Tolvern pulled out her computer and read the response from the fleet bottled up at Persia.
“Powerful alien fleet. Fortify system, await reinforcements. Do not jump.” She returned the computer to her hip pocket.
“Who signed it?” Capp demanded. “McGowan?”
“Does it matter?” Tolvern said.
“I’ll bet it was, the piss nozzle.”
“Capp!”
“Sorry, Cap’n.”
Capp didn’t look sorry, she looked irritated. Tolvern could see them all thinking the same thing.
They were an insubordinate bunch, forged in mutiny against Lord Malthorne’s tyranny, along with Drake, their former captain turned admiral, and honed in battle from one side of the sector to the other. They’d been the ideal crew to cross the inner frontier, trying to make contact with Old Earth.
But this was a mission too far. Because while Capp wasn’t exactly right in casting blame on McGowan, ordering Blackbeard to hold position after Tolvern’s subspace had indicated they were damaged was an act of desperation on the part of the admiralty. She’d clearly used the word “disabled,” in fact. Why would they leave a disabled battle cruiser dangling out here unprotected against a powerful alien fleet?
Because they have no choice.
“Those are our orders,” Tolvern said, “and we’re going to execute them. Let’s look at our position first, then the assets we have on hand.”
She took out her hand computer and brought up a map of their near stellar neighborhood on the small display over her reading niche. Persia was behind them, cut off, with a string of jump points beyond it that led toward Scandian territory, far, far to their rear. There were three other systems cupping Persia.
“This one is Nebuchadnezzar,” she said. They’d done some fighting there in the war. “It hooks into Persia—hooked into it, I mean. That jump is gone. It also connects with us, connects with this system over here, which is another cul-de-sac. One way in, one way out.”
Tolvern tapped her computer screen. “I don’t care much for the system names on these charts. They’re old and they don’t mean anything, so I’m renaming them right now. The system where we are now will be called Fortaleza, and this one over here will be Castillo.”
Carvalho raised an eyebrow. “If you are going to pick Ladino names, you might work on your accent. Listen. You pronounce them Fortaleza, Castillo.”
They rolled off his tongue in a way Tolvern could never reproduce. She didn’t care.
“What do they mean, luv?” Capp asked Carvalho.
“Fortress and castle,” Tolvern said. “Acosta said the navy was reinforcing out here, and that’s what they’ll be. Now look, you can jump through from Nebuchadnezzar to Castillo by going here, and then here, or you can come through Fortaleza, pick up an extra jump, and reach Castillo from where we are. That’s what Acosta was doing when we ran him down. He didn’t know why, only that they sent him around.”
“Don’t make much sense,” Capp said. “Why not go there direct?”
“I can only assume Bilbao was sent the long way because there has been trouble in Nebuchadnezzar,” Tolvern said. “They didn’t tell Acosta because they didn’t want him panicking, being out here without escort. Which means they needed those goods shipped into Castillo and didn’t care about running the risk.
“If Persia is cut off, along with half the fleet,” she added, “then I’m guessing the admiralty is trying to rush up ships to plug the gap here, and wants us to hold the line until they arrive. If we can do that, and they manage to defeat the enemies who already broke through, the admiralty will most likely reinforce this system, build new bases.”
“I’m a tech officer,” Smythe said, “and tactics aren’t my thing, so forgive me if I’m out of bounds—”
“That never stopped any of you before,” Tolvern said.
“—but doesn’t it make sense to pull the fleet back? What’s out here to protect except Persia, and nobody can get in and out of that system anyway. Fall back to the Scandian worlds. Get us closer to the armories, the yards, and cut the length of our supply lines to Albion in half.”
“Yer right, mate,” Capp said, and punched Smythe’s upper arm for emphasis. “Stupid McGowan. He’s bottled up in Persia and afraid the aliens will find their way in. Protecting his own hide, what else is new?”
“Actually,” Tolvern said, “the subspace was signed ‘MD.’ General Mose Drys is apparently still in command.”
They all blinked at this. The Hroom general was no coward. Defensive-minded, yes, but he’d throw his sloops of war into combat, willing to lay down his own life to win a battle.
But who was really in command? Persia was a human planet, and Captain McGowan had been installed as her temporary military governor as the small population attempted to recover from the brutal alien occupation and the ritual slaughter of its people by Apex harvesters. Could McGowan have leaned on the general after receiving Tolvern’s original subspace?
Or maybe McGowan wasn’t in the fleet bottled up in Persia. Maybe he was on HMS Peerless and leading a task force this way. There was no way to know for sure.
Capp squinted at the chart. “Message says we’re gonna get reinforcements. Where’s that coming from?”
“You can bet there are ships rushing out from across the Alliance,” Tolvern said. “Dreadnought is trapped, but what about Citadel and Void Queen? Bring up the other two battle cruisers and their task forces and we’ll have what we need.”
“Won’t be any time soon,” Capp said. “Them big cruisers are way back on the other side of the sector. Too many systems, too many jump points to get here in time. If Persia’s down, all we got in the neighborhood are a few destroyers and some wolves. What do you think they got in Castillo?”
“Who, what, and where is not our worry. Our orders are to defend Fortaleza. Smythe, you’re going to work with engineering to strip Bilbao. I don’t just want the engines. I need our bridge repaired, too, the war room. I’m going to take Bilbao apart to make it happen.”
“Those are some major repairs,” Smythe said. “No yards, working outdoors without antigrav—Barker is going to love that.”
Capp snorted. “Barker? That’s who you’re worried about? What’s that bloke Acosta going to say when we rip his ship open?”
“Don’t breathe a word to him,” Tolvern said. “Not until we’ve got everything ready. Hopefully, he’ll trust that I’m going to make it all good when this is over with. Smythe, do you think you can cobble together a working plasma ejector from Bilbao’s supplies?”
“Maybe if Ping lends me a hand. And him.” Smythe hooked a thumb at Brockett, who was listening with a thoughtful expression. “I’ll need your lab to get the tolerances right.”
“Ah,” Brockett said. “I wondered why I was here.”
“That’s not why you’re here,” Tolvern told the science officer. “I’ll get to you in a minute.”
“Where would we put a plasma ejector?” Smythe asked. “Every inch of Blackbeard is covered with something or other. If it’s not weapon arrays, it’s sensors or engines.”
“We’re going to take whatever is left of Bilbao and turn her into a mobile plasma ejector.”
Carvalho looked concerned. He loved messing around with new tech, but it would mean going on a walk, and he wasn’t so fond of work in the void.
Tolvern nodded. “That gives us the striker wing, the brawler, a mobile platform, and hopefully Blackbeard at near strength. We still have most of the ordnance we set out with, and if someone—or multiple someones—finds us in Fortaleza, we’ll give them a real fight.”
“Sounds like some long shifts,” Smythe said.
“Some very long shifts,” she agreed. “I’m thawing the rest of the marines, waking up Bilbao’s crew—they’ve got useful skills—and Capp is going to change up the duty roster to squeeze in as many hours as humanly possible.”
Capp didn’t look happy at this. There would be a lot of grumbling, and the
one to deliver bad news always took the brunt of it.
“You,” she said, turning to Brockett at last.
“Huh?”
The science officer looked up, blinking, from his hand computer, where his attention had retreated after she’d brushed him off a few moments ago. Better not be that game he and Smythe played when they were bored in a meeting. Tolvern didn’t have patience for time-wasters. She glanced over his shoulder. No, it seemed to be a diagram of a plasma ejector. Good man; he’d started work already.
“Don’t worry about that until the ejector is installed and ready to test, and that will be after we get the bridge repaired. For now, I need you studying the Persia jump point. You know the math, right?”
“I don’t know any math that has a blue, ninety-eight percent stable jump point collapsing in a few weeks, no. Perturbation on the back end, somehow. That could be the other side of the galaxy.”
“What I want to know is if there’s a way these aliens shut it down.”
Brockett and Smythe responded in unison. “That’s impossible.”
“Is it? We used to think it impossible to manufacture your own jumps, but Apex did it.”
“Short range,” Smythe said. “Duration less than a tenth of a second. This is an interstellar jump point that has been around for centuries. Maybe thousands of years—who knows? The amount of energy that would require . . . it’s impossible.”
“We don’t know how they form,” Brockett said, “but theory says it’s a wobble in a black hole.”
“So maybe the aliens found the black hole and caused a wobble.” Tolvern was reaching, but what else was there?
“If these aliens have the tech to physically manipulate a black hole,” Smythe said, “then we’re wasting our time. If they do, they’re so far above us we may as well try to defend Fortaleza with a bow and arrow.”
“They’re not above us, though,” she said. “We fought them and knocked out a couple of their ships. If we’d had a missile frigate or a couple of corvettes on hand, we’d have wiped the floor with them.”
“Which is why there’s no way they can collapse a jump point,” Smythe said. “With all due respect, Captain—”
Tolvern held up a hand to stop him. “Fact number one: the Persia jump was stable—it has barely changed since the original colonists mapped it five hundred years ago. Fact number two: it collapsed practically overnight. That, in and of itself, supposedly violates the laws of physics.”
“We don’t actually know the laws,” Brockett said. “We have imperfect models, that’s all.”
“Fact number three: the Persia jump collapsed right at the moment when an alien fleet appeared nearby, with half our forces conveniently cut off in a cul-de-sac system. If that doesn’t look like the aliens did it, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Smythe and Brockett exchanged bewildered glances. Tolvern waited, half hoping they’d come up with a logical rebuttal of what she’d been puzzling over after receiving Mose Dryz’s subspace.
“I’ll study it,” Brockett said with a shake of the head. “But I still don’t see how it’s possible. Anyway, the math will be . . . challenging. It’s not my area of expertise.”
“Good. And there’s one other thing I want you to do,” Tolvern told Brockett. “Find out who ran Bilbao’s medical facilities. Get the medics Colonel Tibbs used after the fight. And you—I want you on hand. I need to be sure he’ll survive the thawing.”
“You ain’t gonna try to wake up the admiral, are you?” Capp said. “He was in a bad way.”
“We trust your command, Captain,” Carvalho said. “And Drake would, too. Leave him be until we get some proper facilities.”
“Not Drake,” Tolvern said. “Brockett is going to thaw the man we hauled out of the ghost ship.”
Surprised looks at this.
“That was a military vessel from a human colony,” she continued. “I’ve been studying the data we pulled before we ran for our lives, and there are similarities between the damage suffered by that ship and the weapons used against Blackbeard.”
We have been judged.
Who wrote that, and what was he talking about?
“We’ve got a veteran on board,” Tolvern added. “Someone who fought these aliens. Knows who they are and what they want. Maybe even knows their weaknesses. And I want him alive, awake, and communicating.”
Chapter Seven
Svensen was four hundred feet underground in an old storage tunnel, investigating the burned, melted slag of a mining machine, when he got a call from the surface base. It was Jörvak. Svensen couldn’t understand over the racket of men in mech suits, but heard something urgent in his second’s tone, and looked for a quieter place to take the call.
The Scandian raiders had capped the mines and pumped in a partial atmosphere as they searched for leaks in the gutted complex, and Svensen’s helmet vibrated from the grind of power tools dissecting the mining machine so it could be moved out of the way. Word had it that something behind the ruined equipment was giving off a signal, but he couldn’t see it yet.
Boghammer was on the surface of the asteroid, using its antigrav to stabilize the upper part of the base, but these lower reaches were beyond the fields, and the natural gravity of the asteroid was less than .01 G, so he grabbed hand rings and hauled himself out of the room and into the main shaft.
As he came up the tunnel, he used his mech suit to jet along with small bursts, touching with his boot to lift off again as he drifted down. He hit four percent G, then eight percent, and finally he was plodding along, as Boghammer’s antigrav took over.
He touched the com. “Jörvak, talk to me. Something wrong?”
“We’re blind, Commander. There was something Lund saw he didn’t like, so we sent a message to Wang to get her to run scans, and she didn’t answer. The other beetle ship isn’t answering either. Took a look and all we’ve got is a static picture of the system. They vanished about three hours ago. Gone.”
That was bad. Very bad. They’d landed all six star wolves on the surface of the abandoned base as they dug in. War Cry and Icefall had rolled about to present their pummel guns outward, while the other four, led by Boghammer, were prepared for a rapid launch into space, should enemies appear.
The point was he’d brought them down to conceal them against the asteroid, while he’d positioned Wang’s war junks in solar orbit about a million miles away above and below the asteroid. The Singaporeans had superior cloaking technology and superior sensors. They could lurk there indefinitely, watching and reporting until Svensen had dug in and received reinforcements. An early warning system for the Fourth Wolves.
But now Wang’s ships were gone. Vanished. Could they have both been detected and neutralized without either ship crying out a warning?
“I’m on my way. Get crews ready to launch. I don’t want to be caught down here if we’re attacked. We’ll recall every—”
“It’s not an attack,” Jörvak said. “At least I don’t think so. You’d better come up and take a look for yourself.”
A few minutes later, Svensen passed through the airlocks to the base command center and popped off his helmet. It was glossy, metallic green, like the rest of his mech suit—he’d been recognizable in that armor since his raiding days. A pair of blinking red sensors faded over the course of a few seconds after his helmet disconnected from the suit’s power supply.
The command center was a dome-like room about thirty feet across. Enemies had penetrated the room at some point, burning it out, but the viewport had remained intact beneath its bombproofs, and after scrubbing the room and hauling in fresh gear, the Scandians had taken the old command center for their own use.
The bombproofs were retracted now, presenting a view of the base exterior through the viewport. Crater walls rose sharply in a curve several hundred yards in diameter, and the black gloss of space cupped them overhead. A nearby asteroid gleamed a few degrees above the crater wall opposite, and a swath of the Milky Way spread its
radiant glow across the sky. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the command center built by his own people, since it gave a perfect view of three major Scandian constellations: the Wolf Head, Brunhilde, and Thor’s Hammer.
Svensen got to work stripping out of his mech suit, figuring that whatever had cut off contact with Wang’s ships would keep him busy up there for a while. He expected Jörvak to fill him in while he went through the cumbersome process of disconnecting the leads, and looked up with a frown to see his second still standing next to his workstation, arms folded and scowling.
Jörvak tilted his head toward the tech station, where Lieutenant Kelly was working on something.
The room was still unfamiliar, filled with techs from six different star wolves, as well as a pair of Singaporeans and—gods help him—an actual Hroom. The tall, purple-skinned alien always stared at him with those large, liquid eyes, and it made Svensen’s guts squirm.
When you added the fact that cords and power tools were everywhere, and that the room held a sharp chemical scent from the cleaning and disinfecting work, it was no wonder that Svensen hadn’t noticed the Albion officer right away.
Once he was out of his mech suit, Svensen looked around for his boots, but didn’t spot them, so he walked barefoot across the hard, cold ground to where Kelly was working. He peered over her shoulder.
“If you don’t mind,” she said sharply without looking up, and swiped the screen to hide what she was working on.
Svensen had seen enough. “Were you going to warn anyone before you drew so much power?”
“I wasn’t going to send the subspace yet, I’m just composing it.”
“And what are you telling them? You know I don’t read that Albion gibberish.”
He said this hoping she’d bring it back up and give him a good look, but she didn’t bite. Instead, she turned around and glared.
“You don’t need to know at this point.”
“And I suppose I don’t need to know why Wang’s ships suddenly vanished, either.”
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