The Phoenix Crisis (6 page)

Calvin returned the salute and stepped
inside.

“
Captain.”

“
At ease, Vargas,” said
Calvin.

“
Is there something I can do
for you, sir?”

“
I have some final
instructions for you before you go aboard the Arcane
Storm.”

Vargas picked up his dropped bag and then
gave Calvin his full attention.

“
As you know, you are to
take command of the Arcane Storm. Rez’nac and the other Polarians
are going with you. I can’t speak for the others, but Rez’nac is
someone you can depend on. Use him as needed to maintain
order.”

“
Understood.”

“
Also the crew that is going
with you, you can depend on them. But as for Tristan, I want you to
be wary of him. He has proven useful but also resourceful. Consider
him to be Raidan and the Organization’s eyes and ears. Be careful
what you say around him, and how you conduct yourself around him,
and don’t give him too many liberties.”

“
Aye, sir,” said Vargas.
There was a slight look of petrification in his face and Calvin was
sure that the man, along with so many others of the crew, was
actually quite intimidated by Tristan. Fortunately Calvin didn’t
expect any trouble from Tristan, but he wanted to give Vargas fair
warning just in case.

“
You are to maintain regular
contact with the Nighthawk and your primary mission is to
coordinate with Raidan and the Organization for the Nighthawk to
receive new supplies and repairs. Do not surrender control of the
Arcane Storm to Raidan until arrangements have been made for the
Nighthawk to receive the resources it needs. You and the others
will bring the new supplies, along with yourselves, on the Arcane
Storm to rendezvous with the Nighthawk. After that Raidan may take
possession of the ship, not before. Make sure that message is clear
to him.”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
And one more thing,” Calvin
said. He reached into his pocket and handed Vargas a handwritten
note. Vargas picked it up and read it.

“
I’m sorry that I’m not here
to meet with you in person as we agreed. You must trust me, though,
that I have very good reasons. The matter I’m attending to is
urgent. Also I’ve discovered Xinocodone if administered to a
replicant will kill him. Calvin.”

“
See that he gets that
message,” said Calvin.

“
Sir, if I may, what
is
the urgent matter you
are taking the Nighthawk to address?”

“
Need to know basis,” said
Calvin.

“
I understand.”

With that Vargas saluted and Calvin left. He
walked to the elevator and took it to the next deck. He followed
the corridor. It seemed eerily quiet and empty with so few crew
left aboard the ship, he didn’t run into a single person all the
way to Sarah quarters. He rang the chime.

No answer came.

He rang the chime again.

No answer.

Feeling suddenly worried, he banged on the
door and shouted, “Sarah it’s Calvin. Open the door please.”

If she could hear him through the door, she
ignored him. And the door did not budge.

“
Sarah, I’m coming
in.”

He tried to open it. It was locked.

Calvin opened a panel and input a command
override. The door unlocked with a hiss and slid open. The quarters
were dark. He stepped inside. “Lights full,” he said and they
snapped on.

Sarah lay on the bed. She was curled up and
facing away from him. She didn’t seem to be moving. Calvin felt a
jolt of fear and ran to her. He grabbed her arm with one hand and
went to feel her vitals with his other.

“
Calvin,” Sarah said,
turning to face him. Her eyes were red, though she wasn’t crying,
and she seemed pale.

“
Sarah, are you all right?”
he asked.

“
I… I don’t
know.”

Calvin couldn’t believe the sight of her.
Sarah was the one who was always so cool under any kind of
pressure. Seeing her like this… it was like she was a different
person. And Calvin didn’t like it. He had half a mind to tell her
to snap out of it, but he knew that wouldn’t do any good. So
instead he helped her to a sitting position.

“
This can’t just be about
Shen,” said Calvin, wondering if maybe Shen’s demise was more a
last straw than an absolute cause for Sarah’s emotional
crisis.

She shook her head. “It’s my fault,” she
whispered.

“
What’s your
fault?”

“
He… he only went on the
mission because of me. Because I rejected him.” She looked up at
Calvin with her bloodshot eyes. “I
rejected
him.”

“
What do you mean you
rejected him?”

“
He made me this nice dinner
and he asked me out and… I turned him down. Just like that. I’m
afraid he wanted to die…”

“
No, no, that’s not fair,”
said Calvin. Though in truth he was surprised to learn this. He’d
always seen Shen and Sarah as having more of a brother-sister
dynamic and somehow he’d glossed over that Shen might have romantic
intentions toward Sarah—albeit very patient ones. “You can’t hold
yourself responsible for any of this. Shen volunteered for the
mission and saved everyone’s life who made it back. When we were
trying to escape the surface, the gunship we were on lost power.
Shen brought it back. He saved
all of
us
.” He gave Sarah the most tender and
sincere look he could.

She seemed to soften a little at this news.
But the regret and anguish was still clearly in her eyes.

“
And Shen isn’t a goner
yet,” said Calvin, searching himself for anything to say to help
coax Sarah out of her sorrow. “Rain is sure she can save him.”
Calvin couldn’t believe he was saying it. He knew Shen was a goner,
there was no use pretending otherwise. It made him feel cheap and
dishonest to resort to such platitudes to try and cheer Sarah. But
they seemed to help a little.

“
I’m sorry,” said Sarah. She
sniffled and started brushing out some of the creases in her
wrinkled clothing. “I don’t know what got into me—”

She wasn’t better, and she wasn’t happy, but
she seemed to have sobered up emotionally. Though the faint scent
of alcohol was still on her breath.

“
Come on,” Calvin said,
reaching out a hand to lift her to her feet. She accepted it. And
he gave her a hug. She pulled him in tight and held him for several
seconds longer than expected but he didn’t pull away. If she needed
this kind of support it was the least he could do.

Eventually Sarah did break away from him.
“Thank you,” she said with a half-broken smile.

“
Sarah, I want you to go
aboard the Arcane Storm with the others. It’s a short mission but I
think it would be good for you. And there’s no one I trust more
than you to bring everybody back safely to me.”

She nodded. “All right,” she whispered.
Perhaps agreeing that a change of environment would do her
good.

Calvin was about to speak again when General
Quarters sounded throughout the ship. He felt a jolt of adrenaline
shoot through him and he became very alert.

“
What’s going on?” asked
Sarah, giving him a look of concern.

“
I don’t know,” said Calvin.
“But I’m going to find out.”

He left Sarah’s quarters and sprinted for
the elevator.      

***

Calvin stood over the body. The young
defense officer’s corpse had been pulled from the brig and was now
on the ground just outside of it. Being attended to by a medic and
an analyst from the lab. Pellew stood nearby, acting as
security.

“
Time of death was probably
less than an hour ago,” the medic said. She stood up and looked at
Calvin. “Appears to have been carbon monoxide
poisoning.”

Calvin folded his arms and frowned. The ship
had gone to condition one the moment the prisoner had been found
dead by his attending guard. Calvin had sprinted to the scene as
soon as he’d been made aware of the situation. Now here he was
helpless before the scene of another mysterious death on his
ship.

“
Is there any danger to us
being here?” asked Calvin.

“
No, the carbon monoxide has
since been contained,” said the analyst. “The cause of the leak
seems to be damage to the air system and furnace associated with
the containment section of the brig. Fortunately the area where
prisoners are kept, when contained by force field, has an
independent air system. So no one else was breathing it in, not
even the attendant guard.”

Lucky indeed. Perhaps a
bit
too
lucky. “Why
didn’t the carbon monoxide alarm go off?” asked Calvin, skeptical
that this failure had been a freak accident.

“
There was a power overload
that fried the sensor, probably the same event that damaged the air
system. “The systems were put under a lot of pressure during the
action in Remus and there have been sporadic overloads and systems
failures throughout the ship ever since. As far as I can tell this
one is no different.”

Calvin nodded. He still wasn’t convinced but
he supposed the explanation was plausible. Immediately he ran
through a list of people on the ship who might want Patrick dead
and who could have pulled off the engineering feat required—if it
was possible to do—to simulate a natural systems failure. Shen
could do it, but he was obviously not in a position to. And any of
the engineering staff might be able to. It wasn’t any of the
Polarians or Tristan, unless they could have done the sabotage
before the Arcane Storm departed—Calvin doubted it, and Calvin
supposed it could have been Alex. He wasn’t sure what sort of
training an ex-Advent operative had but he couldn’t rule out that
this was the sort of thing one might engineer, except that Alex had
no motive to kill Patrick. No one did. Patrick hadn’t been
particularly well-liked, especially when he’d single-handedly
mutinied against Summers and nearly lost them the ship when he
refused to operate the Nighthawk’s stealth system as the Desert
Eagle’s flotilla had born down on them. But, from what Calvin could
tell, no one had a personal grudge against him. Or truly benefitted
from his death.

“
What do you think?” Calvin
turned to Pellew.

The special forces captain gave Calvin an
indifferent look. “I think it’s a case of bad luck, nothing more.
Good thing Patrick was in the brig when the systems failed and not
someone we actually needed alive.”

Calvin wasn’t surprised by Pellew’s callous
regard for life. He’d seen firsthand what the soldier was capable
of when convenience demanded it. Calvin doubted he would ever
forgive Pellew for flushing a civilian crew out into space—whose
only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure
Pellew had situation reasons for why he’d done what he had, and
there was a kind of morbid logic to it, but it was still cruel,
wrong, and not the sort of thing Calvin was capable of. Or so he
hoped.

“
Why did it take your
soldier so long to discover something was wrong?” asked
Calvin.

Pellew shrugged. “She said it wasn’t until
Patrick refused to awaken for food and water rations that she got
suspicious that something was wrong. Carbon monoxide is odorless
and colorless and someone breathing it in doesn’t show signs of
distress. “

Calvin knew that was true. “Did the soldier
on duty report any visitors?”

“
No, she says she was on
watch the entire time and Patrick had no visitors.”

Calvin nodded. He doubted the soldier
herself had the technical expertise to sabotage the system so
smoothly into killing Patrick, and he had no reason to distrust the
soldier’s word. After all, she had elected to remain a fugitive on
the Nighthawk at her own expense, and if she’d allowed someone else
to enter the deck and tamper with the systems she had no incentive
to protect him or her.

“
When Cassidy gets the
chance I’m going to have her look over the systems thoroughly,”
said Calvin. “On the off-chance that you missed something,” Calvin
looked at the analyst, who nodded. Calvin next turned to Pellew. “I
want you to take Patrick’s body to the infirmary. I’ll have Rain do
an autopsy and see if there is anything else about this death that
stands out—anything suspicious. I’m leaving you to clean this
up.”

“
Understood,” said
Pellew.

With that Calvin left and headed for his
office. Once he was there he took a seat and used the intercom to
summon Cassidy.

“
You wanted to see me, sir?”
she asked once she was inside and the door had closed behind
her.

“
Yes,” said Calvin. He
didn’t know Cassidy particularly well, and he hadn’t forgotten that
during his contest with Summers for control of the ship on the way
to Abia, what seemed like decades ago, Cassidy had taken Summers’
side over his. But since then Calvin had learned to trust Summers
so he supposed he should trust Cassidy as well, and—now that Shen’s
talents and expertise weren’t available to him—Cassidy was the
best-trained operations officer on the ship. “Have you completed
your sweep of deck one?”

“
Yes, sir,” she replied.
“And I did find a listening device.”

Calvin leaned forward.
“
And?
”

“
It had been placed inside
the vent just behind you. I sent it to the lab for
analysis.”