Black Box (24 page)

The door opened, sliding into its frame, and
Beckett tumbled inside the small room. Standing there, the strut
from a chair in his raised hand, Colonel Nicholas Walker looked
down on Captain Ted Beckett and didn’t know what to make of him.
Just outside, he could see MacDonald...and Roger. Roger was
dead.

“The box…” Beckett was moaning. “…don’t
launch the box…”

Lowering the strut, suddenly feeling the
fool, Walker knelt next to this battered man and looked into his
eyes. There, he saw the truth. Beckett looked up at him, spread one
bloody handprint on the knee of the colonel’s white pants.

“I’m sorry,” Walker said, his voice laced
with sadness. “I’ve already done so.”

Massey was driving. Boone could handle
himself on a bike, but Massey was masterful. He’d grabbed her from
her post in Control and, with little briefing, had dragged her to
the hangar deck where there was still one bike waiting for
them.

Boone was using the transit time to check
his weapons and gird his psyche for the fight to come. It had been
so long since he’d seen any real combat that he wasn’t sure he
could actually handle it. In his mind he concentrated only on his
determination, effectively blocking out what had passed for his
rationale for so long. He could have had a transfer. He could have
had a promotion.

Now he could have self respect.

As they burst into the clearing, he tried to
take in the whole scene at once. The sight of the
Einstein
was distracting enough, a piece of history right in front of his
eyes. In the back of his mind, there was this nagging doubt. What
if he was too late? What if it was all over? Rodrigo would gun him
down and celebrate his death. Had he made the right decision?
Should he turn around?
No!
Boone blocked it all out. He
focused on the scene. He looked for the clues and answered his own
questions. Instead of a historical anomaly he saw a ship with a
blown hatch. He saw Cabrera binding and splinting Tedesco’s arm
while Yamata stood by. He saw Knudson, Goldfarb, and Irvin entering
the hatch.

He didn’t see Beckett anywhere.

Boone jumped off of the bike even before it
had come to a full stop. He leveled his rifle at the three
soldiers. “You men stand down!” he shouted.

They hesitated, looked back at Boone.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Knudson
muttered.

“Drop your weapons. You’re all under
arrest.”

By now, Massey had levered herself off of
the bike and was covering Boone, keeping an eye on Yamata and
Tedesco.

Knudson snorted, but Irvin put out a
steadying hand. “Mr. Boone, you are way out of your league here. I
thought you and the sergeant…”

“Shut up, Irvin!”

“Fuck this,” said Knudson and raised his
rifle, but Massey took the shot at him. Her shot was wide, hitting
the side of the ship, but it sent the message. Even Knudson had the
sense to wait.

“Either drop them or there’s going to be a
massacre,” Boone said.

“No there won’t.” Beckett appeared in the
hatch, helped along by Colonel Walker.

Cabrera looked up from where she was tending
to Tedesco and gasped. “Ted! My God.” She ran right to him, but he
gathered his strength and shrugged her off.

The three soldiers turned away from Boone,
confused. They knew MacDonald had gone into the ship and they knew
that Rodrigo had gone to deal with Beckett. What they saw was very
telling. No Rodrigo. No MacDonald. Just Beckett.

“You lay down your guns now,” he said to
them. “This is over.”

Knudson meant to say something but Irvin
stayed him again. They dropped their weapons. It was amazing that
the authority of even a wounded Beckett could accomplish what an
armed and healthy Boone and Massey could not.

“Massey, go back to the ship right away,”
Beckett ordered, without missing a beat. The fact that Boone and
Massey had shown up didn’t seem to have fazed him in the least.
“Colonel Walker has launched the black box and I want Rollins to
track it as best he can. We’re going after it.”

Boone felt his spirits fall. He’d thought
sure that his involvement was going to mean something. He’d had
such
conviction
. But now it seemed all worthless. Beckett
was alive. The black box had been launched. He was useless as
always.

“Tracking it won’t be necessary, sir,” Boone
said, dejected. “I know exactly where it’s going.”

Beckett separated himself from Walker and
walked over to Boone on shaky legs. “Do you want to explain
yourself, Mr. Boone?”

“It’s going into the Ghost wormhole, sir,
what’s left of it. A black box can fit, even if a ship can’t.”

“How do you know that?” Tedesco blurted
out.

Beckett turned on her, then turned back to
Boone.

“It was Rollins, sir. It’s a long story but
he claims the Ghosts are time travelers. He says he’s one of them.
Chief Hardy and Mr. Tunsley will back me up.”

The implications of what Boone was telling
Beckett were astonishing. Not a word of it was lost. In the back of
his mind, Beckett had been wondering how the
Einstein
had
managed to make a landing without it being reported. He wanted more
answers, but there was no time to get them from Boone.

Indicating the three soldiers standing under
the watchful eye of Massey, Beckett ordered her to shoot them if
they moved.

Appearing to have regained some of his
strength, he walked over to where Tedesco was standing, looking
like a wounded puppy. He felt no sympathy as he lifted his fist and
punched her square in the face. She went down like a house of
cards.

“
Ted!
” Cabrera admonished, rushing
forward, but smart enough not to get down and help the
lieutenant.

Beckett ignored her. “Get up,” he hissed at
Tedesco.

To her credit, lip broken and bloody,
Tedesco found her feet.

And Beckett hit her again.

This time he broke her nose and she went
down so fast that some of the spurting blood hung in the air as she
fell.

He did not tell her to get up again and she
did not try. But she did look up at him, all pretense of innocence
gone. She stared daggers at him and he caught them with his
teeth.

“My father will have you gutted,” she spat,
not knowing whether she hated him or herself more. It was a
testament to her lack of resolve. For as long as daddy was alive,
she would always fall back on him in a desperate situation.

Incensed, rage taking over, he moved and
grabbed Knudson’s gun off of the ground. He had it turned and
leveled at her head in under two seconds.

“No, Ted.
No
,” cried Cabrera, this
time launching herself forward and knocking his gun hand aside. He
shouted in pain as the bullet wound in his shoulder stretched
against the muscle. The cry was so violent and laced with such
anger that Cabrera shrank away from him. “You can’t,” she
mewed.

He turned on her, grabbing her and thrusting
her up against the rumbler. He pressed himself close to her. “Why
can’t I?”

She tried to squirm free, cowed by his fury.
Still, she managed to squeak, “It’s murder.”

Beckett let her go and stood there,
breathing down onto the doctor’s face. “Murder?” he challenged.
“She’s a mutineer. Last I checked, the penalty for mutiny is still
execution.”

When space exploration had first begun, it
could be many months before a ship saw port. If any portion of the
crew mutinied, the captain had the right to assign and carry out
punishment. It was a law that, no matter how outdated it had
become, had never gone off the books.

The last of the color drained from Tedesco’s
face.

Beckett turned and looked at the rest of
them. Goldfarb. Yamata. Irvin. Knudson. He’d saved Knudson’s life a
half dozen times. And then, of course, there was Rodrigo…

“Mr. Boone, go inside and collect Mr. Bonamo
and Mr. MacDonald. MacDonald is a mutineer like this scum so don’t
trust him and don’t get too near him. He is absolutely the most
dangerous person on this planet right now, no matter how injured he
appears to be. If he so much as gives you a dirty look, you have my
permission to shoot him.”

Boone moved inside the airlock, gun raised,
and disappeared from view.

Beckett leveled his gun at the rogue
soldiers and beckoned them away from the ship and away from the
rumbler. They did as they were told. He ordered them face first on
the ground, hands above their heads. They complied, the wind
completely taken from their sails. He told them in no uncertain
terms that if any one of them moved, he would execute all four of
them.

“Samantha, you step away from the
lieutenant.”

Cabrera had found the courage to go to
Tedesco. She hesitated. “What are you going to do, Ted?”

“Just step away.”

Hesitantly, she did so, leaving Tedesco by
herself, still on her knees in the dirt. Beckett ordered her away
from the rumbler. He went right up to her, lowering his gun. “Stand
up.”

Slowly, painfully, she complied.

“Who else?”

She laughed at him. After everything, even
with his gun ready to come up and end her life, she had the
temerity to laugh at him. He couldn’t stop himself from hitting her
again.

“
Ted!
” Cabrera cried.

“Shut up,” he warned her before turning back
to Tedesco. The lieutenant was back on one knee, a thick line of
blood dribbling out of her mouth. “Soames?” he asked her.

She nodded.

“Ukpere? Applegate?”

Looking up at him with cold eyes, she nodded
again.

“Tunsley?”

She laughed again, but this time it was more
cynical and less mocking. “Who’d want him?”

He ignored the comment. “Dorian?”

“No,” she said. “She’s been with you for too
long.”

“And Rodrigo hasn’t?”

Tedesco dropped from her knee into a sitting
position. She wasn’t about to get up again. She was just strong
enough to finish the conversation, but she didn’t think she could
stand being hit again.

“Who else?” Beckett asked, crouching down so
he could face her.

She looked at him with her darkening eyes
and bloody lips. “What’s the difference? We’re not mutineers.”

“Assassins then,” he hissed. “Pick your god
damned poison.”

“Our orders come from the
Admiralty,
”
she argued.

“I don’t fucking care if they come from God
Himself. I want to know who was involved.”

“It was half the crew, you stupid
asshole.”

Beckett shoved her to the left and reached
onto her belt for her reader. Tedesco didn’t even protest as he
brought it to life and began scanning through the documents. Most
of the sensitive ones were sealed with a password, but Tedesco gave
it up quickly enough. There was nothing left to hide. Suddenly
Beckett had the names of everyone who knew about the conspiracy. It
really
was
half the crew. If he threw them all off of the
ship, everyone else would be strung out covering the shifts just so
they could get home.

Lowering his arm, he looked up to the sky
and just breathed. “I don’t understand,” he asked no one in
particular. “Why would you do this?”

“It’s about the history,
Captain
,”
Tedesco answered.

As if just remembering that she was there,
his head snapped down so that he could look at her again. “What
does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means everything, you ignorant prick.
You’re so stupid. You think history is all in the past but it’s
not. So much of it hasn’t even been made because we don’t have time
travel yet.”

“What?
What?!
What are you talking
about?” He came so close to hitting her again that, later, he would
actually be unsure of whether or not he’d done it.

Colonel Walker had edged over and was
listening as well. His face was unreadable. He was suffering from
severe emotional shock. Every member of his crew had been
slaughtered and he was only now beginning to understand that
nothing he could have done would have prevented it.

Except preventing the launching of the black
box.

Tedesco continued. “If we want history,
our history
, to follow a certain course of events, to lead
us exactly where we are, we need to pick up the clues and
make
it happen
.”

Beckett looked at Walker and back at
Tedesco. He glanced at the reader in his hand and thought of the
log he’d been listening to since this mission started. Walker’s
log. He had long since deduced that the
Admiralty
had set up
the whole situation, manipulating the crew into massacring the
people of the
Einstein
but he still didn’t know what course
of events they were trying to manipulate. And it was clear on his
face.

“Tyler Coddit went out to look for the
Einstein
,” Tedesco explained. “He never found it and went
home to lead the fight for our liberation from the eXchengue.” She
turned her attention to Walker. “I’m sorry Colonel, but you could
never go home. If you go home, Colonel Coddit never goes out and we
might end up subjugated by the eXchengue forever.”

Walker, who had never heard of the eXchengue
and didn’t know the history of a world that had experienced two
hundred years in his brief absence, knew that she was right. He
understood what she was saying. He was sharp enough to realize that
it was the black box that had given his crew’s murderers their
information. He was savvy enough to realize that he had been
allowed to live while his crew was murdered so that he could be
duped into launching the black box.

He was trained well enough to accept
responsibility for those actions and take the blames for all of
those deaths.

“I get it,” he said, stepping slowly and
dejectedly past the captain. He looked into the lieutenant’s
bloodied face and asked, “You couldn’t let us go home. But why did
we have to die?”