“How do you figure?” Tana said.
“One of the other things he told me was that there are only two people in the Union who have command authority over the ghost fleet. Paulson Lassiter and Tamir bin Ariqat,” he said. “If Lassiter is part of the power behind the throne, Ariqat is his weak spot. That’s why he dropped him in a hole. And if the size of the fleet is as big as he claims, when it does enter the field, I don’t know if even Odysseus could stop it.”
“You’re being melodramatic,” Tana said.
He shook his head. “According to things the admiral and I discussed, the entirety of FleetCom combat capable ships is only a hundred or so multicruisers. If Ariqat’s not exaggerating, he’s talking over a thousand ships in this ghost fleet. That would be enough firepower to disassemble Galileo in a matter of minutes.”
“And Ariqat controls this?” Tana asked, her face showing her struggle to assimilate the idea.
“He has the command codes,” Edison said.
“What’s to say Lassiter hasn’t changed them?”
“He said they’d set it up to be almost impossible for one of them to do alone. But the real question is why would Lassiter need to? He had the only other person who could use them under his control,” he said.
“But he has to know Ariqat’s escaped,” Tana said.
Edison shook his head and looked over at Saf. “What didn’t you see at the mining camp?”
She frowned for several seconds before her eyes lit up. “A deep com dish!”
“Exactly. Ariqat took it out when he blew up the power shed,” he said. “He told me that was one of his objectives. He was thinking it would keep them from calling in search parties. The point is it also would have kept them from letting Lassiter know their package had walked out.”
“So if he’s willing to turn on the people that turned on him—”
“That makes him the most valuable secret weapon FleetCom could have,” he finished for her.
“How do we get Quintana to push this uphill without telling him what we’re sitting on?” Tana said.
“I think I have to figure out how to get him a message that says enough, but not too much. If we get lucky, maybe he will say yes.”
“What if he says no?” Saf asked.
“Then we keep at it until we come up with another option.”
Unaligned Fleet Command: Centaur-Thereus:
Commodore Carlton Atwater sat at his console staring at a performance report. He had a small staff of real people, and a huge responsibility. He maintained the operations base of the Unaligned Fleet and would be in command of the fleet itself if it was ever deployed in any serious way. Atwater had graduated from the Tsiolkovskiy FleetCom Command School and worked his way up through the ranks in support facilities management until he had retired one step short of an Admiral.
He deserved the title and yet they had passed him over, even at the moment of his retirement. Politics had crushed the possibility of an admiral’s pension and he felt betrayed by those who had never seen his true potential.
Now he sat atop the largest single fleet ever assembled, bent on someday leveling things with the Admiralty of FleetCom. His armada was scrap parts, cobbled together from rusting hulks of cast off hardware. But he knew, because of sheer numbers alone, what it would be capable of when it was time to put it into service.
Watching the newswaves from down-system, made it clear the time was coming. He’d ordered his ship commanders to begin drilling for combat. He always kept his fleet at alert ready as occasionally a few ships at a time were ordered into service for clandestine operations. The raid on L-2 had been one such instance. Though it had not been a success he knew that now, with the Union in shambles, it was only a matter of time.
“Commodore, we have more deployment orders coming in.” His Com Officer interrupted the performance report.
“Another deployment already?”
“Yes sir, it’s decrypting and the command codes authenticate.”
“I expect we’ll be sending ships to Zone One,” he said. They’d recently sent a battle group inward for peacekeeping operations, but maybe they were contemplating something more aggressive to get control.
“It’s a video file and trajectory routing orders,” she said, her voice squeaking like she was drinking nitrogen. “Frag me. This will be a major operation. It includes individual calls for 625 ships plus the command group.”
“Send it through and I’ll look at it,” he said, swinging his chair around to watch his wallscreen.
Paulson Lassiter appeared and stood stone still for several seconds. He looked exhausted, with lifeless eyes and labored breathing. It had to be the stress of what was going on down there, taking its toll.
“Commodore Atwater, this is your official activation order. I have attached detailed instructions as to what ships I want involved in this action and I expect you to follow my orders to the letter.
“The situation with former Chancellor Katryna Roja has escalated. We believe it is essential that we use the fleet to put an end to the threat she represents. Reports show the Armstrong and a small battle group have moved to a hidden base of operations and we believe they have joined a substantial fleet already waiting at that location. We need you to take these ships and her base out, at all costs.
“Because of the location of this facility, your resource cost to get there will be extremely high. You are in a prograde position relative to your target. You will need to make sure you are adequately provisioned for this engagement and the return trip once you have completed your mission.”
He paused the playback and looked at the trajectory files and whistled. “Neptune L-4? This is fragged.”
He scanned the list of ships, reading aloud. “500 combat vessels, 100 ice freighters and twenty-five repair tenders? Plus the Columbia attack group and two-thousand troops?”
Unbelievable.
He shook his head and punched the playback icon to continue listening.
“We will also be providing you with an upgraded tactical AA for this operation. You are to prepare all Level-6 and above AI and all AA systems to receive and install new core code elements.
“Once these updates are complete, you are to make way immediately. Further orders will follow, once you are en route.
“Lassiter Out.”
Atwater leaned back in his chair and let the air leak out of his lungs before he punched into his com. “I need my staff in here now, for a briefing. We’re going to war.”
“We are sir?” she asked the squeak still audible in her voice.
“Yah. Just not the one we expected to be fighting.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gateway Colony: L-4 Prime:
Chei walked into Jeph’s office and closed the door behind him, latching it firmly before he bounced to the seat across from Jeph. It was late, almost thirdshift, but Jeph hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night since his gravity sickness had eased enough to wean him off the neuroblockers, and everybody aboard knew it.
Chei’s face split into a comical over-exaggeration of a grin, but he said nothing.
“What’s swinging?” Jeph asked after several seconds. He realized if he didn’t ask he wasn’t likely to get more than the silly expression.
“I’ve been outside the language matrix,” he said.
Jeph scanned the room like he was looking for something hidden in the corner. “I think we’re outside the language matrix now aren’t we?”
“Yes, but I have been outside the language matrix, and still inside the Tacra Un.”
“Wha …” the light came on in Jeph’s brain. “Oh?”
Chei nodded, slowly and deeply. “Yah. I think that means we’re officially finished.”
“How did you get past the matrix?”
“I just walked up to the edge door in an outside node and told it to open,” he said shrugging. “When it did, I realized it wasn’t leading to another node.”
“Where did it go?” Jeph asked.
“To a smaller room with no doors. When I stepped in and turned around, I realized I wasn’t where I started. The door I’d just come through, lead to a larger room with what might have been fabrication machinery in it.”
“Like an elevator,” he offered.
Maybe, but I don’t think it actually moved,” Chei said. “I tried it again from a different node and ended up in a different room. The second one looked more like a biomedical center, maybe.”
“Does every outside door lead to a different place?” he asked.
Chei shrugged. “I only tried the two of them, but if so there are hundreds of edge-doors.”
“The Tacra Un identifies these as aht-oolawath,” Dutch said.
“Space doorways,” Jeph said.
“The two additional chambers are now on my schematic,” Dutch said. “It is worthy of note that they are not contiguous to the language matrix itself.”
“They aren’t?” he said, leaning forward and logging into his console to bring up a diagram of the Tacra Un.
“The first location appears to be approximately two kilometers below the surface,” Dutch said. “The second one was six kilometers east of our present location.”
“How is that possible?” Jeph asked. “Nevermind. It’s magic.”
Chei chuckled. “Obviously it has to be some kind of matter transfer, or maybe an ERB gateway. I suspected that might be what it was, when I moved only fifteen meters sidewise to the second door, and the rooms I ended up in were each more than fifty meters across. They couldn’t have been side by side.”
“I don’t suppose either of these was a control center?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, “but I focused on gravity and physics language threads. Someone with the right language set might recognize what I was looking at.”
“Who was with you?” Jeph asked.
“Nobody,” he said. “I knew we were close to the end of the word mining so I pushed out a few extra hours to see if I could drill down the last line. Honestly, I didn’t notice I was there until I ended up in the … elevator.”
“Is anyone else inside the matrix now?”
“Negative,” Dutch said. “All the personnel from the Armstrong are off duty.”
“Until we map this, it might be a good idea to keep the traffic out of the Tacra Un,” Jeph suggested. “Especially if there’s potentially dangerous equipment in any of those rooms.”
“Danel and Jameson have been handling the study groups that have been working the shanak-che files. Ian and I have been coordinating word mining,” Chei said. “It’s been an effort to get any of them past the pedestals in the amphitheater, so I don’t think it’ll be too hard to keep them occupied, as long as they don’t know what’s happened.”
“We’ll have to post Seva and Cori to limit access while we put a mapping team together,” Jeph said, leaning forward to log back in to his console. “I think it’s smart to make sure nobody goes in without us knowing exactly where they are.”
“I agree,” Chei said. “If it’s jumping people half way across the Tacra Un, it would be easy to get lost.”
“What about the quicksand? Do we know if it’s shut down yet?”
Chei shrugged. “I didn’t do anything in there, so I don’t know.”
“The sensors from the Hector do not indicate that it has been discontinued, and the Tacra Un has not notified me of a change in status,” Dutch said. “Without testing the ceiling threshold of the gradient, I do not know if our sensors would be able to detect any change.”
“If we tell Roja that they might be free, they’ll know we’re through and that might change how they want to proceed,” Jeph said. “I don’t think I’m ready to renegotiate our position here yet.”
“That’s your game,” Chei said. “But I’m sure Jameson will realize quicklike that something’s going on.”
Cell A-106: Security Detention Center One: Galileo Station:
Paulson Lassiter looked better than Derek expected. But that was relative. His eyes were hollow, empty. He mumbled to himself as he rocked on the bed.
“Do you remember who I am?” Derek asked.
Lassiter snapped into reality and nodded. “I will never forget you.” Fire leapt from his eyes for an instant, but it died under something different. Something that looked more like pity.
“Do you know why this happened?”
Paulson leaned his head to the side for several seconds and then nodded again. “Odysseus wants to control everything. Now it will.”
“It needed to make sure you weren’t in a position to unbalance things with your own agenda,” he said, pulling the chair away from the table and sitting down.
“My agenda?” he said, his tone making the statement more a question. “My agenda was to protect us.”
“If it was, you wouldn’t have held those ships back,” he said. “FleetCom is gearing up to attack, and you wanted to keep the unaligned fleet out of the conflict. That isn’t protecting us. It is abandoning humanity to a civil war.”
“So you did get the command codes,” Lassiter said, his eyes glassing over as he fought back tears. “I tried.”
“Yes, Odysseus has ordered enough of the fleet into Zone One to stop the rebellion,” he said. “We have 150 ships inbound now.”
Lassiter shook his head. “I’d already done that. Those ships are coming because I ordered it, not Odysseus.”
“Odysseus sent the order yesterday,” Derek said.
“How long has it been since you locked me in here?” Paulson said.
“Four weeks,” he said. “Why?”
Lassiter leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He looked like he was struggling to put a memory into place. “Then they are about four weeks out,” he said. “Thereus is further out than Saturn. If Odysseus ordered it, they are still more than three months away.”
“Thereus?”
“The centaur where the fleet was based,” he said.
Is that true? Derek asked through his link.
“The battle group will be here in twenty-six days,” it replied.
So you didn’t send the orders? he challenged.
“I did not alter the orders in place,” it said. “I issued orders to the remaining fleet to proceed to the point of ESI contact.”
You don’t think it’s relevant that Paulson was complying with my wishes, before we had him scanned, Derek asked.
“I do not,” it said.
If he was working with us, why did you want to go ahead with it?
“I needed access to the rest of the fleet to complete my primary protocol,” it said. “His cooperation, with your security concerns, was of no relevance to my objectives. Once I acquired the access codes, all else became secondary to my plans.”
He might have cooperated, if you had let me bring him into the situation more completely, he thought.
“I could not risk being dependent on his cooperation. To allow that would have given him disproportionate power over the process,” it said. “His compliance is no longer required.”
Lassiter sat staring at him intensely while he verified the truth. “You just confirmed it didn’t you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Twenty-six days,” he said, nodding.
“I suspected you had a neurolink installed,” Paulson said, tapping the bone behind his own ear at the location of Derek’s implant. “I noticed the scar a few days after you started organizing the new government.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Derek said.
Lassiter pulled himself forward to the edge of the bed. “It does matter. It means you are no longer you,” he said. “Tell me something, now that you think you’ve won. Is your mind your own anymore?”
“What kind of question is that?” he asked, feeling a rush of anger.
“Is your mind yours? Do you think for yourself at all, or does Odysseus do that for you?” he asked.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I thin
k you do,” Lassiter said. “Odysseus owns you. He owns your mind. Your soul.”
“He does not,” Derek growled.
“Odysseus tried to destroy my mind, but he failed because I was stronger than you.” He shook his head, and the insanity vanished from his eyes like fire being sucked into space. “I feel sorry for you. You will never again know silence, will you?”
“He is trying to manipulate you,” Odysseus said through the link.
“Shut up!” he said out loud.
“Me or Odysseus?” Lassiter said, laughing again.
Derek stood up, walked over and punched the door with his fist, both to get the guard’s attention and to pound down his own anger.
“When you’re ready to fight back, go see Jahen Tanner,” Paulson said. “She can fix it. She knows.”
“I don’t need anything,” he said, leaning against the door.
“If you say so,” Lassiter said. “It doesn’t matter. This is all about to end, anyway.”
FleetCom Military Operations Center: Lunar L-2 Shipyard:
Carranza Pratte and Graison Cartwright sat across from each other in the high security conference room in Tsiolkovskiy. Neither of them looked happy with how things were spiraling out of control in New Hope City. Surrounded by a moat of empty space, Admiral Quintana and the L-2 shipyard had the luxury of physical detachment from the situation that no one on the lunar surface could share.
“This isn’t a police action anymore,” Cartwright said.
“Pallassano is still using security units to remove potential dissidents isn’t she? That makes it, by its very nature, a police action,” the admiral said, glancing at his first officer and shrugging.
“The problem is that it looks like the resistance is getting organized,” Pratte said. “It isn’t random violence. It’s a tactical response.”
“If it were a social reaction, we’d expect it to be concentrated in areas where the security forces were evicting loyalists, but instead it is focused on FleetCom areas,” Graison said. “They’re targeting the spaceport and residential areas where our people live.”
“Are you thinking Tomlinson is orchestrating this?” Visser asked, leaning back in her seat and biting her lip.
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 65