One Good Soldier (43 page)

"That's my girl. Your mother will talk with you about that while I'm in surgery."

"So, there is one thing I need to understand," Dee said. "My grandma was an evil twisted psycho nut batshit crazy bitch?"

Sehera let out a rueful chuckle. "Like father, like daughter."

Admiral, I think you'd better get back up here, sir.
The XO sent the message to Wallace directly to his mindvoice.
Our courier is back from the Sol System.

"On my way," he said audibly. "COB, we'd better get back upstairs."

"Understood, sir." Charlie shook the hand of another wounded Marine pilot, call sign Deuce, as they made their way out of the postoperative ward. The marine would probably be paralyzed for days, until her new spinal column section that had been printed and implanted could heal and her brain could figure out which reconnected nerve went to what body part. It would take her weeks of rehab to relearn how to walk, run, fight, and fly mecha again.

"Hell of a mess, Charlie."

"Yes, sir. That QMT tech saved a lot of lives. We sure could have used it at the Oort or during the Exodus," the COB said. "Or back in the old days, or—"

"Didn't save them all, COB. We still have a lot of letters to write."

"Yes, sir." They turned the corner of the corridor out to the elevator. The COB depressed the button, and they waited patiently.

"Any word on the QMT facility controls, sir?"

"Uncle Timmy says that Ramy's Robots took it. It has been swept, and the warrant officers have it working. They've already QMTed up and down between it and the orbital facility several times. We should be able to operate the QMT facility in a matter of minutes."

"Damn good news, Admiral."

"Indeed."

The elevator ride didn't take long, and after having been with the wounded for a while, neither of them was in the mood to talk a whole bunch. Seeing that many of America's finest maimed, dismembered, and disfigured was disheartening to say the least. On the up side, none of the wounded had low spirits and none of them felt bad about what they had done. That in itself was uplifting. The doors slid open, and it was time to get back to work.

"Admiral on the bridge!" The XO stood from the captain's chair and returned to his station.

"As you were." Wallace took his seat, and the COB took his. "So, what's up, Larry?"

"Sir, the courier just returned. The enemy ships left us earlier because Admiral Walker is leading the rest of the fleet against the Separatists at Tau Ceti. The president sent a message for us to get there somehow and help her out."

"Fullback is probably giving the Seppies hell."

"Yes, sir. I'm sure she is."

"I suppose we can't let her have all the fun." Wallace turned on the DTM battlescape view and ship readouts. His mind had been resting long enough. More information than could be understood visually, audibly, and through touch flooded his mind directly. The DTM mindview allowed for a completely different level of perception of massive amounts of data. "It's been a long day, hey, XO? COB, better mix up some more of your coffee."

"Aye, Admiral," Charlie replied. "It's been one of those fine Navy days, sir. Should I make it strong?"

"You mean there is a
strong
version of your coffee, COB?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I make the weak stuff because a lot of our junior officers can't take real coffee, sir."

"Then make it strong. And yes, Charlie, it
has
been a fine Navy day."

"I wouldn't know about Navy days, Admiral, but I don't think even us marines would want too many like the one we've had so far." The XO grinned.

"Do we have full use of the QMT facility yet?" Wallace asked.

"Yes, sir," the STO replied.

"How about that?" Wallace thought about it; things could have been worse. They had jumped into the Ross 128 star system not even sure they had a way home. They knew they were going to have to fight for control of the QMT facility. And fight they had. They had lost an entire supercarrier, with few survivors. "Ground Boss, how we doing down on the planet?"

"We've ground it down to a halt, sir. The fighting is done, unless we want to start taking it house-to-house to look for holdouts," the ground boss replied.

"That's not our call right now. Okay, we'll leave two ships here, and the rest of us will QMT to Tau Ceti and jump right back into the fight." Wallace paused, trying to decide which two stayed. The
Roosevelt
and the
Tyler
could hold down the fort in Ross 128 and lick their wounds. The
Madira
would lead the other four ships that had seen very little of the fighting on to Tau Ceti. He put out the orders to the fleet ship captains.

"Fleet ships, this is Admiral Jefferson. The rest of the fleet has engaged the Separatists at Tau Ceti and needs our help. The
Roosevelt
and the
Tyler
will remain here and maintain operations while the rest of us will rendezvous at the orbital QMT facility for the jump to Tau Ceti in thirty minutes. For the ships about to jump, send out the recall to all of your troops and start prepping for battle. I want us loaded up and ready to QMT into battle in thirty minutes. If that means we run the QMTs to get the tanks and mecha on board at the same time the hangar bays are running and the Starhawks are flying, then that is what we do. I hate to have to ask you to jump right back into the fray again, people. I know this has been a long fight already. But our fellow soldiers are in the thick and need our assistance. We will be there for them. So let us all get moving. Good luck, and God bless."

"Andy, you don't have to be here," Joe told the EM1. "You should be in your rack resting."

"Hell, sir, I'm fine. That immunoboost is good stuff," Sanchez replied. "Did it work? I mean, I'd hate to think I got sucked out of the ship and all banged up for nothing."

"Yeah, it did. I'm gonna have to put you in for some sort of commendation. Bravery or something—the kind of thing usually given to jarheads." Joe smiled. "When the air rushed through the dry hull, it was supercooled through a Venturi effect, and that cooled the overheated coolant big time. We also came up with a new way to run the SIFs that will reduce the heat exchange needs by a shitload."

"Just glad I could help, sir."

"I'm just glad we didn't lose you."

"Aw shit, I wasn't never scared of that, sir," Andy lied.

"You sure you're up for duty then?"

"Sir, EM1 Sanchez reporting for duty, sir." He saluted.

"Well, we're headed into the shit in just a few minutes, so find something that needs fixin' and fix it, EM1." Joe returned the salute.

"Aye, sir."

"Jack, you ready for this?" Penzington asked the mecha jock. She knew that Boland was probably revered as one of the greatest pilots in the fleet, but what they were doing was "wet work," up close and personal. She wanted to make certain that the pilot would kill up close as easily as he could through mindview targeting sights. The distance made it easier for some people, and for some it didn't matter. Nancy never trusted people who could easily kill. She just wanted them to be able to do the job when they had to.

"I'm good, Nancy." Jack slapped the ammo magazine into his HVAR and stepped on the pad with her.

"Good," Nancy said. "We'll take care of the Tangiers first. I know where Elise stays. If they are under attack, then she'll be in her safe house in the mountains. I was a member of the Tangiers inner circle for a while. I know them pretty well. I have her AIC's EM signature saved. As soon as we get near her, I'll be able to pinpoint her."

"Good. By the time you get back, I should be well enough to join you," President Moore said. He had squirreled away one of the original QMT prototype pads more than a year prior, as if he had been planning this all along. The pad was in an old abandoned airport outside Jackson, Mississippi, near where he had grown up. Nancy thought that he was a very resourceful and clever man. He would have made a good spy. He made a great marine, and not too bad a president.

"I've had my AIC train yours, Dee's, and Sehera's external AIC on the operation of the pad. All you have to do is tell them what you want, and they can get you where you need to be. We managed to put backdoors in all the QMT pads known to us. So we can operate any of them, anywhere, and bounce between the network of jump pads. From here, we can QMT through ships or Mars or out to the Oort, and from there anywhere forward and back with a snap-back algorithm. I think this must be what Ahmi was trying to figure out how to do, but she didn't have the advantage of having access to all of the QMTs everywhere. We'll see you in a bit."

"Good hunting, Nancy, DeathRay." Dee waved to them. Then the pad lit up and they were gone to Mars for a fraction of a second, then through the Oort Cloud facility to the big one at Tau Ceti.

A fraction of a second later they were in the northern mountainous region of the Tharsis continent of Ares, inside a hallway with hardwood floors and lavish interior décor. There were paintings on the walls that Nancy knew were priceless, and there were sculptures, suits of armor, and other artifacts aligned down the hall that were each artifacts of antiquity from human history.

"Look at all this shit." Jack whistled softly.

"Elise is a collector. If it is expensive, she wants two of them. You should see her antique cars." Nancy scanned each direction to get her bearings. "This way."

The two of them slipped through the halls until they came past several suites and then an elevator. The elevator had a stairwell to the right of it. Nancy eased the door to the stairwell open and poked her HVAR around the doorjamb.

"Clear. Come on. They'll be two floors down, in her shipping operations room."

"If you knew that, why didn't we go there?"

"I couldn't be sure I had the coordinates right. We didn't want to teleport into a wall or something. I had measured where we came in before because I was going to fly a bomb in there if I ever got the opportunity. I never got it. But what I did get is her SIF encryption sequence. Even though she changed it, she follows the same algorithm. Allison just cycled through the algorithm until she hit the right key code. Ergo, we're in."

"I see." Jack widened his eyes and tried not to grin. "What is this place, anyway?"

"Bunker, hideout, ski resort, spa, whatever she wants it to be. She has more money and power than God. The only person she answers to is Elle Ahmi herself. They are tight, apparently. I didn't find that out until six years ago, and it nearly got me killed then."

They quickly dropped down the stairs to the door into the operations room. There were no guards standing around that far inside the compound, because nobody could get through the layered defenses and security to that point—unless they had QMT teleport technology and the geospatial coordinate information to circumvent those layers.

Nancy motioned DeathRay forward until they came to the operations room entrance. Inside, they could hear people talking and rushing around. This would be the nerve center for the logistics tail of the Separatist army. Taking out this room and its occupants would stall the Seppies' ability to run their defense. The might of the U.S. fleet had been in-system for more than an hour and was pounding away at the mix of Seppy civilian-turned-military vessels, plus the seven Seppy supercarriers that had returned from Ross 128. The battle up top had become a stalemate. Nancy and Jack were about to change that.

Nancy, I've got a fix on Elise,
Allison told her.

Where is she?

You're not going to believe this, but she is on the ski slope.

Skiing?

She's moving up the mountain at about two kilometers per hour.

Ski lift.

Probably,
her AIC agreed.

Okay, calculate the jump to get us there as soon as we blow the operations room.

Done.

Wait for my order.

You got it.

"Now, Jack." Nancy motioned to him.

They burst into the room, letting loose nonstop railgun fire until nothing else moved in the room. Then Nancy pulled out an HE pack and armed it.

"Be ready, Jack."

"Like I'm not now," he said.

Now, Allison
. Nancy pulled the pin on the HE and dropped it at her feet. They flashed out, and the room exploded. They reappeared atop a snowpeaked mountain behind a ski-lift shack.