by Marko Kloos
The crew spent the remaining hour running through system checklists and bantering. Aden did the required approach check-ins when they passed the outer, then the middle marker. They received their final approach direction once they were at the inner marker, and he shunted the data over to Maya’s station and confirmed it verbally at the same time.
“Cleared for final and hard dock at Alpha Five-Three, OMV-2022,” he read back to Pallas One’s docking control.
“Inbound for Alpha Five-Three,” Maya confirmed. “ETA eleven minutes.”
Zephyr finished her counterburn the moment they passed the inner marker. They had scrubbed all the speed they’d worked up at great fuel expense over the last few hours, and now the ship was coasting on the residual velocity, just a few meters per second below the mandated speed limit beyond the inner marker. Maya turned the ship bow forward with the maneuvering thrusters again, then turned the controls over to the computer.
“Two hours, twenty-nine minutes, thirty-eight seconds from the RP3 beacon to the inner marker,” she said.
Both Henry and Decker whistled softly.
Next to Aden, Tess merely let out a satisfied little chuckle.
“That’s almost a half hour off the old record,” Decker said from above. “Be a good while before anyone beats that run, I think.”
Aden switched the display in front of him to show an outside view of the ship. He knew what Pallas looked like from pictures and Mnemosyne feeds, but it was something different to see the planet from only a few thousand kilometers away, even if it was through yet another camera lens. Pallas was small, the second smallest of Gaia’s planets after Hades, but it looked the most intimidating from space. Maybe that was just his subconscious at work, his knowledge that Gretia had suffered most of its wartime casualties down there on the mountainsides and in the tunnels, but the planet looked unwelcoming—harsh and austere.
“Never been here, huh?” Tristan said when he saw what Aden was viewing.
“Never,” Aden repeated. “Have you been down to the surface?”
“Yes, a few times. Had some leisure time, wanted to see what it was like. And try something other than whatever they serve the tourists up on the stations.”
Tristan pointed at the expanse of the planet that filled up most of the camera’s field of view. It was daylight on the hemisphere below Pallas Three, and Aden could see the mountains down there even from orbit. The sunlight glistened on the ice-covered peaks and the waters of the narrow seas between the mountain chains, higher mountains and deeper seas than anywhere else in the system.
“All the cities are on the equator,” Tristan said. “On terraces halfway up the mountains. Only place where it’s warm enough. The stations are right above, on tethers. Freight climber takes five days to get from the ground to the station. You could see the cable if we came in at a lower approach angle. Acheroni graphene.”
“Five days,” Aden said. “You must have wanted to see the place badly.”
“Oh, they make it worth the trip. Great restaurants in the passenger climbers. And let me tell you, the views are worth it. Gods, and the liquor. Watching a sunset from a bar that’s a thousand kilometers above the mountaintops while sipping a hundred-year-old Rhodian whisky, that’ll almost make you believe in the gods. If the gravity wasn’t such a bitch, I’d retire down there.”
“Tristan’s been everywhere.” Tess stretched in her gravity couch and yawned. “He ranks the planets strictly by food and drink. I think he’s planning to do a travel guide someday.”
“Nobody wants to watch me get drunk on five different planets.”
“Six planets,” Aden corrected.
“You couldn’t get me to drink with Gretians if you gave me a thousand ags and a free week in the finest pleasure house on Acheron,” Tristan said.
Aden felt his cheeks flush, and he was glad that everyone was strapped into their couches and mostly looking at the screens projected in front of the bulkhead instead of sitting around the table on the galley deck, where everyone would have noticed. Nobody on the crew had questioned his fictional background, and the only person who knew—Captain Decker—had kept the information to herself, leaving it up to him to determine when to come clean. Aden didn’t know when that would be, but he knew it wasn’t now, not yet. In the last three months, he had gotten comfortable with the rest of the crew, and he felt they had started to accept him as more than just a temporary addition. But revealing to a mostly Oceanian crew that he had mirror-imaged his actual lineage and citizenship, that he was a Gretian with an Oceanian mother instead of the other way around, would probably cause them to leave him at the next space station. Tristan’s casually hostile remark about Gretians just confirmed Aden’s instinct again. If they found out he had been a Blackguard as well, Aden thought there was a nontrivial chance Henry would just walk him down to the airlock deck and flush him out into space on the spot.
Right now, Aden silently thanked his mother every day for insisting that he learn both Gretian and Oceanian from the time he was old enough to start talking, and for spending months on her home planet with him every year despite his father’s dislike for her extended family visits. Plenty of people in his linguistics classes at the Gretian military academy had learned flawless Oceanian, but to his ears, none of them had really sounded like natives because they didn’t have a local accent. They didn’t sound like they were from anywhere. He sounded like an Oceanian from the city of Chryseis because his mother was one, and she had spoken with him in Oceanian almost exclusively whenever his father wasn’t around. The ability to switch his brain between languages had been as automatic as breathing to him.
His mother had left the family when his sister Solveig was just a little girl, too young to keep building on those neural pathways on her own without a constant conversation partner and model. He had continued to keep in touch with Solveig in the Mnemosyne since he’d reestablished contact with her after his release from prison, and when he had switched to Oceanian with her a few times just to see how much of their mother’s influence had stuck, Solveig had been fluent, but her upbringing had tainted her Oceanian with a prominent Gretian accent.
In the last few months, he had started to think of himself as Oceanian, convinced that it was almost the truth anyway, that his citizenship had been the result of a coin flip that could have landed on the other side just as easily. Maybe he was Aden Ragnar, and maybe he had been Aden Jansen all along. Whoever he was now, he wasn’t a Gretian Blackguard major named Aden Robertson anymore, and if he could have erased the seventeen years he had lived under that name, he would have done so without a second thought.
CHAPTER 2
DUNSTAN
“Someone’s in a big hurry,” Lieutenant Bosworth said. “Look at this, sir. He’s practically leaving contrails in space.”
Lieutenant Commander Dunstan Park, master of RNS Minotaur, swiveled around in his seat to look at the plot table, where his second-in-command was slowly turning the projection with his hands to isolate a slice of the stellar map. Minotaur was loitering in space off the current shipping lane from Rhodia to Pallas, gathering and collating data from the Mnemosyne and her own sensors to keep track of everything around her, sitting like a spider in the center of an electronic web.
“Let’s see that,” Dunstan said. “Anything off about him?”
“Negative, sir. It’s an Oceanian courier. Flight plan checks out. They’re just going fast enough to travel back in time.”
Bosworth isolated a segment of the plot and magnified it. It showed a portion of the main traffic lane as a dotted line. Half a dozen different ships were strung along the line like pearls on a bracelet, each with their ID tag and vital data next to their color-coded icon. The one Bosworth had pointed out was going down the lane so fast that it looked like an antiship missile homing in on a target.
“They are really moving. What’s the acceleration?”
Bosworth checked the number and let out a low whistle.
“Fif
teen g, sir.”
“Good gods. Must be an express delivery. Check the type and registry. I didn’t think there was a merchant out there that could pull that sort of acceleration.”
On the other side of the plot table, Lieutenant Mayler opened a data window above his console and consulted the database. When he found the information, he flicked the relevant pages over to Bosworth’s plot display, where they attached themselves to the fast-moving icon.
“OMV-2022 Zephyr,” Mayler said. “Database says she’s a speed yacht. Tanaka Spaceworks model two thirty-nine.”
“Want me to ping them for a status check?” Bosworth asked.
“No, let them do their thing,” Dunstan replied. “They’re not breaking any regulations. But do save that drive profile for future reference. I’m not sure we have anything in the fleet that can chase something this fast.”
“They can outrun us, but they can’t outrun a Mnemosyne signal. Speed is fine, but system-wide arrest powers are final.”
“Quite right, Bosworth. But still.” Dunstan looked at the speed readout of OMV Zephyr again with some envy. Minotaur could do ten g, and maybe break eleven with all the systems running at 100 percent. An extra four g on top of that would make her almost invulnerable against anything launched at her from more than a hundred kilometers away. The ship’s defensive AI gained a few million calculations with each second they could put between themselves and an incoming threat, and an extra g or two could make the difference between life or death in a close fight.
“Look at that power output, on a five-hundred-ton hull. That’s a ridiculously large drive for a hull that size,” Mayler contributed. “Speed yacht, she’s made of composites, most likely. No armor, no weapons.”
“Speed is a kind of armor, too, Lieutenant. You don’t need titanium plating if you’re not around to take the hit,” Dunstan replied. “All right, sports time is over. Let’s get the big picture again. We’re the only RN ship in the area today. It won’t do if we miss a pirate because we’re busy watching a speed run.”
Lieutenant Bosworth closed the data readouts and restored the plot display to its default magnification state, which showed most of the space between Rhodia and Pallas and all the active traffic going back and forth on the transit route. Even though the two planets were almost in opposition this month, and the lowest-energy transfer path between them was at its shortest in four decades, it was still a lot of space to patrol for the handful of light cruisers and frigates the navy had assigned to police duties. Information traveled between ships and planets in an instant, but ships did not. Even for a fast warship like Minotaur, it took hours or days to reach a merchant who was shouting for assistance, and the pirates that were plaguing the transit lanes didn’t give the courtesy of advance notice before attacking. Most of the time, the navy ships arrived too late to do anything but write reports or pluck escape pods out of space.
Dunstan leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his coffee. He looked around in the Action Information Center and watched the command crew return to their tasks. Bosworth and Mayler were the most senior members of his command staff, and they were both ten years his junior. Most of the fresh AIC crew, like Midshipman Boyer, were younger than the ship. Minotaur had been a bit long in the tooth even before the big war had started, and while the networked systems and the weapons had been upgraded to keep with the times over the years, the hull was showing its age more and more with every deployment. But with the resurgence in piracy since last year, the Rhodian Navy was chronically short on deep-space patrol units now, and fleet command had postponed the planned decommissioning of Minotaur in favor of one more refit and overhaul.
“Prepare to end silent running,” Dunstan ordered. “All hands, get ready for gravity. Helm, spin us around and do a wake check. And then bring the drive up and float us over to the transit lane.”
“Wake check, aye,” Midshipman Boyer said from the helm station. “Commencing turn.”
The plot spun slowly as Boyer turned the ship with the maneuvering thrusters until the nose and the main sensor array pointed at the area of space behind Minotaur. Dunstan watched the holographic display as they completed their turn, but no surprise contacts popped up in the neighborhood. They had caught one pirate by doing a routine wake check three months ago, and ever since then, Dunstan had a tingly feeling in the pit of his stomach every time they repeated the maneuver.
“Wake check is negative, sir,” Lieutenant Mayler said.
“All right. Boyer, bring her back around and light the drive. One gravity, nice and leisurely.”
“Turn around and burn for one g, aye,” Midshipman Boyer acknowledged.
A dozen decks below the AIC, Minotaur’s plasma drive came to life with a low thrumming sound. Dunstan felt his own weight again as the acceleration pushed him back into his gravity couch, a welcome sensation after a few hours of weightlessness. He unbuckled his harness and got out of the couch, then stretched his legs and back slowly with a low, satisfied groan.
Over by the plot table, a flashing red message popped up above the situational display.
“Incoming priority transmission, sir,” Lieutenant Bosworth called out.
“I see it.” Dunstan walked over to the plot table and plucked the message off the display, then expanded it to see the content. When he was finished reading it, he let out a breath he didn’t remember holding.
“It’s a crash buoy signal,” he told the AIC crew. “It’s from RNS Danae. Just the automated broadcast, nothing else.”
He flicked the message over to Lieutenant Bosworth’s station.
“Bosworth, check where Danae is supposed to be right now, and see if you can get a hold of them on comms.”
“Aye, sir,” Bosworth replied. He brought up a screen and started populating it with data. Dunstan looked at the plot, which showed every ship in a ten-million-kilometer sphere around Minotaur. The situational display had no hint of trouble—no other warships, no unidentified contacts, just dozens of civilian freighters and transports plodding from planet to planet on the lowest-energy transfer routes and going about their business.
“Maybe it’s a malfunction,” he thought out loud. “Danae popped one of her crash buoys by accident.”
“Their last position update was two hours ago,” Bosworth said. “They were just short of Oceana space and getting ready for turnaround.”
“What about comms?”
“No luck, sir. Their node is offline. They’re either running silent, or their comms gear is malfunctioning.”
“All the way down to the tertiary circuits? Doubtful.”
Dunstan looked at the display and tried to ignore the unsettling feeling that had lodged in his middle suddenly.
“Whatever happened to them, we have to go and render assistance. Bring the gravmag system online. Helm, lay in a course for the location of that buoy and prepare for a full burn. Everyone will be suited up and in their couches in five minutes. And let fleet know that we’ve picked up a crash beacon from Danae and intend to investigate.”
“Aye, sir,” Boyer and Bosworth acknowledged at the same time.
And let’s hope it’s just a spectacular tech glitch, Dunstan thought as he walked over to the suit locker on the far bulkhead of the AIC to put on his vacsuit. There were other explanations for a fleet unit dropping off the network and releasing a crash buoy, but he didn’t want to contemplate those. Danae was a light cruiser, twenty years newer and twice as big and powerful as Minotaur. Light cruisers were designed to hunt and kill pirates, even well-armed ones, and they didn’t fall prey to ambushes, especially not ones so sudden that the crew wouldn’t be able to get a detailed distress call out. But when Dunstan looked at the flashing red text of the crash buoy broadcast, that unsettling feeling in his middle intensified.
“And see who else is in the neighborhood,” he said. “Check with the Oceanians, too. I’d feel better with some backup behind us. Even if it’s just one of their little patrol corvettes.”
Even at nine gravities, it took Minotaur four and a half hours to intercept the source of the automated crash buoy signal, and with every passing hour, Dunstan’s feeling of unease grew. Halfway through the intercept trajectory, Minotaur had to flip around and counterburn, which turned the main sensor array away from their direction of travel. On the plot, the crash buoy sent out its signal with the mindless regularity of a computer brain, one broadcast every thirty seconds.
Thirty minutes out, Dunstan connected the oxygen feed of his suit to the couch and reclined into the high-g position.
“XO, sound action stations. Tactical, energize the point defense and set it to standby mode. Send out the recon drones for an active sensor sweep. No point staying quiet. If someone’s waiting for us, they’ve seen us coming already.”
The sharp, grating klaxon sound of the action stations alarm rang out in the AIC. Every member of the crew was now buckling into a gravity couch and plugging in life-support lines. Even an armored warship was a fragile object in the hostile environment of space, and in the history of zero-g warfare, no ship had ever been in a shooting engagement without taking at least some damage. The couches kept bodies from crashing into things while the defensive AI maneuvered the ship, and the supply umbilicals kept them breathing if the hull got pierced by shrapnel or rail-gun projectiles. But Dunstan knew that he wasn’t the only human with an instinctive aversion to being strapped to a stationary couch in the face of danger. It went against the fight-or-flight instinct, and no amount of training or experience would ever make him fully comfortable with going into a dangerous situation immobilized on his back.
“Point defense is energized and on standby,” Lieutenant Mayler said. “Drones away.”
On the tactical display, two dozen red triangles swarmed out from the center of the orb and rushed outward at a hundred meters per second in a wedge-shaped formation. The recon drones extended the eyes and ears of Minotaur and allowed her crew to see the area of space that was obscured by the visual and radiation noise of their drive plume.
