The Prelude to Eternity by David Adams

Author:David Adams [Adams, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David Adams
Published: 2015-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

ACT II

CHAPTER V

Bean Knowledge

*****

Eden

Velsharn

THERE WERE NO MORE DRILLS. The Madrid returned to fall into formation with the Beijing, the Washington, and the Tehran. By the time Liao returned to Operations, Paar had sent the required data. Liao wasted no time in distributing the information to the whole fleet.

The Piggyback docked with the Washington and began unloading the salvage and survivors.

Survivors.

The concept had seemed impossible to her. They had pulled living Humans from the ruin of Earth? It inspired a duality in her: hope that more people may be recovered, slim in number though they were; and guilt for assuming nobody could have survived the planet-wide hellish firestorm that had engulfed Earth.

A day’s worth of preparations were made, mainly checks to make sure the Beijing had truly survived its liftoff from Eden, and then she, Anderson, James, de Lugo, Sabeen, and Williams—the captains of the surviving ships in the fleet—arranged to meet aboard the Madrid. De Lugo was the first to arrive. He greeted Liao warmly as she took her seat, and she returned the gesture. Then James, Williams, and Sabeen arrived.

As Anderson entered, he did so with an Asian man with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a U.S. Air Force uniform and a stern look on his face. Her eyes met the stranger’s, and for a moment, she looked back into the past.

“Sheng?”

Discomfort pervaded everything, palpable and clear. Lieutenant Commander Gaulung Sheng had been assigned as Liao’s first officer upon taking command of the Beijing. It turned out that, aside from harbouring distinct resentment towards her over a command he perceived he deserved, he had been communicating with Ben behind the back of Fleet Command and herself.

He was dead, killed during an attempted mutiny, but his ghost—aged a decade and wearing another nation’s uniform—took a seat opposite her at the table.

“Andrew Decker-Sheng, actually, United States Air Force.” He spoke with a smooth, easy Midwest accent that betrayed little emotion. “I was stationed in NORAD and was recovered by the crew of the Rubens.”

“Any relation to Gaulung Sheng, from the People’s Liberation Army Navy?”

Decker-Sheng nodded professionally. “Gaulung was my half brother.”

“I see.” She did not know what else to say. Decker-Sheng would know of her involvement in Gaulung’s death, then. “What was your role at NORAD?”

“I was part of the team that was making contact with the construct you know as Ben.” He folded his hands. “Before you ask, Gaulung was invited to be part of that team and had access to some of those materials. He was not authorised to communicate directly with the construct and overstepped his authority. These infractions were discovered only after his death.”

Liao smelt a cover-up—the idea that everything had gone so horribly wrong all because of one person with peripheral involvement due to a shared family linage did not seem plausible to her at all—but that was neither the time nor the place to discuss it.

“I’m glad we were able to find survivors on Earth,” she said, and although she truly was, fate seemed to have an interesting idea of who to save.

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