Chapter 8: Wolf

In a sense, his clandestine investigation had come to an end.

Finding out who had been tampering with the records in the Sunguard archive had turned out to be impossible, simply because his unseen adversary was too powerful for him to even begin to compete with. His efforts to reveal why Myan Lami had defected had become a dead end, because everyone involved was, quite sincerely, certain the former Special Agent had in fact not violated his genetic loyalty. From what he had learned, Colonel Reynolds was inclined to believe them. And the lost colonists? The answer to that conundrum was forever buried on Eta Boötis 4.

The answer was on Eta Boötis 4…

With a jerk, Colonel Reynolds sat up.

His whole investigation had been conducted on the premise that it had to be clandestine, that he’d somehow, in the end, get away with his secret insubordination. And so he had approached the conspiracy from the shadows, hiding his trail to the best of his abilities as he diligently worked away from his workstation at Sunguard Headquarters to try to resolve the discrepancies he had found.

But he hadn’t been able to keep his investigation secret. The Sunguard already knew about his insubordination. If it hadn’t been for Special Agent McBrian’s intervention, he’d already be sitting in a cell on Mercury rather than at his own desk.

Then he had lied to the face of the Supreme Commander of the Sunguard and still continued his investigation. As acts of insubordination went, you couldn’t really be more overt than that. The truth was it was only a matter of time before he got caught again. All he had to do was ensure he unraveled the root of the conspiracy before that happened.

Which meant time, not secrecy, was paramount.

The answer was out there, waiting for him on New Caribbean. He could just take a Sunguard shuttle there and see for himself.

Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite that simple, Colonel Reynolds reminded himself. As a Sunguard officer he could certainly requisition a ship; that wasn’t the problem. But the hyperspace jump would be plotted by the onboard computer, and that computer would obviously refuse to send him to a system in a no-fly zone.

But he didn’t actually have to go to Eta Boötis. Beta Comae Berenices, for example, wasn’t located in restricted space. He could easily jump there and then find a private contractor willing to bend the rules a bit to take him the last step of the way. The repeated visits there by the Special Agents had more or less proved there was no inherent danger in the system, and with the right kind of pressure applied, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find someone willing to take him to New Caribbean. The flight restrictions were quite recent, after all. If he was lucky, he’d run into a pilot who hadn’t even heard of them yet. And if not… well, the wolf-and-the-sun could be quite intimidating indeed, if applied the right way. It wasn’t like he had to tell the pilot his investigation was unsanctioned.

And going to Beta Comae Berenices shouldn’t in itself raise any suspicions. He was a communications officer assigned to the Arcturus region, after all. No one would bat an eye if he had to go out in the field there now and then. It wouldn’t be the first time he had had to do so, anyway.

Now all he had to do was sneak away without raising Special Agent McBrian’s suspicion.

* * *

He had boarded the small ship from the freight terminal at the edge of Landing Field 27. After removing his helmet, he continued taking off his thick, gray gloves. He was just in the process of unlocking the air seal around his left wrist when a bright voice from the small cockpit made it clear to him that he was not alone on board the vessel.

“Good morning, Colonel Reynolds. Please join me up here when you’re ready.”

As the woman looked back at him over the seat of the pilot’s chair, her long red hair, which she had draped over the headrest, rustled as she moved.

Ellie McBrian.

Special Agent Ellie McBrian.

Biotic Special Agent Ellie McBrian.

It was all over. He had been so close.

What was left for him to say? There was nothing he could do to rescue the situation now. She knew—everything. Of course she did. She had only waited for him to tie the noose around his own neck a bit tighter before she struck.

“Hello,” he said, feeling dizzy.

“Hello,” she giggled in response.

“I understand you’re going on a little trip,” she continued, her face serious once more. “I’d like to accompany you. But we’re not going to Eta Boötis.”

Obviously not, he thought. More like to Mercury.

He said nothing.

“I’ve already taken the liberty of laying in the new course sunward,” she told him as he sank down into the co-pilot’s chair and fastened his seatbelt. “It should be about twenty minutes before we’re high enough in Europa’s gravity well to jump.”

Special Agent McBrian continued to busy herself with the instrumentation on board the craft, checking and rechecking the readouts as she adjusted the parameters of their trajectory. Minutes passed in silence as the red and white ice of the moon receded behind them.

Suddenly, she chuckled and turned toward him.

“Oh, don’t be so skittish, Colonel Reynolds! From the way you look at me, you’d think I’m some kind of vampire here to drink your blood. No one’s out to get you. I just want to show you something.”

He finally worked up the courage to trust his voice again. “Well, where are we going, then?”

“Mars.” Just one word. That was all she said as she winked at him.

“Look, Colonel Reynolds,” she continued after a while. “You don’t like me. I get that. People see what they want to see, and you biologicals are so easily clouded by your past experiences. So quick to place people into buckets—one for ‘us’ and another for ‘them.’ I don’t blame you for disliking me. But you might be surprised to hear that I actually like you.”

First silence. Then, carefully, “Why is that?”

He deliberately withheld the honorific.

She turned to him. “Had you been born seven hundred years ago, before we switched to using biots, you would have been selected for Special Agent training. You’re inquisitive, intelligent, and resourceful. You dare ask questions that you honestly believe need to be raised, no matter the circumstances, and you don’t fall for peer pressure. You follow the evidence wherever it leads you, with little regard for your own safety or convenience. Had it not been for your propensity for racism, you would have been perfect for the role during those early days when Special Agents were still biological.

“Your derogatory views of the other races would eventually have disqualified you, of course. Back then, such opinions were not tolerated the way they are today.”

Colonel Reynolds felt his cheeks burn with humiliation from the scolding the half-millennium-old woman next to him had given him. Whatever happened, he would have to seriously think through his own convictions when this was all over.

Then again, if the biots had a problem with him being racist, he certainly had a problem with them committing mass murder.

“You’re right, ma’am.” He could afford to offer her the honorific now. In his mouth, it became a curse. “I don’t like you. You’re so far above us that you don’t even see us. We’re ants beneath your feet, to be ignored or stamped on at your own discretion.”

His outburst wasn’t exactly professional, and he felt a tinge of embarrassment at his behavior. But all his cards were already on the table, and he had lost the game. Whatever he said or did now didn’t matter anymore.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Colonel,” the Special Agent replied. “Most people don’t, I’m happy to say. You’re quite unique in that regard.”

“It’s your duty to protect the Terran Federation!” he exclaimed, exasperated. “And yet you do nothing when one of your own kills a hundred thousand Federation citizens!”

She looked at him in silence. Her deep green eyes still did not show any sorrow for the lives lost at Eta Boötis.

Finally, she spoke. “Like I said before, you see what you want to see.”

“What do you mean?”

“What did I tell you happened on New Caribbean?”

Nothing. You told me nothing.

“You said the colony had been destroyed and that there was nothing left of it.”

“Almost right. But not quite.”

She smiled at him.

“You don’t have perfect recall, but I do. I said the colony was destroyed, yes. I also said there was nothing left there for you.

“I never said anything about the people living there. Just the place. Myan Lami sabotaged everything there that made it a colony: the communications equipment, the hyperspace-capable ships they had, and the technology needed to repair them. He cut them off from the rest of the galaxy. New Caribbean is no longer a colony of the Terran Federation. They’re on their own now. There’s nothing for you there.”

He felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under his feet. Everything he had assumed… Well, at least he now knew why she had shown no sympathy for the dead when she first presented her findings after returning from her initial fact-finding mission to Eta Boötis: there had been no casualties, and no one to mourn.

“I’m not saying I agree with him doing so,” she continued. “In fact, I don’t. He’s always been prone to rash decisions. But I can understand why he did it, and now that it’s done, we need to handle it.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you were getting close to revealing a much bigger truth. One that we could never allow the Sunguard or the leadership of the Terran Federation to learn. The real secret that your questions about Myan’s genetic loyalties threatened to expose. If you had been allowed to keep digging, sooner or later someone with the necessary expertise would have taken notice of your investigation, and then they would have taken a closer look at his genes. We couldn’t allow that to happen.”

He raised his eyebrow. “So you’re admitting there’s a conspiracy?”

“Of course I’m admitting it!” she chuckled. “Why shouldn’t I? You already know there is one. I would just sound silly if I were to deny it now, wouldn’t I?”

“Now that I know, what will you do to me when we reach our destination? This is one of those ‘I can tell you, but then I’ll have to kill you’ types of situations, right?”

She laughed. A clear, carefree laugh, the kind a good friend might give when you’ve said something truly funny to her.

“You are kidding, right?”

He hadn’t been. But he decided not to admit that to her.

“If I didn’t even want to have you court-martialed, I most certainly wouldn’t want you dead,” she explained. “Besides, you know very well capital punishment is, without exception, prohibited by the Constitution of the Terran Federation.”

“We usually treat the Constitution as more of a recommendation than a rule,” he countered darkly.

The Special Agent just glared at him.

“I assumed what you said to High Admiral Okamoto was a euphemism,” he continued. “You didn’t want to invoke scrutiny by turning me into a martyr.”

She looked at him as if he were a small child. He felt like one.

“Once again, people hear what they want to hear. In this case, the Supreme Commander heard exactly what I wanted him to. But that wasn’t what I said.

“The truth is far simpler: I meant every word. You committed treason because you genuinely care about justice and accountability and the fate of a hundred thousand people. I didn’t want you to get hurt because of a decision I was responsible for making.”

She was a very strange woman, indeed.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While Guardian of the Wolf is entirely standalone and can be read without any prior knowledge, I think you’ll particularly enjoy Soldiers of Heart and Steel and Choices of Steel, both which are prequels to this story, as well as Conscience of Steel and From My Point of View, which are sequels.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider giving it a like.