by Jean Johnson
“Absolutely not,” Ia countered flatly, poking the button to open the door. “This is the closest we will get.”
“Excuse me, but you are paying for my protection. I’ve already had words with Miklinn on your behalf,” Belini pointed out. “Five or six minutes of your time—or ten to twelve if you’re headed the opposite way—really isn’t all that much to ask. You can head that way as soon as you’re done loading fuel.”
“Ten to twelve minutes of OTL translates to seventy extra minutes of processing ice for fuel. We don’t even have forty minutes to spare, and we certainly don’t have the fuel,” Ia stated bluntly, turning around to face the other woman. “The best I can do is kick you out an airlock and shoot you in the back.”
The Feyori studied Ia, hands on her hips, aquamarine eyes shifting to something a bit more silvery. Finally, she nodded. “…Deal. But only with a laser. I don’t digest missile payloads all that well. They make me look fat.”
Ia swept her hand off to her left. “Deck 13, portside amidships hull. I’ll go to the bridge and tell Private Ateah to line up the nearest Skystrike L-pod so he can shoot you once you’re off the ship. That size should be safe enough for you.”
Belini peered at her. “You’re rather cranky. Would you like to shoot me yourself, and maybe feel better?”
“I’d be too tempted to use a bigger gun than you could comfortably digest.” At Belini’s quirked brow, Ia rubbed one hand over her face. “We lost another domeworld to the Salik last week. Solarican, but still…”
Lifting a hand to her arm, Belini squeezed it gently. “You’re going to have to stop sympathizing so much with your fellow fleshies if you want to play the Game. Even as a mere soldier, you should know this.”
The harsh look Ia slanted her way between those spread fingers silenced anything else the Meddler was about to say. Giving her arm a gentle pat instead, the Meddler moved back into the living room. The air snapped, and the overhead lighting dimmed slightly as the alien sucked energy out of the nearest outlets.
Sighing, Ia flipped open her bracer and hailed the gunner on duty. If she used the comm instead of walked to the bridge, she’d have almost two minutes more of hot water to help wash away the jangling in her nerves.
DECEMBER 10, 2496 T.S.
PROXIMA CENTAURI
The Choyan fleet was ugly. Not in its shape, for most of the vessels were formed of elegant crescents and elongated lines that were pleasing to most sentients’ senses of aesthetics, but in the threat implicit in its presence. Until now, the Choya had not joined their Salik allies in the fight. Ia knew it was because they had still been building up their war fleet while the Terrans had done their best to delay their war-machine efforts.
If they didn’t openly assist the Salik, the Alliance couldn’t accuse the Choya of colluding with the enemy. They hadn’t been able to attack the Choya openly but had instead tried to wean the amphibians away from their brethren diplomatically, coupled with some covert sabotage efforts. Now, though, the gill-breathers felt strong enough to attack outright, with fresh soldiers and fresh ships being brought into the fight.
But they hadn’t struck yet. Mysuri looked up from her post at the communications station. “Receiving pingback from their capital ship, Captain,” she stated. “They are listening, though they’re not responding.”
“Put the broadcast on video,” Ia directed.
“…Ready, sir,” Mysuri told her.
Ia looked into her monitor. They weren’t sending back a signal yet, but they were apparently listening. “This is Ship’s Captain Ia of the Terran United Planets Space Force. I know why you are here, headed for sovereign Terran space, and I say to you: we have no quarrel with you, and do not wish to fight you. Change your minds before it is too late.”
Silence. At the moment, the Hellfire was the only ship in the system; the Battle Platform that had been serving as a space station for Proxima had finally been moved closer to Earth. With only a few chunks of lifeless, radiation-blasted rocks in orbit around the dull red star, and no ice to speak of for a fuel source in the system, there was no point in defending it. The Command Staff had left scanner buoys in place, sending a constant stream of data back to the Sol System, so they still had advance warning, but the war had forced them to limit how thin they could stretch their defenses.
The Choya had no interest in the local red sun. Proxima Centauri simply made for a convenient, preattack gathering point for a fleet of over forty ships. They soared forward without deviation, ignoring the Hellfire’s placement off to one side of their chosen path.
“I repeat, change your minds and turn back, and we will not harm you,” she stated, watching the fleet, greatly magnified, soaring through the system at somewhere near one-half Cee. “You have until you reach my position’s midpoint to turn back or turn aside. If you continue on toward Earth, I will take that to mean you are going to attack the Terran worlds, and I will strike to destroy you.
“‘Turn back, Son of Cho,’” she added, quoting one of the older Choyan legends, one regarding the vengeance-spurred rage of a trio of ancient kings. “‘Turn back, and let go the burdens of your anger, or your people will never reach the far shore.’”
That earned her a signal. Mysuri silently patched it through to her main screen. The Choya was a green-skinned male; from the darkness of his hide, he was quite old for one of his kind. Blinking at her through the link, he hissed, “We hhhave heard of you. Your psssychological trickss willl not ssway us. Nor, I thhhink, is your one little sshhip a threat to all of uss.”
“You continue on this course, Admiral, and I will be forced to destroy you. Turn aside, or turn back,” she repeated. “Or you will not reach the far shore.”
“You can fffire your weapon all you lllike,” he scoffed, squinting his slit-pupiled eyes. “You cannnot harm allll of usss in one blow. Prepare yourrssellf to die. Not even your sship can withstand all of uss.”
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. “I invoke ktham g’cho.”
He blinked, this time from startlement. Twisting his head, he studied his viewscreen from a slightly different angle. “You innnvoke the rightss of a worthhhy fffoe? What iss your offfer?”
“If you choose to continue toward Earth, I will not fire upon you while you are still within this system,” Ia stated. “In return, you will not fire upon me. Ktham guann?”
“Ktham guann,” he agreed dismissively. “You arrre a worthhy foe. You willl lllive to ffface us at your Earthhh-world.”
His image vanished. Mysuri shook her head. “We’ve lost pingback. They’ve ended the link, sir.”
“So be it,” Ia murmured. Quoting the legend, though the Choyan admiral knew it not. She activated her headset. “All gunners, hold your fire. I repeat, hold your fire. We have a temporary treaty with this Choyan fleet. Do not fire.”
They waited in silence. The ships reached their midpoint and crossed in the blink of an eye. When the Humans didn’t attack, the Choyans picked up speed. Gently turning the Hellfire, Ia moved the ship into their wake, trailing after them.
“…Sir?” Mysuri asked. “Are we going to inform the others that they’re coming?”
“Nope. Earth doesn’t need to know.”
“Shakk that,” Helstead countered. “I want to know if we’re going to get lynched for letting ’em pass. Allowing a known enemy past the gate could be considered Dereliction of Duty at the very least, and Treason at the worst.”
“Shh,” Ia soothed, picking up their speed with a slide of her fingers along the controls. “I gave them my word I would not fire upon them while they were within the Proxima Centauri System.”
“So what, a tail-chase, Captain?” Sangwan asked her. “We wait until they’re past the heliopause, then open fire?”
She increased their speed again. “My plan is to hyperjump ahead of them to the edge of the Sol System, turn around, then attack.”
“We’ll need to contact Earth first, sir,” Ng stated. “We’ll need their updated insystem
traffic before we jump that far.”
“No, we won’t. We’re not jumping that far.”
“What?” Helstead asked, twisting in her seat at the spare gunnery post so she could look back at Ia.
“Sir, they’re at eighty percent Cee and rising,” Ng warned Ia. “They’ll do it well before they leave the local heliopause, too. Once they cross over, we’ll have no way of tracking them.”
“You won’t. I will.” Not waiting for them to argue the point, Ia activated the nose cone, swinging it into position. Lining up her vector by timestream-sight, she fired the engine and sucked them into hyperspace.
As the grey streaks of otherspace slipped around them, Helstead cleared her throat. “You do know I trust you, Captain?”
“And I appreciate that trust,” Ia agreed. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. But I will admit I’m very nervous at the thought of turning around well before those ships will slip back down below the speed of light, and taking them on in a fight,” Helstead continued. Since she had nothing to shoot at, she had pulled out two of her deadly little hairpins and spun them over her knuckles back and forth. “Especially since the only way you could guarantee line of sight is to position this ship dead ahead on their path.”
“An astute observation, Lieutenant Commander. Remind me to requisition you a raise.”
They emerged two minutes later. Slowing the ship, Ia brought it to a stop, then gently swapped ends. The dead stop was necessary; the helm controls had to be adjusted to give her only the tiniest of movements. Most of those were provided by the sort of maneuvering thrusters used for docking the ship. Ia didn’t even look at her screen, just closed her eyes and nudged their position with careful twitches of her left hand. A brief, go-nowhere pulse of the FTL field killed their drift, then they sat.
From time to time, Ia twitched them just a little bit right or left, up or down, compensating for the galactic gravitational curve. Finally, she unlocked the control switch and thumbed the trigger for the main gun.
This time, she kept the tip of her thumb pressed against the button. Red streaked forward, flooding the bridge with its bloody glow. Everyone flinched, half-hiding their eyes behind arms and hands until the forward-pointing monitors mercifully blacked out the center of that beam. The ominous hummm became an unnerving rumble, and the whooshing of the heat engines started to shake the ship. Ia had counted on that, though.
Instead of a twentieth of a second, she kept the cannon firing for a full five seconds, then shut it off. The rumbling ceased, but the whooshing did not. Putting that excess energy to use, Ia backed up the ship. She didn’t bother to turn it around, just backed it up until it reached rifting speed, and activated the stern nose cone.
They sucked through hyperspace backwards for forty-five seconds and emerged somewhere short of Saturn’s orbit. The ringed planet wasn’t actually nearby at this point in its solar year, just a lot of stars. It was the closest they could get to interstitial space and still be inside a star system’s reach.
The current operations tech, Private Sbrande, finally ventured a comment. “I, ah, had no idea that cannon could fire for that long…or use that much hydrofuel.”
“How much?” Sangwan asked.
“Three full percent of our maximum capacity, sucked down in less than sixteen seconds,” Sbrande stated as calmly as she could. Her voice trembled a little at the end.
Several soft obscenities and a whistle from Helstead met the engineering tech’s words.
“Captain, what about the overshoot?” Helstead asked Ia.
“Nothing will be coming from that exact direction for almost a year,” Ia stated. “The force of the beam will dissipate over the next eight light-months, until at most it will be an annoying flash on the scanners of passing ships.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask how much damage it did,” Mysuri stated wryly. “Especially if it takes eight light-months for that beam to stop being lethal.”
“We’ve just obliterated all but seven of their ships,” Ia told her. “I had to hold the beam on for that long to make sure no chunks too large for FTL would remain. What little makes it to Sol System will be slowed by the heliopause winds and the Oort cloud debris. Eyes to your boards, meioas, and thoughts on your tasks. Those seven ships will be coming into system in four more hours, as will a fleet of Salik. We need to turn back the Choya with another warning, if we can. But I’m not going to hold my breath.”
“The hell with that,” Sangwan snorted. “If I were that admiral, and I’d just lost most of my fleet, I’d get the hell out of this system the moment I spotted this ship.”
“It’ll be a touch-and-go fight with or without them. They might choose to stay and help make things worse,” Ia said. “But we will prevail…and then we’ll have a very brief six hours of Leave on Battle Platform Freedom of the Stars II…whereupon many of you will receive commendations for your efforts in my service.”
“About muckin’ time,” Helstead snorted, shifting back in her seat to rest her feet on the edge of her console. “I’ve been putting in recommendations right and left since we fired our first shot on this ship.”
JANUARY 5, 2497 T.S.
CONFUCIUS STATION
DLC 718 TORPETTI SYSTEM
Lieutenant Commander Meyun Harper glared at his CO. He had to raise his voice as one of his engineers started up the cutter at the far end of the manufactory bay, adding to the cacophony of the grinders and laser welders being used. “I’m telling you, Captain, this would be considerably easier if we had stopped at a regular docking facility, or a military one!”
“Everyone else within sixty light-years will be needing their supplies, Commander!” Ia returned just as loudly. The cutter shut off, but the rasp of the grinders and the scorchings of the welders kept going. “I’m telling you, you can modify these supplies to fix our pipe fittings!”
“Well, I’m telling you that if I do fix up these shakking pieces of pipe, we’re going to have to weld them in place, and that means cutting them off and replacing three lengths instead of one! You’re the one who said we only have seven hours in this place. That’s not enough time to melt them down and extrude entirely new pipes of the right size and shape,” Harper reminded her, lowering his voice as the grinder cut off.
Ia threw her hands up in the air. “Just melt and extrude some scrap into coupler rings! That’s why I got you the extralarge pipes stored down on Deck 17!”
He stared at her, then covered his goggle-protected eyes with his hand. Some of the other noises cut off as well, giving him room to speak. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that myself…”
She clasped his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “It’s been a long, hard series of fights, Meyun. You have kept this ship together, and put it back together, more times than I can count.”
One set of doors hissed open off to the side. Lieutenant Rico poked his head inside, spotted the two of them, and plucked a set of goggles out of the plexi-fronted case by the door. He didn’t bother to put them on, just held them over his eyes as he approached.
“Captain, your 12,379 kesant are almost up,” he stated blandly. “You have roughly one hour to compose that message you promised to send to the Greys.”
It was her turn to blank out for a moment. Wincing, Ia nodded. “…Right, right. Too many battles on my brain. I almost forgot about opening up that war front. Time for some damage control—Meyun, do you need me for anything else?”
“Yes. A pass for a week’s Leave on a beach near Aloha City,” he quipped dryly. The grinder started up again. He flipped a hand at her, raising his voice. “Go on! I have those couplings to fit!”
Nodding, she joined Rico. They removed their goggles and secured them at the door, then left the machine-filled manufactory bay. As soon as the thick door slid shut, cutting off the majority of the noise, Ia sighed in relief. She rubbed at the back of her neck, striding alongside her tall intelligence officer.
“Any chance we’ll be getting tha
t much Leave on Earth anytime soon?” Rico asked after several seconds had passed.
She blinked up at him in confusion, then recalled Meyun’s quip. “No. Unfortunately. And even if we did, I’d only be able to spare an hour at most for beach-lounging, myself…never mind other activities.”
He let that pass in silence until they reached her office. Ia blanked out the surveillance pickups as they entered, knowing what he was going to ask her next. Sure enough, he did. He wasn’t the wary junior officer of a year ago. She knew he was on her side, but he still asked anyway.
“Sir, you said a year ago that the Admiral-General authorized these communications with the Greys,” Rico stated. “But does she really know about them? Or is this just a massive stretching of your carte-blanche authority?”
“It’s a massive stretching,” Ia confessed quietly, taking her seat. She gestured for him to take one of the chairs across from hers. “Some would even call it an outright breaking. The probabilities are high that even after I fast-talked to her, Myang would call it Grand High Treason. But I give you my word, if I didn’t foresee this deal brokering saving hundreds of millions of lives in the future, I wouldn’t go anywhere near the Shredou.
“I just…” Frustrated that she couldn’t tell him the full truth, Ia sighed and slumped in her seat, rubbing at her temples. “I need them to stop when I tell them to stop, so that they don’t destroy the Terran Empire and trample onward into the rest of Alliance space. And the only way to do that is to convince them that I am a massive precog. One so powerful, I can see their movements with great accuracy, to the point where they…Hell, I don’t know if they can feel superstition as we Humans do, but I need them to stop their predations because of it.”
“Superstition?” Rico asked, one brow lifting in skepticism.
“They’re not from this galaxy. The energies are all wrong,” Ia said, sitting up again. “They’re trying to rebuild their race by melding it with local biology—Humans are the closest they can come to something both sentient and compatible, which is why they keep coming after us every few generations—but thanks to Feyori interbreeding efforts, our psychic abilities hurt them. It’s a weapon they cannot defend against because it is truly alien to them. And the fact that I can wield this weapon against them by predicting their own movements as well as directing all the others’ is going to scare them.
