The Princess of Caldris

by Dante D'Anthony

  Princess Maggio had uncovered an eel's nest at the edge of an undersea lava flow, and we, apparently, were her dive buddies.

  He sensed my fear, and he responded with a camaraderie. Not that I was in any less danger, rather, he was letting me in on a secret-the tools of the trade, as it were, facing dangers, “Look, kid it’s like this If the entire Caldris system, it's Navy, and worlds and industries and culture, be overwhelmed-take heart, little man. Neither the Imperial Transhuman Overlords, nor the Multi-Star-system mega corporations, are truly united within themselves. There is their weakness-within each Colossus are in fact various competing sub interests-iron vs. copper, copper vs. tin, tin vs. clay-and thus a small dedicated force with subterfuge may divide and conquer the giant idol."

  His stone features creaked, a visage that spoke of eons, patience, and geological deep time. "We will find them out, root them out, then set them upon one another."

  Now it was I with an icy look covering pity. No, I thought. Like Coco-butter Parsons, you will make a valiant stand then die.

  Perhaps my young mind was too deep in a gloom. Parsons had just slammed the ship that hit us with the wormhole shock-wave. Hammerstein was producing leads with my assistance. Yet the time for me to view the Sunrider relic was close at hand and even from the mess hall I could feel its grim presence, emanating hopelessness. My body seemed caught in thickening cement, an astercrete mined from the loneliest asteroid in the darkest corner of the cosmos.

  Something wrong, something that ate human ambition and dreams, something that whispered, "All is lost; look now upon the wreckage of your species’ aspirations, and weep.”

  Gloom indeed.

  Ecclesiastes, vanity, vanity, all is vanity. It drummed upon my mind. Early in my obsession with history and its repetitions I went into a virtual reality play, commonly know as a virtreel, and found myself at the fall of Troy. It was a splendid virtreel, carefully crafted by its makers with the most accurate details of the period recreated in all their Bronze Age glories. After the commonly known drama unfolded, I found myself as one of the refugees making haste away on a water ship. The land shrunk with distance and as the last light of day ebbed, there was only the water, the ships, and the sky. Ominously, even from that distance in the fading light one could see the smoke of Troy's burning like a funeral pyre.

  Today we made more scans of the Sunrider lodged into the side of the O'Neil station at the Arcturian colonies and found myself wondering what the refugees from that war might have seen and felt looking back. –Princess Clairissa Maggio.

  Roy Rudder

  V

  Hangar 3

  In the morning, station time, we made for Hangar 3 and the relic Sunrider. My sense of foreboding increased with every step. I could sense with the beefed up security who knew it was there, and who merely knew something was amiss in the hangar. Few knew. Very few. Even the guards at the outer locks didn't know.

  Inside, we'd been given wide berth. There were no techs poking and prodding at the thing, and it sat in all its streamlined glory as one era's ultimate killing machine. Hammerstein watched me like the proverbial hawk waiting for a sign when too much became too much.

  Yet for all my foreboding, curiosity was having its way with me now. Like any boy of twelve seeing a great and mysterious warship, my mind raced with a ridiculous excitement. It was a frigate, large indeed but no more so than some of the great space planes which it resembled after a fashion. My first impressions were the quantum echoes of its lost crew-they had been proud. They had been convinced they were serving their Imperial defense from the menace of the Colonials.

  Then I sensed their shock, still echoing-sheer confusion like a firestorm-something wrong. Terribly wrong, it had fractured their sanity in a wild snap, and there was only chaos in its wake. The chaos still lingered, somehow, I knew, like a spider fallen into a hot pan, squirming.

  The chaos that hated mankind.

  It had hated the Imperials, hated the Colonials, hated us all-no, hated all living things with an outrage, a disgust, a lust for destruction. "You will do well to keep your techs from the vessel's neural net and computers." I said. I had spoken involuntarily. "I suggest rudimentary bots only-nothing approaching even a modicum of an AI should even touch it. Toxic is too mild a word."

  "An Imperial trap?" Hammerstein asked dryly, wishing it were so.

  I gave him a look beyond my years, "No. Something is here which demolished the minds of strong, brave, hardened Imperial Cyborgs. It was not of their making. Nothing could have broken those men, no ordinary tribulation. Here is a poison which perhaps the very, very fewest of men could have endured."

  "And the Princess and her archaeological team were exploring it unawares. Perhaps our nemeses are after it as a weapon?"

  The smile on my face, at that, set poor Hammerstein aback. I looked like a Devil myself then. "Fools beyond measure if they do."

  Fools beyond measure...

  "The ship itself is a Sunrider 3062 Frigate. It's equipped with five drive systems and backups for various flight conditions. The center of the system is the antigravitational, or gravitational antipolar response field- a helicon magnetic plasma sail system for emergency fuel efficiency and movement in and out of heliopauses-a hyperstring enabling system to negate mass through five dimensional wormhole hyper streams-a super ion drive Buzzard ramjet array for normal space bursts through complex field distortion areas-and emergency use limited standard rocket backup fail safes. Navigation systems are collated through eighty quasar emissions and the galactic plume..."

  I stopped and stepped back-I had inadvertently begun reading from ship's data core.

  "Easy boy!" Hammerstein stepped forward and instinctively placed himself between I and the relic.

  "Rather well engineered, weren't they." I quipped sardonically, seeking to add a note of levity. "Must have been a nasty surprise to the poor Arcturian Air corps when these monsters showed up."

  "Yes, yes indeed," Hammerstein smiled, "although nasty, I think, was probably not the expletive the poor buggers must have lipped when they engaged."

  "And now we have one, nearly intact, and still packing the poison that brought her down."

  "After the war the Imperials stopped using Cyborged crews. They raised an entire new caste of soldiers-not linked to their Hive mind at all." Hammerstein said quietly. "It was the last Great War of multiple systems. Since then there have only been small inter system wars. No one dared challenge the Imperials again."

  Gabriel Montagudo, Stefano Tsai

  "I think Princess Clairissa Maggio may have found the Arcturians were not, in fact, threatening the Imperials. Whatever echo still lingers in the neural net of that ships computer systems, well, I think that is something more menacing that a galaxy full of feisty Colonials. Both factors provide your motive-and it falls doubly on the Cyborgian Central Command Economies-the Empire. As for the other as yet unknown suspects, we'll have to wait for them to strike again." I offered coolly.

  Hammerstein glowered impatience and looked at the relic. "We've got a crew picking the remains of Parsons' kill in the Oort now. There will be something. There always is."

  We made back to the Officers mess for a breakfast of cakes and coffees. At least that's what they called it. I ate silently, knowing Hammerstein had already requisitioned the bots I suggested from a com. By lunch the bots would be scouring the relic.

  The wreckage salvaged from the wormhole attack had arrived at the Hangar as well, and the techs were happily after that for clues. I could sense Hammerstein was pushing back an idea that had validity, so I drilled him with my little kid eyes and he knew that I knew.

  "So what is it detective? What is it about the wormhole attack that you don't want to face?'

  He chortled a grumbling laugh that bordered on a burp, and looked at me with a bitter sweet half smile. "No hiding anything from you, aye?" His eyes darkened and I felt a rush of emotion he'd walled up for decades suddenly opening up, and its impact was palpable to me
.

  His sense of self from that long ago decade was profoundly different-he had been young, a handful of years older than I. His self image from that time impacted me like a strange reflection of the man in front of me-leaner, with swift hair, a reckless step, and an unquenchable awe and thirst for adventure. Youth. Caldris had been in a territorial dispute with the Paramon Republic near the Pleiades.

  Paramon was always disputing some silly rock, and this time it was one of our Kingdom's trade stations near Baal One, a horrid seared rock of soullessness-but our trade station orbited it and operated important business with Chrysalis Isla, deep in the Pleiades Confederation.

  Hammerstein's memories came at me-the flight deck of his first assignment, glorying in the sight of the Kingdom's ships of the line at the ready. Anticipation, joy, a thrill of imminent combat-and then the impossible, the unheard of-a wormhole deep in the gravity well of Baal One sweeping at at them like a cobra, hard and fast and the young Hammerstein watched as the ships of the line-and all of his friends were on those ships-disintegrated in the irresistible shock wave.

  He was nineteen and alone. The only real family he had ever known had been those fellows on the other ships. He had been transferred from one of those very ships that morning.

  There was an awkward moment as the face of the young Hammerstein morphed into the older iron man in front of me, more muscled, more scarred, more resolute. Suddenly, I knew, he was still carrying his nineteen year old self around, standing forever on that flight deck watching his friends die, and an indescribable loneliness taking their place for the rest of his life.

  "Paramon and wormhole shock waves." I said, breaching the subject like pulling a patch from a wound-quickly so as not to drag out the inevitable.

  Most people would have barely perceived the slightest flicker in his eye. For me, however, it was as if the line of ships once again ruptured in violent sequence across his soul.

  He smiled, and I realized the old iron Detective had been forcing that smile for a very long, painful time.

  "Yes. No one uses wormholes in combat except pirates, madmen, and Paramon. Too dangerous. I was at the Baal One Station disaster. In a lifetime of military and police service, I've never seen anyone use them since, until now. I'd stake what's left of my career on it-we follow the bread crumbs and there will be a Paramon agent at the end of the trail."

  I glowered, sick with the sudden knowledge of how a nineteen year old cadet feels after watching his comrades perish, and Fifty years of loneliness after that, always stepping back from that personal bond that would leave the soul wretched come the loss. Fifty years of heavy metal shielding for the soul, and underneath it all, a brutalized nineteen year old boy on flight deck.

  "Don't let your desire to settle accounts with Paramon prejudice your judgement, Detective," I offered from the strange place of his memory.

  A tech came in with a report; efficient, cool, and detached-he handed the data to Hammerstein. The detective's eyes widened and a name came loud to me as if the old block had spoken it aloud.

  "Colonel Herb Lahman, Black Devils." I said.

  Hammerstein looked about the room, "Cut that out. Come on. We need a bigger boat."

  Coco-butter looked at up the mention of "bigger boat.” Hammerstein saw the eager eyes.

  "Pick out the best ship at the Fort, pilot, and tell them we're requisitioning it, King's orders. You can fly a bigger boat right?"

  "I can fly any ship in this Navy, Detective. I was born in flight, my mother at the helm, single handed, strato-caster."

  Hammerstein chuckled back and winked. "Good! Then pick out a good one."

  We stepped out of the Officer's mess and I was struck with the realization that Coco-butter's description wasn't hyperbole. He really had been born in a flight dive with his mother at the helm. She'd lost his twin in the struggle, but had managed to save Justin "Coco-butter.” She was an amazing woman. But that is another story. I looked back at Coco-butter as we left with a new found respect.

  The wheels of his mind at that moment were running through a mental inventory of ships he had seen at the Base. Somehow I already knew he was going to pick the--"Kanaafutura?!" Kemp was steaming. "That's my flagship Hammerstein! I want to see a letter of requisition signed by the King himself before you fly out of here with the pride of this base!"

  Fifty years of heavy metal shielding over one's soul can be a particularly painful defense mechanism to build. However, when he chose to use it, Hammerstein could crush groups of trained men with it.

  That smile. In your face. "Really, Admiral Kemp-because I have a hypercaster right in the Hammerhead and I can get the Royal family on the line right now, and you can explain how you need the ship more than they need their daughter?"

  Kemp folded like a kitten, "No, no, no!" He showed both palms, "Take it. Take it-and take a platoon of Airborne. I don't want to see you, or that ship back at this base again without a very attractive Royal personage by the name of Clarissa on board. Alive, viewing historical tapes, and driving the ship's cook crazy with peculiar dinner requests."

  Hammerstein shrugged. "It's a big Galaxy. Have those bots pick that Sunrider apart for clues and I'll cast you on a coded line."

  The old granite detective looked weary.

  Now Kemp smiled, "Go find her Hammer. Bring her back. The Royals-they picked the right man. I know you. You'll be having lobster and feeding them oatmeal before it's done."

  For a moment the memory of the long ago smugglers lifted Hammerstein's gloom.

  But my mind was on the ship Coco-butter had picked. The Kanaafutura.

  What a ride.

  Gabriel Montagudo

  VI

  The KanaaFutura

  It was a beast; built for speed, blood, and fury. Two massive warp cores and two smaller crossed the back end of the ship could ride the hyperstreams like a surfer on the Tangerine sea, or bend space in normal space like taffy at a high-winter fair. She was a charger, like a knight’s stallion of old, well armored, well muscled, and meant to break the enemy lines in one savage, dashing, berserker bolt.

  "Come on kid, let's go find out what our techs have dug up from the wormhole wreckage." Hammerstein was working on an idea, I sensed it.

  Past the serpentine tunnels deeper and deeper into the older core of the base we careened as Hammerstein’s idea turned and turned in his mind.

  I sought to grasp it but it wasn’t fully formed. At length we came to one of the labs and a small group of techs were immersed in scanning equipment over various bits of wreckage. One of them, and older woman, sported a cigar and produced one from a pocket and gave it to the stodgy detective with a flourish, “Hammer, old boy, so good to pick through the blasted bits of your targets again.”

  Hammerstein lit the cigar, “Glad to oblige, Candy, my dear. What’s the word?”

  She puffed and blew smoke in his direction playfully. I sensed her fondness of the “old boy” ran deep. “The word? The…words are ‘Langley Stay’.”

  Hammerstein’s face turned into a grinning death mask. “Herbivore…?”

  Now she smiled and I sensed they had been thinking alike. “Yes, Herbivore. Colonel Herb LaMann. The Lord God King of the wormhole counter maneuvers back at… the Pleiades incident.”

  “The only one who saw it coming in time to pull his ships out. The only one capable enough to counter measure.”

  “There is no smoking gun here, Hammer. But last word is Colonel LaMann was operating a large hardware operation on Langley Stay. Ships, military equipment, all sorts of goodies-black market. The trace navigationals in the computer systems in this wreckage all indicate a flight plan out of Langley Stay.”

  “Put that together with the wormhole attacks and one gets--“

  “Herbivore. He’s the only one who would keep that kind of equipment flight worthy-just because he could. I just had to confirm the ship was out of Langley to confirm my suspicions.”

  Finally Candy acknowledged my presence, “You going to
introduce me or am I already read like a book?”

  “Both. Lieutenant Candy Parker, forensic Science. Please meet Master Winteroud, of the Sole estate at the edge of the Tangerine Sea. A bonafide, genuine, empath. Historian archaeologist adventurer in training.”

  I beamed. It was the first time anyone had called me a “Historian-archaeologist-adventurer” but it was not to be the last. I felt an immediate affinity with Lieutenant Parker, forensic science being not so different from archaeology in so many of its methodologies. There was an intelligence and good humor about her. Sensing deeper, of course, one often finds various sadnesses. I found the sadness shadowed in the back of her mind. I left it alone, tried to keep my focus on what she had discovered in the wreckage of the ship.

  I sensed it had taken her some time to dig through layers of encryption, but like Hammerstein, she had instinctively sensed the involvement of the “Lord god king of wormhole counter maneuvers” from the onset, and had set about reverse engineering lines of code meant to cover up the attack ships origins until indeed she uncovered it.

  “Pleased to meet you, son! Welcome to Fort Oort!”

  I took her hand, and gave her an aristocratic bow. She smiled, and long ago memories of other aristocratic bows she had once been given came to mind. At the estates near the Military academy Specialist Candy Parker had won the hearts of many cadets; at first sight. Athletic, statuesque, and ever a gleam of laughter in her eye-then the memory passed and her thoughts moved her though back to the encryption codes she had unraveled, and the older, more storied woman looked back at me again.

  Several bots moved through the wreckage, scanning. My mind shifted between decades and the deep emotions and perceptions of Candy’s life back to the present crisis. Such was my lot in life as an empath, even at twelve standard Caldris years.

  “So, you two both sense the hand of “Herbivore” behind this-and yet, Herbivore I gather is also an asset for our side?”