"I’m telling you Cohen, it was a human external comms frequency."
"Well it’s not there now. If the old lady were here she’d have signaled us as soon as she got a fix."
Aesop looked at the transceiver readout again. He’d managed to fix the equipment, or at least thought he fixed it. But if it was picking up human shipboard radios there was a chance it had gone into some sort of operational test mode using known frequencies, and if that test mode included wideband broadcasts it could potentially give away their position. He pulled up the manual on his retinal implants, but no obvious troubleshooting directive presented itself. Besides, if he could fix an alien power module he could fix a damn radio. Sometimes the world had seemed simpler when all he had to worry about were his rifle and his squad mates.
"Look," said Vega, "there it is again.’
This time Aesop caught it, that faint VHF signal with singularly human encryption. On and off again, several more times and then nothing. He waited, but it didn’t return.
"Next broadcast window is coming up, what do you want to do?" asked Vega.
"Hold off," said Aesop. "This doesn’t feel right, let’s not announce ourselves if we don’t know who all is listening." He switched channels to the squad-wide. "Singh, any xeno chatter in the last few minutes?"
"Barely any, just one broadcast on and off and it was fleet wide."
Aesop went to scratch his chin before remembering that it was behind a quarter-inch of one-way see-thru polymer. Vacuum suits were designed to be worn for a few days in the long term, but that wasn’t exactly with the user’s comfort at the forefront of the engineering. There were a few things he would have done differently if he’d been on the project team for the latest generation. Maybe if he survived being a privateer he’d go to the Earth-side factory and have a say in the next model.
"Do they match up with these timestamps?"
There was a pause as Singh compared them to the Blessing’s newly repaired onboard communications receiver. The tether couldn’t generate enough juice to jump start the main engines or maintain life support, but several of the smaller, tertiary systems drew little enough voltage to run off the roughshod electrical patch.
"Negative, they’re staggered."
Maggie Chambers floated in from where she’d been watching the fleet movements. She found a workaround to her fried radio by having the rest of the squad run a speech-to-text program in the background of their suit computers that synced via laser whenever she was in line of sight with one of the others. She caught up quickly to his line of thinking, and her ideas appearing on his retinal implants echoed his own.
A Privateer is giving fleet-wide instructions to the Gavisari.
Only one it could be. "The major warned me about this. Jones piggybacked on the horizon jump and he’s two-timing us with the invasion fleet. Singh, is the recording equipment up and running again? Playback the xeno half of that broadcast if you can, please."
"Aye, give me a moment to patch it through the box," she said. A handful of seconds later, the deep grinding Kosso Standard that the Gavisar vocal cords produced began playing back over the squad channel.
"Brothers and sisters, last Children of Gavisar, this is Fleet Admiral Raksava. A dark shadow over Gavisar ushered us here as we knew one day it must. In times past we sought to make safe this day, and were punished by betrayal so that we would not stray from the true path. Now it is known that we were not worthy to claim our promised land, and only by persevering through this trial can we begin the Second Era.
"So few of us escaped the cataclysm, we have all lost everything we had, everything we remember. But we have gained a guiding star in an unexpected place, this Man of Earth and his primitive vessel and access to knowledge of the betrayers’ plans. I invite him now to share his wisdom with us, and together we shall retake Pedres and make for ourselves a new home. Please listen as vessel assignments are delivered."
Following that were pauses as the Fleet Admiral listed ships and captains, and periods of dead air as Jones delivered instructions that Aesop could not hear without the encryption key. Finally, Raksava’s personal chaplain was given leave to say a brief prayer for their success, which Singh interrupted before it could finish.
"It ends after the invocation."
Vega pounded a fist into the bulkhead. "That mother fucking traitor. He knew we were backing Pedres and he went and joined up with the tripods anyway."
Aesop considered. "It makes a certain sort of fatalistic sense. The Gavisari don’t know the old lady is helping Jalith, and the Maeyar don’t have a clue that Jones is sidled up to the invasion fleet. Earth backs both horses, so Earth has a claim to whoever wins."
"But it still makes it more dangerous for us and the Captain," said Singh.
Aesop nodded, even though the marine couldn’t see it two decks up in the radio room. "What I want to know is what Jones said to convince them that he should be dictating strategy to their fleet admiral. We’re only here because we had an in with Sothcide. What’s his angle with Gavisar?"
"What did they mean when they said ‘Retake Pedres’?" asked Mags
Good question. Aesop had read up on the known history of Pedres and Maeyar during the horizon jump. Horizon space affected everyone a little differently, and for Aesop it manifested in anxiety unless he could find a task to manage his nerves. Usually that meant maintenance, but in this case he decided to be one of the few marines that did the required reading.
Pedres had been pegged as a Maeyar planet for as long as humans had been in the know. Which to be fair, was only a few decades. But Pedres had a population of several million, which even in galactic terms wasn’t something that popped up overnight. It was their biggest colony with significant infrastructure and over half the Maeyar fleet had showed up to defend it. So why did the Gavisari want it so bad? They had a stake here, and it wasn’t that Pedres was the only oxygen-rich planet within their horizon, because Privateers had scouted at least two others. Was this their land of milk and honey?
"Singh, I’ve got a new job for you. Go back through the recordings. See if you can get that encryption codec Jones is using to direct fleet movement. The old lady might not be answering the phone, but If we can feed that back to the Twin Sister maybe we can give the Maeyar a leg up on whatever the invasion fleet is planning."
Captain Marin where are you?
"Vick, the Malagath evacuated the compartment. We’re go as soon as they drop us."
"Thank you, Avery. Davis, prime the ion engine and make sure the goddamned attenuator is secured."
Victoria knew they had left the horizon jump before her command repeater displayed the indication, by the way the familiar chill she had at first taken for the Malagath’s indifference drifted from her skin. She reached up, flipping the main viewscreen display from ship’s diagnostics to adaptive visual sensors. Slowly, the panels of the curved forward bulkhead were replaced by a view of the Malagath receiving bay, where the Condor was held in a lattice of gravitic projectors matching her mass. A flick of Victoria’s eyes brought the monitor to the sensors on the bell of the ship where she watched the belly of the ship slide open despite the lack of any obvious seams or retraction mechanism. Instead of the black of space there was a green glow and a spike on the thermal and gamma radiation sensors facing the opening.
"Christ, they jumped us right next to the core star. Any closer and we’d have sensors melting off the belly."
"Skipper, I’m getting some internal comms chatter from the Malagath. Apparently the Duchess Tora missed our target coordinates by almost two million kilometers. They don’t sound happy."
"Happier than if she had missed by three and put us in the fucking corona. Still, not like the Malagath Nobles to be so far off on a jump calculation. Are you getting anything else?" Victoria asked. One way the Malagath Imperials kept control of their interstellar feudal empire was by trusting the formulas and calculations for long-distance jumps only among those of noble standing. Ships without a member of the royal family were limited only to a distance many times that of humanity. Hell, thought Victoria, they probably taught horizon jump calculations in their version of grade school. Most of their children put Earth’s advanced computers to shame.
Huian listened to the chatter on her headset for a moment. "It sounds like an unexpected mass that their drive couldn’t overcome from deeper in the—"
Whatever she’d been about to say was interrupted as Victoria’s stomach tried to jump up into her mouth. The gravitic lattice expelled the Condor with almost spiteful force, enough to overcome the freshly spooled up inertial dampeners. They had gone from a relative velocity of zero to several hundred kilometers an hour in the span of a few breaths, and if the dampeners hadn’t been active, she and Huian would be dripping off the ceiling.
"Bastards got tired of us listening. They can tell which of our systems are active while we’re aboard. No secrets from the Malagath. Avery, get them on the horn."
As she spoke, the computer oriented itself to the local stellar plane and then began the process of adjusting known constellations of stars to determine their location. Not that it mattered much, humans had never jumped to this system before. They knew very little of Gavisar, only secondhand knowledge from Sothcide that it was a vast planet, incredibly dense and unsuited to most non-native life. Freshwater oceans on the surface, but the crust and mantle were honeycombed with caverns and the background radiation was unusually high. It took a few moments for the computer to spot three likely planetoids from reflected light, but only one was her best bet for Gavisar. She adjusted the computer entry manually before the Malagath video signal bulled over her comms channels and the severe face of the duchess filled all of her screens.
"Condor Actual. Go for course correction," said Victoria. She had to resist the urge to grin. The duchess’ perfect jewelry had been knocked out of alignment and rather than surrounding her like a rich tapestry, the crystals now seemed to buzz about her head like angry hornets. The vents on her neck were pulsing in time with her breath, cooling her blood. Tight muscles stretched across her forehead as she regarded Victoria.
"Condor," said Duchess Tora, rolling the unfamiliar word around in her mouth. "Our proximity to the star’s gravity lessens the chance of gravitic detection and presents an opportunity to come from a perfect vector to mask our thermal signature."
Good cover. But Malagath weren’t as practiced at deception as humans.
"You will investigate and transmit your findings back to me," the Duchess continued.
Any desire to grin drained from Victoria. "I think I might be misunderstanding."
"Quite possible," said Duchess Tora. Now it was her turn to grin, or rather, their equivalent. Victoria didn’t need her retinal implants to provide the translation of the Malagath noble’s pupils dilating practically to the full width of her eyes. The First Prince had never shown her that particular expression, and it wasn’t one she cared to see ever again. Christ, it was probably a view most xenos only ever saw at the end of their life. "I am better equipped than most to study the idiosyncrasies of the lesser empires. Sometimes I wonder how creatures such as yourself function. There is so much you do not understand."
Victoria felt a ‘but’ coming.
"But some have the potential for more. I saw this in the Maeyar as I did in others, in their discipline and their ingenuity. I saw the potential for them to serve the Empire. When Tavram looked upon you he saw little of either quality, but the First Prince saw merit in your sense of sacrifice, and usefulness in your guile and wrath. However, I expect I am more likely to find merit in your guile and usefulness in your sacrifice."
Victoria bared her teeth, unsure whether the duchess was watching commandeered cameras or just listening to her through some other means, as she had never actually opened a communication link between them. If she could barge her way onto her viewscreens, what else could the duchess do? Tora had Victoria in her little xeno pocket, shunned by the Maeyar and far from friendly skies. And now the bitch was sending her, alone, to investigate the origin of a fleet over a thousand ships strong that had arrived with the singular purpose of scouring Pedres clean of humanity’s most lucrative interstellar trading partners.
"Well fuck me. I’ll write you a postcard when we get there."
"A tightbeam communication will do. I’m told by the Maeyar your ship manages encryption for you. I expect details within six hours by secure channel. I shall maintain my current position. Approach as close as you are able."
Her current position, within jump distance of Gavisar’s blue dwarf star, what a reassuring thought. Still, the fighting weight of a Malagath Star-runner was nothing to scoff at. It was a match for any ten of the heaviest ships buzzing around Pedres right now, Maeyar or Gavisar. And it wouldn’t even be considered a warship, more like a glorified yacht. Not to say the duchess would bring those arms to bear in order to bail Victoria out, but a girl could hope.
"Understand all, Duchess Tora. Condor out."
Victoria reached out to cut the circuit before she remembered that she had never established it in the first place. One did not hang up on the Malagath.
The duchess reclined in her throne, tall glass goblet held lazily between slender blue fingers. "Do not fail me, human. There will not be another opportunity to prove your worth to the Empire."
The launch rails always put Sothcide in the mind of carnival attractions, in the way the enormous pitch black cylinders rotated through their warm-ups while he conducted his final pre-takeoff checklist. In the corner of his onscreen display a small timer counted down the seconds until the Starscream reached its launch position. The carrier group was drifting without power, preparing to use the moon’s gravity to adjust course. Once behind it, it would mask the heat of the launch systems and the fighters would drift into an attack run position before circling the planet.
Seventeen ships making a bulwark ahead of the Gavisar fleet screened the invasion against an attack from Pedres, but had left themselves exposed.
"Two minutes, Riz," He signaled in his radio. The gunner in the seat behind him clicked back an assent. His fingers would be on the firing controls, but Sothcide cycled through the configurations for the laser arrays, performing a last minute verification that the delicate apertures and mechanisms functioned as expected. Riz responded by cycling through a set of targeting simulations and off-the-cuff solutions that had margins of error that impressed even Sothcide with his high standard. While the discipline of the crew aboard the Starscream left something to be desired, he had never found reason to question their unerring intelligence. They were a clever set of scoundrels, and they knew the qualities that Wing Commander Vehl desired.
One minute.
Sothcide disabled the final safeties on the launch mechanisms, releasing the mechanical clamps and energizing the magnetic rails. Snow crept across his display from the electromagnetic interference. When active, the sets of launch rails accounted for roughly forty percent of the ship’s total voltage consumption, an even higher load than the engines. He could hear the whine of the power translating through the hull of his fighter, even as the polarity of the rails pushed it back against the wall of the launch chamber. His primary screen switched to the forward optical display, offering no useful tactical information but demanded by many of the pilots out of tradition and the sheer rush of riding the vacuum of space closer than any other.
Except the humans, of course. Somewhere above Juna were humans separated from the cruel pull of space by little more than plastic, climbing through cored ships like bugs on driftwood. He had their communication channel loaded into one of his radio backups, but Arda had insisted on radio silence. Still, his receiver was tuned, and if they were still down there and spoke up, he would hear.
"Fighters, launch by squadron, mark in ten seconds."
Sothcide closed his eyes for a moment, trying to imagine that Vehl’s voice had a soft enough canter for him to convince himself it was Jalith. Then the three second alarm sounded, and he felt the aperture shudder as the fighter before him was launched and his chamber rotated into position with a hiss of escaping gas. The white cloud of nitrogen had barely faded before the array of magnetic coils switched polarity, and he was pressed into his seat as the intense force of the huge magnets chased him out the launch tube on a shimmer of nitrogen heated by the pressure of his interceptor’s nosecone.
"Launch, launch, launch!" came the automatic recording. Several seconds late, as ever.
It took only a fraction of a second to be clear of the long magnetic aperture, and the Starscream dwindled in his rear viewscreen as he assumed manual control over the fighter and polled his squadron for position reports.
The wide arc of Juna’s dark moon dominated his view, blocking out the stars from two thirds of the sky beneath its ribbon of light. Soon the fighter began to push past, and then Sothcide and his squadron were greeted to Juna in all her storm-covered glory, and to the fight that had erupted in her upper orbit.
Ahead, his passive sensors already indicated Arda’s battlegroup appearing to attack with a diminished force, drawing out the overextended members of the screen with exchanged standoff fire as they struggled to climb out of Juna’s gravity at an unfavorable angle. Yadus had been right; their flank was horribly exposed as the majority of the Gavisar fleet was orbiting the planet in the opposite direction and would have to reverse acceleration and climb to offer resistance. Even with the naked eye, Sothcide could see the induction streamers hanging off the backs of the ships, generating enough emergency power to keep their crews alive and little else. So many streamers . . . .
One by one his squadron checked in, and after that it took only seconds for Sothcide to interface with the leaders of the other fighter and bomber squadrons even now coming onto the proper trajectory thanks to the dual gravity wells of Juna and her moon tugging him into alignment.
This would be the day Pedres held.