David Weber - The Apocalypse Troll

"I thought they'd bumped you another ring and retired you, Dick," the admiral added, returning Aston's grip firmly.

"They have, but my date of rank doesn't take effect until next month. Then they separate me and I go to Langley. I'm on-rather, I was on-extended furlough till then, Jack." He noted the captain's reaction to his use of the admiral's first name. "Sorry about all the drama, but I've got a problem."

"I figured that when they told me it was you," Rose said, "but you're lucky I was already over here for a scheduled conference. If they'd dragged me out of bed for this, I'd've ordered them to repel borders!" He released Aston's hand and turned to the other officer. "Captain Helsing, this is Dick Aston. You may have heard of him."

"I have, indeed, Admiral," Helsing said, offering his own hand. His eyes were thoughtful, as if weighing Aston's scruffy appearance against his reputation, and Aston wondered what conclusions he was drawing. "I hadn't heard you were retiring, Sir."

"I'm not, really," Aston said with a grin. "But I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to run around with SEAL teams, so I'm going to be a double-dipper. There's a slot waiting for me at CIA when I get home."

"I see. Won't you have a seat, Sir? Admiral?" Helsing waved at a pair of comfortable chairs, and Aston sat gratefully. The weariness of yet another all-night trick at the wheel was catching up with him, made still worse by relief. This calm, orderly ship was the height of normality-the clearest possible proof that the Troll had not made any overt moves. Yet his relief was flawed by his awareness that, in many ways, the hardest part was yet to come.

"Now, Dick," Rose said once they were seated, "what's this 'emergency' of yours?"

"Jack," Aston ran a hand over his bald pate and let his anxiety show, "I'm not sure I should tell you." He saw surprise in the admiral's face and shook his head, irritated at himself. "Sorry. That didn't come out quite the way I intended." He thought for a moment, and Rose let him.

"I assume," Aston said at last, picking his words with care, "that you must've heard about what went on over the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago?"

"Hell, yes!" Rose snorted, then his eyes sharpened. "Why?"

"Because," Aston said very, very carefully, "I know what it was about."

There was absolute, dead silence in the cabin. Helsing knew Aston only by reputation, and he couldn't quite keep the incredulity off his face. Rose, on the other hand, knew him personally.

"How?" he asked finally.

"I can't tell you that," Aston said. "I'm sorry, but I don't know who I can tell. It's a very ... delicate situation. Even more so than you can possibly guess."

"Dick," Rose said slowly, "we lost a Hummer and every man aboard the Kidd when it hit the fan. We've got over a hundred cases of blindness, and over two thousand dead civilians aboard airliners that lost their avionics and crashed ... not to mention losing three Toms, one KA-6, and enough millions of dollars worth of electronics to put Roosevelt and two Ticos into the yard for a year. If you know what was behind it, you're going to have to spill it ... and damned quick, too."

"I know, Jack," Aston said wearily. He shook his head. "Look, what I really need from you is three things: patience, a secure line to Norfolk, and a good neurologist with a limited sense of curiosity." He grinned tiredly at Rose's baffled expression. "I know it sounds crazy," he said, "and it gets better; I've got a young lady aboard my boat who I need brought aboard McKee with no questions and as little fuss as possible. And-" his eyes begged Rose for understanding "-I need an EEG run on her, very, very discreetly but absolutely ASAP."

"Do you really realize just how crazy that sounds?" Rose asked quietly, and Aston nodded.

"I do. Believe me, I do. I wish I could tell you all about it, but I can't. This thing's got a 'Need to Know' hook that's going to be a copper-plated bitch. I need guidance from CINCLANT before I can even admit what I know to myself."

"All right," Rose said slowly. "I'll let you run with it as you think best-for now, at least." He turned to Helsing. "Captain, get your senior surgeon down to that ketch with a stretcher party and bring the young lady aboard covered up so tight nobody can tell what's in that stretcher, much less who. I want her isolated in sickbay with an armed guard posted round the clock. And tell them not a word. If they talk in their sleep, they'd better drink a lot of coffee until I personally tell them differently."

"Yes, Sir."

"As for you, Dick," Rose said grimly, "I think we can fix you up with a secure line." He grinned mirthlessly. "And I can hardly wait to hear what Admiral McLain has to say about this."

alert adj. 1. Vigilant; attentive. 2. Mentally responsive and perceptive. 3. Lively; brisk. -n. 1. A warning of attack or danger; esp. a siren or klaxon. 2. The period during which such a warning is in effect. -on the alert. Prepared for danger or emergency; watchful. -tr.v. alerted, alerting, alerts. 1. To warn; to notify of approaching danger. 2. To call to action or preparedness. [French alerte, from Italian all'erta, "on the watch," from Latin ille, that + erta, watch.]

-Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos, Publishers

2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

Mordecai Morris's eyes popped open, and the phone rang again. He jerked up in bed and grabbed, cutting off a third ring before it woke his sleeping wife, then peered bleary-eyed at the bedside clock. Two-thirty? He'd kill the son-of-a-bitch!

"Morris," he mumbled thickly, then straightened. "What? Yes-yes, of course! No, wait." He rubbed his puffy eyes, feeling his brain wake up. "This is an open line. Hold the call-I'll be back in a minute."

He waited for an acknowledgment, then slid his left foot into a slipper, strapped the prosthesis to the stump of his right calf, and slipped silently out of the bedroom and downstairs to his library. He ignored the phone on his desk, unlocked a bottom desk drawer, and lifted out another one. He set the scrambled line on his blotter and punched buttons. Within seconds, he was speaking once more to the base communications center.

"All right, we're secure at this end now. Put him through." There was a moment of silence, then a familiar deep voice.

"Howdy, M&M," it said.

"Why the hell are you calling me on scramble at two o'clock in the damned morning?" Morris demanded.

"It seemed the most appropriate way to talk to someone as scrambled as you are, shit-for-brains," Richard Aston said cheerfully, and Morris's eyebrows crawled up his forehead in astonishment.

"Easy for you to say," he returned with automatic levity, but his mind raced. It was largely due to Dick Aston that he'd lost only a foot when the Islamic Jihad decided the US naval attachО in Jordan was responsible for certain difficulties they'd encountered. Aston had been in operational command of the SEAL teams which swam ashore in Lebanon and rescued six American and European hostages and left thirty-two Shiite dead behind, and Morris had assembled the information that targeted the terrorist safe houses for him. They'd used the emergency code phrase "shit-for-brains" exactly once-when Morris called Aston over an open line to report that he was being shadowed by three men. Aston and a team of Embassy Marines had arrived ten minutes later, finished off the remaining pair of terrorists who had him cornered behind his burning car, and gotten him into a hospital.

But that had been eight years ago! Still, it was also the one and only time they'd actually worked together... .

"Old memories die hard," Aston said cheerfully, and Morris's stomach muscles tightened at the confirmation. What in God's name-?