Rogue Messiah: Fleetfoot Interstellar Series, Book 2

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  Time was running out and with it, choices. The Armada spent two more weeks practicing maneuvers and learning how to use standard particle emitters to form directed energy beams. A major problem they faced was that massed space battles had never been attempted before. They had no idea what they were doing. To make matters worse, it was obvious that the Reptilians contemplated war in space a lot longer. They proved very adept at blowing ships out of the sky. The Armada had a lot to learn.

  Many Trade Union ships were fitted with highly destructive energy emitters, but tools like that were used for clearing asteroid fields or planetary mining operations. Sometimes directed energy beams were used to disperse or burn off interstellar particulate clouds to ease navigation. Now they planned to use those tools on other ships, to kill other living, thinking beings. Specifically, that meant other Professional Astronauts. Drexler tried not to think about it too much. He reminded himself that he was engaged in necessary work, nothing more.

  But the work cost money, and that was yet another problem. The credits Drexler earned from the Insectoids was running out very quickly. The Captains did not give up their ships to the Armada free of charge. While those who decided to join fought for their home planets and families, they had no illusions that, without commerce, victory would mean very little. Nobody could afford to work for free. So, not only was Drexler struggling with a group of Captains to fight a war, he had to manage market forces and negotiate business deals and agreements.

  “Damn it!” Drexler bellowed, throwing a display scroll across his cabin. After six hours straight of reviewing the entire battle plan, including the business backend, he had enough. “Six hundred fucking years!” Drexler shouted to the furniture in his quarters. “And the human race is still a slave to commerce! Not only that, we spread the stupid fucking idea to the rest of the Sentient Universe!” He took his rage out on his antique office chair by attempting a kick, which ended up connecting his shin with the metal seat base. Drexler bit his lip and limped around the room, reining in his anger.

  “I don’t know,” Reggie said. “Commerce seemed a pretty good idea six centuries ago. Most sentient species couldn’t survive without it. Exchanging valued goods necessary for survival worked for a very long time. Also, it’s the reason I was born.”

  “Spare me the lecture, will you? I’ve read all about the free markets of the late 21st century; people dying because they couldn’t afford food and medicine, whole population segments reduced to virtual servitude. It’s only successful and beneficial in this day and age because we have never seen scarcity like this. A broken clock is right twice a day. The idea just waited long enough to become a perfect solution, then stuck around long enough not to be.

  Everyone is ethical as long as there are enough goods to go around. As soon as we hit extreme scarcity, people of every species decide that squeezing value out of the scraps is their best bet, and screw everyone else.”

  “Exactly,” Reggie replied, “Just like you squeezed the Insectoids to get rich when you thought they didn’t know any better.”

  “That was different,” Drexler snapped. His face reddened.

  “Really?” Reggie replied. “Enlighten me.”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to a machine!” Drexler yelled. He instantly regretted it. Reggie remained silent.

  Drexler picked up his display scroll, righted his chair and sat down. “Reggie?” Drexler said. No response. “Reggie, I’m sorry. I should not have said that.”

  “I know. It’s ok,” Reggie said.

  “No. No, it is not. People deserve better. Especially you.”

  After a long pause, Reggie said, “Well, of course, I deserve better. I learned a long time ago to make allowances for the failings of meat units.”

  “Jackass,” Drexler said with a smile.

  “Meatbag,” Reggie fired back. Sometimes Drexler believed he felt Reggie smile. He was much more than a machine to Drexler.

  The Captain stretched his arms up over his head, took a deep breath and let it out as he turned to the viewport. His cabin faced away from the refugee cloud. Looking at the vast field of stars, he could almost forget the raft of pain that floated in space on the other side of his ship.

  “I need to get out of this cabin,” Drexler said.

  “Maybe you should get some sleep,” Reggie suggested.

  “Wow. You haven’t been my babysitter for a long time.”

  “Yes, but when I was, I made sure you got your sleep.”

  “Only after tiring me out with scavenger hunts all over the ship.”

  “And I kept you away from radiation leaks, too.”

  Drexler laced his fingers behind his head and looked up at the patchy gray ceiling. Reggie called him back to simpler times when the ship was a gigantic child’s playhouse. Now that he was an adult, space was often still a thing of wonder, and it held far less terror, but it felt even vaster. At times like this, he felt very small. He got up from his chair before his mind wandered further.

  “Where is Gajrup?” Reggie asked.

  “Engineering. He is also sleep deprived,” Reggie remarked. It was his job to monitor the general health of the crew. “Most of the crew is.”

  “Not sure it can be helped,” Drexler replied as he left the cabin.

  The engineering section lay at the ship’s center of absolute mass, where a fifth-generation fusion reactor served as its burning heart. Drexler stepped through the main blast portal as the door panel slid into its wall pocket with a low rumble. The portal reversed course as soon as both feet hit the engineering deck proper. Many tubes, pipes, pulsing energy conduits and snaking cables created the impression of intestines, blood vessels, and nerves. Drex stood inside the body cavity of a living machine.

  It took the Captain a while to find his latest engineer. Drexler wound his way through maze-like passages until he found Gajrup in the main reactor chamber. He stood at the base of the reactor containment dome, looking up at the main power conduit that extended from the dome to the ceiling, fifty meters above. Drexler slowed his pace, trying to understand what Gajrup was doing.

  With the ship underway, the main power conduit accepted physical connections from the surrounding secondary units. With the ship essentially at rest, the secondary conduits remained retracted into the chamber walls. Only a few were attached now. The main column was essentially unoccupied.

  “OK, Reggie,” Gajrup said as Drexler approached. The Captain often forgot that Reggie was constantly engaged with hundreds of other crew members who called on him to manage ship functions. “Simulate three-quarter C velocity, full protective particle field and trajectory change.”

  “Please specify course for trajectory change,” Reggie replied. Drexler suppressed a snicker. Reggie sounded like a normal ship AI.

  “Yes, Master,” Drexler subvocalized in a movie robot voice, “I do your bidding…”

  “Hey,” Reggie replied in Drexler’s comm implants at the same time he conversed with Gajrup, “Just because I’ve indulged you since you were a five-year-old, doesn’t mean I am not a professional.”

  “Ah, I don’t guess it matters, Reggie. Simulate an emergency course correction,” Gajrup replied.

  “Affirmative,” Reggie said.

  As he got closer, Drex saw that Gajrup had the hood of his flight jacket unfolded and pulled up over his head. In this configuration, the active cloth formed a hard helmet. Gajrup looked like an animated mannequin. He used the helmet heads-up display to see the results of Reggie’s simulation.

  “That is excellent,” Gajrup said. “Power distribution to the energy field is stable; course correction is very fast, and reactor shows 85%. What’s the estimated recovery time?”

  “My reactor will recover full power within three minutes of this maneuver, assuming constant course and no weapons contact.”

  “Weapons contact?” Drexler asked aloud. Gajrup yelped, jumped and deactivated the helmet hood.

  “What!” he stammered as he pulled the now loos
e cloth away from his face. “Captain! You startled me,” Gajrup said, placing a pudgy hand over his heart.

  “I’m sorry, Chief Engineer,” Drexler said formally to show he meant it.

  “It’s ok,” Gajrup said, adding, “Sir,” as an afterthought.

  “What are you working on?” Drexler asked.

  “Combat simulation. I’m trying to get reactor efficiency optimal so that, when things happen, we can have as much power as we need when we need it.”

  “And how is it going?”

  “Well, so far, I’ve come up with a hundred-fifty likely base scenarios. Reggie is extrapolating those scenarios for variants. We’ll have a database of maneuvers and counter-maneuvers that we can share with the rest of the Armada.”

  Drexler stood unable to form a reply for a moment. “This is …” he stammered, “Excellent! Very good work. I should have thought of this.”

  “Well, that’s what you hired me for, Captain,” Gajrup said, running a hand through his long, straight black hair. Drexler noticed his normally clean mop was turning greasy.

  “How long have you been working this cycle?” Reggie asked, squinting at the dark, baggy circles under Gajrup’s eyes.

  Before Gajrup could lie to his Captain, Reggie replied for him. “In fifteen minutes, it will be eighteen hours. You, Captain, have been working for nineteen hours as of five minutes ago. You are almost tied in your race of unsustainable work cycles.”

  Gajrup shook his head, said, “He talks differently when you are around. I still can’t get used to it.”

  “Yes, but I notice you refer to him as ‘he’ instead of ‘it’ like you would any other ship AI.”

  Gajrup laughed. “That I do. He is a very special…machine, indeed,” Gajrup replied, unsure of the mixed reference to the AI he still had trouble defining. It seemed to Drexler that Gajrup had almost decided Reggie was a person. Drex couldn’t think of Reggie any other way.

  “I know you’re hungry because I am too,” Drexler said. Gajrup nodded his head and rubbed his hand over his round belly.

  “I’m ordering you to come to have a meal with me,” Drexler said.

  Gajrup fell in beside him without a word. They left engineering. Gajrup issued orders to his staff along the way. Drexler took note of Gajrup’s management style. It was firm but collegial. The engineering staff seemed to respond to him very well. It was more than apparent that Gajrup earned their respect. He was an excellent engineer and a fine officer.

  “What’s the mess hall serving humans at this hour?” Gajrup asked.

  “Nothing good,” Drexler replied. “That’s why we’re taking our meals in the Captain’s quarters.”

  “Didn’t we already have a banquet reunion with Tara, Dewey, and Huey? What did I do to deserve this privilege again?” Gajrup asked.

  “You have to ask? For starters, almost getting killed back on Kelgar 7 planet, then sticking around for a war with little promise of pay. Your job description still says you’re a Merchant Astronaut, but you’re retrofitting a warship.”

  “I suppose I can accept that you did give us our back pay, after all…” Gajrup trailed off. Drexler clapped him on the shoulder before he climbed a ladder outside the engineering bay.

  13

  The Forest Child transport remained drydocked on Medina 3 in a special sector of the Royal Shipyards reserved for vessels belonging to high government officials. The location was perfect. It was an open secret that the Forest Child Ambassador Dhohal and his companions represented a new formation of the Trade Union government. Working out of the shipyards kept their activities just far enough away from public notice to keep the rumors to a minimum.

  So far, the war came to the Caliphate worlds as a stream of ever-worsening news. The rest of the Trade Union planets were not so lucky. Most of the major homeworlds were blockaded by swarms of Reptilian warships that destroyed or captured every Union vessel they came across. Those worlds awaited a ground invasion that seemed inevitable.

  Luckily, most of the Merchant ships and all of the official craft of the Trade Union worlds were aware of Reptilian hostilities. That meant most astronauts avoided the trade lanes and fled to the unincorporated border worlds, or escaped to uncharted space. Many vessels flocked to the City ships of the Federated Americas or the Pan-African Federation. There were reports of widespread disruption from the City Ships, who strained to accommodate the displaced populations.

  In response, the Caliphate worlds increased their production of food and medicine. Their factories and bio-engineering centers worked at double, sometimes triple capacity. Vital goods piled up and were sent into orbital warehouses, waiting in stasis to find use. The problem was that there was no way to get those vital supplies to those who needed them.

  “Do we have any idea when the Armada will arrive?” Margaret asked. She had taken to biting her nails, and she did so as she sat with Abhay and Colonel Meyers at the common room table. Nearly every spare flat surface of the transport ship served as improvised workspace. Officials and functionaries from the Persian Government, the Saudi Royal Family and countless other bureaucrats from across the planet toiled away at plans that had nowhere to go.

  Colonel Meyers sighed, “No, unfortunately. I wish we did, but by necessity, we cannot know. We should not know. It has to be a complete surprise to everyone. We just need to be ready.”

  Abhay leaned back on the large bench designed to accommodate Forest Children. The three humans looked like kids sitting on adult furniture. “I hope it is soon,” he said. “That second massing of Reptilian fighters does not look good. They are moving closer to this system.”

  “That is the strange one, though,” Colonel Meyers replied. “Satellite surveillance reveals that half the ships are captured freighters.”

  “Which lends support to your theory that they are stretched thin,” Abhay replied.

  “That it does,” Meyers said. “But why?”

  “Why what?” Margaret asked.

  “Why are they stretched thin? We believe the Reptilian plan is centuries old. They waited a very long time for this over multiple generations. Why did they act in such a way to stretch out their invasion fleet without immediate support? I mean, attacking, then leaving more than a month for your main battle fleet to arrive is kind of …”

  “Stupid,” Abhay offered.

  “Yes, well, I agree. I try to avoid thinking of the Reptiles as stupid. They are not to be underestimated.”

  “Typical of my brother,” Margaret said. “He got mixed up in something. I think he forced their hand somehow ― found out something they didn’t want us to know. I think they decided they had to spring their trap early.”

  “That does make sense,” Meyers replied. “It is not actionable, but it does ―”

  A commotion from the forward compartment interrupted the conversation. The three Humans turned to the sound. Ambassador Dhohal rushed toward them. He paused in the corridor and motioned the group towards him.

  “Come with me right now. There is a development,” Dhohal said, then turned back down the corridor.

  Abhay, Margaret, and Colonel Meyers jumped up and joined a growing stream of bodies that crammed into the conference room. There was no room to sit around the conference table. Humans and Forest children crammed themselves into the space shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “We are getting this feed live,” Dhohal said. He tapped a console, and an image appeared on the wall.

  A single ship idled in space. The information overlay told Margaret that the location was just inside the Medina system heliosphere. She recognized the configuration of the vessel. It was of the same design as Fleetfoot I .

  “What is going on?” Margaret asked. “What is that ship?”

  “We believe it’s one of ours,” Dhohal replied. “Trade Union. It has no transponder signal.”

  The information display showed fourteen other vessels of various designs surrounding the ship at a distance of one-hundred-thousand kilometers.

  “
Why are those other ships so close?” Margaret asked. “What do they hope to do?”

  “Some of them are equipped with mining lasers and other energy beam capability.”

  “You think that ship is a threat?” Abhay asked.

  “We don’t know,” Dhohal replied. The room burbled with hushed conversation. “The ship is asking for some unknown protocol confirmation.”

  “The ship?” Abhay asked. “Why do you say ‘the ship’?” Goosebumps spread across Abhay’s skin.

  “Because it is the ship itself that makes this request. We have not heard from the crew.”

  “It is searching for the seed ship,” Abhay said. “The hidden protocols are active.”

  ***

  “Jubilee,” Aahloh said. “Please grant access to comm systems. Allow us to reply.”

  “Cannot comply. Ship is not secure,” Jubilee replied. “You are not safe.”

  “The ships out there belong to the trade union,” the Captain responded.

  “Enemy uncertain,” Jubilee said. Her replies were clipped, devoid of the distinct character she displayed a few hours ago. She sounded more like the AI they knew before the attack.

  The remaining crew huddled together on the flight bridge, frantically working consoles in their attempts to regain control of the ship. Jubilee frustrated every attempt.

  “Manual control not advisable,” Jubilee said.

  “I am the Captain of this ship,” Aahloh said in a calm voice. “Please release command functions to me.”

  “Crew is not viable. Emergency procedures necessary. I am sorry,” Jubilee replied. “You are not safe.”

  “Why are you sorry?” the Captain replied.

  “More input, please,” Jubilee said.

  “How is it that you are sorry? How can you be? Your behavior is outside normal parameters, Jubilee. Please return command functions to me,” the Captain said.