Tehrani gestured to the opening. “I hope never to lay eyes on you again as long as I draw breath.”
“You know, if you weren’t married, I’d ask you out,” Grant replied cheekily. He seemingly got the message as her face contorted. Her last sight of the intelligence officer was his scurrying into the security area beyond.
The interrogation room was utterly silent after the hatch clanged shut behind him. Tehrani stared at the chair Samaras had sat in for what seemed like an hour, pondering the events she’d just been through. While she was convinced Grant had a dark soul, as he’d put it, the earnestness of his beliefs bothered her. Are we all susceptible to sliding into a pattern of behavior in which the ends justify the means?
Some time later, she left the area, and as she pushed the hatch shut, she hoped that the action was as symbolic as it was real. I hope I never see such behavior again from a Terran. Something told her that hope was in vain.
14
The next morning, Justin received a summons to the deck one conference room during his daily workout. A part of him wondered if senior officers waited until the exact inopportune moment to send such demands. He quickly completed an abbreviated exercise session and hit the shower. Fifteen minutes later, he strode through the hatch into Colonel Tehrani’s meeting space. Emblazoned with the logo of the Zvika Greengold on one end and the flags of the Terran Coalition on the other, the room had become a familiar sight.
Tehrani, Wright, and Whatley were already there, leading him to glance at his wrist comm and realize he was walking in three minutes late. “Captain Justin Spencer reports as ordered, ma’am.” He braced to attention.
“At ease,” Tehrani replied. “Sit down.”
Justin dropped into the empty chair next to Whatley.
“Nice of you to join us, Spencer. Did we interrupt your beauty sleep? Or maybe those long Hollywood showers you like to take.”
He took the barb from Whatley in stride. “No, sir. I was representing aviation down in the Marines’ gym. You know, the one you’re too afraid to enter because the workouts might give an old man like you a heart attack.”
“Watch it,” Whatley growled. “I’ll school you in the simulator again if you keep that crap up.” His eyes flicked to Tehrani. “Apologies for the language, ma’am.”
Tehrani chuckled. “I expect it out of you flyboys.” Her face changed to a neutral expression. “On to business. Now that we understand where the pirates are tagging their targets for destruction later on, I believe we have an opening to plan a counterstrike.”
“Fighting in a nebula is iffy, ma’am.” Whatley crossed his arms. “Not saying we’re not up to the task, but it's virtually impossible to track ships in a high-energy ultraviolet photon environment, which Lagoon has in spades.”
“I suppose that explains why merchant freighters use it as a waypoint,” Wright remarked. He leaned forward. “We’ve eliminated several of their heavy fighters and two of those up-gunned corvettes. Attacks are down.”
“Yes, but not stopped,” Tehrani replied. “Any loss in rare earth minerals causes delays in munitions and ship construction. Bottom line up front… we must eliminate these pirates by any means necessary.”
Except torture. Justin ran the possibilities through his head as the others discussed the tactical advantages and disadvantages of trying to engage a small fleet in the nebula. Perhaps there was a simple solution. “What if we fight them elsewhere?”
“We would if we could, Spencer,” Wright said. “But unless you’ve got a magic prediction machine, I don’t see how our hit rate will improve. The entire battlegroup is needed to counter that converted bulk hauler they’ve got.”
“All we need to know is where they’re going,” Justin replied. “Doesn’t CIS have tracking devices we could plant on one of their ships, allowing us to find them once the ship leaves the Lagoon Nebula and goes back to its base of operations?”
Whatley glared at him. “How do you propose to place such a device on the hull of a ship, in a nebula, without drawing attention to yourself?”
“Using one of the two SFS-4 Ghost stealth fighters on board.” Justin grinned and put his hands on the table. “And a crackerjack pilot who can fly through anything.”
Tehrani and Wright chuckled, while Whatley snorted.
“Let me find a pin to deflate that ego, Spencer. Okay, let’s suppose for a second you could fly in that muck and find the enemy. How are we going to tag them?”
Tehrani cleared her throat. “I can fill that in, gentlemen. Agent Grant sent over a micro-QET launcher. I believe it’s designed much like an ECM pod and will fit on any standard CDF external wing pylon.”
“We just went from science fiction to mildly plausible, ma’am,” Whatley replied. “But there’s no way to know where the pirates will be.”
“They’ll be where the freighters are. We don’t have to find them. All Spencer has to do is wait by a freighter with rare earths on it. They’ll find him.” Tehrani’s eyes glinted. “Then you follow the fighter back to its carrier, tag it, and get out. Does that about sum up the mission, gentlemen?”
Justin was impressed with Tehrani’s tactical-planning abilities—especially since she was a ship driver, and they rarely grasped the ins and outs of small-craft strategy. “Yes, ma’am.”
“It might help if the pirates’ attention was diverted elsewhere,” Whatley said. “We’ve got a good bit of firepower here. Could rattle their cages a bit, and maybe these guys get sloppy.”
The thought was intriguing. Justin kicked around in his mind how the Greengold could stir the pot. He visualized the galactic map, specifically around the Lagoon Nebula region. “Isn’t there a series of systems used mostly for raw-material extraction one or two jumps from our primary objective? If I remember right, a helium-3 refinery too.”
“The kid might be onto something,” Wright replied. “And yeah, there’s a lot of commercial activity in that area. It’s close to the border, and between Terran Coalition assets, the neutral planets,
