Black Hawks From a Blue Sun Read online

  Beckert clears the adjacent plaque and reads.

  “General George S. Patton

  Brash and supremely confident, Patton believed he was the re-incarnation of valiant warriors, including a Roman Legionnaire, an officer under Napoleon, even Hannibal, himself. A devoted and professional soldier, Patton consumed any news, report, or publication about his enemy to better understand them. By understanding them, he reasoned, he would know how to defeat them.

  In World War II, General Patton turned the Germans’ blitzkrieg tactics against them, and his 3rd Army was continually on the move, scoring victory after victory. His style was absolute, with no objective but total defeat of his opponent. While the Germans had many allied generals to contend with, Patton was the only one they truly feared.

  ‘May God have mercy on my enemies, because I won’t.’”

  Beckert lingers at the vacant case, staring at the image of the drably-clad man. There is the same intensity he sees in General O’Kai, the same intensity of every general displayed at the Cadre memorial. The recognition resonates, building a familial link to this long-dead soldier. He breaks off mid-thought, his jaw dropping.

  He must have been the first of us.

  Never before has Beckert desired to possess something as intensely as this photo. His hands work of their own volition, detaching the simple frame from its mounting and storing it in a pack compartment.

  His tour of the cases complete, he reflects upon each of them. There must be a special insight from each weapon into the success of its owner. One is obvious: the mended yet sturdy spearhead shows Alexander’s pragmatism. He did not care for ornate or flashy things. The others did, however. Even Patton, in his drab clothing, carried an ostentatious sidearm. But how could that be useful? Was it distracting to an enemy?

  Maybe the Major and Lieutenant can make something out of this.

  Beckert strolls through the room, stopping briefly at the couches. Synthetic fabric sags over metal frames, the cushions crumbled to a pile underneath. Neither the couches nor the table dividing them offer anything of interest.

  Above the table, fastened to the wall, is another dust covered plaque. He slides himself between the furniture to clear the inscribed brass plate.

  “You are the wife of a German officer; so you will take what I have to tell you upright and unflinching. You shall know the truth. This is the grimmest of struggles in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, renunciation, doubt, despair and horrible death.

  I cannot deny my share of personal guilt in all of this. I tell myself that, by giving my life, I have paid my debt.

  Augusta, you will sense when the hour has come for you to be strong. Don’t be embittered and don’t suffer too much from my absence. I am not cowardly, only sad that I can’t give greater proof of my courage than to die for this useless cause.

  Don’t forget me too quickly.”

  --Anonymous German soldier’s last letter home from Stalingrad (Volgograd), 1943.”

  A smaller brass plate is mounted below the main plate.

  “In few words, the horrors of war are made plain. It is a potent and poignant reminder that unrestrained hostility does not just end lives. For those left behind, it ruins them. Remember these words, graduates, and let them steer your conscience during your careers as professional soldiers.

  –Maj. Gen. Walston Booker, Commandant, National War College”

  Beckert’s goggles scan the plaque and save the image in his HDI.

  The Geek investigates the deep chairs opposite the desk. Like the couches, they offer nothing of note. As he walks around the desk, he drums his fingers on the desk top. For the first time, Beckert notices a drawer on the left side of the desk. Intrigued, he slides it open. A short glass, an empty bottle, some loose .45 cartridges, and a picture frame reside within. He lifts the frame and turns it over, seeing a woman and three small children in brightly-colored clothes, laughing. On a table before them is a rectangular item, planted with fifty thin candles along its edges. Within the framing of lit candles are the words, “Happy Birthday, Daddy” in rough script. The image is scanned and recorded, then returned to the drawer.

  Raking his toe through the dusty ring around the chair, Beckert drags several gold adornments into the light. He kneels and picks through the dust with a finger, pulling out various medallions, rings, buttons, and insignias. There is a surprising quantity.

  He scoops the golden assortment and lays it out on the desk top, reading each piece. For uncommon Valor…Courage…Service…Duty…Achievement…Loyalty… The awards describe a man of phenomenal accomplishment.

  Beckert nudges the awards around the desk, grouping like ones together, when he grazes an irregularity in the desk’s surface. His finger traces a wide, rectangular seam.

  A monitor?

  In seconds, he has pry tool in hand, and he levers the seam. The action is gritty and resistant, but the top of a large viewscreen edges into view.

  A workstation!

  Excited, Beckert moves to the right side of the desk and opens an access panel. The interior is crowded with copper-plated circuit boards, green with corrosion. Black trails run down from the seam in the desk top, forming dried rivulets on the compartment’s inner walls. The large battery backup is completely discharged with bristling crystals where the fluids pooled.

  The state of corrosion tempers his excitement. He fires up his HDI, not daring to hope the workstation will function, and jacks into the maintenance port.

  Code scrolls by in his goggles while he attempts to explore the circuits. As expected, nearly all are shorted or broken. He shuts the HDI down and sits back.

  Maybe there’s something in there I can salvage.

  The Geek pulls several boxes from his rack and opens them with a touch. Tools both delicate and sturdy spread from the opened boxes. Pliers in hand, he clamps the end of a circuit board and pulls along its rails. The brittle board snaps, leaving a pliers-shaped notch.

  This is gonna take forever.

  The Geek takes a full breath and looks into the guts of his electronic/optonic patient. Returning the pliers to the box, he selects long tweezers and a scraping tool. With surgeon’s care, each connection and rail is stripped, cleared, and loosened. Slowly, gently, he slides the board from its place. Every bit of it is rotten.

  With a slight sigh, Beckert sets the board on the desktop and moves on, carefully working through all of the network interfaces, communication interfaces, graphics processors, even the bulky power supply and battery backup. All of them are corroded beyond recovery.

  He wipes the sweat from his sparse eyebrows and focuses on a fist-sized box deep within the machine. It sits on the rugged motherboard in a square socket. Bundles of fiber optics and raised bus rails feed in from all directions.

  Maybe you remember something.

  With another deep breath, he reaches in. The moment his tools touch the box, it collapses. Inside is a silvery, translucent crystal with symmetrical branches in 45 degree and 90 degree angles.

  Beckert grins at the glimmering jewel. He takes his time tweezing away debris, removing the restraints, and he eases it up from the socket. There is a slight pop. His heart stops, and he stares, frozen. The terror turns to joy when he realizes the crystal is intact and free of the mount. With a great exhale of relief, he reaches in and collects the crystalline memory core.

  The Geek turns the core over and over searching for cracks or imperfections, finding none. The crystal’s thick branches sparkle with microscopic interior facets.

  Treating it like a newborn child, Beckert rests it on the desktop and removes his back rack. Laying the rack flat, he pulls more boxes free and unpacks them. Beside the memory core, he lays out an assortment of his own circuit boards, wires, harnesses, and a battery. Moving down the row, he assembles the parts and seats the memory core in the improvised machine.

  Lines of code scroll in his goggles as his HDI powers up. He pulls a lanyard to the assembly and connects it with a click.
r />   His perceptions buzz as they cross over into the virtual domain of his HDI, giving him the sensation of weightlessness in infinite space. Lines of code scroll faster than can be read and soon he is swimming in a digital sea of strings and pathways. Wasting no time, he goes right for the general’s archives.

  “Enter passkey,” demands the crystal.

  Beckert initiates his usual strings of hacks. A surge of feedback hits his HDI like a maul.

  Good security, he winces.

  The Geek pulls back and studies the virtual construct floating before him. He orbits it and passes through it, admiring the complexity. Regardless of the intricacy, it is a familiar system, only slightly more difficult than the systems at Cadre One. In moments, he has the correct string, and the access point unfolds into a vast galaxy of directories.

  The HDI automatically categorizes by date stamp and he selects the most recent entry, dated nearly one thousand years earlier. The file is labeled, “Resignation”.

  Beckert executes the file and a video screen appears in his goggles. A man sits at a metal desk wearing a charcoal gray dress uniform with choker collar. Dozens of bright medals and ribbons adorn his chest, shoulders, and sleeves. Unlike the crisp perfection of the uniform, the man is pale and emaciated. With hands clasped on the desk before him, he speaks in a deep baritone.

  “To President MacFarlane, Prime Minister Mehta, Chairman Zukhov, General Secretary Choi, and Chancellor Wilhelm, may this message find you alive and well.”

  The man grits his teeth, making the corners of his jaw bulge.

  “Our fleet is annihilated. We…”

  He interrupts himself, looking away before resuming.

  “We need to prepare for a total ground engagement. I have promoted Major General Noromi to Full General, and have given him command of the United Armies. He is a supreme tactician, far better at urban combat than I, and he will provide our people their strongest defense.

  “I have evacuated my staff via the D.C. tunnel to our Arlington Command Bunker, where they will continue the fight. I must recommend you evacuate your civilian populations into shelter and fortify them with supplies for several years. The enemy is coming in a large force, and if the massacres at our colonies are the example, the enemy will kill everyone they find…”

  He pauses, reaching out to something off screen. When he looks back, his eyes are watered, and his voice falters.

  “I could not halt the enemy’s advance through the colonies and I have failed to defend our home. I therefore resign from Supreme Command of United Forces. General Noromi has my endorsement as my successor. He is dogged and relentless, and…well…” The general nods to himself, jutting his lower lip slightly. “He’s a tough soldier.

  “Regarding research stations Cadre One and Cadre Two, their secrecy may be their saving grace. There have been no shipments to or from them since this war began, and I have broadwaved a message to maintain perfect silence. We may not know for some time whether or not they survived, but I pray they do.”

  The official demeanor drops, and the general picks up a short glass. He drains the last of a brown liquid and swallows, savoring the aftertaste.

  “My love and prayers to you and yours.”

  He sets the glass down and lifts a white-handled revolver from a desk drawer.

  “I’m going to be with mine, and beg their forgiveness.”

  RECORDING END.

  Beckert flees from the memory core, restoring his normal perceptions and hyperventilating the musty air. Black dust rolls deep into his lungs, launching a fit of coughing.

  Once settled, he looks through the halted code in his goggles at the general’s skeleton, then at the tarnished pistol which killed him. He re-opens the drawer to look at the framed photograph of the woman and children.

  Utter defeat was engraved in the general’s drawn cheeks, sunken eyes, and wrinkled chin. Beckert expected a commanding presence with determined brow, broad shoulders, radiant confidence…anything but this desolate shell of a man.

  His mind leaps to General O’Kai. No matter how he tries, Beckert cannot imagine his own general in such a state. O’Kai is the most stalwart, ingenious, and capable person he has ever known.

  No way would O’Kai give up, ever. But what if this man was once like O’Kai? Could the enemy be that powerful?

  Mystery heaps upon mystery. Determined to find some answers, Beckert returns to the virtual world of the memory core and watches the video a second time.

  He studies the general’s demeanor more than what he says. There is a determination within those tired eyes, now that he is looking for it, and…

  “CADRE TWO?”

  Beckert slaps his hands to either side of his head, not believing he missed it the first time. He halts the video.

  Cadre Two… he thinks again, the hugeness of the revelation scarcely fitting in his mind. His eyes roam the office, stopping on the hawk statue. He stares at the bluish white orb, at last understanding why it looks so familiar.

  “That’s our star…”

  He yanks the lanyard of his HDI free and scrambles to the statue, not caring about the swirls of dust. His goggles scan the orb for exact color and dimension.

  The Geek’s attention shifts to the reddish orange orb, and he scans it just as thoroughly.

  Could you be to scale?

  The relative size and color suggest a K class star, late in its main sequence and becoming a red giant. If the bluish orb represents Cadre One, the comparative size and color temperature could rule out over 90% of the known stars in the galaxy. When considering the fact it would likely be a similar distance from Earth, the search narrows to a handful of candidates.

  The realization leaps from thrilling discovery to deadly panic.

  If the Blueskins see this…

  Beckert takes a pistol by the muzzle and smashes the butt against the outstretched talons. The legs break off and the orbs shatter on the solid floor plates. He kneels and pulverizes the fragments.

  Rising to his feet, Beckert looks down at the mess he has made. He sweeps his feet through the powdered porcelain to ensure no identifying fragments remain. Beside him, the winged statue seems accusing in its glare, giving him a twinge of regret for smashing something so beautiful.

  “1:00 until rendezvous,” his goggles display. The timer minimizes and slides to the upper left corner where it continues the countdown.

  Three hours already?

  The Geek surveys the office, but the office lighting looks exactly the same. He lifts his goggles and finds the late day sunlight has been replaced by silvery moonlight—the goggles compensated so gradually, he never noticed the change.

  He strides to the desk and disassembles his improvised machine, each part returned to its proper container. The memory core receives special accommodation in the empty food container, packed and padded with the dead general’s golden adornments. He gives the sealed box a shake, ensuring the contents are secure before snapping it onto his rack.

  With all of his equipment packed, Beckert takes a final look before departing. He faces the exit then turns again toward the display cases. The bright metal of the curved blade will not let him leave. It seems to call to him, as if begging not to be left behind.

  Beckert hurries to the case. Pry tool in hand, he pops the latches. The vacuum-sealed case inhales dusty air with a whoosh.

  The Geek reaches for the blade’s handle and lifts it from the cradle. It is lighter than he expected. His other hand grabs the shiny scabbard, and he slides the blade home with a subtle click. He wedges the sheathed blade between his rack and armor.

  On his way out, Beckert turns and puts his heels together. He snaps a respectful salute to the slumped general, spins, and hurries down the stairs.

  At the entry floor, he takes a step toward the foyer and hesitates. Behind him, the staircase continues down into unexplored areas.

  Being late to a rendezvous is bad, but missing anything vital would be worse.

  After a moment
of silent debate, the young operator returns to the staircase and jumps down each flight for faster progress.

  The stairway switches back over and over until Beckert is certain he is several meters underground. Still, the staircase descends. The blackness forces him to invert his goggles again for their meager light. Not a single portal or doorway opens from the deepening shaft.