When Stars Fall (The Star Scout Saga Book 4)

by GARY DARBY

  “And,” he continued, “the second reason had to do with your no-notice. I didn’t know how long it would be until ‘Jadar’ contacted me; it might be days or even weeks, especially if he was on a starside op.

  “I felt it would be unfair just to let you sit in limbo, not knowing why, and especially after our conversation in my office.

  “But more importantly, if I let you proceed with the test, what would be your reaction to the news that ‘Jadar Marrel’ was alive? My fear was that it would throw you into such a tailspin that you might fail the exam entirely, or even worse, that you might endanger yourself or your teammates.”

  He stopped as if to gather his thoughts. “But when ‘Jadar’ did contact me, as I said, though he didn’t reveal himself, I knew he was Deklon.”

  “And you kept it to yourself,” Dason stated.

  “Not very easily, I assure you,” Tarracas answered soberly. “Though not directly involved in Veni, I suspected that there was a great deal more to the story than what was in the public archives or the rumors circulating in the command.

  “In particular, I was deeply troubled by the Romerand report, the lack of what I perceived as a fair and impartial tribunal, and the fact that afterward, the Veni operation, like the planet, seemed shrouded in secrecy.

  “There are good reasons that some things should be kept secret, but Veni isn’t one of them. I decided that I would trust in the veracity of the man I had come to know in those few short months that we were together.”

  He scratched a finger across his cheek in a thoughtful gesture. “When Deklon contacted me, you had already begun the no-notice.

  “Reluctantly, I offered to recall you, since obviously, the circumstances were so extraordinary, but he said no. And I hope you appreciate what it cost him, personally, to make that decision.

  “To his credit, he replied that you had earned the right to compete for your enlistment, and he didn’t want to take that away from you, even though it was incredibly hard for him to make that decision.

  “To have his son so close at hand and yet so far away must have ripped open old, raw emotional wounds. But he knew how hard you had worked to get to where you were, and he couldn’t, wouldn’t take that away from you.

  “We agreed that he would join me on Kanab, where you were to finish up your test. I assumed that’s where he would reveal you his true identity, but—”

  “Certain events kinda got in the way,” Dason finished.

  Rosberg snorted. “That’s an understatement if I ever heard one.”

  He peered at Dason. “There’s still more to the story and, son, this is where we find the rat who stole the cheese.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Star date: 2443.110

  Aboard the IntrepidX in Interstellar Space

  Adjusting the controls on his bed so that it was more comfortable, Rosberg turned to Dason. “When Deklon came to see me, he laid out everything, didn’t hold anything back. His inclination was to turn himself in and take his lumps, but he had to find some way to tackle two conflicting dilemmas: how to find his missing wife and son, and how to prove Jadar’s innocence.

  “To tell you the truth, I was all set to tell him to turn himself in. I’ve always been a pretty straight shooter and what Jadar had done, well, on one level it seemed noble—still, it left a sour taste in my mouth.

  “But then, Deklon revealed something that changed my tune. To get Earthside in the shortest time, he paid top dollar and caught a starliner.

  “First night out, he was in the lounge after dinner and a couple of passengers who’d had way too many carafes of Argellian Snow Wine were talking about how they had contracted out to staff a communications site on an out-of-the-way, fog-shrouded planet.

  “They just happened to mention that their civilian security detail had to beat off attacks by vicious meat-eating ‘flying dragons.’

  “Deklon struck up a conversation with them, and found out that they were communication experts dealing with electromagnetic compatibilities, transient disturbances, wave pulses, and related atmospherics on planets with unstable magnetospheres.”

  He peered at Dason and asked, “Any of that sound familiar?”

  Dason met Rosberg’s frank stare with his own. “Are you saying that there was a civilian comm site on Veni? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It certainly didn’t,” Rosberg answered. “With all the shenanigans that had taken place during the op, Romerand’s skewed after-action report, and now with this piece of information, my intuition told me that the rot on this apple was more than skin-deep, it might even go to the core.

  “More than that, my gut told me that my scouts had not only been misused, but had lost their lives over this debacle. Beforehand, I was disgusted, now I was furious. Come hell or high water, I was going to get to the bottom of what happened.

  “So I told Deklon to hold off turning himself in for the time being. I pulled some strings, had him temporarily assigned to my section, and we started sifting through everything we could find on Veni.

  “Your dad hired a first-class private investigative firm to try and find you and your mother. Long story short, they managed to track her to the transient Crossroads Station on Luna. But the trail went completely cold from there.

  “My guess is that somehow, she managed to get you and herself on an outbound freighter without using your given names. That’s how you two ended up on Randor.”

  He shrugged. “Money talks and apparently to some flea-bitten star freighter captain, she spoke the right language.

  “A short time later, after we started sifting through the Veni material, Lieutenant Colonel Worley, Deklon’s battalion commander on Veni, gave me a call. He was on Earth for some medical attention and offered to take me out to lunch.”

  Rosberg snorted. “What he really wanted was to pump me about getting a staff job in the mount. We met the next day, and I let the conversation drift around to Veni.

  “I won’t repeat his colorful language in describing his thoughts on the matter. However, he did pass on something that I don’t know if anyone knew then, or now.

  “He admitted that he had forgotten to add in his after-action report that the team who found Franklin’s remains also found bits and pieces of a civilian-style body-tracking system, along with a long-range communicator.”

  Dason jerked upright. “The civilian site. They were tracking a SciCorps tech?”

  “That was our first assumption,” Rosberg answered. “We couldn’t prove it, of course, but it passed the smell test and caught our attention.

  “Why would a SciCorps tech wear a civilian body-tracking system and why would anyone go to all that trouble to ramp up an apparently secret communications site to track one person?

  “So, we started looking at those twelve SciCorps techs, and what we found next, snapped our heads back.

  “We dug into everything, even down to the issue of equipment and supplies to those techs. We store most operational information electronically, of course, but on the rare occasion, there is actually a plas-paper copy.

  “In an obscure logistician’s file, we found a plas-paper copy of an electronic hand-receipt for a set of snoopers, issued to, and originally signed for by a ‘Kavon Peller.’”

  Dason all but jumped out of his seat. “Peller!”

  “That’s right,” Rosberg replied. “We checked the names of the entire complement that down-planeted to Veni and could only find one ‘Kavon’ and that was SciCorps Tech Kavon Franklin, who was assigned to Team Marrel.

  “What’s more, when we compared that paper copy against the electronic log, there was no record of a ‘Kavon Peller’ signing for a set of snoopers. Someone had gone in and deleted the original electronic hand-receipt.

  “So, why did that logistician make that plas-paper copy? Everyone knows that logisticians would make their own mothers sign for a piece of equipment they issued to them.

  “My hunch is that Staff Sergeant McNair of the Logistics Corps
had a sneaky feeling when he saw the nametag on Franklin’s uniform didn’t match his signature that something was amiss and kept that copy as insurance. Snoopers don’t come cheap.

  “Obviously, that piqued our curiosity on Kavon Franklin. I called a longtime friend of mine over at SciCorps headquarters, told him that I was doing follow-up work on Veni and that I needed some information on the techs. Which was kinda true if you think about it in a certain way.

  “What I asked for was background information; such as the tech’s previous assignments, training, specialties, that sort of thing. I made it sound as if we scouts had really messed things up, had used their personnel poorly, and I was trying to make sure that it didn’t happen again.

  “I had to eat a lot of humble pie as he agreed that we Veni scouts now held a place in the annals of SciCorps just above their mold specimens in the lab.

  “After a bit, and with more groveling on my part, I guess he felt sorry for me because he finally gave in to my request.

  “I tossed him all twelve tech names on Veni and interestingly enough, he called me back the next day. He hemmed and hawed until he admitted that there was a computer glitch, and all twelve records had been corrupted and the service records only went back partway.

  “I told him that was all right, send over what he had and I’d work with it and let it go at that.”

  Holding up a hand for a second, he then pressed the button that controlled the intravenous morphinate drip. “Sorry, can’t handle the pain like when I was younger.”

  He waited until the medicine took effect and then continued. “When I got the records, I had one of our top compu techs take a look at them.

  “She did her magic for a few minutes and then told me, ‘It’s a programming error. Somebody tried to update or upload those records into the database using a bad programming code.

  “In the most casual tone that I could manage, I asked her if she could tell if it was an update or upload, and I would pass that along to my friend at SciCorps.

  “Her answer was that it probably was a complete upload.’”

  He stopped and peered with an intent expression at Dason. Dason sat very still considering the general’s comments. “Kavon Franklin was a cover,” he muttered. “Someone planted a false electronic record in SciCorps headquarters.”

  “That’s right, so your next question is?” Rosberg prompted.

  “Who exactly was Kavon Franklin, or rather, Kavon Peller?” Dason answered.

  “Correct again,” Rosberg affirmed. “A few weeks later, we found a notice, as required by law, for anyone who had an outstanding claim against the estate of Kavon Peller along with an obituary.

  “The obituary stated that Kavon Peller had died in a diving accident on the water park world of Neptunis. It also listed the names of his parents. Care to take a guess who’s the father of Kavon Peller?”

  Dason’s eyes turned hard. “Adiak Peller.”

  “You got it,” Rosberg replied. “So put it all together, and I can tell you that your father and I deduced many years ago that there was a very real possibility that the Pellers and Ri Romerand were conspiring.

  “And for what purpose?” he asked with a deep frown. “We tried to nail it down, but we just didn’t have the resources or right assets to put all the pieces together.

  “We strongly suspected that it might have something to do with Kolomite, but until recently that was mostly guesswork.”

  “But sir,” Dason contended, “with what you knew, couldn’t you have convinced Star Scout Command that—”

  “Jadar was innocent?” Rosberg answered. “Son, all we had were bits and pieces of mostly circumstantial evidence. Anyone could assert we manufactured our one piece of hard evidence, that hand-receipt.

  “We tried to find the logistics sergeant, but he had mustered out and we couldn’t locate him. We had no way to link Peller’s body-tracking system to that communications site, no way to prove that the place even existed, for that matter.”

  Rosberg ran a hand through his silver hair. “To place what little we had up against Romerand’s report frankly would have been fruitless. Too much of the rind and not enough juice.

  “After a while, we came to the conclusion that the trail had gone cold. So we agreed to keep searching, and we did over all these many years, but it wasn’t until Romerand and Adiak Peller revealed themselves that the truth finally surfaced.”

  “Sir,” Dason asked hesitantly, “respectfully, if you suspected Romerand, why did you keep him as your second-in-command? Why didn’t you remove him?”

  Rosberg snorted in reply. “A fair question, and I’ll answer it by asking you a question. Would you rather know the rattlesnake’s exact location in the woodpile, or would you rather stick your hand in and guess at it?”

  Dason nodded and replied, “You were keeping him under tabs, watching what he did.”

  “To the extent that I could,” Rosberg answered. “Romerand was the newly assigned chief of staff when I was promoted to commanding general.

  “He would never have been my choice, of course, but he was there when I arrived and . . . Well, it would have been a bit awkward to have him removed.

  “You see, Romerand’s career was full of oddities. He started out by being an excellent scout, but then something happened, something changed. His performance fell off; he lost his edge, wasn’t the same scout. Still, he got promoted ahead of his peers even though he wasn’t a stellar performer.”

  “He had friends,” Dason muttered.

  “In high places,” Rosberg replied. He shook his head. “It pains me to say this but the truth is that even Star Scout Command is not immune to playing humankind’s most ugly game—politics.

  “Knowing this, I had two choices,” Rosberg explained. “I could slice Romerand off at the knees, which I would have loved to do, or, to the best of my ability keep my eye on him and never let him suspect that I was watching him.

  “If I chose the first course, the question was whether or not I would remain the CG. Not that I coveted the position, but the truth was that I wasn’t one hundred percent confident that the ponies in my corral could match up to his.

  “So, I let him remain and though I believed I thwarted him at times without him knowing, it’s obvious that I wasn’t entirely successful all the time.”

  “You were up against a very formidable adversary,” Tarracas said in an understanding tone. “One who used people in immoral ways that you were not willing to do, such as his daughter.”

  “That may be, Scoutmaster,” Rosberg replied gruffly. “But it will be forever on my conscience that I wasn’t able to entirely stop him.”

  “You didn’t know Alena was his daughter?” Dason asked.

  “No,” Rosberg stated. “It wasn’t until your report of what happened on the AP planet that we were able to put two and two together.”

  “But you know she’s not Faction,” Dason declared, his voice rising a notch.

  “Cool your hot jets, scout,” Rosberg answered. “We know that, too. She was, as the adage goes, an unwitting pawn in a much larger game.”

  He peered at Dason. “Once we realized that Romerand was a Faction agent, it wasn’t hard to leap to the conclusion that Adiak Peller was Faction, too. I admit that we never suspected that Peller was the Faction’s top dog, or in his case, their alpha vermin.

  “But what we did conclude based on your statements is that if Romerand hated Deklon for the death of his wife, there was more than an even chance that Adiak Peller hated him for the death of his son.

  “And,” Rosberg continued, “both believed that Deklon was still alive and had made off with the Kolomite that they had tried to steal themselves.”

  Rosberg shook his head sadly. “You told your father that your mother believed that the two of you were being watched, and she sensed imminent danger.

  “I have no doubt that Peller and his gangsters were doing exactly that, and I can express without reservation that it’s my belief that she sav
ed your life and hers by fleeing to Randor.”

  Rosberg laid his head back and drew in a breath. “And now you know as much as I do—the good and the bad.”

  Dason rose from his chair and paced a few steps away. He ran a hand through his short hair. “And now, Adiak Peller has Deklon Marrel, whom he’s sought for so long, only he doesn’t know it, and the Kolomite he’s coveted for all these years is probably in the Mongans’ hands.”

  “How’s that?” Rosberg asked.

  Dason turned to answer, “The Mongans must have been on Veni at the same time as the scouts. They were the ones who mined out the Kolomite ore, and they were the ones who took my Uncle Jadar.”

  Rosberg’s face took on a searching expression and to his unspoken question, Dason replied, “I told Peller that I knew where Deklon Marrel was, and I do—maybe.”

  Dason pointed at his head. “The alien images, two are of my uncle standing on a planet with a shattered moon in the background. I’m positive that he stumbled across the Mongans as they mined the ore. The Mongans took him off Veni and put him on that planet. I—”

  Just then, Shanon poked her head into the medical bay. “Excuse the interruption, general, but Elder Tor’al needs to speak with you.”

  “Of course,” Rosberg answered, “show him in.”

  The big Sha’anay lumbered into the room, giving Dason a nod of recognition as he came to stand beside Rosberg. “Elder Rosberg,” he began, addressing the general with the Sha’anay honorific, “you are healing?”

  “I am, Elder Tor’al,” Rosberg answered. “Thanks to some excellent doctors.” He gestured toward Dason and Shanon. “As well as to some brave scouts.”

  “That I know,” Tor’al replied and turned toward the Dason and Shanon. “We are both in their debt as well as to their other clansmen.”

  “And you, elder, are you better?” Rosberg asked.

  “Yes,” Tor’al stated. “My wounds both outside and inside are healing well.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes eager. “Human Rosberg, I have news for you. I have spoken to To’ran. He will hold his forces in place for now.”