“He’s going to find out soon enough. If he thinks we’re deceiving him, he’ll be less cooperative when he does. Wherever he’s from might have serious military firepower, and it would be good to make an ally, not an enemy.”
“What would you like me to say?”
Tolvern addressed the man directly. “This is a military vessel. HMS Blackbeard, from the Kingdom of Albion, operating on an Alliance mission to follow the trade routes back to Old Earth. We came across your ship, which was floating in the space lanes as a derelict.”
Ping worked through this, hesitating when he tripped up on various unknown words. Joneson listened, pale and chewing his lower lip, interjecting with questions and corrections. Ping improved, moment by moment.
It was an irony that the person best suited for talking to their guest wasn’t from Albion, even though modern English and whatever dialect of Old Earth English this man spoke were so clearly related, but if Tolvern listened carefully, she could pick out every fifth word or so. It was clear that Joneson knew, or suspected, who had attacked them.
He asked a question, and Ping translated for Tolvern.
“What year is it?” Ping raised an eyebrow. “You want to answer that or bluff?”
“Answer it.” She held Joneson’s gaze. “By Old Earth reckoning, it’s 2633.”
Joneson closed his eyes. “Aya Rip Van Winkle.”
Tolvern didn’t need that translated. “I take it you’ve been down a while. What year is it for you?”
Joneson thought it was 2586. He’d been in stasis for forty-seven years. Ping tried to ask him about his home planet, but the man could only shake his head. He seemed to be in shock. At last, he opened his eyes and spoke. Ping translated.
“My wife and children. They’d be . . . my God.”
“I’m sorry,” Tolvern said. “What is the name of your planet?”
“Born on Sevastopol. Then Novosibirsk.”
“Russian?”
“Originally,” Joneson said, via Ping. “It was a Russian colony with an Arab and African labor force. The working language was always English, though. You say you’re on a mission to Earth? Who are you?”
“Is Earth okay?” Tolvern asked.
“I don’t know. We were never on the main lanes. That was controlled by the Merchanting Federation. About thirty years ago—no, I guess it would be eighty years, now—the trade shut down. Ships got lost toward the—” Ping translated something unintelligible, and interjected, “I think that means ‘inner frontier.’”
“You have one planet?”
“We have one now. We had two. Sevastopol and Novosibirsk. But Sevastopol was reduced, and we’ve holed up in Novosibirsk. Twenty million people before the refugee crisis. Maybe twenty-five million now. The rest were left behind on Sevastopol. Can’t get them out now.” Joneson shook his head. “Novosibirsk is no place to build a civilization, but it will serve as a redoubt.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“She’s a small planet, dry with tired soils. Sixty percent gravity. Poor in metals, fissionables, and fossil fuels, too. Can’t find them on the moon, either. We mine the asteroids to get what we need.”
Tolvern couldn’t help but glance at Brockett. She’d come out of her sleep cycle a few hours earlier to find a coded data dump from the fleet. Two Singaporean war junks had jumped into the Fortaleza System, commanded by a woman named Anna Wang. She’d been on a mission with the Fourth Wolves, under Ulfgar Svensen, on a ship she vaguely knew from the Apex War by the name of Boghammer.
Part of a larger fleet that had spread thin across a shield of systems between Persia and the inner frontier, Svensen had led six wolves and two war junks into the Castillo System. They’d found abandoned mining colonies and a trio of wrecked orbital fortresses around Castillo itself, including the demolished remains of an orbital fortress. Wang had jumped out of the system just as Svensen was leading an expedition to investigate the surface.
“Castillo is .6 G, isn’t it?” she asked Brockett, who’d also seen Wang’s data, along with Smythe and Capp. “You think that’s Joneson’s Novosibirsk?”
The science officer looked thoughtful. “Most likely—the facts match. It has a moon of the same composition as the home planet. And it’s only a few jumps from where we found the derelict.”
“What is it?” Joneson asked through Ping. “Something’s wrong, I can hear you talking.”
“What happened to Sevastapol?” she asked him. “Were the rest of the people exterminated?”
“Not exterminated,” Joneson said. “Reduced. The Adjudicators don’t exterminate, they are too humane for that.” A bitter, ironic note in his voice. “They reduce.”
“We were investigating your ship when we fell under attack,” Tolvern said. “An unknown alien race. Would that be your Adjudicators?”
“What kind of ships?”
“Destroyer-sized. Let’s say roughly as big as the military vessel we found you on. They had plenty of armaments, mainly small missile-torpedo hybrids, but kinetic weapons, energy-pulse types, as well.”
Joneson’s expression hardened. “Adjudicator dragoons.”
“They hit us pretty hard, but Blackbeard is a battle cruiser, and we had a brawler on hand—a secondary attack craft—and we can throw our own punches. If they hadn’t caught us by surprise, we’d have knocked them out.”
“Did you only face dragoons?” Joneson asked, “or did you face a star fortress?”
“Is that their carrier ship? No, we didn’t.”
“Any decimators?”
“Only that one kind of ship. The destroyer kind. Dragoons, apparently.”
“Then you’re lucky,” he said.
Tolvern thrust out her chin. “So were they. We have fleets and numerous worlds to support them. We’ve fought hostile enemies before, ones bent on extermination.”
“But you have never fought Adjudicators. Once you’ve been judged . . .”
“You have no idea of our capabilities.”
“There were a lot of human planets between Sevastopol and Earth. Yet they all went quiet. When we probed, our ships disappeared. What is the name of your home world?”
“Albion.”
“Albion. I’ve heard of you.” Some respect entered Joneson’s voice. “Out by the old Hroom empire, isn’t it?”
“You know of the Hroom?” Tolvern asked.
“We took refugee ships a few generations ago. They’re a noble race, old and wise. They do not lie or deceive. It is a crime to addict them to sugar—that is their one weakness. It’s like a drug to them.”
Tolvern knew this all too well, and her own people’s shameful role in the matter. Most likely the Hroom refugees had been fleeing from the chaos of the sugar and slave trade when they stumbled into the man’s civilization.
Ping asked a couple of clarifying questions before continuing with his translation.
“So, did you finally defeat the Hroom once and for all? That will attract the Adjudicators for sure.”
“No,” Tolvern said, “we’ve made our peace with the empress. And there’s a sugar antidote now, a way to immunize them against the drug. One of their generals is even a leader of the Alliance.”
Joneson looked disappointed at this. “If the Hroom have any sense, they’ll break that alliance now. Before they’re judged, too.”
“Or picked apart piecemeal. Civilized nations and peoples need to stick together or the barbarian types will eat us alive. Literally, in some cases,” she added, thinking of Apex.
“Civilization is exactly your problem. Without civilization, the Adjudicators leave you alone. And once they’ve wrecked you, once they’ve reduced you, they disappear.”
Joneson explained how the attack had happened. Dragoons swooped down on Sevastopol’s defenses. The two-system civilization didn’t have the most powerful navy in the region, being under the thumb of a powerful trade federation back toward Earth that demanded peace along the outer systems. But they had about forty warships i
n all.
They were locked in a desperate struggle with the invasion fleet a few million miles from the sun when a second fleet, led by carriers, appeared above the planet. The invaders obliterated the planetary defenses, flattened a few cities, and made their demands.
Sevastopol had been judged. Its civilization would be eliminated, its people reduced. The planet was ordered to lay down its arms and allow an army of holy warriors in mech suits—so-called decimators—to come down and smash things. Doing so would avoid a slaughter. The majority of the population would be shipped off to a special reserve—there was no explanation of what this meant—and a remnant would live on at a subsistence level. The decimators would destroy all mines and factories and industry.
“We’re no idiots,” Joneson said. “Lay down our arms and let them ship us off? Where, the Helium-3 mines? To be slaughtered in gladiatorial contests on some strange world? Who knows, and who cares?
“We pretended to negotiate for time to get the various factions of the planet to agree, then launched a counterattack. Smashed a star fortress and drove the dragoons to the edge of the system. We weren’t strong enough to destroy them all, but we bought a couple of years to evacuate people to Novosibirsk. That’s when I left—I was eighteen at the time, and made it out in one of the last convoys.”
“Why Novosibirsk?” Tolvern asked.
“It’s a more defensible system—only one jump point in. And her orbital fortresses are intact.” He nodded. “The Adjudicators returned, of course. And in greater force. We couldn’t resist for long.
“They’ve been active all along the inner frontier,” Joneson continued. “They flattened the Merchanting Federation, destroyed the colonies at Hortz and Fabian’s Star. Broke up the space lanes toward Malaysia—nobody knows what happened in that system, and that was a powerful planet. Maybe like your Albion.
“But you know the worst thing? Once the Adjudicators conquered Sevastopol, they collapsed her jump points. That’s right. Cut the system off forever. The people who remain will never regain the stars.”
“That defies all known physics,” Brockett said when Ping finished translating.
“What’s that?” Joneson asked. “Are you saying it’s impossible? Believe it, friend. We’ve taken other refugees on Novosibirsk, and they tell the same story. The aliens come, proclaim judgment on your planet, and reduce it to a remnant. And then they collapse all the jump points, essentially killing your civilization forever. Novosibirsk only has one jump point, and we’ve got the fleet in continuous patrol, tracking it at all times.”
“And the warship where we found you?”
“We run supplies to hidden listening posts. That way we’ll get advance warning. Everything on Novosibirsk, all our industry, is spent building up our fleet. When the Adjudicators come again, we’ll be ready for them.”
Tolvern took a deep breath. “You’ve been in stasis a long time, Joneson. Things change.”
He pressed a hand to his forehead. “It’s been so long—I’ve got to get back. My wife—I wonder if she’s still alive. My kids, though . . . listen, I’ve got to get home. Please help me.”
“We found your planet already,” Tolvern said. “We’ve got ships in there now.”
“Good. Make your peace with the Dominion government, and we’ll help. We’re a small planet, but we’re fierce, and we know how to fight these bastards.”
It was time to give him the hard news. “You went into stasis in 2586?”
“That’s right,” Joneson said.
“Based on evidence from radioactive decay, we think the war hit your system in 2595. Thirty-eight years ago. Your people held out another nine years after you went under.”
“What?”
“There’s nothing left in there. No fortresses, no fleet. No mining colonies in the belt. No space elevator above the planet. Lots of battle scars, though. Novosibirsk was reduced.”
Joneson’s face turned gray, and his maimed hands groped, as if by instinct, at the stumps where they’d amputated his dead legs. Tolvern felt sick watching him flailing. What a blow, to wake up after a half century to find that your civilization had been wiped out, your planet reduced to a few people scratching out a subsistence lifestyle in the ruins.
“I’m sorry.” It was all she could manage.
“Am I the first one you woke up? Do the others know yet?”
Tolvern’s stomach fell. One final piece of bad news to give him.
“There were no others, Joneson. You’re the only one who survived.”
Chapter Eleven
The Adjudicator fleet entered the system through a yellow jump point in orbit near Fortaleza Six, a milky-gray gas giant with icy rings and four moons. Using the moons and planet as cover, it stayed in orbit for three days before dropping slowly toward Fortaleza Five, where Blackbeard was still dangling next to her own gas giant, undergoing emergency repairs and awaiting orders. As the injured Albion battle cruiser made no move to flee, the alien force slowly began to accelerate toward it.
The Adjudicators were still two days out when Tolvern finally got her new viewscreen installed. The bridge remained a mess of exposed wires, umbilical-like cords running across the floor, and partially built consoles. The defense grid was up, though, and while some of the old fire control was still running from the temporary command center, Capp could access the nav computer, and they had full communications, including the ability to send subspace messages.
Tolvern had no idea what, if any, reinforcements were on their way, but the fleet would know by now that the enemy had found her. Any moment. It was a thought that passed through her head every hour or so. Any moment a powerful Alliance task force would jump into Fortaleza and come to her aid.
Except it never did.
She stood in front of the viewscreen. The left side showed crew crawling about on the surface of Bilbao, turning the stripped merchanter into a mobile weapons platform. Below, the brawler lurked a few hundred miles off starboard—she’d recently christened it HMS Warthog. Technically, only starships earned the designation “His Majesty’s Ship,” and the brawler couldn’t jump, but she needed its crew to operate with full confidence, and so she’d given it the name as a morale-boosting enterprise.
The right side of the viewscreen was an external view of her own ship, sent back from Warthog. It showed the final work on the Hermes-class engines stripped out of Bilbao. One replaced the dead number two engine, and the other had been stripped for parts to patch the number three. Expert work, and somehow Barker was only three percent over the maximum mass he could push through the jump point.
Another 1.4 percent came from tossing mining equipment and a miniature tyrillium forge for repairing armor. A replacement cannon was gone, too, and some parts for torpedoes. Finally, Barker thought they were just light enough to grab Warthog and haul her through.
Tolvern shifted the right side of the viewscreen away from repairs to focus on the results of long-range scans. A long, smeared blob appeared. The enemy fleet, heavily cloaked. Almost anything could be in there.
Lieutenant Capp came up beside the captain. She’d freshly shaved her head, as she liked to do before battle, and ran her palm along the surface. “These blokes are good at sneaking around, you gotta hand ’em that.”
“We’ve seen better.”
“Them Chinese, you mean? We’re bloody lucky to have them on our side.”
Wang was quietly watching out there, listening, one of her ships below, and one above Blackbeard on the Z-axis, her mighty ears trained at the incoming Adjudicator fleet. Passive only. If Wang hammered that fleet with active sensors, Tolvern would quickly get a sharp outline of the exact size and nature of the enemy ships, but it would also give Wang away.
“Point is,” Tolvern said, “they think they’re coming up on us like before. But there won’t be a second ambush. We’re ready for them this time.”
“Yeah, Cap’n, about that.” Capp cleared her throat nervously. “I’d feel better with some corvette
s or missile frigates. Torpedo boats, you know. Couple of star wolves wouldn’t hurt none, either. Even some Hroom sloops of war would be a welcome sight.”
“Cheer up, Lieutenant.” Tolvern clapped her first mate on the shoulder. “This is nothing. We fought multiple Apex harvesters and won.”
“Yeah, and we had a whole bunch of stuff to fight ’em with. Now we got one capital ship and a few auxiliaries. How we gonna fight with that?”
“Captain!” Smythe called from the tech console, where he was hunched with Lomelí, one of the defense specialists. “We’ve got a new subspace. Want me to put it up?”
“I’ll take it at my station.”
Better unpack its contents first, brace herself privately before informing the crew. These things were bad news, as often as not. But it turned out to be good news for once, and she sank into her chair with a relieved sigh.
“We’ve got reinforcements on the way.” A small cheer went up across the bridge, but Tolvern quashed it. “Not what we’d like. I wanted Citadel. Instead we’ve got Peerless and Triumph.”
“What else they got?” Capp asked.
“That’s all it says, just those two cruisers. But they wouldn’t send a pair of Punisher-class cruisers without escorts. We’ll have a dozen ships, at least.”
“Peerless is McGowan’s ship, yeah?” Capp said. “Why does it have to be him again? When’s he get here, anyhow?”
“Two days, plus or minus. That’s his initial entry into the system.”
“So they’ll be jumping in about the time we get into the fight,” Smythe said. “And we’ll be on our own until they arrive. Where are they coming from? Has to be via Nebuchadnezzar, right? That means all the way out here.” He popped up a chart of the system on a small side screen. “So give it another couple of days before we can count on their firepower.”
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