The Princess of Caldris

by Dante D'Anthony

  “Don’t be a Baby. Man up a little will you? This is a walk in the park, if you’ve got a pair.”

  “I’ve got a pair, and they both say it’s a royal pain.”

  “Baby. Just for that I’m not giving you any phone numbers from my little black book when we get to Fort Oort. I don’t want you embarrassing me at the base canteen.”

  “You’ve got numbers from Fort Oort?”

  “Silly wabbit, I have ALL the numbers from Fort Oort. Watch your vectors, you big baby.”

  The Oort cloud was looking a lot better to the co-pilot, I sensed. I also sensed Parsons was going to hook him up the ugliest beast on his list just for laughs.

  I felt sorry for the poor beast. Ugly is an accident of birth, rock-head annoying is a failure of basic common sense.

  Tokushima noticed I was awake and once again I was struck by her yin and yang duality as she pushed her particle beam disser off to the side and said, “There, there, little fellow! Did you sleep well?” and brushed her lovely hand through my hair. Every single officer in her unit would have bought dinner for the crew to have that hand caressing them, I thought, and cursed my diminutive size and few feeble years again. What a goddess!

  “Yes Mam.” I said, keeping all my goddess thoughts to my humble boy self but thinking, someday, you will be mine.

  “Oh good!” She smiled down like a Da Vinci Madonna, angelic, unaware of my boy plans to grow up and propose marriage.

  Well, sometimes you just got a take it as it comes. Eat your heart out unit. I smiled coyly back into those huge Asian eyes. I sensed my cuteness was making her want to find a husband and have babies. Foiled by my own cuteness, she would surely set about and complete that mission before I had time to come of age.

  Steve Allman

  I sighed and glanced at her big disser. Oh well, at least the babies will learn to shoot well. I had an impression of her putting a smiley face on a target at 300 yards unassisted, and knew that it was true. She had changed her hair color to black during the flight, some sort of ready-for-death symbolism I sensed.

  Hammerstein tossed me an MRE. “Eat up kid, you’ll need your strength. This CCCE ship at Fort Oort is so loaded with quanta we’re going to have to work at it slowly.”

  Hammerstein’s duty in the Navy patrolling the cloud had been decades before but for him the place held a strange familiarity. “The sticks. Snowball Ocean, The Ninth Circle (Dante’s frozen Hell for the treacherous), Outer Darkness-the place had a hundred nick-names for the unfortunate military stationed out there.

  Oddly enough, prospectors-and Hammerstein, liked the celestial quietude, the glacial slowness, and the epic sense of geologic deep time. Once Hammerstein had been given an order to watch a mining camp suspected of smuggling weapons. He sat watching for so long his communications gear froze. No way to call for help, and the next expected pass by the Navy weeks away, he decided to find the contraband ammo himself. He ignited it, blinding the smugglers temporarily-long enough to get a bead on them, round them up and lock ‘em down.

  When the Navy finally got around to checking on Hammerstein again he was grilling lobster tails for himself, feeding the smugglers oatmeal and water, and dipping into their spiced rum.

  Today, however, he pushed that memory back into his mind forcefully and realized this wasn’t any old two-bit, six or eight asteroid stalking yahoos peddling bootleg matter cannon ammo to wanna-be mobsters on the moons. Whoever was behind the kidnapping, well, there were a lot more of them than eight and they wouldn’t be taken down with boot-camp mischievous ammo reindeer games. No Soirée at the harbor bar this time.

  Moreover, there still wasn’t a definitive direction regarding motive and suspect.

  Hammerstein and the crew couldn’t know, things were about to get a lot worse. Fort Oort was still a haul away when I got the impression of someone. Vague at first, just that sense of being watched that doesn’t come from giant snowballs in deep space, but from eyes. Sentient eyes, self aware, and busy.

  But whom, and busy at what?

  Busy looking. Looking for…a Hammerhead.

  “Get out!” I yelled. “Pilot, get out! Something’s coming!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

  “Detective you need to sedate the child?” Annoying-man barked from the piloting cabin. Parsons, however, had better instincts and changed his flight pattern hard and fast, bringing us up nimbly in a rush above the stellar plain.

  Just in time. A warp ripple slammed the space where we had been just moments before and I knew not even the inertial dampers of the massive

  Hammerhead would have preserved our skins through that shockwave.

  “What the devil was that?” Annoying-man croaked, and even my twelve year old mind knew he needed a slap in the head big time.

  “Watch your dials, Ensign, or I’ll let the kid co-pilot.” Parsons shot at him.

  “Wormhole Generator.” Hammerstein said evenly. They’re trying to knock us out with a shock wave. Get ready for a snow storm.”

  Comet Storm, to be precise. Six light weeks of super dense Oort cloud shaken with the force of a wormhole suddenly bending the very fabric of time and space with the full force of a gravity bomb whose implosion diameter probably spanned a full hundred kilometers, suddenly sucked away to who knows where.

  And like a snow storm, it came on us with hurricane force in the darkest, coldest part of the system.

  “Find its center, Pilot,” Hammerstein howled over the squealing engines banging into the red to maneuver the storm.

  The Hammerhead swerved in the raging onslaught of primordial ice and rock. I got a big jolt of fear from Annoying-man as the field shielding too slipped into the red. “Shoot us a path through that snow, Buck, or we’re gonna buy it right here right now.” Parsons said coolly, eyeing his readouts looking for the center as Hammerstein said.

  Annoying-man turned out to be a good shot, when his hide was on the line, and the particle beam weapon atop the hammerhead wailed into the dark, creating a shockwave of its own which gave the shields on the Hammerhead a respite from the pounding.

  Hammerstein didn’t feel a moments fear, his overwhelming frustration that he couldn’t do something but hang on and watch . Tokushima’s warrior soul finally broke through, yet somehow merged and not indistinct from her maternal, as she still managed a worried glance in my direction.

  I reached out in my mind, deep through the raging proto-comets rushing at us through the long wave cycle. Until the shockwave, the quanta in the debris had followed eons of predictable, Newtonian orbits, a complexity like a sponge dragged through a five dimensional squeegee. I looked for an anomaly in the quanta, through the storm, what I had felt before watching us.

  The gunner and the pilot rode the storm, the gunner spewing expletives, the pilot, still-such control-hunting the eye of the storm.

  I found it in the quanta-yes-a ship with bad intent. Hammerstein was wrong-finding the center of the storm would only lead to the worm-hole’s exit. The assassin’s were at its origin. “Well Hello, Kitty!” Parson’s hissed as the assassin’s vessel gleamed on his holo-screen.

  “Who is that kid?” Annoying- man whispered from his guns, and dead-eye-dick, squeezed his tracer center mass.

  It was a hit, but the other vessel wasn’t finished yet.

  “Let’s dance!” Parson rolled the Hammerhead forward and the combat was engaged into a dog-fight.

  Hammerstein’s only thought was, should we live, they better leave him some evidence.

  I pressed my mind again into the spaces of the dog-fight, hurling with the combatants, searching for a stray thought, a reveal that would help us define who, and why.

  The ships danced in the darkness, but there was no love between them. Tokushima longed for a gunner’s controls. Her face was not so lovely then, and the red emergency lights cast her fearsome and transformed.

  I felt the inertial dampers strain, the G forces begin to pull on myself and then the others. Parsons rolled the Hammerhead, then splined
it erratically so the enemy couldn’t get a clear bead on him. He watched his fields and plasma shots ahead of the vessel, set on an encrypted random pattern of flux so as to avoid enemy targeting computers.

  Then I felt it. A bloodlust from the other side. They were powering up- “Wormhole! They’re powering up another wormhole and we’re flying right into it!” I screamed in a voice too high for a boy my age.

  “Gravity Bombs Parsons!” Hammerstein barked coolly, “Put one up their hind end right now and see what happens to their little wormhole”

  This time it was Annoying-Man whose instincts where good. His thumbs were all over that button before Hammerstein even had the sentence out and there came a FOOSH-CLANG! loud from somewhere in the bottom of the vessel, and I could sense the wicked tool careening toward its target.

  Its onboard computer was even semi-sentient, rather cruel that-like an insect hatched with a very short life and one hideous objective. The gravity bomb’s inner workings were already unlocked in a clockwork nightmare of force fields. At the microscopic level first. Miniature particle colliders racing, then a very small black hole, and somehow its engineers had devised that the systems of the device remain functioning up to nanoseconds before implosion.

  Suddenly the gravity bomb met the enemy’s wormhole, shot through with an aspect of psychotic horror. A gruesome sheen and sudden skew, all things in our universe bent and twisted, ragged and broken. Time and space scuffled in a nightmare of there, and here, then and now, all raging in a sickening chaos of NO!

  Parsons rode that psychotic shockwaves like a mad surfer in a volcanic whirlpool, “Well, Hello Kitty!” The Hammerhead groaned and the metal fatigue tested its designers' best intent. Still, the pilot was flush with joy that the enemy was down and all that he had to contend with was tidal forces sheering at his stabilizer fields.

  Tokushima gave me an unlikely Edo era geisha smile, like a woodblock print ephemeral across the ages; “Welcome to the Navy Air, kid. Glad to have you flying with us.” she said.

  She knew the only reason we were still alive was I kept giving us a small jump on the assassins. I hoped my prescience held up.

  Hammerstein’s mind was already past the combat, past the whirlpool ride, and into the wreckage of the enemy vessel. “What have we got?” he boomed.

  “The G-bomb sucked the front and the bottom of their hull apart just as they fired the wormhole shot. Looks like you have evidence to scour, Sir,” Annoying-man said in a too cool tone. He was grandstanding. The sweat was still drying on his face and his heartbeat returning to normal.

  “Good. Get a team on it from Fort Oort. And get us warm and dry, NOW.” Hammerstein eased back in his seat with a miserable indignation. On the ride home, he thought, he was bringing a bigger ship. I had Gibbons tapping the black box

  of the Hammerhead the whole while. No one suspects a kid. I had no intentions of relying only on my impressions of what was out there-I wanted to examine the ship camera records later.

  IV

  Fort Oort

  Steve Allman

  I was too overwhelmed with the sheer number of minds reaching for disciplined self control to realize the formation wasn’t for us, it was just five hundred airmen waiting for breakfast and their NCOs to give them a hard time fresh out of bed, just because. It was, however, grand and dashing in a very powerful way.

  Formation. Five hundred airmen; every chin, every toe, every knee, every hand, every eye holding themselves just right, steady, steady.

  Stepping out of the Hammerhead I wanted to wave. I could sense their sudden curiosity like a wave of realization: a kid was climbing out of the gunship.

  The scoured and seared hull bore witness to how close death had raked its bony fingers across our beings, and missed. It would be back of course, it always is. I would dodge it as long as I could. The airmen, unmoving, watched from their peripheral vision-an acquired skill I realized. I looked bizarre to them, like a baby Buddha. A baby Buddha wearing an antique disser.

  A wave of ironic familiarity hit me as one of the officers approached us, “Captain Hammerstein. Welcome back. Officer Tokushima.”

  “Admiral Kemp.” Hammerstein didn’t have to salute, since he was now officially civilian. This pleased him to no end. Long ago and not so far away (this very hangar in fact) he had once been under Kemp’s command. Kemp hadn’t been an Admiral then, however.

  “Is this really necessary, Hammer? I mean,” Kemp looked at me, “No offense kid, but really? You brought an empath? Really?”

  Hammerstein shrugged, looked at me, “Whattah ya say, Sole?”

  “Well,” I looked back at Kemp, enjoying where this was going because it brought Hammerstein a moments respite, “Admiral Kemp you’ve got six months left to retirement and you’re just hoping the CO back in the world doesn't putz it up on you, because your wife has been coddling your grandson, who should be in graduate school by now, and you can’t wait to get in his face and tell him “what for” and how you “seen ten thousand better men doing hard duty out here on the ice while he finds his silly self pondering volcanoes and lava flow.” Your CO, Burke Sherwood, “Analwood” as you and the other officers call him…”

  “Okay, okay. Oka-y! That will be enough of that young man, you’re in.” Kemp eyed Hammerstein. “Good to go. Officer’s quarters. You know the way, Hammer. Report to Quartermaster and make yourself at home, but uh-no more of THAT, aye?”

  “Understood, Sir,” Hammerstein said and looked at me with a smirk. He put his finger to his lips, “Shh.”

  And the Fort was ours, just like a holo-show. The big toys, the big boys, only, when all that armor and hardware is sitting out in front of you, for real, it’s not just cool. It’s deadly, and its true grim purpose and function-to break things and kill people, well, it's rather sinister and menacing actually. Your mind wanders to what it would be like to be on the business end of it all.

  Especially since we just were. Walking to quarters, I could sense a strange respect from the airmen still waiting in formation for breakfast. They saw the scars on the hammerhead and knew we had just been in the “doo-doo.” They had another word in their minds for it, but I am a gentleman, after all.

  Combat veterans, I realized. I was now a combat veteran. Half the unit was envious. Most of them hadn’t seen combat yet. I rested my hands on my disser and gave them a look. Dead Eye Dick, yeah, that’s right. We were just in the doo-doo. Walking by their ranks I basked in the glory.

  Coco-butter Parsons stepped up from behind in a rush, “Come on let’s eat before these chow hounds get released and the mess hall is swarmed.”

  “Officers lounge, flyboy. First class on this run. You certainly earned it.”

  Annoying-man chuckled.

  “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” he said.

  Tiffany’s? Ugh, that guy could take the sheen off a convertible Corvette making a one point landing at a beach bash. Mr. Gibbons gave me a small tilt of the head. One of our private signals: "Chuckle-head.”

  We moved along toward the officer’s quarters and I tried to savor the moment. Fort Oort! Caldera Squadron! Yet a troubling realization had begun to form in my mind and its implications shot a cast of foul refuse and menace. Menace over myself, my small cadre of new companions, and even over the five hundred stalwart airmen waiting for breakfast. I remembered then my impressions of the assassins with the worm-hole device. I hadn't felt the same organization was behind them. There were distinct and different culture complexes, syntax, motivations. Thus there was more than one powerful enemy seeking our destruction, capturing royal persons, and making acts of war across the worlds. I glanced up at my Detective friend, Hammerstein, steam rolling across the astercrete of the hangar floor.

  I remembered my fears when he first approached my family at the Sole estate regarding this case, that it would be the end of him and many others should he find the answers he sought.

  Foreboding whispered in my ear, stroking my head with bony fingers.

  The Offic
er's mess had a bit more privacy than the main cafeteria but currently it was populated with pilots still glued to flight reports and having at their food and beverages with the indifferent stoicism of fueling a machine. They were trained men-the objective was everything, food was a tool to sustain their quest. They took no joy in it like the grunts-it was just something they had to do to continue flying. Eat, bathe, sleep; simple maintenance work. There was only the flight that mattered; the high spaces, the void, the patrolling of the deep Plutonian Oort cloud.

  I looked at them and felt their impressive single-minded absorption in their tasks. No foolish boys here, but men and women-veterans with decades of duty on their stripes, care worn soul who could do eighteen hours at a sitting before they realized they'd done an hour.

  Steve Allman

  I, however, was still twelve-and hungry. We took heaping portions of various foodstuffs-synthetic mostly. Hearty, I realized-but then Hammerstein's mind was back on task like a deep space run, plowing through a glacier, shaking loose from a "snowball.” He wanted to know, "So what did you sense kid?"

  "More devils," I said. "But devils we don't know-meaning another faction. Two distinct echoes and cultures lie behind the attacks. We're in deep, and everything-and everyone," I looked about the mess hall, “is in danger."

  Coco-butter Parsons' eyes went dark. "Come on, I'm you're dancin' dolphin. Come on!"

  Hammerstein shot him an icy look, but his underlying emotion under his granite face was pity. Coco-butter, he knew, would die valiantly-but still die. Hammerstein was beginning to grasp the layers of menace. The Imperials wouldn't want evidence that their genocide in the Arcturian War had been a premeditated horror on a bunch of disorganized Ranchero colonials. Who knew how far, even now, they would go to maintain the fiction otherwise? The corporations, tapping the old technologies the Imperials had let slip for a millennium, they would not want word toxic sentient programs were loose in the technologies frying brains for sport.