Ashen Stars

by Glynn Stewart

  “So it seems,” he murmured. “Commander Catalan!”

  “Sir?” the warp drive engineer replied instantly.

  “Is this ship ready for FTL?”

  “All departments report general quarters status and the drive is online and charged,” the engineer reported. “Scorpion is ready for gravity warp in all respects.”

  Isaac smiled, studying the updated navigation plot on the big screen in front of him. Three glaring red icons showed the ships hurtling toward Auburn Station. Green icons ahead of him showed that Battle Group Enterprise hadn’t decided to be left out after all, though the eight-ship formation would arrive at Auburn hours after this was over.

  Enterprise herself wasn’t there. Three destroyers didn’t call for a battlecruiser—even the two missile cruisers and six destroyers the Fleet had sent were overkill.

  They did make Isaac’s job easier. So long as he delayed or diverted the attackers, that task group would finish them off.

  “Commander Giannovi, please send my regards to the Enterprise task group,” he told his XO. “Then…”

  He smiled at his video link to Catalan.

  “Take us to full warp, Lieutenant Commander Catalan.”

  The only initial response was an indicator that popped up on the main screen, notifying the bridge crew that the warp drive’s exotic-matter ring was spinning up. Twenty percent of target angular velocity. Fifty. Sixty percent.

  After ten seconds, it hit seventy-five percent and the air started to feel heavier as a new velocity icon appeared on the screen.

  Seventy-five percent was enough to engage the warp drive, wrapping Scorpion in a carefully shaped bubble of nonlinear space and immediately accelerating her to just over ninety percent of the speed of light.

  By eighty percent, they were well past the universe’s normal speed limit and the air had taken on a thick, almost viscous pressure in Isaac’s mouth. From the research he’d done, this effect was mostly psychosomatic.

  Mostly.

  But it was still universal to all humans in a gravity-warp bubble and moderately uncomfortable. Several of his bridge officers were coughing, trying to clear what felt like a clogged throat.

  “We are at ninety percent of ring velocity and holding,” Catalan announced, then coughed to clear his own throat. “Estimated pseudo-velocity is three times lightspeed.” He paused. “It would take another hour for us to accelerate up to full pseudo-velocity safely. This will get us to Auburn Station in fourteen minutes.”

  “Entirely acceptable, Lieutenant Commander,” Isaac confirmed. He’d told the Commander fifteen minutes was fine and had mentally allotted half an hour.

  Even at the ninety percent of lightspeed that was the bubble’s minimum pseudo-velocity, they’d have beaten the “Coalition” ships to Auburn Station.

  The screen in front of him continued to show everyone’s positions, but they were estimates and projections now. The grav-warp bubble was blatantly obvious from the outside, shedding energy with nearly star-like brilliance, but from the inside, the rest of the universe had simply ceased to exist.

  “Let’s get a meal served to all stations,” he instructed. “We’re going to be at general quarters for a while, so let’s take advantage of the fact that they can’t touch us in warp.”

  There were some theoretical weapons that could attack a ship under warp drive, but there were only seventeen warp ships in the entire Confederacy. The CSF had consciously chosen to make sure even the theory of how to attack those ships underway was quietly suppressed.

  “Commander Harris?” He turned to his tactical officer. “How is Scorpion’s sting?”

  “Ready magazines have been loaded and charged for all missile launchers,” he reported crisply. “That gives us fifteen missiles ready to go before we need to transfer from the central magazines.”

  Which would increase their launch cycle time almost tenfold. That was the sacrifice made to give the warp cruiser any real missile armament. She had five missile launchers and a hundred missiles, but only three missiles could be held in each ready magazine next to the launchers. The rest were stored in a core magazine buried at the armored center of the ship.

  “Pulse-gun capacitors are fully charged. Once we enter action, we’ll spin all of the fusion plants up to full power to keep them fed. Missile defense suite is active and running in autonomous mode.”

  Harris nodded firmly.

  “Scorpion’s sting is sharp and ready, sir,” he reported.

  “Have you familiarized yourself with the old Archon-class destroyer?” Isaac asked.

  “Not yet, sir,” Harris admitted. “I was focusing on making sure we were ready for battle.”

  “Fair enough,” the Captain allowed. “But make sure you know your enemy as well as yourself, Commander. Let’s not have any surprises.”

  “Agreed, sir.”

  Five minutes later, Isaac half-wished that no one had sent him the data on the Archon-class destroyers. The Conestoga System government, like most in the time frame between the coup and the disarming of the system governments, had understood the distinct possibility that their defense forces could easily be pressed into standing off the Confederacy Space Fleet.

  In the end, none of those fleets had prevented the attempted revolution or the mass arrests that had followed. Thousands had died and tens of thousands had been funneled into the Confederacy’s prison system. Most of the time, Isaac was reasonably sure that there had been that many legitimate members of the revolution to be arrested for their crimes, and that it had been merciful to refrain from executing most of them.

  And if he woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, doubting that his mother had actually done the right thing, that wasn’t something the commander of a capital ship of the Confederacy Space Fleet could admit to.

  But the Conestoga System Defense Force had designed their ships to go head-to-head with their CSF counterparts and win one-on-one. No one had built an Archon-class destroyer in fifteen years, but the last flights of the ships had been easily equal to the CSF’s current Glorious-class ships.

  They were bigger and slower than a Glorious but packed just as many pulse guns and just as much armor as the more modern ship into that bigger hull. Their missile defenses would pale against the firepower of an actual missile cruiser, but Scorpion’s missile armament was probably useless.

  The warp cruiser outgunned any individual Archon, even if they were the last-generation Flight Eight ships. If they were older ships, Flight Five or Flight Six even, Scorpion was an even match for two of them.

  Three of them, however, unquestionably had the Confederacy cruiser outgunned. The irony was that she actually outmassed all three combined, no matter what, but the rebel ships didn’t need to haul their own FTL drives around with them.

  How the ships had escaped the requirement to surrender or scrap the System Defence Forces was irrelevant. There was no way any wormhole station commander was going to open a gateway for armed ships that weren’t definitively CSF.

  Which was probably why they were going after Auburn Station. Isaac pulled up the production data and looked at the numbers. There wasn’t enough exotic matter in the Station’s holding containers to build a modern wormhole station with its multi-hundred-light-year range…but there was enough to build an older-style station. Enough to allow them to cause havoc across a quarter of the Confederacy.

  There was no long-term goal there that he could sympathize with. Whatever high morals this “Free Worlds Coalition” proclaimed, they were looking to build a tool for piracy. Nothing more.

  The Confederacy in its current state was far from perfect. Even the Senate didn’t pretend it was much more than an advisory body to the First Admiral…but it was, at least, honest. The corruption that had drained the interstellar economy and hobbled the outer worlds had been burnt out when Isaac’s mother had lanced the boil of the President’s office.

  He had his doubts about what his mother had done. Doubts about how the Confederacy�
��s government was run now.

  But he had faith, above all else, that First Admiral Adrienne Gallant remained a firm crusader against the corruption that had nearly destroyed the Confederacy once before.

  He had to.

  Chapter Four

  “Warp bubble collapse in five…four…three…two…one…collapse.”

  Isaac coughed, his throat managing to clear at last as the air aboard Scorpion finally returned to normal. Auburn Station was suddenly there, the massive refinery platform with its mostly tame black holes barely fifty thousand kilometers away.

  That was closer than he’d planned on coming out of FTL.

  “Was our navigation intended to be quite so precise, Lieutenant Commander Catalan?” he asked carefully.

  He could hear the engineer swallow.

  “We were supposed to emerge three hundred thousand klicks away, sir,” Catalan admitted. “That’s…maximum emergence variance.” He coughed. “We’ll recalibrate the ring controls, Captain. That shouldn’t happen again.”

  “That’s a good plan, Commander,” Isaac agreed. “But well done nonetheless. Thank you.”

  The channel cut off and he studied the station that was currently causing everyone so much trouble. Auburn Station was clearly an industrial facility, with zero thought or attention given to its aesthetics. The central production facility was two globes half-melted together, almost forming a three-dimensional infinity symbol.

  Storage containers hung down from the globes like icicles, each requiring the power supply of a small city to maintain the containment fields holding their exotic matter in place.

  A three-kilometer-wide circular safety shield hung “above” the production field, massive artificial gravity generators and power plants scattered at seeming random across its underside. Some exotic-matter stations Isaac had seen had an entire secondary station on the other side of the safety shield, where the workers lived. That station had drives and independent power and atmosphere—allowing the crew to run away if something went wrong with the temperamental process they were operating.

  Auburn Station’s builders had been stingier than that. The upper side of the safety shield had been used as an anchor to build a city that, except for the lack of streets, wouldn’t have looked out of place on any Confederacy planet.

  Building it there allowed them to double-purpose the same massive gravity generators that protected the star system from Auburn Station’s captive singularities—but it also made the staff much more vulnerable.

  He hadn’t expected it to be quite so obvious that Auburn Station was a hard labor prison.

  “Sir, a moment?” Harris asked quietly.

  “Step up, Commander,” Isaac ordered. Once the tactical officer was next to his chair, he activated the extended privacy shield, announcing it clearly to the bridge, then turned to the young man.

  “What is it, Harris?” he asked. He had a suspicion.

  “I reviewed the Archon specifications,” the tactical officer told him. “We can’t fight three of them. I hate to sound like a broken record, sir, but this is suicide.”

  “I won’t permit defeatism on my bridge, Commander,” Isaac said harshly. “Identifying the odds is acceptable. Saying this is impossible isn’t; do you understand me?”

  Harris swallowed.

  “Yes, sir. But…I don’t see a way we can take all three of those ships,” he admitted. “They’re just over two hours away. If we go out to meet them, we’ll reach missile range in an hour and pulse-gun range shortly afterwards.”

  “Assuming we just go straight at them,” Isaac pointed out. “We have a significant maneuverability advantage over them and they don’t have missiles.”

  “But they have more than enough missile defense for the three of them to absorb every missile we have,” his tactical officer said. “And while we can control the range, they’re just going to head straight at the station. They know we have to defend it.”

  “They do,” Isaac agreed. “I need to talk to Administrator Paraten,” he continued. “Then you and I and Commander Giannovi need to sit down and see what we can think up.

  “I refuse to accept that a Confederacy cruiser cannot defeat three rebel destroyers,” Isaac concluded. “We just have to be cleverer and more determined than they are. People are relying on us, Commander Harris. We cannot afford wormhole-equipped pirates or, Fates forbid, a new civil war.

  “Humanity looks to us to provide order and safety. We will fulfill that charge. Understand me, Commander?”

  “I do, sir,” Harris admitted. “But…right now, the only way I see to buy time for someone else to arrive and support us is to make the bastards take the time to kill us.”

  Isaac chuckled.

  “Let’s call that Plan Z,” he told the junior. “And try and come up with a whole list of options before we resort to it!”

  Arthur Paraten didn’t look any more authoritative or intimidating in real time. He’d relocated from the control room of his earlier message to an even more plebeian space. This one still had displays around him, but there were no bustling technicians or big displays showing the star system Auburn orbited.

  “Administrator Paraten,” Isaac greeted him politely from his private office. “This is—”

  “Yes, yes, the starship captain,” Paraten cut him off. “What exactly are you planning on doing with one ship? This is a Class One Facility!”

  “It’s also an exotic-matter production facility, which means you’re positioned a long way away from anything we might not want to lose,” Isaac shot back. “Additional units are en route, but for now, the protection of Auburn Station falls to me.”

  Paraten shook his head.

  “Are you serious, Captain?” he demanded.

  “Despite their best efforts, the Confederacy Space Fleet is still limited by the laws of physics as we understand them,” Isaac told him. “We will do all within our power to protect Auburn Station, but you are correct in that my ship is outnumbered and outgunned.

  “Have you begun evacuating the station’s crew? You do have sufficient shipping for that, correct?”

  If they didn’t, there’d be some interesting follow-up conversations going on when this was over.

  “The prison sections have been locked down and the supervisory personnel secured in the safety pod sections of the station,” Paraten admitted. “The presence of the prisoners should prevent these scum from firing on the station.”

  A chill ran down Isaac’s spine.

  “That was not my question,” he said slowly. “You do have the capacity to evacuate your crew, correct?”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to,” the Administrator said flatly. “If there is even the slightest chance that the prisoners’ presence will prevent this ‘Coalition’ from firing on the station, then they must remain. There are always sympathizers and complainers to be arrested; there is no shortage of indentures, Captain.

  “This station is far more valuable than the eminently expendables who crew it.”

  Isaac stared at Paraten for several eternal seconds, then smiled.

  “I see that I will need to be more clear,” he finally said. “I will need to get underway to engage the enemy within fifteen minutes.

  “If you do not begin a full evacuation of Auburn Station within the next ten minutes, I will deploy my Marines to Auburn Station, where they will arrest you and anyone who attempts to stop them evacuating the prisoners.

  “And yes, Administrator, they will be authorized to use whatever force necessary to make certain the fifty thousand civilians on your station are out of the line of fire.”

  If his smile was half as cold as he thought it was, he wasn’t surprised that the Administrator was frozen.

  “Am I clear?” he barked.

  “You would not dare,” Paraten finally replied.

  “Do not test me.”

  “This facility is owned by the First Admiral herself! Why do you think we have access to the prisoner base?” the older man snapped.
“Between her direct ownership and what she owns of WyrmCorp, she’d be out billions if you let this platform get destroyed! If you force me to abandon this platform, you will hear from her!”

  Isaac suspected Paraten wasn’t supposed to tell people that. The First Admiral was quite public that she did not profit from her stewardship of the Confederacy.

  Except that according to Paraten, she did. If she owned a chunk of WyrmCorp, especially…WyrmCorp held a monopoly on wormhole station construction. Many had—quietly—wondered how that monopoly had survived the coup.

  Now Isaac suspected he knew, and he could feel a portion of the faith he had in his mother’s rule shrivel and die as he met Administrator Arthur Paraten’s gaze.

  “You should perhaps have let me finish introducing myself,” he told the Administrator coldly. “My name, Administrator Paraten, is Captain Isaac Gallant. If there is anyone in the Confederacy immune to the First Admiral’s displeasure, I rather suspect it is me.

  “Which means you now have”—he checked the time on his screen—“nine minutes and twenty seconds to begin that evacuation before I deploy Marines.

  “Good day, Administrator Paraten.”

  He cut the channel before Paraten could do more than gape at him in shock, struggling with the shifting emotional ground beneath him.

  Five minutes later, Isaac stood in his ready room with his hands clasped behind his back while Giannovi and Harris took their seats.

  They were supposed to be discussing how to fight this battle, but his own focus was on the bombshell Paraten had dropped on his own worldview. Scorpion’s databanks were extensive, and while he couldn’t look up the ownership of WyrmCorp, he had managed to find the holding corporation that owned half of Auburn Station.

  FranzLieb Interstellar Assets.

  The context he had would have been enough for most people to guess what the name meant, but Isaac had more. Isaac had seen his mother use the same short form of his father’s name for a hundred different purposes.