Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Coms supports that,” Shilu added. “Lots of com traffic, enormous relays. Do’Ran’s not the only world here with a significant population.”

  Everyone on the bridge took a moment just to marvel. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t seen before, in human, tavalai or parren space. But officially speaking at least, no humans had ever been to croma space. Here was an entirely new civilisation, thriving beyond the sight and knowledge of every human to have ever lived. Until now.

  “Coms, are those buoys being helpful?” Erik asked.

  “Um… yes Captain, I’m getting full data from them, all navigational and coms, we all are. Makes things much easier than scanning the system raw.”

  “I’m sure. How about we don’t trust that, huh?”

  “I copy that, Captain,” said Shilu.

  “Good idea,” Kaspowitz agreed.

  “Captain,” said Styx on coms, “I am analysing incoming buoy traffic, I will inform you of any anomalies.”

  “Thank you, Styx.”

  “Jump contact directly astern,” said Geish. “Transponder is clear, it’s the Pau.”

  The croma ship was coming in broadcasting wide — a warship of Clan Croma’Dokran, escorting two alien vessels to the homeworld of the Croma’Dokran. The Pau would have been classified as a medium cruiser in human space, powerful and fast, several shuttles attached and possibly a marine contingent. Certainly there was plenty of room on that crew cylinder, a one-point-two times larger circumference and a slightly faster rotation. The croma had apparently sacrificed some gravity to reduce rotational torque, which beyond certain levels made the ship more difficult to manoeuvre. Croma were designed by evolution to prefer one-point-three and a bit of a standard human gravity, though the sketchy information Erik had read indicated they came in all different sizes. Where croma were concerned, no one seemed particularly clear.

  “Captain,” reported Shilu, “those fire stations are making no effort to stay hidden. They’re broadcasting transponder IDs.”

  There’d been a lot of defensive fire stations at the last world, but nothing compared to Do’Mela. Scan laid them out in a bristling array of red dots on Erik’s holographic vision, covering this approach, neighbouring approaches, all approaches, zenith and nadir, close-in and further out.

  “One thousand, three hundred and forty six,” said Sasalaka as the numbers appeared on her displays too. “Crazy.”

  It was worse than crazy. That many defensive stations would interfere with defensive deployments in a sensible defence of the system. So much ordnance released at once would deny lanes of deployment to defensive and offensive ships alike. If defensive ships could not effectively counter-manoeuvre, all advantage lay with the attackers, who in any attack run were the ones to choose where the battle would be fought. And so many defensive stations could not be resupplied quickly once they’d run out of ammunition, meaning attacking ships could make multiple runs to bleed them dry, pulse up to higher-V to avoid getting hit, and be at little risk from counter-attacking defensive forces who would be as worried about getting hit by their own ordnance as the attackers were. Once dry, useless fire stations would require more ships to quickly rearm them than it took to effectively defend the system. Homeworld had had only twenty-one fire stations, and Fleet’s best tactical minds thought that plenty.

  “I’m suddenly losing all confidence in this vaunted ‘croma wall’,” said Kaspowitz, eyeing those charts with distaste.

  “Maybe it’s a delaying tactic,” suggested Jiri from Scan Two. “Slow down the reeh until help arrives from elsewhere.

  “Maybe they’re not all operational,” added Harris from Arms Two.

  “Given how old a lot of that ammunition must be with the reload times,” Corrig replied from her side, “I reckon they’d hit each other more than the enemy. Even our most advanced guidance systems can’t be trusted to hit the right thing after fifty years in a rack.”

  “Here’s something,” said Shilu, scrolling intently through new datafeeds. “The firebases’ ID beacons are coming out of the translator as family names and dates. Or that’s what the translator says they are anyway, however much we can trust a croma translator. Some of the dates look quite old, a couple of them are… well, sounds a bit unlikely to me, but I’m looking at one that says it’s two-and-a-half thousand years old.”

  “So what the hell use is an antique in defending a system?” Corrig wondered.

  The first scheduled V-dump along this approach lane was coming up in three minutes, and neither coms nor scan indicated anything threatening, so Erik was inclined to allow the chatter. The croma were a piece of a new puzzle they’d have to solve in order to find what they were looking for.

  He flipped channels. “Hello Stan, I take it you’re listening in?”

  “Hello Captain,” came Stan Romki’s voice. Probably he’d be in his quarters, fastened into his acceleration sling until the all-clear sounded, watching on AR glasses and audio. “I am listening in. As you know, my readings on the croma have been infuriatingly incomplete, so I cannot say for sure. But croma clans are led by many large and powerful families, and those families compete with each other to build various monuments. Some of them are extraordinary, there are old towers and temples on their homeworld that can be seen from space, they love to build things bigger and better than their neighbours.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say that this proliferation of defensive fire stations is an extension of that monument-building instinct. Each may be a monument to the family that built it, a sign of their commitment to collective defence. Many croma monuments take the form of defensive fortifications, thus their success in building this fortified wall against the reeh. I take it that so many defensive stations in one system is tactically counter-productive?”

  “Counter-productive in the extreme,” Erik acknowledged. “All are giving the appearance of being operational, but in truth we don’t even know if they’re armed. Their scanning and armscomp seems to be active, but that doesn’t mean much.”

  “Then my educated guess is that these are status symbols and not intended for active defence. There was a group of island people on a barabo world in pre-technological times whose various families found it a status symbol to build tall stone temples to worship their fertility god. Soon their island was covered in tall towers — one of the oldest pre-technological tower building civilisations in the Spiral, as far as I’m aware. They served no technical function and seem like an enormous waste of resources to modern eyes, requiring huge manpower in a time when just gathering food and water was labour intensive. But the social status it brought was enough reward for the builders.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” said Erik, still watching ten things at once as he considered it. “Thank you Stan.”

  “Their fertility god?” Kaspowitz remarked. “I think I read about them — they weren’t building towers, Stan, they were building giant phalluses.”

  “Yes Lieutenant Kaspowitz,” Romki said drily. “Most scholarly of you.”

  “Phalluses?” Sasalaka asked.

  “Penises,” Corrig explained. Sasalaka still looked confused. “Dicks.”

  “Thank you Raf,” said Erik. “Let’s not go through the tavalai’s entire genitalia vocabulary.”

  “Oh,” said the tavalai as she got it. “Barabo, yes. Make sense.”

  “Gotta love the barabo,” Geish sighed. “Dicks on the brain.”

  “You think the croma have dicks?” Kaspowitz persisted.

  “I’m sure they do,” Erik replied. “I’m sure they’re terrifying. V-dump in thirty-five seconds, all hands stand by.”

  13

  After first-shift, Erik grabbed some food and went to a systems review with Warrant Officers Luong and Kriplani, who were struggling to master the intricacies of Phoenix’s new life support and damage control functions. Then he hit the gym for a brief post-shift workout, mostly weights since running on a full stomach was so unpleasant, but it had to be done to get the blood moving afte
r twelve hours in the chair. Then it was down to Midships to check the ongoing installations to secondary electronics and power failsafes, the last parts Rooke hadn’t been able to get done before launch. Phoenix’s fancy new fluidic-electrical systems were causing some headaches, based on technology several times more advanced than anything humans were familiar with.

  There he floated in Midships’ zero-G and watched Engineering crew working on uncovered wall conduits, observing mesh filament bladders that formed some sort of chemical osmosis system that looked more like old powercell technology to Erik, but Rooke insisted actually allowed the re-direction of electrical current by nano-patterns through liquid circuitry, creating infinitely complex reactive circuits for any of the increasingly intricate requirements of the power-consuming systems. After ten minutes of listening to Rooke’s explanations, and listening to the chatter of the crew, Erik became profoundly glad that he’d been fast tracked into piloting and not engineering.

  Soon Romki joined him, pulling himself up the wall from main-storage where some marines were rationalising their ready-stored equipment in case of shuttle deployment. All Midships spaces looked even larger now, expansive walls embedded with storage drawers, red emergency striping for firefighting and medical equipment, and covered with great stretches of cargo netting for when the big spaces were full of floating marines or spacers.

  “Captain,” said Romki. “You wanted to see me?” Looking at the engineers’ work with curiosity.

  “Hi Stan. How’s the reading on the croma coming?” He’d been distracted, Erik knew. Having presided over several of the greatest historical discoveries of the last twenty thousand years in Drakhil’s diary and the drysine data-core it had led to, Romki had now been required to drop those studies and embark on the comparatively mundane task of learning about an unfamiliar alien civilisation.

  “Well the readings are numerous enough,” said Romki with repressed disdain. “It’s their quality that I doubt. There’s nothing in English of course, there’s no actual evidence that humans and croma have even met before, though I’m quite sure some of our Fleet suspects will have done so.” Erik could not help but feel a little disappointed. Being the very first would have been something… but Romki was right, Fleet did a lot of things they kept quiet, and would have found some way to call on the croma. “The parren have quite a bit, but my Porgesh is awful and I don’t trust the translators for anything more complex than ordering a cup of tea, so that leaves me with tavalai readings. My Togiri is excellent, but different tavalai institutions use different jargon for different fields, and of course croma study are a field unto themselves, even though their information is largely contradictory. And being tavalai, they’ve divided into several conflicting camps about the reasons why croma do various things, and spend more time attacking the other camp than they do actually talking about the croma.”

  “Sounds like academics everywhere,” said Erik.

  Romki gave him a hard look. “And there are many academics in the illustrious Debogande line?”

  “Oh hell yes. Great Aunt Mika teaches ancient chah’nas civilisation at Gaudi University, and I’ve a cousin in the mathematics department at Dorego. To say nothing of the teaching gigs for all the damn family lawyers.”

  Further up the wall toward Berth Four, Wowser had taken charge of a particularly intricate installation, braced into position with his larger limbs, working the fiddly installation with his smaller forelegs. Human crew worked around him, not getting too close. Erik knew they weren’t that careful with Peanut.

  “So tell me this,” Erik continued. “Do you think the croma are species-prejudiced?”

  Romki frowned. “It’s hard to say. They don’t mix with aliens at all if they can help it, no one’s allowed into their territory without special permission, but that does not necessarily indicate a prejudice. Parren don’t mix much because their society revolves around these strict rules of house loyalties and lines of command that outsiders don’t respect. Sometimes in this galaxy, xenophobia has a logical foundation. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve been invited down to the surface of Do’Ran, and I’m wondering how we should present ourselves. Phoenix is a mixed crew now, but if we take tavalai down with us, it could cause confusion. To say nothing of drysines.”

  “Captain,” said Romki, “my feeling is that like much of the Spiral, the croma are intensely self-obsessed, and don’t have many opinions of us at all. Actually, they seem to take that to extremes, it’s quite remarkable that Makimakala have the contacts that they do.”

  Erik eyed him sideways. “You suspicious?”

  “Of tavalai institutional politics? Always. I think Captain Pram is our friend and bears us no ill will, but with tavalai it’s never that simple. Captain Pram is Dobruta, and Dobruta intentions are always vague to outsiders. All tavalai power is currently in flux with the decline of State Department, and the Dobruta seem to be on the rise. Now they’re taking charge of this mission to croma space to find clues to the nature of the biotech threat posed by the reeh, and if it’s related to that posed by the deepynines and alo.”

  Erik nodded but said nothing. The senior crew had had this discussion many times on the way out here. New tavalai crew had been useful contributors in that discussion, but all of them were simple tavalai Fleet, and knew little of Dobruta workings.

  “I’d like you to come along,” said Erik. “To Ro’Gana. Captain Pram’s coming down as well.”

  Romki blinked. “Well, if you think that appropriate. Thank you, Captain.”

  “No need to thank me. You’ll be there to do your job as alien civilisations specialist on Phoenix. Croma aren’t your field, but you’ll make better guesses than any of us will, and I’ll need that advice on point and without delay.”

  “Yes of course, Captain. In fact, I’d better get back to my reading, in that case.”

  “Sure thing, Stan. And get some sleep before we go.” Because when Romki became obsessed with something, sleep was the first thing to suffer.

  When he left, Erik flipped on his glassed and blinked on a coms icon. A crackle, then Trace answered. “Captain, what’s up?” From the crashing and whine of machinery in the background, Erik could tell she was in Assembly.

  “Trace, I thought you might like to ask Garudan Platoon to come down to Ro’Gana with us. Could be a good chance to get them to stretch their legs.”

  “You telling me how to do my job again?” Erik could hear the humour in her voice, but with Trace nothing was ever entirely a joke.

  “No, but I just asked Romki if he thinks croma will care if we don’t present an entirely human front to them. He said he doesn’t think croma give two hoots about us either way. I know your instinct is to put your best units on a Captain-protection detail, but if we got into shooting later, you’ll want a chance to check out Garudan Platoon earlier, before the heavy stuff starts.”

  A brief silence from Trace, but for shouts and crashes in the background. “Yeah, I was leaning that way anyway, it’s a good call. So is it true that croma can grow to three metres tall?”

  “Romki says more like four metres, some of them. Ask him for the briefing, it’s worth the time.”

  “Haven’t had a lot of time for alien education tours. Mostly I’d like to know what they’re armed with.”

  “Shouldn’t be an issue, Stan says they’re very stable and predictable, not easily upset. When they decide to kill you, they give plenty of warning.”

  “Comforting. I hear they’ve got natural armour too. Will smallarms penetrate that?”

  “The small ones, sure. The biggest ones, even your Koshaim might struggle.”

  It was Erik’s first time in a tavalai assault shuttle. He had the rear observer seat behind the pilots, as he would in a human shuttle, only the seat was too wide for a human frame and he had to buckle in tight to make the straps fit across his armour. Romki sat behind him, peering at the big side screens at the vast stretch of landscape below.

  The world was
Do’Ran, primary world of the Croma’Dokran Clan, holder of ninety-three percent of the croma population in Do’Mela System. Do’Ran had one-point-one-nine standard human gravities, though the croma homeworld was closer to one-point-four. It looked red and brown on the screens, a rumpled terrain of mountains and valleys, high serrated ridgelines capped with snow, and thick clouds building in anvil-shaped thunderstorms.

  The croma had sent them an atmospheric analysis thirty hours ago, and Makimakala had another list of known bacterias and pathogens. A simple adjustment to everyone’s medical nanos, and a few booster shots had countered it — mostly precautionary and if anyone did catch anything, it wouldn’t be fatal quickly, and Phoenix Medbay would reverse it before that.

  Styx estimated from the coms traffic buzzing between the big trading stations and the ground that Do’Ran’s population was about three billion. To judge from the age of some of the fire stations, there’d been croma here for at least two and a half thousand years, probably much longer. Croma were relatively recent in the Spiral, only fifteen thousand years since their first recorded appearance, that near the beginning of the Chah’nas Empire. The chah’nas had naturally demanded their obedience, received it for a short time until the croma had built up their weapons and tactics, and then became engulfed in a two hundred year croma-chah’nas war that had gone poorly for everyone. But the chah’nas had eventually concluded that in the croma they’d met a species even more stubborn than themselves, and had withdrawn to leave croma space for the croma.

  Since that war the croma had tangled briefly with tavalai, parren and a few minor species not technically part of the Spiral, but had on no occasion been particularly aggressive, just interested in preserving territorial integrity around what they perceived as ‘their’ region of space. About ten thousand years ago the rest of the Spiral noticed that the croma were expanding sideways in response to a newly-arrived species on their far side, away from the Spiral. Some of those conflicts were reputed to be enormous, and croma losses high.