Chapter Two
That Which Was Lost Is Found Again, but What to Do with It?
They found it!
Wolfplanet Mindfuck.
The world that stripped me of my humanity and made me who I am.
The world that arguably made me Emperor.
They bloody found it!
When then-Major Reed found me and taught me who and what I was and how I came to be that way, and then told me the special Section 31 training program had been ended, he never said whether the world that had broken me, had broken so many of us and turned us into Pack, had been destroyed, only that the program had been terminated. So, when I discovered in the aftermath of the explosion on Jupiter Station that a new generation of Pack had been raised, I had no way of determining whether he'd been lying, had later changed his mind, or had been duped from the beginning into believing the program was finished. Nor would it have been appropriate – or even safe – to discuss the issue with others.
When hard work, careful planning, nerves of steel and an enormous stroke of luck or two put me on the throne, I was determined to find the bloody place and reduce it to space dust – personally.
However, just as must have happened to those who originally found the place and realised its potential, I couldn't help but have second thoughts. There was no doubt that using it to subjugate and essentially dehumanise individuals was morally reprehensible, but in a world like ours, if you can't find sufficient support naturally and turn up your nose at a guaranteed way of manufacturing more, your ethics are likely to be the death of you. Once the Pack became self-aware, it also became conscious of how outnumbered it was, and how desperately vulnerable it would be if it was discovered. However 'natural' we might seem to each other, we would be regarded by 'ordinary people' as freaks, as manufactured monstrosities. The only people who could be absolutely depended on to support us were more editions of ourselves. That, of course, exponentially increased the competition too, but that was an aspect of our existence that we understood and could deal with.
So after coming to that bleak, brutal conclusion, I had to revise my original intentions. When I found myself playing Imperial three-dimensional chess with the likes of that treacherous bitch Erika Hernandez, Philip Georgiou, my old friend Jignesh Vaja, and a few other Pack members who didn't realize they were mere pawns until swept off the board by the real chess masters, I couldn't help but realise how useful it would be to be able to manufacture my own allies; but without access to the planet, I couldn't do it.
By the time Alfred was eight years old and a serious little boy with a fondness for history and an ambition that reached to every star in the night sky, I was pondering how to make him understand what it meant to be Pack and to be the Alpha. I've talked to him about it, and his brothers and sister, obliquely, only telling them about wolfpacks here on Earth, because anything more would have made them ask questions I wasn't sure I wanted to answer. I still haven't told their mother about the bloody program, so I certainly wasn't going to discuss it in detail with them.
That's when I first met with Professor Zirkow. I authorized him to form a research team. A small one, no more than three people.
At some point in time, somebody, somehow, must have landed on that planet and discovered its properties. At a guess, those who rescued him and realised the possibilities inherent in the situation did a very, very good job of hiding the discovery itself and all mention of who he (or she) was, and the location of the world itself. Still, the fact remains that a programme was run for years placing people on it, so there must have been a core of those who knew exactly where it was and what it did. There must also have been a core of those who treated those who returned from it.
Extensive research has failed to reveal any of these. Either they were all killed to ensure their silence – not by any means impossible, given the Empire's prompt methods of disposing of the inconvenient and certainly General Hayes' known penchant for ensuring total secrecy – or they were disposed of in places where they would never have the opportunity of revealing what they knew.
It's possible that General Reed knew where the planet was, but he never said so. I did wonder whether Jignesh might have had any success in prising the knowledge out of him prior to his execution, but his health was very frail by that time. Even if he didn't spend his last dregs of strength in a flare of defiance to take the information with him to the grave, I'm not sure he could have physically withstood even relatively mild interrogation. If I'd been certain he did know I might still have made the attempt, but with the chances stacked against success in the way they were, I decided not to try.
Did the affection I once felt for him influence that decision? I don't know, and I try to avoid second-guessing myself. But I can't forget the debt the Pack owes him for creating us from the Army of the Dispossessed, and for that alone, he earned an honourable death.
Still, without any success in finding those who had been involved in the administrative side of things, or any of the documentation that must have existed regarding their activities, we were left to the back-breaking task of sifting Space for one small, innocuous, unremarkable planet – possibly with an old warning beacon orbiting it, to keep out any inquisitive soul who might stumble on it by accident. And given the number of available planets circling available stars in the Terran Empire, looking for a needle in a haystack would have been a comparatively simple task.
Every month for more than a decade, I've been getting reports indicating negative results and showing which section of space they plan to investigate next.
And now they've bloody found it!