“All right, everyone,” Kurzman continued after Harold and the Rekiki were seated. “As of a few hours ago, I relieved Captain Rolfson as Station Commander, Alpha Centauri, for the Duchy of Terra Militia. We are, of course, subject to Imperial Navy authority as represented by Commander Teykay, but one hopes the Commander will listen to my advice.”
Teykay stamped his foot with an accompanying hiss, a brisk laugh for his people.
“I have a handful of destroyers. This ship alone outmasses my entire so-called ‘command’, Squadron Lord. Until more serious Imperial forces arrive, I am more than willing to concede functional authority here to you.”
“I appreciate that, Commander,” Kurzman replied. “My understanding is that a significant Imperial reinforcement is going to be heading our way, but nothing had been confirmed when we left Sol.”
“We can’t let the death of an Imperial flag officer go unpunished,” Teykay told him. “There must be consequences.”
“And as soon as the Imperium is certain who was behind this, there will be,” the Admiral confirmed. “The last I heard was that the Empress had summoned the Theocracy representative on A!To and demanded an explanation—and that the Priest Speaker claimed to have no idea what she was talking about.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time the Priest Speaker lied to the Empress,” Harold pointed out. “He claimed to know nothing about the attack on Sol, and we know that was a sanctioned, if technically rogue, operation.”
“Agreed. We have evidence to suggest these Kanzi weren’t Theocracy, but that ball is now out of our court,” Kurzman replied. When Teykay looked at him questioningly, the flag officer chuckled. “We have no control of that situation, Commander. It’s now a political question, for the Empress and the Houses, not us.
“Our responsibility is simple: no matter what happens, Alpha Centauri holds. We were hopeful that no one outside the Imperium knew what had happened here, but we now know we were at least partially wrong.”
Kurzman tapped a command and a hologram of the Alpha Centauri system, centered on Hope instead of any of the stars, appeared above the table.
“Someone opened a hyper portal here just after we opened ours here,” he told the assembled officers, highlighting two marks on the hologram as he spoke. “Their timing was all but perfect: no one in Hope orbit saw anything, and no one in the task group saw anything except Emperor herself—and all we confirmed was that a hyper portal was created.”
“We’re going over our scan data now,” Harold told everyone. “We expect at this point to find a stealth-fielded ship in place. If we do, we’ll try to trace back its movements until we find its entry into the system.”
He shook his head.
“Likely they entered Centauri with their interface drive down or hiding behind someone else’s hyper portal. It’s certainly something our stealth scouts have done in the past, so we know it’s possible even without a stealth field.”
“We don’t believe the observer was the same as the people who attacked us,” Kurzman noted. “Which means we have at least one more player in this game and they are likely a Core Power.
“That’s not a long list, and the list of those with interests out here is even shorter,” he continued. “I’d love to think that we just saw the tail end of a Mesharom scout ship, but we know damn well the worms have us wired up six ways to Sunday.
“Which means we probably just saw a Laian scout ship, which is going to be a giant pain in the ass.
“But I remind you all, our orders and our responsibility, both to our Duchess and the Imperium, are clear: no matter what happens. No matter who comes calling. We hold Centauri.”
#
Once the main meeting was over, Harold joined the Admiral in his day cabin, where Kurzman poured them both a glass of scotch over ice and passed one to the Captain.
“To absent friends,” he toasted.
“To absent friends,” Harold agreed softly, swallowing the whisky and letting it burn down his throat. They’d both made the wild ride as privateers aboard Tornado with Annette Bond, and there weren’t many left in uniform who had. A good half of the old cruiser’s crew had gone aboard Emperor of China and Queen of England with Andrew Lougheed and Elizabeth Sade, and none of those brave spacers had come home from the battle with the Kanzi.
“You were here, I wasn’t,” Kurzman said after a long moment. “How bad was it?”
Harold shook his head.
“Four destroyers, Admiral,” he reminded his superior. “Maybe…half a million tons apiece. Liberty alone outmassed them and should have outgunned them.
“But each of them had shields as powerful as Liberty’s, backed up with compressed-matter armor and missiles ten percent of lightspeed faster than ours, plus whatever godawful thing they killed Harrison with.”
The Admiral sighed.
“I knew Xander well,” he admitted. “Back when I was a Nova Industries navigator and he was a Navy Captain, I dated his brother. We all stayed friends after, too. He was a good man.”
“Everyone says that about the dead,” Harold replied. “But that was my impression. Not many with the framatanda to sign on with the Imperials as a flag officer.”
“Man had big brass balls,” Kurzman translated from Harold’s Swedish with a chuckle. “But…ton for ton, how would you stack our ships up against theirs?”
“Their missiles have twice the force and are damned hard to shoot down,” the Captain replied. “Their destroyers have the shields of our cruisers and they appear to be able to ignore our short-range beam weapons other than the lances. They’re faster than we are, but they lack active missile defense.”
Rolfson swallowed more of the scotch and looked up at the Admiral.
“In a straight fight, those four ships could have taken Liberty,” he admitted. “Neither of us was quite sure of the other’s capabilities; that’s the only reason we took them down. I’d say, ton for ton, one of their ships is worth two to three of ours.”
“Damn,” Kurzman murmured. “That’s worse than I was hoping.”
“Stack them up against the Laians or the Mesharom, eh, they’re still coming up short,” Harold said. “But we’re not a Core Power and we all know it. Hell, I don’t even know what the hell they shot Harrison with.”
The Admiral nodded, and slid an open scroll-communicator over his desk. “Sign that, Captain.”
“What the hell?” Harold asked, staring at the text on the page. It was a secrecy agreement, similar to half a dozen he’d signed to join the Militia. “What is this?”
“This is you agreeing to accept clearance to our deepest, darkest secret, Captain,” Kurzman told him. “Sign it, and I can give you a few answers. Don’t, and you’re whistling in the dark when these bastards come back.”
Harold glared at his boss for a long moment, and then dashed off a signature with his finger.
“What did I just get myself into?” he demanded.
“You’re now cleared for BugWorks Two,” Kurzman told him. “It’s a short damned list, so far as people who aren’t working at the facility go.
“Long and short of it, the Duchess decided to take advantage of our access to Laian engineers and Imperial technology and intelligence,” the Admiral explained. “BugWorks Two is a black Duchy of Terra Militia project where we are attempting to study the technology of the Core Powers and reverse-engineer useful gear to help keep ourselves valuable to the Imperium.”
“Shit. Seriously?”
“Seriously. The facility is hiding in low Jupiter orbit and has, to date, produced exactly zero useful technologies,” Kurzman admitted. “What it has given us, however, is a solid idea of just what tech is out there.
“So, while I don’t know who hit us, I can at least identify some of what they hit us with.”
“Like?” Harold asked. The Admiral had his full attention.
“The Mesharom have developed a defense they call an antiproton curtain,” Kurzman told him. “They’re doing their best to
keep it under wraps, because proton beams are still a staple of the Core Powers’ arsenals and the curtain no-sells them completely. For a while, anyway.”
“Weaknesses?”
“Being overwhelmed,” the Admiral replied simply. “If Harrison had sustained proton fire on the bastards, he’d have taken down the curtains in three or four salvos. The same kind of maneuvers that extend shield life will work for the curtains, though, and they’re only effective on proton beams.”
“Who else has them?” Harold asked.
“That’s the problem, Captain,” Kurzman said grimly. “So far as we know, only the Mesharom have antiproton curtains. The Kanzi certainly don’t—and perhaps worse, even the BugWorks Two teams, which include some of the best minds we’ve been able to quietly poach from four species, have no idea what they killed Xander with.
“Some of their gear was basically modern. Some was old Core Power tech…but some was Core Power cutting-edge, and some was gear nobody has.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” the Captain agreed.
“No. That’s why we showed up with a fleet and the Imperials are sending one as well,” Kurzman told him. “I’m not going to argue with your assessment of our relative firepower, which means we need three times their tonnage if we’re going to stop the bastards.”
He smiled grimly.
“I’m hoping they stage up more slowly than we did. If they only send, say, cruisers for the next wave…they’re going to have an ugly surprise coming.”
#
The meetings had been informative, though Harold would admit the productivity of them was probably questionable. If nothing else, lining up every Captain of the suddenly swollen Alpha Centauri Station and making sure they knew each other had some value, as had his briefing on what BugWorks Two knew about the strange Kanzi’s weapons.
Most of it was “show and tell”, however, and he did have real work to do. It was also exhausting, and he leaned back in his chair in his shuttle and was about to let himself drift off to sleep when his communicator buzzed at him.
He suppressed an entirely-un-Captain-like desire to ignore it and opened up the device.
“Rolfson.”
“Harold, it’s Ramona,” Dr. Wolastoq greeted him. He couldn’t remember ever telling the xenoarchaeologist to use his first name—and she’d definitely never told him to use hers!
She was smiling as well, a broad, friendly grin unlike anything he’d ever seen on her face. Combined with the eager glint in her eye, it transformed her face from somewhat plain into surprisingly attractive.
“Doctor, you looked pleased with yourself,” he replied carefully.
“I am pleased with myself,” she agreed. “And pleased with you, Captain. Your bit of insight was exactly the key we needed. We found it.”
“‘It’ being…?”
“What is either a fifty-thousand-odd-year-old meteor impact or the crash site of an FTL starship,” Wolastoq replied. “The source of our radiation and debris, and—I’ll bet a nice dinner in New Hope City—what the Kanzi were looking for.”
“I’ll take that bet,” Harold agreed, then paused. That came perilously close to asking the archaeologist out on a date, since he was quite certain she was correct.
She chuckled, far more relaxed than he’d ever seen her.
“I don’t want to open this up without you here, Harold,” she told him, her voice soft. “We found it because of you, and after everything that happened…I want you there.”
Her voice firmed up a moment later.
“And we need a starship specialist, a Navy officer,” she continued. “I know something about excavating and studying starship wrecks, but you know ships better. We can use your help.”
Sleep, it seemed was going to be a long time coming—but it was going to be so worth it.
“I’ll have my pilot redirect,” Harold told her. “We should be on the ground in under ten minutes.”
#
Chapter 13
Admiral Jean Villeneuve was tired. He wasn’t old, not by the standards of Pre-Annexation Earth, let alone the A!Tol Imperium, but he’d given the UESF sixty years of his life only to watch everything they had built fail before the A!Tol.
He’d given Bond and the Duchy another four years since, and some days, he swore those weighed on him more.
All of that, however, was forgotten as he stood on the flag deck of the battleship Manticore and surveyed the results of his work. Orentel and her mate stood slightly behind him, the two man-high beetle-like aliens sharing in this moment of delight as the two brand-new battleships pirouetted through a series of maneuvers with Commodore Tidikat’s attack cruisers.
“Our cruisers are still faster,” that worthy noted, adjusting the straps of his uniforms across his broad, carapaced chest. “Not just the attack cruisers, all of our ships.”
If Jean understood correctly, the three Laian ships that had joined his little fleet had been laid down while Earth was still experimenting with getting into orbit. Despite that, they were, without a doubt, the most advanced ships in the Militia.
They’d also been thoroughly boobytrapped to make sure that the Terrans didn’t tear them apart for that technology. There was an etiquette to how the Arm Powers were allowed to try and acquire Core technology, even centuries-obsolete Core technology.
“We don’t need them to outrun cruisers,” Jean said. “Just Kanzi battleships.”
“They can do that,” Orentel agreed, her eyes glittering as Manticore and Griffon executed a position exchange at half the speed of light. In combat, the switchover would have moved incoming fire from one warship’s shields to the other, potentially saving a pressured vessel from destruction.
“And catch many people’s cruisers, at that. What they can’t do is go pincer to pincer with super-battleships.”
“They don’t need to,” Jean replied. “So long as they can fight battleships on an even keel.”
The ex-Dockmaster’s mandibles chittered in laughter.
“Oh, there is no ‘even keel’, as you humans say, between the Manticores and your blue-furred friends’ ships,” she told him. “One on one, Manticore would crush any Kanzi warship or last-generation Imperial ship with ease.
“Super-battleships would be out of their range, though working together…” her mandibles chittered again, a slower, more thoughtful sound. “The two of them could handle any Arm Power’s super-battleship. Against a Core ship, though…”
“If we have to fight Core ships, we’re dead,” Jean said grimly. “And we all know it.” He shook his head. “We’ve done fantastic work with the Thunderstorms and the Manticores. Your people’s assistance was invaluable.”
“You gave us a home and solid ground beneath our claws, Admiral,” Commodore Tidikat said. “We are grateful. We did not bring technology with us, only our minds. I am pleased that my mate’s mind has been so valuable.”
Orentel’s mandibles chittered in laughter again.
“I have many ideas,” she told the two males. “Even limited to the technology of the Imperium, I think there is much we can achieve that will surprise those who would threaten our new home.
“Give me time, Admiral, and I will make your Militia the envy of the galaxy!”
Jean chuckled.
“That’s more attention than I expect we want, Orentel,” he admitted. “We’re the back end of nowhere by everyone’s standards—and both we and the Imperium want to keep it looking that way!”
The two Laians were intimately involved with BugWorks Two, which was part of why the Duchy was so determined to avoid the Imperium taking official notice—and why the Imperium was very careful not to take official notice.
Jean, after all, had no illusions about the likelihood they’d concealed the project from their overlords. They weren’t hiding BugWorks from the Imperium.
“Beneath notice is good,” Tidikat agreed, watching the five ships dance around each other on the screen. “Beneath notice is a safe place to rai
se our broods.”
And that thought, Jean reflected, was why he wasn’t going to be hanging up his stars anytime soon. The Duchy of Terra was not yet safe for the generation being born—and he owed it to the people he’d once failed to provide that safety.
No matter how much it took from him to do it.
#
A shuttle carried the gaunt Admiral back to his flagship, Empereur de France. The super-battleship, along with President De Gaulle, hovered protectively over the testing area. They were close enough to Earth to arrive inside fifteen minutes if there was a problem, and far enough away that no one was going to be peeking at the Duchy of Terra Militia’s space trials.
His pilot was taking the flight at a leisurely pace. Empereur was only a few hundred thousand kilometers away, which meant the full half-cee capacity of the shuttle’s interface drive was not only unnecessary but dangerous.
It still wasn’t a long flight, but it bought Jean Villeneuve a few quiet moments where he couldn’t justify working, a rare luxury in his current work.
Or his previous work, which was part of why his wife had divorced him so many years before. She’d understood—she’d always understood—but it had eventually become more than she could handle.
Jean didn’t begrudge her that. He’d made his choice long before—and then made it again when Annette Bond had formed the Duchy of Terra and asked him to command her new Militia.
His reverie was broken by a pinging alert on his communicator.
“Villeneuve,” he answered briskly.
“Admiral, this is Chief Shang,” the senior non-com of his flag deck staff immediately greeted him. “One of the hyper buoy just translated into normal space with an emergency alert: we have multiple unscheduled hyperspatial anomalies headed toward Sol. ETA: twenty minutes.”
Merde.
“Understood, Chief,” Jean said, his outer voice perfectly calm. Six decades of practice made that easy. “Inform Captain Ruan that I will be aboard Empereur de France in just over two minutes.”
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 11
