Duty, Honor, Planet: 01

by Rick Partlow

  Duty, Honor, Planet

  by Rick Partlow

  Chapter One

  “Pioneering amounts to finding new and more horrible ways to die.”---John W. Campbell.

  The fabric of reality warped itself around the utilitarian shape of the colony ship, tortured into submission by an arcane twisting of the laws of physics. Traversing the dark between the stars at an effective rate of hundreds of times the speed of light, the Republic Colonial Authority Ship Conestoga rode waves of spacetime into the Epsilon Eridani system. Ten thousand emigrants were crammed into her hold, suspended in the chemical stasis of g-sleep, not to be woken till they reached their new home at the Demeter colony.

  There was no crew. An artificial intelligence controlled the ship from port to port, straying from its mission only under certain, preprogrammed circumstances. One of these was a distress call, and as the ship passed through the cometary halo of the star system it received just such a signal.

  Had there been a human captain, he or she might have felt suspicious that the signal was a tight-beam broadcast from the heart of the system’s outer asteroid belt, the remnants of a failed planet. But the ship’s computer did as it was told and diverted the spacecraft from its course, answering the distress call with an automated reply. The sensors found the source of the call, a ship rotating slowly end for end, its infrared signature dangerously cold, its orbit destined to intersect a kilometer-wide asteroid in mere hours.

  The bulbous drive pods glowed brightly with Cherenkov radiation as the Conestoga decelerated, braking to match orbits with the derelict craft, then they fell dark, and the shimmer of unreality that had surrounded the starship faded into the harsh lines of the mundane. The Conestoga’s computer churned away in furious thought, developing a strategy to halt the tumbling of the derelict. A human crew might have paused in that strategy to wonder at the unfamiliar lines of the ship, or the anachronistic fission-powered drives it mounted, but the Conestoga’s computer was encumbered with no such qualms.

  So the artificial intelligence was taken aback when maneuvering rockets lit up on the derelict’s nose, halting its tumble. And the computer was completely surprised when a missile shot out of the side of the strange ship, slamming into the colony ship’s drive pods and blowing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gravimetic field generators into scrap metal with a spherical fireball.

  But by the time a weapons-grade laser shot out to destroy the Conestoga’s communications antenna, the computer knew exactly what was happening. It watched through the exterior sensors, powerless to act as boarding pods rocketed toward its hull, until the occupants of those pods found the control center and deactivated it.

  Inside the hold, ten thousand men, women and children slumbered peacefully, blissfully ignorant of the fact they would never wake up.

  * * *

  Jason was pressed into his acceleration couch as the orbital transfer vehicle departed the monolithic mass that was the star cruiser Bradley. He watched the ugly, blocky ship recede on the viewscreen, taking with it his old life. His new life loomed ahead in the form of a huge, spinning can hanging suspended in the fifth LaGrangian Point between the Earth and the Moon. He sighed. It could have been worse.

  It had surely seemed worse three months ago. His career had lain dead on the bloody ground of an unimportant agricultural colony twenty light years from Earth, almost unnoticed beside the corpses of half his platoon. If someone had told him then that he would be offered a promotion to First Lieutenant and a position in Fleet Intelligence...

  The imposing mass of Republic Spacefleet Headquarters swelled in the flatscreen display on the front wall of the shuttle’s passenger compartment, revealing the impressive array of defensive weapons and a three-meter deep layer of nickel-iron shielding smelted off an imported asteroid. Constructed just after the establishment of the Republic military, it had grown steadily through the following years, both in size and in mission, until it was an almost incessant buzz of activity. Jason’s orbital transfer vehicle was but one of the ships constantly docking and embarking from the station's twin docking ports at its rotational hubs, passing almost unnoticed among the huge star cruisers and insystem patrol ships and the smaller cislunar cutters and orbital shuttles.

  As his shuttle docked with one of the flexible collars that extended from the station, Jason found himself staring at the viewscreen facing the opposite way, back into the depths of space. Everything seemed so clean and antiseptic out there, so different from the dirty, mud-caked streets of Inferno.

  Visions came unbidden of houses and shops built from local wood and paper by the Asian immigrants in New Saigon, burned to the ground in a single night of unbridled savagery. Whatever noble cause the revolutionaries had espoused, it had been lost in the orgy of violence that had followed the capture of the Colonial Guard armory. The local constabulary had been helpless once the insurgents had seized the military weapons stored in the armory, and the only help available to stop them was the single Reaction Force platoon on the Bradley, passing through the system to refuel at its solar antimatter factory.

  There was the yielding feel of mud beneath his feet and the acrid smell of smoke that the helmet filters couldn’t quite scrub out. Shouted commands echoed with tinny distortion over the radio, punctuated by the stuttering reports of assault rifles...and ultimately, the screams of the wounded and dying.

  He had hardly known them, had only been in command of the platoon for a few months, but now each face was indelibly burned into his memory. Eight of them had died in the fierce battle for the armory, and another half-dozen had been wounded. Thirty-five members of the local constabulary had died as well, along with over two hundred members of the Asian Revolutionary Resistance and forty-three civilian workers.

  Afterward, he had walked among them in a daze, watching the medics go to work on the wounded of both sides, slipping now and then in the endless pools of blood that collected in the corridors. He had been on the verge of slipping into catatonia, when he came upon a Colonial Guard Captain that was trying to prevent one of the Fleet medics from giving treatment to one of the wounded civilians.

  Most Guard officers were the sons of politicians from underdeveloped countries, given their commissions as payoff to their parents for the support they gave the Republic government in their local assemblies, and this fellow was no exception to the rule. Loud and brash, he had nonetheless stayed in the rear during the fighting, then had come strutting in with his clean uniform and his waxed mustache to give orders.

  Jason broke the man’s nose and knocked out three of his teeth before the local cops had been able to separate them. When the Bradley had reached the Fleet base at Eden for R&R, Jason had spent a solid week drinking himself into oblivion, certain that his career was over and once the tapes from the battle were reviewed by his superiors, he would spend the next ten years in a military detention center.

  Instead, he had sobered up to find orders waiting: he was being immediately transferred to the Spacefleet Intelligence Division, promoted to First Lieutenant and assigned to Colonel Kenneth Mellanby’s personal staff.

  Maybe, he reflected with a dark smile, I should have shot the bastard. Then they would have made me a general.

  Flashing green lights and an automated message shooed McKay and the half-dozen other passengers out of the shuttle and through the airlock, directly into a lift car. Pausing at the car’s control panel, McKay glanced at his watch---he had less than twenty minutes before he was scheduled to meet with the Colonel. Not nearly enough time to find his quarters, stow his bags and grab a quick shower. He touched the indicator panel for the Intelligence offices, then slumped aside in resignation. It was going to be one of those days.

  The lift sh
ot down the axis of the station, then began slowing, one wall flashing a warning that it was about to become a floor. As the car changed directions toward the outer rim of the cylinder, Jason began to feel the faux gravity of centrifugal force, increasing the further they advanced. When the pull had reached just short of Earth-normal, the car came to a halt and the doors slid aside, and Jason McKay stepped into the midst of the maelstrom.

  Within the curved halls of Fleet Headquarters, streams of blue-clad personnel flowed from one transitory purpose to another, seemingly oblivious to all around them. Jason stepped into the midst of them, the proverbial sore thumb in rumpled Marine utility fatigues, luggage hanging off him like a rubbernecking tourist. Trying to relate the map he’d seen on the wall of the lift to the confusing, people-filled halls around him, Jason struck off down the corridor to his left.

  After ten minutes of wrong turns and bad directions, Jason veered off the crowded thoroughfare into what was known to the enlisted of the station as Brass Country: the Headquarters Section. Marching down a corridor decorated with flags and battle scenes from all of the Republic's member nations, Jason turned into an open doorway marked, "Headquarters, Fleet Intelligence Service."

  Winding his way through a maze of desks and input terminals, he advanced to a secluded anteroom which guarded an unobtrusive, plain white door. A reception desk was situated in the front corner and a clean-cut young Technician Second-Class sat behind it, typing steadily into a terminal. Jason walked up to the desk and stood silently, waiting for the Tech-2 to notice him.

  "Yes..." The bored-looking Japanese male glanced up, adding, "...sir?" upon seeing the silver bars on the visitor's shoulders.

  "Lieutenant McKay to see Colonel Mellanby," he told the enlisted man.

  "Yes, sir," the Tech said. "He's expecting you---go right in."

  McKay nodded curtly, then dropped his bags next to the Technician’s desk and strode in as the door slid aside to admit him. The office he found himself in was sparsely, almost spartanly, decorated: bare walls but for a holographic map of Republic space floating over the plain, metal desk; and an antique, nickel-plated handgun mounted on the wall behind that desk.

  The man sitting behind the desk was as Spartan as the office itself---not a big man, but rather than seeming short or spare, it seemed his frame had been compacted for efficiency, so that not an inch was wasted. Jason had heard it said that when they'd squeezed all that intelligence, muscle and daring into so small a body, they'd left no room for humanity. Rumors about the Snake's ruthlessness floated around him like familiar spirits, and his record as a Marine Captain in the Syrian Rebellion was well-known.

  "Lieutenant McKay reports," Jason said with a salute, coming sharply to attention in front of the desk.

  "At ease, McKay." Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Mellanby returned the salute. He nodded toward the chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”

  Jason dropped gratefully into the chair, struggling not to sweat. He had laughed at the stories about grown men reduced to tearful anxiety in the presence of the Snake, but sitting there in the cool regard of those iron eyes, he believed every word.

  “I know what you’re thinking, McKay,” Mellanby said with chilling matter-of-factness. “You fucked up royally, got a lot of good people killed and then assaulted a superior officer to top it all off.” Jason’s blood froze at the pronouncement of the indictment he had been dreading for the last three months. He couldn’t speak. “So why,” the Snake continued, leaning back in his seat, “did I ask for you to be transferred to my command and kicked up to a Silver Bar?”

  McKay swallowed hard, finding his voice somewhere. “Yes sir,” he admitted.

  “Tell me, Lieutenant, what do you think you did wrong in your assault on the Armory?”

  Jason answered the question without a second’s hesitation---he’d brooded over it for long, alcohol-hazed hours, answering the nightmare accusations of eight dead men and women.

  “I attacked an entrenched, numerically-superior force,” he said, “with no air or artillery support. And I divided my forces in the face of superior numbers.” His jaw quivered. “They trusted me, and I got them killed.”

  “McKay, you’re twenty-five years old,” Mellanby pinned him with a glare. “You’re three years out of college, six months out of OCS, and this was your first mission as a Platoon Leader. You took your twenty-Marine platoon down to an enemy-controlled stronghold and defeated a force of three hundred armed terrorists without the use of any air or artillery support. You did it because you were ordered to by some two-bit ayatollah’s horny first-born to cover up the fact that he had screwed the pooch and let his command get captured without a shot using their own security system.

  “You not only managed to defeat a vastly superior enemy force with no allies but some poorly-armed and poorly-trained local cops, but you even managed to free all of the Colonial Guard troops being held hostage.”

  Mellanby grinned that Snake grin. “And you even had the balls to punch out that little tin-pot Captain when it was over. Lieutenant, you may not believe this, but if the President hadn’t been counting on a swing vote from that shitbird’s father, you would have been looking at a Medal of Valor.” McKay sat back in his chair, his face frozen in an expression of disbelief. Eight men and women, most of them hardly out of their teens, had died under his command and they wanted to give him a medal?

  “Instead,” Mellanby went on as if he hadn’t noticed McKay’s reaction, “I asked for you to be part of a little project that I’ve been planning for a few months now." He stood, pacing around the desk to the other side of the floating holomap. "Does the date September 12, 2150 mean anything to you?"

  "Aside from being my maternal great-grandfather's eighty-fourth birthday," McKay said with a shrug, "it was also the day the Armstrong left orbit for 82 Eridani."

  "Very good," Mellanby said. "I forget, you were a history major. I was a very young child the day the Armstrong left---the first of the Eysselink starships. I remember well the fantasies that went through my young mind that day." He turned and waved a hand expansively at the map. "Fantastic alien creatures from the movies with incredibly advanced technology and some great galactic federation that we would now be welcomed into."

  A nostalgic smile snuck across his face, creeping slowly lest the Snake notice it. It faded quickly, frightened by the unfamiliar territory, and he turned back to McKay. "Instead, we found a nice little system with two habitable planets and no evidence of intelligent life. Very handy economically, of course, but rather puzzling from a scientific viewpoint. It hasn't gotten any better in the last forty years, either. You know the numbers as well as I do. A hundred explored systems, twenty worlds colonized, but no intelligent life.” Mellanby speared him with a glance, shifting from exposition to interrogation in a heartbeat.

  "Have you ever heard of Enrico Fermi?" Mellanby asked him.

  "Twentieth Century particle physicist," McKay replied, fishing through his memory. "I think there's a big lab somewhere in the US named after him."

  "He's also well known for a simple question he once asked. Given that the events that brought about life on Earth can be duplicated---which, by the way, has since been proven---and given the vast number of Earthlike planets which must exist in this galaxy alone, and the fact that at least some of these worlds must be older than ours, there should be intelligent life somewhere in the galaxy much more advanced than us.

  "So, he asked, where are they? Why haven't we detected their radio waves or seen their starships? It was perplexing even before FTL travel was proven possible, and it's at least a hundred times worse now. Earthlike planets not only exist, but they're relatively common, as is complex, carbon-based life. So now, the question isn't just 'where are they?' but,"---he waved again at the map---"where in the bloody hell are they?"

  Sitting down on the corner of his desk, Mellanby reached over and hit a control. "Computer, project program Mellanby Three on holographic display." The computer silently obeyed
, and eight red dots appeared on the map at seemingly random locations, scattered among the human colonies. McKay leaned forward in his chair to peer curiously at the projection. "You've no doubt heard rumors about the ships that have disappeared throughout the years. Oh, God knows, we expect some losses. We're talking about star travel, after all. But a few have been more than just navigational errors."

  He stabbed a finger at the display. "These ships, all eight, were found by Fleet expeditions in the last five years. Even to the Senate Security Committee, the President admits to only five of them, the five that were unmanned cargo ships. The other three were colony ships."

  "Holy Christ," McKay breathed, thinking of the ten thousand emigrants crammed into each of the huge, tanker-like ships. "What happened to them?"

  "Something...someone brought them out of FTL, somehow, blew a hole in their hulls and stole their cargoes, reactors, fuel...and passengers."

  "Aliens," McKay muttered, slowly shaking his head.

  "Perhaps, perhaps not. No one can say for sure. But I do know that no natural phenomena made those cargoes and reactors disappear. And I have no patience for such fantasies as the notion of the Belt Pirates acquiring starships. Perhaps, in time, star travel will be advanced enough for anyone with the money to build their own ship; but, at present, the only motive force powerful enough to take advantage of the Eysselink Effect is antimatter, and its manufacture requires too much energy to go unnoticed.

  "So we have finally come face to face with the unknown, though through a glass darkly, as it were. And they have not proven friendly."

  "But what does this have to do with my job here?" Jason wondered.

  "I recruited you, McKay, because you're a warrior, and I believe the time is coming when the Republic will need warriors."

  "Sir,” McKay protested, “three months ago I was convinced I was about to be cashiered out of the Corps, and I decided I didn’t mind. Because I was tired of the killing, tired of cleaning up other people’s messes. I think you have the wrong guy."