{"id":424,"date":"2024-05-18T08:53:07","date_gmt":"2024-05-18T12:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/?p=424"},"modified":"2025-01-28T23:49:38","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T04:49:38","slug":"identity-theft-chapter-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/identity-theft-chapter-30\/","title":{"rendered":"The Changeling Game, Chapter 30"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\">\ntt {\nfont: .857em menlo, monaco, consolas, monospace;\nmargin: auto;\n}\nh2 {\ntext-align: center;\n}\nh2.chapterhead {\nmargin-bottom: 2em;\ntext-align: center;\n}\n  .nowrap {\n    text-indent: 0;\n    display: inline-block;\n}\n<\/style>\n<p><b>Title:<\/b> The Changeling Game <small>(Formerly <i>Identity Theft<\/i>)<\/small><br \/>\n<b>Author:<\/b> Ardath Rekha<br \/>\n<b>Chapter:<\/b> 30\/?<br \/>\n<b>Fandom:<\/b> TCOR AU<br \/>\n<b>Rating:<\/b> M<br \/>\n<b>Warnings:<\/b> Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language<br \/>\n<b>Category:<\/b> Gen<br \/>\n<b>Pairing:<\/b> None<br \/>\n<b>Summary:<\/b> After the explosion at the New Marrakesh spaceport, a whole world clamors for answers. Aside from the perpetrators of the heinous crime, only Jack and Kyra know how and why it happened.<br \/>\n<b>Disclaimer:<\/b> The characters and events of <i>Pitch Black,<\/i> <i>The Chronicles of Riddick,<\/i> and <i>The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury<\/i> are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios.  I just <i>wish<\/i> I were in charge of their fates.  No money is being made off of this.  I\u2019m writing strictly for love of the story.<br \/>\n<b>Feedback:<\/b> Absolutely, the more the better!  Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post \u201crough,\u201d so I can always use the help. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<input type='hidden' bg_collapse_expand='6a8e6cf2e2bf87033004812' value='6a8e6cf2e2bf87033004812'><input type='hidden' id='bg-show-more-text-6a8e6cf2e2bf87033004812' value='Long post is long. Click to read the story.'><input type='hidden' id='bg-show-less-text-6a8e6cf2e2bf87033004812' value='Hide the story again.'><button id='bg-showmore-action-6a8e6cf2e2bf87033004812' class='bg-showmore-plg-button bg-green-button  '   style=\" color:#D9ECFB;\">Long post is long. Click to read the story.<\/button><div id='bg-showmore-hidden-6a8e6cf2e2bf87033004812' ><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"chapterhead\">30.<br \/>\n<u>As the Ashes Fall from the Sky<\/u><\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">A terrible silence had fallen over New Marrakesh.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">It wasn\u2019t a physical silence; sirens wailed constantly, ebbing and flowing as emergency vehicles traveled to and from the disaster zone. The drone of military \u2019copters and the whine of airtankers filled the skies. Agonized screams had even come from within Jack and Kyra\u2019s apartment building, from people who had been standing, dumbfounded, at their own west windows when the shockwave had struck. Human wailing pierced the air from all directions as people learned that someone they loved had been near, or in, the blast zone.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">But Jack felt cocooned from it all, even as she and Kyra helped Takama tend their neighbors\u2019 wounds and  joined the Imazighen in aid efforts, even as they shared tears and hugs with people who had known Tomlin\u2014Brahim Meziane, to most of them\u2014and had just discovered his fate. She was wrapped in something dark and quiet. In the silence, she couldn\u2019t even hear her heart beating and wondered if she still had one.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She and Kyra cried together that night, after Takama ordered them to bed, but the silence of her heart still wouldn\u2019t lift. The things that waited for her in her dreams left her alone. Later she had a vague memory of them arguing over whether she, and the \u201cother larva,\u201d might be dying. It seemed unfathomable to her at times that she wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">The initial death toll didn\u2019t quite reach five hundred, but that was more than enough.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Of those almost-five hundred, more than half were \u201cmissing and presumed dead,\u201d people whose last known positions had been too close to the blasts for any identifiable remains to be left. That roster was compiled from multiple lists: the shuttle\u2019s crew, all of whom had signed in to begin their shifts more than an hour earlier; roughly fifty passengers who had already checked in and boarded the shuttle early so they could sleep while they awaited liftoff; the ground crews loading and fueling the shuttle; the clocked-in staffs of an exclusive pilots\u2019 lounge, a small duty-free shop, and the security checkpoint located just before the departure gate\u2026 and one last, terrible, overlapping list of people whose comms had signaled their final locations within the blast radius before going silent forever. <\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin had been among the last group; his comm\u2019s final location had placed him in the pilots\u2019 lounge, less than twenty meters from the first explosion, and his bank account had a pending meal transaction originating from there. Where the lounge had been, the side of a monstrous crater now sloped down into the earth.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">The initial explosion had been declared a terrorist act. Footage had surfaced of an unidentified man leaving a duffel bag on a bench not far from the pilots\u2019 lounge doors, and it was featured in every news feed, but no clear shot of the man\u2019s face was available.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Between the massive fire at the spaceport itself, and the dozens of violent secondary fires on the northwest end of the city caused by the shuttle\u2019s flaming debris, the search-and-rescue operations out at sea were scaled back, almost all of their teams diverted, and the story about <i>that<\/i> disaster, now thoroughly upstaged, vanished to the back \u201cpages\u201d of the news feeds.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">The injury count was in the thousands. The property damage was in the trillions, when six more shuttles and two Star Jumpers that would never fly again were figured in.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">New Marrakesh wasn\u2019t, in fact, Tangiers Prime\u2019s largest city; Tomlin had simply chosen to direct the <i>Scarlet Matador<\/i> there because the planet\u2019s most prestigious hospital was located within it, and possibly because he had his best connections to local resources and logistical capabilities there. Both space traffic and terrestrial flights were immediately rerouted to New Casablanca and New Fes, with the still functional landing pads at New Marrakesh\u2019s spaceport transforming into staging grounds for relief efforts. Thousands of stranded passengers waited within damaged concourses, and in hastily-assembled tents on the tarmac, for transport out of the city.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Check-in stations proliferated. One man, who had initially been reported as presumed dead, turned up a few hours later; he\u2019d been at a police station on the other side of the spaceport, filing a report about his missing comm and wallet, at the time of the explosion. He was the only one thus far, but it had raised hopes that others might reappear. One Tangiers day after the explosion, the secondary list of missing persons, who hadn\u2019t been presumed dead yet but who might have been in the blast radius, had dropped from more than two thousand to slightly under three hundred. At the end of a Tangiers week\u2014four of its long days, a period just eight hours longer than a Standard week\u2014whatever names remained would be added to the list of the dead. It could no longer top eight hundred, but it might still come close. If the noon hour on Tangiers Prime hadn\u2019t been roughly equivalent to the midnight hour on most other worlds, the death and injury tolls might have been five times as high, but the devastation had struck during the spaceport\u2019s \u201cquiet hours.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Every time Jack thought of those numbers, she felt ill.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i>Did I cause this? Is this my fault?<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She wasn\u2019t going to find the answer in the news feeds. Pulling out her most powerful Ghost Code, she dug into the local law enforcement chatter.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">No one seemed to be connecting the shuttle crash over the Mutawassit Ocean to the subsequent explosion at the spaceport, but there <i>was<\/i> an active\u2014if backburnered\u2014investigation into it. Jack had been right; the Quintessa Corporation had chosen to make its move while Tomlin was off-duty and out of the way. He\u2019d spent his day off putting together a plan for stealing his charges out from under the Corporation\u2019s collective noses even as they were executing a plan to do the same thing to him.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Someone had switched around the evening duty rosters for Othman Tower, swapping in a set of false employee records for the new \u201cstaff\u201d that took over the building that night. Jack recognized all of the faces immediately: the merc team. There was no record of who had made the changes.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cSo Quintessa contracted out the kidnapping and let that merc team run it on the ground?\u201d Kyra asked. She had taken to reading everything over Jack\u2019s shoulder, partly slumped against her back. Jack didn\u2019t mind; she needed the contact.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cYeah,\u201d she agreed. \u201cBut whoever engineered this was either using a Ghost Code, like mine, or is <i>really<\/i> high up in the security chain around here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cThat\u2019s not good. Is that who jammed the cameras and comms?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cMaybe. Either them or the mercs. I thought they had it set up to key off the shuttles\u2019 transponders, but everything stayed off for another twenty minutes after those had already flown off, freaked out Ground Control\u2014\u201d Jack faltered for a moment on those words; that had been the first name she\u2019d had for Tomlin. \u201c\u2014and then crashed. Kinda ham-handed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cMaybe,\u201d Kyra said, her voice considering. \u201cOr maybe they thought having a localized blackout keep going for a while after their operation ended would make it seem less connected.\u201d <\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cYeah,\u201d Jack admitted. \u201cEither way, whoever it is\u2026 they\u2019re dangerous and they don\u2019t care who they kill, and they can ghost around as well as we can, maybe better.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">With that in mind, she dug\u2014carefully, because it was being actively consulted by law enforcement\u2014into the back-end records of the spaceport, looking for a ghost\u2019s trail: abrupt changes to databases with no record of who initiated them; glitched cameras that briefly lost the ability to record people\u2019s movements; other signs that someone was doing the things she had done on Helion Prime, but to a far more harmful purpose. It took her another hour to find what she was looking for, but at least it kept her stable, quieting the part of her that wanted to scream to fill the silence, and might never stop if she let it start.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Someone had, indeed, followed Tomlin to the spaceport and shadowed him on the way to the pilots\u2019 lounge. Someone who could only be tracked by the wake of suddenly malfunctioning cameras, about twenty meters behind Tomlin himself. Cameras at the periphery periodically captured small glimpses of a man dressed in the same clothing the suspected terrorist had been wearing, but never in any detail. By the time he was near enough to a camera for it to get a good shot of him, it had stopped recording.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Tomlin, in the footage, looked uneasy. At one point, he spoke on his comm\u2014probably to Takama\u2014as he walked through the concourse toward the shuttle that would ultimately explode. He lingered briefly by a reflective surface, studying the scene behind him. Trying to identify, Jack thought, his shadow.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Other members of the spaceport staff, dressed in uniforms like his, greeted Tomlin and spoke to him at times. He was clearly popular and well-liked. When he entered the pilots\u2019 lounge, the malfunctions following him stilled to just three cameras, obscuring a space fifteen meters from the lounge\u2019s doors. For the next half hour, those three cameras remained non-functional while a handful of people\u2014a man and a woman in pilots\u2019 uniforms entering the lounge with formally-dressed guests on their arms, someone else\u2019s departing guest in a djellaba and a face-obscuring headwrap, and a trio of curious-looking teens who entered the lounge and were escorted back out a moment later, now looking disappointed\u2014came and went. The glitches only moved when a technician showed up to examine one of the disabled cameras.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">For another five minutes, nothing happened. Then a second set of camera glitches described the wake of another person moving, unseen, though the concourse and arriving at the same location.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">The arrival, Jack thought, of the duffel bag.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Soon after, two sets of glitches showed Tomlin\u2019s shadow, and his accomplice, departing the spaceport in two different directions, leaving behind an innocuous-looking bag sitting on a bench beside a potted fig tree. They were outside in another ten minutes. The first explosion immediately followed, every camera within forty meters of the bag registering flaring light from its direction before dissolving into static, the cameras beyond that showing the almost instantaneous destruction that had been wrought, and the intense fire that had erupted seconds after, before registering their own flash-and-static deaths slightly over a minute later.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Whatever kind of bomb had been inside the bag, its position and blast radius had ensured that both the pilot\u2019s lounge and the shuttle\u2019s boarding area would be destroyed. They had calculated it so that, when the bomb went off, it wouldn\u2019t matter whether Tomlin was still eating his meal in the lounge or had joined the other passengers at the gate.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Jack couldn\u2019t bring herself to watch the feeds of the explosion from inside the lounge itself yet. Instead, she ran through all the exterior feeds, hoping that one or even both of the men might have accidentally let themselves get caught on a camera that didn\u2019t glitch. Nothing. The only shot she found was the one law enforcement was already circulating, the moment when a camera, too far down the concourse to capture any detail, recorded Tomlin\u2019s shadow placing the duffel bag on the bench and walking away.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">The uniformity of the glitching suggested that he and his accomplice had been carrying scrambling devices rather than using Ghost Codes. There were no unexplained changes to any of the databases. Jack felt disgusted with herself for being relieved about that, about the fact that she didn\u2019t have to reveal the existence of the back doors she used, possibly closing them against herself in the process, in order to get justice for Tomlin.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Even though she\u2019d put it off for the very end, Jack still couldn\u2019t bring herself to watch the recordings from inside the pilot\u2019s lounge. As much as part of her desperately wanted to see Tomlin again, even for a moment, she didn\u2019t want to have to watch him <i>die<\/i> in that moment. Neither did Kyra, who had been petting Sebby while resting her head on Jack\u2019s shoulder.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cSo everybody thinks it was terrorism when it was an assassination?\u201d Kyra asked.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cYeah,\u201d Jack sighed. \u201cLooks that way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cWhy\u2019d they make it so big?\u201d Kyra asked after a long, morose pause. \u201cI mean, they knew where he was. Did they have to take out the whole concourse to get him? The whole <i>spaceport,<\/i> for fuck\u2019s sake?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Of all the infinite ways that the disaster had struck at them, the sheer, brutal magnitude of it hit hardest after losing Tomlin himself. To ensure one man\u2019s death, the Quintessa Corporation had knowingly killed hundreds of people, injured thousands more, and crippled a city.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Jack\u2019s words to Tomlin from the night before came back to her. <i>They can\u2019t threaten to cripple the economy if you don\u2019t turn over people <b>you<\/b> don\u2019t have, because <b>they<\/b> already took them from you\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She\u2019d been wrong. She\u2019d been so very wrong. Whether it was because they suspected Tomlin still had the <i>Matador<\/i> survivors, or because they wanted to prevent an inquest into the secrecy around Level Five Incidents, they\u2019d been willing to do a whole lot more than just <i>threaten.<\/i> She wondered if the explosion was a message: <i>If you rescue two hundred lives from us, we will take three times as many in their place\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Nobody could be so casually, inhumanly brutal, could they?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i> Death to the things that killed us\u2026 death to the makers of the cages\u2026 death to the \u2019verse that trapped us\u2026 a trillion deaths for every one you took from us\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She shuddered. Whatever <i>that<\/i> was, its malice was personal and vengeful. This was cruelly indifferent. It wasn\u2019t as if Tomlin had known, or could have proven, anything that would actually break the Quintessa Corporation\u2019s monopolistic power over space travel, was it?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i>I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It\u2019s much worse than we thought. We must never let them find my charges\u2026 or either one of <b>you\u2026<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i>Had<\/i> he discovered something that powerful?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cI think\u2026\u201d she said slowly, aware that Kyra was seeking an actual answer from her, \u201cwhatever it was that he figured out about them posed a big enough threat that they didn\u2019t <i>care<\/i> how many people got hurt, as long as they eliminated it. But\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She pulled up the spaceport\u2019s schematics as she talked. Anything other than the lounge videos was a welcome tangent.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201c\u2026that doesn\u2019t really explain how strong that bomb ended up being, or how it started that fire, or why the <i>shuttle<\/i> exploded. Shuttles are made to deal with much worse when they hit atmo. It should\u2019ve been okay. Maybe not <i>space<\/i>-worthy anymore, but still\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">The structure housing the concourse was multi-level. The upper level, where the pilot\u2019s lounge and departure gate had both been situated, was positioned six meters above the tarmac, level with the airlock into the shuttle\u2019s passenger cabin. Beneath it, the ground level was a long, vast warehouse-style structure with conveyors for both baggage and freight, carrying it from the spaceport to the shuttle\u2019s belly. And beneath that\u2014<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cThere,\u201d Jack groaned, pointing on the screen. \u201cOh <i>fuck<\/i>, there it is.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cWhat?\u201d Kyra leaned forward, touching the conduit Jack was pointing to. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cHydrolox-M fuel lines,\u201d Jack managed, feeling ill. \u201cFor refueling the shuttle. It was still an hour until launch time, maybe more. The lines were open and <i>pumping.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She could see it all now. The bomb had been strong enough to ensure that, whether Tomlin was still in the lounge\u2014whose entry doors had been fifteen meters from the duffel bag\u2014or was waiting at the departure gate thirty meters further down the concourse, he wouldn\u2019t survive. But that was also strong enough to reach, and rupture, the hydrolox-M fuel lines eight meters beneath it, while they were actively pumping <i>one of the most combustible materials in the universe<\/i> into the shuttle\u2019s enormous, almost-filled tanks\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Safety valves further down the line toward the spaceport hub would have tripped closed automatically upon sensing a sudden pressure drop, but if the concussive blast had damaged the valves leading into the shuttle itself, the hydrogen fire would have traveled, in moments, into its tanks, generating a blast whose power was just shy of <i>nuclear.<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Had they <i>known<\/i> the bomb would do that? Had they cared at all about the chain reaction it would set in motion?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i>And I thought I\u2019d seen monsters on the crash planet\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cI hate not being the bad guys,\u201d Kyra grumbled.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">For a moment, Jack\u2019s mind stuttered over that. But technically, she realized, they <i>were<\/i> both criminals. Escaped from custody and fugitives, they had stolen money and property and falsified documents along the way. They had participated in the hijacking and destruction of two shuttles, albeit ones that were empty aside from some merc bodies. But those were the bodies of their <i>victims.<\/i> They had committed murder\u2014Jack for a second time, while Kyra had added another dozen or so notches to her belt.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i>I am technically a multiple murderer now,<\/i> Jack thought, feeling a bubble of nausea rise in response. Whether she\u2019d been defending people\u2019s lives or not, both of her victims had, at least nominally, been the ones on the right side of the law.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">But the world would still be a far better place, she admitted, if their crimes were the worst ones on the board, if they were the worst villains on the stage.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cYeah,\u201d she finally agreed with a heavy sigh, \u201cme, too.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">A soft knock on their door alerted them to Takama\u2019s arrival before she came in. She wasn\u2019t alone.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">The silver-haired woman who came in next was unmistakably Takama\u2019s sister. Safiyya Meziane, Jack realized. Which meant that the fair, Celtic-looking man walking behind her, whose appearance was hauntingy similar to Tomlin\u2019s, was his father Cedric. A younger woman, who looked like both Safiyya and Cedric, followed them in\u2014his sister. Jack recalled that Takama had said her younger nephew was away at flight school, following in his brother\u2019s and father\u2019s footsteps.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She rose from the couch to greet them, Kyra rising beside her. It took her a moment to find words. \u201cI\u2019m so sorry\u2014\u201d she began, before she found herself enveloped in a crushing mass hug.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Sebby, who had been sitting by Jack\u2019s tablet tapping ineffectually at the screen with a pincer, scooted back into the bedroom, perhaps fearing that he was next to be squished.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cWas that it? The creature from the other universe?\u201d Tomlin\u2019s sister, Tafrara, asked.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cYeah, that\u2019s Sebby,\u201d Jack told her, wiping her eyes. \u201cSorry, I think he\u2019s feeling shy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cWe brought you food,\u201d Cedric said. \u201cTakama says you don\u2019t seem to keep any in your home.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Jack felt terribly embarrassed suddenly. Amazigh culture was <i>huge<\/i> on hospitality, and they had nothing to offer.  \u201cThank you. We, uh\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cWe\u2019d love it if you\u2019d stay and eat with us,\u201d Kyra said, rescuing her.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">That, Jack decided a few minutes later, had been the plan from the start, based on the quantity of food the Tomlin-Meziane family had brought with them. Soon everyone was settled in the living room with fragrant plates. Jack, who hadn\u2019t thought she would ever want to eat again, found that she was suddenly ravenous.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Conversation inevitably turned to the explosion, and to loss.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cThey\u2019ve told us that there will be nothing to bury,\u201d Cedric said. \u201cHe was too near to the blast. But they haven\u2019t told us anything useful about <i>why<\/i> this happened. No terrorist groups have taken credit, nobody seems to know\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cI know,\u201d Jack said heavily. \u201cI know what happened. And I know why.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">For the next half hour, she walked them through what she\u2019d discovered, showing them the glitch patterns and the small amount that had been captured on camera. She showed them the schematics, and how the size of the first explosion had made the second inevitable. They watched somberly; like her and Kyra, they didn\u2019t want to see footage of Tomlin\u2019s last moments in the pilots\u2019 lounge.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cYou are every bit as formidable as our son said you were,\u201d Cedric murmured as she put the tablet down at last.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cAll this\u2026 to kill our son?\u201d Safiyya finally asked. \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201c\u2019Cause they don\u2019t want people knowing about Level Five Incidents,\u201d Jack sighed. \u201cT\u2014Brahim\u2026\u201d That seemed to be what everybody had called him in the Rif, when they weren\u2019t referring to him as <i>El Krim<\/i> or, as some had pronounced it, <i>Il Karim<\/i>. \u201cHe thought he knew why. Something that happened, when we were rescuing the <i>Matador<\/i> survivors, made him realize what Quintessa had to be hiding. Maybe they figured out he was onto them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cHe didn\u2019t tell you what it was?\u201d Cedric asked.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Jack shook her head. She could see Kyra and Takama doing so as well. Whatever he\u2019d discovered, he\u2019d seemed reluctant to voice his suspicions, and had taken them with him into the black.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d she said again. \u201cThis is all my fault\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cShut that down,\u201d Kyra snapped. \u201cShut that down <i>right now.<\/i> You didn\u2019t do this. <i>They<\/i> did. You want to know why people keep dying around you? It\u2019s because <i>you don\u2019t bail when things go bad.<\/i> Ever. So shut down this \u2018my fault\u2019 bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cDihya is right, Tislilel,\u201d Cedric told her, and Jack abruptly realized that neither she nor Kyra had <i>ever<\/i> actually told anyone their names since their arrival in the Rif; now the names that Tomlin had given them had stuck. \u201cI\u2019m an old hand at these kinds of intrigues. They may have been planning on killing Brahim ever since he took the survivors back from them after the high tide. If he was going up to the space station to retrieve evidence of their wrongdoing, they\u2019d have wanted to stop him in a way that didn\u2019t look too specifically targeted at him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cI think,\u201d Takama said, \u201cfrom watching the footage, they may have intended to abduct him, or possibly engineer an accidental death for him\u2026 until they realized that he knew they were following him, and he made himself inaccessible to them by going into a lounge that only pilots and their guests can enter. Technically, he still numbered among the pilots even if it has been three years since he last flew a mission.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Cedric nodded, looking thoughtful. \u201cThat\u2019d explain why the bloke on his tail staked out the lounge and called for backup\u2026 and a much more violent plan. You say they were using portable jammers on the cameras, not jacking into the security system?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cThat\u2019s what it looks like,\u201d Jack said. \u201cNone of the signs of someone with <i>my<\/i> kind of access were in the system.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Cedric gave her a weighing look, his expression heartbreakingly like Tomlin\u2019s when <i>he<\/i> had restrained himself from asking when and how she\u2019d learned so much high-level espionage. Jack swallowed, suddenly feeling like her food had gotten caught in her throat.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cSo they may not have had any idea that their briefcase bomb was going to trigger something catastrophic,\u201d he said after a moment. \u201cI suspect, if they\u2019d been <i>able<\/i> to gain access, they\u2019d have put it on the shuttle itself and timed its detonation for sometime during launch. So whoever it was had top-level tech, but not top-level clearance. Could <i>you<\/i> have walked a bomb like that onto the shuttle?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Jack winced, feeling ill, and nodded. She knew exactly how she could have done it, too. \u201cI would never do that,\u201d she whispered.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cWe know,\u201d Takama said, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cMaybe I should be bothered by how much access you seem to have,\u201d Cedric agreed, \u201cbut I\u2019m not, because it seems to me like it\u2019s in pretty safe hands. Incredibly <i>young<\/i> hands, but\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cNow <i>hush,<\/i> Cedric,\u201d Safiyya said in a gentle scolding tone. \u201cYou know that my cousin Lalla looked like she was twelve years old until she was nearly thirty. Don\u2019t embarrass her. Or yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cThe point is,\u201d Cedric continued, giving his wife a somewhat subdued playful glance, \u201cyou aren\u2019t at all responsible for what happened. The two of you are, in point of fact, also victims of Quintessa. Both of you could\u2019ve run away and hidden, but you stood beside him when he needed allies most of all. You\u2019re why almost two hundred people survived long enough to escape into the mountains. And you saved <i>his<\/i> life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cI didn\u2019t, though,\u201d Jack blurted. \u201cI just postponed his death.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i>Just like Fry\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cNo one gets to choose how long their life is,\u201d Cedric told her, his voice becoming a bit stern.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\"><i>I tried to\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">\u201cAll we can do is make the days we have count. My son would have no regrets about how <i>he<\/i> spent his last days, and who he spent them with. Nor do we.\u201d He took a deep breath. \u201cWhich brings us to one of the reasons we came here today. We\u2019ll be holding his memorial a few days from now, once the search-and-rescue is over and the Islamic funerals are dealt with first. And we would like it, very much, if both of you would join us at it, and stand with us as part of his family.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Jack looked at Kyra, who was looking back at her in speechless astonishment, eyes filling.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">All she could do was nod and try not to start crying again.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">Tomlin, she knew, would have wanted this. She had a sense that, on some level, she and Kyra had awakened fatherly impulses in him, and he\u2019d have wanted his family to pull her and Kyra into their orbit and take them in on his behalf. But unlike Kyra, she had a father who was waiting for her, and a life and self that had been put on hold for far too long. For Kyra, what Tomlin had offered <i>was<\/i> the life she needed, not a further detour away from it. But even as part of Jack had been\u2014and still was\u2014a little tempted to let herself be enfolded into Tomlin\u2019s world and family, she knew it wasn\u2019t where she truly belonged. She needed to be Audrey MacNamera\u2014not Jack B. Badd, not P. Finch, not Tislilel the mermaid\u2014and inhabit a world without mercs, monsters, or murder. But first\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">She would do this. She would honor Tomlin at his memorial ceremony. She would make sure that someone kept his promises to Kyra so she would have a future on Tangiers Prime that she could take pride in. But then\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:1em;margin-bottom: 0\">It was, Jack knew, time for her to go.<\/p>\n<p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft) Author: Ardath Rekha Chapter: 30\/? Fandom: TCOR AU Rating: M Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language Category: Gen ","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"\u201cThe Changeling Game\u201d chapter 30 by Ardath Rekha","bgseo_description":"After the explosion at the New Marrakesh spaceport, a whole world clamors for answers. Aside from the perpetrators of the heinous crime, only Jack and Kyra know how and why it happened.","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fan-fiction","category-the-changeling-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1194,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions\/1194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}