by TR Cameron
“It will be done immediately, Hierarch.”
AS HE CLIMBED into bed that night, Kraada Tak reflected on the accomplishments of the day. The actions of his enemy–and Drovaa Jat, surely qualified as that–must be answered, and answered immediately. But direct confrontation wasn’t his style. Drovaa played a very linear game with a predictable outcome because of his martial mindset. Kraada used a different approach—circular strategies and misdirection, hiding traps and tactics until the proper time arrived to expose them. He and Indraat Vray had developed multiple contingency options should he run into trouble on the homefront, and the moment had come to put one into play.
With a duplicate copy of the codebook because the original was now charcoal, he painstakingly set into cipher her new orders. They were a direct countermand to Drovaa’s commands. Moreover, they represented a different strategic direction for the war. It should prove to be devastating to both sets of his enemies, human and Xroeshyn. He knew that Indraat would’ve been quietly assessing the loyalty of her subordinate captains, and they had plans for those too connected to the marshal to follow Indraat.
As he lay back with his eyes closed, the pleasure of being on the offensive again suffused him. The governance structure of the Xroeshyn was an exercise in frustration. It separated political, religious, and military powers as if they weren’t dimensions of the same overall strategy. His people were weakened by the men in two of these three positions, and if he could not be rid of them yet, at the very least he’d implement his plans around them.
A smile played across his lips as he realized he was very much anticipating the contest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Kate whined. “No one can track through a tunnel. No one.” Less than twenty minutes in her mother’s presence, and she was already channeling her inner teenager. She laughed at herself, drawing a smile from the older woman’s face.
The Washington had made it to Starbase 11, one of the nearest facilities with the equipment to fix her drives, by the thinnest of margins. Kate had influenced the choice, knowing that the exploration division was currently housed at that base. Her mother cleared her calendar for the chance to visit—and work—with her daughter.
Kate’s mother was remarkably well preserved—in her early fifties—yet young for her position as an admiral. She’d been on the forefront of galactic expansion during her previous career, and Kate had been thrilled to go along on the missions she could, and missed her mother terribly when she left without her. It was a foregone conclusion she’d follow her mother’s path and enter the exploration division of the UAL Navy.
Unfortunately, the war with the Xroeshyn had delayed that plan.
“Well, Kate, I’m sure it makes sense to someone. We just aren’t asking the right questions yet. So, let’s back up, and talk about the last puzzle you gave me.”
“The hypothesis that they’re manipulating gravity?”
“That’s the one.” Her mother punctuated the statement by tapping her fingers on the table, a gesture Kate remembered fondly from the good times growing up and less fondly from the times when she’d stepped over the line. On occasion, that finger tap had occurred on her chest rather than on a neutral surface, but those moments had been rare. She’d made it through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood without any major family incidents. Now her mother was both a close friend and a parent.
“We’ve done a bunch of research down that line, conferencing in our top exploration scientists who are responsible for assessing new planets. They have the most experience with gravity and its effects. They agree that the aliens are manipulating gravity.”
“Out with it, Mother.”
Admiral Margaret Flynn laughed, her green eyes twinkling under the shock of still-red hair that swept gracefully across her brow. Even at her mother’s advanced age, she was gorgeous, and Kate was sure she had no lack of suitors. The split with her father had been amicable, but he was no longer a part of either of their lives. Neither felt a loss from it. “Always looking forward” was the unofficial family motto. Kate often hoped that she’d find love again, but her mother seemed content as she was.
“All right, patience, Kate.” One more smirk, and then her mother got down to business. “We’ve been cross-referencing the unique features of the species: their ability to access different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum than we’re accustomed to and their ability to manipulate gravity. We did extensive computer modeling of each, to no avail. However, once we put those models together, interesting things happened.”
Activating the controls set into the table, Margaret delved through layers of authorization and file structure to project the two separate models onto the walls. They slid to overlap on the large central display in the room, and Kate immediately saw what her mother was getting at.
“They act almost in perpendicular dimensions,” Kate said, wonder in her voice. “So, they’re never manipulating just one, but are always manipulating both?”
Margaret confirmed the theory with a nod. “That’s our working theory. However, we lack enough data to test it in any real way.” Her mother gave her a sideways glance. “You wouldn’t have retrieved anything interesting from your most recent adventures, would you?” She gave her daughter a conspiratorial wink.
Kate cringed. “You’re not supposed to know about that.”
Her mother waved a hand, pushing the objection away. “I’m an admiral, honey. I know everything.”
Kate crossed her arms and retorted, “This is why I never kept a boyfriend for more than three months.”
Her mother had the decency to look shocked and affronted. “Kate, I was just doing what any concerned parent would do.”
“Most concerned parents don’t have access to military police for intimidation and every possible database for background checks.”
“I’m missing your point, Kate. If those boys were good enough for you, they would’ve passed the checks. It’s not my fault you made some poor, poor choices.” She paused, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “But I’ll admit, several were very pleasant to have around. You do have a knack for picking delicious eye candy.”
Kate groaned and put her head on the table, covering it with her arms. “Stop talking. Just stop talking now.” She rotated her left hand and held up a memory chip, hoping it would distract her mother.
“Yesssss,” she crowed, grabbing it and sliding it into the receptacle on the control panel her previous teasing forgotten. “Ciach ort,” quickly followed, as her mother cursed the multi-layered security restricting her access to the data. Under the protection of her crossed arms, Kate laughed.
“All right, little one, quit playing and help me. Time to crack this sucker open and make it reveal its secrets.”
“Do we need to talk about you not calling me little one again?”
“Nope. I’m well aware of your feelings on the matter…. little one.”
Kate groaned again, but lifted her head and got to work.
HOURS LATER, they’d finally broken through. Without the brute-force processing power of the starbase’s master computer, it would’ve been impossible, but in the end, it came down to a few logical avenues to pursue and the ability to run through the permutations at a high rate of speed. Neither woman was comfortable with that as a solution, preferring the elegance of logic to the randomness of trial and error, but in this case, both were happy to take what they could get.
Recognizing their exhaustion, they sat down to a meal before continuing their research. Their worktable transformed into a dining table, as they shared cartons of noodles, protein, and a selection of dipping sauces. Elegant, it was not. Wonderful, it was.
“How is it, being executive officer on the Washington?”
Kate and her mother talked with some regularity, so Kate recognized this as a broad opening to discuss whatever might be on her mind. She relished the chance to talk about things she could never share with her fellow sailors. She se
rved in the same role for her mother from time to time, but the admiral was frustratingly reticent to share details.
“It’s good to be useful. My skills fit the ship’s needs. It also seems like a logical way to get some seasoning before taking on my first command.”
“But…” her mother prompted.
“Being at war isn’t at all what I’d envisioned for my future. Sure, I knew we’d continue our fractious relationship with the Alliance, and I was prepared to deal with that despite its stupidity. But this is something else altogether.” She set down her chopsticks and faced the older woman squarely. “I understand better than ever why you chose exploration over battleships. While there’s an exciting element to our discoveries, they’re secondary to the constant battle for our lives. It seems as if that would be flipped aboard an exploration ship.”
Her mother nodded. “True. There’s much more discovery and science on an exploration vessel than aboard most battleships. However, that’s not the reason I made the choice I did.”
Kate looked up in surprise. She thought she understood all the nuances of her mother’s military career. “So, why did you?”
“When the time came, I knew I could pursue either engineering or pure science and succeed. At that time, the admirals on the exploration side were getting old, which offered more opportunity for advancement in that service. And I was right. Had I become an engineer, I’d have fewer stars or maybe none at all.” She brushed imaginary dust from the jewelry on her epaulets.
“So, it was all about ambition?” Kate was equally shocked and impressed. “I had figured you for a true believer. Expanding the footprint of humanity, discovering new worlds, blah blah blah—you know, like me.”
Her mother shook her head. “It’s not one or the other, Kate. I am a true believer, but I also wanted to be in charge. While you can make a difference as a sailor, you can make more of one as a captain, and a much bigger difference as an admiral.”
“I’m not sure I want to make that big a difference.”
Admiral Flynn reached over and rubbed her daughter’s back, giving it some consoling pats. “Hardly anyone thinks they do at your age. Once you’ve burned off those initial discoveries, once you’ve seen the experience of an exciting new planet in your display turn into the experience of just one more planet in your display, you might feel differently. If so, you’re talented enough to go as far as you want. If not, finding one’s place in the universe is always a welcome thing. Some of us are destined to fly desks, or labs, I suppose. Others, to command starships.”
“Are you done? Because we really should get back to the science.” Kate softened her words with a wide grin, and her mother turned on her “professor” mode.
“While we’ve been eating, the models have been chugging away. Let’s see what they’ve got to show us.” She tapped a few more screens, and the original combined model showed up again on the main display. Data taken from the ship and selected by the computer had been superimposed, and now the gravity and EM spectrum interface was represented in three dimensions. The image rotated on the screen, awash in color and strange waves. Both women admired its elegance.
“Do you think this is how they see?” Kate asked.
“It may very well be, although it would require senses I can’t even put a name to at this point.” The admiral frowned, and tapped a few keys again, zooming in on a selected cross-section. “Okay, this looks familiar. I’ve seen this somewhere before. Where was it? Damnation.” She looked down and suddenly her fingers were flying as she ran searches and delved into deep file structures yet again. Kate sent the efforts to a duplicate monitor so she could watch, and within minutes her mother had retrieved the article she was searching for. She skimmed it and found the matching diagram. A little more computer wizardry, and the image blended into the model they were building as if it had always belonged there.
“You need to explain what we’re seeing. You lost me at least ten minutes ago.” Kate was often the smartest person in the room, but not when she and her mother were together.
“This diagram is from a theory that suggests, in addition to all the expected and observed properties of a system, every system also has an invisible element of order. Not order in the ordinal sense of the word, but rather a continuum that measures how well it follows its own rules. These scientists, clever beings that they are, clearly spent too much time reading Elric books when they were children, because they named the two ends of their continuum law and chaos.”
She walked to the display and put her hands in the center. “It doesn’t operate in the way of a normal continuum, however, with law at one extreme and chaos at the other. Instead, law occupies the central position, the normal position for lack of a better word, when a system is following all of its own rules. As those rules get bent, the measurement moves toward one side or the other, approaching the poles of chaos that cap each end. It struck me at the time as more a mental exercise than anything with a practical application, but the alien data matches to it too well to ignore.”
“So, in real-world usable terms, what does that mean?” Kate hoped her voice didn’t reflect her rapidly increasing level of concern.
With a flick of her hand, Admiral Margaret Flynn killed the displays and sat on the edge of the table looking down at her. “What it means, daughter of mine, is that these aliens don’t only manipulate gravity and the electromagnetic spectrum better than we do. They use it in ways that we’ve never even thought of. Ways that we may be genetically incapable of thinking of on our own.” She pulled her things together. “I’m afraid that our quality time just evaporated. I will need to pull my entire team in on this to figure out what’s going on and how to counter it.”
“Any news I can take back to my ship?”
“You can tell them the same thing I’m going to tell the admirals. We still don’t understand how they’re tracking our ships through tunnels and wormholes, but the evidence on this chip suggests that they’re doing so. With this data, and with their apparent ability to use gravity and radiation to travel from one point to another, they should be able to skip from any place that they are to any other known location, unless there are range restrictions built into the way their drives operate.” She shook her head. “I’m babbling. What I’m trying to say, is that we must act as if they could show up anywhere, anytime, in any numbers, as long as they’ve tracked a ship to that location.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The message ordering all ships to make best speed to Starbase 10 sounded across the command net even before Kate returned. She’d warned him it was imminent and had given him an overview of the findings as she made the transit back. Cross ordered his crew to start working on the problem of defeating the trackers and figuring out how to deal with their sudden lack of security.
He left the bridge in the hands of Lieutenant Commander Claire Martin. When he arrived at Kate’s quarters, the door slid open at his request, and he found her sitting on the edge of the bed staring off into space.
“Kate?”
Without turning to him, she responded, a tremor in her voice, “Cross, this thing just gets scarier and scarier. I understand why we need to fight them, but I feel like all this fighting, all this death, is staining me. By the time I’m finally able to serve on an exploration ship, I’m afraid I’ll no longer find any joy in it.” She finished with a small moan and continued to stare at an unremarkable space on the bulkhead.
He sat cross-legged at her feet, wrapping one arm around her calves and hugging them while resting his head against her knee. He stared at the same spot. “I understand completely, Kate. I’ve known you for a long time, though, and you always bounce back. You’ll bounce back from this. I give you my personal guarantee on it.”
Kate made a choking sound, somewhere between a bark of laughter and a sob. “Your guarantee, huh? Well, I have nothing to worry about now. I guess I’ll just go take out the Xroeshyn single-handed.”
“Consider it an order.”
“Sir, yes, sir, Captain-Commander Cross, sir.”
Cross glanced up and saw that the tension in her face had eased a little. He counted it as a win.
“Kate, can I ask you something?”
“Do I really have a choice?”
“Only if you’re about to wipe out the Xroeshyn single-handed.”
“I’d at least like a nap first. So, I guess you can ask a question.”
“Do you remember how Captain Okoye reacted when Felix was killed?”
He felt her gaze, but now he was the one who could only stare at that unremarkable spot on the bulkhead.
“Do you mean on the bridge, or at the wake?”
“Both.”
“Okay, yes, I remember it.”
“Did it strike you that he was… somewhat…” Cross could not find the words and lapsed into silence.
He heard the question in her voice as she picked up the thread. “I thought that he was, um… reserved may be the best word. I imagine in his place I would’ve been more expressive.”
Cross nodded. “Exactly. It was as if he wasn’t affected by the loss at all. A captain is supposed to take care of his crew-or her crew. Before you say it, yes, I know, not everything is about me.”
This time Kate laughed, and it warmed Cross some to hear it. “The problem is that I may have had this whole command thing wrong in my head, Kate.” He scratched his face, feeling the light stubble of a long day. “I’m getting the impression that Okoye was reserved not because of a lack of emotion, but because he sees the captain’s role differently than I do. He views his sailors as pieces to be used, or even sacrificed, in any way that serves the mission.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kate fold her arms and fall back on the bed. “That’s what we’ve been taught all along, isn’t it?”
“It is. I guess I always figured it was just one of those things they had to say, while in their hearts they meant that it was an important priority, but not as important as keeping the crew alive. But that’s not it at all.”