by M. D. Cooper
Jessica hadn’t known what to expect, but when they dropped out of the dark layer and into normal space, a sight unlike any she had imagined met her eyes. Ahead of them, the cool white dwarf—the final state of a star not unlike Sol—gleamed softly in the black of space. It was not so dim that she could stare at it for long periods, but it was also not bright enough to be visible from more than a hundred AU.
“Gah, I’d heard flying around these things is a bitch,” Cheeky said. “Now I see why.”
“Size of a small planet, gravity and mass of a star,” Finaeus replied. “They’re a pain in the ass.”
“How has it gone undetected?” Jessica asked. “It may be dim, but all the stars around it would be affected by its mass. Any amateur astronomer would know it was here.”
“Oh, for sure,” Finaeus agreed. “We sow a variety of tales about places like this. I believe the latest is that a mission did make it out here, but there was nothing present but the star itself, and it was releasing random gamma bursts that made it way too hazardous to be around. According to our faked records, over half the crew died when the gamma rays breached their shields and melted most of the crew.”
“Youch!” Cheeky gasped. “That would keep me from coming out here.”
Finaeus nodded. “We actively discourage anyone that gets ideas about visiting it, as well.”
Jessica was certain she knew what form active discouragement would take.
“Is that a ring wrapped around it?” Nance asked. “Seriously, it looks like there’s a ring around the star—but it’s way too close.”
Finaeus nodded. “Yeah, it’s a ring, they’re mining it.”
“Mining a white dwarf?” Nance asked, casting Finaeus a skeptical look. “That doesn’t seem wise.”
“It’s tricky, to be sure,” Finaeus nodded. “It’ll grow as they tear it apart, but that’s a ways off. For now, it’s a great source of carbon and oxygen—just what the FGT needs.”
“How exactly are they pulling that off?” Nance asked.
Finaeus smiled. “It’s genius, really. The ring is suspending a number of black holes that are whipping around the star pretty damn fast. The shearing force at the edges of the gravity fields is tearing the surface off the white dwarf.”
“Ohhh…” Nance breathed. “And they’re rotating the black holes and using the grav fields to pull the debris into collectors or something, right?”
“You got it,” Finaeus nodded. “Star mining 101.”
“He says like it’s just a thing you do,” Cargo grunted.
Jessica had noticed that Cargo seemed perpetually unhappy of late. Tanis had always described him as calm and unflappable, but that Cargo seemed in short supply over the last few years—he was growing more terse with each passing day.
She filed the concern away—soon they would be in New Canaan and Sera could decide what to do with her old crew.
“Pretty much,” Finaeus replied. “It’s a bit risky to do it this deep in the Inner Stars, but we’ve operated a base here for a long time. Only in the last few hundred years—since we worked out how to properly construct the Ford-Svaiter mirrors and had the ability to ship the material out—have we started mining it, so any significant decrease in mass is a long way off.”
“We still have a few days to get down to the star,” Cheeky said. “When should we expect to hear from your friends?”
“Damn soon, I’d bet,” Finaeus replied. “I’d put those shields of yours up. They may shoot first and ask questions later.”
“It’s like your psychic,” Jessica said as her display lit up with a tightbeam communication aimed right at them. She flipped it to the bridge’s audible systems.
“Freighter Starstrike, you have entered interdicted space. Stay on your current course and prepare to be boarded.”
The voice was a woman’s and she didn’t sound happy at all.
“So, no ‘Get out of here, or else’ message?” Cheeky asked.
“Do you really think that anyone who sees a Transcend installation ever gets to leave?” Finaeus asked. “Detection has two outcomes: capture the intruders, or drop the black holes into the star.”
Cargo whistled. “I bet that makes quite the boom.”
Finaeus nodded. “We’ve only ever done it once in a situation like this. It’s still a last resort.”
“One hell of a last resort,” Trevor commented.
Jessica glanced over at him. He rarely joined them on the bridge, and spoke even less, but she could tell he was always soaking everything in.
Jessica replied with a smile.
“What’s the plan?” Cheeky asked, and Jessica realized that no one had determined what response to give to the Transcend outpost.
“I suggest something simple, like OK,” Finaeus replied. “That message only took seven minutes after our FTL exit to arrive. That means one of their ships is within three and a half light minutes of us.”
“Or less,” Jessica added.
“And here I was all happy that I brought us safely out of the dark layer,” Cheeky groused. “Instead I practically dumped us right in one of their ship’s bays.”
“Three and a half light minutes is hardly right in one of their ship’s bays,” Cargo said. “Given the data we had on where this thing was, you did a damn fine job.”
“They’ll drop their stealth fields before they send a shuttle over, and there’ll be at least three cruisers,” Finaeus said. “When they do, I’ll send the message that they’re to escort us in. If they just come and get me, it may not go well for you after I’m gone.”
“They have stealth, too?” Nance asked. “Like the Andromeda?”
“Is that one of the Intrepid’s ships?” Finaeus asked.
“Yeah, one of her cruisers,” Jessica replied. “It can walk right up to an AST dreadnaught and they’re none-the-wiser.”
“Sounds like they may have tech almost as good as the Transcend on that front,” Finaeus replied. “If it were straight forty-second century tech, I would say the Transcend has better, but where the Intrepid is involved, I imagine all bets are off.”
Jessica registered a response from the hidden ship, advising them to maintain their course and deceleration pattern. There were no threats; there didn’t need to be.
“I still don’t see anything on scan,” Jessica frowned.
“If they’re staying stealthed, then they may take a day or two to catch up to us and remain unseen,” Finaeus replied. “Or there could be a ship right on our ass and they’re just waiting for an excuse to blow us out of the black.”
“We’ll comply, but keep the stasis shields up,” Cargo ordered. “Let’s let this play out.”
* * * * *
The Transcen
d cruisers suddenly appeared, without warning, two days later.
“Four!” Cheeky called out. “Pay up Cargo, you lose!”
Cargo muttered something unintelligible and tossed a credit chit to Cheeky.
“I don’t know why you took that as payment,” Finaeus said with a frown. “You’ll never be able to spend that where you’re going.”
“Never say never, is what I say—except to say never say never,” Cheeky grinned.
“Sometimes you make my brain hurt,” Cargo said with a scowl.
“And here’s our message,” Jessica said as she flipped the inbound call to the main holotank.
A woman appeared and surveyed the ship’s bridge. Her eyes were cool, but a slight smile tugged at the corners of her mouth when she saw Finaeus.
“Finaeus Tomlinson,” she said with a rueful shake of her head. “Why am I not surprised to see you here—and on the Sabrina of all ships.”
“Admiral Krissy Wrentham,” Finaeus replied with a smile as he flung his arms wide. “You are quite possibly the last person I expected to find out here! I thought you were out on the front.”
“Things…have been getting tense lately, we’ve been beefing up Inner Stars forces, and I got moved here. Mining this little space gem has become a big op, as you can imagine.”
Finaeus nodded. “I bet it has. We’re not here to get in your way, we’d just like to take a little hop through your jump gate.”
“We’ll escort you into Gisha, the gate control platform. We can discuss our options there,” Admiral Krissy replied and closed the connection.
“Well that seemed ominous,” Cheeky said with a worried look at the bridge crew.
Finaeus nodded. “I’ve had drinks with her on more than one occasion. She’s usually a lot more talkative than that.”
“Cut and run?” Cheeky asked as she twisted in her seat to face Cargo.
“Not yet,” Cargo shook his head. “Let’s play this out a bit more.”
INVASION
STELLAR DATE: 10.21.8945 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Watchpoint Command
REGION: Ascella System, Galactic North of the Corona Australis star forming region
The display on the holotank was alarming, to say the least.
“What have the outer sentries picked up?” General Greer asked. “Are there more coming?”
“No signs at present,” the officer monitoring comm reported. “They may finally have the full armada assembled.”
“That’s almost three thousand ships,” General Tsaroff shook his head. “We should have hit them when they first started jumping in. We could have worn them down with minimal losses. Now I’m not certain we can take them out.”
“That’s not our protocol,” General Greer replied, glad he ran the watchpoint and not Tsaroff. By the grace of his three stars over Tsaroff’s one, they had evaded more than one exposure to the Inner Stars.
“There’s no protocol for a full-scale invasion,” Tsaroff replied. “This is an act of war. They know we’re here and they plan to find us. Now we can only fight or run, and either action will reveal us.”
“Not if we blow the stars,” Greer replied. “We can jump out through our gates before the blast hits us. If the AST ships don’t get out before the star gets them, the light from our departure will still be masked by the novae.”
“This watchpoint is too valuable to just destroy,” Tsaroff replied, his brow pulled down low. “We can’t just abandon it.”
“All watchpoints are expendable,” Greer replied calmly. “You’d do well not to get so attached to them. We watch—that’s why it’s in the name.”
“If our only purpose is to watch, then why do we have nine hundred warships tucked away in this system?” Tsaroff asked.
“You know why,” Greer replied.
Tsaroff didn’t respond but sent a cold glance instead. Greer had been waiting years for the surly, trigger-happy general to request his own transfer out, but perhaps it was time to send him on his way more forcefully. First his aggression with the Intrepid, and now this. Of course, there may not be a watchpoint to transfer him out of in a few days.
Watchpoints were always ready to disperse at a moment’s notice. Protocols were in place to ensure that the lightest footprint possible was left in the system, and plasma would scrub the hidden bases from existence at a moment’s notice.
It was a strange way to live, for every action to be ephemeral, leaving no footprint. Greer consoled himself with the thought that even the entire Transcend, vast as it was, would eventually disappear without a trace. With the exception of primordial black holes, the universe abhorred and destroyed anything that attempted persistence.
But those ruminations aside, for now, he had to wait.
ADMIRALTY
STELLAR DATE: 10.21.8945 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Hand Headquarters
REGION: Airtha, Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
“Sera,” Elena exclaimed as she crashed through the door to the director’s office. “It’s happened. The Hegemony found Ascella!”
Sera ran out from behind her desk, racing after Elena to The Hand’s CIC room as messages filled her queue.
“How?” she asked as they dashed down the corridor.
“No one knows!” Elena replied. “Everyone that reviewed the trail the Intrepid left agreed that there was infinitesimally low probability that the AST fleets would be able to tail them. And there’s no way they did it this fast—not without help.”
They arrived in the CIC before Sera could formulate another question and the scene portrayed above the holotank engrossed her. Ascella was invaded.
“How old is this view?” she asked.
“Fourteen hours,” one of the analysts replied. “The watchpoint is passing micro-pulses out to the outsystem gate and it’s dropping probes through. So far, they haven’t picked up any of our installations.”
“Has the president altered the standing protocols at all?” she asked.
“No, alpha protocol still stands.”
Sera accessed and reviewed the details of the protocol. It called for the watchpoint to only engage if discovered, and then only as a delaying action to cover their retreat. If any portions of the watchpoint were revealed, they would be utterly destroyed. Any engagements were to be fought with only what the AST would consider conventional weapons.
She looked up at the holotank’s display again. As of fourteen hours ago, AST ships were still arriving. The count numbered over three thousand, and almost half were dreadnaught-class.
Elena was right. The Hegemony of Worlds had to know the watchpoint was there—otherwise, they would have seen a scout before the full fleet arrived. There was no way standard protocol could apply now.
“How did they know?” she asked the room, which consisted of data analysts, tacticians, operations managers, and other support personnel.
“It’s improbable, but possible, they have stealth tech we can’t see and they scouted it first,” one of the analysts offered.
“We have people everywhere in the AST. There’s no way the Hegemony has that tech and we didn’t know,” a tactician replied.
“They could have developed it after seeing what the Intrepid’s ship, the Andromeda, could do. The ISF has tech even we are hard-pressed to detect, though we can see their stealth ship from time to time in the outer reaches of New Canaan,” a woman in data aggregation offered.
one of the tactical AIs said.
“That is a question we’ll need to answer,” Sera nodded in agreement.
“Feed me any assessments as you make them,” she said to the room. “I have a call with the Admiralty.”
Sera nodded to Elena and walked into her chief’s office to join the meeting. Once inside, the walls around her disappeared, and her mind was transported to a wide conference room where the two dozen sector command admirals sat around the table, along with President Tomlinson and several other advisors.
She noted that Adrienne, Secretary of the Interior, was in attendance. The man was a thorn in her side and had far too much of her father’s ear for her liking.
“…haven’t found any of our bases yet,” Admiral Kieran said as Sera joined. “But with a force that large, you can bet they know we have them, and they’ll hunt until they find them.”
“I’m disinclined to simply wait until they ferret out our bases one-by-one,” President Tomlinson said. “Sacrificing one of them would be preferable.”
“I don’t know that they’d stop looking,” another member of the Admiralty said. “Would you? They obviously have credible intel that something is in Ascella. They’ve sent ten percent of their non-core ships. That’s a bold move if they don’t know we have something there.”
“Sera,” her father addressed her, “do you have any information about what they could have known? Given the level to which we’ve infiltrated the AST, I find it hard to believe that we didn’t catch wind of this.”
The silent accusation hung in the air, but Sera ignored it.
“My teams are analyzing the data we have, identifying the disparate ships they’ve sent. So far, none of them are a part of any fleet groups we’ve infiltrated. We’re also pouring over all communications from field agents, and have sent check-in calls to a select group to get further intel.”
“Are you saying that there are AST fleets with no Hand agents in them?” Admiral Jurden asked.