Branco laughed to see her obvious delight, knowing it wouldn’t last. She’d already thrown her borrowed jacket to the dusty flexi-concrete ground. Clad in just shorts, tee, and boat shoes, she stuffed herself into the pilot’s suit hanging by its interface cables. Her legs wriggled effortlessly into the plastic of the haptic leg sheaths that were indeed the perfect fit for her, while her hands busied themselves initiating the pre-flight sequence.
“You named it?” Jenkins wondered. “Why Leona?”
Sun paused her boot up operations, her mouth clamped shut. From the Mk 6’s open canopy, her eyes swept over the two men like dark lasers.
Branco gave a theatrical cough without taking his eyes off Sun. “In many outfits, Captain Jenkins, it’s common practice for pilots to name their suits after their lovers.”
He was rewarded by a sight even rarer than Sun’s smile. She blushed.
“Good to meet you, Leona,” said Branco, “but now you’re reunited with Sun, what are we gonna do with you? It’s time we thrashed this out. Are we still going to take Romalin Island knowing we’re going to bump against our Midnighter brothers and sisters, in some cases literally?”
“And your sister told us about undersea defenses we haven’t taken account of,” said Skuilher-Dour. “Sun, do you believe her about this? She mentioned Tyzhounes. I’d never even heard of the race before they came calling back home on Thananya.”
The color drained from Sun’s face. “Yes, I believe her. It’s all starting to make sense. I don’t think the Tyzhounes who attacked your hometown were an isolated party. I think the Goltar have recruited the entire race to do their bidding. And before the Tyzhounes, possibly other races going back centuries. Maybe longer.”
Her face went blank as she finally confronted the question none of them had answered. But then a determined look reasserted itself. She fastened up her suit as she explained her decision. “The mission remains the same. We need to hit Romalin hard. We might not be able to destroy it, but we can hurt the Goltar operation enough for them to negotiate. And if our friends and family in the Midnight Sun Free Company get in the way…” She flinched, but then her eyes burned like black sapphires. “Then that is regrettable.”
“Fight it is, then,” said Jenkins. “We’ve got a river ferry hovercraft that will make a creditable CASPer amphibious assault craft, but…neither of you need to fight. No one will think the worse of you if you sit this one out, but I’ve no choice. I only wish I was up there, aboard Unlikely Regret in the captain’s chair where I belong.”
Sun ignored him, securing a helmet festooned with cables onto her head and easing limbs into the haptic suit’s armholes.
Branco didn’t ignore him. Jenkins had been part of this operation for decades, even if he hadn’t realized what was really going on. “Skipper, it’s time to come clean. Tell us everything you know about this place. Everything you ever suspected. It might help.”
Sun snapped a four-foot blade out of the sheath on Leona’s left arm, but the old free trader captain only had eyes for Branco. He tugged at his chin, looking disappointed at the younger man. “Our fleets are maneuvering in space for control of Aneb-4’s orbit, the Patriot attack forces are readying to assault Romalin Island, and you think this is a good time for a chat? Should I go all the way and order a cream tea with cookies and jam?”
“I’m a professional spy, Skipper, and you seem awfully defensive to me. You can hold the tea and jam, but if you want my help then you need to talk. Now.”
The bluster evaporated from the captain’s face. He aged several decades in seconds. With a huge sigh he said, “Very well.”
* * *
“They’re mining red diamonds?” Branco’s mouth fell open. It sounded so…mundane. But it did explain a lot.
“Well, no…Sorry, Branco. Old smuggler’s habits die hard. It’s the official rumor, if you like. What those who think they’re in the know say about Romalin Island. Mind you, they also say anyone who gets too close a look doesn’t come back. That I do believe. Although you could say that about a lot of dark places in the nebula.”
“Rumor or not, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Red diamonds make sense; small, immensely valuable, and something you’d want to keep quiet.”
“Yes, but that’s the thing. I paid for a geological survey of Aneb-4. There are no red diamonds here. Wrong geology. I never opened the freight boxes I was told to ship, but I did ask some careful questions of my fellow captains. I carried cargo pickup from all over the nebula to everywhere else; all of us in this trade did. But I tied it back here, to Aneb-4. I think I was a part of the Infinite Flow. I helped to keep the trade rolling that paid for the Scythe to cut down so many hopes and lives across the nebula.”
“You didn’t know that, Skipper.”
“Don’t give me that crap, son. I’m a part of this. Guilty up to my bushy eyebrows.”
Branco wheeled closer and put a comforting hand over the old man’s arm. “Cut that out, Skipper. Now that you know, you’re only guilty if you do nothing to make amends.”
“I tell myself the same thing. Words go out my mouth. They don’t go into my soul. For years, I’ve been dancing on a wire like an obedient little puppet, keeping someone else’s racket going. How’s that any different from the fighters they sent to terrorize the civilians? Hey? What’s the goddamned difference, Branco? I don’t see any.” He pulled his arm away. “Me and the Scythe, there ain’t no difference between us in the end.”
Branco knew better than to say anything. Inwardly he cursed. And all his curses were aimed at the Goltar.
* * * * *
Chapter Seventy-Three
“My sister is a filthy traitor.”
From within her CIC cocoon, Blue snarled.
At her sister.
At the Patriot fleet forming up around her.
At the ship for putting its malevolent thoughts into her head.
And at herself for allowing them in.
“Sun is just doing what she feels is right.”
“She’s a traitor. You know it!”
Was that the ship talking through her, or was that a voice in her own head?
“Sun’s done nothing wrong.”
“She stands against us. She must be destroyed.”
“Deserters will not be tolerated. Turncoats must be executed.”
“No,” Blue protested. “I keep telling you…Oh.” She realized she was now talking with Gloriana. The voices in her head could be so confusing at times.
“You thought I was the ship,” the Goltar stated. It was not a question.
“I don’t have arguments with the ship,” Blue insisted. “What do you think I am? Mad? No, I have arguments with myself.”
“You two argue all the time. Don’t waste my time, Blue. I can’t see inside your mind, but I don’t need to. I have the simulations that reveal everything.”
Suddenly, stuck inside the gel-filled cocoon didn’t feel like the safety of home. Blue felt trapped. “So, you know that I know about the simulations.”
“I do. And I can do something you can’t, which is to run them at an accelerated rate. When I do that, something interesting happens over time. You’re constantly battling the ship, fighting back against the wash of its thoughts and instincts, but in the end, you always lose. Midnight Sun wants to wipe your betrayer of a sister from existence, and you cannot resist that impulse forever.”
“She is a traitor,” said the ship. “Battle awaits, my pilot. Let us be what we were destined to be. Together.”
“No.”
But the thrill of battle shot through Blue like a plasma arc and would not be denied. She felt Midnight Sun advance toward the center of the Patriot formation, the two Goltar frigates forming up on her flanks.
“Your simulation’s a steaming pile of dingo crap anyway, Gloriana.”
She swallowed hard and clenched her fists tightly enough to make her palms bleed. She thought of Daddy reading stories to his two little girls after tucking them in bed
for the night, of overboiled cabbage and cauliflower, kittens, rotting garbage, and saying goodbye to her mother for the final time. None of those distractions overcame the need to let herself be. To revel in her true nature as the Valkyrie pilot of a living warship.
“No!” she screamed. “You’re wrong. You’re all wrong.”
“Dingo crap,” Gloriana mused. “Interesting. Are you referring to your clandestine visit to the world below? Your first officer overrode the simulation.”
“It’s an AI. Have the guts to call it what it is, Gloriana. If you squid monsters have guts, that is.”
“Your first officer overrode the simulation because the ship refused to cooperate with the false version of its pilot. That was a very important lesson for us. And, no, these are simulations and not AIs for all the reasons that AIs were declared illegal in the first place. They are incapable of self-actualization. We have much to do to improve upon them, Captain Blue, and we want your help to do so. Nonetheless we already have enough to give our Keesius attacks minimum viability. You are a valuable asset. Both of you. But you are no longer indispensable.”
Blue’s spirits sank low. By hiding behind the simulation, she thought she’d played a good hand, but it turned out she was just a card Gloriana was playing in her own game.
Defeated, she no longer resisted as they moved in to attack.
The enemy—these Spine Patriots that Sun and Captain Jenkins had involved themselves with—consisted of armed merchant shipping. They didn’t look like much of an opposition, but the Human Jenkins was every bit as resourceful as the Jeha one. Dangerous surprises would be awaiting them.
The ship concurred. It would be easy to underestimate the forty or so ships arranged like a concave dish, with Unlikely Regret and some of the larger freighters on its outer rim.
“She’s not there,” the ship told her. “Your sibling is still on the planet.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been watching. She is a traitor, but if she means so much to you, I will help you shield her. First, however…”
The ship’s thoughts regressed back to a state too incoherent to form words, but there was no need. Blue felt a burning pit of desire in her stomach to assail this foe, to transform them into hot gas and radiation for daring to defy her. The call to battle was irresistible.
“Get ready to follow my path,” she ordered, simultaneously transmitting her thoughts to both the crew of Midnight Sun and the frigates Uzhan and Tagoz.
It was a simple plan. They were headed for the center of the enemy formation as if expecting them to scatter like the rabble they appeared to be. But as they closed, they would yaw about and burn hard for a new vector that would take them to the edge of the enemy’s formation. There they would blast through Unlikely Regret and its neighbors before spinning about and raking the enemy’s rear.
After that? Any survivors would be pursued and destroyed at will.
* * *
Midnight Sun burned her plasma torches as close to the maximum her mortal crew would allow and charged the enemy.
My sister left us. Deserted. Sun’s mind has been corrupted by that Danish snake. Turned against her own sister and commander.
“Stop it!” Blue shouted. “Get out of my mind.”
They spun and burned, freely expending delta-V until they were headed for Unlikely Regret.
Missiles swarmed at her, but she batted them away with lasers and ECM. The Goltar frigates behind them took out more of the irritants.
The loaded cannons that ran through her core were pregnant with destructive potential. She yearned to release.
Do it.
Do it!
Fire!
“No!”
Blue held her breath…and then flipped through 180 degrees, blowing salted plasma out of her backside as she decelerated and began to reverse course.
The Goltar frigates broke off the attack, their sensors temporarily blinded by Blue’s plasma cloud as much as the Patriots.
“Mutiny!” screamed Gloriana’s voice, pinlinked with Blue’s head. “I have Goltar marines on board your ship, Human. You command only on my sufferance. Have you forgotten you swore loyalty to me?”
“I haven’t betrayed anyone. Not yet. Not if I can help it.” Blue flew back to her starting position, but the desire to return and fight was burning through her very soul. She couldn’t resist the ship’s urgings forever. “We shouldn’t be fighting these people, Gloriana. I’m trying to do what’s right.”
“You are a mercenary. You are not paid to decide the morality of your contracts. You either accept them or you reject them. And if you reject them, I shall reject you! You fight for me, and I say destroy my enemies.”
Blue’s pinplants thrust a security camera view of CIC into her attention.
Goltar mercs were flowing into the CIC oblivious to the 3G acceleration. Their red beaks snapped, and bone pistols covered the crew. A pair was making directly for her station.
With her growl filling the inside of her cocoon, she made a scratching motion across her chest, like a monkey rubbing away a flea itch.
The Goltar marines collapsed. All of them.
Their hearts had stopped.
Somehow, she knew that, because she had stopped their hearts.
“What have you done?” asked Gloriana.
“Do not threaten my Human pilot.”
For a painful moment, neither Human nor Goltar spoke. Then the Goltar soldiers came to, gasping.
“Umm…did I just tell you not to threaten my pilot?” Blue asked Gloriana.
“No, Midnight Sun did.”
“Okay. Just checking. It’s difficult to be sure which voice is which.”
“What is it you really want?” Gloriana asked.
“Time to pause and reflect,” Blue answered. “To negotiate a way out of this fight.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Human.”
“I desire to deliver my purpose,” said the ship. “Violence. War. Destruction.”
The ship’s main weapons wrenched themselves from Blue’s restraint. Targeting systems sought firing solutions.
Blue deactivated the huge Gauss cannons, and then fought to keep them locked down against the ferocity of the ship’s will. Her entire body went rigid with the exertion.
“You cannot resist forever…”
Blue knew Midnight Sun was right. The ship’s implacable desire was burning her, weakening her grip on the weapons. In the physical plane, Blue’s ribs were popping with the strain, but she had to keep holding on, for Sun’s sake. If she let Midnight Sun free, the fight would pass through space and continue down to the planet, sweeping her sister up in the pursuit, no matter Midnight Sun’s talk of shielding her. The ship was amazingly powerful, but it could be amazingly dumb sometimes.
“I have a stubborn streak, too!” she screamed. “Just ask my sister. Ask Venix. Ask Colonel SantoPietro and the Condottieri.”
“Captain! Captain Blue!”
She blinked at a sudden pulse of light and looked up through the open canopy of her cocoon into the ruby eyes of her first officer.
“Captain, there’s a development.”
Midnight Sun wrenched back control of the main armament. Blue gasped, beaten, as the ship came about, ready to attack.
“TacCon,” said Flkk’Sss. “Status summary.”
“Our drone swarm reports a fleet has come through the emergence point and is headed for Aneb-4. Two battlecruisers and ten frigates registered to Spinning Shield, a Maki space merc company. They’re escorting three troop transports registered to Kaznet-Shu, a large Selroth company specializing in underwater assaults. A smaller fleet has appeared in its wake. Lightly armed. Looks like they’re the clients who’ve hired the mercs.”
“Any idea who they are?”
“Their identification is shamelessly fake, but the vessels are bearing the Mobius emblem we saw on Station 5, ma’am. It’s Endless Night.”
* * * * *
Chapter Seventy-Four<
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The air attack alert screamed through the water, electrifying Gun Master Kryanzi’s stinging arms, but he kept his composure and made his announcement with pride swelling his jelly-like bell.
“Turret-7 activating. Standby for emergence. Call out gun status.”
“Reactor feed secure.”
“Targeting array on standby.”
“Weapons lock released.”
Kryanzi’s bell dented with excitement as he felt long-dormant engines throb into life from deep within the mountainside.
This was it! The service that countless generations of Lennek gunners had trained for was finally about to happen.
The outer shroud of dirt, rock, and foliage folded away, scattering stones onto the beach far below. Seabirds screeched at the disturbance to their nesting sites. Animals scurried in panic or were cast away with the falling mountainside to their doom below.
The film protecting the outer skin of the turret bubble chemically burned away. Turret-7 pushed its way out of the mountainside until it reached its stops. It was now a giant bubble of water, gunners, and a 200-megawatt particle cannon pointed into the blue skies.
“Acquiring targeting data.”
“Shield array online.”
“Cannon fully charged and ready to fire.”
From her station deep within the island citadel, the battery commander confirmed his gun’s target zone and released control of the cannon to Kryanzi.
The battle zone display showed forty Selroth dropship submersibles screaming down from orbit. Dengie-class. Big enough to carry a platoon each, and well-armed. Already they’d reached the stratosphere. But they would get no further. Gun Master Kryanzi pushed out the dent in his bell mantle. With his hearts racing, he painted the target selector over the closest dropship in their zone.
“Vape ’em!”
The Selroth had no intention of being defenseless prey. Before the lead gunner could fire, five heavy lasers lanced out to pierce the gun bubble.
Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 33