Inspired by...I don't really know. The scenes just popped into my head.

There are secrets and then there are secrets. To be a Companion protector, you have to be able to keep secrets: security secrets, service secrets, and Companion secrets. Of course, most of those secrets are secrets we keep from the outside world, not each other. Within the service, even a Taelon shuttle doesn't travel as fast as a new rumour, which is why most of us had some idea of what to expect on the day when every unassigned protector was summoned for an emergency meeting.

Sandoval waited until we all fell obediently into line before beginning. Even if we hadn't heard the rumours, we would have known something big was going on from the excitement that illuminated him.

"As many of you already know, early this morning a squad of Volunteers successfully raided a major Resistance base. They managed to capture several Resistance members alive, including the cell leader, and retrieved a great deal of valuable information. The most important piece of information was extracted from the cell leader an hour ago. We now have the name of the new leader of the Resistance." He paused for dramatic effect and called up a datastream with a lone image. "Ladies and gentlemen, the leader of the Resistance is one of our own--Da'an's former protector, Major Liam Kincaid."

The bastard was enjoying this. I saw him smile at the rustle his announcement created among those who weren't quite as connected to the grapevine as an effective protector should be.

"Major Kincaid did not show up at the embassy this morning, which leads me to believe that he was tipped off about the results of the raid, and that means the rest of the Resistance is aware of it too. Obviously the intelligence we gathered will quickly become outdated, which is why I already have Volunteer squads acting on it. Your job is different. From now until it is accomplished, everyone here has one and only one task--find and capture Liam Kincaid."

I know a lot of protectors don't like Kincaid, and with some reason. The rest of us sweated blood just to get into the service, and yeah, part of it was from a desire to expand the frontier of human experience, but a lot of it was simple ambition. The protectors are the best of the best, and the protectors assigned to individual Taelons the best of those. When Boone died, everyone held his or her breath, waiting to see which of us would be chosen as his successor. And then along came Kincaid, sailing effortlessly past us without so much as a backward glance. It wasn't that he wasn't good at what he did--he was--but he didn't earn it. He didn't put in his time, and more importantly, he didn't lie on that table watching a robotic arm creep closer and closer to his head. So yeah, some of us--the ones who were here from the beginning--are a little resentful. But I still shivered at that last line. It's one thing to mutter amongst ourselves about arrogant flyboys who have no respect for protocol. It's another to hunt down a fellow protector as if he were a common fugitive.

The Volunteers had already put a watch on Kincaid's apartment and had begun systematically and unsuccessfully sweeping the streets of D.C. We didn't have great expectations for either approach--a former protector would know better than to return home and all protectors are taught basic evasion tactics--but it had to be done. We didn't bother checking up on the Volunteers. Sandoval might be a prick, but he knows his job and the squads he'd put on this were his handpicked favourites. Instead, we turned to other sources. I was assigned to start searching Kincaid's records for references to friends and family he might run to. Dull work, but still ten times better than the fate awaiting that handful of protectors who had had the misfortune of being given the label "friend of Liam Kincaid." Word had it that Sandoval was questioning each of them personally. My throat went dry when I first heard about that. If anyone had witnessed the incident...but evidently they hadn't and the handful of occasions I'd worked under Kincaid passed unnoticed.

One thing I will say about Kincaid is that he was fair. In this field, dominated by military and ex-military types, 90% of male protectors from Sandoval down believe that women simply aren't as effective as men. Most of them don't say so openly, but it's always floating just beneath the surface and every time an assignment includes a less active, non-combat role, it's the woman on the team who gets it. Kincaid was different. He didn't just spout off phrases mastered in gender sensitivity seminars--he genuinely respected women's abilities. Assignments on his missions were made strictly by merit. That was why so many female protectors clambered to be on his team--not for his looks, as a few men had snidely implied--but because we all knew that we had a better shot at promotion working under Kincaid than under any other senior protector.

The record search didn't take long--occasionally I'm actually grateful for that implant they shoved in my brain--but it turned out to be quite useless. Kincaid had no living family and few friends outside of the protector service. There were references to a hacker whom Sandoval suspected was affiliated with the Resistance, a few connections to Doors International, and not much else. Between his protector duties and his Resistance work, Kincaid apparently hadn't had much time for a personal life. Not surprisingly, Sandoval wasn't too happy with my report. But he'd had three other people assigned to the same task and when we call came up empty, he grudgingly admitted that it might be time to try something else.

The next step, after we were sure he wasn't coming back, was to search Kincaid's apartment. Sandoval himself led the search. By then the number of protectors available to work on the case had dropped substantially. Evidently Kincaid had had more friends among the protectors than had been previously suspected. It seemed like every other day someone was being called in for an interview. Most of them came back relatively intact, if a little pale, but they were all immediately assigned elsewhere.

The apartment wasn't at all what I was expecting. I'd always taken Kincaid to be something of a traditionalist, but his apartment was sparsely utilitarian, the starkness broken only by a few modern pieces. It was as if he had gotten sick of the decorating scheme one day and had cleared part of it out without bothering to replace it with anything. Apart from that, there was little of interest and nothing overtly incriminating. The liquor cabinet was well stocked, and some of it looked expensive. (I sometimes think that one of the things the other protectors resented the most about Kincaid was that he still possessed the ability to get completely sloshed.) A toy model of the Taelon mothership sat on a shelf in the living room, which Sandoval seemed to find mildly intriguing. In his bedroom, the closet was still full--Kincaid had obviously left in a hurry. Sandoval's face lit up when he saw that; it meant that the raid hadn't been leaked beforehand. There were also a handful of old-style books in Kincaid's room in a few different languages, including Eunoia. That caught everyone's attention. All protectors are expected to learn basic spoken Eunoia as of a matter of course, but few could read it and I'd never heard of a non-enhanced human learning to do so. From the murmuring in the room, no one else had either. The most remarkable feature of Kincaid's apartment was what wasn't there: no photos, no letters, no history, nothing to give away any clues about the man himself. Almost as if Liam Kincaid were an identity he put on in the morning for work, rather than one that had developed over time.

Sandoval was one step ahead of me. After the first quick sweep of the apartment he contacted the mothership. By the time we got back, his suspicions had been confirmed: all of Liam Kincaid's records were fake. Well, not fake. Just not his. Zo'or blazed around the bridge for an hour after that discovery while Da'an and Sandoval tried futilely to calm him down. From the beginning, Da'an had claimed complete ignorance of Kincaid's external activities, but I began to doubt him a little as I watched him subtly try to protect his protector.

When Zo'or had stopped ranting enough to start giving orders again, he told us to find a sample of Kincaid's DNA and run it through the databases. We didn't expect to find Kincaid's true identity, of course--whoever had faked those records had done a superb job--but we thought we might be able to track down a blood relative or two. We got two, and what a pair they were. Nothing in the rumour mill had prepared us for the results that came back. The protector on duty didn't believe it at first, but the tech swore he'd run it three times and gotten the same result from each run. That's when things started to get really interesting. The first thing that happened was that Ronald Sandoval was taken off the case and sent off for an extended, very personal interview with Zo'or. Next, the Taelons came in and ran their own tests on Kincaid's DNA. By then, our CVIs and a little historical knowledge had allowed us to fill in most of the gaps, so the results of the Taelon tests came as no surprise. Kincaid wasn't human--he never had been. We still had a few questions about how two Companion protectors had managed to give birth to a part-alien son only a few years younger than themselves, but the Taelons didn't seem inclined to fill us in on that part and no one wanted to ask. I pushed the whole thing aside, except to note that it offered tantalizing hints about a few things, like Kincaid's inhuman piloting skills and that book in his room. And, of course, the incident.

The last time I worked with Kincaid was about three months before our little manhunt. A team of us had been sent as honour guards for a delegation of Taelon scientists in Beirut. Standard security stuff, until fire began falling from the sky like rain and the whole platform turned into a whirlwind of flame. They told us later that it was a new kind of energy weapon, developed in Taelon labs and stolen by a group intent on ensuring the Taelons reaped what they had sown. I didn't know any of that then. All I knew was that people were screaming and I was half-blind and choking and all I could think of was getting to the Companions. I didn't even realize that a gunfight had erupted until I was lying on the ground, Kincaid on top of me, as energy bolts whizzed over our heads. He rolled off and I started to thank him and that's when things really went to hell. For the second time that day, an explosion flashed overhead like lightning, and another firestorm descended towards us and I knew at that moment that I was going to die. And then without warning, the fire slipped away from us, sliding down like rain from an umbrella and falling harmlessly on the grass beyond. The scientists who investigated never figured that part out. Eventually they decided that the terrorists must have miscalculated the trajectory when they sent their little gift. But somewhere between the fire and smoke, the coughing and tears, I saw. I watched as the man beside me lifted his hands to the heavens and projected the shield that somehow sheltered us all.

After we got through to the Companions and secured the area, we assessed the damage. It was bad. The Taelons had been vulnerable to all of the weapons used in the fight and the initial attack had affected most of them to one degree or another. Kincaid took charge, of course, sending the prisoners up to the mothership for questioning and setting up a perimeter around the wounded. But the scene that stuck with me longest was the one that came later, when things had quieted down. The sheer number of injured overwhelmed the medical teams--it had been a large delegation--and they had been forced to resort to a triage system rather than provide the immediate care that the Taelons were accustomed to. Kincaid had stuck around to protect the injured rather than going up to the mothership to begin the investigation. As one of the least injured protectors present, I had also been left behind. I was doing a sweep of the perimeter when I came across one of the Taelons--a junior scientist named Var'el. I'd never before seen a Companion so badly hurt. They don't burn, exactly, but those injuries were a good approximation. He was whimpering a little from the pain, looking more pathetic than any Taelon ever should. Kincaid was with him. He had Var'el cradled in his arms, and he was speaking softly to him in Eunioa. He looked up as I walked by, but didn't say anything. I kept walking and decided then that if the downpour of fire hadn't killed me, one more secret wouldn't either.

Once they realized what they were dealing with, the Taelons moved fast. They'd already grasped from interrogating Sandoval that he didn't know anything, but the next day they let it leak that they were going to execute him for treason. We knew differently, of course. He was the trap's bait, and we were its teeth. I wondered how Sandoval felt about that, being forced to help capture the only son he had. Or maybe he'd volunteered for it. I didn't really know; none of us had had a chance to talk to him since the discovery.

We're back on Earth now, hiding outside a building with just enough overt security not to raise suspicions. Those of us who served with Kincaid know that he'll come. He's always been loyal to his own. In fact, that was one of the things that came up during our conversation earlier today. So did a few other things, like the number of times Kincaid has watched our backs and the number of Taelon lives he's saved. A couple of people alluded to some of the less pleasant aspects of our job: the camps, the experiments, the disappearances. The things we don't speak of, the things that keep us awake at night. The reasons we need the motivational imperative and the reasons we hate it. With the image of Kincaid cradling Var'el in my head, it really hadn't been all that hard to subvert the CVI conditioning, to convince myself that the man calling himself Liam Kincaid was, in fact, working in the best interests of the Companions. Other people must have had their own memories, because they all agreed pretty fast. Not everyone is in on it, but a good number of us are: almost half of the people stationed here. That's almost a fifty percent chance of Kincaid getting away. With a little luck--and he seems to have that in abundance--he'll escape tonight. Live to fight another day and leave us with one more secret to keep. I'm not sure yet that the Taelons intend harm to humanity. I'm certainly not sure that the Resistance is right. But crouching in the darkness, praying that Liam crosses my path and not that of the protector ten metres to my left, I'm more certain than I've been since I took my oath that I'm doing the right thing.

FIN

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