Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “Yes, sir,” the man replied. “Lieutenant Commander Roderick Johnson.”

  “He’s been promoted” Obviously.

  “Yes, sir,” the man confirmed. “He’s acting deputy chief of the agency now, in line to get the job permanently.”

  “Good for him. He’s a good officer. He deserves it.”

  “Yes, sir, he is,” the man agreed, “and he does.”

  While Johnson’s qualifications for the job were certainly sufficient, they were also a topic of discussion for some other time. Why these men had sought him out was the matter at hand. “Why did he send you to find me?” Nick asked, getting back on track.

  “He knows how highly you value human life, sir. The lives of those who serve or have served under you in particular.”

  “So do a lot of people,” Nick pointed out. “So what?”

  “Including us, sir,” the man informed him. “All of us have worked under your command at one time or another, which is why we volunteered for this mission.”

  “Volunteered for what mission?” Nick asked. “To find me? That’s your mission?”

  The man glanced at Heather briefly, then looked Nick straight in the eye again and asked, “I realize she’s your daughter, sir, but... are you sure we’re all right discussing sensitive issues in front of her?”

  “You approached me while I had her with me,” Nick pointed out, “so spill it or get lost.”

  The man dropped his gaze to the sidewalk between them. Whether he was embarrassed by Nick having pointed that out in front of the other men, or just considering whether or not to go on, Nick didn’t know. Nor did he care. “Very well, sir,” he finally replied, meeting Nick’s gaze once more. “Lieutenant Commander Johnson has obtained actionable intelligence regarding the whereabouts and status of one Crewman Stefani O’Donnell, and he stands ready and willing to work with you to try to... improve that crewman’s situation.”

  Nick could hardly believe his ears. Stefani O’Donnell! She’d been abducted nearly eight months ago and hadn’t been heard from since, and no one had made any demands in exchange for her return. He’s given up hope of ever finding her at all, let alone alive. She’d gone AWOL and had broken several laws and had been arrested and had escaped, and then Liz had found her and used her as bait for their own purposes. And then she’d been abducted. Yes, she was facing a number of very serious charges as a result of what she’d done, but before all of that she’d served the Federation and the fleet and the agency with loyalty and honor. If there was even a chance of finding her and rescuing her, she deserved to have the attempt made on her behalf.

  But what could he do to help? He was retired now, as Mirriazu had reminded him quite succinctly. He’d made a decision to put Heather first, and had told her as much. He couldn’t just pack his bags and leave her behind to go command a rescue mission. She’d never forgive him. Not after all this. Not after he’d made her so happy and earned her deepest love and respect.

  “I’ll need time to think this over,” he told the man.

  “You’re in the process of moving, sir, so that’s understood. Commander Johnson didn’t expect you to decide immediately. He does suggest that you don’t wait too long, however. The longer we delay...

  “The worse it is for O’Donnell,” Nick concluded, interrupting. “I get it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dad?” Heather interjected, as though she feared that things had just changed back to the way they used to be—her father putting a mission ahead of everything else.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he told her, hoping to alleviate that fear. “Whatever I decide, I’m not going anywhere you can’t go with me.” And there it was. He’d said it, so now he’d have to stand by it. “Where can I contact Lieutenant Commander Johnson?” he asked the man.

  The man reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a data-chip, and held it out to him. “All his contact information is on this,” he told him. “Times, dates, locations... everything you’ll need to find him whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thank you,” Nick said, taking the chip out of the man’s hand. “Now, if you don’t mind, my daughter and I would like to enjoy our last day in Geneva.”

  “Certainly, sir. I apologize if we startled you.”

  He turned and walked away, and the other six men followed, nodding as they passed but not speaking a single word.

  Chapter 23

  Earth Standard Date: Monday, 28 March 2168

  After trying and failing twice more the following day to get the civilian suspect to talk, or at the very least to identify himself, Special Agent Reese had decided to take the weekend off, take a mental step back, and then approach the investigation from a different angle. He’d spent most of the weekend with Jennifer, confident that if anyone could take his mind off the case for a while, she could. He’d enjoyed their first date immensely—what red-blooded heterosexual man wouldn’t have?—and had enjoyed working with her as well, despite the fact that she hadn’t been authorized to do much more than observe. They’d had a lot of fun together over the last few days and nights—he was really starting to like her a lot—and now he felt rested and ready to handle whatever the world might deign to throw at him. So ready, in fact, that he was arriving at the office almost an hour early, he noted as he glanced at his watch.

  If he played his cards right, he considered, maybe their fledgling relationship might really turn into something. He liked the thought of that.

  “Morning, Eli,” he hollered for the benefit of last night’s on-call duty agent as he walked through the front door—less of a greeting and more of not wanting to sneak up on him and startle him inadvertently. “Chris Reese in the office.” Unlike Jennifer and her co-workers in the C.I.D., who could go anywhere in the facility at their leisure and spend their on-call nights in their own beds, S.I.A. duty agents actually had to stay in the office all night. Incoming intelligence reports had to be reviewed immediately upon receipt and secrecy had to be maintained. That, simply put, was the nature of their business.

  “Eli?” he called out when the man didn’t respond. “You awake?”

  Nothing. Silence. No friendly greeting, no approaching footfalls, not even a sleepy moan or an annoyed grunt. No response of any kind. That wasn’t like Eli at all. He always answered, even if he was just waking up, and more often than not his answer came with an offer of a fresh cup of coffee. So why wasn’t he answering this morning? Where was he?

  Reese sniffed the air, twice, just to be sure. No coffee. If caffeine fanatic Eli hadn’t made any coffee, then something was definitely wrong.

  He opened his coat and grasped his sidearm, but left it holstered as he headed down the hall toward Eli’s office as quietly as he could. He found the door open, but Eli wasn’t inside. He continued down the hall toward the chief’s office, figuring that Eli might be crashed out on the secretary’s couch or watching a virtuavid on her computer terminal, but as he passed the heavy-duty security door that led into the restricted area just outside the agency’s armory, the evidence storage vault, and the holding cell, he noticed a sliver of dim light around its edge and realized that it was standing slightly ajar. That was a serious breach. That door was supposed to be kept closed and secure at all times, even when agents were working on the other side.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  Reese drew his sidearm and held it ready, aiming it toward the floor ahead of him as he leaned closer to the narrow opening and peeked inside as best he could. He didn’t see anything and couldn’t hear anything on the other side, so he backed off a little, raised his sidearm, and started slowly pushing the door open with his foot.

  Nothing. No one was there. All was quiet, or at least seemed to be. Someone had left the ceiling lights on, albeit at their dimmest setting, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. With a prisoner in the holding cell, Eli might have left them on deliberately the last time he checked on him. Aside from that, everything looked normal. The environmental readouts
on the wall showed that conditions were all within normal ranges, and all three inner doors appeared to be closed and properly secured, at least according to the steady red indicator lights on their panels.

  He drew a breath to call out to Eli again, but hesitated when he suddenly got a feeling deep in his gut that it was still too soon to let his guard down—that he’d be wiser to remain quiet for the time being. He let the breath go, slowly and quietly.

  He glanced up and down the hall to make sure he was still alone, then slowly, cautiously, stepped inside, and the moment he crossed the threshold he caught a brief whiff of some kind of foul odor that he couldn’t identify. Or did he? It wasn’t very strong if it was even really there at all, but for a split second there had seemed to be just the faintest hint of something rancid on the air. But what was it? The most likely answer came to him almost before he could finish asking himself the question. Vomit. It couldn’t have been anything else. It had been there and it had smelled very much like vomit. The moment he realized that he started sweating and gagging and tasting bile on the back of his tongue, and moments after that he had to swallow a mouthful of warm saliva to stop himself from losing his breakfast.

  He drew a deep breath and gathered his wits about him again, swallowed once more, and then moved farther inside. The lights’ intensity didn’t change, he noticed. Moving into the center of the room should have triggered them to come up to full strength automatically, so why hadn’t they done so?

  He walked over to the armory door first and inspected it more closely. It was closed and locked, just as the red light indicated, and its tamper alarm was set just as it should have been. He moved on to the evidence vault and picked up on the smell of vomit again—this time he felt sure of it—a little stronger than before as he got close.

  The latch mechanism was missing. No, not missing. More like... melted away. The main assembly was still intact—had that been removed, he would have noticed it as soon as he walked into the room—but the parts that physically locked together between the door and the doorjamb appeared to have been... dissolved somehow.

  He holstered his sidearm and pulled his small flashlight from his inside coat pocket, then knelt down and shined it into the narrow crack. He saw what looked like a stain left behind by some kind of fluid that had run down the lengths of both the door and the doorjamb, right where an acid or some other liquid chemical used to dissolve the mechanism would have left residue. In addition, a small, shallow pit had been burned into the floor directly beneath it, right where that acid or other fluid would have dripped.

  The panel light might have shown red, but the door definitely wasn’t secure. Someone had tried to gain entry and had very likely succeeded, although why their intrusion hadn’t set of the alarm remained a mystery.

  He stood up, put his flashlight away, and drew his sidearm again, then punched his access code into the panel and stepped aside to let the door swing open.

  The lights inside the evidence vault were on their lowest setting, but that was illumination enough for him to see that much of the area had been ransacked, even before he stepped inside. The security cage where most sensitive and high-value evidence such as illegal weapons or large narcotics shipments was kept appeared to be secure—he tugged on the cage door, just to make sure—but the wall shelves and the cabinet drawers had all been swept clear and dumped, their contents strewn across the floor like so much trash. Whoever had broken in had obviously been looking for something specific. Whether or not they’d found it remained to be seen, but Special Agent Reese suspected he knew exactly who that someone was.

  Remembering to keep an eye on the door behind him as he moved, he stepped over the mess carefully—all that evidence related to what were probably more than a dozen different top secret intelligence investigations—and made his way to the cabinet where the data-chip had been stored. He rifled through what little remained in that drawer and quickly confirmed what he already suspected. It was gone. Somehow, with or without an accomplice’s help, the prisoner had escaped from the holding cell, broken into the vault, and stolen the chip back.

  Then again, if he did have an accomplice, maybe that person had broken in and stolen the chip instead, and had left the prisoner behind... or killed him so he couldn’t talk.

  Either way, things didn’t bode well for Eli.

  He left the vault and moved to the door that led into the holding cell, and wasn’t at all surprised to find that its latch had been dissolved away as well, same as the vault door. Holding his sidearm ready, he punched in his access code and then quickly backed away from the door.

  It didn’t open. He moved toward it, slowly, but only close enough to reach out and grab the handle, and then stepped back again as he pulled it open.

  That same rancid smell of vomit hit him square in the face, and once more he almost lost his breakfast. Fighting the urge to let it go, he moved in, noting immediately that the cell itself was empty—its door standing open. He spotted Eli lying face down on the floor, holstered his sidearm, and knelt by the younger man’s side to assess his condition. No pulse. He started to turn him over, intending to begin CPR—the other agents would be showing up for work soon and one of them could call for help—but then caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He let go of Eli and reached for his sidearm as he turned toward the movement.

  He never saw what hit him.

  Chapter 24

  Major Ross had given Dylan three days to rest and get used to whatever time change he might be dealing with before he had to report for duty, but because all Solfleet vessels and space stations were on the same clock, ‘in the same time zone,’ so to speak, and because Dylan had already started getting used to that clock during his brief stay on Mandela Station and during the flight to Mars, a change in time hadn’t really been much of an issue for him. Pretty ironic when he thought about it, considering his rather unique circumstances. All he’d had to do was stay up a few hours later each night to adjust to the midnight shift. Nonetheless, he’d welcomed the chance to settle into his new role and get his thoughts straight for a few days before having to start work.

  The only bump in the road—little more than an inconvenience, really, caused by a lack of clarity in communication, as such inconveniences usually were—had come when he discovered that he and the major had had very different ideas of what constituted three days off. In his mind, three days off had meant that he didn’t have to start working until Monday night. He’d reasoned that he had arrived on station on Thursday night, so his three days off would have been Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and he would have gone to work on Monday. However, as it turned out, when the major had said three days off, he’d meant exactly that. Three days. Seventy-two hours, give or take a few in order to fit into the normal shift rotation. In other words, Dylan’s three days off had ended on Sunday night, not Monday night, and he’d had to start work a full twenty-four hours earlier than he’d expected to. As a result, he’d almost been absent from duty on his first night. If Squad Sergeant Orwell hadn’t given him a courtesy call early in the afternoon to let him know that he’d been assigned as his orientation NCO, Dylan wouldn’t have known he was expected and would have failed to report for duty on time. He might even have been declared AWOL, and that kind of problem he definitely did not need.

  But Orwell had made that call and Dylan had reported on Sunday night, last night, on time and ready for duty. Before their pre-shift briefing had begun, one of his new coworkers had told him that having Orwell assigned to him as his orientation NCO meant they’d be partners through all four nights of his first duty week, and as soon as the briefing had ended Orwell had started giving him what had turned out to be a painfully long and drawn out version of the grand tour of the entire facility. Orwell had been more than happy to ‘take him under his wing’ and had warned him right from the start that the tour would likely take all four nights and perhaps even a part of their two-day break to complete.

  Dylan glanced at his w
atch and quietly thanked God the day shift was finally due to come on duty soon. His first night had been a painfully long one, but it was almost over. Very little requiring security police intervention had happened and he and Orwell hadn’t had to respond to anything, so except for the half-hour break they’d taken for their mid-shift meal, Dylan hadn’t done anything but follow Orwell around for the last seven hours. His eyelids were getting heavy and his feet were starting to protest. He was really looking forward to going back to his quarters and getting some sleep. Apparently, he hadn’t adjusted to the hours as well as he’d thought.

  * * *

  Private First Class Nancy Gillis covered her mouth and yawned big while she waited for the tea dispenser to finish filling her cup. Last night had been one more in a long line of slow, quiet nights. Not that she was complaining, of course. On the contrary, she was one of those very few security police troops who actually preferred to work the midnight shift for exactly that reason. She didn’t need action. She didn’t want action. She didn’t care how many arrests she made. Long quiet nights on shift afforded her plenty of time to devote to her schoolwork on the job, thus freeing up a lot of her non-duty hours, especially during the breaks between classes like the one that had just started.

  This time her break was a good long one, too. She had three whole weeks ahead of her to enjoy before classes were scheduled to resume again and she intended to enjoy them to the fullest. To begin with, she was looking forward to going off shift in a little while and spending the rest of the morning deep in dreamland, and then having the whole afternoon to hit the Rotunda and do some serious clothes shopping. She’d decide how to pass the rest of the evening as she went along.

  In bed with the new sergeant would have been acceptable, were it permitted.

  She glanced around the dining area as she carried her cup of tea over to the nearest table and felt pleased to find that she was currently the only customer—the only person in the whole restaurant who didn’t work there. She preferred the quiet solitude the civilian sector restaurants afforded her as they opened for business early in the morning to all the chatter that accompanied the light but fairly steady overnight traffic that flowed through the dining facilities back in the military sector, short-lived though that solitude may be. Pretty soon now, probably in a matter of minutes, the early breakfast crowd was going to start showing up and she was going to have to leave before the wrong someone saw her sitting there in uniform, armed and on duty and outside her jurisdiction. The restaurant’s owners didn’t care, of course. After all, her money was as good as anyone else’s. But standing orders dictated that all on-duty security police personnel remain in the military sector unless their duties required them to cross into the civilian sector, so it would be better if no one found out where she was.