by M. D. Cooper
The question continued to flit about his consciousness. Why would the Hegemony go to Bollam’s World? It was isolated; there were few systems near it, and though it was rim-ward of New Eden, it was not the first system he would have taken in an attempt to encompass them.
He queried the reports he often left for his subordinates to review and did not see any further detail regarding the Hegemony incursion—though there were several confirmations of the event.
Garza turned his attention to other matters. The morning slipped by, and, as he was preparing for a lunch with the Minister of Defense, an alert flashed over his vision. It was just what he had been hoping for, a report from his contact in the Bollam’s system, an admiral named Nespha.
As Garza began pouring over the data Nespha had sent in, the enormity of what had occurred in the Bollam’s System struck him like a hammer blow.
A lost colony ship, the lost colony ship, the greatest ever built had arrived in Bollam’s World, dumped there by the Kapteyn’s Streamer.
He read through the report four more times, soaking in every detail; the ship’s use of impenetrable shields, the devastating attack on Hegemony Dreadnaughts—a victory so swift he wondered how much Nespha was embellishing it. The capstone of the report was a jump to FTL, but not before the destruction of a planet and the creation of a dark-matter-fueled black hole.
A colony ship, a twenty-six kilometer long, colony ship, from the early fifth millennia jumped to FTL.
There was only one possibility, The Hand had found this ship and taken it to the Transcend.
General Garza rose from his desk. Lunch with the secretary would be especially eventful today.
THE TRANSCEND
A LATE-NIGHT MEETING
STELLAR DATE: 05.19.8928 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Transcend Interstellar Capitol
REGION: Airtha, Hyugens System, Transcend Space
Mark raced through the halls of the Capitol, determined to catch Andrea before the meeting commenced.
It was late at night and the halls were nearly empty. The few people Mark did see paid him little heed, most intent on completing whatever tasks had them awake so late, and getting to bed while there was still a night to sleep through.
Mark knew that sleep would not come his way this night, and by morning—if he had his way—he would be leaving Airtha, headed to wherever she was.
He rounded a corner, nearly slipping on the smooth quartz floors and spotted Andrea.
The tall, dark-haired woman moved and looked so much like her sister that sometimes he thought she was Sera. However, the similarities were only skin-deep. Where Sera was earnest and determined, Andrea was cold and calculating. He greatly admired—and lusted—after Andrea, but it was Sera that he wished to possess.
“Hey! Hold up!” he called out and Andrea turned, a scowl creasing her smooth features.
“I told you over the Link,” she said with no small amount of annoyance in her voice. “You’ll find out with everyone else.”
Mark caught up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Seriously? Me? I’ve known her all my life, I have a right to know.”
Andrea gave his hand a venomous look that made him want her all the more, though it did have the desired effect of getting him to remove it from her soft skin.
“You don’t have a right beyond anyone else. You know all you’re going to until the director briefs us. Core’s Devils, Mark, you’ll know in less than ten minutes.”
Andrea turned from him and resumed her brisk walk down the corridor and Mark rushed to keep up.
He sighed. “Fine.”
“Fucking right it’s fine.”
They rounded a corner and then turned down a narrow hall, which they followed through several security checks before reaching the entrance to their division’s operations center.
Mark barely spared the main room a glance—every station still filled with personnel despite the hour—as he followed Andrea down a hall to briefing room 4C. The door slid open and he saw that their director, Justin, was already present, seated at the head of the table, his expression one of extreme agitation.
“Director,” Mark said a moment before Andrea greeted the man by name.
“Good evening, Justin,” she smiled.
“Yeah, whatever. Sit down. The other heads will be here momentarily,” Director Justin grunted.
“The other heads?” Mark asked. “I thought this was a team briefing.”
Justin met his eyes, the director’s narrowing to slits. “Well you thought wrong, Mark. Now sit down and shut up, this is giving me enough of a headache without having to listen to you.”
Mark knew he had pushed as far as possible. Andrea hadn’t been his first target that night. He had already peppered the director with a host of questions when he first heard that Sera had called in.
Over the next few minutes, the other heads, who were currently on Airtha filed in, and, for those who were away from the Capitol, AI proxies appeared to represent them.
“What’s this all about?” Tressa, a section chief responsible for operations in one of the rim-ward sectors, asked. “So Seraphina called in. What about that gets us all out of bed so late?”
“Other than it being the first time she’s made contact since her exile?” Andrea asked.
“Self-imposed exile,” Tressa countered.
“You’re right, Tressa, Sera alone would not have ruined my day so much—though she’s certainly capable of such a feat if she tried,” Justin sighed. “She found something and is bringing it our way. A colony ship lost in the Kapteyn’s Streamer from the fifth millennia.”
Mark sat up straight and glanced around the table. Everyone had instantly become alert and attentive. They all knew how lost tech could mess up The Plan—a strategy they knew Seraphina had never fully bought into.
“What ship?” Irena asked. “There were a lot of ships lost there over the years.”
Justin gave a dry laugh. “You’ll know this one. It’s the Intrepid.”
It took Mark a moment to recall the ship from his days in the academy. All recruits were required to learn about lost colony ships—especially ones thought to have entered gravitational lenses. The knowledge surfaced in his mind and he realized what was so special about this ship.
“The picotech ship,” he said softly. “I thought they weren’t expected to exit the streamer for another couple hundred years?”
“Correct,” Justin said with a nod. “Our best guess put their exit around the year 9500. We had been building up our presence in Bollam’s in preparation, but the Orion Guard knows what we know; quite the covert war has been going on there for some time.”
“Which we all already know,” Chief Tressa said.
“Yeah, I wasn’t saying it to brief you, Tressa, it was to lead into this,” Justin said as he scowled at the woman. “We have this data from multiple sources now, so what I’m about to tell you is confirmed intel…”
Mark was at a rare loss for words as he listened to the director outline the battle in the Bollam’s system and the subsequent creation of a dark matter black hole. It made their worst-case scenario, for an old colony ship appearing, seem like a walk in the park.
“There was no mention of the Intrepid having stasis shields in the accounts from Kapteyn’s,” Andrea said with a frown. “Are you telling us that somehow, while they were trapped in the streamer, they developed that tech?”
“You’re not thinking in the right temporal frames,” secretary Garrig said. “They were only in there for a few hours, maybe a couple of days at most. Whatever that shielding is, they devised it after coming out. I bet it was some breakthrough they made after Sera gave them grav-tech.”
“How I that possible?” Mark asked. “We’ve never created shields lik
e that, and, unlike the Inner Stars, we kept our tech over the last five thousand years.”
“Mark, you seem to need a refresher on the early interstellar period,” Justin growled. “By the time the Intrepid was built, it had been over four hundred years since a Worldship left Sol; that ship being the Destiny Ascendant. After that, we had no further interactions with the Inner Stars until after the Fall.”
Mark took the criticism in stride. He didn’t believe in wasting his time on ancient history. Recalling details is what AI were for and he lived for the here and now—and the future. It was his future that concerned him most right now.
“They have a half millennia on our best source tech, not to mention whatever advantages pico gives them,” Andrea said, her caustic look making Mark smile. There was just something about the woman that drove him nuts.
“They can’t be that far ahead,” Mark replied. “They don’t have stuff like the CriEn that Sera lost, that thing being in the wild didn’t cause any big ripples.”
“She’s lucky it didn’t,” Tressa said. “If it had, she wouldn’t have gotten to keep flitting about out there. We’d’ve hauled her ass in, daddy’s little girl or no.”
“You would have done what you were told,” a voice said from the doorway.
All eyes turned to the speaker and Mark felt a slow smile slip across his face. Daddy’s little girl indeed. His eyes slid to the side, watching Tressa turn a dark shade of red as she stammered an apology to President Tomlinson.
“You may cease with your blathering,” the president said and waved his hand in Tressa’s direction before taking a seat and looking to Justin. “So, where are we?”
“Sir,” Director Justin said with a nod. “I was just about to let everyone know that Sera did retrieve the CriEn module and will be bringing it back with her—she bested our expectations for how long we thought it would take her, too.”
Mark watched the president absorb the director’s words, his brow heavy, and brooding.
“I’m glad your little experiment worked—and that she came through.” The President’s expression told everyone what sort of trouble Justin would be in if Sera had come to any serious harm. “Did she share it with the colonists?”
If Justin was fazed by the president’s implications, he showed no sign of it. “We have no way of knowing. She didn’t give any indication one way or other. Our direct communication from her is brief, it confirms that the ship is the Intrepid and that she is providing them with the grav-tech to make an FTL jump to Ascella.”
“So standard procedure then,” the president said with a nod.
“Yes, sir.”
President Tomlinson steepled his fingers and peered over them at secretary Pierce.
“Do we have a system in mind for them?”
Pierce nodded. “We’ve done a lot of work on the rim-ward side of M25. There’s a system on the edge of the cluster that should be perfect. It has four, stage-four terraformed worlds and a dozen other planets. It would be a perfect place for them. Plus, it’s only sixteen hundred light-years from Ascella, so the trip won’t be too long.”
“Has it already been ceded to anyone?” Tomlinson asked.
Pierce chuckled. “It’s a choice system, sir. I can think of twenty groups that have their eyes on it, but no official offer has been made. To be honest, giving it to an outside group such as the Intrepid, would be ideal. Then I don’t have to play anyone off anyone else.”
“Make it happen. I would expect that the colony ship will only take four years to get there from Ascella, so we’ll need to make sure the welcome mat is rolled out.”
“What are we going to take in trade for a system like that?” Andrea asked. “Will we make them surrender their picotech?”
Mark watched as the president turned his attention to his daughter. “We will absolutely not ask for their picotech in exchange for the system. We’ll take nothing beyond what they left Sol with—which is an amazing windfall in its own right.”
“Sir, why the stars not?” Mark asked. “Their tech could give us an unbelievable advantage over The Orion Guard.”
“We all know that the Guard has sympathizers…and likely worse...within our ranks. We need to be completely above board on this. It needs to be perfectly clear that we will not take the Intrepid’s tech. What’s more, there will be a complete embargo on directly trading any of the Intrepid’s tech. It must all come through the DOE.”
Tomlinson looked around the table as he spoke, ensuring that everyone understood what he meant. Every bit of tech from the Intrepid would come through the Department of Equalization, and be licensed by the federal government. There must not even be a hint of black-market trading with this colony world.
“The Guard won’t believe for a second that we didn’t take the pico in trade for a system,” Tressa shook her head. “They’ll mount an offense and we’ll have to fend them off—without the tech that they’ll be after.”
Tomlinson smiled.
“Now you’re getting it.”
“She’s getting what?” Andrea asked. “Tressa’s right, we need that tech and we should demand it.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Justin said caustically—unafraid to call out the President’s daughter in front of her father. “That colony ship took out four fleets in Bollam’s and bested the AST’s fifth fleet afterward. And don’t forget that they decimated a serious assault from the Sirians back at Kapteyn’s Star. How many ships do you think we’ll have to sacrifice to force them into submission?”
“We don’t have to threaten them with force,” Mark said, attempting to back Andrea up. “We have what they need, a colony world.”
“They already built one of those at Kapteyn’s Star,” Secretary Pierce said. “They were prepared to fly another hundred years when they hit the Streamer and jumped forward in time. Now, with FTL, they’d just fly through the entire Transcend and find a new world if we forced them.”
Tomlinson nodded. “When they’re settled, and calling that world home, when The Orion Guard has mounted an offensive against us for their tech, then we’ll come to them and beg for their assistance, and they’ll give it to us willingly. We’ll crush the Guard and finally complete our project.”
“So long as Seraphina doesn’t mess things up,” Andrea growled. “She’s like a plasma bomb in situations like this.”
The president cast an appraising eye at his daughter. “Then you’ll bring her back to Airtha. I will explain the situation to her.”
“I’ll bring her back?” Andrea said, distaste dripping from her voice. “I really don’t fancy taking half a year out of my life to go meet with my errant sister. Send Mark, they have history together.”
Mark held a smile back. Being the one sent to meet with Seraphina was the only thing that mattered to him right now. If she had the CriEn module, he would have to destroy it…or her…or both. Given the risks, both would probably be best.
He realized that the president was giving him an appraising look and hoped none of his thoughts had shown on his face.
“I’m no fool, Mark,” Tomlinson said. “I read the reports about what happened when your team lost the CriEn—when you lost Seraphina. I don’t think that you’re the best option. Andrea, it’s you. Bring Serge as well, at least he actually likes Seraphina, it’ll help smooth things over.”
* * * * *
“For fuck’s sake,” Andrea muttered as she walked the halls of the Capitol. “Of all the fucking stupid things to get pulled into, I have to go fetch my dumbass sister from half way across the Arm.”
Andrea laughed aloud, feeling a sense of joy for the first time since getting the intelligence about the battle in Bollam’s World.
PREPARATION
STELLAR DATE: 05.20.8928 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: High Airtha Port
REGION: Airtha, Hyugens System, Transcend Space
“So what’s this about?” a voice asked from behind Andrea as she reviewed the ship’s pre-flight status. She turned to see her second-youngest brother, Serge, standing at the entrance of the small bridge.
“Serge,” she said by way of greeting. “No one briefed you?”
The stocky man shook his head. “Nope, Director Justin told me to hit you up when I got on board. What’s the deal?”
“We’re getting Sera,” Andrea replied simply. “She picked up a colony ship out of Kapteyn’s Streamer—details are on the bridge net in the mission dossier.”
Serge took a seat at a console and pulled up the mission details. Andrea let him read in peace, she had enough to do if they were to leave in the next hour. Satisfied that the pre-flight checks had all met her exacting standards, she moved on to assessing the supplies and weapons loadout. Chances were that any combat would be minimal—likely just infiltration and a quick strike—if it came to that.