Revelation Run

by Rick Partlow

  Fuentes was shaking now, and Laurent found her own shoulders shuddering in empathy.

  “But it doesn’t have to be so brutal and abrupt, Eduard.” Grieg showed his teeth in what might have been called a smile, if you were feeling generous. “As little use as Starkad has for spies, we have great appreciation for intelligence sources. If you tell us everything you know, perhaps a place can be found for you on Stavanger. A new identity, a little money?” The lips closed and the wolf smile disappeared into something even less pleasant. “This offer is temporary, and is entirely dependent on you telling me everything you know about this place in the next ten seconds.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Fuentes insisted. “I’m just a tech! I maintain the air conditioning systems! I was asleep when the alarm sounded and I missed my shuttle! They don’t give me any classified information!”

  “Nine.”

  “Honestly man!” Fuentes would have thrown himself to his knees, Laurent thought, if the Marines hadn’t restrained him. “I don’t know nothing! The Rangers run everything! Guy named Cordova!”

  “Eight.”

  “Mithra’s Blood, man, I don’t know!”

  “Oh, the hell with it,” Grieg snapped and shot Fuentes in the leg.

  Laurent jumped, suppressing a yell. Fuentes didn’t try. He was screaming, and now the Marines did let him fall, let him clutch at his left thigh as the blood spurted from the wound. It had hit the femoral artery, she realized with a cold horror. Grieg knelt over the man, prodding at his leg with the barrel of his gun, giving the screams a higher pitch.

  “You’re dying, Eduard,” he told Fuentes. “You have minutes unless I allow my troops to give you medical aid. I will do that when you’ve told me what I want to know.”

  “Mithra’s Blood, I…” Fuentes trailed off, his face twisted in agony. “The place, it’s rigged to blow. Fusion bombs.” He paused, sucking in a breath. “I helped install them. Cordova will have set the timers.”

  “How do I disarm them?” Grieg demanded, his casual façade falling away. He grabbed Fuentes by the collar of his fatigue blouse and jerked his head up. “How do I stop the timer? Is there a code?”

  “It can’t be stopped,” Fuentes told him, shaking his head, eyes already beginning to glaze over in shock. “Not once it’s armed. Except by disassembling the whole thing, and that would take hours. The SOP is for the timer to be set for an hour, no more.”

  “Fuck!” Grieg spat, straightening, shoulders tensed as if he wanted to shoot someone else in his frustration. Laurent shrank away from him, realizing she was a handy target. Finally, Grieg seemed to calm down and he leaned over Fuentes again. “Is there anyone else left here but you?”

  “I think….” Fuentes head lolled and Grieg slapped him across the face lightly, bringing the coherence back to his eyes. “I think Terrin might still be here. I didn’t see him leave the control room…”

  “Terrin who?” Grieg shook his shoulder. “You’re going to die in a minute unless we stop the bleeding, you moron! Terrin who?”

  “Brannigan.” Fuentes gasped the word. “Terrin Brannigan. The Guardian’s son.”

  Now Grieg did smile, a real smile. He stood up and casually shot Fuentes through the forehead. Laurent didn’t jump this time, but her hands clenched in an automatic defensive gesture.

  “Captain Gerhardt!” Grieg called into his ‘link. Laurent didn’t look around, but she assumed the woman was still involved in organizing the search outside their chamber. “Terrin Brannigan, son of the Guardian of Sparta is in this facility. Find him, no matter if you have to tear this place down to do it! You have less than an hour!”

  “Sir,” Laurent said, tentative but feeling someone had to ask it. “What about the fusion bombs?”

  Grieg sniffed at the question with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “I’m not leaving here empty-handed, Captain Laurent.” He speared her with a glare. “And neither are you.”

  Terrin felt an insistent itch at the back of his neck, as if a mosquito was buzzing around him, landing just long enough to bite before flying away again. It wasn’t fear. Not that he was immune to fear, he was simply familiar with it by now, and this was something different. He thought perhaps it was pressure to perform, pressure not to let everyone down, which was something he wasn’t that familiar with.

  “Where the hell are we going?” Cordova asked, probably for the third time.

  He hadn’t answered yet for several very good reasons. They had very limited time, the hike up these damned stairs was killing him and he couldn’t spare the breath, but mostly, because he didn’t want to admit he really wasn’t sure.

  “Something I saw going over the plans for this place,” he gasped, taking a break for just a moment, leaning on the railing.

  The stairwell was narrow and dark, lit only by the occasional chemical striplight. They’d started out the climb in the bare, unfinished area behind the living quarters, a section they hadn’t had the time nor personnel to investigate as of yet with so much else to do.

  “It’s something that might not even be there,” Terrin admitted, “but if it is, it’s a ship, sort of.” He shook his head and waved a hand. “We’ll figure it out when we get there!”

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Franny said, shocking Terrin with the taut hostility in her tone, “but I’d rather not die here. Can we discuss this while we run?”

  Terrin barely remembered the readout he’d seen in the construction reports. It had only been random chance he’d even brought up the record, just a review of the decryption program they’d developed. He wasn’t sure at the time if it had been an ongoing project or simply a blue-sky proposal from some overeager engineer, but at some point in the last few minutes, he’d convinced himself it existed. All he had to go on was a single line in Colonel Walken Zeir’s personal log regarding reallocation of antimatter fuel for the ships the Imperial complement at Terminus had sent out seeking food and supplies, just a single mention of diverting fuel from the “Courier.” If the Courier was someone’s pet time-sink that had never materialized, they’d come a long way and spent a lot of energy for nothing.

  He nearly ran headlong into the door, bouncing off it with his shoulder instead by the grace of stepping with his right foot instead of his left. He felt for a physical latch but couldn’t find one, couldn’t see anything else.

  “Captain!” he yelled, then turned and realized the Ranger was about ten centimeters behind his right shoulder. “Can you shine a light here?”

  Even in the dark, Cordova moved with trained precision, stripping the weapon’s light off his rifle and holding it up to shine on the door. Squinting against the glare, Terrin spotted the locking panel fitted flush with the wall beside the dull-grey metal of the door and stabbed at it with a finger to try to activate it. If the damned thing had developed a short, or they hadn’t gotten around to wiring the power down here yet…

  It flickered fitfully to life and he almost shouted with exhilaration before he remembered where he was. The display settled down into an input screen waiting for a code and he tapped the command override they’d found in Zeir’s notes and murmured a reflexive prayer.

  Damn. Praying again. This spy business is going to make a believer out of me again.

  He’d been raised Reformed Imperial Zoroastrian, like most people in the remains of the old Empire, but he hadn’t been observant since he’d been old enough to start blaming Mithra for his mother’s death. In the last year, he’d seen enough of what humans were capable of doing to each other with no divine intervention to begin giving his deity the benefit of the doubt.

  The other side of the door lay in utter darkness, unbroken by as much as a glimmer, and he froze for a moment, unsure of his next step.

  “Let me through,” Cordova said, trying to squeeze past with his flashlight, but he needn’t have bothered.

  Less than a second later, light panels dark for over four centuries began snapping to life, illuminating one
section of the room after another in quick, linear succession.

  “Yes!” Now Terrin did yell, pumping his fist and be damned if anyone heard him.

  The Courier was just as he’d imagined it…more or less. A cylinder a hundred meters long by thirty wide, it was smaller than a shuttle and showed no sign of any conventional reaction drive, just a series of vectored thrust nozzles along its belly and matching air intakes on the upper hull. It was bright silver, unadorned by any symbol or alphanumeric designator. He saw only one obvious point of entry, a circular patch on the hull near the bow. It rested on nothing—well, to be more precise, it rested on magnetic fields from electromagnets set in the floor, keeping it a meter off the solid rock just as they had since last humans had darkened the small chamber. Some sort of monitoring equipment surrounded the ship, though he couldn’t identify what they measured by the look of them. Maybe things he didn’t even have names for yet. He was more interested in what was missing than what was there.

  When they’d found the ship Jonathan had insisted on calling the Shakak II months ago, it had been stored at an angle, tilted upward to match the section of roof configured to open for its launch. The Courier was horizontal, barely fitting in the chamber, which seemed to have been cut to fit the ship, whatever equipment they’d used to construct it and not much else, and it was definitely not meant to egress through the roof. Directly in front of it was a tube, smooth as glass and probably cut by a laser, only centimeters wider than the ship itself, going on into the rock face of the wall further than he could see.

  A steep, narrow set of stone-cut steps led down from the doorway to the platform where the Courier sat, and Terrin scrambled down them, hands sliding over the railings, suddenly full of energy again.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Cordova asked him. “Some sort of shuttle?”

  “It’s a prototype short-range starship they called the Courier,” Terrin told him, jogging across the platform at the base of the stairs, scanning the hull for a control panel to open the hatch. “It doesn’t have a jump drive, just the Alanson-McCleary stardrive and an antimatter reactor to power it.”

  “That thing has a stardrive in it?” Franny asked, eyes narrowed in obvious skepticism. “It barely looks big enough to get us to orbit!”

  “I’m just hoping they left some fuel in the damned thing,” Terrin said, finally finding the lock panel for the ship’s hatch.

  No code necessary, it slid silently aside with a slap of his palm on the plate…and he cursed long and loud.

  “What’s wrong?” Cordova asked, jogging up beside him. Then, “Oh.”

  The cockpit was sealed off from the rest of the ship, and cramped, stuffed with monitors and displays and two very tiny seats. Only two.

  “I’m small,” Franny was saying, very little hope in either her statement or the expression on her face. “Maybe I could sit on someone’s lap…”

  Terrin didn’t argue with her because he didn’t want to be the one who said it, but it was obvious only two of them could fit into the thing. Hell, it was so cramped he wasn’t sure he could squeeze through to the left-hand seat. And maybe, he thought, he shouldn’t try.

  “Here,” Terrin said, forcing himself to do the right thing before he let his fear get the best of him, shoving the storage box of data crystals toward Cordova. “You two go. I’ll surrender to Starkad. I’m too valuable to kill and Dad can negotiate for my release. It’s the data that’s important.”

  Cordova sneered at the box and pushed it back at him.

  “If you think I’m going to be the one to tell the Guardian I left his son behind for the enemy to capture, you’re fucking nuts. Get in the damned ship and make sure it can fly.” He motioned sharply into the hatch. “Now. That’s an order.”

  Terrin stared back at the man, wondering if he should try to argue, but realized he wasn’t going to win. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to. He clambered inside, having to eel his way over the right-hand acceleration couch to reach the pilot’s chair. He left the storage box in the right seat and fought to free his right boot where it was caught on the center command console.

  How the hell am I going to fly this thing?

  The ship they’d found a few months ago had come equipped with the equivalent of a neural helmet on a mech, a small halo type device that read the intent of the wearer, but as he settled into the pilot’s seat, he didn’t see one. A ring of lights had come on when he’d opened the hatch, illuminating the controls, but the main displays were still frustratingly dark. He began touching the controls, hoping a haptic hologram would pop up, or maybe a magic genie to give him three wishes.

  Because the first one will be for another damned seat!

  “You should go, sir,” Franny said, her voice carrying through the hatch, high-pitched and a bit grating. “Seriously, you know secrets and stuff. I’m just a tech, I won’t be very much use to them.”

  She’s trying to be brave, but she sounds scared shitless.

  “Petty Officer Hayden,” Cordova replied, clear and final, “I am the ranking officer here, and I will be the one to decide who gets on this ship. The decision has been made. Your job is to do your duty, follow your orders and get your butt through that hatch.”

  He wondered if Cordova was scared. The man didn’t seem scared of anything, but it could have been an act, a front he put on as a leader, to inspire his troops. He knew Logan got scared sometimes, even though he didn’t show it. Maybe even Lyta got scared. Naw, probably not.

  It was all going to be a waste of time anyway, unless he could figure out how to use these controls.

  “Come on, Courier,” he murmured. “Give me some help here.”

  The command console display lit up so abruptly and unexpectedly, Terrin nearly jumped out of his seat.

  “System initializing,” a voice sounded behind him and this time he did jump, craning his neck around until he realized it had come from speakers set in the headrest of his acceleration couch.

  Synthesized computer voices weren’t unheard of in the Five Dominions, but they weren’t very popular. Legends of the AI Wars and the collapse of the old Terran Republic were the fodder for horror stories told around campfires to this day, and no one wanted to make their computers seem too human-like.

  “What did you require assistance with?” the computer asked him.

  “Fuel storage display,” he snapped, disliking the idea of talking to a computer, but lacking the time to worry about it.

  The machine complied and a status bar appeared on the main screen, depressingly close to empty. Terrin’s gut twisted and he dreaded asking the next question.

  “How far will that take us?” He thought about the fact they hadn’t brought any food with them and weren’t likely to find any on a ship stored in a facility whose original crew had starved to death. “At top speed,” he added, lest the computer start quoting Hohmann Transfer orbits to take them out of the star system in a century’s time.

  “At the maximum sustainable speed for the Courier with the current fuel load, the vehicle can reach 9.3581 light-years, including initial orbital insertion within seventy-four hours and fifteen minutes.”

  Shit.

  Nine and a half light years on what had to be two percent of the maximum fuel load was damned impressive, but this place was quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Was there anything habitable that close? He thought about asking the computer before remembering its records would be over four hundred years out of date. Instead, he fished his ‘link off his belt and called up the star charts he’d downloaded from the base’s main computer system to help him run alternate courses of approach for hauling out the technology.

  Won’t have to worry about that.

  And there it was. Far from ideal, but something.

  “Franny!” he yelled, leaning over toward the hatch. “Get in the ship!”

  She’d still been arguing with Cordova and his call seemed to snap her out of whatever logic loop had deceived her into thinking she had a c
hance of winning. She shut her mouth and climbed through the opening into the right-hand seat, grabbing the storage box and settling it between her feet on the deck.

  Cordova leaned inside and fished three ration bars out of the thigh pocket of his fatigues, handing them to Franny.

  “You’ll need these more than me.” The officer frowned. “Are you going to be able to make it? Is there enough fuel?”

  “Enough to get us nine light years,” Terrin said with a shrug. “There’s a system out there with a private asteroid colony I think we can reach.”

  Terrin caught Cordova’s eye as the Ranger was about to pull back out of the hatch.

  “Thank you, Captain,” he told him. “Is there anyone you want me to contact…?” He trailed off, unsure how to ask a man who was about to die to save them what he wanted his family to be told.

  “No one who matters. Just tell Colonel Randell I did my duty.”

  Terrin didn’t have the chance to respond. A burst of gunfire echoed through the chamber, bullets ricocheting off the hull of the ship, punctuated by shouted commands from the entrance to the chamber. The enemy had found them. Terrin swore and flinched away as a round passed through the hatch and smacked into the inner bulkhead, bouncing off and dying on the deck, a tiny, smoking tantalum dart.

  Cordova was returning fire one-handed, spraying burst after burst at the doorway as he stepped away from the hatch and slapped his left palm against the control plate. Metal slid into place, sealing them into the tiny cockpit of the starship. Franny was staring at the bare grey inner surface of the hatch, pale and disbelieving.

  “Courier,” Terrin said clearly, “take us out of here at maximum survivable boost and get this ship into orbit.”

  “Initializing atmospheric thrusters,” the Courier replied, and Franny’s eyes widened even further.

  “Is the ship talking to us?” she asked, almost as if the concept offended her more than the idea of being shot at.

  “Heading required before takeoff,” the ship’s computer reminded him, not paying attention to Franny’s question.