by Wilson Harp
“What were they doing with him when you last saw him?”
“They were closing the lid on his cryo-tube.”
K-man shook his head. “That seems odd somehow. I don’t think an Iltia’cor could fit in one of their cryo-tubes.”
“Unless Manny was a smaller Iltia’cor,” Lippor said.
Mitchell shook his head. “No, he was over six and a half feet tall and huge. Big shoulders.”
“They might have been able to squeeze him in,” K-man said.
“No. Now that you mention it, the tube wasn’t the same size as the ones they put me and Ramirez in. It was much bigger. Manny fit in with room to spare.”
Lippor looked at his commander with a puzzled look.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” K-man said. “Maybe we have it wrong. We assumed they attacked the transport to grab Ramirez. Maybe they were after Manny.”
“What do you mean? Ramirez is still missing?”
K-man ignored Mitchell’s question.
“Lippor, pull up the data on the Iltia exchanges. Find out how long Manny had been on Earth,” K-man said.
K-man looked at Mitchell. “Private, thank you for this information. I’ll have someone take you back to your room.”
“I don’t know what information, sir,” Mitchell sputtered.
“Here it is,” said Lippor. “Mantriq was on Earth for just over eight months. But what does that mean?”
“In one of the reports I read that the Otina had recently taken some Pelod prisoner as well. Find out anything you can about the ones taken.”
K-man hit the nurse call button and smiled at Mitchell. “You couldn’t have known, Private. But I have seen at least a dozen Otina bases where we have freed prisoners. But they were always human or Hedali prisoners. And not once have I seen a cryo-tube that would comfortably fit an Iltia’cor.”
“Sir, you’re not going to believe this. The six Pelod that have been suspected of being taken were all assigned to manufacturing plants on Earth. They were all on Earth for over a year before they went missing.”
“It’s Earth. There is something about Earth that the Otina are looking for.”
A member of the medical staff appeared in the door.
“Sir, is there a problem?” he asked.
“No problem, I think we have bothered young Mitchell here long enough. He has been a great help to us,” K-man said.
“Thank you, sir,” Mitchell said with a smile. “Think you could put in a good word for me and get me something decent to eat?”
“Whatever you want, Mitchell. Have them bill me for it,” K-man said. He smiled as the young private was wheeled away.
“Sir, I am putting this into a communique. Who do you want it to go to?” Lippor asked.
“All the way up the food chain,” K-man said. “Salazar and Kitch for sure. Put Doctor Williams and Ambassador Martin on there as well. We need someone to understand what we are looking at.”
Chapter 15
Kyle walked into the conference room and smiled. An entire tray of chocolate donuts sat next to the coffee. He picked up two donuts and sat them down at the table. He then poured some coffee into one of the mugs. They all had the emblem of Earth Force and Kyle smiled as he thought about how he had hated the design the first time he saw it.
He reached for the sugar and picked up three packets. After a second, he picked up a fourth. Sara wasn’t here to chastise him for his diet right now, and he was an old man. He deserved to have his coffee as sweet as he wanted.
“That’s not going to help that pot belly,” Kitch said as she swept into the room.
Kyle winced as she sat her folders down on the table. Several aides followed her into the room, all careful not to get in Kyle’s way as he stepped back to the table.
“Good to see you, Kitch.” Kyle said with a smile.
She sat down and looked at him. Part of her job was the worry and stress that lived in her eyes. But when she flashed her smile, he could see that she was happy to see him again.
“It’s not every day that I get to have coffee with old friend. Even less rare when I get to have it on the taxpayers’ dime.”
“I noticed you didn’t spare the expense on the doughnuts,” he said as he took a bite.
“Those aren’t all for you, by the way. The Chancellor will be here as well, and Williams will be furious if there are none left.”
“Bah,” Kyle said. “Ever since he left the Corps, Carl has been late for everything. If he misses the doughnuts, it’s his own fault.”
“Speaking of missing the doughnuts, I spoke with Sara,” Kitch said as an aide put a cup of coffee and a doughnut on the table off to her side. “She said that you were to have no more than two, and that you were not allowed to take any home with you. Something about a diet?”
Kyle shook his head. “No. No diet. I admit I need to work out more, but I’m not going on a diet. And who is going to take the rest of those home?”
Kyle looked over at the table. “You bought two dozen. All chocolate.”
“I don’t know who is taking them home, Ambassador, but I told Sara that you were only getting two.”
Kyle opened his mouth to complain further when Chancellor Thomas and his team entered the room. Ostensibly, Kyle was the highest ranking person at this meeting, but it occurred to him that he was the only one without a staff.
“Good afternoon, Ambassador. General Kitch,” Thomas said.
Kyle grimaced as he looked at Thomas. When they had first met, Jim Thomas was pudgy with a short beard. Now it was Kyle that had a pot belly and wore a mustache and three day old scruff. Thomas had lost most of his hair due to stress in the Iltia war, so his wife had convinced him to shave his head and lose the beard. He had also taken up running and was looking fit and trim.
Kyle looked down at the doughnuts sitting in front of him and sighed.
“Chancellor, I’m glad you could make it. Doctor Williams said this was information that we needed to see in person,” Kitch said.
“Yes. Well, in many ways, Williams is an anachronistic man. A top flight researcher and engineer with a collection of vinyl records, print books, and photo albums full of actual film photography. Thoroughly interesting and infuriating at the same time. I’ll be interested to see if this meeting was really needed or if I could have stayed in Baltimore,” Thomas said as he sat down.
A cup of coffee and a doughnut were sat in front of Thomas by one of his aides. Kyle was relieved when he saw Thomas take a bite. Kyle followed with a bite of his own doughnut.
The aides made sure everything was set for their bosses and left the room.
“What have you been up to, Ambassador? I get your reports, but how has retirement from the Marines treated you?” Thomas asked.
Kyle liked the Chancellor. He had never really thought highly of politicians in general, but Jim Thomas was a genuinely kind man.
“It has been good, Chancellor. I never realized how much stress I carried around. The votes on the Galactic Council are important, but nothing like the day to day stress I had dealt with for decades. It’s also good to have a normal home life. I missed seeing a lot of Sara when she was growing up. I’m glad my wife did such a good job raising her. Sandy would be very proud of how her daughter turned out,” Kyle said.
“How is the boyfriend?” Kitch asked.
“Jack is a nice enough guy, I guess. But I don’t know how serious she is with him. Some days, I expect to hear that he proposed. Others, I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me it was over.”
Thomas laughed. “Ah, the exuberance and passion of youth.”
The door opened and Williams walked into the room.
“What? Did I miss a joke?” he said as he looked at those sitting at the table.
“Maybe if you weren’t late all the time, you might catch one,” Kyle said.
“It would take more than him being on time to catch a joke,” Kitch said.
Williams set his folders on the
table. “Hey! Chocolate doughnuts! Glad you got plenty, General. The Ambassador here will likely eat them all before we are done.”
“Fine, I’ll go on a diet,” Kyle growled. “Tomorrow.”
He took another bite of his doughnut and looked at each of his oppressors in turn.
Williams walked over to the table with the refreshments and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Now you don’t know what the Ambassador had to go through today,” he said to the others. “I asked him here a little early because I wanted to run a test.”
“What kind of test?” asked Thomas.
“Mosar. You were testing him for mosar, weren’t you?” Kitch asked right on top of the Chancellor’s question.
“Yes,” Williams said as he sat down. “I needed to see his results before we had this meeting.”
“I’m guessing that you had a strong suspicion of what the results would be or you wouldn’t have scheduled this meeting directly after the test,” Kyle said.
“You are correct, Ambassador,” Williams said.
“And since you didn’t come in here apologizing for wasting our time, I guess you were correct,” Kitch added.
Williams smiled. “You know me all too well, General.”
“Spit it out, Doctor. What did the test show?” asked Thomas.
“Ambassoder Martin is highly infected with mosar. His levels are only matched by four other people that I have tested,” Williams said as he opened a folder and slid a copy of the report toward each of the others at the table.
“This… this can’t be right,” Kitch muttered. “These readings are off the chart.”
“Yes,” said Williams. “They are enormous. And I think I know why. One of the other subjects with levels that high is none other than myself.”
Kyle looked at Williams with a sharp glance. He knew that his friend had discovered something when he was told that he needed to be tested. He was afraid of what he might hear next.
“The gravity weapon,” Kyle muttered.
Williams nodded. “The Iltia’cor gravity weapon somehow raised the mosar levels in our system. Captain Swanson was our first case of a human with mosar that we discovered. He was on the Hemingway in the Do’yar’on system. Two others of that crew have also been tested and have levels the same as myself and the Ambassador.”
Thomas looked anxious and his eyes flitted from Williams to the door.
“Is this a danger? I mean, being in the same room as both of you…”
“Relax, Chancellor,” Kyle said. “We have been infected for over a year. You have been around us many times since then.”
Thomas cleared his throat. “Yes, of course. I didn’t consider that.”
“What are the effects of mosar infection?” Kitch asked.
“I’m not sure,” Williams said. “We haven’t seen any adverse effects yet. But…”
“But if we let it spread, we won’t have any chance of stopping it,” Kitch finished for him.
“Precisely. I have prepared an order for you to send, General. It will require all crew of the Hemingway to report to Washington to be tested. There were only three crew members on the Fitzgerald, and two are in this room.”
“Alex,” Kyle said. “Alex and the others are out there without this knowledge. They are as susceptible to mosar as any alien.”
“Yeah, I thought of that,” Williams said with a sigh. “But we can’t worry about the handful of men and women who are infected at the highest level. We need to focus on the rest of our people.”
“What do you suggest?” Thomas asked.
“From our preliminary data, a person who is around another person with mosar has their own levels increase. But they need to have significant contact before this occurs. Same proximity, we figure around 10 meters, for extended periods of time. We are estimating around ten to twenty hours a week.”
“So family and co-workers, but not casual contact in public,” Kitch said.
“Exactly. If this was a medical infection, we could isolate by means of quarantine. But putting everyone who is infected together would simply increase their levels of mosar,” Williams said.
“House arrest,” Thomas suggested. “A modified version. They could work from home or get jobs which don’t require close co-workers.”
“That’s a possibility,” Williams said. “But we are still trying to determine how quickly it spreads and how many people are already infected.”
“What about animals, materials? Could I have infected my house with mosar?” Kyle asked.
“I don’t know. We haven’t had time to test beyond people associated with Swanson and now those on the Hemingway and Fitzgerald.”
“I’ll assign you some more staff,” Kitch said.
“I appreciate that, but we need to weigh the need for faster research against the need for secrecy,” Williams said.
“You’re right,” Thomas said. “If word got out that humans were infected with mosar, it would cause a panic.”
“Worse, it would allow any potential enemies to know that their mosar based weapons might not be useless against us after all,” Kitch said. “Right now the idea that we are immune to the heavy weapons on most race’s ships is enough to have everyone play nice with us. If they start thinking they might be able to succeed where the Iltia’cor failed, then we might be in jeopardy.”
“True, but I would say at this point that only those who were on board the Hemingway and Fitzgerald are in danger of mosar weapons.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas asked.
“Those who are in the alpha group probably would not even feel it if the mosar was stripped from their bodies.” Williams said.
“Have you tested this?” Kyle asked.
“No, and I wouldn’t want to do human testing until we are certain of the safety. We are going to try white mice, if we can detect an alpha level of mosar.”
“You think you can cleanse it from the population,” Kitch said. Her eyes widened as she saw some hope.
“Yes,” Williams said. “If we have good results with the trials, I am hopeful that we can remove mosar from the people infected at the alpha, beta and delta levels.”
Thomas furrowed his brow. “What about those at the highest levels?”
“Isolation,” said Kyle.
“Correct,” Williams said. “We would isolate those we couldn’t remove the mosar from safely.”
“What about inorganics?” Kitch asked. “If our people are clean but our ships aren’t, we are still stuck with the problems of mosar weapons being used against us.”
“I don’t have an answer for that, General. I wish I did,” Williams said.
Kyle’s phone beeped. He had forgotten to turn it off when he came in the conference room. He looked down to see if it was Sara. He had promised he would always take a call from her. Instead he saw it was a priority message.
He looked around the table. “Who would be sending me a priority message?” he asked.
Kitch and Thomas looked at each other. As far as they knew, they were the only ones with Kyle’s priority clearance code.
Kyle opened the message. It was from Kiskaliski.
“K-man,” Williams said as he glanced at his phone.
Kyle started reading the message. It was something about an Iltia’cor that was captured by the Otina.
“General. Chancellor. You both need to check your messages, this one is addressed to all of us,” Williams said.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Kyle said. “K-man is saying that Ramirez wasn’t the target of the Otina raid on that transport ship. But why else would they expose their ability to pull a ship out of a warp field and attack so openly?”
“This Iltia’cor. I don’t see anything special about him,” Kitch said. “Adept at human languages. Is a good astrophysicist. But otherwise doesn’t seem to be a prime military target.”
“It’s not what he knows that’s the reason,” Williams said. “It’s what he is. Look, K-man has figured
it out. The Pelod that were captured had all spent time on Earth for months. So had this Iltia’cor. The Otina want to study aliens that have spent long periods of time on Earth.”
“But why?” Thomas asked. “What could spending time on Earth possibly have to do with taking aliens as prisoners.”
“Medical experimentations,” Kitch said. “That’s what it is about. The Otina in our system are all about medical experimentations. The Pelod said that it was odd that we were finding so many research stations in our raids. They said that each Otina tribe seemed to focus on something different and this one was interested in medical studies.”
“The answer is in front of us, I think,” Kyle said. ‘We just have to figure out what we need to be asking.”
Thomas suddenly stood up. “No, the answer is in this room. It’s mosar. The fact that we didn’t have it before, and yet the fact that we can have it spread into us means that it isn’t humanity that is special, but our solar system.”
“That makes sense,” Williams said. “What if there is something about the Earth that prohibits the spread of mosar?”
“Then how are other humans getting it?” asked Kitch.
“Maybe because some of the carriers just had too much for the Earth to hold back,” said Kyle.
Williams stood up. “I need to get back to the lab. I’ll get my team working extra hours until we can figure out some parameters. I could use a team of biologists with high clearance to start the white mouse study, General.”
Kitch nodded. “I’ll find some for you. This project has got to be our top priority.”
The door to the conference room opened a crack and a young aide of Kitch’s stuck his head in.
“General, sorry to disturb you. You have a priority message from Admiral Salazar that he needs you to read immediately.”
“Thank you, Marrin,” Kitch said as she pulled her phone back out.
Kyle and the others watched her with feigned disinterest. They were all hoping that Salazar would have news of Alex, and that the news would be good.
Kitch shook her head and smiled. “Gentlemen, we have a new target. We know where Warlord Jii will be, and we have a chance to take him.”
“That’s wonderful news,” Thomas said.
