Solfleet: The Call of Duty (101 page)

“Get me some gauze or a clean towel
or something!” he ordered as he tried to seal a hand over her wounds before he started
compressions again.

“She’s dead, Admiral!” the burly MP
informed him. “Now get away from her!”

“
No!
” Karen screamed, still
bawling and trying to break free. “
No! No! No!
”

“Get me a goddamn towel,
now!
”
Hansen shouted again, desperate to save Liz’s life.

“It won’t do any good, Admiral!” the
MP shouted back. “She’s dead!”

“What the hell happened here?”

Hansen looked up without stopping to
find Krieger peering around the corner at the end of the hall with his gun
drawn. “One of your trigger-happy MPs just shot Commander Royer!” he shouted
angrily. Then he slid to his right to administer two more breaths.

“What!” Krieger exclaimed as he
stepped out from behind the safety of the corner and holstered his weapon. “Why?
What happened?”

“Ask
her
!” Hansen said,
tilting his head toward the MP, who’d risen back to her feet and drawn her
weapon again, as he slid back to his left and repositioned his one free hand. “And
get me something to seal over these wounds
now
!”

“She grabbed Inga’s weapon!” the MP
exclaimed, spitting blood as she spoke. “I ordered her to freeze but she turned
on me and...”

“
Attention all station personnel,
”
the public address system boomed, drowning out the rest of her words and
drawing everyone’s attention to the ceiling speakers. Everyone’s, that is,
except for Hansen’s. He couldn’t stop CPR. Liz’s life depended on it.

“
Attention all station personnel,
”
it repeated. “
General quarters. General quarters. Man your battle stations.
Fighter bays, launch all fighters when ready. All docked ships’ crews, return
to your vessels immediately and prepare for emergency launch. This is not a
drill. Repeat. This is not a drill. All civilian personnel proceed immediately
to your assigned shelters.
”

The emergency klaxons started
wailing in the distant corridor.

“This is Special Agent Krieger,”
Hansen heard the investigator say. “What’s going on?”

“
The Joint Chiefs have declared
Defense Condition One, sir!
” the panicked answer came. “
A Veshtonn fleet
has broken through the outer defenses and crossed into the inner system! They’re
bombarding the Martian colonies from orbit and a full scale invasion of Earth
appears imminent!
”

Liz still wasn’t responding, and
Hansen finally realized that his efforts were in vein. He gave up and sat back
on his heels, exhausted. Karen cried out, begged and pleaded with him not to
stop, but he ignored her anguished cries. There was nothing more anyone could
do for her.

Liz was gone.

And this was it, he realized as
Krieger stepped over her body and stood beside him. They were out of time. They
were all out of time. The enemy was descending upon them. This was the
beginning of the end. The end that a select few had known was coming for the
past six months. The end of their freedom. The end of their entire
civilization.

He closed Liz’s blouse, and then her
eyelids with his bloodstained fingers, then closed his own eyes as if to pray. “Good
luck, Mister Graves,” he muttered.

“Might as well save your breath,
Admiral,” Krieger said, raising his voice to be heard over the blaring klaxons.
“Dylan Graves isn’t going anywhere.”

Hansen looked up at him. “What are
you talking about?”

“Royer told me where you sent him
and why. His illegal mission has been stopped.”

“What?” Hansen asked as he rose to
his feet.

“That’s right, Admiral. We got word
directly to the president and she assured us Graves would be stopped
immediately. Whatever your plan was, it’s failed.”

Hansen grabbed the front of Krieger’s
shirt in both hands and shoved him back against the wall before he could even
begin to react. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he shouted angrily,
glaring into the agent’s frightened eyes.

“Let him go, Admiral!” the MP
shouted.

Hansen looked her way and found
himself staring down the barrel of her sidearm. He reacted instantly,
instinctively, slapping her weapon aside and grabbing it away from her in one
quick motion with his left hand as he stepped into her and slugged her across
the jaw with his right. She went down hard, likely unconscious before she hit
the deck.

The other MP threw Karen aside like
an old rag doll and went for his weapon, but Hansen bounced him off the wall
with a flying side-kick to the chest, then dropped him with a bone-crushing
roundhouse kick to the side of his head.

“Drop the weapon, Admiral!” Krieger
yelled from behind.

Hansen glimpsed their shadows on the
wall and saw that Krieger’s arms were extended. The investigator was holding a
gun to his back. He raised a hand out to his side to draw Krieger’s attention
to it, hesitated a moment, then let go of the pistol, and before it even hit
the floor he whirled around and grabbed Krieger’s weapon in both hands, twisted
it up and to one side, and pried it free of the surprised investigator’s grasp.

“Nothing personal, Krieger,” he
said. He kicked him in the solar plexus, doubling him over, and cracked him
over the back of the head with the pistol.

The enemy was upon them. Heather
would be okay. She knew what to do and where to go. But
he
had to find a
communications center. He had no time to lose. Graves
had
to go through
the Portal. He had to help Karen, For Liz, and then find a communications
center.

Karen had slipped past them at some
point during the fight and was on her knees in Liz’s blood, cradling her wife’s
lifeless body tightly in her arms, rocking back and forth, crying on her
shoulder. Hansen laid a hand gently on her shoulder and said, “I’m sorry,
Karen, but you’ll have to leave her.”

“No!” Karen cried.

“You have to get to a shelter.” He
crouched beside her. “I know you don’t want to leave her, Karen. I know how
much you’re hurting right now. But Liz would want you to go. She’d want you to
be safe and go on living.” He hooked his hand under her upper arm and started
to lift her, but she screamed in protest and pulled free. She’d have no part of
leaving her love behind.

What did it matter? They might all
be dead in a matter of minutes anyway. He
had
to get a message to X-ray
One. That was his top priority now. He hesitated another moment, then left
Karen to her grief and ran through the C.I.D.’s inner offices toward the
corridor.

A shot rang out behind him. He dove
behind a desk and sprang to his knees to return fire, but just as he started
squeezing the trigger, the shooter, a young female MP with blood trickling from
her mouth, dropped her arms and let her weapon fall to the deck by her feet.
She started coughing and spitting up blood, then clutched her arms to her ribs as
she fell into the corner. She turned white as a ghost and was obviously in a
lot of pain. She stood there, gazing across the office through glassy eyes at
him as though she were just waiting for him to shoot her, but since she clearly
no longer posed a threat, he held his fire.

“You’re Inga?” he asked as he stood
up. She nodded weakly. He lowered his weapon part way but held it ready, just
in case. “You need medical attention, Inga,” he told her. “I’m not your problem
anymore. Let me go and I’ll call for the medics.”

“You won’t get off the station,
Admiral,” she managed to articulate through the pain.

“I don’t need to.”

Her eyes seemed suddenly to lose
focus and she started slowly sliding down the wall. She landed on her bottom
with a grunt and dropped her blank stare to the floor in front of her, then
coughed, spat blood, and fell forward.

Hansen said a quick, silent prayer
for her soul, then headed for the corridor.

Another shot from behind sent him
tumbling over the receptionist’s desk, grimacing in pain as he crumbled to the
floor. He’d been hit! Shot in the left shoulder blade! And
God
, did it
hurt! It hurt
a lot
! It burned like the fires of hell! He tried to shake
it off. He had no choice this time! He had to survive! He had to find a
comm-center and send that message to Station X-Ray One. Everything depended on
it.
Everything
!

He came up shooting. Nothing
mattered anymore. If they were lucky—if he was wrong about which theory was the
right one and if Graves completed his mission successfully—then none of this
would matter anyway. None of this would happen. All he had to do was make it to
a comm-center.

He and his as yet unseen assailant
bobbed up and down from behind their respective cover, firing back and forth.
Each of them had the other pinned down, but neither one of them could get a
clean shot at the other.

Hansen glanced behind him and to his
right as he fired blindly over the top of the desk. The door to the corridor
wasn’t four meters away, but he’d have to expose himself to reach it.

The floor vibrated beneath him.

“Give it up, Admiral!” his opponent
called out over the din of the klaxons. “I know you’re shot. Toss your weapon
over the desk and step out into the open.”

He was shot all right, and it still
hurt like hell! And he was also starting to feel a little lightheaded, so he
knew he was losing blood. He had to think fast. He had to act while he still
could. He
had
to reach a comm-center!

“Do it now, Admiral!” the man
shouted.

The lights flickered and the floor
shook with a sound like distant thunder. The Veshtonn had arrived! They were
firing on the station!

“We’re under attack!” Hansen cried.

“And you’re still a felon accused of
capital crimes, Admiral!” came the response. “Now throw out your weapon!”

Time was running out.

He tossed his weapon over the desk
as ordered—he’d emptied it, so what difference did it make?—and heard it hit
the floor with a clatter.

“Now step out where I can see you,
hands in the air!”

Hansen struggled to his feet and
stepped out from behind the desk, hands raised. All he could see of his
adversary, who still crouched low behind a desk no more than twenty feet away
and held him in his sights, was his dark hair and part of his goateed face. But
that was enough. Detective Sergeant Franco, head of the ‘Narco squad.’ Why did
it have to be him?

“Do you know what’s happening
outside the station, Franco?”

“Turn around and face away from me,”
Franco demanded.

“The Veshtonn are attacking!” Hansen
told him as he complied. “Invading Earth!”

“That’s not my problem right now,
Admiral,” Franco responded. His voice sounded sharper and more distinct. He was
coming closer—moving in for the arrest.

“That’s
everyone’s
problem,
Mister Franco!” Hansen pointed out.

“Right now
you’re
my only
problem.”

Hansen sighed. “True enough.” He
spun to his right and thrust his elbow into Franco’s face, then followed with a
side-kick to the ribs. Then, as Franco lay on the deck screaming in pain,
cursing up a storm and holding is hands to his broken, bleeding nose, Hansen
scooped the detective’s weapon up off the floor and scurried into the corridor.

He made his way unchallenged to the
C.I.D. comm-center less than a hundred meters away. He burst through the door
and stopped short when three shocked and confused expressions met him eye to
eye, but those three expressions belonged to three armed and specially trained
personnel and didn’t last more than a second. All three of them lept to their
feet and reached for their weapons, giving him no time and no chance to explain...and
no choice. He raised his weapon and fired three times in rapid succession,
neutralizing the threat.

It didn’t matter anymore, he
reminded himself.

A fiery explosion ripped through the
corridor with the thunder of a thousand stampeding horses and the floor heaved
as he rushed forward and threw him against the far wall. Most of the secondary
consoles were already in flames by the time he climbed back to his feet,
filling the room with thick, gray, choking smoke and the unmistakable odor of
burning electronics. But the main console, the one he needed, still appeared to
be operational.

At least for the moment.

Akagi had blown his stack at the
news that Dylan’s mission wasn’t authorized and had promptly herded everyone
away from the Portal under the watchful eye of the guard and his quickly drawn sidearm.
In stark contrast to the ferocity of the commander’s rage, a great sense of
relief had filled Dylan’s soul immediately afterwards when the commander
proclaimed that he would not be allowed to go through the Portal under any
circumstances. That was fine with him. He was glad to be staying in the present
for any number of obvious reasons, not the least of which was that he’d see
Beth again very soon. But he still didn’t understand what was going on.

“I don’t get it, Benny,” he
whispered as soon as he and the old captain split off from the others to go to
the dining facility while Akagi headed to the comm-room with the two crewmen to
contact Solfleet Central Command and ‘find out what the hell is going on.’

“You don’t get what?” Benny asked as
he opened the door.

It wasn’t time for dinner yet so
there weren’t very many people there—those few who were there were apparently
just hanging out, relaxing and talking—but the mouth-watering aroma of spicy
spaghetti sauce and garlic bread that assaulted Dylan’s senses when they
stepped inside told him that dinnertime wasn’t far off. He was glad for that. In
his opininion X-ray One had some of the best food he’d ever tasted anywhere in
the fleet.