Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  His small apartment was crammed full of his paintings of Vienna, yet still he returned to her for further inspiration. Which was why he was just so damned angry this morning, because was not in Vienna. Instead, he was stuck in the soulless temple to early 22nd Century sociopolitics called the Danube Corridor Development Complex.

  Ha, he thought, snorting mirthlessly to himself, the very name sounds like some sort of mental disorder.

  He paced in front of the open-air café in Schwarzenegger Plaza, waiting for Karla as he sneered at the lines of the megacity. It had been completed almost a hundred years ago, yet it still looked as new and shiny and automated as a datalink fresh from the fabber. Fabricated…that’s what the damn thing was, just like everything else in this fake, fabricated society in which they lived. That’s why he stayed away from the megalopolis, despite its intriguing geometric twists and impossible angles, and a style that was inimitably European…not like those drab boxes the Americans inhabited.

  He sniffed, brushing his multicolored dreadlocks back from his face. Thinking of the Americans had made him feel better about being here. Well, that and thinking about Karla. She was a teacher, and he’d met her when she’d been in Vienna taking her students on a tour of the city. He’d been painting the Schonbrunn Palace and she’d asked if her primary school students could watch him for a while. They’d talked, they’d exchanged ‘link codes and she’d visited him in Vienna several times.

  If he’d believed in a bourgeoisie notion like love, he’d have said he was in love with her. But she had begun to complain that he never came to visit her, so here he was…she was supposed to meet him at the café after work and take him back to her place, where he’d never been, though he’d seen it virtually of course.

  At least most of the city was open to the sky, he allowed, looking up as the clouds turned violet with sunset. Only the industrial centers were covered over, not like a travesty such as Trans Angeles, where they hid everything and everyone from the universe, as if they could shut out creation and become part of the fake, plastic boxes in which they lived. He could even see the river from here, its banks lined by a greenbelt park that ran for kilometers. It was even peaceful…

  Until a harsh, warbling siren began to shriek from every public address speaker in the city. Johan’s head whipped around wildly in confusion until he heard the announcement coming in over his ‘link’s ear bud.

  “Herr Fuchs,” the simulated woman’s voice spoke into his ear, identifying him from his ‘link, “this is an official emergency. There is danger of imminent attack and a general order has been issued that all civilians are to shelter in place. As you are visiting the city and do not have a residence in the area, you should immediately report to the nearest public shelter. The location is being sent to your ‘link, but you may also follow the directions being displayed on all city announcement screens. Time is short, so please get to a shelter immediately and please do not interfere with emergency workers in the performance of their duties.”

  The voice in his ear faded and he could hear more generic announcements being made over the public address in English, French, German and Spanish. He knew he should be going somewhere, following the directions on the signs, but his feet felt rooted to the ground.

  Karla…he had to call Karla. He tapped his ear bud’s control pad and tried to contact her, but his ‘link scolded him that all communications in the city were restricted to emergency announcements and that he should proceed to the nearest shelter.

  “This must be a drill,” he murmured to himself, watching people around him begin to walk quickly, some following the arrows on the signs. Others gave up any pretense of calm and began running. He saw a tall, striking woman running with long, purposeful strides, her long, blond hair tied in tight braids that whipped behind her like the tail of a comet and he thought, absurdly, that the image would make an interesting painting.

  He tried hard to think, trying to shut out the sirens and the running people and the increasing panic around him. Karla’s Learning Center was west of the plaza, he remembered that from the map of the city he’d looked at on his ‘link during the train ride to the Corridor. He pulled his ‘link off his sash and pulled the map back up, searching for the school. His fingers didn’t want to work, but he finally found it and set the ‘link to feed him directions through his ear bud.

  She’d be coming from that direction…but would she be heading straight to a shelter or looking for him first? He thought for a moment about trying to wait at the café, but he spotted a police flitter heading towards the plaza and knew they’d make him leave. He took off at a jog, wishing he’d worn close-toed shoes instead of his usual sandals, following the directions from his ‘link’s mapping function.

  The throng of people running one way or another became thicker as he moved out of the plaza and onto the moving sidewalks, and more than once he had to dodge out of the way as a panicked pedestrian rushed by him heedlessly. At first, with his artist’s eye for detail, he registered little things about each of them: the rampant dragons of the holographic inlays on one man’s jacket, the flash of color from a woman’s face paint, or the contented look on the animatronic bear held tightly in a little girl’s arms…

  But eventually all of them merged into a blur of faceless humanity as he became more and more consumed with finding Karla. Or, to be more precise, he only noticed them at all through a mental template of Karla’s brown, bobbed hair and heart-shaped face and ignored them when they didn’t match.

  What if I don’t see her? part of his mind gibbered at him. What if she went to a shelter?

  He decided that he would head towards the shelter nearest to her school…if she was anywhere other than on the way to meet him, she’d be there. It was only about a kilometer farther than the one on the other side of the plaza…

  “Johan!”

  He wasn’t sure how he heard the yell over the tumult around them. He wasn’t sure how he’d missed her going past him or how she’d seen him in the huge crowd of people. But he knew that voice and he came to an abrupt halt, two people behind him nearly knocking him over, and spun around.

  There she was, racing up to him, buffeted by the throng of desperate humanity but forcing her way through, her conservative work suit disheveled and her normally perfect hair in wild disarray. He elbowed and body-checked his way through a half dozen people, receiving a punch in the cheek that he barely felt, but then she was in his arms and he pulled her into him tightly, feeling incredibly relieved.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” she said into his ear. “I tried to call but…”

  “The government shut down communications,” he finished for her. “It’s all right…let’s just get to the shelter.”

  He grabbed her hand and they began running, with the crowd this time, following the directional arrows that were flashing on every public address sign and in the surface of the moving sidewalks that no one was using because the belts of the walk moved far too slow for this panicked flight to safety. Johan was still scared, but somehow holding Karla’s hand and seeing her beside him kept him from the panic and desperation he’d been feeling before. With her there, he just had a sense that everything was going to be all right…

  The sound was loud and high-pitched and penetrated the tumult of the crowd easily, carrying down from above them, tearing across the sky with a whine of turbines. Johan knew it wasn’t safe to look, that he should keep his eyes on where he was going, but the urge was irresistible…he slowed, and could feel Karla slowing beside him, as they both looked into the reddening sunset sky.

  The aerospacecraft was hard to miss: it was a large cargo shuttle, its broad, delta wings grabbing at the sky as large scoops beneath them sucked in air and superheated it by passing it through a pebble-bed nuclear reactor. The shuttle was still hundreds of meters up, but Johan thought he could see some sort of strange, cylindrical pod slung under its belly. He was no expert, but he’d never seen anything like it.

  As the shuttl
e came lower, Johan was sure he could see some sort of barely-visible mist shimmering below the cylinder, spreading across the city. A cold, terrible certainty came over him that this was the attack about which they had been warned, and they were only seconds from being caught up in it…

  “Herr Fuchs,” his ear bud spoke with the simulated voice of the city’s Emergency Response computer, “you are in imminent danger and you will not reach the public shelter in time. There is a public fabrication center one hundred meters to the north of you…please take a left at the next intersection and get inside and seal yourself in one of the clean rooms.”

  Johan met Karla’s eyes and knew from the look on her face that she had received the same message. They set off at as close to a sprint as he could manage in sandals and headed left where the sidewalks intersected, and so did most everyone else in the crowd. Hundreds of people swarmed around them, all moving with the same intent, a hive mind being manipulated by a computer queen.

  There’s a painting in this, Johan thought, if I live to paint it.

  There was the fabrication center just ahead; it was an unpretentious, unadorned structure, built to allow the low-income citizens and those on the dole to have the basic needs fabricated free of charge or at a reduced cost. Nothing fancy, nothing designer, just cheap but durable clothes, cheap electronics, cheap appliances…and now, perhaps, cheap shelter. For some.

  The mass of humanity hit a bottleneck as hundreds of people tried to push into the fabrication center at once, and Johan and Karla came up short against the backs of a line of people twenty across, then were pushed into them again by the dozens more behind the couple. Johan gasped as the breath was crushed from him by the claustrophobic press of others behind who were also desperately seeking the same shelter. He was trying to keep a hold on Karla’s hand but he could feel her fingers beginning to slip from his…

  With a scream that he didn’t recognize as coming from his own mouth, Johan struck out behind him, lashing out with elbows and fists, thrashing about like a madman until he cleared a path to Karla. He grabbed her in his arms and then put his shoulder down and forced his way out of the press, beyond the push of people trying to force their way into the building. Together, they stumbled onto the grass that bordered the courtyard, Johan gasping as he tried to catch his breath and slow down the triphammer beat of his heart.

  “But we have to get to shelter!” Karla yelled into his ear.

  “We’ll never get in there,” he told her, shaking his head.

  He looked back to the sky and saw the shuttle arcing around, almost as if it was following them…

  “Karla,” he said, looking into her dark, beautiful eyes and telling her what he knew she wanted to hear, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Johan,” she said, sinking into his embrace, a quiet sob going through her.

  Johan was about to close his eyes and wait for the end to come when he saw the shimmering line of light spearing down out of the sky with a thunder crack of super-ionized atmosphere and suddenly the shuttle wasn’t there anymore. In its place was an expanding fireball that bloomed forward in the direction the craft had been flying. There wasn’t even a patter of debris hitting the ground…nothing solid had survived the strike from the orbital laser.

  A cheer went up from some in the crowd, but Johan watched for a moment in disbelief, mouth agape, eyes wide.

  “Does this mean,” Karla stuttered, looking back and forth between him and the slowly-dissipating fireball, “that…I mean, are we going to live?”

  “Yes,” Johan said and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes, I think we are.”

  Oh shit, Johan realized with a crash of reality, I told her I loved her.

  What was even scarier, he didn’t even mind it that much…

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Jason,” President Jameson said, “I understand that your instinct is to follow your intelligence sources, but we have a clear and present danger to the civilian population that won’t wait for a long-term investigation offplanet. Whether Yuri is on or off Earth right now, our best chance of finding him is with his people in Alaska; and you don’t have the personnel to mount an operation of this scope.”

  Jameson turned to General Kage, who emanated waves of self-satisfaction. “Hikaru, I want you to take the lead on this one. You have authorization to do whatever is necessary to find Yuri and those weapons…I’ll make it official before you leave.”

  The 2D recording faded into the 3D image of the Republic HoloNet News anchor---a computer simulation, in reality, though the voice was real.

  “This video,” she intoned solemnly, “was taken by parties unknown during a meeting between President Jameson, General Hikaru Kage of the Homeworld Guard and General Jason McKay of Fleet Intelligence. The meeting was to determine official strategy in light of the tragic and devastating terror attacks on Houston and the Protectorate attack on the colony at Rhiannon.”

  The attractive, racially-neutral female avatar cocked an eyebrow. “Despite the fact that General McKay’s Fleet Intelligence had made obvious progress in tracking down the terrorists and linking them to the Russian bratva crime families in Alaska, President Jameson pulled McKay’s agency completely out of the investigation and turned it over to the Homeworld Guard. This resulted in the brutal excesses that have been widely reported on this network and elsewhere, with scores of innocent civilians dead and injured. A Senate inquiry into the actions of the Guard in this operation is underway…”

  Gregory Jameson waved the image away with a curt, chopping gesture of his hand, wishing there was something he could hit…or someone. He fought hard to keep the murderous rage he was feeling off his face and wasn’t entirely sure if he was succeeding.

  “You’re sure this wasn’t recorded by McKay?” he asked again.

  “No, sir,” Marquesa Fiorentino told him, shaking her head decisively. She stood almost at attention near his office door, as if she were keeping herself out of range of a possible explosion. “Our best techs have gone over this. They’ve determined that there were no surveillance drones present and that General McKay didn’t bring any recording devices with him, nor did he leave with any. Whatever it was, however it got there, it was there before you arrived and was taken out after you left.”

  He nodded sullenly. He’d heard the answer already, and believed it, but he wanted to be able to blame McKay for this…McKay or somebody. Anybody.

  “What’s their best guess?” he asked, feeling hamstrung by the fact that he would usually consult McKay on such a question.

  “A worker,” she suggested. “Cleaning or repair, perhaps. There’ve been a lot of scheduled maintenance visits and any one of them could have done it for the money. Do you want me to contact Director Ayrock and have the workers investigated?”

  He considered it for a moment, thinking that it might be satisfying to see someone prosecuted for this, but then considered the public relations backlash and shook his head.

  “That toilet’s flushed,” he decided, pushing himself up from his desk and pacing across the room. “We need to get ahead of this, Marquesa. We can’t let the media control the spin on this. Get Andy in here.” Andrew Reimer was his Press Secretary and while the man was good at his job, he wasn’t a thinker or a planner, which was why he wasn’t in the room already.

  “Are you going to pin it on McKay’s people?” Fiorentino asked once she’d sent the message to Reimer. There was something in her tone and expression that might have been concern…he wasn’t sure for whom.

  “No,” he spat, “though I wouldn’t mind it, right now. But…you know what makes General McKay so dangerous, Marquesa?”

  “Colonel Stark?” she guessed, and he detected a hint of a smirk in the answer.

  He couldn’t help it…he chuckled at that, admiration overriding his anger for a moment. “Her too, but not exactly. What makes him dangerous is his damn luck.”

  He swiped a control on his desk and the news report r
eturned, the image switching to a video of the mystery cargo shuttle flying low over the Danube Corridor, then the whole projection whiting out with the flare of an orbital laser, leaving a cloud of ionized gas.

  “This is exclusive footage,” the anchor continued, “of the attack on the Danube Corridor Development Complex by a cargo shuttle spraying the same biological weapon that was used to wipe out the Rhiannon colony. RHN has learned that the city was given advanced warning of the attack by Intelligence officer and Medal of Valor winner Captain Drew Franks.” Franks’ boyish face filled the projection, smiling confidently. “Franks and Master Sergeant Tanya Manning were working together with Caitlyn Carr, a CIS agent assigned to investigate the Houston bombing, when they discovered indications of an imminent attack on the Danube Corridor and alerted emergency services and the Planetary Defense networks. Although nearly 200 people lost their lives in the attack, the intervention of these three heroes saved millions.”

  The simulated anchor’s face replaced Franks, her look one of scornful irony. “And their reward for this act of heroism? RHN has learned that all three were arrested on McAuliffe Station and are currently being detained there by the CIS…”

  Jameson cut the recording off once again, glaring at Fiorentino.

  “He’s the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever met…and Marquesa, I didn’t used to believe in luck till I met him.” He let out a heavy breath. “For better or worse, he’s unassailably popular with the Senate and the public. I am very nearly one hundred percent confident that if I tried to use this to publically attack McKay, it would blow up in my face.”

  “So, what’s our strategy to be, sir?” Fiorentino asked, frank curiosity on her face. That was the quality he most treasured in his chief of staff: her reaction to both the worst tragedy and the most promising development was always the same calm equanimity.