by Korza, Jay
“All right, let's get to the sweep.” Seth gestured towards the jungle. Without a co-pilot's chair, Seth had to stand in the canopy area to keep an eye on the screens and area outside the ship.
“This is a fairly remarkable area.” Shar'tuk was trying to make small talk. As the adrenaline of battle wore off and the tension started to fade, it was a common desire to make things feel normal again.
“Yes, it is.” Seth needed the conversation also. “I've seen several primate-looking species down there. A couple of pretty huge things that I couldn't even compare to any animal I've seen. I couldn't even tell where the one had a head, if he had a head.”
They continued to chat as they made their sweeps and checked in every five minutes. As their ship was lifting off, Shar'tuk pointed the transport back to the hangar and was able to land in the shuttle bay without issue. He stayed with the transport to lock it down and Seth headed for the bridge.
Seth arrived to find most of the consoles manned by two people instead of one. These were all Special Forces operators, not starship pilots. Surgeon wanted two sets of eyes on the panels to make sure things weren't missed and avoidable mistakes were avoided. A lot of the men had basic piloting skills and even some advanced skills but flying a fighter was not the same as a vessel of this size and complexity.
“Where do you need me?” Seth stood in front of his mentor.
“I'm sending all available hands to sickbay. There's a lot of wounds to be tended to. Hopefully we can keep everyone we saved alive. Some of them are pretty bad. I don't know how they even survived this long.” Surgeon shook his head as if it were an Etch A Sketch and he could remove the images from its screen.
Turning back to Seth, he said, “Looks like you were wrong, Cadet, for once.” Surgeon smiled.
“I think so”, Seth agreed. “All of the terminals were locked out, so maybe it was a data wipe or just a simple lockout command to keep us from information the base had.”
“That makes me want to rethink setting our stealth ships to detonate.” Surgeon was mulling over his decision. “If the information this base holds is that important, maybe we should keep it around to come back for later.”
“I think that's a good”—” Seth didn't finish his sentence as the ship was rocked violently backward and he was thrown to the deck.
The forward viewer had a split screen of the forward and aft images from the ship. The aft image showed the hangar bay they had just come from erupting like the most massive volcano anyone had ever seen. Fire, debris, molten metal, ships, and everything else imaginable was being shot from the mouth of the hangar.
The base and the ground immediately surrounding it burped upward at least ten meters before sinking into the ground like a soufflé that was taken from the oven too soon. Flames began to shoot out from destroyed areas of the base as it sank in on itself.
Surgeon, who had been sitting securely in the command chair, got up and helped Seth to his feet. He surveyed the bridge and didn't see any major injuries. “Is everyone all right?” After getting affirmative head nods and a few verbal acknowledgements, he turned to Joker. “Are we going to stay up?”
“Yes, sir.” Joker was checking things on his panel. “Luckily this ship likes an angled trajectory out of the atmosphere instead of going straight up. Otherwise we would have been directly over that geyser when it lit up.” He went back to his controls to make sure he didn't miss anything important.
Seth wasn't sure gloating was appropriate in this moment so he smiled when Surgeon did it for him. “I guess your record is still mostly untarnished.” He sat back in the command chair and added, “I hate it when you're right.”
Seth was rubbing the newest knot on his head. “Sometimes I wish I could be wrong more often.” As though the rubbing kick-started his thoughts, he went on. “You know, because I was right about the self-destruct, along with all of the ships we saw leaving the area when we first arrived, I don't think they called for reinforcements. With that in mind, I think we should take the time to recover our stealth craft.”
“I agree. Take as many men that can be spared from medical duty and get our craft back. Joker, can you get us back to our original landing area?” Surgeon was still watching the base destroy itself.
“Yes, sir.” Joker was adjusting the atmospheric trajectory and heading towards the landing site. “We'll be in a good position to launch and receive craft in about five minutes.”
~
Ten hours later, all available hands were in the hangar bay for a mission status and debrief. All unavailable hands would be listening on their comm system or watching from a remote viewing screen at their station.
Shar'tuk was just finishing up. “So that's the basic history of my people. We were deeply ashamed of our past but for the last several generations we have begun to shed those feelings and move on. How long can we persecute ourselves for decisions that we were never a part of? How long can we feel bad for something we didn't do?”
“You shouldn't.” Surgeon was sitting in the center of the amassed group. “Especially considering your ancestors were the ones who risked everything to change the empire.”
To the group, he finished, “All right, we now have a little better idea of what we are up against. We've fought them and we won. It's the first victory we, as the Coalition, have had against this new enemy. We can't let that go to our heads. We have to use this information to keep having victories in the future.
“After we're done here, I want every single operator to put together an independent report on this mission. I want every second of battle that you can remember to be detailed in that report. Focus on the strengths and weaknesses in the enemy for every mode of combat we were involved in. Also be sure to detail what you think we did wrong and why. You won't be hurting my feelings at all. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and we need that hindsight to make our future engagements better. Don't pull any punches.”
After Surgeon was sure that there were no questions up to this point, he nodded to Reaper. “Casualty report.”
Reaper stood. “We lost approximately one-fifth of the crew on the planet. Of those we got back, we've had nine deaths so far, mostly from shock. The injuries are pretty heinous but extremely advanced surgically so most should survive.
“I think we'll even have maybe twenty or so up and walking in a few days. That should be beneficial to ship's operations. Until then, there are plenty of crew members who we can talk to if we have questions about the ship. They may not be mobile but they are still intact enough to help us out.”
“Cadet.” Surgeon turned to his unspoken number two.
“We were able to bring all of our stealth ships back on board so we still have those assets. We have done a preliminary inventory check on the ship and it seems like we still have a fair number of weapons and supplies. They did take some inventory to study, but thankfully not that much.
“The troop transport we took from their base has navigational charts for this region of space, but that's about it. I wouldn't expect this sort of ship to have a full database on their people but we'll go over it again just to make sure we didn't miss some command codes or other useful information.” Seth looked to Shar'tuk because he would be the one doing most of the scanning.
Shar'tuk added, “We have sent a message back to my people asking them to send us a translation key for the ancient Nortes dialect that is in the transport's system. Once we have that key, any one of us can look through the files we have. Until then, we're going to have to rely on me trying to pick out stuff I can understand.”
“That leads me to the last part of this debrief.” Surgeon pulled out a datapad. “About forty hours ago, the Coalition sent a message to us about a pending threat in this sector of space. We just received the message and I barely had time to read through it all before this gathering. It's marked as highest priority and classification so don't forward copies home to your family.” This got a slight chuckle from the group.
He continued. “I'll let y
ou read through the majority of it on your own time but here's the basics. The warriors we've encountered used to be grown on a planet dedicated to that one specific task. For more than a thousand years now, the warriors have been denied access to that planet due to an automated defense system and a built-in genetic code that keeps them from approaching that sector of space.
“Something has changed; we don't know what or how, but it has. The Nortes have had remote monitoring devices in that system since they left the empire and those sensors recently detected intrusions in the area. The sensors are passive so there is no information on the types of ships, just that ships have entered the area.
“Another recon team was on a planet investigating an ancient base that was associated with the succession Emperor just briefed us on.”
All eyes went to Shar'tuk and he just rolled his eyes. “You know, if you call me that around any Nortes military personnel or, gods forbid, the empress herself, I'll probably be imprisoned or executed.”
Surgeon thought for a moment, his facial expression looking as though he was trying a piece of food for the first time and trying to decide whether he liked it or not. “Worth it”, he concluded.
“Moving along,” Surgeon continued. “The team was led by a Marine Science Corps officer, Lieutenant Emily Riley, apparently now Captain Emily Riley after she proved herself on the mission.”
Seth was so dead tired from everything he almost missed what Surgeon had said. The name, the name he wanted to hear and speak out loud for so long now had been said. He quickly pulled out his tablet and began looking for the name. The officer's bio was present with the debrief material. It was her.
It was his chance encounter, his one unbelievable moment in his life. Of all the things that Seth had witnessed on this mission alone, it was still more unbelievable to him that he had fallen in love in less than twenty minutes after meeting Emily. Scratch that, less than twenty seconds after meeting her.
Seth wasn't even aware of the meeting anymore until Surgeon smacked him in the back of the head. “Am I boring you, Cadet?” Seth shook his head back and forth. “Good, now moving on.
“They found a lot of intelligence on that mission, most of it is detailed in your tablets for you to look through later. One important piece of information is one of their operators created a translation program for the alien language. That program will be coming in the next transmission burst. They wanted to make sure we were still alive before they sent it out. We've sent them our ship's private encryption key so they can encode it just for us in case anyone else intercepts the message.
“And finally, that leads us to the next part of our mission. We are moving to a staging area in this portion of the galaxy. Once at the staging area, we will be met by ships from the Coalition fleet as well as the Nortes, Detrill, and a few other non-member species that share a piece of the history we just went over.
“We are already in this sector, so we will get to the staging area first. We will recon it, determine if it's safe and report back. If we choose to keep that location, it will take approximately five months for the other ships to arrive.”
“At least I finally get to use my saved vacation time”, someone quipped. This got a much bigger laugh from the group.
Surgeon smiled. “Absolutely! We will have plenty of downtime after we finish our initial task of securing the staging area. We will definitely use some of that time to recuperate and heal both physically and emotionally.
“We'll also be starting a new training program to integrate everything we now know about these warriors and how they fight. We need to get much better at hand-to-hand combat with them if we want to survive future encounters.
“And of course that time will also be used to help rehabilitate as many of the crew members as we possibly can. I know you guys aren't nurses and doctors but they need our help. They went through more than any ten of us put together ever have or ever will. Reaper will be in charge of their continued rehab until we can get them the specialists they need.”
“Fuck yeah!” someone said. Then the group replied in unison, “Fuck yeah!”
Surgeon didn't expect anything less of his men but it still moved him to see them all get behind the idea of helping out their shipmates. “Thank you, men. We will have a memorial service tomorrow at oh-nine hundred hours. I will be conducting the service from the forward hangar bay we've converted to an extended sickbay. It will be crowded but I'd like as many men in there as possible with the crew members who are bedridden. Some of you also need to be with the more seriously injured who are in the proper sickbay to give them your support. If you have a preference because you are close to any certain crew members, work it out among yourselves and get it done.”
After receiving head nods and a few verbal responses, he concluded the meeting. “Dismissed.”
As people got up and left, Surgeon saw Seth studying his tablet again. “She's fairly attractive.”
“Um, yeah. What?” Seth noticed Surgeon looking over his shoulder.
“What's going on with you? I know you're beyond exhausted right now but you seem kind of gone at the moment.”
“Do you remember that day in the training room when I mentioned a woman I sort of had back home?” Seth turned the tablet towards Surgeon. “That's her!”
“Wow. Small universe, huh? You want to see something that will totally blow your already frazzled mind?”
Surgeon took the tablet from Seth's hands and moved through the other team's personnel bios. When he got to an attractive and somewhat obviously seasoned woman, Surgeon gave the tablet back to Seth. “That's my wife.”
Seth was astounded by the absolutely insane number of chances that would have to happen in the universe to cause this chain of events to occur and put them in the conversation they were now having. Seth looked at the file again; something was niggling at his brain and he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. Then he read the name to himself again. Daria O’Connor.
“Holy crap. Your name is Mike.”
They had never discussed real names before so Surgeon was a little taken aback. “Yeah, how did you know that?”
“Your wife, Daria O’Connor. I’ve been hoping to meet her ever since I signed up for the marines.”
“I’m really not following you at all.” Surgeon had no idea how Seth could’ve known Daria.
“I’ve got a story for you.” Seth then laid out his dealings with AeroTech and how he had discovered that Mike had been “murdered” which eventually led Seth to join the marines.
“This mission keeps getting stranger by the day.” Mike just sat back to think about it for a minute.
Seth was still reviewing the file. “What are you going to say to her when you see her?”
Mike thought for a second. “I'm sorry I forgot to take the garbage out before I left.”
Chapter 51
Deep Inside Enemy Territory – Fancy Meeting You Here
“Sir, the Emilian is on final approach to the staging area and requesting permission to join the fleet”, the conn officer announced.
The captain had been on the bridge for the last three weeks, though he could only take four to six hours at a time on shift before he had to rest again. He was surprised at how well his conn officer was adjusting to his new life with only two fingers on his right hand and four on his left. Almost every one of the crew members who had survived their stint as prisoners were left with some sort of physical disfigurement. Some were adjusting well and others would never make a full physical or psychological recovery.
For the last several hours, ships from the Coalition Task Force had been jumping into the system. The ships were coming in twos or threes and then receiving positioning coordinates from the Vanguard, who was in charge of placing the vessels in strategic formations while they waited for further orders. The task was important, yet dull and repetitive.
“Give them their coordinates along with their companion vessels. Extend them the usual greeting and protocol instruction packet
.” The captain looked over the ship names for the newest trio of vessels and laughed out loud when he saw the last one. “Also tell the crew of The Goonies that we are ready to receive their envoy for the combined debrief. I’ll tell Surgeon that his guest is about to arrive.”
~
Surgeon and Cadet were training with several other members from their team. Intermixed with them were some of the more able-bodied crew members. After their ordeal, they wanted to learn to fight better in case they ever got boarded again. Most of them were doing well for swabbies and all were doing great considering what they had recently been through.
The captain approached Surgeon, who was going through weapons malfunction and reload drills with a few of the crew members. “Surgeon, I thought you’d like to know your, uh, special guest has just arrived in-system. The envoy should be on the Vanguard within a couple of hours.”
Surgeon’s eyes lit up just a little for a second before his years of combat poker face kicked in. “Thank you, sir. It’s good to see you up and around lately. I really didn’t like being in charge of your ship while you were still on it.”
The captain smiled. “You weren’t. I’ll give you a heads-up when their shuttle is on its way.”
“Thank you again, sir.” Surgeon turned to Seth as the captain walked away. “Let’s do about an hour more here before we get cleaned up for our guests.”
Seth nodded in agreement and ushered a few of the crew to Joker so they could all work on some hand-to-hand combat skills.
~
It took almost four hours for the envoy to arrive. The captain was complaining to Surgeon, saying that the envoy had the Coalition president along with the Detrill and Nortes heads of state, and the security teams from the three different parties couldn’t agree on anything. Not to mention the protocol officers from each party having different ideas on how things should be run. In truth, the three people in charge couldn’t care less who walked through a doorway first or whose national colors were used as room decorations.
