“Fire away.”
Friday, December 12, 2403, UD
Farrisport Island Prison
“It’s time.”
Michael got to his feet. “I’m ready,” he said. It was a complete and utter lie. Only the last dregs of courage and self-control allowed him to keep a body torn by fear under control.
Two guards stepped forward. Hands locked onto his arms. They escorted him down a succession of short corridors. Kallewi and a posse of observers fell in behind, his lawyer too. Erica Malvern’s eyes were brimful of tears. Michael was led into a room. Its walls were seamless sheets of blindingly white plasteel, its only furniture a single chair bolted to the floor, its back, arms, and legs fitted with broad plasfiber restraints.
Michael’s heart hammered at the walls of his chest. He was eased forward, turned, and pushed gently down into the chair. The guards worked fast to secure the restraints. The awful, unstoppable inevitability of the process threatened to break him apart. With all that remained of his self-control, he made himself stay still.
“Prisoner is secure, sir,” one of the guards said, moving back.
Colonel Kallewi stepped forward to stand right in front of Michael, a single sheet of paper in her left hand. She leaned forward. “Hang in there, spacer,” she whispered.
Michael said nothing. He was too terrified to speak, even now unable to believe what was about to happen to him.
Kallewi cleared her throat before speaking. “Michael Wallace Helfort. Your final appeal for clemency having been denied by the president of the Federated Worlds in presidential order J-557, a physical copy of which document I have witnessed in person and further confirmed by direct comm with the president herself …”
Michael turned his mind inward. His neuronics cycled through his favorite holopix of Anna, pictures of the best times in his life, pictures rich in hope and happiness. But all of a sudden, it was too much, too painful, and Michael could not take any more. He shut his neuronics down. He opened his eyes and waited for Colonel Kallewi to finish.
“… and now, by the authority vested in me as the superintendent of Farrisport Island Prison, sentence of death will be carried out.” Kallewi stepped back. “Proceed,” she said.
A guard—she looked very young and very nervous—wheeled a small trolley to where Michael sat. On it rested a plasfiber cylinder from which two corrugated hoses led to a face mask. With well-rehearsed efficiency, the guard placed the face mask over Michael’s face, tightening the straps behind his head to form an airtight seal.
“Face mask is secure, sir,” the woman said.
“Confirm system is nominal.”
The guard’s fingers flickered across a small touchpad set below a status screen. “System is nominal.”
“Close the vent. Set the system to recirculate.”
“Vent closed. System set to recirculate. Carbon dioxide scrubber is active, sir.”
“Sentence will now be carried out,” Kallewi said.
This is it, Michael thought, knowing with each inhalation that he was one step closer to death as his body burned the oxygen in the system until too little remained to sustain life. It was strange. He felt disconnected from what was going on. As if it were already over. As if he were …
Quietly and with no fuss, the end came, and Michael slipped away into unconsciousness, falling down into the darkness, down to where death awaited.
• • •
Why could he not feel anything? Why was did the darkness feel so thick? Why was the silence so absolute?
Was this what it was like to be dead? He was dead, so it had to be.
None of it made any sense, so he lay unmoving until a soft voice reached down to where he drifted. It called him back up from the infinite blackness that cradled his being, urging him to come back to the light. He did not want to go, but the voice was insistent; it nagged at him until he had to leave the warmth and security of the darkness. He drifted up toward a faint point of light. It strengthened as he rose; its brilliance grew and grew until it pushed the darkness aside, and then a blinding whiteness enveloped him, a whiteness so bright that he had to screw his eyes shut against the glare. His head filled with sudden stabbing agony, his heart thrashed at his chest, nausea roiled his stomach.
“Can you hear me?” a voice asked.
He wanted to answer, but his mouth was too dry, his throat too constricted to let the words come. With an effort, he drove air from his lungs and past his lips. “Yes,” he croaked.
“Good,” the voice said. “You had us worried. That damn drug is dangerous. We’re transfusing more nanobots to mop up the last of the toxins in your system. I’m afraid you’ll feel like shit until they’re gone, but it won’t be long, so hang in there.”
“Head hurts,” he mumbled. The pain was terrifying in its intensity; it radiated out from behind his forehead in swirling waves of red-hot agony, each more powerful than the last.
“How bad?”
“Bad, real bad.”
“Bloody cataleptic drugs,” the voice said. “Hold on … okay, I’ve upped your painkillers.”
The pain roared to new heights. He bit down on his lower lip to choke down the scream that built in his throat, his mouth filled with the coppery taste of fresh blood.
“Better?”
He shook his head. A mistake; shards of pain slashed razor-edged through his head. “Stop!” he screamed. “Stop it now! Please!”
“Hang in there.”
But he could not. With brutal force, the pain bludgeoned him back to where he had come from.
• • •
In an instant, he was awake. He stared up at the ceiling, which was white and featureless except for a single light panel turned down low. He looked around. Judging from the medibot beside his bed, it had to be a hospital, he decided.
But why was he in a hospital? His mind was blank. Panic engulfed him. He could not remember anything, not a damn thing: who he was, where he was, why he was here. All he knew was what his senses were telling him right there and then.
That was it.
Beyond the immediate lay … nothing. Hard as he tried, he could not see past the nothingness. His mind said he existed, but that was the totality of his universe. He had no idea what lay beyond the Spartan confines of his room; that terrified him. But why? He did not know. But he did know one thing for certain: Outside the door lay unimaginable horrors, horrors that would destroy him with casual, uncaring cruelty, horrors that even now might be coming for him. With fear-fueled desperation, he tried to find a way out, to escape, but he could not move.
Without warning, the door opened. A scream of primal terror boiled up from deep inside, a scream that died before it reached his lips. The man who had entered the room was a marine medic, a corporal, there to help him.
He knew all that without thinking. But how did he know? What was a marine? What was a corporal? Why was the man here to help him? None of it made any sense.
“The medibot told me you were conscious,” the medic said; he leaned over to look him in the face. “How are you feeling?”
“Confused,” he said after a moment’s thought.
“Can’t remember anything?”
“No. Who am I?
“You’re Michael Helfort.”
That did not help. Who the hell was Michael Helfort? “Where am I?”
“A place called Karrigal Creek.”
“Never heard—”
With all the shocking impact of a dam bursting, memories exploded inside Michael’s head, a torrential, confused kaleidoscope of people, places, and events, a churning mess of sensations that Michal struggled to make sense of. His heart lurched as he remembered with an awful clarity the moment when the prison guard had slipped the mask over his face.
“I’m alive,” he whispered. He felt stupid the instant the words came out. Of course he was alive. That had been Colonel Kallewi’s promise to him. He’d wanted so badly to believe the woman, but he never had, not even for a second. Throug
hout those last awful days, he had convinced himself the woman had only wanted to make the inevitable less terrible. But she had been telling him the truth.
“You sure are, spacer,” the medic said with a cheerful grin. “Now, let’s get you hydrated,” he went on, handing Michael a beaker of pale blue fluid. “Get that down you.”
All of a sudden aware of how thirsty he was, Michael took the beaker and drained it in one long swallow. “Thanks, Corporal,” he said. “Any chance of another one?”
“As many as you like,” the man said. “I’ll go get a refill.”
“Thanks,” Michael said. He put his head back and closed his eyes, happy just to luxuriate in the sudden rush of energy surging through his body.
The door opened.
“That was damn quick, Corporal,” Michael said. He opened his eyes and looked up, and there she was, a tall, spare figure in Fleet black. “You,” he hissed at the sight of Admiral Jaruzelska. “What are you doing here?”
“Hello, Michael,” Jaruzelska said, closing the door behind her. “Welcome to Karrigal Creek.”
“I am going to kill you,” Michael shouted, fists clenching and unclenching as rage surged hot through him, “and that’s a fucking promise you can depend on.”
“Hold your horses,” Jaruzelska said, a trace of iron in her voice. “There’s a lot you don’t know, so you need to listen before you kick my head in.”
“Why the hell should I?” Michael shouted, his voice hoarse. “You lied to me, and then you betrayed me. Do you have any idea—” He tried to sit up, hands reaching out for Jaruzelska. “—what I’ve been through? Well, do you? No, you don’t, you callous bitch! If it’s the last thing I ever do, I will kill you.”
Jaruzelska said nothing. Michael, unable to hold himself upright any longer, collapsed back onto the bed. “Everything that’s happened has happened for a good reason,” she said.
“So you say,” Michael said, his face twisted into a furious mask.
“I do say. Now I’ll stand here as long as you like, but in the end you’ll have to hear me out,” Jaruzelska said, her voice all steel now, “so stop wasting my time. Believe me, I have better things to do.”
“Go fuck yourself,” he muttered.
“Last chance.”
Unwilling to trust her, Michael hesitated. His body trembled as he struggled to regain his composure. “Okay, I will,” he said at last, unable to find enough energy to be angry anymore, “though it had better be damn good.”
“Oh, it will be. Right, we’ve a lot to get through, so let’s get started,” Jaruzelska went on, brisk and businesslike. She pulled up a chair and sat down. “First, I would all like to apologize for what you have been put through. It was as unforgivable as it was necessary, and I’m sorry.”
“Keep talking,” Michael said, grim-faced.
Jaruzelska sighed. “Okay, bear with me as I do this one step at a time,” she said. “First, have a look at this holovid clip.”
A wall-mounted holovid screen burst into life. It took Michael a few seconds to work out what he was seeing: a flame-shot pillar of smoke that climbed from the blazing wreckage of what looked like a suborbital shuttle. “What’s that?” he asked.
“That’s all that’s left of the shuttle taking your body from Farrisport Island after your execution. As you can see, there could have been no survivors, and your mortal remains are now well and truly incinerated. In fact, my people tell me that the fire was so intense that the recovery team will be lucky to find anything more than a puddle of molten slag.”
“But why … Ah, right, I get it,” Michael said. “Okay, what’s next?”
“Watch this.”
The holovid came to life again. It juddered and jumped. Michael struggled to work out what he was watching because the image was so poor, so unsteady. Then it clicked. He was looking at a heavy cargo shuttle, its flame-scorched skin free of any identification markings. The camera moved toward a loaderbot trundling a gray shipping container out of the shuttle’s cavernous cargo bay. The letters on the side of the container said: government of the pascanici league. The camera continued on to where a man in a coldsuit stood, his face thrown in harsh relief by overhead lights.
There the vid paused to leave the man’s mouth frozen half open.
“What the hell was that about?” Michael asked. “That’s the worst vid I’ve ever seen.”
“It came from dustcams.”
Michael frowned. He’d never heard of dustcams.
“And before you ask, dustcams are low-res speck-size cameras that record three-sixty-degree vid before squirting it back to us via a microsat. We dropped millions of them over a lump of rock on Commitment the Hammers call Hendrik Island. We got plenty of vid, almost all of it useless. But some came through for us, and this is best we have. The analysts think it settled on someone’s jacket as he walked past that shuttle.”
Michael sat up. “So he tells us something?” he said, studying the man’s face with care.
“That piece of slime,” Jaruzelska said, pointing a finger at the screen, “is Professor Arnoldsen, and he is the Pascanicians’ best magnetic flux engineer. He’s probably the best in humanspace as well.”
Michael’s heart tripped over itself; now he knew why Jaruzelska was showing him the vid clip. “Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Antimatter production is all about magnetic flux containment.”
“It is.”
“Which makes Hendrik Island the Hammer’s new antimatter manufacturing plant, and the fact that Arnoldsen is there proves that the Pascanicians are helping them. Looks like the NRA’s intelligence reports really were on the money. But how did you know about Hendrik Island?”
“We analyzed Commitment’s orbit-to-earth and suborbital traffic for the last ten years.”
Michael turned to stare at Jaruzelska, wide-eyed. “You’re kidding me. That’s petabytes of data.”
“Exabytes, actually.”
Michael shook his head; he still didn’t understand. “But how?”
“After you and your dreadnoughts destroyed the Hammer’s antimatter production plant at Devastation Reef in March ’01, we all knew the Hammers had to replace the plant. The problem was figuring out where they’d put it. After a lot of debate, our intelligence guys decided that the Hammers would have to locate their new plant as close to home as possible—”
“Of course!” Michael blurted out. “Where the defenses are most concentrated; that way we couldn’t take it out again.”
“And you can’t get much closer to home than dirtside on Commitment.”
“So you looked for changes in their traffic patterns,” Michael said; over and over, his forefinger stabbed out in his excitement. “You looked for shuttles. Lots of shuttles, all going somewhere they’d never gone before!”
“And that somewhere was Hendrik Island. When we crunched the data, it stuck out like the proverbial dog’s balls. Hendrik Island was home to a small research station; it used to have one shuttle a month, if that. Now it’s getting hundreds, many of them from the Pascanici League. So now we have hard evidence that proves what the Hammers are up to. That’s the good news. The bad news is that none of what you’ve seen made the slightest impression on the government. Moderator Ferrero and her Worlds First Party always wanted a peace treaty with the Hammers, and nothing was ever going to stop them from getting it.”
“I know,” Michael said, stony-faced. “I watched the holovid of the signing ceremony. It’s a disaster.”
“More than you know. One of the terms of the peace treaty was that both parties would halt all antimatter research and production. We, of course, complied. As we now know, the Hammers did not.”
“Surely Ferrero insisted that the Hammers prove they weren’t in breach of the treaty.”
“No, she didn’t. She said that would be a betrayal of the bond of trust she’d established with the Hammer of Kraa.”
“So the government won’t do anything. What happens next?”
“We take di
rect action. If we sit around and wait, we’ll all wake up one day to find Federated Worlds nearspace full of Hammer starships armed with antimatter missiles, and then it’s game over. Inside a week, we’ll be a vassal state of the Empire of the Hammer of Kraa with Jeremiah Polk our emperor. We don’t have a choice. We must stop him.”
“But how can you do that? With the greatest respect, I cannot—”
“Can you walk?” Jaruzelska said, cutting him off.
“I guess,” Michael said.
“If you can—” Jaruzelska’s tone left Michael in no doubt that not being able to walk was not an option. “—I’ll get Corporal Wei to find you some clothes and bring you through to the command center.”
“Yes, sir,” Michael said to her departing figure, a tiny corner of his brain still wondering why he hadn’t tried harder to kill the woman.
Light-headed from the effort it took to stay upright, Michael followed Corporal Wei through a security post manned by armed marines. He emerged into a brightly lit space humming with disciplined activity, its walls dominated by holovid screens busy with live video feeds and maps overlaid with thick clusters of tactical icons, along with status boards. The air was buzzing with nervous energy underscored by the buzz of quiet conversations from twenty or so shipsuited spacers and marines.
Admiral Jaruzelska waved him over. “Michael,” she said, “it’s good to see you up.”
“What is this place?” Michael murmured even though he knew. This was a command center, a big one, and it was a command center in the middle of a live operation. But Karrigal Creek? He didn’t know where Karrigal Creek was, but he was pretty sure that it formed no part of the Federated Worlds’ massive network of command and control centers.
“Ah, good,” Jaruzelska said when a man in faded marine greens spotted her and came over. “This is General Adam Nwosu.”
“General Nwosu,” Michael said, confused. “I’m sorry, but what are you doing here? I thought you’d retired.”
“I had,” Nwosu said; he was a chunky, well-muscled man, ebony-faced, with soft brown eyes under a wild thatch of arctic-blond hair. “But these are dangerous times, and when Admiral Jaruzelska asked for my assistance—” He shrugged. “—how could I say no?”
The Final Battle Page 6
