Across the Stars: Book Three of Seeds of a Fallen Empire, Page 2

  “Anything on your mind you want to tell me about?” asked Kansier.

  “Nothing special sir,” Dmitriev said, perhaps believing himself, but his expression suggested otherwise.

  Dimitriev was also the kind of person who might criticize outwardly what he did not always feel in his heart of hearts; he didn’t always say what he thought, to keep his mind and heart from being criticized by others. This observation was a logical deduction on Kansier’s part; whatever principles Dimitriev lived by, the secrets of them belonged to him and none other.

  Yet despite the years Kansier had known his subordinate officer, Kansier hadn’t been able to understand Dimitriev’s odd behavior just prior to and throughout the battle, though he didn’t have much time to reflect upon it until now, with the battle over. Now he realized that Dimitriev’s face had the look of a man who had sold his soul to the devil at the moment when the devil at last came to collect.

  “I did something I shouldn’t have done,” said Dimitriev at last.

  When the infiltration team returned just minutes ago, a moment of elation had swept over them all, but Dimitriev’s relief had been short-lived. If anything, he appeared more upset than elated by the news. Kansier didn’t ask him about it, though, figuring that Dimitriev would find whatever resolution he needed on his own.

  Meanwhile, Scott listened as Kansier made an announcement to Arnaud’s returning infiltration team, instructing them to head to the Tactical Analysis Room. Scott understood that it was his duty to make an appearance as well.

  How could he face Erin? He had been so cruel to her before they parted. He felt a horrible unease in the pit of his stomach.

  It wasn’t easy to recollect himself, but there was nothing else he could do.

  * * * * *

  Heading towards the door, Kansier turned to see if his Co-Captain was coming and took notice of Dimitriev’s sudden composure.

  “All ready for debriefing, sir.” The Major offered, cool and aloof.

  Such indifference now, Kansier thought in complete surprise, yet still quietly circumspect. From his tone of voice, Dimitriev might as well have been commenting on the weather!

  But Kansier wasn’t easily fooled.

  * * * * *

  The Stargazer had passed Neptune on its way home from the Charon front line, and all defense systems had returned to normal status, but the infiltration team’s conference with Colonel Kansier, Captain of the Stargazer, and his Co-Captain, Major Dimitriev, was just getting under way in the Tactical Analysis Room. When they had all been seated around the conference table, Kansier asked for a brief account of the mission’s progress in order that he could compile a concise but comprehensive report for the meetings back on Earth.

  “One at a time, I’d like to hear some of your impressions of the alien mothership,” Kansier motioned to his right with a wave of his hand, turning the conversation over to them.

  “Beginning with the hull.” Said Kansier, off-handedly. “It would be very interesting to learn how their ship was constructed. I want to know how well-armored that thing is without their electromagnetic shields.”

  The ploy they had used to allow the infiltration unit inside was not likely to work a second time; the Earth was going to have to figure out how to deactivate the enemy’s shields permanently if they ever hoped to survive, and if the hull itself was penetrable–the Earth just might have a chance, Kansier thought.

  Although nearing fifty, Kansier appeared scarcely older than he had at thirty, though there were perhaps a few more wrinkles around his bright hazel eyes; however, with the average life expectancy well over one hundred, Kansier was often heard to say that he would think about slowing down in another fifty years–if he was fortunate enough to live that long. The alien threat to Earth had, in recent years, substantially lowered the lifespan estimate.

  “Well, sir, the outer hull is about ten meters,” Lieutenant Ricna began with detachment, though such a high estimate effectively minimized any hopes of compromising the alien hull by any means available to the Earth.

  For a while, Mara Ricna had been leading the team, until Erik took over. Ricna was a tough woman of twenty, with ropy muscle and little grace, but with such an earnest face that few ever questioned her assessments.

  “I see,” Kansier nodded, a flicker of anxiety barely perceptible behind his eyes.

  “Underneath there’s a kind of–you might call it a floating hull,” Ricna continued.

  “A ‘floating hull’?” Kansier echoed, not bothering to conceal his skepticism.

  “Well, yes.” Ricna nodded thoughtfully, with a disconcerting air of certainty regarding her appraisal. “We came into an area filled with electro-magnetically charged wires attached to another layer of loose hull plates just under the hull’s skin. My guess is that when the hull was breached, the wires brought one of the hull plates in to seal the gap, but I didn’t actually see it myself–the wires began to tighten in the channel you created for us, and we had to hurry to reach the far breach or be caught in the electromagnetic net. Otherwise our mission would have ended there.”

  “Let’s all be thankful for Arnaud’s new fighters.” Kansier nodded. “And then?”

  “Then we passed through the breach in an inner layer of plates that seals the second hull while heading for the interior–the plates there were also beginning to move as we made it through.” Ricna continued. “I suppose another few seconds and we’d have been crushed. As it was, there was no way back out the way we had come in.”

  “Just like the other one,” Kansier muttered under his breath, thinking of the grounded alien dreadnought on Earth, with its many movable, overlapping hull layers and plates under the smooth outer hull.

  “I don’t know what everyone else expected to come across, but that place was nothing like I imagined, sir,” Lieutenant Etienne Charbonneau interrupted, shaking his head.

  “I can imagine,” Dimitriev agreed, scanning Charbonneau’s face. “And I’m sure there is hardly a soul alive who wouldn’t like to know what the enemy we’re facing truly is. Can you describe what you saw?”

  Kansier nodded to Charbonneau, who, at twenty-three, was about two years older than Dimitriev.

  “I’ll try, sir,” Charbonneau paused, reflecting, glancing between Kansier and Dimitriev. “It was really antiseptic you might say, and cold. Definitely not organic, either. The walls and floors were completely seamless, dark blue or green metal alloys, and there weren’t any lights on. Most of the time the place looked deserted.”

  “Interesting,” Kansier nodded. “Ross, Mathieson, how do you think the interior compared with the ship here on Earth?” Kansier asked, turning his gimlet hazel eyes to them. As part of the Blue Stripe Sky Hawk squadron, they were the only two of Arnaud’s infiltration team to have been inside the first alien ship, grounded on Earth.

  “The coloration and architecture were completely different, sir.” Erik shrugged, seeing where Kansier was going. “But the air locks, cargo bay, and I guess even the walls were the same,” he admitted.

  “The same?” Dimitriev repeated, though it was not really a question.

  “Yes, sir. Still, there was one odd thing,” Erik said, his eyes still on Kansier. “There weren’t many doors. Almost none, actually. The few we saw weren’t like ours or like the ones in the first alien ship.”

  “How so?” Kansier wondered.

  “Well, sir, there were huge identification plates on them.” Erik explained. “We got footage of a few traveling at high speed. If you want my opinion, sir, I suggest we try to slow down the vidigital footage and isolate the writing–compare it to the samples we obtained in the ship on Earth.”

  Kansier thought for a moment. He had yet to inform anyone of Knightwood’s assessment, that the alien script proved the aliens had been on Earth long ago, in that their writing had an Egyptian falcon hieroglyph in it, and type I cuneiform in the name plates. Kansier had yet to deal with the news. If the aliens were related to the ancient civilizations of the
Earth, was the Earth an alien colony? And how were the aliens related to Earth people, if at all? No one yet knew the answer.

  “Yes, we’re having the shipboard analysts copy and examine the alien script,” Kansier said, recalling the countless sealed doors of the alien ship on Earth. Although the grounded alien ship had seemed abandoned and uninhabited after the recon teams explored it, the nature of its origin was still a burning question in everyone’s mind, and Kansier himself wasn’t entirely convinced that they were safe from that quarter, either.

  “As interesting as that may prove to be, sir,” Lieutenant Kusao interrupted, pushing his chair back casually and folding his arms across his chest, “we found something I know that the UESRC, the United Earth Scientific Research Center, will want to know about as soon as possible.”

  “Do go on, Lieutenant,” Kansier said, intrigued.

  “Well, sir, we had gone a substantial way further inside the ship to an enormous area, a few miles wide, and several miles long, where it looked like they had recreated–an entire terrestrial city.”

  Kansier listened attentively, showing no outward sign of surprise. His expression was fiercely concentrated, and they could see his eyes were working over the information. Then Major Dimitriev coughed, and Kansier looked up again, combing his hands through his hair to compose himself.

  “There were mountains further ahead, and thousands of buildings below, sir.” Kusao continued. “We got a look at some trees unlike any I’ve ever seen. Then Erik managed to find the best passage to the power center up above the city, but at first it had been hidden by the artificial sky projection.”

  “Sky projection?” Kansier repeated tonelessly.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve never seen as many stars as were projected,” Kusao finished.

  “We’ll review the recorded material,” Dimitriev added. “And maybe if the projection correlates to known stellar coordinates, we can determine roughly where these aliens came from.”

  “You didn’t make it to the energy source, though,” Kansier commented, masking his disappointment. One thing the infiltration unit had been sent to do was to incapacitate or even possibly blow the alien ship up from the inside if they could. The idea that they could blow up the alien ship from inside had been an optimistic dream.

  More than that though, Arnaud wanted information about the aliens, information that might reveal how best to defeat them, just in case some unknown ship number three or four or five ever appeared in the Sol system. The last attempted nuclear attack on the Charon aliens’ ship had only succeeded in destroying the surface of nearby Pluto; the aliens had a kind of shield barrier protecting their ship that made it impenetrable–except during an attack, when they deployed their own fighters. That had been the weakness that allowed the infiltration team inside the Charon aliens’ vessel, but Arnaud had had no idea what to expect inside. No one had. It seemed even a nuclear bomb had been somehow isolated and kept from doing more than intensive damage to a limited region of their ship.

  “No, sir, we couldn’t find any power source,” Kusao shook his head. “That is, we couldn’t get to many of the main power areas. The corridors were too tight for us to maneuver. And by the time we reached one of the higher energy areas, our infiltration had been discovered. I think maybe someone in the city heard our fighters above them. In any case, we ended up being chased away from the engine area and down a wide corridor in the open air, with buildings over twenty meters high to our right and left.” Kusao finished.

  Erik leaned forward. “We were flying down that corridor when we lost Lieutenant Donnelley, sir. We were hemmed in, but it seemed the fighters we encountered were protecting some of the creatures below us.”

  “Creatures, you say?” Kansier’s hazel eyes flickered with sudden interest. “Did you get a look at them, lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir.” Erik shook his head affirmatively, then raised his eyes to give Kansier a meaningful stare. “They appeared to be humanoid, sir. Grey-skinned, with more, well, bird-like heads than us. Hard to describe it otherwise, but they were like humanoids with more pointed heads, I guess you would say.”

  Kansier remained silent, his hands folded together under his chin, his head partially bowed, elbows resting on the table.

  Dimitriev shifted in his chair; the muscle beneath his left eye twitched. “Humanoid?”

  “Yes,” Erik said, squarely facing the Major, as though savoring Dimitriev’s reaction.

  “You saw the creature in the picture from the alien ship that landed on Earth. Any similarities?” Kansier demanded.

  “I thought so, sir.” Erik looked to the viewscreen, regarding it thoughtfully. “The only difference as far as I could tell was that these aliens had blond hair, almost white really.”

  “They weren’t the same,” Erin interjected quietly.

  “Oh?” Kansier responded, turning to her curiously; the others had also turned. It was clear that they didn’t agree with her statement. “How so?”

  “Well, sir, when you get the footage, just look at their eyes.” Erin offered. “There’re so–pardon me sir, but they’re so damned catatonic, like they are clones or some other species with less intelligence.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. They are both humanoids, with grey skin,” Ricna laughed, summarily dismissing Erin’s argument. She had heard that the girl was suppose to be a genius of some kind, but this kind of statement gave Ricna serious cause to doubt rumor. “Remember that they share some similarities visually—but I guess we can’t say for sure unless we get DNA samples.”

  “Hmmm,” Kansier said, pondering Erin’s words and remembering conversations he had shared with Knightwood and Zhdanov just after their return from the ship buried on Earth. During the mission, he had seen relays of the brief footage taken by the recon team as the Blue Stripes Sky Hawks emerged from the alien vessel, footage the visual experts were now segmenting together in proper order. Erin Mathieson’s instincts concerning the aliens had been so integral to their discoveries that he was not entirely ready to dismiss her argument yet.

  “The eyes are a mirror to the soul,” Kansier said thoughtfully a moment later.

  “What was that, sir?” Dimitriev asked.

  “It’s nothing.” Kansier shrugged. “Don’t be too hasty to dismiss any ideas here, lieutenant Ricna. We still need the DNA, anyway,” Kansier turned back to lieutenant Ross.

  “Let’s leave out conjectures about the aliens, though.” He said. “Right now I just want the facts, without any amateur conclusions. We’ll leave those up to the experts. All I want is to proceed quickly with this debriefing. I’m sure you all need some time to recuperate and compile your reports.”

  * * * * *

  After the long session with Kansier, Erin trailed behind the others as they left the conference room. She was tired. They had been on duty for too long. Only at home was there a time for play, usually when Squeaky the siamese cat came over to be pet and cuddled.

  But, as time went by, Erin was becoming more and more dissatisfied with living for the future, for tomorrow, and with ignoring the growing part within her that wished more than anything for someone to share things with, to enjoy life with today. For so long, she had thought Scott Dimitriev was certain to be the right person for that, and since he had dispelled her illusion just a short time ago, she felt hollow inside. She had begun recently to feel that very little mattered any more, except doing what had to be done, except doing her duty.

  Erin watched Erik disappear around an intersection ahead, but while the others parted ways down their own corridors, groaning about sore muscles and fatigue, trying to drown their sorrow in conversation, Erin felt too anxious for sleep.

  She knew others who would get no sleep that night. In the recent battle, Lieutenant Grayson of the Ural Base’s bagrovii team had lost her fiancé, lieutenant Gibson of the UESRC’s orange team of three years ago. He had recently returned to join the infiltration unit from two years at the Ganymede orbit near Jupiter on board the Carolian. Gray
son was a short, slightly round girl with rosy cheeks, bright lovely brown eyes, and a mass of curly brown tendrils, yet at the moment her eyes were dull and hollow from fatigue and grief. Yet Grayson refused to be comforted by anyone in the infiltration team; Erin decided it was just as well. She wasn’t sure how much comfort she would have been to anyone right now.

  Scott hadn’t spoken a word to her during the debriefing or given any sign to indicate that he was relieved to see her; his detachment disappointed her, but after her clumsy confession in the hours before the battle, it no longer surprised her. He felt nothing for her, that much was clear, and though she knew she had been mistaken about a great many things regarding his character and behavior, she had analyzed herself, and she knew she still loved him. She had meant what she said, that she understood that difficult circumstances had brought him to his present state of mind, but she could still remember what he had once been in late childhood and would always love him for that, no matter what his present opinion of her was.

  She didn’t expect anything from him, and she was not about to feel sorry for herself. She had never believed in mythical white knights on war horses or that one would ever come to save her or solve her problems for her. She had only ever wanted to rely upon herself, to be independent and yet to have something more than that: someone else to love. However, during the long wait before the infiltration team was deployed, she had found ample time to sort out her feelings.

  She found it easy to think about turning herself into a hard unfeeling stone and found she rather liked it. It was much better than the embarassment of confessions of love.

  Erin was so fully convinced of this that on the way to the debriefing, she had decided to give Dmitriev up at last. That did not mean she would give up her love for him. That would have been impossible, as she had told him it would be, even if he had demanded her to do so. She could just be herself. Yet she expected nothing and nothing from him.

  A few minutes later, she was about to activate the door panel when she remembered that she had promised Nathalie a match of chess before the unexpected transmission had arrived from Earth to deploy the fighters; it was still only mid-afternoon, though time was an artificial imposition here, where the sun’s light barely reached them.