The Milky Way Saga: Cities to Embers (Book 1 of 3)

Chapter 10: Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe

0900 hours, January 29th, 2160

Benson Naval Hospital at the Dawn-Jackson Armory and Base, Nevada, Earth, Sol System

I woke up with Fleet Admiral Ford standing at my bed side. 

"Hello, Isaac. How are you feeling?" It took me a minute to realize that it wasn't a dream.

"Hello, sir," I tried to jump up to salute him.

"Hold on there, Isaac. You're not in any position to be jumping out of bed."

"What happened?" I looked at him in the, but he seemed to dodge it, and went over to the coffee maker in the room. Why is there a coffee maker in here? 

"You and your step-brother-"

"Brother."

"You and your brother single-handedly captured and landed a Denizen shuttle, mostly intact, just out side this window." He pointed to the window next to my bed and I looked out. How is it that it looks bigger in on the ground? 

"Is there any thing in there? Any of the Incolma, I mean?"

" There was a few dozen in CryoSleep, but they were killed when we gassed the ship. It's ours now, All that information, all their records, all of their history is within our grasp."

"But we don't have it yet?"

"Not yet, we have our best hackers on that right now. It's behind a series of always changing firewalls, or at least that's the closest thing we can compare them to. They have a very advanced computing system on everything we've ever seen. All of their messages to us all had detailed walls to keep us from reading the data, but nothing as advanced as this one."

"Are we just going to leave that there, the ship I mean? It's kinda in the way of my training grounds." The Admiral let out a laugh, a very rare feat. He rubbed his brow and then took a sip of his coffee, "No, we're going to have to leave i there until we can find something big enough to move it. We'll probably end up cutting it up and hauling it off to some classified Colony in a remote system. The thing is a hundred stories tall and seven miles long. It's kinda hard to throw it into a moving truck." He looked at me for a moment, always looking me in the eyes until I'd try to match his gazer, like he was lying about something. "Sir, are you sure we haven't already gotten important information from them before? No sort of digital log book of any kind?"

"What do you mean?" He set the coffee down on the table behind him. I stood up, my legs working again. "I mean, I touched some of the panels earlier and I think that I some how had them connect with my suits memory system." He sighed. "What's wrong?"

"Your Mark III was severely damaged after the crash, or at least we think it was after the crash. The memory system was completely fried and the helmet was like it was overworked or something, every component in it was burned out, and the mainframe of the spinal connection was turn apart. That's why you're in that bed, your back got messed up again. I'm surprised that your up and moving around so well, maybe those special ops boys were exaggerating how badly you were hurt."

"Sir, what do we do now?"

We wait. Wait for our boys  to obtain and decode that information, then we will know where to strike. But that could take anywhere from an hour ago to a few months from now. It's all up to chance."

"And Luck, sir."

"Ah, well, I don't believe in luck," He stated tapping his robotic legs with his robotic left arm, "Too many accidents in my day, Isaac."

"Maybe you're just unlucky, sir."

"Maybe." There was a long pause. "Isaac, I have a meeting to be at in ten minutes, so I'm going to leave. Try not to get into too much trouble while I'm gone. You've done a great deal for Humanity this week. Good on ya." He walked out the one door in the room. Back in one of these rooms. Do they all look like this? So clean and bright and white? It hurts just to look around.