It didn't take long for the data dump to be off. Invergordon's public network access was sufficient, as the data was easily compressible and the spider's web had enough multi-stage encryption nodes bouncing secure Commission traffic around Sirius that each packet took a different route from the last, and anyone trying to trace a blob of ciphertext back would find its origin either nonexistent or nonsensical. There was no Vermillion, though there was a Cortez. There was no Checkpoint Charlie, though there was a New Berlin. At the end of the chain though, behind all the layers of encryption and obfuscation, there was a Neue Regel and there was a Spider's Watch, and six months' worth of deep-cover espionage had just made it from one end to the other.
For six months, one Florence Clemens and her Commission-crafted alter-ego Agent Mindcrime had dissociated herself from the outside world, observing far-off gravimetric signatures and possible transient spatial-gravitic anomalies in hostile and otherwise unfriendly territory in the southwestern Independent Worlds. She had enough time logged to be able to roughly guess what various movements were, though she could never be certain. A battleship was easy; you could pick a dreadnought out of the black of space with a high school science project strapped to a Starfiler if you had a reception dish hooked up to it. Cruisers, less so, though a small group of them would certainly be noticeable. Anything less would show up live and unprocessed as greyish dots pinging back and forth across an infinite void.
Her first two-way contact back with a member of the Fleet was one Daisy Williams, a Taskmaster claiming to speak for the Fleet as a whole. Their exchange was short, and rough, but it delivered the information that Florence needed: Harold Kane was gone, Tobiah Nitzan and Ellen Ray along with, and no one had seen them or the Redshift -- a new Octavarium-designed jump drive testbed -- in six months. She fully expected her debriefing to be about as much yelling as it was upload.
She had sent a message to the new spymaster of the Commission, a certain "Weaver", who had more insight into the nature of the jump drive accident, but no further information onto the potential whereabouts of the ship or its passengers and crew. It was frustrating; her bosses were gone and replaced, the government had changed hands and styles, and the region was no more stable than when she had left it that half-year ago. If she didn't know better, she would have suspected a coup, an assassination plot, anything like that, but that was the game of the local organizations and states that hadn't spent two years in the void between systems trying to keep fifty thousand people from dying on a fool's hope.
A fool's hope.
That fool, that Harold Kane, was now missing. Florence's job had always been three-sided: keep the fleet together, keep the knowledge flowing, and keep Kane alive. And now, she had failed the most important one to her.
"I should have stopped him," she mumbled to herself before slouching down on the bunk in the back of her long-range-refit Jackdaw. She turned on a speaker near her headrest -- white noise -- and tried to sleep.
In the first six hours since his return to life as a free man, Rodney Miller had committed at least four different crimes in Liberty just trying to leave: One count of disobeying law enforcement agents (they really didn't expect him to stay in a refugee work camp, did they?), one count of purchasing a spacecraft with a felony record (turns out bounty hunting against a bogus contract is just serial murder), one count of credit account fraud (just because the account says it has a few hundred thousand in it doesn't mean it actually does), and one count of flying without a license (he really wasn't planning on having all his paperwork expire while in a Gallic field prison).
Regardless of the magnitude of his offences, none of them were apparently noticeable, as the barely spaceworthy Rhino that clearly had been in various states of disrepair for several decades slipped through the California Minor docking ring and flashed through the gate to Cortez without so much as a "hey there buddy" from a juiced-up LPI detachment. From there it was a mostly straight line through somewhat friendly space, followed by a close shave across the far side of the Tau-31 sun -- Rodney trusted the Rhino's shields to fare better against stellar winds than Gallic patrols -- and one final blip through a jump hole to finally get back home.
Despite almost half a year away from home, the system was still almost disappointingly unchanged. The backdrop of visually-enhanced interstellar medium was still a soup of grey, overcooked peas, and while the ownership of a few stations had changed, Canberra was still Canberra: a massive space station built by god-knows-who back in god-knows-when to do god-knows-what that presently housed the majority of the citizenry of Natio Octavarium.
And, after a bit of finagling and verifying that he was in fact who he said he was, he was allowed to gently bring the freighter in for a landing, exit calmly, hand the keys over to an Aquila asset reclamation engineer, head up to the command offices for a quick debriefing, take a change of clothes, and meet down in the cafeteria of the Spider's Watch for a much less official and more actively useful debriefing with his favourite field agent.
"They want to name a residential wing after him," the agent said, deftly twirling a few strands of noodles onto her fork.
Rodney sat down and smirked. "You name big shit after dead people and rich philanthropists, and you and I both know that Harold Angus Kane is neither of those."
"It's been six months, Rod."
"Six months," he repeated, pausing for a second. "Let's look at what happened in the last six months, Flo. Redshift disappeared in a gravitic cock-up, and Escher got bounced all the way to Omega-41 as a side effect. You ended up watching for jump flashes in Commonwealth space gathering data on fleet movement patterns -- not sure who you pissed off to get that assignment. I got shot down and spent five months in the most milquetoast field prison I've ever seen wishing they would torture me because the same good-morning-Pierre-bonjour-Sirian-dog-do-you-feel-like-talking-yet-no-not-today-maybe-tomorrow-okay-sounds-good routine was actually starting to drive me nuts."
Florence laid down her fork. "Poor you, having to drink all that wine and no one to share it with."
"I know, right? Terrible," he laughed. "The government gets replaced by a proper democratically-elected house of commons, which, you know, good for them for getting it right while we were away. I'm not one to complain about progress. Crayter splits, the Corsairs split, Bering is still a shitshow, none of those are really surprising... but a lot can happen in six months. Redshift had enough provisions on board when she blinked out of Tau-44 to keep everyone on board alive and well for eighteen months, no problem. Gives us plenty of time to figure out where the fuck Harold and the others are." He bit into his steak sandwich and waited for a melancholic reply.
She smiled. "Okay then, Taskmaster Miller, sir, what's our first step?"
Rodney shook his head. "Commander now. Williams seems well-cemented into the chain of command and I've been out of the loop and munching on french bread for long enough that I figured I'd offer my services at a step below my previous and rather disastrous position. Y'know, reduce any paranoia while still letting me do some good around here. Speaking of paranoia, where's the master of spies at these days?"
"Still doing that thing where he walks in as if on cue with exactly the answer you were hoping for. I don't know how he does it, to be honest. As far as the search and rescue efforts, well... he and Harold were-- are close. Practically brothers, in a bit of a strange way. If we can muster up the resources we need to go find us a Kane, I'm certain he'll come with us."
Nodding, Rodney added, "And no one will even notice he's gone, seeing as that Weaver fellow is technically running the Commission." He paused for another bite of his meal before continuing. "If the records say it was an accidental blind jump, they could have ended up anywhere. We have Escher's known exit point as a possible area to start in, and while I don't know too much about the kind of gravitic-spatial-temporal-handwavium technology that powers jump drives, I do know that they like gravity wells, and that volatile jump tunnels like the ones created by jump drives will lens around a gravity well if the coordinates are too inaccurate."
"More or less," the intelligence operative confirmed. "Jump coordinates encode a rough position around a gravity well, which is specified as a 3-dimensional direction and distance from a more or less arbitrarily chosen system approximately at the centre of Sirius--"
"New York, right?"
She sighed. "Liberty is the centre of the universe, don't you know? Anyways, the coordinate system is basically bound to the outer limits of Sirian space, so in theory they'll never not hit a gravity well, even if you miss. A jump navigation computer is smart enough to not let you rip a zero-length jump tunnel, because no one likes having their atoms inverted. So it'll punch in random coordinates, which sends you to a random gravity well in Sirius. If you're aligned properly with a blind jump, you can ride it out as a group and all the ships involved will end up at the random destination together -- assuming you don't have worse luck than a man getting struck by lightning six times in six minutes, in which case you'll become star food."
"And if you're not aligned?"
"You break out of the tunnel, lens around a gravity well, and get rather abruptly ripped out of your now-disintegrating volatile jump tunnel into another solar system."
The two stopped talking long enough for a few bites of their respective meals before Rodney thought of an incredibly pertinent question: "Has anyone ever reconstructed a blind jump based on a misalignment like that before?"
An unexpectedly new-looking Crayterian Nyx was in the place of the rusted freighter Rodney had brought home with him when he returned to his personal Fleet docking berth. He rubbed his eyes and took a quick count of his heart rate; no, it didn't appear that the Commission had put experimental psychotropics in his coffee. Or maybe they did, and he just wasn't sure how to detect them. He would know if the ship's thermal cyclers sprouted lips and began speaking to him in a few minutes.
"Who in the name of fusion and metal are you?" he called out as he walked towards the craft. It was a standard enough looking Crayterian design, but the paint job was lighter in tone and used pale gold accents on the trim instead of monolithic black and red paneling. Octavarium roundels adorned the dorsal pylon; the flattened dome of hullmetal under the cockpit was painted with a slightly reflective false canopy, more for aesthetics than any functional purpose.
The Fleet technician at the rear of the ship pulled the H-Fuel lines out of the maintenance panel and slid the heavy armour plates back over to cover it. They locked in place with a satisfying latching noise. He turned around and smiled. "First-generation Aquila Production Model Enyo-class Nyx assault fighter, sir," he responded proudly. "Fleet issue, of course. Which really just means it has an extra coat of self-healing lacquer on it and the black trim on the roundels is carbon fibre instead of painted metal, but it's a fantastic ship nonetheless. And this one's all yours. All she needs is a name and you're on your way."
Rodney approached the fighter and fished a pair of gloves out of his pockets, slipping them on as to not cover his brand new vessel in fingerprints. He ran a hand across the golden fringes to the cockpit ladder and grabbed hold, pulling himself straight onto the second rung and halfway to the third. While officers weren't expected to go on patrol frequently, nor was it particularly a recommended practice in most navies, the Fourth Octavarium Fleet and its three Vagrant predecessors was ever-vigilant in finding was to be distinctive. Pilot and command officers were given a high grade fleet issue fighter or bomber as their own, and were expected to log a few flight hours a month, if only to keep up appearances and ensure the ships were kept in top working condition.
He slid himself into the cockpit, which had the seat moved forward and rotated one hundred and eighty degrees to expose access to the part of the ship that was Aquila's specialty: a small but cozy sleeper cabin for extended duration missions in remote space. He wondered how they always managed to fit a few square metres of living space into just about any class of ship that they did a custom variant of, especially one such as this, where the original model was generally considered to be one of the leanest assault fighters in Sirius.
He sat in the cockpit and spun the seat around, activating the ship's computer. Aquila's logo appeared briefly on the screen, with smaller Crayterian and Octavarian emblems flanking it. They faded to a short diagnostic test, followed by a prompt:
REGISTER SHIP NAME: _
A pause.
REGISTER SHIP NAME: ATLAS STONE_
Ship name ATLAS STONE registered. Octavarium ship registry number: EFI-108
Welcome aboard, Commander.
"Hey, LT, I thought you were on recovery for another two weeks."
A blonde officer in her late twenties held up a biomechanical artificial hand. She wiggled its exposed fingers and, without turning to face the voice that had entered the room, responded cheerfully. "Doc cleared me for light work for a week," she explained. "After that, a quick checkup and the synthetic skin covering goes on, and then I'm back on full duty. It already feels like it's been there my whole life." She turned around and looked at the clean-shaven middle-aged man who wore the uniform of an Octavarium Fleet non-commissioned officer below the neck and a beaming smile above.
"Good to have ya back, ma'am," he said. He held a clipboard out in her direction.
"It's good to be back, Specialist. Congratulations on the promotion, by the way; it's been a long time coming." She grasped the clipboard with the prosthetic with slightly too much force for a split second before reflexively relaxing her grip. "Refit orders for OXS Glow Worm? Isn't that a Commission special?"
The maintenance engineer nodded. "Corvo-class exploration frigate variant, aye. Long-range scanning package based on production run Limelight kit, which we're augmenting with a tweaked version of one of those eighth-generation gravitic anomaly probe launchers you see research teams using these days. Not the strangest thing we've gotten an order for recently, though. While you were getting those new digits, some strange-looking lad -- at least, I think it might have been a lad -- from the Commission came in with a box full of prototype parts and told us to wire them up to an Ares according to a schematic inside to the countermeasure mounts. Had us replace the hopper with a bunch of supercapacitors, too. Wouldn't say what it was, just pointed us at the interceptor, dropped off the box, and said someone would pick it up in 12 hours."
Katarina paused and thought. An interceptor, a box of unidentifiable parts, short turnaround time, mysterious androgynous Commission agent...
"Specialist Bauer, who worked on that ship?"
Bauer blinked. "No one else but me, ma'am," he stammered.
"Good. Tell no one what you installed, or that you even did any maintenance on that vessel. You didn't see it, you didn't hear anything about, not a word of it. You won't say a thing about it to anyone. Understood?"
"Of course, ma'am," the now visibly concerned technician affirmed. "I, uh, was going to go start an inspection on the Glow Worm's Limelight aggregator. Permission, ma'am?"
"Granted. You're dismissed, Specialist."
Bauer nodded quickly and strutted off towards the airlock that the Glow Worm was magnetically collared to, leaving Katarina at a maintenance console near the back of the Fleet's primary fighter maintenance bay. It was well over a hundred and fifty metres long and wide, and nearly thirty metres tall; clearly, the people who built Canberra liked their wide-open workspaces. If there was an elevator in the bay large enough to carry it up to an airlock, the Glow Worm could comfortably fit inside. Several brand new, Aquila-produced Ares and Enyo fighters were in for delivery inspection before being moved up to a general hangar for assignment and flight. In one corner, a Cormorant-class light gunship was the largest spacecraft being worked on: at nearly 38 metres long, it could be put on the elevator to the general hangar with a little over two metres of room to spare. At the back, a worn-out Rhino was being rapidly decommissioned by a few technicians with plasma torches.
Despite not having a history as a shipwright or even much of a starship engineer, Katarina O'Donnell was given the oversight of the Fleet's maintenance bays not long before the Redshift incident. Her previous post was as the third shift operations supervisor of Melbourne Station before its sale to the Crayter Republic, and it was an assignment that she seldom disliked. It was a point for first contact with ships moving into Tau-44 from contested space; anything heading to Canberra would be seen by Melbourne as a silhouette against the system's primary sun. While she had managed to read several dozen books during the station's quietest hours, surges of adrenaline were not uncommon as proximity alerts and sensor identification alarms were sure to interrupt even the most immersive of novels. Here, in the maintenance bay, there was always activity. Loud, harsh, unforgiving activity that would be impossible to lose oneself in.
She knew just by the work order's details that the Glow Worm was going to be involved in the Redshift's recovery efforts somehow. And, having read through it, she was finally thankful for her noisy, unrelenting duty assignment. If the refit accomplished its goals, she could finally tell Harold Kane in as colourful language as she could muster exactly what he could do with the position of maintenance bay supervisor.
Florence smirked. "I guess I'm formally part of the Commission now," she mused. "No more trying to convince the Fleet that I actually get two paycheques on account of having two sets of responsibilities. How's your arm, lieutenant?"
The flaxen-haired Fleet officer took the XO's seat on the bridge of OXS Glow Worm and looked over at her new commanding officer. "Sometimes I forget it's not the one I was born with. Modern biotech is pretty miraculous." She paused for a second, then added, "Thanks for pulling me off that dock for this, Florrie. I was going mad down there. I know I'm not much of a jump physicist or intelligence agent or anything like that, but I want to do what I can to help find him."
The intelligence officer placed a hand on her friend's shoulder. "You and I have known each other for years, Kat. And that's because of Harold. We're going to find him together."
"You sound like you're trying to convince yourself more than anyone else."
Florence sighed and brought up a topographical map of the space around Canberra. A red cross marked the location where OXS Redshift disappeared and its escorts disappeared into a gravitic anomaly on New Years Day. It was the first live test of the experimental self-navigating jump platform, and Harold Kane himself had seen fit to captain the vessel, with the escorts led by his closest friend, the Commission's founding spymaster Escher. While Escher's ship exited the jump corridor in Omega-41, far off-course from the original destination of Omega-3, Redshift and the rest of the escorts did not appear alongside him. Kane had insisted on performing the test and choosing the destination himself, much to the dismay of nearly everyone in the Fleet who he discussed the plans with, but Redshift's executor AI had verified that the intended path would work, so the test proceeded.
"This is going to be equal parts forensic reconstruction and guessing," she said. "We know that the escort lead appeared in the gravity well of a neutron star about fourteen lightyears away from the intended target, which presumably means it makes a deeper enough 'dent' in the hyperspace fabric than Omega-3's own B2V that the jump corridor at least partially latched onto it. The math for that works, but when we try to work backwards from Omega-41 to Tau-44 using the numbers that Redshift validated, it breaks down and tells us we're well outside charted space." She pulled up a virtual whiteboard and input the previously-calculated hyperspatial jump topology again, receiving the same results as before.
Katarina opened a terminal and brought up the jump topology. The formula that calculated it was as clear to her as mud, but nearly instantly her eyes lit up. "You've got the mass wrong," she said flatly.
Florence looked at her, then back at her whiteboard. "Redshift, three Ravens... Math looks right based on the measurements Redshift took during the initial trajectory plot."
"There were five Ravens, one of which was shunted off into another system. I bet it was too far from the gravitic anomaly to be dragged in properly when it formed, and the requirements to move that extra mass weren't taken into account. Normally when you're not within the proper pull range of a jump corridor like that, you just go nowhere, but creating one like this on the fly to a gravity well isn't exactly standard procedure."
Florence added the mass of two more Ravens to the jump trajectory calculations and ran the simulation for Escher's Raven again. The computer thought for a moment and spat out an origin location of Edinburgh. "Well, at least that's charted," she admitted. "Good catch."
"How far away from the Redshift was the furthest Raven?"
"Nine hundred and ninety-seven metres, roughly thirty degrees dorsal and forty degrees starboard-aft. What are you thinking, that it got pulled through the anomaly sideways?"
Katarina nodded. "Something like that. Can we even sim that?"
"No, but we can plug that into the trajectory calculator from the known origin, isolate that Raven in the calculations, and see what happens." Florence deftly inputted the parameters and watched as the computer proudly displayed the destination.
Katarina smiled. "Omega-41. Isolate Redshift?"
"Already on it," Florence said, changing the mass and vectors as appropriate and hitting the 'calculate' button. Her eyes widened at the reply from the computer.
"We-- we need to double-check this on another core block," Katarina stammered.
Florence pressed the button again. "There are three core blocks being used for quorum on this," she mumbled. "All three are in agreement, every time I run it."
"We have to tell Weaver. Like, now."
"Fuck that, go call Escher. Tell him we're taking the Glow Worm to Zurich."
Navigating the network of jump holes, jump gates, and trade lanes between Tau-44 and Zurich took little time; the longest part of the trip was the lane-free jaunt through the Taus. Entering the Zurich system was no different than taking a jump hole to any other charted system. What was different was that the Zurich system had never before been visited by an expedition from Natio Octavarium, and even with the astrocartography data the Commission had procured for the recovery operation, the system may as well have been complete wilderness surrounding an oversized star.
The first twelve hours of the operation established important positions in the system. The only station visible from clear space was a Gallic civilian one connected to an EFL jump gate via a short trade lane. The system's geography was relatively unaligned, making hiding in mass shadows complex. One asteroid belt and three clouds of rock and dust were identified, with one being noticed immediately upon OXS Glow Worm's emergence in Zurich, as the inbound jump hole's position was firmly inside it.
Another thirty-six hours passed inside that cloud with the Glow Worm's enhanced, intelligence-spec Limelight array cycling through its sectors one by one, looking for any faint hint of a hull in the asteroid field, preferably with active life support. The search was completed with no sign of life or death, and Coordinator Florence Clemens moved the modified Corvo-class frigate to the largest cloud in the system. Its position in the system was such that the massive yellow sun would shield their activity from the Gallic starbase.
The Limelight array was thankfully designed for this type of work. Its distant ancestor, the venerable Spyglass, was built to permit long range espionage in the Barrier, and while the composition of the rocks in Zurich was different than those in the Taus and the western Independent Worlds, it was orders of magnitude better suited for the task than conventional long-range scanners.
Nevertheless, it was a slow-going process.
"Good morning, Lieutenant," Florence announced, entering the bridge with two mugs of coffee. She handed one to Lieutenant Katarina O'Donnell. "How's the search going?"
Katarina took a sip of black lifeblood. "Same as yesterday. We've been at it for almost a week in this cloud alone and all we've found is something that looks like a cobbled-together spaceport. We did some analysis on the traffic around it while you were asleep, and of the three ships we surveyed, two were CTE line fighters and one was a freighter. Probably the local riff-raff moving supplies or some Junkers or something. They didn't see us, though."
Florence sat down next to her XO and brought up a three-dimensional map of sectors in the cloud. One cube representing the active sector had a phosphorescent dot darting through it like the electron beam of a cathode tube, shifting through the display in regular patterns to show the Limelight array's progress in scanning the sector. "How long do we have left on this field?" she asked.
"Not long," Katarina replied between mouthfuls of coffee. "Next set of sectors are the upper third of the west-northwestern edge, then the middle third, lower third, and northernmost faces. We'll need to move a bit closer to it, but it's safe."
The console pinged quietly to signal completion, and the ship's AI automatically shut down the Limelight array and began the process of spinning up the cruise engines to bring the target sectors into scanning range. Florence kept quiet until the ship dropped out of cruise and began scanning again.
"Two days? Three?"
With a shrug, Katarina guessed, "About that I'd say. All depends on whether or not we manage to hit some--"
An excited-sounding beedle-deep sprang forth from the console, interrupting the lieutenant with enough surprise that she nearly spilled her coffee.
"We... we found something," she stuttered. "Focusing the Limelight array for additional analysis."
The next two minutes felt slower to the pair than the whole two weeks it had been since they requisitioned the Glow Worm for the rescue mission. At the end of the wait, the console brought up a rough outline of an Aquila Defense Systems Eyrie-class frigate, with thermal imaging suggesting active life support and visual modifications corresponding to those of OXS Redshift. It had no drive power, but its solar arrays were focused towards the system's sun and were taking in more than enough light than needed to keep the ship's systems online.
Florence turned around and pressed the emergency intercom button on her seat's control panel. "All hands, this is the captain. Prepare for extraction operation. We will be arriving on site in ten minutes."
The airlocks between the Glow Worm and the Redshift opened in sequence as the first extraction team, led by Florence herself, boarded the disabled frigate.
They were greeted with open arms by a clean-shaven Harold Kane, who appeared to have gained several new facial scars since the Redshift's departure from Tau-44. He had a walking stick for support in his right hand.
"Florence Clemens," he said with a smile. "Am I ever glad to see you." He walked forward and wrapped his arms around his friend.
She laughed. "We were all so worried about you. All of you. Thank God you're okay."
He looked at her and the smile faded from his face. "Mostly okay," he said. "To tell you the truth, I'm probably the worst off... Leg is going to need some work, and well..." He pulled the part in his hair aside to reveal a scar almost ten centimetres long. "The old noggin isn't exactly up to spec."
Florence nodded and looked at the extraction team behind her. "Get anyone who needs medical attention over to the Glow Worm and call in the engineering team so we can get this thing fired back up." She looked back at the greeting party and said, "We're going to get you and the Redshift home."
A middle-aged lieutenant spoke up. "Garnett Watkins, Redshift's provisional chief engineer, ma'am. Our engines were completely ruined when we got out of the jump corridor. The reactor slagged itself and took the drives and comms along with it. Lieutenant Commander Chamberlain was killed trying to repair the plant. Antimatter catalyst hit something the wrong way and let out a pretty big rad burst. There's no way we're getting this ship out of this hole. All the sensitive equipment got glassed by the reactor's last throes, at least, so we can abandon the ship safely."
Kane turned around. "Watkins, get your team to pull all our datacores and transfer over to the Glow Worm. Florence, I'll get you up to speed in your briefing room, if you don't mind."
The pair walked back through the docking collar to the Glow Worm and found a conference room. They sat in silence for a minute before Kane started speaking.
"When we exited the jump corridor, the reactor melted itself and the engines flew apart. Apparently what happened was I cracked my head on a console and fell unconscious. Broke my leg in the fall. Doctor Lynwood put me back together but... I've lost some time. When I woke up, it was like... I woke up from a dream. Lynwood says it's partial retrograde amnesia. At first it was as if the last eight years just... never happened. After a while I started remembering things, more recent things came back more vividly but for the most part everything after the Battle of Freeport One and before the Redshift test is..."
He put a hand on his forehead and sighed. Florence put her hand over his other one on the table. "You're missing eight years?" she asked.
"Sort of," he explained. "Some of it, I can remember just fine. Founding the Natio, the exodus from Kansas... but a lot of it is a bit further out of reach. It's like I'm not remembering being there, but like I'm remembering a really good book I've read hundreds of times. Situations I remember, but in my mind they're just something I know about. New memories are fine, but the better part of the last decade is hazy. Every day is a bit better but... I can't lead like this. I can't fight like this. Fuck me running, Florence, I don't even know who we're fighting these days."
"Do you remember Canberra?"
He nodded. "One of the proudest moments of my life."
"It's grown a bit. We have some incredible medical specialists on board now. They can help you, I'm sure of it."
With a sheepish smile, he asked, "And then what? I can't imagine the Natio has stood still waiting for me to come back from the dead. What will I do? When I woke up, I wasn't the leader of a fleet, or the representative of a nation-state. I was Taskmaster Harold Kane, subordinate to Warlady Jada Zachary, in service to John Petrucci. It took days before I realized that was eight years ago, and Jada was missing, and John was... God fucking dammit." He fought back tears. "I'm a broken man, Florrie. It might be time for me to retire."
She stood up, walked around the table to his seat, and kissed the top of his head. "We'll save the retirement plans for once we know what's really going on up in this jumbled up skull of yours," she said. "Come on, I'll take you to the bridge. The extraction operation is almost complete, and I'm sure you're going to want to watch us leave this system with your own two eyes."
He chuckled, standing up and locking arms with her. "Yes, ma'am."
"Your right femur is compromised, so you'll be walking with that stick unless we replace it with a new one, which, while you were stuck in the new frontier, we figured out how to do with a 100% success rate," the attending doctor explained to Harold Kane, who was back on Canberra and sitting upright in a hospital bed. "We can get you in and out of surgery in about three hours flat tomorrow morning if you'd like."
Kane nodded. "Set it up," he said. "What about my head?"
The doctor pulled some notes up on a datapad. "The good news is you don't have much of any severe neural degradation. We can put you on a low dose of the same stuff we use to halt and reverse early stages of Alzheimer's. It'll help with the memories, but we can't guarantee it'll bring everything back. You should notice a lot less of that foggy feeling when remembering things, and it'll feel more like it used to. I'll fill your prescription after you get out of surgery tomorrow. Oh, and you have visitors."
"Excellent, thanks doc."
The doctor opened the door and let Rodney Miller and Florence Clemens in before leaving himself.
Harold spoke first. "I'll say this much, the new government seems to have improved healthcare around here something fierce," he observed.
With a chuckle, Rodney explained, "There was an election while you were gone. We didn't want look all authoritarian so we settled for just stopping them from holding a state funeral. Mostly because they probably would have wanted to build a shrine, or a statue or something, and that would have been real awkward to explain to you when you got back. Or, considering that we went from an unelected council to an elected parliament overnight, they might have just burned you in effigy."
"So who's running the show these days?"
"As far as civilian matters go, Consul John Riley is majority leader and head of government," Florence began. "His United party has ten of the sixteen seats in the Senate. The loyal opposition is the Octavarium Independence Party; they have five seats. The Orange Dream Party managed to score themselves a seat somehow, probably pulled one out from under the Independence ticket."
Harold blinked. "Riley... The trading guy?"
"Former Guildmaster of the mercantile guild."
"Remind me never to bump my head again. What about the Fleet? Who's calling the shots these days?"
Rodney coughed, and mumbled something profane. "Ogden's the Minister of Relations now. He stays out of military affairs; that job is assigned to Taskmaster Daisy Williams. She's in your seat; Taskmaster Flores is in what used to be mine up until I spent five months in a frankly uninspiring Gallic detention camp. I requested a reduction in rank to Commander to save a bit of face, since showing up smelling like cheese and wine in a stolen Rhino after being missing for damn near half the year and asking for your job back looks pretty suspicious."
Leaning back into the pillow, Harold looked up at the ceiling and sighed. "Well, the station hasn't fallen apart and we haven't been invaded, so I guess it could be a lot worse."
"What are you going to do?" Florence inquired.
"I'm going to get myself a new leg tomorrow morning, since this one didn't heal right, and then some old man pills to un-break my brain. Then I'm going to hang around here for a week or so, and after that, I'll go home and enjoy retirement. Assuming no one sold my house to cover the funeral and the shrine."