GEHENNA
They were all gone. All of them who were still living, anyway. She was alone with the dead.
But that wasn’t entirely true, Kath Toom thought as she wandered through the gloomy, rock-hewn corridors of her prison. She didn’t actually think those who remained behind were dead, but only in some kind of stasis, and she wasn’t sure exactly why, either. She remembered the chambers she’d seen when she had first awoken in that tiny room. Rows of small metal doors with 30-centimeter-thick windows in the centers, and lifeless terran feet. There must have been room for twenty in the chambers, maybe more, but the occupants did not stir when she pounded on the windows, and the little doors were locked. Padded little coffins, just enough room for a single body lying on its back, with full life-support systems in each and reinforced walls that looked as if they could survive a nuclear attack.
The rest of her companions (spectres, a voice inside her mind insisted, call them by their proper name) had left a few hours before, including Gabriel Tosh. He had come to see her in the quarters where she’d been assigned to let her know about his upcoming mission, and had quickly launched into the same speech about freedom and the right to live their own lives and the need to put an end to tyranny forever. He hadn’t told her about their specific target, but he had asked her to go with them, which she declined. She found his fervor both seductive and slightly disturbing, the way you might feel about a dynamic young preacher who believes the hand of some god is upon him. His entire body had seemed to tremble with it as he spoke, and his conviction and passion for what he was saying were infectious. She couldn’t deny that.
She also found him physically irresistible, the same way she had felt back in their days at the academy when she’d first seen him in his ghost suit, muscles rippling, dreadlocks not so thick as they were now and partially tied back on his head. He’d been thinner then, but impressive nonetheless, and she’d wanted him from the start.
I guess we better be getting to know each other, he’d said after they’d been assigned to the same team, and his eyes had held a sparkle that let her know he felt something too. Those eyes had been hypnotic even before they had turned the strange, milky white they were now, and she’d been lost in them from the beginning, even though she had worked hard at first to pretend otherwise while Tosh and Nova’s relationship had run its course.
That she remembered any of this was shocking to her in a way that was difficult to describe, sort of like finding out that you had a long-lost twin sister, someone who had lived a parallel life but with different memories and a different view of the world. She felt this mirroring inside her whenever the memories returned, a sense of déjà vu that left her shuddering and weak in its wake. And they returned without any pattern or reason, sometimes fully formed, sometimes not. Sometimes, she realized, they weren’t memories at all, but hallucinations of things from her past that materialized in the present, although they didn’t belong there.
Ghosts were trained to embrace the idea of becoming a human machine built for one purpose: to serve the Dominion. Personal goals, dreams, family histories, and memories were hammered out of recruits every step of the way. The hallucinations she was experiencing were breaking down these carefully constructed walls.
She had experienced friendship. She had loved a man once. And she might even be able to imagine doing so again.
All this was due to the terrazine. She felt sure Tosh had been piping it into her room at night; she had terrible, vivid dreams and woke up with the taste of copper on her lips. But as terrible as the dreams were, something worse had begun happening too. She had started to crave the terrazine, and by the late afternoon she couldn’t wait to go to bed so she could taste it again.
Which led her back to the stasis chambers with the spectres, or at least what she thought were spectres, inside them. She had never asked but had come to believe that these were the newest recruits, and that if she and Tosh didn’t have the history they had together, she’d be in there with them. But she was special, and so he was giving her the run of the place. Toom supposed this was Tosh’s way of showing her that she was free, and that his way was the right one. But it rang hollow. After all, where would she go? She had no ship, and no way to leave.
Toom had to wonder about the chambers. Because if you were building a revolution on freedom, you didn’t begin it by imprisoning your recruits and drugging them into a coma. It was only the first of many things that didn’t make sense to her. But perhaps he was right; perhaps the Dominion was no better than the Confederacy, and Mengsk was a dictator mad with the very power he’d claimed to detest. Maybe if they were all set free, the universe would be different.
The corridor ended in a T at another corridor and a neosteel door, set into the rock, directly in front of her. A small sign marked the room as engineering.
She reached out again with her mind, looking for some sign that she wasn’t alone in this place. She found nothing but emptiness. Where was she, anyway—some kind of strange ship? She had the feeling of movement, and occasionally felt the thrumming of engines under her feet, and yet the rocky walls reminded her of a cavern. It didn’t make any sense. Wherever she was, it felt huge, almost like a planet moving through space. But that was impossible.
Standing there in the corridor, literally at a crossroads, her light cotton gown drifting across her bare skin, she felt certain this place was haunted.
Toom tried the neosteel door and found it unlocked. It swung open into a darkened room lit only by the green glow of computer monitors among a mass of other equipment. It was difficult to see how far back the room went; she had the sense only that it was large. There were evenly spaced rows with banks of machines, switches, piping, and wires thick as her wrist.
How could something like this run without any people, or even any visible AI units? She took a step inside, looked for a light, and found nothing. It was eerie inside this room with its endless lines of monitors and low humming of electrical current. The door swung shut behind her with a thunk, making her jump.
She had made a mistake, coming in here. She was about to leave when one of the closest monitors, one that had been running dark, lit up.
She glanced over and found a message scrolling across the screen in white letters against the green: Kath Toom? It’s Lio Travski.
Toom stood for a long moment in shock, staring at the lines running over and over. The image of a man came to her, little more than a boy, really, thin as a rail, bald-headed, with ears like saucers and an inclination to twitch and run off at the mouth. And so, when he stepped out from behind a nearby row of equipment and smiled at her in that geeky, slightly shy and awkward way, she was hardly surprised.
Answer me, Kath. We need to talk.
“Lio?” she murmured. She took a half step forward, reaching out toward him, memories of their time together at the academy washing over her and making her terribly sad for some reason she didn’t fully understand.
The man-boy disappeared in an instant, leaving nothing but empty space and racks and thick wires beyond, and she realized she’d been hallucinating again. It was something she was getting used to after that first time waking up alone in the place with the stasis chambers and watching a hydralisk rearing up before her. She went to the monitor and tapped it, looking to see if the letters would blink out. Maybe she was hallucinating this too.
Ouch ouch ouch.
In spite of herself, she smiled. If she was imagining it, that was still pretty inventive. And it certainly sounded like Lio, if text alone could be said to sound like anything. She looked for a keyboard, found a holo one, and typed a message.
“Is this really you?”
A moment later, a second monitor blinked on just down the row. In the flesh. So to speak.
Still smiling, she typed, “But how? I don’t remember everything.”
Now all the monitors on both sides lit up and displayed the same message: Hard to explain. I entered the data stream, connected, and became one with the machines, and now I exist beside my own creation, a program within a program.
It seemed impossible that this could happen. But Lio had always been special in that way, able to read machines and affect them with a single thought, avoiding detection from security systems and reprogramming code as he went—even disappearing inside those systems for a short time, leaving a shell of himself behind …
Suddenly she remembered why the thought of him had made her sad: remembered his vicious resocialization and detox at the academy; the differences in him that she had first thought to be healing changes when he returned to action, but later realized were far worse; and the terrible battle for control of the academy AI Sparky and the battle-bots, and all that came after it.
Memories that had been taken away from her, until now. She recoiled from the strength of them, wincing as if bruised. It was too much; she could not bear it anymore.
“Oh, Lio,” she typed, wiping her wet eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Silence for a moment, and then: Don’t be. I am no longer bound by terran flesh. I am free to live as I choose. It is the way it should be. Ultimately, it will be the fate of all terrans.
“But you’re alone, Lio. Nobody deserves to be alone.”
This time, the screen stayed blank for a full minute. Then: Loneliness is a human concern. When you knew me, I was little more than a troubled trainee trying to find his way in a broken world. I did not understand the truth.
“What do you mean?” Toom wrote, but this time Lio remained unresponsive. She waited some more, starting to feel vulnerable standing there alone in the big room in her gown with the monitors all glowing green. She shivered. Ghosts weren’t supposed to feel this way. Love and lust and sadness and fear. She couldn’t believe how far away she had come from her training in such a short time, and she started to understand what Gabriel had been telling her about what the Dominion had done to them.
She was starting to feel like a regular terran again. She didn’t know whether to love it or hate it.
“What did they do to us at the academy, Lio?” she typed into the monitor. “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Nothing for another minute, and then: They took away your lives, brainwashed you, abused you, used you, and they’ll throw you away when it suits them. That’s not how a government should treat its people, Kath. That’s not loyalty or service or patriotism; that’s slavery.
She thought he might be right, but she had spent so long learning about blind devotion to the cause, it made her sick to think about the alternative. Everyone knew a war was coming because there was always another war, and soldiers would be needed to defend the people from the zerg and protoss and any other threat that might be out there, including other terrans. She was one of the best, and she’d always felt good knowing she was fighting for the right side.
But then she thought about what had happened to the ghost program when the Dominion had replaced the Confederacy, and for all the talk about the Confederacy’s evils and how they had treated their ghosts, Mengsk had ended up adopting the program as his own, and the ghosts who were still alive and had transferred their loyalty to him were brain-panned and began fighting for the Dominion, while the extreme treatment they received at the academy had remained the same or even worsened.
Gabriel had promised that terrazine would open her eyes.
As she stood there, shivering, another message from Lio lit up the screen. I want to show you something, Kath. When I was inside the academy AI, I gained access to all the secret holovid files on mind wipes and other things none of us had ever seen before. I want to show you this so you’ll see what they did to me.
The screen flickered, and then a holoprojector to the left whirred to life and a figure appeared on a table. The figure was young, bald, and naked. Lio. He was strapped down with steel cuffs around his wrists and ankles. Another figure approached the table, wearing surgical scrubs and carrying two wands with circular pads on the ends, and he was saying something to someone off-camera and laughing as he placed the two pads on the temples of the boy on the table, still talking about something that had happened the other day to him in the mess hall as he thumbed a switch on one of the wands and Lio jolted violently, convulsing upright and then slamming back down again.
The man in the scrubs wiped drool from the corner of Lio’s mouth with a cloth, studied a screen showing brain-wave patterns, and nodded at something said off-camera. Then he flicked the switch, and Lio started screaming.
Kath Toom turned away through a prism of tears.
A small part of my resocialization. The academy’s radical answer to hab addiction and an independent spirit.
“Turn it off,” she said, and she didn’t know if Lio could hear her, but the holo went dark. She stood there among the machines and tried to find an answer for what she had seen, but nothing made any sense. You wouldn’t treat an animal this way. Of course, it would have been possible to abuse a ghost under these circumstances, since the mind wipes would have left them with no memory of what had just occurred. Most people had a general distrust, even dislike, of anyone with psionic abilities. It would have been all too easy for any abuse to get worse very quickly if enough safeguards were not put into place.
But Mengsk was supposed to be above all that. He was supposed to bring peace to the galaxy, not more suffering. Not this.
She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath, then typed: “What are you planning to do, Lio?”
Gabriel has asked me to help him bring Team Blue back together to take over the ghost program and set everyone free.
“And you agreed? Why? For revenge?”
I am no longer interested in emotions such as revenge. But I do remain curious. It is perhaps the last vestige of my humanity. I am interested in cause and effect. And I am curious about the next stage of human evolution. Perhaps it begins here, with the assistance of mind-expanding drugs. Perhaps we are the beings who will speed the metamorphosis. I think it is so.
“You’re talking about terrazine,” she typed. “You’re going to gas them all.”
Most terrans are not yet capable of understanding the universe as I do. But it is inevitable that they must find a way, or face extinction. I have more to show you about the ghost program, medical experiments, cross-species grafts, executions, and something more personal.
Something about your father.
Toom took another deep breath and tried to calm her thudding heart as a whirlwind of emotions consumed her. Her father? He was dead. The details were still fuzzy for her, but so what?
What could Lio possibly have to show her?
She couldn’t understand anymore what was right or whom she could trust. Her hands would not stop shaking. “I’m sorry, Lio,” she typed. “I have to go.” Then she stepped away from the keyboard and went for the door, but as she reached for it she heard the locking mechanism slide shut. She pulled, but the handle wouldn’t budge.
She turned, her eye catching the monitor screen and what Lio was typing: Kath? Try to control your emotions. There’s so much you still need to know—
“I don’t need to know anything,” she said, and an unexpected rage rose up inside her so suddenly it took her breath away, and at the same time she pushed outward with her mind at the door and heard the lock pop. She stood there dumbfounded as the door swung open and banged against the inside wall, narrowly missing her.
I did that, she thought. I’m a … teek?
But that was impossible. She knew full well what her PI was, and she had never come close to anything like this before. And it had come so naturally to her, like breathing.
It must have been something else. Maybe Lio had done it somehow. And yet she knew the truth, felt it deep inside.
She was a teek.
Her fingers were tingling and her entire body felt as if it were on fire, and the hunger for more terrazine made her mouth dry. The air had grown hot, the walls closing in on her. She had to get out.
All the monitors lit up and started blinking, and the holoprojectors too, and then the lights in the hallway outside flickered and buzzed brightly. Lio was trying to get her attention, but she refused to look at any of the screens. It was all too much, too soon, and she ran out into the hall and to the right, the lights ticking on and off in a line as she went.
As Toom swerved into another branching corridor, a cleaning bot stopped, clicked once, turned, and whirred after her, its squat little body trembling as its motor was pushed to the limit. As she ran past an air vent, she saw duct cleaners emerging and scurrying like little metal spiders to follow her path across the rock. A chill ran up her spine as she barreled headlong into another corridor, bounced off a wall, and watched a mounted security camera swivel to follow her. Lio was sending everything after her, tracking her every movement. There was no place to go.
She took a flight of steps at the end of the hall to another level, leaving the cleaning bot behind, and entered a hangar that was nearly empty except for a single modified banshee and a goliath. There was no sign of anyone anywhere besides a series of maintenance and AAI bots, which turned as she entered and began to roll after her, the AAI unit morphing as it tried to find the right pitch to pique her interest, from a young girl eating breakfast cereal to a woman trying out a sleep aid, and finally to an image of her father. But not her father as he might have been when she was a child; this man was terribly burned, his flesh twisted into ropes, his hair all but gone from his smoking skull.
She stopped dead, staring. This was no auto program.
“Darling,” it said, “you must listen to me. There’s so much I need to tell you about me, about us. About Sector 9. I didn’t steal from the company, and I didn’t broker any deals with the Umojans to sell Dominion secrets. I was set up by Aal Cistler and his father. He was the real criminal. But nobody would believe me. I had no choice but to take my own life.”
“You’re not my father,” Toom said. “You’re reading my alphas, getting inside my head and showing me what I want to see!”
“There’s more to tell you, so much more, about the Conglomerate and its dealings. About Sector 9. Gabriel Tosh knows everything.”
The AAI morphed to show Lio himself, flickering in the holo and reaching out to her like a beggar on the streets of Nidhogg. “I know what happened to your dad too. I have records that prove he was innocent.”
“My father killed himself,” she said. More tears welled up and spilled over onto her cheeks. “I—I remember. He was disgraced and he—he jumped into a warp engine. I remember they told me that. There’s nothing anyone can do to help now.”
“He was betrayed, set up to take the fall for a top secret Kal-Bryant program, Sector 9. Once he found out the truth, he had no other choice. The Dominion forced him to commit suicide. You and Gabriel uncovered all this before you graduated from the academy, but you were mind wiped. You couldn’t remember any of it. But you can clear your family name now, Kath.”
The AAI unit moved closer. “You know that you were taken from your father by a wrangler for the ghost program, and he fought to get you back, but they wouldn’t allow it. They never told you that part, did they?”
She backed away from the holo, shaking her head. It was all too much for her to bear, too much information at once. It was as if she had learned she had a father again and at the very same time had him yanked away from her.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “I mean it. I need to think!” Then she pushed again with her mind, getting used to the feel of it, like a muscle she never knew she had and was starting to flex for the first time.
The results were quite satisfying: she watched the AAI unit spark and sputter, its motor smoking before bursting into flame. The holo of Lio abruptly disappeared.
As the other bots closed in she chose the first door behind her, and later she would wonder if maybe she had been herded there like cattle, because as soon as she ducked inside, she knew Gabriel would have wanted her to see this.
It was a staging room, and at the opposite end was a line of cubicles with holo images of faces above them, marking their ownership. About half of the cubicles were empty.
But the one marked by her own face was not.
She crossed the room and touched the black suit hanging there. Its fabric felt something like a ghost hostile environment suit’s muscle fiber, but thicker, with a tighter weave. The helmet sat on a bench below, looking slightly menacing. She touched that too, letting her finger trace its smooth curve, and wondered where Gabriel was now, what he was doing.
Kath Toom stood in the silence and thought about putting it on.