By Other Means Read online

  “Why are you down there?” Craig said. “Whether they know you’re here or not doesn’t really matter.”

  “Listen to me carefully,” DuLac said in a hard voice. “No one can know we’re here. This is very important. Answer the comm and keep it simple.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Hopefully getting our asses out of the fire. Put enough power into your transmitter so that the Ronald Reagan can read you loud and clear.”

  Craig stared down at her, and she gestured impatiently at the communications array. He jabbed the respond button.

  The thin man in crisp, gray uniform who formed on Craig’s screen was not the same as the first, but he could have been. “Freighter AG-776, stop and be boarded.”

  Craig resisted glancing at DuLac. “You have no right to threaten me! I’m carrying relief-food to scientific outposts and I have to get it to them before they starve. I’m low on fuel and oxygen, and if I stop, I won’t be able to start again.”

  “You are operating in restricted space in association with illegal military maneuvers. Stop your ship or be fired upon.”

  “I’m not military! A military base sent out a distress call, and I tried to answer it. If you guys sent out a distress call, I’d answer you too.”

  The Reagan abruptly cut in, this time with an image of Captain Routan, not the canned broadcast they’d been issuing for weeks. “This is Captain Routan,” he said. “To whom am I speaking?”

  Craig glanced at the thin, gray man on the left of his screen and Captain Routan in his burgundy Earth Fleet uniform on his right. The Galilean looked profoundly irritated.

  “You do not have authority here, Captain Routan,” the Galilean said. “Turn your ship back in-system, or you will be fired upon also.”

  Captain Routan puffed up with offense. “Are you saying that Earth doesn’t have jurisdiction here? Has the Galilean Coalition allied with Mars now?”

  At this the gray man smiled tightly. “Mars does not have jurisdiction here either. The Galilean Coalition lays claim to all areas associated with the main asteroid belt, and hereby declares it off limits to Earth and Mars.”

  “That is in violation of the Treaty of Io, and the jurisdictions established at those proceedings. We do not accept your claim.”

  “Very well, Captain.”

  Through the freighter’s windows, Craig saw the two destroyers launch rockets in the direction of the Reagan.

  “The destroyers fired,” Craig said numbly.

  “Turn off your camera,” DuLac whispered as she squirmed and scrambled up to look. A fierce grin split to her face. “Perfect.”

  “You wanted them to fire on the Reagan?”

  “That was just a warning shot, the Reagan’s anti-missile defenses will handle it easily. But watch and learn how we do things in the Fleet, Captain. Watch and learn.”

  Craig sat, watching the diminishing rockets speed toward the bright spot of the Reagan. He frowned. Was the Reagan getting bigger? Elongating. He pulled out his telescope control-arm and focused in tightly on the bright blotch. “What the hell’s that, Lieutenant?” Flames were jetting out from all sides of her—top, bottom, sides, as the Reagan got wider and wider.

  “Watch.”

  The blotch resolved itself into two blotches. Then three, then four. “Multiple ships?”

  “They’ve been flying in an extremely tight formation for a month, with all their solar cells out to increase reflectance.”

  The communications array pinged over and over, as three more captains resolved themselves around the image of Captain Routan. Craig was stunned to see two of them wore the navy-blue uniforms of Mars Fleet.

  “This is Captain Chen, Battleship Ares Vallis.”

  “Captain Sustakovitch, Battleship Olympus Mons.”

  “Captain Teale, Battleship Berlin.”

  Captain Routan nodded. “Galilean, you have broken the Treaty of Io and have fired upon a joint coalition of Mars and Earth Fleet vessels. You have threatened a civilian ship on a humanitarian mission, in direct violation of the Treaty of Deimos. These shall be construed as an act of war.”

  The Galileans transmission went dark; Craig wasn’t sure if they heard the end of Routan’s speech. The Ganymede battleship’s forward thrusters faded and her aft thrusters roared to life as she attempted to regain the velocity she had squandered in the past three days. The destroyers fired attitude thrusters hard, turning away from the oncoming phalanx of guns and armor.

  Craig rubbed his eyes, and looked at DuLac. She was floating up near the ceiling, looking down at him.

  “Would you please tell me what’s going on?”

  “The Galileans are the real threat, one the fleets can’t address under our standing orders.”

  “Unless attacked?” Craig said.

  “Unless attacked.”

  “Shit. You mean this whole thing, out to MO-226 and back, was just a ruse?”

  “A lot of people will die if the Galileans take advantage of Mars’ and Earth’s weaknesses, exponentially more than are starving now. We have to keep them in check until the war is over.”

  “All that about Baranto and the terminal genes was bullshit?”

  “No, that’s all true. But we transmitted the data to the Reagan months ago along a string of secure beacons. Maybe we’ll need it, maybe we won’t. We’ll see how the future shakes out.”

  “How the future shakes out!? You used me as a chess piece in your war.”

  “I put you, and myself, right on the firing line, Captain. If we’d been blown up today, it still would have been worth it. Our battleships would have had more justification for their attack.”

  Craig looked out at the ships arrayed before him. They were so big and so far away that they’d hardly moved. The fleet battleships were separated into four distinct points of light now.

  “What happens next?” he said.

  “There’ll be a fight, we’ll win, the politicians will sort it out. Meanwhile, our battleships, and Mars’, will scramble around the belt scooping up stranded people in the MO’s. This will be our first chance to get them, and it’s a good excuse.”

  “What’s in the big box back in my hold?”

  “The urns of twenty-seven friends who died on MO-226 in Ganymede bombing runs. We promised them we’d get them home too.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Okay. But I want you off my ship. I’ve got potatoes to deliver.”

  True Colors

  An Alliance Archives Adventure

  Danielle Ackley-McPhail

  There was no stately procession to the airlock. No pomp and ceremony as the hatch was opened. Brockmann’s body wasn’t set adrift in the vastness of space to echo the dignity of an ancient warrior’s burial at sea.

  No.

  She was taken away in a body bag the moment the Teufel docked. By the time the 142nd Infantry—or Daire’s Devils—mustered in the barracks common room for debriefing, a corpsman was presenting to Sarge a two-inch, compressed-carbon cube and a bag of effects. That was all that was left of Suzanne Brockmann, Private First Class, Special Forces, one more offense credited against the pirates that had invaded the sector.

  Private Katrion Alexander felt her hands flex, accompanied by a familiar itch in her fingers. That could have been her reduced to a geometric shape. Almost was…twice.

  She must have moved without realizing it. Beside her Corporal Jackson “Scotch” Daniels cleared his throat and stepped between her and her pile of gear. Well, more accurately, between her and her gauss rifle.

  “Down, Kittie, down,” he murmured, his hazel eyes capturing her gaze. “Ain’t no pirates here.”

  Kat growled. She was doing that a lot lately.

  There was no time to comment. She and the rest of the unit snapped to attention as Sergeant Kevin Daire accepted the remains from the corpsman, ignoring the bag of effects. Turning his back on the man, Sarge cradled the cube in his left hand and drew his combat knife with his right. He then bowed his head; the unit gathered round
and followed suit. Not a word was spoken aloud as each of them bid farewell to their fallen comrade. Nor as, one by one, each of them stepped forward and, with their blades, scratched a line into the smooth, shiny surface of her compressed remains. Each of them maintained silence as they fell back to form a loose circle around their leader once their part was complete. Sarge looked up and met their gazes. Without looking away from them he raised his knife and etched his own line, bisecting those left by the unit.

  The vow was made. For each line segment on the cube was a solemn oath that the pirates would be brought down.

  Only then did Scotch step forward to secure Brockmann’s personal effects from the still-waiting corpsman. Whatever was in that small, compact bag would be shared out among the unit according to need. The rest would be held in reserve or given where it would best serve. Unlike Kat, Brockmann had no family to send material belongings back to, even if the military were willing to foot the bill.

  The corpsman turned to leave.

  “Wait.” Sarge motioned for Kat and Scotch to step forward. She suppressed a flinch and came to attention in front of him. “Alexander, Daniels…accompany Corpsman Kane back to med-bay to be cleared for return to duty.”

  Shit. It was only to be expected, though; Kat had been banged up from her previous encounter with the pirates, and both of them had been with Brockmann when their squad had come under fire a second time. She ran a hand over her dark, regulation-length bristle of hair and accepted the inevitable as she followed Scotch and Kane to the lift.

  Sarge turned to the rest of the unit. “Command has called a general inspection for 1700 hours; use this time to get your billets in order.” Not waiting for acknowledgement, he tightened his fist around Brockmann’s cube and about-faced. In silence he returned to his chamber to secure their fallen.

  Forty minutes in med-bay got Kat a noxious cream to bring down the swelling around her blackened left eye and a shot in her wrenched ankle that hurt ten times worse than the original injury for all of thirty seconds, after which she felt nothing. The damage was still there—a lingering reminder of her first encounter with the enemy—but the pressure bandage would take care of that. She also received authorization to return to duty.

  Poor Scotch. He was still in there arguing as Kat left med-bay to head back to the barracks. As a first-hand witness to Brockmann’s termination, Command wanted Scotch to submit to a psych evaluation before reinstating him to active status. The last thing she heard clearly was him suggesting they submit to a self-administered rectal probe.

  Kat chuckled. She wasn’t hanging around to see which near-immovable force triumphed. In fact, she was hightailing it out of there before someone stopped to wonder how her brainpan was doing after finding half of Trask—former commander and pirate—floating in space. After all, they might decide she was too happy about it.

  Toggling on her bonejack, Kat couldn’t resist a parting jab. “Come on, Scotch, ten minutes on the couch and the shrink will have you visualizing cute little kittens and white sandy beaches, it’ll be fun!”

  Scotch tossed an off-color suggestion her way. “Talk about torture. I’m allergic to cats and the only beaches in this sector come with an atmosphere that would dissolve the flesh off human bones in thirty seconds. I’ll have to pass, the torment would be too much to take…I might crack, and then where would we be? Now get the hell out of my head so I can deal with these quacks!”

  Kat laughed, winking one dark brown eye at him as she switched the comm off and made her escape.

  She hadn’t known that, about the beaches, but then she wasn’t exactly a beach bunny, was she? As she entered the lift she forced away the naughty thoughts of Scotch lounging on the sand somewhere with his blond buzz cut bleached white by the sun, instead turning her attention to the data they’d retrieved from the Groom Lake microsat. Not only had they gained documentation of the pirates’ attempted pillaging of the research facility, but Kat and her squad had intercepted the intended loot: the full research and development files on the Rommel, the state-of-the-art flagship of the fleet. They had it, but the pirates wanted it. Bad.

  Sarge had the encrypted files secured in a lock box in his quarters, but he’d had Kat burn a backup as well. It was hidden on the Teufel, along with the rest of the stuff they’d retrieved from the pirate derelict on the mission that had gotten Brockmann killed. The black box data was the easy part; the computer cores Kat had extracted from the vessel, those were going to take some finesse. Right now everything they had gathered was secreted away in a shielded compartment located near the Teufel’s engine reactor where a scan, visual or otherwise, would not be able to detect their presence. Only Sarge, Scotch, and their unit commander, General Drovak, knew the intel was there waiting to be disseminated.

  Kat didn’t even want to think about trying to crack the code. Fortunately, that wasn’t her job. All Sarge had to do was turn the material over to the general or one of his agents as soon as possible. The whole situation had her nervous, though. With rumors that the crew assigned to the Rommel may have been compromised, Kat couldn’t be sure who they could trust outside of their own unit.

  She shut down that thought and focused on getting back to the barracks. Kat looked up as the decks ticked by. Almost there. The lights fluxed, and the car slowed. For a moment she thought she was screwed; there wasn’t much time left to get her billet in order before the inspection. She half-expected a jerk and the thunk of the lift coming to an abrupt halt in the tube, but the lift continued to descend. With a hiss, the doors opened into the common room she had left less than an hour earlier. If not for the neat stacks of gear she would have thought the unit had left without them.

  She sniffed. Something had made it past the air scrubbers. The remnants were faint, an acrid bite deep in her throat. It was an effort to keep her breathing regulated as she walked across the chamber. Her impulse was to hold her breath. Her body’s was to breathe faster. Neither would do. It was an effort to draw shallow until she reached her gear. She outright had to force her fingers to flex and loosen enough to pick up her gauss as she paused by her own pile of equipment. She grabbed her breather as well and jerked it over her eyes, nose, and mouth until the thick gasket settled snug against her skin.

  Kat should have felt silly, but she didn’t. Paranoid came to mind…but she continued to wear the mask, hoping the filters were enough to combat whatever was on the air. She also held her rifle at the ready.

  That alone made her feel better.

  “Hey, Sarge….” she called out, the words only slightly muffled. Her breath came a little faster, and she forced it back. All the billets were closed, except one. Kat angled left and headed toward the compartment on the end with deck-eating strides. “Yo, anyone there…?” she called out.

  Silence.

  Kat drew closer, swaying a bit as her breath picked up again, as if she couldn’t get enough oxygen. Lightheaded she braced herself against the open hatch. The air coming through her breather still held a hint of that acrid odor. She swayed again and her head dropped forward of its own accord.

  For a split second she saw an out-flung wrist, mottled clear around with bruising, caught between the hatch and the frame. The pattern of the discoloration disturbed Kat but her thoughts couldn’t focus on why. She leaned forward to push the door panel into its retraction slot to reveal the unit’s weapons specialist, Private First Class Christine Dalton, which was kind of odd in itself, as this wasn’t her billet. The details drifted out of focus, though, as Kat’s brain slowly fogged over. She leaned forward to check for a pulse. As she did so, something snagged her mask, tugging it askew. There was a faint hissing as the gasket seal parted from her skin and the earlier odor intensified. After that, all Kat saw was a swirl of darkening colors drawing her down into the black.

  “Time to change your name, you pain in the ass,” a familiar voice grumbled over her, “before you use up all nine lives. Come on, Kittie…atten-hut!”

  Kat grumbled and shoved at the
hands lifting her semi-vertical.

  “Yeah, you go ahead and fight, g’on, give me what-for,” he went on. “Just do it with your damn eyes open.”

  She cracked said eyes just enough to recognize the familiar walls of med-bay and the hard, pale features of Scotch who was leaning over her. At his back a med-tech and a corpsman tried to get around Scotch’s bulk to separate them. Her eyes opened yet further, and she waved the men off. Scotch’s grip loosened until most of her body was once again in contact with the bed, but he didn’t let go. Kat could almost swear she heard a relieved sigh as his eyes closed on whatever expression they held. She didn’t speak until the others had moved outside of the curtains that had been drawn to give her a measure of privacy from the other cots.

  “What happened?”

  Scotch looked up and met her gaze, his eyes dark. The muscles in his jaw tightened. When he spoke, it was low and through his teeth. “I was hoping you could tell me. We’ve been infiltrated. A sleeping agent was introduced to the barracks wing… a time-release gas grenade hidden in the central duct. The atmospheric sensors were disabled. Someone set up an induction fan to force the fumes into every compartment in the wing.” His grip tightened on her shoulders once more until she grunted at the pain and tried to pry his hands away. He didn’t seem to notice as he went on.

  “He’s gone. Sarge is gone.”

  Kat gasped and stopped fighting against Scotch’s hold. If not for his hands on her she would have curled in a ball. Grief and rage and confusion darted around inside her like a rat trapped in a cage. Sarge couldn’t be gone, not in such a senseless way. He was the sergeant in charge of her unit, sure, but he was also a friend…no, family. Actually, after what they’d been through, closer than family, which was saying a lot. Damn, if only her thoughts would stop swimming.

  “They took him,” Scotch went on, his tone lethal and low as he bent his head close to hers. “They took him, and we have to get him back.”