Meanwhile, they kept an anxious eye on the enemy fleet. They weren’t attempting to hide Fort Mathilde, so it was a simple matter of hitting the retreating fleet with active sensors to make sure none of the Adjudicator ships slipped away from notice to circle back and renew the attack.
Wang sent a pair of subspace messages to the admiralty. Once Barker was done bleeding the engines, Blackbeard sent a third.
First, a report of victory. Second, a report of damages suffered. Third, a demand for reinforcements. Urgent.
Delta, Alpha, and Bravo continued toward the jump point, accelerating as they approached. The dragoons flanked them at all times, and finally came in and attached, being unable to jump independently. At long last, the enemy vanished from the system.
#
Elizabeth Kelly opened Svensen’s door and slipped inside. Once again, acting like she lived there, like they shared quarters. He had just come off sleep cycle, ready to return to the command room, and wondered if he’d dressed too soon. But he took one look at her and knew she wouldn’t be long.
Her uniform was freshly laundered and pressed, and she’d found someone to give a fresh trim to her short auburn hair.
“I liked you better covered with soot and smelling like blood and sweat,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow, and the corner of her mouth lifted into a half smile. “Barbarian. Wouldn’t hurt you to get cleaned up, too.”
“Hey, I’ve bathed since the battle. More than once, in fact.”
She fingered the torn edge of his vest. “I’m talking about this. And your wolf head is dented.”
Svensen rubbed a thumb and forefinger over the silver wolf head pendant with the bent ear. Crushed inside his mech suit at some time during the battle, it had left a gouge in the flesh at his shoulder. He wasn’t complaining.
He looked her over. “Did Tolvern call you to Blackbeard? Is that what’s got you all clean and shiny?”
Her expression clouded. “Something like that. Only we’re meeting at the fort.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“A lot of somethings. You heard about the jump point?”
“I heard they jumped out, yeah. Happened right before I left the command room. That was what? Nine hours ago? Did they jump back into the system?”
Kelly shook her head. “Nothing jumped in. Nothing is going to jump in. Or out, for that matter.”
Svensen’s mouth was suddenly dry. “The jump point . . .?”
“Gone. Collapsed. A blue jump point, stable since it was charted half a millennium ago. Vanished six hours after the Adjudicator fleet left the system.”
Svensen touched his forehead, forgetting momentarily that it was the arm with the missing hand. “The gods help us, what now?”
“Sounds like Tolvern is going to send the war junks to the edge of the system and have a look into deep space. Could be a jump point out there somewhere beyond the system. A wanderer.”
“What are the odds of that?”
“Not good,” Kelly said. “Not good at all. In the meantime, we’re supposed to carry on. The Adjudicators collapsed the jump point—maybe they can bring it back, too. Could be they bottled us up only long enough to bring in their own reinforcements.”
“It’s the only thing we can do,” he agreed. “Strengthen the fort, make it harder to assault next time.”
“And that’s the other something that is happening. Tolvern asked questions about me. I heard rumors from a friend of mine on Blackbeard.” Kelly took in a deep breath and blew it out again. “Word has it I’m getting a promotion. Base commander. Can’t say I’m happy. Can’t say I’m surprised, either.”
“Cream rises to the top,” Svensen said. “One of your better English sayings.” He grunted. “So you won’t be on Boghammer anymore. What about my fleet liaison?”
“Guess Tolvern figures you’re reliable enough. Not that I trust you,” she said, a bit of her old sarcasm entering. Her tone was playful, but he could tell she was upset.
“It doesn’t have to change things.” Svensen reached for her, but she shrugged him off.
“Yes, it does. There are rules.”
“Drake and Tolvern are together. They’re even married.”
“You know that’s different.”
“It’s a worse kind of different, is what it is. If the admiral and the current fleet commander can do it . . .”
“She was an acting civilian governor when it happened,” Kelly said. “And when she was reactivated for the war, it took a royal dispensation to make it legal under navy law.”
“So get a dispensation.”
A short, sharp laugh. “Do I look like someone who knows the king?”
“Anyway, I’m not a naval officer,” he said. “So your fraternization rules don’t apply.”
“Captain Tolvern asked me about you. Apparently, rumors go in the other direction, too.”
Svensen scowled. “Well that’s bloody hypocritical of her.”
“That’s what she said. Seemed almost apologetic. But there was some pushback from Captain McGowan. He’s a stuffed-up aristocrat.”
“Whatever the source of gossip around here, I’m not it,” Svensen said, thinking he’d wring the neck of whoever had been the source.
McGowan. That idiot was about to ruin a good thing. And some of Svensen’s irritation was directed at himself. He should have been more careful in allowing Kelly to come and go from his quarters, more careful about how he spoke to her in public. The men weren’t stupid. They’d heard him fighting constantly with Kelly up until the moment when they weren’t.
“Anyway,” she said, “there’s some power struggle between those two, and McGowan must have wanted someone else and used what has been going on between us in his maneuvers. Tolvern wants what Tolvern wants, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost. We can’t be seen together anymore.”
“We’ll be a lot more careful,” he said. A last attempt.
“We’ll be more careful,” she said, voice solemn, eyebrows drawn unhappily together, “by never being alone together.”
#
The patient was stretched out on the bed. It was dim in the room, with cool blue lights that left few shadows.
His blood came out via a tube in one arm, circulated through a machine that mixed and filtered, then entered the other arm. A tube passed down his throat. There were leads connected to his arms and feet, and a tube entered at the navel, as well.
They’d shaved his head and attached wires to his scalp. That part looked like a marine being put down for an extended run in a stasis chamber.
But it was the face that made Tolvern catch her breath. His nose gone, burned off, and with something that looked like putty where it had been. No lips, which turned his mouth into a skull-like grin. The burns went down his face to his neck and chest, all bare and covered with pink strips of regrowth.
Tolvern swallowed hard and turned to Doctor Willis, a middle-aged woman with steel gray hair and a sharp gaze. “His lips . . .?”
“Can’t fix that while he’s got a tube down his throat,” Willis said. “But the lung function is restored, and the lip tissue is regrown and waiting for grafting. We’ll start that the very next round.”
“Should I bring him up, Doctor?” a nurse asked.
Willis checked the reading on one of the machines and seemed satisfied with the result. “Keep the di-sop at 2.6.” She explained to Tolvern. “He’ll be groggy at that level, but it will keep the pain tamped down.”
They pulled the tube, itself a rather unpleasant process to watch. Willis and the nurses verified the patient’s breathing and heart rate, and then they brought him out of his induced coma.
Admiral James Drake.
Tolvern had known a lot of officers in her day, but nobody whose mind worked as quickly, as adaptably, to take in new information. Even coming out of stasis and a lengthy coma, and even partially sedated for pain, his transition to wakefulness was impressive to watch. Willis had warned that it
would take time—maybe up to a half hour—but he was looking around, absorbing the situation within three or four minutes.
A sharp look of understanding. He met Tolvern’s gaze, and his eyes warmed in recognition. A lump formed in her throat.
“How long?” he asked, words malformed through his missing lips.
“A few months.”
“Who hit us? Apex?” The letter P, swallowed.
“Aliens, but not Apex. We’ve had a few fights.”
Drake glanced at Willis. “Where’s Doc?”
“Dead. This is Doctor Willis.”
Willis gave a curt nod. “Chief Medical Officer, HMS Babylon.”
His eyes swung back to Tolvern. “Then we must be in Alliance territory. Babylon was attached to McGowan—are we in Persia?”
Persia. Cut off. Just like Castillo, now.
They had fresh data; war junks had been staring hard at the jump point at the exact moment the Adjudicators collapsed it and left them stranded. They had to find out how, and at the very least pass that information to Albion to prevent it from happening again.
“No, James. We’re still on the frontier. There’s a new war. We’re in a bit of trouble, to be honest. But I’ve fought these bastards, and they’re not invincible.”
“They never are.” Drake looked again at the doctor. “What about my lips?” he asked. Or tried to. One could not say the word “lips” without possessing a valid pair of them.
“Soon as we put you down again,” the doctor said. “Be patient. There’s a lot of regrowth before we have you back to normal.”
He tried to lift his arm to touch at his face and neck, but there were too many cords and wires. His eyes roamed down his body as best they could, and he grimaced.
“I look pretty bad.”
Tolvern touched him lightly on the head, stubbly where it had been shaved. “No, James. You look wonderful. The most wonderful thing I’ve seen in months, in fact.”
“Liar,” he said, and started to chuckle, but it turned into a cough.
Willis pursed her lips. “I advise not laughing.”
“We’ll behave,” Tolvern said.
Willis glanced back at her equipment and gave instructions to the nurses about the grafting. A lot of medical nonsense, and Tolvern didn’t understand the least of it.
“We don’t have long before they put you back down,” Tolvern told her husband. “The medical professionals tell me to keep it light, no deep subjects.”
“Hah. We’re members of the admiralty, and we’ll talk about whatever we want.”
“You know what? I lied. You look hideous without lips. Especially when you try to grin. Right now, you look like a corpse.”
“No laughing!” Willis said.
“Oh, all right,” Drake told the woman. To Tolvern, he said, “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything. How did they spring the ambush?”
It was funny, she thought as she launched into an abbreviated version of the past couple of months, or as much as she could cover in ten minutes, give or take. At every step of the way it had seemed that they were on the verge of death, about to be overwhelmed and killed by the Adjudicators. Judged and executed. She’d been floundering; her memory was clear on that score.
But when she played it out for the admiral, her actions didn’t seem half-bad. A few mistakes, but a lot of good calls, too. Not just her calls, but those of her officers, the various ships, and the people of the Alliance. A lot of bravery, but also ingenuity. Flexibility. They’d been dealt a bad hand and played it well.
There was hope in that. Strength in the lessons of past conflicts and in the combined skills and technologies of their alliance. And a will to resist. The Adjudicators were a formidable enemy, but Tolvern was quite certain the aliens had never faced a challenge equal to this one.
Tolvern’s confidence grew as she continued, and by the time she was done with her story of Charlie’s destruction, the battering inflicted on the other star fortresses, and the way the Alliance fleet had defeated the enemy and ejected them from the system, the whole story had changed.
It sounded to her ears like the first chapter of a heroic narrative.
#
Book Two: Alliance Armada
Chapter One
It was a new planet for the Hroom overseer, and Nils Oolmena cast a wary look at the greenish-gray sky as he stepped out of the shuttle. The temperature was hot, and the work zone was a two-kilometer-wide dead zone in the middle of an otherwise lush plain of shoulder-high grasses. There would be no shade as they worked.
Others began to follow him out. Weak, dispirited. Some fresh out of stasis, while others were near the end of their useful lifespans as devotees, and would soon die and be replaced.
Nils Oolmena had studied the planet through the shuttle window as the Adjudicator ship brought them down. They had descended toward a sea of green grass that ran for several hundred kilometers from the sea to a jagged range of peaks, the largest nearly ten thousand meters in height and crowned with snow. Nearly equidistant from the coast and the mountains sat this small, circular dead zone. A trench surrounded it, with tall poles placed at hundred-meter intervals around the perimeter, each glowing with blue light. The poles seemed to project some sort of force field that would keep out native life. In fact, the air was so still and quiet as he emerged that he realized the field must keep even bugs and other flying creatures at bay.
Sterile, safe. Once they put shovel to earth, he knew that the dirt would be equally dead. No worms or grubs or even microscopic life. Nothing from the outside would be allowed to contaminate this patch of ground, and nothing from the heavens would contaminate this world beyond the dead zone in turn. The Adjudicators must have their purity.
The devotees continued to file out of the shuttle, and the overseer moved to a small rise to study them while they trudged toward the hollow where they’d been ordered to assemble. Some were already six months into their trials—and showed radiation burns and disfiguring scars from past work sites.
Over half of Nils Oolmena’s workforce were humans, starved and dressed in rags, their faces pale and without hope. Towering over them were more Hroom like the overseer himself, but gaunt, their eyes sunk into hollows on their smooth purple faces. Perhaps twenty percent were squat, gray-skinned Cavlee people—a race Nils Oolmena hadn’t known existed until the Adjudicators had thrown them together. The male Cavlee had been culled as unable or unwilling to work, but the other two genders were represented in roughly equal numbers.
A small number of an insectoid species with multiple legs and mandibles instead of mouths made up the rest of his workforce. Another new species since Nils Oolmena’s capture. Whispers heard in ship corridors said that vast numbers of workers were being thawed from stasis across the Adjudicator-controlled systems to fight a powerful human kingdom on the far edge of known space. Some of these devotees—frozen for centuries—were creatures from long-dead civilizations. They were all needed.
More than sixteen hundred devotees in all had been packed into the hold of the shuttle, which now sat empty and steaming, its shell a battered gray beneath a drizzling rain. A figure stepped out, clad in mottled green armor. He . . . or it—after all this time, Nils Oolmena still didn’t know if the Adjudicators had gender, since they seemed to be grown in labs, not born—was unremarkable at first glance. It was taller than a human, shorter than a Hroom. More slender than a Cavlee, and while strangely clad in the mech suit, really no more odd in appearance than the insectoids.
But all eyes were drawn to it. The insectoids trembled and clacked their mandibles as it passed, and the Hroom let out a collective wailing hum that had been reserved for high religious ceremonies or the presence of the empress. The humans wept. The Cavlee stood rigid and motionless, hands clasped in front of them. Eyes closed, they whispered, “Cavlee, cavlee, cavlee,” as the Adjudicator passed.
Worshipful, all. Enthralled by the presence of their master. Who was alone, and completely vulnerable. All it would
take was one malfunction, one broken implant. A human could do it—they were bold and given to fits of emotion. One could charge in and knock down the enemy, hold down its guns long enough for others to snatch up stones and smash its faceplate, break its joints.
Nils Oolmena stared, begging them to act. But nobody made a move. They never did.
The Adjudicator spotted the overseer standing apart and made its way over. Something buzzed in Nils Oolmena’s head as it approached, and there was a cool, throbbing sensation where the metal brackets of the implant emerged from his skull. Not painful, but not pleasant, either. The urge to hum praise was too strong to resist, and he gave in to the sensation.
The Adjudicator spoke directly to his implant. “You will set the devotees to work. This labor must be completed rapidly.”
A flood of joy passed through Nils Oolmena at the sound of his enemy’s voice. He wanted to raise his arms and worship. It was all false; he knew this. The emotion came through his brain implant, and his reaction to the voice of his master was nothing more than a hijacking of his brain’s normal functions, but he still wanted to weep with love.
He was careful to smooth his mind before answering. Always calm the mind first, as if he were still an acolyte at the Hroom temple. Stray thoughts could betray him. Give them a voice, even internally, and the enemy would suspect. And once it suspected, it would soon know.
“Yes, oh Lord of Life and Keeper of the Holy Dwellers,” he said, responding with thoughts, rather than spoken words. “When will the equipment arrive?”
“It’s here already, buried beneath the soil to shield it from radiation.”
“How will we get it out?”
“There are lesser tools in the shuttle. They will help you reach the greater tools.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 26