Sullivan Saga 1: Sullivan's War (17 page)

“Of course. We used to tell those stories to each other as kids.”

“Do you think that of the hundreds of stories about these encounters, all of them can be attributed simply to pilots going ‘space happy’?”

Allen swirled the whiskey in his glass. “I suppose not. And your scientists… they’ve succeeded in reducing the energy requirements for traveling deeper into hyperspace?”

Alexander smiled. “They have. But for the reason I’ve told you, this technology will not be made publicly available by me. If others develop this technology independently—and I have no doubt that someone eventually will—they can have the responsibility of exposing our universe to this potential threat. But not I.”

Allen broke eye contact with Alexander and studied the vase on the table next to his chair. Alexander let him have his moment of reflection before continuing. “The program has been put on hiatus ever since one of my own pilots encountered one of these entities. Fortunately, that particular encounter did not end unhappily. However, I still have the ships equipped with the necessary technology in my hangars. If you would be willing to take the risk for my daughter, you would be handsomely compensated.”

Allen took a deep breath. If he could get to Damaris in four days, he would have plenty of time to find Zednik before Alexander’s man arrived with the money. He could keep tabs on Zednik, wait for the money to be handed over and Kate released and then take Zednik down.

“All right, Mr. Alexander,” he said after a moment. “I’ll do it. But no compensation is necessary. All I ask for is some money to pay my operational expenses.”

Alexander stood and Allen followed suit. “Good,” said Alexander, offering his hand. “And if you do quit the Bureau, I’ll always have a place for you on my security team.”

“I might take you up on that, sir,” said Allen, shaking hands.

“I’ll have one of the ships readied. Be prepared to depart tomorrow morning.”

Allen said a final goodbye and returned to his hotel room to pack and compose his letter of resignation. He planned on sending it to the Bureau just before Alexander’s experimental ship departed. He didn’t want to be called back in to Director Berg’s office to answer any more questions.

He took his bag from the closet and began folding his clothes into it. He hoped he would be able to take actions to keep Kate safe. But he wasn’t doing this for her or her father. He wasn’t even doing it for Sullivan. Allen was going to get Zednik for Liz Wagner; for Liz and for himself.

5

IT HAD BEEN almost a full day. The ship appeared standard in every way, and hyper-hyperspace seemed no different than hyperspace for its black void, its nothingness. Alexander’s pilot was a man named Dale Hammond. Allen, after taking a nap, got up from his bunk and went forward to the cockpit.

“Everything going all right, Hammond?”

“No problems so far. Nice thing about hyper-hyperspace is there’s a lot less time for something to go wrong. But if it does, hoo-boy.”

Allen raised an eyebrow. “Hoo-boy?”

Hammond turned from the controls and gestured for Allen to take the seat beside him. “When a ship traveling through hyperspace loses power, do you know what happens?”

“It drops out of hyperspace, right?”

“Yes. Because it’s so close to the boundary of our universe, the ship falls back into normal space once the energy field collapses. Right now, we’re nearly at the halfway point between two universes. If we lose power here, if our energy field collapses, which universe do we drop into?”

“Hopefully ours.”

“Hopefully. Granted, we’re slightly closer to our universe than the other. If we were exactly between the two, there’s a theory that travel between any two points would be almost instantaneous.”

“How?”

“If neither universe has a hold on us, there’s nothing linking space and time. But if our energy field collapses here, there’s a hypothesis that the ‘pull’ of this other universe could be, for whatever reason, stronger than our own. It could reach out past the midway point and pull us in.”

“But you don’t know that?”

“No. I’m sorry to say that there’s a whole hell of a lot we don’t know about this, and Mr. Alexander didn’t want to take the risk of intentionally sending a ship into another universe.”

Allen glanced around at the various controls, checking for suspiciously blinking lights. “So if we lose power, we could be stuck in a parallel universe?”

“Right. But that’s if we drop out of hyper-hyperspace at all. There are some who think that neither universe has a strong enough hold on us this far out. We might just drift for eternity.”

“You tell me all this now?”

Hammond chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’ve made three flights in this very ship without any problems.”

“Have any of Alexander’s tests had problems?”

“If they did, I wasn’t told about it. The people that worked on this project were broken up into teams. My team didn’t know anyone from the other teams. Each of our results would be reported back to the eggheads at HQ, and they’d process it then tell us what adjustments to make.”

“Alexander mentioned something about entities out here. Have you encountered any?”

“That was another team. We did hear about that because it’s what brought an end to the project.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t get a fully detailed report, mind you, but from what I was able to gather, a pilot from one of the other teams had a three-hour-long conversation with his dead grandmother.”

“And he wasn’t… what was the term Alexander used… ‘space happy’?”

“Well, again, I didn’t see the footage, but I was told that there was definitely something else on that ship with him. He did have an actual encounter.”

“With his grandmother?”

“Or something pretending to be his grandmother. Something drawing on his thoughts and memories.”

“What do you think?”

Hammond took a deep breath and turned to look Allen in the eyes. “There’s something out here. That’s all I know. Is this where we go when we die? Maybe. After I started working on this project, I learned that nothing—and I mean nothing—is impossible. This is the first time I’ve been back into hyper-hyperspace since the project was shut down, and you damn well better know I’m keeping my eyes open. You should, too.”

Allen turned back toward the cockpit window. There was nothing to see outside the ship, but he studied the darkness all the same. If they were going to encounter something, he didn’t want to miss it. If they were going to encounter something, he hoped it would be Liz.

II:
RETRIBUTION

6

EUGENE BRAIN WAS now the de facto boss of Abilene. He’d taken down Orion Zednik and had been working tirelessly ever since to find out who his friends were. More importantly, he was finding out who his enemies were. Most didn’t care who was in charge as long as they got paid. As Brain took over the operations Zednik had once exclusively controlled, many fell in line, especially since Zednik had earned not a little animosity due to his cruelty. Not the cruelty that involves killing someone who’s crossed you; that’s just business. But Zednik practiced the kind of cruelty that saw the traitor’s family tortured and killed as well. Eugene Brain had another way to earn loyalty: through respect. From the beginning, Brain had made it clear that as long as his orders were followed, he would keep the money flowing. He would treat those who worked for him with respect and expected the same in return. Unlike Zednik, the reliability of Brain’s word did not fluctuate depending on his mood.

Even so, Eugene Brain had problems. Zednik was still alive, and as long as there was a chance he might return, a chance he might rally the support of his closest associates, many were holding back on giving Brain their full loyalty. There were even rumors that Zednik was already back on Abilene, that he was reorganizing. This rumor was being spread by a few of Zednik’s associates who hoped to wrest control from Brain.

Brain knew that, given time, Sullivan would kill Zednik. But he couldn’t wait for that to happen. Even if it happened soon, the rumors would persist. No, Brain had to act; he had to secure his position at the top of Abilene’s underworld. He would personally see Zednik killed. He would bring back the body and display it to as many people as necessary to end the rumors.

So Eugene Brain had gone to Damaris. He’d followed Sullivan’s hunch that Zednik had retreated to that planet and was pleased to find out that that hunch had been correct. He’d found Zednik’s hiding place a week after landing three freighters loaded with men and weapons. He had to admit that Zednik was smart. He’d used whatever credits, jewelry and influence he still had to take over the top of a hotel in the heart of Phoebe, the capital of Damaris. It would be difficult to attack him there, fifteen stories up and with all those civilians around. Damaris’s security forces were not as lax or corrupt as Abilene’s. They’d respond quickly to reports of dozens of armed men in the middle of the city.

Brain decided he’d have to run a stealth operation. He rented a room at the hotel, granting him access to the elevators. When he pressed the button for the fifteenth floor, however, a display screen on the elevator’s control panel informed him that the floor was locked. He rode up to the fourteenth floor instead, found the stairwell and climbed up to the top. He tried the door leading onto the floor. It was also locked. But it was an electronic lock, not a physical lock. Eugene Brain began formulating a plan.

HALF A DOZEN of his men had checked themselves into the hotel. Early the next evening, three of them entered the elevator while Brain and the other three climbed the stairs to the top floor. There was a reason electronic locks were not used where security was a serious concern: anyone with a few days’ training could be taught how to use a basic tablet to hack into and override them. Fortunately, stairwell doors and elevators were not considered points of high security for inexpensive hotels. The technology to trick keycard readers had long ago been developed, and as a result, most hotels had returned to a simple lock and key. At least getting past those would require manual manipulation and couldn’t be broken into by simply waving a device in front of them. Still, there was the old standby: break the door in.

Brain’s men in the elevator used a tablet to break the fifteenth floor lockout. At the same time, Brain and the others gained access via the stairwell. They stormed the hallway and began systematically knocking down doors. The men from the elevator started doing the same on their end.

After Brain and the men with him knocked in their third door, they heard gunfire from the other side of the hotel. His men had encountered resistance. Leaving one man to guard the stairwell, Brain and the two others rounded the corner toward the elevators. His other team had retreated back to the elevator and was taking pot shots from the open elevator doors.

Three of the hotel room doors were open. From these, men would peek out, fire toward the elevator then duck back in. Brain indicated to his men to each cover one of the doors. He leveled his gun at the door he had chosen for himself and waited for a head to poke out. Simultaneously, two heads poked out from two of the doors. Brain took down his target, but his man missed.

Knowing they were now trapped in a crossfire, Zednik’s men took cover inside the rooms. After waiting a tense moment to see if they’d go on the offensive, Brain silently gestured to his men to take positions on either side of the doors.

They stormed the remaining hotel rooms and took out Zednik’s men. One of Brain’s men was clipped in the process, but the injury was slight. Methodically, they searched the rest of the rooms on the floor.

Once they were finished, his men reported back to Brain.

“No one else in these rooms, boss.”

“Are you sure? You checked them all?”

“Yeah. They were all empty except for these three.”

Brain slammed his fist into a door. “All right, Zednik is holed up somewhere else. Let’s get out of here before the cavalry arrives.”

7

ORION ZEDNIK, ON the second floor, had received a call from one of his men up above. They were under attack. Zednik didn’t know who it was, but his precautions had just paid off. He gathered the two men in the room opposite his, had them get Kate and Abraham from their rooms and they all made their way down the stairs to the basement parking garage.

Kate and Abraham were put in the back of a cargo van with a guard while Zednik and his other man rode up front. They traveled for around half an hour before the vehicle came to a stop.

When the back of the van opened, Kate caught a glimpse of woods before the garage door finished closing. They were out of the city. She and Abraham were taken to a room on the second floor of the house and locked in. She made her way to the window and looked out. More woods. There were no other houses in sight.

“Well,” said Kate, turning to Abraham, “it looks like Zednik has planned this well. He had a second location ready in case his first was found out.”

Abraham moved to join her by the window. “It’s a good drop, but we could risk it,” he said, looking down.

Kate studied the window frame. “It’s been bolted shut. And this glass looks pretty new. I’m guessing it’s unbreakable by any means we have here.”

“Do you think it was Rick Sullivan who attacked Zednik’s men at the hotel?”

“There’s no way to know. I hope so. I hope he’s near. If he is, he’ll find a way to rescue us.”

There was noise outside the door as the lock was disengaged. Kate and Abraham turned as it swung open and Orion Zednik stepped through. “Ah,” he said. “Settling in nicely?”

Abraham strode toward Zednik and pushed him back against the doorframe. “Go to hell!” he shouted, swinging for Zednik.

Kate ran to shut the door. She closed it just as Zednik’s men arrived and held it with one arm as she slid a small table in front of it with the other. She pushed all her weight against the table as the men struggled at the door and Abraham and Zednik continued to fight.