Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  Nick glanced back over his shoulder and up the stairs to find Rebecca standing at the top holding a towel around her with one hand like Heather and white-knuckling the banister with the other, obviously confused and afraid. The he faced the squad sergeant again, nodded once more to confirm that Rebecca’s status was in fact what he’d assumed, and then asked him, “What the hell is going on here, Sergeant?”

  “Retired Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen,” the NCO began as three of the city’s S.W.A.T. officers entered through the still open front door and spread out behind the MP tactical assault team. Professional courtesy in action, no doubt. The MPs’ commanding officer had contacted the C.S.P.D., told them that military police would be operating in their jurisdiction, and invited them to participate. At least, that was how they’d done things back when Nick was a military police officer. “You are under arrest for breaching security and gaining unauthorized access by illegal means to the Solfleet central and S-I-A classified networks.”

  “Arrest!” Heather exclaimed, glaring at the MP.

  “Heather, relax,” Nick told her, looking back over his shoulder.

  “You can’t arrest him!” she insisted, ignoring her father. “You’re military police! He’s a civilian now!”

  “Yes he can, sweetheart,” Nick informed her as he raised his hands a little bit higher and turned around in response to the squad sergeant’s silent gestures.

  “How?!” she demanded to know.

  “As long as your father draws retirement from the fleet we can exercise jurisdiction over him if and whenever necessary, miss,” the NCO explained to her while one of his subordinates stepped forward and started patting Nick down.

  “Why is this happening, Dad?!” Heather asked her father, pleading with her eyes to see this nightmare end. “What do they think you did?!”

  “It’s just a misunderstanding,” he lied. He, of course, knew that it wasn’t. “Some kind of mistake has been made. Someone obviously got their lines crossed or something.” He glanced up at Rebecca, still frozen solid at the top of the stairs wearing that ‘deer in headlights’ expression on her face as though she were afraid to breathe, then met Heather’s frightened stare once more. He wanted to tell her something more. Something to help put her at ease. And then it dawned on him that whatever the authorities had in store for him, Mirriazu could and likely would get him out of it... for Heather’s sake if not for his own. She might be deeply angry with him, but she loved Heather like her own daughter. Everything would turn out all right in the end. “You and Rebecca go ahead to school,” he told her. I’ll go with the MPs and straighten all this out. I’ll be back here by the time you come home, okay?”

  “Are you sure, Dad?” she asked him, watching as the MP who’d searched him guided his hands behind his back and put him in handcuffs.

  “It’ll be fine, Heather,” he assured her. “Just go get ready and go to school.”

  The same MP took him by one arm and the squad sergeant took him by the other. Then they turned him around and led him away, out through the front door, surrounded by the rest of the police officers, leaving the frightened girls behind.

  Outside, Nick glanced up and down the street to find his some of his curious neighbors looking out windows or poking their heads outside their doors to see what was happening. If any of them started spreading rumors or harassing Heather with questions while he was gone there would be hell to pay when he got back. He intended to make a home for his daughter here where she could feel safe and secure.

  Solfleet MP and C.S.P.D. vehicles alike started pulling up as the MPs walked him up to the side of the road. One of them was an armored transport. His ride, no doubt.

  “What are you going to do about my front door, Sergeant?” he asked as the city S.W.A.T. officers finished shaking hands with the other MPs and started climbing into their vehicles and driving off. “My daughter still has to live there.”

  “Someone’s already on their way to fix it,” the NCO answered. “I’m leaving two of my men behind to stand guard and then secure it when the work is done. Nothing else will happen to your home or your daughter.”

  Good enough. The house would be guarded and Heather would be safe until he returned home. Everything would be all right.

  His handlers guided him up into the back of the transport, strapped him into one of the prisoner seats, and then sat down in the seats on either side of him. “Let’s go,” the NCO called out, slapping the forward wall a couple of times. The transport pulled away.

  Yes, the day was going to be another uncomfortably warm one...

  ...and long.

  Chapter 31

  Earth Standard Date: Tuesday, 12 April 2168

  Regardless of how mentally and emotionally tough, how well trained and conditioned, or how hardened by years of experience a person might be, being involved in a shooting on the job was always a traumatic experience—one that a person could never totally get used to, regardless of how many times he might have gone through it. Policeman on the street or soldier in a combat zone, it made no difference, and Dylan was certainly no exception. He’d seen combat for the first time while technically still a trainee and it had taken weeks afterwards for the fleet’s doctors to help him screw his head back on straight. As a military policeman he’d been involved in several shootings over the years, and as a Ranger in the Marine Corps he’d seen combat that had made those shootings seem like kids playing cops and robbers by comparison. He’d seen dozens of his comrades die, had lost several good troopers under his own direct leadership, and had taken more than a hundred enemy lives that he could confirm, and none of those horrific experiences, or the fact that his quick action had likely saved PFC Gillis’ life, had made blowing half the suspect’s head away any easier. Yes, that suspect had murdered one agent and assaulted two others, but the bottom line for Dylan was that he’d taken another life. There was no getting around that fact.

  Fortunately, however, all of those previous experiences had prepared him to deal with the political aftermath—all the official red tape that he’d known the moment he squeezed the trigger that the powers that be were going to put him through before they allowed him to return to full duty status. Thanks in no small part to those experiences, he’d learned a long time ago exactly what he would need to say to tell the psychologists—exactly what answers he’d need to give in order to earn their official ‘return to duty’ recommendation as quickly as possible.

  And return to duty he had, the very next night. True to form, everyone had started acting as though nothing had happened. The shooting had quickly become yesterday’s news. The next day was a new day, or for those on his shift, a new night.

  Squad Sergeant Orwell had resumed the guided tour of the entire facility, telling pointless stories about each area ad nauseam, and just as he’d warned, hadn’t finished the tour until three nights later, about halfway through their two day break. Glad to get away from him for at least a little while—Dylan liked him well enough, but he’d sorely needed a break—and knowing that he was going to start working without a partner beginning with the next cycle, Dylan had spent the last night of their break alone in his quarters, relaxing and mentally preparing himself for the task at hand.

  Under normal conditions, of course—at least those conditions Dylan had worked under when he was a military police patrolman—every patrolman would have worked with a partner at all times, and more than likely would have been roommates with that partner as well if they were both either single or unaccompanied. But during this time period, Dylan reflected as he strolled through the corridors on his way back to Security Control, the war against the Veshtonn Empire, though paused, had forced Solfleet Command to spread what remained of its armed forces very thin, and there just weren’t enough personnel to fill all of the billets—especially for rear echelon units like those assigned to the shipyard. Much more than his status as an NCO, that shortage of personnel stood as the reason why he’d been assigned quarters of his own, and why, after havin
g survived Orwell’s excruciatingly painful tour and having become thoroughly familiar with the facility’s layout, he’d been working without a partner for the past two weeks, as had everyone else on his shift.

  Since the shooting, few incidents requiring any security police intervention had occurred. Despite the current ceasefire, or perhaps because of it, there had been an almost steady influx of ships in need of major repairs arriving on station around the clock. In some instances, entire battle groups had shown up together, sometimes with one or more ships crippled and under tow, or even missing entirely. Solfleet had taken a major beating prior to the cessation of hostilities and was still grossly under strength, so it was vital those ships be repaired and returned to the line as quickly as possible, for the sake of both the security of Earth and shipyard operations. After all, a ceasefire agreement with the Veshtonn was tenuous at best, and no one could predict how long it might last, or how violently it might end. There was too much work to be done and not enough people to do it, so with most of the technical and engineering crews pulling double shifts, no one had time to get into trouble.

  Dylan was thankful for that. No incidents meant no arrests to make, no statements to take, and no complaint reports to write, and no arrests or statements or complaint reports meant that he’d been able to return to his quarters immediately after shift every morning and get a good six or seven hours of sleep before he had to wake up and devote some time to his real work—to the mission that had brought him back in time in the first place.

  But this morning would be different. This morning sleep would have to wait, or perhaps be forgone completely. Guided by a detailed schematic that Commander Royer had programmed into his handcomp, and using various small components and spare parts that he’d bought at some of the shops in the Rotunda or had ‘otherwise obtained’ from several other areas of the facility, he’d finished building the monitoring/tracking device that would immediately alert him if anyone tried to steal the Albion, assuming, of course, that it worked the way Royer’s instructions had said it would. In addition, he’d crafted several special makeup appliances for his face and hands that would make him look much older and hopefully very different. Those, too, he’d fashioned according to Commander Royer’s instructions. A holo-mask and gloves would have been a lot easier to work with, but he would have had to buy those off the black-market, and Royer hadn’t wanted to take the chance that he might not have time to make the right connections. He’d also been studying the Albion’s blueprints and technical manuals, memorizing as much about the ship’s layout and operation as he could. He’d even obtained her remote computer access codes, though he wasn’t very proud of how he’d gone about getting them. The method he’d employed was similar to what Commander Royer had done to him. He’d dug up some dirt on the dock master and used it to threaten him. No, not to threaten him. To blackmail him. No point in sugarcoating it. If he talked...

  At any rate, after two weeks of spending almost every waking off-duty hour working, the miniature alarm—he’d started referring to it as a ‘microlarm’—and his makeup appliances were finally ready. Now all that remained was for him to don the disguise and sneak aboard the Albion undetected to install the microlarm. ‘All’ that remained. It wasn’t going to be that easy. Nearly a century ago an interplanetary shuttle had been stolen out of an orbital space station by its former pilot, right out from under the noses of the dock control personnel. As a result, security and dock control personnel at every shipyard and docking facility in the fleet had been directed to conduct periodic visual security checks and routine scanning of all ships in dry-dock at irregular intervals as a part of their standard procedure. This stage of the mission was going to prove challenging at best, and Dylan was not looking forward to the challenge. If he got caught aboard that ship, there would be no explaining his presence there. He would be taken into custody, tossed into the brig, and investigated as a possible saboteur.

  He would fail to complete his mission.

  As soon as he arrived back at Control he turned his handcomp over to the desk sergeant so she could upload his patrol report and attach it to the security police blotter, then went straight to the armory to turn in his service weapon. While he waited in line to do so—weapons issue and turn-in was never a speedy process—he responded in kind whenever one of his coworkers threw him a ‘see-you-Thursday-night,’ and when his turn at the window finally came, he turned in his weapon as quickly as he could and then headed straight to his quarters, just as he had every other morning after shift.

  No changes to his established routine.

  He’d been in his quarters for almost three weeks now and had even personalized them to some small extent, hanging a couple of pictures he’d bought for cheap at the Rotunda and setting up a table for his ‘hobby,’ but he still found it difficult to think of them as home, even though for all intents and purposes they were home as much as any other place he’d lived since he joined the service. Thinking of them that way would probably help pass the time more easily, but so far it wasn’t happening. Home was more than twenty years in the future. Home was with the Solfleet Marines in 2190, or rather 2191 by now probably. Home was where Beth was waiting for him to return to her. Nevertheless, walking through that front door and locking it behind him after shift every morning was beginning to fill him with a certain sense of relief, as though the walls that enclosed him somehow provided him with a place where he could let his guard down for a little while—a place where he could forget about his mission and truly relax.

  Except for this morning.

  He stripped off his uniform and tee shirt and tossed them into the laundry, then went into the bathroom and scrubbed his face and his neck and his hands and lower arms until his skin was as clean as it was ever going to get. Then, after he’d thoroughly dried off, he began the slow, tedious process of very carefully gluing the fragile makeup appliances into place, blending them in seamlessly with his real skin, and graying his hair, transforming himself from the tired twenty-nine year old security police sergeant into an equally tired eighty-something year old civilian starship design engineer, and wishing the entire time that he had at least tried to get his hands on a holo-mask and gloves. They really would have been so much easier. All the user had to do was program them from any computer terminal, pull them on, and activate them, and suddenly the user looked like someone else entirely. No fragile appliances, no makeup, and best of all no face covered in glue.

  But he hadn’t tried, and chances were that he wouldn’t have been able to get any anyway. After all, black-marketeers weren’t the most trusting souls. He might have been lucky enough to make the right connections, but he just as likely might have gotten himself killed. No, the much slower old-fashioned makeup had been his only viable option. The elaborate metamorphosis took him nearly three hours to complete, concluding with the insertion of blue contact lenses in his eyes—his own idea—and when he looked into the mirror and examined the results of his work, he felt confident that no one would recognize him.

  He also felt relieved to see that he didn’t look anything like Doctor Royer, the possibility of which had concerned him ever since he’d rescued the man.

  His next step was to very carefully insert the small microlarm receiver into place... in his biotronic arm. Using an injector that he’d ‘borrowed’ from the medbay just this morning, albeit without anyone’s knowledge, he injected the tiny device into his shoulder in such a way as to be sure that he’d broken through the subdural insulation layer and attached it directly to the main sensory input processor. The procedure proved to be significantly more painful than he expected it would be, despite the fact that his entire arm, including the shoulder, was artificial, and at one point he grimaced so severely that he feared he might have torn loose and possibly damaged one of his facial appliances. But upon close inspection in the mirror, he didn’t find any tears or loose edges. Everything was all right.

  Finally, he pulled on a pair of nondescript gray trousers, a p
lain white shirt, and an old, slightly too large dark blue cardigan sweater, all of which he’d bought separately over the last several days in three different stores in the Rotunda. He’d thought briefly about adding an old-fashioned pair of eyeglasses to his disguise, but eyeglasses were so rarely seen anymore that he feared they might actually draw attention to him rather than help him to blend in, so in the end he’d decided against that idea.

  He took his handcomp from its hiding place behind his dresser and slipped it up under his sweater and clipped it onto his belt, then wrapped the microlarm transmitter in a handkerchief and placed it carefully inside his sweater’s right pocket. Then he stepped into what he’d started thinking of as his ‘old-man shoes’—the very old-fashioned brown wingtips that were apparently still pretty popular with most of the older scientists and engineers around the facility. Something like two out of every three older gentlemen he’d crossed paths with since he’d arrived on station, scientists and engineers every one of them, had been wearing them. Come to think of it, Doctor Royer had been wearing a pair of them.

  As ready for this step as he was ever going to get, Dylan left his quarters.

  At first he made quick progress through corridors that were nearly if not totally deserted, ignored by most of the few people he did see and at least unchallenged by the rest. Shipyards housed ships, and where there were ships there were engineers. Civilian contractors were part of the scenery at the M.O.S., and most other personnel likely didn’t pay them much attention. But as he walked deeper into the heart of the facility and began making his way toward the medbay, he started crossing paths with more and more personnel, including security police personnel. He did his best to avoid making eye contact with any of them and, in return, they left him alone and went about their business, at least for a while. But when he’d made it roughly two-thirds of the way to his destination, all of that changed.