Proportionate to the Confederacy, they were swimming in the strange matter with its negative mass. The particle-cannon systems they were working with had originally been designed by Confed researchers, but their exotic-matter requirements hadn’t been cost-efficient for the Confederacy.
Exilium could spare exotic matter more readily than they could spare construction teams or starship crews. The new strike cruisers being built in smaller slips behind Vigil were crafted on the same principle: everything was cheaper than manpower.
“Put your eyes back in your head,” Giannovi told Isaac. “Or I’m going to start getting grouchy that I don’t get to command this one.”
“Galahad isn’t a match for her, but you did get a five-ship battle group out of the deal,” he pointed out. “There’s no one else I’d trust as much to lead the first wave of the expeditionary force.”
“Yes, but you’re making me trust Cameron Alstairs as your flag Captain,” she pointed out.
Cameron Alstairs had been Vigil’s XO under Giannovi. She’d handpicked him to command the new battlecruiser in her place.
“He’ll do fine,” Isaac replied. “He and Reinhardt are waiting for us aboard the station. We should let the pilot take us in.” He grinned.
“Assuming, of course, that you are also done drooling.”
Professor Lyle Reinhardt was one of the single largest men Isaac Lestroud had ever met. The scientist towered over Isaac by at least thirty or forty centimeters, and the neat eyepatch that covered his missing eye didn’t help with the intimidation factor.
Reinhardt was also the only reason Isaac had warp drives that could move a ship at over four times lightspeed. Many of the “new” technologies the Exilium Space Fleet was using had been dug out of the terrifyingly complete archives Adrienne Gallant had sent with her son. The warp drives, however—one-twenty-eights and two-fifty-sixes alike—were entirely the design of the immense scientist.
The Confederacy hadn’t primarily used warp drives, after all. They’d used a network of space stations that created artificial wormholes across vast distances to travel around space. That technology was the only thing that had been missing from the files the Exile Fleet had carried with them.
“Admiral!” Reinhardt boomed, wrapping Isaac’s hand in both of his own for a boisterous-yet-surprisingly-gentle handshake. “It’s good to see you!”
Giannovi got her own boisterous shake, and Isaac traded a calmer handshake with Captain Cameron Alstairs.
“Cameron. How’s your wife?”
Reinhardt audibly cleared his throat at that and leveled a look on both Isaac and his soon-to-be flag Captain.
“Brigette is currently eight months pregnant and running seven different engineering projects in Starhaven,” Alstairs said cheerfully, letting his father-in-law’s faked displeasure wash over him unnoticed. “I’m under strict orders that we’re not allowed to finish building the ship until the baby is born!”
“If the drive lives up to Dr. Reinhardt’s promises, that won’t be a problem,” Isaac told him. “That’s motivation, isn’t it, Lyle?”
The big man shivered.
“Heaven forbid I upset my daughter!” he proclaimed. “Not least by letting her husband get too skinny.” He mimed poking at Alstairs’s stomach, triggering a muted chuckle from Shankara Linton.
The Minister knew Isaac’s people as well as the Admiral did, but Reinhardt was always an experience.
“Come, I have food waiting,” he said loudly. “Follow me.”
“And beer, I’m guessing?” Giannovi asked as they all fell in. “Or have you finally civilized enough to make sure there’s wine?”
“I would never stoop to providing wine to guests!” Reinhardt declared. “Unless, of course, I know you’ll ask for it. There is some waiting for you in particular, my dear Commodore.”
The advantage to having a population of barely more than four million people was that there was very little in terms of processed food being created. The meal that Shipyard One’s staff had put together for the senior officers and the Minister for Orbital Industry was all freshly cooked from ingredients that had probably been harvested within the last two weeks.
It was good. So was the wine and, Isaac presumed, the beer. He was a more of a wine drinker himself, the remnants of growing up the son of a winery owner. Technically, Isaac had owned his father’s winery up until his exile.
His father had died when his mother had become humanity’s unquestioned dictator. That wasn’t something Isaac liked to think of overmuch, though he had some sympathy for where his mother had been that day.
He had, after all, helped put together the plan that had been expected to kill her.
“All right, Lyle,” he addressed Reinhardt as he leaned back with a wineglass in his hand. “What miracle do you have for me this week?”
“You want new miracles?” the big physicist asked. “I give you FTL drives, I give you new particle cannons, upgraded pulse guns, gamma ray lasers…”
“Yes, yes,” Isaac agreed with a smile. “All of that was fantastic. What have you done for me this week?”
“Nothing spectacular,” Reinhardt told him. “The final adjustments to the strike cruisers’ main guns came down in time. They’ll actually be carrying a more powerful graser than any of the Matrix ships—or Vigil, for that matter.”
“Vigil’s grasers are secondary. I can live with that,” Isaac accepted. “I still can’t believe you found the new particle-cannon designs just…in the Confed database.”
Isaac’s old Vigil had been the most modern battlecruiser the Confederacy had built, giving her the most powerful and longest-ranged main gun in the fleet. The lighter cannon now equipped on most of the ESF ships only had about forty percent of that gun’s hitting power, but they had functionally identical range and were barely a third the size.
The new Vigil’s main gun was similar, in that it had much the same range as the old gun but packed ten times the impact force in a package only ten percent larger.
“Each lighter cannon uses nine times the exotic matter of a Confederacy battlecruiser’s main gun,” Reinhardt pointed out. “The Confederacy had one exotic-matter plant per five star systems: seven billion people, give or take.
“We have one production station to supply four million people. We have a lot more available exotic matter to put in our ships than they did.”
“It’s almost addictive,” Linton said with a smile at Commodore Giannovi. The two were apparently in the “on” stage of the on-again, off-again whirlwind the two called a relationship. “Certainly, it enables us to achieve things the Confederacy couldn’t have with our workforce.”
“Which brings me to Project Mimir,” Isaac half-murmured. “Where are we at?”
“We have heavily automated Vigil and the new strike cruisers,” Linton told him. “The task force of two-fifty-six ships we’ll commission for you will require less crew combined than the original Vigil. The Mimir Protocols, though…”
He shook his head.
“They’ve got the upgraded Guardian Protocols, but our hardware just isn’t up to what you’re asking, Admiral,” he admitted. “Dr. Reinhardt is looking at it, but there is no way we can build the kind of high-level, multipurpose artificial intelligence necessary to augment the command-and-analysis crew.”
“What about the drones?” Isaac demanded. “There has to be something we’re getting out of that research.”
Project Mimir was an attempt to build a true “ship’s AI” for the Exilium Space Fleet’s warships. Never in command, of course, but such an AI would be able to provide analysis and feedback, plus run both defensive and repair drones throughout the ship.
“We don’t have the hardware,” Reinhardt rumbled. “If we could convince the Matrices to let us dissect a non-sentient remote, we might get to where we need to be on the drones, but without the full Mimir system to back them up, they’ll be helpful but not a game-changer.”
“Damn.” Isaac sighed. “I guess
we go to war with the ships we have, not the ships we want. What about Task Group Galahad?” He gestured toward Giannovi.
“We’re doing some final work on Frozen Heart and Ice Witch right now,” Linton told him. “Final fitting-out on their particle-cannon turret. They won’t be able to take down combat platforms on their own, but the four of them should be able to handle a recon and security node for you, Lauretta.”
“I’ll be reporting aboard Galahad in the morning to take command,” she replied. “I expect my destroyers ready to move within forty-eight hours.”
“We’ll make it happen,” the Minister for Orbital Industry promised. “What about the freighters for the first wave?”
“I want the task group ready to go first,” Isaac told them all. “We have some days still before the Matrices are here to pick up the freighters, but the sooner the one-twenty-eight ships are on their way, the sooner they arrive.
“And the last thing any of us wants is for Octavio Catalan to face the next Matrix assault alone!”
12
Until a few days before, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters had looked at the surface-to-orbit shuttles of her people as one of their greatest technical achievements. Her guardships were immense, but their core concept was relatively simple. They didn’t need to land on a planet or take off from one.
In many ways, in fact, her guardships were more a series of installations dug into a captive asteroid than actual ships.
The reusable spaceplanes were relatively new, their earliest true siblings entering service after the first guardship. Built around retractable wings and a powerful fusion reactor, the shuttles could land and take off from a planet under their own power and travel a significant distance in the void-sea between.
Despite their price and complexity, the Vistans had built hundreds of the craft. They were the backbone of Vista’s spaceborne economy and infrastructure—and today, they would make the desperately needed evacuation possible.
But she had listened to the datasongs of their sensors examining the strange ship called Scorpion and the deadly warships of the Matrices. Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters understood how far her people still had to go.
Even as her shuttle settled down in the shallow water near Vista’s largest remaining city, the even smaller shape of one of Scorpion’s shuttles flashed over her head. The earpiece covering one side of her head chittered its subtle datasong into her ear, detailing what the shuttle’s scanners picked out of that spacecraft.
The shuttle was barely half the size of the craft she was still sitting in, and the scanners said it was producing more power. That knowledge let a chirp of concern escape her gills.
Just what had she allied her people to?
Shaking herself, she rose from her seat as the doors opened and the water outside began to ripple in. She needed the humans. Strange as they sounded and terrifying as their technology was, they were the only hope to save her people.
Shining Sunset had been the capital of a healthy state of a hundred and twenty million people. Shining Rivers was a relatively minor state by the standards of the planet, but one of the largest to front on Long-Night-Waters.
There had been two larger nations on Orange-Sunset-Waters; but it had been their access to the greater ocean that had made them wealthy and prosperous—and that same ocean had doomed over half their cities and two-thirds of their people.
The city of Shining Sunset had been home to ten million Vistans, but as Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters made her way up the traditional avenue between sea and land, she could see houseboats wrapped around the city’s docks by the thousands.
As they’d flown in, she’d seen portable dwellings gathered around the land side in similar numbers. Shining Sunset had probably doubled in size since the Impact, and it would only get worse.
The reason for that was visible on every street corner. Two reasons, in fact. Every corner held at least two soldiers of the Shining Spears, the national military. The Shining Mother had called in the Spears within minutes of the Impact.
Even if she’d kept peace by the spear and the rifle, Sings would have dealt with the Shining Mother, but the country’s Great Mother had proven her wisdom.
Those Spears weren’t there to replace the police. Thousands of the Shining Spears’ internal police had been transferred to Shining Sunset’s police, but they’d traded uniforms. The soldiers were there to support the police, yes, but they were also there as a visible sign of order…and to guard the mobile cooking stations also positioned at every corner.
The Shining Mother had seized control of every scrap of food in her country within a day of the Impact. Restaurants throughout the territory she controlled were closed, but those cooking stations had scooped up their staff.
The country was under rationing, and that meant they’d survive. Those who defied the Shining Mother would face her Spears, but her first choice to keep the peace had been to make sure everyone ate.
Sings approved. Not that it mattered—only eleven nations had survived the Impact. Two had lost so many of their people, they hadn’t survived as functioning entities.
In the five days since the Impact, six more governments had simply come apart, rioting and disorder shattering any vestige of peace.
Another had tried to enforce peace with their Spears. Age-old frustrations and anger had boiled up in response, and the Great Father of the Last Rising Sun was dead. The Last Rising Sun itself was a disaster, a war zone to make the anarchy of much of the rest of the surviving Vistan countries look calm.
And despite everything, the Chosen Mothers—an elected government, instead of the hereditary monarchies of the Great Mothers—of the Iron Peaks had refused to speak to Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters. The Iron Peaks was a country of strange people by Vistan standards, people born far from the water who’d never set foot in a true ocean in their lives.
The Chosen Mothers had told Sings’s subordinates that the Star-Choir had already failed, and they would not speak with the people who’d doomed their world. They would not speak to Sings. After their initial response, they’d refused to speak to anyone.
They were safe from the storms and tsunamis to come, but Sings worried for their people as the skies continued to darken. Her oaths and duty meant she had to try and save them.
But as the First-Among-Singers of the Guardian-Star-Choir reached the end of the Grand Avenue, where the palace of the Shining Mother awaited, she wasn’t sure how she was going to do it.
The palace was a sprawling single-story structure, with rooms set at various heights to allow them to be filled with different amounts of water. Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters followed her armed guides into the building and then realized in surprise that they’d passed the fountain-filled great audience chamber.
“Where are we going?” she asked her escort, a Shining Spear wearing body armor in a mottled three-dimensional pattern designed to blend into shallow water and hide from Vistan echolocation.
“To the Shining Mother,” the young male replied instantly. “She awaits you.”
It didn’t sound like the Spear was going to give her any more information, so Sings waited until she was brought to an unadorned metal door in a deeper-than-usual hallway.
“We swim under from here,” the Spear told her, gesturing for her to enter the door.
Curious, Sings stepped through and dove into the rapidly deepening water. Vistans could breathe underwater, but even their technology worked better when dry. Sleeping partially above water was safest for them too. Their gills required just enough conscious effort to make sleeping underwater unhealthy for more than a few nights.
Once they’d passed through a few lengths of water, however, the hallway lit up again and she found herself being led deeper underground and underwater. A soft external chirping helped her sonar guide her down the tunnel, until they reached another metal door.
Her guide opened it, led her through and then stopped her as they faced a second door.
“We wait for the chamber to drain.
”
Sings was very familiar with the concept of an airlock, but she hadn’t expected to find one under the palace of a Great Mother. The water drained down around them, and the next door opened.
Datasong filled the room on the other side, creating an illusion of an immense globe in the middle of the room. The space was at least four body-lengths high and mirrored the command pool at the heart of Sings’s flagship…on a far vaster scale.
“We’ll want the third and fourth armies in position here,” a firm voice was instructing a command group. “We’ve heard nothing from the government of Green Waters, but the city of Verdant Shores has requested our help.
“The Chosen-Voices of the city have kept some order, but they fear their Chosen Mothers have lost control. They have failed to control the food supply and fear their people will join the others in the chaos soon.
“We will intervene.”
“Shining Mother,” one of the group surrounding the speaking female said respectfully. “That’s half our remaining reserve. Can we afford—”
“We cannot afford to let a city of six million souls dissolve into the chaos that will doom them,” the Great Mother of the Shining Rivers snapped. “Once Verdant Shores has been secured, we will pull most of both armies back to continue acting as reserve.
“But you are correct about our resources. We will need to start finding the deserters and lost spears among the refugees,” she continued. “I don’t care who they served or who they abandoned. If they are prepared to pick up a spear and fight for our future, I’ll take them.”
“Shining Mother,” Sings’s escort interrupted as she approached. “As commanded, I bring the First-Among-Singers of the Guardian-Star-Choir.”
“Good,” the female replied. “Commanders, you know what we must do,” she told the group around her. “Nine-tenths of our people are dead. We will save as much of the rest as we can.”
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