Black Box

by Ivan Turner

  Ivan Turner 156

  BLACK BOX

  Ivan Turner

  Copyright 2010, 2015 by Ivan Turner

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Other Work by Ivan Turner

  Zombies! Series 1 and 2: A refreshing look at regular people in our society living their lives against the backdrop of a zombie plague.

  Castes Series 1: In the 21st century, elves, dwarves, and humans coexist in a caste society, but conspiracies within the ranks of the castes whisper of revolution.

  Forty Leap: Mathew Cristian is an unwilling time traveler, whose affliction has him leaping forward at an ever increasing rate. What changes come upon a man whose future unfolds unpredictably and whose past is inevitably left behind?

  The Book of Revelations: When a man discovers a way to see into a person's past lives, he deems himself judge, jury, and executioner. Why, then, are all of his followers suddenly hunting for Rabbi Max Guetterman?

  ApocalypZe is a post apocalyptic card game in which you control survivors trying to defend your stronghold and raiders trying to bring down your opponent.

  Please visit http://ninekingdoms.com/Author/ for links to your favorite ebook stores.

  Acknowledgements

  Black Box, like all books, is the product of time and revision. I would like to thank Joyce Turner, Julie Beck, and Joe Connell for reading through my beta draft and giving me some much needed feedback.

  Prologue

  The news from the last transmission was not good. His medical officer’s face appeared on the viewer, lines of fear and stress cutting deep grooves into her features. As a young captain, he felt that fear also. He could see the failure in her eyes. They were all infected. All twenty three of them. Only she showed no signs of the infection. Not just yet.

  The derelict had come into play unexpectedly and the Admiralty has sent him and his ship to meet up with the nearest science exploration vessel. Infantry accompanied technical personnel and ten people had been lost just like that. There had been nothing but one incomprehensible communication. The ravings of a lunatic.

  Six more soldiers and the captain knew he was dealing with a biological enemy. Something you could not kill with guns. So he sent doctors and biologists. He sent his own medical officer. Most of them became infected quickly and she didn’t know why.

  She asked for more help.

  He sent it.

  She was asking for more help now.

  A single bead of sweat welled up just beyond his hairline. Gas bubbled in his gut. On another screen, he could see the faces of his infantry as they awaited his orders. They were due to go over to that ship, escort the next group of doctors and biologists. Anyone who wasn’t infected needed protection from those that were. The infected were mad, dangerous.

  Young faces, all of them. Even his sergeant was young. He’d been hardened and scarred by years of serving in the Space Force, but those years had been short and age had not caught up with him yet. The others were all afraid, even more so than his medical officer, who knew her death was imminent. They didn’t know what they were to face on the derelict. They only knew that there was lunacy there. A terrifying lunacy that needed to be destroyed.

  A message to the Admiralty had been dispatched.

  The captain didn’t like the answer.

  He suddenly decided that no more men and women would go to that ship. There would be no more help.

  Ordering his pilot to take them out to a safe distance, the captain leaned back in his chair and tried to hammer away at the ball of phlegm in his throat by swallowing and swallowing and swallowing. Whatever he did, he could not allow this terrible plague, which had claimed twenty three minds in four hours, to leave that derelict. He didn’t know where it had come from, didn’t know what other dark corners of the universe it occupied. None of that was important. What he did know was that the Admiralty would send another science vessel. They would send two more. They would send an army of them to discover what this thing was and how it could be contained.

  Controlled.

  This captain knew how to contain it.

  He didn’t give a shit about controlling it.

  This captain had learned to trust his gut. The sergeant who had been his mentor would be proud.

  He knew his duty and had made his decision as a captain in the Space Force. He alone would take responsibility for that decision.

  Striding over to the weapons station, he relieved the soldier on duty. His pilot, an officer herself, turned to look at him with wide eyes. He told her to keep the boat steady.

  Just keep it steady.

  Sitting down in the dazed soldier’s chair, he tapped out a few keys and touched the grid that appeared on screen. Instantly, the grid filled with multicolored lines and his data window lit up with possibilities. He’d been working on a program that could determine an enemy ship’s weak spots by its design. He ran it now, but it was useless against the derelict. The ship was older than he was and constructed almost entirely of weak spots. He was surprised it had survived in space for all of that time. Besides which, the derelict would be vaporized when it was all over.

  He ordered his pilot to take them further away.

  Further.

  Further, God damn it!

  He did not warn his medical officer.

  He did not warn his crew.

  He launched one of the ship’s four nuclear torpedoes and watched as its electronic blip closed in on the derelict. He knew that the face of his medical officer was still on his screen. He knew that she could see the missile as it approached. He knew that he owed it to her to look her in the eye as he killed her.

  So he did.

  She said nothing, seemed to grow calm with the certainty. There wasn’t even the barest change of expression. In the four seconds it took for the missile to reach the derelict, she gave no hint of her opinion of his decision. And she died, leaving him with that mystery.

  He would always wonder.

  Afterwards, it was a whirlwind of controversy. Accusations made. Charges filed. Favors called in. Charges dropped. A reputation destroyed. A reputation created. A career pushed into stagnation.

  When it was all over, the captain was still a captain.

  The man was still a man.

  But he was a different type of each. And he would put long years of service into an organization that sought only to eliminate him.

  History

  The United Earth Space Force had been the last established branch of the military. It had its own council of admirals, called the Admiralty, running it. As space travel and colonization had become more and more essential to the development and evolution of the human race, the Admiralty had steadily gained power and influence over the Earth and Earth allied planets. At this point, they practically ran the central government.

  There were currently sixty eight commissioned vessels roaming outer space and jumping from star to star using wormhole technology. The ships of the fleet varied in size and shape and function, but each was crewed by those intrepid folks of the United Earth Space Force, and each was captained by just one of those very special intrepid folks. Of all of the captains on all of those ships, Captain Ted Beckett liked to think of himself as the best. And why not really? He was the best. He had earned his commission by working his way up from a foot soldier. Throughout his career, he had made friends and gathe
red owed favors like dandelions. At the turning point of his career, some nine or ten years before, all of those owed favors had been called in and they had saved his job and his freedom. But not before putting him through proceeding after proceeding, inquiry after inquiry, and countless lectures on the duty of a Space Force captain. Humbled at first, Beckett had questioned himself, played over the situation again and again. Through the sleepless nights, he had emptied bottle after bottle of whatever he could lay his hands on. But he could never get drunk enough. And, when it came time to put the bottle away, he did so without looking back. He was too strong for an addiction. And the Admiralty was too weak to save lives. Twenty four United Earth personnel had perished in that explosion, but they didn’t give a shit about that. All they cared about was the lost opportunity that the disease had presented. An infection that caused madness, when controlled, could be used to put down a New Earth rebellion without any loss of technology. Beckett convinced himself that he had traded those twenty four lives for billions of others. Once he’d worked it all out in his head, he grew comfortable with his decision and hard in his heart.

  But that was the past.

  Of all of the nine admirals that made up the Admiralty, Beckett liked John Poulle the best. And each of the others not at all. Despite seventy four years behind him, Poulle was an arrogant and bitter bastard. Like all of the other admirals, he kept an office in the Admiral’s Building in Manhattan. The office was smaller than all of the others’ because he had insisted on its being on the fourth floor, the same floor as all of the conference rooms. He never saw people in his private sanctuary. He always said that if he wanted to make his private office public he'd invite the neighborhood but in the meantime he was perfectly happy to go on chewing out deadbeat officers and noncoms in the conference rooms where they belonged. Beckett was not a deadbeat. And he sure as hell was no noncom. But Poulle's office was Poulle's alone. He didn't even have a visitor's chair in there. He met with literally no one. Even the secretary had to buzz him before going in.

  Normally, he would greet Ted Beckett with a smile and an insult. They would spend half an hour trading barks that were much worse than their bites and then deciding where to have lunch.

  Today, Poulle would afford Ted Beckett no such pleasantries.

  “Sit down, Ted.”

  Uh oh.

  Beckett had been on Earth for almost two weeks. His ship, the Valor, was being overhauled and his entire crew had been given leave for the time being. Beckett had enjoyed his leave by reading trashy romance novels and smoking aged cigars. When he’d gotten the summons from Poulle, four days before he was due to return the Valor, he’d known there was something wrong. There would be no banter today.

  When Beckett had found a seat, Poulle took one two seats away and leaned back, trying to breathe the tension out of his temples. “How’s your history?”

  “Can’t we skip the lecture and just tell me what this is about?”

  Poulle’s eyes burned in a way that Beckett had never seen. “It is about the history, Captain! And don’t interrupt me!”

  “Sorry, sir.” But he wasn’t and Poulle knew he wasn’t. After ten years of bearing the burden of his particular reputation, there remained pitifully little for which Beckett was ever sorry. He didn’t appreciate coyness or idle conversation. He wanted to know why he’d been called off leave four days early. More to the point, he wanted to know what the catch was without even first having found out the assignment.

  “Do you know who Nicholas Walker was?” Poulle asked, leaning back in his chair.

  Beckett breathed, trying to match Poulle’s curtness with restraint. He could do it. He could pretend be a good officer. He wasn’t that far gone. He began. "Captain Walker…"

  "Colonel," Poulle corrected.

  Beckett cleared his throat irritably. "Commander of the first faster than light drive ship, the Einstein. Isn't there a statue of him in Florida?"

  "Half," Poulle remembered sadly. "They put it up a year after he was confirmed missing. It was damaged during the first eXchengue (pronounced eh-szhen-gi) attack."

  The eXchengue were one of only two intelligent races with which humans had made contact in two hundred years of space exploration. Actually, to tell the truth, it was the eXchengue who had discovered humans, invading Earth and dominating them.

  "Right.” Jesus, thought Beckett, I learned this stuff in grade school. "Didn't they put Coddit's statue up next to it?"

  Colonel Tyler Coddit was the second commander to take a crew into space on a faster than light ship.

  Poulle nodded. "After we defeated the eXchengue."

  "Wait a minute." Beckett leaned forward. "Walker commanded the first ship ever to have an interstellar drive. When he went missing, Coddit went after him. Then the eXchengue invaded and took over. Coddit returned, what, eight years later…"

  "Eighteen."

  "Right. Eighteen years later and started the revolution."

  It’s amazing how the return of school time facts can be almost inspiring. Even Beckett didn’t notice how much he was enjoying his trip down history lane.

  Poulle flashed him an uncharacteristic, yet still sad smile. "There was always a theory that Walker's expedition was lost because it was intercepted by the eXchengue. The timing was right."

  "But Coddit never encountered them before returning to Earth."

  "Right. And his trail of Walker went cold early on."

  "Then what took him eighteen years to come back?"

  Poulle shook his head. "There was a misapplication of the faster than light theory, but it was never corrected because the wormhole equation was solved and proved much more efficient for interstellar travel. But no one knows if that’s what caused Walker’s disappearance and Coddit’s delay. No one ever got the chance to ask."

  “A mystery,” Beckett mused, now understanding the reason for the lecture. “Solved now?”

  Poulle nodded again. "Walker's black box landed in some lady's backyard a month ago. She had no idea what it was, but the local bureaus have Ancient Technology experts on hand so they were able to identify it. The information was stored on digital disc so they had a devil of a time extracting it."

  Beckett laughed at the idea of Space Force tech geeks getting hard-ons over the opportunity to decrypt a digital disc. DD technology was so out of date that most people, Beckett included, had never even seen one. Still, he knew a couple of hackers on one of the outer planets that could crack that technology as easily as cracking an egg. The Admiralty would never look to those people, though. Hell, they barely acknowledged the existence of criminals like that.

  “You’ll listen to Walker’s voice log yourself, but, to make a long story short, they made planetfall and were ambushed and wiped out by some unidentified enemy.”

  “Not the eXchengue?”

  Poulle shrugged. “It could be.”

  “He never got a look at them?”

  The admiral pulled a strange face. “Not that he recorded.”

  “And no mention of Coddit?”

  Shaking his head, Poulle pulled out a palm sized reader from a pocket in his uniform. In a moment, there was a tiny vibration from Beckett’s belt, where his own reader was clipped. He reached for it and woke up the screen. For almost five minutes, he read over the Mission Briefing while the admiral waited quietly.

  “This is it?” Beckett asked finally. “You’re sending me to investigate the site of a two hundred year old event?”

  “It’s a historic event.”

  Beckett shrugged. “Who cares? Send the Courage. Landon Palmer’s the first officer and he’d love this.”

  “We’re sending you.”

  Beckett was not happy. But it could be worse.

  It was worse.

  “There’ve been some promotions and reassignments, also, Ted.”

  This couldn’t be good. The United Earth Space Force (UESF) had a way of sticking it to Ted Beckett when it came to crew. At least they thought so. Part of the reason they
did this was because he was so good at handling the bastards. The other reason was that they liked to keep all of their misfits in one basket. It was why Beckett had inherited command of the Valor in the first place.

  Beckett used a finger to scroll down the file list. “You didn’t send the manifest.”

  Poulle didn’t move.

  “I’m entitled to see the manifest.”

  Poulle didn’t say anything.

  “Hey, John. Are you trying to tell me that I don’t have a right to know who’s on my own fucking crew?”

  Poulle went back to his reader and in a moment, Beckett’s was buzzing again.

  Beckett hardly ever felt anxious anymore, especially when it came to crew changes. He was used to getting the wash outs. Still, at that moment, there was a knot in his stomach. Something was different. He looked at the manifest. Three of his officers had been changed, including Science, Records, and Medical. The strange thing was that his new officers weren’t the usual rejects. They were respected members of the Space Force. His new Medical Officer had been promoted from the Lieutenant’s position. By all rights, she should have been the one transferred off ship. In all truth, he would have preferred it. The Admiralty liked new lieutenants to cut their teeth under Captain Beckett, but quickly got them better assignments. For some reason, though, they had chosen to move his old doctor, a surly guy by the name of Paul Royce who’d been on the Valor for two years. Then there was the new Lieutenant. She was a rookie, sure, just like all of the others. But she wasn’t just any rookie. She was an admiral’s daughter.

  Beckett waited two beats before lodging his complaint. Those two beats helped him calm his anger and filter all of the profanity out of the complaint. Poulle listened patiently, impressed with the formal wording. Then he promptly told Beckett that those were his orders.

  Beckett forgot to wait two beats this time. He tossed his reader onto the table and slammed a fist down.

  “Ted...”

  “Shut up, John. Don’t say another fucking word. You tell me what this is all about, right now.”