Aurora Resonant: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 3)

by G. S. Jennsen

  A second moon rose to brighten the stygian sky, and he couldn’t help but wonder whether the dawn might bring something new.

  AURORA

  40

  PRESIDIO

  GCDA HEADQUARTERS

  * * *

  MIRIAM BLINKED IN CONFUSION at the name of the visitor requesting entry down in the lobby, certain her weary eyes had led her to misread it.

  When the letters didn’t resolve to a more logical name, she checked the lobby security cam. Was someone trying to gain access to her by impersonating a family member?

  Pasha Solovy stood in the lobby atrium, shifting his weight uneasily from one leg to the other in front of the security desk. To her further shock, he wore nice slacks, a knitted sweater and a faded wool fedora—attire usually reserved for funerals and weddings.

  Speaking of the latter, Alex and Caleb’s wedding was the last time she’d seen her father-in-law, almost ten months ago. Their interaction that day consisted entirely of a few awkwardly delivered pleasantries over finger food; in her defense, it had been a busy, even overwhelming affair.

  What in all the worlds could he be doing here? He rarely left the vicinity of his home and work in St. Petersburg and yet more rarely ventured off-planet.

  She drew in a deep breath and readied a welcoming if formal demeanor while steeling herself for the inevitable unpleasantness to come. On the exhale she authorized his entry and directed an officer to escort him up to her office.

  When he arrived, she met him at the door and clasped his hands in hers briefly—it was as affectionate as they had ever been—then gestured to the table by one of the windows. “Pasha, this is a surprise. Please, have a seat. Can I offer you some tea?”

  He cleared his throat and peered skeptically around the office before going over to the table. “Water’s fine.”

  She retrieved the water for him and tea for her, then joined him. “How are you?”

  “Same. Work’s picked up lately—not news to you, I suspect. Unpleasant mess you had there with the Prime Minister.”

  She gave him a closed-mouth smile that wasn’t. “The former Prime Minister, I assume you mean. Her crimes were exposed and justice was served, which was all I sought to do.”

  He raised an eyebrow, neither agreeing nor passing judgment, and sipped on his water. “How is Alex? I hear these outlandish, contradictory things being said about her in the media now and again. Can’t make sense of them.”

  How was Alex…a real answer would take the rest of the day, wouldn’t it? “She’s well, but away at present. She and Caleb are investigating a…recent astronomical discovery. In deep space. When I hear from her next time, I’ll tell her you asked after her.”

  “Hmm.” He nodded and again glanced around the office. “Loony bezumnaya girl, but David would be proud of her.”

  “I know.”

  His gaze settled on his glass. “He’d be proud of you, too, I think.”

  Were her weary ears malfunctioning now as well? Had he just said something nice about her? Perhaps not—perhaps instead he was saying something critical about his son.

  “I hope so. I can’t say for certain if he would have made the same choices as I have, but I want to believe he’d understand why I made them.”

  “All these political spats and wars and aliens and Prevos and whatnot? It’s nothing but noise to me—people trying to fill the silence. I can’t be bothered to worry about it. Gives me a headache. Sofia would’ve understood it, though. You’re like her in that way.”

  David’s mother had died four years after Miriam and David were married. People often said Alex looked like David, but in truth both Alex and David favored Sofia. Tall, dignified and graceful, she’d brought a measure of elegance to what had been a working-class family for generations. She was a good woman who had always been kind to Miriam, and David had suffered when she’d died.

  And now Pasha had paid her another compliment, if in the most off-handed way. This conversation was becoming quite odd.

  She tried to remove any hard edge from her voice. “It’s not easy, and I often wish I could ignore all the noise and simply live my life. But it is, at times unfortunately, my job to deal with such issues.”

  She paused, then decided to risk pushing—it wasn’t as if their relationship could deteriorate much further from its current state.

  “Pasha, why are you here? It is good to see you, but it’s also bordering on unprecedented. Do you need help of some kind? Are you ill? If you’re reticent to ask for my help, don’t be. I have a number of resources at my disposal, and I’ll be more than happy to—”

  “No, I’m not sick. To be honest, it’s starting to feel like I’m cursed to outlive my time. The world’s changing too fast these days. Thought I was seeing the end of everything last year, but we’re all still here, me included.”

  His foot tapped on the floor with nervous energy. “I hear reports here and there of some new threat on the horizon. We managed to stumble our way into surviving the previous one, but as I see it we’re pushing our vezeniye now. So in case things do go bad, I realized there were a few things I needed to say.”

  He stood, removed the fedora to hold it awkwardly at his waist, and walked the room. “I haven’t had the most charitable opinion of you over the years. My reasons are my own. But you made David happy, and I suppose that’s what really mattered.

  “And now…it seems to me you’ve done a lot of good this last bit. Good for the world, for more people than not. When the Prime Minister came after you, I didn’t expect you to have the fortitude to stand up to her like you did. I was wrong. Maybe I’ve always been wrong, but I’m too old to second-guess myself now.

  “Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say. And, you know, good luck. With whatever this fancy space station and all those ships outside are meant for.”

  She leaned forward and clasped her hands atop her knees. “Thank you, Pasha. It means a great deal to me that you feel this way, and that you came here to say it face-to-face. I…thank you.”

  “No need. I should get going. Early shift in the morning.” He turned toward the door, then stopped. “Oh, there was one other thing. A couple of days ago two government stiff-shirts showed up at my door asking for blood and tissue samples. They mumbled something about updating records for a new database.

  “That’s government for you—rolling out a new system every year, and every year everything’s got to be done all over again because they broke the old stuff. Still, it was a little strange. Do you know anything about it?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, no. I’m not involved in those types of initiatives any longer, so I wouldn’t be informed. Do you want me to look into it for you and make sure nothing is amiss?”

  “Nyet. They took their litre of flesh and went on their way. No harm done.” He returned the fedora to its rightful place and adjusted the brim. “So have a good evening.”

  His olive branch hadn’t begun to bring them into hugging territory, but she did go to him and squeeze his hands with greater warmth this time. “Take care of yourself, Pasha.”

  “You’ll be all right, Miri. You were always the strong one. You’ll—”

  “I don’t want to be all right—I don’t want to be strong! David, please….”

  “Miri, my darling, my world, moya vselennaya, know that I love you with everything that I am. I love you more than all the stars in the heavens, more than—”

  Miriam bolted up in the bed mid-gasp, heart pounding into her sternum and skin drenched in sweat. In the space the transition from sleep to wakefulness occupied, it was all real again, and white-hot anguish flooded through her.

  She buried her face in her hands and sank back on the pillow. It must have been at least a year since she’d had the…it wasn’t a nightmare, but instead a memory that had been a nightmare to live through, and remained a spectre to haunt her dreams still.

  Her pulse gradually calmed, and the anguish faded to melancholy as reality took hold. She stared
at the ceiling.

  Pasha’s visit was probably to blame. Even thinking of her father-in-law brought forth a deluge of memories, each of them woven through with the imprint of David’s ghost. It was no wonder after a consequential encounter her subconscious would go straight to the most painful of them.

  Experience had taught her the only way to get past the lingering malaise was to concentrate on other matters, overtaxing her mind until it had no choice but to return the memory to the archives.

  It was barely 0300, and she needed to sleep. But she knew without trying that sleep was unlikely to cooperate.

  Her thoughts drifted to Pasha’s comments before he’d left. It was odd, officials showing up out of the blue to seek blood and tissue samples from him. What purpose—

  A high-priority alert flashed in her eVi. ‘Commandant Solovy, apologies for waking you.’

  She pushed herself up against the headboard. “You didn’t wake me, Thomas. What do you have for me?”

  ‘I have this moment received a large cache of data consisting of numerous details on the Anaden Machim warships and military procedures. It was transmitted by Valkyrie in a single burst, and the Siyane has now returned through the Amaranthe portal.’

  “Alex?”

  ‘The transmission does not include any information about her status or any personal messages. It is pure data.’

  She bit back a flare of concern; as Alex had repeatedly reminded her before leaving, time passed more slowly through the portal. Though her daughter had left almost two months ago, from Alex’s perspective she’d been gone only a few short weeks. And there were a thousand reasons why the communication contained nothing personal, the most obvious being it had been sent by an Artificial in a format intended for processing firstly by Artificials.

  “I see. Thank you.” By then she was already out of the bed and halfway to the washroom.

  “Begin analyzing the data, with a focus on cataloging and categorizing it so we can get the pertinent information to the right people as quickly as possible. I’ll be in the office in ten minutes.”

  41

  PRESIDIO

  GCDA HEADQUARTERS

  * * *

  A VIRTUAL MACHIM BATTLECRUISER rotated ominously above the conference table. Hovering minimized on either side were half a dozen other models, from compact fighters to a command ship which bordered on colossal. The chairs around the table were full, and several attendees were relegated to standing along the walls.

  Richard sank back in his chair and waved in the direction of the battlecruiser. “It doesn’t look so intimidating. No more so than our dreadnoughts do.”

  Miriam arched an eyebrow. “They field ten of them in every regiment.”

  “There is that. How did Alex get all this data?”

  “I do not know. We received a data dump without elaboration. But the information is already proving to be invaluable to our preparations. For instance, we now know their hulls are constructed from a graphenated carbon-borospherene femtoweave alloy. It’s strong and they build the hulls thick, but it’s not adiamene. Their shielding is similarly formidable, but with the exception of the command ships—they call the vessel class ‘Imperium’—not impenetrable.

  “Thomas is working up a report now on structural weaknesses we can exploit using existing technology. Thomas, what’s the status of the report?”

  ‘I expect to deliver it in approximately four hours, just in time to ruin dinner.’

  “Naturally. I can say now the high-level takeaway will be this: if enough force is applied, their ships can be damaged and even destroyed by conventional weapons. This means we won’t need to rely entirely on negative energy devices, which is a relief in light of their disadvantages.” Among those was the fact the weapons were so indiscriminately destructive, in close combat they risked wrecking both sides equally.

  “Initial analysis suggests Sabres can have significant success against the enemy craft. I wish we had more of them ready.”

  She paused only long enough to decide. “Thomas, reallocate forty percent of ship production resources away from the other vessel classes and to Sabre production. Inputting authorization code.” She typed her personal override into the virtual panel on the table.

  ‘Initiating order.’

  “Thank you. Of course, they also wield potent weapons—extremely potent. A class-by-class comparison to our own will be included in the distribution package, but the data indicates their battlecruiser weapons are equivalent in energy to a node on the Earth Defense Grid. That’s each weapon, not the ship’s full complement. Battlecruisers are equipped with six such weapons, and the Imperiums have ten.”

  Fleet Admiral Rychen whistled.

  “So we’ll want to adapt our general combat tactics with a goal of avoiding sustained assaults from the larger ships, because the full brunt of their weapons will break through our shields. Given enough time, they may find seams and other weaknesses to break through the adiamene. We’ll keep Dimensional Rifters online as a last resort, for they could be the sole option for some of our ships to survive a lengthy barrage.”

  Field Marshal Bastian leaned forward, then back, then forward again. “And the collateral damage which will result?”

  Miriam tried not to look smug; after all, it wasn’t truly her victory. “Good news on this front. I’d planned to share the news this morning, but when this data arrived it took priority. A formula’s been derived—” she did not say by whom “—to predict where exit fissures will emerge. The primary factors are the distance the diverted energy traveled before encountering the rift and the angle at which it arrived, but the formula is…complicated. Luckily, we’ll have Artificials onboard to make the calculations on the fly.”

  In truth, though they were doing it for a variety of persuasive reasons, this scenario alone vindicated the inclusion of Artificials in new ships and, barring a disaster, foreclosed any continuing debate on the prudence of the decision.

  “And the problem’s solved, just like that?”

  “Taking into account the distances the typical combat engagement spans, if we’re engaged inside or near a populated stellar system, we’ll need to be careful. Judgment calls will have to be made—but we’ll now have the information necessary to make them.”

  Bastian seemed to accept the answer, and she wasted no time moving on.

  “The Machim vessels are large, hardy and powerful, but at root they rely on brute force to get the job done. We knew this in generalities, but this new data confirms it in the details. They routinely send thousands of ships against a target that objectively only requires hundreds. Their leadership structure is rigid and top-heavy, and this extends to active engagements. An attack plan is developed ahead of time by the commander overseeing the operation—usually a ‘Navarchos,’ which is roughly equivalent to an admiral rank—and executed on by the ship captains.”

  Brigadier Jenner frowned. “What happens when they meet real resistance? Do they have contingency plans in place to address those situations?”

  She shrugged. “Their contingency plans appear to consist of sending more ships at the problem, which they continue doing until they overwhelm the enemy.”

  “Okay.” His brow furrowed. “If they enjoy nearly unlimited reserves, how are we going to counter them?”

  She tapped a disk on the table. “We can’t match their numbers, not in a decade of round-the-clock production. But we do enjoy two advantages. Our craft aren’t merely extraordinarily resilient, they’re also quick and agile. And so is our command structure.” She gestured in Rychen’s direction.

  He cleared his throat. “I have some ideas on this. Well, one idea, really. Turn them loose.”

  Bastian eyed him down the table. “Turn who loose?”

  “Everyone. We’re going to have to beat the enemy by being unpredictable. By being clever. This is why we started putting Prevos and their Artificials in our ships in the first place, right? Since we went to all the trouble, we should consider making good
use of them. This is how.”

  Rychen had broached the idea to Miriam this morning, so in fairness she’d had more time to consider it than the others, and she backed him up now.

  “I agree. Every ship captain and Artificial/Prevo pair will act under our rules of engagement, objectives and the limits we’ve proscribed. We need to trust them to abide by these strictures and let them do their jobs. Beyond those constraints, there is no playbook—simply experience, a feel for the battlefield and gut combat instinct. This should be our modus operandi for not only large-scale conflicts but interdiction and interception missions as well.”

  Rychen laughed wryly. “That ought to screw with the Machims’ heads.”

  She allowed herself a small smile in response. “To start with.” It faded with her next statement. “There is more troubling information in the files. When I said we couldn’t match their numbers, I was understating the problem by an order of magnitude.

  “The fieldable vessel numbers we’ll be facing are so large as to be unfathomable. There’s no question we need to begin thinking about ways to deal with this challenge in the medium term. But first and by far most importantly, we need to make certain we win the first battle.”

  She squared her posture. “Admiral Rychen, I’m formally requesting an increase in the Alliance’s commitment of forces from sixty percent to seventy-five percent. Across the board, excluding Marine ground troops—for now.”

  He groaned while shaking his head. “Gagnon will balk.”

  “Then go to Chairman Anderson first. He won’t balk, and the two of you can coerce Gagnon into compliance. Do what you have to, but get it approved.”

  With a dramatic sigh he motioned toward the ceiling in resignation. “Consider it done. Somehow.”

  She shifted her attention down the table. “Field Marshal—”

  Bastian nodded tersely. “It won’t be a problem.”

  Surprised, she let the silence linger a little too long.