Renegade (The Kurgan War Book 7) Read online

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “My God, it’s all coming together. It’s not just your military that’s interested in the Kenor System. Mine is too.”

  “Then I suggest we work together to find out what is going on before both sides decide to dispatch ships into the DMZ and an incident occurs, plunging us back into war.”

  “I agree. For now, let’s consider this our number one priority. The usual ceasefire verification patrols can continue, but our intelligence assets must combine their efforts so we can get a grip on this situation before it gets out of hand.”

  Kaar stood. “Robert, I believe you to be an honorable man. If only you and I had met before the war. Perhaps we could have averted it and saved millions of lives.”

  Admiral Sheridan got to his feet. “I share your sentiments. But even you have to admit that war was inevitable. Because your government is a theocracy, it saw my people as subhuman because we don’t worship your God. It regrettably took years of bloodshed to show your leaders how wrong they were.”

  Kaar nodded. “Now my people are killing each other because they don’t agree with one another’s interpretation of the Lord Kurgan’s words.”

  “Let’s work together to make sure the bloodshed comes to an end.”

  Kaar bowed slightly and shuffled out of the room.

  Captain Killam had been waiting outside of the door in case he was needed. Robert saw him and waved him in.

  “How did things go, sir?” asked Killam.

  “For the most part, it went as expected. The Kurgs were spying on us as well.”

  “One of their ships, a frigate I believe, jumped away from their fleet a couple of minutes after Admiral Kaar arrived.”

  Robert handed Killam his tablet. “I wrote down some notes while Kaar and I were talking.”

  “More ship inspections?”

  “Yes, and they’re to be surprise inspections as well.”

  “Very good, sir. Anything else?”

  “Where is my son’s task force right now?”

  “He’s in reserve. They’re not scheduled to deploy back into Kurgan space until the borders have shifted.”

  “Have him and Captain Cole report over here ASAP. Use back channels to pass the order. I don’t want this recorded by anyone in our fleet.”

  Killam scrunched up his face. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m going to be speaking with Admiral Oshiro in the next couple of hours. I have a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that he’s going to tell me to back off the Danube and leave it and its crew alone. If he orders me to let her be, I will do as I’m told. I doubt Michael will see things that way and do something to get his wife and her navigator back.”

  “Sir, I don’t understand why you are going to risk your career to retrieve a couple of officers who will undoubtedly be released when the intelligence staff on the Danube are finished with them.”

  “Because, Captain, I want this war to end, and if freeing them to learn what happened during their mission to the Kenor System costs me my career but avoids further bloodshed, then I’m willing to do it.”

  Killam came to attention. “Sir, I’ll make sure Major Sheridan and Captain Cole are here in the next twelve hours. If they’re going to be heading all the way back to Illum Prime, I’ll arrange with Colonel Wright for some of his long-range ships to be made available. You know neither he nor any of his people would breathe a word about this to the fleet.”

  “Thank, you.” Robert waited for Killam to leave the room before taking a seat and staring out a window at the blackness of space. In all the years he had served in the armed forces, Robert had never once disobeyed an order from a superior officer. Now, to avoid a confrontation in the DMZ Admiral Sheridan was ready to break the rules even if it ended his career. It was a price he knew his closest staff officers would also be willing to pay without a hint of reservation.

  Chapter 10

  A holographic image of the Danube hung in the air. It wasn’t a large ship. At just over one hundred meters long, with a significant portion of that being used to house the jump engine, the vessel was reported to have a crew of twenty-three.

  Michael Sheridan studied the image before him. He was confident they could rescue Tarina and Wendy, but only if everything went to plan. Sheridan tapped Colonel Wright on the shoulder. “Any word from Illum Prime, sir? Is the Danube still in orbit?”

  “No change,” replied Wright, sitting behind the controls of a sleek command shuttle. “Two of my ships have it in sight. It hasn’t moved in days.”

  Cole stuck his head inside the cockpit. “Well, if this gets cocked up and we get arrested, at least we’ll have an entire special warfare squadron as cellmates.”

  “It’ll work,” replied Sheridan. “When they fall for our ruse, we’ll be in and out in under five minutes flat.” The two friends walked back into the small crew compartment and popped open a green plastic box.

  Cole hefted a security baton. With an electrically charged tip, the device was used to break up riots by incapacitating anyone who was touched by the end for several minutes. Cole turned it on and nodded. “This should do the trick. You know we’re going to be very unpopular with the folks in the black ops crowd when this is all said and done.”

  “I remember you telling me a couple of years ago how much you disliked special operations organizations.”

  “I do. They’re all a bunch of muscle-bound prima donnas as far as I’m concerned. These highly secretive blokes are even worse. They feel they are unaccountable to the chain of command and can do whatever they want as long as they can justify what they did after the fact. In my humble opinion, that’s when good order and discipline breaks down.”

  “Well, whatever happens in the next few minutes, I’m glad you volunteered to come along.”

  Cole switched off the riot baton in his hands. “As if I’d let you go on a mission without me to guide you. Besides, two of my best mates are being held on that ship, and the thought of getting into fisticuffs with a ship full of black ops personnel is an opportunity I could never turn down.”

  Sheridan smiled. His friend’s confidence and willingness to go to grips with the people holding his wife erased any reservations he harbored deep inside his chest about the mission.

  “Okay, we’re going to come out of our jump in one minute’s time,” announced Wright over the ship’s speakers. “The second we appear alongside the Danube, I’m going to begin venting oxygen out into space. So, buckle up and put your helmets on.”

  The two Marines locked their helmets on their survival suits and took their seats next to the shuttle’s side door. At their feet was a shiny metal ball with four legs on it. Next to it was a small oblong box.

  “Coming out of our jump in five-four-three-two-one,” said Wright. “Opening the outer vents, now.”

  Sheridan turned his head and peered through a window. He could see a thin cloud of oxygen streaming out into the vacuum of space.

  “Danube, this is the shuttle Neptune,” said Wright into his helmet mic. “We have suffered a major oxygen leak and are asking for your assistance. Please help us.”

  “Can you make it to the surface?” asked a man on the Danube’s bridge.

  “Negative, I need to dock with your ship, or I’m going to lose my two badly injured passengers.”

  There was silence for a few seconds. Sheridan thought they weren’t going to help when the Danube gave them permission to dock on its starboard side.

  “Game on,” said Cole, grinning inside his helmet.

  Sheridan watched as the Danube extended its docking arm. The instant the arm magnetized and took hold of their shuttle, Sheridan leaped out of his seat. He held his baton in his right hand and the metal ball in his left. Cole had attached the oblong box to his belt.

  Without waiting to be told, Wright and his co-pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Tolinski, hurried to switch off every power source on the sh
uttle. The last to be turned off were the outside doors.

  The docking arm pressurized.

  “Okay, let’s do this,” said Sheridan as he pressed the open button and the airlock door slid to one side. Sheridan and Cole rushed over to the airlock on the Danube and began beating on the door as if they were in dire need of help.

  A technician on the other side of the door saw them and went to open the airlock. As planned, Sheridan and Cole switched off the power to their suits and held their breath. The door moved aside. In a flash, Cole struck the man with his baton, sending the technician to the floor writhing in pain. Sheridan stepped over the man’s body and placed the metal ball down. He depressed a button on the device and held up a thumb to Cole to let him know it was activated. Less than a second later, a small but powerful electromagnetic pulse shot through the ship, disabling it. Everything shut down at once. Artificial gravity, life support, lights, comms, and propulsion were all offline.

  Sheridan and Cole reactivated the power to their suits and switched on their grav-boots. The hallway was pitch black.

  “Which way?” asked Cole, switching on his helmet lights.

  “Straight down the hallway until we come to a T-junction,” explained Sheridan. “We then take the right-hand passage. That should lead us to where our friends are being held.”

  “Lead on,” said Cole with a wave of his arm.

  In rehearsals, they had always expected the crew of the Danube to be good at what they did and gave themselves two minutes before the ship became fully operational once more. At the T-junction, a man floating helplessly went for his sidearm. Cole reached out and jabbed him with his baton. The man dropped his pistol, flew back against the wall, and blacked out from the powerful electrical shock.

  “Try not to enjoy yourself too much,” said Sheridan to his friend.

  “Hey, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” replied Cole.

  “This way,” said Sheridan, pointing down the corridor. The two men hurried as best they could. Their feet felt heavy inside their bulky grav-boots. In seconds, they came to the door they expected to find Tarina and Wendy behind.

  Cole removed a universal key from his belt, inserted it into the manual lock on the wall, and turned the key over. There was an audible click as the door opened.

  Sheridan grabbed the door and yanked it the rest of the way open. An unsuspecting guard floated out of the room. With a quick flick of his wrist, Cole knocked the agent out cold.

  Sheridan shone his light inside the room. “Yes!” he exclaimed when he spotted Tarina and Wendy floating in the darkened room. Sheridan’s emotions got the better of him. He rushed inside and took his wife in his arms. His heart was racing in his chest.

  “Took your sweet time getting here,” said Wendy to Cole.

  “Sorry, we were busy elsewhere,” responded Cole. “Want a hug?”

  “Not on your life. Now take my hand and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  All over the ship, the power began to come back on. The lights in the room and the hallway flickered for a second before switching on.

  Sheridan and Cole rushed to switch off the power to their grav-boots so they could easily move about using the ship’s artificial gravity.

  “So what’s your plan?” asked Tarina.

  “Stay close behind us,” replied Sheridan. “Your boss has a shuttle docked on the starboard side of this ship waiting to take you to freedom.”

  Cole moved to the door and looked both ways down the hallway. “Coast’s clear.” He opened the box on his belt and removed a gray ball about the size of a baseball. Cole tapped it in his hand and tossed it down the corridor. A second later, the ball exploded. A thick wall of fast-hardening foam soon blocked the passage. Anyone behind them wouldn’t be able to get through for at least half an hour.

  With Cole in the lead they sprinted out of the room and turned to the left at the junction. A door opened in front of the fleeing Marines. A man reached for his pistol but was struck in the chest with one of the non-lethal balls. Cole chuckled as the man cried out in panic as the foam rapidly expanded, blocking the doorway.

  “Get in,” said Cole, guiding his friends into the docking arm and over to their shuttle. He grabbed the two remaining balls in his pouch and threw them to the left and right of the airlock, sealing it off from the Danube’s crew.

  “Closing the outer door,” called Sheridan as Cole dove inside the shuttle.

  “Detaching now,” reported Wright.

  “Everyone, buckle up,” ordered Sheridan, taking a seat next to Tarina.

  “Is this ship armed?” asked Wendy as she snapped her harness tight.

  “Yes, but it’ll do them no good,” said Cole.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because a couple of your friends have their weapons locked on the Danube’s weapons’ control systems.”

  Wright’s voice came over the ship’s intercom. “Jumping in three-two-one.” The stars vanished from the windows as the ship was enveloped in a jump bubble.

  Sheridan turned his head and smiled at Tarina. Every time he saw her face he was reminded of the first time he laid eyes on her back at the academy. Both would never say it was love at first sight, but theirs was now a bond no one would ever break.

  “If you take off your helmet, I’ll let you give me a kiss,” said Tarina.

  Sheridan hurried to remove his helmet. He leaned over and placed his lips on hers and felt the warmth from her kiss, which only made him hungry for more.

  “Oy, you two, save that for later,” said Cole. “We’ve just broken at least a dozen service rules and regulations. I hope your dad is connected because we’re gonna need a good lawyer to keep us out of jail after what we just did.”

  “I’m not so sure that you’re the ones who are going to be in trouble,” said Wendy.

  Cole tilted his head. “Why would you say that?”

  “Our interrogators were fixated on our last mission in Kurgan space. I got the feeling that the intelligence provided to them from our ship’s computer and the satellite in orbit above Kenor-3 was something they had been looking for over the past year. The longer we stayed on the Danube, the chattier our interrogators and the guards became with us. Gents, ceasefire or not, I’m positive people from our side are planning a military raid inside the DMZ.”

  Sheridan shifted in his seat. “To do what?”

  “I know this may sound crazy, but Wendy and I believe the Kurgans are attempting to build a ship or device capable of traveling back in time and our people want to get their hands on this craft before it can be used.”

  “Your father was right,” said Cole to Sheridan. “This situation has the potential to blow up in our faces and turn our relatively stable ceasefire back into a full-scale war.”

  “Good God,” muttered Sheridan. “I thought time travel was just a theory. After all, we don’t have hordes of tourists coming back from the future to take a look around at how we live now.”

  “None that we’re aware of,” said Cole.

  “The best-case scenario is to use a wormhole to travel through spacetime,” explained Wendy. “The problem is that you need a wormhole opening that existed in the past to travel to.”

  Sheridan unbuckled himself from his harness. “Could it work both ways?”

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  “Before we came to rescue you, we boarded a derelict Kurgan ship. We weren’t the first to find her and regrettably, she had been rigged for destruction. Later, Captain Rodriguez theorized that a wormhole had appeared and then disappeared near our ship which resulted in a gravimetric anomaly occurring which cost the life of one of my men.”

  “Michael, what are you getting at?” asked Tarina.

  “I’m no astrophysicist,” said Sheridan.

  “You can say that again,” quipped Wendy.

  “Ha, ha,” replied Sheridan. “Could that Kurgan ship have recently transited through a wormhole from the past and that’s why it had never been detected i
n a century?”

  “Once again, theoretically, yes,” said Wendy. “But the odds of it happening are probably a trillion to one.”

  “I wonder if it’s still there?” said Cole.

  “When we get back to the fleet we can ask the Kurgs to see if it is still floating about the nebula or not,” said Sheridan.

  “Look, I’m not as educated as you three but what about the issues of time travel paradoxes which should prevent such a thing from ever occurring?” asked Cole.

  “Like the one if you travel back in time and shoot your grandfather, which would mean that you and your father would never be born,” said Wendy.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “The Novikov Self-Consistency Conjecture allows you to ignore time travel paradoxes.”

  “The what?”

  “Novikov was a Russian scientist in the twentieth century who theorized that time travel was possible and if an event were to arise which would lead to a paradox, then the chances of that occurring are nil. Thus, it would be impossible to create time travel paradoxes. It’s a tad more complicated than that, but I’m keeping it simple for you and Michael to understand.”

  “My thick skull is having a hard time with the concepts you’re bandying about, but if you believe it’s at all possible, then so do I.”

  Sheridan stood and began to pace the crew compartment. “If the Kurgans could perfect time travel, there’s no telling where in the past they would go.”

  “Or what they might do,” added Cole.

  Chapter 11

  The mood inside the briefing room was uneasy.

  On one side of the table sat Michael Sheridan, Cole, Tarina, and Wendy. On the other were Admiral Sheridan, Captain Killam, Admiral Kaar, and his aide, Colonel Kurn. The presentation Michael and his people had given had left the principal members of the ceasefire committee speechless.

  Robert Sheridan looked over at Tarina and Wendy. “Just for the record, you have no doubt that your ship’s sensors detected tachyon particles over Kenor-3.”