Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  He turned his eyes back to Heather, found her looking up at him, and tried to shut the noise Max was making out of his mind.

  “What time is it?” Heather asked him through her moans as she stretched.

  “About seven-fifteen,” Nick replied without bothering to check his watch again. “You’ve been asleep for almost ten hours.”

  “I needed it.”

  “Yeah, you did. You were pretty tired last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So are you awake enough now, or do you need some time?”

  Heather sat up. She was wearing the same old loose-fitting faded pink tee shirt she’d had on when she went to bed. Nick was pleased to see that she’d kept it on all night. She propped her pillow up against the headboard and then scooted back and sat back against it. “Yeah, I’m awake enough,” she replied. “Tell me everything.”

  “We’re on our way to a planet called Cirra in the Caldanra star system,” he began.

  “Somewhere I’ve never been, nice,” she commented. Then she asked, “So how long will it take us to get there?”

  “Aboard this speedy little vessel, about a week, give or take a few hours, once we jump,” He glanced at his watch, “which should be any time now.”

  “A week?” she asked, clearly not pleased by the prospect. “Dad, I’m really glad we got this chance to go somewhere, but what am I supposed to do on this ship for a whole week?”

  “There’s a stack of readers in the galley,” Max tossed out.

  Nick and Heather both looked her way to find her standing with her hands on her hips, taking a breather. “How’s the selection?” Heather asked her.

  “Surprisingly good,” the woman assured her. “Books, magazines, comics... pretty much anything you could want. There are some games and movies on some of them, too.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Heather looked back to her father. “So, have you ever been to this planet called Cirra? What’s it like?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been there once or twice. It’s a lot like Earth, actually, except that it has two small moons instead of one large one. It’s about the same size as Earth, so the gravity feels the same. The sun is slightly more orange than ours, but that’s barely even noticeable most of the time, and the sky is blue with only a slightly greener tint to it. The only real differences are that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, the days are twenty-seven hours long, and most of the plant life is generally blue rather than green.”

  “Really? It’s all blue?”

  “Most of it is, yeah. From where we’ll be on Solfleet’s Grainger Army-Aerospace Base south of Tarko City you’ll be able to see a huge, dense forest of hundred meter-tall everblue trees to the north and west leading up to a wall of snowcapped mountains off in the distance. Those trees smell just like pine trees back on Earth, but with a strong minty smell mixed in.”

  “It sounds beautiful,” she remarked. “I’m looking forward to seeing it.”

  “I thought you might enjoy it.”

  “So now that I know where we’re going, tell me why.”

  Nick drew a breath to answer, but hesitated. He’d promised to fill her in on everything, but some of the details were obviously very sensitive. Classified information, in fact. He could probably satisfy her curiosity without telling her everything, and frankly, she didn’t need to know everything anyway. “Some of what I’m about to tell you is still classified when presented in full context,” he finally began. “You can’t ever repeat any of it to anyone who’s not assigned to this mission. That includes our flight crew. They only know where we’re going. Understand?”

  “Yeah,” she assured him, nodding her head. “I understand.”

  “All right.” He’d tell her enough to keep his promise, but only in general terms. He loved her and didn’t want his promise to turn out being a lie, but he couldn’t justify divulging classified information. Not even to his own daughter. “A little less than a year ago, a Marine platoon found evidence that indicated one of our officers who’d been listed as M-I-A more than twenty years ago might still be alive, held prisoner by the Veshtonn. That officer’s daughter was a crewman in the fleet and worked for me at the time. She found out about it and went AWOL to try to hire some mercenaries to go into Veshtonn space to try to rescue him. Liz found her on Cirra, but... but someone abducted her before Liz could arrest her and bring her back to Earth.” No need to tarnish Liz’s memory in his daughter’s eyes. “Lieutenant Commander Johnson recently found out that she’s still being held on Cirra by the same people who abducted her. These Marines are going to go in and get her out.”

  “I thought the military police did that kind of work. Looking for troops who go AWOL, I mean.”

  “They do,” he confirmed.

  “The why was Liz out there looking for her.”

  “She wasn’t, actually. She’d gone to Cirra to try to recruit a Marine squad sergeant I met once at the shipyards orbiting Mars, back in sixty-eight after...” He fell silent and looked away.

  “After what?” Heather prompted him. “Dad? Back in sixty-eight after what?”

  Heather’s questions fell on deaf ears. Nick was... what? Shocked? Confused? He didn’t even know what to feel. Confused, certainly. Bad enough that Graves appeared in his nightmares every night, forcing him to wonder if he’d ever been subjected to a memory-edit and if so, why? But they were nightmares. Dreams. They weren’t real memories. But this... this was a memory! A real, conscious, waking memory! How could that be? How could he have met Dylan Graves at the Martian shipyards in sixty-eight? Graves would have been a small child of around six years old then! He couldn’t have met him then! It was impossible!

  No. No, something was wrong with his memory. That had to be it. He was suffering from some kind of side-effect of the memory-edit that he must have been subjected to at some time in the past. That had to be it! He hadn’t met Graves for the first time until just six months ago, back on Mandela Station after they’d selected him for the Timeshift mission.

  No doubt about it. He’d been subjected to a memory-edit and now he was suffering from unexpected side effects. First the nightmares about a traumatic event from his past but with the wrong details, and now waking, conscious memories of events that never actually occurred at all. Bhatnagar had to find something. She had to!

  He would start hounding her until she did... as soon as they got back to Earth. But right now there was nothing he could do. He had to set it all aside and concentrate on the mission at hand.

  “Dad?”

  Nick looked at his daughter She looked concerned. How long had she been trying to get his attention?

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “Yeah,” he answered evenly. Then he cleared his throat and added, “Yeah, I’m fine. I just... My mind wandered for a moment. I’m okay. I just rolled out of bed a few minutes ago. I just need some coffee to help wake me up.”

  “Let’s get some breakfast,” she suggested.

  “Good idea.”

  Nick stood and gazed over at Max again as he stepped back to give Heather room enough to climb out of bed. Apparently having rested long enough, she was lying on her back knocking out a set of abdominal crunches, once more hissing like a broken steam pipe.

  “I really like that you still care enough about your crewman to try to rescue her after all this time,” Heather told him as she pulled a pair of shorts on over the panties she’d slept in, “but won’t this mission be kind of dangerous?”

  How could he remember meeting someone who... No. He couldn’t think about that now.

  Heather had just asked a question. “Cirra’s a friendly world in the Caldanra star system, which we control nearly in its entirety,” he answered, still watching Max while out of the corner of his eye he saw Heather peeling off her tee shirt. Women with such firm and well defined muscular tone didn’t normally attract his attention so completely, but she was pretty easy on the eyes regardless. “Their neighbors, the Sulaini, control the immediate a
rea around their planet, but they’re strictly on the defensive now. Now that we’ve pushed the Veshtonn out of the system, they’re not a serious threat anymore. Besides, you and I won’t be participating in the mission. We’ll be perfectly safe back on the base with Rod, monitoring the field team while they carry out the mission. I wouldn’t have brought you if I thought it might put you in danger.”

  There was simply no way possible he could have met Graves at the M.O.S. in sixty-eight. He knew for a fact that the events he was remembering never really happened.

  Heather had put on a bra and was pulling a clean tee shirt on over her head when one of the flight crew announced over the intercom, “Flight deck to passengers. We are on approach to Trident Jumpstation at this time. Be prepared for a slight surge in the next few minutes.”

  “Hey, I have an idea” he said, trying his best to anchor his thoughts on the here and now as Heather stepped into her flip-flops. “You want to go up to the flight deck and see what it looks like to slip into jumpspace before we go eat?”

  “Yeah, sure!” she replied with some excitement. “Are we allowed in there?”

  He smiled at her. “I am a retired admiral, remember?”

  She smiled back at him, and Nick led the way out.

  They walked up the corridor and around the tactical display table between the head and the large equipment locker in which the environmental suits and other emergency supplies were stored, and then stopped at the flight deck door. Nick pressed the buzzer, and a moment later a woman responded over the intercom.

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Admiral Hansen,” Nick answered, and he had to admit it felt good to identify himself in that way again. “I’m here with my daughter. I’d like to bring her in so she can see what slipping into jumpspace looks like.”

  A moment passed, and then doors slid open and Nick guided Heather onto the flight deck ahead of him.

  Four consoles formed a horseshoe from left to right around the front of the deck—one to port, two side-by-side facing forward, and one to starboard—but only station three, the right side station facing forward, the pilot’s station, was occupied at the moment. One of the women on the crew, a thirty-something year old dark-skinned major decked out in full black and blue flight suit and gear who was obviously too busy to engage in pleasantries, as her hands were dancing over her console as though she were a concert pianist. A fifth chair stood centered behind the forward consoles, a few feet back out of the way, its purpose apparently nothing more than to provide an observer with somewhere to sit. Nick nudged Heather forward and coaxed her into it, then stood behind her to watch.

  “I don’t mean to ignore you two,” the major said without looking away from her controls, “but I’m a little busy at the moment.”

  “That’s quite all right, Major,” Nick told her. “You just go ahead and do what you need to do. We’ll be fine.”

  The other three members of the flight crew—their official designations were operations officer and co-pilot, flight engineer, and tactical officer, but any one of them could have flown the vessel alone if necessary—filed into the cockpit behind them and took their places, each one greeting ‘the admiral’ in turn as they passed.

  “Is that the jumpstation?” Heather asked, pointing forward, out through the canopy at a small glistering speck of silver-gray not much larger than one of the millions of stars hanging in space beyond it.

  “That’s it,” the operations officer answered from his place at station two—a tan-skinned, gray-haired, thick-bearded lieutenant colonel about Nick’s age. “Trident Jumpstation.”

  The oldest jumpstation in the solar system, Trident Station had been designed and built to accommodate the smaller military vessels that were in service at the time. Now relegated almost exclusively to meet the needs of smaller commercial and privately owned jump-capable vessels and manned, at least temporarily, by non-Solfleet personnel—the fleet had been forced to spread its personnel pretty thin since the end of the last Veshtonn invasion—the station maintained its orbit along the path it shared with Neptune on the opposite side of the sun, where the relatively lesser but still immense gravitational forces it generated couldn’t do any harm.

  The ring and its supporting station divided into their separate structures in the center of the canopy as they approached and grew visibly larger by the second as they drew closer. The ring was obviously their target as it floated dead ahead in the center of the canopy. An immense twelve-segment, double-rimmed halo of reinforced metallic silver-gray plastisteel and titanium, a nearly imperceptible glass-smooth sheet of unbroken, translucent crystal coated its entire inner circumference, and as they drew closer that crystal appeared to ripple that the surface a lake in the wind and then began to glow with a dim blue-green sheen.

  The stars that had been visible through the ring suddenly faded, as though someone had simply switched them off, and then a pulsating point of blue-green energy sparked to life in the center of the depthless black emptiness they left behind. That point quickly expanded outward in all directions until it reached the ring’s inner circumference to form what looked like a pool of shimmering seawater.

  “Course plotted” the operations officer announced.

  “Energizing jump nacelles,” the flight engineer, a lieutenant, reported from station one.

  The ring seemed to grow faster until its structure passed beyond the canopy’s borders, leaving only the swirling vortex in view, its blue-green shimmer darkening to a deeper purple and then to violet as its energy field interacted with that the vessel’s twin jump nacelles were generating. Then, with a final shift from deep violet to black as their vessel passed through the ring and slipped into jumpspace, the stars suddenly reappeared, only to fall toward the center of the canopy where they gathered into a hazy, gently pulsating circular band of color like some sort of dark rainbow—deep purple-violet around its inner rim, shifting through shades of purple to blue, to aqua-blue around its outer rim. Every few seconds one or two or a few of them escaped the band and raced past the shuttle, shifting from aqua-blue to green as they sailed by, but the size of the band ahead remained constant.

  “Jump velocity achieved,” the pilot reported, reading from a display on her console. “The field shows stable and we’re secure in jumpspace.”

  “Sensors and scanners showing all clear ahead,” the tactical officer reported from station four—the other woman on the crew. Another lieutenant. “No potential obstacles.”

  “That was pretty,” Heather said as she stood up. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “You’re welcome, sweetheart.” He guided her past him, toward the door, and thanked the crew, then asked his daughter, “Ready to eat?”

  “Yeah, but I think I’ll take a shower first,” she answered as they left the flight deck.

  Chapter 41

  One Week Later

  Earth Standard Date: Sunday, 12 June 2191

  Nick woke from his routine nightmares with barely a start, opened his weary eyes to the dim pre-dawn light illuminating the small cabin just enough so that when he eventually decided to roll out of bed he wouldn’t need to turn the lights on—that pre-dawn light was artificial, of course, its purpose being to help the crew and passengers maintain their circadian rhythms—and sighed. He lay there in his bunk trying to think while Rod snored lightly and steadily above him, threatening to lull him back to sleep. Routine nightmares? What the hell were routine nightmares and when the hell had he started thinking of his nightmares in that way? It was almost as though he’d finally accepted them as a permanent part of the rest of his life without even realizing it. He couldn’t do that. He could not allow himself to do that. He could not just accept them and move on. As soon as they returned to Earth he would look up Commodore Bhatnagar and get to the bottom of the whole memory-edit issue once and for all. But until then...

  Today was the day. The day they were due to arrive at Cirra. The day Rod would confirm that O’Donnell was still being held where his man on th
e surface had found her—the same man who, over a secure and encrypted agency-only channel, had been providing them with all of the boots-on-the-ground human intelligence that he could scrape together every evening at the exact same time since they left Earth. The day the team would finalize the details of the operation and go in and get her... assuming that she was, in fact, still there. How long had it been since she was abducted? Eight months? Nine? What kind of shape would the poor girl be in after all that time in captivity? As a man with a daughter of his own, Nick didn’t even want to think about it.

  Speaking of his own daughter, he couldn’t have been more proud of her. Except for one near miss with a Solfleet starcruiser jumping from Cirra to Earth on their second day out—had they collided, their destruction probably wouldn’t even have left a dent in that vessel—the week had passed uneventfully. Early on he’d feared the boredom might get to Heather and that she might start complaining about it a lot, but she hadn’t. In fact, he hadn’t heard a peep of complaint out of her the entire time, no doubt thanks in large part to Max.

  Max had gone above and beyond the call of duty and taken Heather in under her wing, so to speak. She’d gone out of her way to keep Heather entertained and not let her grow bored when she wasn’t reading or watching something. She had convinced Heather to join her in her morning workouts, had told her stories about some of her previous missions—she’d had to sanitize those stories, of course, to avoid divulging classified information inadvertently, and had whitewashed some of the more gruesome details—and had even thrown a little life advice her way every now and then, such as explaining to her why she should respect herself enough as a young woman to keep her clothes on rather than encourage people to objectify her. That had been Nick’s personal favorite. Heather had come to him more than once and told him about how nice Max was being to her and expressed how much she appreciated that, and had even mentioned once or twice that she’d started thinking of the tough as nails squad sergeant like the big sister she’d never had. Max had made sure that Heather enjoyed the entire flight, which had, in turn, made his flight a lot less stressful than he’d expected it to be. Had there been a medal for making a superior officer’s life easier, he would have recommended her for it. As it was, he was going to have to remember to thank her for her efforts.