Operation Cobalt – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: The Biogenesis War Files

by L. L. Richman

  Amara fought to keep her expression neutral in the face of the man’s arrogance. She shook her head.

  “We need to be underway by then,” she said firmly. “I know we’re only a day’s transit away from the habitat, but that’s cutting things a bit too close to our departure window. Please extend my apologies to your man for upsetting his schedule in such a precipitous manner.”

  She paused and let her gaze sweep the rest of the room.

  “We need everyone else back on deGrasse as soon as possible,” she said. “Consider all liberties revoked, and personnel recalled.”

  There were murmurs of acknowledgement all around the table. Toland was relieved to hear Stinton’s voice among them.

  Though technically a civilian, the chief scientist’s contract with the Navy required that he, and all other civilian personnel reporting up to him, adhere to Navy regulations regarding such things.

  He tended to conveniently forget that from time to time.

  “Very well, then. Please pass any questions or concerns along to Colonel Fraley, and if you run into any issues, know that they’ll be dealt with on a priority basis.”

  Toland pushed away from the table and stood. The room stood with her, those with military ranks saluting. She saluted a dismissal, and then left the room.

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  PREVIEW:

  THE CHIRAL AGENT

  DEADLY DISCOVERY

  Advanced Isolation Lab

  deGrasse Research Torus

  Vermilion, Luyten’s Star

  Geminate Alliance

  The specimen case was unique. Tucked away in deGrasse’s Advanced Isolation Lab, it was disguised as a large gray shipping crate, purposely mislabeled as cleaning supplies. One look inside instantly dispelled that fiction.

  It contained no solvents, no soaps. Yet neither was it a standard specimen case. There were no compartments designed to isolate biological samples, laid out in neat, sterile rows.

  Instead, opening this case was like falling into a looking-glass microcosm teeming with native life. Segmented into four terrarium-like vivariums, each biosphere was host to its own species: insect, arachnid, rodent, reptile.

  The specimen case was unique in another significant way. The biospheres within were engineered from unique molecular building blocks found on Vermilion, the sole habitable planet orbiting Luyten’s Star. The life found here was unlike anything else humankind had discovered in all their centuries-long exploration of the universe.

  For all but a select few in the Geminate Alliance, it didn’t exist.

  When the first reports made their way to Alliance headquarters in Procyon, the decision was made to place Luyten’s Star under interdiction. The discovery was deemed too dangerous, too easily weaponized. Until Geminate scientists could fully decode what they’d found, all information pertaining to the discovery had been classified, reports redacted.

  The Navy’s premier research station was secretly relocated to Luyten’s Star, and placed in orbit above Vermilion. DeGrasse was staffed by a small team of civilian researchers under contract to the Alliance. These were recruited by the Navy’s Advanced Research Agency, and sworn to secrecy about their work.

  The decision to interdict Luyten’s Star had been made in the hope that news of the discovery could be contained, the sensitive information hidden from the prying eyes of Alliance enemies.

  They failed.

  AWAKENED

  LOCATION: Unknown

  “Holy—! Sarge... it’s alive!”

  The exclamation pierced through the fog that cocooned Micah’s mind. Distantly, it registered that he was lying on his back, somewhere cool and dark. With effort, Micah pushed against the mental haze that clung to him like a sticky web. His limbs felt leaden, his eyes refused to open.

  A second voice joined the first.

  “Of course it’s alive,” the sergeant responded. “It’s biomatter. Living tissues and shit.”

  The sergeant’s gruff tone reminded Micah of his drill instructor back at OCS—the kind of person who didn’t suffer fools or idiot officer candidates.

  The sergeant wasn’t done. “Just do what the eggheads in research ordered and burn it.” He barked the order, his voice growing louder as he neared Micah’s location. “Or do I need to shove my boot up your ass to get you to do your job?”

  “But I have neural activity on scan,” the first man protested. “That’s a person in there, Sarge, not biomatter. Already sent a ping to let Doc Janus know.” Agitation was replaced by urgency as his voice drew near. “Hey, grab the emergency kit by the door, will ya? I’ve got to get him out of there.”

  Micah heard the sergeant sigh. “Dammit, corpsman. Why’d you have to go and run a scan?” His tone was a mixture of annoyance and exhaustion. “Couldn’t you have just done as Janus ordered? Now I gotta do as he ordered.”

  Those words stirred a vague sense of unease in Micah. It turned to alarm when he heard the sound of a firearm being unholstered.

  He fought to throw off the haze that clouded his mind, to reach out, call a warning.

  “Sarge? What… wait—”

  The corpsman’s words cut off at the sound of a directed energy weapon being discharged.

  Micah’s gut clenched; he knew what that meant.

  “Sorry about that,” the sergeant muttered. Footfalls closed the distance as he stopped in front of the dead corpsman. “You were a good kid, too.”

  There was a grunt, followed by a soft scraping noise, and annoyance returned to the sergeant’s voice.

  “Well, hell. Now I have two bodies to dispose of. You damn well better be good for the credits, Janus,” the man muttered, “or I might have to pay your pogue ass a visit.”

  Janus. Micah forced his mind to latch onto the name. Not that he was in any position to share the information at the moment.

  In a moment of clarity, he recalled the evanescent wave nanocircuitry wired into his neural net. It was something every Alliance citizen received when they came of age, but Micah’s wire had been upgraded when he joined the Geminate Navy. The implant was military-grade and encrypted, allowing him to connect to any secured network.

  He reached mentally for it, cursing his drug-induced fog. His thoughts were clumsy, his implant a slippery and elusive thing.

  A thundering scrape of metal above his head interrupted his attempt to connect with the dormant unit. His brain nudged at him, the sound vaguely familiar. Something landed with a dull thump overhead.

  The corpsman’s body.

  A spike of adrenaline cleared his thoughts, and he realized what his subconscious mind had been trying to tell him. He knew now where he was being held: inside an incinerator.

  His limbs twitched as he strained to overthrow his paralysis. He had to get out before the thing fired up.

  Easy there. You’ll be fine.

  The thought startled him, seeming to come from nowhere, but he’d run out of time to analyze.

  With a deafening roar, the incinerator fired up. All around him, the inferno raged, heat building in the darkness until he knew no more.

  * * *

  “Shit. He’s not dead.”

  Micah jolted back to awareness as the words brought memory flooding back. He was still supine, still in complete darkness. He was as surprised to find himself alive as the voice sounded.

  From what he could tell, his situation hadn’t changed, although he seemed to have a clearer head this time around. He had no idea how long he’d been out, but he remained unable to move, to speak, or even to open his eyes.

  The voice sounded again. It was the sergeant from before.

  “Now what do we do? Janus said we need to scuttle all the evidence before fifteen hundred hours.”

  His query was met with a curt response.

  “Then kill him again, soldier. And this time, check your work.”

  The new voice was female, her words chilling. They galvanized Micah; he fought for mobility, to no av
ail.

  The sound of soft footsteps heralded her departure, followed by the sergeant’s softly muttered, “Damn Akkadian. I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

  The man began to move toward Micah’s location, but was brought up short when a resounding clang sounded in the distance. The noise elicited a string of curses from the man, the words fading as he ran to investigate.

  In the next instant, Micah felt a slight breeze caress his skin. Within seconds, his mind was much more alert than it had been mere minutes before, when he’d clawed his way to consciousness. His arm bumped against a smooth surface, and he froze, arrested by the knowledge that he could now move.

  This was a significant improvement.

  He turned his attention to his surroundings, to finding a way out of his confinement. The cushion of chilled air around his face suggested close quarters. He reached a cautious hand up and met resistance, ten centimeters above him. The coldness leaching from the material into his palm suggested some type of metal.

  He pressed his other hand beside the first, then slid both apart, using the movement to measure the space that held him. Another twenty centimeters, and both hands stopped, having found the sides of his prison.

  It suddenly registered that he was cold.

  Where the hell am I?

  There was the briefest of pauses, and then an answer sounded inside his head.

  Base Morgue. Level -10. DeGrasse Torus. Luyten’s Star.

  The words jolted him. These weren’t his thoughts. He knew this with certainty, but how he knew escaped him, since they hadn’t come across his wire. After almost two decades living with the unit embedded in his skull, he’d become used to feeling the presence of the neural implant. It was always there in the back of his mind, like subliminal white noise.

  Until now. Its silence was glaring, and yet a voice was unmistakably there.

  Deal with it later, Case, he told himself. Survival first.

  He ran his hands blindly along the seam of his prison walls, seeking a way out. His fingers stilled momentarily as it came to him that his wire wasn’t his only nonfunctioning implant. His optical augments weren’t working properly, either.

  He should have been able to scan the area on all EM bands, the coolness of the metal above him registering in muted blues and purples. Instead, he was enveloped in an unrelenting blackness.

  Now would be a good time to leave.

  With this newly transmitted thought came movement. The darkness split above his head, broken by a shaft of light. His eyes slitted shut in response to the sudden brightness. The light played down his torso as the platform on which he lay slid out of the wall—a wall of identical drawers, each the exact dimension of the space that confined him.

  And then it hit him. He wasn’t just in the base’s morgue, as the voice had indicated. He was on a freaking slab in the morgue, in one of its self-contained storage units, each of which could be individually incinerated.

  Which explains why I’m still alive, he realized. Somehow, my unit must have malfunctioned.

  He turned his head, eyes darting about the room. He was alone, the sergeant nowhere to be seen.

  Expelling a breath, Micah sat up. The chill air hit his naked flesh as he assessed his condition.

  Get dressed.

  The mental words were punctuated by the sound of a locker opening against the far wall. Micah gripped the side of the platform, the sharpness of its metal edge grounding him as he considered what to do.

  Shaking his head, he hopped down from the cold, steel surface. As he strode toward the locker that sat invitingly open, thanks to his mysterious benefactor, he reviewed what he could recall of deGrasse.

  He knew the morgue was on the military side of the torus. He’d been here once before, to….

  His mind hit a blank wall.

  Frustrated, he grabbed the boots that sat atop a folded flight suit, dropping them to the deck beside his bare feet. He reached for the clothing but stilled, his fingers already wrapped around the fabric, when he saw the weapons the suit had hidden. A pulsed energy sidearm lay beside a sheathed tanto knife. The first was a civilized, non-lethal weapon; the second was a brute-force instrument.

  He knew the tanto’s carbyne-edged blade would have twice the tensile strength of graphene and, though he’d never had occasion to test it, could likely cut into bulkhead. One glance at the maker’s hallmark stamped into the handle also told him the knife would be perfectly balanced. It wasn’t the kind of weapon one wielded against one’s fellow soldiers.

  Micah’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he contemplated the unlikely duo.

  An unspoken mental nudge spurred him back into movement.

  Shrugging into the suit, he grabbed the sidearm, clipping it and its spare batteries onto his belt. He left the tanto for now, as he shoved his feet into the boots, tucking his pantlegs into the tops and sealing them.

  He stood—then froze, attention arrested by his reflection in a nearby mirror. The flight suit was standard-issue. Unremarkable, except for its missing rank and nametag. But his face… it looked wrong, somehow.

  He raised a hand, running it through short-cropped hair in confusion, stiffening as realization struck.

  Micah was left-handed, and yet he’d reached with his right. His hair, which stubbornly grew in one direction, now fell to the wrong side. He leaned closer, noting other subtle irregularities in the face that had stared back at him for the past thirty-five years.

  What the—?

  They’re coming. Leave now if you want to live.

  The words were followed by a panel sliding open in a nearby bulkhead. Across the room, Micah heard the pounding of feet in the passageway leading to the morgue. The sergeant was returning, and he wasn’t alone.

  Leave. Now.

  There was a sense of urgency to the words that propelled him forward.

  He spun and lunged for the tanto blade. Palming it, he slammed the locker door closed and turned to face the yawning blackness.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, slipping though the panel.

  It slid shut behind him, darkness enveloping him once more.

  An image appeared in his head, a mental construct of a lab he knew he’d never seen and yet somehow recognized. The feeling of familiarity wasn’t coming from him. It emanated from the same place as the foreign thoughts that he now understood were being pushed to him from… someone else.

  Your destination. Hurry.

  “Who are you?” he repeated as he followed the mental nudge that urged him forward.

  There was a pause. The response, when it came, had him reaching for the bulkhead to support himself, his mind spinning in confusion.

  I am you.

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  TERMINOLOGY

  Helios – Fast-action spacecraft, considered the workhorses of the Alliance Navy, and capable of carrying an entire squad of fully-kitted Marines. A small percentage of Helios are modified as a Direct Action Penetrator stealth unit.

  All DAP Helios vessels are assigned to the Geminate Alliance’s Special Reconnaissance Unit, often referred to as SRU, or simply, The Unit.

  The teams that fly the DAPs are known as Shadow Recon. They deploy on classified missions, inserting elite special operations teams into destinations where conventional warfare is inadvisable.

  DUET Wires (aka “the wire”) – DUET stands for Direct Uplink Evanescent Telecom. Much to the dismay of the corporation that invented the tech, that name never took hold. Commonly known simply as ‘the wire,’ a DUET implant is embedded within every human when they come of age, and is included as a part of the
educational system of most sovereign star nations.

  Receiving a wire must wait until the brain has reached certain development criteria, as its integration evolves after the initial implant.

  Calabi-Yau Gate – This method of folding space bends the compactified branes stacked within the bulk of hyperspace, allowing for instantaneous travel in normal spacetime, from one location to another, regardless of distance.

  Scharnhorst Drive – The Scharnhorst is an interstellar drive that generates a Casimir bubble. This allows the drive to harness the Scharnhorst effect, a phenomenon in which light travels faster than c. The drive allows a ship inside its bubble to travel at triple the speed of light.

  SmartCarbyne Nanofloss – Carbyne, a chain of single carbon atoms, has twice the tensile strength of graphene. A lattice of ultrafine carbyne filaments, when implanted, will reinforce bone, muscle, and sinew.

  Some branches of the Geminate Navy receive a variant of carbyne nanofloss, which functions as an endoskeleton implant.

  SmartCarbyne is a unique variant, capable of altering its state. It was originally created to protect military pilots during high-g maneuvers. Its ability to turn ‘on’ and ‘off’ made it ideal for protecting the soft tissues of vital organs.

  A SmartCarbyne lattice is controlled by an implanted accelerometer. When disengaged, the atoms are in a disorganized, soft state. When experiencing acceleration greater than what the human body can withstand, the lattice automatically hardens, protecting the pilot.

  TENGs and PENGs– Triboelectric nanogenerator batteries are power-harvesting batteries that capture the electric current generated through contact of two materials, converting movement to stored energy. PENGs are piezoelectric nanogenerators that charge using ambient sound in the atmosphere around them.