by Rick Partlow
“Did she go for guys at all?” Kurt wondered. “I never recall her talking about a man.” He shrugged. “Well, honestly, I don’t recall her talking about a woman either, so…”
“She was married to a guy,” Vilberg said. All of our heads spun around to stare at him, and I wondered if my face looked as shocked as theirs did. The former Fleet Search and Rescue NCO shrank a little at the attention, but pressed on. “She told me once. Like a few months ago, when we were in the galley after an op. It was before the war. She ended the contract when she joined up, because she didn’t think it would be fair to ask him to wait for her.”
“Holy shit,” Victor muttered. I nodded agreement.
“She never got a scratch,” I reflected, my own voice sounding strange in my ears. “All those jobs, all those people shooting at us, all the people we lost…she never got a scratch.”
I held my glass up and slowly, the others did as well.
“To Bobbi,” I said.
“Absent friends,” Vilberg murmured.
The whiskey went down smooth, and I didn’t feel its bite till it was deep into my chest. It spread out like a warmth, moving downward to my stomach.
“This feels like the end,” Sanders said, his voice forlorn and desolate.
“It’s not the end,” I corrected him, turning the shot glass over and over in my fingers, watching the light catch in its facets. “Not until I kill Alberto Calderon.”
***
“This is going to change everything,” General Murdock murmured softly, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to M’Voba, who hung over his shoulder, staring in disbelief at the Predecessor corpse.
It…and we…had only arrived a few minutes ago, but Murdock’s researchers were already swarming around it, setting up the scanning equipment around the gurney with the efficiency of termites building a nest. I don’t know what they’d done to it inside that glass-looking block I’d first found it, but it still showed no signs of decomposition, still looked like the eyes might open any second and it would rise from the table to kill us all with some vague, godlike power.
“The Cult worshipped these things before they ever saw one,” I said, eyes glued to its dark, striated face. “What the hell are they gonna’ do now that they’re…” I struggled for a word. “Growing one?”
I looked over to General Murdock.
“Why would Andre Damiani be loaning technicians out to the Cult to duplicate this thing?”
“That’s rather obvious, Sgt. Munroe,” he said, still not looking away from the corpse. “They’re going to create a living genetic duplicate of the thing, probably give it implanted memories and a convincing story, then pass it off to their followers as being a real, live Predecessor.” Now he looked over at me, cocking an eyebrow. “Better shut your mouth before something flies into it, Sergeant.”
I realized that I was gaping at him, and did as I was told. But the disbelief remained.
“Is that even possible?” I demanded, almost angrily. Jesus Christ, can’t some things just stay impossible?
“Unfortunately, it’s very possible,” he told me, a hint of distaste in his voice. I wasn’t sure if it was at the unnatural wrongness of the idea or the fact that it was complicating his job.
“Well, you’ve got your evidence.” I gestured at the body, almost disappearing behind one bank of scanners after another. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Events are already in motion,” he replied as cryptically as ever. “Things haven’t been standing still while you’ve been gone. I’ve been contacted by other assets, and between what you’ve done and what they’ve accomplished, I think we’ve forced Damiani’s hand. He’s going to have to bring this all to a head much sooner than he’d intended, and that’s going to be his undoing.” He sniffed ruefully. “I hope.”
I nodded, not caring as much as I’d thought I would. It all seemed distant, somehow, far away from the things that really mattered to me at the moment.
“What do you want us to do in the meantime?”
M’Voba looked at me sharply, seeming a bit shocked at the question.
“After what just happened with Sgt. Taylor,” he said, and it sounded as if the words were carefully chosen so as not to set me off, “I’d think you’d all be ready to sit the rest of this out.”
“Yeah, well, all that means is you don’t know us very fucking well.” I was surprised at the harshness in my tone and I rubbed a hand over the stubble on the back of my head, trying to calm myself down. I looked away from him, eyes travelling around the cavernous depths of the lab buried deep inside an airless moon.
“We’ve been fighting for the wrong side for years now,” I said, voice calmer. “My Gramps once told me, you may not be able to make up for the bad things you’ve done in the past, but you can definitely make up for the ones you’ll do in the future.”
“I knew the man,” Murdock interjected, and I turned in surprise. He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. But Mastery Gunnery Sergeant Cesar Torres was one of the finest military minds I’ve ever encountered.”
“Gramps would understand. We’re Recon Marines. When we successfully complete a difficult mission, the reward is always getting assigned something even harder. Anyway,” I heard the edge coming back in my tone, unbidden, “wherever Cowboy is, Calderon’s going to be around somewhere.”
I didn’t have to mention why that was significant to me.
Murdock seemed to consider it for a moment before he answered.
“Rest up for a few days,” he said. “I need to do some planning, find out what needs done where, and I’ll have something for you.”
I started to turn, to head back to the others, but he stopped me with a partially raised hand.
“I’m sorry about Bobbi,” he told me. He sounded sincere, but then he always sounded sincere. “She thought a lot of you. I didn’t order her to be your friend, if you’re worried about that. That was real.”
I nodded, more agreement than gratitude.
“Everything about Bobbi was real.”
Chapter Fourteen
“This sucks.” Victor ripped the ViR halo off and tossed it aside, wiping sweat from where it had rested on his forehead as he slammed out of the simulator room. “When the hell are we getting out of here?”
His tank top was plastered with sweat as well, and though I hadn’t been timing it, I knew he’d been in the simulator for almost an hour. The door to the adjoining tank popped open and Sanders stepped out, a great deal more composed and looking pleased with himself.
“That’s three cases of beer you owe me, Vic,” he said, dropping his own halo next to Victor’s.
I leaned back in the sofa and tried to chuckle but it came out sounding forced. We’d been running tactical drills against each other for almost two weeks now because there hadn’t been anything else worth doing on this damn, worthless moon. Murdock had left with M’Voba and the corpse and told us not to leave until he returned, and the only Fleet personnel left on the damn base were a few maintenance techs that couldn’t tell us anything because they didn’t know anything.
The worst part was, I had no way of getting in touch with Sophia. It had been weeks now and all I had to go on was Mom’s promise that she’d look out for them. I’d asked about twenty times if I could use their communications gear, and I’d been informed every single time that it required special clearance to send anything on it; all they could do without the General or M’Voba here was receive.
“I’ll tell you what,” Kurt said from the other end of the couch that was the only furniture in the Training Simulator prep area, “I’m thinking we need to go find our ship and bust out of here.”
Vilberg snorted derisively. He paused in pulling on his own ViR halo to shake his head.
“You think it’ll be that easy? Like breaking into the security systems for a stash house in the Pirate Worlds? This is fucking Fleet Intelligence.”
“You got that shit in your head, right, Munroe?” Ku
rt asked, still looking like the idea made him nervous. “Can’t you use it to get us to the ship?”
“Vilberg’s right,” I admitted with a sigh. “My gear,” I tapped my temple with a finger, “is the best my mom could buy on the commercial market, but it’s not the kind of shit that can break through military firewalls.”
“So we just sit here and play with ourselves until that self-important brass-hat gets back,” Victor sounded as bitter and frustrated as I felt. “So he can send us off somewhere to get shot at for him.”
“He wasn’t gonna’ let us go either way,” Sanders opined, grabbing a squeeze bulb of water out of the cooler set in the wall. “We know too much.”
“First time you’ve been accused of that, huh?” Vilberg teased him. Sanders threw the bulb of water at him but Vilberg dodged it with a laugh and it smacked against the far wall, ricocheting in the low gravity and winding up bouncing back over to Sanders’ feet.
He’d bent down to pick it up again when the door swung open and one of the Fleet technicians stuck her head in. She was a bland-looking functionary type who I’d seen once or twice running a loading jack from some storage room somewhere to one of the fabrication shops.
“There’s a message for you in the Secure Communications Center,” she said in a tone of work-a-day ennui, as if it were just another boring routine task she had to take care of. “Come with me and I’ll open it up for you.”
We looked at each other, eyes lighting up with interest. This was it.
The communications room was another few floors deeper inside the base, surrounded by meters of rock on any side, and it was the only room on the whole level. Its interior looked like any other run-of-the-mill teleconference room with a table and uncomfortable-looking government chairs, and I wasn’t sure why they bothered having it this remote, but I guess what’s the point of being a spy if you can’t be paranoid?
Once all of us were inside, the technician started to leave, pausing to tell us, “This room can’t be opened from the outside until the message ends. Sgt. Munroe, just touch your palm to the table to begin, but please wait until I leave.”
Again, the words sounded like something from a spy thriller, but she delivered them like she was instructing us on how to use a zero-g toilet. I watched her close the door, then we all took seats around the round, flat-black conference table and I slapped my palm against its featureless surface. A hologram of the Commonwealth seal snapped to life above the center of the table, morphing seamlessly into the Space Fleet emblem and then the Intelligence insignia.
“This is a secure eyes-only communication,” a pleasant, female voice announced, “meant to be viewed by Sgt. Randall Munroe, Sgt. Eli Sanders, Petty Officer Braden Vilberg, Mr. Victor Simak and Mr. Kurt Simak. If anyone other than these gentlemen are present in the room, please pause the recording now and ask them to leave before viewing.” There was a slight hesitation and then the computer-simulated voice went on. “Please confirm verbally, one at a time, and in order, that these people are present.”
“Randall Munroe,” I said, shrugging at the others as I guessed at what sort of confirmation the thing would want.
“Who was next?” Vilberg whispered to Sanders, looking worried. “I forgot, was it you or me?”
Sanders rolled his eyes at the man and said his name aloud, and the others followed suit.
“Identity confirmed,” the voice said, satisfied. “Please wait a moment for General Antonin Murdock, Director of Fleet Intelligence.”
The image of Murdock’s head and shoulders replaced the insignia, recorded at a desk somewhere, with generic grey walls behind him that could have been an office anywhere, including a ship.
“I believe I may have found a task for you young men,” Murdock said without preamble. “We have an intelligence report from one of our assets that the Predecessor outpost has been stripped of everything portable. I have some ideas about where most of it was taken, but that’s going to be too heavily guarded for a single team to secure it. That’s going to require a fleet of ships and an army of assault troops, and we’re not ready for that, yet. But I have a separate report from an intelligence source inside the R&D wing of Damiani’s defense contractor. They brought in a single payload in a very heavily-escorted freighter to a top-secret Corporate Council research facility out on a large moon of a system with no other habitables, at the very end of a little-used Transition Line.”
He paused and reached out of the picture to hit a control. His image was replaced by the computer simulation of a Transition Line map, with a system highlighted in red, its coordinates floating next to it.
“Memorize the data,” he told us, “because you won’t be getting any official recording of this.”
I trusted the data to my headcomp, and I found myself wondering if Murdock knew I had it. He probably did.
“I believe,” the General went on, “that they’ve taken something they found at the outpost out to this moon, most likely a weapon given the nature of the research station. They’re probably testing it there because Damiani’s worried the effects might be noticeable and he doesn’t want to draw attention to the base where he’s taken the bulk of the technology.”
His face returned, and he smiled thinly.
“I want you to steal it.”
“He does remember there’s only the five of us now, right?” Vilberg protested, earning a dirty look and a shushing motion from Sanders.
“I realize that your numbers are limited,” Murdock expanded, as if he’d heard Vilberg’s words, “but the base shouldn’t be that heavily guarded, at least not with ground troops. What you will need, however, is a way to approach without being spotted, and I’ve arranged to provide you with that. Good luck, Munroe.”
The image went black and the hologram faded. I was still staring bemused at the space where it had been when the door to the room opened with a pneumatic hiss and the technician popped her head inside.
“If you all would come with me,” she invited. “I’m supposed to show you something up in the hangar bay.”
***
“What the hell is that?” Kurt wondered, eyes wide as he stared at the thing.
I knew what it was; I’d seen ships like it before. I’d flown in one to Demeter back during the war. But I’d never expected to see one again. It was about the same size as the Nomad or any other ship based on the wartime missile cutters, but that was where the resemblance ended. The Nomad was a spare, utilitarian delta, an ugly wedge shape that flew in an atmosphere because of the raw power of her jets. This thing was a bat designed by MC Escher, all insane, bulbous curves with wings reminiscent of the old photos of 21st Century military jets that Gramps used to show me. It was a dull, matte black that seemed almost to absorb the light in the hangar and cloak itself with a veil of darkness.
It was a Glory Boy stealth ship, the kind that Murdock’s commandos, including Cowboy, had used during the war to run covert operations behind enemy lines. I was so mesmerized by the sight of her that I almost didn’t catch what the technician was telling us.
“…uses coldgas jets for low-energy maneuvering to reduce the thermal signature, but you can only use them for landing on low-gravity bodies. Otherwise, she has a normal plasma drive for sublight propulsion and it’s honestly not that fast compared to the ship you came in. What she does have are three capacitor coils to let you execute multiple Transitions in close temporal proximity, which aids in survivability in combat. Your chief advantage in using a vessel such as this is the difficulty any enemy will have in detecting her with the radiation-absorbent materials of the hull and…”
“Is there like a tutorial or something?” I asked, circling around the nose of the ship and stepping onto the boarding ramp.
“Of course,” she told me. “And you have complete access to all systems, Sgt. Munroe. Please remember, however, that she can only be flown via headcomp control, so none of the others will be able to operate her systems.”
“Hear that, Boss?” Sanders a
sked, sticking his head down from higher up the ramp, halfway into the utility bay. “Don’t get killed or we’ll be stuck out there.”
He was joking, but I sensed the real concern behind the humor.
“Trust me, Eli,” I told him, trying to make my tone as light as his, “not getting killed is right up there in my to-do list.”
“What I meant,” the technician clarified, her tone a bit exasperated with our banter, “was that no one else will be able to operate the systems manually. You can, of course, ask the ship’s AI to return you to this base.”
“What’s her name?” Kurt wondered, getting into the spirit of teasing the Fleet NCO. “Is she cute?”
“My name,” I heard the voice over the speakers in the utility bay and in my implant ‘link as well, “is Nightshade.” It was a female voice, business-like and yet still somehow indulgent. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, gentlemen.”
Victor shaped a silent whistle, elbowing his brother.
“And a good evening to you, Ms. Nightshade,” Sanders said, looking around him in wonder.
“There’s some gear in the weapons locker that I’ll need to explain as well,” the Fleet technician went on, brushing past me and Eli on her way into the ship.
The rest of us followed her up the ramp and into the cramped utility bay. The inside of these ships was smaller than a normal missile cutter, much less the post-war modified civilian versions that used what had been the missile magazines for living space. There was barely enough room for the six of us in the utility bay, and Victor had to squeeze against the bulkhead to let her pull open the biggest locker.
Inside it was a rack of weapons…I guess you could call them rifles, but that would be like calling a two-handed broadsword a toothpick. These things were massive and when I tried to lift one out of the rack, I had to use both hands and brace myself, even with the lower gravity. The power pack was the whole buttstock of the weapon and half its weight, and in front of the pistol grip was a rounded, flattened donut shape that fed into an emitter lined with ridged, bulging rings of metal shielding that looked like what I’d seen on a much larger scale when I’d helped service the Nomad’s proton cannon.
