Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  “On your way to where?” he asked.

  As if there were more than one possible answer. “I’m going through the Portal.”

  “The what?” Hansen asked him after a moment, feigning ignorance... poorly.

  Dylan snickered. “Don’t waste your breath, Major. I know what the Portal is and I know where it is. I’ve gone through it before and I have to go through again.”

  Hansen looked as though he’d just seen a ghost. I don’t believe you,” he said, though his expression betrayed his lack of certainty.

  “I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” Dylan told him.

  “Our own scientists, the men and women who have been studying it for years, don’t even know what it is for sure. They have theories and nothing more. If you go through that thing, if you even know how to go through that thing, we don’t know what might happen. It might lead to disaster. For the sake of Earth security... hell, for the sake of the universe as we know it, I can’t allow you to try.”

  “Trust me, Major, I do know how to go through, and the sake of the universe is precisely why I must go.”

  Hansen shook his head. “The stakes are too high, Mister Graves. I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that there are security troops waiting outside. You’ll never make it to the Portal.” He extended an open hand palm-up toward Dylan. “You’re under arrest. Give me the weapon.”

  Dylan looked at the hand in front of him, then back up into the man’s eyes. He sighed and lowered the pistol slightly, giving the appearance of someone who knew that he had lost. Then he took a step toward Hansen and held the pistol out to him grip-first as if to surrender it, but as soon as Hansen reached for it he grabbed his wrist with his free hand and pulled him forward and off balance with enough force that something cracked. He spun him around and locked his arm up behind his back, then drove his knee into his kidney, stunning him long enough to maneuver him into one-arm choke hold that left his injured arm still locked up behind his back. Then he raised the pistol and touched its muzzle to the man’s right temple.

  “You still won’t make it,” Hansen told him through the pain he must have been feeling in his forearm. “They’ll shoot you down as soon as we step outside.”

  “Sorry about your arm, Major, but it’s vital that I complete my mission.”

  “What mission?” Hansen asked him, grimacing. His tone was still challenging, but at the same time he was starting to sound like he genuinely wanted to know, almost as though he were starting to believe what Dylan was telling him. “Under whose authority did you come here?” he went on. Then he raised his voice a little more and demanded, “Talk to me, man! Prove to me you’re S-I-A on a sanctioned mission! Let me verify what you say and I’ll personally escort you to the Portal myself.”

  “I wish I could believe you, Major,” Dylan told him, “I really do. I don’t like having to treat you like this. But I can’t a chance that you’re lying. Besides, I can’t prove what I say. I couldn’t even if I tried. I’m sorry, but it has to be this way.”

  “Then you just signed your own death warrant.”

  “We’ll see. Let’s go.”

  He guided the major ahead of him toward the outer hatch, then moved against the wall by the controls and told him to open it. Hansen reached up with his free arm and touched the pad, and as soon as the hatch opened at least three rounds zipped past their heads and impacted on the ceiling behind them. Death warrant indeed.

  “Hold your fire!” Hansen yelled.

  The situation was about to grow much more dangerous for Dylan, and he knew it. “I have a gun trained on Major Hansen’s head!” he shouted when the shooting stopped. “I’m guiding him out ahead of me! If anyone tries anything I swear I’ll splatter his brains all over the ground!”

  “All right!” someone responded. “No one else is going to shoot! Come on out!”

  Dylan held the major as tight against him as he possibly could and inched his way slowly out toward the center of the opening, but did not cross the threshold. Somewhere out there a sniper was lining up a shot. He could feel it.

  “All personnel, hold your fire!” the same voice ordered.

  Dylan looked to his left and then to his right, then above and, as best he could, below. They had him pretty well surrounded, as he’d expected they would. “Withdraw!” he demanded.

  “You know we can’t do that,” they voice advised him. Dylan looked in the direction it had come from and found a security police officer standing there, armed only with a sidearm—probably their detachment commander. “Let the major go and surrender your weapon. That’s the only way you’re going to come out of this alive.”

  “I said withdraw!” Dylan demanded in response. “Back off or I’ll kill this man!”

  “And then my men will kill you.”

  The officer was clearly stalling for time, likely waiting for that sniper to signal ‘ready.’ Dylan knew that he was running out of time. He had to make that officer hesitant to take any irreversible action. “I already shot Commander Rogers,” he told him, gambling that it wouldn’t just make him more likely to order the unseen sniper to take the shot. “He’s lying inside on the deck, likely bleeding out as we speak, so one more dead officer won’t make a difference to me.”

  A moment passed in near silence. Then the officer asked, “Is that true, Major?”

  “Tell them,” Dylan said when Hansen didn’t answer.

  “Partially,” the major confirmed. “He shot him in the leg, but missed the artery.”

  The officer seemed relieved... a little. “What do you want us to do, Major?” he asked.

  “If I make it to the Portal and can’t make it work, then you’ll have me,” Dylan said quietly into Hansen’s ear as he glanced around, looking for that sniper. Where the hell was that sniper? “But if I can make it work, then you’ll know I was telling you the truth.”

  Hansen seemed to consider that for a moment, then said, “Better do what the man says, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant replied. He hollered, “Weapons down,” and then touched his hand to his collar and said, “Hold.”

  So there was a sniper out there somewhere. But the lieutenant had just ordered him or her to hold fire, so Dylan began feeling just a little bit more at ease, but he knew better than to relax too much. That lieutenant likely also had standing orders to keep him away from the Portal. Speaking into the major’s ear, he said, “All right. Down the ramp. Slowly.”

  Even more dangerous. He was exposing his back now. Dylan held onto the major a little tighter as they crossed the threshold to the top of the ramp and started descending slowly toward the ground. There it was, not more than thirty meters away. The Portal, guarded by a line of security policemen standing between him and it, outfitted for combat. Rogers had landed very close—another way in which he’d let those on the ground know that he was acting under duress. That didn’t seem to make any sense. If anything, he should have landed farther away. “Tell the troops to withdraw,” he told the major.

  “They won’t,” Hansen replied.

  “Tell them anyway,” Dylan said, knowing the major was right.

  “Withdraw,” Hansen called to them. They looked over at their lieutenant and then did so when he nodded to them, though they only backed off a few steps. Still, they were out of position now—not quite where they wanted to be. That was something.

  Holding Hansen as tight against him and hiding behind him as best he could—where the hell was that damn sniper, anyway?—Dylan crossed those twenty meters and then walked up the ramp to the Portal’s controls. He pulled out his handcomp, powered it up, and then brought up the recording of his previous visit—not at all an easy series of tasks to accomplish while holding a gun on a hostage and holding that hostage in a choke-hold at the same time. Then he turned his eyes to the controls and thought back on the research he’d done the last time he was there.

  “Come up here, Lieutenant,” he ordered. Then he backed a few feet out onto the surfa
ce of the Portal when the lieutenant complied.

  He pointed the ‘begin/start/engage’ symbol out to him and told him, “Touch your wrist to the center of that symbol and hold it there. There’s going to be a flash and a loud bang. It’s supposed to happen, so don’t panic and do something stupid.” The lieutenant complied, and that sudden bright white flash and loud rumble that had nearly startled Dylan out of his boots the last time exploded in the air around them, startling everyone else including him. The steady, quiet hum then followed, just as he’d known it would.

  “What the f... What was that?” the lieutenant shouted.

  “It’s all right, Lieutenant,” Dylan told him. “I told you, that was supposed to happen.”

  “Major?” the lieutenant inquired.

  “Let’s see how this plays out, Lieutenant,” Hansen told him. “On my authority.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take three steps back,” Dylan told the younger officer, who complied immediately. And then, still holding Hansen close, he returned to the controls and started manipulating them, just as he had before... he hoped.

  “You can let me go now, Dylan,” Hansen told him while he worked. “As you can see, we’re letting you proceed.”

  “On a first-name basis now, are we?” Dylan asked him. “Establishing a rapport with the offender. Nice try, Major, but... Well, it’s not that I don’t trust you, Major, but... I just... well, I don’t trust you. Don’t worry, though. I’ll let you go before... before I go.” He came to the point where he had to enter his destination time and location into the panel and stopped, then pointed at the destination symbol and looked back at the lieutenant. “Step forward and put your wrist on this symbol, L-T,” he told him, and once more he backed out onto the surface of the Portal as the lieutenant did as he was told. “Whatever happens, do not remove your wrist from that symbol,” Dylan then emphasized. “If you do, this whole crazy contraption will detonate like the world’s largest nuke. You will have killed us all.” That probably wasn’t the case, of course—most likely the worst that would happen would be that the Portal wouldn’t do anything—but the lieutenant didn’t know that. The lieutenant looked at Hansen once more.

  “My authority, Lieutenant,” the major repeated. “No tricks. Let him work.”

  “Thank you, Major,” Dylan said as he brought the recording of Akagi’s voice up on his handcomp. He played it... loud.

  “Pel’Ka. Tre’Qoom boshe’ta vasim. Tusa. Kapek e Tor’Rosha vej Rosha, Pen’to rhim con win, vet wona’sa torsh’kava vo dusin, vet zimta kajj wen subeg ga vol revi.”

  Hansen looked down with him at their feet and watched as eerie wisps of thin, gray-white mist began to appear, dancing lazily across the entire surface of its threshold. “What the hell?”

  “It’s all right, Major,” Dylan assured him. “As I told you, I know how to make this thing do what it’s supposed to do. I really have gone through it before.”

  “When?”

  “In about twenty-two and a half years,” Dylan replied, while at the same time knowing that he probably shouldn’t have. Still, there was something to be said for the satisfaction he felt at having left Hansen speechless.

  Those wisps grew steadily thicker and combined to form clouds, and then began swirling in a counter-clockwise direction like a miniature hurricane, forming a small eye in its center as the arms quickly expanded outward toward the rim, cycling repeatedly through all the colors of the spectrum as they grew, just as they had done the last time.

  He set the handcomp to playback at one-thousandth normal speed, just as he had done the last time, and as he watched history play itself out again, the countdown timer started, already in the double digits.

  Eighties, seventies, sixties...

  He couldn’t let Hansen go too early, or they might yet try to stop him.

  Fifties, forties, thirties...

  But he couldn’t hold onto him too long, either. Who knew what kinds of problems he might cause if the major fell through with him?

  Twenties...

  He was going to have to push the man away from him hard right before.

  Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen...

  He’d push him away with a second left. That should be enough time.

  Ten, nine...

  Maybe with two seconds left, just to be safe.

  Seven, six...

  Yeah, the last two seconds.

  Four, three, two...

  “Go!” he shouted as he pushed Hansen away from him as hard as he could.

  One...

  Hansen leapt over the edge to the ground.

  Zero.

  A shot rang out.