The Belt Loop_Book Three_End of an Empire

by Robert B. Jones

  If his own career could even approach Haad’s waistline on his way up the ladder he would be proud. He decided then to lose some of his youthful bravado and learn to respect his elders.

  He had a lot to learn.

  * * *

  “Is he alive?” Lieutenant Niki Mols asked.

  “Just barely. The ceiling came down on him. He was saved by his bunk, it seems,” Doctor Isaacs said.

  “When can I see him?”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “Not so fast, lieutenant. You know, you’re lucky you were in that stairwell when that shuttle crashed into the blockhouse. You could have done a lot worse than a broken arm. How about we fix you up first, then we’ll talk about getting you into the isolation ward to see your Varson friend.”

  She pouted. Isaacs was finishing up the soft cast on her left forearm. It was just an annoying fracture, nothing serious as far as she was concerned. Not her first broken limb, probably not her last. “Are we equipped to handle Varson physiology at this facility, doctor? Do we have a resident subject matter expert? If I remember correctly, most of the captives were taken to Elber before being repatriated.”

  “Be still, Nicole, let me finish this,” he said. “Keep the pressure at twenty psi and this has to stay on for at least two weeks. I’ll give you a prescription for the pain if you want.”

  She looked at the doctor and smiled. “No, that won’t be necessary. I don’t really like taking drugs; they dull my system. With all of the things happening around here, I need to have a clear mind. I was just on my way to see the Admiral when the wall jumped out and bit me.”

  “So you said,” Isaacs mumbled as he started packing up his gear. “I had to sedate you. You were moaning on about something critical you had to tell your uncle. Didn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

  Mols tried to scoot down from the examining table but, when she put her left arm out to support her weight, the pain shot up her arm like a hot needle. She relaxed and fell back onto her elbows. “Whoa, I guess I’ll be wanting that pain pill after all, doc.”

  “Figured as much. You’ll need it for the headache too. You fell down a flight of metal stairs young lady. Plenty of contusions to go along with your broken arm.”

  She cautiously raised her good arm and felt her head. A couple of knots were poking through her short mane. “I forgot about my head. Prescribe on, Doctor Isaacs,” she said.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out his prescription pad. “This won’t knock you out but it will dull the throbbing. Two in the morning, two at night.”

  She watched the steady hand write the script and thanked him for it graciously. “Now, when can I get to see my Varson friend, doctor? I think somewhere in his twisted head he holds the key to all of this madness going on around here. I was just calling Uncle Vinny when — Wait! I need to get over to headquarters! I have some vital information for the Admiralty, something I need to tell Admiral Paine, something —”

  He held up a hand to cut her off. “Cool your jets, lieutenant. Your Uncle Vincent is right outside. He came over as soon as he heard. Seems you had just reached his yeoman when the fun started. Let me get him for you.”

  Mols sat back on the table and relaxed when Doctor Isaacs left the room. She looked around at the assorted medical paraphernalia along the walls and her attention was drawn to the lightbox on the short wall. The display showed an image of her lower arm, the displacement in the middle of the ulna easily visible.

  The door opened and Vincent Paine rushed in followed by Isaacs and one of her uncle’s aides, a tall lieutenant commander with an absent look on his face and a thin sheen of sweat on his brow.

  “How’re you doing, Niki? Doc here says you’re going to be just fine, just a couple of bumps and bruises to go along with your broken wing.”

  She brightened instantly, not wanting to show the admiral any discomfiture on her part. “I’m okay. Shook up, but okay. I’ve got to wear this stupid cast for a couple of weeks but after that, I should be as good as new,” she said, holding up her left arm.

  “The cast will immobilize the arm until her ulna heals, admiral. She might experience some throbbing, a little paresthesia over time, but the prognosis is for a full recovery,” Isaacs offered.

  “Para what?”

  The doctor smiled and said, “Paresthesia. A prickling sensation on her skin beneath the cast. It’ll itch.”

  Thin laughter around the room as Mols rolled her eyes to the overhead.

  “Well, if that’s all, consider yourself lucky, young lady,” Paine said. “A couple of people didn’t make it out of that rubble alive.”

  She looked at him. “What the heck happened, sir?”

  “Incoming courier boat from Canno, actually Luna-II. Made the fold but lost her control surfaces to Varson laser fire. I listened to the radio traffic while she was on the way down. We have big trouble on Canno, I’m afraid. If what the pilot said was true, Canno, Yellin, is all gone. Destroyed by a new Varson weapon.”

  Mols swung her legs off the side of the examining table. “I was just about to come tell you that! I had just reached your yeoman when the light went out over at the blockhouse.”

  “Commander Ignat, get that reader over here and take her statement for the record. I need to hear everything you know, Niki.”

  Doctor Isaacs chose that moment to leave the room. Mols noticed a couple of armed shore patrolmen standing at parade rest out in the corridor when the door was open. Before she started to tell Paine what Inskaap had divulged to her just before the shuttle crashed, he held up a hand.

  “Before you begin, there’s one more bit of disturbing news to come out of all of this. Coni Berger has escaped. The crash knocked an opening into the top of her cell and she crawled up and away. The base is on lockdown until we find her. She cannot be allowed to leave Weyring.”

  Damn, Mols thought. More complications. Berger on the lose, Inskaap in the isolation ward at the Base Hospital, big briefing to deliver tomorrow morning. Could it get any more complicated?

  She put her thoughts away and started telling the latest revelations from Inskaap. Admiral Paine listened without interruption. Lieutenant Commander Ignat just stood at attention throughout the whole process.

  Chapter 17

  Life was not getting any easier for Teeluur. Oh, he had managed to avoid detection in Narid by keeping to himself, avoiding busy street times — like weekends — and basically kept to a solid routine of moving around among the sleazy fleabag hotels in the downtrodden parts of the city. He limited himself to one meal a day and usually took it at the same diner every other day. On the off days he would buy snacks and consume them in his room or find an isolated park bench to sit and enjoy his food.

  He was running through his stash of credit notes and before long would be desperate to find a source of income. He could always resort to smash-and-grab robberies or street muggings but he knew that would eventually bring him to the attention of the local authorities. Besides, what citizen of this dump would be carrying enough credits to make such an undertaking even remotely profitable? Most of the stores he visited were almost deserted so the shopkeepers couldn’t have amassed enough cash to make a violent robbery worth the effort.

  No, he had to think of something else to augment his dwindling credit supply, something on a grander scale. Based on his current usage, he had enough money for another two or three weeks. Then he would have to act.

  Being alone and abandoned on a strange planet, wearing another man’s face, trying to stay out of trouble was a heavy burden to lift every day.

  Teeluur pushed the soup bowl away from his elbow and sat back. The low sunshine cast a darkening shadow through the window and he shaded his eyes as he looked out on the gray street. Only a few pedestrians hobbled by, coats drawn up around their necks against the stiff wind from the southwest. Suddenly, on the opposite sidewalk, a figure went past the window of the pawn shop across the empty street. This person was lightly dressed, wore only a sweater and th
in pants, and tried to obscure her face. When the woman stopped in front of the pawn shop window, a mirrored display rack of knives behind the tempered glass bounced her reflection to Teeluur’s eyes and ultimately the face made its way to his tiring brain.

  Impossible, he told himself. Here? In Narid? He quickly got up and paid for his dinner and left the diner without worrying about the few bits of change he was due. He lowered his head and made his way across the dusty street and went south a few paces until he was at the shop window. The woman had gone inside and was talking to the less-than-interested clerk. She cast a furtive glance toward the front door and Teeluur caught her face straight on. It was her!

  Standing at the window inside the pawn shop was Coni Berger. Admiral Constance Berger once removed. Instead of wiling her time away in some cell on the Weyring Base, here she was up in Narid trying to score some cash.

  He quickly skulked across the street and stood in the doorway of an abandoned clothing store.

  Teeluur watched the pawn shop.

  He waited.

  * * *

  It took the connection about a minute to work its way through the base communications complex of scramblers and intercepts. Since the hostilities with the Varson Empire had started anew, each and every call leaving the base was scrutinized by a voice intercept processing specialist from Lieutenant Mols’s geek shop. The not-so-modern telecom system had to route a lot of the off-base calls through old-fashioned digital relays instead of using the overhead satellite systems, which for now were exclusively the tools of the Colonial Navy.

  After being switched for the umpteenth time, Max Hansen finally got Ken Royal on the land line.

  “Ken, hi. It’s Max,” she said.

  “Hi there. It is so good to hear your voice. I’m so glad you called. The rumor mill had it that the Hudson had been recalled. Bunch of others, too.”

  She laughed a thin little chuckle. “Yeah, well, the scuttlebutt always seems to be right on the money. Where do these people get their information from? We got back here faster than a radio message could have.”

  “Unnamed sources, I guess. When can I see you, Max?”

  She paused. Good question. She knew the captain was going to try to make arrangements for her to have an overnight stay with her son Harold, but she hadn’t planned much beyond that. “I don’t know. There’s a big to do up at the War College in a few days, and I’m planning to come up to spend a day with Har, but, really? I don’t know, Ken. I tried to call Har first, but they told me at the Hayes switchboard they would not get him out of class for a phone call unless it was an emergency. School policy, the woman said.”

  Ken grunted. “That’s right. They’re pretty rigid up here. Since the war started old Commander Holt has even tightened things up even more. At least, he thinks he has. The boys are still doing a lot of unauthorized things behind his back.”

  Uh-oh. She hoped he didn’t mean Harold. “So, how is he doing? Your last recording said you were giving him some extra-curricular training. Is he trying sports or something?”

  He laughed. “No, not really. Just helping him put on some muscle. We’ve been running a lot in the mornings and evenings. He seems to like it. Inside the gym, we practice some basic self-defense training. By the time he’s an upperclassman, his muscle memory will push him to the top of the cadets in physical training. Something I know he wants to excel in.”

  Max didn’t know if she liked that or not. He wasn’t in school to learn how to fight. Well, she thought, maybe he was, but she’d prefer him to fight with his brain, not his brawn. “Okay, Ken. I’ll trust you on that one. As long as he realizes that he’s there to get an education. As long as he’s not neglecting his studies to play physical war games, I guess it’s okay.”

  “Relax, Max. He’s a smart and brave kid. He’s doing fine in his studies and he’s doing fine with his PT. Stop worrying about him. He’s a lot different than the smart-mouthed kid you let loose on this place three months ago. You’ll see.”

  Pausing to evaluate what Ken had just told her about Har, she shuffled her feet and put her free arm around her waist. “I can hardly wait. What time are his classes done today? I’ll be at the BOQ and I want you to have him call me soonest.” She gave him the number.

  “In about an hour. I’ll make sure he gets the message, Max. I can’t wait to see you. Any way you can come up tonight?”

  “No. Maybe tomorrow. I’m waiting for Captain Haad to get my itinerary done. Could take him hours to make all the arrangements for my overnight up there. I can let you know in the morning.”

  He started to offer to come down to Weyring tonight but thought better of it. He would have to move too much of Commander Holt’s restrictions out of the way to get transportation at this late hour. “Alright, until tomorrow then.”

  They said their goodbyes and she broke the connection. As soon as she left the comm kiosk another ranking smiled at her as he pushed his way to the phone. The comm center was a hub of activity, typical traffic when incoming ships unloaded. She made her way out of the building and walked the few blocks to her quarters. After three months onboard the Hudson River it would be nice to take a long hot shower, a soaking lasting more than seven minutes with fresh, natural water.

  It only took her two minutes to shed her uniform and retire to the head.

  The steam encircled her weary body and she stood motionless in the watery embrace for what seemed an eternity.

  * * *

  Milli Gertz looked down at the Varson native and shuddered. Not in her wildest imaginings did she ever expect to find one of the aliens in her lab, surrounded by a containment field, fighting for his life. His injuries were not severe but somehow in the transition between human physiology and Varson life-saving techniques, she had lost a step. She was supposed to be the resident expert in all things Varson but this latest subject had her stumped.

  “What are you thinking, Mildred?” Doctor Isaacs asked. He was standing at the foot of the bed in the ICU and looking at the bio readouts on the various monitors. Inskaap was heavily sedated and they were waiting for a report from the toxicology labs about his blood chemistry. The only visible injury he appeared to have suffered was a nasty bump on the back of his head, an injury partially deflected by the bristles of wiry hair starting at his brow and continuing down to the base of his spine.

  “I don’t really know, doc. It’s almost as if he is in some form of suspended animation or something. Maybe the blow to his head triggered some kind of biometric defense mechanism or something. It shut down his system as if his lowered heart rate and respiration would give his injuries more time to heal. This is something I have never seen before.”

  During the first Varson conflict Milli Gertz had made a name for herself by studying all she could about the warring Varson race. They were almost distant cousins to the humans they had been fighting, sharing a great percentage of the same DNA strands. They were bipedal, axially symmetric hominid creatures that had developed anthropromorphic characteristics similar to humans but definitely evolved from something other than classic homo erectus strains. They were warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing organisms with two distinct genders and they bore live young; mammals for all intents and purposes.

  The major differences were in the body chemistry. While the typical human was 65 percent oxygen, 18 percent carbon, 10 percent hydrogen and three percent nitrogen by volume, the mature Varson was heavier in the iron department and light in the calcium with the other trace ingredients being just about the same. It was most likely the result of environmental influences over billions of years or some direct tampering with the basic building blocks on the home world sometime in their recent past. One striking difference was that their blood was a dark orange color instead of the deep crimson hues of human hemoglobin.

  “I think that could be a possibility. A lot of animals have similar mechanisms, and in humans we call it shock,” Isaacs explained.

  “This isn’t shock. At least I don’t think so. I’ll k
now more after I see the blood work,” Gertz said.

  “Well, you’re the expert exobiologist and I’m confident you’ll come up with the right answer.”

  She stared at him for a beat or two. Was he being funny or did he really believe that? “Time will tell, doctor. At least, as far as I can tell, he’s in no immediate danger. His heart rate is low, his respiration steady and there doesn’t appear to be any internal bleeding. I’d say he’s just in some kind of Varson self-induced coma.”

  Isaacs grunted and headed for the door.

  Gertz watched and waited.

  Chapter 18

  Captain Dryfus looked at his chronometer. If Captain Curton’s assessment of the Varson battle plans was correct he could expect a raiding party in a few minutes. They would come into the void around Bayliss out of the sunward side and try to provoke a battle with any ships they found in the area. This tactic was nothing more than a glorified war game, he thought.

  The major difference this time was the addition of the resurrected First and the additional boats Dryfus had towed into the arena. These empty ships with the remote operating systems should prove the worth of the new idea from Admiral Teals and the shops on Luna-II. Some of the Varson attackers used energy weapons, some still carried centuries-old ballistic missiles. The test would be to see if the Varson ships had trouble locking on to his ships and to observe the reflective coating’s ability to diffuse targeting radars.

  Dryfus was on the bridge of the Mississippi River and he had arranged for his red team to be on shift at the appointed hour. His XO, Commander Hue Guardo, paced the raised floor of the bridge behind the captain’s chair, first checking his communications alcove, his weapons center and finally the CIC. Lieutenant Commander Norman was at the helm and Lieutenant Burgis manned the science station.