Star Force 11: Exile

by B. V. Larson

That was about all I could do right then, so I paced restlessly while I waited for the next ship-snatch. When the countdown hit zero, the modified surfboard disappeared right on schedule. Unfortunately the battlesuit kept on sailing along untouched.

  “Dammit. I guess the suit was too small. Valiant, tell Bradley to recover the suit when he can and keep rigging surfboards. At least we bought ourselves another hour.”

  “Twelve, really, if Bradley’s people can make a dozen decoys. Good thing Kwon didn’t give up his surfboards for factory reprocessing,” Hansen said.

  “Stubbornness has its place.” I took a seat, rubbing my face with my hands and then stood instead. “You have the conn, Hansen. I need to take a walk.”

  First, I stopped by the assault airlock receiving assurances the other eleven surfboards would be converted into drones on time. I was pretty sure sacrificing one per hour or so was going to let us get away. If not, there were always the pinnaces, the Nano ships, and even the shuttle, Ox and Stalker if we evacuated them of crew.

  Whatever happened, Valiant would go last. Visions of the crew being trapped in the multidimensional maze with Sokolov haunted me—or worse, being stuck in a box with a crystal window. I hoped Natalia and the unknown man next to her remained unconscious in that state.

  Next I got my battlesuit back on and checked on the dismantling of our upper rear armor. I proceeded through the airless assault airlock and out onto the hull in time to see Kwon enthusiastically shove a composite plate off into space. The thing must have massed ten tons and fell away behind us as the ship’s acceleration left it behind. Off to the side I could see the two pinnaces moving back into their positions.

  Other battlesuited marines with cutters worked on taking off the next piece of armor while trying to avoid damaging the inner hull. Two crewmembers stood next to Adrienne in standard suits with constructive nanite sprayers in their hands to patch the inevitable holes the marines left behind.

  I examined Valiant’s battered skin. The Macro fight had left us looking like a tramp freighter rather than a graceful ship of war and dumping the armor plates wasn’t helping. But, I didn’t much care how she looked if Valiant got us out of this crazy star system. We were helpless against the technology of the Ancients, and helpless was not a favorite state of mine.

  Waving at Adrienne, I went back inside confident the mass-dumping work was in good hands. My next stop was Engineering, where I found Sakura with her head and upper body inside one of the main repellers and a tech nearby with tools laid out on the deck. She pulled herself out when she heard my armored boots stamping over.

  “I can’t repair the other engine, but I may be able to get this repeller working in time to give us more thrust,” she said without preamble, her face as inscrutable as ever.

  “Good. I trust you to prioritize as long as you understand that right now exiting this system ahead of the teleport effect is the only thing that might save us. I haven’t seen or heard of any evidence that the golden planet takes things from other star systems.”

  Sakura grunted noncommittally. “Thank you for visiting, Captain, but if you want your extra speed I have to return to work.”

  “Of course. Carry on.” I left with a nod and a wave to the other busy crewmembers.

  I decided to skip visiting the weapons deck. The gun-bunnies there had seen me recently, and I was sure Cornelius was on top of things. There’s a fine line between too little and too much command presence in people’s workspaces, and morale had already taken a beating with the recent losses. While nearly destroying the Macros had elated me, for the average crewmember it may have seemed like an unnecessary fight this chasing a near-mythical enemy for a final showdown.

  Doffing my armor and returning to the bridge, I looked at the still-accelerating Macro seed and Marvin’s position in the holotank. They were almost on top of each other. It appeared the target was just a few minutes from the ring.

  “Valiant, put me through to Marvin on the ansible.”

  “This is Captain Marvin.”

  “What’s the prognosis?” I demanded.

  “The Macro probe has transited the ring. I was not able to capture or damage it significantly as it activated a shield when it detected my presence.”

  I looked at the holotank in brief confusion. The probe hadn’t yet reached the ring. Then I realized the ring area was several light-minutes from us, and the sensor image showed the past while the ansible gave us instantaneous communication. That got me wondering if we could apply the quantum ansible principle to make some kind of faster-than-light sensor to yield real-time data at a distance.

  “What has your scout probe told you?” I asked.

  “I have preliminary data about the area beyond the ring. It appears to be an unusually large and complex quadruple-star system with more than twenty planets and at least eighty moons. I have identified emanations from three separate space-capable civilizations.”

  “Are there defense installations at the ring on the other side? Anything dangerous if we go through?”

  “There are no installations at all near the ring. This is possibly because of the slabs which presumably visit this system from time to time just as they do the Orn system on the other side.”

  “Good news and good work, Marvin. Send us the probe data as you get it, please? I’d like to take a look.”

  “I’ll send you what I have so far,” he said, “but I’ll be transiting the ring in approximately two minutes.”

  “Can’t you send a probe back through later with more data?”

  “I’m sorry, quantum interference from the ring is causing your transmission to become unintelligible.”

  “Then why can I hear and understand you perfectly, Marvin?”

  “Captain Marvin out.”

  I hissed in exasperation. Clearly, he hadn’t wanted to comply with my instructions. I wondered why. It didn’t seem like sending a probe back through the ring would be a strain on his resources. Was there something on the other side he didn’t want me to know about until we got there?

  I watched Marvin’s icon approach the ring, transit through, and then wink out in the holotank. A few minutes later due to the lightspeed delay, Valiant announced, “I have received a data-burst from Greyhound. Shall I load it into the holotank?”

  I glanced around at Hansen and the watchstanders. If there was something controversial about the next system, maybe I should look at the data privately. Then again, that might make it seem like I didn’t trust them, and most likely any worrisome details wouldn’t be obvious to them from across the room as long as I didn’t comment on them.

  “Go ahead and load it,” I said.

  In the tank appeared a sketchy, low-resolution representation of an amazing star system. Marvin hadn’t been kidding when he said it was complex and unusual. Three stars danced in space. One was big and white with two smaller orange siblings. The ring itself orbited far from the gravitational axis formed by the triple-star configuration.

  The fourth was a brown dwarf, a tiny star only about fifty times as massive as Jupiter with a correspondingly low heat output. It orbited about three hundred AU out from the triple center. Like Saturn or Jupiter, it had its own entourage of at least a dozen small to medium-sized planets and a bunch of tiny bodies, asteroids and comets.

  More than twenty other worlds orbited the center triplets and ranged from small hot Mercury-like bodies up to large gas giants. I could see our scientists, including Hoon, would be in geek heaven.

  Speak of the devil, I thought, as Hoon scurried onto the bridge. I should have expected him as I knew his large, watery quarters had a feed connected to everything that happened in the holotank.

  “Move aside, young Riggs. I need to examine this new data.”

  “How about if I have the data transferred to your quarters?”

  “This holotank has better resolution than my equipment.”

  “You should get Marvin to upgrade your system for you.”

  Hoon’s eyestalks fin
ally were aimed at me instead of the holotank. He seemed annoyed. “I find the robot to be difficult.”

  I laughed. “Hoon, my estimation of you just improved.”

  “Please address me as ‘Professor,’ young Riggs.”

  “Then please address me as ‘Captain,’ Professor.”

  “Weren’t you an ensign a few days ago?”

  “You need to get out more.”

  Hoon swung his attention back to the holotank. He rapidly manipulated the controls, altering the viewpoints and using the holotank’s many functions to extract more data. He made notes on a Crustacean-style tablet held in one mouth-part.

  “My examination will take some time, Captain Riggs. Perhaps you have other duties to attend to elsewhere?”

  I bit my tongue. Hoon was trying to banish me from my own bridge. I held back a bout of kicking and cursing with difficulty. I had to admit he had the best brain aboard for pure science, and you never knew when a geek would come up with some obscure but critical factor, especially in a brand-new star system. I decided to let him work.

  “I’m going to grab some food,” I told Hansen. “Want anything?”

  “I’m going to eat with Sakura right after the next decoy is snatched, Skipper,” he replied.

  I shrugged and left him there with Hoon. “Valiant, pass all of Marvin’s data to Doctor Benson.” That made me think of Kalu, still in the brig, which in turn made me realize that I still needed to figure out who had hacked the suits and faked the video. I decided to interrogate her at the first opportunity I had—during the next sixty-four minute window might work well. If Kalu wasn’t guilty of anything worse than scheming and cooperating a little too closely with Sokolov, I shouldn’t be holding her prisoner. After all, plenty of my crewmen were guilty of that. Just because we didn’t get along was no reason to lose her talents in the laboratory.

  There were too many low-priority things I just wasn’t getting to on this journey. Being mutinied against by Sokolov had derailed many of my plans. I’d never figured out who might be aboard—if anyone—who’d had a hand in Olivia’s death. Someone had to have helped send us through that ring leaving known space behind. The trouble was that for all I knew the culprit had died along the way. It could have been one of Valiant’s original officers, for example.

  Sighing heavily, I returned to a more recent crisis. Olivia was dead, and figuring out the circumstances of her death wouldn’t bring her back. I had living people aboard that I needed to consider first.

  One of them was Adrienne and another was Kalu. I came to the conclusion that my best chance to determine who had falsified the sex vids and my death was to have Marvin dig into it. He was the least likely to have been involved because he could have killed me so much more simply if he’d wanted to, and because I doubted he had the cultural sophistication to even think of faking a sex vid to undermine my position. The big problem with this approach was that I would have to give him deeper access to Valiant’s brainbox than I would like. Who knew what alterations he might be tempted to make or what data of his own he might plant inside? Any safeguards I put in to stop him might foil the very investigation I was trying to make.

  I could only think of one way to do this and now was a good time. After grabbing a plate of rations from the wardroom, I headed down to the factory deck.

  The machine that squatted in the center of the chamber hummed and clunked from time to time. A line of recently made spare parts sat on a conveyor, and as I sat down at the control console another piece of machinery appeared. The belt moved accordingly, providing room for the next item.

  “Unit One,” I said, “this is Commander Cody Riggs. Acknowledge.”

  “Commander Cody Riggs acknowledged.”

  “Suspend current script and reset your memory space to load another.”

  “Script suspended. Memory reset.”

  “Do you have enough materials to make a battlecruiser brainbox?”

  “Materials sufficient.”

  “Excellent.” I’d hoped this would be the case, as brainboxes were not large nor were their materials exotic. “Display a script shell for a standard battlecruiser brainbox.”

  “Script displayed.”

  “Overlay and integrate scripts for cloning the current Valiant brainbox, including its software state at this moment and also a standard independent containment system.”

  “Scripts overlaid and integrated.”

  “Begin manufacture,” I ordered.

  “Process begun. Time to completion is one hour seventeen minutes.” The factory began to hum and rattle slightly.

  I decided to stay there until the copy of Valiant’s brainbox was finished. That way no one could tamper with it—at least I hoped not. I didn’t think there was any way to secretly access and influence a factory once its process was started other than by suspending and changing it though the control board. Even after three decades, what went on inside a factory remained something of a mystery.

  “Captain,” Hansen called after a few minutes. “Another scheduled snatch is coming up.”

  “Is the surfboard in place, with the shuttle and pinnaces as backup?”

  “Yes, sir. Everything’s in position. Hoon is still playing with the holotank, by the way.”

  “Unless there’s a crisis, he’s fine. I’ll be down in the factory room for another hour or so. Riggs out.”

  A few minutes later, Adrienne entered still wearing her suit. “Hey, Cody. Looks like Kwon has the hang of things. I gave him clear instructions on which armor pieces to cut away.”

  I grinned. “You sure he won’t chop off something vital?”

  “Pretty sure. What are you doing?”

  I hesitated before answering, and Adrienne’s face fell. She was one of the people with the expertise to hack the suit telemetry and to fake the sex vid…but she was also the only one with no discernible motive to do so except in my wildest paranoid fantasies.

  “Sorry, hon. I’ve just resolved to keep what I was doing here confidential. I had to shift mental tracks. I’m happy to tell you.”

  She moved up beside me, placing a delicate hand on my shoulder. I reached up to take and kiss her fingers before explaining, “I’m making a separate backup of Valiant. At some point we’ll have to really dig into what went on, and I want to have a copy in case anything goes wrong.”

  “But the copy will have the flaws or sabotage of the original.”

  “I know, but it’s one more safeguard.”

  Adrienne leaned down to whisper in my ear, “I already have a new, blank battlecruiser brain tucked away just in case.”

  I turned my head to look into her eyes. “You’ve been keeping secrets too?”

  “Other than you, who can I trust?”

  As her lips were so close, I kissed them and then her nose. “Exactly. Someone’s been trying to kill me ever since I left Earth the first time, and they still have Olivia to pay for.”

  “Quite.” She packed a fair amount of venom into that typical British understatement.

  “By the way, I have something for you.” I reached into my pocket and took out the data stick Cornelius had given me. “Here’s hard evidence the sex vid was faked.”

  “How do you know the evidence itself wasn’t faked?”

  “I didn’t say it was proof, but it does help my case. You’ll have to look at it yourself and decide. Chief Cornelius did the work.”

  Adrienne relaxed. “She’s a dear, isn’t she? Bradley’s a lucky fellow, whatever her faults.”

  “Oh, Bradley and she—”

  “Yes.” Adrienne hugged me and hurried off with the data stick.

  I really hoped that entire disaster had been laid to rest.

  -34-

  I sat at the factory console long enough to finish the backup brainbox in its protective case. Resetting the machine to continue Adrienne’s scripts, I took the heavy box by its handle and took it to the captain’s suite.

  I’d given the thing some thought, but nothing could b
e secreted from Valiant herself unless I shut down the current brainbox, which wasn’t something I was prepared to do until the ship was further out of danger. The next best thing was to put it in the captain’s safe, which had a mechanical combination lock on it supplemented by a code and a biometric scanner. Normally this little vault was used for storing sealed orders, command override codes and anything else that needed to be held securely outside of the ship’s AI network itself.

  It would have to do.

  I reset the safe’s code and my door code for good measure. “Valiant, notify me when the captain’s suite is accessed no matter who does it. Even if you believe it’s me, I want you to notify me.”

  “Protocol updated.”

  Back on the bridge, I saw that Hoon had departed and Bradley had taken over the watch from Hansen.

  “All the surfboards are ready to go, and Chernov is launching them now.” Bradley waved at his drone controller stations, which were now filled. “We’ve got them under positive control.”

  “Excellent. Sorry about waking you up earlier. You can head back to your bunk if you need to.”

  “No need, sir. A stim will keep me going until we exit the ring.”

  I thought about that for a minute, staring at the holotank. “No, I think I’d rather have you at your best when we pass through. I’m sure your senior controller can shepherd a few surfboards into simple trailing positions. If you absolutely can’t sleep, I’m sure Chief Cornelius could use some help on the gun deck. I’ve got the bridge.”

  Bradley looked sideways at me for a moment and then brightened. “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Planting that idea in Bradley’s mind was a little bit of repayment to Cornelius. I was sure they could both use a romantic interlude. I mused as to when my captain’s duties had started to include arranging trysts for my senior staff. This brought a smile to my face.

  I guess the captain has to be all things to all people, I thought, turning to the holotank to study the new star system. I found myself yearning to arrive and wondering when the next thing would go wrong.

  Nothing happened for the next hour. A decoy was snatched on schedule, and I felt an odd sensation of relief. Our decoys were working, and as far as I could tell they were foolproof. We were going to make it out of the system.