by Rick Partlow
Of course, so was Vice President Dominguez…
“Major Stark,” she heard a call over her ‘link’s ear bud. “Check out the building at your eleven o’clock, fifth floor, on thermal.”
“Roger,” she muttered. She shifted around to her left, playing her binoculars over the partially-burned down hotel across the street.
There. Through one of the windows she could see a shape barely moving on thermal, more visible than it would normally have been in the early afternoon because of the winter cold that had set in to the concrete and steel. It hadn’t been there only minutes before when she had done a thermal sweep of the area, which meant that whoever it was had been concealed in a thermal-masking cover of some kind, and had only taken it off because he was ready to shoot…
“Get up there now, Tom!” she said urgently, grabbing her rifle and shifting it over to target the hotel window. “Valerie! Get down!”
She raised the scope to her eye, cursing when she saw the puff of hot gas coming from the window that indicated the assassin had fired. Shannon flicked her selector to full auto and squeezed the trigger, gritting her teeth against the sharp recoil. There was little sound, since her rifle was suppressed, so she could actually hear the impact as a dozen 8mm slugs punched through the decaying concrete of the hotel, sending a spray of dust and concrete chunks into the shooter. Through her thermal scope she could see him jerk back from his hide position in pain and surprise, giving her a better view, and a better target. Letting out a breath, she put the targeting reticle on the shooter’s right leg and stroked the trigger. A single round coughed out through her suppressor, the tungsten penetrator propelled by a mass of caseless hyperexplosive powder the size of her middle finger, and knifed through the concrete wall to spear into the assassin’s right knee.
The shooter thrashed and writhed in pain, a red and yellow light show in her thermal scope as he rolled back and forth inside his hide, trying to get out of the line of fire.
“He’s lame, Tom,” she transmitted. “Take him now.”
There wasn’t a reply, but she could see a red and yellow form move up the stairs into the shooter’s room, then duck through the doorway and raise a weapon in outstretched hands. The assassin on the floor convulsed once and then went limp.
“He’s down, ma’am,” Tom Crossman told her, and she could see him turning the unconscious form over and slipping restraints on his wrists. “I’m bringing him downstairs.”
“Roger that. Good job.”
Shannon grabbed her rifle and binoculars and scrambled to her feet, heading out of the apartment, being careful to avoid the gaping holes in the floor. The stairs were solid concrete and still in fairly good shape and she sprinted down them as quickly as she could, exiting the centuries-old building through a side door, having to jump a meter down to the street because the stoop had been washed away by the years.
“Jason goes off looking for the Protectorate dozens of light years away,” she muttered to herself as she jogged towards Valerie, “and I wind up in a damn firefight. Figures.”
Valerie was helping Amanda to her feet as Shannon approached and she could see that the journalist was ashen, shaking with fear. “Are you all right?” She asked them, putting a supporting hand on the journalist’s shoulder.
Amanda looked up and saw the woman dressed in combat utilities and body armor, carrying a sniper rifle and she jerked away from her with a screech of fright.
“It’s all right, Amanda,” Valerie assured her. “She’s a friend…this is Major Shannon Stark.”
Amanda blinked, looking back at Shannon with wide eyes. “The Shannon Stark?”
Shannon sighed. While Valerie explained things to Amanda, Stark turned to see Tom Crossman and Sergeant Miller, one of their most trusted Special Operations NCOs, carrying an unconscious man between them on a folding stretcher. She stepped over to them, examining the assassin.
He was a solidly-built man somewhere in his middle years, the bushy mustache and shoulder length hair giving her the impression of ex-military, probably a gun for hire. He wore plain black utilities and a combat vest, along with a fresh smart bandage wrapped around his right knee. He was still motionless, having been hit with a fairly large jolt from the electro-dart shooter holstered at Tom’s right hip. The gun used compressed air to shoot darts containing small capacitors that could deliver enough of a shock to render someone unconscious for hours.
“That was some good shooting, ma’am,” Crossman grinned. “Didn’t even nick the artery. He’ll be good as new in days.”
“Good. Get him to the flitter and get him secured.” She looked back at Valerie and they shared a grim smile. “He has a lot of questions to answer.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jason McKay watched with a predatory set to his eyes as the blackened and cracked hull slid by on the Sheridan’s master viewscreen. It had taken some tricky maneuvering, but the big cruiser had finally matched orbits with the disabled Protectorate lighter. In the days since the space battle, it had drifted in an eccentric orbit that was eventually going to slingshot it around the system’s primary star and send it out into interstellar space, but for now it was accessible to their recovery teams. And since it was the only Protectorate ship to survive the battle even partially intact, McKay badly wanted to see what they recovered.
He could see their shuttle hugging the surface of the pirated and converted freighter like a remora on a blue whale, but the men themselves were not visible.
“The boarding party has burned through the airlock,” the Sheridan’s communications officer announced. “They’re broadcasting a video feed now.”
“Put it on screen, Lieutenant,” Admiral Patel ordered. He was strapped into his command couch, but McKay was making do holding onto a handle affixed to the bulkhead beside him. It wasn’t convenient, but somehow he felt more at home there than in a seat of his own.
The image on the screen switched abruptly from the exterior shot to a darkened, claustrophobic corridor in the ship’s interior. From the helmet-mounted camera, they could see the other Marines and Fleet technicians in the boarding party, all of them dressed in massively-armored vacuum suits and the Marines armed with backpack-fed lasers only practical in zero gravity.
“There’s still no sign of any survivors?” McKay asked.
“No, sir,” the Tactical officer told him, checking her sensor displays. “We have some spots that still have auxiliary power and probably life support, but no attempts to maneuver or communicate.”
“It’s been days,” Patel pointed out. “If anyone survived the battle, they’d have got out in landers or escape pods by now.”
“You’re probably right, sir,” McKay admitted with a shrug. “But a live prisoner to interrogate would be nice.”
“You spooks,” Patel lamented, shaking his head. “You always want egg in your beer.”
Jason had to chuckle at that. A few days ago, he’d felt lucky to be alive and not stranded on Peboan for the foreseeable future. It had been a close thing. The Protectorate ship that had split off to try to strike them from orbit had been close enough that he’d been able to see the explosion from the ground when Captain Minishimi’s Shipbusters caught up with it. At the time, he’d been morally certain that the blast was the Decatur being destroyed, and he’d experienced a terrifying flashback to the Protectorate attack on Aphrodite until the transmission from the patrol shuttles told them what had actually happened.
The view on the helmet cam shifted as the party made a turn into a broader corridor that abruptly ended with a mass of charred, twisted metal and a view of the stars.
“The main bridge is toast,” the voice of the leader of the investigation team came through the transmission. McKay had met him before the shuttle had launched…he was a competent young Lt. Commander named Landers. “We’re moving toward the auxiliary control room to see what we can find there.”
“You know, Admiral,” McKay said, eyes still on the feed on the viewscreen, “we’ve b
een pretty busy the last few days, what with cleaning up the mess on Peboan and trying to get the Decatur repaired, so I haven’t had the chance to ask you…how the hell did you wind up here weeks ahead of schedule right when we needed you?”
“You should be grateful I didn’t waste any more time on that wild goose chase,” Patel snorted. “We hit the first system and found a habitable that had some pretty accessible mineral deposits, but no evidence of any Protectorate activity and my XO and I got to thinking: why would Antonov risk discovery for some resources on Peboan when there are a lot of other places he could get them?” The Admiral shook his head. “It didn’t make any sense. So we decided that the only thing that did make sense was if there was something unique or at least rare about Peboan or the star system there, so I ordered a max-g burn back to the system. I brought us down to sublight in the cometary halo and started working our way inward, doing a slow sweep. We didn’t contact you because I had a sense that whatever made this system important could mean the Protectorates were still around somewhere and I didn’t want to advertise our presence.”
“Well, you’re smarter than me, Admiral,” McKay admitted ruefully. “It took me till about five minutes before the attack to figure out why this place was important to Antonov.”
“Oh?” Patel glanced over, curious. “You know what he wants with the planet?”
“I think so, sir. It’s a guess, but it feels right. Podbyrin told me that the network of wormhole jumpgates they’re using has several systems that contain multiple gates---sort of transportation hubs. My guess is that this is one of those hubs. Antonov needs this system to get his ships where they’re going, so he won’t give it up without a fight.”
“Not bad,” Patel judged. “Whether you’re right about that or not, we’ll need to keep an eye on this place long term.”
“The auxiliary control room is intact,” Landers finally reported. On the screen, they could see the door to the control room, marked in Cyrillic lettering, and through the window set in that door to an old-fashioned looking bank of readouts and controls, still lit by emergency battery power. “We are going to attempt to burn through…shit!”
Landers’ exclamation was at a face that suddenly appeared in the window, dark-haired and wild-eyed, with a bushy beard and cracked, chapped lips. He was saying something, but they couldn’t hear him with him behind the thick transplas and them in a vacuum.
“We have a survivor, Sheridan,” Landers reported, unnecessarily.
“Set up a temporary airlock and get him out of there, Commander,” Patel ordered quickly. “Get him into a rescue bubble and get him over here ASAP. But be cautious opening that door…it might be booby-trapped.”
“Roger that, sir,” Landers confirmed, then turned to give the orders to set up the temporary airlock.
Patel grinned at McKay. “Well, there you go, Colonel…you wanted a live prisoner. Now you’re going to have one.”
“Aye, sir,” McKay said, trying to contain his excitement. “Sir, Podbyrin’s back on the Decatur. I need him here when I interrogate this guy. He might know him.”
“By all means, Colonel, we’ll send a shuttle for him.” Patel raised an eyebrow with amusement. “You and Podbyrin and an interrogation in my brig…it’ll be just like old times. Hopefully this time we won’t have to drug him.”
“Do you know him?”
D’mitry Podbyrin stared at the viewscreen hooked to a camera in the security detention cell, at the image of the Protectorate crewman secured to a padded couch via straps at his wrists, chest and calves. The man looked much healthier now than the first time McKay had seen him. He’d been severely dehydrated and hadn’t had anything to eat in days, not to mention the beginnings of anoxia and hypothermia as the life support started to fail in the auxiliary control room.
After a few days in sick bay, the Russian officer was alert and much less grateful than he’d been shortly after being rescued.
“I…,” Podbyrin began, and then closed his mouth, shaking his head. “I’m not sure. I think I have seen him before, but I do not know him, or remember his name.” He shrugged. “You must understand, there were hundreds of men and women, enlisted and officers, even at the beginning. And there were some births over the years, of course.”
The old man’s eyes glazed over slightly, the way they did when he thought back through the long decades he’d been alive; McKay had seen it before when he’d debriefed the Colonel after the war. “We didn’t have that many women…it was perhaps three to one. And the planet we found…the background radiation there was high. Some of the women were made infertile, and the ones who did get pregnant sometimes miscarried. By the time we could make settlements on other worlds, there were few women who could still carry a child to term and few men who were still capable of fathering one. Still, some were…are, I suppose…born every year. So there are probably a few thousand adults at least, even after the war, and some were always other places while I was on Novoye Rodina. I might have seen this man at one time or another, but I do not remember him.”
“Damn,” McKay said mildly. “Oh well, it was just a thought.” He fell silent for a moment, considering the situation. “Okay, it’s probably better that you aren’t in the room then. You may not know him, but he probably knows about you, if Antonov blames you for his defeat. You monitor the interview from in here…you can talk to me through my ear bud, give me advice. Is that all right with you?”
“It is better that I not be in there,” Podbyrin agreed, still staring at the Russian officer on the screen. McKay could see a deep sadness in the man’s eyes, hear a weariness in his voice. It had been there ever since Podbyrin had been forced to kill the Russian officer on Peboan. He couldn’t say for sure, but drawing on the past few years of learning to read people, McKay guessed it was the very final realization by the old man that he really could never go home again.
McKay left him in the main Security office and stepped out into the corridor. The Security section in the new cruisers like the Sheridan was in the rotational drum, giving them faux gravity even when they weren’t under acceleration. McKay wasn’t sure why it had been put there, but at the moment he appreciated it.
The guard outside the holding room opened the door for him and McKay entered, trying to look casual, business-like and unconcerned. The prisoner glanced at him furtively, then looked straight ahead, trying not to meet his eyes. The man was sweating and uncomfortable…the room was being kept warm and humid and not by accident.
“Kak tebya zovut?” McKay asked him in Russian. What’s your name? He’d learned the language quite fluently over the last few years, just in case they ever came across the Protectorate again.
The Russian opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, visibly debating with himself whether he should answer. After a moment, he shrugged. “Konstantin.”
“Hello, Konstantin,” McKay smiled as he went on in Russian, sitting down across from the man. “I’m Jason. Are you being treated well?”
“Yes,” the man said with a shrug…or as much of a shrug as he could give with a strap across his chest and his wrists shackled to the arms of his chair. “They have given me food and water. And new clothes,” he added, glancing at the dark blue utility coveralls he was wearing.
“Good,” McKay said. “I am going to be honest with you, Konstantin. I’m in here with you because we want to know why your ships and your troops attacked us. After the war, after your General Antonov tried to take Earth and lost, we let you alone, didn’t we?”
“You couldn’t find us!” Konstantin snorted. “The General returned and told us how he’d been betrayed by that miserable bastard Podbyrin, but that he had managed to escape his treachery and leave you all with your thumbs up your ass!”
“I’m afraid General Antonov lied to you, Konstantin,” McKay said gently. “He wasn’t betrayed. We captured Colonel Podbyrin’s ship by chance as it came through the wormhole in the asteroid belt and we interrogated him using truth drugs. He had no ch
oice at all. And General Antonov was able to get away because he ran while his officers were being slaughtered and his ships destroyed. Do you know how I know this, Konstantin?” At the man’s shaking head, McKay went on. “Because I was on his flagship during that battle. I was with my squad and two platoons of Republic Marines. We battled your officers on the bridge of that ship, Lieutenant Dubronov and Matviyenko and the others…” Konstantin’s eyes went wide at the names…he knew the men. “And the only reason that your General was able to get away was that we were kept busy killing them and disabling the ship. He even had his cloned toy woman fight us to save himself…she lured in a Sergeant and then killed him and herself with a grenade.”
At the mention of the cloned woman Antonov had kept as a companion, Konstantin’s mouth dropped open. This guy must suck at poker, McKay thought.
“So, Konstantin, I know your General. I know how he will use others to do his dirty work while he stays safe and leads from the rear. And here we are. You and I, front line soldiers---you on an attack ship, me on the planet fighting your biomechanical clone troops. And your General is nowhere to be found. You are going to tell me everything you know about the wormholes and how they’re used, Konstantin; and you are going to tell me everything you know about Antonov’s plans and why this system is important to him.” The Russian began to protest but McKay held up a hand. “You will either tell me because you come to understand that General Antonov is a cowardly, evil man who will lead your people to their deaths as he led his whole nation and nearly the whole world to their deaths…or you will tell me because we will pump you full of psychoactive drugs and you’ll have no choice.”
“Why do you bother to tell me this?” Konstantin wanted to know. “Why not just give me the drugs?”
