Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  “Thank you, Vicky,” he responded as pleasantly as he could. Then he dropped his feet to the floor, sat forward, and, setting the panel to audio only, answered the call. “This is Admiral Hansen.”

  “Mister Hansen, this is Doctor Kessler,” the principal began, demoting the admiral with his tone and giving much more prominence to his own title, just as he always did. If conceit were money, he’d have been one filthy rich man. “I just wanted to let you know that we’d be holding your daughter Heather over after school for a disciplinary detention meeting with her guidance counselor.”

  Hansen sat back again. “What happened?” he asked evenly.

  “First, she failed to show up for her third period class, which forced several of us to abandon our duties to search for her. Then, when one of the faculty finally found her asleep in a maintenance closet and woke her up, she exploded into a tirade of profanities the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever heard.”

  “All right, Doctor Kessler. You do...”

  “I’ve told you before, Mister Hansen, this is an educational institution and we will not tolerate...”

  “I said all right, Doctor!” Hansen barked. Enough was enough. Wherever his proverbial line in the sand might have been, Kessler had just charged across it. “And I’ve told you before, it’s Admiral Hansen, not Mister Hansen! If I have to remind you of that one more time, I’m going to do so in person! Do you take my meaning, Doctor?”

  A moment or two passed in silence before Kessler finally spoke up again, but when he did, he did so in a much more subdued and far less confident tone of voice. “Are you...are you threatening me with physical harm, Admiral?”

  “That wasn’t my intention, but the apparent fact that you perceived it that way seems to have had the desired effect.”

  “Well, I...”

  “Thank you for the call, Doctor Kessler. You take whatever disciplinary actions your policies call for. I’ll have a talk with Heather when she gets home tonight. Hansen out.”

  “I think we...”

  Hansen closed the channel, cutting the arrogant son-of-a-bitch off, then sat back again. Disciplinary detention counseling, on the very first day of the school year. That was a first even for Heather, although the fact that she’d snuck off and gone to sleep somewhere wasn’t really much of a surprise, now that he thought about it. She’d been out all night with her friends, after all. Not that serious an offense, he supposed, compared to some of the things she’d done in the past, and an easy fix. He’d simply reinstitute last year’s school night curfew.

  And speaking of firsts, what the hell had he been thinking, threatening the principal? The fact that he’d only inferred intent to inflict bodily harm on him didn’t matter. The principal’s mere perception was enough to make it a criminal offense.

  Stress. That had to be it.

  Chapter 36

  Nine Days Later

  Earth Standard Date: Wednesday, 8 September 2190

  ...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...

  Dylan moaned. That damn alarm clock was still going. Didn’t it ever give up? Not that it was all that loud—he always kept it on its quietest setting—but on those increasingly more rare occasions when only a peaceful, silent bliss filled the realm of unconsciousness, it annoyed him just the same. And it had been going non-stop for several minutes now. Or had it been hours? Not that it really mattered. He didn’t have anyhere to go or anything to do. He just couldn’t find the strength to reach up and turn the damn thing off.

  He drifted back to sleep.

  * * *

  ...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...

  Still going. How long had it been this time? A few seconds? Several minutes? Another day? One thing was certain. Next time he had the strength to move and the will to employ that strength, he was going to shut that damn thing off.

  He drifted back to sleep.

  * * *

  ...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...THUMP THUMP THUMP.

  That was different. With more effort than he cared to put forth he opened his weary eyes and, after an eternal moment of dizzying disorientation, remembered where he was—where he really was. The intensive care unit of the base hospital. The ICU. That incessant beeping that had been driving him insane all morning wasn’t his alarm at all. It was the bio-functions monitor on the wall above the head of his bed, letting him know that he was still alive.

  THUMP THUMP THUMP.

  But what was...the door. Someone was knocking on the door. Knowcking? Obviously not a doctor or nurse. Maybe Kenny had come to visit again. He’d stopped by at least once every day and sometimes twice since he’d regained consciousness, just to see how he was feeling. God bless him. A man couldn’t ask for more loyal a friend. And he’d been blessed with two.

  Dylan missed those days of his latter teen years. Those days when he and Kenny and their good friend George, the third piece who’d made them all who they were as one—three had never been a crowd in their case—would go out until all hours of the night and inevitably greet the sunrise from their usual table at their favorite all-night coffee shop. Actually, there had often been a fourth with them as well, he reminded himself, feeling obligated to at least acknowledge the fact. Why he felt that way, he didn’t know. That fourth friend had been the same friend he’d joined the service with—the same friend who had later proven that loyalty was not a universal trait among them.

  THUMP THUMP THUMP.

  “Dylan? Are you awake?”

  That wasn’t Kenny. Dylan rolled his head across the pillow to see who it was who’d so thoughtlessly roused him from his drug-induced slumber, and felt pleased to see... “Carolyn.” Finally! After what...a week in intensive care? Eight days? Nine? He couldn’t be sure how long he’d been there, but he knew it was about damn time she showed up! He tried to lift his head up off the pillow and spit his angry words at her like so much venom, but found that he was still far too weak to do that. All he could manage was a feeble, “Where the hell have you been?”

  Carolyn stepped into the room, closed the door behind her, and approached his bedside. Her eyes looked red and swollen. She’d been crying. “How are you feeling?” she asked as she took hold of his left hand—the one without all the pins and braces stretching from the base of his neck to below the elbow—and sat down on the side of his bed, being careful not to jostle him too much. She didn’t make eye contact.

  “It’s not that painful anymore,” he lied. Truth was he was still in constant pain, though the drugs did a lot to take the edge off. And sure, he was angry as hell at her for not coming to see him a lot sooner, but that was no reason to make her feel any worse, any guiltier, than she must have already felt. He would never do that to her. Not that it made any difference, though. Modern medical science being what it was, even a layman would realize that any injury requiring the use of devices such as those attached to him now was a very serious one indeed. “It’s mostly in my head at this point.” With all the selflessness and empathy he could muster, he added, “Seeing you eases it some.” Then he asked, “What took you so long to come by?”

  “You know I don’t like hospitals,” she answered too quickly. And he knew right then that she hadn’t come just to visit. She had something specific to say, and whatever that something was she’d probably spent hours rehearsing it over and over again in her mind.

  “Coming here was a real struggle for me,” she continued. “It’s not that I didn’t want to see you. I just...I just didn’t want to see you like this.”

  “That makes two of us,” he joked, managing a slight grin. But the humor seemed totsally lost on her.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she added.

  “About what?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.

  Her eyes fell to the cold, immobile hand she cradled in hers. “About us.” She placed his hand gently onto his stomach, then got up and went to the window by the foot of his bed. She opened the blinds t
o gaze outside. The bright sunlight that poured into the room made Dylan’s head throb.

  “I can’t handle it anymore, Dylan,” she said quietly, almost choking on the words.

  She was clearly on the verge of tears. How long it had been since he’d seen her cry, over anything, Dylan couldn’t even remember. Despite his anger—despite all the trouble they’d been having, he wanted to hold her. He wanted to comfort her the way he used to when their marriage was young and alive. But of course he was helpless to do anything. Hell, she probably wouldn’t have let him hold her anyway.

  “Every time you’re sent out on a mission I find myself wondering if I’ll ever see you again,” she told him, “...if you’ll come back to me in one piece.” Tears finally filled her eyes and flowed freely down her cheeks. “This time you almost didn’t.”

  If that was true—if she really did worry like that—then why, every time he returned home from an extended absence, did she always act like she wished he’d stayed away?

  “Almost disn’t,” he emphasized. “But I did come back.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Oh yeah, you came back,” she caustically admitted. “Broken, burned and bloodied, and in a stretcher...but you did come back.” She paused and sniffed. Then, as if she were intentionally trying to hurt him, she added, “But most of your squad didn’t.”

  That cut him deep and he suddenly found himself fighting back tears of his own.

  She closed her eyes and bowed her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice full of regret. “I didn’t mean to...” She paused, took a deep breath, and then looked back out through the window again. “What about the next time, Dylan,” she continued, “or the time after that? How long before they send you home in a box, or before there isn’t enough left to send home at all?”

  “Carolyn, you...”

  “How long!” she cried, cutting him off.

  She paused another moment to regain her composure, then went on. “I know I’ve been a real bitch since we came out here and that I haven’t let you get close for a long time. I’m sorry for that. And I’m sorry that I hurt you, but...”

  Dylan sighed. “Carolyn...”

  “No!” she interrupted, turning her back and taking another step farther away from the bed—away from him. “No, I don’t want to hear it. I can’t.” She looked down at her left hand, hesitated a moment, then faced the bed again. “I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled off her wedding ring and tossed it onto the blanket. “It’s over, Dylan. I’m divorcing you.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?” he asked her.

  She looked him in the eye for the first time since she’d arrived. “I do love you, even though I haven’t been acting like it. But I just can’t live like this anymore.” She hurried out of the room before Dylan could respond, but just before the door closed between them, a dark-haired gentleman whom Dylan had seen once before stepped into view and welcomed her into his outstretched arms.

  Suddenly it all made sense—the stranger’s unfamiliarity, his curt greeting and seemingly conscious avoidance of eye-contact, the disheveled state of his clothes, his leather jacket too warm to wear during the day, the locked front door and the closed living room curtains, both rarities on her part. Carolyn sleeping nude—rarer still—their bed coverings rumpled as if two opposing armies had joined in battle upon them, the damp towel in the bathroom and the stranger’s damp hair. Drugged though he was, the realization washed over him like golden beams of sunlight breaking through a dense, gray fog.

  Carolyn had been having an affair the whole time.

  “Son of a bitch,” he mumbled. How could he have missed it? How could he have been so blind that morning, with a clear head no less, to miss what he could see so clearly now?

  He rolled his head back across the pillow and stared into the distance through the blank white wall. For the first time in his life he was alone—really alone. He and Carolyn had been together almost nine years, since early on in his assignment to Mandela Station, and had been married for close to eight. They’d had good times and bad, but as those years passed the bad had slowly added up to outweigh the good. Now, finally, it was over. Actually, it had been over for the last couple of years, ever since he transferred to the Marines. He just hadn’t had the guts to take that final step and make it official. Now she’d done that for him.

  “Sergeant Graves?”

  That wasn’t Kenny, either. Dylan rolled his head back to face the door again. A woman he’d never seen before had just walked into his room. At least, he couldn’t remember ever seeing her before. With all the drugs they’d pumped into his system could he really be sure of anything? She wasn’t a very imposing woman—pretty, though—scarcely over five and a half feet tall if he judged correctly, slender, maybe approaching middle-age, with a touch of gray streaking through her pinned up blonde hair. She had a doctor’s lab coat on, but somehow it looked out of place on her. He sensed a different air about this woman, even through his drug-induced stupor—an air that suggested to him that she was much more than just another doctor.

  “May I come in, Sergeant?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Dylan answered, unenthusiastically. “Why not?”

  The stranger closed and locked the door behind her, then grabbed the chair away from the small physician’s desk in the corner and rolled it up next to the head of the bed, turning it so that when she sat down the door was more to her right than behind her. So she was a woman who watched her back. One of those paranoid types, not unlike a lot of the agents he’d met after joining the C.I.D. A trait he could relate to.

  “I understand from reviewing your records that you’re a damn good Marine and a good Security Forces troop as well,” the woman said.

  “That’s pretty unusual information to find in a patient’s medical record, isn’t it, Doc?” Dylan asked, knowing full well that his medical record wasn’t the record she was referring to. His head must have been clearer than he’d thought.

  The stranger snickered. “Come now, Sergeant. You knew the second I walked in here that I’m not a doctor. You should learn to hide your initial impressions better.”

  “That obvious, huh?”

  “Yeah, that obvious...to me anyway.”

  “Must be the drugs.”

  “The drugs kill pain. They don’t affect the clarity of your thinking.” She considered asking him who he thought she was if not a doctor, to see if he might show any signs of recognizing her, but quickly decided against it. After all, if he believed this to be their first meeting, why say anything that might make him suspect otherwise? “Anyway, what I meant was that I recently reviewed your personnel record at Command, and I like what I saw.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll sleep much better tonight knowing that.”

  “Your infamous sarcasm on the other hand doesn’t impress me at all, Sergeant. But your record does. Quite a lot, actually. Especially all the classified stuff.”

  “What classified stuff?” Dylan asked, trying to look genuinely curious while at the same time wondering who this woman was that she’d have access to his complete record. She stared at him through her big blue eyes with a kind of ‘Please-don’t-insult-my-intelligence’ expression on her face, and he quickly realized that lying to her was pointless. She was obviously not only someone with special authority, but also someone who wouldn’t be easily fooled. But who exactly was she? He decided to ask her, straight out.

  “All right. But just who are you that you’d have access to my record?”

  “That was your wife I just saw leaving here, wasn’t it?” the woman asked, evading his question and pointing back at the door with her thumb.

  “Not for much longer. She’s divorcing me.”

  “That’s too bad. She’s very pretty.”

  “Yeah, well, turns out beauty really is only skin deep in her case. It’s been coming for a long time now.”

  “Ah. Tired of staying home alone and waiting nervously while you go off and try not t
o get yourself killed.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Apparently she hasn’t been doing very much of either lately. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”

  “So I saw. Her friend in the hallway.”

  Dylan didn’t want to talk about it. “So who are you?” he asked again, though he already had a pretty good idea what the answer was.

  “What will you do now?” the woman asked as if she hadn’t even heard his question.

  Dylan sighed. Fine. Let her steer the conversation. See where it leads. “I’ll recover,” he answered. “Then I’ll return to my unit.”

  “If you resigned, maybe she wouldn’t go through with the divorce.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, if you...”

  “I heard what you said. If I resigned she’d know I only did it to try to save our marriage. She’d never forgive herself for forcing me to do that, or me for sacrificing my career and making her feel even guiltier than she already does.”

  He paused a moment and thought twice about what he’d just said. Truth be told, the bitch would have loved it if he resigned, and she probably didn’t feel one damn bit of guilt over having an affair, either. But there was no reason to bad-mouth her to this woman. Besides, he wanted the divorce every bit as much as she did. And even if he were to resign, what would he do with his life? “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I have no intention of resigning. Military service is all I know. I lost her for good a long time ago.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If I weren’t sure, I wouldn’t have said it.” He gazed past her at the door, but he knew he was right. “I know her as well as I know myself,” he pointed out. “Maybe even better. I’m sure.”