Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1) (30 page)

"The crew won't mutiny over it?"

"Between what you did to Anderson and your actions at Calypso? I think they would mutiny for you if you wanted my job."

Mitchell shook his head. "Not a chance. I'm happy being a pilot."

"So you're turning me down again?"

"I didn't say that. Whatever we're facing, whoever these travelers are, I know I'm important somehow, and that makes you and the Schism important too. They tore through Calypso, and through this zone like they know exactly what they want and where to go to get it. This is bigger than you and me. If you need a second head to help you work this mess out, I guess mine will have to suit."

"So you'll do it?"

"Yes."

She smiled. "Thank you."

"Don't be too quick to thank me. You might have just sealed our fate."

She laughed, a mischievous look in her eye. "In that case, who knows how much longer we'll be alive? My bedroom is right over there."

Mitchell felt the stirring below his belt. "After what you just told me, you want to-"

She leaned down, putting a finger on his lips. "I made the decision not to let them steal my life from me. That included my enjoyment of more basic pleasures. I trust you, Mitch."

Mitchell was still for a moment. Then he reached up and took her wrist, pulling her gently to him. She fell into his lap, their eyes meeting first, their lips meeting after. Passion, fear, excitement, anxiety. It flowed between them, fueling the desire and lust. He picked her up, still kissing her, and carried her across the living area to the bedroom beyond. He had tried to swear off women, and maybe he would have been successful anywhere else. Millie was emotional, intelligent, unpredictable. She was hot and cold, fire and ice, steel and silk.

She was just like Ella.

The knock from Singh came two hours later. Mitchell was still in Millie's bed, the Admiral's head resting on his bare chest. They were both awake but silent, giving some time to relax in the afterglow of their passion.

She picked her head up and held it there a moment. Then she looked up at him. "The download is almost done. It's time to get moving. You can use my private shower."

She rolled away from him, out of the bed. He watched her for a moment and then followed behind. Her bathroom contained a more modern and standard cleaning system, and she stepped into it, let it remove the dirt and oil and sex from her, and stepped back out. He took his turn, and then returned to the bedroom to retrieve his clothes.

"We need to do that again sometime," Millie said, pulling on her gray shirt.

"You know where to find me," Mitchell replied. He had been with more women than he could remember since the Shot. She wasn't the most skilled lover, but she had more feeling behind her efforts than any of the others. It wasn't just lust. It seemed as though every emotion she possessed poured out in her lovemaking, and it served to heighten the experience in ways he hadn't felt since Ella was killed.
 

"Your p-rat memory won't hold all of the archives, and we don't have the servers configured with the new encryption yet. You'll have to go down to engineering and let Singh plug you in."

"Plug me in?"

"Through the neural link."

"They can do that?"

"Singh can. She and Watson developed it in the early days to help manage our dark protocols."

Mitchell had been buttoning his own shirt. He stopped and turned towards her.

"Why are you surprised, Captain?" Millie asked. "We're dead to the Alliance. Sometimes we need supplies we can't get from their offline channels. Things we need, or just things to keep the crew happy. We have to find ways of our own. It doesn't matter if we're outside the law because we're already tried and convicted. So, every once in a while we get a short break between sanctioned operations. We have connections, and we use them to pull gray market work. Any encryption can be broken given enough time, so we don't risk putting that data over the air. It's a bit of a throwback, but it works."

It was a little bit of trivia he wouldn't have guessed. It also didn't matter. There wouldn't be time to run mercenary jobs anytime soon.

"I'm heading to the bridge to get us moving towards the next rendezvous point." She walked over to him and kissed his cheek. "I'll be in touch about more private matters. You can see yourself out."
 

She was smiling as she picked up her hat and fixed it to her head. She breathed in, and in an instant had returned to the stone-faced Captain that he had met a few weeks earlier.

Mitchell left Millie's quarters and headed straight to engineering. When he entered, he was surprised to find Watson kneeling in front of Singh. She was leaned back in a chair, her feet up and bared from their standard issue shoes, the portly engineer rubbing them with large fingers.

"Did I come at a bad time?" Mitchell asked.

He hadn't met Singh yet, not formally anyway, though he had seen her at the hazing, and the memorial. She was a slight, petite woman, with dark skin and long black hair, large eyes and an even larger nose that didn't suit her face.
 

"Corporal Watson lost a bet," Singh said, explaining the activity. "He didn't think I could pull the data in less than three hours."

"Millie expected it to take four," Mitchell said.

Watson stopped rubbing and pushed himself to a stand. "Captain Williams," he said, turning and giving him a slight bow.

"Of course she did." Singh leaned down to retrieve her shoes, put them on, and stood. "She didn't knock you to send you down here."

Mitchell hesitated for a second. "I thought the channel was encrypted?"

"The messages are," Watson said. "The point of origin is easy to trace if you know how."

"Does Millie know about this?"

Watson shrugged.
 

"You got here pretty quickly," Singh said. "And she answered my knock from her bedroom." Her eyebrow went up.

"What about it?"

"Nothing," Watson said with a smile. "It's our little secret. Just don't tell anyone about the tracking."

"Why did you tell me about the tracking?"

Singh shrugged.
 

Watson shrugged.
 

Mitchell decided to drop it. They were playing some kind of game with him. No, not with him. With each other. They were using him as the equipment.

"Millie said you needed to plug me in," he said.

"To our servers," Singh said. "Follow me. Watson, hold down the fort. And don't forget to check the oscillations again."

"I already checked the oscillations."

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did."

"You didn't put it in the log."

"Do you want to check the log?"

"Later." Singh sighed as she ushered Mitchell out the door and across the hallway.

"You two have an interesting dynamic," Mitchell said on the way.

Singh led him into a cold room, dimly lit by a few overhead diodes that created a walkway towards the back of the space. "He's a stubborn ass," she replied.
 

They stopped in front of a small workstation, a holographic overlay sliding up in front of them. Singh moved her hands along and through it, selecting menus and entering her password. Then she reached to her left and pulled a small stool from the darkness.
 

"Sit with your face towards me," she said.
 

Mitchell did as she asked. She circled behind him and he heard a click. Then he felt the pressure of the needle being pushed into his skull.

"You know what to do from here," she said. "Knock me when you're finished."

"You aren't staying?" Mitchell asked.

"To do what? Watch your eyes flicker? I've got a foot massage to get back to."

There was no humor in her voice. Even her accusation about his prior activity had been flat and serious. She thought Watson was a stubborn ass. He wondered what Watson thought of her?

She left him alone in the cold, dark room. He closed his eyes, the data archive immediately spreading out all around him, as though he were standing in an endless room of labeled folders. It was more than just the historical data, it was everything that was stored on the Schism's banks - terabyte after terabyte of intel. Secret contracts for dark operations, personnel files, Captain's log entries... everything. Millie had given him the keys to the kingdom. Out of trust or necessity? Did she have sex with him to try to buy his loyalty?

He eyed the personnel files. He could learn anything he wanted to know about any one of the crew, past or present. He could find out if Millie told him the truth of her past. He could discover why Ilanka had been sent to the Schism. Or Anderson. It was tempting, but who was to say that he could look without leaving a trace? In any case, they didn't have time to waste on curiosity.

He navigated completely in his head, leaving his eyes closed and his hands in his lap. The folders swirled around him, flying past until he reached the one marked "Historic." He slipped into it, getting a new list. He spoke a single word in his mind, "Goliath." He was greeted with a structure of documents similar to the one he had viewed only briefly back on Liberty.

He made his way back to where he had been the first time, to the images of the Goliath's shell. He marveled at it anew, in awe of the sheer brute force of the construction, the technology behind the materials, the repulsers, everything, so rudimentary at the time. He flipped through everything, watching the years pass as the ship slowly and steadily became something more than a skeleton.

He didn't know how long he was sitting there. It was long enough that his feet grew numb from the cold, and his head began to hurt from the sheer volume of data that was passing between the implant and the databanks. He watched every video, flipped through every photo. He even went back to the time before the Goliath was commissioned, to the time when the world was at war over the wreck of an alien spacecraft that brought them such incredibly advanced technology. He watched videos of the battles, the clashes between the United States and its Alliance of Nations and the attacking armies of China, India, and Iran.
 

He was particularly interested in the air combat. It was a lot different than modern combat, mainly due to the prevalence of high-explosive warheads and comparatively weak defensive materials. That imbalance had been equalized over the centuries and caused a return of more personal, close-range strategies. It was amazing to him to watch fighters duke it out over dozens of kilometers, shooting one another from the sky without ever drawing near.

There was a lot to learn there. A lot to study and understand. A history that was more exciting than he had ever imagined.
 

It was all useless.

There was nothing in there that would give him any clue about the Goliath's position in space, or any idea where they should go to search for it. He watched the video of its launch day. The commemoration by the U.S. President, the firing of the repulser sled that lifted it out of the atmosphere and into zero-gravity, the countdown to the firing of the FTL engine for the first time.
 

He watched it vanish in the clear blue sky of the morning. He felt the tension and excitement of the people on the ground as they waited for it to return. Minutes passed. He held his breath along with them. He shook his head and ground his teeth when the five minutes expired, then ten, then twenty.
 

The Goliath was gone.

Where? Where did it go? He felt angry and frustrated. He had to know. It was the only thing that mattered right now. The idea of the Alliance falling to this threat, these travelers who decimated Calypso as though it was nothing more than a speck of dust. These travelers who would make their way to the inner sphere of the settled galaxy, who would find their way to Liberty, and to Christine.

Mitchell paused, his emotions falling away, his body feeling the full, sudden brunt of the cold. Why had he thought of her? Why was he worried about her? It didn't make any sense. He barely knew Major Arapo, and their relationship had been nothing more than cordial. Until she helped him escape. Why had she done that? What was her motivation?
 

He could see her in his mind. What was their connection? Why couldn't he keep her out of his head? M had said that people could subconsciously uncover their past lives, to recognize what went before even if they didn't always understand. He had hoped that learning about the Goliath, seeing it, would help jog whatever latent memories had brought it to his attention in the first place, and give him some indication of where it might be hiding. He had gotten nothing from it except a history lesson, and now he was wasting energy on someone he hardly knew instead. Was she a part of his ancient past?

He pushed her from his head, reaching up and back towards the neural link, ready to pull it out. He needed to rest and refocus his energy on the task at hand, rather than his strange infatuation.
 

His hand closed around the small connector. He was about to remove it when he paused. Not because he changed his mind, but because the databank had returned an image from a query he hadn't realized he'd made. A single image, an old photograph, still sharp after all these years. It was a group of men and women, twenty in all, wearing dark blue flight suits and holding helmets at their hips. They were smiling at the cameraman, and beneath the photo was a caption.