by M. D. Cooper
“Hmmmm?” Roxy asked. “I was going to do something, what was it?”
“Faaaaaaaawk,” Roxy stretched out the word in a muted cry of frustration. “What do I do?”
Roxy groaned. “You mean the ship we just left?”
“Yeah…that’s the one.”
THE PRISONER
STELLAR DATE: 09.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Intrepid Space Force Academy
REGION: The Palisades, Orbiting Troy, New Canaan System
“Dad, do you have a minute?” Cary asked, poking her head into her father’s office.
He was bent over his desk, eyes darting over the contents of a dozen holodisplays, but at the sound of her voice, he looked up, and a smile spread across his face.
“Cary! Of course. What’s up? And how’s your charge doing, by the way?”
As Joe spoke, he gestured to the chair on the other side of his desk, and she took it, sitting down and straightening her uniform as she replied.
“Amy’s doing great, Dad. She’s one heck of a tough girl—a bit too tough, but Saanvi and I are working on smoothing her edges a bit.”
“Given her past, I’m not surprised,” Joe replied with a knowing look. “Next rest day, you should take her down and introduce her to Mouse and Goldie. I bet she’d love to ride a horse.”
“She’s not the only one.” Cary shook her head as she thought about how long it had been since she’d seen the horses. “I hope they remember us.”
“You’d be surprised; horses don’t forget. Mouse will be fine, but Goldie might be pissed. They’re still at JP’s family’s ranch, right?”
Cary nodded. “Yup. JP was telling Saanvi about how he’s been taking extra good care of them.”
“Boy’s got it hard—” Joe stopped, and Cary giggled.
“Dad…I mean, probably, he does, yeah.”
Joe chuckled and shook his head. “I was going somewhere else, like he’s fallen hard, but I got pinged by three people at once, and it distracted me.”
“Sure, sure. You’re just lucky Moms told me all about how babies are made, or I’d be asking you some mighty hard questions right now.”
Her father rolled his eyes. “OK, glad we’re keeping to juvenile humor, here.”
“You started it.”
“Maybe watching over an eleven-year-old girl is more than you can take,”
Cary placed her hands over her heart. “Dad, you got me with that one…cut me to the quick.”
“Sure I did.” Joe gave her a knowing smile. “Like I’d fall for that. You’re tougher than that, you come back twice as hard.”
“Damn straight I do,” Cary nodded, reciting the old exchange she’d repeated with her father many times over the years.
“So what brings you here? Have you finally found someone to pine after?”
Cary’s brow lowered, and she shook her head at her father. “What’s gotten into you today, Dad?”
Joe barked a laugh. “Guess I miss your Mom. Trying to experience romance vicariously through my girls. Is that creepy?”
“Sweet and creepy, Dad,” Cary said with a laugh. “No, no romance in my future, I just wanted to talk to you about the OG prisoners.”
“Which ones? We have half a million of them out on The Farm.”
“This one’s not on The Farm,” Cary replied slowly. “In fact, he’s been stuck in the brig here on the Palisades for some time.”
That got her father’s attention. His eyes narrowed as he regarded her. “An Oggie here? There’s…. Cary.” Joe said her name and stopped, regarding her with the look that made her feel small, as though she’d done something wrong and needed to confess.
“Yes. Kent. The colonel who led the assault team on the Galadrial.”
“I know who he is. He was brought here for a prolonged interrogation regimen. One that didn’t involve my daughter speaking with him—though your tone leads me to believe that you already have.”
“I met him before we went to Pyra to see Moms,” Cary said, trying to sound like she was an adult presenting a strategy to her father, and not a child seeking permission. “I was doing a sweep with Saanvi, double-checking that we didn’t have any stowaway remnants in the brigs.”
“And?”
“We didn’t find any—”
Her father blew out a long sigh and leant back. “Well I expect not. I imagine I would have heard about that, at least. I meant ‘And how long have you been talking with Kent’?”
“Oh, just twice now. We kinda got interrupted. He’s a nice man, just born in the wrong place.”
“Do you have romantic feelings toward him?”
“Dad. No! He’s not into women.”
Her father’s eyebrows crept up his face. “I didn’t ask if he was into you, I asked how you felt about him.”
“There’s a mutual lack of feelings. Besides, I can’t have feelings for someone that can’t have feelings back. That’s not how it works.”
“You’d be surprised,” Joe replied equably. “So I assume that you’ve heard about the two Hoplite fleets heading into Orion space? You think that after two chats with this guy, you have him cased—not the other way around—and you can get us some sort of critical intel?”
Cary gritted her teeth. She’d known her father wouldn’t be immediately receptive to the idea, but she didn’t expect him to be so dismissive.
“I thought it was worth a shot.”
“After our best intelligence officers have taken a crack at him?” Joe asked. “Including your mother.”
“I’m different.” Cary kept her tone even. She knew if she made an emotional appeal, her father would shut her down. “He thinks I’m vulnerable, someone he can learn from, too.”
“Which may be the case. You know he has a killmod, right? If he thinks things are going to go sideways, he’ll end himself. The Oggie officers all have them.”
“Yes. I don’t get why you don’t remove them, though.”
“We could—and may do so successfully—but the mods are intertwined rather insidiously through their brains, with multiple failsafes. Even Bob estimated only a fifty-fifty success rate on average.”
“Did you even try it?” Cary asked.
Joe nodded slowly. “Bob’s estimate was correct.”
Cary’s lips formed an O and she sat back. “I get why you’re going the slow route, then.”
“Plus, he’s not our only source of intel,” Joe added. “We have two of the Garzas now. We don’t know how compartmentalized their knowledge is, but we’re making progress with them.”
“Maybe Kent knows something,” Cary suggested. “He was sent in directly by Garza, and seems to harbor a bit of distaste for the general.”
Cary saw her father’s eyes widen a hair. “Does he, now? That is something new. OK. I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you take a crack at him, but I’ll be watching. When was the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday,” Cary said, feeling sheepish at the admission.
“Right, well, we can’t have you go back too soon, then. Need to build anticipation. Let’s plan for the day after tomorrow; just long enough for him to start wondering if there will be another long gap between visits.”
“Dad,” Cary said as she rose.
“Yes, Cary?”
“Thanks for believing me.”
Joe smiled. “You�
��re—”
“After first dismissing me entirely,” she interrupted.
Her father placed both hands over his chest. “Oh! Burn!”
THE SEVEN SISTERS
STELLAR DATE: 09.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Andromeda
REGION: Buffalo, Albany System, Theban Alliance
Corsia stretched her arms as she sat on the edge of the bed, then glanced over her shoulder at her husband.
“Time to get up, Jim, full day ahead.”
Jim cracked an eye and rolled over, facing the bulkhead. “Stars…you keep me up half the night, and then get me up early? I think I liked it better before you had a body.”
“If you’d convinced me to get a body decades ago, I’d probably have it all out of my system by now,” Corsia countered.
Jim rolled onto his back and pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbing them vigorously. “This is my fault?”
“Doesn’t that hurt your eyes?”
“They’re not organic—though even if they were, it doesn’t hurt, no. Nice evasion.”
“I’m a starship, evading things is my business.”
Jim pulled his hands away and glanced at Corsia as she rose from the bed and walked across the room. “Stars…you’re not a starship anymore, you’re just a ridiculously sexy woman.”
“Should I have picked some sort of hideous form instead?” Corsia asked, glancing over her shoulder, knowing that her husband’s already cloudy mind was having trouble focusing on anything other than her ass.
“Stars, no. I just wish we weren’t in the middle of a war.”
Corsia pulled a shipsuit out of the clothes sanitizer and drew it on slowly, giving Jim significant looks as she did so.
“You know,” he began while pulling himself upright. “You should try for some sort of stylized chrome body at some point…go for a cross between a woman and a starship.”
“With engines jutting out of my thighs?” Corsia asked with a laugh. “I’d need a new captain’s chair to fit.”
“Yeah, but I’d get all my desires satisfied at the same time,” Jim winked. “Plus, as your chief engineer, I bet I could manage to upgrade your chair.”
“Given that the whole point of this body is to make it easier to blend in on diplomatic missions, I think thigh-engines are not an ideal mod right now.”
Jim rose from the bed and stepped up behind her, leaning his head over her shoulder while he ran his hands down her sides and across her hips.
“I could make them retractable,” he whispered in her ear.
She spun in his arms and kissed him before pulling back to look in his eyes. “You’re incorrigible, you know that?”
“You might have mentioned it before.”
“Well, get your incorrigible ass in motion, husband mine. We’re due to jump to the staging grounds in four hours.”
Jim reluctantly pulled his arms away from Corsia and reached around her for a shipsuit. “All work and no play makes Jim a dull man.”
“Weren’t you just complaining about ‘playing’ half the night away?”
He snorted as he pulled the fastener up on his shipsuit. “What ‘night’? We had six hours between shifts; you’re only partially organic, so you don’t really understand how important sleep is.”
Corsia palmed the door open. “Well, that’s what we have modern science for. You have your choice of stimulus systems to keep yourself going.”
“The brain, Cor, the brain needs sleep. You can only mod your way around that for so long.”
She turned and gave him a kiss. “Pretty sure last night you said something like, ‘screw sleep’.”
Jim chuckled and then reached down to slap her ass. “That wasn’t all I screwed last night.”
“Crass man.”
“That’s where I should put the engine.”
* * * * *
Corsia stepped onto the bridge ten minutes later, a cup of coffee in her hand, the aroma filling her nostrils with a special kind of joy.
Sex and coffee, two things one really can’t appreciate until in a meat-suit body.
The holotank in the center of the bridge showed the Twelfth Fleet—Corsia’s fleet—arrayed a light second away from the bank of jump gates orbiting Buffalo. Nine thousand seven hundred and twenty six ships.
Tangel must be off her rocker to put all this under my command.
With New Canaan’s fleets spread out in over thirty-nine engagements, the Twelfth represented the single largest collection of ISF ships beyond the home fleet—which had been pulled back to New Canaan, now that things at Pyra were mostly under control.
Corsia looked over the updates on the Albany System. The I2 and the Starblade—one of the new I-Class ships—were still in orbit over Pyra, but other than a smattering of support craft, the ISF presence in Albany was all but gone.
“Hard to believe that this was the site of one of the largest battles in history just a few weeks past,” she said aloud before taking another sip of her coffee.
“And back home, we’re still tidying up space around Carthage.”
“No. I’m more than OK with the trade-off. It’s just incongruous, how the people of this system are so far behind in tech, but they can clean up their nearspace in a fraction of the time.”
“A good man,” Corsia said with a nod. “He has his work cut out for him, keeping this venture running and helping to put the Inner Praesepe Empire back together.”
Corsia nodded absently as she finished her coffee and held the cup out for a servitor to take away.
She glanced at her Fleet Communication Officer, a major named Spencer who sat at a nearby console. “Anything I should be aware of, Major?”
Over a century’s service in the fleet had taught Corsia that the official logs and reports never told the whole story. Captains and battlegroup commanders may report readiness—and usually they were—but often, ‘ready to jump in four hours’ really meant ‘ready to jump if that cargo hopper with half my ordnance and food makes it here in time’.”
Major Spencer had a knack for reading between the lines and ferreting out the actual state of the ships in the fleet—which had made him Corsia’s first pick for her FCO. Granted, the Twelfth was large enough that Spencer had an entire team dedicated to parsing comm traffic and status data to get a clear picture. Even with two AIs on his team, it was a daunting task.
“Nothing yet, ma’am. A few ships aren’t where they should be, and a few others aren’t close to ready yet, but their commanders are aware, and I think they’ll be squared away in time.”
“Good to hear. Anything stand out from the latest reports the Hand agents have delivered from the Trisilieds?”
“I haven’t run through them myself, yet,” Major Spencer shot Corsia an apologetic glance, “But so far, the data boffins haven’t flagged anything for my attention. Usually there’s a lot of rapid-fire chatter between the ships when the analysts land on something, and I’ve not seen any of that, either.”
“That’s something, I suppose,” she replied, waving her hand at the central holotank, bringing up the view of her fleet’s first target. “I’ll be more than happy if the Atlas System continues to remain unremarkable in every way.”
She didn’t doubt for one moment that Tangel had given her one of the most difficult tasks that the ISF and its allies currently faced.
Though conflic
ts raged across the Inner Stars, the Trisilieds had not launched any major attacks, nor had they suffered any incursions since their failed assault on New Canaan nearly two years prior.
Before the conflict in Thebes, the allies had sent messages through Scipian diplomats to the king’s court at Plieone, demanding that the kingdom surrender to the allies and renounce its connections to Orion.
Every one of them had been rebuffed, and ultimately, the Trisilieds had severed all diplomatic ties with Scipio and several other stellar nations that had joined the alliance.
Many had advocated that it was best to let sleeping dogs lie, but Tangel had insisted that, with the assault on New Canaan and no attempt to engage in diplomacy, King Somer had demonstrated that he was a clear danger to the Allies.
Corsia agreed, and the reports of massive fleet buildups within the kingdom supported the decision to make a preemptive strike.
Corsia had thought long and hard about where to launch the initial assault. The Trisilieds Kingdom encompassed nearly half the Pleiades star cluster, as well as a large swath of space coreward of the Seven Sisters. All told, over ten thousand stars were ruled by the kingdom, and while it was not a particularly large interstellar nation by volume of space, it was far richer in raw resources than many others.
Even more beneficial was the fact that the Pleiades—comparatively speaking—contained less dark matter than many other star clusters, making much of it navigable by FTL.
All of those factors had led Corsia—with Tangel’s blessing—to pick Atlas as their primary target.
It was a trinary system consisting of two massive B-Class stars, and a smaller third companion. The stars were all young, but a thick protoplanetary disk was present around the primary stars.
There were no settled worlds, and the system was all but uninhabitable—suffused as it was with hard radiation—but it was one of the kingdom’s primary resource gathering sites, and the destruction of the facilities there would deal a crippling blow to further fleet buildup in the Trisilieds.
One thing Corsia was keenly aware of was that current intel pointed to a fleet strength of over seven million ships across all systems in the kingdom. While many of those were small patrol craft, old ships brought back into service, and newly constructed vessels, it was still a number that boggled the mind.