The Last Flagship (The Science Officer Book 6)

by Blaze Ward

  He flipped it over, carefully peeled away the wax seal he found, and pulled out the pages folded up inside.

  PART THREE

  “ADMIRAL STEINER IS DEAD. She was the Last Admiral of Neu Berne, as we measure such things, and the first casualty when the Intelligence went insane.

  That coward is dead now, and the survivors are trapped here. The technical crew who could have rebuilt things died with it, leaving the poor, sad remains of the crew locked inside our own mausoleum, like an ancient king who buries his household with him for the afterlife.

  Hopefully, I will find a way to haunt that beast in hell.

  To you who have found us here: Greetings.

  The rogue Intelligence was destroyed, and with it most of our records, since we had no other way to read them. With nothing else to do, we repaired as much of the physical structure of the vessel as we could and parked this craft in the most constant orbit we could manage, a gravitationally-stable point where it would hopefully become a suitable monument.

  Without the stardrives controlled by the Intelligence, or the main computer system that was its brain and memory, we could never leave this system, except to aim the vessel across the interstellar darkness at sub-light speeds, to become someone else’s navigational hazard, several centuries after we had all died.

  Our mission had been to escape Neu Berne. To rally the outer colonies and worlds. To hide in the wilderness, like a young prince, and to reclaim the throne when he came of age.

  We have failed. And failed the Empire as well. We discussed allowing the knowledge of our failure to die with us, by flying into one of the three stars here, but in the end decided that we owed the future the truth of what had happened here.

  I have left a written log in my cabin, begun after we had slain the beast and known our own death. The other logs were contained within the memory of the Intelligence, and so hidden from us.

  Each death was recorded. Crew who succumbed to wounds from the final battle. Accidents as we rebuilt the ship to the finest standards possible before powering everything down for the longest night.

  Finally, the day when there was no more we could do.

  The crew retired to the main gymnasium, where we had an evening of the finest food and companionship, telling old stories, singing patriotic songs, and establishing the final bonds of comrades facing the eternal darkness.

  The Medical Officer had prepared the potion. One by one the crew drank it and made their final peace with God.

  Each man and woman retired to the coffins that were their final resting place, bid their comrades Auf Wiedersehen, and closed the lids, to sleep the eternal and find their place to Valhalla.

  Only I remained, a captain dying with his ship. It was my duty to record it all, return to my bridge, and await you.

  I am Captain Ulrich Mayer, last commander of the last flagship of the Neu Berne Navy.

  I failed my Empire, but I have done my duty.

  PART FOUR

  JAVIER TOOK a breath and looked up.

  Sykora was crying openly now. But that was okay. So were the other three women. Probably the fourth as well.

  She was human in all the ways that mattered.

  Everyone who traveled in space had to face that risk. Dying, alone in the darkness, trapped farther away from friends and home than you can ever return.

  Lost, and never coming home.

  Javier nodded to Captain Mayer, a very short, formal thank you for everything the man had done for a future generation in need.

  It made sense now. The Sentience hadn’t responded to him or Afia because it was dead.

  He wondered how much they had been able to repair.

  Most people thought of a Sentience as a giant computer program, billions of lines of code capable of responding to ever more complicated decisions trees.

  Javier knew better.

  At her core, Suvi was a very compact set of algorithms embedded on a set of chips. Not ROM, the read-only-memory that is etched into the board and never modified again, but a firmware that was non-volatile and could be improved over time by someone who took the time to understand how the language worked at that level.

  To help her be more human.

  If he was only ever going to know one daughter, to make sure she turned out a pretty good kid.

  Suvi had.

  It was her memories that took up all the damned space, even written in the multi-dimensional symbolic language that her kind used to encode everything. Cleaning up systems she had been using must have been what it was like to have teenagers in the house.

  Hopefully, the captain had killed the beast by pulling or destroying the chips at the core of the system, and not just blowing up the central computer itself.

  “So now what?” Afia breathed in a quiet voice, as if unwilling to break the tableau that had formed around them like icicles.

  Javier studied Sykora’s face for a clue. That woman did not understand poker one damned bit, wearing her emotions on her sleeves most of the time.

  Today, she had either gone deeper inside herself than he had ever seen, or peeled away all the layers that had accumulated like an angry pearl over the years, to show the grain of stone at the center of it all.

  Six months ago, he would have happily used everything he was learning to drive this woman bat-shit insane. More bat-shit insane.

  But that was yesterday. And this was tomorrow.

  “Djamila?” he said simply.

  Her eyes came back from the horizon, flickered over to his face.

  Bright green emeralds, lit with an internal flame.

  “Now we know,” she murmured.

  Javier nodded. One of the galaxy’s greatest mysteries in the last century, and they had solved it.

  The little evil conscience on his left shoulder showed him a bill of goods they could sell to the happy folks at Neu Berne when they returned the last crew to their homeland.

  Ransom, if you will.

  The planet was poor these days, but even a poor planetary government worked with sums that make interstellar corporations look like popsicle stands by comparison.

  Not that he would ever breathe a word of this to Sykora.

  The good conscience on his right shoulder walked over and knocked the evil one onto his ass with a roundhouse, just like in the cartoons.

  He turned back to Afia, patiently waiting by his side as the emotional tides swirled around her and started to head back out to sea.

  “Now, we go look at the engineering sections and see how much work it will take to get everything in motion,” he said.

  “What about Storm Gauntlet?” she asked carefully. “Should we call the captain?”

  All of the women were suddenly staring intently at him. But that was okay.

  He had been planning this for a long time.

  “Soon,” he said. “It will be much easier to use the ship’s comm to send a signal, as noisy as this system is.”

  Javier pointed at the dead man that had come to dinner.

  “And we only have his word that they didn’t set a trap for us,” Javier continued. “Let’s not suck the whole crew into an ambush.”

  Sykora came back to herself. Feisty. Tough.

  Intent.

  But she held her peace, for now.

  That would make it easier.

  Afia turned to the dragoon.

  “Best way into engineering?” she asked the tall woman.

  “Deck Thirteen,” Sykora said. “Elevators should be working, but let’s take the central stairs anyway.”

  Javier nodded. As long as Sykora remained tactical, everything would be fine.

  Zakhar Sokolov was probably the only one of them sneaky enough to anticipate what was coming.

  PART FIVE

  AFIA WAS ALMOST at the back of the column. The group of them was approaching the port staircase element that ran vertically down the center of the ship, walking along the port-side hallway that served as one of the three boulevards from bow to stern on
Deck Four.

  Everything had a chilled smell, kinda like you got in a brand new refrigerator, before any food had managed to leave an impression.

  Metal and plastic and cold.

  It was weird on a starship, not to smell people and leftover dinners.

  She had let everyone else organize themselves as they tromped noisily through the intestines of the big ship. And it was big.

  If you could have opened up the right frames and access points, the combined cargo deck down the ship’s axis was almost big enough to carry Storm Gauntlet, a fierce, little teacup Chihuahua in a lady’s purse.

  Not that Afia had ever been compared that way either. Especially not as tiny as she was compared to most folks. Being small, and fierce, and technical, she had stood out from the other kids.

  Afia Burakgazi had grown up on Earth, almost exactly half a world away from her family’s ancestral homeland of Indonesia where all her cousins still lived. In the Yukon Protectorate there were still wild places and dangerous critters. You had to keep an eye and an ear tuned to things out of the ordinary and be prepared to listen when your subconscious is trying to tell you something.

  Plus, her grandmother was a witch, and had hexed her early on with the Second Sight.

  Both her nose for trouble and her grandmother’s memory were talking to her now.

  The dragoon was an emotional wreck. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

  Afia probably would be, too, in similar circumstances.

  But all of the snark and bickering had disappeared from Javier.

  Gone.

  Like frost in the morning sun.

  He was treating Sykora carefully. Kid gloves.

  If there was ever a time to score points on her, it was now, when she was in no shape to fight back.

  Afia probably would have had to get up in his face, if he had. Sascha and Hajna as well. But he would have said something.

  It was the nature of the relationship between those two.

  Except he hadn’t. Hadn’t even come close.

  Nothing.

  He had to be up to something.

  Afia didn’t think that anybody but her had picked it up, or someone would have said something. And maybe she was only imagining it, but she didn’t think so. Javier Aritza, occasionally infamous as Eutrupio Navarre, was hands-down the sneakiest man Afia had ever met.

  So she watched the way he moved, one place ahead of her in line and a head taller. He didn’t walk enough steps every day for the suit to look good on his ass.

  They arrived.

  The central stairs were a strange design.

  The designer here had done something weird. And not just because this was a cargo ship with a big empty space down the middle.

  There were two sets of stairs here: Port side and Starboard, well away from the central boulevard. Sascha had picked port for no better reason than she could. The two were identical.

  On most ships, a stairwell ran top to bottom in an open column, with emergency plates that could close horizontally between levels if you lost power and pressure. Plus, they had hatches out at every floor that were normally closed.

  Here, it was a set of tall rooms.

  You went down a level and the stairs ended. You had to go through a hatch at the bottom of the stairs and into another chamber, turn one-hundred-eighty degrees, and go down another flight in another room.

  Each pair of levels was sealed automatically, plus you got a lot more structural strength at the center of the ship because you didn’t have that big, vertical column.

  But it was a serious pain in the ass to go down nine decks this way.

  Afia wondered if that was part of the reason Sascha had done it. Maybe she hoped the grumbling would get Sykora back to being herself.

  Afia considered that maybe she needed to walk more steps every day, too, when they got down to Deck Thirteen.

  Her legs felt like rubber, her butt hurt, and she was short of breath.

  Sykora looked like she had just come from the beach. Hajna and Sascha, too.

  Afia kept her grumbles to herself.

  Mostly.

  At one point, the probe pivoted around enough that she was looking at its “face,” so maybe the grumbles weren’t that quiet.

  Afia worked on keeping her mouth shut after that.

  Thanks, Mom.

  Deck Thirteen looked a lot like Deck Four if you didn’t paint it as often. Not dingy or anything, but faded a bit, maybe. Monochrome. No little trim flashes or color offsets to brighten things.

  Soulless.

  The land of the introverts who went into the engineering tracks, rather than the extroverts who did the line command or ground combat tracks.

  Out the last stairwell door and along this hallway to the aft. The cargo holds were down here, and huge in places. Several decks tall and a hundred meters between frames. Big enough for a hockey rink, stands, and a taco truck.

  Engineering, when they got there, wasn’t nearly as impressive, but Afia wasn’t sure what she had been expecting.

  Sure, big machines everywhere. Control room with transparent windows on this level, so you could watch several parallel rows of monstrous power reactors lined up like ugly, gray turtles on a log.

  But nothing she hadn’t seen recently on Storm Gauntlet, or before she became a pirate.

  The room smelled like a power station, too. Lubricant and ozone in trace amounts. The faintest hint of rust and metal, like tiny shavings spalled off by slowly moving parts.

  It felt good to be home.

  She dropped automatically into the primary station, wiped the screen clean of accumulated stuffff with a rag she kept handy for just that task, and powered it up. These was dust everywhere, but nothing bad. Trust a Neu Berne crew, especially with nothing better to do before they died, to clean everything as well as humanly possible.

  At least the folks had unlocked everything before they died, so that someone like her could put this old beast back into the line.

  “What’s your pleasure?” she smiled up at Javier.

  He looked down at her for a second, blank, before a roguish smile ghosted itself and he winked back at her. More of a promise, since this was probably not the time nor the place.

  Probably.

  You never knew.

  “Make sure everything is intact on standby and no more than a soft yellow,” he said. “If we think the life support systems are solid, start bringing things up to the same temperature as the bridge was. That should be good enough for now. All the food that’s left is long past edible, so I’m not worried about it, but I don’t want it so warm that cans explode.”

  “Coming up,” she said, starting to toggle through screens.

  Things being written in German on this ship didn’t bother her. Everything down here would be written in Engineer, a standard thousands of years old that spanned all forms of communication.

  She could identify the workarounds the crew had programmed into the systems when the Sentience died. It would mostly handle those tasks for everyone, needing only occasional tuning and maintenance to keep it all working.

  A vessel this big probably kept a smaller crew than a little corvette like Storm Gauntlet had.

  Afia didn’t trust the life support systems all that much, but they had held under a low baseline load for a very long time, so she was comfortable telling them to bring the temperature and pressure up slowly.

  Everyone would remain in their suits until she said otherwise. That point, she would hammer home on all of them.

  Fierce teacup Chihuahua.

  “Can you access comm systems from in here?” Javier asked in a voice that just sounded wrong.

  Concerned, but evasive. Like he really wanted the answer to be no, but couldn’t just come out and say that, at least not in front of the others.

  Weird.

  But this was Javier, and he was having to juggle everything else with Sykora being possessed by demons or something. Maybe it was just the struggle to keep them al
l sane that was getting to him.

  Afia toggled through a couple of boards and ran through logic trees while he watched. The other three just waited, torn between watching the big generators and paying attention to what she was doing.

  She could take advantage of their paranoia to help Javier.

  They didn’t need to know that someone had defaulted all login accounts to Full System Administrator rights. And she would fix that pretty soon. That was too much like handing a five-year-old a beam weapon. Stupid, and someone was going to get hurt.

  “I can transmit a signal on the right frequencies as part of the Identification Transponder,” Afia shaded the truth with a small forest of pine trees. “Is that good enough?”

  That must have been the answer to his prayers. Javier sagged just a little, and smiled at her.

  “Perfect,” he replied. “Let Storm Gauntlet know we have boarded, are exploring, and are safe at present. We will check in again in ten hours.”

  “Ten?” Sykora perked up from her fugue with a voice that was a thin ghost of her normal bark, but you could still hear the woman underneath.

  “That’s right,” Javier pivoted to look up at her. “We’ve had a long day, a lot of stress, and the ship needs time to come up from her nap. This is a good time to eat, sleep, and when we wake up, we can probably get out of these damned suits and live like normal people.”

  “Watch cycle?” Sascha chimed in, obviously intent on handling things if her boss was off-line.

  “None,” Javier said, his voice gone hard and flat, like a sword blade. “The probe can handle everything. I want you all down hard and fully refreshed tomorrow. Take something if you need to. There are a whole bunch of dead men and women on this ship and we will need to secure them with the proper ceremonies. Everything else that comes after that will be even more difficult. Questions?”

  The three women subsided.

  Afia nodded, but only inside her head. Javier was up to something.

  That was a sneaky way to ambush somebody.

  Afia called up a schematic to check the location.