by Glenn Smith
Before Nick knew it they’d reached their destination—the first of two massive plastisteel blast doors, which was standing open in the tunnel’s right wall. The driver pulled the sedan over just beyond it to let them out.
Johnson thanked the driver as they climbed out, then walked beside Nick as they passed through the large doorway and strolled down the corridor to where the second massive blast door was also standing open. Along the way Nick noticed that he was drawing some curious looks, but he couldn’t tell if they were angry, hateful, or just that... curious. Not that it really mattered much anymore, he reminded himself. He was retired and would likely rarely if ever see any of those people again.
They passed through that second doorway into the main facility which, like the rest of the complex, had been owned and operated first by the old United States Air Force and then by the slightly realigned United States Aerospace Force since the place was built in the 1960’s, except for a relatively brief period in the early twenty-first century. Judging from all the two-tone blue uniforms most of the personnel were wearing, apparently still was.
“I’m seeing a lot of U-S Aerospace Force personnel around here, Rod,” Nick commented. “I thought Solfleet took the whole place over after Mandela went down.”
“We did, but the U-S-A-F still needs access to its space operations center. We have our entire phase-three facility farther in. I’m sad to say that’s all we need right now. We lost a lot of people on Mandela. We’ve moved our entire headquarters operation in here for the next several years until the new station is built, and we still have room for more.”
Johnson pointed and veered toward a two-man mini-car he spotted parked off to the side. He climbed in behind the controls and waited while Nick walked around and climbed in on the other side, then drove them deeper into the facility, beyond the back of the U.S.A.F. facility and into Solfleet’s new temporary headquarters. He pulled over and parked the little vehicle out of the way, then led Nick into the main building.
It took them a while to get there, but eventually, finally, they made it to Johnson’s office. The time for small talk had ended. Johnson led Nick inside and secured the door behind them, then stepped around him and headed for his desk.
It was a pretty standard setup. A government-issue desk and executive chair placed near the far wall facing the door, an optional coffeemaker embedded in the wall behind it, the flags of the Earth Federation and Solfleet Navy flanking it on either side in the corners, a pair of standard visitors’ chairs, a tall, narrow falsewood bookshelf filled with more personal knick-knacks and prior assignment holophotos and mementos than books, a few framed certificates on three of the walls, and a large communications screen mounted on the fourth. He didn’t have a nice, inviting conference area off to the side like Liz had had, but there was a second door in the wall where such an area might have been set up had there been a little more room, so maybe that led to one.
“Have a seat, Admiral,” Johnson invited, gesturing toward one of the visitor chairs as he walked around behind his desk. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’ve had enough,” Nick answered as he approached the chair. Then, as he sat down, he added, “I expected a little better for the deputy chief of the S-I-A, Rod. Even in here.”
“I actually turned that position down, Admiral,” Johnson told him as he, too, sat down.
“You what?” Nick asked, both surprised and a little disappointed. As a junior officer Rod had always been top-notch and had seemed destined to command the agency one day, at least in Nick’s eyes. For him to have diverted himself from that path intentionally, now that he’d moved up into the command grades, even if only temporarily, was... well... disappointing.
“Yeah, I accepted command of Special Operations instead. It’s a whole separate position now, thanks to... well... thanks to you and Commander Royer, frankly, sir.”
“I see.”
Johnson grinned, then went on, “Anyway, it was serving in that capacity that allowed me to get a look at all the residential security camera footage of Stefani O’Donnell’s kidnapping as it occurred.”
“I’ve seen that footage several times,” Nick told him. “It ultimately proved not to be of any help to us.”
“That’s because the right pair of eyes only recently got an opportunity to see it,” Johnson pointed out. “Long story short, Admiral, we now know who abducted her.”
That peaked Nick’s interest. “We do?” he asked with anticipation.
“Yes, sir, we do,” Johnson assured him. He paused a moment and sat forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his desk. Then, looking Nick square in the eye, he said, “But I have to draw the line somewhere, Admiral, and unfortunately that somewhere is right here. I can’t tell you who it is or even how we know who it is until you come in all the way and agree to work with us on mounting a rescue mission. If you don’t agree, then there will be no rescue mission and the identities of all parties involved to this point will remain protected.”
“And if I do agree?”
“Then I’ll tell you everything, sir, and be happy to do so. And I’ll introduce you to your team, including the person who identified the leader of the kidnappers in the first place.”
Nick paused to consider his decision. His team, Rod had said. His team. On the one hand, he wanted O’Donnell back home safe and sound, out of harm’s way, even though she was going to have to face charges. He would have wanted that for any of his people. To be a part of making that happen would certainly serve as a much more fitting end to his career than the one he’d been afforded. But on the other hand, he’d given Heather his word—had made certain promises to her that he could not go back on. Perhaps there was a way that he could do both. Perhaps there was some way to locate and recover O’Donnell without breaking his word to Heather.
“Stefani O’Donnell went AWOL and violated a number of laws,” he reminded his former subordinate, getting back to the business at hand. Then he quickly added, before Johnson had a chance to, “But then my record isn’t exactly spotless, is it?”
“No, sir, I’m afraid it’s not,” Johnson replied evenly.
“And before she went and got herself into all that trouble,” Nick continued, “she was one of my troops. My responsibility.”
“Yes, sir, she was.”
He thought it over for another few moments, then made his decision. He looked Johnson in the eye and said, “Let’s go find our girl, Rod. Let’s go find her and bring her home.” He’d work it out with Heather later. Somehow.
“Not us, sir,” Johnson pointed out. “As I said, I’ve already assembled a team for you.”
“Right. You also said you’d introduce me to them.”
Johnson stood up. “Follow me, sir.”
Nick stood up and followed Johnson toward the second door which, as it turned out, did open into a conference room as he had suspected it might. A large rectangular table dominated the room and was surrounded by about a dozen chairs, five of which were already occupied by a group of battle-hardened-looking fleet Marines dressed in their class-A’s—one heavily decorated sergeant major and four mid-range NCOs, whose jackets sported quite an impressive number of ribbons themselves.
“Admiral on deck!” the sergeant major bellowed as he stood up. He snapped to attention and the other four Marines jumped to their feet and followed suit.
“As you were,” Nick commanded... if ‘commanded’ was even the right word anymore.
“Gentlemen... and lady,” Johnson added, apparently just remembering that one of those rugged-looking Marines happened to be a woman as all but the sergeant major sat back down, “It is my honor to introduce to you Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen, retired, former chief of the S.I.A.” He faced Nick but gestured toward the sergeant major. “Admiral Hansen, this is the team, led by Sergeant Major Marcus Adeyemi. Sergeant Major Adeyemi is the man who identified the leader of the kidnappers for us.”
“Is that right?” Nick asked rhetorically as he e
xtended his hand toward the senior NCO. Roughly Nick’s age, Adeyemi was a big man, tall and muscular, completely bald, with leathery skin the color of dark chocolate and deep brown eyes that nonetheless seemed to burn with an energy all their own. He had a long, slightly discolored curving scar across his left cheek that ran from just beneath the inner corner of his eye down to his jaw line, and his crooked nose had obviously been broken at least once. His left jacket sleeve bore combat service stripes from cuff line to elbow, and he wore half again as many ribbons on his chest as Nick had worn on his own, many of them combat medals, some sporting sun clusters to indicate multiple awards, a few with ‘V’ devices for valor. This man was a true war hero, and definitely not a man Nick would ever want to have to go up against.
“Yes sir, Admiral, that’s right,” Adeyemi answered for himself as he grasped Nick’s hand firmly and shook it, his voice a deep baritone that seemed to shake the walls when he spoke. He spoke with a slight trace of an accent. Something African most likely, but Nick couldn’t place it.
Nick glanced down at their hands—Adeyemi’s large, somewhat gnarled appendage made his own look more the size of his daughter’s by comparison—then looked up into the big man’s dark eyes and asked him, “So who is he, Sergeant Major?”
“His name’s Paul Pagano, and he’s one cold-blooded sick son-of-a-bitch, sir,” Adeyemi answered in no uncertain terms as he let go of Nick’s hand. “He’s a former fleet Marine turned lowlife mercenary. I served with him in my first unit back in the mid to late sixties and saw him do things to enemy prisoners that gave me nightmares for years afterwards. If he really does still have your crewman...”
“We have reason to believe the Veshtonn were behind her abduction,” Nick told him, being careful not to say anything more than he had to. “Whether they wanted to get their claws on her themselves for some reason or just wanted her out of their way, we don’t know. Would this Pagano guy go as far as to betray Earth and work for them? Would he actually turn her over to them if they asked him to?”
“He’d betray his own father and kill his own mother and sell his brothers and sisters into slavery if the payoff was big enough, sir,” Adeyemi assured him. “He would absolutely work for the Veshtonn, and for your crewman’s sake you should wish he did turn her over to them. She’d be safer in their hands than in his. But he didn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know him, sir. I know what he likes.”
“Our latest boots-on-the-ground intelligence leads us to believe he still has her, Admiral,” Johnson interjected, drawing Nick’s attention. “High enough reliability to warrant going forward, in my opinion.”
“Has her where?”
“Cirra. All this time we’ve been searching for clues as to her whereabouts, he never even took her off world. Had he tried, and had the Veshtonn wanted to get their claws on her as you so colorfully put it, they certainly could have. Especially while we were busy fighting them in our own solar system.”
Nick considered that for a moment. If she really was still on Cirra and they knew where, then getting to her should be relatively easy. But pulling off a rescue... He looked at Adeyemi again. “You said you served with him, Sergeant Major. If it comes down to it and you’re forced to kill him...”
“I hope I am forced to kill him, sir,” Adeyemi told him, seemingly sincere. “It will be my distinct pleasure to end that sick son-of-a-bitch’s miserable life.”
“I see,” Nick replied, convinced. He wondered for a moment what Pagano could possibly have done to Adeyemi to earn his obvious hatred, but then decided that he probably didn’t want to know. He left that alone and instead looked past the sergeant major and glanced briefly around the table at the others. “Introduce me to your team if you would, Sergeant Major.”
“I’d be happy to, Admiral.” He stepped to one side, out of Nick’s way, and the four much younger Marines rose once more to their feet and stood facing them. He gestured toward the one farthest to their left—a young blond-haired, blue-eyed, light-complexioned sergeant who looked to be in his mid-twenties. “Sergeant Tobias Engel of Rothenburg, Germany—anatomical expert and medical specialist. We call him ‘Doc’ of course.”
Anatomical expert? What the hell was an anatomical expert? He’d have to remember to ask Rod later. “Sergeant Engel,” Nick greeted the rosy-cheeked young man.
“Sir,” the young sergeant replied, stone-faced.
Apparently, the young medic didn’t talk a whole lot.
Adeyemi shifted his gesture toward the next person—an olive-skinned woman of thirty or so with short brown-hair and hazel-eyes who looked as though she could take on any two of her teammates at the same time and probably beat them. Well... except maybe for the sergeant major. Nick couldn’t think of anyone he’d ever met who he thought could take him on and win. “Squad Sergeant Marcy ‘Max’ Axton, originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, hazardous materials handler and explosive ordnance expert.”
Hazardous materials? “Sergeant Axton.”
“Admiral,” she returned. “Nothin’ says hello like blowin’ somethin’ up, ay.”
“Sergeant Larry ‘Gizmo’ Smith of San Francisco, our computer and electronics expert,” Adeyemi continued, gesturing toward the next troop in line—an average looking young man of average build, medium brown hair, and medium brown eyes, who nonetheless looked familiar somehow. “And squad sergeant Terrence ‘Eagle Eye’ Irby of Washington D-C,” he concluded, gesturing toward the young man who could have been his own son if he’d had the right name, “our sniper.”
“Gentlemen,” Nick greeted the last two, nodding to both of them.
“Admiral, sir,” they replied together.
“Welcome back, Admiral,” Smith then added.
Nick nodded to Smith again and then turned his eyes back to Adeyemi and asked, “And where are you from, Sergeant Major?”
“Lagos, Nigeria, sir.”
“Really? Your accent doesn’t sound that strong.”
“I’ve been away from home for a very long time, sir.”
“It looks like you’ve put together quite the team, Sergeant Major,” Nick said, glancing around at the service stripes on the Marines’ arms and the combat ribbons on their chests. “But why only five, and aren’t your teams usually led by a commissioned officer?”
“I understood that was to be your roll, sir,” Adeyemi replied.
Nick turned his eyes to Johnson and asked the question without having to say a word.
“From a distance, sir,” Johnson specified. “I meant it when I told you this was your team. You will be in command. More of an observer than a participant, but all the authority will rest in your hands. Execute or scrub, it’ll be your call every step of the way.”
“We have Special Ops Ranger units stationed on Cirra already,” Nick pointed out. “You know that, Rod. Why this half-team of five instead of one of them?”
“This is a very special team, Admiral,” Johnson answered. “They’re all combat veterans, they’re fully cross-trained in one another’s primary specialties, and those specialties are only the beginning of their... special talents.”
Nick looked over the team once more, one Marine at a time, until his gaze finally settled on Sergeant Smith. He really did look familiar. Granted, he looked like about a thousand other service members Nick had seen over his nearly thirty-six years in the fleet, but it was more than that. He personally, individually, looked very familiar. Extremely familiar. Nick knew he’d met him somewhere before. “Where do I know you from, Sergeant Smith?” he finally asked when he realized that his steady gaze was making the young man nervous.
“I was stationed on Mandela Station right out of Basic and Tech School, sir, long before I joined Special Operations. I wrote a computer program for you.”
“That’s right, the HAL program,” Nick recalled. What were the chances?
“Yes, sir,” Smith confirmed, wearing a proud smile. “Still working for you?”
�
��Actually, I lost it when Mandela went down,” Nick answered. Then he asked, “Do you think you could recreate it for me?”
“Sure, no problem,” Smith assured him. “I’m sure I still have most of the base code, so it should only take me a day or two. Will that be soon enough?”
“That depends when we’re leaving,” Nick answered, looking to Johnson for that.
“I don’t know yet, sir, but it won’t be for several days at least,” Johnson informed him. “I have a few special arrangements to make after this mission briefing.”
Mission briefing? He had it prepared already? He looked back at Smith. “Seems two days will be good, Sergeant. There’s something else I’d like you to do for me, too, if you can, but apparently we have a mission briefing to sit through first. See me when we’re done here and we can discuss it.”
“Be happy to, sir.”
* * *
A couple of hours later Johnson escorted Nick back out of the restricted area and shook his hand once more, after which Nick returned to his sedan in a little bit of a hurry to get home. Heather was either going to very excited or very angry—very excited, he hoped—but either way he was looking forward to telling her. He’d deal with her reaction, whatever it might turn out to be, when the time came.
The ‘something else’ he’d wanted Sergeant Smith to do for him was to provide him with a program that would enable him to hack into Solfleet’s central network and gain access to all of his personnel records, including all the classified stuff. One way or another, he intended to find out for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, whether or not he’d ever been subjected to a memory-edit. Not surprisingly, Smith had already had one written and on hand—Nick didn’t even want to know why—so had given him a copy of it on a data-chip with his compliments... and with a warning. The program was sound. He’d used it before, but using it without tripping any security programs could be a little tricky. Nick had listened to his warning and then asked him if it might be safer to wait for the HAL program and then let HAL use the hacking program. Smith had liked that idea and had promised to write the necessary code into the new HAL.
