LONG GAME

"Hold on," Freeman blurted. "You can't expect us to believe you can reset everything in the galaxy again and again, and no one notices something… anything… can you?"

Kearyn shrugged and answered, "There are a myriad of side effects. The most notable is the sense of lingering déjà vu that occurs at the moment of reset. I think we can all admit to getting that been-there-done-that feeling from time to time. He turned to Riddick and added, "And there are some who encounter avatars of those they knew in the past. A doppelganger effect."

"How many times have we done this before?"

Shepard asked, as everyone around the table stared at one another in shock.

"Does it matter?"

"Just curious, that's all." Shepard admitted. "But I would take it as a sign of good faith if you answered my question."

Kearyn pointed to a nearby monitor showing a wide shot of the sector of space they drifted in. "It would be a far simpler task for you to count the number of stars on that screen than it would be for me to put a number on the amount of times we have sat together bickering in this room."

"My God," Freeman said in a hushed whisper. "This can't be happening."

"Oh… I assure you, it is happening."

Riddick sat forward in his seat, purposely made eye contact with everyone at the table and said, "It doesn't matter how we got here or how many times we've been here before. The only thing that matters now is where we go from here."

Kearyn turned to Riddick and said, "Isn't that obvious, to come full circle we have to go back to where it all began; we have to go home."

Riddick sat forward with his elbows on the table, hands covering his face, "Asylum."

Eve stared at Kearyn, mouth open in confusion, and asked, "I thought you said we needed to go home? I'm not from Asylum. I was born on Earth; in a hospital in lower Manhattan."

"Were you?" Kearyn asked, as if knowing something she didn't. His tone made her feel uneasy and argumentative.

"Yes."

"Well. You are wrong." he countered. "Asylum is where you were born and that is where we must go to bring this to an end."

"No," Eve countered with a sour look of her own. She would not blindly accept him turning her life inside out. At least, not without a fight and a mountain of proof. "You're wrong. My parents are John and Katie Logan and I grew up in a mansion on the upper east side. And I don't care how many times you rewind time. You will never change that."

Kearyn smiled at Eve and said, "True, my child. You were raised there. But that was not your first home. Nor is it where you were born." He gestured at Riddick and continued, "Like him, there are many truths about your past that you are ignorant to."

"No one has hid anything about my past."

"Are you so certain." he asked, looking away as if ashamed to make eye contact. "It is a simple enough sleight of hand to hide the truth."

Before Eve could protest any further, Riddick said, "It doesn't matter. We can air this in private. Besides, Thomas was right about one thing."

"What was that?" Eve replied, turning away from Kearyn. But everyone in the room knew that conversation was far from over.

Riddick scanned the room with an ominous look and replied, "We can't show up at Asylum in a Necromonger Frigate. They would detect our approach from a million kilometres away and shoot us out of space before we entered high orbit."

Kearyn nodded at Shepard, who nodded back, and said, "Yes. The phase modulation system is ready."

"Is it tested?"

"I tested it myself."

"Good," Kearyn replied. Then he turned back to Riddick and explained, "In a few hours we will make a long range jump directly into Asylum's upper orbit. From there, we will travel by dropship to the surface at which point I shall, as they say, fill in all the missing details."

"You don't think they'll attack as soon as we pop out of nowhere?" Riddick asked.

"No," Kearyn answered. "Their defense net will not realize a ship has entered orbit." He turned to Shepard and said, "Please explain."

"Certainly," Shepard replied, getting up and moving to a monitor near Riddick. He turned the large monitor on, brought up the footage of an empty patch of space and said, "Here's the vid file of the Rapier's first long range jump. We jumped the unmanned ship from the Beta Tau cluster, 3,672 light years away, into the heart of the Bastion Traverse. Please watch the counter in the lower right corner of the screen. When it reaches zero, the Rapier will have made the jump and arrived. Shepard started the footage, waited for the counter to reach 0, and then turned to everyone and asked, "Now, tell me what you see on the screen?"

Riddick studied the video on the monitor and replied, "I don't see anything. The Rapier never arrived."

"And that is exactly what we thought." Shepard said, stopping the video feed. "But we were wrong. When the Rapier's jump drive was initially tested, an engineer inadvertently cross-connected the power relays used to activate the jump drive sequence. The resulting short circuit had a rather unexpected effect."

Riddick walked over to the monitor, stared at the screen trying to see something in the image, and asked, "What happened?"

Shepard pulled up several technical schematics and explained, "The jump drive failed to disengage after the Rapier made its initial jump into the Bastion traverse. The malfunctioning relays cycled on and off at a rate of 240 kHz, or 240 thousand times per second. The simplest explanation is that the ship rebounded between the two systems, without connecting to either. It phased out of both time and space. It vanished, much like what happened during the Philadelphia Experiment in the 1940s."

"That sounds like a malfunction we could exploit to our advantage."

Kearyn nodded and replied, "Shepard and I reasoned along the same line. That's why he has been working tirelessly to duplicate a way to safely mimic that mistake. By the time we reach Asylum, the Sheong-Ja will be cloaked from all forms of detection, as well as impervious to any form of attack. We will be there, without being there."

"Nice work," Riddick said, offering a thumbs-up gesture as he returned to his seat. "That gets us into high orbit. But how do we get boots on the ground? A dropship will be visible as soon as it penetrates the temporal field wall and enters their airspace."

Freeman stood up, went to a second, smaller monitor near Shepard and pulled up a tactical analysis of a small dropship. "We will use the Rapier's sister ship the Epee: it's one third the size, three times more maneuverable than the Rapier and has the same energy absorbent skin used on her sister's outer hull. It is invisible to everything but line-of-sight detection. If we are quick enough, we should be able to land before they see us. If things get dicey, we have made an alternate plan to get down."

"Nice."

"We'll load everyone going down to the surface onto the Epee before we make the long range jump. As soon as the Sheong-Ja enters Asylum's upper orbit, the Epee will disembark for the surface and the Sheong-Ja' can back out to a predetermined rendezvous location on the darkside of the second moon."

"Do we have a secure landing zone?" Riddick asked.

Kearyn acted as though he didn't want to answer, but after a few moments of stalling, he explained, "I hired a group of local mercenaries to find us a secure landing zone. They will prep the landing zone, set a transponder beacon to pinpoint its location and make sure it remains secure until our arrival."

Riddick glared at Kearyn with a sideways grimace and replied, "And the plan goes to shit right at the point where we get to the mercs. You know everything else about me, Kearyn. Why would you think I would be OK with you putting our lives in the hands of a bunch of money grubbing mercs?"

Kearyn sat back in his seat and said, "Because the team I hired is the most highly trained and respected professionals in the business."

"Respected by whom?" Riddick demanded.

"As it happens, the only person in this room whose opinion matters." Kearyn answered, gesturing to Riddick. "You."

"Me," Riddick replied with a twisted frown.

When Kearyn saw he didn't understand, he added, "You can say, they're family."

Riddick leapt to his feet, pounded his fist on the table hard enough to make everyone jump and fumed, "Are you trying to destroy everything I worked for?"

"Quite to the contrary," Kearyn answered, not phased in the slightest. "I am trying to preserve it for generations to come."

Toombs leaned over to Eve and asked, "Do you ever get the feeling we're totally out of the loop?"

She turned to him with a grin and said, "More times than I'd care to admit."

Carolyn turned back to them and said, "Hey, I'd just like ten minutes when I don't have to hear everything you're thinking. I mean, really. It's all sex, sex, sex."

Eve's mouth dropped open, and she said, "Oh my god, I didn't know you could read minds."

Carolyn winked at Riddick, who was now watching their side conversation unfold with some sense of growing amusement, and said, "Oh, I can't read minds. I just wanted to see what you'd say if you thought I could."

Eve glanced around the room at all the grinning faces staring back at her and turned three shades of red.

Riddick burst into laughter and said, "Toombs, your daughter acts just like you."

"Thomas to Shepard," a voice came out of the monitor behind Freeman.

"Yes, Thomas."

"The retrofit is complete," Thomas reported. "We can make the jump to Asylum as soon as everyone is in position."

"Thank you, Thomas. I'll be down to assist you as soon as possible." Shepard answered. "Please relay my sincerest appreciation to everyone down there, great job to all." Thomas nodded appreciatively, and the monitor went black.

"So, I gotta ask. How'd you get the ship back?" Riddick asked. "You didn't even know it was there. It could have gone anywhere."

"3 hours after the initial jump occurred, the relays exploded, disengaging the jump drive. It materialized exactly where we predicted. Although the resulting damage to the Rapier's propulsion systems took 3 months to repair."

"Who was the engineer who crossed the wires?"

Shepard looked at Kearyn, who nodded he should answer, and he said, "It was Thomas."

Riddick shook his head and looked at Shepard. "And still you put him in charge of the retrofit."

"I," he stressed, "can neither deny nor confirm that, as I seem to have no memory of that conversation. However, if it makes you feel better, you should know, I fully intend to go down to the propulsion room and do a thorough once over on the new system before we fire it up."

"A prudent precaution." Kearyn said, gesturing for Shepard, Thomas, Freeman and his men to go get into position. "Wait for a moment." He said to the others. After the room had cleared, he said, "We need to discuss a few things in private before we part company."

"Like what?" Eve snapped.

"You are prone to heated outbursts just like your mother." He said, shaking his head at her.

"I am nothing like my mother." she countered, glaring at him. Her mother has challenged no one. She detested confrontation.

"At the very least, we can agree on that assessment, my child." he replied with a polite nod. "You are nothing like Katie Logan. And you never will be."

"What's this all about?" Riddick asked, smiling at Eve's frown. He didn't particularly like the anger she radiated at Kearyn. He was just glad someone else was pissed at him for a change.

"I believe I said if we survived the battle I would answer everyone's questions."

"Guy, I have no questions." Toombs said, wrapping his arms around Eve and Carolyn. "You've given me more than I could have ever dreamed."

"Everything but the truth, old friend." Kearyn said, putting his hand on Toombs' shoulder.

"The truth is subjective to the teller." Riddick said, sitting forward in his seat.

"That is why I will not tell you the story of the destruction of Furya." he said, gesturing at Eve. "She is."

Eve's jaw dropped. Her eyebrows furrowed from shock to disbelief and she said, "I know nothing about Furya."

"There is an ancient tome. An ancient tome bound in black with a gold leaf handprint embossed on the front. It is rumored the book of hand was penned long before this galaxy came into being. It is written in the oldest of all Furyan languages, and only certain people can decipher the words and images within the pages. "

"I don't know any old Furyan language."

"Let's hope you're wrong." Kearyn said, pushing himself away from the table and getting to his feet. "Because if you're not. We will have undertaken all this death and destruction for nothing. And you will have utterly ruined my birthday party."

"No pressure." Toombs said, staring at Eve. "Wait. Birthday party. We're going to a party?"

"In a fashion." Kearyn said, gesturing for everyone to get up. "Alexander, you and Eve can meet us in the shuttle bay. Riddick and I have a few things to discuss before we depart for Asylum." He knelt down in front of Carolyn and said, "And you, my angel. I will see you on the other side. You know what to do."

"I do." she said, hugging him and kissing his cheek. "I'm sure everything will go as planned, grandfather. But try to be careful this time." Carolyn turned to Eve, held out her hand and said, "I have time to walk you down to the docking bay before we make the jump." Eve took her hand and she and Toombs followed Carolyn out of the room.

"It is time." Kearyn said, turning to Riddick and gesturing to the still open door.

Riddick's stomach churned. He knew the time was coming, but he was unprepared for the crippling guilt and shame. Now it was here. The time when he would have to go to her. Try to heal. The time to beg for forgiveness. His rending guilt made him queasy.

"Walk with me. I will take you to her."