Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “No, sir, I wasn’t,” Dylan answered truthfully, shaking his head slightly as he dropped his gaze to the deck between them. “In fact, I was...”

  “Don’t tell me,” Suarez said. “Let me guess. You’re returning to duty after taking some much needed leave and you’re feeling terribly guilty right now, either about something you did on leave that you shouldn’t have done, or about something you failed to do that you should have done. Am I right?”

  Dylan looked up at him again. “Direct hit, sir,” he admitted with a nod.

  “Which is it, Sergeant, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “The former, sir,” Dylan told him. He had to hand it to the guy. They had only just met, so the guy didn’t know him from Christ himself. Yet he’d hit the nail right on the head. He asked him, “How did you know?”

  The commander grinned. “I’ve been in the service a long time, Sergeant. I know that look all too well. Do you want to talk about it?”

  Dylan’s gaze fell to the deck again. “I don’t think I do, sir,” he answered after a moment. “Thank you, though.”

  “You’re welcome. Feel free to let me know if you change your mind.”

  “I will, sir. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. But remember this, Sergeant.” When he didn’t go on, Dylan looked up at him again, realizing that was what he was waiting for. “No one ever makes it through this long journey we call life without making at least a few mistakes along the way.”

  Dylan snickered. The commander couldn’t have been more right if he were God himself. “Can’t argue with that, sir.”

  “No one can. It’s what we learn from those mistakes that counts. As long as we do learn from them we’ll be all right.”

  Dylan stared at the commander a moment longer. His was more than just polite concern. He seemed to genuinely care. “Thank you, sir.” And Dylan genuinely meant that.

  “You’re welcome.” Changing the subject, Suarez asked, “So, will you have time to hang around for a while after we arrive, or will you be shipping out right away?”

  “I won’t be shipping out at all, sir,” Dylan advised him. “I’ve been reassigned to the Mars Shipyards.”

  “Really?” the commander asked, seemingly puzzled. “I don’t recall being advised of any new Security Police N-C-O’s coming in.”

  “A last minute change, from what I understand, sir,” Dylan told him, thinking quickly. “I only found out about it a couple days ago myself.”

  “Hmm. Still, I should have been informed.”

  “Why?” Dylan asked him, quickly adding, “I mean... if I may ask, sir.”

  “Because I’m assigned there myself. I’m the new chief of operations.”

  “The new chief,” Dylan echoed, emphasizing ‘new.’ “So you’re just transferring in, too?”

  “No, I’ve been there for some time now. I’m just moving up to a new position. I’m on my way back from a week-long seminar on major facilities management.”

  “I see.”

  “It was terribly exciting,” the commander added with obvious sarcasm, rolling his eyes. Dylan smiled, pretending to be amused just to be polite. “Anyway,” the commander continued, “I’ve kept you long enough. Go ahead and get some sleep.”

  Dylan tilted his seat back and extended the footrest again as the commander returned his own to its original forward-facing configuration.

  Sleep.

  Finally.

  Chapter 15

  As Jennifer turned the corner and headed down the side corridor that led to the Personnel section, she spotted a pair of uniformed security policemen standing outside the front entrance, waiting for her, just as she’d requested. As soon as she drew close enough to recognize who they were—no mistaking Delgado’s slicked back black hair or Layton’s dark chocolate brown skin—she knew that everything was going to go smoothly. Before she’d joined the C.I.D., the three of them had worked the same shift together for more than a year, alternating as partners on a fairly regular basis. They had become good friends during that time and had learned to anticipate one another’s actions on the job, as partners so often tended to do.

  “Zack Delgado and Jerry Layton,” she called out, smiling wide as she approached them. As they turned to return her greeting she added, “I knew I’d find you two still joined at the hip.”

  “Jennifer!” Delgado exclaimed happily, smiling his toothy white smile. “How you doin’? How’s the new job goin’?”

  “Doing great,” she answered, “and the job’s going great, except...” Her smile vanished. “My partner, Ashley Urbana, got hurt the other night.”

  “Yeah, we heard about that,” Delgado told her. “Have you seen her? How’s she doin’?”

  “Yeah, I just came from the medbay. She seems to be improving, at least a little. I think it’ll be a while before she can come back to work, though... if she decides to come back at all.” Not wanting to dwell on that unhappy subject, she quickly diverted their attention, and her own, back to their own happy reunion. “So, how are you guys? I haven’t seen you since before I went off to the C-I-D Academy. I’ve missed working with you both.”

  “Been stuck on the graveyard shift since right after you left,” Layton told her, “but we’re finally back on days again. Just started this morning, in fact. How was the academy?”

  “It was good,” she answered. “Real good, in fact. Intense, but I learned a lot there. And how is Sue doing, Jerry? You get her pregnant yet?”

  “No, not yet,” Layton answered, grinning. “We’re in no hurry.”

  “Good. You should at least have a chance to go on a honeymoon first.”

  “So what’s goin’ on this morning, Jennifer?” Delgado finally asked her. He’d always had a tendency to cut the small talk short in favor of getting down to business. “They sent us up here to back you up, but they didn’t tell us what for.”

  “I’m taking a crewman into custody for suspicion of espionage.”

  “No shit?” Layton asked. “Espionage?”

  “No shit,” Jennifer replied. “The guy’s been passing official information off to someone outside the fleet for a while now.” Knowing it would give added meaning to this particular arrest for Delgado, she looked him straight in the eye and added, “And when I say ‘someone,’ I mean the same someone who shot my partner the other night.” Delgado had lost his first partner to a suspect resisting arrest, so he tended to take assaults against security policemen personally, and his reaction now—his eyes narrowed as he glared at the door in front of them as though it had harmed Jennifer’s partner—didn’t disappoint her. “Nothing classified or particularly vital that we know of,” she went on, talking to both of them again. “At least not yet. But whoever he’s been passing the information to has been paying him a lot for it, so they obviously want it very badly. We just don’t know why they want it.”

  “Then let’s go beat this... I mean, let’s go arrest this little son-of-a-bitch so you can find out what and why,” Delgado enthusiastically suggested.

  “That’s the plan, Zack.”

  “Let’s do it,” Layton chimed in as he tapped the door’s ‘open’ button.

  Jennifer led the way inside and approached the customer service counter flanked by her SP friends. There they found a young crewman mumbling to himself as he leafed through a stack of documents—here they were in the middle of the twenty-second century and the military still hadn’t completely gotten away from using hardcopy documents—apparently looking for one in particular. She laid a hand on the counter next to the documents where the crewman couldn’t possibly not see it, looked right at him, and then cleared her throat, expecting that he’d stop what he was doing and ask her if he could be of some assistance. But he ignored her. Apparently he considered his present task to be more important than helping her... or even acknowledging that she was there.

  “Excuse me, Crewman,” she said after a moment. Then, when he continued ignoring her, she slapped her hand down on top of
the stack, startling him and causing him to lose his place, and repeated herself in a tone of voice that made it very clear that ignoring her was not an option and would not be tolerated, “Excuse me, Crewman.”

  The crewman gathered his wits and then looked up at her through eyes that reflected his obvious displeasure, but when he noticed the SP’s standing on either side of her, that displeasure faded very quickly. He cleared his throat and then asked, “May I help you?” No doubt he had intended to say something far less polite before he saw her friends.

  Jennifer pulled her credentials out of her coat pocket and held them up so the crewman could get a good long gander at them. “I’m Special Agent Jennifer Barrett with the C-I-D,” she informed him. Having heard her say those particular three letters aloud with the emphasis she had given them, the crewman’s entire demeanor changed to a substantially more submissive one as all of his coworkers within earshot stopped what they were doing and looked at her. There was just something about those three letters being spoken in that way that tended to force even the toughest service members to take pause and tuck their tails between their legs. Jennifer had to admit, if only to herself, that she loved doing it. “I need to talk to your commanding officer right away, please,” she told him.

  “I’ll call him for you, ma’am,” the crewman replied as he stepped back from the counter. Then he walked over to the nearest comm-panel.

  ‘Ma’am?!’ Had he really just called her ‘ma’am?’ She was still in her twenties, for God sake! She was too young to be called ‘ma’am!’

  The crewman tapped the call button. “Lieutenant?”

  “Yes?” a firm but gentle voice answered.

  “Crewman Barnes here, sir. There’s a C-I-D agent and two S-P’s here to see you.”

  “Send them in.”

  “Yes, sir.” He closed the channel, then pointed over his shoulder toward the commanding officer’s door. “Right through there, ma’am.”

  ‘Ma’am.’ “Thank you,” Jennifer said as she headed in that direction with the SP’s on her heels. ‘Ma’am,’ indeed. She wasn’t a ma’am. She was...

  A sudden loud CRASH in the far back corner of the large room drew everyone attention. They all looked and saw Crewman Al-Sharif untangle himself from a fallen chair, jump to his feet, and make a run for the exit.

  “That’s him!” Jennifer exclaimed, pointing. “Stop him!”

  Delgado and Layton took off running toward the back exit and intercepted him before he even got close to the door, tackled him and quickly cuffed his hands behind his back.

  “Take him to my office, please,” Jennifer instructed her friends. “Someone there will take care of him until I get there. I’m going to let his C-O know what’s going on.”

  “You got it, Agent Barrett,” Delgado affirmed. He and Layton stood up and then lifted Al-Sharif to his feet and led him away.

  * * *

  About thirty minutes later, Special Agent Wes Boucher, Jennifer’s immediate supervisor, met her in the reception area as she arrived back at the office. “Good job on this, Jennifer,” he told her. “Your boy’s waiting in interview-two. You want some help with the interrogation?”

  “I’ll go it alone this time, boss,” she answered decisively. “I started this investigation and I’d like to see it through to the end myself.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Boucher praised her, smiling. And then he joked, as he often tended to do, “We might just turn you into a real agent yet.”

  “Anything new on the civilian?” she asked him, ignoring his tired remark.

  “No, nothing yet,” he answered. “He’s still clamped up tighter than a frozen clamshell in an iron vice. We don’t even know how he got here yet. All the ships docked on both sides of this place have been identified and their pilots and crews have been accounted for. Agents Norwood and Wick are verifying all their background information, but I don’t think we’re going to find anything out of the ordinary with any of them. Those pilots and crews have been back and forth to this facility a thousand times between them and not a single one of them has ever gotten into any trouble more serious than drunk and disorderly.”

  “What about the chip? Anything new there?”

  “Not so far,” he answered, shaking his head. “Just the list of facility personnel and their personal information that we expected to find. No hidden or locked files at all. The encryption people over at Intel are examining it now to determine whether or not something might be coded into the data itself, but they’re telling me it doesn’t seem very likely.”

  “Okay, thanks. Hopefully this guy will sing me a nice long song about the whole thing and we won’t need anything from the civilian.”

  “Amen to that,” Boucher agreed. Then, as Jennifer turned her back and headed off toward the interview rooms, he added, “Good luck.”

  “Thanks, boss,” she threw back over her shoulder.

  The first thing she noticed when she stepped into the sparsely furnished, neutral gray and off-white interview room was the strong smell of disinfectant. The smell was so strong, in fact, that it made her eyes water and her nasal passages burn for a few seconds, until she got used to it. Word was an Alpha Centaurian had thrown up in there last night. If true, she was glad she hadn’t been there to witness it. The Centaurian races were all basically simian with diets that consisted largely of raw, freshly killed game animals. The Alphas were the biggest of them all, generally about the size of Earth’s largest mountain gorillas, but with legs proportionally more human-like than gorilla that resulted in their average standing height being something in excess of eight and a half feet. She didn’t even want to imagine what the mess one of them could have made must have smelled like. Whoever had cleaned it up deserved a medal for their trouble.

  The second thing she noticed was how truly frightened Al-Sharif appeared to be, sitting there across the small table with his hands cuffed behind his back, chained to his chair by one ankle, looking like a whipped puppy that knew it had done something wrong. His eyes glistened with tears and the faint streaks running down his cheeks told her that some of them had already been shed. She almost felt sorry for the kid.

  Almost.

  “Congratulations, Crewman,” she began as the door closed behind her. “You made it to the big time.” Al-Sharif looked up at her but didn’t say anything. “No more S-P Investigators for you. You got the C-I-D’s attention this time.” She pulled the other chair out from under her side of the table and sat down not quite directly across from him, then showed him her credentials to formalize her introduction. “Crewman Omar Al-Sharif, I’m Special Agent Jennifer Barrett with the Solfleet Criminal Investigations Division. Is there any question in your mind as to exactly who I am or what authority I have?”

  “No,” he answered simply.

  “First, it’s my duty to inform you that this interview is being recorded in its entirety,” she continued. “When this interview has been concluded, the unedited recording will immediately be entered into the official record of this investigation. Do you understand that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Not exactly a great conversationalist, but at least he was responding. Jennifer really hated it when a suspect sat there and didn’t make a sound.

  “Crewman Omar Al-Sharif, you have been placed under lawful arrest and the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate has informed me that you are being charged preliminarily with the offenses of theft of government property, that being at least one encrypted data-chip along with the official data that’s recorded on it, and with providing that data to parties not authorized to possess it. In addition, you are suspected of having committed an act of treason through carrying out activities of espionage against the government of the United Earth Federation.”

  His reaction to that last statement, to the word ‘treason’ in particular, was surprisingly subdued, though certainly not unnoticeable. His eyes grew wide and his jaw fell slack, if only for a moment, and then his breathing grew short and shallow and he st
arted perspiring, but given the possible punishment for treason, Jennifer suspected that most service members probably would have completely freaked out.

  “Crewman Omar Al-Sharif, do you understand the nature of the charges and allegations against you?”

  Now clearly very scared and looking like he was about to vomit, the crewman nodded.

  “I need a verbal answer for the recording,” Jennifer told him.

  “I think so,” he barely managed to squeak out.

  “Louder, please, for the recorders.”

  He cleared his throat and drew a deep breath, then answered much louder, “Yes.”

  “Good.” He looked almost afraid enough to wet himself, Jennifer noted. Excellent. She could use that. She moved a little closer and spoke in a softer, almost sympathetic tone of voice. “I know you’re afraid of what might happen to you, Omar. Espionage and treason are obviously very serious offenses. But I want you to know that your situation is not hopeless. You can help yourself out quite a lot while you’re in this room with me if you choose to. Does that sound like something you might want to try to do?”

  “Yeah, of course,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Okay, good. That’s good. Now, to begin with, there are some circumstances surrounding what you’ve been involved in that I’m not real clear on, so I have some questions that I’d really like you to answer for me. If you’re willing to do that, not only will it help clear those things up for me, it might also start you down that road to helping yourself, assuming you answer honestly. How does that sound to you, Omar?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear you say that. Before I ask you those questions, though, I have to formally advise you of your legal rights and make sure you understand them. That way we both know your rights are being protected.” She pulled a handcomp out of its storage place under the table, turned it on, and gently set it down between them. “The rights I’m going to advise you of appear in writing on the handcomp in case you’d like to follow along.”