Guano groaned and rolled over onto her back. “Is this about your leg?”
“No,” said Doctor Brooks, smiling a little. “This happened before that.” He crossed his legs, putting his hands on his knee. “There’s a mountain in Nepal that, as a young child, I wanted to climb.”
“Mount Everest?” She narrowed her eyes. That was a bit … common, for someone like Brooks.
Doctor Brooks laughed. “There are more mountains in Nepal than Mount Everest,” he said, shaking his head. “No. Fishtail Mountain … or as its known in the local tongue, Machapuchare. Everest is high, certainly, but Machapuchare is something else. It’s steep—basically straight up at points—and it twists. It’s brutal, despite being lower than some of the nearby peaks. To the local Hindus, the mountain is sacred to the god Shiva. I gave up on that dream after I screwed up my leg, but the fact is, I was never, ever going to climb that mountain, no matter what I did.”
“Sounds like a challenge,” she said, nodding understandingly. “But I mean … you could probably buy a tour or something if you really wanted to. Hell, just last year I heard some girl with some kind of horrible disability managed to climb Everest solo. People like climbing stuff. What’s stopping you?”
“Not the leg, that’s for sure. No, unfortunately, Machapuchare has never been successfully climbed before, believe it or not. In the 1960s, two groups tried and failed, and because of the risks on such a steep slope, the Nepalese government banned any further attempts after that. They backed it up by declaring the whole mountain a sacred site. Another team snuck in again in the late twenty-second century, but that’s it. They failed too. Spectacularly so—they all died.” Doctor Brooks clicked his tongue, sighing a little, although the smile remained on his face. “It’s honestly pretty enlightening knowing there is a place on Earth—our homeworld, cradle of our people, the only home we knew for ten thousand years—where no human has ever set foot, and cannot ever set foot.”
Guano snorted. “Aww, c’mon. Surely someone’s snuck in and done it illegally.”
“Can’t,” said Doctor Brooks, simply. “Machapuchare is not something you can really climb on your own, due to its difficulty, and if it got out a group was trying to make the attempt the Nepalese would absolutely block them from entering the country.”
“Still,” said Guano, closing her eyes a moment. “What’s the point?”
“The point is … sometimes you can commit no errors and still fail. Sometimes you can have everything going right for you, you can tick every box and be the best, most perfect you can be, the absolute pinnacle of perfection in action, and still not get what you want.” The edge of his lips turned up in a playful smirk. “But like the song goes … sometimes you just might find, you get what you need.”
Guano couldn’t help but smile too. “Yeah. I guess.”
Brooks picked up one of Guano’s shirts, with the blue and white splotched mil-standard camouflage pattern. “I like the Navy’s camo,” he said, bouncing the shirt in his hand. “I’ve always sort of thought, where are they hiding on a ship? They should be red, or orange, or yellow while at sea.”
The answer was obvious to her, and knew it probably was to him as well being that he, too, was in the navy, but answered anyway. “It’s made that way so that, you know, while you’re at sea, if you fall overboard you’ll blend in with the water so that the SAR craft can’t find you.”
“That’s exactly my point, though. How does it matter in space?”
“See, doc’,” said Guano, waving her hands around above her like she was painting an invisible picture, “you’re not thinking military enough. You have to understand the mindset of government services. Things aren’t just stupid, they’re catastrophically stupid. That’s how you train people to do stupid shit like get into fighter aircraft and submarines and space ships; you bombard them with inanity and idiocy so that they don’t even question what they’re doing.” She snorted. “It’s how you can differentiate people who have served in the military and those who haven’t. Civvies are like, ‘the military is a powerful, fine-tuned engine of destruction and precision carnage,’ and vets are like, ‘the military is the most stupid people you’ve ever met given the most high powered weapons money can buy.”
The two shared a playful chuckle.
“Seriously, though,” said Guano, “with the uniforms? The idea is that if you get oil or grease on it, then it’s not as prominent as on another color scheme. Plus it looks cool. Uniforms are recruiting tools as well as practical ones.”
“I actually liked the Air Force uniforms,” he said. “Blasphemy coming from a Navy man, I know, but they always looked the best. Totally impractical, of course. All that white would get filthy in the field.…”
“Airman? In the field? Unthinkable!” Guano grinned at him. “They don’t call it the chair force for nothing.”
“Sometimes they get lost on their way to the Glorious Humanity coffee shops,” said Doctor Brooks, and then, nodding as though having come to some kind of conclusion. “You were right, though.”
“Mmm? About the coffee shops?”
“About why the military stresses people to ensure that during real combat they can survive and trust their training. True skill only comes through adversity. You weren’t challenged in the simulator and based on what you were telling me, you weren’t challenged by being a gunner, either.” He leaned forward slightly. “So let’s head back to the simulator, because I have a special program for you.”
“Special program?” Guano scrunched up her face. There was just no way it could match to combat. “What kind of program?”
“Well, have you ever heard of the Kobayashi Maru?”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “What, from that ancient campy space show? Star Wars?”
“No, the other one.”
She grimaced. “I’ve heard of it, what about it?”
“Because,” said Doctor Brooks, his tone turning serious, “that was child’s play. You’re about to experience a real no-win scenario.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Losagar System
Planet Waywell, High Orbit
The Aerostar
Smith dabbed a soaked tissue over his bleeding scratches as he rewatched the video he’d taken at Pitt’s compound.
Useless.
He scowled. The angles were all wrong for lip-reading, and what words he could even maybe make out were too few and far between to piece together a general sense of the conversation. They might as well have been talking about the last night’s opera, for all the good it was doing him.
Reardon wandered in, settling on the other side of the table in the ship’s tiny living area. “So. What are you doing?”
Smith gestured towards his tablet in disgust. “Hitting my head against a wall.”
“Huh.” Reardon stared. “Hey, don’t you have your own first-aid kit?” he added, pointing to Smith’s makeshift wound-cleanser.
“Don’t need it for this,” he shrugged.
That, and he’d found the Reardons’ medical supplies—or rather, what passed for them. Money’s in short supply right now indeed. He wasn’t entirely convinced he shouldn’t sneak his kit aboard when he left. Just to help them out a bit.
“Sure.”
The smuggler was being unusually quiet. Smith looked up, frowning.
“What the actual hell is going on?” Reardon burst out before he could so much as open his mouth.
“What do you mean?” the spy asked, voice deliberately neutral.
Reardon scowled. “You know what I mean. I call you to drop some information—already a risk—and instead of just taking it and buggering off, like any sane creepy secret agent, you drag Sammy and me halfway across the stars on some mysterious goose chase. Why?”
“Because,” Smith took some time to fold his hands, picking his words carefully. “The prey I’m after is … powerful. Dangerous to have on official records, if only because he already has his fingers in those pies, and he’d know I’m coming
for him. You know what that means. I need off-grid contacts, and I need them to be trustworthy.” He pointed at Reardon. “You.”
The other man laughed. “It’s going to be dangerous, so you come to me? And Sammy? Wow, glad to know.” Reardon groaned slightly. “You know I have a piece of cargo in my hold, completely unopened, and it’s burning a hole in my hull … I haven’t had the chance to even look at it yet, much less find a buyer and unload it.”
Smith raised an eyebrow. “You are a career criminal. With an inordinate number of buttons marked ‘pew pew’ on your dash, so you’re no stranger to violence—”
“Yeah,” Reardon broke in before he could finish. “I choose which butts I’m going to kick. Me, calling the shots. Not you, not anyone else, because I don’t do the entire ‘beholden to other people’ thing, you know? So, spill it. Why should I not dump you at the nearest space port and go back to my life? I have a hot cargo to sell.”
He nodded slowly. “Do you remember Spectre, Reardon?”
The smuggler gave him a piercing look. “No. Not my problem. Court-martial made sure of that, didn’t they?”
“Maybe,” Smith shook his head. “I think he wants to make himself everybody’s problem. I’m not really interested in seeing that happen—are you?”
“Is that what you were doing down planetside?”
“Sort of.” He pushed the tablet forwards. “Looking into his allies.”
Reardon stared at him for a long moment. “Ok, fine. Why do I care? You can get your own transport, I don’t have to be your taxi driver. And I sure as hell don’t have to live next to the target you’re painting on your back, either.”
Smith returned the gaze evenly. Reardon narrowed his eyes. “You hate the ‘system,’ right? Well, Spectre is the system. Top to bottom. He’s the guy pulling all the strings.” Not entirely accurate, but close enough. “It’s the biggest middle finger you’ll ever find.”
Reardon’s moronic grin reappeared. “You know, it’s a myth that bigger is better when it comes to body par—”
“Reardon.” Smith wasn’t in a mood.
“Yeah?”
“Are you in?”
He paused. Then shrugged. “Old time’s sake. What could go wrong?”
“Really?” Smith asked, fighting down an edge of frustration. “Why do you always have to say that?”
Reardon snorted as he walked around the table, picking up Smith’s screen. “Jeez, imagine if your workmates knew how superstitious you are. They’d have to revoke your generic name privileges.”
Smith ignored him and cleaned some more blood away from his eye.
“Hey,” the smuggler remarked, glancing at the video. “That’s not Spectre, is it? Guy’s looking pretty fit these days.”
“No, that’s not him, and as far as I know Spectre is still … jolly. That’s America’s Senator Pitt, and his dead son.”
Reardon peered at the video. “You just took this, right?”
“Yes.”
“And the second guy’s the son, right?”
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t look very dead, Smith. I thought they taught you the difference between living people and dead ones at whatever fancy CIA academy you went to.”
“He should be dead,” Smith replied. “He died during the first battle with the aliens,” he made air quotes with his fingers, “at the battle over Earth. Body found, identified, buried.”
“A cover-up?”
“Where’s the motive? Pitt Jr. was lined up to take command of the USS Paul Revere, his father was proud. Nothing outstanding in his record, other than good service, no known debts—though if his father is working with Spectre, unknown debts are always a possibility, but otherwise he and Pitt Sr. come up pretty … well, not clean, one of them is a politician after all, but hardly dire.”
“So whatever it is,” Reardon stared at the screen, “the kid and his father have to be in pretty deep, and they’re really trying to keep it on the down-low.”
“Hmm. Yes.” Smith contemplated for a moment. “Can you get anything of what they’re saying? I can’t make head nor tail of it, even with my eye.”
“Stand aside technology, and make way for your inevitable betterment by man.” Smith waited while Reardon stared at the screen. “Um. Well. From what I can see, you’re not going to like this.”
“Why?”
“They’re literally talking about the weather.”
Smith groaned. “Really?”
“Yup. Lip reading is an old smugger’s trait … I can sign, too. Sammy as well. It’s always good to communicate in ways people don’t expect, and to be able to intercept communications people think are secure.”
Fascinating but irrelevant. “OK, well, can you get me a transcript? I have to make a call.”
Reardon looked skeptical. “I can’t get much from this, you know? I think they’re mumbling. But yeah, I’ll try.”
Smith walked over to the other side of the room, bringing up a contact on his communicator. The phone rang about ten times before it was picked up.
“Chuck Mattis, speaking.”
Smith was careful not to say his name. “Hi, it’s me, I need—”
“Excuse me?” the voice on the other end of the line cooled abruptly. “I told you to never call me again.”
Lover’s quarrel? Reardon mouthed from the table.
Shut up, Smith mimed back. “Look, I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t life-or-death, buddy,” he explained patiently.
“Great,” Pitt’s former aide replied. “Not my life, so why don’t you just—”
“Jeremy Pitt is alive.”
A long, long pause. “What?” His voice dropped to a hushed whisper. “Is this a joke? That’s impossible.”
“Yes. Yes it is impossible, utterly so. And yet I just saw him talking about the weather with his father.”
“What?”
“Friend, I don’t know how this is possible, but—”
“I promise you, I saw him go into the ground myself!” Chuck broke in. “This is … insane. If it’s even true.”
“We both know it’s a risk to even be speaking. Notice the careful lack of me using your name? I wouldn’t have called you if I had another option, and if I was lying—well, why would I bother with something so far-fetched?”
“…Shit.” A pause. “I shouldn’t have said my full name at the beginning.”
“Nope, you shouldn’t have, but we’re going to move past that. All I need from you is Senator Pitt’s itinerary for … the last few years. Can you do that for me?”
A pause—Smith suspected the admiral’s son had simply forgotten he was on the phone and replied with a gesture. “Sure. Why not. It’s only like I’ll, you know, go to prison if I get caught because it’s a violation of my parole. It’s only like I have a family to take care of now. It’s only like—” he whined loudly, a low, continuous tone which finally stopped. “Fine. It’ll take me a bit to drag it up, but sure. What’s a felony between friends? How do you want me to get it through to you?”
Smith rattled off a list of instructions, and soon the information was downloading over a secure channel.
Just as he was about to cut off the line, Chuck spoke up again, voice turning strange. “Hey Smith, you might want to know. There’s been another attack, happened right now.”
“The future-humans?”
Reardon looked up sharply.
“Yeah,” Chuck replied. “Rogue planet, Serendipity. They’re saying there’s no survivors.”
Chapter Forty
Rogue Planet Serendipity, Low Orbit
USS Midway
Space Combat Simulator Room
When Doctor Brooks and Guano arrived, Flatline was there waiting for them, already suited up and obviously eager to go.
“So,” asked Guano, casually. “How was flying a real, actual fighter instead of being a gunner?”
“I was great!” he said, making little finger guns at her. “I was, like, the Red Baron o
f fighter pilots. Pew pew pew.”
“The Red Baron was a fighter pilot, moron.”
“Sheesh. If you have to explain the joke … all I’m saying, is that I was on fire!”
Something in his tone suggested that he was putting it on. “You sure?” asked Guano, hands on her hips. “You seemed to be having a lot of trouble with, you know, just getting from point A to point B. Let alone actually doing any kind of engagement. You were too slow to get to the target, and too slow to catch the missiles, so … you were basically zero for two back there.”
“Yeah,” said Flatline, the facade falling away. “Look, I … I know. I wasn’t good enough back there. But hey, bonus points—you suck at being a gunner.”
She laughed, a flood of relief washing over her. “Well, okay, fair enough. We’re both fucking awful at … not what we’re specialized in. I think that’s fair. We can handle that.”
“We can definitely handle that,” said Flatline, reaching out and giving her a playful clap on the shoulder. “Okay. You better play me some Kenny Loggins, because we are going into the Danger Zone.”
“So I hear,” she said, hooking her foot onto the ladder that lead up to the simulated cockpit. “Apparently it’s a no-win scenario.”
“Mmm,” said Flatline, climbing up behind her. “Yeah. Problem with those simulations is, they never really take into account thinking laterally. That’s how you beat the no-win scenario; you do something the programmers don’t expect. Like, you know, say you’re supposed to go out and engage a target, but when you get there, your guns jam. So that’s it, right? You’re done? Well, no. You can always, you know, retreat. Or ram them. Or dump your fuel and then ignite it using your decoy flares. And that’s what you’re supposed to do in real life. Think creatively. Cheat as often and as hard as you can. The best fight isn’t fair; it’s won before you even fire the first shot. If things go south you aren’t supposed to just sit back and go, oops, well, guess I should die now.”
“Right,” she said, sliding into her seat and clipping herself in. “It takes, like, twenty-four million dollars to train a pilot, gunner, or spaceborn technical specialist a year. A spaceworthy fighter craft is worth two hundred million dollars. You don’t just throw them away. This shit is valuable. Contrary to what people might believe, and it really is dumb that I have to say this, you aren’t supposed to lose them.”
The Last Dawn: Book 3 of The Last War Series Page 17