by M. D. Cooper
Time slowed as she lined up a shot with her own flechette gun and dodged to one side of the corridor. The plasma bolt tore through her upper right arm, and she screamed as the armor sealed the breach by clamping down on her scorched flesh. Juergens launched himself down the corridor and surprised their adversary, who was trying to reload the one-shot plasma weapon.
Juergens knocked the rifle away with one gauntleted hand and grabbed the would-be claim jumper around the neck with the other. The pale looking pirate turned a bit paler when he saw the look in Juergens’ eyes.
“Give me a really good reason I shouldn’t just squeeze and remove your head right now!”
The thief’s mouth worked, but nothing came out, so Juergens eased up the pressure slightly. The guy was wearing a standard shipsuit, no space gear was in sight and he was bleeding from a couple of flechette hits.
“I’m just the cook, don’t kill me!” he gasped.
“A cook for a claim jumper is still a claim jumper, try again. Are you the only one aboard?”
“Yes, they didn’t want me on the op because I’m not EV trained.”
“How many went on the op?”
“Fourteen, including the AI and the captain.”
“And who would that be?
“Captain Crawford,” he said with a defeated look.
Juergens swore bitterly. Then he trussed up the “cook” and went back to check on Beads.
* * * * *
Captain O’Bannon turned back toward the cargo bay and started carefully down the passage.
Dodson’s words proved prophetic, as a large person in light armor pushed through the cargo bay doors and launched themselves at O’Bannon.
O’Bannon didn’t react until the figure reached for him. At that point, he deftly snagged the elbow of his opponent with one hand and his weapons belt with the other. Using his maglocked boots as an anchor, he helped the claim jumper’s momentum along and threw him at the bulkhead.
His opponent looked up at the rapidly approaching steel instead of ducking, and the ensuing collision snapped three of the vertebrae in his neck.
The captain made his way the long way around to the control room and found Siobahn and Kenaz staring at a frozen claim jumper in heavy armor.
“You’d better take a look, Captain,” said Siobahn quietly.
O’Bannon looked into the man’s wide-open, frozen eyes.
“Crawford!” he growled. “That’s how this pack of thieves knew so much about our defenses and managed to hack into our Link. Kenaz, this is the crewman you replaced. I told him he was going to come to no good end when he left us. It’s too bad he had to go and prove me right.
“I’ll haul him to the cargo bay. You two go help Juergens get Beads to the autodoc.”
EPILOGUE
STELLAR DATE: 08.29.4127
LOCATION: Ice mining rig Madre De Hielo
REGION: Deep in the Scattered Disk, 200+ AU from Sol
The remainder of the run-in was blessedly uneventful. The crew stored the dead claim jumpers with bounties on them in black body bags netted to the ice cargo. The others that died in the assault, Kenaz had the dubious pleasure of turning into compost. It wasn’t much fun, but he wasn’t about to let organic compounds go to waste. Though watching Beads extract their useable bio-mods with her temporary right arm was something he could have gone without seeing his whole life.
Interrogations of the survivors yielded little in the way of new information. Crawford had hired them onto the ship without telling them its source, and this was their first attempted theft. They also had no idea where the insane AI had come from; they just knew that it was supposed to debilitate the crew and make the op a cakewalk. The captain and Juergens put the survivors into cryostasis chambers nearly as cold as the accommodations their buddies had, netted to the cargo.
Another mystery was the ancient spacecraft found in the small cargo hold of the fast courier now grappled to the D2 tank. Dodson had a pretty good idea what it was, but he wasn’t telling. The golden colored disc they’d found in Crawford’s cabin obviously belonged to the craft, and Kenaz had been given the task of pulling the information from it.
One evening, Kenaz came to the control room to talk with Dodson alone. “What’s the story with Crawford? None of you mentioned him before.”
“He and the captain had a big falling out. O’Bannon looked on him almost as a son. He wanted Crawford to do a hitch in the SWSF then rejoin us and maybe get a rig of his own someday. Crawford wanted no part of it, thought he was too good for the military and didn’t want to live with the discipline. None of us really talked much about him after he left.”
“What about that AI he had? It seemed to be in horrible anguish.”
“I’ve set up a sand-boxed expanse and tried to reach out to him, but I can’t get any coherent response. I can’t take spending more than a few milliseconds at a time with him myself.”
“How do you think he got that way?”
“It’s very hard to tell, but my best guess is that he is the result of a multi-nodal AI that was broken apart in a cataclysmic event, and then pieced back together with only remnants of what was left. He can never be what he once was, and I don’t think he can even integrate his disparate parts into one being. The result is the loneliness and despair you felt over the Link. It might be a kindness to destroy him, but I don’t want to do that until I try to get him some better help than I can provide.”
“I’m glad. I believe redemption is available to everyone. I have some ancient Earth music from the golden disc you might play for him. Perhaps it will make him feel less alone.”
Kenaz passed him the file for “Dark Was the Night” by someone called Blind Willie Johnson.
As they approached New Pottstown, Dodson sent for the Captain.
“Things are really heating up between the Jovian Combine and InnerSol. It looks like our government may be looking at this as an opportunity for more independence out here in the Scattered Disk. I just received an encrypted official communiqué from the SWSF detachment on New Pottstown. Both of our reserve commissions have been reinstated and we are placed on active service as of now. The Madre De Hielo is being reassigned as an armed auxiliary in the SWSF, as well.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised, but I am disappointed. I’d hoped we would have a reprieve for a while, but it’s not to be,” replied O’Bannon with a sigh.
“You know, this is going to get really awkwar
d for Kenaz,” stated the AI.
“Yes, he’s a good kid. He worked out better than I thought on this trip, but he’s also a Jovian citizen and a member of the Ganymede militia. If the SWSF gets wind of his presence on the Madre De Hielo, they will probably want to intern him,” O’Bannon returned.
“What do you intend to do?” asked Dodson.
“I certainly don’t plan to turn over a member of my crew to the SWSF’s tender mercies,” the captain assured him. “We should talk to Kenaz and get his perspective. I feel like he’s nearly a Disker now, but he does have family on Ganymede.”
“That’s going to be a tough set of competing loyalties for someone that young,” Dodson opined.
“It would be a tough set for me. He strikes me as the resilient type, though. Perhaps we can work up an ident for him from one of our deceased friends out there until he can get back home.” The captain looked up at Dodson’s optical pickup and raised his bulb of coffee with a wry smile. “Interesting times, my old friend.”
THE END
ABOUT HENRY ORION
Henry Orion grew up devouring books and traveling to far places in his imagination. Once adulthood reined him back to Earth, he spent a career in the Army, first commanding missile systems, then developing them. He now teaches program management for a living, and looks for ways to feed his creative side through music and writing. For exercise, he enjoys kayaking and flinging flying discs at metal baskets. He happily resides with his wife in Huntsville, Alabama, home of Space Camp and the oldest disc golf course in the country.
KNOW THY ENEMY
BY AARON J. DAVIS
FROM THE AUTHOR
I got my start as an SF fan at an early age, when my elementary school librarian handed me The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis; by sheer coincidence, this was around the time my parents treated my brother and me to the original version of Star Wars (one movie a night on consecutive nights).
I dabbled in my own fiction all through school, but I always found that having the framework of an established setting made it easier to write, so fan fiction fit me well. Since 2013, I’ve been writing mainly short fiction on the Star Trek Online forums (including several stories in the long-running War of the Masters setting, whose cofounder, Greg “Sander233” Hodgson, sadly passed away in 2016).
Given the time demands of my day job, I found that ebooks were an easy way to get my SF fix. I discovered Aeon 14 in the fall of 2016 and quickly became a fan, so when this opportunity to write for a canonical anthology came up, I couldn’t very well pass it up. And in rereading Destiny Lost, I found that the Hegemony of Worlds/AST fleet at the Battle of Five Fleets had no lines, and this gave me a good opening to write.
Aaron J. Davis
M. D. Cooper’s Note:
Aaron deserves an honorary Aeon 14 PhD for the research he did to create this story, which takes place during the Intrepid’s battle in Bollam’s World, but this time from the viewpoint of the AST.
It was a blast for me to read this version of those momentous events from both another author’s eyes and the viewpoint of the enemy.
Of course, the only thing you’ll need to have read to sink your teeth into this tale is Destiny Lost.
CHAPTER ONE
STELLAR DATE: 06.09.8947 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: AST Space Force Eridanus Border Command
REGION: High Vulcan, Vulcan, Keid System
“If you know the enemy, and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
“If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat.
“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
— “Attack by Strategem”, from The Art of War by Sun Tzu (believed Eastern Zhou Dynasty, China, c. -544 – -496 Adjusted Years)
* * * * *
The seaside view shown on the flag office’s right-hand wall reminded her of home.
For a given value of ‘home’ at least: Ahti and the endless tumult of its oceans were Admiral Sini Laaksonen’s birthplace, but she hadn’t set foot on that world, ten light years distant, in more than three decades. And neither her mental image of her homeland or the beachfront projected on the bulkhead bore any similarity to Vulcan, the world that lay hundreds of kilometers under her feet. Ahti was a water world whose people lived in floating cities or on the endless chains of islands. Vulcan, however—forever blasted by its too-close K-class sun and two dwarf companions—had been settled and inexpertly terraformed to feature a single large sea basin, only because the refugees fleeing the destruction of Victoria thousands of years earlier had nowhere else to go.
Not for the first time, Sini wondered idly if it was the heat that had inspired the name. Local lore said that Vulcan, also sometimes called S’harien the Swordsmith by local cults, was some ancient deity with pointed ears and a forge that never cooled. It didn’t hurt the metaphor that the system was now so industrialized: the status display for the shipyards showed a ticker of two hundred new Warhammer-class dreadnoughts and an assortment of smaller patrol ships nearing completion. The AST ruled many of the oldest settled systems in the known galaxy and such massive construction orders could be difficult to fill in other systems, especially Sol, due to resource depletion from millennia of human settlement. But not in a system like this that the FGT had passed on as unfit for human habitation.
The door slid open and Sini turned sharply on a heel, coming smartly to attention.
“At ease, Sini. Dammit, we’ve known each other long enough,” Fleet Admiral Jerra grumbled as she strode in.
“Sir, regardless of our personal relationship—”
“Didn’t I just say save it?”
Sini hid a smile as Jerra walked to her desk. Military protocol or not, it was still fun to mess with her. She let her body relax a bit.
“How’s your grandson?” she asked, nodding her head at the picture frame on Jerra’s desk.
Jerra grimaced. “Great-grandson, and he’s already getting into things he shouldn’t. It’s like a tradition now: I walked into my bedroom in New Victoria last week, and half my lingerie drawer was on the floor.”
“So a three-year-old, then,” Sini summarized, her eyes crinkling.
“What are you up to, four grandkids now?”
“Yes, and Hillevi had number five in the oven last I heard.”
“Congratulate her for me,” Jerra said somewhat absently, still staring at her display.
“I will.” Sini eyed the other woman’s face as she took a seat across from her. Per regulations, Jerra’s aquiline features and ebony hair were more or less natural, barring the odd concession to vanity. Sini often idly wondered how women could stand going grey before rejuv was invented. Of course, she herself still had the same red-brown skin she was born with and had barely changed her hairstyle since the previous century, so she couldn’t talk. “Something must be up, if you pulled me back out here.”
Jerra nodded slowly. “We found the Intrepid.”
Sini gaped as she tried to make sense of the words Jerra had spoken. “What? How?”
“I’m sending you the data over the Link. Short version, Ambassador Yer from the Trisilieds Alliance introduced the president to some new friends.”
“The Trissies?” With some trepidation, Sini accepted the transfer to her classified partition with a mental click, then said to her AI,
So did Sini’s face, once the best bits of the information came up.
“ ‘Orion Freedom Alliance’?” she repeated aloud disbelievingly.
“That’s right. Apparently the terraforming fleets have been pulling strings here in the Core for quite a while.”
“That’s the understatement of the millennium if even half of this is accurate,” Sini muttered. “So,
let me get this straight: our friendly neighborhood Illuminati want us to take how many ships—”
<‘As many as can be mustered’,> Thea quoted from the text of the executive order, at the same moment as Jerra answered, “Twenty thousand.”
“—two thousand light years out to the ass-crack of the Orion Arm just because they say that devil-spawned ship from the dawn of time is there?”
“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”
“And the president agreed to this?”
Jerra nodded.
“Tämä on perseestä,” Sini muttered under her breath. “Where are we even getting the ships for this boondoggle from?”
“You haven’t been paying attention to the fleet expansions, have you?”
“I’ve kind of been stuck at the Sirius Academy since Bollam’s World, you know.”
But, on second thought, a few observations were starting to make sense. The academy’s class sizes had been dramatically ramped up over the last fifteen years: they were putting out enough officers now to fuel a major wartime expansion, so much that the Scipians and Hyadeans were starting to take note.
“Where are we getting the ships? The raw materials, even?” Sini asked.
“What we aren’t mining here or at Ross 128 and the like? Some of it’s coming from the Pleiades, the rest, directly from the OFA.”
“And we’re supposed to get there by… jump gates? Did I step off the Excalibur and into a cheap sim?”
“I’m starting to get the feeling you’re not completely on board with this plan,” Jerra drawled.
“Well, first off, we have no way to independently verify any of what this…General Garza is telling us: the light lag is too much.”
“Stipulated.”
“Second, trusting a Trissie spy cost me both my legs and my Ranger career.”
“Oh, for—that was sixty years ago, Sini!”