A Sword Into Darkness (30 page)

Edwards threw his hands up, exasperated.  “Hence the definition of a clusterfuck!  Listen here, Sergeant.  I’m an old enlisted man myself, and I don’t have to tell you how screwed up and anxious officer types can get when someone changes plans at the eleventh hour, but that’s just what’s happening now.  Some PR flunkies decided the Commander-in-Chief needed to present something tangible to the press corps in order to justify all the damn money they’ve spent on a destroyer no one’s ever going to see.  And they decided who better to show it off than the original crew and the ones who designed the damn thing.  So now I’ve got 26 civilians and two spaceplanes to fly to Washington DC and get in place before the
Sword of Liberty
regains orbit.

“If you go contacting the watch commander, he’s gonna think something funny is up—just like you were, don’t deny it—and he’s going to call his boss.  And his boss is going to wonder why a watch commander is calling him for an authorized and fully legitimate flight, and he’s going to call his boss.  And so on and so on until the White House and the freakin’ SECDEF are wondering where their damn planes are!  Now I’m just a civilian nowadays, but I don’t ever recall anything good coming from the brass wondering why some mid-grade enlisted man was obstructing their grand, FUBAR planning.  Do you?”

The SGT looked worried but determined to stand his ground.  “Sir?”

Edwards relented.  “Okay, Sergeant, you’re making this more complicated than it needs to be.  Despite the fact that this whole joint’s been nationalized, and you got stuck over here to guard these here planes, do they or do they not still belong to Windward?”

The SGT opened and closed his mouth, uncomfortably trying to decide on an answer.  “I really don’t know, sir, only that we’re supposed to guard this facility and everything on it.”

Edwards nodded, commiserating.  “Yep.  I spent plenty of years as a mushroom too.  The answer is yes, they do, and these are still our planes.  The government only owns the one on the ship.  Now, do we or do we not have a properly filed flight plan?”

The soldier glanced down at the paperwork in his hand that Edwards had given him earlier.  “It would appear so.”

“And are we on restriction?  Are you under any guidance to interfere with our work here?  Are we perhaps Chinese spies in disguise?  Terrorists?”

The SGT smiled for the first time and looked at the assembled Windward employees and their stacks of luggage and equipment, sparing a lingering glance at Edwards’ own wheelchair.  “No, sir, no restrictions.  We, in fact, have orders to restrict you as little as possible.”

Edwards sighed and slumped in his seat.  “Well, if I’m not a secret legless hijacker spy, and you’ve got no orders stating otherwise, how about you give us a break and let us just do our damn jobs?”

The SGT cinched his assault rifle up closer to his shoulder.  He looked at the group, then back at the SSTOS in the hangar, and eventually just shook his head.  “You win, sir.  I’ve got rounds to do.”

The crew all smiled in relief and grabbed up their luggage.  As they filed into the hangar, Edwards popped a quick wheelie and turned to face the sergeant as he began to walk away.  “Many thanks to you, Sarge.  I promise to take back at least half the bad things I ever said about the Air Force!”

The receding guard waved a hand and continued on, soon passing the hangar door and disappearing around a corner.  The genial smile immediately dropped from Edwards’ lips and he spun about, just as Christopher Wright, the crew-training lead from the original team and another member of the conspiracy, came up behind him to push him at a run toward the shuttle.  The former Army colonel asked, “Are we good, Edwards?”

Edwards shook his head.  “I’d like to begin our little adventure with a prayer.  Here’s mine:  Please, Lord, let us get outta here before my web of bullshit flies apart and they shoot us all for treason.  Amen.”

March 7, 2045; White House Situation Room; Washington DC

Secretary of Defense Carl Sykes stood straight under the baleful glare of his President and revealed nothing of the mixed anger, embarrassment, and inexplicable sense of vindication that he actually felt.  He was silent, allowing the Commander-in-Chief to process what he had just said.

President Annabel Tomlinson sat primly at the center of the room’s long conference table, surrounded by the anxious expressions of her staffers and military advisors, chewing the inside of her cheek and regarding Sykes as if he were a bug.  “What do you mean, ‘It’s been hijacked’?”

Sykes smiled tightly.  He could feel Gordon Lee laughing at him from beyond the grave.  “Precisely that, Madame President.  The timeline we’ve established thus far would indicate no other possibility.”

“Perhaps you should let me decide whether or not we have another possibility, Carl.  Your experience, while valuable, sometimes has a tendency to limit rather than expand your outlook.”  Her features were stone still, betraying not a whit of emotion.

While he could detect no malice or disdain in her voice or the cast of her eyes, he knew it was there, an undercurrent that pulled along all of their interactions.  It was an unfortunate confluence.  Sykes was the best possible person for his job, the rare, wise Beltway Bandit who had worked his way up to his position through patience, politicking, and unarguable professional competence.  President Tomlinson was the outsider who had swept to a landslide victory, in part, on a platform of dismantling the usual Washington machine—more or less a “throw the bums out” policy.

In Sykes’ case, he was the only competent bum she had to choose from, so he alone of all his compatriots in the previous administration had remained.  Many days, she regretted her decision to advance him from Under-Secretary to SECDEF.  They were fire and ice, matter and antimatter, and the day was not far off when the two would finally clash with cataclysmic results.

The last fifteen months had been more than a little strained.

Sykes sighed.  “Very well, Ma’am.  Here’s what we know for certain—I’ll let you be the judge.  Approximately two and a half hours ago, immediately after the successful strike on asteroid 2006 UA22, all telemetry from the
Sword of Liberty
ceased.  We queried the ship without success and telemetry did not return.  Imaging radar and direct telescopic visuals showed the ship was intact, though resolution at that range prevents us from assessing directly any hull or radiator damage.  One hour and twenty minutes after going offline, we witnessed a track split.”

“Track split?” she asked.

“Her radar return split into two distinct returns.  Imaging showed that the destroyer had launched its single-stage-to-orbit-shuttle, or SSTOS.  There are any number of reasons for this—they could have been sending the shuttle out as a staging platform for repair work, they could have been investigating some of the asteroid debris, or they could have been abandoning ship in response to damage incurred during the asteroid strike.  Without comms or further visuals, we could not determine the actual reason.  However, when the
Sword
itself got underway, heading back to Earth at a higher acceleration and a half hour before the shuttle started moving, effectively abandoning the smaller vessel, it left few other reasonable possibilities other than hijacking.”

President Tomlinson reached out and took a sip of her coffee.  “You say ‘few other possibilities’ but you only give me one.  Is that laziness on your part, or is there something else which supports your hijacking scenario?”

Sykes stood at ease for a moment, simply staring at her, but he eventually responded.  “Yes, ma’am.  While there could conceivably be some other reason for the ship to abandon its shuttle and head home immediately, there is no reason for the unauthorized launch of two additional SSTOS from the Windward Tech air field in Vallejo.  That occurred an hour and a half ago, after the
Sword
broke off telemetry, but before it abandoned its own SSTOS and we ramped up our security posture.  The reason given for these SSTOS flights was so that they could appear at Andrews for an impromptu media blitz involving you ma’am.  By the time that filtered up to us and we sounded the alarm, both shuttles were off the designated air lanes and were making for high orbit.  They are currently orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 3500 kilometers and have refused all attempts to communicate.

“Now, while there might be a slim possibility that these two events are unrelated, that potential becomes vanishingly small when you figure in who was aboard those shuttles and what went missing from Vallejo at the same time.”  Sykes held up a finger.  “That is the original
Sword of Liberty
crew, and,” he held up another finger, “the reserve resupply kit stored at Vallejo.”

Tomlinson stood up, shaking her head.  “All right, all right, Carl!  I yield.  It’s a hijacking and Kelley’s taking back his ship.  But why?  And how the hell did a bunch of civilians make off with two shuttles and a mission resupply kit?  Aren’t there weapons in there—secure, nuclear, WMD-type weapons?”

Sykes shrugged.  “Answering your second question first, it’s a matter of hastily implemented procedures and narrow expectations.  The Vallejo field was a civilian site with a brand new military security detachment devoted to thwarting an outside aggressor or spy, not a bunch of workers going about their own ‘routine’.  And as for the weapons, they’re all inert.  The railgun rounds contain no controlled explosives and the missile has no fuel and no radioactives.  Unless you have a
Sword
class destroyer handy, they simply won’t do you any good.  So, unfortunately, the security team had not been required to implement nuclear safeguards.  It’s the sort of thing that would have been fixed on review of security procedures, but no one’s been in place long enough to call for a review.

“Honestly, Madame President, this sort of thing is a lot more common than anyone in the business likes to admit.  We can handle almost any known threat with ease, but present us with something unique or unexpected and we either overreact or get rocked back onto our heels.  If another group tried to repeat what Kelley and his crew have accomplished here, there’s not a chance in hell they’d get away with it.”

Tomlinson frowned.  “But that doesn’t change where we are at the moment.”  She turned and approached the large flatscreen dominating one side of the Situation Room, her wall-of-knowledge.  On it was real-time telemetry of the approaching destroyer and the two orbiting shuttles.  “You know Nathan Kelley, Carl.  Why are they doing this?  Why didn’t they throw in with us and Colonel Henson’s crew?  Why would they purposefully commit treason for this mission of theirs?”

Sykes walked over to stand beside her.  “For the answer to that, you’d have to have known Gordon Lee.  Did you ever have the pleasure of his acquaintance?”

She smirked.  “I’m an elected official and he was a wealthy industrialist.  Of course, I met him.  He was a major contributor to my runs in ‘36 and ‘40, but it was strictly political insurance on his part.  I can’t say we ever had a conversation more than five minutes in length.”

“Well, I had the displeasure of knowing him for years—both as a Beltway operator and in relation to this project specifically.  Gordon Lee was brilliant, arrogant, and of the firm conviction that he was always right.  Unfortunately for anyone arrayed against him, though, that belief was too often correct.  And even though the miserable old bastard is dead, he rubbed off on Kelley and the rest of them in a big way.

“They come assured by the closest thing to God on Earth that there is only one way to do this, and they mean to do it that way.  This mission is theirs to accomplish, and not you, me, or the collective will of the nation is going to keep them from doing it.  They couldn’t care less about treason when the alternative is violating Lee’s vision.”

The President nodded and turned away from the screen and began walking the length of the room, acknowledging one by one the other people filling it out in silence.  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Volescu, nodded to her in support, support echoed on the faces of her staff and advisors.  They were all behind her, but she was the one who had to make the difficult choice in this unprecedented case, and no one else wanted to be the one to take the blame in the event it turned out badly.

Suddenly, she appreciated Sykes’ unwavering frankness, even when it put them at odds with one another.

“Options?  Recommendations?” she asked the room at large.

No one said anything.  Whether they deferred to Sykes in his role as SECDEF, or were merely afraid to say anything, she could not tell.  Perhaps “throwing all the bums out” had been rash.

Sykes stepped forward and gestured to Volescu.  “Ma’am, there are three main courses of action available.”  The general brought up a series of text slides on the wall-of-knowledge and Sykes continued talking.  “First option is the most difficult, with the highest potential for disaster, but it gives us the most clear-cut win.  We have approximately six hours until the
Sword of Liberty
can make orbit and rendezvous with the two stolen shuttles.  Undoubtedly, she will onload the resupply package and transfer the old crew aboard, then take one of the SSTOS with her, abandoning the other for later retrieval.  The shuttles themselves are not armed, and none of the civilian crew is special forces trained.