One Good Soldier

July 1, 2394 AD

Sol System, Oort Cloud

Friday, 2:17 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

DeathRay finally had a few minutes to himself to relax. Fish had asked him if he wanted to hit the galley and get a drink or two, but it had been a fairly long day already. He pulled his boots off and slid out of his flight suit down to his underwear and crashed onto his rack.

"Long day," he said audibly. When he was alone he liked to talk to Candis through the speakers in his cabin. Jack had been in the Navy for more than twenty years and didn't see family much. In fact, he only kept in touch with his grandfather, who lived in Texas. Otherwise, he was pretty much alone other than his military family. Candis was as close to a wife as he had. If a small sunflower-seed–sized plastic-coated artificial-intelligence computer installed in his brain counted. He closed his eyes and did a few relaxation breaths. "We should go on a vacation sometime. Maybe skiing, or to a beach somewhere."

"You got that right, Jack. You've been saying we were gonna do that for about five years now." His AIC changed the subject. " How about that First Daughter?"

"Not bad. Sure not what I'd have expected had I not met her father and mother on a few different occasions. That apple sure didn't fall far from the tree."

"I think she was kind of, well, interested in you, Captain."

"What? You're out of your mind, Candis."

"I'm not so sure, sir. She eyed you pretty closely and hung on every word you said." Candis had a slight hint of goading in her voice.

"She was in love with the FM-12s, Candis. Not me."

"Whatever you say, Jack."

Jack kept his eyes closed and let his mind wander. He'd been controlling his thoughts all day; driving the quantum mechanics of the DTM links of fighting mecha took a heavy toll on the mental faculties. Most good pilots learned to relax after flying to let their physical body recuperate while letting the mind rest as well.

"No, she sure didn't. I thought she was going to get you for a second there."

"Not a chance. Just letting her feel that false sense of security before I squashed her." Jack laughed with a purposeful tone of arrogance. The tone was only for show, as he had lost all sense of arrogance on the battlefield decades earlier. His true persona was the cool and level-headed confidence of a seasoned veteran. He just considered himself good at his job.

As Jack's mind flowed from thought to thought in random order, he came to the memory of when he had met President Moore for the first time. It was just after the Battle of the Oort, when he and Fish had teleported back to Earthspace, fighting the Seppy ship hell-bent on doing a kamikaze header into Luna City. The president had invited the two pilots to the White House.

At that time Jack hadn't had a chance to read through, much less to understand, the data the CIA agent he knew only as Nancy Penzington had transmitted to his AIC, but she had warned him not to trust anybody. Well, Jack had considered that she couldn't have meant the president himself. So while he and Fish were shaking hands and passing pleasantries with the man, he had his AIC send the data to the president's AIC, along with an explanatory message. Moore never even changed his facial expression during the exchange. He'd make one hell of poker player was what Jack thought after that meeting.

He had also met the entire First Family at several other political events as he had become a poster boy for the president to parade in front of the press at major public addresses. Moore had apologized to DeathRay about doing so, but Jack just assured the president that it was an honor for any Naval aviator. Jack and Moore never did speak of the data he had transferred, but Candis assured him that his AIC had gotten it.

The data itself was nothing short of incredible. Apparently the U.S. had developed a prototype design for the quantum-membrane teleportation technology decades earlier in a top-secret program. There were even drawings of the big QMT facility design, personnel QMT pads, and mention of projecting a QMT forward from a facility to a place where there wasn't one. These thirty-year-old documents even had the math predicting that a device could be built that would allow projecting small masses, like people, back and forth between the stars without a large QMT pad on either end. Neither Jack nor Candis was a quantum physicist, but they understood enough of the math to make some conclusions from the data. It looked to them like a wristwatch-sized device could collect enough vacuum energy to perform one human teleport as far as twenty or thirty light-years.

Somehow all of the QMT information had been transferred to the Separatists but managed to be lost from history as far as the U.S. military was concerned. The entire concept of QMT seemed to have been erased from any databases—only to reemerge after President Moore had taken office. Moore had managed to dig it up somewhere and started putting it to use. Jack was curious what had happened to the scientists that had developed these concepts. Had they just vanished? Had they been murdered or kidnapped by the Seppies?

Finally, Moore got two prototypes constructed on the USS John Tyler and the USS Abraham Lincoln. Then, at about the same time the technology was about to go on line, it was leaked to the press. Moore originally had gotten the blame, Jack recalled, but it turned out to be some sort of coincidence that the Seppies and the U.S. had developed the tech simultaneously and perhaps independent of each other. And it was all part of some FBI sting operation to catch some Seppy spies that were congressional staffers. Yeah, that was bullshit if Jack had ever heard it. Clearly the Seppies had managed to develop the Stingers, Gnats, and Orcus mecha independently, and they just accidentally looked like their U.S. military counterparts, too. And if you believed that one, Jack could pull on his left ass cheek and play the Navy fight song out his sphincter. Something stunk somewhere—something other than Jack's sphincter.

Jack had been thinking on that data for more than six years, and he wasn't anywhere closer to figuring out exactly what it meant than he had been the day he had it transmitted to him. He had decided that there were serious moles within the U.S. government infrastructure that must be sympathetic to the Separatists. In order for them to get such highly classified information, they had to be pretty well-connected. Perhaps there were congressmen and women or senators on the intelligence or defense committees that were Separatists at heart. Jack wasn't sure. And spinning it over and over in his mind only got him all worked up.

He focused his mind on the blackness of space. Then he began to slowly drift off to sleep.

"General quarters! General quarters. All hands, all hands, report to duty stations immediately. Prepare for battlestations call," the ship's AIC said over the 1-MC intercom and through QM wireless to all AICs aboard the Sienna Madira.

"What the hell?" DeathRay jerked himself up via the built-in reflex to the general quarters call. "How long was I asleep, Candis?" He stretched and rubbed at his eyes.

"About thirteen minutes, Captain. I guess there is no rest for the wicked."

"Goddamned right," Jack muttered as he shook himself to and then threw on his UCUs and put a toothbrushing cube in his mouth. "Got any idea what this is about?"

"No, Jack. But the admiral has ordered all the senior officers to the briefing room."

"That doesn't sound good. Start scanning the news feeds for me." He spat out the cube into the sink and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Jack slipped his boots on and pressed the seal tab. They suctioned in place, and the color scheme of his uniform set itself to Navy blue. He slapped on his name tag, insignia, and wings, and stuck the black beret typically worn by mecha jocks in his back pocket. Then he was out the hatch in a mad rush toward the main briefing area.

Ross 128 just seceded from the Union, Jack! Candis thought to him.

"Down ladder! Make a hole, seamen." Jack turned the corner of the corridor into the mostly full stairwell. The enlisted men in his way hugged the bulkhead or flattened their backs to it.

Oh shit! Dee! he thought. They'll shut the QMT gate down first thing. And you know they'll try to nab her.

She is with a bodyguard and a seasoned marine, the AIC said.

Yeah, against an entire damned planet. Those ain't good odds for Dee. DeathRay didn't like this situation at all. He really liked the First Daughter and hated to see her get caught up in the middle of bad shit, again. That kid just has some bad luck, doesn't she?

It's not her fault. And this all seems timed too coincidentally to me, Candis added.

Good point. Dee just happens to arrive at Ross 128 just moments before they secede from the Union and shut down the teleporter. Yeah, bullshit. This was another one of those coincidences where the Separatists were concerned. Who knew what that crazy bitch, Elle Ahmi, had up her sleeve. This could be the start of a full-scale invasion. He hoped like hell that Ahmi didn't get her hands on Dee.

"Hold the elevator!" he shouted as he rounded the corner to the main tower elevator. It was filling fast, and there were several officers piling in.

"Captain Boland, you barely made this one." Colonel Warboys held the door for him. Warboys never smiled as far as Jack could tell. The Army man was all business. Even when he cracked a joke, it was sometimes hard to tell if he was laughing or grimacing.

"Thanks, Colonel." Jack caught his breath. "Any idea what's up?"

"Did you hear about Ross 128?" Warboys asked.

"Yeah, and the First Daughter just passed through the QMT."

"Sounds too coincidental if you ask me." Warboys reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of stimgum. "Want a slice?"

"Hey, do I look that bad?" DeathRay grinned and took the gum. Almost as soon as the stick hit his tongue he felt a wave of energy rush through his body, and he was as wide awake as he'd ever been in his life.

"It's been a long day already. And I suspect it is about to get a hell of a lot longer." Warboys looked blank for second. His AIC was telling him something.

"Shit, gonna need something stronger than gum, then, Colonel."

"Me, too, Jack. Me, too."

A matter of minutes later, very short minutes, and the main briefing room one deck below the CDC filled in and the doors were pulled shut. More than a thousand officers and SNCOs filled the room. The more senior ones were seated forward of the room and the lower ranks filed backward. There were hundreds standing against the rear and side bulkheads of the auditorium. Jack and Warboys sat next to each other in the front row. General Chekov marched across the stage and stood at attention.

"Rear Admiral Wallace Jefferson!" the XO grunted. Everybody stood to attention. The admiral walked across the stage and nodded to the XO, who then turned and marched off the stage and stood by a seat in the front row of the auditorium.

"At ease. Be seated," RADM Wallace said calmly. "At fourteen-seventeen Earth eastern standard time, the ambassador from the Ross 128 colony known as Arcadia announced from the White House that the colony was seceding from the United States of America and that they were aligned with the Tau Ceti separatists and their terrorist leader, Elle Ahmi. The ambassador made his statements and then subsequently vanished into thin air in the same manner as is indicative of a top-secret technology to teleport a single individual from one star system to the other without a QMT pad known by mathematicians as a 'snap-back algorithm.' We have no idea where he teleported to at that point. And now we have been ordered to muster rapidly and QMT into the Ross 128 system and take the government and National Guard units by force. The Outer Fleet is mustering here at the Oort Facility as rapidly as possible and will hold here under the direction of Rear Admiral Walker aboard the USS Anthony Blair." The admiral paused briefly to get his breath and gather his thoughts then continued with the briefing.

"The colonists on the other side of the QMT bridge have shut down communications with us. We will have to do a QMT forward projection from our facility with no way of returning home unless we retake the QMT facility there or take the long eighteen-month hyperspace jaunt. Either way, we are going, and we are going to take that system. You senior officers are having all the pertinent mission goals, data, and battle strategies available at this time transmitted to your AICs. You have thirty minutes to put your teams together and prepare your battle plans and tactics, because we QMT for Ross 128 at fifteen hundred hours precisely and will come out on the other side shooting. We are the tip of the spear of this attack. Thirty minutes behind us will be the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the USS John Tyler. The rest of the Outer Fleet will hold here unless we need them. We will have a team of couriers on board each ship equipped with top-secret snap-back transmitters that will enable them to bounce back and forth between systems to give status reports until we take the QMT facility and turn the long-range QMT communication systems back on.

"Now, there is someone else who would like to speak with you." RADM Jefferson turned to the big screen behind him and stood at attention. "Mr. President?"

The big screen blinked on, and a three-dimensional projection of President Alexander Moore and the First Lady standing in front of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office jumped out on the stage.

"Thank you, Admiral Jefferson. Ladies and gentlemen." Moore nodded at the senior crew of the flagship of the U.S. Navy and appeared to be looking at each and every one of them. "What we are asking you to do today is to go to war. We cannot let another colony effectively secede from our great nation. You, the brave men and women of the U.S. military's ultimate might, the USS Sienna Madira, must go forth and take back that system. If we fail today, I fear that we will fall into a horrible war, one that will be far worse than all the previous civil wars combined. We must put a stop to this separatism today! I know that I am asking you to leap into the unknown without a clear path home. But we are faced with a task that must be accomplished, or our way of life as we know it may fade into history. We have to take the fight to these Separatists before they bring it home to the Sol System. Good luck, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America." The president and his wife stood motionless and looking solemnly at the officers. The admiral and the XO turned and waited for the auditorium to come to attention, and then over a thousand men and women saluted. President Moore stood stern and returned the salute. Then the holo projection blinked out.

"All right! You heard the president. Let's get to work." The XO turned and shouted to the crowed. "DeathRay?"

"Sir!" Jack shouted from down front and to the right of the stage.

"Put Deuce on CAG duties right now, and you stay put."

"Yes, sir." Jack stayed put. Candis, transmit the orders to Deuce to get the battle plan set up and the pilots ready to go.

Yes, sir.

Jack, the XO, and the admiral waited for the crowd to clear the auditorium, which took about five minutes, five precious minutes. And DeathRay had no idea what this was going to be about. Finally, the auditorium was clear and the hatches automatically shut and locked themselves. The three of them stood on the side of the stage.

"Stand at attention and face the screen, Jack," the admiral said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

"Aye, sir." Jack turned and faced the screen at attention. Then a voice came through the speakers.

"Are we clear, Wally?" It was President Moore's voice.

"Yes, Mr. President," the admiral replied. Then the screen blinked back on, and the three-dimensional projection popped out, and the Moores were standing right in front of the supercarrier officers.

"Good. Captain Boland, good to see you," the First Lady said. "Deanna sent me a message about how wonderful a host you were to her. Thank you very much for that."

"Any time, ma'am. And it's good to see you too, ma'am." Jack wasn't sure how to respond.

"Okay, this is the deal, Captain," President Moore said. "We've got a problem that only DeathRay can handle. Can we depend on you, Captain?"

"Yes, sir. Anything I can do for you, Mr. President."

"Well, Jack, you see . . ." Moore paused as if he had to gather himself. Jack had never seen him like that. "They've got our daughter. The goddamned Separatist bastards kidnapped Dee, and we don't know what they plan to do with her or where they've taken her. As you know, she teleported into Ross 128 for a cadet mecha competition right after she left you. Well, she teleported there just moments before those bastards seceded and shut down the QMT pad on their side. But just before they shut down the long-range comms, the Secret Service received a transmission from her bodyguard's AIC that he and the other student with Dee had been killed and Dee was being kidnapped by Colonel Walt 'Rat' Fink. You met him, I gather?"

"Yes, sir. Sorry to hear this, sir. Whatever I can do, you can count on me, Mr. President."

"That is just what I wanted to hear, Captain Boland. Take whomever you want, whatever you want, and go get my daughter back safely! You hear me, Captain? You do whatever it takes!" Moore's face was furiously red, and the veins on his forehead were throbbing. The man looked ready to explode. And Jack didn't blame him at all.

"Yes, sir. I'll get her back, sir."

"Jack," the First Lady interrupted. Tears formed in her eyes. "She may act all tough, but she is still just a kid. Don't let her do something stupid. And bring her home, please."

"Yes, ma'am. I understand, ma'am."

"And DeathRay," Moore added. "The fewer people that know what's going on, the better chance we'll have. We sure don't want the press in on this."

"Of course, Mr. President."

"Godspeed, Jack. Good luck."

Holy shit!