Rising Star

by Donald Nicklas

  Captain Wainwright responded, “What is the displacement?”

  “A little larger than a standard mining scout ship.”

  Wainwright gave that some thought. “A private vessel?” He said, to no one in particular.

  “Sir, it must have been a sensor glitch, nothing came out of the slipstream.”

  “Run a diagnostic and keep me apprised.”

  Had Captain Wainwright or Admiral Wilson bothered to ask the other ships of the fleet, they would have found out that all of them experienced the same sensor glitch. Even if they were suspicious, they would have found nothing. Invisible or not, the Gladius could not hide her mass in the slipstream. Once out though, she did not exist. Tavia plotted a course to the outbound slipstream. This was a fast flyby.

  “Raul, what are the readings on the fleet?” Alaya asked.

  “Telemetry indicates a large number of Sinclair ships in orbit around Petrovia. Mass signatures are just coming in. The masses indicate seventeen dreadnoughts, fifteen cruisers and ten destroyers with five of them running picket duty near the inbound slipstreams. There is one an hour out from our position.”

  “Let’s give it a wide berth and head straight for the outbound slipstream. The main mission is to make sure the missing dreadnoughts are not there. What happens then is destiny.”

  “Yes, captain,” Tavia said as she guided the ship towards the slipstream. They had just over a fifteen-hour transit across the system and they maintained monitoring of the fleet.

  As the Gladius glided through the system unseen and undetected, Admiral Wilson spent his time sitting in his ready room looking over the reports from the planet. Since the regulars left and turned the planet over to mercenaries, the reports were maddeningly monotonous. The mercenary commander, who fancied herself a general, was constantly putting out fires lit by the resistance. General Henrietta Upton was a tough commander, who managed to keep her troops in line with a mixture of carrot and stick. She was in her late forties and a veteran warrior. However, Admiral Wilson knew the planet would never be subdued, since the mercenaries retaliate against the resistance by killing innocent civilians. This had been going on for almost four years and by now, the entire population hated Sinclair forces as if they were demons. Wherever the resistance goes, the population helps them. This would have never happened with regular troops. Now here was a report that continued to be a mystery. Apparently, almost a month ago, the mercenaries discovered a hidden resistance base and sent a reinforced company to investigate. They lost contact with the troops and flyovers revealed nothing in or around the volcano other than recent landslides. A week later, the remnants of the company arrived at a base, barefoot with severe lacerations of their feet. They reported being attacked from an elevated battery aimed at the side of the mountain. Apparently, this caused landslides and pelted them with bombs. General Upton thought they were just making excuses for a poor job and seventy-five percent casualties, all dead. However, just in case, she sent a reconnaissance force to the location and sure enough, there was evidence of landslides cause by rail gun slugs, of all things. One or two unexploded cluster bombs were also found. What was odd about the findings was the fact that they were the size launched from ships, not from ground emplacements. The destroyed remains of a rebel base were found in the caldera of the volcano. The reconnaissance team then looked at all of the surrounding mountains and there was no evidence of any emplacements or evidence of where they might have been, for that matter. The entire episode was a mystery and mysteries left Admiral Wilson nervous. Even though he had no say in using mercenaries, as the overall commander of the operation, he would be blamed for failure. So far failure was very much an option and every year that passed saw the admiral approaching an ignominious end to his career. When he was finished with the dispatches, he went over to his liquor cabinet and got out his latest bottle of bourbon. He didn’t think he was an alcoholic, but he was aware he spent a lot of his off time drinking bourbon. When Horatio Sinclair shot Alexi Petrov right in front of him, the admiral started to spiral downward. He began to question the very corporation responsible for his successes. He had made his name fighting a large pirate force along the Spinward Marches of the Erie Corporation. That catapulted him up the ladder to a future flag position as admiral of the Mobile Fleet. Since then he had been stagnating and he had hoped this conquest would move him out of the military and into the corporate structure with a future as a vice president of one of the many division of Sinclair Corp. Now that dream was slipping through his fingers and the dispatches from central command were laced with disappointment in his progress and threats of replacement. Like any good corporate lackey, he blamed everyone else for his failures, but in the end, he had five hundred marines on each of his seventeen dreadnoughts and never used even one to help consolidate the planet. That would require thinking out of the box, and that kind of activity is frowned upon by the corporation. He poured another glass of bourbon and drank more until it was time to retire for the night. He fell asleep reflecting on how truly alone he felt.

  The Gladius was now ten hours into her transit of the system and Raul continued to monitor the enemy fleet. Nothing had changed.

  Captain Wainwright was getting tired of sitting on the bridge of the Vermont. He was bored and the fleet was bored. Four years without relief and he knew they were all getting sloppy. The admiral liked to think he still controlled a well-oiled machine, but Wainwright knew the mechanism was rusting. The marines were tired of constant drilling with no action and leaves to see their families in home space were rare. There was a reason the corporation borders rarely changed. It was necessary to keep a conquered enemy in line and that meant constant fights against resistance. Home could not be moved into the new territory until it was subdued, and since the conquered could not be trusted to defend their space for their conquerors, corporation fleets and troops had to be stationed far from home. This caused a constant grinding down of the will of the conqueror as the will of the resistance increased with every atrocity necessary to control them. In addition, here was the cruelest cut of all; control was only an illusion that lulled the conqueror into complacency.

  “Captain, there are multiple vessels coming into the system,” The Vermont’s sensor tech reported.

  Wainwright sat up in his chair, “What are the mass readings?”

  “The masses are consistent with dreadnought class vessels. One has entered and a second one is at the end of the slipstream.”

  “How old is the information and which slipstream?”

  The tech looked at the screen, “The slipstream is inbound from Sinclair space and the information is three hours old.”

  Wainwright gave that some thought. If the ships were coming from Sinclair space, then there should be nothing to be worried about, but he had been feeling uneasy for a while. His thoughts were interrupted by the sensor tech.

  “Captain, telemetry is coming in now; they are Sinclair dreadnoughts, those we detached from the fleet.”

  Now that was good news. The Mobile Fleet would be back to full strength. Wainwright felt good about that, but was surprised that the revelation did nothing to assuage his uneasy feeling.

  Aboard the Gladius, the new ships were also noted, but identification occurred much sooner since they were closer to the inbound slipstream. Raul looked at Alaya and said, “Captain, the new ships are their missing eight dreadnoughts.”

  Alaya could not believe it. Talk about bad timing. “We will have to send a message capsule ahead as soon as we can. Once we reach the slipstream, I want to launch the capsule so it is ahead of us in the stream. How long will it be detectable.”

  “It will take it a minute to deploy but, if we program it not to send an address code until it is in the next system, they will only pick up us deploying it, and that only for a few seconds.”

  Alaya gave this some thought, “We will have to risk it. Send them the telemetry on the new arrivals and the information of the rest of the fleet.”

  “Yes
, captain.”

  Just over four hours later, they were in the slipstream but did not deploy until the capsule was sent and it entered the slipstream. The Gladius followed.

  “Captain,” The sensor tech aboard the Vermont interrupted Captain Wainwright’s discussion with Admiral Wilson. The latter had come to the bridge on word of the return of the detached dreadnoughts. The tech continued, “There was an indication of a launch then it disappeared.”

  Admiral Wilson looked at the tech, “A repeat of that glitch from earlier?”

  “No sir, this was a missile tube launch.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At the outbound slipstream towards the outer Petrov bases.”

  The admiral and the captain both considered this. “Did we have any indication of a ship out there?”

  “No sir.”

  Admiral Wilson then ordered the communications tech to contact the other ships in the fleet and see if they picked up anything and if they had the glitch earlier. The response was yes to both questions. This was very troubling. The corporations did not live in an era of magic and specters. They lived in an era of science. That meant there must be an explanation for all of these glitches happening throughout the fleet at the same time.

  “Alfred, get the best computer techs up here and find out what those glitches were all about.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  Over the next day, all of the data collected by the fleet was examined and the head of the fleet tech service reported to the Admiral and Captain Wainwright. “Sirs, we have determined that the signals picked up by the fleet were not glitches in the system.” At this point, the tech paused and the Admiral and Captain looked at each other.

  “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, what did you find?” Captain Wainwright asked.

  “Sir, we are not sure what we found. The mass readings were correct, but no ship came through, that is why we thought it was a glitch. Nevertheless, we could find no glitch. That could be chalked up to an unexplained anomaly. They have actually happened before when a mass object, such as an asteroid or comet breaks the slipstream. It is the second anomaly that we cannot explain. It is definitely not natural, but it is also not human. It appears to be telemetry from a ship that has non-human electrical activity.”

  This time Admiral Wilson spoke first, “Are you telling us that we had an alien ship in our system? I think we have all been in orbit here too long.”

  “No sir, what I am saying is the telemetry we picked up came from non-human electronics. The signals could have come from outside the system. We have no knowledge of what resides outside of the slipstreams we sail between systems.”

  “Surely not aliens. Why have we not made contact with them before?”

  “Sirs, I don’t know what the answer is to that, but if that signal did not come from outside our system, then that alien ship was invisible. What would be worse?”

  The admiral and the captain knew they would rather have aliens living between systems then have them flying around in invisible ships. They were thankful nobody knew how to accomplish that feat. If nothing else, the discovery of an alien signal broke the monotony. Admiral Wilson and Captain Wainwright knew the techs were always looking for aliens, and if they wanted to believe aliens existed, fine. As long as they did their job, they could believe what they wanted. Next time he rotated back to the Sinclair home world, he would make sure he told this story to Horatio Sinclair and they could both have a good laugh over the idea that there were actually aliens out there. He smiled and returned to his quarters and opened a new bottle of bourbon.

  The Gladius was finally in the last slipstream leading to the system hiding the Romani fleet. Alaya was very concerned with the arrival of the missing dreadnoughts. The battle was going to be tough before they arrived. It may be almost impossible with the Mobile Fleet at full strength. As Alaya was mulling this over, Tavia interrupted her.

  “Captain, we are about to enter the system. Hatch, make us invisible. Preparing for depolarization in 3...2...1.” Tavia pressed a button, the slipstream wings were depolarized, and the ship dropped out of the slipstream just as Hatch made them invisible. As the system came into view, the wings rotated from slipstream sail position back to normal position and the engines came alive.

  “Captain, I am picking up telemetry only from the Rising Star. The rest of the fleet is maintaining invisibility.”

  Alaya looked over to Hatch, “Hatch, make sure we don’t bump into any invisible ships. Is the fleet all there?”

  “Sss. Captain Slone, there are now nineteen dreadnoughts in the system, all invisible. Other ships still the same.”

  As Alaya was thinking this over, Raul reported an incoming message. She ordered it on the bridge speakers. “Welcome back Gladius. Report to the Longinus, we will become visible. As the Gladius approached the fleet, the Longinus appeared. This was necessary since the serpent technology could identify where invisible ships were and by their mass, guess at the ship type, it could not identify an individual ship. As the Gladius approached the dreadnought, they could see other shuttles appearing, as if out of nowhere, and heading to the Longinus. The Gladius became visible and entered the landing bay, where Tavia was directed to bring the ship into the assigned docking spot. When the crew exited the ship, Christopher Slone was there to greet his wife.

  “Chris, we detected eight additional dreadnoughts in the fleet. Where did they come from?”

  “Captain Abramov arrived yesterday with them. Our old friend, Igor Perminov returned with him. He wanted to help liberate his home world.”

  “I’m glad New Wales allowed him that honor.”

  “Tavia’s father insisted. Ian MacDougal knows how important it is to be able to free your own people.”

  The day before the arrival of the Gladius, Christopher Slone was on the bridge of the Rising Star. He had toured the ship several times and it was huge. The deck under the gun deck had been turned into a prison deck for the mercenaries. Slone’s concern was what happens when they go into battle. He had just fewer than fifteen hundred mercenary prisoners. This required taking serpents from his combat troops to guard them. If the guards were needed to repel boarders, what would they be doing? There really were no actual cells on the ship. It was fear of the serpents that kept them in line. Slone had only a minimal crew aboard the battleship. The mercenaries were not part of the Sinclair military and fought for money. Perhaps he could strike a deal with them. Slone called to the bridge and told Paul McMann to take command. He then told Tom Gardner to contact the Longinus and request permission for him to come aboard and speak with Captain Lorenzo. By the time he reached the hangar, Tom reported permission was granted and Captain Lorenzo awaited him in the captain’s quarters. Slone went over to a boarding shuttle and slipped into the pilot’s seat. In a short time, he was landing on the hangar of the Longinus and went up to the captain’s quarters. After pressing the bell button on the door panel, the door opened after Juan Lorenzo gave the order. Slone walked in.

  “Welcome Christopher. Are you as bored as I am? Navy men like us hate this waiting game. If all went well on Alaya’s flyby, she should be arriving back here later tomorrow.”

  “I hope so, Juan. I always worry when she is on a scouting mission, even though I know she can take good care of herself.”

  Since they were meeting in the captain’s private quarters, they were more casual and did not stand on ranks. They could talk as friends. Juan went to his cabinet, brought out some quality scotch, and poured a glass for each of them. Christopher swished his scotch a little and then took a sip. “Very good scotch, Juan. I must say, since joining the Romani, my appreciation of food and drink has very much matured. I always felt like a bit of an orphan when Alaya told me about all of the fine food she had as a Sinclair daughter.”

  “You have a fine woman there, Christopher. If she weren’t totally in love with you, I would give you some competition. So what brings you over here, other than boredom?”

  “It�
�s the mercenaries I have under guard. There are nearly fifteen hundred of them and I am concerned when we enter battle and are boarded, they will be a dangerous group in our rear.”

  “They are not afraid of the serpents?”

  “Yes they are, Juan, but when we are boarded I will need every one of my serpents. Therefore I have a proposition I would like to put to them.”

  “Ok, I have a feeling I know where this is going. Let me guess, you want to hire them.”

  “They will fight for whoever pays them. I was thinking of offering them the choice of fighting or being eliminated so they are not in our rear. Their pay was aboard the battleship in the form of three tons of gold I had transferred to the Invicta. I would like to take a half ton and offer it to them for their services.”

  “Christopher, how are you going to stop them from turning on you anyway?”

  “Well, they are not navigators or naval personnel, so where are they going to go and I was not going to make the offer until we are in the slipstream. I also plan to give them only handguns and no armor. If they agree to this, then they have a chance for some cash. If not then we will have to distribute them throughout the fleet, or I will need a squad of marines just to act as jailors.”

  “I see the dilemma. Let me give it some thought. Let’s enjoy our scotch.” They sat and had some casual conversation when they were interrupted by the intercom.

  “Captain, a message capsule entered from the incoming slipstream in the direction of Petrovia.”

  “Open the capsule and let me know when the message arrives,” Captain Lorenzo said. He then turned to Slone. “That is the slipstream the Gladius should be returning on. They must have sent the capsule. Sinclair would not know we are here.”

  The communication tech sent the code to retrieve the message. Since the capsule was still far from the fleet, there was close to an hour one-way, so there would be a two-hour lag time. While they were waiting, Slone called over to the Invicta and had half a ton of gold transferred to the Rising Star. Slone spent the rest of the time discussing the findings on the previous scouting mission and deciding how to handle the land battle, assuming the space battle went their way. As they were still discussing the situation, the bridge notified Captain Lorenzo that the message had arrived. Both captains went to the bridge.