by Jim Melanson
“Il est étrange que votre vidéo n’a pas été rétabli.”
“Oui.”
“Le vidéo principal est de retour, mais pas le vôtre,” then after a brief pause, “Pourquoi exactement?”
Ernst just stared at him. The Platform’s video should indeed have returned when the Mar-Sat video returned. When the interference for the first one cleared up, the other one should have cleared up at the same time. That left only two possibilities. Either The Platform had been destroyed, or, Karl muttered, “Quelqu’un d’autre avait le contrôle du satellite.”
There was someone else besides Ernst and Mike that had control of The Platform.
Freddie gravely looked over his shoulder at both of them, then turned back to watch the big screen, “Tu ma volé les mots de la bouche.”
Karl nodded sagely, turned around and went back up the raised levels of floor in Mission Control, towards the back of the room. He quietly discussed his concerns with Hans and Jayden. Jayden looked pissed. Hans looked pissed. They looked at each other. They were all pissed.
“Phone her,” said Hans. Jayden nodded, and headed to his office.
After closing the door he sat down at his desk and opened the top drawer, reached way in the back and pulled out a card taped to the back of the drawer. It contained a phone number for the one he had secretly started to refer to as the Puppet Master, because she had pulled so many strings in getting this mission on its way. He picked up the telephone handset from its cradle, and dialed the number. He waited for only one ring after the international connection was made.
“88th Air Support Wing, Commandant’s office,” came the friendly voice.
“Lef-tenant General Rosewood, please.”
“I’m sorry, the General isn’t here at the moment, may I take a message?”
Jayden suppressed a sigh of exasperation and gritted his teeth, “It’s about Aquarius.”
“Wait one.”
There was a pause, then a beeping and gurgling sound. The same voice, a little less pleasant, came back on the line, “Is this line secure?”
“Ummm …”
“The General will call you back. Stay by your phone,” then the line went dead. Jayden stared at the receiver in surprise, and then slowly hung it up. He sat there tapping a pen on the desk and wondered how long it would take for her to call. He pondered forwarding his phone to Mission Control and heading back down there. After three minutes of waiting, his office door opened with no announcement.
Two men in black suits and black fedoras, perfectly trimmed crew cut hair, very square jaws, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses walked into his office. They stopped in front of his desk. Wordlessly, one of them reached inside his suit jacket, pulled out a digitally encrypted satellite phone, and handed it to Jayden. They then stood there, hands folded in front of them, staring at him. The phone rang.
Jayden, usually nonplussed, almost dropped the damn thing. He swiveled up the antenna and pressed the talk button.
“What do you want?” came Lieutenant General Rosewood’s voice, Gilda, Gabby to her friends.
“Have you been following events on Mars?”
“Of course we have.”
“We have the Mar-Sat signal back but not,” he paused, looking up at the two men, “the other one.”
“I’m aware of that. Do you know why yet?”
“That’s what I was calling to ask you.”
Gilda sounded genuinely confused, “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s kind of odd we got one signal back, and not the other. When the interference on the first one cleared up, the second one should have cleared up as well. Those two signals are so far away that they are almost the same signal by the time they get back here.”
“And why would I know why we aren’t getting the second signal? If you are implying that we are blocking it; we aren’t, we are relying on that signal as much as you are.”
“Yes but if the …”
“If the second signal hasn’t returned it means that either the satellite has been destroyed, or someone turned off the signal. Someone at that end.”
“Yes”, Jayden said.
“Jayden,” she sighed, “We want this mission to succeed as much as you do. We have invested billions in it, and we made a lot of political enemies getting your man off the ground and across the solar system. If we had been able to put someone there who could turn the signal off and on, why would we need your guy?” Jayden couldn’t see her smiling at her own Oscar worthy performance.
“Okay, okay. I see your point. But it doesn’t change the fact this is damn peculiar. Is there any way we can find out if the satellite has been destroyed?”
“Humph, I doubt it has. It’s well defended.”
They had never discussed that, “What do you mean, well defended?”
He could almost hear the contempt in her voice, “You didn’t think we’d send it to orbit Mars, carrying what it carries, without defense did you?” Jayden felt kind of numb at those words. He started to get a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was getting the first inkling of the thought that he was more of a pawn, than puppet. There was a sound of an excited voice in the background as she muffled the phone. Then she said quickly, “The signal’s back,” and she hung up.
He looked at the phone and pressed the End button. He looked up and one of the two men in black suits and black fedoras, perfectly trimmed crew cut hair, very square jaws, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses was already reaching across the desk. The silent man took the phone out of his hand, swivelled the antenna closed, and stuck it back in his suit jacket. Without a nod or a smile, they both pivoted on their heels and walked out of his office, leaving the door open behind them.
Jayden got up right behind them and walked to the door. He stepped into the hall and stopped in his tracks. They were gone. The hallway was thirty feet long and the exit was at the far end. His desk was only ten feet from the door. They couldn’t have gotten to the far end so fast without him hearing them running. He swallowed nervously, and looked behind him in his office, then down the hallway again.
“What the hell have we gotten into,” he muttered as he headed back to Mission Control.
Teviot Vallis
When the Eridani reinforcements began pouring into the hangar bay, everyone on both sides held their position. The pilot in the lead Dart communicated with the Eben Battle Cruiser, and the behemoth edged frighteningly close to the entrance of the hangar bay, so close that two of its forward rail guns actually passed through the magnetic curtain. This had the desired effect of slowing down the rushing reinforcements, and convincing all present to keep their heads. If the Eben ground pounder opened up this close, nothing in the Eridani base would survive.
“It’s time to leave,” Lieutenant Colonel KamPen tossed over his shoulder. As his troops started to slowly TransMat back aboard the ships, he spoke to the Eridani Master again.
“As for today’s events, Master Voiya, this matter is closed. The terms of the détente have been satisfied to my liking. As of this moment, that human is now under my protection. If you attack him, you attack us - and you will suffer swift consequences,” he let that sink in. It hadn’t actually been part of his orders to say that. He just threw it in to piss off the Eridani even more. It was counterproductive to the grand plan of his betters, but he didn’t know about the grand plan, yet.
KamPen continued, “We’ll leave you in peace and thank you for allowing our operative to wait here for us. If you choose to press this matter any further,” KamPen smiled and looked over his shoulder at the now almost completely blocked entrance to the cave, “well, then we’ll just have to begin some aggressive negotiations.”
The Eridani Master was then looking at empty air where KamPen had been standing. The ground pounder started to withdraw from the entrance and the three Darts, turning in unison, accelerated out of the hangar bay between the nose of the battle cruiser and the rock wall of the entrance.
Master Blitowyn of Chernasai lo
oked around him. He looked down at six pairs of bloody calves sticking out of combat boots and the gooey, bloody sludge around him and on him that had so few minutes ago been his loyal personal guard. He looked at the corpses of the drones, and he looked around at the hundreds of mostly armed reinforcements that had crowded into the hangar bay. He looked behind him and saw the other two surviving Voiya, the other two Eridani Masters pushing their way through the crowded space to emerge right by the steps of this platform. They looked as pissed as he was, but then again, the Voiya always looked pissed. This, for Blitowyn, was a special kind of pissed. This was beyond the garden variety pissed, and had moved into the realm of apoplectically pissed. That scurrilous half-breed had called him, “fathead”. The hybrids were going to pay. Oh, they were going to pay deeply for that.
Aboard the Eben Battle Cruiser “Shin Fa”
The TransMat materialized Lieutenant Colonel KamPen on the bridge, directly behind the ship’s True-Blood Eben Commander, who also happened to be KamPen’s uncle. The bridge was one of only three places on the Battle Cruiser with enough room for a hybrid, or a human to be TransMat aboard.
“Prill Foosh”, he nodded. His Uncle Foosh, dressed in the traditional Eben black turtleneck and slacks, turned and acknowledged him.
“Looks like Master Eridani not a happy camper,” said Foosh, using his well-practiced English, and one of the many loved idioms he studied carefully. He smiled.
“I don’t think this is over, not by a long shot.”
Commander Foosh ObooPen (Oboo was Kam and Foosh’s father; Kam ObooPen was Lt. Col. KamPen’s father) made a sound that was the Eben equivalent of “hmm”. As the Battle Cruiser was now clearing the Vallis and arcing around to pass over Hellas Planitia, he turned to his nephew, “Wasn’t that Rillixiwen’s little shumshah?”
“Yes, it was,” KamPen looked thoughtful.
He looked at his uncle, and his uncle, equally thoughtful nodded, “Yes, strange.”
“Why was I dealing with someone so minor? I would have expected Tsweflon or Ufektin of even Rillixiwen himself. Why did they send someone so low down the totem pole?”
“Others busy maybe,” his grammar wasn’t as perfect as he thought it was.
“Perhaps, uncle, but they wouldn’t have left Blitowyn in charge, he’s too young, too new. He’s only been here three years.”
“Your think is correctly,” Uncle Foosh paused and looked down at the deck, “something very strange is going on in Eridani base.”
“Pol”, yes, was KamPen’s reply in Eben, “Pol rem” (for sure).
Uncle Foosh looked up at his nephew, looked him squarely in his now unguarded, dreamy blue eyes, “I think something odd is going on elsewhere as well.”
KamPen met his uncle’s gaze but didn’t say anything. After staring at him a bit longer than was comfortable, Commander Foosh turned back to the bridge crew, “Achael is in my quarters.”
Just like that, the uncle had dismissed the nephew.
KamPen turned around without saying anything else. He exited the bridge and ducked down to pass through the Eben sized corridor. Down one flight of stairs, whose walls seemed too close together, and then along that deck’s back bending low ceiling corridor a few feet to the Commander’s cabin. He didn’t knock. He opened the hatch, ducked even lower, and stepped into the oddly spacious room. Achael stood up, but not all the way up. They stood there looking at each other’s feet, shoulders hunched and heads bent forward, chins pressed into their necks, back of their heads grazing the low ceiling.
“Commander,” she said in acknowledgement.
“Achael,” he said, then added, “dumb ass”.
Awkwardly, she managed to hunch her already hunched shoulders, flapped her arms against her side and tried to smile, “Everyone’s a critic!”
KamPen tried really, really hard not to laugh, but it was pointless. He loved Achael in a fatherly way and could never stay mad at her. Besides, her actions had finally been sanctioned by the old woman, so technically, he didn’t really have anything to be mad about. He wasn’t, however, going to let that stop him from dressing her down.
“Can we please sit down?” she said.
He tried to nod, but only bumped his head on the ceiling. They both sat down. Notwithstanding the official sanction, he knew he couldn’t let her actions this day go unaddressed. He proceeded to give her a military style dressing down that lasted ten full minutes. From the fight and the destruction of so much of that section of the base; putting the SF sergeant in the infirmary; her taking the Dart without clearance; interfering with the human colonist; risking exposure to the human’s … oh shit. He thumbed his communicator and ordered the base Communications officer to terminate the interference generator aimed at Mar-Sat. He then continued Achael’s dressing down without missing a beat. She risked her own neck by towing that piece of junk a quarter of the way around the planet, arriving unannounced at the enemy base, and then stirring the pot up to the point they were ready to execute her.
By the time KamPen had finished, he could see that Achael was visibly upset. She was upset alright, she was upset she had to sit there and listen to this for so long. She had no regrets and no reservations about what she had done. She knew she had done the right thing, and the fact that she wasn’t, at this moment, sitting in the Battle Cruisers brig confirmed that for her. She didn’t say any of this to him. Even though she seemed to so frequently break his rules and disappoint him, she truly did respect and care for her Commander. She did try to please him in so many ways, and always defended him when the others questioned him behind his back. Right now she kept silent, looked at the floor for a moment, then looked up at him, “I’m not sorry for what I did, I am sorry that I disappointed you, and that I put you in the position that I did.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“And thank you for coming to get me.”
Fifteen minutes later the Battle Cruiser Shin Fa glided effortlessly through the magnetic curtain of the cavernous hangar bay in the hybrid base, a hanger bay five times larger than the Eridani’s. The outer doors of the hangar bay slid almost silently shut after two of the Darts followed the ground pounder through the magnetic curtain. The third Dart, Khlam and a True-Blood Eben at the controls, maintained a Combat Air Patrol around their base just in case the Eridani showed some balls and were coming for vengeance. A chime sounded in the Commander’s cabin and both Achael and KamPen stood up, hunched over. Then they were standing on the hangar deck, appearing right in front of Hlef and Ahshuun; who were having a heated argument, having materialized mid argue.
They both paused and looked at Achael and the Lieutenant Colonel. Hlef was too pissed with Ahshuun to do anything but glare. Seeing them materialize, heads bent and hunched over like they were talking to their feet, Ahshuun couldn’t help but snort and guffaw loudly. The Commander straightened up, smacked him in the back of the head and muttered, “asshole” as he strode towards his office. He had to turn The Platform communications back on with Earth, pronto. No telling what those Eridani bastards might do.
Mike Lane
Two hours after my tablet first buzzed, I slowly woke up with a stretch and a yawn. I had to pee. I was also hungry. As I tried to decide which was more pressing, I noticed the unacknowledged priority message indicator flashing on my tablet, which was resting in its bracket on the wall above my head.
I didn’t even remember waking up two hours before. I never heard any of its subsequent buzzes or chirps. I plucked up the tablet, and carried it upstairs with me as I went towards the head. I sat there having a leisurely and looked at the priority messages. There were three of them. One from Karl, one from Jayden, and one from … I’ll be damned … Lieutenant General Rosewood.
I read Karl’s message first. They had gotten video and telemetry back about three hours ago. Internal habitat camera’s came back online about twenty minutes after that. They couldn’t locate me anywhere on camera, but they were getting telemetry indicating that CO2 was being proc
essed. That told them that I was alive and breathing, well, something was alive and breathing; and they assumed it was me. It didn’t tell them what condition I was in. Karl made the correct assumption I was in my quarters, and told me to let them know when I was awake.
I hit the reply button and typed one word, “Awake”. Send.
Jayden’s message said nothing about my condition, it simply asked if I had loaded and installed the secure video software yet. I replied for him to give me an hour, and it would be. Send.
With some mounting curiosity I opened the Lieutenant General’s message. She was one person I never expected to hear from again. She simply asked if I was okay, told me to keep strong, and not give up and that “we” were pulling for me. The word “we” implied the United States Air Force Materials Command, 88th Air Support Wing, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I typed back to her, “Been better. Won’t give up, and don’t have any choice. Send a CIWS :-)”. Brashly asking for a Close In Weapons System would probably make her smile. Send.
Finishing my business, I performed what was every man’s ritual morning ablutions, and then went out to the kitchen area. I sat the tablet down, and made up a protein shake. I purposefully went and looked out the portal on the east side of the habitat, looking out over the sand dunes. Nothing out there. Good. Very good. Oh wait … I watched a pair of dust devils spin by in the distance, one at a time, dissolving into nothingness. Those damn things were still a mystery to the climatologists.
I cleaned out my shake container, went to the W-Hab, and sat down at the workstation I had unpacked and already set up. I closed my eyes at that point and had a long talk with God about yesterday’s events; what I was afraid of, what troubled me, and how I needed his strength and protection.
Now, in a better frame of mind, I booted up the workstation and launched the communications app (more than just email). First, I installed the software Jayden wanted online. Next, I went through the Mission Control emails, answering Karl, Hans, Carrie and Ernst. Then I answered a few of the techs emails, sending them local readings and observations. Surprisingly, everyone except Carrie and Hans had avoided the topic of the day before. Ernst just wanted to know if I had local connection with the Jalopy-Sat; and Karl told me to turn off the friggin’ cameras if I was going to walk to the shower nude again. He said they were getting tired of seeing my junk. I have to admit, I blushed quite hotly at that one.
