Winterhome

by Blaze Ward

  Bizarre, but that android body were close enough to human ta fool most doctors without scanners, so thats made sense. Tear ducts an’ all. Moirrey’d seen the chest opened up when she put the babe in this body so’s she could escape the mean Red Admiral, back when he were a servant o’evil.

  Tears fell into her hair now, so Moirrey held her friend close.

  “Are there any more, or are you really the Last of the Immortals, this time?” Moirrey finally asked as Summer got hold of herself again.

  “I’m sure there are others,” Summer said. “But they are either well-hidden, or sitting dead in space awaiting a competent mechanic to repair them well enough to return to life. None are in a position to threaten humanity, if we can take Carthage at his word that he and Kinnison were the last two. Buran was supposedly a factory controller, securely boxed up for transit, when all hell broke loose, back in the day. The colony was just barely capable enough to survive the century it took for them to unbox him and assemble enough pieces that he could get to work in the fallen darkness.”

  “So what’re you doin’ after Pops?” Moirrey asked.

  Another heavy sigh shook the taller woman’s frame. Tears again, but not as bad.

  “Moving on,” Summer finally said. “I had considered aging my shell slowly, and living out his last twenty years or so with the man, but I suspect that he’s done and going to retire after this. I would like to remember him at his best, rather than watch the slide into entropy.”

  “It’s hard, living forever?” Moirrey leaned back enough to look the girl in the eyes.

  “They never tell you that part, Moirrey,” Summer said. “I watched Piper turn from a young woman, angry and wet behind the ears, into one of the greatest politicians of her age over the course of five decades. And I visited her tomb before leaving Ballard forever, to say goodbye. I have outlived the nation that gave birth to me, and plan to outlive the one that freed me from my cage.”

  “How long does Aquitaine have?” Moirrey’s interest peaked.

  Here were a scholar who had read most o’human history at one time or ’nuther. No other experts that good available.

  “If we can kill Buran?” Summer asked. “Centuries. Maybe more. Without Jessica, Fribourg would have won in your lifetime, and Buran in your children’s assuming you and Digger finally settle down.”

  “That’s coming soon,” Moirrey said. “I’s too important ta keep doing whats I do. He’ll hafta settle fer being an Imperial gentlemans and stuff. Then kids and my own, private lab ta builds stuff. Prolly needs an estate big enough that he can have construction equipment ta drive. Builds an amusement parks er som’thin’.”

  Summer laughed.

  “Good,” the android said. “Maybe Auntie Summer could come visit you and spoil the young’uns rotten.”

  “That would be nice,” Moirrey agreed.

  They kinda turned as silence fell, and watched the big beast of a box slide those last few centimeters into alignment with the rest. At least well enough that Pops and Yan were no longer gesturing angrily at each other and the poor teams driving the loaders and adjusting the sleds moving the thing.

  She supposed that it weren’t a caterpillar anymore. T’were times to becomes a Butterfly, and go looks fer a flower to rest on, enjoying the summer sun.

  Fall would be on them all, soon enough.

  Chapter LV

  Imperial Founding: 181/04/29. IFV Butterfly, Weevohn Station

  Gunter found the quiet of the tiny bridge soothing, being alone on the command deck of the strange vessel he had somehow managed to become First Officer of. The others were all noisy, nerdy people, engineers of one type or another who were all interconnected in ways he would never be, except in the minds of the rest of the whole galaxy, once this was done.

  And he liked them, but there were times he preferred silence. Like now. It did not break his heart that Ainsley had personally taken charge of the dry-dock crews, and that Lady Moirrey and Summer had decided to watch the entire affair from the comfort of a station observation deck.

  He could trust all of them to be professionals about what they did, but nobody was talking to him today. Even less than normal, since Bedrov and Nakamura were on a different channel, supervising the enormous effort to lock that last piece of this three-dimensional puzzle into place.

  Gunter brought up a projection of the vessel and color-coded everything based on planet of manufacture, which in turn sequenced the assembly. He still had several minutes before the loaders were in a position to push the power array into the aft slot.

  The yard at Arcturus had not questioned the order from the Grand Admiral to construct the strangely-shaped vessel. There had been significant bonuses factored into the work, to offset some Duke or shipping magnate having to wait an extra month for his latest vessel to arrive.

  Lady Moirrey had suggested a butterfly in her original design, as a way of harnessing solar power to augment the generators in the Londra section of the weapon, named for the planet that built it. Bedrov had designed something like a juvenile version of a Transport Tug to handle it and added deployable solar sails that could quickly expand to an area nearly two kilometers in diameter, like the translucent wings of such an insect.

  They were indeed flying a butterfly, perhaps.

  Geminus had built the first section they had picked up, the focus controls and aiming hardware for the emitter. It made no sense, by itself, which was a significant part of the design, as Bedrov had rehoused a number of components from a scout corvette, to get the fine manipulation he would need later.

  Lagos had built the forward part of the emitter array. That pirate had done a great job of vaguely disguising it as an energy transmissions system. The kind you needed to link a solar sail in orbit of a small colony to the ground, when you needed significant power without dropping reactors onto the surface. Mining colonies on ice worlds often used something similar, since the surface of the ice shifted much more frequently than stable ground did.

  Londra, their most recent stop before this, had built the aft housing of the array and a bank of power generators that would have been overkill on the old Paladin-class battleship Firehawk, his last fleet service. But they needed power. Staggering amounts of it, delivered into as compact a form as possible, as quickly as the energy could be siphoned off without everything melting or exploding in the process.

  Weevohn’s contribution would have given the game away, had they started at the other end when assembling the sword. It contained a few generators, mostly to power up the solar array it was connected to and to keep that element somewhat isolated from the rest of the ship. It also had the single biggest array of batteries ever put together on something smaller than a station.

  As Bedrov had explained over beer, it wasn’t a question of whether or not the bus bars involved would sublime from the amount of power being pushed through them, but how quickly. Metal could literally evaporate, at this scale.

  Gunter Tifft was a logistics officer by training, and a spy by vocation, when he wasn’t pretending to be a line commander. He understood just enough of the physics involved to be utterly aghast at the entire undertaking, and to be confident that it should work.

  He also had very distinct orders from the Grand Admiral to make sure that none of them were taken prisoner, if everything failed and the ship was trapped in RealSpace, either before or after everything went down. The scuttling charges had actually been part of Bedrov’s original design, to make sure that Buran could not recover enough pieces of the ship or the gun to build a copy.

  Type-4 beams were dangerous enough. A Type-6 was potentially cataclysmic.

  Hopefully, it would never come to that. But Hendrik had still made a point to prepare him for the eventuality.

  “Gunter, this is Yan,” a voice finally intruded on his channel.

  “Go ahead,” Gunter responded, sitting a little straighter and scanning all his boards once to make sure everything was still green.

  “Station
team is about thirty seconds from contacting your hull hard enough you’ll feel it at that end,” Bedrov continued. “Make sure that the fifth lockpins drop all the way into alignment while we have the necessary force handy to drive it to the bolts. I didn’t like the way we had to get an angle grinder out to set things right at Londra.”

  “Understood,” Gunter said.

  Only a minor issue, it had taken them all of about an extra hour to pull the chunk of ship out, grind a millimeter of steel off in a few places, and then line it all back up and press it home. But Bedrov was an engineer, and used to working with very tight clearances on things. Someone, somewhere had failed to meet his exacting standards for implementation, but none of them were in a position to take everything apart in front of witnesses who could describe it later.

  Nobody technically had the security clearances necessary to know these things, including the crew of this ship.

  The aft of the ship pinged.

  IFV Butterfly was docked hard in place, with grapples in three places binding them to the fabric of the station, so that the massive steel puzzle piece could be moved in three dimensions by professional stevedores used to working with the same level of exactitude as Bedrov, but who also understood the need to hit something with a bigger hammer, when necessary.

  Today might be their day.

  A larger thump, transmitted up the adamantine spine of the butterfly, itself perhaps more of a dragonfly carrying off a caterpillar, if you wanted to look at it that way from the side. That was probably the image Lady Moirrey saw, out that window.

  Lights began to come on as connections were made and circuits found themselves able to run front to back on the vessel. For the most part.

  “Yan,” Gunter spoke up. “Third and fifth lockpins show red. The other six are green. Looks like something has bowed, but I can’t tell which part is out of true from here.”

  “Stand by,” Bedrov replied. “Ainsley’s got a laser level she’s going to stuff down in there. Gimme five minutes.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Gunter reached down to the small refrigerator between the two command seats and pulled out a juice pack. His job was to watch, which he was fine with.

  A few minutes passed as he watched men swarm over the hull.

  “Tifft, this is Pops,” the other man came on the line. “I need you to unlock the tertiary housing on section three, but only on the port side. Leave the starboard pins tight.”

  “Repeat, please,” Gunter said back.

  Pops did. Made no sense to Gunter, but he wasn’t the guy out there watching.

  “Stand by, Pops.”

  Gunter tried to visualize the whole, but what the engineers were seeing eluded him. He was just a pilot today.

  Quickly, he located the necessary controls and manually triggered the locks to loosen things up.

  “Pops, you are clear for action,” Gunter said as he triple-checked things.

  “Watch this, children,” Pops Nakamura’s voice came from the general channel, rather than the one he had been using previously.

  Somebody banged the hull with what sounded like the hammer end of a boarding axe. Certainly, nothing larger, or the sound would have been a church bell calling the faithful to prayer. No, this was a winter chorale bell chiming once.

  Something shifted. IFV Butterfly shuddered once, almost bow to stern like a tiny earthquake, before settling back to nothing.

  “Gunter, what are your boards like?” Bedrov’s voice joined the line.

  “Everything’s green,” Gunter said.

  Every light had clicked at almost the same instant.

  “Damn it, I hate it when you’re right, Pops,” Yan groused over the open line.

  “Hey, you’re pretty good, Bedrov,” Pops crooned triumphantly. “Almost as good as I am. Only almost, though.”

  Ainsley’s laugh joined Nakamura’s. Gunter didn’t understand the rivalry between the two men, but he had been around them enough over the last several months to see that there was no rancor involved between them. Just a serious amount of respect, from what everyone agreed were two of the best naval architects alive.

  Technically, EASC Carthage wasn’t alive, and the bartender was only a pale echo of the original, to hear the projection talk, but that being, even in his reduced form, was at least as good as Yan Bedrov and Pops Nakamura.

  Gunter was just glad he was on their side. Things were very shortly going to get ugly.

  Chapter LVI

  Imperial Founding: 181/04/02. IFV Valiant, Osynth B’Udan

  It felt good to be back in the saddle. Tom knew that he needed to stay away from the dockyard crews and ship’s engineers making the repairs or he would have pestered them with his questions and needs to the point someone would have probably punched him.

  And been in the right, regardless of rank.

  So he had spent a lot of time on the surface of the planet, making political calls on various entities, or in orbit, aboard one of the stations that protected this system. Anything to not slow the work down.

  Yesterday, after a significant refurb, they backed out of the dry-dock and slid into open space at the core of Second Squadron, First Expeditionary Fleet. Today he was in his office with Charlie d’Noir, going over the various things they needed to verify before they set off to find Jessica in her new hiding place. He had warned her that it had been too good to last. Fortunately, his warning to Fleet Centurion Whughy had been better received. They had cut and run, pausing only long enough, apparently, to dock one last shuttle craft filled with engineers, before vanishing like a soap bubble.

  A voice suddenly filled the room.

  “Tom, this is Yasuko, up on the bridge,” Valiant’s Captain said without preamble. “You need to hear this.”

  “Osynth B'Udan Flight Control, this is Command Centurion Phil Kosnett aboard RAN CS-405, flying an Imperial Flag as part of Keller’s squadron,” a man said in a slow cadence. “Requesting an escort with a senior officer aboard. Reply on this channel, please.”

  “Thoughts?” Captain Pitchford continued when the recording ended. “One vessel, apparently. Thirty light-seconds out, and at rest relative to the station.”

  “Drop the squadron on top of them, Yaz,” Tom said. “Action stations on all vessels, and put us around him like hounds treeing a fox, like we did that idiot from Blue Essex. As fast as we can all jump at the same time, and let the captains know I’m keeping score today.”

  Charlie was already standing and moving towards the hatch. Tom rose and followed him. Red lights and emergency sirens simulated the necromantic act of raising the dead from their temporary graves midship.

  The squadron went from a cold stop to Jump faster than Tom would have been willing to bet money on. Must have been expecting him to walk out of that meeting with Charlie and throw surprise maneuvers at them.

  And to keep score.

  It felt good to be surrounded by professionals, with all the hunger that went with it.

  Sure enough, one of the new style corvettes, flying RAN signals with an IFV Courtesy next to it, if the transponder was to be believed.

  CS-405. Command Centurion Phil Kosnett.

  The vessel looked a little worse for the wear, but Tom was willing to grant that taking a year to get home, and today was the anniversary of their disappearance, might not leave someone as clean and sharp as a heavy dreadnaught less than thirty-six hours out of dry-dock.

  Tom checked the projection between him and Charlie. Unlike Firehawk, the two of them sat across a small, round table. It was a little weird, after all his time standing with the other man close enough to punch.

  Four cruisers had dropped out with Valiant, almost to the second over this short of a distance. It took him a moment to place the last ship, since he was used to Dundee, Glasgow, and Birmingham being led into action by Indianapolis. But she was off with Jessica.

  Qin Lun had done a very nice job of hopping with the squadron. Something to be said for a life of reformed piracy to k
eep your strike jumps sharp and crisp. Quick count put all seven corvettes with him, sheltering the laager on the assumption that the big sisters could handle a scout corvette in their midst.

  Tom opened a line.

  “CS-405, this is IFV Valiant, Tom Provst commanding,” he called in a serious voice.

  “Valiant, this is Kosnett,” the intruder replied, opening a screen that showed the man, but not the rest of his bridge. It did look like Kosnett. “We got separated from Vanguard after the raid on Severnaya Zemlya when both JumpSails were lost. In the process of limping home, we decided to turn ourselves into pirates and have a number of adventures across Altai sector. Might have made it here two days ago, but this was too good of an anniversary to miss.”

  “That would explain a few things that Imperial Intelligence shrugged at,” Provst scratched his chin, feeling a little too much stubble. “Their whole frontier got soft, all of a sudden. Were they chasing you?”

  “Most likely,” the supposed pirate explained. “We attacked Barnaul, Laptev, Abakn, Kyzyl, and Mansi on our way home.”

  “You’re just a scout corvette, Kosnett,” Tom was amazed. “How did you attack planets?”

  It did not add up. Even for Jessica’s folks.

  “That’s why I came in alone first, Vanguard,” Kosnett’s tone became almost triumphant, if Tom had to place it. “The rest of my task force is parked out in deep space, waiting for you to come and escort them safely home.”

  “Task force?” Tom asked incredulously.

  He glanced at Charlie across the table, and got a literal shrug, both palms up and face blank.

  Keller’s folks were known for crazed audacity. Tomas Kigali, or Alber’ d’Maine, for instance. He supposed that the corvette commanders would get infected, too, after long enough.

  Look at what happened to Second Squadron, just from flying with that woman and her legend once.

  “Told you we stopped and raided several places along the way,” Kosnett almost sneered at him on the screen. “My crew also took four enemy vessels and pressed them into service.”