Even more than sex, men tended to lie about their military careers.
Fake Daggers were under every rock. And people hated them.
The owner of the bar ordered drinks on the house for Dagger Team Nine.
Zack emptied his drink over the owner's head.
His unit didn't understand. Didn't need to. There wasn't one of them telling Cade to take it easy either. They were closing ranks, ready to back him up no matter what.
Gretch asked, "Problem, brother?" While Ix Chel was dismembering a chair to give herself a couple clubs to keep the bar's bouncers from interfering with this private conversation.
The bar owner had his arms up, hands open in surrender.
Everyone in the room was staring at Zack.
Zack Cade said coldly, "I spilled my drink."
The owner personally fetched him another drink.
You're a real one, the man had said. As if another Cade were a fake one. Zack wanted to flush the man's face down a toilet.
Zack tried to tell himself to forget it. This was a little man. Not worth his time.
But he couldn't help it. He left the owner wearing the second drink on his face.
The rest of the team fell in behind Zack. He heard drinks splashing onto the barroom floor behind him. Zack loved these guys.
Not one of his team asked why he'd done it. Though he did overhear Umber ask Paul Rittenhouse in a low mutter, "Any idea what that was about?"
"No, sir," Ritt answered. "No, sir, he did not see fit to impart any particulars of the disagreement with me. I am assuming that Cade will tell us when and if in fact he wants us to know."
Zack's mom had cried when he said goodbye. What Zack said was, "See you in five." Years he meant. Dad had already passed away. Zack hoped his Dad would be proud, even if becoming a Dagger was the last thing AC Cade wanted for his son.
Zack's Dad had been the best father in this or any universe.
AC Cade was a big man, strong, competitive. He was the worst loser you ever met. Dad didn't lose often. He was a great shot. He was great at all sports.
Dad had been a Dagger pilot. That was family lore.
Zack never talked about it.
Because Dad had been in Dagger Team Seven.
Dad was a sole survivor.
Dad only talked about the Daggers to a few people and not very often. It wasn’t blustering bragging when he did. It was just some stories. Dad was a forward-looking guy. The stories from his past came out at odd times.
Dagger units reported up through Space Corps Plans and Programs, but you felt the Intelligence Agency moving behind that veil. Dagger Team Seven had gone through the Intersection. AC Cade was the only one who came back. He came back angry. Zack's Dad was not by nature an angry man.
"They killed us," Dad told Zack.
Us. Dad included himself among the fallen. It struck Zack as chilling, as if his father had died too. The Space Corps and the Intelligence cryptos buried all record of the unit as if it never existed. Anyone without a need to know the truth were fed the story that there was no Dagger Team Seven. Never had been.
Dad didn't remember how he got back to normal space. Dad couldn’t say what kind of vessel he was in when someone picked him up. He didn't have his tracer in him. Separating a man from his tracer wasn't ever an accident. Your tracer was implanted in your mouth. Removal was either surgical or violent and never accidental. The rest of Dad’s team wasn't with him.
The cryptos didn't tell him anything of what happened to him.
“Intelligence officers don't give. They collect.” Dad told Zack. Dad didn’t remember what happened. "An officer wearing a brand new Spacer uniform came to me in intensive care. He wasn’t a Spacer. He smelled like crypt. Fuches. Colonel Fuches. Fuches was the same bung who briefed us going in. I don't know if that was his real name. We called him something else. He asked why I abandoned my brothers to the enemy. That's when I tried to kill him. Succeeded actually, but the medicos resussed the bastard. And then the cryptos made us go away."
Zack asked his Dad if he'd ever contacted the families of his unit. Dad went silent. Dad never spoke of that. He seemed to shudder at the thought. Come to think of it, what would a sole survivor have to say to the families of his lost team?
The official line was that Daggers never leave a man behind. Dad had a different story.
"Real orders are you don't compromise the mission for the man. If you need to, you leave him. You're not out there to stay alive or to keep one of your mates alive. You do everything you can for each other, but if you’re forced to choose, you're out there to safeguard your country. You take that oath, you put your nation before you and your brothers, even if your nation isn't always grateful." That, of all things Dad ever said, always struck Zack as strange.
But then, right before Zack and his team—Dagger Team Nine—were sent through the Intersection, an officer ordered them in strictest confidence, "If you need to leave a man, you leave him. When you take that oath you put your nation before you and your brothers, even if your nation isn't always grateful."
Zack's mates just traded looks as they all answered, "Aye, aye."
Here and now Zack fought to urge to go assist Dagger Team Eight. The Eights had lost a ship.
Don't compromise the mission for the man.
Dagger Team Eight knew how it was. They hadn't asked for help.
Zack wasn't sure he could obey orders not to go to their aid if the Eights had asked. They hadn’t.
Team Eight might not even be in trouble.
They might not even be here.
And the Eights had warned of imposters.
Rittenhouse sent coordinates to fold Team Nine deeper into Rutog space.
They came out of the warp. A low crumbly voice sounded on the com, calmly urgent, saying. "Incoming."
Dagger Team Nine broke wide. Zack didn't see anything. His tac screen was blank.
"John Henry?" he prompted his ship for information.
"I have them," John Henry responded, changing his orientation.
"What are they?" Zack demanded as he heard the other pilots shouting over the com, "There!"
"Shimmer," John Henry said, jinking away from lethal Shimmering waves.
Should have known. Shimmer comes up on you sneaky. By the time you see it, it’s on you. John Henry moved faster than thought.
Umber’s ship announced, "Deploying magnets now. Enjoy the show."
Umber sounded positively smug.
The magnets struck the Shimmer’s generator. The waving curtains froze and shattered, throwing out neon bows of electric color, green, orange, and violet.
The gaudy flashes mapped the vicious shapes of the Dagger ships—black, wicked and eerie against the light. It was a chilling sight.
It's good to be the monster in the dark.
"Um. I got a stupid question," Ix Chel sent. "Who said that warning?"
"I was gonna ask that," Gort said.
"I didn't recognize that voice," Gretch said.
"Wasn't one of us," Umber said.
"Well it couldn’t’ve been Rutogs,” Zack said. “It was a voice."
It had been a warm voice, male, low, and gravelly, the kind of voice that ought to belong to someone named Satchmo or Leon, old time singers Zack's Dad used to listen to. Zack suddenly felt baited.
Imposter.
Zack was about to ream John Henry for taking orders from an outside source, but he couldn’t figure out how to fault obeying a call to high alert.
Umber asked hesitantly, "Did the Rutogs just warn us of their own bounce?”
Gretch snorted. “That's pretty inept."
“It couldn’t have been the Rutogs,” Umber said.
“Well, who else is out here?”
Ix Chel said, "Had to be someone from Team Eight. Team Eight could have sent the warning.”
“Where are they?” Umber asked. “They’re not on my tac.”
“Call them,” Rittenhouse ordered.
Gretch tried
the Dagger warp channel.
“Negative response. Negative acknowledgement,” Gretch said. “We're talking to ourselves. They’re gone.”
“This is what we call a diversion. Form up and move out," Rittenhouse ordered sending warp coordinates.
The Team had finite supplies and ammo, and the mission took priority over anything.
***
Zack's Dad died young. It was a well-known fact by then that passage through the Intersection takes years out of you. You accept that when you sign on for Daggers. The Space Corps didn't send too many human beings over here any more. They sent vehicles, drones, and self-controlled attack craft. But not people.
You really do lose five years. You don't notice them gone right away. You don't appear to have aged much, not on your immediate return you don't. But a man who's been on the Rutog side decays quicker on the back end of his normal life cycle.
When a veteran of Rutog space loses the color in his hair he's told to get his affairs in order quick—he's in the exit lane. Dad died before his hair could turn.
As long as Dad was alive, Zack resisted looking for confirmation of Dad's missing past. He didn't want Dad to catch him digging. Zack just wanted to know everything about him. Zack was desperately proud of his father.
When Dad died, Zack went searching for confirmation of Dad's service with the Daggers. Zack's search was discreet. He never spoke the word "Dagger" or the tainted number "Seven" or his father's name when he asked questions. Things hidden should leave a hole. Zack was looking for the shape of missing pieces. His father's name should come out of one of those holes.
Zack found some men by the names Dad had mentioned as his teammates. That was a relief. It was a sure sign of a fraud when a self-made hero can't remember the names of his teammates. His Dad had names.
Zack’s sense of relief faded fast. None of those names were on the proud Dagger roles.
But then again, they wouldn't be, would they? Not if Team Seven had been erased by the Cryptos as Dad said.
Not being able to find Dad's teammates didn't mean they hadn't been members of a secret unit.
The data trail would appear identical whether it was an expertly thorough data-wipe done by the cryptos, or if it was a tall tale of a team that never existed.
The names of Dad's mates troubled Zack. Not just because they had no recorded association with Daggers. The Dagger part could be hidden. The real problem was that those men's names weren't on KIA or MIA roles either.
How do you hide a Killed in Action record?
There would be families. You can't shut them all up. Death records were public.
Zack broke down and asked his Uncle Jake. "What'd my Dad do in the service?"
Dad's brother was a sour, jealous port jock who drank too much. At the question, Uncle Jake's eyes beetled huge, like he'd been waiting a long, long time for Zack to ask. Jake musta had it bottled up for a while, because it came gushing out in a roar. "AC was in the Chair Force!"
"What?"
"He was in Supply! That's all he ever was!"
Zack stopped asking questions.
He wouldn't have his father held up to the kind of abuse reserved for fakers.
And the truth was Zack wasn't sure anymore.
Okay he was sure. He didn't like what he was sure of.
It didn't matter.
Dad had made him a man who could stand up on his own. Zack shouldn't feel betrayed that he was standing up on vapor.
It had been a good story. It'd made him proud.
It knocked the breath out of him to suspect that the story was all just breath.
Some part of him still clung to hope and belief in his father against all the allegations that Dagger Team Seven was a fake.
Then he found the five years.
He'd been looking in the wrong place. He'd been searching military files.
He hadn’t checked the civil files. There would be a five-year blank in Dad's civil history if he’d ever passed through the Intersection. You cross through that Intersection, you don't come back until five years later as measured on the home side. There had to be a five-year blank in Dad's civil data trail.
There wasn't one.
There was an unbroken log of tax returns. There was a mailing address to a house in Indiana. There were records for training courses AC Cade completed in '43 and '44. Had to do with Supply systems. There was a receipt for a transport he financed in '48.
AC Cade was on Earth. The data trail said he was on Earth his whole life.
That sealed it.
The stories had been nothing but stories.
4.
It was an exaggeration to call a few agitated molecules of matter "heat," but it was significant. A Rutog mass had passed this way. Dagger Team Nine back-traced the enemy’s attenuated trail in search of the Rutog base of operation.
Flying on point, Zack’s ship John Henry spoke an advisory. "Structure detected."
"Define structure,” Rittenhouse demanded. “Enemy craft?"
"Friendly,” John Henry reported. “They are Daggers."
Rittenhouse called, “Break! Break! Break! It’s a false read!”
The Nines broke wide and went dark.
Team Eight had warned them about imposters.
Morris Umber sent out a micro-sensor toward the structure. The sensor interpreted the readings into visual images. “Jesus!” Umber cried.
The jagged edges took on clarity. The shape was almost familiar but distorted and grotesque, broken.
It was a Dagger fort. It had been attacked while joined together as a fortress. "It's the Eights!"
"I thought they were going home," Gretch said.
"They didn't make it,” Ix Chel said solemnly.
There were only five Dagger ships here, clinging together. Their fortress had been torn open and peeled back like petals of a hideous lily. The sixth Dagger ship was missing altogether.
"The bodies are still in there," Umber reported.
Rittenhouse ordered, “Team! Spread wide! Eyes everywhere. Do not maintain position for more than seconds. We will not be caught sitting.”
Zack rogered that. John Henry jumped every eight or nine seconds while Zack stared at the images on his screen. Umber drove the sensor drone into the wreckage. Umber’s voice was hushed. "This was the Alamo."
The drone showed bodies, their spacesuits torn.
The drone’s sensors sent more than visuals. The reading of the temperature inside—the lack of it—was astonishing. The ruined Dagger fort, including the engines, stood at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, as if the attack had happened a very long time ago.
Team Eight had only been in Rutog space four months.
“This is not Team Eight,” Umber said.
The drone floated over the frozen men in the wreckage. They hadn't gone peacefully. Umber steered his drone over the Dagger pilots’ suits, their tags and insignia.
“Are they kidding me?”
Umber had a second micro-sensor gliding along the exterior of the wreckage. Umber’s equipment translated the data into visual images. The outside sensor showed ice-crusted unit markings on the hull of one ship.
Umber said, "You seeing this?"
"No. No and no,” Gort Neuman said. “This is not here."
“That.” Umber paused the sensor over the unit number on the Dagger ship’s hull. “Is a seven.”
“Dagger Team Seven is a joke," Gretch said.
"I'm not laughing," Umber said, while Zack felt like he'd been shot and hadn't realized he was dead yet.
Gretch pinged for human tracers.
And got a return. Six of them.
There were only five bodies in the Dagger fort.
"I don't see the sixth ship or the sixth man," Umber said.
He guided his drone to read the names off the bubble helmets of the dead pilots.
"Thompson. Bagnold. Li."
Umber hadn’t got to the next body yet. Zack Cade recited hollowly, gazing out at the
vacuum, "Goodwin."
"Uh, yeah. Got a Goodwin here. How in the hell you know that, Cade? This one is named Williams." Umber moved the sensor around the husk, casting about. "Anyone see the other one?"
There were only five bodies.
"Is he outside?"
"You won’t find him," Zack said. He saw his own reflection in his bubbletop canopy. His eyes narrowed to glinting slits as if about to cry or murder somebody.
"What's that, Cade?"
Zack’s voice sounded brittle and strange to his own ears. "He’s not here."
"We'll find him,” Umber said, dispatching more sensors.
Zack snarled, "He's not out here."
Rittenhouse’s voice sounded annoyed to angry. "Did the cryptos happen to read your special self into some operation of which we do not have the privilege of knowing, sir?"
"No," Zack said. He looked away from the monitor. "Cryptos don't tell me shit."
He heard Umber breathe, "Oooh." The sound of discovery.
Lieutenant Rittenhouse said, "Some vocalization with more substance, Pilot Umber."
"See this?" Umber moved his drone around a thin strip of metal that floated lazily amid the other debris in the airless weightless space in the wreckage. The twisted blade-thin sliver of metal was a tracer. "It's creepy to see one of these outboard of a guy. It has to be the sixth pilot’s."
"What's it read?" Rittenhouse demanded.
“Its number is coming up Name not on Record,” Umber said and moved his drone around the tracer. "Okay. Looks like a printed name here."
Everything inside Zack went still. He didn't think his heart was beating. His vision was closing into a tunnel. He heard a stillness over the shared com.
Umber spoke. "Are you dead, Cade?"
"My name isn't AC," Zack Cade said.
"How do you know this says AC Cade?"
"Does it?" Zack whispered faintly.
It didn't blunt the blow any to hear it. "Yeah. AC Cade."
Umber moved the drone so the stamped letters on the tracer came into view on the team monitors.
Zack coughed, like trying to cough up a black tumor lodged under his diaphragm, something dark and ugly that had been feeding on him a long time. His own doubts. I am an idiot. He should have believed in his father in face of all shit to the contrary.
Gretch, asked, cold, "Cade, you want to tell us what you know?"
No Surrender Page 22