Black Box

BLACK BOX

Ivan Turner

Copyright 2010, 2015 by Ivan Turner

Smashwords Edition

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Other Work by Ivan Turner

Zombies! Series 1 and 2
:
A refreshing look at regular people in our society living their
lives against the backdrop of a zombie plague.

Castes Series 1
: In the
21
^st
century, elves, dwarves, and
humans coexist in a caste society, but conspiracies within the
ranks of the castes whisper of revolution.

Forty Leap
: Mathew
Cristian is an unwilling time traveler, whose affliction has him
leaping forward at an ever increasing rate. What changes come upon
a man whose future unfolds unpredictably and whose past is
inevitably left behind?

The Book of Revelations
:
When a man discovers a way to see into a person's past lives, he
deems himself judge, jury, and executioner. Why, then, are all of
his followers suddenly hunting for Rabbi Max Guetterman?

ApocalypZe
is a post
apocalyptic card game in which you control survivors trying to
defend your stronghold and raiders trying to bring down your
opponent.

Please visit
http://ninekingdoms.com/Author/
for
links to your favorite ebook stores.

Black Box,
like all books, is the
product of time and revision. I would like to thank Joyce Turner,
Julie Beck, and Joe Connell for reading through my
beta
draft and giving me some much needed feedback.

The news from the last transmission was not
good. His medical officer’s face appeared on the viewer, lines of
fear and stress cutting deep grooves into her features. As a young
captain, he felt that fear also. He could see the failure in her
eyes. They were all infected. All twenty three of them. Only
she
showed no signs of the infection. Not just yet.

The derelict had come into play unexpectedly
and the
Admiralty
has sent him and his ship to meet up with
the nearest science exploration vessel. Infantry accompanied
technical personnel and ten people had been lost just like that.
There had been nothing but one incomprehensible communication. The
ravings of a lunatic.

Six more soldiers and the captain knew he
was dealing with a biological enemy. Something you could not kill
with guns. So he sent doctors and biologists. He sent his own
medical officer. Most of them became infected quickly and she
didn’t know why.

She asked for more help.

He sent it.

She was asking for more help now.

A single bead of sweat welled up just beyond
his hairline. Gas bubbled in his gut. On another screen, he could
see the faces of his infantry as they awaited his orders. They were
due to go over to that ship, escort the next group of doctors and
biologists. Anyone who wasn’t infected needed protection from those
that were. The infected were mad, dangerous.

Young faces, all of them. Even his sergeant
was young. He’d been hardened and scarred by years of serving in
the Space Force, but those years had been short and age had not
caught up with him yet. The others were all afraid, even more so
than his medical officer, who knew her death was imminent. They
didn’t know what they were to face on the derelict. They only knew
that there was lunacy there. A terrifying lunacy that needed to be
destroyed.

A message to the
Admiralty
had been
dispatched.

The captain didn’t like the answer.

He suddenly decided that no more men and
women would go to that ship. There would be no more help.

Ordering his pilot to take them out to a
safe
distance, the captain leaned back in his chair and
tried to hammer away at the ball of phlegm in his throat by
swallowing and swallowing and swallowing. Whatever he did, he could
not allow this terrible plague, which had claimed twenty three
minds in four hours, to leave that derelict. He didn’t know where
it had come from, didn’t know what other dark corners of the
universe it occupied. None of that was important. What he did know
was that the
Admiralty
would send another science vessel.
They would send two more. They would send an army of them to
discover what this thing was and how it could be contained.

Controlled.

This captain knew how to contain it.

He didn’t give a shit about controlling
it.

This captain had learned to trust his gut.
The sergeant who had been his mentor would be proud.

He knew his duty and had made his decision
as a captain in the Space Force. He alone would take responsibility
for that decision.

Striding over to the weapons station, he
relieved the soldier on duty. His pilot, an officer herself, turned
to look at him with wide eyes. He told her to keep the boat
steady.

Just keep it steady.

Sitting down in the dazed soldier’s chair,
he tapped out a few keys and touched the grid that appeared on
screen. Instantly, the grid filled with multicolored lines and his
data window lit up with possibilities. He’d been working on a
program that could determine an enemy ship’s weak spots by its
design. He ran it now, but it was useless against the derelict. The
ship was older than he was and constructed almost entirely of weak
spots. He was surprised it had survived in space for all of that
time. Besides which, the derelict would be vaporized when it was
all over.

He ordered his pilot to take them further
away.

Further.

Further, God damn it!

He did not warn his medical officer.

He did not warn his crew.

He launched one of the ship’s four nuclear
torpedoes and watched as its electronic blip closed in on the
derelict. He knew that the face of his medical officer was still on
his screen. He knew that she could see the missile as it
approached. He knew that he owed it to her to look her in the eye
as he killed her.

So he did.

She said nothing, seemed to grow calm with
the certainty. There wasn’t even the barest change of expression.
In the four seconds it took for the missile to reach the derelict,
she gave no hint of her opinion of his decision. And she died,
leaving him with that mystery.

He would always wonder.

Afterwards, it was a whirlwind of
controversy. Accusations made. Charges filed. Favors called in.
Charges dropped. A reputation destroyed. A reputation created. A
career pushed into stagnation.

When it was all over, the captain was still
a captain.

The man was still a man.

But he was a different type of each. And he
would put long years of service into an organization that sought
only to eliminate him.

The United Earth Space Force had been the
last established branch of the military. It had its own council of
admirals, called the
Admiralty
, running it. As space travel
and colonization had become more and more essential to the
development and evolution of the human race, the
Admiralty
had steadily gained power and influence over the Earth and Earth
allied planets. At this point, they practically ran the central
government.

There were currently sixty eight
commissioned vessels roaming outer space and jumping from star to
star using wormhole technology. The ships of the fleet varied in
size and shape and function, but each was crewed by those intrepid
folks of the
United Earth Space Force
, and each was
captained by just one of those very special intrepid folks. Of all
of the captains on all of those ships, Captain Ted Beckett liked to
think of himself as the best. And why not really? He
was
the
best. He had earned his commission by working his way up from a
foot soldier. Throughout his career, he had made friends and
gathered owed favors like dandelions. At the turning point of his
career, some nine or ten years before, all of those owed favors had
been called in and they had saved his job and his freedom. But not
before putting him through proceeding after proceeding, inquiry
after inquiry, and countless lectures on the duty of a Space Force
captain. Humbled at first, Beckett had questioned himself, played
over the situation again and again. Through the sleepless nights,
he had emptied bottle after bottle of whatever he could lay his
hands on. But he could never get drunk enough. And, when it came
time to put the bottle away, he did so without looking back. He was
too strong for an addiction. And the Admiralty was too weak to save
lives. Twenty four United Earth personnel had perished in that
explosion, but they didn’t give a shit about that. All they cared
about was the lost opportunity that the disease had presented. An
infection that caused madness, when controlled, could be used to
put down a New Earth rebellion without any loss of technology.
Beckett convinced himself that he had traded those twenty four
lives for billions of others. Once he’d worked it all out in his
head, he grew comfortable with his decision and hard in his
heart.

But that was the past.

Of all of the nine admirals that made up the
Admiralty
, Beckett liked John Poulle the best. And each of
the others not at all. Despite seventy four years behind him,
Poulle was an arrogant and bitter bastard. Like all of the other
admirals, he kept an office in the Admiral’s Building in Manhattan.
The office was smaller than all of the others’ because he had
insisted on its being on the fourth floor, the same floor as all of
the conference rooms. He never saw people in his private sanctuary.
He always said that if he wanted to make his private office public
he'd invite the neighborhood but in the meantime he was perfectly
happy to go on chewing out deadbeat officers and noncoms in the
conference rooms where they belonged. Beckett was not a deadbeat.
And he sure as hell was no noncom. But Poulle's office was Poulle's
alone. He didn't even have a visitor's chair in there. He met with
literally no one. Even the secretary had to buzz him before going
in.

Normally, he would greet Ted Beckett with a
smile and an insult. They would spend half an hour trading barks
that were much worse than their bites and then deciding where to
have lunch.

Today, Poulle would afford Ted Beckett no
such pleasantries.

“Sit down, Ted.”

Uh oh.

Beckett had been on Earth for almost two
weeks. His ship, the
Valor
, was being overhauled and his
entire crew had been given leave for the time being. Beckett had
enjoyed his leave by reading trashy romance novels and smoking aged
cigars. When he’d gotten the summons from Poulle, four days before
he was due to return the
Valor
, he’d known there was
something wrong. There would be no banter today.

When Beckett had found a seat, Poulle took
one two seats away and leaned back, trying to breathe the tension
out of his temples. “How’s your history?”

“Can’t we skip the lecture and just tell me
what this is about?”

Poulle’s eyes burned in a way that Beckett
had never seen. “It is about the history,
Captain!
And don’t
interrupt me!”

“Sorry, sir.” But he wasn’t and Poulle knew
he wasn’t. After ten years of bearing the burden of his particular
reputation, there remained pitifully little for which Beckett was
ever sorry. He didn’t appreciate coyness or idle conversation. He
wanted to know why he’d been called off leave four days early. More
to the point, he wanted to know what the catch was without even
first having found out the assignment.

“Do you know who Nicholas Walker was?”
Poulle asked, leaning back in his chair.

Beckett breathed, trying to match Poulle’s
curtness with restraint. He could do it. He could pretend be a good
officer. He wasn’t
that
far gone. He began. "Captain
Walker…"

"Colonel," Poulle corrected.

Beckett cleared his throat irritably.
"
Commander
of the first faster than light drive ship, the
Einstein
. Isn't there a statue of him in Florida?"

"Half," Poulle remembered sadly. "They put
it up a year after he was confirmed missing. It was damaged during
the first eXchengue (
pronounced eh-szhen-gi)
attack."

The eXchengue were one of only two
intelligent races with which humans had made contact in two hundred
years of space exploration. Actually, to tell the truth, it was the
eXchengue who had discovered humans, invading Earth and dominating
them.