by Rick Partlow
The conference room was straight down the main hallway, and I didn’t need to ask to know that was where the general was waiting for me. He’d messaged me about twenty times while I was in flight from Austin, telling me where I should go once I landed and asking repeatedly why I was taking so long. He could have just told me what the whole thing was about via message and skipped the meeting, but that wasn’t something generals did, because then people wouldn’t get to see how important they were and how vital their jobs were.
Olivera was standing at the center of the room, arms folded when I entered as if he knew exactly when I would get there. Which he probably did, thanks to the tracker in my comm unit. I’d expected him, and I guess I should have expected Dani Brooks. The Ranger colonel was sitting, relaxed, not caring about making me feel like I was a shitbag for being late, which was remarkably chill for both a Ranger and a colonel.
I had not expected Joon-Pah. As far as I knew, he was on his way back to Helta space to bring back some technicians to help out our modernization process and the last I heard, he was supposed to be gone for weeks. He was dressed in the typical Helta Napoleonic artillery officer uniform and Brooks and Olivera were in combat utilities and I was acutely aware that I was the only in the room wearing civilian clothes.
“Greetings, Andy Clanton,” he said, offering me a hand in the human way. He was technically a Helta ship captain, a military officer, but at times, I thought he was more a diplomat than anything else. “I grieve to be the cause of you losing time with your child.”
“That’s okay,” I told him, even though it wasn’t. I let the duffle bags slide off my shoulders and dropped them inside the door before I shook his hand. “But I didn’t think you’d be back this soon. What’s wrong?”
“Murphy strikes again,” Dani Brooks explained, still sprawled in her seat. From her tone and her body language, I had the impression she’d been on base for hours, maybe even days, and wasn’t feeling particularly patient about waiting to fill me in.
“Captain Joon-Pah,” General Olivera cut in, probably not pleased at the conversation beginning without him, “was supposed to travel to Helta Prime to procure a crew of shipwrights to aid us in building cruisers around the hyperdrives you and Master Sergeant Bowie retrieved from the Helta shipyards.”
“Shipwrights?” I repeated, raising an eyebrow. “That’s what they call them?”
“It’s the nearest translation to English,” Joon-Pah said, settling into what I’d come to understand was a resting stance for the Helta, feet canted outward, hands clasped in front of him. “If I called them engineers or technicians, it would not adequately convey the intricacy and complexity of their vocation. To craft a starship requires years of education in hyperdimensional physics, years more of technical training and nearly twice those years as an apprentice. Even then, the shipwrights are constantly experimenting, refining their techniques. A master shipwright is rare and invaluable, and the Tevynians know this. Whenever they capture one of our colonies or shipyards, the first thing they do is check every prisoner to see if they have found a master shipwright.”
“But you had one who would work with us?” I assumed. “One who wouldn’t blab to your government until you got the chance to bring us in and let us meet with them?”
“He did,” Olivera snapped, thumping his fist against the hardwood tabletop. “Until, as Colonel Brooks put it, Murphy stepped in.”
“We translated out of hyperspace at the last outpost world from Helta Prime,” Joon-Pah related, “and I received a coded transmission left at what you would call a dead drop from Master Shipwright Shaylon-Kao. He was reassigned by the Prime Facilitator to the great shipyards in our asteroid belt. Trying to move him out now would raise too many questions.”
“Well, shit,” I sighed, leaning against the table.
We needed those ships. The Tevynians had a whole fleet and if they came after us before the Helta decided to accept us into their alliance, just the one cruiser wasn’t going to save us.
“There is, however, another possibility,” Joon-Pah went on. He knew by now how to inflect his English for the desired emotional effect, and the impression I got from him was of someone who was trying to tell a good news/bad news joke. “There is a well-respected Senior Journeyman Shipwright named Fen-Sooyan who was travelling with his crew to his final assignment before attaining the rank of Master. The final assignment was to be at Waypoint.”
“Well, that was a bust.” I didn’t quite laugh, though God knows I’ve laughed at darker things. Waypoint’s shipyards were where we had acquired the James Bowie, our one complete cruiser, as well as the three hyperdrives. The Tevynians had been defeated there, but I was pretty sure that shipyard wouldn’t be building anything for a while. “Where did they send him instead?”
“That’s just it,” Olivera broke in, constitutionally unable to remain silent despite his Miranda rights. “They sent him to Waypoint and his ship made a stop at the planet first before they headed to the drydocks. And then the fucking Tevynians invaded.”
“Did he get out with the civilians who evacuated before the invasion?” I asked. It might be tricky to extract him from the middle of a bunch of refugees on some outpost without revealing who we were, but not impossible.
“Unfortunately, no,” Joon-Pah shot the idea down. “We have scoured the list of evacuees who managed to escape before the invasion and his name was not among them.”
“Then what’s the point of talking about him?” I wondered. “The Tevynians control that world.”
“They do,” Brooks said, turning her hand over in counterpoint, “and yet they don’t. Not really.”
I pulled a chair out from the table and dropped into it.
“Obviously, you all know something I don’t. Has there been a group decision made to punish me for actually having a life or is someone going to tell me why I’m here?”
And yeah, they were both my superior officers, and no, I didn’t care.
Joon-Pah saved the day by actually answering my question.
“We have been monitoring the situation at Waypoint since the battle there,” he explained. “We launched sensor-shielded drones toward the planet and had them send back burst transmissions before they self-destructed. Once the shipyards were damaged and all the usable hyperdrives taken along with your cruiser, the Tevynians repurposed their forces there, sent most of them to support other missions. They still occupy the planet, of course. They constructed a military base outside the city, and they’ve left behind fighters and orbital weapons platforms, but their cruisers are gone.”
“If we hit them now,” Olivera said, his smile feral, like a stalking wolf, “with the Jambo and the Truthseeker, before they reinforce what they have, we could get in there and rescue this Fen-Sooyan and his crew, get them out before the Tevynians know what’s happening.”
“And by now,” I said, leaning forward, hands flat on the table, “you mean like now, don’t you?”
“Your briefing package has been messaged to your comm unit and your team is waiting in their arming bay.” He motioned at the door. “Shuttles launch in three hours.”
Those damned duffle bags got heavier every minute I carried them, and despite the relatively cool autumn temperatures, I was sweating two minutes into the walk from the admin building to the barracks the Delta team occupied when we were at the staging base. I skipped the front door since I wouldn’t be using either my barracks room or my office, and jogged around to the rear of the building, to a heavy, metal double door usually secured with a biometric lock.
At the moment, it was wide open, with equipment scattered on the pavement outside and crates of ammo and batteries already loaded onto pallets, waiting for a forklift to come and take them to the shuttle. The team was half in and half out of the arming bay, helping each other strap into their Svalinn powered armor. We’d wear it onto the shuttle, because previous experience had shown us that it was too big of a pain in the ass to ship it up separately and then try to y
ank it out of the cargo bay after it had been offloaded. It took useless, futile hours and since I was in charge and I wasn’t an idiot, I’d changed the policy, which had been implemented without asking me so I didn’t ask if I could change it.
Colonel Brooks had changed the procedure for her Ranger company as well, though I think she had gone through the trouble of getting permission, which was ever so much more complicated than just begging forgiveness.
“Hey, sir,” Pops said, nodding. He had his suit on and squared away, except for the helmet, which he carried tucked under his left arm. “They catch you on your vacation?”
Chief Warrant Officer Mark Tremonti was older than me, which was quite an accomplishment for a man who’d called Delta Force his home for over a decade and had hardly lived a staid, sedate life before that. Deep lines were etched into a face the color of old teak, though perhaps not as deep as they once were. Like the rest of us, Pops had taken part in the retelomerization treatment the Helta had developed in conjunction with our medical researchers, and I’d been told it would begin to make us all look younger as the changes in our DNA had time to make their way outward as cells died and were replaced.
Would he still be “Pops” when he looked twenty-five years old again? Would people take colonels and generals seriously when they looked the same age as captains and first lieutenants? Those were questions I doubted anyone else had bothered to ask before they’d foisted longevity and restored youth upon us, but I was a science fiction writer by trade, or I had been before reality had caught up with science fiction a few months ago.
“Yeah,” I said, dumping my bags on the ground beside the door and stepping into the bay, intent on grabbing my own armor and weapons. “Bastards couldn’t even let me go the full two weeks before they snatched me back up.”
I did a quick headcount.
“We got everybody?”
“Now that you’re here. You know the op?”
“I got a three minute summary and probably know as much about the op as you do from the briefing package. We’re going back to the place we just came from to do a snatch-and-grab on some assets we could have gotten while we were there last time, and we’re hoping the enemy has the good grace to not fight us too hard.”
“Damn,” Pops said, nodding in appreciation. “That may be the most succinct summary of an op I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, I am a writer,” I said, shrugging. I waved at my Svalinn suit, resting in a cradle marked with my name in magic marker on a strip of masking tape. Very high tech. “Wanna help me get this shit on?”
I nodded to some of the other team members. I couldn’t always remember their real names, but their nicknames, I knew. Dog, Ginger, Gus, Rodent, Cowboy, Quaker, Bubba, Chuck, Swag, Frank—which was short for Frankenstein because the guy was nearly seven feet tall and looked as if he should have bolts sticking out of his neck, and Pops. There’d been a twelfth, Jambo, and I was the thirteenth warrior, the outsider pulled in because they needed somewhere to stick me. Now, I was one of the twelve. Maybe.
Pops was behind me, checking the gaskets on the torso plates of the Svalinn and everyone else had moved on outside.
“I’m a bit nervous about this shit,” I admitted.
“Can’t be any worse than what we saw on the shipyards,” he said, shrugging. He adjusted my neck yoke. “Is that too tight?”
“No. And that’s not what I mean. This is going to be my first time leading the team without Jambo.”
I couldn’t see his face, just felt him yanking at the straps holding the hard-plates onto the exoskeleton around my left arm.
“It’s our first time without him, too, don’t forget that. We’ll all have to adjust,” he said.
“I know that. But every one of you has been through Ranger School, SFAS, Q School, Delta Selection and Assessment and all the training that comes after that, and I was just a fucking Marine rifle platoon leader.”
He stepped out from behind me, the corner of his lip curled up in amusement.
“Andy,” he said, “in all those fucking training courses and schools, exactly how much do you think the curriculum included aliens, powered armor, starships, fighting in a vacuum in zero gee…”
“It’s more accurately called free-fall if you’re in orbit,” I corrected him automatically, remembering a bad review from my fist book, “or microgravity if you’re not.”
“Ex-fucking-zactly.” He slapped my shoulder hard enough to push me back a step. “You think any of us would have known that unless you and Jambo taught us? Hell, the two of you are the ones who created most of the training we’ve done. All that shit you were talking about, you know what it’s for? It’s to weed out the pretenders, the wannabes, the ones who aren’t qualified. It’s to give us an excuse to keep them out of Delta, the ones who just don’t belong, to make them prove themselves. You….” He tapped a finger against my chest, metal clicking against metal. “…have already proven yourself. They don’t give The Medal to wannabes or pretenders. Every one of us saw what you did at the shipyards at Waypoint. And we all know what you did against the Russian mercs who tried to infiltrate this base. No one here has any doubts about how you’ll do in combat. Trust me.”
“Thanks, Pops.” I nodded. “I guess I just wish Jambo was here.”
“We all do. We were his family.” Pops shrugged. “Even if you did know him longer than any of us.”
I’d never had the time to finish that story for Zack.
Chapter Five
The TOC—Tactical Operations Center—at Combat Outpost Morton wasn’t high tech or high speed or pretty much high anything. It was a laminated map tacked up to the wall, a sand table and a bank of radios, along with an overworked, overtired RTO manning them. Crewing them, I should say, because in this case, the RTO was Lance Corporal Clarice Molina.
Molina smiled wanly at me when I entered through the blackout curtains.
“Morning, sir,” she said. “I hear you had some fun last night.”
“Only if you consider ordering a TOW missile fired at an IED and watching a whole city block explode, Molina,” I said, trying to appear stern and by the book. It didn’t work. A snicker busted through and spoiled the whole thing. “Hell yes, I had fun. The skipper around?”
“He’s in his office,” she said, jerking a thumb behind her at another curtain.
I knocked on the wooden frame.
“Come.”
I pushed aside the curtain and found Captain Glenn sitting behind his desk, which is what he insisted on calling the plastic table where he set his laptop. He squatted on a folding, three-legged stool behind it, his boot soles flat on the ground, making sure his oversized bulk didn’t tip over. Brian Glenn was a big man, six-three, 220. He had played defensive end at the Naval Academy and still looked it. He could have been drafted into the pros, he had assured me more than once, if he hadn’t blown out his ACL in the first game of his senior year.
“You sent for me, sir?” It wasn’t a question, really. He had sent for me. But it sounded politer than what the hell do you want.
“Come in,” he waved at me. “Close the door.”
I didn’t sigh in exasperation, but it was a battle. The “office” was about the size of a linen closet, which meant there was barely room for Glenn, much less me. And I wasn’t a small man. And the door was a fucking curtain that wouldn’t hold in or keep out any sound, so if privacy was a concern, the whole thing was pointless.
But then, so was Captain Glenn in many ways. Oh, he wasn’t a coward or a martinet or a micromanager, so I considered myself lucky in those respects. And he wasn’t stupid, not really. He was just…dull. In every sense of the word.
“Yes, sir?” I asked, after I’d gone through the motions of pulling the curtain shut.
Inside the windowless alcove, the only light came from a battery-powered lantern sitting on the upturned base of a spent 155mm artillery shell, and the shadows it threw cast a false malevolence over Glenn’s squared off features. In reality,
he wasn’t interesting enough to be evil.
“What do you know about that special operations team you encountered last night?”
Again, I resisted a sigh. We’d gone through all this last night. Or should I say, early this morning.
“They have shitty taste in sport utility vehicles,” I said, unable to resist at least one smart remark. “Aside from that, the guy in charge said his name was James Bowie and they were wearing civvie clothes and carrying M68’s, among other things. The SIG’s probably mean they’re Army, and the clothes and facial hair tells me they’re probably Delta.”
Glenn grunted, eyes focused on the black curtain that served as a door as if he were watching a slide show projected on it. When he looked back at me, his face was twisted into a deep frown.
“Is something wrong, sir?” I wondered, slipping unconsciously into parade rest in case a dressing down was coming. “Did he complain about us blowing his op? Because there was no way we could have known he was running one in that area.”
“He’s here,” Glenn said, cutting me off.
“Sir?”
“Your James Bowie character,” he amended. “He’s here. He drove up an hour ago, while you were racked out. He wants to see you.” Glenn shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell me anything else until you showed up, so I made him wait outside the wire.”
I laughed. Glenn might have been uninteresting and unimaginative, but he was as stubborn as a case of the clap. He didn’t share the laugh.
“I don’t like this, Andy,” he said. “Guys like this showing up, it’s never a good thing. Like those SEAL pricks who dragged Third Platoon out on that interdiction.”
I nodded agreement. Lt. Campos had been a good guy. And the SEALs hadn’t even bothered to come back to the COP after to tell us they were sorry he’d bought it.
“I think I’ve kept him waiting about as long as I can.” He stood, the folding stool tipping over backward without his weight to hold it in place on the uneven plank floor. “I’ll have Top bring him in.”