The Oncoming Storm

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Crap,” the XO commented. “Do they have something new?”

  Roach looked down at his console. “I think they ramped up standard sensors,” he said after a moment’s thought. “I don’t think they’ve got anything new, sir.”

  But you could be wrong, Kat thought. They’re not stupid. They might have developed something we missed.

  She pushed the thought aside as red icons separated themselves from the enemy fleet and raced towards Lightning’s position. Gunboats. She cursed under her breath, remembering tactical analysis reports that had suggested the Theocracy had no gunboats. Clearly, someone had dropped the ball somewhere. Kat wasn’t particularly surprised. Even if the Theocracy’s scientists hadn’t come up with the idea for themselves, they’d have no trouble stealing it from the Commonwealth or one of the other independent powers.

  “Gunboats will enter engagement range in five minutes,” Roach warned.

  Kat thought fast. They’d already learned more than she’d expected to learn—and more than she’d wanted to learn—about the enemy fleet. There could be no doubt of its objective, not now. The only logical reason to mass a fleet round a useless star, where it couldn’t hope to defend an inhabited planet, was to prepare to mount an invasion of enemy space. Even exercises could be carried out in a populated star system.

  “Helm, take us out of here,” she ordered. An engagement with enemy gunboats might prove disastrous depending on what weapons they carried. Shipkiller missiles would rip Lightning apart if they were launched from very close range. “And then set course for the border, maximum speed.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Weiberg said.

  “I’m picking up drive emissions from the enemy superdreadnoughts,” Roach said. “They’re powering up their drives.”

  Kat exchanged a glance with her XO. They hadn’t just found proof of the imminent offensive, they’d triggered it. She had tried to warn the XO’s friends and allies on 7th Fleet, but would they be ready to fight when the Theocracy arrived? Somehow, Kat couldn’t help feeling as though disaster was about to unfold. It was vaguely possible the offensive wasn’t about to begin . . . she shook her head, angrily. That was wishful thinking and she knew it.

  They’ve lost the element of surprise, she thought. But if they act fast they can still give us a pounding before we’re ready to meet them.

  “Vortex opening,” Weiberg said. Behind them, the enemy gunboats broke off as it became clear they wouldn’t be able to catch Lightning. “We are gone.”

  “Take us to the border,” Kat ordered as the eerie lights of hyperspace enfolded her starship. “Don’t worry about stealth. Just get us to Cadiz as fast as you can.”

  She thought rapidly. Thankfully, they did have some advantages. The enemy might give chase, but it was unlikely they could get a ship into hyperspace fast enough to actually track her ship before she put enough distance between them to be effectively invisible. But then, they’d have no real doubt of her destination. Cadiz was still the closest Commonwealth world with a StarCom. Once she reached Cadiz, she could scream a warning that would outrace any Theocratic attack fleets. But the first invasion fleet would be hard on her heels.

  Assuming they’re not pushing their drives to the limit, she thought, how long would it take them to reach Cadiz?

  She played with tactical simulations on the display but the solutions changed, depending on the variables she entered. If the Theocracy pushed its drives to the limit, there was a good chance they’d reach Cadiz within seventeen hours, just after Lightning’s own arrival. But if they decided not to risk burning out their drives within enemy territory, they’d take around twenty hours to reach Cadiz, giving the defenders several hours to prepare for the attack. It wouldn’t be enough.

  “We might run into a guardship,” the XO warned. “Or a minefield.”

  “We have to take the risk,” Kat answered. “We don’t have time to try to sneak back through the Seven Sisters.”

  She gritted her teeth. One day, she told herself, someone would invent an FTL communicator small enough to be mounted on a heavy cruiser, one that would save future ships from having to flee with the forces of hell snapping at their heels. It was possible, in theory, to mount one on a superdreadnought, but as StarCom units were staggeringly expensive and power intensive, it was unlikely anyone would try. The Commonwealth had preferred to establish a single StarCom in orbit round each of its populated worlds. God alone knew what the Theocracy had done with their StarComs.

  But the XO was right. They might well run into a minefield if they weren’t careful, although part of her suspected the Theocracy might have disabled its own mines in preparation for the invasion. Mines weren’t known for being good at telling the difference between friendly and unfriendly targets, particularly in hyperspace. IFF signals were dangerously unreliable in hyperspace, after all. It was one of the reasons the Commonwealth had never bothered to mine even rarely used hyper-routes.

  That might cost us now, she thought, grimly. The Theocracy will have free reign to move through hyperspace to our worlds.

  “Prepare messages for your allies,” she ordered, grimly. “Tell them that time is about to run out.”

  She reached for her terminal and started to compose a message to the Admiralty. If it had the right priority tags, it would be bumped right to the top of the queue for processing and transmitting, as soon as they reached Cadiz. The admiral would be informed, of course, but he wouldn’t be able to stop the message. She attached the raw sensor recordings to a follow-on message, then pulled up the records and started to study them, hoping to draw something from the raw data. But she knew it would take a team of analysts to parse the data successfully. The only hopeful sign was a suggestion that enemy datanets were nowhere near as capable as the Commonwealth’s systems—and she knew better than to take that for granted. It was equally possible the enemy systems had merely been stepped down.

  “Captain,” Roach said, “we may have an enemy contact.”

  Kat looked at the display. A yellow icon had appeared . . . not quite blocking their path to Cadiz, but alarmingly close. There was no way to tell if it was a warship, a smuggler, or simply a glitch in the sensors. But surely even the most paranoid guardship wouldn’t be expecting a heavy cruiser hightailing it out of Theocratic space.

  “Keep us on course,” she ordered. “If they come within engagement range, prepare to open fire without further warning.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Roach said.

  Kat forced herself to relax. She’d done all she could. All they could do now was keep running to Cadiz—and pray to God they got there in time.

  She accessed her implants, then linked directly to Davidson. “I want you to carry a message to the CO on the ground,” she subvocalized. “He needs to be informed that his garrison may come under heavy attack.”

  “Understood,” Davidson said. There was a pause. “Do you want to disembark my company?”

  “I don’t know,” Kat said, honestly. If Cadiz was about to come under attack, the defenders would need all the help they could get. But unless the situation was better than she thought, she would be sending Davidson and his men to certain death. “Do you believe it’s necessary?”

  “They’ll need support, Captain,” Davidson said. He sounded solidly confident, although he rarely sounded excited or nervous. “And there is a Planetary Defense Center on the surface. The bastards couldn’t just flatten the planet from orbit.”

  Not all of it, Kat thought. But the insurgents would probably tip the scales against the Commonwealth garrison. Poor bastards.

  “Leave one platoon of Marines on the ship,” Kat ordered. “You may deploy the remainder of your force to the surface.”

  She hoped, as she closed the channel, that she hadn’t made a deadly mistake.

  Admiral Junayd listened absently as the cleric harangued his men, telling them of the virtues of fighting the infidel and the rewards each man could expect if he died in combat against the Theocracy’s deadliest
foe. Thankfully, the cleric was smart enough not to insist the men drop everything to listen, particularly as the fleet was readying itself for departure. He merely spoke through the communications network, trusting that those who had no immediate tasks would listen.

  Junayd allowed himself a tight smile. They might have been caught by surprise, but the crews had responded very well. It had been barely fifty minutes since the enemy craft had vanished into hyperspace, but his ships and crews were ready to depart already. He’d sent messages to the homeworld, warning of the outbreak of war, and messages into the Commonwealth, activating sleeper cells that had been waiting for the command to move. By the time his fleet entered enemy territory, they would already have given the Commonwealth a bloody nose.

  And then there would be the declaration of war . . .

  The Commonwealth would have some warning, he knew. Their spy ship had made certain of that. But it wouldn’t be enough to make a difference. The hammer was about to come down hard.

  “Admiral,” his ops officer said, “the fleet is ready to depart.”

  Junayd smiled again. “Then open the vortex,” he ordered. There was no longer any time for doubt and uncertainty, merely victory. “And set course for Cadiz.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Lieutenant Jacob Moorland was shaking so hard as he walked into the StarCom Control Center that he was surprised the security officers didn’t pull him aside for questioning. It was his fault, he knew, and he would have deserved nothing less than arrest and imprisonment for being so weak, but he didn’t have the nerve to turn himself in and confess everything. Instead . . . he knew he would do as he’d been told, one final time.

  He’d been bored on Cadiz. He’d moved between the giant StarCom and the spaceport, seeing nothing of the planet outside the walls and seeking what solace he could in the facilities on the ground. They’d managed to get their hooks into him there, he recalled; first, they’d helped get him into debt, then manipulated him into doing small tasks for them in exchange for payment. And then it had been too late to back out, confess all, and escape unscathed. He’d been too deeply committed for surrender.

  The giant control center held over a dozen operators, each of them responsible for checking and vetting messages sent from Cadiz to Tyre and the rest of the Commonwealth. He sat down at his console, then pressed his hand against the scanner, allowing it to identify him and confirm his access permissions. There was a long pause, just long enough for him to hope the system had developed problems, then a line of messages streamed up in front of him. He couldn’t help noticing that most of the messages were civilian. Military traffic was handled by another section.

  He reached into his pocket and removed the datachip. It looked absurdly common, just like any other commercial datachip capable of storing a billion terabytes of data. There were trillions in existence, he knew, so many that no one would think anything of an officer carrying one or two in his pocket. It could have held anything from personal messages from home to his private collection of porn. But instead . . . it had come from his masters, from the men who had ruined his life. Whatever it held, he was sure, it wasn’t something as unremarkable as porn.

  “You will insert the chip into the command system,” his contact had said. They’d met in one of the more extreme brothels, where the more exotic tastes were satisfied. “And then you will activate the chip.”

  Jacob swallowed, wondering if he dared accidentally lose the chip. But he knew it would result in his betrayal—or death. He’d crossed too many lines already. No one would ever look the same way at him if they knew what he’d done. He would be lucky if he was only dishonorably discharged, then dispatched to Nightmare as an involuntary exile. Bracing himself, he took the chip and pushed it into the console. A screen popped up, requesting permission to run the chip. Jacob hesitated, knowing there was no going back now, then keyed his command code into the console. The chip activated without further delay.

  Nothing happened for nearly an hour as far as he could tell, then all hell broke loose. The StarCom pulsed signals across space with the assistance of a singularity, held within powerful force fields at the center of the massive structure. Now, with terrifying speed, the singularity destabilized and then fell back into the quantum foam as safety systems activated, trying to prevent a disaster. Alarms howled in the control center as datalinks to Tyre, Marigold, and the other worlds that made up the Commonwealth collapsed, isolating Cadiz from the remainder of the network. It would take weeks, Jacob realized numbly, to purge the command and control system of the rogue software and then generate another singularity. Until then, Cadiz was cut off from the network.

  The authorities caught up with Jacob within an hour, but by then it was far too late.

  “Transmit the signal,” Kat ordered as Lightning burst back into normal space. They’d jumped out of hyperspace far too close to the planet for comfort, but she’d seen no other choice. “And then get me a secure link to the admiral.”

  There was a long pause. “Captain,” Ross said, “the StarCom network is down.”

  Kat blinked. “Locked out?”

  “No, Captain,” Ross said. “They’ve lost the singularity.”

  “Shit,” the XO said. “It could take weeks to recreate the singularity.”

  Kat couldn’t disagree. Everything she’d been taught about singularities said that creating one was an incredibly finicky task. First, they had to produce the gravity well itself, then set it to resonate with the rest of the interstellar communications network. The XO was right. It could take weeks of fine-tuning before Cadiz was back in touch with the rest of the Commonwealth. By then, the Theocracy would have hammered 7th Fleet into the ground.

  “Find a courier boat,” she ordered. There were always one or two commercial couriers in the system, even though their owners should have had access to the StarCom. Some information was just too sensitive to be placed on the network. “Hire him, then transmit a copy of our records and order him to fly directly to the next working StarCom.”

  The XO gave her a look. “Captain,” he said slowly, “what if the entire network is down?”

  Kat swallowed. It took three weeks for a starship to travel from Cadiz to Tyre. If the entire network was down, the war was within shouting distance of being lost before it had even fairly begun. The Theocracy’s commanders would be able to exercise a degree of command and control the Commonwealth’s officers would not be able to match. But she knew enough about the network to be fairly sure it couldn’t just be taken down as easily as a commercial datanet. The system had multiple redundancies built in everywhere.

  “Then we’re in trouble,” she said grimly. She rose. “Contact your friends and warn them of the oncoming storm. I’ll speak to the admiral in my Ready Room.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the XO said.

  Kat took a breath as she stepped through the hatch and sat down at her desk, then waited for Admiral Morrison to answer the call. She’d hoped they could reach Cadiz ahead of any enemy force and it seemed likely they’d succeeded, but she hadn’t anticipated losing the StarCom. And yet, in hindsight, it was the obvious move. The Theocracy could have sent their own signal ahead of Lightning, warning their operatives to move at once. And they’d succeeded magnificently.

  She keyed her wristcom. “Patrick,” she said, “the StarCom is down. Do you still want to go to the surface?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Davidson said. “Someone has to warn General Eastside.”

  Kat nodded, impatiently. The admiral still hadn’t responded to her call.

  “Then good luck,” she said. Was the admiral occupied? Or was something more sinister going on? “Watch your back.”

  The terminal bleeped, informing her that the admiral had finally responded. Kat braced herself, then keyed the switch. Morrison’s face appeared in front of her, looking tired and worn. Had they just woken him up? She checked local time and fought down the temptation to swear out loud. It was local night, just past midnight. She’d forgotten
that detail in her desperate rush to return to Cadiz.

  “Captain,” the admiral said. He didn’t sound happy. “I was at a party. My daughter is being introduced to Lord Percy. What is the meaning of this?”

  “The system is about to be attacked,” Kat said, flatly. She tapped a switch, transmitting the records her ship had collected. Her tactical department’s analysts had been working their way through them, but hadn’t drawn any useful conclusions yet. “The Theocracy has an attack fleet within range, which may be less than an hour from Cadiz.”

  She glanced at a message that blinked up on her display. The vast majority of the fleet’s commanding officers were down on the surface, either at the spaceport or enjoying themselves at the admiral’s estate. Kat had to fight to keep her face impassive. Had they learned nothing from the previous attack? The StarCom was down, the victim of sabotage, and yet they were partying? She clenched her jaw. The theory about the admiral being in the Theocracy’s pay was starting to seem a great deal more plausible.

  “Your ship provoked them, Captain,” the admiral said.

  Kat said a word she knew her mother would have slapped her for saying, at least in front of her social inferiors. But it caught the admiral’s attention.

  “Admiral,” she said, “it doesn’t matter if they thought they were provoked or not. They have already started their campaign. The loss of the StarCom cannot be coincidence. Their attack fleet is already advancing towards Cadiz. I implore you, Admiral, to sound the alert and ready 7th Fleet for action. Time is running out.”

  “Captain,” the admiral said, “I . . .”

  His image vanished from the display. Kat stared, then reached for her wristcom. It bleeped before she could touch it, just as alerts flashed up through her implants. The entire planetary command and control network had just crashed, violently. Each and every starship, orbital defense platform, and automated tracking system was now isolated from everyone else.