by Nick Webb
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Veracruz Sector
Chantana III
Crimson Phoenix
Danny Proctor, captain of the magnificent Crimson Phoenix, leaned back and kicked his boots up onto the main flight dashboard. The ship—his second starship after the inglorious destruction of his first, the beloved Magdalena Issachar, over the colony world of Sangre de Cristo—was state-of-the-art, courtesy of his shiny new contract with Shovik-Orion. So the controls he accidentally nudged with his boots didn’t even register them as commands, since the fancy new control panels only registered human skin contact.
That particular tech wasn’t even new. It was hundreds of years old. But the fact that he could now afford a starship with even basic user-interface design was a huge step for him. The old Magdalena was basically a glorified garbage scow.
The Crimson Phoenix? She wasn’t really a true cargo carrier either, rather an armed-to-the-teeth miniature missile frigate with a couple of extra-large cargo bays. After his almost-permanently fatal experience with the Magdalena Issachar, he wanted his next ship to be able to hold her own in a fight, and then some.
Are they paying us? asked Fiona, her voice blaring through his mind through the Valarisi Ligature. She was still in bed, since they tended to take piloting duties in shifts due to their unfortunate lack of crew.
Paying us? Fiona, dear, it’s Captain Whitehorse. And Batshit.
So?
And Jerusha said Aunt Shelby wouldn’t trust anyone else with the mission.
Dear, you’re not IDF. This is not an IDF ship. You don’t take missions. We take jobs. Remember? Bills to pay?
He sighed. What bills? The ship’s paid off.
The ship will be paid off next year, she corrected him.
Technically, yes, but the contract with Shovik-Orion is so plum that we’re paying this off and then buying an island. United Earth is throwing rebuilding cash around like candy.
Okay, so by taking a quote unquote mission from your aunt, we’re delaying my island ownership by a week.
Oh please. We’re going that direction anyway to drop off all these Britannian refugees on Bolivar. What’s a quick pit stop on—
On where? she asked. Where exactly are we taking Batshit and his merry band of dipshits?
On . . . Jerusha wasn’t exactly clear. Said we’d know more once we meet in person. That’s why I’m waking you up—we’re nearly there. Let’s head down to the shuttle bay.
Roger that. Liu out.
Ten-four, good buddy.
He chuckled. It was their running joke, using ancient radio-comm protocol and jargon when they talked to each other’s minds through the Ligature. He lifted his boots down off the dashboard and opened the hatch door of the cockpit.
She added, Call me good buddy again and I’ll fuck you up.
He climbed down the access ladder from the cockpit to the empty operations center of the ship and started down the hall toward the shuttle bay. Is that a promise?
Honest to god.
Don’t threaten me with a good time, dear.
They bantered back and forth all the way there, and when he turned the last corner, she was already outside the shuttle, prepping it for takeoff.
“All aboard!” he yelled as he opened the shuttle’s hatch. “Last stop before the Ballsy.”
“How do you say that with a straight face?” she asked, following him in.
“Ballsy?”
“No. All aboard. You sound like a five-year-old playing with his train set.”
He glanced up at her face—still slightly scarred from her experiences aboard the Defiance a few months ago, in spite of the healing effect of the Valarisi flowing through her veins. For a moment he marveled anew at the biological regenerative power of the Valarisi matter, at how amazing it was that it had almost completely healed her face. Then he remembered that he’d been, in fact, dead, and it had brought him back.
In fairness, he was only kinda dead. But dead was dead.
Her expression of annoyance didn’t change. Usually she’d crack a faint smile during the banter. But this time a faint scowl joined the annoyance. Fiona was never one to wear her emotions openly on her sleeve, so a faint anything visible on her face was practically an angsty teenage meltdown.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Bull.”
“Really,” she insisted, faking a smile.
“That’s a bullshit smile. What’s wrong?”
“I said nothing, Danny.” She forcefully jabbed a finger on the engine initiator button and without warning yanked at the flight controls, sending him tumbling back into his seat.
“Right,” he murmured, mentally setting a clock for about a day. That was Fiona’s timetable—bottle something up until her nerves started fraying a bit, and then letting out the explosion a day later.
“Really. It’s all good. See?” She eased up on the controls, and the shuttle’s acceleration approached something normal. They sailed out of the Crimson Phoenix’s shuttle bay and shot into orbit around Chantana III, where the ISS Volz was waiting.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Poincaré Sector
World IXF-459
Surface
The shuttle ride to the surface was uneventful, even if Lieutenant Sanchez, the only pilot among his tiny crew, was a bit wet behind the ears. She almost forgot to engage the reverse thrusters before they entered the upper atmosphere, resulting in quite a jolt as the shuttle collided with it. Only quick thinking by Commander Rice in the copilot’s chair prevented disaster.
“Sorry, sir,” said Lieutenant Sanchez, sheepishly. She was tall, gangly, and looked utterly uncomfortable crammed into the regular-sized pilot’s seat.
“It’s okay. Almost dying comes with the territory.” Granger managed a tight smile.
Rice glanced back at him. “Sir, I’m still not convinced this risk is necessary. You know the regulations regarding flag officers in a potentially dangerous away mission.”
“I’ve noted your protests in the log, Commander. But let’s get real here. This is not a normal mission. I am not a normal captain. And this is not a normal planet.” He pointed out the viewport to the surface below. It actually looked quite peaceful and beautiful. No intelligent life signs that any of them could see.
“Which makes my point even more salient, sir. You’re special. The mission is special. And the planet is not normal. All the more reason for you to stay onboard and let your grunts do the grunty work.”
“Last time I checked, your uniforms weren’t red, Commander,” he said, referencing a common joke among IDF officers. He didn’t even know the origin of the joke—he supposed it had something to do with British Redcoats during the American Revolution—but everyone understood it to mean you’re comically expendable. “Look, I know in my gut that I need to be down here. There’s something here that will give me some sign as to . . . what I did, or what I was trying to do . . . or something. All I know is this is where I need to be, so you can go log your protests where the sun don’t shine.”
Rice seemed to be a stickler for rules, but at least he had a backbone. That was good. Very good. Backbones came in handy during love, career progression, and especially war. No wonder he’d made lieutenant commander at age thirty-one.
“We’re almost there, sir. I’ll land us about a half a kilometer from the outer perimeter of the ruins,” said Sanchez.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. First name?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“What’s your first name, Lieutenant Sanchez?”
She almost squirmed, which, with her tall thin frame crammed into the tiny seat, looked almost painful. “Lisa, sir.”
“You’re doing good, Lisa. Keep it up, and I’ll tell Oppenheimer you should be a flight instructor at the academy.”
The praise was hyperbolic and over-the-top, but she cracked a tiny smile nonetheless. “Thank you, sir.” She pulled up on the controls and dialed in the landing procedure.
Soon the rear hatch was opening and Granger walked down the ramp, followed by Rice, a marine, and a wide-eyed ensign from engineering who hadn’t spoken the entire trip. Ensign . . . Shin?
As soon as his feet touched the ground, a tall, beautiful flower nearby emitted a small cloud of what looked like pollen, but also had a blueish tinge to it, like smoke.
“Thank you, Commander, for insisting on the enviro-suit.” He tapped his helmet with the dedicated air supply. Rice tapped his in response. He had no idea if that pollen, or the accompanying gas, was poisonous or not, but it was probably wise not to tempt fate.
Sometimes rule-sticklers had their benefits.
They trekked across the field, every so often passing another tall, red flower which would release its cloud of blueish pollen and smoke. They finally approached what would have been a stone building had most of the stone not been lying in piles around the foundation, moss and lichen nearly making them indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.
“Primitive,” said Rice. “Stone buildings, the blocks look like they were hewn using rough hand tools.” He held up a stone, moss still clinging to one side, and pointed at a few rough edges.
“Okay,” replied Granger, walking over the piles and stepping over what remained of one of the walls and into the small building itself. “Except why is the foundation made out of reinforced duracrete?”
Rice caught up with him and bent low to wipe the dirt and moss away from a section of foundation. Sure enough, the duracrete looked almost pristine, as if it had been laid not ten years ago. That was of course one of its benefits—it lasted nearly forever, with zero degradation from the elements. Metal rebar stuck up out of the surface at certain points where walls had once been located.
“So. We’ve got a building that looks like it was made with rough pre-industrial-age tools, built upon a foundation that was most likely laid by a post-spacefaring civilization. At least, the technology level required for duracrete would tend to allow you to get yourself out of a gravity well. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a mystery here.”
Rice stood back up. “Remember anything, sir?”
He shook his head. “Just flashes. Images. Feelings. Nothing more.”
“Flashes of what?”
He paced the interior perimeter of the building., looking for traces of what he knew would have to be there if his memories were true. “War.”
“You think that whoever built these buildings was wiped out in a war?”
“Two wars, actually. I remember a great battle happened here. And then, later, another conflict, but this one was more like a massacre. Entirely one-sided. Look,” he added, pointing down at a section of duracrete under a pile of stones. He lifted a few out of the way.
Underneath was the unmistakable sign of a blast pattern from a directed energy weapon of some sort. A deep gouge had been cut into the duracrete, leaving behind tiny beaded areas where the temperature had risen high enough to melt duracrete composite—no small accomplishment.
“From the angle, that looks like it came from the air,” said Rice.
“It did. During the massacre, the attack came from the air. The images are coming clearer now.”
“You— you were here? During the battle?”
Granger turned to look at him. “No. At least, I don’t know. That’s the funny thing about some of these memories. Lots of them, I’m not even sure they’re mine. When the Skiohra’s Ligature was in place—that vast meta-space network that connected all the species of the Swarm’s Concordat of Seven into one mental link—I had the capability of seeing what any individual in that network was doing. More or less.” He glanced down at the ancient blast mark. “Though at the time it was the Concordat of Six. Humans were still coming out of Africa when these marks were made. It’s a wonder this whole area hasn’t been buried under dirt and vegetation yet.”
“Not natural. Agreed.” Rice looked around the building, at the horizon, at the rest of the ruins nearby. “Maybe whatever force caused the unnatural shape of the island is responsible for keeping this place almost pristine.” He turned to the ensign, who had been fiddling with his sensor package the whole time. “Ensign Shin? Reading anything interesting around us?”
“Interesting? Plenty interesting, sir. The trick is to distinguish what’s unusual and relevant from the interesting.” He said it so carelessly, so monotonously, that Granger wondered if they’d brought a robot along on the away mission.
“Enlighten us, Shin. Anything unusual?” said Rice, obviously annoyed, but giving the junior officer some latitude. Which could only mean one thing, Granger thought. The ensign must be some kind of tech kid prodigy, or he’d have been sent to a deep-space way-station years ago with that attitude.
“Nothing terribly unusual. I mean, if you consider a two point six two cubic meter void in the ground beneath our feet unusual, I’ll give you that. Beyond that, just a continent seemingly held together for eons against the forces of nature by some unseen power. Otherwise, nothing unusual. Nothing at all.”
“Funny, Ensign.” Rice ignored the dry sarcasm of the rest of the comment. “Where? Here?” He pointed straight down. “How far down? Are there any others?”
“Here. Two meters below. And yes. There appear to be dozens of others. Regularly spaced out below us. All two meters under the surface. Well, one point eight five meters on average, with a variance of—”
“Graves,” said Granger.
Rice looked up at him. “Pardon, sir?”
“Six feet under. Regularly spaced apart. Dozens of them. What’s the shape of the voids, Ensign?”
Shin consulted his sensor package. “Cuboid.” Granger shot him a cold look that meant cut the shit, and the ensign seemed to understand, as he added quickly, “Rectangular. Sir. Yes, looks like a coffin shape. Coffinoid.”
Rice grunted. “Well. We stumbled onto a graveyard then. Odd that these aliens would have a burial custom so similar to ours.”
“Yes. Odd,” murmured Granger, crouching down to feel the dirt below his feet. “Ensign? Nothing else noteworthy about them?”
“Well, not all of them, sir.”
Granger squeezed a handful of dust in his fist, and replied in as level of a voice he could muster. “Ensign Shin. If you speak to me in a riddle again, I’ll load you into a torpedo tube and launch you into the fiery maelstrom of lava, ionized plasma, and dead bodies that is the floating graveyard of Britannia.”
“Yes! Yes, sir, one. The one you’re standing directly over. There’s a weak meta-space signal coming from it.”
He snapped his head toward the ensign. “What? Meta-space? Are you sure?”
“Sure, sir. Very weak, right at my detection limit. And no information that I can tell encoded into the signal. Just a steady sinusoidal wave.”
Granger motioned to Rice, who understood right away. “Lieutenant Sanchez, this is Rice. Dig out the sonic excavator from the shuttle’s emergency storage. Have it ready for me when I arrive in a few minutes. Rice out.” He pointed at the marine—PFC Alba, Granger noticed on his name tag—and then quickly held up two fingers to his eyes and pointed them at Shin and Granger. Alba nodded, hefting his assault rifle reassuringly, and Rice excused himself in a hurry.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Veracruz Sector
Chantana III
ISS Tyler S. Volz
Shuttle Bay
Danny flipped open his data pad and checked on the status of the Crimson Phoenix’s engines and orbital station. Yet another tiny detail he loved about his new ship: remote control. Engine output normal, phase variance within norms, coolant flow optimal, orbital station steady. He noticed a slight eccentricity of the orbit that would make it drift from the Volz a few hundred meters over the course of the orbit, so he tapped the autocorrect thruster controls, then flipped the pad shut and pocketed it.
“So why can’t you just find him with the help of your own Valarisi companion? Why Fiona and me?” He looked back up at Jerusha Whitehorse. She’d been ru
nning through the last known location of Granger with him, offering several theories and suggestions of where to start looking.
The question seemed to momentarily silence her. Danny reached out to her through the Ligature and felt . . . nothing. “Oh. You don’t have a companion.”
Ethan Zivic shook his head. “Nope. Fleet command thought it was too much of a security risk to have all of us running around with potential alien spies in our brains.”
Danny was taken aback. “Idiots. Do they know what kind of advantage they’ve given up? Instant communication across lightyears? Heightened coordination and control of big operations? Like, you know, big space battles with mortal enemies? And they’re brilliant. I can ask mine a question, and even if he doesn’t know the answer, he huddles with his millions of buddies through the Ligature, and within a few minutes he’s got a guess that’s better than any answer I could ever dream of coming up with. Is Fleet Command insane?”
“Seems that way most of the time,” said Zivic. “The rest of the time they’re just grossly incompetent. Best of both worlds, really.”
Fiona snorted. She’d been the victim of IDF insanity—a former admiral had tried to have her killed just a few months ago. “It was their incompetence that saved my life, so I’ll take it.” Her tone turned more serious. “So, Captain. Does it hurt?”
“Hurt?”
“When they take the companion out and sever the link to the Ligature?”
Whitehorse seemed at a loss for words again. Strange.
Ethan glanced at her, then offered, “Not for me, but I only had it for a few days. Not sure if it was the same for Jerusha. But when they took mine out, it was just like getting an IV in my arm, only in reverse. Like donating plasma. They stick a needle in your arm, pull the blood out, filter out the Valarisi matter, and send your blood back in.”