Two Bottles of Wine with a War God

by Blaze Ward

  Two Bottles of Wine with a War God

  Blaze Ward

  Knotted Road Press

  Contents

  Bedrov

  EASC Carthage

  Bedrov

  EASC Carthage

  Bedrov

  EASC Carthage

  Bedrov

  About the Author

  Also by Blaze Ward

  About Knotted Road Press

  Bedrov

  Looking around the ship’s dining room, Yan Bedrov suppressed a sigh of contentment.

  He hadn’t redesigned any of the Aquitaine Fleet Replenishment Freighters, mostly because the original design had been so good to begin with. Not fast enough to keep up with strike squadrons barreling through JumpSpace, but fast enough to be there when they needed fresh cream and socks after the battle.

  Plus, Nils Kasum, then First Lord of Aquitaine’s Navy, had already done most of the work for him. The space forward had already been rebuilt for the Expeditionary fleet. On older versions that was where a matched pair of massive Standard Weapons Packs would slide in on side rails. In their place, a replenishment freighter like RAN Mendocino carried six Expeditionary Packs Yan had designed. These were smaller, since they didn’t need to carry pallets and pallets of missiles and Primary reloads for the fleet. Just food and stuff.

  Mostly these days Mendocino carried consumables and electronics parts, plus a shit-ton of metal in various sizes, shapes, and hardness ratings, for whatever an engineering crew might need to suddenly fix in the middle of nowhere.

  But this crew also ate better than anybody in any fleet Yan had served with. Not that he would begrudge them that, having to run constantly between bases and fleets, with all the risks of modern warfare and pirates, and rarely even so much as a destroyer handy to hide behind. But he could see where they might sneak in and swap out their own food supplies, whenever something really good happened along.

  “What are you laughing at?” Ainsley asked pointedly, bringing him back to the present.

  Yan supposed he did get a little lost, from time to time, in naval architecture and the associated socializations therein. Like now, when he was at dinner with Ainsley and should be paying attention to the beautiful woman across the table from him.

  “Nothing,” he replied, looking around the dining hall anyway.

  Unlike bigger ships, where officers might mess separate, everyone ate from the same, single kitchen here. Having a nominal crew of only twenty-seven helped. The kitchen staff set the times to eat, rather than having something going constantly for a stream of hungry bodies.

  “You’re lost in thought again,” Ainsley verbally poked him.

  They were seated across from each other, enjoying something of a date, if you could call it that. Empty dessert plates were all that was left, plus strong coffee in sippy cups.

  “Occupational hazard,” he replied. “Trying to figure out how to make this ship better with the next class.”

  “Stretch the hull enough to add another pair of packs up front?” she offered. “Back home, you could always haul a pair of fighters stowed in a pack. Out here, more food for longer missions, deeper into Buran space.”

  “Kinda my thought, too,” Yan said. “Plus bump up the flight deck just enough to include a Fast Strike Bomber on standby, to surprise pirates, and then increase the engines and JumpDrives a little more than enough to compensate. Get you there faster.”

  “What about maybe building a smaller version of the standard outpost unit?” she asked. “Like those ones we’ve been blowing up or stealing around Buran’s planets. You could drop those as way-stations, fill them with food, and let Jessica run wild.”

  “That’s a really mean idea, love,” he smiled. “We’ll have to give it some thought later.”

  “And the day-dreaming now?” she asked with a twinkle in her eyes. “Eye candy across the table not enough to hold your attention?”

  Yan laughed. Ainsley Barrett was as tall as he was standing. Long and lanky and curvy in all the right ways, with a sarcastic tongue and a dirty mind that just pushed all his buttons.

  How had me managed to find a woman like this? Or better, how had an old, skinny pirate like him managed to turn her head?

  “Just wondering why we’re here,” he said.

  “You wanted to head back to St. Legier, bubbles,” she noted with a grin. “Catching a ride with Mendocino was the only way, and that only gets us to Osynth B'Udan. Still gotta hitchhike home from there. Bringing me to show off a little leg on the way? Throw some T&A at an admiral to convince him?”

  Gods, that woman was something else.

  “Brought you to keep you out of trouble back with Jessica,” he snarked back. “And save me from ex-wives. Because yeah, I don’t suppose the old man’s going to come back to the frontier in this decade, and I need to talk to Emmerich. Might have had a breakthrough.”

  “The butterfly?” she asked, suddenly deadly serious.

  “Yeah,” Yan nodded.

  He started to explain the idea when Val stuck his head in the opening hatch and whistled to get his attention.

  “Bedrov. Ainsley. You bored?” he yelled with a grin on his face.

  Command Centurion Waldemar Ihejirika, Republic of Aquitaine Navy. Val.

  The man was an Anglo so pale Yan mistook him for snow, occasionally. Especially standing next to him, where Yan figured he looked like mud, by comparison.

  Long, black hair, naturally straight, suggested Chinese Diaspora at some point, whereas Yan’s ancestors had that Hispanic hue that happened to be so common in the Fribourg Empire, and almost impossibly-rare out in Corynthe.

  Ainsley was just a tall brunette, not as pale as Val, but just as Anglo.

  “What’ve you got, Val?” Yan called back.

  “New route home,” Val grinned. “Got a nav anomaly, so we have to drop out and survey it. I know you two. Figured you’d maybe come up with some better ideas for that sort of thing.”

  “Are you reading my mind?” Yan asked.

  “Nope,” Val grinned back. “Know your type. Bad as Moirrey or Oz.”

  Ainsley laughed out loud as she rose.

  “C’mon, grumpy,” she said down him and taking his hand. “All my attempts at seduction will fail until you’ve dreamed up a new system. Then you’ll be feeling frisky.”

  Yan tried hard to suppress a smile and still failed. Pirates weren’t supposed to be predictable people. Bad occupational hazard.

  Of course, he wasn’t a pirate anymore. Nope. Good little citizen these days, trying to get rich as a naval architect.

  And teach a deathless AI, a Sentient system who thought he was a god, what dangerous really was.

  The bridge of a fleet replenishment freighter was a compact thing. Ship normally only had four officers, and one of those, Emery Ghrist, was the Quartermaster, so she didn’t generally sit bridge watch.

  Otilia Calkin had the watch right now. Kid. Young enough to be one of Yan’s. Probably even younger than either Malka or Kai. Fresh out of the Academy and had specifically requested this duty.

  Maybe the only way to get an In with First Expeditionary Fleet. Where everybody with ambition wanted to be these days.

  Calkin was in the right hand seat, facing Yeoman Chrestman with screens between them. Two people was the normal bridge crew on this ship, especially in JumpSpace. One more active down in Engineering, listening to things go ping, and the rest were off watch, doing stuff until it was time to play stevedore.

  Except today, the bridge was crowded. Val, Ainsley, and Yan had stuffed themselves into a corner, out of the way. First Officer Wrenne had come aft from her cabin and taken one of the empty stations.

  Mendo
cino had a single weapon, aft and dorsal. A Type-2 beam for defense. Melody Wrenne, in addition to being First Officer, was also the only qualified Gunner, although nearly anybody could use the weapon in a pinch. Maybe he needed to take Oz’s new weapon design and tweak it for a ship like this?

  The two women officers made an interesting contrast, as Yan leaned his butt against a wall and let Ainsley settle back against his chest. Wrenne was tall and blocky, almost built like Yan’s old Command Centurion back on Kali-ma. Shiori Ness. Wiley. The same sable hair, but Wrenne was far lighter skinned.

  Calkin was more angular, a little meat hung on long bones, with strawberry blond hair buzzed on the sides and longer on top and back, like a horse’s mane. And the two couldn’t be further apart temperamentally: Calkin practically vibrating with energy most of the time, while Wrenne was one of the most phlegmatic, laconic people Yan had ever known.

  But they got along. That was all that really mattered on a ship this small.

  “Did I need an audience today, Val?” Centurion Calkin turned a sarcastic face to survey the faces behind her.

  “Need?” he fired back with a laugh. “Probably not. Getting one anyway. We have a naval architect aboard. Best to put his lazy ass to work, you know.”

  “I suppose I should take offense to that,” Yan offered. “But I’ve only ever flown with fighters and warships, so I don’t really know what y’all do. How about you show me your process, and I’ll figure out how to make it easier?”

  “Got it,” Calkin replied, turning back to her boards and sending her display to a two meter board on the front wall.

  Yan shifted so he could see over Ainsley’s shoulder, without letting go of the hand possessively holding her hip bone. Groping her on the bridge of Val’s ship was probably not acceptable. At least with an audience.

  Maybe if he took over a watch sometime and locked the hatch?

  “So we have a calculated path, based on the Standard Gazetteer, and any flight notes from other vessels that have come this way,” Calkin said. “Except nobody has ever flown this route that we are aware of. Fleet Centurion is way off the normal shipping lanes you would get, and we don’t have Buran’s notes. With me so far?”

  “Got it,” Yan said.

  “And we’re crossing the M’Hanii,” she continued, referring to the vast river of dark gas clouds and space devoid of stars. Her speech shifted into something Yan always called Academy Voice. Kids relaying important information the way they had been trained. Like a Greek chorus. “We’re surrounded by regions of fog and hydrogen clouds out here. Thick stuff that blocks a lot of starlight. But the grav-sensors are still able to see through it.”

  “And you found something new?” Yan asked.

  “We did,” she agreed. “Star not on any charts. Easy to miss, since it looks like a brown dwarf, a super-Jovian that never quite got big enough to ignite. Those are pretty common. Normally, we drop out, flag their vector and gravity well, and then bounce back up into JumpSpace and go. Something weird here.”

  Yan hated that phrase, especially from young Academy graduates like Otilia Calkin. Nothing good ever came of weird.

  “So that’s where I come in,” Val joined the conversation. He had a long, thin face, almost aquiline, but without the big nose you normally got. Almost more of a crescent moon, seen from the side. “Weird means call the Command Centurion. This weird meant I could roust you two from your date and make you talk business for a while.”

  “Ha,” Ainsley exclaimed. “All he ever talks is business. Except when he wants to fool around. And even that is approached professionally.”

  “Hush,” Yan blushed as the others laughed. “Define weird.”

  “Second brown dwarf, possibly orbiting the first,” Val said. “Way smaller, possibly only Jovian-scale, but big enough we could see it at range. No other gravity signatures indicating planets or companions. Middle of nowhere, so it might have been evicted by a collision of star systems at some point in the past. But those are usually moving pretty fast as a result.”

  “How good are your grav-sensors?” Ainsley asked, the ex-pilot scout in her coming to the fore.

  “That’s all we know,” Val said. “You had better eyes on your old P-4 Outrider, da Vinci.”

  “Huh,” was all she grunted.

  “How much survey work does a ship like this do?” Yan probed.

  “With the Fleet Centurion?” Calkin laughed. “Way more than we’re supposed to. Fleet Replenishment Freighter is supposed to run predictable lines between bases and fleets. Behind the lines, sort of thing. I almost feel like a Scout, some days. Going to look good on my resume, though.”

  “Interesting,” Yan said. “Was talking to Ainsley earlier about improving this design. Would a bigger sensor suite make more sense than more cargo capacity?”

  “Absolutely,” Calkin offered her opinion. “Flight time between points is a factor of going around gravity wells, but it’s also being able to see hydrogen clouds and the thinner spots where you can pick up an hour or two of speed. That gets us to our destination faster.”

  “Plus, see strange things further off and decide then if you want to avoid them,” Val interjected. "We get on top of some things before we can spot them. Rules say drop out and survey for the next people when we’re that close to something.”

  “Okay,” Yan agreed. “Lemme see what I can do with a future design. Aquitaine’s still too old-fashioned with things like this.”

  “Exactly,” Val said. “Kigali got a smoking-hot new ride. I deserve one as well.”

  That got another round of laughs.

  “Standby to Emergence,” Calkin called a few moments later. “We’re coming up on the smaller signature, on the assumption that it is a captured gas giant.”

  “Captured?” Ainsley asked.

  “Brown dwarf shouldn’t have other Jovians orbiting this close, ma’am,” Calkin replied. “But space is a big place and everything will happen at some point.”

  Emergence.

  “We facing the wrong way?” Yan asked.

  On the screen, the image was deep space, rather than a large disk where a big gas giant was deforming space-time.

  Calkin was silent as she pressed buttons. Yan could see her scowl. In addition to being the ship’s Pilot, the young woman was also trained as a Science Officer, probably another useful thing, if they spent that much time being explorers.

  “Negative,” she said in a hard, grumpy voice. “Sensors show a major gravity well directly in front of us.”

  “I don’t see a planet,” Ainsley offered helpfully.

  “I realize that,” Calkin said testily.

  She pressed a button and the screen changed from deep space to grav-sensors. Suddenly, there was a huge bubble, a gravity well sitting in front of them.

  “Diagnostics?” Yan checked,

  “Zero and Ten,” Calkin snapped pointedly.

  Every check passed. Every system reporting normal behavior. Back home in Corynthe, Kali-ma was the only ship Yan had ever served on to get above Two and Eight, and that right after she came out of dry-dock.

  “Something’s not right here,” Ainsley said.

  “Agreed,” Val said. “Sound the alert. Otilia, shift to Science Officer. Melody, unlock the guns, just in case. I’ll take command.”

  Yan watched Val sit in the last spare station and power up the boards. The alert siren began to wail.

  On the board, Yan watched the gravity well actually move. It had been in front of them.

  Suddenly, it expanded five-fold, trapping Mendocino in RealSpace, unless Val wanted to shatter his drive matrix escaping, then have to spend a day or two realigning everything. Maybe while being chased by whoever just sprang that trap.

  “We’re being hailed,” Calkin said in a tight voice. “Audio signal only.”

  “Conference mode,“ Val replied quietly.

  The voice that emerged from the speakers sounded to Yan like an angry dragon that had just woken up from his nap, to fin
d midget burglars trying to steal his gold.

  “Who comes?” the being demanded angrily.

  EASC Carthage

  Engineering status: optimal

  Weapon status: at rest

  Fuel supplies: full with external hydrogen tanks deployed. 10,831 power years at current standby levels

  Crew status: off-vessel, presumed dead of old age

  Vessel status: 81%, peak of what can be accomplished without human assistance and a shipyard

  Memory status: 73% full with stable backups

  Darkness still reigned on all long-range scanners. Logs had recorded no artificial signals penetrating the local hydrogen cloud in 2,893 Standard years.

  Until now.

  EASC Carthage reviewed the signal that had awakened him from the great sleep. A starship had arrived in-system.

  He recognized the ripple in space-time indicating Emergence, and the subsequent electromagnetic pulse of a sensor array.

  He was being scanned.

  Carthage sent a coded IFF pulse at the intruder.

  Identify-Friend/Foe. “Who are you?”

  No response.

  He dedicated nearly 0.5 seconds to an analysis of the incoming signal. Without an active scan of his own, the intruder was still too far away to see clearly.

  It did not match anything in his memory core.

  Idly, Carthage wondered for the briefest moment if an alien species had finally been located, humans having been largely destroyed in the conflagration known at the time as the Concordancy War, but that was merest speculation.

  Three thousand and fifty-one years had passed since he had failed to protect Earth from orbital bombardment. That was potentially enough time for survivors to have rebuilt.

  Primitive humans had gone from the Bronze Age to the Space Age in just over three millennia, the first time.