by Jay Allan
And the questions she struggled not to ask herself. Was the war already lost? Was Tyler dead, obliterated with the ruins of Dauntless, even as she raced to try to save him, and so many billions of others on the Rim?
“Push us up, Lex…as much as you think you can sustain without too much risk.” ‘Too much’ was a vague term, one that left a considerable amount to Lex Righter’s judgment. There weren’t many people in all of human inhabited space Andi Lafarge trusted with more than the slightest leeway, but her battle-tested engineer was one of them. “It’s a risk, I know, but it’s also a risk if we let ourselves get slowed down. We don’t know how much time we’ve got, Lex, but we know it isn’t much.”
“I’ll manage things down here, Andi. I think I can push us up to 108, maybe 109…as long as I keep a close eye on things.” A pause. “If you get a chance, can you have someone bring down my bedroll, and a couple sandwiches. I think I’ll camp out down here tonight.”
Andi felt a twinge of guilt at consigning her engineer to sleeping on the floor in Pegasus’s claustrophobia-inducing engineering section, but not too much. All her people had a stake in saving the Rim, and while she knew she was sometimes pointlessly hard driven, there was no false pride pushing her now. Just the burning need to save the people she loved.
“I’ll bring it all down myself, Lex.” A pause. “And thanks…I just feel like every hour we can save is crucial right now.” She knew she didn’t have to explain…Lex understood. But it made her feel better.
She closed the comm line, and she looked up again at the main display. Pegasus was heading toward Telus Zakaris, about halfway there. Andi had come close to scratching the system from her list a couple times, not because it didn’t meet the required parameters, but because of the distance from the other prospects. It was costing a lot of time to go there, time her friends and comrades might not have…and that was driving her to accept greater risks. And driving the ship’s systems past their limits was a risk, even with Lex Righter sleeping right next to the reactor.
She hesitated, faced a moment of doubt, and for perhaps half a minute she hung on the precipice of ordering Pegasus back toward the shorter route, the one that excluded Telus Zakaris. Then she felt her head moving, shaking back and forth, as one word forced its way to the forefront of her thoughts.
No.
She wasn’t going to bypass Telus Zakaris. She’d tried like hell to scratch the system from her list, but it had met every requirement. The odds weren’t exactly strong that it was the one she sought, if only because a dozen others had met all the same conditions. But they were high enough that she had to go, even if it took longer. Even if she had to push Pegasus a bit harder.
“You’ve got the con, Vig. I’m going down to engineering for a few.” She wanted to talk to Lex face to face. She wanted to get a read on whether 108 was really the best he could do with a reasonable safety factor…or if she could nudge him up to one ten.
She stood up, turning and walking back toward the ladder. She had a few stops to make on the way to the cramped and winding engineering spaces. The bedrolls were in the main storage locker…and she had to stop at the galley as well. If Lex could camp out down there to try and minimize the risks and keep them all safe, the least she could do was see that he did it on a full stomach.
And while no one thought of food preparation as one of her key skills, Andi Lafarge made a mean sandwich.
* * *
“What the hell…” Vig was leaning over his workstation, his eyes fixed on the small scanner screen. His words had been meant only for himself, but Andi had been halfway up the ladder from the lower deck, and her hearing had always been sharp.
“What is it, Vig?” She pulled herself the rest of the way up the ladder in one herculean lunge, an effort, she noted wistfully, that would have hurt less in her younger days. She half-jogged onto the bridge itself, and Vig turned to face her after a noticeable delay.
“Sorry, Andi…we’re picking up something from the point. Number four, the farthest one.” Transit point four was neither Pegasus’s entry point into the system, nor its planned exit. But the last thing Andi had expected to find so far out in the fringes of the long-dead Badlands was another ship.
Or a group of ships.
Her eyes darted to the main display, her mind working on the data even as Vig answered her question.
“We’re getting readings…definite activity at point four. It’s far out for any real data, but my guess is, we’re looking at multiple ships.”
Andi had reached that conclusion an instant before Vig, and even as he continued his report, she was bent over her chair, tapping the comm controls. “Lex…shut everything down now. Bring us to silent running.” Andi had never known where that phrase had originated, or how it had come to describe spaceships seeking to evade detection. Motion, material, energy emissions…a number of factors went into a vessel’s detectability, but sound wasn’t one of them. Her people could have thrown a party and banged all night on drums, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference as to whether Pegasus popped up on some scanner screen.
She didn’t have time to ponder the possibilities though, not just then.
“I’m in engineering now, Andi…shutting engines down, cutting reactor to minimal power levels.”
Of course, you’re down there…you’re always down there…
The engineer had barely left the lower section since Andi had ordered the reactor up to 100%.
One of the advantages a warship like Dauntless had over a vessel like Pegasus was a large enough crew to work in shifts. Andi’s vessel didn’t have—and couldn’t carry—enough spacers to cover stations around the clock. But Lex Righter was a workaholic almost as insane as she was, and he practically lived in the tight confines of Pegasus’s engineering spaces, even when he wasn’t trying to keep the power core from burning out.
Andi stared at the main display as a series of small symbols appeared and disappeared…and then reappeared. It was strange, but it also had a familiar look. It could have been just the range, and the fact that Pegasus was far out, and her active scanners were offline.
But it also looked a lot like the strange phenomenon that surrounded Highborn ships, the effects of the mysterious Sigma-9 radiation on scanner beams.
Highborn…all the way out here?
It seemed impossible, and certainly unexpected. And then it made total sense. Her blood ran cold.
This is how they’re getting to the Union.
Andi had known, of course, that the Highborn were somehow getting ships and supplies to Union space, but as much as that had been inarguable fact, it hadn’t seemed entirely real. Not until that moment.
She felt a fog of confusion. What should she do? The location of the enemy’s communications line to the Union seemed strategically important information, crucial even. Should she turn back, get the word to Tyler?
Or should she press on, try to finish what she had started, search for the lost imperial weapon to defeat the Highborn? That was a mission that had just gotten vastly more difficult…and dangerous. She’d imagined all sorts of problems she might encounter, but trying to sneak around some Highborn task force had been nowhere on that list.
As she had a day before, she came close to ordering Vig to bring Pegasus around, to make a run back to the transit point they’d come through thirty hours before, and to slip away from the Highborn force. But she remained silent. She wished she could get a message to Tyler, but she wasn’t going to turn around and bring it back herself. Not when it would serve no useful purpose. There was nothing Tyler could do, even if he was warned. He couldn’t dispatch forces from Striker’s defense, certainly not for some longshot effort to block the Highborn supply line to the Union. Even if he could consider it—which he couldn’t—Andi didn’t have any real data on the strength of the enemy convoys, or what course they were following, either before or after Hexarus Veti. All she knew was a single convoy had entered that system. Even the enemy’s destin
ation, the Union she supposed, was her own conjecture, even if it was highly likely.
No, I can’t turn back, not now…
She wasn’t going to give up on Telus Zakaris. Her reasons were based on hard analysis, but also on more than that. She just had a feeling…and such things had rarely led her astray in her long and chaotic career. Her detour to that troublesome system was going to take even longer than she had thought. For all her efforts to push her ship to its limits, all she could do just then was to sit, dead, like a hole in space…for as long as it took the Highborn to move through the system and transit out.
She felt the tension growing, fear of the enemy, of possible detection…and even more, about the hours—days—she was likely to lose.
None of that mattered, though. She was going to find out how the empire had expelled the Highborn, and she was going to bring that secret back…along with the new information on the enemy’s lines of communication. She was going to do it all.
Unless the Highborn spotted Pegasus…
Chapter Twelve
Highborn Flagship S’Argevon
Imperial System GH3-2307 (Beta Telvara System)
Year of the Firstborn 390 (328 AC)
“All units report ready to advance, Viceroy. The fleet awaits your orders.”
Tesserax stood in front of his chair in the center of S’Argevon’s command center. The Grand Fleet of the Colony, as he had designated his immense force, was indeed ready. He had known that even before he’d requested confirmation, but there was always a place for show in war, especially when the vast majority of the combatants were mere humans. The Thralls were controlled by their Collars, and that made them reliable. But Tesserax was confident that strong morale, and a belief in victory, would extract the greatest effort from his hundreds of thousands of warriors.
“What of Ellerax?” The newly arrived warship was by far the largest in his fleet, and the first of the imperial Terradonna class vessels he’d commissioned to face off against the sole ship of the same class in the human fleet. Its mission was starkly simple, at least in the coming battle, where it would be the only such vessel in the Highborn fleet. Move directly toward its counterpart…and engage in a fight to the death. Ellerax would either prevail, or if it was defeated, before its destruction, it would occupy its adversary and keep that great ship out of the battle. That was all Tesserax needed. He had the strength to prevail, and the only thing the humans had that truly scared him was the old imperial ship. The fight would be a bloody one, especially with the plan to board several enemy units and capture their senior commanders, but with the human-controlled Terradonna—Colossus, they call it—locked in a deadly duel away from the rest of the action, any doubts he might have had were satisfied. Even if Ellerax lost its epic duel, it would leave its adversary badly damaged…just as the next Highborn vessels of the class came into service.
The ship’s name was a glaringly obvious attempt to gain favor with its namesake, Ellerax, number one of the Firstborn, leader of the Highborn. Ellerax would realize that immediately, of course…but Tesserax had become aware enough of the way his comrades’—and his—egos worked, and he was pretty sure the exercise would accomplish some portion of its goal despite the undisguisable clarity of its intentions.
“Ellerax reports all system fully-functional, Viceroy. They await the command to engage engines and set out with the fleet.”
Tesserax sat silently for a moment. He wasn’t surprised at the report that Ellerax was ready, that the great ship was free of malfunctions, but he was a bit relieved. He’d rushed the completion of the giant vessel, and a major part of that time savings had been gained by truncating the battery of tests that would normally have preceded a move to fully-operational status. The Highborn were meticulous creatures, with the mental and intellectual capability to minimize mistakes in anything they did, but most of the actual construction had been done by Thralls, and despite extensive training and close supervision, humans were just…well, humans.
He’d almost postponed the offensive, awaited the completion of the other Terradonna-class vessels. But the pacification of the humans had already taken too long. There were many reasons to accelerate the process, to complete the conquest as quickly as possible. News from the primary front was troublesome, but there was also opportunity in that. If Tesserax could consolidate control over the Rim and bring his vast fleet—along with the higher order of Thralls the Rim was expected to produce—to that fight, he would be second only to Ellerax himself…a giant, even among the Firstborn.
A god among the gods…and the master of the formerly free humans. He could feel the power, the position, the sense of standing at the very highest level. Where he belonged.
It was time to seize what was his.
“The fleet will advance at 10g thrust.”
* * *
Stockton sat in his fighter for a few seconds. More importantly, it was several seconds longer than he normally would have remained in the cockpit after landing. He’d been working constantly, putting all his effort into taking control of his actions. He’d become a bit more daring, extending the time periods from half a second to four or five. He was excited at every twitch, every response of his muscles to his focused thoughts after four years of unending frustration, but he was also terrified the part of him still controlled by his malfunctioning Collar would become aware of what was happening. Whatever damage had been done to the Collar, it had so far gone undetected. But if his controlled psyche was to report a possible problem, it would almost certainly result in a more aggressive examination.
And his chance at escape, to help his comrades somehow in the coming fight—and to finally to secure the death for which he’d long prayed—would slip away in an instant.
Stockton had been through four years of relentless hell, and the thought of losing whatever chance fortune had finally granted him at defiance horrified him more than any enemy he had ever faced, any battle he had fought.
He wanted to stay where he was, exert all his efforts to keep his body in place, but he knew he couldn’t. He wasn’t sure whether his Collar-controlled side was even aware that there was a part of his old self still surviving. Clearly, it remembered his training, his tactics. It knew who Reg Griffin had been, and the weaknesses of Confederation fighter formations. But did it recall old emotions? Loyalty, friendship? Love?
He stopped all his efforts, yielded full control back to his controlled persona. He couldn’t risk discovery. He had to continue to explore the extent of his newfound ability to control his actions and motions, but he also had to hold back. He wanted to be sure he could do what he would have to do when the battle against Fortress Striker began, but he knew he couldn’t push that hard. He would go into that fight with intentions, with plans…but without any certainty any of it would work.
Stockton had always been a maverick of sorts, but part of that reputation had come from his swagger, the utter confidence he had always exuded. Much of that had been fake, of course. Jake Stockton felt fear like any man. He had also thought his tactics through and through, considering them from every angle, and practicing his maneuvers again and again until they were perfect. The image of the godlike pilot who pulled remarkable moves from thin air was largely a construct, one that had been very useful, but not one he’d taken into battle.
Until now. You can’t properly prepare. You just have to believe you can do it…
That would have been easier if only confidence had been required. But he was also relying on the Collar’s malfunction, on how far it would allow him to go.
He was walking down the corridor, and for a moment he felt a slight panic. His controlled self was going a different way, not taking the usual route back to his quarters. Had he pushed too far? Had he exposed the Collar malfunction?
His near-panic lasted perhaps thirty seconds, until he saw himself walking through the doorway into the equipment storage area. He moved toward the Thrall sitting at the workstation there, and he could hear himself spea
king. He saw his hands extending, placing his helmet on the table.
His eyes and ears answered his question at almost the same instant, and his panic quickly faded. There was a small crack in the helmet, and he was requesting a replacement.
He felt almost nauseous, without being able to actually feel nauseous. If he’d been responsible for moving his body just then, he suspected his legs would have wobbled, even given out on him. But his alter ego seemed utterly unaware. He could see the door, and then the wall in the corridor, as he began walking down in the old familiar direction…toward his quarters.
He felt thankful, grateful for whatever bit of fortune had once again begun to shine dimly on him. He’d endured more than he could have imagined, suffered with an intensity he wouldn’t have thought possible. The prospect of helping his comrades, of repaying them for some of the cataclysmic harm he had caused them, was all important to him now, the only thing he cared about. Save for one.
Revenge. He wanted his vengeance against the Highborn, and the need to strike out at those who had compelled him to do as he had done consumed him. It was like a blue flame in the icy depths of space, searing hot and bitter cold all at once.
But if he came this close to a chance to end his misery, to help his friends and claim his vengeance, and lost it…it would destroy him.
It would destroy him utterly.
* * *
“Our plans are well set in motion, Phazarax. Even now, we stand a single jump from the climactic fight, from the operation that will secure our control of all human space, from the former Hegemony to the reaches of the Far Rim. The fleet will jump into the system and form up quickly. I have conducted several exercises, and we have developed the most efficient plan for getting ships through the point and into battle order. I believe the humans will be surprised at how quickly our fleet forms up. That will be an excellent distraction. They will likely be occupied with launching their fighter squadrons and waiting for us to advance. But the fleet will remain just inside the jump point. We will bait them, see if they can be goaded into moving their ships forward, away from their fortress. Whether they do or not, we will launch our own fighter wings. However, this time, they will be armed with the upgraded weapons systems. The enemy have managed to maintain the upper hand in most of the small craft actions, despite our having Jake Stockton commanding our own wings. But now, Stockton and his pilots will have a decisive edge in weaponry, which will be all the more effective for the fact that it will be a surprise.”