by Rick Partlow
Mironov looked to McKay, who sighed and had a brief exchange with the man in Russian.
“I think I can,” Mironov said haltingly. “I would need to see system…” Another exchange with McKay. “…specifications, planetary positions. I would need to be within one or two jumps, I think.”
“Mr. Mironov, I want you to sit down with Mr. Sweeny and give him every detail you remember about the systems near Novoye Rodina… Colonel McKay, you can help translate, if you wouldn’t mind. Get it done in four hours and get it to my office.”
“I’m beginning to sense a pattern there,” McKay said with a grin.
“Well, you are the head of intelligence,” Patel observed wryly. “I want to be moving on a course of action in six hours. If we have to rig the laser focusing fields, I want us ready to leave the minute the work is done. We are not going home without the location of Novoye Rodina, even if it means flying blind through every jumpgate between here and the next galaxy. Do you concur?”
“The President’s last word to me on the matter of General Antonov,” McKay told him, “was ‘Kill that son of a bitch.’ I don’t want to head home until I at least try to carry out that order.”
“Excellent. Then let’s get to work.”
Vincent Mahoney smiled slightly as he traced a finger over the curve of Esmeralda Villanueva’s shoulder. Her skin was warm and slightly damp with sweat; spherical globules of their perspiration floated around inside the sleep net that kept them in her bed.
“You know,” Vinnie said quietly, “I never had sex in zero gravity before this trip.”
Esmeralda raised an eyebrow. “And you were a Marine? I find that hard to believe.”
He shrugged. “Getting involved with someone in my platoon didn’t seem smart. And the Fleet girls… well, by the time I made it on the Reaction Force platoons, I was an NCO and it didn’t seem like the right example to be setting.”
“Jesus, you’re a regular boy scout, aren’t you?” She laughed, a sound he would never get tired of.
“If I were a boy scout,” he replied, raising an eyebrow, “I wouldn’t be fraternizing with a superior officer.” He shrugged. “Of course, I may have mellowed a bit in my old age.”
“And fraternizing very, very well, may I say,” she purred, leaning over to kiss him. “I’m just glad for the break. It seems like we’ve been on battle stations for days.”
“If we do find a way to detect the wormholes,” Vinnie said, “we’ll probably be on battle stations for the foreseeable future.”
“Can I ask you something totally stupid that you’ve probably had to answer a million times before?”
“You can ask me anything except to leave you alone, darlin’,” Vinnie cracked.
She seemed reluctant, but finally managed to say it. “Everyone’s seen the movie and the newscasts, and I know you’re going to want to toe the party line, but tell me honestly: Colonel McKay and Major Stark… were they really that, you know…” She shook her head, looking for a word.
“Heroic?” He supplied, grinning. “Larger than life?”
“Yes,” she laughed. “I guess. You know how stuff gets exaggerated.”
Vinnie stared into space for a moment, thinking how to answer the question. “The first thing you gotta’ understand,” he began, “is that they’re very different people. Different leadership styles, different personalities, sometimes different priorities. How they wound up working so well together… and becoming a couple… is still a mystery to me. Major Stark is very calculating, almost cold. She will risk her life in a heartbeat if it’s the best way to accomplish the mission, but she also knows that sometimes as a commander, you have to put other people in situations that might kill them while you manage the situation from the rear.
“The Colonel, now, he was a Marine like me and he never met a door he didn’t want to bust in. He leads from the front, guns blazing and I think he figures, if he bites a bullet, the guys coming up behind him should have been trained well enough to take over. Don’t get me wrong,” he said quickly, “he’s smart too, and he has really good instincts, but he’s also got some great big cajones and a conscience that won’t let him order someone to do something he hasn’t done himself first. And the thing that makes it even more… awesome, I guess, is that I know him well enough now to know that he is scared when he does that shit. And he does it anyway, and he does it just as good as any of us door-kickers.”
“You sound like you like him,” Esmeralda commented, keen interest in her eyes.
“Darlin’,” he corrected her, “I love the man like he was my own family. More, since a lot of my family are shitbirds. You asked me if he and Major Stark were heroes… that’s an easy one. Everyone in the war was a hero. Bunch of cops and Republic Service Corps janitors taking the Defense Satellite Control Center, damn straight they were all heroes. And our team with two squads of Marines boarding the Protectorate flag ship. Ari Shamir realizing he was walking into a trap and finding a way to spring us from it, Gunny Lambert saving us all from a grenade by giving up his life, they were heroes.
“But the one thing that Colonel McKay did that made me love him like a brother, that made me respect him like I’ve never respected another officer, was when we were on Pallas, and Admiral Patel and Captain Minishimi were arguing about what to do and Colonel McKay realized that someone had to take charge and make a decision and he had the balls to tell them so. And then when both of them had the damn nerve to ask a Captain-and an Intelligence Captain at that, an O-3, not a Fleet Captain O-6-to take charge of the whole thing and he said yes. That’s what took some balls. I can’t imagine saying yes to that, when screwing up means you’ve just lost the whole damn planet.”
“Wow,” Esmeralda murmured. “I can’t imagine Admiral Patel doing that… handing off responsibility to a junior officer like that. He seems so… confident.”
Vinnie frowned, head cocked thoughtfully. “You know, that’s true. He has seemed awfully sure of himself since then. Especially on this mission.”
“Maybe he decided that’s how he had to be if he was going to be the Fleet admiral,” she suggested.
“I know plenty of guys who pretend to be confident, darlin’. The Marines are full of ‘em, and we get more than our share in the recruits for Special Ops. He really is confident.” He shrugged it off. “People can change, I guess.”
“I’m sure they can, corazon,” she said, nibbling at his earlobe, “but we only have a couple hours left and I would hate to waste them talking about the Admiral…”
“That is all I can remember,” Konstantin Mironov concluded, letting out a breath and then taking a sip from the bulb of water that had been attached to the table by an adhesive strip.
McKay translated the last of Mironov’s directions to Lt. Sweeny, who was feeding them into the ship’s navigation system in the ship’s auxiliary control room, away from the noise and bustle of the main bridge.
“Okay, got it,” Sweeny said as he adjusted the virtual template and saved it in the navigation system. “Thanks, Mr. Mironov,” the Helmsman nodded to the Russian drive tech. “With that, we should at least know if we’re in a jump or two of Novoye Rodina. Now I just have to get all that ready to present to the Admiral in…” He checked his ‘link. “Christ, in an hour.” He glanced up at McKay. “Sorry sir, but I need to work on this, if you’ll excuse me?”
“No problem, Lieutenant,” McKay assured him. “I need to go grab some food anyway. You want some lunch, Konstantin?”
“I do not eat too much in this no gravity,” Mironov said in English, making a sour face.
“There’s an officer’s mess in the gravity drum,” McKay told him, pushing off from the worktable. “Come on, I’ll buy you a soy burger.”
A few minutes later, they were both reveling in the pleasures of eating a meal under normal gravity, if not the meal itself.
“This tastes like shit,” Mironov commented as he took another bite of the soy burger.
“Well yeah,” Mc
Kay acknowledged with a shrug. “We can grow cloned cow muscle in a factory, but there isn’t much room for food freezers on a starship. It’s either fresh soy or reconstituted dried meat. Trust me, this is better. What did you eat on your ships?” He frowned curiously.
“We ate shit, mostly,” Mironov admitted after taking a moment to find the right words. “But I got spoiled in my time on the outposts. They had to be self-sustaining, so they had pens with animals.”
“Earth animals?” McKay asked. “Where did you guys get Earth animals?”
Mironov looked uncomfortable answering, but he finally replied. “From the colony ships that General Antonov pirated. The cloned animal fetuses you had frozen. He duplicated them in the nano vats on Novoye Rodina.”
McKay just nodded, not trusting himself to comment on that without getting angry. Tens of thousands of colonists had been murdered by Antonov and his clone troopers before the war and during the invasion of Aphrodite.
“So, Konstantin,” he changed the subject. “Do you… did you have family? On Earth?”
The Russian shook his head. “Not alive. My parents and my sister died in the war with China a long time ago. I was not married… though there was this one girl…”
“Tell me about her,” McKay urged.
“She was beautiful,” Mironov said with a sad smile. “She had this long, blond hair that I could just lose myself in.” He shrugged. “But she is long gone now. And I am alone.”
““Did she die in the war as well?” McKay asked solicitously.
Konstantin gave him a look that made his blood go cold. “Yes, she died in the war, Colonel McKay.”
“Sorry,” McKay said, holding up a hand. “Didn’t mean to open up a sore subject, Konstantin.”
“No,” the Russian shook his head, “it is all right. Sometimes the memories… they get the best of me. Living this long, the brain was not built for it, you know? The old memories seem more recent sometimes than the new ones, you know? When I thought of her, of Yevgenia, the old anger came back as if we were still at war.”
We? McKay thought.
“You were at war with the Chinese,” McKay reminded him quietly, “not America.”
“They were pawns of the Americans,” he said with an air of one who’d used the line before. “But it is no matter. It was a long time ago.”
“Yes it was,” McKay said with a neutral voice. Holy shit, he thought, guarding his face carefully, D’mitry is right: this guy is over the edge. I need to talk to Patel about this… “Well,” McKay went on aloud, making a show of checking his ‘link, “the Admiral has had all his consultations by now, so I had better get to his office and see if he needs my input. You can stay here and eat some more if you like, or there’s also a gym and a sim room and a ViR theater. If you hear the warning klaxon, it means we’re going back on alert and the drum rotation is about to stop, so hold onto something.”
“I understand,” Mironov told him. “I will finish eating then go back to my quarters.” He shrugged. “I do not need entertainment. After all these years, I have little need of anything.”
“Come.”
At the invitation over the exterior speaker, McKay palmed the door plate to the Admiral’s office/cabin and pulled himself inside. Patel was alone in the flag cabin, belted into his chair to give him better access to the readouts and holographic projections that covered the surface of the desk. He glanced up at McKay and waved him over,
“Well, here it is, McKay,” he gestured at the data. “Everything we know and everything we can do.”
“Did you give the order, sir?”
“Yes, I did,” Patel replied, still staring at the readouts. “I hate losing the lasers, but I’d hate to lose our FTL drives a lot more.” He jabbed a finger at a projection that floated above the surface of the desk top. “Pirelli did it, McKay. She’s a hell of an officer. She’ll be a Captain soon.”
“She found a way to detect the wormholes?” McKay asked, excitement creeping into his voice as he drew closer to the projection. He couldn’t make much out of it: it was mostly mathematical symbols.
“She surely did,” Patel nodded. “Oh, you have to be at fairly close range-their gravimetic signature is small when they’re not open-but she thinks she’s found the other gate in this system already. As soon as the laser focusing field projectors are converted, we’ll be heading though it.” He looked away from the desk, catching McKay’s eye. “When that happens, I’m putting you, your team, the Marine platoons and all non-essential personnel in the shuttles and landers.”
“Sir?” McKay frowned.
“We’re jumping blind into what could wind up being the heart of enemy territory. I’m playing Russian roulette here with a starship full of good people. We know they have the ram ships outfitted with Eysselink field generators… if they score on us with one of them, we don’t have any friendly forces to cover us while we affect repairs. If that happens, I’m launching all shuttles and landers and whatever lifepods we can get loaded in time. If we’re in reach of a planet, make for it. You’ll be in command then.” At McKay’s doubtful look, he nodded. “I know, it’s a desperate measure, but what we’re about to do is a desperate move. Besides,” he added with an irreverent grin, “if anyone could find a way to pull it off, it’s you, McKay. You’re the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
“Your lips to God’s ears, sir,” McKay laughed. “But I have something else I wanted to tell you. It’s Mironov… Admiral, I think he’s not mentally stable.” He sighed. “To be honest, I think he’s totally fucking bugnuts.”
“Do you think this affects the reliability of the data he’s provided us?” Patel asked, steepling his fingers in front of him as he regarded McKay carefully.
“I don’t believe so. He’s not trying to deceive us… I just think his hold on reality is tenuous. As far as I can tell, he seems to regard everything happening around him as little more real than a ViR simulation.”
“You’ll have to keep an eye on him, McKay, but right now, I think he’s given us everything we can get from him and we have Antonov to worry about. Tell your people to get some sleep and get some food in them. We head through that gate in thirty six hours.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Wooden planks creaked under Daniel O’Keefe’s shoes as he stepped out of the back door of the cabin, fastening his jacket against the chill in the air. Spring in northern Minnesota was colder than winter in Capital City.
I’m getting soft, he thought to himself with a trace of bitterness. He’d once been used to the cold, fond of it even. He’d spent most of his youth in the family home outside Calgary, and it was no colder here than it had been there. But he’d spent too much of his life in Capital City, first as a Senator and then as President, and now he needed a jacket where once he would have worn shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Old and soft.
He sat in the padded deck chair on the back porch of the cabin and stared up at the night sky. The stars were incredibly clear out here, away from the cities; countless hundreds of thousands of them stretched overhead in a breathtaking Sistine-Chapel ceiling painted by a universe-spanning divine Michelangelo. When he was a young man, O’Keefe had been fashionably atheistic, but as he grew older he found himself leaning towards something closer to a Jeffersonian Deism. He still couldn’t envision any sort of personal deity that meddled in the day-to-day affairs of men-or other beings-but he could very easily imagine a Watchmaker God that set the universe in motion then sat back to observe.
At the moment, he wished he could believe in a more personal God… because he very much wanted to pray. His son in law, a man he had trusted more than any other, a man he imagined could someday hold the very office he now occupied, was dead in a senseless act of violence that he still couldn’t fathom or understand. His daughter, the person who meant the most to him in all the world, someone he also envisioned as President one day, was missing for over a week.
How the hell, he raged inwardly, not for the first tim
e, did the President’s daughter, a Republic Senator, go missing in this day and age?
Her car had been found abandoned in the Old City. The woman she’d gone there to meet was also missing and the security teams that had gone over the area had found nothing… except an unexplained blood stain in a nearby building. The press hadn’t stopped hounding him and everyone connected to his administration, interfering with his attempts to find her…
And then, over a very, very secure and private ‘link that only he and Jason McKay had supposedly known about, Shannon Stark had contacted him yesterday and told him to find a way to get out to Glen and Valerie’s vacation cabin and to bring Natalia with him.
He hadn’t told anyone why he was out here, just said that he needed a break from the pressure due to his daughter’s disappearance and his son-in-law’s murder. His staff had been quietly apoplectic at the thought of leaving Capital City with an economic crisis looming and the Biomech bill being argued in the Senate, and his Presidential Security Service agents had practically thrown a fit at the idea of an unscheduled visit to such an unprotected spot.
But he had put his foot down and here he was. There were no agents and no staff on the grounds of the cabin, just a security perimeter thrown up at the major roads within twenty kilometers and a complete air cordon. Natalia was asleep inside… finally. His gut clenched at the memory of her helpless cries for her mother and father, at her sobs as she cried herself to sleep in her mother’s bed. He’d fought back sobs himself, remembering how Valerie had cried all night the day her mother had been killed in a terrorist attack in Europe so many years ago.
His ‘link buzzed in his pocket and he pulled the bud off of it and put it in his ear.
“O’Keefe,” he snapped.
“Mr. President,” he heard the voice of Agent Havelock, his chief of security. “there’s a flyer approaching the air cordon. It’s registered to a rental company in Houston ‘plex. We hailed it and all the driver would say was that you were expecting company.”