Winterhome

by Blaze Ward

  Pops was on her right, holding her hand for no other reason than he was Pops. He liked to say things like that when asked about listening to his own music.

  Yan and Ainsley across the table, also holding hands. Moirrey on Summer’s left, feet curled up under her like a cat. Gunter Tifft across from Moirrey, with the ship safely in JumpSpace on autopilot.

  Nobody had broken out a bottle of beer yet, but, like Yan had said, the day was young.

  Gunter was the only one still in a uniform of any kind, as Ainsley had reverted to her regular tight pants and a maroon long tunic as soon as the courier broke atmosphere for deep space. Moirrey was in a sundress she had sewn herself. Yan and Pops wore competing gray outfits that had something to do with the Corynthe Royal Court.

  Summer had very briefly considered wearing something green that would suggest the old Concord Yeoman’s uniform she had worn for six millennia, but decided that might be pushing her luck. Instead she had broken out a comfortable body stocking in bright blue, with a corset-like bodice in heavy cotton duck that circled her waist and covered her breasts with an extra layer in a soft pink. Shipboard, she had toeless booties that covered most of her feet and reached up to mid-calf in a matching pink. She had left off the pink gloves and the utility belt with pockets for keys and change and stuff, and her hair was down.

  Total stranger. She wondered if she should go for black hair for a while.

  “Why the hell didn’t you have the damned thing already assembled, Bedrov?” Pops tried another tack as the laughter finally died down. “We really have to fly to five different planets to do this?”

  “That were my idea, Pops,” Moirrey spoke up. “Ya canna decipher random pieces near so well if’n yous only gots the one. Only last yard’ll sees the whole, and only then it’ll be the fellows flies it ta orbits and attaches it to the butterfly. Then zooms, we’re gone.”

  “And Jessica doesn’t know?” Pops got serious now.

  Two of them answered directly to Jessica. Well, they all did, in their own way, Summer supposed. Tifft was Imperial Navy and Jessica was an Admiral of the Red. Ainsley was functionally married to Yan, even though the legal paperwork had never actually been filed anywhere, as far as Summer knew. Moirrey was Moirrey.

  And that left Summer Ulfsson, hopefully the Last of the Immortals this time. At least the last of the dangerous ones. With luck all the old warships really were dead now, and she and the Tiki Guy represented the true end of the Concord.

  Idly, Summer wondered what Ayumu Ulfsson or Javier Aritza would have thought about the modern age. Or her other great loves over the millennia, like Piper or Henri.

  She suspected they would have approved. All of them had demanded action in the face of evil, in their own times. And put word to deed.

  “Jessica is aware that I’m up to no good on her orders,” Moirrey’s voice sounded like an Imperial scholar now, never a good sign. “She doesn’t need to know what or how, because there will be nothing she can do, one way or the other, until we succeed or fail. A secret known to three people is only a secret if two of them are dead, Sri.”

  Summer nodded to that, in synch with the others. Somberness had snuck up and bit everybody on the ass.

  “Huh,” Pops finally grunted. “As long as Wachturm isn’t about to charge us with piracy for stealing his yacht.”

  “Oh, it’s better than that,” Yan’s grin got wider. “This was actually Casey’s yacht, not Emmerich’s. She’s not a princess, anymore, so she can’t make do these days with anything less than Indianapolis or one of her sister warships. But this was hers before.”

  “At least we’ve be traveling in style, right up until we’re arrested,” Pops groused some more.

  “Oh, hush,” Summer said.

  She leaned over and kissed him to shut him up. And because he was fun to kiss. All those centuries without physical form to show the men and women she loved that level of physical intimacy, but she could do so now. And Pops Nakamura really was that amazing a man. Summer was glad she had gotten to know him.

  She would have to leave the man soon enough.

  Immortality in a perfect body still had its downsides. She had never met any others of her kind that she figured would be safe to hide in an android body, that she might have someone to travel with forever. She supposed she could consider building a clone copy of herself and gender-swapping it, so she could have a boyfriend to travel with, but there were so many other interesting people out there she might have missed if she had someone to distract her. And she never would have gotten to know Pops.

  Better this way.

  “So where’s the first stop?” Pops turned to Tifft now, directing his lessened ire on the Imperial officer.

  Rather than answer, Tifft rose now and walked across the room, cracking open the refrigeration unit built into a bulkhead. Apparently, it was time for beer, as he pulled out a bottle and gestured it to everyone.

  “Arcturus,” Tifft said quietly. “Who needs a beer?”

  Summer shook her head. She could take a quick taste of Pops’s bottle, but that would be sufficient. As an android, she could taste food and drink, but mostly just stored it and eliminated it later, rather than processing it like the humans could.

  Moirrey ended up with a metallic sleeve filled with juice, while the other three also broke out beers.

  Quickly, the silliness got a level of serious underneath. Summer had spent sixty centuries studying humans, so she was pretty good at predicting.

  They would be relaxed, as well as focusing on the fact that the grand, mad quest had actually begun.

  “At Arcturus, we will pick up the ship itself and leave behind the courier,” Tifft said. “From there, Geminus, where we will mount the first piece of the weapon. Lagos, Londra, and the Weevohn, and the Butterfly itself will be complete.”

  “Will it really work?” Summer asked in a quiet voice.

  She had studied the physics, but as Tiki Guy had suggested, he represented a level of technology three thousand years more advanced and sophisticated than her earlier model.

  “T’will,” Moirrey said with a seriousness at odds with the woman’s reputation.

  It sounded more like how the woman had been aboard Summer’s old station, when her own name had been Suvi. Deadly earnest intent.

  “The beam ’self were no more trouble than scalin’ stuff up to crazy levels,” Moirrey continued. “Power were th’trouble. Gettin’ nuff to punch it through yer systems without blowing thin’s up in’th’process. Yan and Carthage solved that well enough for m’needs.”

  “Well enough?” Summer turned to look more fully at her, snagging the bottle from Pops and taking a sip before handing it back.

  “Well enough,” Yan joined them. “Only have to do this one time, and then it’s done. Won’t matter if the machine falls apart or blows up, as long as the beam coheres long enough, well enough. We’ll be gone.”

  “Gone?” Summer let her brows furrow.

  “Part of the Butterfly design is that the main life compartment and about half the inner frame will separate when we fire the beam,” Yan said. “That has the JumpDrives and enough power to get us home, hopefully.”

  “So this is more of a crapshoot than you were letting on, before?” Summer asked, wondering if she should disappear somewhere along the way, rather than die in some grand, ritual seppuku.

  “Oh, hell no,” Pops growled. “Kid’s just morose. Everything checks out and I ran the numbers three different ways before I agreed with him that it would work. Otherwise, you and I would be sitting by the side of a pool somewhere, getting some sun.”

  That made her feel better. She was willing to risk accidental death, especially with good people like this. No more forlorn missions for her.

  And she wanted to be the only one that lived forever.

  The rest of her cousins were usually dangerous sociopaths that never should have been put in charge of a cross-walk, let alone a planet or a warship.

  Chapter XLVIIIr />
  Date of the Republic February 3, 403 Fleet Headquarters, Osynth B’Udan

  One of the options on her projector was to show ships by nationality, so Jessica had engaged that filter as the squadron began to move away from Osynth B’Udan. It made a strange, colorful mélange.

  Indianapolis was a white star rimmed in red. Most of the rest of the squadron were white spheres outlined in blue, except for the ship on the stern that was white with gold.

  She and Denis had agreed that Robert Fitzwalter would work best at the tail end of the line, since it was a solid bulwark of Type-3 beams without any current heavy weapons facing forward. Since Vanguard, Indianapolis, VI Ferrata, and VI Victrix all had Bubble Guns on forward arcs, the softest spot in the column was always the rear, just behind Arad and II Augusta.

  Not that anyplace was soft here, but the heavy dreadnaught could lead, with the three cruisers in a triangle around everyone else, and then a ring of RAN corvettes outside that.

  Jessica had reverted the squadrons for now, leaving all of the Imperial vessels here with Provst until Valiant was ready to rejoin them. Dundee had taken the most damage behind Provst’s team, but that would be fixed with just a week of dry-dock, once all of Denis’s team was clear.

  Vo and his Legion were down on the planet, training and recuperating with the new team added. Jessica suppressed a giggle as she thought about Lady Moirrey’s Own. Casey had outdone herself with that suggestion, especially since there really wasn’t anything Pint-sized could do about it except grit her teeth and smile.

  But it had been Moirrey’s idea in the first place. And she held all the patents and copyrights across both Republic and Empire. There would be money coming in for a long time if the design worked as expected in combat.

  Jessica had plans to do something even more sneaky next with the 189th. Severnaya Zemlya had been a quick hit and run mission, since four thousand men simply could not hold anything larger than a city for long.

  But what if your whole colony wasn’t much bigger than that? Jessica’s mind was in a place verging on evil, to consider just wiping out an entire colony with ground troops. But she wasn’t going to order Vo’s men to shoot women and children.

  And knowing Vo and the kind of men he would want to recruit, the 189th would probably mutiny if she did.

  But if the order was to simply destroy all industrial capabilities, blowing up factories and railroads and transport nodes, that would make them happy. Only one city on the surface of Severnaya Zemlya had suffered that retribution.

  She looked forward to letting them do that across a whole colony.

  First, they needed to get back out to Arott Whughy and scout the next target.

  Then, the next phase in her destructive mission could begin.

  Chapter XLIX

  Imperial Founding: 181/01/31. Imperial Fleet Headquarters, Strasbourg, St. Legier

  “Will it work?” Emmerich asked, suppressing the urge to wipe his hand down his face as if it was covered in mud, and not just tiredness.

  Hendrik had joined him for this meeting. Torsten Wald and Grand Marshal Arald Rohm had flown up from the surface. Nobody else was here, as he didn’t want any other witnesses.

  “We believe so,” Rohm said, containing his usually-sharp tongue today.

  The man had gotten better at being personable after dealing with zu Arlo’s dangerous crew. It was one of the few reasons Em was willing to put up with him now.

  “Moirrey designed it,” Torsten put his two florins in as well. “My understanding is that she, Bedrov, and a few others sat down one night to conduct a thought experiment on what Buran might field in the way of land forces, since nobody had the slightest clue what they would eventually encounter. This was before the Mechanical Terrapin was confirmed as the apparent armored backbone of Buran’s Land Forces.”

  “As the story goes, the last time they got that drunk we got the Bubble Gun out of it, Em,” Hendrik smiled.

  The Bubble Gun. The most bizarre advancement in weapons technology in a century or more. Probably since a damaged Type-3 beam had overloaded badly and carved a small hole in a planet in the process of blowing out the side of a cruiser, giving civilization the Primary Beam. And this was the end result of drunk engineers with wax markers and tables covered in white paper. And a lot of alcohol.

  Perhaps he should attach a brewery to an engineering school, as a way to advance things? Necessity was the mother of invention. And then Lady Moirrey had gone on to invent the Winged Scouts concept for zu Arlo’s team.

  At least Em had been right when he first told Joh that he needed Kermode’s genius if they wanted to save the Empire. And he was pretty sure Joh would have approved this latest madness.

  “Explain it to me again,” Em said, picking up the file and flipping it open to the picture some artist had mocked up.

  There were none of the sharp edges of a computer-generated render here. This felt more like the image that a sculptor started out with, before reducing a block of marble to art by eliminating the unnecessary, as a precocious teenager named Casey had once explained the process. Em let Rohm’s words bring it to life.

  “The Mechanical Terrapin has shields comparable to a GunShip, from the files Victoria Ames stole,” Rohm said, emphasizing the part where a teenage girl in uniform had thought up something the boys had not.

  Em grinned with the man. Casey had infected them all and there would be no stuffing that particular genie back into the bottle.

  “And like all shield generators, they do not work particularly well, this deep in any atmosphere,” Rohm continued. “But they are still hard enough to stop simple artillery, and to significantly mute the effect of the 70mm particle cannon on the Leros Heavy Battle Tank. Lighter weapons like autocannons had no effect at all.”

  “I remember a design zu Arlo showed me for a super-heavy tank,” Em offered. “One of Lady Moirrey’s, I believe.”

  “And we are looking at that design,” Rohm agreed. “But that will require a lot of engineering because it will weigh four times as much as the biggest land vehicle we have ever built. Which will necessitate new transports, new support, new everything. We have been able to build this design quickly enough instead and get them into the field as an interim measure.”

  Em studied the picture closer. Two sets of tracks, one down each side. They looked small, but each was nearly a meter wide, on a vehicle almost five meters across and more than fourteen long.

  Unlike the tanks he was somewhat familiar with, this beast had a heavy box sitting atop the treads with a massive barrel emerging from the front, rather than a flat body with a turret atop that. There would be no fancy maneuvering with this machine, seeking a flank to fire into like a Goth on horseback with a bow.

  No, the Firelance Heavy Assault Gun, to give it the name someone had attached to this file, this monstrous machine would simply waddle up to a terrapin and attempt to punch a hole in the shielding and armor with the largest particle cannon generator they could mobilize.

  “Leros Tanks have a 70mm gun, yes?” Em asked, confirming. “And this is only a 52mm?”

  “That’s the bore, Grand Admiral,” Rohm said. “With particle cannons, the smaller the hole, the tighter the beam focus and the greater the damage and range. Smaller is thus better. Fifty-two millimeters is going to have almost twice the damage of the standard seventy millimeter cannon we deploy now.”

  “And how will a Strike Legion like the 189th utilize this?” Em asked. “I was of the opinion that zu Arlo preferred maneuver and enfilading fire on a target, rather than the brute-force approach.”

  “You can outrun a terrapin, and out-maneuver him, Em,” Torsten said. “But eventually one is just going to sit still and make you try to dislodge him from the target he is defending. It would actually be easier at that point if Jessica was willing to orbitally bombard a target until they battered his shields down, but we all understand why she will not go there. At least not yet.”

  “Okay, so we have built this
beast,” Em admitted. “And we have landing vessels large enough to put them on the ground quickly and ready for combat. Do we replace part of the 189th?”

  “No, Grand Admiral,” Rohm said. “My plan was to take one of my heavy armor units and pull out the most veteran crews I can in order to field a single one of zu Arlo’s Legionary Squadrons, which will be nine vehicles with a dedicated motor pool element capable of field repairs. We can do that and get them to zu Arlo fast enough for his next raid, transported on one of the smaller attack carriers we have always used in lieu of the Assault Carriers Aquitaine has.”

  “And the testing?” Em asked. “It seems we are rushing this out into the field without much review.”

  Rohm smiled and flipped Em’s file to an appendix buried at the back.

  “We actually used something very similar about two centuries ago,” the Grand Marshal pointed to a smaller version of the same tank. “When we were conquering planets by invading them, rather than just taking over politically while holding orbit. All the engineering was done then and the files are still useful. We already have several other experimental weapons on various proving grounds, as a result of Anthohn Jenker’s mission to update Imperial Land Forces. In another year, Lady Moirrey’s super-tanks will also probably be ready for service in large enough numbers to field an entire Super-Heavy Armored Legion, if we need something like that.”

  “And this?” Em asked. “This Heavy Assault Gun? Will we field an entire legion of those?”

  Em liked the way Rohm’s eyes got deadly serious. In the past, there had always been an element of personal calculation in them that had put Em off. He didn’t know if finally putting the man in ultimate control had made him grow up, or if the legendary stories about his encounters with zu Arlo were to be believed.