Onboard the Personal Space Station Solaria

Home of the Chairman of the Celestial Expanse

They stared each other down across the desk, together in the same room for the first time ever. But for all that they’d never shared the same physical space before, theirs was a connection that spanned years. Allies and enemies in turn, they had fought the good fight, both with each other and against each other, and now, after all this time, they had finally come to their last battle.

The Chairman slowly inclined his head to the left. “So.”

“So,” she repeated.

The Admiral regarded the Chairman narrowly. From up close, she could easily see what he’d gone to so much trouble to conceal over the link—the yellow tinge to his skin, the gaunt planes of his face. Not the worst she’d seen, but bad enough. How long did he have left at this point? Six months? A year? Only whatever time remained since he’d quarantined himself away on this station at the end of the universe.

An injector lay at one end of his desk, almost casually, as though he’d simply forgotten to put it away after its last use. The Admiral stared at it for a moment before slowly lifting her gaze to the Chairman’s. In his eyes lurked a tacit confession of what she already knew, and if she’d had any illusions that he would let her leave after all this, they were gone now. Picking up the injector, the Admiral turned it around in her hand a few times, and then tossed it back on the desktop with a clank.

“How long have you known you were infected?” Silence greeted the question. The Admiral’s eyes went to the patterned half star on the Chairman’s lapel, a symbol worn only by bona fide members of PsyCorp, and a bitter laugh fell from her lips. “You’ve known all along, haven’t you? You’re a psychic; how could you not have? That’s why you remained on this station all this time: because you knew you could never make it past a psycheck.” She paused. “What’s it been now? A year and a half? Two?”

A beat passed, then—“Twenty-nine months.”

The Admiral let out a low whistle. “Only seven months left to live. No wonder you’ve been so desperate for a cure.”

“A cure that you have still failed to deliver.”

“I deal in science, not miracles.”

“Really?” The Chairman raised an eyebrow. “Rumor would suggest otherwise.”

The Admiral’s lips thinned. Ignoring the pointed implication, she pulled a data chip the size of her thumb out of her pocket and threw it on the desk. “I’m not here about rumors; I’m here about facts.”

The Chairman eyed the chip, though he didn’t touch it. “What is this?”

“It’s a data chip taken from the relay station on Prism just before R&D fell. The intel on it identifies the saboteur who destroyed the Archangel project, and with it the lives of the nearly three thousand people who worked on it.” She paused. “This chip was the last thing the Doctor saw before he died. Do you want to know what’s on it? Go ahead—look.”

Silently, the Chairman uplinked to the data chip, eyebrows rising as he took in the authorization code buried within its depths. “It’s your code.”

“My code,” she repeated, “but not my crime. But then, you already knew that, didn’t you?”

The Chairman looked away. “I . . . have recently discovered . . . signs . . . that I may not have been as entirely in control of my . . . circumstances as I’d thought—”

“Control?! You thought you were in control?” Her eyes fell on the injector, still lying on the corner of the desk where she’d tossed it, and with a harsh laugh, she seized it. “Why, because you’ve been using this? Because you’ve been dosing up with Psi-Lac and Spectranol every day for the past twenty-nine months? You thought a few drugs and some fledgling psychic abilities so minor they barely registered on the PsyCorp tests somehow put you in control?”

“I dosed at regular intervals; I made sure I always had a full supply. The regimen was working—”

“Until it wasn’t, was it?” He started at the interjection, his face appearing strangely vulnerable, and a look almost akin to pity entered her eyes. Linking her hands casually behind her back, she slowly paced the room. “Those once-a-day doses, so effective at first, eventually became two a day, and then three. You told yourself it was only natural, that of course the drugs would lose effectiveness as your squatter adapted to them, and that it was no cause for alarm. It was all a matter of dosage, really. You upped the concentration, increasing the amount until you were taking two, even three times as much with every dose as you once did, and for a while, it seemed to help.

“For a while.”

The Admiral stopped at the end of the room, turned around, and began walking the other way. “It was a delaying game—not a cure but a moratorium—a way to postpone the inevitable until a true cure could be found. But time continued to pass, and the cure never came, and though you continued to up your meds, somehow you knew, deep down inside, that the Spectre was taking control. You started to notice little discrepancies between memory and reality. Small things at first—a lost half hour here, a missing tip-pad there. Signed orders you couldn’t remember issuing no matter how hard you tried. You told yourself it was nothing—”

She paused, slowly pivoting around and advancing back across the room until she faced the Chairman once again.

“—but it wasn’t nothing, was it?”

For the first time since the conversation began, a shadow of doubt passed over the Chairman’s face. Almost unwittingly, his eyes dropped to the data chip still clutched in his hand.

Leaning in, the Admiral whispered, “It was the seed of R&D’s destruction.”

The Chairman paled. “How could you possibly—”

“I’ve been in charge of the military’s bioresearch division since this war started. Did you think we wouldn’t have experimented with various forms of drug therapy? Every time, it always came out the same way. Perhaps we had the concentration wrong, or perhaps it was as simple as missing a single dose. That’s all it takes, you know. One missed dose, and the Spectre has control, and just like that, everything that comes after is a lie.”

She held his gaze, eyes boring into his from across the desk as she willed him to admit the truth. It was the Chairman who blinked first.

“Perhaps I did . . . contribute to the events on R&D in some small way,” he finally conceded, “but what other option did I have? I’m not just some expendable person; I’m the Chairman of the Celestial Expanse! I have responsibilities and duties only I can carry out. What should I have done?”

“You should have turned yourself in the moment that squatter took up residence in your head!”

A sneer came over his face. “So arrogant, so superior! You hunted me down, located my station, and came all this way, and for what? To rake me over the coals about what happened at R&D? Quite ironic, don’t you think, when we both know you weren’t entirely onboard with the Archangel project? Admit it! You would have taken down anything that might have ended your precious Helios Project. Yes, R&D fell, but can you honestly say you aren’t secretly glad about the way it all turned ou—”

Quick as a whip, her arm lashed out, sweeping across the desk with unconcealed fury. Items flew in every direction, whipping through the air before hitting the deck in a series of clatters. Her hands slammed down on the now-empty desk.

“MY FATHER DIED BELIEVING I SOLD HIM OUT!”

The pistol was out of her sleeve and in her hand before she’d even decided to withdraw it. The Chairman jerked back, utter shock reflected in his eyes as he stared down the barrel of a weapon that should never have made it past his security. He inhaled, and then inhaled again, then with a visible effort, he forced his muscles to slowly relax. Eyes never leaving her face, he picked up his glass of brandy and took a sip.

“What? Are you going to stun me with that thing?” he asked after a moment. Setting the glass back down, he continued in a conversational tone, “I’m not sure what you think to accomplish by it. Even were you to succeed in shooting me, I have guards posted all through this station, not to mention just outside. Stun me, and you won’t get ten meters past that door.”

“No, I imagine I wouldn’t,” she told him slowly, deliberately, “but then, I didn’t come all this way to stun you.”

For a second, he froze, nearly convinced by her grave demeanor in spite of himself, and then he relaxed. He laughed softly. “We both know you can’t kill me. The minute I die, this Spectre will be released to take a new host, and you, my dear Admiral, will be the closest option.”

He smirked. It was the reason he’d let her onto the station, his ace in the hole. With her on Solaria, the Retribution wouldn’t dare shoot at the station, and with him a squatter, she couldn’t kill him—not without risking herself. It seemed a foolproof solution, and if she were anyone else in the universe, it would have been, except that she, too, had an ace in the hole.

An answering smirk cracked her lips. “You’re right, Chairman. Or at least you would be, if not for one thing.” She raised her pistol to his face. “I’m immune.”

Then she pulled the trigger and shot him straight through the eye.

One instant he was alive, and the next he was dead, slumping lifelessly over his desk in an inelegant heap. A surge of sour-and-sweet poured into her nostrils as his squatter took to the air, a ghoul once more. It hovered in the space between them, so close she almost fancied she could see it, limned in a blanket of its own scent.

A frisson of excitement sparked within her. Maybe, just maybe, it would be different this time . . .

They faced each other down, the Admiral and the Ghoul, like two commanders meeting on a battlefield of old, pennants flying and armies arrayed behind them as they made their intentions known. This, then, was the creature behind it all—the co-opting of the Chairman, the fall of R&D, the death of her father.

She glanced at the feeds still running silently across the Chairman’s desk and slowly shook her head.

The fate of Iolanthe.

It had taken a long time for her to determine the significance of that planet—longer still to realize it had any significance at all—and yet now that she knew, she couldn’t help but see how neatly it aligned with everything else the enemy had done. One by one, the pieces of their conquest were falling into place, and she wasn’t sure if even she, with her vast power, could stop them. That’s why the Helios Project was so important, not that anyone—not the Doctor, not even the Chairman—had ever truly understood what she was trying to do.

And now they never would.

Her eyes flicked to the empty space above the Chairman’s desk. Though precious seconds had slipped by, still the ghoul lingered, hovering silent and unmoving in the sour-scented air. Had this one ghoul masterminded everything that had come to pass, using the Chairman to engineer each and every detail one step at a time, or was it merely one small piece of a picture so hopelessly vast she could never hope to perceive it all? No doubt her father would have had his theories, but he was no longer here to give them even if she could bear to listen. Rather than theorize further, she simply waited as the ghoul continued to hang in the air, moving neither toward her nor away, wondering if perhaps her luck, her curse, had finally, inexplicably run out.

Slowly, she exhaled, letting the air trickle slowly out through her modified nose, then inhaled . . .

 . . . and it was gone, evaporating into the station in less time than it took to draw breath.

Her shoulders slumped at their standoff’s sudden end. Though she’d known the ghoul would leave—they always did—she still felt an inexplicable sense of reprieve, as though she’d been saved at the last second from having to make a decision she wasn’t quite ready to make yet.

Her eyes went to the Chairman’s body, still draped over the desk barely a meter away. In death, he looked little different than he had alive. She would almost think him asleep if not for the clear fluid seeping from his left eye, dribbling down over his cooling cheek to pool in a chit-sized puddle across the desk.

A sudden image of her father lying dead among the crystalline shards of his own station flashed through her mind, and her jaw hardened. After what he’d done, this was too good a death for the Chairman, this fool whose cowardice and conceit had allowed the enemy to play him to the very end, but it was the only death she could offer him. It would have to be enough.

It was enough.

At least that’s what she told herself as she turned her back on the Chairman for the last time, strode over to the adjoining docking port, and entered the codes to access his personal escape craft—a gift from Nye-Tang. Only after she was well clear of the station did she finally link Inarez, audio only, voicing just two words into the com.

“It’s time.”

The barrage came so swiftly the station didn’t stand a chance. The missiles struck the Solaria one salvo after another, invisible but for the bursts of gold blooming steadily across her shields. By the time the station finally managed to begin a series of clumsy maneuvers, it was too late. With a final fusillade, the shields fell, and instead of sparkles of gold, red-and-orange flames bloomed across the black carapace. The Retribution sent forth one final salvo, and suddenly it was over. The Solaria imploded, crumpling in on itself like a tin can crushed by an invisible fist.

The Admiral let out a slow breath and sat back in her chair. It was done. The Chairman was dead, and the Spectre that had controlled him was now condemned to a hostless eternity in this desolate place. It was her greatest victory, a feat to wipe out all of the evil that had come before it, and yet as she watched the remains of the station slowly get eaten up within the roiling flames of the sun, it wasn’t triumph she felt. All she felt was empty, hollowed from the inside out, and somehow she knew that nothing she did—not in the past, not in the present, not even in the future—would ever be enough.