“Chuck Mattis? Son of Admiral Mattis?” asked the stranger, his English heavily accented. Chinese?
Chuck stopped, turning to face him. An old guy, definitely Asian, frazzled and harried-looking. If it wasn’t for his thick foreign accent he would have been just another veteran from the Sino-American war. “Yes,” he said, carefully. “But I don’t have any money.”
“That’s good, because I don’t want any.” The man held out his hand, clutched around something small. “Give this to your father.”
Chuck laughed. “I’m not taking anything to my dad without at least knowing your name. What, do you think I’m crazy?”
The guy glanced around, conspiratorially, and then lowered his voice. “I’m Admiral Yim.”
Chuck almost laughed again, but the name triggered a memory within him. Something his dad had mentioned…
“Wait,” said Chuck. “Admiral … Yim? You … you killed my uncle.” Suddenly, he felt all his muscles tighten, his breath coming quicker. “If you’re here to kill me too, then I’m going to kick your fucking ass, you—”
“No!” hissed Yim, angrily. “I mean … yes. I did. But that was in war, a long time ago—”
“Get away from me!” Chuck backed away. It was tempting to raise his voice and shout out to the crowd, but something caught the words in his throat.
Yim held up his hands, including the one that was still holding something. “I’m—” he paused. “I’m Smith’s chess piece. I think you know what that means.”
Smith. The CIA agent he had met during the break-in at Pitt’s office—met because the guy was also breaking into the same place. He’d mentioned contacting one of his ‘chess pieces’ which would help him….
Deep breath, calm down. “Okay,” said Chuck. “What do you want?”
Yim extended his hand and opened it, revealing a tiny data drive within. “Just to implore you to pass along this to your father. He’ll trust me.” A pause. “I hope.”
Chuck narrowed his eyes skeptically. “What’s on it?”
Yim hesitated, but Chuck met his gaze, glaring angrily. “It’s a top-secret gravity-wave engine,” he said. “The full schematic. And documentation about some of the strange, unexplained effects it can generate. Including quantum dislocation, which…” Yim groaned. “Blah blah blah, mumbo jumbo, it allows very short term time travel for small particles and … possibly more. The notes within will explain it much better than I ever could. Tell your father: This is why Captain Shao’s ship exploded.”
“But—” said Chuck.
“Your father has to have this. In payment, for his trust in me at Chrysalis, with Goalkeeper. Without that trust, both he and I would be dead.” He offered the tiny drive again. “The password is the name of the man he sent into that place, to infiltrate the facility. He’ll know what I mean.”
“Funny, since you could have almost asked him yourself, but he just left,” protested Chuck, pointing to the sky in the vague direction the ship had left. “If you’d been just a few minutes earlier.…”
Yim glanced over his shoulder, as though looking for some unseen enemy lurking in the shadows, then back to Chuck. “Just get that to him, will you? I have to be going.”
“Wait! Why not just give it him yourself?”
“Too many people watching,” said Yim. “Any one of them could be … well, it’s not important for you to know. Just get it to him. As soon as humanly possible. For all our sakes.” He turned abruptly and moved toward the crowd in the park, and in moments he was gone.
Chapter Four
Earth
Washington, D.C.
Pentagon
Mattis had been to the Pentagon a handful of times, but each time was always impressive. Heavily damaged in the Sino-American war, and rebuilt almost twice as large with an emphasis on security and safety, the building was the throbbing heart of the American interstellar war engine.
Having checked in his sidearm at the heliport façade, he followed Admiral Fischer deeper into the structure. She hadn’t said a word since she picked him up. Whatever was going on must be big.
Further and further they descended into the pentagonal structure, taking some stairs down under the ground. Soon they came to an armored door, reinforced steel with hinges on the other side, flanked by two guards. Above them, built into the ceiling, was a ball-turret with a pair of prominent barrels projecting out. From the gauge in the barrels, and the size of the shell-casing ejection ports, these weapons were not here for show. Were they expecting someone to, possibly, drive a car down the stairs? Or an APC?
“This is new,” said Mattis, eyeing the construction.
“Actually, it was built after the Sino-American war. It’s only recently been declassified.”
That drew his attention. “Declassified? At what level?” Despite the curiosity of it, he made a joke. “Hiding stuff from your fellow Admirals, Fischer?”
She didn’t smile. Odd—Fischer normally loved a joke. “You have no idea,” she said, handing her lanyard to the guard to her left.
The man checked it, then checked Mattis’s. Both were subject to an inordinate amount of scrutiny; the holographic images were examined, tilted this way and that, and the magnetic strips read three times and verified through a computer whose purpose was not entirely clear. Finally, seemingly satisfied, the guard nodded respectfully and stepped back.
And then the door opened.
Beyond was a tri-forked corridor that lead to a series of doors, each one wooden and simple in design, and each bearing a brass number. 1. 2. 3.
“This way,” said Fischer, pushing open door labeled 1, revealing a round room with an oval table, at which were seated many senior officers, some familiar to him.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff occupied one half of the table, most of whom he knew by reputation only, and at the other side of the table were his XO, Commander Stewart Lynch, and his chief of engineering, Commander Oliver Modi.
They did not look happy.
“So,” said Mattis, taking a spare seat beside Lynch, “I came as fast as I could.”
“Yeah,” said Lynch, his tone gilded with frustration. It was only then Mattis noticed he was out of uniform, wearing suspenders and a dark grey T-shirt. “Me too. Dragged me away from a lovely day’s fishing the Red River down in Texas. Not that I could say no; the engine noise scared away damn near every fish in the water.”
“I was asleep,” confessed Modi. “Fortunately I was given time to shower and dress appropriately.”
“It’s three o’clock in the afternoon,” said Mattis, confused.
Modi simply shrugged. “I adapt my sleeping patterns to the requirements of the job, but if left to my own devices, I inevitably become nocturnal, especially when working on my personal projects. I’d only been asleep for six hours, twenty minutes.”
“Damn gremlin,” muttered Lynch. “Living in darkness and playing with circuit boards.”
Fischer cleared her throat pointedly. “As interesting as this is, shall we move on from our leave-based sleeping habits? We do have a lot of ground to cover, ladies and gentlemen. The sooner we begin, the sooner we can take action.”
“I concur,” said Modi.
“Me too,” said Lynch.
Mattis made three. “What can you tell us about what’s going on, Admiral Fischer?” he asked. “We’re all in the dark here. Is this about my ship?”
“No,” said Fischer, reaching under the table and withdrawing a stack of tablets. She passed them around the table. “But indulge my curiosity; have any of you visited the world of Zenith?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Mattis. “But the name came up in our investigations of the—” he almost said the deep state conspiracy which, given the high ranking military officers he was surrounded by, would almost certainly be an unpopular topic to broach. “uh, recent unpleasantness at Chrysalis.”
“That’s a shame,” said Fischer, touching the screen of her tablet, lighting up Mattis’s and the others as she did s
o. “Because as of six hours ago, every city, every building, every human being on its surface is gone.”
The image on his screen was obviously taken from high orbit and showed the churned, black-brown land typically found in a terraformed but uncolonized world. Soil turned over by aerators, but with nothing planted in it; just raw earth, dirt, featureless and plain like muddy clouds.
Only the smallest thing, faint red embers occasionally dotting the landscape, belied the truth. As he zoomed in, each of the embers became a roaring sea of fire the size of cities. Mattis scrolled around. Whole areas had been churned up, mixed in like cake ingredients.
“My god,” said Modi, utterly baffled. “The damage is … not consistent with nuclear strikes, or neutron bombs, or any of the weapons we might have at our disposal. It is almost as though the entire crust of the planet were lifted up a kilometer of more, and then dropped—repeatedly. Mixed up the whole surface of the planet.” He pulled the tablet close to his face, as though a more rigorous inspection would show him some piece he’d missed. “But it’s impossible. The energy requirements are simply staggering, beyond any of our capabilities,” he paused slightly before adding, the recent brushes with the possibility of time-travel apparently on his mind, “or even our projected capabilities, for hundreds and hundreds of years.” He looked up, dark skin noticeably paler than normal. “What kind of thing did this?”
Lynch leaned over toward him. “If it scares the engineers,” he whispered, a wobble in his tone, “you know it’s gotta be bad.”
Mattis couldn’t help but agree.
“We are unsure as to the nature of the device which caused this devastation,” said Fischer, flicking her finger across the screen, obviously viewing other images. “But sufficient enough to say, we are extremely alarmed. Commander Modi, your initial assessment does, in fact, seem to be accurate; based on the information given to us by our source, it does, in fact, appear that Zenith’s crust was lifted away from the planet.”
“Who?” asked Mattis, doing as she did, inspecting other images. They showed the same bleak, churned up landscape, pulverized into bland emptiness by incomprehensibly destructive energy. “What source is this? Another government? Did someone claim responsibility for this?” That didn’t make any sense at all. “Who in the hell would attack Zenith of all places? It’s a backwater.”
Fischer tapped on her tablet in rapid succession, and Mattis’s screen changed. “This,” she said, as the image of a somewhat disheveled, roguish-looking man appeared, wearing a light pink shirt under a black leather jacket and sporting an almost ridiculous set of antique aviator glasses, “is Harry Reardon. At least, that’s who he claims to be. He’s a … ahem, private courier who regularly hops between New London, Zenith, and Chrysalis. He and his younger brother, Sammy Reardon, claim to be witnesses to the attack on Zenith.” She paused a moment, letting her words sink in. “They say it was, and I quote, the aliens.”
If it wasn’t for the images he was holding, showing a ruined planet destroyed by some kind of weapon Modi couldn’t even understand, let alone theoretically accept, Mattis would have laughed. “You know that the DOD gets a thousand tips like that every day,” said Mattis, cautiously. “People from all over the galaxy, trying to cash in on potential reward money, swearing black and blue they got abducted by aliens, or alien mind control made them divorce their husbands, or … whatever.”
“We feel this one is genuine,” said Fischer. “If only because Harry Reardon has an arrest record as long as your arm—and he hasn’t once tried to claim any kind of reward.”
“What has he asked for then?” asked Mattis, dubiously. “I doubt an … enterprising young man with his own, ahem, courier business that only seems to go to the disreputable places in the galaxy is willing to talk to the US Department of Defense for free.”
“He isn’t,” said Fischer, nodding understandingly. “He only wants to talk—” she turned to directly face him, “to you.”
“Me.” Mattis blinked. “What?”
“By name. You’re quite the media celebrity these days.” Fischer smiled. “Normally we’d dismiss him, but excerpts from his ship’s sensor logs did raise a few eyebrows down at Intel. We want the complete logs, and an interview.”
“Is there anyone else?” asked Mattis. “I can’t believe that only a single—albeit talented—young pair of brothers with a ship managed to escape planetary devastation on this scale.”
“Not as of yet,” said Fischer. “He’s the only one we’ve located so far. If Reardon doesn’t show up to the meeting, go to Zenith itself. There might be more information there, in satellites or surviving installations if nothing else.”
At least they had a backup plan. That was better than he was given in most crisis situations. “Okay,” said Mattis, breathing out a low, long sigh. “I’ll go talk to the smugger.” He glanced to Lynch. “Cancel all outstanding leave and get the crew back to the ship.”
“One thing you should know,” said Admiral Fischer, her voice suddenly firming. “Regarding the command of the Midway.”
His chest tightened and he straightened his back. Somehow, he knew this wasn’t going to be good. “Yes, Admiral?”
Fischer’s voice was a mixture of uncompromising firmness and genuine sympathy. “You know as well as I do,” she paused, meeting his eyes before continuing. “Command of the Midway was never, truly, meant to be yours after the attack on Friendship Station. Your expertise with the ship’s systems and configuration was extremely useful after Captain Malmsteen’s untimely passing, and I don’t want to diminish that, but…” wait for it, here it comes… “Ultimately, command of the Midway will be reassigned after this mission. We’ll be monitoring your progress until then, and evaluating you as we go, but you should know this going in.”
Lynch practically spat out his own tongue. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “Admiral, there’s nobody in this galaxy who’s more capable than Admiral Mattis. Nobody.”
“Funny words,” said Fischer, “from the man we’re looking to take command.”
Mattis and Lynch exchanged a brief glance.
“Admiral, I—” Lynch sputtered.
“It’s fine,” said Mattis, keeping his voice even with sheer force of will. “All good things come to an end. We’ll discuss it after this mission.”
“Aye aye,” said Lynch. “I’ll go get a uniform on.”
“Step on it,” said Mattis, grimly. “Harry Reardon sounds like the kind of guy who one might label a flight risk. And who knows where that allegedly alien ship is going to pop up next. Modi, how’s the refit coming?”
“Well, sir,” said Modi, hesitantly. “There’s something about that you need to know.”
“Good news? Bad news?”
“I’m honestly not quite sure, sir.”
Chapter Five
Chrysalis
Rand City
Spectre’s Apartment
“Oh,” said Spectre as he casually tapped his pen on the surface of his wooden writing desk, “what tangled and messy creations we have birthed.”
Birthed. He hadn’t planned on using that word, but, considering the mere existence of their new, grotesque creations where before they had been simply human, the word birthed was apt.
He let his eyes drift over the surface of the paper, prosthetics scanning the words and highlighting important bits of information. This report on the mutants was just like the last one but, fortunately, contained the hopeful glimmer of incremental progress; an entirely unexciting notion to be sure, but one for which he knew he should be, at least, a little grateful.
This was, after all, how true science was achieved. Through the rigorous and pragmatic application of experimentation.
It did seem to be a waste that this batch of mutants, although more tame and seemingly more susceptible to control than any previous attempts, ultimately had to be destroyed.
But what was trial without a little bit of error? Error was the lifeblood of science.
&nb
sp; Spectre had his prosthetic eyes store the relevant numbers—chemical traces, hormone levels, dosages—and focused on the broad-brush strokes. Remembering precise facts was something that computers were very good at, and interpreting results was something humans were very good at, so he tried to leverage as much of his advantages as possible.
Still, eventually, all the report’s words just started to blur together and he switched off the tablet.
“What should we do now, sir?” asked the scientist who stood opposite his desk. Doctor Janet Sizemore, a mousy-haired woman who had earned, somehow, the title of lead researcher into their mutant ‘problem.’
“Just keep working on it,” he said. “You know what to do. You know what the goal is.”
“I understand,” said Sizemore, creasing her brow ever so slightly. “I just … I thought you’d be pleased at our progress, and I was wondering if you had any guidelines for the next steps we might take.”
Spectre had no time for a lecture, nor the inclination to issue comforting compliments and inspiration. “Half a success is a failure,” he said. “The goals remain unchanged.” He reached up and rubbed his temples. “Out.”
Fortunately, she didn’t seem to want to argue and, without a word, turned to leave.
“Actually,” said Spectre before she made it out the door, a light flicking on in his head. “Send in my secretary, if you wouldn’t mind.”
She nodded, and left, and moments later his secretary leaned through the door. “Sir?” he said.
“Prepare my ship.”
“Sir?” asked the man again, clearly bewildered. “You’re … leaving?”
The Last Dawn: Book 3 of The Last War Series Page 3