“He took his flyer west, then it dropped out of sight near the Canadian border…” Rietveld began.
“Shannon,” O’Keefe interrupted, “he went to Valerie’s lake house in Minnesota! There’s nothing else out there! She’s
“Oh, Christ…” Shannon moaned, collapsing back to a seated position. “It makes sense… they’re his hostages. He knows we can’t just put a missile strike into wherever he’s hold up now.”
“And if we try to send a team in to free her,” O’Keefe said in a voice filled with rage and impotence, “he can blow them out of the sky or take out any ground vehicle that gets close.”
“We’ll get her back, sir,” Shannon assured the President.
“We can try,” Rietveld said a bit doubtfully. “But Dominguez controls the ground-based laser launch sites too… if he sees them coming, he can shoot them out of space with the lasers. Same thing for missiles, if the ships sit back and launch them from out of laser range. We could try Gauss cannons, but I doubt we can target them accurately enough for fire support from that far out.”
“Dammit, there’s gotta be
“Perhaps there is,” another voice came on her communications link, identified on her heads-up display as Fleet Captain Di Ndinge. “Colonel Stark, I have a priority transmission waiting… someone would like to speak with you.”
When the voice came over her helmet speakers, it hit Shannon like a wave, washing away a fraction of the constant tension that had been resting between her shoulders for months and bringing a smile to her lips despite the circumstances.
“Hi, honey,” Jason McKay said, “I’m home.”
Joyce Minishimi clenched her hands on her restraint straps and tried not to fidget as the cramped lifepod jerked and shifted in the grasp of the hangar bay’s cargo arm. She’d never been claustrophobic before, but spending the last few hours crammed into one of the tiny Engineering Level lifepods with the corpse of a young Lieutenant. He’d still been breathing when she’d found him in a corner of the Engineering Bay, and she’d dragged him along to the lifepod, but he’d passed away only an hour after she evacuated the ship.
He was barely twenty-five and she couldn’t even remember his name, but she’d never forget his face. She’d stared at it or tried not to for the last three hours, or watched drops of his blood orbiting around the small space, dreading the inevitable moment when they would splash into her. When she’d been pulled on board and the ship had gone back into one g acceleration, they’d spattered on the floor and seats like red rain. She’d endured it, telling herself over and over that this was surely not worse than nearly being killed by a knife to the chest… but now, when she was so close to being free of her prison, she felt a panic attack barreling down on her and she wasn’t sure if she could hold it back this time.
Then the lifepod came to a shuddering halt and a telescoping airlock slid out to attach itself to the hatch with a deep, metallic tone. The atmosphere light on the interior control panel went green and Minishimi fairly lunged out of her seat to slam her palm into the panel that opened the hatch. Her hands shook as the hatch slid aside with painful slowness, teasing her with a glimpse of light and a taste of fresh air, until finally she pushed through the narrow gap, feeling the door scrape painfully against her lower back, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain and panic.
Then someone took her hand and pulled her gently through the opening hatch, drawing her into a powerful hug. She sobbed quietly for a moment into a uniformed shoulder before she pulled herself back to control with deep, shuddering breaths. When she drew back, she realized that the one holding her was Commander Gianeto, and that he was crying as well.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, letting her step back as he wiped at his eyes. “I thought you were dead.”
“I was under that impression myself, Commander,” she laughed a bit maniacally, dragging sleeves across her face. “What the hell ship are we on board, anyway?”
“It’s the
“It’s actually General McKay now,” a voice said from behind them. Minishimi turned and saw a young-looking, redheaded Intelligence officer stepping into the hangar bay’s utility lock with them, trailed by a pair of medical techs. “Captain, I’m Lieutenant Drew Franks; I’m aid to General McKay and Colonel Stark-yeah, she got promoted too, while you were gone.”
“Damn,” Minishimi said mildly, “I’m going to have to salute him now.”
“Do you need medical attention, Captain?” Franks asked her, eyeing the bloodstains on her clothes.
“No, Lieutenant,” she assured him. “I’m fine.” She caught the attention of the med techs. “There’s the body of an engineering officer in the lifepod,” she told them, gesturing back through the lock. “You should see to him.”
The med techs nodded and moved past her, heading through the airlock back to the lifepod.
“Ma’am,” Franks went on, “we’ve got a situation on Earth… it’s complicated and I’ll explain it later, but basically, the
Minishimi closed her eyes and took a deep breath, leaning against Gianeto in utter exhaustion for a moment. A few hours ago, she’d been resigned to her own death, at peace with it. Unexpectedly surviving had been ten times as stressful as the acceptance of death, paradoxically. She dug down deep within herself, imagining the last mile of the Hokkaido marathon, then straightened and looked Franks in the eye.
“Do I have time to take a shower?”
Admiral Patel, Jason McKay reflected, looked like hell.
“Wait outside,” McKay told the security guard as he stepped into the Admiral’s cabin, which had become his prison since they’d emerged from g-sleep a few hours ago. The guard nodded and stepped back into the corridor, allowing the door to slide shut.
Patel didn’t even look at him as he entered the room; he just sat motionless on the edge of his bunk, staring at the photo on the wall across from him. It was a hologram of the Admiral with his teenage son, who was a freshman at the Fleet Academy. The Admiral’s first marriage had fallen apart for the predictable reasons of being a starship captain, but he’d maintained a close relationship with his son. McKay had met him once, when the boy was just a freshman in High School.
The Arvid Patel in that photo looked a million years younger than the man sitting on the bunk. His uniform jacket was unfastened, his face grey and his eyes sunken and lifeless, and there was a tremor in his lip: he looked as if he’d been weeping and as if he might start again at any moment.
“Admiral,” McKay said quietly. Patel didn’t answer, didn’t move.
McKay grabbed the Admiral’s desk chair, disengaging its magnets and moving it in front of the bunk, then reengaging them and sitting down across from Patel.
“Arvid,” he said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder.
The Admiral seemed to wake up from his stupor then, and his eyes narrowed.
“‘Arvid?’” he repeated hoarsely, a little shocked.
McKay shrugged, grinning lopsidedly. “Sorry, just trying it on for size… I got promoted to General while we were gone.”
“Of course you did,” Patel muttered with a humorless chuckle. “You know, for a while there, Jason, I hated you. I loathed myself for shunting the responsibility of command onto you there on Pallas, and since you can’t hate
