12: The Commander and The Guardian, Terra-932

Mirai, Mirai #12. Serial fiction: multiverse family drama.

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

This week, we find ourselves exploring the alternate future-past of Jacob’s son, Jonathan Jones (alias Titan Beetle, of the People’s Liberation Space Force.) See here for the beginning of this section of the story.

Previously, as a landing party of Mhekanites threatened to breach the space station’s hull, Beetle and Commander Cotlin went below to try to contain the damage. They’re also attempting to rescue an enemy prisoner left behind during evacuation, but he’s been less than cooperative…

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Major Grimes flexed his shoulders back and forth, testing Jonathan’s grip. “You’re gonna come all the way down here for me an’ then throw me back in, are you?”

“I’m sure not letting you out to fight me and my crew,” the Commander said. “Like I said, your people aren’t coming back for you. We’re facing another threat, something totally alien. I came to find you because we could use your help.”

He scoffed. “You honestly believe I’ll work with you, after everything you’ve done.”

“You seemed pretty eager to get out. Would you rather I leave you to die?”

The Guardian was silent; Jonathan couldn’t see his expression while standing behind him and holding his arms back, but his head tilted like he was giving the Commander a searching look. “Maybe.”

She curled her lip. “What are you so loyal to them for, Major? The world you and I grew up in is gone. The Sun’s wobbling. We’ve lost our Moon, half the asteroid belt, and Pluto, and anybody who’s still on Earth in eighty years had better be one hundred per cent radiation-proof. And they’re not taking collaborators out of this dying system—they won’t accept that many variables on a starship. Typicals only, they don’t trust anybody else. The minute the government gets their deep-space colony settled, they’ll take off for greener pastures and dump you all on an asteroid to fight with the rest of us until the supplies run out.”

“I know,” he said. “Ain’t about me.”

The Commander rocked forward on her toes, reaching for him, then pulled back. “I could punch you.”

“So do it.”

“No. I need you on my side,” she said. “If you don’t want to help us out of gratitude, fine—do it for the safety and security of the honest tech bros of UniTerra, or whatever it is about for you. Because right now, we’re the only thing standing between the invaders and Earth.”

The Guardian sighed and leaned forward as far as Jonathan would let him. “Commander, you’re dangerous.”

She smirked. “Thank you.”

“You can let go, kid,” he said, looking back to talk to Jonathan. “Ain’t sayin’ I’ve seen the error of my ways and been seduced over to the dark side, but she can have one good fight outta me.”

Jonathan raised an eyebrow at the Commander, but she just returned the expression and waved for him to go on. “This’ll only take a minute,” she said, holding her hands up towards the Guardian, about a foot apart. A pinpoint of orange light appeared between them and began to slowly increase in size. “I had this field running on its own, so I have to go back in and unwarp your personal physics for you to be able to use your abilities again…don’t look so concerned, Jones. I don’t intend to let him out of my sight.”

Oh, sure, she doesn’t intend to. But if there were any superior officer to keep his thoughts to himself around, it was this one, so he grimaced as politely as possible and stepped around them to wait by the door. He hadn’t realized it before now, but the nanites had retuned his hearing levels to ignore the emergency alert, since he was ignoring it too. Titans had to be able to operate with as few distractions as possible. A win, he supposed, for being part robot now. Just how much robot was something he still had to figure out.

At the end of the corridor, a lone viewscreen still showed a darkened globe, maybe somewhere over Canada as they made the north-south orbit. He wondered if anyone down there knew what was going on, far above their heads in the middle of the night. Ops would have alerted the rest of the network as soon as the rift opened, but their own security measures and the UniTerran government kept them locked down to a few tightly controlled channels.

Something glinting white with too many legs skittered across the camera that fed the screen, and he had to suffocate a primal fear. “—Commander?”

“Working as fast as I can. This is way more complicated…what did they do to you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know…”

Jonathan took a few slow steps down the hall, his eyes on the screen and hand on his sidearm, but nothing showed again except the blooming constellation of city lights along the Eastern Seaboard. His parents were down there, probably. He hadn’t talked to anyone from home since he left; there was no way he could have trusted any of them. Not his father, who might have the right opinions but was apparently content to set aside his principles rather than rock the boat. He’d thought his aunt was on his side, too, but she’d tried to talk him out of it. Of course there was no talking to Mom at all. She was too invested, had too many years taking blood money for “hard-hitting investigations” that were state propaganda in all but name. She’d have turned him in. He’d gone into the Titan Corps knowing it meant he’d never see her again, given his own permanent investment in the opposition. Still, he couldn’t bear the thought that she might be vulnerable down there, not even knowing the danger she and all of humanity was in.

“Done,” the Commander said behind him. Jonathan turned to see her tapping behind her ear to cancel a comm notification. “Let’s go. The security system hasn’t stopped pinging me since we got in here.”

“One thing first,” the Guardian said, holding his hand to the side of his neck. “You gonna take off the good-boy collar, too?”

The Commander paused, anger percolating down her face, before she whirled back around. “Who the hell put a governor implant on you?”

“Your security guy said he trusted it more than he trusted you.” He raised an eyebrow slightly. “No big, I have to wear one most of the time anyway. Just I need it off if you want any real help outta me.”

She growled a few uncomplimentary things about both the security chief and his mother on her way to reach up and pull back the collar of his flight suit. A thin, narrow metal plate wrapped around Major Grimes’ neck where it met his shoulder, a light from beneath pulsing red across the skin in time with with his heartbeat. Having grown up on Earth, where they were only required for the most dangerous atypicals, Jonathan had never gotten such a close look at a governor; but he knew basically what it was. If you even thought about using your abilities, its hardwired connection to your central nervous system would deliver whatever amount of pain it took to make you stop. If the pain didn’t stop you, the fact that your brains had started leaking out of your nose usually did. Those who didn’t have their power under conscious control either learned fast or died. He hadn’t quite known that the Guardians were kept locked down when not in use, but the way the federals treated everybody else, he supposed he could have guessed it.

“Absolutely barbaric,” the Commander muttered as she ran her hands across his throat. “This isn’t what I fought for. Jones, I don’t ever want to catch you using these, we’re better than this.”

“Rebel insurgents not livin’ up to their high an’ mighty ideals. Be still my heart,” Grimes said. The light was flashing more and more rapidly. “Uh, not that I’m worried you’re gonna trigger the anti-tamperin’ measures, but don’t you wanna go get the keys?”

“Shhhh. Talking makes it move.” She cupped one hand around the implant and held his neck still with the other. “This is faster. The mechanism uses a trineutronium slip that’s quantum-aligned with the changes your abilities cause to your biosignature, but by projecting a cancellation field onto its surface texture, I can neutralize the alignment, resetting the implant directly to its default staaaaate—there.” The plate fell away into her hand, leaving behind three thin trickles of blood and revealing a patch of heavy scarring where he’d been through this before. “You’re welcome,” she said, letting it swing from her fingers as she looked up with a tilted smile.

Beyond a doubt: orbital-mad. The Commander was orbital-mad, the station was under attack, and Jonathan was stuck down here with her and one of his literal sworn enemies in a deck slated to blow. He cleared his throat quietly. “Commander, the evac.”

“What? Yes. I didn’t forget.” She gestured for the Guardian, now glowing faintly blue, to walk ahead of them; he made a show of looking disdainfully at the zap in Jonathan’s hand before he complied.

The empty halls of Level E seemed to stretch into eternity. Jonathan was itching to get back above and join the fighting, but when they reemerged, the renewed chaos and noise took him aback—things were obviously going worse than when they’d left. He felt for the batteries in his jacket while the Commander seized a passing lieutenant and made inquiries.

The man twisted in her grasp. “They were flooding out of the rift—we couldn’t keep them back anymore. They’re landing all over the station now.”

“Follow me,” the Commander said, but she was talking to Grimes this time. “Jones, do what you have to do. We’ve got to buy time for reinforcements.”

“Aye, ma’am.” He left them and ran, following the nanites’ directions and the subconscious sensation of a missing piece of himself. Get to his armor, charge the weapons banks, and get out there in zero-G with the invaders. Simple.

He was halfway down the second corridor when the emergency alert changed tone. WARNING. HULL BREACH IMMINENT. DON PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT IMMEDIATELY. SEGMENT QUARANTINE IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. FOURTEEN.

Jonathan ran faster. The next hull segment was so close.

THIRT—

The alert succumbed to a bang and the shriek of rushing atmosphere, the vacuum of space trying to suck him back down toward the breach. Ahead, the doors were already closing. If his autoshield activated before he got there, he’d be trapped in an airless cocoon, waiting for help that would never come.

Faster. Titan strength, Titan training.

The doors.

Feeling the artificial gravity falter under his feet, he kicked off and launched himself through the narrowing gap, twisting sideways as the walls rushed past him—

It wasn’t fast enough. The doors met each other through his trailing left arm, just below the shoulder.

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Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory. And tune in this Thursday for the final part of the Titan Beetle backstory episode…