Solfleet: The Call of Duty (30 page)

The scene
jumped ahead roughly forty-three minutes as Johnson’s small window winked off.
There was no way for Hansen to know for sure exactly where Zucker and his team
were at that point, but the apparent lack of consoles and equipment in the area
served as a fair indication that they were probably somewhere in the lower
decks—possibly in the maintenance corridors or the cargo holds.

“
I think
I’ve got it, sir,
” one of the troopers said.

“
Everyone
ready?
” Zucker asked as he stepped to the side of the large door in front
of him and backed up against the bulkhead in the same manner as before. Several
affirmative responses were voiced, then, “
All right, T-J. Open her up. And
let’s hope there are some more live ones in there.
”

The loud
hiss of a heavy blast door rising into the ceiling immediately followed his
order. So it was a cargo hold. Either that or a small craft hanger deck.

“
Jesus
Christ,
” someone said.

“
Holy
mother of...
”

“
If you
boys are done calling for help, Ripper, I’d appreciate an ‘all clear,’
”
Zucker said.

“
Uh,
yeah. All clear, sir. Sorry, Colonel.
”

Zucker
stepped away from the bulkhead and turned to look inside. The entire lower
third of his HUD glowed with that same dull red aura. Bodies were strewn across
the deck as far as Hansen could see. Zucker chose one, seemingly at random,
aimed his rifle, and half squeezed the trigger again.

“
Identify
and analyze tactical.
”

His computer
pack took its readings, extrapolated its data, and reported, “
Species: Tor’Kana.
Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and explosives.
Threat: none apparent.
”

Female? “Well
I’ll be damned,” Hansen said as he sat forward and rested his arms on his desk.
They had more females!

“
Hey,
Colonel?
” one of the troopers called.

“
Stand by
a second,
” Zucker told him. He selected another body. “
Identify and
analyze tactical.
”

“
Species:
Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and
explosives. Threat: none apparent.
”

Another dead
female. How many more? Johnson had mentioned that some Tor’Kana had been found
alive. Hansen could only hope that some of those survivors were female as well.

Zucker
acquired one more target. “
Identify and analyze tactical.
”

“
Species:
Tor’Kana. Gender: female. Status: deceased. Analysis: Negative armaments and
explosives. Threat: none apparent.
”

“
Are you
men all finding dead Tor’Kana females, too?
” Zucker asked.

Without
exception, his men responded that they were. He reset his TAC-unit to scan the
entire room. “
Scan for alien life signs.
”

“
Scanning.
Negative alien life signs within range.
”

Hansen heard
Zucker’s disheartened sigh, even over his own.

“
Are all
the bodies Tor’Kana females?
” Zucker asked.

“
Biological
identification is not possible on wide scan setting.
”

“
Medics,
”
Zucker called, rather than resetting his TAC-unit again. “
I want to know
what killed these...uh...people.
”

“
You got
it, sir,
” someone responded.

“
Let’s
light it up for them, boys. And make sure your TAC-units are set to wide scan.
I don’t want anyone sneaking in here behind us.
”

Zucker’s HUD
winked off and the room before him grew brighter as the other troopers
dispersed and added their spotlights to his own.

Despite the
relatively limited field of vision that Zucker’s continuously moving camera
provided—the colonel must have been making his way back and forth, from one end
of the room to the other—it didn’t take very long for Hansen to realize that
the troopers had been faced with a most gruesome task. There looked to be at
least two hundred bodies scattered throughout the cavernous room, and from the
looks of things most of them had died a horrible death. Many of them had four
empty sockets where their multifaceted black eyes had been, and a light
colored, semi-liquid substance, doubtless the yellow-white syrupy fluid that
was Tor’Kana blood, seemed to be splattered everywhere.

Hansen’s
gaze fell to the surface of his desk as he bowed his head in mourning for the
dead.

Several
recorded minutes passed in silent fast-forward mode while the medics examined
the bodies, one at a time. Then, finally, the recording slowed to real time
again as one of them reported their conclusions.

Hansen
listened without looking up.

“
We’ve
got exactly one hundred and sixty-one dead Tor’Kana females here, Colonel,
”
one of the medics said. “
Cause of death in one hundred nineteen cases
appears to be massive tissue damage associated with sudden decompression. As
you can see, the evidence is pretty obvious.
”

“
If you’re
talking about their eyes exploding out of their heads, Sergeant, that’s only a
myth,
” Zucker said. “
Sudden decompression doesn’t really do that.
”

“
Sudden
decompression doesn’t really do that to us, maybe, but it does it to them, sir,
”
the medic clarified. “
They have small sacks of air behind their eyes, and
the tendons and muscles holding their eyes in place aren’t nearly as strong as
ours. As for the others, the cause of death appears to be asphyxiation due to
inhalation of an improperly balanced atmosphere, but our doctors back on the
ship are going to have to examine them more thoroughly to be sure.
”

One hundred
and sixty-one. Hansen looked up just as the image of the medic talking to
Zucker froze, as if the recording had suddenly malfunctioned. He understood now
why Johnson had tagged this report the way he had, and he agreed wholeheartedly
with the young agent’s assessment. Not many Tor’Kana females had escaped the
invasion of their home system. Maybe a few thousand at best, including those
that Zucker’s team had found, plus any more that might have been aboard that
ship. The slaughter of so many of them was truly devastating.

Johnson’s
image reappeared in full-screen. “
Turns out that medic was right, Admiral.
The autopsies are still ongoing, but I’m told the results so far do indicate
that several victims were breathing an atmosphere with improperly balanced
gasses. In all there were seven-hundred ninety Tor’Kana found dead onboard,
including all four-hundred seventy-seven females they were transporting. There were
also one-hundred thirty-eight severely wounded, most of them mortally. Only
about eleven are expected to survive. That’s eleven out of nine hundred
twenty-eight souls, Admiral, in case you weren’t counting.

“
Examination
of the damage to the ship’s hull confirms they were attacked by the Veshtonn.
We’re assuming for the time being that the Veshtonn somehow tapped into the
ship’s computer and adjusted the atmospheric mix enough to kill the female
passengers, though why they didn’t just kill the whole crew that way instead of
boarding the ship and slaughtering them remains a big question.
”

Hansen could
guess the answer to that question. He’d lived through it once, long ago.

“
One more
thing, Admiral. That ship has been positively identified as one of the seven
Tor’Kana military vessels we know to have escaped from their home system last
month. And as you know, only three of the five that have been recovered were
carrying females. If there really is only one more out there somewhere...

“
It doesn’t
look good, Admiral. I’ll keep you posted. Lieutenant Johnson out.
”

The wall
screen went dark. Hansen took a deep breath and bowed his head again as he
exhaled. Four hundred and seventy-seven more Tor’Kana females dead. No, it didn’t
look good. It didn’t look good at all, and things were getting worse every day.

And he still
had one more report to review.

It had taken
just under another hour to make it back to the base. Once the Marines had
finally put the mountain range and foothills behind them and reached the local
town’s hard paved roads, where the APC’s rough-terrain tracks were retracted in
favor of its more road-friendly all-tire configuration, the ride had become a
whole lot smoother and quieter. So much so in fact that Dylan had almost fallen
asleep by the time they reached the base’s main gate. Frieburger had managed to
hold down that meal, though just barely, and the FTX had been declared
officially completed.

Having
finally made it downstairs to the locker room after sitting through a seemingly
endless mission debriefing—talk about struggling to stay awake—Dylan maneuvered
past the few other stragglers who hadn’t managed to get away yet and
practically collapsed with exhaustion onto the long wooden plank that served as
a bench in front of his locker. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his
knees, and hung his weary head. For a 28 year old man in good physical condition,
he sure felt awfully old.

With more
effort than it should have required he pulled off his combat boots and heavy
socks and dropped them none too gently to the floor in front of him, then drew
a deep, relaxing breath and stood up with a groan. Sounded old, too. He punched
his code into the locker door panel and released the latch, but paused before
opening it to steal a sidelong glance at Marissa, whose locker stood at the end
of that same row.

As an
unmarried Marine eligible for promotion to the rank of sergeant E-5, she’d been
assigned her own single-person room in the barracks and didn’t need that locker.
She could just as easily have gone upstairs to shower in the privacy of her own
bathroom. But she was strongly attracted to Dylan, a fact that she’d never
tried to hide from him, or from anyone else for that matter, and she enjoyed
teasing him a little bit whenever she got the chance. Exactly why she was
attracted to him, Dylan didn’t have a clue. God knew she could have had any guy
she wanted. Damn near all of them wanted her. But for whatever reason, she’d
chosen to focus her attention on him.

He’d made it
perfectly clear to her on more than one occasion that due to any number of circumstances,
not the least of which was the fact that he was married, nothing could ever
come of that attraction. But she indulged herself just the same, often to the
delight of her good-humored squad mates, and Dylan had to admit that he enjoyed
it as much as she did, though he kept that to himself. She could be a
strikingly beautiful woman when she wanted to be, especially in civilian
clothes free of uniform restrictions, and he was every bit as attracted to her as
she was to him, if not more so.

He kept that
to himself, too.

Besides, he
reminded himself as he watched her pull off her dusty trousers and stuff them
into her laundry bag with her tunic, he owed her two cups of coffee, and knowing
her she wasn’t going to let him wander very far out of her sight until she
collected.

Amazing.
Even exhausted, sweaty, and half covered in dirt, she was still beautiful. And
what a body—perfect, curvaceous figure, and not an ounce of fat anywhere, except
of course where men liked it the most.

She’d already
stripped down to her Corps-issue black panties and tank top when Dylan suddenly
realized that his quick sidelong glance had graduated into a long lustful
stare, so he quickly opened his locker door to block his view...and to block
her view of him. He stripped off his own dirt-caked cammies and stuffed them,
along with his boots and socks, into his canvas laundry bag. Then he grabbed
his towel and a clean pair of non-issue blue boxer briefs—Corps-issue underclothes
were for uniform wear only as far as he was concerned—closed his locker, and
headed to the showers.

The first
stall on the left was free. He stepped into the changing cubical and closed the
door, hung his towel and clean briefs on the hooks, then stripped off his own
black underclothes and dropped them onto the narrow seat. He set the shower for
medium-warm, heavy flow, then stepped into the stall and stood still as a
statue under the pulsating stream while the past two weeks’ worth of ground-in grime
turned to mud and fell away from his sun-baked skin in small clumps that
threatened to stop up the drain.

It wasn’t
that he hadn’t tried to keep himself clean in the field, because he had. But
there were limits as to how thoroughly a person could bathe out of a portable
field basin with only a single canteen’s worth of cold water.

He cupped
his rough, dry hands under the soap dispenser and held them there until the
creamy white fluid overflowed and oozed down the length of his forearms. His
palms felt like coarse sandpaper as he lathered up, but that didn’t bother him
in the least. In fact, it felt pretty good. “Finally, to be clean again,” he
mumbled. He couldn’t remember another time when a warm shower had felt so good.

“Hey, Kenny!”
he called out. “You in here?”

“Yeah!” the
answer came from somewhere deeper in the long, narrow shower room. The
acoustics being what they were, it was hard to tell exactly where he was.

“I told you
I was still a white man under all this dirt,” he kidded.

“I’ll call
my great-grandfather for you,” Kenny offered. “Maybe he can help.”

Dylan
laughed. Kenny’s great-grandfather was a doctor. Still practicing full time in
fact, despite his advanced age, and showing no signs of slowing down.

Dylan
enjoyed being able to see Kenny on a regular basis again after so many years.
He’d known Ken Franklin, whom he alone had the right to call ‘Kenny,’ ever
since he was six years old and Kenny was eight. His father had abandoned the
family to accept his own command—the starcruiser
Excalibur
—so his mother
had moved them to a new house that stood directly across the street from the
Franklins. At the time the neighborhood had been predominantly black, which had
meant nothing more to Dylan than that the neighbors’ skin just happened to be a
darker shade of color than his own. Nevertheless, a predominantly black neighborhood
wasn’t what Dylan had been used to at the time, and being only six years old its
unfamiliarity had scared him a little bit.

Early that
first full day in the new house, Dylan had been sorely missing his friends, had
worked himself into a pretty foul mood, and had grabbed his most prized
possession, his toy cap gun, and gone outside to sit on the porch and sulk. He’d
only been sitting there for a few minutes when an unfamiliar black kid came out
of the house across the street and started playing in his own front yard.
Afraid that kid might someday try to take the place of those friends he’d left
behind and missed so much—an intrusion that would have been unforgivable in
Dylan’s mind—Dylan had raised his toy gun, taken careful aim, and squeezed off
a shot. The crack of the cap had attracted the boy’s attention, and upon seeing
what Dylan had done the boy had immediately slapped his hands to his chest with
a loud grunt and collapsed dramatically to the ground.

Despite having
preoccupied himself with wallowing in self-pity, Dylan had laughed at the other
boy’s antics, and five minutes after he committed his cold-blooded, brutal act
of mock-murder, he and Kenny became instant friends. They got along well and within
days became the very best of friends, always together and absolutely
inseparable, and as they grew older even their girlfriends couldn’t come
between them.

But like so
many other childhood friendships, theirs had been tested by early adulthood.
They’d grown up and had inevitably gone their separate ways. Kenny had enlisted
in the United States Aerospace Force as a communications specialist immediately
after he graduated from high school—two years earlier than Dylan—with the hope
of qualifying for a position in Solfleet after his initial enlistment. When
Dylan graduated two years later, Solfleet had changed its enlistment policy and
started allowing high school graduates to join the fleet directly, so Dylan and
another friend had signed up to become Solfleet Military Policemen. Life’s
journey had torn Kenny and him apart and had squeezed billions of miles between
them, but in the end they’d passed that test with flying colors.

Despite the
vast distances that had separated them for years, they’d managed to maintain
semi-steady contact with each other. Despite the odds against them, they’d kept
their nearly lifelong friendship alive. So it was much more than just a
pleasant surprise for the both of them when they ended up assigned to the same
Ranger platoon together. It was the culmination of a plan, quickly outlined as
soon as the opportunity presented itself and carried out across those billions
of miles. Now Kenny served as squad sergeant of the second squad, equal to
Dylan in rank but with almost two years more time in grade, and was on the
verge of being promoted into the platoon sergeant’s slot. And he was still
Dylan’s very best friend in the world.
Any
world.

Dylan heard
the door to the next stall slam closed with a sharp crack. Was maintenance ever
going to adjust the tension on that thing? Then he heard Marissa—he’d know her
angelic voice anywhere—humming a soft melody that he didn’t recognize. When she
turned the water on the sound drowned her out, but then her haunting melody
exploded into a reverberating moan of such ecstasy that everyone in the
showers, and probably in the locker room as well, had to have heard it.

“Oh!” she
cried out, sounding as though she were on the very brink of orgasm, eliciting
assorted snickers and various comments. “Oh yes! Yes! Oh, it feels so good!”

The
snickering graduated into open laughter.

“You said a
mouthful, Ortiz,” someone shouted.

“I wouldn’t
mind giving her a mouthful,” someone else remarked.

“Watch your
mouth out there!” Dylan warned, stopping in mid scalp scratch.

The ruckus
stopped for the most part, but he could still hear someone snickering not quite
under their breath. Then someone hollered out, “You don’t even have a mouthful!”

“Only
because you won’t give it back!” the response came.

Then someone
else yelled, “Damn! Even my schlong is dirty!”

“Yo! Your
schlong’s
always
dirty!”

“Screw you,
Pauly! At least I have a schlong!”

“Trust me,
so does Pauly!”

That last was
Sweeney, no doubt about it. Dylan dropped his arms to his sides and just stood
there shaking his head. They were all fine Marines, every last one of them, but
they could be mercilessly brutal with each other when they wanted to be. “I
think I’ll just stay in here forever,” he mumbled.

“Great! I’ll
stay with you.”

And that was
Marissa. He glanced at the ugly yellow-tan block wall that separated his stall
from hers—how the hell had she heard him through
that
?—then stepped back
under the water to rinse the shampoo out of his short, dark brown hair. She’d
said a mouthful all right. The lukewarm water felt so good pouring down over
his body that he almost wished he really could stay in there forever.

Once
satisfied that he was finally clean and thoroughly rinsed off, he tapped the
button to stop the water and then threw the forest-green plastic curtain aside
and grabbed his towel off the hook. Then, when he’d dried off, he stepped back
into the changing cubicle, hung the towel back on the hook, and stood naked in
front of the full-length mirror on the wall to look himself over.

As usual, he
felt generally pleased with what he saw. His muscles weren’t particularly large
like Sergeant Running Horse’s—certainly nothing like a bodybuilder’s—but they
were well defined, hard and strong, more like those of an accomplished martial
artist. That, of course, made perfect sense. He’d been a student of the martial
arts off and on since he was twelve years old and held advanced black belts in
two separate disciplines.

“Looks good
to me.”

Dylan yanked
his towel down so hard that he broke the hook and held it in front of him as he
spun to face the door. “Marissa!” he exclaimed quietly, looking her in the eye
but seeing a lot more. She was holding the smoke-gray plastiglass door halfway
open and standing there in the narrow doorway. Her long black hair was still
dripping wet and clung to her bare shoulders, and the bright red towel she’d
wrapped herself in barely reached the tops of her thighs.

“Hello,
Dylan,” she said, smiling flirtatiously at him.

“What the
hell are you doing in here?” he asked, being careful not to let his own towel
drop too low in front as he hastily wrapped it around his waist.

His gaze
fell to her athletic legs as she stepped over the four inch high water stop and
into the cubicle, slowing the door with one hand as it closed behind her, and
he saw that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her towel. But then...so what?
He’d seen her naked before. Hell, as Marines serving together in a Ranger
platoon, they’d
all
seen each other naked before. More than a few times,
in fact. In squad tents, field showers, Nuclear-Biological-Chemical decontamination
stations, a certain oasis lake in the middle of The Great Cirran Desert... Aw
hell. This was different and he knew it. Trying to rationalize it wouldn’t
change that fact one little bit.

“I wanted to
talk to you,” she answered, stopping barely three feet in front of him.

“Couldn’t
you have waited until I came out?” he asked as his eyes met hers again. “This
isn’t exactly the most appropriate place for us to be talking.”

“It’s all
right,” she assured him. “There’s no one else here. I made sure we’d be alone.”

“That doesn’t
matter,” he countered. “In fact, that’s the point. I’ve told you before...”