by Smith, Glenn
“I guess that would explain why we never see Tor’Kana females, sir,” Dylan commented, “but what does that have to do with my father’s ship?”
“I want you to understand the gravity of our situation.”
“What situation is that, sir?”
“I’m sure you’re well aware of the fact that last July an armada of over a thousand Veshtonn ships invaded the Rosha’Kana star system and decimated the bulk of the Tor’Kana defense forces.”
“Yes, sir. Of course. It was all over the news. The Tor’Kana interstellar fleet was forced to withdraw from other sectors and go home to bolster their defenses, and whenever possible the other members of the Coalition, including us, sent ships to help them.”
“That’s exactly right,” Hansen confirmed. Good. The sergeant kept up on current events. “That campaign was a hard-fought one that lasted for weeks,” he added, “but in the end the Veshtonn won a decisive victory and drove the Tor’Kana from their world.” He stopped the history lesson to let the gravity of what his words implied sink in.
“Yeah, and...” Dylan paused as the significance of the admiral’s statement hit him, then concluded, “and...if their females can’t breathe anything but their native atmosphere, then...”
“Then they’ll die out,” Hansen finished for him.
“What about survivors on Kana, sir?” Dylan asked. “I mean, we’re talking about an entire planet here. There must be millions of places where survivors could still be hiding out from the Veshtonn. There could even be a resistance movement fighting back.”
Hansen drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled, shaking his head, then answered, “The Veshtonn dispersed a biological weapon as soon as they achieved planetary orbit. Enough to poison the entire atmosphere for weeks and contaminate the oceans and fresh water bodies for months, if not years.”
“My God,” Dylan exclaimed. How could any intelligent being do such a thing to an entire world? “What about escapees?”
Excellent. Hansen liked an NCO who asked intelligent, logical questions. He considered that a sign of a tactical thinker, which was exactly what his agency needed more of. “Less than an hour before dispersal, a number of Tor’Kana crews did manage to dip their vessels into the planet’s atmosphere and flood their cargo holds with indigenous air, then escape with thousands of their females onboard. According to their government in exile they were hoping to find a new world to settle. One with an atmosphere they could quickly and effectively alter to sustain them. Unfortunately, most of those ships were tracked and destroyed before they got very far.”
“Most?”
Hansen grinned slightly. Excellent.
“Some escaped, for a while, but they never found a planet that met their needs. Not that they had much time to search. Most of them were hunted down and destroyed. We did manage to save a few, however. The Rapier located and recovered the last of them about three months ago, with all hands alive and well, including several hundred females. But all totaled, Sergeant, fewer than two-thousand Tor’Kana females survived, and they’ve already started dying out.”
He paused once more to let the full significance of what he’d just said take root in the sergeant’s mind. Then he spelled it out for him anyway. “Barring some kind of miracle, the Tor’Kana are doomed as a race, Sergeant. And without them—without their access to the ancient Tor’Roshan technology that has helped our cause so many times before—the entire Coalition, including Earth, will fall to the Veshtonn within a very short period of time.”
“What about Operation Mass Eviction, sir?” Dylan asked. “If we’re successful in retaking the Rosha’Kana system...”
“That’s a very large ‘if’, Sergeant,” the admiral told him. “Things aren’t going nearly as well as we hoped for out there. And there’s still the matter of the contamination.”
Dylan could hardly believe what he was hearing. The impending extinction of an entire race of sentient, intelligent beings was a catastrophe of such great magnitude that he could scarcely conceive of it. But to think that all the races of the Coalition would soon fall and likely face a similar fate was nothing short of mind numbing. “But...Coalition forces have kept them away from the core worlds for so long,” he pointed out.
“Yes they have, Sergeant,” Royer said. “But only with the Tor’Kana and their long lost cousins’ technology at their center,” she then reminded him.
“Granted, ma’am. But even without them we’re still a major force. I can’t believe that after so many years we’d fall so easily all of the sudden.”
“Believe it, Sergeant,” the admiral said sharply. “That data your squad from the Tripoli obtained six months ago included the enemies’ strategic layout and detailed plans for their entire Terran campaign, as well as for a number of other attacks on Coalition systems. Some of those attacks have since been carried out successfully, despite the fact we knew they were coming. We got enough intel to conclude that we can’t win this war without the Tor’Kana.”
“What about cloning?” Dylan asked.
Hansen exchanged an uneasy glance with his executive officer, then answered, “Breeding cyberclones is expressly forbidden by Federation law, Sergeant.”
“I’m well aware of that, sir. I didn’t mean...”
“Of course you didn’t,” Hansen said, raising a hand to silence him. “You were referring to the Tor’Kana.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We thought of that as well. Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to successfully clone a Tor’Kana before, including the Tor’Kana themselves. At least, not that they’re admitting. But even if it could be done, we’d have to set up the facilities directly on the surface of Kana for it to do any good. I doubt very much the Veshtonn would allow us to do that.”
That was it. Dylan was fresh out of ideas. “Then everything we’ve fought for—all that we are...”
“Will be lost,” Royer finished for him. And when Dylan looked at her, she added for effect, “Gone...forever.”
With a slight, disbelieving shake of his head, Dylan said in a near whisper, “My God.”
“I’ve already spoken to him, Sergeant,” Hansen said sarcastically. And as Dylan’s eyes met his, he added, “I haven’t as yet received any response.”
“This is...I don’t know,” Dylan said, unable to find the words. “There must... There must be something we can do, sir.”
Hansen traded another glance with the commander, then seemed to perk up, if only just a little bit. “There is one possibility,” he said. “You see, Sergeant, in addition to the enemy’s strategic plans, we also received information that indicates the Excalibur was destroyed by the starcruiser Albion.”
Dylan’s eyebrows nearly met. “The Albion? But that was one of our own ships.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You’re telling me that my father and his crew were murdered by our own people?”
“That’s what the information suggests.”
“Well...excuse me for asking, sir, but are you sure your information is dependable?”
The look on the admiral’s face made it very clear that he did not at all appreciate being questioned that way by a subordinate. “Don’t try to tell me my business, Sergeant,” he said. “The information is as dependable as the circumstances surrounding its acquisition allow it to be.”
“May I ask, sir, where that information came from?”
Hansen leaned forward, placed his elbows on the desk and rested his chin on his folded hands, and looked at Dylan with amusement. “You certainly aren’t at all intimidated by my rank, are you, Sergeant?”
“To be honest, sir? No. Not really. You’re a superior officer and I respect that, but I’m not intimidated by it.”
Hansen grinned, ever so slightly. “I think I like that.” He paused for a few moments and studied the younger man, then dropped his hands to the desk. “Well. Ordinarily you wouldn’t be told where the information comes from. That kind of information is provided strictly on a need-t
o-know basis, and you really don’t need to know. But in this case,” He glanced briefly at Royer, “considering the circumstances, I think we owe you an answer to that question.”
“Sir?” Royer questioned. Hansen may have found out about how she’d used O’Donnell, but she didn’t understand why Graves had to be told.
“I said we owe it to him, Commander,” he reemphasized, his tone leaving no room for misinterpretation. “The whole story. Tell him everything.”
Dylan had watched the brief exchange very closely. The admiral clearly wasn’t happy with his executive officer at the moment. He couldn’t help but wonder why.
Royer sighed. “Yes, sir.” To Dylan she said, “That abduction you witnessed.”
“My neighbor on Cirra,” he said hopefully. “You found her?”
“Unfortunately, no, we haven’t,” she answered. “No, the information came to us long before she was abducted.”
“But that was over two months ago,” Dylan reminded her.
“And the information came to us long before that, in the same data stream as those enemy plans,” Royer reminded him in return. “What’s your point, Sergeant?”
“I, uh...I’m not sure I have one, ma’am,” Dylan admitted. “I guess I just thought that particular information was more recent for some reason.”
“Sometimes in our line of work, several months is recent, Sergeant,” Royer explained. “At least until additional relative information is received. Then it’s ancient.”
“Let’s just get on with it, shall we, Commander,” Hansen said impatiently.
“Yes, sir. At any rate, Sergeant, that young lady’s father was a member of your father’s crew twenty-two years ago. Sometime before the Veshtonn invasion of the Rosha’Kana star system, he somehow managed to transmit a message out of Veshtonn space to the Tor’Kana. He told them he was alive, did his best to describe where he was at that time, and detailed what was probably as much about the attack on Excalibur as he could remember. The data you Marines took back to the Tripoli included a very poor quality recording of that message, but the Tripoli communications specialist who analyzed it just happened to have been one of your former neighbor’s comm-school classmates. Since the message appeared to have come from her father, who’d been missing for over twenty years, he forwarded the entire file to her instead of notifying his commanding officer like he should have, so he could in turn notify us. We’ve assumed that since she was a communications and linguistics specialist for our agency, he probably figured she’d notify us herself if she wanted us to know about it.”
“Needless to say,” Hansen interjected, “that communications specialist had some serious explaining to do once we caught up with him.”
Royer waited a moment to be sure the admiral was finished, then continued, “To her credit, our girl notified her commanding officer right away.” Then she snickered. “But when the decision was finally made not to mount a rescue mission, she decided to assemble a covert team and mount one of her own.”
“On her own?” Dylan asked. “Unsanctioned?”
“No, not at first,” Royer specified. “She fought like hell for days trying to push SpecOps into doing something. But in the end, Central Command had made its decision. After that, she worked on her plan for weeks before we finally found out she was up to something. By the time we had enough to arrest her she’d obtained false Solfleet identicards, forged official transfer orders, and raised a hell of a lot of funding from God only knows where. She was just about ready to start recruiting people. Your name was on her list, by the way.”
“My name?”
“That’s right.”
“How did she get my name? We never knew each other.”
“She worked for our agency, remember? She had access to a lot of information. My guess is she simply did her homework.”
“Commander,” Hansen said.
Royer glanced at Hansen. ‘Get on with it’, his eyes were saying. So she got on with it. “Anyway, she escaped from custody and disappeared before she could be brought back for trial. We figured she’d be recaptured in a matter of hours, maybe a day at the most. Unfortunately, we underestimated her resourcefulness and completely lost track of her.
“Then I went to Cirra to talk to you about joining the agency. After I visited you in the hospital that first day, I spotted her and immediately arrested her. I interrogated her myself and learned that she’d obtained a whole new supply of false documents and had gotten herself transferred there posing as someone else. I also discovered two very interesting facts. Number one, your name was at the top of her list of people to recruit. And number two, she’d already taken steps to join your unit in order to get close to you.
“Now understand, Sergeant, I could have just locked her up and had her sent back to Earth on a prison transport, but in this line of work it helps to be the kind of person who can take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself. That’s exactly what I did. I arranged for her to move into the apartment directly across from yours, then told her I wanted her to attract your attention for me when you returned home from the hospital. Given what had just happened in your personal life, I suggested that if she were to bare a little skin from time to time you’d eventually start paying her that attention. Seems I was right.”
Dylan felt both embarrassed and infuriated at the same time. It was bad enough that these officers knew he’d been spying on the girl. Had counted on it, in fact. But the fact that Royer happened to be a woman herself made it even worse. “And she agreed, just like that?” he asked.
“Well, she agreed, but not exactly just like that. It did take a little persuasion on my part. She agreed in exchange for a promise of relative leniency. Desertion, impersonation, possession of false military identification, forgery of orders, conspiracy to commit an unsanctioned assault and espionage against a foreign power... They’re all very serious offenses, Sergeant. She was facing a guaranteed general court-martial and probably a sentence of life in prison, and she damn well knew it.”
Dylan was slowly approaching his boiling point, and it was beginning to show. “So you set her up, just to get another crack at me?”
“We’d spent a lot of time trying to recruit you, Dylan. But you’d turned us down, time and time again. And, not surprisingly, your C-O wasn’t any help to us at all. However, I thought that if I had another opportunity to talk to you myself, once I’d created a little leverage, I might be able to change your mind.”
He may have been subordinate to the commander, but Dylan knew from experience that his silent, angry glare could make almost anyone nervous, so he put it to use.
“She knew exactly what we were doing all along,” Royer continued, apparently feeling the need to further explain herself. The glare was working. “We didn’t set her up, and we certainly never wanted her to get hurt. When word of what she’d been planning to do leaked out, the agent I’d left in charge decided that the danger to her had grown to an unacceptable level. He sent someone in to bring her out.”
“So I was right. Her visitor was an S-I-A agent.”
Royer nodded. “Yes, he was.”
“So why didn’t your agent just pick her up and get her the hell out of there?” Dylan asked. “Why’d he stay in her apartment that night?”
Royer turned a questioning eye toward Hansen, who only nodded to her. Apparently, the admiral had decided that he should be told everything.
She rested her elbows on the arms of her chair and folded her hands together in front of her chest. “The station commander in Tarko City didn’t want to use anyone who might be recognized by the local residents, so he brought an agent in from a different duty station, posing as an ordinary Terran immigrant who had to use regularly scheduled commercial transportation. He couldn’t just whisk her out of there and bring her back here to Earth on a government flight. That would’ve raised too many eyebrows. He had to wait for a commercial flight, which, as I’m sure you know, isn’t exactly a daily event between star systems.�
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“With all due respect, Commander, that doesn’t answer my question. He could’ve taken her somewhere else to wait for that flight.”
Royer looked to the admiral again, obviously wanting him to put an end to the sergeant’s questions. But he just sat there, stone-faced and silent, and left her to her own devices. “All right, Sergeant,” she said with a hint of frustration evident in her voice. “The truth is we don’t have any idea why he stayed there that night. He sure as hell wasn’t supposed to. He was given explicit orders to pick her up and get her out of the area without delay.”
“Sounds to me like your man might have been a double agent, Commander,” Dylan suggested. The very idea clearly struck a nerve with the commander, as evidenced by the way she recoiled, her lips tightly pursed, and Dylan felt an odd sense of satisfaction at having done that to her. But he was still growing angrier by the second.
“That’s possible, yes,” Royer admitted with a hint of defensiveness in her voice. “And that’s one reason we’ve had to move so slowly since then, Sergeant. Where there’s the likelihood of one double agent, there’s always the possibility of more than one. At any rate...”
“My fiancée was shot twice and almost died, Commander!” Dylan reminded her sharply. “Several others, most of them innocent civilians and some of them my neighbors did die! The guy who lived below me gave his life willingly in my defense!”
“Watch your tone, Sergeant,” Hansen warned. “Don’t forget who you’re talking to.”
“He was also one of our agents,” Royer told him. “A retired agent, actually, but one of us nonetheless. I guess he felt the need to relive some of the good old days.”
“And thanks to somebody’s fuck up, he still had a Solfleet-issue pistol to help him fulfill that need!” Dylan pointed out spitefully.
“Sergeant Graves,” the admiral warned a second time.
“Granted, he shouldn’t have had the pistol,” Royer agreed. “I guess too much inactivity dulled his sense of judgment.”
