It had taken just under another hour to make it back to the base. Once the Marines had finally put the mountain range and foothills behind them and reached the local town’s hard paved roads, where the APC’s rough-terrain tracks were retracted in favor of its more road-friendly all-tire configuration, the ride had become a whole lot smoother and quieter. So much so in fact that Dylan had almost fallen asleep by the time they reached the base’s main gate. Frieburger had managed to hold down that meal, though just barely, and the FTX had been declared officially completed.
Having finally made it downstairs to the locker room after sitting through a seemingly endless mission debriefing—talk about struggling to stay awake—Dylan maneuvered past the few other stragglers who hadn’t managed to get away yet and practically collapsed with exhaustion onto the long wooden plank that served as a bench in front of his locker. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and hung his weary head. For a 28 year old man in good physical condition, he sure felt awfully old.
With more effort than it should have required he pulled off his combat boots and heavy socks and dropped them none too gently to the floor in front of him, then drew a deep, relaxing breath and stood up with a groan. Sounded old, too. He punched his code into the locker door panel and released the latch, but paused before opening it to steal a sidelong glance at Marissa, whose locker stood at the end of that same row.
As an unmarried Marine eligible for promotion to the rank of sergeant E-5, she’d been assigned her own single-person room in the barracks and didn’t need that locker. She could just as easily have gone upstairs to shower in the privacy of her own bathroom. But she was strongly attracted to Dylan, a fact that she’d never tried to hide from him, or from anyone else for that matter, and she enjoyed teasing him a little bit whenever she got the chance. Exactly why she was attracted to him, Dylan didn’t have a clue. God knew she could have had any guy she wanted. Damn near all of them wanted her. But for whatever reason, she’d chosen to focus her attention on him.
He’d made it perfectly clear to her on more than one occasion that due to any number of circumstances, not the least of which was the fact that he was married, nothing could ever come of that attraction. But she indulged herself just the same, often to the delight of her good-humored squad mates, and Dylan had to admit that he enjoyed it as much as she did, though he kept that to himself. She could be a strikingly beautiful woman when she wanted to be, especially in civilian clothes free of uniform restrictions, and he was every bit as attracted to her as she was to him, if not more so.
He kept that to himself, too.
Besides, he reminded himself as he watched her pull off her dusty trousers and stuff them into her laundry bag with her tunic, he owed her two cups of coffee, and knowing her she wasn’t going to let him wander very far out of her sight until she collected.
Amazing. Even exhausted, sweaty, and half covered in dirt, she was still beautiful. And what a body—perfect, curvaceous figure, and not an ounce of fat anywhere, except of course where men liked it the most.
She’d already stripped down to her Corps-issue black panties and tank top when Dylan suddenly realized that his quick sidelong glance had graduated into a long lustful stare, so he quickly opened his locker door to block his view...and to block her view of him. He stripped off his own dirt-caked cammies and stuffed them, along with his boots and socks, into his canvas laundry bag. Then he grabbed his towel and a clean pair of non-issue blue boxer briefs—Corps-issue underclothes were for uniform wear only as far as he was concerned—closed his locker, and headed to the showers.
The first stall on the left was free. He stepped into the changing cubical and closed the door, hung his towel and clean briefs on the hooks, then stripped off his own black underclothes and dropped them onto the narrow seat. He set the shower for medium-warm, heavy flow, then stepped into the stall and stood still as a statue under the pulsating stream while the past two weeks’ worth of ground-in grime turned to mud and fell away from his sun-baked skin in small clumps that threatened to stop up the drain.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to keep himself clean in the field, because he had. But there were limits as to how thoroughly a person could bathe out of a portable field basin with only a single canteen’s worth of cold water.
He cupped his rough, dry hands under the soap dispenser and held them there until the creamy white fluid overflowed and oozed down the length of his forearms. His palms felt like coarse sandpaper as he lathered up, but that didn’t bother him in the least. In fact, it felt pretty good. “Finally, to be clean again,” he mumbled. He couldn’t remember another time when a warm shower had felt so good.
“Hey, Kenny!” he called out. “You in here?”
“Yeah!” the answer came from somewhere deeper in the long, narrow shower room. The acoustics being what they were, it was hard to tell exactly where he was.
“I told you I was still a white man under all this dirt,” he kidded.
“I’ll call my great-grandfather for you,” Kenny offered. “Maybe he can help.”
Dylan laughed. Kenny’s great-grandfather was a doctor. Still practicing full time in fact, despite his advanced age, and showing no signs of slowing down.
Dylan enjoyed being able to see Kenny on a regular basis again after so many years. He’d known Ken Franklin, whom he alone had the right to call ‘Kenny,’ ever since he was six years old and Kenny was eight. His father had abandoned the family to accept his own command—the starcruiser Excalibur—so his mother had moved them to a new house that stood directly across the street from the Franklins. At the time the neighborhood had been predominantly black, which had meant nothing more to Dylan than that the neighbors’ skin just happened to be a darker shade of color than his own. Nevertheless, a predominantly black neighborhood wasn’t what Dylan had been used to at the time, and being only six years old its unfamiliarity had scared him a little bit.
Early that first full day in the new house, Dylan had been sorely missing his friends, had worked himself into a pretty foul mood, and had grabbed his most prized possession, his toy cap gun, and gone outside to sit on the porch and sulk. He’d only been sitting there for a few minutes when an unfamiliar black kid came out of the house across the street and started playing in his own front yard. Afraid that kid might someday try to take the place of those friends he’d left behind and missed so much—an intrusion that would have been unforgivable in Dylan’s mind—Dylan had raised his toy gun, taken careful aim, and squeezed off a shot. The crack of the cap had attracted the boy’s attention, and upon seeing what Dylan had done the boy had immediately slapped his hands to his chest with a loud grunt and collapsed dramatically to the ground.
Despite having preoccupied himself with wallowing in self-pity, Dylan had laughed at the other boy’s antics, and five minutes after he committed his cold-blooded, brutal act of mock-murder, he and Kenny became instant friends. They got along well and within days became the very best of friends, always together and absolutely inseparable, and as they grew older even their girlfriends couldn’t come between them.
But like so many other childhood friendships, theirs had been tested by early adulthood. They’d grown up and had inevitably gone their separate ways. Kenny had enlisted in the United States Aerospace Force as a communications specialist immediately after he graduated from high school—two years earlier than Dylan—with the hope of qualifying for a position in Solfleet after his initial enlistment. When Dylan graduated two years later, Solfleet had changed its enlistment policy and started allowing high school graduates to join the fleet directly, so Dylan and another friend had signed up to become Solfleet Military Policemen. Life’s journey had torn Kenny and him apart and had squeezed billions of miles between them, but in the end they’d passed that test with flying colors.
Despite the vast distances that had separated them for years, they’d managed to maintain semi-steady contact with each other. Despite the odds against them, they’d kept their nearly lifelong friendship alive. So it was much more than just a pleasant surprise for the both of them when they ended up assigned to the same Ranger platoon together. It was the culmination of a plan, quickly outlined as soon as the opportunity presented itself and carried out across those billions of miles. Now Kenny served as squad sergeant of the second squad, equal to Dylan in rank but with almost two years more time in grade, and was on the verge of being promoted into the platoon sergeant’s slot. And he was still Dylan’s very best friend in the world. Any world.
Dylan heard the door to the next stall slam closed with a sharp crack. Was maintenance ever going to adjust the tension on that thing? Then he heard Marissa—he’d know her angelic voice anywhere—humming a soft melody that he didn’t recognize. When she turned the water on the sound drowned her out, but then her haunting melody exploded into a reverberating moan of such ecstasy that everyone in the showers, and probably in the locker room as well, had to have heard it.
“Oh!” she cried out, sounding as though she were on the very brink of orgasm, eliciting assorted snickers and various comments. “Oh yes! Yes! Oh, it feels so good!”
The snickering graduated into open laughter.
“You said a mouthful, Ortiz,” someone shouted.
“I wouldn’t mind giving her a mouthful,” someone else remarked.
“Watch your mouth out there!” Dylan warned, stopping in mid scalp scratch.
The ruckus stopped for the most part, but he could still hear someone snickering not quite under their breath. Then someone hollered out, “You don’t even have a mouthful!”
“Only because you won’t give it back!” the response came.
Then someone else yelled, “Damn! Even my schlong is dirty!”
“Yo! Your schlong’s always dirty!”
“Screw you, Pauly! At least I have a schlong!”
“Trust me, so does Pauly!”
That last was Sweeney, no doubt about it. Dylan dropped his arms to his sides and just stood there shaking his head. They were all fine Marines, every last one of them, but they could be mercilessly brutal with each other when they wanted to be. “I think I’ll just stay in here forever,” he mumbled.
“Great! I’ll stay with you.”
And that was Marissa. He glanced at the ugly yellow-tan block wall that separated his stall from hers—how the hell had she heard him through that?—then stepped back under the water to rinse the shampoo out of his short, dark brown hair. She’d said a mouthful all right. The lukewarm water felt so good pouring down over his body that he almost wished he really could stay in there forever.
Once satisfied that he was finally clean and thoroughly rinsed off, he tapped the button to stop the water and then threw the forest-green plastic curtain aside and grabbed his towel off the hook. Then, when he’d dried off, he stepped back into the changing cubicle, hung the towel back on the hook, and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the wall to look himself over.
As usual, he felt generally pleased with what he saw. His muscles weren’t particularly large like Sergeant Running Horse’s—certainly nothing like a bodybuilder’s—but they were well defined, hard and strong, more like those of an accomplished martial artist. That, of course, made perfect sense. He’d been a student of the martial arts off and on since he was twelve years old and held advanced black belts in two separate disciplines.
“Looks good to me.”
Dylan yanked his towel down so hard that he broke the hook and held it in front of him as he spun to face the door. “Marissa!” he exclaimed quietly, looking her in the eye but seeing a lot more. She was holding the smoke-gray plastiglass door halfway open and standing there in the narrow doorway. Her long black hair was still dripping wet and clung to her bare shoulders, and the bright red towel she’d wrapped herself in barely reached the tops of her thighs.
“Hello, Dylan,” she said, smiling flirtatiously at him.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” he asked, being careful not to let his own towel drop too low in front as he hastily wrapped it around his waist.
His gaze fell to her athletic legs as she stepped over the four inch high water stop and into the cubicle, slowing the door with one hand as it closed behind her, and he saw that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her towel. But then...so what? He’d seen her naked before. Hell, as Marines serving together in a Ranger platoon, they’d all seen each other naked before. More than a few times, in fact. In squad tents, field showers, Nuclear-Biological-Chemical decontamination stations, a certain oasis lake in the middle of The Great Cirran Desert... Aw hell. This was different and he knew it. Trying to rationalize it wouldn’t change that fact one little bit.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she answered, stopping barely three feet in front of him.
“Couldn’t you have waited until I came out?” he asked as his eyes met hers again. “This isn’t exactly the most appropriate place for us to be talking.”
“It’s all right,” she assured him. “There’s no one else here. I made sure we’d be alone.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he countered. “In fact, that’s the point. I’ve told you before...”
“I know what you told me before,” she said as she began slowly approaching him again, “but I’m not buying it anymore. I saw you watching me undress by the lockers and I’ve known for months that you feel the same way about me as I do about you. You try to hide it, but you can’t. Not from me. Not anymore.”
“I wasn’t watching you,” he told her as she inched closer. He knew he should back away from her and not let her get too close. But he didn’t want to back away. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to kiss her. Hell, he wanted to f... No. No, not that. That was different. That was something a guy did to a girl he didn’t care about—something he paid an escort for. He didn’t want to do that to Marissa. He wanted to make love to her.
“Yes you were watching me,” she insisted as she touched her generous, towel-covered breasts lightly to his chest. “I saw you.”
“I just happened to glance your way for a second. That’s all.”
“Sure you did,” she said, making it perfectly clear that she didn’t believe him for a second.
She placed her hands on his shoulders, then gently slid them together and laced her fingers loosely behind his neck. Dylan kept his arms at his sides and nervously clenched his fists.
“I like that you were watching me undress,” she told him, smiling seductively. “You should’ve kept watching. I might have given you something more to look at.”
He swallowed. “Out there in front of everyone? You’d have been asking for trouble.”
“What about in here?” she asked.
“Marissa...”
“I know you want me, Dylan. And we both know I want you.”
Dylan licked his lips and swallowed hard as he gazed into her deep brown eyes. “I won’t deny that I’m attracted to you,” he said. “You obviously know that I am. But you also know...”
She surprised him with a kiss. Nothing more than a quick peck on the mouth, at first. But when he didn’t protest or pull away, she pressed her lips to his and kissed him more intimately, much more intimately, and still without any resistance from him.
He felt a stirring deep inside as he began to reciprocate. A stirring that caused his heart to pound and his breath to grow labored. An old, familiar stirring that he’d long thought dead. Then he felt himself responding to her on a more carnal level.
He unclenched his fists, and despite his better judgment, slid his hands slowly up under her towel and over her smooth, curved hips. Their kiss burned with passion.
What am I doing? he asked himself.
He wanted her. He wanted her badly. He’d wanted her ever since he met her. She was so beautiful. So beautiful. And she was giving herself to him—all of herself, if that was what he wanted—because she wanted to. How could he not take her?
Pulling him along with her, she backed into the wall. She untucked his towel and dropped it to the floor, then eagerly wrapped her legs around his waist as he held her up and pressed her against the wall.
What the hell am I doing? This isn’t allowed! I have to stop. I have to stop!
“Make love to me, Dylan,” she whispered.
The brunette-tufted flesh between her thighs felt warm and soft against him, moist with fervent anticipation, and it took all the will power he could possibly muster not to cross that ultimate, heavenly threshold.
He let her down and pulled back from their kiss, but still held her close. He gazed into her beautiful brown eyes and whispered, “I’m sorry, Marissa. I can’t do this. I want to more than you know, but...”
“I know,” she regretfully agreed.
“I’m a married man,” he reminded her again. “Unhappily married, but married just the same. And more importantly, I’m your squad sergeant.”
She reached up and gently stroked his cheek. “I know. But I can’t help that I’m so in love with you.”
“You’re not supposed to be in love with me.”
She grinned, just slightly. “I know that, too.”
“Then why do you let yourself be?”
“Why are you in love with me?” she asked in return.
He started to answer—started to deny that he loved her, but he found that had no words.
“I don’t know, either,” she told him. “I just know that I love you.” After a moment, she added, “I’m sorry.”
“No. Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I’m not.”
A smile appeared on her sweet, tender lips, even as tears of joy began to well up in her eyes. “You’re not?” she asked.
He heard the cautious delight in her voice—the joy that was building inside her. But it was a guarded joy, he knew. It was as if she wanted so much to believe him, but was afraid that he might not really mean what he said. And that meant that he had one opportunity to qualify his words. One last chance to do what he knew was right without tearing her heart out in the process. And this was it. The moment was upon him. If he was going to stop their relationship from moving to another level, he was going to have to do it right now.
He gazed deeply into her beautiful eyes once more and found his answer within them, but it wasn’t the answer he knew he should give her. He shook his head, ever so slightly, and told her instead, even as he warned himself not to, “No. I’m not sorry.”
Her chin began to quiver. “It makes me so happy to finally hear you say that,” she told him as her tears flowed freely down her cheeks.
Shit. He’d really stepped in the deep pile now. Might as well dive in head first. “And it makes me happy to finally say it,” he told her. Then he went even further down what he still knew to be the wrong path and admitted, “My marriage hasn’t been any good for years. I can’t even remember the last time my wife said she loved me, or the last time I actually meant it when I said it to her.”
“I love you, Dylan. And I do mean it.”
“I know you do, Marissa.” He reached up with both hands and gently brushed away her tears. “And I think, I know, that in time I could love you, too.”
She kissed him again and hugged him tightly to her. “God, I love you so much,” she whispered.
He returned her embrace and asked, “So what are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then she cleared her throat and looked up at him. “But right now you owe me some coffee.”
They shared a quiet laugh together. Then, after one more gentle kiss, Marissa slipped out from between him and the wall and quietly stepped out of the cubicle, glancing back and smiling at him once more as she closed the door.
Dylan looked back at the mirror and sighed. “You’re an idiot,” he told his reflection, now that he was thinking a little more clearly.
He’d wanted her something awful. He’d resisted that final act of consummation, though just barely, but that didn’t make any difference. As far as he was concerned, he’d just cheated on his wife. No, worse than that. He’d confessed his attraction to another woman—to the other woman. This wasn’t just cheating. This wasn’t just a one-time encounter. This was only the beginning. This was first step toward having an affair. Perhaps even a long-term relationship, complete with all the emotional baggage that such a thing would inevitably create.
And that presented him with a very serious problem. Not because of what it meant to his marriage—that was already in trouble, regardless—but rather because of their positions within the platoon. If he was going to pursue a relationship with her—if he was going to ‘fraternize’ with her, so to speak—then he had an obligation to transfer her to another squad immediately. In addition, because he was married, they were going to have to keep their relationship a secret, so he was going to have to come up with a fictitious reason for that transfer as well.
But he didn’t want to transfer her. She was a good Marine and a damn good Ranger. She was too valuable to the squad to lose.
He gazed into the mirror again. “Nice going, jackass.”
Admiral Hansen sat motionless behind his desk and stared in the general direction of the list of messages still displayed on his comm-panel’s small screen, though in reality his eyes were focused on some intangible point somewhere beyond that display and his mind on some other place far beyond that. Two of the messages were dim, barely contrasting with the background—he’d already reviewed them—but the third still glowed brightly, waiting to be played. He just wasn’t ready for it yet. The heartbreaking, gut wrenching contents of the last one were still far too prevalent in his mind.
All those dead Tor’Kana. Such a tragic, senseless waste of precious lives.
Fewer than seven thousand Tor’Kana were known to have escaped the invasion of their home system, and fewer than twenty-seven hundred of those survivors, including the four hundred seventy-seven who had subsequently been found dead aboard the vessel the Rapier had just salvaged, were females. Due to their inability to survive for extended periods of time outside their own natural atmosphere—even their own scientists couldn’t reproduce it adequately enough to support them indefinitely—those females who had been rescued alive, something over thirteen hundred of them, were currently being held in protective custody aboard their vessels by some of the gelded males of their race. According to their long-time ambassador to Earth, those vessels had all been pumped full of their world’s atmosphere prior to their exodus, so the females would be able to live aboard them for several months if they had to.
It sounded to Hansen like they were being held prisoner, but he couldn’t argue against the necessity of it. The fact was they simply had no other choice. To release them would be to kill them, and to kill them would mean to doom their entire species to extinction.
But would a mere thirteen hundred females be enough to propagate that species? Would the Tor’Kana people ever flourish again? Hansen was no scientist. He had no idea how large or how diverse a gene pool might be needed for an entire species to thrive. He could ask someone, he supposed. Professor Verne probably knew someone among his many colleagues who could enlighten him if he really wanted to know the answer. Thirteen hundred? He couldn’t be sure without asking, but had his doubts.
He glanced at his watch and was surprised to find that he’d been sitting there lost in thought and staring into space for so long. More than half an hour had passed since he’d played Lieutenant Johnson’s message.
He finally focused on the screen, where the third message still waited patiently for him, the only line on the list still glowing. Hoping and praying that it didn’t contain even more devastating news, he leaned forward and touched his finger to it.
After two weeks of spending every day and most of the nights in thick, sweat-absorbent field socks and heavy combat boots, the smooth, cool plasticrete steps that led from the basement gym and locker/shower facilities back up to the first floor felt like blocks of soothing ice beneath Dylan’s bare feet. Unfortunately, regulations prohibited going barefoot in the barracks’ common areas, so as he reached the top of the staircase he paused to pull on his old, worn leather sandals. Funny. Nearly all of the deadliest forms of cancer had been both preventable and curable for nearly a century and a half, yet athlete’s foot could still be contracted all too easily. Just as easily cured, of course, but contracted all the same.
He made a U-turn at the top of the stairs and headed down the wide central hallway, noting how the overhead lights reflected brightly off the surface of the always highly polished tile floor as he passed by the company commander’s and other administrative offices. Then he made a right and exited through the rear blast-proof door—one of two that opened out onto the large ground-level patio.
Made of the same blast-proof material as most of the rest of the building’s exterior, the patio ran the entire length of the building and extended out from the back wall for about ten meters. The infantry company that occupied most of the building sometimes used the patio as a sort of makeshift training classroom if the weather was nice enough, but usually reserved it for recreational activities, such as unit parties, barbecues, and so forth.
For this morning’s return to garrison the morale officer had set up about half of it to resemble an old Parisian outdoor café, complete with padded wrought iron chairs, checkered tablecloths in red, white, and blue, and oversized umbrellas to shield the ‘customers’ from the sun when it rose. Recorded accordion music even played in the background, loud enough for those who might want to listen, but discreet enough for those who might not. The only thing missing was a team of waiters and waitresses, but the fancy buffet set up in the patio’s center made for a pretty nice substitute.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble.
The mountains off to the west still shielded the base from the rising sun’s direct assault—watching the sun rise in the west and set in the east had taken some serious getting used to—but they couldn’t stop its rays from painting the thin, low-lying clouds in long broad strokes of golden yellows and oranges and brilliant reds and violets as they slowly drifted by, scratching their bellies across the highest of the gray stone peaks. The sky directly overhead had brightened to a dark blue-green but still faded to violet blackness low along the eastern horizon. Just off the patio’s edge, thin wisps of gray-white fog were beginning to form above the thick blue lawn, foreshadowing the morning dew’s impending death by evaporation.
It was a beautiful morning, much like those back home in southeastern Pennsylvania where Dylan had grown up. Those mornings in April or early May before the god-awful heat and the thick, sweltering humidity of summer oozed in for their unwelcome three or four month residency. He was glad he’d had an old pair of shorts in his locker. His jeans would have been too warm.
A few of his people, including Marissa, were seated at a table alongside the far railing. Most of them, Dylan could see, had already grabbed whatever they wanted to eat or drink and were chowing down like it was the last real meal they were going to get for another two weeks. Who could blame them? They’d had nothing but field rations to eat, three squares a day, every day for the last two. But not Marissa. The only thing sitting in front of her was an empty patch of tablecloth and her silverware, still wrapped in a napkin. She was still waiting for those two cups of coffee he’d promised her.
He sighed. Marissa. What was he going to do about her? What was he going to do about that whole situation?
As he approached the buffet, an incredible medley of mouthwatering aromas assaulted his senses. Scrambled eggs and bacon, at least three different kinds of spiced sausages, French toast, American style toast, a dozen different kinds of jams and butters, assorted fruits and fruit juices. And real coffee! After two weeks of powdered instant that tasted more like the dirt off the bottoms of his boots, real honest to goodness coffee! Given half a chance he could have devoured everything in sight and exploded a happy man.
He spoke briefly to the attendant—a volunteer from the base Services unit who probably hadn’t known he was a volunteer until his supervisor told him—then grabbed two large mugs out of the plastic rack at the end of the table, filled them nearly to the brim with coffee, and headed over to the table to join his squad mates.
Carolyn, his wife, often complained to him—more like nagged him, really—about what she referred to as his ‘infuriating habit of hanging around the barracks a lot longer than necessary’ after an FTX or other such extended assignment. She would inevitably claim that she’d made some kind of special plans to welcome him back home but that his late arrival had somehow ruined them. He expected the same thing would happen this time if he stayed too long, but this particular FTX, relatively short though it had been, had also been one of the toughest and most demanding exercises the platoon had gone through since he’d been assigned to the unit. His people had performed their duties well beyond his expectations, so there was no way he going home without first having some breakfast and enjoying a little down time with those of them who were still ‘hanging around.’ If Carolyn didn’t like it, tough. Besides, it wasn’t even zero six-hundred yet, and it was Saturday. She wouldn’t be up for another two or three hours.
Marissa was wearing short—very short—blue denim cut-offs and a bright red tee shirt and was sitting cross-legged in her chair with her sandals set aside on the deck beside her. As Dylan set a mug down on the table in front of her, he caught himself staring down at her smooth milky thighs and he quickly averted his eyes. Not twenty minutes ago those gorgeous legs had been wrapped tenaciously around his waist, inviting him, even urging him to pierce the soft flesh between them. So, from a certain unspoken but no doubt mutually understood point of view, he had a right to stare. But she was a fellow Marine and was his immediate subordinate. It wouldn’t be good for the others to catch him drooling over her as though she were a piece of fresh meat.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling up at him.
“You’re welcome,” he answered as he sat down to her immediate right in the only remaining empty chair. No coincidence there, he was sure, but perhaps a little too obvious for secrecy’s sake.
Sitting there put him between Marissa and Private Sharon Baumgartner, the sort of cute but too young looking, usually quiet red-headed farm girl from somewhere in central Kansas. No one who didn’t know her would ever have thought to look at her that she was a Marine of any kind, let alone one of the most elite Marines in the entire Corps.
Private Jeffrey Walters, another newbie, was in turn seated to her right. A black kid from one of the roughest neighborhoods in South Detroit, he sported an old knife scar that stretched from the outer corner of his right eye to the front of his ear.
Sergeant Billy Running Horse, the man with all the muscles, completed the circle of five. In addition to being one of the squad’s fire team leaders, the rather large Native American was the best electronics and explosives specialist in the platoon. His father was some kind of bigwig at Solfleet Headquarters—Dylan couldn’t remember exactly what his position was—but Billy always tried not to let that fact get around too much. He’d once explained that he didn’t want anyone thinking that his faster than average promotions had been due in any way to his father’s influence, but Dylan suspected that he wasn’t really all that sure himself.
Billy had been Dylan’s biggest antagonist when he first arrived at the unit, admittedly full of bitterness and resentment for having been passed over for promotion into the squad sergeant’s position himself in favor of some new guy with no real ground combat experience who’d only just earned his beret. He’d known nothing of Dylan’s background and prior experience at that time, of course, but since Dylan had outranked him, Billy had had no recourse. That was and always had been just the way the military worked. It hadn’t taken long, however, for Dylan to earn Running Horse’s respect once he’d gotten to know him, and now the sergeant was one of his most loyal subordinates, as well as being his biggest kidder. In fact, Billy had been the first to take Dylan’s initials, D.E.G., and turn them into his nickname.
“Not eating anything, Degger?” Running Horse asked.
“Our food’s coming,” Dylan answered, identifying Marissa as the other half of ‘our’ with a quick gesture.
As if he’d been waiting for an off-stage cue, the buffet attendant approached the table carrying two platefuls of food, which he set down in front of Dylan and Marissa. “There you go, Sergeant Graves,” he said. “You and the lady enjoy your breakfast. If you need anything else, just give me a sign. I’ll be right over.”
“Thanks, Chris,” Dylan said, looking up at him.
“Thank you, Dylan,” Marissa said, smiling brightly at him, exaggerating her appreciation. Then she gazed across the table at Running Horse.
Dylan followed her gaze and grinned. Yup. Any second now. It was coming, working its way up. And...now.
“What the...” Running Horse stammered, his eyes wide with disbelief. “What the hell is this?” he zealously inquired as Chris walked off and left them to themselves. “Squad leaders get waited on now?”
Marissa and the others started laughing while Dylan, with a deadpan expression on his face, calmly asked, “What’s wrong, Billy?”
“What’s wrong?” He was starting to laugh a little as well, despite himself. “Let’s see. Did anybody else here get waited on? No! I don’t think so! I know I had to get my own food! Jesus, Degger, who did you bl...”
“You just have to know how to talk to people, Billy,” Dylan pointed out as he tossed a steaming forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth. “You can usually get anything you want if you just know how to talk to people.” The eggs were so good he just had to close his eyes and savor the entire experience. Steaming hot and fluffy, perfectly seasoned with a touch of salt and freshly ground black pepper. They practically dissolved in his mouth.
“Oh really?” Billy had responded. “Well, I hope I can be a squad sergeant when I grow up so I can learn how to talk to people, too.” With that last statement said, he dropped the subject and fell silent for several seconds, which told Dylan one thing. He was plotting his sweet revenge. The only question was who the victim of that revenge would turn out to be. Billy rarely did anything directly.
“Anyone seen Sergeant Franklin?” Dylan asked.
“He said he was too tired to eat,” Marissa answered. “He grabbed a donut and went straight up to his room.”
“Oh, okay. I guess his squad did have it pretty rough out there this time.”
“I’ll say they did,” Private Walters chimed in. “Looked to me like the L-T was running them ragged the whole...” He fell silent as he glanced around the table to find everyone staring at him, then suddenly looked as if he weren’t too sure it had been such a good idea to speak out. He was, after all, the newest guy in the unit. Almost everyone outranked him and he didn’t really know any of them that well yet.
“Go on,” Dylan finally coaxed as he lifted his mug to his lips. “Let’s hear it.” He sipped his coffee—its heavenly aroma was surpassed only by its deep, rich taste—then added, “Well come on, Jeff. If you have something to say, say it.”
The private began, somewhat reluctantly, “Yes, Sergeant.” He briefly tipped his head toward Private Baumgartner. “One of our...”
“Private Walters,” Dylan hastily interrupted.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Jeff. We’re off duty, remember? This isn’t Boot Camp or Ranger school, or the regular Marines. You earned your beret just like the rest of us. It’s okay to relax a little bit. You don’t have to address me as ‘Sergeant’ every time you speak to me.”
“Yes, Sergeant. I mean...”
“Call me Dylan, or Degger. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of time for formalities.”
“All right, Degger.”
“Good. Now, what were you saying?”
He began again as the others took a minute to work on emptying their plates. “One of my buddies from Ranger school is in Sergeant Franklin’s squad. He told me when we got back this morning that the L-T ran them ragged over the northern peaks.”
“I’m sure he did,” Marissa pointed out. “There are what...five or six newbies in Sergeant Franklin’s squad?”
“Yes...uh...Corporal?”
“Teezer,” she told him, though she didn’t bother to point out the fact that her nickname wasn’t actually derived from the second syllable of her last name. He was still too new to be trusted that far. Still too much of an unknown element. “The lieutenant probably just wanted to see what they could do.”
“Yeah,” Running Horse agreed, “at everyone else’s expense.”
“You’ve got to admit, Billy, the new lieutenant knows his stuff,” Dylan pointed out.
Running Horse looked at Dylan, flashed his bright white smile, and said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Degger. Anything interesting happen downstairs in the showers?”
Dillon glared at him, clearly very serious, and despite whatever encouragement the few short-lived, under-their-breath snickers that arose from around the table might have provided him with, Running Horse’s smile abruptly disappeared. He’d begun his revenge, no doubt innocently, but he’d chosen a very personal and dangerous topic, and he knew better. So where did he intend to go with it?
“Anything interesting?” Dylan asked cautiously. Where did he intend to go with it? Not at Marissa. That was too obvious. Dylan waited a moment to make it look like he was thinking it over, then shrugged his shoulders and shook his head and answered, “No, not really.”
“Hey!” Marissa complained, slapping him playfully on the arm.
Dylan turned his eyes to her, but Running Horse didn’t give him a chance to accuse her of anything. “Don’t blame her, Degger,” he said. “She didn’t say a word to anyone.”
“That’s right. I didn’t,” she adamantly confirmed.
Then Running Horse added, “Walters saw her step out of the shower stall ahead of you.”
Walters stopped in mid chew and stared wide-eyed at Running Horse with shock and disbelief written in big bold black letters across his face, but he was smart enough not to say anything inappropriate. The Navajo was a lot bigger than he was.
Running Horse, his victim now identified, made a point of not returning the underling’s horrified stare. “He said it looked like she was tucking in her towel, as if she’d just wrapped it around herself.” With a brief shrug, he added, “He just happened to mention it to us.”
“Oh, really?” Dylan said, turning his gaze to the young private. “You just happened to mention it to them, huh.”
With much effort, Walters swallowed everything in his mouth, then tried to defend his wounded honor. “Honest, Degger, I meant...I didn’t mean to imply...”
“So, without talking to either me or the corporal first, you drew your own conclusions based on what you thought you saw, even though there was no way you could be sure you saw what you thought you saw, then told them what you thought you saw.” Dylan could almost see the gears turning in Walters’ brain as the poor kid tried to follow his reasoning and think of something to say in his own defense, but the words just weren’t coming out.
The private exhaled heavily and finally admitted his guilt. “Yes, Sergeant.”
“That’s how nasty rumors get started, Private Walters,” Dylan scolded, his voice full of mock anger. Actually, he was glad Running Horse had brought it up. It gave him a chance to address what had happened and present his own defense without appearing too defensive. In other words, it presented him with the perfect opportunity to lie his way out of potential trouble, at least for the time being. Maybe that had been Billy’s ultimate intent to begin with. It would be just like him.
“For your information, Jeff,” he resumed, “nothing happened in there. Not a thing. But by talking to people out here in public about what you thought you saw after you thought you saw it, even though you didn’t really see what you thought you saw at all, you risked ruining our careers.”
“Yours and mine?” the younger man asked, obviously confused by Dylan’s doubletalk.
“Mine and Corporal Ortiz’s,” Dylan clarified.
“Oh.” Walters swallowed hard. “Sorry, Sarge.”
Dylan let him sweat for another moment, then said, “All right, forget it. It’s over and done with. But I hope you learned something. That was, after all, Sergeant Running Horse’s intent when he spoke up. He wasn’t just trying to get you into trouble.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Deciding that it was time to finally let Walters off the hook, Dylan looked at Running Horse and asked, “You weren’t just trying to get him into trouble, were you?”
“Of course I was,” the sergeant answered, stone-faced.
“You were?” Walters asked, staring at Running Horse again. “Why?”
But Running Horse didn’t respond. He didn’t even look back at him, or acknowledge the question in any other way. Then the laughter started around the table again, and after a moment, when he finally realized that they’d only been teasing him, Walters freely joined in.
He was going to fit in just fine.
Dylan glanced across the table and offered his silent thanks to Billy, then turned to Marissa. “And as for you,” he began, smiling, “drink up. You still have another one coming.”
“Yes, dear,” she responded, quietly, so that only he would hear.
“Sergeant Graves?”
Dylan looked up to find the company clerk standing a few feet to his right. “Hey, Ronny, what’s going on?”
“You must really have done it now, Sergeant,” Ronny said melodramatically. “The C-O wants to see you in his office right away.”
“Probably needs help with a command decision,” Dylan kidded. “Look what happened when no one helped him choose a favorite football team.”
“What happened?” Walters asked.
“He’s a Cowboys fan,” Dylan answered, himself a Philadelphia Eagles’ fan.
“Maybe he has cameras in the shower stalls,” Running Horse quipped, smiling again.
“At ease, Sergeant,” Dylan warned. It was a friendly warning, but serious enough to put an end to the once more renewed snickering that Running Horse’s comment had evoked. To the clerk he said, “I’ll be right there.”
“I’ll tell him you’re on your way so he has a minute to hide the helmet.”
Dylan snickered and grinned. “As if he’d ever.”
Once the clerk had walked off, Dylan got up from the table and moved around to Running Horse’s side, leaned in close to his ear and said, “The shower jokes stop here, Billy. Marissa and I don’t need the C-O catching wind of any rumors.”
“No problem, Degger. Sorry.”
“All right, thanks.” To the table as a whole he said, as he straightened, “Back in a few.” Then he headed off toward the company commander’s office.
* * *
The company commander’s office sat at the end of the administration area closest to the center of the building where it was heavily protected. Dylan knocked on the door and, getting an immediate response, walked in. It was a standard setup. Government-issue desk and chair set at a rough forty-five degree angle in the far corner, flanked on either side and to the rear by the colorful Federation and Solfleet Army flags, a couple of nondescript chairs for visitors, a half-size bookshelf, a wall locker, and a large wall-mounted screen that, when it wasn’t being used as a communications monitor, showed a view of the outdoors as it would look if the screen were just a regular window. Dylan stopped two feet in front of the desk and assumed the position of attention, but since he wasn’t in uniform, he did not salute.
“Squad Sergeant Dylan Graves reporting as ordered, sir,” he said.
“Relax, Sarn’t,” the captain said. “Have a seat.”
As his accent strongly suggested, Army Captain Austin Douglas was pure Texas cowboy, with longhorn beef for muscle and steak sauce for blood. His most prized possession was a very old and heavily autographed Dallas Cowboys’ football helmet, which he proudly displayed right behind his name plate in the center of his desk for all to see. He often wore an old brown leather Stetson when he was off duty and had even been known to ride the beautiful mahogany stallion he’d brought to Cirra with him—no one had yet figured out how he’d managed that one—around the base perimeter from time to time. Rumor had it that he’d been born and raised on one of the Lone Star State’s few remaining family-run cattle ranches. No one knew for sure if that was true or not and for some reason he liked to keep it a mystery, but the less than subtle hints, at least, were there in abundance.
What was known to the troops at large was that he’d been an infantry officer ever since he completed Officer Candidate School, and that he’d been the commanding officer of Bravo Company, 111th Infantry Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division for the last year and a half. The Black Berets of 4th Platoon, 7th Marine Corps Ranger Battalion, though not actually assigned to Bravo Company, had been attached for administrative purposes to the Highly Mobile Light Infantry unit ever since their arrival on-planet, and were, as far as any outsiders were concerned, just one of the company’s four regular Army infantry platoons. So even though he himself wasn’t one of them, Captain Douglas was still technically their company commander.
“Thank you, sir,” Dylan said as he sat down.
“You been thinkin’ ‘bout applyin’ for trainin’ as an Intelligence agent, Sarn’t?” the officer asked.
Dylan snickered, then answered, “No, sir. One of their recruiting officers came to see me a couple times before the F-T-X, but I told him I wasn’t interested.”
“Was it a Lieuten’t Pillinger who came to see you by any chance?”
“Yes, sir, that’s right.”
“Well shit. If I’d’a known you’d already turned that li’l thorn in the saddle down, I’d’a tossed him out on his boney little ass as soon as he showed his face in my office. He came out here to pester me three days in a row after you folks rolled out, right through the weekend, and he asked me the same damn thing every time, too.”
“What was that, sir?”
“He wanted to know if I thought there was a chance you might consider joinin’ the S.I.A., and he asked me to pull you outta the field so he could meet with you and explain the so-called benefits of such a career change.”
Dylan harrumphed. “I’ve gone through two career changes already. The last thing I need is to go through that again.”
If Douglas was at all aware of how Dylan had come to join the Rangers, he chose not to address it. It wasn’t relevant to the matter at hand anyway. “I tried to explain to the little piss-ant that I couldn’t just pull you out from under your L-T like that, but the boy seemed to have a little trouble graspin’ the idea that I don’t have full C-O authority over you Marines the way I do over my own regular Army grunts.”
“He didn’t happen to mention to you just exactly what it is the S-I-A wants with me, did he, sir?”
“Far as I can tell they wanna rope you into bein’ one of their covert agents,” the captain answered, stating the obvious. “Anythin’ beyond that, I have no idea. Hell, Pillinger wouldn’t even admit to that much.”
Dylan shook his head as he gazed past the captain’s shoulder at the Solfleet Army flag. Then he asked, “Why me?” He’d meant it to be a rhetorical question, but the captain threw an answer out anyway.
“I imagine it’s ‘cause you’re a damn fine Marine, Sarn’t.”
“There are a lot of fine Marines in the Corps, sir.”
“Well, look here,” the captain said as he leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know much about this whole situation, but I already hit the greens with your new L-T a few times. I think I can safely say that he’d be willin’ to let you go, but only if it’s your choice to go. I know he’d hate to lose you, but I think he’d be willin’.”
“He’s not going to have to worry about it, sir.”
The captain grinned. “Well good. I’m glad to hear it, and I’m sure he’ll be pleased as punch to hear it, too.”
“If they happen to contact you again, sir, you can tell them once and for all that I am absolutely not interested.”
The captain sat up in his chair again and, still grinning, said, “If they contact me again, Sarn’t, I’m gonna sick your lieuten’t on ‘em. When you Marines are back here in my A-O, I can do shit like that.”
Dylan smiled. “Yes, sir.”
“All right, Sarn’t. That’s all I needed you for, and I know you’re tired. Thank you for your time. You’re dismissed.”
“You’re welcome, sir,” Dylan said as he stood up.
He snapped to attention, then turned to leave, but just as he reached the door, the captain said, “Oh, and don’t you go and forget to buy that pretty little filly her second cup o’ coffee, now, ya hear?”
Dylan turned and stared at the captain’s completely expressionless face for a moment, then responded with a rather apprehensive, “Yes, sir.” Then, once he was sure the captain wasn’t going to say anything more, he left his office.
* * *
By the time he returned to the table with two fresh cups of coffee in hand, everyone but Marissa had gone. He set one down next to the empty mug in front of her, then took a seat across the table. Earlier, when the others were there with them, no one would have given the fact that the two of them had been sitting next to each other a second thought. But now that they were alone, it wouldn’t have looked right.
If she took offense, she gave no outward sign of it. “What did the C-O want?” she asked.
“That Lieutenant Pillinger guy from Intel came to see him about me a few times after we rolled out to the field. He just wanted to know what was going on.”
“Jeez, doesn’t that little twerp understand the meaning of the word ‘no’?”
“Apparently not.”
An uncomfortable silence fell over them, during which they both took several slow, cautious sips of their still too hot to drink coffee. Then, after looking around to make sure there wasn’t anyone within earshot, Marissa lowered her voice and said, “I want so badly to kiss you right now.”
Dylan shot her a ‘what-the-hell-are-you-doing-saying-that-in-public’ look and quickly glanced around, then gazed at her without actually giving the question a voice.
“I wish you could come up to my room and stay with me for a while,” she added.
“Marissa...”
“I know,” she said as she gazed sadly into her mug. “You can’t. You have to go home to your wife and pretend to love her.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Dylan drew a deep breath and let it out, slowly, then asked, “Would it make you feel any better if I told you that I want to stay with you?”
She looked up at him again, with just the slightest of smiles. “A little. Maybe.”
“Well I do. But you’re right, of course. I can’t.”
“Of course.”
After another brief, uncomfortable silence, she asked, “So what are we going to do about this, Dylan?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly, shaking his head. “I’ve been asking myself the same question.”
“Don’t transfer me,” she said abruptly. “I couldn’t take that. Not now. Not after we’ve finally been honest with each other.”
“I’m not going to transfer you,” he assured her. “I’d be lying if I told you the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but to tell you the truth I don’t want that any more than you do, for a number of reasons. We’ll just have to figure out something else.”
Their conversation moved on to other things as they shared what little time they had. Then, once both their mugs were empty, they stood together, traded a knowing look, which was all they could risk in such an open area, and said their good-byes. Another few seconds passed between them before Dylan reluctantly excused himself and went back down to the locker room to grab his laundry bag.
That done, he headed for home.
The third report had turned out to be a special supplement to the first, and had been filed by the commanding officer of all Solfleet forces assigned to the Caldanran system—the system Sergeant Graves was currently assigned to, and for which Commander Royer would be departing this very morning. As it came to a close and the wall screen shut off, Admiral Hansen propped his elbows up on his desk and rested his chin atop his folded hands with a sigh. The situation was even more critical than any of them had realized. They were going to have to do something. Fast.
Veshtonn scout ships had been probing the Caldanra system’s outermost boundaries for over three and a half years, ever since the Caldanran Intervention, conducting small hit and run raids, probably for the purpose of gathering intelligence on the strength, locations, and reaction speed of Coalition defenses in the area. The Veshtonn were nothing if not patient. Until recently, Coalition space forces, led in that particular region by three Solfleet carrier groups, had managed to hold them off with little difficulty. But the Veshtonn had had over a month now to establish a firm foothold in the neighboring Rosha’Kana star system and build up their forces there. Their intrusions on Caldanra had gone much deeper into the system lately and their offensive actions had been much more bold and aggressive. Now Hansen understood why.
The war between the Cirrans and the Sulaini dated back at least half a dozen millennia, if not more. The actual reasons for their mutual hostility were unknown to outsiders, buried deep in ancient myths and legends that neither side talked about. What was known was that both peoples were the descendants of a single species as human as Terrans themselves who had originally evolved on Cirra and had broken into two major warring factions at some point in their ancient history. Through thousands of years, the two sides had never learned to live in complete peace with one another. Even the Sulaini migration a century ago to the only other habitable planet in the system had done little to quell their conflict.
In fact, as far as Hansen knew, the only thing in their history that had ever put a stop to their fighting was the heavy iron claw of total Veshtonn domination, under which both worlds had suffered for nearly eighteen years. But in the four years since the Coalition had liberated their system, the acts of violence between them, though still relatively small in scope, had begun to pick up again, both in frequency and in severity.
Now, it appeared, proof of the long suspected covert cooperation between the Sulaini government and the Veshtonn had been discovered. The Sulaini had begun making concessions to their old enemy in return for their support. No doubt the Veshtonn had their own agenda, separate from that of the Sulaini, but as far as the Sulaini were concerned, their old enemy was now their ally.
So the two Caldanran worlds were once again teetering precariously on the very brink of interplanetary war. In fact, knowing that the Veshtonn were poised to take advantage of any opportunity that might arise, the Cirrans’ memory of what it had been like to live under their brutal rule was probably the only thing preventing them from retaliating against their aggressive brothers. But memory could be fleeting, especially in the face of active aggression. There was no way of telling just how long their better judgment might hold out, now that the Sulaini had made a move against them.
Hansen sighed again. A shooting war in the Caldanra system would not only jeopardize Solfleet’s facilities there, but would also significantly degrade the overall effectiveness of Coalition forces throughout the entire sector. That in turn would provide the Veshtonn with a huge tactical advantage. Once hostilities commenced, the enemy would soon be able to advance almost at will through the system and would likely retake that entire sector before any Coalition counterattack into the Rosha’Kana system could be mounted.
If that happened—if the Veshtonn were given the opportunity to rebuild their forces in the Caldanra system and then combine them with those already occupying the Rosha’Kana system, Solfleet would stand little if any chance of slowing their advance toward Earth to the extent that he, the president, MacLeod, and everyone else involved in planning the Timeshift mission were counting on. As a result, their timetable would likely be shortened drastically, perhaps by as much as four months. There wouldn’t be near enough time to prepare Sergeant Graves for the mission. They’d have to send someone else, and Hansen really didn’t want to have to do that.
Truth be told, he didn’t really want to have to send anyone. But if the president ordered the mission then his duty would be to see that it was carried out.
But what if the president ultimately decided not to authorize it, which was very likely going to be the case? What then? Without Timeshift everything depended on the survival of the Tor’Kana race. Everything depended on the success of the Rosha’Kana counterattack.
The mission, dubbed ‘Operation Mass Eviction,’ called for all of the as yet unconquered Coalition member worlds to combine whatever military forces they had left within the vicinity surrounding the Rosha’Kana system and mount a comprehensive, multi-faceted attack into the heart of the Veshtonn occupation. In Hansen’s opinion they had no choice but to go forward and had to do so soon. They had to return the surviving Tor’Kana to their home world as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the most logical place from which to stage the operation had proven to be the Caldanra system. Considering the latest developments, staging an operation of such magnitude from there was going to prove much more easily said than done.
There was only one thing to do. He wished it could wait. He wished he could give Royer the time she needed to get out there and persuade Graves to join them. But there was no way the Cirrans were going to wait that long. Hell, he was surprised they hadn’t already retaliated.
He picked up his mug and gulped down the last mouthful of his lukewarm second cup of coffee—or was it his third?—then reached for his comm-panel, hoping it wasn’t too late to catch the president in her office before she left to conduct her weekly Federation Network broadcast.
The day known as Set’Ah, which currently fell on Saturday on the Earth calendar, served as the Cirran equivalent of a Sabbath, so traffic had been very light and Dylan had made it home in record time. As he reached the top of the stairs that led up from the complex’s parking lot, he noticed someone coming down the sidewalk from the general direction of his building. The man gave no indication of having seen him yet. Rather, his attention seemed to be focused solely on whatever the ring-adorned fingers of his right hand were tapping into the small handcomp he carried in his left. He was dressed in casual tan slacks and a dark blue button-down dress shirt, neither of which looked much like they’d just been taken out of the closet, and a lightweight brown leather jacket that matched the color of his dress shoes almost perfectly. His slicked back dark hair looked damp, as if he’d just taken a shower, but that might just have been a generous application of hair gel.
They’d approached to within five meters of each other before the stranger looked up quite suddenly, as if Dylan had startled him. When he did, an odd expression like recognition combined with fear flashed briefly across his face and he seemed to hesitate for a moment—just a slight, barely perceptible stutter in his stride—before he continued approaching. Had Dylan not been trained to observe, he probably would have missed it.
“Good morning,” the stranger mumbled as he passed, nodding slightly, which enabled him to avoid making eye contact.
“Morning,” Dylan responded. Then he stopped, turned around, and watched the stranger stuff his handcomp inside his jacket and trot hurriedly down the steps and out of sight.
There was something not quite right about that man—something about the way he’d avoided eye contact. Dylan felt sure that he’d done it intentionally. And his ‘good morning’ had come without the quick flash of a friendly smile that usually accompanied such a greeting. And then there was that split second of fear. Why? Why would the stranger fear him? Dylan wasn’t angry at him. Hell, he didn’t even know the guy. Maybe he was just shy? No, that wasn’t it. Shyness might explain the averted eyes and the frosty greeting, but not the fear.
A car door closed. An engine started. Dylan watched a small blue sports car, presumably the same guy, pull out of the lot and speed down the road and out of sight, then continued walking toward his building. He’d have to keep an eye on that guy if he ever came back around.
It was an odd thing though. He’d thought he knew everyone who lived in his building, at least by sight if not by name. Then again, the stranger might just have been visiting someone. He might have been a tenant’s friend or relative. Or maybe he’d come out of one of the other buildings and, being unfamiliar with the layout, had taken a roundabout path to the parking lot. Of course, Dylan had been gone for a couple of weeks, too, and since the complex housed mostly Solfleet personnel, there tended to be a fairly high turnover rate. Running across a new face every now and then wasn’t all that uncommon. So maybe he was a new resident. Whatever the answer, he decided there was no point in dwelling on it.
He crept as light-footed as he could up the stairs to his landing—it was still pretty early and Carolyn would still be asleep—and found the front door to be locked. That was as it should have been, although Carolyn rarely ever remembered to lock it. Good for her, this time. He dug his keycard out of his pocket, slipped it into the slot, and punched in his access code. The lock released with a click and the door swung slightly ajar.
He stepped inside, closed and relocked the door behind him as quietly as he could, then stood still in the semi-darkness for a moment, listening for any indication that Carolyn might be up and about. The apartment was completely silent. He slipped off his sandals and kicked them aside, then crossed the living room and opened the full-length beige curtains that hung across the large panoramic window—Carolyn had actually closed them for a change—flooding the room with bright morning sunlight. The vibrant blue and deep green house plants that flanked each piece of furniture and dressed the four corners of the room, many of which Carolyn had brought with them from Earth, seemed to perk up right away, as if the warm life-sustaining light had awakened them from their own nocturnal slumber.
He crept quietly into the bedroom and found Carolyn still in bed asleep, just as he’d expected he would. She lay naked on her right side, facing the far wall and hugging her over-sized pillow tightly to her bosom, and her her legs were wrapped around the twisted and tangled blankets as if they were making love to her. That was certainly different. Thinking back over the years, Dylan couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept in the nude. The bed was heavily rumpled and the bottom sheet had pulled away from the corner of the mattress closest to her head. Bad dreams?
Being careful not to disturb her, he set his laundry bag down out of the way and treaded lightly into the bathroom to relieve himself. He finished quickly and washed his hands while the toilet flushed, then dried them on a damp hand towel that was hanging slightly askew on the rack next to the sink. Then he stepped back into the bedroom and tip-toed over to the curtains—a matched set to the ones in the living room. Instead of hiding one large panoramic window, they covered a sliding glass door and the two substantially smaller windows of a more conventional design that flanked it. He found the cleverly concealed split in the fabric and pushed the left curtain aside just enough to expose the small green touch-pad set into the narrow strip of wall between the door and the left window.
He tapped the pad and the door slid open, almost without a sound. He stepped out onto the beautifully stained hardwood rear deck and drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with fresh forest air. Roughly nine months had passed since he and Carolyn had arrived on Cirra and moved into this secluded housing complex several kilometers from the base, but he still enjoyed sitting outside and taking in the view whenever he had time.
The smaller, more distant of Cirra’s twin moons was slowly rising into the now cloudless blue-green sky from beyond the snow-capped peaks in the west, its soft gray-white face barely visible through the sunlit atmosphere. Several large birds of prey, some with wing spans he knew to be as wide as six or seven meters, soared in silence at dizzying heights, awaiting their chance to swoop down out of the sky and snatch up any unwary prey—their favorite meal was an animal very much like Earth’s white-tail deer—while untold numbers of the smaller, more timid species sang their morning greetings to Caldanra, the mother star, for all to hear. A dense, eternally dark forest of hundred meter tall everblues blanketed the rolling terrain of the surrounding countryside and stood watchful guard over the small city that lay nestled in the deep valley far to the north. No matter the time of day or night, their pleasing pine-like aroma was always prominent and early-morning fresh, no doubt due to the underlying hint of mint that emanated from the bluer female variety.
Now there was irony. Unlike Earth women, not to mention most other humanoid females, Cirran women never wore any kind of perfume because to do so would violate one or another of their innumerable religious taboos. Yet the female trees of Cirra used their aroma in a perfume-like manner to stimulate their male counterparts into releasing whatever it was they released to make little trees. And they bred like rabbits in springtime. Not even the invigorating fragrances of the varied flora in the garden below could overpower the tree-scent much beyond the garden’s own confines.
The trees’ human-like characteristics reminded him of a Bible passage he’d read once, long ago when he used to take a little time each morning to read that ancient text. It came from the book of ‘Luke’ if he remembered correctly. ‘And some of the Pharisees called to him from the crowd, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” But He answered and said to them, “I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.’” If trees could use perfume to seduce other trees, then maybe the idea of stones crying out wasn’t such a stretch after all.
The garden itself—one of four in the sprawling sixteen building complex—was large and meticulously sculpted, and dominated almost the entire courtyard that lay amidst the four identical apartment buildings, including his own, that formed a loose square around it. Several sand-based paths of pale pink and off-white pebbles, many of them speckled with shimmering orange-yellow flecks, meandered among hundreds of varieties of pastel blossoms and exotic blue and green flowering plants. Small wooden bridges provided solid footing where narrow streams of cool, semi-phosphorescent violet-blue water flowed across them. Every dozen meters or so along each one of those paths, larger than life-sized white stone statues of gracefully posed and often scantily clad Cirran gods and goddesses, much like the figures created by the ancient artisans of Europe, stood watch over polished wood and rose-marble benches that sat amidst the flower gardens, waiting for visitors to take rest upon them. The garden was truly an artistic achievement and, except for Marissa, was the most beautiful sight that Dylan had seen in the last two weeks.
He sighed. Marissa. Damn his big mouth anyway. He didn’t genuinely love her, not really, but he’d as much as told her otherwise. So now what was he going to do? He liked her well enough as a person, of course—very much, in fact. She was a great girl who was fun to be with and fun to play around with a little once in a while. He certainly didn’t want to hurt her. But it wasn’t love that he felt for her, it was lust. Pure, unadulterated lust. He would have loved to have had sex with her right there in the shower when he had the chance, but the idea of carrying on a romantic relationship with her held little appeal for him. She was a Marine, and a Ranger at that—essentially one of the guys, except for her gender. Not his idea of serious relationship material at all.
He drew another deep, deep breath, yawned, and then exhaled slowly. He was too tired to think about it anymore. Short as it had been, the FTX had seemed like one of the longest, most grueling ones he’d ever been a part of. Two weeks, bivouacked high up on the barren, hard, dusty gray-faced slopes of the western range. The nights had been bitterly cold, the days almost oven-like. But now, finally, he was home, breathing in the minty, pine-scented air and gazing down at the lush, living garden, enjoying some much needed peace and quiet.
“You’re home early,” Carolyn said as she stepped out onto the deck behind him, pulling her bathrobe on around her. She made it sound as if it were some kind of miracle.
So much for the peace and quiet. But at least she couldn’t give him the old ‘you’ve ruined my plans again’ speech, since she’d only just climbed out of bed. For that he felt eternally thankful.
“We cleaned most of our gear in the field as soon as we broke camp last night,” he told her. “All we had to do when we got back to the base was put everything away. We knocked out our leadership debriefing and got released by about four-thirty this morning.”
He leaned close to kiss her good morning as she reached his side, but only because it was the proper thing to do. His heart certainly wasn’t in it. Neither was hers apparently, as at the last second she turned her face away so that his kiss landed on her cheek.
She tied off her robe, then leaned on the railing next to him and gazed down into the garden. “In that case you should have been home over two hours ago, shouldn’t you?”
“They had a big breakfast buffet set up for us when we got back. They put a lot of hard work into it and there was a ton of food there. I knew you’d still be asleep, so I stayed and had breakfast with some of the guys.”
“Of course you did,” she said sarcastically. “Just you and some of the guys. No big deal. God knows there’s nothing more enjoyable than spending time with some of the guys. Especially right after you’ve been with them day and night for two solid weeks. Certainly wouldn’t want to go home and get into bed with your wife.”
He looked at her. If that was an invitation—it didn’t sound much like one, but she had slept in the nude, knowing that he was coming home—he was certainly ready to accept after what had almost happened back in the shower stall. “It’s still early,” he pointed out.
She returned his semi-amorous gaze with a much colder one of her own. “I’m up now,” she pointed out, her tone making it very clear that she had not been extending an invitation.
Dylan didn’t respond to that. How was it that she could go for days or weeks at a time without seeing him or even being able to speak to him and still greet him with such a poor and spiteful attitude? He just couldn’t understand it.
“So how did this latest in a very long chain of field training exercises go?” she asked, changing the subject. What she didn’t say with words came through as clear as crystal in her icy tone. She didn’t much care how the FTX went. The question, like his attempted kiss moments earlier, was only offered out of perceived obligation.
Dylan shook his head, almost imperceptibly, thinking about Marissa again. The urge to ask Carolyn for a divorce had been weighing heavily on him for several months. So far he’d been able to resist it, to bite his tongue and not bring up the subject. But now that he’d come so close to telling Marissa that he loved her—he didn’t truly love her, he reminded himself, but perhaps he could learn to love her, given the chance—now that he’d held her in his arms and kissed her and very nearly made love to her...
‘How’d the field training exercise go?’ Carolyn had asked. “It was a little too long,” he answered. “Only two weeks, but somehow too long.” And then, for whatever it might be worth, he added, “I’m really glad to be home,” even though he wasn’t.
She didn’t respond. A quick glance her way confirmed that she wasn’t even listening to him. Not really. He could have asked her what was wrong, but if he did she’d only refuse to discuss it as usual. She’d just insist that nothing was wrong, which would annoy the hell out of him and most likely touch off an argument because if there were nothing wrong then there was no good reason for her to behave the way she was behaving. Then again, she’d never needed a reason, had she? God! He was so sick and tired of her childishness!
Yes. He’d be much better off if he didn’t bother to ask. That was a lesson he’d learned a long time ago, the hard way. Don’t ask. Just don’t ask. He’d tried it for the first time right after Ranger school, and again soon after they moved into their present home. Eventually he’d quit asking for good, preferring the long periods of not speaking over all that arguing. Now that he and Marissa had started...whatever it was they’d started, he wasn’t all that sure he cared about his marriage any more than Carolyn did, despite the fact that he’d always tried harder than she had to make it work.
“Too long,” he repeated, referring both to the length of the exercise and to what he was beginning to see as a pointless struggle to save an already failed marriage.
She peered at him out of the corner of her eye. “And what about the platoon’s resident beauty queen, little Miss Marissa? I’ll bet she didn’t think it was too long.”
Dylan looked over at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, Dylan. We’ve been to a lot of unit social functions since we got here. I’ve seen the way she watches you. She wants you in a bad way.”
“You’re imagining things,” he told her as he looked away.
“Am I? Then why are you so uncomfortable all of the sudden?”
“What makes you think I’m uncomfortable?”
“Look me in the eye and tell me there’s nothing going on between the two of you.”
“Oh, here we go again,” he remarked as he straightened up. She was going out of her way to pick a fight, and she wasn’t going to give up until she got one. He should have asked her what was wrong after all, he now realized. Her refusal to discuss it would have led to a short argument, then to one of those long periods of silence between them, which would have been uncomfortable but a lot easier to deal with than her petty, jealous accusations.
Especially now that there was actually something to those petty, jealous accusations.
“That’s right,” she confirmed, standing with him. “Here we go again.”
“I’ve told you at least a dozen times, Carolyn, there’s nothing going on between Marissa and me,” he reminded her as calmly as he could manage. Then, looking her square in the eye, he asked, “Why do I have to tell you again?”
“Because you haven’t convinced me it’s the truth,” she answered, glaring back at him.
“It is the truth, Carolyn,” he proclaimed. Now of course, for the first time ever, that often repeated proclamation was a lie. “There is absolutely nothing going on between us.”
Lying usually left a bitter taste in his mouth, but in this case he didn’t have a choice. If he told her about what had happened earlier she’d probably accuse him of having been in a sexual relationship with Marissa for months. Convinced of that, she’d not only file for divorce, which he would probably welcome at this point, but she’d likely try to hurt his career as well.
“Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t,” she said after a moment, “but she’s attractive enough to tempt you.”
There was certainly no denying that fact, and Carolyn would never believe him if he tried. She knew him far too well. In her eyes a denial would be akin to confessing all, even though there really was nothing to confess. Well, almost nothing. Damn her anyway. She could be almost psychic sometimes. No, even worse than a psychic. A wife, with several years of experience.
“So she’s attractive,” he admitted as he turned away and leaned on the railing again. And why not? She was attractive. Hell, she was downright gorgeous. That was an obvious, objective fact. “So what? So are several billion other women in the known galaxy, including you.”
“Don’t even try to sweet-talk me, Dylan,” she warned. “We’ve been together too long for that to work.”
“Well, you are.” She was. That was the truth.
“Tell me something,” she said, brushing off the compliment like so much worthless dust. “Was Marissa one of the ‘guys’ you had breakfast with this morning?”
“Yeah, she was there. Her and about twenty-some other people from the platoon, out on the back patio. So what? She’s just another Marine, Carolyn, just like I am. She just happens to be assigned to my squad.”
“Exactly. She serves the Corps directly under you, which is exactly where she’d love to serve you personally. I’ll bet getting naked with you in the showers is the highlight of every mission for her. Probably for you, too.”
“We don’t get naked together!” Dylan shouted, glaring at her. He was quickly losing what little patience he had left.
“Oh no?” Carolyn asked, unperturbed. “You told me yourself there’s only one locker room in the whole barracks.”
“Oh, for God sake, Carolyn! Are you listening to yourself? Do you have any idea how childish you sound?”
“What’s wrong, Dylan? Can’t answer my question without lying?”
“The showers are in separate stalls with their own private changing cubicles,” he pointed out. It wasn’t anything she didn’t already know. “Just like the ones you’d find at a public gym or a health club. We couldn’t see each other even if we wanted to, and you damn well know it!” He looked away again, then added as an afterthought, “Besides, Corporal Ortiz has her own shower in her own room in the barracks. Another fact you were already aware of.”
“Yeah, I know that. But did she use her own shower in her own room this morning?” she asked, her tone growing even more challenging.
Dylan just shook his head in disgust, completely exasperated. Why did he even bother? “I don’t know because I didn’t look for her,” he lied without a second thought.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, drawing her own conclusion. “She used the locker room showers with everyone else.”
She faced out toward the garden again, but didn’t lean on the railing with him. “I still can’t believe the Corps lets men and women who work so closely together take showers together, even if they are in separate stalls. Especially when some of them are married to other people. It’s just too easy for a couple of them to step into the same one and...how should I say it?...spend some quality time together.”
“Carolyn, would you please just...” Dylan stopped short, trying to keep his temper under control. Whatever it was that was really bothering her, it was bothering her a lot. She was really going all out this time. Good thing he’d never told her about how the Rangers’ field expedient procedures ignored gender completely.
“You know what? Forget it,” he said as calmly as he could. He looked up at her. “Just let it go, all right?”
“Fine,” she said, looking back at him.
“Thank you.”
“But it looks like the two of you are going to be spending some more time together again real soon.”
Her expression made it clear that she had something more to say. He waited, but she said nothing. She was going to wait him out and make him ask. More childishness. “What makes you say that?” he asked immediately. He was in no mood for any more of her stupid mind games—mind games that easily rivaled any of those he’d experienced in Basic Training, Advanced Marine Infantry Training, or Ranger training.
“Your lieutenant just called,” she answered, “personally.”
A personal call from the lieutenant? That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all. Such a call so soon after an FTX could only mean one thing. Something serious had gone down, real world as he would say, and SpecOps was being called on to respond.
“What did he say?”
“You’ve got what he called a ‘real-world’ mission tomorrow.”
Dylan sighed as his eyes fell to a point in space somewhere between himself and the garden. “Tomorrow,” he mumbled. “Great.”
“I thought you’d like that,” she went on. “Who knows? Maybe now you’ll have a chance to sleep with her, too...assuming you haven’t already. I know that’s what you want.”
Yes it was what he wanted, perhaps even more than she suspected. Perhaps even more than he suspected. But despite her suspicions she couldn’t possibly know that for sure. So why was she being such a bitch this morning?
He looked up at her again and said, “I thought you just agreed to let it go.”
“Truth hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Carolyn!” he shouted, pounding his fists on the railing and glaring angrily at her. All right. For the first time, her suspicions were correct. So what? He’d still had enough. “Just shut the hell up, okay! This whole argument is so damn stupid!”
Her lips quivered and her eyes burned with rage as she glared right back at him, looking as if she were about to scream. But she held her tongue. After all their years of marriage, she obviously knew just how far she could push him—she’d had plenty of practice, after all—and she’d just reached the limit.
After a moment her features softened, if only a little, and she calmly asked, “Want some coffee?”
He blinked, looked at her oddly. Was that empathy that had found its way into her voice all of the sudden? Surprising, and very much unexpected. Yelling at her and telling her to shut up usually set her off on an rant or sent her stomping away in a fit of anger, throwing whatever breakable objects might be within reach at that moment as hard and as far as she could. But not this time. Why the difference? Could it be that she, too, was finally getting tired of all the arguing? No, of course not. She’d started it in the first place.
What had she just asked? Did he want some coffee? He nodded. She turned her back and went inside.
Dylan stepped back from the railing and stretched out on one of their two chaise lounges, rested his elbows on the arms, and covered his face with his hands.
No wonder she was in such a foul mood. Despite her ill temper and her tendency to act like he was little more than a bothersome inconvenience when he was home, she really hated it when he went away for extended periods of time. And now, after having just come home from two weeks in the field, he had to leave again tomorrow morning.
But why did she constantly have to act this way?
What was he going to do about Marissa?
“Just great,” he repeated.
He sat in silence and waited for his coffee.
Karen rolled onto her back and stretched her left arm across the width of the queen-sized bed, but all she found between the warm cotton sheets was emptiness. Peering through narrow crescents of dry, sleep-filled eyes, she focused on the pillow beside her. The beige pillowcase appeared a dull, washed-out gray under the dim blue-green glow of the headboard clock display, the dimple in its center lost in shadow. It reminded her of a small hill not far from the barren, rocky wasteland of Luna’s Sea of Tranquility—Apollo 11’s landing site—so bright where the sun’s rays shone across its angled surfaces and so dark where they didn’t reach. She’d spent hours hopping playfully about like a little school girl at recess on that hill when she and Liz celebrated their thirteenth wedding anniversary at the Mare Tranquillitatis Resort and Historical Park just last summer.
She rolled onto her side and pulled the pillow to her, abandoning her own, and laid her head in that place where her loving wife’s head had been. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, finding comfort in the subtle yet sensuous bouquet of Liz’s sweet perfume, even as a solitary tear flowed from the corner of her eye and lost itself in the pillowcase.
Liz had been so busy over the last few weeks since the ten days or so she’d spent working at home, often working sixteen to eighteen hour days in order to catch up on things. They rarely had dinner together anymore, and practically never went out.
But last night had been different. They’d enjoyed a wonderful evening of dining and dancing together at the Officers’ Club’s semi-annual Friday night ball, and an even more wonderful and exhausting night in bed. Karen smiled with the memory of the passion they’d shared, but her smile quickly waned and more tears ran from her eyes as she reminded herself that their wonderful and exhausting night of passion was also the last night they were going to have together for at least a month.
Liz had left her alone before, of course. Many times over the years, in fact—sometimes for several months at a time. Such was the life of a soldier’s spouse. But the longer she and Liz were together, the deeper their love for one another grew, so those long separations, though inevitable and unavoidable, never got any easier.
She sighed, and still more tears swelled the damp spot on the pillowcase. This newest long period of loneliness was only just beginning, and she already missed her so much. If only Liz had awakened her to see her off. Just to say good-bye.
Karen halted in mid regret. Granted, Liz had had to catch an early flight, but it wasn’t like her to leave without saying good-bye. It wasn’t like her at all. She hadn’t done that since... Come to think of it, in all the years they’d been together she’d never done that. Not once. As a matter of fact, loving and considerate wife that she was, she’d always gone out of her way to make sure she didn’t do that. So maybe...
Karen looked up and checked the time. The display showed 0553 hours. Relief poured into her very soul like a sudden breath of fresh air into starving lungs and she dropped her head back to the pillow and wiped the tears from her eyes. It was still early. Liz hadn’t left yet.
She heard a sound—a sound like that of a gentle spring rain. A seemingly distant, barely perceivable whisper, existing almost solely on a subconscious level. A sound so faint that it wasn’t until the sound suddenly stopped, trailing off with one last, quiet spatter, that Karen realized she’d been hearing anything at all.
The shower had been running.
She tossed the cozy blankets aside, sat up, and dropped her feet to the soft, thick carpet. The room felt comfortably warm and the sweet honeysuckle fragrance of her favorite potpourri filled the air. “Lights,” she said, her usually melodic voice sounding scratchy with its first use of the morning. The lights came up to a third of their capacity, exactly as she’d programmed them to do with each morning’s first activation, but she still had to drop her unfocused, waking stare for a few seconds until she got used to the relative brightness.
The red bikini panties she’d worn last night lay on the floor next to her feet, right where Liz had dropped them. The sexy, sheer black lace panties Liz had worn were there, too, and the matching bra lay just a few feet away from the bed. The short trail of clothing ended just inside the bedroom door with their stockings and the expensive new designer dresses they’d bought last week specifically for last night’s ball.
She grinned once more. It had indeed been one hell of a passionate night. Liz had looked so beautiful.
She stood up and reached for the ceiling, yawning and arching her back, her joints cracking and popping as she stretched every muscle she possibly could. She ran her fingers through her long, dark brown hair and gave her scalp a quick two-handed scratch, then dropped her arms to her sides and strode to the bathroom.
A warm cloud of honeysuckle-scented steam enveloped her as she opened the door to find Liz standing naked on her side of the long rose-beige marble counter in front of the large mirror brushing her shoulder-length hair, which shone like strands of platinum under the bright white light bar that spanned the mirror’s width across its top. So beautiful.
Leaving the door open to let the steam escape, Karen walked up behind her, wrapped her arms around her, and kissed the side of her neck, just below her ear. “Good morning, beautiful,” she said.
Liz laid her head back on Karen’s shoulder and kissed her tenderly. “Don’t get me started again,” she warned.
“Why not?” Karen asked, grinning mischievously.
“Because I won’t want to stop, and I have to get ready to go.” Her disappointment and her desire both were clearly evident in her tone.
“That’s okay. I have to go, too.” Karen kissed her again, then stepped away and sat down on the toilet. “Want some breakfast when you’re done?” she asked, gazing wantonly at her wife’s beautiful body.
“No thanks,” Liz answered as she resumed brushing her hair. “I’m not that hungry yet. I’ll grab something later at the terminal or on the flight.”
“How can you not be hungry?” Karen asked. “I’m starving.”
“You should be starving. You hardly ate anything last night.”
Karen grinned mischievously. “I was saving my appetite.”
Liz smiled as well as she set her brush aside and started arranging her hair into one of the freer, loosely clasped styles that Karen had always preferred over the tight vertical roll in back that she usually wore when in uniform. “Well, next time think about what you’re saving it for,” she suggested. “Some things simply don’t fill you up.”
Karen finished, pulled a tissue from the wall dispenser and patted herself dry, then got up. As the toilet auto-flushed, she stepped over to her sink and washed and dried her hands. Then she turned her back to the mirror and, moving a little closer to Liz, leaned back against the edge of the counter. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she said as she crossed her arms beneath her breasts.
“So do I,” Liz agreed, holding her hair in place just so with one hand to consider the style’s acceptability in the mirror, “but I don’t really have a choice.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Rejecting that style, Liz let her hair fall free and dropped her hands to her sides. “We talked about this at dinner last night, Karen,” she reminded her, staring at her reflection and considering what style to try next.
“I know, I know. The trip was your idea in the first place and it wouldn’t look very good if you backed out of it now.”
“Exactly.” Liz gazed into Karen’s beautiful but sad hazel eyes. “Hey,” she said, reaching up and gently wiping a tear away from her cheek with her thumb. “I have to do this, Karen, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it.”
“Then why not make yourself too busy to leave and send someone else?”
“We did send someone else,” Liz answered as she looked back into the mirror and started working with her hair again. “Ensign Pillinger. Remember? I told you about him at dinner.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Then you should also remember that I told you he didn’t do so well.” She pulled her hair back from the sides and held it in place behind her head.
“That looks nice,” Karen commented. “You should wear it that way.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. It’s cute. Makes you look like a teenager again.”
Liz snickered. “Yeah, right.”
She rooted through the small glass bowl on the counter, selected two little white-gold oval barrettes from among the various pins and bands, and pinned her hair in place. Then she turned her head back and forth to the left and the right a couple of times to double-check the results in the mirror. “That’ll work,” she decided.
She looked at Karen again. “Sweetheart, I don’t want to be away from you for the next month any more than you want me to be,” she reassured her. “God knows I’m going to miss you so much. But like I explained last night, there’s a very important mission in the works and the admiral and I feel it’s vital that we get the right person for the job.”
“That Marine Corps sergeant you told me about?”
“That’s right, yeah,” Liz answered with a nod.
“And you’re taking a commercial flight?”
“With a military escort at the other end, yes. That’s why I’m wearing civilian clothes, to draw as little attention to myself as possible.” Liz began to see the wheels turning in her wife’s mind. “Why do you ask?” she inquired, suspecting she already knew the answer.
Karen’s gaze fell to Liz’s ample breasts while she considered whether or not to ask the question that had popped into her head. They were so perfect, as firm and round as they had been the first time she saw them when they were teenagers, with nipples the color of pink carnations.
“Karen? Hello?”
“I was just thinking,” she finally said, snapping out of it. She looked up again, her eyes pleading even before she spoke. “Any chance I could come with you?”
Liz smiled. “Believe me, if I could take you with me I would. But this trip is classified, so I can’t. Hell, I’ve already told you more than I should have.”
At that, Karen smiled, too. “My dear, you always tell me a lot more than you should,” she humorously pointed out.
“Yes, I know. It’ll be my downfall one day.”
“Nonsense. I’ve never repeated anything to anyone.”
“I know, but that’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is, if I take you with me Admiral Hansen will assume I’ve compromised the secrecy of my mission. Rightfully so, too. He’ll pull me off that flight so fast it’ll make my head spin, which will make it easier for him to rip it off my shoulders afterwards. This mission, not to mention my career, is just too important for me to allow that to happen. I’m sorry.”
With a slight shrug of her shoulders and a smile to let Liz know that she wasn’t too badly disappointed—she hadn’t really expected her to let her go along anyway—Karen said, “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“Of course not,” Liz agreed, smiling back.
They gazed at each other for another moment. Then, as Karen started to cry again, Liz took her into her arms and hugged her close. “I’ll be back before you know it,” she whispered.
“Wanna bet?”
Liz grinned. “Try not to hound the admiral too much.”
Karen sniffed. “I won’t.”
They relaxed their embrace and gazed into one another’s eyes again, then kissed. A long and passionate kiss, it could easily have led to something more if Liz had had more time. But, unfortunately, she didn’t.
“I really do have to get ready,” she said.
Reluctantly, Karen let her go. “Behave yourself out there,” she said.
“Yes, mother.” Liz kissed her again as she grabbed a dry towel off the rack attached to the side of the counter, then left the bathroom.
Karen watched her go, then stepped into the shower.
Liz tried to wrap the towel around her as approached her dresser, only to discover that it barely reached around her chest and only hung halfway to her waist. She laughed. She’d grabbed a hand towel instead of her bath towel. No doubt Karen would have found that hysterical. She dropped it onto her stool instead and then sat down to apply her makeup. Because she spent so much of her time in uniform, she never really wore much makeup, but a little bit, when properly applied, could go a long way to bring out a woman’s natural beauty. That was what she’d always gone for.
She didn’t want to leave Karen behind any more than Karen wanted to be left behind. She loved her so much and loved to spend as much time with her as she could. Turning her down had been hard. If only she could take her along. Given the option, she would without hesitation, but that was an option the admiral would never give her.
They’d been lovers since high school, totally committed to one another, and had married in the summer after Karen finished college. In all they’d been together almost twenty-two years. Who would ever have thought, way back at the very beginning when they first met, that things would ever turn out to be so good between them?
It had all begun with a party early in Liz’s junior year of high school. Her overbearing parents, who’d raised her and her brother in a strict religious home, had finally caved in and given her their permission to start dating, and she’d wasted no time in making her classmates aware of her sudden availability. A senior boy named Chris, whom she’d known had had his eye on her ever since grade school, had eagerly asked her out to a Halloween party that one of his friends was throwing. That friend had rented the clubhouse at the condos where he lived, which he’d claimed had a heated indoor pool, a large hot tub, and if they could break into it, a very well stocked liquor bar. She’d happily accepted Chris’s invitation and had promptly told her parents that the party would be chaperoned, which was of course a lie. After all, if it really had been chaperoned, no one would have wanted to go.
Both the clubhouse and the party had turned out to be everything Chris’s friend had claimed they would be, and more. The pool was Olympic-sized, lit from several feet below the surface of the crystal water by a row of bright, built-in amber lights. Except for the recessed safety light in the ceiling above the front door, their host had turned all the other lights in the pool house off to enhance the Halloween mood. Costumes were discarded early in favor of swim trunks and bikinis, but it wasn’t long after someone finally managed to break into the liquor cabinet behind the bar that a few of the more uninhibited girls discarded their bikini tops as well.
As the evening wore on and what had started as a generous supply of liquor dwindled, more and more of the increasingly intoxicated partiers abandoned their inhibitions and stripped off their swimsuits. Now and then couples disappeared into the sauna or to some other secluded place for a time, and then return to the festivities with renewed enthusiasm. But for the naïve, sixteen year old Elizabeth Royer, it was the hot tub that marked her passage into that new stage of her life.
Like most everyone else, she and Chris had traded Halloween costumes for swimsuits fairly early. Hers was a navy blue two-piece with bright yellow highlights, but was of a more conservative cut than the skimpy string bikinis that a lot of the other girls were wearing. They’d been swimming and diving for most of the evening and were starting to get tired, so at a few minutes past 10:00, about an hour before Liz was going to have to ask Chris to take her home, they decided to go out and relax in the hot tub for a while.
The tub was actually located outside, but was enclosed within a semicircular extension of the building’s walls, tall enough so that no one not attending the party could see it. Several other guests were already enjoying it when Chris and Liz got there, but it was big enough to seat over a dozen people around its circumference, so the tired couple went ahead and joined them.
At first, the dark jet-churned water was a bit too hot for comfort and Liz had to sit there, body tense and eyes closed, willing herself not to jump right back out. But after a few minutes she began to find its heat and its gentle massaging action quite soothing and luxurious, not to mention a little stimulating, sexually.
About five minutes into it, Chris leaned in close and quietly suggested that she take off her top. At first she refused outright, but then he pointed out to her that all the other girls in the hot tub were already topless. As a matter of fact, the one straddled across her boyfriend’s lap kissing him was having sex with the guy at that very moment, or so he claimed. But a ripple of bright color below the water’s surface told Liz that the girl still had her bikini bottom on, so she didn’t believe him...until the girl clutched her boyfriend’s face to her breasts and started rocking back and forth.
Liz reconsidered Chris’s suggestion and finally decided that becoming known to her friends as the only girl at the party who wouldn’t go topless would be a lot worse than actually going topless, especially when some of them, guys and girls alike, were already running around stark naked without a care. After all, a tag like that might adversely affect her fledgling social life. So, much to the delight of everyone else in the hot tub who happened to be paying attention, her top came off, and they showed their appreciation of her generous attributes by breaking into a short round of applause.
She couldn’t help but feel self-conscious at first, but the next few minutes of conversation with Chris helped her to relax. She was really beginning to like him. Soon the talking turned into kissing. Petting and fondling followed as the booze she’d imbibed began to affect her judgment, and her ingrained inhibitions slowly fell away like so many layers of clothing on a hot summer day. Before too much longer she was as naked as the day she was born, perched on the edge of the underwater bench and lying back against the angled seat back with her legs wrapped tightly around Chris’s waist as he deflowered her for all he was worth.
As it turned out, all he was worth wasn’t as much as she’d hoped for, once she’d decided to give herself to him, but that certainly wasn’t due to any shortcomings on his part. On the contrary, he knew exactly what to do and how to do it, and he had the equipment to do it very well. And she was thoroughly enjoying it, too—at least it was a lot more fun than all those years of masturbation had been—but it just wasn’t totlly...fulfilling.
She opened her eyes for a moment and happened to notice that the couple locked together in a deep, passionate kiss directly across from her were both very pretty girls with long dark hair. All but ignoring Chris’s efforts, she watched intently as they kissed and caressed one another, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed them sooner.
The one on the right stood up. She wasn’t just topless, she was completely naked. She stepped up onto the bench, then turned around and sat on the hot tub’s narrow rim and opened her legs. An almost bestial lust filled Liz’s heart as she looked between them, surprising her as much as it would have anyone else, and when the second girl stood up—she was naked, too—and turned her back, then knelt before her friend and leaned in to taste her soft pink flesh, Liz’s entire body suddenly quivered and erupted with the first non-self-induced and most explosive orgasm she’d ever experienced.
Poor Chris would probably live out the remainder of his days thinking he was responsible for her awakening.
Finally, at that moment, it had all made sense. As far back as grade school, Liz had had the same superficial feelings of puppy love for boys that all of her friends had. But as she passed into her teens, that attraction had begun to diminish, replaced by what she’d always thought was nothing more than innocent curiosity and the simple platonic appreciation of a young woman’s beauty. She’d never even considered the possibility, until that very moment, that she might like girls in that way more than she did boys.
She didn’t want to be mean, so she let Chris finish what he’d started, but when those two girls climbed out of the hot tub a few minutes later and started to dry off, she excused herself to go talk to them while she had the chance.
Leaving her suit behind—they were naked, too, so why bother putting it back on?—she climbed out and joined them. She introduced herself, and the taller of the two responded in kind. Her name was Karen DiAngelo, and her lover’s name was Julie Covelli. Both were fourteen year old freshmen new to the school district.
After a brief conversation, during which Julie left to use the bathroom, Liz asked Karen out for the following weekend. But Karen turned her down, explaining that she and Julie had been friends since early elementary school and had secretly been lovers for the past two years, since long before their parents’ recent marriage had made them stepsisters. Since that marriage had resulted in their living together, they had a great thing going that neither one of them wanted to complicate.
Over the ensuing weeks, Liz tried a few more times to get one or the other of them, or even both of them if they were interested in trying that sort of thing, to go out with her, but they turned her down every time. Finally, she accepted their kindly offered platonic friendship and started dating the few other girls in school she occasionally found who were willing to go out with her and participate in her sexual experimentation. It was during that period in her life that she realized she preferred girls exclusively, but opportunities for that sort of relationship came few and far between in such a small town, and no matter how hard she tried to ignore it, her unwavering desire for the stepsisters lingered.
Then, during spring break of that same year, Julie met a boy from the neighboring school district. Liaisons with her stepsister grew more and more infrequent as she grew closer to him, and before long she was spending nearly all of her free time with the guy, leaving Karen alone to fend for herself. That rejection, unintentional though it might have been, hurt Karen deeply and plunged her into a pit of depression.
Liz was there for her friend, and made sure she knew it. She spent nearly every evening after school by her side, helping her to cope with the pain that she didn’t dare share with her parents. She made no advances toward her—that would have seemed wrong somehow—but somewhere along the line something happened. Karen chose to give herself over one night and asked Liz to make love to her, and that was that. Karen fell in love with her that very night, and they’d been together ever since.
Focusing on her reflection as her mind returned to the present, Liz suddenly realized as she lifted her mascara applicator to her eyelash that she’d already finished putting her makeup on. Funny. She could barely remember starting.
The mini comm-panel in the wall beside the bed chirped to life. “Commander Royer?” it called in the admiral’s voice.
She set the applicator aside and got up, went over to the comm-panel, and tapped the respond pad. “Go ahead, sir.”
“Good. I’m glad I caught you. Go silent and secure.”
“Stand by.” The mini panel was an older model that didn’t have the S&S feature, so she had to go into the living room, to the main terminal. She activated the unit, double-checked to be sure it was set on audio only—she still hadn’t put any clothes on—then flipped it to S&S and put on the headset. “All right, Admiral. Go ahead.”
“We’ve got a major problem, Commander,” he began. “I received an Intel report a short time ago that confirms the Sulaini have brought the Veshtonn back into the Caldanra system as an ally. No doubt they’re hoping to enlist their help to overrun Cirra and finally claim the whole system for themselves, once and for all. What prompted them to trust the Veshtonn all of the sudden is still anyone’s guess at this point, but I think we can both guess what the Veshtonn plans for that system are.”
“Yes, sir,” she agreed. “Has fighting broken out yet?”
“Not yet, but I don’t think it’ll be quiet for much longer. As a matter of fact, it looks like the Sulaini have already struck right at the heart of the Cirran government. The Crown Prince of the Cirran Republics and his first bound concubine have been abducted.”
“The Sulaini admit responsibility for that?” she asked doubtfully.
“Of course they don’t. They’re blaming the Caldanran Unity Front and are offering to assist the Cirran government in any rescue attempt they might want to mount. Naturally, the Cirran government has declined their kind offer.”
“I should hope so.”
“Listen, Liz. I called you because I wanted to let you know what you were getting into on this trip, and to tell you that I’ve already discussed a plan of action with the president and issued the appropriate orders to initiate it. We’re sending in our Rangers.”
No doubt that meant... “Sergeant Graves’ unit?”
“Exactly.”
“Is that wise, sir? I mean...shouldn’t we keep him out of harm’s way at this point?”
“Believe me, Commander, I’d like to. But we can’t. Not now. Not without drawing a lot of unwanted attention to ourselves.”
“I can think of any number of ways to...”
“Negative, Commander. We can’t risk delaying this operation. That system’s a powder keg, and it’s about ready to blow. With that in mind, you might want to put your travel plans on hold for now, until we know for sure that Graves will still be there for you to talk to.”
“I’d love to, sir, believe me.” She glanced back into the bedroom to make sure Karen was still out of earshot, then lowered her voice. “But like you just said, we can’t risk any delays. Assuming he lives through this, we’re going to want to get him back here and into the academy as soon as possible. I think I should still go.”
“I agree completely, Commander,” Hansen said, relief clearly evident in his voice. “But since you volunteered for this, I felt obligated to give you the option.”
“I appreciate that, sir, but I really think it’s best that I go.”
“Thank you for not disappointing me, Commander. Have a safe trip, and good luck. Hansen out.”
Liz closed the channel and set the headset down, then went back into the bedroom to get dressed. She went to the bureau and pulled on clean underclothes, then chose a new pair of jeans and a pullover top from the closet and put them on.
Karen came out of the bathroom wrapped in a thick white towel—one that actually reached around her and covered everything—and followed Liz back into the living room. She waited while Liz pulled on her soft, well worn deck shoes, then stepped into her welcoming arms.
Liz kissed her tenderly and said, “I love you,” then grabbed up the suitcases she’d packed yesterday afternoon and left for the aerospace terminal.
“I love you, too,” Karen quietly responded as the door slid closed in front of her.
The Next Morning
Earth Standard Date: Sunday, 29 August 2190
Except for last night, and whenever necessary in order to complete those mundane tasks they’d long ago coined as the ‘official business’ of being a married couple—cleaning the house, buying the groceries, preparing the meals, paying the bills, and whatever else happened to come up—Dylan and Carolyn had hardly spoken to each other for most of the day yesterday, which had left Dylan feeling more than just a little bitter. Sadly, he was growing used to feeling that way toward her. God only knew where her heart truly lay amidst all the trouble between them, but Dylan had long since resigned himself to the fact that he was probably going to be miserable for most of the rest of his life unless he divorced her or got himself assigned to a starcruiser again to escape his domestic life for a while.
But last night something very unusual had happened—something so rare that he couldn’t even remember the last time it had happened. They’d enjoyed a nice dinner together and had actually engaged in a few hours of intelligent conversation afterwards without getting into an argument. They’d even gone to bed together and made love before they went to sleep, which was something else they hadn’t done in quite a long while.
He fastened his boots, then stood up, tucked in his black tee shirt and fastened his green battle fatigue trousers, then picked his mug up off the nightstand and stepped over to one of the bedroom windows to stare out at her while he sipped his coffee. She was just standing there, leaning against the deck railing with the breeze blowing gently through her auburn hair and the early morning sun shining through her thin white nightgown, silhouetting her athletic body. She was a vision of beauty—a vision that served to remind him of what it was that had attracted him to her in the first place.
The bitterness in his heart began to languish. He was funny that way. No matter how much headache and aggravation she caused him, he always seemed to be able to easily let go of his anger, if given a little time. He liked to think that he had mastered a uniquely high level of self-control, but he knew that it was more likely just a subconscious response to the undeniable likelihood that her moodiness wasn’t always completely her fault.
He finished his coffee and set his mug down on the bureau, then stepped out onto the deck and approached her from behind. He wrapped his arms around her slender waist and gently pressed against her as he kissed the nape of her neck. “Good morning,” he said as warmly and pleasantly as he could. To his surprise she responded in kind, resting her hands on his and welcoming his loving touch. But when he kissed her again, she grasped his wrists and gently freed herself, then ruined the moment completely by opening her mouth.
“Don’t get carried away,” she said as she stepped away from him. “Just because we had a nice dinner and I let you fuck me last night, doesn’t mean I’m not still upset.”
Dylan let out a long, silent breath, but held his tongue. How discouraging was that? He’d thought, somewhat naively perhaps, that he and Carolyn had gone a long way last night toward finally starting to heal their ailing relationship, and he’d prepared himself to break things off with Marissa immediately, difficult though it would be to hurt her like that. And he’d decided that no matter what, he was not going to say good-bye with another argument this morning.
“Besides,” she continued, staring down at the garden. “You don’t have time for that. You have to go.”
“I still have a few minutes,” he said, glancing at his watch.
“You don’t want to be late.”
“I’m not going to be late!” he told her, much more harshly than he’d intended. Perhaps the bitterness that had been festering in his heart for so long hadn’t completely languished after all. His self-imposed patience was obviously wearing thin, and he could only shake his head in disgust at himself for having been naive enough—no ‘perhaps’ about it—to think that last night’s truce might actually carry over into this morning.
“Don’t you yell at me!” she snapped back, glaring at him. “I’m not one of your little tin soldiers you can scold whenever you want to!” Then she turned her back on him and said, as if to dismiss him from her world completely, “See you when you get back.” She actually sounded disappointed at the prospect.
Dylan thought about trying to kiss her good-bye, but only for a moment. Why he’d even bothered to consider it, he couldn’t guess. Instead, he just shook his head in disgust again, waved her off, and went back inside without another word. How the two of them could share a nice dinner and conversation and even make love afterwards, then turn right around and not be able to talk to each other the next morning without tempers flaring was beyond him.
He huffed at his own stupidity. At least he’d thought at the time that they were making love. She obviously had her own way of looking at it.
He grabbed his shirt and his beret off the back of his chair and headed out.
Minutes later, as he tore down the road in his sleek red sports car on his way to the base, he glanced at the bright gold band on his left ring finger and made a mental note to take it off and secure it in his locker when he arrived at the barracks.
He sighed. Despite their problems, he’d never taken his wedding ring off before. Come to think of it, he’d never even thought about taking it off—at least not seriously. Not even in combat, when he probably should have. Did the fact that he’d decided to do so now necessarily mean anything significant? Had he also decided, perhaps, without even realizing it until this very moment, that Carolyn just wasn’t worth the effort anymore? Was his rocky marriage finally coming to an end after almost eight years?
“All right, listen up, people,” the lieutenant called out, grabbing the brand new perfectly shaped black beret off of his clean-shaven head as he marched into the briefing room, already dressed in his black battle fatigues. A recent academy graduate, he’d only joined the unit three weeks ago, but he wasn’t soft and unseasoned like most other rookie second lieutenants—the kind who often hoped to start their careers sitting in an office at some rear echelon jumpstation somewhere, assigned to one of the more technical specialties. Not at all. This man was hard-core and tough, a real Marine through and through, and he had the strength of mind and body to back up the attitude. He’d gone through the same Sea-Air-Land-Space combat training as the rest of the Rangers, and then some. Dylan had no sooner met the man than he’d learned to admire and respect him, despite the fact that he hadn’t proven himself in actual combat yet.
“You may continue to attack that lame excuse for coffee and those incredibly fattening donuts,” he added as he marched to the front of the room, “but I want your otherwise undivided attention on me.” He looked around to make sure he had it, then began his briefing.
“Okay. Here’s the reason you’ve all been so graciously invited back so soon. The Crown Prince of the Eastern Republics and his Royal Consort have been missing for three days. They are now known to have been abducted by members of the Caldanran Unity Front. The C-U-F has openly claimed responsibility and has threatened to execute the royal couple unless the Cirran government meets a whole laundry list of political and economic demands. Number one on that list is their insistence that the Coalition pull all Solfleet forces off planet and out of this system for good. Needless to say, that is not going to happen.”
“Hell, no,” someone commented. “We haven’t been here long enough for the Veshtonn stink to clear out yet.”
“That’s not coming from here,” someone else added. “It’s floating through space from the next system over.”
“Odors can’t float through space, dipshit.”
“All right, stow the nonsense!” the lieutenant barked.
“Why don’t we just leave this system like they want us to?” someone asked.
The lieutenant looked over the small sea of disbelieving expressions, then asked with obvious disdain, “Who the hell said that?”
“I did, sir,” one of the replacements responded, raising his hand. Disappointed struck Dylan straight through the heart when he saw that it was one of his new fire team leaders—a brand new buck sergeant.
“On your feet, Ranger,” the lieutenant ordered. The young sergeant practically leapt out of his chair and stood at attention. “What’s your name?”
“Sergeant Allen Matrewski, sir.”
“Matrewski. You’re one of Squad Sergeant Graves’ new men, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sergeant Graves.”
Dylan stood up and came to attention as well. “Sir,” he answered, clearly not pleased.
“At ease, Sergeant.” Dylan relaxed. “Has this man been given his newcomer’s orientation briefing yet?”
“No, sir,” Dylan answered, glaring at Matrewski, “he just arrived on planet last night.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Sergeant Matrewski, if I were you I’d ask my squad sergeant why we don’t leave this system. But save it for after this briefing. Do not interrupt me again.”
“Yes, sir,” Matrewski answered.
“Take your seats.”
The lieutenant glanced up at the ceiling for a couple of seconds as the sergeants sat down, then continued. “Our current big brother up there,” he said, referring to the Solfleet starcruiser watching over the planet from orbit, “has detected an artificial energy source on a large, remote island that was completely uninhabited just two months ago. The power levels are such that Intel has determined they’re leaking through a rather inefficient cammo-screen. High intensity scans through that screen have provided us with a layout of everything it’s hiding. From all appearances, what it’s hiding is a small, hastily but fairly well built C-U-F compound, manned by at least seventy-two enemy soldiers—if you can actually call that gang of self-interested, murderous terrorists ‘soldiers’. We believe that’s where the royal couple is currently being held. Our mission is to go in quietly and get them out, gather all the intelligence we can, and take the terrorist commander and as many of his troops as possible into custody.
“As always, the Sulaini government has officially condemned this latest act of C-U-F aggression. However, not surprisingly, the Cirran Council of Nations still believes that C-U-F actions are secretly and routinely sanctioned by the Sulaini government, and a quick end to their patient temperance seems to be fast approaching.” He paused, then sidestepped to his left and faced the spot he’d just been standing in.
“What do you mean by ‘a quick end to their patient temperance’, L-T?” he asked the empty air.
He sidestepped back to his original position, faced back to the spot he’d just abandoned, and answered, “I’m glad you asked, Lieutenant. The Cirran government has refused to rule out the possibility of total nuclear retaliation against Sulain.”
Dispensing with his ad-hoc comedy routine as murmurs of both disbelief and disapproval resonated through the room—along with a few snickers that no doubt pleased him—he addressed the troops directly again. “Therefore, this is not just another simple rescue mission, and it’s much more than a simple favor to the Cirran government. If we fail to recover the hostages unharmed, this one incident will likely plunge these two worlds back into full-scale civil war, Coalition or no Coalition.”
One of the troops asked, “How do we know the Crown Prince and his little whore are there, sir? For that matter, how do we know they’re still on the planet at all?”
The lieutenant looked at the young man with fire in his eyes. “His little whore? Ranger, you’re stationed here as a guest of the royal government of the Unified Cirran Republics. You will not...I repeat, will not speak of its leadership in such a disrespectful manner. Your words reflect on the whole platoon. Therefore they reflect directly on me, not to mention the rest of the Ranger Regiment, my beloved Marine Corps, and the entirety of Solfleet itself. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” the troop answered, sufficiently humbled.
“Good. Now as to your question, no extra-planetary flights have lifted off since the last known sighting of the royal couple prior to their abduction.” Keeping track of all such flights was a matter of Solfleet routine in situations such as the one that existed in the Caldanra system. “If there had been any flights, our people up there would have boarded and searched the vessels from bow to stern. They haven’t had to do that, so we know the couple is still here. Any more questions?”
There were none.
“All right then. We’ll form up at nineteen-hundred and move out after dark. Until then, as usual, you’re all restricted to the base and ordered to keep everything that’s been discussed in this room to yourselves. I suggest you get some rest, too. You’re going to need it.” With that, and with a quick glance at Matrewski, the lieutenant left the enlisted men and women to finish off the coffee and donuts, or to do whatever else they might want to do for the rest of the day.
“Sergeant Matrewski,” Dylan called out as the troops stood and started moving about. The rest of the briefing room fell into a dead silence.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“I need to see you in the training office.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
No one uttered a single word as the two men made their way toward the exit. They might have been heading for the training office, but they weren’t going there to discuss the squad’s training schedule, and everyone knew it. The Training NCO was on leave and his office was currently unoccupied. Matrewski was in for one very unpleasant experience.
* * *
Dylan closed and locked the office door behind them. Matrewski assumed the position of attention and, judging from his expression, prepared himself to receive the ass-chewing of a lifetime...or worse. But rather than lash out Dylan kept his cool, relaxed his posture a little, and calmly asked, “What in the galaxy ever possessed you to ask the lieutenant why we won’t pull out of this system?”
“Sorry about that, Squad Sergeant,” Matrewski replied. “I guess I should’ve waited for my orientation briefing.”
“That would have been the smarter thing to do, yes.”
Dylan paused, then told Matrewski, “Stand at ease.” The younger sergeant let out an impatient sigh as he relaxed, but Dylan chose to give the guy a break and ignore it. “At the very least you should have waited and asked me, after the briefing.”
“Agreed. It’s just that...well...I’m not all that clear on what we’re doing in this system. I read Stinson’s new book during the trip out here, and...”
“Stinson’s books are about as radical and uninformed a series of works as you’ll ever have the misfortune to read,” Dylan pointed out. “You do know he’s the leader of that Earth Isolationist Movement that’s sprouting up back home, don’t you?”
“I’m aware of that, yes.”
“Then you should know better than to waste your time reading that trash.”
“I read to be informed, Sergeant Graves,” Matrewski said in his defense. “That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he writes.”
“Yet you question our presence here.”
“Yes I do, but not just because he...”
“Or is it more than that?”
Matrewski hesitated a moment, then asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean...do you simply not understand what we’re doing here, or do you honestly believe that we shouldn’t be here at all—that we should just pull out and go home?”
“All right, you tell me, Sergeant. Why shouldn’t we just pull out? Why don’t we just leave this system and let the Cirrans and the Sulaini fight it out to the bitter end? It’s their star system and it’s their civil war. Our war—our real war—is against the damned lizards. They’re the whole reason Earth joined the Coalition in the first place.”
“Lesson one, Sergeant Matrewski. Know your enemy. Those lizards as you call them are not really lizards at all. The Kree-Veshtonn—the purebloods—are classified as something totally alien to the way we categorize life forms. They’re actually some kind of semi-humanoid reptilian insect, or some such thing.
“Lesson two, and more to the point, the Veshtonn occupied this entire system until we finally pushed them out four years ago. We only accomplished that little miracle of modern warfare because we had the help of Cirran and Sulaini underground resistance movements that were able to work together. Without that cooperation between them we might never have liberated this system at all. But now that we have liberated it, someone has to keep things peaceful between the natives. Otherwise our position here will be weakened, and the Veshtonn might find a way to exploit that weakness.”
“But why us? Why not one of the other member races? Why does Solfleet have to station troops here?”
“Because this system falls within our sector of responsibility.”
“As the Coalition defines it.”
“That’s right. Aside from the Rosha’Kana system, which has already fallen to the enemy, ours is the closest member system to this one and as such is the one most endangered by the Veshtonn presence here. So it falls to us to defend our own interests by defending this system. It’s exactly that simple.”
Matrewski thought it over, then said, “I guess I just don’t see the strategic value, Sergeant. We could defend our own interests just as effectively from home. Maybe even more effectively. And I should think that you of all people would rather kill Veshtonn warriors than babysit the Cirrans. After all, the Excalibur...”
Dylan stepped up into Matrewski’s face so fast he almost bumped the younger sergeant’s nose with his own before he could stop. “My father’s ship has nothing to do with it, Sergeant, and I will thank you to never bring it up again. Is that understood?”
Matrewski swallowed noisily. “Yes, Sergeant.”
“Good.” Dylan glared at him for another second or two, then stepped back to a more comfortable and appropriate distance. “The responsibility of assessing this system’s strategic value lies with the top brass at Solfleet Central Command. Whether or not you happen to recognize that value is completely irrelevant.”
“I understand that, Sergeant. But I still think we should let the locals handle their own internal affairs without any interference from us.”
“Their own internal affairs?”
“That’s right.”
Dylan turned and started pacing slowly back and forth in front of Matrewski, much like one of the Social Sciences teachers he’d had in high school had often done when he lectured the class. “Sergeant Matrewski, how much of your high school history class did you actually stay awake for?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you remember learning about the Iraqi dictator of the latter twentieth century using chemical weapons on the Kurdish and Shiite populations of his own country while the United States and the rest of the free world stood by and watched, not wanting to interfere in an ‘internal affair’?”
“They didn’t just stand by after Iraq invaded Kuwait,” Matrewski pointed out.
“It wasn’t an internal affair anymore at that point, was it?”
“No, but...”
“What about the terrorist-friendly Taliban government of Afghanistan around the same time period, or the aggressive Communist regime of North Korea, or the Somali warlord who finally seized control of that country around the middle of the last century?”
“They were all dealt with,” Matrewski pointed out.
“Only after they lashed out against both their neighbors and the interests of the west and murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians,” Dylan clarified. “Until then they were given free reign to starve or enslave or slaughter as many of their own people as they wanted to for whatever reasons they decided justified their actions, all because of a spineless and toothless United Nations that discouraged interfering in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs. Do you want to see something like that happen here? Do you want to see thousands of innocent Cirrans slaughtered?”
“No, of course I don’t. But I think the Sulaini make a good point. They should be allowed to demand what’s rightfully theirs. Their methods might be wrong, but...”
“You can think whatever you want to think, Sergeant. Just remember, your duty is to follow your superiors’ orders and that is exactly what you will do, even if those orders tell you to jump into the jungle and kill Sulaini terrorists. Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself in a very uncomfortable predicament.”
“I’m well aware of my duty, Sergeant,” Matrewski responded, clearly offended. “I don’t need to be reminded of it. And I have no problem following my superiors’ orders as long as those orders are lawful.”
“Good.”
Dylan turned his back for a moment to hide his satisfied grin. Reminding one of his Marines, especially a fellow NCO, of his or her duty was a tactic he used on gung-ho grunts fresh out of Ranger training without any hesitation at all, whenever he felt it was necessary. It worked every time without fail, and usually without any further discussion. But this time a little further discussion was necessary, for Matrewski’s own sake.
He faced the young buck sergeant again and continued, in a softer tone of voice, “One more thing, Sergeant—a little advice from someone who’s been here for a while.”
“I’m listening.”
“Keep your pro-Sulaini political opinions to yourself when you’re out in public or you’ll find yourself visiting the political officer so fast you won’t even know how you got there.”
“Visiting the what?”
“The Cirran Defense Force liaison officer who will make a career out of watching your every move until you leave this planet if he gets wind of your sympathetic views toward the terrorists.”
An expression of shock crossed Matrewski’s face. “My sympathetic... Sergeant Graves, I do not sympathize with...”
“Good,” Dylan replied, interrupting. “Don’t ever let anyone suspect otherwise. Especially the Cirrans. Their government can be a little paranoid, and with good reason, so avoid even the appearance of evil by keeping your mouth shut when it comes to your opinion of their political situation. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Satisfied that he’d made his point, Dylan dismissed the younger man, then headed back to the briefing room to find Kenny.
No doubt Marissa would be waiting for him there as well.
Marissa. What was he going to do about Marissa?
Starcarrier U.E.F.S. Rapier, Somewhere Near the Rosha’Kana Sector
Lieutenant Bellinger yawned, then shook his head vigorously and blinked several times to clear the advancing fog. Until today he hadn’t had much trouble staying awake and alert during his shift, despite the sheer boredom inherent in the ship’s current assignment. At least not as much as some of the other members of the bridge crew had been having—Ensign O’Connor had actually fallen into such a deep sleep at his post yesterday that he’d started snoring—but that first hour or so right after lunch could be rough. As a matter of fact, staring at sensor displays on a full belly had turned out to be the best cure for insomnia Bellinger had ever known, and today was the absolute worst of all. After more than a month of doing almost nothing else day in and day out, Bellinger was starting to feel downright narcoleptic.
Okay. So maybe he was having as much trouble staying awake as the rest of the crew after all. He only hoped the captain hadn’t noticed.
Without taking his weary eyes off his sensors’ display screens, he leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms out over his head, then stretched his neck muscles.
“Mister Bellinger,” Captain Erickson called.
Bellinger glanced over his shoulder to find his commanding officer staring back at him. “Sir?” he responded as he turned back to his screens.
“Why don’t you go get yourself a strong cup of coffee?”
“I’m all right, sir.”
“That wasn’t a suggestion, Lieutenant,” the captain advised him. “The Rapier is a very expensive ship. I can’t have my tactical officer falling asleep at his post out here.”
“Aye, sir.” Bellinger stood up, but stayed by his post and kept his eyes on those screens.
“Ensign O’Connor,” Erickson called as he spun his chair around and faced the young communications officer, “take Mister Bellinger’s post until he gets back, and keep your eyes glued to those sensor screens.”
“Aye, sir,” the communications officer confirmed. He rerouted Communications control to the Tactical station, then relieved Bellinger.
“Anyone else want some coffee?” Bellinger asked aloud.
Only one hand went up. Erickson’s. He spun his chair around to do a quick visual of the rest of his bridge crew, then told Bellinger, “Bring a full pot and enough cups for everyone.”
“Will do, sir,” Bellinger said as he left the bridge.
Erickson had considered, for a moment, telling Bellinger to stay at his post and calling down to the galley to have a yeoman bring the coffee up to them, but had quickly thought better of it. Bellinger’s head had started bobbing a few minute ago. He’d been having an unusually difficult time of it this afternoon. It would do him some good to stretch his legs.
Truth was they’d all been having a difficult time of it. Every last one of them. Over the past couple of hours every member of the bridge crew besides himself—there was always enough going on to keep a ship’s captain occupied—had had to stand up at their post for a few minutes to keep from dozing off. But Erickson couldn’t hold that against them. Over every other kind of mission they might otherwise have been tasked with, any one of which would have been preferable as far as he was concerned, the Rapier’s top priority over the last five or six weeks since the Tor’Kana were driven out of their home system had been to search for their few surviving vessels. True, they had drawn a couple of other assignments since then—nothing more than short, token diversions, really—but except for the relative excitement of having found the one Tor’Kana vessel a few days ago, which they’d passed off to a pair of escort ships only a few hours later, the duty had been incredibly dull. Each day had seemed longer than the one before, and most of the crew were bored to tears. Thank God there was only one more Tor’Kana vessel out there to be found. That they knew of, at least.
Erickson checked himself. The latest scuttlebutt to trickle down through the Command grapevine was that the Coalition’s continued existence—hell, its member races’ very chances of survival—depended on the survival of the Tor’Kana. The fact that there might really be only one more ship full of them out there was not at all something to be thankful for.
“Captain, I’ve got some kind of ping on the sensors,” O’Connor reported.
Erickson immediately punched the ‘all-call’ button on his command board. “Lieutenant Bellinger, report back to the bridge on the double.” He closed the channel as he spun his chair around to face O’Connor. “Can you be more specific, Ensign?”
“Sorry, sir. I’m...I don’t think I can,” the ensign explained regretfully. “It’s really big, whatever it is, and I think it’s metallic, but I’m not familiar enough with these sensor systems to give you much more than that.”
“That’s all right, Ensign. That’s not your job. Return to your station.”
“Sorry, sir,” O’Connor repeated as he got up.
As O’Connor returned to his station, the main doors parted and Bellinger hurried back onto the bridge. “Lieutenant Bell...”
“Check your sensors, Lieutenant,” Erickson ordered, brushing the reporting formalities aside. “Mister O’Connor reports seeing a large, possibly metallic object out there somewhere.”
“Aye, sir.” Bellinger took his station and played his board like an accomplished concert pianist performing an elaborate concerto. Then he reported, “The readings are varying with every pass, sir, and are getting consistently weaker. Switching over to active scanners.” After another moment he added, “Object is moving away from us at approximately eleven thousand kilometers per hour, Captain. We’ll need to get a lot closer and match its velocity for a good scan.”
“Close on it, Helm,” the captain ordered. “Cautiously.”
“Aye, sir,” the young woman affirmed. “Thrusters ahead. Now closing relative distance at...” She checked her board to be sure. “...ten kilometers per second.”
“Recorders on.”
Bellinger took a half second and snapped the recorders on, then turned all of his attention right back to his scanners. “Bridge recorders on, Captain,” he confirmed. “Putting the object up on the screen.”
The object appeared in the center of the viewscreen as something not much larger, and substantially dimmer in luminance, than the thousands of stars that surrounded it—just like the Tor’Kana vessel from the other day. But unlike that vessel, this object seemed to grow and shrink at short, regular intervals, as if it were breathing, or pulsating like a beating heart.
As the Rapier slowly drew closer to the object, Bellinger’s scanners were able to provide more precise information. “It’s them, sir!” he shouted with excitement. “It’s the last Tor’Kana battleship!”
“Magnification ten, Lieutenant,” Erickson ordered with his own sense of urgency.
“Aye, sir,” Bellinger replied. A second later an image of the last Tor’Kana vessel known to have escaped filled the screen, rolling and spinning, tumbling slowly end over end. Despite its magnified size, its lines appeared a little hazy due to its relative distance, but Erickson could still discern enough detail to determine that the pearlescent-white main structure was, or at least appeared to be, virtually unscathed. Then the keel, or rather what little was left of it rolled into view, and he and everyone else saw that the giant main gun that had once been mounted to the forward two-thirds of the vessel’s underbelly was gone. Only a scorched, gaping gash and at least three exposed decks remained.
Erickson stood up and took two slow steps toward the screen. “Mister Bellinger?” he quietly prodded without taking his eyes off the vessel’s gaping wound.
“Judging by the pattern of the scoring on what’s left,” the lieutenant offered, “it looks like the hull took a proton beam hit from well below the port quarter aft, probably right behind the main gun’s energy transfer casing. If that beam was strong enough to cut into the conduit and ignite the plasma, it will have produced an explosion large enough to blow the entire gun and most of the hull away from the ass end forward. My guess is that’s exactly what happened, and that’s most likely what sent them tumbling out of control.”
“How long ago?”
“I’m not reading any residual surface heat or atmospheric particles in the area, so it’s been several hours at least, but for all I know it might have been several weeks, sir. Without some left over effect, there’s just no way to tell.”
Erickson considered the ramifications of both scenarios. Several hours or several weeks. If the vessel had taken that damage weeks ago, then the passengers and crew were probably long dead. But if, on the other hand, the damage had been inflicted only hours ago, or maybe a few days at most, there might very well still be survivors on board. The Veshtonn were the only enemy the Tor’Kana had who would have dared fire on that ship, and they wouldn’t have done so unless they’d detected life signs aboard.
“Are you detecting any other ships in the area?” he asked.
“Nothing, sir,” Bellinger answered. “Except for the Tor’Kana and our own corvettes, short range sensors show nothing out there. Long range sensors show completely clear.”
“All right. Maintain visual scanning as well. I don’t want any of those damned bolamide torpedoes flying up my ass.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Mister O’Connor,” Erickson called as he returned to his chair. “Signal stand-by alert.”
“Stand-by alert, aye, sir,” O’Connor confirmed. He pressed the appropriate alert switch, but the only evidence of the change in ship’s status they heard was a single, short tone. Erickson had insisted long ago that the three-pitch klaxon that would be sounding all over the rest of the ship for the next sixty seconds be disconnected on the bridge. Few things annoyed him more than irritating noises in the background when he was trying to issue orders.
“Helm, continue to close on that ship. Mister Bellinger, give me all you can as soon as you can. You know the drill.”
“Aye, sir. Continuing scans. As you can see, the vessel’s relative attitude is changing erratically. It’s spinning on all three axis—negative pitch and yaw, positive roll. If anyone’s alive over there, sir, it’s a good bet there’s nothing left in their stomachs.”
“Can the commentary, Mister Bellinger. Just give me the facts.”
“Aye, sir. Jump nacelles are intact but cold. Fusion engines and maneuvering thrusters are off-line as well. Aft-most surface gun emplacements have been destroyed. Port and starboard emplacements appear to be intact along the forward two-thirds. Looks like they kept the enemy to their rear. Must have been fighting on the run.”
“Facts, Mister Bellinger,” Erickson reminded him.
“Sorry, sir. Aft torpedo tubes are open, banks completely exhausted. Forward tubes are closed. The rest of the hull appears to be intact. No signs of venting atmosphere, as I said earlier. Radiation levels are well within safety limits as deep in as our scanners can penetrate. Energy output readings continue to fluctuate, but it appears they have at least some internal power.” In a much more somber tone he added, “The escape pods are all in place, Captain. I don’t know about the shuttles, but the bay doors are closed up tight.”
Just like the last one. “Life signs?” Erickson asked tentatively.
“Stand by for that, sir. We’re not close enough yet.”
“Get us closer, Helm,” Erickson ordered. “I want to be able to wave to their captain if I have to.”
“Aye, sir.” The young woman’s fingers danced over her board. Suddenly, the Tor’Kana vessel filled the screen, appearing as if it were tumbling directly toward them. Erickson and everyone else who happened to be looking the main screen at that moment instinctively drew back, pressing themselves into the backs of their seats.
“Reduce magnification, please,” Erickson requested.
“Factor one, sir,” Bellinger confirmed. The alien vessel instantly shrank to a much less stomach-churning size. Then, somewhat baffled, the lieutenant reported, “I’m not reading any bio signs, Captain...” He turned and added, “...living or dead.”
Erickson stood up again and took another few steps toward the screen. “Try to hail them, Mister O’Connor.”
“Hailing, sir.” The young man tried three times, per standard procedure, then reported, “There’s no response, sir.”
“Keep trying.”
“Sir, their comm tower is down,” Bellinger reported. “They probably can’t receive us.”
“If they’re even onboard,” Erickson added, giving a voice to what everyone else was probably thinking. “Belay my last, Mister O’Connor. Try the signal light.”
“Won’t do any good while they’re spinning like that, sir,” the ensign advised him.
Of course it wouldn’t, Erickson realized. If anyone over there did happen to see the signal light flash, assuming there was anyone over there, they’d tumble and spin out of view before they could see it flash more than one or two more times, let alone enough times to actually understand any part of their message. Damn. That fact couldn’t have been more obvious. He needed rest. He was in worse shape than he thought.
“That leaves us no other choice,” he concluded, thinking aloud. “We’re going to have to bring that ship under control ourselves.”
Both Bellinger and the young woman at the Engineering station turned in their chairs and stared at the captain as if he’d just proclaimed himself emperor of the known universe.
“Sensors, Mister Bellinger,” the captain reminded the tactical officer, glaring back at him.
“Aye, sir,” Bellinger responded as he turned quickly back to his instruments. “Sorry, sir.”
Erickson threw the engineer a similar look and got the same result, then turned back to Bellinger again and asked, “How fast is that thing tumbling?”
“Taking its yaw rate into account, the vessel completes one revolution of pitch about every sixty-five seconds. The yaw rate itself is much slower, about one revolution every hundred and seventy-three seconds. However, she’s only rolling at...”
“Spare me the arithmetic, Lieutenant. What kind of G-forces would someone working on the exterior of the bow or stern have to deal with?”
“I’ll call up their specifications, sir, but I suggest you get a physicist up here for that one. The answer is going to be a variable in both value and exact direction, depending on exactly where on the bow or stern that ‘someone’ is working.”
Erickson turned briefly to the communications officer. “Mister O’Connor.”
“I’m on it, sir.”
“Engineer, take over sensor monitoring at your station. If you see anything that’s not there right now, speak up.”
“Will do, sir,” the young woman responded.
Moments later, a tall, lanky, dark haired gentleman whose uniform sleeves were too short for his arms stepped onto the bridge. “Lieutenant J-G Donmoyer reporting from Astrophysics, Captain,” he said as he gazed at the tumbling vessel on the screen.
That was fast. “Take the Sciences station, Lieutenant,” Erickson told him, pointing the station out to him. “Mister Bellinger is uploading some information on that ship out there. I want to know what the G-forces are at the bow and stern.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man’s long strides weren’t too unlike those of a giraffe in Erickson’s eyes, and the captain couldn’t help but grin as he recalled the last time he’d taken his now adult son to the San Diego Zoo. Then just nine years old, the boy had had the time of his life.
The astrophysicist sat down and powered up the console, then accepted the data from Bellinger. “All right, Captain,” he began, “I’ve got the data now.” His practiced fingers danced over the console as he checked the specs and ran the figures, talking out loud to himself the whole time. “Let’s see now. The alien vessel is approximately six-hundred fifty meters in length. That’s about seven hundred and four yards, or two-thousand one-hundred and twelve feet...”
Erickson drew a breath and sighed. Several decades ago most of the nations of Earth had come together in peace and formed an international military space force. So why couldn’t they agree on one system of measure?
“Its mass is distributed almost equally fore and aft for the most part,” the astrophysicist was saying, “so the ship is tumbling and spinning on an axis virtually at its exact center. Very smart design on their part. Circumference of the danger sphere is approximately...six thousand, six hundred and thirty-six feet. One revolution of pitch every sixty-four point eight seconds equals...one hundred two point four feet per second, equals...three point two gravities. One revolution of yaw every one hundred seventy-two point eight seconds equals...thirty-eight point four feet per second, equals...one point two gravities. Three point two gravities of pitch combined with one point two gravities of yaw equals...just under three and a half G’s. Factor in the ship’s slow roll, and...”
“Hold that thought, Lieutenant,” Erickson said. He doubted his brain could stand to hear anymore without suddenly hemorrhaging.
“Three and a half G’s, Captain,” the young engineer interjected.
Erickson looked over at her, inviting more.
“That’s damn near impossible to work in for very long, sir,” she continued. “Even for someone very strong.”
“Fighter pilots pull more than that all the time,” someone interjected from somewhere behind Erickson.
“Not the same thing,” Erickson replied. Then he asked the engineer, “What if they use an exoskeleton?”
“Those things were designed to compensate for high-gravity planet surfaces, sir,” she pointed out. “We’re talking about centrifugal forces here—negative G’s forcing our man off the surface. Forces that will constantly be shifting, I might add, their exact directions of pull depending on where our man is working.”
“She’s right, sir,” Donmoyer confirmed.
“Why constantly shifting, Lieutenant?” Erickson asked, looking back at the astrophysicist again.
“Because we’re dealing with both pitch and yaw rotations,” the scientist explained. “If the bow of that vessel were the head of a stylus, it would draw a constantly curving line along its danger sphere. And that doesn’t even account for the slow roll, which I didn’t factor in yet. That could add up to nearly another half-G, depending on how far from the center point of the roll our man is, in yet another constantly changing direction. A pretty tight arc, in this case. Even if our man is strong enough to work against all those forces, which I doubt, he’ll also have to deal with a constant lack of balance.”
“It’s going to be a very dangerous undertaking, sir,” the engineer added, summarizing what had by now become pretty obvious.
Erickson thought the situation over in the span of about two seconds, then stepped back to his station and thumbed a pad on his command console. “Captain Erickson to Engineering.”
“Engineering. Commander Doohan here, sir.”
“I’ve got an interesting challenge for you, Jim. Mister Bellinger and Mister Donmoyer from Astrophysics are sending you some data.” He nodded to the men, who uploaded their scanner readings and calculations to the chief engineer. “Look it over, then meet me in the main conference room as soon as possible.”
“Aye, sir. I’ll be on my way in a few minutes.”
Erickson closed the channel, then began to put a plan together in his mind as he started toward the doors. “Mister Donmoyer, you’re with me.” The scientist shut down his console and joined the captain. “Mister O’Connor,” Erickson continued, pausing by the Communications station, “encrypt and encode to Solfleet Central Command our situation. Then have Lieutenant Colonel Zucker and Doctor Zapala join us the conference room.”
“Aye, sir.”
Erickson left the bridge, with Donmoyer right at his heel.
* * *
“So what do you think, Jim?” Captain Erickson asked after he’d explained the situation to his chief engineer. “Can your people stop that thing?”
The older, gray-haired, chief engineer turned his chair to face the wall screen and stroked his square jaw with his long gnarled fingers as he stared at the image of the tumbling Tor’Kana vessel. “Oh, we’ll stop it, sir, one way or another,” he answered with conviction. He gazed at the dizzying image a few moments longer, then turned back to the table. “But you said it yourself, Captain. It’ll be one hell of an interesting challenge. That thing is spinning like a giant baseball bat that got away in mid swing out there. If it hits something...” he warned, shaking his head, “or someone...”
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly as he pondered what they were facing, then finally offered up the first detail of the plan he’d been struggling to develop in his head for the last several minutes. “It would be best if we started with one person, alone.”
“I agree,” Erickson said. Better to lose just one individual rather than a team of two or more. That was the obvious if cold-hearted reason for that decision. They all knew it, but no one wanted to say it. “So what’s your plan?”
Doohan snickered. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have one.” Then, with the press of a button in the small panel imbedded in the table in front of him, he replaced the vessel’s image with all the data that had been sent to him earlier.
“As you can see, the vessel is rolling at only about fifteen feet per second—much slower than its pitch and yaw. Our man would still be pretty unsteady there amidships, but he’d only have to put up with about a negative half-G. At least until he was ready to deploy the thrusters. That’s going to be tricky, regardless.”
“Excuse me,” Doctor Zapala interrupted. “Roll, pitch, yaw—I can never remember. Which one’s which?”
“Sorry, Rhea,” Doohan said, smiling at the olive-skinned woman. All traces of black in her hair had faded to silver long ago, but in his eyes she was still as lovely as she’d been the first day he met her, all those years ago. He lifted his arm in front of him to demonstrate as he explained, “Pitch is the ship’s up and down,” he began, raising and lowering his forearm with his elbow as the pivot point. “Yaw is its left and right, and roll is its rotation around its own lengthwise centerline axis. That ship out there has what we call a negative pitch—that is, it’s tumbling bow down and stern up—a negative yaw, or counter-clockwise spin, and a positive roll, or a roll to the right. Basically, it’s rotating on all three axis at the same time.”
“Which is going to make approaching it extremely dangerous,” Erickson concluded, wanting to get on with it.
“To say the least, sir,” Doohan agreed wholeheartedly. “He’ll have to set the work pod’s computer to match the ship’s pitch and yaw, then constantly adjust its arc for the steadily decreasing distance as he crosses the perimeter of the danger sphere and thrusts forward toward the center point.”
“Danger sphere?” Zapala questioned.
“The imaginary sphere formed by the perimeter of the vessel’s pitch and yaw,” Doohan explained to the doctor. “The line where my guy becomes the baseball to the vessel’s bat.”
Now there was an analogy that she as a medical doctor could understand all too well. “Oh. I see.”
“Who’ve you got in mind for this, Jim?” Erickson asked, half expecting the chief engineer to name himself rather than expose one of his beloved ‘junior knuckle-draggers’ as he called them to such risk.
“Probably Lombardo. He’s the strongest guy I’ve got who has the right experience.”
“Good. I was afraid you might try to volunteer yourself. You just got back on your feet. I can’t afford to lose you again.”
“Don’t worry about that, Captain,” Doohan said with a smirk. “I’m getting far too old for that kind of fun. Sick or not, my reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and I seriously doubt I have the strength for it. Besides, I’ve got a whole boatload of strong young men and woman down there who still don’t know any better.”
“The best you’ve got, Jim. I don’t want to lose anyone.”
“Nor do I, sir. Lombardo’s the right man for the job.”
“All right.” He turned his eyes to the securituy chief. “Colonel Zucker, I want as many Security Forces teams as you can put together ready to board that ship as soon as Jim’s people bring it under control. Hostile zone protocols again. We’re not getting any bio readings from her one way or the other, so we don’t know what you might end up facing over there.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Same goes for you, Doctor,” he pointed out to Zapala. “And I want at least two medical teams outside in separate shuttles while Lombardo works to stop that thing. If something goes wrong, I want help on the scene as fast as possible.”
“You’ve got it, sir,” she assured him.
“If Colonel Zucker’s people find any survivors, I’ll want your medical teams all over that ship, but none without a security escort.”
“Understood.”
“Any questions?” Erickson asked, looking around the table. No one spoke up, so there apparently weren’t any. “Okay. Let’s get on this, people. I want your teams inside that ship as soon as possible. Dismissed.”
As Admiral Hansen sat back in his recliner with a cup of coffee and read over his notes for tomorrow morning’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs—God, he was even working on Sunday afternoons now—he started thinking back on what he’d told Mirriazu during that impromptu one-on-one meeting they’d had right after the Timeshift briefing on Friday, and before long he wasn’t seeing his handcomp at all. To quote one of the president’s own phrases, what a song and dance he’d performed for her—telling her that he’d never dealt with time travel before and that he didn’t know anything about altering the past or creating a new reality, when the real truth was that he had dealt with it and that he did know something about it. He didn’t know anything definitive about the results of those efforts, of course, and maybe he never would, but he sure knew something about trying.
And, as he’d explained to Liz after he got back from that meeting, the unfortunate results of what they’d done six years ago—or to be more accurate, the unfortunate lack of results—would only make sending someone else through the Portal that much more difficult. Günter had never returned from his mission and they’d seen no signs of change. No results of any kind, in fact. Hansen had hoped that maybe, at the very least, even if Günter failed completely, he might make contact with either him or Liz once his timeline caught up to theirs—if such a thing were even possible—but even that had not come to pass.
Apparently, Professor Verne’s flowing river theory was the right one after all. Either that or Günter’s actions had simply failed to affect on the timeline. Or he’d died before he ever had the chance to try. Whatever had happened, Sergeant Graves, or whoever else they might end up sending back, if anyone at all, would probably never return.
He hadn’t been able to share any of that with Mirriazu, of course. Not without getting both himself and Commander Royer thrown into prison for the rest of their natural lives. Not to mention half a dozen other officers, at least twice that many enlisted technicians, and even a few government-contracted high-profile civilian scientists who’d been stationed on Window World at that time. He hated that he’d had to withhold the truth from her like that—that he’d had to lie. She was a dear friend in the truest sense of the word. The fact that he’d had no choice didn’t matter to him at all. The bottom line was that he’d lied to someone who trusted his word implicitly.
At least he’d been honest with her about his nightmares. He really didn’t have any idea how or why they had changed. At least, not beyond the theories he’d brought up at the time. Hell, who knew? Maybe their reality really was connected to some kind of parallel timeline somehow. Maybe two—or three or four or how many more?—timelines were intertwined with each other in some way. Illogical? Ridiculous? Perhaps. But he couldn’t dismiss the possibility of it outright just because it sounded like science-fiction, no matter how hard it might be to accept. To do so would be nothing short of irresponsible. After all, who in their right mind would ever have believed fifty years ago that the Portals could exist?
And besides, how else could he explain the change?
Actually, he recalled as he willed his eyes to focus on his handcomp again, he’d been honest with the president about one more thing. The upcoming counterattack in the Rosha’Kana system. He’d told her that he thought that was where they needed to concentrate their efforts. And that was the truth. It might have been for very different, or at least much more specific reasons, but he essentially agreed with her assessment of the Timeshift Resolution. That mission had to be their absolute last resort.
The comm-panel chimed. Hansen set his handcomp aside and got up with a grunt, went over to the panel, and opened the channel. His heart sank the second he saw the Civil Security sergeant’s face, and he sighed. Heather. It had to be. “What did she do this time?” he asked.
“Admiral Icarus Hansen?” the sergeant inquired before he answered. He obviously had to verify who he was talking to before he could say anything.
“Yes, Sergeant, I’m Heather Hansen’s father. So what is it this time?”
“It’s actually nothing major this time, Admiral,” the sergeant told him. “Just a minor trespassing charge.”
“Trespassing? Where?”
“She and some of her friends were caught at the adults-only section of the beach.”
“The nude beach!” Hansen shouted. “Are you kidding me?”
Despite the level of authority inherent in his own position, the sergeant seemed to recoil, just a little. “I assure you, Admiral, I’m not kidding,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Hansen said, raising a hand to stop any further explanation. “You just caught me a little off guard with that, that’s all.”
“I understand completely, Admiral. I have a teenage daughter of my own. With that in mind, you should know that I’ve looked into Heather’s record. I’m aware that she’s on juvenile probation, but I’m also aware of...” He glanced around, then lowered his voice. “...of the service she provided last month.”
“And?”
“And I talked to my lieutenant. We’re not going to record a formal charge against your daughter this time. You can come get her and take her home.”
Hansen let out a breath he hadn’t even known he was holding. “Thank you, Sergeant. Tell your lieutenant I appreciate that.”
“Everyone here appreciates what you and your people do for us, Admiral...every day. I’ll see you when you get here, sir.” The sergeant reached out of frame, and the screen went dark.
“Aw, Heather,” Hansen said, shaking his head and sighing yet again. “You were doing so well, too.”
He snickered. “Adults-only beach,” he scoffed as he got up and headed into his bedroom to get properly dressed. “There shouldn’t be such a thing up here in the first place. Damn Peoples’ Liberal Party majority. Talk about a subculture. Some of them don’t get voted out of office soon, I’m going to end up talking to myself.”