The drive took about half an hour. Baskin was essentially a military planet – a base for humanity’s various armed services. Thus, Maker didn’t find it unusual that, despite finding himself in a region that was primarily rural, he still had to pass through multiple checkpoints before reaching his final destination.
Ultimately, the car pulled into the parking lot of a nondescript one-story building that, from the outside, appeared to be about two thousand square feet in size. Maker exited the vehicle and headed towards the building entrance, noting that it was guarded by an armed soldier on either side. The two guards saluted smartly as Maker drew near, while the door – which appeared to be fashioned of steel – opened by sliding sideways into a recessed compartment.
Maker returned the salute and then stepped inside; the door closed behind him with a slight hiss. Glancing around, he found himself in a nigh-featureless white room that was completely and utterly devoid of even the most basic accouterment: no windows, no furniture, no decorations… The only thing of note was a set of elevator doors set in the far wall; like the building entrance, it was manned by two guards who were standing at attention.
With nowhere else to go, Maker approached the elevator, at which point one of the guards turned to a scanner set in the wall. The guard placed his right palm on the scanner and muttered something Maker didn’t catch – presumably a code-phrase. The elevator doors opened almost immediately, and Maker, understanding what was expected of him, walked in.
As the doors closed, Maker noted a control panel set in a wall of the elevator. However, instead of having multiple buttons for various floors, there was only a single button available for selection.
Only one direction for this elevator, Maker thought as he pushed the button. And one destination.
As the elevator was housed in a one-story building, Maker wasn’t surprised that it started moving down. What was unexpected, however, was the depth to which it descended. Starting when the elevator went into motion, he mentally ticked off forty-seven seconds before it came to a halt. That meant he was well below ground – a fact confirmed when the elevators opened and he stepped out to find himself on a subterranean railway platform.
As in the building up on the surface, there were guards on the platform – seemingly half a dozen: two by the elevator doors, two near the edge of the platform, and two near a side door set in one of the walls. Frankly, the number of soldiers present struck Maker as overkill. There was nothing down here but a single railway line, on which, at the moment, sat a lone train car with heavily-tinted windows. But he, of course, did not run this particular outfit, so it wasn’t his place to say how many guards constituted a glut.
Not needing directions, Maker headed for the train car, the doors of which were open. Once inside, he immediately noticed that he wasn’t alone. Sitting on one side of the railcar was Browing.
After giving a cursory “Hello,” Maker took a seat across from him. A moment later, the doors closed and the train started moving.
Chapter 10
The journey took about five minutes, with the train car traveling at what felt like high speed the entire time. With the windows tinted on the interior as well, Maker couldn’t see anything outside (not that there was much to see in an underground tunnel), but he got the impression that they passed several other railway platforms.
Neither he nor Browing spoke while in transit. Maker took this as indication that his companion, like himself, suspected that the railcar was bugged. Besides, other than rehash what they had already discussed earlier, they wouldn’t be able to do anything more than guess at what was going on. More to the point, the need for speculation was minimal, because they would clearly find out soon enough.
Eventually, the train came to a halt. When the doors opened, the two passengers stepped out to find themselves on a railway platform similar to the one from which they’d departed. The only difference was that this particular platform seemed to be functioning at full capacity, with a steady stream of railcars pulling up and allowing passengers to disembark. As a result, the place had far more people milling about, including civilians as well as soldiers. In fact, the platform appeared to connect to what looked like a sizeable underground facility – a bunker or fortification of some sort.
“Lieutenant Maker?” asked a feminine voice, interrupting his thoughts. “Mr. Browing?”
Maker turned to find a Marine sergeant standing just a few feet away. He had been so busy assessing their surroundings that he hadn’t even noticed her approach.
“That’s us,” Browing said to the sergeant.
She gave a curt nod and said, “Follow me please.” She then turned and began walking away, without waiting to see if they would follow.
***
The sergeant led them into the bunker Maker had noticed earlier. Once inside, he noted that it was even more expansive than he’d initially assumed, with wide hallways leading off in various directions.
Following the sergeant down a corridor, Maker asked, “What is this place?”
“That’s classified, sir,” she responded without breaking stride.
“Its name or its purpose?” Maker inquired.
“Both,” the sergeant replied flatly.
Browing gave her a skeptical look. “You can’t even tell us what this place is called?”
“No,” she stated rigidly.
“Surely we’re cleared to know that much,” Browing insisted. “After all, we’re here.”
“Except you don’t know where ‘here’ is,” the sergeant admonished. “All you know is that you’re in a subterranean facility, but you can’t tell anyone where it’s located or how to get here. You arrived in a train car, but you don’t know the direction it went or the distance it traveled, not to mention how far underground you are.”
“Speaking of the train car,” Maker said, “any reason why it’s running on rails instead of using anti-gravs?”
“I’m afraid that’s classified as well,” the sergeant declared in a bored monotone.
Maker merely nodded, but didn’t say anything. He had been assigned to numerous classified facilities in his time, and was therefore able to glean a fair amount of info from the sergeant’s responses. However, he kept his thoughts to himself.
Eventually, their guide led them to – and through – a door that opened up into a room that was eerily similar to the building Maker had entered earlier: devoid of furniture and almost anything else other than armed soldiers. This time, however, it was just a door in a side wall being guarded rather than an elevator.
One of the soldiers stepped forward and muttered something inaudible to the sergeant, who nodded and then turned to face her two charges. “My apologies, but we’re going to have to check you for weapons.”
“Haven’t you done that already?” Browing practically demanded. “I mean, none of you people have asked me who I was or demanded I show any sort of identification, and I assume Maker had the exact same experience. That means you’ve probably been scanning us since the moment we stepped out of our vehicles and satisfied yourself as to who we were via facial recognition, biometrics, and so on. I find it hard to believe none of that encompassed a weapons scan.”
“The methodology we use to verify bona fides is confidential,” the sergeant explained. “But if it makes you feel any better, the weapons check only applies to the el-tee.”
She then waved over a big, burly soldier who was at least a head taller than anyone else in the room. The fellow took a position in front of Maker and simply stared at him for a moment with an are-we-going-to-have-a-problem? expression on his face.
Maker glanced at Browing and shrugged. He wasn’t armed, and therefore didn’t see the need to make things difficult. Ergo, he lifted his arms and held them out to the side at shoulder level, inviting the soldier to do his job.
Thankfully, the soldier performed the pat-down quickly – although perhaps a bit more thoroughly than absolutely necessary. (Maker couldn’t tell if the guy was simpl
y meticulous, or if he just enjoyed his work.) When done, the fellow simply nodded at the sergeant, apparently indicating that Maker was clean.
“You good?” Browing asked Maker.
“Oh, yeah,” Maker replied, “although I think I might be in love now.” As he spoke, he winked at the soldier who had searched him; caught off-guard, the fellow suddenly looked like someone who had accidentally stepped on a landmine.
“Okay, you’re clear,” remarked the sergeant, plainly ignoring the raillery between her guests. As she spoke, the side-wall door slid open.
Browing and Maker did as expected and stepped through the door into the next room. Calling it a room, however, was incredibly generous. It was more of a closet, if anything, that could accommodate perhaps six full-grown men (assuming they weren’t adverse to being packed in, jowl-to-jowl).
They had barely entered before the door behind them slid shut, followed by a series of mechanical clicks that seemed to indicate that it was locked and bolted in position. Maker was perplexed for a moment, as the other three walls were bare. He and Browing shared a confused glance, but before either of them could comment, the wall opposite the door they had entered began to move.
From all appearances, the right corner of said wall appeared to be hinged, allowing the entire wall to swing outward. It put Maker in mind of the door to a vault, and a moment later he realized that was exactly what it was: a vault. Something valuable was on the other side, and Maker suddenly found himself itching to know what it was.
As soon as the opening was wide enough, Maker slid through. He was in another white room, about twenty-by-twenty feet in size. However, his attention was immediately drawn to the fact that the entire wall opposite the vault door was made of glass, revealing another room that was almost a mirror of the one he was in except for one distinct difference: there was a single individual in the other room, standing maybe ten paces away from the glass.
Maker drew in a ragged breath, recognizing the other person immediately.
Skullcap.
Chapter 11
Maker instinctively reached for his sidearm, but it wasn’t there. He typically didn’t wear it outside of battle conditions (and if he had worn it, it would have been confiscated during the pat-down), but going for his gun wasn’t anything that he had consciously thought about. It was a natural impulse, a reaction, to seeing Skullcap.
The insectoid wasn’t in his battle armor or wearing his namesake helmet, but Maker had no trouble recognizing him. Although bipedal, the Vacra had six arms, and Skullcap was distinguishable by the fact that one of his middle arms was stunted and deformed. It was actually a regenerated limb; the original arm had been normal, but Skullcap had lost it during his first skirmish with Maker. His body had attempted to regrow the appendage, but with less-than-stellar results.
“Looks like I owe you an apology,” Browing muttered. “He is alive.”
Maker didn’t even hear him. From his perspective, the rest of the universe had fallen away, receded to a distant point. The only thing that existed was him and Skullcap.
Maker dashed to the glass wall separating the two rooms. He pounded on it with a fist, then hit it again. It felt like he was striking steel. The glass was obviously made of some kind of reinforced material – probably meant to withstand anything up to and including a grenade blast.
Skullcap, roughly seven feet tall and dressed in something like a gray tunic, stepped towards the glass.
“Maker,” the insectoid said, pronouncing the name as “Make-her,” with two separate syllables. “News of your demise was conveyed to me. I told them it could not be so. Death cannot claim you – not while the Senu Lia grants you protection.”
Maker ignored him, although it registered somewhere in the back of his mind that the voice had seemingly come from overhead – speakers – rather than in front of him. Instead, Maker scanned the framework of the glass wall before him, looking for an access point, some way to breach it.
Somewhere near him, he picked up on an odd noise – a type of chattering – but his mind filtered it out, mentally waving it away like the buzzing of an insect. His focus stayed on the problem at hand as he continued to look for a way to get into the room with Skullcap.
“There’s gotta be…” he murmured to himself, eyes examining the glass partition between the rooms. “How do I…”
The chattering sounded again, louder this time. Closer. Still, Maker’s disregard of it persisted. Skullcap was all that mattered.
The chattering increased in volume, almost enough to become an irritant. Maker turned in the direction of the sound, not to see what it was but as part of an effort to survey the room. In his mind, there had to be something on hand he could use to try to break the glass wall – a chair, a table leg, a light fixture… Something. Anything.
That’s when he noticed that the source of the chattering was a person. More specifically, it was a man in uniform sporting the rank of a Space Navy fleet admiral. He was red in the face at the moment, and seemed to be screaming something in Maker’s direction. No, not just in his direction, but at him, to be precise. At that moment, the singlemindedness that had gripped Maker vanished, and the chattering he’d been hearing suddenly became words he could understand.
“–ay it again!” the admiral bellowed. “Soldier, stand down!”
Chapter 12
“What the hell is going on?” Maker practically demanded. “What’s Skullcap doing here?”
“Ambassador Vuqja is here as our guest,” said the admiral who had yelled at Maker to stand down. His name tag identified him as “Lafayette,” and Maker now remembered him as one of the officers who had been present during his debriefings.
“Ambassador Vuqja?” Maker repeated, not bothering to hide his surprise.
“Yes,” said Lafayette. “He’s here as a dignitary and official representative of the Vacra.”
Maker frowned, trying to process this.
They were currently in a small chamber in the general vicinity of – but not adjacent to – the room where Maker had seen Skullcap. He had been so taken aback by his archenemy’s presence that he hadn’t even noticed that there had been other people in the room at the time besides himself and Browing. (In addition to Lafayette, there had been a field marshal named Steiner and a Star Forces general named Grasso present.) After his initial astonishment at seeing his archenemy – and subsequently being ordered to stand down after trying to get at him – Maker had been hustled out of the room in question.
A few minutes later, he’d found himself at his current location, along with Browing and the three general officers. (En route, Browing had managed to convey that these were three of the people he’d met with earlier.) At Lafayette’s insistence, they had each taken a seat at a table located in the middle of the room, at which point Maker had launched into his questions, seemingly without regard for the fact that the other officers in the room outranked him by a mile.
Now, upon hearing Skullcap labeled as an ambassador, all Maker could do was shake his head in disbelief and say, “Can someone explain to me how a piece of flotsam like that gets to be an ambassador?”
“Funny that you should describe him as flotsam,” Grasso said, “because that’s exactly how we found him.”
“What?” Browing asked, plainly bewildered.
“After your incident with the Vacra ships,” Grasso explained, “we found him floating in a lifepod.”
“Incident?” Maker echoed. “You mean the battle where their invasion force was destroyed?”
“The ambassador describes the encounter a little differently,” Steiner interjected. “But, yes, that’s where he was found.”
Maker’s brow wrinkled as he struggled to process what he was hearing. “So what – any piece of sentient trash that we pick up can just declare himself a dignitary?”
“Well, we didn’t just take his word for it,” Lafayette assured him. “We had your reports to go by.”
Upon hearing this, Browing let out a gro
an of agitation and shook his head in solemn frustration.
“What am I missing here?” Maker asked him. “Did you call him an emissary in your report or something?”
“Not exactly,” Browing stated. “But I did refer to him as a leader of the Vacra and one of their military commanders.”
“Actually, you all did,” Grasso clarified. “Including you, Lieutenant Maker, when you were debriefed.”
Maker shrugged. “So what?”
“Think about it,” Browing said. “He’s the only representative of his species that we’ve managed to have sustained contact with, he says he’s an ambassador, and our own people vouch for him being a leader of his race.”
“Basically, we had no reason to doubt his claims,” Grasso said. “Not to mention the fact that some of our people have, ahem, had prior contact with him.”
Maker balled his fist, remembering how certain individuals had tried to hand Erlen over to the Vacra, but tried to keep the anger of his voice.
“So that’s what this boils down to,” Maker muttered. “You still want the sub rosa tech the Vacra took.”
“Of course we still want it,” Steiner admitted. “It’s generations of work – not to mention weaponry that is incredibly potent, powerful–”
“And illegal,” Maker interjected.
There was an uncomfortable silence following Maker’s last statement. He had highlighted a harsh and galling truth: most (if not all) of the tech taken was banned and forbidden by either law, treaty, or common decency. It should never have existed in the first place.
“Look, let’s just talk straight,” Lafayette said. “We’ve got to get that tech back. Not only is it dangerous in the wrong hands, but just the fact that it exists could tear apart dozens of treaties that mankind has with other species. So the physical damage these weapons can do is only part of the story. The political fallout can’t be measured.”
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