Shroud of Eden (Panhelion Chronicles Book 1)

by Marlin Desault

  Unyielding, synthetic oak walls implied the obdurate rules under which the men and women in Panhelion military service must conduct their affairs.

  Elegant and simple, the bench of synthesized obsidian shielded the lower part of the judges. Two admirals and three captains had decided Scott’s future.

  He stood at attention in his freshly pressed, white dress uniform with gold braid epaulets. The face of the full admiral seated in the center was creased with lines from long years of military service, his stern expression magnified by his chest full of campaign ribbons.

  Left of the bench, in the position of honor, the wall screen displayed an image of the flag of the Panhelion inter-solar, with its brilliant gold eight-pointed star on a field of deep blue. The center symbolized Earth, and the eight points the semi-autonomous nations of the home planet and the settlements scattered among the planets and moons of the solar system. The Panhelion, as supreme authority, set the law and the punishment. To the right, a screen displayed the raptor and arrows flag of Defense Command.

  Trying to maintain a stoic expression, Scott stared just over the admiral’s head. Never look a senior officer in the eye. The reflex had been drilled into him as a lower class-man in the Officer Training Corps, one of the many reflexes meant to condition future fighting officers in the service. In the next few moments, he’d learn if there was to be a future role for him in the Panhelion military.

  Moisture gathered on his palms as the panel of officers behind the bench exchanged glances and then turned toward the senior admiral.

  The full admiral lifted his head from his virtual data screen and narrowed his eyes. “Captain Scott Drumond, this court finds you guilty—”

  Scott slumped, struggling to regain his composure.

  “—of disobeying a legal order issued by competent authority.” The admiral droned on, reading the charge details off his data screen. “That on June 30, 2550, while in command of the Targelion on combat maneuvers, you failed to join your ship with the Defense Fleet as ordered.” He leaned forward and in a softer voice continued. “However, we find extenuating circumstances that serve to mitigate your sentence. Do you have anything to say before sentence is passed?”

  Scott swallowed hard and stiffened his pose in anticipation. “Sir, I appreciate the Court’s consideration of the circumstances surrounding my actions.”

  “In that case....” The admiral sat up and looked straight at him. “By sentence of this Court you are reduced in rank to Commander. In addition, a note will be placed in your personnel file stating that this court finds you unfit for operational command in Panhelion Defense Service. This court-martial is adjourned.”

  Scott’s forearms flexed in anger, not enough for anyone else in the room to notice, nor enough to stem the fury building in his blood or the sourness welling up inside him. He was all too aware that the verdict protected a certain admiral who delayed the order to call off the exercise. Two other ships followed their orders and never returned to base. They now formed part of the debris forever orbiting Jove. By this verdict the court had cleared Admiral Andre Camus, Fleet Commander, of responsibility for his indecision. Scott was the scapegoat and must pay for HQ’s command failure.

  He saluted the senior admiral of the court and made an about face. As he walked out he nodded a curt thanks to his defense council. Their best arguments would not have changed the outcome.

  In his apartment, Scott sat at the kitchen counter. He lifted the nearly empty bottle of rum, ready to pour, when the voice of the electronic entry assistant sounded.

  “Captain Drumond, you have a visitor,” said the soft feminine voice.

  He hadn’t gotten around to changing the greeting to his new, lower rank. He’d do that later. “Tell whoever it is to go away.”

  “He’s very insistent,” the voice replied. “He says to tell you it’s Blyds Gatura.”

  “All right, tell him to come in,” Scott mumbled and reached for his glass. As he poured, the spillage formed a small puddle on the counter.

  Blyds walked in and hesitated, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness. “Stale sweat and rum. Christ, this place smells like that sleazy bar on Luna, the one we stumbled into on our first leave.”

  At the sound of Blyds’ voice, Scott lifted his glass.

  Blyds slid his hand over the wall and the room brightened. He shook his head as he eyed his friend and former captain still in the disheveled uniform, open at the collar, the same uniform he’d worn three days ago at the court-martial.

  Scott stared back at him, rubbing the three days growth of stubble on his chin, and looked back into his glass. “Why do you think the Martian settlements make such good rum?”

  “I’ve never been there, but I hear it’s the water,” answered Blyds with an indifferent tone. “The cane is grown by hydroponics in specially flavored water. Makes it mild and gives it a slight coconut flavor.”

  Scott grunted. “I might just chuck it all and emigrate to the Mars settlements.” He jerked his head up. “By the way, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Captain, speaking of hell, that’s exactly what you look like.”

  “Knock off the captain bull. I’m not a captain anymore. Don’t you know? I’ve been demoted and I’m unfit for command, see.” Scott swung the glass toward his shoulder now stripped of its epaulet, and a rivulet of rum sloshed onto his sleeve. “Now get the hell out of here.”

  “Sorry, Captain... uh, Skipper. Sorry, I’m not going.”

  “Look, I’m fine. I’ve got plenty of rum and time to make good use of it.” Scott lifted his near empty glass and took a swig.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Well, if you’re gonna hang around here bothering me,” he slurred, “then at least have a drink.”

  “Just like the old days?” Blyds took a glass from the shelf and sat down.

  Scott grabbed another bottle from under the counter and poured both glasses full. “Blyds, you’re good man. Damn good. We’ve served together for a long time. You were my senior in the Corps and during our first duty assignments. You deserved promotion ahead of me. If you’d been captain of the Targelion what would you have done?”

  “The same, in which case I’d be at home drinking myself blind, and you’d be there consoling me. But face it, Scott, your abrasive manner has made you an enemy or two in the flag ranks. A little more humility on your part and this might never have happened.”

  “And the rank of admiral gave Camus the right to blame me for his mistake?” Scott quaffed his drink. “My command decisions were damn good ones. I’ve got nothing to appologize for. Somewhere along the line the Corps turned sour, and I got caught up in the grinder.” He stared into his glass. “Blyds, do you think the service will ever be the same? Will integrity ever have value again?”

  The dark-skinned officer took a sip from his glass. “Only if officers like us work to improve it. Wallowing in self-pity won’t make anything good happen. What you need is a good woman to give you advice, not an old married guy like me.”

  “I had a good woman.” Scott lifted the bottle to pour his friend another drink. “I couldn’t make her happy. You’ve found the answer. How’d you do it?”

  “For one thing, I backed off on my drinking.” Before Scott could pour him another drink, Blyds covered his glass with his hand. “Becky was good for you, but when you drank you weren’t always the most reliable or the easiest to get along with.”

  The memory of the breakup still vivid, Scott’s mind raced back through the early days, when he had so often neglected his fiancée. The week before they were to marry, he had come back from a six-month tour and immediately went to the club with some of the officers from his ship. The next day he went home and found the apartment empty. He never saw her again.

  “She’s better off. She’s married now.” He staggered to his feet and took hold of Blyds’ lapel. “She married an admiral, don’t you know?”

  Blyds gently brushed Scott’s hand aside. “You
’re a mess. Get over it and on with your life.”

  “Too late. My life is a mess. I’ll never get back into space.”

  “Drink isn’t going to get you back into space, and it sure as hell won’t get you your life back.”

  “Yeah, but it sure helps to forget.” He held up his glass and gazed through the amber liquid at Blyds. “Drink enough of this and the incompetence, the deceit in the Corps, don’t mean a damn thing. They don’t matter anymore. Nothing matters.”

  “But it also blots out the things that do matter. The Panhelion has kept the Earth and the settlements free of nuclear war for a hundred and seventy-five years. I’d say that’s worth something, but it won’t last if we, you and I, and others don’t work at it—don’t fight to keep the service from descending further into the stink of corruption.”

  “Nice words, but how do you make them work? We’re both lowly commanders, and I’m busted and disgraced. What makes you think we can change anything?”

  “There are still some senior officers who want to make the service better. When you’re sober, I’ve something important to tell you.”

  Earth

  ~~~

  The alarm chrono read 03:30 when the secure comlink jolted Ensign Rodol Arashan from a doze to groggy consciousness. He sat up at his desk and rubbed his eyes. A year of demanding service as aide to the admiral had drilled instinctive reactions into him. He blinked hard to focus his eyes. Over and over, the word ‘Urgent’ crawled across the screen in front of him. He reached out and touched the screen. The link sprang open.

  “Admiral Delmar’s residence,” he said with a yawn.

  An insistent voice responded, “This is ECCO. Priority H message for Admiral Jestin Delmar. Please confirm.”

  “Priority ECCO message for Admiral Delmar confirmed.” Arashan’s standing orders now compelled him to wake the sleeping Admiral. He hesitated for a moment and reached for the Admiral’s call icon, touching it as gingerly as if it were the trigger to a nuclear charge.

  Arashan entered the exact time in his duty log: 03:31 hours.

  The shrill tone stirred Admiral Jestin Delmar out of a fitful sleep.

  “Yes, Arashan? Better be a damn good reason for this.” Despite Delmar’s gruff manner, he liked the ensign and considered him one of his best staff aides.

  Arashran said, “Sir, a message for you from Entangled Communications Command, Operations. It’s Priority.”

  On this far side of the residence, the admiral’s sparse bedroom contained a simple bed, night stand, and a bureau. In spartan quarters, unusual for an admiral, Delmar lived for efficiency, summarily discarding anything and anyone he didn’t find useful.

  He hesitated, clearing his mind. “Are you sure?” A quantum entangled message meant one of his scout ships had reported in. Priority H told him the ship plied the interstellar regions.

  “Yes, Admiral, ECCO was quite specific. The call came in on your official line three minutes ago.”

  He pushed himself up and swung his feet to the floor. With his head in his hands he rubbed his temples. His mind sufficiently clear, he stood and strode across the room to his personal communications booth, tapped the display screen, and spoke with intentional clarity.

  “ECCO, this is Admiral Delmar, codeword ‘pivot’.” He spoke in carefully chosen, specific words.

  With each word, the green line of his voiceprint danced up and down on a small screen. His fingers drummed impatiently as he waited for the cryptographic circuits at ECCO’s receiving office to dissemble his voice. No other voice or recording had his unique phase spectrum, and as a further precaution protocol dictated he make subtle changes to his speech.

  A distant voice replied, “Admiral, you have an ensemble message from Hyades R.”

  Fully alert, Delmar read the message on the screen, his eyes wide in anticipation. “My God, Hyades R,” he whispered.

  His mind reeled at the thought as he looked at his heavy-boned reflection in a mirror, his tan complexion contrasting his bushy white hair. The reconnaissance team sent to the Hyades cluster six months ago had reported from deep space.

  Delmar considered himself a careful, thoughtful man. On more than one occasion he’d overheard his subordinates refer to him as morose, a reputation earned by his perpetually sullen visage.

  Grave issues preoccupied him and his command, which stretched from Earth out hundreds of light years to the current limits patrolled by his reconnaissance ships. The four holographic stars on his epaulets signified his authority, and that authority weighed as heavily on his mind as if his insignia were made of elements from the far end of the periodic table. Somewhere in the blackness of space, a hostile intelligence lay in wait, ready to be discovered by one of his crews.

  This knowledge caused Jestin Aloysius Delmar sleepless nights.

  He closed the link then reopened the screen with a different alpha numeric. The small pointed face of Commander Barnett Eisler, Hyades operations director, appeared. “Eisler, I want you to assemble the Hyades team in the Galaxy conference room at 07:15, and Barnett... be there thirty minutes early.”

  The conference rooms of Exploration Command were named for various constellations, but galaxy, the largest, was the exception.

  “The Hyades team? I’ll let them know 07:15. Yes sir.”

  Eisler stared in disbelief at his screen. For a moment, he sat in silence unable to react. “I’ll set up for virtual conference—”

  “No, dammit, not virtual.” the admiral’s voice boomed from the comm. “You and the other Hyades members are to be in conference with me in person, understood?”

  “Yes sir. I presume we’ll discuss some aspect of the Hyades program. Is there something specific you want me to prepare?” He was fishing for a hint of what was afoot.

  “You’ll be told when we meet in the morning.”

  The call had surprised Eisler, and he struggled to make sense of Delmar’s statement. Why was the admiral awake at this hour? The Hyades team normally met once each month, always in virtual conference. He couldn’t remember a time when they met in person. They never had much to talk about—they rehashed old events and speculated on when Hyades Reconnaissance might report in, if ever.

  Had there been an encounter? His instincts told him something important was afoot. If so, maybe a promotion is in the offing. A career officer, Eisler yearned for a line command. He had applied several times, but the answer always contained the same sham of an explanation: his value as a manager outweighed his desire for a command assignment.

  He fumbled with his tunic as he hurried to dress. In another year, he’d be too old for a line assignment. His record needed something significant, and soon, if he were to ever get an operational command. He had never been to space, and the line officers joked that he held the High Order of Perpetual Expectation.

  Earth

  ~~~

  The first light in the eastern sky cast a gray morning glow across the cityscape outside Delmar’s office in Exploration Command Headquarters. At his desk, while poring over the overnight reports on his document projector, he stretched and lifted a steaming cup of Arabica to his lips, savoring the aroma before he took the first sip. The brace of needed caffeine would help start the long day—after the early morning ECCO message arrived, he’d gotten very little sleep.

  Satisfied he had a grasp on the status of his scout ships, he closed the display, set his cup down, and tapped the desk display to alert his personal electronic secretary. “Please get me Admiral Camus on the visual-com.”

  He rocked back in his chair as he reflected on the news from the Hyades scout corvette, Pegasus, collecting his thoughts.

  The soft voice of the electronic secretary jerked him out of his contemplative mood. “Admiral Camus is on the link.”

  Delmar positioned himself in front of the camera mounted in the display.

  The grizzled face of a slightly balding man with a scar under his left eye appeared on the screen. Admiral Andre Camus, Commander Panhelion Defens
e Command, was a veteran who had advanced through the ranks during the hard-fought battles that had put down the rebellion on the Earth’s outer settlements a decade before. A martinet, his ambitious nature left him disliked by many of the officers in his Command.

  The two rivals locked gazes.

  Delmar smiled politely and shifted in his chair for a better view. “Good morning, Andre. A stroke of luck finding you in your office.”

  “Did you call me at this hour to exchange pleasantries, Jestin?”

  Delmar rolled his eyes and replied with a sneer. “You know me better than that.”

  “Well then, shall we get to the point? I received a message telling me you have something urgent.” A sour expression filled Camus’ face.

  Delmar took a deep breath. Dealing with Camus so early in the morning was a wearisome chore. “I do. We have an entangled message from one of our reconnaissance ships. We conference on it in the Galaxy at 07:15 this morning. You may join us if you like. I think you’ll find it worth your while.”

  “If one of your ships has encountered a threat to the Panhelion, it’s damn fine of you to let me know,” Camus replied with a frown. “And since the Senate has directed you to cooperate with Defense Command, I presume you won’t object if I bring my staff.”

  “If they have appropriate clearances, they’re welcome.” Delmar smiled coldly at the lens and brushed a hand through his shock of gray hair. “I’ll see you at the briefing.” He closed the link with a slap of his hand.

  He disliked Camus’ self-obsessed attitude, and resented Defense Command’s priority in funding and access to high-ranking Senate members. His blood simmered for a moment until, with conscious effort, he put the thought out of his mind. Exploration Command might be the neglected stepchild, but one day it would prove its value when his crews gave the first warning of danger from the far regions of space.

  The e-secretary sounded again. “Commander Eisler is here to see you.”