by Rick Partlow
“What if we can’t make a connection?” Franks wanted to know. “There’s gotta’ be some time pressure on this, right?”
“Yes, there is,” Shannon confirmed. “Yuri still has at least a couple canisters of that nanovirus and it’s only a matter of time before he finds a place he wants to use it. Give it a day or two, but if you can’t get anything through passive observation…” She trailed off, shrugging.
“Right,” Franks nodded. “I’ll bring a chemical interrogation kit along.”
“Should I bring my team along for backup?” Manning asked.
Shannon considered it for a moment but then shook her head. “No, we don’t want to attract too much attention if we can help it. You four should be able to handle things.”
Franks glanced at Patel out of the corner of his eye and saw the young man breathing a bit quicker. Franks fought back a grin, wondering if he’d looked that green around the gills when he boarded the Bradley back during the Protectorate attack.
“There’s a shuttle leaving in three hours,” Shannon went on. “Draw your gear and be on it.”
“Well, it’s not Novoye Rodina,” Manning mused, punching Franks playfully on the shoulder, “but I guess it’ll have to do.”
* * *
Jason McKay circled carefully around his opponent, keeping a close eye on the man’s hips. Most amateurs watched their opponent’s eyes in a fight, but McKay had been taught by the best. You could fool someone with your eyes, but when you shifted your weight, you had to move your hips. And there it was…just a slight shift, a movement of weight from the left foot to the right, but it was like an advertising banner if you knew what to look for.
When the punch came, McKay was already moving, stepping to the side and ducking beneath it, then coming in with a right hook that caught the other man in the ribs below his left arm. The air went out of the man with an audible grunt and McKay followed through with a cross to the jaw that impacted with a solid finality. His opponent stumbled backwards and McKay lunged forward, grabbing the man at the hips and slamming him back to the floor, then mounting him at the waist and raising a fist to deliver a shot to the temple…
“Okay, okay,” Vinnie Mahoney wheezed, raising one hand above his face and tapping the other against the mat. “I’m tapping out, I’m tapping out.”
McKay let out a deep breath, then stripped off his padded helmet as he rose to his feet, offering Vinnie a hand up.
“Jesus, sir,” Vinnie said, shaking his head, “you’ve been doing some serious training, haven’t you?”
“I don’t get to train the troops or go on missions, Vinnie,” McKay said with a shrug as they both worked at the fastenings of their chest protectors. “I gotta’ stay in shape somehow.” He was trying to conceal a grin, though, and knew he was failing.
“Yeah,” Jock Gregory said from where he’d been watching at the edge of the mat, arms crossed over his workout shirt, voice full of skepticism. “I’m sure it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you and Colonel Stark both go through Tom’s refresher course every year and have your own personal unarmed combat instructor on staff,”
“Like I said, Jock,” McKay said, letting the grin break free, “a General’s gotta’ stay in shape somehow.”
“Well, so does a Sergeant Major,” the big Aussie complained, pulling on the chest protector that McKay had discarded. He waved around the gym, empty but for the three of them. “Which of you’s gonna’ fight me?”
“That’d be me, Jock-o,” came a voice from the open door. Jock looked around and saw Sgt.-Major Tom Crossman striding into the room, already wearing a chest protector but no helmet. “You think anyone else’d be stupid enough to go up against you?”
Tom Crossman had changed quite a bit from the cocky, undisciplined smartass McKay had been saddled with ten years ago, but he still had the same swagger, the same movie star’s face and the same shit-eating grin. He was also still a top-level unarmed combat fighter, perhaps the best McKay had ever encountered except for the late Nathan Tanaka.
“I can’t believe even the General was able to pry you away from your wife and kids, Tom,” Jock teased the other NCO.
That was just one of the ways that Tom had matured in the last ten years. Once a womanizer that rivaled even the legendary Jock Gregory, he had married a domestic servant who had worked at the governor’s mansion on Aphrodite during the Protectorate invasion of that colony world, and had been a devoted and faithful husband and father for the last eight years, most of them spent as the NCOIC of the Special Operations Training Course.
“You think I’d miss the biggest military operation in the history of the Republic?” Tom countered with a wide grin. He shrugged. “Rosalita understands. Jimmy and Mira…well, they know what daddy does for a living.”
“All right, then, family man,” Jock taunted, gesturing with both hands, “come on, put your helmet on and let’s throw down.”
“Oh, I won’t need a helmet,” Tom said, shooting Jock a challenging smirk as he stepped onto the mat. “You ready?”
McKay leaned back against the nearest wall as he watched the two men square off. They were, he thought not for the first time, the antithesis of each other: Jock was a mountain of muscle, although deceptively quick for all that; while Tom was lighter, thinner and much, much faster. Tom reminded McKay of a coiled spring.
McKay glanced over as Vinnie joined him at the wall. It was hard for McKay to think of Vinnie as a Colonel with nine years of experience in Special Ops; whenever he saw the man, he still pictured him as a the Marine NCO he’d been when he came into that briefing room on the MacArthur ten years ago.
Vinnie rubbed at his jaw ruefully. “I guess I should feel proud or something,” he said quietly, “that my boss is still enough of a badass that he can beat me up. But to be honest, I just feel sore.”
“Sorry, Vinnie,” McKay said, eyes still on the fight. Jock tried to move in on Tom, but the smaller man danced away again. “I should’ve pulled the punch a bit, but you’re pretty fast---I was afraid I’d miss.”
“Like you say, sir,” Vinnie said, shrugging, “you train like you fight and you fight like you train. The question is: why are you still training to fight? You’re a General, and I don’t recall the Snake going on one single field op once he got that office on Fleet HQ.”
McKay smiled a bit at the reference to Colonel Kenneth Mellanby, “the Snake,” the legendary creator of Fleet Intelligence. The man had recruited them all ten years before, when all anyone had known was that there was an unknown threat pirating cargo and colony ships. He’d had a vision of recreating the special operations forces that had been a part of the old national armies and had put McKay in charge of the first team.
There had been several apocryphal stories about Mellanby’s service as a Marine officer during the various insurrections that had predated the policy of exiling political malcontents to the star colonies, and the aura of danger that had surrounded the man had made a young Lt. Jason McKay nervous as hell around him.
Mellanby had died when the Protectorate had ignited a cargo hold full of fusion bombs next to Fleet HQ, sneaking them to the base on a hijacked freighter. Instead of commanding the new Special Operations Command, McKay had taken Mellanby’s chair, and it was still a constant source of consternation to him that there was now a generation of young officers who were just as disquieted meeting him as he’d been meeting Mellanby.
“The Snake didn’t have the Protectorate to worry about,” McKay reminded Vinnie as they both watched Tom take Jock down with a leg sweep. The big Australian slapped the ground as he landed on his side, distributing the impact to lessen it, and then rolled to his feet again before Tom could press his advantage.
“Until the Protectorate is no longer a threat,” McKay went on, “I’m not resting behind a desk.”
“What happens then?” Vinnie pressed, sounding curious. “What happens when the Protectorate isn’t a threat anymore?”
McKay closed his mout
h on the pat answer that he’d been about to give. Vinnie was an old friend: he deserved an honest response. He thought about it for a moment before speaking.
“After that, I gotta be honest, Vinnie; I’m thinking about hanging it up.”
Vinnie looked away from the fight for a moment, eyes going a bit wide. “Seriously?” he blurted. “I mean, sir?”
“I’ve been doing the same job going on ten years,” McKay explained. “Fighting the same enemy, fighting the same political battles over and over, facing the same short-sighted, short-term thinking.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I’m getting tired of having to live up to the legend…if I ever managed to. Anyway, I’m getting a vibe from Shannon that she’s burning out on it, too. I think she wants to try something closer to a normal life.”
On the mat, Jock went in low at Tom’s hips, trusting that his sheer strength would keep the smaller man from executing the counter of pushing him down to the floor. Instead, Tom planted a foot to the side and spun outward into a heel kick that caught Jock right between the shoulder blades and planted him flat on his chest with an explosion of expelled breath. Had it been a real fight instead of just training, the kick would have landed on Jock’s exposed neck, breaking it and killing him.
Instead of pressing the attack, Tom backed up and gave Jock time to scramble to his feet, gasping in a lungful of air.
“You getting tired, big man?” Tom taunted him, dancing slightly on the balls of his feet.
Jock grunted a barely articulate insult and took up a fighting stance, clearly forcing himself to not give into his anger.
“So, what would you do?” Vinnie asked McKay. The Intelligence chief shrugged.
“Go back to school, maybe,” he said. “Get an advanced degree in History or Sociopolitical Psych, maybe teach at the Academy.”
“Teach?” Vinnie snorted. “Sir, they’d make you Director of the Academy if you wanted it.”
“Maybe,” McKay admitted. “That wouldn’t be too bad.” He let his mind wander for a moment, picturing himself running the Republic Fleet Academy. “I could have some influence on the next generation of officers, make sure they learn the lessons from what’s happened these last ten years...”
Jock Gregory shot in on Tom Crossman once again, seemingly going for his legs, but then rose in an amazingly swift uppercut. With anyone else, anyone McKay had ever seen, the punch would have connected and taken their head off. But somehow, Tom felt it coming and leaned back, letting the blow skim by so close he had to have felt the kiss of the calluses on the back of Jock’s knuckles against the stubble on his chin.
Then Tom did one of the most amazing things McKay had ever seen: going with the flow of the backwards lean and snapping his right leg up like the crack of a whip with his right instep as the tip. Tom Crossman’s foot smashed into the side of Jock’s padded helmet, sending the bigger man flopping to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut.
“Holy shit,” Vinnie muttered, coming off the wall to step over to where Jock was stretched out.
McKay followed him and saw that the Aussie’s eyes were open but unfocussed, and a thin moan was issuing from his partially open mouth.
“Are you all right, Jock?” Vinnie asked, kneeling down next to his friend.
“Yeah,” Jock grunted hoarsely, eyes slowly sharpening to focus on Vinnie. “But who the fuck hit me?”
“Attention all crew and passengers,” the ship’s PA system announced, echoing through the gym. “The Farragut will be leaving Martian orbit in exactly one hour. The ship’s rotational drum will be secured thirty minutes from now. Please lock down all equipment and report to duty stations.”
“Oh well,” Tom sighed, peeling off his chest protector, “guess the fun’s over.”
“We were having fun?” Jock muttered, letting Vinnie help him up.
“Hit the showers, you two,” Vinnie told them. “And Jock, go see the medic before we hit the g-tanks and make sure you don’t have a concussion.”
“General McKay,” Jason McKay heard the voice of the ship’s communications officer in his ear bud. “Admiral Minishimi would like to see you in her quarters at your earliest convenience before we leave orbit.”
“I’ll be right there,” he replied, following the others out of the ship’s gym and into the curved corridors of the rotational drum.
McKay would rather have grabbed a shower and changed into his uniform before meeting with Joyce Minishimi, but she’d specified that she wanted to talk to him before the ship got under way, and that didn’t leave enough time. He pushed himself along in the zero gravity by way of straps set in the bulkheads, being careful not to collide with the dozens of crewmembers making their way to duty stations, racing the clock after spending a precious last few hours messaging loved ones or downloading the latest entertainment for the trip ahead.
The Flag Quarters were at the end of the officers’ section, sheltered in an alcove and well marked to make sure no hapless ensign blundered into them by mistake. McKay was about to palm the door plate to announce himself when the hatch slid aside.
“Come on in, Jason,” he heard Admiral Minishimi’s voice call to him.
Shoving off from the wall, he floated through the doorway and into the Flag Cabin, which was spacious only by comparison with the other living quarters. It was about the size of his apartment’s bedroom, and his apartment was on a space station. But Minishimi didn’t need much space. The only decorations to the room were a small display case with the medal for coming in third in the Hokkaido marathon three years ago and a holotank that displayed a series of videos on a loop. McKay glanced at the videos as he entered and saw one of Minishimi and her husband at their wedding ceremony, another of them running together in some race, and one of an older couple he took to be her parents.
Admiral Joyce Minishimi was strapped into the chair behind her desk, looking a bit harried as she reviewed a series of reports on the desk’s video display. She was a tiny woman, slender with short, dark hair and the features of a china doll, and she looked a bit like a schoolgirl playing dress-up in the white-piped blues of her Fleet uniform; but McKay knew she was much tougher than her exterior let on. Four years ago, she’d been stabbed in the chest by her traitorous First Officer during the long voyage back from a remote outpost; she’d pulled the knife out of her lung and killed the man with it. Then, just days later, she’d captained not one but two different cruisers during an extended space battle, having to abandon ship at the very last possible second from one of them, sharing a lifepod with the body of a dead technician.
“Hey Joyce,” he said, nodding to her as he stopped himself against the edge of her desk. Though the structure was different in Intelligence, they were of equivalent ranks…and she was an old friend. “Everything running smooth?”
“Is it ever?” she shot back. She eyed his sweat-stained gym clothes. “You do know that just about everyone on the ship was watching you and your boys spar in the gym, right?”
He shrugged. Five or six years ago, he would have been annoyed by the attention. By now, he was used to it. “Sorry I didn’t have time to change, but you said you wanted me here ASAP, so…”
She laughed softly, shaking her head. “Jason, you’re the commander of this operation, you don’t have to apologize to me or anyone else.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. That was something he’d never get used to. “So, what’s up?”
“I wanted to go over the lading with you real quick,” she said, pulling up a holographic diagram that she shifted into the projection above her desk.
McKay drew himself closer to it and saw the depiction of the armada gathered in Martian orbit. At its center was the massive, angular wedge of the new cruiser, the RFS Farragut, Admiral Minishimi’s flagship; by her side was the much older monolithic bulk of the Bradley, the sole survivor of the three cruisers that had faced down the Protectorate invasion four years ago. Arrayed around them like pilot fish around a great white shark were the smaller delta
shapes of a dozen Patrol cutters. The cutters couldn’t carry enough antimatter to keep up with the cruisers in a journey through realspace using the Eysselink stardrives, but this trip would be through the jumpgates.
McKay was still amazed that President Jameson was allowing him to take that much projected space power---a fifth of the Fleet’s cruisers and a full quarter of the available Patrol cutters---on a mission so far from home. Hell, he was amazed that Jameson trusted it to him at all.
“We managed to fit in the four squadrons of assault shuttles by offloading all our conventional landers,” Minishimi was explaining, “and spreading some of the fourth out among the cutters. Likewise, the company of Marines, though that meant stuffing them on some of the cutters. They’ll be living shoulder to shoulder there for the duration, I’m afraid.”
“I’d rather have uncomfortable Marines than no Marines,” McKay commented dryly.
“Well, you’ve got ‘em,” Minishimi noted, cocking an eyebrow. “The carbon dioxide scrubbers are going to be working overtime. Your special ops teams are all together here on the Farragut, as you instructed.”
“So, what’s the hang-up then?” he wondered.
Minishimi scowled at him. “I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.”
“Shit,” he muttered. “Kage, right?”
“Bingo, the man wins a prize.”
McKay rubbed a hand over his eyes. This had been the condition of getting this mission approved: he’d been forced to take along a company of Kage’s Colonial Guard troops. It wasn’t the quality of the troops he objected to…not anymore, anyway. General Kage had molded the Guard into a well-trained, effective fighting force in the last few years.
No, what he objected to was the fact that Kage had been sent along to “keep him in line.” It wasn’t something anyone had said out loud…but they didn’t need to.