Solfleet: The Call of Duty (16 page)

“
I’ve
known you for almost a year, Paolo,
” she was saying. “
I think I know better
than to play you for a fool.
”

“
Do you?
”
he asked. “
You wanna know what I think, Heather girl? I think...
” Quick
as lightning, he pushed her backward into the shelves behind her—she shrieked
briefly—with both hands and held her there.

Hansen leapt
to his feet, fists raised as if to attack. “Son-of-a. . .!”

“
I think
you’re trying to set me up!
”

He grabbed
two fistfuls of her blouse, eliciting another short shriek, and tore it open. Then
he grabbed hold of the mini-transmitter that was clipped to her bra and yanked
it off. He made a show of looking at it for a few seconds, then threw it aside
and glared at her. “
You lying little bitch,
” he said, all traces of his
fake accent gone. Then he leaned in close and shouted, “
You fucking cunt!
You think you can fuck me, bitch! I’ll fuck
you!
I’ll fuck you like you
ain’t never been fucked in your life!
”

He grabbed
her and practically threw her over to his sidekick, who grabbed her by the arms
and held her tight.

“Tell them
to move in
now
!” Hansen hollered to any cops who might be within
earshot.

“
Hold
her!
” the dealer commanded his muscle. Then he moved in on her and grabbed
the front of her jeans. “
Get ready to bleed, bitch!
”

“
NO!
”
she screamed...

...and for
one brief flash of a moment, Hansen found himself back on Vice-President Harkam’s
shuttle, beaten and bloodied and forced to watch while that sadistic, demonic
alien beast raped and tortured and brutally murdered Misses Harkam and their
teenage daughter.

Heather
kicked and screamed and struggled and squirmed, but she couldn’t break free of
the big man’s grasp.

“Get my
daughter out of there!” Hansen shouted angrily, wide-eyed.

The dealer
popped the fastener and broke open her zipper, then yanked her jeans down from
her hips and lifted her feet up off the floor as he stepped back and stripped
them off of her, pulling her shoes off with them. He threw them aside, then made
a show of licking his lips in anticipation. “
Ever been raped before, little
girl?
” he asked her, wearing an evil grin.

“I’ll
fucking kill you, you son-of-a-bitch,” Hansen warned the image on the screen.

“
No!”
she
pleaded as she began to cry. “
Please, Paolo, don’t!
”

“
Scream
all you want, bitch,
” he told her. “
Nobody’s gonna hear you in here.
”

He stepped forward
and grabbed hold of her panties, but before he could pull them down she launched
her foot up between his legs like a catapult and nailed her obvious target so
hard with what might very well have been testicle-crushing force that he
actually came up off the floor before he collapsed to it.

“Oh!” Hansen
exclaimed, surprised and impressed at the same time. “
That’s
my girl!”

She punched
the big man as best she could in the same place, but he barely flinched.

“
Dat was
a big mistake, little girl,
” he warned her. “
Paolo was jus’ gonna rape
you. I’m gonna split you in two.
” He spun her around, lifted her up off the
floor, looked her in the eye and added, “
By de time I finish doin’ you, you’re
gonna wish you let Paolo have you instead,
” but before he could do anything
the door burst open and the detectives swarmed into the room. “
Let the girl
go, now!
” one of them hollered, pointing his sidearm directly at the big
man’s head. He glared at the detective for a moment, but then did exactly as he
was told and raised his hands in surrender.

The suspects
offered no resistance as the detectives quickly and quite convincingly took
them into custody. Not at all surprising where the dealer was concerned,
considering the fact that he was still rolling back and forth on the deck,
clutching his crotch in both hands and moaning in what must have been excruciating
pain when they got to him.

Hansen took
a deep, deep breath and exhaled loudly while he watched Franco pick up Heather’s
jeans and shoes and hand them back to her. Thank God they’d gotten there when
they did. He’d have to be sure to thank them. Either that or he was going to
beat them all senseless for waiting so long.

He watched
while they waited for Heather to get dressed—the male agents all turned their
backs while one of the female agents watched her and then handcuffed her for
her own safety, as they still had to make it look like she was also under
arrest—then practically fell back into his chair and sighed with relief. After
his promotion ceremony, he’d wondered if he might actually make it to
retirement before what he and Liz had done six years ago came to light. Many
more anxiety-filled evenings like this, he told himself, and he probably wouldn’t
live long enough to have to worry about it.

“Commander
Rawlins?” a voice called out, firmly but subdued. “Sir?”

Rawlins
opened his weary eyes, blinked a few times to bring the world around him back
into focus, then quickly lifted his head up off his fist when he realized that
he’d fallen asleep sitting at the command station on the bridge. He stretched
his stiff neck and opened and closed his mouth to flexed his sore jaw—apparently,
he’d been resting it on his fist for quite some time—and wiped a small rivulet
of saliva from the corner of his mouth.

“Sir?” the
voice repeated.

Sergeant
Noonian. Rawlins turned and faced him. “What is it, Sergeant?” he asked.

“The RIG’s
team leaders are reporting all work complete and are requesting permission to
detach,” the communications specialist told him. “Commander Marshall confirms.”

Finished
already? “How long has it been?”

“Three hours
and forty-seven minutes, sir,” the sergeant told him, without having check.

Three hours
and forty-seven minutes? It certainly didn’t seem as if he’d been asleep that
long, but a glance at his watch confirmed it. 2024 hours. When he’d looked at
it last, it had read 1650-something, and he felt pretty sure he dozed off
shortly after that.

“Permission
granted, Sergeant,” he said, “and extend my thanks and my complements for a job
well done to the team leaders. Then get me Commodore Van den Engel.”

“Yes, sir.”

Three hours
and forty-seven minutes, he reflected as he faced front again, still flexing
his sore jaw and trying to work the kinks out of his stiff neck. Three hours
and forty-seven minutes, and he’d slept through at least three and a half hours
of it, in front of the entire bridge crew no less, right through their shift
change. How could he have let himself do such a thing? Not only was that kind
of lapse extremely unprofessional and totally unacceptable,
especially
for
a commanding officer, it was also embarrassing. How could he ever enforce
discipline aboard ship again after...

That’s
right, he suddenly realized. Shift change had come and gone almost half an hour
ago. So what was Noonian still doing on duty? Twelve straight hours was long
enough, even for a cyberclone. He might have been...enhanced, but in the end he
was still a human being.

As he turned
to ask Noonian why he was still on duty, he noticed that the sergeant wasn’t
the only one who had stayed. The entire bridge crew had remained, and had
apparently notified their relief not to show up, since no one from the night shift
was present.

“I have the
commodore for you, Commander,” Noonian reported.

“Put him up
on the main screen.”

An image of Commodore
Van den Engel sitting behind his large executive desk replaced that of the enormous
jump ring ahead of them. One look at him betrayed the fact that he was clearly a
man of substantially advanced years. As a matter of fact, Rawlins recalled upon
seeing him that scuttlebutt among command rank officers throughout the fleet said
he’d long since passed the age of mandatory retirement, but that he had some
serious dirt on someone very high up in the pecking order that pretty much guaranteed
he could stay on active duty for as long as he might want to.

All that
aside, the commodore nonetheless commanded great respect and admiration. He’d been
Solfleet’s Rosha’Kana Sector Commander for almost ten years, and in all that
time he’d never had so much as a single personal complaint filed against him.
In fact, it was well known both within the sector and without that his
subordinates absolutely adored him. With his handsomely chiseled features and
his full head of silver-gray hair, they tended to think of him as a sort of
surrogate grandfather. He had a gentle disposition, but could be firm when he
had to be, and he always,
always
, treated his people fairly.

And rumor
had it that he was as physically fit as any man thirty years his junior.

“
What can
I do for you, Commander?
” he asked.

“I just
wanted to thank you for your help, Commodore. Your teams did an outstanding
job, and in record time, I believe. I only hope...”

“Commander!”
Irons shouted, interrupting. “Sensors are picking up three large vessels
approaching from directly astern!”

An all too
familiar sinking feeling grew in the pit of Rawlins’ stomach as he stared at
the tactical officer and waited silently, anxiously, for her to complete her
report.

After some
of the longest seconds in his life, she finally met his gaze and said, “I’m not
reading any Solfleet or Coalition transponder signals, sir.”

Veshtonn! It
had to be. “Can you identify them at all, Lieutenant?” he asked anyway.

“Sorry, sir,”
she answered, shaking her head. “Not this close to the jump ring with our
scanners in their present condition.”

On the
viewscreen, Commodore Van den Engel muted his audio and spoke to someone off
camera. Then, a few seconds later, he reactivated his sound and relayed an
anticipated but still very unwelcome bit of news to Rawlins. “
They’re
Veshtonn heavy destroyers, Commander,
” he said evenly, “
and they’re on a
direct course to this station.
”

“Damn it!”
Rawlins exclaimed, banging a fist down on the arm of the chair and glaring down
at LaRocca briefly. He and the captain both had told that kid to make sure they
didn’t lead the enemy to the jumpstation! No matter what! If they ended up
losing this vital facility because he screwed up...

He’d have to
cross that bridge if and when he came to it. They had a much more pressing
issue to deal with at the moment. “I don’t know how much help we’ll be in a
fight at this point, Commodore,” Rawlins reiterated, “but we’ll do what we can.
What are your orders?”

“
Get your
ship to safety, Commander,
” Van den Engel directed, his tone leaving no
room for discussion. “
We’re energizing the ring now.
” He nodded to
another someone off camera.

“What about
you and your personnel, Commodore?” Rawlins asked. “Granted, we’re in bad
shape, but we still have the capacity to take on at least some of your person...”

“
Negative,
Commander. The enemy’s closing too fast. There’s no time. Get your ship out of
this system. We can take care of ourselves.
”

Take care of
themselves? How the hell were they going to take care of themselves with more
than half of their defense fleet already engaged in battle on the other side of
the system? The station’s defense grid might have been effective as a
supplement to that fleet, but it hadn’t been designed to stand alone as their
only
means of defense. Rawlins drew a breath to protest, but the commodore
stopped him with a look.

“
That’s
an order, Commander,
” he said, settling the issue.

“Order
acknowledged, Commodore,” Rawlins acknowledged after a second, still hesitant
to leave the commodore and his people behind. “Maintaining our present course
and speed.” An order was an order, and it was very unwise for a starship
command officer to disobey his sector commander’s orders if he wanted his
career to continue unscathed, especially when that sector commander
specifically pointed out that his instructions were in fact an order. And
most
especially when it was this
particular
sector commander. Still, they
were talking about their very lives.

“
Good.
And listen, Commander. Be sure to pass my best wishes and prayers for a speedy
recovery on to Captain Bhatnagar when you have a chance.
”

“Will do,
sir, and good luck.
Victory
out.”

The ring
reappeared in the center of the screen and began growing visibly larger by the
second as they approached it, faster and faster. An immense, sixteen-segment
double-rimmed halo of structurally reinforced metallic silver-gray plastisteel
and titanium, large enough for even the most enormous of Coalition vessels to
pass through cleanly, with an almost imperceptible glass-smooth sheet of
unbroken, translucent crystal coating its entire inner circumference—the vortex
generator lens.

As they drew
closer, that crystal appeared to ripple and then began to glow with a dim burgundy
sheen. Burgundy instead of the normal blue-green, Rawlins noted. The emergency
jump nacelles, being less efficiently shielded than their permanent ones had
been, were already beginning to interact with the emerging vortex, despite not
having been energized yet.

The stars
that had been visible through the ring suddenly faded to darkness as if someone
had simply turned them off, and in the center of the depthless black emptiness
that remained, a pulsating point of crimson sparked to life. That point quickly
expanded in all directions until it reached the circumference and formed what
looked like a pool of shimmering crimson oil that filled the entire ring.