Part 17

They were led through the corridors and up the elevators of the huge building, and ushered into a very large and ornate office with dark red carpeting and wood paneling, and pictures of Elders in formal tech suits on the walls. The ornate sign on the door had identified the office as belonging to the Houston Regional Director of The Department of Justice.

Davdan introduced her group to Sandor, the Leader of the Councils of All Tiger People. He was a tall and rangy elder with dark eyes and a huge white mane of hair and beard, his body still straight and strong after one hundred and twenty-one years of life.

He thanked them for coming, then introduced them to four Elders of the Tiger People who were his staff, then to Mister Ronald Miles, Regional Director of Justice whose office they were using, and two of his staff, then to the Director of the Department of Intergovernmental Affairs for the Council of All Peoples and six of her staff, The Director of the Department of Medicine and Human Genetics and two of his staff, and the Director of the Department of Space Operations and two of her staff.

Second-last to be introduced was Lonigan MacSanchez, the Leader of the Council of All People, known to the techs as Secretary General of The United Nation. He was a thin man of slightly less than average height, with light skin and intense green eyes, completely bald, and though one could not see it in him, he was known to be ninety-seven years old. None of his own staff were there with him. His presence was surprisingly less intense than one might expect from the leader of all humanity, but as Davdan had found, he could be incredibly fierce in his own way, when he chose to do so.

Last to be introduced was the person they had all come to hear, who was named simply as Missez Almona King. She was a gray haired tech of average build with sparkling blue eyes, wearing a light blue pantsuit. She looked thoroughly intimidated by this gathering of power.

"I am Tika. You are my grandmother." Tika told her softly. "John King is your son. He had sex with my mother almost nine years ago, and I was conceived. He is my father. I met him yesterday, and spent the day with him, and interacted with him in a way that was healthy for us, and that brought us happiness and fulfillment. It was so good to finally meet him, and he was so lonely it would break your heart. I visited him again today, with Pina and Jela and Jena, and he is recovering from loneliness, with our affection. Other than that he is well, as well as he can be, considering his affliction. Yesterday I ... coaxed him into a few moments of lucidity, and he told me his name, and that he was from Houston Texas.

"You ... you are my grandmother, and..." she paused, and swallowed hard. "You are my Grandmother."

There was a long moment of silence. Then, though her expression did not change, Tika's eyes overflowed with tears.

"I'm ... I'm sorry I ... Oh please forgive me, I never knew..." Almona King told her, her own expression becoming distraught, and held her arms out to Tika, who stepped into her embrace. They silently cried together for a minute. Then Almona held her at arm's length and just drank in the sight of her for a moment, both still quietly crying, before gathering her in again for another firm hug.

"Johnny didn't try to hurt you?" she asked Tika, still softly sobbing.

"Only once, when he had a tantrum." Tika told her as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her crying coming to an end as she got herself under control. "He could not hurt me, as I am the most dangerous fighter. I have all of his abilities, but not his mental affliction. I had to lightly discipline him for a moment, but once he realized the futility of attacking me, he stopped trying to. He was very friendly before and after that, but I had approached him very carefully, in such a way that he did not feel threatened by me. And as I say he is very lonely, so he was mostly very welcoming of my company. Of course, he does not realize that he is my father."

"Look, I really want to talk to you after all this." Almona smiled, determinedly wiping away her own tears. "But for right now, let's just get the testimony finished with and get out of this government rock pile."

She turned to the gathered officials and announced: "I'm ready."

"All right, Missez King." Ronald Miles said, indicating one of a circle of chairs and couches that had been arranged in the center of the large room. "We'll just get settled, and then we'll begin.

Seated in the circle were Almona King, the heads of Departments, The Leader of the Grande Council, Leader Sandor, Tika, and Davdan. The rest of the Green Band and Slin, as well as all those who were staff, stood around the walls behind the circle. Many readied their screens to record.

"This is a fact-finding inquiry, initiated by the Department of Intergovernmental Affairs." Ronald Miles stated. "No charges are presently pending against anyone here. Now Missez King, tell us about your son."

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, then looked around the room, and spoke quietly.

"My husband, Jeffrey King, has been dead three years. He was a Missions Specialist in the Space Service. His last mission was to the asteroid belt, almost forty years ago. It was classified top secret for reasons of security. They still did that, then.

"There was an incident. That was all they ever told me about it. That there had been an incident. He never spoke again. Not one word, not to me or anyone else. They told me he had suffered traumatic shock, and that his brain had been starved of oxygen during the incident. He was given the best treatment, and was otherwise healthy. When it was decided that they couldn't do anything else for him, I brought him home. He interacted with me like a child, though he obviously recognized me, and if no one was interacting with him he'd just stare at nothing.

"We still shared our bed, and he ... responded to me sexually. I became pregnant with Johnny about a year after Jeffrey came home. During my pregnancy I was made aware that Johnny was biologically ... unusual. That prompted me to have my husband, and his semen, examined at a private hospital. Though my husband's body was normal, his sperm wasn't. That was about all they could tell me.

"Other than that, my pregnancy was normal, and the birth went well, and Johnny was healthy. I took him home, and he was fine. He was just a normal little boy in every way, athletic and intelligent, he got along well with people.

"I have a daughter, Susan, three years older than John. One night when John was thirteen I was woken up by the sound of Susan screaming. I ran into her room, and John was raping her. I tried to get him to stop, I tried to pull him off her, but it was like he was possessed, and he threw me across the room. I hit my head on the closet doorframe, and it almost knocked me out. He finished raping Susan, then he raped me on the floor. Susan called Emergency Response when John had finished with her, and she let them in when they got there. They pulled him off me and tried to restrain him, and he, he killed one, and ran, out of the room, out of our apartment, and down the corridor. That was the last time I ever saw my son. They told me I could visit him later, but I could never ... never bring myself to do it.

"He killed two more Emergency Response personnel, and injured eleven, before they finally subdued him. They told me he killed and injured more people at the hospital the next day. He'd completely lost his mind, just like Jeffrey only worse, and he never recovered, despite the best treatment. For the next three years he was kept in solitary confinement, fed through a slot in the door. They'd tried to counsel him over a screen in his wall but it never worked. About once a week they'd drug him unconscious by putting sedatives in his food, so they could clean and examine him, and eventually to try various drugs on him to try to cure him. They never had any beneficial effect.

"Then they put him in the forest on the other side of the world.

"My daughter and I had both became pregnant, and had abortions. We did everything we could to have the records of what happened sealed. The Space Service supported us in that, at least.

"With the exception of my psychologist, I've never told any of that to anyone since then.

"My husband died three years ago. He just stopped breathing in his sleep one night. Know one knows why."

Everyone there could see that she was struggling bravely not to cry.

"Thank you, Missez King." Ronald Miles told her with a gentle smile. "That should be all. I know this has been difficult for you, and you may leave if you wish..."

"My husband did not have an accident!" Missez King stated angrily. "He was tortured and experimented on, either before he took off for that mission to the asteroid belt, or while he was in space, or after they landed but before he was returned to me! Sometime between the last time he told me he loved me and left our home for that mission, and the time they brought him back catatonic, someone experimented on him and tortured him! I myself gathered enough evidence to prove that much at least, at my own expense, despite the complete lack of co-operation in these matters by every concerned department of government! I'd been investigating for fifteen years, when Johnny ... lost his mind, and then I stopped looking.

"This is the only time I'll have the attention of anyone powerful enough to break down the wall of secrecy surrounding my husband's last mission, and I'm not leaving here until I know exactly what happened!!! What happened to him caused what happened to my son, which caused what happened to my daughter and myself, and I'm sure it caused whatever happened between my son and this Tiger Woman that led to the birth of my granddaughter, and it caused whatever my granddaughter's done that prompted this meeting of the powerful! I've waited almost forty years for this, and I'm not leaving until I have complete satisfaction!!!"

There was a moment of silence at this outburst.

"Missez King, I'm afraid we've..." Ronald Miles began, before he was firmly interrupted by Lonigan MacSanchez, the Leader of the Council of All Peoples.

"I agree with you completely, Missez King." the great Leader stated, as he looked around the circle and met the eye of all the leading officials with his steely gaze. "Everything that is known of these matters will be revealed here today, to you and to myself, and to the public record. More and more, this affair strikes me as a massive conspiracy, perpetuated with public funds.

"Director Elena Nakabomo, what do the records of the Department of Space Operations show in these matters?"

The Director of Space Operations shook her head in embarrassment, and began flashing files to the screens of the others in the room, who began auditing the information and vid clips. "I'm afraid you're right, there was definitely a complex conspiracy. The records of the last mission of Jeffrey King are incomplete, Leader MacSanchez. It occurred years before I entered the Space Service. Apparently the mission was to emplace an Astronomical Observation Installation on an asteroid, and was the fifth of a series of eight such missions planned. Our records of the missions are complete, except the records of the installations; the payloads that is, had been removed or falsified even before the missions that emplaced them were launched. The remaining three missions of the eight planned were cancelled after Jeffrey King's unfortunate incident. The five that were emplaced are all operating, but since their existence was classified, no one's used them to make any observations since they came online. They're full spectrum instruments, I checked their output a couple of hours ago, but my astronomers tell me they're not looking at anything interesting, and we don't have the codes we need to re-task them. We do have the records of what they've looked at these last forty years, but they seem to scan around, looking at nothing in particular, with the exception of the fourth unit, which has been continuously observing the fifth unit.

"Here's the thing; every record of the design and construction of these devices has been removed or altered. Every single person who worked on their construction was either working under a false identity, or was an elderly person, near retirement or called out of retirement for the project, and is now dead."

There was a pause, as everyone absorbed that.

Then Pina stepped forward, hesitated a moment, and spoke. "Elder Davdan can verify to you that I am fully qualified as an astronomer, and I can tell you that this is a bad plan, from the initial concept forward. The idea of having eight linked automated wide-spectrum observatories in a phased array in a solar orbit at the distance of the asteroid belt; that is a great idea. But it is obviously risky over the long term to station them within the asteroid belt, and this idea of actually placing them on the surface of asteroids is ludicrous! It would only limit their mobility and usefulness, and no one who is capable of executing such a plan could fail to realize this! Whoever decided on the placement of these observatories, did not choose these placements to maximize their effectiveness as astronomical observatories! They must have been placed to fulfill some other agenda!"

"I agree." nodded one of the Director of Space Operations' staff.

"So noted." nodded Leader MacSanchez. "Continue, Director Nakabomo."

"While we have most of the mission records, we're missing those that show the devices themselves, with one very important exception.

"There were three persons on each mission, which were launched from Farside Moonbase, one pilot and two mission specialists.

"One mission specialist was responsible for maintaining the payload during the outbound flight, initiating it's operation once it had been deployed on an asteroid, and monitoring and fine tuning of it's operation while they returned.

"The other mission specialist was responsible for assisting with that, and for the physical deployment of the device, and it's installation on the asteroid, including all E.V.A. work. Jeffrey King filled this position on the fifth mission.

"We have audio, video, and telemetry of all the routine functions of the mission, except those that show the payload and it's deployment, installation, and operation. But I initiated an all-systems maximum priority search for anything that might have to do with the mission. The search was triggered on a piece of video with audio labeled as an accounting file, hidden in with the other accounting files of a defunct entertainment productions company, because the audio contains the spoken names 'Jeff' and 'Ivan'. Ivan is the name of the other mission specialist.

"It's the last thirty-one seconds of video and audio from Jeffrey King's helmet camera and microphone before the incident. At the beginning of the footage Jeffrey King has just finished driving the last anchor holding the installation to the asteroid, when he sees something in his peripheral vision, out of camera view. Play."

The video showed Jeffrey King's spacesuit gloves and boots, gray ground, and the end of the strut he'd just pinned to the asteroid, his hands clipping a tool shaped like a large nail gun to a ring on his side. The audio carried only his amplified breathing.

"What the hell... ?" Jeffrey King's voice quietly exclaimed, and he straightened and turned, bringing the edge of a white panel on the side of the installation into view, with the unnaturally close and sharp horizon of the asteroid beyond it.

In the quiet of the ornate office, Almona King choked back a sob.

Jeffrey King turned away from the installation and activated a thruster on his suit for a fraction of a second, and drifted forward fifteen yards, contacted lightly with a soft bounce, then thrusted forward another ten yards, and stopped.

"Is there a problem, Jeff?" sounded from the audio track.

"Give me a minute, Ivan. I think I saw something."

Jeffrey King thrusted forward twice more, and the black edge of the terminator appeared on the horizon as he approached the night side of the asteroid.

"Careful Jeff. You'll be over our communications horizon in a second." Ivan's voice noted.

Jeffrey King's viewpoint turned as he looked back the way he had come.

"Freeze." Director Nakabomo said. "That's the only recording of the installation we have, when he turned back for a moment to judge his distance."

The corner of the view containing the installation was then magnified and centered for their inspection.

"That is way too big." Pina stated. "Even given the state of the technology forty years ago, that observer only needed to be eight feet long by two feet wide. It did not need to be one-twentieth that size. Even one-thirtieth!"

"Crap! It is a weapon!" Raz cried in surprise.

"Pardon me young man?" Director Nakabomo asked.

"It is a whole weapons system! A diversified attack platform!" Raz said, striding around the room to stand behind Director Nakabomo and touch her screen over her shoulder. "Here, let me outline subsystems ... These struts, that are so uselessly long? You see they are rail guns, and this is the loading mechanism! This huge emitter is particle beam, probably electron beam, and this communications laser could punch a hole through Deimos! The real 'observatory' components are only its targeting viewers! That is why it is on an asteroid! In case of incoming projectiles, it can turn the whole asteroid with those thrusters, and use it as an ablation shield! It is cleverly disguised, and might pass a casual viewing, but it is unmistakable once you realize what it is that you are looking at!"

"Of course! It all makes sense!" Almona King cried. "Jeffrey always did think we should've kept some of our 'military readiness', as he put it! He never though we could maintain peace over the long term. We argued about it a few times! He might've agreed to help build something like that, that could strike at any military aggression anywhere in the solar system, as long as he thought that it's construction was legal, and thought he could trust those who were operating it to not use it first!

"I bet they lost trust in him somehow, it would happen easily in a conspiracy like that! And then they ambushed him up there, and interrogated him, and silenced him!" she declared angrily, tears running down her face.

"Perhaps, Missez King." Director Nakabomo nodded. "Let's watch the rest of the recording, it's only a few more seconds."

The view from Jeffrey King's camera swung away from the installation, and his voice said: "Don't worry, I've got another three hundred feet of safety cord at least." He bounced forward on his thruster three more times, and the recording ended.

"At that point, contact with Jeffrey King was lost." Director Nakabomo stated. "One of the first things Mission Specialist Ivan Roche did was to re-task the fourth installation to observe this one, as it covered most of the far side of this asteroid. It was too far away to find Jeffrey King on the surface of the asteroid, but if he'd left it and was drifting in space it would have easily detected him with radar. So Ivan Roche knew that Jeffrey King was still on the asteroid. They immediately set out to search for him; Ivan went E.V.A. in a suit, and Pilot Paul Grickstadt circled the asteroid in their ship. Ivan Roche found that Jeffrey King's safety cord had been cleanly cut. They found him, conscious and apparently unharmed, eighteen minutes after he lost contact, in a small depression, almost a cave, in the side of a crater. His mind, from the moment he was found, was the way it would be for the rest of his life. Their examination found that he was uninjured except for momentary oxygen starvation symptoms, and they couldn't explain that because his suit was sealed and undamaged, and he still had enough air in his tanks and recyclers for five hours. His recorders and rescue beacons had been turned off.

"They scanned the asteroid and recorded it thoroughly after he was recovered, and found nothing unusual. It's a big rock with a few ice pockets, no voids, no gas pockets, almost zero metals content except for their own installation.

"Ivan Roche finished the activation of the device, and they returned to Farside Moonbase, where Jeffrey King was admitted for medical observation.

"I submit that it is unlikely that what happened to Jeffrey King was intentionally caused by members of the weapons conspiracy. From what we've observed of Ivan Roche and Paul Grickstadt, both from the mission record and their subsequent behavior, they were ignorant of happened to him, though they will now be questioned in connection with the weapons conspiracy. We haven't audited the entire record of the two-year mission yet, but that's being done as we speak, and we've sampled it thoroughly. Furthermore, if any other unseen members of the conspiracy had done it to him, they would certainly have destroyed his crucial helmet recording. I can only think they allowed it to continue to exist, though very well hidden, because they hoped to find a clue in it as to what went wrong."

"Yes." Director Miles nodded. "So someone else knew what they were up to, and had someone up there waiting for him. They ambushed him, interrogated him, and silenced him, and just to throw a scare into the rest of the weapons conspirators, they not only ruined him, they ruined any future children of his as well."

"There could not have been anyone there waiting for him!" Raz insisted. "They would have been detected! Even if they had been hidden within the asteroid, and could somehow fool all the scans, they would have to have left sometime, and the fourth unit has not detected any ship leaving the asteroid except for Jeffrey King's since the incident, though it has been observing the asteroid continuously for the forty years since! They must have left a trap for him, something small and automated, shielded and camouflaged into the surface of the asteroid!