Hal and the cowboys stepped onto a lift, the door shut, and Jack felt it accelerate for the kilometer-long run from one end of the battleship to the other. He felt it vibrate slightly as it hit terminal speed of just over 100 kilometers an hour before beginning to decelerate. Jack swallowed and felt his ears pop. Even with complete command of gravity, the Peloran still hadn’t licked that little side effect. The lift slowed to a halt, the doors opened, and they stepped out into one of the largest cabins on the battleship. The clear forward bulkhead showed them star-filled space ahead of the flagship.
Despite the thickness of the clear armor, Jack felt exposed. In his fighter, at least he could dodge. Here, he would be a sitting target if something shot at them. Intellectually, he knew he was safer now than he had been on Leif Erikson Spacebase, but that didn’t stop the inner paranoid from gibbering in terror. Jack stuffed the inner paranoid into a deep, dark hole and smiled as if there was no other place he’d rather be at the moment.
Aneerin, wearing the normal Peloran white uniform that blended into the white walls, cleared his throat to get their attention and waved them into the large empty cabin. “It is good to see you again,” he said in his calm tone. He turned to face the stars with a smile. “We shall see battle soon I think, and viewing hyperspace with friends is always preferable to doing so alone.”
Jack blinked in confusion, looking around to see the other Cowboys doing the same. Aneerin considered them all friends? For the first time Jack wondered how many people Aneerin counted in that column.
“I am sorry,” Charles said and cleared his throat. “We are leaving now? I thought we were planning an exercise with all of the squadrons in the task force.”
Aneerin chuckled. “We are entering hyperspace now,” he said with a smile. “We are not leaving.” He aimed a look at Jack. “We will I think be here for at least another day or two.”
Jack’s instincts started to tingle, and not just because Aneerin wanted to talk to him. Something was going on here, something he’d not considered, and now his subconscious was trying to alert him to it.
“Hal?” Aneerin asked with a smile.
Hal nodded, and then his eyes began to flicker back and forth as he communicated with the other ships in the task force. “We are ready to dive,” the cyber finally announced.
“Then dive,” Aneerin ordered.
Jack closed his eyes, a bright flash turned his vision red through his eyelids, and darkness returned. He blinked stars away and peered into the chaotic, twisted rainbow of colors that was hyperspace. Gravity itself flowed and rippled here, eddies brushing up against the warship viewable to the naked human eye. It was truly beautiful. Jack pulled in a deep breath and nodded. It was almost as beautiful as a morning sun bouncing off a mist-covered lake. Almost.
“Plot a course for the Hyades Cluster,” Aneerin ordered, pulling him out of his momentary lapse. “Maximum depth, maximum speed, and engage,”
“Engaging,” Hal answered.
Jack felt the ships go deeper into hyperspace, away from the wall that separated them from normalspace. The multihued colors of hyperspace grew more muted as they moved farther away from normalspace, deeper into the regions were hyperspace acted less like anything humanity naturally lived in. He felt the ship shudder around them as a band of stressed gravity smashed into them. And then they were moving forward into a mass of gravity bands so tight Jack couldn’t imagine how they were moving between them. And more than once the ship shuddered as Hal failed to completely avoid them.
Jack licked his lips, forgetting the beauty of a few seconds ago. “I thought we weren’t leaving yet?” he asked, really hoping for some encouragement.
“Oh we are not,” Aneerin answered in a brisk tone. “We are simply going deep to avoid Shang scouts. They cannot follow us this deep.”
“Of course, we did lose the couriers from Independence,” Hal supplied. “So it would seem they can now.”
“Yes,” Aneerin whispered, bringing a hand up to rub his jaw. “Most unfortunate that revelation is.” He nodded as if deep in thought. “We will have to go deeper then.”
Hal’s face seemed to tighten. “Of course,” he said without protest though.
Aneerin pulled in a deep breath and set his jaw. “Go ten percent deeper and look out for storms.”
Hal swallowed, placed his hands behind his back, and nodded. The ship dove down further, the intermittent bangs becoming a steady thrum of gravity slamming against the ship.
“Is this safe?” Charles asked, a shade of worry in his voice.
“Absolutely not,” Aneerin answered, though his tone didn’t reveal even a hint of nerves.
“If this is not safe for a Peloran ship, what about the rest of them?” Charles asked, waving a hand at the Terran warships in the Guardian Light’s wake.
Peloran pulled in a deep breath before answering. “With the upgrades we performed on them, they should be able to follow us.”
“Should?”
Aneerin smiled. “It is best to find out if they will break now, before we have traveled far, rather than later when we are attempting to penetrate the Hyades Cluster.”
Jack shivered at the idea of testing the new systems like this.
Aneerin nodded towards Hal and chairs appeared in the middle of the observation deck, courtesy of the hard light projectors in the walls. Aneerin and Hal sat down in the ones with their backs to hyperspace and waved for the Cowboys to sit. His face took on a speculative look. “Do you know why we’re here right now?” he asked with a matching smile.
Jack and the others exchanged confused looks, and Jack poked his chair to make certain it was as solid as it looked before sitting down. He finished with a long look at Betty, who just smiled back at him as if she knew exactly what was going on. He blinked and frowned at her for a second, before shaking his head and returning his gaze to Aneerin.
“Do you mean the metaphysical question of why we exist?” Jack asked with a wry smile. “Or why we are at this spot at this moment in time?”
Aneerin smiled at him. “I think I understand the first question.”
Jack’s eyebrows rose. “Care to share the secrets?”
“Perhaps later,” Aneerin answered with an amused wink.
“You said something about battle,” Charles interjected.
Aneerin nodded towards him. “Correct. The important question of course is who will we fight?”
Charles, Jack, and Jay exchanged confused looks. Their cybers of course just smiled. Jack sighed and rubbed his forehead. They were being tested. He hated tests. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.
Aneerin aimed a raised eyebrow at him. “Jack? Can you tell me your interpretation of The War in the Outer Colonies?”
Jack frowned, glanced at a smiling Betty, and rolled his eyes. Reluctantly, he gathered his thoughts, ran his mind over the reports he’d read over the last month, and quickly checked his conclusions again. “You know we’re not on the Pentagon’s preferred mailer list,” he commented.
“I know,” Aneerin answered, with an understanding smile.
Jack grimaced, shook his head, and sighed. “Well, from what I’ve read, there’s a lot of wailing and very little gnashing of teeth going on out there.”
Aneerin gave him a questioning look, and Jack had the pleasure of actually, for once, catching the older man off guard with something. And that pleasure made him a bit more verbose.
Jack sighed. “Nobody has enough ships out there to really push any fight, so they’re doing more sparring over position than anything else,” he explained. “Avoiding big fights if they can. Really, no commander wants to be responsible for losing the war out there, so they’re not trying to win it. They’re waiting for the big fleets near Earth to decide the matter.”
Aneerin smiled. “Good summation. So they’re irrelevant to The War?”
Jack almost answered in agreement, but something stopped him. He blinked, and looked at Betty with a frown. She gave him a pleased
smile. He turned back to Aneerin, a mystified look on his face. He didn’t know why, but they would be important. “No.”
Aneerin chuckled. “Can you explain that?”
Jack shook his head and smiled. “Absolutely not.”
Aneerin nodded in approval. “Honesty. And instincts.” He turned to Charles and Jay. “Either of you?”
Charles smiled. “The Outer Colonies can not influence who wins The War, unless our casualties are so catastrophic that there are no winners of course. But they will almost certainly have the numbers to influence the Peace that follows.”
Aneerin gave him a quizzical stare. “So you assume there will be a peace?”
Charles nodded. “No war can last forever. Sooner or later, one of us will win and one of us will lose and there will be ‘peace in our time’ for a time.”
Aneerin nodded in approval. “Your analysis is in accord with mine. Do you believe the same thing of the Inner Colonies?”
Charles frowned. “Mostly, yes, though there are some exceptions that could turn The War.”
Jay cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention. “I have noted a difference in how the Chinese fleets near Earth have fought compared to those in the Colonies,” he rumbled.
Aneerin smiled and nodded for the larger man to continue.
“The Chinese commanders near Earth thought they could beat us so they tried to destroy our fleets.” Jay grunted then, with a rather pleased smile. “They failed. The commanders in the Inner Colonies have avoided any major Alliance fleets and focused on easy targets, where they know there is no one to defend.”
Charles nodded in agreement. “The last report we received of any strike was two weeks ago. They have been silent since word of our victory here reached them.”
“Indeed,” Aneerin noted in a solemn tone. “So what do you think they intend now?”
Jack frowned and scratched his neck as an idea came to mind. He examined it against everything he knew, looked at it from all sides in his mind for any hole, and grunted as he could find nothing wrong with it. It felt right. “They’re coming here,” he whispered.
Aneerin cocked his head to the side. “What makes you say that?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then lightning struck and his eyes opened wide at the message from his subconscious finally got through. “Wait. Yosemite. That was just the first step to taking our fleets out of action,” he said with more intensity than he meant to.
Aneerin nodded in approval. “Yes. I agree. So where?”
Jack frowned and glanced around the observation deck. He caught a shift in Hal’s demeanor and his eyebrows rose. He glanced at Betty, wondering if she’d caught it too. She inclined her head marginally, showing she had. Jack smiled at Aneerin. “Well, I think he’s about to tell us.”
Aneerin smiled. “That is cheating, Jack.”
Jack spread his hands out wide. “Just making use of every piece on the field of battle,” he said with a wink.
Aneerin shook his head. “So now we are at battle with one another?”
“Every time we speak, it’s a battle of wits,” Jack said, once again with more intensity than he’d planned.
Aneerin bowed his head. “Touché,” he whispered before turning to look Hal. “You have news?”
Hal nodded. “The scouts are detecting movement.”
Aneerin turned back to Jack. “New Washington?”
Jack considered the Peloran for a moment before answering. It felt right. “It is a good target.” Then the realization hit and he looked out at hyperspace. “And that’s why we went so deep. They saw us leave. The coast is clear, isn’t it? So they think?”
“Indeed,” Aneerin answered, approval in his tone. “Indeed.” He turned back to Hal and nodded. “Bring us around.”
Hal nodded. “Changing course now.”
The ship groaned as it came around, and Jack could swear he felt it battering its way through the gravitic storm around them with renewed determination. He shook his head in amazement. While he’d been fighting a battle of wits with Aneerin, the older man had been fighting one with an enemy none of them could even see.
And now it was time to see how the cards dealt out.
Hello, my name is Jack. The Peloran are a strange lot, or at least the ones that I’ve spent time with. Those back on their worlds are content to sit back and let life pass them by. The ones that leave their homes, the ones who serve in their military, tend towards wanderlust. Those who work with Aneerin tend towards intellectual wanderlust, always asking and answering questions so they can understand more about the worlds around them. Or helping us understand.
Questions
Jack looked out onto hyperspace through the transparent hull of the Guardian Light’s observation deck. Gravity ripped and twisted around them, dim red waves slamming into the battleship hard enough that a steady thrumming set his teeth on edge. The battleship’s deflection grid plowed through the darkness, a red wake of disturbed gravity fanning out behind them.
Jack turned to see the rest of the task force, fifty-one destroyers, cruisers, and light carriers, displayed in all their holographic glory on the walls of the observation deck. They followed in the wake of the Guardian Light, riding the waves of gravity broken by the battleship’s relentless charge. Man wasn’t meant to fly this deep in hyperspace. Hell, man wasn’t meant to be in hyperspace at all, but they were too deep when the gravity waves were all red over a blackness so much darker than any black he’d ever imagined.
Jack swallowed carefully, not wanting to disrupt any of Hal’s attention.
“Charles, I need the Cowboys ahead of the task force. Surface, relay what is there, and engage if you need to at your discretion.”
“How the frak are we supposed to launch in that?” Jack asked waving a hand at the red bow wave ahead of them.
Aneerin chuckled. “Your fighters are better than you think.”
Jack gave him a disbelieving look.
“But we will rise to a more standard operating depth before launching,” Aneerin added with a wry smile.
“Thank you,” Jack returned, his voice betraying relief.
“So we are going to be the diversion?” Jay rumbled.
“Yes. And I believe a test,” Aneerin answered with a pointed look at Jack.
Charles and Jay followed his gaze and Jack sighed. “For all of the new recruits?”
“Indeed,” Aneerin answered with a nod and a knowing smile.
Jack returned the smile with interest. “And unless we detour to play wack-a-Wang along the way, that’ll be it before Hyades?”
“Exactly. Though I can think of no Chinese targets along the way as important as Hyades,” Aneerin returned and nodded towards the rear of the ship. “Do you believe them ready?”
Jack looked at Charles, the question written on his face. Charles smiled and cleared his throat. “All of the Cowboys are veterans, new and old alike,” he supplied and stepped up to stand next to Aneerin. “Every single one has fought and lived. I only worry how we will fight as a group. That said, we are at least as prepared as when we first deployed. Not counting for technology or numbers, I think the Cowboys back there are a match for the Cowboys who fought at Fort Wichita.”
“Agreed,” Aneerin whispered. “You have chosen well, I think.” Aneerin paused to take in a long breath, and Jack could seem him studying the deep red waves of hyperspace intently. Finally Aneerin nodded and turned, his face determined. “It is time.”
Charles echoed Aneerin’s action and nodded to Jack and Jay. “We should return to Cowboy Country now,” he ordered and began to walk out.
“Jack,” Aneerin said, waving for him to stay. “You can take the next lift.”
Charles and Jay paused for a moment, until Aneerin waved them on. They looked at Jack and he shrugged, letting them know they were free to go. They answered with smiles and stepped into the lift, Dorothy and Winona nodding at him as they followed their partners.
Aneerin cleared his
throat and Jack turned back to him. He scanned the older man, wondering what he was thinking. “You are looking to do something that we do not do,” Aneerin began in a stern voice. “Do you know why?”
Jack looked between Aneerin and Hal. “Yes. I know why the cybers decided not to do it.”
Aneerin smiled, catching Jack’s pointed tone. “Good. But I would like to know why you wish to do this.”
Jack glanced at Betty and Jasmine, who gave him reassuring smiles, before turning back to Aneerin with a nod. “OK.”
Aneerin look at him in approval. “Good. Can you tell me in one sentence?”
Jack said the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t want to leave Samantha.” He considered his feelings for any evidence that he’d been untrue, but his eyes opened wide as he realized that there really wasn’t anything else.
Aneerin’s expression softened. “Women.” He shook his head. “They always make us do things we did not think we would do.”
Jack turned his head slightly and scanned Aneerin carefully. “You sound like you’ve had experience.”
“Oh, yes,” Aneerin whispered with a smile.
Jack felt a smirk come over his face at the idea. “And next you’re going to tell me there are little Aneerins running around?”
Aneerin sighed and nodded slowly. “Yes,” he whispered. “There are.”
Jack considered that for a moment and glanced at Betty. She raised an eyebrow at him, wondering what he was thinking. He smiled and turned back to Aneerin. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t how the Peloran do things. Are you all test tube babies or do you…” he trailed off, trying to figure out how to say it without being rude.
Aneerin smiled. “We have families, much like your people.”
Jack nodded slowly. “Did you choose the girl? Or girls? Or did your family choose?”
Aneerin stared at him for several seconds before answering. “Arranged marriages are not our custom,” he finally answered with a sigh. “And yes, I will always love them,” he added, answering the question Jack had been about to ask.
Forge of War (Jack of Harts) Page 42