“Stolen,” Erik said simply. “A heavy descender, docking at Chara retrieval date twelve days ago. It’s currently docked with Podiga, you can see it with your own eyes.”
“Admission of this theft is enough to see you convicted by…”
“Read the damn document!” Erik snapped. “State Department are liars and traitors to the tavalai people. They are an illegal institution under tavalai law, and as senior legal authority in tavalai space you must state it so. State Department have no authority to give orders to tavalai Fleet, and without that Fleet’s enforcement, you have no means to keep Phoenix here. Jurisdiction for our circumstance now falls to the parren, we are leaving.”
Communications broke off, followed by another intense series of multi-directional lasercoms between Ragada and various tavalai ships, including Tantotavarin.
“What a mess,” Karle observed.
“It’s a wonder the tavalai ever ran anything, let alone the whole Spiral,” his co-gunner Harris agreed.
Erik felt no exhilaration to watch it, as the laser coms escalated, and ships began rolling like giant, breaching whales, bringing new lines of communication into play. It looked to Erik that the ships of tavalai state were quite literally writhing in agony. Suddenly he was frightened, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it. Pull the right brick from the foundation of a great tower, and the whole lot could fall. No matter how rotten that brick, and how deserving of punishment, the consequences for all the billions of lives in the tower could be catastrophic. Phoenix’s bridge crew had had similar arguments about their human Fleet, in the aftermath of their own calamity, and the murder of Captain Pantillo. Fleet was rotten, but the consequences of bringing it all crashing down would spell catastrophe for humans everywhere. As much as Erik wanted to see those responsible punished, even he was horrified by the thought. Given what he’d seen in recent months, of the scale of the threats facing humanity, the prospect frightened him even more now than it had then. And to fatally damage the Tavalai Confederacy at such a time, and remove one of the last great, remaining obstacles to the expansion of alo/deepynine power, could be nearly as bad. He was increasingly convinced that if humanity was going to survive the alo/deepynine alliance, they were going to need tavalai help to do it. Now he saw that prospect slipping through his fingers.
Shuttles were now beginning to fly, from various tavalai ships, heading for Ragada this time, not Toguru, nor Tantotavarin. The balance of authority amongst the competing tavalai institutions had swung once more. Erik decided he could wait no longer.
“All hands,” he announced. “Main engines start, this is a thirty-second warning. Light outbound push, we are about to move.”
They didn’t really need the warning — Phoenix was on red alert, which meant the crew cylinder was no longer rotating, and everyone was zero-G and strapped to something. But there was no need to rush, in these circumstances least of all. He uncapped the thumb and finger guards on the twin control sticks on his armrests, and tested the arm braces. Diagnostic raced across his screens, a cascade of green lights, sign that Engineering had been doing their usual excellent work despite all the recent punishment, and had everything ready to go.
“Message from Ragada,” called Shilu. “Insisting Captain Debogande should personally attend a meeting to explain this latest evidence.”
It was almost tempting. If Ragada could convince their esteemed institution to convince State Department to drop all charges in return. But the prospect of throwing himself upon the mercies of the tavalai legal system struck Erik as preposterous at this point, or any other point. “Thank Ragada on my behalf,” he told Shilu. “Wish them best of luck, and peace and justice for all tavalai.” Ten seconds, read the countdown timer. “But decline regretfully, because Phoenix is needed elsewhere. We’re leaving.”
7
The parren called it Brehn System, and it was spectacular. Humans called it a late-stage proto-planetary disk — a solar system in formation, and still several hundred million years from maturity. Phoenix, Toristan and five of the Domesh Fleet ships entered at solar nadir — a necessity given the lethal consequences of high-V travel through the elliptic plane — and for a two-day cruise from jump, they all had an incredible view of the brilliant, glowing white disk of galactic debris. Brehn had eleven planets forming, two visible to the naked eye, and the rest at high magnification — congealing blobs of gas or rock, half-lit by the brilliant white light of what would soon become an infant G2 star.
Brehn was three long jumps from Cherichal, and right on the edge of the parren ships’ capabilities, though Phoenix handled it easily enough. The second jump had taken them into parren space, and the course correction before the third had broken something on one of Toristan’s escorts, though it had decelerated easily enough, and called that they were safe, and would dock with a local shipyard for repair, if possible. Phoenix now spent forty hours on approach toward the Brehn elliptic to complete post-jump systems inspections, as the relevant bridge crew brushed up on their parren political and military institutions.
Brehn had no habitable worlds, and even those proto-worlds currently forming were torn by infancy volcanism, and an endless bombardment of asteroids and ice chunks. Miners of any species were usually not crazy enough to try such conditions, but with this much extractable material just floating around, they didn’t need to. Brehn System had a population of between three and four million parren, their parren escorts informed them, almost all of them tied to the mining trade, and scattered in a multitude of small bases, mobile refineries, hollowed out rocks and other, makeshift habitats. On passive coms, Lieutenants Shilu and Lassa could probably have guessed that population themselves, listening to the waves of operational chatter emanating from various parts of that enormous white disk.
Four million people was a tiny number next to the big inhabited worlds of a grounded population, and so, as in human politics, the mining systems were agglomerated together with the bigger systems, from where this entire region of space would be run. Parren political districts generally had three such inhabited systems, plus perhaps fifty uninhabited ones that nevertheless possessed a large enough mining and industrial population to rate representation in the parren parliament.
If it could be called a ‘parliament’. Parren leaderships ruled like kings and queens, yet changed with moderate frequency without the need for elections, thanks to the constant rearrangement of the five parren Houses due to phase-change. Parren had an institution, known as the Jusica, who performed a regular census in each territory. The House with the largest percentage of population got to form the government in that region. Currently, Brehn System was ruled by House Harmony, courtesy not of Brehn’s puny population, but by the fact that Drezen System, thirty-two lightyears away, was nearly forty percent House Harmony aligned, and had been for a century. Brehn System’s miners got a seat in a separate parliamentary body, like a senate, which guaranteed them special rights as an independent system, but within the Harmony-run framework of this sector.
It all seemed straight forward enough to Erik, whose family had deep roots in the highest levels of human politics, and had always grasped the structural nature of such things. Less straightforward was why the Domesh Denomination got their own Fleet of warships, and other military forces, in an obvious rejection of common sense.
The answer, as near as their hosts could explain, was that each parren House had its own military, and technically the denominations weren’t supposed to hold any sway. The Incefahd Denomination ruled House Harmony, and thus all House Harmony military forces obeyed the command of Tobenrah, the Incefahd Denomination’s leader. Only they didn’t. House politics infected military procurement, promotion and structure in ways that Erik simply did not have time to learn about in any depth, but the result was that each denomination held a certain amount of sway amongst the various units of House military — by far the most important of which, of course, were the fleet. Captain Duoam of Toristan was the commander of an entire House Harm
ony squadron — thirty ships as far as any human knew — yet he was Aristan’s man, pledged mind and soul to the Domesh, as were all of his crews.
“So their military forces are divided into five Houses,” Shahaim said as they’d eaten dinner over their customary post-shift review in Erik’s quarters, “and each of those Houses is divided again into, what… ten denominations? Fifteen?”
“At least,” Erik agreed, into the notable silence from Kaspowitz, who would normally be dominating this kind of conversation. But on a run into a place like Brehn System, he was permanently nose-down in his never-ending calculations, and not much on conversation, or sleep.
“No wonder they’ve been such a non-event in the scheme of Spiral great powers since the end of the Parren Empire,” Shahaim concluded. “And no wonder lots of parren might be attracted to a single, charismatic leader who promised to unify the whole crazy mess and focus parren power outward for a change, instead of always fighting amongst themselves.”
“Aristan’s charismatic?” Geish said drily. “I hadn’t noticed.” And for once, Erik had agreed with the dour Scan Officer’s cynicism entirely.
From the edge of the system’s elliptic plane, the ships dumped their remaining hard-V and cruised for a further thirty hours into the increasingly hazardous soup. Erik recalled Argitori, where Phoenix had first run after Trace had broken him out of Fleet HQ’s brig on Homeworld, and where they’d first encountered Styx. Kaspowitz informed them all that as messy as Argitori was, Brehn System was approximately three-point-seven times more densely packed with rocks, ice and other ship-killers.
Soon the auto-correct was overriding the pilot once every five minutes or so, dodging some tiny object that was not yet logged on the parren's system navigation charts. That chart, Kaspowitz further informed them all, currently logged in excess of seventeen trillion objects, system-wide. Every time a ship, base, buoy or drone detected a new object (which in Phoenix’s case was running at nearly a hundred a minute) it would upload the object’s details into the steadily growing database. That database was growing at fifteen million new objects every twenty-two hour parren cycle, logged by parren across the system, yet Kaspowitz estimated that accounting for the mass that must exist in a system exhibiting this much gravitational rotation, they’d probably logged less than ten percent of the possible objects, not counting the baby planets or the baby star.
To make things even more interesting, every few minutes, somewhere in the vast system, something would violently explode — the consequence of so much floating mass orbiting a central core with enough variance and relative-V to produce some truly impressive collisions. Most of these detonations were an extremely long way away, like everything else in space, but the collective sparkle they made on scan was enough to confuse Phoenix’s tactical systems into querying whether an active battle was in progress. Erik thought that if an active battle were to break out in such a system, half of the fast-manoeuvring ships would find themselves destroyed by the local environment in a few minutes, without a shot being fired.
Their final destination was a large refinery facility, currently docked on the pointy end of an egg-shaped asteroid that contained a population of a few tens of thousands of parren spacers. The asteroid rolled, generating gravity for those within, while the refinery did not — an unglamorous steel bulk with multiple spherical storage tanks to power its central machinery, turning raw materials into steels, plastics and various gasses. Numerous small insystem runners and haulers parked about, or were docked directly. As Erik brought Phoenix into an adjacent park about thirty kilometres from the five-kilometre asteroid, he could see the fusion thrusters built into the rock, making it like a very slow moving spaceship in its own right. The rock was scarred with countless craters, like a piece of cheese nibbled by a thousand mice, and would doubtless take small hits every few months. The big engines would adjust its track just enough to miss anything bigger, and the navigational charts were good enough to spot most of them coming years in advance… but even so, there were unpredictabilities in a system like this, and new trajectories being created all the time by the bigger collisions elsewhere in the system. Localised cascade effects from nearby big hits could create a rain of destruction that no low-powered thrust was going to save them from. It wasn’t the kind of place any parents wanted their kids to grow up working in, for sure, and if parren psychology worked anything like human, everyone here would be earning danger pay.
As soon as they’d arrived, Toristan’s Captain came, and one other, by shuttle to dock at Phoenix’s Midships. It was the middle of Phoenix’s second-shift — midnight, by Erik’s sleep clock — but no matter, spacers did not get to choose the time when things happened, and it put Draper and Dufresne in their chairs in the natural middle of their working cycle.
Erik waited outside the briefing room, talking with Kaspowitz with coffee in hand, looking at the displays the Nav Officer had been obsessing over, while the parren officers and Aristan settled into the room behind, with the rest of Phoenix’s senior crew.
“I can’t talk for Stefan,” Kaspowitz was saying, “but I don’t trust scan at anything beyond low-V in this mess. The luminosity variance is extreme even for a rock storm like this place, and the percentage of stuff in the lowest visibility range is high… we’re just not going to see very much in any high-V manoeuvres.”
“Stefan’s working on the sensitivities now,” Erik replied. Second Lieutenant Stefan Geish had given the impression he wasn’t going to get much sleep either, despite not being invited to the briefing. “He thinks he can get another ten percent sensitivity to the invisible stuff, at least in the time we’re docked here.”
“Still not enough,” Kaspowitz said with concern. “If we have to make a run for it in this place…”
“I know,” Erik agreed, trying to get his mind to focus. So many variables to keep track of. So many possible outcomes, and so little time available to spend thinking on them. “I’m more worried about where we’re going, at the moment. If anything goes wrong, it’ll go wrong there.”
“In which case,” Kaspowitz persisted, leaning his tall frame down to talk quietly as crew passed in the corridor, “we’ll have to run fast back to tavalai territory, and the fastest way back is through this place.”
“Not really sure I want to head back to tavalai space right now,” Erik murmured, staring at the blank wall.
“Captain, if Aristan’s as trustworthy as we expect, we’re not going to have a choice.” Kaspowitz’s tired eyes were grim with meaning.
“Yeah,” said Erik, sipping his coffee. “Yeah, I know.” Lisbeth. The name seemed to hang in the air between them, unspoken yet obvious. Erik had absolutely no idea what to do about it. So much was at stake, so many lives beyond just that of his sister. And yet… Kaspowitz grasped his shoulder in firm-fingered solidarity, to show he understood. “There’s a chair for you in there if you want?”
Kaspowitz tapped his slate. “The parren have sent us good charts on the Dofed Cluster and Cason System,” he said. “I need to do a full review.”
“Make sure you get some sleep,” Erik said after him as the tall Nav Officer left. “I’m sure even you function better with sleep.”
“Uh-huh,” said Kaspowitz, and was replaced by Suli Shahaim, pausing at the door before entering.
“Erik,” she said. “Don’t feel you have to downplay her, just because she’s your sister. She’s Phoenix crew, and that matters to all of us.”
Erik gazed at her for a moment. Suli was such a familiar, indispensable feature of the bridge. On any other ship she could have made a good captain, but on this ship she’d found her true calling — not as a cog in the machine, but as the grease that kept all the cogs smoothly humming. Suli was a very good pilot, but not a great one, just as she was very good at command, without being spectacular. Where she excelled was in anticipating the needs of others, and always being on hand to give them anything required, whether information, advice or other vital facts, before they even
knew they needed it. If Captain Pantillo had been a father figure, Commander Shahaim was everyone’s mother — not at all like Erik’s mother, perhaps, but much like the mothers of some of his more accomplished friends. Wise, unflustered and friendly, always approachable and never using her authority to bludgeon anyone. If ever you were in trouble, Suli would be there, giving simple advice, and letting you know she had your back.
“Thanks Suli,” said Erik, and gestured her inside, then followed.
Erik made his way into the circle of chairs, glancing at several light-armoured marines against the walls. They were there for the visitors — Captain Duoam of Toristan, and his second, Captain Lalesh of Cherow. None had argued with Phoenix’s insistence that the meeting should take place in human territory. Phoenix had Drakhil’s diary, and the means of understanding it. That being the case, it was not the parren way to argue with necessity.
Neither captain even glanced at the armed marines, but sat to either side of Aristan, huddled and murmuring in low voices. The captains were not robed, but wore jumpsuits as any species of spacer might wear. Their headwear was unusual, a stylised visor beneath a crown-like ring that served as a helmet, Erik guessed… though also, he saw it had attachments at the back. Likely it would clip to the captain’s chair headrest, and secure the head in place during high-G manoeuvres. Parren were slim compared to humans, with deadly-fast reflexes, but likely they would suffer worse in combat manoeuvres. Behind their visors, both captains were nearly as covered as Aristan, with only their lower faces visible.
Erik sat between Trace and Suli, the other chairs occupied by Romki, Shilu, Lieutenant Jalawi of Charlie Company, and Phoenix’s lead shuttle pilot, Lieutenant Hausler. Everyone else who needed to listen would be doing so elsewhere on the ship, but these were the people most likely to contribute back. Given Jalawi and Hausler’s presence, Erik had some idea what Trace was thinking.
Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) Page 9