Solfleet: The Call of Duty (68 page)

“Most?”

Hansen
grinned slightly. Excellent.

“Some escaped,
for a while, but they never found a planet that met their needs. Not that they
had much time to search. Most of them were hunted down and destroyed. We did
manage to save a few, however. The
Rapier
located and recovered the last
of them about three months ago, with all hands alive and well, including
several hundred females. But all totaled, Sergeant, fewer than two-thousand Tor’Kana
females survived, and they’ve already started dying out.”

He paused
once more to let the full significance of what he’d just said take root in the
sergeant’s mind. Then he spelled it out for him anyway. “Barring some kind of
miracle, the Tor’Kana are doomed as a race, Sergeant. And without them—without
their access to the ancient Tor’Roshan technology that has helped our cause so
many times before—the entire Coalition, including Earth, will fall to the
Veshtonn within a very short period of time.”

“What about
Operation Mass Eviction, sir?” Dylan asked. “If we’re successful in retaking
the Rosha’Kana system...”

“That’s a
very large ‘if’, Sergeant,” the admiral told him. “Things aren’t going nearly
as well as we hoped for out there. And there’s still the matter of the contamination.”

Dylan could
hardly believe what he was hearing. The impending extinction of an entire race
of sentient, intelligent beings was a catastrophe of such great magnitude that
he could scarcely conceive of it. But to think that all the races of the
Coalition would soon fall and likely face a similar fate was nothing short of
mind numbing. “But...Coalition forces have kept them away from the core worlds
for so long,” he pointed out.

“Yes they
have, Sergeant,” Royer said. “But only with the Tor’Kana and their long lost
cousins’ technology at their center,” she then reminded him.

“Granted, ma’am.
But even without them we’re still a major force. I can’t believe that after so
many years we’d fall so easily all of the sudden.”

“Believe it,
Sergeant,” the admiral said sharply. “That data your squad from the
Tripoli
obtained
six months ago included the enemies’ strategic layout and detailed plans for
their entire Terran campaign, as well as for a number of other attacks on
Coalition systems. Some of those attacks have since been carried out
successfully, despite the fact we knew they were coming. We got enough intel to
conclude that we can’t win this war without the Tor’Kana.”

“What about
cloning?” Dylan asked.

Hansen
exchanged an uneasy glance with his executive officer, then answered, “Breeding
cyberclones is expressly forbidden by Federation law, Sergeant.”

“I’m well
aware of that, sir. I didn’t mean...”

“Of course
you didn’t,” Hansen said, raising a hand to silence him. “You were referring to
the Tor’Kana.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We thought
of that as well. Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to successfully clone
a Tor’Kana before, including the Tor’Kana themselves. At least, not that they’re
admitting. But even if it could be done, we’d have to set up the facilities
directly on the surface of Kana for it to do any good. I doubt very much the
Veshtonn would allow us to do that.”

That was it.
Dylan was fresh out of ideas. “Then everything we’ve fought for—all that we are...”

“Will be
lost,” Royer finished for him. And when Dylan looked at her, she added for
effect, “Gone...forever.”

With a
slight, disbelieving shake of his head, Dylan said in a near whisper, “My God.”

“I’ve
already spoken to him, Sergeant,” Hansen said sarcastically. And as Dylan’s
eyes met his, he added, “I haven’t as yet received any response.”

“This is...I
don’t know,” Dylan said, unable to find the words. “There must... There must be
something we can do, sir.”

Hansen
traded another glance with the commander, then seemed to perk up, if only just
a little bit. “There is one possibility,” he said. “You see, Sergeant, in
addition to the enemy’s strategic plans, we also received information that
indicates the
Excalibur
was destroyed by the starcruiser
Albion
.”

Dylan’s eyebrows
nearly met. “The
Albion
? But that was one of our own ships.”

“Yes, it
was.”

“You’re
telling me that my father and his crew were
murdered
by our own people?”

“That’s what
the information suggests.”

“Well...excuse
me for asking, sir, but are you sure your information is dependable?”

The look on
the admiral’s face made it very clear that he did not at all appreciate being
questioned that way by a subordinate. “Don’t try to tell me my business,
Sergeant,” he said. “The information is as dependable as the circumstances
surrounding its acquisition allow it to be.”

“May I ask,
sir, where that information came from?”

Hansen
leaned forward, placed his elbows on the desk and rested his chin on his folded
hands, and looked at Dylan with amusement. “You certainly aren’t at all
intimidated by my rank, are you, Sergeant?”

“To be
honest, sir? No. Not really. You’re a superior officer and I respect that, but
I’m not intimidated by it.”

Hansen
grinned, ever so slightly. “I think I like that.” He paused for a few moments
and studied the younger man, then dropped his hands to the desk. “Well.
Ordinarily you wouldn’t be told where the information comes from. That kind of
information is provided strictly on a need-to-know basis, and you really don’t
need to know. But in this case,” He glanced briefly at Royer, “considering the
circumstances, I think we owe you an answer to that question.”

“Sir?” Royer
questioned. Hansen may have found out about how she’d used O’Donnell, but she
didn’t understand why Graves had to be told.

“I said we
owe it to him, Commander,” he reemphasized, his tone leaving no room for
misinterpretation. “The whole story. Tell him everything.”

Dylan had
watched the brief exchange very closely. The admiral clearly wasn’t happy with
his executive officer at the moment. He couldn’t help but wonder why.

Royer
sighed. “Yes, sir.” To Dylan she said, “That abduction you witnessed.”

“My neighbor
on Cirra,” he said hopefully. “You found her?”

“Unfortunately,
no, we haven’t,” she answered. “No, the information came to us long before she
was abducted.”

“But that
was over two months ago,” Dylan reminded her.

“And the
information came to us long before that, in the same data stream as those enemy
plans,” Royer reminded him in return. “What’s your point, Sergeant?”

“I, uh...I’m
not sure I have one, ma’am,” Dylan admitted. “I guess I just thought that
particular information was more recent for some reason.”

“Sometimes
in our line of work, several months
is
recent, Sergeant,” Royer explained.
“At least until additional relative information is received. Then it’s ancient.”

“Let’s just
get on with it, shall we, Commander,” Hansen said impatiently.

“Yes, sir.
At any rate, Sergeant, that young lady’s father was a member of your father’s
crew twenty-two years ago. Sometime before the Veshtonn invasion of the Rosha’Kana
star system, he somehow managed to transmit a message out of Veshtonn space to
the Tor’Kana. He told them he was alive, did his best to describe where he was
at that time, and detailed what was probably as much about the attack on
Excalibur
as he could remember. The data you Marines took back to the
Tripoli
included
a very poor quality recording of that message, but the
Tripoli
communications
specialist who analyzed it just happened to have been one of your former neighbor’s
comm-school classmates. Since the message appeared to have come from her
father, who’d been missing for over twenty years, he forwarded the entire file
to
her
instead of notifying his commanding officer like he should have,
so he could in turn notify us. We’ve assumed that since she was a
communications and linguistics specialist for our agency, he probably figured
she’d notify us herself if she wanted us to know about it.”

“Needless to
say,” Hansen interjected, “that communications specialist had some serious
explaining to do once we caught up with him.”

Royer waited
a moment to be sure the admiral was finished, then continued, “To her credit,
our girl notified her commanding officer right away.” Then she snickered. “But when
the decision was finally made not to mount a rescue mission, she decided to
assemble a covert team and mount one of her own.”

“On her own?”
Dylan asked. “Unsanctioned?”

“No, not at
first,” Royer specified. “She fought like hell for days trying to push SpecOps
into doing something. But in the end, Central Command had made its decision.
After that, she worked on her plan for weeks before we finally found out she
was up to something. By the time we had enough to arrest her she’d obtained
false Solfleet identicards, forged official transfer orders, and raised a hell
of a lot of funding from God only knows where. She was just about ready to
start recruiting people. Your name was on her list, by the way.”

“My name?”

“That’s
right.”

“How did she
get my name? We never knew each other.”

“She worked
for our agency, remember? She had access to a lot of information. My guess is
she simply did her homework.”

“Commander,”
Hansen said.

Royer
glanced at Hansen. ‘Get on with it’, his eyes were saying. So she got on with
it. “Anyway, she escaped from custody and disappeared before she could be
brought back for trial. We figured she’d be recaptured in a matter of hours,
maybe a day at the most. Unfortunately, we underestimated her resourcefulness
and completely lost track of her.

“Then I went
to Cirra to talk to you about joining the agency. After I visited you in the
hospital that first day, I spotted her and immediately arrested her. I
interrogated her myself and learned that she’d obtained a whole new supply of
false documents and had gotten herself transferred there posing as someone else.
I also discovered two very interesting facts. Number one, your name was at the
top of her list of people to recruit. And number two, she’d already taken steps
to join your unit in order to get close to you.

“Now
understand, Sergeant, I could have just locked her up and had her sent back to
Earth on a prison transport, but in this line of work it helps to be the kind
of person who can take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself. That’s
exactly what I did. I arranged for her to move into the apartment directly
across from yours, then told her I wanted her to attract your attention for me
when you returned home from the hospital. Given what had just happened in your
personal life, I suggested that if she were to bare a little skin from time to
time you’d eventually start paying her that attention. Seems I was right.”

Dylan felt
both embarrassed and infuriated at the same time. It was bad enough that these
officers knew he’d been spying on the girl. Had counted on it, in fact. But the
fact that Royer happened to be a woman herself made it even worse. “And she
agreed, just like that?” he asked.

“Well, she
agreed, but not exactly just like that. It did take a little persuasion on my
part. She agreed in exchange for a promise of relative leniency. Desertion,
impersonation, possession of false military identification, forgery of orders,
conspiracy to commit an unsanctioned assault and espionage against a foreign
power... They’re all very serious offenses, Sergeant. She was facing a
guaranteed general court-martial and probably a sentence of life in prison, and
she damn well knew it.”

Dylan was
slowly approaching his boiling point, and it was beginning to show. “So you set
her up, just to get another crack at me?”

“We’d spent
a lot of time trying to recruit you, Dylan. But you’d turned us down, time and
time again. And, not surprisingly, your C-O wasn’t any help to us at all.
However, I thought that if I had another opportunity to talk to you myself,
once I’d created a little leverage, I might be able to change your mind.”

He may have
been subordinate to the commander, but Dylan knew from experience that his
silent, angry glare could make almost anyone nervous, so he put it to use.

“She knew
exactly what we were doing all along,” Royer continued, apparently feeling the
need to further explain herself. The glare was working. “We didn’t set her up,
and we certainly never wanted her to get hurt. When word of what she’d been
planning to do leaked out, the agent I’d left in charge decided that the danger
to her had grown to an unacceptable level. He sent someone in to bring her out.”

“So I was
right. Her visitor
was
an S-I-A agent.”

Royer
nodded. “Yes, he was.”

“So why didn’t
your agent just pick her up and get her the hell out of there?” Dylan asked. “Why’d
he stay in her apartment that night?”

Royer turned
a questioning eye toward Hansen, who only nodded to her. Apparently, the
admiral had decided that he should be told everything.

She rested
her elbows on the arms of her chair and folded her hands together in front of
her chest. “The station commander in Tarko City didn’t want to use anyone who
might be recognized by the local residents, so he brought an agent in from a
different duty station, posing as an ordinary Terran immigrant who had to use
regularly scheduled commercial transportation. He couldn’t just whisk her out
of there and bring her back here to Earth on a government flight. That would’ve
raised too many eyebrows. He had to wait for a commercial flight, which, as I’m
sure you know, isn’t exactly a daily event between star systems.”

“With all
due respect, Commander, that doesn’t answer my question. He could’ve taken her
somewhere else to wait for that flight.”