Spaceside

by Michael Mammay

  I laughed. “What? Can’t a guy be in town and drop by for dinner?”

  He smiled, and his eyes crinkled around the edges. “He absolutely could. But you didn’t.”

  He wasn’t upset. More curious. “Yes, sir, you caught me. There’s a thing at work. It’s a bit strange. I thought maybe you’d know something.”

  He settled back into his chair a bit. “Shoot.”

  “I got asked to investigate a potential breach in security.”

  “Sounds normal,” he said.

  “It would be, except the suspected breach was at Omicron.”

  His face scrunched a bit, and he thought about it for a few seconds. “Huh.”

  I watched him closely for signs while pretending to focus on my drink. I couldn’t pick up anything from his reaction so far. “What made it stranger is that I really don’t do that kind of work. If I’m being honest, I really don’t do much work at all.”

  “So they gave it to you because you were available?” He didn’t sound like he believed that.

  “Not likely. Especially since the job came directly from the top.”

  “From Javier?”

  “Yes, sir. You know him?”

  “Yeah. We’re not friends, but I’ve met him a few times. We talked about me going to work there when I retired. You sure it came from him?”

  “He called me into his office, which has never happened before, and he gave it to me personally.”

  “Huh.” Serata sipped his drink. I didn’t read it as a cover, more like he needed a moment to think. “I’m assuming you looked into it.”

  “I did. I found a contact at Omicron and met with him. A guy named Gylika.”

  “Warren Gylika?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I only know him by reputation, but I’ve heard he’s a good man.”

  “He was. He’s dead.”

  Serata had been raising his glass to his mouth, but stopped halfway. “Shit. I didn’t know that.”

  He was telling the truth. I’d have bet a lot of money on that. “He called me after we met and asked to meet again. Told me he had something he wanted to share. He never made it.”

  Serata took a deep breath. “Damn. You think it had something to do with what he was going to tell you?”

  “Police say it was a murder. Is there another way to see it?” I asked.

  “It’s definitely suspicious.” He thought for a few more seconds. “So how does this lead to you being here talking to me?”

  Now we were getting to the crux of it. If he decided to lie, we’d reached that point. “Once somebody died and the police started asking me questions, I began to take things a little more seriously. I went back to Javier and asked him about his source. I wanted to know how he heard about a breach at Omicron when it didn’t appear in the news feeds. It wasn’t public at all.”

  “And you thought I told him?”

  “I asked him, and he told me his source was military, but he wouldn’t reveal any more than that. I knew he knew you because he recognized your picture in my office, so I figured I’d take a shot and see if I got lucky.” I didn’t think I should reveal that I’d had Javier’s contacts hacked. I still didn’t know his relationship with Serata.

  “Nope. Wasn’t me.”

  “Did you know about the breach?” I tried to ask it casually. We weren’t in the military anymore and I didn’t have to defer to him, but I didn’t want to piss him off, either. He could still kick my ass.

  “Rumors,” he said. “More than rumors. Strong rumors. Like something happened, but nobody really said what. I didn’t believe them . . . that’s not right, it’s not that I didn’t believe them . . . I never gave them much thought until you brought it up just now.”

  “It didn’t seem important?”

  “It didn’t. Nobody made a big deal of it, you know? And if something major had gotten out, people would have made a big deal of it. No alarm, no fire.”

  I put my glass to my lips and studied him over the top of it. I believed him. He was capable of lying to me if he thought he needed to, but I didn’t sense it. He really didn’t know. “Any idea who else Javier might know who would have that information?”

  He considered it. “I can’t say for sure, but from what I know about Javier I’d say that he’s unlikely to do anything without being very deliberate. He doesn’t strike me as someone who makes rash decisions.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  “I feel like if he called you in and put you on it, he had to know something pretty firm. I don’t think a rumor would do it.”

  “The way he said it, it didn’t come across like a thing where I should find out if it happened. He wanted to know what happened.”

  “In that case, I don’t know anything useful. I’m not as connected as I once was. I could ask around, call in a few favors.”

  “Thanks, sir. That would be great.” It crossed my mind for a fleeting second that Gylika had said something similar just prior to his death, but I’d already shared that info with Serata, so he knew the risks. He could protect himself.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’ll keep on it.”

  “Carl, I know that look. What are you thinking about?”

  “It’s nothing, sir. It’s . . . I’m wondering if there’s a reason that Javier put me on this. Some specific thing, tied to me.”

  “Like you’re involved somehow?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. It sounds ridiculous, when I say it out loud.”

  “Well.” He paused. “Sometimes things sound ridiculous and they aren’t. Sometimes you’re staring at everything, and it points one way, and you still have that feeling that it’s something else. You know?”

  And sometimes people in power want to use you. I nodded. “I know.”

  “And we train people to put their feelings aside. We tell them to look at the facts and take emotion out of it. But we both know that’s bullshit. You can’t do that and be worth anything. It’s why we have humans make decisions, not computers.”

  “So you’re saying I should run with it,” I said.

  “I don’t know. Try another angle. What if Javier did bring you in for a reason? What would that reason be? Find that, and you’ll find your connection, if there is one.”

  Lizzie called us for dinner then, and we let the conversation drop, transitioning to more pleasant things like remembering old friends and catching each other up on mutual acquaintances and what they’d been up to. I needed that conversation. I hadn’t realized how much until I sat there and laughed and found myself comfortable for the first time in a couple of years. I didn’t stay long after dinner. I didn’t want to go back to the study and discuss deep matters. I wanted to let the good times remain at the forefront for a little while.

  “Thanks for having me, sir,” I said, as I stood at the door. Serata had a genuine smile plastered to his face. I think our talk was important for him, too.

  “I’m glad you came, Carl. It’s good to see you.”

  “It was good to see you, too, sir.” I meant it. I should have come to see him sooner. Not about the business with Omicron, but about everything else. Nothing had changed with what I had done, or what he had done, but the shared experience somehow spread the weight of it, made it not quite so heavy.

  And I needed that, too.

  Chapter Eleven

  The talk with General Serata did a lot of good for my well-being but didn’t do much to help me with my mission. Still, his words kept coming back to me. He called Javier deliberate, said that he didn’t do things without thinking them through. That got me to considering how I came to be at VPC in the first place. Javier had brought me in for my connections. Maybe I could find a way to use that, though I didn’t want to dive back into Omicron directly without knowing more about what might be waiting. If Omicron had linked me to Gylika, they could be watching for anyone else who might talk to me.

  I came up with two other possible places
to look for a source of information: MEDCOM and SPACECOM. A lot of the MEDCOM people disappeared two years ago when Elliot shot herself and the whole mess became public. Certainly they didn’t eliminate everybody who knew, but they got rid of enough where everybody else would stay clear of even a hint of the project. But a file could still exist. If one person leaked it, the brains at Omicron could do the rest. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any way to check into MEDCOM, so instead I focused on the other possibility. One that had been haunting me for some time anyway.

  Some of the subjects had gotten off of Cappa.

  Some of it may have been paranoia—me seeing things—but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Cappan hybrids were actually here. If people who had the treatment survived and escaped, they’d need medical attention. With Elliot dead, they’d have had to search out somebody else who knew the technology and had the facilities to continue treatment. I’d seen what happened to people like Colonel Karakov back on Cappa when they didn’t get treatment. So when the theoretical escapees found someone to treat them, it wouldn’t take much for that doctor, whether they knew about the program or not, to contact somebody in a position of authority. Once that happened, a link to Omicron became simple.

  I’d destroyed all of the Cappan off-planet launch capability with my attack, so they’d have had to get off before that. I’d been ambushed on the space station, so I couldn’t rule out that they’d been off planet all along. They also could have blended in with the humans during the evacuation before I launched the strike. Many Cappans—millions—survived. They wouldn’t have any way to get off the planet anymore. Even mining operations had shut down. Humans didn’t go to Cappa anymore; Cappans didn’t leave it. The government embargo ensured that. If they hadn’t left before I went planetside—and I didn’t think they had—then that left a short window of time for them to have escaped. I knew where to check that window, but I needed help. I sent a note to Serata.

  Sir, I need to get access to some old files at SPACECOM. Who do we know there who might be able to help?

  His answer came back almost immediately.

  Stirling is Director of Training Development. You want me to give him a call?

  I laughed.

  No, sir. Thanks for the lead. I’ll take it from here.

  I hadn’t seen Stirling since Cappa, and I hadn’t realized he lived so close. I knew he’d been promoted to brigadier general, but not his assignment. We didn’t keep in touch. Director of training development for Space Command sounds like an impressive job, but it isn’t. The promotion probably had more to do with pretending there hadn’t been any issues on Cappa than because he truly deserved it. A lot like mine and Serata’s “retirements.” He landed in a dead-end job where he’d be in charge of some things that didn’t matter much and ran mostly on their own, and he’d serve out the rest of his time in obscurity. I knew something about that, because I’d been on the same track a few years back. The difference was that I had accepted it. Unlike me, it would eat Stirling up from the inside. He didn’t have the personality to handle that sort of thing.

  I looked forward to seeing him.

  I showed my retiree ID at the gate of the base and they admitted me without question. Getting an audience with the man I wanted to see presented a bit more of a challenge. One can’t just walk up and visit a brigadier general, especially if he didn’t want to see you—and he almost certainly didn’t want to see me. I could have had Serata set it up, but where was the fun in that? I headed to his office unannounced.

  The base directory led me to an ugly one-story building that had to be forty years old. The rocks lining the walkway outside sported a clean coat of paint, and the construction appeared serviceable, but it hadn’t been designed to impress visitors. The door had a touch pad and I didn’t have authorization, so I waited for somebody else to go in and I followed her. I had prepped a story to talk my way through when she challenged me, but she didn’t stop to look. Guess they didn’t put a big priority on security, which might have spoken to the importance of what went on in the building.

  Finding myself alone in a dim hallway, I fell back into my normal method: I pretended I belonged there. I passed a major in the hall and didn’t make eye contact. I needed a better target. I turned the corner and found a young soldier coming out of a supply closet with a mop.

  “Excuse me. I have a meeting with General Stirling. Which way is his office?”

  The soldier pointed to his right. “Right down there and take a left, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  I walked into Stirling’s outer office as somebody else came out so I wouldn’t have to buzz in. I walked directly up to the secretary, a civilian lady about my age with short blonde hair shot through with gray. “Carl Butler here to see Brigadier General Stirling.”

  She looked at me for a few seconds, appraising. I knew immediately I wouldn’t fool her with my bullshit. People didn’t stay secretaries to generals without being good at their jobs. “Mr. Butler, I don’t see you on the appointment list.”

  “He’ll want to see me.”

  “He’s in a meeting. I don’t know when he’ll be out.” She kept her eyes locked on mine without flinching.

  “Tell him my name. We go back.”

  She stared me down for a few more seconds, and sighed. “Fine. But he’s not in acquisitions. Whatever you’re selling, you’re wasting your time.”

  I almost cracked. She pegged me for a corporate salesman. Of course. She probably got that a lot, and they’d all be guys like me. Retired officers. “I’m not selling anything. We served together on Cappa.”

  Her eyes went wide at that. I knew the look, because I got that same look every day. That moment of realization when somebody makes the connection and recognizes me. “Butler. You’re that Butler?”

  “I am.”

  “The general really is in a meeting,” she said. “I wasn’t making that up.”

  “I didn’t think you were,” I said. “I can wait.”

  “Have a seat over there on the sofa. I’ll let him know you’re here at the next break. You want some coffee?”

  “Good to see you, Carl,” Stirling lied, still as transparent as clean glass.

  “Good to see you too, Aaron.” I lied too. But I wanted something from him, so of course I did.

  He sat behind a large, modern desk, the polymer surface uncluttered and polished to a shine. “I’m sure you didn’t just drop by to catch up.”

  I chuckled. “No. I need some help.”

  He hesitated a second too long. “Sure. Anything, of course.” He meant that, but mostly because he didn’t have much choice. He owed me, and we both knew it. I took the fall for Cappa, and I never mentioned publicly how bad he’d messed things up and how that contributed to what I did. He certainly didn’t hold himself as culpable as I did, but I could have made it rough on him and I didn’t.

  That didn’t mean he appreciated my showing up to collect.

  I didn’t care.

  “I need to know if any ships left Cappa. Any non-sanctioned ships. Could have been miners or disguised as them. It would have been right before the end. Within a couple of days.”

  He considered it a moment. “We had the blockade.”

  I adjusted my position in the worn, padded chair across from his desk. “Right. Did anything get through?”

  “I’d like to say no. But we didn’t have enough ships to do the job. So . . . I don’t know. I guess I couldn’t rule it out.”

  “Any way we can find out for sure?” I had already worked out the answer, but I wanted him to come to it on his own.

  “It’s important?”

  “I have reason to believe that some Cappans made it off the planet. Or possibly some people working with them. Maybe both. They seem to have taken an interest in me, and I really don’t want all that stuff to come up again.” I left it unsaid that he didn’t want it to come up again either. I figured I’d given him enough of the truth to spur him into action.

&nb
sp; He thought about it. “They’d be able to access the records from Ops. We store everything somewhere, so if they don’t have it immediately, they can pull it.”

  “Any way we can see it? I figure I need maybe two days of data.”

  “You still have a clearance?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I need it for my job, so the company pays to keep it updated.”

  “I’ll make a call.”

  “You can do that? With Ops?” I asked. If he could, that would make it easier than I’d hoped. I’d thought I’d need two visits to get what I wanted, but with his help, I could potentially find what I needed in one.

  He snorted. “I might be at a dead end, but I’m still a general. Nobody will think twice about something minor like this. You’ll need a cover story, though, unless you want to tell everybody the real reason why you want the data.”

  He had a point. “Sure. Let’s say I’m writing my memoirs, and I want to verify some facts about the last days before the attack. They’ll be unattributed, of course, and I won’t use anything classified. You’re just doing a favor for an old comrade.”

  “That’ll work.” He picked up his phone and got somebody right away. He had me set up in under a minute.

  “Thanks, Aaron,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I made the ten-minute walk to the Ops building, glad that he’d set me up for a meeting the same day. I needed to act quickly, because once Stirling had time to think about it, he’d tell somebody, and depending on who he told, I might lose my access to the information. If the Intelligence folks found out what I suspected, they’d likely want to bring me in for debriefing. I’d rather not have to deal with that.

  I entered the same modern wonder of a building where I’d visited Serata three years before. A female major with dark skin and her black hair in a tight bun met me at the door to the headquarters and led me downstairs, opposite of where I’d gone to meet Serata the last time. Two floors down she led me through a maze of corridors before palming open a door that opened into a low-ceilinged room with no interior walls. About forty workstations lined the sides of the large space, about half of which had operators.