by Adam Gaffen
“What?”
“I’m not going to explain. Evacuate those compartments. Now.”
The Defiant slipped into position below the al-Battani.
“In position. Target locked.”
“Rio, audio only. Last chance, Olesen. Are they clear?”
“Yes.”
“I hope so. Out. Lieutenant, fire at will.”
The laser, carefully attenuated, lanced out and struck the hull of the dreadnought. Instead of smashing through the plating, though, it melted through, burning a precise hole through the armor, then the inner bulkheads. The occasional bursts of venting atmosphere didn’t interfere significantly with their accuracy, and less than thirty seconds later they’d burned through to the warp drive.
Warp drives channel a tremendous amount of power when underway, far more than the few paltry terawatts Wilder was applying, but the power is carefully routed through conduits and circuits. When applied directly to the drive and the relatively delicate components?
Think of a plastic brick on a stovetop.
“Disengage laser. Rio, evaluation?”
“Their warp drive is permanently disabled, Captain.”
“Life support?”
“All other systems are functional, including weapons.” The last was added with a warning tone.
“Understood. Open the channel.” When Olesen appeared she made sure to give him a wide smile. “Captain.”
“What did you do?”
“Your warp drive won’t be giving you any more issues,” she said with a twinkle.
“You bitch!”
“Ah, ah, Captain. Temper! The rest of your ship is perfectly sound, or will be once you patch a couple holes. Recall your people; they don’t have to die in deep space.”
“We can’t go anywhere! Not in our lifetime at least; not with only our sublight engines!”
“We’ll be sure to send a tow truck. Bye, now. Been fun. Out.”
“Captain?” said Huff.
“Rob, I just want to go home, and those poor bastards didn’t deserve to die no matter how obnoxious or short-sighted Olesen was. We’ll get back and the Admiral will send out one of the big girls to fetch them home.”
“Makes sense. Won’t you be in trouble for disobeying orders?”
“What? I caught them and fired on them; I wasn’t told to kill them. Ensign Skaggs, set course for home. Maximum warp.”
“Aye, Ma’am.”
THE SHIP WAS READY.
There wouldn’t be a ceremony, at least nothing compared to the original commissioning ceremony. Neither Admiral was available, as Kendra mourned her friend and Davie led the investigation into the explosion. The officers and crew, too, felt they’d been there, done that for the original Defender and weren’t of a mind to repeat it. Besides which, a third of the crew was out-System, aboard Enterprise, another third on temporary duty (TDY) on Defiant, and so they were heading out on their shakedown cruise undermanned.
At least there weren’t any warp ships to give them trouble.
“Ensign Moore,” Petra said, settling into the chair. Hecate swore it was the same chair from the original ship, but she had her doubts. It didn’t feel right. “Prepare for maneuvers.”
“Prepare for maneuvers, aye.”
“Commander McIntosh, contact Hecate and clear us for departure.”
Commander Rene, the usual First Officer, was TDY, so the Second Officer, Brianna McIntosh, was filling in for the nonce.
“Aye, Ma’am. Njord, Defender.”
“Hi Brianna! Ready to go?”
“Yes, Hecate; are we clear?”
“No traffic in the bay, Bri, but there’s a couple of Wolves on maneuvers thirty kiloklicks southeast. Endeavour is tucked in nice and safe.”
“Understood, Hecate. Release the docking clamps, please.”
“Oh, sure, I can do that for you no problem, there, all done!”
“Thank you, Hecate. McIntosh out.” She glanced over to Orloff, who pretended not to notice. She’d been in Brianna’s shoes before, after all, and the only way she’d learn was to do it. Still, a hint might not go amiss.
“Commander, let’s be about it.”
“Aye, Ma’am. Course?”
“Your discretion.”
“Ensign, station keeping thrusters only until we clear the bay, then one-quarter sublight to the edge of the exclusion zone.”
Moore’s hands flew over her controls and the starship gracefully separated from the dock, seeming to float into the bay before slowly accelerating. She was still barely at 10 MPS when she cleared the doors, but the sublight engines engaged and she began covering space in great gulps.
“I think we should do a nice gentle loop,” McIntosh said. “Full sublight out to Titan, then engage the warp drive on a circumnavigation of the System. Vary our speed to test the drive, then do a little target practice in the Oort Cloud before coming home.”
“Seems good. You have the Conn, Commander.”
“I STILL DON’T BELIEVE you were adopted,” Cass grumbled. She and Alley were on the bridge, overseeing the last details before departure.
The orbital habitat was fully functional, and the fabber kernel was nearly finished bootstrapping itself. Jolly was pleased, insofar as an AI could be pleased, with the progress and was already planning the next phase of expansion. All the personnel returning to Earth were aboard. Enough data and samples were being brought back to Earth to guarantee Seabolt a Nobel, while every spare piece of equipment had been landed with the colonists. Five ‘cat-human adoptions had happened groundside, and four more ‘cat-human adoptions had occurred since the ‘cat colony had settled into their temporary home.
“It’s like they were waiting for humans,” Seabolt had remarked. “Someone else, someone different.”
Whatever the reason for the adoptions it was clear it was going to continue.
“LJ wasn’t thrilled either, at least until she got hooked by Hunter’s kit. Then it was all over.”
“What’s his name?”
Alley frowned. “He doesn’t really have one yet; he’s young and hadn’t really developed his own sense of self. The mental pictures LJ was getting were all over the place, so we’re trying to hold off.”
“And Theo and Luci?”
“Oh, they think he’s the best thing since catnip. Not as sure about Hunter, but she’s twice their size and can actually climb the bulkheads. I think they’re intimidated.” She checked the status board on her chair arm and Cass caught the gesture.
“On schedule for departure at fourteen, Captain.” She tapped her jawline to remind Alley of the implant, which she’d had longer than anyone else in the Federation. “Second nature to multi-task at this point. You know, Captain, something just occurred to me.”
“What?”
“Well, we’ve spent a month investigating Freyr, right?”
“Right.”
“We haven’t done anything with Freyja, and we know there’s at least chlorophyl-based life present there, too.”
“No, we haven’t.” Alley’s tone was wary and Cass hurried to make her point.
“Not a complaint, Captain. But since we’re leaving Charlemagne and Ataturk behind they have the capacity to do so, if they have the time. I simply found it curious.”
“You’re right. I can’t believe we missed a whole planet!”
Cass shrugged. “It’s not like Phaedra and her team haven’t done enough to completely upend our best theories on evolution. We’ll get to Freyja.”
“Very well, XO. If you’re so confident, the Conn is yours. I’m going to take the rest of the afternoon off. I want to be back on the bridge when we return to Sol, and we’re going to arrive by six hundred.” Alley stood, Hunter rising from where she’d been sitting by her seat.
“Enjoy, Captain,” Cass replied equably. She wasn’t the naïve and wide-eyed scientist who had first stepped onto the Enterprise two years earlier. “I’ll notify you of anything unusual; otherwise, I’ll see you in the mor
ning. Four hundred?”
“Sounds reasonable.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Habitat Njord
Stardate 12009.05
Davie worried briefly what the fallout from her report would be, then put it out of her mind.
My job to find facts.
The hatch slid aside.
“Come in, Davie.” Kendra sounded tired. Worse, she sounded defeated. “What do you have?”
“Diana will download the complete report to you, but the short version is Colin was a plant, orchestrated between him and one of his Underministers, Tal Phalkon.”
“Fuck me. And we trusted him.”
Davie nodded. “We all did. Taylor’s really torn up about it since he ‘convinced’ Dent to come over to our side.”
“What about Taylor? Are we doing anything about him?”
“He’s already voluntarily turned over access to all his systems and moved out of his quarters to a secure compartment. Diana’s tracking everything in and out of his ‘plant. Needless to say he’s not participating in the landing.”
“I want Harpo in his records, in his files, in his computers, in his head.”
Davie tried to keep the horror from her voice. “Kendra, you can’t! Not Taylor’s implant. Bad enough we’re monitoring his traffic, but it’s against everything the Federation stands for to invade his mind! You put that in the Charter yourself, remember? ‘Every citizen is guaranteed the privacy of their own thoughts; no law shall ever be passed to abridge the right to think what they will.’ Sound familiar?”
Kendra, on the verge of exploding her reply, restrained herself. “You’re right, Zeus blast you. No digging into his head. Everything else is on the table, though.”
“As I said, he’s already agreed to it.”
“What else can you tell me?”
“From what we’ve pulled from Dent’s files it all started shortly after Nicole defected. I don’t think he realized how extensive the backups are when you use the station AI for your server. You can put privacy protection on anything and Diana will honor it, but by the same token once you’re gone she’ll be into them in a nanosecond.”
In the next fifteen minutes Davie laid out the chronology: the discovery by Phalkon of Taylor’s amateurish plans to defect. Her subtle covering of the evidence. The plotting with Dent to ‘Trojan Horse’ himself into the Federation. The contacts with Novak and Phalkon, then Pitt.
“Sweet suffering Semele, what did he expect to get out of this?”
“I wondered too, Kendra. The Dent I knew was always concerned about power and prestige, moving his Family upwards in the hierarchy, possibly with an eye to deposing Newling as Primus.”
“And she had him kill his cousin.”
“Yes, Arthur. Which was the clinching argument for us letting him in so readily, I’ll admit. What we forgot is Dent always put Family before family, if you get my drift. He knew he had to kill Arthur or lose any chance of his Family advancing, and if he could make it work on multiple levels, well, he was Minister of Intelligence for a reason.”
Kendra nodded reluctantly. “He set up a litmus test for us, proved his supposed loyalty to the Primus, and recognized the threat to his Family, all in one move.”
“Exactly. As for what he was to get out of the deal? His Family’s lives and positions restored.”
“How?”
Davie shook her head. “Not in his files. It’s something Phalkon is doing for him, or will do for him, after the rest of her plans fall into place. But she’s better at compartmentalizing than he was and didn’t tell him anything he didn’t need to know, Oberon take her.”
“Wait. Cris told me she’d caught him communicating with Luna and he told her some story about arranging a plot to remove the Empress.”
“Which would be the only way for Phalkon to guarantee his Family’s safety and power,” agreed Davie. “Which gives us a challenge and an opportunity.”
“Lay it on me.”
“If it’s true, if Phalkon’s working to remove the Empress, then we might be well off to allow her to move forward. She seems more reasonable, more thoughtful, than Newling ever was. Maybe we can negotiate with her from a position of strength. But we can’t let on we know anything about her plans.”
“So we, I, can’t punish her for killing Cris and forty other innocent people because she might remove Newling for us? Is that it?”
“In a nutshell.”
Kendra fell silent. The seconds stretched into minutes before she spoke again.
“Agreed. You, me, Diana, Harpo. Nobody else knows, so nobody else can blow security.”
“Sensible.”
“I don’t like it, Davie.”
“Neither do I, Kendra. But war is waste, and pain, and decisions you’d rather lose an arm than make. We both know this.”
“We do,” Kendra agreed sadly. “We do. I’ll leave it to you to run our little maskirovka.”
She glanced at the old-fashioned clock on her wall.
“Close enough.”
Reaching down she pulled out a bottle filled with dark amber liquid and a pair of glasses. Davie looked at her quizzically.
“In the words of the old song, it’s five o’clock somewhere, and we’re going to have an old-fashioned Irish wake for Cris, just you and me.” As she spoke she uncapped the bottle and poured a generous amount into each glass. She picked up hers and waited for Davie to lift the other.
“To Cristina Montana, the best agent at ‘hurting people and breaking things’ I ever knew.”
Their glasses clinked and they drank, Kendra closing her eyes as the drink whispered smoothly down her throat.
“Did I ever tell you about how Cris got looped in with Cass and I?” she asked, eyes still closed.
“No,” said Davie.
“It was August of ’13 and Cass and I were in trouble. Big trouble. So I was running back to OutLook for help...”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Translunar Space; TFS Enterprise
Stardate 12009.06
“I do love deep patrols,” commed Grease Monkey.
“Put a cork in it,” Locksmith growled. She wasn’t in the mood for the Monkey’s attitude, not today.
“Sorry, L-T,” Monkey replied with an appropriate level of contriteness. “But deep patrol sucks!”
The five Direwolves which composed Division Two of Red Squadron were patrolling translunar space on the ‘forward’ side of Earth’s orbit, and she had a point. Translunar space was defined as the region beyond Luna’s orbit out to about five light-seconds’ distance. Or, to put it another way, the outer 1.1 million kilometers of a sphere three million kilometers across. It was huge, in other words, especially compared to a Direwolf 20 meters long. Even if they achieved their maximum speed of 4500 KPS simply reaching the outer boundary took 4 ½ minutes, and no Direwolf ever flew that fast. It was a long, tedious, and generally boring duty.
But it was necessary. The starships could patrol the volume in a fraction of the time, with their sublight and warp drives, but there were too few of them and their other duties too pressing. The Wolves could manage it as well, but their vulnerabilities were too well known. So the Direwolves drew the short straw and today was Red Div2’s turn.
“Between you and me, Monkey, I agree. We have our duty and I need you to concentrate. Besides, only two more hours and we can head back home.”
“Whatever you say, L-T,” Monkey answered. “We just haven’t seen shit.”
“Hold on that, Monkey,” called Frak Me. “I’m picking up a satellite. No, two. Four. Damn, there’s a whole cluster of them.”
“Range and direction, Frak Me!”
“Transmitting.” The information flowed from his Direwolf to the other ships. Frak Me was farthest away by a good ten thousand kilometers and the satellites were further outward still.
“You got them on active or passive sensors?”
“Passive, L-T.” He almost sounded offended. SOP was to only use their passive sensors w
hile on deep patrol to minimize any Union ship’s ability to spot them. They couldn’t do much about their engines radiating power, but there were plenty of ships in the System. An energy source could be anyone, especially since there were a limited number of designs in use.
The active sensors, though, would be as if they were lighting a flare in a dark room. Everyone within ten light-seconds would ‘see’ them, and unlike fusion reactors the sensor suites were unique to each type of vessel. A Direwolf using active sensors could no more be mistaken for a merchant vessel than a mouse could be mistaken for an elephant.
“All ships, alter course to converge,” Locksmith ordered. The next minutes were silent as they raced to the coordinates Frak Me provided.
“Got them,” reported Chewbacca, first to approach.
Grease Monkey and Ding Dong soon chimed in as well.
“Sheba?”
“Nothing yet, Lexie,” came the elegant, slightly British tones of her AI. “Correction. Detecting satellites now.”
“All ships, reduce closing rate. Don’t want to walk into anything.”
Her pilots decelerated to 400 KPS as their sensors pulled all the data they could from the objects.
“Sheba, analysis.”
“There are a total of ten objects, arrayed in a sphere eight thousand kilometers across. They are cylindrical objects on the order of five meters across and thirteen meters long. No external panels, but I am detecting low levels of power generation in all.”
“Purpose?”
“Unknown, Lexie.”
“Anything in the database?”
“Checking. Yes. The Union of Artemis has logged the installation of a communications relay at these coordinates.”
“Communications relay?” Locksmith thought about this. “Doesn’t look like any relay I’m familiar with.”
“It is possible they are attempting to construct an omnidirectional relay; such a design would roughly match the pattern we are detecting.”
“Fine. Note the position and count, course, and speed, all the good stuff. Can it and shoot it to Diana. Frak Me, nice work picking this up. Be a pure bitch if one of the starships happened to come barreling through here at warp and ran into one.”