Black Box (19 page)

If there were any answers to be had, they
would lie in the reports filed by Rodrigo and Bonamo regarding
their expedition. Despite popular belief, Boone read all of
Rodrigo’s reports. As one of his primary antagonists, he’d always
felt it necessary to keep abreast of whatever libelous things she
might write about him. She often hinted at his incompetency, but
very seldom said anything outright. He hadn’t gotten around to
reading her latest report, but was surprised by it. It was so tame.
If that didn’t send up a red flag, nothing would. Unfortunately,
Rodrigo’s bland report didn’t contain any information. It reported
the incident exactly as he he’d heard it. With little hope of
insight, he went on to Bonamo’s report. When he finished reading
it, he was left with more questions than answers. He leaned back in
the chair and folded his hands behind his head. Feliciano glanced
at him, then glanced back at her instruments.

Boone definitely did not trust her.

Suddenly, he realized that he couldn’t trust
anyone. Not
anyone
. If Rodrigo was against the captain then
absolutely anyone could be. If the orders truly
had
come
from the
Admiralty
, then there wasn’t a person on board who
wouldn’t be duty bound to follow them.

Including William Boone.

He was about to give up this mad
investigation and go straight to Hardy when he discovered a file in
the trash that shouldn’t have been there. It was a text record of
the sensor log. The reason it caught Boone’s attention was that he
had never seen one before. Way back during his training, the
computer techs who had taught him about the machines had talked
about sensor dumps. In the event that someone attempted to delete
or move any sensor logs, an immediate text backup was made and
dumped randomly onto the system.

Opening the file, Boone began scanning
through the contents. A creepy feeling crawled up his spine and he
turned to see Feliciano looking over his shoulder again. She turned
away quickly when he looked at her.

“Get out,” he said.

She jumped at the sound of his voice.
“Sir?”

“Go. Now.”

“Sir, I’m still on for another hour.”

He told her one more time, this time
injecting that tone of voice that officers had always taken with
him. She hesitated, but didn’t say anything. They looked at each
other for a moment before she stood up and stepped out into the
passageway. Boone watched her until she slid the door closed, then
went back to the sensor dump. Without the watchful eyes of mutinous
crew members, he was able to freely open the file and scan its
contents.

A sensor dump didn’t exactly look like a
readout. Boone had never seen one in this format before and it took
him a few minutes to get his bearings. As a text file, it was
simple characters without the benefit of having actual words. Many
of the characters were format indicators. They alluded to deleted
video or spatial coordinates. Once he had a handle on it, he began
to code a macro that could interpret the text and give him the
information he needed. Even after he had parsed the whole file, it
was still a dirty mess, but there were just enough chunks of
comprehensible text for him to figure out that something had
entered the atmosphere shortly after the
Valor
had made
planetfall. He was able to extract a trajectory and pull a
longitude and latitude for the something’s landing site. When he
put those numbers into the computer and had the GPS software
correlate them with an actual location on the planet he discovered
that the thing, whatever it was, had touched down right where the
Einstein
was supposed to have landed two hundred years
before.

Boone suddenly had a sinking feeling in his
gut.

He quickly checked the logs and determined
that these sensor readings had never been reported. Someone had
covered this whole thing up, but why? Was this part of what Tedesco
and Rodrigo were hiding? The only thing Boone could think of was
that a Ghost ship, a
second
Ghost ship, had come after them.
What if the Ghosts were responsible for murdering the
Einstein
crew? What if everything they thought they knew
about the Ghosts was a lie?

Though a fool he was, William Boone was no
fool. He immediately pulled up the data dumps that the orbital
satellite had been feeding the
Valor
ever since being
launched. It had been programmed to take pictures of the
Valor
, herself, as well as the
Einstein’s
landing
site, and much of the surrounding area. Most of those pictures
showed the tops of trees and giant fern like plants. The ones of
the
Valor
were clear. The ones of the other landing site
were also unobstructed. Boone was astounded. Of all of the images
of which he might have conceived, he would never have believed what
was clearly on the screen in front of him.

Copying everything quickly to his reader, he
shut down the windows, covered his tracks as best he could, and
left the room.

I have left the remainder of my crew
behind so that I might have the chance to launch the black box and
send warn the Earth. Maybe, in a hundred years, someone will find
it and know the fate of the
Einstein
and her intrepid
crew.

Alice Roberts

Geoff Markakis

Gil Mendez

Marcia Thomas

Jude Leaventhall

Danielle Smith

Roger Rhodes

Nicholas Walker

Perhaps I shouldn’t have waited. Was I so
wrong to want to retrieve the bodies of my comrades? Geoff said it.
He said we should just go. I suppose that an enemy with the
technology our enemy has shown could have just blown us out of the
sky as we’d launched, but he was right. We should have tried to
escape.

Now it’s too late.

They’ve blown the outer hatches and boarded
the ship from both ends. They had me dead to rights and left me.
Maybe they thought I was dead. When they left though, I got to my
feet and locked myself in the cockpit. I only needed time to finish
this log, to warn humanity and to ask why.

I don’t know who these (garbled) are. I
don’t know why they would want to destroy us. I only know that they
have succeeded.

March 27
^th
,
2056

Colonel Nicholas Walker

Beckett had pieced some of it together. He
was sure that Rodrigo’s left hand would fit neatly into the imprint
on the
Locklear
which meant that she had killed Cummings.
The only question left was the most important one? Why did she do
it? If Cummings had fired first, as Bonamo suggested, then she
could have done it in self defense. But then why fire off three
volleys into the trees? Why did she have a laser pistol in the
first place? Unless…

“Bonamo,” Beckett called across the
clearing. The shadows were really beginning to take over now and it
was becoming harder and harder to see the young man only fifteen
feet away. “How many times has this gun been fired?”

Bonamo didn’t even have to inspect the
weapon. “There’s no way to tell, sir.
Locklears
were capable
of discharging any amount of energy, regulated by the constant
depression of the trigger. You could theoretically empty a clip
with one shot. Of course if you didn’t know what you were doing,
you’d also melt the gun.”

Like this one here,
thought the
captain.

“But I think there were three blasts, sir.
It’s tough to distinguish one blast from another because of the way
the beam is charged, but I could swear I detected two pauses.”

Unclipping a portable light from his belt,
Beckett began to scan the area where Rodrigo had allegedly pursued
the sniper. The others watched him with fascination and then with
alarm as he disappeared into the darkening foliage. It wasn’t safe
for any one of them to go off alone. But Beckett had the advantage
of suddenly knowing exactly where everyone was at the moment. He
tracked Rodrigo as best he could, losing the trail, doubling back,
making a mess of things, and then finding it again just when he
thought he would have to give up. If his theory proved correct, he
didn’t know how he’d be able to reconcile it in his mind.

The others called out to him once or twice
and he called back to reassure them that he was okay. Burbank once
suggested that it was reckless to be out after dark in a hostile
environment, but Beckett was reasonably sure that nothing hostile
was about. Not yet anyway.

Finally he came upon his destination, the
scene of the crime. The real crime. There in a clearing even
smaller than the one in which Cummings had been killed, lay two
bodies. The furthest away was a man, his body having been thrown
back several feet by the force of the beam that had burned a giant
cavity into his chest. The flashlight, as strong as it was, did
little to permeate the blackness of this alien night, but it was
enough to see by. The second victim was a woman. She lay as she had
fallen, almost as an afterthought, the top of her head sliced
cleanly off by a laser beam. In his years of service, Beckett had
dealt with his share of death. Gruesome though it had been, the
sadness of this cloaked him.

Rodrigo had done this. Why?

He called back and the others joined him
quickly. Night had almost completely enveloped the area and the
forest was bathed in a soft purple light. Beckett switched off his
flashlight and breathed in the memory of a simpler time.

He had more answers now, yet still more
questions.

“Who are they?” Cabrera asked, looking down
at the bodies in disgust.

“Gil Mendez and Danielle Smith,” Beckett
answered. “Crew members from the
Einstein
."

“The
Einstein?
” asked Burbank. “But
you said that was a farce.”

“These bodies aren’t fake.”
What a
mess!
This wasn’t about him at all. This wasn’t some elaborate
scheme to strip down Ted Beckett. These people had been murdered
for a reason.

“But how did they get here?” Burbank asked.
“Did we go back in time?”

It was all so simple. “They came forward,”
Beckett said. “Their drive activated a time warp and they ended up
here. There was no sign of them at the landing site when we flew
over it because they hadn’t even arrived yet.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but that doesn’t
make sense," Bonamo said. “Didn’t you give orders to monitor the
atmosphere for Ghost ships? A clunker like the
Einstein
would have given off a signal that would have had our instruments
screaming.”

That was true. But it would be up to whoever
was monitoring those instruments to inform the captain. That could
have been anyone in Navigation or Engineering or in Compcon. It
could have been anyone in Infantry. Or it could have been all of
them. The
Admiralty
had sent them out there to find and
murder Colonel Walker and his crew. The Black Box had told them
where and when. What else had it told them? Which parts of that log
had been omitted when it had been re-recorded?

“Anabelle did this,” Beckett whispered to
himself.

“Is she even capable of this?” Cabrera asked
in disgust.

Beckett knew the sergeant very well. He had
served as her subordinate and as her superior. He knew her inside
and out. “Yes.”

“My God. Why?”

Beckett gritted his teeth. “She was under
Admirals’ orders.”

There was a long pause then as they all
stared at the bodies on the ground. Finally, Beckett turned
away.

“We need to get back,” he said abruptly,
realizing that the confrontation to come would be bloody and
divisive.

“Wait,” Bonamo said, putting a hand in the
air. It was clear by his posture and the angle of his head that he
was listening for something. No. He was listening
to
something. Because they could all hear it now. The whine of an
engine was slowly approaching.

“Air bikes?” Burbank asked.

“Shhh!” Bonamo admonished.

But Burbank was right. The sound was coming
from air bikes. More than one of them.

“Two of them,” Bonamo said. “For sure. And
they’re moving slowly.”

“Then they’re pacing the rumbler,” Beckett
said.

Cabrera looked from one soldier’s face to
the next. She didn’t know what it meant.

Beckett did. Hardy had been right about a
conspiracy. They hadn’t been sent there to study history. They’d
been sent there to make it. Beckett looked at the burned out laser
still in his hand. It was as if they were following a script. But
who had written the script? And why? Always
why
?

He pulled his reader from his belt and began
to look over the satellite recordings. They weren’t far from
Walker’s landing site. That was where they had to go. Whoever had
decided to produce this gruesome play had left the captain of the
ship off of his cast list. But he was in it regardless and he was
determined to make sure every last thing went horribly wrong.

As he spoke, he checked his sidearm. “That
rumbler will have just about every soldier from the
Valor
.
They’re headed to Walker’s landing site where they will find
Walker’s expedition. Rodrigo didn’t fire on Cummings in self
defense. She shot him because he was trying to prevent this. You
can all guess what happens next.”

“Here?” Cabrera asked. “Now?”

Beckett nodded.

They all stared at the ground, the air, away
from each other, away from their captain. Green or experienced,
they all knew what was at stake. For some reason, some of the crew
had been given a different mission, the
real
mission. Find
the
Einstein
, murder her crew.

No one said anything, but they were all
thinking the same thing. Why send the
Valor
? Why not send a
captain and crew who all had the stomach for the job at hand? And,
now that they understood, what was their role?