She groggily tried to sit up, but her head swam. That was a bad idea.
“No, no!” said Flatline, his helmeted face appearing at the edge of the fighter’s cockpit. “Stay there. Stay down. I’m calling the corpsman.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted, her voice groggy. “I just … fell.”
“You freaking passed out.” Flatline scrambled down the side of the fighter, jumping the last meter or so onto the deck, his metal boots hitting with a thump. “You didn’t just fall.”
Guano searched for a good lie, but none of them came. “I…”
“You,” said Flatline, hooking his arms around Guano’s shoulders and pulling her up, “are going to get yourself checked out. Right now.”
Try as she might, Guano was simply too tired, too dizzy, to resist. She went limp in the arms of the medical technicians who arrived to carry her away.
Chapter Eighty
Captain’s Ready Room
USS Midway
Orbit above Chrysalis
Kepler-1011 system
Mattis felt free.
He’d been keeping other peoples’ secrets for too long and to have them all out in the open was liberating. The consequences for his actions would be serious, even dire—but at least his conscience was unburdened. He sat on the couch in his ready room, tablet in one hand, mug of black coffee in the other.
The ratings started to come in. His interview was the third most popular broadcast that day, after reruns of the initial video of the aliens, and some really cute video showing a cat eating spaghetti.
“How’s my star doing?” asked Ramirez, smiling as she returned with a warm cup of coffee, tired but seeming, as he was, to be quite glad that they had let everything out of the bag.
“Much better now that I have some coffee and a little breathing room.” He smiled back. “Feeling good.”
Ramirez slid into the couch beside him. “Good.” She sipped her drink. “Thank you again.”
“Naw,” said Mattis. For a moment, he almost put his arm around her shoulders—a sudden impulse he suppressed just in time. “You did all the work. All I did was talk.”
“Talking is work,” said Ramirez, and then she put her arm around his shoulder. “At least, it is in my world. And it was brave, too.”
A funny comment given that he’d considered, and chickened out, of doing exactly what she’d just done. Mattis found words hard to come to his throat. “I … suppose so.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, grinning playfully at him. “I think we have a lot more chances for you to tell the galaxy about important stuff. You’ll be in front of my cameras again.”
“Great,” said Mattis, groaning teasingly. “Just what I always wanted.”
There was a bit of silence as the two of them sat, their sides touching, pretending like it wasn’t a huge deal when it was.
“I really do think you were brave,” said Ramirez, finally.
Brave? He didn’t feel brave. “Like I said, all I did is talk.”’
“Important talk,” said Ramirez, a firmness in her tone that surprised him. “And not just because you told the galaxy a whole bunch of stuff that frankly it didn’t want to hear but needed to, but because of what it meant to you.” She squirmed around on the couch, facing him squarely. “You went for transparency, and that’s what’s so good about it—you went out of your comfort zone. I could see you squirming as you spoke, trying to find some other way of delivering the news that would make it hurt less, even though such a thing wasn’t possible. So you just did it anyway. Bravery means overcoming a challenge. That’s what makes you a hero.”
“I suppose so,” said Mattis, unable to refute what she was saying, but also unable to accept such flattery from her. “Maybe if I’d done a better job, it’d be the number two trending video instead of number three. That damn cat is tough to beat, though.”
Ramirez stifled a giggle. “As much as this was important, even I’m forced to concede that the cat was really cute. The way that noodle dangled out of its mouth…”
“Very cute,” said Mattis, and he leaned in and kissed her.
She sat there. For a moment, he thought—feared!—that she was going to do nothing, but then she leaned back, settling in on the couch with him once more.
“Jack,” she said, “sometimes I feel like you’re the last hero in the whole damn galaxy. Even if you are number two to a cat.”
He gently squeezed her. “For now,” he said, smile widening. “Humans live longer than cats. If nothing else, I’ll outlive the bastard.”
She laughed and squirmed around. “You’re insufferable.”
Maybe, maybe not. Going public like he had could not be good for his career, but … it had been necessary.
“So,” asked Mattis, “why the hell were you even on Chrysalis in the first place?”
“Anonymous tip.”
He frowned, rolling his eyes. “Cut the crap.”
Ramirez hesitated before she answered. “It was your son, Jack. Chuck sent me this message out of the blue—I think he’s conducting his own investigation or something. Anyway, something about it spoke to me, and then, what do you know. I found what I was looking for.”
“Resourceful kid,” said Mattis. “Hope it doesn’t get him killed. Or worse, arrested.”
“I hope you don’t get yourself killed.” Ramirez looked up at him.
“I won’t,” he said. “Promise.”
Another moment of silence passed, then Ramirez—sounding almost sleeping—spoke up again. “Do you think … these experimented-on humans, these future-people … do you think they’ll come back?”
Mattis sipped his coffee. “They’re not from the future. I think that’s clear now. I never thought that time-travel explanation was very believable. Whatever this … Deep State is up to, they not only created these things, but they supplied them, in complete secrecy, with a fleet. A fleet that took out Friendship station and nearly took us out with it.”
“Mmm.”
Mattis wanted to talk more with her, but he had work to do. With palpable reluctance, Mattis pulled out his communicator. “Mattis to the infirmary.”
The on-call nurse, the same one who had struggled to inject Modi with a simple inoculation, picked up. “Good evening, Admiral. What can I do for you?”
Mattis gave Ramirez another gentle squeeze. “Just checking in on Doctor Bratta.”
“He’s resting,” said the nurse. “He’s pretty beat up, but he has company and plenty of painkillers. He’ll be fine. We gave him a video of some cat eating spaghetti, and that seemed to make him happy. We’re mostly focused Guano. She was recently admitted.”
He made a mental note to check up on that. “Good. Keep me apprised. On both counts.”
“Aye, sir.”
He cut the connection. The moment he terminated the call, another came through.
“Sir?” asked Modi, a tinge of concern in his voice. “You and Martha have been in there for a while, I’m worried that—”
There was the faint sounds of a scuffle. “Give me that!” he heard Lynch hiss in the background. Then, louder, “Sorry, sir, Commander Modi’s come down with a case of the stupids. Sorry to disturb you both. Sorry!”
And then he hung up, too.
The two of them shared a laugh which took a long time to fade. It was partially Lynch and Modi’s stumblings, but also relief. Relief they were alive. Relief the truth was out. Relief that they were sharing that exact moment together, happy … or at least, something like it.
“They’ll be back,” said Mattis, unable to keep the levity in his voice despite it all. “Sooner, rather than later.”
“I know,” said Ramirez, her eyes drooping closed, snuggled up to Mattis, her slowly cooling cup of coffee almost forgotten. “This isn’t over. Not by a long shot.”
He wanted to reassure her, to convince her that everything was going to be okay, but the words didn’t find their way to his lips, and so he just sat there, waiting, until she was a
sleep, their drinks were cold, and the ship’s lighting changed to signify a shift change.
Mattis was alone in the silence with his own thoughts and his own words echoing in his ears, twisting and reforming until they shaped a new, realized thought:
The war was just getting started.
Epilogue
Private Office
Genetics Lab
Chrysalis
Kepler-1011 system
With the Midway and the Luyang in orbit of Chrysalis, and nothing else left to do but wait until they came down to arrest him, Senator Pitt was reduced to watching the news coverage of the events.
“Breaking news on the Chrysalis station incident: we are now receiving reports that the President herself is scheduled to make a speech on the developing situation within the hour.”
He flicked to another station, seeing a familiar face. Chuck Mattis.
“I don’t know anything about this,” said Chuck, his lying face obviously withholding something. “Uhh, as far as I’m aware, there is no quote-unquote deep state within the United States or the People’s Republic of China at this time.”
Lying son of a liar. Pitt angrily changed the channel again.
“—orts indicate that neither the Midway or the Luyang have launched marines or ordnance into Chrysalis at this time, but we remain vigilant and remind our viewers that this remains a developing situation—”
Liars. Probably. If the American or Chinese ship were going to attack they wouldn’t broadcast it onto the news. Another channel, this time, Mattis’s face himself.
“The MaxGainz genetics corp is a front for illegal research, and we will see to it that—”
Not in time. Whatever that idiot was planning on doing it wouldn’t be done anywhere near fast enough. Senator Pitt would get what he needed and get out.
Right on cue, his private communicator chimed. A message from General Tsai.
TSAI: We’re ready. Come to Productions.
Barely able to keep his nerves in check, Senator Pitt leapt up from the table and darted out of the small office. All around him alarms blared and sirens wailed, although he wasn’t sure—or didn’t care—if they were in relation to the technical-wizardry being performed, the presence of the two warships in orbit, or something else entirely.
Rounding a corner, Senator Pitt came upon a simple steel door labelled “Productions.” He swiped his card at the reader. Strange, it had never been locked before. He practically fell down the stairs leading to the laboratory floor.
Within the wide open lab space lay row after row of surgical slabs. Each contained a body draped in a white sheet; multi-armed surgical robots tending to them beneath the covering, stitching and sewing, and injecting pulses of the glowing green fluid, some of which dripped into the floor, pooling beneath each of the bodies.
As he watched, one of the bodies jerked as it received an electrical current. Then, slowly, as though waking from a deep sleep, the body sat up and pulled the sheet away from his head.
Senator Pitt’s face split into a wide smile. “Hello son,” he said.
Commander Peter Pitt looked at him, and blinked in surprise. “Hello, dad,” he replied.
And it was all worth it.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title
Dedication
Front Matter
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Epilogue
ebook backmatter
The Last Hero: Book 2 of The Last War Series Page 28