Lieutenant Junior Grade Mark Lombardo had just started his third year in the fleet, and he couldn’t have been happier if they’d made him an admiral right out of the academy. As a boy, he’d always loved to tinker with things. Every Christmas he’d begged his indulgent parents for the latest electronic toys, only to dismantle every one of them to see what made them tick as soon as he got them. The most amazing thing though was the fact that he’d had a knack for putting them back together as well, properly, and usually on his first attempt. Sometimes he even modified them to add features or just make them work better. So an assignment to one of the fleet’s newest starcruisers as a junior engineer was like a long term vacation in Heaven for him.
When word came down from the chief that he was looking for a volunteer to fly a work pod out to the alien vessel and rig its hull with a series of portable thrusters to stop its tumbling, Lombardo had been the first to volunteer. Only afterwards, as he was suiting up and preparing to depart, did Commander Doohan come to him and tell him one-on-one that he would have been assigned anyway, had he not volunteered. The commander had then gone on to explain, almost as if to apologize for that, that the job required a better than average pilot physically strong enough to work under the difficult conditions this particular job entailed—specifically, greater than normal G-forces. Regardless of the reasons, he knew Doohan wouldn’t have chosen him if he didn’t have confidence in his abilities, so being selected had been a great boost to his ego.
Now, if only they had a larger work pod onboard...or at least one with a bigger cockpit. His six foot five inch, two hundred eighty-five pound muscle-bound frame plus double extra-large EVA suit made for quite a tight squeeze. He barely had room to move his arms.
He piloted the pod to within a hundred meters of the Tor’Kana vessel’s so-called danger sphere—personally, he preferred to call it the sphere of death, though he certainly hoped it wouldn’t actually live up to that name—then brought it to a stop relative to the enormous vessel. Then, having not had an opportunity to see the one they’d found last week because he’d been elbow deep in the guts of the Rapier’s backup reactor at the time, he sat idle for a couple of minutes, just to gaze at the tumbling behemoth. After all, he’d never seen a Tor’Kana ship before, except in pictures, and if the rumors were true and there weren’t many of them left, he might never have another chance.
Interesting design, he thought. The vessel’s relatively smooth, roughly cylindrical primary hull was comprised of three major segments, like the bodies of the Tor’Kana people themselves. With an oddly semi-reflective black hull that was somehow still easily visible, even here in deep space, it looked almost like a long, slender ant, but with four needlelike jump nacelles instead of legs, spaced equidistantly around the forward segment. The aft segment was obviously dedicated to their sub-light drive engines and supporting systems, so most of the habitable parts of the ship were probably located in the center segment. Unfortunately, the main gun that he’d heard so much about had been completely blown away, as evidenced by the huge gash along the ship’s underbelly. Too bad. He’d been looking forward to seeing that.
“Wait a second,” he mumbled, confused, remembering what he’d been told during his pre-launch briefing. “Rapier, Pod One,” he called over his spacesuit’s comm-link.
“Go ahead, Pod One,” Commander Doohan’s voice came back immediately. The fact that the chief himself was on the line was just one more indication of how much he truly cared about his people. Another chief engineer might well have delegated communications to a subordinate, but not Doohan. No, Doohan would be right there with him through the whole thing, in spirit if not in body.
“I thought you told me this beast was a pearlescent-white, Commander. I’m looking at a black hull out here.”
“That’s not unexpected, Mark. I’ll explain the technology to you later.”
In other words, get to work. “Copy that, sir. Proceeding with mission.” He checked his instruments. “I’m at one hundred meters and holding. Ready to set computer to match target vessel’s pitch and yaw.”
“Affirm, Pod One,” Doohan responded. “Medical and Security teams are in position and standing by. You’re clear to proceed.”
“Copy that. Proceeding.”
He called up the rates of the vessel’s rotations, factored in the hundred meters distance, then initiated the computer controlled burn. The pod lurched to the left and downward, relative to his own orientation, and nudged forward to maintain a constant hundred meter distance around the sphere. Not unlike a vessel moving into orbit around a planet, he supposed. As he watched through the large canopy, the vessel’s bow whipped by from his two o’clock to his eight o’clock. The stern followed seconds later from his five o’clock to his eleven o’clock, but at a relatively slower rate. As seconds ran into minutes, the ship’s rotation rate seemed to grow steadily slower. Before long the stern stopped coming so close, while the bow no longer pulled so far away.
Then, finally, he found himself staring steadily at the leading edge of the bow. Except for the vessel’s counterclockwise roll, all sensation of movement had gone...as long as he ignored the thousands of stars in the background, and the occasional glimpse of the Rapier as it soared by in the distance, and the constantly shifting G-forces. Speaking of which...
He loosened his harness and found it a little difficult, though not impossible, to lean forward against those forces. But leaning forward in a work pod seat was hardly the same thing as working. How was he going to get the job done if he could barely climb out of the pod? How? He was a Lombardo—the latest in a long line of them who’d served with distinction as Solfleet engineers. That was how.
“Rapier, Pod One,” he hailed with renewed determination. Then, without bothering to wait for a response—he knew the chief was monitoring him constantly anyway—he reported, “I have matched the vessel’s pitch and yaw at a steady one hundred meters distance directly off the bow. G-forces are pretty strong, but I think I’ll be all right. Resuming approach.” How much difference would a hundred meters make? Probably not very much, considering that the vessel was over two thousand feet long. He nudged the stick forward—just a tap. Outside, the rolling Tor’Kana vessel appeared to be creeping slowly toward him on a collision course.
“Slowly, Mister Lombardo,” Doohan warned him. “I’m not wearing my catcher’s mitt.”
Lombardo grinned. “Baseball’s dead, Commander,” he reminded his superior officer. “It died a slow and painful death a long time ago.”
“Not in my home town, it didn’t, son.”
Lombardo laughed. Son. That was what he liked most about Commander Doohan. He thought of the ship’s entire Engineering staff as his own sons and daughters and treated them accordingly. Hell, he was probably old enough to have fathered every one of them.
He glanced down at his instruments. Eighty-seven meters. Eighty-six. Eighty-five. Too slow. He was anxious to get started. He nudged the stick forward again, even lighter than before. His rate of closure on the Tor’Kana vessel increased, but so minimally that he could barely perceive the difference.
“That’s fast enough, Lieutenant,” Doohan told him. “I don’t want to have to scrape you off their hull any more than I want to have to catch you.”
“Copy that, sir.”
All Lombardo could do was watch and wait while the numbers fell through the seventies, the sixties, the fifties, and so on, until they finally reached the teens. Then he quickly throttled back and adjusted until he was within twelve feet of the massive black surface.
“Rapier, Pod One. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot there for the pod’s grapplers to grapple. Are you sure the claws can bite into their hull?”
“Affirmative, Pod One,” Doohan answered. “They were constructed specifically for that purpose.”
“If you say so, sir. Deploying grapplers.”
He squeezed both triggers on his stick at the same time, as though he were firing all weapons at an enemy fighter in one last act of desperation. The twin four-clawed grapplers shot forward obediently and dug into the Tor’Kana hull, several inches deep from the looks of it, and with one last, sudden jolt that threatened to rip the claw’s arms from their housings the pod started rolling with the ship. Now, from his point of view, the only thing that appeared to be moving was the entire universe around them. He, his work pod, and the Tor’Kana vessel were motionless.
At least that was what he intended to repeat to himself, over and over and over, until he finished the job.
“I have a good grab,” he reported. Then he tapped the ‘grasp’ and ‘retrieve’ controls to bring the pod itself into contact with the ship. “Closing now. I’ll be getting to work inside two minutes. Wish me luck, Commander.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant. Hold on tight.”
The troop shuttle soared several miles above the vast, dark island jungle in virtual silence. Even from inside its dimly lit and slightly chilly passenger cabin, Dylan could barely hear the subdued whisper of the small vessel’s engines with their tactical noise dampeners fully engaged, and no one had spoken much more than a few words in the hours since departure, so the flight had been nearly as quiet as it had been long. But that was normal for a combat mission. There was something very humbling about the very real possibility of not living to see another sunrise that tended to plunge even the bravest of Marines into quiet reflection.
Not for the first time since he transferred to the Corps, Dylan had spent that time thinking back over his career—how it had begun almost before he realized what he was doing, how it had progressed over the roughly ten years since the that early baptism of fire in the middle of which he and his fellow recruits had found themselves on Tamour IV when they should have been going through Basic Training’s Final Phase dozens of light years away, how it had affected his marriage, and where it might take him in the future—and he’d found himself wondering what he was doing in a Ranger unit of all places. Any Ranger unit, let alone a unit in Special Ops. A combat line unit was the last place he’d ever expected to end up, and it certainly wasn’t what he’d originally enlisted for.
Lacking any firm sense of direction of his own at the time—he hadn’t exactly benefitted from a lot of adult guidance growing up—Dylan had followed one of his high school friends down the path he’d chosen and had enlisted in Solfleet’s Delayed Entry Program for the Military Police career field during the summer after eleventh grade. They had reported for Basic Training together the following year just two weeks after graduation, Dylan having given up a surprise scholarship to the U.S. Aerospace Force Academy in favor of sticking by his friend’s side and following the only path that guaranteed he’d make it into space. As it turned out, he’d also given up the love of his life, though he’d certainly never intended to.
Ironically, the friend he enlisted with, who’d suffered from a severe superiority complex for as long as Dylan had known him, turned out to be one of the weakest recruits in their platoon, and it quickly became apparent that he wasn’t going to make it through training. He had the physical strength but not the stamina, and he became ill with some sort of condition that Dylan could never remember. Late in the third week, at Sergeant Carlson’s recommendation, the company commander ordered him discharged and he was sent home.
Dylan on the other hand, as much to his own surprise as anyone else’s back home, did very well, due in large part to Pat’s influence—Recruit Pat Thomason, whom both Dylan and his friend had befriended from the very beginning. A distantly related indirect descendant of the infamous U.S. Army General George S. Patton, Pat had easily been the most highly motivated recruit in the whole company, and that motivation had had a way of rubbing off.
After Tamour—someday Dylan would tell that story...to someone—Dylan attended and graduated from Military Police training at the top of his class, earning a Security Forces specialty code in the process. That code would forever identify him as one of the top ten percent of his class who, in addition to their regular police duties, were qualified for assignment to away team and first contact mission security units, and he felt proud to have earned it.
He took to his duties as if he’d been born to them. But rather than congratulate him for his success, that same so-called friend he’d originally enlisted with began to ridicule both the service itself and Dylan’s involvement in it at every opportunity, attempting but failing miserably to disguise his cruel comments as good-natured humor. They crossed paths from time to time over the ensuing few years, usually while visiting mutual friends, and each meeting felt more awkward than the one before.
But perhaps worst of all, the former close friend soon got into the habit of referring to himself as a military veteran, the very thought of which angered Dylan as it would anger any member or former member of the service. The man had never served a day on active duty, had spent less than a month in Basic Training, and had failed at that. He’d claimed his failure was due to the sudden onset of his illness, but Dylan had never completely believed that. More likely the illness was just an excuse he’d come up with because he couldn’t bear the thought that Dylan might actually be tougher—might be more of a man—than he was. Regardless, his claim of veteran’s status was a slap in the face to real veterans everywhere. A slap that had ended their friendship forever.
Dylan, however...
His first assignment was to the patrol cruiser U.E.F.S. Blackhawk, a vessel assigned to carry out a variety of paramilitary and interstellar law enforcement duties within the borders of Solfleet-controlled space, but that assignment didn’t last very long. He was wounded on his very first away mission and subsequently transferred to a hospital ship for care. By the time the doctors declared him fit for duty again a replacement troop had filled his position, so Command reassigned him to law enforcement duties on Mandela Station for one year. It was during that tour of duty that he met and eventually married Carolyn Mitchell.
As luck would have it, another Security Forces position aboard the Blackhawk became available near the end of that year. Someone onboard pulled a few strings—he never did find out who—and had him reassigned to the ship. Naturally, Carolyn wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of her new husband being away for months at a time for the next four years, but to her credit she realized that military spouses had been living through long periods of separation for hundreds if not thousands of years. She also knew how much Dylan missed being out there in deep space where all the adventure was, so she reluctantly gave him her blessing. It was hard for Dylan to leave his new bride as well, but he nonetheless welcomed the chance to rejoin his old shipmates.
At the end of those four adventurous years, during which time he earned a number of commendations for his distinguished service, he was given a rear area assignment that very few Military Policemen, especially those holding the Security Forces qualifier, ever wanted or had to worry about getting stuck with. He was appointed as an Internal Affairs Investigator inside the Solfleet maximum security confinement facility on Luna. He hated the idea of working in a prison and started looking for a way out of the assignment right away, but the only slot available within his career field at that particular time was another four year deep space assignment, and having just completed one Command wasn’t likely to grant him another one right away. Besides, the previous four years away had put quite a strain on his marriage. Four more would very likely destroy it. So he was stuck. Or so he thought.
A couple of weeks into his tour in the confinement facility, one of his fellow investigators suggested he look into the Criminal Investigations Division. The C.I.D. wasn’t exactly what his training had prepared him for, but it was considered to be within the scope of his career field, and best of all it would get him out of the confinement facility for good, never to return. And since the C.I.D. was always looking for new agents to fill their ranks, he figured he had a good shot. So he applied, and a few months later he was accepted into the C.I.D. Academy.
He graduated with honors, earning the title and position of Special Agent, and received an assignment to the Europan office—one of the division’s busier offices and not a bad place for a new agent to get his feet wet. He approached his new duties with enthusiasm, but as time went on he discovered that being a C.I.D. Special Agent wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was instead an enormous amount of desk work and relatively very little of what he’d expected. So, as he approached the end of his year-long apprenticeship, he submitted a request to Headquarters-Personnel, asking to be released from the C.I.D. and transferred back to the uniformed Military Police.
Personnel approved his request almost immediately, but only in part. He was released from the C.I.D., but by that time he held the enlisted grade of E-6, a staff sergeant by rank if not by actual position. He was an experienced non-commissioned officer, and due to a shortage of NCOs and promotion-eligible lower enlisted personnel in the Marine Corps, Solfleet had stepped up efforts to recruit a small percentage of its top MP Security Forces NCOs for ‘voluntary’ transfer to the Corps. By changing career paths twice in as many years, a practice the fleet apparently didn’t appreciate very much, Dylan had as good as volunteered.
Voluntold, as it were.
With his release from the C.I.D. granted, he received orders to report immediately to Solfleet Headquarters for assignment to an accelerated Marine Corps Infantry training unit. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to go that route—hadn’t wanted to go that route at all, in fact—and his wife had been dead set against it, but the only other option he’d been given was to rejoin the ranks of the civilian work force, and he wanted that even less. So he went, and to his surprise he found that he liked it.
Upon completion of that training, he received an official letter from the Commandant of the Marine Corps Rangers, inviting him to try out for a coveted slot among the ranks of that elite combat regiment. Pleased with his latest accomplishments, he did so on a whim without even thinking to consult Carolyn first. He cruised through the tryout process and received a ‘qualified for acceptance training’ classification. Given the option of accepting an assignment to a regular infantry unit or going forward with Ranger training, he surprised even himself. He chose to join the Rangers.
Carolyn, of course, did not react well at all when she found out.
Ranger training lasted nearly a year and turned out to be the toughest, most intensive training he’d ever gone through. When it was finally over the commandant took him aside and gave him verbal instructions to report directly to Solfleet Command, where he would receive supplemental assignment orders. When he complied with those instructions, he found himself facing one of the most difficult decisions of his career.
The ongoing Coalition-Veshtonn war had cost Earth and her allies dearly. But nowhere were Earth’s losses more devastating, from a percentage point of view, than in that division of the service that didn’t even officially exist. The 7th Marine Corps Ranger Battalion—a top secret branch of the Rangers, known unofficially to some as the ‘Panthers’, that fell under the direct authority of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency’s Special Operations Command. Assignment to that non-existent battalion was and always had been strictly voluntary and difficult to obtain, and he was being asked to volunteer.
He’d wondered at the time if he should even dare consider it. Carolyn had been pretty upset over his decision to transfer to the Marines and she’d been downright furious when he joined the Rangers, so he’d had serious doubts. But then he had an idea. Since 7th Battalion was a part of the Rangers, he could just tell her that he’d been assigned to that unit at random. She didn’t have to know that assignment to Special Ops was strictly voluntary.
That had been the decision-maker. Still surfing high on his roaring wave of success, he’d proudly accepted assignment to the most elite of the elite, and for the past nine months he’d served with distinction in his current capacity as a SpecOps Ranger squad sergeant on Cirra, the fourth planet of the Caldanra star system—Caldanra being the star’s indigenous name—helping to protect the Earth colonists and the virtually human Cirran natives from the terrorism of their extremist Sulaini brothers from the fifth. And, of course, doubling as a part of what would be the first line of defense should the Veshtonn ever again invade the system.
The overhead lighting changed from its normal soft blue-white to a not too bright blood red, startling Dylan from his reverie. “Coming up on insertion point,” the pilot announced over the intercom.
“On your feet!” the lieutenant called out from the front of the cabin.
Dylan and the eight men and four women who comprised his squad stood up and faced forward, forming two columns, and conducted a final check of their weapons and equipment. Then they fastened their oxygen masks into place and gave the lieutenant a thumbs-up signal as soon as they were ready.
“Man the capsules,” the young officer ordered.
The black-clad commandos moved to the port and starboard sides of the shuttle and squeezed into their seven foot tall, matte-black, torpedo-shaped drop capsules. As the hatches closed, the lieutenant stepped up and checked each capsule’s pressure gauge to verify the integrity of the seal.
As squad sergeant, Dylan climbed into his capsule last, as soon as the lieutenant gave him the go-ahead with a single nod. Once inside he reached up and grasped the rubber handles at the periphery of his vision and the hatch immediately dropped into place and sealed him in. Then he pushed the toes of his boots against the plastisteel stops and locked his feet into the bindings. Seconds later the lieutenant appeared just beyond the narrow viewport, verifying the seal, just as he had done for the others.
“Good luck, Sergeant,” he said over the comm-link.
“Thank you, sir.”
The lieutenant looked him in the eye—not an easy thing to do, considering how narrow that little viewport really was. “We’ll be there if you need us.”
“I’m depending on it, sir.” And he knew, somehow, that he could.
“Everyone goes home.” With that, the lieutenant stepped away.
A deafening silence filled the capsule. As he waited, Dylan imagined he could hear his own heart beating. Or was he really hearing it? He could never be quite sure. He could feel it pounding hard against his chest as if it were trying to escape. That was certainly real enough.
He drew a deep breath to try to relax, but the cabin lighting changed again at that same moment, this time from red to amber, and the pounding continued unabated. The flight engineer was slowly depressurizing the cabin. “I knew I should’ve joined the Aerospace Force,” he said aloud, just as he always did right before a drop.
And just like his predecessor before him, the new lieutenant pointed out, “I don’t know what you’re bitching about, Sergeant. You’re already flying, and you’re about to solo.”
“Yes, sir. Straight down, sir,” he answered back, completing the ritual.
Moments later, amber changed to green. Then, about every three seconds or so, the floor plate vibrated beneath Dylan’s feet. Locking clamps were disengaging and the stealth-tech capsules were being jettisoned in pairs through their launch tubes. The vibrations grew stronger each time until Dylan’s stomach suddenly leapt into his mouth. Were it not for the boot bindings holding him down, he would have come off the floor and struck his head.
Just as normal procedure dictated that the squad sergeant always be the last to climb into his capsule, it also dictated that he be the last to drop. That way he could count off those launch vibrations and know whether or not all the other capsules had jettisoned without any problems. It was a philosophy Dylan disagreed with—he’d always believed a leader should lead the way, not bring up the rear—but it was what it was. The Corps hadn’t consulted him when it wrote up its doctrine and his personal disagreement with it didn’t mean squat to anyone.
This time the capsules had all launched successfully, thank God—he needed every single trooper on this mission—and as he dropped blindly through the night, he imagined what the scene might look like from the outside. The small black rectangular silhouette of the troop-shuttle soaring high against the diamond-studded deep purple-black sky, spitting out its thirteen coffin-sized capsules in pairs, plus his own at the end, sending them plunging like a baker’s dozen freefalling missiles toward the planet surface so far below.
“Thirty seconds to capsule dispersion,” the onboard computer announced. “Air pressure and temperature adjustment steady.”
He counted off the seconds in his head. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one...
“Twenty seconds to capsule dispersal. Air pressure and temperature adjustment steady.”
“Ten seconds. Stand by to disengage cap locks,” Dylan mumbled in anticipation.
“Ten seconds. Stand by to activate cap release.”
Close enough. Dylan tightened his grip on the handles. He yawned, and his ears popped.
“Five seconds. Activate cap release.”
He twisted the handles with a sharp jerk, disengaging the cap locks, and the entire power-locking mechanism assembly tore away, taking the power source that had maintained the capsule’s structural integrity field with it. The sudden absence of that energy field allowed for the thunderous release of all remaining internal pressure, which exploded through the capsule’s abruptly destabilized walls and inner ceiling, reducing them to several million bits of harmless, scanner-blinding dust, as designed. Deaf to all but the torrent of wind that suddenly engulfed him, Dylan tumbled freely through the cold, black sky.
The disorientation only lasted for a few seconds, but the exhilaration, he knew, would be with him all the way to the ground. He loved to jump, and he knew that had he not transferred to the Rangers he might never have gotten the opportunity to try it. Perhaps there were benefits to this assignment after all.
He stretched his arms and legs to the four corners of the compass, flattening himself out to create drag and minimize his acceleration. Then, when he’d counted off the correct number of seconds, he pulled his arms in and placed his hands on his buttocks, going vertical to accelerate more rapidly. He could see no sign of his troops below against the fast approaching black jungle canopy, but that was to be expected.
“Ten seconds,” his helmet’s altimeter announced through the speaker at his left ear.
He spread his limbs to slow himself down again, to minimize the impending jolt.
“Five seconds.”
He waited.
“Three, two...”
He braced himself.
“...one...”
A single beep sounded briefly in his ear, signaling his parachute’s deployment, and less than two seconds later his harness jerked him up hard as the parachute snapped open.
He looked up at the rectangular black canvas, visible in the darkness as little more than an area devoid of stars, and then captured the steering handles that swung around just above either side of his head. He peered down past his feet at the approaching treetops, which blended together to form a heavy black carpet. A veteran of more than a dozen jungle jumps, he knew all too well that once he fell below their cover he’d be plunged into utter blackness, flying blind. If he was going to crash into any branches, he wanted to hit them as softly as possible. So, just seconds before the jungle swallowed him up, he put his feet together and yanked down hard on the steering cords, slowing his decent significantly.
He plunged through the canopy as though it were only a cloud, the whisper of leaves and slender twigs brushing and scraping against him the only sound, but the world around him grew suddenly blacker than he could possibly have imagined—blacker than any jungle he had ever jumped into before. He couldn’t even see his own hands beside his head. More abundant leaves rustled and thicker twigs snapped as he dropped through them, but at least he was managing to avoid any large branches...so far anyway.
“Ground,” someone warned.
Dylan yanked down on the cords as hard as he could and gently touched down onto the soft jungle floor. He ran a few steps to keep from falling until he slowed himself down, but then his chute caught on something and yanked him backwards. He turned into the breeze, slapped his harness release, and pulled it off, then pulled his chute down out of the trees. Then he knelt down and spoke quietly into his pin mike.
“Any injuries?” he asked. No one responded, which of course was exactly what he’d been hoping for. “Okay, good. By the numbers.”
Everyone counted off by their permanently assigned numbers. Then they waited for the next several minutes, silent, unmoving, listening intently to their surroundings for any indication that they had been detected.
Once Dylan felt satisfied that all was safe, he gave the order to assemble and prepare, and in less than two minutes the squad was ready to go. He snapped his helmet’s night-vision display down into place only to find that the dense canopy was filtering out too much starlight, without which the display was useless, so he quickly retracted it again. Then he locked a magazine into his assault rifle, activated its power pack, and gave the order to move out.
At first their trek was slow and precarious, through a forest as thick and as black as road tar. They traveled in relative silence using the faint sounds of each others’ careful footfalls to maintain their proper intervals, because bunching up could be a fatal mistake. But every once in a while someone walked into a low-flying tree branch or took a bad step and a rather solid sounding thud or the cracking and rustling of the underbrush broke that silence. Occasionally, an emotional yet carefully subdued curse followed those thuds or cracks or rustles, and with each one of those Dylan made a mental note to tack another five minutes onto the next noise and light discipline training class.
As the hours passed and the larger of Cirra’s moons slowly rose into the heavens, its glow began to filter down through the thinning ceiling of foliage in ghostly rays. So, too, did the level of nervous anticipation among the squad members rise until it seemed to permeate the air. They all felt it, Dylan included, and they all knew it. But they knew also that they would overcome it, just as they had so many times before.
At least now their night-vision displays would work the way they were meant to. Without bothering to give the word—he knew his troops didn’t have to be told—Dylan flipped his NVD into place over his eye. Through its dark amber-green lens, the forest took on an eerie, haunted appearance, and a feeling of foreboding suddenly filled the depths of his very soul. That feeling grew more intense as they drew steadily closer to their objective, but he kept that to himself. He wasn’t just one of the Marines. He was the squad sergeant. He was their leader. History was replete with battles that had turned tragic when those in command let their troops learn of their own misgivings and he wasn’t about to lead his squad into that kind of situation. No. It was vital that he keep any feelings of fear or doubt to himself.
A brilliant, blinding light suddenly flooded the forest. The Marines instinctively dove and rolled for cover and froze wherever they happened to land.
Several seconds later, when he felt sure they hadn’t come under attack, Dylan quietly asked, “Everyone’s eyes all right?” Too many times in the past, sudden flashes of bright light had literally burned unwary soldiers’ optic nerves when their NVDs’ light dampeners kicked in a split second too late and they were too slow to close their eyes. And while it was true that biotronic implants had been used to restore sight to most of them, there had been an unfortunate few who’d been permanently and irreversibly blinded.
Fortunately, no one responded to Dylan’s question this time. He allowed himself a brief moment to quietly thank God for that, then got back to the task at hand.
“Ortiz, scan the area.”
“Coming right up,” she responded quietly. She pulled her virtually noiseless and lightless tactical hand-scanner from her belt pouch, activated it—only a tiny point of dim green light confirmed that it was operating—and quietly pivoted in place a full three hundred sixty degrees, searching the surrounding woods for energy emissions that might indicate the presence of any sort of motion-detection or other early warning equipment.
“Nothing’s showing up on the scanner, Sarge,” she reported. “As far as I can tell, we didn’t trip any kind of perimeter security system or anything like that.”
“All right. Everyone stand by.”
The Marines remained still and silent. After what Dylan judged to be about a minute—no doubt one of the longest minutes in mankind’s history of recording time’s passage—he heard a ground vehicle approaching from the distant rear. Given the hilly terrain and the soft forest floor, a troop carrier or other armored vehicle would likely have been tracked rather than wheeled. No telltale squeals of track joints echoed through the night and he felt no teeth-rattling vibrations that such a vehicle’s incredible weight would inevitably have sent rumbling through the ground, so the vehicle approaching their rear was likely nothing more than a passenger car or light truck.
As it grew closer, the spotlight that had nearly blinded them all tracked to the right, away from their positions, plunging them back into darkness. The vehicle passed by them not more than fifty meters to the right and continued on ahead, only to stop about a hundred meters farther up, judging from the sound.
Marissa confirmed the distance with a quick scanner reading and at Dylan’s order they moved, ever so slowly, crawling forward through the sparse brush like a pride of lions moving in on their prey until they had drawn close enough to see their objective.
There, situated in the center of a large clearing, was the reason for the camouflage screen the orbiting starcruiser had detected. Judging by the size of the large solid wall that appeared to completely surround it, the compound was much larger than Intelligence had reported. Perhaps that camouflage screen wasn’t so inefficient after all.
Marissa scanned the wall, intending to report its overall size, but felt disturbed by what she found. “Wait a minute,” she quietly mumbled over the comm-link. “That can’t be right.”
“What’s wrong?” Dylan asked.
“It’s the wall. According to my scanner, most of it isn’t even there. Upwards of eighty-five percent of it just doesn’t show up.”
Dylan could think of only one explanation for that, but it seemed so unlikely that he had a hard time believing he could possibly be right. “It can’t be bolamide,” he commented aloud. “Not here. Not that much.”
“It has to be bolamide,” Marissa countered. “Doesn’t it?”
“Are you sure your scanner is working right?”
“It’s picking up everything else normally enough.”
Dylan had to stop and think for a minute. Bolamide was an unusual element that, when properly processed, didn’t show up on any but the newest, most powerful and sophisticated of high-intensity shipboard scanners. Anything less, particularly anything as compact as a hand-scanner, and an object made of bolamide would appear exactly as Marissa had just described—as though it weren’t even there. But these days large veins of bolamide were only known to exist deep within the planets of the Boshtahr system—a star system nearly half a dozen light-years away that had been under Veshtonn control for more than twenty years. Few deposits of that rare ore had ever been found locally—not that finding them was all that easy—and according to the publicized reports, those that had been found were too small for anyone to bother trying to mine.
So how in the galaxy had a group of Sulaini terrorists gotten their hands on enough of it to build that wall?
As though she’d been reading his mind, Marissa commented, “It must have been left over from when the Veshtonn occupied this system. Where else could it have come from?”
“Yeah. Must have been,” Dylan responded, not totally convinced that was in fact the case. After all, if true, then why would they have left such a valuable resource behind?
After about a minute the vehicle pulled forward into the compound and the spotlight at the top of the wall went out. Darkness returned to the thick of the forest, but the moonlight left both the compound itself and the surrounding clearing dangerously illuminated. Closing in without being seen was not going to be easy.
“Disengage night-vision if you haven’t already,” Dylan instructed as he retracted his own device up into his helmet. “Let’s do this thing right and go home. Take up your positions and prepare for act one.”
The squad dispersed. Dylan watched and waited for his vision to readjust to the natural ambient light as Marissa selected a tree and started to climb.
She reached the top of the tree in what she figured to be record time, then took out her binocs and focused on the inside of the compound. “I can see over the wall from here,” she quietly reported. “It completely surrounds the compound. Layout is confirmed. It’s exactly as Intelligence reported, except for the spacing between the buildings. That’s about ten to fifteen percent greater. I see one guard in each of four corner towers, each with an individual weapon. Strictly small arms. Two more guards with the guy on the spotlight, manning some kind of heavy crew-served weapon I don’t recognize. There’s also one guard walking the wall, going from tower to tower. The rooftops look clear. The guard at the exterior checkpoint appears to be all alone. I’m not sure he’s even awake.”
“No one on the outer perimeter?” Dylan asked.
“No heat signatures on infra-red at all. Not even a little bunny rabbit.”
Dylan considered what such a lack of perimeter security could imply. “They’re either foolishly over-confident, which is highly unlikely, or they’re expecting us,” he said. “What do you think, Corporal?”
“I think you could’ve kept that last part to yourself, Sarge,” Ortiz commented.
“Sorry. Can you see that vehicle?”
“Affirm. It’s parked in front of a small building in the center. Standard Sulaini design would dictate that to be the commander’s office. There’s no one around it that I can see.”
“All right...”
“Wait a second. There is someone, but not by the vehicle. Looks like another guard posted by the door to one of the other buildings. That building itself is surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and does not have any windows. Looks just like a stockade to me, Sarge. I think we might have just found our objective.”
“Good work, Corporal.” He considered the ominous lack of any perimeter security again. The Caldanran Unity Front wasn’t just some ragtag mob of angry Sulaini citizens. It was a well-trained, battle-hardened, paramilitary terrorist force with a well established and well organized command structure. Its members would never have overlooked something so basic as perimeter security in an area they considered to be hostile, and he didn’t believe for a second that they considered any part of Cirra to be anything but hostile to them.
“Ortiz, switch to ultra-violet. Look for a security grid.”
“Stand by.” She thumbed the ‘mode’ switch, and a violet-blue triple-beam energy barrier instantly popped into existence near the edge of the wood line. So bright was its sudden glow at that first moment before the binocs adjusted themselves that it seemed almost as if someone had fired three lasers directly across her line of sight.
“Bingo, Sarge,” she said. “I’ve got triple U-V light beams running horizontal and parallel to each other, approximately one, three, and five feet above the ground. The grid appears to surround the compound wall about eight to ten meters out. Looks like it originates from the guard shack by the main gate.”
“Standard Sulaini military design again,” Dylan commented.
“Probably just stolen from the Sulaini military, don’t you think?” she asked, a hint of real reluctance finding its way into her voice.
“I hope so.”
She hesitated, then asked, “We’re not prepared to go up against one of their regular Army units tonight, are we?”
She sounded scared. She’d seen combat two or three times before, but never against a superior or near equally as well trained armed force. “We’ll be fine, Marissa,” Dylan assured her. “The rest of the platoon has our backs. Just be ready in case we need you early.”
She sighed loud enough to be heard over the comm-link. “You can count on it.”
“I never doubted it.”
With Marissa reassured...he hoped...there was nothing more he could do but wait for the others to report in. Fortunately they began to do so almost immediately.
“Alpha team, in position.”
“Bravo team, in position.”
“Charlie team, in position.”
“Delta team, in position.”
“Echo team, in position.”
“Acknowledged,” Dylan responded. “All teams in position. Let’s do this thing right and go home.”
“You said that already,” Running Horse commented.
Dylan grinned. Leave it to Billy to crack wise when they were all about to risk their lives. “So I did, Billy, but you heard what Ortiz said. Be careful.”
“Always. On my way.”
Running Horse, one half of Echo team, crouched low and crept forward in virtual silence through the deepest shadows as though he were possessed by the spirits of his warrior brave ancestors. As he made his way slowly toward the check point guard shack, the knowledge that Degger, Teezer, and Private Jeffrey Walters, his new teammate, held the three terrorists above the gate dead in their sights comforted him. He didn’t yet know Walters very well, of course, but Degger and Teezer? He’d never met two better marksmen, or two finer people, in his life. He was truly proud to serve with them.
He reached his goal quickly and without being spotted, and hunkered down against the base of the wooden guard shack’s forest-side wall. The door stood to his right and opened onto the dirt road that led into the compound. He reached around the left corner, searching blindly for the main power conduit that had to have run from the guard shack to the invisible security grid’s first amplifier post. He found it easily, then pulled the laser cutter from his belt and quietly got to work. Seconds later, with only a quiet pop to betray its change in status, the grid went down.
“Jee bock to nae?” the guard mumbled.
A shuffling sound came from inside the shack. Then the door opened. The guard stepped out and rounded the corner. Running Horse drove his fist into the Sulaini’s solar plexus like an iron battering ram, forcing the air from his lungs and doubling him over so far that he collapsed breathless to his hands and knees. Then, before he could utter a sound, Running Horse grabbed hold of his jaw and the back of his head and twisted violently. His neck answered with a satisfying snap and his body fell limp and lifeless to the ground.
Running Horse put on the dead man’s hat, lifted him into the shack and laid him gently on the floor, then closed the door and sat down in the chair with his back to the small window that faced the compound.
“Security grid and checkpoint guard neutralized,” he reported—the cue for the other teams to move out from their positions in the woods and approach the walls as near to their assigned towers as possible without leaving the shadows, and to begin their silent ascents.
“Acknowledged,” Dylan responded. “Ortiz, where’s the roving guard now?”
“Left side, moving away from us toward the far tower,” she answered. “He’s about a quarter of the way there, more or less.”
“All right. Bravo team, you’re up first.”
Having already pulled their razor-sharp climbing claws over their boots and onto their hands, Corporal Greenburg and Sergeant Matrewski quietly scaled the wall, slipped over its top about twenty meters to the right of the far left tower—actually, the tower was nothing more than a small makeshift shack that sat atop the corner of the wall—and lowered themselves onto the walkway. They removed their claws, then crept toward the tower slowly, being careful not to make a sound and staying low in the shadows until they reached its side. Matrewski stayed down while Greenburg unholstered his dart gun, slowly rose up on his knees, took aim, and gently squeezed the trigger. They were in the shack to catch the dead guard’s body before it could hit the floor.
If the roving guard could even see the shadowy figure leaning comfortably against the wall in the shack ahead of him, he no doubt believed it to be his comrade, probably drowsy with boredom and possibly even sound asleep. He lowered his weapon as he stepped through the door, right past Matrewski’s position. Matrewski rose up behind him, slapped a hand over his mouth and yanked his head back, and Greenburg delivered a lightning-fast knife-hand strike across his trachea before he even had time to think about struggling. The guard fell limp, and Matrewski lowered the body gently to the floor, laying it next to the other one.
“Bravo team, secure,” Matrewski reported.
Despite his somewhat questionable political views, killing Sulaini terrorists without mercy was apparently not going to be a problem for him.
“Alpha, Charlie, and Delta teams, prepare to move,” Dylan ordered.
“Confirming Bravo team’s status,” Marissa reported. “Roving guard is neutralized. Far left tower is secure.”
“Acknowledged,” Dylan responded. “Alpha, Charlie, and Delta teams, go.” And just a few moments later...
“Charlie team secure. Tower guard neutralized.”
“Alpha team secure. Guard neutralized.”
“Delta team secure. Guard was indisposed but is now neutralized. Made a hell of a mess, too, Sarge.”
“Spare me the commentary, Andolini,” Dylan warned.
“Sorry, Sarge.”
Marissa shifted slightly to observe each team’s situation for herself and confirmed their reports for Dylan. “All primary targets confirmed neutralized, Sarge.”
“Acknowledged.”
So far, so good. They’d gained the wall and the towers without being detected. He could only pray their good fortune would continue.
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, then said, “All teams, proceed with act two.”
Dylan had assigned Alpha team—Private Baumgartner and Lance Corporal Frieburger, along with Doc Leskowski, who stayed close behind the other two—to recover the hostages. They descended the near left tower’s steps and emerged inside the compound at the rear of what Ortiz had identified as the likely stockade. Baumgartner then moved to the left, Frieburger to the right. Being a medic, Doc was considered a non-combatant until such time as it might be necessary for him to defend a patient, so he hung back in the tower doorway for the moment. Frieburger would call him forward if and when they needed him.
Peering through the old-fashioned chain-link fence, they could just see the seated guard at the far corner. Baumgartner knelt down as she and her partner raised their pulse rifles and took aim. Frieburger gave Marissa the ready signal.
Marissa slipped her binocs back into their case, then raised her sniper rifle and took aim at the guard manning the spotlight atop the front of the wall. “Alpha team and I are ready,” she reported.
“Walters, ready on the right,” Running Horse’s partner reported, aiming at the crew-weapon gunner on that side of the spotlight man.
Dylan sighted in on the one to the left. “Ready, and... Fire.”
All three of them fired one silenced shot each in almost perfect unison. The crew-weapon gunners collapsed right where they stood, but the man on the spotlight flipped backward over the railing and fell to the dirt road below with a resounding thud.
Startled by the sound, the stockade guard leapt to his feet and raised his weapon, but thanks to Baumgartner and Frieburger he ended up lying face down in the dirt before he could make any noise of his own.
Marissa eyeballed the compound through her scope. “All secondary targets neutralized,” she reported.
“Act three,” Dylan ordered.
As Dylan waited for Marissa to climb down from the tree, Delta team—Lance Corporal Sweeney and PFC Andolini—dashed toward the control panel above the gate, where the crew-weapon gunners lay dead. Baumgartner and Frieburger began cutting into the fence around the stockade, while Greenburg and Matrewski moved to the armory. Charlie team—Private LeClerc and PFC Shin—ran to the soldiers’ barracks to cover the doors on either end.
“Front gate locks are deactivated,” Sweeney reported. “I’m opening it now.”
Dylan and Marissa dashed into the compound and double-timed to the commander’s hut, followed closely by Running Horse and Walters, who broke off halfway there and ran toward what Intel had identified to be the main hall.
Baumgartner and Frieburger finished cutting through the fence and hurried around the side of the building farthest from the center of the compound, where the shadows were darkest, and made their way to the door. The lock was solid but easily defeated. They slipped into the building and found themselves face-to-face with another guard who looked as surprised to see them as they were to see him. The Sulaini raised his weapon, but never got off a shot. He was dead before he hit the floor, so didn’t resist when Baumgartner stripped him of his key cards.
“Building’s clear, Doc,” Frieburger advised the medic. “Come on in.”
Leskowski broke from cover, dove through the opening in the fence, and scrambled around the side of the stockade and into the relative safety of its interior.
There were four makeshift cells, but only one was closed. In it they found a near middle-aged man, alone. He’d obviously been beaten, was dressed in tattered, dirt-caked, bloodstained rags that left him half naked, and was chained to the floor, cringing in the corner in fear.
“We’re here to get you out, Prince,” Frieburger told the frightened future monarch as Baumgartner went to work on the cell door. “How fast can you run?”
“I will run fast that you tell me to run,” the prince assured his rescuers. His English wasn’t too bad, considering, though he spoke it with a fairly heavy accented. “But where am Carrina?” he then asked. “Please! Was you find her? It is unspeakable, what things they was did poor my Carrina!”
“Our people will find her, Highness. Don’t worry. They’ll carry her out of here on their backs if they have to.”
“I thank you.”
Baumgartner easily defeated the cell lock and threw open the door. Leskowski rushed past her and knelt at the young prince’s side. “Are you seriously injured in any way, Highness?” he asked as he ran his medical scanner over him, while Baumgartner and Frieburger started working on his chains.
“I think no. You find?”
Doc shook his head. “Scanner readings look good. You should be fine.”
The prince sighed with relief. “Thank to the gods. But Carrina!”
“Alpha team confirming pickup of Objective One,” Baumgartner reported as Frieburger finished cutting the prince free of his chains. “Negative on Objective Two at this time.”
“What’s his condition?” Dylan asked urgently.
“Physically abused, possibly tortured, but I think he’ll be all right.”
“Is he okay to move?”
“Doc here, Sarge. Affirmative on that.”
“All right. Get him out of here.”
“We’re as good as gone, Sarge.”
Dylan and Marissa had gained entry into the poorly lit commander’s office and were busy grabbing all the documents they could find and sealing them into the water-proof/fire-proof envelopes they’d brought with them. A quick check with Echo team revealed that they were doing the same thing in the main hall. Bravo team was still trying to deactivate the security field around the armory. Charlie team was watching the barracks—still no sign the enemy had become aware of their presence, so far—and Delta team had moved from the wall to the motor pool, where they were busy disabling whatever vehicles they had found there. All but one, just in case they needed a ride out.
“Looks like that’s everything, Sarge,” Marissa said as she stuffed all the envelopes she’d filled into her rucksack. “I’ve emptied every drawer or cabinet I can find.”
“Same here,” Dylan answered as he pulled his pack onto his back.
“Good,” she said as she pulled hers on as well. “Then what do you say we get the hell out of...” She fell silent and turned and stared, unmoving, into the blackness just beyond the lone interior doorway.
“What is it?” Dylan quietly asked, raising his rifle. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought I heard something in there.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. Like...someone crying maybe?”
He stopped with the questions and listened with her to the darkness beyond the doorway. After a moment, he heard a faint moan.
“There it is again,” Marissa whispered.
“I heard it, too,” Dylan advised her. Marissa looked back over her shoulder at him, but she didn’t have to ask. “Let’s check it out,” he said. “Carefully. You’re behind me.”
Slowly, treading as softly as they could, they stepped into the darkness, one on each side of the hallway and staggered, Dylan on the right and in the lead by a couple of meters, brushing the fingertips of his left hand lightly along the wall ahead of him, his rifle raised and resting across his forearm. About three meters in his fingers hit something hard. He stopped to listen for a moment—Marissa kept her distance—then ran his hand lightly over the object’s surface. It felt smooth like polished transluminum, but more like some kind of hard plastic or a more basic metal. He detected no imperfections in its surface that might have been controls. It ran all the way down to the floor and rose overhead to the farthest extent of his reach, where it turned and continued horizontally. A doorframe. A very tall one. Had the front door been that tall? No. Not that he’d noticed anyway. He drew his hand away and paused to listen for another moment.
There it was again...the moan...weak...little more than a whimper...barely audible, but definitely a woman’s voice. And it was coming from the other side of the door he’d just found. Could it be the prince’s consort?
He pressed his hand against the door and gradually increased the pressure, but it didn’t give. He felt around for a latch or a panel in the wall but didn’t find anything. Perhaps there was something on the other side. He crossed in front of the door and positioned himself on the other side, then felt around again as Marissa crossed the hall and moved forward to the spot he’d just vacated. This time he found a single round button in the wall, right next to his ear.
He glanced at Marissa. She nodded. He pressed the button and the door made the devil’s own noise as it slid sluggishly aside, disappearing into the wall. He waited for a moment, then peeked cautiously into the room. It wasn’t as dark in there as it was in the hallway, thanks to the moonlight that shone in through the single small window in the opposite wall, but he still had a difficult time discerning detail in certain areas, particularly in the back. But as far as he could tell, no one waited for them inside.
Using hand signals, Dylan asked Marissa if she could see his signals well enough to make out his message. She nodded, so he signed his plan to her. She nodded again when he finished.
They entered swiftly, one behind the other, and immediately separated and switched on their rifle-mounted beam-lights, moving constantly as they scanned the entire room. Something moved under Dylan’s light as it passed low across the back wall. He panned back quickly, his finger tightening ever so slightly on the trigger. “Oh my God,” was all he could manage to say when he realized what he was seeing.
Marissa pronounced her half of the room clear and hurried to his side. She added her light to his and almost choked on her sudden, sharp gasp.
A smallish, slender, dark haired young woman—not much more than a girl, really—lay stretched out on what looked like some kind of surgical bed next to a series of ominous looking machines, her eyes rolled back in her head so that only the whites were visible. She’d been stripped naked, had obviously been beaten and probably tortured as well. Her badly skinned hands were strapped to a metal bar above her head and her legs, thighs badly bruised, were spread wide and strapped to the sides of the bed frame just below her knees. A pair of narrow flexible tubes ran from a panel on the front of one of the machines, feeding some kind of fluids into her arms, and a series of what looked like small sensors were fastened to the sides of her head, beneath her breasts, and over her heart, their thin leads running back to another of the machines—apparently some kind of medical monitor. Her belly looked swollen, as though she were at least a few months pregnant, and she was bleeding fairly heavily, or had been at some point, from her vagina, which looked like it had been torn.
“Oh my God,” Marissa echoed. “Is she alive?”
“I think she moved a second ago. Must have been her we heard moaning.”
“What are we...”
“Doc, this is Graves. I need you in the camp commander’s office ASAP. Main door, then down the hall, first room on the right.”
“Copy that, Sarge. Two minutes.”
A loud demonic hiss like that of a very large and very angry reptile suddenly filled the room. The startled Marines separated quickly, but before either of them could react further, a heavy stream of thick florescent bile-yellow fluid sprayed in from the darkness of the hallway as if fired from a high-powered garden hose and spattered over Marissa’s face and chest. She dropped her rifle and clutched her face in her hands, screaming at the top of her lungs as she collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain.
“Marissa!” Dylan shouted. He raised his rifle to the doorway and fired blindly into the darkness as he rushed toward her, but a long and immensely powerful whip suddenly lashed out and knocked him back as it ripped the rifle from his hands. Then, in that same fluid motion, it struck Marissa square across her chest as she tried to climb back to her feet and knocked her back against the far wall. She dropped back to the floor, unconscious or dead Dylan could not know.
A man-sized, vaguely humanoid creature—the beast had two arms, two legs, and a head, at least—emerged from the darkness, crouching low, baring sharp teeth and stiletto-like fangs as it moved to block Dylan’s only escape route. Its evil red eyes glowed like two small suns hanging side-by-side in space. It hissed as it breathed, its torso pulsated with each heavy breath, and its smooth, dark exoskeleton glistened like wet leather in the dim moonlight.
“Holy shit,” Dylan mumbled, staring wide-eyed at the creature as he slowly backed away.
A huge, thick membrane like a cobra’s cowl fanned out from the sides of its long triangular head and neck, stretching beyond the width of its massive shoulders as the creature grew to nearly three meters in height, lifting its feet from the floor and holding its legs tightly against the long, muscular tail on which it balanced.
“What the hell are you?” Dylan asked, though he didn’t expect to get an answer. One possibility immediately came to mind, however, and he wasn’t as quick to dismiss it as he might have been under less stressful circumstances. It was the serpent—the Prince of Darkness. It was the devil itself!
It slithered slowly toward him, hissing, taunting him as though it knew what effect its hideous appearance was having on him. A sign of intelligence, Dylan noted as he backed farther away, his eyes still wide with shock. He finally gathered his wits and drew his sidearm, only to have it whipped from his grasp by the creature’s lightning quick tail before he could aim and fire, just as his rifle had been.
He grabbed everything he could find within his reach—medical instruments, tools, chairs, equipment—and threw it at the creature’s head as hard as he could, but the agile monster moved too fast and ducked out of the way every time. Then, suddenly, it spat. Dylan threw his arms across his face barely in time to protect it from the venom, but in so doing he left himself wide open to attack.
The creature whirled completely around and grabbed him up in its long tail, which it swiftly coiled around his mid-section. It lifted him up off of the floor, and then slowly began squeezing the life out of him.
The air gushed from his lungs. He opened his mouth as wide as he could, but he couldn’t even begin to draw a breath. One by one his ribs began to crack like dry twigs under a hiker’s boots. Tiny sparks of light began dancing like fireflies in the darkness before his tearing eyes. He choked and coughed up what little air he had left. He felt warm blood trickling down his cheek. This was it. This was finally the end. His incredible luck had finally run out. He was going to die in agony and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
Gunfire exploded in the tiny room and the bone-crushing pressure abruptly disappeared as the screeching creature dropped him. More gunfire erupted as he lay on the floor clutching his shattered ribs, gasping painfully for air, but it quickly ceased with a loud crash as suddenly as it had begun.
Dylan looked up just as the blurry creature reached down—its arms looked oddly frail, too long and skinny for its body size—and grabbed him by the front of his TAC-vest. It had dropped to its feet again and had clearly been weakened. Lifting him off the floor seemed to take more effort than it should have for a creature so powerful. Even one with such skinny arms.
It wasn’t the devil at all! It was flesh and blood, just like him, and it was wounded!
And that meant it could be killed!
He reached out with one arm, still cradling his ribs with the other, and pushed as hard as he could against the creature’s armored torso, but his feet kept slipping on the wet floor and he couldn’t get the traction he needed to put up more of a fight. He stared in horror as the creature’s jaw bones suddenly separated, opening into four fanged mandibles, thick saliva dripping from the sinew that stretched between them. A second row of long needle-sharp teeth protruded from its mouth as if hinged along the gum line. Its breath smelled of rotten meat and vomit. Dear God, it intended to eat him!
He grabbed its upper mandibles, one in each hand, and screamed in agony as he pushed against them, forcing them outward with all his might. He kicked repeatedly at the creature’s knees and groin, what it had of one, until it finally threw him down again. He hit the floor with a bone-jarring thud and tried to roll out of the creature’s reach, but it recovered too quickly and grabbed him again. This time, however, he was ready. He drew his combat knife from his belt sheath, and when the creature pulled him in, he lashed out and opened its gullet from one side of its head to the other.
The doomed creature dropped him into the expanding pool of its cold, thick blood. It tried to cry out as it collapsed, but the only sounds it managed to make were the flapping of its loose gullet tissue and the gurgling of its gushing blood. Finally it just lay there twitching, silently waiting to die. Dylan could only stare through tear-filled eyes at the fallen creature as he struggled to breathe against excruciating pain.
He was dying.
A small explosion outside shook the floor and rattled the window. Gunfire followed, then another small explosion and more gunfire. Much more. Dylan recognized the distinct sound of his team’s pulse rifles. The squad had been compromised. Battle had been joined.
He was dying.
“Lieutenant?” he strained to say.
“We’re on our way, Sergeant. Hold on.”
Someone moaned.
“Who’s there?” Dylan shouted, “Marissa!” and it hurt like hell! He tried valiantly to ignore the pain as he crawled to her side and struggled to turn her over. When he finally did roll her onto her back, that same stench of rancid vomit hit him so hard that he almost vomited himself, but somehow he managed to hold everything down.
Her face was badly discolored and her eyes were nearly swollen shut. The front of her TAC-vest had dissolved completely away, and what little remained of her battle-dress tunic was torn wide open. A deep cut ran high across her burned and bloodied chest, but it didn’t appear to be bleeding anymore.
“I’m still with you,” she weakly proclaimed through gritted teeth. “How bad is it?”
“I don’t think it’s too serious,” Dylan lied.
“Sure burned like hell.”
“Past tense? How does it feel now?”
“Like salt and lemon juice in an open cut. Stings a lot, but it doesn’t burn like it did at first. Let’s not even discuss the smell.”
Despite everything, Dylan grinned. “At least it missed your sense of humor.”
“Did I get the bastard?”
“You got it all right. Practically cut it in half. You saved my life.”
But he was dying anyway.
“You’re welcome,” she told hm. “So what the hell is it?”
“That’s a damn good question...for another time. All that matters right now is that the bastard’s dead and we’ve recovered our second objective. We’ve got to get her out of here.” He looked around. “Where the hell is Doc?” The sounds of battle grew louder and more intense. “Sounds like it’s getting bad out there. How are your eyes? Can you see anything?”
“I can see enough to find my way the hell out of here, that’s for sure!” she exclaimed as he helped her, as much as he could help her, to sit up. He leaned her back in the corner against the wall.
But he was...no. He wasn’t going to die. Not here. Not like this.
“Hold on a second.” Barely able to keep from crying out as he stood up, Dylan staggered once, but managed stay on his feet. He searched the room and retrieved their rifles and his pistol. Forcing himself not to give in to the crippling pain that his movements caused, he slung her rifle over his head and shoulder while he held his own in hand. Then he returned to her side.
“Okay, Marissa. Let’s free that poor girl and get the hell out of this Godforsaken place.”
Grimacing against the agony in his back and chest, he helped her to her feet—he wasn’t real sure that it shouldn’t have been the other way around, but so be it—and guided her over to the royal consort’s side.
“Aren’t you going to have Doc look her over before we move her?” she asked him as he started unfastening the leg strap closest to him.
“We can’t wait for him anymore. We need to get her out of here now.”
“But moving her might...”
“It might, but she’s on the verge of that now. Get her hands.”
He freed her leg and gently straightened it and laid it down, eliciting a weak moan that sounded like a response to pain. “I’m sorry,” he told her through gritted teeth, even though she probably didn’t understand English. Then he got to work on her other leg.
“Your arms are burned,” Marissa observed as she started on the straps around the consort’s wrists.
“The bastard spat at me.”
“Yeah, it does that. What about these needles in her arm, and all these sensors?” she asked once she’d freed the young woman’s wrists.
“Pull them out, carefully. Then see if you can find something to wrap around her arm.”
Marissa complied, then wrapped the girl’s arm with a strip of material she tore off her own damaged tunic. Hell, it was ruined anyway. “Hey, look. She’s awake,” she then observed.
Dylan looked and saw that her irises had reappeared, and that she appeared to be trying to focus on her rescuers. He laid her right leg down gently, then moved closer to her head, where he guessed she might be able to see him better, and grasped her arm and slid his other hand under her shoulder. “Help me sit her up.”
“I think standing her up would be a lot better, Sarge,” Marissa advised. “Provided her legs will hold her, that is. Sitting her up will put pressure on her genitals and I think she’s got enough problems there already.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Dylan agreed, clenching his teeth as his ribs mercilessly reminded him not to try to lift too quickly. He relaxed. “Okay, let’s do that.”
Marissa slipped her hands under the girl’s armpits and sat her part way up to get a better hold. She whimpered, but offered no resistance. Dylan raised her knees just enough to wrap his arms around them. “On three,” he said, knowing that lifting her was really going to hurt. “One, two, THREE.” They lifted.
Dylan clamped his jaw down tight but couldn’t hold the scream in, and then collapsed to his knees when he started to crouch down to set the girl’s feet on the floor. Thank God she was small and slender. He grunted his way back to his feet and handed Marissa’s rifle back to her, then pulled off his TAC-vest and shirt, replaced his vest as quickly as he could, and held his shirt out to the girl. She accepted it eagerly with a nod of thanks, pulled it on, and buttoned it to the collar.
“All right,” Dillon said through clenched teeth. “Let’s go.” They took the girl gently by the arms and led her out of the room.
“I’m cut, burned, and half blind,” Marissa commented as they hobbled up the hallway toward the main door, “You’re in pain and barely able to walk, and this poor girl is...well, whatever is wrong with her. Aren’t we a sight to behold?”
“Fire in the hole!” someone warned, just as they stepped outside.
“Ortiz is out of it,” Dylan advised the others over the comm-link. “She’ll be taking...”
A huge explosion suddenly rocked the main hall and the shockwave knocked Dylan and Marissa and the girl backward to the ground. Seconds later the entire building crumbled into a pile of rubble. The armory went up in a thunderous eruption of flames as well, but its specially designed structure directed the blast and subsequent detonations of ammunition and explosives upward, into the night sky.
As a shower of smoldering debris rained down on the compound, terrorists and Sulaini Regular Army troops alike poured out of both ends of the barracks, only to be mowed down by Matrewski, Greenburg, and LeClerc at one end and Shin at the other before they ever had a chance to join the fight.
Dylan jumped up, his pain quenched by the mad rush of adrenaline that surged through his bloodstream, but as he and Marissa helped the girl back to her feet, dozens of huge, muscular, heavily body-armored Veshtonn blood-warriors began to appear all around them, seemingly out of nowhere. The compound screamed with pulse-rifle and automatic weapons fire. Seconds later a pair of Solfleet assault shuttles soared into view and hovered just meters off the ground, their onboard and pod-mounted weapons firing in all directions while friendly troops dropped to the ground firing from both sides.
Dylan caught a glimpse of Shin as she collapsed motionless to the dirt. Then something burned his thigh. He glanced down at it, and just as he realized that he’d been shot, his right shoulder exploded in a burst of searing agony so intense that he couldn’t even scream as he stumbled backward to the ground, dragging the girl down on top of him.
“Sergeant Graves is down!” Marissa hollered as she bent down to pull the girl off of him. But she lost her balance and fell as well. She struggled to her hands and knees, only to fall face down into the dirt again. The world was spinning. She couldn’t find her balance.
The battle raged on.
Dylan’s pain faded to numbness. Good. The wound wasn’t that bad. He rolled onto his stomach, retrieved his rifle, and staggered to his feet, determined to stay in the fight. But as he plodded forward, unable even to raise his rifle, his head suddenly snapped back and his knees buckled. He collapsed, his legs bent up underneath him, his buttocks on his heels and his shoulders and the back of his head on the ground. Somehow, through sheer force of will, he managed to sit up again, and he felt his own warm blood flowing into his left eye and down over his cheek and neck. Everything slowed down and the world around him began to spin out of control.
Idiot! Standing up and walking toward the enemy like that!
Why hadn’t the enemy soldiers come charging out of the barracks a lot sooner?
Funny, the thoughts that crossed a person’s mind as they died. Wasn’t his entire life supposed to flash before him or something?
The world faded until all was darkness.
The Next Morning
Monday, 30 August 2190
Admiral Hansen woke with a gasp, drenched in a cold sweat, and panted heavily as he struggled to catch his breath, propped up on his elbows and clutching the bottom sheet in his white-knuckled fists before he even realized where he was. What the hell... Of course. The damn nightmares again. He’d thought he was getting used to them, but apparently not.
He drew several slow, deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth, to calm himself down. Then he lay back again. His sheets and pillowcase were cold and damp with his perspiration, but that was nothing new. He’d grown used to it again, weeks ago. What was new was...was what was old. For the first time since Dylan Graves had shown up in his nightmares, he’d been absent. The nightmares had reverted to their original form as if the sergeant had never appeared in them at all. But why? What could it mean? If he really had been dreaming the events of a parallel timeline these last several weeks—having no other explanation for the phenomenon, he’d come to believe that to be the case—then why had those events suddenly stopped intruding on his mind now?
Günter? Could all of this have something to do with Liz’s brother? Had he finally done something after all this time? Had he altered their reality in some unforeseen way all those weeks ago and caused his nightmares to change? If so, then what had happened to change them back? And perhaps more importantly, why? Why had they changed back? If Günter had done something to cause this, what had happened to undo whatever he did? Was history set in stone after all? Was the flow of time, in the end, unalterable?
Questions. So many questions.
Questions better left for morning, he decided. He was too sleepy at the moment to think straight. He closed his eyes, yawned, and settled in to go back to sleep.
His alarm suddenly pierced the peaceful silence. He sighed. Monday morning already. Hadn’t he just laid his head back down a few seconds ago?
Those one day weekends—working weekends, to be more accurate—were getting old in a big hurry. But with the state of affairs in the galaxy being what it was, his self-imposed six and a half day work weeks were more necessary than ever. Still, it would be nice to enjoy two days off in a row once in a while. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had two days off. He couldn’t remember the last time he and Heather had spent just a Saturday or a Sunday together, let alone an entire weekend.
No wonder she’d always had such a hard time staying out of trouble. He hadn’t spent nearly enough time with her over the years since her mother died. He hadn’t given her the guidance she’d needed growing up until it was too late, and then only in the form of long angry lectures and often harsher than necessary punishments that, admittedly, didn’t always fit the offense. But with so much responsibility resting on his shoulders, what real choice had he had? Tens of thousands of lives had depended on his agency’s operations every day. They still did. If it hadn’t been for... No. No excuses. He was her father. He owed it to her to be her parent as well. That was as much his duty as anything else.
At least school was finally starting up again. That would take some of the pressure off of him.
Yes, school. What had no doubt been a short summer vacation for Heather had been three very long and trying months for him. Shoplifting, stealing from her friends’ parents, using narcotics... A few years ago he never would have believed her capable of doing any of those things. He’d tried to raise her well. He’d tried to teach her right from wrong and instill good moral principles in her. Obviously he’d failed, because she’d done all of those things many times over. And each time had felt like a sledge hammer to his gut.
And then there was yesterday. In some ways that was the worst thing she ever could have done. Not the trespassing. That was no big deal—illegal, yes, but in the grand scheme of things, a slap-on-the-back-of-the-hand kind of offense. Not the wearing of a much more revealing bikini behind his back than the one she’d shown him, either. Deceitful, yes, and therefore irritating, but in the end he understood her need to do that. Peer-pressure could be a powerful force. No. It was the taking her top off in public that distressed him so much. Despite everything she’d done—despite every illegal act she’d ever committed, she was still his daughter. She was still his baby girl. ‘The apple of his eye,’ as Royer had once referred to her. The thought of her lying half naked on a beach full people had torn at his gut like nothing else and had left him so utterly...so utterly what? Shocked? Devastated? Hell, he couldn’t even define what he’d felt. But whatever it had been, it had left his mind and heart spinning in such a whirlwind that he hadn’t even been able to decide how to punish her.
And then, out of the blue, Mirriazu had called just to say ‘hello’ and had asked him how Heather was doing, just as she always did when they talked. Naturally, their conversation had turned to what Heather had done—among other things, the president was the mother of six very successful grown children, so Hansen had taken to asking her advice whenever he found himself at a loss for what to do—and she had been quick to remind him that sexual curiosity and sexual awakening were all a part of growing up. They weren’t something to be punished.
Hansen sighed. His baby girl was indeed growing up.
His alarm seemed suddenly to grow louder. He reached up to his headboard and tapped the chronometer’s faceplate, silencing it, and the lights immediately came up to their full intensity. He shielded his eyes for a few moments until they got used to the brightness, then rolled out of bed, yawned, and went into the bathroom.
The twin pairs of recessed ceiling lights and the strip light above the large rectangular mirror all flared up to maximum as soon as his foot hit the bathroom floor. He paused in front of the mirror and looked closely at his face. Still smooth and clear, and rash-free. Three full days now and the new brand of beard retardant was still doing its job without triggering his normal allergic reaction. It felt so good not to have to shave every morning anymore.
He went to the bathroom and washed his hands, then grabbed his toothbrush out of its charger, inserted a new toothpaste cylinder into its handle, and started brushing his teeth.
So what did it mean? Why was Graves gone from his nightmares? Could it be due to some action the universe itself had taken to undo something Günter might have done? Maybe... He snickered, spitting tiny droplets of watery toothpaste onto the mirror. How the hell was he supposed to figure out why the sergeant had disappeared from his nightmares when he didn’t even know why he’d started appearing in them in the first place? Better to leave it alone and not drive himself crazy. After all, he had enough to worry about in the real world.
He finished brushing, rinsed off his toothbrush and put it back in its charger, then rinsed out his mouth. Then he dampened a length of toilet tissue, cleaned the spattered toothpaste off the mirror, and tossed the tissue into the bowl and flushed it. Finally, he locked the door that led into Heather’s bedroom, then untied his drawstring, stripped off his pajama pants, and stepped into the shower.
Ten minutes later he stepped back out, towel-dried what little moisture the warm air dryer hadn’t already evaporated from his skin, and wrapped the towel around his waist. Then he knocked twice on Heather’s door. “Heather,” he called. “Time to get up.”
Despite the fact that she always looked forward to summer vacation and then moaned and groaned when it came to its inevitable end, Heather had always liked school, or at least the social life that came with it. In all the years he’d been waking her up for it, he’d never had to call her twice. So, without bothering to wait for an answer, he unlocked her door and walked back into his bedroom to get dressed.
He opened his closet and stood staring at his uniforms, hung so perfectly square on their large padded hangers. Another weekly planning meeting with the Joint Chiefs. Yet another opportunity to dress up—one of the fleet’s many unwritten rules stated that a flag-grade officer should always look his or her best for such occasions—and strut around like a peacock in heat in front of his peers. He shook his head. If those deskbound, paper-pushing bureaucrats at Solfleet Headquarters would spend half as much time worrying about how to fight the war as they did about protocol, maybe they’d actually be winning the damn thing by now.
He sighed. At least today’s meeting wasn’t just going to be the same old review and rehashing of the same old strategies. Today, they would turn the tide. Today, they would begin to take the war back to the Veshtonn. Today, deployments for the Rosha’Kana counterattack would finally commence.
Actually, the staff meetings weren’t as bad as all that. Not anymore, anyway. Generals Christian Alexander of the Army and Kristjana Jóhannsdótir of the Aerospace Force were usually pretty laid-back and would most likely show up in their class-B’s for comfort, though with all their accoutrements in place. The always squared-away Marine Corps Lieutenant General Hayes, on the other hand—did that guy even have a first name?—was guaranteed to show up all spit-and-polished in his best class-A’s. Maybe even in his dress grays. At the opposite end of the spectrum though, Command Fleet Admiral Chaffee, one of the most anti-protocol officers Hansen had ever met, was just as likely to show up in his class-C’s, or even his duty fatigues if he felt so inclined. After all, they were a lot more comfortable. And besides, Chaffee was the commanding officer of the entire Solfleet now. It wasn’t like he still needed to impress anyone.
A’s, B’s, and C’s, and maybe fatigues. After a few moments’ thought, Hansen finally decided to go with the happy medium. Class-B’s it was.
He pulled on his trousers, shirt, and shoes and socks, then brushed his hair, but as he grabbed his jacket out of the closet he suddenly realized that he wasn’t hearing any running water. He stepped up to the bathroom door and held his ear close to listen. He was right. No running water. No sound at all in fact. No indication whatsoever that Heather was in there.
He knocked. “Heather?” he called. She didn’t answer. He knocked again, a little harder. “Heather, are you in there?” Still nothing. Had she even gotten out of bed?
He opened the door and leaned in, and found no sign of her. He crossed to her door and knocked. “Heather, are you up?” He knocked again. “Heather?” He waited a few more seconds, then pressed the button to open her door. It failed to open—locked from the other side.
He went back through his bedroom and crossed the living room to her bedroom door, but as he reached up to press the ‘open’ button, he heard her come into their quarters through the front door. He turned toward her, his hand still raised as if searching for the button, and she froze wide-eyed in her tracks when she saw him. He immediately took note of the fact that she was dressed in her favorite leatherette mini-skirt and tight knit half-top—the same scant, provocative clothes she’d had on when she went back out last night.
“Where have you been?” he asked as he dropped his hand to his side.
“Relax, Dad,” she answered as she resumed her approach. “I just went out to breakfast with the same friends I was with all day yesterday.”
He stood his ground as she drew closer, blocking her path, knowing that she knew better than to try to go around him. “You mean the same friends who talked you into going over to the adults-only beach?” he asked sharply. And the moment he said it, he wished he hadn’t.
“Yes,” she answered defiantly, looking him right in the eye. “And for your information, they didn’t talk me into it. I decided to go there myself, and I decided to take my top off myself.”
“All right, all right,” he said, raising a hand to stop her oncoming tirade before it started. “So what you’re telling me is that you came home last night, went to sleep, and then got up and went out again early this morning?” he asked skeptically.
“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you,” she answered, still staring him straight in the eye.
Pretty bold of her, he had to admit to himself, staring him right in the eye while she lied to him like that. She was getting braver all the time, which meant the time had come to put her back in her place...again. “Then tell me this. Since when does Heather Hansen wear the same clothes two days in a row?”
She dropped her gaze and exhaled sharply, then rolled her eyes and confessed, “Okay, fine. You got me. I didn’t come home last night. You going to have me arrested now?”
“Where were you all night, Heather?” he asked, ignoring her smart-ass remark, at least for the moment.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Different places,” she answered evasively.
“Such as?”
She huffed and rolled her eyes again. “Such as, we went back to the beach for a while. The public beach,” she added quickly before he could ask. “I wore the suit you approved of. I’m wearing it under my clothes right now, if you want to see it.”
“Not necessary,” he told her, briefly shaking his head. “Where else did you go?”
“Antonio’s Pizza for dinner, then the coffee shop, then bowling, then the youth club. You know, that kind of stuff. Now can I go to my room, please?”
“You do know school starts this morning, right?”
“Yes, I know school starts this morning,” she answered sarcastically. “That’s why I want to go to my room, to get ready.” When her father only stared at her with doubt in his eyes, she added, “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll make it.”
“See that you do,” he said. He glared at her for another moment, then sidestepped out of her way.
“I will! God!” She stepped up to her door and practically rammed her finger through the ‘open’ button, then mumbled something unintelligible under her breath as she stepped inside her room. She glared back at him with disgust, then closed and locked the door behind her.
Hansen sighed and shook his head. “I knew her good behavior was too good to last,” he mumbled. Then he pulled on his jacket and headed out to work.
As usual, Vicky was waiting with the admiral’s first cup of coffee when he arrived. “Good morning, Admiral,” she said, holding it out to him as he absentmindedly passed her by. Then she asked, “No coffee this morning?”
He stopped short and turned back to accept it. “Good morning, Vicky,” he replied. He must really have been preoccupied, he realized, to have forgotten his first cup of coffee. “Thank you.” He took a careful sip, then turned and headed straight to his office.
“Meeting with the Joint Chiefs at zero nine-hundred, sir,” she reminded him, speaking to his quickly retreating back.
“Thank you,” he responded automatically as he punched in his code and pressed his palm to the scanner plate. The door opened, but as he stepped inside it suddenly dawned on him that he hadn’t consciously acknowledged what his subconscious mind had apparently taken full note of, and he turned around again. Vicky had worn her hair loose and flowing down over her shoulders. Her copper satin blouse was only fastened about as high as her sternum and revealed an inappropriate amount of cleavage, and her hip-hugging, charcoal-gray, pinstriped skirt was even shorter—substantially shorter—than the one she’d worn last Saturday.
“Was there something else, Admiral?” she asked, smiling provocatively.
He shook his head and said, “Never mind,” then stepped back to let the door close him in.
He crossed to his desk, set his mug down in front of his chair, and sat down. As usual, his message light was flashing—when was the last time he hadn’t found messages waiting for him first thing in the morning?—but at least it was flashing green this time. Good. No urgent reports. No bad news to ruin his day. Well, no exceptionally bad news anyway. He knew he’d only have been fooling himself if he thought for one second that any of the waiting messages contained any good news of any real consequence.
He called up the message list and was even more pleased to discover that there were only two reports waiting for him. As usual, the twice daily report of overall fleet actions topped the list. The other one was an update on the hunt for the fugitive Stefani O’Donnell. He tapped it, then picked up his coffee and leaned back.
“Admiral Hansen,” the unfamiliar man on the wall screen began, “I’m Special Agent Jankewich, Mandela Station C-I-D. My station chief asked me to provide you with a courtesy update on the O’Donnell case. As you know, it’s been three days now since she escaped from Military Police custody. We’ve spread as many of our agents and informants as we can spare throughout the system, concentrating most of our manpower in the rougher parts of the largest cities where most of the known criminal safe houses are located, but so far we’ve got nothing. No sightings, no communications, no trail of purchases. Nothing at all. Wherever she is, she’s being very careful.
“That’s it, Admiral. I know it isn’t very much, but it’s all we’ve got at this point. I’ll let you know whenever anything changes.”
The message closed. Hansen set his coffee down and tapped the ‘pause’ button before the summary of fleet actions report started to play, then leaned back in his chair again, rested his head on one hand, and sighed.
Stefani O’Donnell. He had a feeling her name was going to be synonymous with trouble quite a bit in the foreseeable future. Still a fugitive, on the run for three days and apparently not leaving a trail of any kind in her wake, she could easily have made it out of the solar system by now, and if he were to guess based on her reputation, he’d guess that she probably had. Hell, if she was lucky enough to find a transport right away she could have made it to any one of the three Centauri star systems already, and it would be a real bitch to find her in one of them.
And then there was Heather. What was he going to do with her? Fifteen years old by only a few weeks, sneaking onto the adults-only beach and taking off her top, then staying out all night with her friends on a school night and trying to lie right to his face about it afterwards. And then getting upset with him...upset with him...for calling her bluff on it! It wasn’t like lying to him was anything new for her, of course. She’d been doing it for years. Lying, cutting classes with her friends, shoplifting, using narcotics—that one still surprised him—dressing like a low-rate escort whenever she thought she could get away with it.
Speaking of which, what in God’s name was going on with Vicky all of the sudden? Sure she had a tendency to wear her skirts a little on the short side—she certainly had the legs for it—but generally speaking, she’d always dressed for work like the consummate professional. So why so short today? And why so much cleavage? Was she trying to seduce him? Was she trying to fan the flames of his unspoken interest in her. The way she’d smiled at him... But how could she know about that? He’d certainly never told her? Hell, he didn’t even think about it himself! That kind of relationship was the last thing he needed at this point in his life.
He chased those thoughts from his mind and sat up. He didn’t have time to ponder such things as romance and child rearing and fugitives from the law. And there, he knew, was the root of all of Heather’s problems right there. He didn’t have time. He had too much work to do. He always had too much work to do. He was going to have to figure something out and soon, before it was too late to make a difference in her life.
He reached out to his comm-panel again, but before he could tap the other message the small text monitor blinked to life and indicated that he had an incoming live transmission. So he tapped the ‘receive’ pad instead and said, “Admiral Hansen here.”
The image of another man he didn’t recognize filled the wall screen, and the first thing he noticed—how could he not?—was how incredibly thick his longer than regulation dark brown hair and his close-cropped yet still very full dark brown beard were. “Good morning, Admiral,” the man began. “Agent Bob Thornton of the Grainger Field Office on Cirra. I just finished reviewing the report on last night’s action.”
That guy was one of his agents? “How’d it go?” Hansen asked.
“Overall, the mission was successful. They got the Crown Prince and his concubine out alive, but they took heavy casualties. Report says there were Veshtonn blood-warriors there.”
Veshtonn warriors on the surface of Cirra? Things were getting worse every day. “Can you send me a casualty list?”
“Yes, sir. I have it right here.” On the wall screen, Agent Thornton leaned forward just long enough to tap the ‘send’ button on his own comm-panel, and barely a second later the words ‘File Received’ appeared on Hansen’s text monitor.
Hansen called up the list and was saddened to see that nearly two dozen young Marines had lost their lives. Several others had been wounded, a number of them critically. Squad Sergeant Dylan E. Graves’ name appeared on that list, but he was expected to survive. Hansen sighed with relief. The sergeant was alive. “Thank you, Mister Thornton,” he said. “I appreciate you getting word to me so quickly.”
“My pleasure, Admiral. Thornton out.”
The wall screen went dark.
‘Severely wounded’, Hansen reflected, ‘but expected to survive.’ That was something at least. Liz’s trip might still be worthwhile. And just as importantly if not more so, the Marines had succeeded. The Cirran government had gotten its Crown Prince back alive. Now, hopefully, the situation in the Caldanran star system would stabilize enough to allow the Coalition to go forward with Operation Mass Eviction. The Joint Chiefs would be pleased to hear it.
Speaking of which... He glanced at his watch and saw that he still had plenty of time before he had to head out to his meeting. He tapped the other recorded message and sat back to listen, coffee mug in hand, and was pleased when Roderick Johnson’s face appeared on the wall screen. He really did like that young man. His always professional demeanor was refreshing.
“Hello there, Admiral,” the lieutenant began, seemingly fighting back a smile so as to maintain his air of professionalism. A smile? With everything that was going on in his sector? He must have had some very positive news to report.
“I don’t have any footage to show you this time, at least not yet, but I wanted to report this to you as quickly as possible. The Rapier has found the last of the missing Tor’Kana vessels adrift in deep space and is engaged in rescue operations as I speak. It took a hell of a beating and several decks are proving very difficult to reach, but Captain Erickson reports his teams have found over a thousand survivors so far, including several hundred females.”
“Excellent,” Hansen whispered aloud.
“I’ve sent word upstairs to the sector commander so he can dispatch a recovery group as quickly as possible and get them to safety.
“That’s all I’ve got on it for now, sir. I’ll update you as things happen. Johnson out.”
The screen went dark.
Hansen felt an almost physical lifting of his spirit. The last ship had been found, and over a thousand more Tor’Kana had survived the holocaust. That was very positive news indeed. Not only because it improved their chances of survival as a species, but also, looking at things from a tactical point of view, because it meant the Rapier was now available for reassignment to the soon to assemble Rosha’Kana task force. And that task force needed all the ships it could get.
Mirriazu would want to know about this right away.
Hansen tapped the intercom. “Vicky.”
“Yes, Admiral?”
“Get me the president.”
Hoping to avoid the frustration and disappointment of the last time, Captain Erickson had made a conscious decision to anticipate the worst, so he couldn’t have been happier with what his people had discovered onboard the second Tor’Kana vessel they’d located. Especially after that gruesome discovery they’d made onboard the first one. Even though finding the ship in the first place had been sheer luck, and even though they’d had no control whatsoever over what they might find inside, having found over seventeen hundred uninjured survivors still made him feel like he and his crew had done an exceptional job somehow. This time.
It wasn’t that he’d felt like they failed the last time...exactly. It was just that Solfleet Central Command had had a tendency since its inception to congratulate its field commanders for a job well done when their missions resulted in great success, even when those officers had no control over those results. The practice was actually an old tradition, if ‘tradition’ was the right word for it, mindlessly perpetuated by nothing more than simple human nature. When things went well, people tended to congratulate one another.
They’d probably get three kinds of commendations for this one, he suspected as he sat staring at the now steady and under control derelict vessel on the viewscreen. And if they did he’d make sure that Lieutenant Junior Grade Lombardo got a fourth. That young man had been the first one to step up and answer the call, and had done an exceptional job under extraordinarily difficult conditions, at great risk to his own life.
“Receiving new orders, sir,” O’Connor announced, startling Erickson from his reverie.
Erickson, as well as everyone else on the bridge, he noticed, swung his chair around to face the communication officer with eager anticipation. “Are they properly encrypted using the new protocols, Ensign?” he asked first, restraining any visible sign of enthusiasm through sheer force of will. After all, no matter how relieved he might be to finally put this search and rescue mission behind him, it was still important he maintain his professionalism in front of the crew.
O’Connor routed the message through his decryption algorithms. This month the fleet had changed its communications encryption protocols at least once and sometimes twice every week in order to continue to protect its forces against unknowingly acting on false orders. Next month, Central Command had already advised all field commanders throughout the fleet, they’d change them only once during the first, third, and fifth weeks, but up to three times during the second and fourth weeks. The specific days and times had yet to be determined and would be forwarded to the field on the first of the month.
So far that procedure had proven successful. The fleet, and the entire Coalition once the rest of them adopted the practice, had been able to stay well ahead of the enemy’s attempts to crack their codes. The most recent change had just become effective at 0600 this morning.
“Yes, sir,” O’Connor advised the captain as soon as his board displayed its results. “The message is properly encrypted.”
“Very well, Ensign. Authenticate and verify.”
“Aye, sir.”
New orders, Erickson enthusiastically reflected as O’Connor carried out his instructions. He’d been waiting for a month to hear that short but most welcome phrase. Somewhat less than patiently, too, if he was being honest with himself, though he’d kept his impatience well buried. Those words sounded like a beautiful melody in his ears. Thank God their search and rescue mission was finally over! Rescuing the surviving Tor’Kana had been a very admirable, not to mention extremely important thing to do to be sure, but a pair of medium range corvettes could have done it just as well as they had. The Rapier was a warship, not an ambulance. Her job—hell, the very reason for her existence!—was to defend the Earth and her sovereign colonies, and their Coalition allies when necessary, by slamming the hammer down hard on the enemy’s head, not by picking up the pieces that enemy might leave behind. Rapier was a heavy cruiser and a heavy cruiser belonged in combat.
“Orders authenticated and verified, Captain,” O’Connor advised him. Then he grinned and added, “I think you’re going to like these ones, sir.”
“Let’s hear them, Ensign. Out loud, but you can dispense with all the usual formalities.”
“Aye, sir. Orders summarized as follows.” He cleared his throat, then announced, loud enough for everyone on the bridge to hear, “Immediately upon surrendering custody and control of the derelict Tor’Kana vessel to the recovery ships, you are to proceed with all haste directly to the Caldanran star system where you will rendezvous with the assembling Coalition task force and participate in the Rosha’Kana counterattack, dubbed ‘Operation Mass Eviction’!”
Cheers and applause and yelps of approval resounded from the newly motivated crew and filled the bridge. Erickson allowed it, welcomed it in fact—even discovering all those Tor’Kana alive and well hadn’t boosted their morale the way these new orders just had—then directed O’Connor to, “Confirm receipt and intent to comply.”
“Yes, sir!” the young officer acknowledged enthusiastically.
“Helm, what’s out E-T-A to Caldanra?”
“Approximately two days, sir,” the young woman answered.
“We are going to kick some lizard ass!” someone from the Operations deck proclaimed.
Erickson grinned at that...briefly. “Best speed just as soon as the recovery ships take possession of the Tor’Kana.”
“Aye, sir.”
Indeed they were going to kick some lizard ass, Erickson reflected. But combat was no game. It wasn’t about action and excitement. He welcomed his crew’s enthusiasm, of course, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt that they would perform their duties in a completely professional manner, just as they had during the first Rosha’Kana campaign last month. Just as they always had. But he also knew that there was a real good chance that some of them, or all of them for that matter, might not come out on the other side of it alive.
This was going to be a tough one.
The first thing Admiral Hansen saw when he strolled into his office’s reception area after the meeting with the Joint Chiefs was Vicky, squatting down in front of the coffee cart with her skirt hiked almost to her hips, leaning forward on one hand—at such an angle as to inadvertently give him a good view down the front of her blouse, of course—while she rummaged through the well stocked cabinet with the other. For one brief flash of a moment he imagined himself unfastening his trousers as he walked around behind her, pulling her skirt the rest of the way up over her hips, and...
He shook his head and looked away, purging those thoughts from his mind. “Anything happen while I was gone?” he asked as he headed straight for his office.
“Yeah, the coffeemaker behind your desk caught fire,” she answered.
Hansen stopped and turned back, speechless, as she stood up with a pack of filters in her hand and tugged her skirt back down into place. “I’ve already called Facilities Maintenance, but they’re not going to be able to get to it until tomorrow, so I was going to make a pot out here.”
“How the hell did it catch fire?”
“I don’t know, Admiral,” she answered, shrugging her shoulders. “Short circuit, I guess.”
“The fire suppression system...”
“Didn’t even activate,” she answered without having to hear the rest of the question. “I was in there when it happened, so I was able put it out right away myself.”
Hansen sighed, relieved beyond words, and said a simple, “Thank God for that.” If the fire suppression system had been triggered it wouldn’t have shut itself off until it had made a complete mess of his office. Everything in the entire room would have been covered in a thin layer of sticky, non-combustible mist residue. It would have been a fairly simple matter to have it all cleaned up afterwards, but it probably would have taken at least a couple of days, and having to find a temporary workspace, even for that short period of time, would have been damned inconvenient.
Then again, it would have given him a good excuse to work at home.
Vicky glanced at the pack of filters she was holding, then said, “I’ll bring a cup into you as soon as it’s ready.”
“Okay. Thanks, Vicky.”
“You’re welcome, sir.” And with that she turned her back and started to make the coffee.
Hansen gazed at her for another moment, then went into his office. He checked to make sure the door didn’t lock behind him, then crossed to his desk—a few small black marks on the wall above his coffeemaker were the only evidence of the fire that he saw—and sat down. He loosened his collar, drew a deep breath and exhaled long and slow, then glanced at his comm-panel. No blinking light. No reports or other messages. Incredible. For the first time in longer than he could remember he had absolutely nothing scheduled for the rest of the day.
Of course, that probably wouldn’t last very long. Inevitably, something would come his way. New reports would come in for his review, or a crisis would crop up somewhere and need his immediate attention, or at least that of someone in the agency. But for now at least, he had nothing to do.
He leaned back in his chair and lifted his feet up onto his desk to enjoy the most welcome respite, short-lived though it would likely be.
Like it or not, there was no denying it. Vicky was an extremely attractive young woman, at least in his eyes, and he was definitely attracted to her. The way her hair flowed down over her shoulders like a waterfall of gold when she wore it loose, as she had today. Those short skirts she always wore that drew his attention to her long, shapely legs rather than covering them. While it was certainly true, as he’d reminded himself just this morning, that he didn’t have time for any kind of romantic relationship, or even for a strictly physical one for that matter, it was also true that deep down inside he was a very lonely man. In all the years since his wife’s tragic death he hadn’t even gone out on a date.
What if he were to take a shot? While she was his secretary, and therefore in a sense his employee, she was also a civilian—in all actuality, an employee of the Federation government. He was her boss by virtue of position only. He was not her commanding officer. The regulation against fraternization didn’t apply and she didn’t work in an environment that required her to compete for raises or promotions. She received both of those benefits automatically at specified time intervals. So would any harm really be done if they decided to start dating? Might she be willing to quit her job, if necessary, in favor of pursuing a deeper relationship with him? If so, and if things worked out well between them—if they grew close and became intimate, what would Heather think about the possibly of her becoming her stepmother?
He snickered and shook his head. What the hell was he thinking about? Romancing and marrying Vicky? Yeah, right. She was at least twenty years younger than he was. Maybe as much as twenty-five. What on Earth had made him think she could possibly have any interest in a man like him, a secretly disgraced officer in the twilight of his mostly deskbound career, when she could easily have any much younger and more handsome and energetic man she might want?
“You need to get a grip on reality, Nick,” he told himself.
The meeting with the Joint Chiefs. That was reality. Surprisingly enough, considering the way such meetings of the minds usually went, this morning’s meeting had actually been a very productive one. Much more productive than usual. While all tactical decisions would of course be left up to the task force commander—one lesson that mankind had finally learned from his own history, somewhere along the way, was that a war could not be successfully waged from the halls of government—a good number of final strategic decisions had been reached and agreed upon. Ships had been selected and orders had been issued, all in plenty of time for lunch, which he and the Joint Chiefs had all gone out for together afterwards.
He’d almost felt like one of them. Talk about needing to get a grip on reality.
The stage had been set. The countdown had begun. It would take several days, the whole of the Solfleet Naval Forces’ admiralty had determined, for all nine carrier groups and fourteen Marine battle groups that Solfleet Central Command had committed to the campaign—a hundred and one heavy vessels in all—to gather at Caldanra. Perhaps a day or two more for those of the other Coalition worlds who were contributing forces to join them, and then another day to a day and a half after that to complete whatever rearming and resupply operations might be necessary. And then, once all of that was done, the largest single Coalition flotilla ever assembled would begin its nine day voyage to Rosha’Kana—too bad they didn’t have a few hundred jump rings for them out there—and Operation Mass Eviction would finally begin.
With all the red tape and cumbersome bureaucracy inherent in any large organization, most particularly the military, it had been quite refreshing to see that in the end, when push came to shove, the top brass could still damn that bureaucracy and get things done. Too bad the brand new Excalibur-II battlecarrier and a few of her sister ships weren’t ready for combat service yet. If anything could ever persuade the Veshtonn to give it all up and turn tail and run, the sight of a few of those behemoths would certainly be it.
Still, even without those immense new wonders of modern technology, he felt confident about their chances this time. There were never any guarantees in war, of course, and he was certainly no expert on interstellar fleet warfare—company-sized ground combat was the closest he’d ever come—but he did know one thing from the official reports he’d read. Despite the advanced warning that the Bokken’s discovery of the Veshtonn observation post had provided the last time, the Coalition as a whole had still been caught off guard by the sheer enormity of the enemy invasion. As luck or fate or whatever gods might be on high would have it, they hadn’t assembled nearly enough vessels in the region at the time to mount much of an initial defense. The loss of that star system, as he understood it, had been all but inevitable from the very beginning. But this time things would be different. This time they were ready. They would emerge victorious—they had to emerge victorious, not just for the Tor’Kana but for all the people of all their worlds—and the ‘Timeshift Resolution’ would quietly go away and fade into oblivion so that another operative wouldn’t have to.
After what he’d learned in this morning’s meeting about the size of the assault fleet, he was beginning, finally, to truly believe that.
“Excuse me, Admiral?” Vicky’s voice called from above, sounding a little tentative.
So much for the respite. “Yes, Vicky?” he answered.
“Sir, the uh... Heather’s school principal is on the line for you,” she told him reluctantly. Obviously, having worked for him for a while, she knew enough about Heather’s track record both in school and out to realize that her principal wasn’t calling with anything the admiral would actually want to hear.
Hansen sighed as the live-transmission light on his panel lit up and began to flash. There was certainly no love lost between himself and Doctor Kessler, that was for sure. That egotistical jackass had always been far too full of himself to worry about treating anyone so far beneath his station as a mere military officer with anything even remotely resembling civility. But what could Heather possibly have done to get herself into trouble on the very first day of school? It wasn’t even a full day of school!
“Thank you, Vicky,” he responded as pleasantly as he could. Then he dropped his feet to the floor, sat forward, and, setting the panel to audio only, answered the call. “This is Admiral Hansen.”
“Mister Hansen, this is Doctor Kessler,” the principal began, demoting the admiral with his tone and giving much more prominence to his own title, just as he always did. If conceit were money, he’d have been one filthy rich man. “I just wanted to let you know that we’d be holding your daughter Heather over after school for a disciplinary detention meeting with her guidance counselor.”
Hansen sat back again. “What happened?” he asked evenly.
“First, she failed to show up for her third period class, which forced several of us to abandon our duties to search for her. Then, when one of the faculty finally found her asleep in a maintenance closet and woke her up, she exploded into a tirade of profanities the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever heard.”
“All right, Doctor Kessler. You do...”
“I’ve told you before, Mister Hansen, this is an educational institution and we will not tolerate...”
“I said all right, Doctor!” Hansen barked. Enough was enough. Wherever his proverbial line in the sand might have been, Kessler had just charged across it. “And I’ve told you before, it’s Admiral Hansen, not Mister Hansen! If I have to remind you of that one more time, I’m going to do so in person! Do you take my meaning, Doctor?”
A moment or two passed in silence before Kessler finally spoke up again, but when he did, he did so in a much more subdued and far less confident tone of voice. “Are you...are you threatening me with physical harm, Admiral?”
“That wasn’t my intention, but the apparent fact that you perceived it that way seems to have had the desired effect.”
“Well, I...”
“Thank you for the call, Doctor Kessler. You take whatever disciplinary actions your policies call for. I’ll have a talk with Heather when she gets home tonight. Hansen out.”
“I think we...”
Hansen closed the channel, cutting the arrogant son-of-a-bitch off, then sat back again. Disciplinary detention counseling, on the very first day of the school year. That was a first even for Heather, although the fact that she’d snuck off and gone to sleep somewhere wasn’t really much of a surprise, now that he thought about it. She’d been out all night with her friends, after all. Not that serious an offense, he supposed, compared to some of the things she’d done in the past, and an easy fix. He’d simply reinstitute last year’s school night curfew.
And speaking of firsts, what the hell had he been thinking, threatening the principal? The fact that he’d only inferred intent to inflict bodily harm on him didn’t matter. The principal’s mere perception was enough to make it a criminal offense.
Stress. That had to be it.
Nine Days Later
Earth Standard Date: Wednesday, 8 September 2190
...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...
Dylan moaned. That damn alarm clock was still going. Didn’t it ever give up? Not that it was all that loud—he always kept it on its quietest setting—but on those increasingly more rare occasions when only a peaceful, silent bliss filled the realm of unconsciousness, it annoyed him just the same. And it had been going non-stop for several minutes now. Or had it been hours? Not that it really mattered. He didn’t have anyhere to go or anything to do. He just couldn’t find the strength to reach up and turn the damn thing off.
He drifted back to sleep.
* * *
...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...
Still going. How long had it been this time? A few seconds? Several minutes? Another day? One thing was certain. Next time he had the strength to move and the will to employ that strength, he was going to shut that damn thing off.
He drifted back to sleep.
* * *
...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...beep beep...THUMP THUMP THUMP.
That was different. With more effort than he cared to put forth he opened his weary eyes and, after an eternal moment of dizzying disorientation, remembered where he was—where he really was. The intensive care unit of the base hospital. The ICU. That incessant beeping that had been driving him insane all morning wasn’t his alarm at all. It was the bio-functions monitor on the wall above the head of his bed, letting him know that he was still alive.
THUMP THUMP THUMP.
But what was...the door. Someone was knocking on the door. Knowcking? Obviously not a doctor or nurse. Maybe Kenny had come to visit again. He’d stopped by at least once every day and sometimes twice since he’d regained consciousness, just to see how he was feeling. God bless him. A man couldn’t ask for more loyal a friend. And he’d been blessed with two.
Dylan missed those days of his latter teen years. Those days when he and Kenny and their good friend George, the third piece who’d made them all who they were as one—three had never been a crowd in their case—would go out until all hours of the night and inevitably greet the sunrise from their usual table at their favorite all-night coffee shop. Actually, there had often been a fourth with them as well, he reminded himself, feeling obligated to at least acknowledge the fact. Why he felt that way, he didn’t know. That fourth friend had been the same friend he’d joined the service with—the same friend who had later proven that loyalty was not a universal trait among them.
THUMP THUMP THUMP.
“Dylan? Are you awake?”
That wasn’t Kenny. Dylan rolled his head across the pillow to see who it was who’d so thoughtlessly roused him from his drug-induced slumber, and felt pleased to see... “Carolyn.” Finally! After what...a week in intensive care? Eight days? Nine? He couldn’t be sure how long he’d been there, but he knew it was about damn time she showed up! He tried to lift his head up off the pillow and spit his angry words at her like so much venom, but found that he was still far too weak to do that. All he could manage was a feeble, “Where the hell have you been?”
Carolyn stepped into the room, closed the door behind her, and approached his bedside. Her eyes looked red and swollen. She’d been crying. “How are you feeling?” she asked as she took hold of his left hand—the one without all the pins and braces stretching from the base of his neck to below the elbow—and sat down on the side of his bed, being careful not to jostle him too much. She didn’t make eye contact.
“It’s not that painful anymore,” he lied. Truth was he was still in constant pain, though the drugs did a lot to take the edge off. And sure, he was angry as hell at her for not coming to see him a lot sooner, but that was no reason to make her feel any worse, any guiltier, than she must have already felt. He would never do that to her. Not that it made any difference, though. Modern medical science being what it was, even a layman would realize that any injury requiring the use of devices such as those attached to him now was a very serious one indeed. “It’s mostly in my head at this point.” With all the selflessness and empathy he could muster, he added, “Seeing you eases it some.” Then he asked, “What took you so long to come by?”
“You know I don’t like hospitals,” she answered too quickly. And he knew right then that she hadn’t come just to visit. She had something specific to say, and whatever that something was she’d probably spent hours rehearsing it over and over again in her mind.
“Coming here was a real struggle for me,” she continued. “It’s not that I didn’t want to see you. I just...I just didn’t want to see you like this.”
“That makes two of us,” he joked, managing a slight grin. But the humor seemed totsally lost on her.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she added.
“About what?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.
Her eyes fell to the cold, immobile hand she cradled in hers. “About us.” She placed his hand gently onto his stomach, then got up and went to the window by the foot of his bed. She opened the blinds to gaze outside. The bright sunlight that poured into the room made Dylan’s head throb.
“I can’t handle it anymore, Dylan,” she said quietly, almost choking on the words.
She was clearly on the verge of tears. How long it had been since he’d seen her cry, over anything, Dylan couldn’t even remember. Despite his anger—despite all the trouble they’d been having, he wanted to hold her. He wanted to comfort her the way he used to when their marriage was young and alive. But of course he was helpless to do anything. Hell, she probably wouldn’t have let him hold her anyway.
“Every time you’re sent out on a mission I find myself wondering if I’ll ever see you again,” she told him, “...if you’ll come back to me in one piece.” Tears finally filled her eyes and flowed freely down her cheeks. “This time you almost didn’t.”
If that was true—if she really did worry like that—then why, every time he returned home from an extended absence, did she always act like she wished he’d stayed away?
“Almost disn’t,” he emphasized. “But I did come back.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Oh yeah, you came back,” she caustically admitted. “Broken, burned and bloodied, and in a stretcher...but you did come back.” She paused and sniffed. Then, as if she were intentionally trying to hurt him, she added, “But most of your squad didn’t.”
That cut him deep and he suddenly found himself fighting back tears of his own.
She closed her eyes and bowed her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice full of regret. “I didn’t mean to...” She paused, took a deep breath, and then looked back out through the window again. “What about the next time, Dylan,” she continued, “or the time after that? How long before they send you home in a box, or before there isn’t enough left to send home at all?”
“Carolyn, you...”
“How long!” she cried, cutting him off.
She paused another moment to regain her composure, then went on. “I know I’ve been a real bitch since we came out here and that I haven’t let you get close for a long time. I’m sorry for that. And I’m sorry that I hurt you, but...”
Dylan sighed. “Carolyn...”
“No!” she interrupted, turning her back and taking another step farther away from the bed—away from him. “No, I don’t want to hear it. I can’t.” She looked down at her left hand, hesitated a moment, then faced the bed again. “I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled off her wedding ring and tossed it onto the blanket. “It’s over, Dylan. I’m divorcing you.”
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” he asked her.
She looked him in the eye for the first time since she’d arrived. “I do love you, even though I haven’t been acting like it. But I just can’t live like this anymore.” She hurried out of the room before Dylan could respond, but just before the door closed between them, a dark-haired gentleman whom Dylan had seen once before stepped into view and welcomed her into his outstretched arms.
Suddenly it all made sense—the stranger’s unfamiliarity, his curt greeting and seemingly conscious avoidance of eye-contact, the disheveled state of his clothes, his leather jacket too warm to wear during the day, the locked front door and the closed living room curtains, both rarities on her part. Carolyn sleeping nude—rarer still—their bed coverings rumpled as if two opposing armies had joined in battle upon them, the damp towel in the bathroom and the stranger’s damp hair. Drugged though he was, the realization washed over him like golden beams of sunlight breaking through a dense, gray fog.
Carolyn had been having an affair the whole time.
“Son of a bitch,” he mumbled. How could he have missed it? How could he have been so blind that morning, with a clear head no less, to miss what he could see so clearly now?
He rolled his head back across the pillow and stared into the distance through the blank white wall. For the first time in his life he was alone—really alone. He and Carolyn had been together almost nine years, since early on in his assignment to Mandela Station, and had been married for close to eight. They’d had good times and bad, but as those years passed the bad had slowly added up to outweigh the good. Now, finally, it was over. Actually, it had been over for the last couple of years, ever since he transferred to the Marines. He just hadn’t had the guts to take that final step and make it official. Now she’d done that for him.
“Sergeant Graves?”
That wasn’t Kenny, either. Dylan rolled his head back to face the door again. A woman he’d never seen before had just walked into his room. At least, he couldn’t remember ever seeing her before. With all the drugs they’d pumped into his system could he really be sure of anything? She wasn’t a very imposing woman—pretty, though—scarcely over five and a half feet tall if he judged correctly, slender, maybe approaching middle-age, with a touch of gray streaking through her pinned up blonde hair. She had a doctor’s lab coat on, but somehow it looked out of place on her. He sensed a different air about this woman, even through his drug-induced stupor—an air that suggested to him that she was much more than just another doctor.
“May I come in, Sergeant?” she asked.
“Sure,” Dylan answered, unenthusiastically. “Why not?”
The stranger closed and locked the door behind her, then grabbed the chair away from the small physician’s desk in the corner and rolled it up next to the head of the bed, turning it so that when she sat down the door was more to her right than behind her. So she was a woman who watched her back. One of those paranoid types, not unlike a lot of the agents he’d met after joining the C.I.D. A trait he could relate to.
“I understand from reviewing your records that you’re a damn good Marine and a good Security Forces troop as well,” the woman said.
“That’s pretty unusual information to find in a patient’s medical record, isn’t it, Doc?” Dylan asked, knowing full well that his medical record wasn’t the record she was referring to. His head must have been clearer than he’d thought.
The stranger snickered. “Come now, Sergeant. You knew the second I walked in here that I’m not a doctor. You should learn to hide your initial impressions better.”
“That obvious, huh?”
“Yeah, that obvious...to me anyway.”
“Must be the drugs.”
“The drugs kill pain. They don’t affect the clarity of your thinking.” She considered asking him who he thought she was if not a doctor, to see if he might show any signs of recognizing her, but quickly decided against it. After all, if he believed this to be their first meeting, why say anything that might make him suspect otherwise? “Anyway, what I meant was that I recently reviewed your personnel record at Command, and I like what I saw.”
“Glad to hear it. I’ll sleep much better tonight knowing that.”
“Your infamous sarcasm on the other hand doesn’t impress me at all, Sergeant. But your record does. Quite a lot, actually. Especially all the classified stuff.”
“What classified stuff?” Dylan asked, trying to look genuinely curious while at the same time wondering who this woman was that she’d have access to his complete record. She stared at him through her big blue eyes with a kind of ‘Please-don’t-insult-my-intelligence’ expression on her face, and he quickly realized that lying to her was pointless. She was obviously not only someone with special authority, but also someone who wouldn’t be easily fooled. But who exactly was she? He decided to ask her, straight out.
“All right. But just who are you that you’d have access to my record?”
“That was your wife I just saw leaving here, wasn’t it?” the woman asked, evading his question and pointing back at the door with her thumb.
“Not for much longer. She’s divorcing me.”
“That’s too bad. She’s very pretty.”
“Yeah, well, turns out beauty really is only skin deep in her case. It’s been coming for a long time now.”
“Ah. Tired of staying home alone and waiting nervously while you go off and try not to get yourself killed.” It wasn’t a question.
“Apparently she hasn’t been doing very much of either lately. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”
“So I saw. Her friend in the hallway.”
Dylan didn’t want to talk about it. “So who are you?” he asked again, though he already had a pretty good idea what the answer was.
“What will you do now?” the woman asked as if she hadn’t even heard his question.
Dylan sighed. Fine. Let her steer the conversation. See where it leads. “I’ll recover,” he answered. “Then I’ll return to my unit.”
“If you resigned, maybe she wouldn’t go through with the divorce.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, if you...”
“I heard what you said. If I resigned she’d know I only did it to try to save our marriage. She’d never forgive herself for forcing me to do that, or me for sacrificing my career and making her feel even guiltier than she already does.”
He paused a moment and thought twice about what he’d just said. Truth be told, the bitch would have loved it if he resigned, and she probably didn’t feel one damn bit of guilt over having an affair, either. But there was no reason to bad-mouth her to this woman. Besides, he wanted the divorce every bit as much as she did. And even if he were to resign, what would he do with his life? “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I have no intention of resigning. Military service is all I know. I lost her for good a long time ago.”
“Are you sure?”
“If I weren’t sure, I wouldn’t have said it.” He gazed past her at the door, but he knew he was right. “I know her as well as I know myself,” he pointed out. “Maybe even better. I’m sure.”
“Sorry to hear that,” she said with all the emotion of a machine.
“Yeah, I can see you’re all broken up about it.” When she didn’t respond to that, he finished by saying, “It’s better this way...for the both of us.”
“In that case I have a proposition for you.”
Dylan eyeballed the woman, more confident than ever that he knew who she was, or at least who she represented. “What kind of proposition?” he asked anyway.
“A change in your career path.”
He scoffed. “This again?”
“Yes, this again. It really would be for the better.”
Dylan scoffed at that, too. If he’d learned only one thing in all his years of service about the military bureaucracy’s attitude toward the individual soldier, it was that a soldier’s apparent inability to settle into one career specialty and stay there was not highly regarded or appreciated. And he’d already changed paths twice. “Better for who?” he asked.
“For you,” she answered, but then she added, “and ultimately for the service.”
“I figured that would work its way in there sooner or later,” he commented. “Okay, I’m listening, though I don’t know why.” That despite the cynicism he still felt over the whole idea.
“You’d have to be retrained again, of course. But if you’re willing, I can get you out of your combat unit and land you a commission in the agency.”
“The agency?”
“That’s right.”
“And what agency would that be?” he asked, hoping against the obvious that he was wrong—that her visit wasn’t just another attempt by the S.I.A. to recruit him, even though he knew it was.
That same telltale expression returned to her face, but she otherwise ignored his question and simply went on with what she had to say. “I’m offering you a chance, once again, to become an S-I-A Special Agent.”
Dylan groaned with disgust, his own expression no doubt making it very clear that his thoughts on that subject hadn’t changed.
“Don’t worry,” the woman continued off his reaction. “As our recruiting officer should have told you the first time he met with you, the S-I-A isn’t like the C-I-D. It’s smaller, more unified, and has a lot more away from your desk time. In fact...you won’t even have a desk. And being one of our agents is certainly a lot better than leaving parts of yourself behind on some alien battlefield somewhere.”
“I’ve seen a lot of combat in my time, major battles and small firefights combined. This is only the second time I’ve ever been seriously wounded. That’s not a bad record, considering the kinds of missions my current unit draws.”
“Well, congratulations, Sergeant,” she responded sarcastically. “With a track record like that you’ll probably survive four or five more battles. Maybe even six if you’re lucky, before you finally get yourself killed.”
“And I suppose being an Intelligence agent is safe?” Dylan asked just as sarcastically.
“At least your enemies don’t shoot you as soon as they see you. And if you’re good they never even know you are the enemy.” After a pause she asked, “What if Command decides you’ve had enough and doesn’t let you return to your unit? Have you thought about that?”
No, he hadn’t, and she had a point. He’d seen that exact thing happen to Marines before. But he couldn’t surrender to her that easily. “There’s always Colonial Security. Or I could go back to Earth, home to the States...join the National Police Force or a local department.”
“I thought military service was all you know.”
Another point for blondie, but he still wasn’t ready to give up. “I could try to go back to the Military Police.” Somehow, she didn’t look convinced. “The point is,” he continued, “I have options. I’ll have to think about it. Where can I contact you if I want to talk to you again?”
The woman grinned as she stood up. “Nice try, Sergeant. Take your time. Give it some serious thought for a change. I’ll contact you.” She started to turn, but stopped and added, “Oh and, by the way. I’ve been on planet waiting to talk to you for three days already and it was a long trip, so don’t expect me to give up.” With that, she turned to leave.
“Wait a minute,” Dylan said, suddenly grasping the connotation of something the woman had said. “What did you mean exactly when you said ‘leaving parts of yourself behind on some alien battlefield somewhere?’ In case you didn’t notice, I’m all here and everything’s in the right place...” He glanced at his right arm. “...such as it is.”
The woman returned to his side, but didn’t sit back down. “You think so?” she asked, slipping her hands into the pockets of her ‘borrowed’ lab coat.
Something about the way she asked, or perhaps it was the look on her face, filled Dylan with apprehension, even fear. She knew something he didn’t know. But what? He could see both of his hands even now, and the twin peaks at the foot of his bed were proof enough there were still two feet under the blankets. He’d been awake when the nurse came in and gave him his early morning sponge bath, so he knew that everything else was right where it belonged as well. Everything on the outside, at least. Could he have lost an internal organ or something? Was that possible? He stared at the stranger.
“The first round that hit you,” she began, not waiting for him to ask—very perceptive on her part—“was an old style inert hard metal projectile. A bullet. It passed clean through your left thigh and just missed a major artery. That wound’s healing normally but will require some therapy. The second round came from a pulse rifle and blew the hell out of your right shoulder.” Dylan stared at the metal straps and the plastisteel braces that covered his shoulder and half his arm. “The doctors had to replace all the bones and tissue in your upper arm and shoulder and then graft them back together like some kind of puzzle. The third round...”
“Wait a second,” Dylan interrupted. “What the hell are you talking about? I know I was shot in the shoulder. I remember when it happened. I got right back up after I was hit. I picked up my weapon and rejoined...or tried to rejoin...”
“If you picked up your weapon, Sergeant Graves, then you did it with your left hand because your right arm was laying in the dirt half a dozen meters away from you when you were picked up.”
She finally sat down again, then leaned forward, rested her elbows on the bed, and looked him square in the eye. “Dylan, your right shoulder was blown apart, the bones splintered into a million pieces. When they brought you in your arm didn’t come with you. Someone retrieved it later, during the cleanup. As I understand it, most of the upper portion was completely useless and the surgeons had to use synthetics to reattach the rest of it.”
“Synthetics?”
“Synthetics.”
Dylan stared down at his right hand and flexed his fingers, slowly, several times. “I really lost my arm?” he asked.
“Yes, you did. But don’t worry. The doctors tell me that it’ll be as good as new after it heals. You’ll be back on the ice or punching and kicking the heavy bag and throwing your sparring partners to the mat in no time.”
He flexed his fingers a few more times, then gazed back up at the woman who seemed to know an awful lot about him, and said, “You mentioned there was a third shot.”
“The third shot was another solid metal projectile, fortunately a much smaller caliber. It destroyed your left eye and shattered the surrounding bone, but deflected away from your brain.”
Dylan glanced around the room as if for the first time, testing his vision, particularly his depth perception. “But I can see fine.”
“It’s biotronic, like the rest of the synthetic replacements.”
“Biotronic,” Dylan repeated, looking back at her. “So I’m like some kind of cyborg? Like the cyberclones?”
The woman drew a sharp breath at that and withdrew, sitting straight-backed in the chair as if his question had somehow slapped her right across her face. She took a moment to compose herself and then answered as though his question hadn’t affected her at all. “You’re not a clone, obviously, but in a manner of speaking, yes. In that regard you’re like a cyberclone, if you define the term loosely enough.” Once again, she stood up. “Think about that, Sergeant, while you’re pondering your various options.” She turned and started toward the door.
“One more thing,” Dylan said, ignoring the woman’s sarcastic reply.
She stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “Name it.”
“My squad. My wife mentioned they didn’t all come back and the damn doctors won’t give me any straight answers about anything. All they do is tell me not to worry and feed me a bunch of medical jargon about my own condition.”
The woman faced him once again. “Frieburger, Baumgartner, and Leskowski all came through it all right. Running Horse and Ortiz were wounded but also made it back alive. As for the others...” Dylan’s gaze fell in sadness as he sighed. He knew what was coming next. “Well, suffice to say that things didn’t go as well as planned. You and Running Horse will recover completely, though how in God’s name he managed to survive the explosion that killed Private Walters is beyond me. Marissa Ortiz, on the other hand, is still questionable at this point. They gave her a new heart, but she’s still listed in grave condition.”
“A new heart?”
The woman nodded. “My understanding is that hers had a small tear in the wall. It didn’t go all the way through or she would’ve died almost immediately, but it weakened the wall’s integrity enough that even a small amount of exertion might have been sufficient to cause her heart to burst. I’m sure they had no other choice but to replace it.”
“My God,” he said, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. “How critical is she? Can I go see her?”
“You’ll have to ask the doctors about that, but I doubt you can get up and move around on your own with all that hardware on you.”
Of course he’d have to ask the doctors. How would she know if it was all right for him to visit Marissa? “She had some pretty nasty burns on her face and around that gash across her chest,” Dylan sadly recalled. “When she’s out of danger will she be all right? I mean, she’s so pretty. She won’t be permanently disfigured, will she?”
“Again, you’ll have to ask the doctors,” she answered neutrally. “Though these days they can do things you wouldn’t believe.”
“So I’ve noticed,” Dylan commented, glancing at his hand again. Then he asked, “What about the rest of my squad? The ones who didn’t make it back?”
“Some of their remains have been recovered. A few of them still haven’t officially been accounted for yet, but...”
“Haven’t been accounted for?” he asked with a spark of hope. “Then there’s still a chance that some of them...”
“I said they haven’t officially been accounted for,” she pointed out. “And while there’s still a small chance that some of them might actually be alive somewhere, it wouldn’t be a good idea for you to get your hopes up. I promise you we’re looking into all possibilities, but you have to realize that neither the C-U-F nor the Sulaini Army is known for keeping prisoners of war alive for very long.”
“But a small chance is still a chance,” Dylan optimistically pointed out. “We have to go after them.”
“As I said, we’re looking into all possibilities.”
Dylan settled for that...for the time being. “And the mission?”
“Sorry, Sergeant,” she said, shaking her head. “Any and all actions that we may consider or act upon during this process are classified.”
“No, I mean our mission. The mission that put me here.”
“Oh. Well, your mission was successful, for the most part. The royal couple is safe, the royal consort is recovering from her injuries, a healthy amount of intelligence was collected, and the Sulaini presence on the island is no more. I only wish the Sulaini commander had been there at the time.”
“Yeah, the commander. I’m glad you mentioned that.”
“Why?”
“Because, number one, I want to put Ortiz in for a decoration. She saved my ass in the commander’s office, after she was wounded. Or in the same building anyway.”
“I’ll pass that on to your L-T. And number two?”
“Number two, I’ve been wondering what the hell a force of Veshtonn blood-warriors was doing at a Sulaini terrorist compound on Cirra. For one thing, how did they get there in the first place without our knowing about it? And for another, what the hell was that...that thing that almost killed me?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed as she sat back down again. Whether they did so out of curiosity or suspicion, Dylan didn’t know. “What thing that almost killed you?” she asked. “You mean the Sulaini soldier who tried to beat you to death with his rifle?”
“What? What Sulaini soldier? What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
This woman seemed to know just about everything about him and his entire career. Was it really feasible then that she didn’t know how he was wounded? Not likely. “I’m talking about that thing that was hiding out in the Sulaini commander’s office building. That...alien...creature that would’ve snapped me in two if Marissa...that is, if Corporal Ortiz hadn’t turned it into Swiss cheese when she did.”
“Alien creature?” the woman asked, wearing a puzzled look on her face. “I’m...I’m sorry, Sergeant. I must have missed something. What alien creature are you talking about? What did it look like?”
“What alien creature am I talking about?” Dylan asked, exasperated. “The alien creature that burned Marissa! The one that damn near crushed my ribs into powder!” The bewildered expression on the woman’s face told Dylan that despite her intimate knowledge of him and his career, she really didn’t know anything at all about any alien creature being on that Cirran island. Why she didn’t know he couldn’t venture to guess, but she was going to find out right now. “It looked like...like...awe hell! I don’t know what the hell it looked like! I can’t remember! I see the damn thing in my nightmares all the time, but when I wake up I can’t remember what the hell it looks like! What about its remains? We killed it so somebody must have found it! You must know something about it!”
“Sergeant Graves,” she said soothingly, “Corporal Ortiz was cut by shrapnel and burned by chemicals in one of the explosions. Your ribs were broken by a rifle butt in hand-to-hand combat with the Sulaini regulars. Aside from a couple dozen Veshtonn blood-warriors, whose presence we are certainly investigating, there were no alien creatures there.”
“You’re wrong, lady,” he responded more calmly, his head hurting again. “Or whoever told you that was wrong. That’s not how it happened at all. There was a creature. I keep seeing it over and over.”
“Seeing it where?”
“I told you, in my nightmares! I have nightmares about the battle every night now and it’s there every time. It was there!”
The woman sighed. “All right, look. You’re seeing something in your dreams.”
“It’s not just in my dreams!” Dylan insisted.
“Yes, it is!” the woman insisted right back. And then she continued, “Dylan, listen to me. You’re seeing something in your dreams—some kind of alien creature. Okay. But it’s not real, whatever it is. It wasn’t there.”
“Yes it was!”
“No it wasn’t! Think back, Dylan. Think about the battle. Replay it in your mind. Do you really remember this alien creature being there?”
“Yes, I really remember it being there! I see it every damn night!”
“I’m not talking about in your nightmares! Ignore them for the moment. Think about the actual battle ten days ago. Go through it, step by step, as you actually remember it.”
He closed his eyes and thought back as she suggested, and he thought hard. Sure enough, as his memories played themselves out, he couldn’t place the creature anywhere among them. As a matter of fact, the more he thought about it the more clearly he remembered events occurring exactly as she had just described them. He remembered Marissa being wounded in a chemical explosion. He remembered being beaten repeatedly with a rifle in brutal hand-to-hand combat. And he remembered being shot...three times. He drew a deep breath and sighed.
“That’s it,” the woman said. “Now tell me, do you remember this alien creature of yours being there?”
“No,” he admitted, hesitantly, as he opened his eyes again.
“Of course you don’t, because it wasn’t there. Seeing it in your nightmares is probably the result of some kind of post-traumatic stress or something. I’ll let the...”
“So now you’re a doctor?” Dylan asked sarcastically.
“I’ll let the doctors know what you told me,” she responded sternly, clearly growing weary of his attitude. “They’ll help you work it out. Now why don’t you get some rest?”
“I would, but people keep coming in and waking me up.”
She stood up. “I’ll be in touch.” With that, the visitor turned away one final time and left the room.
“But...it was so real,” Dylan mumbled.
Hoping to be mistaken for someone who belonged there by any members of the hospital staff who might happen to pass by her, Commander Royer let her hair down and combed her bangs forward with her fingers to hide her eyes, then grabbed the medical chart off of a nearby patient’s room door and gazed down at it as she strolled back up the hallway toward the large supply closet she’d borrowed the lab coat from. The ruse worked perfectly. Several personnel did pass, both from ahead of her and from behind, but none of them challenged her, and as far as she heard—she was, of course, listening very carefully—none of those who weren’t alone said anything to whomever they were walking with about not knowing who she was.
She paused in front of the closet door and pretended to study the chart while she waited for the last of them to walk out of sight. Then, when she couldn’t hear any more footsteps, she looked around to make doubly sure that no one was watching her, then ducked inside and closed and locked the door behind her, relieved that no one had locked it while she was visiting Graves. Finally, she pulled off the lab coat and hung it back up on its hook, then drew a deep breath and stood there to enjoy a moment’s relief.
She smiled, finding humor in her success. Hiding in plain sight the way she had was one of the oldest and most often used tricks in the proverbial book and it had worked like a charm once again. She’d infiltrated the hospital, reached her objective, and would now make her escape completely undetected for the second time in as many days, right under everyone’s noses.
None of that would have been necessary, of course, if that arrogant chief of surgery had simply bowed to the legal authority she’d claimed to have like a good little administrator and given her access to the sergeant in the first place. But no, that would have been much too easy. Instead, he’d thrown his rulebook in her face and denied her that access, just because she wasn’t a member of the patient’s family. So what if she wasn’t related to him? She had official business to conduct. Important official business. And so what if the chief of surgery also happened to be a commodore? That didn’t give him the right to interfere with her. If he hadn’t been the sergeant’s doctor, or if she’d been able to identify herself as an agent instead of having to pose as a legal officer... Damn doctors had far too much authority, in her opinion.
Oh well. It never hurt to stay in practice.
She opened the door a crack and peeked out to make sure the hallway was still clear, then slipped out, made her way quickly to the nearest public exit, and left the hospital as quietly and as inconspicuously as she had entered it.
Once outside and in the clear, she slowed to a more comfortable pace and strolled toward the shuttlebus stop as though she didn’t have a care in the world, but halfway there she changed her mind and decided to walk. After all, the agency’s local field office sat less than a mile outside the main gate, and although the day was still young and this world’s notoriously unpredictable late summer weather could take a turn for the worse at any moment—interesting how the northern hemispheres of both Earth and Cirra happened to go through the same seasons at nearly the same time—it had so far turned out to be a beautiful one. Moderately warm with bright sunshine, little if any humidity, with a gentle breeze and not a cloud in the greenish-blue sky. A perfect day. A day not unlike those she’d always made the most of as a young girl, back on the family farm...except for the greenish tint to the sky, of course. Besides, she had a potentially serious problem on her hands and she needed some time to think things through.
Sergeant Graves should not have been having those nightmares. Some nightmares, yes, but not those nightmares. Not the nightmares he’d described to her. Nightmares of explosions and of heavy gunfire, of close-quarters firefights and hand-to-hand combat, of killing the enemy and of comrades being killed—those were normal for any combat veteran, especially after being so seriously wounded. For Graves, nightmares that reflected what were, as of yesterday, his conscious memories of the battle. His subconscious should not have been showing him what really happened.
And yet at the same time, consciously, he apparently remembered everything exactly the way he was supposed to—unless he’d lied to her. She considered that possibility but quickly rejected it. He was still off balance and out of sorts, badly wounded and half strung out on pain killers. Had he been lying to her she’d have seen right through it. No, he was remembering everything exactly the way he was supposed to...consciously.
And that fact pointed directly to her problem. Although his conscious memories had been reshaped exactly as planned, the edit had completely failed on the subconscious level. And now Sergeant Dylan Edward Graves, the best candidate for the Timeshift mission, the man whom she herself had recommended to Admiral Hansen for the job, was a security liability. “Damn it,” she mumbled under her breath as she approached the main gate. The procedure had supposedly been perfected years ago. What the hell could possibly have gone wrong?
She nodded and smiled politely to the tall, lanky young Military Policeman standing post at the gate as she approached him. Not the same quiet, inquisitive looking corporal who’d been there when she arrived, and unless she’d suddenly gone half blind he couldn’t have been a day over eighteen years old. He nodded slightly in return and stared at her—was that lust in his eyes?—as she walked past him and exited through the pedestrian gate.
She glanced back for a quick second, just enough to see him out of the corner of her eye as he stared after her and licked his lips. She could almost feel his unblinking eyes stripping off her skin-tight jeans and she grinned as she continued on her way. Despite the fact that she harbored no real interest in drawing that kind of attention from men, younger or older, it still gave her ego a nice boost to know that one so young could still find her so pleasing to look at in that way. How might he react, she wondered, still grinning, if she went back and identified herself to him? It would probably be pretty funny. Lucky for him she wasn’t the kind of person who went out of her way to embarrass people in that way. Well, not without a good reason anyway. Besides, she was still trying to keep her presence on planet as quiet as possible.
Speaking of pleasing to look at! Royer abruptly stopped and froze in place like some kind of statue. Across the street and just a short distance ahead an attractive young woman with long golden blond hair had just come out of a small shop and was walking toward a nearby bus stop. She was wearing a short black pleather skirt that revealed a lot of leg—and what very nice legs they were, too—a deep forest green blouse, and a pair of those black knee-boots like the ones the admiral’s secretary often wore. As a matter of fact, the whole outfit looked like something Vicky would wear, and this girl definitely had the body to pull it off.
And in another life, Royer mused, she wouldn’t have minded the chance to pull that outfit off of her nice and slowly, one garment at a time.
The girl reached the bus stop and took a seat on the bench facing the street, and when she crossed her right leg over her left Royer caught a glimpse of white between them and got a good long look at what appeared to be a smooth, firm thigh. Her heart started pounding in her chest and she felt a stirring deep inside that until that very moment she’d only ever felt with Karen, and she knew right then that if she weren’t a married woman...
But of course, she was a married woman—a very married woman—and as she averted her gaze and resumed walking she scolded herself for letting her thoughts drift in that direction, even for a moment. She loved her wife very much and missed her terribly. “I need to get home to Karen, and soon,” she whispered under her breath.
And then, as though a light bulb had suddenly snapped on in her brain, she realized who it was she’d just been gawking at. She looked at her again just to be sure, but she knew she wasn’t mistaken. Stefani O’Donnell, the agency’s own fugitive from the law, was sitting right there, not fifty feet away, as plain as the day was bright. What the hell was she doing on Cirra of all places? And why was she out in public, in broad daylight, so close to a Solfleet facility? She hadn’t even tried to disguise herself. She had to know she was wanted by Solfleet authorities. Not a very smart thing to do.
O’Donnell looked toward her, so Royer quickly turned away and ducked into the nearest shop...and realized immediately that she’d just made the second of two very basic mistakes. “And that wasn’t a very smart thing for you to do,” she mumbled, referring not only to the way she’d been standing out in the open and staring at O’Donnell—the first mistake—but also to the way she’d dashed out of sight, which had been the surest way to draw attention to herself. She’d been spending too much time behind her desk lately. Her skills were getting rusty, and making mistakes could be dangerous.
She stepped back, away from the door and the large storefront window, moving out of the direct sunlight while still gazing out at O’Donnell, hoping to determine whether or not she had recognized her and fled. It didn’t matter that they’d never actually met face-to-face. As deputy chief of the agency, her official portrait hung prominently displayed alongside Admiral Hansen’s and about a dozen other officers’ and politicians’ on the walls of every facility that fell under S.I.A. command. That included the field office on Europa, where O’Donnell had been stationed before she went AWOL and got herself arrested.
“Excuse I,” someone behind her said in a deep, heavily accented voice. “You would like drink some?”
Royer turned around and found herself standing in some kind of combination newsstand and whatever-the-Cirrans-drink-to-wake-up-in-the-morning shop. Its quiet, small community atmosphere was typical for such establishments, including those she’d frequented in the past, like most of her favorite coffee shops back home in the Midwest. It seemed a little out of place here in the city, though. Several racks of printed newspapers and magazines—she could smell the fresh ink—lined the walls. Tables already set for customers, who at the moment were very few and far between, filled the dining area, and a lone apron-adorned waiter stood about five feet in front of her, holding a tray full of cups of...something...in his hands, staring at her like she had three heads. A native, she knew immediately. Not from his accent—all known alien races, not to mention the vast majority of the Earth’s own population, spoke heavily accented English—but rather from his eyes. Those beautiful violet eyes that all Cirrans were blessed to be born with. All Sulaini, too, for that matter. She so loved their color.
“No, thank you,” she finally answered. “I uh...I was just talking to myself.”
“You was talk to you?” the waiter asked, smiling, looking amused and confused at the same time. “You spirit must be strong agitate.”
“Yeah, you could say that,” Royer responded with a grin of her own.
“You would like drink some to calm you spirit?”
“Thank you, that’s very kind, but I don’t have time right now. Maybe later.”
The waiter shrugged his shoulders—the Cirran equivalent of shaking the head—and said, “You Terrans, always much fast.” And with that, he turned and walked away.
“Yeah, that’s us,” Royer quietly agreed as she turned back to look out the window again. “Always in a hurry.” O’Donnell was still there, thank goodness—still sitting on the bench.
Speaking of always being in a hurry, whatever she was going to do—however she was going to take O’Donnell into custody—Royer knew she was going to have to do it quickly, before the bus showed up and whisked her away. But what exactly was she going to do? What would be the quickest and quietest way to make the arrest? She could stay out of sight and call for the Grainger MP’s to come grab her but that would draw a lot of curious attention from the locals that she really didn’t want to draw. Besides, there was always a chance the bus might show up before the MP’s got there, despite the fact the base was so close.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, she considered. She could let O’Donnell get on the bus and then have it intercepted down the street. At least that would cut down on the number of witnesses. But not by enough, she decided. No. She was going to have to do it herself, quickly and quietly, without drawing any attention, and then get out of sight as fast as possible.
And to do that she was going to have to walk right up to her without being seen.
Royer sighed. The only way to sneak up on her would be to approach her from behind, but how was she going to cross the open street in full view of her target without being seen? The only alternative was to go out the back door, if the shop even had one, and circle around both blocks, but that would take time—time that she might not have. No. She could lose her that way. She was going to have to cross the street in full view.
The farther away from O’Donnell she could get before she crossed, the less chance of seeing her O’Donnell would have, so when Royer finally stepped back outside she turned away from her and headed back toward the base to put some more distance between them. Then, when she decided that she’d gone far enough, she crossed the street and started back the other way again, walking at a leisurely pace and staying as tight against the storefronts as she could in order to stay in the shade and out of O’Donnell’s peripheral vision...she hoped.
Barely two minutes later, as she drew to within ten meters or so of the bench, she turned her face away from her target as much as she could without actually taking her eyes off of her, just in case she suddenly looked in her direction again. God! She was even more beautiful than she’d first realized!
She passed behind the bench—she’d done it!—then circled around the far end and gazed straight ahead, across the street, as she sat barely a foot to her lovely target’s right. Out of the corner of her eye she saw O’Donnell glance at her, or at least in her general direction, then turn away again as if everything were okay. It was a perfectly normal thing to do. Anyone else would have done the same thing. The important thing was that she apparently hadn’t recognized her.
Royer stole another look at the younger woman’s gorgeous legs and licked her suddenly dry lips as she considered what to do next. Perhaps under different circumstances the two of them might have gotten together for dinner and... She purged those thoughts from her mind—she really needed to get home to Karen—and, having finally decided how best to proceed, stared straight ahead and asked, “How are you, this morning?”
O’Donnell looked at her—no doubt this time—and answered, “Fine, thank you.” Then, apparently wanting to be pilot in return, she asked, “How are you?”
“I’m fine, too,” Royer answered, still without looking at her. “It’s a beautiful day.”
“It certainly is,” O’Donnell agreed, looking up at the sky.
Royer took advantage of O’Donnell’s momentary inattention and glanced around to make sure any bystanders who might happen to be close enough to hear them talking weren’t actually paying them any attention.
O’Donnell looked back at her. “Excuse me, but...have we met before?”
Royer finally looked her in the eye and answered, “No, we haven’t met.” Then she leaned a little closer, prompting O’Donnell to lean slightly away, lowered her voice to a near whisper, and said, “But if you try to run, I’ll shoot you in the back without a second thought.”
O’Donnell’s mouth fell open and she inhaled sharply as she withdrew further. “What did you just say to me?” she asked, obviously dumbfounded.
“I said it’s a beautiful day, and if you try to run, Crewman Stefani O’Donnell, I’ll shoot you in the back.”
“Who the hell...” O’Donnell started to ask. But then a look of total recognition suddenly washed over her face and her jaw practically fell into her lap. “Oh my God,” she said as her face turned three shades of red. “You’re Commander Elizabeth Royer, aren’t you?”
“In the flesh,” Royer confirmed, “and you, my dear, are under arrest.”
O’Donnell’s gaze fell to the sidewalk in front of her as she sighed heavily. “Shit.”
“Yeah, deep shit,” Royer pointed out, “and you’re ass is right smack in the middle of it.”
O’Donnell’s eyes began to tear. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do to get out of it, is there?” she asked without looking up.
Royer started to answer automatically—she’d certainly been offered bribes before—but then hesitated. ‘...anything I can do to get out of it...’ the girl had asked. What exactly had she meant by ‘anything?’ Was she hinting at a willingness to pay her off in exchange for her freedom, or was she offering something else? Was she perhaps offering to...
O’Donnell looked up at her. “Ma’am? Did you hear my question?”
“Yeah, I heard it,” Royer answered. Then she asked, “What exactly are you hinting at, Miss O’Donnell?”
“Whatever,” the frightened girl answered, shrugging her shoulders. “I can’t go to prison, Commander. I’ll do anything to avoid that. I’ll pay you whatever I can scrape together, I’ll deny you ever saw me if I get caught later, I’ll...I’ll sleep with you if...”
Royer raised a hand to stop her. Had the girl seen the glint of lust that had doubtlessly flashed through her eyes a few moments ago? Maybe so. Then again, while she’d certainly never gone out of her way to advertise it, the fact that she was married to another woman was no big secret within the agency, or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe O’Donnell had just figured that she might be up for a little action on the side. And maybe, Royer considered as she gazed into the younger woman’s eyes...maybe she wasn’t entirely wrong. It wasn’t like the thought hadn’t crossed her mind a few times over the last few minutes. Would it really hurt to take this beautiful, fresh young woman to bed for a night or two and then cut her loose afterwards, as long as she swore never to mention it to anyone?
Yes, it would. It would hurt, in more ways than one. The knowledge that she’d had a fugitive in custody and had let her go for something as cheap as a romp between the sheets would hurt. The memory of having had sex with another woman behind Karen’s back would hurt and would haunt her for the rest of her life. And it would hurt Karen as well. It would break her heart, in fact, if she ever found out.
“You’re a very beautiful young woman, Stefani, and I admit...” She stopped, realizing it would be best for her not to admit to being attracted to her. “We can discuss how you might be able to help yourself when we get to the field office,” she amended, hoping that her momentary lapse hadn’t given O’Donnell the impression that she was thinking her offer over. “It’s less than a mile up the street.”
She stood up and faced her prisoner. “Let’s go,” she prompted. O’Donnell looked up at her through tear-filled puppy eyes. “Now,” she added.
O’Donnell wiped away her tears, then stood up and offered her hands to be cuffed. Royer glanced down at them, then took a step backward and started to turn away, but stopped when O’Donnell only stared at her and didn’t move to follow. “I said, let’s go,” she ordered in a more authoritative tone of voice.
O’Donnell dropped her hands to her sides and asked, “How are you going to shoot me in the back when you don’t have a gun?”
Royer stepped right up into her face, almost close enough to kiss her, stared her in the eye and answered, “You’re right. I don’t have a gun. But I’ve been running track since grammar school, so if you try to escape I’ll have no choice but to chase you down and kick your ass all the way to the office. Now, if you think you can outrun me or come out on top in a fight, go for it. If not, I suggest you come along quietly.”
O’Donnell stared back at the commander for a few seconds, then dropped her gaze to the ground and said, “I promise, I won’t make any trouble.”
“Wise decision,” Royer told her with conviction. Then she pointed her thumb behind her and said, “This way. Now.”
O’Donnell fell in beside her and they headed up the street.
Two beautiful, sexy blonds from Earth, walking side-by-side up the street, Royer mused as they walked in silence. One in form-fitting, skin-tight jeans, the other in one incredibly sexy mini-skirt. No one who happened to see them would ever guess who they really were, unless O’Donnell went back on her word and tried to escape, of course.
“I meant what I said, Stefani,” she pointed out with that thought in mind, just to make sure the girl clearly understood her and didn’t have any doubts. “If you try to run I will make you regret it.”