“And he thought Fortitude were like those snakes?” Kono asked.
“‘Walk tall when they confront you,’ he said. ‘Hold your chin up, and look them in the eye. Let them stand taller, or prouder, and they will devour you.’”
That ‘evening’, 1800 Defiance time, Erik sat with Trace and those senior crew not currently on duty back in the Aronech Dar habitat, where they could all have the relief of full gravity while eating the day’s final meal. It was parren food again, which most of the crew were acquiring a taste for, to the displeasure of those who hadn’t.
“I spoke with Lisbeth today,” Erik told them. The ‘room’ was just back of the kitchen, an open space between ovens and storage units where Phoenix’s two chefs, plus some rotating help from regular crew, loaded trays and meals, and now sent the clattering piles of dishes back through the washer they’d brought down from Phoenix. The officers’ table was two smaller tables shoved together, and held all bridge crew ranked Lieutenant or higher, plus Trace and Dale representing the marines, and Hausler for Operations. Engineering remained unrepresented as Lieutenant Rooke, of course, had sent back a harried reply upon notification of this meeting, requesting that someone send him a summary. Erik doubted he’d find time to read that either. “The situation with Rehnar is bad. Speculation is that Gesul might win the count, making him the official ruler of House Harmony. Everyone doubts Rehnar will let that happen, so he’ll probably move against Gesul soon. He’s got support from the other denominations, but how much support is unknown.”
“How much is being orchestrated by House Fortitude?” Kaspowitz asked around a mouthful of tuku — a flightless, domesticated bird, they’d been told. The crew called it parren chicken.
“It's a sensitive thing,” Erik admitted. “None of the Harmony denominations want to admit they’re doing Fortitude’s bidding. But if Gesul wins, we have the Domesh winning control of House Harmony, and all the other houses will hate it nearly as much as they did when Aristan was head of the Domesh.”
“So if Gesul wins, we’ll have helped to start a parren civil war,” Lieutenant Commander Dufresne said bluntly. “That’s charming.”
“Anyhow, you can read about it,” said Erik, toying with his food. “Lisbeth’s given us a full writeup, she can explain it far better than I can. The real thing I wanted to talk about here is the Major and I meeting with Captain Sampey and Commander Adams of Lien Wang.”
An attentive silence on all sides, beneath the hum and crash of kitchen machines. Somber stares. A few faintly hopeful. Erik suspected that at this time, most of them just wanted to go home. Whether that was possible or not, he suspected, was largely up to him. Again.
“News from home is that the Worlder disturbance is getting worse,” he told them. “It’s not a full scale civil war by any means, but it turns out that the Worlders actually have some warships, and are using them from hidden bases somewhere out in deep space, away from populated systems, to launch raids against undefended Fleet shipping. Freighters mostly, there’s been some casualties, speculation is the Worlders are after supplies as much as anything — weapons especially. Fleet’s caught and destroyed a couple, but there’s no decrease in attacks, so more speculation says they might have more ships than thought, or even a shipbuilding capability.”
“It’s almost like they remember what we did against the krim for five hundred years,” Kaspowitz said sarcastically.
“It’s almost like Captain Pantillo was right all along,” Shilu added sombrely. There were nods and murmurs of agreement around the tables.
“Sampey says Fleet have offered to let us come home with clean records,” said Erik. More anxious silence, at that. “If we agree to pledge total loyalty, etc, etc… and if we come home immediately, share everything we’ve acquired with the data-core with no questions asked, and basically reincorporate ourselves into the chain-of-command.”
“Which they broke,” Dale said loudly. Some of these soft, spacer pussies might have wanted to go home, but Dale was letting everyone know he thought otherwise. Erik repressed a smile. He’d found Dale’s tough guy routine aggravating in the past. Now he was coming to realise that it wasn’t a routine, it was just Dale. And some larger appreciation of why Trace found him so invaluable to the operation of her company.
“And we’d have to abandon any thought of going out to croma space and try and track down the origins of the alo,” Erik continued. “Obviously.”
“Where are we standing with that anyway, Captain?” Draper asked. “I was up to date until you met with that parren scholar, Juresh. Then I lost track.”
“Because we haven’t heard back from her yet,” said Erik. “She’s got contacts in one particular croma household, it takes time for messages to travel back and forth. And the croma don’t trust outsiders much, they’ll only accept outside contacts if it’s through a trusted intermediary. So we can’t move until we get Juresh to approve it for us, basically.”
“Captain,” said Stefan Geish, the only Second Lieutenant present. He was as old as Kaspowitz, a much-decorated veteran of his post, yet had shown no interest in promotion, and had a conspicuous lack of that sparky, charismatic drive that Fleet always preferred to see in their full Lieutenants. But for experience alone, Erik valued his inputs more than he did from his Commander and LC — on these matters at least. “God forbid I should try to speak for everyone, but it strikes me that the data-core is the most important thing on anyone’s table right now. The parren are all queuing up to get a look at it, likely if they start blowing each other up it’ll be access to the data-core that does it — Gesul’s got access now and that makes him far too powerful for the others to tolerate.
“I think we’ve gotta go home, sir. We have to bring them the data-core — yeah they’ll probably fuck it up, Fleet fucks a lot of things up lately, pardon my Porgesh. But they’re all we’ve got, and we’ve gotta take the chance to drum into their thick heads just what they’re facing out here. And the data-core not only does that, it gives them the technology they’ll need to fight it.”
There were glances, and a few, faint nods. It was the value of Stefan Geish — he could be brusque and sometimes rude, but he said what the majority were thinking but lacked the conviction to say out loud.
Erik nodded to himself, then looked at Trace. “Major?”
“I’ll follow your lead, Captain,” she said calmly.
The calm didn’t last when they were back in his quarters.
“Okay, here are the things we lose if we go back home,” Trace said, in a tone that suggested he was going to hear her list whether he wanted to or not. Erik sat on his bed, activated the wall-screen with a feed from the Phoenix control tower of all their current deployments, and pulled off his boots. Trace joined him on the bedside.
“First,” she said, “if we hand over the data-core, we lose all our leverage. We have our reputation with the Captains, plenty of whom have been sticking their necks out for us it seems, but that still leaves plenty of senior officers in Fleet who’d rather see us dead than rehabilitated. We’re trouble. Fleet doesn’t like trouble. To them, we’re a virus that spreads disorder and dissent. The Fleet immune system will react accordingly, whatever nice things they say to us now.
“Second, the reason no one gets to meet the croma is the same that almost no one gets to meet the senior parren — lack of leverage. We’ve got plenty right now. We go home, we lose all that with croma and parren alike. Not to mention, we leave Lisbeth hanging out to dry, all alone in parren space without all the political capital our presence gives to Gesul.”
“We do that if we go see the croma, too,” Erik reasoned, gazing at the wall screen. The icons showed Rooke still in place, working on the ship. Lieutenant Lassa was in charge of the night shift at Phoenix Tower, protected by two squads of Delta Platoon, the other two watching over Phoenix in her repair bay.
“Not to the same extent,” Trace persisted. “Away from human space, we’re still independent. We’re still in the gam
e. Back home, we surrender autonomy to Fleet, we’re not a player anymore.
“Third, we don’t know anything about alo or deepynine motivations. We don’t know how they met, why they get along, what their long-term goals are. We don’t even know what the extent of their technological advantage is. If it’s based on what the reeh have, we could be in real trouble because I’m not sure anyone in the Spiral has any counter to that. So what if they’ve got some kind of secret weapon, or hidden motivation up their sleeve that we could conceivably figure out by chasing our leads out to croma space? And we give that up just to go home?”
Her eyes bore into him, with her usual controlled intensity.
“I know,” Erik said simply. Looking at the screen instead of at her was probably cowardly, but he knew how hard it was to match Trace’s intensity on most things.
“So why do you want to go home? Lay it out straight.”
“I think we’ve done enough,” Erik said simply. “We just got hammered, Trace. We’re lucky anyone survived at all.”
“Who cares?” said Trace. Erik did look at her. She was utterly serious. “You know I love my people. All of our people. But we didn’t embark on this so that we could live, Erik. This isn’t just some ass-kicking Kulina thing — that wasn’t the oath that any of us swore.”
“Sure, we’re all prepared to sacrifice,” said Erik. “And we have. But we’ve been lucky too, Trace. We took some huge risks in what we’ve done so far. And Sampey’s right — we did destabilise tavalai space, we did destabilise parren space, we might even have accelerated any aggressive timetable the alo and deepynines have against us. And I’ll defend all of those actions to my last breath, because I think they all turned out for the best, for humanity as a whole. But odds are we’re going to stop being lucky sometime. And the consequences for everyone when that happens, when we finally screw something up and make things worse for everyone…”
“So don’t screw up,” Trace said bluntly. “I believe in you.”
“This isn’t about belief. It’s about statistics — take enough chances, one of them will blow up in your face.”
“No, it only becomes about statistics when you run out of self belief.”
Erik sighed. “I’m warning you Trace, don’t push me too hard to stay out here. There’s already one very big reason not to go home that’s clouding my judgement, and it’s not Lisbeth.”
Trace frowned at him. Quite predictably, she didn’t get it. “What?” she asked finally.
“You,” said Erik. “If we go home, Fleet may leave the rest of us alone, but the Kulina are another matter. You might survive if you went into hiding, but you’d never do that. Probably they’ll find a way to kill you.”
Trace gazed at him. Erik looked away, swallowing hard against the lump in his throat. “You don’t think that’s the reason I’m arguing for…”
“Don’t be stupid,” Erik interrupted with a faint smile. “Geez, you’d think you thought I didn’t know you at all.”
Trace thought about it. “Sure,” she said. “They’d probably get me. You can’t let that sway your thinking though.” And she looked away with a roll of her eyes, and shook her head, then laughed. “Damn you’re clever. You’ve got me arguing against myself.”
“It’s the Debogande people-influencing gene,” Erik explained. “We’re born with it. Look what Lisbeth did with the parren.”
“Look,” said Trace, “you may have good reasons for going home. Certainly it’s what most of the crew want, even the marines. But I won’t let you make that decision because you’ve suddenly acquired a few bruises and it hurts. This isn’t a school excursion. If you’re not prepared to die on this job, you shouldn’t have joined.”
“It’s a balance,” Erik said quietly. “The potential good we might do, the potential bad we might do, and the dead certainty that more of our crew will die either way.”
“It’s an extraordinary threat,” Trace disagreed. “It requires extraordinary efforts to beat it. I don’t think it’s why we’re here. I think it’s why we’re alive.” Erik smiled at her, repressing the emotion that he knew she didn’t like, and clasped her hand. Trace clasped it back, then gave him a light whack on the cheek with her other hand. “And don’t let me ever catch you making command decisions based on my welfare. I’m not your wife.”
Erik grinned. “You’d make a great Debogande.”
Trace snorted. “I don’t think your mother would approve.”
“You kidding? She’d love you. Finally a woman in the family who gets out of bed before she does.”
Trace laughed. She had a nice laugh, all the more pleasant for being so rare. Erik wished she’d do it more often. “Get some sleep,” she advised, and left with a kiss on his forehead. Erik watched her go, and wished she hadn’t done that. It made the prospect of sleep less likely.
Two hours into his sleep, an uplink call woke him. “This is the Captain,” he said, reaching groggily for his AR glasses in case the call were emergency enough to require immediate situational awareness.
“Hello Captain, it’s Jokono.” Ensign Jokono, that should have been, but the life-long policeman sometimes forgot military protocols.
“Go ahead Joker.”
“A parren shuttle carrying the scholar you were talking to regarding contacting the croma took off from Sector KV-140 twenty-one minutes ago. It crashed nineteen minutes ago, directly into the side of the Tower District geofeature cliff. All aboard were killed, including your scholar.”
Erik should have felt more shocked, but he’d seen so many shocking things of late that his nervous system couldn’t muster the energy. “Is it possible that you could investigate? I don’t know who has authority over this, or what your relations are like with them.”
“Yes Captain, I’m on the ground at the crash site now. I thought I’d delay informing you until I had more concrete information, given you were sleeping. Best to only wake you once. It will be hours before I have anything else to report, it can wait until your morning.”
For the thousandth time, Erik felt relief to be working with a crew of such professionals. “Good work Joker. I’ll speak with you then, and in the meantime try not to step on any toes.”
“Yes Captain, I’ll do my best.”
Probably murder, Erik thought as he lay looking at his situational display. It was too convenient that that particular scholar, who was key to Phoenix’s onward journey to see the croma, just happened to be in a shuttle crash. Surely there were a lot of parren who didn’t want Phoenix making that particular contact… though what their reasons might be, he couldn't guess. Parren always had reasons.
A year ago, such developments would have kept him awake much of the night fretting on possible answers. This year, he was asleep barely a minute past the end of Jokono’s call.
In what felt like only a few minutes later, Erik got another call. “Captain,” he said loudly enough to drive the exasperation from his voice. He hoped. The glasses told him it had in fact been thirty-three minutes.
“Hello Captain,” said Lieutenant Lassa, on night-duty at the tower. “A new contact just arrived at jump point. It’s Makimakala. Captain Pram says he’d like to meet with you at the earliest. Thought you’d like to know.”
Erik actually smiled. He’d been expecting this particular visitor for some time now, and was surprised it had taken so long. Which was probably not smart — tavalai left to their own devices were usually punctual, but tavalai bureaucracy could make a man late for his own funeral. Makimakala had to deal with more bureaucracy than most.
“Very good, Lieutenant,” he said. “Tell Captain Pram it will be nice to see our old friends again.”
“Yes Captain.”
This time when the call ended, he was asleep again in twenty seconds.
Lieutenant Tyson Dale hadn’t been too upset to get pulled from his bunk. Four months of waiting around might have been nice for everyone else, but for him they’d been hell. For all his love of the United Forces Marin
e Corps, Dale was quite unsentimental about his service. He’d joined to fight, not to drill, not to get promoted, not to climb the greasy pole through the back offices of Fleet bureaucracy. To come all the way to this amazing city, only to pass each day with dull routine, had tested his patience.
He stood with First Squad, widely spread upon a ledge halfway up a Defiance cliff. This cliff was part of what was known as the Tower District geofeature, and made one wall of a canyon in which the enormous spires of the Tower District were located, like so many chopsticks bundled together in random patterns. The canyon was nearly two kilometres wide, and Dale had heard various explanations for the technical details of Defiance’s sub-surface design that resulted in such oddly natural-looking features. None of it directly affected his job, and so he mostly didn’t care. But it sure looked amazing to be here, in person, gazing out at the perfect detail that only an vacuum could provide.
A vacuum with no sunlight. Defiance’s moon was many lightyears from any sun, having been thrown into deep space by a catastrophic science experiment many millennia ago, carried out by some earlier incarnation of the AI Machine Age. The steel canyon was now alive with artificial light, much of it restored when Hannachiam had brought the power back on, and more coming up each day as parren engineering teams multiplied. The Tower District looked spectacular, multi-coloured striations of light dividing various levels in the sixty-or-so clustered towers. Half of them were occupied now, so many parren importances had moved to Defiance in recent months — nearly all of them House Harmony, an even split of scientists, bureaucrats and soldiers. Shuttles and surface runners buzzed the scene with running lights flashing, and every few minutes a bright trail of flame would light on the horizon, then climb vertically to reach a ship’s passing orbit. There were hundreds of those now, and in just four months the population of Defiance had grown from zero to three hundred thousand and climbing. And yet, despite these localised patches of growth, most of Defiance remained unexplored.
Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five) Page 8