that they intend to seize her."
"Hold on," David said, his eyes shut tight, as he tried to wrap his head around the problem. He took a moment to sort out his thoughts. "You said that stage three will be a failure. Will fail. You're speaking in future tense, things that will happen."
Bishop nodded. Instead of explaining, he tapped his hand-pad. The small speaker inside started spewing static. After a few seconds, I began to make out a voice.
"Echo-two, Echo-two," the tired, male voice called out. "This is Zulu-two-three, on the ball and requesting assistance." I sat up a little straighter in my chair. I felt a chill run up my spine.
"That's you, man," Kyle whispered to me, astonished.
"Shhh!" I hissed, trying to hear my own desperate voice through the static.
The recording continued, but the static made it hard to follow. "... Saturnus is compromised. Edra commandos are pushing... bridge is secure. Captain... won't cease experiment... temp... psychosis. Entire crew affected."
Admiral Bishop stopped the recording. There was a deathly silence in the room. I could feel the blood in my face drain away, and I realized I was holding my breath. I let it out with a loud puff. Everyone was looking at me, with glares that ranged from surprised to horrified. David eyed me keenly, as though examining me, considering every possibility.
"There are more recordings," Bishop said evenly, "but I cannot share them with you. Suffice it to say, things will go very wrong on the Saturnus. I am hoping you can sort that out before it happens."
"That recording," David said, looking to Bishop's hand-pad. "It hasn't been sent yet."
Bishop nodded. "Correct. So far as my people can figure out, the stage two burst, which our listening posts detected on schedule, destabilized the area of space around the Saturnus. Obviously the crew did not realize this, though we are not sure why. When they enacted stage three, something occurred," he stopped himself, "occurs, which creates some serious problems with space-time. I wish I understood more of it, but I am not a temporal physicist. In short, the experiment will not only fail, it will create a situation in which we are able to receive Captain Mallory's transmissions, despite them not having been sent yet."
"I guess we know why the Edra objected," Kyle commented.
Bishop grimaced, nodded. "That is as good a guess as any."
"So this is why we were brought here," I reasoned aloud. "You received this transmission, realized that we are going to be sent on this mission, and order us brought here."
"No," the Admiral replied. "You had already been here for several days when the Saturnus left. You were sent here pending the investigation into your actions in the field. The Saturnus was so highly classified, most of Fleet Command had no idea it was here. If they had, they certainly would not have sent you here." He shook his head. "No, you being here is a lucky stroke for us. We did not receive this particular transmission until this morning. Others had been streaming in during the night, though we could not identify the voice. I had already decided to deploy you, when this particular transmission came to me."
"Am I the only one getting a headache?" Kyle muttered.
"Let me keep it simple, then," the admiral raised his voice slightly. "What we know is this; the Saturnus will shortly begin the third stage of her experiments. That is scheduled to happen in less than three days. Your squad will be deployed via needle-jumper. You will board the vessel and stop stage three from going online. You have full discretionary authority during this mission. If that means weapons, so be it. All of the details we can give you, we will put into your hand-pads. You can read them on the way. In the meantime, I want you geared up and ready to board your ship right away."
There was a silence in the room, the disconcerted scowls of four men who were being asked to walk into the bizarre and unknown. It felt like an ambush, with that creepy transmission as a sort of warning, like when the enemy accidentally snaps a twig while he lies in wait for you. When you heard that tell-tale snap, you stopped, reassessed, and generally either backed away or started shooting. You certainly didn't keep walking forward. In this case, we were doing just that.
"Any questions?" the admiral asked.
I shook my head, trying to keep my own fears from showing through. This whole situation smelled like shit, and we were about to be eye-balls deep in it.
Where was a simple board of inquiry when you needed one?
Goddammit.
***
Less than an hour later, laden down with as much gear as we could carry, we were strapping into the troop hold of our needle-jumper, and waiting for launch clearance. Needle-jumpers are small military transports. They can't generate their own wormholes, so they are loaded onto larger, specially-built ships, which move into position, generate the wormholes themselves, and then fire the needle-jumper like a bullet from a gun. They arrive at their destination unseen, move in under the best stealth tech humans could develop, and if necessary, literally jab their way into enemy ships like a hypodermic needle. Needle-jumpers were shaped just like the name suggested. They were one-way ships, but did have slow escape capability, mostly the drift-away-and-hope-you're-found kind.
The troop hold was small. It was designed for twelve troops, but the four of us had so much gear, we pretty much filled the small, cylindrical compartment. The curved ceiling forced us to duck as we strapped our duffel bags full of equipment into the unused seats. The troop hold had compartments for gear bags, much like any civilian airliner or spaceliner, but soldiers never used them. The compartment doors tended to jam when the ship rammed its target. If we went in hot, I didn't want us to have to pry open the compartments to get our gear. So, we strapped them to the deck. Only our rifles stayed with us, strapped to our bodies. Marines didn't give up their rifles. Ever.
In addition to our own personal combat gear, blast armor, power packs, medical kit, rations and water, a dozen tools that did everything we might need, and of course our plasma rifles, we each had a duffel bag full of extra goodies. Raj was carrying enough remotely detonated explosives to cut a battleship in two, let alone the Saturnus, which was maybe a quarter the size. Raj took a particular joy in blowing things up. It wasn't the technical challenge that excited him, but the idea that he could take all of the power inherent in large hardware, and with the push of a button, reduce it to wreckage and rubble.
David was carrying all sorts of engineering diagnostic equipment, handed to him by a nervous physicist who insisted that we take all sorts of readings before we shut the Saturnus down. David could probably take control of the ship and fly it home, and do it all from a closet, considering the sorts of gear he was carrying. He also carried a small, sealed water cooler that sloshed as he carried it. We always brought it along for needle-jumper insertions. We should have brought two of them, but we couldn't find a second cooler in the rush.
I was carrying a bag full of emergency beacons, meter long tubes on retractable tripod legs which put out a signal powerful enough to be detected in the next star system. I also had a small tank with enough trizene gas to put the entire crew to sleep for a year, and the gear to hook it into the Saturnus' environmental system. I also carried a specially-issued Captain's Pad, a small hand-pad usually issued exclusively to ship captains. I could do anything to that ship, once I interfaced it with the Saturnus' system. I could even blow the engines, or direct it to fly into a star, if it came to it.
Kyle
