The Borrega Test

by James Vincett

  “Kekayvus is being pursued,” Sarafian said over the radio.

  As Darius rode with the trucks, a loud rumbling noise filled the air. He turned and saw four missiles arc up from launchers hidden in the cliffs, each pushed upward on a growing pillar of fire. The missiles disappeared from sight for a few moments, and then detonated high in the atmosphere, the staccato explosions rolling across the landscape. Darius realized that the General had discarded his caution; those missiles could reveal Kabir Caverns’ existence to the Shah’s security forces.

  Is Kekayvus worth it?

  Darius pulled down his night vision over his eyes. The engines sounded loud in the desert night; the crackle of the gravel beneath the wheels seemed as loud as the horses’ hooves. Darius heard the excitement in his men’s voices as they all kept careful pace with the slow-moving trucks.

  Darius heard a low whine; the sound grew louder in seconds. He saw a craft fly over, the whine of its engines now almost deafening. Beneath the whine, Darius heard and felt an irregular throb, and a shower of sparks flew from the craft. Several green beams rent the night air and thunder boomed across the desert. The beams struck the craft and blew it sideways. An instant later, the ship dropped to the desert floor and exploded, the light of destruction overwhelming Darius’ night sight.

  “Kekayvus is down!” Sarafian cried over the radio.

  The trucks halted, and Darius heard his men cry out in alarm.

  “The crew bailed out in time!” Sarafian cried. “Lieutenant Shirazi, recover the crew. They wear laser strobes, and probably dropped a few hundred meters to the west.” His heart pounding, Darius called out for his men to follow and he rode off into the desert.

  A few moments later, another craft flew over. Four times the size of Kekayvus, it looked like a squat wedge; the whine of its engines filled the air. It moved slowly, passed over Darius and his men, and circled the burning wreckage of Kekayvus. The size of the thing filled Darius with fear and awe.

  Darius scanned the rolling desert; he immediately saw the bright strobes pulsing in his night vision. As he and his men rode toward the strobes, a screech and clap of thunder filled the air. Darius turned and saw the trucks, which had begun moving back toward the caverns, explode in bright fireballs. The hovering craft fired green lances of laser light at Captain Najafi and his men as they scrambled back to the safety of the mountain.

  He spurred his horse and called out as he approached the green strobes. “Kekayvus!”

  “Here!” a male voice answered; a figure stood up and raised a rifle. “We must speak with General Sarafian!” A second figure stood and said, “We have urgent news!”

  Darius rode up to the first figure and extended a hand. The man grasped it and pulled himself up onto the horse. “I am Commander Abbas,” the man said in Persian, “and my companion is Lieutenant Commander Sakineh. We are both agents for Naval Intelligence, Union Imperial Navy.” One of Darius’ men retrieved the other crewman, and the horsemen turned their mounts to ride back to the caverns.

  The craft hovered above the burning wreckage of the trucks, maybe a hundred meters above the desert floor. Darius felt exposed to the powerful weaponry and pulled back to stop his mount. His men did the same. “We will ride into certain death if we continue,” Darius said.

  “The enemy could have killed us easily,” Abbas replied. “They will want to take prisoners. Look.” The vessel moved sideways and Darius saw small dark objects drop from bottom of the ship. At the same time, several green lances of laser fire arced from the ship and struck the entrance to the Caverns. “The Commander has ordered his assault platoon to move into the Caverns. They seek to recover intelligence, as well as fresh meat.”

  Darius felt nauseous. “What?”

  “That is a Naati vessel, Wolf class.”

  “Why are the Naati attacking us?”

  “I need to speak with General Sarafian. Do you have radio contact? I tried to contact him earlier but the Naati scrambled my transmission.”

  Darius took off his headset and handed it to Abbas.

  “Commander Abbas, here, General Sarafian. I regret to inform you that Admiral Kilgore is dead.”

  Darius felt like someone punched him.

  “That’s correct, General. He had been providing you, and other worlds in the Naati Neutral Zone, with arms and supplies, against the orders of the Ministry for War and Consul Nicholas. A young naval officer uncovered and exposed the operation. The Admiral died in a shuttle accident before the Navy could question him. Mine was the last supply ship, but it seems word reached the Shah before I arrived.”

  “Yes, General. The Shah no longer fears any consequence from Admiral Kilgore or the Hominin Union, so he has given the Naati the order to attack. It is my suspicion the Naati are moving against the Resistance over the entire surface of the planet.”

  As Abbas spoke with the General, Darius looked toward the caverns. He turned up the magnification on his night vision goggles and saw several figures, he estimated more than thirty, group together near the burning trucks. The figures formed four smaller wedge-shaped groups and moved toward the caverns.

  “Yes, General. I understand. Yes, sir. We’ll do our best.” Abbas handed the headset back to Darius. “He wants to speak with you.”

  Darius put on the headset. “Yes, General?"

  “Darius? You must retreat from this fight.”

  “What?”

  “Commander Abbas and Lieutenant Commander Sakineh must not be captured by the Naati. You are to make for Siyazan, on the eastern coast of the continent, and ensure the survival of the Naval Intelligence agents.”

  “General, that’s more than three hundred kilometers away! We have no supplies! And what about the dithya?”

  “Lieutenant Shirazi, that is an order, and you will carry it out. Good luck and God bless!”

  “God bless you General,” Darius said. “You will never be forgotten.”

  This is why he ordered us from the caverns; he wanted at least some of us to live.

  At that moment, four more missiles flew from the side of the mountain, rocketed out over the desert, and circled and struck the ship. Explosions enveloped the craft and lit up the desert landscape. Darius saw a field of light shimmer around the vessel, but the force of the attack knocked the vessel sideways. The men cheered. Engines whining, the Naati ship rose upward and accelerated up over the mountains, trailing sparks and fire.

  “That’s our cover fire,” Abbas said. “The ship will be back soon and probably with reinforcements. We need to keep moving.”

  Anger and frustration filled Darius. “Good God! We can’t just leave them here!”

  “They are fighting to draw the Naati and the Shah’s forces away from us! We must escape to fight another day!”

  Darius pulled an electronic compass out of his pocket; the needle and degree dial glowed green in the night vision goggles. The dithya had scores of secret water wells across the continent, and Darius knew the coordinates of several. He tapped a few keys and read the display. The closest was over fifty kilometers away.

  Darius took one last look at the Kabir Mountains, the highland dark green in his night vision. “Who was the young naval officer?”

  “What?”

  “The officer who betrayed the Admiral.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Who was it?”

  “McFinn. Lieutenant Joshua McFinn.”

  If the Naati moved against the entire Resistance, it was quite possible that over the next several days and weeks Darius would lose almost everything he loved. He knew he might even lose his life, and the lives of his wife and daughter may be forfeit. He had a name, a name to remember in the long dark days ahead. The name of the man who would pay for what he had done, how he had betrayed the Resistance and left it open to destruction. Darius did not know how it would happen, but he prayed to God for Justice.

  Darius called to his men and led them away from the mountains.

  Beckenbaur

 
; The shuttle was packed.

  Beckenbaur looked around at the faces of the wounded Marines and crew of the HSS Varano, their eyes wide in anticipation of reaching home. Heather took his hand in hers and smiled. Bandele stood beside them, his face passive. They had spoken at length during the journey back to Sol system about what Bandele could expect.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Bandele had said.

  The shuttle decelerated and Beckenbaur heard a clang. The rear doors opened and they all began to file out into the docking bay. Other shuttles had also docked. Hundreds of people lining the walls and standing on the balcony cheered, and several ran forward to greet their loved ones.

  Nine months earlier Bandele and Ferrel had left Von Kármán Station on board the HSS Vitus Bering. Beckenbaur himself had only joined the mission when the Bering picked him up on Rutana. After the battle against the Naati and the destruction of the Anuvi Artifact, the survivors had flown to Kongerslev on the Benevolence hospital ship and transferred to a Navy transport docked at Finwarden Station. After a journey of several weeks, they arrived in Sol system, the Bering destroyed and most of their fellow crewmembers dead. During the long journey home, no one spoke about the fantastic discovery.

  Beckenbaur couldn’t get it out of his head.

  A tall woman in an Exploration Service uniform, followed by two uniformed and armed Union Security Service personnel, appeared in the crowd and strode toward them.

  “Captain Bandele?”

  “Yes, Admiral?”

  “You are under arrest.”

  “What the hell is this, Collins?”

  “William, the Ministry for Exploration is charging you with violating general orders and gross negligence leading to the loss of the Vitus Bering.” She turned to the security personnel. “Take him into custody.”

  “Surely he doesn’t need to be arrested!” Ferrel cried.

  “These are orders direct from the Minister. You two are confined to station,” Collins said as the security personnel escorted Bandele away. “We will need your testimony during Bandele’s court-martial.” She turned and followed Bandele.

  “How can they do this? Hans! Do something!”

  “There isn’t much we can do, Heather.” He sighed. There’s nothing we can do. “Look, you go ahead and get settled. There’s something I need to do.” He turned and left Heather standing in the crowd.

  I hope it’s not too late! He walked as fast as he could to the Exploration Service offices on the station. As he walked, he pulled out a pockcomp. The Naati’s yallic slaves had found this particular device after the Naati had taken possession of the tower on the surface of the third moon of Anuvi III. After the Varano’s Marines took the tower back, Beckenbaur, Bandele, Ferrel, and other crew of both the Varano and the Bering had explored the place. Beckenbaur had spotted this device sitting on a console in the yallic’s makeshift lab and pocketed it. Only during the voyage home did he realize what it was.

  Dr. Batista’s pockcomp.

  Batista had changed the Bering’s flight plan and forced them to abandon their earlier surveys before they found the artifact on the third moon of Anuvi III. There could only be one reason why she had done this.

  She knew what we would find.

  Surprisingly, the device had no encryption or security protocols, but as he poked around in the files during the long journey home, he discovered there wasn’t much information either. Besides the scientific research the survey team of the Bering had gathered, he found a copy of Batista’s original flight plan, and a DNA sequencing template. Cryptic notes in the margins of the flight plan pointed at something else, but he could make no sense of terms like “locator sequence” and “translation algorithm.”

  The Exploration Service offices looked deserted. Everyone was probably at the docking bay welcoming those returning. He walked through the double glass doors and Batista’s pockcomp chirped. He followed a map on the device, navigated the narrow halls and found her lab. He swiped the pockcomp against the lock and the door slid open. The lights flickered on and he stepped in; he took one last look into the hall and then shut and locked the door.

  It can’t be this easy!

  More of an office than a lab, scores of dataglasses of all sizes hung on the walls. At the far end was a computer terminal with three large dataglasses. The machine looked dark, powered-down. As he approached it, he heard the pockcomp chirp and the terminal came to life.

  Lucky! Lucky! Lucky! Beckenbaur figured the Exploration Service and the Intelligence Directorate were still reeling from the fallout of the Anuvi Incident, since they had not yet locked down Batista’s lab.

  “Welcome back, Dr. Batista,” a male voice said. “Your last login was November 3, 2632. You have three thousand six hundred and seventy-two messages waiting, thirty-six of which are priority encrypted.”

  Tempted though he was to rifle through Batista’s mail, he figured he shouldn’t be here too long. He almost spoke, but thought better of it; the machine probably had a voiceprint detector. He typed out the command on Batista’s pockcomp to transfer all information related to the Bering’s flight plan.

  “Information transferred,” the machine said. “Thirteen of the priority messages are from Assistant Director Bacchus Freedman, General Intelligence Directorate.”

  Beckenbaur typed out a command to transfer all mail and turned to leave. He stopped short of the door and realized somewhere an access log recorded his meddling. He grimaced and typed out a command to delete the information and e-mails on the terminal and all related access logs. He realized that some of this could probably help Bandele; the messages undoubtedly contained secret orders relating to the change in flight plan.

  “Information and access logs deleted,” the machine said.

  Sorry, Bandele, but no one can know this, or that I have it. I’ll make it up to you, if I can.

  Kruger

  General Intelligence Directorate Agent Macsen Kruger leaned back in the command chair and puffed on a cigar. He looked around the cramped command deck of the Molly Mae; the crew of the exploration scout hadn’t looked him in the eye since he took command of the vessel in orbit around the world of Cerilia IV.

  They’re afraid of me. Good.

  Kruger liked to use his appearance to effect. He found it easy to intimidate people, given his height of two meters, broad shoulders and chest, craggy facial features, a bald head, and deep booming voice. The commander of the Molly Mae, the beady-eyed and skinny Lieutenant Koff, nearly fainted when Kruger strode on board the exploration scout and started barking orders.

  Kruger’s boss, Assistant Director for Operations Lars Pederson, finally gave him the green light to survey the rest of the Cerilia system. Dr. Batista, whose research had led to the discovery of the Anuvi Artifact, had used clues on the world of Cerilia IV in her successful search. Bacchus Freedman had classified the world’s location before the events in the Anuvi system, given the knowledge the planet had and may yet yield, but the Exploration Service had only performed a cursory survey of the rest of the Cerilia system.

  They all think I’m stupid.

  Only he had thought of the possibility of finding additional clues about the Harbingers by performing a more thorough search of the Cerilia system. Kruger himself had been on the Anuvi Artifact, one of only a handful of people that survived. The artifact itself had been an entire world, and the Harbingers had left it in orbit around a gas giant in the Anuvi system, hidden in plain sight among four-dozen other moons.

  Wouldn’t they do the same here?

  Cerilia VII was a blue gas giant, a little larger than Jupiter, with seventy moons, the largest a Mars-sized rock and the smallest a hunk of ice thirty kilometers in diameter. A thin ring system of rock and ice surrounded the world like a glittering necklace. The Molly Mae had spent the last several weeks intercepting and orbiting the moons, slowly working inward. Kruger had let the crew determine the best methods to perform the surveys; they were the experts, and he found the crew of the Mol
ly Mae much more manageable when they had something to do. The crew performed exhausting surface scans looking for any anomalies, and had on several occasions suited up and walked on the moons themselves.

  They had just entered orbit around Cerilia VII-42, an ice-covered Moon-sized rock, the surface pocked with impact craters and riven by fractures. Kruger heard the crew’s quiet grumblings and whispered profanities, obvious signs of their growing frustration. He noticed Lieutenant Koff had become quite agitated, but it took the former commander of the Molly Mae nearly an hour to work up the courage to say something.

  “This is all very interesting, but you need to give us some idea of what we’re looking for,” Koff said. He stood at the sensor console, just outside of Kruger’s arm length, his eyes not quite meeting Kruger’s gaze.

  Kruger looked at him for several moments, puffed on his cigar, and blew a smoke ring in the man’s face. “Structures. Anything artificial.”

  “Okay, well, is there any reason to believe we will find structures out here? What is the context?”

  “It’s classified.” Kruger’s gaze discouraged any further questions, and Koff turned back to the sensor console.

  An hour later Kruger heard the crew talking in excited voices. “What is it?” he barked.

  “I think we’ve found something, sir,” Koff said. He tapped a few keys on the sensor console and the image of a crater, surrounded by an apron of impact ejecta, appeared on the main data display. “This is one of the largest and newest craters on the surface of the moon. The object that created it pierced the moon’s ice cover and gouged the crust. The ejecta is composed of both ice and rock.”

  “So what?”

  The image zoomed into the side of the crater. “This object does not look like a natural formation,” Koff continued. Kruger saw what looked like a round tube or column vertically embedded into the side of the crater. “The removal of surface material by the impact revealed this structure. It can’t be natural. Only part of the object looks to be visible; it probably extends below the surface. The previous survey of this moon was far too cursory to find it.”