Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “The Caldanra sector?” Royer asked. “That’s an awful long way, Mister Graves. Do you really think you’ll be able to find someone willing to take you out there?”

  “For the right amount of money you can find anyone to do anything, Doctor.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” Royer conceded.

  “I’ll do it tonight,” Dylan decided, handing the pizza over to the doctor, who accepted it with a questioning look on his face. “Eventually I’ll complete my mission, and then I’ll come back for you, Doctor. I promise.”

  He turned his back and hurried off in the opposite direction, not even knowing where he was going yet, before Doctor Royer had a chance to ask him what he expected him to do with the pizza. And as he put ever increasing distance between himself and his quarters, he said a silent prayer, hoping that whatever Major Hansen was doing in there wouldn’t result in his stumbling across the small compartment where he’d hidden his handcomp and recall device.

  Chapter 47

  It struck Dylan as he made his way through some of the less frequently trafficked areas of the shipyard on a roundabout route to the Rotunda, where he hoped to lose himself in the crowds for a while, that in all the weeks he’d been living and working there he hadn’t yet taken the time to patronize Little Green Manny’s. He’d heard a lot about the place from Danny and a few others from among the more extroverted of his fellow security policemen, but he’d never had occasion to actually go there himself. Well, now he did have occasion to go, and with any luck there’d be a good size crowd there among whom he might hide, at least for a little while.

  It took a while—he’d gone pretty far out of the way, ‘down’—actually, it was more like ‘in’—through the virtually deserted bowels of the yard where dust collected like snow during a country winter and the air was warm and dank and water leaked and dripped from tangled pipes and collected in shallow puddles on unfinished decks—but he eventually found himself walking up the long corridor, approaching Little Green Manny’s NCO Club. Two friendly little women about his age or perhaps a few years younger, both of them painted green and wearing red wigs and silly costumes right out of a 1950’s science-fiction B-movie, were manning the large padded red doors. They smiled at him, flashing their incredibly bright white teeth, and greeted him as one with voices that could have belonged to a pair of lady munchkins in the Land of Oz.

  “Good evening to you, sir,” they said, bowing their heads to make the springy antennas they were wearing wave back and forth and swing wildly around in circles, “and welcome to Little Green Manny’s. Please, go right in.” They opened the doors ahead of him and waved him through.

  “Thank you, ladies,” he said as he passed between them.

  “You’re very welcome, sir,” they replied in unison.

  He stopped briefly inside the doors and looked over to the side at what he immediately recognized from Danny’s description to be Manny Junior—the Martian used in the filming of the 1950’s ‘War of the Worlds’ movie. Then, forgetting exactly what the longtime tradition Danny had told him about involved, he moved on into the club’s large dining area and discovered that if there had been a large dinner crowd, it was already thinning out. Roughly a quarter of the tables and booths were empty, though most of them hadn’t been cleaned yet since their last occupancy.

  He found an empty two-person table along the far wall that had already been cleaned and took the seat facing more or less toward the entrance, then glanced around the club. A number of silver-clad waiters and waitresses with green skin and red hair were moving from table to table or booth to booth, or back and forth from the kitchen or the bar with food trays or drinks. The air smelled of a variety of foods, all of them good, and Dylan’s mouth began to water. He took it all in. The ‘little green men and women’ from Mars, the barstools that looked like the classic three-legged Martian war machines, and the large copper replica of the manta-looking war machine from the movie that hovered overhead, lighting the stage across the dance floor. Then his stomach began to growl and he reached for the screen on the wall to bring up the menu.

  “Mind if I join you?” came a young woman’s voice from slightly behind him.

  Dylan looked back over his shoulder to find PFC Gillis standing a couple of feet away, looking right at him, and answered, “Yeah, sure.” Then he gazed at her as she stepped by him, over to the other side of the table, and sat down across from him. Nancy Gillis. He’d never considered her to be particularly attractive, though he hadn’t thought of her as unattractive at all, either, but then he’d never seen her off duty and out of uniform with her hair down before. Now that he was seeing her that way, dressed in hipping-hugging blue jeans and a tight-fitting maroon sweater top that accentuated her breasts, wearing just the right amount of makeup with her shiny chestnut hair falling loosely down over her shoulders, he found himself rethinking that opinion. She was actually rather pretty, with a much more shapely body than he’d realized.

  “You’ve never been here before, have you, Sergeant?” she asked, sounding as though she already knew the answer.

  “How’d you know?” Dylan asked her in return.

  “I spotted you when you came in. You didn’t pay your respects to Manny Junior.”

  “Ah. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do,” he admitted. Then, when she only smiled in response—she had a very pretty smile as it turned out—he asked, “So what? Does that mean Manny Senior’s going to put a hit out on me?”

  She laughed. “I doubt it. Not as long as you frequent his club, at least.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to come here more often,” he said. “God knows I don’t want a bunch of little green mafia Martians coming after me.”

  “No, of course not,” she agreed, laughing again. “That would be horrible.”

  She didn’t seem to have anything in particular to say. In fact, she seemed to be struggling to find something, anything, to say, which told Dylan that this was more than just a coincidental social visit. She had something specific on her mind that she wanted to bring up and was afraid to bring up at the same time. Perhaps she just needed an opening and a little nudge to send her in the right direction. “So what brings you over to my table, Nancy Gillis?” he asked her, opening that door for her. “What can I do for you?”

  She gazed into his eyes for a couple of seconds—she had very interestingly colored eyes, a mixture of blue and green with a touch of amber—and then told him, as if he weren’t already aware, “You saved my life six weeks ago, Dylan.” Her eyes suddenly grew wide and she gasped. “I mean... Sergeant Graves,” she amended. Then her gaze fell to the tabletop. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Nancy,” he told her, hoping that his use of her first name might help her to relax a little bit. “We’re off duty, away from the unit, away from the C-S-C. You can all me ‘Dylan’ here if you want to.”

  She raised her eyes to his once more and said, “I wanted to... tell you how grateful I am for what you did... Dylan.”

  “You already thanked me,” he reminded her. “You don’t have to say anything else. I’m sure that if our roles had been reversed you would’ve done the same for me.”

  “Yeah, but...”

  “Good evening, folks,” one of the little green waitresses said, smiling a big bright white smile as she stepped up beside their table, ordering tablet in hand, bringing a look of relief to Nancy’s face. “May I take your orders?”

  Dylan glanced at her and then looked back at the menu on the wall screen. Sure enough, there wasn’t any way they could order remotely, directly from the menu. He hadn’t noticed that before. Good on Manny for giving up speed and efficiency in favor of providing more jobs. He and Nancy ordered their food—just burgers and fries with a side of baked mozzarella sticks and light beers to drink. Then, when the waitress walked off, Dylan looked at Nancy and prompted her to continue. “You were saying?”

  “I was saying that...” She paused, then asked, “What was I saying?” She stop
ped to think, or at least to look like she was thinking, Dylan suspected. She obviously didn’t know how to say whatever it was she wanted to say.

  “Just go ahead and say it, Nancy,” he finally told her. “What’s on your mind?”

  The frosted green lights on the manta-like Martian war machine’s bow and both wingtips suddenly started pulsating as a mysterious alien sound echoed through the otherwise very quiet club. It was as though everyone had stopped talking at once, hypnotized into silence by the eerie tone. Then the machine’s long, sinuous neck began panning back and forth from one side to the other as though it were scanning the customers.

  “We can talk more after this set,” Nancy told him.

  Dylan nodded to her, hoping that she’d find the courage when that time came, and then turned his attention back to the war machine. Back and forth, back and forth, the heat ray emitter atop the long neck scanned, its otherworldly resonance the only sound reaching his ears. Then it stopped suddenly. It glowed orange and then pulsated yellow in the center as a band who’d taken the stage unseen began to play. The house lights went dark as the heat ray ‘fired’ its flickering white strobe light, accompanied with a rather irritating loud screaming noise that could probably have been heard for miles if sound could travel through space. Then the three green floodlights embedded in the war machine’s belly snapped on, bathing everyone on the stage in a ghostly green aura as they played.

  The crowd broke into applause. Then the strobe light stopped, the house lights came back up to a dimmer level, and the band played on.

  Dylan and Nancy listened while they waited for their food, then continued to do so while they ate. The band was very good in Dylan’s opinion—he liked music as much as the next guy and probably more than a lot of people—but he would have enjoyed it more if they didn’t play quite so loud. After all, he’d come to eat dinner, not attend a concert. They played for quite a while, finally finishing their set a good fifteen or twenty minutes after he and Nancy had finished eating and their table had been cleared for them.

  “What were we talking about?” Dylan asked as the excitement subsided and the members of the band walked off the stage to take a well-deserved break. He suspected he knew where their conversation had been going before it was interrupted and he had to admit that he wasn’t totally opposed to the idea, though he did feel a little guilty for feeling that way, but he still wanted to hear it from her. She really wasn’t bad looking at all. In fact, she was kind of cute. Rather pretty, even, as he had noticed earlier. Bottom line, he hadn’t gotten any since that night he spent with Olivia Dunn back on Mandela Station, and he was starting to get a little...

  “I didn’t really ask to join you because I wanted to tell you how grateful I am,” she told him, staring down at the tabletop as the noise level began to rise in the dining area again.

  “You didn’t?” he asked her, playing dumb, coaxing her along.

  “No, I didn’t.” She looked around. She was nervous. “I asked to join you because...” She locked eyes with him. “...I want to show you how grateful I am, Dylan.”

  “Show me?” he asked her as though he didn’t already know what she was hinting at.

  She exhaled sharply. “Come on, Dylan,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Are you really going to make me say it? Come back to my quarters with me.”

  Dylan gazed into her pleading eyes. She obviously wanted him in a bad way. He intended to be gone within hours, so the rules against fraternizing didn’t really concern him anymore, but he couldn’t let her know that. He had to at least appear to resist.

  “Was that so hard?” he asked her first.

  “Yes,” she insisted, nodding firmly. “It was.”

  “Well, I’m flattered, Nancy, but... we work together,” he reminded her.

  “I know we do, but...”

  “I’m an N-C-O and you’re a P-F-C,” he added.

  “But I’m not in your squad,” she countered.

  “That doesn’t matter. You know that,” he replied. “We work on the same shift.” Her gaze fell to the tabletop once more and she sighed as her disappointment and sadness became evident on her face, along with no small amount of embarrassment. “However,” he continued, prompting her to look up at him again with a ray of hope returning to her expression and shining through her colorful eyes. “What nobody knows... and I mean nobody,” he emphasized, “...can’t really hurt anyone, can it?”

  A renewed smile slowly found its way to her lips. Then she said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You first,” Dylan suggested. “I’ll take care of the bill.”

  She stood up, smiled at him for one more moment and licked her lips, and then hurried off. Dylan slipped his identicard into the slot beneath the menu, tapped the ‘Pay Bill’ button, and then followed her out.

  Chapter 48

  He took Beth by her waist and pulled her close, then slid his hands down over her smooth hips and gently squeezed her bottom as he softly kissed her. She pressed her lips to his, and as the passion between them grew she dragged her fingernails lightly down his back, then freed him from his jeans. She pressed her body to his and moaned with desire as he responded to her touch. Then, suddenly, she drew back and said, “Come back to me,” and then ran off and dove into the pool and started swimming toward the opposite bank.

  He tossed his jeans onto the pile of clothes and ran in after her. He caught up to her near the center of the pool where a narrow column of stone rose up out of the unknown depths to fall barely an inch short of breaking the surface. She stood atop the small platform, faced him, and struck an enchanting pose. “The goddess Satah’ra has appeared once again,” she proclaimed to the night. She looked down at him and added, “And you, mortal man, have looked upon her.”

  “And she’s even more beautiful than the legend says.”

  Beth smiled, looked up into the trees, and then whirled away and dove back in.

  He swam after her and caught her by the ankle as she reached the far bank. He closed the space between them, then reached around her on both sides and grabbed hold of the moss, trapping her between his arms and pressing himself against her as he kissed the nape of her neck. She turned to him and rested her hands on his shoulders, then wrapped her legs around his waist and invited him with a passionate kiss to consummate their newfound relationship.

  Olivia stood before him, dropped her robe to the floor behind her, then leaned down and kissed him passionately. Then she whispered gently into his ear, “Make love to me.”

  He stood with her. She kissed him, pushed his jeans and his briefs down past his hips and dropped them to the floor. He stepped out of his clothes, then took her into his arms and kissed her passionately, pressing himself against her warm, bare flesh. Then he guided her down onto the couch and climbed over her, eased himself down between her legs...

  Awareness. Thought. Consciousness.

  Awareness of... what? He was lying on his back. Blind? He opened his eyes. Deaf? No. He could hear someone breathing softly, steadily.

  He was warm. Comfortably warm.

  He drew a breath. He heard it. He felt his lungs expand.

  Ground? No. Soft. He was lying in a bed.

  Dylan felt lost. Disoriented. Where was he? When was he? What the hell had happened? He hadn’t felt so... so... so out of it since... What was happening to him?

  He must have just woken up from a deep sleep. Perhaps a haunted sleep. He opened his eyes... again?... to a dark room and blinked them into focus, though he couldn’t really see well enough to focus on any specific thing completely. He could see enough, though, to conclude that he was in a bedroom. Of course it was a bedroom, he told himself. He was lying in a bed after all. Actually, he realized as he glanced around the room a little more, it wasn’t just a bedroom. It was the single room of enlisted quarters. More precisely, junior enlisted quarters, as there was a second bunk sitting against the wall across the room. An occupied bunk. Where was he?

  He and Doctor Royer had pla
nned to meet in his quarters over pizza and discuss their exit strategy, but that meeting had fallen through when Major Hansen showed up at his quarters while he was out picking up the pizza. He’d crossed paths with Royer in the corridor, however, and together they’d come to the conclusion that the major was on to him and that he had to leave the shipyard, so he’d handed the pizza over to Royer and had headed to Little Green Manny’s for dinner alone. PFC Gillis had found him there and joined him, and then... Oh yeah.

  He looked over at the other bunk again, where PFC Gillis’ roommate lay sleeping. He’d become so anxious to get laid after Gillis invited him back to her quarters that he hadn’t stopped to think that as a PFC, she likely had a roommate. In fact, the thought hadn’t occurred to him at all until they got there and he saw both bunks in the room—fortunately, her roommate had been out somewhere at the time—but by then all his focus had been on getting Gillis into bed, so he’d disregarded that little detail. They hadn’t wasted any time, either, and as luck would have it, the roommate had walked in on them while they were going at it hot and heavy in Gillis’ bunk. An attractive young woman in her own right with olive skin and long black hair, she’d greeted them both in passing as though walking in and finding Gillis having sex with some guy in her bunk were a nightly occurrence. Then she’d stripped off her clothes...all of her clothes...and gone to bed as though he weren’t even there. Watching her undress, Dylan had considered trying to coax her into joining them, but not knowing how she or Gillis would respond to that idea—he didn’t even know the other girl’s name, for God’s sake—he’d thought better of it.

  Being careful to move slowly, he reached out to the nightstand, picked up his watch, and tapped the light button. 0214 hours. If he got up and left right now he would have plenty of time to swing by his quarters and then make it to the docks and find his way onto a drop ship bound for Mars.