Rick Partlow - Duty, Honor, Planet

Flashing green lights and an automated message shooed McKay and the half-dozen other passengers out of the shuttle and through the airlock, directly into a lift car. Pausing at the car’s control panel, McKay glanced at his watch—he had less than twenty minutes before he was scheduled to meet with the Colonel. Not nearly enough time to find his quarters, stow his bags and grab a quick shower. He touched the indicator panel for the Intelligence offices, then slumped aside in resignation. It was going to be one of those days.

The lift shot down the axis of the station, then began slowing, one wall flashing a warning that it was about to become a floor. As the car changed directions toward the outer rim of the cylinder, Jason began to feel the faux gravity of centrifugal force, increasing the further they advanced. When the pull had reached just short of Earth-normal, the car came to a halt and the doors slid aside, and Jason McKay stepped into the midst of the maelstrom.

Within the curved halls of Fleet Headquarters, streams of blue-clad personnel flowed from one transitory purpose to another, seemingly oblivious to all around them. Jason stepped into the midst of them, the proverbial sore thumb in rumpled Marine utility fatigues, luggage hanging off him like a rubbernecking tourist. Trying to relate the map he’d seen on the wall of the lift to the confusing, people-filled halls around him, Jason struck off down the corridor to his left.

After ten minutes of wrong turns and bad directions, Jason veered off the crowded thoroughfare into what was known to the enlisted of the station as Brass Country: the Headquarters Section. Marching down a corridor decorated with flags and battle scenes from all of the Republic’s member nations, Jason turned into an open doorway marked, “Headquarters, Fleet Intelligence Service.”

Winding his way through a maze of desks and input terminals, he advanced to a secluded anteroom which guarded an unobtrusive, plain white door. A reception desk was situated in the front corner and a clean-cut young Technician Second-Class sat behind it, typing steadily into a terminal. Jason walked up to the desk and stood silently, waiting for the Tech-2 to notice him.

“Yes…” The bored-looking Japanese male glanced up, adding, “…sir?” upon seeing the silver bars on the visitor’s shoulders.

“Lieutenant McKay to see Colonel Mellanby,” he told the enlisted man.

“Yes, sir,” the Tech said. “He’s expecting you—go right in.”

McKay nodded curtly, then dropped his bags next to the Technician’s desk and strode in as the door slid aside to admit him. The office he found himself in was sparsely, almost spartanly, decorated: bare walls but for a holographic map of Republic space floating over the plain, metal desk; and an antique, nickel-plated handgun mounted on the wall behind that desk.

The man sitting behind the desk was as Spartan as the office itself—not a big man, but rather than seeming short or spare, it seemed his frame had been compacted for efficiency, so that not an inch was wasted. Jason had heard it said that when they’d squeezed all that intelligence, muscle and daring into so small a body, they’d left no room for humanity. Rumors about the Snake’s ruthlessness floated around him like familiar spirits, and his record as a Marine Captain in the Syrian Rebellion was well-known.

“Lieutenant McKay reports,” Jason said with a salute, coming sharply to attention in front of the desk.

“At ease, McKay.” Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Mellanby returned the salute. He nodded toward the chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”

Jason dropped gratefully into the chair, struggling not to sweat. He had laughed at the stories about grown men reduced to tearful anxiety in the presence of the Snake, but sitting there in the cool regard of those iron eyes, he believed every word.

“I know what you’re thinking, McKay,” Mellanby said with chilling matter-of-factness. “You fucked up royally, got a lot of good people killed and then assaulted a superior officer to top it all off.” Jason’s blood froze at the pronouncement of the indictment he had been dreading for the last three months. He couldn’t speak. “So why,” the Snake continued, leaning back in his seat, “did I ask for you to be transferred to my command and kicked up to a Silver Bar?”

McKay swallowed hard, finding his voice somewhere. “Yes sir,” he admitted.

“Tell me, Lieutenant, what do you think you did wrong in your assault on the Armory?”

Jason answered the question without a second’s hesitation—he’d brooded over it for long, alcohol-hazed hours, answering the nightmare accusations of eight dead men and women.

“I attacked an entrenched, numerically-superior force,” he said, “with no air or artillery support. And I divided my forces in the face of superior numbers.” His jaw quivered. “They trusted me, and I got them killed.”

“McKay, you’re twenty-five years old,” Mellanby pinned him with a glare. “You’re three years out of college, six months out of OCS, and this was your first mission as a Platoon Leader. You took your twenty-Marine platoon down to an enemy-controlled stronghold and defeated a force of three hundred armed terrorists without the use of any air or artillery support. You did it because you were ordered to by some two-bit ayatollah’s horny first-born to cover up the fact that he had screwed the pooch and let his command get captured without a shot using their own security system.

“You not only managed to defeat a vastly superior enemy force with no allies but some poorly-armed and poorly-trained local cops, but you even managed to free all of the Colonial Guard troops being held hostage.”

Mellanby grinned that Snake grin. “And you even had the balls to punch out that little tin-pot Captain when it was over. Lieutenant, you may not believe this, but if the President hadn’t been counting on a swing vote from that shitbird’s father, you would have been looking at a Medal of Valor.” McKay sat back in his chair, his face frozen in an expression of disbelief. Eight men and women, most of them hardly out of their teens, had died under his command and they wanted to give him a medal ?

“Instead,” Mellanby went on as if he hadn’t noticed McKay’s reaction, “I asked for you to be part of a little project that I’ve been planning for a few months now.” He stood, pacing around the desk to the other side of the floating holomap. “Does the date September 12, 2150 mean anything to you?”

“Aside from being my maternal great-grandfather’s eighty-fourth birthday,” McKay said with a shrug, “it was also the day the Armstrong left orbit for 82 Eridani.”

“Very good,” Mellanby said. “I forget, you were a history major. I was a very young child the day the Armstrong left—the first of the Eysselink starships. I remember well the fantasies that went through my young mind that day.” He turned and waved a hand expansively at the map. “Fantastic alien creatures from the movies with incredibly advanced technology and some great galactic federation that we would now be welcomed into.”

A nostalgic smile snuck across his face, creeping slowly lest the Snake notice it. It faded quickly, frightened by the unfamiliar territory, and he turned back to McKay. “Instead, we found a nice little system with two habitable planets and no evidence of intelligent life. Very handy economically, of course, but rather puzzling from a scientific viewpoint. It hasn’t gotten any better in the last forty years, either. You know the numbers as well as I do. A hundred explored systems, twenty worlds colonized, but no intelligent life.” Mellanby speared him with a glance, shifting from exposition to interrogation in a heartbeat.