Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer

by David VanDyke

  “Probably not, but I want to make sure. Your first priority is to determine for certain if this man is human or not.”

  Shan and the corpsman remained with the immobilized subject while the doctor hustled out of the containment facility through the decontamination room.

  The corpsman looked at Shan as if realizing for the first time that the steward had no protection. “What if he is infectious? You are already exposed.”

  “Have no fear for me,” Shan replied, and the corpsman shrugged.

  Long minutes went by, with the two inside and the two outside watching the man, and the doctor hurriedly running tests with his automated analyzers according to Shan’s protocols. Eventually the physician returned, his faceplate open to show a stunned expression. “It’s not human. The cells…they’re amazing. It’s a Blend?”

  “I believe so, doctor. Is there any sign of disease or infectiousness?”

  “No, none.”

  “Keep it in isolation, then. I will leave a steward here at all times, as well as two Marines sealed in full combat armor, until the admiral decides what to do with it. And say nothing to anyone. This is top secret.” Rumors would get out, but Shan was less concerned with stopping them than merely slowing them down enough for him to set certain other plans in motion.

  He strode quickly to rouse Admiral Huen in his quarters.

  Chapter 41

  “Shan, you are to be commended in the highest regard,” Huen said as he brewed a pot of tea to help him wake up. “A superb piece of work, especially as you turned out to be correct. Amazing. An enemy Blend in the BioMed lab. The first one ever captured.”

  “Yes, sir. The first we know of, though of course, the covert services on Earth might have some we do not.” He cleared his throat. “Now I need immediate authority to search Simms’ quarters. I believe the creature we have in custody is Simms himself, but there is also a chance that the real colonel is some kind of puppet that the Blend controlled biochemically, just as it incited those Marines to sedition with its touch.”

  “Of course. Have the paperwork drawn up immediately, and you have my full authority to commandeer whomever you need. Aerospace Police or ship’s Marines, perhaps?”

  “Yes, Admiral. I must get moving on this.”

  “Agreed. Dismissed. I will be on the bridge if you need anything further. Pass the word to get the prime watch up there, too.”

  “Yes, sir.” Shan departed, moving as fast as Huen had ever seen.

  On the bridge Huen was gratified to see Lieutenant Commander Johnstone at CyberComm. The man was an absolute wizard at his station, if a bit casual for his tastes. This time he looked clean cut and more properly uniformed than usual. Huen recalled that the man’s wife, a Marine, cohabited with him on the base. He supposed she was having a positive effect on his appearance. That triggered another concern.

  “Johnstone, have you been briefed on the situation?”

  “Umm, not really, sir. I was told we are on condition yellow and the prime watch was to report to duty.”

  “Very well.” Huen sat down in the Chair. “The situation involves potential internal threats to this ship and this command. It may involve the base Marines. I understand your spouse is among them?”

  “Yes sir.” Suddenly, Johnstone became very still.

  “Have you noticed any unusual behavior since you two arrived here…six weeks ago?” Huen peered down at the display on the arm of the Chair, reading details about Johnstone from his personnel file.

  Johnstone gave a significant look around, as if asking about the others listening.

  Huen replied to his unspoken question. “Forgive me, Lieutenant Commander, if this is an awkward request, but I trust everyone here, and this is of vital importance. If you know something, please tell me.”

  Johnstone swallowed, then spoke. “My wife, First Sergeant Jill Repeth, has been informally investigating some serious issues she discovered within the base Marines. These might involve the battalion commander, or even others of higher status here on Callisto. Or off.”

  “What kind of issues?” Huen kept his voice deceptively mild, while flogging himself mentally. Obviously his hands-off approach, trusting the base’s Marines to police themselves, had failed. Then he realized that if, as Shan asserted, they had an actual agent of the Meme Empire in custody, they could hardly be faulted.

  “Drugs, for one, sir. Disciplinary problems – gambling, smuggling, failure to train properly. And less definable things as well. She said there was a…cultural problem. Because of the battalion commander.”

  “The commander?”

  “Yes, sir.” Johnstone glanced around the bridge again at the rest of the prime watch, who were now staring at him, fascinated. Years of routine duty on a pseudo-warship sitting at a training base apparently made this quite an interesting turn of events for them. “Because the battalion commander only joined EarthFleet Marines recently, she felt he had a culturally incorrect approach to handling combat troops.”

  Huen folded his hands in front of him, his elbows resting on the arms of the Chair, and leaned forward to stare at his CyberComm officer. “In other words, he’s a bad commander that exacerbated problems in the unit instead of dealing with them.”

  “As you say, sir.”

  “I’ve recently become aware of some of these issues myself,” Huen went on. “I have directed my stewards and the ship’s Marines to take certain steps to investigate this matter quite thoroughly. Every member of this crew is to give every assistance to them, is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” all of the watchstanders replied in near-unison.

  “There is also a possibility of something worse than a commander gone bad. It is conceivable that political forces, criminal elements, or even Meme agents present a threat to this ship and this base. The ship is the first priority, and after that, we will coordinate a full internal security review for the base. And that,” Huen said with a calculated wave of his hand, “is why we are all up in the middle of the night, the tertiary watch is on the auxiliary bridge, and all entry points are guarded.”

  ***

  By 0600 the prime watch had relaxed somewhat, as nothing seemed to be happening other than routing a few requests through the bridge. Admiral Huen had authorized the base analytical lab staff to be rousted out of bed at Shan’s request, and were even now testing all of the blood samples they had on file against his anti-Blend protocols. It now seemed particularly fortunate that First Sergeant Repeth had instituted frequent drug testing, so at least one Marine unit could be cleared.

  “Bravo Company is clean,” Shan reported to Admiral Huen. “I have ordered the company commander in your name to muster in full combat gear in case other personnel must be suppressed. Also, there is no sign of Simms. I believe the creature we have in BioMed is he. Or it.”

  “Very well. Continue.” Huen smiled inside at that term. Suppressed. There was nothing suppressive about recoilless machineguns and fragmentation grenades. While nonlethal weapons were common on Earth, Fleet Marines had to be ready to kill aliens, not “suppress” other humans. They did have a supply of Needleshock ammo, but he suspected anyone on the receiving end of the vetted Marines’ weapons would deserve what they got.

  “The next order of business is to obtain and process updated blood samples from the rest of the Marines. Once we are certain we can rely on them, I respectfully suggest we go to Condition Zebra and begin to do the same for all base personnel.”

  “All base personnel?” Huen made a mental calculation, starting with the count of fifty thousand people on Callisto. “That will take weeks.”

  “Yes, sir, but it must be done.”

  “Agreed. BioMed,” Huen turned to the appropriate watchstander, “pass to the senior physician that I want her to work up a plan to test this entire base for Blends. Also have her assign someone to liaise with ship’s Marines to make the brig secure for holding Blends.” And if that is not possible, he thought, I am not averse to killing them rather than risk
ing their escape, especially if, as Shan suspects, they can change their appearance.

  Next, Huen dictated a brief report to be sent at flash priority to Admiral Absen on Orion, assuring him that he believed everything was under control. Then he notified the Aerospace Training Wing commander of the situation, ordering him to suspend all other operations and to put a squadron of his instructor pilots on alert with armed Aardvarks, after they had been blood-tested.

  The rest of the day turned into a grinding administrative nightmare that tested Huen’s peacetime leadership skills to the utmost. It wasn’t long before the rest of the base got wind of the rumors and he had to lock everything down with emergency drills and curfews. The corporations protested, but as he’d learned over the last years, threats to their funding got quicker compliance than any other kind. With the carrot of increased compensation for overtime, they even agreed to use their corporate security to help keep order until the crisis eased.

  Eventually Huen turned the bridge over to Captain Rikard, his executive officer, and rotated the watch. Then he used the opportunity to go down and take a look at what they had caught.

  When he walked into the small but well equipped BioMed lab, he found the staff there looking morose and tired. One corpsman tried to call the area to attention but Huen waved him down and approached his senior physician, Commander Guptra. “What have we got, Doctor?”

  “I’m afraid the patient is dead, through no fault of our own,” she said distractedly. “I believe he killed himself in some biological fashion. We have tested for contamination but there appears to be none.”

  “Perhaps the creature had insufficient warning to prepare any such thing,” Huen remarked.

  “Or was simply unable. It’s not magic, Admiral. I would suspect that if it intended to release some kind of plague in the base, it would have done so.”

  “Unless it was saving that for when the Destroyer showed up. Now we are testing everyone and we will continue a program to do so, until…”

  The doctor smiled tiredly. “Until we win or die. I understand. Admiral, I’d like to stand some of my staff down for rest. We’re really not equipped for this kind of round-the-clock operation.”

  “Use your best judgment, Doctor. Just make sure that thing is no threat to anyone. I don’t want to find some kind of xenomorphic monster rampaging around the ship like a science fiction movie.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll make sure we have armed Marines here at all times.”

  Huen left Doctor Guptra to do her job, then headed for his own quarters, utterly exhausted. It was either that, or stims, and he felt that at this moment his subordinates had the crisis well in hand.

  Chapter 42

  First Sergeant Repeth had a spring in her step that had nothing to do with her cyberware or the low gravity of the base. Bravo Company stood in polished ranks in dress uniform – this time only because their new battalion commander would inspect them.

  Ever since Simms had been…what would she call it? Arrested? Captured? Identified? She settled on “removed.” Ever since Simms’ removal, she’d witnessed a dramatic improvement of the entire battalion, and Bravo Company in particular. Not perfection, but moving in the right direction. All was well with her world. The bizarre and surreal situation she had stepped into upon arrival had turned out to have a direct cause, and that cause had now been eliminated. Her faith in EarthFleet and the Marines had been restored.

  “Company…tench-hut!” she barked in that peculiar throaty seal-like yelp affected for Marine drill and ceremonies. NCOs and officers from other nations had different ways of doing things, but she’d brought as much USMC with her as she could.

  She turned the formation over to Captain Miller, the new Bravo Company CO. While no one on base, least of all Captain Rapplean, had yet turned out to be a hidden Blend, her candid secret report to Senior Steward Shan, and thereby Admiral Huen, had prompted a purge of those personnel deemed too tainted to rehabilitate. Perhaps they would be put to use somewhere else, or maybe their cyberware would be deactivated, even surgically removed, but that wasn’t her problem anymore.

  The front lines were no place for the unreliable.

  The short, chunky blonde captain received and returned Repeth’s salute with a precise flip and then about-faced to wait for the new commander, a man named Ruchek. He came highly rated, and it couldn’t hurt that the battalion would get a full colonel to take charge of it. Repeth had heard he was a no-nonsense, by-the-book officer of Hungarian extraction, minor nobility if one could believe the reports.

  No problem. That kind of officer I can deal with. For a while I thought the world had gone mad, with a commander holding love-ins with line Marines. It’s actually a relief to know he was an enemy Blend, subverting for a nefarious purpose. Otherwise I would have to believe my troops were disloyal, and I could never stand that. As she watched the new colonel inspect Repeth’s company – all right, Captain Miller’s company – she couldn’t keep a satisfied smile off her face.

  ***

  Repeth stood up with the rest of the people in the battalion conference room when Colonel Ruchek entered the room, still wondering why she was there, and why everyone was back in dress uniform. It reminded her unpleasantly of the ridiculous procedures of the former commander.

  Captain Miller and the other company commanders and first sergeants were in attendance, as well as Sergeant Major Tano. The new battalion XO, a rat-faced woman named Hennessy who despite the Eden Plague managed to support a visible crop of acne pimples on her face, rounded out the group of key Marine personnel on the base.

  Behind the principals at the table sat more than a dozen lieutenants, all of the platoon leaders that had not been summarily busted in the purge and the staff officers, and another dozen-plus platoon sergeants, and Staff Sergeant Botkina, the personnel NCO. In short, anyone who was anyone in the battalion was here.

  “Take your seats,” Ruchek said, then sat down, folding his lanky frame into the chair at the head of the table. His words susurrated with a middle-Asian accent, and his features reflected his Turkic and Kazakh bloodlines, mixed no doubt with the remnants of the Mongol peoples that had roamed the area almost a thousand years ago.

  “I have just come from Admiral Huen’s office aboard Artemis. I must tell you that he is extremely concerned right now about the state of this base. Fortunately he is less concerned about the state of this battalion, now that the possibility of enemy influence has been removed, as well as certain personnel who took advantage of past laxity.”

  Ruchek stood up again, as if his body contained too much energy to hold him in place, and he began to pace around the room. “The admiral asked me what role I saw this battalion playing in restoring and ensuring Grissom Base runs properly, and of course, I told him we would do whatever was asked of us. Marines get the job done, no matter what.”

  Soft grunts of agreement and oo-rahs echoed around the room.

  “Then he told me he wanted us to bolster an increased police presence here. Aerospace Security Police are already being transferred in, which is good, because they never held up their end before. Now they will have at least enough specialists to keep track of their own pilots and support personnel, which as you know comprise forty percent of the people here.”

  Reaching up, Ruchek idly ran a finger along the top of the EarthFleet heraldic shield mounted on the back wall, flicked off the accumulated dust with a curled lip, and then continued to slowly pace the room. “The admiral has also put the corporate security forces that are supposed to deal with the civilian contractors on notice that they had better tighten up their areas. So I asked him what he envisioned our role to be, and you know what he told me?” He had come to a stop directly behind Repeth, so she had to turn her chair and crane her neck to keep him in view.

  “Admiral Huen gave me two names. One was that of his Senior Steward, Shan. Big bastard, and not someone I’d want to tangle with from anywhere closer than a thousand meters.” This drew a bit of laughter.

/>   “The other name was that of our own First Sergeant Repeth.”

  Repeth’s eyes widened and her lips pressed shut, wondering just what this could mean. Was the admiral angry with her and Rick for slipping the video that exposed Simms anonymously into his system instead of going through normal channels? She’d heard Huen was a by-the-book type.

  “Please, First Sergeant, join me up front.” Colonel Ruchek marched over to stand next to the EarthFleet flag on its pole in the corner.

  Repeth quickly stood, wondering why it sometimes seemed easier to face an enemy with a gun than to be stared at by a room full of peers and superiors. She stood where he indicated, next to him, and came to attention.

  Am I going to be publicly humiliated? Is this the way Ruchek is going to shape battalion up? With a whip in an iron fist? Will I lose my rank or position?

  “Admiral Huen,” Ruchek went on, “identified First Sergeant Repeth as a highly competent EarthFleet Marine. What’s more, he pointed out that as a member of the United States Marine Corps, she was a highly decorated military police specialist, and served for a time as one of Admiral Absen’s stewards. All of this experience undoubtedly served her well in the recent difficulties. I suspect that is why Admiral Huen instructed me to appoint her to head up a special law enforcement task force that will coordinate among the various entities on Callisto, and will report directly to Senior Steward Shan, who of course reports to the admiral.”

  Ruchek paused and initiated a polite round of applause as Repeth reddened with pleasure. Not a censure after all, but an appointment. Then she realized that she could not possibly perform her First Sergeant duties at the same time, and her heart fell.

  “This will be a temporary appointment, the admiral told me, for no more than one year, and then she would come back to us. I in turn told him that it was not appropriate for a noncommissioned officer to hold such a position. So…”