Return Fire (Earth at War Book 3) Read online

  “A meal?” I objected, waving at the food on our table. “What the hell’s this, then?”

  “A snack,” he informed me. “The Skrith are very serious about food, as I am sure you have discovered.”

  “And I respect that,” I admitted. “But Goddamn, I don’t know if I can eat any more.” I’d been picking at the shredded pork and something very close to sourdough bread all afternoon and if I ate another bite, they’d have to roll me out of the hall.

  “What are we going to do if the vote goes against us?” Olivera asked. He seemed out of place. I’d seen him in space battles, seen him negotiating with aliens and politicians and alien politicians and he’d never looked this lost before. “I mean, what are the options?”

  “If the Alliance votes against your entry,” Joon-Pah said, “they will likely call for the removal of all Helta advisors, ships and equipment from your star system.”

  “They’re not getting the Jambo,” Olivera declared. “We fought for it, and it’s ours. The other hyperdrive ships, too. We took those in battle.”

  “And you may be far enough along to finish the remaining ships,” Joon-Pah conceded. “But there will be no more, not from us. Those four will be all you will have unless the Chamblisi change their mind.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Julie mused. “I mean, we have the fusion reactors, and I think we can make more of those. We have the shuttles to get stuff to orbit cheap and I know we can make more of those, so we can still get resources from the asteroid belt and the moon. And we’ll still have the orbital defense platforms.”

  “What we won’t have,” Garcia countered grimly, “is membership in the Alliance. And believe me when I tell you, that is the only thing holding our coalition together on Earth. If it turns out we’re on our own, it’s going to turn into every nation for themselves, trying to grab as much of the technology pie as they can.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. He was getting dangerously close to letting the cat out of the bag right in front of Joon-Pah. I wondered if I should let him, but Olivera had noticed it, too.

  “Secretary Garcia,” he said, a warning edge to his tone, “I’m sure we’ll be able to settle our internal differences peacefully.”

  “Huh?” Garcia started. “Oh, yes, of course.” He shot an apologetic look at Joon-Pah. “Sorry, didn’t mean to feel sorry for myself. Danger of the job.”

  “Joon-Pah,” I said, impatience roiling in my gut. Unless it was indigestion. “Look, you guys are clearly the muscle of the Alliance. I mean, you supplied them all with the hyperdrive to begin with.” Wherever you got it. But that was a question for another day. “Why do you have to just bend over and take whatever they vote for? Couldn’t you just tell them you’re going to maintain a relationship with Earth and if they don’t like it, they can go back to living in mud huts, or whatever they did before you showed up with all the goodies?”

  “We could, on a practical level,” Joon-Pah admitted, “but I only say that to you this easily because of all the experience I have with your way of thinking. The truth is, the vast majority of Heltan, even the ones who like and admire you Earth humans, would never even consider it. Our society is very bound by tradition, as you may remember from your last visit there.”

  I eyed the Skrith servers bringing a massive platter of steaks to each of the tables…including the Helta one, despite their vegetarianism.

  “What about the Skrith?” I wondered. “They don’t seem so hidebound.”

  “Perhaps. Yet, they are also one of the least technologically advanced of the Alliance races, and often refuse to accept our idea of improvement because they prefer to be closer to nature. They might indeed risk expulsion by maintaining trade with you, but once the other worlds of the Alliance cut them off, it would likely be you providing technology to them and not the other way around. The Chamblisi are the only other member of the Alliance with their own shipyards, and they share their output with the Vironians, which is why their votes will be in lockstep.”

  I grunted, unsatisfied. After everything we’d done for the Helta, they still wouldn’t go against the lizard-men and the octopus people. Still, Julie was right. Four starships were better than no starships. We could still colonize that habitable planet out at Alpha Centauri with four starships if we converted one of them into a cargo vessel. Maybe we could keep the coalition together by promising Germany and France and the UK their own continents or something. Hell, they’d probably be happier if we didn’t have a commitment to fight the Tevynians anymore.

  The problem, of course, would be whether the Tevynians decided they still wanted to fight us. That was where all this could fall apart. We’d weakened them, but they weren’t out of the game by any means, and if they managed to take down the Helta, I would say the odds were even as to whether they’d go after the Chamblisi next or come straight for Earth. And without us, the Tevynians would take down the Helta. Joon-Pah had learned a lot about military tactics from us, but he was one commander.

  My eyes were wandering as I thought, and settled on one of the Space Force technicians. Olivera had brought down a team to install our own satellite connections to the Jambo, not trusting local communications methods after our unpleasant experience on Helta Prime. Not that we thought the Skrith would do that to us, but fool me once, as the saying goes, shame on you, fool me twice, I punch you in the face. That’s how I learned it, anyway.

  I didn’t recognize this particular technician, which wasn’t unusual. I knew a lot of the shipboard personnel but the roster changed from one mission to another as the military rotated crews through to get trained. This guy was tall, though, which I thought I would have remembered, like six-foot-four, with hair just barely regulation and startlingly blond. His combat utilities were neat and sharp-edged like only the utility uniform of a troop who will never wear them in ground combat can be and yet…

  There was something about him that bothered me. He was walking along the far wall toward the main exit, glancing back as he went, as if he were waiting for something to happen, though that alone wouldn’t have caught my attention. There was something about his stance, about his gait. American military personnel, even Space Force pukes walk a certain way when they’re in uniform, especially when they think officers and senior NCO’s may be watching. Hell, Americans in general had a gait that was different than a Russian’s, that was different than a Venezuelan’s, and right on down the line.

  It was probably nothing, but I was the head of security, and being suspicious about stuff that was probably nothing was my job. I scrolled through a menu on my comm unit and touched my earpiece.

  “Hey Pops, you reading me?”

  “Five by five, fearless leader. What’s up?”

  “You see that Zoomie heading for the main exit?” I picked Pops out near the perimeter of the hall, facing straight toward my table. “On your right?”

  He turned, scanning across the far wall.

  “Yeah, I got him. What’s up?”

  “Maybe nothing, but he looks funky to me. Detail a couple guys to check him out, would you?”

  “Copy that. Give me a sec.”

  “Something wrong?” Olivera asked me, frowning at the one side of the exchange he’d heard.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I got a weird feeling is all. It’s probably just me being paranoid.”

  Preacher and Ringo moved off their assigned positions at the outer wall of the room to cut off the technician. I stood and started in that direction, not running, not giving any indication anything was wrong. But with each step, the urgency inside me grew. I wanted to tell myself it was an illusion, the sort of feeling I would get when I was a little kid and went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and ran back to my room after I turned the bathroom light off because the monsters would get me if I stayed in the dark hallway too long.

  In my world, the monsters were real, and I ran toward them.

  The tall, blond technician very deliberately did not look at Pr
eacher or Ringo, tipping me off more than if he’d actually stared at them, because if two guys in powered exoskeletons were marching toward me, I’d have been looking at them and wondering what the hell they were doing. He could only keep that up for just so long before the panic set in. It always did, no matter how well-trained someone was. They could act cool as ice as long as there was a chance of getting away with it, but once the trap was sprung, they ran.

  He ran. Preacher and Ringo took off after him, their Svalinn armor at first seeming in slow motion at first, as if they had to move the armor with their natural muscles instead of the servomotors but gathering speed with each step. They’d catch him, and if they didn’t…

  “External patrol,” I snapped into my throat mic. “We have a Tango in a Space Force technician’s combat utilities heading out the front entrance. Secure him alive, if possible, but do not let him get away.”

  I didn’t run after them. I should have. My conscience was nagging at me, telling me it was my duty, but the same instinct that had made me suspicious of the man in the first place froze me in my tracks between the Helta delegation’s table and the Chamblisi. He’d been looking back this way. I’d seen his eyes going somewhere near these tables.

  Ms. Universe, which was as close as I was going to get to the name of the Chamblisi ambassador, undulated from her seat and regarded me with bug eyes, which could have been anything from curiosity to annoyance to sexual frustration for all I knew.

  “What is occurring here, Andy Clanton?” she asked, saying my name as if it were some sort of title. “Is this a normal procedure for your people?”

  I debated telling her some bullshit about a medical emergency, but we were trying to convince these…people…that we were worth having as allies, so I went with the truth, instead.

  “I believe,” I told her, “that we may have a Tevynian spy among us, Ambassador. My people are pursuing him, but I suspect he may have already committed sabotage.”

  “There are Tevynians among us?” The Vironians, for all that they were closed-mouthed, could be quite vocal when they wanted to be, and apparently had good hearing since their ambassador had been a good thirty feet away when I made the pronouncement to Ms. Universe. “How would they get here?”

  “Disguised as one of us,” I admitted. “Though I’m still not sure why.”

  “I think I’m sure, boss,” Pops said, clomping up beside me, faceless and intimidating with his visor down. He leveled a finger at the Helta table. “The suit’s chemical sniffer is picking up traces of high explosives.”

  “Shit.”

  I motioned for the Helta delegates to move. Joon-Pah was already up, having been at our table, but he took a few steps closer when he saw me. I took a knee and ducked under the marble table top, scanning from the base upward…and stopping when I saw the lump of plastic explosives stuck at the juncture of the single, metal support and the slight concave of the table. I couldn’t see a detonator, but a single spike antenna stuck out of the thing, and if no one had caught the saboteur yet…

  “Out!” I yelled, scrambling to my feet, hoping my translator would reach enough of them.

  “Everyone out of this fucking room!”

  They were moving, way too slow, but at least they were listening, flowing away from the table like floodwaters receding, and so was I, but too damned slow as well, because I had to wait for them. Pops grabbed me and pushed me in front of him, saying something about how I wasn’t a private and I wasn’t expendable…

  And then the world exploded.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Ow.”

  I forced my eyes open and squinted at the blinding glare of whatever spotlight was shining in my face, my vision swimming in a sea of afterimages. I tried to sit up, but a hand on my chest kept me down, and I thought it had to be a suit of Svalinn armor pushing against me because I couldn’t budge it. Then my vision cleared and I saw it was Julie.

  “Don’t get up,” she insisted. “You have a concussion and you’re bleeding all over the damned place. Medics are on the way.”

  “Corpsmen,” I insisted, the response groggy but automatic.

  “No, it ain’t fucking corpsmen,” Pops said from somewhere above me. “For one thing, these guys are Army, not Navy, and for another, even the Navy doesn’t call them ‘corpsmen’ anymore because half of them are women.”

  I turned my head toward his voice since my girlfriend wouldn’t let me sit up, and that turned out to be a huge mistake because, as was previously mentioned, I had a concussion.

  “Ow,” I repeated.

  Pops’ armor looked as if he’d had the camo paint sandblasted off of it, and I suddenly realized he’d put himself between me and the explosion.

  “Thanks,” I told him, my voice a dry rasp. “Casualties?”

  “No dead, at least we don’t think, which is something of a miracle.”

  That wasn’t Pops, it was Olivera and suddenly, he was crouched down beside Julie. His dress uniform had seen better days and I wondered if the blood staining his sleeve had come from me. There was something wet on the left side of my face and I imagined I’d taken some shrapnel to the scalp. Scalp wounds bled like crazy. A haze passed across the general’s face and I wondered if the smoke was from the bomb or if my vision was graying out.

  “We’re still doing a count, but we think there were only about a half a dozen wounded.” He winced. “Unfortunately, Joon-Pah is one of them. His people are taking him to the Skrith medical center.”

  “You’ll be going there, too,” Julie assured me. “We just wanted our people to take a look at you first.”

  There was a quiver in her voice, something no one else would have picked up on, the only indication she’d been scared.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “If you want to get rid of me, you’ll have to divorce me.”

  “Quinn and the Rangers got the runner,” Pops said. “You want him taken back to the ship?”

  “No,” Olivera answered the question for me. “Mansur is coming down here. But I want to know how the hell he got here, because he sure didn’t come with us.”

  “He’s got a ship,” I told them. I felt a little better and I gently pushed Julie’s hand away and sat up. “Shit, I got a concussion and I already know that. It’s the only way. Joon-Pah said it, this place isn’t big on high-tech. He probably snuck a lander down from a shuttle, got dropped here by one of their cruisers. They knew about this conference.”

  “How would they…?” Olivera began, but then shut his mouth. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. “Oh.”

  I could see now, and yes, it had been the smoke of the explosion. It was still floating across the room, obscuring the crystal chandeliers, drifting slowly toward the upper windows. The hall was deserted except for us and a few Skrith searching through the wreckage. One of them might have been Anu Neeme Klas but if he was there, he was too busy helping clear away overturned tables, making sure they hadn’t missed any victims, to come talk to me. Where the Helta table had been was a charred, splintered hole in the sheet stone flooring.

  I blinked.

  “How did that table not turn into a giant fucking frag grenade?” I wondered. “That should have killed a lot of people.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Pops said. “But whatever the things are made of is pretty damned tough.” He pointed across the hall. “The bowl section flew off in one piece and landed about fifty feet thataway in three pieces.”

  “Thank God for Skrith artisanal furniture,” I mumbled.

  An Army medic rushed toward me, carrying a musette bag loaded with a lot more high-tech goodies than corpsmen had carried in my day, and the first thing the fresh-faced kid did was still to pull out a piece of cloth and wipe the blood off my head.

  “Just hold still, sir,” the kid said, digging through his bag of tricks. “I gotta check you for a concussion.”

  “I’ll save you some time and confirm I have one,” I told him. “Hurry and patch me up, so
n.” I offered Julie an apologetic tilt of my head. “The Skrith hospital is going to have to wait. I need to talk to our boy the Tevynian.”

  ***

  Okay, I admit it, I let my girlfriend bully me into going to the hospital first, but only because Olivera insisted on waiting for Mansur’s shuttle to land before we questioned the prisoner. That took over an hour, and in that time, the Skrith did something to me, under the supervision of the Helta, that made my headache go away. Maybe Patel could have told me what it was if he’d been there, but no one had thought to bring him along on this trip, and I’m fairly sure that Army medic wouldn’t have known.

  The Skrith doctors had a lot of patients and hadn’t been talkative, leaving me in the isolated chamber with some sort of slimy goop still smeared on my head when they were done. I figured that meant I was good to go and wiped my temples with my sleeve before I wandered out to try to find Joon-Pah.

  He was laid out on what looked like a cross between a hospital gurney and an alien torture device, and he was naked, which would have been awkward if he wasn’t also covered in fur. The blue-black hair on his lower legs was matted with blood, but the wounds that had produced it were already closing and he didn’t seem to be in pain.

  “Joon-Pah,” I said, putting a hand over his. The Skrith doctor glared at me but didn’t say anything, going about her business, tapping something into a control screen beside his bed. “Are you all right?”

  “I shall be,” he said to me, his eyes unfocused, his voice faint. He turned his head to look at me, but the rest of his body moved not at all. “Thank you for discovering the device when you did, Andy Clanton. Our whole delegation would have been killed if not for you.”

  “I should have spotted it sooner,” I said, bitter now that I could think clearly again without my head splitting open. “Everything’s fucked now.”