Solfleet: The Call of Duty (4 page)

He stepped
inside and closed and locked the door behind him, then went into the living
room and found her stretched out on the couch in nothing but a pair of white flower-print
panties and an old threadbare tee shirt that looked about three sizes too small
for her—her typical stay-at-home garb—totally absorbed in her deafening game.

“Hi, Dad,”
she shouted over the mayhem without taking her eyes off three-dimensional
action that she commanded through the elaborate, multi-buttoned game controller
she held in her hands long enough to spare him an acknowledging glance—a high-speed
multi-vehicle police chase through the streets of old Detroit from the looks
and sounds of it.

“Turn that
down, Heather!” he shouted over the blaring sirens. “In fact, shut it off!”

Heather hit
a button, freezing the action just as one very unfortunate police officer drove
his motorcycle off the end of a seaside dock, then turned and stared up at her
father as though he were little more than an annoying distraction. “What do you
want?” she asked coldly.

“First of
all, how did you even hear me come in over all that noise?” he asked.

“It’s not
that
loud, Dad,” she told him, her tone of voice betraying the obvious fact that she
considered the idea that her game might actually bother somebody to be totally
ridiculous.

“Yes it
is
that loud, and I want it turned down before you restart it. Otherwise, you’re
going to lose it for a while. Understood?”

Heather drew
a deep breath and exhaled sharply and quite dramatically as she rolled her
eyes, then said, “Fine. Anything else?”

“Yes,” he
answered firmly. “How many times do I have to tell you not to lie around in
your underwear before you finally stop doing it? What if I had one of my men
with me right now?”

“I guess he’d
of gotten one hell of a thrill, wouldn’t he?”

The admiral
started to respond, but his words caught in his throat. He didn’t like her
answer, but as much as he wanted to disagree with it, he couldn’t. Still about
a month shy of her fifteenth birthday, Heather already had the body of a
curvaceous twenty-one year old, and she was pretty good at strutting her stuff
when she wanted to be, too—a fact that no father could have missed in a
daughter so young, no matter how straight-laced and proper he might be. Like
her mother, God rest her soul, she was very beautiful, with long
strawberry-blond hair and piercing emerald-green eyes. She was, often to his
annoyance and exasperation, an incredibly sexy young woman—an incredibly sexy
very
young woman. Far too sexy for her own good, he often feared.

“That isn’t
funny, Heather,” he finally responded. “You
cannot
lie around here in
your underwear with the door unlocked.
Anybody
could have wandered in
here.”

“God, Dad,
don’t be so paranoid!” she chided him in disgust. “We live on a space station for
God sakes. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

“All right,
all right,” he surrendered. “Forget the lecture for now.” It was an old
argument anyway. There would be plenty of time to continue it later—again. “Right
now I’m more curious about why you didn’t come to the ceremony this morning
after you told me you were going to be there.”

“I’m sorry,”
she told him, not sounding sorry at all. “I overslept, okay? Congratulations on
once again being recognized as the Hero of the Galaxy.”

He stared at
his daughter in silence, totally at a loss as to what to say to her. Why did
she have to be like that? Sure, her mother’s death had been hard on her. He
understood that. It had been hard on him, too. But eleven years had passed
since that tragic day. How long was she going to hold onto her anger? How long
was she going to blame him for their loss?

She must
have seen the hurt in his eyes, because she dropped her gaze to the floor.

“Don’t
forget,” he said, changing the subject as he started toward his bedroom, “you
have an appointment with your probation officer. Two o’clock.”

“When have I
ever forgotten, Dad?” she asked rhetorically.

He stopped
short and turned back toward her. “Excuse me?” he prodded as he slowly
approached her again. “When have you ever forgotten? Is that really what you
just asked me?”

She glared
back at him, but apparently knew better than to push him any further.

“
Admiral
Hansen?
” his secretary’s voice called through the link insignia pinned to
his collar, heading off what had promised to be a verbal storm of a response.

He tapped
the pin, hard enough that it hurt and forced him to swallow and clear his
throat before he answered. “Go ahead, Vicky.”

“
Sir,
Lieutenant Young would like to know how soon you’re coming in.
”

“As soon as
I change uniforms,” he told her. Then he asked, “Why? What’s going on?”

“
He’s
holding an incoming live transmission on standby—your eyes only.
”

“All right.
Have him tell the caller I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“
Yes,
sir.
”

“If they can’t
wait that long, have him make an encrypted recording of the message and I’ll
review it first thing when I get there.”

“
Will do,
Admiral. Thank you.
”

He tapped
his collar pin again, more gently this time, to close the channel. Then he told
Heather, “I have to change and go to work. We’ll talk about your attitude
later.”

Heather
harrumphed. “What else is new?”

He shook his
head, not knowing what else to say or do, then escaped into his bedroom to
change. Six more weeks before school started up again. He was beginning to
think his patience might not last that much longer.

Admiral Hansen hadn’t been issued
his new class-A uniforms yet, but he had been issued everything else, and as he
pulled his new black-on-tan class-B jacket on over the new tan button-down
shirt that went with it, he gazed into his full-length mirror and admired its design.
It looked a lot better with the fleet’s customary black trousers than the
slightly longer brown one had, and he really liked the way the new cut tapered
down to his waist and made him look as if he were in even better physical
condition than he really was. Whether that effect was achieved by design or simply
by happy coincidence, who knew—and who
cared
? He certainly didn’t. He
liked it, and that was all that mattered. Most of all, though, he liked the
fact that once he got to his office he could take the jacket off and work in
comfort, and still be ‘in uniform’ if someone happened to stop by.

Thank God the class-A’s were the
only ones whose fleet-wide issue had fallen behind schedule. Six months of
wearing those ugly chocolate browns were more than enough.

Yes indeed, the
newest
new
uniforms were a vast improvement over the
previous
new uniforms. Now, if
Solfleet could just manage to stick with them...

He gazed at his jacket’s
accoutrements as he fastened it—particularly at the three shiny gold-plated
starbursts fastened to both sides of the black collar. Vice-Admiral Icarus
Hansen.
Vice
-Admiral. Had a nice ring to it, and it had been a long time
coming—especially for someone who had started out on the fast track almost
since day one out of the academy the way he had. From a young Security Police
platoon leader to a tough-as-nails infantry company commander and combat
veteran to a field-grade Security Police detachment commander, all in his first
seven years of active service. His was a promotion rate that still stood unparalleled
anywhere in any of the fleet’s five branches, including the combat arms
specialties. If it hadn’t been for all the political fallout over that one
horrific incident over twenty years ago...

Except for the little star cluster
next to the bronze ‘Valor’ device on his Distinguished Service Cross ribbon,
the rest of his accoutrements remained the same. He took one last look, then
went back into the living room. No surprise, Heather was still lying there
playing her game in her underwear, but at least she’d turned down the volume.

“Clothes, Heather,” he sternly
reminded her as he passed her on his way to the door.

“I will, Dad! God!” she exclaimed. “I’m
in the middle of a level here!”

He didn’t have time to argue. He
set the door to lock behind him and headed out.

* * *

The almost intoxicating fresh
brewed aroma of his favorite blend of Columbian coffee wafted over Hansen like
a warm summer breeze as soon as he walked into the reception area outside his
private office. It might have seemed a bit old-fashioned, the pretty young personal
secretary serving coffee to the older executive, but every morning Vicky met
him a few feet inside the door with his large personalized ‘official’ black and
tan Mandela Station Command Staff mug in hand, and every morning he gratefully
accepted it from her with a friendly smile. This morning was no different.
Despite the fact that he barely slowed down as he walked by her, she handed his
mug to him with all the precision of a relay racer handing the baton off to the
next runner, and she did it without spilling a drop.

“Thank you, Vicky,” he said
automatically, without even sparing her a glance.

“You’re welcome, Admiral,” she
responded pleasantly, but with a hint of disappointment evident in her tone. “Good
morning, and congratulations by the way.”

He’d forgotten to greet her
properly, he realized immediately—something he’d promised himself a long time
ago that he would never do. He stopped halfway to his office door and turned
back to her. “I’m sorry, I have a lot on my mind this morning,” he told her.
Then, to correct his oversight, he said, “Good morning and thank you.”

“That’s okay, Admiral.”

He drank in the sight of her with a
few quick covert glances over the rim of his mug as he took a long careful sip
of the steaming brew. She’d dressed in finely tailored dark blue business
attire over a silk blouse like mother-of-pearl and a pair of those black
pleather knee-high boots that seemed to keep coming back into style every
couple of generations or so. She’d pinned her long, wavy, light brown hair back
on the sides, away from her soft, smoothly sculpted face, but had left the rest
of it loose to flow freely down her back, presumably to help her maintain an
air of femininity in the otherwise all business atmosphere. All in all a very
professional appearance, as usual, though her skirt could probably have been a
little longer.

“Where’s Lieutenant Young?” he
asked her quickly when he suddenly caught her eye, hoping he hadn’t made her
feel uncomfortable as he realized that his glances likely weren’t as covert as
he’d thought they were.

“He said something about meeting
with someone from the Criminal Investigations office,” Vicky answered. “He
wouldn’t tell me what it’s about, but he seemed to think you already knew about
it. He recorded the caller’s message as you instructed before he left.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Hansen passed his mug from his
right hand to his left as he turned and approached his office. He punched his
access code into the wall panel to the door’s right, then pressed the palm of
his hand to the scanner plate and looked directly into the coin-sized camera
imbedded in the center of the door. “Hansen,” he identified. The plate glowed
white for one second, analyzing his palm and fingerprints while the camera
scanned his iris. Then the door slid aside and he went in.

He reached back and tapped the ‘close’
button, then crossed to his desk and set his mug down in front of his chair.
Then, as he sat down, he noticed that the ‘message waiting’ light on his
communications panel was blinking amber, indicating that at least one message
coded as ‘Other Intelligence’ had been received and decrypted. He called up the
list of new messages and was relieved to see that the one he’d already been
told about was the only one waiting for him. No new update on fleet actions
waited for his review, which meant the fleet hadn’t suffered any major losses
over the last twenty-four hours—especially significant, given what was
currently happening in the Rosha’Kana system. He reached out and tapped the
message on his screen, then picked up his coffee and sat back.

One of the large rectangular panels
that made up the wall directly across the room from his desk came to life and
displayed the frozen image of a red-haired, ghostly white-skinned but rather
regal looking woman at least twenty years his junior, but probably more like
twenty-five. She was wearing the older brown Naval tunic, which indicated to
him that she wasn’t stationed on or around the Earth—otherwise she would have
received her new issue already—with the single gold diamond of a lieutenant
commander on her collar. Hansen couldn’t see much of the room behind her, but judging
from what little he could see, she wasn’t aboard a ship.

“Play recording,” he said.

“
Admiral Hansen, sir,
” the
woman’s image began, suddenly vibrant and full of life. “
My name is
Lieutenant Commander Kathleen Quinn. I’m the new operations officer at the agency’s
Europan office. First of all, on behalf of all of us, congratulations on your
award and promotion. Second, the station commander has asked me to brief you on
some information we just received.

“
Less than forty-eight hours
ago, several platoons of Marines from the
Tripoli
and a few other
assault carriers boarded one of the Veshtonn command cruisers currently engaged
in combat in the Rosha’Kana star system. One team managed to hack into the
enemy vessel’s computer and copy a large amount of data. A lot of them were
killed in action, but the rest did manage to make it back to their ship with
the data.
”