do with it?"

"If it's detailed information you want, I've no time to give it to you."
She paused, reminding herself not to antagonize them further. "Obviously it deals with memory, but where you had another's surface memories installed into that implant you wear and shunted to your own, we worked on a deeper level, on the theory that a person is equal to the sum of their memories."

"You made a copy of Gideon's
, didn't you?"

She nodded.
"About a month before he was shot."

"Why didn't he know?"
Caitlin asked.

"There's a loss of a few hours or so prior to the point of record.
I told him it was something to do with new aural implants before he came in, then told him the truth right beforehand."

The accusation was plain in Caitlin's face.
"You deliberately told him so he'd forget."

"
Yes, I did! It was a classified experiment! But he when he agreed to it, he knew the truth."

"
The truth that it was a memory experiment, or that you were trying to find a way to bring him back if something happened?" Felix asked.

"You're perceptive, Mr. Hiatt.
So was he. I told him the memory part, I think he figured out the rest." Gid hadn't been fully comfortable with it, but he'd finally agreed anyway, if only to make her happy. She doubted he believed then that anything really could happen to him.

"And yet you still didn't tell him after that," Caitlin snapped.

Ondrea glared. "He knows now. If you're going to keep pointing out mistakes I'm already sorry for, we'll be here a long damned time." She looked away. "But even after Gideon died, I couldn't use his memories. Not immediately. There were technical details to work out: various setbacks, scientific and otherwise. The company had other, 'more promising' things to spend its time and money on. To make a long story short, Marquand recently had need of some very valuable information in the mind of a dead man. Someone else, as coincidence would have it, that Diomedes shot."

Felix's eyebrows went up
. "That guy from ESA in Northgate?" Did Felix already know it was Marquand who ordered the hit in the first place? That Ondrea herself was involved? That it wasn't coincidence?

At first, Ondrea only nodded, choosing her words before going on.
"He was going to sell us some secrets. Marquand got access to the body after he died, but we couldn't just scan his memories. He'd need to have been alive for that." And cooperative. "So I took advantage of the situation and proposed a plan that would also let me help Gideon."

"Gideon has that bloke's brain, doesn't he?" Caitlin guessed.

With effort, Ondrea nodded through the haze. "He was shot in the chest. The brain was undamaged. We overwrote Gideon's memories, his engrams, atop the existing ones on the theory that Gideon, as the conscious personality, would be able to remember the information Marquand needed. If only subconsciously at first. We thought we could bring them more to the surface with hypnosis and other treatments."

"That explains an awful lot," Caitlin said, scowling deeper.

"It didn't work quite right, did it?" asked Felix.

"It did
. At first. Except for some minor things, he's my brother. Now and again pieces of the donor's personality peek through, but he's actually showing less sign of CP." She sighed. "But he couldn't remember the secrets Marquand needed as fast as they needed them. So they pushed. I'm not sure if the pushing caused it or just sped up the process, but things started to break down. You saw it when he passed out.

"His brain can't
handle both engram sets for long on its own. Keep one whole, and you lose the other. We get around the problem by keeping them in a state of flux with—" She cut herself off with a shake of her head that left her dizzy. Such details were useless now. "The point is his brain can't take the stress any longer. Rather than risk losing the secrets they need, Marquand effectively cut the lifeline to Gideon's memories."

"So," Felix started, "
he turns into the donor?"

"There's not enough of the donor left.
He'll likely still have the information Marquand needs, but mostly he'll be a blank. It'll take a few days for that to happen, but if nothing's done my brother'll fade and I won't be able to save him. Marquand's sent him off. He won't be back until it's too late."

"Back from where, exactly?" Caitlin asked.

"Right now he's on his way to the Western Space Consortium's lunar station, but what he knows has to do with an ESA research base. All Marquand could get were the base coordinates, but he's got the layouts and access codes in his subconscious." She'd likely have to give them Omicron's coordinates too, she realized, just to be safe. In for a penny. . .

She tried
to remember what she'd been saying. Access codes. Layouts. "Once he's there and in a situation that triggers the knowledge he'll be able to use them. At least that's the idea. The body they built for him, beyond just looking like Gid, is state-of-the-art. Stealth modes, ECM, combat gear, EMP shielding. They're sending him to break in, steal what secrets he can, and get back."

"What sort of secrets?" Felix asked.

"It doesn't
matter.
If he gets that far it'll be too late!" The room swam a moment, and she paused to regain her bearings.

"You're telling us this to send us after hi
m," Caitlin said. "That's it, isn't it?"

"For whatever reason, you care about what happens to him.
The only other I could turn to is Beck, but he's worthless. And I'm in no shape to go myself."

"Rather convenient, that," Caitlin quipped.
"You keep him in the dark all this time and then get someone else to—"

"I know what I did!" Ondrea shouted.
"I let it go too far, is that what you want to hear? That I should have told Marquand to kiss off instead of taking the long shot that it might possibly turn out okay?"

Caitlin's only response was a dissecting silence that remained unbroken until Felix spoke up.
"So just what is it you're asking us to do?"

"I need you to go to the WSC base and if you can, catch him before he leaves for what ESA's calling the Omicron Complex so you can reverse what they did to him.
" She swallowed. "Please."

"Do you have a way for us to get there?"

"No, you'll have to arrange something. But I can pay for it."

"And just how are we supposed to
'catch' him?"

"You'll have to find a way."

"That's it?" Caitlin snapped. "That's your plan? My cat could come up with a better plan than that!"

"Well Lucifer
is—"

"He'll recognize you," Ondrea insisted, cutting Felix off.
"His memories will be slipping, but he'll still remember you."
I hope.

"What about Marquand?" Caitlin asked.

"To hell with Marquand now! To them Gideon was just a way to help get the information, someone who'd cooperate because he knew me. It was never about their secrets for me. I did this all for Gid." And now maybe all she'd accomplished was to make herself live through his death twice. "I'll throw it away to keep him, too."

"Well that's a lovely speech you must have rehearsed," Caitlin
said, "but I mean will they try to stop us?"

"No.
There's only a few of us from Marquand up here, and they'll all be here with me. You won't see them or need them. I'll give you a modulator for the implant: essentially just a modified palmtop with an interface. All you need to do is plug it in and it'll do the rest."

"What will it do to him?"

She tried to think of how to explain it simply. "Flips what the implant's doing now so it favors Gideon's engrams and abandons the others, then reaccelerates his back to stable levels. You'll need to have it plugged in for about fifteen minutes, but it will tell you when it's done. Just plug it in, wait, unplug it."

"Once we catch up to him, find him, and convince him to let us plug it in at all," Felix said.

"I didn't say it would be easy."

Cait
lin glared. "Yes, there's rather a lot you didn't say since we've known you."

"If you don't hurry there's no chance at all," she pleaded.
"Now are you going to help Gideon or not?"