War of the Spheres Read online

  “Yes…” Colonel Hughes agreed. “He has to learn to respect other people’s time. Do you know where he is?”

  Dr. Fillmore threw up his hands. “Maybe he’s in his office, sleeping or daydreaming. I haven’t seen him all morning.”

  Hughes was tapping at a slip of smart-paper. “Security shows he never logged out last night… Do you think he worked all night?”

  People shrugged. Everyone admitted it was possible.

  Curious to meet such a person, I stood up.

  Every eye followed me, and they fell quiet. It wasn’t intentional, but I often had that effect on people.

  “Take me to Dr. Adams’ office.”

  Colonel Hughes smiled. “Yes… Let’s surprise him. The rest of you stay here and continue our regular agenda. I’ll be right back.”

  She led the way, and I followed. We left the rest behind us to wait. I could see them through the glass walls of the conference room, talking rapidly among themselves. Except for Fillmore, they were pretty quiet. I wondered if they had been intimidated by Colonel Hughes or myself, and I suspected it was Hughes. She seemed like a natural slave-driver.

  We arrived at a locked door a hundred steps later. The placard identified it as Dr. Adams office. Hughes knocked, then worked the touchpad when there was no answer.

  “Let me,” I said, and I caressed the lock.

  It swung open without hesitation.

  Hughes didn’t scream at what we saw inside. I’ll give her credit for that. She gasped in shock, and she dropped her paper, which luffed to the floor—but she stood her ground. Although she was a colonel in Earth’s collective military, she obviously wasn’t a trained front-line fighter. She was more like a doctor or a dentist who’d gotten rank because she owed her schooling to the government. But she wasn’t a wimp, even so.

  A man in a lab coat lay on the floor of the office. Not only was he dead—he’d been eviscerated.

  His open, staring eyes looked up at us from the cold floor. His mouth was locked in a rictus of horror and surprise. Flecks of blood were splattered in a semi-circle around his body. It was almost as if his guts had exploded from the inside. Something had made quick work of opening all his soft stuff and putting it on the ground.

  “Is this Dr. Adams?” I asked Hughes.

  She stared and breathed rapidly, but she managed to answer me.

  “Yes,” she said. “This is why they sent you, isn’t it? Do you think they already knew?”

  I eyed the mess on the floor and slowly nodded. “Probably,” I admitted. “I’m never sent on a mission without good cause.”

  She watched me with a different look in her eyes as I stepped into the office and began basic forensics work. She summoned her guards from outside the lab then fell strangely quiet.

  It took the guards several minutes to reach Adams’ office. All those doors and robots… sometimes, that sort of stuff could work against you, like a difficult lock on a gun case. When you really needed help, minutes could seem like hours.

  The office of the late Dr. Adams made for an interesting crime scene.

  By all appearances, he’d been disemboweled by a large, vicious animal. It was an unusual way to go for a guy inside a secure room at a buttoned-down facility.

  I made quick work of assessing the dead scientist’s office and then turned back to his body. The different perspective gave me new insight. What I didn’t see here spoke volumes.

  Soon the cavalry showed up—the real goons.

  “Please clear the area,” said some guy with a colorful patch on his jacket.

  I lifted his gun barrel with my finger as I stepped back toward the body. The feisty guard barred my way. He was taking this seriously, but I could tell he was no forensics expert. I could also tell he was regular military, not special forces of any kind. His posture was untrained, unfocused—the chin tucked down a bit too far.

  “Let him work, you idiot,” Colonel Hughes admonished him bluntly.

  Everyone could tell she was flustered, and the security man complied with a glower and a shake of his head. “Yes, sir.”

  They wanted to zip up what was left of Adams and haul the mess out of there, but I stopped them. After a few more minutes alone with the corpse, I made a gesture with a swirling finger. They removed the body and began to clean up. Robots did the dirty work, buzzing and spraying chemicals.

  “Would you care to discuss this incident further in your office, Emily?” I asked Colonel Hughes.

  “Yes, we’d better do that—I’ve already messaged the staff to break up the meeting at the conference room,” she said, frowning at me. Then she added, “and please, Chief Gray—call me Colonel Hughes.”

  “Of course.”

  As we turned down brightly lit hallways, I found them peopled by random assistants, researchers and confused-looking security people. Everyone looked nervous and there were dozens of whispered conversations. Word of the discovery had leaked out. Soon, it would be past the walls of this place and in the general population—it was inevitable, it was human nature.

  I couldn’t help but notice security had subtly tightened. Even innocuous doorways required some kind of new trick to gain access. We passed through a secure checkpoint as we changed sectors and approached the colonel’s private office again.

  Once we were inside, I noted to myself that the delivery lifter was now missing—I hoped that wasn’t significant.

  I resumed the chair I’d used previously. I even put my feet up this time.

  She got right to it. “How could anyone have done this right under our noses? We thoroughly check everyone. We use extreme security procedures…”

  I brought my feet back down to the floor. “Hold on—anyone? After seeing the physical damage inflicted on Dr. Adams, I’d say we’re looking for anything that might have done this.”

  She got a little snotty at that point. “Oh, pardon me if I didn’t include clawed ghosts on my list of suspects.”

  “That’s not what I meant—” I began, but she cut me off.

  “Okay—let’s go there then. Just because we’re talking about building a ship, everyone thinks there’s alien involvement in anything that goes wrong around here. The very idea is absurd.”

  “We have to consider all possibilities,” I told her.

  “Is the Ministry of Control in agreement on this?”

  “They sent me, didn’t they?”

  “So… you’re an expert on aliens? You should be aware then that there hasn’t been a single verified incident of alien malice documented. We’ve barely had any contact with outsiders for decades. What little we have had has all occurred out at the barrier, at the edge of our Sphere—not on Earth itself.”

  “All true, but—”

  “Someone at Control is going to blame me for all this, aren’t they? That’s the plan, here, isn’t it?”

  I raised my eyebrows, not sure where she was going now. Most people became excitable when confronted with violent death, but Colonel Hughes seemed to be turning paranoid.

  “We’re talking about my entire over-achieving career. It’s all rolled up into this project!” she shouted at me.

  She stood and then continued. Soon, she was cursing.

  I stopped listening after a half-minute or so and shrugged off her tirade. I could honestly empathize with her frustration—but I didn’t care to listen to it.

  “Look,” I told her when she took a deep breath, “I’m not here to place administrative blame. I’m here to solve problems, not to make them. Rest assured I don’t get called into a situation unless things have gone beyond a certain threat-level.”

  She took in a deep breath and forced herself to become calm.

  “I’m terribly sorry I’m not at my professional best right now,” she said a moment later.

  “I understand. I’m just trying to get to the heart of the situation, and I want to be effective.”

  “Right… right… You see, this project has almost reached launch day. It’s crushing to lose a
key team member in such a horrible way. I can’t fathom what the hell is going on with our own security.”

  “Colonel Hughes, I think we’re looking at more than a security problem.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “I still think the words we choose matter, and I’ll try to show you what I mean. Adams not only got torn apart by something which apparently didn’t even need a tool to do it. He was also surprised.”

  She stared, waiting for the punch line. “So… you’re saying a monster stalked past our countless prohibitive check-points? That it crept up behind Bill Adams and killed him violently before somehow vanishing from the facility without a trace?”

  I leaned forward and took another crack at it. “Emily, we’re short on time, here. What happened wasn’t an accident. It was murder. Something got to your Dr. Adams inside a secure room and put him down before he could so much as think to call for help.”

  “Murder…?” she said, as if tasting the word for the first time. She crossed her arms and squinted at me. “Okay, go on.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual about the man’s office?”

  She thought for a moment. “Well… other than the dead body on the floor, no, I didn’t.”

  “Neither did I. Dr. Bill Adams toppled out of his chair with one hand still in his pocket. There wasn’t a thing out of place in the whole damned room except his small intestine. No struggle, no messy desk, not even a footprint.”

  “But… that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Correct. We’re looking for something that doesn’t make any sense, and I’m going to need to be unhindered to keep you and your people safe.”

  “Yes… all right, Chief Gray. I’m sorry—I’ve been difficult, and you clearly have a unique skill set. I am going to trust you with all of it—my life’s work.”

  She deflated almost imperceptibly. Even though she turned to look up at me with resignation, she was conflicted. A leader to the core, Emily Hughes didn’t know what to do with herself when she wasn’t in charge.

  I turned and gave her my full attention, touching her shoulder briefly. “I’m not taking anything away. You’re the boss here. My job is to keep you and your team safe. Without that, this launch won’t happen.”

  “It’s still a go, then?” she asked quietly. “You haven’t heard anything from the Ministry about shutting it down?”

  “That would be letting the bad guys win, wouldn’t it?”

  She gave me a tight smile. “Fair enough, Chief—we’ll call our relationship symbiotic.”

  “One more thing, if you don’t mind?” I asked.

  “Now what?”

  “I could sure use a comm-link if you’ve got an extra to spare.”

  “Who doesn’t wear a comm-link these days?” she asked.

  “I’ve got no answer to that question,” I told her truthfully.

  “Well—I have an old external model I don’t use any more,” she said after making a quizzical face. “It’s yours to borrow. I’d like to be able to get ahold of you anyway.”

  “We ought to be real careful from here out,” I said. “I’d like a full accounting of the primary staff A.S.A.P.—let’s round them up again.”

  Colonel Hughes was already texting the summons. Fifteen minutes later, most of them had assembled in the too-small conference room once again. People were buzzing with adrenaline-fueled whispers and muttered conversations.

  “Listen up, people,” began Colonel Hughes. “We have a job to do, and I can’t afford for us to steer off course now.”

  Unable to pace in the small room, she stood and drummed her fingers on the table instead.

  A scan through the group left her wondering. “Where has Dr. Brandt gone now?”

  No one gave her an answer, so she became annoyed with them all.

  “Fillmore?” she asked. “Why am I not seeing the attentive face of my leading engineer in this conference room?”

  Shrugs and more muttering were the response.

  “Damn it.” She grabbed her earpiece and clipped it on. “Brandt, report in immediately.” She waited and stared—then waited some more. “Dr. Brandt...?”

  I met the Colonel’s eyes. “Any response at all?”

  “Negative. She’s off-line.”

  She was holding it together pretty well, but this couldn’t be a good sign. I grabbed the initiative. “We’d better go check on her. Where would we expect the doctor to be working right now?”

  “Dr. Brandt has been on the team from the start—built the entire engine except for Sean Fillmore’s work on propulsion and the navigational tech that Dr. Adams contributed. The first place I’d look would be the construction bay.”

  “Let’s do it. Lead the way.”

  Colonel Hughes addressed the room full of unblinking eyes.

  “Stay here. Do not leave for any reason. Even if you go for a piss, make sure you do it in pairs. We’ll check on things and be right back to clear up confusion and move the project forward.”

  She dashed down halls that were now empty save for the scant presence of guards manning checkpoints.

  Keeping up with a determined jog between these stops, I was impressed that the boss-lady seemed to be quite fit and capable. If I had to guess politely, I’d say she was pushing forty, but her eyes were clear and her breathing reasonably comfortable—even at a near sprint. Could she be taking longevity drugs already? Perhaps government policy had changed on that point since the last time I’d been awake. Whatever the case, she was giving me a run for my money.

  It crossed my mind then that I didn’t really know how old I was. By my appearance, I guessed myself to be in my mid-thirties. I had no wrinkles or graying hair to speak of, and yet I felt much older somehow. I could feel the weight of many, many years of experience and training in my subconscious—like I had a lifetime of secrets held there.

  Colonel Hughes nodded her head toward the next guard station. It was more heavily manned than previous checkpoints. Some of these guys even had two patches on their jackets.

  “You know,” I said, “we’re going to need a lot more muscle around us. Real soldiers who are trained and know their business. The heavy reliance on robots and other tech in your facility isn’t enough. It’s reckless—even if you weren’t getting invaded by killer ghosts.”

  “Hold on.” Emily Hughes pushed back her hair to touch her earpiece and listen. “Dr. Brandt?”

  She paused to listen, but still heard no intelligible response.

  “Chief, something’s wrong in there…” she said. “I’m hearing movement.”

  Stepping past her, I went first. The automated vault didn’t give me an argument. I breezed through the daunting array of biometric screenings.

  Glancing back, I saw Colonel Hughes cringe. She’d stopped cold and was now clutching her earpiece.

  I could hear it now too, as the massive door unsealed before me. It sounded like a muted, squawking shriek. Was that Dr. Brandt? Could something be killing her right now?

  Trickles of nanites drew back into recesses, and an audible snap of air popped as the pressure equalized.

  Then we heard a desperate, scrambling scuffle.

  Once the door had swung wide enough to allow entry, we stepped inside. The ceiling vaulted away, high above us. We stopped in our tracks with open-mouthed stares.

  Chapter 5

  The noise was all coming from Toby. He was banging a hammer on the back of a robot, which was marching slowly over the deck ignoring him. He was crashing a hammer on the back panel, clinging to the shoulders and going for a ride—if a headless robot can be said to have shoulders.

  “Well, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said, taking in the scene. “Are we witnessing sabotage, Colonel?”

  “No… he’s always doing something odd. If we didn’t need him, I’d send him back to the university labs.”

  I nodded, but I was still disturbed. Could this youth be somehow responsible for all the chaos? It seemed unlikely, as he looked like a sk
inny nerd to me—but looks could be deceiving.

  Just then Jillian Brandt came out of a supply room with her arms loaded and a smart-scroll tucked under her chin. I was surprised to see her wearing what looked like old-fashioned librarian’s glasses.

  Deciding that any peculiarities I was seeing passed for normal down in this vault, I turned back to Hughes.

  “Give me five minutes with this little gentleman,” I said. “After that, I say we all get back to that staff meeting we’re having so much trouble getting started.”

  “All right,” Colonel Hughes said.

  She seemed relieved everyone was alive—even if they were behaving oddly. “It looks like we have matters under control. Jillian, get yourself together and head up to the conference room quickly, please. And for God’s sake, please keep your link handy so I can reach you.”

  Dr. Brandt gave her an affirmative nod, and Hughes spun on her heel to leave. Hughes shook the comm-link on her wrist as she walked out and spoke aloud to communicate with others. “Security, it’s Hughes. Meet me at the construction bay, I need an escort back up to the main floor.”

  The massive vault door soon opened with a gush of air, then resealed behind her after she’d left. After a quick scan, I sensed only three of us in the chamber. So far, things could be much worse.

  Trotting after Toby and his robot, I soon caught up and plucked him off the back of it. I stood him up as he sputtered and complained. Half-dragging him, I took the teen by the scruff and hauled him into a break room that I found within hollering distance of the showers. He staggered and reeled dramatically, beginning to screech before we got through the door.

  “Cut it out, or I’ll give you a reason to yell.”

  Toby sat sullenly and just looked at me with dark eyes. His cap was now missing and revealed short hair the color of fresh pumpkin.

  “Jeez, kid—what are you, fourteen years old?”

  His eyes grew even darker. He had a downy halo of fine facial hairs on his neck and face which I believed wouldn’t know the edge of a razor for many years.

  “You are as despicably disagreeable as the rest,” he said. “My age shouldn’t matter. Surely even you can see my capabilities far exceed my chronological years. Incidentally, what are you supposed to be? A security guard or something like that?”