Citadel: First Colony (34 page)

He had been surprised by how much anguish he had felt.

Almost in the instant that he heard the news, he made a decision. He formulated a plan. Or rather, he decided on a general outcome, since he had no way of knowing what life would be like twenty, fifty, or a hundred years down the road. He could speculate, and his speculations were always very close to reality if not dead on. But he could never be positive, and so the best he could do, in the instant that he discovered his parents were dead, was create a generic plan.

And that had led to the next big surprise in his life. It had
worked
. Or, more accurately, it was
working
.

Uncle John—John Thomas Paris—had been framed. There had been no doubt in young Johnny’s mind. And there was no doubt that his parents, along with 20,000 other colonists, had been murdered in the name of some insane cause. And finally, there was no doubt that he would find a way to avenge the deaths of his parents and save his Uncle John from the false imprisonment that was being forced on him.

Now, on a planet light years from Earth and outside of the colony circuit, Alan was about to accomplish both goals. He had only to find the right pod.

The young woman beside him, Penny, was a big help. But she also made him nervous. She was an unknown in all of this. He had read plenty about her, once he had awoken from stasis and started studying to fill in the gaps of his historical knowledge. Here is where his eidetic memory came in handy. He had always been able to see information once and retain if forever, with instant recall. Now he would use that ability to catch up with the rest of the world—or universe, as it turned out—and blend in seamlessly in this society.

He had awoken a full year before Thomas. He had programmed the stasis computers to awaken him early, setting up a protocol that would allow him to be there when Thomas awoke, so he could explain what was going on. Meanwhile, as they both lay in stasis, Alan’s life became intimately tied to his Uncle John—now known as Thomas. In order to hide his presence from those who were monitoring Thomas in stasis, Alan had piggybacked on all of the systems in his pod. The computers all showed one pod, one occupant, but in reality there were always two—Thomas above, in the visible pod, and Alan below, in the specially-designed hidden compartment, built into the base of his uncle’s stasis pod. Their systems were intimately linked. If Thomas had died in stasis, Alan would have died as well.

When Earth First had initiated a wake-up protocol, the worm Alan had written went into action. It was programmed to give Alan a head start by waking him up well before Thomas. The program was set to give him the maximum time possible, which had turned out to have a strange but useful result. Alan had not figured on Earth First setting the wake-up time a year in advance. And so he found himself awake in a Taggart Industries compound in Colorado, with 365 days to kill until Thomas was awake himself.

Alan didn’t know exactly what he should do at that moment. But as he made his way out of the compound, learning what he could about their computer and security systems as he went, a new plan began to form—or rather, an improvisation on the old plan.

“There it is,” Penny said beside him, breaking him out of his reverie. He knew what the others all thought of him. He was odd. He was an anachronism, a man who traded tools for paper books and then actually
read
them. He was analytical, and maybe even a little cold. But with Penny ...

“Yeah, I see it.”

Penny was different. Or rather,
he
was different when he was around her. He felt something. Appreciated her. He had liked what he’d read about her, following her very public life from childhood to adulthood, watching as she became a top-notch athlete. He had cringed to see the things that she said and did for the tabloids, but had come to understand that she was putting on a show. He saw through her mask. He was intrigued.

“Well,” she said as they reached the pod. “Do your scanny thing.”

He did the scanny thing. He knew in seconds that this wasn’t the right pod, but he went through the whole scan anyway, just as he had with the others. He checked vitals. He checked brainwave patterns. He checked for the Trojan.

Everything was fine.

He awakened the man inside and called in the team. He, Penny, and the man made camp, and the recovery team arrived the next morning. Alan saw to it that they prepared the pod to be taken for parts, and made sure the colonist had plenty of food and water from the pod’s stores, allowing him to make the journey back to camp.

“We’ve reached the point of no return,” he said to Penny, as they pushed through the thick underbrush they had entered into and eventually came to a river. “This river is on my map. It’s the point I have marked as the furthest viable range for getting the recovery team here and back. At this point, we have to find the closest pods and set up a new camp we’ll call Beta. We’ll have to wait for Mitch and Reilly to come back with the shuttle before we can move beyond this area.”

Penny considered this and nodded. “What if we set up Beta, get the colonists lined up with food and water, and then called the rescue team to send someone here to help them. They could wait for the shuttle, and we could keep going to find more pods.”

Alan considered this. Penny was a sharp girl, and she was great to have by his side here in the wilds of this world. But he knew her real motivation was to find her mother. She didn’t want to stop looking. She intended to keep going. “What if we find your mother?” Alan asked. “Will you keep looking after that? Or is that the end for you?”

He regretted asking as soon as the words left his mouth. Even to him, it sounded oddly cold and detached. Penny had every right to be concerned about her parents. Wasn’t that part of what was driving him on? If she found her mother, she would have every right to wait out the shuttle and go back to Citadel with both of her parents in tow. He would expect no less, and he would do the same.

“I’ll keep going,” Penny said, to his surprise.

“Why?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You said you were trying to save your parents. I don’t know what you have in mind, but I want to help if I can. It’s the least I can do.”

Alan considered this, then nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

They trudged on, and Alan thought about everything that had happened since he had awoken from that stasis pod. He had spent weeks and months absorbing as much of human history as he could. He had fairly accounted for the hundred plus years that he’d been in stasis. He had caught up on the whole of advancements in science and physics and engineering. He had learned as much as there was to know about the Esool, the lightrail system, and the colonies themselves. To help him learn more and become more familiar with this strange new world, he took a job with a transport crew, choosing to stay awake while most others slept. He would do his work during his on hours, and read, watch vids, and converse with the rest of the waking crew during his off hours. By the time Thomas awoke from his century-long slumber, Alan was an expert on the most important aspects of this new world.

And his plan now had a definite shape and goal.

More shape than when he’d first started this, at least, a century ago. Back then it had taken quite a bit of effort to crack into the government’s high-security systems. And he hadn’t done it without being noticed. Once he got in, he had needed to use his newly acquired security clearance to send the message he had prepared in advance. The message itself was a work of art. It had the seal of the United Earth government, a security watermark that was “impossible to duplicate” (in fact, he’d had to fake it with a fractal code generator he had programmed from scratch), a nine-digit, randomly generated character set that would be the security ident, and an embedded language code, hidden in every sixth, nineteenth, and thirty-seventh word. There were numerous other security measures involved in the real thing, but his target wouldn’t have the security clearance to verify them. So Alan had faked them, and when the message went through the agent reacted as expected. Less than two hours after Alan had pushed “send,” he watched the agent pulse the computer with EMF, douse it, and burn it, then drop the charred and twisted remains into an acidic solution that devoured even the aluminum casing in less than an hour. Only the tiniest charred bits of metal remained.

Meanwhile, Alan had to make his exit. Agents were immediately alerted that he had breached the system, and in a couple of minutes, they would be on him. He left everything in the room he’d been using. He had taken precautions against leaving prints, DNA, or even a heat signature. But he knew they’d figure out who he was in time.

He didn’t intend to be here when they did.

He made the arrangements for the storage and maintenance of the stasis pod he and Thomas would share. It would be tricky, keeping the pod safe for the years ahead. He would have to turn to the only organization in existence that would be able to maintain the pod indefinitely.

He turned to Earth First.

Taggart Industries, then a much smaller but still very powerful firm, held numerous companies that operated as covers for its less-than-legal activities. By tapping into their computer system, much less sophisticated than the world government system but almost as secure, Alan was able to put the pod on a list of high-priority systems. He then called it to the attention of the Taggart family.

This “leak” was meant to provide an extra layer of protection and was perhaps the trickiest part to pull off. He had to get them to keep Thomas safe and to secretly store him, for an incredible amount of time. Alan hinted that he was part of the Earth First operation at a high level and that he had been contacted by the Taggart family itself to retrieve Thomas and store him for later use. A hundred years or so might be best.

Ironically, the Taggarts were such a secretive group that no one questioned the story.  Each Taggart sibling assumed that the order came from their father, who was in charge of Earth First. Taggart senior assumed that one of his sons had followed through on his order to secure John Thomas Paris, and he was actually pleased with the martyr plan.

And so, Alan hid himself in the concealed compartment of the pod, and when Thomas was put under, they both slept for a century.

As Alan and Penny trudged through the rough terrain, he felt that his plan had gone extremely well, despite some unforeseen complications. Some people had been hurt. Some had been killed. It was tragic, and he regretted it. But compared to the loss of First Colony and to what he had in mind, the loss of a handful of lives here was all but insignificant.

As they stopped for water and a rest, Alan looked over the alien landscape and realigned his thinking, as he had so many times before. He was not standing on alien soil after all. He was standing on First Colony.

He would create it here as it was meant to be.

M
itch
barely had the patience
to wait for the shuttle to be unloaded, so he could get back in the air. They had touched down at Alan’s base camp over an hour ago, loaded the shuttle with materials and as many colonists as they could, and then sailed over the horizon to Citadel. As they settled onto what was shaping up to be a well-marked landing pad, Mitch slammed the button to open the cargo bay doors and grabbed everyone within sight to help him unload. He fully intended to get back in the air and track down Alan out in the wild.

And then he was going to kill him.

Captain Somar came to the shuttle with Billy Sans and Thomas in tow. “Mr. Garrison,” Somar said.

“Hmph,” Mitch grunted, pulling on one of the heavy pods to drag it out of the door.

“It is good to see you again,” Somar said.

Mitch only nodded and went straight back into the bay. He helped a woman make the step down to the ground from the side of the platform, which was bustling with activity.

“Mitch,” Thomas said. “You ok?”

For the first time, Mitch stopped and turned to them. His face was a red fury, burning and pinched and nearly glowing with his anger. “He was one of
my
crew,” Mitch said.

“I understand,” Thomas said, “but ...”

“No. You don’t. You don’t understand, because you’ve never been on a Blue Collar crew. We depend on each other every second of every day. We have to. And we become ... family. Tight. For him to do what he’s done, to kill Marcos and injure the Captain, and to strand us
here
...” He paused, breathing heavily, turning to kick one of the support struts for the cargo door. When he turned to face them again, he said simply, “I’m going to kill him.”

“No,” Somar said. “You are not.”

Mitch’s temper flared, but when he turned to the Captain, he was cold and quiet. “Sir?” he asked, his jaw so tight he could chew through steel.

“You will not kill Mr. Angelou. You will arrest him, and he will stand trial. That is the way of your laws. It is the way we will deal with Mr. Angelou.”

“Our laws?” Mitch asked, incredulous. “Are you serious? He’s a murder and a saboteur! If we were in space, we’d pack him into a barrel and eject him!”

“But we are not in space, Mr. Garrison. We are on a colony world. It may not have been the world we were attempting to reach, but it is now our colony. And as such, it is governed by the laws of the Earth Colony Fleet, as recognized by the treaty between your people and the Esool.”

“I ... I can’t believe ...”

“To do any less, Mr. Garrison, would be to invite anyone present to break the treaty and ignore the law. At present, that would be as fatal as any other danger we have encountered thus far. Mr. Angelou does not represent an immediate threat, and thus our recourse is to arrest him and hold him for trial.”

Mitch choked on what he was going to say, made a sort of guttural noise, and then turned and walked back into the shuttle. He was hoping to find something to break.

Thomas entered the shuttle behind him, and he spoke quietly now. “Mitch, listen, it’s going to be ok. Justice will be served. But not your way. It has to be the right way. Taggart ...”