by Rick Partlow
Lee hit a button and the screen faded to black.
"There was some other shit about penalties and curfews," the corporal said, "but you get the gist of it."
"It must be some kind of trick," Senator O'Keefe said, hands visibly trembling. "Antonov---even if he survived the war, he'd be dead long ago. It's got to be a trick."
"I don't know," Shannon admitted, still staring at the screen. "The reason I'm---I was back here was to report our findings on the investigation at Aphrodite." She turned and looked the Senator in the eye. "Those 'alien' Invaders, Senator, were actually biomechanical constructs, assembled from cloned tissue---cloned human tissue." She saw Daniel O'Keefe's eyes narrow and nodded. "We managed to piece together a theory, and it looks like we were right."
"What kind of theory?" Glen asked. He seemed, incredibly, unfazed by the series of revelations. Maybe, she thought, he'd finally reached the point where he couldn't be shocked anymore.
"According to rumors among the Russian scientific community," she told them, "the first Protectorate ships that were sent to the asteroid belt discovered some kind of gateway---a hole in space that led to another solar system, somewhere. They reported their discovery, but before Antonov could do anything about it, the war with China broke out. Sometime during or after the nuclear exchange, the stories say, Antonov and his staff and personal guard took a shuttle to the ships that were waiting in orbit for their planned Mars mission.
"Our theory was that Antonov took the ships through the gateway and that somewhere on the other side, someone or something found them and used them for their genetic material to create the army of biomechs that invaded Aphrodite."
"You said that was your theory," Senator O'Keefe interrupted.
"Yes, sir," she explained. "If that is Antonov, then the Russians that escaped through that gateway weren't just the victims---they are and have been collaborators."
"But what can we do about it?"
"That's your decision, sir," she told him. She couldn't help but want to laugh. Jason would love this. "With the President in enemy hands and his staff and the other members of the Senate dead, you are the acting head of the Republic."
Chapter Eighteen
"The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill."
---The Duke of Wellington.
Jason woke from a fever-dream of shark-eyed blue monsters to a rush of frigid air and the bitter aftertaste of biotic fluid. He choked out a hacking cough and forced his eyes open. For a long moment, he was convinced the face looming over him was a creature come to life from his nightmares, but then it coalesced into the severe bangs and perpetually disapproving gaze of Commander Hellene D'Annique, First Officer of the Patton.
"Captain wants to see you on the bridge," she told him curtly, "soonest."
"Yes'm," he croaked, but she was gone.
"What the fuck, over?" Jason heard Vinnie's voice beside him and tried to sit up---and quickly discovered what the NCO was bitching about. His head felt like it weighed ten kilos. And it probably did.
"We're still at two gee's," Vinnie said, steadying himself against the side of his chamber.
"Emergency deceleration," McKay guessed, prying himself painfully out of his g-sleep chamber. "Something's wrong." From everywhere around him, he could hear the groans and complaints of the Marines and the scientific staff---apparently, the Fleet personnel had been revived earlier.
"Orders, sir?" Vinnie asked him.
McKay glanced around, saw that Jock and Tom's eyes were on him as well.
"Collect Lieutenant Shamir and Gunny Lambert," Jason instructed him, "and meet me in Situation Room Three in an hour."
***
Jason watched the image of Antonov fade from the main bridge viewscreen, his heart pounding. He jerked his head toward Captain Arvid Patel, saw the man watching him with a somber expression.
"The ship's computer picked it up out around the orbit of Saturn," the spare, thin-faced Fleet officer told him, "and brought me out of g-sleep." He grimaced. "We were still braking at four gees, and believe me, it wasn't half as pleasant as it is now."
"Have you confirmed this?" McKay rasped, mouth dry, the heavy deceleration dragging at him.
"We received a tightbeam signal from the Bradley not a half-hour ago," Patel said. "She's hold up in the belt near Pallas, along with a few dozen system defense boats and corporate cargo haulers. She was steaming in from a run to Eridani when she received an emergency signal from Luna---it gave her enough warning to get away." The ship's captain fell back into his padded chair at the center of the bridge with a sigh, his dusky face darkening even more.
"The Fleet engineers at the Lunar mines saw the whole thing. Apparently, the enemy hijacked a robot freighter from the Ceres run and loaded it up with those drop pods---and quite a few fusion bombs. When the ship reached Cislunar orbit, the pods were ejected and the ship headed straight for the Defense Base at L-4." Patel's eyes closed for a moment, pain evident in the set of his mouth.
"L-4 saw what was happening and launched missiles, but it was too late. The ship went up and took the Defense Base with it."
Jason remembered Colonel Mellanby and felt an intense sadness and something of disbelief that even a fusion bomb could take out the Snake. But most of his thoughts were absorbed with the fact that Shannon was either somewhere on Earth and in imminent danger, or on that station and dead.
No! he screamed at himself silently. She was alive. He wouldn't let himself believe her dead---not this time.
"About an hour after the pods hit the atmosphere," Patel went on, "the Lunar base saw seven ships coming in from somewhere in the direction of Ceres."
The captain punched a command into his console and an image came on the viewscreen of a squadron of spacecraft in a loose wedge formation. Jason shook his head, wondering if his eyes were still bleary from the g-tanks---for the ships were the oddest collection of craft he'd seen outside the Air and Space Museum.
Three of them were Republic ships---corporate cargo haulers, most likely pirated and refitted with armor and weapons---but four were obviously Russian Protectorate ships from a hundred years ago. Bright flares of fusion fire expanded like balloons behind giant blast bells as a drive lasers reached out to ignite deuterium/tritium fuel pellets in a pulse drive that hadn't been used in the Republic for twenty years. Paired habitat cylinders were hinged on each side of the main hull, fixed and motionless under acceleration but designed to rotate for gravity when the ship was in free fall. Jason could see that weapons pods had been grafted to the shielding over the bulbous fuel tanks, almost an afterthought on ships designed for asteroid mining.
The camera view panned in to the grey-metaled hull of the lead ship, lingering on the red and white vertical stripes of the Protectorate flag.
"The Lunar base stopped transmitting about a half-hour later." Patel hit a control and the screen went dark. "We're burning in to join the Bradley at Pallas---we should be there in six hours." He turned to look Jason in the eye. "I want you to meet me in the shuttle bay at..." He glanced at his watch. "...2300 hours. We'll be meeting with Captain Minishimi at the multicorps mining base---she's set up a command center there. If you can come up with anything, I'm sure we'll all be glad to hear it."
"Aye, sir," Jason replied numbly. I'd be glad to hear it myself.
"Captain Patel!" The sensor officer spun around at his station. "We've got a contact at four million kilometers, coming in way off the ecliptic." He shook his head. "It just popped onto the screen, sir---one second it wasn't there, then there was an energy burst almost like a nuclear explosion and there it was!"
"Calm down, Damphousse," Patel soothed. "What can you tell me about it?"
"Uh..." The mousey little man glanced back at his board. "It's small and slow, sir---can't mass much more than five or six thousand tons, and the spectrograph says he's running some kind of fission drive." He looked back around. "It looks like he's setting a course for Earth."
; "It's one of them," Jason decided. Patel fixed him with a questioning stare.
"Are you certain?"
"The Russians are using some kind of hole in space---that's got to be what your sensor man saw," McKay said. "No other way a ship that small would be out here. We should intercept it."
"If he gets off a transmission, we could be sentencing a lot of innocent people to death," Patel reminded him. "You heard what Antonov said."
"His communication gear can't be that good," Jason pointed out. "If what we've seen so far is any indication, he'll be using straight microwave. Jam him."
Patel frowned, his eyes lowered in thought as he weighed the consequences.
"All right," he finally assented. "Sound general quarters," he ordered the First Officer abruptly. "Helm, take us on fastest possible intercept course---I want to be on top of him before he knows we're there." The whooping of the alarm filled the ship's bridge and Patel had to raise his voice to be heard over it. "Communications, lay down a wide-spectrum microwave jam---I don't want him getting a word out on radio. Weapons, arm lasers and let me know when we reach optimum range."
"We've got to take them alive," McKay said quickly, grabbing hold of the edge of Patel's chair as the ship lurched to starboard, changing course to go after the bogey.
"We'll try," Patel told him, seemingly unaffected by the stomach-jarring turn. "But that all depends on how cooperative he wants to be." He turned to Damphousse. "Give me a sensor-enhanced image on the main screen."
The viewer lit up with a glittering starfield, and it took Jason a moment to search through the points of multicolored light for the glowing red triangle that represented the enemy ship. It was moving slowly compared to the Patton's velocity of nearly a tenth of lightspeed and, even as he watched, the icon was growing in relation to the decreasing distance between the ships.
"Laser range in ten minutes," the Weapons officer announced.
"Helm, I want to match velocities with him," Patel ordered.
"Sir," the helmsman objected, looking up in surprise, "that will take a four-g deceleration analog for at least five minutes!"
"Then sound the alarm and start the burn, Mr. Raines," Patel told him calmly. He caught Jason's eye. "You might want to find an acceleration couch, McKay."
Swallowing hard, Jason nodded and made his way over to one of the spare seats at the front of the bridge, strapping himself in just as the acceleration alarms began. Then a massive weight came down on his chest and it was all he could do to force breath into his lungs. Prying his eyes open, he let his head loll to the side and saw the bridge crew also struggling against the press of the focused tidal forces, pressed back into the liquid-filled cushions of their seats, only their hands and eyes moving. All of a sudden, the womblike sleep of the g-tanks didn't seem so burdensome to him.
The seconds seemed to crawl by, and the red triangle of the enemy ship grew at a slower pace as the Eysselink field contracted the space behind the ship and lengthened that in front of it. Jason was beginning to wonder if he would ever breathe again, but then, as abruptly as it had settled, the crushing weight lifted from him and he was floating against the straps of the acceleration couch in the bliss of near zero-gravity. On the viewscreen, the red triangle had been replaced by an enhanced visual image from the ship's telescope. A bulbous passenger pod stuck out from a cluster of hemispherical fuel tanks arrayed around the small fission reactor, and a thin blue line of exhaust stretched out from the single engine bell.
"We're running just over his speed, sir," Helm told him, sweat beading on his forehead from the strain of the burn. "At the rate he's accelerating, we'll be running parallel to him, a thousand meters off his starboard bow, in five minutes and twenty-two seconds."
"Communications?" Patel demanded.
"He's attempting to signal, sir," the woman reported. "We've got him covered though---nothing's getting through."
"Weapons?"
"He's in range for a missile or a railgun shot," Weapons replied with a shrug. "If you want to use the lasers, it's another three minutes before we can be assured a full-effect shot."
"What about his long-range transmission antenna?" Patel asked. "Are we close enough to burn it out?"
"That we can do, sir," he confirmed.
"Make it happen."
The ship's lasers were ultraviolet in frequency, and would have been invisible in a vacuum in any case, but the ship's computer thoughtfully provided a simulated crimson line that intersected the enemy ship at the juncture of the passenger pod and the reactor, striking the dishlike antenna mounted there and melting it to slag in a fraction of a second.
"His transmission has been terminated, Captain," the communications officer reported.
"Send him one of ours, Ensign," Patel ordered. "Tell him he can either cut power and prepare for boarding, or we'll blast his reactor and hope he's got the radiation shielding to survive it."
"Aye, sir," she acknowledged, turning back to her station to deliver the message.
"Could we disable him any other way, sir?" Jason wondered, frowning at the thought of losing such a potentially valuable intelligence source.
"Of course we can." The Captain eyed him with evident disdain. "But he doesn't need to know that."
"Yes, sir." Ears burning, Jason looked back to the view of the ship.
"Reply coming in, sir," Communications reported.
"Put it on the main screen."
The image on the viewscreen shifted abruptly from the Protectorate ship to a snowy, blurry picture of a man. Pale and gaunt, his bald head was beaded with sweat, and his dark eyes had the look of a trapped animal. He wore some kind of high-collared brown uniform, pulled open at the front to reveal the stained t-shirt beneath, with the flag of the Protectorate displayed on the breast.
"I am Colonel Dmitry Grigor’yevich Podbyrin of the Great Protectorate," the man said, trying to put more pride and confidence in his voice than could be seen in his eyes. "You will cease this attack on my ship and allow me to proceed unmolested, or your fellows on Earth will suffer the consequences."
"Don't waste my time with idle threats, Colonel," Patel snapped. "You know as well as I do that your transmissions were jammed. If you don't surrender, I can and will cut you in two, and no one need be the wiser."
Jason knew that Podbyrin had to have been expecting that sort of reply, but the man's expression was still one of nervous indigestion. The Russian swiped at his brow, sending globules of perspiration cascading off him in the null gravity and splattering against the video pickup, blurring the picture.
"I can destroy this ship," Podbyrin stammered, his English worsening as he became more agitated. "There is a device---a thermonuclear device on my ship. I can activate it and damage your vessel if you do not let me go."
"Sensors, distance?" Patel asked, sotto voce.
"Four thousand meters," Damphousse replied quietly.
"Colonel Podbyrin," Patel said, "any device you may or may not have will not be close enough to damage our ship. All you will accomplish is your own death. However, if you surrender, I will guarantee you will be treated humanely."
"I cannot!" Podbyrin shook his head, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. "The General would..."
"The General will not know," Captain Patel assured him as he might a frightened child. "They will assume your ship was lost." The Russian seemed to hesitate, but Patel pressed on. "Consider, Colonel Podbyrin, that whatever your duty to Antonov, you will definitely be of more value alive than dead. I will give you thirty seconds to decide, then we will move to a safer distance and disable your drives unless you power down your ship. Contact me if you make a decision." He turned to Communications. "Off screen."
The viewer switched back to an image of the little ship.
"What do you think?" Patel asked Jason.
The question startled McKay---the Captain had seemed so sure of himself speaking to the Russian.
"He's scared," McKay said. "He's scared of you, scared of Antonov, b
ut mostly scared of dying. He won't use the bomb---if it even exists."
"That's my read," Patel agreed, satisfied at Jason's confirmation.
"Sir," the Communications officer announced. "Transmission coming in."
Podbyrin reappeared on the main viewer, seeming even more haggard than before, his mouth twisted in distaste and abject fear.
"I will not be harmed if I do as you say?" he stammered.
"You have my word, sir," Patel assured him.
"Very well. I am shutting down my drives. I will await your boarding party."
The screen went dark as Podbyrin cut off.
"Security." Patel spoke into the intercom pickup on the arm of his chair. "I need a boarding party in the primary EVA airlock in ten minutes. We're going to be bringing a ship in tow."
Not waiting for the reply, the Captain looked up at McKay. "Well, Mr. Intelligence Officer," he said, smiling thinly, "it looks like you're finally going to get some real intelligence."
Jason wasn't sure, but he thought it was just possible he'd been insulted.
***
"I will not betray my people," Podbyrin declared again, hands shaking as he sipped from a squeeze bottle of water.
Jason eyed him with a clinical detachment he wasn't aware he possessed till a few hours ago. The man had given up his ship---it was now in tow as they decelerated towards Pallas---but steadfastly refused to yield any information. They'd been cooped up together without a break in the same three-meter by three-meter room for the last three hours, just the two of them, while Captain Patel and his Security Chief watched over a video pickup. The room was bare but for a small table and a pair of chairs facing each other over it, and Jason almost felt that he was becoming as claustrophobic and bored as the Russian.
