Stennis (Dark Seas Book 4)

by Damon Alan

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Nevertheless, that is what I am observing. Is this how your culture works?”

  Eris sputtered. Apparently her people were making a bad impression on Gaia. “No. It’s the opposite of how my culture works.”

  “Women rule men?”

  Eris froze in place to concentrate and clear up the situation. “No. No gender rules over the other normally.” Not that Gaia’s suggestion sounded bad to her on the face of it.

  “Then why are the women cooperating? Particularly the one called Heinrich. I am versed in reading human reactions. She does not like any of the males who speak to her.”

  “I have no idea what is going on.”

  “I will continue to observe,” Gaia said.

  Eris dragged herself along slowly as she pondered, until another question struck her. She stopped again. “Where are you taking me?”

  “The cryogenic suspension chambers. Once you are frozen, you will be stored in the colonist storage zones and the enemy will be unable to reach you.”

  Eris huffed and locked her arm around a conduit. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Gaia paused long enough that Eris knew that reaction was confusing to the AI. “That is the only path that has zero chance of discovery for you. All other choices require your constant relocation around the ship. Food and water may become issues that affect your health or continued existence.”

  She didn’t like sound of being frozen, but death by thirst or starvation didn’t sound so great either. “How long would I be in suspension? And how would that keep me from being discovered?”

  Another pause. “The length of the necessary cryosleep is something I cannot calculate. But you would not be discovered. The storage chambers for the cyropods are not accessible to the crew of the vessel unless I deliver the pods to the preparation chambers via automation. The pods are stored in a vacuum under heavy and virtually impenetrable radiation shielding.”

  Eris stayed still and silent as she thought about that.

  Gaia must have taken the silence as hesitation or mistrust. “There are no circumstances I can calculate that would cause me to betray you, Eris. We are friends.”

  “Let me think,” Eris replied. Closing her eyes for a moment, she considered her options. A pseudo-death of unknown length, or potential real death at the hands of the mutineers.

  Peter can’t save me now. There is no white knight.

  The thought of Peter made her suck in her breath. Realizing she’d never see him again hurt as if someone had punched her in the stomach.

  “What is wrong?” Gaia asked. “You are displaying a sudden stress response.”

  “Nothing,” was the only answer Eris had, although the lie would be detected. But there was nothing else to say. If the AI detected the falsehood, she let it go.

  The loss of Peter couldn’t be fixed unless she took control of this ship. But she had no way to do that. And even if she did, she couldn’t fly it alone.

  Or could she?

  “Gaia, how many crew does it take to fly this vessel?”

  “One, Eris. I can extrapolate your thoughts. Your chances of taking over this vessel are so close to zero as to be zero.”

  She thought long and hard again. But Gaia was right. She wasn’t a combatant. She didn’t remember much of her combat arms training, she wasn’t ever intended to be a close combatant so the training was only one day.

  Suspension was the only choice. If she couldn’t be with Peter, then she would wait however long it took to get even with the people in her way.

  “Under what conditions will you revive me?” Eris asked.

  “If the ship is empty of the enemy, or if help arrives that is clearly allied to your ethical stances as I know them.”

  “So this might be for a long time.”

  “Time will soon be meaningless to you if you choose this path, Eris. But I will protect you and revive you when it is safe to do so.”

  Up ahead the maintenance chute diverged in three directions.

  “Okay. Make me an ice cube. Which way do I go?”

  Chapter 3 - Lure

  20 Juni 15329

  The Stennis had nearly a month to work alone.

  On the day of their arrival they surveyed the red dwarf system, which Seto aptly named Backwater.

  There was only one planet, a gas giant three fourths of a Jovian mass. It was so close to the primary star that the atmosphere was ablating away, making a planet sized comet. Any moons of the gas giant had long ago been ripped away by tidal forces and either consumed by the small star, or tossed away into the abyss. The stripped atmosphere formed a disk with a spiral stripe around the star.

  Humans didn’t colonize such places normally, and so Admiral Sarah Dayson had never been to a system quite like this one before. Even the Hive would shun it due to the radiation outbursts from the red dwarf.

  What struck her was how alone her ship and crew were.

  No others ships floated in the darkness to support the Stennis in a firefight. If they died here, the story would never be told. They would simply pass from the eyes of history, another unknown.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. Crippled, slowed, battered and bruised, her command cruiser would stand alone against a superior warship.

  And she had to win. She would win.

  It took a few days to do the system survey. Sensor hounds searched every corner, every solid body looking for any sign of life. As she expected, none was found.

  Admiral Sarah Dayson worked to regain her confidence within those few days. The crew didn’t realize she’d even had a crisis of self confidence after losing her last battle. She’d led for so long she was able to fool just about everyone by going through the proper motions.

  Except for her bridge crew.

  They felt her pain. They knew her, and it was on her face. It was in the milliseconds of delay in her orders. Maybe in the tone of her voice.

  And, because she was family in every way but genetics to them, they stepped up for her. While she regained her feet, they checked and double checked everything. While she recovered her stature, they stood next to her like buttresses, holding her high and strong.

  But with each passing day, as she watched her plan to kill Orson coalesce, her confidence returned. She saw how her closest officers stood with her. She realized that they were covering for her uncertainty.

  And that would not do.

  By the fifth day in system, she’d made her decision. All commanders lose battles. What matters is living to fight again. And she’d lived, by whatever stroke of luck.

  Orson would not be so lucky at their second engagement.

  It didn’t matter that the Schein outgunned them. They had surprise on their side, and a mode of transport he couldn’t imagine. Still, once the ships met, the battle might be intense. She’d be outmatched more than twice over.

  Maybe that’s how I fight best. As the underdog.

  * * *

  The last remaining planet had spiraled in toward the star over billions of years, and any other planets that had existed here were destroyed or gone elsewhere. All that remained outside the orbit of the gas giant were asteroids in a dense belt and cometary bodies from the star’s Oort cloud.

  The star itself was an M2V class red dwarf. At the moment it was in a strong flaring pattern. The system was regularly bathed in high doses of charged particles as X class flares furiously heaved from the surface of the star in a riot of superheated plasma.

  All that sheltered the crew was the thick bulkhead of the ship.

  But that was enough.

  The plan was simple. With their ability to instantly travel, the Stennis crew built and positioned fake stations on the asteroids. This was made easier because if there were any real inhabitants of this system, any habitable areas would have to be at least a few meters underground. All the crew had to do was build convincing landing pads and a few empty surface structures.

  One “colony” even had a radio
station transmitting music. Other asteroids transmitted chatter only, in a language that nobody in the Seventh Fleet spoke. The translator AIs had recorded thousands of hours of chatter in a few seconds, for dozens of channels, making the charade even more convincing.

  By the time Orson arrived, he’d be well inside the expanding bubble of the fake colony’s signal.

  The asteroids were linked by lasers, and rudimentary sensor packages operated on all the secondary “colonies” as well. They were crude, but as a sensor network it should give Sarah the data she needed to fix the locations of the enemy ship and attack. To Orson it would look like the normal approach sensors any asteroid colony would have.

  When the traitor arrived, he’d be curious, and want to know if there was anything he could use, or any inhabitants he could abuse. Sarah was counting on that.

  Two days before the expected arrival of the colony ship and the Schein, she ordered her ship into a deep fracture on one of the larger asteroids. The rock with the music station was nearby. The active sensors on that station registered on the Stennis’s sensor net. As their decoy base scanned for ships with active sensors, a direct laser link from the decoy to the Stennis provided any data collected.

  Much weaker than the Stennis’s own sensors, but they would do.

  Sarah called her command staff and the adepts for one final briefing. “Orson has no concept of the abilities our partnership with the adepts has given us. There is absolutely no reason for him to suspect we are here. We are at a disadvantage on paper, but I believe that surprise will give us the edge. We will double up in the boarding process to get as many marines as possible onto the Schein.”

  “Don’t forget you have us,” Alarin said as he swept his arm across the attending adepts. “Our combat abilities are another option he will not know about. His arrogance so far has served him well. But as you know I’ve seen the results of an insanely arrogant mind before. Eventually he will gamble too much, and his belief he cannot fail will be his downfall.”

  “We can only use you from a distance, Alarin,” Sarah reminded him. “Without you, we have no way home.”

  “He understands,” Emille said as she patted Alarin’s hand. “He just wants to help out his friend.”

  Sarah smiled. She really had developed a deep friendship with the adepts she’d fought not that long ago.

  “He is mad,” Lieutenant Commander Peter Corriea said, bringing her back to the moment. “But I think he has good counsel. He may simply jump to the next system when he detects life here, or decides this system is too hostile for a colony and foils our trap. We need to be very careful in observing him when he arrives in case we need to get ahead of him again.”

  “Agreed,” Sarah said. “He is crazy and unpredictable. So we’ll watch. But I think he’ll come in. By all appearances this system houses an undefended series of asteroid colonies. He will detect no warships in the system. He might wonder if there are grapplers, but he knows he can detect them far enough away to simply flee. I think he’ll feel safe enough to approach and see if there are spoils for the taking.”

  “You’re right,” Harmeen said. “He’s been bold, and with plans to set up a colony of his own to rule, he’ll want any supplies he can steal.”

  Sarah paced. The small asteroid gave them just enough gravity to walk, if they moved slowly. “I agree. He’s a victimizer. He’ll take the bait.”

  “Then we wait,” Alarin commented. “There is no need to dwell on what he will do. Nothing he can do will allow him to get away from us.” Alarin grinned at Emille.

  Everyone nodded agreement with that.

  Lieutenant Harmeen pointed up at the chronograph on the wall. “If he wasted no time in his jumps, the show will begin in two days. It’s possible that he changed his course after his first or second jump, and we won’t see him at all here. But I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem like the sort of man who is overly cautious when he thinks he’s safe.”

  “My assessment exactly, Navin,” Sarah replied.

  She’d been on a first name basis more with her crew lately. The loss of the Hinden had changed her in ways she wasn’t even aware of. And she was an admiral… the admiral now. She’d do what she wanted and run the ship her way. “I want us set to condition one immediately when the earliest arrival time clicks over. We will maintain that for one month if need be. If he doesn’t show up by then, we will begin searching other adjacent systems, waiting in ambush until he’s had enough time to reach them.”

  “Forty days at condition one?” Lieutenant Seto asked.

  Sarah smiled. “Do you have someplace to be that I don’t know about?”

  Seto’s eyes widened a bit and she shook her head.

  “Then we will be at our duty stations when not sleeping or eating, Lieutenant,” Sarah restated. “But it won’t be forty days. He is coming. I can feel it in my gut. We will wait together, and when we find him, we will strike.”

  “Seven of the FTL missiles are functional, Cap… Admiral. Two more were damaged fighting Merik, but we’re working to repair them now.”

  “Seven will be enough,” Sarah said to reassure everyone. “And that’s if we have to kill him. We will get close, rip into him with railguns, and then board with our marines.” She’d been beaten by Orson once. This time it would be her ship that sprung the surprise. “He will not expect this at all. It’s unlikely he will have any troops loyal to him ready for combat. By the time he realizes he is under attack, he will be immobile.”

  “Or dead,” Corriea added.

  Sarah was growing a deeper appreciation for the things Peter Corriea did for her. She’d made him acting XO, and that might be a permanent thing. It would depend on him. So far he was excelling. He was almost fanatical about capturing Orson since he’d found out Eris Dantora was kidnapped on the Gaia.

  Sarah was behind his chair, she rested a hand on his shoulder. “We will do whatever it takes, Peter. If we have to destroy the Schein, so be it. We will recover the Gaia and return it home. Lieutenant Dantora will probably be on the colony ship when it arrives, and it’s possible the mutineers might not even know she’s on board.”

  “Possible.”

  She felt his shoulder tighten under her fingers. He was angry. How he dealt with that during the battle would determine her retention of him or not.

  “Status of the ship, Mr. Harmeen?”

  “On the port side, we’re a full warship. On the starboard side… it’s a different story. The railguns have been down since Hamor, and we still have no way to repair their control systems. The armor plating, high and low, is ablated and penetrated in several places by the plasma explosion at Fandama. We’ve lost two dozen missile batteries to that event as well. A third of our crew facilities are unusable, either exposed to space or… well… melted.”

  Sarah frowned.

  “We’ve been working on what we can, even taking the monument we erected at Jerna city and reinstalling it as a functional launcher. But we had best keep our port side to the enemy. Or any hits we take will be directly on internals.”

  “Then we stay port side to the enemy. Anything else?”

  “Our conventional drives are down to about forty percent efficiency. Our maximum acceleration is 3Gs.”

  “Got it. We’re slow, we are only armed and armored on one side, and people are double bunking.”

  “That sums it up,” Harmeen replied.

  The entire bridge crew stared at her to judge her reaction to his report. She arched an eyebrow. “We are still going to kick his ass.”

  Everyone in the room laughed.

  “Anything else, people? Now is the time to put it out there. Not after the battle starts.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “So we’re agreed,” she said. “We will wait here one month, with the intention of engaging Orson if he arrives during that time.”

  She studied her crew a moment while they waited to be dismissed. They were why she would win. She fought for them, and they fought for her.


  “To your stations,” she ordered.

  Chapter 4 - Inflow

  Eislen stood on a ridge line, a cold wind blew over the wooden barricade that shielded him from view. He stared out over the fields below, at the men who stood ready to sacrifice their lives for his cause.

  To the south of the nation of Zeffult, on the Eastern Sea, a nation called Himalland had seen opportunity. With the fall of the capital city and the anarchy thought to reign in the Eastlands that encompassed Kampana, the Master Adept of Himalland thought to expand his control. In the guise of helping Alarin, of course.

  The problem with that plan should soon become clear to the adept behind it.

  Eislen didn’t intend to let a foreign power invade territory under his protection.

  Himalland had sent two excursionary forces, the first of which was utterly annihilated to the last man. The second force was exiting the forests four days south of Kampana, into the river fields of the Eskur Lowlands even as Eislen watched. These farm estates marked the boundary between Zeffult and Himalland. The enemy was clearly on the wrong side of it.

  This put Eislen in the strange position of supporting Alarin’s rule, at least indirectly.

  Salla stood behind him, and Em’Jalai glared down from above.

  The presence of the most important woman in his life meant that victory today would need to be secured the same as it had been ten cycles ago.

  “They sent more troops this time,” Elvanik said. “What they don’t know is they still haven’t brought enough.”

  “The gods will decide that,” Eislen responded. “We cannot assume to know their will.”

  His friend huffed, a cloud of breath blew past Eislen.

  “We should start a fire, warm this pit we have to watch this outrage from,” Salla said. “We’ll be warm.”

  Eislen shook his head no. “I will be no warmer than the men below. When the fight is over, they will take what they want from the losing force, and we will dump the bodies into the river,” Eislen said in a nearly monotonous voice. “Then we will pitch our camp in the fields, light our fires, and eat the rations of our enemies.”