Melissa nodded sorrowfully. “Then he must have blankets or something here to keep him warm. Can you go and find them while I try to get him to talk?”
Shawn nodded, and then lifted Garcia’s head from his knee before standing up. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Once Shawn had hurried from her side, she turned her full attention to the young man. “Mr. Garcia?” she asked, barely above a whisper. She repeated it three more times, each one increasing in volume until the young man finally responded.
“Y…yes?”
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” she smiled. “Mr. Garcia, my name is—”
“Th…the shhh…the ship…” His words were labored, as if he were trying to speak from a mile away.
“Try to relax, Mr. Garcia. You’re going to be all right.”
“The shh…the ship. In…da…danger.”
She looked around the compartment, relieved that the groaning and creaking noises had temporality subsided. “I think we’re out of danger for now, Mister Garcia.”
“Lieu…lieutenant…”
“Lieutenant Garcia?”
He nodded his head slowly.
“That’s your rank?”
He nodded again, this time with more force.
Not wanting to confuse him, she decided to stick to her military-assigned rank for the time being. “Lieutenant, my name is Lieutenant Commander Melissa Graves. We’re from the USCS Rhea. We’ve come to render—”
“The…the Rhea?”
“Yes, we’re here to help you.”
“The Rhea…she’s…sss a good ship.”
Melissa smiled, knowing from experience that holding a conversation such as this—with someone who had obviously experienced as much trauma as the lieutenant had—was a very good sign that his mental faculties were still in order.
“How…how many more?”
“How many what, Lieutenant?”
“Sur…surv…”
“Survivors?”
He erupted in a short spasm of nods.
“Honestly, Lieutenant…you’re the first one we’ve found.”
With a tear-jerking moan of agony, Garcia tried to sit up, but Melissa placed a gentle hand against his chest and lowered him back to the deck with little force. She tried to keep her voice steady and clam. “Try to relax, Lieutenant. That’s an order.”
“Yes…yes, ma’am.”
“What can you tell me about what happened here?”
Just as she asked the question, Shawn arrived with a small pile of uniforms, a pair of pitifully thin bed sheets, and a relatively new-looking pillow. “This is all I could find.”
Melissa took the heap from his outstretched arms and draped everything she could over the young man, then positioned the pillow beneath his head. “Commander Kestrel, meet Lieutenant Garcia. Mister Garcia, this is Lieutenant Commander Shawn Kestrel.”
Garcia brought a hand to his forehead in a very sluggish salute, but then let the hand fall above his head. “Sss…sorry for n…not standing at attention, ss…sir.”
Shawn smiled and leaned over the young man’s scraggly face. “I think we’ll skip the court-martial for now, Lieutenant.”
Garcia smiled, but it seemed to pain him to do so. He winced in agony as his left hand clutched at his chest where Melissa’s concussive blast had landed. Shawn reached into his medical pouch and withdrew a mild stimulant and vitamin shot. Engineered for wounded Marines in the combat zones, it went to work fast and helped get otherwise fatally wounded men back home. As Shawn pressed the pneumatic syringe to Garcia’s neck, injecting his veins with the concoction, the Lieutenant’s reaction was no different.
“Ouch, man. That’s smarts,” the lieutenant said after a moment with only the slightest hint of his former stammer.
“Just a standard issue shot, Lieutenant.” Using the sleeve of a discarded and soiled uniform, Melissa carefully wiped a bead of sweat from Garcia’s forehead.
“Not that, ma’am. I’m talking about that blast to my chest,” Garcia said, then absently rubbed the location where Melissa’s concussive round had bounced off his ribcage. “I haven’t felt like that since the homecoming game at the fleet academy.”
“The after-game party?” Shawn asked comically.
Garcia shook his head in the negative. “Hell no, sir. I was a wide receiver. Got blindsided by one of those speed demons from Markus Colony. Son of a bitch cost us the game.”
Melissa cradled his head in her hand. “Think you can sit up now, Lieutenant?” she asked with all the sweetness of a well-practiced nun.
“Yeah…yes, ma’am,” Garcia placed his hands at his side and slowly, painfully slowly, brought himself to an upright seated position. He let out a labored breath and shook his head, as if he were clearing the cobwebs left by a long night’s sleep. Shawn reached into his satchel and withdrew a liter of water, which Garcia guzzled completely in an instant. “Thanks. I needed that.” He then jerked his head in the direction of the water generator. “That stuff over there is awful.”
“So,” Melissa said, squatting next to Garcia on the floor and looking him in the eyes, “what happened here, Lieutenant?”
“Well, ma’am. It’s really hard to say. I was…I was down in engineering during most of the action.”
“You didn’t see anything?”
Garcia looked from her eyes to a distant point on the far bulkhead. “Oh, no. I saw…plenty.”
“Please, Lieutenant. Tell me everything you remember in as much detail as possible.”
“What are you, Unified Security?”
She chuckled, recalling what some of her old colleagues would have thought if they were ever asked that question. “No, Lieutenant. I’m with the OSI.” She reached into the pocket of her environmental suit and withdrew a small, finger-sized recorder. Capable of recording over six hours of three-dimensional visual images with multi-phasic sound, it would be an invaluable tool when she reviewed it later as part of her official report.
“OSI, you say?” He looked to Shawn pensively. “You, too, sir?”
“Oh, no,” Shawn replied emphatically. “Not me. I’m just the driver.”
Garcia gave him a puzzled look, then shrugged. “Well, one is preferable to two when it comes to the OSI.”
Melissa smiled reactively. “I guess you’re right about that. So tell me what you can.” She flipped on the recorder and placed it onto the deck in front of the lieutenant.
Garcia leaned back on his elbows as he contemplated his words, making sure to get everything in its proper order. “It started out simple enough. We set out from the planet Concordia to link up with the rest of our strike group. They were sitting just outside the system, waiting for us, you know? So anyway, we linked up with the Valley Forge and the rest of the group and set out for Corvan on a search and rescue mission.”
Corvan. The name had echoed in her mind ever since she’d heard Toyo speak it on Persephone, and even before that, when she’d received the last letter from her father, addressed from there. This was the last place her father had checked in before vanishing.
“Did you know who or what you were looking for?” she asked.
“No, not me personally. Above my pay grade, I guess.”
“Still, didn’t you think it was odd?” Melissa asked. “I mean, sending out an entire battle squadron for a search and rescue mission?”
“Yeah, sure I did. So did a lot of the other guys. Talk about overkill. But, you know how it is, Commander.” He looked to Shawn for understanding before continuing. “When Sector Command tells you to go, you go, and you don’t ask why. Am I right?”
Shawn nodded briskly. “Yep.”
Garcia smiled and his eyes darted back to Melissa. “So after about two weeks, we made it to Corvan, only it wasn’t Corvan we were at.”
Melissa furrowed her brow. “I don’t follow.”
Garcia lowered his voice and leaned off his elbows toward Melissa, his eyes full of mischief. “We were at Second Earth. At le
ast, that’s where I thought we were.”
“How did you come to that conclusion?” she asked in disbelief.
“I know what Corvan looks like, and we weren’t in orbit of that place. You ever been there, ma’am? Corvan, I mean.”
Melissa shook her head slowly.
Garcia scrunched up one of the soiled uniforms and placed it under his head as a makeshift pillow. He looked to the poorly defined overhead as if he were dreaming of a far distant and beautiful place. “You should, you know. You should go there sometime. The sky is a brilliant blue-green. The sands on the beaches are like…are like a field of miniature diamonds, but not hard or uncomfortable to walk on. It’s like…it’s like walking on cotton. And those pink and yellow clouds…you’ve never seen such long stretches of—”
Melissa cut him off with a hand to his chest. “Okay, Lieutenant. I get the picture. So if you weren’t at Corvan, then how did you come to the conclusion you were at Second Earth?”
Garcia’s facial expression changed as his mental picture shifted from the serenity of Corvan to the other planet he’d actually seen that day. “For one thing, the planet we were in orbit around was all wrong. It was green, but in all the wrong places. There was snow on the caps…and there’s no snow on Corvan. And the clouds…they were dark. Ominous.”
“You could be describing Rugor,” Shawn injected.
“No way, sir. You see, I took a walk into sensor control the day before we got there, and I saw that our course heading was still in the general direction of Corvan, only it was just a little off.”
“How far off?” Melissa asked.
“Far enough for a wise lieutenant to know we were heading somewhere close to Corvan, but not Corvan itself. When the battle group came to a halt, I had a pretty good feeling where we were.”
“Everyone else must have known, too,” Shawn said suspiciously. “One look out the window and everyone on the Icarus would be wondering the same thing.”
“Commander Taggart, the ship’s CO, came over the squawk box and put us in a blackout. All exterior view ports were sealed and made dark well before we arrived.”
“How much earlier?” Shawn asked.
“At least three days. Regardless, it was long before we had visual contact.”
Shawn and Melissa both knew the significance of that. Normally, ports were sealed only when the commander of the vessel thought he would come under direct enemy attack. Metal curtains would slide over all external hatches and ports to minimize the possibility of structural decompression in those areas, and most—if not all—exterior lights would be set to minimal power.
“Why would they want to keep you in the dark?” Shawn asked.
“To minimize the security risk,” Melissa replied before Garcia had a chance. “If anyone in the crew figured out where they were, it’d show a serious breach of regulations on the part of Sector Command. People would invariably start asking questions. As you know, Second Earth is off-limits to everyone in the UCS, from the top of the chain on down. No exceptions and under no circumstances.”
Shawn nodded, then looked back to Garcia. “Okay, so you figured out that you’re at Second Earth. What happened next?”
The man’s lips curled into a smile. “Like I said, we had gone black. No visuals. Sensors only. The captain came back over the box, said the Icarus and the destroyer Titan would perform fighter guard for carrier operations that were going to be carried out in the morning.” Garcia cast his eyes down to the deck in contemplation. “The Titan. That was a tightly run ship. One of my buddies from high school was on her. He was a good guy, always had a funny joke. Now…now he’s gone…all those people.”
“Lieutenant,” Melissa brought her face into his field of view. “I need you to focus right now and keep telling me what happened. What happened after Commander Taggart gave the order? What was the crew’s reaction?”
Garcia looked to her skeptically. “We followed it of course, ma’am. We made preparations for moving into position on the starboard-dorsal side of the Valley Forge, then the Titan moved to a port-ventral one.” He moved his two hands into the described formations as if they were large, lumbering fleet cruisers. “It was like practiced clockwork.”
“What happened next?” Melissa asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No, ma’am. Nothing. Everything went fine for nearly twelve hours. Twelve hours we were there, watching the Valley Forge’s fighters and transports with our sensors.”
“Transports?”
“Yeah, lots of them…whole squadrons at a time. They would fly down to the surface, stay there for a few hours, and then come back up.”
“Do you know what they were doing down there?”
“No, ma’am. Not a clue. I’m a junior sensor officer, so I didn’t get a lot of time in front of the console.”
“That’s odd,” Shawn interjected. “Normally that would be a good job for a junior officer like yourself. It’s good training time.”
“I thought the same thing, sir. But the order had come down from the Icarus’ executive officer that only senior officers—those ranking lieutenant commander and above—were allowed to man the sensor sweeps. The only time I got to sit up there was for a few minutes in between two watches.”
“And that’s when you saw the transports?” Melissa asked with finality.
“Yes, ma’am. Two squadrons of heavy logistics craft, along with two squadrons of mediums, both escorted by three squadrons of interceptors, were making their way back to the carrier when I peered at the scope. I watched them for about two minutes before I was relieved by the ship’s operations officer.
Melissa pondered the lieutenant’s words for a moment before she spoke up. “Did he say anything to you? About what you saw?”
“All he said, ma’am, was that I was relieved, that I would be debriefed in less than three hours…and that I should wait in my cabin until I was called. I thought that last bit was a little strange, considering I was only at the console for a few minutes and didn’t see much of anything, but I did as I was told…sort of.”
Melissa looked at him slyly. “Sort of?”
“Well, I went down to my cabin like I was told, but after two hours I was getting pretty bored. I figured if they called me to a debriefing they would use the ship’s intercom, so I didn’t see the harm in leaving my room for a few minutes.”
Shawn nodded in understanding. He’d been in a very similar situation the first time he’d been ‘ordered’ to stay put in his cabin. He smirked at the recollection. “Where did you go?”
Garcia looked around the darkness of the space, and when he spoke after a moment, his voice was distant. “I came here.”
“Why here?”
“I needed to catch up on some EVO training. You know, Extra Vehicular Operations?”
“Yes, I know,” Shawn agreed.
“So I came down here. One of the water maintenance techs, I think his name was Donaldson, helped me put on the suit and walked me through some basic EVO operations.”
“There’s a gravity simulator near here?” Shawn said in revelation as he looked around the space once more with new eyes.
“Yes sir,” Garcia nodded, then jerked his head toward a closed door that neither Shawn nor Melissa had seen before. “One of the new ones, too. Perfect simulation of every gravity field in the Unified Collaboration’s catalogue.”
“So,” Melissa expelled the word in an attempt to regain control of the conversation. “What happened next?”
Garcia looked away pensively. “I can’t say for sure. It all happened so…so damn fast.”
“Try, Lieutenant.”
“Well, first there was this large jolt. I mean really large. It knocked us all flat on our backs in an instant,” Garcia emphasized his statement by slapping his hands together in a crack that reverberated off the cold, lifeless walls. “By the time we staggered to our feet, there was another jolt, not as bad as the first, but still pretty bad. Tha
t’s when the ship’s general alarms started ringing.” He paused as he reflected on those moments, reliving the fear and horror he’d felt at the time. He shuddered as something crossed his mind.
“What then?”
“Everything shut off, all at once. Everything. Lights, gravity, environmental controls, door circuits.”
“Emergency power?”
“Not yet, because about two minutes later everything kicked back on for about ten seconds before it all went down again. The shock of having everything off at once had tripped the breakers for the emergency electrical conduits on most of the decks, but I didn’t know that was the case until a few hours later. Once I located the outage I was able to bypass the system. That’s why I’ve got limited air and gravity in here.”
Considering the lieutenant’s synopsis to be far from complete, Shawn jumped back into the fray. “So what happened between losing the power and where we are now?”
“Like I said, sir, everything was off. Life support was shut down.” He turned away and looked toward a distant point on the overhead. When he looked back to Shawn, Garcia’s eyes were full of angered confusion. “That’s not supposed to happen, is it Commander?” The pitch of his voice was near-panicked. “Never. I mean that’s never supposed to happen! There are fail-safes, you know? Redundant backups for the backups. No matter what, you never lose your heat or your air. Never, man.”
“Try to keep calm, Lieutenant,” Melissa said softly. “Just tell me what happened.”
With a fine mist of sweat on his face, he nodded briskly, collected his thoughts, and then turned back to Shawn. “Well, they all just…froze, you know. All of them. The crew, I mean. Donaldson…the technician that was down here with me…he was gasping for air.” Garcia’s breathing became quick as he recalled the man’s face. “He couldn’t breathe. I had my helmet on…I couldn’t do anything. Then he started…he started clutching at his body. He fell on the floor…started…started convulsing. I didn’t know what was happening until he started to frost over. It was all happening way too fast for me to do anything.”
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