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“Sir, I think there might be a problem with one of the outposts.”
The man to whom this was addressed, a balding, stout Marine wearing the three diamonds and oak leaf wreaths of a full colonel, finished stirring his coffee. Then, he walked over to the watchkeeping officer for the Rim Sector, a middle-aged, auburn-haired lieutenant commander, and leaned over her shoulder to look at her workstation’s display.
“What’s the problem, Fiona?”
“Tyrell Station, sir. They didn't send their daily status report for the second time in a row. I checked the log, and it’s never happened before.” She glanced up at him. “In fact, I’ve seen no one miss two consecutive reports in my time here.”
Colonel Maartens, who prided himself on knowing just about every ship, regiment, or installation in the Fleet, couldn’t think of a single fact about Tyrell Station.
“Call up the data on Tyrell, will you?”
As words appeared on Lieutenant Commander Fiona Morelli’s display, Maartens let out a soft sigh. Any hope of a quiet, final overnight shift in the operations center before he retired from the Corps at the end of the week vanished. The readout was eloquent in its lack of information. Everything except the name was classified.
But even more ominous, the brief listing ended with a notation that the head of Naval Intelligence’s Special Operations Division, Rear Admiral Hera Talyn, had redacted Tyrell Station’s file. And nothing good ever came from problems involving her department.
Maartens suddenly found himself in the unenviable situation of having to wake one of the most feared flag officers in Fleet HQ at oh-dark-thirty. Every senior officer knew who Admiral Talyn was. However, few knew much about her, except that she was married to a Marine Corps Special Forces legend, Colonel Zachary Thomas Decker, the 1st Special Forces Regiment’s commanding officer.
And wake her for what? He couldn’t say. But his years in the operations center told him it was probably a glitch, nothing one should get excited about. Still, the procedures were clear — when a problem arose with a classified operation, the sponsor must be called.
“Query Tyrell with a priority message, Fiona. Ask them why they’ve not reported. In the meantime, I’ll call Admiral Talyn, just in case this is something she should hear about now rather than during morning prayers. Then, pull up the last week’s worth of log entries for Tyrell and track down any ship that called there recently.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Maartens returned to his glass-enclosed office on the mezzanine above the bullpen and opened a comlink with Admiral Talyn’s quarters on flag officers’ row. Only twenty seconds passed before the audio came on, and a sleep-filled voice answered.
“Talyn here.”
“Sorry to wake you, sir. This is Colonel Maartens. I have the overnight operations center shift. There may be a problem involving your branch.”
“Go ahead.” Any hints of drowsiness vanished from her voice.
“Tyrell Station has missed two daily status reports in a row, something that’s never happened. We’re attempting to contact them, but it’ll be a bit before we can expect a reply. It might be nothing. However, since information on Tyrell is classified at your orders, I can’t make that judgment and figured you should be aware right away.”
“That was the right decision, Colonel. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
**
Rear Admiral Hera Talyn, head of Naval Intelligence’s Special Operations Division, swept into the Fleet operations center and made a beeline for Colonel Maartens, standing in front of the three-dimensional projection of human space occupying the circular center’s heart. A mesmerizing sight at any time, it was doubly so during the hour of the wolf, long after midnight but still before sunrise over Sanctum, Caledonia’s capital.
“Good morning, Colonel.”
Maartens, coffee cup in hand, turned and immediately stiffened to attention.
“Good morning, Admiral.” If he was surprised at seeing her in uniform, even though he’d roused her from a sound sleep no more than fifteen minutes earlier, he kept it well hidden. “Would you like to take my office?”
“Certainly, and thank you, Colonel. Please have someone connect me with Major General James Martinson, 1st Special Forces Division — he lives here in Sanctum — and Colonel Zachary Decker, 1st Special Forces Regiment, at Fort Arnhem. I need to inform them of the situation.”
She headed for the senior watchkeeper’s office without waiting for a reply and sat behind the uncluttered desk. A pair of familiar faces appeared on the office’s primary display in under two minutes — James Martinson and her spouse, Zack Decker.
“Let me guess,” the latter said before she could get a word in edge-wise, “Tyrell stopped talking with us. Or did another emergency creep up before you fine intelligence people sniffed it out?”
“Good morning, Zack, Jimmy. Sorry for pulling you out of bed a little early, though I suppose it’ll give you time for a longer run before breakfast. The Almighty knows you Marines enjoy it. Yes, Tyrell missed the second daily sitrep. Curtis called it, which means they likely are or were under attack and lost subspace communications. The question is, did they lose Tyrell?”
Both Decker and Martinson shook their heads.
“Doubtful. Curtis Delgado is one of the sharpest company commanders in the entire Special Forces community,” Martinson said. “He’s quickly turning into a younger and better-looking version of your husband.”
“Sneaky, ruthless, overly fond of explosives, high altitude jumps, and historical quotes?” Talyn gave Decker an amused look.
A smug expression crossed his face. “What can I say? Apparently, I’m an inspiration to the next generation of door kickers. But joking aside, his planning and preparation, at least what he shared with us, is top-notch. I couldn’t do better under the circumstances. The bigger question is, when will the cavalry arrive?”
“In just under a day and a half. Garibaldi’s captain is pushing into the highest interstellar hyperspace bands, but she’s not exactly fresh from the shipyard. Until then, Erinye Company is our very own version of Schrödinger’s cat.”
“While I have you,” Martinson said, “anything more about the artifact Curtis’ people found and why we didn’t know about it until his report?”
Talyn shook her head. “Sorry, nothing new has come up. The Assenari Enterprises zaibatsu has a pretty good corporate intelligence and security branch, right up there with ComCorp’s, so I’m not surprised they kept it from us. Besides, Assenari isn’t high on our threat list. Its management generally stays away from politics, unlike their counterparts in the larger conglomerates.”
“But not from the Sécurité Spéciale.”
“Apparently. Provided Curtis is right, and they couldn’t have prepared an operation to take the WMD depot faster than we could ship the Erinyes to Tyrell. Hallikonnoen has been there for weeks already, and her reinforcements wouldn’t have had time to pass through the Assenari hiring system and climb aboard Thunder Bay so quickly.”
A grim expression crossed Decker’s square face.
“Then either Curtis faces protecting two separate high-value targets simultaneously or will fight two separate waves of Sécurité Spéciale mercenaries, the original for the artifact and a hastily arranged raid on the depot.”
“Or Garibaldi will arrive before the second wave and destroy it.”
“From your lips to the Almighty’s ear, my dear Admiral.”