Omega

Now the menu arrived. The efficiency of the service was beginning to anger Owain. He could do nothing but wait as his brother went through a little ritual of asking for more information about some ok the courses on offer. Owain ordered what was listed as Game Saucission with Creamed Potatoes, pointing to the item but ostentatiously asking for “Sausage and Mash”.

“You’re not going to have a starter?” Rhys enquired.

“Soup,” Owain said. “Whatever’s available.”

He told himself that he had to remain calm, patient. Rhys wasn’t exactly toying with him but was plainly enjoying the power he temporarily held by the promise of disclosure. Had they been anywhere else, Owain would have had him up against a wall by now, wringing his neck until he squawked.

“So,” Rhys said when the waiter had departed again, “what were we saying?”

He was refilling his glass. Owain’s resolve vanished as swiftly as he had made it. He leaned across the table and grabbed Rhys’s wrist, squeezing.

“Do you think I’m going to make frivolous dinner table conversation with you about a mission in which four men were killed and I got this?” He jabbed a finger at his pockmarked face. “Do you, Rhys? Do you?”

“You’re hurting me.”

“I’ll slit your fucking throat if I have to, brother or not, unless you start telling me what you know.”

Owain spoke in a fierce whisper. No one at the other tables was paying them the slightest bit of attention. The violence of his words, which matched the strength of his feelings, shocked me. Even so I couldn’t discern whether he seriously meant the threat. I considered and dismissed the idea of trying to intervene. Something important was brewing here.

Owain released his brother’s hand. Rhys, plainly shaken, said, “It wasn’t a bomb.” He began flexing his wrist. “Nothing to do with any munitions, at least not in the traditional sense. We think of it as a discharge. A release of potential energy.”

His face was perfectly serious. He swallowed more wine.

“We?” Owain said.

“What do you remember about the original mission? To the No-Go Zone?”

Owain didn’t want to talk about it. Especially to Rhys.

“Why are you asking me?” he said angrily. “Haven’t you seen the files?”

“It’s important you tell me yourself. Your medical reports suggest you were exposed to CNS agents that might have induced some form of aphasia and possibly selective amnesia.”

It was like a violation of his privacy. His simpering brother, making backroom judgements on his condition. Owain despised the idea that his experiences on the mission could be reduced to a series of impersonal medical syndromes.

“I gave a full report,” he insisted, though he knew it wasn’t true. “I told them everything.”

“What was the purpose of the mission?”

“To take a look at a base where covert activity was suspected.”

“Was that all?”

Owain made himself think about it. “We were field-testing new equipment.”

“What equipment exactly? “

“Does it matter? It’s the sort of thing that goes on all the time.”

“Indulge me, Owain.”

Owain watched him refill his glass.

“A new APC,” he said. “Weapons, radar and landmine detection systems.”

“Nothing else?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“There was a new boy with you. A Corporal John Vassall.”

Owain was unlikely to forget, though he’d never consciously registered the corporal’s first name.

“He was attached at the last minute,” he said.

“Do you remember why?”

“He was a remote operations specialist.”

Rhys looked encouraged. “And?”

“And what?”

“I’m interested in his extra speciality.”

Owain tried to think. Nothing would come except the image of Vassall with his face pressed to the Spectre’s window, white-eyed, his bloody mouth imploring.

“He was sent in specially, Owain. To test the device. You and your commander were fully briefed.”

Owain didn’t know what he was talking about. He had no recollection of himself and van Oost sharing any secret knowledge. But he did remember Vassall at the workstation, pulses of data flowing across the screen. Something he’d never spoken of; something no one had explained.

“What device?”

“You really don’t remember?” Rhys said with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.

Owain wanted to slap him. Rhys saw it and sat back.

“The system that’s finally going to make mincemeat of all opposition?”

Rhys made it sound frivolous, almost a joke.

Owain’s soup arrived. Minestrone, or something resembling it. Rhys had a fancy arrangement of frilly mushrooms around a dollop of greenish puree.

“You say I knew,” he remarked to Rhys when the waiter was gone.

His brother nodded, already eating.

“So why can’t I remember?”

Rhys shrugged. “You tell me. Battlefield trauma? The agents you inhaled? Wilful ignorance?” He forked a mushroom. “You still haven’t told me what happened out there.”

Owain considered. Considered whether to tell him everything or nothing at all.