by Rick Partlow
“Where’s Trinity?” Logan wanted to know. “Hell, what is Trinity?”
By way of an answer, Constantine slid his finger across the touch screen control and the view on the star map zoomed out and scrolled to their right so quickly she couldn’t follow the distance in the digital ruler at the bottom of the display. It finally settled on a K-class star with two terrestrial-sized planets further in, colored black which meant they were lifeless, and glowing yellow, which meant they were also dangerously irradiated. Further out in the system, a single, massive gas giant loomed over all the rest of the worlds, but its larger moons were also black tinged with yellow.
“This used to be the Volturnus system, back when it was an Imperial outpost. It’s smack in the middle of the Shadow Zone, the systems ravaged in the fall of the Empire and the civil wars that followed. According to the most complete records we could find, it used to have four habitables, two planets and two of the moons of the gas giant. Now, they’re too highly irradiated to even land without heavy shielding.” He shrugged and indicated the gas giant with a nod. “The atmosphere still works fine for mining helium and heavy hydrogen, though, and there are several wildcat platforms with crews scraping by a living selling to pirates and bandits and smugglers, and anyone else who’d rather stay away from legitimate sources of fuel. And this…” He scrolled again over to the system’s asteroid belt, to one of the largest rocks. “…is Trinity. It’s a fairly large asteroid turned into an operations station, business negotiation hub and recreational center for the gas miners.”
“Is it like Gateway, then?” Logan wondered.
Katy knew what he was talking about, even if she hadn’t had the chance to go aboard the pleasure station herself. Gateway was a quasi-legal space habitat in the fringes between the Dominions. It was where Logan and Lyta Randell had gone to recruit Captain Donner Osceola and his ship, the Shakak, to be part of the operation to find Terminus.
“Not at all,” Constantine disagreed, shaking his head firmly, “other than that they both began life as a rock. Gateway is a product of the Empire, with its typical raw-power-solves-everything approach. They drilled the core of an asteroid, spun it and heated it up to create an oblong, hollow cylinder. This is just a rock.” He jerked a thumb toward the representation of Trinity on the map. “Drilled into a bit at a time, until it has levels going all the way around in some places, but it’s still a maze. Spun for gravity by the expedient of hitting it with successive rocks until it started spinning fast enough. It’s crude and confusing and run by whichever criminal gang is on top at the moment.”
“Good Lord,” Katy murmured, an open pit forming in her stomach at the General’s words. She leaned forward as if she could reach into the image. “We have to get him out of there!”
“But we can’t afford to send a Spartan military force through other Dominions without permission,” Constantine reminded her. “Not openly. Things are already tense enough right now with the Starkad forces seizing the contested systems on the border with Clan Modi. We could spark a war here, and not just with the Supremacy.”
“Wholesale Slaughter has to go,” Logan said.
Katy saw his eyes flicker her way with what might have been a bit of guilt in the look, and she knew he had to be thinking of what they’d said on the boat.
“It’s your brother,” she said, covering his hand with hers, and be damned what General Constantine or the Guardian himself thought. “We’ll get him back.”
And the rest of it can wait.
Logan nodded, either agreeing with her conviction they would get Terrin back or her judgement of their future plans, or perhaps both.
“We’re going to need the crew gathered together within the day,” he said, addressing the statement both to his father and the general. “And we’re going to need the ship, if we’re going to get there in time.”
Jaimie Brannigan stepped forward, one hand going to his son’s shoulder and the other to Katy’s. She tried not to flinch away at the touch, even though it was from a man whose presence intimidated the hell out of her. It felt…familial. Accepting.
“You’ll have whatever you need,” he assured them. He glared at Constantine meaningfully. “Won’t they, Nicolai?”
“Major Bray is arranging for equipment and troops to be on the drop-ships by the end of the day,” Constantine said, not acknowledging his ruler’s anger any more than he had Logan’s curtness. “As for the ship…Colonel Randell is handling it.”
“Bring Terrin back to me, son,” Jaimie said, so softly Katy almost missed it right next to him. “And bring yourself back, too.”
5
Lyta Randell wouldn’t have admitted it, but she hated free-fall. Everything tilted and twisted and she was never sure which way to align herself, which threw off her inner ear even more than the microgravity. Her head was constantly stuffed up, she had no sense of smell or taste, and no matter how much anti-nausea medication she took, she was perpetually on the verge of puking.
Which was all just one more reason she hated Commander Larrabee. Besides being an officious, self-important prick, he seemed to be one of those rare people who were totally at home in microgravity and took every opportunity to show it. The shipyard’s control station was necessarily a zero-gee environment, built into the framework of the construction cradles, but it was aligned with a natural up and down for convenience and it was considered good manners to align yourself with the person you were talking to. Yet every time he approached, he was off at some angle relative to her and would always apologize in that patronizing way of his and spin around like a damned ballerina and stop himself exactly in place with that smug smile plastered over his face.
“The modifications are complete?” she asked him, refusing to watch his acrobatic maneuvers this time, keeping her eyes locked on the ship.
The last time she’d seen it this way, able to look down the whole length of it, had been when they’d discovered it in the underground hangar on Terminus. It had changed considerably in its time at the shipyard orbiting Hecate, the larger of Sparta’s moons, its sleek, slender lines kludged and muddied in an attempt at maskirovka. A fusion drive bell had been added to the stern for use when under observation to conceal the secret of the ship’s reactionless stardrive, and dummy fuel tanks were clustered around the aft to add to the illusion. It was a shame; the ship had been beautiful, deadly and graceful, but now it looked like a freighter, which was the idea.
“Oh, certainly, Colonel,” Larrabee replied. “I mean,” he equivocated, “there may be a few minor cosmetic issues to clean up, but the changes were mostly external to begin with, except for the addition of the point defense system and the new control suite. And, of course, we kept the whole thing compartmentalized, as you and General Constantine ordered.”
So compartmentalized, you throw Constantine’s name around at the drop of a hat, she thought, checking out of the corner of her eye whether any of the duty crew had been listening.
“Would you care to see footage of the tests we ran her through at the proving grounds before we began the modifications? It’s quite impressive.”
“I’ve seen it,” she said flatly. “And even if I hadn’t, no one in the crew here is cleared to be present for it.”
It had been impressive. Even lacking the antimatter power plant the Imperial vessel had been designed around, it could till accelerate at the equivalent of nearly thirty gravities and, more importantly, lose its forward momentum immediately upon deactivation of the drive field and immediately boost off on another heading. The drive field also acted as a defense shield, more effective than the deflectors Dominion military vessels were equipped with, able to shunt aside lasers as well as projectile weapons. It had seemed surreal watching the lasers—well, the computer simulations of the lasers, since the actual beams were invisible in a vacuum—bending away from the ship, following the line of warped space around it.
And that wasn’t even considering the weaponry, which was some sort of particle beam. Th
ey still couldn’t figure out exactly what sort of particle it accelerated, and it wasn’t nearly as powerful as when it had been fed by an antimatter reactor, but it could still overload the deflector screens on all but the largest of military ships with one or two shots.
If we had a fleet of these, we could take down Starkad in a single battle.
But they only had the one, and its mission wasn’t quite so dramatic, though nearly as important.
“If I may say, Colonel,” Larrabee droned on as if he hadn’t noticed the rebuke she’d couched in her answer, “I don’t know how you can rationalize putting such a powerful weapon into the hands of these…well, criminals isn’t too strong a word. This ship should be crewed by the best Sparta has to offer! Why, I’d be honored to be considered for a position on her!”
“Commander, the people crewing the Shakak II have proven themselves in battle. You have not. They’ve shown themselves capable of maintaining operational security under some very dark circumstances. You can’t keep your mouth shut just slapping a new paint job on the fucking ship.”
Lyta’s words were as hard as a naked nuclear core, but her glare was even harder, and finally a bit of green made its way onto Larrabee’s face. She bit down on what she wanted to say next, realizing her elevated rank wasn’t a license to tell every rear-echelon wannabe what she thought of them, even one who thought he could jump from a drydock babysitter to a spot on a ship he probably considered invulnerable. She sucked in a breath, held it for a moment, let it out.
“If you want to serve in a combat command, I suggest you put in for a transfer to the active fleet and do your time on a line vessel. Once you’ve laid your life on the line in the face of the same long odds these people have, then you can apply for a place among them.”
Larrabee’s face fell in on itself and she thought just maybe he finally understood what he’d said.
“Ma’am, I didn’t—”
“Just have this ship put together and ready to sail in six hours, Commander. That’s your mission, and I won’t accept failure.”
She pushed away from the bulkhead and headed out of the control room, leaving him to consider what, exactly, she’d meant.
“This is what that bastard calls ‘cosmetic issues?’ I’m going to have his ass cleaning the shitters on that fancy drydock of his!” Lyta Randell’s face was turning a very interesting shade of red. Kamehameha-Nui Johansen couldn’t make up his mind if it would best be described as coral or salmon, but he was thinking about buying a shirt in the color.
“It’s not as bad as it looks, ho’onani,” he insisted. The word meant “beautiful” in his great-grandmother’s tongue, a language called Polynesian. “It’s just kind of how things ended up.”
He waved at the nightmare of cables, bypasses, and splices all kludged together with insulated tape and all running out of the rear of the center command console and then out to the rest of the bridge’s stations. The command console’s displays were haptic holograms, as sophisticated and beyond their technological level as anything else they’d found on Terminus; but the stations slaved to it were conventional, with two-dimensional touch-screens and even the acceleration couches at the terminals seemed jury-rigged and half-assed.
“I mean, this is an operating system based on a fucking neural halo like in a mech, but not just for things like balance and fine motor skills; this thing read the pilot’s mind. It wasn’t easy patching conventional controls into it, and the only access point was the emergency manual control terminal.” He gestured at the source of the spider-web of cables. “We had to run everything out of one point, and that means no redundant systems, which means everything has to be out in the open in case we get a break or an overload.” The big man laughed. “I guess we could have just counted on Katy to be the pilot for every trip, since the damned system wouldn’t work for anyone else after she turned it on, but I think she likes shuttles a bit more than starships.”
“I suppose,” Lyta sighed, fingers wrapped in the loop of a handhold affixed to the bulkhead to keep her from floating away with the exhale of breath. “But it doesn’t seem very military.”
“I like it,” he told her, grinning broadly. It was the only way he knew how to grin. “It reminds me of the old boat…” He shrugged, the motion of his broad shoulders trying to carry him away from the acceleration couch and control station at the center of the ship’s bridge. It seemed even more out of place and rigged together than the others, perhaps because of who wasn’t there to sit in it. “It reminds me of the Captain.”
He felt guilty for bringing up Donner Osceola. Sure, he’d loved the Captain like a brother, but Lyta had loved him. Pain sailed across the familiar seas of Lyta Randell’s eyes, but she forced it back as she always did. He’d begun calling her ho’onani as a pet name when he’d first met her, when she’d been running an undercover operation for Spartan Intelligence and needed to hire a smuggler. But he should have called her ikaika, strong.
“Don would be proud to see you as Captain, Kammy,” she told him. “He always thought you deserved your own ship.”
He nodded, but couldn’t speak. He’d seen the life drain out of the Captain’s eyes after the battle with the Starkad cruiser Valkyrian, seen him slip away just as salvation was at hand, just as Katy had destroyed the enemy vessel with this very ship. He couldn’t get the image out of his head, and unlike the Captain, he didn’t have the temperament to drink away bad memories.
“What are you two doing on my bridge?” Tara Gerard demanded, coming up behind Lyta and wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “Isn’t it a big enough mess already?”
Tara was all that was left of the Shakak’s original bridge crew besides Kammy, a fixture at the Tactical station. She looked for all the world like she’d just come off a three-week bender, her gaunt face perpetually drawn and flushed, her eyes showing the slightly blurry haze of the recently buzzed, her dark brown hair short and yet still somehow frizzy and uncontrolled.
The only thing organized about the older woman was her uniform, the same utility fatigues Kammy was wearing, with the logo of Wholesale Slaughter on the arm and the breast. Kammy knew Tara wouldn’t have consented to wear the uniform of the Spartan Navy for all the money in the Five Dominions; but the blood they’d shed, the friends they’d lost had cemented them together under the banner of the mercenary company, fiction though it was.
“You heard the news?” Kammy asked her.
“About Terry? Yeah.” They both knew his real name was Terrin Brannigan, younger son of the Guardian, but they’d come to know him as Terry Conner on the mission to find Terminus and it was hard to think of him any other way. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go get him.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Lyta told her. “It’s more than just Terrin, though. He has the data files from Terminus, and since they probably had to blow the charges when Starkad raided the place, it’s all we have left. We can’t let anyone else get ahold of it.”
“That shit’s all well and good, Colonel Randell,” Tara said with a dismissive snort, “but this is Terry we’re talking about, and we’re going to pull his ass out of the fire.”
Kammy nodded enthusiastically. “What she said.”
Lyta grinned, and Kammy knew she couldn’t stay mad at Tara because no one could, not even the Captain.
“All right, then. The drop-ships will be arriving in four hours. If there’s anything you need to do to get this boat ready to go, do it now.”
Valentine Kurtz held his head and wished among all the technological treasures of the Empire they’d discovered on Terminus, they’d been able to find a cure for a hangover. The motion of the bus didn’t help any, nor the close proximity of the other mech-jocks and their duffle-bags and backpacks. Half of them had been at the same bar in downtown Argos when the MPs had arrived, and the smell of stale beer and staler body odor was enough to make him want to puke.
“You know,” Gerald Paskowski said, leaning in next to his ear to be heard over the rumble of
the bus tires on the old, cobblestone road, “maybe if you’d listen to me about mixing beer and liquor, you wouldn’t be in this bad of a shape.”
Kurtz looked up, feeling several days’ worth of beard scraping against his hands as he met the taller, older man’s eyes. Paskowski was obscenely fresh for a man who’d been on the same bender as the rest of them…well, the officers anyway. You didn’t do this sort of thing with the enlisted, or even the Warrants.
“I thought the whole idea of this was to get in bad shape,” he protested, his own words echoing inside his aching head. “We were supposed to be getting shitfaced in memory of Marc.”
Marc Langella had been First Platoon leader, Logan Conner’s second in command during the Terminus mission, but he hadn’t made it to their objective; he’d died fighting a splinter group of Jeuta pirates along the way. Kurtz couldn’t remember whose idea it had been to have this memorial, but it had seemed like a good time for it, with Colonel Conner away on leave with his girlfriend.
“There’s shitfaced and then there’s shitfaced,” Paskowski said unhelpfully. Kurtz couldn’t tell if he was being so cryptic because he was still buzzing or if it was just the way he was. Probably the latter. It had taken a good two hours to stop by the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters and grab everyone’s go-bags and personal items and they’d all pretty much dropped whatever buzz they’d been carrying.
“I drank enough to feel good,” Paskowski went on. “I don’t think Marc would have wanted me to punish myself. We only get one go-around and I don’t see the point in making myself miserable.”
“Dude,” Mandy Ford moaned from behind Paskowski, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you’re way too fucking philosophical lately. Can’t we just get drunk for once without turning it into a church service?”
She was one to talk. She looked as if she’d just shown up for a parade formation, despite the fact she’d been hitting it as hard as any of them. Aliyah Hernandez shared a seat with her fellow platoon leader and had the decency to at least share in Kurtz’s disheveled appearance if not his obvious pain.