by Glenn Smith
For his part, when he wasn’t standing by in the background quietly observing the team’s twice-a-day verbal mission rehearsals, which changed a little with each day’s intelligence update, Nick had taken some time to get to know the members of the team a little bit.
Sergeant Major Adeyemi had been born in Lagos, Nigeria, as he’d previously said, but his father had gotten a good job in the United States and had moved the family there when he was eleven. He’d enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as an infantryman at seventeen. At twenty-one he’d transferred over to the Solfleet Marines, and at twenty-four he’d joined Special Operations. He’d gotten that scar on his face fighting the Veshtonn back in the mid-sixties, a couple of years before the ceasefire, and his nose had been broken in a barroom fight. Nick had asked the man about some of his more impressive medals, how and where he had earned them, but he hadn’t wanted to talk about any of that, and Nick had respected that and let it go.
Sergeant Engel’s story was pretty straightforward. His father had served in the Solfleet Army and had been wounded in combat during the battle for Boshtahr and medically retired as a result. Tobias had grown up admiring his father... his hero... and had enlisted to be a medic so that he could help soldiers when they got wounded like his father had. He’d seen a little action as a regular Army infantry medic, but had decided to transfer to the Marines and join the Rangers so that he could help the elite special operators make a real difference where it counted most. An idealistic view, perhaps, but not an entirely unrealistic one.
Max’s story had turned out to be the simplest of all, though it likely covered a truth that was much more complicated. All she’d told him was that she just liked to watch things explode and found it twice as satisfying when she was the one who caused them to explode. She hadn’t wanted to talk about her life before the fleet or about why she enlisted. Nick had gotten a feeling that her childhood might not have been a very happy one, so he hadn’t pressed.
Squad Sergeant Irby had grown up in Washington D.C. and joined the police department at twenty-one. He’d proven to be such a good shot in the academy that he found his way onto the D.C. police department’s S.W.A.T. team as a sniper almost before he knew what was happening. He liked to shoot and had trained hard, but when opportunities to use his skills proved rare, he’d left the department and enlisted.
Sergeant Smith had been a tinkerer for as long as he could remember and had enlisted because the way he saw it, not only did the military get all the best toys, it also got access to new and alien technology before anyone else.
Nick had spent some of his downtime with his daughter, of course, but she’d really taken to Max so he’d been careful not to smother her too much. He’d spent the rest of his time relaxing and reading. Having found the entire series on one of the readers, he’d resumed reading the book he’d started back home in the Springs—The Realm: Darkness Dawns. Yes, technically he’d been placed in command of the rescue mission—an odd development, considering that he’d been retired from active duty for the last several months—but he’d been out of the game for a while and had no doubt grown a little rusty. Come to think of it, he’d never even been in the game. Not this one. He’d served as a security police platoon leader, as an infantry company commander, as a security police special detachment commander, and then finally as chief of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency, but never as a Ranger or special operator. He didn’t possess the tactical knowhow necessary to effectively command a mission of this kind. He had the book knowledge, but no practical experience.
He sat up and turned and dropped his feet to the deck. No. He was not the right choice to command this mission. When the time came, he would make the decision to go forward or to call the whole thing off. Stefani O’Donnell had served under him and he owed it to her to at least try to rescue her, so unless circumstances made success seem very unlikely, they would go forward. But once he made that call, he’d leave the rest up to Sergeant Major Adeyemi. He was the one with all the practical experience. The tactical decisions would be his to make in the field, where those kinds of decisions should be made.
He stood up and pulled on his slippers, then grabbed his shower kit and a towel and clean clothes and quietly left the cabin. As he walked forward toward the head and the shower room, Heather and Max appeared together from around the corner ahead, wrapped in bath towels, their hair still damp. They greeted him as they passed and he returned their greetings, then realized as he approached the shower room that he must have slept in later than he had on all the previous mornings. According to what Heather had told him, she and Max worked out at exactly the same time and for exactly the same amount of time each morning—he could have set his watch by it—and he’d managed to wake up and get in and out of the shower every morning before they were finished... and before anyone else even got out of bed. Except for the flight crew, of course, but they’d worked out a schedule of their own that didn’t interfere with anyone.
He did his morning business, took his shower and dried off, and then pulled on his clean clothes, combed his hair, brushed his teeth, and went back to his cabin. He found Rod still sound asleep in his bunk, still snoring the hours away, and decided to let him be. He’d have his hands full soon enough, and who knew how long it might be before they all got their next good night’s sleep. He put his things away and then headed aft to the galley to make himself some breakfast and coffee.
Heather and Max were sitting across a table from one another when he walked in, Max in faded blue jean shorts and a black tee shirt with her unit logo emblazoned on the front, Heather in jeans and a plain sky-blue tee shirt, having already dove into their breakfast—sausage patties, toast, and a variety of rehydrated fruits, and of course a glass of orange juice for Heather. Best of all, one of them had already made a pot of coffee. He walked over to the counter, grabbed a mug out of the rack beside the sink and filled it nearly to the brim, and then took a careful sip as he stepped over to the refrigerator—hot, but not too hot—but before he could even open the door a short, steady tone sounded over the intercom.
“Attention, all passengers,” one of the flight crew said as soon as the tone fell silent. “We crossed into the Caldanra star system a short time ago and are on final approach to the planet Cirra. Prepare for a slight braking motion when we drop out of jumpspace in ten seconds on my mark. Lieutenant Commander Johnson, please report to the flight deck immediately afterwards. You have an incoming encrypted transmission. Mark.”
Breakfast could wait, Nick decided as he grasped the refrigerator door handle and braced himself for the braking motion. Rod’s incoming call would be his contact’s last communication before they set down at Grainger. He wanted to be there to hear it with Rod.
He and the girls swayed forward momentarily and gently at the end of the ten seconds, he without spilling a drop of his coffee. That was all they would feel. The vessel’s artificial gravity would compensate for their steady deceleration all the way to planetary orbit. He took his coffee with him as he left the galley and headed forward, and fell in beside Rod as he came out of their cabin in his tan utility fatigues. The flight deck doors opened ahead of them and they walked in to find all four crewmembers at their stations. Cirra hung in the center of the diamond-studded black curtain directly ahead, a beautiful blue and gray-brown world blanketed in layers of cotton-like white clouds—it looked a lot like Earth, actually—growing rapidly as they approached at speeds still near the speed of light.
Rod grabbed a pair of headsets down from their hooks beside the door and handed one of them to Nick, who slipped it on over his left ear, switched it on, and waited while Rod provided his decryption code. Then he listened.
“This is Johnson. What do you have for me, Lieutenant?” Rod asked.
“I’m afraid we have a problem, Commander,” the man on the other end began.
“Explain,” Rod said.
“Pagano and his people have taken the target off world.”
“What?” Rod e
xclaimed without raising his voice. “When did this happen?”
“As best we can determine, sometime in the last twenty to twenty-seven hours, sir.”
“Any indication where they went?”
“Everything points to Sulain as their likeliest destination. They took a non-jump capable vessel and broke orbit on the perfect trajectory to take them there.”
“That could have been misdirection,” Rod pointed out.
“True, but if you think about it, sir, it makes perfect sense. Relations between us and the Sulaini are hovering around cold-war status at best, and with the Veshtonn out of the system and the Sulaini only now starting to bring their own defenses back up to adequate levels, it would be relatively easy for someone the Coalition considers to be a criminal to slip in there and hide out for a while. Plus, that’s the most difficult place in this system for us to go unchallenged.”
“I find it interesting, Lieutenant, that after all this time they chose to move her today,” Rod told him. “That’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.”
“Agreed, sir. Looks like we have a mole in the agency.”
“Not just in the agency, Lieutenant,” Rod pointed out. “Whoever it is knows we found... our target, and what we’re doing about it. That narrows the list of suspects down significantly.”
“Indeed it does, sir,” the lieutenant agreed.
“Send everything you’ve got to my handcomp,” Rod ordered. “Then I want you to start trying to identify that mole.”
“We’re already on it, sir.”
“Do it quietly, Lieutenant. Don’t trust anyone and report directly to me, and only to me. Do you understand?”
“I do, sir.”
“Good. Johnson out.”
They pulled off their headsets and Nick handed his to Rod. “Engage stealth protocols and alter course for Sulain,” Rod told the pilot.
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“What if he’s the mole?” Nick asked him. “Your lieutenant.”
“That man is the best intelligence agent on my team,” Rod told him as he turned toward the door and hung the headsets back up on their hooks. “If he’s the mole I’ll eat my boots and go for a walk out the airlock because we’re all screwed.”
“This is why you brought us in a stealth ship,” Nick observed with admiration as he and Rod left the flight deck and walked aft together. “You expected this to happen.”
“I knew there was a possibility it might, yes,” Rod admitted, “and a certain old friend of my father’s once taught me to always expect the unexpected.”
Nick grinned. “That was good thinking, Commander.”
“Maybe so, sir, but everything just got a lot more difficult, regardless. We have agents in place all over Sulain, but there’s no telling how long we’ll have to wait for actionable intel from them. We’re going to need a whole new plan, and we can’t start developing one until we know what we’re facing. And that’s assuming our agents can even find O’Donnell in the first place.”
Nick gazed at the younger man as the galley doors opened ahead of them. Rod met his gaze as they walked in and grinned sheepishly. “Listen to me,” he said, shaking his head as they angled toward the refrigerator, “telling the former chief of the agency how things work.”
Being reminded by a former subordinate of ‘how things work’ didn’t bother Nick nearly as much as the fact that he’d been short-sighted enough to bring Heather along knowing full well they weren’t just taking a vacation. What the hell had he been thinking?
* * *
Later that night, after most everyone else had gone to bed, Nick and Johnson were sitting in the galley reminiscing over a snack—they’d done a lot of that during the flight—when another call came over the intercom from the flight deck. “Lieutenant Commander Johnson, please come to the flight deck. Lieutenant Commander Johnson to the flight deck, please.”
“This should be it,” Rod said as he stood up. “You coming?”
“Yes I am,” Nick answered as he joined him.
They went forward to the flight deck and found the operations officer pulling duty in the pilot’s seat. “We’re approaching Sulain,” the lieutenant colonel reported, scratching his beard as he glanced back over his shoulder at them.
Sulain, the Caldanra system’s fifth planet, hung in space directly ahead, nearly filling the view, it’s only natural moon little more than a large, cratered, red-brown rock with a deep gash across its middle hanging off to its left, much closer to them, as though it were some kind of sentry standing guard over its master. The planet itself looked much like its brother nearer their mother star but was slightly larger, with smaller oceans that appeared more purple than blue and vast, thick jungles of deeper blue that appeared tinted slightly red. Long, thin strands of gray-white clouds encircled the entire planet, coming together to form a massive hurricane toward the east of the southern hemisphere and covering nearly two-thirds of the rest of the visible face.
The ops officer checked his screens, then reported, “Passive sensors show they have a lot of ships in high orbit over there, Lieutenant Commander. I can’t tell what classes they might be, but with the Veshtonn no longer around to defend them, you can bet a good number of them are warships. They’ll never see us on their scanners, but if we get close enough for visual contact...”
“Nothing yet from our people down there, I assume?” Johnson inquired.
“Not yet, no,” the older officer confirmed.
“All right.” Johnson looked at Nick as if to ask his advice. Nick met his gaze, but rather than say anything—Rod was still in charge at this point, after all—he just tilted his head briefly toward the moon and raised his eyebrows. Johnson looked out at the moon, understood, and then told the acting pilot, “Alter course for the moon. There’s a deep canyon running around about three-quarters of its equator that’s always dark at the bottom along the bases of the walls. We can hide there until we hear from our people.”
“You got it.”
Chapter 42
Three Days Later
Earth Standard Date: Wednesday, 15 June 2191
They had made it to Sulain’s moon without incident and, as far as they knew, undetected, and had been quietly hiding in the perpetual darkness of those deep shadows at the bottom of its massive equatorial canyon for the last three days. They’d gone nearly as dark, powering down all but the dim emergency deck lighting and shutting down all systems but those most vital to their survival—environmental control, food preservation and water flow, and bathroom and shower facilities. The only two exceptions were communications—Lieutenant Commander Johnson had directed the operations officer to leave that system active, set to minimum power, with the single, previously agreed-upon channel open and set to receive only—and the laundry facilities, which they’d run as soon as they landed and then shut down immediately after everyone had finished using them. Fortunately, the readers emitted low enough levels of energy that reading, playing games, and watching vids remained a viable option for passing the time if and when conversation became tiresome.
Nick, Heather, Johnson, and the team had been relaxing in the galley, eating lunch and talking about nothing in particular when the young tactical officer walked in and interrupted to report that she had just received a narrow-beam communications burst from the planet surface. Johnson had gone forward to download the compressed data package to his handcomp, had taken some time to review it, and then, with Nick’s blessing, had met with Sergeant Major Adeyemi to devise a plan of action. That done, he’d called everyone but the flight crew to gather around the tac-table for a briefing. Even Heather had been invited to sit in to watch and listen.
“As you know, we received a comm burst from one of our agents on Sulain a little while ago,” he began. “We now know with reasonable assuredness where Crewman Stefani O’Donnell is and at least some of what you’ll be going up against, Sergeant Major, when you go in to bring her out.” He pulled the data-chip from his handcomp,
slipped it into the slot on his side of the table, and then switched the table on. The surface lit up a bright blue-white and the table began to emit a low hum, but the sound faded quickly into the subliminal when a few seconds later a large and surprisingly solid looking high-resolution three-dimensional image of a large three-story rectangular building backed up to the edge of a sheer cliff seemed to grow up out of that glowing surface and then started rotating slowly so that everyone around the table could look at it from every angle. The building appeared old and was surrounded on the other three sides by a thick jungle that had been cleared back some distance. From the look of it, approaching that building from any angle without being seen was going to be virtually impossible.
“The building you’re looking at,” Johnson continued, “is located along the northern west coast of Noktressen, the largest continent in Sulain’s eastern hemisphere, approximately twelve-hundred eighty miles north of the equator. Our best guess is that it used to be a military facility of some kind, as its roof and walls are heavily shielded against both surface and orbital scanners. I say ‘used to be’ because we know that up until two days ago it had been abandoned for decades and all but consumed by the jungle that until yesterday had encroached and surrounded it on all three landward sides. Two days ago a Cirran spy-ship observed a small vessel as it approached Sulain on a trajectory that likely originated from Cirra and kept watch as it descended through the atmosphere and landed in the jungle near that building. Since then, the spy-ship’s sensors have been detecting more than the usual wildlife activity in that area.
