Honor Bound

“I understand,” Mironov told him. “I will finish eating then go back to my quarters.” He shrugged. “I do not need entertainment. After all these years, I have little need of anything.”

“Come.”

At the invitation over the exterior speaker, McKay palmed the door plate to the Admiral’s office/cabin and pulled himself inside. Patel was alone in the flag cabin, belted into his chair to give him better access to the readouts and holographic projections that covered the surface of the desk. He glanced up at McKay and waved him over,

“Well, here it is, McKay,” he gestured at the data. “Everything we know and everything we can do.”

“Did you give the order, sir?”

“Yes, I did,” Patel replied, still staring at the readouts. “I hate losing the lasers, but I’d hate to lose our FTL drives a lot more.” He jabbed a finger at a projection that floated above the surface of the desk top. “Pirelli did it, McKay. She’s a hell of an officer. She’ll be a Captain soon.”

“She found a way to detect the wormholes?” McKay asked, excitement creeping into his voice as he drew closer to the projection. He couldn’t make much out of it: it was mostly mathematical symbols.

“She surely did,” Patel nodded. “Oh, you have to be at fairly close range-their gravimetic signature is small when they’re not open-but she thinks she’s found the other gate in this system already. As soon as the laser focusing field projectors are converted, we’ll be heading though it.” He looked away from the desk, catching McKay’s eye. “When that happens, I’m putting you, your team, the Marine platoons and all non-essential personnel in the shuttles and landers.”

“Sir?” McKay frowned.

“We’re jumping blind into what could wind up being the heart of enemy territory. I’m playing Russian roulette here with a starship full of good people. We know they have the ram ships outfitted with Eysselink field generators… if they score on us with one of them, we don’t have any friendly forces to cover us while we affect repairs. If that happens, I’m launching all shuttles and landers and whatever lifepods we can get loaded in time. If we’re in reach of a planet, make for it. You’ll be in command then.” At McKay’s doubtful look, he nodded. “I know, it’s a desperate measure, but what we’re about to do is a desperate move. Besides,” he added with an irreverent grin, “if anyone could find a way to pull it off, it’s you, McKay. You’re the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

“Your lips to God’s ears, sir,” McKay laughed. “But I have something else I wanted to tell you. It’s Mironov… Admiral, I think he’s not mentally stable.” He sighed. “To be honest, I think he’s totally fucking bugnuts.”

“Do you think this affects the reliability of the data he’s provided us?” Patel asked, steepling his fingers in front of him as he regarded McKay carefully.

“I don’t believe so. He’s not trying to deceive us… I just think his hold on reality is tenuous. As far as I can tell, he seems to regard everything happening around him as little more real than a ViR simulation.”

“You’ll have to keep an eye on him, McKay, but right now, I think he’s given us everything we can get from him and we have Antonov to worry about. Tell your people to get some sleep and get some food in them. We head through that gate in thirty six hours.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Wooden planks creaked under Daniel O’Keefe’s shoes as he stepped out of the back door of the cabin, fastening his jacket against the chill in the air. Spring in northern Minnesota was colder than winter in Capital City.

I’m getting soft, he thought to himself with a trace of bitterness. He’d once been used to the cold, fond of it even. He’d spent most of his youth in the family home outside Calgary, and it was no colder here than it had been there. But he’d spent too much of his life in Capital City, first as a Senator and then as President, and now he needed a jacket where once he would have worn shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Old and soft.

He sat in the padded deck chair on the back porch of the cabin and stared up at the night sky. The stars were incredibly clear out here, away from the cities; countless hundreds of thousands of them stretched overhead in a breathtaking Sistine-Chapel ceiling painted by a universe-spanning divine Michelangelo. When he was a young man, O’Keefe had been fashionably atheistic, but as he grew older he found himself leaning towards something closer to a Jeffersonian Deism. He still couldn’t envision any sort of personal deity that meddled in the day-to-day affairs of men-or other beings-but he could very easily imagine a Watchmaker God that set the universe in motion then sat back to observe.

At the moment, he wished he could believe in a more personal God… because he very much wanted to pray. His son in law, a man he had trusted more than any other, a man he imagined could someday hold the very office he now occupied, was dead in a senseless act of violence that he still couldn’t fathom or understand. His daughter, the person who meant the most to him in all the world, someone he also envisioned as President one day, was missing for over a week.

How the hell, he raged inwardly, not for the first time, did the President’s daughter, a Republic Senator, go missing in this day and age?

Her car had been found abandoned in the Old City. The woman she’d gone there to meet was also missing and the security teams that had gone over the area had found nothing… except an unexplained blood stain in a nearby building. The press hadn’t stopped hounding him and everyone connected to his administration, interfering with his attempts to find her…

And then, over a very, very secure and private ‘link that only he and Jason McKay had supposedly known about, Shannon Stark had contacted him yesterday and told him to find a way to get out to Glen and Valerie’s vacation cabin and to bring Natalia with him.

He hadn’t told anyone why he was out here, just said that he needed a break from the pressure due to his daughter’s disappearance and his son-in-law’s murder. His staff had been quietly apoplectic at the thought of leaving Capital City with an economic crisis looming and the Biomech bill being argued in the Senate, and his Presidential Security Service agents had practically thrown a fit at the idea of an unscheduled visit to such an unprotected spot.

But he had put his foot down and here he was. There were no agents and no staff on the grounds of the cabin, just a security perimeter thrown up at the major roads within twenty kilometers and a complete air cordon. Natalia was asleep inside… finally. His gut clenched at the memory of her helpless cries for her mother and father, at her sobs as she cried herself to sleep in her mother’s bed. He’d fought back sobs himself, remembering how Valerie had cried all night the day her mother had been killed in a terrorist attack in Europe so many years ago.

His ‘link buzzed in his pocket and he pulled the bud off of it and put it in his ear.

“O’Keefe,” he snapped.

“Mr. President,” he heard the voice of Agent Havelock, his chief of security. “there’s a flyer approaching the air cordon. It’s registered to a rental company in Houston ‘plex. We hailed it and all the driver would say was that you were expecting company.”

“Let it through,” O’Keefe ordered instantly. “And Havelock, I don’t want any record it was ever here.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said with a resigned sigh.

O’Keefe broke the connection and levered himself from the chair. He could hear the whine of the turbines as the flyer came in over the lake, though he couldn’t see it: it was running without lights and there was no moon tonight. He had a vague impression of something dark passing in front of the stars and a wind tugged at his hair, rustled the leaves on the trees around the lake.

Then he could see the shape of it, a black shadow across his vision as it landed in the meadow beyond the back porch, the fan humming as it slowed, the turbine whining down. He forced himself not to run as he approached