by Smith, Glenn
The driver didn’t answer, but the engine’s steady hum drop in pitch, just a little, and Dylan felt the APC slow down. Good enough for now. But when they got back to the base...
“Yo, Sarge?”
Dylan leaned forward and peered down the row of Marines to his left. Not that he needed to, of course. He knew who’d called him—PFC Paul Andolini from South Philadelphia, one of the more recent arrivals.
“Yeah, Pauly?”
“How comes we gotta ride in these oversized sardine cans anyway? We ain’t no brother-humpin’ Humlees. Hell, we ain’t even in the fuckin’ Army! We’re Marine Corps Rangers! We should be flyin’ home.”
“We’re Special Ops Rangers, dumb ass,” PFC Shin interjected. Andolini shot her a dirty look, but let her keep talking. “We don’t even exist, remember? We’ve got to look like a Humlee unit or the wrong people will start asking the wrong questions. Why do you think we’re attached to a regular Humlee company in the first place?”
Now that Shin was finished, Andolini had something to say to her. “Who the fuck do you think you’re callin’ a dumb ass, you slant-eyed little...”
“Uh oh,” someone intoned.
“Andolini!” Dylan roared. All eyes turned toward him as even the APC itself seemed to fall quiet under his authority. “One more remark like that and the only stripes you’ll have left when I’m finished will be the brown ones in your shorts! You got that, Private?”
“Damn, Sarge, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it!”
“I said, do you got that, Private?” Bad grammar, maybe, but his point was loud and clear.
“Yes, Sergeant! I got it!”
“Good!” With that, Dylan sat back and bowed his head again. The pain had finally begun to recede, but had returned with his sudden outburst. He sighed and shook his head in disgust. Thousands of years of social evolution, and mankind still hadn’t managed to completely expel its stupid, groundless, racial prejudices.
“What’s Humlee?” Private Walters asked. The youngest and newest Ranger in the squad, he’d only been out of training a couple of months and hadn’t yet picked up on all the slang the more seasoned Marines tended to use.
“H-M-L-I,” Shin spelled out for him. “Highly Mobile Light Infantry.”
“Oh yeah.”
A few minutes later the pain had finally subsided completely, as had the spirited laughter that had been filling the compartment until he yelled at Andolini. Dylan drew a deep, cleansing breath—as if a lungful of that musky stink could be considered cleansing—and slowly exhaled. Then he started rolling his head around in circles to work the kinks out of his neck. A few to the left, then a few to the right. Oh yeah. That felt much better. Much better.
“Hey, Ortiz,” he called out, speaking louder and more clearly than he had been able to earlier.
“Yeah, Sarge?”
“When we get back to the barracks I’m going to buy you the biggest cup of coffee you’ve ever had in your life.”
She smiled appreciatively. “Gee, thanks, Sarge,” she responded in a humorously sarcastic tone. “That means a whole lot, considering the coffee back at the barracks is always free.”
“Oh that’s right, it is,” he returned, pretending to have forgotten that little detail. “Well in that case, I’ll buy you two cups.”
“You’re just too generous, Sarge.”
Chapter 18
Yesterday had been a total washout as far as getting any real work done was concerned. First there had been the trip down to the surface for the early morning meeting with Mirriazu and the others—it still bothered him that he’d had to be less than honest with her—then the trip back, which had been delayed more than an hour due to some kind of minor mechanical problem with the shuttle. Then, after a brief conversation with Liz and a frustrated call back to the Provost Marshal’s Office on Europa, there had been a much longer than usual mandatory command staff meeting, during which many very important topics that didn’t concern him in the least were discussed at length and in great detail. The Military Police battalion’s change-of-command ceremony had followed that, and that had in turn been followed by one of those ever popular so-called ‘voluntary’ social gatherings that all officers and senior NCOs were always expected to attend, commonly referred to by some as ‘mandatory fun.’ By the time Hansen had finally made it to his office, the duty day had ended.
Which was why he was heading there almost two hours earlier than usual this morning, despite the fact that it was Saturday. Well, that and the fact that Heather was having a few of her friends over for one final too-loud-for-Daddy-to-concentrate weekend-long get-together before school started up. Otherwise, he would have worked from home like he’d been doing every Saturday for the last several weeks.
Actually, it felt pretty good to start the day so far ahead of the curve. The only down side was that Vicky wouldn’t have a pot of coffee waiting for him when he got there.
Or so he’d thought. But as the doors parted and he walked into the reception area, that pleasantly intoxicating aroma of freshly brewed Columbian coffee drifted over him like that proverbial summer breeze, just as it always did. Vicky met him a few feet inside and held his mug out to him as if he were a marathon runner trotting past a water point, just as she always did.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as he stopped and gratefully accepted his mug.
“You’re welcome,” she responded sarcastically.
Hansen grinned. “Sorry. Thank you.”
“You’re forgiven,” she told him, smiling back at him. Then, in answer to his question, she added, “And what I’m doing here, Admiral, is making sure you don’t start your day without your morning caffeine.”
“Okay, you’ve done that, and I appreciate it very much. Now get out of here.”
“No, sir. If you’re working, I’m working.”
“Nonsense. It’s Saturday. Go somewhere. Have a good time.”
“You first.”
Hansen gazed at her, then grinned again and surrendered. “All right. You win.”
“Damn right I win.”
“What would I ever do without you, Vicky?”
“Probably fall asleep at your desk.”
As usual, he checked her out on the sly as he took that long, careful, first sip. Today’s wardrobe consisted of yet another finely tailored lady’s business suit—dark charcoal gray with black trim this time. It looked kind of like a Military Police uniform, except that it included what had to be the shortest skirt she’d ever worn to work. She wore it with a bright yellow blouse and those same black boots she’d taken to wearing pretty regularly lately. Her hair hung freely about her shoulders and down her back, and her makeup, as always, was perfect.
“You are truly amazing, Vicky,” he said. “How the hell do you always know...”
“It’s easy, Admiral,” she interrupted, smiling again. She had a way of anticipating his questions as well as his arrival times. “You have your sources and I have mine.”
“Spies in the corridors?” he asked. Just their usual, light-hearted morning banter, not an accusation, though with all that was going on in the galaxy it took a great deal more effort lately not to appear too serious all the time.
“Something like that, yeah. We can’t have you protecting the universe without your morning coffee, can we?”
“Good point,” he said as he started toward his office again. “Keep up the good work.”
“That’s the only kind of work I know how to do, Admiral.”
“I know,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s why I keep you around.”
“Is that why? Damn. All these months, I thought it was because of my good looks and charming personality.”
He stopped in front of his door, turned and faced her again. Damn, but she did have nice legs. “Well, those, too,” he told her. Then he said, “Listen, do me a favor. I have a lot of work to catch up on. If you won’t take the day off, then at least take a long lunch. Say about ten-thirty. I’ll see you back
here around thirteen-thirty or so. I’ll make sure you still get eight hours’ credit.”
“All right, Admiral,” she said, smiling. “I do have a few things to take care of today, so I guess I can use that time.”
“Yes, I know.”
She paused a moment as he passed his mug from his right hand to his left and faced his door again. Then she laughed, but there was a certain nervousness to her laughter, as if she wasn’t all that sure he was kidding. After all, he was the commanding officer of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency and she’d only worked for him for the past eight or nine months. So, in her mind at least, the possibility that he really was having her watched was a very real one.
Hansen punched his access code into the panel, pressed his hand against the scanner plate, and looked into the coin-sized camera.
“Hansen,” he said. The plate glowed white and the door opened, but before he stepped inside, he faced around one more time—she was still staring after him for some reason—and said, “You do know that I was only kidding, right? I didn’t really know you had errands to run.”
“Of course, Admiral,” she replied, though still a little hesitantly. “I never thought...”
“Glad to hear it. I wouldn’t do that to you, Vicky.”
“Of course not.”
“I mean it. Your pre-employment investigation took longer than you’ve worked here so far. If I really thought I couldn’t trust you, for any reason, you’d be working somewhere else.”
“Thank you, Admiral. I appreciate that.”
He nodded, then stepped into his office, wondering why he’d felt the need to reassure her of his trust all of the sudden. Surely she’d known he was only joking when he insinuated that he knew she had errands to run. Such insinuations and innuendo were just another part of their normal morning banter. So why...
It was nothing. Why was he even worrying about it?
He reached back and tapped the ‘close’ button, then crossed to his desk, set his mug down in front of his chair, and turned on the brewer in the wall. Then, as he sat down, he noticed that his comm-panel’s message light was flashing red, indicating that he’d received at least one incoming communication, either an official message or an Intel report, coded as ‘urgent’. Not the way he wanted to start the day.
He called up the list. There were only three intelligence reports and no other messages—not bad for having missed an entire day of work. The one coded ‘urgent’ was second on the list. He reached out to tap it, but paused before he touched the screen. While it was true that all intelligence was potentially important, it was also true that what an agent in the field considered to be urgent usually wasn’t as urgent as he or she thought. In addition, it was fairly common for two or more separate reports to relate to each other on some level, and they always made more sense to him when he reviewed them in the same order in which they’d been filed. So he tapped the first message on the list instead, then picked up his coffee mug and sat back in his chair.
The report came up on the wall screen and started to play. It turned out to be nothing more than the now twice daily overall summary of fleet actions, indicating, as it had nearly every day for the past few months, just how badly the war was going for the Coalition. It told the same old story. Solfleet carrier groups had engaged Veshtonn forces in this sector or that, or had cruised into an ambush in one star system or another. Solfleet had lost more battles than it had won, and with every loss, the fleet, and consequently the entire Coalition, had grown that much weaker, that much more unprepared for the next engagement. When the report finally came to its grim conclusion, Hansen sighed. At the rate things were going, the Coalition wouldn’t last another six weeks, let alone six months.
As he swallowed the last of his coffee, the second report opened with a splash-screen warning printed in bold, bright red letters:
PRIORITY-ONE URGENT: CODE RED
CHIEF, SOLFLEET INTELLIGENCE EYES ONLY
‘Priority-one, code red?’ Whoever had filed it obviously believed its contents to be of grave importance.
He spun around and refilled his mug. Then, as required by the Information Security regulation, he tapped the door lock pad on his console and listened for the computer’s verbal “Door locked” verification. Once he had it, he started the playback.
Lieutenant Roderick Johnson’s familiar face appeared on the wall screen, immediately kicking the seriousness of the report up a notch in Hansen’s mind. The youngest son of one of Hansen’s old academy classmates, Rod Johnson was a career-minded special agent who’d been assigned to the Rosha’Kana sector about nine months ago, and who’d had the misfortune of having to pass bad news up the chain to his superior officers ever since. He was also one of the best field agents in the S.I.A. and would likely rise to command it someday, if he so desired...and if the agency, and humankind, still existed when that day came. He most certainly was not the kind of agent who tagged reports as ‘urgent’ without sufficient cause. In fact, he’d done so only once before, and in that case ‘urgent’ had been a gross understatement.
“Hello, Admiral,” Johnson’s image began. His tired brown eyes looked even hollower than they had looked just a couple of days before, and the dark circles beneath them stood out in sharp contrast against his caramel skin. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he continued, “but I guess that’s nothing new here, is it? The footage you’re about to see was forwarded to me by the captain of the starcruiser Rapier about twelve hours prior to my filing this report. I apologize for the delay, but I wanted to provide you with as many details as possible and it took some time to put them all together. I would tell you to sit back and enjoy it, but there’s very little about these recordings for any of us to enjoy. So have a look, sir. I’ll be back afterwards to give you those details I mentioned.”
The wall screen went dark for a moment. Hansen sat back in his chair again and got as comfortable as he could.
“Bridge recorders on, Captain,” an unfamiliar voice said as the screen came back to life.
A new image, as three-dimensional as possible for a 2-D wall screen, replaced that of Lieutenant Johnson. The bridge of the starcruiser Rapier, as seen from slightly above the aft-most access doors. Solfleet had been installing multiple perpendicular rings of 3-D cameras into the most sensitive areas of its vessels for decades. Had he wanted to, Hansen could have used the controls on his desktop console to manipulate the image and view the vessel’s bridge from virtually any angle. But as it was he could already see almost every officer and duty post in the semi-circular command center, as well as the ship’s main viewscreen, so he left it alone. The only exception was the communications station, located along the aft bulkhead, below and just to the right of the cameras that were providing his current point of view.
“Thank you, Mister Bellinger,” the captain responded. “Put the vessel up on the screen. Standard view.”
A slightly elongated object, not much larger than one of the colored pinpoints of light that shined in the velvety background of space, but barely half as bright—presumably the vessel that the captain had just made reference to—instantly appeared in the center of the Rapier’s main screen. Hansen couldn’t make out any identifying details and was about to zoom in for a closer look when the captain took care of the problem for him. Fleet Captain Vance Erickson, if Hansen remembered correctly.
“Magnify it, Lieutenant,” he ordered. “Let’s get a good look.”
“Aye, sir,” Bellinger answered. “Magnification factor ten.”
A split second later the vessel filled the Rapier’s viewscreen. It was still a little hazy, but Hansen could make out enough detail now to determine that it was a Tor’Kana battleship. Only seven Tor’Kana heavy vessels were known to have survived the invasion of their home system long enough to jump into deep space and escape. Five of them had already been recovered and would soon be folded into the fleets of the other member worlds. Now the Rapier had apparently found number six, though it didn’t look too he
althy. So unless there were more of them out there that no one knew about, only one remained to be found.
“Can you sharpen that up a little, Mister Bellinger?” Erickson asked.
“No, sir, not at this distance,” the younger officer answered. “She’s drifting away from us pretty fast, so it’ll take another minute or so. But if you’re wondering, sir, that is in fact a Tor’Kana battleship.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant, I can see that. What about a damage report. Are we close enough for a preliminary scan of her major systems?”
“Aye, sir. Scanning now.” A moment later, “One of her jump nacelles has been sheared completely off. I’m seeing small bits of debris floating away from the ship, but not nearly enough to account for the nacelle, so it either floated out of range already or it was vaporized. The other three appear to be intact, but are cold. The fusion engines and maneuvering thrusters are offline, too, and are venting small amounts of plasma. Looks like they’ve been venting for some time, too, and the dispersal pattern is very irregular. If I had to guess, sir, I’d say they were completely defensive, on the run, and taking evasive action when whatever happened to them happened.”
“What about her weapons?”
“We’re still too far off to tell, sir.”
“Helm, increase velocity,” the captain ordered. “Close in and bring us alongside.”
“Aye, sir,” the helm officer answered. Hansen didn’t know her.
“Reduce magnification to normal.”
“Magnification-one, sir,” Bellinger acknowledged as he complied.
The image of the Tor’Kana battleship shrank once again, but to a size slightly larger than before, and as the Rapier grew closer, it began to grow visibly.
