“No, it doesn’t work like that, Tom….my Lord Admiral,” Finch said quickly. “Though if they had thought of this innovation, I would likely commend them highly as it took me several months of research with the Book to figure…” Finch allowed his voice to drift away upon seeing the faces of those he loved and cared for favoring him with naught but disdain. “I shall be right here if you have need of me, my Lord,” he added quietly.
“Very well,” Weatherby said tersely. “So I shall begin by focusing on HMS Mars, which ought to be –”
Weatherby gasped as the mirror below filled with stars and, a moment later, that fine vessel appeared as if it were off his larboard side, with full sail and guns out. “Dear God,” he breathed. “Now for Thunderer.” Another stream of stars went by, and Patrick O’Brian’s ship came into view. Soon, Weatherby had found every ship in his fleet. He called out a relative position upon each and had one of Searle’s lieutenants mark them accordingly on a rough map.
“Now, where are the French?” Weatherby muttered. “Finch, how do I find the bloody French?”
“You must see them from the eyes of your men, or the minds of your captains,” Finch said gently. “I think you shall have to ask.”
Weatherby frowned. He was not at all enamored of the idea of being a voice in his captains’ head. Having been a captain himself, he knew full well that his voice—imagined, of course—was already there, berating or encouraging them, depending on their wont. But…there was nothing for it.
“You and I will have a long, long talk about responsibility once again, Doctor,” Weatherby groused before closing his eyes and clearing his mind. “Patrick O’Brian. Paddy, it’s Tom. This is a genuine message. It’s Finch’s doing. Can you hear me?”
Weatherby spoke the words aloud, but the reply came as a tentative whisper in his mind. “Lord Weatherby? Is that you? I can hear you. Do I need to speak aloud or can you hear my very thoughts?” Immediately after hearing this, a jolt of pain lanced through Weatherby’s head; it seemed the working exacted quite a toll indeed.
“I’ve no idea, Paddy, but I can hear you,” Weatherby said, gritting his teeth through the pain and yet, oddly, somewhat amused that his officers on the quarterdeck were forced to listen to but one side of a conversation. “However you are communicating, continue it. Where are the French?”
As it happened, Thunderer had spotted two French ships, a third-rate and a frigate. From there, Weatherby touched the minds of his other captains—engaging in long and often-times frustrating conversations in the process, accompanied by continued aches in his head—until he had a complete picture of the field of battle before him.
“I believe we have but seven French ships, including three ships of the line. Our best stratagem will be for as many of us to set upon single ships as possible,” Weatherby said, both to his captain aboard Victory and, he hoped, to his other captains. By now, he felt completely fatigued—and the battle had yet to even start. He could only hope to remain standing throughout the engagement. “O’Brian, take Thunderer and make for the 74 nearest you. Kent, set your course three points to starboard and two down upon your planes, and adjust when you see both the French and Thunderer. I shall send Agamemnon and Enterprise to join you. Meanwhile, Captain Searle will take Victory and engage four points to larboard. We should find a first-rate of ninety guns there, and I shall bring Mars and Surprise to join us.”
And with that, Weatherby allowed himself a few moments of quiet to mollify his aching head and to gather his wits about him for another spate of communication, should it come to that.
Searle posted lookouts to both sides of the ship specifically to look for Mars and the 28-gun frigate Surprise, and was not disappointed. HMS Mars appeared within a point of where Weatherby had predicted, while the frigate Surprise was even more precise. Meanwhile, a single point of light ahead grew in size and soon revealed itself to be a substantial three-decked vessel flying the French tricolor.
“Traditional signals should work now, I believe,” Weatherby said, using his kerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. “Signal our compatriots. Mars shall take the larboard side, we shall fire upon the starboard. And have Surprise come up upon her keel and fire upward.”
It was, in the end, no contest at all.
The French ship attempted to maneuver but was taken by surprise, and Weatherby’s captains were able to adjust well enough. Victory and Mars raked the French ships with massive broadsides, while the French—split between two enemies—could only manage a small barrage on either side. Victory shuddered with the impact of several shots, but Weatherby could see that Searle’s gunners aimed true, for there were several holes rent in the side of the French as it flew past. Weatherby could only imagine the damage Surprise had done to the French’s underbelly.
All upon the quarterdeck wheeled around and pulled their glasses to see the effects of the strategy. Smoke poured from several gaping holes in the French vessel, both upon the sides and from her keel. One mast was listing to starboard, and both her planesails were in tatters. Open flames could be seen from inside the windows of her stern, and there were several men dangling over the sides on lifelines.
The admiral snapped his glass shut. “Very well, then,” he said grimly, turning back to his map and mirror and, with substantially more confidence, donning the lenses once more. “I shall contact Thunderer and, if they have fared as well as we, select new targets. Captain, give me a damage report on Victory when you have it.”
Yet before Weatherby could focus his mind upon his captain and friend O’Brian, there were shouts from the topmast and forward—more ships spotted.
Weatherby tore off Finch’s goggles and used his own glass to look, and felt his stomach sink. “Dear God, have we fallen into a trap?” he muttered.
During the battle, the Royal Navy ships had continued to travel toward Venus at a very high speed, and the green, cloud-shrouded planet began to obscure more and more of their view. But now, from either side of the world before them, more French ships were spotted—at least three clusters of them, coming from larboard, starboard and above.
“Captain, I need numbers for these contacts,” Weatherby said as he snapped his glass shut, and wrestled with putting his headgear on once more. “I shall warn the others and see what their lookouts may find as well.”
The news was far from good. Each of the three clusters of French coming toward them had two ships of the line and at least four other vessels, which meant they were more than a match for Weatherby’s own groupings. The admiral’s mind raced, even as pain seemed to emanate from his very skull. The French had at least half again as many ships, with at least a third more guns. They could be more flexible, darting around the Void to pick off their English targets as if they were hunting grouse.
So we must be larger game, then, he thought suddenly.
“I’m telling Thunderer and Agamemnon to signal the others and form up on Victory,” Weatherby said to his officers. “Captain Searle, identify the very nearest group of French ships and make for them, full sail, royals and stud’sels. Signal Mars and Surprise to follow suit.”
Weatherby returned to the mirror upon the table before him and added instructions to his captains as to how they should form up, for the old admiral had a very specific plan in mind for maximizing his guns. He was in the midst of explaining it to the captain of Kent when the mirror before him burst with a strange blue light, causing his eyes to water as he turned away suddenly.
“Finch!” he cried. “What was that?”
The alchemist scurried over to the table and, using a strange eye-piece of his own, peered into it. “My God,” Finch said quietly and reverently, which was wholly opposite his normal demeanor. “Look at it, Tom.”
Weatherby turned back and saw that the starfield before him had several new additions; in his mind, he could hear the confusion in his captains’ minds as well. A lookout upon Agamemnon had seen one of the unknown marks up close, and found it to be a metal object some twent
y feet long, shaped like a coffin, with insect-like, yet rectangular, wings protruding from it and two large concave plates attached at either end.
“What just happened, Finch?” Weatherby demanded. “There are several new…things…out there.”
Before Finch could answer, they were interrupted by a cry from Searle. “Full down on the planes! NOW!”
Reflexively, Weatherby grabbed for the railing of the quarterdeck with one hand and at Finch’s wrist with the other. The gravity upon Victory shifted greatly as the maneuver prompted the massive Victory to begin a steep dive. And just overhead, Weatherby saw a massive object nearly scrape the top of the mainmast. It was similar in metallic design to what the lookouts had seen—but several times larger.
It was so close, in fact, that Weatherby could see the markings upon it—including a flag painted upon the side, in an all-too-familiar pattern of stripes and stars.
“They’re here again,” Weatherby said, amazed. “Dear God. Are we too late?”
CHAPTER 16
January 29, 2135
It didn’t take long for Hadfield to discover the malfeasance aboard the Virgin Galactic liner. Baines managed to avoid collision with ease, but then required an additional thirty-second burn to get the ship back on course—and they lost several hours on the other ship.
Of course, nobody thought this was coincidence, but confirmation came just a few short hours later—when the first frozen corpse appeared on sensors.
Shaila called up a visual on the first one. She was Asian, probably Korean, somewhere in her 30s, and dressed in an elegant gown that flowed behind her yet was as motionless as her body. She only had one of her stilettos on—the other was probably close by, but too small for sensors to find. The woman’s skin was grey and bruised, the result of blood vessels bursting in the vacuum of space, and her eyes were open and milky. Somehow, Shaila expected her to look stricken or horrified, but the woman merely looked as though she was mildly surprised.
After that, Shaila didn’t look at any more.
As the first two or three showed up on sensors, Diaz seemed to be inclined to stop and pick them up…but then more and more bodies showed up on the screen, and the entire CIC quickly grew quiet. Finally, the general ordered the position and course of each body calculated and transmitted to Houston. Someone, hopefully, would recover the dead. The perpetrators were heading for Venus, and justice would be better served by capturing them instead of cleaning up their mess.
The problem was finding them. Two days later, their sensors had picked up no trace of the pirated ship.
“Stable orbit, 500 kilometers above the surface,” Baines reported from the cockpit. “Sensors running at max.”
Diaz nodded and gave a wave toward the cockpit. “All right. Full sensor sweeps with every orbital pass. I want Venus mapped all over again and I want everything in orbit out to a hundred thousand klicks. If there’s so much as a micrometeor out of place, I want to know about it.”
Shaila nodded and ensured Diaz’ orders were carried out, then turned back to Chrys VanDerKamp, who had been trying for the past twelve hours to uplink with her satellites using a new tack. Long-range hacks hadn’t worked, but the satellites also had short-range comms aboard to coordinate their efforts. The hope was that Chrys, with Coogan’s help if needed, could use those short-range receivers to beam commands into the satellites’ operating system, circumventing the normal I/O interface that had been seemingly given a new operating system. Perhaps by approaching the problem at the hardware level, they could at least cripple the satellites, robbing Greene and Hutchinson of their use.
“I can’t even find my sats,” Chrys said as her fingers flickered over the holocontrols. Screens of data and maps flowed across the air before her, and none were able to wipe the frown off her face. “Hard to send a signal if I can’t aim it well enough.”
“Can’t you just broadcast it wide?” Shaila asked.
Chrys turned to her with a look of disdain. “They’re narrow-band laser comms, sat-to-sat only. They’re designed to be secure. Otherwise, anybody with a goddamn ham radio could mess with them.”
“Try harder,” Shaila said icily before leaving the exec to her work. Naturally, Chrys’ conglom opted not to allow JSC full access to the satellite array without a representative aboard—as was their right—but Shaila didn’t have to like it one bit. She tried to have sympathy for the exec, but the fact was that, to Shaila, she was just as small-minded, and as complicit, as Harry Yu.
“Jimmy, why aren’t we finding these sats?” Shaila asked. “We’re going at a pretty good clip. Shouldn’t we have been in range by now?”
Coogan sat at his ops station and manipulated the holoimage of Venus in front of him. “Our last track on the satellites was here,” he said, pointing to several dots in geosynchronous orbit around the planet. “When we entered the atmosphere to brake, we lost them, and we’re still not picking them up.”
“Debris?” Shaila asked.
“None detected. In fact, if it weren’t for several diagnostics on the sensors, I’d question whether they were working properly. I’m not getting anything. I can’t even find the Stanford outpost.”
Now that got Shaila’s attention. Stanford University’s orbital labs held twenty souls aboard, the vast majority of them academic researchers. It was an older facility, but it worked well, and it gave the tourists somewhere to visit when they got tired of looking at clouds all day. “Did Stanford report a burn?”
“No, Commander. We should be well within comm range, and we should’ve gotten a hail by now, but there’s nothing.” Even Coogan looked concerned, which seemed extraordinarily out of place on his usually placid face.
“What about Cherenkov radiation? Maybe there’s been a rift and they got caught in it or something,” Shaila said.
“Nothing there either, ma’am.”
“Keep trying,” she replied, then hit the comm. “Major Parrish, how are we doing on V-SEV readiness?”
A moment later, the marine responded: “All systems ready. We can launch in five if needed.”
“Thanks. Jain out.” Shaila then turned to Diaz. “General, suggest we hail the Stanford facility. If they’re in trouble, we can maybe get a bead on them, even use the V-SEVs to evacuate as needed.”
Diaz was reading her own holodisplays and frowning. “Yeah…something’s just not right. Where the hell is everything? Did the Virgin ship just come in and blow everything up?”
“We’d see something, ma’am,” Shaila replied. “Debris, latent energy readings, something.”
“I know,” Diaz snapped, then calmed visibly. “Sorry. Send a broad comm out for Stanford.”
“Yes, General.” Shaila toggled a few keys, then spoke into a mic on the console. “Stanford University Venus Outpost, this is the Joint Space Command Ship Hadfield. Come in, Stanford outpost.”
To Shaila’s surprise, a reply came back within seconds. “Hadfield, this is Stanford. Where the heck did you guys come from?”
Diaz and Shaila traded a look. “Stanford, we’ve been coming in hot for a while now, just made orbit. You should’ve picked us up hours ago. Over.”
“We should’ve, yeah. We’re not getting anything right now. All our sensors went down about six hours ago. All our projects on the surface, stuff up here, nothing.”
Shit. “Do you require assistance, Stanford?” Shaila asked.
“Maybe if you got a tech handy or a spare sensor suite. We were showing an incoming before our sensors went down, but we haven’t made comm or visual on them since. You might want to check on them first.”
“Roger that. We’ll survey what we can and get back to you soon. Hadfield out.” Shaila dropped the link and turned to Diaz. “Ma’am, looks like we need to do a search for….”
Oh, shit. Shit shit shit!
Diaz saw the emotions play out on Shaila’s face. “What? What is it?”
Shaila turned to Coogan. “We’re being jammed! The whole goddamn system is being jammed!
Countermeasures!”
Coogan’s fingers flew across his controls. “I believe you may be right, Commander. There’s a very low-frequency signal surrounding the system. Trying to place the source now to counter it.”
Diaz caught up fast. “Focus on the last known location of those satellites and extrapolate, Jimmy. Only possible source.”
Chrys rushed over to Coogan’s station, and the two began trading data quickly and furiously. “Confirmed. Low-frequency signals emanating from projected positions of corporate satellites. Hang on. Engaging countermeasures.”
Suddenly, every alarm aboard Hadfield went off at once, followed quickly by a half-dozen voices.
“Cherenkov radiation spikes!” Ayim reported. “In orbit and on the surface!”
“Debris, straight ahead, twenty klicks!” Baines reported. “Taking evasive action!”
“Proximity alert! We have another ship within fifty kilometers and closing fast!” Coogan shouted. “They’re heading right for us!”
Diaz rushed forward toward the cockpit. “Baines! Evasive burn! Take us to 350 klicks above the surface and prepare for a slingshot into geosynch. We need to get above this crap!”
“Calculating! It’ll take a few seconds!” the young pilot replied.
The general then turned to Ayim. “Gerry, report! What’s going on with Venus?”
The physicist looked both elated and alarmed. “There is a huge area on the surface, General, covered with vegetation! At least two hundred square kilometers. The area appears to extend upward into orbit, ending at the satellites! I don’t know how… It’s extraordinary!”
“Roger. Record everything. What about that debris?” Diaz called out toward Coogan.
“Scanning now, General. Appears to be…oak wood. Iron. Hemp fibers. Human remains.”
Shaila put it together quickly. “Ship! It’s a goddamn shipwreck!” She met eyes with Diaz. “We’ve just flown into the middle of an overlap!”
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