Peace Talks (Adventures of the Starship Satori Book 12) by Kevin McLaughlin

Author:Kevin McLaughlin [McLaughlin, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-29T22:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Two guards waited in front of the elevator shaft as Hereford approached. He flashed his ID to them without their even asking. No one was exempt from security protocols on this base, not even a general. They allowed him to approach the elevator doors, where he had to give handprint and retina scans before the doors would open.

“Stay frosty,” Hereford told the guards before the doors cut off his view of them.

Then he began to descend. Base One's control room was deep beneath the planet's surface. It had originally been designed as a shelter in case of nuclear attack. Now, it was one of the main hubs for USSF's operations on Earth. Even as deep underground as the place was, it might not survive a direct kinetic strike, but it was more secure than most locations could manage. Half of what they were operating with was 'the best they could do'. Very little was optimal.

“But what is an optimal defense against a planet-killing weapon?” Hereford groused to himself. He didn't have the answer. If he had, he would have implemented it already. He’d done what he could, sending the Satori and Independence away in the hopes they could find a secret, distant world humanity could flee to if Earth was destroyed. But they hadn’t come back yet, and setting up a new home for humans millions of light years away was one hell of a long shot.

The doors slid open and revealed an already bustling room. Massive screens lined the walls, giving him a view of near-Earth objects as well as a constantly updating scan of the entire solar system. That latter screen was still a work in progress. Light lag meant that the scans from more distant regions were grossly out of date. Again, it was the best they could do, for the moment.

But one screen now showed a tactical camera feed, split with overhead imagery from a satellite feed that showed Captain Jenkins and his men approaching the camp site. McInness had been right. His directions made the spot easy enough to find, and the satellite showed there were still quite a few heat signatures in the campground. Was one of them Benson? It was impossible to tell. Much as Hereford wanted to wrap this entire operation up as neatly as possible, he doubted the man would be there.

“How are we doing?” Hereford asked as he approached the row of techs monitoring the situation.

“You're just in time, sir,” Lieutenant Marshall replied. “They're about to go in.”

This was a dicey operation. True, the President had given Hereford much more latitude than any military officer had possessed before they were attacked by aliens. But this was still a US military strike on US citizens on US soil. Under normal circumstances such a thing would never have been allowed.

The situation Hereford faced was anything but normal. Humanity's existence was hanging by a handful of threads, and Hereford was holding most of them in his hands. Let too many slip, and he'd doom every human being.

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