by Rick Partlow
The hopper deposited them in the courtyard outside the front entrance to one of the larger office buildings and he followed Kara in a brief foray back into the muggy heat until they crossed the threshold into the welcome air conditioning of the building’s lobby. The Marine guards there stiffened at the sight of their sidearms, but relaxed almost immediately as the authorizations Kara had arranged reached the IFF transponders in the helmets of their powered battlesuits. Deke felt like shooting them a bird, but contained himself. He didn’t want to embarrass Kara…too much.
They took one of the elevators up to the top floor of the building and down a sterile, beige hallway to a large suite of offices. The importance of the officer ensconced within the suite was indicated by the actual human clerk parked outside at a reception desk. The young Technician Second Class began to jump to his feet as he realized who it was, but Kara interrupted him with a raised hand.
“He’s expecting us,” she told the enlisted man before he could say a word.
The man was still stuttering a reply as Kara moved past his desk, touching her palm to the door’s ID pad. That, Deke knew, was a show: she was rubbing Sykes’ face in how much more important she was than he, despite his superior rank. More politics, he thought, suppressing a snort of disgust.
Colonel Lionel P. Sykes---Deke could see his rank and full name displayed on a plaque behind his desk congratulating him for his appointment as head of Starfleet Intelligence--- looked up as he and Kara stepped into the office, seemingly unsurprised by the intrusion. He was a recruiting-video type, all strong jaw and clear, steely eyes, with a dusting of blond hair and a disapproving look on his face.
“Not much for saluting, are you Major?” he asked, clearing a holographic display from his desktop as the door slid shut behind them.
“If you’d wanted me to report like a military officer,” Kara countered, “you’d have let me go back to my office and change into a uniform. Since you didn’t, I assumed you had more important things to discuss than military decorum.”
Sykes sniffed dismissively, showing his opinion of that, but seemed to shrug it off.
“As you say,” he conceded in a reserved tone, “we do have something more important to discuss.” He glanced at Deke. “You’re Conner.” He made it sound like an indictment.
“Every day,” Deke admitted.
“Are you in the habit of allowing known criminals to carry weapons on a military base, Major?” He nodded at Deke’s gunbelt and the holstered pulse pistol that hung low on his hip.
Kara laughed softly. “Colonel Sykes,” she said, “if you know who Conner is, then you know he doesn’t need that gun to kill you and probably anyone in this building not wearing a battlesuit…except, perhaps, me. So can we get to why General Murdock isn’t here and why you called me to your office so urgently?”
Sykes seemed to consider that for a moment before he spoke again.
“Have a seat, both of you,” he finally said, waving at a pair of chairs in the corner.
“I could take you, too,” Deke muttered to Kara as they retrieved the chairs and pulled them over to the Colonel’s desk. She gave him a quelling look but didn’t reply.
“General Murdock,” Sykes began after they were seated across from him, “received a communication a little over three weeks ago. I’m not privy to its origin---you know how he is about his sources.”
Deke didn’t know, but he could imagine. The Bulldog had never been what you would call forthcoming.
“He told me he had to go check something out in person, but he wouldn’t elaborate.” Sykes sounded slightly bitter, Deke thought. On the one hand, Deke couldn’t blame him: there was supposed to be inter-service cooperation. But on the other hand, it hadn’t been that long ago that Murdock had exposed a conspiracy that ran all the way to the top of the DSI; and that sort of thing didn’t tend to make a person overly trusting.
“He seemed very concerned about penetration of our computer systems,” Sykes went on, “so he didn’t want to leave any recorded messages. Instead, he asked me to give you a message in person if he didn’t return before you.” The man took a deep breath, as if he were trying to make the announcement more momentous than it was. Deke decided at that point that he wasn’t going to like Colonel Sykes.
“First of all, he said that he had intelligence that the Naga---he wouldn’t say who or what that was---was targeting anyone involved in breaking up the Corporate Council Conspiracy.” Deke winced at the overblown name the media had given the events of four years ago, even as he felt a jolt of shock at the announcement.
“Why the hell would they be after us?” Deke blurted, earning a dirty look from the Colonel.
“He didn’t say,” Sykes replied curtly. “He just said you had to warn them…especially Caleb Mitchell.”
“What else?” Kara asked, as if the first item were of little import. “He had to give some indication about where he was going.’
“All he said was to tell you that he would be rounding up the usual suspects,” Sykes said, looking as if he were embarrassed to repeat it.
Kara didn’t reply, and it looked to Deke as if she were keeping her face carefully neutral.
“Does that mean anything to you?” Sykes wanted to know.
“No, sir,” she answered. Deke checked her heart rate and respiration and wasn’t surprised when they didn’t change. Her wetware wasn’t as sophisticated as his, but it was plenty to fool most lie detectors.
“The last thing he said,” Sykes went on, looking a bit disappointed, “was that if he didn’t return or communicate with you in two weeks, then you were to assume that he’d run into trouble. But he also said that you were not to search for him before you warned Mitchell and his family. He was quite specific about that.”
Kara took in a deep breath that Deke knew signified frustration, but she didn’t argue with him.
“Then I should be going immediately,” she said, standing abruptly. Deke followed suit a beat later, feeling awkward as he glanced between the two officers. “If General Murdock returns, I’d be grateful if you’d…”
Whatever she was going to say was interrupted by an alarm that sounded not just in the office but throughout the building and echoed from speakers outside as well. Deke’s neurolink wasn’t connected to the base’s secure net, but he picked up the general broadcast anyway.
“Attention all personnel,” the announcement sounded inside his head, “there has been an intrusion by an unauthorized spacecraft that has penetrated our orbital defenses. All personnel to duty stations! All civilians report to the nearest shelter immediately!”
Deke’s eyes went wide. There was no way in hell that anything could get by Inferno’s orbital defense screen, unless… He locked eyes with Kara and there was a stark fear in them that he hadn’t seen before.
“We have to get to the ship,” he said, ignoring Sykes, who had sprung to his feet and was speaking in low, urgent tones on his implanted mastoid comlink.
She nodded and they left the office at a sprint. Deke had a vague sense of the shocked look on the clerk’s face as they passed by, heading for the emergency stairwell. The elevators would be packed and Deke had a sinking feeling that they didn’t have time to wait.
The stairwells were crowded with military personnel who’d had the same idea; but to Deke, they seemed to be moving in slow motion. His implant pharmacy organ was dosing him with adrenalin and artificial stimulants and his hardwired nerves were acting in conjunction with his headcomp to speed up his perceptions and he knew that something similar was happening with Kara as she followed behind him. He weaved between and around the sluggishly moving uniformed figures, pushing past some and leaping over others.
Squawks and curses followed them down the stairs, but Deke barely heard them. Instead, he spent what part of his concentration that wasn’t guiding him down the stairs to contacting his ship’s computer.
Dutchman, he transmitted via his neurolink, do you read?
I read you, Ca
ptain Conner, the ship’s AI responded. It wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, nothing near as sophisticated as the Stealthship he’d piloted during the war, but then he didn’t especially care for sophisticated AI’s. I’ve received notice of an emergency alert and the port authority has cautioned all civilian craft to lock down and not attempt to take off. Do you wish me to comply with this?
Hell no! Deke snapped. Get the ship ready for takeoff and power up the weapons. We’re on our way---if the Authority yells at you, tell them to call Major McIntire. Do you have a sensor fix on the bogie?
Negative, Captain Conner, the ship admitted. Whatever is out there, I can’t get a fix on it with active radar or lidar.
And the ship couldn’t use the gravimetic sensors inside the gravity well either…
Damn.
It took less than a minute for them to reach the lobby, leaving hard feelings and dented walls behind them, and Deke saw that the Marine guards had been called away, likely to defend what was considered a more vital location. In the lobby, you could really hear the blare of the klaxons echoing back and forth between the post buildings, and Deke had to fight off flashbacks to the war.
The oppressive heat swallowed them up as they emerged into the harsh glare of 82 Eridani, under a sky suddenly full of the roar of turbojets from launching fighters. He couldn’t see the threat yet, but he did see their hopper still waiting for them in the courtyard.
Thank you, Technician Laussel!
The doors of the vehicle began to swing open and he was ducking inside when the ground shook and nearly threw him off his feet. He spun around, looked upward and witnessed a scene from his nightmares. The top of the office building they’d just exited had disappeared in an expanding ball of iridescent green fire, and a hail of burning debris was raining down almost in slow motion.
“Go!” Kara yelled, yanking him into the hopper.
Deke landed on the rear compartment seat next to her, feeling the aircraft lifting off in a desperate burst of power to the fans. He twisted around, pushing himself up to a sitting position as the door’s motors fought against the slipstream to close it, and through the gap he caught a glimpse of something in the sky…something large and vaguely cigar-shaped and glowing a pale, sickly green.
He felt a lurch in his stomach that had nothing to do with Technician Laussel’s frantic maneuvering as a green tendril shot from the bogie and touched one of the interceptors that was roaring through the sky to meet it. The dagger-like lines of the aerospace fighter melted away into nothing and then another a few kilometers away vanished in a flash of green. Then the hopper turned away from the carnage, lurching desperately towards perceived safety.
“What the hell?” Deke yelled, trying to strap himself in, fighting against the erratic motion of the hopper. He tried to come up with an intelligent question to ask, but all he could do was repeat: “I mean, what the hell?”
He twisted around and saw the strange spacecraft, moving freely and maneuvering effortlessly despite the lack of any reaction drive, strike once again at the Starfleet Intelligence building, disintegrating several more floors and sending what was left collapsing into a mass of steaming rubble.
“It hit the DSI headquarters building first,” Kara told him, her face ashen. He assumed she was accessing the reports through her implants, hooked into networks he wasn’t authorized to access. “It’s gone, Deke…the whole building is gone.”
“They’re after us,” he declared, finally able to put into coherent words the feeling that had been roiling his guts. “We have to get out.”
“How the hell would anyone know we were coming here?” Kara objected, the anger in her voice not quite able to cover up the fear. “How could they know when?”
“Murdock was paranoid about someone cracking your comms,” Deke reminded her. “I guess he was right.”
“Ma’am,” Laussel called back from the front compartment, his voice taut with desperation, “where are we going?”
Kara glanced at Deke for just a moment before she answered. “The spaceport, Laussel. Take us back to the Dutchman.”
Deke nodded to himself. No matter what he was saying earlier, he couldn’t punch out yet, not when Cal and his family were in danger. On the other hand…
“How are we going to get past that thing?” he wanted to know.
“That thing is about to be distracted,” she told him.
He felt her neurolink touch his and suddenly he had access to the security feeds from the base’s satellite network. He saw through their eyes that a dozen Attack Command cutters were closing in on Tartarus, flying down from their high orbit patrol routes, their tails on fire with fusion flame. These weren’t part of the automated defenses---the intruder had already shown it could slip by those, somehow. These ships carried weapons that could destroy the city completely, destroy every city on the planet, and they weren’t entrusted to even the most sophisticated AI. Men and women flew them, and men and women would die fighting that alien ship while he ran away.
The movement of the hopper jarred him out of his view from the satellites and he looked around to see that they were already coming down at the spaceport. He could see the outdated lines of the Dutchman already, resting in its high-walled bay open to the sky in a line of couriers and cargo shuttles. And suddenly, he could see the Predecessor ship heading straight for the port, only a few kilometers away…
“About that distraction…,” he muttered, but he wasn’t sure Kara was listening.
“Take us down now!” she snapped at Laussel.
Then the sky exploded.
For a long moment, Deke could see nothing but painfully flaring afterimages, could hear nothing but a white-noise roar, could feel nothing but his safety harness digging into him as the hopper was buffeted violently; and he was one hundred percent certain that they’d been shot down by the Predecessor ship. There was a scraping of plastalloy on fusion-form concrete that set his teeth on edge and the hopper shook like it was about to come apart, but a whine of electric motors and a grinding drone of belly fans pushed to their limit told him that the little aircraft was still in one piece.
By the time his vision cleared, he saw that the alien craft hadn’t fired at all---it had been fired upon. Four of the Attack Command cutters had closed on the cigar-shaped starship and the eye-searing light and thunderous sound had been the converging strikes from four different proton cannons. The Predecessor vessel’s glowing halo had gone from a pale green to an iridescent and raging emerald and it slewed across the sky, coming ever closer to the ground.
“Out!” Kara was yelling at him, and he suddenly understood that the hopper was on the ground, the door swinging open.
Deke forced his brain to work again, shoving himself under the slowly-raising door, with Kara pushing at his back to hurry him up.
Drop the ramp! he transmitted to the Dutchman’s AI, stumbling into a run as he got his bearings. They’d landed nearly half a kilometer from the ship, at a side entrance to the port.
He led Kara, sprinting with everything the Starfleet research team had gifted him, ducking through the small doorway just ahead of a panicked civilian pilot trying to get to the imagined safety of his ship. He heard a pained exclamation behind him that he just knew was Kara pushing that pilot out of the way, but he didn’t have the time or inclination to yell at her about it. He barely registered the other civilians and Starfleet personnel running headlong towards one exit or another, or from ships to administration buildings. He wondered if any of them had any real idea why they were going where they were going or if they were running just to run…and he wondered if he was doing the same thing.
He was passing by a heavy-lift cargo shuttle when a green tendril from the sky touched next to the bulbous, ugly vehicle and suddenly it wasn’t there anymore and the liberated heat from its disintegration exploded the surrounding bay walls outward with an eruption of steaming buildfoam and a pressure wave that knocked Deke off his feet. He had a glimpse of Kara plowing into t
he ground behind him but his gaze was locked onto the oblong spacecraft floating a kilometer away from the spaceport, looming over him like certain death.
Then the cutters were on it once more. There were only three this time, and a quick scan of the security net showed that the other had been destroyed, and that the remaining three had scattered, then reconsolidated there over the port. Deke squinted and threw up a hand to shield his eyes as proton beams slammed into the alien ship’s defensive shield yet again.
He didn’t wait around to see the results of the exchange; he scrambled to his feet and took off again for the Dutchman, glancing back quickly to make sure Kara was behind him.
Fire up the belly jets! he told the Dutchman’s AI. Close ramp and lift off the second the two of us are on board!
This time, the battle in the sky didn’t reach to the ground and he fought back the urge to look up at the rolling thunderclaps of fusion-fed proton beams or the whining scream of turbojets. The alien ship made no noise at all, and he had no idea who was winning, but they were keeping the thing busy long enough---there was his ship, sitting intact and beautiful in its bay.
Waves of heat and clouds of dust billowed from beneath the converted missile cutter as the belly jets whined to life, powered up just shy of the force needed to lift the ship off the ground. The ramp was down, vibrating against the fusion-form concrete with the rhythm of the ship, and Deke had to slow his pace to keep himself from falling as he hit the edge of it. The hull rang under the impact of his boots as he bolted straight into the cockpit, vaulting over the top of his acceleration couch and into the pilot’s position.
He noticed that Kara had fallen into the copilot’s seat beside him, noted on the display that the ramp had closed, but most of his concentration was fixed on flying his ship. He fed a burst of power from the ship’s reactor to the turbines, drawing in more air and running it through the depths of the reactor to heat it up before firing it through vectored thrust nozzles to lift them out of the open bay on shimmering columns of superheated gas.
