Free The Alejandra Variations by Paul Cook Page B

asked his underling.
    Jarre was mouselike, with rascally brown hair and quick furtive brown eyes. He was a little older than the rest. Nicholas guessed that he was Lazlo's right-hand man.
    Jarre looked once more at Nicholas, then faced the Captain. "The only leads we found come from a small reactor, and they all flow to here. The computer says those are stasis couches, Captain."
    Lazlo and Jarre walked up to one of the couches. Jarre put the Captain between himself and Nick as they carefully stepped up to the trays still in place in the huge wall.
    Nicholas looked about the room. Although it did not resemble the in-system sleep center for Mnemos Nine at Foresee's headquarters, it obviously served the same purposes. The names on the other trays told Nicholas more than he wanted to know.
    Reitinger. Bolyard. Mallory. Childs. Flinn. Feterling. McKibben. And several dozen others he'd never heard of before. The whole Project was here. Things were starting to add up, and Nicholas didn't like it. His knees were beginning to wobble. He closed his eyes briefly and leaned back on the tray as Jarre and Lazlo tried to draw out the couches one by one.
    Lazlo turned to Nicholas. "That one electrical lead we picked up must've been plugged into your couch. All these others are out."
    "And I found him," Lexie sang proudly beside him.
    "The computer must have kept him alive all this time," Jarre said. Jarre didn't say it, but Nicholas could almost hear the word "Eridani" on his lips—certainly it had been in his eyes.
    Lazlo squinted as cigar smoke curled up about his face. He looked myopically at Nicholas. "When did you go under?"
    Nicholas recalled his last scenario—and the circumstances under which he had gone into it. He gave Lazlo the date.
    "Makes sense," the Captain muttered as the tray Jarre was pulling on finally yielded. Nicholas thought he was going to be sick.
    The couch had been marked "Bolyard." Inside was a diminutive skeleton shrouded in the fibers of a blouse that had given away to the passing of the centuries. The skull, jarred by the motion of the tray, snapped off at the neck, falling to gaze directly up at Nicholas. A small necklace glittered like a constellation lost in a forest of bones. Blond-gray strands of hair still clung in places to Staci's skull.
    "Oh, my God," Nicholas whispered, feeling faint.
    "Thought so," Lazlo stated flatly, emotionlessly. "I don't think any of the others made it either."
    The soldiers examining some of the other stasis couches all concurred with their Captain. The trays were full of bones and dust and the shards of ancient apparel. A thousand years! Somehow, when Nicholas hadn't come out of Mnemos, they'd moved him here, along with the rest of Foresee. How they did this—or when—he had no idea.
    Lazlo said, "Let's get some more readings of the place, and get you back to DefCon. I don't think you should be burdened with all the facts at once." He puffed once or twice on his cigar, then said with a touch of sadness, "I think you know what's happened."
    Lexie held onto Nicholas. She said, "I'll debrief him, Daddy."
    Lazlo glared at her. "You'll do no such thing, young lady. This is a job for Class One Historians. We're just an exploratory team. No one's going to hog a discovery like this."
    Nicholas swayed. The injection Lexie had given him helped him stay on his feet. The overhead lights were dreamlike, and the shiny metallic uniforms everyone wore cast the whole scene into a kind of unreality that nothing in his training had led him to expect. No scenario of the far future had come up like this. The last thing he remembered was the image of his dream wife and daughter in a fiery wind. He now knew that it had been a dream.
    He found himself wishing this were one too.
    Captain Lazlo turned and clapped his hands like an impatient impresario at his uneasy brood, who had returned to the far wall upon discovering the crypts of the Foresee dead. "Well, gentlemen, haven't we got business to