Admiral Hansen was having one of those days. The kind of day that starts off badly and only gets worse as it drags by. The kind of day where absolutely nothing seems to go right. The kind of day that made a person whish they had never climbed out of bed. And he hadn’t even made it to the office yet.
He’d crawled out of bed a full hour earlier than usual, intending to sit down and watch the early morning news over breakfast. He’d wanted to see if the investigative reporter looking into that Federation Building shooting that had occurred a couple weeks back—the guy was supposedly the best in the business—had managed to discover the identity of the suspect who’d died in the hospital yet. The suspect who had cost five New York City police officers their lives. He knew the chances of that were slim, but a slim chance was better than no chance at all.
Under normal circumstances Hansen would simply have tapped into his own sources. He had them virtually everywhere and sooner or later one of them would have come through for him. They always did. But if the dead suspect was in fact Professor Min’para—all he knew for sure was that the professor hadn’t yet made it home—the last thing he wanted to do was to create a trail of inquiries that might lead the investigating authorities straight to him and Royer. Better to avoid showing any interest at all.
So far the U.S. Marines and civilian security guards who’d been involved in the incident hadn’t been any help at all with regards to determining the dead suspect’s identity. That in itself seemed more than a little odd to Hansen. Between the four of them they should have been able to provide enough information to positively identify the suspect within the first twenty-four hours. But instead, the F.B.I. and the C.I.D and the Solfleet Intelligence agents he’d assigned to follow their progress had only hit one road block after another. Every lead had led them to a dead end.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed as if there was someone somewhere on the inside, working against them.
Oh well. Hopefully, Commander Royer and her team would find the professor soon, alive and well and safely out of their business. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. He grinned, despite the urgency of it all. The look on her face when she’d had to come to him and report that her team had lost track of the old guy—that she’d failed—had been priceless.
He’d managed to get a shower and pull on his uniform in peace, but five minutes after he’d started his breakfast an urgent call had come in from the midnight shift duty officer, yet another young ensign—weren’t newly commissioned officers ever assigned to the fleet or to line units anymore?—who’d been left on her own and in charge for the very first time. It had only taken a couple of minute for Hansen to convince the young officer that her situation wasn’t nearly as urgent as she’d thought it was, but as luck would have it that had proven to be just long enough to ensure that his breakfast overcooked and was ruined beyond recovery.
He’d considered starting breakfast over again, but rather than risk ruining it twice in the same morning he’d decided instead to grab something at the officers’ dining facility. He’d headed directly there, and had been sorely disappointed in his selections. One bite of whatever kind of meat it was that had been served with the eggs was all it had taken to remind him of why he’d started cooking for himself in the first place. Even after centuries of improvements, military rations prepared in bulk still tasted exactly like military rations prepared in bulk.
After breakfast, what little of it he’d actually eaten, he’d left the dining facility and headed down the corridor to lift 137, the one that would take him directly to his department, only to discover that some kind of malfunction had shut it down, trapping at least half a dozen flag officers between two decks. As good a place as any for a couple of them, as far as he was concerned. Maintenance crews had been hard at work trying to rescue them, but once that was done it would likely take ‘two to three days, give or take a few hours,’ according to the repair crew supervisor, for service to be completely restored. So he’d had to double back and walk three times as far to the main elevators.
There he’d run into the station’s Military Police chief, who’d been glad to bump into him so early because there was a matter of extreme importance he needed to discuss with him. Unfortunately, he’d left the reports and supporting documents he needed to refer to back in his office, so he needed the admiral to accompany him there, if he wouldn’t mind. And of course, in the interests of interdepartmental harmony, he hadn’t minded.
Naturally, the matter hadn’t been as important as the Military Police chief had thought it was, but their discussion had nonetheless dragged on for more than two hours.
Hansen snapped out of it just in time to respond to a passing crewman’s greeting with a polite “Good morning,” and then glanced at his watch as he stepped into the agency’s offices, and immediately wished he hadn’t. It was a little after 1000 hours. Far too early to escape to his quarters and put this miserable day behind him, yet far too late to be wandering into his office for the first time to begin the day’s work.
A couple of years ago it wouldn’t have been a problem. A couple of years ago he could have shown up late and still gotten his work done by the normal end of duty hours, if not earlier. But this wasn’t a couple of years ago. Things had gotten a lot busier since then, especially over the last six or seven months. The long and very costly succession of Veshtonn victories that had followed their invasion and occupation of the Rosha’Kana star system had kept the agency busier than he could ever have dreamed possible, and the renewed campaign to liberate that system was certainly no different, though Coalition forces were slowly, finally, beginning to get the upper hand out there. Intelligence reports were constantly flooding in from all directions. Teams were being assigned or reassigned almost on a daily basis. And of course, worst of all, there were the losses and the letters to grieving families that went with them. He felt as though he’d written more of those in the last six months than in all of his previous years of service combined.
He and his staff always had a lot to do. A full day’s work really was a full day’s work, if not more. So now, unless he wanted to work straight through dinner and well into the evening, he was going to have to find a way to squeeze this full day’s work into little more than half a day. Of course, if he did work late, that would leave Heather to cook dinner again, and that wasn’t a bad thing at all. She’d turned into quite the gourmet chef lately.
He sat down at his desk—had he said ‘Good morning’ to Vicky? Had she even been there?—and noticed that the incoming message indicator on his terminal was flashing. The time/date stamp indicated that the message had come in a few hours ago. “Receive and play message, full audio-video mode,” he said.
“Message is scrambled and encrypted. Please provide decryption access code.”
“Hansen, Icarus. Vice-Admiral. Alpha one dash one nine one beta alpha.”
“Access code accepted. Message is text only,” the computer advised him.
“Display at this location.” The message immediately appeared on his screen.
TO: Commanding Officer, Solfleet.
FROM: Commanding Officer, Station X-ray One.
SUBJECT: Request Confirmation of Orders.
BODY: Admiral, an S.I.A. agent has recently arrived
this station. His mission orders are, to say the least,
unusual, and I would like you to confirm them for me
before I allow him to proceed. Orders indicate that he
is to go through. This is highly irregular. Please
confirm. Say again. Please confirm. Standing by.
Hansen leaned back in his chair and sighed. As if the day hadn’t been difficult enough already, now he had to deal with the growing conflict within his own conscience all over again. Not to mention with that annoying Commander Akagi. This was the last thing he’d expected to happen. He’d thought that once Lieutenant Graves left the station, that would be it. There would be no turning back—assuming Captain Sedelnikov got him to Window World safely, of course. While it was true that Commander Akagi was an egotistical and self-righteous man who thought himself more than just a little bit superior to everyone else, Hansen had never even considered the possibility that the little twerp might actually have the gonads to interfere in an S.I.A. matter. Yet he had done just that. And in doing so he had unwittingly provided Hansen with one final opportunity to abide by the president’s decision and cancel the Timeshift mission. One final opportunity to save his already tenuous career.
He thought about it very seriously for several minutes. He was usually a man who stuck to his guns no matter what once he made up his mind about something, but this time...this time he couldn’t be so sure. He’d been wrestling with second thoughts almost from the beginning.
At least Admiral Chaffee hadn’t read the message before forwarding it to him. If he had, the decision would already have been made and the day would have gotten a whole lot worse for him than it already was, real fast. Chaffee would have sent a message canceling the mission and he’d most likely have been thrown into the brig by now. But Chaffee hadn’t read it, so none of that had happened.
Yes, he was definitely having one of those days, but perhaps the fates were giving him a chance to make it a little better.
He tapped his comm-panel’s ‘call’ button. “Admiral Hansen to Commander Royer.”
“Royer here, sir.”
“Where are you right now, Liz?”
“On my way back from a meeting with the station X-O. Less than a minute away.”
“See me in my office, please.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be there in about two seconds.” She stepped through the door before Hansen could even close the channel. “What’s going on, Admiral?” she asked as she approached him.
“This message just came in this morning,” he told her, pointing at his screen. “Take a look at it, Commander.”
He scooted his chair to one side, making room for her as she walked around his desk to stand at his side. She read the message, then looked down at him and asked, “Have you sent him a confirmation message yet?”
“Not yet,” he answered, staring at the screen.
When he said nothing further, she asked, not without some measure of doubt, “May I assume, sir, that you intend to do so?”
He folded his arms across his broad chest and considered his answer for a few moments. Then, looking up at her, he told her, “I’m not so sure we should go through with this mission anymore, Commander.”
Royer stepped out from behind his desk, allowing him to move back to his rightful place. If she was going to...to question his resolve, and perhaps even his fitness to command, looking down her nose at him while invading his personal space was not exactly the best way to do it. She took a seat directly across from him and paused for a moment to gather her thoughts and carefully—very carefully—consider her next words.
“I realize, sir, that you’ve had your doubts about this mission from the beginning,” she pointed out as tactfully as she could. “Especially since the president chose not to authorize it. But I’ve never known you to second-guess your own orders once you’ve issued them.”
“You make it sound as though I’ve never made a mistake.”
“Well, we all make mistakes, of course. But I’ve never known you to give an order unless you were sure it was the right one. Consequently...”
“I know, Commander,” he agreed. “But you’ve got to admit that these particular orders are highly unusual.”
“Granted, sir, but they also happen to be necessary. This mission is absolutely essential to the survival of our world.”
“Not necessarily, Liz,” he countered. “The tide of battle in the Rosha’Kana star system is beginning to turn in our favor. If we do in fact prevail in that campaign and return the Tor’Kana to their world...”
“For how long, Admiral?” Royer asked. “If we do drive the Veshtonn out, how long do you think they’ll stay out? They know as well as we do how vital the Tor’Kana are to the Coalition’s survival. How much time to rebuild our forces do you think they’ll give us before they turn around and invade that system all over again?”
“They’ll have some rebuilding to do, too, you know,” Hansen pointed out.
“Which they’ve always managed to do a lot faster than we have,” she reminded him. “That’s a cold hard fact, and you know it. Sir.”
She had a good point. Two of them, actually. “You’re absolutely right, Liz,” he told her. “The Veshtonn have shown us many times during this war that they can rebuild their forces a lot faster than any of the Coalition members can...including the Tor’Kana. And they do know how vital the Tor’Kana are. But that doesn’t necessarily guarantee they’ll try to take Rosha’Kana back again. At least not right away, because now they also know what lengths we’re willing to go to in order to defend that system.”
“Which does not one damn thing to improve our chances of defending it successfully when the time comes, sir,” she countered. “And you know the time will come. They’ll invade again, before we’re ready for them.” She paused a moment, strictly for effect, then added, “You need to send a confirmation message right away, Admiral. Deep down inside you know as well as I do that Timeshift is the only hope we have.”
“I know no such thing, Commander,” Hansen contended as he stood up and stepped over to his window. The station had been turned and his view of the Earth was gone, replaced by that of millions upon millions of stars. How poetic, he thought. The Earth...gone, with only the stars remaining and no vessels in sight. Was that what the future held for Earth, her colonies, and the Coalition as a whole? Was that to be their fate?
“Write the message, Commander,” he instructed, “but don’t send it. If it’s to be done, the responsibility will be mine and mine alone.”
Royer took his place behind his desk, went to work, and finished in barely a minute.
“It’s ready, Admiral,” she advised him, moving aside for him but not yet relinquishing his chair. He stepped over to her side and read what she had written.
TO: Commander, Station X-ray One.
FROM: Commander, Solfleet Intelligence Agency.
AUTHORITY: Commanding Officer, Solfleet.
SUBJECT: Confirmation of Orders.
BODY: Agent’s orders are officially confirmed.
“Short and sweet,” he commented. “Directly to the point.”
“That’s exactly what Commander Akagi would expect from Admiral Chaffee, sir,” she pointed out, looking up at him. “Even though the response is coming from this office, which I’m sure he won’t be very happy about.”
“And just like that we rewrite history. Maybe.”
“We save history, sir,” Royer corrected. “If not for ourselves then for our counterparts in an alternate timeline, depending on which theory is the right one. All you have to do is send the message.” Hansen stood there, staring down at the ‘send’ pad just beneath the lower right corner of the screen. But he didn’t move to touch it. “Sir?”
“What about our people assigned to look for the lieutenant’s message?” he asked.
“Already in position and standing by, sir. And they’ve all got crypto-links, so they can notify you directly by comm-link if they find something.”
His office door suddenly flew open with a whine at twice its normal speed and a vaguely familiar voice called out, “Admiral Hansen.”
Hansen and Royer both looked up to find Chairman MacLeod and a young, clean cut and very well dressed gentleman approaching them. A pair of uniformed Military Policemen—one a fairly large and muscular Asian squad sergeant in his early to mid twenties, the other an even younger white female sergeant of average size and build—came in behind them and took up positions on either side.
“Chairman MacLeod,” Hansen began angrily as he stepped out from behind his desk.
“Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen...”
“Yes, Mister Chairman, as you well know, and this happens to be my private office, and that door you just came through without the courtesy of buzzing first was closed for a reason. Now, I don’t know who you think you are, but I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t just...”
MacLeod held a data chip out in front of him. “Yes, Admiral. Complaint noted,” he said as he and his party came to a halt halfway across the room. “This chip contains presidential arrest warrants for both you and Commander Royer.”
Hansen and Royer exchanged a look that only they as longtime colleagues would know how to interpret.
“The gentleman to my right is Special Agent Krieger of the C-I-D,” MacLeod informed them. Then he faced the agent and said, “Agent Krieger, let’s get this over with, shall we.”
Krieger took a single step forward and slightly in front of MacLeod, but before he could say anything Hansen stepped up to him, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “You’re orders, Agent, are to turn around and escort the chairman and his party out of my office immediately.”
The young agent hesitated, swallowed hard, then began, “Sir, I...”
“Make your choice, son,” Hansen told him.
The agent hesitated again, for a moment, then did just that. “Admiral, by direct order and authority of the President of the United Earth Federation, I hereby place you, Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen...” He met Royer’s eyes as well, just long enough to address her, “...and you, Commander Elizabeth Royer...” then looked back at Hansen again, “...under arrest for willful violation of the Brix-Cyberclone Cessation Act of twenty-one sixty-two. Sergeants, take them into custody.”
“Sir,” the squad sergeant began as he approached Hansen, “please turn around and place your hands on top of your head.”
“You, too, Commander,” the buck sergeant added as she started toward Royer. “Stand up, turn around, and place your hands on top of your head.”
It was all over. More than six years of worrying that they’d one day be arrested for what they had done, of wondering whether or not he would make it to retirement, had finally come to an end. Strangely enough, an almost intoxicating sense of relief filled his spirit as he complied with the Military Policeman’s instructions. They’d broken the law—the two highest laws of their world, in fact—and inevitably the law had finally caught up with them. There had been times along the way when he’d almost wished for it. Now he knew why.
But Royer wasn’t so ready to cooperate. At first she remained defiantly seated, but when the buck sergeant came around the desk and grabbed her by the arm like she was some kind of common criminal she suddenly sprang to her feet and yelled, “Get your fucking hands off me!” and then shoved the younger woman away from her so hard that she almost fell backwards to the floor.
“As ease, Commander!” Hansen hollered as the squad sergeant cuffed his hands behind his back. But when the sergeant moved in on her for the second time, much more aggressively than before, Royer expertly countered her attempts to grab her by the arms and then spun around with lightning speed and kicked her square in the chest, launching her back into the small bookshelf against the wall with a loud crash. Then she lunged for the comm-panel.
The squad sergeant practically threw Hansen into Krieger’s hands and then jumped up into one of the visitor’s chairs, launched himself over the desk, and tackled Royer to the floor as though she were the opposing quarterback in a football game, but not before she managed to thumb the ‘send’ pad and delete the confirmation message from the screen. Within seconds of that, the MPs had Royer face down on the floor with her arms cuffed securely behind her.
Krieger tapped the comm-link pinned to his suit coat collar. “Communications Center, this is Special Agent Krieger of the C-I-D. Intercept and suspend all communications outgoing from the S-I-A’s offices in the last minute, and advise me as to their contents.”
“Understood, sir. Stand by.” And a few seconds later, “Special Agent Krieger, this is the Comm-Center. There have been no outgoing signals from any terminal at that location in the last minute.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Confirmed, sir. No communications in or out in the last minute. In fact, according to my logs, there haven’t been any outgoing signals from there in over an hour.”
“All right. Keep an eye out for any that might have been set for delayed transmission. Krieger out.” He tapped his comm-link off, then gestured for the MPs to pick Royer up off the floor. As soon as they had her back on her feet and facing him, he asked, “What did you just do on that panel, Commander?”
“Nothing,” Royer lied.
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Commander. We all saw you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mister Krieger.”
He exhaled loudly. “No. Of course you don’t,” he said, obviously having expected to get exactly that kind of response. No doubt he expected the same from Hansen as well, but he still had to ask. He faced him. “Admiral Hansen, what was on your screen?”
“Sorry, Mister Krieger,” Hansen said after thinking about it for a few seconds. “I would tell you, but I couldn’t see it from here.” He needed time to think.
“Of course you couldn’t.” He turned to MacLeod. “Let’s get them out of here, sir.”
“One moment please, Mister Krieger.” MacLeod moved to the front of Hansen’s desk, reached across to the comm-panel, and pressed a couple of pads. “This is Chairman MacLeod to the Military Police patrol supervisor.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
“We have both subjects in custody, Sergeant. Please clear the designated corridors of all traffic at this time.”
“Affirmed, sir. You should be clear to move in about two minutes or so.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. MacLeod out.”
The door chimes played their short melodic song, but the tune fell on deaf ears. A few seconds later they played a second time, and then a third, before they finally drew Karen out of the romantic, not to mention very erotic virtuavision drama she’d been thoroughly engrossed in for the past hour and a half. Liz was going to love it...if she ever found the time to watch it.
Karen paused her program and switched off the display. “I’m coming,” she called out as she stood up. She tied off her jade-green Japanese silk mini-robe as she approached the door—Liz had bought the beautiful, dragon-adorned garment for her at the same time she’d bought her own pearl-white one, and she loved it—then checked herself out in the full-length mirror.
The chimes played one more time before she finally tapped the intercom.
“Who is it?”
“Military Police, ma’am,” the answer came. “Open the door, please.”
Military Police? What could they...Oh God! Liz! She slapped the ‘open’ button. Two young women in tactical Military Police uniforms—all black, heavy duty coveralls and TAC vests—each adorned with a pair of silver-gray chevrons on the left sleeves—lance corporals, if she wasn’t mistaken—stood before her.
“Misses Karen DiAngelo?” the one on the left asked. She was a fairly plain looking woman, about Karen’s size, with blond hair nearly as bright as Liz’s pulled straight back and rolled into a fist-sized bun.
“Yes. What can I do for you?” Karen asked anxiously.
“You’ll have to come with us, ma’am.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” Then it hit her. “Oh my God. My wife, Commander Elizabeth Royer? Is she all right?”
“We’re not at liberty to say anything, ma’am,” the other policewoman told her. She was a taller and probablu outweighed her by a good fifty pounds—a less attractive woman with short brown hair brushed behind her ears and hanging loosely at her neck. “You’ll be told all about it back at Security Control.”
“Told about what?” Karen asked anxiously. “Can’t you just tell me if she’s all right or if she’s hurt or...”
“She’s fine, ma’am,” the blonde answered, “She’s been arrested, but she’s...”
“Arrested!” Karen exclaimed. “What for?”
“We really can’t tell you anything more than that, ma’am. Now, please, let’s go.”
“Umm, okay. Just, uh...” She stepped away and started toward the bedroom. “Just let me put some clothes on and...”
The MPs charged into the room and grabbed her by the arms.
“You’re not going anywhere by yourself, ma’am,” the stocky one said.
“Take your hands off me!” Karen shouted, twisting herself free of their halfhearted grasps. “How dare you put your hands on me!”
“Look, I apologize for that, ma’am,” the blond said. “We didn’t mean to upset you, but we can’t just let you wander into the other room by yourself. We don’t know what you might come out of there with.”
“All I want is to put on some decent clothes! I’m not going anywhere dressed like this!”
“That’s fine, ma’am,” the blond conceded. “Of course you can get dressed first, but one of us is going to have to go with you.”
“Why? Am I under arrest, too?” Karen asked, her tone growing more challenging as her patience began to wear thin.
The MPs exchanged a look. Then the blond answered, “Well, no, ma’am, you’re not actually under arrest, but...”
“Then I don’t really have to go anywhere with you if I don’t want to, do I?”
“Uh, yes, ma’am, you do.”
“The hell I do! You can’t just...”
“We can and we are!” the stocky one bellowed, leaving no room for argument as she stepped closer. “Now, you can either let one of us come with you while you change your clothes or you can come with us as you are. But one way or the other, you are going to come with us.”
Karen stared at the heifer of a woman, sizing her up. She clearly meant what she’d said, and the piercing look in her dark brown eyes made it clear that she would not hesitate to grab her by the neck and drag her out if she had to. And if heifer did that, Karen knew, she wouldn’t stand an unsuited astronaut’s chance in the icy cold of open space against her. “Fine,” she finally said. “You can both come with me for all I care.” She turned her back and headed into the bedroom.
Judging from the footfalls behind her, it was the heifer who followed. A backward glance as she opened the bedroom door confirmed that she’d judged correctly.
She slipped off her robe without a second thought and tossed it onto the foot of the bed as she walked by it on the way to her dresser. But then, as she leaned down and opened her bottom dresser drawer, she felt the other woman’s eyes on her and that made her uncomfortable enough that she didn’t want to leave her back turned any longer than necessary. Problem was, she didn’t want to face the woman bare-breasted either, so she grabbed whatever shirt happened to be on top of the stack of neatly folded clothes—her sleeveless sky-blue half-tee—and quickly pulled it on, then opened the top drawer and pulled on a pair of ankle socks. Then she closed both drawers and moved to the closet for a pair of jeans. She pulled them on and fastened them, then shooed her escort back into the living room ahead of her.
“Ready?” the blond asked rhetorically.
“Don’t I look ready?” Karen returned sarcastically. She slipped on her sneakers, opened the door, and punched the lock code into the wall panel. “Well? Let’s go,” she said, gesturing for them to lead the way.
“Not quite yet,” the blond said. Karen looked at her, then followed her gaze when it fell downward to the empty space between them. She was holding a set of handcuffs, open and ready to be put to use. “For our own protection.”
“Oh no!” Karen exclaimed. “You are not putting those on me!”
“It’s regulations.”
“What regulations? You said I wasn’t under arrest!”
“You’re not, but it’s standard procedure when bringing in a potentially hostile witness.”
“I’m not going to do anything!”
“Damn right you’re not,” the heifer assured her as she grabbed the handcuffs out of her partner’s hand. She stepped forward and grabbed Karen by the arm and spun her around.
“Hey!” Karen hollered. “What are you...”
The heifer shoved her into the doorjamb with a thud and held her there as she twisted her arm up behind her back.
“Ow! Stop it! You’re hurting me!” She heard the ratchet and felt the cuffs lock into place around her wrist. Fear filled her heart as the MP bent her other arm up behind her and locked it in as well, and though she tried her best not to, she began to cry.
The heifer pulled her away from the doorjamb and let the door close. The blond took her other arm, and as they started down the corridor, the heifer commented, “They always have to do it the hard way.”
Except for the one extraordinarily large, stalwart MP who stood silent guard beside the windowless blue-gray door directly behind him, whose unwavering glare he could almost feel burning through the back of his head, Admiral Hansen waited patiently, all alone. The MPs had seated him at one end of a small rectangular table near the center of the barren and immaculately clean but excessively over-lit interrogation room. The sign on the door had identified the room as ‘Interview 2’, but the room had obviously been constructed with criminal interrogations in mind. His chair was one of three, all identical to one another, which were arranged around the table. But unlike the other two his was permanently affixed to the dull gray plasticrete floor and had a set of security straps hanging from its arms and the back of its seat. Had he been anyone other than a flag-grade officer, he imagined, he’d likely have been strapped in.
There was nothing else in the room. No additional furniture, no cabinets, not even a clock or a video screen on the plain white walls. Had the table been made of old dried out wood, its surface slightly warped and its paint chipped and peeling, and had there been a single, blinding source of light hovering directly above it, he would have felt like the newly captured suspect in an old police drama, waiting to be interrogated by the hero detective.
Come to think of it, the longer he waited the more he felt like that anyway, despite the more contemporary surroundings. Probably because that was exactly what he was waiting for.
He’d been waiting for nearly an hour and a half when Special Agent Krieger finally came in. After asking the MP if he wouldn’t mind taking up his post outside the room, which he did immediately, the young investigator set a handcomp down on the table in front of the admiral and took a seat in the chair to his right.
“I apologize for taking so long to get back to you, Admiral,” he said politely. “I was in the middle of something pretty important when the special agent in charge assigned me to go with Chairman MacLeod and bring you in. I had to finish it up.”
“That’s quite all right, Mister Krieger,” Hansen replied. Then, with obvious sarcasm, he added, “It’s not like I have anything more important to do during wartime.”
Krieger looked him in the eye for a moment, then said, “Yeah. Well, I don’t like this any more than you do, Admiral.”
“I seriously doubt that, Mister Krieger.”
“Yeah, I’m not surprised. So, now that we both know where we stand, let’s get started, shall we?”
Despite his unfortunate circumstances, Hansen grinned as he gazed at the young man in front of him. If he was the old police drama’s newly captured suspect, then Special Agent Krieger was indeed its hero detective. He fit the part to a tee. He looked unusually young for a man in his position, was probably single, and was quite obviously physically fit. And he was exceptionally handsome—Hollywood handsome, to invoke the old phrase—with smooth, clear skin that looked like it hadn’t grown a single whisker, a healthy tan, perfectly chiseled features, well groomed short dark brown hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a glistening white smile that could have melted even the most frigid woman’s heart. Heather would probably fall instantly in love with the guy if she ever got the opportunity to meet him.
And given her behavior over the last couple of years, the chances of that happening were not entirely small.
“What’s so amusing?” Krieger asked, seeing the admiral’s grin.
“Nothing,” Hansen told him. “It’s not important.”
“All right,” the investigator reluctantly accepted. “Then let’s get started.”
“Why not.”
Krieger pointed out the small camera mounted near the ceiling in the center of the room’s back wall and said, “This interview is being recorded in its entirety. Upon completion of this interview, the recording will be entered into the official record of this investigation.
“Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen, Commanding Officer, Solfleet Intelligence Agency, you have been placed under lawful arrest and are preliminarily charged with the commission of a capital crime against humanity, that being the willful violation of the Brix-Cyberclone Cessation Act of twenty-one sixty-two. You are also charged with grand theft of government property and unlawful use of government equipment and/or facilities in furtherance of criminal activities. In addition, you are suspected of the unlawful alteration or falsification of official Solfleet records, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to commit murder.”
“Whoa! Wait a second!” Hansen exclaimed. “Murder? What murder? What are you talking about?”
“Just a minute, Admiral, please,” Krieger said as he raised an open hand between them. “Let me get the necessary formalities out of the way first. Then I’ll fill you in on all the details and we can talk as much as you want to.”
Hansen fell silent, as requested, genuinely impressed with the young investigator’s polite and professional, yet somehow still warm and friendly manner. He’d worked with a lot of the older and more experienced, and consequently more cynical criminal investigators in the past, and in his experience such qualities were rarely seen among them. No doubt that was at least partly the reason why Krieger had been chosen for this case. Hansen might have been a criminal suspect, but he was still a flag-grade officer, still an admiral, and as such was owed a certain measure of consideration and respect.
Krieger dropped his suspect-silencing hand to his lap and asked, “Admiral Hansen, do you understand the nature of the charges and allegations against you?”
“Of course I understand,” the admiral answered curtly. “Now can we just get this over with, please? I have a lot of work to do.”
“Certainly, Admiral. But as you know, before I ask you any questions I must advise you of your legal rights and make sure you understand them. They appear...”
“I understand them perfectly, Mister Krieger,” Hansen interrupted.
“I still have to go through them, sir,” Krieger patiently explained. “As I was saying, they appear in text form on the handcomp in front of you if you’d like to follow along.”
Hansen glanced down at the device without actually reading the words as Krieger pulled a small card from his shirt pocket and began to read.
“You have the absolute right to remain silent. You do not have to answer my questions or say anything. If you choose to waive that right, anything you say can and will be used as evidence in an administrative hearing, a criminal court-martial, or both. You have the right to consult with an attorney before questioning and to have an attorney present with you during questioning. This can be a military attorney assigned to you at no expense to you, or a civilian attorney that you arrange for at your own expense, or both. If you choose to waive any or all of your legal rights, then later wish to invoke those rights, you may do so at any time.
“Vice-Admiral Hansen, do you understand your legal rights as I have explained them?”
“Yes, damn it, I understand,” he answered impatiently. “I understand the nature of the charges and allegations against me and I understand my legal rights. What I don’t understand is what this murder conspiracy charge is all about!”
“Regarding your right to remain silent, Admiral, do you choose to waive or invoke that right at this time?”
“I choose to be told what the hell this murder conspiracy charge is about, Agent Krieger, before I say a damn thing!”
Krieger sat back in his chair with a sigh, seemingly discouraged, and slipped his rights advisement card back into his shirt pocket. “You know, Admiral, I’m trying to be polite and respectful here. With all your years of service you’ve earned that, probably many times over. But you’re not making it very easy for me, sir. You of all people should know that we have to go through this rights advisement first, word for word, by the book, before we can discuss anything. After all, it’s not like you’ve never been through it before.”
Hansen glared at the investigator, his jaw clenched so tightly that he almost ground his teeth to dust. He knew all too well exactly what Krieger was referring to. There wasn’t a Solfleet officer or a criminal law student alive who hadn’t, at some point in their professional education, thoroughly studied the massive investigation and courtroom drama that had followed the tragic deaths of the Earth Federation’s vice-president and his family all those years ago. The numerous interrogations, the private and public hearings, and the very public humiliation that Hansen had been forced to endure, particularly over the deaths of the Security Police troops under his command. It had been one of the most heavily covered news stories of its time and would have cost Hansen his career, not to mention his freedom, had it not been for his willingness to go along with the government’s dire need to keep some of the details of the incident quiet.
It was still a painful memory and Krieger was a lowlife bastard for bringing it up. But he was also right, about both the legal requirements of the rights advisement and the fact that he was well aware of those requirements. And, as the investigator had pointed out, he really was trying his best to be polite and respectful, with that one unfortunate exception. So, reluctantly, Hansen acquiesced. “Very well, Mister Krieger. Go ahead.”
“Thank you, sir,” the investigator replied as he sat up straight and took the card out of his pocket again. “Now, Admiral, regarding your right to remain silent, do you choose to waive or invoke that right at this time?”
“I choose to waive that right,” Hansen declared. “For now. But say the wrong thing...”
“Noted.”
Under normal circumstances, of course, Hansen would never have waived it, even if he were completely innocent of the charges. Lawyers were far too skilled at twisting a person’s words and attributing new meanings to them. But circumstances were anything but normal and he really wanted to know exactly what Chairman MacLeod had discovered that had enabled him to persuade the president to issue the arrest orders. More than that, he needed to know. He needed to know if the Timeshift mission, and therefore the existence of the Portal, had been compromised in any way.
“Regarding your right to consult with an attorney before questioning, do you choose to waive or invoke that right at this time?”
“I choose to waive that right,” Hansen repeated. “For now.” Again, had the circumstances been different...
“And regarding your right to have an attorney present with you during questioning, do you choose to waive or invoke that right at this time?”
“At this time I choose to waive that right.”
“All right then,” Krieger said, flashing a brief but friendly smile as he relaxed his posture, just a little, and poked the rights advisement card back into his shirt pocket again. “Now that we’ve gotten that little formality out of the way, Admiral, I’d like to start by asking you a few questions about a group of cyberclones you allegedly had something to do with.”
“Ask away, Mister Krieger.”
As if it weren’t really that big a deal, the agent started by saying, “As I understand it, the issue has something to do with you overseeing the development of several series of cyberclones before you obtained the properly authorized signatures on the correct legal documentation, or something to that effect. What can you tell me about that?”
He was pretty good, this self-confident young criminal investigator. The C.I.D. Academy instructors truly would have been proud. But Hansen, being an equally well-trained interrogator himself, easily saw through the much younger and much more inexperienced man’s act.
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Mister Krieger,” he impatiently suggested. “We’re both very well aware of how serious the allegations against me are.” It wasn’t that he was necessarily offended by the young investigator’s obvious attempt to get him talking by downplaying the seriousness of the charges. He was just a little irritated by it. It was a simple, basic textbook method commonly used on the more naïve and inexperienced suspects. Krieger should have known it wouldn’t work on him.
“You’re right, Admiral,” Krieger admitted. “I should have known better and I apologize. I meant no disrespect.”
“Don’t patronize me either, junior. And pardon my lack of patience, but the cyberclones can wait,” Hansen said authoritatively. “I want to know about this alleged murder conspiracy, and I want to know right now.”
“I’m sorry, Admiral, but that’s not how we do things here,” Krieger responded. “And my name’s not ‘junior.’” He took a second to collect his thoughts, and then explained, “Look, I’m not trying to play hard ass with you, sir. I understand you have a lot of questions and I promise I’ll do my best to answer all of them. But there are certain procedures I have follow in situations like this. Certain ways I have to approach things. When I’m brought in on an investigation and asked to conduct the interviews, I usually have ample time to review everything first so I can determine the most logical place to begin. But in this particular case...”
“In this particular case, Mister Krieger, you’ll begin by explaining this murder conspiracy charge to me,” Hansen insisted. If Krieger was as interested as he appeared to be in hearing what he had to say, the last thing the young investigator would want him to do would be to invoke his rights. That gave him a certain measure of control over the interview and he knew it, so he added, “Either that or I will immediately invoke my legal rights to remain silent and secure a civilian attorney of my own choosing. And I’m quite sure the attorney I intend to choose won’t be available for at least several weeks.”
Krieger smiled the smile of a man who knew he’d just been outwitted by a worthy and superior opponent, and said simply, “Touché, Admiral.” No doubt he’d decided it was better to give a little ground where it couldn’t do any real harm. That was, after all, exactly what Hansen would have done had their rolls been reversed. Cooperation usually came easier that way.
“Don’t be discouraged, Mister Krieger,” Hansen said, sounding much more pretentious than he’d intended. “You’re good at what you do. I’m just better.”
“I appreciate the input, Admiral,” the investigator said, though his words lacked sincerity. “Now, do you want to discuss these charges, or would you rather just continue the psychological boxing match we’ve gotten ourselves into?”
Hansen grinned. “No, I think I made my point, Mister Krieger. By all means, let’s talk about the charges, starting with the murder conspiracy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
His thanks sounded even less sincere than his appreciation, bordering on sarcasm. He might have been good, but he still had his youth and inexperience to overcome. His confidence had been shaken. He was rattled. Intimidated. He’d be on his guard from here on out, looking for Hansen to try to trip him up instead of concentrating on doing the same to him. Consequently, he’d be more cautious than aggressive, which was exactly what Hansen wanted.
“All of the evidence that led to you and Commander Royer being arrested was provided to E-S-C Chairman Brian MacLeod by a Cirran university professor named Loson Min’para,” he began. “Fortunately, the professor was smart enough to keep a computer record of everything he uncovered before he was murdered.”
“What?” Hansen asked, hardly able to believe his ears and wanting to even less, even though he’d already suspected the worst where Min’para was concerned for some time.
“I said, fortunately...”
“I heard what you said, Mister Krieger. Professor Loson Min’para was murdered? Are you sure about that?”
Krieger stared at him for a moment, then said, “Yes, Professor Min’para was murdered. He was gunned down outside the New York City Federation Building two weeks ago today.”
Two weeks ago today. The very day Royer’s people had followed him to Earth. That fact slammed home another ugly truth that Hansen already suspected but hadn’t wanted to believe. The police detectives who’d lost their lives, whose identities had never been released to the public, weren’t police officers at all. They were his own agents. Hansen sighed. “So it was him,” he said. Damn her.
“That’s right, Admiral,” Krieger confirmed.
Hansen bowed his head and sighed. He hadn’t wanted to believe that Liz had so blatantly defied him...again...and then hidden what she’d done from him...again. He still didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t deny it any longer.
“I guess I don’t need to tell you, Admiral, that the other five casualties weren’t New York City police officers,” Kreiger said. “They were co-conspirators from your own agency.”
Hansen looked up at Krieger and said, “The agents under my command are professionals, Mister Krieger. They’re Solfleet officers of the highest caliber. Those five gave their lives in the performance of their duties. They did what they did in compliance with what they believed to be lawful orders.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Damn right I am. None of them would have murdered anyone in cold blood, and if you even think about dragging their names through the mud...”
“Not even under the direct orders of their superior officer, Admiral?”
“I’m their superior officer, Mister Krieger,” Hansen pointed out, “and I assure you, I would never give such an order.”
“You’re not their only superior officer,” Krieger pointed out.
Hansen froze. No reaction in his weary body, no expression on his pale face. There it was. There was Krieger’s end, as obvious as it could possibly have been. He was targeting Liz. And why not? She was obviously responsible.
Krieger picked up the handcomp and tapped a few buttons, then offered it to him. “These are the names of your agents who were involved in the incident, sir,” he quietly told him.
Hansen glanced at the list just long enough to read the five names, then dropped his gaze to the tabletop. He knew every one of them. All five were agents who had worked closely with Royer several times before. Agents who had always been unquestionably loyal to her. They were also husbands and fathers, brothers and sons, and one daughter not ten years older than his own.
Their lives had been wasted...thrown away...and for what?
Krieger held the device in place, its screen staring at Hansen like a big bright unblinking accusatory eye.
Anger born out of his despair filled the admiral’s soul. He looked up at Krieger. “Get that damn thing out of my face,” he demanded.
“I understand your anger, Admiral,” Krieger said as he set the handcomp aside. “Truth is, I never thought you were involved in these deaths in the first place. Min’para believed you were in this up to your neck, but the evidence seems to indicate otherwise. So tell me something. Is it just the loss of all those lives that angers you, or are you angry at someone in particular?”
He and Liz had served together for years. But did he owe her anything after she’d twice defied him so blatantly? Did he owe it to her to protect her? “What are you getting at, Mister Krieger?” he asked. As if he didn’t know.
“I think you know exactly what I’m getting at, Admiral.” He paused a moment for effect, and to give Hansen a chance to play dumb, which he didn’t. Then he asked, “So who is it? Who are you angry at? Who betrayed you and ordered Min’para’s murder?” He paused again and leaned slightly forward in his chair. “Who’s responsible for the needless deaths of those agents whose families you’re going to have to write to?”
Did he owe it to Liz to protect her? “If I’m not mistaken, Mister Krieger, you already have a suspect in mind.”
Krieger leaned back again. “Yes I do,” he conceded. “But at this point your confirmation would go a long way toward strengthening my case against...her. Your executive officer is very adept at covering her tracks.”
Did he owe it to Liz to protect her? “And why should I help you strengthen your case against my executive officer?”
“Simple, Admiral. Because it’s the right thing to do, and you know it.”
Did he owe it to Liz to protect her? Hansen looked the impressive young investigator dead in the eye. He hesitated, but only for a moment. He could hardly believe it had come to this, but the kid was right. Things had gotten way out of hand. The time to face the consequences had come...for both of them. He knew what he had to do, and he knew that once he did it there would be no turning back.
“Mister Krieger, you are in fact looking in the right direction.” The words tasted bitter as they passed his lips, like poison on the blade of a dagger.
“Strictly for the record, Admiral, and so I can be sure I understand you correctly, are you telling me that your executive officer, Commander Elizabeth Royer, did in fact order the murder of Professor Loson Min’para, a citizen of the planet Cirra who was visiting Earth at the time?” he asked, doing a pretty good job of hiding the exuberance he almost certainly must have been feeling over having solved one of the most critical parts of his case so easily.
“For the record, Mister Krieger?” Hansen asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. For the record, I never heard her give such an order. For the record, no one has told me that she gave such an order. For the record, I have not overheard any talk of her giving such an order.”
“But you believe she did,” Krieger presumed.
“Yes, Mister Krieger, I believe she did. At this point I have little doubt.”
“And if in fact she did, she did so without your knowledge or consent?”
“Of course without my knowledge or consent!” Hansen barked, causing Krieger to draw back a little bit. “If she did in fact give the order at all.”
“No need to bite my head off, Admiral,” Krieger said. “I had to ask you that, strictly for the investigation.”
Hansen saw the truth in that easily enough. “You’re right,” he said more calmly. “I apologize.”
“Forget it, sir,” Krieger said, waving the whole incident aside, “but let me ask you this. Beyond just acting without your knowledge and consent, didn’t Commander Royer in fact give the order to kill in direct violation of your own explicit orders to the contrary?”
Hansen might have been feeling physically and mentally exhausted for weeks, but he wasn’t stupid. He was well aware that he’d already pretty much solved Krieger’s murder case for him, and he recognized that the investigator was throwing him a bone in return—providing him with a way out from under the conspiracy charge. The fact that the way out also happened to be the truth was just a bonus. The fact that Krieger had gone out of his way to bring it up, on the other hand, could mean only one thing. The ambitious young investigator wanted something more than he’d already gotten.
“Yes, she did,” he finally confirmed. “Again...if she did in fact give the order. I explicitly forbade the use of deadly force against Professor Min’para.” Might as well play it out and see where it leads. See what else Krieger wants.
“Why do you think she did it, Admiral? What might she have been trying to hide?”
“Don’t you mean, what might we have been trying to hide, Mister Krieger?”
“Do I, sir? Commander Royer was willing to kill to protect her secrets. You weren’t. And she thought nothing of taking about a half dozen of your agents down with her. Maybe she was hiding something more than you were.”
Try as he might, Hansen couldn’t figure this young investigator out. What was he doing? Was he trying to give him a way out from under even more of the charges that had been laid against him? If so, why? What did he stand to gain by doing that? What more could he possibly want so badly that he didn’t already have? For that matter, what exactly did he already have? How much did he know?
Hansen pondered those questions for several long seconds before he finally decided that it just didn’t matter anymore. He knew exactly what Royer had been trying to hide, of course. They’d both gone to great lengths over the last six and a half years, more or less, to keep it under wraps. But now several innocent people had lost their lives and many more had no doubt been seriously traumatized. And as far as he was concerned, as senior ranking officer he was every bit as guilty as she was, regardless of whether she’d acted on her own this time or not. The cover-up had gone on long enough. It was time to come clean and accept the consequences of his actions.
“You’ve got the professor’s records, Mister Krieger,” he pointed out. “You know as well as I do what she was hiding. What we were hiding. It was the first charge on the list.”
“Yes I do,” Krieger admitted. “You were hiding illegally developed cyberclones. A hell of a lot of illegally developed cyberclones, which was the first thing I wanted to talk to you about when we started this little conversation. You see, Admiral, there’s a lot of information in the professor’s records, but most of it’s kind of sketchy. Some of the details don’t seem to fit quite right, and others don’t appear to be relative at all.” He leaned slightly forward and added, “Still, there’s enough evidence in there to put the both of you away for a very, very long time, even without your cooperation. But, believe it or not, sir, I really don’t want to see that happen to you. I’d much rather hear your side of the story now, so I can tell the government’s attorney that you cooperated fully out of a great sense of remorse.”
That much was true. He was remorseful. Not necessarily for what he and Royer had done those years ago, or even for having probably stranded Günter in the past for the rest of his life, though he’d certainly never feel good about that. After all, they’d done all of that to serve the greater good—to protect and defend the Earth and her colonies. Günter included. No. His only real regret was that he’d misjudged Royer’s resolve so badly and that now, as a result of that poor judgment, lives had been lost.
So why not cooperate fully, as long as he didn’t compromise any classified information? He’d done the crime, so he deserved whatever punishment he might get, regardless of what his motives might have been. Besides, if the Timeshift mission was successful there was a chance, however slim, that none of this would matter anyway. He drew a deep breath, exhaled loudly, and said, “Make yourself comfortable, Mister Krieger. I have a story to tell you.”
“I’m all ears, Admiral, as long as it’s a true story.”
“It is.” At least most of it would be. “As you know, we’ve been at war with the Veshtonn for a very long time. About seven years ago, when things were looking particularly grim for our side—pretty much like they’ve been looking here lately—Commander Royer and I developed a plan to mass produce an army of cyberclone soldiers. We knew what we were doing was illegal, but a couple decades earlier, before the B-C-C-A banned breeding and enhancement programs, cyberclone soldiers had proven themselves superior to what we then called ‘true-human’ soldiers over and over again, and we desperately needed the advantage they could give us. Over a period of about three months we bred tens of thousands of them.”
“You must have had a lot of help,” Krieger commented.
“Not as much as you might think, but yes, we had some help.”
“Then how in God’s name were you able to keep your plan quiet for so long? It’s been my experience that most people who are privy to secret information can’t keep their mouths shut for very long.”
“Keeping secrets is part of our business, Mister Krieger.”
“I understand that, sir, but I would think the sheer enormity of such a program would make it especially difficult to hide.”
“And you’d be right. It has been especially difficult. But there are ways to do it.”
“Apparently.” Krieger seemed to drift off for a few moments, appearing lost in thought. Then he asked, “So where are these tens of thousands of would-be cyberclone soldiers now?”
Hansen hesitated to answer that particular question, wondering if the clones might be better off if he didn’t say. But he also realized that those clones who hadn’t been sent back with Günter as embryos would be sought out anyway, now that their existence had been made known, and that sooner or later they’d be found. So perhaps it would be better for them that he reveal their whereabouts now—only their whereabouts, of course—and make an argument for their right to remain there if they should choose to do so.
“They’re settled on a small out of the way world of their own, code-named Charlie Colony. You’ll find everything you need to know about it in a secure file in my office. But before I provide the access code to that file I want to officially request that they be allowed to stay where they are in accordance with the Zephyrian Colonization Act, if that’s their wish. They’ve been there for several years now and have built lives for themselves.”
“Built lives for themselves?” Krieger asked. “They’re only children, Admiral. How could they...”
“They’re not children, Mister Krieger,” Hansen interrupted. “They’re full grown adults. Some of them even have children of their own.”
“I thought you said they were just bred seven years ago.”
“Closer to six and a half, actually.”
“Then how...”
“Artificial age acceleration.”
“Artificial age acceleration?” Krieger parroted, his voice filled with skepticism. “You know what, Admiral? This tall tale of yours is beginning to sound more and more like a science fiction novel. I thought you’d decided to do the right thing here.”
“That’s exactly what I am doing, Mister Krieger,” Hansen assured him. “This tall tale of mine, as you call it, happens to be the truth.”
“It seems pretty far-fetched to me, sir.”
Hansen shrugged his shoulders. “It is what it is.”
Krieger thought about it for another moment, then said, “All right, Admiral. Because you are who you are, I’ll accept that for now. Your request on behalf of your cyberclone colonists is noted. I’ll be sure to send it up the chain of command.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Now, let’s talk about Dylan Graves for a little while.”
“All right,” Hansen said, not at all caught off guard by the sudden change of subject. The best criminal investigators did that regularly when they interrogated suspects in order to keep them off balance and, hopefully, get them to admit something they might not have intended to admit. “What do you want to know about him?”
“First of all, as one of your newest agents, how exactly does he fit into all this?”
“Well,” Hansen began, thinking as he spoke, “in one sense he’s at the center of it all, but he’s more a victim than he is anything else. Back when he was a marine squad sergeant his unit was assigned a particular mission. I can’t go into the details because it’s still classified, but I can tell you that it got real ugly, real fast. There was a firefight, and during the battle Sergeant Graves encountered a...a Veshtonn blood-warrior that had been surgically altered. My agency later retrieved the remains of that Veshtonn and determined that the alterations were based on our own cyberclone technology. This was the first hard evidence we’d ever obtained that the Veshtonn had, in fact, gotten their claws on our technology and were using it against us. What was worse, some of what we recovered was based on advancements my agency had made in the technology just a few years earlier.”
“So there was little doubt that you and your people had somehow enabled the Veshtonn to get hold of our latest, most advanced cyberclone technology,” Krieger concluded. “Either through lax security procedures, or failure to identify a spy, or...”
“There was no doubt at all, Mister Krieger.”
“And because Sergeant Graves saw this altered Veshtonn...”
“We had a memory-edit done on him. Actually, on him and one other marine who also saw it.”
“Who was that?”
“A young woman by the name of Marissa Ortiz. A corporal in Sergeant Graves’ squad at the time. We altered her memories to match the ones we gave him and then implanted a strong desire to put the whole thing behind her and start a new life, which she has since done.”
“Then what?”
“Then we thought we were good. We thought we’d covered our tracks...until Sergeant Graves’ true memories started coming back to him in the form of nightmares. I personally didn’t know about that until much later than Royer did, and to this day I don’t know how or why that happened. I’ve never heard of a memory-edit failing before. But, for whatever reason, this one did fail. Sergeant Graves started experiencing two conflicting sets of memories of the same incident. Naturally, he wanted an explanation.”
Krieger snickered. “Can you blame him, Admiral?”
“Hell no. Of course not. If it were me I’d have wanted one, too. Anyone would have.” It was him, of course. His nightmares had played out the impossible time and time again. And yes, he did want an explanation. More than Krieger could possibly know.
“So he was given one,” he continued. “Post-traumatic stress. He’d been badly wounded. Damn near killed, in fact. Commander Royer arranged for him to get some counseling with psychiatrists, psychologists, post-trauma specialists... Eventually, he bought into the idea that his nightmares weren’t real, and apparently they stopped soon after that, at least for a while.”
“You say you didn’t know about any of that until much later, sir?”
“I had been informed of the battle and I authorized the memory-edits at Commander Royer’s request, but I didn’t know about Sergeant Graves’ nightmares until...until she filled me in much later.”
“I see. Besides the fact that Sergeant Graves is now Special Agent Graves of the S-I-A, what’s your current interest in him? If what you’ve told me is true, why did Commander Royer find it necessary to fill you in on all this so long after it happened?”
Hansen hesitated. That was one question he couldn’t answer truthfully, no matter how much he’d agreed to cooperate. For one thing, Dylan Graves’ identity as an S.I.A. Special Agent was classified. Despite the fact that Krieger had Min’para’s files, his references to him by that title might still have been a fishing expedition. Hansen hadn’t had the benefit of seeing those files for himself, so he had no idea what details they might or might not include. And he certainly couldn’t say anything about the mission he’d sent Graves on without revealing the existence of the Portal.
“Isn’t it obvious, Mister Krieger?” he asked, hoping to redirect the investigator’s line of questioning. “For some reason his true memories have once again started reasserting themselves. That’s why his fiancée introduced him to Min’para in the first place. The professor is a...was...a telepath. After they met we kept a close eye on the watched the professor. I put Royer in charge of the surveillance operation, and based on her team’s observations we knew that he’d not only figured out what we did to Graves, but had also put together the facts of what we’d done in regards to the cloning.”
“And in an attempt to keep all of that from coming out, Commander Royer took it upon herself to order the professor’s death,” Krieger concluded. “Yes, Admiral, we covered that. That doesn’t answer my question.”
Hansen’s gaze briefly fell to the tabletop, but then he looked Krieger in the eye again and said, “Understand this, Mister Krieger. Despite everything she’s done, with or without my knowledge, Commander Elizabeth Royer is a fine officer with whom it’s been my privilege to serve with all these years. Handing her over to you on a silver platter with my knife sticking out of her back is not an easy thing for me to do.”
“Nor should it be, Admiral. But it is the right thing to do, and right now you need to do the right thing. If you understand that, sir, and you obviously do, then all of this will go a lot easier for you.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“I’m sure you do, sir.” When Hansen didn’t say anything more, Krieger shifted in his chair and said, “Tell you what, Admiral. We’ll leave the commander alone for the moment. We were talking about Dylan Graves. My office has been trying to find him since early this morning, but we haven’t had any luck. Would you happen to know his current whereabouts?”
“No,” Hansen lied, perhaps just a split second too quickly.
Krieger hesitated for the briefest moment, then simply said, “I see,” but that moment’s hesitation was enough to give him away. He did indeed see, Hansen knew. Gazing intently into his eyes, the admiral saw that Krieger didn’t believe his answer for a second. He obviously knew more than he was letting on, and that was dangerous. Hansen was going to have to knock him off his current line of questioning.
“If I did know, Mister Krieger...”
“What did Commander Royer do on the comm-panel in your office, right before the MPs subdued her, Admiral?” Krieger asked, ignoring Hansen’s attempt to expound on his previous answer.
Krieger definitely knew something. But what? “I thought you said we were going to leave the commander alone for now.”
“I did, sir, but if you’re going to start lying to me...”
“I’m not lying to you, Mister Krieger,” Hansen claimed, doing his best to sound both genuinely offended and a little perturbed by the accusation, hoping and doubting at the same time that it might rattle him a little.
“I think you are lying, Admiral,” Krieger contended, clearly not the least bit intimidated. “I think you know exactly where Dylan Graves is.”
Hansen fell silent. Of course he knew where Graves was. He just couldn’t say anything about it, and fortunately he didn’t have to. “You know what, Mister Krieger. I think I’d like to talk to my attorney before I answer any more of your questions.”
Krieger sat back in his chair and sighed, probably wishing he could kick himself right in the teeth. “All right, Admiral,” he said. “If that’s what you want.” Then he stood up. “Wait here, sir. Someone will get back to you in a few minutes.”
Krieger turned and left the room without another word, and the oversized MP sergeant stepped back inside and closed the door.
“Wait here, he says,” Hansen muttered under his breath. “Like I have a choice.”
Agent Krieger paused outside the door, feeling very pleased with himself, and shook his fist in triumph. Vice-Admiral Hansen had more years in law enforcement and Intelligence than he had in life itself. He hadn’t expected to get anything useful out of him at all, let alone get it so easily. But the methods he’d employed—the methods his instructors at the C.I.D. Academy had taught him—had worked beautifully. The admiral had waived his rights and had ended up doing exactly what he’d described. He’d handed Royer over to him on a silver platter with his knife sticking out of her back.
He had her.
He walked the short distance down the hall to the first door on his left and stepped back into interview room number one with newfound confidence.
The room was identical to the one Admiral Hansen was occupying in every way but one. Instead of having its back to the door, the chair with the prisoner restraints had been installed at the far end of the table, facing it. Back in the C.I.D. Academy Krieger had learned all about how an interview room’s design could affect on an interviewee. About how the arrangement of the furniture, or even the lack thereof, could make a difference in the failure or success of an interrogation. He’d put Commander Royer in Interview-1 to make her feel surrounded and cornered. To make her feel like there was no way out of her predicament except through total cooperation. She could see the door, her only escape route, right in front of her, but she couldn’t get past the guards to reach it.
At least he hoped she couldn’t get past the guards. She’d already shown how volatile she could be back in Hansen’s office, but per the supervising agent’s instructions—that brownnoser was always sucking up to the brass—she hadn’t been strapped into her chair. A big mistake, in Krieger’s opinion.
The guards, the same two MPs who’d dragged Royer’s wife in for questioning—they’d roughed her up a little in the process, too, which wasn’t exactly going to be conducive to gaining Royer’s cooperation if she happened to find out about it—started to leave as he entered, but he raised a hand to stop them and closed the door behind him.
“What are you doing back in here, Krieger?” Royer asked him, spitting his name out as though it were poison on her tongue. “I already told you I want an attorney.”
“I know what you told me, Commander,” he responded as he sat in the chair to her right. “I just thought I’d give you one more chance to change your mind and come clean before I classify you as uncooperative in my report.”
“I am clean.”
“Yeah, so you’ve told me. But Admiral Hansen and I just had a nice long conversation, and he tells me otherwise.”
“Bullshit.”
Ignoring her vulgarity, he further explained, “He told me all about what the two of you did six and a half years ago. He gave me a full confession, Commander.”
Royer snickered. She knew better than that. Hansen had a lifetime of training under his belt. Krieger could interrogate him for a month and he still wouldn’t talk. Besides, the Portal’s existence was classified, so he couldn’t have confessed even if he’d wanted to.
“You, Mister Krieger, are a liar,” she said, wearing a defiant grin. “Even if the admiral were the type to stab his people in the back, which he isn’t, we didn’t do anything wrong for him to confess to.”
“Oh. I see.” He leaned slightly forward and rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, folded his hands together, and asked, “So, you and Admiral Hansen didn’t head up a project to produce thousands of cyberclones, then send them into combat against the Veshtonn as soon as they were ready?”
Royer looked him right in the eye and asked, “What’s a cyberclone?”
Krieger sat back in his chair again and snickered. “That’s very funny, Commander. The other inmates are going to love you. But we don’t have to talk about that now. If you prefer, we can start by talking about Professor Min’para’s murder.”
Royer’s defiant smile quickly faded. “What the hell are you talking about, Krieger? Who’s Professor Min’para?”
“Don’t even try it, Commander,” he said, shaking his head. “Admiral Hansen just gave you up like a bad habit. He told me all about how you tried to convince him to authorize the use of deadly force against the professor. He also told me that he refused to do it, which puts the responsibility for the professor’s murder squarely on your shoulders. Even as we speak, the Military Police are on their way to pick up the only surviving member of the team that carried out that assassination for you.” He knew that last part was a gamble—the only surviving member of the team hadn’t actually been at the Federation Building where the murder occurred—but the potential payoff, a full confession from Royer, was worth the risk. “Now, I haven’t met Agent Kaminski yet, but I’d be willing to bet that his testimony given in exchange for immunity from prosecution will back up what Hansen told me. What do you think, Commander?”
Her jaw clenched tight and her teeth ground together as she drew a deep, deep breath, filling her lungs as her growing anger colored her face a warm blush red. “I think you’re one sorry son of a bitch, Krieger.”
“I take it you finally realize where you stand.”
“I’ll show you where I stand,” she muttered under her breath.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She glared at him for a moment with murder in her eyes, then suddenly yelled at the top of her lungs, “That back-stabbing son of a bitch!”
She leapt to her feet with the final syllable and let go a blood-curdling scream as she charged at Krieger, who reacted a second too late, and knocked him to the floor. She made a break for the door, but the MPs were on her the next instant and wrestled her hard to the floor.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” she screamed. She lashed out, twisting and turning, punching and kicking like a wild animal fighting for its life, as if she’d gone completely insane. She clawed their faces, pulled their hair, tugged at their uniforms and equipment—whatever it took to get them off of her—but in the end her violent struggle was all for naught. Despite her adrenalin-enhanced strength, the MPs managed to flip her onto her stomach, pin her down, and cuff her hands behind her back.
When she finally stopped struggling they lifted her to her feet, led her by the arms past Krieger as he stood back up, and strapped her into her chair.
Krieger stared at her as he brushed himself off. Her platinum hair had been pulled free of whatever had been holding it in place and had fallen in disarray around her shoulders. Tears stained her cheeks. Blood seeped from her left nostril and the corner of her mouth. Her left sleeve was torn at the shoulder seem and the front of her blouse had been ripped wide open, several of its buttons having been pulled off. Every few seconds a drop of blood fell from her chin to her chest and trickled down between her breasts, which rose and fell with her heavy breathing, only to be absorbed into the fabric of her bright white bra.
The MPs weren’t in much better shape themselves.
“That was really stupid, Commander,” he finally said. “It’s all over for you now. I hope you realize that.”
“Help me out of this, Krieger,” she half-pleaded, half-demanded between labored breaths, still more angry than frightened. “Or give me a way to help myself.”
“Now you want to help yourself?” he asked as he returned to his seat, genuinely surprised by the sudden change.
She bowed her head for a moment. Two more drops of blood dripped onto her chest and trickled down to join the growing bright red stain in the center of her bra. Then she looked back up and said, “Better late than never.”
“Agreed, but how do I know you’ll tell me the whole truth?”
“I have a wife to think about.”
Krieger harrumphed. “You should have thought about her a minute ago.”
“I was thinking about her a minute ago. That’s why I lost it.” When Krieger didn’t respond to that she added, “Come on, Krieger. I’m reaching out to you here.”
He thought about it for a moment, then said, “All right, Commander. Waive your rights to remain silent and talk to an attorney first. I’ll hear you out.”
“Consider them waived.”
Krieger turned to the MPs. “Close her blouse. Then call and have a medic sent up here. I want all three of you looked over.”
“Yes, sir,” the blond MP answered. She used a couple of her hairpins to close Royer’s blouse as best she could, then headed for the door.
Krieger watched her leave, then turned back to Royer. “So you want to help yourself. All right, Commander. Let’s start with Min’para’s murder. When did you...”
“You’re mistaken, Mister Krieger,” she interrupted. “His death wasn’t murder. I admit I authorized the use of deadly force, but...”
“Against Admiral Hansen’s orders?” he asked, wanting solid clarification on that point.
“Yes, but only if it proved absolutely necessary. My orders were to bring him in alive and unharmed if possible. He must have fired first or my people...”
“He didn’t fire first, Commander,” Krieger told her, his impatient tone conveying that he knew that to be an solid fact. “He wasn’t even armed. But let’s put that on hold for now. I want to look at your reasons for wanting him out of the way in the first place. There were those cyberclones of yours, of course, but they weren’t the only thing he’d discovered, were they?”
“What do you mean?”
Where is Dylan Graves?”
Royer was taken aback. How could he... Of course. Graves had told Min’para about his mission to rescue the Crown Prince of the Cirran Republics, and about the nightmares he’d suffered from afterwards. That had to be it. But had he violated his word to the admiral and told the professor everything? Had he violated his oath and disclosed the existence of the Portal? If he had, then she’d only be hurting herself...and Karen...by keeping quiet about it now. And for no good reason. Karen had to come first.
“How will answering that question help me?” she asked.
“I can’t promise you anything, Commander,” he told her honestly. “I don’t have that kind of authority. Answering that question might help you a lot, or it might only help you a little bit. Then again, it might not help you at all. But I guarantee you this. Refusing to answer it will hurt you. I’ll make sure of that. So what will it be?”
What indeed? What should she do? She needed time to think. She needed time to weigh her options. No promises, he’d said. Not even an ‘I’ll-put-in-a-good-word-for-you,-if...’ She’d sworn an oath to protect and defend the Earth and her colonies, and protecting their secrets was part of that oath. Therefore, no promises...no deal.
“Go to hell, Krieger.”
Krieger stood up. “Suit yourself, Commander.” He went to the door and opened it, and stepped aside as the blond MP came stepped back inside.
“A medic will be here in a few minutes,” she reported.
“All right. Thank you,” Krieger acknowledged. Then, as he stepped into the corridor, he said, “I hope you enjoy your confinement, Royer. It’s going to last a very long time.”
“All right, Krieger!” she hollered. She hated to give up. She hated to lose, but Karen needed her. She was more important than anything else.
Krieger stopped and turned an ear slightly toward her, but didn’t turn around. “All right what, Commander?” he asked.
“You want to know where Dylan Graves is? Fine. You’ve got the proper clearance level, so I’ll tell you where he is. But the MPs will have to leave the room first.”
Now Krieger did turn around. “No more bullshit?”
“No more bullshit.”
He stepped back in. “Ladies, if you please.” The MPs exchanged uncertain glances, then looked at him, questioning him with their eyes. “It’s all right,” he told them. “She’s handcuffed and strapped in. She can’t do anything.”
They exchanged glances once more, then walked out into the corridor and took up a new post just outside the door. Krieger closed it behind them.
“All right, Commander,” he said as he returned to his chair. “So where is Dylan Graves?”
She hesitated, knowing that once she started talking—once she began divulging classified information—there would be no stopping. No turning back. She’d be committed to that path. But she knew also that she had to do it, for Karen’s sake. Besides, he might not have had a need to know—then again, maybe he did at this point—but as a C.I.D. agent, he did have a Top Secret clearance. She needed only to tell him, “This is classified Top Secret, Mister Krieger.”
“Understood,” he assured her.
“All right then. Dylan Graves is at an outpost called X-Ray One, on a top secret planet we’ve code-named ‘Window World,’” she began. “Admiral Hansen sent him there in direct violation of the president’s orders. He’s on an unsanctioned, illegal mission to travel back in time through an ancient Tor’Roshan Portal the crew of the Australia discovered there a few decades ago. His objective is to alter certain specific events in our history in order to change our present circumstances.”
For a moment Krieger just stared at her, expressionless. Was she serious? Did she really expect him to believe that? He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “Did you actually just tell me that Lieutenant Dylan Graves is on a time-travel mission?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the truth,” she said with a shrug.
He stood up again, shaking his head. “You promised me no more bullshit, Commander. And now you feed me what’s probably the biggest pile of...”
“Tell the president,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
She stared him right in the eye. “Tell President Shakhar what I just told you.”
“You want me to call the President of the United Earth Federation and start spouting off at the mouth with some fairy tale about...”
“All right!” Royer shouted. “All right, Krieger. If you won’t go to the president, then go to Chairman MacLeod. Ask him to tell her. Tell him I said we have an agent on Window World waiting to go through the Portal. Tell him Commander Akagi held him up—that he wouldn’t let him go through until he got confirmation of his orders from Central Command. And tell him that while I was being arrested I managed to send that confirmation to him from the comm-panel in Admiral Hansen’s office. Or don’t tell him. The choice is yours, as will be the consequences.”
She was lying. She had to be lying. Time-travel was the stuff of science-fiction and abstract theoretical physics. It sure as hell wasn’t possible in the real world. But no matter how deeply he stared into her desperate, angry eyes, he could find no sign of the deceit that he knew had to be in there.
He sat back down anyway...again. After all, it wouldn’t hurt to hear her out. The only thing he stood to lose was a few more minutes of his time.
“Assuming for the moment that what you say is true, why would you tell me about it behind the admiral’s back? After all the years you two have served together I have to believe your loyalty to him runs deeper than that.”
“My loyalty to him?” she asked with irony. “Didn’t you just tell me that he gave me up like a bad habit?”
“So you’re doing it for revenge?”
“I’m doing it for my wife,” she said somberly. “She needs me to be with her.”
“Oh, I see. So you’re hoping to avoid a prison sentence.”
“Exactly.”
Krieger almost laughed. The chances of Royer and her wife ever being together again after today were miniscule at best. But of course he couldn’t tell her that. Instead he said, “And if staying out of prison means stabbing Admiral Hansen in the back the same way he stabbed you in the back, then so be it.”
“Then so be it,” she echoed in confirmation.
“Makes perfect sense to me. Except for one minor little detail.”
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t believe a word of your story.”
Royer shrugged. “That’s okay with me. But if I were you, Mister Krieger, I’d make sure my story reaches the president’s ears anyway.”
“Fine,” he said as he stood up again. “I’ll see to it she hears your story. But if you think that’ll get you released from custody, you’re sadly mistaken.”
“We’ll see,” she told him as he turned and headed for the door.
In the corridor, a medic was tending to the MPs. When he glanced into the room and saw Royer’s condition, he asked, “What the hell did you people do to her?”
“She got belligerent,” Krieger answered as he walked by. “They had to subdue her.”
“Looks like they beat the hell out of her,” he commented. “I can’t treat her thoroughly enough up here.”
Krieger stopped dead in his tracks and asked, “Why not?”
“Whoever called Medbay said there were three people with minor bumps and scrapes, so I only brought a first-aid kit with me.” He gestured toward Royer. “Look at her. She needs to be checked for broken bones and internal injuries.”
Krieger sighed. “All right.” To the MPs he said, “Take her to Medbay.”
“No problem, sir,” the stockier of the two women responded as she turned and walked eagerly into the room.
“I’ll meet you there, and make it quick,” the medic said. Then he followed Krieger down the hall.
The MPs approached Royer from both sides. As they unfastened the heavy straps that held her in the chair, the stocky one said, “Any funny business, Commander, and we’ll throw you into the wall the way we did your wife.”
“Ronnie!” the blond complained.
“What about my wife?” Royer asked angrily, glaring up at the ugly cow.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you knew?” she taunted, ignoring her partner’s protest. “We had to go to your quarters and bring your wife in for questioning, but she wouldn’t come quietly. I just hope I didn’t rip her arms out of their sockets when I threw her into the doorjamb and yanked them up behind her back to slap the cuffs on her.”
“Ronnie!” the blond shouted.
Royer glanced down. The straps were undone. “You fucking bitch!” she screamed as she shot to her feet and launched herself into her antagonist.
The stocky MP hit the floor with a loud and very solid thud as her partner grabbed Royer by the back of her blouse and yanked her back toward the chair. But Royer twisted and plunged a vicious side kick into the blond’s right armpit, breaking her grasp and knocking her into the wall, and hopefully numbing her arm in the process. Then she kicked the ugly cow across her face as she tried to get back to her feet, flooring her again.
The blond charged her again—she was a determined little wench—but Royer kicked her square in the chest for her troubles. She slammed into the wall again and collapsed to the floor grimacing and cradling her breasts, apparently unable to catch her breathe. She could only watch as Royer squatted and rolled onto her back, maneuvered the handcuffs past her boots and raised her arms up in front of her all in one smooth motion, and then jumped back to her feet, ready to keep on fighting.
The ugly cow rose to her feet at the same time and charged, but Royer stepped aside at the last second and tripped her. Then she made a run for the door, but the surprisingly resilient blond was on her back again in an instant, choking her from behind and trying to force her to the floor. Royer jabbed her elbow sharply into her ribs once, twice, three times...aain and again until she finally heard a telltale crack and the young woman fell away. She spun around and punched the ugly cow across her bloodied face with both fists, sending her sprawling across the table. Then she bent down and grabbed the blond’s sidearm out of its holster. She ran for the door, slapped the release, and charged into the corridor.
“Freeze, Royer!” the ugly cow shouted at her back.
Royer turned without thinking, the MP’s sidearm still in her hands.
A sharp CRACK pierced the air and reverberated through the hallway.
Dylan shook his head in quiet disbelief as he read on. How could man ever have been so cold-blooded and murderous? He’d known what was coming, of course, as the chapter carried him out of the twentieth century and plunged him into the tumultuous war-filled years of the early twenty-first. He’d learned all about those dark days in his Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection training classes. But as the events of Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001 unfolded in black and white before his eyes he couldn’t help but feel stunned and amazed all over again, and he wondered, what if someone were to go that far back in time and prevent those terrible attacks? Or perhaps even farther back than that? What if someone were to kill Bin-Laden and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as children—or even Germany’s Adolph Hitler for that matter—before they ever had a chance to come to power and begin their murderous reigns of terror? How incredibly different the world might be.
He heard a knock at his door.
“Come in.”
The door swung open and Benny stepped inside. “It’s later,” he said.
“What?” Dylan asked, looking up.
“Commander Akagi just received his confirmation of your orders.”
“So I’m going through?”
“You’re going through.”
Dylan set the reader aside, sat up on the bed, and dropped his bare feet to the floor. He’d had plenty of time to familiarize himself with the details of what Hansen and Royer expected him to do once he arrived in the past, and to get used to the idea of actually doing it. And taking the ‘a mission is a mission’ approach, he believed he had done so. But as he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, he realized that was all he’d done—gotten used to the idea—because he’d known in the back of his mind that there was always a possibility, albeit a slim one at best, that the whole thing might be called off. But now that the final word had come, now that his orders had been confirmed and nothing remained to stop him from going through the Portal, he realized that the prospect of actually going through with it, of actually traveling backward in time, made him nervous. No, more than that. It scared him. He felt honest to God afraid.
“Are you all right, Dylan?” Benny asked as he pulled up a chair and sat down in front of him. “You don’t look so good.”
“I don’t know, Benny,” he answered honestly. “I thought I was ready to do this, but... I can’t believe we’re really going through with it.”
“I’m a little surprised myself, to be honest with you. As far as I know, nothing like this has ever been tried before. But Admiral Hansen is nothing if not decisive.”
“I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Sure you can,” Benny reassured him. “All you have to do is walk out onto it. Think of it as wading into a swimming pool.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Dylan told him as he stood up and started pacing back and forth from one end of the small room to the other. “Going through the Portal will be the easy part. It’s knowing what’s at stake that scares me. Everything depends on me—depends on what I do back there. Or what I don’t do. What if I make a mistake, Benny? What if I fail?”
“That doesn’t sound like the Dylan Graves I’ve come to know.”
Dylan stopped his pacing and looked at the old captain. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I haven’t known you very long, but I think I’ve gotten to know you pretty well. You’re confident, determined, and very sure of yourself. You’d never have made it as a Ranger squad leader if you weren’t.”
“Yeah, but this is totally different.”
“I’ve known Admiral Hansen for a long time, Dylan. He wouldn’t have chosen you for this mission if he didn’t believe you could pull it off.”
“Admiral Hansen chose me for this mission because I’m the son of the Excalibur‘s captain, Benny. He said so himself.”
“And because he shares Royer’s faith in your ability to succeed. Don’t forget that.”
Dylan snickered. “I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything Commander Royer says, if I were you.”
“Regardless, you were their choice, and for good reason. And,” he added as he stood up and started toward the door, “you accepted this mission with your eyes wide open, knowing exactly what was expected of you. So at this point it’s your duty to see it through.”
Dylan grinned, finding Benny’s frankness humorous, even if Benny hadn’t meant it to be so. How many times had he resorted to that tactic himself? How many times had he reminded one of his own subordinates of his or her duty to get them to do what they were supposed to do? Now Benny had done the same for him. And the old captain was right, whether he liked it or not. It was his duty to see the mission through. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
“I’ll be in the recreation room,” Benny told him as he left.
Dylan had showered and shaved earlier—priority one upon arrival in the past, buy some more beard retardant—so all he had left to do was get dressed. He went to the closet and pulled out a uniform. This time, one that he’d never worn before. The one that he’d brought with him specifically for the mission. The blue utilities that enlisted Solfleet Military Police troops had worn two decades ago. Security Police, he reminded himself. The branch hadn’t changed over to the current Military Police/Security Forces doctrine until 2172 when someone high enough up in the chain of command to do something about it finally realized that assigning military law enforcement officers to landing party and away team missions without providing them with a lot of additional specialized training was just a plain bad idea.
He dressed quickly—anxious energy, no doubt—and grabbed up his quarter century old equipment, then went by the recreation room to retrieve Benny. They headed out together.
Commander Akagi met them outside the tunnel entrance, and as they descended the stairs to once more walk beneath the ancient ruins, Benny just kept on talking, hoping to ease Dylan’s nerves. Akagi flashed him several irritated looks along the way, but not until they reached the stairs that led up to the Portal site did the old captain finally clam up. But even then his silence didn’t last for very long.
“How do you feel now, Dylan?” he asked as they approached the ancient relic.
“To be honest, Benny, I’m still a little nervous.”
“Only a little?”
Dylan shook his head. “No.”
“Deactivate the security field,” Akagi said to the guard manning the post. “Mister Graves here will be going through the Portal.”
“Sir?” the bewildered guard responded.
“You heard me, Corporal!” Akagi snapped. “Drop the goddamn field!”
“Yes, sir!” the corporal shouted disrespectfully.
Akagi glared at the junior NCO for a second or two but didn’t say anything else. Over the last twenty hours or so since Sedelnikov and Graves had arrived, he’d made no secret of the fact that he didn’t like the idea of letting someone step through the Portal, whether he was on a sanctioned mission or not. What he had kept secret, and what he truly resented, was the fact that someone other than him had been chosen to do it. He was envious. He’d been denied permission to go through time and time again. Denied permission to travel into the Earth’s past to conduct first-hand historical studies. Denied permission to actually live and experience every historian’s fantasy. And now this...this kid was going through. This kid who couldn’t care less about Earth history. This kid who hadn’t the faintest idea of what an incredible opportunity had been handed to him on a silver platter. Why him? What right did he have? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all.
The security field was still active. “I said drop the damn field!” Akagi shouted.
“I am dropping the damn field!” the guard shouted as he jumped to his feet. He stared curiously at Dylan’s outdated uniform as he finished entering a sequence of commands and a sort of hostility seemed to burn in his eyes, as though he blamed Dylan for his being yelled at. Then, as soon as he was ready to shut down the field, he said, “Captain Sedelnikov, I’ll have to ask you to keep your distance. Please stay there with the commander, sir.”
Dylan could see in the guard’s face just how much he enjoyed that little taste of authority. It reminded him of the former high school friend he’d originally enlisted with. No wonder they’d stuck this guy way out here in the middle of nowhere. Chances were no one could stand to be around him for very long.
“You don’t have to worry about me, mister,” Benny responded. “I’m much too old to do any of that kind of traveling.”
“You’ll still have to keep your distance, sir.”
“Not a problem, son. I’ll stay right where I am.”
“Thank you, sir.”
With the press of one last button the invisible field suddenly flashed a bright yellow-blue with an electrical-like snap, then instantly disappeared again. “The barrier is down,” the guard announced.
“Will you be able to hear me in there?” Dylan asked Akagi.
“Within the security field, yes,” the commander answered, “as long as you speak up a bit. You should be able to hear me with no problem, too. Once you go through the Portal, of course, we won’t be able to communicate with each other at all. At that point you’re history, at least from our perspective.”
Dylan glared at the commander with a disapproving grimace on his face. “Could you possibly have chosen your words any more poorly?” he asked sarcastically.
“That was a stupid thing to say, Commander,” Benny scolded.
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Akagi said with a complete lack of sincerity. “Now, to activate...”
“No,” Dylan said as he turned and faced the Portal again. “I’ve been studying the ancient Tor’Rosha a lot over the last couple of weeks. I’d like to try this myself.”
“Fine,” Akagi said as though Dylan had insulted him with his request. “Since you’ve got weeks of research under your belt, by all means. Be my guest.”
Benny grinned and nodded, ever so slightly. Yes. He’d seen it when he and Dylan met. The lieutenant was a born explorer. He didn’t belong in the Marine Corps or with the S.I.A. He belonged on an Explorer-class starcruiser.
“What’s he going through for, sir?” the guard asked of Akagi.
“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Akagi said. He turned to Benny.
“I told you before,” Benny said, heading off the question. “It’s classified.”
Akagi shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
Benny grunted. Then he said, “I have a question for you, Commander.”
“What’s that?”
He glanced at the guard. “Do you always let your subordinates shout at you like that?”
“What, you mean like the corporal there?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“Well, I don’t like it, of course. But it’s not like I’m an officer of the line or anything. I’m a scientist.”
“You’re still a commissioned officer, Commander, and you’re this outpost’s commanding officer. You should demand your subordinates treat you as such. Otherwise discipline will break down, as you can plainly see.”
“Can’t say you’re wrong about that. Maybe I should be a little more by the book.”
“You might want to start by throwing it at the corporal there.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Dylan stepped inside the security field’s perimeter. It hummed briefly behind him when the guard reactivated it, then gave no further hint that it existed at all. He moved forward, raising a hand toward the Portal, and even though he expected it to feel cool and hard, just like any other metal object, he’d barely touched his fingertips to the edge of its rim before he quickly withdrew, just in case.
He’d felt no sensation of electrical current. No sense of extreme heat or cold. He repeated the exercise, maintaining contact for a fraction of a second longer, then pulled his hand away again...still unharmed.
Benny laughed, and Dylan turned to look at him. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Have you ever seen the film based on your Admiral Hansen’s favorite old book, ‘Two-thousand One: A Space Odyssey?’”
Dylan shook his head. “I’ve never even heard of it. Why?”
“The way you approached the Portal. You remind me of one of the characters in the film’s opening sequence.”
“Oh,” Dylan replied, having no idea what Benny was referring to. He turned back to the Portal and touched its rim once more. He pressed his entire palm against it and dragged his hand slowly across its surface. He heard Benny laughing under his breath again, but chose to ignore it. Benny had been a good traveling companion. If he found something about all this amusing, then let him laugh.
The Portal’s rim felt warm to the touch, but not too hot, and perfectly smooth. Much smoother than he’d expected it to feel once he noticed the millions, perhaps even billions of minute pockmarks that he hadn’t seen until he got close. It felt a little like the surface of a polished white metal deck table that had been sitting in the sun for several hours.
He withdrew his hand and passed it through the open space beneath the rim. Nothing. No different than the air around him. There simply wasn’t anything there.
He sidled over to the ramp and ascended to the pedestal to study the hieroglyphs on the control panel.
“Can you read them?” Benny shouted.
“I haven’t had much practice, but I think so. Some of them anyway.” He found the basic symbol that could mean either ‘begin’ or ‘start’ or ‘engage’, depending on its context, and touched his wrist to its center. Why he had to use his wrist he didn’t know, but that was what the research notes he’d studied had indicated humans had to do. At first nothing happened and he thought maybe he was doing something wrong. But then a sudden bright white flash and a loud rumble exploded in the air around him as though an intense thunderstorm had decided to strike directly overhead, practically scaring him right out of his boots. A steady, quiet, gentle hum like that of a high-voltage electrical generator immediately followed.
Dylan cursed a tirade under his breath as his vision slowly returned and the ringing in his ears quieted, then paused a moment to wait for his heart to stop trying to pound its way out of his chest. Then he turned to Benny and asked, “What the hell was that?”
“Hell of a rush, isn’t it, Lieutenant?” the laughing guard joked.
Dylan glared at him. “Very funny,” he resplied sarcastically.
“Nothing like a good rush of adrenaline to make the day worth living, is there?”
“You’ve never been in combat, have you?”
“Oh, big hero,” the guard said. “You’ve been in combat. So what?”
“At ease, soldier!” Benny shouted. He knew ‘so what.’ He’d seen the horrors of combat first hand just as Dylan had, and damned if he was going to let someone mock a fellow combat veteran. Especially another service member who ought to know better.
The guard fell silent.
Paying no further attention to his silenced antagonist, Dylan took out his twenty-five year old handcomp, turned it on, and set it to record. Then, anticipating another burst of the Portal’s fireworks, just in case, he continued examining and manipulating the controls.
Some of the symbols were completely unfamiliar—maybe they were of an older dialect than the one he’d studied—but he still managed to make fairly steady progress...for a while. But then he reached the point where he had to enter his destination time and location, and no matter what he did, no matter what sequence of buttons he pressed, he couldn’t get the Portal to respond.
“Need some help, Lieutenant?” Akagi asked without disguising his attitude of superiority when he’d apparently watched in silence long enough.
“How do you enter the destination?”
“You have to speak it, Lieutenant, in ancient Tor’Roshan, using their system of spatial coordinates and their measurement of time.”
Dylan straightened and turned to him. “Then I guess I need some help, Commander.”
“I thought you might,” Akagi said as he started toward him. The guard lowered the field for him without waiting to be asked.
* * *
Recently assigned Crewman Joey Nelson and his newest friend, Crewman First Class Theodore Petrakos, sat in the small communications room playing poker. Actually, at less than three meters by four meters, it was more like a communications closet, or as they affectionately called it, ‘the cell.’ It housed so many consoles and pieces of specialized communications equipment that barely enough room remained for them to set the card table up between them.
As usual, Theodore—everyone called him Ted, he’d told Joey when they were originally introduced to one another—was cleaning up. Fortunately for Joey they never gambled with real money. Just a gentlemen’s game for them, although Joey was beginning to suspect that Ted didn’t know how to play like a gentleman. The guy won all the time. All the time. No one could be that lucky, but Joey hadn’t actually caught him cheating yet, so discretion being the better part of valor, he continued to keep his suspicions to himself. After all, there weren’t very many people assigned to the remote outpost. To risk alienating the one who’d been first to befriend him when he arrived would be just plain stupid.
“Your deal, Joey,” Ted said, grinning with victory once again.
“When are you going to start losing for a change?” Joey asked him as he collected the cards and started shuffling them.
“I never lose,” Ted answered, shaking his head. “Don’t know how.”
“Yeah well, you’re turning me into a expert at it. I’d be more than happy to teach you.”
“No thanks. I’d rather keep winning.”
Joey finished shuffling and started dealing. “So I’ve noticed. You sure as hell won a lot last night.”
“What do you mean?” Ted asked. “We didn’t even play last night.”
“I’m not talking about poker, Ted.”
“Then what...”
“I’m talking about Noelle.”
Ted sat back in his chair and nervously ran his fingers through his thick, dark curls and scratched his scalp. “What about her?”
“I saw you sneak her into your room,” Joey answered.
“Oh.” He started picking up his cards, one at a time. “Did anyone else see us?”
“Not that I know of,” Joey answered. He finished dealing and set the deck face down between them, then picked up his hand and started rearranging his cards. “But you’d better be careful. She’s still a newlywed, you know, and I hear her husband’s a pretty big guy.”
Ted picked up his last card, but didn’t pay it much attention. “Yeah, I know.”
“And he’s an MP, too.”
“Yeah, Joey, I know,” Ted replied impatiently. “You don’t have to remind me. Besides, it’s not like I was on the hunt for it or anything. It just sort of happened. She actually started the whole thing.”
Joey snickered. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“I’m serious. A bunch of us hung around the dining hall for a while after you left. We were talking about what being assigned to this god-forsaken place for six months can do to a relationship. First she mentioned how tired she was of sleeping alone while she waits for her husband’s transfer to come through. Then I said something about how I only get involved in casual relationships because I like to change assignments a lot. Next thing I know she’s leaning over and asking me if I’m making her an offer, so I said... Well, you’ve seen her so you can probably guess what I said. We went to the rec-room and shot some pool for a while, then went back to my room for a couple drinks. One thing led to another and the next thing you know...”
“Joyeux Noël from Noelle.”
Ted grinned, despite his discomfort. “Exactly.”
“Any regrets?”
“What, are you kidding me?” Ted asked, wide-eyed. “She’s twenty years old and fucks like a bunny in heat. She’s coming over every night from now on.”
“What?” Joey asked, looking at his friend like he had two heads. “Are you nuts? What about her husband? What are you going to do when he gets here?”
“End it, of course,” Ted answered as though it should have been obvious.
“End it? Just like that?”
“Yup,” Ted answered with an exaggerated nod. “Like I said, I only get involved in casual relationships. This one’s no different. That’s the agreement. We’ll stay friends after her husband gets here, but the rest is only temporary. Sex, sleep, more sex, and so long. Once he gets here, we both pretend like nothing ever happened.”
Joey harrumphed. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“Trust me, you’ll see it.”
“I hope so. You’ve been a pretty good friend to me since I got here. I’d hate to have to sit through your funeral. But in the meantime you guys better be more careful. If anyone besides me ever sees you two together like that, you’ll have to live in fear every day, knowing that someone might talk at any time. Who knows what Akagi would do to you if he ever found out?”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
“Good.” Joey leaned in a little closer, lowered his voice, and asked with a grin, “So how was she?”
Ted smiled from ear to ear as he, too, leaned closer and lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “She was awesome, Joey. Like I said, she fucks like a bunny in heat. You wouldn’t believe how many times she...”
“Hold on a second,” Joey interrupted, his grin fading as he straightened and dropped his cards face down on the table. He pointed over Ted’s shoulder at the console behind him and said, “The message panel’s lighting up like a Christmas tree. Looks like something pretty important is coming in.”
Ted looked back over his shoulder at the panel. Sure enough, a new message was coming in. As he watched, the decryption and decoding protocols automatically engaged—he’d set them to do that so he wouldn’t have to get up—and prioritized the new message as ‘URGENT’ over everything else. “What the...” He stood up, dropped his cards, and stepped over to the console for a closer look. “Holy shit,” he muttered, puzzlement apparent on his chiseled face.
“What’s wrong?” Joey asked.
“It’s coming in on a tight jumpspace beam directly from Earth.”
“A direct beam?” Joey asked, full of doubt as he got up and went over to join his friend. A direct beam to this outpost? “Are you sure about that?”
Irritation erased his puzzlement as Ted looked at his friend. “Who’s the rookie here?” he asked sharply. Then, as he shifted his gaze back to the comm-panel, he added, “Of course I’m sure about that.”
“Sorry,” Joey said meekly. He’d been warned that Ted didn’t like being questioned where his job knowledge was concerned. The guy had an apparently well earned reputation within the specialty for being one of the best to ever do the job. In fact, at least according to everyone else in the unit, he was the best. The problem was that he knew it.
“I’m sorry, too,” Ted said after a moment. “I didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
And that was that. Spat over. “So...doesn’t this tight beam message violate pretty much every regulation in the book concerning communications with this place?” Joey asked.
“Damn right it does,” Ted confirmed. “Someone’s in a lot of trouble.”
“Did their identification come up yet?”
“Not yet, but when it does... Hold on a second. It’s coming up now.” And a second later, “No way.” He initiated a quick tracking check, just to be sure, then double and triple-checked the results. “Oh my God.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think anyone will be getting in trouble for this.”
“Why not?” Joey asked, his curiosity piqued. “Come on, Ted. Who’s it from?”
Ted looked up at his friend. “It’s from President Shakhar.”
* * *
“So where exactly are you headed, Lieutenant?” Commander Akagi asked as he nudged Dylan aside, away from the controls.
“Mars Orbital Shipyards,” Dylan answered, figuring there wasn’t any harm in telling the commander just that little bit. Especially when he was about to put his fate, and perhaps his very life, into the guy’s hands.
“No can do, Lieutenant,” Akagi said, shaking his head. “As I told you before, this Portal is focused directly on Earth. I can’t put you down anywhere else.”
“Yes, sir, I know. I thought you meant once I get there.” He looked down at the controls again. “How about somewhere a few miles from Solfleet Surface Headquarters in mid to late April, twenty-one sixty-eight?”
“I doubt I can set you down in that specific a location or time, Lieutenant,” Akagi further advised him. “Something more along the lines of ‘United States’ eastern seaboard, late sixty-seven to early sixty-eight’ might be the best I can do.”
Dylan hoped Akagi was just yanking his chain, antagonizing him, trying to make him even more nervous than he already was. It would be a childish thing for him to do, but the alternative, that he was being straightforward and honest, could mean that he might spend as much as nine or ten months in the past before he was finally able to come home again. Given that choice, Dylan would have preferred to have his chain yanked.
“Well, as long as it’s no later than April, sixty-eight,” he said. “Aim a little earlier if you have to. Just don’t send me back short of that mark or this whole thing will be a waste of time.”
“You got it.”
“And please, Commander, try not to drop me in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“I’ll try not to.” He replaced Dylan’s hand on the destination symbol with his own, then called out in a much deeper voice than was natural for him, “Pel’Ka. Tre’Qoom boshe’ta vasim. Tusa. Kapek e Tor’Rosha vej Rosha, Pen’to rhim con win, vet wona’sa torsh’kava vo dusin, vet zimta kajj wen subeg ga vol revi.”
The destination symbol began to glow beneath his fingers. He pulled his hand away.
Dylan turned and gazed down at the Portal, and as he watched with wonder, eerie wisps of thin, gray-white mist began to appear, dancing lazily across the entire surface of its threshold. Those wisps grew thicker, combined to form clouds, and began swirling in a counter-clockwise direction like a miniature hurricane. A small eye even formed in its center as the arms quickly expanded outward toward the rim, cycling repeatedly through all the colors of the spectrum as they grew.
Dylan held his handcomp out to record the phenomenon as the swirling clouds began to form images of what appeared to be prehistoric Earth. He watched in awe as the eons passed before his eyes. Centuries of volcanic activity passed in the blink of an eye. He bore witness as the polar caps expanded and contracted over and over again with the pulse of a heartbeat. The dinosaurs came and went. Then mankind appeared. Or was he already there? He witnessed the great migration, the expansion of the continents, the growth of cities, the horrors of hundreds of wars, the wonder of incredible scientific achievements and untold numbers of other important historical events, all of them blended together and compressed into mere moments. He glimpsed an old three-man space capsule that he remembered seeing pictures of in history books, but its image had barely registered in his mind when the first starcruiser flashed before his eyes and was gone. A split second later the images seemed to liquefy, to lose their cohesion, and the swirling clouds of color reappeared and swallowed them into the vortex.
Dylan stopped recording and immediately started the playback, intending to determine the precise moment when he’d have to step out into the Portal’s event horizon. Only then did he realize that the centuries had begun to slow as the programmed destination time approached. But even when the targeted moment arrived, the decades were still passing by far too quickly and he wasn’t able to pin down any specific, accurate jump off point.
He set the handcomp to playback at half speed and started it again, only to discover that events still passed by much too fast for his needs. One quarter speed. Again, too fast. He stepped it down to a mere hundredth of the originally recorded speed and tried again. Then a thousandth. That looked better. He could probably work with that. As he waited for history to play itself out again, he programmed a countdown timer to reach zero at that moment when he would have to step out. He linked it to the recording and synchronized it, then ran it through...twice. After one minor adjustment it was perfect. He was ready.
Well, he was as ready as he ever would be.
He drew a deep breath and touched a hand to the recall device, safely hidden away and sealed inside the lining of his jacket, then exhaled.
“Ready, Lieutenant?” Akagi asked.
“Good luck, Dylan,” Benny said, grinning at the familiarity of the scene that was playing itself out in front of him. The Portal looked different from its fictional counterpart, of course, but the similarities between what he was witnessing now and the episode of that old science-fiction series from the 1960’s that he’d recently seen on virtuavision were obvious.
Dylan looked back at his new friend one last time, wishing he’d had more time to get to know him better. A little odd, that wish, considering all the time they’d just spent cooped up in the skiff together. “I don’t believe in luck, Benny,” he said, “but thank you.”
He tried to swallow, but his mouth was suddenly very dry. “Commander...” He cleared his throat. “Let’s do this.”
“All right, Lieutenant. Walk out to the center.”
“What?” Dylan asked, staring at Akagi as if he’d just told him to step off a cliff.
Akagi stared right back at him. “Do you want to do this or not?” he asked impatiently.
Actually, no. But he answered, “Yeah, but I thought...”
“Then get out there.” When Dylan didn’t move he said, “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. You won’t fall through it until you’re supposed to.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Akagi hesitated a moment, then answered with a shrug, “Reasonably sure.”
“That’s not very reassuring, Commander.”
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said as he turned back to the controls. “It’s the best I can do.”
Dylan sighed, then asked Benny, “Are you sure this thing isn’t just going to kill me?”
“If there was any chance of that Admiral Hansen wouldn’t have sent you out here in the first place,” the old captain assured him.
Dylan accepted that for whatever it was worth—he trusted Benny well enough, despite the fact that he hadn’t really known him for very long, although Admiral Hansen was another issue entirely—then turned back to the Portal and gazed into the center of the weakening storm. As he watched, what remained of the miniature hurricane fizzled into insignificant dancing wisps of smoke once again, but the ‘surface’ beneath had taken on a silvery metallic appearance. It looked like someone had filled a pool with mercury. He swallowed hard then stepped out, tentatively, shifting his weight from his rear foot to his front very slowly, and much to his relief found the mercury-like surface to be as solid as the ground.
Another step. Still solid. He walked out to the center as Akagi had instructed, gazing down at his feet with every short step and noting that his movement through the smoke seemed to have no effect on its haphazard currents. He glanced back at Akagi and nodded. At this point he just wanted to get it over with.
Akagi touched his hand to the destination symbol again and repeated the ancient phrase. “Pel’Ka. Tre’Qoom boshe’ta vasim. Tusa. Kapek e Tor’Rosha vej Rosha, Pen’to rhim con win, vet wona’sa torsh’kava vo dusin, vet zimta kajj wen subeg ga vol revi.”
Dylan stared unblinking at his handcomp’s readout as the colorful hurricane began to reform around his ankles. The storm clouds swirled faster and faster around his feet and they thickened and expanded outward toward the Portal’s rim. Earth’s prehistoric oceans and jungles and mountains and plains appeared together beneath him, morphing with the passing centuries before they could even fully take form. His heart pounded harder and harder as the millennia passed until it felt like it was going to burst forth from his chest.
The timer appeared on the screen and began its countdown. His heart thundered, feeling as though it might explode at any second. His breaths grew shallow and rapid.
Double digits. Nineties... eighties... seventies... sixties... fifties... forties... thirties... His hands were shaking.
Twenties... He felt queasy.
Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen... He wanted to back out.
“Commander!” someone hollered from a distance.
Dylan looked up, but only for a second before his gaze fell back to the handcomp. Two young crewmen were approaching, running as fast as their legs would carry them.
Ten, nine, eight... Why was he doing this? Why was he leaving Beth?
Seven... Why did he have to do this?
Six...
“Stop, Commander! Don’t let him go!”
Five... He glanced up at the young men again. Why were they trying to stop him?
“Why not?” Akagi shouted.
All eyes, including Dylan’s, converged on the two young men as they skidded to a halt just outside the security field’s perimeter. “His mission isn’t authorized!”
One...
Akagi withdrew has hand as the counter reached zero.
A second CRACK echoed through the hall less than a second after the first.
“Stay right there, Admiral!” The MP guarding Hansen ordered as he drew his sidearm and slapped the door release. He charged into the hall, leaving the admiral unguarded as well as unrestrained, and didn’t take the time to close the door behind him.
Gunshots, Hansen knew. Double tap with a pulse-pistol. No doubt about it. Nothing else sounded quite the same.
“What happened?” he heard his guard inquire.
“She grabbed a weapon!” a woman shouted in response, obviously hyped up. “I didn’t have any choice!”
“No!” another woman screamed in horror. “Oh my God! No!”
“Stay away from her, ma’am!”
“No! Let me go!” the woman screamed. “No, God! Liz!”
Liz? Royer!
Hansen bolted from his chair and dashed into the hall to find his MP guard hauling an obviously distraught woman off the floor to her feet. It was Karen, he realized even before he saw her face. Liz’s wife, crying uncontrollably, screaming Liz’s name over and over, struggling against the MP’s efforts to restrain her. Royer lay face up and motionless on the floor in front of them, sprawled across the width of the hall in a rapidly expanding pool of blood with her hands cuffed in front of her. Another MP, a stocky female bleeding profusely from her mouth and nose, stood frozen at Liz’s feet and stared down her pulse-pistol’s sights at her, seemingly in shock.
“What the hell did you do?” Hansen demanded as he rushed forward. The female MP snapped out of it instantly, holstered her weapon and stepped into his path, raising her hands to stop him. But he wasn’t about to be stopped. He slapped her hands aside and shoved her out of his way, perhaps more violently than was necessary but he didn’t care about that, and dropped to his knees at Liz’s side as the MP stumbled over her feet and fell backwards to the floor.
“Don’t touch her, Admiral!” the burly MP who’d been guarding him shouted. “This is a crime scene!” But he still had his hands full trying keep Karen under control and couldn’t do anything to stop him.
Hansen saw the standard Military Police-issue pistol lying on the floor beside her and realized instantly what must have happened. “Aw Liz, what did you do?” he quietly asked as he gazed into her lifeless eyes and touched his fingertips to the side of her throat. She had no discernible pulse but blood was still oozing from the button-sized holes in the center of her chest, so he knew there was still a chance to save her. He tilted her head back and pinched her nostrils, then leaned down, sealed his mouth over hers, and blew two quick breaths, watching for the rise and fall of her chest. Then he slid to his left—all that blood on the floor made it easy—pulled her bloodstained bra up out of the way, positioned his hands over her sternum, and started CPR, but bright red blood streamed from her wounds like water from a fountain with his first compression.
“Get me some gauze or a clean towel or something!” he ordered as he tried to seal a hand over her wounds before he started compressions again.
“She’s dead, Admiral!” the burly MP informed him. “Now get away from her!”
“No!” Karen screamed, still bawling and trying to break free. “No! No! No!”
“Get me a goddamn towel, now!” Hansen shouted again, desperate to save Liz’s life.
“It won’t do any good, Admiral!” the MP shouted back. “She’s dead!”
“What the hell happened here?”
Hansen looked up without stopping to find Krieger peering around the corner at the end of the hall with his gun drawn. “One of your trigger-happy MPs just shot Commander Royer!” he shouted angrily. Then he slid to his right to administer two more breaths.
“What!” Krieger exclaimed as he stepped out from behind the safety of the corner and holstered his weapon. “Why? What happened?”
“Ask her!” Hansen said, tilting his head toward the MP, who’d risen back to her feet and drawn her weapon again, as he slid back to his left and repositioned his one free hand. “And get me something to seal over these wounds now!”
“She grabbed Inga’s weapon!” the MP exclaimed, spitting blood as she spoke. “I ordered her to freeze but she turned on me and...”
“Attention all station personnel,” the public address system boomed, drowning out the rest of her words and drawing everyone’s attention to the ceiling speakers. Everyone’s, that is, except for Hansen’s. He couldn’t stop CPR. Liz’s life depended on it.
“Attention all station personnel,” it repeated. “General quarters. General quarters. Man your battle stations. Fighter bays, launch all fighters when ready. All docked ships’ crews, return to your vessels immediately and prepare for emergency launch. This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill. All civilian personnel proceed immediately to your assigned shelters.”
The emergency klaxons started wailing in the distant corridor.
“This is Special Agent Krieger,” Hansen heard the investigator say. “What’s going on?”
“The Joint Chiefs have declared Defense Condition One, sir!” the panicked answer came. “A Veshtonn fleet has broken through the outer defenses and crossed into the inner system! They’re bombarding the Martian colonies from orbit and a full scale invasion of Earth appears imminent!”
Liz still wasn’t responding, and Hansen finally realized that his efforts were in vein. He gave up and sat back on his heels, exhausted. Karen cried out, begged and pleaded with him not to stop, but he ignored her anguished cries. There was nothing more anyone could do for her.
Liz was gone.
And this was it, he realized as Krieger stepped over her body and stood beside him. They were out of time. They were all out of time. The enemy was descending upon them. This was the beginning of the end. The end that a select few had known was coming for the past six months. The end of their freedom. The end of their entire civilization.
He closed Liz’s blouse, and then her eyelids with his bloodstained fingers, then closed his own eyes as if to pray. “Good luck, Mister Graves,” he muttered.
“Might as well save your breath, Admiral,” Krieger said, raising his voice to be heard over the blaring klaxons. “Dylan Graves isn’t going anywhere.”
Hansen looked up at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Royer told me where you sent him and why. His illegal mission has been stopped.”
“What?” Hansen asked as he rose to his feet.
“That’s right, Admiral. We got word directly to the president and she assured us Graves would be stopped immediately. Whatever your plan was, it’s failed.”
Hansen grabbed the front of Krieger’s shirt in both hands and shoved him back against the wall before he could even begin to react. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he shouted angrily, glaring into the agent’s frightened eyes.
“Let him go, Admiral!” the MP shouted.
Hansen looked her way and found himself staring down the barrel of her sidearm. He reacted instantly, instinctively, slapping her weapon aside and grabbing it away from her in one quick motion with his left hand as he stepped into her and slugged her across the jaw with his right. She went down hard, likely unconscious before she hit the deck.
The other MP threw Karen aside like an old rag doll and went for his weapon, but Hansen bounced him off the wall with a flying side-kick to the chest, then dropped him with a bone-crushing roundhouse kick to the side of his head.
“Drop the weapon, Admiral!” Krieger yelled from behind.
Hansen glimpsed their shadows on the wall and saw that Krieger’s arms were extended. The investigator was holding a gun to his back. He raised a hand out to his side to draw Krieger’s attention to it, hesitated a moment, then let go of the pistol, and before it even hit the floor he whirled around and grabbed Krieger’s weapon in both hands, twisted it up and to one side, and pried it free of the surprised investigator’s grasp.
“Nothing personal, Krieger,” he said. He kicked him in the solar plexus, doubling him over, and cracked him over the back of the head with the pistol.
The enemy was upon them. Heather would be okay. She knew what to do and where to go. But he had to find a communications center. He had no time to lose. Graves had to go through the Portal. He had to help Karen, For Liz, and then find a communications center.
Karen had slipped past them at some point during the fight and was on her knees in Liz’s blood, cradling her wife’s lifeless body tightly in her arms, rocking back and forth, crying on her shoulder. Hansen laid a hand gently on her shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, Karen, but you’ll have to leave her.”
“No!” Karen cried.
“You have to get to a shelter.” He crouched beside her. “I know you don’t want to leave her, Karen. I know how much you’re hurting right now. But Liz would want you to go. She’d want you to be safe and go on living.” He hooked his hand under her upper arm and started to lift her, but she screamed in protest and pulled free. She’d have no part of leaving her love behind.
What did it matter? They might all be dead in a matter of minutes anyway. He had to get a message to X-ray One. That was his top priority now. He hesitated another moment, then left Karen to her grief and ran through the C.I.D.’s inner offices toward the corridor.
A shot rang out behind him. He dove behind a desk and sprang to his knees to return fire, but just as he started squeezing the trigger, the shooter, a young female MP with blood trickling from her mouth, dropped her arms and let her weapon fall to the deck by her feet. She started coughing and spitting up blood, then clutched her arms to her ribs as she fell into the corner. She turned white as a ghost and was obviously in a lot of pain. She stood there, gazing across the office through glassy eyes at him as though she were just waiting for him to shoot her, but since she clearly no longer posed a threat, he held his fire.
“You’re Inga?” he asked as he stood up. She nodded weakly. He lowered his weapon part way but held it ready, just in case. “You need medical attention, Inga,” he told her. “I’m not your problem anymore. Let me go and I’ll call for the medics.”
“You won’t get off the station, Admiral,” she managed to articulate through the pain.
“I don’t need to.”
Her eyes seemed suddenly to lose focus and she started slowly sliding down the wall. She landed on her bottom with a grunt and dropped her blank stare to the floor in front of her, then coughed, spat blood, and fell forward.
Hansen said a quick, silent prayer for her soul, then headed for the corridor.
Another shot from behind sent him tumbling over the receptionist’s desk, grimacing in pain as he crumbled to the floor. He’d been hit! Shot in the left shoulder blade! And God, did it hurt! It hurt a lot! It burned like the fires of hell! He tried to shake it off. He had no choice this time! He had to survive! He had to find a comm-center and send that message to Station X-Ray One. Everything depended on it. Everything!
He came up shooting. Nothing mattered anymore. If they were lucky—if he was wrong about which theory was the right one and if Graves completed his mission successfully—then none of this would matter anyway. None of this would happen. All he had to do was make it to a comm-center.
He and his as yet unseen assailant bobbed up and down from behind their respective cover, firing back and forth. Each of them had the other pinned down, but neither one of them could get a clean shot at the other.
Hansen glanced behind him and to his right as he fired blindly over the top of the desk. The door to the corridor wasn’t four meters away, but he’d have to expose himself to reach it.
The floor vibrated beneath him.
“Give it up, Admiral!” his opponent called out over the din of the klaxons. “I know you’re shot. Toss your weapon over the desk and step out into the open.”
He was shot all right, and it still hurt like hell! And he was also starting to feel a little lightheaded, so he knew he was losing blood. He had to think fast. He had to act while he still could. He had to reach a comm-center!
“Do it now, Admiral!” the man shouted.
The lights flickered and the floor shook with a sound like distant thunder. The Veshtonn had arrived! They were firing on the station!
“We’re under attack!” Hansen cried.
“And you’re still a felon accused of capital crimes, Admiral!” came the response. “Now throw out your weapon!”
Time was running out.
He tossed his weapon over the desk as ordered—he’d emptied it, so what difference did it make?—and heard it hit the floor with a clatter.
“Now step out where I can see you, hands in the air!”
Hansen struggled to his feet and stepped out from behind the desk, hands raised. All he could see of his adversary, who still crouched low behind a desk no more than twenty feet away and held him in his sights, was his dark hair and part of his goateed face. But that was enough. Detective Sergeant Franco, head of the ‘Narco squad.’ Why did it have to be him?
“Do you know what’s happening outside the station, Franco?”
“Turn around and face away from me,” Franco demanded.
“The Veshtonn are attacking!” Hansen told him as he complied. “Invading Earth!”
“That’s not my problem right now, Admiral,” Franco responded. His voice sounded sharper and more distinct. He was coming closer—moving in for the arrest.
“That’s everyone’s problem, Mister Franco!” Hansen pointed out.
“Right now you’re my only problem.”
Hansen sighed. “True enough.” He spun to his right and thrust his elbow into Franco’s face, then followed with a side-kick to the ribs. Then, as Franco lay on the deck screaming in pain, cursing up a storm and holding is hands to his broken, bleeding nose, Hansen scooped the detective’s weapon up off the floor and scurried into the corridor.
He made his way unchallenged to the C.I.D. comm-center less than a hundred meters away. He burst through the door and stopped short when three shocked and confused expressions met him eye to eye, but those three expressions belonged to three armed and specially trained personnel and didn’t last more than a second. All three of them lept to their feet and reached for their weapons, giving him no time and no chance to explain...and no choice. He raised his weapon and fired three times in rapid succession, neutralizing the threat.
It didn’t matter anymore, he reminded himself.
A fiery explosion ripped through the corridor with the thunder of a thousand stampeding horses and the floor heaved as he rushed forward and threw him against the far wall. Most of the secondary consoles were already in flames by the time he climbed back to his feet, filling the room with thick, gray, choking smoke and the unmistakable odor of burning electronics. But the main console, the one he needed, still appeared to be operational.
At least for the moment.
Akagi had blown his stack at the news that Dylan’s mission wasn’t authorized and had promptly herded everyone away from the Portal under the watchful eye of the guard and his quickly drawn sidearm. In stark contrast to the ferocity of the commander’s rage, a great sense of relief had filled Dylan’s soul immediately afterwards when the commander proclaimed that he would not be allowed to go through the Portal under any circumstances. That was fine with him. He was glad to be staying in the present for any number of obvious reasons, not the least of which was that he’d see Beth again very soon. But he still didn’t understand what was going on.
“I don’t get it, Benny,” he whispered as soon as he and the old captain split off from the others to go to the dining facility while Akagi headed to the comm-room with the two crewmen to contact Solfleet Central Command and ‘find out what the hell is going on.’
“You don’t get what?” Benny asked as he opened the door.
It wasn’t time for dinner yet so there weren’t very many people there—those few who were there were apparently just hanging out, relaxing and talking—but the mouth-watering aroma of spicy spaghetti sauce and garlic bread that assaulted Dylan’s senses when they stepped inside told him that dinnertime wasn’t far off. He was glad for that. In his opininion X-ray One had some of the best food he’d ever tasted anywhere in the fleet.
“Why would Admiral Hansen send me all the way out here on an unauthorized mission?” he asked as he grabbed a pair of plain white coffee mugs out of the rack and handed one to Benny. “He didn’t strike me as the kind of officer who would casually disobey orders.”
“I doubt there was anything casual about it,” Benny said as he started filling his mug. “Besides, acting in the absence of orders isn’t necessarily the same as acting against orders.”
“What does that mean?” Dylan asked as Benny topped off his mug then stepped aside. But no sooner had the question passed his lips when he realized that he already knew exactly what Benny was inferring. “Oh. You mean that he might not have been ordered not to pursue the mission.”
“Exactly.”
As they started toward what, in the short time they’d been there, had become their usual table near the back of the dining room, Dylan noticed the people around him throwing curious glances in his direction. He stared right back at them but didn’t say anything. Noticing his apparent discomfort and seeing the reason for it, Benny pointed out, “It’s probably the outdated uniform you’re wearing.”
Dylan glanced down at himself with sudden understanding and then looked at Benny and said, “Right. I forgot I was wearing it.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Benny said as they reached their table. They pulled their chairs out—as usual, Dylan chose the one facing the door so he could keep an eye on everyone who entered—and sat down across the table from one another. “Everyone here knows what this outpost is about. They all have special security clearance.”
“I know. It just bothers me that I could forget something like that so easily. Good way to blow a mission.”
“You’re no longer on a mission, remember?” Benny pointed out. “If you were, I’m sure your instincts wouldn’t have let you make any mistakes. Now where were we?”
“I suppose. You were reminding me that acting in the absence of orders isn’t the same thing as actually disobeying orders and we were assuming that’s what the admiral did.”
“That’s right. The president’s message, as I read it, wasn’t at all clear on that point. All she said was that you were to be stopped because she hadn’t authorized your mission. She didn’t say anything about specifically having told the admiral not to pursue the mission.”
“Splitting those hairs pretty fine, aren’t we, Benny?” Dylan asked as he raised his mug to his lips. He took a cautious sip. As usual, the coffee was too hot and too strong. But he’d drink it anyway, of course, when it cooled down a little.
“Are we?” Benny asked, letting his own coffee sit and cool. “The inherent ability to act in the absence of orders is an important trait of a good leader.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dylan said as he followed Benny’s example and set his coffee aside to cool. “They taught us that in the Primary Leadership course at the N-C-O Academy. But that distinction seems a little flimsy in this case if you ask me. I mean, look at the specifics of the mission—at the finality of its consequences. Do you honestly believe the president would have left any doubt in the admiral’s mind if she’d decided against pursuing it?”
“Honestly? No, I don’t,” Benny admitted, shaking his head. “I think she would have very clearly and specifically ordered him to stand down, but maybe she didn’t make her decision prior to him sending us out here.”
“Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that,” Dylan confessed.
“Granted,” Benny continued, “the admiral’s career has had its share of bumps and rough spots over the years, but until we receive information to the contrary, I’d prefer to give the admiral the benefit of the doubt.”
“Yeah,” Dylan agreed. “That’s fair, I guess.”
“There’s no guessing involved, Dylan,” Benny clarified. “It is fair and we owe him that. As you say, look at the specifics of the mission.”
Benny paused for a moment to consider what else to say, and what not to say. While he was right about everyone assigned to the outpost having a special security clearance, none of them had a need to know the details of Dylan’s mission. Even though it had been stopped cold, the Timeshift Resolution was still classified ‘Top Secret,’ and that classification would remain in effect until someone with the authority to do so downgraded it.
“Or better still,” he almost whispered when he continued, “consider the alternative. You know what’s at stake here, Dylan. You know what the Coalition worlds are facing. If you ask me, Admiral Hansen had a pretty damn good reason for going forward, orders or not.”
Dylan did as Benny suggested. He considered the alternative to going forward with the mission. The pictures that flashed through his mind—pictures of war, pictures of the slaughter of millions, pictures of the destruction of whole worlds including the Earth—were every bit as bleak as those Admiral Hansen had painted for him during his mission briefing. Benny had a point. “I guess I can’t argue with that,” he finally said.
“Exactly. And if I know Admiral Hansen half as well as I think I do, then I have to believe that he thought the mission to be absolutely necessary.”
“Oh, he thought it necessary all right,” Dylan ardently confirmed, nodding his head. “You’re definitely right about that, Benny. But for someone so high up in the chain of command to have even maybe disobeyed the orders of the Commander-in-Chief...” He shrugged. “I guess I’m just not used to seeing something like that.”
“Given where you come from, that’s understandable. You’re used to strict obedience.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“But we’re not talking about the Rangers here, Dylan,” Benny reminded him. “Or about the Corps, or even the Military Police. We’re talking about a three-star admiral. Still, even if he did disobey presidential orders, I’m sure he didn’t do so lightly.”
Dylan picked up his mug and sipped his coffee again—still very hot, but drinkable—then asked, “So what do you think will happen to us now?”
Benny shrugged. “My guess is we’ll be ordered to return to Earth immediately.”
“Think we’re in trouble?”
Benny shook his head. “I doubt it,” he answered as he reached for his coffee. “As far as we knew we were obeying the lawful orders of a superior officer. No one can punish us for that.”
Dylan snickered. “Sure they can,” he said. “You’re talking about the military, remember? If someone high enough up in the food chain wants us punished, they’ll find a reason to punish us. You can bet Akagi will push for it.”
Benny sipped his coffee, then asked, “That’s a pretty cynical attitude to have, don’t you think?”
“Based solely on past observations.”
“The past observations of an N-C-O, correct?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“So you’re a commissioned officer now,” Benny explained, visibly disappointed. “You need to keep such attitudes to yourself for the sake of your subordinate troops’ morale.”
“What subordinate troops?” Dylan asked. Then he pointed out, “I’m not in a leadership position here, Benny. I don’t have any subordinate troops. And no offense intended, but if being a commissioned officer means I can’t speak my mind, then I’d rather resign my commission.”
“Captain Sedelnikov and Lieutenant Graves, please report to Commander Akagi’s office immediately,” the deputy commander’s voice called out from the speakers in the ceiling, cutting off Benny’s response. “Captain Benjamin Sedelnikov and Lieutenant Dylan Graves, report to Commander Akagi’s office.”
Dylan sighed. “What now?” he asked rhetorically.
“Perhaps Commander Akagi has received his clarification,” Benny surmised as he stood.
“This fast?” Dylan asked as he, too, stood up.
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
They pushed their chairs in under the table, then headed for the commander’s office, leaving their coffee behind.
* * *
“Come in, gentlemen,” Akagi said, smiling warmly as he stood up behind his desk.
Dylan and Benny looked around as they entered Akagi’s office for the first time. It was small and sterile, more the size of a walk-in closet than of an office, and completely impersonal. A small standard-issue falsewood table with shortened legs and a computer terminal on top served as the commander’s desk. There were no paintings or prints hanging on the dreary gray walls, no antique books lined up on the nearly empty shelves, and no family holophotos or little bobbles or trinkets or knick-knacks of any kind anywhere. There wasn’t even a Federation flag or a Solfleet crest behind him. Overall, the office looked more like an afterthought than a commanding officer’s domain—like a small, impromptu workspace that had been hastily thrown together long after the facility’s construction had been completed.
“Please forgive the starkness of my office,” the commander politely requested. “I don’t spend a lot of time in here. As I explained earlier, I’m much more of a scientist than I am an administrator. I prefer to spend my time at the Portal or in the research labs.” He gestured toward the pair of thinly padded fold-out chairs in front of his so-called desk. “Please, gentlemen, have a seat. Make yourselves comfortable.”
“You’re in an awfully good mood all of the sudden,” Benny observed as all three of them sat down.
“With good reason, Captain,” Akagi expounded. “Things are finally looking up.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Dylan asked. Benny was right. Akagi was in an awfully good mood, acting much friendlier, much more personable than he had at any time since their arrival. He was obviously very pleased about something, and Dylan suspected it was something more than just the fact that his mission had been scrubbed.
“I just heard from the president’s office again,” Akagi told them. “Admiral Hansen has been arrested.”
“Arrested!” Dylan exclaimed. “For what?” In truth there couldn’t be much question as to ‘for what,’ but he’d asked anyway.
“This so-called mission of yours, whatever it might have been, wasn’t just unauthorized, Lieutenant,” Akagi calmly explained. “The president’s go-ahead was a specific prerequisite to its initiation. Not only did she never give that go-ahead, she specifically told Admiral Hansen not to go forward with the mission, before your mission briefing.” He leaned forward and rested his arms on his desk. “By disclosing the existence of the Portal and sending you out here with orders to go through it, Admiral Hansen willfully disobeyed a presidential directive.”
“You seem awfully pleased about that, Commander,” Benny charged.
Akagi turned his eyes to Benny. “Not at all, Captain,” he rebutted. “It’s never a pleasing thing to hear that a fellow officer is in trouble with the law.”
“Bullshit,” Dylan mumbled.
Akagi glared at Dylan. “Excuse me, Lieutenant?”
“I said bullshit, Commander,” Dylan boldly repeated, glaring right back at him. “Captain Sedelnikov is right. You look like you couldn’t be more pleased.”
As if by some black magic incantation, the enmity and spite that Dylan and Benny had quickly grown accustomed to in Akagi at once reemerged in his demeanor. “Look here, you cocky little junior grade son-of-a...”
“At ease, Commander!” Benny barked. “The lieutenant’s right and you know it. You said it yourself yesterday when we arrived. Admiral Hansen has been...how did you put it?...‘grilling’ you every few days over the comm-channels.”
Though he looked about ready to scream at the top of his lungs—Benny had no doubt hit pretty close to the mark—Akagi held his tongue...for a few seconds at least. But then he stood up and leaned slightly forward on his hands. “You know what, Captain?” he asked, sarcastically overemphasizing Benny’s rank. “I have nothing but admiration and respect for you and I’ve gone out of my way to show you that respect because you deserve nothing less. But I’m getting a little tired of your treating me like some kind of inexperienced junior officer. You may hold a higher rank than I do, but yours is a retired rank. Technically, I’m not required to obey your orders or abide by your decisions, and I’m certainly not required to let you push me around.”
Benny stared at him for a moment in silence, then stood up and leaned close, mirroring his posture and nearly touching his nose with his own. “My rank is semi-retired, Commander, so would you like to bet your career on it?” he quietly asked as he continued to stare him in the eye without even blinking.
The contest of wills lasted only a moment longer before Akagi backed off. “The two of you have been ordered back to Earth for debriefing,” he said as he straightened.
“Says who?” Dylan asked. “You or Central Command?”
“Central Command,” Akagi answered flatly as he sat down again. Benny followed suit. “But I sure as hell won’t cry over your departure.”
“Comm-room to Commander Akagi,” the panel on his desk suddenly called out.
Akagi reached out and tapped the ‘channel open’ button. “Go ahead.”
“We’re receiving another message from Earth, sir.”
“Pipe it in here, Mister Petrakos,” Akagi said, sitting straight with an air of superiority about him as he turned his monitor so his visitors could see it as well. Whatever the message might be, he was obviously expecting it.
“Yes, sir.”
The seconds passed in silence as they waited. Then a face appeared on the screen. An ashen, sweat-soaked, soot-smudged face wide-eyed with urgency. It clearly was not the face that Akagi had been expecting to see, and Dylan and Benny were every bit as surprised as he was.
“This is Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen at Mandela Station to Commander Akagi!” he shouted. “Be advised, we are under attack! This station is taking heavy damage! The Lunar and Martian colonies are...”
A sudden explosion of thick, billowing smoke and flaming debris blew Hansen out of the picture as the roar of the thunderous blast echoed through Akagi’s office.
“Oh shit!” Dylan shouted as he leapt to his feet.
Hansen returned to the screen a few seconds later, bleeding heavily from a pair of cuts on his cheek and forehead. “The colonies are being bombarded from orbit and there’s a Veshtonn invasion fleet on its way to Earth! We don’t stand a chance here, Commander! You’ve got to send Lieutenant Graves on his mission! It’s our only chance of survival! You’ve got to...”
The screen flashed white, then went blank.
“Get him back, Crewman!” Dylan shouted as he charged the comm-panel.
“It was a recorded message, sir,” Petrakos advised him. “The signal is gone and the channel isn’t open anymore.”
“Keep trying to raise Mandela Station, Mister Petrakos,” Akagi instructed. “Akagi out.” He closed the channel.
“Well, that certainly changes things,” Benny said as Dylan sat back down.
“No it doesn’t,” Akagi contradicted, shaking his head. “Doesn’t change a damn thing.”
“What do you mean ‘no it doesn’t?’” Benny asked, bewildered. “You heard the admiral! There’s a full-scale invasion of Earth underway!”
“The admiral!” Akagi exclaimed. “Captain Sedelnikov, the admiral has been arrested for disobeying presidential orders and has obviously escaped from custody! He might even have killed someone to affect that escape! I’m not doing anything based on the frantic and probably fraudulent orders of a fleeing felon.”
“Was that explosion fraudulent, Commander?” Dylan asked as he stood up again. “Was the blood on Admiral Hansen’s face fraudulent?”
“Possibly.”
“Oh, come on! You can’t possibly believe that...”
“Comm-room to Commander Akagi,” the panel called out again.
Akagi blew his breath out noisily and thumped the ‘channel open’ button with his knuckle. “What is it now, Mister Petrakos?” he impatiently asked.
“Another incoming message from Earth, sir. It’s the...”
“If it’s another recording from Admiral Hansen, I don’t want to...”
“No, sir! It’s not recorded, and it’s not from Admiral Hansen. It’s a live message from the president.”
“The president?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Well what the hell are you keeping her waiting for, Mister Petrakos? Pipe her through!”
“Yes, sir!”
This time there was no momentary silence. The president’s face appeared on the screen immediately. She looked exhausted and very, very stressed. “Commander Akagi,” she began. “A Veshtonn invasion fleet has broken through the solar system’s outer defense perimeter. Europa and Ganymede are gone and the Martian and Lunar colonies have been virtually annihilated. Mandela Station is breaking up in orbit as I speak and there’s a very real danger that Earth might soon be overrun. As of this moment and under my direct authority, you are hereby ordered to disregard my previous message and permit Lieutenant Graves to proceed through the Portal in pursuit of his mission. Do you understand?”
Akagi opened his mouth to respond but couldn’t seem to find his voice. “I...uh...”
“I said, do you understand, Mister Akagi?” she asked again.
“Yes, ma’am,” he finally answered. “I understand.”
“Good. Do it now, Commander, and may God help us all. Mirriazu Shakhar, President, United Earth Federation.”
The screen blinked off.
“As I said,” Benny reminded the commander, “that certainly changes things.”
“Can’t argue with him this time, can you?” Dylan added.
- - - - - - - - - -
All glory to the Holy Vul-Khashka-Veshto, the sixty-sixth Pod Priest praised with a sneer.
The report from the thirteenth Pod Priest had been scripture filled with glory. Much of the Tseirran demons’ spawning world now burned with the flames of sanctification and soon their Gateway into the realm of the blessed interlight would fall to that same fate, as proclaimed and commanded by the High Priesthood itself.
The Blessed once more found themselves on the verge of cleansing the interlight of yet another evil—another wicked pestilence that had poisoned and polluted the realm for countless eons, even before it had begun to spread itself outward into the interlight. And now the High Priesthood’s final blessing had finally come. The Zielepchtah Crusade was to begin at once by holy commandment. The Tseirran demons were to be eradicated.
All glory to the Holy Vul-Khashka-Veshto.
Dylan, Benny, and Commander Akagi lagged a few meters behind the Security Forces squad’s alpha fire team as they once again walked through the tunnels toward the Portal—the tunnels that somehow felt darker and colder than they had before. The squad’s bravo team maintained a minimum distance of ten meters behind them, bringing up the rear. With Earth’s solar system under attack, all Solfleet forces everywhere had gone on high alert, and now that Dylan’s mission had officially been sanctioned by the president—had been classified as vital to Earth and Coalition security, in fact—Akagi wasn’t taking any chances with his safety. It was an unexpected reversal on his part, but to his credit, one that demonstrated his professionalism...at least as far as Dylan was concerned. Benny, on the other hand, didn’t seem to agree with that assessment. “Probably worried about how he’ll look to the president if you get killed or wounded and can’t carry out your mission,” he’d whispered to Dylan as soon as Akagi called his Security Forces commander and requested the squad.
The alpha team leader waved them forward, and as they turned into the last tunnel Dylan reflected back on the president’s despondent message. A Veshtonn invasion fleet had broken through. Europa and Ganymede were gone, she’d told them. The Martian and Lunar colonies had been ‘virtually’ annihilated, whatever that meant. Even Mandela Station had been destroyed, and the Earth was in danger of being overrun. Tens of millions of human lives had already been lost.
This was it. This was the end that Hansen and Royer had warned him was coming—the end of human society and culture. The end of mankind.
“Comm-room to Commander Akagi,” Crewman Petrakos’ voice called over the comm-link as they approached the stairs.
Akagi tapped the link on his collar. “Go ahead.”
“Sir, we’ve lost contact with the orbital patrols again.”
Akagi cursed under his breath, then asked, “Did they say anything about heading over the horizon?”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“All right. Keep trying to raise them and update me again in a few minutes. Akagi out.”
“Is there a problem, Commander?” Benny asked as they waited at the bottom of the stairs for the alpha team leader to signal the all clear.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Akagi answered. “We sometimes lose contact with the patrols when they head around to the other side of the planet. We have the best research equipment known to science at this outpost, but our comm equipment isn’t exactly state of the art, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
The team leader gave the signal, and as they started up the stairs Dylan asked, “You mean all the patrols headed to the other side of the planet at the same time?”
“Of course not,” Akagi answered. “That would leave our outpost wide open.”
“That’s my point.”
“Give my S-F commander a little credit, Lieutenant,” Akagi insisted.
They emerged from the tunnel, and with a wave of his hand Akagi pointed out that the alpha team members had fanned out and set up a hasty security perimeter among the scattered boulders. “See there?” he said. “He and his people know what they’re doing.”
“Then why can’t you make contact with them?” Benny persisted.
“Not all of the patrols have a direct link to the comm-center.”
“Why not?”
“I would guess it’s to prevent them from tying up the main comm-channels with a bunch of needless chatter, Captain,” Akagi answered somewhat impatiently. “We do need to keep those channels as clear as possible, you know. But that is only an assumption on my part. I let my S-F commander handle those things. That’s part of his job.”
“I hope you’re right,” Benny commented.
As they walked in silence the rest of the way, each man lost in his own thoughts, Dylan watched the Security Forces teams operate. The individual soldiers leapfrogged from one source of cover to the next while moving as a group at the pace he and his fellow officers had set, maintaining a secure perimeter around them at all times. Seeing them in action brought back memories of the people he’d served with and of the worlds he’d visited, and he realized, though certainly not for the first time, that he still missed it. He missed being a Military Policeman. He especially missed his Security Forces duties. He missed it more than ever before. He missed that even more than he missed being a Ranger. Why he suddenly missed it so much he couldn’t say. Perhaps because of what he was about to do. Yeah, that was probably it.
Life had been so much simpler back then. Sure, he’d seen his share of danger. He’d seen friends and comrades killed or wounded in action, some of them under his leadership. But he’d never had the fate of the entire human race resting on his shoulders before.
They rounded the last huge boulder, the canine-like head, and made the final right turn.
“Drop the field,” Akagi ordered the guard. The same corporal was still on duty. “Seems the lieutenant here will be going through after all.”
“Are you sure this time?” the guard asked sarcastically as he threw Dylan a dirty look.
“Just drop the goddamn field, Corporal!” Akagi shouted as he and Dylan approached it.
The guard complied without another word.
As the Security Forces fanned farther out and moved to secure the perimeter around the Portal, a sudden explosion rocked the site, hurling dirt and bits of stone and rubble into the air and knocking everyone to the ground.
Someone—Dylan felt sure it was one of the SF troops—screamed at the top of his lungs, “My leg! Oh God! They blew my fucking leg off!”
Dylan rose to his hands and knees and spotted the panic-stricken soldier lying on is back, screaming, writhing in pain and clutching his severed leg’s bloody stub in his hands. He started to stand, intending to rush to the man’s aid, but then saw that two of his comrades were already running toward him, so he dropped back to the ground, crawled to some cover, and stayed put, just as he knew they’d want him to. Just as he’d want his charges to, were he one of them.
“Lizards!” another of the soldiers shouted in warning as he fired his weapon to the north and east. His head exploded a second later, splattering the area around him with blood and brain tissue, but his finger held the trigger depressed and continued firing even as his body tumbled down over the rubble he’d been using as cover and fell to the dirt.
The rest of them opened fire in the direction he’d been shooting.
The Portal guard scrambled to his feet and dashed back to his console, but an almost blinding beam of green-white death stabbed through his chest and out through his back like a spear of lightning before he could raise the energy field. His torso disintegrated in an explosion of boiling blood and guts and bone fragments, leaving only his head and extremities to fall half-burned and lifeless to the ground.
Sirens blared to life all around them. Dylan broke cover and joined Benny and Akagi as they scrambled toward more effective protection—Akagi’s precious ruins were all there was—while the SF troops fought on.
“Those are the air raid alarms!” Akagi shouted over the din of battle as they jumped over a fallen column—Benny moved pretty good for a man his age, Dylan noted—and shrank into its shadow as best they could. “This must be a full scale invasion!”
The security post next to the Portal exploded, and potentially deadly bits of smoldering plastisteel shrapnel and transluminum rained down on them.
“I don’t think your patrols just cruised around the planet!” Benny shouted.
“Neither do I!” Akagi agreed, his eyes wide with fear. “We’ve got to make it back into the tunnels!”
“That’s a negative, Commander!” Benny contradicted. “The tunnels won’t be safe under aerial bombardment! Too much danger of a cave-in. Besides, we’ve got to send Dylan through the Portal before they destroy it!”
“How the hell are we going to send him through now?”
A distant but obviously massive explosion shook the ground beneath them.
A panicked call followed seconds later. “X-ray One to Commander Akagi! X-ray One to Commander Akagi! Come in, Commander!”
Akagi slapped his comm-link. “Go ahead!”
“Commander, we’re under attack! We’re being bombed from orbit! At least...”
Another explosion shook the ground and roared over the comm-link.
“Petrakos!” Akagi shouted.
“We’re still here, Commander, but I don’t know for how long! Half the barracks just went up and there’s a plasma leak in the...”
The largest explosion yet hit—a deafening blast that seemed to rock the entire planet. Ancient stone columns that had stood the passing of thousands of millennia crumbled and fell. Boulders tumbled from the tops of ancient rubble piles. Akagi’s comm-link went dead and the air raid sirens fell silent.
“Mister Petrakos!” Akagi shouted. “Crewman Petrakos, come in!” He slapped his link. “Petrakos, come in!” He slapped it again. “Petrakos!”
The ground rumbled yet again, but it felt different somehow—not like the explosions of incoming ordnance. Then it rumbled again. And again.
“Oh shit,” Benny said quietly.
“What?” Akagi asked urgently, glaring at him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“They’ve induced an Earthquake. We’ve got to send Dylan back now, Commander!” Benny advised him.
“What?”
“We’ve got to send Dylan through the Portal!” he shouted. “Right now!”
“But there’s a war going on out there, Captain! We’ll get killed!”
“That doesn’t matter anymore!” Benny shouted, suddenly angry. “Don’t you see what’s happening here?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is all part of a full-scale interstellar invasion! Jupiter’s moons, the colonies, Earth, here! The goddamn Veshtonn are hitting us everywhere at once! We’ve got to send Dylan back before it’s too late! Before they blow this whole damn planet to bits!”
“Before they... But they have troops down here! They wouldn’t blast the whole planet with their own troops on the surface!”
Benny looked him in the eye and said, “Don’t bet on it.”
Suddenly a cry like the voices of hundreds of crazed, screaming killers filled the air as the quick reaction force of SpecOps marines armed with heavy weapons poured out of the tunnel and charged the perimeter to join the fight. An entire platoon armed with heavy pulse rifles, crew-served machineguns, grenade launchers... The clamor of war grew deafening, forcing the officers to hunker down even lower and cover their ears. Akagi, Benny, and before long even Dylan found themselves screaming just to compensate.
And then, less than a minute that seemed like an eternity after the QRF had arrived, the battle ended and peace returned. Only the cries of the wounded calling for medics remained.
Dylan broke cover first and stood up, potentially exposing himself to certain death, but nothing happened. “Looks like it’s all over,” he said as he watched some of the marines fill the gaps in the perimeter while others tended to their wounded comrades.
Benny and Akagi stood with him just as the QRF’s platoon leader jogged up to make his report. “They bugged out, Commander,” he said. “We probably took out close to a hundred of them before they could escaper, though.”
“It was a ruse, Commander,” Benny interjected.
“What are you talking about?” Akagi asked him as the platoon leader looked on.
“The Veshtonn never turn tail and run from a fight they intend to win,” Benny explained. “They were nothing more than a distraction.”
“Why would they want to...”
“So we’d stand and fight instead of evacuating?” the platoon leader asked.
Dylan didn’t need to hear any more. He knew exactly what they needed to do. “I’ll meet you by the Portal,” he said, heading in that direction even before he finished speaking.
“Right now, Commander,” Benny said to Akagi. He grabbed the commander by the arm before he had a chance to follow on his own and pulled him along beside him.
And then the enemy resumed their aerial bombardment. Benny and Akagi charged ahead as one pile of ancient ruins after another exploded all around them. Clumps of dirt and shards of shrapnel and rubble pelted them as they ran. With no more enemy ground troops left to fight, the surviving marines and Security Forces troops pulled back and scrambled for whatever cover they could find.
Benny cried out when a large chunk of stone struck the side of his head and knocked him to the ground. Dylan heard his cry and started back to help him, but Benny shouted, “No, Dylan! Go! Before it’s too late!”
Dylan hesitated for one more brief moment—blood was pouring down the side of his new friend’s cheek—but he knew that even minor head wounds tended to bleed a lot. Benny would be all right. His mission remained his highest priority. His only priority.
He ran back up the ramp with a newly determined Akagi hot on his heels. He stepped out into the center of the Portal and Akagi went right to work. The mechanism’s bright flash and loud rumble came and went but were for the most part lost amidst the explosions that surrounded them and continued threatening them, and the steady hum that followed never had the slightest chance of being heard.
Akagi’s fingers sped over the controls like those of a concert pianist’s. He touched his hand to the destination symbol and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Pel’Ka! Tre’Qoom boshe’ta vasim! Tusa! Kapek e Tor’Rosha vej Rosha, Pen’to rhim con win, vet wona’sa torsh’kava vo dusin, vet zimta kajj wen subeg ga vol revi!”
Dylan stared at his handcomp as the ancient ruins continued disintegrating around him.
Double digits.
“Come on,” he quietly coaxed the timer.
A massive explosion rocked the entire area. Akagi fell against the console but somehow managed to hold his hands in place. Dylan glanced over at him as dirt and pebbles rained down on him and saw a rivulet of blood flowing down the right side of his face.
Eighties, seventies, sixties...
More explosions.
Fifties, forties, thirties...
A blinding flash far beyond the horizon, and then a glow that dimmed ever so slowly. No mistaking what that was. The Veshtonn were using nuclear weapons!
Or something even worse.
Twenties...
The shock wave would be on them in seconds.
Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen...
Dylan started doubting that he was going to make it.
Ten, nine...
No chance. He was going to die right there. They were all going to die.
Seven, six...
He was going to burn to a cinder and vaporize in an instant.
Four...
He could hear the thunderous wave of death approaching.
“Here it comes,” Akagi said with calm resignation.
Dylan looked over at him, standing there and staring at the approaching harbinger of his doom, having already surrendered to the inevitable.
Three...
Dylan turned and looked that way as well and just watched the swirling, billowing black wall of oncoming death.
Two...
At least it would be a quick death.
One...
“Here I come, Lord.”
Zero.
Several Months Later
Wearing his medal-heavy dress grays for what he knew was most likely the last time, Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen—soon to be the former Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen, he strongly suspected—sat straight and tall in the filled-to-capacity military courtroom’s defendant’s chair, lost in his own quiet thoughts as he waited for the panel of judges to return to the bench and pass sentence against him. His court-martial proceedings had dragged on for more than four months thanks to all the motions, countermotions, and other legal maneuvers the attorney’s for both sides had entered and pulled along the way. He found it all pretty remarkable when he thought about it, considering that he’d pled guilty to every single charge that had been brought against him and had pretty much thrown himself on the mercy of the court.
But now, finally, it was all coming to an end. His trial and everything that had led up to it had dominated nearly every aspect of his life almost since the moment he was rescued and he’d quickly grown tired of the whole thing. But at least he still had his life. That in itself was nothing short of a miracle given the enormous size and scope of the Veshtonn invasion—that Heather had survived as well was truly a miracle indeed—and despite the fact that he was probably going to spend the rest of it in prison, he supposed he should be grateful to be alive.
No one, not even those few individuals who’d already known that the end of the human race was all but inevitable, had seen the attack coming. Not that soon. Not the commanders in the field, not Earth Federation President Shakhar, not Chairman Brian MacLeod or the members of his Earth Security Council. Not even he himself. Especially not once the tide of battle in the Rosha’Kana system had turned and the Veshtonn had been forced to retreat, thanks in no small part to the creative tactical maneuvering carried out by the starcruiser Rapier under the command of now Fleet Captain Erickson. Who could have guessed, given the losses the enemy had begun to suffer in that embattled system by that time, that their gradual retreat had actually been a desperate redeployment of forces in preparation for a massive assault against the Earth and her solar system?
The answer, unfortunately, had been ‘no one.’ Coalition commanders in-theater had been convinced that the enemy was simply regrouping for a counterattack and had redeployed their own remaining forces to defend against it. Solfleet Central Command had even deployed additional ships to reinforce the line, leaving the solar system inadequately defended. As a result of that gross miscalculation, Earth’s colonies beyond the asteroid belt had been annihilated and the inhabited moons of Jupiter and Saturn had been pulverized before anyone had even seen the enemy coming. The colonies on Mars and Luna had likewise been bombed to rubble, though a few hundred colonists had somehow managed to survive long enough to be rescued. Mandela Station had been reduced to scrap, but again several hundred personnel had survived and had later been rescued from those compartments that hadn’t either fallen to the Earth, burned up in the atmosphere, or tumbled off into space never to be found. The enemy had even landed on Earth herself and had proceeded to destroy one city after another while every man, woman, and child who could do so fought desperately to preserve of the human race.
All totaled almost nine-hundred million people had lost their lives. And yet, perhaps by some miraculous act of God, of the billions who’d survived the initial bombardment, several millions had managed to fight back and had eventually banded together with the remnants of Solfleet and each nation’s own military forces in Earth’s defense, and had saved their mother world one more time.
Yes, mankind had survived...again...and his survival had come to be referred to in the news media as ‘the first silver lining to the dark cloud of events’ that had occurred. The second, of course, being the continued survival of the Tor’Kana race. By withdrawing from Rosha’Kana, the enemy had handed that system back to the Coalition, and those Tor’Kana who still survived had quickly returned to their world. Only time would tell if there were enough of them left alive to successfully repopulate that world, but at least they had a fighting chance. Had they died out completely the Coalition they had founded would likely have died with them, and not one of the member worlds would have stood a chance against the Veshtonn alone.
None of that made any difference to Liz, of course. She was still just as dead. ‘Armed and dangerous,’ the news services had described her as after the fact. A military tribunal had declared the shooting—had declared her death—justified. She’d been buried in her hometown outside Kansas City. Karen had stayed there after the funeral to spend time with their families.
Despite the fact that she could be a real pain in the ass sometimes, Hansen was going to miss Liz. She’d been one of the most motivated and dedicated officers he’d ever worked with. She certainly hadn’t deserved what had happened to her.
For a while after everything calmed down Hansen had held on to one small hope. The hope that Lieutenant Graves might do something, anything, to change it all. But then the official word had come down through channels that Station X-Ray One had been vaporized in another Veshtonn attack with all hands lost. The ancient Tor’Roshan Portal that he’d ordered Graves to travel back in time through had been destroyed, and no sign or signal that he’d made it into the past had ever been identified.
Lieutenant J.G. Dylan Edward Graves had answered the call of duty—a call unlike any other that had ever gone out before—and had paid for it with his life. Unable to acknowledge that the Portal had ever existed, Solfleet Central Command had listed him officially as Missing-In-Action, but all of the classified evidence that Hansen had seen, thanks mostly to one of his loyal former subordinates, indicated that Graves had been there on the surface of Window World when the Veshtonn glassed it, so he knew the truth.
He only wished that he could tell Miss DeGaetano that truth, to relieve her of the burden of false hope that she was bound to carry with her for the foreseeable future. The desperate hope that somehow, somewhere, her fiancé might still be alive and might soon return to her.
Yes, Window World was gone. The Timeshift Resolution would never again be a viable option. If humankind was going to help win the war, then he was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. He was going to have to outthink, outmaneuver, and outfight the enemy. Of course, considering how things had turned out this time, not to mention what had happened with Günter, perhaps that was for the best. Perhaps the Portal being destroyed was the best thing that could have happened.
Portal and time-shifting aside, so many other questions still remained, and Hansen knew that with his sentence about to be passed he’d likely never learn the answers to any of them. Who had kidnapped Stefani O’Donnell and why? Where were they holding her, if she was even still alive? Where was her father, assuming of course that the message that had started them all down the Timeshift path in the first place was genuine, and that its author really was the former Excalibur tactical officer and not some enemy intelligence agent trying to mislead them? Was he still being held captive somewhere deep in Veshtonn space or had they already executed him? Perhaps the new commanding officer of the S.I.A., whoever that might turn out to be, might eventually find those answers. But as for why Graves’ memory-edit had failed...the answer to that question would likely remain a mystery forever.
As would the answer to the one question that begun troubling Hansen more than any other. The question as to whether or not he had been subjected to a memory-edit at some point in time as well. He alone had survived that horrible attack on Vice-President Harkam’s ship twenty-three years ago and he’d suffered from nightmares for a long time afterwards. But with the help of professional counseling, those nightmares had eventually gone away. And then, just last year, they’d suddenly returned, and for reasons he still couldn’t begin to fathom Dylan Graves had started appearing in them as the Security Police sergeant and second survivor, even though the SP sergeant who’d really been there had been killed along with everyone else onboard.
Hansen’s memories of the attack were clear, even after more than two decades. He knew that he alone had survived. He’d always known that. Hell, Graves would only have been about six years old at the time, so he couldn’t possibly have been there. Nevertheless, he had made an appearance in his nightmares, as a grown man, and as hard as he tried, Hansen couldn’t think of another explanation for the discrepancy. Even though his symptoms weren’t exactly like those that Graves had suffered—in Graves’ case both conflicting memories were at least possible—they had to be the result of a failing memory-edit. They simply had to be.
But why? Why had he been subjected to a memory-edit? What had he ever been involved in that someone in authority higher than his own would have wanted removed from his memory? And almost as importantly, why had yet another memory-edit begun to fail in the first place? Those things were supposed to be infallible.
Yes, a lot of questions still remained unanswered. But as he’d already reminded himself a few moments ago, at least he was still alive to ponder them. He only wished that he could do so while spending whatever remained of his life in freedom with his daughter rather than behind bars. Especially now that she’d finally put forth the effort to straighten herself out. Since learning of his arrest, Heather had left her delinquent ways behind and had stood firmly and uprightly by his side. She hadn’t gotten into any trouble and in fact stood poised to finish the school year on the honor roll for the first time ever.
Hansen couldn’t have felt more proud of her, and he knew that regardless of what might happen to him in the next few minutes, at least he could feel confident that she’d be all right in her aunt’s and uncle’s care.
“All rise,” the sharply uniformed bailiff called out suddenly.
Hansen looked up from the heavily varnished wooden tabletop he’d been staring at while his mind processed the instructions they’d just been given, then joined everyone else in standing up as the panel of three black-robed military judges, two men and a woman, Solfleet admirals all, marched single file out of their chambers and returned to their places on the bench.
“The defendant will remain standing,” the bailiff instructed as soon as the admirals had taken their seats. “All others, be seated and come to order.”
“Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen,” the judge in the center seat began once everyone else had sat back down and settled in, “you stand before this court and before all the people of the Earth convicted of committing a capital crime against humanity, that being the willful violation of the Brix-Cyberclone Cessation Act of twenty-one sixty-two. Do you have anything to say before this panel passes sentence against you for that offense?”
“Yes, Your Honor, I do,” Hansen answered. “I could probably go on for the next several minutes explaining why I did what I did, but I wouldn’t be telling this court anything it hasn’t already heard several times during these proceedings. The bottom line is that I did it. I am guilty as charged, sir, and so convicted. My only regret is that I haven’t been a better father, and now I’ll likely never have an opportunity to make up for it.” He knew Heather was back there. He knew she was watching him and listening to his every word, and that she was probably crying now, too, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn and face her. “That’s all I wanted to say, Your Honor,” he concluded.
“Admiral Hansen, the crime of which you have been convicted is not only one of several serious offenses with which you were originally charged,” the judge pointed out, “it also happens to be one of the very few crimes on the books that still carry a maximum possible sentence of death.”
Somewhere behind Hansen, Heather gasped and whimpered, “No.” The fact that the rest of the charges had been dropped for reasons of planetary security—if they hadn’t been, a lot of highly classified information would have been disclosed during what had quickly become a very public trial—suddenly didn’t seem to make much of a difference anymore.
“However,” the judge continued, “having taken into account your more than thirty-five years of honorable service to the fleet, no one sitting on this bench could bring him- or herself to even consider passing such a sentence against you. But you have been convicted and you must be sentenced in accordance with the law.”
This was it. This was the first moment of the rest of his life.
“Vice-Admiral Icarus Hansen,” the judge proclaimed in his most official sounding tone of voice, “it is the decision of this panel that you be sentenced as follows. Effective immediately, you are stripped of your Solfleet commission and reduced to the pay grade of E-one. In addition, you are ordered to forfeit all pay and allowances, as well as any and all retirement benefits that you have earned, and you are to be confined to whatever Solfleet correctional facility might have survived the last invasion for a period of life, minus those thirty-five years of service.”
The judge relaxed his posture...slightly, then continued, “Now we obviously have no way of knowing when your life will end, so the term of your confinement has been calculated based on the average human life expectancy of one hundred and twenty years. Therefore, you are to be confined for a period of just less than thirty-one years, and are to be released on your eighty-fifth birthday.”
Hansen remained still and stoic as he watched the judge reach for his gavel, but Heather’s quiet sobbing somewhere behind him nearly tore his heart out.
The judge raised his gavel and proclaimed, “This court is adjourn...,” but the doors in the rear of the courtroom burst open before he could strike it. With his arm still in the air, annoyance twisted his features as he drew a deep breath, no doubt intending to admonish the intruders. But then he saw who those intruders were, and he wisely held his tongue.
“Not yet it isn’t, Your Honor,” a familiar voice begged to differ.
All eyes, including Hansen’s, turned to find President Shakhar marching forward through the center of her four-man security detail, the rear two of whom closed the doors behind them. All military personnel in the room, including the judges, stood up and assumed the position of attention. Some of the media and other civilians stood as well. Hansen took the opportunity to steal a glance at his tearful daughter and was pleased to see her aunt and uncle seated to either side of her.
“As you were, everyone,” the president commanded as she stopped near the center of the public seating area. “Please, everyone, take your seats.”
Except for the senior judge, everyone quietly sat back down. “What can we do for you, Madam President?” he asked her.
“May I approach the bench?” she asked in return.
“Certainly, ma’am.”
She went forward, alone, and spoke to the senior judge for a moment while the other two judges listened in, too quietly for anyone else to hear. Then she produced some kind of document from within the folds of her sarong, handed it to him, nodded briefly, and then promptly turned and headed back toward the rear of the courtroom.
She looked alive again, Hansen noted as she passed. Not so gaunt and troubled as she had looked on that morning in her office so many months ago. The sparkle had returned to her eyes, and while her close-cropped hair had continued slowly fading from black to gray, so too had the healthy glow returned to her chocolate-brown skin. That meant she was resting well, and that pleased him.
He sat quietly and stared straight ahead while the judges took a few moments to review the document she had given them, and he wondered what she was up to. He’d known all along that she was listening in on the proceedings, of course, but he’d thought she was doing so through a secure link to her temporary office in Norway. He’d had no idea she was actually in the building. Was it possible that she...
“Mister Hansen,” the senior judge called out.
“Yes, Your Honor?” he replied as he stood up again.
“I have here, in my hand...” He raised the document for a brief moment, then set it aside as he continued, “...a presidential decree concerning your sentencing. It is not a reversal of your conviction. Nor is it a pardon. Rather, it is a short letter of explanation reemphasizing the reasons why you did what you did, and a set of guidelines that we on the panel have been asked to abide by in passing sentence. We have discussed it amongst ourselves and have decided to do so. In light of this, your sentence is hereby amended as follows.
“Effective immediately, your Solfleet commission is retired rather than revoked. You are ordered to forfeit all active duty pay and allowances, but your retirement benefits, to include full payment of all pension installments under the standard plan, will commence immediately. In addition, your sentence of confinement is hereby commuted. You are instead sentenced to military probation for the same period of thirty-one years.” He paused a moment, then added, “Go home, Admiral. Leave all of this behind you and start a new life with your daughter.” He raised his gavel into the air once again, proclaimed, “Now this court is adjourned,” and struck it.
Hansen practically collapsed back into his chair and sighed with relief. He felt as though a million pounds had just been lifted from his shoulders. Next thing he knew, he was on his feet again, holding Heather close and lovingly stroking her long strawberry-blond hair while she squeezed him as tightly as she could. His ever faithful younger brother and his sister-in-law made their way to him and reached over his weeping daughter to hug him as well. Then they all headed for the exit together.
Hansen recognized nearly all of the military personnel he came into contact with on the way out. Most of those he knew by name congratulated him on his sudden retirement, shook his hand, and wished him luck in his new life, but a select few flashed him dirty looks. No matter. He’d grown used to that years ago. Some enemies would always remain enemies, regardless of the passage of time.
He caught up to Mirriazu in the lobby before her security detail could whisk her away, introduced her to Heather’s aunt and uncle, and thanked her for her incredible thoughtfulness. When she graciously accepted his thanks, he followed up by inviting her to visit them in their new home at any time, wherever that new home might end up being, but her response to that invitation wasn’t at all what he expected. She stared at him for a moment, then turned her back and walked off, surrounded by her ever-present security team.
He couldn’t blame her, he supposed, considering that he’d lied to her and betrayed her trust, but the moment carried with it a certain feeling of finality that he found...regretful. He gave Heather one more gentle squeeze and kissed the top of her head, then nodded to his brother and sister-in-law and led them out of the building for the very last time.
He was pleased to see that the chilly, damp, overcast morning had turned into a warm and beautiful sunny afternoon. He unfastened his collar and the top part of his jacket. So what if that wasn’t the proper way to wear the uniform? He was retired and was wearing it for the very last time, so what did he care? It didn’t mean he wasn’t proud of it, or of what it stood for.
“What do you want to do first, Nick?” his younger brother asked as they walked casually toward the parking lot.
“You know what, Jason?” he responded as he decided he liked the idea of not having to work for his pay anymore. “I think I’m in the mood for a great big pepperoni pizza.”
“Me, too!” Heather added enthusiastically. “I’m starving!”
“Sounds good to me,” Jason’s wife agreed.
“Then I guess it’s lunchtime,” Jason concluded.
“Yes it is,” Hansen confirmed.
The Earth wasn’t safe. The war between the Coalition and the Veshtonn Empire wasn’t over. It would continue to rage on and on until one side or the other finally emerged victorious. But for this one very small moment in time, everything seemed right with the world.
“Admiral Hansen,” someone called out from behind them as they crossed the street.
All four turned to find a well dressed young man hurrying toward them, though he wasn’t actually running, carrying something flat and square in his hand.
A picture frame? “Do I know you?” Hansen asked him when he reached them.
“I doubt it, sir,” the man answered. “I’m new to the, uh...to the...to the department you used to work in, sir.”
“What can I do for you?”
“My supervisor asked me to give you this,” he answered, holding the picture frame out to him. “Said to tell you it was taken a few days ago near Drexel University in Philadelphia.”
Hansen accepted the frame and gazed down at the holophoto, and an icy chill suddenly climbed the length of his spine. “Oh my God,” he uttered neutrally, being careful not to display the utter shock he was feeling at that moment.
“What is it, Dad?” Heather asked, looking up at him with concern. “What’s wrong?”
A wide city sidewalk, much like any other, except for the brief message that appeared to have been scratched into the plasticrete when it was still wet.
‘Lt D-G, 21 Mar 2168.’
Hansen drew a deep breath and exhaled very slowly.
He’d made it.
THE END