Get a grip and protect yourself, Dee, Bree screamed in her mindvoice.
Right, Dee thought and shook herself.
The scuffle continued in a flurry of hand-to-hand jabs, knees, head-butts, and elbows between Fink and Dee's bodyguard. Spitapp, spitapp, spitapp, she heard again and stood to rush Fink.
"No, Dee!" Clay yelled at her. "Stay out of this."
"No way," she yelled back at him as she leaped forward in a bicycle roundhouse kick, bringing the top of her right foot hard against Fink's back. The kick stunned him only slightly, but it was enough for Clay to twist inside his grip, backward head-butt him in the face, and then pull Fink's elbow down against his shoulder. There was a loud crack. Fink's right elbow hyperextended the wrong way, and he let out a scream of pain.
Dee jumped up at him again and slammed her left knee into his ribs, brought her left elbow down on his collarbone but missed it, and then she gave him a right knee into his back as hard as she could.
"Get off my back, you little bitch!" Fink, bloodied and with his right arm broken at the elbow, somehow managed to squirm out of Clay's grip and pushed off his back, sandwiching Dee between him and the bulkhead. Dee's head slapped against the viewport so hard she saw stars and wobbled to her knees.
Dee was dazed but managed to make out that Clay had blood trickling from his lips. Then she realized that he had a red spot on his chest. He had been shot, too. Dee forced herself to her feet and shook the stars out of her eyes with the hopes of another assault on the crazed Fink. But even though Fink had a broken arm, he still managed to hold them off with blocks and kicks, and then out of nowhere came a knife. Clay managed to avoid it once by falling backward, but he had just lost too much strength from his wound, and Fink was soon on top of him.
Clay met Fink's lunge with both his arms, but Fink put all his body weight behind the knife. Clay couldn't hold him off much longer.
"The gun, Dee!" he managed to say as the blade of the knife inched closer to his throat.
Dee turned and scanned the deck of the shuttle wildly for the gun, but it was on the other side of the two men. Instead, she threw her body into Fink, knocking him over onto his right side. His broken arm rammed into the pedestal of the pilot's chair, and he screamed in agony. Clay managed to push him the rest of the way off him and kneed him in the groin. Unfortunately, Fink fell right on top of the railpistol. Seeing this, Clay pushed Dee backward into the bulkhead and rose between her and Fink just as the madman raised the weapon and fired. Spitapp, spitapp.
There was absolute quiet for a brief second. Dee looked into Clay's eyes, and he smiled at her with his big, toothy smile. Red poured from the corners of his mouth and off his tongue.
"Sorry, Dee . . ." He collapsed dead on the floor at her feet.
"What did you do?" Dee screamed and started at Fink but then quickly froze as she was staring at the barrel of the railpistol.
"Quiet!" Fink shouted at her while waving the pistol in her direction. "Don't you make a fucking move, or it will be your last. Now sit down! Turn back around in that chair and keep your hands up where I can see them."
Dee did what she was told. Fink carefully approached her, then grabbed her left arm and pulled it behind her chair with his good arm. She briefly thought of trying to overpower him, but Fink jammed the barrel of the railpistol into the side of her head. He winced in pain when he did it, but there was no doubt he could still pull the trigger.
"Don't even think about it." He then zip-tied her hand to the railing of the chair back and continued to do the same with her right hand.
"Why are you doing this, Fink? What do you hope to gain? You killed them. You killed Jay for no reason. You, k-k-killed Clay!" Tears ran down her cheeks. She and Jay had been classmates for years. They were wingmen, and at one point there had been some sexual interest. Now he was dead. She had known Clay since she had been six years old, and the man was one of her heroes. And for some reason this madman had just killed them both!
"Casualties of war, Dee."
"Don't call me that. You don't have the right to call me Dee or anything else, you fucking monster! My father will hunt you down to the ends of the galaxy if you harm me. He will rip your fucking eyeballs out!" Dee screamed at him uncontrollably. But Fink only laughed at her as if she were a silly little girl.
"It won't be me that he will go after, girly. I'm just a middleman. And in about ten minutes I'll be a very fucking rich middleman." Fink double-checked that Dee couldn't move. He pulled the ties tighter, and Dee could feel them cutting into her wrists.
Fink stepped back behind her and began rummaging through something in the back of the shuttle. Dee managed to swivel her chair, but as she did Fink brought the pistol up with his left hand. Once he realized she wasn't going anywhere, he set the pistol down and went about digging through the locker in the side panel of the shuttle. He finally found what he was looking for, apparently, and pulled it out with his good arm.
Bree, what do we do? Dee thought. Fink was preoccupied with something; now might be a chance to come up with a plan, or something, anything.
I'm searching for help, Dee, but we are a long way from home. I've contacted the governor's mansion, but got an odd response.
What do you mean?
They claim to no longer recognize U.S. authority.
This ain't good. Keep broadcasting my emergency signal. There has to be somebody out there that can help.
"Aha!" Fink pulled out a first-aid kit and popped the latch on it. "This will do."
He found an emergency hypo of immunoboost and peeled the plastic wrapper off with his left hand and his teeth. Holding the hypo up, he turned and glared at Clay's body and then jabbed the hypo in his neck. There was a quick hiss, and then he tossed the empty medicine tube on the deck. Then he felt about his right elbow with his left hand.
"Shit, at least it ain't broken. Just dislocated." He muttered to himself and then yanked his arm outward, popping the bones back in place. "Fuck!" he screamed.
"Well, come over here and I'll break it for you, if you like," Dee spat at him.
"You've got spunk, kid. I give you that much. Most kids in your position could be spoiled little worthless brats. But you're not. Oh, well, sometimes life is a meat grinder."
"You are a disgrace, Fink. A murdering goddamned disgrace and for certain not a U.S. Marine." Dee struggled against the chair briefly, until she realized that she wasn't going to pull free and was only cutting her bonds more deeply into her wrists. She screamed again in anger.
"Hey, haven't you heard the saying, 'Once a marine always a marine'?" Fink gave her an evil look.
"Yeah, well, apparently, it's just an expression, you piece of shit."
Daddy ain't gonna get a chance to kill this motherfucker, because I am so gonna rip his goddamned head off and shove it up his ass!
I hear you, Dee. You hang in there.
Chapter 13
July 1, 2394 AD
Sol System, Oort Cloud
Friday, 2:17 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
DeathRay finally had a few minutes to himself to relax. Fish had asked him if he wanted to hit the galley and get a drink or two, but it had been a fairly long day already. He pulled his boots off and slid out of his flight suit down to his underwear and crashed onto his rack.
"Long day," he said audibly. When he was alone he liked to talk to Candis through the speakers in his cabin. Jack had been in the Navy for more than twenty years and didn't see family much. In fact, he only kept in touch with his grandfather, who lived in Texas. Otherwise, he was pretty much alone other than his military family. Candis was as close to a wife as he had. If a small sunflower-seed–sized plastic-coated artificial-intelligence computer installed in his brain counted. He closed his eyes and did a few relaxation breaths. "We should go on a vacation sometime. Maybe skiing, or to a beach somewhere."
"You got that right, Jack. You've been saying we were gonna do that for about five years now." His AIC changed the subject. " How ab
out that First Daughter?"
"Not bad. Sure not what I'd have expected had I not met her father and mother on a few different occasions. That apple sure didn't fall far from the tree."
"I think she was kind of, well, interested in you, Captain."
"What? You're out of your mind, Candis."
"I'm not so sure, sir. She eyed you pretty closely and hung on every word you said." Candis had a slight hint of goading in her voice.
"She was in love with the FM-12s, Candis. Not me."
"Whatever you say, Jack."
Jack kept his eyes closed and let his mind wander. He'd been controlling his thoughts all day; driving the quantum mechanics of the DTM links of fighting mecha took a heavy toll on the mental faculties. Most good pilots learned to relax after flying to let their physical body recuperate while letting the mind rest as well.
"No, she sure didn't. I thought she was going to get you for a second there."
"Not a chance. Just letting her feel that false sense of security before I squashed her." Jack laughed with a purposeful tone of arrogance. The tone was only for show, as he had lost all sense of arrogance on the battlefield decades earlier. His true persona was the cool and level-headed confidence of a seasoned veteran. He just considered himself good at his job.
As Jack's mind flowed from thought to thought in random order, he came to the memory of when he had met President Moore for the first time. It was just after the Battle of the Oort, when he and Fish had teleported back to Earthspace, fighting the Seppy ship hell-bent on doing a kamikaze header into Luna City. The president had invited the two pilots to the White House.
At that time Jack hadn't had a chance to read through, much less to understand, the data the CIA agent he knew only as Nancy Penzington had transmitted to his AIC, but she had warned him not to trust anybody. Well, Jack had considered that she couldn't have meant the president himself. So while he and Fish were shaking hands and passing pleasantries with the man, he had his AIC send the data to the president's AIC, along with an explanatory message. Moore never even changed his facial expression during the exchange. He'd make one hell of poker player was what Jack thought after that meeting.
He had also met the entire First Family at several other political events as he had become a poster boy for the president to parade in front of the press at major public addresses. Moore had apologized to DeathRay about doing so, but Jack just assured the president that it was an honor for any Naval aviator. Jack and Moore never did speak of the data he had transferred, but Candis assured him that his AIC had gotten it.
The data itself was nothing short of incredible. Apparently the U.S. had developed a prototype design for the quantum-membrane teleportation technology decades earlier in a top-secret program. There were even drawings of the big QMT facility design, personnel QMT pads, and mention of projecting a QMT forward from a facility to a place where there wasn't one. These thirty-year-old documents even had the math predicting that a device could be built that would allow projecting small masses, like people, back and forth between the stars without a large QMT pad on either end. Neither Jack nor Candis was a quantum physicist, but they understood enough of the math to make some conclusions from the data. It looked to them like a wristwatch-sized device could collect enough vacuum energy to perform one human teleport as far as twenty or thirty light-years.
Somehow all of the QMT information had been transferred to the Separatists but managed to be lost from history as far as the U.S. military was concerned. The entire concept of QMT seemed to have been erased from any databases—only to reemerge after President Moore had taken office. Moore had managed to dig it up somewhere and started putting it to use. Jack was curious what had happened to the scientists that had developed these concepts. Had they just vanished? Had they been murdered or kidnapped by the Seppies?
Finally, Moore got two prototypes constructed on the USS John Tyler and the USS Abraham Lincoln. Then, at about the same time the technology was about to go on line, it was leaked to the press. Moore originally had gotten the blame, Jack recalled, but it turned out to be some sort of coincidence that the Seppies and the U.S. had developed the tech simultaneously and perhaps independent of each other. And it was all part of some FBI sting operation to catch some Seppy spies that were congressional staffers. Yeah, that was bullshit if Jack had ever heard it. Clearly the Seppies had managed to develop the Stingers, Gnats, and Orcus mecha independently, and they just accidentally looked like their U.S. military counterparts, too. And if you believed that one, Jack could pull on his left ass cheek and play the Navy fight song out his sphincter. Something stunk somewhere—something other than Jack's sphincter.
Jack had been thinking on that data for more than six years, and he wasn't anywhere closer to figuring out exactly what it meant than he had been the day he had it transmitted to him. He had decided that there were serious moles within the U.S. government infrastructure that must be sympathetic to the Separatists. In order for them to get such highly classified information, they had to be pretty well-connected. Perhaps there were congressmen and women or senators on the intelligence or defense committees that were Separatists at heart. Jack wasn't sure. And spinning it over and over in his mind only got him all worked up.
He focused his mind on the blackness of space. Then he began to slowly drift off to sleep.
"General quarters! General quarters. All hands, all hands, report to duty stations immediately. Prepare for battlestations call," the ship's AIC said over the 1-MC intercom and through QM wireless to all AICs aboard the Sienna Madira.
"What the hell?" DeathRay jerked himself up via the built-in reflex to the general quarters call. "How long was I asleep, Candis?" He stretched and rubbed at his eyes.
"About thirteen minutes, Captain. I guess there is no rest for the wicked."
"Goddamned right," Jack muttered as he shook himself to and then threw on his UCUs and put a toothbrushing cube in his mouth. "Got any idea what this is about?"
"No, Jack. But the admiral has ordered all the senior officers to the briefing room."
"That doesn't sound good. Start scanning the news feeds for me." He spat out the cube into the sink and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Jack slipped his boots on and pressed the seal tab. They suctioned in place, and the color scheme of his uniform set itself to Navy blue. He slapped on his name tag, insignia, and wings, and stuck the black beret typically worn by mecha jocks in his back pocket. Then he was out the hatch in a mad rush toward the main briefing area.
Ross 128 just seceded from the Union, Jack! Candis thought to him.
"Down ladder! Make a hole, seamen." Jack turned the corner of the corridor into the mostly full stairwell. The enlisted men in his way hugged the bulkhead or flattened their backs to it.
Oh shit! Dee! he thought. They'll shut the QMT gate down first thing. And you know they'll try to nab her.
She is with a bodyguard and a seasoned marine, the AIC said.
Yeah, against an entire damned planet. Those ain't good odds for Dee. DeathRay didn't like this situation at all. He really liked the First Daughter and hated to see her get caught up in the middle of bad shit, again. That kid just has some bad luck, doesn't she?
It's not her fault. And this all seems timed too coincidentally to me, Candis added.
Good point. Dee just happens to arrive at Ross 128 just moments before they secede from the Union and shut down the teleporter. Yeah, bullshit. This was another one of those coincidences where the Separatists were concerned. Who knew what that crazy bitch, Elle Ahmi, had up her sleeve. This could be the start of a full-scale invasion. He hoped like hell that Ahmi didn't get her hands on Dee.
"Hold the elevator!" he shouted as he rounded the corner to the main tower elevator. It was filling fast, and there were several officers piling in.
"Captain Boland, you barely made this one." Colonel Warboys held the door for him. Warboys never smiled as far as Jack could tell. The Army man was all business. Even when he cracked a joke, it was
sometimes hard to tell if he was laughing or grimacing.
"Thanks, Colonel." Jack caught his breath. "Any idea what's up?"
"Did you hear about Ross 128?" Warboys asked.
"Yeah, and the First Daughter just passed through the QMT."
"Sounds too coincidental if you ask me." Warboys reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of stimgum. "Want a slice?"
"Hey, do I look that bad?" DeathRay grinned and took the gum. Almost as soon as the stick hit his tongue he felt a wave of energy rush through his body, and he was as wide awake as he'd ever been in his life.
"It's been a long day already. And I suspect it is about to get a hell of a lot longer." Warboys looked blank for second. His AIC was telling him something.
"Shit, gonna need something stronger than gum, then, Colonel."
"Me, too, Jack. Me, too."
A matter of minutes later, very short minutes, and the main briefing room one deck below the CDC filled in and the doors were pulled shut. More than a thousand officers and SNCOs filled the room. The more senior ones were seated forward of the room and the lower ranks filed backward. There were hundreds standing against the rear and side bulkheads of the auditorium. Jack and Warboys sat next to each other in the front row. General Chekov marched across the stage and stood at attention.
"Rear Admiral Wallace Jefferson!" the XO grunted. Everybody stood to attention. The admiral walked across the stage and nodded to the XO, who then turned and marched off the stage and stood by a seat in the front row of the auditorium.
"At ease. Be seated," RADM Wallace said calmly. "At fourteen-seventeen Earth eastern standard time, the ambassador from the Ross 128 colony known as Arcadia announced from the White House that the colony was seceding from the United States of America and that they were aligned with the Tau Ceti separatists and their terrorist leader, Elle Ahmi. The ambassador made his statements and then subsequently vanished into thin air in the same manner as is indicative of a top-secret technology to teleport a single individual from one star system to the other without a QMT pad known by mathematicians as a 'snap-back algorithm.' We have no idea where he teleported to at that point. And now we have been ordered to muster rapidly and QMT into the Ross 128 system and take the government and National Guard units by force. The Outer Fleet is mustering here at the Oort Facility as rapidly as possible and will hold here under the direction of Rear Admiral Walker aboard the USS Anthony Blair." The admiral paused briefly to get his breath and gather his thoughts then continued with the briefing.
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