Authors: Vaughn Heppner
“We’re going to do the unexpected,” he said.
“Okay. What is that?”
“Do you see that door over there?” Maddox asked, inclining his head
to the right.
She glanced at it, a utility door it seemed to her. “I see it.”
“Good. Then turn around one hundred and eighty degrees from it and
run
,” he said, releasing her elbow as he broke into a sprint into the direction he’d just told her to go.
While panting, Lieutenant Noonan glared at Captain Maddox. She sat in the passenger seat of his flitter, a fast sportster with a bubble canopy. Below, the mall and the greater metropolis of Paris quickly faded from view as they climbed with unbelievable speed. She couldn’t even see the Eiffel Tower anymore.
The engine hummed
, but there was hardly any vibration. This was some craft, clearly a specialty machine approaching combat efficiency.
After that harrowing
sprint, Valerie was still sucking down air. Sweat prickled her face and neck.
Maddox
glanced at her and flicked yet another switch. A conditioning vent poured cooling air against her skin. She repositioned, opening a top button. Ah, the blowing air felt good.
Valerie
liked to stay in shape. Compared to Maddox, though, she was an out of shape slob. The captain seemed placid as he kept checking his instrument panel. He’d sprinted like a cheetah back there. Only as Valerie broke out of the mall, struggling to catch up to him in the parking lot, had she realized a sniper fired at them—not that she’d heard anything. The captain had thrown himself to the paving, and she’d seen something glittery break apart on the hard surface. Maddox had produced a long-barreled gun, snapping off several shots. Then he’d sprinted back, grabbed her and forced her to bend low as they wove through parked vehicles.
She would have asked what was going on
, but it was all she could do to keep her legs churning as he propelled her along. Finally, he’d holstered the weapon and pulled out a black unit, pressing buttons. She’d yelped when a flitter literally dropped out of the sky in front of them.
Another of those glittery things broke apart against the
machine’s canopy. Then they’d piled in. The flitter lifted before she clicked on her buckles. Now they headed north.
“Who shot at us back there?” she said between gasps.
“That’s a good question,” Maddox said. “I wish I knew.”
“
You must have an idea.”
He glanced at her.
“There are several possibilities.”
She frowned at him. “I’d guess it was the same people who came f
or me in the mall.”
“That’s loose thinking
at best,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she
asked, stung. “That makes perfect sense. They tried to kidnap me in the mall. I saw what the sniper fired at you. It wasn’t bullets. Steel-jacketed rounds don’t break apart on paving or against armored glass. He shot darts. Something with knockout drugs would be my guess.”
Maddox
gave her another glance, this one more quizzical.
“Did I say something stupid?”
she asked, exasperated.
“I
didn’t expect someone like you to be so observant in these kinds of situations,” Maddox said.
“What
’s that supposed to mean?”
He raised an eyebrow. “A
Star Watch lieutenant. What did you think I meant?”
She said nothing.
“Someone from Detroit perhaps?” he asked.
Her face stiffened. “You listen to me—”
“Save yourself the indignity,” Maddox said. “I meant no insult. I’m letting you know that I’ve read your file.”
“Yeah?
” she asked. “What does it say?”
“For the most part it speaks about your competence in your chosen
area of expertise.”
“And the rest?”
He grinned. “None of us are perfect, are we?”
“If you think because my family lived on welfare that you’re better than us, you have another thing coming. “
“That’s an interesting word.”
She scowled. “What is? What are you talking about
now?”
“Better,” he said.
“What about it?”
“You asked if I think I’m better than you. That’s too broad of a question. I run faster, so that makes me a better runner. As a navigator in space, you would be better. You have to add a qualifier to your
statement for it to make sense.”
She
debated remaining angry with him, but he
had
helped her in the mall. The thugs with the black leather jackets…who knew what they would have done to her.
“You’re a slick operator
,” she said. “I can see that.”
“And you revert to your upbringing in times of stress
,” Maddox said.
“
Maybe I do. Is that going to be a problem for you?”
“
Negative,” he said. “It makes your selection more reasonable.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question. Who do you think shot at us back there?”
“I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities,” he said. “One, maybe the sniper belonged to the men trying to kidnap you. But then, why did they shoot at me?”
“Who were they anyway?”
“Yes. That’s a good question. Could our enemy have moved this quickly? I don’t like what that implies.”
“What does it imply?”
Valerie asked.
“That they have operatives within the
Star Watch,” Maddox said.
“So
, who shot at you?”
“It could be the same people or one of the Methuselah People, a tycoon.”
“Why would he or she come after you?”
“He no doubt believes I caused the death of his son. He wants revenge.
Octavian Nerva has the money to hire the best.”
“
Octavian Nerva of Nerva Conglomerate?” she asked in shock.
“The same
,” Maddox said.
“You have powerful enemies.”
“Not half as powerful as those after you,” he replied.
Valerie turned away, staring out of the canopy. They shot through clouds as they continued to fly north.
This man helped me. Maybe he saved my life. I have to quit getting so mad so easily
.
Valerie
realized her upbringing had made her ultra-competitive. One of her few friends had said she was prickly like a porcupine. “Make people like you,” her friend had suggested. “That will make things a lot easier for you. Besides, you’re beautiful. You should learn to use that to your advantage.”
Well,
life hadn’t been easy. Smiling at problems hadn’t helped her any. She’d had to lower her head and charge through her problems. Stubborn pride and hard work had been her secrets.
“
So what’s the plan now?” Valerie asked.
“
First. I need to know how much you know.”
“
Sure. We’re off on the wildest goose chase in the galaxy. We have to find a place that doesn’t exist and commandeer a warship that can do the impossible. Is that the same mission you’re on?”
“
If you feel that way, why did you agree to do this?”
“Why did you?”
she shot back.
Maddox
studied her before saying, “I believed your story about the battle with the three starships.”
“And?” she asked.
“And we need that alien sentinel if we’re going to defeat the invaders.”
“You think
the ancient ship exists?” Valerie asked.
“Don’t you?”
he asked.
Valerie shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible, I
suppose. It doesn’t seem very probable, though.”
“
If it doesn’t exist, how do we defeat the New Men?”
“Oh, so we’re done calling them
them
?”
“We’re in private
, not in public.”
Valerie
closed the button she’d undone. “In my opinion, the New Men can’t be invincible. I don’t think anyone is. All you have to do is find their weak point and exploit it.”
“
I’ve heard worse theories. But what if our point turns out to be weaker than theirs?”
She frowned. “They have a deadly beam. We should start researching like crazy, using what I recorded
from the battle. In time, we’ll probably duplicate that beam. That will give us a weapon to bypass
their
shields. Until then, we play for time in order to do our research.”
“And if they invade en masse
before we’re ready?” Maddox asked.
“Then that’s how we stop them,” Valerie said. “We
hit them with mass, trading ten ships for one of theirs.”
“What if they have
too many ships to make the formula sustainable?”
“I doubt they do. We must have a far larger population and industrial base.”
“Hang on,” Maddox said.
She glanced at him, not getting it.
“Hang on,” he repeated. “We’re going to turn.”
Oh. She grabbed an armrest and hunkered low
er.
Maddox
banked the flitter, and he took them down fast.
“Where are we headed?”
she asked.
“Scotland.”
“Any particular reason?”
Maddox nodded. “We have to get our pilot.”
“Who is he?”
“Keith Maker.”
“Where in Scotland is he?” she asked.
“At this time of the day,” Maddox said, cocking his head. He seemed to be thinking. “He should be in a pub in Glasgow, beginning his afternoon beer. He likes to take his time with those. Later in the evening, he’ll start on
the whiskey shots.”
“What kind of pilot is he?
” Valerie asked. “The man sounds like a drunk.”
“
Indeed,” Maddox said.
She gave him a dubious
look. “You’re kidding me, right? We’re not really going to recruit a drunk for the mission.”
“By recruit, you mean get him to
voluntarily join us?”
“What else would I mean?”
she asked.
“Ah. I see. No, we’re not going to recruit him.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Then what are we going to do with a drunken pilot in a Glasgow pub?”
“Kidnap him,” Maddox said.
Maddox let the flitter drop toward Glasgow. He’d taken himself off the traffic control net
as they’d lifted from Paris. Because of an advanced anti-tracking device, the machine would be incognito for an hour, maybe two hours if he was lucky.
Given enough
flight time, there would be an anomaly somewhere. That would alert the planetary tracing system. A clock would begin ticking then: the countdown. At that point, it would only be a matter of time before the tracing system cracked his invisibility. He had to be gone from Earth before that happened, or it would jeopardize the entire mission.
The kidnapping attack against Lieutenant Noonan deeply troubled him. The brigadier had suggested the New Men had infiltrated
the Star Watch with agents. The strike against Noonan would seem to prove the enemy had burrowed much farther than he’d believed possible after leaving the Lord High Admiral. It made more sense now why Cook and O’Hara had set up the operation the way they had.
Humanity was up against a deadly enemy. If the New Men were smarter than people, as regular humans were compared to chimpanzees, what chance did humanity have?
Is humanity the old breed, the obsolete model? How do you defeat a superior foe? The New Men know us, but we don’t know them. Right now, our advantage appears to be numbers. Are they using the women on Odin, Horace and Parthia to breed vastly more soldiers? Will they outnumber us in twenty years?
Maddox scowled. He needed to concentrate on the task
before him. He’d read the personnel files in the brigadier’s office. It gave him a rundown on the candidates. He didn’t really know them yet. Their files helped him to know what to look for.
Lieutenant Valerie Noonan clearly had issues. Who didn’t
, though? He’d observed her in the mall dealing with the first kidnapper and the second. The woman knew how to handle herself in a tough spot, although she wasn’t a professional in that department. He had begun to take her measure during their conversation during the short flight.
In his opinion,
Lieutenant Noonan wanted acceptance. She keenly felt herself as the outsider. She also carried a two-ton chip on her shoulder. Maddox found it telling that she didn’t rely on her beauty. It told him she likely didn’t believe herself to be beautiful. The concept was preposterous, but there it was, blinking like a neon sign.
From what he’d read, observed and heard from her own lips, he believed she must be an excellent navigator. She might prove to be a difficult companion in the
scout, though. Valerie had not liked his running speed or his competence. It threatened her. He was certain anyone who could do something better than Valerie Noonan threatened her. Like most things in life, that had its good sides and its bad. She would not quit easily. Good. The mission would likely prove to be extraordinarily difficult. Quitters were not welcome.
That brought him to Keith Maker.
By the file, the drunkard
was
a quitter. He found the ace’s inclusion on the mission as highly questionable. The man’s brain patterns seemed as if they were the only qualifier.
“Don’t crash us,” Valerie said
, sounding worried.
Maddox leaned to his left, looking down at the city. Individual
buildings rapidly grew in size. It was one thing to fly a spaceship and another to pilot a flitter about to wreck.
For
Valerie’s sake, Maddox eased the rate of their descent. Then he continued to think.
A few years ago
, a painfully young Keith Maker had shot down six enemy strikefighters and five bombers, one more than he’d needed to become an ace. He’d fought in the Tau Ceti Conflict, a system-wide civil war. The Star Watch had quarantined the fighting to Tau Ceti. The split on Earth, and on many colony worlds, as whom to back had threatened a larger rift in the Oikumene. Because of that, the Commonwealth Council had decided to let those on Tau Ceti settle the issue there.
Before the quarantine,
Keith Maker had joined the gas and asteroid miners rebelling against the Wallace Corporation. He’d been on the losing side. Not that Keith had been around at the end. Before that, the miner chiefs had grounded him. The reason was that he’d endangered his squadron with his drinking. The dividing line in Keith’s combat career had been his brother’s death, a fellow pilot and his wingman.
Until that dreadful day
, no one had flown better than Keith Maker could. Afterward, he became sloppy in every way.
Before leaving the brigadier’s office, Maddox had commented negatively on the man
, saying, “He strikes me as useless.”
“No,” O’Hara said. “That’s not what our profilers say. You’re going to need a daredevil, likely in more places
than we can estimate. If you can get Keith Maker working again, there will be no one better.”
“And if I can’t get him
working
?”
“Then you’re the wrong man for the mission,” O’Hara had told him.
Maybe I am, at that
, Maddox told himself.
Just how many broken or cracked tools can this mission absorb?
“What are you grinning about?” Valerie asked him.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re looking all serious as you plunge us to our deaths. Then you start grinning. What are you thinking?”
That I’m as cracked as the rest of you.
“The grin is the realization
of how much I’m enjoying your company,” he said.
“Ha-ha,” she said, “very funny.”
Maddox braked, and he brought the flitter down onto a rundown parking pad. There was the good side of Glasgow and the bad. They were definitely in the latter. Most of the parked air-vehicles here were police cruisers and corporation meat-wagons that carried security personnel.
“We’re going to move fast
while we’re in Glasgow,” Maddox said.
Frowning, Valerie stared outside
at the dingy buildings.
“Worried?” Maddox asked
her.
“This place looks worse than
where I used to live in Detroit.” She scowled at him. “No. I’m not worried. Why, are you?”
“A little,” Maddox admitted. “The gun laws
are enforced in Scotland. So, I can’t give you one.”
“What about that long-barrel under your coat?”
she asked.
“I’m licensed to carry, at least for a little while longer.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Didn’t the
Lord High Admiral tell you how this was going to go?”
“Maybe I forgot,” she said.
Maddox examined Valerie, deciding against telling her that soon he would be a hunted ex-Star Watch Intelligence officer. He would be in the cold, outside any legal aid.
“We have to go in and out,” he said.
“With a struggling man between us?” she asked. When Maddox climbed out of the flitter without answering, she said, “I’m not sure I can help you with that.”
He looked back at her. “You have scruples against
kidnapping?”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “yes. I don’t believe
in making anyone doing anything against their will.”
“That’s a noble sentiment, and it does you credit. Would you prefer to wait here
, then?” That’s what he’d wanted from the beginning, but he wanted it to be her idea.
She glanced around. “How safe is this
city?”
If he said
worse than Detroit, she would probably join him to prove she wasn’t afraid.
Before he answered, she asked,
“Is the parking pad dangerous?”
Maddox shrugged
to indicate
maybe
.
“
You don’t think I can look after myself?” she asked.
“It’s your funeral
if you stay,” he said.
A hint of worry entered her eyes, and Maddox wondered if he’d miscalculated.
“I’ll wait here,” she said. “Give me the keys to your flitter. If it gets too rough, I’ll take it up.”
“Have you ever flown one of these
before?” he asked.
“How hard can it be?”
Maddox hesitated before tossing her the control unit. “If you see that light flash,” he said, pointing at the instrument panel. “Take it up and come and get me.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Valerie asked.
“No.”
She hesitated before saying, “Sure thing. No problem.”
Maddox nodded once. He wasn’t sure about this. Yet he didn’t want her along in the pub. If she had cold feet about forcing Maker to join the team, he didn’t want her around.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said.
“Whatever,” she said,
pressing a switch, making the canopy slid back into place.
Maddox strode to the tollbooth, swiping
a false ID credit card through the slot. Afterward, he moved down the rundown streets. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the city creatures had begun to stir. The workers would leave their shifts soon, heading home. That meant the night people had begun to wake up. Already, the first gang members leaned outside their chosen residences. At least, he took them for crawlies.
Humanity had gone to the stars. That hadn’t eradicated poverty, overpopulation and sloth. Some people didn’t like to work. Some weren’t any good at it. Many preferred illegal trades, preying upon their fellow man, or woman as the case might be. Glasgow had its slums, congregated in
its welfare island. Instead of an entire city given over to welfare, only half of the population accepted the dole.
Earth was unlike any other world in the alliance. It had a teeming population twenty times the size of the next three largest planets. Humanity had begun here, and it showed in countless ways. Seventy years ago, there had been enforced emigration. That hadn’t worked
out so well and had eventually been discontinued. Now, the only involuntary emigrants were those leaving for a prison planet, in other words, the murders, rapists and other notorious criminals.
I wonder where Sergeant Riker is now. I’m going to have to free him from Loki
Prime along with this Doctor Dana Rich
.
Loki
Prime was considered as the worst of the penal colonies.
Maddox zipped up his jacket, turned up his collar and used his right hand to mess up his hair. He still didn’t blend in. He knew eyes watched him, judging whether he would be worth robbing.
The predators of this concrete jungle had finely tuned senses. Just like the lions on the Serengeti Plains, they could sniff out weakness. A strong person had little to fear this time of day.
A prickle touched between Maddox’s shoulders. Someone else watched him now, someone dangerous.
Long ago, he had learned to trust his senses. He resisted the impulse to look around. This type of predator wouldn’t scare off easily. He would—
Ah. The feeling evaporated. Whatever greater beast had zeroed in on him, had decided this wasn’t the time or place to attack.
As Maddox hurried to his destination, he realized there were too many gaps in his knowledge. He was beginning to believe that neither the Lord High Admiral nor the Iron Lady had told him enough.
How had the enemy known to go after Lieutenant Noonan in the mall? That indicated there had been enemy
agents in yesterday’s meeting when Noonan had told her tale. It might even mean the agents knew about his mission. Maybe they wouldn’t know the exact parameters, but they would have learned by now that something was brewing. That might mean killers beyond anything he’d faced before were after him. Octavian Nerva’s hitmen would be like Sunday school teachers in comparison.
Maddox’s gut squeezed. It hit him here, as it hadn’t
before, the stakes involved. He was up against the toughest enemy he’d ever faced. Worse, he only had bits and pieces of the real picture.
I’m more out in the cold than I realized
.
It might even be possible the
Lord High Admiral had sent him on a red herring in order to lure the New Men agents in the wrong direction.
The thought threatened to bring Maddox to a halt.
He shook his head. He was letting the enemy rattle him. The New Men weren’t gods. They were beings of flesh and blood. Stick a knife in one and the man would bleed.
Another thought occurred to him.
The best place to stop something was in its infancy. If the New Men had an inkling of his prize, they would logically attempt to kill him now.
Maddox
flexed his fingers, letting his legs eat up one city block after another. Finally, he reached Danny’s Pub. It was an ancient brick building. There were bars over the windows and garish neon signs of Budweiser and Lagers beer. He pushed through the door into an atmosphere of smoke and beer fumes.
With the defeat of cancer
one hundred years ago, the old antismoking laws had changed. People could smoke inside again. Maddox had seen a history show or two on the subject. Some of these drinking establishments looked just as they’d been in the early twenty-first century. It seemed Danny’s Pub was one of those places.