Chapter 14

Eleven Days Later

Sunday, 1 August 2190

Sweating profusely and writhing in agony on the deck, while at the same time crying for his slaughtered family, Federation Vice-President Jonathan Harkam somehow still managed to reach out and grab the front of Hansen’s jacket in his quivering, blood-stained fist. He pulled him closer, bared his clenched teeth and spat streams of red saliva over his chin as he grunted against the pain, then stared up at him through red, swollen eyes.

“Please!” he managed to force through the pain. “Oh God, it burns! Make it stop!”

Hansen took hold of Harkam’s wrist with both hands and tried with all his strength to pull free of his desperate, vice-like grip, but the dying man only tightened his grasp to the point where Hansen thought he heard a finger snap and pulled him closer. “Mister Vice-President,” Hansen responded as calmly as he could. “I can’t just...”

“Yes you CAN!” the dying vice-leader of the unified free world roared.

“Do it, Major.”

Hansen whirled around as far as the vice-president’s grasp would allow and glared wide-eyed at...at the squad sergeant—the only one of his men who’d managed to survive the attack with him.

“He’s the vice-president for God sake!” he reminded him.

“He’s suffering, sir,” the sergeant pointed out. “There’s nothing more we can do for him now.”

“I can’t just kill him!” Hansen insisted.

“Yes, you can.”

Gasping for every breath, Harkam jerked Hansen hard, drawing his attention back to him. “Please, Major!” he pleaded, crying openly now, barely able to speak through the agony anymore. “Do it!” He coughed suddenly, spewing a foot-high fountain of dark, red-brown blood that barely missed Hansen’s face when he recoiled, then splattered back over his chin and his suit coat. “Do...it,” he begged once more.

“You’ve got to do it, sir,” the sergeant told him. “There’s no other option.”

Hansen knew in his heart that the sergeant was right. Harkam’s entire family had been brutally slaughtered and the vice-president himself had been pumped full of...of whatever it was that damn beast had pumped him full of. If the poor man’s cries were to be believed, then he was literally burning to death from the inside out.

He drew his sidearm and slowly pressed the muzzle to the vice-president’s temple. He drew several short, deep breaths and licked his suddenly very dry lips. But he just couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the trigger.

“It’s the humane thing to do, sir,” the sergeant pointed out.

“DO IT!” Harkam shrieked through the pain, his tears tinted red with blood. Then he suddenly started shaking Hansen violently back and forth as he lost whatever control he’d been clinging to and convulsed, screaming and crying even louder than before. “OH GOD!” he screamed, spitting and coughing up blood. “DO IT!”

“Do it, sir,” the sergeant repeated.

Hansen closed his eyes and turned away. “Forgive me,” he whispered. Then he drew a long, deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.

Hansen woke suddenly but realized immediately that he was safe in bed—that it was only the nightmares again. They’d haunted his sleep every night for the last two weeks, and quite frankly he was starting to get used to them. He’d even accepted the presence of the unidentified squad sergeant who’d first appeared the night before he learned of the Coalition’s devastating loss at Rosha’Kana, although he was still a little curious about where that sergeant had come from in the first place.

A sudden, rapid knock-knock-knock on his door diverted his train of thought.

“Dad, are you up yet?” came Heather’s muffled voice from the other side. “Come on. Breakfast will be ready in two minutes.”

Breakfast? Since when did Heather get up and make breakfast—especially on a Sunday morning? She must have wanted something.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he told her. Then, as he sat up and dropped his feet to the floor, he remembered. Two weeks had passed since she’d gotten caught stealing again at Nigel Worthington’s store. Actually, two weeks and a day had passed, but the way he always measured it in regards to handing out punishment... She’d gotten herself into trouble on a Friday, so her two weeks had started that Saturday and had run through the entire Saturday two weeks later. At any rate, her punishment had come to its end.

He stood and stretched, then changed into a pair of shorts and a tee shirt and headed into the kitchen, where the mouthwatering aromas of cinnamon French toast, spicy Italian sausage, and fresh brewed coffee overwhelmed him seconds before he got a look at what she’d prepared.

“I’m really impressed, Heather,” he told his daughter, who had actually dressed decently for a change, when she greeted him with a rare smile.

She must really have wanted to get out of their quarters for a while. Not that he could blame her. By grounding her he’d essentially grounded himself as well because he’d had to stay home in order to enforce it—except for normal duty hours, of course, during which he’d simply posted a guard outside their door—so he knew exactly what it felt like to spend every evening for over two weeks at home. He’d had to do it more than a few times over the years, and he knew that as a young teenage girl, it had to have been doubly hard for her.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling even more brightly as she set his plate and his coffee down on the table. “Consider it an apology for all the trouble I’ve caused you over the years. Especially with Mister Worthington.”

He took his seat, leaned over his steaming plate and took a big whiff, then looked at his daughter and said, “Smells like a good apology to me. I accept.”

Heather gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, then set her own plate on the table across from him and sat down. “Helping the police bust that guy last week means yesterday was my last day grounded, right?” she asked hopefully as they started to eat.

“That was our deal, yes,” her father answered as he chopped the sausages into bite-sized pieces with his fork. Then he asked, “Why? Have you already made plans for today?”

“Nothing’s confirmed yet, but Corrine called me this morning and asked if I could go to the beach with her. Is it all right?”

‘Nothing confirmed’, he reflected with a grin. She’d been around military people so long she was starting to talk like them. He asked, “You’re actually asking my permission?”

“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do, Daddy?” she asked in return.

“Yeah, I’m just not used to it.”

“Well, get used to it, because I realize now that it’s a matter of respect and that I should have been doing it all along, so I’m going to be doing it from now on.”

She was really laying it on thick. Either that or—dare he hope?—she really had finally seen the error of her ways. He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt, as usual, and told her, “Yes, you may go to the beach.”

She smiled, jumped up, and hugged him again. “Thank you, Daddy.”

“You’re welcome, Princess,” he responded, hugging her back. “Have a good time, but please, don’t come home too late.”

“I won’t,” she promised.

“And remember, even though you’re not grounded anymore, you’re still not allowed in Mister Worthington’s store without me.”

“I know. I won’t forget.” She returned to her seat, and for the first time in a long time, in much too long a time, they enjoyed their meal together.

Less than an hour later, as Heather happily left for the day, Admiral Hansen wandered over to his recliner with a nice big cup of coffee, sat back, and picked up ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ for the first time since he’d pulled it off the shelf eleven days ago, hoping that he might actually make it past page one this time. It had been a good choice then, and was an even better choice now, because not only did it have little to do with politics, at least when compared to the rest of his library, and nothing at all to do with interstellar war, it most especially had nothing to do with little girls growing up and becoming beautiful young women.

Before he’d allowed her to leave, the one condition he’d required Heather to agree to was that she put on her swimsuit and let him see her in it first. He’d been to the station’s artificial beach many times over the years and he’d seen the suits that typical teenage girls liked to wear these days. Some were okay, or at least acceptable, but others were much too skimpy in his opinion, leaving far too little to the imagination for decency’s sake, and where Heather was concerned, his opinion was the one that counted. No way in hell was he going to let his daughter wear one of those.

Heather had complied with that condition without argument, and although he’d found her suit to be adequate—as he’d expected, she’d bought herself a new bikini, but to his surprise she’d actually chosen one that was age appropriate—he’d nonetheless been taken aback by how...how sexy she’d looked in it. There simply wasn’t a more parent-appropriate word for it. Like it or not, his little girl was growing up.

Back to his escape. ‘Primeval Night, Chapter 1: The Road to Extinction.’

The door buzzer sounded.

Hansen dropped his hands, and the book, to his lap and sighed. Who the hell would be coming to see him on a Sunday morning? He set the book aside and got up. The buzzer sounded once again as he approached the door. “I’m coming,” he announced, less than patiently. The fact that whoever was on the other side couldn’t possibly hear him didn’t even occur to him. Not that it would have made any difference.

“Open.”

The door slid aside to reveal a tired looking Commander Royer, standing there holding a handcomp in blue jeans and a plain black tee shirt with her hair cascading freely down over her shoulders. “I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning, Admiral,” she said before the door had even finished opening, as if she knew beyond any doubt that she truly was disturbing him.

“That’s all right, Commander,” he told her. “Come on in.” He took a step back and to one side. “I assume you’re here about that list of agents you’ve been working on?” he asked as she stepped in and quickly glanced around, as if to make sure they were alone.

When the one week he’d originally given her to research their agents’ files and come up with a list of the ten best candidates for the mission had ended on Wednesday, she’d come into the office first thing in the morning with her recommendations but had made it clear that she wasn’t completely satisfied with any one of them, for an assortment of reasons, and had asked for more time. As was often the case with government agencies, the Earth Security Council’s discussions and deliberations had been moving along much slower than expected, so he’d been able to give it to her.

“Yes, sir, I am,” she answered. He gestured toward the couch, and followed her over to it.

The council had started focusing its attention on the starcruiser Excalibur and had pretty much settled on trying to prevent its destruction, but hadn’t even begun to discuss how best to go about doing that. Why it had taken them an entire week to start looking more closely at that situation was beyond him, considering the intelligence the O’Donnell recording had provided them with. At any rate, he had filled Royer in on that and on everything else he’d learned during the week, and had given her one additional week to work on the list. He wasn’t at all surprised that she’d only taken half that time.

Royer sat on the leading edge of the corner of the couch closest to the recliner, looking as though she wasn’t quite comfortable being alone with him in his quarters, despite all the years they’d worked together. Hansen wondered for a moment why that might be, but at the same time realized that that was a topic for another time. They had business to discuss.

He turned the recliner to face her, then sat down and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Their mutual posture betrayed their mutual states of mind. This was an official meeting, not a social one.

Why did she look so on edge?

“Where’s Heather this morning?” she asked.

“She just left for the beach,” he answered. Then, wanting to get down to business so he could salvage the rest of the day to relax, he asked, “So what have you come up with?”

“Sergeant Dylan Graves,” she answered succinctly.

“Sergeant who?” Hansen asked. Whoever Dylan Graves was, he’d never heard of him.

“Squad Sergeant Dylan Edward Graves. Son of the Excalibur’s Captain Richard Graves,” she explained. “He’s one of our Special Operations Marines, stationed on Cirra. Not one of our agents, obviously, but he has a pretty impressive record, and uh...I was thinking, if this mission is going to somehow involve the Excalibur, then it might be advantageous to have its captain’s own son carry it out.”

Hansen considered that for a moment. Was that what had her so on edge—her decision to step outside their normal operating parameters and recommend a non-agent for what promised to be the most vital mission they’d ever have to prepare for? Understandable, he supposed, given the familial relationship. But a Marine wouldn’t have had the kind of training he’d need in order to carry out such an assignment. At least, not enough of it to have a shot at actually succeeding. Add to that the fact that the captain’s own son would almost certainly make the mission personal and the results could potentially prove disastrous.

On the other hand, maybe she had a point. Maybe someone who’d make the mission personal was exactly the kind of someone they needed. He decided to play devil’s advocate for the moment to see just where her head was.

“Then again, Commander, it might be distinctly disadvantageous,” he countered. “There is something to be said for not wanting someone who’s too close to the situation. Objectivity often provides for a clearer decision-making process.”

“That’s true,” she agreed, but clearly not without exception, “but since we don’t yet know exactly what the mission is going to be, I think we should at least keep him in mind.”

So much for gaining any more insight into her thought process. “We can certainly do that, yes,” he agreed. Then he glanced down and nodded toward the handcomp she’d brought with her. “That his information?”

“Yes, sir,” she said as she held it out to him. “His official photo and his entire record.”

Hansen accepted the handcomp and took a look, then suddenly had to gasp for air as a ghostly chill washed over him. “Oh my God,” he uttered.

Royer sat up straight as all the color drained from the admiral’s face before her very eyes. “What’s wrong?” she asked, genuinely concerned. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Nothing,” he answered, too quickly. He looked up at her and swallowed hard. “Nothing at all.” He handed the handcomp back to her. “I want an agency recruiter on the first flight out of here tomorrow morning. That’s our man.”

“Yes, sir,” she responded, more than a little bewildered.

 

Chapter 15

Federation Center, Four Weeks Later

Friday, 27 August 2190

President Mirriazu Shakhar stood before her large twenty-fourth floor office window in somber silence, folded her slender arms tightly across her narrow chest, and gazed out over the sharply sloped rooftops of the waking metropolis. The early morning sun shone through the tinted plastiglass and warmed her chocolate brown face, which in recent months had finally begun to betray her age. Most mornings she enjoyed the breathtaking view. Especially at that moment when the sun’s first golden rays beamed like spotlights from Heaven over the rocky, snow-capped peaks of the Alps and danced across the sparkling sapphire surface of Lake Geneva’s southern fingertip. Indeed, losing herself in that living picture postcard as she sipped from a steaming porcelain cup of oriental green tea had become a fundamental part of her daily morning ritual over the last three and a half years since her landslide re-election and subsequent relocation to the new facility. A part that had no doubt made each day seem just a little bit brighter than it might otherwise have been.

Most mornings, but not this morning. This morning was different. This morning she had forgone her usual cup of tea and had offered the beautiful mountains and the pristine lake little more than a cursory glance. This morning she suffered from a heavy heart, for it was the people far below that were foremost in her mind.

Her gaze fell to the narrow city streets, lined as always with hundreds of brightly colored decorative flags. Fiery reds and oranges, dazzling yellows, deep blues and rich ocean turquoise, emerald greens, and royal purples and lavenders fluttered in the gentle summer breeze. Despite her somber mood, she grinned. The peace-loving people of Geneva, Allah bless them, certainly loved their flags.

The people, she considered as her grin faded. Seen from so high above the old city they looked so small and insignificant, going about their daily routines like so many thousands of faceless worker ants, oblivious to the impending doom that was inching its way ever closer to their world. But they weren’t small and insignificant at all. They were human beings. They were individuals with lives to live, families to love, and their own unique purposes to fulfill.

And she was their president. They were depending on her to protect them and to keep their families safe. As Commander-in-Chief of Earth’s unified military space forces, that was every bit as much her responsibility as it was that of the brave men and women who directly commanded those forces. But in recent weeks it had become an ever increasingly more difficult responsibility to live up to, and now that the Veshtonn were closing in on the last remnants of Tor’Kana survivors, it was very soon going to be nearly impossible.

Commander-in-Chief. Even after nearly nine years in office it was almost funny when she thought about it, as long as she didn’t think too hard. The enormous weight of all that responsibility resting squarely atop her narrow shoulders. Career officers, battle-hardened admirals and generals with enough fire power at their disposal to level an entire planet, all of them waiting for her to make the tough decisions that would guide their next actions. Decisions that would determine where their troops would fight and where, inevitably, many of them would die. And she’d never even served a day in the military.

For the last several years there had existed a small but steadily growing movement in the world. A semi-organized group of vocal citizens, mostly military veterans, who believed that no one who hadn’t served in the military should ever be allowed to serve as the military’s ultimate commander—should never be allowed to serve as president. Perhaps they made a good point.

“Excuse me, Madam President?” her temporary secretary’s voice called down from the small speaker recessed in the center of the cloud-white ceiling. She sounded tired, poor girl. A Political Science major, she’d just begun her senior year as a foreign exchange student at the University of Geneva last week, and already her studies were keeping her up very late at night. She’d been a great help over the last couple of months and the president sincerely hoped she’d find a way to work it out so she could stay on to the end of her internship in the spring.

She also hoped that mankind would be around long enough for it to matter.

“Yes, Regina?” the president finally responded without turning away from the window.

“Chairman MacLeod and his party are here to see you.”

She sighed. MacLeod. He’d been a real pain lately. She didn’t really want to see him, but she had to. “Send them in, please.”

“Right away, ma’am.”

Two quick, solid raps on the old-fashioned wooden door—at least she liked to think of it as real wood—immediately followed the intern’s acknowledgement. The door wasn’t really made of wood, of course. No one used real wood in construction anymore and hadn’t for over a century. To do so wasn’t legal anymore. Federation law protected what was left of the world’s forests. Not that the Federation actually ruled over the governments of its member nations. It didn’t. But some laws, those that the majority of nations had agreed really were for the good of the world as a whole, had been put into place and were enforceable everywhere on Earth. Anyway, the door looked like real wood and was beautifully crafted. That was good enough.

It would have to be.

Having waited a few seconds for a response that never came, Brian MacLeod, easily the International Council on Solar Affairs’ most outspoken and paranoid sub-council chairman, pushed the door open and led the way into the spacious but sparsely decorated office. “Thank you for seeing us on such short notice, Madam President,” he said to the frail, sixty-three year old Bantu woman’s back as he approached her broad, darkly stained oak desk—an almost priceless antique that had been in her family for countless generations. “I realize how extremely busy you are these days.” A hint of the old Scottish brogue, which he’d learned over many years spent in the United States to effectively disguise, made itself evident in his boisterous voice—a sure sign that he felt unusually anxious about this particular meeting.

As well he should, the president thought, after the way he’d spoken to her earlier.

She turned around to greet her visitors properly, but under the circumstances none of the normal pleasantries seemed appropriate, so she merely acknowledged each one with a slight nod of her head. As she’d requested, as if ‘either-bring-them-with-you-or-don’t-bother-coming-at-all’ could be considered a request, two other gentlemen accompanied the chairman. Professor Joseph Verne, the highly-regarded, sophisticated yet approachable and always ‘professorly’ dressed head of Drexel University’s award-winning physics department was out of his element in the presence of the president to say the least, and it showed in his awe-filled yet nervous expression. The recently decorated and promoted Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen, on the other hand, a long-time trusted friend and confidant, appeared perfectly relaxed.

Admiral Hansen brought up the rear and closed and locked the door behind him. Never one to let himself be outshined by members of what he’d long ago branded as ‘the human sub-culture of poorly disciplined civilian suits’—at the time he’d been referring not just to the apparel, of course, but to the people who wore it as well—the admiral had donned his brand new black and tan class-A uniform for the impromptu meeting, complete with all of his ribbons and gold-plated accoutrements, several of which, though he’d earned them in the truest meaning of the word ‘service’, he owed in some way or another to her unwavering support.

“Indeed I am busy, Mister MacLeod,” the president finally responded. Unlike the good chairman, she never bothered trying to suppress her accent when she spoke English. But she’d received all of her higher education in the United States just as he had, so she had learned to annunciate her words precisely enough to make herself clearly understood. “But these days we must be prepared to do anything and everything on short notice,” she continued. “We live in very desperate times, and we are all looking for an answer to the dilemma that had befallen us. And, I must admit that I am most curious as to the details of this particular proposal.”

“Well, ma’am, I’ll certainly be glad to...”

“Nevertheless,” she interrupted as she stepped behind her desk and sat down, “I would not have agreed to see you at all concerning this matter had you not in return agreed to let me hear both sides of the argument for myself, from someone other than you alone. This so-called ‘Timeshift Resolution’ of yours is, to say the least, a most unusual proposal, and if there ever comes a time when I am forced to make an ultimate decision one way or the other, it will no doubt be the most difficult and possibly the most final decision a president has ever had to make for her people. And from what I understand, there were not nearly enough affirmative votes among the members of the Earth Security Council to override a veto, should I choose that avenue.”

That last statement lingered in the air between them, sounding very much like a threat, which was exactly how she’d intended it to sound. The Chairman knew he had his work cut out for him.

“Well, we appreciate your time, nonetheless, ma’am,” he said.

She nodded politely in response, then said, gesturing across her desk toward the three antique, wooden high-back chairs that she’d inherited along with the desk, “Please, gentlemen, be seated.”

She waited while all three settled in. Then, without further preamble, she got right to the point. “All right. So the Earth Security Council has passed this resolution. I understand the basics of what you are planning, Mister MacLeod, but I have not had an opportunity to familiarize myself with the details, so I would appreciate it if you would do so now. And while you’re at it, please explain to me exactly why you think this action could be the answer to our problem.”

“I’d be glad to, Madam President. It’s our opinion...”

“Ah, excuse me, Mister Chairman,” Professor Verne interrupted, clearly as annoyed with MacLeod as the president seemed to be. Apparently, the two of them had already exchanged a few words of their own before their arrival. “What you are about to say might be your opinion, but it’s not my opinion at all.”

“Please, Professor,” the president said before MacLeod could respond to his protest, “I am well aware of how adamantly opposed you are to this resolution. That in fact is exactly the reason why I asked for you to be here this morning. You will have ample opportunity to voice your concerns, I assure you.”

“Of course, Madam President,” Verne said, acquiescing to her authority immediately as he nervously scratched the ever-present light brown stubble on his cheeks and chin. “I uh...I apologize.”

“Accepted.” To MacLeod she said, “Please continue.”

MacLeod nodded his thanks to her, mimicking the characteristic polite response she often gave to others, secretly pleased that the professor had interrupted him so rudely, thus helping him to appear to be the calmer, more reasonable of the two, which he had little doubt he was anyway. But in deference to his well educated yet clearly misguided opponent, he did decide to alter his choice of words.

“It is the opinion of those of us who support this resolution,” he began again, glancing briefly at the professor, who seemed sufficiently pacified for the moment by the modification, “that preventing the destruction of the starcruiser Excalibur twenty-two years ago might reverse and ultimately enable us to prevent the recent string of Veshtonn victories from ever occurring, including, most importantly, the one that brought us all together this morning.”

“I am already aware of your opinion, Mister MacLeod,” the president pointed out. “I’ve been aware of it ever since you interrupted my meeting with the Joint Chiefs to personally hand me a copy of the resolution. What I want to know are the specifics of why you believe this to be the case, and how you intend to go about doing it. But,” she quickly interjected, raising her hand to cut off his reply, “before you start over and possibly waste my time, I have a simple question for you. You’re talking about time-travel. You’re talking about sending someone more than two decades into the past to change our history. Can we actually do that, or haven’t you determined that yet?”

“Oh, we can do it, ma’am, theoretically at least. Based on all the cultural and historical records the Tor’Kana have shared with us and the rest of the Coalition governments over the years, we’ve known for a long time now that the ancient Tor’Roshans used their Portals to visit their targeted planets and return home while always maintaining what we refer to as ‘time-flow synchronization’. In other words, if Tor’Roshan travelers stepped through a Portal on planet-A and visited planet-Z for three and a half days, then upon their return to planet-A that same three and a half days would have passed there as well. For that to have worked, the actual duration of the travel itself would had to have been extremely short if not instantaneous, despite the incredibly vast distances between the two worlds.

“Back when our scientists first learned this, they realized immediately that some sort of precise time targeting and adjustment technology must have been built into the Portals. We’ve had research teams studying our particular little wonder ever since we discovered it. I’m sure the professor here can explain the quantum physics involved, if you’re interested. Assuming they’ve learned to manipulate that technology sufficiently enough...”

“Very well, Mister MacLeod,” she interrupted. “For the sake of this discussion we will assume that we can send someone back in time as you propose. I would like to know why you believe the Excalibur to be the key to solving our problem.”

“Of course, Madam President. If you’ll allow me summarize for you some of the more significant events that have occurred over the last twenty-two years of our history, I believe you’ll agree that our conclusions make perfect sense.”

“Mister MacLeod,” she said, somewhat put off by his suggestion, “grasping the concepts of quantum physics may not be one of my strengths, but I’m sure you’re as aware as the rest of the Federation Congress that I was a history major in university, and that as a career civil servant I have always kept up with current events.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am well aware of that.”

“Then please spare me the history lesson and just get to the point.”

“Forgive me, Madam President, but I ask that you please indulge the members of the council. They feel,” he pointed out, temporarily separating himself from his subordinate council members, hoping to redirect toward them the impatience that the president was obviously still feeling toward him, “that in order for you to make the most informed decision possible, it’s vitally important that I go over all of the significant events with you in great detail.”

The president sighed, then said, “Very well, Mister MacLeod. Proceed.”

“Thank you, ma’am. As I’m sure you will recall, in late June of twenty-one sixty-eight the Excalibur’s battle group was ambushed by a fleet of Veshtonn warships in direct violation of the cease-fire agreement that was in place at that time. Although the escort ships were destroyed, the Excalibur itself, though heavily damaged, survived the initial attack only to be destroyed a few days later after Captain Graves ordered her into the Caldanra star system in an attempt to rescue a Cirran shuttle that had been attacked by the Sulaini. Of course, we didn’t know any of that until many months later when the Excalibur’s wreckage was found.”

“You are correct, Mister MacLeod. I do recall the Excalibur incident. I recall it quite clearly in fact, and I would appreciate it if you would...”

“Yes, ma’am. I understand. But take a good look, if you will, at the chain of events that followed. Sometime between that battle and our recovery of the wreckage, the Veshtonn launched a full-scale invasion of both Cirra and Sulain and quickly secured the entire Caldanra star system for themselves. They set up several bases and began a massive strip-mining program that eventually led to their discovery of bolamide. Before long they learned to use that new and very unusual element to build those phantom torpedoes of theirs that our sensors and scanners still can’t detect.

“Then they sent agents into our system, presumably in a small craft with a bolamide hull because no one ever detected it. Those agents attacked then Vice-President Harkam’s transport when they happened to cross paths with it in interstellar space and the vice-president, his family, and all but one member of the security team were killed as a result.” He glanced very briefly at Hansen and added, “Whether directly or otherwise.” When the admiral showed no outward reaction to the slight, he also added, “That tragic incident nearly cost the admiral here his military career.”

“I am aware of that, Mister MacLeod,” the president impatiently pointed out, “and I am quite sure Admiral Hansen is also very well aware of it. I for one doubt very much that your insensitive holier than thou attitude...”

Her voice faded into oblivion as Hansen’s thoughts turned inward and drifted back more than twenty years into the past, to that place where his nightmares had been forcing him to return each night.

Jonathan Harkam, the Earth Federation’s vice-president at the time, had been invited to say a few words at the opening ceremonies of the new terraforming facility on Tau Ceti-IV. He’d chosen to have his entire family accompany him on the trip, which was certainly nothing new for him, but due to the ongoing war, those responsible for his safety had decided that instead of traveling aboard Solfleet-Two, his official vessel, he and his family would travel in one of the fleet’s heavily armed interstellar transport shuttles. In addition, a team of Solfleet Security Police troops had been hand selected to augment the regular civilian executive security team, and Hansen, then a major with those same Security Police—their unit’s commanding officer in fact—had been appointed to command that team.

The trip to Tau Ceti-IV was supposed to take roughly twelve days, depending on how often the pilots were forced to make course corrections or take evasive action in order to avoid being struck by arrant bits of jumpspace flotsam. Sure, the transport was heavily armored, but even at relatively slow orbital velocities something as seemingly insignificant as a coin-sized meteor fragment could inflict catastrophic damage if it struck a vessel in exactly the wrong place. At hyper-light velocities through jumpspace a vessel could be destroyed before its crew even had time to scream.

As he was a man who did not at all enjoy taking long trips, Harkam had chosen to travel in suspended animation and had directed that his family do the same. So, immediately after the transport achieved escape velocity and departed Earth orbit enroute to the nearest jumpstation, the entire Harkam family had been pit on ice...so to speak.

But they would never make it to their destination.

About five and a half days into the journey, somewhere deep in interstellar jumpspace, a small Veshtonn vessel that the flight crew hadn’t even seen approaching had attacked and quickly immobilized them. With both jump nacelles and the sub-light fusion engines destroyed and their weapons disabled, they could only arm themselves and wait while that, that thing and its blood-warrior guards cut through the hull and boarded the vessel. The ensuing carnage had been so much worse than mere horror, and the unspeakable savagery that the vice-president’s wife and teenage daughter had endured while the rest of them were forced to watch...

With a blink of the eyes, Hansen suddenly found himself back in the president’s office, but he still couldn’t purge the grisly images from his mind. Although he’d been right there in the middle of it all—and although he continued to return there in his nightmares each night—he still couldn’t begin to imagine, twenty-two years later, what it must have been like for poor Jonathan Harkam to be forced to watch but helpless to intervene while his family was so brutally and so gruesomely ravaged and slaughtered. But at least the poor man hadn’t lived and been forced to endure the aftermath. With the press always eager to bend the facts and sensationalize a story, that incident had quickly become the most heavily covered news event of its time, and the investigation and congressional hearings that had followed his rescue had been almost enough at the time to make him wish that he’d died in that vessel, in the icy cold of deep space, along with everyone else.

“Now if you and the other members of your council feel it is so vitally important that I sit here and listen to your historical recitation,” the president was saying, “I will do so. But I will thank you not to color it with your own personal or political comments and opinions. Do I make myself perfectly crystal clear, Mister MacLeod?”

MacLeod cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am, you do. And I apologize. I didn’t mean to...”

“I think you certainly did mean to, Mister MacLeod, and I think it most inappropriate and unprofessional of you.”

“Excuse me, Madam President,” he said defensively, “but I assure you...”

“So far, Mister MacLeod, you haven’t assured me of anything. Please, just get on with it while I still have the patience to listen.”

Hansen had no idea what might have happened between the president and the chairman prior to this meeting, but he hadn’t seen her so annoyed with anyone in a very long time. The poor chairman had to have been feeling uneasy as hell.

“Yes, ma’am,” the chairman yielded, self-consciously adjusting his position in the suddenly uncomfortable chair while wisely biting back several rather off-color retorts that had quickly come to mind. “As I was saying, those same Veshtonn agents—at least we’ve always assumed they were the same agents—then destroyed the Hawking Institute’s lunar orbital platform, effectively blinding Earth to what was going on in roughly half the solar system at any given time. And they escaped undetected. Then, as you know, came the invasion. All our outer system observation platforms, destroyed. The Europan ice-mining and asteroid belt ore mining facilities, likewise all destroyed. All of the Martian and Lunar colonies, either badly damaged or destroyed. Even the Earth itself was nearly overrun.”

“Mister MacLeod,” the president sighed.

“And then, Madam President, by the time that first delegation of Coalition representatives surprised us with their unannounced visit, barely a month after we discovered the Excalibur’s wreckage, we as a people were so xenophobic that our government threatened to blow their entire fleet out of space if they didn’t leave our system immediately and never return. In my...” He stopped himself. She wasn’t interested in hearing his opinion. Instead he said, “It’s a miracle we even met with them face to face first, considering the paranoia that our people were suffering from.” That was still just his opinion, of course, but at least he’d been able to disguise it as a fact. He hoped. She had to listen to facts.

“Mister MacLeod,” the President repeated more sternly.

Her patience was wearing as thin as rice paper, and the fact that making her angry had proven on more than one occasion to be among the worst career moves a politician could make was common knowledge. MacLeod knew he was treading on dangerous ground, but still he pressed on. He was working himself into quite a state, and his accent was beginning to thicken.

“Then t’was our turn to go on the offensive. And we showed the bloody Veshtonn just how tough we were, didn’t we! By losin’ to ‘em in the Caldanra system! And four months after that we lost even bigger when they turned ‘round and took Boshtahr away from us!”

“Mister MacLeod!” the president protested.

“Those outer Boshtahri worlds were rich in bolamide back then, Madam President. So rich, in fact, that the Veshtonn were eventually able to build themselves a whole bloody fleet o’ their phantom ships and re-invade the solar system without even bein’ detected!”

“Mister MacLeod, that is enough!” the president finally shouted, slapping an open hand down on her desk. “I am not an elementary school girl! I know my history! Including the fact that we eventually won the Caldanran campaign, and the fact that we still maintain a strong military presence there to this very day! Nothing of what you have said answers my question!”

She paused to take a deep, calming breath, and then continued. “Now, I want you to give me a straight answer. How might preventing the Excalibur’s destruction twenty-two years ago in turn change what has happened in the here and now?”

MacLeod took a moment to calm down and collect his thoughts as well, before he got himself thrown out of her office, then answered, “Madam President, those of us who voted for this resolution...” he glanced briefly at Verne again, “...believe that if the Excalibur had not been destroyed, then perhaps the positive diplomatic relationship that we now enjoy with the Cirran government might have begun that much sooner. If it had, then we, rather than the Veshtonn, would have established a dominant presence in the Caldanra system. Under those circumstances we might have been the ones to discover the bolamide and use it to build phantom missiles and torpedoes. The Veshtonn might never have gotten their claws on any of it, and without it they wouldn’t have stood a chance against us. History might then have played itself out in a much more favorable manner. At the very least the Excalibur’s captain would have been able to report the Veshtonn fleet’s violation of the cease-fire agreement to Solfleet Central Command, and that warning might have made a huge difference for us in both the Caldanran and Boshtahri campaigns. It might possibly have even enabled us to prevent the subsequent invasion of our own system.”

The president could scarcely believe her ears. Was he serious? Was that it? Was that the best he could do? Had she asked Regina to rearrange her entire week’s schedule for this? “If, Mister MacLeod?” she asked. “Perhaps? Might have? Your theory seems to be filled with uncertainties. Are you really asking me to base a decision of this magnitude on little more than conjecture and a few remote possibilities?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You are not doing a very good job of convincing me, and I am quite frankly disappointed in your attempt.”

“But, Madam President...”

“Wait just a moment,” she said, a barely raised hand effectively stifling anything more he might have wanted to say.

She turned her gaze to Professor Verne, who had been nodding his head in time with her somewhat animated response to the chairman’s no doubt politically motivated song and dance as though she had been singing a song. “Professor Verne, even before you spoke out I was well aware, as I already indicated, that you are quite adamantly opposed this course of action,” she said. “What are your specific arguments against it?”

Verne straightened slightly in his chair and gave his right cheek and his chin another nervous scratch. It sounded like sandpaper sliding across coarse wood against the grain. If he were a gambling man, he’d have bet the chairman had something to gain, whether personally, politically, or both, by taking the stand that he was taking. He was, after all, a politician who hadn’t yet ascended to the highest possible peak of his career, and he was known to have some very lofty goals. That made for a formidable and possibly even dangerous opponent. He’d have to be clear, but careful.

He cleared his throat, then began to deliver the speech that he’d rehearsed over and over again, hoping that it wouldn’t sound nearly as rehearsed as it was. “Ah, Madam President, I admit that it is possible, however unlikely, that traveling into the past and changing the course of history by preventing the Excalibur’s destruction could indeed result in the chain of events that the honorable chairman has outlined. However, such an action on our part could just as likely result in horrific consequences for Earth, and for the entire Coalition as well.”

“Explain.”

“Well, simply put, ma’am, it is virtually impossible for anyone to predict with any known degree of accuracy how this theoretical time-traveler’s interference with the course of history might affect our world. Each and every little action that he or she takes...”

“Each and every little action?” MacLeod blurted out, interrupting. “For God sake, Professor, we’re no’ just conducting a harmless physics experiment here! We’re tryin’ to prevent the extinction of every member race o’ the Coalition! We canno’ afford to be concerned with every little detail!”

“I beg your pardon, Mister Chairman, but it goes far beyond little details,” the professor countered. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that your time-traveler does manage to prevent the Excalibur’s destruction. Let’s even say that galactic history decides to cooperate with you and actually follows the path that you and your colleagues have so ingeniously come up with. No one can possibly predict the subsequent actions of all those people aboard the Excalibur who were meant to die, but whose lives your time-traveler will have saved. Not to mention those of all the others who might be born to them afterwards. Or even those of the millions who were meant to die in the war that followed. What’s to prevent one or more of them from taking some action that will adversely affect our history and put it on an even more catastrophic course than it’s on now, such as leading a violent coup against the Federation government, for example, or assassinating the president?”

Judging from the president’s reaction, that last statement had made exactly the impact on her that Verne had been hoping it would. If MacLeod didn’t know it before, he certainly must have realized by now that he, too, was dealing with a much more politically insightful opponent than he had originally anticipated.

“I believe the professor makes a valid point, Mister MacLeod,” the president said. “How do you propose to protect the world against drastic changes for the worse?”

“Yes, Mister MacLeod. How do you?” Verne parroted, despite his perceived need for caution.

“With all due respect, Madam President, could anything that might happen as a result of this mission possibly be any worse than what we’re already facing?” MacLeod asked. “If we don’t do this, then how do you propose we save the Coalition from Veshtonn domination here and now, given what’s happened? The way I see it, and the way the council sees it, it’s simply a matter o’ choosing the lesser of two evils. If we don’t do this, then we lose everything. Earth and the Coalition will fall to the Veshtonn and all our people will be at best enslaved. At worst... Well, I think we’re all aware o’ what the Veshtonn did to the Boshtahri when they retook that system.”

He paused momentarily to allow those images that Solfleet’s Intelligence operatives had been able to smuggle out of that system—those few horrible images of what had been left of the Boshtahri population after the Veshtonn invasion—to replay themselves in the minds of each person in the room. Professor Verne might have shown himself to be a bit more politically savvy than he’d originally given him credit for, but he was still an amateur when it came to playing politics with the big boys. “If, on the other hand, we do go through with this mission, then we at least have a chance,” he concluded.

“That’s twice you’ve referred to ‘this mission’, Mister MacLeod,” the president pointed out. “The Earth Security Council passed the resolution only yesterday, yet you talk as if you’ve already laid down a plan and are prepared to move forward with it immediately.”

“To be honest with you, ma’am, we have and we are, to an extent. I believe it’s our only hope of survival at this point.”

The president hesitated a moment, then stood and smoothed her deep burgundy and black African serape as she turned away from her guests to once again gaze out through the large window behind her desk at the city streets below. She saw none of the grandeur before her as she considered both sides of the argument in silence for what seemed to her guests like several long minutes, during which time none of them dared speak for fear of drawing her rarely brandished but nonetheless infamous wrath down upon themselves.

Finally, she faced them again. “Gentlemen, our Coalition is...or rather was...comprised of over a dozen member worlds and many more protectorates. Too many of those worlds have already fallen to the Veshtonn and I have no desire to stand by and watch while the rest of them meet that same fate.”

MacLeod straightened triumphantly in his chair.

“However,” she continued, looking directly at him with something of an angry glare, “I do not share your apparent taste for playing God with the galaxy, Mister MacLeod.” A glimmer of hope now shone in the professor’s eyes, while the chairman’s shoulders began to slouch ever so slightly under the burden of impending defeat.

But the always resourceful chairman still held one more card to play. “I understand your misgivings, ma’am,” he said, “but there is something more you should consider before you make your final decision.”

Caught off guard, Professor Verne leered at his opponent and scratched his chin with suspicion. Any and all information and/or secret arguments that existed between the two sides of the issue were supposed to have been brought out into the open between the two of them prior to this meeting. The fact that the chairman had held something back smelled to the professor like evidence of some kind of conspiracy.

“What more should I consider?” the president asked as she returned to her chair.

“Over the years,” MacLeod began, all traces of his accent gone, “it has become common knowledge that the Excalibur was attacked and destroyed by the Veshtonn while attempting to rescue a Cirran shuttle in the Caldanran star system. But in all that time, some of the more so-called minor details that appear in the official reports seem to have been forgotten. One of them is the precise wording of the final report itself. Specifically, it states that the Excalibur was destroyed by ‘unidentified superior hostile alien forces, presumed to be the Veshtonn.’ That’s ‘presumed’ to be the Veshtonn, Madam President. That presumption now appears to be wrong.”

“Really?” the president asked skeptically. “And why is that?”

“Because about a month and a half ago, while the Battle of Rosha’Kana was still raging, the admiral here received information that indicates the Excalibur was destroyed by one of our own starcruisers, the Albion, with the help of two former military vessels that were in service with Newstar Corporation at the time. The initial Veshtonn attack on the Excalibur battle group is and always has been a known, confirmed fact. But according to this information they had nothing to do with the follow up attack.”

The president glanced at Hansen as she leaned forward and rested her elbows on her desktop, confident that he would read the ‘Why-didn’t-you-ever-tell-me-about-that?’ very clearly as it flashed across her face. But the words she gave voice to were still directed at the chairman. “The Albion?” she asked. “Are you telling me that one Solfleet vessel attacked and destroyed another Solfleet vessel?”

“That is what the information indicates, ma’am,” the chairman answered, choosing his words very carefully. If he was going to win this debate, it was important he maintain at least the appearance of possessing some measure of objectivity. “Unfortunately, we cannot be absolutely sure this information is a hundred percent accurate because there’s no way for us to positively confirm the source’s identification.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, Madam President, as you know, once we found the Excalibur’s wreckage, it wasn’t long before most of the life pods were also located. And while it’s true that no survivors were ever found, there were about twenty crewmembers whose remains were never recovered. In the absence of any direct evidence of their deaths, they were all listed as ‘Missing-in-Action’, and their names remain on the M-I-A roles to this day.

“This information came to Admiral Hansen indirectly, in the form of a Veshtonn computer record of a high-power burst transmission that originated deep within their space. It was intercepted sometime last year as best we can tell, and was transmitted by someone alleging himself to be one of those missing crewmembers.”

“Really?” the president asked. Although their names still appeared on the M.I.A. roles, Solfleet Central Command had all but written off the missing members of the Excalibur’s crew years ago. The possibility that one of them might suddenly have been heard from after all this time was nothing short of astonishing. Especially considering where he’d alleged himself to be. “Did this alleged crewmember identify himself?”

“Yes, ma’am. He claimed to be a Lieutenant Robert O’Donnell. Our records indicate he was a tactical officer aboard the Excalibur for the three years leading up to its loss.”

“O’Donnell?” She looked at Hansen. “Any relation to that Crewman O’Donnell of yours whose arrest you mentioned the other day, Admiral?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hansen answered. “Robert O’Donnell is, or was her father.”

“Hmm. Interesting. You’ll have to fill me in on some of the details when we have more time.” Addressing MacLeod again, she asked, “And what about the Albion itself? What do we know or think we know of its whereabouts during the time of the Excalibur’s destruction?”

“We know the Albion was decommissioned in early February of twenty-one sixty-two, and that it was dry-docked at the Mars Orbital Shipyards—MOS-balled, as it were. According to shipyard records, that’s exactly where it stayed until a little over two years after the battle of Epsilon Eridani, at which time several major upgrades were completed and it was relaunched under a temporary recommission.”

“Two years after the battle of Epsilon Eridani, you say?” the president asked. “But the Excalibur was destroyed only a year and a half after that battle,” she then reminded him.

“A little less than seventeen months, actually,” MacLeod corrected her.

“A little less or a little more, what difference does it make?” she asked. “If the Excalibur was destroyed several months before the Albion was ever relaunched, then how can this new information of yours possibly be correct?”

“As I’ve already said, Madam President, we can’t be absolutely sure that it is. But we’ve also discovered something that makes me wonder if the shipyard records might be erroneous.”

Even as Professor Verne threw his hands up with a disgusted grunt and dropped them noisily to his lap, the president drew a deep breath and sighed, trying to hold on to the last shred of her sorely-tested patience. “And what is that, Mister MacLeod?”

“At least as early as three years after the Excalibur’s destruction, perhaps even earlier than that, everyone who was stationed at the Martian shipyards at that time and who could reasonably be expected to have possessed some knowledge as to whether or not the Albion was ever relaunched prior to its upgrade and recommissioning, was dead.”

The president was taken aback, and judging from the professor’s reaction—Hansen, for his part, remained as stoic and unreadable as ever—he was just as surprised as she was. Clearly, he hadn’t been told about this before.

“Everyone?” she asked, her patience suddenly renewed.

“Yes, ma’am. Every space traffic controller, every flight engineer, every deck crewman, technician, records clerk, and every former member of the Albion crew. Not to mention an inordinately high percentage of their immediate family members. Everyone who might possibly have known anything about it.”

“That is most...unusual, Mister MacLeod,” she remarked.

“It is most suspicious, Madam President, and I believe it lends a certain amount of credibility to this new information. It’s too much of a coincidence to be just a coincidence.”

“I agree. I trust the matter is being looked into.”

“Indeed it is, ma’am. The admiral’s agency and the Federation Bureau of Investigations are looking into it jointly.”

“Good. Now, all that being said, and as obvious as it might seem, are we absolutely sure that whatever was going on back then that led to all those deaths had to involve the Albion?”

“To be honest, Madam President, we can’t be absolutely sure of that either, at least not yet. But the investigators have been looking into every record of events from that time period that they can find, and so far the apparent status of the Albion is the only thing we have any reason to question, other than the deaths themselves of course.”

“That reason being nothing more than this new information of yours,” she concluded. “This...this transmission record, which is itself of questionable reliability.”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

The president gazed silently at MacLeod for a moment, then shifted to Verne. “I take it from your reaction a few moments ago, Professor, that you were not made aware of this information prior to this meeting.”

“Ah, no ma’am, I certainly was not,” he responded, glaring at the chairman again. Then he looked back to the president and said, “But, ah, since we seem to be laying our hold cards out on the table now, here’s another one for you to think about. Of all the published theories on the possible effects of backward travel through time and subsequent changes to history, only three have ever really been accepted as plausible by the scientific community.”

“And they are?”

The first, which seems to have its roots in nothing more scientific than a late twentieth century work of science fiction, states that any given historical event is the result of a complex. That is to say that there exists no one single cause of any event, so it’s quite difficult, though not completely impossible, to change the flow of history simply by altering one event. That being said, if someone were to go back in time and kill one of a man’s immediate parents before that man is conceived, then his birth would naturally be prevented. But according to this theory, if someone were to go back and kill an ancestor numerous generations before that man’s birth, then he would still be born because his genes result from the entirety of his ancestry. There will have been compensation for the loss of that one single ancestor.”

“That’s all well and good for a single person, Professor, but what about a major event?” the president asked. “Like the destruction of the Excalibur?”

“Such an event could be, and I stress could be, what’s referred to under this theory as a nexus—a key event in history. If such an event is altered, then the subsequent timeline is drastically changed. Examples of such a nexus might include the prevention of Adolph Hitler’s birth by killing one of his immediate parents, the destruction of the Japanese fleet before they launch their planes for the attack on Pearl Harbor, or certainly the destruction of the Veshtonn home world before they ever achieve space flight.”

“Now there’s an idea,” MacLeod quipped.

Ignoring him, the president asked, “What are the other two theories?”

“The second, the one the chairman is obviously counting on to be the correct one, states that if a significant event in history is altered, then all subsequent events that occurred as a result of that event are altered as well, thus changing the future that the time-traveler came from. The farther back along the timeline the initial change occurs, the more drastic all the subsequent changes become because their numbers compound exponentially. The major argument against this theory is that a traveler could not possibly make a significant change to the timeline without creating a paradox.”

“Explain.”

“All right. Say for example that a traveler went back in time to prevent World War Two, and that he was successful. Not just in delaying it, mind you, but in completely stopping it from ever happening. World War Two never happens, and because it never happens, his mission back in time to prevent it never happens, either. But, if his mission to prevent it never happens, then the war breaks out.”

“I see. And the third theory?”

“The third and somewhat more logical theory is that if a significant event in history is altered, then a new timeline is created from that point forward. That timeline continues to unfold on its own as a sort of parallel universe if you will, but the future that the time-traveler originally came from remains unchanged.”

“You said that theory is the more logical of the three, Professor,” the president observed. “May I assume then that it’s the one to which you yourself subscribe?”

“Yes you may, Madam President,” he answered without hesitation. “You may absolutely assume that.”

“And why is that?”

“Because physical and natural science supports it.”

“How so?”

“Think of time as a river, Madam President. Let’s assume that the water in this river flows down hill in a southerly direction. Halfway down the hill the riverbed forks, but all the water bounces off a large rock near where the fork occurs and stays to its left, thus flowing southeast from that point on. One day, a creature that lives in the water sees the fork as he floats by it. He climbs out of the water and walks back to the fork to try to move the rock and force all the water to bounce to the right and flow to the southwest. He succeeds, and from that moment on, all the water hits the other side of the rock and flows southwest. But has the water that the being climbed out of—the water that has already flowed to the southeast, changed its course? No, it hasn’t. It continues along its original path, still flowing to the southeast.

“According to this theory, Madam President, if you send someone back in time to change the past, and if that someone is successful, it still won’t change a thing for us. Unless of course the analogy of the river is even more accurate than any of us in the scientific community have previously theorized, in which case our timeline might one day simply dry up and cease to exist altogether.”

The president sat back in her chair and considered all that she’d been told. This decision was going to be even more difficult than she had originally anticipated. “Standard procedure dictates that I present this proposal to the Council of Coalition Member Worlds for their input,” she pointed out.

“Of course,” Verne agreed immediately. “Then you’ll see.”

“What will I see, Professor?”

“Wisdom, Madam President. The representatives of the other Coalition worlds will know of the incredible dangers we’re dealing with here. Especially the Tor’Kana. They’ll never approve of this insane resolution.”

“You seem very sure of yourself.”

“Madam President, I’ve had a number of opportunities throughout my career to work with some of the most brilliant minds the Coalition has to offer. I am sure of myself.”

“Excuse me, Madam President,” MacLeod interjected, “but I must caution you against taking this matter up with any of the other Coalition governments’ representatives. The members of the Earth Security Council feel it is vitally important that we continue to keep the existence of our Earth-targeted Portal classified.”

“Even now, Mister MacLeod, after all that has happened?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason we’ve always kept it classified, Madam President. As the esteemed professor here pointed out, time-travel can be an extremely dangerous business, theortetically at least. Therefore the Portals represent an extremely dangerous technology. If the rest of the Coalition were to find out there’s a functioning Portal aimed directly at the Earth, the possibilities of the wrong person gaining access to it would be greatly multiplied. And if that wrong person somehow did gain access to it, who knows what he might use it for?”

“I see. So what you are telling me, Mister MacLeod, is that the council wants me to make this decision on my own, without any input from any of our allies.”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am. The way the council sees it, this is nothing less than a matter of planetary security.”

“That is not going to be easy.”

“No, ma’am, it’s not. And they understand that most clearly. Nevertheless, they insist that you do just that.”

“Oh, they insist, do they?”

MacLeod raised his hands in self-defense. “I’m only the messenger, Madam President. I’m not trying to tell you what to do.”

She exhaled loudly, then turned to Hansen again. “We’ve barely heard a peep out of you since you got here, Admiral,” she commented. “What’s your opinion on all of this?”

The weathered, fifty-three year old officer drew a deep breath as he carefully considered his answer. He hadn’t seen his old friend face to face in over three months—the both of them were always so busy—and had been looking her over closely since the moment he sat down. She looked thinner than before. Not emaciated by any means, but gaunt enough that he worried her health might not be what it should. And her close-cropped black hair had begun to gray at the temples and around behind her ears. After all these years, the pressures of her office were finally beginning to take their toll. What she needed was a little moral support.

“I am, first and foremost, a soldier and a patriot, Madam President,” he said. “My duty here is to receive and act on your orders. My personal opinion on this matter is completely irrelevant.”

“That is nothing but recruit dogma, Admiral, and you know it,” she scolded, clearly disappointed with his response, “and recruit dogma has no place in this meeting. I want to know where you stand with all of this.”

He combed his fingers through his thick, graying, sandy blonde hair and gave his scalp a scratch, then dropped his hands back to his lap and explained, “You know me, Madam President. I’m a realist. All this time-travel stuff is beyond my desire to even try to comprehend. It’s not my area of expertise and I won’t pretend to completely understand one theory or another. I’m sorry, but I really am here just to receive your orders. If you tell me to send an agent on this mission, then I’ll send one. If you tell me not to,” he hesitated, just for a moment, “then I won’t.” With a shrug of his shoulders and a slight cock of his head he added, “It’s as simple as that, ma’am.”

“Not quite so simple as that, I think,” she disagreed. She knew him far too well to believe for one second that he’d blindly follow his superiors’ orders simply because they were his superiors’ orders. He had an opinion, no doubt a very strong one, one way or the other. But she accepted his answer, at least for the moment, out of friendship and respect. He obviously didn’t want to say anything more about it.

“Let me ask you this, then,” she moved on. “If you do send someone back, would that person be able to return home again?”

Hansen cringed, but only internally. Of all the questions she could have asked, why did she have to ask that one? He said, “Perhaps the professor would be better suited to answer...”

“I’m asking you, Admiral.” She knew the value he placed on the lives and well being of every one of the men and women who served under his command. If there were any doubt as to the possibility of the traveler returning home, he’d be the one to tell her.

She had him cornered. He had no choice but to answer. Damn. “Well, Madam President, as the chairman indicated earlier, we know that the ancient Tor’Rosha who created the Portals used them for two-way travel, so...”

“We also know the Tor’Rosha didn’t interfere in the development of the worlds they visited in any way,” Professor Verne piped in. All eyes turned to him. “Ah, they went strictly as observers, and never revealed themselves to anyone.”

“That we know of,” MacLeod pointed out.

“As I was saying,” Hansen continued as he threw the other men a brief but very clear message—‘do not interrupt me again’—with just a stern expression. Then he turned his attention back to the president. “I’m inclined to say yes, ma’am. I personally don’t know the specific procedures, but there is apparently some kind of recall device that he’d have to carry with him. Once the targeted moment in history has passed, he’d need only to activate this device to be pulled forward to the present again.”

“Yes, but to which present, Admiral?”

“Ma’am?”

“To which timeline would he return? Would he return to the professor’s unaltered flow of river water that’s already passed the fork, to the home he knows? Or would he return to an altered present and find himself stranded in a less familiar world?”

“Since we have no way of knowing which if any of these theories is correct, there’s no way I can answer that question, ma’am.”

“So you may run the risk of losing your time-traveling agent forever,” the president concluded.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And have you found an agent willing to risk his or her own life on a mission based solely on these theories of yours? Willing to risk everything he or she holds dear to carry out this mission that the Chairman has already planned so efficiently?”

They weren’t actually his theories of course, but that was beside the point. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What does that mean?”

“Commander Royer—my executive officer,” he pointed out for the professor’s benefit—“has been involved in the planning of this mission almost since it began, and she’s come to me with a recommendation. It’s a little unorthodox, but I believe has merit.”

“And what is that?”

“When Captain Graves took command of the Excalibur he was married and had four young children—a girl and three boys. One of them, the middle son, is currently a squad sergeant with the Solfleet Marine Corps Rangers stationed on Cirra.” Had the chairman and the professor not been present, he could have been more specific as to the squad sergeant’s exact assignment, but they were present and that information was classified, so pointing out that he was a Marine Corps Ranger would have to suffice. At least for the moment. “When Commander Royer first told me about him, she asked me a question that I think makes a very good point. Who among us would be more highly motivated to prevent the Excalibur’s destruction than one of its captain’s own children?”

“But he is not one of your agents,” the president said.

“No, ma’am.”

“Then does he not lack the specialized training and experience that someone assigned to such a mission would require?”

“Sergeant Graves has only been with the Marines for about two years. Before that he spent about seven years with the Military Police Security Forces and something over a year with the Criminal Investigations Division. He’s also worked at least one major undercover operation before, which I understand he performed very well. If he were to attend the S-I-A Academy, he’d gain the skill set to accomplish this mission and he’d know how to use it. We’ve already sent an agency recruiting officer to see him.”

The president’s eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead. “Oh? Have you really?”

“Yes, ma’am. About three and a half weeks ago.”

“I trust your recruiting officer doesn’t know anything about this resolution?”

No, ma’am, of course not.” As well as she knew him, how could she even ask such a question? Perhaps the pressures of her office were taking more of a toll on her than was already apparent. “All we told him was that we’re interested in bringing Sergeant Graves into the agency, and that’s all he was sent to talk to him about.”

“And has Sergeant Graves expressed an interest in joining?”

“No ma’am. Not according to the latest report,” Hansen answered hesitantly, “but we’re still working on it.”

“Why not just order him to join?” Verne asked.

“That’s not the way the agency operates, Professor,” Hansen explained, “or the rest of the fleet for that matter. Due to the nature of the job, our agents are recruited strictly on a voluntary basis. If we were to make an exception to that practice for one individual it would draw too much attention.” He looked back to the president and added, “The most we can do is to put a little pressure in him, quietly, but in the end it will have to be his decision.”

“Yes, well, I will leave that to you.” She let out a long, slow breath. “Well, gentlemen, this is certainly one that I am going to have to sleep on for a while. I am obviously not up on all of these time-travel theories myself, and there is an awful lot to think about. I sincerely hope that we will never find ourselves in the position of having to seriously consider taking such a drastic step, but if we do find ourselves in that position, and if I ultimately decide to authorize this mission, I will transmit that decision to you in plenty of time for you to carry it out. Now please, excuse me. I have a lot of research to do. Thank you for coming.”

As Hansen and Verne stood up to leave, Chairman MacLeod took it upon himself to offer the president one last piece of unsolicited advice. “Consider this point as well, Madam President, if you would. Our latest estimate puts the Veshtonn armada at our doorstep within six to eight months. The longer you take to make your decision, the more campaigns the Veshtonn will win and the closer they’ll get to this system. And if they do reach Earth again, we’ll fall quickly and we’ll fall very hard.”

“I believe I just told you, Mister MacLeod, that if it becomes necessary, I will give you my final decision in plenty of time for you to set your mission into motion...if I decide to authorize it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” MacLeod said with a submissive nod as he stood with the others. “Thank you, Madam President, for your time.”

Verne had wanted to make one last comment as well—a comment that might very well have swung the president’s thinking over to his side of the argument for good. But in view of how she’d just responded to MacLeod, he reconsidered that desire and quietly followed the chairman out of the office.

Hansen fell in behind the others as they left, but as he passed through the doorway, the president called after him, “Just a moment, Admiral, if you will.”

“Certainly, Madam President,” he responded. He stepped back in and let the door close the others out, then started back toward her desk, but she raised a hand, halting him in mid stride.

“First, I want to apologize for snapping at you,” she began. “You didn’t deserve that, and I was wrong for doing so.”

“No apology necessary, ma’am. With all the pressure you’ve been under...”

“Nonetheless, I do apologize.”

“Then I accept,” he said, nodding graciously.

“Secondly,” she continued, “why didn’t you tell me about the Albion?”

“As Chairman MacLeod pointed out, ma’am, that information was unconfirmed, and still is. But I would have told you this morning, if he hadn’t done so himself first.” The president gazed at him for several seconds without saying anything more, so he asked, “Was there anything else, Madam President?”

“Yes,” she answered after another moment. “I trust your judgment without reservation, Admiral,” she told him. “I always have, but I have to ask. Wouldn’t it make more sense to send one of your properly trained and more experienced agents on a mission like this? Why this Marine Corps sergeant? Are you really that confident in him?”

Hansen drew a deep breath and let it out slowly—time enough to whip up an answer she might actually buy—then explained, “I don’t know the sergeant personally, but I have had some indirect experience with him.”

“What experience?”

“That undercover operation I mentioned? I was referring to the Caldanran Intervention. He was one of the Security Forces troops who posed as a crewman on the Athena. More recently he was with the Tripoli Marines at Rosha’Kana. Not assigned. Just in the wrong place at the right time. Overall, his military record is exemplary. He started as one of Sergeant Walker Carlson’s products—was with him during the Tamour incident in fact. He really proved himself back then and he’s been decorated several times since. He’s highly intelligent, physically fit, and extremely dedicated to his duties. He doesn’t give up easily when things don’t go his way. And he’s not just a Ranger. He’s with our Special Ops, so he’s practiced at deceit and keeping secrets. Add to all of that the fact that the Excalibur’s captain was his father, and... I’d have to say yes, Madam President. I am that confident.”

“For someone who’s never met him you sure know a lot about him.”

“Special Operatives’ record jackets are extensive, and extremely detailed.”

She gazed at him for several long seconds without saying a word, then settled back in her chair a little more and folded her arms across her chest. “Sit down, Nick.”

Hansen hesitated, realizing that he’d fallen far short of convincing her—that she hadn’t bought one word of his explanation. Then, not wanting to make her ask a second time, he took a seat in the same chair he’d warmed during the meeting and looked her square in the eye. Several more seconds passed in silence between them before the president finally spoke again.

“What are you not telling me?” she asked.

“Ma’am?”

“I know you better than that. The familial relationship between the Excalibur’s captain and this Marine sergeant of yours is interesting, but it isn’t nearly enough. Not for you. And all that song and dance about his impressive military record?” She shook her head. “Irrelevant. No. Under normal circumstances you would never entrust such a sensitive and important mission to anyone but the best and most experienced of your deep cover agents.”

“Begging your pardon, Madam President, but the current circumstances are anything but normal,” he reminded her.

“Granted, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? Much more.”

Hansen drew another deep breath and exhaled long and loud, then nodded affirmatively and admitted it. “Yes, ma’am, there is.”

“What is it, Nick? Aside from this awful war, what’s troubling you?”

“Off the record?” he asked, almost pleading with his eyes.

“All right, provided you tell me the whole truth this time.”

He nodded again, then began. “As you well know, that...incident with Vice-President Harkam and his family stayed with me for a very long time.”

“You eventually sought counseling as I recall.”

“Command mandated that counseling, so I had no choice. But, yes, I did see a counselor regularly for several months afterwards. What you don’t know...what no one knows...is that from time to time...” Another deep breath, then, “The nightmares have returned.”

The president’s gaze fell to her desktop. She recalled how troublesome those nightmares had been for him all those years ago. How he’d suffered from chronic exhaustion, unable to get even a single good night’s sleep for the longest time. To think that they’d returned to haunt him after so many years... She looked back up at him. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Nick,” she said, genuinely concerned, “but what does that have to do with...”

“What does that have to do with Sergeant Graves?” he asked for her.

“Yes.”

Hansen stood up, folded his hands behind his back, and stepped around to the window to gaze out at the mountains and the lake. The president turned her chair with him and gazed at him as several more moments passed in silence. She wanted to say something more. She wanted to coax the truth out of him, but she refrained. Better to let him take his time and allow him to offer it up on his own.

“The nightmares were always the same back then,” he finally began, staring out the window but seeing only the horrible pictures in his mind. “The battle, the unspeakable horrors of what...what they did to Harkam’s family while they forced us all to watch, Harkam himself crying out in agony and begging me to stop the pain...” He paused, drew another deep but trembling breath, then continued. “And the loneliness—that awful feeling of complete and total isolation. Knowing that I’m the only survivor aboard a powerless ship full of rotting, eviscerated bodies, doomed to drift helplessly through deep space until my oxygen runs out and I slowly suffocate.”

“Were the same,” the president quietly asked after a moment. “Has something changed?”

Hansen nodded almost imperceptibly—she was as always an extremely perceptive woman—then blurted out, “I’m not the only survivor anymore.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What?”

He folded his arms across his broad chest as he turned and faced her. “The nightmares returned again last month, just after the Veshtonn victory in the Rosha’Kana system.” He started pacing slowly around the room. “Everything that ever filled those nightmares still happens, but now there are subtle differences in the minor details. Someone says something in a slightly different way, or...or agrees to eat chicken for dinner instead of holding out for steak. Little things like that. And at the end of it all, there’s another survivor—one of the Security Forces troops under my command. I see his face clearly enough, but I don’t recognize him. I mean, I think I know him in the dream, but in real life I don’t.” He stopped pacing and looked at the president. “At least I didn’t, until Commander Royer showed me his file.”

“Sergeant Graves?” the president asked, bewildered.

An extremely perceptive woman. “Sergeant Graves,” he confirmed, nodding.

“But...that’s...not possible,” she pointed out, shaking her head.

“I know.” He returned to the window and folded his hands behind his back again. “Don’t ask me to explain it, Mirriazu, because I can’t. I know there were no other survivors aboard that ship, and that Dylan Graves was just a small child at the time, so he couldn’t have been there regardless. But when Commander Royer showed me that file, I recognized him immediately as the second survivor in my nightmares.”

“I...I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” Hansen confessed, shaking his head, “but my gut tells me that if we do send someone back on this mission, it absolutely has to be him. No one else.”

“Based solely on a nightmare?”

He faced her again. “I know it sounds crazy,” he admitted. “Hell, I can’t explain this gut feeling of mine any more than I can explain his appearance in my nightmares in the first place. Maybe... I don’t know. Maybe I’m just losing my mind. Or maybe somehow, in some...some kind of parallel timeline somewhere...in one of Professor Verne’s alternate universes perhaps, we’ve already sent him back on the Timeshift mission and he somehow got himself assigned to my team afterwards.”

“Which, if true, means that he was unable to return to his own time,” she concluded.

Hansen sighed. “At least up to that point in time. A logical assumption, unfortunately.”

“But even if you are correct, how and why would that effect your nightmares?”

“Hell if I know,” he answered honestly. Then he faced away again and cleared his throat. “We’ve never dealt with time travel before.” He started pacing again. “Maybe this theoretical parallel timeline is somehow connected to our own. Maybe they intersect or are intertwined in some way. I don’t know. All I do know is that I’ve got a very strong hunch that Dylan Graves must be the one we send back, if we send anyone at all.”

“Ordinarily, I would trust your hunches more than most other officers’ facts, Nick, but this is all very strange.”

Hansen snickered. “You’ll get no argument from me.”

“What if you cannot convince Sergeant Graves to join your agency?”

“Then we’ll have to send someone else, assuming you approve the mission.”

“Regardless of what your gut tells you?”

“I feel very strongly that it has to be him, as I said, but I won’t allow my feelings to interfere with my duty. If you do order the mission, then I will send someone.”

“Perhaps we should call the professor back in here and discuss...”

“Absolutely not,” Hansen insisted, rudely cutting her off. Under her slightly perturbed glare he returned to his seat and took more care to guard his tone. They were friends, but she was still the president. “I still have a few enemies in powerful positions above me, Mirriazu. If word gets out that I’m having those nightmares again after all these years, some over-zealous fleet doctor somewhere is apt to declare me unfit for duty. Let alone for command of the agency. I remind you, though I’m sure it’s unnecessary, you agreed that all this was off the record. I’m counting on you to keep it just between us.”

“Very well,” she agreed. “I assure you, I’ll do that.”

“Thank you.”

“And on the record, Admiral, if your gut, as you say, tells you that Sergeant Graves must be the one, then I want you to do your very best to recruit him. If the question of our survival comes down to my approving this mission, I’ll want to be confident that you have someone you believe to be the very best choice for the job standing by.”

“Understood, Madam President.”

“In the meantime I want you to continue with your duties as if this resolution were not an option, because right now I consider it to be our very last resort, and I doubt very much that that will ever change.”

“Also understood,” he assured her. “The Joint Chiefs and I are meeting on Monday to finalize plans for a Rosha’Kana counterattack.”

“Very good. Now, if you will excuse me, Nick, I have a lot of bureaucratic nonsense to attend to.”

“Certainly.” Hansen stood, but the two of them had long since gotten over the need for formalities between them—the use of each others’ first names acted as a sort of signal between them, for one to let the other know that they were communicating as friends rather than as professional colleagues—so he didn’t bother snapping to attention and saluting. “Try to have a good day, Mirriazu.”

“You also, Nick. Say ‘hello’ to Heather for me, and please, express my deepest apologies for missing her birthday.”

“I will.” And with that, he turned on his heel—not quite a picture perfect about face—and headed for the door.

She watched him go and almost let the door close behind him, but she had to know. She hit the button, holding the door open. “Nick,” she called out.

Hansen faced around and, when she waved him back in, stepped back into her office yet again. “Ma’am?”

“You said earlier that you are a soldier and a patriot. I understand that, but I really want to know your opinion of this whole ‘Timeshift Resolution’ question,” she told him frankly. “Is it worth all this attention or not?”

Hansen considered his response very carefully. There were things he knew, things he’d done through the years and things he’d learned as a result that he couldn’t admit to her no matter how long they’d known each other. No matter how long they’d been friends.

“I live in the here and now, Mirriazu,” he began. “My concern is for the security of Earth in the here and now. I don’t know anything about time travel, altering the past, or creating a new reality. To be perfectly honest the whole thing sounds like science fiction to me, regardless of the change in my nightmares or anything else. What I do know is that the Veshtonn have taken over the most important star system in the Coalition and that we’ve got to take back, and fast, before it’s too late to make any difference.

“The Rosha’Kana counterattack, Madam President. In my opinion, that is where we should concentrate our efforts.”

“So you agree with Professor Verne, then,” she tentatively concluded. “You stand against the ‘Timeshift’ mission.”

“I will continue to do everything I have to do in order to be prepared to go forward with it, should you give the order. But to tell you the truth, I think it’s a waste of time and effort.”

“Despite everything you’ve said in the last few minutes.”

He hesitated for the briefest moment, then avoided the question altogether by answering, “You asked my opinion.”

The president considered his answer for several seconds, then thanked him and sent him on his way.

As he strolled down the hall, all alone—Chairman MacLeod and Professor Verne hadn’t stuck around to wait for him, and why should they?—he had little doubt that, given the proper training, Graves could indeed accomplish the mission. The bigger questions were one, was there still enough time to convince him to join the agency and send him through the academy, then get him to Window World and through the Portal before the Veshtonn swept through that sector? And two, if he did make it back twenty-two years into the past, and if he did succeed, would his actions really give them a second chance at survival? Would they even know it, if and when he brought about a change?

His previous experience from six years ago was not encouraging.

 

Chapter 16

As his private shuttle crossed out of Earth’s atmosphere and into the cold, dark vacuum of space and fell into orbit, Admiral Hansen sat totally oblivious to the wondrous beauty of that giant turquoise jewel that was mother Earth hanging just outside his window. While it was true that he’d seen her from that same perspective literally thousands of times before and could readily see her that way again whenever he wanted to, it wasn’t just her familiarity that blinded him to her majesty. It was distraction. It was preoccupation. He’d left the president’s office hours ago, but his thoughts still lingered there.

Her question about whether or not a hypothetical time-traveler would have the means to return home had caught him off guard—he hadn’t expected her to think that far ahead so soon—and for a moment he’d feared she might follow it up with a few more questions he wouldn’t have wanted to try to answer. Questions that had been touched on but not yet asked of him directly. Questions he’d asked himself many times over the past six years. Questions like, even with the recall device, was it really possible for a time-traveler to return to the future he came from, since for him, once he’s in the past, that future would not yet exist? Or, if a traveler is in the past for six months before he affects a change, would six months pass for the people he left behind in the future as well, or would that change come immediately for them because it happened in their past? Or finally, as he’d asked himself outside the president’s office, would a time-traveler’s actions really give them a second chance?

Would they even realize any change had occurred? That remained perhaps the biggest question of them all.

Thank God the president hadn’t taken the time to research the various theories for herself before the meeting. Who knew how many more questions she might have come up with?

“Admiral Hansen?” the pilot’s voice called out over the intercom. “Sir, we’re on final approach to Mandela Station. If you’re up and about, please return to your seat and fasten your harness, sir.”

“I’m already strapped in, pilot.”

“All right, sir. Thank you.”

Mandela Station, the United Earth Federation’s enormous international space complex, contained an enormous combined military and civilian space dock facility, separate office areas for each group of representatives from both the member nations of the Earth Federation and the member worlds of the Coalition, dozens of commercial corporations’ offices, literally hundreds of smaller businesses, a myriad of recreational facilities, and Solfleet Orbital Headquarters. Not to mention atmosphere-controlled housing facilities for all the residents and their families. It floated, or rather free-fell, high in geosynchronous orbit above a different part of the Earth every month, visible to the naked eye on clear nights to the people far below. This particular month it had hung over New York City. In September its maneuvering thrusters would carry it south, over Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

All totaled, Hansen had been assigned to the station for well over half of his career—long enough that it had become his permanent home. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing. That kind of stability was virtually unheard of in the life of a soldier. He was very fortunate to be able to enjoy it, even at his level, and it had made raising his daughter as a single parent a lot easier than it otherwise would have been. Relatively speaking, of course.

He was also fortunate, he reminded himself once more, to still have a career, and not just because he and Commander Royer had so far been able to keep what they did six years ago a secret. As Chairman MacLeod’s allusion to the tragic incident of twenty-plus years ago had reminded him, his career might have ended long before he and Royer ever even thought about sending her brother through the Portal. Long before he ever met Royer, for that matter. If the fleet hadn’t so desperately needed to garner as much positive public opinion as possible at the time, things probably would have turned out much worse for him.

But as fate would have it, the needs of the fleet had not only saved his career, but had also guaranteed his continued ascent through the ranks. The only downside to the whole deal was the fact that even if he served for another thirty years, he’d probably still never see another field command.

He thought about stopping by his quarters and changing into his class-B’s before heading to the office, but by the time his shuttle docked and he disembarked, he’d changed his mind. Commander Royer would be anxious to talk to him as soon as possible. She could be quite abrasive when she wanted to be, even with her superiors, and if he made her wait longer than necessary, she’d want to be. Besides, the station operated on Greenwich Mean Time. The work day was already half over, so why bother?

He made his way directly to the agency’s offices and greeted the commander’s wrinkled old crone of a secretary with a slight nod of his head and a “Good morning, Misses Applegate,” as he passed by her desk and approached the commander’s desert-rose door. Somehow, even while sitting in her chair, the elderly woman managed to look down her crooked, hooked nose at him, and she offered no reply whatsoever. She’d been close to Jonathan Harkam and his family back in her slightly younger days, had apparently thought of him like a son, and had never forgiven Hansen for what he’d done. Her coincidental employment with the Solfleet Intelligence Agency was just one more cruel twist of fate in Hansen’s life.

He touched his finger to the buzzer and the door slid aside, disappearing into the desert-tan wall to admit him.

“Come in, Admiral,” Royer said from her seat behind her artificial cherry desk. She was talking to a young ensign in class-A’s who was seated across the desk from her, the stubble-haired back of whose head Hansen didn’t recognize. He sat up straight as a board when Royer spoke, and upon turning and seeing the admiral he practically jumped to his feet, nearly tripped on the leg of his chair, and snapped to attention. Royer, on the other hand, made a slight adjustment to her pinned-up platinum-blond hair as she stood, but never actually made it to the position of attention before Hansen spoke and eliminated the need. Not that she ever really tried to anyway.

“As you were,” Hansen said automatically. Then, without having to look, he reached back to the left of the door and tapped the ‘hold’ button, preventing it from closing behind him—a silent signal to Royer telling her to dismiss the ensign immediately, and that he would be staying...at least for a little while.

“Good morning, Admiral,” Royer said cheerfully as he approached her desk. “How was your flight?”

“Commander,” he responded with a curt nod. Then he looked at the young man to his right—the very young man to his right—who’d barely relaxed at all, and added, “Ensign.”

The younger man stared dead ahead and swallowed nervously. He looked like he was about ready to puke. “Ad...Admiral Hansen, sir,” he responded, his voice a little shaky. “Good morning, sir.”

Jesus. Had Fleet grown so desperate that it had started recruiting kids right out of high school? “Relax, Ensign. That’s what ‘as you were’ means, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir. I haven’t forgotten. Thank you, sir.” But after all that, he still didn’t relax. He was too busy staring wide-eyed at the rows upon rows of colorful ribbons centered perfectly above the admirals left breast pocket.

“Admiral Icarus Hansen,” Royer began, her slight grin betraying her amusement, “allow me to introduce Ensign Martin Pillinger, the agency’s newest recruiting officer. I understand you didn’t have an opportunity to meet him before he left on assignment.”

“No, I didn’t,” Hansen confirmed. “Pleased to meet you, Ensign Pillinger,” he said as he extended his hand toward the young officer. The kid—he was what, twenty-two or twenty-three years old? He was clean-shaven, had a slight pinkish tint to his cheeks, and he wore his light brown hair buzzed high and tight in the traditional style still required by the United States Marines and favored by most of Solfleet’s combat troops. God, he looked so young. Hansen couldn’t help but see him as a kid.

“The pleasure is all mine, sir,” Pillinger gushed as he shook the admiral’s hand as firmly, and as briefly, as he could. “I’ve heard a lot about you, sir.”

“All of it good, I hope,” Hansen quipped.

But the joke was completely lost on the ensign. More than that, it actually seemed to frighten the hell out of him, as if it were some kind of accusation directed right at him. “Uh, yes, sir!” he assured the admiral. “Of course, sir! All of it good.”

Royer shook her head ever so slightly and fought back the amused grin that threatened to break out as she observed the interaction in front of her. The poor kid was making a complete ass of himself right in the face of his top-level commanding officer. Amusing, but certainly not the best way to begin a career.

“Just back from Cirra, aren’t you?” Hansen had just asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“How was your trip?”

“Uh, just fine, sir,” Pillinger answered after a slight hesitation. No doubt the last thing in the world the young ensign wanted to have to do was admit to that same top-level commanding officer that he’d failed in his first assignment. “The food was actually pretty good, and the ship’s accommodations were excellent, sir.”

“Where they really? I guess junior officers’ quarters have improved a lot in the years since I was a young ensign.”

Pillinger glanced at the three glistening golden starbursts that adorned Hansen’s epaulets, then gazed once more at the rainbow of ribbons on his chest as he answered with a firm and decisive, “Yes, sir.” The words had escaped before he could stop them, and the poorly disguised look of horror that twisted his baby-faced features was absolutely priceless.

Royer bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing out loud.

“I mean...”

“You’re dismissed, Ensign,” Royer interjected, no longer able to hide her amusement and knowing how relieved the young man would be to hear those three words at that moment. “Take the rest of the day away from the office and finish up your report.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” To Hansen he said, “Pleasure meeting you, Admiral.” And with that the young officer executed a picture-perfect left face and marched, very quickly, out the door. Royer tapped the ‘close’ pad on her desk panel.

“Is he always that stiff?” Hansen asked.

“Apparently so,” Royer answered as she pulled off her duty jacket and draped it over the arm of her chair. “At least he has been whenever I’ve seen him anywhere. He never sits back and relaxes, he addresses his superiors as ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ much more often than necessary, and he marches when he walks. Tell you the truth, Admiral, I don’t think I’ve ever met such a nervous young officer before.”

Hansen watched as she adjusted her black midi-skirt then stepped out from behind her desk and walked over to the more relaxed setting of her small, informal meeting area.

“Can I get you something to drink, Admiral?” she asked.

“No, thank you.” He joined her and took a seat in one of the five matching soft-cushioned chairs that surrounded her oval, frosted glass-topped coffee table. Not exactly fleet issue, but then again neither was her desk or very much else in her office. She preferred to be surrounded by her own things.

“So what’s Pillinger so nervous about?” he asked.

“He seems to be deathly afraid of failure,” she explained as she poured herself a small glass of ice water. “I don’t know. He came to us fresh out of the academy. Maybe he’s just still in awe of the whole ‘commissioned Solfleet officer’ thing.”

She set her glass down on the table, then unfastened the top couple of buttons of her new blouse and pulled open her collar. “I like the new uniforms, but this damn collar is so tight I can barely breathe,” she commented as she sat down about a third of the way around the table to Hansen’s right. She crossed one leg over the other and tugged downward on the hem of her skirt, then rested her elbow on the arm of the chair and her chin on her closed fist, and asked, “So, how was Geneva?”

“Clean and very colorful, as usual,” he answered. That had become his standard answer to that particular question long ago—the one he gave each and every time someone asked it. But this time he had something more to add, though he sincerely wished he didn’t. “I only hope I can still say that a year from now. Poor folks have no idea what’s about to hit them, but I guess the same can be said for pretty much the rest of humanity, as well.”

“Speaking of which, how’d the meeting go?” she asked more sullenly.

“I think ‘interesting’ would be the best way to describe it.”

“Really? Hmm. I expected something more along the lines of ‘boring’, considering all the time you and I have already spent on the subject over the years.”

“And you’d probably have been right, too, under normal circumstances, but this meeting was a little different than most. There was a college professor there—a guy named of Joseph Verne. He...”

“I’ve read about him. He’s head of the Drexel University Physics department.”

“That’s right. The president wanted to hear both sides of the Timeshift Resolution debate first hand, so she granted him a special security clearance. He talked about a few of the more widely accepted time-travel theories.” Hansen snickered. “I have to say that for a non-politician, he sure gave Chairman MacLeod a run for his money. If this whole situation weren’t so serious it would have been funny. He’s dead set against the Timeshift mission ever being carried out, that’s for damn sure.”

“Was there anything in what he said that might shed some light on our other problem?” she asked hopefully, referring of course to their illegal activities of six years earlier and the subsequent loss of her brother.

Ah, yes, the other problem. They’d been calling it that for so long, ‘the other problem’ had almost become its official title. Hansen shook his head. “No, not really. It was all pretty much the same stuff you and I considered back when we started that whole thing. A little more refined, maybe,” he appended, “but nothing new.”

Royer sighed. She’d been hoping for more, if not actually expecting it. “Damn it. I’m so tired of not knowing, and of not knowing if I ever will know.”

“We do know, Commander,” Hansen reminded her, as he had several times before.

“Not necessarily, Admiral. Maybe...”

“Liz,” Hansen said, calmly interrupting. “It’s been six years now. How many times have we had this conversation? Günter isn’t coming back, and so far as we can determine, nothing has changed. We can only assume that he either returned to a different timeline, or that he wasn’t able to return at all. And that’s assuming he made it in the first place.” He paused a moment, wishing he’d chosen those last words a little more carefully. But rather than try to explain what he’d actually meant—she knew anyway—he simply continued, “Knowing all of that is going to make sending someone back on this mission even harder.”

“Why?”

He looked her in the eye and sternly asked, “How would you like to be stuck in a world where you don’t belong? How would you like to leave Karen and never return to her?”

“I guess I wouldn’t like it very much,” she answered sheepishly.

“Exactly. And neither would she. You know that better than anyone. Whoever we end up sending back there is going to be leaving loved ones behind. Probably forever. They’re going to miss those loved ones and those loved ones are going to miss them, just as you miss Günter.” He drew a deep, relaxing breath, then added, “I only wish we’d thought about that a little more when we sent Günter back.”

“We did what we thought was right at the time, Admiral,” Royer reminded him. Though in truth she’d said it as much to convince herself as to comfort the admiral. Six years. Six long years. Yet somehow she still managed to cling to that slowly dwindling hope that something positive might come out of what they had done. But deep down inside she knew the admiral was right. She’d known it for years, but had avoided admitting it to herself, as if that would somehow make things different.

Günter had failed. Neither he nor any of the cloned progeny he’d taken back with him had ever returned to the present, and they most likely never would. She and the admiral couldn’t even be sure that any of them were alive. As difficult as it was, she knew she was going to have to accept that fact once and for all, sooner or later, and let her brother go.

“Did the president give any indication as to which way she’s leaning?” she asked, getting back to the subject at hand.

Hansen shook his head. “She considers it strictly a last resort for now, but she left herself room to change her mind, which was exactly what I expected her to do.”

“Really? Why?”

“Why? Come on, Liz. You’ve known Mirriazu Shakhar almost half as long as I have, and I’ve known her for well over twenty years, since long before she ever considered running for the presidency—which, by the way, makes it extremely difficult for me to mislead her. You know she doesn’t make rash decisions.”

“I know, Admiral. She analyzes every aspect of every available option and then plays out scenarios in her head based on all the foreseeable results of each one of those options. Then she has several long discussions about those scenarios with her advisory staff. You’ve explained it to me more than a few times.”

“The way any smart leader would,” Hansen pointed out. “And in this particular case, I can just about guarantee she won’t make a decision one way or the other until she’s confident that she knows with reasonable certainty what all of the results of that decision will be. And I suspect she’ll only approve this mission if she feels like she absolutely has to.”

“In other words, we may be in for a very long wait,” Royer concluded.

“That is a distinct probability,” Hansen confirmed, “which brings me to my next point.”

“Which is?”

“We know it’s going to take time to train Sergeant Graves, prepare him for the mission, and get him to Window World. We also know that the Veshtonn are on the move, en masse. We still have time, but not a lot of it. We can’t afford to put things off much longer.”

A moment passed in silence. Then Royer uncrossed her legs, sat up straight, and folded her hands in her lap and said, “Then we might have a serious problem, Admiral.”

“What problem?” Hansen asked with apprehension. But he suspected he already knew the answer.

“Sergeant Graves still hasn’t agreed to join us.”

He was right. He had already known the answer. “Ensign Pillinger’s visit didn’t help, huh.” It wasn’t a question. Having read Royer’s extensive background report on the sergeant at length, Hansen hadn’t really expected any extra effort on Pillinger’s part to make a difference. Squad Sergeant Dylan Edward Graves was a middle child who had grown up fatherless from the age of six and had spent most of his childhood years as a social outcast with very few friends, despite his eventual rise to his high school’s varsity ice hockey team. As a young man he’d found a home in the service, especially with the Rangers, and Hansen knew exactly why. Esprit-de-corps. That feeling of belonging. That feeling of absolute unity with one’s brothers-in-arms that the children of broken homes always found so appealing. Hansen had seen it so many times before, in all branches of the service but most particularly in the Solfleet Marine Corp’s Rangers. And more often than not, almost to a one in fact, those Rangers in whom he’d seen it had stayed with the Rangers until they retired or until the day they died, whichever came first.

“The sergeant’s unit should just about be wrapping up a two week field training exercise as we speak,” Royer added. “Right before it started, Pillinger met with him at length two or three times, but he didn’t bite. I’m hoping he was just too busy preparing for the F-T-X at the time to give our offer any serious thought.

“After they deployed to the field, Pillinger tried at least three times to talk his company commander into either pulling Graves back out of the field so he could meet with him again, or talking to him about it himself. He refused, of course.”

“In other words,” Hansen concluded, “after more than half a dozen attempts, including yours, we’re no closer to recruiting him than we were before we started trying.”

“Not even a little bit,” Royer reluctantly confirmed.

Hansen sighed. That was discouraging news, because Royer had been right about Graves. Once properly trained, he really would be the most logical choice for the mission. Hansen would have known that even if he hadn’t seen him in his nightmeares. But because of his nightmares, though he didn’t completely understand why, Hansen had been hoping even more that they would succeed in persuading him to come aboard. Even more so now, since the president herself had asked him to try his best to recruit him. He’d hate to disappoint her almost as much as he’d hate to act against that gut feeling he still had.

But the sergeant had given his answer, and they were quickly running out of time. The mission itself had to take priority over everything else, and that included his own intuition and psychological well-being.

“Who’s at the top of your original list of candidates?” he asked, apparently giving up on the sergeant.

Royer was taken aback by the admiral’s uncharacteristic defeatist attitude. In all the years they’d served together, she’d never known him to give up on anything so easily, and she didn’t know what to make of it. What kind of grilling had the president put him through down there? More importantly, what could she do about it? She’d been considering the possibility of meeting with the sergeant herself, but she really hated deep space travel, primarily because of the long separations from her wife that came with it, and in this particular case she couldn’t even be sure her efforts would make a difference anyway.

No matter. Whether she succeeded or not wasn’t the most important issue anymore. The admiral’s continued faith in the mission was vital, for her brother’s sake, and the strength of that faith lay in the continuing possibility that they might get Sergeant Graves to carry it out.

“Wait a minute, sir,” she said. “I never said I was ready to give up on him just yet.”

“I didn’t say that either, Commander,” Hansen clarified. “As a matter of fact, I have no intention of giving up. On the contrary, I intend to keep trying until he agrees to sign on or until it doesn’t matter anymore. But in the meantime we have to be prepared to send someone else in case we suddenly run out of time before we expect to.”

“Understood, sir, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

“Oh? You have something particular in mind, Commander?”

“Nothing specific yet, Admiral, but I’m working on it.” She leaned forward and picked up her drink. As she sat back and tilted the glass to her lips, a large drop of condensation formed at its base and dripped onto the front of her blouse. “I’m sure I’ll have a solid plan in place by the time I get there.”

The droplet faded, absorbed by the material of her... What? ”By the time you get there?”

“That’s right.”

“By the time you get where, Commander?” Where else could she mean but...

“Cirra, sir.”

“Cirra.”

“Yes, sir,” she answered, palming the bottom of the glass in her lap to keep her skirt from getting damp. “I thought that since I was the one who brought Graves to your attention in the first place, I should make one more attempt, personally, before we give up on him entirely.” She raised a hand, stopping the admiral’s retort. “I know. We’re not giving up on him.” Hansen still didn’t look convinced, so she added, “Besides, I’m afraid Ensign Pillinger might have come off wrong with the sergeant’s C-O and I’d like a chance to correct that. You never know. We might need his cooperation some day.”

“We have other recruiters,” Hansen pointed out unnecessarily. “And what about Karen?”

“Karen has been a military spouse long enough to know that long separations are part of the job description, sir,” she explained. “As for sending out one of our other recruiters, just how many people can we involve in this process before we risk compromising its secretive nature?”

She had a point, and the only logical response to that question was obvious. “As few as possible.”

“Exactly.”

Hansen considered. The idea of Liz leaving the station for the next month or more didn’t exactly thrill him. She was a valuable asset and did a lot to make his job a hell of a lot easier than it would be otherwise. He’d miss having her there. “What about the supply shipments to Charlie Colony?” he asked her, reminding her of one of her most important routine responsibilities, albeit unnecessarily. “They’re already a month behind schedule and the colonists are beginning to get a little desperate. I’ve got wartime Intelligence operations to oversee, Commander. I don’t have the time to actively devote to the colony right now.”

She took another drink. “They’re cyberclones, Admiral,” she reminded him, as if that in itself made the point of his question moot. “Trained combat soldiers, every one of them. They’re used to living with adversity for short periods of time.”

“They’re living, breathing human beings, Commander, and you’ll be gone for at least a month,” the admiral countered, glaring at her as he shifted in his chair and leaned slightly toward her. “They’re counting on us for their survival until they become permanently self-sufficient. And you know as well as I do that most of them have never even seen real combat, and that there are a lot of civilians up there with them now, too.”

Yes, she did know that. Over the past few years, despite being told that they would never be allowed to return to their homes again, thousands of men and women had immigrated to Charlie Colony, a handful at a time so as not to be noticed, to help the former would-be combat soldiers settle their new world. Thousands of weddings had been performed so far, and over the past several months many of those couples had begun having children.

“Point taken, sir,” she said in quick capitulation. A wise person would not dare challenge Admiral Icarus Hansen once he took a stand in defense of someone’s life and well being. “Tell you what, Admiral. I’ll turn colony support operations over to Lieutenant Vandenhoven until I get back.”

“Lieutenant Vandenhoven?” Hansen snorted. “Are you sure that guy can be trusted with the colony?”

The sour look on his face told Royer exactly what was on his mind. Poor Vandenhoven. Back when he was only a lowly, newly commissioned ensign who hadn’t yet been on station a month, he’d inadvertently let the cat out of the bag about a surprise party the senior staff had planned for Hansen’s mother’s seventy-fifth birthday. He’d happened across her one day when she was visiting her son at his office and he was dropping something off to the admiral’s secretary. They’d struck up one of those friendly conversations that sometimes occur between strangers when they meet, during which the elder Hansen had mentioned that she’d known the admiral all his life. Having no idea who she was and without realizing quickly enough what her words inferred, he’d asked her if she was going to the admiral’s mother’s surprise birthday party, to which she’d whimsically replied that she hadn’t been invited.

The party had been a pretty big bash with a lot of important guests, and the admiral had been furious to learn that the surprise had already been spoiled. Four years had passed since that night, but the admiral apparently still hadn’t let it go.

Perhaps that had something to due with his thoughts on the idea of having an Intelligence officer who couldn’t keep a secret on staff.

“I’m sure your mother got over that a long time ago, Admiral,” Royer commented. She’d meant only to lighten his mood a little, but when he responded with a burning, laser beam stare, she quickly dropped the subject and answered his question. “Yes, sir, I am absolutely sure he can be trusted. Lieutenant Vandenhoven has been inspecting and maintaining all the Charlie Colony supply inventories for me since before we sent the first shipment. Plus, he’s pending review for promotion nomination, so he’ll be extra attentive to his duties.”

“I know, but he’s not exactly the most energetic officer we’ve got. And I hate to say it, but he doesn’t always show the best judgment, either. Is he fully aware of the absolute secrecy of the Charlie Colony operation?”

“We’re still here, aren’t we? Besides, do we ever run any other kind of operation out of this office?”

“Good point,” he admitted. Then he stood up and straightened his jacket. Royer set down her glass and stood up with him. “All right, Commander. It’s your call. If you really believe he can handle it, then go ahead and turn Charlie Colony operations over to him, but on a temporary basis only. Just make damn sure he’s aware that it’s your responsibility and his career if he screws it up.”

“Will do, sir.”

“When do you leave for Cirra?”

She started to answer, but before the words could escape from her mouth, her comm-panel chirped. “Commander Royer?” it called.

She touched the comm-link on her collar. “Royer here.”

“This is Senior Crewman Pratt in Command-and-Control, ma’am. Admiral Hansen isn’t in his office. Is he there with you?”

“Yes, he’s right here. Go ahead. He can hear you.”

“Oh, uh...all right,” the crewman responded, sounding hesitant to do so for some reason. “Admiral Hansen, sir, we just received a priority message for you from the Provost Marshal’s office on Europa.”

Hansen and Royer exchanged a look.

“O’Donnell,” Hansen mumbled, rolling his eyes. “I’ll bet you a month’s pay it’s about O’Donnell.” Then, speaking loud enough for Royer’s comm-link to pick him up, he asked, “What’s the message?”

“Uh, just a reminder first, Admiral. We’re on an unsecure channel.”

“That’s all right, Crewman. If the message were classified the Provost Marshal would’ve sent it encrypted and directly to me. Just give me the bottom line.”

“The bottom line, yes, sir.” A short pause, then, “At zero eight twenty-two hours today, Europan Colony Time, while enroute to Mandela Station to face court-martial proceedings, Crewman First Class Stefani O’Donnell commandeered a lifeboat and escaped from Military Police custody and control.”

“Are you kidding me?” Hansen roared.

“No, sir! That’s exactly what the message says!”

“Forward it to my office. Hansen out.”

Royer tapped her comm-link, closing the channel.

“Son of a... How the hell did she evade a police transport in a lifeboat? Can’t the M-P’s keep one little girl under lock and key, for God sake?”

“That little girl has a reputation for being a very resourceful individual, Admiral,” Royer reminded him. “And working Linguistics and Communications for us these past few years, she’s no doubt become pretty familiar with a lot of our methodology.”

“Maybe we should send her to the academy,” Hansen commented sarcastically.

“What? You mean as an instructor?”

Hansen stared at her for a moment, then snickered and grinned—her goal when she said it, of course—and his momentarily foul mood brightened again. Not that it had been all that bright to begin with. “At least she can’t get too far in a lifeboat,” he stated, as much to reassure himself as to point it out to Royer. “So, where were we?”

“You asked me when I was leaving for Cirra, sir. Early tomorrow morning.”

“All right, Commander. Enjoy your trip, as much as possible.” He turned and headed for the door. “Just try not to be gone too long.”

“Trust me, Admiral, I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can be.”

Just as he reached the door, he turned back. “Oh, and one more thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“After the meeting this morning, the president asked me if I really thought Sergeant Graves was the right person for the job. When I told her that I did, she asked me to try my very best to recruit him.”

“I understand, sir.”

“I want him for this mission, Commander. Lean on him a little if you have to. Make this trip of yours worthwhile.”

Royer gazed at him for a moment. Had he just given her card-blanche to do whatever was necessary to bring Graves aboard? If so, then she would, without hesitation. If not, better that she assume he had anyway. She’d have more room to maneuver that way. “You can count on it, sir,” she assured him.

Hansen nodded once, and then left her alone.

Let Günter go, the admiral had told her. Like hell. He was her big brother. He’d been her protector in childhood and her moral support in adolescence. She would not abandon him...ever. A long time ago she’d promised herself that she would bring him home, no matter how long it took, and the Timeshift mission appeared to be the perfect opportunity to do just that.

 

Chapter 17

Planet Cirra, The Next Day

Earth Standard Date: Saturday, 28 August 2190

The painful throbbing behind Dylan’s eyes seemed to be worsening by the minute. It felt as though a pair of ice-picks had been jabbed through his temples to hold his eyeballs firmly in place while the herd of stampeding elephants inside his skull tried with each pounding heartbeat to push them from their sockets. It hurt so much that he was beginning to think he might actually get sick. He’d tried Marissa’s relaxation technique at least a half dozen times in the six or seven hours since they’d broken camp and started back toward civilization, and was trying it yet again, but it still didn’t seem to be working.

Of course, the way that God-forsaken sardine can of an armored personnel carrier was bouncing him around on its inadequately cushioned bench seat as it tore down the rocky, ditch-ridden dirt road at break-neck speeds wasn’t helping any, either. He’d already slammed the back of his head against the hard plastisteel bulkhead behind him at least ten times, and the god-awful noise was enough to drive a man insane!

Not that the APC itself was all that noisy. On the contrary, as heavily-armored tactical vehicles went it was actually fairly quiet. At least from the inside. It was well insulated, both to protect the Marines inside from the elements and to mask their heat and sound signatures from enemy scanners. But the ungodly road noise that the vehicle’s four squealing plastisteel tracks created as they plowed through deep ruts of hard-packed dirt and rolled over thousands of loose, sedimentary conglomerates was almost deafening. Those rock clusters had an annoying tendency to explode like grenades under the vehicle’s incredible weight and spatter the resultant shrapnel-like fragments against the underside of the deck plate.

Road noise. Hah! That implied the presence of an actual road, and this just didn’t qualify. This was nothing more than a dried up old riverbed that happened to snake steadily downward through the deep mountain draw in the general direction of Solfleet’s Grainger Army-Aerospace Base, winding its way through a narrow clearing in the dense evergreen forest. Correction—the dense everblue forest. Blue trees. They were beautiful to be sure, but after growing up on Earth would he ever really get used to that?

Left behind by fresh mountain waters that had carved the 580-kilometer long draw into the eastern slopes over thousands of years before they dried up, the old riverbed had reportedly remained unspoiled until the Veshtonn invasion of ‘68, when the occupying alien forces had apparently matter-sprayed it from low orbit in an attempt to render it impassable to ground vehicles. So, even after four years of fairly steady use as a tactical deployment route by Solfleet’s ground forces, it still didn’t make for much of a thoroughfare. But the dual-drive M450-A3 quarter/quadtrack APC’s with their accordion bodies, heavy-duty shock-suspension assemblies, full meter of ground clearance, and front-mounted obstacle deflectors, hefty as they were, could make a road out of just about anything if they had to, as long as the ground wasn’t too soft. Unfortunately, that made for some very rough rides, despite those very same heavy-duty shock-suspension assemblies.

When? When would those rear echelon brainiacs at R&D ever figure out how to build an armored personnel carrier that could float above the ground, nice and smooth, like a comfy little street skimmer? When? Probably never.

He felt a light tap on his left shoulder. “Go away. I’m sleeping,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over the clamor. Talking made his head hurt even worse.

“I have something for you, Sarge,” someone said.

He opened his eyes and raised his heavy head, and became suddenly aware of the fact that the over-taxed ventilation system was losing its battle against the dank, musky odor of the dozen sweaty, dirt-caked Marines who filled the cramped troop compartment. Because there were no open air slots or other compromises to the armor’s integrity, ventilation was generally poor to begin with, dependent solely on twin circulators that sucked air in through heavy filters from the outside, provided that air didn’t contain dangerous levels of any toxic substances. It didn’t take very many people to heat things up inside, so an entire squad of hot, sweaty Marines tended to put quite a strain on the system. Even the air in the base gym’s locker room had rarely ever been so offensive.

The compartment was poorly illuminated as well, lit by just a single adhesive cold-light strip that ran down the center of the low ceiling. But the ghostly blue-green glow it gave off was sufficient enough that he could see one of the squad’s four females standing in the center aisle just to his left, between the two facing rows of seated Marines, several of whom had taken off their camouflage tunics and black tee shirts in what was probably a futile attempt to find a little bit of relief from the sweltering heat. She was fairly tall, had shed her tunic and knotted her tee shirt up around her midriff, and was swaying from side to side as if dancing in time to the APC’s motion, holding tightly onto the overhead safety bar with one hand and reaching out to him with the other. She was still wearing her black Ranger beret—why, he couldn’t even guess—but a long lock of her jet black hair had fallen loose on one side and was swinging back and forth across her cheek, so he could tell easily enough who she was. Corporal Marissa Ortiz, whom some would argue held the destinction of being the sexiest, most beautiful woman in her entire branch of the service. Or, to put it into typical ‘Marinespeak’, the hottest damn piece of ass in the whole friggin’ Marine Corps.

“Here, Sarge. Take this,” she said.

He focused on the hand in front of him. “What is it?”

“Liferin.”

He raised his hand and let her drop the pill into it. “Thank you, Corporal,” he said as he watched the little white tablet already beginning to dissolve in his sweaty palm. “You’re a life saver. My head is really killing me.”

“You should have asked me for one a lot sooner.”

With a little more effort than it usually required, Dylan filled his hot, pasty mouth with warm saliva and tossed the pill to the back of his throat and swallowed. Then he said, “I thought you didn’t carry these things anymore.”

“Never hurts to have a backup plan.”

“Good point.”

“Anyway, that’ll fix you right up.”

“I hope so.”

“Did you at least try the discipline?”

Dylan nodded...slightly. “Only about half a dozen times since we left. It worked a little bit, but this one’s a major skullquake.”

“Aw come on, Sarge. You oughtta know by now size doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head.

Dylan eyed her suspiciously as several of the others broke into laughter. He couldn’t be sure if she’d intended the pun or not, though she most likely had—it was hard to tell with her sometimes—but jokes like that were always good for a laugh when the leader of the group was made the butt of them, and the squad was so over-tired and giddy right now that they would laugh at just about anything...with one exception.

Lance Corporal Frieburger. He was too preoccupied to laugh, still holding his helmet upside-down between his knees and trying his damnedest not to lose his last meal into it. Poor kid had suffered from motion sickness his entire life. Corporal Daniel ‘Doc’ Leskowski, their primary corpsman, had twice given him something for his upset stomach just since wake-up and probably didn’t want to risk another dose so soon.

Ortiz raised her free hand to stop whatever comeback she might have thought Dylan was preparing to throw at her and said, “Just keep working on it whenever you have a chance, Sarge. You’ll get the hang of it eventually.”

“I hope so,” he said. “I don’t like taking pills.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

As she turned away and started back toward her seat, the APC lurched hard to the left and then dropped violently too far back to the right in one swift motion. She lost her grip on the safety bar and fell backwards into Private LeClerc’s lap, smashing him in the face with the back of her head as the entire compartment echoed with the rapid-fire bang-bang-bang of hundreds of attacking rock fragments. A chorus of colorful expletives shouted in the background and an arrangement of tumbling weapons and gear crashing to the deck accompanied the thunderous percussion symphony of stone while LeClerc’s profanity-filled pronouncements of pain provided the lead vocals.

But LeClerc quickly shook off the sudden, painful blow to his face and wasted no time in grabbing hold of Ortiz’s slender waist with both hands. Just to help her up, of course...which he didn’t rush to do.

As everyone began to settle down again, the green, roughly coin-sized indicator light on the intercom panel to Dylan’s right winked on. “Sorry about that, back there,” the driver’s voice said. “Is everyone all right?”

“We’re fine,” Dylan answered. “But why don’t you slow this thing the hell down, Lance Corporal!”

“Hey, Squad Sergeant, sir! It’s dark as all fucking hell outside and we’re only running on blackout markers! If I lose sight of the A-P-C. in front of us...”

“Then comm ahead and tell them to slow the hell down, before you kill somebody!”

The intercom light winked off.

“I enjoyed that very much, Corporal. Thank you,” LeClerc shouted with a mischievous grin, grabbing hold his crotch as the woman escaped his grasp and bounced back to her feet.

“I guess it’s a good thing for you that size really doesn’t matter, hey, Jean-Pierre?” Lance Corporal Margaret Sweeney jibed, never hesitant to jump right in and help out a fellow female Marine. The laughter that had so abruptly stopped when the APC started tossing them around returned just as quickly.

“Yeah, fuck you, too, Maggie!” LeClerc shouted angrily.

“Hey!” Dylan hollered, causing that small burning sun in the middle of his brain to go nova. “Stow the attitude right now, LeClerc!”

He glanced over at Sweeney and wasn’t at all surprised to find that she’d joined those who had stripped down to their waists. She’d folded her tee shirt into a roughly square pad, had apparently soaked it with water from her canteen, and was using it to give herself a sort of sponge bath, making no effort at all to hide her bare breasts from anyone’s view. He almost told her to put her shirt back on, but stopped himself. This wasn’t one of those old-fashioned thinking military services that still employed a publicly popular but counterproductive...not to mention inefficient...‘modify-for-training-environment’ regulation. This was the Solfleet Marine Corps, and Solfleet Marines in a field training environment did everything exactly the way they would in a real combat situation, regardless of gender. They fought together, bathed in lakes, ponds, or puddles together, decontaminated after a chemical attack together, and even slept together if and when circumstances so dictated. Simply put, they weren’t men and women when they were in the field. They were Marines. Nothing more and nothing less.

On the other hand, for the good of the unit, certain types of behavior on the part of certain individuals probably shouldn’t have been allowed, at least in Dylan’s opinion. It was common knowledge within the squad, for example, that the two of them—Sweeney and LeClerc—had recently enjoyed a passionate weekend fling together. In fact, over the last eight months since she arrived, Sweeney had spent such weekends with several of the other men and at least one of the women as well. Officially, her sordid activities, unlike her current state of partial undress, were in violation of Solfleet regulations. But because enforcement of such regulations brought into question a person’s own morals and upbringing, it was one of those kinds of violations that no one ever really talked about and the leadership usually tended to ignore, as long as the offending parties committed the violation off base and the unit’s health and morale weren’t adversely affected.

Which, to a small extent, it unfortunately had been. As far as Dylan knew, LeClerc had been the first of Sweeney’s partners to have any problem with ending their brief tryst. Theirs was the first conflict of that kind that he’d been forced to get involved in, at least. He’d had Ortiz talk to Sweeney about putting a lid on her ‘recreational activities’ for a while, at least those that involved her squad mates, while he’d talked to LeClerc. LeClerc had told him that he’d believed their rendezvous to be the beginning of something more permanent. But she’d rejected that idea, rather abruptly if he was to be believed, and he’d had a hard time dealing with that.

From the sound of it, it was time to have another talk with LeClerc.

God his head hurt.

“Fuck you, too, Maggie?” Ortiz questioned, still standing in front of LeClerc and looking down at him. “What do you mean, ‘you too’, Jean-Pierre? I sure as hell didn’t feel anything.”

The laughter grew even louder.

LeClerc gazed up at her with that same mischievous grin. “Maybe you didn’t, Corporal, but me and my perma-woody sure did.”

“Oh, is that what that was?”

“Yes, ma’am!” he answered, smiling proudly from ear to ear. “I guess you felt something after all, huh?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I did! Whew! God, what a relief! I thought I sat on one of Greenburg’s little killer darts!”

The laughter graduated into a roar.

“Oh yeah? Well...” He was obviously trying, but it looked like he wasn’t going to come up with a comeback for that one anytime soon.

“Are you bleeding, Jean-Pierre?” Sweeney asked.

LeClerc glanced across the aisle at her, then touched a hand to his face and brought it away bloodied. “Oh, shit!” he cried. “She broke my fuckin’ nose! Sarge, Corporal Ortiz broke my fuckin’ nose!”

Dylan looked over at him again. Sure enough, a dark smudge of thick, oozing fluid nearly covered the lower half of his face and was dripping onto the deck. “Doc!”

“I got it, Sarge,” Leskowski answered as he pressed his harness release and grabbed up his med kit. Ortiz moved out of his way and returned to her seat, while Dylan, his anger renewed, nearly punched the back of his fist through the intercom panel. “Driver!” he barked. “Slow this fucking tin can down before I come up there and kick your mother-loving ass!” He didn’t particularly enjoy talking like the stereotypical ground-pounder, but sometimes a sergeant just had to explain things in such a way as to make his point unmistakably clear.

The driver didn’t answer, but the engine’s steady hum drop in pitch, just a little, and Dylan felt the APC slow down. Good enough for now. But when they got back to the base...

“Yo, Sarge?”

Dylan leaned forward and peered down the row of Marines to his left. Not that he needed to, of course. He knew who’d called him—PFC Paul Andolini from South Philadelphia, one of the more recent arrivals.

“Yeah, Pauly?”

“How comes we gotta ride in these oversized sardine cans anyway? We ain’t no brother-humpin’ Humlees. Hell, we ain’t even in the fuckin’ Army! We’re Marine Corps Rangers! We should be flyin’ home.”

“We’re Special Ops Rangers, dumb ass,” PFC Shin interjected. Andolini shot her a dirty look, but let her keep talking. “We don’t even exist, remember? We’ve got to look like a Humlee unit or the wrong people will start asking the wrong questions. Why do you think we’re attached to a regular Humlee company in the first place?”

Now that Shin was finished, Andolini had something to say to her. “Who the fuck do you think you’re callin’ a dumb ass, you slant-eyed little...”

“Uh oh,” someone intoned.

“Andolini!” Dylan roared. All eyes turned toward him as even the APC itself seemed to fall quiet under his authority. “One more remark like that and the only stripes you’ll have left when I’m finished will be the brown ones in your shorts! You got that, Private?”

“Damn, Sarge, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it!”

“I said, do you got that, Private?” Bad grammar, maybe, but his point was loud and clear.

“Yes, Sergeant! I got it!”

“Good!” With that, Dylan sat back and bowed his head again. The pain had finally begun to recede, but had returned with his sudden outburst. He sighed and shook his head in disgust. Thousands of years of social evolution, and mankind still hadn’t managed to completely expel its stupid, groundless, racial prejudices.

“What’s Humlee?” Private Walters asked. The youngest and newest Ranger in the squad, he’d only been out of training a couple of months and hadn’t yet picked up on all the slang the more seasoned Marines tended to use.

“H-M-L-I,” Shin spelled out for him. “Highly Mobile Light Infantry.”

“Oh yeah.”

A few minutes later the pain had finally subsided completely, as had the spirited laughter that had been filling the compartment until he yelled at Andolini. Dylan drew a deep, cleansing breath—as if a lungful of that musky stink could be considered cleansing—and slowly exhaled. Then he started rolling his head around in circles to work the kinks out of his neck. A few to the left, then a few to the right. Oh yeah. That felt much better. Much better.

“Hey, Ortiz,” he called out, speaking louder and more clearly than he had been able to earlier.

“Yeah, Sarge?”

“When we get back to the barracks I’m going to buy you the biggest cup of coffee you’ve ever had in your life.”

She smiled appreciatively. “Gee, thanks, Sarge,” she responded in a humorously sarcastic tone. “That means a whole lot, considering the coffee back at the barracks is always free.”

“Oh that’s right, it is,” he returned, pretending to have forgotten that little detail. “Well in that case, I’ll buy you two cups.”

“You’re just too generous, Sarge.”

 

Chapter 18

Yesterday had been a total washout as far as getting any real work done was concerned. First there had been the trip down to the surface for the early morning meeting with Mirriazu and the others—it still bothered him that he’d had to be less than honest with her—then the trip back, which had been delayed more than an hour due to some kind of minor mechanical problem with the shuttle. Then, after a brief conversation with Liz and a frustrated call back to the Provost Marshal’s Office on Europa, there had been a much longer than usual mandatory command staff meeting, during which many very important topics that didn’t concern him in the least were discussed at length and in great detail. The Military Police battalion’s change-of-command ceremony had followed that, and that had in turn been followed by one of those ever popular so-called ‘voluntary’ social gatherings that all officers and senior NCOs were always expected to attend, commonly referred to by some as ‘mandatory fun.’ By the time Hansen had finally made it to his office, the duty day had ended.

Which was why he was heading there almost two hours earlier than usual this morning, despite the fact that it was Saturday. Well, that and the fact that Heather was having a few of her friends over for one final too-loud-for-Daddy-to-concentrate weekend-long get-together before school started up. Otherwise, he would have worked from home like he’d been doing every Saturday for the last several weeks.

Actually, it felt pretty good to start the day so far ahead of the curve. The only down side was that Vicky wouldn’t have a pot of coffee waiting for him when he got there.

Or so he’d thought. But as the doors parted and he walked into the reception area, that pleasantly intoxicating aroma of freshly brewed Columbian coffee drifted over him like that proverbial summer breeze, just as it always did. Vicky met him a few feet inside and held his mug out to him as if he were a marathon runner trotting past a water point, just as she always did.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as he stopped and gratefully accepted his mug.

“You’re welcome,” she responded sarcastically.

Hansen grinned. “Sorry. Thank you.”

“You’re forgiven,” she told him, smiling back at him. Then, in answer to his question, she added, “And what I’m doing here, Admiral, is making sure you don’t start your day without your morning caffeine.”

“Okay, you’ve done that, and I appreciate it very much. Now get out of here.”

“No, sir. If you’re working, I’m working.”

“Nonsense. It’s Saturday. Go somewhere. Have a good time.”

“You first.”

Hansen gazed at her, then grinned again and surrendered. “All right. You win.”

“Damn right I win.”

“What would I ever do without you, Vicky?”

“Probably fall asleep at your desk.”

As usual, he checked her out on the sly as he took that long, careful, first sip. Today’s wardrobe consisted of yet another finely tailored lady’s business suit—dark charcoal gray with black trim this time. It looked kind of like a Military Police uniform, except that it included what had to be the shortest skirt she’d ever worn to work. She wore it with a bright yellow blouse and those same black boots she’d taken to wearing pretty regularly lately. Her hair hung freely about her shoulders and down her back, and her makeup, as always, was perfect.

“You are truly amazing, Vicky,” he said. “How the hell do you always know...”

“It’s easy, Admiral,” she interrupted, smiling again. She had a way of anticipating his questions as well as his arrival times. “You have your sources and I have mine.”

“Spies in the corridors?” he asked. Just their usual, light-hearted morning banter, not an accusation, though with all that was going on in the galaxy it took a great deal more effort lately not to appear too serious all the time.

“Something like that, yeah. We can’t have you protecting the universe without your morning coffee, can we?”

“Good point,” he said as he started toward his office again. “Keep up the good work.”

“That’s the only kind of work I know how to do, Admiral.”

“I know,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s why I keep you around.”

“Is that why? Damn. All these months, I thought it was because of my good looks and charming personality.”

He stopped in front of his door, turned and faced her again. Damn, but she did have nice legs. “Well, those, too,” he told her. Then he said, “Listen, do me a favor. I have a lot of work to catch up on. If you won’t take the day off, then at least take a long lunch. Say about ten-thirty. I’ll see you back here around thirteen-thirty or so. I’ll make sure you still get eight hours’ credit.”

“All right, Admiral,” she said, smiling. “I do have a few things to take care of today, so I guess I can use that time.”

“Yes, I know.”

She paused a moment as he passed his mug from his right hand to his left and faced his door again. Then she laughed, but there was a certain nervousness to her laughter, as if she wasn’t all that sure he was kidding. After all, he was the commanding officer of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency and she’d only worked for him for the past eight or nine months. So, in her mind at least, the possibility that he really was having her watched was a very real one.

Hansen punched his access code into the panel, pressed his hand against the scanner plate, and looked into the coin-sized camera.

“Hansen,” he said. The plate glowed white and the door opened, but before he stepped inside, he faced around one more time—she was still staring after him for some reason—and said, “You do know that I was only kidding, right? I didn’t really know you had errands to run.”

“Of course, Admiral,” she replied, though still a little hesitantly. “I never thought...”

“Glad to hear it. I wouldn’t do that to you, Vicky.”

“Of course not.”

“I mean it. Your pre-employment investigation took longer than you’ve worked here so far. If I really thought I couldn’t trust you, for any reason, you’d be working somewhere else.”

“Thank you, Admiral. I appreciate that.”

He nodded, then stepped into his office, wondering why he’d felt the need to reassure her of his trust all of the sudden. Surely she’d known he was only joking when he insinuated that he knew she had errands to run. Such insinuations and innuendo were just another part of their normal morning banter. So why...

It was nothing. Why was he even worrying about it?

He reached back and tapped the ‘close’ button, then crossed to his desk, set his mug down in front of his chair, and turned on the brewer in the wall. Then, as he sat down, he noticed that his comm-panel’s message light was flashing red, indicating that he’d received at least one incoming communication, either an official message or an Intel report, coded as ‘urgent’. Not the way he wanted to start the day.

He called up the list. There were only three intelligence reports and no other messages—not bad for having missed an entire day of work. The one coded ‘urgent’ was second on the list. He reached out to tap it, but paused before he touched the screen. While it was true that all intelligence was potentially important, it was also true that what an agent in the field considered to be urgent usually wasn’t as urgent as he or she thought. In addition, it was fairly common for two or more separate reports to relate to each other on some level, and they always made more sense to him when he reviewed them in the same order in which they’d been filed. So he tapped the first message on the list instead, then picked up his coffee mug and sat back in his chair.

The report came up on the wall screen and started to play. It turned out to be nothing more than the now twice daily overall summary of fleet actions, indicating, as it had nearly every day for the past few months, just how badly the war was going for the Coalition. It told the same old story. Solfleet carrier groups had engaged Veshtonn forces in this sector or that, or had cruised into an ambush in one star system or another. Solfleet had lost more battles than it had won, and with every loss, the fleet, and consequently the entire Coalition, had grown that much weaker, that much more unprepared for the next engagement. When the report finally came to its grim conclusion, Hansen sighed. At the rate things were going, the Coalition wouldn’t last another six weeks, let alone six months.

As he swallowed the last of his coffee, the second report opened with a splash-screen warning printed in bold, bright red letters:

PRIORITY-ONE URGENT: CODE RED

CHIEF, SOLFLEET INTELLIGENCE EYES ONLY

‘Priority-one, code red?’ Whoever had filed it obviously believed its contents to be of grave importance.

He spun around and refilled his mug. Then, as required by the Information Security regulation, he tapped the door lock pad on his console and listened for the computer’s verbal “Door locked” verification. Once he had it, he started the playback.

Lieutenant Roderick Johnson’s familiar face appeared on the wall screen, immediately kicking the seriousness of the report up a notch in Hansen’s mind. The youngest son of one of Hansen’s old academy classmates, Rod Johnson was a career-minded special agent who’d been assigned to the Rosha’Kana sector about nine months ago, and who’d had the misfortune of having to pass bad news up the chain to his superior officers ever since. He was also one of the best field agents in the S.I.A. and would likely rise to command it someday, if he so desired...and if the agency, and humankind, still existed when that day came. He most certainly was not the kind of agent who tagged reports as ‘urgent’ without sufficient cause. In fact, he’d done so only once before, and in that case ‘urgent’ had been a gross understatement.

“Hello, Admiral,” Johnson’s image began. His tired brown eyes looked even hollower than they had looked just a couple of days before, and the dark circles beneath them stood out in sharp contrast against his caramel skin. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he continued, “but I guess that’s nothing new here, is it? The footage you’re about to see was forwarded to me by the captain of the starcruiser Rapier about twelve hours prior to my filing this report. I apologize for the delay, but I wanted to provide you with as many details as possible and it took some time to put them all together. I would tell you to sit back and enjoy it, but there’s very little about these recordings for any of us to enjoy. So have a look, sir. I’ll be back afterwards to give you those details I mentioned.”

The wall screen went dark for a moment. Hansen sat back in his chair again and got as comfortable as he could.

“Bridge recorders on, Captain,” an unfamiliar voice said as the screen came back to life.

A new image, as three-dimensional as possible for a 2-D wall screen, replaced that of Lieutenant Johnson. The bridge of the starcruiser Rapier, as seen from slightly above the aft-most access doors. Solfleet had been installing multiple perpendicular rings of 3-D cameras into the most sensitive areas of its vessels for decades. Had he wanted to, Hansen could have used the controls on his desktop console to manipulate the image and view the vessel’s bridge from virtually any angle. But as it was he could already see almost every officer and duty post in the semi-circular command center, as well as the ship’s main viewscreen, so he left it alone. The only exception was the communications station, located along the aft bulkhead, below and just to the right of the cameras that were providing his current point of view.

“Thank you, Mister Bellinger,” the captain responded. “Put the vessel up on the screen. Standard view.”

A slightly elongated object, not much larger than one of the colored pinpoints of light that shined in the velvety background of space, but barely half as bright—presumably the vessel that the captain had just made reference to—instantly appeared in the center of the Rapier’s main screen. Hansen couldn’t make out any identifying details and was about to zoom in for a closer look when the captain took care of the problem for him. Fleet Captain Vance Erickson, if Hansen remembered correctly.

“Magnify it, Lieutenant,” he ordered. “Let’s get a good look.”

“Aye, sir,” Bellinger answered. “Magnification factor ten.”

A split second later the vessel filled the Rapier’s viewscreen. It was still a little hazy, but Hansen could make out enough detail now to determine that it was a Tor’Kana battleship. Only seven Tor’Kana heavy vessels were known to have survived the invasion of their home system long enough to jump into deep space and escape. Five of them had already been recovered and would soon be folded into the fleets of the other member worlds. Now the Rapier had apparently found number six, though it didn’t look too healthy. So unless there were more of them out there that no one knew about, only one remained to be found.

“Can you sharpen that up a little, Mister Bellinger?” Erickson asked.

“No, sir, not at this distance,” the younger officer answered. “She’s drifting away from us pretty fast, so it’ll take another minute or so. But if you’re wondering, sir, that is in fact a Tor’Kana battleship.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant, I can see that. What about a damage report. Are we close enough for a preliminary scan of her major systems?”

“Aye, sir. Scanning now.” A moment later, “One of her jump nacelles has been sheared completely off. I’m seeing small bits of debris floating away from the ship, but not nearly enough to account for the nacelle, so it either floated out of range already or it was vaporized. The other three appear to be intact, but are cold. The fusion engines and maneuvering thrusters are offline, too, and are venting small amounts of plasma. Looks like they’ve been venting for some time, too, and the dispersal pattern is very irregular. If I had to guess, sir, I’d say they were completely defensive, on the run, and taking evasive action when whatever happened to them happened.”

“What about her weapons?”

“We’re still too far off to tell, sir.”

“Helm, increase velocity,” the captain ordered. “Close in and bring us alongside.”

“Aye, sir,” the helm officer answered. Hansen didn’t know her.

“Reduce magnification to normal.”

“Magnification-one, sir,” Bellinger acknowledged as he complied.

The image of the Tor’Kana battleship shrank once again, but to a size slightly larger than before, and as the Rapier grew closer, it began to grow visibly.

“Surface gun emplacements are all damaged or destroyed, Captain,” Bellinger reported. “Looks like the main gun is dead, too.”

“Torpedoes?”

“Aft tubes are open, banks completely exhausted. We’ll have to swing around her bow to get a reading on the forward banks.”

“Helm.”

“I’m on it, sir,” the woman responded.

“There are numerous hull breaches in the aft compartments and along the length of her keel,” Bellinger continued. “As best I can tell, approximately thirty-five percent of her interior has lost atmosphere.”

“Radiation levels?”

“Within safety limits as far inside as our scanners can penetrate, but not by much. And all the internal power appears to be shut down.” As the bow of the Tor’Kana vessel swung into view, he reported, “Forward tubes have been blown open, Captain. The banks are all empty. They must have fired their torpedoes right through the closed ports.”

“Good thing they don’t arm right away,” Erickson commented.

“Yes, sir.” Bellinger made a quick adjustment, presumably to his scanners, hesitated for a moment, then turned in his chair to face his commanding officer. With a grim look on his face, he said, “Captain, the escape pods are all still in place, and there’s the wreckage of at least nine shuttles inside what’s left of the hanger bay.”

Erickson rose to his feet and took a few steps toward the screen. “Are you reading any life signs onboard?”

Bellinger turned back to his instruments, made some more adjustments, then answered, “I think so, sir, but these readings are awfully weak. It may just be the radiation interfering with our scanners, but...”

“Any sign of enemy presence onboard?” Erickson asked with sudden urgency. “Life signs? Tics on the hull? Anything?”

“No tics, sir, but unknown as far as life signs,” Bellinger answered, shaking his head. “I can’t get specific enough readings.”

“What about other vessels in the area?”

“Long range sensors aren’t picking anything up, sir, but you know how that goes.”

“Yeah, don’t we all, Lieutenant. Mister O’Connor,” Erickson called as he turned and stepped back to his chair, “sound standby alert.”

“Standby alert, aye, sir,” O’Connor, presumably one of the communications specialists, responded from out of the picture.

Erickson sat down, then thumbed a pad on his command console, which seemed to grow out of his chair’s right arm. “Captain Erickson to Security.”

“Security. Lieutenant Colonel Zucker here, sir.”

“We’ve found another Tor’Kana vessel, Colonel, but it’s in pretty bad shape. Go to Medbay, grab as many field medics with training in Tor’Kana biology as your boarding craft can carry, suit up, and get over there. As it stands right now, this should be a non-combat rescue and recovery mission, but go with standard hostile zone protocols all the same. We don’t want any surprises.”

“You got it, sir.”

The image of what appeared to be the inside of some sort of airlock suddenly replaced that of the Rapier’s bridge. Except for the single low-intensity spotlight slowly playing over the bare, metal-looking walls, the area was pitch dark. A line of data at the bottom of the screen indicated that the slightly grainy, green-tinted monochrome image was coming from Lieutenant Colonel Zucker’s helmet-cam. According to the chronometer in the far right corner, only twenty-three minutes had elapsed since Captain Erickson had given the order to board the vessel. They’d done so much more quickly than Hansen would have thought possible. Very efficient.

Zucker’s spotlight momentarily came to rest on a small black panel labeled with yellow-green Tor’Kana script—Hansen was right, it was an airlock—but the helmet-cam had been designed to mimic the user’s eye movements with perfect precision, so Zucker’s was constantly shifting from side to side. Its light drifted over the bare bulkhead to his right, then passed across the identification panel again and fell upon the space suited figures of the other members of the boarding party’s Security Forces troops. Their faces were hidden in the dark behind their helmet shields, but the seriousness with which they were treating the operation was clearly evident in the individual weapons they were carrying—the sleek, easy to handle VK-19 recoilless laser-pulse rifle, which served as the standard zero-G combat weapon fleet-wide, an HS-21 squad assault weapon, even a pair of HE-100 35mm grenade launchers. In short, they were armed to the teeth.

Back in the days when he served in combat, Hansen had never liked the laser-pulse rifles. He’d understood why they needed them, of course. After all, firing a non-recoilless weapon in a zero-G fight meant floating backwards, out of control and away from whatever protective cover and concealment you might have been using, and that was never a good thing for a soldier. But laser pulses, while extremely painful as they burned through a target’s flesh, had a nasty habit of cauterizing the wounds they inflicted, which prevented excessive bleeding, so it almost always took multiple hits to bring a stalwart target down.

And the Veshtonn were nothing if not stalwart.

“Take your positions, everyone,” Zucker ordered as he and his camera looked back at the inner airlock door in front of him.

The cramped space seemed to rotate 180 degrees to the right as Zucker turned around and backed himself up against the bulkhead, putting the inner door to his immediate right. Hansen caught a brief glimpse of the outer doors—closed now, no doubt to protect against the loss of any atmosphere that might remain inside—but Zucker quickly looked back to his right, at the inner door again.

“Let’s do it, T-J,” Zucker said.

“You got it, boss.”

One of the troops, most likely the ‘T.J.’ whom Zucker had just spoken to, stepped away, moving out of the picture. Moments leter the inner door rose up into the high ceiling, out of sight, and Zucker’s light beam fell against the far left wall of the otherwise pitch black inner room. Zucker waited for a few seconds, then leaned forward and peered inside the vessel—it was pretty dark in there—but he quickly backed off again before Hansen was able to focus on anything in particular.

“Activate HUDs,” Zucker said. A second later a series of green lines and odd shapes appeared on the wall screen—on the inside surface of Zucker’s face shield, Hansen reminded himself—artificially diagramming those portions of his surroundings that weren’t illuminated sufficiently to see with the naked eye. The trooper directly across from him on the other side of the door appeared as a red figure with a small point of blue light flashing in the center of his chest—a ‘friend-or-foe’ indicator, identifying him as a friendly.

Hansen had never liked them, either. Two hundred years after their first introduction to the battlefield, they still couldn’t be completely counted on not to fail. Nor should they ever be, in his opinion. How many good soldiers had they lost over the decades, killed by friendly fire because their indicators had malfunctioned? Soldiers had become far too dependent on them for their own good.

“Point of view, weapon,” Zucker commanded.

The image switched to one seen from a lower angle and flowed across the screen from right to left as Zucker raised his rifle and aimed it around the corner to get a look inside without exposing himself to any dangers that might be waiting for them there. His HUD reconstructed the room and outlined everything in it. A large, dim red mass lay motionless on the floor several meters ahead of his weapon, indicating the presence of organic material. There was only one thing it could have been.

“Oh my God,” Hansen muttered.

Zucker trained his weapon’s sights on the body and squeezed the trigger halfway to acquire a target lock. A set of cross-hairs appeared and remained centered on the unmoving red mass, even as the image wavered slightly when Zucker’s arms moved. “Identify and analyze tactical,” he said.

There was a very slight pause as his computer pack took a series of scanner readings through the rifle’s target acquisition unit and extrapolated the data, but the response came as close to instantaneously as was possible under the circumstances. “Species: Tor’Kana,” the artificial voice reported. “Gender: male. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”

Lieutenant Johnson’s image suddenly appeared in a small, unobtrusive window near the upper right corner of the wall screen. “They found the same thing all over the ship, Admiral,” he said as the video footage continued, its audio temporarily muted. “Some were found alive, but the vast majority were dead. Here’s the main part I wanted you to see.”

The scene jumped ahead roughly forty-three minutes as Johnson’s small window winked off. There was no way for Hansen to know for sure exactly where Zucker and his team were at that point, but the apparent lack of consoles and equipment in the area served as a fair indication that they were probably somewhere in the lower decks—possibly in the maintenance corridors or the cargo holds.

“I think I’ve got it, sir,” one of the troopers said.

“Everyone ready?” Zucker asked as he stepped to the side of the large door in front of him and backed up against the bulkhead in the same manner as before. Several affirmative responses were voiced, then, “All right, T-J. Open her up. And let’s hope there are some more live ones in there.”

The loud hiss of a heavy blast door rising into the ceiling immediately followed his order. So it was a cargo hold. Either that or a small craft hanger deck.

“Jesus Christ,” someone said.

“Holy mother of...”

“If you boys are done calling for help, Ripper, I’d appreciate an ‘all clear,’” Zucker said.

“Uh, yeah. All clear, sir. Sorry, Colonel.”

Zucker stepped away from the bulkhead and turned to look inside. The entire lower third of his HUD glowed with that same dull red aura. Bodies were strewn across the deck as far as Hansen could see. Zucker chose one, seemingly at random, aimed his rifle, and half squeezed the trigger again.

“Identify and analyze tactical.”

His computer pack took its readings, extrapolated its data, and reported, “Species: Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”

Female? “Well I’ll be damned,” Hansen said as he sat forward and rested his arms on his desk. They had more females!

“Hey, Colonel?” one of the troopers called.

“Stand by a second,” Zucker told him. He selected another body. “Identify and analyze tactical.”

“Species: Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”

Another dead female. How many more? Johnson had mentioned that some Tor’Kana had been found alive. Hansen could only hope that some of those survivors were female as well.

Zucker acquired one more target. “Identify and analyze tactical.”

“Species: Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives. Threat: none apparent.”

“Are you men all finding dead Tor’Kana females, too?” Zucker asked.

Without exception, his men responded that they were. He reset his TAC-unit to scan the entire room. “Scan for alien life signs.”

“Scanning. Negative alien life signs within range.”

Hansen heard Zucker’s disheartened sigh, even over his own.

“Are all the bodies Tor’Kana females?” Zucker asked.

“Biological identification is not possible on wide scan setting.”

“Medics,” Zucker called, rather than resetting his TAC-unit again. “I want to know what killed these...uh...people.”

“You got it, sir,” someone responded.

“Let’s light it up for them, boys. And make sure your TAC-units are set to wide scan. I don’t want anyone sneaking in here behind us.”

Zucker’s HUD winked off and the room before him grew brighter as the other troopers dispersed and added their spotlights to his own.

Despite the relatively limited field of vision that Zucker’s continuously moving camera provided—the colonel must have been making his way back and forth, from one end of the room to the other—it didn’t take very long for Hansen to realize that the troopers had been faced with a most gruesome task. There looked to be at least two hundred bodies scattered throughout the cavernous room, and from the looks of things most of them had died a horrible death. Many of them had four empty sockets where their multifaceted black eyes had been, and a light colored, semi-liquid substance, doubtless the yellow-white syrupy fluid that was Tor’Kana blood, seemed to be splattered everywhere.

Hansen’s gaze fell to the surface of his desk as he bowed his head in mourning for the dead.

Several recorded minutes passed in silent fast-forward mode while the medics examined the bodies, one at a time. Then, finally, the recording slowed to real time again as one of them reported their conclusions.

Hansen listened without looking up.

“We’ve got exactly one hundred and sixty-one dead Tor’Kana females here, Colonel,” one of the medics said. “Cause of death in one hundred nineteen cases appears to be massive tissue damage associated with sudden decompression. As you can see, the evidence is pretty obvious.”

“If you’re talking about their eyes exploding out of their heads, Sergeant, that’s only a myth,” Zucker said. “Sudden decompression doesn’t really do that.”

“Sudden decompression doesn’t really do that to us, maybe, but it does it to them, sir,” the medic clarified. “They have small sacks of air behind their eyes, and the tendons and muscles holding their eyes in place aren’t nearly as strong as ours. As for the others, the cause of death appears to be asphyxiation due to inhalation of an improperly balanced atmosphere, but our doctors back on the ship are going to have to examine them more thoroughly to be sure.”

One hundred and sixty-one. Hansen looked up just as the image of the medic talking to Zucker froze, as if the recording had suddenly malfunctioned. He understood now why Johnson had tagged this report the way he had, and he agreed wholeheartedly with the young agent’s assessment. Not many Tor’Kana females had escaped the invasion of their home system. Maybe a few thousand at best, including those that Zucker’s team had found, plus any more that might have been aboard that ship. The slaughter of so many of them was truly devastating.

Johnson’s image reappeared in full-screen. “Turns out that medic was right, Admiral. The autopsies are still ongoing, but I’m told the results so far do indicate that several victims were breathing an atmosphere with improperly balanced gasses. In all there were seven-hundred ninety Tor’Kana found dead onboard, including all four-hundred seventy-seven females they were transporting. There were also one-hundred thirty-eight severely wounded, most of them mortally. Only about eleven are expected to survive. That’s eleven out of nine hundred twenty-eight souls, Admiral, in case you weren’t counting.

“Examination of the damage to the ship’s hull confirms they were attacked by the Veshtonn. We’re assuming for the time being that the Veshtonn somehow tapped into the ship’s computer and adjusted the atmospheric mix enough to kill the female passengers, though why they didn’t just kill the whole crew that way instead of boarding the ship and slaughtering them remains a big question.”

Hansen could guess the answer to that question. He’d lived through it once, long ago.

“One more thing, Admiral. That ship has been positively identified as one of the seven Tor’Kana military vessels we know to have escaped from their home system last month. And as you know, only three of the five that have been recovered were carrying females. If there really is only one more out there somewhere...

“It doesn’t look good, Admiral. I’ll keep you posted. Lieutenant Johnson out.”

The wall screen went dark. Hansen took a deep breath and bowed his head again as he exhaled. Four hundred and seventy-seven more Tor’Kana females dead. No, it didn’t look good. It didn’t look good at all, and things were getting worse every day.

And he still had one more report to review.