Solfleet: The Call of Duty (69 page)

Royer looked
to the admiral again, obviously wanting him to put an end to the sergeant’s
questions. But he just sat there, stone-faced and silent, and left her to her
own devices. “All right, Sergeant,” she said with a hint of frustration evident
in her voice. “The truth is we don’t have any idea why he stayed there that
night. He sure as hell wasn’t supposed to. He was given explicit orders to pick
her up and get her out of the area without delay.”

“Sounds to
me like your man might have been a double agent, Commander,” Dylan suggested.
The very idea clearly struck a nerve with the commander, as evidenced by the
way she recoiled, her lips tightly pursed, and Dylan felt an odd sense of
satisfaction at having done that to her. But he was still growing angrier by
the second.

“That’s
possible, yes,” Royer admitted with a hint of defensiveness in her voice. “And
that’s one reason we’ve had to move so slowly since then,
Sergeant
.
Where there’s the likelihood of one double agent, there’s always the
possibility of more than one. At any rate...”

“My fiancée
was shot twice and almost died, Commander!” Dylan reminded her sharply. “Several
others, most of them innocent civilians and some of them my neighbors
did
die!
The guy who lived below me gave his life willingly in my defense!”

“Watch your
tone, Sergeant,” Hansen warned. “Don’t forget who you’re talking to.”

“He was also
one of our agents,” Royer told him. “A retired agent, actually, but one of us nonetheless.
I guess he felt the need to relive some of the good old days.”

“And thanks
to somebody’s fuck up, he still had a Solfleet-issue pistol to help him fulfill
that need!” Dylan pointed out spitefully.

“Sergeant
Graves,” the admiral warned a second time.

“Granted, he
shouldn’t have had the pistol,” Royer agreed. “I guess too much inactivity
dulled his sense of judgment.”

“Dulled his
sense of judgment!” Dylan exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “Is that what you
tell yourself so you can sleep at night? He’s dead, Commander! And so are a lot
of other people! Their lives were wasted! And for what?”

“All right,
Sergeant, you’ve just stepped across the line,” the admiral said, surprisingly
calm, considering Dylan’s sudden behavior. Perhaps the fact that he agreed with
the sergeant’s sentiment had something to do with it. “I suggest you sit down
and shut up.”

Dylan
glanced at the admiral briefly and hesitated, but finally did comply—the guy
was an admiral, after all—still glaring at the commander.

Royer
grinned. “See what I mean, Admiral?” she said, studying Dylan’s glare. “There’s
one hell of a fire burning in there.”

“I see it,
Commander,” Hansen replied. Then, to reinforce his previous warnings, he added,
“And it had better
stay
in there where it won’t get him in trouble.”

Dylan took
the obvious hint to heart and reined in his temper, but his words still came
forth with a razor’s edge. “Why the big charade, Commander?” he asked. “Why did
you go through all that trouble to get me to watch her in the first place? You
could’ve come to my home again, armed with your recruiting speech. Why didn’t
you just do that?”

“As I
recall, my recruiting speech wasn’t any more effective than Ensign Pillinger’s
was, and the one time I did go to your home you refused to answer the door. But
your service record, on the other hand, speaks for itself. You were decorated
and promoted for your actions on Tamour while technically still just a recruit.
You earned your Security Forces skill designator and graduated from the
Military Police Academy at the top of your class. You’re a qualified expert
with every weapon you’ve ever tested with. You’ve earned something more than
half a dozen different medals, not to mention an assortment of service and
professional development ribbons. And, in addition to all that, you’ve joined
the Marine Corps, made it through Ranger training, and served with distinction
in Special Operations. Is that enough, or shall I go on?”

“Please don’t,”
Dylan practically pleaded. “I’m well aware of my own record. Though what it has
to do with your choice of recruiting methods, I have no idea.”

“I was also
well aware of your record,” she explained. “O’Donnell had been dealing with
some seriously bad individuals for a while to get what she’d gotten, so we knew
she might be in some danger even before the station commander got word of the leak.
He planted agents in the area just for that reason.”

“The
other
dead and wounded with government-issued weapons,” Dylan concluded.

“Uh...yeah,
that’s right,” Royer confirmed hesitantly. “At any rate, based on your record I
gambled that you’d try to help her if anything happened before we decided to pull
her out. Obviously, I was right again. But even if nothing had ever happened, I
was still going to...get another crack at you, as you so eloquently put it, one
way or the other.”

One way or
the other? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Face it,
Sergeant. Peeping through open windows at naked women isn’t exactly the kind of
conduct we approve of.”

The frank
directness of her answer totally blind-sided him. As obvious as it should have
been, he hadn’t seen it coming. “You intended to blackmail me into the agency?”
he asked.

“If
necessary, yes. But I’m just as glad we didn’t have to.”

“Oh, well,
that makes all the difference.”

“Spare us
the sarcasm, Sergeant,” Hansen said.

Dylan
glanced at the admiral, but continued to address Royer. “Why me, Commander?” he
asked. Then he looked at her again and continued, “A lot of Marines have
records that are a lot more impressive than mine. Why were you so intent on
recruiting
me?
”

When Royer
didn’t answer, Dylan looked back at Hansen and sighed, shaking his head. “Granted,
I’m an outsider, sir, and maybe there’s more to all this than I can see right
now. But I can’t believe you approve of her methods.”

“First of
all, Sergeant, you’re not an outsider. Not anymore. You’re one of us now. You’re
an agent.”

“But I’ve
only just finished the academy, sir.”

“And
secondly,” Hansen continued, ignoring that apparently insignificant detail, “what
I don’t approve of is a peeping tom.”

“She set me up,
sir.”

“Yes she did,
Sergeant,” the admiral freely admitted with a single nod of his head. “But you
did it, nonetheless.” A slight grin found its way to his face as he added, “But,
just so you’re aware, while it’s true that I
don’t
always approve of the
commander’s methods, I’ve always found her personnel choices to be sound.”

“With at
least one notable exception, sir,” Dylan pointed out. “Of course, he’s nothing
more than a sofa stain now.”

“That’s
enough of that, Sergeant!” Hansen barked, pointing a stern finger at him. “Any
more comments like that out of you and I’ll drop a general reprimand into your
record so fast you won’t have time to read it before your stripes hit the deck!
Do I make myself perfectly crystal clear, Sergeant?”

“Yes you do,
sir,” Dylan answered with a heavy swallow, thoroughly intimidated now by the
half dozen golden starbursts that were glaring at him from both sides of the
admiral’s burning stare. No one had ever been able to do that to him before,
and he didn’t like how it felt.

With an
instantly calmer voice and without the emphasis of his pointing finger, Hansen
explained, “Commander Royer didn’t choose that agent to bring the girl out. The
local station commander did. Commander Royer’s choices of personnel have
always
been sound, just as I said. And that’s never been truer than it is in your
case.”

“Which leads
me right back to my original question, sir,” Dylan pointed out calmly, all evidence
of that ‘burning fire,’ as Royer had put it, now thoroughly internalized. “Why
do you want
me?
I mean, I just graduated from the academy for God sake. Why
am
I
the right choice for this mission, whatever it is?”

Hansen
sighed as he adjusted his position and looked at Royer. “Whatever happened to
the good old days when we handed an assignment to an agent and he just took it
and ran?” he asked rhetorically.

She grinned
and answered, “I thought that was still how we did it, sir.”

He looked at
Dylan again. “Why are you the right choice for this mission? Partially for one
of the same reasons the commander wanted you watching over your neighbor. Your
service record. But mostly because of the specifics of the mission itself.”

“And they
are, sir?”

Once again,
the admiral leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. Then he said, in
a very matter-of-fact manner, “Very simple, Sergeant. We want you to travel
back in time to the year twenty-one sixty-eight and prevent the destruction of
the
Excalibur
at Caldanra.”

Dylan drew a
breath to respond, but he didn’t have any words. Then, certain that he couldn’t
possibly have heard the admiral correctly, he simply said, “Excuse me?”

“More
specifically,” Hansen clarified, “we want you to pose as a Security Policeman, infiltrate
the staff of the Martian Orbital Fleet Yards, and take whatever actions you
determine necessary in order to ensure that the starcruiser
Albion
remains
dry-docked there at least until the time that our records indicate the
Excalibur
was destroyed.”

Time-travel?
But that was just science-fiction. How was he supposed to respond to such a
suggestion, especially when it came from a flag officer? And even if it
were
possible, which he believe for a second, what about the unpredictable
consequences that all of the most popular theories on the subject warned about?
Which ones were right and which were wrong? According to everything he’d ever
read on the subject, even the most knowledgeable scientists couldn’t agree on
the answers.

“Sergeant
Graves?”

Dylan raised
his eyes to the admiral. He was waiting for a response.

“Do you
understand what it is we’re asking you to do?” he asked.

“I uh...I
think so, sir.”

“But?”

“But...uh...forgetting
for a moment that I don’t happen to own a time machine, sir, if the
Albion
was
taken out and used in the attack on
Excalibur
, and if I somehow go back
and keep the
Albion
in dry-dock so that can’t happen, won’t I be changing
history?”

“Obviously.
That’s the whole idea.”

“No, sir, I
mean...wouldn’t I be changing more than just that one detail? Wouldn’t I be
changing everything?”

Hansen
sighed. “I’ve sat through this discussion several times already, Sergeant, and I
really don’t want to sit through it again. What you say is a possibility, yes, but
changing history is the whole point of the mission.”

“But isn’t
that supposed to be dangerous, sir? If I understand the theories correctly,
those changes would include our present reality.”

Hansen drew
a deep breath and bowed his head as he slowly exhaled, then looked up at Dylan
again and said, “Sergeant Graves, our present reality is that the Tor’Kana will
become extinct when the current generation dies out, and the rest of us
probably won’t last much beyond that. Altering that reality is precisely what
we’re trying to do. It’s the whole point of the mission, as I said. And we
think that by saving the
Excalibur
we might just accomplish that.”

“How so,
sir?”

“Those
details aren’t important to your mission.”

Dylan gazed
at Hansen, at Royer, and back at Hansen again, but got only stern blank stares
in return. “You’re really serious about all this?” he finally asked.

“We are
absolutely serious about all this,” Hansen assured him. “If we weren’t serious you
wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Dylan
thought it over, but he still wasn’t completely convinced. “Okay. All right.
Let’s just say for argument sake that I
can
do this—that I can somehow
go back in time and save my father’s ship. Do we really want to alter the
course of our history, sir, based on one remote possibility? I mean, what if
preventing the destruction of my father’s ship still doesn’t save the Tor’Kana
and I end up making things even worse for the Coalition? What if we all end up
dead? How do we know for sure what’s going to happen?”

Hansen
looked at Royer and asked, “Remember the same good old days when you could give
an N-C-O an order and he’d run with it without having to analyze it with you
first?” Then, without waiting for Royer to answer, he looked back at Dylan and
explained, “We
don’t
know for sure. We can’t. All we do know is that we
have a chance to make things better. If you succeed you’ll undoubtedly save a
lot of lives, including your own father’s.”

“That’s why
you chose me, isn’t it?”

“That’s
exactly right, Sergeant,” the admiral confirmed. “That is the one specific
detail that pointed us right at you for this mission.” That wasn’t the entire
truth, of course. There were also his nightmares, but his nightmares were none
of the sergeant’s business. “The fact that the captain of the vessel we’re
trying to save is your father.”

“
Was
my
father, sir,” Dylan amended.

“Twenty-two
years in the past, he still
is
your father,” Hansen reiterated.

“Twenty-two
years in the past, Admiral, I’m still a six year old boy,” Dylan parried. But
beyond that he conceded the point without further debate.

Long moments
crept silently by while he thought over all that he’d just been told. They were
offering him a chance to save his father’s life...in theory. It made some sort
of sense...in theory...though the whole idea of time-travel and multiple histories
was so extraordinary that he could hardly conceive of actually participating in
such a feat. But now that the possibility that he might be able to save his
father’s life had been specifically pointed out, he was, for the first time,
actually considering accepting the assignment.