Honor Bound

it, even as the clamshell doors opened and light leaked out from the interior, silhouetting the vehicle’s passengers as they clambered out.

But when the light fell on the face of one and he saw that it was Valerie, he couldn’t hold back: he ran across the meadow and pulled her into his arms, half sobbing as he held her.

“Oh my God, honey, I am so glad you’re alive! When they found your car…”

“I’m sorry, daddy,” she said soothingly. “I am so sorry I put you through all this.”

O’Keefe held her at arm’s length, looking her up and down. “Are you all right? Were you hurt? What were you doing in the Old City anyway?”

“I’m fine, daddy,” she assured him. “We should go inside: we need to talk.”

For the first time, O’Keefe looked beyond Valerie to Shannon, who was sealing the flyer’s doors. “Tell me you didn’t involve my daughter in your cloak-and-dagger bullshit, Stark,” he hissed.

Shannon winced, hesitated.

“Daddy,” Valerie interrupted, putting a hand on his arm, “don’t. I called her. I didn’t accept the circumstances of Glen’s death and I wanted to look into it, but I knew it would be dangerous, so I asked her to back me up. She kept me safe.”

O’Keefe’s expression softened and regret showed on his face. “I’m sorry, Major Stark,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just been a very… stressful few days.”

“I’m afraid it’s going to get much worse, Mr. President,” she told him. “Let’s go inside… we have a lot to talk about.”

From the opposite side of the desk, Shannon watched the President’s eyes get wider and wider as he watched one video after another, culminating with the video recording of Liam’s testimony.

“God in Heaven,” O’Keefe breathed. He looked up at Shannon, then back and forth between her and Valerie, disbelief in his eyes. “You can’t be saying… I can’t believe…” He shook his head, trying to come up with something coherent to say. “What proof do we have of any of this?”

“Well sir,” Shannon ticked off on her finger, “we have first-hand testimony that the Colonial Guard mutiny is real, and we have eyewitness evidence that it is connected to the multicorps via this Lone Star Security, where Hellene D’Annique works. Colonel Lee was told by D’Annique that there would be an assassination attempt on you via an orbital strike timed to coincide with the return of the Decatur-well, let me clarify, we think he meant the Decatur, we have no names or specific ships. We also know that the merc who murdered Glen Mulrooney and tried to kill Valerie was hired by a shell company with ties to Lone Star Security, and we know he was only hired to do this after Glen began asking his friend the journalist to look into the background of Vice President Dominguez.”

She shook her head. “As for the rest… we only have Mr. Bryant’s testimony under chemical interrogation to say that Antonov was involved with this or that this story about…” She searched for a word. “…duplication, I suppose, is true. Investigator Kovach vouches for the accuracy of information obtained through the combination of drugs, but there is no psycho-medical study that confirms that those memories are real and not fantasy. Still sir,” she pointed out forcefully, “something happened on that trip to Aphrodite. Bryant was on it and immediately developed psychological problems. D’Annique was on it and immediately quit the Fleet and is now working against your government. And Vice President Dominguez was on it and is, we know, at least tangentially involved in all this.”

She shook her head. “Once is happenstance,” she quoted, “twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

“If Antonov isn’t behind this,” Valerie said thoughtfully, “someone has gone through a lot of trouble to make us think he is. If the attack on the outpost was staged to draw away Jason or you, Shannon, and to get some of the Fleet out of the way… there has to be involvement by some of the top officers in the Republic Spacefleet.”

“Jesus,” O’Keefe murmured, burying his face in his hands for a moment. When he looked back up, his eyes were haunted, his face pale. “So either a sizable percentage of the military and the multicorps are conspiring in an elaborate plot to assassinate me and overthrow our elected government, or Antonov has access to technology that can duplicate people and has foisted a copy of the Vice President on us and brainwashed the entire crew of a starship, including Admiral Patel and possibly General Kage.” He laughed a bit maniacally. “I can’t honestly say which of those possibilities I find worse.”

Still chuckling, he stood from the desk and went to the bar against the far wall, pulling out a bottle of Scotch and pouring himself a tall glass of it. He downed half of it in one gulp, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself. “I used to feel sorry for Greg Jameson, you know,” he went on, refilling his own glass and pouring one for each of them. “He had to handle Antonov’s invasion, being a prisoner, almost dying, the war… and of course the economic aftermath.” He set the glasses in front of both of the women at the desk, then retrieved his own and sat back down with them. “I used to think it wasn’t fair that all that was dumped on his head. Now…” He shook his head. “Now I wish that son of a bitch were back in office so he could deal with this.”

Valerie picked up her glass and took a long sip from it. “Daddy,” she said, “we… you have to make a decision. We have to do something and you have to be the one to make that call.”

O’Keefe caught Shannon’s eye. “You wouldn’t have come here without some ideas, Stark.”

“Yes, sir,” she confirmed, taking a long gulp from her own glass. The Scotch was old and smooth. “The most obvious course of action is to bring in D’Annique for interrogation and follow her trail up the line.”

“I assume there’s a downside to that other than the Constitutional and legal issues,” O’Keefe said dryly, “since that hasn’t stopped you so far.”

“The downside is that her disappearance would be noticed,” Shannon explained. “Which would give her superiors time to go to ground. Right now, so far as we know, whoever is behind this in the Fleet and the multicorps has no reason to think we’re onto any part of their plan beyond the Guard mutiny. If we grab D’Annique, they’ll know for sure, and whatever we did get from her might not be enough to make all the connections.”

“I see. So what are the alternatives?”

“Well,” she said, reluctantly, “there’s one that appeals to me on a visceral level but I doubt I can get you to approve.”

He looked at her and smiled shrewdly. “You want to put Xavier Dominguez in a hotbox and sweat him, don’t you, Major Stark?”

Shannon chuckled despite herself. “Yes, sir, I surely do. He’s the key to all this. None of it will work without him in place. If we take him off the board, we may remove the threat entirely.”

“That certainly makes sense,” O’Keefe admitted. “The problem is, we have no legal justification to do it; and unlike some psych burnout junior Fleet officer, we can’t make the Vice President disappear without raising more questions than I can answer and still stay president. No, barring an actual state of civil war, I don’t think kidnapping the Vice President is on the table.”

“Then there’s only one other option, sir,” Shannon told him. “We keep watching D’Annique and hope she leads us to someone bigger… and we wait for the other side to make their move and hope we can get you through it alive when it comes.”

O’Keefe slumped back in his seat, rubbing the back of his head tiredly. “If this isn’t Antonov,” he began uncertainly, “if it’s just a home-grown coup attempt… I wonder if I should approach Dominguez myself and try to make a deal.”

“Mr. President?” Shannon’s eyes went wide.

“Daddy, you can’t deal with these people!” Valerie exclaimed. “They murdered Glen!”

“Look, Major Stark, Valerie,” O’Keefe held up his hands palms-up in a helpless gesture, “I’m not sure if either of you realizes just how tenuous a position our economy is in right now. It can’t take another war, particularly not a bitter and bloody civil war. The economy will collapse, the Republic government will collapse and we will have one would-be warlord after another vying to take over what’s left. Millions of innocent people will die, maybe tens of millions. Nuclear weapons, kinetic kill weapons from space, biological weapons… if there’s a protracted civil war, any of those can and will be used.”

“What sort of a deal would you propose?” Shannon asked quietly, the wheels turning behind her eyes.