Renegade

by Joel Shepherd

  So which of the ships out there had marine complements? Phoenix was a carrier, and carriers were made bigger than most specifically to hold a large complement of marines. Accommodation for two hundred plus extra troops plus equipment and transport was a heck of a lot of weight to pile onto a warship whose survival depended on speed and mobility. So designers had had no choice but to upscale every other system as well — bigger thrust engines to push the extra mass, bigger jump engines to move between stars, and bigger and more numerous weapons to protect the whole, expensive enterprise. Troop carriers were slow and vulnerable, but combat carriers were about the most deadly thing in space. They also cost about the same as five perfectly effective cruisers, and were blasted by some Admirals as overrated and a waste of resources.

  The United Forces Fleet was actually seven fleets. Each fleet had three combat carriers, for twenty-one total. Erik didn’t recognise any of those here, though it was possible others were on their way. He was also noticing a distinct lack of Phoenix’s most familiar support vessels. They varied, Phoenix did not have a ‘support fleet’ as such, though doctrine was that combat carriers would always operate with numerous support where possible, being too valuable to risk alone. But over the past four months’ operations, a usual bunch had accumulated, and those crews and captains had come to know each other well.

  He did not see any of those vessels here. Small wonder. Probably HQ was sending word to other fleets and forces within rapid response range, to find captains who knew nothing of Pantillo personally, and would believe whatever nonsense they were told. Most particularly they’d get those captains whose primary skill was to climb the greasy pole, and would not disobey an order to round up their grandmas were their next promotion contingent on doing so. Erik knew there were many. The Captain had bitched about very little, but when he did, those other sorts of captain were usually the subject.

  Still, that presence of marines onboard ships looking for them was worth considering. He made a call to Second Lieutenant Abacha on second-shift Scan. “Hi Karli, it’s the LC. Just a note, I’d like you to make a list of any ships out there with smaller marine complements. Trace it back to their jump signatures when they first arrived and make some guesses from who we know was at Homeworld.”

  “Aye LC,” Abacha said warily. “We can assume they won’t send anyone friendly after us, right?”

  “Exactly,” said Erik, thankful Abacha understood. “So see if you can get me a list of probables. The Captain had Worlder sympathies, we all know it. You don’t have to do it yourself, but get someone or someones to go back over those captains who were at Homeworld, and match them against known political sympathies, if any. It might not be on record — ask around if it’s not. I’d like to know exactly who’s out there, and I just haven’t been around long enough to know all this old gossip. The guys who knew were the Captain, and Commander Huang.”

  “Aye LC, I’ll get on it. And LC… I don’t know if you saw, but thirty minutes ago, that chah'nas ship manoeuvred.”

  “I saw it.”

  “It looked to me like a search grid move, something they’re coordinating with someone else. I think she might not be alone.” Another chah'nas ship nearby. Running dark.

  “Interesting. Keep an eye on it.”

  “Aye LC.”

  Because of all the ships and captains searching for them, the ones with the least compulsion for mercy toward Phoenix were the chah'nas. Erik wondered drily how many more of them HQ would bring in to look for them.

  * * *

  Off the main hangar Trace had passed through in the marines’ first armoured sweep of the rock, the Engineering crew had found corridors converging to make crew quarters and control rooms. Trace glided along them now in zero-G, her suit light illuminating wall panelling, doorways and light fittings, and trying to imagine it all as it had been, ten thousand years before.

  The artwork astonished her. She paused before one such piece, gazing at abstract shapes carved into the rock wall, and wondered what it had meant to those who’d made it. There were circles and crescents that might have been planets, and some triangles, all run through with beams of what might have been multi-spectrum light. In the design it seemed to refract into different beams, then pass through an eye, surrounded by… clouds?

  It could only be tavalai, she thought, wishing the air were warm enough, and clean enough, to open her visor and take a closer, unfiltered look. Only tavalai would take the time and effort to carve pictures into rock. Chah'nas weren’t much on art beyond the crudely symbolic, and krim hadn’t been known to even comprehend the concept. On Sugauli, there wasn’t anything left of krim but some old mines and ruined settlements. No artistic flourish to recall an entire species by. But the krim hadn’t appeared to care about that, so it seemed pointless that humans should care about it either.

  “Big deal,” said Private Van, arriving at her side to peer at the shapes. “A kid could do this.” Trace sighed. Krim weren’t the only ones without artistic appreciation.

  “You know T-Bone,” she told him, “I did tell you to stay behind and sleep.”

  “You did,” said Van. “What’s your point?”

  “My point is that for a commanding officer, I seem to have very little say in who comes with me.” She waved him on, and the rest of Command Squad behind him. None of them had listened when she’d told them to stay, but her reprimand held only affection.

  Grand passages opened into stairs, and an open elevator in the middle of a circular walkway. Trace peered through doorways, and found rooms stripped bare save fittings for water, electricity and others. All the air was pumped in through great vents hidden behind wall grilles. The machines didn’t need air, but they preferred a higher temperature than the super-freeze their metal bodies would drop to in a vacuum this far from any sun.

  Trace found Ensign Hale and two Engineering colleagues in a command room. It was a big, circular space with a pronounced step-up to some large chairs on a platform overlooking the others. In the centre of the room, some artistic decoration in what would have been a central power column and ceiling support. Further around the rim were the main workstations, smaller chairs facing onto blank frames where long ago, display screens would have been mounted.

  Hale and another spacer drifted by one of the big command chairs, with cables fed into one of those empty sockets. Trace’s uplink found a construct running in the room, and opened onto an engineering-geek conversation about data feeds and programming languages.

  “Wow,” said Corporal Riskin from Alpha Heavy Squad, who’d also come along with his chain gun. “Those command chairs are bigger, right?”

  “Chah'nas,” said Trace, turning off her suit light. The techs had portables set up, and she didn’t want to blind anyone. “These lower work stations are for tavalai. The big boss chah'nas sit in the big chairs, and crack the whip on the tavalai down here.”

  “Poor bloody froggies, huh?” said Terez with dry sarcasm. “Must have sucked for them.”

  Yes, Trace thought, looking around. Yes, it must have. Tavalai were very far from slaves in the Empire, but they’d followed chah'nas rules. And by god did the chah'nas have rules. Strict caste segregation amongst their own kind, strict behavioural codes, strict everything. Chah'nas society was a maze, and when they’d been in charge, everyone else had been forced to appreciate their bizarre sense of order. Chah'nas weren’t inherently cruel or parochial — so long as you played by their rules, you’d get a fair run. They’d discovered early that tavalai were better at bureaucracy and what they regarded as ‘lower-level governance’, than chah'nas were, and from then on, tavalai had been regarded as a separate caste within chah'nas society who specialised in precisely those lower-level functions. It had grown to entail quite a bit of power, and tavalai who remained satisfied with that had done quite well, and been treated ‘fairly’, as far as that went.

  But tavalai were a creative, intellectual and argumentative bunch, and many of them were naturally inclined to squab
ble amongst themselves, and with their then-overseers. And the chah'nas would eventually get sick of it, and start handing out punishments, and tavalai would recall that ultimately it was the people with the bigger stick, and the greater utility in its use, that got to make the decisions. They’d learned that lesson well, over the millennia. Though perhaps not quite as well as humans had.

  One of the voices in the construct, Trace realised, was Second Lieutenant Rooke’s. “Hey Rooke,” she told him. “You’re not taking time away from fixing the ship to dabble in alien archaeology, are you?”

  “I had a choice between this or sleep,” came Rooke’s voice. He was back in Engineering on Phoenix, watching all this on a VR setup. “I chose this, it recharges me better than sleep.”

  “Is it useful?” Trace asked dubiously, drifting across.

  “Well they’ve got some amazing fabrication tech up in the nest,” said Ensign Hale. She was Erik’s friend from second-shift, which generally overlapped with bridge crew third-shift. With various absences, she was now second-in-charge of Engineering. Ensign was a low rank for that, but no one seemed too fussed — Engineering was one department everyone agreed was overflowing with talent. “We think it was tavalai tech in the original base before the hacksaws arrived and took it. If we could find where a few more of those are, it would save us a lot of searching.”

  “Lots of stuff we can’t fabricate on Phoenix,” Rooke explained. “A rock this size, we might be able to make stuff we’d normally have to go to station dock for.”

  “You’re going to convert the rock into a factory to make parts to repair Phoenix?”

  “A small factory, yeah. We’re missing a whole chunk of jump line, it was a lucky shot, it’s not something ships just carry. But we should be able to fabricate a new section, if we can get the raw materials and the right fabricators, plus a little more manpower.”

  “I can put some marines on it, if that would help.”

  “Do you have anyone with engineering experience?” Rooke said skeptically.

  “How many degrees does it take to push buttons on a fabricator?” Trace retorted. “We operate heavy equipment all the time, our suits for one thing. Tell them what to do, they’ll do it.” She glanced at Riskin.

  Riskin nodded with a wary look around. “If it means getting the hell out of here, hell yeah.”

  Trace floated to Ensign Hale’s shoulder, to peer at a display of the data they were extracting from the cable port. “Are you seriously getting data you can read?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Hale looked excited. “Incredible, huh? It’s an old tavalai coding routine. Ten thousand years old and we can still read it.”

  “I suppose there’s not much living here to age everything,” said Trace. She ran a combat glove tip across a dash frame. It collected a layer of fine particles. “There’s no humidity, and it’s cold all the time.”

  “No microbes,” Hale agreed. “We scanned it, there’s nothing else alive here. It’s incredibly old, but it’s in great condition.” Trace prodded a seat cushion. The synthetic surface compressed oddly, and did not spring back when her finger left it. It was very old, certainly, but completely undisturbed. She wondered if the crew who’d sat in these chairs could have imagined this — suited humans, a race unknown to tavalai and chah'nas at the time, prodding around in their quarters ten thousand years later.

  “Actually it’s very interesting,”said Rooke, as though continuing some earlier conversation that Trace had rudely interrupted. “The human records from when we ran into krim for the first time showed a lot of them just didn’t believe it. Not the krim — the whole Spiral civilisation, fifty thousand years back to the Fathers. They talked a lot about the impossibility of technological stasis — they thought fifty thousand years was far too long for civilisation to remain essentially the same out here.”

  “Well it wasn’t the same,” Hale corrected. “The Fathers were the only ones in space that far back, everyone else came later.”

  “Sure, but humanity at the time was going through the Acceleration — we see it everywhere with all species, all the low-hanging fruit being plucked, I mean we were just a few centuries out from horse and carts, and no electricity. Just massive change, across about five hundred to a thousand years, heavy industry, micro-circuits, bio-tech, and finally FTL, etc. So they thought technology always moved at that pace, they didn’t realise how much it slowed down once you got out here, into large-scale FTL civilisation… I mean once you get into quantum computing there’s only so much further you can push it. Same with everything. They thought spacefaring aliens ten thousand years ahead of them would be unrecognisable, would have evolved beyond physicality and mortality, become trans-human gods. A lot of the science-folk didn’t like discovering that even the tavalai and alo were still far away from anything like that. Post-Acceleration, civilisation actually reverts to something more like what humans had for thousands of years pre-Acceleration — similar weapons, similar tools, similar lifestyles, relatively slow change.”

  Trace left them to their work and conversation. Marines did not chatter as they worked, but Engineering was filled with different kinds of people whose brains and culture worked in different ways. She did not begrudge them that, so long as they were effective, and Phoenix’s techs were certainly that.

  Back in the hangar, she found Delta Platoon’s second squad hauling large nets filled with hacksaw parts, heading back to Phoenix. Sergeant Lai gave them a halt when he saw Trace, marines jetting with difficulty to stop the nets of clanking, drifting parts getting away from them.

  “And the techs say it’s entirely safe to bring these back aboard?” Trace asked Lai, peering at the assorted junk through the netting. It looked like someone had dismembered some giant robot spiders. Mostly these were power units, CPUs and weapons, she saw. Some dull sensor eyes stared out at her accusingly.

  “Techies insist it’s not a horror movie,” Lai said drily. “They don’t come back to life in the middle of second-shift and cut our throats while we’re sleeping.”

  “Better fucking hope not,” someone muttered.

  “And we can reverse engineer any of this?” Trace asked dubiously.

  Lai made an exasperated gesture. “Hey Major, the techs are still up in the core, screwing around in that nest. I’m just a marine.”

  “Insects specialise, Spanky,” said Trace, prodding some of the parts. “Don’t be an insect.” Sergeant Calvin ‘Spanky’ Lai snorted. No two bits of molded body casing were identical. The head casings were all different, alloy steel of great strength and low mass. Probably it had insulating and conducting properties too. There was no reason to make them all different unless the insides were different too. Did hacksaws build natural variation into their designs? “I wonder how old they are. All of these parts can be made locally with the fabricators, except for the CPUs. They’ll have the knowledge to copy themselves, but without the fabricators that can actually print the circuits, it won’t do them any good.”

  “Maybe they take the CPUs of dead hacksaws with them,” Private Ijaz suggested. “From where ever they came from. Maybe they’ve only got a limited number of fabricators and they have to keep recycling their dead.”

  “Why can’t they just make new fabricators?” someone wondered.

  “This is crazy advanced stuff,” said Trace. “Pocket fabricators won’t do it, you need whole facilities. AI reproduction was never very efficient when they got this advanced. Big advantage for organic life — we don’t have to spend half of our resources and labour just reproducing new ones.”

  “Sure, but we don’t live forever, either.”

  “Neither do they, apparently,” said Lai, looking at the broken parts. “You know we’re violating ten kinds of Fleet law on the AI restrictions by studying this? Usually we’d have to report it, hand it over, or if that was impossible, destroy it.”

  “Yeah, well Fleet are already trying to kill us, so there’s not much more they can threaten us with. And right now we ne
ed every edge — who knows what our techs will find useful in here.”

  “Major?” Trace looked about at the floating armour. On coms alone, it was often hard to tell who was speaking. “Here, it’s Melsh.”

  “What is it Smat?”

  Some repressed grins within faceplates. They loved that she knew all their nicknames, many of which were rude or silly. The lower ranks found it funny to hear those names on her lips. Ehud ‘Smat’ Melsh had earned his for being a ‘Small Man Always Talking’. “If we’re recovering junk now? Does that mean we’re not going to be making a station call for quite a while?”

  Silence amongst them, awaiting her answer. She looked around at them. “You’ve seen the Captain’s last recording?” There were nods — within articulated combat helmets you could see that. “Captain made that right before the LC went to see him in holding. I was only marginally surprised LC found him dead — I’ve told you why before. I think Spacer Congress was shit scared of him running for office, I think they’ve got the armchair admirals’ balls in a squeeze, or vice-versa, and they planned to have him framed. Ruin his political career, now the war’s over. Only he wouldn’t roll over, and the LC wouldn’t, so they framed the LC with his murder to kill two birds with one stone.”