Solfleet: The Call of Duty (79 page)

“Didn’t I
give you the day off, Commander?” Hansen asked her as he walked past her desk
and over to the window to gaze down at the Earth.

“I have too
much work to do to take the day off, sir. Besides, even if I had gone home I’d
have just spent the day tracking Professor Min’para’s use of the library...which,
by the way, is exactly what I’ve been doing all day from right here.”

Hansen
looked over at her with disbelief. “He’s still at it?”

“Yes, sir.
Sixty-five straight hours now and still counting,” she specified as she leaned
back in her chair. “He’s not showing any signs of slowing down, either.”

“Speaking of
not slowing down, you look a lot more awake and alert than you were this
morning,” he observed. “Been taking your coffee intravenously?”

“Went down to
the medbay and got some stims,” she told him.

“You want to
be careful with those things, Commander,” he warned as he gazed out the window
again. “They’re pretty addictive.”

“I’ll be
careful, sir. Don’t worry.”

“So... What’s
the status of our traveling duo?” he asked. “Have they left the station yet?”

“Yes, sir,”
she replied, turning her chair to face him. “About ten minutes ago, right after
they had their dinner. The
Wells
does close to point five-C, so they
should reach Trident station in about eight or nine hours.”

“Good,” he
quietly commented, nodding slightly. “That’s good. The farther away from this
station the lieutenant gets, the better I like it.”

“I thought
you liked him, sir. Despite the fact that he’s a smartass.”

Hansen
looked back over his shoulder at her and said, “I do like him, Commander,” and
then turned right back to the window again, “that aspect of his personality
aside. More than that, I admire him. I just finished reading through his
service record again, cover to cover. I found it as impressive the second time
as I did the first.” He paused, drew a deep breath and exhaled long and loud. “Which
makes it all the more difficult to do this to him. And to his fiancée.”

“And the
farther away he gets, the more difficult it becomes for you to recall him,
should you have second thoughts,” she concluded.

“Something
like that.”

“Sounds to
me like you have a guilty conscience, Admiral,” she quipped. It was an old
joke. An inside joke. A joke they’d passed between them on dozens of occasions
over the years. But this time, rather than sharing a laugh with her, the
admiral glared silently at her, clearly not at all amused.

“Sorry, sir,”
she said, reading his expression. “That was a little out of line this time.”

Given the
scope and seriousness of what they were involved in, ‘a little out of line’ was
the understatement of the year, and Hansen decided not to let it go that easily
this time. “That was more than just a little out of line, Commander,” he
confirmed. He turned sharply and took a single step toward her. “So let me make
one thing perfectly clear to you right here and now. I don’t enjoy violating
orders any more now than I did then. Willful insubordination and criminal
conspiracy still leave a very bad taste in my mouth.”

“I understand,
sir, and I apologize.”

Ignoring her
apology and pointing out the window, he added, “And I like what I might be
doing to that man out there even less!”

Damn he’d
had a short fuse lately. “Don’t you mean what
we
might be doing to that
man out there, sir?” Royer asked, consciously addressing any doubts the admiral
might have had that she was prepared to accept her share of the responsibility.

“I don’t
remember consulting you before I decided to go forward with this mission.”

“No, sir,
you didn’t. But if you recall, I did
agree
with that decision,” she reminded
him. “And I still do agree with it. And it was I who recommended that you order
Graves to go in the first place after he’d already declined.”

“The key
word there, Commander, is ‘recommended.’ I
gave
the order, and to the
best of my knowledge Chief of Solfleet Intelligence is still a one-officer billet.”

“Yes, sir,”
she acquiesced. What else could she say to that? Changing the subject she
pointed out, “You know, I still don’t understand why you won’t let them use the
belt station. It would shave several hours off their trip.”

Hansen
turned back to the window again and paused to regain his composure. Having come
online only a few months ago, the asteroid belt station was the newest jumpstation
in the solar system—so new that it hadn’t even been given a proper name yet. As
a matter of fact, it was the newest jumpstation anywhere within Earth
controlled space. It was also the first of the newest
generation
of
jumpstations. Due to the strong flash-gravity force that jumpspace vortexes
created when they reacted to a ship’s energized nacelles, jumpstations had always
had to operate on the periphery of their respective star systems. But the new belt
station employed a recently developed method of gravitic shielding—a sort of
anti-gravity wave generation system that acted to cancel out the gravitic flash—which
enabled the station to remain nestled between the orbits of Mars and the
asteroid belt. So Royer was right. Using the belt station would have saved them
hours. But it also would have increased the chances of the wrong people seeing
them depart.

“Out of
sight out of mind, Commander,” Hansen explained. “The asteroid belt station
handles near constant traffic twenty-four hours a day. All that traffic means
too many witnesses. That starskiff is officially registered to this office, so
the fewer people who see it jump out of the system, the less likely that I’ll
have to explain to Central Command where it went.”

“Good point.”

Hansen gazed
down at the Earth for another moment, then finally stepped away from the window
and turned his attention to Royer’s desktop monitor. “So how’s the no-sleep
professor doing with his research?” he asked. “Or more to the point, how are
you
doing with it? Have you been able to throw him off track at all?”

“Ah yes, the
professor,” she began as she, too, looked at the small screen. She drew a deep
breath and exhaled sharply. “Well, I’ll say one thing for him. He’s thorough as
hell. I mean, I’ve been able to throw him a few curve balls here and there, but
he keeps cross-referencing all the reports and looking for verification on
everything. Throwing him off track is one thing.
Keeping
him off track is
not
proving to be easy.”

“That’s all
right, Commander,” Hansen told her as he stepped over to her visitors’ chairs
and took a seat. “I have complete confidence in you. After all, misleading
people has proven to be one of your most highly developed talents.”

“Thank you...sir,”
she said with obvious hesitation, wondering if he’d really intended his comment
to sound like the double-edged sword that it had. Was he still angry at her for
not telling him about having found and apprehended O’Donnell right away?

“You’re
welcome.” He let her stew for another moment—apparently, he’d known exactly
what kind of sword his words were wielding—then asked, “What about Miss
DeGaetano?”

Royer tapped
a control and waited until the current visiting enlisted quarters registration
ledger she’d called up finally appeared. She scanned down the page until
Bethany DeGaetano’s name appeared and, at that very moment, started flashing
back and forth between black and green. “She’s checking out of their quarters
as we speak, Admiral. Looks like she’s decided not to stay after all.”

“Any
indication yet that she’s going to cause us any problems?”

“No, sir, not
so far. I’ll find out where she’s going and make arrangements for continuous
surveillance anyway. If she tries anything we’ll know about it.”

Hansen
looked Royer in the eye. “Remember what I said, Commander. No interference. I
don’t want anything to make her any more suspicious than she probably already
is.”

“Understood,
sir. She’ll never know we’re there...wherever ‘there’ is. I promise.”

“Good
enough.” He stood. “Well, I’d better head home. Heather’s already started
dinner and I don’t want to be late.”

“Heather’s
making your dinner?” Royer asked with a disbelieving grin.

Hansen
returned her smile, “Yeah, who’d have thought?” Then told her, “Don’t you stay
too late either, Liz, or Karen’s apt to come looking for you.”

“Just a
couple more things to wrap up and I’m out of here. Good night, Admiral.”

“Good night,
Commander.”

Hansen left
her office, knowing full well that she’d probably stay right there and keep
working until Karen really did come looking for her.

The Next Morning

Earth Standard Date: Tuesday, 7
December 2190

The oldest
jumpstation in the solar system, Trident Station had been designed and built to
accommodate the smaller classes of military vessels that were in service at the
time of its construction. Now relegated almost exclusively to the needs of
small commercial and privately owned jump-capable vessels, the station
nonetheless still had to maintain its original orbit along the path it shared
with the planet Neptune, on the opposite side of the sun, where the relatively
lesser but still immense gravitational forces it generated couldn’t do any
harm. Had it been what was now considered to be a full-sized station, of
course, it would have to have been located much farther outside the system,
beyond the Kuiper Belt, whose nearer objects tended to get a little excited
during a jump as it was.

The
appropriately named starskiff
H.G. Wells
passed through what was still
an enormous vortex generator ring as far as Benny was concerned, despite the ‘smaller’
scale, and darted into jumpspace. Only then, when there remained no possibility
of being intercepted and boarded—they could still be attacked and destroyed,
however—did he enter the coordinates of their top secret destination into the
nav-computer. Once he’d done that, he turned the pilot’s chair around to face
Dylan and sat back and relaxed. “Now we just enjoy the ride,” he said.

“I’ve been
enjoying the ride for the past nine hours,” Dylan commented, still leaning back
in the co-pilot’s chair with his feet propped up on the edge of the console and
staring out the starboard side windows.

“I noticed,”
Benny told him. “You’ve been like a child on Disney World, like you’ve never
even been in space before.”

“You know
how it is, Benny. Fleet vessels don’t have a lot of windows. This ship lets us
see all the way around us, above us, and below us. It’s great.”

Benny
smiled. “You have the heart of a true explorer, Dylan.”

Now that
they’d jumped, there wasn’t a whole lot of anything to look at anymore, except
for the colorful little donuts directly ahead of and behind them, which he’d
seen before, so Dylan finally peeled his eyes away from the windows, dropped
his feet to the floor, and sat up. “Speaking of exploring, how much longer are
you going to make me wait before you tell me where we’re going?”

Benny
grinned. “Ah yes. Where we’re going. Sit back and relax, Dylan. I have quite a fascinating
story to tell you.”

The chairs
had been designed for comfort as well as for functionality, so Dylan felt fine
just as he was. But he sat back a little anyway, just to please his elderly
companion. Besides, given Benny’s apparent age and his outgoing personality, he
had a feeling the guy was ready with more than just one story, so he wanted to
be as comfortable as possible.

Benny began
as soon as he saw that Dylan was ready to listen. “You noticed my outdated
uniform before. This was one of the uniforms I wore when I served as a
technician in the old Solar Defense Command more than forty years ago. Of
course, my waist size was a bit smaller back then and my shirt had sleeves,” he
added with a smile.

Dylan
laughed politely.

“I served most
of my time aboard the starcruiser
Australia
. She was a primitive tub by today’s
standards, a bit smaller and slower, but she was still a lovely vessel, bless
her fusion reactors. She was like a loving woman, only a lot easier to love
back, and the officers and crew were the finest collection of spacers I’ve
never known.” A look of melancholy crossed the old man’s features. “
Da
,”
he said, nodding slightly. “Space can be a wondrous place, but it can be damned
unforgiving, too. I’ve lost a good number of friends over the years, and a
piece of myself with every one of them.”

Sadness
suddenly weighed heavily on Dylan’s shoulders and his gaze fell to the floor. “I
know what you mean,” he said quietly, thinking not too far back on his days of
combat—on one terrible night in particular. “I’ve lost a few friends of my own,
most of whom were serving under my leadership when they were killed.”

A look not
of pity but of sadness and understanding crossed Benny’s features. “I know you
have,” he said with heartfelt compassion. “Commander Royer told me a lot about
you, including your role in the mission I think you’re referring to now. It’s a
terrible sadness what happened to your squad. There’s truly no worse experience
for a leader than that.” He drew a deep breath. “But, life goes on.
Da
?”

“
Da
,”
Dylan answered, his use of the Russian word soliciting a grin from Benny. “Life
does go on.” He paused for a moment of silence, then looked Benny in the eye.
They’d only just met a little more than eleven hours ago, but somehow, at least
at that moment, he felt closer to the man in front of him than he did to anyone
else in the world. Except for Beth, of course. He felt like he could tell him
anything, even bare his soul to him if need be, and he decided to do just that,
within reason, though he didn’t know why. “But it can be really hard sometimes,
you know?”

“Yes, it can
be,” Benny agreed.

“Sometimes I
wonder why I’m still here when so many of my friends and comrades are gone. I
wonder why I didn’t die with them.” Their holophoto faces were still fresh in
his mind and tears began to well up in his eyes. “What right do I have to still
be alive?”

“I asked
myself those same questions many years ago, Dylan, more often than anyone
should ever have to, and I found the answer to be quite simple really. You have
the same right to be alive that everyone else has. You didn’t kill those marines
in your squad. The enemy did. So set the survivor’s guilt aside and don’t beat
yourself up over being alive. Honor their memory always, but go on with your
life. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yeah, I
understand. It’s just not that easy.”

“No, it’s
not. It will take some time, but you can do it. You must.”

“I hope so.”

“You have no
other choice, my boy. Especially if you intend to marry that lovely lady friend
of yours and
stay
married to her.” Dylan looked at him with questioning
eyes, but Benny ignored that for the time being. He’d have plenty of time to
explain how he knew about her later. Instead, he continued, “If she has agreed
to build a future with you, then you owe it to her not to...not to live in the
past as it were.” The expression that crossed Dylan’s face told Benny that the
younger man had recognized the double entendre behind his words. “So, if you
can’t do it for yourself, or even if you
won’t
do it for yourself, then
do it for her. ‘Beth’ is her name, is it not?” Dylan nodded, smiling at the
sound of it. “There it is,” Benny said, smiling as well. “That’s much better.”
He gazed at the younger man for a moment, then got up, crossed to one of the
storage compartments near the top of the starboard bulkhead, and took out a
tall bottle and a pair of shot glasses.

“What’s
that?” Dylan asked.

“Only the
best vodka this side of the galaxy,” Benny answered proudly, slightly
over-enunciating the ‘V’ in his effort to pronounce it in the proper English
way.

“Vodka? At four
o’clock in the morning?”

“It is only
four o’clock in the morning if you have been to sleep,” Benny pointed out as he
returned to his seat. “We have not been to sleep, so for us it is four A.M.,
very late at night.”

“And I’ve
been up for what...more than twenty-one hours?”

Benny
scooted forward to the edge of his chair and handed the glasses to Dylan, then
opened the bottle and filled them. Then he closed the bottle again, set it down
on the deck out of the way, and took one of the glasses. “Here’s to old friends
and fallen comrades,” he said, raising his glass in a toast.

Dylan wasn’t
much of a drinker, but how could he refuse to share that toast with this man? A
man who had suffered the loss of comrades many times over, just as he had. A
man who had been there, exactly where he was now, in that dark emotional limbo,
unsure of how he was supposed to feel.

A man who
was absolutely right. Old friends and fallen comrades were to be honored. Dylan
raised his glass, touched it to Benny’s with a clink, and drank.

And then it
was Benny’s turn to smile first as Dylan tried and failed to suppress a fiery
cough. “I hope they appreciate this, wherever they are,” Dylan barely managed
to say before the coughing fit took hold of him again.

“
Da
,
it does pack a satisfying punch!” Benny commented with a laugh, licking his lips.

“To say the
least,” Dylan heartily agreed, recovering. “You sure that’s just vodka?”

Benny
smiled.

More than
anything at that moment, Dylan wanted to direct their conversation back to the
here and now. He wanted to know where they were going and exactly how long it
would take them to get there. He wanted to know everything. But as he gazed at
the elderly gentleman in front of him he saw a man who, for whatever reason, still
needed to tell his story. Still needed to reminisce with someone about old times.
Times, it somehow seemed, that he longed to return to, despite what he’d just
said about living in the past.

“I’ll bet
you’ve got some great stories to tell, Benny,” he said, providing him an opening.

Benny looked
Dylan in the eye and understood immediately what the younger man was doing. He
smiled again. “
Speciba
, Dylan. But there will be plenty of time for
that. I suspect you would like to know where in the hell we’re going first.”

“Well...”

“
Da
,
you would. But don’t worry. There’s a story that goes with that, too.”

“I thought
there might be,” Dylan bantered.

Benny
chuckled, then began his tale. “Not too long into
Australia
’s deep space
mission... By the way, we were the first Earth ship ever to visit another star
system. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I did.
I remember learning that in history class.”

“History
class?” Benny exclaimed, but with a smile. “Am I really that old?”

Dylan smiled
with him. “Sorry, Benny.”

“Anyway, we
were orbiting this previously uncharted planet when our scanners showed a large
mass of refined metal on the surface. Now keep in mind, man had never been to
this planet or ever met any aliens before, so this was an wonderous find.”

“What did
you do?” Dylan asked, genuinely interested in how a crew of that day and age
would have handled such an astonishing discovery.

Benny poured
himself a refill—when had he finished his first one?—gulped it down, and poured
himself another, then set the bottle aside again.

“We
assembled a team of scientists, techs, and security personnel and shuttled right
on down there. We didn’t know the upper atmosphere was so violent. Like rough
surf on an angry sea, so bad the jostling threatened to shake us apart. Our
pilot damn near lost control of the shuttle and crashed, but once we came out
of the clouds everything was fine. The air was calm and quiet. Problem was, we’d
been blown so far off course and used so much fuel fighting the winds that we
had to touch down half a dozen kilometers from the metal mass or risk not
making it back to the ship. We had to walk the whole way to the metal mass.”

“What did
you find?” Dylan asked, totally engrossed.

“Ruins. A
lot of them. Fallen columns, collapsed walls, crumbled building foundations. An
entire city’s worth of ancient ruins. And right in the center of it all, a
short ramp leading up to the most unusual old relic I’ve ever seen.

“Looking
down at it from the top of the ramp it looked like an old swimming pool. The
kind you assemble above the ground, but with a rim at least a foot wide. It was
perfectly round, about three meters across, and looked to be filled with some
kind of liquid metal that gave off steam but no heat. Nothing held it up,
either. It had no walls or foundation of any kind. It just floated there, about
a meter and a half or so above the ground.”

“What was
it?”

Benny looked
Dylan dead in the eye and answered dramatically, “The Portal.”

“The what?”

Benny took
another drink, then explained, “It was a...a kind of window, or more like a
doorway actually...a doorway into the past, although we didn’t know that at the
time. It took our scientists over a dozen years to figure out vhat it...
wh
at
it was, and to get it vorking. I vent back vonce, after they finally did, and
learned de most incredible thing. You can actually set it for any time period
at any place on Earth and drop right through into the Earth’s past! Theoretically,
at least.” Dylan was smiling. “Vhat?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.
Out vith it,” Benny insisted.

“Okay. It’s
just that I’ve noticed when you get emotional a lot more of your accent creeps
into your speech, and the more emotional you become, the stronger the accent
is.”

“Oh,
nyet
!
Is not de emotion. Is de wodka! Yoo shood hearrr me vhen I get
really
drunk!”
he said, humorously over-exaggerating his accent.

They shared
a brief laugh, but Dylan wanted to hear the rest of the story, despite the fact
that it was quickly becoming too incredible to believe. Then again, the whole
concept of his mission was too incredible to believe, yet here he was. He
coaxed Benny along. “You said this Portal can show you the Earth’s past?”

“
Da
!
I mean, yes.”

“Why just
the Earth? Why not other planets?”

Benny
cleared his throat, as if to keep from snickering at a rather stupid question. “Dylan,
the Portal isn’t some old science-fiction drama’s all-powerful guardian of
time,” he explained, concentrating on not reversing his ‘V’s and ‘W’s. “It’s a
real-life doorway into another time and place. When you’re in your house, you
can’t step from your living room into your bedroom and end up in the kitchen,
can you?”