Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  “Engineering,” Minishimi called into her ‘link. “Any chance of getting the auxiliary drive back online?”

  “I’m working on it, ma’am,” Prieta reported, still unflappable. “We have to build up a charge in the capacitors though, and it’s slow on batteries. I can get the fusion reactor online in another…” He hesitated, checking his figures. “…call it seventeen minutes. Then another few minutes before the plasma drive coils are charged. Less than half an hour.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we have quite that long to live, Commander,” Captain Minishimi told him. “I am sure we’d all appreciate whatever you could do to expedite matters.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Captain,” he assured her cheerfully.

  “I don’t think the bogey has Gauss guns, Captain,” Gianeto said thoughtfully. “She might not have the room for weapons pods with the gear for the Eysselink drive and antimatter storage crammed in there. I’m not seeing anything that looks like Gauss guns or lasers on her hull. She might have missiles, or…” He looked back at her. “She might be intending to ram us.”

  “Time?” She snapped, staring at the display.

  “Not much,” he replied. “She should be well past us and heading the opposite direction, but when our fields touched, I think it absorbed all of our momentum and fed it into the gravito-inertial spectrum as gravity-analog stress. That’s what knocked us for a loop. It left us both drifting pretty slow in the same long orbit around the primary star. She should be able to match velocities with us in less than twenty minutes.”

  “That’ll be suicide for all the crew,” Witten protested weakly.

  “Not if their Eysselink generator is still working,” Minishimi corrected him. “Then it’s just us that gets crushed.” And didn’t it feel shitty to be on the other side of that equation. Well, no use letting the clock run out with time outs still on the board. “Helm, full maneuvering thrusters…whatever we have left. Aim us for a lower energy orbit. Maybe we can buy some time.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Witten replied without enthusiasm. They could barely feel the gentle jolt as the maneuvering thrusters---solid-fuel rockets powered by small, isotope reactors---began nudging them slowly out of the way of the enemy ship. It was pointless, but it was all she could do…

  “What the hell…” Gianeto breathed, staring at the sensor readout in disbelief. Minishimi opened her mouth to chide him for cursing when she saw the monolithic shape of a Republic starship appear on the main viewscreen, its image distorted by an Eysselink drive field as it brushed within a hundred kilometers of the Protectorate vessel.

  The Republic cruiser was gone in an eyeblink and the Protectorate vessel was quite abruptly ripped to shreds, consumed in a savage explosion of fused hydrogen, fissile uranium and matter/antimatter. But many of those shreds were still headed their way…

  “Tactical, are we going to clear this orbit before what’s left of the ship hits us?” She demanded quickly, snapping Gianeto out of his amazed speechlessness.

  “Umm…yes, ma’am,” he stuttered. “It’s still got the same heading more or less, but it’s not accelerating anymore. It’ll take over an hour to get here.”

  “Who the hell was that?” Witten asked what the rest of them were thinking.

  Minishimi relaxed against her seat restraints, smiling the smile of someone who’s had a death sentence commuted. “That was an old friend,” she said, “with a wonderful sense of timing.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I don’t like this,” Ari said between panted breaths, sweat running off his brow to sting his eyes.

  “You don’t like what?” Alida asked, her voice and breathing maddeningly even, despite their pace. “The fact that it’s twenty-seven degrees and eighty percent humidity and it’s not even dawn, or the fact that I’m running your ass into the ground?” They were on their daily---at least daily while they were in garrison rather than the field---run around the same perimeter path where Ari had been attacked weeks before, but Ari couldn’t shut his mind down and run the way he usually did. He was worried and stressed and the dark trees around them seemed to him to be filled with concealed menace.

  . “I’m running right next to you,” he reminded her a bit peevishly. “And I am used to the heat. I don’t like how long this is taking. It’s been over two weeks since I told them you were an investigator and your ass is still hanging in the wind.”

  “Always thinking about my ass, aren’t you?” She laughed.

  He shot her a baleful glare. “It is charming that you retain your sense of humor, my dear, but I am not quite so sanguine. I have not received any further instructions from my command since my last communication and I should have. There is no point in stringing this along any further…we have nothing else that we can learn from Lee that he has not already revealed. We should take them down now and kill as much of this plot as we can.”

  “Ours is not to question why, kedves,” she shrugged.

  “I don’t like the other half of that quote,” he grumbled. “It involves something about us dying, if I recall right. Another thing that bothers me is that we still don’t know who hired those guys that tried to kill me.”

  Before she could reply, they both slowed to a jog, staring at a dark figure standing at the edge of the trees, just out of the reach of the illumination of the chemical light poles that lined the path. Ari automatically began scanning the woods around them, searching for other threats, trusting Alida to watch the one they already knew about. She was already opening her waist pack, her hand wrapping around the compact pistol there…

  “Relax, Inspector,” the man said, emerging from the shadows to reveal himself as General Kage.

  “Sir,” she said, coming to a halt. “I am…surprised to see you out here.”

  “It is the only way I could speak to the two of you without raising suspicions,” he told her, stepping up to the two officers. He seemed out of place dressed in dark sweats and running shoes, his bearing casual.

  “General,” Ari said with a cautious nod.

  “Nice to meet you formally, Captain Shamir,” Kage smiled thinly. “By the way, let me assure you that, had I not known who you were in advance, I would never have suspected you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Ari replied. “Let me assure you, I was serious about what I said in our meeting.”

  “And they were very intelligent suggestions, Captain. But we don’t have much time, and we have more pressing matters to discuss.”

  “Did something happen, sir?” Alida asked.

  “No, Inspector, and that is the problem. Given what Captain Shamir was able to discover about the scope of this conspiracy, I have decided that the scope of our investigation needs to expand as well. I need you to take the next step up this ladder: Lee has a contact with whomever in the Fleet or the corporations or the government recruited him into this plot. You need to meet with this person.”

  “How do we get that information from Lee?” Ari wanted to know.

  “I have further decided,” Kage went on as if he hadn’t heard the question, “that since we know nearly everything that Lee knows, there is no sense leaving him and Captain Ali out there as potential wildcards.” He spared Alida a meaningful glance. “You will clean this mess up, Inspector, and then you will use whatever means necessary to find out who Colonel Lee’s contact is. Do you understand what I am saying, Inspector?”

  “Completely, sir,” she answered, mouth set grimly.

  “General,” Ari interrupted, “aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “And what would that be, Captain Shamir?” Kage raised an eyebrow, seemingly amused by the thought.

  “The hitters that came after me, sir,” Ari said. “Someone hired them…someone who knew who I was and that I was here investigating Lee.”

  “The men who attacked you were street trash from the city,” Kage informed him. “Hired because they were disposable and wouldn’t be missed. And they were indeed hired by someone who knew who and where you were.”
He smiled once more and Ari felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

  “You hired them,” he realized suddenly. He glanced at Alida, his eyes narrowing, a film of unreality settling over him. “You hired them so I would trust Alida when she ‘rescued’ me from them. So I would work with her, help you with this investigation.”

  “What?” Alida exclaimed, looking back and forth between the two of them. “General, is this true?”

  “You don’t need to keep acting, Alida,” Ari told her, anger in his voice. “I would hardly abandon the operation at this point, even if I had clearance to do so.”

  “Captain Shamir,” Kage said quietly but firmly. “Yes, I did indeed hire those men. I needed to find out how good you were…if a group of street toughs could kill you, then you would not be of much use to me. And it worked out very well that your ‘Alida’ arrived in time to help. But she was not informed of my tactic…I decided that I could not trust her to allow you to be put in harm’s way. It was my observation that she was already developing feelings for you.”

  “Ari,” she said, shaking her head, “you must believe me; I did not know about this, and had I been told, I wouldn’t have let you go out there alone.”

  “Enough,” General Kage snapped impatiently. “You can have this lovers’ quarrel on your own time. What I need to know, Captain Shamir, is whether I can count on you to help us carry this out. I can’t simply have Guard troops march in and arrest the Colonel and Captain Ali…that would burn our bridges. This must be handled quietly, and it must be the two of you that handle it.”

  “I’m in,” Ari confirmed, his mouth a hard line, his face stone.

  “And you will not balk at doing what must be done?”

  “Accidents happen,” he replied with a shrug.

  Kage snorted appreciatively, and then turned back to Alida. “When you have the information, you may contact me again.”

  Without another word, he turned and faded back into the shadows. Alida glanced from the suddenly empty darkness to the doubt in her lover’s eyes. “Please believe me, kedves.”

  “I do not even know your real name,” he responded, smiling sadly. “There is no Alida Hudec…I call you by a name of someone who does not exist.”

  “My name is…” she began, but he gently placed a finger over her lips.

  “Wait. We have work to do first. When we have done what we must, when I know that I am speaking to who you are and not who you must pretend to be, then you will tell me your name and we will speak as a man and a woman."

  She considered that silently for a moment, then grabbed his finger and quickly and painfully bent it back. Shocked, Ari went down to his knees, mouth open as if he were on the verge of crying out in pain.

  “The hell with that, Ariel Shamir,” she said forcefully, lowering her face to look him in the eyes. “I can’t make you talk, but I will make you listen. If we die doing our duty, then you will die knowing that my name is Roza Kovach, that I told you the truth about being kidnapped as a teenager, about my parents and about Pithapuram. And you will know that I am telling you the truth when I tell you that I love you.” She let loose of his finger and pushed him away, putting him on the ground on his rear. He stared at her, mouth agape. “Get off your ass, Captain. As you say,” she turned and began jogging down the path, “we have work to do.”

  * * *

  Valerie O’Keefe-Mulrooney felt strangely relaxed as she waited for someone to try to kill her. The Old City was, she decided morbidly, a very good place to die, if it came to that. She stepped away from her groundcar reluctantly, as if it somehow represented safety, and gazed upward at the crumbling remains of what had once been a city at the center of the world: New York. Millions of people had lived and worked there, businesses and homes had been crammed into every square centimeter of it. They had all thought, she realized, that it would go on forever. And then things had changed.

  The bombs hadn’t touched the old United States directly…most had been targeted at China and the Russian Protectorate. But they had come so close, so horrifyingly close to destroying civilization and driving the whole of humanity back to the Paleolithic. There had been riots, cities had burned and people had starved. Troops had patrolled the streets.

  Looking out at the shadowed, empty streets, now overgrown by grass and trees, she could feel the ghosts of those people haunting the ruins. She tried to imagine what it had been like, but it was just too alien. She was glad she hadn’t seen it, and she didn’t want to see it happen to her world…to her daughter’s world. That was worth dying to prevent.

  She pulled her jacket tighter around her against the chill; the sky was grey and there was the feel of imminent snow in the air. The Old City seemed so much more real down here. She had passed over it and by it so many times in flitters, never imagining what it would be like to walk among the buildings. It wasn’t closed to the public, but very few people came here. Very few people ventured outside the megalopolises at all, she reflected sadly. If things collapsed again, those people would all die.

  She started slightly when she heard the other groundcar approaching down the narrow, barely-maintained service road, but made herself relax. She was expecting it; it was why she was there. The woman who stepped out of the vehicle was familiar to her from various political and celebrity events: exquisitely dressed even for this clandestine meeting, she was blond, tall and statuesque, and she mingled freely with the glitterati of Capital City. Val knew she was a veteran who’d been in the business for decades, despite her seeming youth.

  “Good afternoon, Senator,” Amanda Sanchez said, offering a hand.

  “Call me Valerie,” she insisted, shaking the hand, “since we’re conspirators.”

  “Then I’m Amanda,” the other woman said. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your husband, Valerie.”

  “Thank you, Amanda, but the way I feel I can best honor his memory is to carry on the work that got him killed.”

  “You really believe that someone assassinated Glen to suppress this information?” Amanda frowned. “It’s just so hard to believe.”

  “I know, Amanda,” Val said, biting back the urge to snap at the woman’s inanity. “But if I’m wrong, I’m just a grieving widow with a paranoid imagination, no real harm done. If I’m right, though…”

  “Yes, I can see what you mean. Well, I have the information you asked for…I was able to access Ozzie Fuentes’ last log-in to his network’s system and I just ordered the results re-computed using his credentials.”

  “Have you read the results?”

  “Yes I have,” Amanda told her, pulling a small tablet from her bag. She looked at it, shaking her head. “But it’s pretty thin, Valerie…basically, the program they have analyzes behavioral patterns over time to try to discern hidden variables. For some reason, Ozzie had been looking at Vice President Dominguez.”

  Just tell me, you bitch! Val was screaming at her mentally. Instead, she clasped her hands tightly in front of her and asked politely: “Did the program find anything?”

  “As I said, it’s pretty slim…all it found was that Dominguez was something of a dilettante until five years ago, when he became more set in his ways.”

  “What do you mean ‘set in his ways?’”

  “Well,” she glanced at the tablet, trying to remember, “he had never stayed with one woman for more than a few months, but he’s been with his current girlfriend for five years. He used to skip around from one passionate hobby to the next---competitive chess, martial arts, you know---but he’s been an avid rock climber for the last five years. Used to jump from one group of friends to another, but has been close with the same group of people for the last five years…you get the idea.”

  Valerie’s brow furled. That was intriguing, but there had to be more. “Did anything happen five years ago? Before the lack of changes?”

  “Um…” Amanda scrolled through the document on the tablet. “Yes, actually.” She sounded surprised. “He travelled to Aphrodite
just after the war, for a conference. It was when he returned that the program noticed the discrepancies.”

  Valerie felt the hackles rising on the back of her neck, but she wasn’t sure why. There was something surreal about this…something she couldn’t quite pin down. But that wasn’t why she was here anyway.

  “Thank you for your help, Amanda,” she told the woman, holding her hand out for the tablet. The journalist handed it over, with a trace of reluctance. “Trust me,” Valerie said, noting the hesitation, “if and when I can piece something together, I will contact you and allow your ‘net to be the first to break this story.”

  “Valerie!” A voice buzzed urgently in her ear. “Get down!”

  Without thinking, Valerie grabbed Amanda and dragged her to the ground behind her vehicle, just as something passed through the air where her head had been moments before…

  Shannon Stark sighed with relief as she saw Valerie’s vehicle pull up at the end of the service road. She had been lying motionless in a hide on the fourth floor of this ruined apartment building for nearly seven hours, since before dawn, and the Senator’s car had been the first movement she’d seen. Which was disappointing; she had hoped to spot whoever came to make the hit long before Valerie arrived. She’d never forgive herself if she let anything happen to Valerie…not after Glen had died trying to help her. Not to mention how Jason would feel about it: he and Valerie had a short-lived relationship six years before, when they’d been stranded alone together in the high deserts of Aphrodite during a Protectorate incursion there. It was long over, but she knew he still cared about her.

  When Shannon saw the second vehicle approaching, she reflexively reached for the rifle lying beside her in the hide, even though she’d been expecting it. She recognized Sanchez, the journalist, from the file she’d pulled when Valerie had contacted her about Fuentes. The two of them had worked for the same newsnet, though Sanchez was much farther up the food chain. Shannon looked her car over thoroughly with the thermal scanners in her binoculars, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. She hadn’t expected to: Sanchez was a solid citizen with an extensive background.