Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “That is inarguable logic,” Kyle agreed, chuckling and shaking his head again before drinking more beer. “It will delay our deployment out to Antioch, though,” he pointed out.

  “The Foreign Affairs analysts think that if there’s a Commonwealth component to the raids, their plan is to drive a wedge between us and Coraline,” the diplomat told him. “Which means that adding some glue to that relationship is worth a delay in deployment. The Joint Chiefs agree, which is what those orders”—he gestured at the chip—“say.”

  “Orders are orders,” Kodiak’s new Captain concluded. “We’ll make it happen, Mr. Nebula.”

  #

  “This chip contains your formal orders for what has now been designated Operation Glorious Elephant.”

  The image of a gray-haired woman in the Navy’s blue-piped black uniform with three gold stars on her collar filled the wallscreen in Kyle’s office as he finished his beer and played the message on the chip. The woman was Fleet Admiral Meredith Blake, the current Chairwoman of the Castle Federation Joint Chiefs of Staff and the uniformed commander of the Federation military.

  “Your first task is unrelated to the existing issues,” she noted with a twist of her lips. “Foreign Affairs has requested your presence in response to an invitation from the Imperator for you to attend a formal presentation on Coral itself.

  “The courier this chip was sent with has more details, but yes, Captain Roberts, you are expected to go to the Coraline system and meet with the Coraline Imperator on his planet. He needs us as badly as we need him, but we all have to work together to survive this war.

  “You will take Alexander with you to the Coraline System. A single ship, even as powerful as Alexander, will not fill the requirements of the systems that have called for our help.

  “She might meet their needs,” Blake admitted, “but we must show that we take their call for aid seriously.

  “Once you have finished at Coraline, you are to proceed to Antioch and meet with their civilian and military leaders to establish a full understanding of the situation. They’ve provided a lot of information via q-com, but there is no substitute for direct conversation with the people involved.

  “All of the information they have given us has been forwarded to your ships, and we will update as the situation evolves.

  “From Antioch, how you progress will be up to your discretion. We would strongly prefer that Antioch, Serengeti and Istanbul survive unharmed with as much of their merchant fleet intact as possible. While we would certainly be pleased if the surrounding systems are unharmed, those three must be your priority.

  “Your mission is the destruction of the pirates that have been raiding those systems,” Blake concluded. “Protection of their infrastructure and ships is a higher priority than dead pirates, but we both know dead pirates are the best guarantee of the long-term safety of the region.

  “We have limited real intelligence about the area and no resources to provide you once you are in the AO,” she warned. “Both of your ships have extensive self-repair and resupply capabilities if Antioch and the others prove uncooperative, but if you are in major need of supply or aid, report via q-com and we will try and make something happen.

  “If Antioch and the others prove severely uncooperative, you may be recalled,” Blake continued, “but that would represent a failure of the mission. We don’t need these systems in the Alliance, but we do need our trade with them to fund the fleet.

  “Keep them safe, Captain Roberts.”

  #

  Chapter 8

  Castle System

  09:00 September 14, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Gawain Orbit, DSC-052 Kodiak

  Some day, Kyle would take command of a ship that wasn’t in a hurry to be deployed somewhere. It would probably be after the war was over, however, so he had no expectation that “some day” would be anytime soon.

  Forty-seven hours after his arrival aboard Kodiak and three hours ahead of deadline, he sat in the command chair on the carrier’s bridge and watched as both of the ships under his command got underway.

  There was a faint tremble through Kodiak’s bones as her massive antimatter engines opened up, a momentary adjustment as her mass manipulators swung into play, creating a gravity field that exactly offset the crushing acceleration.

  Alexander loped ahead for a few moments, Sarka taking advantage of the battlecruiser’s higher acceleration to slide into a forward escort position and then adjusting her engines to match Kodiak’s course.

  “We will be clear for Alcubierre-Stetson drive in an hour and forty minutes,” Houshian reported.

  “Do you have a course laid for the Coraline system?” Kyle asked.

  “Yes, sir,” she reported crisply. “Eleven days, peak velocity five point five light-years per day. We will arrive in-system in the early morning on September twenty-fifth.”

  “Carry on, Commander Houshian,” Kyle told her. “You have the call on the drive.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, a flash of cheer and confidence flickering across the neural network as Kyle leaned back to watch his crew get to work.

  Thirty light-years away and the Imperial capital system was less than two weeks’ travel—and instantly reachable by q-com for virtual discussions. The scale of operations that the Alliance worked with was mind-boggling, but the A-S drive made it possible.

  Of course, the same shield projectors and mass manipulators that made faster-than-light travel possible were incredibly expensive. The five Class One mass manipulators Kodiak carried to produce her Alcubierre drive field were easily a third of her cost…and a full percentage point of a moderately wealthy system’s GSP all on their own.

  Linked in to the ship’s systems, Kyle quietly reviewed Commander Trent’s status report on the Class Ones. The status itself appeared fine, though the status report itself was…lacking. There were items he had to dig for that should have been front and center, and unless he was mistaken, one of the Class One’s statuses was entirely missing.

  Kodiak only needed four Class Ones to create her bubble of warped space, but all Federation warships carried the fifth as a safety precaution and to help with her normal maneuvers. A few mental commands linked Kyle into the engineering net and allowed him to pull the status directly from the manipulator’s own computers.

  Eighty percent readiness. That was…not good. Not when they were leaving their refit slip. The other four were at ninety-nine or above, but the fifth, redundant mass manipulator wasn’t.

  That was a problem. Not a big one, but a problem.

  A bigger problem was that the information hadn’t been included in the official status report and that Trent had tried to conceal that by making the report nearly incoherent.

  He apparently needed to have that conversation with his chief engineer sooner rather than later.

  #

  Alexander and Kodiak cleared the zone around Gawain where the gas giant’s gravity made it impossible to enter Alcubierre drive exactly on schedule, the two immense ships accelerating out of the planet’s gravity well at over two hundred gravities.

  “Captain Roberts? All identified gravity sources are beyond effect range,” Commander Houshian told him from her seat. “Current gravitational force is beneath one picometer per second squared. We are prepared to warp space on your command.”

  “You have the call, Commander Houshian,” Kyle told her, settling back in his chair to watch.

  “Aye, aye, Navigation has the call,” she confirmed. She opened an audio channel to Engineering, unnecessary but traditional as part of this process outside of a combat situation.

  “Engineering, this is the navigator. Please confirm status of Class One mass manipulators.”

  “All Class Ones are functioning within parameters,” Trent replied over the channel. “Kodiak is ready to warp space.”

  A tiny window inside Kyle’s implant feeds watched Sarka’s bridge crew going through the same motions, though the junior Captain was
still making the call herself. She’d learn when that was and wasn’t required—there were no transitions better charted by the Castle Federation Space Navy than the ones in the Castle System itself. It was a good one to leave to a junior.

  Houshian glanced back at him, clearly uncertain that he was truly leaving the whole process in her hands. He smiled and nodded to her to continue.

  Swallowing, the tiny navigator opened a shipwide channel.

  “All hands, prepare for Alcubierre drive,” she declared over the channel.

  A countdown appeared on Kyle’s implant displays, counting down the requisite sixty seconds between the warning and the actual transition.

  “Initiating interior Stetson fields.”

  Hundreds of small projectors across Kodiak’s hull powered up, and faint haze descended across all of the carrier’s views of the outside world. The interior Stetson stabilization field would protect Kodiak from the radiation of her own warp bubble and the gravitic affects of the drive’s singularities.

  “Interior Stetson field active,” the navigator reported. “Exterior field on standby, mass manipulators on standby.”

  Houshian made one last look back at Kyle, and then the ship shivered as she lit up the Class One mass manipulators.

  Space outside the ship seemed to warp as four micro-singularities took form—and the exterior Stetson field wrapped around them to protect the Castle system from their presence.

  “We have singularity formation. Exterior Stetson field is active; containment is one hundred percent and holding.

  “Initiating warp bubble now.”

  The massive arrays of zero-point cells that fueled Kodiak flared to life, and the Class One mass manipulators expanded their singularities, the distortion of the space around the carrier growing and moving until a bright flash of blue light encapsulated the ship.

  There was a moment of disorientation as the starbow compressed to a strange purple haze, and then Kodiak’s computers replaced the visual pickups with a simulated view of their position in the universe.

  “Captain Roberts, we are under way,” Houshian reported with a sigh of relief.

  “Thank you, Commander,” Kyle told her. Looking around the bridge, he rose from his chair with a smile. “Thank you, everyone; that was well done. Commander Houshian, you have the watch.”

  “Yes, Captain!”

  #

  The central engineering core of a modern warship was an awe-inspiring place, a large open void near the heart of the vessel, containing the largest of the zero-point cells that provided the incredible amounts of power that fueled a starship.

  While Kodiak had over a hundred zero-point cells scattered through her hull, even ignoring the positron lances which were basically the same technology, the eight that filled her engineering core provided the power that allowed her to outspeed light.

  Offices and drone control centers surrounded those core cells, as did the primary routing nexuses for power, heat, air and water throughout the massive starship. The primary engineering control center was easily a rival to the bridge or auxiliary control in terms of processing power.

  Kyle dodged a trio of welding robots as he approached the control center, the drones moving in sync with a distracted-looking engineering Specialist who didn’t even notice he’d almost run over the Captain.

  He stared after the robots and the engineer for a long moment as they continued on their way, half-waiting for the man to stop and apologize and half in pure shock that they’d come so close to an accident and not noticed.

  Finally, he added the incident to his mental list and stepped into the primary control center. Just post-transition, it was still a buzzing hive of activity, though there were already signs of consoles and screens being shut down as engineering switched over to the somewhat slower tempo of FTL watches.

  To his surprise, however, Commander Ivy Trent wasn’t in the central command chair of the control center. An unfamiliar Lieutenant Commander, with the shaved head and visible circuitry common to the Federation’s transhumanist minority, occupied the chair, overseeing the stand-down from transition.

  They spotted him and leapt to their feet with a crisp salute.

  “Captain Roberts, sir! Lieutenant Commander Innes Harvey,” they introduced themselves. “How can I assist you?”

  “I was looking for Commander Trent,” Kyle said in a dangerously mild tone. Even with the transition over, if there were any problems with the Alcubierre-Stetson systems, now was when they were most likely to show up. The engineer should have been there.

  “The Commander is in her office, sir,” Harvey replied. “I took over the stand-down from transition. Everything is going smoothly.”

  “Good,” the Captain agreed. “Is this the ordinary procedure aboard Kodiak, Lieutenant Commander Harvey?”

  “Yes, sir!” Harvey answered brightly. “Either myself or one of the other seconds sees to the stand-down.”

  “I see. In her office, you said?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Commander.”

  #

  Trent’s office was locked, set up to require anyone entering to intercom in and request entry. Unfortunately for the Commander, Kodiak’s security was quite hierarchical in its setup, and the engineer couldn’t actually lock her office against the Captain.

  He overrode the security in mid-step, forcing the door to slide open and charging into the Commander’s office. He was half-expecting to find her asleep or watching porn or something similarly unacceptable, but instead she was working at her console, looking up in surprise at his entrance.

  “What the hell, Captain?” she demanded.

  “That was my question, Commander Trent,” he told her. “That was my question when I realized that one of our mass manipulators was in worse shape than I expected. That was also my question when I realized you’d omitted that from your report—and it was certainly my question when I arrived in your control center fifteen minutes after transition to discover you’d left the stand-down and initial safety checks to a subordinate.”

  “How I run my department is my business, Captain.”

  “No, Commander Trent, it is not,” Kyle said flatly. “Especially not when standards and policies that exist for a reason are being ignored by a senior officer, and the rot appears to be spreading into her subordinates.”

  “My seconds are all competent officers; I will not stand—“

  “I don’t mean your officers,” Kyle interrupted. “One of your technicians almost crushed me on my way down here, Commander. That shouldn’t have happened—and it should have been caught by a superior and dealt with.

  “It wasn’t, because you, Commander, are hiding in your office and your subordinates are taking their cues from you and sticking their heads in the sand. So, Commander Trent, do you understand why I am somewhat irritated with you?”

  Trent looked about ready to yell back at him, but then swallowed, seeming to realize that she wasn’t going to win a yelling match with her commanding officer.

  “That…shouldn’t have happened,” she agreed. “I’m not certain I agree with your assessment of the cause, but I agree that the incident shouldn’t have happened. I will look into it.”

  “Why aren’t you at your post, Commander?” Kyle demanded. “You should be in the middle of everything, making sure your people know you are there—both to back them up and to stop them short.”

  “My officers are more than competent to handle the day-to-day affairs of Engineering,” Trent told him. “They don’t need me to babysit them through the boring parts.”

  “The boring parts,” Kyle echoed. “Commander, the ‘boring parts’ are the parts that keep this ship safe—and are your damned job!”

  “I trained my subordinates to handle them so I wouldn’t have to,” she said flatly. “They get better experience and I get to focus on the more interesting parts of the job. It was a win for everyone.”

  “And a violation of Navy Policy,” he poin
ted out.

  “Which is more important, the Policy or a functioning ship?”

  “The latter,” Kyle admitted, “except that hasn’t been what you’ve delivered to me, Commander. Your department appears to be fraying, and you, Commander Trent, failed to inform me that one of our Class One mass manipulators was only at eighty percent readiness.”

  As he spoke, he took control of her wallscreen and threw the status display up for the five Class Ones up on it. Studying it now, he saw that none of them were where he’d have expected them to be just after leaving port. One through Four, at least, were all over ninety-five percent—but they should have been at almost one hundred percent…and Trent’s report had showed them at ninety-nine.

  “All are within safe parameters.”

  “For normal operations,” Kyle replied. “Barely, in the case of Five. And what happens, Commander Trent, if I order you to take the ship to Tier Three acceleration?”

  The “tiers” were plateaus of fuel efficiency in the interaction of antimatter engines and mass manipulators. Tier One was used by civilian ships, supremely fuel-efficient but only about one hundred gravities. Tier Two was now around two hundred and fifty gravities, enough for capital ships. Tier Three was usually reserved for starfighters, at five hundred gravities, and Tier Four came with dangerous radiation and inertia leakages, and was reserved for missiles.

  The carrier was theoretically capable of Tier Three acceleration, but would be burning through days’ worth of fuel for minutes of flight.

  “That would be crazy,” Trent pointed out.

  “Why? It’s something we’ve done in the past, and something this ship is capable of—but not with Manipulator Five barely sufficient for regular operation,” he pointed out. “I’d also like to note, informally before it goes into your permanent record, that the status report you gave me lacked any information on Five and overstated the readiness of One through Four.