The Phoenix Conspiracy (12 page)

"Yeah there's lights," said Miles,
pointing to the tiny flashing light on his console.

"What about the ceiling lights and the
klaxon?" Summers was dumbfounded.

"Calvin had them removed a long time
ago," said Sarah.

Summers spun to face him. "You had
them removed?"

Calvin shrugged. "Don't you
think lots of red lights and noisy alarms are exactly the kind of
distracting things you
don't
want on the bridge during a critical
moment?"

She looked ready with a retort but
Sarah cut in. "We're at five thousand meters and closing
fast."

"All stop.”

“Answering all stop.”

“Ops, what do you have?"

"The vessel has no political markings
of any kind and it’s flying no colors, could be that their lights
are out. No obvious damage to the outer hull, though. It's a Model
B personal yacht made by a Polarian corporation out of Riyu Seven.
Designed for two passengers but only one life sign is aboard which
appears to be stable."

"One person?” asked Calvin. "Who'd be
this deep into nowhere in a ship like that? That's like finding a
speedboat in the middle of an ocean."

"Someone with stones," said
Miles.

Summers looked at him. "Bravery and
stupidity are two sides of the same coin."

Calvin went to the ops station. "What
are we dealing with, Shen? A Polarian?"

"A human, actually." He tapped his
console. "Err... now I'm not so sure."

"What do you mean, not
sure?"

"It's a
modified human
, sir."

A chill traced Calvin's
spine, rippling through his body while flashes of buried memories
came to mind, images from his deepest, darkest nightmares.
"What
kind
of
modified human?"

"Database lists it as a type three
remorii."

"Ok, helm, bring us into docking range
and open a channel," said Summers.

"Belay that order!" Calvin cut
in.

Everything felt exactly
like it had on the Trinity... years ago.

"Sir?" Shen looked back at him but
Calvin shifted his attention to Sarah.

"Close the channel and accelerate to
five percent until we're six hundred kilometers away then get us
into a deep jump, at least eighty percent potential. We're getting
the hell out of here. And, Miles, keep that stealth system
engaged."

"
Sir
?" Summers asked, more demanding
than Shen.

"Sarah, under no circumstances will
you attempt to contact that vessel or go anywhere near it. Is that
clear?"

"Yes, sir," she said, complying
immediately. "One-twenty degrees yaw and heading about."

"We
have
to respond,” said Summers. "As
long as he's sitting there he's harmless."

"He's lucky I don't blow him up right
now."

Miles turned around. "It isn't too
late for that, Cal. I've always got a couple of aft missiles ready
to go."

Summers stepped into
Calvin's line of sight. "A word please,
Lieutenant Commander
." She nodded
toward his office.

"All right," he said, gesturing for
her to lead the way.

Once the door slid shut Summers
erupted. "What are you doing? We have a duty to do!"

"Sometimes, for the good of the crew,
a few rules have to be broken and hard decisions made."

"We have a duty as people, not just as
officers!"

Calvin sat down at his desk, barely
able to stand. As loud as Summers was, she was nothing compared to
the resurgence of buried memories twisting his brain. Everything
about this whole situation felt so damn familiar, he could scarcely
separate the Nighthawk and the Trinity in his mind. He could still
see his friends' faces as clear as blood soaking paper, and the
echo of screams spreading from deck to deck were even
worse.

He shivered, feeling unusually cold
and as Summers ranted he just sat there in a deep stupor, no longer
in the present.

"You need to pay attention to
me!"

He snapped back to his whereabouts
and, very calmly, looked her squarely in the eyes. "Summers, do you
know what a remorii is?"

"No."

"It's a creature that comes from a
secret planet called Remus Nine. A type three remorii is,
effectively, a lycanthrope."

"Werewolves?" Her curiosity twisted to
skepticism. "There's no such thing."

"Technically, of course, you are
correct. Lycanthropes do not occur in nature. But neither do blue
roses, and yet they have huge gardens of them on Capital World. You
must remember the orange and blue grounds at Capitol Square, don't
you?"

"Yes."

"Well, just as those flowers were
engineered, animals have sometimes been engineered. And even though
the Empire has broken its back to shut the science down, some fifty
years ago the genetic experiments of Remus Nine gave birth to all
kinds of modified humans. The most dominant two were types two and
three, strigoi and lycanthrope. They are different, they aren't
really vampires and werewolves. For example strigoi don’t need to
suck blood and they don’t wear capes and live in coffins, and the
lycanthropes aren’t very wolf-like in appearance. Sure, compared to
a man they’re hairier, more muscular, have claws, and are feral.
But otherwise they’re nothing like wolves. Some say their creation
was inspired by ancient superstition and lore. I could believe
that, man—as usual—isn't content until he's tried something crazy,
so instead of finding The Lost City of Gold he decided to make one.
And by the time the Empire caught on and put these scientists out
of business, most of them were already dead—killed by their own
creations. And now thousands of modified humans are still
unaccounted for. Intel Wing estimates their numbers have
grown."

"They can reproduce?"

"Not sexually. But, like a virus, they
can transfer their likeness to a host. A whole, healthy human being
with the right blood type does the trick. O-positive is most
vulnerable. Which, unfortunately, I am."

"So our distress call sender is a
werewolf and he can turn other people into werewolves? And that's
why we're not going to respond to his distress call even though
duty demands it?"

"That's correct."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever
heard."

His eyes narrowed.

She didn't back down. "What's the
problem? We need silver bullets?"

"No, regular bullets work fine. You
just need a lot of them. Although incendiary seems to work
best."

"You're exaggerating."

He gave her a deadly stare. "You know
nothing about it."

She raised a skeptical
eyebrow.

He glanced away and stared at his desk
for a minute, letting the memories flow unrestrained. Even after
all this time they were still excruciating, in ways he could never
describe and very few people could understand. Maybe no one could.
Certainly not Summers who stood there, doing her duty, demanding to
know why he'd ordered them away. She needed to know why. Even if
she could never appreciate it fully. There are dangerous parts of
the universe that no one speaks of, and she shouldn't be ignorant
of them while serving as his second.

"Summers, have you ever heard of the
ISS Trinity?"

"Yeah it was a command cruiser for the
7th Fleet, but it had some kind of design problem and exploded a
few years ago because of a coil leak. We talked about it as a case
study for particle..."

He interrupted her. "That was just a
cover-up.”

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that isn't what actually
happened."

"And... you know this because of some
kind of secret intelligence file?"

"No." He looked at her for a few
seconds. "I know this because I was there."

She folded her arms in an attempt to
look skeptical but her eyes betrayed her curiosity, he had her full
attention.

"Back before I was a member of Intel
Wing I served on a navy ship. I was a Third Lieutenant—barely had
the copper emblem a month—and I was a pilot in training, the
inexperienced green-shift officer who saw very little flying time
but, regardless, had the helm when it all went down." He chose not
to tell Summers about his relationship with the young operations.
Thinking of Christine's warmth and kindness was far too painful,
and none of Summers' damn business.

"I had only been on the ship for a few
months and wasn't that well acquainted with most the people aboard.
But I knew the XO, he'd sort of taken me under his wing. He used to
teach at Camdale, where I went, and he liked to talk about home. We
used to play cards and stuff. Anyway, this particular day both he
and the CO were on duty to help us train. We felt like we were
really getting the hang of it until we picked up that distress
call."

He paused and sipped his water bottle,
letting his eyes stare past Summers and the walls around him until
they disappeared. He was there again, sitting at the helm, feeling
a surge of energy as the XO ordered him to change course and go to
condition one.

"We followed standard
procedure," Calvin continued. "We did everything by the
book,
you would have been
proud
." He shook his head. "And as we
approached, the CO had us run some scans and assess the situation
while trying to contact the ship. The distress call was automated,
coming from a large civilian transport called the Starweaver. She
was adrift with several main systems offline but showed no external
damage. We identified the ship as one that had gone missing two
days before, but her present position was more than three clicks
from her flight plan. And the number of life forms aboard was much
less than what we’d been expecting.

"The ship answered our hails
only once and the staticky garbled response was impossible to make
out for sure. But to me it sounded like
'don't come after us, there's no one left,’
but I wasn't sure and I didn't speak up. The CO
was a by the book kind of captain and demanded we respond, and we
did. Once we were within ten-thousand kilometers we did a deep scan
and found that all 37 life forms aboard were humanish... but there
was something unusual about them. They had an elevated amount of
certain hormones. The XO recognized what it meant and went into a
ballistic panic. He ordered the ship to evacuate the region but the
Captain overruled that command and told me to dock with the
Starweaver. I'll never forget the way the William—the XO—looked at
me. He begged me to withdraw the ship to a safe
distance."

"So what'd you do?"

"I obeyed my captain. I was a green
officer and knew what I was supposed to do, and I did it without
hesitation. Will looked so betrayed. At that point he got desperate
and ordered the defense officer to fire on the Starweaver. Which
she didn't do, of course. The Captain had Will dismissed from the
bridge and confined to quarters. As the marines dragged him away he
screamed that we'd all die if we boarded that ship. Of course, no
one believed him." As Calvin spoke he looked through the window of
his memories with such clarity he saw the ghostly lights of the
Trinity's bridge.

"We docked with the Starweaver and the
Captain sent over medical teams and a small security detail to help
bring everyone aboard without incident. We got word that their ship
was smashed on the inside—like there'd been a fight, but no sign of
an enemy boarding party. We found twenty-nine survivors and almost
a hundred bodies before we pulled away—eight people had died since
our original scan. The Captain had me set course for the nearest
medical facility where we could drop off these refugees—it was
twelve hours away. In the meantime, the survivors were put into our
infirmary and our med staff was put on full activity. But we
couldn’t get any information from our new passengers, they were in
no shape to answer questions.

"For the first hour everything was
fine, but then several systems started crashing. Doors wouldn't
work. Lights flickered and died. And communication between decks
became spotty and unreliable. A team was dispatched to the
infirmary to make sure their systems had adequate power, but we
lost contact with them and they never returned. A second group was
sent and they vanished as well.

"At first we blamed it on
the failing comms systems, but when no one returned to report, we
got more than a little anxious. The captain sent half a platoon of
soldiers to the infirmary where they came face-to-face with what
was left of our medical staff and those we'd sent before, our
friends and colleagues—I didn't see them, but I remember hearing
the description over the radio. Bodies littered the floor, torn up
and mutilated patternlessly. But the dead were the lucky ones. The
living were in torturous agony as their bodies changed,
transforming into vile murderous night creatures. And by the time
we realized what we'd actually brought aboard, Strigoi...
vampires
, it was too
late.