Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  DEFIANCE

  THE SPIRAL WARS; BOOK FOUR

  JOEL SHEPHERD

  Copyright © 2017 by Joel Shepherd

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and is not intended by the author.

  Cover Illustration by Stephan Martiniere. http://www.martiniere.com/

  Titles by Kendall Roderick. http://rmind-design.com

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  1

  In Erik’s dream, he was sitting at a cafe with Lisbeth. In typical dream logic, the location made sense, because it was a place they’d often gone — Arcadia Park near the shopping district. But it did not make sense, because there were whales, sea dragons and other Homeworld ocean life swimming through the air nearby. None of the passers-by paid the creatures any attention, and he had his coffee and a slice of shared cheesecake, and talked with Lisbeth about sibling stuff.

  Here again, the dream made no sense, because when he’d been to this cafe with Lisbeth, he’d been a new cadet in the Academy, and she’d been just turning ten or eleven… but here in the dream, she was the newly-adult Lisbeth who braved the Phoenix corridors in her spacer jumpsuit and harness. It had been their weekend thing after Lisbeth’s volleyball or tennis, when Mother, Father or the other siblings had been unable to organise anything else. That was often, for Family Debogande was busy, and Cora, the only sibling still at school, was a true socialite, always at parties with friends and often scolded by Mother for not having time for the rest of the family.

  Erik got on well with all his sisters, but Lisbeth was different. Being the littlest, she looked up to and adored him, and that flattery was always nice. But more than just cute and lively, Lisbeth loved what he did in a way that was true of perhaps none of his other family, besides his father. And so they’d often meet on a weekend, when he had a half-day off and the family had nothing else on. He’d made probably less friends in the Academy than he could have, dodging the social events of his classmates to spend time with his little sister. But in truth, not only did he enjoy Lisbeth’s company more, he was worried by the dawning realisation that if he were posted away from Homeworld for long stretches, he’d miss most of her growing up, and would return one day to discover that he barely knew her at all.

  In this dream, she was talking to him about a hacksaw drone she was building. As her own personal hobby, she said airily, when he asked her if that was wise. Romki was helping her. Erik asked her what the parren who were holding her captive would make of that. A nearby sea creature roared, and suddenly the woman Lisbeth was a little girl once more, frightened and in tears.

  A plaintive alarm woke him, and the scene disappeared. Erik hit audio on the bedside wallscreen, eyes still closed. “Captain. What?”

  “Major,” came Trace’s reply, mocking his sleepy drawl. “Open.”

  She was at the door, Erik realised. Moving on automatic, he reached and released the bednet that would stop him from being thrown about in an unplanned manoeuvre, hauled it back with the sheets, and put socked feet on the cold deck. Fleet spacers always slept in underclothes as a minimum, so that dressing was a simple matter of pulling on a jumpsuit. He dragged on a jacket, took the one-and-a-half steps that was all his quarters required to open the door, then went into his tiny bathroom cubicle as Trace entered with someone else. He splashed water on his face, checked the stubble on his bleary-eyed reflection, and judged that he needed a shave. Later.

  Back in his quarters, Jokono had entered with Trace, looking similarly tired, but in the manner of someone who’d been awake for much longer and was dealing with it. Erik wanted to greet him warmly, but procedure came first, as every conscious captain had to be fully aware of his ship’s tactical situation. He ignored both visitors to sit on his bed, pull on AR glasses and call up a feed from Scan.

  What confronted him was a great big tavalai mess. UFS Phoenix had arrived at Cherichal System ten days ago, a nearly-uninhabited place, used by tavalai Fleet primarily as a mid-point between strategic locations. There she’d met the tavalai cruiser Podiga and two other warships, members of the rebel tavalai Fleet faction that had assisted Phoenix in her raid on the Kantovan Vault. They’d given Podiga’s captain the impossibly top-secret container that the rebel faction had demanded in exchange for their help, holding secrets of the tavalai’s State Department, and then they’d awaited the arrival of parren ships, from their Domesh allies of House Harmony.

  Instead, an endless stream of tavalai ships had followed them from Kantovan, and now clustered about Phoenix and Podiga in parking proximity, a tangled ball five hundred kilometres across of nearly thirty ships and rising. Tantotavarin was here, an ibranakala-class cruiser that alone was nearly Phoenix’s equal, and had a record of bloody success in the Triumvirate War nearly as great. With Tantotavarin were another six tavalai Fleet vessels, none quite so formidable, but collectively enough to make Phoenix’s destruction certain and fast, should it come to shooting.

  Those six regular Fleet ships were now locked in grim dispute with Podiga, and now Kanamandali, a lata-class cruiser not Tantotavarin’s equal, but large enough, and carrying the person of Admiral Janik himself. The very tavalai, in fact, who had first agreed to help Phoenix on the Kantovan mission, and the most senior member of the rebel faction anyone on Phoenix knew of. Kanamandali had arrived from a different direction, and now sat parked a hundred Ks from Phoenix’s side — practically in her lap, as such things were measured by FTL ships in space.

  The remaining twenty or so ships were representatives of various tavalai bureaucracies, legal institutions or government departments. Most prominent of these was Toguru, a State Department vessel, whose behaviour since arrival reminded Erik of those cartoon caricatures of the unpleasant ex-wife, always shouting and sneering, forever trying her damnedest to make everyone else as miserable as she was. She’d been demanding that Phoenix be forcibly escorted back to Kantovan to answer for her crimes, which included conspiracy, theft, assault, murder, espionage, and the violation of solemn oaths of tavalai law that Lieutenant Shilu, and even Stan Romki, admitted they did not understand. Save for those, Erik knew that Phoenix was guilty of all the others. But then, as the kid in the playground said about the bully, ‘he started it’.

  All of them were in a meeting now — he selected a scan feed on his glasses, and saw the great cluster of shuttles about Tantotavarin like the cloud of flies about a rotting fish on a riverbank, far too many to all fit at once to the big carrier�
�s Midships berths. Ominously, they’d all been transmitting when they first arrived, talking on heavily encrypted coms. That had been convenient and instructive, for Phoenix could now decrypt any and all tavalai encryption in milliseconds. But now, all were silent. They knew, Erik thought. Surely after all the evidence left behind at Kantovan, in the Tsubarata, in the city of Gamesh on the planet Konik, and on the moon of Kamala, both in the atmospheric city of Chara or the fortified vault on the surface… they knew what Phoenix had aboard. Or at least, they guessed. Now they did not use general coms at all, save for tightbeam laser coms that Phoenix Scan could see making faint lines between the neighbouring ships, like gossamer threads in the web of a very lazy spider. Erik felt as though Phoenix were the weird kid at school, with pierced nose and purple hair, invited to a respectable tea party. Everyone staring at her in silent outrage, and whispering behind her back.

  Erik stowed the glasses in a pocket, then rose to finally greet Ensign Jokono with a warm smile and a handshake. “Good to see you well, Joker. I heard that was a hell of a trip.”

  “Good to be back, Captain,” said Jokono, nowhere near as deferential before the Captain as another Ensign might have been. Jokono was older than Erik and Trace combined, his lean, brown face showing the lines of youthful middle-age, by the current human standard. As Phoenix’s newly acquired Intelligence Officer, he was cool and professional at most times, and Trace in particular found great use in his services. “And yes, quite a trip.”

  Erik gestured for one of them to take a chair by the small table, both afixed to the wall, while he sat on the bunk. Jokono offered Trace the chair, ever the gentleman, but Trace refused, giving the recently-civilian older man no choice. It was the unofficial code of conduct on most Fleet ships that in mixed company, if there were limited seats, the marines would stand. Smart spacers like Erik just smiled, and allowed the marines their masochistic superiority.

  “There was another classified containment cylinder from the Kantovan Vault on the heavy descender that Tif stole from Chara,” said Trace, cutting straight to the point as usual.

  Erik frowned. “I know, it was in your report.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d had time to read my report.”

  “I made time,” said Erik, repressing irritation. Even now, Trace tested him. But he was used to it, and barely bothered. “You said you’d assign it to Jokono when he got back, after Styx decoded it. I take it she did decode it?”

  Second Lieutenant Tif had been forcibly removed from the kaal heavy descender that Phoenix had hired, at considerable expense, for the Kantovan mission. With Styx’s help, Tif had managed to steal another one at Chara base, in mid-prep for a final launch into orbit. It had been on its way up from the Vault, while Tif’s descender had been on its way down. Descenders on their way up were often carrying classified things they’d gone down to acquire. This descender had been no exception.

  “She did,” Trace agreed. “But she couldn’t make much sense of the documents that appeared once decoded. It’s all tavalai bureaucratic forms and records of financial transactions, not Styx’s strongpoint. So I put a copy on the shuttle that went to fetch Jokono, and he’s been working on it since then.”

  “Yes, welcome back to Phoenix, Ensign Jokono,” Erik said drily. Jokono smiled. No doubt he’d have liked a little rest and time to recover from his previous mission, but instead Trace had dropped this in his lap. Erik suspected that instead of being annoyed, Jokono was pleased to be found so useful. “I’m guessing you found something or you wouldn’t have woken me up in the middle of second-shift.”

  “No, he woke me in the middle of second-shift,” Trace corrected. “I woke you.”

  Erik ignored her, eyebrows raised pointedly at Jokono. “Well,” said the older man in his calm, melodious way, “I learned several things. Firstly, I learned that tavalai bureaucracy is one of the wonders of the known universe. I don’t mean that in a good way.”

  “I know,” Erik agreed. “We’ve all been learning.”

  “Which means that the Major was correct to give the documents to me. In my years as a senior investigator, before I became a station security chief, I spent a considerable amount of time digging around in corporate records. Now, tavalai being tavalai, it took me a long time just to get my head around what I was looking at… but with Mr Romki busy, your Coms Officers Lieutenant Lassa, and then Lieutenant Shilu, were able to assist with some of their legal training, and what they’ve learned of tavalai bureaucracy and law in the past months. Styx then assisted with some of the numerical complexities, which is possibly the most egregious misuse of a hacksaw queen’s intellect yet, using her as a glorified calculator. My excuse is that her user interface is just that much simpler than the Phoenix mainframe.”

  “And more entertaining,” Erik agreed. There was no point in being concerned about it. On this ship, there was precious little any of them could do to stop Styx from accessing data if she wished. No doubt she’d have followed all of Jokono’s work with great interest, whether he’d directly involved her or not. And unlike humans, there did not appear to be any limit to the number of things Styx could analyse simultaneously. “A spacer in Armaments swears she made a joke the other day, though there is some dispute.”

  “She’ll learn to be funny if she wants,” Trace said with certainty. “The real question is whether she’s capable of finding anything funny.”

  Jokono tapped his fingers on the small table, in the manner of an older man concerned the youngsters were getting distracted. “The documents are financial transactions,” he said. “It’s obscenely complicated, because they’ve effectively shuffled enormous sums of money through a series of major bureaucracies and financial institutions, disguising it in every way possible. But whoever compiled all of those documents has essentially done all the hard work for me, allowing me to do in hours what would have taken months or years of legwork for an army of tavalai investigators, otherwise. All I had to do was identify the common thread, and use Styx’s help to keep the monetary totals in sight amidst all the other numbers.”

  “Payments,” Erik said slowly. “Payments from whom to whom?”

  “From State Department,” said Jokono, with a note of triumph that made all the hours of missed sleep worth it. “To the sard. Incredibly large payments. Entirely illegal — the news and historical databases we’ve accumulated since we’ve been in tavalai space are comprehensive enough, the kind of thing regular tavalai can access. They include any number of definitive statements from senior tavalai officials, in various departments, that the sard are allies of their own free will, and that there are no payments or bribes involved. All lies, apparently, though perhaps unwitting.”

  Erik stared. And looked at Trace. Trace looked pleased, in the way someone would look pleased who saw something very bad coming for her enemies. Pleased, but not pleasant. “A coverup? You can prove that?”

  “With these documents, yes,” said Jokono. His voice was trembling a little, and not with tiredness. Jokono was a very experienced lawman. In his time, he had presided over some significant events, arrests and scandals. But this one changed the course of Spiral history, and the lives of hundreds of billions of sentient beings. “They took great effort to hide it from everyone, most particularly their own bureaucracies, who are supposed to provide checks and balances to prevent this sort of thing, among tavalai. But it looks like the sard have only been allied to the tavalai for cash. For how long, who can say?”

  “And someone needs to keep track of the records,” Trace finished. “To document what they’ve been doing, and count the money. And they kept it in the Vault, where no one else could see.”

  “Most of it looks as though it’s going into sard/tavalai joint ventures,” Jokono added. “Large corporations of some sort. I’m sure the sard like money, since they love numbers so much, but they’ll love advanced technology even better. That was always their Achilles heel.”

  Erik thought hard. They’d just given one piece of potenti
ally incriminating evidence to the Captain of Podiga. This one, if analysed properly, would surely sink the State Department. But sinking the State Department was not their primary mission. It had been the price that the rebel faction of Fleet had demanded, in exchange for help in robbing the Kantovan Vault. To share this particular bomb with the Podiga, at this time, would be to play an ace card without knowing the size of the pot, nor the shape of anyone else’s hand.

  “Thank you Jokono,” he said. “This gives us a vital bit of ammunition. We’ll spend it when the moment is right. In the meantime, you should get some sleep at last.”

  “With your permission, Captain,” said Jokono, “it’s nearly first-shift now, and I’d like to synchronise myself properly back to first-shift. If I’m to stay awake, I might as well keep working and show some others what I’m doing in person.”

  Erik shrugged. “If you think that’s best.” He rose. “Good work, Ensign. On this, and the Konik job. You even impressed Lieutenant Dale, and that’s not easy.”