Solfleet: The Call of Duty (17 page)

“Course
plotted, Mister LaRocca?” Rawlins asked.

“Yes, sir,”
the helmsman answered. “Several hours ago.”

“Very well.
Energize jump nacelles,” he ordered. Then he quickly added, “Carefully, Ensign,
and keep your eyes on those output levels,” hoping and praying that the less
efficient emergency units wouldn’t blow themselves up in protest. “Then give me
best safe speed into the vortex.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Picking up
a second group of vessels now, sir,” Irons interjected.

“Noted,
Lieutenant,” Rawlins responded dismissively without even looking at her. He had
his orders, and difficult though they were to swallow, he intended to obey
them. Sacrificing the
Victory
and her crew wouldn’t help the commodore
and his people.

The ring
seemed to grow faster as the helmsman complied with Rawlins orders, until its
structure passed beyond the viewscreen’s borders and only the vortex remained
in view, its blood-crimson shimmer shifting to a deeper purple-violet as its
energy field interacted with that the nacelles generated. Then, with a final
shift from violet to black as the
Victory
passed through the ring and
slipped into jumpspace, the stars suddenly reappeared, only to fall toward the
center of the viewscreen, where they gathered into a hazy, gently pulsating
circular band of color like some kind of dark rainbow—deep purple-violet around
its inner rim, shifting through shades of purple to blue, to aqua-blue around
its outer rim. Every few seconds one or two or a few of them managed to escape the
band and raced past the ship, shifting from aqua-blue to green as they sailed by,
but the size of the band remained constant.

“Jump
velocity achieved, Commander,” LaRocca reported, reading his board. “The field
is stable and we are secure in jumpspace. Sensors and scanners, such as they
are, show all clear ahead, sir.”

Rawlins drew
a deep breath and exhaled slowly as he sat back and relaxed, truly relaxed, for
the first time in weeks. They’d made it. Two jump nacelles gone, their lower
hull breached, portions stressed to near buckling, most of their systems
crippled, and their weapons nearly exhausted...but they’d made it. They’d
actually made it.

But what about
all those people they’d just left behind?

The Next Morning

Wednesday, 21 July 2190

Sweating
profusely and writhing in agony on the deck, while at the same time crying for
his slaughtered family, Federation Vice-President Jonathan Harkam somehow still
managed to reach out and grab the front of Hansen’s jacket in his quivering,
blood-stained fist. He pulled him closer, bared his clenched teeth and spat
streams of red saliva over his chin as he grunted against the pain, then stared
up at him through red, swollen eyes.

“Please!”
he managed to force through the pain. “Oh God, it burns! Make it stop!”

Hansen
took hold of Harkam’s wrist with both hands and tried with all his strength to
pull free of his desperate, vice-like grip, but the dying man only tightened
his grasp to the point where Hansen thought he heard a finger snap and pulled
him closer. “Mister Vice-President,” Hansen responded as calmly as he could. “I
can’t just...”

“Yes you
CAN!” the dying vice-leader of the unified free world roared.

“Do it,
Major.”

Hansen
whirled around as far as the vice-president’s grasp would allow and glared
wide-eyed at...at the squad sergeant—the only one of his men who’d managed to
survive the attack with him.

“He’s the
vice-president for God sake!” he reminded him.

“He’s
suffering, sir,” the sergeant pointed out. “There’s nothing more we can do for
him now.”

“I can’t
just kill him!” Hansen insisted.

“Yes, you
can.”

Gasping
for every breath, Harkam jerked Hansen hard, drawing his attention back to him.
“Please, Major!” he pleaded, crying openly now, barely able to speak through
the agony anymore. “Do it!” He coughed suddenly, spewing a foot-high fountain
of dark, red-brown blood that barely missed Hansen’s face when he recoiled,
then splattered back over his chin and his suit coat. “Do...it,” he begged once
more.

“You’ve
got to do it, sir,” the sergeant told him. “There’s no other option.”

Hansen
knew in his heart that the sergeant was right. Harkam’s entire family had been
brutally slaughtered and the vice-president himself had been pumped full of...of
whatever it was that damn beast had pumped him full of. If the poor man’s cries
were to be believed, then he was literally burning to death from the inside
out.

He drew
his sidearm and slowly pressed the muzzle to the vice-president’s temple. He
drew several short, deep breaths and licked his suddenly very dry lips. But he
just couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the trigger.

“It’s the
humane thing to do, sir,” the sergeant pointed out.

“DO IT!”
Harkam shrieked through the pain, his tears tinted red with blood. Then he
suddenly started shaking Hansen violently back and forth as he lost whatever
control he’d been clinging to and convulsed, screaming and crying even louder
than before. “OH GOD!” he screamed, spitting and coughing up blood. “DO IT!”

“Do it,
sir,” the sergeant repeated.

Hansen
closed his eyes and turned away. “Forgive me,” he whispered. Then he drew a
long, deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.

He gasped
and opened his eyes wide and clutched the sides of his bed. Then, after a brief
but strangely frightening moment of profound confusion, he realized he was safe
in bed and he relaxed. At least, he relaxed his body. His mind, on the other
hand, was another matter entirely.

The nightmares
again, of course. After an absence of more than twenty years, they’d haunted
his sleep for the last five nights in a row.

He sighed
and wiped the sweat from his brow. And then, as if a light had just been turned
on in his mind, he suddenly realized why he felt so confused. Something very
strange had just happened—something that he didn’t understand at all. After forcing
him to relive that terrifying experience from his distant past for the last
four nights, exactly as it had occurred, his nightmares had inexplicably
changed.

Someone else
had been onboard the shuttle this time—someone who had
not
been there in
reality twenty years ago. Not in any capacity. That much he could be sure of,
because the head of the vice-president’s own security detail had introduced him
to everyone onboard prior to their departure. Security personnel, the vice-president’s
aids, the hand-selected members of the press, the flight crew, even the vice-president’s
own family had been identified to him. Even now he could see each of their faces
in his mind as if he’d just seen them all two days ago, rather than two
decades. No. This was someone he definitely didn’t know, had
never
known,
and therefore couldn’t possibly have been at all familiar with. And yet in the
nightmare he’d accepted the man’s presence there without question, as if he had
belonged there all along.

That was the
way of dreams, he reminded himself. The dreaming mind often accepted as
perfectly logical that which might be wrong, or even totally ridiculous, in
real life.

Something
else suddenly dawned on him. The stranger had been one of his own...in the
nightmare at least—one of the Security Police troops. He’d been their squad
sergeant, in fact, but not the one who had
really
been there. And something
else. He’d survived the battle. That wasn’t right either, because none of his
troops had survived. They’d all been killed on that terrible day,
including
the
sergeant. Everyone had been killed, except for himself. He had been the only survivor—the
only one who’d come home alive.

So what the
hell was going on? Who was this new character in his nightmares?

He glanced
up at the clock and was disheartened to discover that it was only 0428 hours. He
knew he should go back to sleep. Cutting himself ninety minutes short could
make a pretty big difference in his day. But he also knew that he probably
wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again, even if he tried. So instead he got up
and pulled on his robe, then strolled quietly into the kitchen and started a
pot of coffee.

When it was
ready, he filled a large mug, took it into the living room, and crossed to the
bookshelf to find a good book to read for a little while. Preferably one that
had absolutely nothing at all to do with military intelligence, politics—well,
maybe
a little
about politics—or, most especially, interstellar war and
the slaughter of innocents. He grabbed his old, fuzzy-edged and dog-eared
paperback copy of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s original ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ off
the bottom shelf—he’d always preferred the tactile feel of a real book in his
hands over digital readers—then crossed to his overstuffed recliner, set his
coffee on the end table beside it, and kicked back and put his feet up. Sure,
he’d read it about dozen times since his old friend Benny gave it to him, but
not in the last ten years or so, so it was time.

He adjusted
the small lumbar cushion behind his back, then opened to ‘Primeval Night,
Chapter 1: The Road to Extinction’.

“
Excuse
me, Nick,
” Hal’s voice called from the ceiling speaker.

Hansen
dropped his hands, and the book, to his lap and sighed. All he wanted was one
hour’s escape. Was that too much to ask? “It’s four-thirty in the morning, Hal,”
he reminded his computer’s A.I., which had apparently forgotten the concept of ‘down
time’. He’d connected his home and office terminals the other day to facilitate
his need to work at home, and after careful consideration had decided to leave
them connected permanently. Now he realized that might not have been such a
good idea after all.

“
I’m
sorry to bother you at such an early hour, Nick, but your office terminal has
just received a code-red message from the Caldanran Field Office that I think
you should be made aware of immediately.
”

“Code-red?”
he asked as he set his book aside and sat up straight. Code-red was the most
urgent of priorities, reserved for emergency or near emergency situations only.
Something very bad had either already happened or was about to very soon.

“
Yes.
There is no error. The message is encoded as code-red.
”

“Summarize
it for me, Hal.”

“
Certainly.
The Caldanran Field Office reports that all contact has been lost with both the
Rosha’Kana Field Office on Tor Two and that star system’s jumpstation. In
addition, Solfleet forces within that star system report that the Veshtonn have
them on the run. Coalition losses over the last seventy-two hours are described
as having been extremely heavy, to the point of critical, and it appears the
Tor’Kana people have been forced to evacuate their home world and flee the star
system entirely. The message ends.
”

Hansen felt
the blood rush from his face and, for a brief moment, found it a little
difficult to breathe.

“
Would
you like me to play the message for you verbatim?
”

“No, Hal.
That won’t be necessary. Thank you.”

“
You are
welcome, Nick.
”

The Rosha’Kana
star system. The planet Tor Two, home to the Coalition’s founders. That star
system was the most vital system of all to the survival of the member worlds. It
was there, dozens of kilometers deep within the caverns of that star’s
long-abandoned fourth planet, where Tor’Kana explorers had discovered their
long-lost brethren’s ancient yet incredibly advanced weapons and propulsion
technologies—the technologies that had so far enabled the Coalition to survive
the Veshtonn onslaught. The technologies without which they would have no
chance of winning the war—no chance, even, of survival.

And now that
system had been lost to the enemy.

The Road to
Extinction.

Admiral
Hansen watched silently, expressionless, as Chairman MacLeod stood up, threw
him a brief glare of superiority, then left his office without uttering another
word—his last few had made it perfectly clear that the matter wasn not open for
debate—and he continued to stare blankly at the door for several seconds after
it closed behind the arrogant bastard. If he hadn’t heard it from the man’s own
mouth himself, he never would have believed it. More than that, he didn’t
want
to believe it.

Having just arrived
from Earth without prior warning, the headstrong chairman of the Earth Security
Council had been waiting none too patiently for him in the reception area when
he returned from lunch, annoying the hell out of Vicky if her expression was
any indication, which it no doubt was. Once inside Hansen’s office with the
door locked, he’d advised the admiral that the Earth Security Council had held
an emergency session first thing in the morning to discuss the ramifications of
the loss of the Rosha’Kana system and the resulting mass exodus of the Tor’Kana
people from their home world. The council members had almost immediately come to
the same grim conclusion that Hansen himself had reached when he’d first heard
the terrible news, and quite uncharacteristically for them had come up with the
general framework for a possible solution very quickly. It was a very
unorthodox solution to say the least—one that required not only the admiral’s
keen insight, but also his active cooperation. Someone on that council had been
doing some very serious out-of-the-box thinking.

Hansen had answered
the chairman’s questions as best he could, had offered his opinions when asked
for them, and had even made an official recommendation, despite
not
having
been asked for one. But in the end the chairman had told him in no uncertain
terms what he expected him to do, and had left him no room for further debate. So
his task was clear, which was more than he could say for the council’s solution.
But where the hell was he ever going to find the time to...