Hero's Return, page 5
The Marine popped to attention. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Then he relaxed and turned to the other three men of his detail. “You heard the president. Move out.”
Julie couldn’t help but chuckle as she watched the four Marines thunder down the ramp and deploy in an arc around the rear of the shuttle.
“I’m no expert, but I’ve been around you enough lately to know that’s not how your normal Marine guard force does it,” Anna whispered.
“The Corps doesn’t train its shipboard Marines to act as a personnel security force. My normal escort had additional training. They—” Julie gestured at the four Marines arrayed at the bottom of the ramp “—did what the Corps trained them to do when exiting a shuttle under combat—or possible combat—conditions.”
“In other words, they stormed the beach,” Anna said with a chuckle.
“Not exactly pretty, but effective,” Julie responded. “Now let’s go find out what the hell is going on.”
* * *
Julie looked down at the man lying in the life-support module, a shocked look still etched upon her face. But that look was mixed with amazement and hope.
“He’s alive?”
“Very much so,” an unfamiliar voice answered.
Julie tore her eyes away from the coffin-like device to look for the speaker and found a fleet doctor wearing surgical scrubs standing next to her. His name tag said Keefer.
“Where’s Doc Grimes?”
Julie had spent a lot of time aboard the Connie. It had been her flagship back when she’d commanded the 1st Frontier Fleet right after the Swarm War. When Empress Regent Hiroko had sent her out to take command of the Imperial forces in the Sol Sector, Julie had briefly hoisted her flag on the supercarrier, which had preceded her to the sector as part of a second wave of reinforcements. Jennifer Grimes, Captain, Fleet Medical Corps, had been Constellation’s chief medical officer then. Julie had found her to be an outstanding officer as well as an excellent physician.
“Jenn decided she wanted to return to the Empire. I was both the next senior doctor in the fleet and the most experienced one. So, Fleet Command transferred me here to replace her. I’m Commander Keefer Solinger.”
“Doctor Solinger was the CMO aboard Hurricane,” Dorothy added. “Medically, he has far more experience than anyone else available.”
“Well, if Ant Roberts trusted him to take care of his Marines, that’s good enough for me,” Julie stated. When Hazard King had set out on his expedition to Earth to find a potential cure for a virus that threatened the Empire, he’d brought along a Marine assault battalion under the command of Colonel Antwan Roberts. Hurricane, an older model Marine assault transport, had carried that force.
Julie looked back down at the figure of Hazard King. To her, he didn’t seem to be alive. He looked like a lifeless corpse, the chamber simply preserving her friend’s dead body.
“You say he’s definitely alive, yet he’s still in a life support chamber?” Julie asked, shifting her focus back to the doctor.
Doctor Solinger handed Julie a medical tablet. “He’s definitely alive, as you can see, but barely so. If we tried to remove him from the chamber, he’d be dead before we finished the process.”
“So how do we—” Julie began, but Solinger interrupted her.
“Heal him? Thaw him out? Frankly, I don’t know. And that’s only the beginning of what I don’t know.”
The doctor, seeing President Adams’ raised eyebrow, elaborated.
“The pod was intact enough that it stored all the data from the chamber. We were able to access the information,” Solinger said.
When he didn’t continue, Julie became frustrated.
“And?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Solinger finally managed to say. “The emperor was as close to death as you can be and still be alive when someone stuck him in the pod. Then—and this is the part that doesn’t make sense—his body began to repair itself.”
“I thought the human body could repair itself, given enough time,” Julie observed.
“Not like this, ma’am. Yes, the body can self-repair a lot, but it can’t repair every injury. And it definitely couldn’t repair the injuries the emperor had. There’s evidence that the explosion on Superb’s flag bridge broke his back in three places. But his body healed those breaks.”
“Broken bones will knit themselves back together, Doctor,” Julie said.
“They do—” the doctor nodded “—but the emperor’s spine mended perfectly. I’m not sure I could have aligned it that well.”
“Then why is he still near death if all this miraculous healing is going on?”
“Like I said, the healing started right after they sealed the chamber. Then, after about eleven weeks, it stopped. It’s like his body ran out of gas and couldn’t fix anything else.”
Or ran out of his special nanites, Julie thought.
“You said if you tried to thaw him out,” Julie used fleet slang to describe bringing someone out of cryogenic sleep, “he’d die before you could work on him. What can you do?”
“Out here, at the edge of nowhere, not much, Madame President,” Doctor Solinger replied.
“Can anyone in the Empire do anything for him?”
“I don’t know,” Solinger answered honestly. “Frankly, Admiral, I’m both a doctor and a professional officer. You and I graduated from the same alma mater before I went off to study medicine.”
The doctor saw the shocked look on the former admiral’s face.
“Class of ’23,” Solinger supplied. “And yes, we were both there at the same time. I looked you up. But I only bring it up because I’ve concentrated on knowing the medicine that helps me keep wounded spacers alive. I’m not up to date on everything that’s happening in the field of medicine. I know that several of the medical universities have been researching different ways to work on a patient in cryo. Last I heard, there’d been no breakthroughs.”
Rambling a bit, Doctor Solinger continued, “If we could figure out how the emperor’s body was healing itself, and help it do that again, it would be an immense help.”
Julie nodded. She understood what the doctor was saying.
“Can we go somewhere a little less open, Doctor Solinger? Perhaps your office? I need to have a private conversation with you about the emperor’s condition.”
“Of course, President Adams.”
Julie turned, looking at the rest of her group. Scott Conners and Kyle Kane had said nothing since the brief greeting in the hangar bay. Dot Evers had only answered the questions she’d asked.
“Admiral Evers—” Julie was formal, since they were standing in front of Doctor Solinger and his staff “—can you take my wife to the quarters you’ve assigned to me? I need to have a private word with the doctor—” she cocked her head toward Solinger “—then I’ll be up to discuss things with all of you.”
Then something struck her, and Julie scanned the special treatment area where the medical staff had set up the stasis pod. She was looking for something specific, but didn’t find it, and turned back to Dorothy Evers.
“Admiral, as far as I’m concerned, that man—” Julie pointed at Hazard lying in the survival pod “—is still emperor. Where are his guards?”
Julie decided that Dorothy and the others were just thinking about Hazard as their friend returned from the dead, not as the emperor.
“I’m sorry, Julie,” Dorothy stammered. “I mean, Madame President. A proper guard force will be here in two minutes.”
Julie watched as the admiral spoke quickly, and almost frantically, into her wrist comm.
“I’ll stay here till they arrive, and my Marine guards will protect the emperor.”
“My office is right next door, President Adams. We could go there while your Marines stand guard.”
“What do you think, Sergeant?” Julie asked the NCO in charge of the detail.
“Your office is right next door?” the sergeant asked. “And I mean right next door, not halfway down the passageway?”
“It is right next door, Sergeant,” Solinger answered, one corner of his mouth curling into a grin. He understood the sergeant’s intent. “That’s why I picked this room. I wanted it nearby.”
The sergeant nodded and turned to look at Julie. “One man on the doc’s office door, me and another Marine in the hall guarding this door—” he gestured toward the exam room’s only door “—and one Marine in here with the emperor. That will give us adequate coverage for both of you, Madame President.”
“I like it, Sergeant,” Julie stated. “Post your Marines.”
It didn’t take long. In less than a minute, the Marine sergeant stuck his head through the door and nodded toward Julie. She nodded back, and the head disappeared.
“Now, let’s go have a private chat, Doctor Solinger.”
* * *
Doctor Solinger waved Julie into the single chair situated in front of his desk.
“It’s not much, but it serves its purpose,” Solinger said, referring to the room. “What is it you wish to know about the emperor’s condition?”
Then he held up a hand to stop Julie. “Before we get too far, I have to warn you. Privacy laws severely limit what I can share with even you, Madame President.”
Julie suppressed a chuckle.
I’m the one who’s about to share deep, dark secrets.
“I appreciate that, Doctor, but I asked for this meeting not to learn anything more about Hazard’s condition, but to share privileged information I have about the emperor. And when I say privileged, I mean classified.”
“I spent a great deal of time assigned to General Lee’s special operations folks. Fleet HQ gave me the highest security clearances there are because of that.”
This time, Julie did chuckle. “There are security clearances, and there are security clearances. If you spent that much time with Malcolm Lee and his special operators, I’m sure you heard their sophomoric joke, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’ Well, this secret falls into that category.”
“I understand.”
“Doctor, what I’m about to tell you, I’ve classified as Top Secret Presidential. Empress Elizabeth V classified it as Top Secret Imperial. Now, the Federation is still fairly new, and we haven’t figured out a lot of things yet, like how to deal with secrets like this. So, we’ll fall back on controlling information like this the way the Empire did. Do you know what would happen to someone back in the Empire who revealed an imperial secret?”
Doctor Solinger could only shake his head.
“That someone would simply disappear. Poof. There would be no trace of him. Either one of Grand Duke Henry’s Imperial Intelligence teams would do it, or some of the special operators you used to work with would. But they would be gone, never to be seen again.”
“You’ve made your point, Madame President,” Solinger responded. “Like I said earlier, I consider myself a serving officer first and a doctor second. What information do you have that might help me treat the emperor?”
“What do you know about nanites? Specifically, medical nanites?”
“Not as much as I’d like,” Solinger began. “Doctor Brougham developed them to treat the Black Dragon Virus. Fleet Medical actually sent us a small manufacturing unit that will make nanites just in case we had an outbreak of the Black Dragon virus out here.”
Julie, who’d been lounging in her chair, sat up straight at hearing that news.
“Where is that unit, Doctor?”
“It’s at the new hospital we’re building outside the planetary capital of Atlanta.”
Julie’s mind raced at the possibilities the unit might provide.
Can it make other types of nanites? Are there “recipes” for other nanites on a menu buried somewhere inside the unit?
Julie pulled out her comm tablet and contacted Dot. “I’ll explain later, but I want Connie and the diplomatic ships to break orbit and head to the jump limit. We’re all going to Earth.”
“But—” Admiral Evers began, but Julie cut her off.
“No buts, just do it, Dot. I’ll explain when I get up there,” Julie ordered, then closed the channel before her friend could respond.
“President Adams, there’s nothing super-secret about nanites or how we use them to fight the Black Dragon Virus,” Solinger said. “A bunch of us have been speculating that Doctor Brougham is likely working on other strains to fight other diseases. We can’t wait to see them.”
“Doctor, would it surprise you to learn that nanites have been around for quite a while? Somewhere around twenty-five years or so?”
“Yes, that surprises me. Like I said, I pay more attention to medical developments that help me treat the spacers and Marines of the fleet. I’d never heard of medical nanites before Doctor Brougham developed the ones used to combat the virus.”
“This is the highly classified part of the discussion, Doctor,” Julie said. “Way back, twenty-five years ago, Carl Brougham was the imperial physician. He was Empress Elizabeth’s personal doctor and treated the rest of the imperial family, including a teenage Prince Henry. Wanting to improve the health of the family, he experimented and devised a strain of nanites that provided near-universal immunity for the empress.”
“But something like that would have been a benefit to the entire Empire,” Solinger exclaimed. “Why limit it to the empress and a few others?”
“First off, there were only two others who received the initial design. Prince Edward, who was the crown prince at the time, and Prince Henry, the second in line. The nanites were expensive, ruinously expensive. Hazard told me each dose cost more than the annual revenue of a wealthy star system.”
“But still—” the doctor began, but Julie cut him off.
“They were too expensive to mass produce, Doctor. What would have happened if the Empire’s citizens had learned about it? Everyone would have wanted it. And those who couldn’t afford it—which was 99.99 percent of the population—would have first resented, then hated those who could get it. So Empress Elizabeth declared it an Imperial Secret and set up Doctor Brougham with his own institute to refine the process, and hopefully make it more affordable.”
“He was obviously successful,” Doctor Solinger said bitterly. “He was able to make the nanites for the Black Dragon cure, but he hasn’t released the universal nanites.”
“You’re a serving officer, Doctor Solinger,” Julie began, trying a different tack with the upset physician. “You have a general idea of how much the Empire was spending on the military at the end of the Swarm War?”
Solinger nodded.
“Empress Elizabeth spent four years’ worth of defense spending to create and manufacture the virus nanites. Carl Brougham used his initial strain of nanites to develop that cure. It’s effectively a very watered-down, but highly focused strain of universal nanites.”
Julie waved a hand dismissively. “We could debate this all day, Doctor, but we’re straying from the reason I revealed this to you. Doctor Brougham, like any inventor, tinkered with those early designs, hoping he could make them do more. He developed specialized repair bots that would help an injected body heal injuries.”
Julie could see the realization dawn in the doctor’s eyes.
“That’s what was healing his injuries. But why did they stop?”
“I’m no expert, but the way Hazard explained it to me—and mind you, he didn’t, or I guess I should say, doesn’t, since he’s alive, understand it all that well himself—is that as they perform various repair functions, the repairs use up nanites. Even though they are also self-replicating, I suspect in extreme cases, the body can use them faster than the nanites can reproduce themselves.”
“So you’re thinking the emperor’s body used up all his medical repair nanites,” Solinger said. “And if we can inject him with new ones, they might restart the repairs.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Julie said, nodding.
“But can the fabricator we have produce those nanites?”
“That’s what we’re going to Sol to find out, Doctor.” Julie didn’t add that there was another option for obtaining the “special” nanites.
He doesn’t need to know unless we have to go that route.
“Here’s the plan, Doctor. We go to Earth and find out if the fabricator can produce the nanites. If it can, we inject the emperor with the replacement repair nanites so his body can begin healing itself again. Whether or not we get those nanites, Connie will then head for Britannia as fast as she can travel. It’s a long way back to the Empire, as I’m sure you are aware. If we get the nanites, and the emperor’s body repairs itself enough for you to safely thaw him out, you can perform the surgical repairs needed to speed up the process. If not, we turn Emperor Hazard over to the experts, including Carl Brougham, to fix.”
“That’s a logical plan. I agree, Madame President. As for our philosophical discussion—or maybe I should say argument—I see your point of view. As a doctor, I want to save everyone.”
“Would it surprise you to learn that as an admiral, and now as president, I have the same desire?”
“I hadn’t thought of that, ma’am,” Solinger stated, “but knowing your record, I can clearly see that you do care.”
“All right, then,” Julie said, standing and offering the doctor her hand. “We’re agreed. Now, I have a lot of things I need to do to make all of this work.”
“And I have a patient to check on,” Solinger said, shaking the offered hand. “Thank you, Madame President.”
* * *
“I wish you had brought Allison and the baby along with you, Kyle,” Julie heard her wife say as she stepped into the VIP suite.
Julie scanned the room from just inside the doorway, feeling it close behind her. Viceroy Kyle Kane, Ambassador Scott Conners, and Admiral Dorothy Evers sat in armchairs facing the sofa where her wife, Annalese, sat with their baby on her lap. No one had noticed her arrival.
“It would have been fun to watch Stephen and Henry play with each other,” Anna continued.
“Why didn’t you bring Allison along, Viceroy?” Julie asked. While Anna had come to know the new leader of the Human Confederacy, along with his wife and newborn, very well over the last year, since they were next-door neighbors, Dorothy didn’t know the man well. In fact, their previous meetings had been contentious.
