Alabaster Noon Page 11

  Aleksandra gawked. There were many theories as to why Pegasus was so successful in combat, but this wasn’t one of them. Lech addressed Akoo directly.

  “Has Ghost spoken to you since this happened?”

  “No,” Akoo admitted. “I’ve tried several times. Ghost sent the flight profiles which allowed us to dive through the atmosphere and rescue the mercs, and that was the last time we are certain anything came from it.”

  Lech looked at Akoo and rubbed his upper lip. “Have you gone down to try and talk to it directly?”

  “How do you do that?” Aleksandra asked. Akoo and Lech looked at each other uncomfortably.

  “I’m sorry,” Lech said, “this revelation has always been handled by Alexis. Let me start a little further back.” He paused as he gathered his thoughts. “Shortly after the original commander, Lawrence Kowalczy, found Pegasus, the legend of the Ghost began. It wasn’t until Alexis and her twin sister Katrina took over the Hussars that the legend was proven. You’ve heard the story about Katrina Cromwell dying in an incident on Pegasus?”

  “Everyone has,” Aleksandra confirmed.

  “Of course. Well, Katrina didn’t truly die. In that incident, the AI which had been aboard Pegasus for thousands of years overwrote itself on Katrina’s brain. In essence, it took human form. It’s been there, in the body of Katrina Cromwell, ever since.”

  Shocked, Aleksandra put her hand to her mouth. What must it have been like for Alexis to have the dead body of her sister inhabited by an alien AI program? The AI gave the Hussars considerable power, but she somehow doubted it made up for the horror of an undead, AI-infested sister to forever remind you.

  “So, you see it is possible to have a face-to-face with Ghost,” Lech finished.

  “It won’t let anyone in,” Akoo said. “Food continues to be delivered, but the AI won’t talk to anyone, not even to the crewmember who brings the food.”

  Lech nodded and sighed. “I was really hoping for help from Ghost. Counting on it, actually. Please keep trying,” Lech said, and Akoo nodded. “But don’t harass it. Maybe it’s working some angle.”

  “Would you like my opinion, sir?” Akoo asked.

  “Of course.”

  “If Ghost were a Buma, or even a Human, I’d think it was sulking.”

  The three regarded each other in silence.

  * * *

  Winged Hussars Prime Base, New Warsaw System

  “There you are,” Lieutenant Colonel Walker said as he came upon the solitary SalSha staring out the viewing window of the observation deck. “Your squadron is looking for you.”

  “Squadron?” Thorb asked without turning around. “I don’t have a squadron anymore. They’re all dead. Eleven bombers and twenty-two SalSha. All dead!”

  Walker nodded. So that’s what this is all about. He’d gotten a call thirty minutes earlier that Thorb couldn’t be found and had turned off all methods of communication. Walker knew the observation deck was his favorite place to come and had come up looking for him. Because I don’t have anything better to do with my fucking time at the moment than look for a sentimental alien. Less than a day until the Merc Guild arrives, and I’m now the head psychologist for an otter with PTSD.

  “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” Thorb added. He continued to look into space. “Is it always like this?” he asked after another moment.

  “What do you mean?” asked.

  “Does losing people under your command always hurt so much?” Thorb asked. “That I can’t stop seeing their faces or hearing their voices?”

  “Losing your troops is like the pain from a wound,” Walker replied. “It hurts a lot while it’s fresh, but the pain becomes more tolerable after it heals.” He shrugged. “Some wounds are worse than others, though, and they stay with you longer…sometimes the rest of your life. Like losses where you could have done…where you should have done something else, something better. Those can really haunt you. When you didn’t do the things ahead of time to prepare—when you should have done something else but didn’t—those hurt the worst and the longest.”

  “But I did everything I could!” Thorb exclaimed, the anguish in his voice plain. “We trained as hard as we could!”

  Walker raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

  “Yes, we played, too…” Thorb replied to the look. “That’s just how we are. We may even have practiced the Kloop, some—so we could welcome everyone home appropriately—but that type of flying was practice, too. It helped us practice flying in close formation!”

  “I could tell you’d been practicing,” Walker acknowledged. “And the people who saw the Kloop were all very impressed. Even Alexis Cromwell told me she was impressed.”

  “But it didn’t matter that we practiced! I still lost my entire squadron!”

  “I heard,” Walker said. He could see Thorb shaking and stepped forward to put a hand on the SalSha’s shoulder. “I also heard that you took out your target, and that the attack was only able to proceed because you did.”

  “Well, yes, but the attack was a failure. All those lives, lost for no reason!”

  “But you didn’t know it at the time,” Walker replied. “That attack was necessary to help the overall battle plan succeed. The fact that it didn’t isn’t your fault. From what I’ve heard, we were out-played by that rat-bitch Peepo and her minion Paka. Sometimes that happens in war, and sometimes you lose people. I survived a total wipeout of my company; I know how badly it hurts to be one of only two survivors. I also know that it gets easier.”

  “How does it get easier? What do you do?”

  “You go on. You keep putting one foot in front of the other. You make your unit better, so the next time you don’t get wiped out—you wipe out the enemy, instead.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Thorb said, his eyes on the deck.

  “I know you can’t do anything else,” Walker said.

  “Oh?” Thorb asked, looking up. “Why is that?”

  “You haven’t heard? The Merc Guild is coming. They are coming here—to New Warsaw—and what do you think they’re going to do when they get here? Offer us tea and cookies? No! They are going to kill every single one of us. Men, women, and pups. And then they’re going to enslave both of our races—those they don’t kill—and use them as fodder for the Merc Guild’s plans. Is that what you want?”

  “Well, no…”

  “You once told me that when the grahp comes, everyone fights—everyone does their part. Well, the grahp is truly coming this time—for both our races. What are you going to do? Are you going to continue to sit here and feel sorry for yourself, or are you going to organize what remains of the SalSha squadrons so we can beat the ever-living shit out of the Merc Guild forces when they get here? You’re the senior ranking SalSha officer—they need you to lead them. You may see something with your experience that everyone else misses—something that could be the difference between victory and defeat, yet you don’t know if you can? Don’t whine to me—I don’t have time for it! Just tell me one thing—what are you going to do?”

  Thorb took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then Walker saw him stand a little straighter and square his shoulders. His eyes gleamed as he said, “When the grahp comes, everyone fights. I will grieve for them when this is over, but for now, I will organize our squadrons, and we will fight!”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Six

  EMS Shadowfax, New Warsaw

  “…stressed frames 19 and 44.”

  Patrick Leonard rubbed the bridge of his nose and tried to will away the growing headache. The report from the structural specialist wasn’t helping. The five Egleesius-class battlecruisers had been through hell on their dive though Earth’s atmosphere to rescue a group of mercs trying to escape. The ship’s condition was a testimony to that hell.

  For the last seven hours, since he’d arrived aboard Shadowfax, he and his team had worked non-stop trying to deal with the damage her crew had been unable to fix in hypers
pace. Patrick had expected to spend a few hours getting started, then rotate back to Prime Base for more assignments. Only it didn’t work out the way he’d planned. Shortly after arriving on board, he’d gotten word the alien fleet was due to arrive in less than twenty-four hours.

  So they’d stayed on board, prioritizing vital combat and flight systems first, popping the stimulants known as CASPer Candy, and working nonstop. The problem was that his people kept locating problems faster than they could be fixed. Shadowfax might be just as old as Pegasus, but she’d been sitting for eons without any maintenance, and it showed. He suspected a lot of the issues they were struggling with might not have been a problem if the ship had been better maintained.

  “Can the frames be reinforced?” he asked over his pinplants.

  “Sure,” the engineer replied. “But it won’t be as strong as a drydock repair.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Patrick stressed. “Get it done, ASAP.” He waited for a second, half expecting another of his team to call with a problem. Nothing happened, and he sighed in relief; He could go back to the diagnostics he’d been trying to finish for more than two hours. The secondary charging coils on the ship’s ancient particle accelerator spinal mount weren’t cycling properly.

 

  He looked up and checked his pinplant comms. No channels were open. What the heck, he thought.

 

  More curious than freaked out, Patrick didn’t know how to respond. It sounded like an artificially modulated voice. Was someone playing a trick on him. Of course, the question was how he heard it at all. How could he be hearing a comms signal without receiving one? He decided to just think a reply, and see what happened.

  “Who is this, and how are you talking to me?”

 

  “Then why should I talk to you?” he asked. “You’ve hacked the comms system or broken into my privileged channel.”

 

  “I doubt there’s anyone in New Warsaw who doesn’t know that by now,” Patrick replied.

 

  “I’m listening.”

 

  “Pass them along to Commander Lech Kowalczy,” Patrick said. “Why tell me?”

 

  “Then I shouldn’t follow it either,” Patrick said.

 

  The last statement made Patrick pause. Was this person expecting him to take some sort of tactical data from a mystery comms hacker?

  “Even if this data is somehow useful, why are you giving it to me?”

 

  Patrick floated in the auxiliary power room and considered. It sounded like whoever he was talking with was delusional. He ran his comms log back and found nothing since speaking with the engineer. Nothing. Even if the mysterious voice was crazy, it had ability. “Okay, give it to me.”

 

  “I have to meet you in person? Fine, where are you?” Patrick thought it was a perfect opportunity. He’d write a report to HST, Home Security Team, once he had a name to go with the voice. The whole affair was highly irregular. Elizabeth would want to know what was going on aboard her ship as well.

 

  “I’ll be right there.” Patrick left his analysis tools floating where they were and fished a micro-recorder from his tool kit. His pinplants could record anything he saw, but the recorder could see in low light and infrared. Besides, if the mystery talker turned hostile, a recording would remain. Once he’d clipped it to his uniform in a way unlikely to be noticed, he consulted the ship’s deck plans in his pinplants and headed for the auxiliary computer room.

  Just before he arrived, Patrick took one more precaution. He wrote an email on the encounter, complete with a recording of the conversation from his point of view and left it in his outbox. Now confident it would be extremely difficult to make him disappear without at least some clues remaining, he opened the airtight door and looked inside.

  The space was the size of a tiny apartment on Prime Base. Every wall was lined with the high-density computer cores used for storing data needed to bring the starship back online should the main computer be destroyed. While there were countless glowing and flashing indicators, the room itself was in darkness.

  Patrick ran his hand along the inside door frame and found the light control. Flicking it caused no change. The lights were either broken or disabled. His every instinct told him to flee. “A-are you here?” he stammered.

 

  “Come out so we can talk,” he said.

 

  Patrick ground his teeth, stuck between wanting to get answers and wanting to run for his life. He hadn’t thought to bring a weapon; however, he had a small tool kit and several screwdrivers rested inside. He popped open the kit and took the longest, sharpest-looking one. If the mystery talker was armed, the screwdriver would be less than useless. Patrick’s hand-to-hand training went no further than the mandatory four-hour familiarization course.

 

  Easy for you to say, Patrick thought. He chastised himself for being a coward. The space was small, and the ship’s security was tight. Whoever it was couldn’t be an alien spy or an assassin. Even if it were one of the legendary Depik, why would it go through all the effort to get him alone? He was just a Geek Squad tech, not a Winged Hussars command-level officer.

  He took a deep breath and floated into the space.

  The door closed behind him with a sickening Clang, followed immediately by the locking mechanism engaging. “Shit!” he squeaked in a most undignified manner. It took a long moment to get a handhold and spin around, and even longer to find the locking mechanism in the near-total darkness. He jerked on the lock with no result. He jerked harder and harder, and still nothing. A sound behind him made Patrick spin around, holding onto the lock with his hands behind his back.

  “Don’t come any closer!” He yelled. “I have a gun!” In addition to not getting a weapon, he’d left the portable light in his tool kit. Shit, shit, shit, he mentally moaned, feeling his panic growing by the second.

  “I mUst sHoW yoU,” a voice spoke aloud, a voice like fingernails screaming across a chalkboard. Then out of the gloom floated a skeletal woman with wispy hair as white as hyperspace.

  By the time he could bring his hands around to defend himself, the woman’s equally skeletal hands had reached out and grabbed his head. Patrick screamed as the fingers searched along his temples. Patrick’s own hands closed on the tiny wrists just as the her fingers touched his pinplants, and liquid fire poured into his brain, burning away everything.

  Somebody screamed.

  * * *

  Shadowfax’s medical alert blared, and a team was dispatched. They reached their destination in moments, having trained for weeks and become battle-hardened after Earth. They found the door open to the auxiliary computer core and a member of Geek Squad floating there, her face ashen. Her name tape said D. Redcheck.

  “What’s the situation, ma’am?” the medical team head asked.

  “He’s in there,” she said and pointed into the room. “I-I think he’s dead.”

  One of the techs floated in while the leader questioned Redcheck. “What happened, exactly?”

  “No clue,” Redcheck re
plied. “I couldn’t find Patrick and used his pinplants and the ship’s locator to find him. When I got here, he was dead.”

  “He’s alive,” the other med tech called out. “Unconscious—maybe in a coma—but alive.”

  The team leader floated in and checked the patient. Another Geek Squad member, a male in his forties. Her assistant had him hooked up to a medical monitor and was running tests.

  “Severe shock, it looks like. I’m getting strange signals from his pinplants.” He reached into his kit for an instrument then fumbled it, the device spinning away into the dark room. “Can you hit the lights?”

  “Sure,” the team leader said and floated back to the doorway where Redcheck was watching. He flipped the switch. Nothing. “It’s broken.” He looked around. Spaces like the one they were in were seldom visited by medical personnel. He grabbed a light from his toolbelt and flicked it on. “Holy shit!” he yelled and pointed. The body of an old woman slowly spun further back in the center of the bay, toward the rear.

  After the shock wore off, the med tech anchored on a handhold and caught the woman. He felt for a pulse. “She’s dead,” he said.

  “Sure,” the team leader said. “But who the fuck is it? Nobody on this ship is that old.

  “I’m not sure she’s really that old,” the med tech said, examining the body. He took out a sequencer and pushed the needle into the corpse’s skin. “If she was in New Warsaw, she has to have a record.” The machine only took a second to respond. “That’s not possible.”

  “What does it say?” the team leader asked.

  “Lieutenant Commander Katrina Cromwell,” he replied. “But she’s been dead for more than a decade.”

  * * *

  Merc Guild Detention Facility, Ubatuba, Brazil, Earth

  Jim Cartwright had no idea how long he’d been in his prison cell; he only knew pain and despair. He’d tried counting meals for a time, then they stopped feeding him regularly. Then he counted what Major Vels Lucas euphemistically referred to as questioning sessions, until he lost track of those as well. He’d never considered that nanites could be used to help torture; now he wished he still didn’t know.