She tried to remember the fading image of her mother, while also coming to understand that she was alive, they had made it through. She took a deep breath, savoring the taste of air in her lungs.
She had found a different path than her mother's.
Her cheek pressed against the metal console. Looking up, she saw the two panels showing the graphs and the images from ProgressWorld Elegaia were now blank. Someone took her arm, pulling her up, and she lifted her head to find Lieutenant Athan standing over her.
He nodded, face drawn by fatigue. "We have passed back through the gate, ShipLord."
Asarik let him help her to her feet. "Thank you," she said. She took another deep breath and let it out. Her chest ached like she had breathed fire. She adjusted her uniform as she took in the state of the command deck.
Sythil was staring blankly into her console, expression slack. The sight of Sythil looking so lost brought clarity to Asarik's mind. She straightened, her thoughts filling with the ship's next steps. Status checks. Detailed reports. Communications. She would have to make sense of what had happened, explain it somehow.
She cast another glance at the panel where Alia's face had hung over them, thinking for a moment the woman might still be there.
"Lieutenant Sythil," Asarik said.
Sythil jerked upright. "Yes, ShipLord," she gasped, straightening her shoulders.
"I need ship's status. I also want to know if Jessin's pod made it through the gate. Conduct communications scans."
Sythil nodded and raised her hands over her console. She paused, staring at her display, then looked up at Asarik.
"ShipLord," she said. "We already have an external status request."
Asarik frowned. How could anyone know they had come back through Halith? "Who is it?" she said.
Sythil swallowed, turning back to Asarik with anxious eyes. "The signature is the Council of Known Worlds on Sandrit, ShipLord," she said. "Robert Karak." She caught herself, realizing whose name she had just read. "Your father."
"Hold the request," Asarik said. She looked at Athan, now seated at his console. "Do we have ship status yet?"
"All stations report no casualties, ShipLord," he said. "However, several wounded throughout stations and our tertiary drive core reports misalignment." He cracked his knuckles and tapped his console. "Excellent, considering. I am ready to transmit ship status to Command."
Asarik nodded approval. "Lieutenant Sythil," she said. “Prepare a message for Garalan Council Member Tyu Sala. Let him know that InquiryShip Serens' Reach wishes to inform him of the loss of the guard-class cruiser Prowling Thunder. We attempted to assist but--" she paused, choosing words, "Due to the dangerous nature of the unexplored environment, conditions did not enable our success." She nodded. That sounded sufficiently political. "And," she continued, "we are proud to inform the council member of our return through Halith Gate and our claim of the ProgressWorld Elegaia for Serens System."
Laughs and weak claps sounded around her. They were still too tired to truly celebrate.
"Now," Asarik said, "to respond to Council Member Karak." Asarik imagined her father's face, stern with flickers of affection deep in his eyes. "Inform him Serens' Reach is operating as expected. Four lost during mission through Halith Gate. I will want to speak with him in person when within range." Asarik paused. "Also," she said, "we require his support for a ship's upgrade request."
"Missiles," Athan said. "Lots of missiles."
"And a rail gun," Sythil added. "A big one."
Asarik allowed herself a grin.
The End
For a free story about Asarik's father, Robert Karak and his battle with Tyu Sala during the Council of the Known Worlds, join my mailing list at http://jamesaaron.net/list.
You can find more stories from the Known Worlds on my author page: http://jamesaaron.net/books, including my new novel Ground Private Parvel, which tells the story of the Serensian return to ProgressWorld Elegaia.
More About James Aaron
James S. Aaron is an army vet with experience points in journalism, retail hijinks, airspace control and lately chicken wrangling. He lives in Oregon by the McKenzie River.
Genre: Galactic Empire
Within a Phrygian Sky by Jim Johnson
As destructive as wars are, they can also be a crucible of discovery, both on a galactic political scale and on a deeply personal scale. This story is about the latter—two people from opposing sides of a long, cruel war, encounter each other and discover that there is more connecting them and their respective worlds than they could have possibly known.
Chapter 1
A sudden, unfocused mental jolt pushed Vance to consciousness. She was up and out of her bunk seconds before her comm buzzed.
“Skipper? Real sorry, but we need you on the command deck.” The urgent tone of Perle Gint, her extraordinarily young but able first lieutenant, crackled over the tinny shipboard comm system.
She stretched both arms behind her head and rubbed the base of her neck. That damn ache was back again. Was that what had woken her? She reached out and thumbed the toggle on the panel fixed to the bulkhead next to her bunk.
“What have you got, Gint? Better not be another sensor malfunction.” She lifted her voice at the end of the sentence, hoping he’d pick up the unspoken question.
“Ah, no, Skip. Mister Tolle reported in a couple bells ago—the outboard sensor nets are back to nominal.” He paused to take a breath. She could visualize the apple in his thin throat bob with nervous excitement.
“But, ah, the new sensor nets…they picked up an anomaly entering our flight vector. It hadn’t appeared on the navcharts back when we plotted the course before spiraling into FTL.”
She reached for her flight suit hanging off the sole hook in her cabin. “Threat assessment?”
Gint gulped for air again. “Uh, high enough to wake you. And I know you hate being waken up.”
Fair enough. She stepped into her magboots and pulled the flight suit up over her nakedness. She fastened the quicksnaps with one hand while she raked the fingers of her other hand through her tangled mess of sweaty hair. Freaking heaters were still acting up.
Normally she’d keep the flight suit on while sleeping, in case she had to run to the flight deck or another station at an odd hour, but lately it had just been too damned hot in her cabin and in random places on the ship. Cold she could handle—just layer up as needed. But hot…only so much clothing you could take off. And while she loved her crew, she had no interest in standing before them in her unencumbered glory.
“I’ll be right there. Get everyone up and set condition two throughout the ship.”
“Condition two, aye, Skip.” The comm crackled again and then was silent.
She toggled off her mic, frowning all the while. Her renewed headache, the unwelcome heat, this damn mission… She shook her head. At least Tolle got the sensor net working. She hated commanding a near-sighted ship.
She scratched the back of her neck again, but the itch was one she just couldn’t reach. The Commodore had screwed her over big this time, and hot on the heels of the last special assignment he’d pushed on her, no less.
Maybe she needed a break. She glanced at herself in the little mirror bolted to the bulkhead. Red-rimmed eyes, dark bags underneath, light brown skin uncharacteristically sallow… “Sainted Perrus, Vance. You look like shit.” She caught her own glance and made a face.
“You can’t help it. No one can say no to the Commodore, especially not the skipper of the fastest and most agile sloop in the Resistance.” She snorted. “It’s your own damn fault for being the best damn blockade runner in any fleet.”
She switched focus and thought about amending her order to push the ship to condition one, but… She didn’t know enough to send the crew into full alert, not yet. And most of them needed the sleep as much as she did.
No, no sense panicking them just yet.
She grabbed a bag of water out of her tiny cooler before le
aving her cabin. She swung the hatch shut and dogged it, then headed for the command deck, the center of operations of the Aethenne, her sloop-of-war. She quietly counted the steps as she went, running through a centering ritual she’d picked up along the way in her short but eventful career. Six long paces aft along the quarterdeck corridor, left at the intersection, up a flight of seven metal stairs, and then another half-dozen strides forward to and through the open command deck hatch.
Hers were the closest quarters to the command deck—a minor benefit of her position as skipper. A glance at the polyscreens arrayed around her small but efficient command center showed her the essentials, but she asked anyway. “Status?”
Gint, showing all the signs of a career sailor even at the ripe old age of twenty-two, grinned his lanky grin. “Morning, Skip. Condition two set throughout the ship. Hazard fields on full; defensive screens on standby. Weapons warm and the gig’s being prepped.”
She gave him a sidelong grin. The last two weren’t regulation, but her own standing orders. Gint had been listening during her briefings. Wonder of wonders.
“We’ll make a skipper out of you yet, Gint. Everyone awake?”
He lifted his shoulders in a slight shrug. “All sections reported in.”
She shot a glance at him but then winked. Not exactly an answer by the book, but good enough for her. Sometimes the book was more of a guideline, especially for a small ship playing a very large, dangerous role in a long, brutal war.
“Bring up the anomaly’s details on screen two.”
The tech specialist on duty, Kayan Ndomo, said, “Aye, Skip.” She adjusted several switches on the console at her station.
The center screen of the three available on the command deck flickered to life, displaying a high-res graphic of the ship’s flight path through FTL and a wire-frame model of the path toward their destination—Lovaro VI, a colony long sympathetic to the Resistance.
Most of the flight path appeared clear, lined in white and blue, but there was a bright orange object on a vector that would intercept their course in approximately ten minutes.
She studied the constantly changing telemetry displayed at the bottom of the graphic. At first it wasn’t clear why Gint had called her up—the situation looked manageable enough.
But, there was a set of variables that flipped from green to red and back again, over and over. She frowned. “Ndomo, what’s the cause of the variance?”
Ndomo glanced at her, her large brown eyes full of concern. “Undetermined, Skip. I’m pinning it on the recalibrated sensor nets. They’re delicate pieces of technology. Sometimes it takes a while to get them broken in.”
Not to mention that the very rare, and very expensive, models installed on Aethenne were on loan from the Mekallans, a fact she was sure most of the crew did not know. Hell, she hadn’t known until she had wheedled the information out of the Commodore.
Vance glanced at Gint. “I see why you called me up. Any thoughts?”
Gint focused on the telemetry. “Stray asteroid or other space debris stumbling into our flight path?”
Vance nodded. “Stumbled, or placed there intentionally?” She met Gint’s eyes, but then returned focus toward the center screen. No, there could only be one possibility. Damn.
She moved over to her command pedestal and keyed on the intraship comm. “All hands. We’re about to have an unpleasant surprise in our trip to Lovaro. We have a Union scatterbomb ahead that’ll cross our flight path in just a few minutes. Lock down anything loose and brace yourselves. All stations to condition one.”
She ignored the looks of concern being shot her way from all around the flight deck. She didn’t need to see them to know they were there. She glanced at Gint. “Sound the collision alarm twice, then shut the damn thing off.”
He stared at her, an unspoken question dancing on his slightly agape mouth, but he nodded and then hit the collision alarm.
The comms emitted a high-pitched bleat once, twice, and then were silent. Navy orders were to run the stupid thing until the collision crisis had passed, but she knew that doing so did little more than distract the crew and damage their collective hearing besides. It was enough to know there was an imminent collision—no sense going to a possible frozen grave with an annoying wail piercing your ears.
Vance glanced at the crew arrayed around her central command pedestal. “Recent intel reports state that the Union is launching scatterbombs into most of the regular shipping lanes around major planets and many of the colonies sympathetic to the Resistance. This probably isn’t an attack specifically targeted against us.”
The moment she said the words, she paused suddenly as a chill crept down her spine. For the briefest of moments, she heard a whisper in her mind, as if she was wearing an earset.
Oh, Gods, not here. Not now.
She shot a glance around the command deck, but the people on deck with her were all focused on their stations and consoles.
She forced herself to breathe, slow and steady. Now was not the time to panic about her unexpected circumstances. Focus on keeping the ship and crew safe; worry about your deteriorating brain later.
Gint called out, “One minute before the, ah, scatterbomb intercepts our flight path. Current telemetry has it coming in just ahead of us.”
Vance frowned at that statement. “Hell of a coincidence. Brace for impact.” She reached down and flipped open a panel on her pedestal, and pulled out a pair of restraint harnesses, then wiggled her toes to activate the maglocks on her boots. If the artificial grav on the ship got knocked out, she’d remain stable. The crew around her likewise prepared themselves for collision.
Vance glanced at her weapons officer, Cam Kraft. “Chief, all power to defensive screens and hazard fields. If we’re lucky, most of the debris will just slide around us.”
Kraft nodded. “Aye, Skip.”
Vance stared at the screen. Not much else they could do. While modern FTL engines were a marvel of science, they were limited in that once you plotted and locked in a flight plan, you were pretty much committed to it. The Resistance knew it, and the Union knew it. Which is why a scatterbomb tossed into the shipping lanes was so diabolically effective. The Resistance had lost too many ships to the tactic lately. They had yet to figure out an effective countermeasure.
Watching the red-green flickering telemetry count down and the path of the bomb creep ever closer to her ship’s flight path, she wished that the Resistance scientists and engineers would hurry the hell up and figure it out already.
Gint called out, “Here it comes!”
Vance clamped both hands down on her command pedestal as the icon depicting the scatterbomb entered their flight path and then suddenly blossomed into a million tiny orange dots. The telemetry tried to follow along, but the center screen flickered and went dark—data overload.
Before she had a chance to call for a reboot, the Aethenne entered the debris field created by the detonated scatterbomb, and her world descended into chaos.
Chapter 2
The sound debris makes when vaporizing against an active hazard field is a constant buzzing, like a swarm of gnats flying into a charged plasma grid.
The buzzing grew in volume as the Aethenne flew into the cloud left behind by the scatterbomb, the few pieces too large for the hazard fields caroming off the hardier defensive screens.
Every time the screens took a hit, the lights flickered and the deck attached to her feet jolted her hard enough to rattle every tooth in her skull. She fired off a silent prayer of thanks to the Resistance ship engineers—they may not have figured out how to counteract the Union scatterbombs, but their defensive shielding technology, with their triple redundancies, had saved her life and her crew on countless occasions.
But, even then, the last bit of telemetry she’d seen on the left-hand screen before it winked out due to lack of rerouted power was alarming. She called out, “Aux power to defensive screens! We can’t afford to let one of those big pieces hit the ship.”
The Aethenne was a sloop-of-war, not a frigate or ship-of-the-line. It was built for speed and hit-and-runs, not for standing still and taking punishing blow after punishing blow. The armor she carried was heavy over the critical systems, but the rest was wrapper-thin. Trusting in defensive screens over physical armor for smaller ships had been a choice the Union ship builders had made long ago, with the Resistance naturally following along.
“Status?” She called out, knowing that her crew could see about as much data as she could, which wasn’t much at all.
Kraft said, “Defensive screens at sixty percent and falling with each hit.” As if to punctuate his statement, another chunk of debris slapped into the defensive grid, torqueing the ship around her and nearly pulling her feet right out of her gravboots.
Ndomo said, “Minor damage to the gig bay and the engine room. Hull breach on deck two, sections eleven and twelve.”
Vance recalled the mental map of her ship and noted that area—backup computer core and reserve cryo storage. Hellfire. “Damage report?”
Ndomo checked the readout in front of her, lines of blue-tinged text scrolling past. “Early reports indicate the backup core is intact, but two of the four cryo tanks burst when hull plating caved in on them. Emergency doors sealed the breached sections off from the rest of the ship, but we’ve lost half of our reserve cryogenics.”
Vance pushed away a surge of panic and glanced across the red-lit command deck and met Gint’s eyes. “Get your ass to the engine room. Help the Chief shut down. We’ve gotta get out of FTL.”
Gint nodded mutely and clomped off the command deck, his magboots engaging and disengaging with each step.
Vance focused on the blank screens in front of her, letting the cacophony around her fade into the background as she focused on the problems before her.
The Union had to have known they were in the shipping lane to Lovaro. No way was this intercept a coincidence. Just dumb luck that their backup cryo got popped; the attack itself had been deliberate.
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