Neptune's War

by Nick Webb

  They’d been followed. That, or there were traitors on the other two ships.

  But he suspected they’d been followed, somehow. The virus must have been deployed on a loop, transmitting over and over again, trying to lure their ships into opening a comm channel. The hack had hit the other two ships as soon as they broke their silence. Who knew how long it had taken to overtake over the ships, but the evidence suggested it had happened quickly.

  The last thing he felt like doing was being a good leader right now, but if they were going to get through this, his crew needed to trust him. He looked up at the helmsman. “You saved the ship,” he told her. “You know that, right?”

  She paled, but nodded. “Yes, sir. And I just had the video channel open for a few moments to figure out what was there. In case that virus was still transmitting. I don’t know if a video channel is enough to … pick it up, so I closed it down immediately.”

  “Good.” He settled back in his seat.

  Calm was returning, and with it came reasoning. They had one ship now, not three. One ship could not reasonably hope to take on whatever ships were carrying the missiles—they would be protected.

  So he needed more ships. More at Mercury, perhaps.

  And for that, he needed Nhean to smooth the way.

  “Send a message to the Koh Rong and the Santa Maria,” he said to the lone communications officer on duty. “Put it on the priority comm buoys, and code it to use the Telestine buoys if it needs to. You know that override?”

  For years, they had programmed their messages so as to be ignored by the Telestine buoys—best not to give them any window into human programming, or so they had thought. Now, in Larsen’s opinion, the risk was justified. Better to use any and all buoys they had at their disposal.

  His communications officer nodded.

  “Message begins,” Larsen said. “Svalbard and Riker taken by Funder fleet. Any open channel still a risk. Require backup. Move fleet to guard positions eight through seventeen. Message ends.”

  Nhean would know how much backup he needed. He might not understand ‘eight through seventeen,’ a reference to the numbers the Exile Fleet used for human settlements, but he already knew where the ships should go. And Min, God willing, would hear the message and move the fleet to protect between Earth and Mercury.

  That was all he could do. For now.

  “Continue to Mercury,” he told the helmsman. “We must prepare to finish this alone. I will go speak with the gunnery chief about our missile spreads.”

  And try to find some way, any way, for a single ship to take out however many their enemies would send.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Near Earth

  EFS Pius

  Shuttle Bay

  “A fine addition.”

  “Oh, it was nothing.” James Dorian, newly returned to the fleet with the Svalbard and the Riker in tow, accepted a handshake from Pope Celestine with what he hoped was a gracious smile. He could hardly help that he was radiating smugness.

  It had been child’s play, really. Wait for them to break protocol, and broadcast The Seed as soon as they did. Now the fleet had two of the newest destroyers, ready to be put to work in service to humanity, along with the carrier and the three missile frigates they’d appropriated. Well, the carrier, at least. The five smaller ships were needed for another purpose, temporarily.

  “You were absolutely right,” Celestine said. “Two of three ships, taken without engagement. Preferable, no doubt, to three taken with shots fired.”

  Dorian felt his smile fade. Celestine always seemed to manage to do that, steal the shine from a victory. He let the sound of his boots beat out his displeasure on the shiny floor before he answered.

  “The mission was always to avoid engagement,” he said, when he trusted himself to speak. He had been given the target, and he had formulated a plan—one, after all, that had worked. “Ships are precious. I do not forget that.” Unlike some people, he wanted to add, but that seemed a little too pointed. Captain George had quickly become a favored candidate to lead the new fleet, and Dorian did not want to risk offending her backers.

  But what had the woman been thinking? She could have left Walker’s ship to be destroyed by the Telestines. It was barely flying, that thing. A few crippling shots at most, and a quick retreat, would have been George’s best course of action in Dorian’s opinion.

  Instead, she had returned bearing some story about how Walker had allied herself with the Telestines and then crashed on the surface.

  All nonsense. Battles were no more than chess on a grander scale. It was clear to Dorian that the woman had panicked, and he simply had to trust that it would be clear to the others in time. He was not yet one of their number. He was not yet part of the inner council.

  Yet. But someday, he vowed, Celestine would greet him as an equal.

  It seemed that day might be sooner than he thought, for Celestine gave an inscrutable smile over at him. “As you are back, there is a meeting you should attend.”

  “Oh?” Dorian spared a glance to where the unconscious bodies of the destroyer crews were being unloaded—a simple matter of oxygen deprivation, another of his own tactics—and then looked back to Celestine. He did not dare appear too eager. For all he knew, this was nothing more than clerical decisions dressed up into a meeting.

  “Yes.” Celestine looked about as smug as Dorian had felt upon his return. “Our patron has docked, and it is time you make their acquaintance. They’ll be needing the Svalbard and the Riker for a few days. Small price to pay for the infusion of cash and resources she’s arranged. I believe you’ve met her before, on Venus.”

  Dorian felt a flutter of interest. Their patron? This was the first he had heard of any such thing. Was he talking about Julianne Mora? But she wasn’t rich, just … resourceful and … passionate. It had been his understanding that Funders were all either self-made, or the heirs to the substantial fortunes of the main religious groups on old Earth. A patron that had been kept secret even from him suggested that there was considerably more to it.

  “I see,” he said simply. “I thank you for the honor.”

  His response was noted with a nod. “You know, it was our patron’s idea to take those particular ships.” Celestine led Dorian to a small door off the main concourse, and nodded to the guard. As the door swung open, he gave another of his small smiles. “Perhaps you can explain to her why two ships were taken, instead of three.”

  Dorian’s look at Celestine was venomous.

  This wasn’t a promotion. Celestine was calling him to account.

  With a promise to himself that he would make Celestine pay for this, now or in the very near future, Dorian slipped into the room and opened his mouth. “Good evening, ma’am. My name is James Dorian. I am….”

  His voice trailed off when the patron turned to regard him with a truly unsettling gaze.

  A Telestine? The Funders were in the keeping of a Telestine?

  The door shut behind him with a soft sound and he was alone. Celestine had left without the merest explanation of what the hell was going on.

  “Good evening, James Dorian,” the Telestine told him. “I am called Ka’sagra.”

  Dorian watched her as she swept to one of the chairs and sat. Her gaze appraised him, and there was a hint of something that might have been a smile playing around her lips.

  “You are surprised to see me,” she said. “No, not … surprised. Let me think. Your word would be betrayed, yes? You think that your goal to win back Earth has been compromised. You think that you have served false leaders.”

  Dorian said nothing. If he said yes, would she strike? How did Telestines kill? He knew very little about them, he realized now.

  “You have no need to fear,” Ka’sagra told him. “I am not like most of my kind. I do not favor either Tel’rabim’s maniacal quest to wipe humanity out, or the enforced servitude in which you have lived all these years. It is not to be borne. I want … more for humanity. Tha
t is why you are here too, no?”

  Dorian nodded jerkily. Those eyes were mesmerizing, but none of this made any sense.

  “What do you want?”

  “Did you never meet any of the Daughters of Ascension?” She looked intrigued. “Where did you grow up, James Dorian?”

  “On Venus,” he said shortly. His father had been happy to be little more than a glorified butler, and but James had always been keenly aware of the fact that they were maintaining only one of the Funders Circle locations, that they were cut off from the center of power. That they were servants, not equals.

  When Celestine had asked James to travel with him, he had seized his chance to leave. And when Julianne Mora asked for his assistance to … shake things up a bit, as she put it, he jumped at the opportunity.

  “A private estate, I can only imagine.” Ka’sagra’s fingers toyed with an object he couldn’t identify. Prayer beads of a sort, perhaps. “The Daughters of Ascension provide food and medical aid to humanity. We have long solicited private donations from other Telestines to make up the shortage from the exports off Earth.”

  “I … see. We owe you our thanks, then.” Dorian sat, at her gesture, but remained on high alert. “And why do you do this?”

  “Because your kind are essential to our salvation,” Ka’sagra said enigmatically. “I have known it for many years. Many of my own kind seek ‘peace’—but theirs is a peace born of human annihilation or servitude, and what sort of peace is that? None.”

  That seemed a slender thread on which to hang an entire ideology. A chill settled in Dorian’s gut.

  “The Daughters of Ascension have sought the peace of the heavens since before our own exodus.” Ka’sagra’s smile was bitter for some reason he could not fathom. “Now it lies within our grasp. That is why I sent you to intercept those ships. It is why I have done many things, in fact. And it is why I need a human’s help now.”

  “Oh?” That seemed the safest thing to say.

  “Yes.” Ka’sagra stood. “I have in my possession a single human—most dear to one of the members of the Exile Fleet. You see, while the Funders Circle has seen reason and chosen to ally themselves with me, the Exile Fleet has not. And the United Nations—such as it is at this point—also has not accepted my aid. It is why I had your leaders take control of much of the fleet—and it showed me that human allies are vital to my success. You….” Her gaze traveled over Dorian. “You, I need to speak to this human for me. Others have failed, but perhaps you may succeed. You see, I now have the required number of human ships that I need for my upcoming … project. But I need to … how would you humans put it? I need to … tie up a few loose ends.”

  “What do you want to know?” He had never tortured anybody. In fact, he was uncomfortably aware that he might very well be unable follow through on such an assignment. “Who are they?” Admiral Walker had a lover, that much was rumored….

  “I need to know how much progress they have made in their control of … what do you call your humans that are highly susceptible to suggestion? Drones?” Ka’sagra said.

  She led the way down empty corridors in silence. Celestine had kept her presence carefully hidden, it seemed, and she knew the ship well. With a suppressed shudder, Dorian wondered how long she had been here.

  He sucked in his breath when they entered the brig at last. The man staring up at them was emaciated, beaten black and blue, and there was nothing left in his vacant eyes but irredeemable despair.

  There was no hope in those eyes.

  “Hello, Parees,” Ka’sagra said. “I brought you someone new to talk to.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Near Earth

  Koh Rong

  Bridge

  The bridge of the Koh Rong was quiet. Hollywood had sunk into a pensive silence as she worked on making micro-adjustments to the thrusters and engine control systems—they were running on manual, given that The Seed was still a danger. “Fizzledips!” She looked back at him. “Sorry, sir.”

  Every once in a while, she let fly a string of made-up curse words. Ringers were notoriously non-vulgar to a fault.

  And it meant she was scared.

  Nhean tried not to blame her. This hadn’t been the life she’d imagined, no doubt, when she signed up for his fleet after her father’s smuggling ship was impounded by the Telestines—and the loss of Parees had hit them all hard. She had tried to nurse him after his visit with Ka’sagra at Vesta, coaxing bites of food into him, offering him the lightest touch on the shoulder. And then, all at once, Parees had been gone and a traitor, and they were always on the run now.

  No, this hadn’t been the life they signed up for, any of them.

  Nhean found comfort in his work, in the slow crawl across information networks and servers. Translation from Telestine to English was demanding work, as the parallels between the two languages remained nebulous at best. It made searching through the archive a seemingly insurmountable task. And yet, Nhean knew no other way to find the information he sought other than to begin the search. He knew that the girl’s access point into the system had radically narrowed their search.

  Even so, he feared he might take too long to find what he sought. If he found the blueprint of Ka’sagra’s bomb, would he recognize it? Would he be able to do anything with it? For how—how—did she expect to be able to trigger such a strong reaction that the sun would not simply swallow her bombs? What was the catalyst?

  If he could disrupt the catalyst remotely, he could end everything.

  In the meantime, more technology than he had ever imagined was flowing past him in the form of Telestine schematics. If they survived this, they were going to have more technology than they knew what to do with.

  It was maddening to not be able to speak to the girl. After her initial message, she had gone back to her own research and reading. The other drones dutifully sent the schematics to the Koh Rong, and she interrupted the feed every once in a while to send a specific one: a propulsion system, a life support module that simultaneously scrubbed excess hydrogen and CO2 from the air while serving as an effective engine heat sink, a series of what seemed to be wildly abstract mathematical proofs based around the number twelve.

  Apparently they all meant something to the girl, but what? Nhean ground his teeth in frustration and stared out into the black for a moment.

  They were running out of time. Whatever Ka’sagra wanted … every moment brought her closer to it.

  He was rubbing at his temples distractedly when he heard a strange clank from the decks above. He looked up at the helmsman, who was looking at the ceiling. Her eyes returned to the screen, drawn by something he couldn’t see, and panic flashed across her face.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh my God, we’re … being hacked.” She began to jab at the screen, trying desperately to regain control of the machine.

  “Impossible. I put precautions in place—”

  “Not enough of them,” she snapped back. “They must have adapted The Seed to infiltrate our system too.”

  The Funders again. Using his own weapon against him. For just the briefest of moments he thought of Schroeder, wondering how he died. Whether he knew that the weapon he’d developed to bring down a Telestine fleet was now being used to divide humanity against itself.

  This was intolerable. He was used to overestimating an enemy’s intelligence, not underestimating it.

  One last file streamed in from the girl. Another esoteric treatise. On the number twelve.

  Something about that number … something the Telestines revered, almost … religiously.

  His mind snapped into action. Get Rychenkov in position for the pickup, hand off the files before the Funders Circle got them, wipe his own hard drives before the Funders realized what he was trying to do, and let the girl know what was going on.

  The clank came again, and he nodded to the helmsman. “Go. See if you can manually override the docking controls. I need to get word to the surface before they ta
ke us.” Or kill us. But he didn’t say that.

  If she resented him taking control of the computers while she went into bodily danger, she didn’t say anything. Her fingers curled around the grip of a gun she pulled from the bridge’s tiny weapons locker and she crept out the door, down one of the hallways.

  His fingers danced over the screen and, for a time, it seemed he might break the program before it had time to take hold. It was almost too fast for human reactions to counter it, but the blocks he had put in place were slowing it considerably. Sections of the servers blinked red, and were firewalled and cleansed, forcing the virus to replicate its efforts as well as itself.

  The message to Rychenkov sent, and the files began to transfer. If Tel’rabim saw them….

  They were important. They must be, if she sent them. It was worth the risk.

  Nhean typed a message to the girl, his lips moving along with his fingers. Find Rychenkov to get you out. The Koh Rong has been boarded. He paused, then added, Code for The Seed important, but stopping Ka’sagra is all that matters.

  There was no time for anything else, even if he had wanted to say more. Even as gunfire rang out down the hallways, Nhean watched a wave of red sweep across his screens. The ship shuddered as navigational control transferred to whoever had locked onto the ship—now there was no doubt that they had been both physically captured and digitally hacked simultaneously.

  The other Funders, it turned out, were not simply impulsive. They employed people as meticulous as Nhean was himself.

  Footsteps were approaching, the heavy tramp of booted feet moving in unison.

  He stood, and straightened his cuffs. There was nothing else for it. He was about to be executed—or perhaps captured—and he refused to be shot in the back of the head while staring at screens that showed his failure.

  A grim smile touched his lips. He knew this ship better than they did, and if they wanted to bring him down … he was going to make sure they worked for it.