Rebellion at Ailon

by T J Mott

  The next to enter was Commander Rapp, who led up Gray Fleet’s analyst division and personally specialized in the history and analysis of the Norma Empire. He also commanded the fleet’s groundside resources when Cooper and Abano were away. His footfalls were loud, the result of a lifetime of office administration experience that meant he wanted his subordinates to know when he was present and in charge even if he didn’t announce himself.

  The third man was Senior Captain Covier, chief administrator of the Headquarters facility itself. His footfalls were uneven: a tap, a pause, then a heavier tap with an occasional scuff followed by a shorter pause than the first. He was older than Cooper, somewhat overweight, and had a bad hip. Cooper was surprised by his presence, usually Covier sent his second-in-command, Captain Pichler, in his place.

  The final person to enter was Commodore Reynolds, Blue Fleet’s elderly commander. His knees creaked and sometimes clicked with each step, but his footsteps were measured and precise enough to set a clock by, the result of his lifelong military career in the Keide Defense Force prior to joining Marcell’s organization.

  And now the room contained many of the Organization’s highest-level officers, at least those who were present at Headquarters, gathering as they did every few days to discuss all the plans and schedules and news regarding Marcell’s group. The Organization was a major player in the Independent Regions south of the Norma Empire, although it was so secretive that the neighbors only knew of it as a well-respected if quirky mercenary company with an unknown base of operations. None of them realized the true scope of Marcell’s operations.

  He turned around and watched them patiently, anticipating, keeping his face stern as they settled down into the chairs on the other side of his desk.

  Brrrraaaaapppp!!! The sound ripped through the office with ferocious intensity. Abano’s eyes opened wide and his jaw hung open in shock and horror, and the rest of the officers stared at him accusingly. Cooper flashed an overbearing look of disgust at the Gray Fleet second-in-command.

  Abano slowly stood, lifted up the cushion from his chair, and retrieved the inflatable rubber device from beneath it. It was flattened and empty now. He calmly reset the seat cushion, turned around, and tossed the device at Cooper, although his aim was a bit off and it slapped into the window instead. Then he sat down with a not-so-subtle shake of his head.

  Covier sighed. “Commodore Cooper,” he said sternly, although Cooper suspected he was secretly amused and only pretending to be scolding. “In Admiral Marcell’s absence you’re currently the most powerful man in the Independent Regions. You have six fleets to draw from and a brigade of elite Marines standing ready a few kilometers away. You have hundreds of agents posing as interstellar couriers who covertly decrypt and send you data from the galactic messaging networks. You have informants within a number of the galaxy’s states and governments, including Norma, and you know enough dirty secrets to start a ten-sided galactic melee that would kill trillions if you revealed them. And yet here you are, amusing yourself with foolish pranks as if you were still a twelve-year-old boy.”

  “Cov, he is a twelve-year-old boy,” said Abano with a raised eyebrow. “He never grew up.”

  Cooper stepped forward, took his seat, and locked his fingers together on the desk in front of him, sitting up perfectly straight and putting on the most stoic expression he knew how to. “How’s this? Serious enough for you?”

  “Nah,” said Commander Rapp with a dismissive wave of his hand. “That old rumpled-up gray jacket says ‘Homeless Unemployed Mechanic, Will Work For Food,’ not ‘Most Powerful Man South of Norma.’ ”

  Cooper spread his arms, looked down at his clothing, and opened his mouth, feigning offense. “This is my best jacket!” he said. He reached over to the top of his shoulder and fingered the single silver star pinned there. “And what about these? A homeless mechanic wearing a commodore’s stars?”

  “ ‘Homeless Unemployed Commodore, Will Work For Food?’ ” offered Rapp.

  Abano shook his head dismissively and sighed. “Anyway, down to business.” Cooper grunted. Abano was always the first one to push the group away from foolishness and towards real work. But that was part of what made him a good XO. He pulled a tablet from a large side pocket on his pants and consulted it. “First, if everything has gone according to his schedule, Admiral Marcell should be at Ailon by now.”

  Covier shook his head in bemusement, a bemusement that Cooper himself shared. “I still say letting him go there was a terrible idea,” Covier said. “After what happened at Cadria Minor, surely they’re bound to notice him. By this time next week they’ll have him drawn and quartered.”

  “Actually,” said Rapp, his voice sounding upbeat, “hardly anybody is even talking about his attack on the Waverly Depot or our Marines boarding the casino at Cadria Minor. The death of Emperor Moric is still dominating the interstellar news reports. Everyone’s worried about Norma, and our recent antics have pretty much gone ignored, even out here in the Independent Regions.”

  “He should be fine as long as he follows the cover identity I set up for him,” explained Cooper. “And as long as he stays out of trouble. That part I’m not so sure about.”

  Commodore Reynolds leaned back in his seat as an amused smile stretched across his lips. “Marcell is the luckiest man I’ve ever met. Cadria Minor would surely have lit the Independent Regions on fire had it not been overshadowed.”

  Rapp looked a bit confused. “What’s he hoping to accomplish at Ailon?” he asked. “That’s about as minor a planet as they come. How many ships and men did he take? It looks to me like all of Blue Fleet is still here.”

  “He went alone,” Cooper answered. “I don’t think he wants to accomplish anything. He just wants to see it with his own eyes.”

  “I still don’t understand,” said Covier. “He’s goal-oriented to the point of obsession. This doesn’t fit his personality.”

  “Our employer appears to have grown a conscience,” Reynolds stated mildly. “And I don’t think he knows how to handle it yet.”

  “A conscience is a very dangerous thing for a pirate and mercenary to have,” Covier pointed out. “If it sticks around, what does that mean for the Organization?”

  “I think you’re on to something, Reynolds,” said Cooper, ignoring Covier and nodding slightly in the Blue Fleet commodore’s direction. “It’s a fight-or-flight reaction. The Waverly mission scared the hell out of him and he’s not been the same since. So he runs away. But his new-found conscience and sense of guilt won’t let him just go on care-free vacation to unwind, so he runs away to a world that he feels guilty for.”

  “But if he feels that bad about it, why not take a fleet up there and fix it?” Rapp asked with a frown. “Going alone is dangerous. It makes no sense.”

  Reynolds shrugged. “There might not be any sense to make. Not yet, anyway. He’s rattled and he’s not thinking rationally.” He leaned forward in his seat. “It’s somewhat ironic. He’s finally convinced us that there might be more to Earth than old rumors and myths, and thus perhaps he isn’t crazy after all. And then he immediately behaves in a way so far from the norm that you still find yourself wondering…”

  “That brings us to the next item on the agenda,” Abano said as he entered some notes into his tablet. Cooper silently approved. Abano was great at keeping the group focused when their discussions began to wander, and their recent discussions regarding Marcell tended to run in endless circles. “Adelia Devaux. Rapp, you reported that your analysts are done debriefing her. Any highlights to share?”

  Rapp nodded, then stood up. He started pacing around nervously as he pulled the details from his memory. “So. Adelia Devaux, 31 year-old female. Claims to be from a planet called Earth, from a city called Paris. She and Admiral Marcell definitely knew each other and worked together on a ship when he was a young adult. Like Marcell, none of her knowledge lines up at all with the usual legends and stories about Earth. But their descriptions coincide with
each other quite well, so whether or not it was actually Earth, I’m convinced that they came from the same world.

  “Anyway, at some point she was abducted, although she cannot remember many specifics about it, and brought away from ‘Earth’ and into our realm where she was sold into sex slavery. Six months to a year later, well, Waverly and Cadria Minor happened, and she’s been recuperating here at Headquarters ever since.” He stopped pacing and rubbed the back of his neck. “And this is where things get weirder. Their timelines don’t agree and it’s confusing the hell out of my men. Marcell says it’s been eleven years since he was taken from Earth. But Devaux says the time between Marcell’s disappearance and her recovery at Waverly was at most a year. There’s a ten-year difference there.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at Cooper. “The only things we can think of to explain the discrepancy is that whoever took her put her in stasis for a very long time. A less likely scenario is she spent some time crossing the stars at relativistic speeds, without hyperdrive, and experienced time dilation.”

  Abano scoffed. “Why would anyone do either of those things?”

  Rapp shrugged. “Hard to say, but for now I think it’s the most likely scenario even if we can’t identify a motive for it. But one of my analysts raised an interesting point. If she lost ten years to stasis or time dilation or whatever, what about Marcell? If they were abducted by the same people, they both could have lost an indeterminate amount of time.”

  “That raises a lot more questions,” Reynolds observed. “Like how long ago did their Earth exist?”

  Rapp nodded. “One hypothesis that addresses them—and Earth—is that whoever abducted them did so a very long time ago. They cruised along at near-lightspeed, experiencing time dilation, for thousands of years and only recently got to our space. Meanwhile, humanity develops hyperdrive technology and expands away from Earth, overtaking the ships that transported Marcell and Devaux. During that time, Earth was abandoned or destroyed, and then the two of them arrive in an unfamiliar galaxy which has advanced several millennia during their transit.”

  “If that’s true, it makes the search for Earth even harder,” said Cooper. He’d never before considered time dilation to be a factor in his boss’s story, or that Marcell’s abduction could have somehow occurred before hyperdrive technology became mainstream.

  And yet, as unusual as it was, it made some sense. The Admiral had repeatedly explained that the galaxy’s level of technology was well beyond Earth’s, and that his Earth-based civilization did not even know about hyperspace travel. The murky and somewhat questionable legends said that the Imperial capital world of Norma had been colonized by Earth some eight or ten thousand years ago. Could Marcell predate the Norma Empire?

  Cooper chuckled at the idea that his employer, half his age, was actually the oldest man in the galaxy. “Much harder. We not only don’t know where his Earth is, but now we don’t know when it was, either.”

  Rapp nodded. “Assuming Marcell’s memory and timeline are trustworthy and accurate, we figured that his Earth must be within five thousand light-years of Norma. But now…it could be anywhere in the galaxy. Think about it, the well-known part of the galaxy is what, three thousand by three thousand light-years? And even much of that is unexplored. We’re in a galaxy that’s at least hundred thousand light-years across. The space mankind has explored so far is just a little pinprick on the galactic map.”

  “I think our galaxy just maybe got weirder,” Cooper said.

  “Anyway, to finish out, we do have some leads to follow. Just some names Ms. Devaux could recall. Some starships, captains, worlds…owners and customers and clients. Many of them were probably Imperial, though she has so little knowledge of the galaxy that it’s hard to link things together. I’ll send you the list, Abano, and I’ll need you to have some agents follow some leads. Other than that, my analysts will just keep cross-checking everything she’s told us against every source of information we have, and maybe we’ll find some kind of connection.” Rapp returned to his seat.

  Abano nodded. “Yeah, get me the list and I’ll assign some field agents to it. So, any more on Ms. Devaux?” Rapp shook his head. “Very well, next topic should be short. We’re finally starting to get some messages out of the Empire again.”

  Gray Fleet’s Imperial contacts had suddenly gone silent months ago, and just a few days afterwards the public news reports stated that the Emperor had died after a long battle with an unspecified illness. Which was very concerning to Cooper, considering that the Norma Empire was the largest, most powerful empire in the galaxy, controlling nearly a third of known space. “Is the Imperial Courier Network finally open again?” Cooper asked.

  “No,” answered Abano. “Our agents confirmed that the official channels are on lockdown. No encrypted messages are allowed except for official government use, and unencrypted messages are being rejected outright or at least heavily filtered. Our agents have not risked using the official couriers. Still, there’s nothing to stop word-of-mouth as average people travel around, so some information is starting to flow again through unofficial channels.”

  “Okay, so cut to the chase. What do we have on Emperor Moric’s death?”

  “We did receive a snippet of a classified autopsy report. He died of a cerebral contusion. That’s about all we know. That knowledge is not public, it came from one of our agents as an encrypted message sent via private courier.”

  “Cerebral contusion? So someone hit him over the head and killed him,” Cooper said. It wasn’t too surprising. The Imperial Court was stacked with cutthroat leaders from among the Norma vassal states, each one vying for more power and territory, and, ultimately, the throne itself.

  Abano shrugged. “Or he fell down the stairs. He was seventy-eight years old, after all. Anyway, the Imperial Court is in quiet chaos but we just don’t have enough data yet to find out who’s in charge or where things might be going. Rapp, you may need to pull analysts from other projects once the floodgates of data open back up.”

  Rapp nodded. “Can do. I’ve got my Norma analysts doing other work since there isn’t much for them to look at.”

  Abano consulted his tablet again. “Lastly, Captain Covier’s got an item on expansion of the base. I’ll let you explain.”

  “That one’s simple,” Covier said. “Reynolds here has requested immediate construction of facilities to support his new gunship squadron. I was thinking of setting it up on our eastern perimeter, but I know how…controlling…Admiral Marcell was regarding the base’s construction years ago, and wanted to run it past Cooper before I begin since he’s currently top of the food chain.”

  Cooper nodded. “You’re the base administrator, not me. I don’t have any problems with it.” He hesitated. “Unless you want me to pull rank and stop you, for some reason.” Covier shook his head no. “Okay then.” Cooper smiled mockingly at Reynolds. “So, you really got yourself a real Hyberian Raider?”

  “In a way, though Amanda Poulsen was never a full member because of her age,” answered Reynolds. “I promoted her, bought her ten Lancer gunships, and now she’s working on building her unit. I expect to have an elite good gunship squadron within a couple of years.”

  He’s risking a lot. On his last mission, he lost his ship and crew and even his boss—although through no fault of his own—and then immediately gets promoted to Commodore. And now he puts a huge chunk of his fleet budget towards a new unit led by a young woman with no command experience, all because she supposedly is from an overblown mercenary group that was destroyed years ago. If it doesn’t work out, his new rank might not stick… “And if she fails?” Cooper asked. “You’re pouring a lot of resources into this experiment of yours.”

  Cooper’s Blue Fleet counterpart shrugged. “If she fails, I put her back in the pilot’s seat and pick a new commander, and instead of an elite gunship squadron, we end up with a merely good gunship squadron.”

  “Doesn’t she have a bit of a history?” asked Cooper. �
�Temper issues? I read her files. Sounds like before she joined us, she bounced from ship to ship, usually getting fired after a short time. Usually for angry and violent outbursts with crewmates she didn’t like.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Reynolds said mildly.

  “And despite that, you’re actually okay with giving her command?” asked Abano incredulously.

  “It’s certainly an experiment,” Reynolds admitted. “But I think a lot of her issues were because she never felt like she had any control. So I’m giving her some control. And I think she’ll mature, and it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  ***

  Hangar 7, a building on the hidden asteroid base which served as Headquarters for Marcell’s organization, was tightly-packed. It was one of the facility’s largest hangars, but ten gunship-sized starships were parked side-by-side within it, each one a forty-meter-long, sharp-looking vessel bristling with oversized thrusters and ominous-looking laser turrets. Crates of supplies and racks of test equipment lined the hangar’s walls, data umbilicals ran to and fro between the hangar’s systems and the starships, and a number of Blue Fleet technicians scurried about as they finished inspecting the newly-received gunships.

  Lieutenant Commander Amanda Poulsen crossed her arms over her dark blue jacket and studied the nearest ship, remembering the last time she’d seen gunships of this model. “These are Lancer-class. We had a bunch of them in the Hyberian Raiders,” she noted, referring to the legendary but now-defunct mercenary group which had raised her after her parents died. “Mostly old Mark 2’s and a few Mark 3’s.”

  “These are Mark 5’s,” said Commodore Reynolds, commanding officer of Marcell’s Blue Fleet. “I don’t know much about 2’s and 3’s, but compared to Mark 4’s they have upgraded thrusters and an extensive electronic warfare suite. The datasheets claim they can run at four hundred G’s in sublight and maintain an average of 1.6 light-years per hour in hyperspace.”