by Peter Nealen
Only then did the leader, a gaunt woman with a shaven head and burning, maddened eyes, utter a phrase in a facsimile of a language no human throat was designed to utter, lift her arms toward the sky, and mash the detonator button in her fist.
Two floors below, the last bomb-laden truck detonated. The center of the headquarters building momentarily disappeared in a cloud of ugly black smoke and dust. When the debris began to settle out of the air, almost the entire center of the “U” was gone.
The Misericorde was a Thunderbolt-class star cruiser, a mountainous, needle-tipped arrowhead, painted red and gold in the colors of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster. She hovered in a stately orbit only a few dozen kilometers from Dawn Station, the first and still largest orbital station over Provenia. The great wheel of Dawn Station had been turning for nearly seventy years, and ships were coming and going from the central hub constantly. The Station was run by the Provenian Central Government, and as such, most interstellar traders found a warmer reception there than down on the surface. The Families held less sway on the Station.
Ship’s Master Gaz Orr floated above his command chair on the Misericorde’s command deck, surveying his domain. He had set the holo tank to a real-time vid pickup of their surroundings, and was admiring the view as he sipped tea from a zero-g bulb. It was somewhat fortified with Krovya Nectar, but they were in orbit over Provenia. Any pirates operating in that sector were not the type to attempt to tangle with a Tancredus Cluster star cruiser, least of all one of the Thunderbolt-class.
He sighed. Provenia was the farthest stop on their patrol; after this they would be moving back along the coreward edge of the Perseus Arm, visiting various systems that had appealed to the Order for protection. It would take another twenty thousand hours, near enough, to finally get back to the Caer on Sokorova. He was already tired.
He looked at the mostly yellowish-gray orb of Provenia below and sighed. It certainly wouldn’t be called a pretty world, at least not by any of the more sophisticated. On the edge of the Ietran Bubble, with a fifty-parsec void between it and the nearest star in any direction, it was drab and still sparsely populated, dominated by hidebound clans that still thought their status as first settlers mattered to anyone else in the galaxy.
He wouldn’t be sorry to put this world behind their drives. And he was sure none of the rest of the Knights would be, either. Provenia was a waste of their time. The Order’s resources were limited, and needed to be devoted to more important worlds, more important causes. Piddling little rebellions and fights with the primitive indigs weren’t Order business.
The comm board pinged. The command deck was currently at a skeleton manning; Orr had seen no reason to maintain a full operational crew on duty while they were in orbit over this speck. Lazily, the only other watch officer on the deck, Ven Detch, shoved off from his spot near the navigation station, expertly catching himself with a handhold near the comm station. Ven Detch had been born on the Hasstoria Habitat, and was as comfortable in zero gravity as he was in nearly two gees. His bone structure still had the graceful, almost bird-like slenderness that his upbringing had led to, though he’d had extensive grafts and mod injections to make sure his body could withstand far higher gravities than most spacers or light-worlders.
Ven looked at the screen with a bored expression that suddenly froze. His eyebrows rose as he turned to face Gaz Orr.
Something about the man’s expression made Orr put the bulb aside. Something was wrong. Was something actually happening in this backwater?
“Rebels just executed a series of coordinated strikes across the human-inhabited continent,” Ven Detch said. “One of them actually penetrated into the PDF Headquarters building, coopted the deep space transmitter, and sent a signal toward the outer system before they blew themselves up and half the headquarters building with them.”
Gaz Orr’s eyebrows rose, but the momentary excitement he’d felt was fading. Just more dirtside shenanigans. Nothing for the ship’s master of a star cruiser to do about it, unless Knight Commander Char Donh called for an orbital strike. And even that seemed boring and pointless at this point. It had been a long patrol, with few challenges worthy of the Knights, much less the Misericorde.
“So, their little insurgency is heating up, is it?” he said with a yawn. “I do have to say, using the PDF’s own transmission gear to send their propaganda broadcast was a bit of a stroke of genius. Little more than grandstanding, but still…”
Ven Detch was still frowning. “I don’t think that it was a propaganda broadcast, sir,” he said slowly. He had turned back and was tapping keys on the comm station. “It was heavily encrypted, and it’s not a cypher that I am familiar with.” He straightened, still frowning down at the comm station’s screen. “If it was a propaganda broadcast, then it wasn’t meant for anyone on Provenia, or in the orbitals.”
Gaz Orr felt a frown furrowing his own brow. That was strange. “It was a directional signal?” he asked, as he reached for a handhold to propel himself toward the comm station.
“Yes, it was,” Ven Detch replied. He rattled off the arc of the transmission’s beam. A moment’s triangulation, and he said, “It was aimed toward Draguyen.” The system’s sole gas giant, Draguyen was relatively close, only about ten light-minutes.
Gaz Orr’s eyes narrowed, as he began to run through the possibilities. Pirates seemed unlikely; there was little on Provenia that they would want. And yet, based on the precious little he remembered from the intelligence updates they’d received upon entering the system, the attack described on the surface seemed a bit excessive for the off-world rebels on Provenia.
It didn’t make sense. There was nothing about Provenia to make it an attractive target for anyone. The only reason it was still on the Misericorde’s patrol route was because the Order had not yet gotten around to striking it from the records; the original plea for help had proved to be about the rebels, after a particularly gruesome massacre one hundred twelve kilo-hours ago, and the Order simply didn’t have time for such things.
No, wait. That wasn’t why the Provenians appealed to the Order. That was just the first action the Order conducted on the planet. And until we came, the only one. But the rebellion wasn’t the reason for the formal agreement…
Gdan. His blood ran cold.
He reached over to his command chair and punched a red button on the armrest’s touchscreen. Red lights began to blink on the overhead, and a brassy trumpet blared over the Misericorde’s intercom system. Ven Detch looked at him, his eyes widening.
“I hope that I’m wrong,” Gaz Orr said, as he pulled himself into his command chair, acutely aware that he wasn’t wearing his armor.
Just over six hundred kilo-hours before, the M’tait had raided Gdan. That planet was still recovering from the devastation those monsters had wreaked; it made Provenia seem like paradise, which was why many of the so-called “Latecomers” the Provenians disdained so much came from Gdan. The few who could make it off that blighted, desolate world, did.
Can we handle a Huntership? He was sure that they could. Of course, there were no records he knew of detailing an encounter between a Huntership and a Thunderbolt-class star cruiser, but he was confident in his ship. The questions arose when one started getting into a possible larger force.
How many ships struck Gdan? He had to look it up as the command crew, most of them in armor, unlike him and Ven Detch, scrambled out of the lift, swimming and swinging their way to their stations. Five. Five Hunterships against one star cruiser and half a dozen armed lighters, when no recorded encounter where the odds were any less than five to one against the M’tait ended in anything but disaster.
He took a deep breath as he strapped himself in, his fingers swiping the informational window aside and beginning the sequence of commands to bring the Misericorde to full combat readiness.
Well, I was complaining about the boredom. I just suppose that I would prefer if I was going to die in battle, that it be defending an important w
orld, not someplace like Provenia.
After an hour of preparation, Gaz Orr was starting to wonder if he hadn’t overreacted. After all, there had never been a documented case of humans or anyone else working with or for the M’tait. That would require communication with the enigmatic, spacefaring predators, and the M’tait never communicated with anyone. That was a known and established fact. They came, they destroyed, they rounded people up in vast herds, and they left, with nothing but devastation in their wake.
And there was no sign of any ships incoming from the vicinity of Draguyen. Space in that direction was empty and silent except for the hiss of background radiation and the pops and crackles of radio noise from the gas giant itself.
Once the command deck was better staffed, he turned command over to Raz Cha, and retired to his own chambers below, to don his armor. Every bit as functional as the ground Knights’ armor, it was far more elaborate, as was fitting for a ship’s master. Baroque patterns were etched and inlaid onto every surface, with the stars-and-spear crest of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster prominent on the breastplate. As he settled his helmet on his head and sealed it at the neck ring, he felt properly dressed, and much of his rattled confidence returned.
There has been no M’tait activity in the Ietran Bubble in over four hundred kilo-hours. They’ve moved on. This is likely just what I thought it was initially; just rebel grandstanding.
Even so, he still returned to the command deck in his full armor, taking the conn back from Raz Cha and settling himself into his acceleration couch. “Report,” he said.
“The sky is still clear,” Ven Detch reported. “No emissions out of the ordinary, no contacts aside from the long-range freighter coming in from Ostenya.”
Gaz Orr nodded. There was some interstellar traffic in the Provenian system, mainly for luxury goods and high tech that the locals could barely afford. Most such interstellar trade was that way; there were simply too many resources within any given star system for any kind of raw materials or staples of life to be worth the expense of shipping across the vast gulfs of space. There was communication between star systems because people wanted there to be, not because it was necessary. Ostenya certainly didn’t need anything from Provenia, and as miserable as the yellow world below them was, they didn’t really need anything from Ostenya, either. Of course, offworld machinery that couldn’t yet be produced could accelerate a world’s development, and having someone else mine rare resources was often worth the cost…
A whooping alarm suddenly halted his woolgathering. “Contacts!” Ven Detch called out, an uncharacteristic strain in his voice.
Gaz Orr didn’t need the announcement. He could see well enough in the holo tank.
A cloud of yellow dots marking unidentified contacts had appeared in the tank, barely outside the orbit of Provenia’s second moon. There were a lot of them. His eyes widened behind his visor; there were too many to count individually, but an estimate of one hundred to one hundred fifty was not unrealistic.
“Battle stations,” he said, proud that he managed to maintain his aloof, almost bored tone. Best for a Ship’s Master to remain detached, even as his blood was turning to ice. The contacts were already starting to turn red as more information came in, and side windows were automatically popping up with profiles of the contacts as they were identified.
Most of them were vaguely irregular spikes, ranging in size from a few hundred meters in length to nearly a thousand. They didn’t look constructed; their angular but ever so slightly asymmetrical shapes brought to mind spires of volcanic rock rather than starships. But even though he’d never seen them before in real life, Gaz Orr knew M’tait Hunterships when he saw them.
Worse, the ship leading the charge was the size of an asteroid, nearly five kilometers long and almost as wide. The computer had no historical record of a M’tait ship of its size or configuration. It looked like a fanged mountain hurtling through space on blood-red drive plumes.
“How are we supposed to fight that?” someone muttered, forgetting command deck discipline in the shock of the sight.
Gaz Orr was already programming in flight paths, though, and said nothing as he piped them over to Kor Ban at firing control, so that he could determine firing arcs. The question lingered in the tense, brittle atmosphere of the command deck, however, and echoed in Gaz Orr’s mind as he worked.
The Misericorde was a top-of-the-line Thunderbolt-class cruiser. There were few ships in the known galaxy that stood a chance, going toe-to-toe with her. She was barely twenty-five thousand hours old, with bleeding-edge sensor, targeting, and weapons tech. But even she would be badly outmatched by a single M’tait Huntership, never mind over a hundred of them.
A straight-up fight was out of the question. On the other hand, he knew that to simply run was going to go down in the annals of infamy within the Order. He still had to observe the demands of honor at least, before he ran for reinforcements.
How long will it take to gather a big enough fleet from the Ietran Bubble to face that, though? He shook off the thought. Time enough for those questions later, once they had survived the next few hours. He touched a key and addressed the entire vessel.
“This is Ship’s Master Gaz Orr,” he announced, as if any of his crew didn’t already know his name. “Provenia appears to be under attack by a fleet of M’tait Hunterships. We are badly outnumbered and outgunned, but we are Knights of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster. These degenerate destroyers are outclassed simply by virtue of facing us. All hands, brace for high acceleration and prepare for battle.”
He knew that most of that was humbug. The M’tait were horrifyingly dangerous, and no Order chest-thumping could change that fact. The best they could hope to do would be to try to damage a few of them on a high-gee pass, then go tachyonic and get away to summon reinforcements. Hopefully, the groundside forces could avoid being completely annihilated before they returned.
The low murmurs around the command deck hadn’t stopped. “How did they get so close without being detected?” someone asked. Gaz Orr couldn’t identify the voice, but he answered anyway.
“They must have stayed tachyonic until the very last second,” he said. “They outran their own emissions.” Which was either very skilled, very reckless, or both. With the M’tait, who knew?
There was no more time. He began to tap the controls to bring the Misericorde’s drives up to full power and start to break orbit.
Just how little time they had was quickly emphasized as the holo display suddenly fuzzed, icons jittering around wildly, the information windows with vector values for most of the M’tait contacts dissolving into noise and question marks. At the same time, every comm speaker on the command deck suddenly blasted and crackled with noise, that might have simply been electronic hash, but somehow sounded like a harsh, alien voice shouting words that had no meaning.
“They’re jamming everything,” Ven Detch said. “Full spectrum; the only sensors we have that are unaffected are visual.” At the ranges usually involved in space combat, the telescopes were usually considered less than effective, but at only just under two light seconds, and with the crimson drive plumes pointed toward the planet as the Hunterships decelerated, they could actually be useful. For what that was worth, against that many targets.
Several of the Provenian armed lighters had already broken orbit. Two had taken the coward’s way out, retrofiring their drives and descending toward the planet’s surface. There won’t be anywhere down there for you to hide, if they get through. When they get through. The others had accelerated, thrusting away from the planet and toward the oncoming nightmare of lurid sparks in the dark.
The lighters were simple, little more than tin cans slightly tapered at the nose and slightly flared at the drives. They weren’t terribly capable, especially not in comparison with the state-of-the-art bulk of the Misericorde. But they could still put up a fight.
Or they could if they had a chance. One of them was suddenly just gone, little more
than a polychromatic smear of light and hard radiation. Another showed no sign of having been struck by anything, but suddenly went into a hard tumble, its drive still firing, the drive plume sweeping across a third lighter’s hull, doing catastrophic damage in the process.
Gaz Orr had no idea what sort of weapons the M’tait were using. No one had ever managed to study them. The only hope of defense was to flood the EM spectrum with as much noise as possible and fly as evasively as possible. Which was a good trick under thrust and while trying to target and fire at the oncoming Hunterships.
Heavy chunks were reverberating through the hull, more felt than heard over the roar of the drive, which was still hundreds of meters below the command deck. Kor Ban was punching out the Misericorde’s X-ray laser pods. From the sounds of it, he was deploying all of them, keeping none back for later.
Which was wise of him. There probably wouldn’t be a “later.”
An electric thrum passed through the ship, and Gaz Orr felt gooseflesh rise under his armor as his hair tried to stand on end. That had been the main, spine-mounted particle beam cannon, the bore running through the ship’s centerline, only a few meters from where he lay on his acceleration couch. The bore was well-shielded, but that didn’t keep a little bit of the acceleration field’s electromagnetic discharge from leaking through with each shot. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t particularly dangerous, either.
The beam’s path was clearly visible even in the fuzzing, jumping haze of the tactical view in the holo tank. “Shut that overlay off and give me visual!” Gaz Orr grunted. The gees were piling up as the drives ramped up to full thrust, and it felt like he had an ontos on his chest.
The holo tank cleared, showing only the composite picture assembled by the ship’s computer of the telescopic feeds. The field had narrowed on the incoming M’tait ships, a threatening swarm of red fireflies from that angle. The switch had happened too late to show the faint purplish line of the particle beam, but perhaps one of the Hunterships was yawing slightly, and there might have been a luminous cloud nearby, that might have been sublimated rock or metal, or whatever they made their ships out of. Or maybe it was an illusion, brought on by high acceleration and wishful thinking.
