by Smith, Glenn
“Again!”
“Clear!”
This time his body nearly jumped off the bed and the monitor beeped twice in time with the spiking light spot, but then the flat-line returned once more.
“Mister Chairman, please leave the room,” the med-tech apparently in charge requested as he emptied a hypo full of something directly into the old man’s chest.
“But I need to...”
“Now, Mister Chairman!” he demanded.
MacLeod hesitated another moment, but the look on the med-tech’s face made it very clear that he wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer. That in addition to the Federation police sergeant’s hand that found its way to his shoulder made for a very persuasive argument, so he started backing toward the door, slowly, still watching as the medical team tried frantically to revive the old man.
“Have a nice night, sir,” the sergeant told him as he stepped in front of him and ‘helped’ him to back away.
MacLeod bumped into the door, then reached back and opened it and stepped into the hall while still observing as much of the medical team’s valiant efforts as he possibly could until the door finally closed in front of him.
He turned his back and, with his bodyguards once again at his sides, went in search of the patients’ property storage room.
Chapter 62
Her long platinum hair fluttered freely in the fresh evening breeze blowing in off the open sea and cooled her bare, suntanned skin. As she strolled along the unspoiled beach’s hard wet sands, holding Karen’s soft, warm hand in hers, small waves—just minor swells that rose above the smooth surface of the tranquil sea—succumbed to the shallow depths and rolled up onto the beach with a sound like the tinkling of crystalline wind chimes, lapping at her feet and chilling her toes with salty foam. The swollen orange-red sun painted a glowing rainbow across the distant clouds as it slowly sank into the sea beyond the indistinct horizon, bathing Karen in a soft golden glow that enhanced her radiant beauty. Somewhere off in the distance seagulls screeched for reasons known only to the gulls themselves.
“Our world is so beautiful,” Karen said, her melodic tone like a tender song in Liz’s ear.
Liz stopped walking, and Karen with her, and turned to her. “Not so beautiful as you.”
Karen gazed at her through those gentle eyes and smiled her warm, loving smile. “I so love you, Liz,” she said.
Liz stepped closer, touching her breasts to Karen’s, and kissed her softly. “I love you, too,” she told her, unable to speak above a whisper. She kissed her again, then took her into her arms and embraced her.
“Incoming communication.”
“What did you say?” Liz asked as she pulled away, though only far enough to look Karen in the eye.
Karen looked at her oddly, but didn’t reply.
Liz let go of her, then stepped away from the water, up the sloping beach toward the line of giant palm trees that sheltered their home from the elements. She chose a spot at random and spread their blanket out on the fine, dry sand.
“Incoming communication.”
Liz turned to find Karen standing at her shoulder. “Why do you keep saying that?” she asked her.
Karen flashed her that same odd look, but followed it up this time by saying, “I didn’t say anything, my love.”
“But I...”
“Make love to me,” Karen said. Then she lay back on the blanket and stretched out her arms, beckoning to her.
Liz knelt on the blanket, straddling Karen’s right leg, then leaned forward onto her hands and knees and lowered herself into Karen’s waiting arms.
“Incoming communication.”
She gazed into Karen’s eyes once again, but this time she didn’t ask. What did it matter? Closing her eyes then, she touched her lips to Karen’s, stroking and gently pinching her nipples between her fingertips as they kissed. She dragged her fingers lightly down between Karen’s breasts as the flames of passion burned inside them, over her stomach, through her silky pubic crown and into the moist, warm folds of soft flesh between her legs. She kissed Karen’s chin, her jaw, her neck. She dragged her tongue lightly along her collar bone and down over her right breast, then began licking and suckling tenderly on her nipple.
“Incoming communication.”
Liz ignored Karen’s odd words, shutting them completely out of her mind. She quivered and moaned with pleasure, feeling Karen’s fingers sliding deep inside her.
“Incoming communication.”
She let Karen’s right nipple spring back from her gentle bite and turned her attention to the left, and—dropped her head back into the soft, overstuffed pillow.
“Incoming communication.”
Liz jumped, startled by the suddenly deeper voice behind her. She turned to find Admiral Hansen standing at their feet and staring down at them.
“Admiral Hansen!” she exclaimed, red-faced with embarrassment. She couldn’t believe he’d caught her naked—that he’d caught them in the act of making love.
“Incoming communication,” he said.
“What?” She looked at Karen, then back at Hansen. “Why are you both saying that?”
Hansen just stood there staring down at her for what seemed like several long seconds, then repeated, “Incoming communication.”
Liz was about to turn back to Karen and just ignore him when he suddenly bent down and grabbed her firmly by the arm. “Incoming communication!” he barked.
“What are you doing?” Liz cried, struggling to break free of his grasp. “Let go of me!”
He pulled her to her feet and started dragging her away from Karen toward the water.
“Let me go!” she insisted. She twisted and pulled against his grasp, pounded on his arm repeatedly with her fist, even hauled off and punched him right in the mouth, but she couldn’t break free. “Admiral, please!” she pleaded. “Let me go!”
“Incoming communication!” he repeated as he pulled her into the water.
Ankle deep. The receding waves swept the sand from beneath her feet, robbing her of what little leverage she could find. She couldn’t break free. She looked back to her wife, who’d risen to her feet and stood gazing after her. “Karen!” she screamed.
“Incoming communication!”
Knee deep. The receding waves pushed against her legs, further defeating her efforts to resist. She couldn’t break free. Her wife walked to the water’s edge. “Karen!” she screamed again. “Help me!”
“Incoming communication!”
Hip deep. The current pushed against her. She couldn’t fight it. She couldn’t break free. Her wife only stood there and watched with tears running down over her cheeks, unable to do anything as the admiral pulled her farther out to sea. “Karen, please!” she cried as her own eyes filled with tears. “Don’t let him take me!”
“Incoming communication.”
Liz opened her tired eyes and blinked back her tears, but she couldn’t see a thing. The bedroom was as dark as a moonless midnight. Even the headboard clock’s dim blue-green glow was missing. Karen must have switched it off. She closed her eyes again. She’d been sleeping on her stomach, she realized—something she rarely ever did, usually only when she was completely exhausted—and was lying on her right arm with her hand tucked between her legs.
“Incoming communi...”
“All right!” she shouted, finally silencing the computer. “Damn it!”
She remembered that Karen had taken the day off work. She stretched her left arm across the width of the bed but found only the empty sheets. Karen had gotten up already. “What time is it?” she asked.
“The time is nineteen twenty-seven hours,” the computer responded.
Jeez! She’d slept the whole day away! She pulled her right arm out from under her body and reached for the comm-panel in the wall to answer the incoming call, but then realized that her fingers were wet. So instead she tossed the blankets aside and threw her legs out over the floor and sat up. “Lights,” she said.
Despite the hour, the lights only came up to the same dim level they did each morning. No doubt Karen’s doing. She’d have to remember to thank her. She reached out to the panel with her other hand and set it for audio only, then stabbed her index finger to the answer pad.
“Elizabeth Royer here,” she said. Her voice was scratchy.
“Sigma one-seven here, Commander.” There was something immediately apparent in his voice, and Royer knew right away that she wasn’t going to like this call. “Better go silent and secure, ma’am. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
No. She wasn’t going to like this call at all. “Stand by,” she said. She put the call on hold. “Where is Karen?”
“Karen is not presently at home,” the computer answered.
Not presently at home? Where might she have gone? Had she made plans for the day? Liz couldn’t remember anything. Perhaps she’d just gone out shopping or something.
She stood and stretched every muscle in her body—the room’s cool air felt good on her bare, sweat-moistened skin—then went into the bathroom to wash her hands. She picked up her short, pearl-white Japanese silk mini-robe off the back of her chair as she made her way back through the bedroom but thought twice about pulling it on, preferring to take a shower first.
“Is there anyone else besides me anywhere in these quarters right now?” she asked. Not that there should have been.
“Negative,” the computer responded.
She hung her robe on the door hook and left the bedroom without putting anything on.
She smelled coffee. She went into the kitchen and found a freshly brewed pot waiting for her. Karen once again. God bless her. She’d thought of everything. The comm-panel above the counter top was also waiting, flashing “COMMUNICATION ON HOLD” in its familiar bright blue-green letters.
“Resume communication, audio-only,” she said as she grabbed a mug out of the cabinet.
“Security encryption is engaged. Please provide decryption access code.”
“Royer, Elizabeth,” she said as she poured her coffee. “Commander. Beta five dash six one one alpha gamma.”
“Positive match. Access code accepted. Audio channel open.”
“All right, Mister Preston. Let’s have it.”
“It’s bad, Commander.”
She sipped her coffee—it had never tasted better—then asked, “So, are you going to tell me or not?”
“Yes, ma’am. I just lost four of my agents.”
That hit her head on like a freighter zipping through jumpspace. “You just what?” she asked, hoping she’d misunderstood him but fearing that she hadn’t.
“I’ve got four dead agents, one badly wounded, and one in civilian police custody.”
She set her mug down and grasped the edge of the counter with both hands, feeling a little lightheaded all of the sudden. “What the hell happened, Mister Preston?” she demanded. “Tell me everything. I want every detail.”
“One of my men tried to grab subject-one off the city tram when it stopped at Roosevelt Island. I don’t know what went wrong or why yet, but I do know that a plain-clothes police officer wrestled him to the floor of the tram and dragged him away in restraints.”
“What about subject-one?” she asked urgently.
“He got off in Manhattan and headed for the Federation Building. We tried to take him into custody before he got there, but... Everything went to hell, Commander.”
“Mister Preston, ‘everything went to hell’ doesn’t sound like every detail to me.” What little patience she had started with was growing shorter by the second. “What happened?”
“Subject-one fought off the next agent who tried to take him and got away. Her back-up moved in as fast as they could, but by that time he’d reached the Fed Building and dragged the U.S. Marine guards into the picture. There was a shootout, and...”
“What!” she gasped, glaring at the comm-panel. “A shootout between whom?”
“My agents and the marines, ma’am.”
“Are you kidding me?” she shouted. “Your agents traded gunfire with the United States Marines?”
“I’m afraid so, ma’am.”
“In the middle of New York City and in broad daylight? What the hell were your people thinking? Are they fucking crazy?”
“I don’t know, Commander!” he shouted back. “Four of them are dead and the fifth one probably isn’t too far behind them, so I can’t very well fucking ask them, can I!”
“Don’t forget who you’re talking to, Preston! Jesus Christ! Admiral Hansen is going to blow a gasket when he finds out about this!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What about the... What about subject-one? Where is he now? Do you have him in custody? Are the marines all right?”
“One of the marines was wounded, but word is it was just a leg wound and he’ll make a full recovery. Subject-one was wounded as well and is in the intensive care ward at one of the local hospitals where we can’t risk going after him.”
“Why can’t you risk going after him?”
“My people tell me there’s too much security around him.”
“That didn’t seem to matter to you at the fucking Federation Building, did it?” she asked sarcastically. He didn’t respond. “My God, Mister Preston! You’d better pray he dies in that hospital! How the hell am I going to break this to the admiral?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, but I sure don’t envy you the task.”
She stopped talking to think for a moment. Then she told him, “Keep subject-one’s name out of the news, Mister Preston. I don’t care what it takes. Threats, blackmail, payoffs, I don’t care. Just keep his name out of the news. Do you understand me, Mister Preston?”
“Yes, ma’am. I understand you perfectly. Anything else?”
“Yes. Be ready to travel at a moment’s notice.”
“All right. Where might I be going?”
“That’s ultimately for you to decide, but if Hansen finds out about this the farther the better, for your own sake.”
“What do you mean ‘if’ he finds out?”
“Leave that to me.”
“Got it. Sigma one-seven, out.”
Royer slapped the panel, closing the channel, then leaned down on the counter, resting on her forearms, and let her head sag forward. “I do not believe this.”
Chapter 63
Loson Min’para. A Cirran mentalist. A university professor. How the hell had he gotten himself caught up in the middle of an Earth Federation political conspiracy? If that even was in fact what was going on.
Well beyond frustrated, Chairman MacLeod switched off the professor’s handcomp and set it down among the others on his abnormally cluttered desk, sat back in his oversized black leather captain’s chair, and rubbed his tired, burning eyes. He’d been at it non-stop for hours, but he wasn’t any closer to the elusive answers than he had been when he began. ‘Cyberclones,’ the professor had said. ‘Desperation.’ ‘Conspiracy.’ What did it all mean? What had the professor stumbled onto that was so vitally secretive that someone had felt it necessary to kill him in order to keep him quiet? And who exactly was that someone? Vice-Admiral Hansen and his deputy, Commander Elizabeth Royer? Their names were certainly prominent enough in the professor’s materials. Were the two most senior officers of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency really involved, as the evidence seemed to indicate, spotty as it was? Were they the ones who had something to hide? And what did this Lieutenant Dylan Graves person the professor had written about have to do with any of it?
Questions. Nothing but questions. Questions and no answers. Where were the answers? Where in God’s endless universe were the answers?
His stomach rumbled. He glanced at his watch. It was late, long past even his ‘later-than-anybody-else-on-Earth’ dinner time. He hadn’t eaten anything since lunch and he was hungry to the point of getting the shakes.
Like it or not, he was going to have to stop soon.
He leaned back in his chair as far
as it would go, propped his feet up on the corner of his desk, and laced his fingers behind his head. He closed his eyes and took a few moments to mull over what little bit he had been able to figure out.
Not long ago, Lieutenant Dylan Graves had been a Solfleet Marine Corps squad sergeant stationed on the planet Cirra in the Caldanra star system with a Special Operations Ranger unit. During a mission, the specifics of which were still classified, he’d apparently fought in close quarters against something that had almost killed him. Something so completely alien to his experience that he couldn’t even begin to identify it. Or even describe it, for that matter. But his memories of that conflict had allegedly been altered, presumably through the application of a memory-edit, which might possibly have been ordered by either Admiral Hansen or Commander Royer...or perhaps both. A memory-edit which, for reasons as yet unknown, had apparently not been entirely successful. If it had ever really been performed at all.
He opened his eyes. That was it. That was the extent of what he’d been able to figure out. A few simple facts loosely laced together by little more than wild allegations and presumptions.
He stared at the half dozen handcomps and the piles of data chips that were strewn across the well worn surface of his desk. Why all the material on cybernetic and biotronic technologies? And why, according to Professor Verne, who despite their personal differences had been good enough to cross-reference what MacLeod had forwarded to him against the identical reference materials in Drexel’s own library, had someone gone to all the trouble of altering or deleting certain parts of some of the publications, while leaving other parts untouched? And what the hell did any of that material have to do with aliens and memory-edits?
More questions. MacLeod yawned.
The sudden, multi-pitched warble of the door tones pierced the lingering silence with what at that moment seemed comparable to the blare of an emergency klaxon, startling him nearly out of his skin. He glanced at his watch again and was surprised to see just how late it really was. Who in their right mind would expect to find him in his office at this hour? For that matter, who in their right mind would be in their office at this hour?
