Citadel: First Colony (19 page)

“They’d use their guns, of course,” the man smiled. “No one uses their bare hands to kill anymore, Mr. Paris. You of all people know that.”

Paris said nothing and stood silent. He was numb. He was dead, as far as he was concerned. After more than two years of incarceration, a sensational trial, throngs of reporters trying to get some sound byte out of him, Paris found he had very little left to say. He had said enough for his lifetime.

“I have an offer for you,” the man said. “One that you’ll take. Because I’m not going to give you any choice.”

“ok,” Paris said.

The man’s eyes widened with amusement. “They really have beaten you, haven’t they? You’re not half as feisty as you were two years ago.” He waved the comment off. “No, no. I’m wrong. You were a smart ass, but you were always quiet in your way. Always logical. And when they blew up
First Colony
you were right there, arguing calmly that you had nothing to do with it.”

Paris had been prepared to let the man keep talking, to let him say anything he wanted. He didn’t have the strength left in him to fight. He had spent far too many days and nights staring at the walls of the cell that confined him. He had spent too many hours with only a book as a companion—the old-fashioned kind, with paper pages that were already become rare, even a hundred years ago.

Paris had been robbed of anything of value—his work, his ability to produce—for far too long to care what anyone said to him anymore. But what he had not been prepared for was the word “they.”

“Who?” Paris said. He was suddenly aware that his mouth had gone dry and his voice had the croaking, rasping quality of someone who has been lost in the desert, without shade or water, for some time.

“They call themselves ‘Earth First.’ Ever hear of them?”

Paris nearly spat on the ground at the sound of the name. “Of course,” he said sourly. “Everyone thinks I’m one of them.”

“But you’re not, are you?”

Paris eyed the man closely. What was his game? What was he trying to get out of this conversation? Some sort of confession? But that would be useless, since Paris was already sentenced to life in prison. No possibility of parole. No hope of seeing the world outside his cell.

Except that here he was, standing in an open field with the sun on his shoulders and a slight breeze cooling the sweat on his forehead. “What do you want?” Paris asked.

The man smiled. It was the sort of mirthless smile that said there was no real joy behind it. “Earth First has taken up your cause, Mr. Paris. They have a plan to break you out of prison. They plan to help you escape.”

Paris said nothing. What
could
he say? Obviously the authorities knew about the plan and wouldn’t let it happen. Unless ... “You’re going to let them break me out?”

The man laughed. “Not hardly. No, we’ve already put operatives on the inside, both in the organization and in the prison where we’re keeping you. Earth First thinks they have their own inside man, but he’s working for us.”

Paris blinked. “I’m confused, then. What is it you want? Why are you telling me about this if you’re going to prevent them from freeing me?”

“I didn’t say they were going to free you, Mr. Paris. I said they were going to break you out. They want to remove you from the prison and use you as a symbol for their cause. Of course, a symbol that adamantly refuses to agree with them or, even worse,
opposes
them ... they can’t have that.”

Paris caught on immediately. “They want to kill me.”

“A martyr for the cause,” the man smiled. “I bet you never realized how important you would become, back when you were helping build the colony ship.”

Paris felt weak. He had thought he was prepared for any horrific thing that might happen to him. He had prepared to live out a quiet existence in solitude. He had prepared for limited human contact, none of it filled with love or friendship or companionship. He had prepared to one day be a hopeless old man, clutching some oft-read book in his wrinkled hands. But he now found that he hadn’t really prepared to die. He had never given serious thought to dying because his sentence had been life.

“So ... I don’t ... ”

The man held up a hand to calm him. “Don’t worry, Mr. Paris. We have no intention of letting you die.” He waited and Paris felt a bit of relief. It must have been what the man was waiting for. “Of course, we have no intention of letting you live, either.”

Paris blinked. He thought for a moment, trying to puzzle together this thing that was happening to him. His life had taken a turn two years ago, and he’d lost control of it. He’d been accused of murder. Many murders, actually. More murders than any single man had ever really been accused of before. The accusations were enough to end him. The public outrage, the desire for an overcrowded world to put the blame on
someone
, had taken over, and in the process, his life had ended. In that sense, anyway.

“What is it you want here?” Paris said finally. He was annoyed, and his annoyance showed in his voice. He took a slight step forward, and the two guards let their hands go to the guns hidden in their jackets.

“Mr. Paris, I’m offering you a chance to start a fresh, new life. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Paris paused. “What? I ... ”

“A new life, Mr. Paris. A new start. Of course, some changes will have to be made. Your name, for one. That’s easy. Your face. That will take some doing. We have plastic surgeons who are part of witness relocation, so they can be trusted to be discreet. Most of the time. But you, you’re a special case.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Paris said. His mind was numb. His body was numb. He could barely think.

“Of course not, it’s a lot to process. I didn’t fully understand it myself, but the orders were quite clear. And they came from the highest source.” He laughed. “I don’t even have the clearance to
verify
them. In fact, I have nothing but an encoded message with a security level so high that I had to have my computer destroyed after reading it.” He shook his head, obviously bitter about the destruction of his equipment.

He paused, thoughtful. “I’ll explain it to you as best I can. My orders are clear. We can’t let them make a martyr of you. And if we leave you in prison, they will eventually find a way to get to you. One guard with a gambling problem or one cafeteria worker who sympathizes with their cause, and you’d be a corpse. The public would never believe that it wasn’t in our power to protect you at all times. They’d assume that we’d circumvented the laws on capital punishment and allowed you to be executed. Earth First would have its martyr, and we’d have egg on our face. And frankly, since we’re still struggling with the bad PR of the
First Colony
explosion, your death is something we just don’t need.”

Paris was calmer now. His brain was shifting back to normal speed. “Won’t you be accomplishing the same thing?” he asked. “If you make me disappear, won’t you be giving Earth First what they want?”

“Of course not,” the man laughed. “You ever hear of Elvis? Amelia Earhart? Michael Jackson? People still think they’re alive somewhere, living in robot bodies or clones or magic fairy circles. No body means no answers. And in the absence of answers, people make up their own stories. Oh, yes, you’re right to an extent. There will be many who assume we’ve killed you. But they won’t find any credible witness who has seen your body. And there will be just as many, probably more, that will assume there was some sort of government conspiracy to let you out of prison and place you somewhere in the world with a new identity.” The man laughed again. “It will be pretty amusing, actually. There will be sightings of you all over the world. The tabloids will run doctored photos of you having lunch in some dive diner in London or Istanbul or Cleveland. You’re going to be the new Elvis! People will look for you everywhere, and they’ll be sure to find you.”

“Except you don’t plan for me to be found,” Paris said. “You’re not going to kill me because then someone might discover it’s me, and you’ll end up doing Earth First’s dirty work for them. But you have another option.”

“Everyone always said you were smart. I knew you’d get it right away.”

“Cryogenic stasis?” Paris asked.

The man nodded. “You’ll be put on ice, Mr. Paris. You’ll be out of our hair and out of the public’s eye in a place where only the most paranoid would suspect you to be.”

Paris thought about this. It was actually not a bad plan. He would get a new identity and a new face. And then, he would go to sleep. Almost like being dead, only he would wake up later, in a world that was no longer looking for him. “How long?” he asked.

“We thought we’d be conservative about it,” the man smiled. “Say, a century?”

Paris felt his skin go clammy. He was pale and light-headed. He stumbled a bit, and the guards, thinking he was lunging, drew their weapons.

The man signaled them that it was ok, and they holstered the guns, reluctantly.

“You ok?” he asked, and for the first time, Paris thought there might be real emotion in the man’s voice. Real concern. It was the first Paris had experienced in two years.

“Yeah,” he said.

The man helped him stand straight again. He left a hand on his shoulder, as if he were somehow supporting him, helping him stand. “Mr. Paris, I want you to know that we’re fully aware that you’re innocent.”

Innocent
? That was a word Paris had thought never to hear again. Not, at least, as it applied to him.

“We’ve known for some time, actually. But the way it went, there was nothing we could do. Earth First did too good of a job framing you. They didn’t even have anything against you in particular. They hated the program, that’s all. They’re non-progressionists. This business of moving out into the stars, colonizing other worlds, it’s a danger to them. They feel that we’ve only just recently gotten our act together on
this
world. They think that once we fracture ourselves, we’ll fall apart and be at war with each other again.”

Paris had heard all of this before. He’d read about it, studied it. Too late, of course. He’d only looked at all of it since being accused of the worst crime in human history. He was touted as somehow being a part of this insanity, this refusal to move forward. It was so
different
from him, so
outside
of him, so
opposite
of him that when he’d first read an article detailing his supposed involvement in the organization, he had literally laughed out loud, and then he’d vomited. How could anyone believe that he, a man who had spent every waking moment working towards the colonization of other worlds, could ever be a part of something as profane as Earth First?

“We know you’re innocent,” the man said again. “That’s one of the reasons why some of us felt we should give you another chance. The government isn’t quite as corrupt and evil as everyone thinks it is, you know. A world government is hard to run without some sort of corruption, but we’re all as human as you are. You have more supporters than you realize.”

Paris couldn’t take this. He spun around, looking for the van that had carried him here. He wanted to leave this man, to go back to his cell, to sit in solitude and pay for the crimes of a useless organization that had an insane goal. But the van was gone. Another vehicle had taken its place. A limo.

“Mr. Paris,” the man said from behind him. “Your new name is Thomas. It was my idea to let you keep your middle name. Sort of ... well, sort of an
homage
of sorts. In a minute, you’ll take a seat in that limo, and it will take you to a facility where your face will be altered. And after two months of recovery, you’ll be put in a stasis chamber. A hundred years from now, you’ll wake up and ... well, what you do from there is pretty much up to you. Maybe you and Walt Disney can have lunch, eh?” The man laughed and, strangely, put his hand on Paris’s shoulder.

It felt as cold as space.

“
You
ok?” Reilly asked him
.

“Huh?” He’d been lost in hypnosis. He’d been daydreaming of a different time on a different world—a different life.

“You spaced there for a minute. I was asking you if we should check in with Mick and Alan.”

Thomas stopped and mopped sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. He caught a glimpse of his hands. Somewhere along the way, he’d managed to shed the bandages all together, and no one had noticed. He looked at his hands for a second and noted that the skin was unblemished, unscarred. New. Everything old is new again. How many second chances would his body get?

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. He shook himself. Reilly looked at him oddly. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago.”

“Must have really been something,” Reilly said. “I can’t imagine it. What made you want to go into cryo for so long?”

Thomas shook his head. “It’s a long story. I guess ... well, I guess it was really the only option I had at the time. Life wasn’t going in the direction I’d had in mind.” He smiled.

Reilly waved a hand around them. “Is this more like what you had in mind?” she asked. “Stuck on an alien planet, hiking to a crash site? Oh, and let’s not forget about Princess Penny over there.” She nodded to indicate the young woman who had stopped in the shade of a stubby tree to drink from her canteen. She was about a hundred feet ahead of them now.

“I don’t suppose I had this in mind exactly, but believe it or not, it beats the alternative.”

Reilly thought about this for a moment as the two of them picked up the pace in an effort to catch up to Penny. “You must have had a bad time of it,” she said.

Thomas nodded slightly. “It was like the end of a world.”

They marched on for the next half hour and finally came to the hunk of wreckage. Penny was already moving purposefully toward it.

“Careful!” Thomas yelled to her. “We don’t know what we’ll find. It could be dangerous.”

Penny seemed to pay no attention. She was moving with purpose, and Thomas and Reilly struggled to catch up. They finally caught her as she stopped, staring wide-eyed at the plain before them.