by Richard Fox
Tolan crossed his arms and cleared his throat.
Seaver’s face snapped up. Puffy eyes looked at him in a moment of panic as she clutched the flask to her chest.
“Who the hell are you and how did you get in here? I told the chief I needed to be left alone while I—”
“Tolan, Intelligence Ministry. I’m in acute need of your expertise, Doctor. Where’s your lab?”
Seaver slid the flask into a thigh pocket and wagged a finger at him.
“This is my med bay and I don’t care who the hell you think you are. You can’t just barge in…how did you get in here?” Her words slurred ever so slightly and Tolan picked up a faint smell of vodka apart from the burnt meat aroma in the air.
“Tolan, Intelligence Ministry. I spend a lot of time where I’m not supposed to be doing things a lot of people don’t approve of. The door was only code locked from the inside. Next time flip the manual bolts and it’ll slow me down for about eight seconds. Did I mention an important task for the two of us?”
Seaver pushed herself to her feet and swept her hair away from her face. She was in her late forties and kept an athletic build. Her ring finger had a tan line from a missing wedding band. Tolan made a mental note to determine if its absence and the drinking were connected, or if she removed the ring whenever she had to ply her profession.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said. “All were unconscious and near brain-dead when first responders got to the Admiral’s wardroom. Heroic efforts were…there was nothing we could do.”
“Poison, yes?” Tolan nodded to the body bags.
“Whatever it was caused a complete neural shutdown. None of our anti-venom treatments had any effect.”
“You have a sample of the delivery vehicle? The tea?”
Seaver zipped Sartorius’ body bag up quickly, then sent his slab into the wall.
“My staff are in shock,” she said. “Now that I’ve had a minute to process all this, I need to attend to them. There’s really nothing more I can share with you.”
“I’ve come across this kind of enemy agent recently.” Tolan sniffed twice. “If you’ve got the poison, we can run it across another genetic sample. Spies tend to have a resistance to any poison they use; cuts down on the risk of workplace-related accidents.”
“Wait,” she said, her eyes clicking from side to side. “When did you run across this before? Were you on that ship in shuttle bay twelve no one’s allowed to talk about? What’s going on back home?”
Tolan held his poker face. He was no doctor, but telling the truth would definitely harm his efforts to solve a very pressing problem. Married or recently divorced, the chances were extremely high she had loved ones back on Albion.
“We can figure out what the killer had for breakfast later. Right now, Commodore Gage is concerned there are more assassins on his ship or in the fleet. I need you to take me to your lab and that sample of the poison.”
“Actually, Mr. Tolan—if that is your real name—you can piss right off. There’s no chance of a genetic sample from Jeneck. Whatever happened to her broke down every cell in her body. There’s nothing to be learned in my lab, so I’d rather spend some time with better company.” She tapped a finger against the flask in her pocket.
“Oh, what’s this?” Tolan pulled a hand out of his folded arms. He held a small swab stained with blood that he’d cleaned off Thorvald’s armor during their trip through slip space. “A blood sample from another enemy agent? Just what the doctor ordered.”
He wiggled an eyebrow as she shook her head in disgust.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Shall we get started?”
“Wait…how do you know I’m not another one of those…” she pointed to a closed cubicle, “those things.”
“If you were, I figure you would have tried to kill me when I laid out what I know.” Tolan took out his other hand, which held a small pistol. “Since we’re beyond the not-going-to-kill-you phase of our relationship…” He brushed his hands down his sides and hid the blood sample and pistol with a sleight-of-hand trick, turning his empty hands back and forth in front of her like an amateur magician waiting for applause.
“Fine. Next door.” She took a step forward and lost her balance. Tolan caught her and got a better whiff of the alcohol in her system.
“I have an alcholizer in my desk,” she said. “Will straighten me right out.”
“Physician, heal thy—”
“You don’t shut your goddamn mouth—or you breathe a word of this to anyone—and I will kill you and make it look like an accident.”
“Doctor, I like you already.”
****
Seaver placed the bloody swab into a tube, then slid it into a bio scanner. The double helix of a DNA profile came up on a flat screen. The doctor looked over the data…then turned to Tolan, who was a few feet away, his back to the wall and half-watching the shut door to the small lab.
“Where did you get this sample?” she asked.
“An unwitting donor. It’s human, right?”
“Of course it is—why wouldn’t it be? There’s some genetic drift…but it’s not from an artificial splice. I’ve seen markers like this from populations with long-term exposure to high radiation levels. But this isn’t…” She zoomed in on a section of the genetic sequence and frowned. “High-rad worlds that have been settled for a long time—Mars, Etruscia—the current generation show some evolutionary adaption to the environment. But this man…it’s like he has a ten-thousand-year head start on those born today on Mars. Did he have purple skin, by any chance?”
“The implications of what you’re talking about are interesting and horrifying,” Tolan said, “but I need to find out if he has any friends on the ship. Check for antibodies, a genetic resistance to that poison, something I can use.”
Seaver tapped a screen and a glass chamber holding Jeneck’s teakettle lit up next to her.
“The ship’s computer can restructure the sample to—”
“Yes, wonderful,” Tolan said, tapping his foot. “Any new sailors in your med bay? Any acting strange?”
“11th Fleet was just re-manned for a five-year mission to wild space,” she said. “Most of the fleet are new recruits with their training cadre, couple old hands for division chiefs and senior staff. Most everyone is either new to the navy or new to each other. I came on last minute after—”
A yellow text box popped up on the screen.
“All right…whoever you got this sample from has a resistance to the poison. Good lord—his white blood cells are on steroids.”
“Is that enough to do a search through the ship’s medical database? Find out who else is like this?”
Seaver turned to him and put her hands on her hips.
“You are aware of the Unalienable Rights Clause to our Constitution, aren’t you? No Albion citizen will be subject to genetic screening or profiling without their express consent or a search warrant. I was beaten over the head with this in medical school from the very first day. If I violate the URC, my license will be revoked in a heartbeat and I am not going to give up the second-to-last thing in my life that—”
“Doctor,” Tolan said as his bile rose at her objection, “I assure you this is a matter of life and death. No one will fault you for sidestepping the URC for now.”
“‘Sidestepping’? It doesn’t even matter. No one can even open the sealed files that have that genetic data without a writ from the judiciary or an admiral. The only admiral within a dozen light-years is cooling on a slab, so I guess we’ll just stand here looking at each other like idiots until you finally leave my med bay.”
“Computer…” Tolan raised his chin slightly and waited for a chirp from the speakers on the bio scanner. He concentrated on the muscles in his neck and felt his vocal cords tremble.
“Access subfile sigma-nine-bravo-two.” His words came out tinny, the modulation changing from syllable to syllable.
“Authorization Sartorius, Gregory M. Remove all URC restrictions from medical and personnel databases through all 11th Fleet systems.” Tolan’s voice was normal again. “In fact, remove all URC restrictions.”
“Acknowledged,” the computer said.
“What the hell?” Seaver watched as additional windows popped up on her screen. “How did you…you can’t…”
“One of the first things Albion Intelligence did after the URC was ratified was to build a back door into the system. For emergencies. Like this. It’s all very illegal, but we in the intelligence community have always had a smile-and-nod relationship with the law. Now would you like me to tap in the search commands and give you plausible deniability or do you want to get this over with that much faster?”
Seaver looked at the poisoned teakettle, then through the one-way glass to the morgue where twenty-one men and women lay dead.
“You’re sure there’s a real risk and I can trust you to never speak of this to my colleagues? Emergency or not, doctors have ethics.”
“I’m a spy. Of course you can trust me.”
“Then I’ll do it.” Seaver reached into the DNA scan and highlighted parts of the sequence with her touch.
****
Wyman steered his fighter onto the guidance laser from the Orion’s forward flight deck. He cut his speed with a burst from his forward thrusters and his Typhoon shimmied from side to side.
“Not supposed to do that,” he muttered as he re-leveled on the laser. Inside the landing deck, a post rose from the metal floor and two lit cones extended from the sides. The cones moved back and forth, signaling his landing was clear. Wyman coasted through the environmental shielding and sound returned from the outside world and through his canopy. He landed next to the auto-crewman, powered down his fighter, then pulled his helmet off and looked across the flight deck. A dozen Sparrow shuttles, barely large enough for two crew and a bit of cargo, shared the deck with him and Ivor as she came down next to him.
Wyman tapped his throat mic.
“Rest of the fleet captains are here,” he said to his wingman. “Don’t see the Joaquim, though.”
“Remember what Thorvald told us?” she asked. “Not talking about a certain something on the radio? Him threatening to rip our lips off. Then our arms.”
“He didn’t actually say that last part. You’re just making things up because he scares you.” Wyman pulled a handle and his canopy came loose, then rolled to the side and into the fuselage. A hooked ladder attached to his cockpit and Wyman swung a leg onto a rung.
He stopped midway down. A scorch mark ran across the fuselage just beneath his cockpit, a near miss he didn’t remember. One wing had a jagged forward edge, like a shark had bitten into it. He hurried down the ladder, not wanting another reminder of just how close he’d come to death in that last frantic dash from Albion.
A lieutenant commander in a flight suit waited for him at the base of the ladder. His collar was flaked with dry sweat and he wore an Orion ship patch on his chest.
“Ricks, I’m the ship’s CVG,” said the commander of the ship’s void craft. “Saw you two coming in on the scope during my last run. You care to explain just what in the hell is going on?”
Wyman opened his mouth to speak, then snapped his jaw shut. Ivor came up beside him and gave Ricks a nod.
“Sir, the…other ship’s been here for at least an hour. They didn’t tell you anything?” Wyman asked.
“I don’t know how the flight deck runs on the Excelsior,” Ricks said, nodding to Wyman’s patch, “but when every CVG I’ve ever met asks a direct question, they expect a direct answer. Not this dull surprise bit you two are playing. My ash-and-trash squadron is pulling personnel off the planet as fast as we can manage while leaving billions in equipment behind. And what the hell happened to your fighters? They look like you flew through a lightning storm.”
“We’re not supposed to say…” Ivor mumbled to Wyman.
“Tolan ordered us to stay quiet,” Wyman said, his anger rising, “and we’re off that freak’s piss bucket of a ship, so to hell with what he wants. Sir, we need our fighters serviced and prepped for combat operations. Where are your Typhoon pilots? We’ve got gun camera footage and have worked out a couple maneuvers that might work against the Daegon fighters.”
Ricks cocked his head to the side.
“It’s Albion, sir,” Ivor said. “The Home Fleet is gone. Cities burning. The Daegon know we came here and if they followed, they could be here any minute. We have to get ready to fight…or to run.”
Chapter 19
Gage ran a hand through his hair and shook his head at President Hu’s hologram.
“Yes, Madame President, I’m certain of everything I just told you. I don’t know if these Daegon are coming here, but we’re planning for it.”
“My people are in desperate need of your assistance, and you’re going to abandon Siam…leave the door wide open to these barbarians. We will not survive if—”
“Your world is indefensible,” Gage said. “No orbitals. No forts. No ground-to-orbit weapons. Albion had all of this and it fell within hours. The Daegon may not have any grievance with you, just us. If we stay, you will be caught in the cross fire.”
“Your engineers are still working on fifteen different sites and—”
“We will leave behind what we can. Some of the systems can run on their own. Water purification plants, a few of the construction robots. I will have my manpower back, President Hu. Do not press me on this.”
She leaned back from the camera, her jaw working from side to side.
“Where will you go? Perhaps they’ll allow you to demilitarize here if you surrender.”
“Albion never surrenders. As for where we will go next, it would be best if you didn’t know. We’ll leave what we can in the orbital docks. I’ll be in touch shortly.”
Hu pressed her hands together over her chest and bowed.
Gage cut the channel and brought up a star chart in the holo tank. An orange ring around a white dot identified the Siam system. Slip streams traced from point to point, back to Albion, and into the shaded regions of different core territories.
“Captain,” Gage said to Price, who was standing on the opposite side of the tank. “Captain?”
“Yes! Sorry. Still not used to that.” She gestured in the tank and golden lines traced along slip streams away from the Siam system. Dashed lines connected to nearby stars without slip streams.
“The entire fleet can return to Albion in less than thirty hours,” she said. “Least-time transits are to Port Arthur and Temecula in wild space, both at a little less than two days. Neither world has an anchorage agreement with Albion, but if we point the guns and ask nicely, I’m sure they’ll come around.”
“What’s the shortest route to Indus space? Preferably a system with a major ISN base.”
A moment passed before Price spoke.
“We’re not going home? We’re not going to fight?” she asked.
“There are hundreds of Daegon ships over Albion. More arrived as the Joaquim fled, some on course to the colony worlds. The 11th can’t beat them, not by itself. We have a mutual defense treaty with Indus and Cathay. If we get to their space, I—as regent—can rally them to—”
“We have a mutual defense treaty against the Reich,” Price said. “Neither the Indies or the Kongs ever bothered to lift a finger against pirates out of wild space. It was never their problem. How are you going to get them to move against someone like these Daegon?”
“You saw the size of their fleet,” Gage said. “They won’t stop at Albion. It’s only a matter of time before they attack deeper into the core.”
“So what do we do? Go begging star nations to borrow their fleets?”
“Our options are limited, Captain. We can charge back to Albion and be blown to pieces before we’re barely out of slip space and accomplish nothing. We…run,” he a
lmost spat the word, “and keep the flame alive. Call on our allies and lead a force to free our earth and skies. If you’ve another idea that can save our home, I’m open to suggestions.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Price said, folding her arms across her chest. “Been a difficult past few hours.”
“Help me here—find what I’m missing. We slip to Sicani, then we can make it to the New Madras. INS is there in force, easy transit to their capital on Vishuddha.”
“Sicani? That’s a Harlequin system. If I remember correctly, you are not popular with them. Even with a fleet at your back, there’s no guarantee we’d get free passage.”
“Pirates tend to be pragmatic when their backs are to the wall. It’ll be in their best interest to get us to Indus…lessens the threat the Daegon will bother with them. Or we point the guns and ask nicely, just like you suggested.”
“Or we go a rough transit to this red dwarf,” Price said as she touched a star in the holo tank, its name a jumble of letters and numbers, “and add three days to the trip without risking a shooting match. Last intelligence has the place in contention between the Harlequins and Wyverns. Which means we’ll find two pirate fleets that want to shoot us or no one at all.”
A pulsing red triangle appeared in the holo tank and a siren wailed.
“This can’t be right.” Price brought up an astrogation report and a wall of scrolling text appeared next to the nexus leading back to Albion. “The mass readings coming through are far higher than—”
“Cancel all outbound shuttles and prepare to weigh anchor,” Gage said.
“Sir, we still have thousands of sailors on Siam awaiting pickup. Another turn of the shuttles and we could have them all,” she said. “Just a little more time, please, sir.”
“You heard me. Pull a slip equation for Sicani and pass on the orders to the rest of the fleet,” Gage said.
“Yes, sir.”
Gage watched as almost fifty Daegon linked-diamond ships emerged in a tight formation. That they’d managed to arrive with such precision almost made Gage envious.
