Six

6 - Identity Crisis

— FDN VESSEL "CASCADE OF SPIRITS", HARMONY, CHORUS DOCKYARDS —

"This isn't possible."

You'd have thought that maybe she could have gotten some sleep over the last half a day- that maybe she'd be able to rest well, knowing that the frontier was safe at last from the claws of the elusive Wraith.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

As the engineers had worked to get the Cascade back into working order, Gray had tossed, turned, and laid awake for hours- the haunting image of his face always in front of her, burned into her retinas.

Six years had passed since Regis was destroyed, six years since Spyglass had been overthrown- and six years since Tobias Four and KT-0298 had mysteriously vanished.

It had been initially been assumed that they were dead; but later, it was theorized that they'd been swallowed up by the explosion of temporal energy left behind by the unstable portal of Spyglass's fold weapon, sucked into the time-stream along with the half the planet. Debris from the event had turned up everywhere and anywhere- not to mention anytime.

Every year or so, another temporal rift would open up on some distant world, and the FDN would send a retrieval team to collect whatever had been spat out of time. It was these ships that usually had found themselves targeted by the Wraith, though why they never stole anything physical had always been a mystery.

She and the others- Gates, Vale, Buck, all of them- had accompanied the retrieval teams for the first few instances, but ... it eventually became too painful to build up hope and ultimately have it wither away, time and time again.

She couldn't claim to have been as close to him as the others were, and wouldn't have dreamt of pretending to be- Gates and Vale had been with him since the beginning as a part of his team. But he was still her friend, and humanity's hero- he meant a great deal to her and the frontier as a whole.

And now he was back from the dead.

She had so many questions- where had he been all this time? Why was he doing this? Where was Kay? The whole myriad of them swirled about in her mind, plaguing her thought process with demands for answers.

Now, she was going to get some.

Gates and Davis had settled down together on the edge of Chorus, Harmony's most prominent city- and the rebuilding efforts after the Seed's attack on it had turned it into a metropolis to rival those of Luma. Skyscrapers stretched high into the air, it had the largest interstellar dockyard in the system ... and yet, the two of them preferred to live out in the suburban areas, close to the Floating Gardens, or what remained of them.

She knew why; so many years of warfare had left them, especially Gates, with a desire for stability in their lives. The last time she'd seen them had been three years ago, the final time she'd gone with on a retrieval mission. They had kids now, kids that they wanted to protect from a life of high-octane action.

To truly get the answers she needed, she needed Gates with her. She knew Tobias best- and as Gray had expected, she'd accepted the invitation to the Cascade the moment she'd been told of the situation.

Now, the former captain stood next to the Ghosts and other crewmen in an room adjacent to the interrogation chamber, staring through the one-way glass at their captive as he sat at a stainless steel table, his hands cuffed in front of him. On the table was a tray of objects that had been confiscated when he'd been searched, ones that Gray intended to talk with him about.

"I know it's a lot to take in," she said softly, sympathizing with the other woman's shock, "but it really is-"

"No, you don't get it- I mean, this isn't possible," Gates emphasized, her eyes never leaving the Wraith.