The Soldier: Escape Vector Read online

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Let me double check this.”

  “Cyborgs, Cade. Have you spotted the cyborgs?”

  “Let me double check,” Cade said again, sounding annoyed.

  He peered through the scope, making minute adjustments. The targeted vessel was oval, huge, perhaps one quarter the size of Earth’s Moon. It looked exactly like a cyborg mobile base. During The War, Cyborg GHQ moved mobile bases into position when they planned to occupy a planet. The mobile base would rain cyborg troopers onto the surface, usually meaning the death or conversion of everyone on the planet. This mobile base was in orbit around the gas giant nearest the Asteroid Belt, a Saturn-like planet with rings. Had the mobile base deployed deuterium floaters into the gas giant’s upper atmosphere to collect fuel?

  Wait a minute, what was this?

  Cade made further adjustments. A sense of relief flooded through him as he spied a massive hull breach in the mobile unit. Particles streamed from the breach—not a river of particles, but enough so the sensor scope noticed it from this distance.

  Had the mobile base taken a recent hit, a massed missile strike, perhaps? Could it be an old hull breach? Where did the interior particles come from then? Wouldn’t they have all poured out in a few minutes from the initial breach?

  Cade went to maximum zoom as he searched for cyborg guard vessels, for floating cyborg parts. He kept at it until the mobile base drifted over the gas giant’s horizon, taking it out of direct line of sight.

  “Cade, I’m going to have to drop the field,” Halifax said.

  The soldier looked up from the scope. He nodded before resuming his sensor scan.

  Halifax switched off the Intersplit Field. The scout dropped out of FTL travel, soon moving at point zero one light-speed, a crawl compared to a second ago, although relatively fast in system terms.

  “Unless you think otherwise,” Halifax said, “I’ll aim us for the second planet.”

  Cade continued scanning.

  “Does that work for you?” Halifax asked.

  “I said nothing, so it does,” Cade said.

  “That’s a piss-poor way to communicate at a time like this.”

  Cade looked up, surprised. “You said—forget it.” He went back to scanning, reminding himself yet again that Halifax wasn’t a soldier.

  As the hour passed, he focused on the second planet: the terrestrial world with a heavy atmosphere. It was far away for the scope. This was interesting. He picked up traces of radiation indicating nuclear power. Was that from the planet or from spaceships around the planet? He was still too far out to tell.

  “Say, Cade, I’ve been thinking.”

  The soldier looked up, and he tweaked a neck muscle doing so. He’d been bent over the scope for hours. He massaged his neck. Maybe it was time to eat or get some rest.

  “Are you listening to me?” Halifax asked.

  Cade nodded.

  “Where was Tarvoke when he sent us the message?”

  Cade shrugged. Who cared?

  “No, this matters,” Halifax said. “It will tell us more about this…realm.”

  Cade raised his eyebrows, interested.

  “The star system strikes me as normal space,” Halifax said.

  “Agreed.”

  “But that’s weird,” Halifax said. “How can the star system be normal when it’s all alone behind a gray barrier, sitting within a gray non-Einsteinian realm or dimension?”

  “I have no idea,” Cade said. “You called it a pocket universe, suggesting someone or some group made it this way.”

  “Maybe I’m not making myself clear. It seems as if the laws of physics work normally inside the pocket universe. Or what we would think of as normality. Outside the barrier, the laws were different, bizarre. Messages and missiles traveled faster than they should.”

  “And you want to know where Tarvoke was when he sent us the message?”

  “Exactly,” Halifax said, pointing and snapping his fingers. “Tarvoke couldn’t have been deep in this star system when he did it. The laws work normally here, and a message would take time traveling through an Oort cloud, days in fact. Yet, we spoke back and forth, indicating nearness on his part.”

  “Tarvoke would have had to been near the edge or outside the barrier,” Cade said.

  “That’s what I think.”

  “So…?”

  “So, where is Tarvoke now? Did he watch us enter the barrier and then come through in his ship? If so, where is his vessel?”

  “I’ll start scanning behind us.” Cade put his face back to the scope. The neck muscle spasmed again. He grimaced, rubbing his neck. Then he pulled his face from the scope and rubbed his eyes.

  “Feeling tired?” Halifax asked.

  Cade shrugged.

  “If you’re tired, get some sleep. We should be as sharp as possible, right? I can scan for trouble.”

  Cade studied the man. He did feel tired, and a nap would help. Still, there was a possible problem—

  “Don’t you think I can do it?” Halifax asked.

  “It’s not that,” Cade said, yawning.

  “I’ll watch the shop while you take a nap.”

  Cade stood up. Despite his superior physique, the tension of all this had taken a toll. Halifax could check and call him if he found something troubling. He stumbled through the short corridor to his cabin, entering and slumping onto his cot. He rolled onto his back, kicking off his boots. He closed his eyes and felt glorious sleep claim him. It felt good—

  A baring klaxon woke him some time later. He sat up, instantly alert, not half asleep like a normal man would have been. Jumping up, slipping on his boots, he ran into the piloting compartment.

  “What’s the problem?”

  Halifax looked up groggily from the piloting seat. His eyes were red rimmed.

  Cade realized the doctor had fallen asleep at the controls yet again. This time, I should give him a beating. I trusted him. He said he’d check. Cade clenched his hands, making fists, really considering it.

  “Missiles,” Halifax said a moment later, as he checked a console. “They caught me by surprise, coming from around the nearest gas giant. They’re coming on fast, Cade. We can’t use the Intersplit because we’re too deep in system to energize it.”

  “Right,” Cade said. What was done was done. He’d have to teach the doctor discipline later. The soldier’s blood coursed through his veins as he took his seat at the sensor scope. He peered at the missiles and with a shock, realized he recognized them from The War: two big Raptor 5000s. They were cyborg-manufactured missiles, of course, huge, full of fuel and barreling in boldly, daring the target to defend itself. In this case, it was the ex-scout. The Raptors would have thermonuclear warheads, more than 200 megatons each. The two missiles were also staggered. He would have to take out each one separately if they were to survive.

  “What do we do?” Halifax shouted.

  “First, you must stay calm, Doctor. I’m here. I’m going to take care of it.”

  “Yes, yes, but how?”

  “I can’t think if you’re shouting hysterically like a schoolgirl.”

  Halifax squeezed his eyes closed. Cade was startled to see tears leaking from the man’s eyes. The doctor opened his eyes and wiped at them savagely.

  Cade went back to studying the missiles on the scope. What could he learn from this? The missiles came from the nearest gas giant, the Saturn-like planet. The missiles burned hot, their exhaust suggesting deuterium fuel. He would bet a year’s pay the cyborgs had deployed floaters in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere to scoop up deuterium particles. That was standard mobile base operating procedure around a gas giant.

  Cade blinked in surprise as the missiles shimmered. He looked again, but there was no shimmering now. Had his eyes watered for a second?

  He sat up and replayed what he’d just seen. Sure enough, the missiles had shimmered.

  “Something?” asked Halifax.

  “Give me
a second,” Cade said.

  He tried several things before finally sitting back perplexed. He told Halifax about the shimmering. They traded suggestions. Finally, Halifax asked if there was a field of some sort that the missiles might have passed through to cause the shimmering.

  “What kind of field?” asked Cade.

  “A planetary force field maybe,” Halifax said.

  Cade shook his head. “The missiles are already farther out than anything like that.”

  “You’ve seen planetary force fields before?”

  “Planetary screens,” Cade said. “That was long ago.”

  “That’s amazing. I would have liked to have seen something like that.”

  “It’s not what you think. But that’s neither here nor there. I looked for a field or energy projection. I couldn’t spot one. Why did the missiles shimmer?”

  Through the scope, Cade studied the gas giant and its surroundings for twenty minutes. He didn’t locate any kind of field. He went back to studying the approaching missiles. There was something odd about them now. He couldn’t pinpoint it, though.

  The Descartes had already reached the outer edge of the Asteroid Belt. The scout was over three hundred million kilometers from the missiles. Such attacks took time to reach the target. Even in a star system, space was vast compared to planets, even gas giants.

  As Cade watched the missiles through the scope, he witnessed the most astounding thing. Two green beams simply appeared. The beams reached out, each one striking a Raptor 5000. Seconds later, each missile began rotating. This was not a spin, but each missile rotating so each exhaust port instead of the nosecone aimed in the direction of travel. Then, abruptly, each missile expelled thrust, the deuterium-fuel tails growing longer and longer as the two missiles decelerated.

  Cade told Halifax about the development.

  “Beams can’t just appear,” the doctor shouted. “They need a generated source.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Cade said.

  “Is this magic?” the doctor shouted.

  “No. I suspect cloaked ships.”

  “Oh. Yes. Certainly,” Halifax said in a quieter and relieved voice.

  As Cade watched through the scope, he saw two vessels appear at the origin point of each green beam. The ships might have teleported there or uncloaked. He believed the latter, as it was the simpler explanation for what he’d observed so far.

  The Raptor 5000 missiles decelerated more. Once again, green beams shot out, this time from cannons on each ship. The ships were teardrop-shaped vessels, each approximately half the size of a Raptor 5000. That made each vessel twice the size of the Descartes. The missiles quit decelerating, drifting at their new velocity. The teardrop-shaped vessels began accelerating, each heading for one of the Raptor missiles.

  This was finally too much for Cade. He sat up, using both hands to rub his face.

  “What’s wrong?” asked a worried Halifax.

  Cade shook his head. Then he got up and went to communications. He began hailing the teardrop-shaped vessels.

  A third ship now appeared.

  The Nion warned them about it. Halifax checked the nav, spying a large boxlike spaceship on a screen. The third ship was in the Asteroid Belt with them, although over five million kilometers away to their left. The boxlike vessel was massive: dwarfing the Descartes like Jupiter would dwarf the Earth’s Moon. The boxlike ship was drifting, compared to the ex-Patrol scout that moved fast through the belt, heading toward the system’s second planet.

  “Don’t interrupt the proceedings,” a familiar voice told them over the comm.

  “Captain Graven Tarvoke,” Cade said. “What’s going on?”

  “Just this, Mr. Interloper,” Tarvoke said. “Begin immediate deceleration or I’ll launch missiles at you, destroying your vessel. You have ten seconds to comply.”

  Chapter Nine

  Cade sat back at the comm board, thinking about what Tarvoke had just said.

  “What do we do?” Halifax asked, with his fingers aflutter with nervousness.

  “Let me think,” Cade said.

  Halifax checked a timer. “Our ten seconds are almost up.”

  “I don’t want to have to destroy your ship,” Tarvoke said from the comm. “But I will if you don’t immediately comply.”

  Cade glanced at Halifax. The doctor was not looking at him. The small man had jumped up, racing to sensors, no doubt watching the boxlike free trader through the scope.

  The soldier spoke into the microphone. “Clearly, by your actions, you’re mining cyborg technology.”

  Tarvoke said nothing to the accusation.

  “I witnessed a shimmer to the missiles as they left the gas giant’s vicinity,” Cade said. “What caused that?”

  “If you don’t know, it doesn’t matter to you,” Tarvoke said. “Now, listen, I’ve already been too lenient with you. Begin immediate deceleration.”

  “Why did you fire missiles at us when we were outside the barrier?”

  “I didn’t do any such—what did you say?” Tarvoke asked.

  “You launched two missiles at us when we were outside the barrier,” Cade said.

  Tarvoke breathed heavily before saying, “The idiot, I can’t believe it.”

  Cade glanced at an upright, thoughtful Halifax before asking the free trader, “Can you clarify your statement?”

  “Do you claim to have already spoken to me?” Tarvoke asked.

  “You already know the answer to that,” Cade said.

  Halifax leaned closer toward the comm, listening intently.

  “There’s been a mistake,” Tarvoke said. “You claim to have just come through the barrier?”

  “You said earlier that we’d spoken to the Eagle-Dukes,” Cade said.

  “Oh, that tears it,” Tarvoke said. “Look. That wasn’t me who did those things outside the barrier.”

  “Your voice sounds identical,” Cade said.

  “Yes, yes, it was a Graven Tarvoke, but not me,” the free trader said.

  Remembering Leona Quillian, the original, from Group Six in the Durdane System, Cade asked, “Are you suggesting I spoke to a clone?”

  Halifax snapped his fingers, pointing at Cade as if in silent agreement.

  Over the comm, Tarvoke sighed heavily. “If you want to think of it that way, yes, that will work. It wasn’t a clone, however. It was a—okay. Listen. We’re getting off track. I need you to decelerate.”

  “Why?” asked Cade.

  “For starters, you can’t go to the second planet.”

  “To Coad?” asked Cade.

  “I can’t believe this,” Tarvoke said. “He’s a total idiot. What was he thinking? Listen. Listen to me. What else did he tell you?”

  Halifax motioned with a hand. Cade noticed. The doctor shook his head.

  Cade nodded, saying, “Perhaps if you start from the beginning, I’ll understand your position.”

  Halifax gave him an “okay” sign.

  “I demand that you decelerate,” Tarvoke said sternly. “You’ve seen two of my cloaked strikers. Believe me. I have hundreds more, hundreds. You’ll never make it to the second planet.”

  “Why not call it Coad?” asked Cade.

  “Fine,” Tarvoke said, “you obviously know more than you’re letting on. I imagine he told you far too much. What’s your price then?”

  “Wait a second,” Halifax said, standing.

  Cade muted the comm.

  Halifax concentrated as he rubbed his chin. “Do you believe anything he’s saying?”

  “Well…you said Tarvoke couldn’t have been this deep in the star system and spoken to us beyond the barrier. Perhaps there really are two of them. It would explain how it happened.”

  “Did you see what his strikers are doing to the missiles? They’re collecting them. I think you hit upon it. Tarvoke is collecting cyborg weaponry. Isn’t that audacious and amazing?”

  “Yeah,” Cade said. “It is.”

  “The shimmer you
saw earlier must be important. Tarvoke refuses to say what it is. And he clearly doesn’t want us to go to Coad. Our ship represents something important to him. He threatened to launch missiles against us, but I don’t believe he will.”

  “Because he doesn’t want to destroy our ship?” Cade asked.

  “I think that’s it. Now, we just have to figure out why.”

  “If that’s so… We must accelerate and get out of here.”

  Halifax pursed his lips, nodding, hurrying to the pilot’s seat. He began manipulating controls, starting acceleration.

  “I’m going to decline your offer for now,” Cade said into the microphone. “But if you want to begin telling us what’s really going on, I’m perfectly willing to negotiate with you.”

  “I just saved your life,” Tarvoke said. “The Raptor missiles would have obliterated your tiny ship.”

  “Possibly,” Cade said.

  “Have you ever heard about cyborgs?”

  “A time or two,” Cade said dryly.

  “You’re being foolish,” Tarvoke said. “Don’t you want to get back to your own space-time continuum?”

  Cade stiffened, thinking hard, deciding to play a hunch, as Tarvoke seemed too eager. “I have no worries there,” he said.

  There was silence on the other end. “Okay, okay,” Tarvoke said. “I can see you’re a dealer, a Scavenger, perhaps. You know what I mean when I say that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Cade said, lying, of course, but seeing it as tactics in a combat situation.

  “Well…?” asked Tarvoke.

  Still playing the hunch, Cade asked, “Did you forget how to get back home?”

  “You bastard,” Tarvoke said in a rough voice. “You’re mocking me. You must know then.”

  “If you want to play coy, go ahead,” Cade said. “I can do the same thing.”

  Halifax nodded, giving him another “okay” sign.

  There was more silence from Tarvoke. It lasted for so long that Cade glanced at Halifax. The doctor shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “Let me ask you one question,” Tarvoke finally said. “If you answer it, I’ll answer any one question you have for me.”

  “The law of reciprocity?” asked Cade.