Of Bravery and Bluster

by Scott Kelemen

  But it gave the Agent his answer. “How many operatives do we have on the grounds?”

  “Six, Sir.”

  “Coordinate an approach on the hangar. He doesn’t need to survive, but they can’t be seen by the authorities. If they need to let him get inside before they take him down, so be it. We cannot sacrifice our covert status for any reason.”

  “Second and third access at the hangar control panel unsuccessful. He still hasn’t cracked the code.”

  The Agent’s mouth came together in a firm line, controlling any show of tension. Sanders had shown exactly how proficient he was at penetrating security. “If he doesn’t have access yet, it won’t be long. How long until our teams are on him?”

  “Less than a minute, Sir.”

  “Get the drone overhead. If he bolts, I want tracking on him immediately.”

  “Fourth and fifth hack attempt on the door unsuccessful!”

  Sloppy, the Agent thought. Maybe Sanders wasn’t as good when he was caught unprepared. He hadn’t expected to be on the run when the morning started.

  “Team Bravo is holding at the nearest building corner.”

  “Alpha now at final turn before visual range, ready to take.”

  The Agent said, “He’s dangerous. Wait for one more.”

  “Delta is in position!”

  The Agent nodded. “Take him down.”

  Orders were passed over the radios, and a flurry of conversations were held by his assistants as they tracked the operation. Then, a panicked assistant chirped at him, “We were wrong! It’s not him! Delta reports an automated code jacker was in place, hammering away at the entry panel. It’s a raw machine with basic code. It isn’t meant to get through, just make it look like it was trying.”

  The Agent sank back into his chair, stunned. Sanders wasn’t going to the shuttle! Killing Ryan…just a diversion? ‘He was buying time. Buying enough time to lose himself on the grounds.’

  The Agent found it hard to believe anyone outside of the TSU could have been that cold-blooded. It was precisely what he would have done. Sanders had been right not to trust TSU technology. He could have detonated the fail-safe device inside long before they could have isolated it. They would have died in orbit.

  ‘Remember what you tell your teams. Don’t get lost in the past. Work the future problem.’ Aloud, he said, “Alright, everyone. We can’t let up the pressure. We aren’t going to find him using random scans. Start thinking about how he’s going to get off-planet. Look at shuttle bookings on private and public flights heading for the moons. Look for loading shuttles heading up to transports in loading orbits. Anything he could use to get off planet and onto a ship capable of jumping to Proxima.”

  We know where he is headed. Now, we just need to make sure he doesn’t interfere. He turned to his nearest assistant. “Find the contact information for Lieutenant Cravette.”

  “Sir? She is fairly incompetent.”

  The Agent understood what she meant, but corrected her, “She is quite competent as a staff officer. She is simply not very subtle.”

  “Most people you activate need to be subtle, don’t they Sir?”

  “In this case, it is more important that she be friendly and obedient.” The Agent added, “But she will not be brought into our circle. Bounce the transmission off the FTL array. Make it look like a message coming from back home.”

  “Anything else, Sir?”

  “Make arrangements for Cravette to be sent as a handler with the graduating class. There are always four junior officers sent to handle details so that the cadets can enjoy their own ceremony and get them to Proxima.”

  “Those four would have been selected some time ago. They leave in two days.”

  “Then one of them will get sick. Make sure of it.”

  “Yes, Sir. Of course, there is a very low survivability for anyone arriving at Proxima, based on your intended sacrifice of the class.”

  The Agent nodded. “Another good reason to use her and not another more valuable asset. Is the FTL array ready to receive my message?”

  “Standing by to record.”

  ***

  Louisa Cravette tried to recover from her surprise as the lead planner for the upcoming graduation ceremony finished welcoming her to the team. “I’m taking Wendy Allcon’s place? What happened to her?”

  Commander Darrack showed a little sympathy. “Took to bed with a violent flu. Came on quite suddenly. The medical staff will flush her system, but they aren’t confident she’ll be ready for space before we break orbit.”

  Realizing there was no real harm to anyone, Louisa unleashed her brilliant smile. She had never been called any better than handsome, but her sincere cheer never failed to disarm. “Well, guess I am grateful to be aboard! Thank you, Sir!”

  Darrack gave her a nod of approval. “Glad to have you with us. Remember, I’ll have the lead up to the graduation. After that, Lieutenant Forster will be the senior handler, and you’ll report to him. Our newly minted midshipmen will be in high spirits, but you need to ensure they begin their midshipmen study packages, keep up their physical fitness routines, and generally don’t irritate the transport’s crew. Drop them off and then come right back home. Easy. Nothing to it.”

  Louisa liked the sound of that. She had never been good at handling stress, a good reason she was most likely permanently frozen in her current rank. Pure seniority and a kind word from her supervisors might one day push her up to Lieutenant-Commander, but that would be years down the road. Until then, she was content to wallow in desk jobs and the occasional small adventure like this. She chimed, “Looking forward to it!”

  Darrack returned a kind smile, then severed the connection.

  Louisa edged back from her desk, her mind already spinning. She had to pack! Oh, and pass through the nearest campus hospital. Hyperspace sickness affected her twice as badly as anyone else she had ever met. Yet another reason she’d let a real career in space pass her by.

  But she loved watching new cadets graduating! They were always happy to the point of delirium, and their anecdotes about their Academy time were hilarious. She had attended seven graduations during her time inside the Gate, but had never had the chance to go all the way to Proxima to hand them off to their new ships as midshipmen. ‘How exciting!’

  She had just planted her palms on her desk to get up and head home when her computer chirped at her insistently. She saw the symbol in the corner of the screen. An FTL message? She had just read one from her mother two days ago. She was the only one who cared enough to send long-distance messages from home, gathering up all the family news in one big download. But she wasn’t wealthy enough to send two in so short a time. Not unless something was very right, or very wrong.

  She opened her message queue, and was further surprised that the originator wasn’t even listed. What was going on? She clicked it open, waiting while the video file decrypted and resolved itself into a washed out face she couldn’t even recognize as a human.

  “A14 F42 H77 M39, you are being activated.”

  Louisa paled to bone white. She crumpled back into her chair. This had to be a joke.

  The message didn’t give her any reason to laugh. “Your placement with the graduating class is no accident. You are needed on Proxima to protect our interests. Your task is two-fold. First, you must establish a friendly rapport with Cadet Johanna Summer. There is no requirement for you to become intimate friends, but she must be ready to trust you and report if she has noticed anything out of place. Second, on arrival, you will not return with the shuttle. We are aware of your predisposition toward space sickness. Play on this to remain and recover prior to returning on the next available transport.”

  Louisa’s puzzlement grew. ‘What? Why?’ But she had no chance to ask, no ability to protest!

  The message pushed on, unrelenting. “A weapon will be left for you on the transport. We will get it past any security blocks. We have intelligence that indicates a man named Glen Sanders may in
terfere with the graduation process. He has a personal vendetta against Cadet Johanna Summer, and may interfere with the class to see her fail. We are not concerned with Cadet Summer, specifically. We are concerned with the orderly process of the class graduating, arriving on Proxima and distributing to their ships. Any effort to halt that process must be stopped. If you must kill Sanders to prevent him from interfering, you will do so.”

  ‘Kill him?’ Louisa thought. She began to sweat and fanned her face with her hands. She couldn’t bring herself to swat a fly! How could she gun down a trained rogue agent like this Sanders person? ‘And why does that name sound so familiar? Didn’t I read it in a report somewhere?’

  The message ended with an ominous promise, “It is imperative you remain in Summer’s vicinity until she is safely aboard her new ship. Security on a Navy ship will prevent Sanders from further action. Until then, she and her class are vulnerable. A folio on Sanders will be transmitted to your personal data device. Keep it confidential. Any mention of it to the authorities may result in the ceremonies being cancelled, and this must not happen. Any deviation will be considered non-compliance. Should Sanders complete his mission, you will be considered personally at fault. Action will be taken accordingly.” A set of plain text appeared, declaring ‘End of Brief.’

  Louisa waited. Nothing else appeared. “What, that’s it? That can’t be it!” Her heart raced faster, and she felt that panic she always hated in herself rising. They couldn’t be serious! How could they blame her?

  But they would, and they didn’t need to make any specific threats. This was the TSU. It had to be. Only they would have known her citizen number. Louisa had never cared about Trinity. She had left as soon as she could, before she was even old enough to join the Navy. She had joined on Rym after earning her citizenship there by working asteroid mines for a couple years. She was less Trinitian than many visitors who stayed on the First Point of Trinity for a couple years! But outsider as she was, she still knew what they would do to her family if she failed.

  Her datapad pinged softly to announce a new download. Her hands were shaking so badly she nearly dropped it as she tried to pick it off its charging stand. Trying to open the file was nearly impossible. Struggling to see through the tears, she got her first look at Glen Sanders.

  ‘Please, for the love of all that is good, I hope I never see you again. Just stay away. Please, just stay away and don’t try anything!’

  Chapter 22

  Johanna Summer took her last steps as a cadet of the Alliance Navy.

  She had shed her grey-on-grey uniform back in the previous chamber. Even her white underclothes had been those issued to her by the Academy. Today, she had to leave all of it behind. She would never wear the colors of the Academy again. Whatever happened next, that was the past.

  Her gymnast body was all she took with her into the outer airlock. Behind her, the doors shut, sealing off any retreat into that phase of her life. There was intimidation in standing completely exposed with only a single airlock door between her and the endless vacuum of space. Then again, Johanna had never been one for illogical fear.

  Instead, she found herself appreciating the poetry of the moment. For four years, she had been tempted with stories of flying between stars to serve an ideal of human cooperation. To the protection of humankind in their new home far from their old. This was the doorway to those experiences which had been promised to her.

  With practiced hands, she donned the exposure suit with her name hanging above it. They were walking out in the order of their student ranks. Her academic grades would have placed her first, but there were other metrics like peer voting and charitable service that others had taken more to heart. Even so, she had only missed the mark by a half-dozen. As such, dozens of other suits surrounded her, waiting for the cadets who would walk into the darkness behind her.

  With meticulous care, she stepped into the form-fitting underlayer followed by the thicker insulation suit above. The mag boots followed. A helmet, next. She let her eyes track the data displayed in her HUD as the readouts flooded her face with a soft blue radiance and displayed life-support systems and communication channels. She backed herself into a small thruster pack, and the HUD added a new column as her suit interfaced and ran confirmation checks on the additional equipment.

  Everything checked green, but she ran her own standard verification protocol. One only put so much trust in automatics when it came to space walking, much less what she was about to experience. This was not just a ceremony. This might be a straight-forward task she had done hundreds of times in training, but she was marking herself as a competent spacer.

  Ready for the fleet.

  Stepping to the portal, she keyed in the code to cycle open the airlock. The atmosphere was exhausted in a briefing venting rush. Then, the green indicators shifted to red and the durasteel doors parted to reveal the expanse of stars stretching out into infinity. Another step, and Johanna stood at the edge. The hull of the transport opened to either side of her. If she stared straight ahead, all she could see was those stars.

  Far off, in the distance, a single metal ring hung in the depths of space.

  The Gate.

  Fixing the target in her HUD, she bent her knees and launched herself from the transport without preamble. Her arms extended in an imitation of a swan dive into water, stabilizing her rotation as she pushed off.

  The distance was not great by interstellar standards. Not even by intra-system planetary standards. Indeed, the distance was not even far by planetary standards. A mere fifty kilometers, which would be the equivalent of insanity by the rules of combat in space. But drifting even fifty kilometers would take time. Most of her classmates would undoubtedly accelerate using their thrusters, using minute corrections to ensure they cut through the heart of that ring on a rapid, powered flight.

  Johanna did neither. Her eyes closed, and she embraced the sensation of weightlessness. Bathing in the freedom beyond the gravity fields that always felt too heavy to be right, she just breathed. Her eyes came open again, and they locked on the Gate. She picked a single star shining particularly bright through the miniscule point of blackness that was the ring’s center. That star became her beacon, her whole world as she flew through the blackness like a phoenix reaching for that star to set herself aflame.

  One by one, others of her class passed by her. Their glowing thrust lit up the night as they soared far enough ahead that they became scattered flecks in the distance. As each reached the Gate, Johanna’s star was obscured as a vivid green glow flashed within the ring. It wasn’t symbolic. Without a graduation token carried with each of them, the Gate would flash red, and anything passing through would be ripped apart by a laser grid. It was a potent statement, that only those who sacrificed their lives to the Academy, learned its lessons, and survived to be acknowledged as graduates dared to pass through. Pretenders were forbidden in the deadliest of ways.

  There would be no pretenders among them, this time. Today, it was all about tradition. Johanna smiled serenely as she drifted closer, uncaring about the time. Her trip would take over a dozen hours. She immersed herself in the meditative quality as time washed over her. For the first time in her entire life, there were no expectations. She had been explicitly told that they could take as little or as much time as they wanted. This was their experience, for them to make special in whatever way they wanted.

  Most burned through as quickly as they could. A harrowing flight as they rushed toward the new uniforms waiting for them in the airlock of the second transport hanging fifty more kilometers beyond the Gate. Dianne had gone first, and she had screamed through the Gate with ever mounting velocity, flipping to burn through an equally hard deceleration and touch down with an aggressive sort of grace at the far end. No one had overtaken her.

  As Johanna drifted, she saw the names of the other cadets on her HUD. Sam whipped by at a full burn, spiraling in a thrilling weave with Makaio as they played a game of interstellar tag. Garam roar
ed by, having calculated a close pass on her while not endangering them both. He waved from a distance, then kicked up his thrust and punched through the ring. By the time Johanna reached the Gate, her entire class had already passed through and were well on their way to the transport waiting beyond.

  At this range, what had been a coin-sized circlet of metal in the far distance had grown to immense proportions. The open space in the middle had a diameter of two kilometers, while the ring and its internal systems added another half kilometer of thickness. From their initial range, that meant Johanna had been aiming at a target only a couple of degrees across. Her initial jump had been an attempt to thread a needle on a massive scale.

  She passed through within a few meters of dead-center. The feat would be considered exceptional by nearly every standard imaginable. She knew her friends well enough to know they would probably be watching her on a viewscreen inside the transport and would be cheering madly. As likely as not, Makaio would have a bet riding on her success.

  Johanna simply projected the next result. She was at the halfway point. The green glow of the Gate swelled around her with such power that she tasted green splashing along her taste-buds. Her focus was fully on the next speck beyond, mathematical calculations spinning through her head. 975 meters from one side and 1025 from the other, if her estimate was correct. Over the fifty kilometers she had travelled, that sounded impressive enough that she had only been off by 25 meters. But it also meant her vector was off, and she would drift another equal measure before she intercepted the transport. It would not be enough to miss the ship altogether, but she would not touch down at the twin airlock to the one she had launched from.

  In her mind’s eye, her friends each advised her on a different course of action. Johanna amused herself with how she seemed to have surrounded herself with personalities that would each react differently to any given moment.