Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1)

by M. R. Forbes

  "Then let's do it," Ilanka said. "There's no time to waste."

  "Let's show them what a ship full of friggers can do," Shank said.

  48

  It took Watson and Singh a little bit of time to parse the data they had captured and post it to the ship's streaming service, making it available to everyone on the crew. For Mitchell, it meant a few minutes of downtime that Millie had no intention of wasting. She practically dragged him from the conference room after the others had left, getting him to her quarters and efficiently undressing them both.

  A quick round of intense sex proved to be a satisfying release for both of them.

  Afterward, they spent the remaining time nestled in one another's arms, with Millie resting her head on Mitchell's chest.

  "Do you really think we'll find it?" she asked.

  "Even if we do, there's no guarantee it will be enough. It's one ship. One very old ship." Even as he said it, he felt a spark of hope, as if his past self was pushing him not to lose it. "We'll find it. We'll make it work."

  "I'm grateful to you, Mitch."

  "For what?"

  "This." She smiled. "And out there. I've always had to fight so hard to keep the crew in line. Anderson was an annoying pain in the ass, and I had to put up with him because he had a way with the troops that I just haven't been able to figure out. All the training in the world doesn't prepare you for the real thing, not really." She picked up her bionic hand. "When I lost my hand, I was crushed. I didn't want bionic. I didn't want to be... incomplete. Now this is the one thing that sets me apart here. It makes me more formidable. I could crush your spine with this thing as easy as if I was cracking an egg."

  "You can be pretty gentle with it, too," Mitchell said, remembering the feeling of it on other parts of him.

  She laughed. "That's not the point. The point is that sometimes I think the crew sees me as the hand. They don't see the training, the studies, the work. Hell, they don't even call me Admiral."

  "Did you ever ask them to?"

  "In the beginning, with the first batch of recruits. Ilanka was the one who suggested I stick to Captain so that they would see me more as one of them, rather than a higher authority. She was right about that, and it helped."

  "I guess I still don't get what you're thanking me for? Besides this. I haven't even been here that long."

  "I respect you. The crew respects you. They don't care who took the Shot, the fact is that Greylock company won the battle, and you were part of it. You could have challenged me for the ship. You said yourself you aced the aptitude tests, and I can see by the way people respond to you that you're a natural leader."

  "That's not how the military works."

  She waved her arm. "That military. There's a separate one in here. If Anderson had cut my throat in my sleep and gotten Watson to crack my implant he could have accessed mission parameters, the crew's drop codes, everything. Would Cornelius have accepted that? My father is as pragmatic as they come. He would have cried on his own time, and then sent the Schism on to the next target."

  "I don't think he would have done that."

  "No. It's just an example. It could have been any of them. Watson is terrified to die, you saw that yourself. How long do you think he would last under threat? Fifteen seconds?"

  "Five, if you were lucky. Anyway, I wasn't interested in command back then, and I'm not interested now. I'm helping you out of need. I'd be happy to go back to the galaxy before, back when I was only a pilot for the most bad-ass Space Marines in the universe."

  "I guess you'll have to be happy with the disintegrating boat and the company of criminals," she said. "It sounds like an even trade." She rolled her eyes.

  He ran his hair through her hair, looking down at her. "It isn't as bad as you're trying to make it sound." He leaned his head over, reaching his face towards hers. She came up to meet him, their lips catching.

  A knock interrupted them both. "It's ready," Singh said.

  Millie broke the kiss, her face losing all of its softness in an instant. A moment later Mitchell heard the tone of the channel opening on his p-rat.

  "Riggers," Millie said, sitting silent and naked in his arms, her voice loud and clear in his mind. "The race is on. A data stream has been loaded into the system, on channels M-12 and M-13. Your orders are to watch the streams and pay close attention to anything out of the ordinary, anything that seems off, no matter how minor it may appear to be. A scratch on a wall that doesn't look normal, a piece of clothing that is unique to a specific shot. If you need motivation, our enemy is looking at this same data, searching for the same clues. We either beat them to it or we watch the rest of our people - our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters, our children if we have them - get slaughtered by this alien invader whose goal is already known to be the extinction of the entire human race. This is war, Riggers, and war is our game. Let's win it."

  There was a slight pause on the channel, and then the chorus, "Riigg-aaah!" Mitchell joined it as loudly as he could without vocalizing the words.

  The channel closed. Millie pushed herself up closer, kissed Mitchell once with as much passion as he had ever felt, and then rolled out of the bed. He joined her a moment later, and they quickly dressed. Mitchell would join the rest of the crew in reviewing the data, while Millie walked the ship and offered support in person. Right now it wasn't about issuing orders. It was about inspiring, pushing, and applauding.

  "Let me know if you find anything," she said right before leaving him in her quarters.

  "Yes, ma'am." He waved her out the door, and got to work.

  49

  Mitchell opened the data stream for Christine Arapo first. He was more curious about the woman he had met, the one he had known, however briefly. He started with her basic military dossier, which contained things like height, weight, and age, and moved on to enlistment history. According to it, she was thirty-seven years old and had joined the Alliance army at fifteen. It was young for a recruit, the youngest age that the military would allow, and only with parental consent. Two coded signatures were outlined on the original document, verified secure signatures.

  She had done well in the army, surviving a number of missions across the galaxy. She had been in Federation territory, had spent a tour on a colony planet protecting terraformers from indigenous life, and finally had been transferred. The dossier didn't say where. It was classified.

  He had to search the data for the answer, finding it buried in the protected records that Watson and Singh had stolen. As he had suspected, she had been moved to Special Operations and trained as high-level security for VIPs. A bodyguard. One who spent over a year in intense training, learning everything from advanced firearms and martial arts, to defense tactics and crash survival. It was an impressive resume. Way more impressive than his own.

  He moved on from the dossier to other records. Mission reports, ARR recordings, statistics on weapon certifications, shots fired to verified hit percentage on certified weapons, and all of the other data captured by the implant and passed along to Command.

  He was surprised when he reached the medical reports.

  There weren't any.

  That wasn't completely true. There was a single document for each yearly physical, passing her through with flying colors, confirming that she was in perfect health. Not a single laceration that needed treatment. Not a single broken bone. She served in a number of theaters of war, and she had never had an accident, never been shot, never needed the synthetics from the implants in her buttocks to keep her going.

  He knew what his own medical records looked like. He had been fixed up by the medi-bots at least forty times from a number of wounds. The worst had been the burns he had suffered when his mech had taken a direct hit in the rear from an SSG-12 anti-mech rocket. The explosion had reached him in the cockpit of his Knight with enough force to melt his flight suit to his back. He still flinched when he remembered the pain of it.

  It was a curiosity, but it didn't reve
al anything he could use right now. It was possible someone could be lucky enough to avoid injury, even if the odds were strongly against it. Could it also be possible that she was one of the aliens, or one of their replicas? Were they so advanced they couldn't be shot even a single time? No, he knew that wasn't true. M claimed to have killed the one that was trying to assassinate him. Though that begged the question:

  Killed him with what?

  He found only a smattering of video streams with her in them, mainly media reports centered around the target of the attention. She was typically attached to their arm, or floating nearby, in each case with a different hairstyle, a different posture, a different look. The same person changing their mannerisms and basic looks enough to pass as someone else, someone who was going unnoticed because they weren't the celebrity in the frame.

  He found a video of himself.

  It was recorded two weeks after the Shot, at one of his first public interviews. He had never even known she was there, and yet the video clearly showed her in the background, watching him from slightly out of view. He wouldn't have noticed her if he hadn't been looking, because she blended in perfectly with the crowd.

  He found another video of himself. And then another. And another. She was in all of them. She looked different in each, her hair colored differently, her clothes provocative, conservative, eclectic. Always close by. Always there.

  If she was assigned to him and he didn't even know it, then where the hell was she during the assassination attempt?

  Called to home base for a meeting? Or did he inadvertently give her the slip? Based on her training reports, he doubted that.

  Was her absence intentional?

  He was coming out with more questions than answers. The only thing he was sure of what that Major Christine Arapo was a real person with a real history. Everything else was still up for debate.

  He shut down the stream, opening his eyes. He had remained in Millie's quarters, laid across the gel sofa. He got to his feet and checked his p-rat again. Four hours had passed since they had started the exercise. He hadn't expected the process to be quick, but he was still disappointed they hadn't come up with anything yet. He knocked Millie.

  "How are things going?" he asked.

  "You would have heard if there were any breakthroughs. Which stream did you review?"

  "Arapo."

  "Anything juicy?"

  "She's a trained super-soldier," he replied. "And she was following me around weeks before she was officially assigned to me. She was AWOL during the attempt on my life, which is a little too coincidental."

  "I agree. What does it mean?"

  "No idea. There are too many possibilities, and none of them point towards Goliath."

  "Right, we can work that out later. Try Asher's feed. Apparently, she left a video diary of her training for the Goliath mission."

  "Anything juicy?" Mitchell asked.

  "Not so far. Maybe you'll spot something."

  "Roger. Ares out." He closed the channel and walked over to the small viewport near the back of the room. He looked out of it, into the darkness of space broken up by thousands of stars. "I know you're out there. Why do you have to play so hard to get?"

  He returned to the sofa and closed his eyes again, navigating to Katherine Asher's data. It also contained her dossier and military records, but he didn't spend much time looking at them. Instead, he moved right to the videos Millie suggested. They were in the form of a diary, her face close to the camera as she recited the date and then gave a rundown of the day's events. Seeing her there, in motion, only cemented his original opinion.

  She was Christine Arapo.

  How? Why? They would have to figure that out.

  He watched her for a couple of hours, mesmerized by the similarities in posture, in eye movements, even in the way her nostrils flared when she talked about something that annoyed her. She was going on and on about her selection to the mission, and to the rigorous training they were doing to assure they were in top health. It was interesting from a historical perspective but hardly exciting. He paused to relieve himself, finding Lopez waiting for him when he came out.

  "Captain Williams," Lopez said. "Captain Narayan asked me to bring you dinner." He held out the wrapped nutrition bar and a bottle of water. He looked tired, frazzled, his face red, his breath ragged. Mitchell could imagine he'd been working non-stop to keep the troops supplied.

  "Thank you," Mitchell said, taking it from him. He peeled back the wrapper, exposing a corner of the green block.

  "She wanted me to give you something else," Lopez said. "A surprise." He smiled and reached behind his back.

  Mitchell was about to take a bite from the bar. He paused and smiled. Millie had sent him something? He knocked her. "Thanks for the food," he said. "And the surprise."

  Lopez's hand found whatever it was, and he started pulling it forward. His eyes were darting back and forth, and he licked his lips.

  Mitchell felt his body tense. He had been in fights before. He knew what to look for. He knew he was seeing it now.

  Lopez's hand cleared his side, clutching the grip of an assault pistol. He started back-stepping at the same time he tried to get it aimed at Mitchell. He had tears in his eyes, his mouth curling into a feral snarl.

  "What surprise?" Millie asked, even as Mitchell lunged at the Ensign, reaching for the pistol.

  Lopez fired. The first three rounds slammed into Mitchell's left side, punching through his skin. The pain flared, as did the alarms from the p-rat. Synthetics were released from his implants: drugs to ease the pain, drugs to keep him up. He reached Lopez and batted the pistol aside, sending a round of bullets into the walls and furniture on his left.

  Lopez cried out, dropping the gun and skipping to the side, avoiding a hard punch that had been aimed at his face. He recovered, throwing his own fists into Mitchell's side, first his right, and then the injured left. It hurt like hell, but Mitchell managed to stay upright and focused on his target.

  "Mitch, what surprise?" Millie asked again.

  "Lopez is trying to kill me," he replied. He grunted and turned, catching Lopez' blows on his forearm and returning the favor with a hard blow to the ribs that sent the Ensign stumbling backward.

  "What? Shit."

  "What is this about Lopez?" Mitchell asked, chasing after the man. Lopez scrambled around him, making a move for the dropped gun. He dove towards him, catching him in the side and dragging him to the floor.

  "Screw you, asshole," he said. "Screw you." He was crying while he fought. What the hell was going on?

  Lopez brought his knee up and into Mitchell's groin, and then found a knife he had hidden in his pants and jammed it into Mitchell's shoulder. Then he shoved, hard, taking advantage of the loss of strength in the arm to push Mitchell back. He scurried along the floor, heading for the pistol.

  Mitchell fell back, grabbing the handle of the knife and pulling it from his arm. He switched it to his other hand and made himself get back to his feet, regaining the chase. Mitchell caught up just as Lopez bent down to pick up the gun, stabbing him in the back of the shoulder and dragging him to the ground a second time.

  The Ensign had gotten the gun into his hand, and he fought to roll over, to use the weapon, even as Mitchell worked to keep him still. His own blood was spilling out on both of them, making the soldier slippery and leaving him short of breath. His p-rat was screaming in his ear, his vitals dropping in a hurry from loss of blood. More synthetics were released, pushing his system past the point where most men would be dead.

  He punched Lopez in the kidneys once, twice, three times. The man grunted beneath him but didn't give up, squirming and twisting and finally sliding free. He kicked back on his way out, catching Mitchell in the face and breaking his nose, stopping him from following once more.

  Finally, he rolled over and raised the barrel of the assault pistol, aiming it at Mitchell's face from only a few meters away.

  The hatch to Millie's quarters slid
open. Mitchell narrowed his eyes at the sound of the gunfire, expected to feel the burning of his face being ripped away before feeling nothing at all. Instead, he watched Lopez twitch as a dozen rounds slammed into his chest with enough force to throw his body backward into a bloody heap.

  He turned his head back. Cormac was standing there, slim lines of artificial muscle and blocks of metal surrounding his human frame. A high-velocity chain-gun was mounted to the left arm of the light exoskeleton.

  The barrel was still smoking.

  "Captain Williams?" Cormac said. "Oh, hell."

  50

  "I've got good news, and bad news," Millie said when Mitchell came out of medical eight hours later. The bots had done a good job of removing the bullet fragments and patching him up, though his side was still sore and his nose would never be quite the same.

  "What's the bad news?" Mitchell asked.

  "It's been fourteen hours since we started this exercise. We're still at ground zero."

  That was really bad news.

  "Good news?"

  "Lopez wasn't one of them, at least not as far as we can tell."

  Mitchell paused in the corridor. He hadn't gotten much time to sort through why the soldier had nearly killed him. "Then why the hell did he jump me like that?"

  "Retaliation for Anderson," she said.

  "What? I didn't do anything to Anderson."

  "No, I did. Don't try to make too much sense of it. Lopez was Anderson's lover. He wanted to kill you to get back at me."

  "I thought Anderson wanted-"

  "He did. He also never got it. He must have settled on Lopez for those cold, lonely nights."

  Mitchell couldn't quite believe it. Lopez had seemed so calm and personable, the polar opposite of Anderson. "How do you know?"

  "He left a recording. He wasn't expecting to survive, he just wanted to take you with him."

  "Can you be sure? He may have been lying."

  "No, I can't be sure. The DNA scan came back positive, so if he wasn't the original Lopez, he was a perfect copy. It's the best we can do with a corpse."