by Rick Partlow
The one thing that he couldn’t shake though, no matter how many scenarios played themselves out in his head, was the conviction that there was no way that his friend Arvid Patel was a traitor; there was no way that the man he’d fought beside six years ago was working for the Protectorate.
He hoped to God he was right, because if he was wrong, Patel could easily have him and whoever else saw the video put in confinement and then erase everything.
The door to Security was closed and sealed, but Patel’s palm on the door plate opened it and they entered to find Vinnie and Lt. James seated at the console. Both men jumped to their feet as the officers entered.
“Admiral,” Vinnie nodded, the expression on his face like a kid who’d walked in on his parents having sex.
“All right,” Patel waved a hand impatiently. “What did we need to see?”
“Well, umm, sir,” Vinnie said hesitantly, “Lt. James and I were going through video footage from Mironov’s room and we… we think we found who slipped him the weapon..”
“Excellent, let’s see it.”
Lt. James looked to Vinnie, face pale. Vinnie shrugged helplessly and hit the control to show the video. While Patel and McKay watched the playback, Vinnie watched Patel. He didn’t react at first as he saw himself enter the cabin, but then his eyes grew wide as he realized that Mironov wasn’t in the cabin.
“When was this taken?” He asked hoarsely.
“The day before Mironov took the hostages in Engineering,” Vinnie replied quietly, pointing to the date/time stamp projected in a corner of the picture.
For the first time since Vinnie had met the Admiral, Patel seemed speechless. “But that…” he finally stuttered, face slack. “That’s not possible!”
Then he saw himself reach into his belt under his uniform jacket, and pull something dark and metallic out, quickly hiding it between stacks of clothes in the wall locker. When he turned around in the video, his face was blankly intense, his mouth in a hard line but his eyes staring at something a thousand kilometers away. Then he left the cabin.
Patel looked around him at the other officers, mouth agape. “Gentlemen,” he said slowly and carefully, “I can’t explain this.”
“Vinnie,” McKay asked, “is there any other suspicious interaction between the Admiral and Mr. Mironov that was caught on the security cameras?”
“There was one thing we found,” Vinnie confirmed, “when we looked up every time they’d been together since Mironov came on board.” He nodded to Lt. James, who pulled up the footage.
“This is earlier that same day,” Vinnie supplied.
The video showed the Admiral walking into the cafeteria, stepping over to the dispenser and grabbing a cup of coffee. Mironov was sitting at a table nearby and rose when he saw the Admiral enter. He stepped close behind the officer and as he reached for a cup and paused.
“Lodka,” the Russian whispered. In the video, the Admiral’s eyes took on the same distant stare as they had in Mironov’s cabin. “Get me a handgun. Put it in my cabin.”
Then he turned and was gone. Admiral Patel left his coffee cup sitting on the counter and left the mess without his expression changing.
“You go straight from there to the armory,” Lt. James finally spoke. “You asked the guard on duty to run an errand, then removed the transponder and took the pistol. A few hours later, you left it in Mironov’s cabin. Sir.”
“Lodka,” McKay repeated, rubbing a hand over his chin. “That’s Russian for ‘boat.’ What the hell is the significance of that?”
Patel was still staring at the video display, his face a mixture of rage, disbelief and absolute horror. “Hypnoprobe me,” he snarled suddenly.
“Sir?” McKay looked up at him, startled.
“McKay, I don’t remember any of this! In fact, I actively remember not doing it!” He threw his hands up helplessly. “I can’t explain it and I am not going to just stick myself in a holding cell until I know how it happened. Take me to the medical bay and hypnoprobe me, McKay and find out what the hell happened to me!”
McKay looked his old friend in the eye, seeing the desperation and fear in the man’s face. “Aye, sir.” It might, he thought sadly, be the last order that Patel ever gave.
“I just don’t believe it,” Commander Estefan Nunez repeated, shaking his head.
McKay glanced at him sidelong as they both waited for the ship’s medical officer to finish setting up the hypnoprobe. Nunez was a short, broad-bodied man in his early forties, his face jowly, his dark hair cut short and tightly curled. Right now, watching the Admiral strapped into a seat in front of the machine, he looked as if he’d been sucker-punched, and McKay knew the feeling well.
“Pull it together, Steve,” Patel told him, staring at the memory probe with a bit of trepidation. “No matter what we find out, you’re going to be in charge till we get home. Who are you going to have as your acting XO? I know Pirelli is senior, but she’s a hell of a Tactical Officer, so you might want to keep her on the bridge in case we have to fight again.”
“Probably Sweeny then,” Nunez decided, swallowing hard and trying to steady himself. “I’ll bring Ghent up from the auxiliary bridge to run the Helm.”
“And make sure you listen to McKay,” Patel instructed him. “He’s not always right, but he’s always worth listening to.”
“We’re ready,” the medical officer announced, swinging the hypnoprobe’s visor into place over Patel’s eyes. She pulled an injector from a tray and applied it to his bared arm. “Once we activate the probe, you can ask your questions, but you need to speak into this microphone,” she pointed to a small mic that extended from the side of the machine, “and they need to be specific. If this is something he can’t access consciously, he’s not going to be able to help guide you in your line of inquiry.”
“I understand, Dr. Walters,” McKay said, smiling thinly. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”
Walters seemed to blush a bit as she remembered who she was talking to. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m activating the probe now.”
Patel was lolling slightly as the drugs took effect, but when the light patterns began to pulse in the hypnoprobe’s visor, he stiffened slightly.
“Admiral Patel,” McKay said quietly into the microphone, “why did you give Mironov the gun?”
“I don’t remember,” Patel responded, his voice steady and clear but with an automatic tone to it, as if he were reading from a script.
McKay frowned. “What does the word ‘lodka‘ mean to you?”
“You said it was ‘boat,’ in Russian.”
“When did you first hear the word?” McKay pressed him.
The Admiral paused, not speaking for a long moment. “I don’t remember.”
McKay glanced at the medical officer, who was frowning in confusion. “But you have heard the word before this week?”
“I don’t remember.” The answer came faster this time.
McKay reached down and turned off the microphone, leaning back against the wall, his face thoughtful.
“He’s suppressing the memory,” McKay mused.
“How is that possible?” Dr. Walters asked. “I’ve never heard of anyone being able to fight the hypnoprobe.”
“It’s possible,” he told her, “but it’s not easy. It takes deep conditioning by experts.”
“Wouldn’t that take some time to do?” Nunez asked him. “When would that have happened?”
“Is there a way to get past it?” Dr. Walters interjected before he could answer the XO.
“I don’t know when it would have happened,” McKay told the XO, “but yes, it would have taken days at least.” He turned to the medical officer. “There are ways, but it’s risky and to be honest with you, I’ve never tried it, just heard about it from a colleague.” He hesitated, weighing Admiral Patel’s desperate desire to know the truth against the risk to his friend’s health. “Do you have any neuronomine in the medical stores?”
Walters raised an
eyebrow. “I’m not sure… I haven’t even heard that name since medical school.” She pulled a small tablet out of her pocket and pulled up an inventory. “By God, we do have a little of it.”
“Inject the Admiral with 10 cc’s of it,” he instructed her.
She looked at him doubtfully but went back into the drug storage cabinets and typed the name into the console. A motorized retrieval system delivered a vial of the drug to a dispenser tray and Walters pulled it out then fed the vial into an injector. She paused with the injector near Patel’s arm.
“Colonel,” she said, “I don’t know how this will interact with the psychoactives…”
“I do,” he said gravely. “And it’s not good. Prepare to treat for seizures and intracranial bleeding.”
“Jesus, sir!” she exclaimed, eyes widening. “Are you sure we should do this?”
“It’s what the Admiral wanted,” McKay told her. He looked to Nunez. “It’s your call, though, Commander… you’re in charge now.”
Nunez’s eyes narrowed and McKay could almost see the debate going on in the man’s head. Then he visibly came to a decision. “Give the Admiral the drug, Dr. Walters,” he said quietly but firmly. “I take responsibility for the consequences.”
The medical officer was still shaking her head doubtfully as she placed the head of the injector against Patel’s arm and pressed the activation stud. The drug hissed into the officer’s veins and the doctor stepped back, watching the Admiral with a worried look. Patel showed no effect for a moment but then he began to jerk against his restraints, his muscles tensing, the veins in his neck popping out, and the only sound coming from his lips a strained moan as his breathing became labored and harsh.
“Is he having a seizure?” Nunez asked, alarm on his face.
“A minor one,” the medical officer confirmed, her mouth set in a grim line. She brought out another injector and quickly used it. The Admiral relaxed, his head hanging forward against the visor, his breathing slowing down to a steady rate. Dr. Walters pulled a small MRI unit over to the Admiral’s chair and took a quick reading. “No bleeding,” she said with a relieved sigh. “I think he’s okay. Go ahead and ask your questions, sir.”
“Admiral Patel,” McKay spoke into the microphone again, “when did you first hear the word ‘lodka‘ and what is its significance?”
“I first heard it five years ago,” the Admiral told them easily, in a calm, drowsy voice, “when my ship was boarded by Protectorate troops in the Tau Ceti system, just after our relief mission to Aphrodite.”
“What the fuck?” Nunez muttered as Dr. Walters’ mouth dropped open in shock. McKay only just restrained himself from muttering a curse, refraining only because of the knowledge that it would be picked up by the hypnoprobe’s microphone.
“The word ‘lodka’ was to be the trigger,” Patel went on, oblivious to their reactions. “I was instructed that the next time I heard it, I would be given instructions and I must follow them as if they were orders from the President, then I was to forget everything connected with the event.”
“Were you given any other instructions?” McKay asked carefully, forcing his brain to work despite the shock.
“Yes,” Patel said in a steady drone. “I was to forget that the ship had been captured, and instead remember an antimatter feed chamber fault that caused our return to be delayed. And I was instructed that if there was ever a possibility of the Republic finding the Protectorate homeworld, that I was to make sure that I was along on the mission. Especially if you were to be involved, McKay-they wanted me to keep an eye on you if you ever came close to finding them.”
“Was Antonov there?” McKay demanded. “Did you see him?”
“No, I never saw him,” Patel admitted. “I just saw the biomech troopers who were guarding us and the doctors who were hypnoprobing all of us.”
“Who was on the ship?” McKay asked, a faint memory of the mission coming back to him with a creeping feeling of horror. “Besides the regular crew, who else was on that mission?”
“Colonel Kage was there; he’s a general now. Unpleasant, abrasive son of a bitch, but intelligent.” McKay felt the hairs prickling on his arms. Kage. Why am I not surprised? “And that Senator… Xavier Dominguez. He was there too.”
McKay froze, cold fire running through his veins. He didn’t look around, but if he had, he would have seen Dr. Walters and Commander Nunez mirroring his stunned expression.
“Vice…” He coughed, clearing his throat of the lump that had suddenly formed there. “Vice President Xavier Dominguez?” He asked.
“Yes, that’s him. He did get elected Daniel O’Keefe’s Vice President later on. He seemed sincere; nice man. A bit too smooth, perhaps, but after all he is a politician.”
Trying to keep his hand from shaking, McKay reached out and switched off the microphone, turning to face Nunez. “Commander,” he said, iron discipline keeping his voice steady, “I’m going to pull up a manifest from that mission. If we find any other crewmembers that were on it, it’s my recommendation that they be confined to quarters for the rest of this voyage.”
“Of course,” Nunez waved an impatient acceptance. “But Colonel… we have bigger problems than that! The fucking Vice President! We have to get home… we have to tell people about this!”
“If they don’t know already, Commander,” McKay said with a grim nod. “If they don’t know already…”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Shannon Stark slept fitfully in the unfamiliar cot, unable to get comfortable and also unable to shut down her conscious mind. It was unusual and frustrating for her. She had always been able to grab sleep whenever it was available, even strapped into an acceleration couch. But here, in the sparsely furnished Intelligence Service safe-house in Houston, she simply couldn’t shut out everything that was happening.
She knew that Ari and Roza were in the next room, Val and her daughter were down the hall and that the operatives that Tom had assigned to her were standing watch, some inside near the front door and some surreptitiously patrolling outside. Despite that, however, she felt utterly alone in a way she hadn’t since the War.
Dammit, she thought, rearranging her pillows once again, how did I wind up in this position again? Wasn’t it enough to have to save the world once?
Theoretically, she should have handed the whole thing off to the Republic Investigative Service, the agency in charge of domestic law enforcement; but they were a joke, notoriously inefficient and inept, and with the Vice President corrupted and the money of the Multicorps Executive Council behind the scheme, she just couldn’t trust anyone else.
Up to now, it hadn’t seemed real, somehow… it had the cognitive plausible deniability of being in the shadows, invisible to the rest of the world. But Wednesday would change all that and she wasn’t sure she was ready for the ramifications.
She tried to force it all down, to bring on needed sleep with an old mantra she’d used as a child, repeating “silence, darkness” to herself in her head till it drowned out all other thought. Finally she felt herself being drawn into the dark embrace of sleep… and then her ‘link beeped for attention. Swearing softly, she pushed the ear bud into place.
“Stark,” she answered abruptly, trying not to snap in frustration.
“Ma’am, it’s Lt. Franks,” the voice in her ear announced, a tinge of excitement in his usually steady voice. “We received a tightbeamed pulse message about ten minutes ago from somewhere out in the Belt. It’s the Decatur, ma’am… they’re back!”
“Jason… I mean, the Colonel is back?” Shannon bolted upright in bed, relief flooding into her suddenly, highlighting an ache deep inside her that she had hardly noticed with everything else that had happened.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Franks told her. “It’s encrypted and it’s for your eyes only. I’m sending it to your tablet.”
She disconnected without another word and lunged across the bed for her tablet.
“Please be okay,” she mut
tered urgently in half a prayer.
The message was encoded biometrically and she obediently pressed her finger to a port in the side where a small needle pricked it and took a DNA sample from her blood. A few minutes passed as a progress bar showed the status of the decryption and then she was looking at an image of Joyce Minishimi. The woman was in a medical bay bed in zero gravity, held lightly in place by padded straps across her chest and hips and she looked gaunt and pale; and Shannon fought back a rising sense of doom.
“Colonel Stark,” Minishimi said a bit hoarsely, as if she couldn’t draw in a full breath, “this is Captain Minishimi. We’re in the asteroid belt. We’re intact but we’re deadlined on antimatter. How we got here… well, I hope you’re sitting down…”
“Well, now I really don’t know what in the fuck is going on,” Shannon admitted tiredly, running her hands over her face, elbows on the table of the safe-house’s kitchen.
“I was almost ready to believe that the Protectorate wasn’t involved at all,” Valerie said, nodding, from where she sat opposite Shannon. The young senator looked drained, her normally styled hair hanging limply and circles under her eyes. She’d left her daughter sleeping in her room when Shannon had woken her.
“At least we know the boss is okay,” Ari interjected. He and Roza shared a rumpled but satisfied post-coital glow but were businesslike as they had viewed the recorded message with the others. “Sailing into the teeth of the enemy,” he amended with a shrug, “but he was alive when she left him. And he’s got Admiral Patel there, too.”
“Admiral Patel,” Shannon nodded in grim counterpoint, “who was also aboard the Patton when it was hijacked.”