Smythe looked her way, eyes wide. “I found it, Captain. It was there all along.”
Chapter Three
Twelve hours after the battle with the trio of injured dragoons, Tolvern, Smythe, and Blackbeard’s chief science officer, Noah Brockett, were in the war room when Capp called from the bridge saying there was a video message from Fort Mathilde. Most likely from Drake.
Tolvern swiped a hand over her computer to shift aside the three-dimensional map above the table. It marked a sphere 1.85 million miles in diameter, with sectors marked yellow, red, or blue—the latter color being the unscanned portions, and still the majority of the empty space. They were way out on the outer rim of the system, and had detected nothing in the yellow or red zones larger than a piece of gravel.
Her husband appeared on the war room viewscreen. Admiral James Drake. He looked a lot better than he had a couple of months ago, when they’d brought him out of the induced coma—a man was always more attractive with lips, for one thing—but he still didn’t look quite his old self.
His face was pink and baby smooth where they’d regrown the skin, which he tried to cover up by growing a beard, with limited success. His complexion was flushed, as if he had a fever, although that was just extra blood flow induced by the medical staff. The regrown lips were slightly fuller than they had been, and so red they almost looked like he was wearing lipstick.
But all in all, Tolvern had little room to complain. Her husband was alive, when so many others had died. Some of those lost, like Oglethorpe and Manx, had served with her for years, through multiple battles and across the inner frontier as they probed toward Old Earth.
He raised an eyebrow as the recording began. “Far be it from me to criticize your little jaunt around the outer system. I got your report—a rather modest assessment of the battle, don’t you think? We caught the fight on scans. Three enemy ships destroyed, and barely a ding to your own armor. Perfect execution.”
Tolvern cleared her throat uncomfortably, glad that Capp wasn’t present to smirk and drop innuendo. Gushing compliments were all fine and well . . . except when they came from your own husband. Never mind that Drake almost never gave them in public to her or anyone else.
“He’s right,” Smythe said. “We were great. Perfect.”
“Yes, we were,” Tolvern said, emphasizing the team aspect. She started to say something else, specifically praising the work at the tech and defense grids, but Drake’s message was a recording, and he continued.
“But you’re up to something out there, and I admit that I’m . . . curious.” His eyebrow lifted higher. “Care to fill me in? What are you looking for? It’s not the wreckage of that dragoon—Svensen relayed your order to harpoon it and send over mech raiders—and you’ve let it drift anyway. So what is it?”
The recording ended. Short and to the point.
Capp’s voice popped up on the com. She must have been listening in from the bridge, where she had the helm. “You wanna tell him, or should I?”
“It didn’t sound like a question, did it?” Tolvern said. “More like an order.”
“Aye, Captain. That’s how I took it, anyhow.”
“Make it a video message—draw it out. That will buy us some time while it crosses over.”
Once Capp was off the line, she turned back to the tech and science officers. “We’ve got roughly six hours until the admiral hears what we’re doing and starts his own search. Then Wang’s ships hit the search zone with scans, Drake sends out a task force, and . . . well, there goes your glory.”
Brockett had dipped his head to his computer, and now looked up and adjusted his glasses. “What do you mean by glory?”
“If you solve this, if it gets us out of here, and the human race survives this war without those blasted aliens massacring half of us, enslaving most of the rest, and reducing a handful of survivors to the Stone Age, then Brockett and Smythe will go down as the men who made a major discovery about the nature of inter-system jump points. That’s what I mean.”
“Ah, yes. Glory.” Brockett brightened. He brought up the map again.
Smythe leaned back and put his hands behind his head. He puffed his cheeks and blew out the air. “We’ve searched eleven percent of it in twelve hours, and our confidence level is low on the yellow zones. You ever play that old game Battleship?”
“Thought you were more into Romans vs. Soviets,” Tolvern said.
Smythe blushed—he loved to play when he was on duty and his mind only half-occupied, and he was aware that others were onto him. They certainly mocked him enough. The game playing used to annoy Tolvern, but not these days; she thought multitasking jogged loose good ideas from the more techy sorts on her crew.
“Point is,” he said, “if we don’t get lucky, it’s going to take the better part of a week to search it all.”
“That’s why I dragged you in here in the first place,” she said. “To find a way to speed this up before Drake or McGowan started to hassle us. Now we know our deadline. So let’s find this thing before someone else does. You’re the two smartest people on this ship, so let’s hear some ideas.”
“Actually,” Brockett said significantly, “Beth Lomelí scored higher on the naval math aptitude test than either of us.”
Smythe shot the science officer a look. “I told you not to mention that.”
“And the crown awarded a medal for her paper on the secondary flash-burst while she was still in the academy.” Brockett nodded appreciatively at Tolvern. “Your scores were quite good, too, Captain. Not as good as the admiral’s, but very solid. Did you ever consider a tech or science career instead of command?
“What? No.”
“Well, you should have,” the science officer continued. “You scored higher than Drake on the spatial memory portion, in fact, and his score was quite solid . . . for a naval captain, I mean.”
“My spatial memory was higher than Drake’s?”
“A statistically significant amount,” Brockett said. “Six and a half points, in fact.”
Tolvern flushed. “Never mind your snooping. You could lose clearance for that.”
“Told you,” Smythe said.
“The point is, you’re both full of flashy tricks when you want to be,” she told Smythe, then fixed Brockett with her gaze. “As for you, you’ve supposedly been studying this collapsed jump point for the past two and half months.”
“I’ve studied enough to know the Adjudicators couldn’t collapse it with any known science,” Brockett said. “I’m more confident of that than ever.”
He tapped his computer and equations came up on one of the war room’s side displays. Some of the figures almost looked familiar, and Tolvern was so caught up in a bit of vanity from Brockett’s compliment that she tried to make sense of it. Too long since the academy; she might as well have been trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“However, this part right here,” the science officer continued, highlighting a section that contained some sort of mathematical proof, “indicates that there might be a way to conceal a jump point by introducing a slight wobble in the gravity fields emanating from the system’s star and any nearby gas giants.”
“That’s what he had me watching for,” Smythe said. “And I think that’s what we detected. Just a hint, but it’s there. Somewhere in this sphere.” He gestured at the spherical zone.
“Come on, Smythe,” Tolvern said impatiently. “Stop messing around and figure out how to speed up the search.”
The tech officer scowled in response. “The object is maybe seven feet long on a side and hundreds of thousands of miles away. And it doesn’t want to be found.”
“Blackbeard’s instruments are sensitive enough to locate an object of that size from that range. Cloaked, or not.”
“Sure, eventually. But a sphere of 1.86 million miles in diameter presents a volume of”—Smythe glanced to one side, licked his lips, and paused for a couple of seconds, before continuing—“close to twenty-seven million
cubic miles.”
“26.95 million, to be exact,” Brockett said.
Smythe gave him a look. “Yes, I know.”
“Oh, I know you know,” Brockett said. “But the captain didn’t know the exact figure, that’s my point. She scored below the admiral on the mental math portion of the aptitude test if you recall.”
Tolvern sighed. “Anyway . . .?”
“Smythe’s point,” Brockett continued, “is that we could use Wang’s ships, but they’ll need to get closer than where they are. And then we’d share the glory, like you said.”
“We need to break the cloaking,” Smythe said. “That’s the way to do it. Whatever is baffling our active sensors, knock it out.”
“What would make it more visible?” she asked.
“Noise,” Smythe said. “Flashes and radiation pulses and the like. We’ve already tried some of that, which is how we got the yellow zone on this map. That’s the part we’ve searched at a high level.”
Tolvern thought it over. “What if you comb back through the data of the battle? Might have picked up something more concrete, something small enough you didn’t notice it at the time, but big enough to show in the records.”
“Except most of the battle was fought over here,” he said, pointing to one edge of the sphere, “since we were gradually maneuvering in this direction. It wouldn’t contain anything meaningful. But I guess I could shift over some of Jane’s computing power and give it a second look.”
“No, keep the AI on task. The fresh data is more important.” Tolvern turned it over. “What about nukes?”
Smythe exchanged glances with Brockett before responding. “Sure, that would help. They make plenty of noise.”
“Perfect. There are eight of them on board loaded into Mark-IVs.”
“But shouldn’t we . . . you know . . .?” Smythe said.
“Ask Drake’s permission first? Maybe we should, or maybe it’s more important to show initiative. I can justify it after the fact—it’s not like they’re the best weapon against enemy ships anyway. You have to be right on top of them for nukes to do any good, and the shields have to be fatally weakened already.”
Leaving aside, of course, that the Scandian star wolf Icefall had, in fact, knocked around Star Fortress Delta with nuclear torpedoes. Or that the eight torpedoes represented the total nuclear firepower available to the rump fleet trapped in Castillo. There were plenty of fissionables to mine in the system’s thick asteroid belt, but they had limited ability to refine them.
She rose to her feet. “Good. You have fifteen minutes to give me a plan. Smythe will go down in the records as the one who discovered the alien jump point baffler, and Brockett as the one who unlocked its secrets.”
#
So far, the nuclear torpedoes were returning nothing but noise. Smythe and Brockett had calculated they could gain sixty percent blue coverage by exploding their nukes at proper intervals, indicating ninety-four percent confidence level. A further thirty percent would rate as yellow, which was greater than sixty percent certainty.
That was still a lot of uncertainty, but Tolvern figured they’d search the last ten percent with the old method. But after six torpedoes detonated their payloads and the tech people found nothing echoing off, she worried that the enemy device would be in one of those yellow uncertainty zones.
Or maybe their assumption was bad, and she’d draw all of Drake’s attention out here for nothing. Plus throw away their entire nuclear arsenal for what looked like target practice.
If we’re trapped anyway, what does it matter if I waste the nukes?
It was mostly pride, she admitted. Instead of returning in triumph after wiping out three enemy dragoons, she’d go back looking foolish. Captain McGowan, especially, would make her feel like an idiot.
But on the seventh explosion, Smythe and Lomelí got a hit. Something small reflected radiation, then vanished from scans almost as quickly. But they had a location, some two hundred and seventy thousand miles from their current position, or roughly the distance between Albion and her moon.
Tolvern launched five falcons, who accelerated toward the object. She directed all active sensors toward the approximate location, and fired countermeasures in that direction too, trying to keep the area noisy. And held her breath until Carvalho and his mates arrived on the scene.
And there it was, a small, ovaloid piece of hardware, mostly cloaking, and the rest emitting some sort of gravitational field, not so different from what could be found radiating off a Singaporean eliminon battery, the kind designed to destroy artificial gravity systems on Apex harvester ships.
Except this one had another purpose, one they confirmed as soon as they’d hit it with a couple of disabling bursts of radiation and ensnared it in a containment field. Once the device went offline, there, to everyone’s relief, was Castillo’s jump point.
Never collapsed. Just hidden. Probably the same thing in Persia and all the systems the Adjudicators had reduced. The destroyed civilizations would never find them, would probably never even look, but the general’s fleet in Persia certainly could.
Everyone working at the tech consoles was beaming, including Brockett, who’d stayed on the bridge during the search. The science officer rubbed his hands, a look of bright anticipation on his face.
“Nice work, people,” Tolvern said. “Brockett, that device is yours once we get it safely into the hold. Just promise not to turn my ship into a black hole, will you?”
“A black hole is theoretically possible, I suppose,” Brockett said. “But you’d really have to work at it.”
“Like I said . . .”
“Hey, Cap’n,” Capp said. “We’ll be getting something back from Drake about now. But I guess you’ll wanna tell ’em not to bother, we found it. I figure the admiral will want to send someone through the jump and see what’s on the other side. It’s probably enemy ships over there, keeping an eye on things, yeah?”
“Which is exactly why we can’t sit around waiting for the aliens to call in star fortresses and bottle us up in the old-fashioned way. We’re not waiting. Bring in the falcons and tether the brawler. As soon as everyone is secure, we’re going to accelerate to jump speed and go through alone.”
Chapter Four
The mech raiders came ashore during a heavy storm, when the tides were at their highest, and thirty-foot waves crashed onto the beach. It was breeding season for the water dragons of Odense’s northern seas, and the huge males used the waves and the storm and tides to heave their bulks as far inland as possible. There they burrowed into the ground to protect their young from predators as they died, even as the offspring hatched inside egg pouches and slowly devoured the carefully conserved fat stores their fathers had built before dying.
Each dragon was fifty feet long, and the raiders, scrambling onto shore while trying to keep their suits from being battered on the rocks, had shaped their landing craft like the sea monsters to disguise them from radar. By midnight they had two hundred men on the island, clear of the waves, and were ready to move.
It was like a Viking raid of old, a quick hit from the sea, and the attackers overran the outer defenses and captured missile batteries, gun emplacements, and dozens of prisoners without a single whisper of alarm raised by the defenders.
Captain Catarina Vargus had landed her battle cruiser on Odense knowing the ship would be vulnerable. She wasn’t some naive daughter of an Albion duke—she’d earned her bars on the outer frontier, earned them fighting pirates, doing a little pirating of her own. She’d learned plenty of tricks while working with her father, her sister, and later, alone, after the romance with Edward McGowan fell apart in the ugliest way possible.
And she’d known that even on an island bristling with guns, with Lars Olafsen’s star wolves protecting her from orbit, an Ironside-class battle cruiser like Void Queen presented an irresistible opportunity to revanchist elements. Most of the Scandian people, nations, and tribes had been pacified after the brutal Apex assa
ult, but not all of them.
Some had spent too long since the collapse of Scandian civilization in pillaging and slaving, and would spot Void Queen in the yards and imagine it armed and loaded with raiders. Take to the heavens in her ship and it would be the most powerful star wolf to ever menace the sector. That there were also two Albion destroyers and a corvette in the yards was just the bow on top of the gift-wrapped battle cruiser.
Or so the raiders must have thought.
In reality, while Catarina couldn’t have anticipated the clever use of the water dragons’ reproductive cycle to smuggle enemy raiders ashore, she had guessed that enemies might try to disguise themselves as yard workers and infiltrate in that way. That they might jam radar, might smuggle themselves onto the base in one of a hundred other ways.
Upon landing Void Queen planetside, she’d taken aside the yard commander, a former mercenary from the Ladino worlds by the name of Hubert Rodriguez, and told him she was overhauling his security protocols. He’d listened in exasperation, pointing out that his work crews were undertrained and undersupplied, and that there was already no way to satisfy the navy’s schedule to get their battered warships back into combat. If Catarina implemented a dozen pointless security protocols for his yard workers, he’d lose a week, minimum, getting Void Queen back into orbit.
She’d listened calmly while Rodriguez’s temper worked itself out. “I don’t care. It’s my ship, and my prerogative. I’m the sole representative of the Admiralty in this system, and the general has given me command of all Alliance forces in Scandian territory.
“This planet isn’t close to pacified yet,” she continued, “and we were shadowed three different times by hostile star wolves since we fought off the alien attack. Someone is watching, trying to take advantage of the war and confusion, and that someone is going to make his move. There’s no better place than here, while we’re grounded and helpless.”
To be fair, Rodriguez had only made token complaints after that. Most vigorously when she insisted that Royal Marines, and not Scandian workers, inspect every incoming shipment from the mainland. That cost more time. Did she want her ship patched up or not?
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