Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  She paused.

  “Are you certain you can keep our people safe, Captain?” she asked. “We have lost too many already, and our own militaries have failed to keep us safe.”

  “My ships are more modern, my starfighters more advanced,” Kyle assured her. “I cannot guarantee anything, Miss Aksoy. We don’t know enough about these pirates to be certain, but I promise you that my people will do everything within their power to protect your ships and your crews.”

  “That’s all we can ask, I suppose,” she allowed. “Thank you, Captain. It has been a dark time, and your arrival is a ray of light and hope.”

  “We do what we can,” he replied. “And we will keep doing what we can. We’ll find these bastards.”

  #

  After a few more pleasantries, they cut the channel and Kyle ordered Taggart and Song into his office. While they were entering, he raised Jamison on his implant.

  “Lieutenant Commander, we’ll be receiving contact information for our escortees from the FTZ Shipping Commission,” he told her. “I’ll need you and your people to reach out to them all and get them set up for a coordinated ship-out time. I want both convoys moving by eighteen hundred hours tonight.

  “Make it happen.”

  “Yes, sir!” she replied. “I’ll let you know immediately if there are any problems we can’t handle.”

  “Good. Roberts out.”

  He turned to his two subordinates, gesturing for them to sit. He didn’t offer drinks and wondered if they even noticed.

  From the way they shifted slightly closer together, they did…and their reaction confirmed his suspicion.

  “You heard my conversation with Jamison,” he told them. “Are there any problems with Kodiak that would prevent us shipping out on that schedule?”

  If there were, he should already know about them, but the possibility of something having come up always existed.

  “No, sir,” Taggart replied. “We’re shipshape and ready to take on the galaxy.”

  “We won’t be going that far,” Kyle said, “but the odds are good we’ll be taking Kodiak and her wings into action against pirates that have demonstrated both ingenuity and firepower. We won’t be able to afford unpleasant surprises, so I need you two to turn over every rock, check every flaw. Double-check that Trent has actually done her job instead of getting distracted.

  “Is there anything going on I need to be aware of?” he asked in conclusion, giving the pair one last chance to come clean.

  “There’s a gambling ring going on in Engineering,” Taggart volunteered. “I think Trent has missed it, but there haven’t been any problems yet, so I’m just keeping an eye on it, with a stack of bricks ready to fall on them if it becomes a problem.”

  That was the kind of minor problem Kyle would normally hope to hear about in this kind of session, things not normally brought to the Captain’s attention but that could be issues later on. Today, however, he was after something else.

  “The Flight Deck is running cleanly,” Song said slowly, “but I get the feeling you’re poking for something specific, sir.”

  “Perceptive of you, CAG,” he told her. “Would you care to make a guess, Vice Commodore, or do I need to call the two of you on the carpet like a pair of ill-behaved teenagers?”

  The room went very silent and very still.

  “I thought we were being discreet,” Taggart finally admitted. “We never let it impact our jobs, sir.”

  “Discretion is all well and good, Commander Taggart,” Kyle ground out, “but keeping it from getting in the way of your jobs is the minimum standard in this kind of mess; do you understand me?”

  “Sir.”

  “What you did not do,” Kyle continued, “is make sure it didn’t get in the way of my job. Do you understand?”

  Both swallowed hard.

  “I’m not sure I follow, sir,” Song admitted.

  “You aren’t in violation of regulations, quite,” he told them. “It’s generally considered a bloody stupid idea, but the XO is out of the CAG’s chain of command unless the Captain dies. Regardless of however professional or competent you are, however, a relationship leaves you both emotionally compromised.”

  “We’ve been avoiding that!” Taggart objected.

  “But he’s right,” Song told her lover. “That we have to be consciously aware of not letting our relationship impact our work and keeping it secret does compromise us.”

  “Exactly. Which is why you’re supposed to tell me about shit like this,” Kyle snapped. “Because that way, if nothing else, at least one damned person can tell you if you are letting it get in the way.”

  “Sir,” Taggart clipped out.

  “So, how about we start from the beginning?” the Captain replied. “‘Mister new Captain sir, I’m in an inappropriate but not technically regs-violating relationship with the CAG. We’re trying to be good about it, but life just happens.’ Sound like something that should be familiar?”

  “Yes, sir. Apologies, sir,” the XO ground out, glancing helplessly at Song.

  “Our previous Captain…didn’t want to know,” the CAG admitted. “We got in the habit of hiding it from everyone.”

  Kyle sighed.

  “Which, I’ll point out, you don’t actually need to do. Discretion is required, yes, but there is no need for this to be a deep, dark secret. We have to trust each other, people, and right now, the evidence says that I can’t necessarily trust you. Do you see why that’s a problem?”

  “Yes, sir,” Taggart admitted. “Like Melania said, Captain Cindre didn’t want to know about relationships amongst the crew, so we kept it under wraps. We were in the habit once you came aboard, awkward as the habit is. We didn’t mean…” He sighed.

  “We fucked up,” he said flatly. “You’re right; you should be able to trust us. I can tell you that you can, but that doesn’t change whether or not you do. If you want my resignation, you can have it.”

  “And mine,” Song agreed quietly.

  Kyle looked each of them in the eyes in turn, holding their gazes for several moments as he gauged their sincerity.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he finally told them. “Even if we were somewhere I could reasonably replace you, it wouldn’t be necessary. You make a damned fine team, one I’m learning to lean on. This might be a big stupid mistake, but it’s only one mistake.”

  He held up a finger.

  “Don’t make more.”

  #

  Chapter 20

  KDX-6657 System

  10:00 October 14, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  BC-305 Poseidon

  “Somebody had a worse week than we did, I see. My heart simply bleeds.”

  Pure implant communication carried as much emotion, if not more, as a conversation in person. Sherazi’s commentary on the tactical feed Poseidon’s Captain was sending James dripped sarcasm and gloating satisfaction.

  “We do need to work with them,” James told Sherazi mildly, focusing the feed in on the collection of Coati’s ships.

  The Terrans weren’t entirely sure how many of the strange combinable corsairs the pirate warlord had, but six currently orbited l’Estación de Muerte—and two of them, as Sherazi had pointed out, had been handled quite roughly.

  “Positron-lance hits?” James queried aloud.

  “Looks like. Charlie took at least three hits from what CIC is calling forty-kiloton-a-second beams, fighter guns, and Epsilon took a clean hit from a three-quarter-megaton beam just front of Engineering. I’m guessing she only made it back because the rest carried her.”

  The pirate ships had names. James’s people even knew them, but his officers and crew continued to refer to them by the letter designations CIC had assigned them when they’d first arrived.

  “Intel says Sultan went missing while we were gone,” James reminded his subordinate. “Unless I misremember, she had seven-fifty beams, didn’t she?”

  “That’s what my implant database has,” Sherazi
confirmed. “She was an old cruiser, but damn. That’s…”

  “That’s a clean sweep of the local warships, and Coati probably grabbed the entire four-ship convoy,” James concluded. “If the Alliance hadn’t finally shown up, the entire sector would be open for him to take.”

  “The Alliance is here, though. Mission accomplished, I guess,” Poseidon’s Captain said slowly. “What happens now?”

  An icon flickered in the corner of James Tecumseh’s mental “screen.”

  “Well, first, it appears I’m going to talk to our pirate friend,” he told Sherazi. “But then…then I need to talk to the Marshal.”

  “Good luck,” the junior Commodore replied. “On both of those.”

  “Thanks. We’ll talk later, Daryush.”

  Sighing, James activated a full-privacy implant communication channel and transferred the com request from Coati into it. They didn’t have q-com links with the pirate, but they were close enough to l’Estación de Muerte to avoid significant time delay.

  “Commodore Coati, a pleasure as always.”

  “Commodore Tecumseh, you seem to be missing a ship,” the brightly colored pirate told him with a massive smile. “I’m guessing that means your mission either went very well or very poorly.”

  “Well, Coati. Ocean Dreams is on her way to Amadeus under Chariot’s watchful eye. It’s a roundabout route; she’ll be a while.”

  His own route back to KDX-6657 had taken almost half again as long as a direct flight from Salvatore. It was a pain in the ass, but…the vector of a ship entering A-S drive could be tracked, and any given line in space would only have a handful of stars along it at most.

  Stopping a light-year outside the system had added over a day to the trip, too. The A-S drive accelerated at roughly a light-year per day squared, but you had to decelerate to zero as well to avoid incinerating both your ship and a significant portion of your destination with radiation release.

  “We had our own successes while you were gone,” Coati told him. “Your captains must have been happier without my ‘psychopaths’…and mine were happier without nursemaids with sticks up their asses.”

  “Are you trying to aggravate me, ‘Commodore’?” James asked sweetly. “Thinking you might not need us anymore?”

  “Every warship in this sector is gone, Commodore Tecumseh,” the pirate replied. “It’s almost time for me to begin planning my triumphant return to Serengeti as their new king. Want a planet, Commodore? I may not need you anymore, but I could use you…and I can be generous.”

  The thought of working for Coati instead of with Coati turned James’s stomach, but practice kept his face and emotions level. He had a filter on his implant channel to minimize emotional transfer, but it worked best if he kept his emotions under control.

  “I wouldn’t plan your coronation just yet,” he told the pirate. “A Federation task group arrived in Antioch two days ago, under the command of the Stellar Fox himself. It appears we’ve drawn some powerful attention.”

  “Huh,” Coati said, then grinned. “Then I guess it’s a good thing you’re almost unaggravatable, isn’t it, Commodore? It seems I may still need you after all. Now that your enemies are here, what is your plan?”

  “I’ll let you know,” James promised. “I need to call home.”

  “Like a good dog.” The pirate sighed. “All right, Commodore. You lick your master’s heels, then tell me what he says.”

  “We’ll talk,” James said sharply, then cut the channel and rubbed his temples.

  Coati gave him a headache on a good day.

  #

  James retreated to the quiet meditation chamber off his office to call his superior, taking a few moments of blessed silence to compose himself.

  Fleet Admiral James Calvin Walkingstick, Marshal of the Rimward Marches, was one of the most powerful military officers in the Commonwealth. He and James Tecumseh both hailed from the Amerindian tribes of Earth’s North America—indeed, both came from families that still preserved many of their people’s ancient traditions. They had that and a first name in common, which had occasionally seemed to trigger a mentorly attitude in the older man.

  Then the Stellar Fox had happened. Kyle Roberts had pursued a Commonwealth warship guilty of a horrendous atrocity into James Tecumseh’s area of responsibility, and faced with a choice between an enemy in pursuit of justice and a theoretical colleague guilty of mass murder…James had stood aside and let Roberts blow a Commonwealth battleship to hell.

  It had cost him his own ship and left him working on logistics for the offensives against the Alliance instead of commanding a starship, but James couldn’t bring himself to regret it. Captain Richardson had been a blot not merely on the honor of the Terran Commonwealth Navy but of the human race.

  This mission was both a chance to rehabilitate himself…and a rather pointed reminder that wars could not always be fought with perfect honor.

  James Tecumseh was not longer quite as impressed with Marshal Walkingstick as he had once been, but the Marshal remained his commanding officer.

  With a sigh, he linked into Poseidon’s q-com systems and pinged the battleship Saint Michael. The systems promptly proceeded to demand a series of authentication and security codes to confirm who he was, and then the wallscreen of his meditation chamber began to show a slowly spinning version of the multi-starred seal of the Terran Commonwealth.

  It took a surprisingly short five minutes for the man in charge of a massive interstellar campaign of conquest to become available and appear on the screen. Walkingstick was a tall man, with darker skin and heavier features than James himself, with a long single braid of black hair hanging down his back, and unreadably dark eyes.

  “Commodore Tecumseh,” he greeted James. “It appears congratulations are in order for a well-executed first phase. Your actions have caused great confusion in the capitals of the Alliance at a most convenient time.”

  “Thank you, sir,” James replied. “We have confirmed that three capital ships have arrived in the Antioch system under the command of Captain Kyle Roberts. We’re not sure of the classes, but that is a significant commitment.”

  “Indeed,” Walkingstick agreed thoughtfully. “Successful indeed, Commodore, though not as much as we’d hoped. It appears the Alliance is still hesitant to commit too much force to that region.”

  “I suspect they sent the Stellar Fox instead of more ships,” the junior man replied.

  “Fair enough if they did,” the Marshal replied with a chuckle. “That man seems worth another wing of starfighters all on his own; I’m perfectly happy if they want him on the far side of nowhere and not taking a supercarrier into the middle of my plans again.”

  “If we want more forces diverted, I may need to become further involved,” James warned. “Tempting as feeding our local allies into the wood chipper of an Alliance task group is, it wouldn’t draw more forces out here.”

  “Believe me, Commodore, I don’t expect or desire this situation to end very well for our pirate friend,” Walkingstick told him. “But yes, I need the Alliance to commit more than three old ships and one first-class tactician to hunting him down.

  “You’re going to need to engage the Fox’s ships directly,” he continued. “Isolate and destroy one of his ships, preferably the most modern one. If you can take out Roberts himself, I certainly won’t object.

  “They sent a task group to the Free Trade Zone, Commodore. I want them thinking they need a fleet. Do you follow?”

  “I understand completely, sir,” James confirmed. He’d rather have been told ‘mission complete, come home,’ but Walkingstick’s logic made sense. “I’ll speak with Coati and prepare an operation. We’ll keep the Alliance looking over their shoulders, sir.”

  “Good. Keep it up, Tecumseh, and there’ll be Admiral’s stars and a task group waiting for you when you come home.

  “Good luck, Commodore.”

  #

  Even though James hadn’t warned Coati he was coming, he
was completely unsurprised to find the scaled and multi-colored pirate waiting for him when he disembarked from his shuttle, power-armored Marines in tow.

  “Sooner or later, Commodore, you and I are going to have a reckoning,” Coati said cheerfully, his smile bright but strained. “You can brazen your way around my authority in front of my men only so long.”

  “That, Commodore, is your problem,” James replied, his voice equally cheerful. “We need to talk. There are plans to be made, and I don’t think this decrepit hangar is the place for them.”

  Coati grunted and gestured for James to follow, leading the way to the now-familiar office in the structure and pouring a strange, almost fire colored, liqueur for them.

  “Red opalfruit liqueur,” he explained as he passed the Terran officer a glass. “The rare bottles that make their way all the way to Earth go for tens of thousands…and it was originally a waste product on Serengeti. They grow the trees to harvest blue opalfruit, but about half of the crop is always red.”

  Blue opalfruit was a staple of Serengeti’s exports, a naturally evolved fruit that filled about a quarter of a human’s daily dietary needs in a single fist-sized lump and was a mild stimulant.

  “I thought red opalfruit was toxic?” James asked, eyeing the beverage. He didn’t think Coati was going to poison him, but…

  “Ha!” The pirate downed half of his tumbler in a single swallow. “Unprocessed red opalfruit is toxic. Mix it with Terran yeast, however, and leave it for two months, and you get this. The yeast eats all of the poisonous crap and spits out alcohol. Win all around.”

  James took a single, very careful sip and inhaled sharply in delight. It was definitely alcoholic, but it danced across his tongue like a dozen flavors rolled into one, stimulating his taste buds in a cascade of tastes.

  “Wow. And blue opalfruit gets harvested in preference to this?” he asked.

  “Can’t feed a family on alcohol,” Coati pointed out. “Where blue opalfruit gets you high and feeds you well. But there’s a reason no one has engineered trees that only produce one type of opalfruit,” he finished with a mocking toast.