Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “Can I help you?”

  Dylan turned toward the voice to find an SP approaching him. A very large SP eyeballing him with... what? Caution? Suspicion? A little of both, maybe, with a touch of ‘I can take him down if I have to’ thrown in for good measure? “No, thanks,” Dylan replied. “I’m just looking at the ship.”

  “Do you have clearance for this area?” the SP asked him.

  “I wasn’t aware I needed any,” Dylan answered honestly. “There’s nothing posted.”

  “Actually, you don’t if you’re military. But we don’t usually find people hanging around down here staring at the ships. You got some identification?”

  “Name’s Dylan Graves,” Dylan advised him as he produced his identicard and handed it over. “I’ve just been assigned to your unit.”

  The SP stuck Dylan’s card briefly into a hand-reader, then gave it back. “Welcome to the shipyard, Sergeant Graves,” he said in a friendlier tone, extending his hand. “I’m Squad Sergeant Danny Orwell. Call me Dan.”

  “Dylan,” Dylan repeated, shaking his hand. “Nice to meet you, Dan.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, too, Dylan. Real nice. We need the manpower.” Orwell let go of Dylan’s hand and then asked, “So, you got a thing for starcruisers, Dylan?”

  “You might say that.” He turned his gaze back to the vessel. “My father was... He served aboard a starcruiser,” he explained. “I look at those ships and I see the beauty, the power, and the creative genius of mankind all rolled into one package. It’s an awesome achievement.” Thinking now not about the Albion, but about the mammoth starcarrier Excalibur-II that he’d seen back on Mandela Station—back on his Mandela Station—he added, “It boggles the mind, what wonders man can create when he’s determined enough.”

  “Uh huh,” Orwell agreed non-committally, tossing Dylan a sidelong look. Then he added, “Major Ross mentioned you were into technology and stuff. I guess he understated the fact.”

  Dylan snickered and said, “He was talking about electronics. That’s just a hobby of mine. When I look at those ships I just... I think about him. My father, I mean,” he clarified. And why not? He’d already established a logical relationship between the two. There was at least a chance Orwell might buy it.

  “So, I guess you’ll be going right to the midnight shift?” Orwell asked.

  Change of subject. He’d bought it. “That’s what the boss tells me,” Dylan replied.

  “I just found out I’m being switched to that shift myself tomorrow night. I checked the duty roster and saw your name, so I guess I’ll see you on the job.”

  “Not right away,” Dylan told him. “I don’t actually go on duty for three more days.”

  “Yeah, the major mentioned that, too. I meant I’ll see you then.”

  “Yeah, see you then,” Dylan echoed.

  “Nice meeting you, Dylan,” Orwell repeated as he offered his hand once more.

  Dylan shook the man’s hand again. “Nice meeting you, too, Dan. Good night.”

  “Good night.” Orwell spun on his heel and walked off.

  Dylan stayed and stared at the Albion a while longer, slowly and meticulously painting a mental picture of every detail that he could see from his vantage point—the shapes of the major hull assemblies and how they fit together, the sizes and locations of every airlock and every maintenance access hatch, the positions and attachment points of the docking clamps and of the lone, wide aerobridge that remained connected to the ship’s main cargo doors. He had no way of knowing which if any of those details he might need to be familiar with later, when the time came for him to sneak aboard and install the monitoring/tracking device, so he committed as much of it as he could to memory, turning his back to test himself every few moments and then facing around again to determine how well he’d done.

  As soon as he felt satisfied that he’d memorized as much as he could as best as he could, he left the dry-docks and went back to his quarters for the night.

  Three more days.

  Chapter 20

  Monday, 16 May 2191

  Nick lay on his bed in just his briefs, having long since kicked off his blankets, rolling his head back and forth across his damp pillow and tossing and turning and moaning as...

  Sweating profusely and writhing in agony on the deck, while at the same time crying for his slaughtered family, Federation Vice-President Jonathan Harkam somehow still managed to reach out and grab the front of Hansen’s jacket in his quivering, blood-stained fist. He pulled him closer, bared his clenched teeth and spat streams of red saliva over his chin as he grunted against the pain, then stared up at him through red, swollen eyes.

  “Please!” he managed to force through the pain. “Oh God, it burns! Make it stop!”

  Hansen grabbed hold of Harkam’s wrist with both hands and tried with all his strength to pull free of his desperate, vice-like grip, but the dying man only tightened his grasp, to the point where Hansen thought he heard a finger snap, and pulled him closer. “Mister Vice-President,” Hansen responded as calmly as he could. “I can’t just...”

  “Yes you CAN!” the dying vice-leader of the unified free world roared. Then, gasping for every labored breath, he pleaded, “Please, Major! KILL me! Quickly! Stop the... Stop the pain! STOP THE PAIN!” he screamed.

  “Dad?”

  Hansen whirled around as far as the vice-president’s grasp would allow and glared wide-eyed at the horribly brutalized, lifeless body of the dying man’s teenage daughter. But she was already dead! The beast had ripped her open from the inside out—from her genitals to her sternum! She couldn’t possibly have spoken! She couldn’t possibly!

  “Do it, Major,” the squad sergeant steadfastly encouraged him, kneeling only a few feet to one side. Squad Sergeant Dylan Graves—the only one of his men who’d managed to survive the attack with him.

  “He’s the vice-president of the Earth Federation for God sake!” Hansen reminded him.

  “And he’s suffering terribly, sir,” Graves pointed out. “There’s nothing more we can do for him now.”

  “I can’t just kill him!” Hansen insisted.

  “Yes, you can.”

  Gasping for every labored breath, Harkam jerked hard on Hansen’s jacket, drawing his attention back to him. “Please, Major!” he pleaded, crying openly, barely able to speak through the agony anymore. “Do it!” He coughed suddenly, spewing a foot-high fountain of dark red-brown blood that barely missed Hansen’s face when he recoiled, then splattered back over his chin and his suit coat. “Do... it,” he begged once more.

  “Dad?”

  Hansen ignored the dead girl’s ghostly voice.

  “You’ve got to do it, sir,” the squad sergeant told him. “There’s no other option.”

  Hansen knew in his heart that the sergeant was right. Harkam’s entire family had been brutally slaughtered, and the vice-president himself had been pumped full of... of whatever it was that damn beast had pumped him full of. If the poor man’s cries were to be believed, then he was literally burning to death from the inside out.

  He drew his sidearm and slowly pressed the muzzle to the vice-president’s temple. He drew several short, deep breaths and licked his suddenly very dry lips. But he just couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the trigger.

  “It’s the humane thing to do, sir,” the sergeant pointed out.

  “DO IT!” Harkam shrieked through the pain, his tears tinted red with blood. Then he suddenly started shaking Hansen violently back and forth as he lost whatever control he’d been clinging to and convulsed, screaming gurgling and crying even louder than before. “OH GOD!” he screamed, spitting and coughing up blood. “DO IT!”

  “Dad,” the dying vice-president’s dead daughter said.

  “Do it, sir,” the sergeant repeated.

  Hansen closed his eyes and turned his face away. “Forgive me,” he whispered. Then he drew a long, deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.

  Nick’s eyes snapped open and he gasped for ai
r as he awoke abruptly. Then he exhaled slowly to relax as he once more worked out in his mind just exactly where he was. His room was filled with daylight. Bright sunlight shone in through the window. Morning had come. So ended his fourth night in the visitors’ suites... his fourth night since learning that Lieutenant Graves had arrived safely in 2168... the fourth straight night this slightly altered version of his nightmares had returned to haunt him. An even more grotesque version in which Harkam’s ravaged daughter actually spoke to her father, even as she lay dying on the deck. A version in which Dylan Graves appeared once more as the security police sergeant and fellow survivor of the attack. And as he lay there on his sweat-moistened bed, Nick could almost have sworn that he’d actually heard his weapon fire this time—heard the bullet tear through Harkam’s head and splatter brain tissue and skull fragments over the far bulkhead as it impacted—and that that was what had awakened him.

  A thought suddenly occurred to him. Dylan Graves had gone back in time. Presumably, he was still alive and well and operating in the past now—operating in March of 2168—an adult. The ‘Harkam incident,’ as it had come to be known, hadn’t occurred yet from his point of view. So was it possible? Could it be that Graves appeared in his nightmares because he’d gone back in time and really was onboard Harkam’s shuttle with him, or would be when he eventually reached that point in the timeline? Had Graves really been there and survived the attack alongside him?

  No, it wasn’t that simple, he realized, recalling one important factor that stood a major obstacle to that theory. Graves had appeared in his nightmares even before he went back in time. His presence in the past now couldn’t explain his presence in the nightmares then.

  So what the hell was going on?

  He rolled onto his side, threw his feet out over the floor, and sat up on the side of the bed. He felt the familiar chill of air on perspiring skin across his upper back, so paused briefly to let it dry, then stood up, pulled on his pajamas, and headed out of the bedroom. The lock indicator on Heather’s bedroom door across the hall glowed green, unlocked, and as he angled toward the living room and reached for the button on the wall to open the bathroom door, he noticed that one glowing red and heard the water running on the other side. Heather had already gotten up and was apparently in the shower, so he walked on by and headed through the living room and into the kitchen to start breakfast.

  Heather had started a fresh pot of coffee first, he was pleased to see. It was ready and waiting, and from its aroma he guessed that she’d found his favorite Columbian blend. He took a mug down from the cabinet and filled it nearly to its brim, then set it on the counter, opened the refrigerator, and started looking through it to see what they had left to make for breakfast, which turned out to be not very much. Not knowing how long they were going to stay in the guest suites, he hadn’t wanted to buy too much food, so if they were going to stay more than another day or two, they were going to have to go grocery shopping again. They were fast running out of food. The last four eggs, a third of a package of link sausages, a couple of hash browns each, and all that was left of the milk and orange juice. Enough for this morning’s breakfast, but that was it. They were definitely going to have to go grocery shopping again.

  He pulled it all out and arranged it on the counter, took a careful sip of his steaming hot coffee—it was his favorite Columbian blend, God bless her—and then started going through the other cabinets, looking for the frying pans.

  What the hell was going on? Prior to Lieutenant Graves’... departure... he’d experienced two markedly different versions of his nightmares. In the first, he’d been the lone survivor of the attack. That was real. That was the way things had really happened. Well, except for Harkam’s dead daughter calling out to her father, but that had only happened because the part of his mind that remained aware of his surroundings as he slept had heard his own daughter trying to wake him up at the time. In the second, Dylan Graves had replaced the security police squad sergeant who had really been there and had survived alongside him. That version was false, of course. So where had it come from?

  He found the frying pans and set them out on the stovetop, then started taking down the plates and drinking glasses and utensils they were going to need.

  Okay, maybe Graves’ presence in the past now did somehow have something to do with it. But even if it did, that still didn’t explain how the man had appeared in his nightmares before he went back in time. Prior to going back, there was simply no way he could have been there. It was impossible. There had to be some other explanation for that. There had to be. Some other logical reason, if he could just figure it out.

  A memory-edit, he considered as he set a pair of bowls beside the stovetop, one to crack the eggs into, the other to collect the empty shells. Of course. That had to be it. Didn’t it? He’d been suspecting for some time now that someone had subjected him to one at some point in time. Was that the explanation? It was certainly the only one that he could think of that even remotely made any sense. Maybe Graves had traveled back in time and actually had been on that shuttle with him and Vice-President Harkam and his family and all the others, and maybe somebody had wanted his memories of those events suppressed and replaced... for some reason. Why someone might have wanted that, he couldn’t even guess at this point, but that remained the only logical explanation that he could think of. After all, Graves’ memory-edit had failed, so why not his?

  “Morning, Dad,” Heather said a half-second after he heard her walking into the kitchen behind him. “What are you doing?”

  “Making breakfast,” he answered, looking back over his shoulder at her as she finished tying off her robe. Her long strawberry-blond hair was still damp, as though she’d only dried it enough to stop it from dripping, combed straight and hanging down behind her shoulders, and her generous cleavage and the small bumps where her robe hung over her breasts made it pretty obvious that she hadn’t bothered to put on a bra. Her legs were bare and she hadn’t put on her slippers, either, and Nick found himself wondering if she’d even bothered to turn off the water and lights before she left the bathroom.

  “Looked more like you were just standing there staring into space,” she told him as she stepped up beside him, into his welcoming arm, and gave him a gentle hug.

  He kissed her gently on the top of her head and then explained, “I was just thinking,”

  “Well... grab your coffee and go think in the living room,” she told him as she nudged him away from her. “I’ll make breakfast.”

  “You have a deal,” he replied as he stepped back to let her take his place. “Your cooking tastes a lot better than mine does.”

  “I agree,” she quipped as she started cracking the eggs.

  Nick grinned. Even after all these months, the positive changes he’d been seeing in his daughter amazed him. Her general attitude and disposition, her relatively newfound refusal to do anything that might get her into trouble or embarrass him, her continuing avoidance of any drug use, her willingness to more than do her part as they moved forward together, and especially her grades. She’d been applying herself to her schoolwork like he’d never seen her apply herself before, had worked her way onto the Honor Roll, and had even completed her academic year’s work early so she wouldn’t have to worry about school during their move. He still wished she’d dress more appropriately, both at home and when she went out, but he tried to avoid pushing her too much on the issue. Peer pressure was a very real and formidable force in a teenage girl’s life, and the last thing he wanted to do was upset her and make her angry enough at him that she quit trying to improve herself out of spite. After all, her clothing choices might not always meet with his approval, but it wasn’t like she had a tenancy to run around naked.

  Well... not since that trespassing incident at Mandela Station’s adults-only beach with her friends almost nine months ago, soon after her fifteenth birthday.

  He watched her crack open the last egg and drop the shell into the waste bowl, po
ur the milk in with the eggs, and then start whisking it all together. Then he asked her, “Have you given any thought yet to where you want to live?”

  “Actually, yes,” she replied as she blended the milk and eggs. “I thought about it a lot last night. I think I’d like to live in Colorado Springs, at least for a while.”

  “Okay,” he told her. “Colorado Springs it is.”

  “That’s it?” she asked, looking at him, the disbelief in her tone showing through those bright, piercing emerald-green eyes as well. “That’s all it takes?”

  “That’s all it takes,” he confirmed. “You’re my daughter and I love you. It’s high time I put your needs first for a change.”

  “Wow,” she exclaimed, eyebrows climbing her forehead as she turned her eyes back to what she was doing. “I love you, too, Dad. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Now go sit down and enjoy your coffee. I’ve got this.”

  He smiled. “Yes, ma’am, if you insist.”

  She grinned. He picked up his coffee and took another sip as he gazed at her for one more brief moment—he was enjoying the new, much closer and more loving relationship they’d begun to build, and he sincerely hoped that it would last for the rest of their lives—and then headed into the living room.

  He sat down at the computer terminal and turned it on, sipped his coffee again, and then called up the Aerospace Mobility Command’s PCS page to plug in all the information pertinent to their move to Colorado—having retired with benefits intact, thanks to Mirriazu, the fleet still owed him one final household move. There was a lot to enter—their full names, point of origin, destination, date of move, description of property, approximate value of property, approximate total weight of property, and more—and as he filled out the form he started realizing how much he missed HAL. He missed having to just talk to the computer. He missed being able to just tell the computer what to do and know that it would be done. He missed having the computer answer him in that calm, soothing, gentlemanly voice. But HAL was gone. HAL had been ‘killed’ when the Veshtonn attacked and destroyed Mandela Station, and Nick hadn’t stored an backup copy of the program anywhere off station. If he wanted to work with HAL again, he was going to have to rewrite the program from scratch.