by Richard Fox
He dialed back the charge through his rail cannon and looked away as the ship broke through the shield and vanished into the storm.
His fury was gone, replaced by failure and shame.
Chapter 18
Armsmen snapped to attention as Admiral Lettow stepped into the brig. In a cell closed off by both bars and a force field was Petty Officer Ruiz. She sat on a cot, her wrists and ankles bound to a heavy chain. Her head hung, staring at her hands.
The Ardennes’ chief intelligence officer, Commander Kutcher, stood up from the brig’s control station.
“Get me up to speed,” Lettow said.
“We found her almost by accident,” Kutcher said. “There was some anomalous data in that transmission the Ibarrans sent you. We thought it was just noise from the poor connection, then we found her system ID in the data. Couldn’t recover anything substantive from that first message, which chaps my ass. Took three passes through logs before we saw where she’d logged into the telemetry exchange. From there we found her hack into the Javelin internal comms and her messages to the rest of her sleeper agents. First couple of words are nonsense, then instructions for the artillery strike that took out the first Kesaht ship.”
“What’s she said to you?” Lettow asked.
“Won’t answer questions. She seems disorientated, confused. Might be a counter-interrogation technique. I need to work her over for a few more hours to know for sure.”
“What about the others?”
“They all surrendered after you ordered the fleet to attack.” Kutcher shook his head. “Their cell was perfect. No communication between any of them as far as I can find. No co-located assignments. They’re all isolated on their own ships. I’ll have them brought aboard and start the interrogations. Too many people to keep a cover story straight. I’ll get to the bottom of this, find out who else is working for the Ibarrans.”
“There’s a connection between these sleeper agents,” Lettow said. “One that’s…going to be difficult to accept. Did you open her naissance file?”
“The proccie data?” Kutcher almost whispered. “Why would I…oh no. I can’t open that, sir, takes a flag officer to get through the privacy locks.”
Lettow pressed a palm against a screen.
“Computer. Lift all restrictions on personnel naissance files for myself and Commander Kutcher. Authorization Lettow, Carter J.”
“Warning,” the computer chimed, “unauthorized access to naissance files carries a mandatory twenty-year prison sentence, loss of all pay and benefits, and—”
“I consent.”
“All naissance file access is automatically reported to the Chief of Naval Operations for mandatory review. Decryption sequence initiated,” the computer said.
“I’m an intelligence officer,” Kutcher said. “There aren’t many rules I have to follow. Lie? Cheat? Steal? All acceptable in the greater service of the Terran Union. But there was one rule that was pounded into me and every other secret squirrel type at training: Thou shalt not access proccie data.”
“The Naissance Act was the first major piece of legislation President Garrett insisted on after the Ember War,” Lettow said. “Human beings would be human beings; didn’t matter if they were true born or if they came out of a procedural crèche. No distinction in law or treatment.”
“The first, and last, law to pass unanimously if I remember right,” Kutcher said.
The screen blinked green and a box popped up over Ruiz’s file. Lettow pressed his fingertips against the box and the computer flashed a glaringly obvious warning that he’d accessed restricted data.
Lettow looked over Ruiz’ history.
“She’s a proccie, as I feared,” the admiral said. “Came out of the tube…two days before the Ibarras disappeared through the Ceres Crucible. Cross check naissance files with the rest of the sleeper agents, find the link.”
“I’d rather get a slap on the wrists for looking at the data than find a smoking gun. The implications…”
“Aren’t yours to worry about. I’m going to talk to her.” Lettow left Kutcher behind and went to Ruiz’s cell. The force field dissipated with a pop and a whiff of ozone. The cell door unlocked and the admiral stepped inside.
The force field came back on, the inner wall an opaque slate. Ruiz didn’t bother to look up at Lettow.
“Why’d you do it?” he asked.
Ruiz’s head tilted back. Her eyes were soft and unfocused.
“You know what you’ve done? How many lives we lost? What this means for our future with the Kesaht? I just want to know why. What the Ibarrans offered you.”
“I…I had to, sir,” she said quietly.
“You’re not a slave. You made the choice to send instructions to your confederates. How did you think this would end for all of you? You think the Ibarrans care about you? This was a suicide mission. You had to know you’d be caught or killed in the fight you started.”
“There was no ‘why.’ I just did it. Never bothered to consider what was happening. You don’t think about breathing or your heart beating. Just happens, admiral,” she looked aside for a moment, then sat up. “Admiral. I’m supposed to say something to admirals. It’s hard…like an old memory.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I can’t trust you anymore,” Ruiz said, her voice changed to a different accent, as though someone else was speaking through her. “You’ve…let the barbarians come to our walls and you’re about to open the gate. You’re too weak to do what must be done, so I will do it for you. Leave me alone, and I will do what must be done. Win what must be won. Leave me alone. Leave me…alone.” Drool dripped from the corner of her mouth.
“Ruiz, who told you this?”
“She…loves me. She will save us. Ibarra will save us all.” Ruiz’s shoulders began twitching. A seizure spread through her body and she fell to the floor, limbs thrashing.
“Corpsman!” Lettow grabbed Ruiz and forced her onto her side. The seizure subsided, and her whole body went limp. Blood and foamy spittle flowed from her mouth. He felt for a pulse and a final flutter passed through her neck.
The admiral closed her eyes and stood up. He roared and stomped the cot, breaking it off the hinges. He clenched his hands into fists and waited for the anger to subside. A med team burst into the room seconds later.
He stepped around them and stalked back into the brig. The room was deathly silent. Kutcher and a pair of armsmen kept their gaze off the admiral.
Lettow walked up to the intelligence officer, the look on his face conveying his question.
“We swept her for suicide implants,” Kutcher said. “She’s a proccie. Her procedural memory files are in a vault on Hawaii…we go through those and I bet we’ll find more impulses hard-wired into her brain.”
“The others?”
“All proccies. All with a naissance date within a few days of the Ibarras’ disappearance,” Kutcher said. “Takes nine days to make a proccie, and all the tubes were shut down not long after they left. If the sleeper agents are all from the same batch, we can contain them; won’t be too many in the fleet. If they hard wired commands into all the proccies…”
“If the Ibarras could control almost every adult on Earth and the fleet with the snap of their fingers, they would’ve done it a long time ago. They must’ve altered the code in the last few batches of proccies once the Hale Treaty was signed.”
“The more I think about this, the worse it gets,” Kutcher said.
Lettow looked back at the cell. A medic stood up from Ruiz and shook his head.
“Go through the entire fleet’s naissance files. Find the others that might be compromised, but keep this quiet. We’ll detain them all at once.”
“Detain them for…”
“Treason.”
****
Lettow’s legs ached, one shoulder was stiff, verging on pain from the countless hours leaning against his holo tank. The Ardennes was in high orbit over Oricon Prime, the 14th’s
artillery ships and strike cruisers in formation with the flag ship. His cruisers and other ships—those still in fighting shape—trolled along the gas giant’s upper atmosphere, scanning the depths for where ever the Ibarrans were hiding.
Ducking into the upper atmosphere of a planet was risky for any ship, damn near suicide if done on a gorgon of a world like Jupiter or Hades III. Oricon Prime’s upper layers weren’t as relatively benign as Saturn’s, but it wasn’t a garden spot.
What Oricon Prime did have was scale. It would take his fleet days to do a thorough search.
At least there was no way the Ibarrans would slip back through the Crucible gate. Not while he held high orbit.
“First probes are coming over the horizon,” Strickland said. “No sign of the Ibarrans.”
“I doubt they’d be so careless as to anchor where we could spot them that easily,” Lettow said. “Stagger probe orbits. Don’t give them a window to where we’re not looking.”
“All ready executed, sir. Just like you said earlier.”
Lettow rubbed a hand over his face. How long had it been since he’d slept?
A message popped up on Lettow’s screens; Kutcher with an urgent message.
“Strickland, bring me the butcher’s bill,” the admiral said.
“Aye aye.” He left the holo tank and went to the forward bridge to speak with the ship’s XO.
Lettow opened Kutcher’s call on his screens where the rest of the crew couldn’t see who he was talking to. The intelligence officer had the same poker face as ever.
“Well?” Lettow asked.
“The rest of Ruiz’s sleep cell are dead,” Kutcher said. “Same system shut down that killed Ruiz. No one spoke to them, so I doubt there was any subliminal triggers. That all expired within five minutes of each other leads me to believe they were programmed to destroy themselves after they were activated.”
Lettow swallowed hard. There was little left to be learned from dead men and women.
“You’ve found anything else to connect them to the Ibarrans?”
“Nothing. They may have been sleeper agents without even knowing it.”
“And what about the rest of the fleet? How many fall in that same naissance window as the cell?” Lettow asked.
“It’s hard to get an exact count after the casualties from fighting the Kesaht, but at least ten more. We round them up now and we run the risk of triggering their poison pills. Medical did an autopsy on Ruiz, there’s no physiological reason they could find for why she died. Tentative cause of death is stroke.”
“I want full surveillance on everyone you identify. Anything you even suspect is out of the ordinary…detain them at once.” Lettow scrolled down the list of names. His finger hovered over one in particular.
“You’ll have more as I find it, sir,” Kutcher said.
Lettow stabbed his screen and ended the call as Strickland walked over, a white-backed data slate in his hand. He glanced at the screen just as Lettow brushed his hand over the list of suspected sleeper agents and deleted it.
“Everything all right, admiral?” Strickland asked.
“No…it’s never a good day when you review casualty lists.” Lettow took the slate from Strickland and his other hand went to the pistol holstered on his belt.
His operations officer was on Kutcher’s list. If the theory that the Ibarras had made the procedurals from that time period into sleeper agents…why hadn’t they activated Strickland? What were they waiting for?
Lettow unsnapped the holster flap; he could draw it in a split second if need be. The admiral struggled with what to do to Strickland. Remove him from the bridge? Wait until he acted out of character, then shoot him? Do nothing?
Damn the Ibarras, he thought. This is what they want. Suspicion all around. Lack of trust will wreck a command just as badly as a missile strike.
He read through the casualty numbers. Over four thousand confirmed dead. Two thousand still unaccounted for. Hundreds more badly wounded. Auburn City was in no shape to take in his wounded. Those that could be moved were being loaded onto the fleet’s medical frigate, Hope, for immediate transit back to Earth.
He slapped the list against the side of the holo tank. The bridge crew went silent and glanced at him from their work stations.
“Sir?” Strickland stepped between the admiral and the crew.
“Did the Ibarras cause this?” He rapped the slate against the holo tank again. “Or did they do us a favor by destroying that battleship and forcing the Kesaht to spring their ambush too late to hurt us?”
“I doubt they were doing us any favors,” Strickland said. “They’ve got their own agenda. No one minds when their enemies bleed each other dry.”
“They’ll see just how much fight we’ve got left soon as we find them,” Lettow said.
An alert flashed through the holo tank. Lettow put his hand on his pistol as Strickland went to his station.
“Got a quantum field fluctuation…” Strickland said.
“Earth find a way through the Crucible?”
“That’s…odd. The fluctuation’s not from the Crucible. It’s just inside the Oricon Prime atmosphere. Redirecting probes. The Beijing and her group are the nearest ships.”
“Alert them but don’t send them just yet. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
Oricon Prime rotated slowly within the holo tank. A single point pinged just over the dawn’s edge on the far side of the gas giant. The first of several probes passed over the anomaly.
A window opened over the point, and video from the probe streamed in. A black whirlpool several kilometers wide spun in the clouds, twisting two color bands together.
“That’s impossible,” Strickland said. “From the sensor data…it looks like a worm hole formed there. But we don’t have that technology anymore. The Qa’Resh disabled all the jump engines after the war.”
“And yet,” Lettow looked at the whirlpool, its force already dissipating back into the clouds, “and yet our own eyes tell us differently.”
The Ibarrans beat me, he thought. They played me like a fiddle while they found whatever is it they came for and got away scot free. If we’re not at war with the Kesaht now, we will be soon. Earth won’t have the time or resources to hunt them down, and neither will the Kesaht.
Lettow straightened up, then re-secured the flap on his pistol.
Strickland gave him a dour look.
“Continue the search,” Lettow said. “We’ll return to Earth soon as we’re sure the Ibarrans are gone. I’ll be in my quarters preparing a summary for my court martial.”
Chapter 19
Aignar stood in front of a raised bench. Three individuals listened as he struggled to talk through the speaker in his throat. Two, a woman with a lined face but the bearing of a Marine sergeant, and General Laran of the Armor Corps, sat impassively. In the center, the President of the Terran Union, Garrett, looked increasingly agitated as Aignar spoke. Behind the armor soldier was a small group of officers.
Aignar’s metal fingers twitched, clicking against one another.
“…and then they left with Warrant Officer Roland Shaw,” Aignar said. “Lieutenant Gideon recovered my armor soon afterwards.”
The woman with the lined face leaned toward the edge of the bench.
“Ibarra had no environmental gear?” Torni asked.
“No, ma’am. She was…she’s not human. Somehow.”
The woman looked at the president and Laran. “I doubt she was on Oricon looking for a cure to her condition.”
“What happened to her?” Aignar asked.
“During the course of the Ember War, a number of humans were…altered,” Torni said. “Some adjusted better than others. Stacey Ibarra suffered a rather traumatic incident. There were concerns for her sanity before they rebelled. I’m not sure if she’s finally lost her mind.”
“Did she say anything about the Kesaht?” General Laran asked. “Anything at all?”
“No, ma’am.”
Aignar shook his head and felt his prosthetic jaw sway.
“Any update on the Qa’Resh artifact?” President Garrett asked Torni.
“It sank into Oricon Prime a few hours after the last of our armor was recovered,” she said. “Admiral Lettow hasn’t been able to find any trace of it since then.”
The president picked up a gavel and slammed it against the bench. Data slates bounced against the bench top. He pointed the gavel at Aignar and one side of the president’s face twitched. Garrett pushed his chair away from the bench and left through a door in the back of the room. Torni and General Laran followed him after an awkward pause.
Aignar turned around, his prosthetic feet dragging against the floor. Colonel Martel, Captain Sobieski, and Tongea rose from their seats.
“Sir, any update from Mars? Gideon and Cha’ril?” Aignar asked Martel.
“She’s through medical,” the colonel said. “No long term issues. She’ll be back in her armor by the end of the day.”
“And what about Roland?” Aignar asked. “Where did they take him? What do they want with him?”
“We don’t know where the Ibarras are hiding,” Martel said. “But we will find them. The Corps never leaves a soldier behind.”
“You left some details out,” Tongea said, “about Nicodemus.”
Aignar glanced back at the empty bench.
“Is he really one of us?” Aignar asked.
“We knew Nicodemus,” Martel said. “Brave man. A warrior,” he touched the red Templar cross on his uniform, “and deeply devoted to the Saint.”
“Nicodemus had the cross on his armor,” Aignar said. “I don’t…I don’t understand how someone who keeps to Saint Kallen could leave Earth and follow the Ibarras. I haven’t stood the vigil yet, but I thought we took an oath to defend all of humanity, to be the light against the darkness.”