Rika Rising
Page 15
Vargo Klen, in his new-old persona of General Mior, had given Barne a special field promotion to General, and Rika had resigned her commission—something that had been far more emotional than she’d expected.
Vargo had then reinstated Rika in the newly formed NGSF and promoted her clear up to a three-star general.
She was certain that someone writing the history books would laugh at the shenanigans they’d pulled to get to this point, but the most important thing was that—thanks to a mountain of documentation—everything they were doing was entirely legal under Old Genevian law.
So now she stood, a general in the NGSF, before the Genevian magnus, who had ruled for all of twelve hours, in front of the people she had fought and bled alongside for the past two years of her life.
“Are you ready?” Vargo asked in a voice barely above a whisper. “I could still commission Oda and make him magnus.”
Rika snorted and shook her head. “You don’t need to goad me into a coup, General Mior. I’m finally ready for this. Just…just get on with it before I lose my nerve.”
Vargo nodded. “General Rika of the New Genevian Space Force, I have a matter of grave importance to discuss with you.”
Hearing the reference to the NGSF grated on Rika’s ears, but by the time they’d settled on Genevian Marauders, Vargo had already disseminated the other name. It made no matter, though. She’d rename the military as one of her first acts.
“General Mior, I stand ready for whatever task you have for me.”
They’d not rehearsed the words, but Rika decided to have a little fun with it. Something to mark the memory.
“It won’t be easy,” he replied, his voice ringing out and filling the room. “But it’s a job fit for a queen.”
She rolled her eyes at him, but replied in a somber voice. “I’m not afraid of a difficult assignment.”
“Good.” He reached into a pouch on his waist and pulled out a sheet of plas. “This is my resignation from the NGSF, effective immediately. I am no longer the head of the Genevian military, and I am no longer the Genevian magnus. You are, General Rika.”
Rika took the plas, nodding silently as a feeling of nervous uncertainty welled up inside of her. Applause came from around the room, and she felt a lump form in her throat. She turned from Vargo to face those assembled, and a smile split her lips, growing so wide it ached.
Rika laughed and shook her head, raising her hands for silence—which only made the cheering grow louder. She saw that even the normally stoic Tremon was shouting and clapping his hands above his head.
It took several minutes for the furor to die down, and when it did, Rika called out, “Now where’s that Vargo Klen?”
“Here, Magnus Rika,” he said from beside her.
“Ah, yes. Well, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve just been drafted. But since I heard that you quit the Marauders all willy-nilly, I’m going to have to reinstate you as a captain.”
The man beamed at her and nodded while shaking her hand. “That’ll do just fine, ma’am.”
“And as for the rest of you,” Rika shouted above the din that ensued. “We’re not calling this outfit the NGSF—sorry, Captain Heather. You’re all in the Genevian Marauders now!”
This time it took a shorter period for the cheers to die down, but more because everyone was hoarse than from a lack of excitement.
“Now, you’re all thirsty after screaming,” Rika continued, “so as my second act, I’m telling you all to enjoy yourselves—but not too much. We have a football game this afternoon.”
She felt a modicum of guilt that they’d have the game without Colonel Borden’s ISF Marines, but they’d returned to New Canaan with Admiral Carson, none of them able to sit by idly as their home system was under attack.
The only silver lining was that they’d left their massive walker, the Starcrusher, behind.
The ranks of soldiers and crowd of civilians broke up at her words and began to mill about, talking and enjoying beverages the servitors began to pass around. Even though everyone appeared pleased with the proceedings, there was a pall hanging over the attendees. Ships from two more systems had jumped in during the night, telling of other systems that had seen the Nietzscheans cripple their infrastructure and destroy food supplies before they left.
She was tempted not to have the football game, but Tremon had convinced her that it was worth it, and the reports from intel indicated that they’d still have time to move the fleets to defensive positions before the Nietzscheans could launch an attack on Genevia—should they plan to.
“Well, Magnus,” Chase said as he approached Rika. “You’ve finally done it.”
“This was just a ceremony,” she replied, taking his hands in hers. “There’s still so much to do.”
“I think that’ll always be the case, but this calls for a bit of contentment, don’t you think? Just for a moment?”
Rika nodded, smiling at the man standing before her. “Yeah, I suppose…though I’m going to hold out hope that at some point, things settle down a bit.”
“You wouldn’t know what to do if they did,” he replied.
Rika nodded as she looked out over those assembled around them. “You’re probably right. But can I pretend for a bit?”
“Sure, we all have our little fantasies.”
Piper fed her the scan data, which showed the Pinnacle, the massive carrier that the Nietszcheans had been building at the Capeton shipyards, boosting away from the planet on an outsystem vector.
Rika said, trying to absorb what she was seeing.
the AI replied.
THE LANCE
STELLAR DATE: 06.02.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GMS Fury Lance, departing Belgium
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
Rika leant over the holotank on the bridge of the Fury Lance and shook her head in disbelief.
“How the hell did the Niets get tech like this?” she asked.
Niki suggested.
“I guess that explains why it’s so weird,” Captain Heather said.
“Yeah.” Rika ran a hand through her hair as she stared at the six-kilometer-long ship with its single central hull surrounded by six cantilevered hulls. She’d always assumed that the vessel was designed that way just to fit through smaller jump gates and present a smaller mass profile for regular FTL flight.
However, the central hull had a two-hundred-meter void that hadn’t served any discernable purpose until Piper correlated information that Kora had gotten from Oda and Arla with what he knew of black holes.
Piper said.
“I think everything else has been a smoke screen,” Rika said. “When properly outfitted, that ship has the ability to smash stasis shields, and if those ancillary hulls do what you think, it can steer the beam it fires.”
Heather met her gaze. “Which means that if the Niets manage to escape with it, and can replicate the tech, our biggest tactical advantage disappears.”
“Or we’re forced to attack prematurely to stop them from building more,” Rika replied. “Either way, it sucks.”
Silva stood a meter away, studying the secondary holotank, which displayed the positions of the Marauder fleets in t
he Genevia System. “A lotta sucks. We were stretched thin even when Carson was here. Most of our ships have skeleton crews at best. I hope to hell that the Niets aren’t good enough at timing things to pull off their swoop and poop in the next day or so. We’re gonna get caught with our pants around our ankles.”
“You don’t wear pants,” Heather countered. “One of the benefits of being a mech.”
Silva gave a single laugh and rolled her eyes. “You’re a funny one. Still, I suppose we don’t even know for certain that it’s the Niets who’re making off with the Pinnacle. There were only a dozen engineers and a pair of LHO mechs on board. It wouldn’t have taken a large force to take the ship.”
“And then be able to pilot it?” Rika asked. “It’s one thing to board a ship like that. It’s something else entirely to have it be anything other than a big hunk of steel in space.”
“Sure,” Heather nodded in agreement. “But keep in mind those engineers know how to fly the ship, and civilians aren’t trained to resist torture.”
“The Pinnacle is worth more than a planet,” Silva said. “I can guarantee you that if the opportunity presented itself, there are a lot of enterprising individuals who would have gleefully stolen the thing.”
“Valid,” Rika said. “Either way, we have to assume that it has a competent crew.”
“Which is why I wish we weren’t chasing after it alone,” Silva said. “I get that we have to anchor all our other defensive positions with stasis-shielded ships, but I’d feel a hell of a lot better if it wasn’t just us versus that behemoth.”
Heather cleared her throat and patted the side of the holotank. “Don’t you besmirch my Lance, Colonel Silva. I won’t have it.”
“I’m not besmirching,” Silva protested. “It’s just that that thing is four times our mass and has a main weapon that can fire right through our stasis shields.”
“How sure are you about that?” Silva asked.
“Did the ISF provide any data on how big the black hole has to be to power the anti-stasis beam?” Rika asked.
Though the Nietzscheans had never before fielded a ship with weapons capable of breaching stasis shields, the ISF had encountered them several times. They called them DMG ships, and the first had been produced by a now-defunct faction in the war called Airtha. Later, the Orion Guard had demonstrated that they possessed DMG weaponry.
Because the beams a DMG ship could fire were capable of holing even one of the ISF’s vaunted I-Class super-dreadnoughts, DMG technology was something about which they didn’t disclose a lot of details.
Niki confirmed that expectation.
“And what if it only has to be microscopic?” Rika asked.
The three women shared a long look while they waited for one of the AIs to respond.
Rika knew that, but it was nice to hear Piper confirm it, and put the fear that she’d missed some critical part of the equation to rest.
“I guess that makes me feel better.”
“So,” Silva gestured to her holotank, which showed the Pinnacle’s outsystem route and the Fury Lance’s intercept route. “At our current acceleration, we’ll meet them just as they pass Babylon. They’re obviously going to use it for a gravity assist, so if we don’t take them then, they’ll make it to jump distance.”
“No pressure,” Heather muttered.
Rika laughed. “Just another day at the office.”
“You’ve never worked at an office, Rika,” Silva shot back, her tone terse.
For a moment, Rika was about to respond in kind, but she bit her tongue. Silva’s daughter, Amy, was aboard Tangel’s flagship, the I2. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that if New Canaan was under attack, that’s where the I2 would be.
“Good point,” Rika said after a moment of mental floundering.
“We’ll hit them here.” Heather placed a marker on the holotank’s display, just past where the other ship would emerge from its slingshot maneuver. “We’ll fire everything we have at their engines. Even at full power, their shields won’t be able to take the Lance’s atom beams—not unless they turn the ship at the last moment to move their engines away from us.”
“And that ship turns slow, so even the Lance can outmaneuver it,” Rika added. “Then we storm it.”
“OK, then,” Heather said. “We just have twenty-two hours until intercept. Anyone have a Snark deck handy?”
A GAME OF SNARK
STELLAR DATE: 06.03.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GMS Fury Lance, en route to Babylon
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
“Shit!” Leslie swore, shaking her head in disgust. “You’ve been captain for six voyages so far, Rika. How do you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Chase added, giving Rika a suspicious glare. “But if she had sleeves, I’d suspect something was up them.”
“It’s just six voyages,” she replied, picking up the cards from the best manifest and setting them in the cargo pile before shuffling the rest back together. “One time, Barne held it for over thirty.”
“By cheating,” Leslie growled.
“Shouldn’t you be supporting your partner?” Rika teased.
“I do. Trust me, being with Barne requires a lot of supporting. But he was totally cheating that time. I don’t know how, but he even admitted it to me.”
“No way.” Chase shook his head. “I was watching him like a hawk, he couldn’t have been.”
Leslie shrugged. “Well, he claims he was, and while I often wouldn’t, this time I believe him.”
“He does like to mess with people,” Rika said. “It would be so Barne to tell people he was cheating when he wasn’t just to make them go nuts trying to figure out what he’d done that he didn’t actually do.”
“Yeah, that would fit as well.” The other woman nodded in agreement.
“What do you see in him, anyway?” Chase asked as he picked up the cards Rika dealt.
Leslie’s tail swished in the air behind her, and she gave Chase a languid wink. “Maybe I’m with him just to get you to ask me why I’m with him. Ever think of that?”
“No, because I didn’t think you were that much of a masochist.”
Leslie snorted. “Funny.”
“Are you ever going to stop asking Leslie why she’s with Barne?” Rika picked up her cards and looked over them at Chase. “You’re going to give me a complex.”
“It does come off a bit like you want to bang me,” Leslie said as she pulled out her two best cards and passed them to Rika.
“Whoa, hey,” Chase gave Leslie a wide-eyed look before shaking his head. “That’s not what I was going for at all. It’s like a mystery of the universe, you know. Like why some stars don’t have Oort clouds, or whether or not low-mass primordial black holes can survive from one universe to the next.”
“As much as I like being compared to a black hole, I—”
“Well, you’ve modded your skin to be very dark,” Chase interrupted. “I mean…so much innuendo is possible right now.”
Leslie locked eyes with Rika. “Is he trying Barne-level humor now?”
“Beats me. Here are your two cards. I hope you like them.”
“You’re all grace, Your Grace.”
“I don’t think queens get called
‘Your Grace’,” Rika said. “Well, maybe?”
“Pretty sure it’s priests that get called that,” Chase said as he sorted through the cards in his hand.
Rika played a pair of sixes, and he pulled out two cards and was about to set them down on the table, when his eyes flicked up and turned to the galley’s entrance.
“About time, Bondo. I was dragging this game out as long as I could.”
“Sorry, Captain,” the lieutenant said from behind Rika, and she turned to see the head of the company’s Repair and Refit team grinning like a fool.
“Dragged it out, why?” she asked suspiciously.
“Well, you see…” Bondo began slowly, suddenly looking uncertain of himself.
“It’s your armor,” Chase said, placing his cards on the table and rising to stand beside the R&R lieutenant. “There was something wrong with it.”
Rika’s brows knit together. “Something wrong with it? But you repaired it after that fight on Lisbon. It seemed fine when I wore it after.”
“Well, of course.” Bondo’s expression shifted from one of uncertainty to pure confidence. “I wouldn’t screw up repairs on your armor.”
“So then, what’s wrong with it?” Rika pressed.
“Well…” Chase said, glancing at the lieutenant. “Is it the color, specifically?”
“A bit, yeah.”
“Wait,” Rika held up a hand as she glanced down at herself. “It’s stealth armor, it can change color.”
“The design, then,” Bondo said with a nod. “Yeah, color and design. They go hand-in-hand, you know.”
“OK, you two, what’s going on?” she demanded, a smile on her lips. “You’re clearly up to something.”
“Bring it in,” the lieutenant called over his shoulder.
A second later, Corporal Stripes came into view, pushing an armor rack on an a-grav pad into the galley. The rack held what was clearly SMI gear, but it wasn’t the standard grey, it was white—though not a pure white, more of an eggshell.
But that wasn’t the only difference. Instead of being blocky and angular, it was slimmer. More human-looking. A GNR sat on the rack, its design matching the armor: sleeker, with the ammo mounts further back, atop rather than below the firing system.