“Less germane?” Capp said. “I can barely understand when you speak English, mate.”
Tolvern started Bailyna Tyn’s recording again, and the Hroom colonel continued.
“I have two Royal Navy cannons in my holds—sixty-fives—as well as human torpedoes and missiles, and of course, enough ammunition for our serpentine batteries to fight a lengthy engagement. Admiral James Drake, I present all of this for your disposal, and pledge to serve you and the Alliance in whatever capacity you deem fit. I remain humbly awaiting your orders.”
Bailyna Tyn made a low, exaggerated bow, and the screen blanked out.
Nyb Pim gave a whistle, long and admiring. “Bailyna Tyn is a noble soul. From one of the great matrilineal families.”
“Aye?” Capp said. “What’s that mean?”
“From a caste of holy warriors. She could have joined the death cultists—indeed, most expected her to do so—but resisted them at great personal risk.” The pilot seemed awed. “We are fortunate to have her.”
Tolvern settled into her chair and could almost feel her blood pressure dropping, even as her hopes rose. “Four more ships—not even a full task force, but I’ll take them. Are they incoming now?”
“Yes, Captain,” Smythe said. “A trajectory toward Fort Mathilde.”
“Apollo,” she said. “That’s a new ship since we crossed the frontier. What is that, a destroyer? A missile frigate?”
Capp had updated the naval base from McGowan’s records, and she tapped at her console. “She’s a Swift-class corvette, Cap’n.”
“Very good. A little acceleration out of the blocks, some firepower. Good for hunting wounded dragoons.” Tolvern rubbed her hands. “And those sixty-fives will come in handy, too. I was trying to decide if we should strip a couple of our guns for Fort Mathilde. Give her something for close-in fighting if the enemy tries to land decimators.”
“Take our guns?” Capp sounded horrified.
“Now we won’t need to.” Tolvern rose and straightened her uniform. “Smythe, what’s the colonel’s current range?”
“Roughly three hundred and fifty-seven million miles, sir. Half hour delay on transmissions.”
She wanted to send a return message, but gave the situation some thought first. If she was right, and hadn’t just been bluffing in the war room, their strength relative to the enemy was directly related to the strength of the Alliance.
The Hroom were an ancient, proud race. Their civilization had once dominated this sector, hundreds, even thousands of years before humans took to the stars. Their ruins were everywhere, together with evidence of past glories in their temples and monuments, many of truly heroic proportions.
When humans arrived to colonize Albion in the Great Migration, the Hroom Empire had been in decline, and the crippling effects of pure sugar on the alien physiology had only exacerbated that collapse. Albion, and to a lesser extent the Ladinos, New Dutch, and Singaporeans, had benefited as a result. War after war was fought, with Albion continually gaining at Hroom expense, until vast swaths of the population were either addicted to sugar and unable to live without it, or enslaved on great plantations to meet the demand.
It was only recently that this relationship had changed—the antidote spread, the Hroom death cultists defeated, and an alliance forged to fight off Apex, and now to face the Adjudicators.
Bailyna Tyn’s pale pink skin showed that she was personally familiar with the Hroom struggles. Her nobility showed her connection with the long, proud history of her people. Her presence here, so far from home, showed her commitment to the Alliance. All of that should be honored and acknowledged.
“Nyb Pim, can you help me with the transmission?”
A long whistle. He stared at her with his large eyes. “Me, sir?”
“Yes, I would like you to make an introduction. Make it as flowery as possible in your own tongue.”
“You understand that I grew up on Albion, sir. I am not familiar with courtly language.”
“You know enough. Do your best.”
Nyb Pim unfolded his long limbs and stood next to her. He wasn’t particularly tall as Hroom went, but he was still two heads above her, and looked down solemnly.
“Just an introduction?”
“Full of flattery, praising her. Praising the Hroom.” Tolvern gestured with her hands. “You know, really lay it on thick.”
An uncertain hum. “If you are referring to human deception, I am not capable.”
“Nothing like deception. That’s the whole point. I want her to know, in the most sincere way possible, that we are endlessly grateful that she fought her way out of Viborg, kept herself hidden as she kept jumping outward, and brought us critical reinforcements. But don’t hold back with the praise. That’s all I mean. You got it?”
“Yes, Captain Jess Tolvern. I believe that I understand completely.” He stiffened and faced the viewscreen. “Ready to obey, sir.”
Smythe started the recording, and Nyb Pim began to talk. It was such a strange language, musical in its delivery, with words that sounded like singing, punctuated with all sorts of other sounds that humans simply could not reproduce. Their language was genetic; Hroomlings could practically speak it from birth, even if they needed to be taught specialized vocabulary. So different from how the human brain worked.
The pilot went on and on until Tolvern wondered what the devil he could possibly be saying with all of that. She’d only wanted a flowery introduction with some flattery slathered on top. What was he doing, reciting the traditional Hroom epics from memory?
At last he stopped with a final, drawn-out whistle that turned into more of a wheeze. It was Tolvern’s turn.
“This is Captain Jess Tolvern. I am in command of HMS Blackbeard and this fleet. Unfortunately, Captain Drake was grievously injured in battle and has been in stasis to keep him stabilized. We only now have medical facilities sufficient to bring him up and—”
Nyb Pim leaned down. “I already told her that.”
Tolvern gave the chopping motion to Smythe. “You were supposed to give an introduction, not the whole history of our adventures.”
“But that is what an introduction entails. She knows your name already. How can we introduce ourselves properly without explaining the situation? That includes name, rank, military situation, and the like.”
Tolvern gave an exasperated sigh. “How many years have you lived with humans now?”
“Oh, I understand human introductions. But you wanted a Hroom greeting. Anyway, it is perfectly acceptable to repeat yourself.”
“Ay, you silly sod,” Capp said. “Why did ya interrupt her, then?”
“I thought she was trying to be direct.”
“Cut back to the end of Nyb Pim’s monologue,” Tolvern told Smythe. “I’ll give mine another go.” She glared at Nyb Pim, who stared back, unblinking. “Without the interruptions.”
This time she got through it. Smythe sent the message, and Tolvern sat down at her console to draw up a new battle plan, enjoying the luxury of new guns, three more sloops of war, and a Swift-class corvette.
She was starting to feel hopeful.
#
Tolvern entered the science lab. The air was cool and smelled of strange, astringent chemicals. Clear tanks bubbled with murky greenish liquid near the doorway. Compressors whirred, and centrifuges spun on a table to one side. Scientists and technicians worked at consoles with large screens displaying numbers and symbols that were pure gibberish to her eyes.
Science Officer Noah Brockett had his hands in gloves that penetrated a clear plastic box, where he manipulated some sort of biological sample. Someone called his attention to the captain’s arrival, and he pulled his hands out, gave instructions to an assistant about how to seal up the sample, and approached.
“Have you seen the specimen they pulled out of Castillo?” he asked. “Mummified inside the suit, but we’ve isolated cell cultures and—”
Tolvern had no time for a full rundown and interrupted.
“I saw pictures. He’s an ugly devil. Gray skin and dead eyes. But a full examination seems a low priority at the moment.”
“More important than you might think. We can search for biological agents or figure out how to poison their air in a way that would be harmless to us. Understanding their anatomy will help us learn what kind of planet they evolved on and where they can settle. What gravity is natural for them? Would an eliminon battery break them, like it did Apex?”
It all sounded logical, but she doubted that was entirely it. One of Brockett’s pet projects was studying the biomechanical life forms that inhabited the void, starting with the creatures they called space barnacles that grew on ships after they passed through spore clouds. Those, in turn, were related—or so Brockett claimed—to the voracious monsters of the deep, the star leviathans, that ensnared and devoured unwary starships.
Brockett had a theory that some ancient race had constructed these things for mining and scavenging, then gone extinct or vanished from the sector. Their creations, being partially biological, had evolved into independent organisms. He was eager to get his hands on any sort of alien life form, always searching for a connection to this hypothetical alien race.
Tolvern had no patience for those studies under the current circumstances. “I’m sure it’s vital work, but what about the admiral?”
Brockett gave a dismissive wave. “We’re culturing his skin. Nothing more we can do until it’s ready for grafting. Doctor Willis did a partial stasis release and verified that the admiral’s brain didn’t suffer oxygen deprivation in the fire. His lungs are badly burned, but they can be repaired. It will be a slow process, but Willis thinks he’ll come around without permanent respiratory impairment. The same goes for other organ damage. She claims it’s nothing the medical facilities can’t handle.”
Tolvern closed her eyes and allowed herself a moment of relief. James would be all right, thank God. She’d never quite allowed herself to hope, but never allowed herself to despair, either. Only keep him stabilized, stay busy keeping the rest of them alive, and hope for the best.
“How long?”
“A few weeks until he’s ready to come up. We’ve repaired the damaged terminal bronchioles, but the alveoli regrowth is very slow, and it works better if he’s not conscious and struggling with an artificial respirator.”
A few weeks. No help with the battle, then. She’d fantasized about having the admiral back at the helm of Blackbeard while she took personal command of the brawler. And if not that, at least awake and able to help her with tactics and strategy. No such luck.
It’s up to me to keep us alive then.
“What about the jump point?”
Brockett blinked. He propped his glasses on top of his head and rubbed his eyes. The glasses seemed like an affectation—they could certainly fix his eyesight any time he wanted.
“What do you mean, the jump point?”
“Brockett, come on. The problem of the collapsed jump point into the Persia System. I’ve got a third of the blasted fleet bottled up in there. Dreadnought—do you know the difference that battleship would make in this fight? And Mose Dryz and his sloops. They’re only a couple of weeks from here if we can get them out.”
“It’s not like I haven’t studied it.” Brockett fixed his glasses back into place. “But I told you already, I don’t know any technology that could bring down a jump point. It’s a natural phenomena, it—”
“That’s the whole point. You say it’s impossible, but they did it. And supposedly they collapse the jump point every time they reduce a system, but here we are in Castillo, and the old jump point is back. So what I’m thinking is that maybe they shut it down temporarily, but then the gravity waves or . . . whatever—I don’t know the science, but the jump point comes back.”
“That’s logical, I suppose.”
“So how long does it take? Does the jump point return in two months? Two years? Can you induce it?”
“I have a few ideas about experiments,” Brockett said. “But I was lacking proper equipment. If you’ll give me Singaporean sensors and close examination of the jump point, I could try some things. Be better if I could fly out to the former Persia jump point and test for residual signals. A Singaporean vessel could slip through unnoticed.”
“That’s ridiculous, and you know it. You’re not flying to Nebuchadnezzar with one of my war junks.”
Until Wang arrived with her two ships, Tolvern only had the single war junk that had accompanied McGowan to Castillo. It was needed to run continuous scans, not just of their own jump point, but of the whole system.
Nobody knew for sure that there hadn’t been an enemy fleet lurking here all along, watching and waiting. The system was roughly eight billion miles in diameter to the farthest orbiting planetoids. A quiet, well-cloaked enemy had a lot of hiding places.
“Then all I have is simulations,” he said. “A poor imitation. Do you still want me to work on it?”
“Yes, blast it. I want you to work on it. You’re not going to get ideal circumstances. Do what you can with what you have.”
“Can you lend me Jane?”
“The AI? Sure, until we’re out of the docks, at least. Her computing power is yours.”
“And some spare programmers to write up code?”
“Um . . . sure, why not? I’ve got them on fire control at the fort, but that’s the one area we’re ahead of schedule. Most of them are testing—I’m sure they’ll be happy to do some real coding.”
“I suppose that will do.” Brockett cast a glance back at the box where he’d been working with tissue samples and sighed. “All right, I’m making it my number one focus.”
“Not your number one, Brockett. For now, it needs to be your only focus.”
Chapter Twenty
The aliens arrived.
The Adjudicators brought a star fortress and six dragoons into Castillo before the Alliance fleet clustered around Fort Mathilde knew a thing. Sensors from half a dozen ships were trained on the jump point, including the superior instruments on the war junk, but somehow the aliens managed to carry through a massive amount of firepower before they were detected.
Tolvern hadn’t been guarding the jump point anyway, so nothing would have stopped them from entering unopposed. Knowing that the enemy would arrive in force, she’d concentrated her own power where it was the strongest. She might, in fact, have done some damage during the jump, but whomever she’d sent out there to contest the entry would have ended up badly mauled, which in turn would have weakened the defense at Fort Mathilde.
Twenty-one days had passed since Wang sent her initial subspace. The woman had sent two additional messages since then. The first estimated that three star fortresses would lead the attack. The second subspace narrowed the window of the enemy jump into Castillo to twenty to twenty-three days from the initial warning, based on when the fleet had departed Fortaleza. Tolvern hoped that Wang was following at a prudent distance, but there was no clear signal of that.
So the enemy arrival wasn’t a surprise, even if Tolvern wanted as much advance warning as possible. She didn’t know exactly how they’d cloaked their arrival so well, but the Alliance had their own tricks. Particularly, the human element. Lies and deception—ancient human capabilities unmatched by any alien race yet encountered.
In this case, it was an old Scandian raiding trick that broke the alien disguise. A force of star wolves made an appearance near the jump point. Engines hot, cloaks down, pummel guns firing.
There had been no star wolves, of course, as Svensen’s ships were at Mathilde. The Scandians had dropped off a second shipment of the Castillo primitives to be trained at the base, and they were participating in the heavy work by their side. But Boghammer sent out ghost signals twice a day, sending simulated attacks against the jump point.
The Scandians had pulled this trick before, and numerous Albion commanders had fallen for it over the generations. But this time, it was turned against the Adjudicators, and the a
lien fleet fell for it as well.
The star fortress dropped its cloaks and fired a heavy barrage of missiles. Cannon emerged and readied kinetic shot. The torus shield generator flared to life, giving off enough radiation for the war junks to sense it. Dragoons did likewise, firing weapons and maneuvering to block the star wolf charge.
The pummel gun fire turned into vapor like water droplets on a hot skillet. The aliens recognized their error. They hastily threw up cloaks again.
Too late. Tolvern’s forces knew how many ships had entered, were able to estimate how long they’d been in the system by position and velocity, and also gained a sneak preview into how the Adjudicators would fight when actual battle came.
The Blackbeard crew was jumpy, anxious to fight after a few weeks of relative calm. Relative being the key word. They’d been going flat out, no R&R throughout the fleet, only work, meals, and sleep—Tolvern insisted that even the most critical personnel be in bed, lights out, for six hours per day. And now it seemed battle had caught them in a state of exhaustion.
But the enemy fleet was still some distance away, and Tolvern kept up her preparations even as worried messages came from across the fleet. The only change to routine was to increase lights-out to seven hours per day, with a threat to double the workload of anyone caught messing around when they should be sleeping, since they obviously had energy to spare.
Two days later, the enemy force, swollen to unknown size, began to close in on the asteroid belt. Tolvern called the other commanding officers of the fleet.
First, McGowan and Zenger. The two cruiser captains appeared side by side on the split screen. McGowan was handsome and aristocratic in bearing, but cold and reserved. Zenger was slender, pale faced, and jittery looking. But word had it he was ice in battle.
“I want a shallow-depth minefield laid down between forty-eight and seventy-three thousand miles from Fort Mathilde. Sending coordinates now.” Tolvern tapped her console and sent through the minefield that Smythe and Lomelí had previously plotted. “You will place the two destroyers in stacked formation on the inner edge of this minefield, then bring Peerless and Triumph as close to the back side of the asteroid as possible.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 20