The Liberty Fleet Trilogy (War of Alien Aggression, box set two)

by A. D. Bloom

  "If I have any power, it's not in the hulls and hardware orbiting this planet. It's in the officers and crews."

  "Yes. We're not imprisoning them. We need them to lead the convicts you'll train. There will be millions upon millions to choose from."

  Ram nodded grimly. "I should have known. Earth is emptying its prisons on this planet."

  "The Aussies at Staas HQ have already named it. They're calling this planet Otherworld. But we won't be sending only convicts. We'll also send the ones that are causing problem in the minds of the powers that be. Global dissidents will be among them, including a number of anti-establishment activists and displaced, largely ethnocentric minorities raising hell in a dozen countries on four continents."

  "Some of those groups will be at each other's throats once you exile them here."

  Cyning smiled. "And, therefore, they will have far less time to cause trouble for us. They'll have each other to fight and a world to build. And they won't have to build it all themselves, of course. They can buy what they need from Staas Company."

  "They won't have money."

  "They can fight once they're trained. That's quite a salable skill these days."

  "You want to make this into a kind of mercenary planet?"

  "Expertly applied lethal force is a valuable export. I'm sure you don't approve, but it'll happen with or without you, Devlin. I'd prefer to work with the devil I know. You'll gripe and whine, but in the end, you'll cooperate because you're well-aware it will go better for all involved with you at the helm. You won't treat the convicts like some men would."

  "I'm not training your mercenary armies."

  "Of course not. You're the Governor of Otherworld and prisoner number one. You should know that in addition to the Human colonists, there will be bugs. You won't govern the Shediri, of course. Hive Regent Kesik is simplifying her political landscape and sending upstart rebel Hive Hrt'ee to share the planet with you. As far as the Regent is concerned, the further away Hrt'ee the Usurper is from the homeworld seat of Shediri power, the better."

  "Why did Hrt'ee's bugs attack my recon party on this planet? Did you set that up?"

  "They didn't attack you because that never happened. But if it had, I would promise you I was not involved in any way and that if Hrt'ee the Usurper had a motive it would have been because she wanted to colonize a system free of any future Ekkai threat. I very much wanted the same thing, but I had seen it working out differently. I had hoped you'd succeed in your arrogant bid to save the Ekkai from an Earth fleet and the Ortani Imperium's wrath would do the dirty work of making this system safe for us. It very nearly did, didn't it. Who would have thought you and the exploits of your combined task force would inspire another more powerful species to intervene and shield the Ekkai homeworld from an induced stellar mass ejection of planet-killing proportions. The power that unknown species wields is unthinkable."

  "I told you all I know about them."

  "And not one bit of data was recorded from their 30km-long ships during the encounters with them. It's perplexing. I assumed at first you had somehow scrubbed the data from the mainframes of all your ships and Guerrero, too, but my technical specialists assure me that's not the case. They assure me there was never anything recorded."

  "Do you really trust me to tell you if I had scrubbed all the data?" said Ram.

  "No, of course not." Cyning laughed to himself with a nervousness Ram read as fear. "Ghost ships," said the company man.

  "Alien ghost ships if you use the Shediri words for them."

  "We've searched this planet, of course, and not just where they were last seen moments from impact with the surface. We've found nothing."

  "I'm not surprised," Ram said.

  "For the sake of appearances, you'll maintain command of Hardway and your ships until we've got the treaty signed. After that, you'll hand the ship to Dana Sellis. Mr. Biko's history makes him a less attractive choice to the Board of Directors. Then, you'll lay the cornerstone of the first convicts' blockhouse, push the 'go' button on the company's fast-build printers, and when they finish the cell-block, you'll move into a prison of your own making. The convicts of the first wave will begin to arrive shortly after that."

  SCS Hardway, sub-tower

  Alone, back in his quarters, Ram Devlin didn't sleep easily. When he finally did, there were no nightmares of the Squidies' homeworld as it cracked and no visions of all the faces that war had taken from his sight forever. None of the dreams that had tormented his sleep for so long repeated in his mind. Instead, he experienced a new dream, over and over. He counted seventeen loops of it like a message repeating and each time it did, he got the unsettling sense he wasn't alone.

  Ram's consciousness had been forcefully invaded before. This wasn't the aggressive telepathy and mind sifting employed by the Ortani emissary, Thrall. That had been painful and invasive. This was more like being read a story and imagining what he heard. He imagined the same story seventeen times before he came to waking again.

  He blinked at the ceiling not understanding what he'd dreamed. As he rose to put on an exosuit, he told himself he had no proof, no way of knowing if what he'd seen had been real or only imaginings, but the urgency in his movements said otherwise. He knew. It was real and it was a message. From whom was clear, but what they were was harder to say.

  The moment his foot hit the puddle of thin slime on the deck of his quarters, he froze. Instinctively he looked around for something leaking somewhere, but there was nothing. The bulkheads and everything else were intact; nothing had been disturbed except the deck beside the bed where something had left a wet patch.

  Ram poked at the slime on the ball of his bare foot with his finger. It didn't have a smell and it didn't look like anything they carried on the ship. It looked uncomfortably biological and somewhere in the back of his brain, the part that he'd dreamed in, he knew it was. A pair of Lucy's Marines were outside his hatch. No prankster got in to leave this. Whatever it was had manifested itself out of thin air. He wouldn't have believed that possible, but he'd seen it before - recently and not only in his dreams.

  He scraped up enough of the slime to fill a jar of nuts, screwed down the lid and then stared at the deck wondering what to do and if he should decontaminate it somehow or not. He left it the way it was and put on a liner and his exosuit and made for the hatch.

  In Bay One he commandeered a longboat, but not a pilot. Pardue on the bridge gave him clearance without questions, but Anton Cyning would be watching. Ram Devlin lifted the longboat out if its bay, rotated his maneuvering thrusters and made sure to tell her on an open frequency that he was on his way to UNS Guerrero to see Captain Chun Ye Men.

  The battleship had taken punishment, but even with all the hell she'd just seen, at least half her sixteen guns looked operational as Ram flew the longboat past the canyon-scarred bowplate where enemy beams had tried to hull her and failed. Her power was majestic. It gave him a tingle under the skin and made the hair on his arms stand up the same way a formation of Sky Jacks did in a close flyby of the command tower. He admitted to himself was going to miss that.

  SCS Guerrero

  Chun's bright-eyed XO, Whip, gave him the clearance to land himself and met Ram outside the locks. "He's in the brig," Whip said as Ram removed his helmet. "We didn't want to put him there. I just want you to know that."

  "Don't they usually take a prisoner to another ship in a situation like this?"

  "That's right. If he didn't need to be around for the treaty ceremony on the planet, I'd swear they're just trying to humiliate him in front of us."

  There was probably an easy way to get to Guerrero's brig, but the labyrinthine path Whip took him on to get there gave him the impression they'd gone entire kilometers down into the bowels of that immense ship. The passages narrowed and the deep hum of the energized coils told Ram they were somewhere near engineering and the ship's massive pinch set when they came to the brig.

  Whip brought Ram in the hatch and told the g
uards to give him whatever he needed. "You can find your own way out of here, right?" said Whip.

  Ram couldn't, but he figured he'd be going a different way anyhow. "I've got it. Thank you, Commander."

  Chun's XO disappeared out the hatch. "The Captain is this way, sir," said the first of the four guards.

  "I'm a Privateer. You don't have to call me sir."

  "Yes, sir."

  The cells were arranged off a central corridor and after passing through two more hatches and a man-trap five meters long, he followed the guard to the last cell on the right where Captain Chun Ye Men sat behind the perforated crystal-pane of a see-through wall. The cell was as spartan as Ram had expected and smaller.

  As he reached in his pocket for the set of counter-surveillance devices and set the six multispectral noisemakers on the surrounding bulkheads as best he could, Chun rose from the cot jutting from the bulkhead of his cell and tossed down the book he'd been reading. Ram switched on the noisemakers and felt the twinge of their vibration in his teeth and mandibular joint.

  "I hate that noise," Chun said. "It reverberates in this tiny cell."

  Ram said, "Enjoying your time off? What are you reading? Herodotus..." Ram said, glancing at the spine.

  "The more things change..." Chun said.

  "But this time they did change Chun. We changed them. We bent the arc of history with our own hands and made the altruistic lies they sold us into the truth. With machines of war we fought and won victories that preserved life. We did the best things possible with the power they gave us."

  "That was inspiring, Devlin, especially for a pirate. But I didn't mean to sound bitter about all this," Chun said, rolling his eyes over the bulkheads of the cell that confined him so closely. "What we did was what I joined to do. It's too bad I'm going to a very dark hole for a very long time, but it was worth it. It was a bargain, actually." The UN Captain smiled.

  "Deal of the century."

  "They tell me you're going to prison, too, but a nicer one. And under different circumstances."

  "They'll confine me after the treaty signing."

  Chun nodded. "I'll be there for the ceremony and then, after that, they'll ship me to the dark side of the moon."

  "There's something I have to do before they lock me up, Chun."

  "What's that?"

  "I need a favor."

  "Whatever I can do for you." Chun spread his arms out to almost touch the bulkheads on either side of his cell.

  "This ship carries a stealth insertion craft for your Spec Ops teams. I need it."

  "Why?"

  "There's somewhere I have to go and I don't want anyone to see. Specifically not Anton Cyning. He's watching me very closely at the moment."

  Chun shook his head.

  "I need you to trust me."

  "I do trust you. If you say you have to do this, I believe you. And I believe it must be done. But I can't let you steal government property." Before Ram could protest, Chun grinned and said, "So I'm coming with you."

  "You're in a cell. In the brig of a UNS battleship."

  "My battleship, Ram." That made Devlin grin. Cyning thought all the power was in the hardware. "I'm escaping," Chun said. "It'll serve them right for trying to humiliate me and my crew by locking me up on my own ship. Go get my guards."

  Ram brought the warrant officer in charge. "What's that sound?" he said when he heard Ram's counter-surveillance devices. "Like ringing in my jaw..."

  After Chun told him to, he brought the other three guards with him down the corridor to Chun's cell where the UN Captain explained what he wanted from them and how he was going to escape. "I don't want you four to be prosecuted for this. We'll need to make it look good, I'm afraid. We're going to have to hit you sailors one or twice each so you can say we knocked you out."

  The warrant officer clearly looked uncomfortable with the idea, but his mouth just opened without any words coming out. "What's wrong with that plan?" Chun asked.

  "All four of us, sir? Knocked us out, Captain?"

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "With all due respect, Captain, sir, there's four of us and we're...and you and the Commodore are..."

  "Are you saying we're too old to have believably overpowered you four teenagers? I'm 39," said Chun. "And Devlin here is what?"

  "31."

  "The oldest of us four is 22." The sailor let the words hang there like the point he was trying to get across. "And we're armed." He patted the electrified truncheon on his belt.

  "What if we had weapons?" Ram said. "Would that make it believable?"

  "What...what kind of weapons, sir?"

  Ram brought his open hand up in plain view slowly so as not to spook anyone before he extended his index finger like the barrel of a gun with his thumb pointing upwards. They chuckled politely at the joke at the very same moment the gesture he made armed the hidden flechette gun integrated into back panel of his suit glove. The barrel holes along the line of his knuckle were too small for them to see and be alarmed before Ram curled his index finger back as if squeezing a trigger and holding it.

  The projectiles sprayed out soundlessly from four barrels in rapid fire as he swept the face of his knuckles and the spitting flechette gun over the torsos of the four guards. The narcotic flechettes penetrated their jump suits and their skin and dissolved almost instantly. The sailors dropped to the deck, faces surprised, but limbs slack. Unconsciousness followed almost instantly.

  "No!" Chun slammed at the crystal-pane.

  "Easy...they're only sleeping," he said. "I shot them with narcotic flechettes. The darts are thin as a needle and made entirely of the narcotic compound they were intended to deliver. They've already dissolved...all gone. These sailors will wake up in 12 hours. Maybe earlier; they are pretty big fellas, after all."

  Chun Ye Men sneered at him. "Are you trying to say we couldn't have taken them in a fight? Get me out of here," said Chun. "The swipe key is on the Chief's belt. You'll have to drag him back over there for the biometric verification. I can get us to the bay without a lot of contact with my crew, but on the way to the boat I want an explanation."

  The UN captain led Ram through corridors so narrow and low he assumed they were only there to service whatever was behind the panels that projected outwards from both sides and made the passage even more claustrophobic. The path Chun picked went up ladders in vertical access tunnels for power conduits where the gusting winds threatened to blow them down hundred-meter drops as they bounced off the side. It was dangerous, but direct, and Ram was glad there wasn't much opportunity for him to explain to Chun on what evidence he was basing his decisions.

  By the time they got to what the UN Captain claimed to be a hatch leading out into the corridor near the Spec Ops craft and the bay, Ram told him about the dreams.

  "A dream? This is all about a dream you had?"

  "There was physical evidence as well," Ram said. "The goo." Chun groaned. "I dreamed the same dream seventeen times in a few hours. It wasn't my dream, Chun. It was someone else's dream they put in my head. It was a communication - a message. From them. The species that saved the Ekkai from the Imperium."

  "But who are they? What are they?"

  "Don't you want to know? This is our only chance. I'm not waiting years to find out. I need to know now why they came here and why they interceded. Are they our allies or the Ekkai's? And why was the last place we saw them here, crashing into the planet beneath us to leave no trace. I can't figure it out from prison and neither can you."

  Out in the corridor, all the open the space around them made Ram feel exposed. Chun pointed to a hatch set off at one end of a string of airlocks leading into the bay where Ram's longboat was still parked. Chun said, "The two stealth craft are stored in their own section behind a moving blast door that leads into the bay. That hatch is our way in. Just walk with me to the hatch and we'll enter quietly."

  UN sailors came and went from another hatch into the bay some fifty yards down the passage and ha
dn't yet noticed them. Chun chose his moment and began to walk that way, closer to them. It was the only way to get the hatch they needed to enter, about fifteen meters away. Ram noticed him slouching, doing his best not to look like the captain as they stepped the last meters to the hatch.

  Chun began to input a code into the lock interface, and Ram said, "Your codes still work?"

  "Always leave a back door for yourself."

  Ram couldn't see the light over the airlock door just down the passageway. He never saw it change color and was as surprised as Chun when its hatch opened and five of Chun's maintenance crew came out, took off their helmets, and recognized their captain immediately.

  "Skipper on the deck!" one of them said so loudly it hurt Ram's ears.

  Chun raised his hand to quiet the man. Ram raised his hand and sprayed them all down with narcotic flechettes. They collapsed where they stood.

  "No! Dammit, Devlin! Stop shooting my crewmen!"

  The ones father down the passage were still walking away; they hadn't seen a thing yet. "Open it."

  "Bloody pirate. I'm already regretting this." Chun still spun the wheel and opened the hatch.

  "12 hours...I promise they'll be fine," Ram said as they stepped into the dim compartment.

  Chun quickly closed and sealed the hatch. "We've got less time than you think before they lock this ship down," Chun said. "Don't just stand there gawking." Ram couldn't help it. He'd never seen the specs on this craft for obvious reasons and now that it was before his eyes, he wasn't sure he was seeing it at all.

  It looked like a 17-meter stroke of ink-wash staining the air like watercolor stains wet paper.