Independence: Book 1 of The Legacy Ship Trilogy

by Nick Webb

  “Huh?”

  “Farthest planet out in San Martin’s solar system. They might have a supply depot there,” he added, looking back up through the port to stare at the abyss. “It’s like walking on a tightrope. Over a bottomless cliff. One wrong step, and pow, you’re falling forever, never dying until you have a heart attack or starve.”

  “Huh?” she repeated. “You’re starting to worry me with all your morbid talk.”

  “I wonder if this is what it was like for Granger.”

  “Huh?”

  He was starting to wonder if that was her only response when she was trying to sleep.

  “You know, as he was falling into that black hole.”

  She grunted. “Falling? I thought he was aiming.”

  A smile tugged at his lips. “Heh. Right. Swarm never knew what hit ‘em.”

  She shifted in her seat, eyes still closed, trying to get comfortable. “Assuming he actually hit them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as of a few weeks ago, he was still technically falling in. Hadn’t even crossed the event horizon yet, from our perspective. So my question is, how did that actually stop the Swarm from sending meta-space signals out of that black hole from their own universe, if Granger hadn’t even fallen in yet and blew them to smithereens with the anti-matter aboard the Victory? And what was the plan, anyway? There’s a lot the higher-ups never told us. I think they’re covering up something, if you ask me.”

  He blew a puff of air in disbelief. “What, you’re not a Grangerite, are you? Or a conspiracy theorist?”

  A wry smile crossed her lips, even though her eyes stayed closed. “Right, because conspiracies never happen. Just ask Jerry Underwood.”

  He shrugged. Touché.

  “And no, I’m not a Grangerite. Those people are a little mentally disturbed, if you ask me,” she murmured. “But … my brother-in-law is. My sister and he were Methodists. She still is, and the kids, but he started falling in for the Grangerite stuff a few years ago. But he was always a little whacked.”

  “I just don’t understand how they can deify a guy like that. Dad always talked about him. Granger. Said he was just this regular dude. A bloke, as mom called him. And now these freaks are turning him into a god. Seriously? Welcome to the twenty-seventh century, people.”

  “Meh. Catholics do it all the time.”

  “Huh?” Now it was his turn for the huhs.

  “You know. Saints, and all that.”

  “Oh. Right. Still, at least they….” He trailed off, wondering what point he was about to make.

  “At least they what?”

  “You know. At least they’ve got almost three thousand years of precedent and history behind them. They’ve been making people saints for millennia. And Jesus is, like, you know, ancient history. There’s some historical heft there. Same with Mohammed and Buddha and whatever religion you want. But Granger? We’ve got video of him. People are still alive that knew him. How do you make a god out of that? Especially now? You know, in the present? Modern society, modern culture, and all that?”

  “I’m sure people living around Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha thought the same thing.”

  “Yeah, and what happened to them?”

  She shrugged. “They either all converted, or were killed, I guess.”

  “Well that’s a wonderful thought.”

  Her eyes still closed, she flashed a devious smile. “So, would you rather lose q-jump engines in interstellar space in a shuttle, or convert to Grangerism?”

  He chuckled. “Depends. Can I bring a deck of cards on the shuttle? Or at least a multi-level marketing sales presentation pamphlet? Then I choose the shuttle.”

  The console beeped again. “Ladies and gentlemen, prepare for jump number three hundred and fifty-three,” he announced.

  She grunted. “You know, I’m trying to sleep here.”

  “Fine, I’ll shut up.”

  She smiled, and snuggled down further into her seat.

  “But before I do—”

  She frowned.

  “—Help me think through this. What could be so important that someone would kill for it, right in the middle of a battle, when the station is about to explode?”

  She shrugged. “Chocolate?”

  “I’m serious here.”

  “So am I. Are you going to let me sleep, or not?”

  He sighed. “Just thought it might be important to think about, seeing how someone’s trying to, you know, kill us because we already know too much about it.”

  “Not much we can do about it now, can we? In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re kinda in interstellar space….”

  He ignored her. It was crucial that they figure this out, and not only to save their own necks. It just … felt wrong. There was far more riding on this than just a few hired goons shooting at them. Something big was happening. Or was about to happen.

  “It was either a weapon, or … or evidence about something. Evidence of some conspiracy or wrong-doing or whatever. The guy—Underwood—kept on calling it it. So it’s a singular item, not a collection of things, unless it meant like a crate with lots of stuff in it. Or maybe—”

  “You’re not even making any sense,” she mumbled.

  “I wonder if its connected to Sangre.”

  She frowned. “I’m not good with Spanish. Blood?”

  “Sangre de Cristo.”

  “Oh. You think it was another nuke? Aren’t those, you know … conspicuous?”

  He nodded. “Well yeah, especially since they’re banned.”

  He bolted upright, then stood. She finally opened her eyes. “What? What is it?”

  “If it was a nuke, we can tell.” He dashed out of the cockpit, and she rolled out of her seat to follow him. As if reading his mind, she grabbed the engine diagnostic toolkit and pulled out the general-purpose scanner.

  “What band?” she asked, fiddling with the handheld device.

  “Gamma band. That’s the one that will detect any leftover radioactive signature.”

  She nodded, frustratedly. “Sorry, I should know that.”

  “You’re good.” He worried about her—it was clear she was still in a little shock from the previous day’s traumatic events, in spite of her show of bravado and humor.

  She went into the cargo hold, and waved the detector back and forth across the floor, over the walls, up to the ceiling.

  He waited. Patiently. Dammit, hurry the hell up!

  “Ok, looks like—”

  She paused.

  “And?” he asked.

  “Nothing. No leftover radioactive signature.”

  He sighed. “Well, it was worth a shot.” He started heading back to the cockpit.

  She wasn’t moving. “Wait. I’m reading something, though.”

  He stopped in the doorway. “What is it?”

  Her eyes went wide. “I have no idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Irigoyen Sector, Bolivar System, Bolivar

  Bridge, ISS Independence

  The doctor had recommended bed rest and observation for a day in the hospital, followed by a week of recuperating at home, along with pain meds and reconstructive enzyme therapy for the torn ligament in her right leg and some frightfully large orange pill as a precaution against hemorrhaging because of her concussion. Proctor had smiled, thanked her, and told her to go to hell when the doctor protested her getting out of bed and boarding her shuttle back up to the Independence.

  “Admiral on the bridge!” called out one of the marines at the entrance as she hobbled through—damn, was she hobbling?

  Commander Yarbrough looked up suddenly from the XO’s station. “Admiral? Are you feeling well enough to continue with the mission?”

  “Am I dead?”

  Yarbrough’s eyes narrowed slightly. His reply was slightly hesitant. “No?”

  “Then we’re continuing the mission. Prepare for t-jump. Any new sign of the mystery ship?”

  He shook h
is head, then glanced at tactical, and Lieutenant Whitehorse flashed a quick thumbs-down. “No, Admiral, no sign of it. All systems in this sector are on the lookout, and have express instructions to report to us by meta-space signal if anything changes.” He hesitated again. “Uh, ma’am, where exactly are we t-jumping to if we have no contact with the alien vessel?”

  Proctor, trying not to limp too much, walked to her chair and eased herself into it. Dammit, seventy-year-old bodies and torn ligaments don’t mix very well. “San Martin.”

  “What’s on San Martin?”

  She snapped her head towards him with an impatient glare. “Our destination.”

  Yarbrough nodded nervously. “I’m sorry, Admiral, I didn’t mean to sound impudent, if that’s how I came across. It’s just Fleet Admiral Oppenheimer has been insistently, uh, badgering would be the wrong word, but he’s been following our progress very closely—”

  “Wait, Oppenheimer’s been in touch with you?”

  Yarbrough looked uncomfortable. “Yes, ma’am. Meta-space messages.”

  Interesting. Oppenheimer was keeping tabs on her. Through her own XO, no less. “Very well. Keep me apprised of what he says, and if CENTCOM Omaha has any new info for us on the extrapolated origins of this thing. Oh—” she turned to face him fully. “And see what you can find out on the GPC.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You know. What Oppenheimer and his people are doing about it. What the political climate at CENTCOM is. If their reach has extended up into the chain of command, I want to know about it. See what Oppenheimer’s opinion of them is. His real opinion—he and I are not exactly conversation buddies.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Yarbrough turned back to his station, but paused as if he had more to say.

  “Spit it out, Commander.”

  The man actually looked sheepish. “You don’t suppose Oppenheimer is sympathetic to the GPC, do you?”

  Proctor glanced sidelong at the rest of the bridge crew out of the corner of her eye. She could see Lieutenant Whitehorse sit up a hair straighter. Ensign Riisa cocked her head slightly. Proctor knew that gossip, especially the juicy, political kind, was the life-blood of a crew, even in wartime. Hell, especially in wartime—people just seemed to need something to distract them from the awful realities of life. And death.

  “No, I don’t,” she replied quickly. Maybe too quickly. “Ready room. Now.” She pointed to the door off to the side and grunted as she pushed herself to a standing position. Damn leg. She resented it already.

  She hobbled into the ready room, making no effort to hide the limp this time, all pretense of being the picture of health for her crew forgotten. The door slid shut behind them. She turned to face the commander, her eyes flared open wide. “Commander Yarbrough, on this ship, on my bridge, we do not openly speculate about the political leanings of our commanding officers. Period. Is that clear?”

  Yarbrough cowered. Cowered. “Sorry, Admiral. I’m … sorry. I didn’t think that combat would affect me as much as … well, as much as it did.”

  Proctor’s face softened a bit. She was being too hard on him. On all of them. None of them, save Ballsy, had actually been in combat before.

  Though, neither had she, when the Swarm attacked out of the blue, thirty years ago. Swarm behavior and biology had been her doctoral thesis, and even she had been taken by surprise. She had been sure the Swarm was on a hundred and fifty year activity cycle, and that, seventy-five years after their first attack humanity was safe for another seventy-five. Humanity should have enjoyed seventy-five more years of security, time to build before the next attack.

  As it turns out, the sense of safety was false, and Proctor swore to never again be lulled away into a feeling of false security. But it was one thing to live through all that, and another to be ready for it all to happen again. These people, her crew, never had that. They only had their history books. Stories of bravery. Cultural legends of heroism, loss, and sacrifice. They’d all lost relatives in the war, but it was already distant enough to be out of living memory for anyone under fifty.

  “It’s ok, Commander. I was the same way in your position, thirty years ago.”

  He did a double-take. “You were?”

  No, I wasn’t. I was a frickin machine.

  “Yes, believe me. You’re doing fine.” His face told her he still didn’t believe her, so she waved him over to the desk and sat down, pointing to the other chair. She reached over to the teapot that she’d asked Ensign Flay to have ready and hot at all times, and poured them both a cup. “I was Captain Granger’s new XO—”

  “The Hero of Earth,” interjected Yarbrough, accepting the cup of tea.

  “The Hero of Earth, yes. Though you’d be surprised that the Hero of Earth had his moments. He doubted. Agonized over what to do. It was hit or miss there for awhile. Mostly miss. But anyway, I was his new XO, and my job—given to me by your grandmother by the way—was to decommission the Constitution. With Granger still on it. Can you imagine?”

  “She didn’t!” said Yarbrough, with an amused air, his brow furrowed in disbelief.

  “She did. But I was up-and-coming, let me tell you. I was going to have my own command if it killed me, and I saw that as my opportunity to prove myself to old Admiral Yarbrough. I mean, if she could trust me with such a … bold assignment, then she could sure as hell trust me with my own little cruiser. And so I went aboard the Constitution, and I was a ball-buster, taking names, blazing a trail that would have gotten me kicked off any other ship under any other captain.”

  “The Hero of Earth was pretty magnanimous, then?”

  She snorted. “Magnanimous? Tim? He was as crotchety as they come. I’d only been aboard a few days and he was thinking about air-locking me.”

  “Why didn’t he?” Yarbrough leaned in closer, sipping his tea.

  “The Swarm saved me, ironically enough. Once it became clear what we were up against, my job—my only job—was to enable Tim to win. He was my captain, and, while he wasn’t the greatest, most inspirational leader around, he had grit, and he had what all of us need in a situation like that. He was a survivor. He wasn’t going to go quietly. He was going to do anything—anything—to stop the Swarm and win. I recognized that in him instantly, and so I made it my job to make his job do-able. I ran the ship. I organized the repair crews, the ordnance and reload teams, the fighter jocks, the ops teams, the science team, the … well, you name it. I slept about two hours a night for those four months, and aged twenty years in the process. And in the end, we did it. Tim did it. We won.”

  “Not without a huge cost, though,” he added. “Granger piloted the Victory into the black hole the Swarm was coming through, to shut it down.”

  “He did. And saved us all in the process.”

  “Some say he’s still there. That he’ll come back some day.” Yarbrough finished his tea and set the cup down.

  “Grangerites, yes. They need their messiah, whether it’s Jesus or Buddha or, in this case, a man who finished his day by collapsing onto his couch, farting up a storm, and scratching off his bunions with his thumbnail.”

  “Is it even possible? Can he come back? Technically he hasn’t even crossed the event horizon yet….”

  “Actually, he has. As of a month ago.” She took a sip of tea. “The light coming off of the Victory finally red-shifted down into the radio waves, and once the wavelength of those waves stretches out to be greater than the width of the event horizon, then he’s truly crossed it, from our perspective. At least, that’s what the theoretical physicists say. No, he can’t come back. He’s gone. Forever.”

  She finished her own tea and leaned forward again, touching Yarbrough’s forearm amiably. “Commander, I need you. The point of all that is to say: I need you. Granger was nothing without me. And without you, I likewise can be nothing. As captain and XO, we depend on each other, absolutely and irrevocably, like no other relationship, especially in wartime. We live for this moment, right here. The moment when our entire ci
vilization depends on us.”

  Yarbrough nodded, with what Proctor interpreted as the man’s best show of confidence. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll do the best I can.”

  “Can I trust you?”

  Without blinking, he nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good. Because this threat is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Twenty-five years ago, when the order came down from President Singh to go and annihilate the last trace of the Swarm, or rather, the liquid beings that the Swarm had usurped for use in our galaxy as the vehicle of their influence in our plane of existence, I was ambivalent. Torn, really. I was being asked to commit genocide. And, regrettably, I did not have an XO at the time that I could trust, that I could depend on to help me make the right decision.”

  Yarbrough shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am. So your mission failed?”

  “Failed? Of course not. It was a rousing success. I utterly destroyed the last few remaining Swarm carriers, and razed the surfaces of the planet the liquid beings called their home. And my XO was there, encouraging me to go through with it, just as CENTCOM wanted him to.”

  “Then what was wrong with him?”

  “What was wrong with him is that, ever since then, I have the sneaking suspicion that I made the wrong choice. I committed genocide against a race that was as much a tool of the Swarm as the Russian Confederation had become. Would it have been right to utterly destroy the Russian Confederation? Every last man, woman, child? Of course not. But that’s what I did to the Liquid Swarm. And I should have been able to depend on my XO to see the situation clearly, and urge me to make the right choice. He didn’t. And I’ve lived with that decision every day since. I have to look myself in the mirror at night with that knowledge.” She looked up at him. “I pray you never have to do that.”

  Yarbrough leaned back in his chair, seemingly at a loss for words.

  “And years later, that XO succeeded me as the fleet admiral of IDF. Admiral Oppenheimer knows my views on this subject, and I’ve told him that, given the choice, I will not destroy our enemy if I can help it. I will stop them, but I won’t destroy them. At least, not without knowing their true nature. If it turns out that they are evil personified, then fine. Bam. I’ll rain fiery death on them relentlessly. But, with the exception of the Swarm, I’ve never encountered any being of unmitigated evil like that. And I want to know that, when the moment comes, when the time of decision is at hand, that you’ll have my back, and be my conscience.” She reached out again and gripped his forearm. “I need to know you’ll help me make the right decision this time.”