Salvation

“Because this happens to be the right way. Try thinking about this—because that’s what you’re actually supposed to be here for, to produce an impartial informed opinion. Though fuck knows why Emilja and Jaru sent you.”

“Because I’m actually capable of having a rational thought, not just paranoid ones.”

“You’ll give it away,” Kandara said in a weary voice. She’d taken her jacket off, exposing heavily muscled arms as she sat in the recliner, picking at the vegetarian meal on her fold-out tray.

Yuri and Callum both turned to stare at her.

“What?” Callum asked.

“Sorry, but Yuri is quite right,” she said. “The aliens, whoever they are, are going to know who those people in their ship are. So if we start loading their image or DNA sequence into solnet, they’ll know we found the ship. And as keeping this discovery secret is our one advantage…” She shrugged.

“Thank you.” Yuri grinned. “What she said. Which is what I was trying to explain.”

Callum growled and held up his empty tumbler. A steward came over to pour him a shot of malt whiskey.

Alik sat back, swirling his bourbon around the glass. He looked at Yuri, then Callum, came to a decision. “Okay, I gotta ask. What did happen with you two? Even the Bureau doesn’t have files on it, but I heard rumors. And now here you are, both of you trying to make nice—and screwing that up.”

“This is bigger than us,” Yuri said sourly—a tone that would have made anyone else stop like they’d run smack into a stone cliff.

“Showing some humanity now, are we?” Callum said.

“Fuck you,” Yuri spat back.

Jessika, Loi, and Eldlund watched the scene intrigued, and maybe a little nervous. Understandable; you don’t often see two powers of this magnitude go head-to-head.

“You’re a corporate robot,” Callum said. “You were back then, and nothing’s changed. You’re not just employed by Connexion, you’re its high priest, leading the worship.”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

“Am I supposed to be grateful?”

“It wouldn’t hurt!”

“Really?” Callum sneered. “You want me to tell them? Let them judge? Because it’s not just my story, is it?”

“Go ahead,” Yuri said belligerently. He reached for the bottle of iced vodka.

Callum looked around the rest of us in turn. Uncertain.

“Do it,” Kandara said with a small smile, daring him.

“It was a long time ago.”

“Ha!” Yuri snorted. He downed his vodka shot in one. “Was it a dark and stormy night, too?”

“You didn’t know where it started. That was a huge part of the problem. And you didn’t know because you don’t fucking care about people!”

“Fuck you! I cared—about her. Not you. Nobody cared about you. Asshole.”

“The real beginning was in the Caribbean,” Callum said, his expression softening at whatever ancient memory he was reliving. “That’s where Savi and I got married.”

“Illegally,” Yuri countered. “If you’d told us like you were supposed to, it would never have happened.”

“It wasn’t illegal. For all its size, Connexion is a company, not a government, and we didn’t need your fucking permission! Just because Ainsley paid our salary doesn’t mean he owned us. So screw your fucked-up corporate policy! And it did happen.”

“We have those policies for a reason. If you’d told us you were in a relationship, if you’d been honest, everything would have been different. You created the problem. Don’t try and make me out as the bad guy.”

I couldn’t have planned it better. I wanted their stories, especially Yuri’s. It had taken me a while to convince him he should come along on the mission in person, rather than just rely on my reports.

And now here they were, angry but uncensored, with something to prove. All they could use against each other now was the truth, because it was truth that could inflict damage more accurately than any smart missile strike, and their animosity hadn’t even begun to heal over, not after 112 years. It always amazes me how long humans can hold on to grudges.

I glanced around as unobtrusively as I could, saw Kandara and Alik holding back smiles, enjoying the show they’d provoked. Yuri and Callum reheated their old war, ready to say anything, spill any secret.

“So it wasn’t a dark and stormy night,” Callum began. “Quite the opposite.”

CALLUM AND YURI

HEAD TO HEAD, AD 2092

The beach was perfect. That was a major part of Barbuda’s appeal. The tiny Caribbean island had a single Connexion portal door, which led to its larger and more prosperous neighbor, Antigua. In 2092, a solitary portal serving an entire population made it almost unique on Earth, where quantum spatial entanglement had brought everywhere “one step away”—as Connexion’s tag line ran.