Flashpoint (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy)

by Adam Quinn

  On their way to wherever the rest of her team was staying, Taylor and Keagan passed through a hallway with large windows on one side that looked out onto a small grove that Taylor had not seen from above the complex. A collection of ground lights gave the place a low level of ambient illumination, which helped Taylor distinguish the lone figure leaning against one of the trees.

  Hezekiah.

  His head turned toward Taylor, and at first, she thought he was affixing her with his cool gaze, but then she realized he was looking at Keagan, standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with her.

  Taylor took a self-conscious step away from the Jacobin.

  She then ran to the nearest door, punched the button to open it, and dashed out to the tree Hezekiah leaned against. “Hezekiah? Are you okay—what are you doing out here?”

  “I’m fine—their doctors said it was just minor head trauma. Said to get some rest, and it was quiet out here, at least until a minute ago.” His unreadable gaze was still over Taylor’s shoulder. She turned around. Keagan gave her a short bow, then quickly strode away. Taylor turned back to Hezekiah.

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  “What?”

  Hezekiah shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. I should be thanking you. They said you carried me all the way here.”

  “Well, I had a little help from a gunboat.” Taylor smiled, but she was still concerned by his first statement. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Hezekiah pulled two brown packets and two spoons out of one of the pockets of his IES uniform, handing one of each to Taylor. “Here.”

  Taylor examined the packet. “Corn?”

  “The Jacobins gave us rations—the Archavians can’t digest this, so we had a lot of extras.” Hezekiah tore off the top of his packet and scooped out a spoonful of corn.

  Taylor had more to ask Hezekiah, but her stomach gave an indignant grumble, so she tore her own packet open and consumed three spoonfuls of corn before speaking again. “I talked with the Jacobins. We came up with a plan.”

  “Why are we working with these people?” His words were pointed.

  “Because they offer us the best chance of striking back at the Kaleknarians—and the Alliance, with the plan we came up with,” Taylor said. “I would have thought you’d be enthusiastic—the Kaleknarians almost killed you.”

  “Yeah, and then Mars Keagan swooped in and saved you. I heard.”

  Taylor grimaced inwardly, chewing another spoonful of corn as she considered her response. “He didn’t save us, exactly. We might have been able to get away on our own. He just offered us an opportunity. To fix things.”

  “I thought the goal was to leave things the way they were, as much as possible.” Hezekiah’s tone was still more questioning than she would have liked, but it had lost its edge.

  “I thought it was,” Taylor said. “I thought by interfering with the balance of power we were asking for trouble, but sometimes interfering is the only way to prevent trouble. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s all I’m trying to do—trying to stop the Kaleknarians and the Alliance, and get back Marissa.” Taylor felt her face heat, and she blamed her exhaustion for making her lose her composure. “That’s all I’m trying to do, and yet I’ve had to fight everyone to get it done—Brook wanted to run away, Saifan wanted to chase the Alliance, the Jacobins wanted to start a war—and I still have to sell this new plan to all of them, plus Harrison, and I guess I just figured that, after what you told me about following principles, you would understand, and you, at least, would be on my side.”

  “Of course I am.” At some point, Hezekiah’s arm had found its way around her shoulders. “I have a few concerns about this… rebel organization we’re aligning with, but that doesn’t mean I’m against you, so why don’t you tell me this plan you came up with, and I’ll see if there’s any way that I can help you make sure it turns out for the best.”

  Taylor glanced up at him in surprise. “Really?”

  “Really,” Hezekiah said. “I can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on. So tell me.”

  Taylor told him about the Meltian fleet, the control centers, the hothuxix leader, and finally her plan, plus Dane’s last-minute addition. As she spoke, Hezekiah nodded along, and when she stopped, he paused thoughtfully.

  “It’s audacious,” he finally said, “and more than a little risky. But I think it could work, and if it does… the Alliance, Marissa, the Kaleknarians…”

  “So you’ll go with it?” Taylor asked. “I know you’re… injured, but we need you, especially, on the bridge of the Frankenstein so that you can circumvent the destroyed fire control center, like you said you could.”

  “Right.” Hezekiah slipped his corn packet and spoon into one of his uniform’s pockets, allowing him to run a hand through his hair. “I’m still not sure how much we can trust the Jacobins. I mean, flip, you said their original plan was to help start a war. But at the same time, I think it’s worth a try. As to my injury, I’ll be fine.”

  “Thank you.” Taylor felt a surge of relief. Hezekiah had hardly offered a glowing endorsement of her plan, but to have him on her side at all was… important. And not just because of his engineering skill.

  “Thank me when this is over.” Hezekiah stepped away from the tree, releasing Taylor’s shoulders. He offered her what remained of his corn ration. “For now, eat this, and figure out how you’re going to talk Harrison into this plan. I’ll take care of Captain Brook and the others.”

  Taylor clutched both corn packets to her chest. “Good luck.”

  Hezekiah’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I took the easy job; I don’t think I could convince Ryan Harrison to do anything. I think you can, but not on an empty stomach. So eat up.”

  Hezekiah strode off purposefully toward the door through which Taylor had exited the building. She watched him go, allowing a breath of relief to escape her lips. Then she dug back into her corn packet, determined to quell her stomach’s protests as Hezekiah suggested.

  Because now this really had to work.

  Cherran had been told—multiple times, and with visible pleasure on each occasion—that the battleship MRS Ingenuity was the pride of the Meltian Guard. Admiral Lauderheist, the commander of the entire fleet, was especially fond of the ship, and Cherran had nodded politely as the venerable admiral described how the Order-War-era vessel had been retrofitted with a dual-spun flip drive and active shielding and a whole host of massive secret weapons that Cherran was not allowed to see.

  At least he assumed they were massive because that was the only acceptable excuse for his quarters being smaller than a Telahmir apartment.

  Cherran had to lean backward over the foot of his bed to fit his broad shoulders within the view of the tiny mirror screen on his wall. He considered changing the screen’s field of view, but he was on the fence over whether his purple tie was unflatteringly thin on his frame—something he would very much like to lock down before calling into PanGal that afternoon—and a wide-angle field of view would distort that aspect of his attire.

  Somebody rapped on his door.

  Cherran groaned. “Use the ringer!”

  The door played a little ten-note tune that he had talked a Meltian Guard technician into helping him custom download.

  “Thank you!” Cherran went back to his tie. He was not supposed to call in to PanGal for an hour yet, and they were still the better part of a day away from Trascion, so there was no way anyone really needed his urgent attention. “Could you come back in fifteen minutes?”

  “We have a communications query from Trascion,” Shuping said from outside his door.

  Cherran’s hands froze in midair. Altez had given his little speech the day after the fleet left, and there had still been no response, putting the entire fleet—Cherran included—on edge. “Kaleknarian?”

  “The query claims to be from Taylor Ghatzi, and it has verification codes from Captain Jareyn Brook of the Interstellar Emergency Service, as wel
l as Ryan Harrison, who is sending us a simultaneous query.”

  “Well then.” Cherran smoothed down his collar. If Ryan Harrison and reclusive war hero Taylor Ghatzi were on the same communications query, it had to be important, and he saw no reason for them to contact him unless it was related to his mission—official and personal—to peacefully recover Trascion from the Kaleknarians. “I suppose I shouldn’t keep them waiting.”

  “You already are,” Shuping said.

  “Well, in that case—”

  “Get out here, Cherran.”

  “Joking, joking.” Cherran followed Shuping to one of the Ingenuity’s long-distance conference rooms, which he was peeved to find was slightly larger than his quarters. Ryan Harrison’s full holographic form was seated in the conference room because the Ingenuity had no better use of space than the hologram projectors needed to virtually present the director of the MRSIS’s flipping shins, while Taylor’s head and shoulders were displayed on a wafer-thin screen that stuck up from the table. Both of them regarded Cherran with fake smiles, like a newly-divorced couple who had been inadvertently put in the same car in an amusement park ride.

  “Mr. DeGuavra,” Harrison said. “Putting in some more of that beauty sleep?”

  “On the contrary, I hear that baggy-eyed sleeplessness is the vogue in Telahmir these days.” Cherran took a seat at the head of the table. “Director, I believe you may be one step ahead of me in that regard, with that up-all-night-reading-Special-Intelligence-Service-reports look you’ve been cultivating. Telahmir’s women must throw themselves at you.”

  “Contrary to popular belief,” Harrison said, “I do sleep—just not when I am supposed to be at a Cabinet meeting.”

  “Oh.” Cherran put a hand over his mouth as if he had said something he had not intended. “Is that your natural look, then?”

  “Gentlemen,” Taylor said.

  “My apologies, Ms. Ghatzi,” Harrison said. “Now that Mr. DeGuavra is here from the 6th fleet, we should get down to business. I should tell you, I was surprised to hear you had found your way to Trascion, as I—”

  “I doubt that,” Taylor said, “considering that you knew I was with the Kindred Spirit, which had, shall we say, intimate contact with an MRSIS vessel on our way here. I believe it was called the Frankenstein.”

  “Did you.” Harrison’s face was inscrutable, but it was definitely not a question.

  “We did,” Taylor said. “Fortunately for you, I’m not interested in discussing our encounter with that MRSIS ship because I believe we have a broader alignment of interests—namely that I have a way to get the Kaleknarians to yield to Mr. DeGuavra’s fleet, but I need your help to do it.”

  There it was: the connection to his mission. Cherran thought that the Cabinet’s plan to remove the Kaleknarians was fairly robust, but he had no intention of turning down Ghatzi’s assistance if it could increase the chances of realizing a peaceful solution to the Trascionese crisis. “What’s your plan?”

  Harrison was less enthusiastic. “What if I told you that we already had a satisfactory plan for removing the Kaleknarians?”

  “Then I would ask why your ship was over Trascion,” Taylor said.

  “What is she talking about?” Cherran asked.

  “I told you and the Cabinet that the MRSIS had an asset in place to knock out the Kaleknarian control centers,” Harrison said. “Unfortunately, that asset was disrupted by… Kaleknarian forces. We have been looking into other options, but it is possible that Ms. Ghatzi could provide a useful alternative.”

  “And you didn’t think that maybe you should have told the Cabinet about this disruption?” Cherran threw a distrustful look at Harrison. To give the director the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he would have told Cherran eventually that the Ingenuity was going to arrive on Trascion to find its control centers still intact, but it was still the kind of critical problem that Cherran would have liked to be informed of as soon as it happened.

  Harrison shrugged noncommittally. “As I told you, we have been looking into other options.”

  “Well, you obviously have not come up with anything good yet, so let’s hear Taylor’s plan,” Cherran said. Taylor Ghatzi had worked with his father, though she probably only knew Percival by his first-initial pseudonym; if Percival could trust Taylor, then Cherran could too—not to mention that he certainly didn’t trust Harrison at the moment.

  “Thank you, Mr. DeGuavra,” Taylor said. “Mr. Harrison, the first thing I need from you is transportation for me and the remaining crew of the MRS Kindred Spirit from the surface of Trascion to the Frankenstein. You will then carry the majority of them away from Trascion, but I will lead a small team to take command of the ship and use it to eliminate a certain radical element of the Kaleknarian leadership. Cherran’s fleet will then flip in and open fire on us in a show of goodwill toward the Kaleknarians, forcing us to flip away… into Meltian custody.”

  “So you want a Meltian agency to help you commandeer a Meltian ship, which will get beat up by a Meltian fleet before escaping into Meltian custody?” Cherran asked.

  “The situation is complicated,” Harrison said, “but that plan is completely unnecessary. I can order my asset to perform that orbital strike without you.”

  “You could,” Taylor said, “but you already know that goodwill is just one of the reasons why I want the Frankenstein… decommissioned, so I’d suggest that we move on to what I am offering in return, unless of course you’d like me to spell those reasons out to you—and Ambassador DeGuavra.”

  “That would be nice.” Cherran looked back and forth between the war hero and the MRSIS director. He felt increasingly like he was being left behind by this conversation, which was not good considering that he would be the one who had to negotiate with the Kaleknarians.

  “You had better be offering me something good if you expect me to give up an important part of the MRSIS’s galactic arsenal,” Harrison said.

  “It’s simple,” Taylor said. “If you help me get my enemies, I’ll help you get yours. I understand you have been after the Jacobins for a while.”

  Harrison leaned back in his seat, his fake smile by now replaced with a frown. “Since they carried out the Anniversary Attacks.”

  “Longer than that, I bet.” Taylor leaned slightly forward, pressing her advantage. “The funny thing is, I know of a Jacobin division that is currently based on Trascion and is led by someone who is a general within the Jacobin organization. If you were to work with me, I could give you the precise location of that base, and perhaps Mr. DeGuavra could send a couple gunboats full of Meltian Guardsmen swooping in to apprehend them. It would be seen as another olive branch to the Kaleknarians, and I’m sure the MRSIS can come up with some charges to get them transferred to your custody. JP—er, the IES’s political liaison officer—informs me that the Jacobins have evaded a hefty sum of Meltian taxes with all their secret transactions.”

  Harrison did not respond. The two locked gazes. It was clear that some kind of battle of wills was happening, but Cherran was not even sure what the prize was. Taylor wanted to take some MRSIS ship for a joyride, while Harrison wanted to apprehend the Jacobins, and they clearly both wanted the Kaleknarians off Trascion—which reminded him of a key aspect of the Cabinet’s plan that Taylor and Harrison seemed to have forgotten.

  “What about the control centers?” Cherran asked.

  The staring contest was broken, and both heads swiveled toward Cherran at the same time. He pressed ahead, working through the implications as he spoke.

  “You said it yourself, Director: that was the original mission of this ‘Frankenstein’ ship, to destroy the control centers on Trascion, freeing the collaborators so that the Kaleknarians would face a revolt if they stayed put.” Cherran became increasingly certain as he spoke that this was the lynchpin of their—and his—efforts to remove the Kaleknarians, and that it was still entirely viable. “What if Taylor could do that for you? Your first attempt failed, but she’s got som
e advantages, like the fact that she’s obviously in contact with the Jacobins, who are already planning an operation against the Kaleknarians; she could just ask them to find the locations of the control centers and then destroy them herself when she takes over the Frankenstein!”

  Taylor nodded slowly. “I like that… and so would the Jacobins. A lot.”

  Taylor and Cherran turned to Harrison’s holographic form. The director of the MRSIS was scratching his chin, probably searching for any flaws in the plan. Cherran gave him an encouraging look, beseeching the director with his eyes to accept the plan—for the interests of the Meltian Republic, but also to prevent an unnecessary war from shredding the galaxy up any further.

  Cherran glanced at Taylor, realizing the irony that no one else in the room could: that ten years after Percival DeGuavra worked with Admiral Ghatzi to start a galactic war, Cherran DeGuavra was working with her to stop one.

  “So, in simple terms,” Harrison said, “you want me to trade the Frankenstein for Trascion and a few high-level Jacobins.”

  “Correct,” Taylor said. “A leg up on some of your worst enemies, and the largest trascionite reserves in the galaxy. I do not know what else you could ask of me.”

  “I do,” Harrison said. “You know the Frankenstein’s name—perhaps you have heard of a certain project carried out onboard that vessel. Project Firestorm?”

  It was Taylor’s turn to be taken aback, and she hesitated for a moment. “Perhaps.”

  Harrison nodded. “Well then, perhaps once you are onboard the ship, you could go to its facility for Project Firestorm and link the MRSIS in—my people will give you a special transceiver datacard—so we can poke around a bit.”