“What the hell is a Psi War?”
“I think I can guess,” I said grimly.
Munroe exchanged a look with McIntire and she spread her hands.
“It’s not like it’s a secret to anyone. Anyone here.”
“Well, it’s not exactly how I envisioned this,” Munroe said, “but you brought a damned Predecessor ship here, so you’re obviously significant enough to break protocol for. I’ll brief you before you brief me.” He offered a lopsided grin. “But as you say… this is going to take a while.”
[ 8 ]
“I wish Korri were back in here,” Munroe began, “because the first part mostly involves her.” He sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “Then again, it’s probably better that she isn’t. It all started with her granddaughter stealing a Predecessor artifact from a Corporate Council lab out on the Periphery. It contained a sentient AI that melded itself with her brain.”
I wouldn’t know anything about that.
“The AI rewired her to accept it, and that gave her… abilities. Telekinesis of a sort, through channeling thought into Transition Space and converting it to kinetic energy.”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” I told him. Vicky glared at me, but to hell with it. We were either going to report what happened or not, and there was no point in lying to them. Munroe’s expression showed that he noted the comment but didn’t let it stop him for the moment.
“The Corporate Council had fallen apart a few years before.” He snorted humorlessly. “That’s another story for another time, though not one that’s pertinent to the current situation. But elements left over from their corruption, rogue former DSI agents and Corporate Security Force mercenaries, came after her, wanting the abilities she’d gained for their own purposes. She went to her grandmother, and Korri and her friends tried to help her by following the advice from the AI.”
“That’s always a mistake,” Vicky murmured.
I heard that, Jim said.
Shut up, I’m trying to listen.
“The AI was able to use the abilities it gave to Jackie to take their ship out of the Cluster,” McIntire took up the tale. “It led them to a world they called Homecoming.”
I looked up sharply but decided not to interrupt her this time.
“Things went… wrong.” McIntire sighed. “Another long story, and in no way Korri’s fault, but the end result was, the Transformation Virus was brought back to the Commonwealth.”
“No,” Deke growled, eyes darkening at a vision the rest of us couldn’t see. “The end result was that billions of people died. Every major city on Earth is an open grave that we’re never even going to begin to be able to clean up. We’ll wind up having to fusion bomb the damned places and start over. If we ever even get a big enough population to make it worthwhile.”
“When did you get so bitter?” McIntire asked, reaching over to grab the man’s hand and squeeze it. Ah. I hadn’t realized that about the two of them.
Deke shrugged, didn’t look like he wanted to answer.
“It just hits me sometimes when I don’t expect it,” he admitted.
“Tell me about it,” Munroe agreed. “The virus didn’t affect everyone. Maybe one in a hundred thousand, maybe even more than that. We never had the time or opportunity to run any tests. Just a few people in each colony, just a few dozen or a couple hundred on Earth… maybe. Again, we don’t know for sure. They were basically gods… or demons, if you prefer. They couldn’t be shot, couldn’t be touched, and they surrounded themselves with an army of thralls under their spell. Soldiers who weren’t afraid of death or pain, who’d keep fighting until they died. And they weren’t just fighting us. Because y’see, the worst part about the Changed wasn’t that they all became psychopathic narcissists with delusions of grandeur, it was that, more than they wanted to kill us, they wanted to kill each other. The war between the Changed was what wound up destroying most of the colonies and most of the megacities. What was left of the military wound up retreating here because we were the one colony that hadn’t been infected.”
“It all sounds about as horrible as I imagined it would be,” I told Munroe, “but that doesn’t answer the main question I have. How in the hell did you beat them?”
“We didn’t,” Deke corrected me. “Cal did.” I frowned at him, wondering if I’d missed something, but McIntire filled us in.
“Caleb Mitchell,” she said, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I’d heard the name before. “He was the only one infected by the Transformation Virus who didn’t let it take him over.”
“How the hell is that possible?” I blurted. “How could he fight the ghosts?”
All three of them stared at me like I’d just admitted to being an axe-murderer, and I cursed at the slip. Too late now.
“I was infected,” I admitted. “I was able to hold out for a few weeks, but by the end I knew they had me. And then they didn’t.”
“Cal fought off the ghosts the same way he fought off anyone else who ever fucked with him,” Deke said with the conviction of the old priest in our parish in Tijuana speaking about the power of the Holy Spirit. “By being the baddest, toughest, most strong-willed son of a bitch who ever lived.”
“According to him,” Munroe said, with not quite the whole-hearted belief of Deke Conner, “the… network, he called it, the fabric of Transition Space, was like a huge quantum computer, and the AIs the Predecessors had sent into it to try to use it against the Skrela had overwritten it with their own… patterns.”
“Yeah, I got that part,” I confirmed. “I got way too familiar with their patterns.”
“Cal overwrote them,” Deke said, grinning. “With himself. He erased those damned things like a fucking exorcist.”
“Shit,” I murmured. “Then he’s every bit the badass Chang said he was.”
“Chang,” McIntire repeated, rising from her chair, fists clenching. “Robert Chang? Where the hell did you hear that name?”
The others didn’t try to answer, not even Vicky. They just looked at me.
“We met him,” I said, “on Homecoming. We went there trying to find the Northwest Passage to finally get back to the Cluster, but he showed up in a Resscharr ship and told us he’d just closed it off.”
“Yeah, that fucker closed it off and left us high and dry,” Deke muttered, arms crossed.
“You were with him on Homecoming,” McIntire snapped, then pointed out the window in the general direction of the spaceport. “Is he on your ship?”
“No, he wanted to be left behind,” I told her. “Jim…” I shut my mouth, opened it, and tried again. “The AI we found on a world called Waterline, where we found the ship, thought he could help Chang. Make him less insane, closer to what he was back before he started duplicating himself.” I winced at a sudden realization. “And you were the friends he told me he felt so guilty about screwing over.”
“I believe Caleb Mitchell did more than just get rid of the ghosts,” Munroe said, eyeing me closely. “My son was among the infected as well. This was after the network was cleansed, but it was still troubling. But then Captain Mitchell took most of the Changed with him along with his family and headed out of the Cluster. That was just a few weeks ago, but my son Cesar, along with every Changed who stayed behind just… lost their abilities. Lost their connection to the network.”
