Empty Casket Conspiracy (Terran Patrol Book 1)

by Lewis Dually

  “Time to blow this place.” I said out load.

  I reached down and flipped open the manual torpedo fire control panel, grabbed the fire control lever and pulled it out. At first nothing happened and I briefly feared the fire control lever had been disconnected in the crash. Then after what seemed an eternity I heard the familiar sound of the eight torpedoes being shot out of their tubes by compressed air. The four aft torpedoes would leap out of the tubes and streak off to the far end of the corridor but I wouldn’t be around long enough to hear their deafening explosions because the four forward torpedo tubes were opening point blank on the carriers’ rear bulkhead. The explosion was instantaneous and a massive shockwave blasted back from the disintegrating bulkhead and flung the Dawn Rising back like a child’s toy. For a brief moment I lost consciousness but soon regained my faculties to find myself flying through the internal chamber of the Krueg ship. Through the dense smoke of the rocket burn I could just see the bridge of the Dawn Rising below me and realized I was no longer on it. The entire top deck of my ship had been ripped open and I was now airborne inside the enemy vessel! Glancing to my left, I saw several Krueg running along a gangway attached to the wall of the ship. One of the soldiers had a weapon and he raised it to fire at me. I saw a bright flash of white from the muzzle of the weapon just as a large section of ship hull struck the gangway and the running Krueg. The hull section covered the Krueg soldiers and the entire section of gangway was crushed behind the flying metal plates from the Dawn Rising. Then my momentum was stopped dead as the second shockwave from the four aft torpedoes hit me from behind. The two shockwaves emanating from opposite ends of the ship had met in the middle and I was caught between them. The Mercury suit’s internal alarm sounded and I heard the computer voice call out a suit pressure warning. The two colliding shockwaves crushed against each other and something had to give. And give it did. Directly below me a massive section of the floor buckled down and then ripped open revealing the internal sections of the ship’s bottom decks. A massive explosion erupted from the gaping hole and a fire ball shot up enveloping me. The heat from the fire ball boiled the water vapor on my helmet visor and an intense white light burned my face. I closed my eyes just as the helmets sun shield slammed down to protect them from the intense radiation blasting up through the ruptured decks below. I felt another shockwave and was flung violently upward. I braced for the inevitable impact with the ceiling and waited. Something struck me hard on my right side and I felt a momentary loss of pressure inside the suit. Another alarm sounded and I heard the suit’s computer voice call out a warning for breach protocol. Then all went quiet. No sound. No sensation of motion. No nothing. I tried to reach my right arm up to open the sun shield but it didn’t seem to work. I tried my left arm. It worked fine and I flipped up the sun visor and peered out at my surroundings. I was astonished to see stars and all around me, sections of hull plating, deck plates, superstructure and various types of debris spreading out in an ever increasing fan of tumbling high speed junk streaking off into the vast blackness of space. Mixed in with the streaking ship parts were Krueg bodies too numerus to count and just ahead of me and slightly to my right was the mashed mangled golden colored arm of a space suit ripped off just below the shoulder. For a second I watched it, amused at the similarity of this Krueg space suit to our own Mercury suits. Then I realized the arm tumbling off into the void was my own!

  “Well there’s something you don’t see every day.” I said out loud.

  The sound of my own voice was odd and I realized my internal suit pressure was too low. I looked up at the small internal status display mounted on the inside of the helmet’s visor mount. The colorful LCD display was flashing red and the internal pressure reading was down to sixty four percent. The reserve air supply showed just below fifty percent but for some reason it wasn’t maintaining my environmental pressure. Then I looked to my right where my arm should have been. It was gone and in its place was a white bubble of emergency gap seal foam protruding from the Mercury suit’s shoulder joint. At that moment I realized my arm was gone. I felt no pain but did have a strange overwhelming feeling of calm. I was alive! I shouldn’t be but I was. E-PERB I thought. Emergency Personnel Beacon. I had to activate my E-PERB. Looking back up at the suit’s internal display, I saw that the E-PERB was already working.

  “Maybe I’ll survive this after all.” I said out loud. Then I closed my eyes and slipped off into the void.

  “Can you hear me? Say something!”

  I was suddenly aware of a bright light with fuzzy dark shadows coalescing out of the mist until my vision cleared and I found myself peering up into the crusty old face of Dr. Hirsch. Walters was seated at my head and Gale was standing behind Hirsch. I felt someone rubbing my legs and heard Cob saying something about getting my blood flowing. The overhead lights were extremely bright and I tried to squint my eyes against the glare but my eyelids seemed to be stuck so that I couldn’t close them.

  “The Krueg ship?” I tried to say. My voice was nearly gone and my jaw felt like it was being zapped with a taser. I swallowed what felt like a mouth full of cotton and tried again. “The Krueg ship? Destroyed?”

  “Pretty much.” Hirsch replied.

  “The Javelin? Did we find her?”

  “Yes. You lead us right to her. They picked up your E-PERB and were in the process of bringing you on board when we arrived. Sprite and his Seals boarded her and we are taking it back to U E One before we revive the captives.”

  “Good. My arm? Did you find it?”

  “No. Sorry but we didn’t even think about that.”

  “Find it! I want my watch back.”

  Hirsch grinned at me and said. “Yes Sir Skipper. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Ok.” I said. Then I laid my head back on Walters lap, tried to close my eyes and drifted back into the void.

  CHAPTER 27: Space Ranger?

  A low persistent beeping brought me out of my slumber and I squinted against the early morning sun slicing in through the blinds of my window. I had been observing the world through that window for ten days and simply could not wait to venture back into it. Why the stupid machine was beeping didn’t really concern me. I had gotten used to beeping machines and probing doctors. My journey to recovery was just beginning and had already taken me from dead and frozen to alive and armless to cyborg! At least that’s what I was telling everybody. I was now a cyborg. The titanium alloy bone structure and synthetic muscle tissue of my new right arm didn’t really qualify me for cyborg status, but what the heck. There were only six of us in the whole world and I had already met two of the others. One would be here shortly to offer his morning pep talk before going down to physical therapy for his control exercise. Another had stopped in one day last week for her monthly checkup and battery charge. They both thought cyborg was a much better designation than what we were currently called. F-I-A-L-R, Fully Intergraded Artificial Limb Recipient. Cyborg is definitely way better than Fialr!

  “Good morning Mr. Paul.”

  “Good morning Mrs. Randolph.” I replied. “What’s for breakfast today?”

  Today’s breakfast had become our daily conversation about all things yucky! Every morning at a quarter past eight Nurse Randolph would come in and say, “Good morning” to which I would respond, “Good morning, what’s for breakfast.” For the past nine days she had replied with, “Yuck, honey, you don’t even want to know.” This morning was different.

  “You have company waiting down the hall. I told them to give us a minute. You want me to help you with your trousers?”

  “Company? Military or civilian?”

  “One is a cop of some kind. The other looks like a lawyer? You in some kind of trouble?”

  “Don’t think so. I think I can dress myself today. I’m getting better at this.” I said as I slid my legs down off the bed and felt the twitchy jerks of my new arm as its processor struggled to interpret my brain’s commands. I was getting better! Five days ago when they first t
urned on my arm I tried to flex my fingers and punched myself in the throat. Not a smooth move for a man nursing a broken jaw. Now I had enough control to pull my pants up and button the button. The zipper was not as easy and after a minute of cursing to myself I looked at Randolph.

  “I got you Honey.” She said as she reached over and zipped me up. “You’re doing real good. Another five days and you will be playing like a concert pianist.”

  “That would be a miracle seeing as how I never played one before!”

  “I’m going to send in your visitors now. Looks like they brought coffee and donuts so you can skip the yuck today.”

  “A cop with donuts, is he wearing a white cowboy hat?”

  “Nope, He’s wearing a black one.”

  Merle Baca ducked his head as he strolled through the door. He took two steps into the room, stopped, and stared at me.

  “Dang Hoss! You don’t look bad for a dead man!”

  “He actually looks well rested!” Dr. Shaw added as he stepped in behind Baca. “I see your burns have healed.”

  The burns had healed and thank the Lord they had. They hurt worse than having my arm ripped off. Fact was I never felt the arm. I just noticed an arm flying out in front of me as I was thrown clear of the battle carrier’s explosion. Then I heard my suit announce breach protocol and looked down to see a white bubble deployed in the open cavity where my arm used to be. Even then I didn’t realize the arm I had seen flying off into space was my own. But the burns, those I felt. Not as it was happening of course. And it wasn’t heat or radiation burns either. It was basically freezer burn. After sixteen hours of floating in space I had run out of air and basically froze to death. I was as surprised as everybody else when I suddenly found myself awake and staring into the face of a grumpy old man. Modern medicine or divine intervention, I don’t know which. Honestly, if I had seen a light at the end of a tunnel I would not have come back!

  I grinned at the two of them and said. “Well I am well rested, and bored as all get-out and I sure could go for one of those donuts you’re hiding behind your back.”

  “What, these?” Baca grinned back. “We’ll have to check with your doc about that. Make sure you can handle the sugar.”

  “I’ve got a robot arm here that can exert four hundred foot pounds of force so hand over the donuts before I handle you.”

  “Testy, testy,” Shaw chided me. “You can’t take a little ribbing?”

  “Not much.” I Replied. “It’s the drugs they got me on. What brings you two here today?”

  “Well we brought you these.” Shaw replied as he handed me a white paper bag. “Coffee, donuts, snuff and one Timex watch that truly took a licking and is still ticking. I have a question. Why do you wear your watch on your right arm? You’re not left handed.”

  “Thanks.” I said as I looked in the bag. “You can keep the snuff. I haven’t had a dip in two weeks and I don’t know why I wore it on my right arm. Just always have ever since I got my very first Mickey Mouse watch for my sixth birthday. I guess no one ever taught me different. What else brings you?”

  A couple things.” Shaw Replied. “First off, we wanted to see how you were doing. Walters has been giving us updates but we wanted to see for ourselves. Second, we wanted to give you a couple updates. We figured out why Liam Adolphus took off with the vaccine.”

  “Do tell. I didn’t buy the ‘sudden attack of conscience’ narrative, so what was it?”

  Shaw sat back in one of the blue vinyl chairs and Baca crossed his arms and leaned against the wall next to my window to the world. The two of them looked resigned to giving bad news so I hunkered down in my own chair and prepared for the worst.

  Shaw started. “You’re right, it wasn’t his conscience that got him, it was his brain!”

  “His brain? How so?”

  “Liam and his research team, being the good scientists they are, decided to test the vaccine before they released it to the Krueg.”

  “Well that would make sense. What’s wrong with that?”

  Baca snorted. “The dumb S O B dug his own grave is what’s wrong with that.”

  “What do you mean, what happened with the test?”

  Shaw leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Liam acquired sixteen Krueg test subjects. Not sure where he got them yet but he used them for his test. Injected all sixteen with the vaccine, waited twenty four hours and then exposed them to the Bird Flu. It worked perfectly. The Krueg developed mild symptoms for half a day and then they were fine. Until six months later when they started developing symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s. Just like they were supposed to. Problem was, every person at the research facility developed the symptoms.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Yep.” Baca chuckled with a tone of delight. “What goes around comes around.”

  Shaw sat upright again and continued. “Here’s what we figured out. The vaccine had a gene mutation serum that mutated the Krueg’s genes and gave them the Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately it also mutated the flu virus and turned it into an Alzheimer’s virus transmittable through bodily fluids: sweat, saliva, blood, and other things. You can pretty much catch it as easily as catching the flu. Every person at the research station and every person on that ship now have Alzheimer’s.”

  “Holy crap! What about the captives, and Sprite and his team, and the Marines? They all entered the station or boarded the Javelin.”

  “The captives are fine. Their immunity to the original virus protected them and should give us a vaccine against this new virus as well. We think the Marines and Seals are ok as well but we will continue testing them for eight months or so. They were all sealed in their space suits at both locations and went through standard decontamination before coming back on our ships.”

  “Well that’s a relief.” I said.

  “It’s not going to be a pleasant eight months for any of them. We have them in isolation just in case. If this thing gets loose we could suffer the planet wide epidemic the PDA had planned for the Krueg. Real scary stuff.”

  Baca shifted position against the wall and said. “Not too long ago they were calling you the hero of the battle at Neptune. When this gets out they’ll be calling you the savior of three worlds. If we hadn’t stopped that delivery, then all three races would be facing extinction.”

  “I would prefer they call me something other than the savior. I’m Baptist and in my book there is only one Savior. I would really prefer it didn’t get out at all. I really don’t want that kind of recognition.”

  “Amen to that.” Baca agreed.

  “You said a couple updates, what else?”

  Baca pushed off the wall he was leaning on and plopped down in a chair. Then he said. “We got the shipping addresses Hoag sent the gold to. The first one went to Albright Mining in the Klondike and yes that would be Admiral Albright mining. The second was B&B Mining in Bastion Nevada. B&B happens to be owed my Berry Bodine, retire chief director of the Alien Contact Division of the PDA, formerly the head of Groom Lake division two research.”

  “My former boss.” Shaw interjected.

  “And the third address was to Juan Adolphus in Cusco Peru, Antwon’s other brother.”

  “Well dang!” I exclaimed.

  “It gets better.” Shaw replied. “The treasury department got curious and did a review of Fort Knox. They found three empty gold lockers right next to the two lockers the bird flu cultures had been stored in before they were shipped to Liam for his research. I wonder what Ray Bishop will say when he finds out he escorted sixty tons of gold bullion to the Kuiper belt?”