‘Please, detective,’ Erin begged him tearfully as she grabbed his hands, and for a moment he thought that she might slip off the couch onto her knees before him. ‘Please look into it. If there’s anything that the police have missed, it might be enough to save my husband’s life. You and I both know that he won’t survive long in that terrible place and my lousy salary as a shuttle–taxi flight attendant doesn’t earn us enough to pay a fancy lawyer to fight Xavier’s case.’
Nathan rested one hand on Erin’s and squeezed it gently.
‘I’ll look into it right away and see what I can find, I promise.’
Nathan glanced meaningfully at Foxx and together they stood and walked from the waiting room. The door closed behind them and Foxx took Nathan’s arm.
‘Don’t get carried away with this, Nathan. There’s not much evidence to suggest that Xavier did anything other than shoot his colleague.’
‘And yet I take it that Forrester handed you this, and that you brought it to me,’ Nathan countered. ‘So you both think it’s worth pursuing.’
‘Forrester wanted to see what we thought about it. So?’
Nathan glanced back at the waiting room.
‘Neither the wife nor the mother spoke about how they
knew
Xavier was innocent,’ he replied. ‘They both told me what Xavier told them. They’re not blinded by love for Xavier, they didn’t tell me what happened at the scene of the crime as though they were there. They related what he told them, plain and simple. They believe him, one hundred per cent.’
‘That’s not enough,’ Foxx said. ‘Sure, they’re convinced they’re onto something here but then they would be, wouldn’t they? I don’t think this is a case that can be solved, Nathan.’
Nathan gripped the electro–film tighter and smiled at her. ‘I bet you dinner that I can.’
Foxx smiled brightly and rolled her eyes. ‘So where do you want to start, oh Romeo?’
‘What’s the weather like in San Diego these days?’
***
VII
CSS Titan
Heliosphere Patrol Sector Four
Admiral Jefferson Marshall awoke to a soft beeping sound and a buzzing in his ears. The cabin was dimly illuminated with subdued lighting that mimicked dawn on Earth, the walls glowing with the first hint of sunrise on a distant horizon. Marshall glanced at his optical display and noted that he had slept for almost eight hours – two more than he would normally have needed.
He sucked in a lungful of air that was scented with the sweet aroma of the pine forests that surrounded his home in Idaho, and he could hear the sound of birds calling each other with the sunrise. Despite the array of technology surrounding him, designed specifically to remind him of home and bring comfort to the military lifestyle, none of this helped his tiring body as he dragged it off the bunk and sat for a moment gazing down a slope to the shore of a limpid lake that perfectly reflected the dawn sky.
Marshall reached up and felt for the
Lucidity Lens
, then switched it off. The image of the dawn sky and vast panorama of forests faded slowly away and the interior of his quarters aboard the largest warship in the fleet swam into view. Marshall wasn’t much one for fantasies, but the lens did bring him some measure of comfort when away from home for so long, which he often was. He reflected briefly that he had probably spent at least half of his life on tours of duty, far from Earth and his family. Plenty of criminals had served less time aboard the orbital prisons that drifted in the frigid vacuum of space around Jupiter and Saturn.
Marshall stood up, the hard–light bunk switching off automatically as he dressed and grabbed a small breakfast of crushed cereal before he washed and prepared himself for another day. At least the current rota had him on “days”, in as much as time counted this far out in the solar system.
Marshall glanced at himself in a mirror on the wall, which was in fact a sheet of electro–film that flipped his image the right way around so he could see himself as others did. He looked older, the lines in his face more deeply ingrained, the gray hair a little thinner than on his last tour. He reminded himself, as his wife often did, that he had weathered well for a man of one hundred twenty six. She had also reminded him that most commanders of his age would have considered retirement before now, a thought that filled him with a greater horror than confronting an entire fleet of Ayleean warships in nothing but a…
‘Good morning!’
Marshall almost jumped out of his skin as he whirled and saw the glowing holographic form of the ship’s doctor, Schmidt, shimmering before him.
‘It’s against protocol to invade the sanctity of the captain’s quarters,’ Marshall growled.
‘Unless circumstances dictate that a given situation qualifies as an emergency,’ Schmidt corrected him with an ingratiating smile of neon blue–white teeth.
‘What emergency?’ Marshall asked, all his anger instantly forgotten.
‘Follow me,’ Schmidt said with a cheerful nod to the door, and then vanished in the blink of an eye.
Marshall strode through the door of his quarters and out into a corridor where Schmidt was awaiting him. The doctor’s ephemeral nature was one of the many advancements of mankind that Marshall felt uncomfortable with, many people no longer entirely human and, in the case of Schmidt and his kind, both alive and dead at the same time: a
Holo sapiens
.
‘Long range sensors have detected a high–priority transmission coming from the Ayleean system,’ Schmidt explained as he walked alongside Marshall. ‘The transmission is garbled and broken, but it doesn’t look good.’
‘For us or for them?’
‘Both,’ Schmidt replied, all pretense of humor gone. ‘Our communications team are trying to decode the message and extract some kind of meaning to it.’
‘What’s the emergency in all of this?’ Marshall asked.
‘It was a distress signal.’
Marshall stopped dead in his tracks in the ship’s corridor and stared at Schmidt. ‘The Ayleeans sent
us
a distress signal?’
The last encounter that mankind had had with the Ayleeans had been a protracted battle that had nearly cost the lives of everybody aboard Titan and the orbital city of New Washington, when the Ayleeans had attempted to breach the solar system and attack Earth.
Marshall had fought the Ayleeans in two wars, from both of which the CSS had emerged victorious. The species were in fact human, but only partially so. Three hundred years before the Earth had succumbed to a plague known as
The Falling
that had taken the lives of some five billion souls and rendered society utterly broken. The land had been given over to both nature and to gangs of brigands and thugs who had roamed the wilderness and the crumbling wastelands of the fallen cities of Earth. Only small pockets of true humanity had remained, cities well protected by the remnants of the military, where studies had continued until a cure for the plague had been found.
In those dark and terrible days many possible means of eradicating the plague had been explored, and with them the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Enforced elimination programs designed to destroy, however humanely, those carrying the plague had cost the lives of millions more innocent citizens, those in power acting only in the knowledge that to do nothing would see the end of the human race entirely.
Some of those slated for “elimination” had inevitably escaped, and in turn some of those had in fact survived the plague by virtue of losing limbs, either by decay or by choice. Among those wandering, miserable hordes of disfigured survivors grew a new species of man, well versed in the art of bionic prosthetics, skeletal reconstruction and tissue regeneration, skills they used to replace their damaged limbs. By the time the war against the plague had turned in mankind’s favor, millions around the world were only half–human, the rest of their bodies made up of ever more complex machinery. Two centuries later and mankind was once again a technologically advanced species, with cities and space fleets and a renewed appetite to reach for the stars. For the Ayleeans, centuries of marginalization gave them the appetite to do more than just reach, and they had been among the first to leave Earth in the colony ships and find their own home several dozen light years from Earth beneath the fearsome glare of a red dwarf star. Ayleea, a steaming tropical world and one of the first ever–discovered habitable planets around an alien star, had evolved them even further into a race of hunters with an abiding hatred of humans, their only true brethren in an uncaring cosmos.
‘We were as surprised as you are,’ Schmidt replied as they began walking again, officers moving past in the opposite direction visible through Schmidt’s semi–transparent form as they moved by. ‘I decided to wake you while the cryptographers were studying the message, which seems to have been subject to interference of some kind.’
‘I was already awake.’
‘Just.’
Marshall ground his teeth in his skull but did not reply. Schmidt’s unusual status as a
Holosap
meant that he complied with regulations and decorum only when it suited him. There was little in the way of punishment that could be meted out to those who were already dead and besides, Schmidt’s near–genius intellect and two hundred years experience of life, if that it could be called, were invaluable to Titan’s crew. In some strange ways, the emergence of the Holosaps was even stranger than that of the Ayleeans.
‘Do we have an idea of when the signal was originally transmitted?’ Marshall asked.
‘Forty eight hours plus,’ Schmidt informed him. ‘It should have been here hours ago, and what little we have received suggests ill winds on Ayleea. Whatever’s happened, it’s not good.’
Marshall was about to reply when suddenly the ship’s lighting switched to a dull red and an alarm sounded that echoed through the endless corridors with a mournful wail. Marshall saw the bridge doors before him, two Marines standing guard either side of them. A tannoy crackled with an anxious command.
‘Cap’n to the bridge!’
Schmidt vanished like a genie as he transported himself directly onto the bridge and Marshall broke into a run. The Marines guarding the bridge’s physical doors reacted immediately, one of them entering an access code via his optical implant, his eye flickering as he entered the data and the doors slid open. Marshall rushed through as the Executive Officer barked his arrival.
‘Cap’n on the bridge!’
Titan’s bridge was a large oval with two floors, one elevated back from and above the other, both facing a large viewing screen and tactical panels. Dozens of staff worked at stations around the upper floor, overlooking the lower where several more manned stations were arranged around the captain’s chair.
‘At ease,’ Marshall snapped and turned to the XO. ‘What’s the story?’
The XO, Olsen, was a man possibly a little younger than Marshall with a ramrod straight back and a jaw as wide and thick as a harbour wall, framed by a neat white moustache that shimmered with metallic implants as he spoke.
‘Distress signal, priority traffic from Ayleea. It’s garbled and has been jammed to some extent, but what we’re hearing is some kind of major catastrophe. Now we’ve got a jump cue right ahead of us.’
Marshall’s gaze switched to the main viewing panel at the front of the bridge, upon which was displayed an optical image of the cosmos ahead. Ranks of millions of stars shone against the velvety blackness of space, but some of them were shimmering as though a gigantic lens was passing across them and warping their appearance.
‘Battle stations!’ Marshall snapped, knowing that Olsen would already have made the call. ‘Charge all plasma batteries and ready Quick Reaction Alert fighters for launch, all shields up full power!’
The crew swarmed to carry out his orders, the Commander of the Air Group scrambling the QRA
Phantom
fighters in the launch bays, tactical officers re–routing power to shields and gunnery officers charging the plasma batteries that lined Titan’s immense hull as she prepared to face whatever was about to come out of the jump cue. The bending, spiralling patch of space was a sign of a vessel’s warp drive twisting the fabric of space and time like a bow wave ahead of it and thus betraying its arrival, a tactical error that would cost its crew dearly.
‘They’re coming right at us,’ Olsen observed as Titan’s computers calculated the incoming vessel’s mass and course. ‘They’re not even trying to conceal their approach.’
Marshall took hold of the railings that lined the captain’s command position, ready for whatever was about to appear.
‘They’re either wildly confident or wildly stupid,’ he replied. ‘Let’s hope it’s the latter. Tactical? Status?’
‘All batteries fully charged, all shields at maximum deflective power!’
‘CAG?’
‘Four fighters on the catapults, ready to launch! Eight more right behind them!’
Marshall nodded, the bridge now enveloped in silence as they all stared at the jump cue right ahead of Titan.
‘Bring her to bear, port batteries,’ Marshall said in barely a whisper.
An old man sat at the helm with his hands on a series of complex looking controls while a thick bunch of optical fibers travelled out of the man’s head and into his seat. Although Marshall had spoken the words the helmsman had already carried out the command, his mind reacting not to Marshall’s words but to his very
thoughts
, his brain wirelessly connected to the admiral’s to reduce reaction time during combat. The helmsman had served with Marshall since his first command, and their thoughts were often perfectly aligned. Titan turned her massive port batteries to face the jump cue as suddenly the stars within rippled as though they were reflections of a night sky in a pool of water as a pebble was tossed in, and then a brilliant white flare of light burst like a new born star and a massive ship loomed into view.
The white starburst of light faded, and in the faint starlight of deep space Marshall got his first look at the new arrival, a huge and lumbering warship painted a dull red in color that matched the glow of the lights on Titan’s bridge. But that was where the similarities ended.