Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  The tones warbled again. “Come in,” he called out.

  The door swung open and his personal executive secretary stepped in carrying a covered tray. “Good evening,” she said.

  MacLeod dropped his feet to the floor, sat up, and laid his arms across the arms of his chair. “Kathleen. What are you doing back here so late? You got off work hours ago.”

  “Yes, I did,” she replied. “And when I left, you were wearing that same look on your face that you get when the day ends before your work is done.” She shoved the handcomps aside and set the tray down in front of him. “I figured you’d still be here and I knew you probably wouldn’t have eaten anything yet, so...” She lifted the lid to reveal a large plateful of steaming spaghetti in meat sauce, green beans, and Italian garlic bread. “I brought you dinner.”

  He smiled down at the food and took a big whiff. “Oh my God, this smells fantastic,” he told her. Then he looked up at her again. “I really do appreciate this, but I don’t have any...” She reached into her pocket and whipped out a set of silverware wrapped in a napkin, which she then set on the tray next to the plate. “Thank you.”

  “I also brought this,” she said, pulling a bottled soft drink from her coat pocket. “And there was a gentleman outside dropping this off,” she added, handing him an envelope along with the soda, “...just as I arrived.”

  He set the bottle aside and tore open the envelope. Inside he found a single sheet of paper folded into thirds, which he unfolded and began to read silently.

  “What does it say, if I may ask?” Kathleen inquired.

  “It’s a summary of a series of coroner’s reports,” he answered without looking up.

  “Coroner’s reports? Whose?” she asked with concern. “Who died?”

  He refolded the paper and stuffed it back into the envelope, which he then set aside, and looked up at her. “Thank you for the dinner, Kathleen,” he said abruptly. “It was very kind of you, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

  “You want me to go?” she asked, clearly disappointed.

  “I’m sorry, but I have a lot of work ahead of me. I promise I’ll eat first.”

  She sighed. “All right.” She leaned down and gave him a quick peck on the lips, then asked, “Coming by my place tonight?”

  “If I manage to get out of here sometime before sunrise, yes, but don’t count on it.”

  “All right,” she said as she turned. Then, as she walked toward the door, she added, “If I don’t see you tonight, I guess I’ll see you here in the morning. Goodnight, Brian.”

  “Goodnight, Kathleen.”

  Chapter 64

  Thirteen Days Later

  Earth Standard Date: Tuesday, 21 December 2190

  For the first time since he and the old captain had left Mandela Station, Dylan donned his Military Police uniform. Then he went forward to join Benny in the cockpit.

  Two weeks. Actually, fifteen days. A long time to be cooped up in such a small vessel with only one other person for company. The ship had seemed so spacious and comfortable when they started, too. Spacious and comfortable enough for two people, at least. Funny how the bulkheads had seemed to close in on them as the time passed slowly by.

  Still, the trip had been as relaxing as it had been long and Benny had suffered no shortage of tall tales with which to fill the time. Dylan had heard stories of everything from espionage and murder to epic space battles to heroic pets alerting their masters to imminent danger. He’d heard more stories of discovery, such as that of the relatively primitive Naku, a hardy humanoid race whose frozen world had become a Coalition protectorate almost as soon as it was discovered. He’d heard stories of unusual anomalies in space and of alternate universes, though he seriously doubted the authenticity of those particular tales. Each successive story had seemed more bizarre than the one before and Dylan couldn’t help but wonder, though he’d never voiced his doubts, just how many of them had been nothing more than figments of Benny’s imagination.

  Of course, Dylan had managed to squeeze in a few stories of his own, too. None of them had been as fantastic as Benny’s adventurous tales, but at least they’d all been true.

  He gazed over at his traveling companion as he strapped himself into the copilot’s chair and contemplated all that he’d learned about the man behind those piercing jade-green eyes. Not the old Solar Defense Command officer or the highly skilled technician, but the man himself. The human being. His interests differed from Dylan’s. He had different tastes in music and art and entertainment, and immensely different recreational preferences. After all, he was a man of a different generation. More than that, he was a man of a completely different century. Dylan had been shocked to learn that Benny had been born in 2079, back during the pre-jumpspace days when sleeper-ships were the newest and most state-of-the-art method of interstellar travel known to man. The days when a single deep space assignment could last an serviceman’s entire career. He looked as though he was only in his mid-sixties and he was as healthy as a man a decade younger than that. Not bad for someone with one-hundred twelve years of life experience under his belt.

  Yes. Figuratively speaking, Dylan and his traveling companion were men of entirely different worlds. And yet, as they had discovered over a few shots of vodka—actually, over an entire bottle of vodka—they were of one spirit. That of duty and honor, of loyalty and service to one’s home world. And as their journey through deep space had progressed, so too had their unlikely friendship.

  But now that journey was coming to its end, and so too was their time together. Dylan was back in uniform, back on the job. Benny had spun his last tall tale and was fully engaged now with bringing the H.G. Wells out of jumpspace.

  “Counting down,” the old captain said. “Three...two...one...jump.”

  As Dylan watched, the violet-blue ring of stars directly ahead began to lighten to more of a blue-green shade and swell outward in all directions. Then, suddenly, it exploded into millions of sparks like a thousand burning embers snapping in a campfire all at once as the stars darted back to their true places all around them. Normal space.

  Where the ring of stars had been, a small, seemingly dead dark orange and red globe now floated, growing larger and larger until it eventually filled the window. As they drew closer to the planet, what Dylan had at first thought was a thick, rolling blanket of dark storm clouds instead revealed itself to be a series of long, narrow, curving ranges of rocky, charcoal-peaked mountains separated by wide expanses of deep, almost featureless rust-red valleys and plains. They looked so much like row after row of giant, rotting, decay-blackened shark’s teeth that Dylan could almost smell the fishy stench in his imagination.

  Which reminded him... “Where are the oceans?” he wondered aloud.

  “There aren’t any oceans,” Benny told him. “Window World is a lot like Mars, but with a breathable atmosphere and temperatures that don’t vary nearly so much in extremes. In fact, the average temperature at the outpost can be uncomfortably warm in the summer, even at night.”

  “But a breathable atmosphere means plant life to produce oxygen, doesn’t it? And in order for there to be plant life, there has to be water.”

  Benny looked at him, grinning slightly—the experienced traveler amused by the naivety of a child—and asked, “How many alien worlds have you visited during your career, Dylan?”

  “I don’t know. Eight or nine maybe.”

  “All similar to Earth?”

  “Pretty much. For the most part, I guess. Why?”

  “My friend, there’s a world out there where a billion square mile forest of three hundred foot tall naturally energized crystals provides a breathable atmosphere to the inhabitants. There’s another so hot that water only exists as vapor and the plant life draws it right out of the air, then splits it into hydrogen and oxygen much like our fusion drives do. I’ve already told you stories of at least a dozen more alien worlds.”

  “Point taken.”

  “How
ever, in this case you’re at least partially right. There is water down there, but only in the form of thousands of underground fresh water rivers and lakes. The native plant species developed deep root systems to tap into it. If there ever was any surface water down there, it’s long since evaporated, but as far as I know, there’s never been any evidence of...” He fell silent as something on the overhead display caught his attention.

  “What’s wrong?” Dylan asked.

  “Yeah, I was afraid of that,” Benny said as he gazed up at the short-range scanner screen on the left.

  “Afraid of what?”

  Benny pointed up at the screen. “Reception committee.”

  Dylan gazed up at the two slow-moving bright red triangular blips Benny had just pointed out to him. Angling in on them from two widely separate points on the screen, each was pulling a seemingly random series of letters and numbers along behind it. He knew, of course, that those readouts were their identification tags, but he didn’t have a clue what the codes stood for. “Any idea who they are?”

  “Solfleet Military Police patrol boats,” Benny answered. “Vectoring in on two different intercept courses. Looks like it’s going to be a red tape landing.”

  “A what landing?” he asked, looking at the old captain.

  “A strictly by-the-book kind of landing, I’m afraid,” Benny explained, clearly not thrilled with the prospect. “Lots of unnecessary chatter and extra safety and security procedures.”

  “Oh.” Hoping to lighten Benny’s suddenly sour mood, Dylan quipped, “I think you’ll do all right with it, Benny. After all, you’ve been flying this boat for two weeks now. You must have the hang of it by now.”

  And that was all it took. Benny looked at him, eyes and mouth wide open in exaggerated response but smiling at the lighthearted insult. “I was flying starskiffs...”

  “...over sixty years before I was born,” Dylan finished for him with a grin. “Yes, I know. You’ve told me.” Throughout their journey, Benny’s prideful ‘I-have-more-life-experience-than-you-could-ever-dream-of’ response had become a standing joke between them.

  “More like sixty-five,” Benny amended, just to get the last word more than to correct the minor misstatement. They shared a laugh, but only a short-lived one.

  “Unidentified Earth skiff, this is Solfleet Military Police Patrol Boat three-zero-five. I have you on my scanners and show you on standard orbital approach to the planet directly ahead of you. Please identify yourself and explain why you’re not transmitting your vessel’s identicode.”

  Dylan looked to Benny for guidance and asked, “We’re not transmitting our code?”

  “No, we’re not. Admiral Hansen told me not to, for security reasons.”

  “But they were expecting us here, right?”

  Benny looked him in the eye. “No, they weren’t, for the same reasons. This facility is a very sensitive and highly classified one, Dylan. The admiral didn’t tell anyone we were coming.”

  “Then...what should I say?”

  “It’s your show,” Benny reminded him with a shrug. “I’m just your pilot.”

  Dylan might not have been a pilot, but communications protocols among Earth’s various space-faring organizations were all standardized for simplicity sake, so knowing and following the proper procedures, at least, wasn’t a problem.

  He switched on the comm-panel. “P-B three-oh-five, this is Lieuten...” He clamped his mouth shut and checked himself, realizing his mistake even as he made it. He was supposed to posing as a sergeant, but he’d said too much to be able to disguise it now.

  “Say again, skiff. I did not copy.”

  “P-B three-oh-five, I say again. This is Lieutenant Dylan Graves of...the Solfleet Military Police, aboard the starskiff H.G. Wells. We’ve been running silent all the way from Earth to avoid enemy detection. Prepare to receive our identicode and landing authority burst.”

  “Copy that, Wells. Standing by.”

  Dylan thumbed the data-transmit pad as a third patrol boat joined the escort group from behind the Wells, sending everything the senior patrol officer needed to know in order to allow them to land at the Window World outpost in a nanosecond burst.

  “Burst received. Stand by.” There was a brief pause, then, “Starskiff H.G. Wells, adjust your course to heading three-five-seven mark zero-two. We’ll guide you in.”

  “Affirmative, patrol.”

  “H.G. Wells, this is P-B three-zero-five. Power down your engines and prepare to be guided down to the landing pad by magnebeam.”

  “Acknowledged, P-B three-oh-five,” Dylan responded. “Powering down engines now.” He nodded to Benny, who complied with the instructions without question just as he would have if those instructions had come from his own commanding officer.

  After a moment, the view finally shifted from what had been starting to look like an impending collision with the ground to that of a normal landing gear down vertical descent. A few minutes later they touched down safely on the ground, and Benny didn’t waste any time in shutting down all systems.

  “Now that’s what I call a perfect landing, Benny,” Dylan told him as they both released their harnesses, “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” Benny replied with a smile as they stood and started walking toward the access hatch. “Especially since I didn’t have to land it. I’m just glad it wasn’t as rough a ride as the last time.”

  “Yeah,” Dylan snickered. “From the way you described it, so am I.”

  As soon as Benny opened the hatch a blast of very warm air hit Dylan square in the face—Benny hadn’t been kidding when he said it could be warm—but he didn’t find it all that uncomfortable...yet. But by the time they stepped off the bottom of the ramp and Benny started what Dylan assumed was a routine post-flight walk-around check of the vessel, he felt himself beginning to perspire a little. Ignoring that as best he could, he stood fast and waited for the inevitable welcoming committee, which didn’t take long to arrive.

  There were three of them. In the center and ahead of the others by a single step, a fairly short and slightly overweight looking Asian gentleman wearing a somewhat threadbare white lab coat hanging open over Solfleet naval class-B’s that looked like he’d slept in them led the way. His ghostly complexion was a bit rough and peppered with age spots, and his thinning salt and pepper hair, while cut fairly short, was nonetheless unkempt and badly in need of a trim to clean it up. He also wore old-fashioned silver-colored wire-frame eyeglasses. Eyeglasses! Who wore eyeglasses anymore? Flanking him were two very serious looking Security Forces troops in battle dress uniform with full combat gear, armed with large caliber box-magazine fed automatic rifles of a type Dylan wasn’t familiar with.

  “Gentlemen,” the squat Asian began as he approached, smiling warmly and extending his hand. “Welcome to the middle of nowhere. My name is Lieutenant Commander Toshiro Akagi. I’m the commanding officer of this outpost.”

  “Lieutenant Dylan Graves,” Dylan responded, shaking the officer’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Commander.”

  “Likewise, Lieutenant,” Akagi responded. Then, offering his hand to Benny’s back, he asked, “And you, sir, would be?”

  “Captain Benjamin Sedelnikov, semi-retired,” Benny answered as he turned away from the craft and stepped forward to grasp the commander’s hand. And as they shook hands he added, “And I would be back on Mandela Station tending to my dear Selena if I hadn’t been tasked to bring the lieutenant all the way out here.”

  Akagi looked as if he were seeing a ghost. “Captain Benjamin...” His voice trailed off, but his eyes maintained their gaping stare.

  “Sedelnikov,” Benny finished for him. “Yes.” The younger officer still just continued to stare at him, and that was clearly making Benny feel a little uncomfortable. Finally, when he’d had enough, he asked, “Are you trying to stare a hole through my head, Commander?”

  “What? Oh...sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just...”

  “You didn’t
mean to stare?” Benny asked. “Then I suggest you see an eye doctor.”

  Akagi grinned. “It’s just that... I recognize your name, sir. I can’t believe...”

  “That I’m still breathing?”

  “Well, frankly sir, yes, but that isn’t what I was going to say.” He shook his head in wonder. “To think that you have actually come back here in person after all this time. Benjamin Sedelnikov, chief technical engineer of the Australia and co-discoverer of the...” He glanced at Dylan, then concluded, “...of these ancient ruins.”

  “In the flesh, Commander. And quite a bit more of it than the last time I was here, I might add. But enough of the hero-worship. Please, just call me Benny.”

  “That’ll take some getting used to, sir, but I’d be honored.”

  “Thank you.”

  The three officers just stood there for the next several seconds and just gazed silently at one another under the Security Forces’ watchful eyes. Then Commander Akagi finally spoke up again. “Well, gentlemen. If you’ll follow me.”

  He turned on his heel and led them toward the small building he and the SFs had come out of. As they approached the door he looked Dylan over and said, “I’m obviously not one to be pointing out flaws in the wearing of the uniform, Mister Graves, but unless there have been changes that I’m not aware of, yours is standard enlisted Military Police issue. And I know those are still the stripes of a staff or a squad sergeant, depending on your job.” He touched his fingers to a series of buttons on the control pad next to the door, then put his hand on the reader panel. “Why do you identify yourself as a lieutenant?”

  “I’m actually a lieutenant J-G, sir,” Dylan informed him.

  “Then why the enlisted uniform and sergeant’s chevrons?”

  “To mislead anyone who might have seen us departing Mandela Station. To make them think I’m just a regular MP escort on an official run. Officers don’t normally pull that duty.”

  “I see,” Akagi responded with obvious apprehension. He looked as if he were beginning to suspect some kind of trouble. He pulled his hand away from the panel before the system granted them clearance to enter. “I take it you’re not just a regular MP escort on an official run.”