A Star Wheeled Sky

by Brad R Torgersen

  “Were you angry?” she asked. “Did you ever…hate any of us?”

  “Hate you, lass?” Elvin said, his facial expression becoming incredulous. “You were the sweetest little one I ever did see! How could I hate you? Besides, I could be proud of the fact that I had a place in this universe. And a war record to match any man’s. If I first left home confused about where I fit, I came back to Oswight space knowing who I was, and what I was capable of doin’. To include servin’ your family. Who gave me a title, and a comfortable living, and never expected me to be anything other than what I was. Which is more than I can say for the few Dissenter rabble-rousers who occasionally try to make trouble, even to this day. Miserable idiots. Stuck in a past that never existed—when they oughta be looking forward, like I ultimately done.”

  A few moments of silence passed between them, as Garsina mentally metabolized what she’d heard. Like Wyodreth Antagean, and Garsina herself, Elvin had worked to build his own identity, apart from his heritage. Not an easy thing to do, when you didn’t have much in the way of resources. But DSOD had given Elvin a home, and he’d clearly embraced military life so thoroughly that the military state of mind went with him when he left the service. She could still remember him dressing up in his old DSOD formals—on Constellar Founders Day—proudly puffing out a chest decorated with numerous medals, while he waved the Constellar flag more enthusiastically than any Oswight Family member ever had.

  “Anyway,” he said, “you know what happened to my little family. When that all went to hell, and there was no way of getting back into the service, Family Oswight made a place for me. And gave me people I could care about. Not like I was an equal, mind you, there was a never a day when I wasn’t fully aware of the fact that Oswight employed me. But there are far worse jobs in the Waywork, with far less reward. I may not show it sometimes, but I’m a happy man for havin’ a home, Garsina. And when that Antagean fellow brought up my Dissenter heritage—like it oughta be a wedge between you, me, your father, your brothers—I got so angry, I wanted to put him on the deck. Ain’t no officer in any service who’s got the right to suggest I’m part of something I don’t want to be part of. Through my own choice. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling, with tears rapidly dropping down her face.

  “Now don’t go spreadin’ any of that to outsiders,” Elvin pleaded. “I can’t let any of these people think I’m soft, you see.”

  “Secret happily kept,” Garsina said, and allowed herself to laugh.

  “That’s music to my ears, lass,” he said, and grinned warmly.

  Chapter 26

  One by one, the Antagean starliners puffed their jury-rigged ejection pods into the void. Nothing spectacular, per design. The pods were gently pushed out of their tubes. Like ice cubes being dropped from a dispenser, they floated slowly away from their respective ships, at the same time those ships dialed their thrust up slowly past two gees, and into three-gee territory. Leaving the ejection pods to drift in a small but expanding sphere of space—looking for all the universe like a collection of comet nibblets, shaved from the hulk of some larger, much more impressive body.

  It was days before the slumbering weapons crossed the Nautilan pursuit force’s path. At which time some of the ejection pods had dispersed very widely indeed. Too wide to be of any use.

  But a few were within the desired activation envelope, which brought their small attitude-control computers to life. The computers quickly identified where the nearest, largest masses were, and activated their respective reaction-control thrusters. Ice and hydrogen blasted away from the thruster nozzles, and formerly drifting bits of interplanetary junk suddenly became accelerating projectiles.

  At first, the threat-detection matrix being used by the Nautilan pursuit force did not recognize the pods. They were moving too slowly, and not giving off the right signatures for the kinds of missiles the matrix was programmed to recognize. But when the other detection system—the one designed to help with conventional collision avoidance—began to bwoop painfully at the Nautilan crews, they knew something was seriously wrong.

  Of the four ejection pods within reach of a warship, only one of them found its mark. The other three went off prematurely, providing their prey with a trio of very bright, very disturbing explosions. The fourth got to within one hundred meters of its intended target, blowing away half of the ship’s fuel tanks, and cracking the superstructure like a man might bend dry sticks between his hands—before tossing the kindling on an open fire.

  Golsubril Vex was sleeping when it happened. One moment, she was nestled securely in her gee hammock. The next, she was rolling out of the hammock and almost smashing her face into the deck, on account of three gees pulling her much more quickly to the floor than her reflexes could remember. The threat klaxon was very loud in her ears, and when she called for her compartment’s lights to come on, she got just the dull orange of the emergency lanterns, which popped out of the ceiling near the door.

  Vex pulled a zipsuit from the wall locker where she kept her emergency-readiness supplies, and struggled into it. Once she had it secured at the collar, she made her way out into the corridors of the Alliance, intent on reaching the lift shaft, which would take her to the command module. Crew bustled past—if one could call struggling in three gees bustling—and Vex had to make way several times for space-suited security personnel who clomped past her. Each with beads of sweat on their foreheads, visible through the transparent face bowls of their space helmets. If she thought it was tough carrying just her own weight around, trying to move in a full vacuum suit seemed much, much worse.

  Finally, the kosmarch emerged through the hatch to the command module.

  “What happened?” she demanded of the watch officer.

  “We’re not sure yet, Madam Kosmarch,” the young woman said. “It looks like the Destiny has been catastrophically damaged. Except there are no enemy ships close enough to fire upon us.”

  “Constellar forces?” Vex said, sliding into the gee chair next to where Ekk normally sat. The old man was conspicuously absent.

  “Too far away,” the watch officer said. “This is something else.”

  “What does your tactical readout tell us? Give me the three-dimensional visual.”

  The air over their heads came to life. Three of the four Nautilan destroyers, remained in formation. But a fourth was now drifting out of line—in what appeared to be fragments.

  “Any response from the Destiny’s captain?” Vex asked.

  “No, Madam Kosmarch,” the watch officer said. “I’ve notified our own captain, who should be here any moment.”

  “Those,” Vex said, stabbing her finger at the tiny little lights forming a halo on the pursuit force’s three-sixty perimeter.

  “Looks like bits of cometary debris,” the watch officer said. “We were steering past them when the Destiny broke up.”

  “Those aren’t massive enough to cause catastrophic failure, even if a ship hits them at interplanetary speed,” Vex said.

  “I agree, Madam Kosmarch,” said the watch officer.

  Ekk appeared, laboring hurriedly with his walker.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demanded. The watch officer quickly relayed to him everything she’d been telling to Vex up to that point.

  Again, Vex pointed at the little, drifting lights.

  “Weapons,” she said. “It’s got to be.”

  “But what kind?” Ekk said, peering into the hologram. “There are no ships nearby to deploy them. Looks like…well, if the spectrographic evidence is any clue, those are little hunks of comet.”

  “Destroy them!” Vex ordered.

  The watch officer merely stared.

  “Do it now!” Vex practically screamed.

  “Y-yes, Madam Kosmarch,” the watch officer said, and relayed the order to the countermeasures officer, who had to manually identify each of the little lights—on his own display—before the antimissile system would launch. Three
ships deployed over a hundred antimissiles, which streaked out and found their targets. One by one, the supposed cometary slivers vanished from the tactical display.

  “Wait,” said the countermeasures officer. “We’re getting a fresh look with the spectrograph. There’s more to those targets than we first thought. Picking up traces of steel, copper, aluminum, carbon…and plutonium.”

  “Plutonium!” Ekk roared, slapping his fist onto the arm of his gee chair.

  “Our quarry sent us welcome notes,” Vex said coolly.

  “I don’t understand how,” Ekk said, rubbing a shaking hand over his scalp. “Those starliners aren’t armed with ship-to-ship weaponry.”

  “How big are the smallest tactical thermonuclear devices in Nautilan service?” Vex asked.

  Ekk thought about it for a moment.

  “Smaller than you, Madam Kosmarch,” he said.

  “So, small enough to fit onboard any civilian ship of any size, correct?”

  “Apparently so,” he said, slightly embarrassed.

  “But we never saw them coming, because they didn’t look like missiles—to our computers. Do I have that correct?”

  “Madam Kosmarch, we’ll have to go back over the computer logs. We don’t have enough data at this time to draw a conclusion.”

  “Of course we do,” Vex said, exasperated. “We’re following the trail left by the Constellar squadron—and following it so exactly, their diffuse hydrogen exhaust is like a beeline vector. So, they dummied up their weapons to look harmless upon initial sensor detection. We’re lucky more ships didn’t suffer damage. General Ekk, take us off the wake of those starliners. We don’t need a repeat of what happened tonight. Is there anything left of the Destiny worth salvaging?”

  “We’re doing an initial sensor sweep for survivors,” he said, tapping fingers at his gee chair keyboard.

  “Damn the survivors,” Vex said angrily, “was there anything aboard that ship we need, once we arrive at our destination?”

  Ekk stopped typing, and gave the kosmarch a bleary eye.

  “Nothing we don’t have with us on the Alliance, or any of the other two destroyers. Beyond personnel, of course. Who will require rescue, assuming there is anyone still alive to be rescued. Watch officer, order our sister ships to match with us as we stick close to the Destiny and try to determine what we can do to help them.”

  “Belay that, pilot,” Vex said. “Follow my original instructions, and take us away from the trajectory we were on when the Destiny got hit. As in, several thousand kilometers away. And get the countermeasures computer programmed so that it treats anything—even something that looks like it might be natural—as a potential threat. Those starliners played us once. We cannot let them do it again. As for the Destiny and her crew…we can’t waste time poking through the rubble. We’ve got to get out of harm’s way, and continue the pursuit. Do I make myself clear to everyone in this command module?”

  A small chorus of Yes, Madam Kosmarch went through the place, save for General Ekk, who simply stared up at the splintering remains of his former destroyer, now diverging from the rest of the pursuit force. His eyes didn’t blink. He merely watched for several minutes, then made a sour expression with his mouth, and changed the tactical view to a larger, system-wide strategic view.

  “Trajectory altered,” the pilot reported.

  “We’re still behind them,” Ekk said to Vex. “We can try to push ourselves to four gees, but that’s going to be almost unbearable for everyone aboard. And it won’t allow us to catch up completely, Madam Kosmarch. One way or another, they’re going to reach the next gas giant, and do a second slingshot maneuver. I’d say their rear-guard attack was their way to try to delay us.”

  “Which is precisely why we can’t waver,” she said. And then added, “Even if it was the Alliance which had been hit, I’d expect the remaining three ships in our formation to keep after the Constellar ships.”

  “But what about Destiny’s Key?” Ekk protested.

  “We’ll track the wreck. A salvage expedition can be deployed later.”

  “Doesn’t make it any easier to leave them,” Ekk said softly, almost for nobody’s ears but Vex’s.

  She chose not to upbraid him in front of the rest of the command module. She knew that he was still a spaceman first, in his bones. Abandoning a wreck without doing everything possible to assist survivors was contrary to the tacit spaceman’s code.

  Vex stayed at her station for the rest of the night, and well into the next morning, monitoring their progress. When the time came to make the second gravity-assist maneuver at the second jovian world, she ignored the beautiful exterior camera feeds sending back gorgeous imagery of a chocolate-milky striped world, swirled with white cream. The moons, the thin ring, none of it interested her. She had a mind only for completing the slingshot, and staying parallel to the Constellar starliners’ trajectory—which now appeared to be dead on for the small terrestrial with the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 27

  Objective Epsilon was a cold, dark place. That far from the home star, the comet’s surface remained a wilderness of shadows. Gravitational pull was minor, but present, so that Catapult’s pilot had to spend some time maneuvering into a stable orbital position which did not conflict with the orbit of the comet’s small satellite, nor the tiny flake of rock which in turn served as the satellite’s satellite. From a purely exploratory standpoint, the place was no different from countless other Kuiper bodies orbiting in almost every system. What made Objective Epsilon special was the fact it was the only Kuiper body Admiral Mikton could reach before having to risk another full engagement with the Nautilan attack squadron which was hot on her heels.

  “We made it,” Commodore Urrl said, floating out of his gee chair while stretching his arms and chest. “Now what?”

  “How long before Daffodil arrives?” she asked, still seated, staring into her flatscreen.

  “About a day, at best,” he replied.

  “Then we’ll have to be done with it before they arrive.”

  “Care to tell me what ‘it’ actually is, ma’am?” Urrl asked—an edge of annoyance in his voice.

  “I said it before. Our whole problem up until now has been playing to lose, not playing to win. Now that we’re in this system, and they know it, we can’t say we’re really holding ground until we stop them from bringing their ships over. They’re obviously confident in their ability to cut the Task Group apart, one ship at a time. And Antagean is on his own for the duration—though I give our detachment commander credit for taking out one of the destroyers dogging him. I doubt he’ll manage the same trick again before he’s landing people on the clement planet.”

  “Uxmal, according to Lady Oswight,” Urrl said.

  “Right. They’ll be extremely vulnerable as long as Nautilan controls the space around Uxmal. Just as we’re extremely vulnerable while Nautilan can potentially push a second squadron across from the Jaalit Waypoint. What we need to do is neutralize their Waypoint on their side. Bottleneck their relief effort. Which buys us the time we need to redouble our effort on the Oswight side.”

  “It will take many more ships—and a lot more firepower—to tangle with their security flotilla in the Jaalit system.”

  “If it’s a stand-up brawl, sure,” Admiral Mikton said, punching keys on her keyboard—until the command module holographic projector displayed Objective Epsilon, and all of the Constellar ships currently surrounding it.

  “But what if we could pass as Nautilan in origin? Cross through and emerge in Jaalit system space while sending the right codes to keep their security flotilla happy? Even if it was just one ship, by the time that ship got close enough to launch weapons, their security flotilla might not be able to respond before several ships are destroyed or disabled. More to the point, it rocks them back on their heels. I know Nautilan doctrine well enough to realize that an offensive operation against them, in their own backyard, will shake
them up a lot. Constellar hasn’t done a counterstrike of that kind in years. I am betting they will immediately shift their effort to rebuilding the defense at Jaalit—under the assumption that we’re using resources in the Oswight system to hit them with their pants around their ankles. And while they spend days or weeks getting fresh ships moved to Jaalit—from across Nautilan space—we can get the rest of Iakar’s flotilla moved to Uxmal territory.”

  “That’s one hell of a gamble, ma’am,” Urrl said. “What if you’re wrong? What if their assumption that we’re striking from Oswight merely causes them to hit Oswight system in reply? Without Iakar’s ships to guard the Waypoint, the system is more or less wide open for a Nautilan Task Group to go in, surgically knock out the defensive planetary stations, and then begin a siege of Planet Oswight proper.”

  “We’ll just have to find out if I understand their thinking as well as I suspect I do,” she said.

  Urrl’s face held an expression of skepticism, while his mouth curled slightly.

  “And…how are we supposed to get their codes, Admiral?” he asked.

  “That’s what I need to figure out in the next few minutes,” she said, staring intently at the hologram of Objective Epsilon. “Out in deep space we’d never get close enough. But this comet gives us something to work with.”

  “Work with for what? In order to have their codes, you’d actually need the physical item—the computer installed in their communications array, which carries the codes, and automatically syncs with other, similar computers of Nautilan manufacture. And our version can self-destruct. To prevent somebody else from doing to us, what you’re proposing we do to the security flotilla in Jaalit space. Is there something you suddenly know about the Nautilan code machines which I don’t?”