by M. D. Cooper
The Grey Wolf's bluish light took on a much greyer hue as they drew closer to the elliptical plane. Clouds of carbon and oxygen flowed out from the star's surface, swirling in gravitational eddies formed by the orbiting black holes mounted in the ring wrapping around the star.
"How do you even build something like that?" Cheeky asked.
"Do you see any planets around here?" Finaeus smirked. "We tore them down to build the ring and create the mass for the first few black holes. Now there are thirty of them in there, all moving at a few thousand kilometers per second."
"Yeah, but how?" Cheeky asked. "You mined entire planets, and you said before that you've only been mining the star for a few hundred years."
"Oh, how do we make the ring? We put boosters on all the dwarf worlds in the system and smashed them into the system’s two terrestrial worlds. That ejects a lot of material out into space. Out there, we use magnetic fields to pull in the ferrous metals, and then charged ES fields to separate the rest. Then into the refineries.
“In the end, we smashed the two terrestrial worlds together to break them apart as much as possible. We built the orbital frames for the black holes, and then created the first few, feeding them the remains of the planets. Once the black holes had enough mass to balance out against hawking radiation loss, it was a simple matter of kicking them in toward the star in a close orbit. They tore off all the carbon we needed to complete the construction of the ring, and there you have it."
"Just like that," Jessica said with a laugh.
"You saw things like that back in Sol," Finaeus replied. "They did it with Neptune and Uranus. Pulled their clouds right off and fed them into Jupiter."
"That was before my time," Jessica shrugged. "By the time I was alive, Uranus's core was already in orbit of Jupiter, and Neptune was on its way to its new home in the Scattered Disk."
Finaeus shook his head. "Never understood that. Could have mixed it up just right, and fired a compressive antimatter blast around it...would have made a great super-Earth for InnerSol.
"Shows you how much clout Terra had lost by then. The Jovians happily sold it to the Scattered Worlds Alliance—and I guess we found out why," Cargo said.
Jessica nodded wordlessly. It was still difficult for her to think of what had happened to InnerSol at the hands of the Jovians. The only world they’d left habitable inside Ceres’ orbit was Venus.
Five thousand years later, the Jovians had finally cleaned up Earth, but Luna and Mars were both still ruins—their once-great cities, broken and twisted reminders that the Jovians, now known as the Hegemony of Worlds, left for any who would test their might.
Jessica pushed the melancholic thoughts from her mind and focused on the growing form of Gisha Station.
A hub and spoke station, it was the tried and true style that had been in use for thousands of years. Even with inexpensive antimatter on hand, it was still more efficient to spin a station to simulate gravity than run AG systems everywhere.
The holodisplay noted that the station was over a hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter, with two hundred and thirty-five ships in external berths on the outer ring. Many were easily recognizable as military vessels; though she spotted a small number of ships that appeared to be freighters—likely contractors that supplied the station with goods. Several large ships—nearly large enough to rival the Intrepid—were drifting near the station; probably undergoing refit and repair, by the clouds of drones surrounding them.
As Sabrina approached, a new sight appeared in the distance; a one-thousand-kilometer long arch that was drawing in the clouds of material torn from the star, funneling it into two of the massive ships.
As they watched, one of the ships ceased its intake of material, and a brilliant light erupted from it as antimatter-pion drives boosted the ship toward its destination—a ring several thousand kilometers retrograde off Gisha Station.
"The jump gate," Finaeus noted as he caught Jessica looking at it. "Getting these big daddies through a gate took a bit to work out. Focusing the negative energy across a ten-kilometer ring is no mean feat, but I solved it eventually."
“Jess, we’ve got a hail from one of the ships out there,” Cheeky said from her station.
“Oh, shit, sorry, missed that,” Jessica said, glancing down at her comm console. “Weird. It’s from that smaller destroyer hanging out just off the outer docking ring over there.”
Jessica glanced back to Cargo who nodded, and then placed the caller on the main holo tank.
The figure of a tall man resolved into view. His face was grim, and his brow was creased from a frown he must frequently wear. His long, dark hair fell behind his shoulder in tight curls. His grey uniform bore no markings other than a colonel’s birds on his lapels.
“Captain Cargo, I am to inform you that your docking arrangements have been altered. Please alter course to dock with my ship and await further orders.”
Cargo’s frown deepened to match the man’s. “Colonel….”
“Bes,” the TSF officer supplied.
“Colonel Bes. I have very strict orders from a TSF admiral, and a berth from STC. If you would like to have those changed, please proceed through proper channels.”
“Cheery sort, wasn’t he?”
“Kinda cute, though,” Cheeky mused. “I’m OK with going to see him. Maybe I can get that frown off his face.”
Jessica gave an appreciative laugh and leaned over to give the Cheeky a high-five.
“Friend of yours?” Cargo asked Finaeus, ignoring Cheeky’s comment.
“Bes probably doesn’t have any friends. He’s GD.”
“A Good Doobie?” Cheeky asked with a grin. “Doesn’t seem like one to me.”
“Grey Division. Officially known as the 137th Division of Space Force Strategic Research, but no one calls them that. They work for her,” Finaeus replied.
“Her?” Cargo asked. “Any chance that’s the same ‘her’ that President Tomlinson gave Airtha to?”
“One and the same,” Finaeus grunted. “She was behind my exile as well—hunted me across the Inner Stars trying to take me out. I’d really hoped we would beat them down here. Fool’s hope, I guess.”
“Does she have a name?” Jessica asked.
“Jelina,” Finaeus replied. “Whatever you do, don’t dock with that ship.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Cargo said. “You get a berth from a station, you take that berth. Especially when you can see their defense turrets tracking you.”
Finaeus rubbed his jaw. “Maybe that was his hope; that we’d deviate, and get blown away. Stuff like that is GD SOP.”
“Well, I suspect that we’d get a warning first. Not really sure what his plan would be, then,” Cargo replied.
As he spoke, scan lit up, registering beamfire, and Jessica hit the stasis shields an instant after Sabrina.
“What the—?” Cargo called out.
“Shit! That looks like it came from us!” Jessica exclaimed while re-running scan analysis on the shot.
Sure enough, analysis showed that the shot came from Sabrina’s forward dorsal beam. It had struck one of the nearby station turrets, tearing the unshielded weapon to shreds.
“Station’s on comm,” Jessica called out. “And surprise, surpris
e, that Bes guy just fired on us—tried to take out our engines, but Sabrina beat him to it with the shields.”
“What a shit-show,” Cargo grunted. “Put the station on.”
“Vessel Sabrina what the hell was that! Why did you just fire on this station?” The call was audio only, and the voice was pissed.
“Gisha Station, this is Captain Cargo. I promise you, we did no such thing. Whatever just happened, that shot did not come from our ship.”
“This is Stationmaster Lloyd. Our scan shows your dorsal weapon hot, and now you have shields up.”
“I don’t understand it yet, either,” Cargo replied calmly. “But we raised shields because we thought we were under attack, and it’s good that we did, because that Colonel Bes guy just shot at us.”
There was no response from Stationmaster Lloyd, and a new call came in. “It’s our friend, the Admiral,” Jessica said.
Cargo sighed and waved his hand. “Let’s see what she has to say.”
“Captain Cargo,” Admiral Krissy said, her expression severe. “You’ve just made my day immeasurably worse. Thank you very much.”
“I assure you, we did not fire. And we were fired upon,” Cargo insisted.
“That’s not what our logs show. You clearly took out that target and raised shields. Despite your protestations to Stationmaster Lloyd, we have no records of any ship firing upon yours.”
“Funny that this all happened right after Colonel Bes instructed us to change course to dock with his ship,” Finaeus said. “Don’t be daft, Krissy. This is the GD’s modus operandi through and through. What do we have to gain from an attack on Gisha? We need your cooperation. He wants us dead. Or worse.”
“Is this more of your insane ramblings, Finaeus? Nonsense like this is what got you kicked out of Huygens all those years ago. It’s time you put all that aside.” Admiral Krissy appeared as though she was going to say more, but then stopped and shook her head. “We’re running a detailed analysis on the attack, but if the scan data holds up, we’re going to have to take you into custody. You can’t just fire on a TSF facility and get away with it.”
“FGT, Krissy. This is an FGT facility. I’ve been away for a while, but Stationmaster Lloyd isn’t military, and neither is Gisha,” Finaeus countered.
“Close enough as to make no matter these days, Finaeus. Now, Captain Cargo. Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded. This little game has come to an end.”
“Cheeky, take us out of here,” Cargo ordered.
“You got it, Captain. New Canaan, here we come,” Cheeky called out triumphantly
Jessica killed the connection to Admiral Krissy and glanced back at Cargo. “I assume you were done with her.”
Sabrina said.
“Weak, Sabs,” Cheeky said. “We live for naughty stations. You need to work at metaphors and allegory more.”
Finaeus stroked his chin. “Yes, yes, that would work. You have many upgrades from the Intrepid, but not a sensor suite that could detect a stealthed TSF vessel. Especially not a GD ship. But how did the GD sneak one in under Krissy’s nose?”
“You better find out, because we’re not going anywhere,” Cheeky said.
“What do you mean?” Cargo asked.
“Station here has some serious grav emitters. They’re pulling us back. I could fire up the AP drive or the burners, but we’re inside their shields. We’ll kill everyone on the station.”
“Fuck!” Cargo swore.
“That’s one hell of a gamble they’re taking,” Jessica said.
“There’s another layer of shielding that would keep them safe…provided you didn’t run your APs at max. Point-blank focused gamma rays would melt any organics in their path,” Finaeus said.
“The admiral’s betting on our decency, then, is she?” Cargo asked. “A bit risky, with a bunch of Inner Stars smugglers like us.”
“Or they think they can take out our stasis shields,” Jessica suggested. “They have had some time to study what we did back at Bollam’s.”
Cargo pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes and sighed. “Put the admiral back on.”
“Captain Cargo,” Admiral Krissy said as she appeared with a frown and crossed arms on the holotank. “I assume you’ve thought better of your folly? You’re not leaving.”
“No,” Cargo replied. “But only because we’re not murderers. We’ll come in, but we’ll take the dock you offered. We’re not leaving Sabrina out here where Bes can take more pot shots at it with his stealthed ship.”
Jessica noted that Krissy’s eyes widened slightly, and then narrowed before she replied. “Very well, but power your reactors down.”
UNCERTAINTY
STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Regent Mary, Near Gisha Station
REGION: DSM Ring, Grey Wolf System
“Is that possible?” Captain Lin asked in a low voice. “Could they have brought a stealthed ship with them?”
Krissy let out a long breath. It certainly wasn’t possible to hide a stealth ship in Grey Wolf for long. Bending photons and rads around a ship was one thing, but eventually its silhouette would stand out against the ever-shifting grav fields.
That meant if there was one, it jumped in right on the tail of Bes’s destroyer—though she had never heard of a ship jumping in stealth before.
“Have your teams review scan again,” Krissy said. “Look at everything for the past two hours. I want to know definitively whether or not there’s a stealth ship in Grey Wolf.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Captain Lin said, before looking to Nelson.
Krissy held back a comment. Once Lin had been a good captain, but for some reason his heart just wasn’t in it anymore. If war wasn’t looming, she’d recommend retirement for him.
It certainly wasn’t fair to Nelson—not that fair was the goal—but she didn’t want to ruin a good officer by saddling him with the duties, but not the honor, of a captain.
One crisis at a time. Lin could muddle through for a bit longer.
The reply was instantaneous.
Bes snorted.
Krissy replied.
Krissy chewed on the inside of her cheek, biting back what she wanted to say to Bes. Chances were that Finaeus was right, but without any proof, there would be little she could do. Once those orders were confirmed she would have no choice but to comply with Bes’s demands.
She considered letting the Sabrina go. All she had to do was order Lloyd to turn off the grav field holding the freighter in place. He would probably comply—he had no desire to take that ship into his station.
But that would go badly for her—though not as badly as it would for Finaeus and the crew of the Sabrina.
No, this would have to play out a little longer.
“Anything?” she addressed Captain Lin, though her eyes looked to Major Nelson.
“Nothing,” Nelson replied. “We’ll keep looking, but scan is clean. No signatures at all. No sensor suite in the fleet, or on Gisha, picked up a shot from Bes’s ship, either.”
Krissy nodded absently. “Picking up the beam would be hard, unless you were looking for it—but we’d see the ionized atoms. Space isn’t exactly empty around here.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Nelson agreed. “A lot of dust about. We’d see the trail.”
“Very well,” Krissy said. “Bring us in. I want to be there to meet Finaeus when he disembarks.”
GISHA STATION
STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, Gisha Station
REGION: DSM Ring, Grey Wolf System
“Aaand we’re in the cradle,” Cheeky reported.
“This stinks,” Cargo said. “Any ideas what our next move should be?”
“We have to get out of here as quickly as possible,” Finaeus said. “That GD commander won’t have any of our best interests at heart.”
“We’re not going anywhere with that grav field there,” Cheeky said. “Not unless you’re willing to kill everyone on this station…”
“If it comes down to them or us, that’ll be an option I’ll consider,” Cargo said. “But for now, I’ll meet with them and see if we can’t resolve this peacefully.”
“Not on your own, you’re not,” Jessica said. “You need backup. Besides, I’ll bet Finaeus has something up his sleeve that Iris can use to disable their grav field.”
“What makes you think I have something like that?” Finaeus asked.
“Oh, well, I can see how you’d think that…” Finaeus said.