Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1) (38 page)

He returned to the sofa and closed his eyes again, navigating to Katherine Asher's data. It also contained her dossier and military records, but he didn't spend much time looking at them. Instead, he moved right to the videos Millie suggested. They were in the form of a diary, her face close to the camera as she recited the date and then gave a rundown of the day's events. Seeing her there, in motion, only cemented his original opinion.

She
was
Christine Arapo.
 

How? Why? They would have to figure that out.

He watched her for a couple of hours, mesmerized by the similarities in posture, in eye movements, even in the way her nostrils flared when she talked about something that annoyed her. She was going on and on about her selection to the mission, and to the rigorous training they were doing to assure they were in top health. It was interesting from a historical perspective but hardly exciting. He paused to relieve himself, finding Lopez waiting for him when he came out.

"Captain Williams," Lopez said. "Captain Narayan asked me to bring you dinner." He held out the wrapped nutrition bar and a bottle of water. He looked tired, frazzled, his face red, his breath ragged. Mitchell could imagine he'd been working non-stop to keep the troops supplied.

"Thank you," Mitchell said, taking it from him. He peeled back the wrapper, exposing a corner of the green block.

"She wanted me to give you something else," Lopez said. "A surprise." He smiled and reached behind his back.

Mitchell was about to take a bite from the bar. He paused and smiled. Millie had sent him something? He knocked her. "Thanks for the food," he said. "And the surprise."

Lopez's hand found whatever it was, and he started pulling it forward. His eyes were darting back and forth, and he licked his lips.

Mitchell felt his body tense. He had been in fights before. He knew what to look for. He knew he was seeing it now.

Lopez's hand cleared his side, clutching the grip of an assault pistol. He started back-stepping at the same time he tried to get it aimed at Mitchell. He had tears in his eyes, his mouth curling into a feral snarl.

"What surprise?" Millie asked, even as Mitchell lunged at the Ensign, reaching for the pistol.

Lopez fired. The first three rounds slammed into Mitchell's left side, punching through his skin. The pain flared, as did the alarms from the p-rat. Synthetics were released from his implants: drugs to ease the pain, drugs to keep him up. He reached Lopez and batted the pistol aside, sending a round of bullets into the walls and furniture on his left.
 

Lopez cried out, dropping the gun and skipping to the side, avoiding a hard punch that had been aimed at his face. He recovered, throwing his own fists into Mitchell's side, first his right, and then the injured left. It hurt like hell, but Mitchell managed to stay upright and focused on his target.

"Mitch, what surprise?" Millie asked again.

"Lopez is trying to kill me," he replied. He grunted and turned, catching Lopez' blows on his forearm and returning the favor with a hard blow to the ribs that sent the Ensign stumbling backward.
 

"What? Shit."

"What is this about Lopez?" Mitchell asked, chasing after the man. Lopez scrambled around him, making a move for the dropped gun. He dove towards him, catching him in the side and dragging him to the floor.

"Screw you, asshole," he said. "Screw you." He was crying while he fought. What the hell was going on?

Lopez brought his knee up and into Mitchell's groin, and then found a knife he had hidden in his pants and jammed it into Mitchell's shoulder. Then he shoved, hard, taking advantage of the loss of strength in the arm to push Mitchell back. He scurried along the floor, heading for the pistol.

Mitchell fell back, grabbing the handle of the knife and pulling it from his arm. He switched it to his other hand and made himself get back to his feet, regaining the chase. Mitchell caught up just as Lopez bent down to pick up the gun, stabbing him in the back of the shoulder and dragging him to the ground a second time.
 

The Ensign had gotten the gun into his hand, and he fought to roll over, to use the weapon, even as Mitchell worked to keep him still. His own blood was spilling out on both of them, making the soldier slippery and leaving him short of breath. His p-rat was screaming in his ear, his vitals dropping in a hurry from loss of blood. More synthetics were released, pushing his system past the point where most men would be dead.

He punched Lopez in the kidneys once, twice, three times. The man grunted beneath him but didn't give up, squirming and twisting and finally sliding free. He kicked back on his way out, catching Mitchell in the face and breaking his nose, stopping him from following once more.

Finally, he rolled over and raised the barrel of the assault pistol, aiming it at Mitchell's face from only a few meters away.

The hatch to Millie's quarters slid open. Mitchell narrowed his eyes at the sound of the gunfire, expected to feel the burning of his face being ripped away before feeling nothing at all. Instead, he watched Lopez twitch as a dozen rounds slammed into his chest with enough force to throw his body backward into a bloody heap.

He turned his head back. Cormac was standing there, slim lines of artificial muscle and blocks of metal surrounding his human frame. A high-velocity chain-gun was mounted to the left arm of the light exoskeleton.
 

The barrel was still smoking.

"Captain Williams?" Cormac said. "Oh, hell."

"I've got good news, and bad news," Millie said when Mitchell came out of medical eight hours later. The bots had done a good job of removing the bullet fragments and patching him up, though his side was still sore and his nose would never be quite the same.

"What's the bad news?" Mitchell asked.
 

"It's been fourteen hours since we started this exercise. We're still at ground zero."

That was really bad news.
 

"Good news?"

"Lopez wasn't one of them, at least not as far as we can tell."

Mitchell paused in the corridor. He hadn't gotten much time to sort through why the soldier had nearly killed him. "Then why the hell did he jump me like that?"

"Retaliation for Anderson," she said.

"What? I didn't do anything to Anderson."

"No, I did. Don't try to make too much sense of it. Lopez was Anderson's lover. He wanted to kill you to get back at me."

"I thought Anderson wanted-"

"He did. He also never got it. He must have settled on Lopez for those cold, lonely nights."

Mitchell couldn't quite believe it. Lopez had seemed so calm and personable, the polar opposite of Anderson. "How do you know?"

"He left a recording. He wasn't expecting to survive, he just wanted to take you with him."

"Can you be sure? He may have been lying."

"No, I can't be sure. The DNA scan came back positive, so if he wasn't the original Lopez, he was a perfect copy. It's the best we can do with a corpse."

It was another chilling thought. They might not be able to tell their enemies apart from their allies. In fact, every soul on the Schism could be one of them, and he would never know.
 

"That was the last thing I thought would happen today."

Millie laughed. "Yesterday, now." She leaned into him and kissed him softly. "I'm glad you're still alive."

"I'm glad medical wasn't damaged in our run. I take it Cormac carried me down?"

"Yes. We had to leave Watson unattended for a while. Fortunately, the troops are a bit more concerned with saving humanity than putting down a child molester right now."

"I owe him a cigar or something. Do you think Hubble can get me one?"
 

"I'll see that he does. It might be a while if he doesn't have one squirreled away somewhere already."

"Thanks. I do have one question: why did you send Cormac up, instead of just using the implant kill switch to take him out for me?"

She stared at him for a moment, and he understood.
 

"There is no implant kill switch."

"No. I lied about that. Most recruits figure it out in a couple of days. You've been too busy with other things."

"Like not dying. It doesn't matter, I never intended to run."

"I know."

They started moving again, heading towards the lift.
 

"So what's the plan?" Mitchell asked. Each step sent a shiver of fire through his side. It would take a few days for the pain to fade.

"We keep going. I have to admit, every hour that passes I get more restless, more frustrated. Watson estimated that their ships are moving at least three times faster than the Schism."

"It didn't help that I was offline for eight hours."

"No. If Lopez weren't dead, I would have crushed his throat before I airlocked him." The scary, endearing part was that she wasn't joking. "For now, let's get you back to your bunk so you can rest and watch the streams. I'd bring you back to my quarters, but they're a disgusting mess. I'm going to be in Yasil's room for the foreseeable future."

"Who was Yasil?" Mitchell asked.

"Our one and only doctor. He was sent here after he was court-martialed for accepting a bribe to let a patient die. He swore he didn't do it, that he was set up, the entire year he was here. He didn't report for duty one day, and we found hm hanging in his room."

"Suicide?"

"I would wonder, except he was a doctor. Nobody on this ship wanted anything to happen to him. That was before we got the newest tech to field trial from Command." Her voice dropped, and she looked down. "We lost a lot of people because we had no one to patch them up. We don't have the resources to carry dead weight."

Mitchell swallowed the lump that ran into his throat. "You mean-"

"Yes. I had to, and it was killing me. I begged Cornelius for another doctor, for bots, for something. He came through for me on that one, but it took some arguing."

They reached the lift and took it up to B-deck. Mitchell noticed a chill in the air when they arrived.

"Two of the heating units are malfunctioning. Singh is going to bring Alice up to help her fix it once we finish reviewing the data."

"Alice?"

"One of Shank's grunts. She's an exo mechanic, so she's already good with her hands."

Ilanka was in her bunk when they arrived, her own eyes closed and twitching. She seemed to sense he was there because her eyes opened as he entered the room.

"Mitchell," she said loudly, jumping to her feet and holding out her arms before pausing. "Better not, it will hurt, no?"

"I've had worse, but it's pretty sore."

"I told you that you need more practice with sticks. Stick is like knife."

"You did, and I wish we'd had more time for it."
 

"Is good to see you back on your feet. Captain, any news?"

"Not yet," Millie said.

Ilanka frowned. "I am hopeful but worried. Exelon is not too far from Liberty, depending on which direction they go."

Mitchell put his hand on her shoulder. "We'll stop them."

"Or die trying," Ilanka said.

"Let's get back to it," Millie said. "Ilanka, with Lopez gone and Mitchell injured, would you mind playing nurse a little bit and making sure he eats and drinks?"

"It is no thing."

"Thank you," Mitchell said.

"I'm going to head over to engineering to see how Singh and Watson are coming along. They started putting together a more systemic approach to the data a few hours ago and-" She paused. Her focus shifted inward. "Cormac? Cormac, slow down. What? Damn it, Firedog, shut up!" She huffed a breath of frustrated air, and then Mitchell heard the tone of the channel opening on his p-rat.

"I said I found something," Cormac said. He was breathing heavy, excited. "Me, of all people. I've never done a good thing in my life that didn't involve my dick."

"Cormac!" Millie snapped.
 

"Sorry, Captain. I'm just excited. Nobody's paying attention to Watson, so I got bored and started watching the streams. I found something, I'm sure of it."

"Meet us in engineering," Millie said.
 

"Yes, ma'am."

 
The channel closed. Mitchell and Millie looked at each other.

"What is it?" Ilanka asked.

"Cormac thinks he found something," Mitchell said.

"Cormac?"

They hurried back to the lift and down to engineering, finding Cormac, Watson, and Singh waiting for them. They had pulled up the stream onto a holo-projector, which Singh was controlling through her ARR.

"I was just watching the diaries, you know," Cormac said. He was still excited about his find, his voice shaking and the words flowing quickly. "So I'm watching the ancient girl's selfie, and I'm thinking, wow, she's so damn hot, and I'm not really paying attention to what she's saying, you know? And that's usually a bad thing, because I need to do better paying attention when people talk, at least that's what Shank keeps telling me well that's what everyone keeps telling me and-"