by Rick Partlow
“Hell,” Mansur said, as if reading my thoughts, “we’re building them a fucking fusion reactor. Martijena says he’s gonna use the free energy and the new fabrication plants to build free housing and tear these barrios down. Everyone will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, free entertainment…”
“Noble idea,” Pops said, leaning against the back of my seat, “but it ain’t gonna work for this generation. Maybe not the next, either.”
“Someday, though,” Mansur insisted. He grinned. “And since we’re all gonna live like three or four hundred years, we’ll even be around to see it.”
Okay, that almost cheered me up.
“Here it is,” Mansur said, pulling the ancient Toyota into a driveway, pausing at a pitted and faded garage door and shutting off the headlights. He honked the horn and it began to roll open, the sections hesitating on the way up as rusted hinges resisted with the inertia of age. We pulled into utter darkness illuminated only by the red glow of the brake lights. The door closed and we waited inside the van until the final clunk sounded and the lights switched on.
The garage was ordinary, faded and cracked cement and cheap, plastic doors. The man standing by the light switch was not. He was Venezuelan military intelligence, if you wanted to use euphemisms. The death squads, if you wanted to be brutally honest. I could read it in his face, in the twist of his mouth, in the shark-black eyes that had seen too much death and violence and decided at some point that they liked it.
My gut tightened and I tried not to remember fighting beside men like him. Not that I ever felt like we were supporting the wrong side. This was Venezuela, and there were only two kinds of people here: victims and victimizers. And for once, we hadn’t even tried to pretend we’d come to set the people free or establish democracy. I mean, we’d tried, afterward, and the jury was still out whether it would work. But we’d come here because Venezuela had become the Western Hemisphere’s own version of 1990s Afghanistan, a haven for terrorists and drug lords, and Russia wasn’t going to do a damned thing about it.
“Guys, this is Carlos,” Mansur told us as we climbed out of the van. “Carlos, these are the guys. Take us to Lermontov.”
Carlos didn’t say a word, just eyed us with the flat expression of a venomous snake and pulled the door open.
“Anyway,” Mansur said, “the reason we didn’t do this in space was that no one trusts the security of the facility right now, since the Tevynian got grabbed.”
I shot Mansur a sharp look, but he shrugged it off.
“Carlos has already been read in. How the hell did you think he was going to help us interrogate the man without knowing the questions we needed to ask?”
Pops just shook his head and pulled the door shut behind us. The light in the hallway was dim, the bulb hidden behind a crystal globe half-filled with dead bugs, but I could see well enough to make out the word Pops mouthed.
“Spooks.”
The interior of the house was surreal, as if someone had taken a security cell from a prison and plopped it into an urban townhouse in a barrio in Caracas. There were a couple of regular bedrooms—we passed them on the way to where the dining room should have been. Their doors hung open, revealing bare walls and a couple of folding cots with duffle bags propped in corners, overflowing with clothes.
Presumably the clothes and the bags belonged to the four men guarding Colonel Lermontov. The Russian was strapped into what might have been an old dentist’s chair, which brought back uneasy memories of watching Marathon Man on TV as a kid and I hoped to God that wasn’t the direction this was going to take. He’d already had a rough day, flying straight here from Poland in the hold of a C17 and if he’d had any sleep it had been accidental. I’d only caught about an hour in our shuttle, so I wasn’t in the best of moods myself, but seeing Lermontov’s twin black eyes and flattened nose certainly lifted my spirits.
The guards were scattered around the mercenary commander, HK M27s slung over their shoulders. They were bearded and hard-eyed and looking enough like locals that it was a coin flip whether they worked with Carlos or Mansur.
The woman was the one who was out of place. She was clean and professional and well-dressed and a Gringa and obviously didn’t belong here, but the case open on the table beside her explained her purpose. Vials of clear liquid ready to load into an injector gun, a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, an ophthalmoscope…and other things, things I was less comfortable with and I hoped she wouldn’t have to use.
“Dr. Valentine,” Mansur said, nodding to the woman. “Are we ready to go?”
“Just waiting for you,” she said with the husky voice of a woman who’d spent far too many years smoking cigarettes. Doctors. They always have the worst habits.
Mansur didn’t introduce us, which upped my opinion of his competence. Lermontov, of course, needed no introduction.
“You think you can get me to talk?” he scoffed, his English a little stiff, the muscles in his neck bunching as if he would have been shaking his head if it hadn’t been strapped down. “Better men than you have tried. I am a true son of Russia, a Slav. We bow to no one, and especially not you American dogs!”
“Oh, boy, he’s a real treat, isn’t he?” Mansur said, leaning casually against the wall as if he wanted to enjoy the show. “You really punched him in the face?”
“I can do it again if you like,” I offered.
“You!” Lermontov said, his eyes widening inside their racoon mask of bruises. “You are the pig who assaulted me!”
“I am that pig,” I confessed. “And you’re a lying sack of shit. You’re no fucking Slav. Your parents and grandparents were German. And you’re always bowing to someone, whether it’s Popov or Putin or Stalin or Nicholas. So why don’t we cut the shit and you can tell us who hired your people to steal our ship.”
I expected a denial, more bluster, more insistence we’d never get him to talk. Instead, he laughed. He laughed long and hard, spit flying out of his mouth, and I was glad I’d stayed a safe distance away.
“Is that all?” he wondered. “Is that what you seek from me?”
I exchanged a look with Pops and I wondered if my expression was as confused as his.
“I would have told you back in the Ukraine!” Lermontov was jovial, like a man who’d just learned his team won the championship. “There is no point in keeping it a secret, because there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it! You tried to cheat us out of our place in the universe, to grab the power and riches for yourselves—as you Americans always do—but we have outsmarted you yet again!”
Mansur sighed and it could have been that he was as exasperated as I was, but I thought it more likely that he was playing a role.
“Dr. Valentine,” he said, “I think we can proceed. The subject is obviously just playing for time.”
“I do not need to play for time!” Lermontov told him, his laugh mocking. “You are the ones running out of time! Our allies are this very second making our own deal to benefit the human race, not to defend a group of freakish mutations! When this war ends, what remains of the United States will beg us for aid, for the crumbs from our table!”
That was enough. I closed the distance between us with one step and grabbed his nose between my thumb and forefinger and squeezed. He screamed.
“Listen to me, you bloody-handed piece of mercenary shit,” I grated out. “Despite an adult life devoted primarily to applying overwhelming violence, I don’t generally take pleasure in the pain of others. But I’ve had maybe an hour’s sleep in the last four days and I am just so willing to make an exception in your case. Tell me who hired you to take our prisoner and steal our ship.”
“The Chinese!” he said, his voice comically distorted by the grip I had on his nose.
I let go and hissed out a breath. It was the answer I had expected, but one I’d hoped not to hear. If it had just been the Russian government, we might have been able to contain it. But if Chairman Xiang was involved in this…
“Fuck.�
��
“Now you understand, American,” Lermontov growled, the amusement and the laughter gone, but the satisfaction still there. “Now you see you have already lost.”
“How many Chinese?” I asked. “How many of your men?”
He seemed as if he was going to be reluctant to answer the question and I went for his nose again.
“A dozen of my men in powered armor,” he told me. “Ten Chinese. Eight in the flight crew, plus a high-ranking Red Army officer and some sort of diplomat. I didn’t get any of their names. I didn’t need to know.”
“And where were they headed?”
“They didn’t tell me that,” he insisted, scoffing. “Why would they? Do I seem to you a man knowledgeable of other star systems? I just know they’re going to meet these…Tevynians.”
I turned away and rubbed a hand over the back of my head, fighting a yawn.
“Do you believe him?” Pops asked me.
I nodded, too exhausted to speak.
“Yeah, me too,” Mansur admitted, sighing. “But we’re gonna do our due diligence anyway.” He motioned at Valentine. “Doctor, if you would.”
She took the injector out of her bag and began loading a vial of some clear liquid.
“We gonna stick around for that?” Pops wondered.
“I think I should get the word back,” I told Mansur. “If his story changes, you’ll let us know?”
“Of course,” he said, then fished his keys out of his pocket and tossed them to me. “Just leave the van at the airbase, keys in the visor. I’ll get a ride.”
“What about him?” Pops asked, motioning at Lermontov. “What happens to him once you’ve confirmed what he said?”
“I don’t know who you mean,” Mansur said, his smile coy. “We certainly wouldn’t risk open war with the Russian Federation by kidnapping one of their sovereign citizens and holding him against his will in another country. As far as anyone is concerned, Colonel Yevgeny Lermontov died in the mysterious attack on his compound in the Ukraine.”
Pops said nothing, just followed me into the hallway back out to the garage. I tossed him the keys and he caught them without looking.
“Spooks, man,” he murmured once the door was closed behind us. “I hate fucking spooks.”
Chapter Four
“Do you play golf, Major Clanton?” Assistant Secretary of State for Interplanetary Affairs Roberto Garcia asked me, smiling broadly.
I stared at him, trying to make my eyes focus. Two hours of sleep on the flight from Caracas to San Antonio hadn’t helped as much as you might think.
Garcia was Delia Strawbridge’s replacement, or so I gathered from listening to him talk to General Michael Olivera. The two were polar opposites, the general in his blue dress uniform, tall and straight-backed, with an aquiline nose and a recruiting-poster jawline, and the career diplomat in his Brooks Brothers suit, his hair long and wavy, his face soft around the edges. Yet the two apparently shared an undying love of golf and they’d been going on about the different courses they’d played for the better part of an hour while we waited for the President to arrive. I tried to sleep with my eyes open without actually putting my head down on the conference table like a child at naptime.
“I do not,” I admitted. “Unless you count miniature. And I play that badly.”
“Oh, boy, does he,” Julie agreed from across the table.
“Maybe we could all go golfing sometime,” Garcia suggested. “I mean, assuming all this doesn’t end up in World War Three and we’re not all living in a radioactive wasteland in a few months, you could give it a try. I know this wonderful course in Nevada, not too far from where you live…”
“On your feet!” Olivera barked as the double doors to the conference room burst open at the push of Secret Service agents and the President stalked into the room.
I’m not trying to brag when I say that I knew the man well enough by now to tell when he was in a bad mood, and President Crenshaw was in a bad mood. He usually took the time to change out of his dress clothes at his ranch, but when he came in, he still wore a suit along with a face grim enough to start the war Garcia had been joking about a moment earlier.
“Sit down,” he snapped, dropping into his seat at the head of the table without a preamble.
National Security Advisor Tommy Caldwell followed him and silently took a seat to his right. This man was a combat veteran, a hard charger, but today he looked as troubled as I had ever seen him.
“I want an assessment,” Crenshaw said, his natural eye and the prosthetic beside it tracking each of us, daring us to speak, “of the likeliest location that the Chinese took our ship.” He hissed in obvious frustration. “Does the damned thing have a name yet? Because calling it ‘the ship’ is beginning to get on my nerves. Anyone?”
Olivera cleared his throat. “No sir, we were waiting for guidance from the Department of Defense as to what your office wished to name the ship.”
The President grunted dissatisfaction but waved at him to continue.
“Mr. President,” Olivera said, answering the more important of the two questions, “the ship they stole wasn’t fully fueled.”
“Fueled?” the President repeated. “I thought their drives used some sort of gravity field thing.”
I didn’t blame him for not knowing the nomenclature. He’d been a SEAL, not a physicist, and the only reason I knew was because, I—what seemed like a lifetime ago but was really only a year or so—had made a living writing science fiction. Olivera might or might not have been impatient at the question, but the man was a general, and you didn’t get to be a general without being an expert on asses—whose to kick and whose to kiss. And the President’s ass always got kissed unless you were tired of your job.
“There are two different terms in use here, sir,” he said, “fuel and reaction mass. Reaction mass is what leaves the exhaust in a conventional rocket, and Newton’s laws being what they are, makes the rocket go in the opposite direction. In a chemical rocket, there’s the fuel and the oxidizer. In a nuclear-powered rocket, there’s the fuel, as in the nuclear fuel rods, and the reaction mass, the thing they heat and accelerate out the exhaust.
“In the Helta warp engine, there is no reaction mass because it propels the ship by manipulating spacetime, kind of like a boat propeller in water except the water in this case is the fabric of the universe. The same field is used to open a wormhole for the hyperdimensional translation for interstellar travel. However, as with a nuclear rocket, there is still fuel for the reactor, because the warp field generator requires a fusion reactor to power it. In this case, the fuel is metallic hydrogen.”
“Right,” President Crenshaw interrupted. “I know about that. The Helta helped us build a production plant for it in Lunar orbit.”
“They did.” The corners of Olivera’s eyes tensed ever so slightly, and I’d served with him long enough to know it reflected how very much he disliked being interrupted. But there was that whole asses thing and he kept puckering up. “The starship the Chinese hijacked was scheduled for a proving run out to Alpha Centauri—today, actually. Since metallic hydrogen is expensive and has multiple uses, the ship was only loaded with enough fuel pellets for the round trip, but no more.”
He glanced at Julie and she took up the thread, perhaps a bit reluctantly. She didn’t like dealing with the politicians, but Olivera, she told me, had insisted she learn to do it for her career’s sake. Which I suppose was a cool thing for him to do as a boss. He wasn’t a bad guy, for all that he was a brass hat.
“There’s only one Tevynian outpost we know of that’s in range for the amount of fuel they had, Mr. President.” She unfolded a tablet and touched the screen to activate the image she’d already had called up on it, then handed it across the table to the President.
“HD 196761?” he repeated, frowning. “Forty-six light-years? That seems awfully far away. I thought they were low on fuel.”
Olivera sucked in a breath and let it out in a slow hiss. Warn
ing sign number two he was having to reign in his impatience. I decided he needed a break, so I took over.
“As I understand it, sir, hyperspace….” I stopped myself and grimaced, remembering the official terminology. “Hyperdimensional translation, that is, isn’t based solely on the physical location of the star. It has to do with hyperdimensional pathways, like in another universe, involving gravitational interactions and all sorts of shit that’s not really germane to the problem at hand. The bottom line is, the shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line when you’re going outside our spacetime. Systems that are dozens of light-years apart in real space are next door neighbors in hyperspace.”
The President smiled, a twinkle coming into his eye.
“In other words,” he said, “traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dustin’ crops, boy.”
I barked a laugh at the quote, which seemed to bring his mood up a little. I liked to think he enjoyed having another door kicker in the room to balance out the Space Force tech-heads.
“Pretty much, Mr. President,” Olivera jumped back in. “And given what we know, this is the only place the Chinese could have taken the ship.”
“All right,” President Crenshaw said, sitting back, steepling his fingers at his chin. “I want you launching in twelve hours. I want that damned ship back.”
“Yes, sir,” Olivera said, nodding curtly. “We’ll get it done.”
“Sir,” I said, hating to interrupt but too pissed off not to, “what are we gonna do about the Chinese? I hope I’m wrong, but I’m getting the feeling they’re going to skate on this, just like they did after Wuhan.” My jaw clenched and I tried to force myself to relax. “I lost two grandparents to the virus.”
“They will pay for it,” the President assured me. He squirmed a bit, about to use weasel words and hating himself for it, I knew from past dealings with him. “But I have to admit there are problems with confronting them openly.”
