The Short End: Broken Galaxy Book Four

by Phil Huddleston

  Helen nodded in agreement.

  “So, the real question, then. Will they do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ollie. “But I think so. I think they are pissed off enough to take action. If they can find someone who has some leadership ability, I think we may have a shot.”

  Helen looked a question at him.

  “Can we help them on that?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they need to work that out on their own. They need to find someone who’s willing to step up to the plate and lead them, in spite of the danger. And I don’t think we have enough insight into their culture to do that for them.”

  Leaning back onto the couch, Ollie got quiet for a while as he thought about their situation.

  Being a spy on the enemy home planet was the last thing he had expected to be doing at this point in his career.

  But that was before Admiral Rita Page had called Ollie into her office and asked him to volunteer.

  He had stood at attention in front of her, but she had waved him to a chair.

  “Major Coston, I would like to offer you the most dangerous job in the Fleet,” she started out. “One that is practically guaranteed to get you killed if you make the slightest mistake. I would not ordinarily ask this of anyone; but we have tremendous need. You know how slim our survival was in the recent battles with Zukra and the Ashkelon; and you know there are more battles to come, none of which we can be assured of winning. We need every possible advantage in this war if we are to prevent humanity from being overwhelmed and rendered extinct.”

  Ollie nodded. “Of course, milady. Whatever you need.”

  Rita looked at him with some sadness in her eyes.

  “Ollie, I want you to go to Ashkelon, disguised as a Dariama citizen from Dekanna. I want you to instigate an underground movement to overthrow Zukra and try to stop this war. You can use sabotage, bribery, coercion, anything that comes to mind. You’ll be my ‘hornet’. Sting these Ashkelon bastards where it hurts.”

  Ollie began to get the idea. But an immediate objection came to his mind.

  “Milady, there’s some pretty significant differences between humans and the Dariama. Their extended ears, for one thing. Different elbow and knee joints. How will I be able to pass for one of them?”

  Rita looked grim.

  “That’s where the pain point comes in. You’ll have to undergo some plastic surgery on your ears. Wear loose, floppy clothing to cover up the knee and elbow joints. Learn to walk in that crooked way they have. And even then, you’ll have to stay indoors during daytime, and only go out at night. Even with the plastic surgery on your ears, you’ll have to always wear a turban when you go out. It’s not going to be easy.”

  Ollie nodded. He began to see the essence of the plan.

  Rita continued.

  “You’ll need at least one other person to go with you, maybe two. At least one of them should be Nidarian - they can move freely around Mosalia since there is a substantial Nidarian presence there.”

  Ollie thought about it for a moment.

  “I’d like to take Yuello, that Nidarian cook in the wardroom. He can easily pass as our cook and housekeeper. And he’s very sharp. And if she’ll take the job, Helen Frost. She’s my second in command. Her command of Nidarian is excellent, probably better than mine, so she’ll have no trouble communicating.”

  Rita hesitated, but finally spit it out.

  “Is she the right color?”

  Ollie realized what Rita was saying. The Dariama as a species were universally brown, as he was. That was undoubtedly a big part of the reason Rita had chosen him.

  “Yes, milady. She’ll pass if we do the other things.”

  And so it had happened. When he told Helen there was a mission almost certain to get her killed, but critical to the survival of humanity, Helen had immediately gone to Rita and had a discussion with her. Ollie wasn’t privy to the conversation, but when Helen came out of Rita’s office, she was on Ollie’s mission.

  Looking across the table at Helen now, Ollie realized how much he depended on her. This entire mission was fraught with danger. Even the slightest mistake in their appearance, language or presentation could bring the Ashkelon secret police down on them. And Helen was remarkable in keeping them focused on the details that kept them alive.

  It wasn’t an easy life. They had been on Ridendo for three months now, attempting to jump-start a resistance movement among disaffected Ashkelon.

  They had concentrated on ex-Navy officers who had been booted out of Zukra’s “new order” fleet because they weren’t aggressive enough, or loyal enough, or fanatical enough. It was a slow process, and one that put their lives on the line every time they stepped out the door of their safe house.

  But they had a start now. They had finally made contact with a small group of disaffected ex-officers - a group willing to consider the concept of a resistance movement. If they could get that snowball rolling downhill - recruit others, get a movement that would grow on its own - then their job would be half-done.

  The other half of their job would then begin.

  Sabotage.

  To date, they had not started on that aspect of their mission. Rita had directed them to ensure they got the Resistance movement off the ground first.

  But once they had a self-sustaining Resistance movement in operation, Ollie and Helen would start destroying anything of value which would sting the Ashkelon.

  Ollie was deep in a reverie, thinking through the many problems they faced, when Helen said something.

  “What?”

  “I said…are you listening this time?”

  “Yes, I’m listening. What did you say?”

  “I said I want to sleep with you tonight.”

  Ollie looked at Helen. There was surprise in him, but not as much as he expected. He realized he had felt this coming. Helen had been making all the signs lately. And he had felt some stirrings himself. Three months was a long time to be the only Humans on a planet.

  But…there was the mission.

  “You report to me. We’re in a dangerous situation. I don’t think we can do that,” Ollie replied.

  “Bullshit,” said Helen. “You and I both know it won’t affect the mission. We’re not two wet-nose ensigns just coming out of the Academy.”

  “Well…yeah, you’ve got a point,” Ollie said grudgingly. He hesitated, then spoke again. “But…well…there’s one other thing…”

  Helen had been half-sitting, half-lying on the chair opposite Ollie. Now Helen got up, came across to him, and pushed him all the way down on the couch. Then she lay down on top of him, pressing herself into him.

  “What?” she asked.

  Ollie nearly groaned out loud at the need in his body. But he fought it off.

  “Well…I have…”

  “You have?” Helen pushed her body even more into him, putting pressure on the part of him that wanted her so much.

  “I mean…I have feelings for you…”

  Helen paused in her push against him. “Oh,” she said. “Gotcha. So what’s the problem? Seems like you’d want this even more.”

  Ollie closed his eyes, struggling to talk. “I mean…women are different from men. This will only make me want you more. But sometimes…with women…”

  “Oh, I see,” Helen said. “You think if we sleep together, then I’ll lose interest in a more serious relationship.”

  Ollie nodded, although by this time he was playing with her hair in a distracted fashion. He was losing ground fast. He knew he wouldn’t be able to talk much longer.

  Helen leaned down and kissed him, long and hard and deep. As Ollie gave up the fight and his body took over, he heard Helen make one last statement.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  Chapter Five

  Dekanna System

  Gas Giant

  The Merlin II fighter blasted through space at 40% of light speed. At that velocity, bright sparks flashed off the nose like
sparklers at a Fourth of July celebration. The gravity gradient generator in the nose of the ship fought to protect the fighter from the incredible energies of such a speed, pushing stray hydrogen molecules and particles of space dust to the sides.

  And if by some incredible bad luck anything larger than a pea was missed by the long-range radar and lidar of the fighter, and it failed to dodge aside in time…

  Well, the results would be a cataclysm greater than many Hiroshima-size atomic bombs. The energies released by a collision at these speeds were beyond the ability of a Human mind to comprehend.

  In the distance, a big gas giant loomed large in the cockpit VR, filling the entire left side of the pilot’s view. It was streaked with colors - browns, licorice, dark cherry - and sported a tiny, almost invisible ring system.

  Decelerating hard at negative 300G true, the Merlin’s frame groaned as the fighter performed a tight double slingshot around the huge planet and its first moon, a stark body with nothing on the surface except the pockmarks of ancient craters. As it finished its pass, the fighter came out of its maneuver behind a Dariama destroyer, facing directly into its starboard engine.

  “Consider yourself dead, Captain,” called Lieutenant Commander Michelle “Winnie” Winston, grinning from ear to ear, as she pressed a button on her sidestick and fired a simulated gamma lance at the destroyer in front of her. The fighter’s AI generated a satisfying simulated explosion in her VR.

  In the destroyer in front of her, another AI blanked all the consoles on the bridge for five seconds, letting the destroyer’s bridge crew know they had been “killed” by the fighter behind them.

  “Crap!” yelled the destroyer’s captain, Ziollo.

  The five-foot tall Nidarian captain was no rookie. She had served as Tactical Officer on the cruiser Qupporre in the first Earth-Ashkelon battles in the Sol System, and the more recent battles in the Ashkelon home system. She knew her business.

  But Winnie in her Merlin was a force of nature, the best of the best of the EDF training team assigned to the Dariama.

  Slamming her fist down on the arm of her command chair, Ziollo continued her tirade.

  “Crap, crap, crap!” she yelled at no one in particular. Her native language, Nidarian, had few curse words. But that was not a handicap for her or the rest of the Nidarians serving with the EDF. They had adopted the curse words of the Humans with great relish. And were quite adept at using them.

  “It’s not so bad, Captain,” smiled her XO, Commander Naditta. “We took out a cruiser and five fighters before she got us.”

  Ziollo glared at him.

  “We’re still dead,” she growled.

  “Aye, mum, but I doubt any of the Ashkelon pilots are as good as Winnie. In the real world, we’d have smoked that last fighter as well.”

  Ziollo grunted, still unhappy.

  “I hope you’re right. But I’m still pissed off. I waltzed right into her little trap. I can’t believe I did that.”

  Naditta shrugged and smiled.

  “That’s why we train, Mum. We’ll never fall for that again.”

  Ziollo sighed and stood up from her command chair as the bridge crew relaxed a bit, the exercise over.

  “XO, take us back to base. I’ll be in my day cabin.”

  Naditta nodded and gestured to the Tactical Officer, who had heard the orders and was already laying in a course to their home base, the largest moon of planet Dekanna. Ziollo walked to the hatch in the back of the bridge that led to her day cabin and entered, still pissed at getting ‘killed’ in the day’s exercise.

  Sitting at her desk, she had to smile, though, as she thought it over.

  Thank the stars Winnie’s on our side. I’d hate to be the poor dumb Ashkelon bastard that goes up against her. And now I have to buy her dinner tonight!

  Heaving a sigh, Ziollo turned to her eternal ‘paperwork’, as the Humans called it - even though there was no ‘paper’ involved. She was always puzzled by the inconsistency of their language. So many of their idioms made no sense at all!

  But…paperwork. That’s what they called it, even though it was all electronic on her tablet. She leaned into it, processing through dozens of miscellaneous communiques, maintenance forms, crew actions and requisitions.

  Beans, bullets, and requisitions, she thought to herself. The life of a warship. Hours and hours of paperwork followed by moments of sheer terror.

  called the ship’s AI several hours later.

  Uh-oh.

  “Acknowledge the message and reply that I’ll be there. Notify the XO I’m moving to my cabin.”

 

  Ziollo got up and went down the circular stairs to her personal cabin one deck below. One of her three husbands - Four - was lying on his bunk, reading. Within their six-way group marriages, Nidarians didn’t use full names; they used a numbering system that reflected when they had joined the marriage. Something that always confused Humans who overheard them talking to one another.

  Glancing at her, he spoke in Nidarian.

  “What’s up, One?”

  “Sobong called a full staff meeting.”

  “Oh. Well, you’ll be fine. She likes you,” he replied.

  “Yeah,” Ziollo replied, stripping off her uniform. “As much as she likes anybody. Which is nobody.”

  As her Four nodded, Ziollo stepped into the shower and started scrubbing. For a Nidarian, cleaning the body was a ritual that could take an inordinate amount of time. Ziollo had been known to take a shower for twenty-five minutes.

  But not today. Today she had to prepare for a meeting with Admiral Sobong and her entire staff.

  Which could mean only one thing.

  Something had changed.

  Dekanna System

  Dariama Naval HQ

  The Dariama base on the largest moon of the planet Dekanna was large and well-built. The carpet was soft, and the walls had a pastel shade of blue that was soothing to the mind. The air was well-conditioned, with little of the metallic tang that was so common on the warships and fighters of the fleet.

  The Dariama were no slouches when it came to technology; they had taken the original Merlin fighter designs brought to them by Winnie and upgraded them significantly, resulting in the Merlin II. The new models had a tuned gamma lance that could reach out 5,000 klicks, instead of the 4,500 klicks of the original design. Other changes had been incorporated to make the fighters more maneuverable and provide better protection for the pilots.

  But in other ways, the Dariama were a strange species. In ancient times, according to Admiral Sobong - before the collapse of the Golden Empire that led to the Dark Ages and the Broken Galaxy - the Dariama had been mostly engineers, building new technology for the Golden Empire of two thousand years prior.

  “In fact, it’s highly likely we designed Dragon,” Sobong had once told Winnie. “Nearly all new warships of that era came out of our design shops. We were the specialist engineers for the entire Empire.”

  “But…” Winnie had begun, then suddenly stopped as she realized she had been about to say something that might be taken as an insult.

  Sobong had smiled.

  “But why are we so timid in war now, if we were the weapons builders of the old Empire?”

  Winnie had shrugged, somewhat embarrassed.

  “We’re not as timid now as you might think, Commander, I can assure you,” Sobong had said. “We know what the other species say about us. They call us cowards, afraid to fight. And we were, two thousand years ago when the Empire fell. But time will tell if we are still those cowardly engineers that the stories tell. Time will tell.”

  Now, Winnie met Ziollo at the entrance to Sobong’s briefing room. They had been working together for months, acting as technical advisers to the Dariama, teaching them lessons learned from the recent battles with the Ashkelon. They greeted each other with a slig
ht hug.

  “I guess I owe you dinner tonight, Winnie,” Ziollo said sheepishly.

  “Yep,” Winnie agreed. “I need to think of something expensive.”

  That made Ziollo laugh.

  “Every meal in the commissary is the same price, I believe,” Ziollo responded to her.

  “Even so,” grinned Winnie. “Maybe I’ll have two meals!”

  Entering the conference room, they took their seats. There were a couple of Dariama from Sobong’s staff already there, at the other end of the table. Winnie and Ziollo sat in the middle, halfway between the others and the head of the table.

  Admiral Sobong swept into the room, trailed by her Chief of Staff and a bevy of aides and assistants. As Sobong sat down at the head of the table, the rest took places around her and in the corners of the room, depending on their rank.

  Sobong waited until it was quiet, glanced once at Winnie and Ziollo, and started speaking.

  “As you know, we Dariama are basically a race of engineers. We like computers. We like modeling and simulation. In most cases, we base our most important and fundamental decisions on simulations of the various controllable parameters of the situation and the most likely outcomes of those simulations.

  Sobong paused, gazing around the room, then returned to her speech. It was clear to Winnie that the preamble Sobong was making was primarily directed toward her.

  “We have modeled the present situation backward and forward, up and down, until we’ve exhausted all reasonable alternatives - and even unreasonable alternatives - trying to ascertain the proper path to take in the face of the Ashkelon and Nidarian threat to our society.”

  Sobong laid down her tablet and let her gaze traverse around the room, her face a study in bad news.

  “The short version is that it is impossible to defeat Zukra and Garatella. Even with the combined forces of ourselves, the Humans, the Taegu, the Bagrami, and the breakaway Nidarian detachment that still serves in the Human fleet…”