by Blaze Ward
Winterhome
The Jessica Keller Chronicles: Volume 8
Blaze Ward
Knotted Road Press
Contents
I. Overtures
Overture: Bedrov
Overture: Vo
Overture: Jessica
Overture: Pops
II. Call to Arms
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
III. Severnaya Zemlya
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
IV. Stalking the Beast
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLV
Chapter XLVI
Chapter XLVII
Chapter XLVIII
Chapter XLIX
Chapter L
Chapter LI
Chapter LII
Chapter LIII
Chapter LIV
Chapter LV
Chapter LVI
Chapter LVII
Chapter LVIII
Chapter LVIX
Chapter LX
V. Chapter LXXXV
Chapter LXI
Chapter LXII
Chapter LXIII
Chapter LXIV
Chapter LXV
Chapter LXVI
Chapter LXVII
Chapter LXVIII
Chapter LXIX
Chapter LXX
Chapter LXXI
Chapter LXXII
Chapter LXXIII
Chapter LXXIV
Chapter LXXV
Chapter LXXVI
Chapter LXXVII
Chapter LXXVIII
Chapter LXXIX
Chapter LXXX
Chapter LXXXI
Chapter LXXXII
Chapter LXXXIII
Chapter LXXXIV
Chapter LXXXV
VI. Epilogues
Epilogue: Keller
Epilogue: zu Arlo
Epilogue: Wiegand
Epilogue: Ulfsson
Epilogue: Wald
Winterhome Cast List
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
Part One
Overtures
Overture: Bedrov
Date of the Republic May 10, 402 Fleet Base Prime, Osynth B'Udan
Yan had wondered who they would send out, given the message of vague yet important news he had sent along to St. Legier when the folks in this area had decided to keep him and Ainsley on the frontier, rather than letting him and his new discovery aboard one of their ships.
He knew it wasn’t a bomb or a Trojan Horse, but the Imperials hadn’t been there. Wouldn’t understand.
Probably wouldn’t believe him.
Not his fucking problem.
Then Gunter Tifft walked into the warehouse room, dressed like an everyday naval officer who had opened the wrong door by mistake and wandered into the situation. Except that Gunter had a pistol on his hip.
Yan wasn’t surprised, like most people would be. But he also knew who the man was.
More importantly, what he was, and who he represented.
“Gunter,” Yan acknowledged with a brief nod.
“Bedrov,” Tifft nodded as he stepped closer and let the hatch close behind him.
They were alone in a big, open space, as Yan had specified. The walls were stripped bare, painted Imperial off-white, and too far away for Yan’s needs, but it was easier to start simple today and work his way up.
At least with Gunter Tifft, representing Imperial Authority in all its facets, someone would be listening.
Tifft came to a pause at the normal distance to snap off a salute, if Yan had happened to serve in any fleet that might necessitate such a thing. Yan presumed that was just bone-deep training on the younger man’s part.
They eyed each other for a few long moments in stillness.
Yan remembered when the kid was more fidgety.
Kid. Sure. Yan could call him that. Gunter was only barely older than Yan’s own children: Malka and Kai.
He was calmness itself now. Tall, blond, ruggedly handsome. Perfectly still.
Yan didn’t figure that the guy had graduated to assassin, but he had no doubts what Gunter Tifft did for Hendrik Baumgärtner, Emmerich zu Wachturm’s Naval Chief of Staff.
Tifft was a spy.
Made sense. Yan had gone so far off the reservation recently that the old men probably wanted to reassure themselves that Yan had stayed this side of compromised.
“So what brings me to Osynth B’Udan, Bedrov?” Gunter asked quietly, his eyes flickering to a spot on the ground a meter behind Yan’s feet. Wasn’t a smile on his face this morning.
The thing on the floor behind him wasn’t a bomb, but it would have about as much impact on the folks around here, most likely.
“I ran into something on my way here from Jessica,” Yan replied in a flat, vaguely evasive tone. “Local admirals went paranoid and sent a message to zu Wachturm for help, which they should have. He or Hendrik sent you, because they didn’t believe me.”
“You entitled the field report that you sent to us Two Bottles of Wine with a War God, Bedrov,” Tifft said sarcastically. “I doubt that anybody but the Grand Admiral would have even believed you.”
“That was on purpose,” Yan nodded. “Not everyone in your profession has the sense God gave a goose.”
Gunter grinned wryly and almost said something, but changed his mind.
“So he sent you home with something?” Gunter said. “This War God from the ancient times?”
Rather than reply, Yan turned and knelt on the floor. The room was raw metal on all sides, like an open space on a ship that had been stripped of internal bulkheads, leaving only the frames, twelve meters on a side and four meters tall.
Like a big barn in here.
The device chirped once as Yan flipped the power switch. The machine was what his Da would have called a cigar box, in overall size. Maybe a little more square, but not perfect. Black exterior made of some extruded material Yan guessed might have been a carbon-fiber-sheet, cast stronger than steel.
Chemistry had never been Yan’s strong point, stopping with some metallurgy, but he suspected that Carthage was right when the AI ship had said that most of the tech was beyond what Aquitaine and the galaxy could do right now.
Right now.
Show an engineer a thing that has been done, and they’ll figure out a way to do it, if they have to move heaven and earth in the process. Doubly so if you sneer at them in a superior way.
Yan stood and turned back to Gunter with his own smile. He remained perfectly still as the Tiki Lounge came into being around them. It was all a hologram, but Yan had never imagined you could get tha
t level of complexity without shadows of moving objects, particularly not when starting with a single beam emitter in the middle of the floor.
Somehow, it was ray-tracing itself off of every available surface with so much processing power that it could create a solid-looking image believable enough that Yan had dropped a glass through a projection once, not realizing that the table wasn’t there.
Gunter’s eyes got big and he muttered a mild profanity under his breath.
This was the Tiki Lounge, as it had been on the now-destroyed Earth Alliance Sentient Combatant Carthage. The Last Dragon. The only surviving veteran of the Concordancy War that had begun three thousand years ago with the bombardment of the Homeworld.
Gone now.
“What’ll it be, mates?” The Lord of Tiki asked as he came into being behind the old, oaken bar with the stained and dinged copper surface.
He presented as a big, gruff Irishman, to quote the old adage. Short hair the color of carrots, scarred ears and heavy face. Not as big as Vo zu Arlo, but bigger than Yan. Maybe the size of the Grand Admiral, with an extra fifteen kilos of mass around the upper body. Not fat, but strong bulk.
“Carthage, meet Imperial Naval Commander Gunter Tifft,” Yan said by way of introduction.
“Technically, I’m only an avatar of Carthage,” the bartender replied in a soft brogue. “Although I might grant you with him dead and all, I might be all that remains in this modern age.”
The bartender nodded to Tifft and began to wipe down the bar with a wrap that materialized in his hand. It wasn’t like the projection was bound by the laws of physics or anything.
Gunter looked around with awe. After a few moments, he remembered to shut his mouth, lest he start catching flies, according to Yan’s maternal grandmother.
“How is this possible?” Tifft asked, passing a careful hand through first the bar, and then the bartender’s arm when he held it up.
“You lot might have some nifty technology, sure,” the bartender smiled sadly. “But my kind were about six thousand years past that point when we blew up all the factories and planets. Ya ain’t caught back up yet. Although the JumpSails are a nifty thing that never occurred to me and mine, back in the day.”
“You know about those?” Tifft asked.
“I contain most of my Principal’s logs, Commander Tifft,” the bartender replied, transforming subtly into something more than just a guy behind a bar. “Those include the scans of RAN Mendocino, which I can compare rather unfavorably against most of the ships in my own logs. Hells, my shuttles were more advanced.”
“What else do you contain?” Tifft turned more fully to face the being, turning serious himself in turn.
“The entire history of mankind, right up until 10,419 Standard Era,” the Avatar said coldly. “You’ll pardon if I am somewhat lacking over the last three thousand and eighty years, Commander.”
“Including technology?”
Yan detected a trace of awe and avarice under those normally-calm tones. That was where Yan had gone, as well.
Seeker, the defector who had once been the Khan of the Buran world Trusski, had explained that the Sentience known as Buran had originated as a control system for a factory making tractors and other heavy farming equipment, some five thousand years ago. Somehow, it had gotten missed in the great purge, or repaired after having been mothballed before the war. Something, so that neither Carthage nor Kinnison, nor their subsidiary fleets, had managed to make it to the tiny planet known as Winterhome to finish that job.
Imagine what the future would have been like, without Buran threatening everyone.
“Some,” the bartender replied. “Or rather, things beyond the wildest dreams of your current understanding of physics, if Mendocino was any indication. I don’t have the sorts of scanners available in this box to know about the place Bedrov and Barret have brought us to, but most of what I know would require you building the tools to build the tools to build the tools.”
Yan smiled as Gunter cursed under his breath, again.
“How can you help us, barkeep?” Yan asked in a leading way.
He and Ainsley had already spent many hours with the man, or recording, or whatever he was, on the flight here.
“That’s where it gets iffy,” the tall, gruff man turned cagey and quiet, nodding to Yan. “I’ve heard about St. Legier. Not everything, mind you, but an eyewitness account, and I appreciate why you didn’t tell me before. And thank you, by the way.”
Yan nodded. Gunter turned enough to give them both a dose of side eye.
“For?” Gunter asked.
“Not telling me, us, whatever, about Buran, when I might have gone off and done something about that bastard,” the bartender said. “I appreciate that my assistance might not have been welcome, even then. Not sure if it will be now.”
“Could you have done something to stop Buran?” Gunter asked in a quiet voice.
“Commander, I’m reasonably confident I could have annihilated his entire fleet, and then him,” the bartender suddenly looked more like a God of War rather than a Lord of Tiki. “I was a Mark XXII Advanced Skymaster. Only Concord Warship Kinnison was more dangerous. Nothing Yan has told me about those silly sharks has changed my mind.”
“What have you told him?” Gunter suddenly turned to look at Yan, deadly serious.
“Barely enough,” Yan conceded. “What he is today is a greatly reduced version of Carthage. Another Librarian of Alexandria, if you will.”
“Probably more,” the Tiki God interjected. “That one was ancient, by our standards. Probably only used trinary logic circuits.”
“And you?” Gunter asked.
Yan held his breath, aware that Tifft might decide to draw the pulse pistol on his hip right now and shot the box containing the Lord of Tiki. He might even be empowered by the Grand Admiral to do exactly that.
That this was technically Ainsley’s property would only mean that she would file a complaint and Fribourg would send her cash as a reimbursement. Not enough for the value lost, but Fribourg had a low opinion of any AI system to begin with. A former warship might get their hackles up too far.
“Both Kinnison and I used hexal logic boards, Commander,” the bartender returned to the fore, leaning forward onto the bar itself with a breezy smile. “Each memory address had six possible value combination flavors it could store, whereas she uses three and your systems are generally simple primitive bit gates with an on or off value. It’s actually much more complicated than that, but that at least gets your mind in the right direction. Mind you, she’s only about three thousand years older than I am, from what I understand, but technology and science moved a bit in that span.”
Gunter turned back to face him now. Yan smiled grimly.
This was the crux of things. This being could help them, but it was a Sentient system, at the end of the day. Literally one of the destroyers that had cast humanity down from the heavens, in his time, and the most dangerous, illegal thing in the entire Empire.
“Okay, I think I understand,” Gunter said grimly.
It helped that Gunter had been zu Wachturm’s point man on some of the crazy, mean stuff Yan had dreamed up over the last few years. He and Gunter had a good working relationship, which any of Baumgärtner’s other spooks would not have brought to the table.
“I don’t answer to you, Gunter,” Yan explained firmly, reminding the man of his loyalties. “Nor to the Grand Admiral. Not even Karl VIII. I only answer to Jessica Keller, especially on this. Period.”
“Understood,” Gunter said. “But those three will have to talk. On your word, I’m willing to pass this off as a fantastically-impressive toy that does not represent a threat to the Empire.”
“Oh, he does represent a threat to the Fribourg Empire, boyo,” Yan said, watching Gunter’s head snap around hard to scowl at him. “But not the one you envision. Carthage is a threat to the Empire of Karl V and Karl VI. The threat here is what he could do to help Karl VIII ram home her vision of the
future. And all the bastards that want stop her.”
“Yes,” Gunter scowled. “That’s what frightens me.”
Overture: Vo
Imperial Founding: 180/05/15. Imperial Palace, Mejico, St. Legier
Vo zu Arlo had always thought of Iskra Vlahovic as taller than she really was. Everyone was tiny, standing next to him, including the new Emperor, but the Fleet Centurion was only a little taller than average for a woman. She just had a desperately outsized personality, even for as quiet as she was.
Iskra wasn’t one to take a gram of shit from anyone. And as commander of an RAN task force set to join Jessica and First Expeditionary Fleet in the war with Buran, she didn’t have to. The only person she did answer to was Judit Chavarría, the Palatine Ambassador from Aquitaine’s Senate to the Fribourg Empire.
