Flashpoint (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy) Page 4

  In reality, Hezekiah’s workload was far from Taylor’s top concern. Submitting reports and providing information to the IES was one thing, but getting her hands dirty in Meltian politics was another thing entirely. Last time she had meddled in galactic politics, she had helped start a war that killed a lot of good people—including, apparently, Hezekiah’s mother—and indirectly gave rise to the Kaleknarian Empire, a xenophobic theocracy ten times more oppressive than the old GG ever was. Hardly an experience that left one wanting to come back for more. No, the galaxy could sort out its own issues just fine while she stayed on Cryzdeklith, saving lives without having to worry about whether her actions would tip the fragile galactic order into bloody conflict.

  “Ms. Ghatzi, you can bring whomever you want with you—crew, friends, family—we have room. If you do bring your crew, JP’ll see to it that a team of our best people is left behind to protect Cryzdeklith in your absence. The galaxy needs you on Meltia, not Cryzdeklith.”

  “If the galaxy needs me to do anything, it is to remove myself from the picture.” Taylor searched Captain Brook’s demeanor for any sign of irresolution, any nagging doubts about asking Taylor to trade her blissful isolation away, but she found none. Taylor knew that Brook did not have the authority to compel her to leave Cryzdeklith without approval from MRES Headquarters—the IES was considered co-equal with solar-system-level MRES branches—but a rebellious part of her wished that she did. Taylor sincerely wanted to find out exactly who had the nerve to launch such an attack on Royal City, but conscientiously could not allow herself to be sucked back into the corrupting machine of galactic politics. To do so would be a final betrayal of those whom she got killed in the Order War.

  Captain Brook, meanwhile, appeared to be completely taken aback by Taylor’s reluctance. “Ms. Ghatzi, you may have saved a few dozen lives in the Anniversary Attacks, but that’ll mean just about nothing if we cannot stop the next attack, and for that we need you. You are our best—actually our only—witness if we need to convince people to act on this, and if you remember something else, or something that you didn’t think to tell us becomes important, we need you on hand. If it comes down to it, you have more experience in covert operations than anyone in the IES, and you are arguably the foremost authority on fighting these people in the galaxy. Plus you’re a celebrity—you’ll lend credibility to our efforts.”

  “Well,” Taylor began. It was tempting, but hadn’t it been tempting the first time around? Back on Sambourloin, when the foundations of the Order War were being laid, it had seemed like all they needed to do was show a little backbone and all the problems with the GG would go away.

  Brook pressed forward at the first sign of Taylor’s uncertainty. “Even if the only planet in the galaxy you cared about were Cryzdeklith, you should still do this—they could be targets of the next attack, too.”

  Taylor took a step back. “I need to talk to my crew.”

  “But of course.” Brook swept her arms out congenially, though it was clear from her countenance that she would have been much happier if Taylor made her decision on the spot. “JP and I will be at the Spirit’s docking point when you’re ready to go.”

  Without a pause, Brook moved to JP’s side, pointing something out on her own personal screen. Taylor would not have been surprised if they were already planning their interrogation of Charles Griffin.

  Taylor slipped her Newface on, let herself out of the conference room, made her way back to her control boat, and headed home.

  Despite the Operation-Galactic-Resolve-related cacophony, it was easier to think without an overzealous IES captain bearing down on her. Then again, perhaps ‘overzealous’ was too harsh of a judgment. Taylor admired Brook’s decisiveness, especially considering the plodding obtuseness of most of the Meltian Republic’s bureaucracy, but her offer raised every warning Taylor had internalized since her decision to return to Cryzdeklith. She had wanted a place where she could stay off the galactic political radar, a job where she could use her skills for the benefit of all, maybe even repair some small part of the wounds the Order War had dealt to the galaxy, and she had found all that. Yet now she was considering jumping back into the political fray.

  Still, it had not been her who launched the Anniversary Attacks—the Alliance had brought violence and hatred to her doorstep, and if she was at all serious about preserving her little bubble of paradise, she had to be willing to take the fight to them. How easy would it be for them or some other group to launch another similar-scale attack if Brook’s IES responded weakly to the first one? And that would be all on Taylor.

  Taylor groaned as she pulled into the MRES frigate’s hangar—the horrible truth was that she was already immersed in the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t world of politics. She had been ever since their frigate’s alarm pulled her out of her sleep two days ago. The only solution was to utterly destroy the people who attacked her home—after Cryzdeklith was safe, she could worry about trying to reclaim her distance from the galaxy.

  When she jumped out of one of the control boat’s under-wing hatches, she found Hezekiah waiting for her in the hangar.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  A fine question.

  “I think I’m going to Meltia,” Taylor said.

  Hezekiah’s eyebrows hiked. “Are you under arrest?”

  Taylor shook her head. “Voluntarily.”

  Hezekiah might not have been part of the MRES branch for long, but apparently he had picked up on her violent distaste for anything to do with galactic politics. Which made Taylor painfully aware of how much she was breaking from the way of living that had ensured her a happy post-Order-War life thus far.

  “There’s a chance we could identify the group that carried out the Anniversary Attacks,” Taylor said, “but they need my help.”

  Hezekiah nodded slowly, in a way that told Taylor he was picking over his words, choosing the best response. Perhaps something she should try, considering her last conversation with him.

  “You’ve told me the Order War was a mistake,” Hezekiah said, “and that’s why you don’t want anything to do with Meltia—because you feel the balance of power is fragile. So fragile that another mistake could tip off another war.”

  “It’s not a feeling, it’s a fact,” Taylor said. “Now more than ever. Meltia and Kaleknar are ready to pounce on each other if either so much as flinches.”

  “I don’t contest it,” Hezekiah said. “I just feel as though this investigation is not as big a threat to that balance as you think. Your goal is to prosecute a terrorist group, not to take down a government. As long as you’re focused on that noble goal, you can hardly go wrong.”

  Taylor nodded. She badly wanted to believe Hezekiah. “But it seemed like a noble goal last time, too.”

  Hezekiah smiled, his kind brown eyes playful. “Last time you were knee-deep in a resistance movement long before the Order War started. This time, you’re part of a respectable organization, surrounded by levelheaded people.”

  Taylor thought back to Captain Brook and JP. “I wouldn’t count on that last part.”

  “Well, I’m hurt.”

  “What?” It took Taylor a moment to catch the implication of Hezekiah’s words. “Wait, you want to come too?”

  Brook had given her permission to bring others along.

  “I figured you’d want me since I helped you with the Nechlian Hazard Code and all that,” Hezekiah said. “Especially now that you’ve judged your other companions to be less than sensible.”

  Taylor shook her head quickly. “Oh, no, I do want you—I mean, I’d be happy to have you come along. You’ll have to get ready quickly, though, because Brook—that’s the captain of the outfit that came to see me—wants to leave in three hours.”

  “I can be ready,” Hezekiah said. “Do they have someone to replace us on such short notice?”

  “Brook claims she’ll send her best.”

  “You’d better tell Ciro to be on his best behavi
or, then,” Hezekiah said. “He won’t listen to me.”

  “In theory, he could come with us,” Taylor said.

  “Do you think he’s going to volunteer for an extra interstellar assignment?”

  “Not really.”

  Unlike the rest of the CRSC station, the area around the Kindred Spirit’s docking point was virtually empty as Taylor turned the corner, toting a small suitcase with a few essentials and pushing a hoverplatform that carried her damaged SX-7 and the tools and replacement parts she would need to put it back in order. She had no intention of using the suit, but the flip drive journeys to and from Meltia would give her plenty of time to fumble through the repair job with her limited maintenance skills. Hezekiah matched her stride, a black duffel bag over his shoulder.

  JP and Brook were waiting just outside the docking hatch. While Taylor’s hoverplatform earned her a skeptical look from JP, Brook’s smile brightened as they approached.

  “Taylor, welcome back, glad you’re joining us. Mr. Ghatzi, nice to meet you. Taylor, you should have—”

  “No! No.” Taylor’s face was flushed. “Hezekiah’s my coworker.”

  “Ah,” Brook said. “That’s fine too.”

  JP made a quick note on a palm-sized personal screen. “I will send two of our officers to replace you.”

  Hezekiah extended his arm to shake Brook’s hand, then JP’s. “Sorry for the confusion. It’s an honor to serve alongside the Interstellar Emergency Service.”

  JP lifted his chin approvingly. “Likewise.”

  “Well, we don’t have much time to waste.” Brook swept her hand toward the open docking hatch, then took the lead herself. “Come along.”

  Judging by what Taylor saw on her approach to the CRSC station, the corridor they were entering led straight toward the center of the “barrel” of the Kindred Spirit, near the ship’s nose. Unfortunately, it appeared that the corridor terminated after no more than ten meters in a vast empty space, without so much as a railing to prevent one from falling out. Brook and JP were unfazed. The two of them dropped into a crouch when they reached the end of the corridor, and tipped themselves over the edge.

  Then they stood back up.

  Taylor gave the captain and the political liaison officer—now standing half a meter below and perpendicular to her—a quizzical look.

  “Sorry about that.” Brook knelt and extended a hand to Taylor. “Our gravity is set up in a way that’s useful for our operations, but not so much for passengers who are unused to it.”

  The captain pulled Taylor over the threshold, and her insides shifted as gravity rotated ninety degrees. Looking around in amazement, Taylor found that they were standing on the inside of a sterile-white barrel-shaped space. People strode across the uniform curving wall of this space at every conceivable angle, dropping into and popping out of hundreds of doors just like theirs that were embedded in the wall.

  “That’s… impressive.” Taylor twisted her neck, suppressing her stomach’s natural uneasiness with the fact that people were traversing the inside of the barrel right-side-up, upside-down, and perpendicular to her own frame of reference. She knew that artificial gravity allowed modern starships to be laid out in whatever abstract fashion the designer wished, but most ships still maintained at least an illusion of up and down, simply because every intelligent life form in the galaxy had evolved on a planet. “What kind of… operations prompted you to come up with this design?”

  “The Spirit’s nose can open up.” Brook pointed to one end of the barrel. “It allows us to engulf smaller ships that need emergency assistance. The gravity’s set up like this so we can efficiently use the space around the perimeter of this area while still having a region of microgravity in the center where we can easily suspend those ships in need.”

  Taylor shook her head. “Interesting.”

  She let Brook and JP shift her hoverplatform into the barrel, not quite trusting herself to negotiate such a large object through the two gravity fields. Hezekiah followed after it.

  Brook cast a sideways glance at Taylor and Hezekiah after they were all standing in the barrel. “So you do want separate quarters, then?”

  “Yes, please,” Taylor said.

  Brook shrugged.

  As it turned out, their quarters directly adjoined the barrel, so Brook and JP helped them stow their bags before bringing the two of them back to the ship’s bridge. The rear half of the Kindred Spirit was thankfully put together like a normal starship, and the bridge layout was reminiscent of the cruisers Taylor had flown in during the Order War.

  Brook took a few minutes to check in with some of the bridge officers, probably preparing to activate the ship’s flip drive, which would “flip” the Kindred Spirit into the seventh dimension, the lowest dimension in which it was possible to surpass the speed of light and thereby leap across the galaxy in a matter of days. It paid to be careful, since attempting to flip into a location with a non-negligible amount of mass could result in the obliteration of the Kindred Spirit and her crew, but if the ship’s navigator managed to flip into the 99% of the galaxy that was vacuum, it was extremely safe. A few ships disappeared each year in what the public had begun to term “Icarus Events” after Icarus Day, but considering that there were trillions of flip drive journeys executed each year, the risk was infinitesimally small.

  As Brook surveyed her officers, though, Taylor noticed a full two-thirds of them were Archavian, confirming a nagging suspicion she had held since she set foot on the Kindred Spirit.

  “Mr. Parriburt—”

  “Everyone on this ship calls me JP,” he said. “I take no offense from it.”

  “JP, then,” Taylor said. “I am sorry; you must feel like this all the time since humans dominate most of the galaxy, but I have never seen so many of your people in one place before.”

  JP smiled, revealing his short ebony-black teeth. “Archavians are overrepresented in the MRES in general. In the olden days, it was because we could tolerate environmental stress better than you humans—heat, cold, smoke, toxins—and can hold our breath much longer. Now that drones have made those advantages less relevant, it is mainly a cultural artifact.”

  Taylor nodded appreciatively. “A noble cultural artifact.”

  Captain Brook finally stepped away from her officers, raising her voice. “All right everyone, we have what we came for. We’re already cutting this one close, so let’s warm up the flip drive and get on the metaphorical road!”

  “Captain,” JP said, “we’re still docked to the Cryzdeklithian station.”

  Brook shook her head ruefully. “Always slowing me down, JP.”

  Cherran DeGuavra may have been an ambassador to PanGal, the most hopelessly feckless intergovernmental organization in the galaxy, but flip it all, he was going to look good while doing it.

  Cherran’s deft fingers flew over a silver-trimmed white pocket square, pressing it into a crisp Galactican Four Point fold, and tucking it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He swayed his hips slightly, eyeing himself in his mirror screen. “Now let me buy you a drink, and I’ll show you why interstellar politics is a real major.”

  “What in the galaxy are you up to, Cherran?” Shuping’s voice came from her adjacent room.

  Cherran let out a dramatic sigh. Shuping was a confidant of his late father’s, and she had technically been Cherran’s legal guardian for a few years after the Order War, but none of that made her his mom.

  “Are you playing with your handkerchiefs again? Cherran, go to bed; you have PanGal tomorrow!”

  “They’re pocket squares,” Cherran said. “Not handkerchiefs. And PanGal? Pff! I could do PanGal in my sleep, Ms. Wei. This requires focus.”

  “Well, the Meltian Republic would probably appreciate it if you didn’t fall asleep while representing them in the only galaxy-wide diplomatic forum since the fall of the GG, not to mention that Percival would be distrau—”

  “He would understand,” Cherran said, “if he wasn’t so busy b
eing dead.”

  Shuping’s silence made Cherran immediately regret his words. How was it that after four years working with varyingly hostile governments in the foreign service, he could not deflect the criticisms of his own assistant without reminding her of what they’d both lost in the Order War?

  Then again, she had brought the old man up. Cherran was beginning to appreciate why his father had been so secretive, going by just his first initial as he built the Galactic Resistance from the ground up. If everyone regarded Cherran the same way Shuping did—as Percival DeGuavra 2.0—he might have to flip into the center of a star.

  “You’re right,” Shuping finally said. “Your father would understand better than I can why you gave up on PanGal… and how to get you to try again.”

  “I never gave up on PanGal.” Cherran straightened his pocket square. “The system is broken.”

  “Percival would have tried to fix it.”

  Rap-rap-rap!

  Cherran turned toward the door to his suite, grateful for the interruption.

  Without waiting for an answer, the knocker shouted, “Ambassador DeGuavra! The Cabinet has been attempting to contact you! Your presence is requested immediately!”

  Relief flooded through Cherran. Whatever emergency this was, it could not be more uncomfortable than rehashing the same worn-out arguments with Shuping. “Sorry, I turned off the emergency channel on my transceiver because PanGal kept sending me things that were only emergencies to PanGal.”

  “You what?” Shuping was already striding into Cherran’s room, straight black hair let down and a mahogany nightgown wrapped around her body. She gave Cherran’s Galactican business attire a skeptical look, but said nothing, instead beckoning him toward the suite’s door. Her uplink implant, a golden band around her forehead that linked her more intimately to the interplanetary network, caught the soft light from Cherran’s mirror screen.

  Rap-rap-rap!

  “Coming!” Shuping said.

  Cherran went after Shuping, pulling ahead of her after a few steps to open the door. Outside was a man in the deep maroon formal uniform of the Meltian Guard—the professional force that formed the core of the Meltian Republic’s military.