She was reasonably certain she could see Pulver’s influence there. In the short time she’d had to observe the engineer, she’d formed a provisionally favorable opinion of his leadership skills.
She extended a hand, feeling the sudden gravity the way you do when you lift your arm out of a pool. She grabbed the egress stanchion and pulled herself forward at the right moment, stepping lightly onto the deck.
She walked over to sit with her back to the bay opening, the mining world known as Caleb’s Rock turning slowly behind her. Ava was already there, sitting opposite her.
She took a moment to scan the faces in front of her. Wary eagerness seemed the best description.
She smiled. “Thanks for coming, folks. I’m happy to report that we’ll be able to get out of our young host’s hair in the very near future!”
One of the privateer captains leaned forward. “How near?”
“So near,” Ava replied, “that we’ve already launched Phase One.”
“Which involves what, exactly?” another captain asked.
“No details,” Julia said firmly. “You’ll be out there fighting while the tail end of the first phase is still active, so we don’t want that information falling into Gray hands.” She gave them a moment to take that in. She’d shut him down, but she’d done so because they’d be in action soon.
“You’ve seen the cure,” she went on. “Phase One is the propagation of that cure through the colonies.”
“Fair enough,” the first captain conceded. “We’re Phase Two?”
Ava shook her head. “Tim, we’re Phase Three. When the cure-estimate reaches ninety percent, we orchestrate a PR campaign, exposing the Grays as the cause of our own civil war. Then we take our existing privateer forces into Gray space. We’ll be launching a series of lightning raids to disrupt their communication and logistics.”
“Just the colonials?” Tim cut in, waving a hand toward the spot where three Imperial captains were clustered together. “What about our Imperial friends, here?”
“They’re already going to be busy,” Julia told him, “ensuring that Phase Two keeps the Grays too afraid to launch a full scale retaliation for your own attacks.”
Pulver frowned. “General, I doubt the Grays will take our threats seriously. We’re too small a force to be sent as a warning.”
“Agreed, Captain,” she said, granting him the courtesy of his position instead of his rank. “As a deterrent force, we’re too small. The Grays would assume we’re simply a renegade unit and wipe us out.”
A round of chuckles ensued. The small Imperial flotilla was exactly that – a renegade force.
“So we leave off any thoughts of threats or dire warnings,” she continued, “and politely greet any Grays we meet.”
Pulver started to nod, a grin eating his face alive. “Of course! We’re simply responding to a request for medical aid for the citizens of whatever planet, or technical assistance in an industrial accident.”
“Exactly.” Julia inclined her head slightly in recognition of his grasp. “Or we say we’re responding to a distress call. Believe me, that will have them wondering what we know about their activities out here.
“By stating benign interests, we give them the definite impression that the Imperium has long-term designs on the colonies or, at the very least, an interest in what goes on out here. We’d never tell the truth about something like that!”
“They’d definitely think twice about wiping out the colonies,” Tim allowed, “but they won’t just sit still while we attack them.”
“Which is why we’ll end Phase Two with the ‘discovery’ of some egregious Gray atrocities against colonials and use the Sucker Punch’s wormhole generator,” she waved a hand to indicate the ship they sat in, “to start launching a flurry of raids.
“We’ll hit targets that border Imperial space. They’ll be certain a full-scale Imperial invasion is building up.”
Windemere had been silent so far, but now he stepped in. “They’d try to hit Santa Clara again.” He turned a shrewd eye on Julia. “That’s exactly what you have in mind, isn’t it?”
The Grays had already tried once before. If they could destroy the factory ships beneath the ice crust of Santa Clara, the Imperium would run out of organic circuits in a matter of months.
With no chips, ships would grind to a halt as the circuits started to fail. It was an accepted fact of the industry. The circuits were incredibly powerful, but they had a short lifespan. The only thing you could rely on was the fact that they’d fail on schedule.
The Navy and Marines would quickly lose their ability to deploy. Even their personal weapons needed the chips to operate.
If the Grays could wipe out Santa Clara, then they need only fight a delaying action for a few weeks before they could start taking the upper hand.
“Dangerously close to treason, don’t you think?’ he asked her.
“Closer to patriotism,” she said. “The Grays will try again, but they’ll wait a decade or so. If we push them into it now, they’ll throw the dice while CentCom still has that huge emergency force stationed in orbit.” She shrugged. “It will happen, Vance. If we set the schedule instead of them, we give the Imperium its best chance of survival.”
“There’s also Irricana,” Pulver reminded them.
Julia nodded. “They’d almost certainly send an attack to Irricana as well. It has less value than hitting Santa Clara, but if they can choke off the flow of erbium from Irricana, the end effect will still be the same, once the factory ships run out.”
“It would take longer for us to grind to a halt,” Pulver added, “but we’d still be screwed.”
“Which is why we will have to stop the attack on Irricana.” She held up a hand to forestall a privateer captain. Before she could explain, Ava jumped in.
“No, Franco, we won’t be sent off to fight for the Imperium. The colonial forces will be too busy fighting for our own territory.” She nodded at Julia. “General Urbica will lead her dragoons and the Imperial forces from here on, and they’ll look after Irricana.”
“General?” Tim frowned.
“As of now,” Julia stated formally, raising her voice to ensure all could hear, “I resign from the commission voted for me by the officers and crew of the colonial forces. With Commodore Klum fully recovered, you have no need of the split command structure we’ve struggled under for the last few months.
“Those who’ve served directly under me, I advise you to ratify the leadership of Commodore Ava Klum. I’m sure I needn’t remind you of her record!”
Tim took a quick look around the crowd. “As a quick expedient,” he called out, “all those in favor of ratification, remain seated; all those opposed to serving under Commodore Klum, stand now.”
“And see how long you can stay on your feet,” a captain at the back joked.
Amid the ensuing laughter, it became clear there were only a few challenges.
Captain Hale, who’d served as Julia’s flag captain for most of her tenure and Captain Savage, who’d risen from chief engineer to captain one of the captured cruisers, were both standing. Savage nodded to Hale.
“Ma’am,” Hale began, “Karen and I figured you might be playing some kind of Imperial distraction card and that you’d be glad of a couple of heavy cruisers to guard the Sucker Punch and secure your rendezvous sites.”
“Otherwise, you’d be using some of your Imperial ships for security when they could be more profitably employed in giving the Grays something to worry about,” Savage added. She grinned. “And our guns will come in handy when the Grays attack Irricana. Might even confuse them further, seeing colonial forces fighting for an Imperial world.”
They had a point, or perhaps several, and they were all good. When the ‘Imperial’ raids began, they’d be launched and recovered through wormholes created by the Sucker Punch. Having two cruisers to defend the exit strategy would be a definite plus.
And, knowing she’d be drawing the Imperium int
o the fight, having colonial forces defend Imperial holdings might just prove a valuable bargaining chip, later on.
She nodded. “Commodore Klum, are you willing to lose two ships?”
Ava shook her head. “We have lots of prize crews. We can just take a few replacement ships from the Grays while we’re raiding.” She grinned. “It’s you Imperials that can’t recover your force strengths without an approved shipyard…”
Julia grinned. “Have you forgotten who built my current flagship?” The assembled leaders laughed.
Julia turned back to Hale and Savage. “Glad to have you with us. You’ll make life a hell of a lot easier for us”
“Alright folks,” Ava stood. “Get your commands ready. We’ve got a war to start.”
And neither official participant had any idea it was coming.
Spreading the Love
“Try it now,” Paul suggested.
“That’s definitely the strongest point we’ve seen so far.” Oliver’s voice sounded in Paul’s helmet. “Can you move a little closer to the centerline? I think we’ll get a better link over there.”
Paul looked across the station’s cluttered hull. Ceres had been built to an older Imperial design, when grav-plating was so expensive that these larger, rotating models were preferred. The central block had grav-plates but, unlike the newer stations that relied entirely on artificially generated gravity, these older models routed their sub systems outside the hull to minimize the area served by the expensive plates. There was an endless jungle of pipes, protrusions and railings for him to hold onto.
“How far do you need me to go?” He grimaced as he heard the sound of a mug setting down on a table. Oliver’s voice was half muted as he thanked the server.
“Last thing we need is a break in the connection while I’m still coding,” Oliver reminded him, “so I’d like to at least double our signal index, if we can.”
“You’re buying me one of those espressos when I get back inside.”
“Sure, sure. Just keep moving.”
Paul was about to move around a large heat pump when a shadow stopped him. He suppressed an angry curse, knowing it would alarm Oliver, who was supposed to be acting like the standard coffee shop poser with his data slate.
A guy who was writing the ‘next big holo movie’ wasn’t supposed to suddenly put a hand to his ear and demand to know what was wrong.
But Paul was angry with himself for ignoring simple precautions. He subvocalized a command and the electronic warfare suite in his new dragoon armor suit activated. Sure enough, a Marine IFF transponder was just on the other side of the heat pump.
The last thing Kinsey’s compromised Marines would expect out here is for their transponders to be picked up by hostiles. For one thing, they were short range only, designed for fire-team coordination, not long-range detection. For another, the signal was meaningless unless you knew what it was and the colonials didn’t know.
Paul wryly congratulated himself for ensuring his own transponder was off, but then, he was trying to be sneaky. He considered asking Oliver for help in cracking the suit’s operating system, but, despite the Maegi’s recent improvements to the two HMA suits used by Rodrigues and Armstead, he had no experience breaking into a deployed suit.
And he didn’t have access to the kind of quantum computing power that resided in Paul’s sinuses. The Nathaniel family’s investment in him had paid for itself many times over and now it would help free the colonies from the grip of a Gray instigated civil war.
He found the Marine suit’s login protocol and hacked the password by brute force. His core was able to throw billions of guesses at the login simultaneously. He found the life support routines and initiated an oxygen warning.
Damn it! The transponder was moving his way! He stepped back into the harsh shadow between the heat pump and some kind of large boxy thing and froze.
The Marine walked past, mag-plates in his soles allowing an ungainly but relatively rapid progress. The slap of the man’s boots reverberated through the hull plating, sending faint echoes of sound up through the air in Paul’s own suit.
This was why the instructors at the Twenty-Nine Moons station insisted that hull sentries never use their mag-plates and it was why Paul had worked his way out here, handhold by handhold.
He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding as the sentry disappeared among the jumble of modules, headed inside to have his atmo-cycler checked.
Space always brought out the absurdity of human reflexes. How could that Marine have heard Paul’s breathing? He moved past where the man had been standing and continued on.
“Wait,” Oliver suddenly commanded after Paul had gone another thirty meters. “Back-track about three meters. Signal index was growing fine but then started dropping. Looks like you just passed the best spot.”
“How’s that?”
“Good. Settle in while I find the best place to hide our codes.”
Paul looked around, settling on an array of heat-sinks mounted a half meter above the hull plating. He wedged himself under them, figuring he’d look like more miscellaneous crap to any casual observer.
He treated himself to a small sigh. He had the most advanced processer in the entire sector lodged in his head and, here he was, acting as a mobile relay station. At least he’d get some of the fun.
He’d been in this operating system before, when they’d almost sent the kill signal that would wipe out all conditioned Humans. He quickly found the security module and cracked the password cascade in a heartbeat.
“We’re in,” he told Oliver. “It’s all your show now.”
“One of these days you’ll have to tell me how you slip into hostile systems so easily,” Oliver muttered.
“Not without a better argument than that,” Paul retorted. “I thought you Maegi were supposed to be freakishly persuasive.”
“Nah, we just put that in the recruiting posters,” Oliver replied with a slight distance in his voice. He was probably already at work. “We do take our dental plan seriously, though…”
Paul forced himself to keep quiet. He didn’t know if Oliver worked better or worse with distractions, so he figured he’d leave it up to the Maegi. He scanned around for signs of sentries, but the Grays in charge of this signal operation probably had their species’ lack of understanding when it came to ground-pounders.
Their idea of security was a cordon of heavy cruisers. A clone species with no finite life span, the Grays showed no inclination to fight and die with a rifle in their hands. It offended their sense of group solidarity. If one of them were to die in combat, they’d prefer to die along with a ship full of crewmates, thank-you ever so blandly.
Did that indicate a belief in the afterlife?
“OK,” Oliver cut into Paul’s musing, “here’s the plan. For a start, we leave all the existing code intact. We don’t want conflicting commands triggering a suicide imperative before they get a chance to act on our own addition.”
Silence for a moment, then a flurry of key strokes.
“We’ll just add in an additional nested line…” barely audible humming, “… here. This line gets accessed a hell of a lot, I’d imagine. They actually regulate the subjects’ eating habits. I suppose they don’t want to go to all the trouble of brainwashing us only to have us keel over from heart disease a couple years down the road.”
The Grays would rather have their subjects perpetuate the Human civil war and then eventually die in combat against other Humans. It helped reduce the nuisance represented by the colonies and it wouldn’t force the Imperium to get involved.
More keystrokes.
“Alright. After each meal, they’ll have a compelling urge to top it off with a tube of FMG. Hm…” A few more strokes. “We’ll put it at the start of the suicide imperative as well. Kind of a time to end it all, but I’ll have a last puff before I snuff it.”
Paul frowned at his heads up displays. “Oliver, wouldn’t an important line like that be more
likely to get checked out by their programmers?”
Oliver laughed. “You’ve never met a Gray programmer, have you? They do it right the first time. Why the hells would they ever feel the urge to waste valuable time looking at code they’ve already written?”
“Fine,” Paul conceded. “This is your area of expertise.”
He grunted as he slid out from under the heat exchangers. “Order me something in a quarter centi. I’ll be right down.”
He made his way back to the docking port on the aft side of the central block and climbed onto the dorsal surface of the long-range, export-model Hichef shuttle they’d arrived in. He cycled his way through the escape trunk and stepped out of his armor, leaving it to retract itself into a collection of neatly stored plates and fabrics.
He stopped at the front console to check the system before leaving through the airlock to enter the station.
The elevators to the habitat ring had a longer line than expected. He must have arrived during a shift change. Still, by the time he stepped out into the rotationally generated gravity of the ring, it was pretty close to the time estimate he’d given Oliver.
The station was even more impressive than the one orbiting Ganges. This one was the same diameter but twice as wide. Two rivers flowed around the ring, with inlets and small lakes offering connections between them. The habitable area curved up the sidewalls, giving way to forest and crops where it neared the seam with the roof.
It all curved away behind the roof in the hazy distance, rivers appearing to flow uphill as they followed the circumference of the massive ring and, yet, the large cargo ships floated placidly along on the water.
The Imperium had long since lost the sense of grandeur represented in the old ring-station designs. It wasn’t simply the question of grav-plate cost. The ancient architects could have easily relied on maglev trains for the station’s inter-zone shipping needs but they chose to create a river out of the station’s water supply.
The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Page 12