by Rick Partlow
“Who?” O’Keefe could see that Dominguez wanted to say more but didn’t trust himself to do it.
“You, Xavier,” O’Keefe told him. “They were investigating you. And what happened to you on that mission to Aphrodite five years ago, just after the war.”
Dominguez’s eyes went wide, his self-control compromised by the drugs that had coated the interior of the glass from which he’d drunk the bourbon. “Jesus, Daniel, you can’t know this,” he shook his head, trying to lever himself out of the chair but somehow lacking the strength. “They’ll kill you when they find out you know.”
“They’re planning to kill me anyway, Xavier,” O’Keefe reminded him. “And when they do, do you think that it’s going to be easy? That the military and the government are going to follow you because you’re the Vice President?”
“They said there wouldn’t be any other choice,” Dominguez agreed, his eyes seemingly horrified at what his mouth was saying. “They’ll be looking for a leader and I’ll be there to lead them.”
“And who’s ‘they,’ Xavier?” O’Keefe demanded. “Who made you all those promises? Who’s your contact?”
“Lobbyist for Republic Mineral Resources multicorp,” Dominguez told him. “Guy named Fourcade.”
“How shocking,” O’Keefe muttered dryly. “And who else does Mr. Fourcade say is involved in this?”
Dominguez shook his head. “He says it’s better that I don’t know. The fewer people who know, the better. Hell, I didn’t even have to do anything. Just wait for you to die, then take office and we could start undoing the damage you did with your emigration policies.”
“You supported those policies too, Xavier,” O’Keefe snarled at him, leaning across the desk. “You were elected as Senator because of your support for them! When did you change your mind on that?”
“I..,” Dominguez’s face went slack and he looked as if he were about to fall unconscious, but then he shook himself. “I don’t remember ever feeling like that. I know I did. I’ve seen the voting records, the speeches. I know I did… but I can’t remember why.”
“What happened on that trip to Aphrodite, Xavier?” O’Keefe asked him, elbows resting on the desk as he studied the man, as if he could discern the truth if he watched him closely enough.
“I don’t know,” Dominguez replied.
“What happened on the trip to Aphrodite?” O’Keefe repeated, slamming his fist on the desk.
“I don’t know,” Dominguez insisted sullenly. “I can’t remember any of it. I just have this weird… divide in my memory. Like everything that happened before the trip is… muffled somehow. Not real, or less real. Like I had been sleeping my whole life and just woke up after that trip. Fourcade said something happened on the trip, too… he said it was key to what we are going to do, but he wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think he trusts me.”
“So why do you trust him?” O’Keefe wanted to know. “Why are you going along with this?”
Dominguez blinked, his face showing some surprise. “It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t,” he admitted. “It seemed… right. Like it’s what I had been waiting for.”
O’Keefe looked up to where he knew the video pickup was located. “Is that enough?”
“No,” Shannon told him over his ear bud, “but it’s all we’re going to get. Go ahead and cut him loose.”
The President sighed in frustration, then turned back to Dominguez. “Xavier, in a moment, I am going to give you another drink. After you drink it, you’re going to go to my guest room and take a nap. When you wake up, you’re going to remember that we had a conversation about how worried I was about Valerie and how I thought you should deliver my scheduled speech to the Senate next week.”
“I can’t!” Dominguez exclaimed, surprising both O’Keefe and Shannon.
“You can’t what, Xavier?”
“I can’t give that speech… I won’t be anywhere near the Senate! I’ve been ordered not to.” He hesitated. “He wouldn’t tell me why… but I’ve been thinking, and I think that’s when they’re planning on having you killed.”
Ari stared at the screen for a second, then looked at Shannon, who was frozen in place with shock.
“Oh shit,” he muttered.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Welcome aboard, Colonel,” Esmeralda Villanueva said to Jason McKay as he moved into the cockpit of the shuttle, pulling himself into the seat behind the command station, strapping himself in next to Vinnie and Jock.
“Thanks, Commander,” he told her. “Tell me, can you link your main viewer to the one on the bridge?”
“Not a problem, sir,” she assured him, adjusting the screen controls until it showed the tactical readout from the bridge, complete with an avatar of the wormhole they were about to transit.
“We’re in range of the gate, sir,” they could hear Pirelli’s clear contralto over the intercom.
“Where’re our resident Russians?” Vinnie leaned over to ask.
“Locked in their cabins and strapped to acceleration couches,” McKay replied.
“Best place for ‘em,” Jock muttered.
“Activate the emitters,” Patel ordered from the bridge. “Helm, ready the pulse drives.”
“Well, here we go again,” Vinnie said under his breath.
“At least we aren’t chasing the ass-end of a fusion drive this time,” Jock mused
The stars ahead of them disappeared as the wormhole opened, then the Sheridan lurched forward under the thrust of the plasma drives. McKay clenched his jaw and gripped the arms of his acceleration couch tightly, preparing himself for the transition, but it didn’t seem to help. Reality abandoned him and left him naked to what was beyond, what couldn’t be perceived by the human mind, for just a fleeting moment that lasted all of eternity and yet no time at all.
And then they were through. “Oh man,” Jock moaned, “Thursday smells horrible.”
McKay let out the breath that he’d been holding for light years and tried to focus his eyes on the viewscreen, where a small, bright primary star and a nearby gas giant were already visible. An alarm began to sound as threat icons popped up on the screen and Pirelli’s voice came over the speakers. “We have multiple bogies within three light seconds… we are being scanned on active radar and lidar.”
“Drive field reactivated,” Sweeny announced.
“Commander Pirelli,” Patel spoke up, “where are we on an analysis of the system?”
“Sensor sweep in progress,” she informed him. “Gauss cannon capacitors charged and ready. Two of the bogies are accelerating our way.”
As she spoke, McKay could see the viewscreen filling in the details of the system, adding detail to the gas giant and adding three large moons to its orbit, two of them marked with the blue and green coloration of habitable worlds… and then adding another jumpgate less than a light second from the one they’d just exited.
“We have the next wormhole located,” Pirelli noted. “Still scanning for Mr. Mironov’s parameters.”
“Helm,” Patel ordered calmly, “make for that gate, one g acceleration analog.”
“Aye, sir,” Sweeny confirmed and in the shuttle they could feel the pressure of their normal Earth weight pushing them into their couches.
“Admiral,” Pirelli reported, excitement creeping into her voice, “we have it… this is one of the systems Mr. Mironov told us about! If he’s right, we should be two jumps away from Novoye Rodina!”
“Excellent, Commander. Is there any sign of the Eysselink-equipped ramships?”
“Negative sir,” Pirelli told him. “Not close enough for us to detect anyway-our gravimetic sensor range is only about five light seconds with the weaker emitters. The two ships heading for us are conventional fusion pulse drive. We should be at the next gate before they intercept.”
“Admiral Patel,” McKay spoke over his ‘link, hooked to the intercom speakers on the bridge.
“Yes, Colonel McKay?” Patel looked up at the interrupt
ion.
“Sir, this close to their home system, we have to assume they have communications set up through the gates. From here on out, they’ll be waiting for us.”
“Understood,” Patel assured him. He glanced at Sweeny. “Helm, I don’t suppose we have any idea what would happen if we transited the wormhole with our Eysselink field engaged?”
“I couldn’t tell you precisely without running some experiments, sir,” the officer told him deadpan, “but my assumption would be: bad things.”
“Don’t try dazzling me with your technical terms, young man,” Patel replied dryly. “All right… on the chance that our computers recover from the transition faster than we do, create a subroutine that activates the drive as soon as we’ve exited the hole.”
“On it, sir,” Sweeny said, then began mumbling to the computer input as his hands traced commands on the ViR board projected in front of him.
“If they have those damned rams on the other side waiting for us,” Vinnie said to McKay, Jock and Villanueva, “it won’t matter if our drives are activated or not.”
“That’s why we’re on the shuttle, Vinnie,” McKay reminded him impassively, doing his best to project confidence despite not feeling it.
The minutes passed by insufferably slow, with the Protectorate ships growing ever closer until smaller icons split off from the larger ones, speeding forward just ahead of them.
“The Protectorate ships have launched Shipbuster missiles,” Pirelli announced. “Accelerating at ten G’s. We should be able to beat them to the gate still, but it’s going to be close.”
“Increase to one and a half G acceleration,” Patel ordered.
McKay’s chest ached as he was pushed back into his acceleration couch, but the ship began to inch slightly ahead of the oncoming missiles.
“We’re approaching turnover,” Sweeny warned. “We need to start decelerating.”
“Negative,” Patel snapped. “Open the gate, then cut the field… we’re going through at speed!”
“Aye, sir,” Sweeny acknowledged, doubt in his voice. “Preparing to open the gate.”
“Well, that’s one way to avoid an ambush,” Vinnie grunted. “We’re going to be at relativistic speeds when we come out of the gate.”
“Prepare for high-g deceleration once we’re through the gate,” Patel warned.
“Cause there’s nothing we love more than negative G’s,” Jock said cheerfully inside the shuttle.
“Activating the emitters,” Sweeny announced.
“The gate is opening,” Pirelli said. “Transition in ten seconds.”
Another slide down the rabbit hole of unreality ended with a brain-bending jerk light years away and when McKay returned to coherence, the viewscreen was a sea of white and alarms were sounding.
“…were fusion mines,” Pirelli was saying. “We just shot through a minefield around the gate exit at about a quarter lightspeed! The computer activated the drive field in time… we’re okay!”
“Emergency high-G deceleration,” Patel ordered. “Then get us to the last gate!”
The emergency boost alarm sounded and McKay pulled his straps tighter as the ship flipped end for end under maneuvering thrusters in preparation for deceleration.
“We have at least four bogies around the gate area,” Pirelli reported. “We’re out of range for more details until we get closer.”
McKay was just noticing the details filling in on the viewscreen: a red dwarf primary surrounded by layers of asteroids, with what looked to be a cold gas giant beyond the fields; when the boost hit and he was crushed into his seat and nearly into unconsciousness by five gravities worth of deceleration analog-the Eysselink stardrive expanding space behind them like a cosmic boat propeller and the energy building up in the gravito-inertial spectrum until it was forced to feed back into four-dimensional space as gravity analogous to the acceleration or deceleration.
The Eysselink drive made star travel possible, but the damn feedback made the g-tanks necessary for long journeys and made tactical maneuvering a nightmare. McKay had heard they were working on a neural interface to make it possible to control the ship while in the g-tanks, but the prospect of being awake while breathing liquid scared the shit out of him.
Then again, he reflected dimly, from some far distant part of his mind that somehow retained consciousness during the brutal deceleration, breathing liquid didn’t seem as bad as not breathing at all.
Finally, after what seemed like hours of torture, the boost ended and his vision returned along with an agonizing pounding in his head and he could hear a collective gasp both in the shuttle and on the bridge as two dozen people took a deep breath simultaneously.
“Executing turnover,” Sweeny reported. “Preparing for acceleration back to the next gate. Should take about five minutes at one and a half g’s.”
“Tactical,” Patel ordered, “once we hit turnover, I want three spreads of Area Denial missiles launched and detonated just short of the gate in intervals of a thousand kilometers. And launch them quickly… I want our drive field back up with as little delay as possible.”
“Aye sir, preparing to launch now.”
“Area Denial missiles?” Jock murmured a question to Vinnie that McKay barely overheard. Vinnie shot him a baleful glance and Jock shrugged apologetically. “Ay, Captain sir, I’m busy enough keeping track of new infantry weapons!”
“They’re small,” Vinnie told him, sighing like a teacher lecturing a slow student, “launched out of the Gauss cannon coils and then they have a quick burnout solid-core fission drive to take them the rest of the way. They have a small fusion warhead surrounded by lasing rods; when the warhead goes, the rods blast the immediate area with gamma-ray lasers. Takes out any mines, smaller blockade ships, etc… He’s trying to clear the mines before we head through the gate.”
“Launching ADM’s,” Pirelli announced, and a section of the main viewscreen showed dozens of small missiles shooting from the weapons pods so fast they could barely be seen. “That’s the last of them, Admiral.”
“Helm, take us to the wormhole at one point five g’s,” Patel instructed.
One and a half gravities seemed gentle compared to the high gravity deceleration they’d just experienced and McKay was able to keep his attention on the screen display. Six enemy ships were insystem, four of them arrayed around the gate that should lead them to Novoye Rodina. Two of the four were accelerating to intercept the Sheridan, the flare of fusion pulse drives at their tails.
“Admiral,” Pirelli said sharply, “one of the ships heading for us is a rammer. He’s trailing the lighter… same tactic they used with the Decatur.”
“Are the AD missiles going to hit them before they reach us?’
“The first two waves are past their position…” Pirelli reported, checking a sensor readout. “The third… is in range and detonating now.”
A series of flashes on the screen simulated the warheads exploding less than a light-second from the Sheridan, a halo of light surrounding each detonation signifying the ignition of the gamma-ray lasers surrounding each warhead.
“Looks like positive hits on the two ships,” Pirelli said. “Not sure of the damage yet.”
Then without warning, the lead ship, a pirated and converted freighter, was consumed in a huge fusion explosion that expanded into a glowing spherical cloud of gas and debris. A brief cheer erupted on the bridge. “Got her!” Pirelli exclaimed. “The grasers must have ignited her hydrogen fuel stores!”
“What about the rammer?” Patel demanded.
“Can’t tell yet, sir,” Pirelli shook her head. “The explosion is masking her… no, wait! I’m getting her Eysselink signature now… she’s activated her drive field.”
“Come on, Admiral, earn your pay,” Vinnie hissed. McKay glanced at him; he’d never known Vinnie to show nerves in the face of danger, but the man seemed rattled. McKay could sympathize: it was one thing to keep your head and your nerves in check when the bullets were flyin
g and the adrenaline was flowing, it was another thing entirely to sit and wait while simulated icons on a screen decided whether you lived or died from thousands of kilometers away.
“No one has any experience fighting one Eysselink drive ship against another,” Villanueva mused from the pilot’s seat. She turned to Vinnie. “What would you do?”
“Long term,” he said after a moment’s consideration, “I’d develop a Shipbuster missile with an Eysselink drive. Short term… I’d try to use the gravimetic sensor emitters to destabilize her drive field.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.” McKay’s head snapped around and his mouth nearly fell open.
“Admiral,” McKay broadcast over his ‘link to the bridge speakers, “Vinnie had an idea… would it be possible to use our gravimetic emitters to destabilize the rammer’s drive field?” Vinnie glanced at him wide-eyed, looking like he wanted to shush him.
“Pirelli?” Patel threw the question to his Tactical Officer.
“Theoretically it’s possible,” she allowed. “I don’t know what range we would have or how much damage we can do with the reconfigured laser focusing fields…”
“Pirelli, here’s what I want you to do,” Patel said with an intensity born of inspiration. “On my signal, deactivate our drive field, target her with the emitters, hit her with two volleys of Gauss cannon fire, then reactivate the field.”
“Aye, sir,” Pirelli acknowledged. “Helm, prepare to deactivate the drive field.”
“Ready when you are, Angie,” Sweeny said with a grin. She glanced at him sharply, then smiled in return.
“Bogie is two minutes out at current acceleration,” Pirelli announced. “I estimate another minute before our emitters would have any effect.”
“Jesus, sir,” Vinnie said quietly to McKay in the shuttle. “Way to leave my ass hanging in the wind if this doesn’t work.”
“But if it does work, you’ll be the hero of the day, Vinnie,” McKay countered, grinning widely. “By the way, when we get back-assuming we live through this-I think it’s pretty well past time to make you Major Mahoney.” He looked between Vinnie and Villanueva, still grinning. “Then you two can date without feeling guilty.”