by Rick Partlow
“I’m not liking how this is sounding,” Higgs said.
“We have more pressing concerns right now,” Gianeto reminded them. “Four Shipbusters and a whole bunch of big metal slugs just a few minutes out.”
Suddenly there was a fierce, white globe visible on the optical viewers. “That was one of our Shipbusters,” Gianeto announced, excitement in his voice. “Negative detonation on the other one… the countermeasures or the Gauss rounds must have taken it out. Ha! Got one of them!” The threat icon on the right side of the viewscreen flickered out.
“Just one left between us and the gate,” Witten said hopefully.
“Thirty seconds until the Gauss rounds impact,” Gianeto said. “Engineering, power up the antimatter reactor. Francis, kill the plasma burn and activate the Eysselink drive now.”
The pressure of two gravities lifted from their chests as the plasma drive shut down and Gianeto gulped in a huge breath of air, then had to fight not to throw up.
“Drive field is up,” Witten told him. “Station keeping.” He checked a readout. “We can maintain station keeping status for a while, but we ain’t going anywhere.”
“We’ve deflected the Gauss rounds,” Gianeto said, eyes glued to the tactical screen. “Shipbusters are only seconds out. The enemy ship is still accelerating…” He snarled a feral grin. “Three g’s acceleration, ramming course!”
Alarms sounded throughout the ship and Gianeto steeled himself just before what felt like the weight of a planet descended on him, pushing him into the gel of his acceleration couch. He could see a fleeting glimpse of the Shipbusters on the screen as they were ripped apart on impact with the drive field, but then they were past and the Protectorate ship loomed ahead of them, maneuvering rockets flaring as it tried desperately to change course.
“Commander Gianeto,” he heard dimly, over the roaring in his ears, “this is Commander Prieta.” Prieta’s voice sounded as if he were at the bottom of a well. “The antimatter will only last a few more seconds at this rate…”
God, Gianeto prayed silently, just long enough…
There was a white light that filled the bridge and then the pressure disappeared and Gianeto wondered for a brief moment if this was what being dead felt like…
Then his head cleared and he drew a breath and looked down at his station’s display and saw the lidar and radar readings off the remains of the Protectorate ship.
“Sweet Jesus,” Witten murmured. “We cut that one pretty damn close, didn’t we?”
“Commander Gianeto,” Prieta called up from Engineering again, “we have depleted the last of our antimatter stores.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Prieta,” Gianeto told him, letting out a deep, relieved breath. “It lasted just long enough. Weapons, launch the modified Shipbuster and get that gate open before something else pops up. Francis, give us a half g burn on the plasma drive and take us to the gate.”
“Aye, sir,” Witten shot him a grin.
“Medical, this is Gianeto,” the Tactical officer called. “How is the Captain?”
“Stable, sir,” came the answer. “She was in a suspension tank, so the acceleration didn’t affect her.” The medical officer chuckled. “The rest of us are a bit sore, though.”
“Commander Gianeto,” their conversation was interrupted by a call from Security. “This is Lt. Marvez. We were securing Commander Duncan’s cabin and personal affects and we kind of got stuck in there during the emergency acceleration. We’re getting something on Commander Duncan’s ‘link. I think you should hear this, sir.”
“Go ahead and patch it through to the bridge,” Gianeto ordered.
There was a hesitation at the other end of the transmission. “Uh… sir, this is… it’s, well, very sensitive. You might want to hear it in private.”
Gianeto hesitated, then glanced at Higgs and Witten, the only other people on the bridge. “No, Lieutenant,” he decided. “Just patch it through.”
“Yes, sir,” Marvez acquiesced reluctantly.
There was a pause, then the scratchy, static-filled recording began to play. “The situation has changed, Duncan,” the male voice stated without preamble. “O’Keefe has changed his schedule, so the original target area is a no-go. You and the support ships should hold up there in the Sirius system until we can get you a revised target area and strike schedule, then you can gate through and go ahead with the original plan. End of message.”
The recording shut off, replaced by Marvez’s voice. “It keeps repeating, but that’s the gist of it.”
“Higgs,” Gianeto snapped, fixing her with a glare.
“I’m on it!” She assured him, turning back to her station, fingers flying over the display. “Sir, this is not coming via an internal ‘link, I am sure of that. But the system isn’t picking up this transmission…”
“I’m sure because Commander Duncan programmed it specifically not to,” Gianeto said grimly, his eyes beginning to fill with a murderous fury. “Dammit, if the Skipper hadn’t done it already, I’d kill the fucking traitor myself. Get into the subroutines, Janice, find out what he did.” He looked over at Witten. “Francis, once we get through that gate, I want you to kill the drives. We’re going full silent till I say differently.”
“What the hell is going on?” Witten muttered, shaking his head. “Was someone just talking to Commander Duncan about… about assassinating the fucking President?”
“What’s going on,” Gianeto answered, staring at something light-years past the main viewscreen, “is that we’re not just fighting the Protectorate. There’s something else happening here.”
“I’ve got it,” Higgs said, pushing a stray lock of blond hair out of her eyes. “The signal came from a point less than 30,000 kilometers from the wormhole. I’m sending the coordinates to your station.”
Gianeto checked the sensor readout, adjusting the lidar to cover the area she had indicated. “Yeah, it’s there. It’s small… can’t be much bigger than about two or three meters across.”
“It has to be a relay,” Higgs said, “for signals coming through the wormhole.”
“Then it’s coming from the Solar System,” Witten said. “Someone back home wants to use us to kill President O’Keefe!”
“Not just us,” Gianeto corrected him. “Remember they said ‘the support ships.’ That would be those three Protectorate ships we just destroyed. Someone back home, one of our people, is working with Antonov.”
“What are we going to do?” Higgs asked in a small voice, her face pale.
“The gate’s open,” Gianeto announced, eyes still on the main screen. “We’ll be through in two minutes. What we’re going to do once we get through is shut down, go dark and wait until the Skipper wakes up. Air’s too thin up here for an O-4 to make this call. Anyway,” he shook his head, “I wouldn’t know who to try to warn about it.” He met their lost, overwhelmed looks with one of his own. “Who the hell can we trust?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“So, where the hell are we now?” Jock Gregory wondered, sitting up in the g-tank and wiping biotic fluid from his eyes.
Jason McKay wondered the same thing himself. Shaking his muddled head clear, he sat upright and glanced at the readout on the g-sleep chamber’s bulkhead display panel. “We’ve been under for forty-six hours,” he said. “That means we’ve gone through at least two gates, maybe more.”
“Are we there yet, Daddy?” Vinnie muttered, levering himself out of the tank.
“Just a little farther,” McKay returned automatically, carefully stepping out himself and moving stiffly towards the showers.
“We’re still alive,” Esmeralda Villanueva observed as she stepped over to Vinnie, brushing her hand against his. “I wondered when we went into the tanks this time if we would be getting out again.”
“Ah yes,” Jock intoned as he headed into the showers, “I too wondered, as I entered the forbidding chamber of deathlike sleep, whether I would ever see your face once more, my dear Captain Mahon
ey. Sir.”
Vinnie scowled at Jock’s retreating back but Esmeralda’s full-throated laugh interrupted his comeback.
“He reminds me of my younger brother,” she said fondly, shaking her head.
“He reminds me of a dog we used to have,” Vinnie cocked an eyebrow, “who used to shit all over the floor.” He sighed. “I gotta’ get going, Esme… gotta’ meet with Lt. James still… we never did have time to track down where Mironov got that gun.”
“Then I will see you when the opportunity arises,” she said with a wistful smile, letting her leg brush against his as she passed by.
Vinnie felt an electric tingle run up his spine and he closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath before he moved on in to the men’s shower room.
It was less than a half an hour later that McKay stepped onto the bridge. Patel and the bridge crew were already there, of course, having been woken up first, and the viewscreen showed him a familiar picture of one of the systems they’d circumnavigated on their way to Novoye Rodina.
“How long did it take us to lose them, Admiral?” McKay asked as he stepped up behind the command chair.
“I’m not a hundred percent certain we have yet, McKay,” Patel responded grimly. “But by the second jump, they’d slowed to five g’s acceleration and after the third, they seemed to have run out of antimatter. That doesn’t mean they still couldn’t be following on conventional engines. But there’s no trace of enemy activity in this system so far. We have a few hours’ transit time to the next gate.”
“I was hoping we’d have a bit of time to discuss what we’re going to recommend to the President when we get back, sir.”
“Of course,” Patel assented with a shrug. “Commander Pirelli, you have the bridge. “Notify the First Officer that I will be in my cabin.”
“Aye, sir,” Pirelli acknowledged as McKay followed Patel to the lifts.
“Okay, sir,” Lt. James said, “this weapon,” he waved, indicating the Fleet-issue sidearm in the clear-plastic locker built into one wall of the Security station, “is definitely one of ours. Came out of the Sheridan‘s armory. But,” he shook his head, “it was never officially signed out. According to the computer records, the pistol’s transponder never left the armory vault.”
“Well how the hell is that possible, Lieutenant?” Vinnie wanted to know. The two of them were alone in the Security station: Vinnie hadn’t wanted an audience for this investigation.
“The transponder was physically removed from the weapon.” James motioned towards the back of the pistol’s handle, where Vinnie could, upon closer inspection, see a small cavity. “I had the armory crew check… it’s still sitting in the vault. It was hidden behind another handgun.”
“There have to be security cameras in the vault,” Vinnie assumed. “That would let us see who removed it.”
“Of course, sir,” James agreed. “If we knew when they did it. No unauthorized personnel have been in the armory and the last full visual inventory was before we left the Solar System. Even if I just restrict it to the time since Mironov came on board, that’s days of footage that we’d have to watch in close to real-time to be sure of what was being done.”
“Tell you what, Lt. James,” Vinnie said, “instead, pull up a list of all the personnel to enter the armory on this trip. Highlight the ones that entered since Mironov came on board.”
“No problem, sir,” James spoke the command into the computer’s audio pickup and the list appeared in the display over the main Security station console.
“All right,” Vinnie went on, “now, I want you to bring up a list of everyone who’s been in Mironov’s cabin since he came on board, and cross-reference it with the ones who’ve been in the armory.”
“But Captain Mahoney,” James said with a frown, “whoever took the gun could have hidden it somewhere and let Mironov come and get it later. Wouldn’t that have been safer?”
“Yes, it would,” Vinnie admitted, “but we’ve gotta’ start somewhere, so let’s just add that to the list. Cause if this doesn’t work, James, you personally are going to be sifting through every second of footage we have of Mironov until we find out where he got that gun.”
“Yes, sir,” James assented glumly. “All right, here’s the list. There aren’t many: just me, Colonel McKay, the Admiral, the First Officer Commander Nunez, and… I think Security Tech Morales. That’s it.”
“Now find me which of those visited the armory since Mironov has been on the ship but prior to visiting his room.”
James relayed the question to the computer and then examined the results. “That would be just me, Colonel McKay and the Admiral.”
“Bring up the video of all three of you when you were in his room after visiting the armory. Can’t be that much of it.”
“I’ll pull up mine first,” James decided. “I was only there for a minute when we gave him the cabin and then again when we put him there before the battle.”
The video played on the holographic display, showing James doing his duty, checking the cabin before Mironov entered and then dropping the man off prior to the battle and sealing the door.
“Guess you’re off the hook, Lieutenant,” Vinnie spared him a small grin. ‘Course, as head of Security, you could have doctored the recordings. But like I told James, ya’ gotta’ start somewhere.
“Now for your Colonel McKay,” James went on. Vinnie thought about telling him not to bother-he would believe that he himself had given Mironov the gun before he’d think the Colonel had done it-but decided that wouldn’t be fair, seeing as how the man had gone ahead and shown footage of himself already.
McKay had spent quite a bit more time with Mironov, obviously, and they had to fast-forward through the footage, making McKay look a bit absurd in the process, Vinnie thought with vague amusement. But as he’d known as certainly as his name, there was no sign of the Colonel passing the Russian a weapon.
James sighed. “Just the Admiral left, which is a huge waste of time. Then I’m going to wind up sitting here for hours watching that loony Russian play with himself.”
Even as James was calling up the video of the Admiral, Vinnie was nodding in agreement with the man. There had to be some way of paring down the footage. The problem was, James was right: Mironov could have picked up the weapon almost anywhere on the ship. All it would have required was whoever had stolen it leaving him some sort of message. They were back to square one.
“I don’t see too much need for discussion, McKay,” Patel admitted as he sat behind his desk, motioning McKay into a chair. “We have to take out the Protectorate fleet and destroy their ability to make war.”
“That’s a maneuver, Admiral,” McKay argued, “not the main goal.”
“And what is the main goal, then?” Patel asked, raising an eyebrow.
McKay spread his hands as if the answer were obvious. “Sir, our goal should be to either capture or destroy the alien technology they found on Novoye Rodina. Without it, their ability to make war on us, as you say, is incredibly limited: not much more potent than the Belt Pirates.”
“Good point,” the Admiral admitted, nodding in acknowledgement. “But how does that affect our strategy, or what we’re going to recommend to the President?”
“A frontal attack will be costly, sir. More costly than we can likely support, given the current economic realities. What we need to do is draw them away and launch a targeted strike on Novoye Rodina. If possible, we secure it, but I doubt it will be that easy. I think the most straightforward plan with the best chance of success is to plant nukes and take out their production facility.”
“That sounds pretty risky,” Patel said, brow furling. “Why not just take it out with missiles?”
“Antonov’s had a long time to set up space defenses,” McKay explained. “I’m thinking he wouldn’t expect a small-scale insertion, particularly if it’s masked by a large space attack.”
Patel smiled knowingly. “And I suppose you’ll be leading that operati
on personally, eh?”
“Unfinished business, sir,” McKay replied with a shrug.
“Colonel,” Vinnie’s voice sounded in his ear over his ‘link’s earpiece. “I know you’re in Admiral Patel’s office; don’t respond to this call. Act as if you’re still talking to him, sir.”
McKay had never been much of a poker player, but he tried to put on his best poker face nonetheless and act as if he hadn’t heard the transmission. Patel was chuckling lightly, shaking his head.
“McKay, someone needs to have a little professional development talk with you,” he was saying. “You’re a Colonel now… O-6’s don’t generally lead commando raids. Shouldn’t you delegate something like that to Captain Mahoney?”
“There will be plenty for all of us to do, sir, I’m sure,” he replied, trying not to sound distracted.
“Sir,” Vinnie said quickly, “we ran some of the Security video from Mironov’s cabin. Admiral Patel was in there the day before Mironov took over engineering-he was in there alone, no one else. We can’t be one hundred percent certain because the angle’s bad, but we’re pretty sure we just saw the Admiral put the pistol in the cabin, in the clothes locker.”
It took every ounce of will and self-control that Jason McKay had within him to keep his composure at that moment and he knew his face had given something away, so he wasn’t surprised when Patel frowned at him.
“Is something wrong, McKay?” the Admiral asked.
McKay’s mind worked furiously and still he knew it couldn’t work fast enough to reason through this, so he went with his gut, as he had so many times before. “Sorry, sir, I just got a call from Vinnie down in Security. He says there’s something that you and I should see, if you wouldn’t mind. He says it’s important and he’d rather we saw it in person.”
Patel’s eyebrow rose but he shrugged assent. “All right, let’s go while we have the time.”
It wasn’t far from the Admiral’s cabin to the Security station, but to Jason McKay it seemed like kilometers as he feverishly worked possibilities out in his mind. Why the hell would Admiral Patel put a gun in Mironov’s room? It made absolutely no sense; if the Admiral was a traitor, why would he have worked so hard to save the ship after Mironov’s-he still found it uncomfortable and confusing to think of the man as Antonov-sabotage? But what other reason could there be for him helping the Russian?