by Jay Allan
And if Simpson didn’t give the order, Holsten would, however illegal that would be.
Holsten had seen desperate battles, and he’d watched Tyler Barron’s career with wonder and awe as the admiral brought his people—some of them at least—back from one hopeless fight after another. But if Simpson’s forces, and Grimaldi, didn’t hold, or at least if they didn’t take the enemy fleet down with them, the Confederation would be laid bare.
In non-official military parlance, the battle then raging all around was quite simply one the Confeds couldn’t afford to lose.
So, Gary Holsten, no one’s idea of a dewy-eyed optimist, resolved simply that they would win.
Somehow.
Chapter Fourteen
Free Trader Pegasus
Hexarus Veti System
Year 328 AC (After the Cataclysm)
“I think we’re clear, Andi. It’s been almost twenty hours since the last contact…and longer since we picked up anything farther back in the system.”
Andi listened to Vig’s words, and she understood. Her second in command knew as well as she did how little time they likely had. Their mission was desperate and dangerous, and in more retrospective moments, she realized it was somewhat of a longshot as well. But one thing was certain. If they were too late, even total success would be failure. Her purpose was to get back in time to save the Rim, not to arrive to see a destroyed fleet and an enemy moving unimpeded through the Confederation and beyond. She wasn’t sure what she would find if she was able to track down the empire’s mysterious old weapon against the Highborn, but she was damned sure it wasn’t something she and her people would be able to employ on their own.
Still, it would serve no purpose to fire up the reactor, blast the engines…and draw an arrow right from any hiding enemy ship or Highborn probe to Pegasus. The enemy was very far from anywhere they’d expect to encounter Pact forces, and they had a lot of systems to cross to reach Union space. That suggested they might not leave scouts behind, that they might disregard concern for the lines of communications, deeming them unlikely to be threatened.
But that was only what Andi liked to call a wild guess.
She might fire up Pegasus and continue on her previous course, and perhaps even find what she sought. Or, she would send up a signal flare to any enemy ships remaining in the system. Even the smallest Highborn scout was more than a match for Pegasus. Andi would match her ship against any out there in her class, but Pegasus wasn’t a warship, and her tech, for all its leading edge status for a free trader, didn’t come close to matching that of the Highborn.
She had killed one Highborn ship, but that had been a perfect ambush, a one of a kind situation, and for all she wanted to claim the credit, she still rated most of it as luck. If an enemy ship caught her people out in the open, it wouldn’t even be a fight. It would be an execution.
Still…you don’t have any choice. You’ve got to press on…
She knew her thoughts were nothing but the truth, but her insides tensed at the thought of giving the order…even as the words came out of her mouth.
“Lex, bring the reactor up, as quickly as possible…without pushing things too hard.” Andi was the type to take wild risks, but only when they offered some gain. Crash starting the reactor would do nothing for her people except shave twenty minutes off their schedule. And as short as she was on time, she didn’t think less than half an hour would matter much in the end.
And if there are Highborn still here, a normal start is enough for them to find us. Then, the end will come quickly enough…
“Alright, Andi. Ten minutes, maybe twelve to full output. I didn’t shut the reaction down completely, just cut the flow of reaction mass to bare minimum. The shielding hid that, I’m sure, and not having the reactor stone cold makes a ramp up much quicker.”
Andi heard the unspoken words in her engineer’s report. I wanted to have power quickly, in case we were detected. Lex felt the same way she did. If either of them was going to die, they were damned well going to do it fighting.
Andi managed a quick smile, something unexpected given the situation. She’d always respected defiance and raw stubbornness, perhaps over all things.
“Do it, Lex. Active scanners first…then power up the engines.” A thorough scan of the system was probably the closest thing she could find to useless. Even if she detected a hidden enemy vessel, the active scan would reveal Pegasus’s presence and location as well. And the chance of finding a Highborn ship that was trying to hide was still pretty damned poor…in which case, all her active scanners would do is reveal Pegasus to the still-hidden enemy.
But the engines were going to light up her ship’s location in a few minutes anyway, and Andi wanted to know as well as she could what lay out there. It was unlikely it would do any real good, but she’d made her decision.
She sat quietly, waiting as Lex amped up the reactor. She could hear the soft whine, the sound of Pegasus’s power system coming back to life. She waited, her eyes fixed on the screen, even as she the active scanners began sending out their beams.
There was no sign of enemy activity, not yet. Of course, there wouldn’t have been any yet, even if there was a massive Highborn war fleet out there. Lightspeed was still a prison of sorts, and while the transit points allowed rapid interstellar travel, in the endless depths of normal space, communications and scanning moved no faster than the photons that carried them.
The enemy, if there were any enemy forces remaining in the system, were at least a light hour away. That meant, if they detected Pegasus it wouldn’t even happen for an hour. And it would take another hour for Andi’s active scanners to report any response underway.
She leaned back and sighed softly. There was no reason to wait. Further delay wouldn’t do anything to help her people. “Lex…as soon as the engines are ready, lets continue on our course. Full thrust.”
* * *
Telus Zakaris.
The one system on her list of potential sites for the base she sought that lay apart from the others. Three full transits, completely out of the way from everywhere else Andi’s data sent her, and three back once her people had surveyed the system.
Not just three transits…but a near encounter with a Highborn task force, one from which her people appeared to have escaped unnoticed, even if the knots in her gut were still untying themselves.
It is good you know how they are moving ships to Union space. Tyler will want to know that.
Though what Tyler Barron could do about it, with the Pact’s forces tied down at Striker and Grimaldi, she didn’t know.
None of that mattered, not then. Pointless, soul-wrenching worry wouldn’t help her complete her mission. It wouldn’t help anyone.
Now it was time to explore the system, to match off its characteristics with those she sought…and then to head back and resume her exploratory course. Looking out for Highborn along the way this time…
Unless Telus Zakaris was the place they were seeking. So far, it matched every parameter.
“Let’s up the power on the active scans, Vig. The more we can pull in from a distance, the quicker we can move through the checklist.” She’d almost added, “and get out of here,” but she’d held it back. There was something inside her, in the back of her mind telling her Telus Zakaris was her destination.
“Pushing to maximum…data stream on the display.”
Andi looked up at the main screen on Pegasus’s bridge. The number of planets, the attributes of the primary, even the twin asteroid belts between planetary bodies two and three, and six and seven…so far everything matched the descriptions her people had found on Pintarus.
Andi leaned down over the comm unit. “Ellia, can you come up here?” There was nothing the Hegemony Master could see that Andi couldn’t, but she wanted verification. If she brought Pegasus down on the target planet, if she squandered days, more likely weeks, scouring it surface, and it turned out Telus Zakaris wasn’t the system she’d come to find…well, sh
e didn’t know how much time she had, but she was damned sure she didn’t have any to waste.
“Let’s target the planet, Vig. I want updated mass numbers, diameter readings…and as soon as we get close enough, let’s launch a probe to do an atmospheric sampling as well.” One of the odd bits of information her people had found included a complete breakdown of the composition of the planet’s atmosphere. Andi didn’t know what kind of nightmares had engulfed the system during the Cataclysm, but she was well aware that some forms of high yield weaponry could change such planetary characteristics. Still, it was a starting place.
“Andi…” Andi could see Ellia’s head popping up on the ladder just outside the bridge.
“Come take a look at all this, will you? Looks dead on to me so far, but I’d love some back up.”
Ellia pulled herself up through the opening into the floor, and then she walked onto Pegasus’s compact bridge. The third chair in the room was vacant, as it often was, but the Hegemony Master walked up just behind Andi and stood there, staring at the main display. She was silent for perhaps thirty seconds, and then she said, “I have to agree, Andi. So far every reading is a direct match, or at least close enough.” A few more seconds passed. “Maybe this is what we’re looking for.”
“Maybe.” Andi’s voice was doubtful, but that was reflexive more than anything, her normal cynicism asserting itself. She was actually about eighty percent of the way to believing just what Ellia had suggested.
Telus Zakaris was the system they had been seeking.
“We can scour the system, Andi, check off a few more items, but I think we’ve got enough to justify a closer look at the target planet.”
Andi could feel herself shaking her head, another almost involuntary response, but her words struck out in the opposite direction. “Yes,” she said, turning around to face her friend. “Yes, that is what we’re going to do.” She spun around, her eyes settling on the bridge’s second station. “Vig, plot us a speed course to the planet. Bring us into high orbit.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky…maybe this is it.” Ellia sounded more confident than she had just a moment earlier.
Andi sat silently, looking at the display. Part of her didn’t want to believe in luck, the part born into squalor and despair, the woman could barely remember a mother who’d struggled, and finally died, to protect her. She’d seen the worst humanity had to offer, and she believed far more in the dark side of people than the light. But she was enough of a realist to acknowledge that she wouldn’t have survived, much less gained great wealth, met Tyler, and had the succession of true friends she’d had without fortune’s favor.
Perhaps it was time to believe in luck…at least a little.
“Yes, Ellia…maybe this is it.”
* * *
“Almost an exact match on physical characteristics. Some variation on the atmospherics, but a few centuries alone could account for that, aside from the fact that the place looks like it was bombarded pretty heavily during the Cataclysm.” Ellia was sitting in the bridge’s third chair this time, her face pressed against the scope. “There is definitely some radiation. They got hit with a good number of nukes…but not an annihilation level bombardment. I’m guessing something else was in play as well, mass drivers or railguns. No sign of life, of course, but there are some significant ruins. I’m guessing there were survivors, at least for a while. Whether they fled to somewhere less badly hit…or they died out here, I couldn’t guess.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Andi knew the words were cold. People had lived on the planet below, hundreds of millions of them if not billions. They had been men and women, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters…and they had all suffered unimaginable misery. Death had come for them, for the lives they had led. Those who’d survived the longest were rewarded by more suffering, and by watching their loved ones die. But Andi looked on with a clinical frame of mind. She’d scoured the Badlands, seen more dead planets than she could ever purge from her mind. The empire’s dead in the Cataclysm—at least a trillion, she guessed—haunted her, at least when she allowed them to get to her. But she didn’t have time for the imagined wails of the dead. She was there to save living humans, the descendants of those who’d survived mankind’s unimaginable nightmare. It would do no one any good to sit there feeling sorry for people three centuries dead. “The population centers look to be in the right places, too. At least as far as I can piece these clusters of ruins together.”
“I agree, Andi.” Ellia’s tone didn’t suggest whether her agreement extended to the irrelevancy of the suffering the planet’s people had endured, or simply that the remnants of cities were roughly where they should be. Andi knew her ability to turn her blood cold, to retreat into a purely analytical view of things, often unnerved her friends. Her logic was flawless, but her ability to put aside pity and compassion to pursue her goals sometimes came as a bit of a shock to her, much less those around her.
But dead was dead, and three hundred years or more dead was really dead. Andi’s thoughts just then were for those still alive, for the remnants of humanity fighting for survival and freedom.
They were all that mattered.
“Vig, bring us down. Let’s do a series of low passes, say fifteen kilometers up. Ellia, you know what we’re looking for as well as I do.” There should be a city, at the convergence of three rivers.” Rivers that could have dried up in the bombardments or shifted to new courses.
There were still a hundred things that could go wrong, but if they were in the right system, just maybe she would find what she had come for.
She leaned back in her chair as Pegasus skipped along the planet’s upper atmosphere, and then shuddered as the engines fired, controlling the vessel’s rate of descent.
Andi still didn’t know if she’d truly found the planet she was seeking…but if her newly appreciated luck was with her, she just might find out in the next few hours.
Chapter Fifteen
CFS Constellation
60,000 Kilometers from Fleet Base Grimaldi
Krakus System
Year 328 AC (After the Cataclysm)
“It’s fine, Doc. There are others who need your help more than I do.” Sam Taggart looked down at her arm, the bloodstained sleeve torn open to reveal the dressing Doc Stanhope had just put in place. The bleeding had been pretty bad—and it still hurt like hell—but she meant every word she uttered. Constellation—even the ship’s well-protected bridge—had officers and spacers far more badly hurt than the ship’s captain.
“Are you sure, Captain?”
“I’m sure, damn you…don’t you have anyone else wounded on this ship to harass?” She knew she shouldn’t let her frustration and fear come out as anger against Stanhope, but that didn’t stop her from adding, “Now…get the hell out of here!”
The doctor nodded abruptly and turned to move toward a number of officers lying along the outside wall of the bridge. He didn’t seem unduly troubled by Taggart’s outburst. He was used to her language, and the rough edges she brought with her skill and experience. She knew that much…and she knew that despite the invective liable to pour out of her mouth at the slightest provocation, her people had come to think of her fondly. Constellation had become a happy ship in the short time its crew had been together, or at least it had been until it had been plunged into hell twenty hours earlier.
The battle had been raging almost without pause for nearly a day. Both fleets had suffered crippling losses, and yet they were still locked in desperate combat. Grimaldi was a twisted wreck, entire sections blasted to scrap, or torn off from the main structure entirely. The fort was still in the fight, though. Perhaps ten percent of its guns were still operational…including one of the big mounts, which continued to lash out, occasionally striking a Highborn ship and inflicting massive damage.
Constellation was damaged, too, but the superbattleship was now the strongest unit in the fleet, its still-functional weaponry outclassing what little remained of Grimaldi’
s once fearsome armament.
Taggart turned, trying not to wince as her motion tugged at her arm. The last thing she wanted was to catch Stanhope’s attention again and bring the doctor back to poke at her while she was trying to run her ship.
Sam Taggart had lobbied hard for her bid to the Naval Academy, and she’d endured four years of near poverty, surrounded by the rich and privileged scions of the great naval families. She might be in command of one of the most powerful ships in space now, but it still made her uncomfortable for the ship’s chief surgeon to be wrapping a bandage around her cut arm while some unknown number of her spacers were writhing in agony, struggling to survive desperate wounds and radiation sickness.
“Admiral…Vandengraf…”
The officer’s words reached her just as her own eyes fixed on the flagship. The old battleship had taken yet another hit, and its portside guns that had remained in action fell silent. The ship was spewing out great spouts of instantly-freezing fluids and atmosphere, and it was clear she was wracked with secondary explosions.
“Get me Commodore Simpson!” Her right hand slapped down hard on ger armrest, sending a wave of pain up her arm and a wave of almost silent curses from her lips. She gritted her teeth as pulled her headset on with her left hand.
“On your line, Captain.”
“Commodore…”
“I hope this is important, Captain. I’m a little busy over here.” Taggart could hear the tension and fatigue in Simpson’s voice, but even more upsetting was the sound of explosions and the panicked shouts in the background.
“Commodore, you have to transfer your flag.”