by Scott Warren
Three, return to Vitacuus. Advise Arda to press the attack. We will keep Gavisar blinded.
Chapter 16 – Return to Pedres
Victoria woke, sprawled on the sweat-stained gurney of Doc Whipple’s office, the smell of it burning her nostrils. The memories of the Kossovoldt were already fading like a bad dream, and she struggled to hold onto whatever details she could. That giant space squid was like something out of a twentieth-century horror classic, and had all but admitted a direct hand in humanity’s development. In that false Condor, that somehow area existing between the physical world and that of horizons beyond the tears in time and space she had learned more about the Kossovoldt than the collective knowledge humanity had assembled over the previous century.
She wished she hadn’t. The implications were less than ideal.
Behind her she could hear the hatch sliding open, and then Doc Whipple’s voice on the growler. Victoria brushed off a probing hand, and pried open her gummy eyes to see what the pain in her arm was. An IV drip had been stuck in her, feeding her fluids while she slept.
"Doc," she said, panic rising from deep within. "get this fucking thing out of me."
It took all her restraint to not tear at the medical tape and yank the two-inch needle out of her vein. Whipple hurried over and Victoria grit her teeth as he performed the extraction.
"How long?" she asked, finding uncertain feet awaiting her as she stood up in the small medical shack.
"Easy, Vick. You’ve been out two days, ever since we fell into that hole in horizon space."
Two damned days. Gavisar could already be moving on Pedres. She thumbed open the door to the medical shack and found Red Calhoun waiting on the other side.
"Red, get me up to the conn."
"Easy there, girl."
Victoria scowled. "Stop saying that. Just get me up there."
Red offered the support of his arm, and though she was loath to accept it, Victoria felt like the bulkheads were spinning around her and the deck was buckling under her bare feet.
"Vick. We’re stuck in horizon for two days now. Avery can’t make heads or tails of the readings. We’re flying rudderless and blind. We don’t know that we’ll ever hit enough mass to pull us out. Breaking your neck rushing yourself to the conn isn’t going to help our situation."
Victoria shook her head as they passed the wheelhouse hatch. God, if only she could bring a bottle up with her. "No, we’re going back to Pedres. The Kossovoldt," She stopped, clutching at the fading image of the Kossovoldt circling in her mind before it was flushed down the pipe all old dreams went to.
"We’re going to Pedres," was all she could manage. The Kossovoldt were an issue too large for any one captain to handle. But the problem of the Pedres invasion was right before her, and that problem she could affect.
Red and Whipple looked at each other. "Alright. Then we’re going to Pedres," said Red.
"Stupid to argue when you get this stubborn," said Doc Whipple. "I can’t say as how you’re so damn certain."
The lighting flickered and the hairs on Victoria’s arms began to settle. The tone of the Condor’s ambience took on a substantially muted hum as the horizon drive shut off and the ion engine ignited. The three paused, then pushed into the conn.
Huian twisted at her pilot’s station, looking from Victoria to Carillo at the XO’s chair. Never one to miss a beat, she turned back to her screens. "Ma’am, I’m running stellar recognition now."
"No need," said Red, offering a sly smile and a wink at Victoria as she settled into the command couch, "We’re at Pedres. Captain Marin has the deck and the conn."
The computer confirmed his assertion moments later as it began identifying constellations and stellar bodies, including Juna at just a few million kilometers distance. They were staring right at the night side of it. Damn but Victoria would hate to play that Kosso at darts. It had thrown the Condor at a bull’s-eye from two-dozen light years away. In another dimension. And hit. How did it even begin to calculate the math involved?
Whipple set Victoria’s boots down by her chair with a hand on her shoulder, and then followed Carillo out as she tugged them on and engaged the magnetic locks with her coverall cuffs. She eyed Red up and down and scowled. The Scot was displaying his usual languid calm, but he only did it to hide his excitement.
"Something happen while I was out?" asked Victoria.
"Well I didn’t think it mattered while we were stuck, but Avery decrypted the bulk freighter’s logs. They received a warning of a Maeyar attack, after they’d already registered active missile tracking from the opposite vector. Jones provoked the Maeyar by making it look like Bullock fired on them."
"That little shit. If we pull through this I’ll nail his dick to the wall with those logs so hard I’ll make the Reformation look like a god damn sticky note. We’re Privateers, not xenos, we don’t treat our own like meat to slaughter when it suits us. It’s time he learned that."
"Union Earth won’t take too kindly to his attempts at sabotaging our alliance if it caused civilian deaths, either."
"No sir they will not. If they don’t throw him in Leavenworth to rot he’ll be lucky to pilot a turnip truck. Alright, let’s go see how your boy Cohen is holding up."
The minimal thermal signature blossomed, the heat output increasing tenfold as Sothcide’s interceptor became awash with targeting radar. After an hour of pursuit the active tracking of his two rear fighters had forced Jones’ hand, leaving him no choice but to respond to the threat of the fighters closing on him close enough to engage.
"Anti-fighter missiles incoming, evade and engage with point defense. Contact is maneuvering to the southwest."
Relying on his wing mates to deal with the primitive, if plentiful, human missiles, Sothcide increased the thrust on his engines and banked to the right in a maneuver that would cut off the turn the Privateer was making and close the distance to visual range before Jones could escape to the night side of Juna. Advance warning had neutralized the greatest human weapon of surprise and allowed his interceptors to push in and buy Arda the time she needed. At his altitude, and under the pocket of dense ionization, he could hear snippets of radio chatter indicating Arda’s intent to capitalize on the opportunity. Sothcide was somewhat incredulous that she had actually listened to his advice, but it did come from a position of validating her own suspicions about the humans’ motives in the system.
On his screen, the thermal signature increased another four degrees as the active radar overwhelmed whatever mechanism was masking it. Still not sure enough for a weapons solution without Riz at the controls of the laser arrays.
Pushing through a bank of clouds, he entered a wide eye in the storm and got his first glimpse of the privateer before it disappeared into the shroud again. His battle recorders were capturing every detail, but he could see the matte black shape with its stubby shielded wings at fore and aft. It looked a brother to the Condor, but different, more twisted and sinister. Like it was built for hunting, not exploring. But now its captain had been thrust into the light, was forced to run like vermin. Now Jones would feel what it was like to be hunted through the storms of Juna. Sothcide tightened his grip on the fighter’s controls and pressed onward.
"Intensify signal strength. Give him nowhere to hide."
As his wing mates complied with his demands for higher wattage, additional contacts lit up his screen, awash with radar reflections deep in Juna’s storms. Sothcide’s eye looked from his battle scanner to his instrumentation. "Cut it off, cease all active emission now!" he yelled into his radio.
The radar return matched the cross-section of the Vitacuus. Jones had led them back through the clouds to their own fleet, and the Gavisari would pick up the reflections well enough to turn the surprise attack into a meat grinder. Thermal signatures bloomed as Arda was forced to alter course, unmasking the engine heat that had been vectored behind the massive ships. Before he could process what had happened, Sothcide’s telltale track of the source he�
��d been following across the sky vanished. The Privateer, running only a few degrees above ambient, was washed out by the Maeyar fleet’s temperature spike.
"Wing Officer Sothcide," his radio chirped. The voice of the Vitacuus’ first officer. "Would you care to explain why you felt the need to bungle the attack you yourself advised?"
Victoria examined her main viewscreen as the Condor decelerated beyond Juna’s moons. The only contacts left in orbit were those trailing the magnetic tethers too damaged to press on into the system. Which meant the bulk of Gavisar’s forces had pushed on to siege Pedres. Ringed cloud formations on the surface told a tale of nuclear exchange. Had Sothcide’s counteroffensive been driven down into the maelstrom of the planet? Juna’s powerful magnetic field protected its atmosphere from solar winds almost to low orbit. You could hide a fleet in there for months. Either way, something had gone terribly wrong with the counteroffensive. Sothcide might already be dead. She needed a closer eye. Red had elected to stay with her on the bridge and she didn’t have the will to send him packing, so Victoria made a point of ignoring him instead.
"Send the interrogation signal, let’s see if anyone is listening."
The fraction of a second pulse would come across as stellar radio noise to any device not tuned to descramble the signal, in this case the marine communication dish that Aesop Cohen should have patched in by now, if he wasn’t too busy twisting his throttle to all the xenotech floating down there. Sure enough, a return ping hit the Condor’s radio receivers within half a minute, and Victoria issued a shielded laser communication once her marine’s transponder had been identified. First came a data burst of everything the squad’s retinal contacts had marked and catalogued over the course of the previous three days. Then a voice-to-text transcript of all squad-level communication, and finally a black and white video transmission of Aesop Cohen himself. Presumably from his own helmet camera, since he wasn’t wearing it. A few days beard growth didn’t look too bad on the kid.
There was a small amount of latency in the signal, as soon as the squad leader was sure he was connected he offered a short salute in the IDF style and awaited her orders.
"Unless I’m mistaken, the hull we set you down on had no airtight integrity to speak of," said Victoria.
"Um, yes ma’am. Exceptional circumstances required that we commandeer a new vessel. We had need of a pressurized cabin to perform a battlefield medical procedure. We boarded and seized the Oracle from a crew of approximately sixteen, nine of whom were killed during the assault. The rest sealed themselves in the aft compartment of the ship with a host of civilian refugees. We’re holding an additional four hostage in the forward compartment as insurance against the survivors irradiating us while Private Singh negotiates their surrender. One of them claims to be a higher-up in their priesthood that the others wouldn’t willingly harm, something like a cardinal that can lay about two-hundred female eggs a year. Genetically engineered specifically for this Exodus. There’s at least one on every surviving ship, as many as six on some of the bigger ones."
Busy little bastards. With numbers like that, the Gavisari would be on track to pass Earth’s biggest colonies in just a few years. And naturally cave-dwelling? You’d never root them out without sucking the entire atmosphere into a tear in space and time. The Kossovoldt lamented releasing them on the galaxy. Now she knew why. Most of the encounter had faded, but she remembered the mournful speech. Victoria scowled as she read over the brief medical report Vega had included in the databurst. The Gavisari ship’s higher air pressure and oxygen content had likely kept her alive. Better they’d have finished off all the Gavisari onboard, but that wasn’t her way and it wasn’t Red’s either.
"Noted. With the majority of the fleet away I think we can slip close enough to pull Chambers off that wreck and rotate the rest of you."
Sergeant Cohen hesitated. "Ma’am, with respect, I would like to stay aboard to help the replacement team however I can. This frigate is equipped with advanced countermeasures and sensors, and right now Sothcide and the Maeyar need all the help he can get. The Maeyar fleet took a licking, and what’s left of the forward guard is fighting for their lives right now while Jones runs recon."
Victoria muted the feed and decided to notice that Red had stayed on the conn. "Your call Red, you’re the Major. Aesop is a marine first and an engineer second. If Jones is down there, the Maeyar are going to need a hell of an ace in the hole."
Red shook his head. "What he is, is the best xenotech specialist on this boat. I hate to make him stay on that frigate, but he’s the only way we’re going to get those sensors working."
Victoria clicked her fingertips on her console, considering. Then she restored audio. "Alright Cohen, you get your wish. But Vega, Singh, and Chambers are coming off. Rig for docking. And tell the surviving Gavisari that they have a ticket off when we take their priest with us."
"Aye ma’am. Oh, and one more thing," he said, allowing a grin to split across his face. "We have the codec Jones is using to talk to the invasion fleet."
Sothcide was at a loss. Somehow Jones had driven them back to Arda’s fleet, revealing both the attack and their position and range relative to the invasion fleet. Only a full burn in atmosphere and the resilient nature of Maeyar ship design prevented the loss of another vessel from a Gavisari artillery salvo that Arda was unable to answer in kind with the Slingray’s arsenal of long-range missiles.
Whatever small capital he’d gained with Arda appeared spent. In the wake of her husband’s wroth he’d been dressed down and reprimanded. Only the pressing need for an experienced wing officer to remain in command of her fighter squadrons had kept Arda from turning him into a space walker, and once Riz’s body had been pulled from his interceptor and honored he was right back in the cockpit with a gunner of Arda’s choosing.
If she did decide to eject him, could the humans have saved him?
Sothcide had seen the humans unpacking and distributing spare suits and breathing masks for passengers they carried without the rare physiological quirk of oxygen tolerance they shared with the Maeyar. That genetic anomaly of carbon-based life in the galaxy closed off a lot of worlds to species not capable of terraforming on a planetary scale, and competition within those worlds was fierce for their rarity. Gavisar had fended off more than a few attempts to seize it, consolidating power. The Maeyar had spread themselves, and now it appeared too thinly.
The communication bulb for the Privateer channel illuminated, and Sothcide’s finger had brushed the circuit almost before he thought about what he was going to say. Human Aesop’s intel had directly led to the confrontation with Jones and the subsequent demotion, but to pass the blame for that onto the human warrior would be nothing short of sheer cowardice.
"This is Sothcide, go ahead Aesop."
"Not quite," said Captain Marin. Sothcide almost fumbled his course correction. He lowered his voice on the radio, despite what a foolish and conspiratorial gesture it made. All communications on Maeyar fighter-craft were recorded locally and reviewed. But the logs wouldn’t be downloaded until his next refit on the Vitacuus.
"Victoria. Did you scout Gavisar with the Malagath as the Wing Admiral requested?"
There was a humorless chuckle on the other end of the connection, a human gesture he had become familiar with as losing poker hands were revealed and the holders were relieved of their currency. "What’s left of it. Sothcide, the Kossovoldt claimed the system, killed everyone on Gavisar and two-thirds of their fleet."
"Kossovoldt? This deep in the Paior’s Bridge? What in the stars are they doing?" asked Sothcide. Paior’s Bridge had been a no-man’s-land for as long as the Maeyar had been a space-faring empire. The stretch of stars under contention from the Malagath, Dirregaunt, and Kossovoldt was the only link between the first and second blade of the galaxy without traversing the entire length, almost twenty-thousand light years.
In his mind’s eye, Sothcide could practically see Victoria shaking her head as she spoke, run
ning her small hand through that short crop of fur at the roof of her head. "They’re, something. I don’t know. But they’re trying to draw out the Empire and the Praetory. They tore a hole in space and wrung out the planet like a rag. No air, no water. Just a barren rock with the Kossovoldt hanging over it. Sothcide, the Gavisari in this system? They’re the only ones left. Anywhere."
Sothcide cursed to himself. "Then they have nothing left to lose, and we must be steadfast, Victoria, for Pedres and the light of my horizon are in graver danger than ever I dared believe."
There was a pause before Victoria responded, more-so than the transmission delay could account for. "My people have a word for stamping out an entire population. Genocide. I will stand with the Maeyar, but I cannot condone your action. Is there no way to make peace?"
Outside his cockpit the storms of Juna had calmed, and his interceptor was merely pelted with a rain of acetic acid. One star in particular shone on his viewscreen. There was a world set aside there. Uncolonized, untamed, rich with breathable air and drinkable water. The Gavisari had known of it, the Maeyar had made it a gift of sorts, when they realized their grave error. But the Children of Gavisar had come here to seek revenge for an ancient wrong. And peace was not their intent.
"Victoria. There is an episode in our history we do not share with outsiders. I learned of it upon becoming an officer, and it is not a proud moment for the Maeyar. Before your kind joined the rest of us, the Maeyar and Gavisar colonized a planet together. But we thought ourselves strong, our vessels were swift and deadly, and our great philosophers and generals had yet to tame our wild passions with the discipline of reason and humility before the vulnerable. The poem I told you of the pilgrim and the beggar had yet to be written.