"Is it just me or are the storms getting worse?"
Aesop looked up from mangled communications dish to Vega and Maggie floating near a small breach in the pressure hull of the ship. He’d seen IDF soldiers get shot exposing less surface area, but he stilled his nerves and looked past the marines.
"It’s not just you. There’re fewer tethered ships below us. Less light pollution so you’re better able to see the surface storms."
"So why are there less ships below us?" asked Vega.
"I think we’d better get those damn communications patched through. How’s it going up there, Singh?"
There was no answer, just soft static in his radio. Aesop tried again, looking at the deck above him. "Singh? Report, how’s that comm array looking?"
Vega’s hand shifted to his rifle as he glanced at the bottom of the deck above them. Unease had Aesop’s hair on end where it wasn’t flattened by the vacuum suit. A hand signal to Mags told her to stay put, and he pushed off the bulkhead, loosening the strap on his own X-87 carbine as he caught the lip of the hatch. Firing an assault rifle in microgravity resulted in interesting things happening to the trajectory of the shooter, even with the rifles designed for employment in space.
The chamber above was a mess of twisted cables and panels, dark screens and reams of translucent filament on spindles that would have printed sensor data. Everything was built into what he would have considered the floor and ceiling, creating the illusion of a canyon between high walls of equipment. Light from his helmet dispelled the shadows cast by dozens of tiny holes in the hull of the ship. Weapons fire had perforated the starboard side, and whatever had done it was spiking his suit’s radiological sensor. Infrared wasn’t helpful either, everything on the ship had cooled to a uniform temperature.
"Vega, cover me."
Two quick keys of the radio acknowledged and confirmed the order. Vega could be an arrogant condescending ass, but Aesop trusted no one to watch his back better than the Brazilian. With his rifle at the ready, Aesop floated forward to the plastic cloth separating the sensor shack from what remained of the radio room. It was further up the forecastle of the ship, and had avoided most of the damage concentrated near the stern. At least until their harpoon had pried it open like a tin can, exposing it to the vacuum of space. A wedge of the equipment packing the room was illuminated periodically by the bright flashes of storms below, and Aesop slowly swept his rifle across the rest. His back was tight, and sweat beaded on his upper lip as he revealed consoles of dead bulbs and magnetic tape deck storage where the Condor would have advanced computers. Some aspects of xenotechnology were incredibly complex, like power generation and chemical manipulation. But when it came to computers, it was better to look hundreds of years into the past to find their human equivalent.
It was in front of one of these banks that his beam swept over the small frame of Singh, floating cross-legged and inverted to his perception. He lowered his rifle, releasing a breath. The panel in front of her was lighted, and black rubber human cables snaked among the silvery blue alloyed conduits of Gavisari design. A cord ran from Singh’s suit-board computer to a patch panel, and then into the radio bank through means of soldered connections.
"Hold fast Vega, she’s just got her pants down."
There was pressure behind him, and then the uncomfortable abrasion of two armored vacuum suits contacting as Vega forced his way in for a look. "Huh," he said, spotting her. "Hey, ask her if they can pick up the telecasts."
"At this distance? I think the earliest television broadcasts might have had time to reach us," said Aesop. Of course, the signals would have long since attenuated.
Aesop pushed Vega back and used the momentum to slide close to Singh, careful not to collide and potentially wreck her delicate work. He couldn’t see through the opaque black shell of her helmet, but his lights flashing across it woke her from whatever reverie she’d found herself wrapped up in. She started, legs coming unraveled as her hand went to her hip for her sidearm before she relaxed and retuned her radio. Aesop could hear background chatter in Kossovoldt as she reconnected her squad radio channel. It was a much deeper and sibilant version of the language than he was used to hearing from his fellow crewmates. Humans had adopted it as the official Union Earth language after it became clear that so much of the Orion Spur used it. Aesop shared no human language with Singh, and only broken English with Vega. Maggie at least spoke some Spanish, and could understand a little of Vega’s Portuguese by relation. Beyond that her only other language was English, like Captain Marin. The only language unifying the entire crew of the Condor was Kossovoldt.
"Sorry Sarge, I’ve been listening to some of their recorded fleet broadcasts while I try and get the live coms working, but no luck there. The Blessing lost primary reactor power shortly after jumping to Pedres and the automatic recorders shut off."
Aesop shined some light on her work, identifying a few potential issues with the wiring, which he pointed out. "The Blessing?" he asked.
"That’s what we’re on. It’s not a diplomatic envoy, it’s a ship for their priest caste. A lot of the recordings I’ve listened to make reference to something they call the ‘Great Exodus", but doesn’t say what that is, only that it’s arrived because the Old Ones have come back to reclaim the planet they loaned to the Gavisari, and that the ‘Children of Gavisar’ have begun it."
"A xeno Armageddon prophecy," said Aesop. "Not many species make it interstellar with religious dogma intact."
"‘Cept us," Vega reminded him. Aesop waved him off and he left to give Mags the all-clear.
"Cohen, for all we know, the Gavisari here around this planet? They may be the only ones of their kind left. Anywhere. Their whole surviving species might be packed into these thousand ships."
Which meant that the old lady signed them up for a genocide at the hands of the Maeyar. But even a hundred warships with orbital superiority was enough to scour Pedres clean of the Maeyar, and most of Gavisar’s civilian ships could not make another horizon jump in such a damaged state. Hell, plenty enough of them couldn’t make it to the star under their own power. Not only were most of them too damaged to risk engaging any kind of compression-based faster than light engines, several hundred were hauling around reactors too damaged to create electricity, and a few were probably leaking enough radioactive particles to slowly poison whatever survivors were on board.
But if this was the entire surviving population of the Gavisar homeworld, the whole of their planetary defense armada was here. And the non-expansionist society would have held a tight grip on their homeworld with a strong home fleet. What could have chased them off so easily? And why come here? Was it the only oxygenated planet within their horizon range? The local cluster of stars was fairly loose as far as horizon lanes went, only a few routes in and out. The Condor had needed help to make it in a single jump, and even the technique to accomplish such a jump was a treasure. The Gavisari had more highly developed interstellar plotting and equipment, but not by all that much.
"The captain may not know what she’s up against here. Keep listening, Singh. But I want active comms to be your main priority. If there’s a major fleet movement going on I want to know why."
All he had to do was fix the broadcast array while there was still someone left to hear his report.
"We’re coming up on the remains of your Yakima, Captain Marin," said Jalith. Victoria winced.
Your Yakima. The message was clear, Jalith was separating the Condor from her command and lumping her in with the rest of the Union Earth fleet. Her reputation took a huge hit to shield Victoria the way she had, but the unofficial punishment would be ostracism from the Maeyar captain’s battlegroup once she left to meet with the Malagath.
"Acknowledged, Twin Sister. We’ll only need a few minutes." The Maeyar commander cut the transmission, and Victoria raised her voice to be heard over the open microphone. "Avery, see if the Yakima has auxiliary power for a remote protocol or if we’re going to have to board her."
"Way ahead of you, Vick. Remote challenge was accepted and we’re transferring the Yakima’s logs now."
Victoria scanned the progress on one of her repeater screens. She opened a file at random to see an inventory manifest of the holds. Silk, coffee, preserved citrus fruits, and vegetables. It could have been the inventory list off a sloop coming home from the Indies. Union Earth men and women had died for this? Two ships lost in as many days, one to hostile xenos and another to friendlies. Victoria eyed her pilot, who had been unusually quiet since the initial skirmish. The Hudson River’s sister ship had been the Clarke, Huian’s original intended billet before Tech Div’s director, Sampson, had put her on the Condor as leverage against the girl’s mother. Had she not elected to remain aboard the Condor, there was a good chance she would have been on the control deck when those Gavisar missiles broke through the Clarke’s defenses. Control was deep in the heart of a ship, away from the escape pods that carried crew away from a total loss. Many of the men aboard made it off the ship and had been picked up by Bullock and the Hudson River, but the pilots and captain? Unlikely.
"Hard, isn’t it?" said Victoria.
Her pilot jumped a little, her eyes tearing away from the main viewscreen where the Yakima had been enlarged enough to see the rent metal where the Maeyar lasers had carved open her hull and exposed the crew to vacuum. A human could survive in vacuum for a few moments. Victoria managed it, and counted it a worse experience than waking up with a hangover, a migraine, and a jealous wife trying to cave in what was left of her head over forgotten carnal transgressions from the previous night. It had taken her weeks to fully recover. The crew of the Yakima never would.
"We’re not ready for this, ma’am," said Huian. "How can we survive in this universe when we’re not strong enough to play by their rules? Sometimes, sometimes it’s easy to forget. Aboard the Condor. It’s easy to forget just how savage and uncaring and unfair the odds are. And then you look at the rest of humanity, and our ships, and our weapons. And you realize that we don’t have the advantages they have, and it kills us."
Huian upped the acceleration again to rejoin the battlegroup. "But it’s why we’re out here. Why they were out here so far from Earth with nothing between them and the emptiness of space but a thin frame of composite hull and the trust that maybe these xenos wouldn’t strip that protection away for some slight."
And now they were depending on the charity of the selfsame xenos. It maybe worked to some advantage that the Maeyar thought they were handing her over to death at the hands of the Malagath. Still, Sothcide and to some degree Jalith had stuck their strange membranous necks out for her. Whether it was out of a sense of honor or loyalty, as the two were very different things, she could not say and would not ask. Best Victoria set her mind to the task ahead. The Malagath and Gavisar awaited.
Sothcide inspected the Starscream’s launch mechanisms for her fighters. Six cylindrical magnetic rail systems with the fighters stacked inside ready to be rotated into position and launched at speeds that pushed the limits of their inertial dampeners. As flippant as Vehl outwardly appeared, the pristine condition of the flight deck revealed her competency as a commander and her husband’s diligence as her chief maintenance engineer. Every contact was greased or polished, every electrical connection secure, and each magnetic coil buffed of the inevitable burn scuffs from the intense heat the system generated. The Starscream could launch a full squadron of fighters every four seconds, emptying her total complement of fifty-two interceptors and bombers in just under a minute. The Twin Sister had a larger complement, but could not match the speed of deployment.
"Call to bearing!"
Sothcide wasn’t sure who shouted the order, but every crewmate and officer on the flight deck snapped straight as an arrow, right hand across belly and left across the small of the back in the traditional salute. Wing Commander Vehl Ku had entered the deck through the magnetic lift as it hummed gently down to seal with the gravity plating beneath. She had switched her formal uniform for one of war, with a long silk shawl buckled about her shoulders patterned after the southern reefs of Maeyar.
"Stand at ease," she said, eye on Sothcide. She nodded to her husband on top of one of the launch coil capacitors before handing Sothcide a docket of paperwork. "Your orders and stratagem. Long-range sensors have identified a displacement of several ships outside of their line. Yadus wants Arda to push up toward Juna, draw them into a fight while we drift outside the moon and wait to join battle at a full burn run. As soon as we strike, her forces will withdraw in the confusion to avoid being drawn in by the main body of their defense fleet."
Sothcide looked at the diagrams, committing the timing, positioning, and astrogational distances to memory. "A quick strike to blunt the tip of their spear when it comes. Do we know the nature of the target?"
"Juna tends to throw off sensors, but the gravitic distortions suggest three light cruisers and a battleship. Gavisar vessels are heavily armed and armored, but sluggish. And if the report of your human captain is to be believed, they should be damaged to some degree already. They have no logistics train here, we are targeting engine linkages, propulsion shrouding, anything that cannot be fixed without the aid of a shipyard."
"What of the ships trailing the magnetic tethers that Victoria reported? A dozen fighters could make quick work of many of them."
Vehl Ku’s proboscis wagged at him. "Greedy. They are not our priority. Stick to what the Wing Admiral ordered. Are you ready, Wing Officer?"
Dipping down into orbit would have given him an opportunity to locate the human warriors, though he did not know which ship they had landed upon and by all accounts the number had grown to nearly 1400 vessels. Still, he had their communication protocol and an opportunity might yet yield itself. Sothcide saluted once more. "I stand ready, Wing Commander."
Vehl returned the salute, if lazily. "Good. Allow me to introduce your second."
She gestured, and a younger pilot nearby jogged up in his flight suit. He had the lightest skin Sothcide had ever seen, likely a Pedres native.
"Wing Officer Allid. With the Senior Wing Officer’s unfortunate fall, seniority now falls to him. But he lacks experience against the Homeworld Defense Fleet, which is why I requested you. Allid will lead the second wing, four additional squadrons to apply pressure where you see fit."
Allid offered his hand, and Sothcide clasped his wrist in greeting, meeting his nebula-patterned eye.
"The reputation of this battlegroup’s pilots precedes it. You require little from me," said Sothcide.
"Just an exhaust trail to follow, wingboss. From what I hear of you, we’ll have to keep up full burn just to see it."
Having the Yakima’s logs and deciphering them were two separate beasts. Despite their human origin, the encryption on the data would take some time for the Condor to crack. That gave her plenty of time during the horizon jump to Gavisar to ponder over the possibilities with no way to validate her hunches. It was just another form of stealth and subterfuge the rest of the galaxy seemed to have left behind. Even the Big Three tended to use open-air communications with encryption being reserved for distress calls and position reports.
The Condor had been brought aboard the Malagath imperial yacht for the jump so that the Duchess could meet humanity, this new curiosity of the Malagath Empire. The zero-gravity cargo bay in which the Condor floated was almost the size of the Maeyar fighter decks. Victoria would just as soon have avoided contact all together, but couldn’t deny that she was curious if the minor noble was anything like the First Prince, Tavram. Her notion was dispelled as she was swept into an ostentatious throne room draped with Malagath tapestries that hung in the air without apparent suspension or power source. Her retinal implants were going crazy, marking and cataloguing bits and bobs throughout the ship.
How many humans had been aboard a Malagath vessel? A better question might be, how many left again? Several Privateer ships exploring systems near the Perseus Arm remained unaccounted for, captains on the doorstep of the Malagath Empire where Victoria had delivered the First Prince of their empire. Hope that Tavram put his brief contact with humanity to the back of his mind while he pursued peace with the Dirregaunt was quickly fading. Staring down indecisive flag officers was one thing, being in the crosshairs of one of the biggest empires to ever spread across the cosmos was another.
The duchess herself preened at the top of the throne, an array of crystals casting vibrant patterns of light across her skin as they drifted through the air near her seat. They followed her as she turned to the new arrival, as if somehow surprised by the presence of the human she herself had commanded. The blue face regarded her at the end of a long, slender neck wrapped in an intricate lattice of jeweled chains. The rest of her extremities were similarly bedecked, and unlike Tavram, who had worn the uniform of his crew, the duchess wore a shimmering dress of shifting colors.
"The human captain, Grace Tora," announced a member of her retinue as the hatch behind Victoria rolled shut. This was no combat center. The whole of the space had been designed and arrayed to meet the aesthetic demands of a single person, to display a measure of wealth and arrogance befitting Malagath imperials. Her retinal implants informed Victoria that it was not appropriate to offer a placating gesture in the presence of the duchess, which suited her fine since she seemed to be having difficulty taking her eyes from liquid crystals that formed into a faceted fluted glass in the duchess’ hand before a younger Malagath scaled the substantial height of the throne to fill it from a sealed flask.
"So you are the lesser empire captain that helped dear Tavram defeat Best Wishes. It is a shame his body could not be recovered; it would have looked a fine thing hanging from the imperial palace at Malagan. I must say, you are not as frightening as I would have expected from such a scourge of the Dirregaunt Praetory."
The corners of the duchess’ eyes tilted in a way that Victoria did not need the aid of the retinal implants’ explanation to know she was being teased. And not in a kind way.
The Duchess continued between sips of whatever liquor she was sampling. The noble was obviously exempt from the Malagath prohibition of intoxicants while serving in the fleet. Perhaps it was the fleet that was serving her. "When I heard the rumor that a human ship was among the defenders of Pedres it offered a curiosity, but when I learned it was the illustrious Victoria of Human I knew I simply must have you for myself."
As an ally or a favored pet? Neither was where Victoria would have liked to find herself. She’d come to this part of the Orion Spur specifically to avoid further engagement with the Malagath Empire and the Dirregaunt Praetory. What was Duchess Tora even doing this far from the frontier?
"Clearly the creature is confused into silence," the Duchess said to her crew in Malagath. Chittering sing-song laughter floated up to answer her.
"I was wondering," Victoria said, responding in Malagath rather than Kossovoldt, "What brought you to Pedres."
That cut the laughter fast enough. The duchess nearly dropped her glass, leaning forward. The crystals floating about her began to cast a deep scarlet light. "Those words are for we above your station. You will not profane them with your voice aboard my ship again if you wish to leave it," she hissed. She settled back, obviously agitated, and looked away from Victoria.
"The Maeyar are a curiosity of mine these few years past. I thought to offer them vassalship if they can prove their martial skill by repelling this invasion and so came to witness. But when I arrived, sensor signatures from the system you call Gavisar require my more immediate attention. Tavram spoke of the quality of your ship’s optics, and so you will be my eyes and alert me to danger."
More like her canary.
"I understand, Duchess. I will make ready my ship for a jump to Gavisar."
Again, the birdsong laughter from the duchess and her hangers on. "Oh I cannot leave to you such a delicate calculation. I’m told you use computers to plot your interstellar events. How barbaric. No, human, we have already made the jump. You need only rejoin your crew."