The Alliance Trilogy

  He tried to speak again, and this time steered clear of the subjects that would block his ability to communicate.

  “Is Scorpion still alive?”

  “Your ship?” Willis asked. She glanced at Brockett with a shrug, as if looking to him for confirmation.

  Brockett nodded. “Better than alive—she got into the action. Fired her guns, saved our missile frigates. Possibly kept us in the fight, in fact.”

  Fontaine felt a warm glow of pride. “There are more Terran warships in the Earth System if you can get them out. We’re not strong enough on our own—guess that’s obvious, isn’t it?—but we’ve learned how to hit the ghouls and hit them hard.”

  “That’s why they flung me across in the middle of a battle,” Brockett said. “I’m the head science officer of the Royal Navy, and an expert on xenobiology. After Tolvern and Vargus saw what your ship is capable of, they suddenly became very interested in figuring out what you know.”

  “And if there’s any way to save your hide,” Dr. Willis said. “That’s my job.”

  Fontaine pressed on, eager to show his worth. “If I had ten stingers and a couple of gorgons to put alongside the ships you’ve got here, we could finish the ghouls off. Well, except for the leviathan part. Is it true that they’ve—”

  His mouth suddenly felt numb, his tongue thick and immobile. Mentioning the leviathan had pushed him too close to one of the forbidden subjects. He groaned in frustration.

  Brockett tapped something into his hand computer. “I’m pretty sure I can accelerate the memory recall. Get the rest of it out of you at once, instead of playing it out in dribbles like we were doing before.”

  Fontaine found his voice. “Do it. Get it over with.”

  Void Queen shuddered, a reminder that they were having this conversation in the middle of battle. There was no more chitchat, as the doctor gave quick, forceful instructions to her nurses, and the science officer worked with a piece of equipment that Fontaine hadn’t seen before, something handheld with an alarming number of wires that looked like they’d be fixed to his skull.

  Moments later, the nurses were putting him under. He surrendered to the memories.

  #

  The Lord of Lords put Fontaine and Al-Harthi onto the small human freighter and launched them into space. They were to take turns as pilot and co-pilot while a crew of sixteen Cavlee devotees kept the ship running. Ten more Cavlee were kept in stasis to replace those who died in the course of their work. A built-in redundancy to make sure the mission could be completed.

  “We have two captains,” Al-Harthi observed when they were still pulling away from the Adjudicator base. “Does that mean we’re redundant, too? What are we doing out here, anyway? Do you have any ideas?”

  “I do, but let’s get out of here before we speculate.”

  “How far?”

  “Until we’re not getting hit with scans,” he said. “I’ll feel safer then.”

  She didn’t look overly satisfied with his answer, but settled into her work without complaint.

  Fontaine’s first glimpse of the enemy-controlled system was stunning. There was a neutron star at its heart that was devouring a second, less dense star. Blasts of radiation swept out from the dying star, and he guessed that these radiation bursts had sterilized the sole water-covered planet in the system.

  The Adjudicator bases and colonies were all located in the asteroid belt. That was not surprising, given what their leader had divulged. The Adjudicators were a spacefaring race, designed to purify natural environments against those who’d defiled them, and the first object of their wrath had been their own species. Which meant they had no home world, and neither did they want one.

  A handful of the larger bases were nearly as big as the moon-sized asteroid from which they’d come, and most of them seemed devoted to shipbuilding: star fortresses, dragoons, transports, and smaller shuttles of various kinds. It was a civilization given over to making war.

  Other, smaller bases appeared to be little more than giant repositories of stasis chambers, filled with millions of enslaved creatures to be thawed and worked to death. Still others were massive floating farms that collected solar radiation and grew food for the Adjudicators and their workers.

  Fontaine and Al-Harthi stuck to business as they slipped through the asteroid belt. They were hit with scans on several occasions, not from the commanding Adjudicator’s headquarters, but from smaller bases and dragoons. Someone was keeping an eye on them, but otherwise, they were largely ignored by other ships while they crossed through the Adjudicator colonies.

  Fontaine studied his counterpart whenever he had a chance. Al-Harthi had a lean, hungry look about her, military all the way. She was extremely competent, seemed to know all of the ship’s systems, from the engines to the nav computer, and in those few cases where they needed to communicate with their crew in a way that wasn’t pre-programmed by their implants, managed to explain with gestures. The squat gray Cavlee were intelligent in their own way, and waddled away to obey her commands with their knuckles and squat legs propelling them down the corridors.

  After emerging from the asteroid belt, they accelerated into a course that would take them out of the system and toward Earth. This carried them past the system’s watery planet, and at fourteen hours from the belt, they hit a patch of empty space that temporarily carried them behind the bulk of the radiation interference from the neutron star and its victim.

  Which meant they’d earned some privacy.

  “I want to take a look around,” Fontaine said. “See what else is out here.”

  “Can’t imagine our masters will be too happy if they spot us searching,” Al-Harthi said.

  Fontaine raised an eyebrow. “Good point. They might recall us and work us to death in the rendering plant.”

  “Ha!”

  They pinged the inner system with a series of long-range scans, and this brought a surprise. The watery planet had plenty of oxygen and carbon dioxide in ratios that showed that life must have found a way to survive the lethal radiation bursts.

  In addition, six star fortresses orbited the planet and were hitting it with hard scans. Dragoons dipped in and out of the atmosphere with sensors trained across the surface.

  “What are they looking for?” Fontaine asked.

  “Maybe some devotees escaped and took refuge on the planet,” she said.

  “Can’t be that. If there were escaped slaves down there, they’d land decimators and finish them off. But they’re scanning from orbit—I can’t see any shuttles or smaller craft at all. They’re treating the planet like it’s uncontaminated. Like they don’t want to land someone on the surface unless they have to.”

  “So what is it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t suppose it concerns us.”

  Al-Harthi leaned back in her chair and put her hands behind her head. “Too bad the carriers weren’t scattered like that when they hit Tunisia. The pair over the poles are too low in the atmosphere. They’re not planetary ships—you could knock them lower and see what the gravity well could do.”

  “You have a military mind,” he said.

  “I told you already—Tunisian militia.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She laughed. “Why would I lie?”

  “I don’t think you’re lying, I think you’re holding something back. You may be former militia, but you’re not just that, are you? This frigate has a modified Terran Arms plasma engine. Rated for a Seeker-class patrol boat. The militia was getting its ships from the Merchanting Federation—different engine system entirely. But you didn’t even blink when calibrating the acceleration rate.”

  “And how would you know that,” Al-Harthi said, “if you’re really only a tramp freighter captain?”

  “I graduated from the Martian Academy, actually,” Fontaine admitted.

  “Really?” A raised eyebrow at this. “So you’re ex-military after all?’

  “No, sorry. That was my plan, but it didn
’t come through. It was peacetime when I graduated, and there weren’t many commissions to be had. So I went civilian, instead.”

  “I was offered a commission,” Al-Harthi said. “But Tunis was paying my bill, and I was required to complete a ten-year service term. Could have legally renounced my citizenship and done five years for the home system instead, but that didn’t seem right.” She gave him a sharp look. “I graduated in 2915. How about you?”

  “Class of ’17.”

  “So we overlapped by a year,” she said. “My last, and your first.”

  “How did you get an offer?” he asked. “There were over three hundred grads my year, and only thirty-three commissions. Preference went to . . . never mind. I’ll assume you’re just that much better than I am.”

  She chuckled. “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. We’ll get a chance to see over the next few months, won’t we?”

  This dropped Fontaine into silence as he thought about the end of their mission. He’d had plenty of time to turn it over since leaving the base, and had even toyed with doing something about it. The enemy had freed him from the mind control of the poor fools working under direct supervision. The human, Cavlee, and Hroom devotees had effectively been turned into the hive mind-like insectoids, down to following chemicals.

  At times, it felt like he’d regained his autonomy, but whenever he tried testing boundaries, the implant released its chemicals. Fear, adrenaline, devotion, even a sort of holy rapture if it meant keeping him on task.

  A few hours earlier, while Al-Harthi was asleep, he’d left the bridge and descended the ladder to the hold, where he stared at the smooth, cylindrical object he’d discovered during an earlier exploration. It lay gleaming and malignant on the floor. What if he tore off the cladding and activated it within the ship? Would it fry the electronics and scramble the crew’s brains? What if he shoved it out the airlock as they passed the neutron star and let it fall into the gravity well to be crushed like an eggshell?

  He went to the crane system that would be used to extend the device from the ship, but no sooner had his hand touched the pad than his body went rigid, and his vision went black. He came to a few seconds later lying on the floor, trembling, while four Cavlee stood above him with their huge hands clenched into fists. One carried a wrench that could have caved in Fontaine’s head with a single blow.

  He rose shakily to his feet and backed away from the crane operating panel. The Cavlee dispersed without another glance in his direction. He looked once more at the device, and this time it seemed to him beautiful, the work of angels, and tears rose to his eyes.

  What was I thinking? What blasphemy? This holy object will cleanse the sector of sin and filth.

  Now, back on the bridge and in control of his faculties once more, he thought about how his body had been taken over, how his mind had been violated yet again, and glanced at Al-Harthi to find her staring at him.

  “We’ve waited long enough,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “To share what we know. Have you seen the charted course?

  Fontaine nodded. “We’re going back to Earth.”

  “But not just Earth. We’ll start in the home system, then trace out nearly the entire pattern of human migration during the Great Migration.”

  “I saw that.

  “Except not all of them,” she said. “There are notable exceptions.”

  “Oh? I didn’t see that. Which ones?”

  “The map of our journey includes all the planets that are known to have been reduced by the Adjudicators. The other missing systems—and there are a fair number—are unknown, but I’m going to assume that our masters have taken these out, too.”

  “That makes sense. We don’t need to destroy them—they’re already gone.”

  “We’re the destroyers now, aren’t we?” Al-Harthi asked. “I don’t understand how. Something about seeds of destruction and holy fire and all of that. And what’s that thing in the hold, anyway?”

  “Star leviathans. That’s what we’re doing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Each of the systems has a star leviathan in it,” Fontaine said. “Our job is to pass through and send out a signal to wake them up.”

  “You can’t control a leviathan.”

  “We can’t. Maybe the Adjudicators can. I don’t know,” he added when he saw her skeptical look. “The enemy has been out here a long, long time, and must have encountered hundreds of the things. I can’t imagine it would be easy, but maybe they’ve figured out a way. But I don’t think this is about controlling them. It’s about waking them up.”

  “So they, what? Put a star leviathan to sleep in every system and waited?”

  “It’s a fail-safe. The Lord of Lords came through the sector thousands of years ago, saw that humans had mastered fire and organized into complex, hierarchy-based tribes. It knew we were a threat to reach for the stars, but maybe this doesn’t always happen with intelligent races. Otherwise, it would have exterminated us then and there. But to be safe, it lured a star leviathan into Earth’s solar system, fed it a huge meal so it would go dormant, and then hit it with a tranquilizer or something so it would stay asleep.”

  “A tranquilizer?” Al-Harthi sounded skeptical.

  “Something must be effective. Leviathans aren’t a naturally evolved organism. They had a creator, at least in an earlier form, and whoever that was needed a way to pacify them. A monster that big . . . you couldn’t take a risk. The Adjudicators must have learned how.”

  “Plausible, I suppose. And if humans explored the stars, one leviathan wouldn’t be enough. Better to place them in multiple systems, ready to wake when the time came.”

  “Assuming the Lord of Lords and his people can’t destroy the starfaring race with conventional arms. Seems that manipulating the leviathans is a last-ditch effort. A sacrilege to stop an even greater sacrilege.”

  “Ugh,” Al-Harthi said. “What a twisted philosophy. So you think they plant the leviathans, leave them for hundreds or thousands of years, and then wake them one by one? They’ve been dormant, and they’ll wake up ravenous, ready for maximum destruction? Is that it?”

  Fontaine nodded. “Eat ships, fall on mining colonies, knock out space elevators . . . then the Adjudicators come in later and clean up whatever is left.”

  “It sounds like a huge guess to me. How do you know?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I do know the humans are putting up a fight, and I know we’re supposed to go through the unconquered systems, hoist some huge transmitter outside our ship, and send out a massive signal.”

  Fontaine touched the implant that emerged from his skull. As always, the bone and flesh around it was tender and swollen.

  “And I know that the Adjudicators can control brains,” he added. “If they can control yours and mine, maybe they could control a leviathan’s, too.”

  #

  The next system was uninhabited except for a single small base where an Adjudicator fleet was undergoing repairs. Based on its location on the charts, the alien fleet seemed poised to fight beyond the frontier of the Merchanting Federation’s old monopoly zone, toward a host of lesser-known civilizations: Persia, Scandia, Albion, Singapore, and the Hroom Empire.

  There were four star fortresses at the base, together with eighteen dragoons. Two other dragoons were gutted wrecks, being stripped down by slave labor for parts to repair other, less damaged ships. One of the star fortresses had lost its torus ring and suffered gaping wounds along the starboard flank.

  “Someone is putting up a fight,” Fontaine said. “Wish we could help them instead of clanging the bell of doom.”

  “At least they’ll go last. Could be a year or more until we come back this way and wake their leviathans.” Al-Harthi tapped her console. “Keep the instruments quiet—we’re being hit by long-range scans.”

  “I’m sure they want to have a look, want to be sure we keep going the direction we’re supposed to.”

  “I
t’s not the fleet doing it.” She swiveled her screen toward him. “Look.”

  The hit was a subtle blip in the numbers scrolling across the screen, and the computer had highlighted it only as a burp in the background radiation.

  “Good eye,” he said. “You’d have made an excellent first mate on a tramp freighter.”

  She gave him a semi-amused look, then returned to her screen. “I’m surprised the ship’s sensors are good enough to pick it up. This is military-grade gear right here.”

  “Just because it’s a freighter doesn’t mean it should run blind. If you’re an independent operator, and you don’t have any real guns to speak of, you’d better put your money into detection. When survival comes down to running from danger, the last thing you want is someone sneaking up on you. And you’re sure it’s not Adjudicators?”

  “Look at where they are,” Al-Harthi said.

  She brought up the star system and highlighted a blinking yellow light cloaked in the radiation shadow of the star. Whoever they were, they didn’t want to be spotted by the star fortresses or they wouldn’t have positioned themselves there.

  “Human, then?” he asked. “We must be close to systems contested by whoever struck this fleet.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We were getting scanned in the last system, too, and that was firmly in enemy territory. Could simply be the Lord of Lords is following us and hasn’t told the rest of his fleet what he’s up to.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” Fontaine said. “I hope it’s humans, and I hope they blast us out of the sky.”

  They didn’t detect any more scans in the system, and none in the next one, either, but that didn’t discount the human theory, as they were moving away from the far frontier and back toward the systems ravaged by the Adjudicators.

  Two more jumps brought them into a system containing the wreckage of an old battle with the Merchanting Federation, at least thirty of their Mercher warships gutted and swinging in slow orbit around the star. The slowly cooling radiation indicated a battle at least two decades old.

  After that, an occupied system, with a devastated planet and a handful of survivors clinging to life on a pair of mineral-rich moons that orbited a gas giant. No military forces, no way to fight back when the enemy returned to exterminate them.