“Jason… I mean, the Colonel is back?” Shannon bolted upright in bed, relief flooding into her suddenly, highlighting an ache deep inside her that she had hardly noticed with everything else that had happened.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Franks told her. “It’s encrypted and it’s for your eyes only. I’m sending it to your tablet.”
She disconnected without another word and lunged across the bed for her tablet.
“Please be okay,” she muttered urgently in half a prayer.
The message was encoded biometrically and she obediently pressed her finger to a port in the side where a small needle pricked it and took a DNA sample from her blood. A few minutes passed as a progress bar showed the status of the decryption and then she was looking at an image of Joyce Minishimi. The woman was in a medical bay bed in zero gravity, held lightly in place by padded straps across her chest and hips and she looked gaunt and pale; and Shannon fought back a rising sense of doom.
“Colonel Stark,” Minishimi said a bit hoarsely, as if she couldn’t draw in a full breath, “this is Captain Minishimi. We’re in the asteroid belt. We’re intact but we’re deadlined on antimatter. How we got here… well, I hope you’re sitting down…”
“Well, now I
“I was almost ready to believe that the Protectorate wasn’t involved at all,” Valerie said, nodding, from where she sat opposite Shannon. The young senator looked drained, her normally styled hair hanging limply and circles under her eyes. She’d left her daughter sleeping in her room when Shannon had woken her.
“At least we know the boss is okay,” Ari interjected. He and Roza shared a rumpled but satisfied post-coital glow but were businesslike as they had viewed the recorded message with the others. “Sailing into the teeth of the enemy,” he amended with a shrug, “but he was alive when she left him. And he’s got Admiral Patel there, too.”
“Admiral Patel,” Shannon nodded in grim counterpoint, “who was also aboard the
“You think Admiral Patel was… copied?” Ari asked her, eyes narrowing. “But she said he saved their ship, destroyed Protectorate spacecraft… why would he do that if he were on their side?”
“I hope he isn’t,” Shannon told him earnestly. “But Commander Duncan didn’t show any sign of having been copied or brainwashed or whatever until he tried to destroy the
“If Antonov is involved,” Roza said thoughtfully, “the question I have is, how did he and Fourcade-or whoever Fourcade represents-come to be in contact? It’s not as if they could meet each other in passing at the local bar.”
“I think the more important question,” Shannon countered, “is what Antonov has to gain by allying himself with Fourcade and his people? It’s not as if the multicorps are going to hand over the planet to him… and I don’t know he would settle for less.”
“He can’t have replaced all of them,” Ari figured, shaking his head. “If he could get away with that, he wouldn’t have to be this subtle. So they have to have something to offer him. You’re right though, ma’am, I can’t figure what. This was simpler when it was a home-grown insurrection.”
“We’re missing some piece of the puzzle here,” Valerie declared.
“Or several pieces,” Shannon granted, “but we can’t sit back and wait for them to fall into place. The enemy isn’t going to sit on their asses and we can’t either.” She tapped a code into her ‘link. “Franks, this is Stark. The area where the transmission came from… what do we have out there that can deliver a load of fuel-grade antimatter in the next 48 hours?”
She listened for a reply, then nodded to herself in satisfaction. “Excellent. Get them out there immediately and, Franks,
“There’s someone we could ask,” Valerie suggested quietly, a small grin lighting up her weary countenance. “Someone we could trust, who knows the multicorps inside and out.” She shrugged. “The only tough part will be figuring out how to contact him without attracting too much attention…”
Shannon leaned tiredly against the window of the flyer, her eyes slitted against the late morning sun, looking down every now and then when the vast, nearly unbroken plains of Oklahoma were interrupted by the swiftly moving dots of pronghorn antelope or the lumbering masses of elephant herds. Once, she was sure she saw the tawny bulk of a pride of lions slinking through the tall grass near the edge of a clump of bison.
“I’ve never been to the Preserve before,” Ari commented idly from the pilot’s seat, glancing back at Major Stark. “Always meant to check it out one of these days.”
“My parents brought me here when I was twelve,” Shannon told him, her voice sounding rough and hoarse to her own ears. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in days. “For a year after, I wanted to be a park ranger or a wildlife biologist.”
“My family never had the money to take all of us that far,” Ari said wistfully, “what with five kids, and my folks weren’t taxpayers or anything.”
“Maybe you should take a vacation one of these days, Ari,” she suggested. “I personally plan to take one when all this is over, assuming we live through it and don’t wind up conquered by the Protectorate or exiled to a star colony by a new government.”
“That’s what I’ve always liked about you, ma’am,” Ari said with a grin. “You’re so upbeat and optimistic.”
The flat grasslands and gently rolling hills of the Great Rewilding Preserve that covered millions of acres of America’s Great Plains gradually gave way to clusters of support and control buildings and living quarters that ran along the edge of the park, then to the infrastructure that was the outskirts of Oklahoma City.
“There it is,” Shannon nodded at a long fence-line that ran along the cracked and neglected length of an ancient surface road “Follow that fence-line and it’ll take us to the ranch house.”
“Flying this thing on manual, it feels like I’m out on a colony world somewhere,” Ari commented, “instead of the middle of the United States.”
“Well, we can switch back to satellite control if you like,” Shannon replied dryly. “Then we could go on Republic HoloNet and announce to the whole system what we’re doing, just to put a cherry on top.”
“Well, when you put it like that, ma’am…” He chuckled. “I see the house. We should be there in a minute.”
Ari traced the route of a dirt track that turned off the main road and then followed it to the crest of a low hill, where a single story ranch house sprawled comfortably in the dry, brown grass of summer as it had since the early 1900s. He landed the flyer on the side of the house, between it and a much newer garage, not far from a rugged- looking all-terrain rover suitable to travel the untended roads as well as the rolling grassland.
Shannon was unstrapping even as Ari powered down the turbines, and when she looked up from unfastening her safety harness, she could see the lone figure stepping out the side door of the house to meet them. He was tall and powerfully built, still intimidating in his early 70’s, though looking strangely incongruent to her in a short sleeved shirt, jeans and boots. He had skin the color of cafe-aux-lait; close-cropped, tight-curled hair with no grey in it and a face that had been sculpted from the side of a granite cliff. He halted a few meters from the flyer and waited for Shannon and Ari to climb out of the vehicle.
“Welcome to my home away from home, Colonel Stark,” he said with a thin smile, his voice a modulated earthquake.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet, Mr. President,” Shannon said, extending a hand.
Gregory Jameson, former President of the Republic, took her hand in his and shook it warmly.
