by Peter Nealen
Rehenek had lost his mother and father in the last hours of Valdek’s resistance to the Unity. There had been times in the hours since when it seemed that he held that a greater crime than the invasion of his world; he had even pledged to raise a monument to their memory in the wreckage of the Sparat system.
Scalas had also lost a mentor on Valdek; Brother Legate Kranjick had given his life to delay the Unity forces trying to penetrate the mountain fastness where the Pride of Valdek had been prepping for launch. But he had presumed Rehenek too absorbed in his own pain—and his own stoicism intact enough—that he had not noticed what that loss had cost the Brothers, and perhaps Scalas in particular.
Kranjick had been his Centurion during his first years as a Brother. The massive, slow-speaking, immovable man had become like a second father to him. His loss had struck him more deeply than he had expected.
Rehenek gently shoved a drinking bulb toward him, and he caught it easily. It was filled with some sort of tea, sweet, but with an underlying spicy tang.
“The truth is, while I wouldn’t have realized it when we parted ways, I’ve found that I’ve missed your company over the last few months,” the young Valdekan General-Regent said. He lifted his own drinking bulb. “What happened on Valdek…it’s still not real to these people. Oh, they’ve seen the recordings we brought out, they’ve seen the reports of other strikes and the increasing unrest and provocations happening across the Arm. They know that trouble is coming. But you and I…we were there. We saw. We fought those…things together.” His eyes suddenly got far away. “And we both lost men we looked up to and respected.”
Rehenek folded his hands around the drinking bulb in front of him and looked down at them. Scalas suddenly realized just how alone this young man really was.
He looked up. Scalas had seen Rehenek make speeches, seen him be calculating and ruthless. But there was no guile in his eyes right then. There was only a mingling of weariness, loneliness, and a deep-seated fear. “I am not a friendly man by nature,” he said. “I know it. But if the last few months have taught me anything, it is just how much a man in my position needs true friends. I know your first loyalty will always be to your Brotherhood. But given what we have seen together, what we have both lost…I would hope that we can be friends, Erekan Scalas.”
Scalas looked at him. In over ten years as a Caractacan Brother, he had seen little to recommend friendships outside the Brotherhood. The Caractacan Brothers shared a common Code and a common Faith. They shared hardships and dangers. They were knit together by those commonalities in a way that no outsider could ever quite grasp.
Or, they were supposed to be. He recalled the growing “new school” of thought, and Centurion Dunstan, who had disgraced himself and his Century. Dunstan had been recalled to the Conclave for judgement, but the specter of what he had done, and why he had done it, remained.
In that moment, he realized that he did feel closer to this sharp-featured, angry young man than to the likes of Dunstan. Rehenek might have been hotheaded and impulsive, but from what Scalas had seen, he had done everything he had done out of loyalty to his world and his people. He’d been prepared to stay behind, fighting a losing battle to the bitter, inevitable end, rather than flee his world and save his own life. Only the grim, inexorable logic of Brother Legate Kranjick had persuaded him to leave with them.
He held out his hand. “I think that we will all need as many friends as we can get, in the war to come,” he said.
Rehenek’s eyes lit with an intense flash, and he gripped Scalas’s offered hand, hard.
Chapter Eight
The rest of the fleet departed for the nearest proto-system in the nebula, flickering away and leaving only faint, gossamer trails of electric-blue luminescence in their wake, and the Nemesis was alone.
The command deck, which the Dahuans referred to by the ancient nautical term “bridge,” was bigger than Scalas was used to, and included extra seats for observers. All in all, from what he had seen so far, the massive Dahuan star cruiser was far more luxurious than any of the more ascetic and utilitarian Caractacan ships.
He was presently strapped into one of those extra acceleration couches, along with Rehenek, the Valdekan’s right hand man, a grizzled, older Valdekan officer named Major Zorek, and Squad Sergeant Kahane. They were clustered just behind the captain’s couch, where Ravinu was preparing the Nemesis to descend into the accretion disc.
The captain’s couch swiveled smoothly around to face them. Ravinu was a man of indeterminate age, carefully groomed. His every dirty blond hair was in place, his soft, rounded jaw clean-shaven. Scalas had taken an immediate dislike to the man upon meeting him, and had been careful to keep it hidden. He was almost certainly a competent starship captain, but his soft appearance and simpering manner had not endeared him to a man who had spent the better part of twenty years as a combat soldier.
He had noticed a certain brittleness to both Rehenek and Zorek when speaking to the captain. So, he wasn’t the only one.
“I believe we have plotted a reasonably safe course into the system, gentles,” Ravinu said with an unctuous smile. “The trouble with a situation like this is that even inertialess, space is so dirty that there is considerable hazard involved in making any great relative velocity. Not so much from the kinetic impacts; the Bergenholm, of course, renders those harmless. But the sheer friction can burn the ship up if we are not careful. But I think that I have successfully plotted a trajectory that will get us to the proper orbit without going through too much of the thick stuff.”
Scalas kept his own face carefully neutral during the lecture. He hardly needed a primer on the Bergenholm field or its effects regarding micrometeorite impacts. Nor, he suspected, did Rehenek or Zorek, though the two of them had done considerably less interstellar traveling than any of the Caractacan Brothers. It was simply another mark of Ravinu’s infuriating attitude.
From the way Rehenek was watching the captain through narrowed eyes, Scalas suspected that the General-Regent was silently wishing that he’d picked a different ship for their reconnaissance. But it was too late.
“Show me the course you have plotted, Captain,” Rehenek said flatly. His irritation was plain in his voice.
Ravinu smiled more widely, and, if it was possible, more condescendingly. “I’m sure that you would prefer to leave the details…” he began.
Rehenek cut him off. “Show me the course plot, Captain.”
Ravinu’s eyes might have tightened a little, his lips thinned ever so slightly. He tapped a control, and a glowing, gossamer line appeared in the holo tank, curving down into the accretion disc. “I can explain the orbital mechanics involved, if you wish,” he said.
Rehenek ignored him. “Change the course,” he said. “Take us up, above the ecliptic, and above the plane of the disc.”
“That will hardly be normal,” Ravinu pointed out. “We have managed to detect what appear to be ship trails—though it is admittedly hard to tell, given all the electromagnetic noise in this system—going directly into the disc. A pirate would not be casting about for Ktatra’s location.”
“Unless they are new,” Rehenek replied. “A brand-new warlord, looking to make his mark, might not know the correct approaches to Ktatra, even after he found the system in the first place. So, would he not attempt to look more widely before risking his ship in that?” He stabbed a finger toward the holographic representation of the disc for emphasis.
Ravinu looked like he was trying to suppress a grimace. “I suppose he might, when you put it that way,” he said.
“And how long did you expect your course through the disc to take to find Ktatra itself?” Rehenek asked relentlessly.
Ravinu looked even more uncomfortable. “We plotted several mass concentrations within the disc that could be protoplanets. That course is designed to pass by the three largest, over the course of about two hundred hours.”
Rehenek shook his head. “Over the ecliptic, Captain,” he said. “Bet
ter to look down on the disc than to muddle through the dust and asteroids, hoping that we calculated right.”
“With all due respect, General-Regent,” Ravinu started to say.
It was not Rehenek who interrupted him, however, but Zorek. “In my experience, man who says, ‘with all due respect’ offers none,” the older man grunted. His Trade Cant was accented but quite clear.
“Who exactly is in command of this operation, Captain?” Scalas asked quietly. He had no vested interest in Rehenek’s authority, friend or no, but Ravinu’s attitude needed to be dealt with. He had seen such men before, and dreaded what would happen if they needed him to react quickly in an emergency that he had not personally foreseen.
Ravinu glanced at him. He met the captain’s gaze levelly. He knew what Ravinu saw. Scalas and Kahane were still in armor, sans helmets. So, Ravinu could look Scalas right in his cold, black eyes.
He could see that the simple soldier he had doubtless considered the Caractacan Centurion to be was far from ignorant, either of space travel or of his own little power games.
“General-Regent Rehenek is the overall joint commander of the Alliance Task Force,” Ravinu admitted, sounding more than a little pained. “And the Nemesis has been officially seconded to his command.”
“Then perhaps you should do as he says,” Scalas said, his voice still quiet and level. “Barring a compelling argument that to do so will result in mission failure or unacceptable risk.”
Ravinu stared at him for a moment, then nodded curtly and started to swivel his couch back toward the holo tank.
“Captain,” Rehenek said lazily. Ravinu froze. “The Centurion’s statement requires a response.”
For a moment, Ravinu looked like he was sitting on something sharp. “Of course, Centurion,” he said stiffly. “You are right.” He turned to Rehenek. “We will plot a course to pass above the ecliptic of the proto-planetary disc, General-Regent.”
Rehenek smiled. There was no warmth in the expression. “Thank you, Captain.”
Her Bergenholm field reengaged, the Nemesis’s drives lit, and she plummeted into the Ktatra system.
The accretion disc was thickest around the star itself, narrowing to less than a light-second at the edge. The Nemesis, an infinitesimally tiny speck against that vast cloud of gas, dust, rock, and ice, soared up over the top of the disc, arrowing toward a point two light-minutes above the north pole of the young star.
Scalas watched the plot in the massive holo tank aboard the Nemesis’s bridge, as they raced deeper into the star’s gravity well, gathering more and more information and data as they went. From above the ecliptic, the starship’s sensors were able to begin to refine their picture of the disc’s geometry.
There was an ocean of data to be collected and processed, just to form the most rudimentary picture of their surroundings. The disc itself was almost four hundred light-minutes across, and composed of an ever-shifting conglomeration of debris. Between the scale of the system and the ever-present background roar of radiation from the nebula, it would be almost impossible to spot the Nemesis at anything but a few light-seconds’ distance.
Almost impossible. There was no way to hide the emissions a starship put out, and once a ship arrived in a system, those emissions were on their way. There was no way to hide in open space, even without being under thrust. But there were ways of plotting a course to minimize detection for as long as possible, using debris, planets, and simply timing. A good starship captain understood the concept of the “light cone” and how to best use it to his advantage.
Ships began to appear on the plot, entering the system and diving into the accretion disc. Interestingly, all of them seemed to arrive above the ecliptic before descending into the debris. Of course, there were probably just as many arriving from “below” the ecliptic, hidden by the mass of dust and asteroids that made up the disc.
The picture started to become clearer as the minutes ticked by. The approach and departure tracks were all old; they were coming in from nearly seventy light-minutes away, even at the Nemesis’s relative velocity of over thirty percent the speed of light. The ships themselves were long gone. But they were clustered around the same sector of Ktatra’s orbit. Whether Ktatra was a protoplanet, a space station, or an asteroid base, they had a general location.
“That has to be it,” Rehenek said. “There is no other ship traffic anywhere else around the accretion disc.” He tapped his thumb against his chin as he stared at the holo tank. “That is Ktatra.” He looked at Scalas. “You and your Brotherhood have been hunting this place for years, or so I am told,” he said. “What do you think?”
The Centurion nodded. “Ktatra’s location has been a carefully guarded secret for a very long time,” he said. “And given that they hid it in a dangerous place like this tells me that even now that we know where it is, there will still be other defenses.” He pointed toward the plot. “Ktatra itself might not even be there; that might only be the prescribed entry point to the debris field. There might be guide ships waiting there, to either move to a higher or lower orbit. We should proceed carefully.”
“You will get no argument from me,” Rehenek said. “Take us in, Captain.”
By the time the Nemesis had neared the entry point, the sky around her was clear. Ravinu had slowed the ship to a relative crawl, carefully easing toward the spot in the disc where the pirate starships had disappeared.
“This is going to be quite risky, sir,” Ravinu pointed out, swiveling his couch around again to face Rehenek and Scalas. “Without a precise vector for Ktatra itself, we will have to go into the disc while still inertialess, and make our synchronization burn, inert, while within the debris field. We could sustain minor damage, depending on the thickness of the dust and micrometeorites.”
“This ship was built for combat, Captain,” Rehenek pointed out. “I am well aware of the reputation of Dahuan star cruisers. I am sure she can weather whatever we encounter in there. Besides, if the synchronization burn for the designated orbit around the star is conducted here, above the ecliptic, then that should minimize the necessary maneuvering while inside the disc, should it not?”
Before Ravinu could say anything more, an alarm pulsed in the tank. The ship’s captain swiveled back to face the tank as two blood-red indicators appeared, rising out of the accretion disc only a few light-seconds away.
“Two ships,” the Dahuan tactical officer reported. “Both older K’hara-class cruisers. They appear to be inert and under thrust at one point five Gs. One of them just swept us with a targeting lidar.”
“Have they deployed weapons or altered their vectors to intercept us?” Ravinu asked.
“Negative,” was the response, after a moment. “They seem to be accelerating to keep up with us at our current relative velocity, and I expect that their onboard weapons are trained on us, but they have not deployed missiles, weapons drones, or X-ray laser pods, at least not that we can detect. They are still within the upper reaches of the disc, so there is still a lot of dust and debris that is obscuring our own sensors.”
“So, they’re sizing us up and deciding whether we’re prey or not,” Ravinu mused. For all his softness and condescending manner, the man wasn’t a fool.
“Tell me about these ships,” Rehenek said. “Are they a threat?”
“An asteroid miner mounting a laser cannon can potentially be a threat,” Ravinu retorted, “provided it has an advantageous vector and proper targeting. As for the K’hara-class, I can’t say for sure what their capabilities are.”
“They are older Galerian designs,” the tactical officer said. “Dating back from the Craemal Wars.” Scalas was familiar with that series of conflicts, though they had been before his time. The Caractacan Brotherhood had been instrumental in ending the vicious blood feuds between the Galerian humans and the Craemal houkh, though not after six waves of unmitigated slaughter. “They were some of the top-of-the-line ships toward the end of the Wars, and are roughly equivalent to an old Man
ticore-class. We can generate slightly more thrust, and have more weapons, but they can soak up all but a direct hit from an X-ray laser. They have multiple redundant systems, more armor than most starships these days, and extremely powerful maneuvering thrusters.”
“So,” Rehenek mused. “They can put up a fight, and aren’t likely to go down before at least one of them yells for help. And they’ve already detected us, so we are already compromised.”
“That is a fair assessment,” Ravinu said.
“Hail them, then,” Rehenek said.
“What?” Ravinu blurted, half spinning his acceleration couch around.
“You heard me,” Rehenek said. “Open a comms channel. I will speak to them.”
Scalas was studying Rehenek, as Ravinu stared for a moment, then turned and spoke to his communications officer in whatever Dahuan dialect was used aboard the Nemesis.
“What is your plan?” he asked. “Subterfuge?”
“Of a sort,” Rehenek replied. “I’d call it more of a bluff.” He glanced at Scalas. “I know your Code forbids lying, even to an enemy. I find that a little bizarre, but I’ll play along. These pirates don’t know who I am, not yet. You might want to move away to stay out of the pickup though, at least until we can get you some more piratical-looking armor. That Caractacan plate is going to be a dead giveaway, and then we’re all dead.”
Scalas said nothing, not at first. It was true that the Code included the injunction, “To always speak the truth.” It could seem inconvenient when in a combat situation, but Kranjick had always taught him that there was a difference between lying and simply holding one’s peace. Rehenek was right. Where the truth would not suffice, silence was better. Without a word, he unfastened his harness and moved away.
A comms window opened in the holo tank. The yeheri who appeared in the tank was a surprise; yeheri ordinarily kept to their own ships. They were proud that way.