Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  Chapter 26

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Friday, 20 May 2191

  Nick rolled onto his back, again, and sighed with frustration as he adjusted his blankets. Wanting to avoid the long hours of sitting and waiting at the Solfleet Veterans’ Administration clinic downtown—due to the uncommonly heavy concentration of high-security fleet facilities around the greater Denver-Colorado Springs area, large numbers of retired fleet veterans lived in or near both cities—he’d gone out yesterday and found a private family physician open to taking on new patients and had signed Heather and himself up. He’d then explained to the doctor that he was having trouble sleeping due to recurring nightmares and the doctor had prescribed for him a particular type of sleeping pill. But the only difference the pill had made was that now, instead of not being able to sleep peacefully, free of the nightmares, he couldn’t fall asleep at all. He’d been trying for what felt like hours, lying in bed with the lights off, the door closed, and the window and deck door shades down to block out the bright moonlight, but despite his best efforts to relax and not think too much about anything, his mind had been racing like a top contender in the annual race to the cold rocky summit of Pike’s Peak since the moment he climbed into bed, and it wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down anytime soon. And to make matters even worse, his head had just started aching terribly.

  When he’d walked out of that military courtroom a free man with his family a week ago, involuntarily retired from the fleet but with his veteran’s benefits fully intact and the probability of having to serve some serious prison time permanently eliminated—it was always good to have friends in high places—he’d felt a great sense of relief. No more dangerous covert operations to plan, no more intelligence reports to analyze and cross-reference, no more half-pointless staff meetings to attend, no more extended absences from home… no more war. At least, not for him. All he’d had to look forward to for the remainder of his days was rest and relaxation, and a rare second chance—the opportunity to nurture the new, more loving and understanding relationship with his daughter that the events of his arrest and subsequent court-martial had given birth to.

  And then that young agent had walked up to him and shown him the holophoto, and any hope he might have had of getting a good night’s sleep any time in the near future had gone right down the drain. All he’d thought about since that moment when he wasn’t busy doing something was that simple, cryptic message scratched into the surface of a random Philadelphia sidewalk. ‘Lt D-G, 21 Mar 2168.’ Against all probabilities that he could imagine, Lieutenant Dylan Graves had traveled backward in time and had arrived alive and well in Philadelphia twenty-three years in the past, ready to carry out his mission.

  And now he was showing up in his nightmares each night... when he could sleep, at least. That had to be the result of a failing memory-edit. There simply was no other explanation.

  And now he had an opportunity to try to rescue Stefani O’Donnell.

  It was no use. He couldn’t sleep. Surrendering to the futility of his efforts, he rolled out of bed and straightened his pajama pants, pulled on the matching shirt and his slippers, and then walked out onto the wide upper deck, opening and closing his room’s sliding door as quietly as he could so as not to disturb Heather. Heather, who had surprised him once again when she told him that she was going to wake up at six o’clock to get ready and go to her new school. While she’d completed her current academic year at her old school, she’d decided to go in and get her new student orientation prerequisite out of the way and get a jumpstart on completing all of the administrative requirements of her transfer and test for next year’s class placement so that she could dive right into the routine in September. He didn’t know if she could hear his door open from her room or not, but he didn’t want to take the chance that she might. He stepped up to the meter-tall wooden railing and gazed westward at the front range, which, except for a few small patches of moonlit snow around Pikes Peak’s treeless summit, appeared as little more than a jagged black silhouette set against the star-studded, deep violet tapestry of the western sky.

  The night was an unusually warm one for May, but as he stood there quietly staring out at the mountains for the next few minutes, the stars began to disappear behind a thick charcoal gray ceiling of clouds as it drifted slowly eastward across the ridgeline. Then, what had begun as a gentle breeze started growing stronger and began cooling things off. Apparently, the west side of the city was in for one of its rare midnight thunderstorms. Whether or not that storm would roll east across the city and reach out to the plains was anyone’s guess—the weather in Colorado was fickle to say the least, especially along the front range—but he was glad he hadn’t uncovered the pool yet. At this altitude it could even snow in May.

  At least his head was starting to feel better.

  Heather had definitely made the right decision, he decided as he drew a deep breath of clean, fresh mountain air. Back on the base where his court-martial had been held, while he and his family had been enjoying their pizza dinner, he hadn’t been sure whether he wanted to move back east to West Chester, where he’d been born, or to the old family home near the base of the eastern slope of the Rockies, where he’d spent most of his teen years. He’d known the old home was still in great shape and that it had been unoccupied for the last two months since the most recent tenants bought a home of their own and moved out, but he’d also known of an available home in a beautiful West Chester community that both he and Heather would have liked just as well. Both areas had a lot to offer, especially for Heather—West Chester wasn’t far from big city shopping in Philadelphia and a number of shore points on the Atlantic, and Colorado Springs had the Rockies and the outdoor lifestyle that took full advantage of them—and he knew that he’d have had no problem calling either one of them home. He’d lived in both areas and had liked them both, and without his having to worry about getting up and going to work, it didn’t really matter much to him where he lived, as long as Heather was happy.

  In the end, the deciding factor had been the sizes of the two cities themselves and their respective paces of life. While not physically a part of the city of Philadelphia, West Chester sat only a stone’s throw away from the city line, and that bustling city was busting at the seams with a steadily growing population that had reached nearly six million people, most of whom seemed always to be on the go. Everywhere one looked, the streets were constantly filled with people. Colorado Springs on the other hand had been holding relatively steady with a population of only about one and a quarter million for the past half century or so, and the overall pace of life there was significantly slower than that of most of the east coast—something Hansen welcomed after all his years of service in Solfleet. Sure, there were areas where large numbers of people gathered in relatively small areas to work or to shop or to relax, particularly downtown. It was a city, after all. But there was also an abundance of wide open spaces—large outdoor shooting ranges out on the eastern plains for those who liked that sort of thing, miles of horse trails and hiking trails and campgrounds, and of course the beautiful Rocky Mountains themselves.

  Lightning flickered and then flashed brightly over the mountains, well beyond the front range, illuminating the growing cloudbank so brightly that it seemed for that one moment to glow with an energy all its own.

  Nick thought about his personal connection to the Philadelphia area, and considered how odd it was that out of all the geography up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States, Graves had landed right there. Of course, now that he thought about it, he recalled that Graves had grown up there himself, so if a personal connection to a particular geographical area meant anything at all to the Portal, it might just as well have been the lieutenant’s connection that had landed him there, rather than his own. Either way, at least he knew that Graves had survived the trip. Whether or not Günter Royer had survived his trip was still a mystery, a big unknown, and would likely remain as such forever.


  But what had Graves done since his arrival? Had he accomplished his mission? Had he prevented the Excalibur’s destruction or done anything else to change the course of the timeline? If he had, and if some changes had occurred in the present, what were they? Would they even recognize them? Was there any way to determine what had changed, and how? Come to think of it, every shred of intelligence the S.I.A. had obtained in the last few years prior to the most recent Veshtonn attack on Earth had indicated that there was no way the civilization of humankind on Earth could possibly survive another full-scale enemy invasion. Perhaps more than anything else, the enemy campaign plans that the Marines of the Tripoli had obtained during the first battle for the Rosha’Kana star system had made that very clear. And yet the civilization of humankind on Earth had survived. Was it possible that it originally hadn’t—that the defenders of Earth had only held on long enough to turn the enemy back this time due to something Graves did in the past? If that was the case, then what else might he have changed?

  Lightning flashed twice more over the mountains, and then Nick felt a raindrop strike his cheek. The clouds hadn’t yet moved over the city and the sky above him was still clear and full of stars, which meant the still increasing winds alone were blowing the rain eastward, at least for the time being. He turned his back on the mountains and went back inside. If Lieutenant Graves had changed the timeline in any way, he wanted to know about it, agency chief or not, retired or not. Speculation and assumption just wasn’t good enough. He owed it to Liz’s memory to follow through—to not give up. He owed it to her and to Karen, her widow, to do all that he could to find definitive answers. To do that he needed irrefutable evidence. He needed facts. Did records still show that Excalibur had been destroyed? Was the Portal research facility on Window World still a seventeen mile wide glass-coated crater? Was Stefani O’Donnell still missing in action—still presumed a captive of... Of course she was. Rod Johnson had sent those men to find him and tell him he had a lead on her whereabouts.

  Was Liz still dead?

  Yes, Stefani O’Donnell was still missing after being abducted, presumably still alive, and the last he knew the answers to all three other questions were ‘yes’ as well. The Excalibur was still more than two decades destroyed, the Portal and facility was still a sheet of glass, and Liz was still dead and buried. Then again, who knew how all that time-travel changing the timeline stuff really worked, anyway? Who was to say that the world as they knew it couldn’t change little by little over some extended period of time, rather than all at once?

  So many questions, the answers to which he’d most likely only be able to obtain through his old office. Problem was, he no longer had the necessary security clearance to access any of his resources there, and the back door password he’d written into the intelligence net had been found and removed months ago. He could try to hack in, but that would be a very difficult and risky process. He wasn’t a bad programmer, but neither was he an expert. Any attempts to hack in on his part would likely involve a lot of trial and error and trip multiple software security red flags, and the Intelligence net was perhaps the most secure network ever assembled. More likely than not he’d get caught, and then there would be hell to pay. He might have tried asking the officer who was in line to replace him as chief if he had any idea who that was, but he didn’t. He didn’t even know if one had been selected yet. The one thing he did know, though, was that the woman who’d been serving as the agency’s interim chief since his arrest wouldn’t be any help at all. Commodore Suja Bhatnagar had lost her last command—the starcarrier U.E.F.S. Victory—to her former X.O. and was more tight-lipped than an angry clam in ice water. He could always turn to Rod, of course—Rod was obviously a man he could trust—but he didn’t want to put him into any more of a compromising position than he’d already put himself into by contacting him about O’Donnell. No, the only way he was going to get any information out of the S.I.A. was to find a junior officer who used to work for him. Someone who owed him some kind of debt whom he could still intimidate into quietly helping him out, off the record.

  And he believed he knew just the person.

  He glanced up at the clock in the wall. 2:40 AM. That meant it was 9:40 AM, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time, or Zulu. Whatever they were calling it these days, the offices of Solfleet Headquarters were open for business.

  He walked quietly downstairs to the kitchen and chugged down a glass of cool tap water, then strolled into his den, sat down behind his desk, and punched the appropriate call code into his comm-panel. A few seconds later his intended victim’s image appeared on the monitor.

  “S-I-A, Lieutenant Commander Vandenhoven here,” he answered without looking into his own screen camera.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant Commander?” Nick began. Lieutenant Commander? What, were all the agency lieutenants being promoted? “How are you this morning?”

  Vandenhoven looked up slowly, without even trying to hide the shock and surprise on his face. “Admiral... Hansen,” the second newly promoted lieutenant commander Nick was aware of then acknowledged, obviously not feeling very comfortable at all about receiving his call. He looked away, as though making sure no one was close enough to him to listen in, “It’s uh...” and then looked back at the screen again. “It’s good to hear from you, sir, though it’s... unexpected. How are you? And uh... what can I do for you?”

  Nick decided to begin with the friendly approach and go from there, though he nearly choked on his next words. “First, congratulations you on your promotion. It’s well deserved.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Vandenhoven replied, though his tone of voice betrayed the probable fact that he’d never expected to hear that from his former commanding officer. “That means a lot coming from you.”

  “You’re welcome. And second, I need some information, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Vandenhoven suddenly looked as though he’d just swallowed a whole glass of month-old milk. He clearly wanted nothing to do with what they both knew their conversation was leading to. Hesitantly, probably wanting to close the channel and forget he’d ever called but just as likely reluctant to hang up on an admiral, retired or not, he asked, “What uh... what kind of information do you need, sir?”

  “The kind of information that you should probably give me very quietly, off the record,” Nick answered in no uncertain terms.

  Vandenhoven sat back in his chair and sighed. “I knew you were going to say something like that. Look, Admiral, we’re not even supposed to talk to you anymore.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Nick freely admitted.

  “Then you’ll understand, sir, that if the commodore finds out you called me and I didn’t immediately hang up on you...”

  “Don’t tell her.”

  “Believe me, I don’t intend to, but she does have her ways of finding out things.”

  “So do I, Mister Vandenhoven, and right now you’re that way.”

  The new lieutenant commander made his decision, firmed his chin, and then shook his head. “I can’t help you, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “You owe me... Lieutenant,” Nick pointed out. Then, when he’d paused just long enough for the desired effect, he corrected himself. “I mean, Lieutenant Commander. Sorry.”

  Vandenhoven stared at him for several seconds, obviously unsure as to whether or not the retired admiral had actually intended to threaten him, and then asked him, “I owe you? How do you figure that, sir?”

  “You ruined my mother’s surprise birthday party.”

  “I what?” the lieutenant commander asked, growing louder, as though he couldn’t believe the old man had actually brought that up again.

  “You ruined my mother’s surprise birthday party,” Nick calmly repeated.

  “Sir, that was... that was years ago, and... and I apologized to both of you. I’m surprised you even remember that.”

  “I never forget that sort of thing, Commander,” Nick advised him, adding, “Not ever,” after a
brief pause and in a more threatening tone of voice, just to make sure that he’d made his unstated point loud and clear. He knew, of course, given the circumstances of his retirement, that he couldn’t actually do anything to threaten the man’s career even if he’d wanted to. And even if he could, he certainly wouldn’t. He wouldn’t stoop that low. But Vandenhoven didn’t necessarily know that. “Apologies notwithstanding, you owe me. I need your help, and I mean to get it.”

  “All due respect, sir, you’re retired now. You’re not in charge here anymore, and you’re not my commanding officer. Consequently, you’re not in a position to make me do anything.”

  Nick smiled at him, actually quite pleased to discover that the man wasn’t willing to be manipulated so easily, and then asked him, “Lieutenant Commander Vandenhoven, do you truly believe that a vice-admiral with more than thirty-five years of service loses all of his influence upon retirement?”

  The younger officer didn’t have to say a word. The pained expression on his face was all the answer Nick needed. “She’s a former starship captain recently promoted to commodore to preserve her dignity after she lost her last command to her former executive officer, Lieutenant Commander, and she’s only filling my chair temporarily. I, on the other hand, am an honorably retired vice-admiral.”

  “I know that, sir... but...”

  “Three gold starbursts or one, Mister Vandenhoven?” Nick asked him, interrupting his reply to play the last ace he was holding. “Make your choice, son.”

  Vandenhoven swallowed visibly and hesitated for another moment, obviously thinking it over, and Nick couldn’t be sure but he thought the younger man was starting to sweat. To his credit, he held Nick’s experienced stare the entire time. Then he finally sighed again, dropped his gaze and asked, “What do you want to know, sir?”

  Chapter 27

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

  “Do it, sir,” the sergeant repeated.