The Varissian Affair by Jonathan Kuiper

Author:Jonathan Kuiper [Kuiper, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: star trek, insurrection, planet isolation, military science fiction, lost in space, space wars
Published: 2021-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

I WONDERED WHETHER Admiral LaShay’s trust in me was merited, especially with him dead and the entire situation out of control.

On many an assignment, I have those moments of self-doubt, but shit, it had been three months and I feel like I’m letting him down, because I haven’t been able to find a way forward.

He would be the first to say that with some assignments there is no win, just self-preservation with enough managing to spin things in a slightly upward direction. The rain let up enough for me to get out of the hovercraft. I made my way over to a pile of nearby rocks. I hoped that all of this wouldn’t be for nothing.

It’s not just for those that have died, but even for insurgents, those that I have gone to bat for, knowing that there is a big bad wolf that doesn’t care, no matter the costs. The wolf isn’t just the Armory, but the Alliance.

Why did they feel it was such an important mission? I know what the admiral said, but since when do we look the other way?

Usually, I wouldn’t think twice about carrying information, but my intuition said otherwise with Renesco’s flash drive. Back in my training days I was told to serve as an intermediary and nothing more. The idea was to let others do the heavy lifting and play the role of support.

I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t always agree with that policy because sometimes you need to know what you’re going into.

With so many dead, I wondered what was on the flash drive that would be beneficial to Sagar. If it was simply a diagram on where they were planning to attack next or drop points for the bomb or bombs, big deal right? I could tell what target was next, the one that had the most followers of Tinara. This shouldn’t be a shock especially when thousands of them were held up in those caves.

You get rid of them and any additional splinter groups are moot.

Doctor Renesco wanted me to deliver the drive, but he didn’t explicitly say to not look at the information either. Out of sight, from both the hovercraft and the road, I took out the handheld and the flash drive. It struck me as funny that a piece of technology from the early twenty-first century had a universal connection with multiple planets in far reaches of the galaxy.

While it didn’t have the exact input prongs, the handheld had a universal connection outlet where a microorganism discovered in the mid-twenty-second century on Epsilon 12, could access the information. The organism had a symbiotic relationship with the handheld. Whatever drive was connected to the outlet, the organism’s electromagnetic current read the data and then translated it to the handheld.

I slid the drive into the handheld and waited to see what information I was carrying with me.

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