Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  He folded the corner of the page to mark his place, then closed his book and set it aside in the empty seat beside him as he gazed out through the window at the millions of stars hanging like tiny gems against the black velvet curtain of space. He couldn’t wait to get back to Mandela. While the occasional short-term temporary duty assignment was always good for providing a welcome respite from life’s normal routines, it always felt good to get home.

  He rested his head against the pillow built into the back of the seat and reflected on his trip. All things considered, his so-called inspection tour of the surrounding security police units had gone pretty well—better than usual, actually, though why the brass had insisted on calling it an inspection tour in the first place was beyond him. He hadn’t inspected anything, nor had his itinerary called for him to do so. Conducting inspections of other units wasn’t even a part of his job. The real purpose of his tour had been to visit those other security police units to interview possible candidates who’d expressed an interest in joining his special assignments detachment. All totaled, he’d interviewed over two dozen interested SPs, and in his expert opinion, more than two-thirds of them had a real shot at making the team.

  God knew he needed the manpower every bit as much as any other shorthanded unit did. His people had been running themselves ragged for months.

  “Major Hansen, are you in your seat?” the pilot asked over the speaker imbedded in the seatback in front of him.

  He reached up and tapped the unit. “Yes I am,” he answered.

  “Sir, I have Colonel Embry standing by on comm from your brigade headquarters. He’s asking to speak to you on a private channel.”

  Hansen glanced around the passenger cabin. Most of the seats were empty, but there were a few other passengers whom he didn’t know scattered about, so he decided to take the call on the headset, just in case what the colonel had for him was classified. He pulled the headset out of the seat pocket and switched it on, then put it over his ear and said, “Okay, switch me over.” He heard the telltale click and beep, then announced himself. “Major Hansen here, sir, on headset.”

  “Major Hansen, Colonel Embry here.”

  “What can I do for you, Colonel?”

  “Major, I need you to divert to the M-O-S immediately. Major Ross has got some serious shit going down out there and he needs some help cleaning it up. Someone gained unauthorized access to one of the MOS-balled fleet ships and two security police personnel were killed while trying to apprehend the subject, who seems to have disappeared into thin air. And that comes on the heels of the murder of a C-I-D agent and the killing of an espionage suspect in that case.”

  Hansen sighed. The last thing he wanted on the back end of a short-term assignment was another short term assignment. “Colonel...”

  “Look, Nick,” the colonel interrupted, no doubt already well aware of how Hansen would feel about his orders. “I know you’re on your way back to Mandela Station, but Major Ross has officially requested additional security police personnel on a temporary basis to help his staff deal with this situation. Those personnel are already on their way there and I need my best staff officer there to act as their commanding officer and liaison to Major Ross and his people. That’s you, Major.”

  Hansen sighed again... this time with resignation. He wasn’t being given a choice. A new basic trainee in his first day of Boot Camp could have seen that much. He was being ordered to go, whether he wanted to or not. The colonel was simply being diplomatic about it. “Consider it done, Colonel,” he said. “I’ll tell the pilot to divert as soon we end this call.”

  “I’ve already taken care of that, Major, and thank you. I knew I could count on you. I’m sending all the details we have to your handcomp so you can familiarize yourself with the case on your way there. Update me as you can.”

  “Will do, Colonel. Anything else?”

  “That’s it for now, Major. Embry out.”

  The channel closed. Hansen drew a deep breath and sighed. “Sorry, Jessie,” he mumbled. “Guess you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer.”

  Chapter 38

  Dylan dropped to his knees, cupped his bloodied hands tightly over his ears and squeezed his pounding head between them, trying to deafen himself to the blood-curdling screams echoing unceasingly through the dark shafts of the Albion. It made no difference. He couldn’t shut them out. He couldn’t escape their condemnation. It was as if his dying comrades had become forever suspended in the moments of their tragic deaths—deaths that he had caused—and their screams were coming from inside his own head, and there was nothing he could do to make it stop. He started screaming himself, but even that didn’t help.

  And then, suddenly, the screaming finally stopped and he woke up. He wasn’t kneeling on the hard shaft floor anymore. He wasn’t even aboard the ship. He was back in his quarters in bed, and absent the death-screams that had filled his nightmares, his bedroom was deathly quiet.

  He felt pretty well rested, which he figured to be a good sign, but as he grew more awake and alert it didn’t take long for him to realize that he wasn’t in very good condition physically. Nor had he expected to be, given what he’d gone through, regardless of how much rest he might have gotten. On the contrary, he fully expected to be plagued by a myriad of aches and pains for at least the next several days, and as he lay there he decided that it might be a good idea to take stock of himself before he tried to move too much.

  He’d thrown his blankets off in his sleep, but his bottom sheet and pillow case felt damp with his sweat. His tongue felt swollen and sore where he’d bitten it, the right side of his jaw hurt when he yawned, and his neck was painfully stiff. Breathing didn’t hurt too badly so far, but the bandage he’d wrapped around his torso was preventing him from breathing very deeply, so that was likely going to change whenever he took it off—that was going to have to be soon, before his restricted breathing caused pneumonia—especially after having suffered several broken ribs just four short months ago. He reached up to rub the sleep from his eyes and felt stiffness in both of his shoulders. And then there was his leg. He remembered being shot in the leg. Well aware that moving it was going to hurt like hell, he braced himself, then raised it slightly up off the bed, slowly, grunting when it felt as though someone had just run a sword clean through his thigh.

  He grunted and groaned some more as he struggled to sit up, which proved to be every bit as difficult and painful as he’d expected it was going to be. By the time he managed to launch himself up off the bed and stand up straight, he felt as though he’d just wrestled an eight-hundred pound grizzly bear in the middle of a hot fusion reactor... and lost.

  He glanced at the clock in the wall—Thursday, 14 April 2168, 1640 hours—then started limping toward the dressing mirror, but as what he’d just seen on the clock’s display registered in his mind, he stopped short and looked again. Thursday! It was Thursday? That meant that he’d slept for two whole days, straight through, and that meant that this was a work night! He had to report for duty in a little more than six hours!

  He folded his arms across his aching ribs with a grimace and a sigh and hobbled over to the dressing mirror to look himself over, and the first thought that crossed his mind as he stepped in front of it and gazed at his reflection was that he was beginning to make an unfortunate habit of having to do so. He’d done so in his home on Cirra after being wounded while rescuing the Cirran crown prince and his consort and he’d done so again in the hospital after being wounded trying to prevent his neighbor’s abduction. And now there he was, standing naked in front of the mirror to examine his wounds... again. Déjà vu all over again.

  The right side of his face had swollen up slightly and felt particularly tender around the eye socket and cheekbone, but had hardly bruised at all. Both of his knees were banged up and his right hand ached so badly that he could barely ball it up into a fist. Despite that weakness, he managed to unfasten his torso bandage, but his left shoulder had stiffened quite a b
it so he had to unwind it very slowly and carefully. When he finally got down to the last couple of wraps, the bandage contracted and fell away on its own to reveal a dark purple, green, and yellow bruise about the size of a football covering most of his right side.

  Generally speaking, he was in pretty sad shape.

  He limped into the bathroom and cleaned himself up, which took a good long hour, then pulled on some clothes and went out for something to eat.

  The evening flew by much too quickly, and before he knew it, it was time to start back to his quarters to get ready for duty. As he passed several people on his way, he came to realize that no one he’d crossed paths with while he was out had given him a second look. Despite the pain he was in, it seemed as if his limp and his other injuries weren’t even noticeable to anyone else. He started to wonder if he might be able to hide his injuries from Orwell and his coworkers and do his job as if nothing were wrong, but by the time he actually made it back to his quarters and changed clothes, he realized that wasn’t going to be possible. Try as he might, he simply wasn’t going to make it through to the end of shift without some kind of medicinal help. He was in far too much pain to even try.

  The only other option available to him was to call into Security Control and ask the Desk Sergeant on duty to advise Sergeant Orwell that he might be a few minutes late. He did that, and then left his quarters and headed straight to the medbay.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said to the lieutenant who was sitting behind the nurse’s station when he walked in. “Is there a doctor available who can see me without too long a wait? I go on duty pretty soon.”

  The muscular young lieutenant looked up from his work and raised one dark eyebrow as he looked Dylan over. “No, there isn’t,” he answered, his tone unnecessarily firm, “but you look like you’d better see someone. Have a seat in there,” he said, pointing at the waiting room across the hall with his stylus. “I’ll call Doctor Zapala back in.”

  “Thank you,” Dylan answered. He stepped back from the counter, but rather than go into the waiting room, he hovered where he was for a moment, just to make sure the nurse followed through and actually made that call. The man’s tone of voice hadn’t exactly fostered trust in his word on Dylan’s part.

  The nurse flashed Dylan a dirty look as he tapped the comm-panel with the delete end of his stylus. “Medbay to Doctor Zapala.”

  After several seconds without a response, Dylan started doubting that this Doctor Zapala was going to answer. Then she did, and he found himself almost wishing that she hadn’t.

  “Doctor Zapala here,” she responded sharply. “What is it now?” She didn’t sound at all happy about being disturbed so late in the evening.

  “Nurse Batiste here, ma’am,” the lieutenant began, seemingly ignoring her angry tone. “I’m sorry to bother you again, but a security police sergeant just walked in and he looks pretty banged up. I think someone should see him, but no one else is available right now.”

  Doctor Zapala’s tired sigh came across loud and clear, and the verbal response that soon followed sounded a lot like total surrender. “All right. I’ll be right there. Zapala out.”

  “She sounded tired,” Dylan commented, simply trying to show a little empathy. After all, he was more than a little acquainted with long hours and lack of sleep himself. But what he’d intended as empathy, Batiste had apparently heard as sarcasm.

  “Doctor Zapala devotes a lot of extra hours to the job, Sergeant, far above and beyond her normal duty shifts,” he advised him none-too-calmly. “Take today for example. She got here at zero six-thirty this morning and just went off duty at exactly twenty-one forty-two hours. I think she’d like to be able to stay away from here until her next shift for once. Now, why don’t you go wait for her in the waiting room, Sergeant?”

  Dylan’s gaze lingered on the nurse for another second or two after he turned his attention back to his work. Then he went into the waiting room, sorry that he’d said anything and hoping for all the patients’ sakes that Nurse Batiste wasn’t that grouchy when he made his rounds.

  Less than five minutes after he sat down, an olive-skinned woman with long shiny black hair walked up to the nurse’s station, pulling a generic white lab coat on over her green medical scrubs as she spoke to Batiste. She turned and looked right at him through the window, glanced back at Batiste for a moment, and then stepped away from the counter. Seeing the name tag on her coat as she approached the waiting room door, Dylan stood up to greet her.

  “Sergeant Graves?” she asked, standing in the doorway.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed as he looked her over, hoping to get some idea of what kind of medical care experience he might be in for over the next little while.

  In the brief moment of silence that followed, he estimated that she was somewhere in her mid to upper forties. Her hair was streaked with gray in front, and subtle crow’s feet were just visible at the corners of her large, dark brown eyes. She was not at all unattractive for a woman her age, but the scowl she was wearing at the moment served as a clear warning to all who might cross her path that she was in no mood for the normal pleasantries.

  “Follow me, Sergeant,” she said, already stepping out of the doorway and heading down the hallway.

  Trying to ignore the pain that the simple act of walking was causing him, especially in his wounded leg, Dylan managed to catch up to her about halfway down the hall and followed her into an examining room, and then took a seat up on the diagnostic bed that she gestured toward as she walked by it. She grabbed an instrument tray and a handcomp off the counter, stepped up in front of him, and started running a hand-held scanner over his upper torso, all without saying a single word to him, and he decided that in the end he’d probably be better off if he just let her work in silence and answered her questions if and when she asked any. She was obviously in no mood for small talk.

  All of that changed when she moved the scanner up to his head. She ran it across his eyes and read the data on her handcomp’s screen. Her scowl disappeared almost immediately and was replaced by a look of utter bewilderment. “What the hell?”

  “Ma’am?”

  She looked up at him. No, it was more than that. She wasn’t just looking at him. She was staring at him, intensely. Specifically, she was staring at his left eye, as though she were trying to verify visually whatever it was her scanner had shown her. “That is not a typical cyberclone implant,” she declared conclusively.

  “You mean my eye?” Dylan asked her.

  Her focus shifted to a more benign form of eye contact. “Of course I mean your eye.”

  “Of course you do,” he parroted, feeling a little stupid. To what else could she have been referring? “And you’re right, Doctor. It’s not a cyberclone implant. It’s a biotronic replacement.” She looked at him with an expression somewhere between amazement and disbelief. He couldn’t really tell which. “It’s supposed to be indistinguishable from the real thing,” he added.

  “It damn near is,” she assured him. “If I didn’t know exactly what to look for… Even so, that has got to be the most advanced biotronic eye that I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of them, believe me. Whose is it?”

  A rather ambiguous choice of words, but that was a good thing. He could use that to his advantage. The time had come to employ some of that quick thinking that Commander Royer had put so much faith in. “It’s mine, of course,” he answered, hoping to buy himself a few more seconds to come up with a plausible answer to the question he knew she’d intended to ask. “Who else’s would it be?”

  She huffed with indignity and shook her head. “No, smart ass. I mean whose technology is it? Who manufactured it and where did you get it?”

  “On a hospital ship, about four months ago,” he told her. Not too unbelievable an answer, he figured. And at least if she examined it more closely, whatever medical evidence she might find would support the timeframe.

  “On a hospital ship?” She didn’t sound at all convinc
ed. “Sergeant, that eye isn’t based on Earth technology.”

  Dylan’s mind flashed back to one of those moments in the S.I.A. Academy that he knew he would never forget for as long as he lived. The lesson had been a relatively simple one, but no less important than any other for the students’ success as intelligence agents, and the instructor had worded it in such a way as to make it unforgettable. “When confronted by someone who knows their stuff, the best play is often to play stupid,” he’d said.

  “I don’t know the answers to your questions, ma’am.” Dylan told Doctor Zapala. “All I do know is that I was wounded. I lost my left eye and was given this one as a replacement.”

  “Well… who was the surgeon who installed it?” she then asked him.

  “I don’t remember,” he answered. That much at least was the truth.

  “Then what was the name of the hospital ship?” she persisted.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t remember that, either. I was badly wounded and pretty much out of it the whole time I was there. I really don’t remember anything.”

  “Well I’m sure as hell going to find out,” she told him as she keyed something into her handcomp. “That thing is years ahead of anything I’ve ever seen. Certainly ahead of anything I have here, and of anything currently available through Biotech Industries, for that matter, and they’re supposed to be the industry leader.”

  Great, Dylan thought, while at the same time being careful to check any outward reaction he might have shown to her stated intentions, which would likely have made matters even worse. The last thing he needed was someone digging too deeply into his manufactured history, looking for anomalies. The possibility of someone doing exactly that had been considered, of course, and Commander Royer had developed his cover story so that it fit as closely as possible with known historical events, but he doubted very much that it would stand up to extremely close scrutiny. Royer had said it herself during his mission briefing. They couldn’t plan for every contingency.