Guano just vaguely shrugged as the missiles went in. “Two hits,” she said. “Splash one, splash two. Good effect on target.”
“How are you feeling?” asked Doctor Brooks.
Questions. The questions didn’t help. She lazily drifted her fighter out of the way of some return fire. “Normal.”
“Is there any indication of intestinal pain?” he asked.
Intestinal pain? What? She squinted, and a dozen red lines bored into the side of her ship with an electronic chirp chirp. She dodged again, kicking the rudder thruster pedals. “No,” she said, swerving the ship side to side. “Nothing like that. Why would that matter?”
“Well, all crew are given dietary supplements,” said Doctor Brooks. “Under stress, sometimes they can cause…” he coughed politely. “Intestinal distress.”
“Guano?” Flatline laughed, his gun making a very fake chirp chirp as it ‘fired’ at the distant enemy, fake tracers streaking across space. “Holy hell, did you get explosive shits when you passed out?”
“No.”
Flatline tapped her on the back of her helmet. “Truth! Did you? Did you leave skid marks in your flight suit? Oh my god, you did, didn’t you?”
“No!”
“Tell me! Tell me you did!”
She hadn’t and the taunting just pushed her to the edge. She squirmed around in her seat, trying to slap his hand away, and in the distraction, her ship was damaged by blast after blast from the virtual alien fighters. “Shut up,” she said, shaking her head and pulling the ejection handle, which ended the simulation.
“What?” asked Flatline, reaching around and tapping the back of her head. “What happened? You feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, with a lot more frustration than she truly intended. “And that’s the fucking problem!” She sighed and ran her hands through her hair. “Look, look. I can’t consciously summon this thing at the best of times … let alone in a simulator. It just doesn’t work that way.”
“Okay,” said Doctor Brooks, seeming to understand. “That’s fine. Look, obviously the simulator isn’t going to bring this out of you.”
“Clearly,” said Guano, casually swinging a leg out of the cockpit. “And no. I didn’t shit myself. I’m fine.”
“Well, thank you for your honesty,” said Doctor Brooks, smiling a little. “The truth is—and this is just between you and your gunner—apart from regular health and physical benefits, the supplements are supposed to also be stress relievers. They’re biochemically engineered to activate during times of great stress and produce a profound calm in the person instead. Just … well, not quite so serious as what you’re experiencing.”
What the hell were they feeding them? She didn’t like being … experimented on. It might not, in truth, have been a real experiment but it felt like it.
Flatline leaned out of the fake cockpit. “I don’t feel anything,” he said.
“I know,” said Brooks. “The effect is supposed to be minor. Subtle. Just to take the edge off—which is why I’m looking into why it’s affecting Lieutenant Corrick so much.” He shook his head. “Lieutenant, I’m going to look into your medical file again and see what I can find. You just rest, relax, and I’ll talk to you soon.”
She wasn’t sure how she could do that having just learned the pills she’d been swallowing for months were in some way a little more than vitamins, but she resolved to put that out of her mind and never think about it, just like so many of her problems.
“Your hospital gown is in the bathroom,” said Brooks, and then he left. And then she was alone with Flatline.
“You wanna go again?” he asked. “I got time enough for another go before the next briefing, if you want to give it another shot.”
No. It was time to get out of there. “Thanks, but hard-pass. I gotta go lay in bed and listen to the most annoying music in the universe from some dickhead on the other side of the wall.”
“Okay,” said Flatline. Way, way too casually. Like he was trying really hard to be supportive, but it just came across as insincere, pissing her off even more. “Whatever you need.”
Bah. Guano climbed down and stormed off toward the simulator room bathroom, shoving open the door and angrily began peeling off her flight suit. She shoved it into a corner and pulled on the gown.
But then a thought occurred, something that made her smile.
The very good doctor never actually ordered her back to sickbay. Just to relax and rest.
Clad only in the off-white gown, Guano slid the door open a crack. Flatline was gone.
She slipped out of the simulator room, heading towards the pilot’s lounge.
Time to hang out with her buddies and get drunk. Wearing only her open-backed hospital gown. She was sure in about half an hour she’d be too plastered to care.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Zenith, High Orbit
USS Midway
Hangar Bay
Mattis and two teams of marines—including the full squad of the infamous armored suit-clad Rhinos—stood by the threshold of the hangar bay as the small ship, really no larger than a shuttle, sailed silently through, leaving an expanding red trail behind it, just like the future-human fighters. The ship had the same blocky, aggressive architecture the hostile ships had, with the same unclean, angular lines.
If it was a disguise, it was a damn good one.
The shuttle silently drifted toward the centre of the hangar bay and touched down. The armored hangar bay doors closed. Jets of gas streaked out of the deck as the whole area pressurized, and then the door to the shuttle began to open, bathing the area in a dim red glow.
“When we’re done here,” said Mattis to Lynch, “make sure Modi and his engineering nerds take that ship apart. I want to know exactly what’s inside it.”
“Aye sir,” said Lynch.
“And Lynch?” asked Mattis, his tone serious. “Make sure that ship gets put on a launcher. The kind we use for heavy bombers. Keep that thing primed and divert emergency power to it; if that ship so much as squeaks I want it ejected out of my ship at once.”
Lynch nodded firmly. “That would be my pleasure, sir.”
A man appeared at the loading ramp. Mattis was expecting a tall, strong woman with strong hands and a warrior’s outfit. Instead, he got a short, pasty-looking man with an antiquated British suit and a wide, nervous smile, and an obvious earpiece clipped into his ear. His balding head was covered with flop-sweat. If this was an intergovernmental intelligence mastermind, the disguise was perfect—Mattis would have never guessed.
He ground his teeth and touched his radio. “One person, Spectre. No bodyguards. No hangers-on.”
The man held up a device to his throat. “I’m afraid this is me,” said Spectre, the man’s lips matching her words. “Just a formality, you see. To throw people off-balance. To challenge their preconceptions and … well, to be perfectly frank with you, see the stupid looks on their faces when they find out they’re adversary—or ally—is just an out-of-shape bald guy in a bad suit.”
“Off-balance is not what I want to be right now.” Mattis took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly. “No more tricks. Formalities or otherwise. Leave your little voice changer thing on your ship.”
With a playful smile, Spectre tossed the thing over his shoulder, and then slowly raised his hands above his head. “Okay,” he said, in his natural voice, a polite, clipped, British accent. “Let’s talk.”
Mattis gestured forward. “Rhinos,” he said, his tone conveying an edge of caution, “search him, but don’t break him.”
“Roger,” said the nearest one, and the five of them stomped out toward the ship. With steel-clad hands they roughly patted down Spectre, searching him all over for anything big and metal. Then they waved a metal scanner over his body—did those muscle heads even know how to use that?—and, apparently they were satisfied.
“Looks clear,” said the lead Rhino, waving one of her massive steel hands. “No sign of weapons or explosiv
es.”
Hardly a ringing endorsement. As though sharing his thoughts, one of the marines standing by glanced at him. “Admiral,” whispered the guy, “you know, one of the Rhinos shot themselves in the head last month, playing Russian roulette in some dingy dive bar on New London.”
Mattis grimaced. The Rhinos had a somewhat less-than-stellar reputation. One of his marines had once said, it takes a special kind of person to want to crew something that’s designed to get shot at … much less enjoy it. The Rhinos were a necessary part of shipboard defenses—the kind that said, essentially, bring heavy weapons or go home—but it was true. They weren’t exactly recruited for their brainpower or ability to solve complex problems.
Fortunately, the scanner wouldn’t lie and it was simple enough to use. “Good,” said Mattis. “Walk him in.”
Spectre, flanked by Rhinos, walked back toward the doorway that lead away from the hangar bay and toward the rest of the ship. It seemed almost a comical picture to him; a short, pudgy man in a suit being escorted by giant armored suits of metal brimming with weapons.
Again, Mattis expected treachery. Bombs. Tricks. Every little nasty piece of work human minds could conjure, but it was all for nothing. Spectre made his way over to the hatchway and one of Mattis’s marines pulled it open.
“Welcome aboard,” said Mattis. Definitely getting paranoid, old man. Not everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Murphy was an idiot sometimes.
“Glad to be here,” said Spectre. “Those metal hands are cold.”
Mattis flashed an equally cool smile. “Just a formality,” he said, beckoning for Spectre to follow.
Flanked by armed guards, the two of them marched to the bridge. The journey happened in silence, apart from the marines occasionally checking in and giving reports. They came to the bridge, and Mattis escorted Spectre inside, past the armored casement and the secondary door, inside the ship’s beating heart, then to his ready room.
“You’re letting me into our own private little study?” asked Spectre, smiling as he came into the ready room. “This is more than I expected.”
“Because you expected the brig?” said Mattis, sitting behind his desk.
“Mmm.” Spectre tapped his foot on the deck. “Yes, frankly. This is a surprising amount of trust you’re putting in a complete stranger.”
“We need the workspace,” said Mattis, sweeping everything off his desk with a clatter and tapping on it, lighting up the screen embedded within. “You’re no use to me sitting in a cell, breathing our air and eating our food while we try and make absolute certain that you’re not a threat. So here’s what I’m thinking: if you are here to cause mischief, I’m giving you the perfect time to play your hand so you might as well do it now and get it over with, otherwise…” he folded his fingers. “Start talking.”
Spectre smiled a whimsical half-smile and sat in the chair opposite. “Well.” He took a deep breath. “The first thing you should know is, we can track the craft that attacked Zenith. Or at least I can tell you how to track it. It’s very complicated; I’ll pass along the schematics to your engineers.”
“If it’s a device you’re building, I’m not putting any of your technology aboard my ship. End of story.”
Spectre nodded understandingly. “Well, there are other ways. Less good ways. But they’ll work. Again, I’ll need to speak to your chief of engineering to make the modifications we need.”
Mattis tapped his earpiece. “Mister Modi. I have someone here who needs to speak to you.”
“Aye sir,” said Modi. “Our visitor, I presume?”
“Exactly.” Mattis transferred the call to the speakers and indicated to Spectre to speak. “Happy for you to talk.”
Spectre immediately began talking in what Mattis could only suppose was some form of derivative English comprised entirely of techno-gibberish. He genuinely tried to follow along with the conversation but simply could not; it was a torrent, a stream of words that he understood the base meaning of but, put together, meant nothing. The only pause was when Spectre listened and, after what seemed like too short a time to him, gave his answers.
Back and forth, back and forth. C’mon Modi, he thought to himself. If there’s bullshit here, I need you to smell it out. Find what he’s doing. Where the trick is.
After several minutes, Spectre looked at him. “I like him,” he said, brightly.
Mattis glowered and clipped his earpiece back in to talk semi-privately. “You there, Modi?”
“Absolutely,” said Modi, his tone positively aglow. “I like him.”
Mattis suppressed his frustration. “What are you two planning to do to my ship?”
“Well,” said Modi into his ear, “it turns out the ship that we’re trying to find emits a form of radiation which we can easily track if we’re looking for it.”
“I’m aware,” said Mattis. “Lynch himself worked on an early, primitive version of their cloaking technology. If you recall, he was able to use this information to track the fleet that was heading to Ganymede, and then on to Earth.”
“Of course,” said Modi, a slight shift in his tone suggesting something similar to talking to a child. “That’s not what I’m concerned about. Since that discovery our passive sensor suite has been upgraded, fleet-wide, to deal with that version of the cloaking technology. The ship which attacked Zenith appears to be carrying a different model.”
That, in and of itself, was worrying. The idea that their enemy was adapting to their technological advances. Countering their every move.
Which would make sense, since he’d assumed their enemy was the powerful, secretive interests scattered across the power centers of the United States and China, buried so deeply that he wondered if they’d ever have any hope of uprooting them. Of course they’d have been apprised of the military’s upgraded abilities to detect their ships, and would have adapted.
But so it always was in war. One side would develop powerful armor, another side, a new weapon, spurring the development of even newer armor. Or active countermeasures. Or some other fantastic, brand new technology which would make previous generations of tech obsolete instantly.
Unless … unless what Spectre had mentioned was true. Unless their enemy truly was from the future.
Which was … ludicrous. Even though he’d proclaimed as much on Martha’s broadcast, it didn’t make it any less ludicrous.
“Okay,” said Mattis, thoughtfully. “So what has Spectre given us?”
“It’s … complicated,” said Modi, to his complete and utter shock. Modi never said anything was complicated. The closest he ever came was interesting. “But the gist of it is—we can now track the graviton-based residue left by this radiation, which lasts a lot longer … hours, days, months. The future-human ships are leaving a trail for us to follow. Their cloaking device has, ironically, become a locating beacon.”
That was useful. “When can you have it working?”
“It’s working now,” said Modi. “The path the ship has taken is clear as day.”
Complicated my ass.
“Send it to my desk.” Mattis closed the link, removing his earpiece.
Spectre smiled across his desk at him, inclining his head respectfully. “The first of many gifts,” he said.
Not a gift. A gift was given with no expectation of return. This was a trade.
And Mattis didn’t know what he was expected to give away.
His desk lit up with a star chart, which Modi had helpfully drawn a bright red line through, showing the ship’s projected path through Z-space as translated into real space. The line ended in the vast void between stars … its path and destination unclear. Just a blank area of space. Nothing for lightyears around.
“Fascinating,” said Spectre, nodding as though this brought great understanding. “Well, now we know where they’re going at least.”
Mattis blinked at the red line. It seemed to lead nowhere. “We do?”
Spectre tapped on the desk and drew with his fi
nger a series of numbers. “Head to these coordinates,” he said. “We might be in time to stop them.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Earth
United States
Georgetown, Maryland
Chuck Mattis’s Apartment
03:01 hours
Chuck was fast asleep when his phone jingled and jangled, playing the theme song to some antiquated tv show he’d watched a few years ago with dragons and swords and icy undead armies. His favorite kind of entertainment, lightyears away from his actual work—babysitting politicians.
He blindly groped for it, picked it up and, stifling a yawn, clicked the answer button without looking at the screen—his eyes were too bleary to have a chance of seeing who was calling him. “Hello?”
“Sorry to get you out of bed,” said Smith, a voice Chuck had hoped to not hear again for the foreseeable future. “But I need you to find something out for me.”
Something. Always something. Chuck dragged his legs out from under the covers and sat up, feeling the cool night air quickly begin to steal away the precious warmth from his body. “Is this something going to get me put into jail?” He rubbed his eyes with his spare hand. “Again?”
“You did that on your own,” said Smith, a point Chuck couldn’t contest.
“Fair enough. What do you want?”
The line buzzed slightly, indicating a long distance. Possibly lightyears. “I need to talk to a mutual friend about a problem I have. I think you have the best chance of locating this particular friend, seeing how you’ve … visited his office before. Can you help me out?”
Chuck knew, instantly, Smith was talking about Senator Pitt. “Are you fucking high?” he said, standing out of bed and moving over to the window, keeping his voice low to not wake up Elroy. Fortunately the guy was a heavy sleeper. “I can’t get involved in this shit again. I already lost my job and spent a night in a filthy cell thinking I was going to get shanked at every moment, I can’t get involved in Pitt again. I just can’t. You know that as well as I do.”
The Last Dawn: Book 3 of The Last War Series Page 11