Chapter 3
POWER TO TRUTH
Ben finished the last of the beef with noodles Hydro pack that was left for him, and wiped his mouth. It was surprisingly good, considering the horror stories he’d heard about Army rations. He pushed the empty pack to the side and looked down at an old paperback book with a black cover that was on the table, titled “COVAN”, typed out in a white Papyrus font. A stream of blood came out of the bottom of the “V”.
The book piqued Ben’s curiosity, so he opened it and thumbed through its 400 pages. It was worn, but all the pages were intact. He had time, so he decided to indulge. He slouched back into his chair and began to read.
Ben was so involved with the book that he didn’t notice the beeping noise in his room indicating that he had a visitor at the door. The door eventually slid open by itself, and Kara walked in, startling him again.
“Is this going to become a habit – me scaring you?” Kara laughed.
“Gawd, I hope not!” Ben chortled.
“That’s a good read,” Kara said, pointing to the book in Ben’s hand. “I hoped you’d like it.”
“It’s yours?”
“Yep.”
“Why paperback?” Ben asked curiously.
“Not everything has to be digital,” Kara explained. “Besides, there’s something nostalgic and comforting about it. Call me old-fashioned.”
“I never gave it much thought.” Ben shrugged his shoulders.
“Well…paperback books kind of take me back, I guess.”
“So, you like horror, do you?” Ben asked. “Is that also your thing?”
“I like just about everything. Horror, fantasy, you name it. This is kind of a mix between the two. I’ve read it a few times. But consider it my gift to you.”
“Hey, thanks!” Ben replied genuinely. He didn’t have much, and a vintage book was something cool.
Kara smiled back with that intoxicating look. Ben blinked rapidly. “Are you ready to see Colonel Stoddard?” she asked, halfway turning her body in the direction of the door.
“Lead the way,” Ben replied, standing up.
They reached the conference room a few minutes later. “I’ll introduce you,” Kara said before they entered. “Word of advice, be professional.”
Ben nodded his head in understanding, and then Kara opened the door.
“Sir, Mister Ben Taylor,” Kara said, introducing Ben to Colonel Stoddard after they walked in. Stoddard stood and shook Ben’s hand, looking him square in the eyes. He was taller than Ben had expected.
“It’s good to meet you in person, Ben,” Stoddard said. “Please, have a seat.”
Ben sat down in a very comfortable high-backed hover-chair that automatically adjusted to his height so that his legs slid perfectly under the table and his arms rested comfortably on it. Stoddard and Kara moved to the opposite side of him and sat down next to each other.
“You’re trying to figure out what in the fiery nebula is going on, aren’t you, Ben?” Stoddard asked casually.
“Is the look on my face that obvious?” Ben replied with a sideways grin.
“It’s the nature of the circumstance, not the look.”
“Fair enough,” Ben conceded. “I’m extremely confused, I admit. I gather from what I’ve seen so far, and Kara’s evasive answers, that I’m not going to COTA. But as far as I’m concerned, whatever this is about is better for me than those pits were.”
“You might learn to regret you said that.”
“Learn to regret it?” Ben asked speculatively. “Not come to regret it?”
“I always choose my words carefully, son,” Stoddard told him. “I have to in my line of work.”
“Which is what exactly?” Ben inquired.
“You have an amazing clarity for someone so young. Most kids your age would be so confused right now, they wouldn’t know what to think, let alone what to ask. You’re already two steps ahead of the conversation.”
“You must not know very many kids,” Ben responded with a cut smile as he pushed an eye towards Kara. “I’m not going to pat myself on the back for the compliment. It’s just a little deductive reasoning, is all.”
“Explain,” Stoddard said directly.
“Well, sir, I know you’re not a representative of COTA because of your uniform. And this is a Zeus command ship, but none of the other subordinate ships that make up a Fleet Battle Force are around. There aren’t any Athena carriers or Artemis battleships. I know that Fleets cover a large area and not all of the ships stay together, but I would assume that the command ship would at least be accompanied by one or two of their subordinate ships. So, either you’ve left your fleet, or you don’t belong to one. I’ll hedge my bets on the latter. That and you’re a colonel, not a general. Pieces in the puzzle.”
Stoddard brought his teepeed fingers to his face again and tapped both sides of his nose with his fingers, but he didn’t say anything. The kid knew there were puzzle pieces scattered about, and he was already piecing them together. Most kids wouldn’t even recognize a proverbial puzzle, let alone the pieces to it. This was very promising indeed.
Ben continued.
“And then we come to Kara. She’s a COTA cadet, and she said she’s here because her dad’s assigned to this ship. That gives the impression that she’s here visiting him, but she didn’t say that she was. To that point, why would she be the one to greet me and take me to my quarters? If she’s only here on leave to visit her dad, she wouldn’t be working – she wouldn’t be escorting me around. There has to be someone else here who’d do that under normal circumstances.
“And so, of course, that begs the question – why isn’t Kara with her dad? Where is he?” Ben shrugged his shoulders and quirked his face. “That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I don’t know what this is about or why I’m here. That’s the part that I can’t work out.”
Stoddard turned his head and looked over at Kara, who returned his look. He then turned back to Ben and cajoled, “That’s impressive, Ben. That’s really impressive. You should pat yourself on the back.”
Ben smiled, but he didn’t say anything in response.
“Well, Ben, you’re right, I’m not from COTA, and I didn’t bring you here to join the academy. You’re here for another reason. What do you know about the Smith Project from the year twenty-fifty-four?” Stoddard asked him.
“Not much,” Ben admitted. “I think there was a paragraph on it in one of my history books in school. Something about a bunch of Christian fundamentalists who believed in aliens. They claimed that one of the lost tribes of Israel was especially righteous and transcendent, so God put them on another planet. Supposedly, their descendants created spaceships and visited Earth thousands of years later to see the world their ancestors came from. It caused a bit of controversy in both the religious and scientific communities for a while.
“The Smith Project was the fundamentalists’ attempt to prove that their beliefs were true,” Ben continued. “They financed a bunch of satellites to search the galaxy, but they never found any proof, though they did discover planets that could support human life. In fact, we’ve since settled them.”
“You remember all that from a paragraph?” Kara asked, astonished by Ben’s seemingly photographic memory.
Ben shrugged his shoulders and then said, “It was a long paragraph. Well, that and I was raised in a Catholic orphanage on a plant that was discovered by them, Naroon. So…anyway…it was controversial. The nuns often poked fun at it.
“We’ve explored space, and we haven’t found any intelligent life forms – I mean, outside of some strange fish and reptilian-type creatures.” Ben continued, remembering Scotty Scarecrow’s mutterings on LG4. “Nothing humanoid like us. The debate’s over. We’re a unique species in the universe.”
“It’s a big universe, Ben, and we’ve barely covered a fraction of our own galaxy,” Stoddard intoned. “And that includes all of the unmanned probes that have gone far beyond anywhere that humans have gone.” Stoddard paused briefly and canted his head noticeably before saying, “Watch the imager.” He pressed a stylus down on the table and then looked about three feet above it.
A lifelike, three-dimensional, holographic image appeared in the air, showing an aerial view of a beautiful, green, mountainous landscape with a large mirror lake that reflected both the mountains and the sky. The image was so lifelike that Ben felt as though he could reach out and touch it.
On a small peninsula jetting out into the lake was a large stone building in the making. It was triangular-shaped with tall, reinforced stone walls and tall square towers on each of the three corners. The first tower faced the peninsula’s inland area. The other two towers had large stone walls that branched off towards the back of the peninsula, with a linear wall connecting them. Both back wall corners also had large towers, though they were a little shorter than the actual building’s towers.
Inside the protective walls behind the building was a modest-sized grassy court. In the middle of the back wall of the building, at the center of the entire complex, stood a tall circular keep. The keep was the largest tower in the complex and the only part of the structure that was finished.
The structure was obviously a castle, something that could have taken shape in Europe during the High Middle Ages.
The view zoomed in, showing masons on rudimentary scaffolds, and some people below them moving large blocks with ropes and pulleys, and others churning straw into the mason’s mud.
The view then panned a little further inland away from the castle to a small village made up of mud huts with straw roofs and poorly framed wood homes. People were bustling all about. At the opposite end of the village was what appeared to be the charred remains of another smaller stone castle.
“Are these clips from a movie?” Ben asked a little too incredulously.
“That’s funny, kid,” Stoddard replied flatly as he instinctively twitched a finger in his direction, “but no, it’s not. This is real footage that was taken about three months ago.”
“Wait a second. Are you saying that you somehow looked back in time? It looks like it could be Medieval Germany or France.”
“We aren’t looking back in time,” Stoddard replied. “This is footage from another planet known as Crucis One. Unfortunately for us, it’s in a solar system in the inner crest of Perseus’s Arm, relatively close to the outer crest of Sagittarius-Carina’s Arm.”
“That’s in the Alliance’s half of the galaxy,” Ben replied observantly, but in a confused voice. “I don’t get it. Our scientists have already declared that we’re alone in the galaxy. How is this possible?”
“Clearly, our scientists were mistaken. The Alliance is tight-lipped about this discovery, and the official line from our government is that Crucis One doesn’t exist. It’s a political move on their part.”
“Well, why don’t you take this information to the press then?” Ben asked, his heart suddenly racing with anticipation. This was amazing! “Put our government and the Alliance both in the political hot seat. I mean, this is a life-changing discovery – if it’s real.”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about it, but there are complications. For one thing, like you implied, we can’t prove it’s real. There’s no way to prove the authenticity of this video footage or the other footage that we’ve been able to obtain. If we released the videos to the public, both governments would disavow them as fakes.
“Another problem is that even if we could prove the videos’ authenticity, it could result in a PR nightmare for both the Army and the Federation. You see, most of the footage we’ve gathered was taken during a black-ops mission that went south. They came from one of my spies shortly before his ship crashed on that planet. The president and the congressional committee that oversees my activities authorized the original mission, but they started damage control after my spy went missing under nefarious circumstances.
“You have to understand, Ben, that we’re in a simmering cold war with the Alliance, and this could seriously heat things up. The nonaggression pact strictly forbids us from going into their side of the galaxy – or the DL for that matter, though both sides do. The slightest misstep could trigger an all-out war. The only reason why the Alliance isn’t making a big stink about our breach into their territory is because of their desire to keep Crucis One a secret.
“But there’s more to this, Ben. Look closely at the lower left corner of the hologram.”
Ben did as instructed. He saw what appeared to be a knight sitting atop a horse-like creature with long, shaggy hair. Stoddard enlarged the image so Ben could get a better look. The knight was wearing a chainmail shirt and a coif, but there was something peculiar about the front of the chainmail shirt. It appeared to have a large Christian-like red grapevine cross embroidered into it. But when Ben looked more closely at it, he saw a second straight vertical arm slightly above the bottom Λ shape arm cross.
“It looks kind of like a Christian cross,” Ben said.
“That it does,” Stoddard confirmed.
“The obvious response is that it’s just a coincidence and that it’s probably just their insignia,” Ben suggested, shrugging his shoulders.
“It would be, if they were the only people on that planet that had it. But they’re not. A cross has been spotted in four of their six known civilizations. Not all of them look exactly like that, but all of them are cross’s in one fashion or another.”
“A cross is a pretty basic symbol,” Ben retorted. “Even early humans on Earth used the sign of a cross before Christianity took root. Ancient Egyptians had the ankh. Are you trying to convince me that there’s some truth to the Smith Project’s hypothesis, Colonel?”
“That’s the big question, Ben. We don’t know. It’s quite possible that the Alliance is conducting a social experiment on those people, meaning they gave them the idea of the cross.”
“I thought the Asian government was largely agnostic or even atheistic?”
“For the most part, they are, but that doesn’t mean they can’t use religion for social experiments.”
“Okay, so why not Buda or Allah?”
“There’s no need to poke holes,” Stoddard said with a hint of agitation in his voice. “I said it’s possible that they’re doing it, not probable. Either way, you can see the broader scientific and religious implications here.
“Aside from that, we also believe that the Alliance has been abducting the indigenous people for nefarious purposes – experiments, slavery, you name it.”
“Okay…look, I’m really confused,” Ben said while adjusting himself in his seat. “Why are you telling me all of this? All I did was apply to COTA, and now, from what I can tell, you’re giving me highly classified information. This is stuff that you should be harpooning the political class with, not me. This isn’t adding up. I’m a nobody.”
Stoddard took a noticeable breath and exhaled it smoothly, and then with a tempered voice, he said, “Well, Ben, based on your aptitude test, you’re smart, clever, and crafty – and quite frankly, you’re expendable.”
Direct enough. The tumblers in Ben’s head began to fall into place after hearing Stoddard’s fateful words. “You need someone who’s expendable to go after your missing spy. Someone who can provide a good cover. Who better than an orphan, right?”
“Correction, Ben,” Stoddard began. “Who better to help Kara rescue her father, Kynan?”
Ben looked over at Kara, who locked solemn eyes with him. Her role made perfect sense now.
“He’s one of my best,” Stoddard continued. “The president and the congressional committee that oversees my activities have strictly forbidden me from going after him. They say that we knew the risks before he left, and they don’t want to be held accountable for a military breach into the Alliance. But that doesn’t mean my hands are tied.”
“I think I can see why you said I might ‘learn to regret it,’ Colonel,” Ben said. “This sounds like it could be an awfully dangerous mission.”
“Yes, it does. You have two options here, Ben,” Stoddard told him. “You can either go back to that miserable rock we found you on, or you can do something important with your life. It’s your choice. We’re black ops. We live in the realm of the unconventional. We rely on the unorthodox to meet our objectives. In this case, the logical approach is the most unsuspecting.”
“Yeah, that’s not cryptic or anything,” Ben replied, obviously confused.
“Under normal circumstances, we would conduct a military operation to get Kynan back, and as such, everyone would expect that the operation would never see the light of day for fear of bad political fallout. But it’s also just as logical to believe that Kynan’s family would do everything in their power to get him back. While it’s unsuspecting, no one would be surprised to learn that his hot-tempered, teenage children went to find him after the Army refused to do it. This is the plot of hundreds of young adult books. I remember a few as a kid.”
“So that’s the back story to this narrative? I’m Kara’s brother?” Ben asked.
“That’s right. Kynan adopted you ten years ago, right after his divorce, at least according to all of the ‘official’ records that we created for you. Your orphan status fits the narrative perfectly for anyone who’s lightly digging.”
Ben gave Stoddard a perplexed look after he said, ‘lightly digging,’ to which Stoddard responded, “Don’t get your head wrapped around the axle on this, Ben. We intentionally did a sloppy job on this part of the narrative. Let’s just say I’m multitasking. It’s nothing you need to be concerned with.
“If you get picked up by the Alliance, which won’t happen, they’ll run a check on you, and they’ll see that you’re telling the truth about being Kynan’s adopted son. It lends credibility to your story about trying to rescue him, and that keeps the Federation’s hands clean.”
“Okay, so how exactly does the rest of this plan unfold? How are we going to rescue Kynan?” Ben asked.
“Are you familiar with Jack Crews?”
“Yeah, they’re Jack-of-all-trades; they’ll do just about anything for money. But they’re mostly criminals who can’t find legitimate work anywhere. A lot of them fly C-class Harpy’s because they’re cheap and plentiful.”
“Very good,” Stoddard replied. He then waved a finger between Ben and Kara and said, “You and Kara have hired a Jack Crew to take you to Crucis One to look for Kynan.”
“How’s that going to work if he’s being held captive?” Ben asked.
“I never said he’s being held captive. What I said is that he’s missing. We received a duress signal from his portable TCL shortly after his ship crashed on the planet.”
“TCL?”
“It’s a Transit Communications Link handset. It operates under the same principle as Triple T’s, except it opens a communication gate that can transmit encrypted messages that can only be picked up by a special receiver. It uses a lot of power, even more so at greater distances, so he could only send a duress signal, not an actual message.”
“So, you know where his last transmission was sent from then?”
“To within twenty feet on that planet. That’s one of the advantages of using a communication gate.”
“Wow!” Ben replied, impressed.
“Anyway, we can’t just send you out there blind. You, Kara, and the Jack Crew will be going through four weeks of training on planet C Six, Six, Six – affectionately known as ‘Planet Hell.’”
Kara jerked her head up towards Stoddard after hearing this, her eyes popping. “Four weeks on Planet Hell?” she asked nervously. “Sir, there’s plenty of other quality training centers that General Hyatt oversees that we can go to. When you said we had access to all of them, I didn’t think you meant that one!”
“Are you whining, Cadet?” Stoddard asked with an edge to his voice.
“No, sir, it’s just…well…it’s Planet Hell! This is where Special Ops troops go to train in preparation for high-level combat operations. We’re trying to avoid combat.”
“What’s the other reason we send them there, Kara? What’s the one benefit this training center offers that the others don’t?”
“Heavy gravitational pull, sir.”
“That’s right. You’re only going to be there long enough to build your strength and stamina a little. What you’ll gain there in one month would take you three anywhere else.”
“It sounds good to me,” Ben chimed in. Stoddard and Kara both looked back at him as though they’d just remembered he was still there.
“You say that now, Ben, but after a few days, you’ll be crying for your mother,” Kara said.
“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have one then, huh,” Ben retorted.
Kara’s face turned red. “Sorry, Ben,” she apologized genuinely.
“Look,” Stoddard began, “the instructors aren’t going to run you through the wringer. You’ll be going through a specialized training program centered on CQC tactics, light weapons training, rescue ops, and some basic survival skills. You’ll also be doing a lot of physical conditioning. On the bright side, the food there is great, and there’s plenty of it. You’ll need a lot of calories to sustain your energy.”
“How will the gravitational time dilation affect us? Will that factor into our month?” Ben asked.
“It’s negligible. It’ll be a matter of minutes, not days or weeks.”
“Okay. So, what can you tell us about this Jack Crew we’ll be with?”
“It’s the only Jack Crew I trust. To be quite honest with you, I don’t really even know why they are a Jack Crew. This team has a very solid reputation for honesty and for not breaking the law, which is not at all consistent with their line of work. They’ve been doing jobs for me for over five years now. When I’m not employing them, they spend their time running refugees out of the Alliance. They’re the best at what they do. You’ll be safe with them.”
“What kind of jobs do they do for you? I mean, besides this,” Ben asked curiously.
“I can’t get into that with you, son. Let’s just say they aren’t afraid of a fight, and they won’t hesitate to ghost people when they need to.”
Ben didn’t know how to respond to Stoddard’s casual mention of killing people. His ears rang with Missy’s words back on LG4 about what happens to soldiers who do.
Stoddard keenly picked up on Ben’s concerns and then said, “There’s no point in haranguing over the morality of killing people, Ben. Nobody contemplates the deep-rooted moral complexities of killing another human being more so than soldiers do. Very few jobs exist where killing other people is a requirement to get the job done. The Army is unique in that respect. Don’t misunderstand, we try to use non-lethal force when we can, and we deploy Titans as often as we deploy human soldiers, but killing is still inevitable.”
“I understand, Colonel, but I’m only sixteen. I don’t want to think about killing people. It’s just…well, it just seems like that’s something that adults would do.”
“Ben,” Stoddard said, even-toned, “people younger than you have been fighting and killing in wars since the beginning of humankind. But don’t get hung up on this. Like I told you, you’re going on this mission with a very adept Jack Crew. They’ll take care of any nasty business that might come your way, so you won’t have to worry about killing anyone. The training you’ll receive is to help you defend yourself if the need arises. And it’s not very extensive at any rate. You’ll probably learn just enough to get yourself into trouble.” Stoddard wasn’t very reassuring.
“Sir,” Kara started as she looked up from a Simpad that was on the table in front of her, “it looks like the Jack Crew is here. They’re docking now in Bay Three.”
“Oh, good, they’re early. Let’s go down and…”
“Sir,” Kara cut him off, “you’re also getting an emergency call from Naroon.”
Ben visibly twitched and stared concertedly at her.
“It’s not your concern, Ben,” Stoddard said. “If you two will please excuse me. Go ahead down to the docks. You’ll be able to recognize them when you see them.”
“Yeah, I imagine they’ll be in the only Harpy docked on this ship,” Ben said sarcastically.
“Something like that,” Stoddard replied as he stood formally. Ben and Kara followed suit and then turned to leave the room, but Stoddard stopped them. “One more thing,” he said as they both looked back. “After you find Kynan, tell him I said, ‘The future’s bright.’” Stoddard sent them a quick, awkward smile, for which they reciprocated just as awkwardly, and then they left the room.
After the door slid closed, Stoddard sat back down and tapped a finger on the table. A lifelike holographic image of Sister Catherine came to life before him.
“Sister,” Stoddard said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Are you Colonel Stoddard?” she asked him tentatively.
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
“I’m afraid I have terrible news for you. Colonel Roper, the man who was here doing that background check on Ben Taylor, well…he was kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped?” Stoddard asked way too casually. “By whom?”
“I don’t really know. I think it may have been a Jack Crew.”
“Do you have a video feed of the incident?”
“I do. I’m sending it to you now,” she said as the holograph of her leaned forward and appeared to press something. A 2D holographic image appeared next to Sister Catherine, showing Jim running towards the platform, scaring away a few kids, and then running into his ship. A few seconds later, images of lasers striking the ship materialized, and then the scene rolled into Jim running out of the ship, and then him flying through the air as the ship exploded. Shortly after this, his unconscious body was being hauled away by three men dressed in black.
Another scene materialized from another camera, showing the men loading Jim onto a black Harpy, then the Harpy taking off.
“Well, Sister, I think you’re right. It certainly does look like a Jack Crew.”
“You seem astonishingly unalarmed by this, Colonel,” Sister Catherine observed.
“Do I?” Stoddard replied straight-faced.
“There’s no need for sarcasm, sir,” the nun said sternly. “Prior to him leaving my office, which he did rather abruptly, I might add, he gave me your contact information. When I asked him why I’d need it, he said, ‘Just in case.’ It was as if he knew something was about to happen.”
“Indeed. Sister, I appreciate the information,” Stoddard said, signaling the end of the conversation. “Please send me any other video feeds that you have of the incident.”
“How is Ben?” Sister Catherine asked before Stoddard severed the connection.
“I don’t know, ma’am. I haven’t seen him, and I probably won’t. He’s not my concern.”
“Huh,” Sister Catherine muttered. “Strange.”
“Have a good day, Sister,” Stoddard concluded, then pressed a button that terminated the holograph. It was an interesting development to be sure. But as Sister Catherine said, he wasn’t at all alarmed by it.