The Belt Loop_Book 3_End of an Empire

by Robert B. Jones

  His gun hand wavered. “Tell me,” he said.

  Coni Berger shook off her jacket completely and laid out her elaborate plan. It only took her twenty minutes to convince him.

  Chapter 20

  The jarring ring brought Max Hansen out of a deep sleep instantly. It took her a few bewildering seconds to realize where she was and what was making that incessant noise. The flashing light on the comm stack in her room quickly put all the pieces together for her.

  “Hello?” she said with anticipation. “Lieutenant Hansen here.”

  “Mom. It’s Har. Ken just gave me the message that you’re back.”

  She caught her breath. “Hi, honey. How are you?” she dragged the word “are” out into a literal freight train of syllables.

  “I’m actually doing okay,” he said in a voice mature beyond his years.

  “I am so glad to hear your voice, Har. Listen, baby, I’m going to be up at the War College for a couple of days and Captain Haad is trying to arrange it so we have at least an overnight stay together. Won’t that be great?”

  Har paused and she used the moment of silence as an opportunity to rub the sleep out of her eyes. She wondered what time it was and when she opened her eyes again she focused on the digital readout on the comm screen.

  “Sure, Mother, that would be great,” he said. Something in his voice gave her pause.

  “Well, you could sound a little happier about it.”

  “Mother, don’t call me ‘baby’ anymore. I’m not a toddler.”

  Geez, she thought, where was all of this coming from? The last time she’d spent any time with her son he had been crying on her lap. Had the aliens kidnapped him and substituted a young adult in his place?

  “Okay, that’s fine with me,” she said, “it was just a little term of endearment.”

  “I know, Mother, but you have to realize that I’m growing up. That’s what you wanted me to do, right?”

  She remembered. Only it was Har that had suggested that he should grow up and accept his life for what it was. Max didn’t expect the transition to happen so suddenly. He was correct, though, and she should start rethinking her motherly attitude toward him. “Of course, son, I can see your point. Just don’t expect me to give up loving you just because you have suddenly found your manhood. I will always be your mother and you will always — in my heart — be my baby. Even if I live to be one hundred years old.” A filmy tear worked its way across her left eye and she knew if she didn’t change the subject quickly she would start leaking.

  “And, I will forever be your son. Just bigger, older,” he said matter-of-factly.

  She sniffed back her emotions and squared up her shoulders. “So, Har, what’s your schedule look like for the day after tomorrow? I have to be present for a ceremony on Friday and after it’s done I would like to meet you so we can catch up on what’s been happening. Ken tells me you’re doing really well in your studies and your extra work in the gymnasium. He’s very proud of your progress, Har.”

  He brightened a bit. “Aw, you’re just making that stuff up. Mother, you don’t have to try to schmooze Ken into the happenings, I already like him. We get along fine and he’s taught me a lot of useful things.”

  “No, honestly, honey, he actually said that. I’m so glad you found someone up there you can relate to. I think he’s a fine man,” she gushed, “and, he’s kind, too.” She was trying to process the change Har had wrought upon her, shifting her from Mom to Mother. Something else new, she mused.

  “So, I can suppose Ken will be joining us this weekend?”

  “Only if you don’t mind, Harold. I think it would be kind of nice. Maybe we could go on an outing.”

  “Sure, that’ll be okay. It’ll give you something to do instead of fawning over me. Can we bring my friend Cory?”

  In his several recordings Har had told her about his roommate Cory Chase and how they were becoming fast friends. She thought for a moment and agreed. He told her she would have to sign him out and be responsible for him as well.

  “Won’t that be a prideful moment, being escorted around by two of Hayes’ finest. Sure, we’ll make a day of it, it’ll be a lot of fun.”

  “When will you know for sure, Mother? I’ll have to put in a leave request and all.”

  “Barring anything unforeseen, let’s plan for me picking you up around 1700 hours on Friday. That okay?”

  “You won’t have to come get me. I already have an invitation to the ceremony. I have to wear my dress uniform and everything. If you sign Cory out as well, we’ll already be there when you arrive. Ken can take us over straight from here.”

  This was unexpected news. She wondered how Harold’s invitation to the promotion ceremony had already been arranged. Captain Haad at work, she thought, the soft old salt water taffy hard-ass that he was. Then she remembered he had mentioned something about Harold getting some kind of award.

  They finalized their weekend plans and she promised to leave a message for him through Ken Royal if everything was going to go off as planned. She offered him a respectful adult goodbye and broke the connection. Wow, she thought, my baby — no, my manchild — is growing up in a hurry. She would have to see him face-to-face to determine if she liked it or not.

  * * *

  Gertz had her back turned to the bed. She was studying the gas chromatograph scans from the analysis of the Varson’s blood and had her head down close to the screen trying to make sense of the numbers and the spikes on the graph. The percentages of calcium, phosphorous, potassium, sulfur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium and the rest of the trace elements looked amazingly human. Along with the cobalt, copper, zinc, selenium, fluorine and calcium she found small amounts of silicon, zirconium, nickel and osmium. At last she had a live specimen that she could monitor and find out which of these ingredients combined for his natural anesthesia.

  The dead specimens she had examined over ten years ago were for the most part carmelized slabs of cooked meat and provided no viable tissue to examine and no flowing blood to analyze. DNA and dissection was about all she’d been able to do. Still, she had examined enough Varson cadavers to become an expert on their phylum and after careful consideration of the data she was now pouring over, she realized she would have to update some of her work.

  Her careful study and position at the biometric console prevented her from seeing the subject on the bed move his arm.

  Gifted with excellent peripheral vision, the slight movement of the sheets behind her made her instinctively turn toward the bed.

  Nothing.

  Gertz glanced at the monitors above her head. Still reading about the same as before.

  She looked back at the bed. Something was moving the sheets!

  Once she abandoned her chair and moved to the bedside she saw what was moving the coverlets. The patient was moving a couple of his fingers beneath the sheets. Slight and subtle but movement nonetheless. She produced her Brinkman light and flicked it on. His eyes were still closed so she gingerly raised one lid with her gloved hand and shined the light into the steel gray eye. The pupil was still dilated and fixed. He was still under. Could his hand movement just be his nerves firing off random commands from his idling brain? She leaned in for a better look at the back of his eyeball when his other eye opened suddenly.

  Expert exobiologist or not, the movement of the other eyelid caused her to jump back a step. “Whoa,” she said calmly even though her heart rate doubled in a second or two. “You’re awake.”

  Like a wooden string puppet suddenly activated from the control sticks above, his arms started to gyrate in herky-jerky movements made even more peculiar to her by the disproportionate lengths of the upper and lower segments.

  “Take out the drug feed, take. . .”

  Gertz was startled by the firmness of his voice. His words were spoken in clear Elberese and she understood him perfectly. She made no attempt to comply with his wishes until she could get his arms in restraints. Niki Mols might have trusted this Va
rson spy but for Gertz the jury was still out.

  “Relax and lay back and I’ll adjust your IV drip,” she said.

  “Take it out. Please. I do not need it. I am recovered now.”

  She had been right! The injured Varson had put himself in some kind of self-induced coma. “Only if you let me strap your arms down. For your own self-protection.”

  He looked down at his hands and the leather straps on the side railing of the bed. “I am regaining control of my muscles. I will not need the restraints to keep myself from doing damage to my limbs,” Inskaap said.

  Gertz took another step back. “No, colonel, it’s to prevent you from being shot. You let me restrain you then I pull out the IV line. If that’s not acceptable to you, I will shoot you right on the bed. I don’t know anything about you except you are at war with the Colonial Navy.” It was then he noticed she was wearing a formidable looking sidearm.

  He stopped moving and breathed deeply. “Agreed. Do it quickly, as I might not be able to counteract the drugs for much longer.”

  “That’s better,” she said, moving closer. “Once the drip is out, perhaps you can tell me who you are and how you managed to get on my table.”

  He nodded his head in the universal motion of acceptance. “Hurry,” he croaked out.

  Gertz strapped his thin muscular arms down to the bed and once satisfied he showed no signs of defiance, she removed the IV line from the back of his hand. She swabbed the area with alcohol and applied a bandage.

  “Thank you, doctor. What is your name?” he said, flexing his hand.

  “I am Lieutenant Commander Gertz. You are in the Weyring Navy Base Hospital. They found you in the rubble over at the blockhouse where you were being held. You with me so far?”

  “Yes. I remember. There was an awful crash and the walls started to crumble. Was there an attack on the base?”

  “Attack? No. A shuttle lost control and crashed into the building. A shuttle from Canno.”

  At the mention of Canno, Inskaap showed no emotion, showed little interest. “Were there many casualties? All I can recall is something crashing down on my head and knocking me unconscious.”

  “Let’s just say there were a few. You’re one of the lucky ones.”

  “Lieutenant Mols. What about her? She had just left my cell when the walls started to cave in. Was she injured?”

  Okay, it made sense to her now. This was the turncoat Varson spy Mols had sequestered over in the guardhouse. Even though it was supposed to be a well-guarded secret, Gertz had heard of it by way of the base rumor mill. If Mols had a real-live Varson captive, she should have at least let me examine him, Gertz thought. No matter. He had been on her slab for hours and she had all of the information she needed to update her work on the Varson species.

  “Lieutenant Mols made it out okay. She was on the stairwell when it collapsed and she broke her arm. Nothing too serious.”

  “Can you elevate my bed? Raise my head? I need a gravitational assist to help drain off the drugs you put in my system.”

  She pushed the control knob on the side of his bed and raised the head almost thirty centimeters. That seemed to satisfy him and he thanked her.

  “I see by your chart you are a colonel in the Malguurian Defense Forces. Zuure Inskaap. Did I pronounce that right?”

  “Close enough, doctor. There is a slight pause between what you call the vowels in these words. Lieutenant Mols told me she was instrumental in ‘romanizing’ our language, something she did during the last war.”

  “That is true, colonel. I must say your Elberese is very good. Did you just learn that since you’ve been here?”

  “Praise the Deliverer! I wish I were that intelligent. I have studied the language of the humans for almost six of your years. Recorded transmissions saved from the first war. I had some help from, well, let’s just call them prisoners. I interrogated some of the captives and my language skills improved with usage.”

  Hmmm. Must have heard a lot of protests and yells. From the reports she’d been privy to, the Varson — Malguurian — detention centers were nothing more than torture chambers. The nasty rumor going around for years involved humans being kept just barely alive so Varson surgeons could preform live operations on them without the benefit of anesthetics. Now an entire ship, the one with the trade delegation aboard was in Varson hands. She shuddered when she thought of the pain and suffering these creatures would inflict on the human captives. But, the debate was a raging one: which species was the most barbaric. Humans had a long history of conquest and assimilation and lesser races were killed off in the billions before the Great World Integration back in 2510. Not much was known about the darker side of the Varson. They were regarded as vicious in battle, insanely loyal to their race in defeat, religiously inspired in their quests and utterly fearless in hand-to-hand combat. Humans shared similar characteristics and they augmented that supply of militarism by being able to literally wipe out any indigenous population that decided to engage them in warfare. Three Varson worlds were destroyed during the last war and had it not been for a quick surrender by the governing body, Gertz was certain there would have been more. Once loaded for bear, the human race was not easily persuaded to put the safety back on its destructive trigger.

  “Did I say something to offend you, Lieutenant Commander Gertz? Your silence is unnerving.”

  She shook her thoughts away and responded finally. “No. Just lost in my own head for a minute thinking about the first war with the Varson. I was heavily invested in that conflict even though I never personally fired a shot. I’m one of the few exobiologists in the Colonial Navy. My job is to study alien life. Up until four months ago, the Varson race was the first non-human sentient species we have run into out here.”

  “I see. I understand the word exobiologist. We have something similar on Canuure — my home planet. Our exobiologists are often called firing squads. The new leader does not like prisoners and would prefer death over detention.”

  Inskaap went on to explain his perspective on Bale Phatie and his maniacal revenge campaign. They also discussed why and how he came to be here on Bayliss in the custody of Lieutenant Mols. When the word “defector” surfaced from his sea of explanation and bobbed on top of murderous Malguurian waves, she held out a hand.

  “So, how many people did you have to kill to get here, Colonel Inskaap? Are you sure you need to be telling me all of this? You realize this is being recorded by Mols, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I suspected. But, Gertz, I have nothing to hide. I have shared this story with your Lieutenant Mols. She knows of my sincerity.”

  Milli Gertz just stared at him. This was the same Varson spy that had corrupted Coni Berger, had kidnapped Davi Yorn and indirectly caused the murder of Lieutenant Commander Gena Haslip and scores more back on Elber Prime. Now he wanted to be on the other side of his treachery. She didn’t want to buy it.

  The rumor mill instant-communication service had also spoken of planet-wide destruction on Canno. How was she going to get beyond that? She shrugged and turned away from the bed. If it was up to her she would replace the IV drip in his arm and feed him undiluted potassium cyanide and see if his system could metabolize that.

  Chapter 21

  Piru Torgud Bale Phatie stalked the bridge of the Decimator like a caged animal looking for its next meal. The two-week journey to Wilkes was at the halfway point and so far he had only executed seven of the Decimator’s crew. His aide, Lieutenant Manciir, was kept busy erasing the names of the fallen from the ship’s official log and he had made sure to go below to the mainframe and delete the malcontents from the stored archival documents as well. Phatie had sensed a plot against his mission to Wilkes. An overheard scrap of conversation between two officers belowdecks had started the purge and after two lieutenant commanders, four lieutenants and one ensign had been dispatched to the Deliverer via ceremonial sword, he considered the matter concluded. Now he was still on the prowl.

  “Admiral Regiid,” Phat
ie growled, “activate the main screen.”

  The admiral passed down the order and the forward blister went active. Usually during trips through folded space the observation cameras were deactivated. The counterintuitive optics played havoc on most observers but Phatie found it an interesting way to pass the time.

  The forward blister sputtered to life and Phatie moved forward for a better look. On the screen the stars were plentiful and bright but as they flowed past the ship they seemed to expand to infinite radii and dissolve into individual fountains of spectral luminescence. The stars above the plane of travel moved upward at right angles to the bow of the ship and the ones below their keel seemed to stretch into infinitely long elastic shapes that snapped away almost as quickly as one focused on them. When Phatie had the comm center switch to the aft cameras the opposite visual effect could be seen: stars falling down to their plane of travel, blobs of light coalescing from a murky udder-like expanse above and long star trails beneath the ship that would suddenly snap into oblate spheroids and disappear in her Dyson Drive’s wake. The dizzying slit-scan images on the blister perturbed many on the bridge but Bale Phatie watched the screen for hours at a time. Regiid could not help but wonder what Phatie found so fascinating about the fold images.

  “Admiral Regiid, announce a ship-wide inspection to be conducted by myself in this cycle. All departments, all sub-commands should be ready. All shifts, all personnel are to stand ready.”

  The admiral acknowledged the order and broadcast the impending inspection tour to the general population. If it were not for the meters and meters of intervening bulkheads between the lower decks and the bridge, Phatie would have been able to hear the raucous groans and complaints.

  “Lieutenant Manciir, you’re with me. Let us retire to my ready room and have our meals,” Phatie snapped, then pointed to his coterie of personal bodyguards. “You men are dismissed until 0630 hours. Assemble on my quarters at that time and be prepared to accompany me on the inspection tour. And,” he said, pointing to one guard in particular, “Sergeant Poourde, if you show up in my presence again with your uniform not in pristine condition you will be buried in it. The blood splatters from your severed neck could not make your appearance any worse.”