Pandora's Box: Part Seven - Tunnel Visions
October 2012
Stepping into the shower, Domino hissed as the hot water hit her bruised shoulder. She had been a little too enthusiastic about diving for cover when the Scion they'd cornered had pulled out a plasma grenade and started screaming about dying for the High Lord. None of her people had been hurt in the subsequent explosion, but having the poor bastard - he hadn't been much more than a kid - blow himself to bloody shreds had still been a less-than-pleasant end to an otherwise easy operation.
This particular group of Scions really hadn't planned things very well, she reflected, reaching for the soap. Their little raid had blown up in their faces quite comprehensively. Not that she was complaining, of course. It was always easier when the bad guys were incompetent.
She had brought fourteen prisoners back with her and left nearly twice that many bodies behind in an Iranian morgue. The artifacts were back in Tehran's National Museum, though. Not the optimum result on that score, but at least she had convinced the local authorities to let her leave a security team behind. Maybe Diplomatic Affairs could convince them to send the artifacts to the Tower for analysis and temporary safekeeping. Either way, it was out of her hands--
Domino blinked as her psi-link with Nathan quivered, the feel of his presence intensifying sharply. She had been sensing him, if faintly, since she and her team had teleported back to the Tower, but he felt closer suddenly. Somewhere in the building. The link felt wrong, too, cold and disjointed in a way that had grown all too familiar since August, and Domino shivered as she shut off the shower and grabbed her towel.
Nate? What are you doing? She didn't get an answer, which didn't surprise her. Something had set him off again, Domino thought worriedly as she hastily pulled on a fresh uniform. Time to go find him before he did something to provide more material for the rumor mill.
Which is quite active enough already. She would never cease to be amazed at the speed of gossip around here, and this particular subject had been simmering away in the XSE's collective awareness for two months. She doubted that there were many officers stationed at the Tower who didn't know there was something wrong with Nathan these days. I've certainly fielded enough questions about it lately.
None of these 'episodes' of his were anything that could give Cecelia or the command staff a concrete reason to take him off duty again, something that Domino knew was a source of severe frustration for Cecelia, at least. No, Nate had just been--weird since his latest trouble with his shields. Conspicuously weird, and more than slightly disturbing at times, but he hadn't done anything to make anyone question his judgement yet.
Except that she was psi-linked to the man, and she knew damned well that he was doing more than 'acting out' (Pete's latest suggestion) to demonstrate how aggravated he was with the slow pace of their efforts against the Scions. Part of the problem was the new psi-suppressants Cecelia had him on, she suspected - even though he hadn't complained, she could sense how 'fuzzy' they made him - but there was definitely more to it.
What really bothered her was the increasing likelihood that the root of this, whatever it was, had actually been going on for months and all the problems he'd been having were only symptoms. Well, that and the fact that in all those months, she hadn't really pushed him to explain what the hell was going on, despite her bold words to Cecelia the first time he had collapsed.
It had been easier not to ask. Cowardly, but easier. Domino stopped at the first com-panel in the hall outside the officers' locker rooms and called up the locator program. It informed her that Nathan was in the R&D laboratories, and Domino's eyes narrowed. That wasn't one of Nathan's usual haunts. But it happened to be where most of the techno-organic technology that had been taken from the legacy sites during the first several weeks of the sweep was being studied.
She headed straight for one of the high-speed elevators, the most expeditious way up to the labs. The elevator was otherwise empty, which was something of a blessing, because she didn't think she could have kept her expression composed had she had an audience. The link was quivering steadily now, alive with an alarming combination of anger and uncertainty, and nothing he was letting slip made any sense at all. One of these days I'm going to have to get him to re-teach me Askani--
Once she got up to R&D's main floor, all she had to do was look for the crowd. There were at least a dozen people clustered at the window of one of the clean rooms, and Domino sighed as one man shifted and she got a glimpse of what, or rather who they were all watching.
"All right," she said crisply, and most of them looked at her, a few even snapping to attention. "Would someone like to tell me whether you were playing with anything hazardous in there before I go drag him back out?" No one looked particularly upset, which reassured her. Still, Nathan being in there without protective gear did not impress her at all. Maybe he had been staying on one side of a very fine line so far, but demonstrations of carelessness like this would give those worrying about his fitness for duty exactly the excuse they needed. *And maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.*
Chris Benford, one of the scientists heading up R&D's analysis of the rather extensive haul from the legacy sites, came forward, looking mildly apologetic. "He didn't go through decontamination before he went in, but there's nothing harmful in there. We were working on some of the T-O components the field team brought back from Tunisia when he came in and ordered us out."
"And you went?" Domino inquired, part of her surprised at how evenly the question came out. Benford gave her a look that said 'I was not going to say no to the Askani'son' as clearly as if the words had been written on his forehead. Domino reminded herself that he was ex-network and thus prone to treating Nate like a minor deity even when what he really needed was a kick to the posterior.
"He's, um, not doing anything--objectionable, ma'am," a young woman she didn't know pointed out, fiddling nervously with the sleeve of her lab coat. "He seems interested in the T-O components, that's all."
Benford gave her a quelling look and then turned back to Domino. "He's talking to the T-O components," he said, then paused. "Or himself. I'm not sure which."
Oh, charming. Domino sighed, running a hand through her still-damp hair. "Okay, then," she said a bit unsteadily, firmly squelching the ripple of near-hysterical mirth Benford's words had provoked in her. Nothing about this was funny, really. Nothing at all. "Stay out here, all of you. I'll go get him." It occurred to her to say something to them about how she would see they were all assigned to the most godforsaken station she could find if she caught any of them gossiping about this, but the threat would probably be futile.
Nathan didn't look up at her as she came through the clean room's revolving door. He was standing beside one of the tables, running a hand over a cone-shaped piece of techno-organic fibre that had been split open length-wise to reveal the complicated-looking circuitry inside. Something about it was bothering him, to judge by the way he was scowling. She opened her mouth to ask him what was so interesting, but he started to mutter in Askani, shaking his head.
Taken aback, she hesitated for a moment, and then stepped forward and laid her hand over his, stilling its movement over the T-O component. "Nate. What are you doing?" she asked, quietly but firmly.
He jerked his hand away suddenly and turned away without even glancing at her, hobbling across to another one of the tables, where other T-O pieces were strung along a rack like knobby harpstrings. "That can't be it," he growled, this time in English. He reached out to touch one of the strings, but withdrew his hand sharply, as if it had given him a shock. "That can't happen."
Domino let her breath out on a harsh sigh. "Nate," she said, as patiently as she could manage. "What can't happen?"
He swore in Askani, and there was something close to fury on his face as he looked around at the lab and its contents. "I know it's not just replacements," he snarled, still not talking to her. As far as she could tell from the link, he wasn't aware of her presence in the lab with him at all. The thought provoked a strange mixture of fear and anger. "I just didn't see it before. But that doesn't mean I'm going to let them do it."
"Nathan," Domino grated, her tolerance rapidly running out. This was just too much, too strange. And she really hated being ignored. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I am not going to let them raise it again--"
She acted on impulse and lashed out, sending the contents of the table next to her crashing to the floor with one sweep of her hand. Nathan rocked backwards, almost stumbling, his eyes going wide and focusing on her at last.
"Dom, what are you doing?" he asked, sounding confused.
"What am I doing?" she repeated, the question coming out low and deadly. He blinked at her, looking bewildered. "I asked you first, Nathan."
"You asked--" He cut himself off, flushing, and she scowled at what she saw in his eyes. If she had needed confirmation that he hadn't been aware she was in the room with him, that flash of bafflement would have done just fine. "I thought some hands-on might help," he said tightly. "I'm as familiar with this technology as most of the people studying it."
He didn't seem to notice the sheer lameness of his answer. "I'd ask you to tell me what you thought," Domino said, never taking her eyes off him, "but I already heard some of it. Not that it made any sense to me. You were a little too busy ranting at your invisible friend." She couldn't keep the acid bite out of her voice and by the time she had finished, Nathan was crimson-faced, not just flushed.
"So you've finally joined the general consensus," he said harshly. "I suppose it was inevitable."
"I beg your fucking pardon?"
"You know perfectly well what I mean." He drew himself up to his full height - blatantly looming, Domino thought angrily - and glared down at her. "You think I'm losing it. Just like everyone else."
"Hate to tell you, babe, but carrying on one-sided conversations isn't a good sign," she gritted out. The gall of him, to try to turn this around on her just because she'd caught him at a bad moment.
"Dismiss it because you can't understand it," Nathan growled, the link vibrating with white-hot anger that was easily a match for her own. "But only because you can't ignore it anymore. Isn't that right?"
She almost hit him. The impulse to do so was overwhelming, but if there was something she'd learned over the years, it was how to stifle that particular reaction.
"I'm not trying to ignore it, or dismiss it," she said, barely managing to keep her voice level. "And I may not have--asked before, but I'm asking you now, Nathan. What the hell is going on?"
He didn't answer for a moment, and the play of emotions across his face was unreadable. "Only what has to," he said finally, his voice low and troubled, all the anger fading from the link.
"Damn you," Domino hissed. "That's not an answer!"
"It's the only answer you're going to get, Dom." A thin, bitter smile tugged at his lips. "And let's be honest, here. You don't really want the truth."
With that, he turned and walked away from her. Stunned by how bluntly he'd called her on all these months of avoidance, she actually let him.
***
The desert again. Nathan blinked, narrowing his eyes as he tried to sort out what was happening. Intellectually, he knew that this had been a vision, a persistent one, but he didn't think it still was. The years between this place and the first time he'd foreseen it were there in his mind, the memories hazy but almost palpable.
"Dad? You okay?"
The question from beside him was tentative, but it was enough to banish the moment of confusion. He was here, with his son, Nathan told himself with more confidence. That was all that mattered.
"I'm getting old. The heat doesn't agree with me anymore," he confessed, summoning up a grin. "But don't worry, kiddo. The day I can't manage a bit of a hike in the desert is the day you know you can go ahead and bury me."
Stopping short, Hayth gave him a sharp look, a spark of real anger in those pale eyes. "Don't even joke about that," he said vehemently, growing a few centimeters taller as he spoke, until his shoulders were straining at the seams of his brand-new uniform jacket.
Nathan was strangely touched to see that the boy still had less-than-perfect control over his mass-shifting ability when he got emotional. It was good to see that he wasn't growing up as quickly as he sometimes seemed to be. I'm not ready to let go just yet, that's the problem.
"I can't not be morbid, Hayth," he said lightly, though he wasn't quite sure that he should be brushing this off so lightly. I know he was upset when I wound up in the hospital last month--I didn't realize he was still worrying. But Nathan didn't want to grill him, either. If Hayth wanted to talk, he would. He didn't have Clare's natural reticence. "Ask your mother," Nathan went on, still sticking to the bantering tone. "She'll vouch for me."
Hayth relaxed, a slight smile tugging at his blue lips, but there was an edge of sadness to the expression that made Nathan sigh inwardly. "I just--don't like to think about you not being around," he said simply.
"Which is normal," Nathan said much more gently, "but it's something you will have to face at some point. Not just with me, either."
Hayth grumbled something under his breath and then started back down the side of the dune. "Let's not go there, okay?" he asked, smiling again, although the expression was more strained this time. "I don't feel like discussing my immortality today."
"You need to stop being so touchy about the subject," Nathan said seriously, a good portion of his attention occupied by the need to pick his footing carefully. He didn't want to fall again. Very embarassing when your son had to pick you up and put you back on your feet. "And you ought to talk to Sam some more about it. After all, the two of you will hopefully be spending a lot of time together over the next several centuries or so."
"It's helped, talking it over with him," Hayth admitted, "but Uncle Sam doesn't have the burden of this face." There was a bitter edge in his voice, and Nathan winced. "I ought to have asked for plastic surgery or something as my graduation present."
"Don't brood on it," Nathan said, reaching out telepathically to soothe him. Hayth's mind was wide open, as it always was when he was unhappy, and that could be awkward when his thoughts had been known to flatten unwary telepaths. "It's a perfectly good face," he said as reassuringly as he could, meaning it. Other than the tone of Hayth's skin, there was little resemblance at all to his gene-donor, which was the term Hayth had always preferred to use, from the time that he had been old enough to understand what cloning meant--
--"Commander?"
Nathan blinked, shaking off the vision with some difficulty as he struggled to focus on the woman standing in the doorway of his office. Layla was regarding him with visible concern, and he wondered a bit dizzily how long she had been trying to get his attention.
"I was about to head out for the day," his assistant said, peering at him and frowning. "Is there anything else you need before I go?"
He took a deep breath, trying to pull the fragments of the facade he'd been wearing for weeks now back together. "I don't think so," he said, relieved when his voice came out sounding relatively even. "But thank you, Layla."
"I live to serve," she said dryly, but still looked doubtful. "Are you sure you're all right, sir?"
"Just fine," he told her, attempting a smile.
Layla shook her head. "I've heard that one before," she said wryly, turning to go. "Try to get some sleep, all right?" she tossed back over her shoulder.
"I'm not making any promises," he called out after her. He waited until he heard the door to the outer office open and close before he let himself slump in his chair. Wincing, he rubbed at his temples. Layla's interruption had snapped him out of the vision prematurely, and he could feel the headache coming on.
It was a small consolation that his headaches hadn't been quite as bad since August. He must have put a sizeable hole in his block that night, because the visions were coming much easier now. The down side to that was that he was beginning to lose himself in them.
He looked down at the file lying open on his desk and shivered as the timeline surged around him. The file had been in his possession for a full week, but he still felt the timeline react every time he looked at it. There was a nexus point in the offing, he suspected, one that depending on what he chose to do with the information in front of him.
For the first time, he was actually thankful for the visions. As much progress as Lily and Alice had made, it still wasn't enough. They could tell him that their variable was almost certainly a child, based on how its influence on the timeline grew over the course of years. They could chart its interaction with the Scions and use the evidence of the artifact retrievals and the cult's rhetoric to argue that the child was possibly a Nur-clone.
But without the visions - particularly that persistent, haunting not-quite memory of walking in the desert with a young man who could have been Apocalypse but wasn't - he couldn't have been certain. And he needed to be certain if he was going to bring about a future where Haytham Summers was a lieutenant in the XSE rather than one where a young clone of En Sabah Nur grew up to destroy the world.
Too bad the visions weren't equally illuminating on precisely how he was supposed to do that. At least he knew Akkaba was going to be a locus of some sort. Nathan gritted his teeth, wondering again why it had taken him so long to figure out that the techno-organic components the Scions had been taking were what they needed to rebuild Apocalypse's fortress and beef up its defenses. He should have seen that right away.
Still, it didn't mean that the clone would be born there, and he couldn't make assumptions. The timestream shuddered sickly every time he contemplated the possibility of the XSE moving on Akkaba too early and revealing to the Scions that they knew what was happening. There were just too many details still unknown. So many of the rest of his visions were still full of battles he couldn't place, disasters with causes he couldn't discern. The minefield they were trying to navigate might be a little more visible to him now, but that didn't diminish the danger of crossing it.
Nathan swallowed, feeling ill as he remembed that the first words out of his mouth when Lily had told him that it was a child had been 'Can we kill it?' The vision of Hayth had been fragmentary then, the child only an idea, an abstract. Now there was a person there--not just a person, either, but his son. You weren't supposed to have memories of the future, but Nathan felt like he did. If he concentrated, he could almost summon up memories of holding a child with only the most passing physical resemblance to the Apocalypse he'd known. Of watching that child grow, loving him--
Lily's answer to his question had been immediate and definitive. The child couldn't be killed, she had told him. Murdering him would send the timeline down as destructive a path as letting the Scions have him. Her explanation had provoked another vision for him, a quick flash of people blowing themselves up in crowds as they screamed Nur's name. The cult turned to martyrdom, he assumed, robbed of the hope of their High Lord's rebirth.
It only gave added urgency to their one real option, the still-shadowed path that led to Hayth instead of Nur Junior. They had to save the child, take him away from the Scions. Lily was working on a projection that involved the XSE intervening to do just that, even though they didn't currently know where the child would be found. Nathan was perfectly willing to sit down with the rest of the command staff and explain everything, to weather the recriminations for keeping this to himself, if that turned out to be the right option. He wasn't hopeful, though. Not when he saw the command ship falling from the sky in flames and XSE troops locked in battle every time he thought too hard about the idea.
He needed to concentrate on the child, he told himself harshly, rubbing at his eyes. That was what he was seeing the most clearly. If he could just hold the vision in his mind for long enough, remember enough of the future--
A future in which he would have to explain to Dom that they needed to raise a clone of Nur as their son. Her first reaction, he was almost certain, would be to laugh in his face. It really did sound absurd. Nathan winced, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands, his focus vanishing as he remembered their argument in the lab last week. She had been frosty and uncommunicative ever since, and he couldn't blame her. He'd been so unfair. Still, why did she get to decide when enough was enough and it was time for him to spill his guts?
You should have told her everything months ago, his conscience, which had been awfully mouthy lately, pointed out.
Maybe that was true, he admitted to himself tiredly, but it was a little late to be acknowledging it. Things had gotten so complicated. He was seeing so much, sensing so much. There were too many variables here and they were all pressing in on him, pushing at him so hard that it hurt to try and focus. He felt like he was under siege by the future.
A rock, Nathan thought dimly. That was what he was. A rock being worn away by the river of the timestream. If he didn't solve this soon, there'd be nothing left of him to do what needed doing.
***
"Ah'm guessing this is a bad time," Sam said, watching Domino pound on the punching bag. She didn't answer him - didn't look up at him, even - and he sighed, surrendering to the inevitable. He had tracked her down in order to straighten out the detail of a training exercise they'd been planning, but obviously that conversation wasn't going to happen just now.
The smartest thing to do would be to leave her to finish venting her frustrations, but he'd never been able to keep his nose out of things. "So, personal or professional?" he asked, staying out of range just in case she decided she'd rather take a swing at him. He might be prepared to pester her until she explained what had her so upset, but there was no reason to provide her with undue temptation.
Domino stopped, pushing sweat-soaked hair out of her eyes and glaring at him. "What?" she demanded testily, sounding honestly baffled by the question.
"What's got you so upset?" Sam persisted calmly. "Job stuff or home stuff?"
"Nathan stuff," she snarled and attacked the punching bag with renewed energy.
"Ah," Sam said. "Should've guessed."
"Why?"
"Well, when you're this mad, it's either him or something real serious," Sam pointed out, in the same tone he might have used to point out that the sky was blue. Being a little more blatant about bantering with her might have made her think he was making fun of her, and that wouldn't be productive at all.
"All these years, and he can still push my buttons like no one else." Domino sighed, taking a step back from the bag and flexing her hands with a wince. "But you don't really want to hear about it, Sam."
"Sure ah do." And even if he hadn't, she clearly needed to talk about it. "So what's the problem?"
Domino gave him a baleful look and then sat down on the edge of the mat, unwinding the bandages from around her hands. "You're as stubborn as he is," she grumbled as he sat down beside her. Sam was wise enough not to say anything about taking that as a compliment. "At least you talk when you're having problems, though. I'm very glad you didn't pick up that particular bad habit of his."
"The two of you not communicating well?" Sam said, a wry smile tugging at his lips as he pondered his own choice of words. It was an understatement, to put it mildly. When Nathan and Domino weren't communicating well, the Cold War had nothing on them.
Domino laughed humorlessly. "That's the symptom, Sam, not the cause." Her expression tightened, and she looked away, her hands clenching into fists. "There's something wrong with him. Really wrong. I think it's got something to do with all the problems he's been having with his powers this year, but the stubborn bastard won't talk to me."
Sam grimaced. "Typical, ah guess," he conceded. Nathan had been overly touchy on the subject of his powers since Akkaba, and he supposed that wasn't liable to change anytime soon. "But ah still don't like the sound of it."
"Yeah, well, welcome to the club. Apparently I lost the right to ask because I didn't for so long."
"Sounds like his twisted version of logic," Sam said, and Domino looked up with a wan smile at his disapproving tone. "Low of him, to try and make you feel guilty like that, but we both know he'll do whatever it takes to deflect a question he doesn't want to answer. You haven't been able to figure out anything about what's wrong, then?"
Domino shrugged. "Once I got over wanting to strangle him, I tried pushing. It didn't work." She sounded so dispirited, Sam thought, frowning. Almost as if she'd given up sorting this out, and that wasn't like Domino at all. "I don't like arguing with him about it while Clare's around. She's too sensitive to it." A bitter laugh escaped her. "She's also taking his side. Apparently I'm not supposed to yell at her father when he's 'all weird'."
Sam took a moment to process that. The implications were interesting. "She have anything more to say about it than that?" he asked thoughtfully.
Domino looked back at him, blinking. "What?"
"Clare's such a precocious little thing," he pointed out. "If she's taking Nathan's side, maybe she's sensing something that's making her act all protective."
"I--didn't think of that," Domino said slowly, her eyes almost distant, as if she were mentally reviewing whatever Clare had said to her. Then she shook her head, giving him a deadpan look. "Although the idea of grilling my daughter is not appealing. Especially given that I don't think she's speaking to me at the moment."
"Ah could get Dana to try," Sam offered. "The kids are all over at our place on Friday, remember?"
Domino scowled slightly, massaging her hands. "This discussion is making me feel very manipulative." She hesitated for a moment, then sighed. "Unfortunately, I'm also very desperate."
***
"Twice in two weeks. I'm going to start thinking you actually enjoy my company," Nathan said as Lily walked into the conference room, closing the door behind her and then sitting down across from him. The bantering tone took more effort than it should have; he hadn't expected another summons to the lab this soon, and as eager as he was to hear whatever progress she'd made, he couldn't help but be a little apprehensive as well.
"I certainly wouldn't want you to get that idea, Nathan." Lily set the file she was carrying down on the table in front of her and sighed, rubbing at her eyes. She looked tired and stressed, worse than she had two weeks ago. Nathan supposed he should feel somewhat responsible for that, but he couldn't seem to muster the appropriate feelings of guilt.
"Where's Alice?" he asked instead.
"Checking some things for me." Lily gave him a thin smile that made him blink at her warily. "People are going to think that the three of us are in collusion if we keep meeting like this. Although I suppose we are, aren't we?"
"I've always believed in calling a spade a spade," he said, meeting her eyes as steadily as he could. She was still angry at him for insisting that she keep the results of her analysis between the three of them, he knew. Not because she wanted to shout the news from the rooftops - she had been meticulous about security all along with this - but because she was worried about what he was planning.
"I see," she said, eyeing him mistrustfully. "I really wish I knew how you reconcile being so direct in some situations and so damned secretive in others."
"Years of practice. Can we focus?" he asked mildly.
Lily took a deep breath. "All right. This is for you," she said, pushing the file across the table to him. "You can go over it at your leisure. I figured we could cut through the formalities of presenting the evidence and just get to the heart of the issue. You did say you had other commitments this afternoon."
Nathan frowned. It wasn't like Lily to be this peremptory about her reports. "I suppose this isn't good news," he said, prodding as delicately as he could at her shields. She was guarding her thoughts carefully, though, and the damned psi-suppressants were making it too hard to focus and find a crack in her defenses.
"I don't know whether to call it good or bad," Lily admitted, meeting his eyes levelly. "We've confirmed a lot. It's almost certainly a child. Between the other evidence and your visions--" There was a hitch in her voice that spoke of her discomfort with the idea, but she went on more forcefully. "I think we need to be working on the assumption that it's a Nur-clone."
Nathan leaned back in his chair, letting his breath out on a sigh. Lily had been playing the devil's advocate when it came to his visions for so long that hearing her accept them like this was--strange, to put it mildly. "I hope you don't take this the wrong way, Lily," he said, "but I've been working on that assumption for a while now."
"I know." Lily stared at the file for a moment, and then shook her head. "I just don't understand how you can be so calm about this. I mean, are you actually calm?" She looked up at him, her expression tightening and a spark of real concern - for him, which was sort of touching - in her eyes. "Or are you just pretending to be?"
"I'm too tired to throw tantrums these days," Nathan said dryly and tried to smile. "Besides," he went on, "I have reason to be optimistic, I think. Unless you're about to tell me otherwise?"
"No. We're still dealing with two possible timelines." Folding her hands in front of her, Lily seemed to relax a little. She was always more comfortable when she was talking about the science. "One is still looking substantially better than the other. In that one, the Scions lose their influence over the child almost immediately and then cease to be a factor."
"So how do we get the child away from them?"
Amazingly, he didn't get a lecture about jumping to conclusions. Lily just looked at him, wearing her professional mask again. "'We', if by that you mean the XSE, don't," she said flatly. "Alice and I ran that scenario. The results were almost as bad as our original projection."
He straightened in his chair, shaking his head as those same haunting images of the command ship crashing and a battle in the desert flooded his mind as Lily went on. "It looks like the child and a hell of a lot of other people would die violently in that scenario. Which leaves the timeline just as irretrievable."
"But," he prompted, his throat suddenly dry.
She fell silent for another long moment. "But, I had Alice run another projection," she said finally, an edge of what sounded almost like anger in her voice. "Using you instead."
Oh. That was it. Nathan forced himself to relax. "It worked, didn't it?" he said quietly, not looking at her. "I'm the one who has to do it." Of course he was. It made perfect sense. That was going to be his claim on the child, that he was the one who'd taken him from the Scions--
"There are risks, Nathan," Lily said insistently. She wanted to snap at him, he sensed, to tell him that this was exactly what she had been afraid he would say. "Significant risks. If you take the child away from the Scions but die doing it, which is considerably better than a remote possibility--"
"Goodbye, happy ending," he said humorlessly.
Her eyes flashed. "Don't be flippant," she grated, and he grimaced as her shields slipped and he caught a glimpse of how worried she truly was about the scenarios she had examined. "If you died, we'd be back to the first possible timeline again. It looks like it's a question of the duration of your influence on the child. Just getting him away from the Scions won't do it."
"In other words, I have to play a significant role in his life," Nathan said. "Which would be why I've seen him all grown up and bearing my last name, I'm guessing." He smiled mirthlessly at Lily. "Quite a thought, isn't it? Me raising Nur's clone. At least I'll be able to tell him that I fought a cult full of religious fanatics for the privilege--"
"And just how are you going to do that?" Lily asked bluntly, leaning forward in her chair, her gaze very intent all of a sudden. "Fight the cult on your own, I mean."
"Probably the same way I've always handled bad guys," he said as he entertained some of the possibilities. Maybe he wouldn't have to fight the Scions. If he figured out where he was supposed to go and managed to pull off a simple, discreet kidnapping, this might be a fairly simple proposition. Although he would have to destroy the cloning lab to make sure the Scions couldn't do it again, so a little noise was probably unavoidable--"Avoid them if possible, kill them if they get in my way. It's really very simple, Lily."
"Ten years ago, maybe," she pointed out. "But now? When was the last time you were in an actual combat situation, Nathan? Akkaba, wasn't it?"
"Just because I can't keep up with the kids anymore doesn't mean I can't do significant damage," he replied evenly. "And it doesn't look like we have much of an option, does it? If your projections for XSE involvement are so dire--" He squeezed his eyes shut as he got another flash of the command ship crashing. "I get the picture," he muttered.
"I wish to hell I could tell you where they were doing this," Lily began almost savagely. She pushed her chair back from the table as if deliberately putting more distance between the two of them. "If we could stop the clone from being created in the first place--"
Nathan opened his mouth and then closed it, struggling with a vague sense of uneasiness at Lily's words. "That wouldn't bring about the same bad end as if he was killed?" he asked uncertainly. The timeline was shifting again, trying to show him something new, something that hinged on Lily's words.
"There's a difference between killing someone and negating their existence," she said, waving a hand at him almost dismissively. "But I don't know any other way to remove the clone from the timeline without preventing it from being created in the first place. Any suggestions?"
"Nothing--off the top of my head," Nathan said a bit faintly, folding his hands together beneath the table as they started to tremble. Lily gave him a quizzical look and he tried to keep his expression level, praying she wouldn't catch the lie. Because something had just occurred to him, and given what she'd said about the risks of him retrieving the child himself, he was very much afraid that he'd need to explore it as a back-up plan. And he was even more worried about how Lily might reaction if she found out what it was.
"This is one of the few times in my life that I half-wish I was telepathic," Lily said, staring at him steadily now. "Nathan, what are you thinking?"
"Reviewing my options," he said, and very deliberately looked down at his watch. "I've got to go," he said, hauling himself up out of the chair. "Security Council briefing."
Lily nodded, but her eyes were still locked on his face, intent and wary. "You know," she said quietly, "just because the XSE can't solve the problem doesn't mean that you shouldn't bring the rest of the command staff in on it."
Nathan managed a chuckle. "Giving me tactical advice, Lily?"
"I wouldn't presume," Lily said, more than a touch of sarcasm to the words. "But I really don't think handling this entirely on your own is a good idea. There's too much at stake--"
"True," Nathan said quietly, picking up the file. "But there's more to this than chronography can tell you, Lily."
***
Lying flat in the grass at the top of the hill, Sulven peered down at the Scion camp. Past midnight and they were still hard at work, with floodlights set up to illuminate the excavation site. Whatever they were seeking in the ruins of this ancient temple, they clearly wished to acquire it as soon as possible. Another artifact, mostly likely.
She would have a definite answer soon, Sulven told herself fiercely, and hopefully the answers to several other pressing questions as well. Information-gathering could be a painstaking process, but when one exercised sufficient diligence, one link in the chain inevitably led to the next. As it had here.
The first link had been a tip from a Scion prisoner, a vague but tantalizing reference to an 'archaeological operation in Central Europe'. The information was still working its tortuous way through the XSE's labyrinthine system of analysis, but she had grown tired of waiting. Some private interrogation of the prisoner involved had elicited a few more details, and some good fortune with the surveillance satellites had located this place. She had arranged a training exercise for one of the better Black Ops teams as a pretext. Judging by the number of cultists below, it was fortunate that she hadn't chosen to come alone.
She hadn't told Nathan about any of this. It hadn't been one of his visions that had set her on this path, after all, and he had more than enough to deal with right now. This change in his precognition was not a good thing, that much she could see. The line between the present and the future was blurring for him, perhaps irrevocably, and Sulven had no doubt that without his exceptional strength of will he would have lost himself completely by now. He was in over his head, as the saying went, and she could only hope he found it in himself to continue to swim. What was happening to him was beyond all her experience. She couldn't help him.
The team's field commander, Jarnan, crawled up beside her. She could feel the tension, the disapproval radiating from him as he stared down at the camp. "We have company," he observed, keeping his voice low as he glanced sideways at her.
Sulven gave him a deadpan look that she knew he'd see, even in the dark; Jarnan was a feral, with exceptional night vision. Physically, he reminded her vaguely of Creed, which was one reason she had never particularly liked him. But he was one of the best team leaders available, and she respected ability more than she cared about trivial personal issues. Although the way he was looking at her now was beginning to make her think she had made the wrong choice.
"Obviously," she said after a deliberate pause. He deserved a few moments to assimilate what the camp below them meant for the night ahead. "That would be our target, actually."
Jarnan chewed on his lower lip, looking back down at the camp. "I see. So what are we doing here?" he asked after a moment, his voice tight. It could have been a simple request for more information, Sulven knew, but it wasn't. Not when it was put in a tone that made it very clear he was questioning her motives, questioning her. She could sense his mistrust, his suspicion. It was almost disappointing; she'd thought better of him.
"They're Scions," she said softly. "In the midst of an artifact search. What do you think we're doing here?"
"This was supposed to be a training exercise," Jarnan growled. His mind was mostly opaque, like most ferals, but she could still sense the anger rising in him. Apparently she had offended his sensibilities. Really, she had given him credit for being flexible than this. What was he doing in Black Ops if he was this concerned with the rules?
"A necessary subterfuge," Sulven said dismissively, only deigning to respond when she realized Jarnan was waiting for an explanation. "Had we waited, we might have missed the opportunity--"
"Just tell me we have clearance, Commander," Jarnan demanded brusquely. "Please."
"It's easier to apologize than ask permission."
"Except when sorry has no meaning, right?"
Sulven took a deep breath and eyed him for a moment, reminding herself that this was neither the time nor place to teach the boy manners. "Are you seriously suggesting that we leave?" she hissed at him, not bothering to hide the anger in her voice. "Just turn around and teleport home when the enemy is within our reach?"
Jarnan gave her a decidedly unfriendly look. "I didn't say that," he muttered almost grudgingly. "We're here, they're here, so let's do it." Sulven opened her mouth to congratulate him for showing a little sense, but he went on before she could speak. The anger was coming off him in waves now. His control was actually quite impressive. "But consider this my official protest, Commander. You set this up, you get to face the music. I'm not taking any responsibility for this when we get back."
Sulven bared her teeth at him. "Then it's a good thing I only require your obedience and not your support, isn't it?" And it would snow in the desert before she ever chose him for another mission. She'd take a formal oath to that effect as soon as she had the opportunity. "They've set no sentries," she said, breaking eye contact with Jarnan and looking back down at the camp. She could still feel him glowering at her. "Send Palliser and her squad to approach from the west. I'll accompany you and yours from the east."
"Yes, ma'am," Jarnan grated, turning away to signal the rest of his team.
Sulven ignored him and continued to stare down at the camp, relishing all the possibilities inherent in the situation. Protocol could flonq itself for all she cared. When she came back with more prisoners and whatever artifact the Scions were seeking here, the others would have to admit that her actions had been warranted.
Ten minutes later, when the young woman walking point for Jarnan's squad tripped a psionic mine halfway down the hillside, Sulven was left with no time to consider the folly of too much optimism.
to be continued...
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