Battlecruiser Alamo_Depth Charge

by Richard Tongue

   Nodding, Orlova replied, “I still think...”

   “Kolchak has to go home, Captain. We’ve got traitors in our midst, and I’m going to root them out for all the world to see. I assure you that even the craziest member of the Security Council would never dream of anything like this, but I won’t deny that we’ve got our hotheads in Intelligence, just like you.”

   “Your words, Colonel, not mine,” she said with a chuckle. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a datarod, and passed it across the counter. “Everything we have on the not-men. Aside from a few bits and pieces that directly impact Triplanetary Security. That should be more than enough to give you a good start, if nothing else. I trust that you’ll make sure this gets where it needs to go.”

   “I’ll see to that,” he said, turning the datarod in his hands. “There are a lot of people on both sides who would gladly see you thrown into detention for this.”

   “True, but I could say the same about your actions out here, and I don’t like being in debt at the best of times. Especially not heading out into the abyss.”

   “If you run into trouble,” he said, “We’ll be heading back out to Sutter’s World. Or someone will, anyway, and after this, I think you can assume that any request for reinforcements will be accepted. We can go back to our own little feuds later. Any race able to tear a planet apart is something too big for us to handle individually, I think.”

   “Our latest assessments of the scope of the disaster are on that datarod,” Orlova replied. “The planet itself is going to survive, at least, though the explosion hurled away billions of tons of rubble. Most of it will probably crash back onto the surface at some point over the next few million years or so. Maybe, one day, it’ll be back to what it was. Or maybe it’ll end up as something completely different. It’s still impossible to send anything down there other than a protected probe, but I suspect that our two governments will probably end up both dispatching research teams here in the near future. It would be nice to hope that it might be a cooperative project.”

   “Let’s not get too optimistic,” he replied with a smile, “Though it is a nice thought, I agree.” Rising to his feet, he continued, “I’d better be heading back to Kolchak. Good luck, Captain. And good hunting, as well.” Clarke stepped through the doors, leaving Orlova and Nelyubov alone in the office.

   “You think he’ll pull it off?” Nelyubov asked.

   “Impossible to say,” Orlova replied. “I gave him enough to demonstrate UN involvement with the not-men, up to and including Sergeant Gurung’s sworn testimony. It ought to be more than sufficient, but with those bastards, you can never tell. I guess it depends on how adroit he is politically.” She paused, then added, “One thing I will say. He’ll do his best.”

   “In an odd way, the not-men have managed the exact opposite of their intentions. They’d wanted to put us both up against each other, start a war between the Confederation and the United Nations, but it’s beginning to look as though they might actually have caused us to join forces against them.”

   “Let’s hope so. I think we’re going to need all the allies we can get.” Taking a deep breath, she added, “Inform Astrogation that we’ll be breaking orbit in ten minutes. Maybe next time we won’t go down a blind alley.”

   “As long as they don’t start blowing up planets again, Captain, I’ll be happy,” Nelyubov said, stepping out onto the bridge. Orlova looked out of the viewport, watching the world slowly simmer, cooling off as the force of the explosion finally began to abate. A sentient race had once lived down there, had been so paranoid about the threat from outside that they had destroyed their own world and every trace of their existence rather than face it.

   And somewhere at the dark of her soul, she wondered whether they were right.

  Author’s Note

   This was unfinished business, to put it mildly. I first came up with the plot for what would ultimately become this book three years ago – originally, it was supposed to take place at some point during the Cabal storyline, but I couldn’t quite get it to fit, no matter how hard I tried. Then it was to go here, in place of what ultimately became ‘Forbidden Seas’. (Which was meant to be the title of this book, originally.)

   Ultimately – I couldn’t get it to work as I intended, so I abandoned work on it at about the mid-point, and went on to complete the saga in a different path, but I’ve been meaning to come back to it for a long time. The primary problem was length. A normal Alamo novel runs at 70,000 words – this is a little under 60,000, and I couldn’t get it to the required length without excessive padding. Nevertheless, I still wanted to tell the story, and I originally thought of finding a way to put it into the Andromeda storyline.

   Then I read what I had written, and two years later, I rather liked it. And came up with the idea of finishing it anyway. It still fits nicely in the story arc, placed before ‘Forbidden Seas’, and perhaps closes a few holes in the ongoing storyline – notably, the reason why the United Nations Fleet doesn’t send a ship of their own, and why, on several occasions, the crew seems to think that they might be able to get reinforcements from that quarter. I think, unconsciously perhaps, that I fit this story into my own ‘mental canon’, and now it can take its rightful place in the Alamo universe.

   This is the first ‘Lost Adventure’, but it might not be the last. It was a blast to write about some of my old characters again, to take a look at the development of some of the new major players before they had evolved quite so much, and if the response to this book is favorable, I think you can probably look forward to a few more of these in the near future – going back, perhaps, all the way to the beginning, when it was Marshall, Caine and Orlova, rather than the current triumvirate of Salazar, Harper and Clarke. (And yes – the first use of that surname as a prospective continuing character was here. I did seriously consider changing it, but at the last moment, I decided to leave it as I’d originally intended.)

   Possible future adventures might flesh out the Cabal storyline a little, cover the gap between ‘Final Orbit’ and ‘Into the Maelstrom’, or perhaps finally the second Spitfire Station book – one that is four years overdue at this point, after several attempts at writing it. I’ve got a few ideas I’m exploring – but ultimately, this is something of an experiment, so please, let me know your thoughts!

  Thank you for reading the first Lost Adventure of the Battlecruiser Alamo, ‘Depth Charge’. For information on future releases, please join the author's Science-Fiction Mailing List at http://eepurl.com/A9MdX for updates. If you enjoyed this book, please review it on the site where you purchased it.

  The writer's blog is available at http://tinyurl.com/pjl96dj for details of forthcoming books in universes old and new.

  Coming in early 2018, ‘Cries in the Dark’, the latest installment in the Battlecruiser Alamo saga...