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KS Desiccator; Bridge
En route to rendezvous at Silenos System, ETA: 00:12
The Peleus System, Deneb Quadrant, Epsilon Sector
DEC 06 2793/2793.340; 2347 Hours (CST)
As the dozens of crewmembers went on about their duties on the bridge, Blair and Vell carried on their conversation—one which hadn’t changed too terribly much in the past hour.
"I don’t believe it."
Vell sighed as he watched Blair toss the PAD he’d been staring at for the last half hour onto the black leather cushioning of Vell’s command chair.
"I just don’t believe it."
"It’s in the news archives, Confed records, and history books, Blair. It fucking happened."
"Then Braddock... that medic on the station... they were both right. God, I was assassinated."
"You read about your Star Runner run, I take it?" Vell asked. He’d been hesitating to bring the matter up with Blair.
Blair’s silence was answer enough. "Insane... I went down in history as being insane—psychotic!" A warrior without a war, the PAD went into depth how one retired Commodore Christopher Blair flew a Demon-class fighter named the Star Runner, later upgraded with unknown alien technology he’d acquired from parts equally unknown, first fighting for the independence of the Firekkan Commonwealth, then for simply for the sake of fighting itself. In the end, Christopher Blair had been put down like a rabid dog, "taken out" by those who were once his friends and comrades in early 2685 to stop the chaos and death he wrought for his own twisted vision of glory and "vindication."
"But how can this be? You obviously remember an entirely different past than history has recorded. Unless, of course, you’re lying. But I don’t think you are."
"My wife... my family... they never happened? I was never put into cryogenic stasis?"
"I’ve seen the holofootage. Unless someone’s been doing some crazy ass time-traveling, history is telling the truth."
"Then, damn it, who am I?"
"We’ve reached the rendezvous point, Sers," an officer shouted up, interrupting their conversation. Blair couldn’t pick the officer who had spoken from the clusters of men in the crewpits that encircled the bridge. Observing crewmen on the Desiccator reminded him of watching a bustling ant hill.
Blair rubbed his eyes. Distractedly, he moved to one of the crewpits and leaned over the overlooking rail. "ETA of the Confed carrier’s arrival?"
"Any second now, Ser Blair," an officer answered.
As if on cue, a familiar Hispanic woman’s visage suddenly came into being on the frontal viewports where only a starfield had been a moment ago. "This is Captain Juliana Kincaid of the Confederation megacarrier Blair, responding to your request. How may we be of assistance, Kindred vessel?"
Vell tugged on the collar of his black trench coat, almost smirking. It wasn’t often that he found himself being greeted by Confed, Blair figured. "I’m Vell Ricaud, the man who summoned you."
Kincaid’s eyes lit up unexpectedly. "The leader of the Kindred?"
"Yes."
"I’m afraid I’ll have to apologize on behalf of the High Command—the Confederation never properly expressed its gratitude for your assistance in the Steltek invasion. I understand your squadrons accounted for the destruction of more than twenty Drone ships."
"My men fight hard," Vell answered, acting as if he couldn’t understand how she could think otherwise. From the look of things, Blair thought the man could make a hell of a wing commander in the Confed Space Force. "It’s what they’re trained to do."
"Once again, our thanks."
Blair took this as his opportunity. Stepping before Vell, he came into Kincaid’s view. He saw her eyes widen, her jaw drop slightly, and nearly lose her balance. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it. She opened it again, then dumbfoundedly shut it a second time. At a loss for what to say, she finally raised a hand to salute him.
Blair returned the salute, grinning. "Hello, Captain."
"But... how...?" she managed.
"I don’t know," he replied. "Hell, there’s a lot I don’t know. That’s why I arranged this rendezvous. I need to get inside Confed—really inside. If there’s any Black Ops divisions still operating, I need to know about them."
"The Black Projects division was shut down over a century ago. If there’s anything still going on, I wouldn’t know about it. I’m just a captain."
"Damn."
"I might be able to steer you in the direction of some people that may be able to help you. Come aboard and we may discuss it." The transmission ended.
Did he see a smile on her face? He could have sworn he did.
Vell nudged him with an elbow, bearing a sly grin.
TCS Blair; Captain Kincaid’s Cabin
En route to Zeta Orionis System, Sol Sector, ETA: 05:48
The Orestes System, Deneb Quadrant, Epsilon Sector
DEC 07 2793/2793.341; 0102 Hours (CST)
His hands behind his back, Blair poked his head into Kincaid’s day cabin as the doors opened.
Entering, he was immediately affronted with the sweet aroma of burning incense. The lights were dimmed, but he could still make out the spacious interior. Aside from the basic necessities of a bed, a desk, a closet, and the door to the personal bathroom, he found the room to be plastered with memorabilia of all kinds. Posters, sculptures, news clippings—it looked like she had something from every decade. A particular portion of her wall drew his interest. Clippings from the twenty-seventh century, pictures from the Kilrathi and Nephilim wars. A blowup of Blair’s face in an interview he once gave with reporter Barbara Miles adorned an entire corner, above the headline "‘HEART OF THE TIGER’ ENDS WAR." Smaller length articles relating to him were placed in no particular fashion around it. A second article caught his eye, this one with the headline "INSANE CONFED HERO GOES ON RAMPAGE." He turned away, reminded once more of his existence and just how questionable it was.
"You came."
Blair jumped at Kincaid’s voice. He noticed her sitting on her luxurious-looking bed, her legs crossed, and her now-unbraided brunette hair draped pleasantly over her shoulders. No longer in her Confed Naval uniform, she wore an attractive black nightgown that nearly made her invisible in the dim light. "Yes, well..." he stammered. He stood straighter, remembering why he was supposed to be here. "Since we’ve already been underway for an hour now, I wanted to know a little more about this depot we’re heading toward."
"Certainly." She patted a space on her mattress beside her, gesturing for him to sit.
Blair swallowed. "Captain, I—"
"Juliana, please. I’m off-duty."
Not putting any thought into it, Blair obliged and sat where she told him.
"There’s so much I want to ask you," she said.
Blair nodded understandingly. "I know. About what happened in 2685... how I survived the Steltek deal earlier this year... I just wish I had answers. I don’t."
She nodded, equally understandingly. "This is so strange. I studied you in school, I was read about you in the Academy, and after all these years I get to meet you in the flesh. Last time we met we were never really properly introduced, but now... now it feels so real. Real... and bizarre... all at the same time."
Blair gave her his best "aw, shucks" smile. "Trust me, it’s no walk in the park for me, either."
"When did you grow that goatee of yours, anyway?" she inquired offhandedly, smirking. "Or do you not have an answer for that, either?"
"Nah, after I came around fifteen days ago, I just let it grow out. No particular reason. A change, I guess."
She ran a finger over his chin. "It looks good on you, old-timer."
"Thanks."
"Can I tell you a secret, Chris?"
Blair made no comment to her calling him by his first name. "Um, sure."
"All these years I’ve been reading about you since I was a little girl... Well, I’ve kind of had a crush on you."
Blair found himself swallowing again. If he was blushing, he hoped it didn’t show. "Oh."
"But, anyway, what was it you wanted to talk about?"
He remembered his wife, his two children. The family that history wanted him to believe never happened, yet he knew so intimately in his head. Even if history was right, and they had never existed, some false memory his mind had constructed, they were a century dead. How long was he willing to make himself suffer over it?
What would Maniac do? an inner voice told him to ask himself. That’s right, Chris... fuck it!
Seizing the moment he threw his arms around her, pulled her to him, and eagerly pressed his lips to hers.
TCS Blair; Wardroom
En route to Zeta Orionis System, Sol Sector, ETA: 04:40
The Vespus System, Grills Quadrant, Enigma Sector
0250 Hours (CST)
Since his youth Vell had always found solace in the stars.
Gazing out there from his vantage point in the officers’ wardroom, he watched as many of the thousands upon hundreds of thousands of them in that black void, glittering, sparkling at him. Every time he got used to staring at one particular formation of stars, the TCS Blair would finish recharging its Jump Drive capacitators and make another inter-system jump, the stars immediately shifting or disappearing from his perspective. Easily losing track of time as he stared, Vell was barely able to keep tabs on his scheduled return to the Desiccator in just under the hour. But then, maybe that had more to do with his worsening intoxication than the splendor of stars and hyperspace.
"Another drink, Ser Ricaud...?" a particularly attractive short-skirted barmaid asked him, drawing his gaze away from the ceiling-high viewports of the observation lounge.
"Why not?"
"Just a moment, then." She took his empty glass and started back toward the bar.
Through the conversations and chatter filling the lounge, Vell didn’t hear a very worn out-looking Blair walk up to his table and pull up a chair.
"What’s on your mind?" Blair asked him tiredly. The last time Vell had seen him he was downbeat, glum, and downright depressed—not that he didn’t have every right to. But now... now Blair looked exhilarated, almost chipper.
Vell smiled, wondering if something happened between Blair and that starry-eyed Captain Kincaid. "Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about... her."
"Who?"
"Melissa. She was on that Tiger Shark-class cruiser that was on my wing during the Steltek counterstrike."
Blair cocked a grin, seeing a guy-to-guy talk brewing and seeming more than willing to indulge his new twenty-eighth century friend. "Ah. What went wrong?"
"Wrong?" Vell graciously accepted the refilled glass handed to him by the barmaid and swallowed half of it in a quick gulp. He didn’t care enough to find out just what the drink was—that it was alcoholic and burnt going down was enough for him. "Nothing went wrong. At least, I don’t think. The last time I saw her was something like two months ago. She just left, like she always does, but hasn’t come back. I keep trying to figure out if she’s dumped me, gotten herself killed, or just found someone else."
"How’d you two meet, anyway?"
"Back three years ago, during my whole amnesia stint when I called myself Lev Arris, I was flying my fighter across the Tri-System on some contract mission I don’t even remember. Anyway, I suddenly get this E-mail from Melissa halfway across the sector requesting assistance with a band of pirates that were attacking her. After I dealt with the pirates, she asked me to meet her in the Rampant Robot Bar on the planet Hephaestus. The rest is pretty much history."
"Not bad." Blair chuckled. His own heyday had to have been fresh in his mind, Vell guessed. "You meet all your women like that?"
"Well, now that you mention it, there was this other woman, Tamessa Ames, the daughter of Veklyn Ames, this wealthy senator on Janus IV. I did kinda come to her rescue, too. Man, if I’d stayed with her, I wouldn’t have even had to take over the Kindred to be wealthy—I’d be set for life. It was all just a one-night-stand kinda thing,—we both knew that—but it was before I met Melissa."
"You really love her, don’t you?"
"Bloody hell, I don’t know jack shit about love." Vell scoffed, then glugged the rest of his drink. "But you do, don’t you? I’ve done my homework on you."
"Me?" Blair sighed heavily. His cheeriness was waning. Vell had hit on a touchy subject, he could see. "More than I’d like. My first serious love was a pilot who I’d met on my first tour of duty on the TCS Tiger’s Claw, Jeannette ‘Angel’ Devereaux. Much later, after the destruction of the Claw, I’d come aboard the Concordia and we met again. We fell in love. Over the next few years we became separated, first when I joined the Special Operations, then when I came back and she joined. Only when her team undertook a Special Ops mission to Kilrah, she never came back. The Kilrathi crown prince murdered her in cold blood. It was all I could do after finding out about it to avenge her death over Kilrah." Vell nodded excitedly, remembering his father’s tales of what Blair was telling him well...
... And here he was now, exchanging love stories with the Heart of the Tiger himself.
"Afterward, I felt so empty, so alone," Blair went on. "I wanted so bad to feel what I’d felt with Angel again. I’d spent a lifetime knowing nothing but war, death, treachery, and killing. All of the wingmen—my friends—turning up dead daily, all the funerals I’d attended. What I had with Angel made it seem bearable—I’d found someone I knew I found someone I could love.
"It wasn’t easy, but I managed to love again. I... I found happiness again with Rachel Coriolis, a chief technician I’d met during my tour on the TCS Victory. I came very close to choosing another woman over her, Robin ‘Flint’ Peters, but I just couldn’t bring myself to fall in love with another pilot who could very easily become a casualty of war as it had with Angel. I wouldn’t put myself through that again."
Vell raised an eyebrow. According to the historical reports he’d read through after the Steltek invasion, Blair had teamed with one Robin "Flint" Peters in 2684 before he’d gone on his killing rampage during the coming of the Firekkan Commonwealth. Recruited by her, actually.
"After the end of the war," Blair went on, "Rachel and I spent some time on Earth when I was still endeavoring to become part of the diplomatic staff that would work toward the strengthening of the Kilrathi-Terran Treaty of Torgo. But when that petered out, we settled on Nephele II, where I moved into the farm property I inherited from my dead uncle. We got married, but I’m not sure what really happened after that. I started spending nights alone, drinking, and pretty soon stopped talking. After about a year, she just left."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that. Afterward, I had a couple of short-lived relationships, the first with a tech that then became my shipboard liaison with the Border Worlds Union when I received wing command of the Intrepid, Velina Sosa; the second with Tamara ‘Panther’ Farnsworth, a pilot who stayed aboard the Intrepid to help when I’d decided to become a flight instructor. Almost a decade later I met Rachel again on the Midway during the Nephilim War, but we only talked, really, until circumstance forced us apart once more. Besides, she seemed more interested in Lance Casey, the son of a great man I once flew with off the Claw." Blair looked down. "Then I met my wife."
At this point Blair had to have been speaking of the woman that history negated. Vell knew better than to remind him of what history had to say about his wife, as he understood this couldn’t possibly be easy for Blair. Still, he had to know. "Tell me about her."
"Nina..." Blair began, "... she... she was everything I could have possibly wanted—and more. So beautiful, intelligent, and so full of life and joy. For nine happy years we lived on Venus, not a single otherworldly care."
"This Nina, she got a last name?"
"Last name?" he asked, reacting almost defensively. "She took mine."
"No, before you married her," Vell clarified his question. "What was her last name?"
"Oh, before. I... I..." Blair’s brown wrinkled in a frown. He sat there, concentrating fiercely. "Why... why do you ask?"
"Just curious. You seemed to spout the others out fast enough."
"I... I don’t remember."
Vell turned a glance. "You don’t remember your wife’s last name?"
"I-I... just don’t remember. I know I should... of course I should! Damn it... I can’t remember it!" He smothered a hand over his face.
"Are you all right?"
"I don’t know. I... I just can’t remember my wife’s last name for the life of me."
"Maybe she didn’t have one," Vell offered, though he did so doubtfully. "I think I heard of some Pilgrim frontier colonies stemming from the 2200s that didn’t believe in last names, so they dropped them. Malcolm X-type situation or som—"
"No, no, she had to have had a last name," Blair insisted. "I just don’t know it! I... I don’t remember ever knowing it! I don’t even remember asking about it!"
For the first time, Vell was starting to have suspicions that the past Blair remembered never happened. Yet at the same time, he knew Blair couldn’t be blatantly lying. If someone was trying to make up a story about a wife they never had, how much effort would it honestly take to make something up? No, Blair believed what he was saying. That much he was certain of. "It’s all right, man," he coaxed. "Don’t worry about it."
Blair leaned over the table, staring him in the eye. "You’ve got to help me, Vell," he rasped. "I need to know what happened to me. I need to know who I am... why I am."
"We’re trying to figure that out right now. We’re on our way."
Blair eased up and let himself slouch in his chair. "God damn I need a drink."