Solfleet: The Call of Duty (25 page)

“Commander,”
he responded with a curt nod. Then he looked at the young man to his right—the
very
young man to his right—who’d barely relaxed at all, and added, “Ensign.”

The younger
man stared dead ahead and swallowed nervously. He looked like he was about
ready to puke. “Ad...Admiral Hansen, sir,” he responded, his voice a little
shaky. “Good morning, sir.”

Jesus. Had
Fleet grown so desperate that it had started recruiting kids right out of high
school? “Relax, Ensign. That’s what ‘as you were’ means, in case you’ve
forgotten.”

“Yes, sir. I
mean no, sir. I haven’t forgotten. Thank you, sir.” But after all that, he
still didn’t relax. He was too busy staring wide-eyed at the rows upon rows of
colorful ribbons centered perfectly above the admirals left breast pocket.

“Admiral
Icarus Hansen,” Royer began, her slight grin betraying her amusement, “allow me
to introduce Ensign Martin Pillinger, the agency’s newest recruiting officer. I
understand you didn’t have an opportunity to meet him before he left on
assignment.”

“No, I didn’t,”
Hansen confirmed. “Pleased to meet you, Ensign Pillinger,” he said as he
extended his hand toward the young officer. The kid—he was what, twenty-two or
twenty-three years old? He was clean-shaven, had a slight pinkish tint to his cheeks,
and he wore his light brown hair buzzed high and tight in the traditional style
still required by the United States Marines and favored by most of Solfleet’s
combat troops. God, he looked so young. Hansen couldn’t help but see him as a
kid.

“The
pleasure is all mine, sir,” Pillinger gushed as he shook the admiral’s hand as
firmly, and as briefly, as he could. “I’ve heard a lot about you, sir.”

“All of it
good, I hope,” Hansen quipped.

But the joke
was completely lost on the ensign. More than that, it actually seemed to
frighten the hell out of him, as if it were some kind of accusation directed
right at him. “Uh, yes, sir!” he assured the admiral. “Of course, sir! All of
it good.”

Royer shook
her head ever so slightly and fought back the amused grin that threatened to
break out as she observed the interaction in front of her. The poor kid was
making a complete ass of himself right in the face of his top-level commanding
officer. Amusing, but certainly not the best way to begin a career.

“Just back
from Cirra, aren’t you?” Hansen had just asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“How was
your trip?”

“Uh, just
fine, sir,” Pillinger answered after a slight hesitation. No doubt the last
thing in the world the young ensign wanted to have to do was admit to that same
top-level commanding officer that he’d failed in his first assignment. “The
food was actually pretty good, and the ship’s accommodations were excellent,
sir.”

“Where they
really? I guess junior officers’ quarters have improved a lot in the years since
I was a young ensign.”

Pillinger
glanced at the three glistening golden starbursts that adorned Hansen’s epaulets,
then gazed once more at the rainbow of ribbons on his chest as he answered with
a firm and decisive, “Yes, sir.” The words had escaped before he could stop
them, and the poorly disguised look of horror that twisted his baby-faced
features was absolutely priceless.

Royer bit
down on her lower lip to keep from laughing out loud.

“I mean...”

“You’re
dismissed, Ensign,” Royer interjected, no longer able to hide her amusement and
knowing how relieved the young man would be to hear those three words at that
moment. “Take the rest of the day away from the office and finish up your
report.”

“Yes, ma’am.
Thank you.” To Hansen he said, “Pleasure meeting you, Admiral.” And with that
the young officer executed a picture-perfect left face and marched, very
quickly, out the door. Royer tapped the ‘close’ pad on her desk panel.

“Is he
always that stiff?” Hansen asked.

“Apparently so,”
Royer answered as she pulled off her duty jacket and draped it over the arm of
her chair. “At least he has been whenever I’ve seen him anywhere. He never sits
back and relaxes, he addresses his superiors as ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ much more
often than necessary, and he marches when he walks. Tell you the truth,
Admiral, I don’t think I’ve ever met such a nervous young officer before.”

Hansen
watched as she adjusted her black midi-skirt then stepped out from behind her
desk and walked over to the more relaxed setting of her small, informal meeting
area.

“Can I get
you something to drink, Admiral?” she asked.

“No, thank
you.” He joined her and took a seat in one of the five matching soft-cushioned
chairs that surrounded her oval, frosted glass-topped coffee table. Not exactly
fleet issue, but then again neither was her desk or very much else in her
office. She preferred to be surrounded by her own things.

“So what’s
Pillinger so nervous about?” he asked.

“He seems to
be deathly afraid of failure,” she explained as she poured herself a small
glass of ice water. “I don’t know. He came to us fresh out of the academy.
Maybe he’s just still in awe of the whole ‘commissioned Solfleet officer’
thing.”

She set her
glass down on the table, then unfastened the top couple of buttons of her new blouse
and pulled open her collar. “I like the new uniforms, but this damn collar is
so tight I can barely breathe,” she commented as she sat down about a third of
the way around the table to Hansen’s right. She crossed one leg over the other
and tugged downward on the hem of her skirt, then rested her elbow on the arm
of the chair and her chin on her closed fist, and asked, “So, how was Geneva?”

“Clean and
very colorful, as usual,” he answered. That had become his standard answer to
that particular question long ago—the one he gave each and every time someone
asked it. But this time he had something more to add, though he sincerely
wished he didn’t. “I only hope I can still say that a year from now. Poor folks
have no idea what’s about to hit them, but I guess the same can be said for
pretty much the rest of humanity, as well.”

“Speaking of
which, how’d the meeting go?” she asked more sullenly.

“I think ‘interesting’
would be the best way to describe it.”

“Really?
Hmm. I expected something more along the lines of ‘boring’, considering all the
time you and I have already spent on the subject over the years.”

“And you’d
probably have been right, too, under normal circumstances, but this meeting was
a little different than most. There was a college professor there—a guy named
of Joseph Verne. He...”

“I’ve read
about him. He’s head of the Drexel University Physics department.”

“That’s
right. The president wanted to hear both sides of the Timeshift Resolution
debate first hand, so she granted him a special security clearance. He talked
about a few of the more widely accepted time-travel theories.” Hansen
snickered. “I have to say that for a non-politician, he sure gave Chairman
MacLeod a run for his money. If this whole situation weren’t so serious it
would have been funny. He’s dead set against the Timeshift mission ever being
carried out, that’s for damn sure.”

“Was there
anything in what he said that might shed some light on our other problem?” she
asked hopefully, referring of course to their illegal activities of six years
earlier and the subsequent loss of her brother.

Ah, yes, the
other problem. They’d been calling it that for so long, ‘the other problem’ had
almost become its official title. Hansen shook his head. “No, not really. It
was all pretty much the same stuff you and I considered back when we started
that whole thing. A little more refined, maybe,” he appended, “but nothing new.”

Royer
sighed. She’d been hoping for more, if not actually expecting it. “Damn it. I’m
so tired of not knowing, and of not knowing if I ever
will
know.”

“We do know,
Commander,” Hansen reminded her, as he had several times before.

“Not
necessarily, Admiral. Maybe...”

“Liz,”
Hansen said, calmly interrupting. “It’s been six years now. How many times have
we had this conversation? Günter isn’t coming back, and so far as we can
determine, nothing has changed. We can only assume that he either returned to a
different timeline, or that he wasn’t able to return at all. And that’s assuming
he made it in the first place.” He paused a moment, wishing he’d chosen those
last words a little more carefully. But rather than try to explain what he’d
actually meant—she knew anyway—he simply continued, “Knowing all of that is
going to make sending someone back on
this
mission even harder.”

“Why?”

He looked
her in the eye and sternly asked, “How would you like to be stuck in a world
where you don’t belong? How would you like to leave Karen and never return to
her?”

“I guess I
wouldn’t like it very much,” she answered sheepishly.

“Exactly.
And neither would she. You know that better than anyone. Whoever we end up
sending back there is going to be leaving loved ones behind. Probably forever.
They’re going to miss those loved ones and those loved ones are going to miss
them, just as you miss Günter.” He drew a deep, relaxing breath, then added, “I
only wish we’d thought about that a little more when we sent Günter back.”

“We did what
we thought was right at the time, Admiral,” Royer reminded him. Though in truth
she’d said it as much to convince herself as to comfort the admiral. Six years.
Six long years. Yet somehow she still managed to cling to that slowly dwindling
hope that something positive might come out of what they had done. But deep
down inside she knew the admiral was right. She’d known it for years, but had
avoided admitting it to herself, as if that would somehow make things
different.

Günter had
failed. Neither he nor any of the cloned progeny he’d taken back with him had
ever returned to the present, and they most likely never would. She and the
admiral couldn’t even be sure that any of them were alive. As difficult as it
was, she knew she was going to have to accept that fact once and for all,
sooner or later, and let her brother go.

“Did the president
give any indication as to which way she’s leaning?” she asked, getting back to
the subject at hand.

Hansen shook
his head. “She considers it strictly a last resort for now, but she left herself
room to change her mind, which was exactly what I expected her to do.”

“Really?
Why?”

“Why? Come
on, Liz. You’ve known Mirriazu Shakhar almost half as long as I have, and I’ve
known her for well over twenty years, since long before she ever considered
running for the presidency—which, by the way, makes it extremely difficult for
me to mislead her. You know she doesn’t make rash decisions.”

“I know,
Admiral. She analyzes every aspect of every available option and then plays out
scenarios in her head based on all the foreseeable results of each one of those
options. Then she has several long discussions about those scenarios with her
advisory staff. You’ve explained it to me more than a few times.”

“The way any
smart leader would,” Hansen pointed out. “And in this particular case, I can
just about guarantee she won’t make a decision one way or the other until she’s
confident that she knows with reasonable certainty what all of the results of
that decision will be. And I suspect she’ll only approve this mission if she
feels like she absolutely
has
to.”

“In other
words, we may be in for a very long wait,” Royer concluded.

“That is a
distinct probability,” Hansen confirmed, “which brings me to my next point.”

“Which is?”

“We know it’s
going to take time to train Sergeant Graves, prepare him for the mission, and get
him to Window World. We also know that the Veshtonn are on the move, en masse.
We still have time, but not a lot of it. We can’t afford to put things off much
longer.”

A moment
passed in silence. Then Royer uncrossed her legs, sat up straight, and folded
her hands in her lap and said, “Then we might have a serious problem, Admiral.”

“What
problem?” Hansen asked with apprehension. But he suspected he already knew the
answer.

“Sergeant
Graves still hasn’t agreed to join us.”

He was
right. He had already known the answer. “Ensign Pillinger’s visit didn’t help,
huh.” It wasn’t a question. Having read Royer’s extensive background report on
the sergeant at length, Hansen hadn’t really expected any extra effort on
Pillinger’s part to make a difference. Squad Sergeant Dylan Edward Graves was a
middle child who had grown up fatherless from the age of six and had spent most
of his childhood years as a social outcast with very few friends, despite his
eventual rise to his high school’s varsity ice hockey team. As a young man he’d
found a home in the service, especially with the Rangers, and Hansen knew
exactly why. Esprit-de-corps. That feeling of belonging. That feeling of
absolute unity with one’s brothers-in-arms that the children of broken homes
always found so appealing. Hansen had seen it so many times before, in all
branches of the service but most particularly in the Solfleet Marine Corp’s
Rangers. And more often than not, almost to a one in fact, those Rangers in
whom he’d seen it had stayed with the Rangers until they retired or until the
day they died, whichever came first.

“The
sergeant’s unit should just about be wrapping up a two week field training
exercise as we speak,” Royer added. “Right before it started, Pillinger met
with him at length two or three times, but he didn’t bite. I’m hoping he was
just too busy preparing for the F-T-X at the time to give our offer any serious
thought.

“After they
deployed to the field, Pillinger tried
at least
three times to talk his company
commander into either pulling Graves back out of the field so he could meet
with him again, or talking to him about it himself. He refused, of course.”