by Medron Pryde
Malcolm’s gaze stopped on Normandy, the jewel of his squadron. He’d found her in Harmony, playing the part of a floating museum, complete with retired fighters in her twin hangar bays. They’d been so ancient nobody had bothered to refit them for The War, and even Normandy’s outer armor had been reclaimed for use by “real” warships years before. That last bit had actually been good news, since it made it easier to access her hyperdrives and refit them for the long trip to New Earth. And the Peloran had done wonders for her, just like they had for every other ship he brought to them.
The yards restored her to her original appearance, four hundred meters of first-generation gravtech beauty that gleamed under the work lights of the platforms still arrayed around her. The rest of the squadron looked just as beautiful to his eyes, long fins and curving armor reminding Malcolm of a time when starships were works of art, not simply one more cog in a giant war machine that no one would miss when their time came to die.
“That’s your ship?” John asked from the other seat in the shuttle’s cockpit.
“Yes,” Malcolm answered with a smile, considering once again that the Peloran did good work when it came to restoring art.
“She’s beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Dawn said from behind them, voice betraying pleasure at John’s reaction.
The shuttle’s engines flared brighter for a moment, and Malcolm felt them shed the last of their speed relative to the shipyard. They came to a stop, drifting next to the eight warships and one colonization ship that would soon be the only home that mattered to him. Thrusters came to life and the shuttle moved towards Normandy’s bow. He glanced at Dawn and she smiled. Then the bow split open to reveal a hangar bay just large enough to accommodate the Peloran shuttle, and the thrusters fired again. They drifted there, holding station off Normandy’s bow until four tractor beams locked onto them. The thrusters shut down, and Malcolm relaxed as Normandy tucked them inside her bay with a precision only cybernetic intelligences could match. The tractor beams dropped them on the deck just as the outer doors shut, and Malcolm felt the clang through the seat of his pants.
“Nicely done,” Malcolm whispered and unbuckled his five-point harness.
“Nothing to it,” Dawn answered and he heard the hatch screw open behind them.
He rose out of his seat and walked into the shuttle’s rear compartment, eyes scanning back and forth on instinct. Yesterday, passenger seats filled the shuttle from side to side and fore to aft, with only a narrow aisle splitting them. Now Malcolm’s last shipment that Michael Callahan had acquired on such short notice filled the compartment from one end to the other. Almost everything on board was illegal in the Alpha Centauri A star system, but Malcolm wasn’t concerned about that. As far as he could tell, if something made him giggle when he thought about doing it, somebody had already made it illegal in Alpha Centauri. And using what was in these crates gave him a serious case of the giggles when he thought of the probable response any enemy would have.
The shuttle’s rear ramp clanged against the deck, making way for a procession of Normandy crewmembers to walk on board. They quickly went to work, lifting the heavy crates with an ease that labeled them as members of the cybernetic segment of the crew.
Dawn looked around, waving a hand to catch the attention of one of the cybers before she could reach a crate. “Kara, could you take Pastor Parker to his quarters?”
“Of course,” the cyber answered and walked over to the preacher. “Would you follow me?”
John turned to Malcolm with a calm smile. “Malcolm?”
Malcolm returned the smile, knowing exactly what John was asking for. This was his ship after all. Well, his and Dawn’s. And maybe a few hundred crewmembers’. And Captain Wyatt’s. Malcolm felt a smile take over as he realized just how many people had a claim to the old bucket of bolts. Not that he would ever call her that when Dawn could hear. But John was most certainly the newest visitor to the ship, and it made sense that he would want to ask the one person he knew before taking a step into her. “Make yourself at home, John.”
The preacher nodded and turned back to Kara with a broad smile. “Lead and I shall follow,” he said in a magnanimous tone.
Kara gave her head an amused shake and turned to lead the man away, exactly as he’d asked. As they approached the ramp, Malcolm heard her ask, “Are you really fluent in half a dozen languages?
“Not fluent,” John corrected with a shake of his head. “But I can read Latin and Aramaic. And I can muddle through Ethiopian,” he added with a shrug. “Greek and Hebrew I suppose you could say I’m fluent in. But those are living languages, so learning them is easy.”
Kara turned her head and studied John intently for a moment. “Why did you learn so many languages? It must have taken you years. Decades.” She sounded truly curious, and Malcolm wondered how much she already knew. He’d caught Dawn asking him questions she knew the answer to more than once. Although to be fair, that was usually when he should have been thinking along those lines already.
“It did,” John answered, and Malcolm heard contentment in the voice that had never been there when he was young. “But I wanted to study the scriptures myself, to read the words as written so many thousands of years ago. It’s not like they spoke King James English back then,” John said as they walked down the shuttle’s ramp.
“I’ll be lucky if I get her back by the time we hit Sunnydale,” Dawn whispered.
Malcolm chuckled. “I hope she knows what she’s getting into.”
“She does.” Dawn turned to smile at him. “She asked me to introduce them.”
“Really?” Malcolm raised an eyebrow at her, wondering what she and Kara had planned for the older man.
Dawn’s look turned serious. “You’d be surprised how many people claim they believe something so they can gain followers, not because they actually believe.”
Malcolm frowned and turned to gaze out the open end of the shuttle where they’d disappeared. “John’s not one of them,” he declared with a firm shake of the head.
“Is that your instincts talking?” Dawn asked in a very serious tone. “Or your friendship?”
That froze him. Malcolm blinked as he considered the question, wondered if he was letting his friendship blind him to some long con. No. That didn’t feel right. Malcolm frowned at the feeling and looked back at Dawn. “John believes what he says he believes,” Malcolm said, paying careful attention for the mental warning that usually told him he was being stupid about something. Nothing. “And it feels right to say that,” he added with a smile made of more relief than he’d expected. “The John I know was never that kind of con artist, and he doesn’t feel like one now.”
Dawn nodded slowly as she processed his words, before finally bestowing a smile on him. “Good. That makes me feel better. But I hope you don’t mind if we grill him a bit. He has quite a checkered past,” she finished with a very pointed look at Malcolm.
Malcolm snorted and smiled back at her. “Are you implying something?”
“Oh, no,” she answered, her face a paragon of innocence, and waved a hand towards the opening in the rear of the shuttle. “Would you like to go? The Captain wants us on the bridge.”
“Oh!” Malcolm exclaimed and stepped towards the exit. “One should never keep her waiting,” he added and flowed around a crewmember lifting another crate into the air.
“I thought you might say that,” Dawn whispered with a knowing smile as they walked down the ramp and finally set foot on Normandy’s deck.
They moved through the organized chaos of crates filling the shuttlebay and made it to the open lift door in seconds. The doors shut behind them, and the lift began to move towards the center of the warship. Malcolm found a wall and leaned against it, eyes examining Dawn. She cocked her head at him and he smiled, wondering again why she was here. He managed to suppress the impulse to ask her this time, and her lips twisted in amusement. Then the lift began to slow and he straightened his suit and tie.<
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The lift doors slid open and Malcolm stepped out into the guardroom. The two guards on duty examined him first, before turning eyes to Dawn, probably scanning to make certain they weren’t mad assassins coming to wipe out Normandy’s command staff. The guards nodded after a moment, presumably deciding they were safe, and opened the hatch leading to the bridge.
He stepped through to see nearly a dozen men and women hard at work. Cybers in grey and blue coveralls worked on opened panels, their legs sticking out from under numerous stations. The grey-garbed Peloran yard dogs still worked hard to complete the final refits Normandy needed so badly. They weren’t actual dogs of course. Dogs rarely chose engineering as a career.
Normandy’s blue uniform coveralls and the bridge crew’s pre-War style of white service uniforms came from American navy surplus stores, and the uniforms had proven as rugged and dependable as promised. Thanks to his long shopping trips, he knew every surplus storeowner within twenty lightyears of New Earth on a first-name basis, and most within fifty lightyears at least recognized him when he walked in the door. Excluding those on Earth, of course. He had no fundamental problem with using Charles’ family to acquire the colony equipment without them knowing about their contribution. But flaunting it by buying stuff in their backyards was a bit too flagrant an abuse for his tender peace of mind. And one Malcolm McDonnell needed far too much beauty sleep to be keeping himself awake at night with worries of Hurst-family assassins dancing through his halls.
Malcolm turned his mind away from that unappealing nightmare and nodded at each crewmember as they acknowledged his presence in their domain with a smile, a shrug, or a few less flattering gestures. “Watch it,” he whispered through the side of his mouth at Walter Thompson. “You might get stuck like that.”
The tactical officer snorted under his breath, but returned to work the moment Captain Wyatt cleared her throat.
Peloran ships boasted very small crews, leaving the operations of their warships to the cybernetic brain. The ship’s captain gave orders and the ship executed them. It was a surprisingly simple command chain, and Malcolm had been sorely tempted to follow that example. But he’d never served in the military, and Dawn was an administrative cyber without a single warship cyber within several generations of her family line. He trusted her to run the ship, but even she admitted that she didn’t have the family experience to fight her like a real warship cyber could.
So even with the Peloran upgrades that would have made it possible for him to take direct command of Normandy, he’d elected to maintain something closer to standard American crew policies. On the one hand, by recruiting experienced naval personnel he also recruited their experience and knowledge. And on the other hand, most of the ten thousand colonists asleep inside Wolfenheim truly were civilians, with very little if any military experience. Recruiting the better part of two thousand retired naval and marine personnel to crew the warships would almost certainly prove invaluable in the very likely event that things got exciting once they reached the other side of The Gateway.
Malcolm studied the naval veteran he’d trusted with command of Normandy. The brunette was far older and more experienced than her twenty-something looks suggested, of course. Her naval dossier held a long series of “performs above and beyond the call of duty” characterizations from her commanders. That they ended with “showed profound misjudgment of the tactical situation” meant very little to him. Charles vouched for her, and the reports Malcolm wasn’t supposed to see showed him a classic example of shooting the messenger. The woman who had extricated her ship from the Battle of Epsilon Reticuli, mostly alive and against formidable odds, turned away from the recalcitrant tactical officer and aimed a steady gaze to him. “Malcolm,” she intoned, following one of the few actual orders he was prepared to give her.
“Olivia,” he answered after a quick breath. He was too much a civilian to confuse the issue of command with fake titles he hadn’t earned. And if he was just another civilian, given names were an appropriate form of address. “You wanted me?” he asked, raising an eyebrow with the highly inappropriate words that would have gotten him reprimanded if he were in the military. Lack of rank, in this case, surely had its privileges.
Olivia rolled her eyes, but amusement colored the haunted look they normally held. “Hardly.”
“Bugger.” He made a show of a regretful sigh that brought a slight smile to her lips. Very slight. Anyone with less sensitive eyes probably would have missed it altogether. “So why ask me up here then?”
Olivia grimaced and waved a hand towards the holodisplay next to her.
Malcolm followed her eyes and scanned the ships anchored in the Peloran yard. Most were modern or near-modern warships undergoing repairs or refits. British, American, German, and even French ships dotted the girders running through the yard. They were the last of a long line of warships that had been flowing through the yard for months, and Malcolm wondered if they would make it to Sunnydale in time to rendezvous with the fleet. But one ship declared her century of age with every first-generation gravtech curve and fin. Hastings was the last, the oldest, and the most troublesome of his ships.
“I wanted to tell you in person,” Olivia said, her voice betraying worry. “Well. Wanted isn’t really the right word.”
Malcolm sighed. He hated to throw the word around, but he was starting to wonder if the ship had actually been cursed when she was still in her original building slip. She’d certainly suffered from enough “unfortunate events” during her time in service, and even her brief time under his ownership had been “eventful,” as one of his people had said. “What happened this time?”
Olivia opened her mouth to answer, but an alarmed shout cut her off, and they turned towards the sensor display in the middle of the bridge. “Multiple hyperspace footprints on the Earth–New Earth Run!” Anton Lee reported. Malcolm suppressed a groan as he saw the flashes on the display. “Designating Bogey One. Thirty-one lightseconds out, point zero one cee, and accelerating to cross The Red Line now.”
The display zoomed in to show a tight formation of eight ships emanating hyperspace radiation in all directions. He couldn’t see what they were at first, but the displays confirmed it was a military formation. The three-dimensional pattern allowed them to support each other on the off chance that someone might be waiting for them.
Then the displays cleared and revealed eight new Austin-class destroyers. Even he knew those ships. The Austins had a truly unique forward wedge, designed to look like a double-headed hammer. Each of those eight hammerheads carried twice the firepower of any single ship in his squadron, and even if limited to broadside weapons his ships would be hard-pressed to defeat them. He licked his lips and knew deep down in his bones that those ships were not just stopping by on their way to Sunnydale. The fleet needed to leave now.
“Olivia?” he asked, his voice revealing more nerves than he really meant it to.
“Got it,” she answered and pointed out a pair of chairs at an empty station at the rear of the bridge. He and Dawn took her suggestion with haste and she turned to the man operating the sensor display. “Plot us a course for Sunnydale, Lieutenant Lee,” she ordered.
“Yes, Ma’am,” the man answered and his fingers flew across the controls. On the display, hundreds of possible courses appeared and then faded out as he erased swaths of them that took the squadron too close to the incoming ships. The possible courses narrowed down to a single option, pointing at an angle away from the incoming Austins. “I have a course laid in for The Red Line in…twenty minutes,” he reported, turning to face her. “We can be on the New Earth–Sunnydale Run in…forty-three minutes from your order, Ma’am.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Olivia said, sat down in her command chair, and studied the display. “I concur,” she finally said with a firm nod.
“Thank you, Ma’am,” Lee answered and ran his fingers across his console. “Transmitting to helm and comm now.”
“Lieutenant Lopez?” Ol
ivia asked.
“I have the course, Ma’am,” the helmsman answered after a quick check.
“Lieutenant Jones?” Olivia asked.
“Transmitting course now, Ma’am,” the comm officer reported and leaned to the side to listen to her earpiece. Then she nodded. “All ships confirm receipt.”
“Thank you,” Olivia said with a smile and turned her chair towards Malcolm with a look that asked if she really needed to report that they were ready to leave to him.
He chuckled and shook his head. He’d never been one to require pointless reports like that. Pointless to him at least. He understood why military forces were more careful though. It would never do to shoot up a planetary capital by accident because you mixed up your numbers, after all. That would seriously hurt an efficiency report. And that said nothing about how the citizens of the planet would react.
“We’re receiving a transmission from Bogey One, Ma’am,” Jones reported. “It’s broadcast in the clear. Full holo.”
Olivia looked at Malcolm, a questioning look on her face. He nodded back and she smiled. “Well, if they don’t care who hears, put it on display, please,” she ordered, waving at the main forward display.
The static system display that showed every ship near the Peloran yard faded away as he watched. In its place, the transmission Bogey One sent over half a minute ago came into focus. The transmission lag didn’t allow for live conversations, of course, but the woman who appeared on the display looked almost stubborn enough to try. Malcolm studied her black hair and narrow face, wondering if he knew her. She looked familiar, and he could have sworn he’d seen that face wearing a smile in the past, but he couldn’t place her.
“I am Commodore Murphy,” she began in a clear soprano, “commander Third Destroyer Squadron, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Star Fleet. On order of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, we have been sent to impound all assets of the Wolfenheim Project and secure them for return to Earth. All starships belonging to the Wolfenheim Project will stand down immediately and prepare to be boarded.”