Second Earth (3 page)

  
Shawn was beginning to tire of this game.
“Why don’t you just ask me what you really want to know?”

  
“Because I like prying the information from
you,” she said as she pointed a wavering finger at him. “It’s one of the few
joys I’ve gotten out of this mission.”

  
Trying not to let her current state affect
him, Shawn folded his arms across his chest and glared at her. “Well, since
you’ve ticked me off, I’m going to answer it anyway.
You
won’t be going down there with us.”

  
Her eyes went wide and she bolted upright in
her chair. “And why not?” she yelled, dropping the whispered tone the two had
been sharing for the last few minutes. “I’m the only one qualified to make an
investigation of the surface.”

  
“Krif’s got a few specialists on board who
can—”

  
“Specialists,” she scoffed, then finished
her drink. “They’re pushbutton officers who don’t have the…the…
ce cadeau spécial
to do what I do.”

  
He narrowed his eyes. “Did you just speak to
me in French?”

  
She continued to point an accusatory finger
across the table at him. “Don’t change the subject, mister.”

  
“Krif thinks it might be too dangerous for
you. He wants to make sure the area is secured before he brings anyone else
down.”

  
“Too dangerous?” she spat. “Too dangerous?”

  
“You’re repeating yourself.”

  
“I know what I said, Mister Kestrel.”

  
Shawn flagged down the waiter and ordered
two more waters. “We’re back to Mister Kestrel, are we?” he asked as the young
man disappeared.

  
“Yes, we are. And I’ll have you know I can
handle myself just fine down there.”

  
“Like you did on the
Icarus
?” The words were out of his mouth before he could catch
them. Shawn closed his eyes, putting up a completely useless shield against the
verbal onslaught he was sure she was about to release.
Here it comes.

  
In a moment of realization, Melissa Graves’
expression turned from frustration to pure anger. She scowled menacingly at
him, and he knew that once again he had once again been caught. He wasn’t sure
how much farther he could shove his foot into his mouth, but he was positive
that Melissa Graves would be more than happy to help.

  
“
You
did this,” she sneered.

  
“What?”

  
“Don’t play stupid with me, Kestrel,
regardless of how well you pull it off! You told Krif not to let me go down
there! This was your idea!”

  
He slapped his hands into his lap. There was
probably no way to salvage the conversation at this point, so he decided to
throw all his cards down and see what Melissa was getting at. “And what if it
was?”

  
“And I’ll bet
Raven
is going with you.” Melissa had all but sounded out the
syllables of his executive officer’s call sign.

  
“And just what is that supposed to mean?”

  
Melissa leaned back in her chair as the
waiter reappeared with the two ice waters. She took her drink hastily, causing
some of the liquid to spill on the tabletop. “I think you know perfectly well
what I mean.”

  
“Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea. And
yes, she’ll be acting as my copilot and liaison back to the
Rhea
.”

  
“How convenient. You know, it’s nice to know
that my…my extensive intelligence training will be completely superfluous on an
actual
intelligence-gathering mission
!”

  
“In my own defense—which, by the way, I
don’t know why I even need to defend myself—I didn’t say you can’t come down.
All I’m saying is that I don’t want you down there until the area is cleared by
the Marines.”

  
“
You?
You don’t want?” she wailed bitterly.

  
“That’s right.
I
don’t want. I’ve been appointed the expedition commander for the
landing team. So for a change, what I say goes, not you.”

  
“Well, I’ve got news for you, Mister
Kestrel. I don’t really care right now about what you do or don’t want. I
outrank you, and I can do whatever I want on this mission. For heaven’s sake,
I’m in operational command of this entire carrier!”

  
“Yeah, you look it,” he said under his
breath as he brought his glass to his lips.

  
“What did you just say?” she all but
slurred.

  
“I said that is precisely the reason why you
should remain safe until I can ensure that you won’t be coming into a hostile
zone.”

  
Like the flip of a switch, her mood
instantly changed from anger to self-satisfaction. “Well, Mister Kestrel, you
and I are in a hostile zone right now. And having said that, I’m not sure I
want to continue this conversation with you any longer.” She brushed her hair
back in an overly exaggerated fashion, as if she were actively trying to cover
up the fact that she’d had too much to drink.

  
Shawn leaned back in his chair and turned
his gaze back to the large view ports. “Fine.”

  
“Fine.”

  
“Fine!” he snapped. “I have a mission to
prep for.” He stood from the table, ready to bolt from the space. A sudden
flash of insight crept over him and he turned around to regard the intoxicated,
yet still alarmingly attractive woman. “You know something? I really do care
about you. I don’t think I’ve truly been able to say that about anyone in a
very
long time. I just…I just hope
someday you can talk to me like a normal, non-crazy person. Maybe then we’ll
both be better off.”

  
Her mouth fell open and before she could say
anything that might have marginally repaired their conversation, Shawn turned
briskly on his heel and strode out of the observation deck. She watched as the
doors sealed behind him, then she gently closed her eyes before letting her
forehead free fall onto the backs of her hands.

  
Damn
it!

*
* *

  
The enormous Unified Sector Command
supercarrier
Rhea
slowed gracefully
in her approach as she neared the small blue-green world. This was Second
Earth: a name coined by the first settlers to venture out this far due to her
uncanny resemblance to their native home planet. Two hundred years ago, when
Old Earth had become too overpopulated and her natural riches almost entirely
depleted, it was decided that it was mankind’s opportunity to travel deep into
the heavens and seek out a new world to cultivate and grow. By that time, Old
Earth had already been visited by a small number of alien races, and when the
trade routes between their worlds became firmly established, so too were the
seeds planted that would eventually blossom into the Unified Collaboration of
Systems in the year 2253.

  
A short time before that, in 2248, a planet
had been discovered by pioneering free traders beyond the outer rim of the
then-explored systems. It was a place said to be a mirror image of their home
planet, nearly the same diameter, with slightly more land mass and a much cleaner
oxygen level than the used-and-abused world they were departing. The planet—by
then dubbed UNGC 3329—also had the added bonus of being entirely uninhabited.

  
Using primitive jump drives and fission
engines, four colonization ships—each containing a thousand volunteers,
scientists, teachers, doctors, and military personnel—departed for the new
world after two years of preparation in November of 2250. Joining them was a
small flotilla of warships from the newly created Unified Sector Command Fleet,
and together they set forth into the unknown.

  
Approximately one year later, a maintenance
oversight in the engineering plant of one of the colonial vessels had gone
unchecked, and the resulting explosion cost the intrepid explorers the colony
ship
Thimbron
and the destroyer
Lagrong
. Undeterred in their quest, the
fleet continued on for another eighteen months before they came to their new
home. It was exactly as it had been described to them, and exactly as they had
dreamed it would be.

  
Officially claiming the planet as Second
Earth, and after deploying a jump gate to the new world, each colony ship was
allowed to set down on a landmass of its choosing. They began erecting
settlements of their own, cultivating farmland and setting up irrigation
channels from the rich blue oceans of the planet. However, of the three cities
that had been built—Aberdeen, Mendahar, and Crystal—only Crystal City was
chosen by Sector Command for their primary staging grounds.

  
Beyond the west borders of the
thirty-two-square-mile city, Sector Command established a military base which
was fully equipped with research facilities to rival that of any system in Beta
Sector. They were the first scientists to have reached that far into space, and
they took the abundant opportunities that were afforded them to further the
sciences of the entire quadrant. In 2257, it was decided that Second Earth
would form the furthest edge of the Unified Collaboration’s outer sphere of
influence, itself containing all the member worlds of the fledgling Unified
Collaboration of Systems. Peace reigned on the planet for over a hundred years
as the wealth of knowledge inside the Unified Collaboration grew immensely.

  
That was until the Kafarans had come. No one
could really say why they invaded Unified space. Some said it was because we
entered theirs first, while most thought of them as nothing more than a warlike
culture with twisted concepts of right and wrong. Most agreed they were
monsters who destroyed everything and everyone in their path. When they
massacred the entire colony at Beta Five, the inhabitants of Second Earth began
to get nervous. They knew—as did everyone in the UCS—that the planet was simply
too close to Kafaran space.

  
As the war raged on, and as the Kafaran war
machine inched ever closer to the planet, the city of Mendahar—on the southern
continent of Imash—was completely evacuated. The mayor had tried to convince
the remaining colonists in Aberdeen and Crystal that they would soon face death
at the hands of the Kafarans, but her words were met with only deafening
silence. After two hundred years of peaceful existence, and with the aid of
Unified Colonial Operations, Mendahar packed up every last man, woman, child,
and pet and set back out into the heavens to try and start again.

  
Years later, their departure would be
remembered as providential.

  
Less than six months after Mendahar was
abandoned, every living thing on Second Earth was wiped clean from the planet.
The Sector Command Fourth Fleet was immediately dispatched from Concordia, and
when they arrived three months later, it was said they were greeted with a
lifeless world, completely incapable of supporting life in any form in the
known universe. The surface was said to be littered with craters from an
orbital bombardment, the air was completely saturated with toxins, the oceans
had been boiled away, and the radiation levels were off the charts. A fleet of
Kafaran warships was located nearby, and it was understood that the Fourth
Fleet wasted little time in dispatching the justice the enemy richly deserved.

  
Once the threat was over, Second Earth was
sealed off from the rest of the UCS. A series of automated defense and
communications satellites was placed in high orbit, used to transmit warning
messages to any approaching vessel and—should it become necessary—open fire on
any ship attempting to gain access to the planet.

  
Not long after, the Kafarans retreated back
into their space, and the war abruptly ended.

  
Now, four years after the events that had
supposedly decimated the planet, a new fleet of Sector Command ships approached
the once-beautiful world. What they saw was nothing like the reports had
claimed those few years ago.

  
The seas that had been ‘boiled away’ were
still plainly visible, bright blue and gleaming with majesty, even from the fleet’s
moderate distance. As the
Rhea
and
her destroyer and cruiser escorts moved closer, they began to see that the
surface was not at all covered with the impact craters from some ‘unimaginably
devastating orbital bombardment.’ The valleys and forests, mapped out over a
hundred years ago by the first explorers, were still as beautiful as they had
been so long ago. Snow still covered the polar regions of the planet, as well
the higher peaks of the great mountains of the Granite Forest on the northern
continent of Erros.

  
The only thing that meshed with the
after-war reports was the devastation caused in the cities, but even those
reports seemed exaggerated. The greater part of Mendahar was unscathed, and
Aberdeen fared little worse. The majority of the damage to the population
centers had been done at Crystal City. From what the sensors of the
Rhea
were telling the crew, the city and
the military base were in compete ruins.