Solfleet: The Call of Duty (28 page)

The driver didn’t
answer, but the engine’s steady hum drop in pitch, just a little, and Dylan felt
the APC slow down. Good enough for now. But when they got back to the base...

“Yo, Sarge?”

Dylan leaned
forward and peered down the row of Marines to his left. Not that he needed to,
of course. He knew who’d called him—PFC Paul Andolini from South Philadelphia,
one of the more recent arrivals.

“Yeah,
Pauly?”

“How comes
we gotta ride in these oversized sardine cans anyway? We ain’t no
brother-humpin’ Humlees. Hell, we ain’t even in the fuckin’ Army! We’re Marine
Corps Rangers! We should be flyin’ home.”

“We’re
Special
Ops
Rangers, dumb ass,” PFC Shin interjected. Andolini shot her a dirty
look, but let her keep talking. “We don’t even exist, remember? We’ve got to
look like a Humlee unit or the wrong people will start asking the wrong
questions. Why do you think we’re attached to a regular Humlee company in the
first place?”

Now that
Shin was finished, Andolini had something to say to her. “Who the fuck do you
think you’re callin’ a dumb ass, you slant-eyed little...”

“Uh oh,”
someone intoned.

“Andolini!”
Dylan roared. All eyes turned toward him as even the APC itself seemed to fall
quiet under his authority. “One more remark like that and the only stripes you’ll
have left when I’m finished will be the brown ones in your shorts! You got
that, Private?”

“Damn,
Sarge, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it!”

“I said, do
you got that, Private?” Bad grammar, maybe, but his point was loud and clear.

“Yes,
Sergeant! I got it!”

“Good!” With
that, Dylan sat back and bowed his head again. The pain had finally begun to
recede, but had returned with his sudden outburst. He sighed and shook his head
in disgust. Thousands of years of social evolution, and mankind still hadn’t
managed to completely expel its stupid, groundless, racial prejudices.

“What’s
Humlee?” Private Walters asked. The youngest and newest Ranger in the squad, he’d
only been out of training a couple of months and hadn’t yet picked up on all
the slang the more seasoned Marines tended to use.

“H-M-L-I,”
Shin spelled out for him. “Highly Mobile Light Infantry.”

“Oh yeah.”

A few
minutes later the pain had finally subsided completely, as had the spirited
laughter that had been filling the compartment until he yelled at Andolini.
Dylan drew a deep, cleansing breath—as if a lungful of that musky stink could
be considered cleansing—and slowly exhaled. Then he started rolling his head
around in circles to work the kinks out of his neck. A few to the left, then a
few to the right. Oh yeah. That felt much better. Much better.

“Hey, Ortiz,”
he called out, speaking louder and more clearly than he had been able to earlier.

“Yeah,
Sarge?”

“When we get
back to the barracks I’m going to buy you the biggest cup of coffee you’ve ever
had in your life.”

She smiled
appreciatively. “Gee, thanks, Sarge,” she responded in a humorously sarcastic
tone. “That means a whole lot, considering the coffee back at the barracks is
always free.”

“Oh that’s
right, it is,” he returned, pretending to have forgotten that little detail. “Well
in that case, I’ll buy you
two
cups.”

“You’re just
too generous, Sarge.”

Yesterday had
been a total washout as far as getting any real work done was concerned. First
there had been the trip down to the surface for the early morning meeting with
Mirriazu and the others—it still bothered him that he’d had to be less than
honest with her—then the trip back, which had been delayed more than an hour
due to some kind of minor mechanical problem with the shuttle. Then, after a
brief conversation with Liz and a frustrated call back to the Provost Marshal’s
Office on Europa, there had been a much longer than usual mandatory command
staff meeting, during which many very important topics that didn’t concern him
in the least were discussed at length and in great detail. The Military Police
battalion’s change-of-command ceremony had followed that, and that had in turn been
followed by one of those ever popular so-called ‘voluntary’ social gatherings
that all officers and senior NCOs were always expected to attend, commonly
referred to by some as ‘mandatory fun.’ By the time Hansen had finally made it
to his office, the duty day had ended.

Which was
why he was heading there almost two hours earlier than usual this morning,
despite the fact that it was Saturday. Well, that and the fact that Heather was
having a few of her friends over for one final
too-loud-for-Daddy-to-concentrate weekend-long get-together before school
started up. Otherwise, he would have worked from home like he’d been doing
every Saturday for the last several weeks.

Actually, it
felt pretty good to start the day so far ahead of the curve. The only down side
was that Vicky wouldn’t have a pot of coffee waiting for him when he got there.

Or so he’d
thought. But as the doors parted and he walked into the reception area, that
pleasantly intoxicating aroma of freshly brewed Columbian coffee drifted over
him like that proverbial summer breeze, just as it always did. Vicky met him a
few feet inside and held his mug out to him as if he were a marathon runner
trotting past a water point, just as she always did.

“What are
you doing here?” he asked as he stopped and gratefully accepted his mug.

“You’re
welcome,” she responded sarcastically.

Hansen
grinned. “Sorry. Thank you.”

“You’re
forgiven,” she told him, smiling back at him. Then, in answer to his question,
she added, “And what I’m doing here, Admiral, is making sure you don’t start
your day without your morning caffeine.”

“Okay, you’ve
done that, and I appreciate it very much. Now get out of here.”

“No, sir. If
you’re working, I’m working.”

“Nonsense.
It’s Saturday. Go somewhere. Have a good time.”

“You first.”

Hansen gazed
at her, then grinned again and surrendered. “All right. You win.”

“Damn right
I win.”

“What would
I ever do without you, Vicky?”

“Probably
fall asleep at your desk.”

As usual, he
checked her out on the sly as he took that long, careful, first sip. Today’s
wardrobe consisted of yet another finely tailored lady’s business suit—dark
charcoal gray with black trim this time. It looked kind of like a Military
Police uniform, except that it included what had to be the shortest skirt she’d
ever worn to work. She wore it with a bright yellow blouse and those same black
boots she’d taken to wearing pretty regularly lately. Her hair hung freely
about her shoulders and down her back, and her makeup, as always, was perfect.

“You are
truly amazing, Vicky,” he said. “How the hell do you always know...”

“It’s easy,
Admiral,” she interrupted, smiling again. She had a way of anticipating his
questions as well as his arrival times. “You have your sources and I have mine.”

“Spies in
the corridors?” he asked. Just their usual, light-hearted morning banter, not
an accusation, though with all that was going on in the galaxy it took a great
deal more effort lately not to appear too serious all the time.

“Something
like that, yeah. We can’t have you protecting the universe without your morning
coffee, can we?”

“Good point,”
he said as he started toward his office again. “Keep up the good work.”

“That’s the
only kind of work I know how to do, Admiral.”

“I know,” he
said over his shoulder. “That’s why I keep you around.”

“Is
that
why? Damn. All these months, I thought it was because of my good looks and
charming personality.”

He stopped
in front of his door, turned and faced her again. Damn, but she did have nice
legs. “Well, those, too,” he told her. Then he said, “Listen, do me a favor. I
have a lot of work to catch up on. If you won’t take the day off, then at least
take a long lunch. Say about ten-thirty. I’ll see you back here around
thirteen-thirty or so. I’ll make sure you still get eight hours’ credit.”

“All right,
Admiral,” she said, smiling. “I do have a few things to take care of today, so
I guess I can use that time.”

“Yes, I
know.”

She paused a
moment as he passed his mug from his right hand to his left and faced his door
again. Then she laughed, but there was a certain nervousness to her laughter,
as if she wasn’t all that sure he was kidding. After all, he
was
the commanding
officer of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency and she’d only worked for him for
the past eight or nine months. So, in her mind at least, the possibility that
he really was having her watched was a very real one.

Hansen
punched his access code into the panel, pressed his hand against the scanner
plate, and looked into the coin-sized camera.

“Hansen,” he
said. The plate glowed white and the door opened, but before he stepped inside,
he faced around one more time—she was still staring after him for some reason—and
said, “You do know that I was only kidding, right? I didn’t really know you had
errands to run.”

“Of course,
Admiral,” she replied, though still a little hesitantly. “I never thought...”

“Glad to
hear it. I wouldn’t do that to you, Vicky.”

“Of course
not.”

“I mean it.
Your pre-employment investigation took longer than you’ve worked here so far.
If I really thought I couldn’t trust you, for
any
reason, you’d be
working somewhere else.”

“Thank you,
Admiral. I appreciate that.”

He nodded,
then stepped into his office, wondering why he’d felt the need to reassure her
of his trust all of the sudden. Surely she’d known he was only joking when he insinuated
that he knew she had errands to run. Such insinuations and innuendo were just
another part of their normal morning banter. So why...

It was
nothing. Why was he even worrying about it?

He reached
back and tapped the ‘close’ button, then crossed to his desk, set his mug down
in front of his chair, and turned on the brewer in the wall. Then, as he sat
down, he noticed that his comm-panel’s message light was flashing red,
indicating that he’d received at least one incoming communication, either an
official message or an Intel report, coded as ‘urgent’. Not the way he wanted
to start the day.

He called up
the list. There were only three intelligence reports and no other messages—not
bad for having missed an entire day of work. The one coded ‘urgent’ was second
on the list. He reached out to tap it, but paused before he touched the screen.
While it was true that all intelligence was potentially important, it was also
true that what an agent in the field considered to be urgent usually wasn’t as
urgent as he or she thought. In addition, it was fairly common for two or more
separate reports to relate to each other on some level, and they always made
more sense to him when he reviewed them in the same order in which they’d been
filed. So he tapped the first message on the list instead, then picked up his
coffee mug and sat back in his chair.

The report
came up on the wall screen and started to play. It turned out to be nothing
more than the now twice daily overall summary of fleet actions, indicating, as
it had nearly every day for the past few months, just how badly the war was
going for the Coalition. It told the same old story. Solfleet carrier groups
had engaged Veshtonn forces in this sector or that, or had cruised into an
ambush in one star system or another. Solfleet had lost more battles than it
had won, and with every loss, the fleet, and consequently the entire Coalition,
had grown that much weaker, that much more unprepared for the next engagement. When
the report finally came to its grim conclusion, Hansen sighed. At the rate
things were going, the Coalition wouldn’t last another six weeks, let alone six
months.

As he swallowed the last of his coffee, the second report opened with a splash-screen
warning printed in bold, bright red letters:

PRIORITY-ONE
URGENT: CODE RED

CHIEF, SOLFLEET INTELLIGENCE EYES
ONLY

‘Priority-one,
code red?’ Whoever had filed it obviously believed its contents to be of grave
importance.

He spun
around and refilled his mug. Then, as required by the Information Security
regulation, he tapped the door lock pad on his console and listened for the
computer’s verbal “
Door locked
” verification. Once he had it, he started
the playback.

Lieutenant
Roderick Johnson’s familiar face appeared on the wall screen, immediately
kicking the seriousness of the report up a notch in Hansen’s mind. The youngest
son of one of Hansen’s old academy classmates, Rod Johnson was a career-minded special
agent who’d been assigned to the Rosha’Kana sector about nine months ago, and
who’d had the misfortune of having to pass bad news up the chain to his
superior officers ever since. He was also one of the best field agents in the
S.I.A. and would likely rise to command it someday, if he so desired...and if
the agency, and humankind, still existed when that day came. He most certainly
was not the kind of agent who tagged reports as ‘urgent’ without sufficient
cause. In fact, he’d done so only once before, and in that case ‘urgent’ had
been a gross understatement.

“
Hello,
Admiral,
” Johnson’s image began. His tired brown eyes looked even hollower
than they had looked just a couple of days before, and the dark circles beneath
them stood out in sharp contrast against his caramel skin. “
I’m afraid I
have some bad news,
” he continued, “
but I guess that’s nothing new here,
is it? The footage you’re about to see was forwarded to me by the captain of
the starcruiser
Rapier
about twelve hours prior to my filing this report.
I apologize for the delay, but I wanted to provide you with as many details as
possible and it took some time to put them all together. I would tell you to
sit back and enjoy it, but there’s very little about these recordings for any
of us to enjoy. So have a look, sir. I’ll be back afterwards to give you those details
I mentioned.
”