Defiance: Book 5 of the Legacy Fleet Series (The Legacy Fleet Trilogy)

by Nick Webb

  The meaning of his statement began to dawn on Oppenheimer. “You mean, I can relieve Proctor?”

  “Of course not. Politics, remember? But you can … persuade her to follow your lead. As long as I don’t hear about it. Besides, I’ve got a rogue admiral of my own to put in his place. This one is above your pay grade, I believe.” He stood up, and with a knowing glance to Quinkert, his body man, the kid immediately left to go gather the president’s personal belongings for a quick interstellar trip.

  “What are you going to do? I told you, if we piss him off and Shovik-Orion decides it no longer wishes to service our starships—”

  “Don’t shit your pants, Christian. I got this. I just won the biggest election in galactic history, remember? I persuade people. I get them to think we’re on the same side. It’s what I do. He’ll find I can be very persuasive. And in the end, he’ll back off, and he’ll think it was his idea.”

  He walked out of his office leaving the admiral behind. The other man’s face clearly looked like he wanted to talk more, but Quimby both didn’t care and also wanted to leave the impression that he was the alpha dog: driving the conversation, in control of the situation. It would piss the admiral off, sure, but then Quimby would heap some public praise on the asshole and puff up the blustery, shallow ego. It’s how he neutered and controlled the most powerful political leaders that ended up endorsing him. Play them like fiddles. Their fragile egos were his piano.

  “And where are we going, Mr. President?” asked Quinkert.

  “Bolivar. To have a few choice words with Mr. Mullins.”

  And what were those words going to be? Hell if he knew. He had a day-long interstellar voyage to figure that part out. Shoot from the hip—that’s why people loved him. Maybe a few beers would be all it took to loosen Mullins up a little. Or giving him a fat payoff. It worked for him before.

  Or give him a planet. Shit, whatever it took. He sure as hell wasn’t going to be a sideshow to some megalomaniac admiral. Much less three of them.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Orbit over Mao Prime

  ISS Independence

  Bridge

  There was an unwritten order of things. Every social situation, every locale where humans gathered into social structures—there were always law codes and regulations and rules, and inevitably, there was the stuff that happened under the table. And in the military, Proctor mused to herself as she walked into the bar, that “under the table” stuff often happened right there on top of the table in full view of everyone.

  Like the bar itself. She smiled lopsidedly at the name stenciled on the archway to the converted storage room near the fighter bay: Futwick’s. She knew there was a joke in there somewhere—she knew for sure there was no crew member named Futwick aboard the ship.

  She flipped a chair around at a table and sat in it backwards. Captain Volz was already there, glass half empty—usually she would have said it was half full, but such were the times. She noticed several other officers and pilots stand up in respect once they’d noticed her, and she waved them back down—the unwritten order allowed the existence of the unofficial bar next to the fighter bay, but the written order still required standard courtesy and protocol.

  “Ballsy. Been here awhile?” She indicated his half full glass, while simultaneously catching the attention of the barkeeper, who this shift looked to be one the fighter deck hands.

  “Less than two minutes.” He held the glass up and gulped the rest of the beer down. “It’s been a hell of a day. Did the last of the Dolmasi ships finally leave?”

  She nodded. “A few of them hung around, staying well beyond Mao Prime’s moon, but they finally q-jumped away. Polrum Krull finally saw reason and agreed to keep the Magnanimity in the system until the last Dolmasi ship left.”

  “And the Independence? What’s our itinerary?” Volz waved at the deck hand to hurry up.

  “Admiral Sun from the CIDR fleet asked that we stay awhile—at least until the Magnanimity leaves. The Skiohra make them nervous, and Sun thinks I’ve got cachet with them. That if I’m around, the Skiohra will behave themselves.”

  Volz grinned half-heartedly. “They don’t step out of line with the Motherkiller around.”

  She shot him a glare. “That was uncalled for, Ballsy.”

  “Sorry.” Volz looked sheepish. She wondered if that glass was his first. Though by the unwritten order, the drinks they served there had to be lower alcohol content than usual. The deck hand finally came over with another glass full of the watered-down beer for Volz and looked at her questioningly. She glanced at his name tag. Rydberg.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Coffee. Cream and sugar, please. And yeoman Rydberg?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Extra strong.”

  By the look on his face, he knew what extra strong meant. She couldn’t officially be asking for Irish coffee, after all. He saluted and retreated behind the bar to prepare her drink.

  “I assume you’ll speak at the memorial service?” Volz downed another half of his new glass.

  She paused several moments. Sighed. “Of course. How many pilots? Did Sanders make it? He was in intensive care earlier….”

  Volz shook his head. “No. Batship just told me he passed. The burns were too extensive. Lost too much blood.”

  Proctor held her head in her hands. “Damn.” She didn’t even notice the deck hand place the coffee in front of her—it was there when she finally looked up. “How many?”

  “Nine.”

  She gulped several swallows of coffee, relishing the burn, welcoming its fire and the accompanying warmth of alcohol. She could have been one of the nine—any of them could—but for now, she was alive, and she savored it, all while feeling the pain of losing her people. People who were her responsibility. People who wouldn’t go home to their kids and wives and husbands and parents. “Damn,” she repeated.

  “Death is life, Shelby. We’ve all got to go. Question is when. At least those folks went out for a cause, and went fast. We can only hope for as much for ourselves.”

  “A cause? And what cause was that?”

  He didn’t have an answer. They sat in silence for a minute. She glanced over to the table next to them full of enlisted men and women—mechanics, by the looks of them and nodded a greeting. They gave nodded salutes back. “Batship? Which pilot is that?”

  “My son.”

  Proctor’s eyebrow went up. “I thought his was Batshit.”

  Volz grinned—good, they needed something to laugh at, so she’d laugh at whatever he found funny. Anything to distract them, even for a moment, from the awful realities of war. “It was, until you tamped down on the, quote, potty-language two weeks ago.”

  “Ah. Batship.” She glanced back up at the sign on the wall. “Futwicks.” She shook her head. “You people. Pilots. Fighter jocks. There’s not a rule or regulation you people won’t sidestep around.”

  Volz grinned even wider. “If we didn’t, there’d never be places like Futwicks.”

  She raised her cup. “And god bless you for it.”

  Volz looked sidelong at her, stroking his stubble goatee—another unwritten rule: officers in war could look like whatever the hell they wanted to, as long as they got shit done. “You could have just changed it all when you were Fleet Admiral, you know.”

  “And why would I do a batship stupid futwick thing like that?” She sipped the coffee, feeling the Irish whiskey finally kick in a little bit.

  Volz grunted. “No more of this sidestepping rules shit. Just have it all out in the open, you know?” He finished his second, and final beer—the deck hand had caught his attention with a questioning glance, but Volz waved him off.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “It happens anyway, Shelby. May as well be up front about it. I mean, come on,” he waved an arm around towards the storage bay-turned pub with a look that said gotcha. “Here you are.”

  She sipped another mouthful. “Here I am, and I wouldn’t ha
ve it any other way. Ballsy, I never had kids. But I had my little brother and sister and nieces and nephews, and I’ve commanded thousands of twenty-something kids over the years. And the one thing I’ve learned about humans—young people in particular, is that they, we, have to rebel against something. It’s in our blood. It’s our evolutionary and cultural heritage. If we’re not rebelling against something, by god we’ll soon find something to rebel against. And I, for one, would far prefer to channel that rebellion into something beautiful like Futwick’s than something terrible like … whatever you people would do if this place were officially sanctioned.”

  “A fight club?”

  She smirked. “Don’t push your luck, Captain.” She downed the last mouthful. “It’s human nature. Defiance. Rebellion. It’s what gave us Magna Carta. It’s what gave us the American Revolution. The French Revolution. The women’s suffrage movement. It’s what gave us the People’s Accord that ended the First Interstellar War. On and on and on. It’s what gave us bloody Tim Granger and the defeat of the Swarm.”

  At the mention of the name, the mood went darker.

  “But they’re back,” Volz said.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Shelby, they’re coming,” he quoted to her.

  “That could mean anything.”

  He stared her in the eye. “Or, it could mean exactly what we think it means. Exactly what we know it means.”

  “I know. Dammit, I know. But Ballsy, thirteen billion years. How the hell is that even possible? It flies in the face of all reason.”

  “Tim always did have a knack for flying in the face of reason. You could say it was his defining quality.”

  Proctor snorted. “His defining quality was being a crotchety old man who grumbled. Constantly.”

  “And now he’s a god,” Volz added with a smile. “How ironic.”

  “I think not. Sounds like the Old Testament god to me. Grumpy old man who grumbles all the time. Destroys a few cities. Sends a few plagues. The usual.”

  “The question is, taking the Granger-as-god fantasy a bit further,” he stared down into his empty glass. “Is he the Old Testament god of wrath and vengeance? Or the New Testament god of salvation and redemption? After all, we’ve got several moons with holes bored into them, the ISS Chesapeake destroyed, hundreds, no, thousands of deaths already—”

  She cut him off by leaning in. “This is classified top secret. Tau twenty. But you should know. You know the moon in the Jakarta sector? Tal Rishi?”

  “Yeah. Uninhabited system, right? Except the Golgothic ship hit Tal Rishi with its beam while no one was looking?”

  “Right.” She downed the last of her coffee. “I just heard a few minutes ago. It’s gone.”

  He looked up suddenly. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Gone. Disappeared. The whole moon.”

  “Debris?”

  “None.”

  Volz puffed air in exasperation. “You’re the scientist, you tell me. Is that possible?”

  “No.”

  “Let me get this straight. A thirteen billion-year-old message from Granger. A piece from the Victory just as old as the message. Now an entire moon just … poof … disappears. What the bloody hell is going on?”

  She shook her head. “I wish I knew. Believe me, Ballsy, I wish I knew.” She was half-tempted to wave the yeoman over to refill her cup. But the slight buzz she felt was enough. With the Dolmasi out there, ready to spring on an unsuspecting system at any time, she had to stay ready for duty. “It’s like my mom always said, they come in threes. The bad things. The deaths, the catastrophes—whatever. They come in threes. My question is, after Granger’s message, and after Tal Rishi going missing, what the hell could follow that up?”

  A shadow passed over Volz’s face, and he looked like he wanted to say something. But he just played with his cup.

  “Out with it.”

  “You’ve had way more than three, Shelby. Are you doing ok? I haven’t heard you talk about Danny even once since you learned he was dead.”

  “We don’t know for sure he’s dead.” She said the words, but they sounded hollow even to her.

  Danny Proctor. Barely twenty years old. Oldest son of her younger brother, almost like her own son since she had helped raise him over the past ten years.

  And he was gone. Just months after finally achieving his dream of captaining his own starship, a merchant freighter named the Magdalena Issachar. But an unknown ship had intercepted it over Sangre de Cristo in the San Martin system, boarded it, killed Danny’s crewmates, and detonated the freighter’s cargo: a stolen nuclear missile, destroying one of the domed settlements on Sangre.

  They found Danny’s charred space suit a hundred kilometers from the nearest domed settlement several days later.

  “If you say so, Shelby. When you’re ready to talk about it, I’m here. I haven’t lost a child or a nephew like that, at least, not exactly, but if you want to talk….”

  “I don’t. Not yet.”

  “Fair enough.” He spun his cup a few more times. “Oh, Lieutenant Qwerty reports he figured out a new Dolmasi phrase as he listened in on their Ligature comm traffic when the Skiorha showed up.”

  That caught her interest, and made her glad that Volz had the good sense to change the subject. “Really? What?”

  He cleared his throat dramatically. “Ohhhhh shiiiiiit.”

  She laughed. Ballsy could still make her laugh, after all those decades. “Well tell Mr. Qwerty to keep at it. I want a full Dolmasi dictionary by the end of the week.”

  “And Commander Mumford is still working on the analysis of the sensor readings we took of the Golgothic ship before it plunged into Titan. He’s having a hard go of it—honestly, he needs more people. An actual science team.”

  She nodded. “I might still have some sway at IDF Sciences. I’ll see if I can’t pull some people in. Besides, I’ve got a few other things I want them to look into. I want our own people looking into the science of the meta-space pulse and its interaction with and effect upon the Ligature. I want some extra eyes on the data we got on the Magdalena Issachar—just to confirm what Admiral Tigre’s folks are telling me. And….” She paused, considering. “And I want to take another look at the black hole data. I know, I know, our top scientists have been studying the Penumbra black hole for three decades. But … I just want to … I don’t know. Take another look. Study the interaction of those anti-matter bombs that Tim piloted into that thing with the meta-space link the Swarm supposedly used to enter our universe. There are issues of causality and interactions between quantum physics and general relativity physics that I’m not one hundred percent clear on. And I also want—”

  He started laughing.

  “What?”

  “You know who you sound like? President Avery. Especially when you mentioned her anti-matter bombs. She had dozens of different secret projects going on at once. Probably still has several of them going on right now, even though she’s been out of office for twenty-five years. The whole anti-matter bomb project—the Mars Project, she called it, to confuse the Russians about what it actually was all about—was secret right up until we finally used them on what we thought was the Swarm’s homeworld, and then again a day later when Tim ran a few of them into the Swarm’s end zone like he was rushing with a football. But was that all Avery was working on in secret? I bet she had a dozen other things up her sleeve in case those bombs didn’t work. You’re the same. Always thinking twenty steps ahead.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “No. I’m complimenting you. I guess I’m just saying that … with you on our side and back in the game, as bleak as things seem, I can’t help but think that our enemies have a freight train headed straight at them. A freight train called Shelby Proctor.” He lifted up his glass and tipped it towards her as a toast, and tried to drink before he remembered it was still empty.

  “Well I’ll be a lot more at ease when we know what the third thing is,” she
said, circling back. “A message from Granger, a moon disappearing, and then….”

  As if on cue, her comm beeped. She shot Volz an unnerved look, and pulled her hand terminal out of her pocket. “Proctor,” she said.

  “Admiral, a small freighter is approaching and is requesting permission to dock.”

  Her brow furrowed in mild surprise. “Commercial freighter?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Permission denied. We don’t have time for whatever they—”

  “I told them that, ma’am. But … well, she says her name is Fiona Liu. Was really insistent that her name get passed to you.”

  Fiona Liu? Proctor’s eyes bulged out. Her spine ran cold. Oh my god.

  Volz mouthed to her, “Who the hell is Fiona Liu?”

  She replied into her hand terminal. “Permission granted. Shuttle bay two. I’ll meet her there.” She stood up and rushed for the door. Volz followed close behind.

  “Who the hell is Fiona Liu?” he repeated.

  She didn’t even pause as she responded. “His girlfriend. Danny’s dead girlfriend.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Orbit over Mao Prime

  ISS Independence

  Sickbay

  Zivic paced. Back and forth past the door to the surgical ward, stopping every now and then to peer in through the window, past the blinds, through the small half-centimeter gap between them and the window sill. Wait, were they done? Or were they just taking a break? He saw the surgeon step back from the operating table, frustration covering his face. His front was wet with blood.

  Dammit, dammit, dammit….

  “You’re hopeless, you know?”

  He spun around at the sound of the voice. He didn’t know whether to smile or glare at the voice’s owner. “Look, Jerusha, she was hanging by a thread out there. If we had have been ten seconds later….”

  He turned back to peer through the window, while she sidled up next to him. “How is she?”