by Selby, Caleb
“And what will you do if I don’t old man? Shoot me?”
“If I have to,” Grider replied and then shook his head. “You’re being manipulated Mick; If you really don’t know that, then you’re either more stupid than you look or just plain evil. My guess is a little of both.”
“Manipulated?” shouted Mick, his eyes bulging with rage. “Me? I don’t think so! It’s all of you who are being played with by him!” he finished, pointing to Fedrin.
“No Mick,” Grider said solemnly shaking his head. “Fedrin doesn’t kill innocent people to prove a point.”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” Mick shouted back.
Grider closed his eyes and shook his head. “Let me get this straight Mick. You just punched a hole into the Iovara’s hull and you don’t think you killed anyone? Do you know what happens when you depressurize a starship in space Mick? Do you? Because I can tell you if you really don’t know.”
“If anyone died it was incidental!” Mick shouted back, as he waved his arm in the air. “They were but a small price that had to be paid to save the whole!”
Grider pointed a finger at Mick and shook his head. “A true admiral would never let a sentence like that come out of his mouth!”
Mick shook his head. “Wrong! A true Admiral must know when the collateral cost is acceptable, or have you forgotten how you let the Asar colonists get butchered because you wouldn’t risk your son?”
Grider squirmed. “That was different! Now stand down before this gets uglier than it already is!”
“You’ll have to shoot me old man because I’m not standing down. This is my fleet now!” answered Mick, tightening his jaw and looking as resolute as ever.
Grider raised his weapon till it pointed directly at Mick’s chest. Mick stared down the barrel of the weapon as beads of sweat formed along his hairline. “You won’t do it,” he said as he slowly reached for the pistol fastened on his own belt. “You don’t have the courage to pull that trigger. You’ve never had the courage to make the important decisions and you never will.”
The Corinthia command crew looked on in awe at the situation playing out on their bridge, many beginning to wonder if Mick was indeed mad.
Mick continued to speak to Grider, all the while inching closer toward the handle of his own weapon. “Its a good thing your son died when he did.”
“Why is that?” Grider asked with furry burning in his own eyes.
Mick shrugged. “Because he probably would have grown up to be a coward just like his dad!” he finished and grabbed at his gun and let off a shot, striking Grider in the chest but not before Grider had sent two of his own rounds into Mick.
Mick slumped to his knees and gasped as blood oozed from the gaping holes.
Grider too struggled to breathe as he rode up beside Mick and looked into his eyes. “My son...was not a coward,” he calmly said and then leveled his weapon to Mick’s temple and squeezed the trigger one last time. Mick slumped over dead. The rest of the Corinthia command crew looked on in horror as the leader of their short-lived mutiny lay dead in the center of the command deck.
Grider then dropped his weapon to the floor and mustered all of his remaining strength to look up at Fedrin. “Lead on Admiral,” he struggled to say before slumping back in his chair, dead.
Fedrin turned away from the screen in a daze. He took several shaky steps toward the nearest operating station and rested against it.
“Sir, we are being flooded with transmissions from the commanders,” Gallo hesitantly announced. “They all want to talk with you.”
Fedrin slowly nodded. “Set up a fleet wide transmission. I want it played on all speakers in every corridor of every ship.”
“Done,” said Gallo promptly.
Fedrin swallowed hard and wiped his sweaty brow. “Attention crewmen of the Sixth Fleet. This is the Admiral,” he began. “We have all just seen firsthand how our enemy operates. We should take heart in the fact that they are afraid...perhaps even terrified of us. They have beaten us badly these last several days, with the cost almost more then we can bare and yet they are still frightened of us! They are so scared in fact, that they are now resorting to sowing seeds of discord and mistrust within our very ranks with the hopes of destroying us from the inside out. I fear that they have already succeeded in doing this back home and today they nearly succeeded here! Yet Commander Mick’s misguided treachery need not be a total loss for us. For with this audacious move by our enemy, take comfort in the fact that they fear us now, more than ever before! Now let’s give them even more reason to fear us! Secure all equipment, retract all external instruments and divert full power to engine cores. We’re going to Sibid and the Voigt colony!”
***
Darion walked away from the transport-tube ramp and made his way down the shaded stone path that led to the Memorial Fountain. He was dressed in civilian clothing, although he didn’t really know why. To anyone that may have been tracking him, he must have stood out like a sore thumb.
The Memorial was located in the center of Liberty Park, a picturesque oasis in the otherwise arid Larep landscape. A few trees and a host of small, but well maintained vegetable gardens leased to restaurants and wealthy city residents filled nearly every free inch of the park’s real estate. Circumscribed by these gardens was the famous Refrac War Memorial Fountain.
It was crafted out of a large asteroid harvested from the Asar system and hewn out to form a deep, watertight basin. A holographic star system hovered above the center. Embedded into the outer edge of the basin were hundreds of micronized water jets, which propelled tiny droplets of pressurized water through the holographic system. As the droplets passed through the hologram, they were reshaped by polarity beams to form the name of a casualty in the Refrac war. The name would display for only a few seconds before the form dissipated and rained back down into the basin.
An old man with a cane in hand stood nearby, looking intently as the names rained down. Every so often he would shake his head as a name appeared and then quickly vanished. A few kids, barely seven or eight years old, played on the other side of the basin each taking turns reaching their hands into the water and splashing the other, neither seeming to have any idea of the fountain’s purpose or significance.
Darion sat down on a stone bench facing the basin and looked up at the raining names, all the while keeping a watchful eye for anyone or anything that seemed suspicious. The more he looked around however, the more he felt he stood out. This covert stuff was not his thing.
At least fifteen minutes had passed when a hand suddenly squeezed his shoulder. He quickly jumped to his feet.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on a guy like that!” he exclaimed, holding his chest and then glancing around to see if he had attracted any attention.
“I see you got my note,” Kebbs said and smiled. “Thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I almost didn’t,” said Darion. “I didn’t really want to see you again anytime soon.”
Kebbs nodded awkwardly before smiling. “Then I guess double thanks are in order.”
“Whatever,” muttered Darion, not at all amused. “So what’s this stuff about the Clear Skies system?”
“This isn’t the best place for this discussion,” Kebbs replied frankly, nodding toward the fountain and the people gathered around it.
“Then why’d you ask me to come here?” Darion asked rolling his eyes. “This place was your choice, not mine!”
Kebbs motioned toward a dusty path well beyond the fountain. “Walk with me,” he said.
Darion glanced around before reluctantly following, having convinced himself that if he had come this far, he might as well go all the way.
They walked in silence for sometime, Darion wondering with each step what in the world he was doing while Kebbs suspiciously eyed every person they passed and made a point to walk on the harder paths. On and on they trudged until the lush oasis filled with water and pleasant little gardens was far behind them
and nothing but dried up trees and unending sand mounds surrounded them. Tired and sweaty, Darion finally planted his feet after stumbling over a drift of sand and would be compelled to go no further.
“This is far enough Kebbs!” he said definitively. “Now do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
Kebbs motioned for Darion to lower his voice and once more looked around nervously. “We are here because I don’t want to take any chances,” he said and nodded toward a cluster of withered trees, their deadened roots protruding out of the shifting sands.
Darion glanced up and then looked back at Kebbs in surprise and shock. “You mounted signal disruptors in the trees? You must be joking?”
“Like I said,” Kebbs began “I wasn’t going to take any chances.”
“Chances about what? Your parole officer finding where you spend your time? Come on Kebbs! I don’t have time to waste with all this cloak and dagger nonsense. You’re a trash man for goodness sake! Now tell me what you have to tell me so I can go. I have a lot of responsibilities that I need to get back to...not that you’d know anything about responsibility.”
Kebbs shook his head. “Some things never change.”
“Apparently not!” snapped Darion. “You have three minutes! Make them count.”
Kebbs raised an eyebrow. “Ok, then. Well, the reason I wanted you here instead of your office is because I believe your new office is bugged.”
Darion momentarily looked surprised and then shrugged. “So?”
Kebbs shook his head; frustrated that his revelation didn’t have the impact he had hoped but pressed on just the same. “I believe the same people who have bugged your office are the same people that are trying to make you their puppet now.”
“Two minutes, thirty seconds,” Darion replied, looking as disinterested as he could.
Kebbs eyes flared. “Don’t be an idiot Darion! You know what I’m talking about!”
Darion leaned toward Kebbs. “I have no idea what you are talking about. And if you have a point to make, I suggest you make it sooner rather than later. Your clock is ticking.”
Kebbs looked at Darion in disbelief and then shook his head. “Darion, you have been set up to make our defenses as soft as possible, undoubtedly in preparation of a major landing by the Krohns!”
Darion looked at Kebbs and then turned to walk away. “You know what Kebbs, I don’t have any time for this apparently. I’m sorry I came. Have fun at the trash plant!”
Kebbs held out his arms. “This isn’t about your brother Darion! This is about the fate of the capital! Maybe the fate of the Federation!”
Darion froze in his tracks, still facing away.
Kebbs shook his head. “Don’t be a selfish jerk! This is bigger than your feelings!”
Darion turned sharply and shook a finger in Kebbs face. “Try telling my brother that I’m a selfish jerk! Oh wait, you can’t! He’s dead!”
“Are you really going to start this all over again now?” Kebbs asked with disgust. “It was an accident Darion! I don’t know how many times I need to tell you. It was just an accident!”
“You were responsible! You should have been watching after him more closely!”
“He wasn’t a child, Darion!” Kebbs said sharply. “I couldn’t hold his hand every step of the climb.”
“Not a child? He was only seventeen!” Darion exclaimed. “Who brings a seventeen year old on the hardest climb on the continent? Who?”
“It was our third time doing it!” Kebbs yelled back. “He hit a bad spot and slipped. It was an accident Darion. And regardless of what you want to think, or whom you want to blame, at the end of the day, that’s what it was! An accident!”
Darion tossed his hands up in frustration and turned once again to walk away.
Kebbs shook his head. “I’m sorry Darion. I’ve told you for years that I’m sorry. Isn’t there anything I can do or say for you to forgive me?”
Darion slowly shook his head. “Nothing I can think of.”
Tears nearly came to Kebbs’ eyes but he fought them back and looked intently at Darion. “If I can’t make you forgive me, please, please just let me help you! What I’m trying to tell you is important. I wouldn’t have come to you if it wasn’t. I wouldn’t have risked reopening these old wounds for both of us if it wasn’t important. I promise.”
Darion reluctantly nodded, slightly moved by Kebbs’ passionate appeal but not enough to show it.
Kebbs breathed in deeply, realizing he only had one shot. “There are no arctic holes in Clear Skies system, or anywhere else. The system was designed to be comprehensive. No enemy can approach the globe from any direction. But when the system is high jacked, it doesn’t matter what direction enemy ships approach.”
“What do you mean high jacked?”
“It’s been reprogrammed by some sort of virus to ignore enemy ships and possibly even target our own.”
Darion looked at Kebbs doubtfully. “The entire system has been reprogrammed?”
Kebbs nodded emphatically.
“And just how did you stumble onto this little nugget of information?” Darion quizzed Kebbs. “Do you study military mainframes when you’re not at the trash plant?”
Kebbs shook his head. “I can’t tell you how I know what I know, at least not yet. But trust me Darion, it’s the truth.”
Darion looked intently at Kebbs and then shook his head. “What if you’re wrong?”
“If I’m wrong, the Krohns will land in the Arctic as you’ve been told and from there they will launch scattered attacks across the globe where the regional armies will battle them. It will be messy but manageable. But if I’m right, the Krohns will land in force right here in Larep, our capital city! If your army is not in the area when they land, our entire Federation will be crippled in less than a day!”
Darion shook his head as he began to fight an internal battle. The implications of making the wrong decision were suddenly tremendous. “I...I have to go,” he said glancing at his link and then back up at Kebbs. “I will consider what you have told me,” he said. “But I make no promises.”
Kebbs slowly nodded. “That is all I can ask.”
Darion nodded once more and then turned up the path and walked away.
Kebbs watched on until Darion was completely out of sight before turning toward one side of the path.
“Do you think he’ll help us?” Kebbs asked as Professor Jabel appeared from behind a clump of withered bushes, his cane as always accompanying his strides.
“You’ve done what you could,” said Jabel as he patted Kebbs on the shoulder. “That is all that matters.”
“I just wish I could have gotten him onboard now, for sure. The longer he waits, the harder this entire thing will be for all of us.”
“It’s already too late,” the old man answered and handed Kebbs a small data pad. “Got that post just a few minutes ago.”
Kebbs glanced at the pad and then shook his head. “What do we do now?” he asked as he handed back the pad.
“We’ll have to jump to plan C,” Jabel answered and then chuckled, well aware that there was no plan C.
Kebbs smiled and shook his head. “I’ll have to let her know of the change in plans then.”
“She’ll have to do it tonight of course,” Jabel said thoughtfully. “If we wait much longer Darion will already be dead.”
Kebbs looked at Jabel in shock. “You think they’re on to us?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then how do you know they will kill him?”
“Because after tonight, they will no longer need him,” Jabel answered as the two began to walk down the path. “They have groomed him for this one decision for many, many months. Once it is made and acted upon, they will cast him away without a second thought.”
“What if he doesn’t go along with it? What if he changes his mind?”
“I doubt he will change his mind even after your passionate plea,” answered Jabel. “Their hold over him is very str
ong and his own character is very weak. He will send the army away, with reservations perhaps, but he will do it.”
“Then why continue to mess with him?” asked Kebbs. “He is the playboy general after all! This isn’t news to us. Lets just wait for Fedrin and his ships to help us and leave Darion to deal with his own devils.”
Jabel sighed. “We don’t have time to wait for Fedrin. And although Darion has many faults, we need him. Like it or not, he is the key. We must convince him of his importance. Without him, we won’t be able to restore Clear Skies. Without him, we won’t get the Origin Codex. Without him, the Federation will be in jeopardy.”
Kebbs smiled. “I thought you’d say something like that.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and contact her and brief her on the situation,” said Jabel nodding to Kebbs’ link. “Regrettably, she is our stubborn General’s only hope for survival and thus our only hope.”
Kebbs nodded.
“And I must presently return to hiding,” added Jabel wearily, pointing with his cane back down the path. “It is not for cowardice that I hide but as the only one that can fix Clear Skies, I must remain alive until Fedrin fetches the program from the Voigt Colony and sends it to me.”
“We have so much work to do,” exclaimed Kebbs.
“We do indeed,” remarked Jabel. “And time, as always, is not on our side.”
“Do you have the adapters?” asked Kebbs.
“Right here,” answered Jabel, presenting Kebbs with three small golden ringed-adapters.
Kebbs picked up the rings from Jabel’s hand, thrusting two of them into his pocket but retaining the third. He held it between two fingers and looked through it, the sun illuminating the intricate inner workings of the hollowed device. “Its beautiful Professor. Simply beautiful.”
“Regrettably, I only had materials and time enough to build three,” lamented Jabel.
“Three is enough for now,” Kebbs said contentedly.
A twig snapped in the dry underbrush a small distance away causing both men to turn sharply.
“We need to keep moving,” said Jabel in a whisper.