The Blockade

by Jean Johnson

  “We did not,” Anjel argued. “We haven’t mentioned any men, yet. There were at least two perfectly good lesbian-zombie romantic comedies made. Well, not perfectly good,” their backup pilot amended, briefly waving her hand in the air to negate any misunderstanding. “More like campy good for at least one of them, and fairly decent but still not perfect for the other. But that could be said for pretty much most of them. Zombie stories are not exactly the highest form on the art-and-culture scales.”

  “You’ve watched lesbian romantic comedy zombie movies?” Ayinda asked, brows rising. “When, exactly, were you going to share these hidden cultural depths with the rest of us, Anjel?”

  Li’eth sighed and spoke telepathically to Jackie, ignoring the two women as they continued their teasing cultural conversation unaided by the other two. (I think that even after thirty more years of being exposed to your people’s plethora of cultures, I will still not completely understand them by the time I turn old and gray. Any of them.)

  (Fair’s fair,) she pointed out, meaning her own occasional confusion over certain V’Dan customs and preferences. (All the nuances of Imperial culture are going to mystify me from time to time, too, even when I’m old and gray. Are you ready for the coming battle?)

  (So long as we’re the mop-up crew when it comes to the orbital and insystem defenses,) he agreed, digging into his breakfast. (I’m tempted to put on an emergency suit before we get there, in case of a hull breach. I don’t ever want to feel as near helpless as I did while on board that shuttlecraft.)

  (So says the man who blasted pure pyrokinetic power through a capital ship,) she reminded him, finishing up her own breakfast. They had slept in the same cabin, but she had been awakened early to answer the communications files shipped to them as soon as the V’Goro came out of faster-than-light speeds. (We may have been in a multimember Gestalt, but that had to have taken at least a Rank 14 effort, purely on your own power, before compounding in my efforts as your Gestalt partner, then the others’ help, like frosting on the cake top. Possibly even a Rank 16, though we won’t know for sure until we can get back to some place with a KI machine.)

  He started to reply but caught her distraction when a new message came through, broadcast from the hyperrelay located a few decks away to her Terran-style datapad. (New message?)

  (. . . Coded message from the Premiere.)

  (I’ll back out of your thoughts,) he promised, scooping up a sporkful of fruit, (and focus on eating my breakfast instead.)

  (Thank you . . . and I do appreciate your discretion every time,) she added, erecting her innermost shields between them. It didn’t take long for her to read through the message in full. When she did, she relaxed the wall screening out stray underthoughts. (Nothing too sensitive. He’s just reminding us that when we take prisoners, Darian and I are to xenopathically scan them for the exact locations of the Salik war-materiél industries for their eradication.

  (There will be more xenopaths arriving to help assist with that task—so I’m to help them learn Sallhash, oh joy—and he closes with a fervent wish that we all survive with minimal casualties, and none to the two of us. He sends greetings and hope of your good health, by the way,) she added.

  (Please write back and let him know I’m doing well, thank you,) Li’eth returned. (I suppose he didn’t know exactly when we’d drop out of faster-than-light speeds, and it doesn’t sound like he needs a reply to anything, so a letter sent via the matrix is more practical than trying to align a vidcall.)

  She smiled at that. (You’ve been in and out of my mind for three-quarters of a year now, and you still call it ‘the matrices’ and not ‘the net’ for the Terran version.)

  (I am a marks-on-the-skin V’Dan,) he reminded her. Then winced. (Sorry, that was rather jungen-ist and ageist of me, wasn’t it?)

  Her smile widened into a grin. (My turn to give you the correct phrase to use. We say “dyed-in-the-wool.”)

  (That’s an odd turn of phrase. Where does it come from?) Li’eth asked her.

  Blinking, Jackie eyed him. (You know, I haven’t a clue. If we weren’t hundreds of light-years from Earth, and seconds of lag time on messages, I’d search our nets,) she teased, (for the background information on where that phrasing originated.)

  (I’ll try to make a note of it for later. Our host, Admiral A’quon, wants us on the bridge for the battle,) he reminded her. (I know Buraq would rather have us on the Embassy 1, ready to launch, but the bridge is the most heavily shielded and sturdiest location on the ship. We’ll have a higher chance of survival than in your tiny little ship, even behind airlock doors.)

  (I’m willing to be there if they’re willing to let us use the comms to demand the planet’s surrender.)

  (That’s the other reason she invited us,) he agreed. (It’ll look much more imposing and impressive to have a familiar V’Dan Imperial Warship bridge for your background when demanding their surrender. Your tiny Terran cockpits aren’t very impressive, I’m afraid. Kind of like being asked to surrender by someone sitting in the cockpit of a fighter craft.)

  (I’d claim that was an insulting comparison if you weren’t so very close to being right,) she allowed, amused by the truthful analogy. (One day, we’ll have faster-than-light ships of our own, ones with working gravity, and can make our bridges look properly imposing, too. Now, if you’ll excuse me, since my breakfast is finished, I need to go make my daily recording of my Oath of Service, then dress up in a more formal uniform so I can look imposing enough to belong on a V’Dan warship’s bridge.)

  Admiral A’quon looked just as imposing as her bridge; even seated, her back was straight, her shoulders square, her jaw and gaze level. Jackie had seen her several times before, of course, but each time, that first-glance impression threw the Terran. A’quon’s jungen marks, colored a rich dark brown, streaked her face rather dramatically with jagged lightning strikes from her upper-right brow to her lower-left jawline, and even down onto her throat. Given that her hair grew in shades of a similar dark brown streaked with thin strands of gray, it almost looked on first glance like she had lumpy, straggled, extra-long bangs angling down across her golden tanned face.

  “The War Prince sees you,” she warned her bridge crew, her contralto voice quiet and steady. The red-uniformed men and women seated at the banks of workstation controls and monitoring screens sat up a little straighter but did not take their eyes off those screens. Particularly when she added, “Give him your discipline.”

  When the crimson-uniformed woman turned in profile to listen to the murmurs of a bridge officer, the truth of her jungen showed. All of her hair had been pulled back firmly into a complex braid tucked up into itself, forming a sort of flat, plaited bun. Enlisted men and women of the Fifth Tier had to keep their hair regulation short because they were the ones most often headed into combat, but Fourth Tier noncoms and higher were all allowed more leeway in the length of their locks.

  This wasn’t Jackie’s first trip to the bridge, but each time, she found it impressive. Most everything had been painted or manufactured in neutral shades of gray, even down to the seat cushions. Crew uniforms provided some spots of color; banks of control panels and curves of monitors provided the rest. This time, she wasn’t being shown right away to a particular seat, so she strolled over to the door at the back of the room, on the highest tier but off to one side of the command station. Her goal was a creamy plaque marked with dark lettering

  In a tradition oddly and inadvertently shared with Terran warships, someone had crafted a nameplate display for the bridge bulkhead. Not out of bronze, but out of some sort of carved stone, alabaster perhaps. Jackie wasn’t familiar with all that many stone types. She was, however, familiar with the foreign lettering, incised and inlaid in polished, blue-toned steel.

  The plaque displayed the official name and numerical designation of the ship, its date of construction, its launch date, and basic information about lengt
h, width, height, number of decks, number of life-support bays, number of shuttle bays, minimum crew capacity, and maximum recommended personnel capacity. Which, for a ship of this class, they had already overburdened on other vessels with Terran soldiers by a third again. On this ship, on this trip, they did carry Terrans above and beyond the crews of the Embassy 1 and 14, but only enough to serve as translators and hydrobomb operators. Not thousands meant to land on a planet’s surface and hold it against the enemy.

  “This way, Grand High Ambassador,” someone stated. The polite young man, wearing a solid brass parallelogram for his rank insignia—a Warden Superior, member of the Third Tier of demiofficers—gestured toward a station one level down from the Admiral’s seat. Two extra seats flanked the chair centered in front of its screens. “You will be taking my seat for the broadcast though I will, of course, still be operating the controls. I will endeavor to stay out of the projection range.”

  “Thank you, Warden Superior . . . Taq’enez?” she added, glancing at the nameplate stitched onto his uniform and giving it an emphasis on the first syllable.

  “Tok en-ez,” he clarified, giving her a brief but warm smile to take the sting out of his correction on her pronunciation. Unlike the Admiral’s, his jungen marks were small, almost discreet, lavender that decorated his throat just under his jawline in three small dots down each side. “My bloodline is from the Polar Isles on V’Dan. We were a bit isolated for around two thousand years, so . . . well, we still pronounce things differently.”

  “Half of my family line comes from a set of tropical isles in the middle of an ocean that covers one-third of our home planet,” she replied, smiling back. “I understand about isolation influencing the people of an area. Including many centuries after mass transportation gets developed.”

  He grinned and walked with her to his duty station. “Normally, I manage isolated or special operations activities . . . which sounds much more impressive than it actually is. I’m responsible for scheduling nonvital maintenance work such as painting bulkheads, repairing furniture, the things that can be handled in transit from one system to the next. When we arrive and drop below lightspeed, I spend most of my time analyzing lightwave readings as a backup to the navigation and communications teams. We’re a large enough ship, we run a lot of backups, because we’re responsible for a lot of lives.”

  “I can understand and appreciate that,” she murmured. Picking the right-hand seat, she settled into it, letting him take the center seat. Li’eth stayed up by the Admiral, murmuring with her about what they’d analyzed so far of the battle taking place around the Salik colony, which most people in the Alliance simply called Pwok for the fact it was the one part of the alien name that most everyone could pronounce without needing either a translator unit or to actually be a Salik. “Estimated arrival?”

  “Ten more minutes. You can see the countdown there,” he added, pointing at the lower-left corner of one of the screens. “We have about two seconds of lightwave lag. That set of readings there indicates that everything appears calm, according to our tactical officers’ assessment of the battle’s aftermath.”

  “We still have another forty minutes estimated before the first ships from farther out in the system could arrive, summoned by lightwave broadcasts of our attack,” the woman seated at the station to Jackie’s right warned them.

  Her insignia was also a slanted rectangle, but it displayed a hollow outline bisected by a straight bar, making her a High Warden in rank, one step higher up the ladder from Taq’enez. Jackie couldn’t see her nameplate easily.

  “We will have a thirty-mi-nah window of opportunity to launch and demonstrate our firepower—in fact, they’re already being launched. It’s rather tight,” the high warden muttered. She glanced at Jackie, her brown eyes clipped on one side by a bit of mint-green crescent. On her brown skin, that green mark made Jackie think of a sort of reversed mint-chocolate-chip ice-cream effect. “I hope the Admiral can convince them . . . or if not, that you can.”

  “So do I, meioa,” Jackie agreed, eyeing the magnified view of the cloud-and-water-marbled planet they approached.

  Li’eth came over, taking his seat on the other side of the warden superior. He wasn’t supposed to show on the screen at all; if the Salik in the system knew that the War Prince was there personally, in a seemingly undermanned fleet of mostly battle-damaged ships, they just might launch everything they had. They understood the value of a V’Dan War Prince, having lived in the Alliance for many years.

  They did not yet understand the value of a Grand High Ambassador who looked like a juvenile V’Dan. Jackie hoped they would surrender quickly rather than need to learn. As Empress Hana’ka herself had once said, however, there was no point in holding one’s breath.

  Bridge chatter, some of it familiar from Terran similarities, other parts foreign, flowed around her in quiet ripples of conversation, monitor noises, and personnel movements. Most of the intership chatter with the eight surviving K’Katta, three Tlassian, three Solarican, and four V’Dan warships in orbit revealed that the Terran personnel accompanying the battle on some of those ships had managed to do most of the damage to the enemy vessels.

  Some of that comm-system chatter came from the Salik government, requesting permission to send small insystem-capable ships to rescue any survivors. Others were requests to send out the orbital sweepers, ubiquitous little machines that shared a common, simple design across the Alliance, and even had counterparts among the Terrans, built with great mesh sails charged with static energies meant to attract and trap even the tiniest particles whipping around a planet at orbital distances and speeds. So far, Admiral A’quon had denied both requests. Even the K’Katta, compassionate to a fault, knew better than to offer to pick up Salik survivors without a formally broadcast surrender and a lot of backup.

  One of the communications officers spoke up, a fellow with a chartreuse streak down the back of his dark blond head, woven awkwardly through his short braid. “Admiral, the Grand High Governor of Pwok has finally agreed to discuss terms of surrender with the lead Alliance vessel.”

  “Does the Commander-of-Tens-of-Thousands still agree to let us handle the matter?” A’quon double-checked, naming the highest-ranked K’Katta Guardian in the system. As the fleet with the greatest number of surviving ships and thus the greatest amount of resources at hand, this battlefield was technically their cleanup to manage, according to Alliance combat rules.

  Another fellow answered, shorter-haired with a hand-sized blotch of burgundy among his dark curls. “. . . Confirmed, Admiral; Commander-of-Tens-of-Thousands Kana-k’ka confirms this a Terran and V’Dan battle. He wishes you a harder exoskeleton.”

  (That means he wishes her good luck,) Li’eth translated absently, (one combatant to another.)

  “Please let him know I . . . we . . . shall beat them until softened and surrendered,” A’quon stated. “Grand High Ambassador, are you ready?”

  “Warden Superior Taq’enez, are we being recorded by the Terran comm systems?” Jackie asked.

  “Yes . . . we are recording, meioa,” he stated, and unbuckled his safety harness so that he could switch seats. “Please take my place.”

  Swapping places so that she sat between him and Li’eth, Jackie buckled the lower belt but did not bother with the upper straps. A brief query to Li’eth had him reassuring her that she looked good, her hair pinned at the nape of her head, no strands out of place. He did use a pinch of telekinesis to pick off a pale bit of fluff from her Dress Blacks, then gave her his silent approval.

  Nodding, she looked into the pickups buried in the monitor screen, and stated, “I am Grand High Ambassador Jacaranda MacKenzie of the Terran United Planets, Colonel and Vice-Commodore of the four Branches of the Terran United Planets Space Force. I am aware in advance of the nature of the various orders I am and may be about to give, and I accept the possible consequences to myself, to the United Planets
, and to the various member nations of the Alliance. I accept also that there will be consequences to the Salik nation, with whom we are at war.”

  Sensing Taq’enez leaning forward slightly, twisting his head to peer at her face, she glanced his way and arched a brow.

  “. . . Yes?”

  “Do all of your military officers make such statements before going into battle?”

  “Warden Superior . . .” Admiral A’quon chided softly.

  Jackie couldn’t see the older woman’s face, but she could hear an implied eye roll in A’quon’s tone. Permitting herself a brief, amused smile, she shook her head. “No, Warden Superior—and that was a valid question to ask. I have to make that statement wherever possible because I am a civilian authority. A very-high-ranking civilian. When I speak, meioa, when I make decisions that involve great changes in a situation, and particularly a situation requiring force or violence . . . my decisions can literally decide the lives and deaths of millions, if not billions.

  “Your question is quite valid. Since your people do not know mine all that well just yet, you have every right to ask about the steps my people take. Just as my recitation that I am indeed aware of many possible consequences from the choices I make today is equally valid, and even more necessary.”

  He blinked a little, and nodded. “Thank you for enlightening me, Grand High Ambassador. I will strive to enlighten others should they ever be puzzled by it.”

  “That would be appreciated. Admiral A’quon, I am ready to assist you in calling for the colonists of Pwok to surrender, and hopefully the rest of the system as well,” she finished. “Thank you for your patience with our legal customs.”

  “I hope the legal repercussions will not be severe, should things go wrong,” the Admiral replied.

  “Well, usually it sounds more serious than it actually is, when things go wrong,” Jackie allowed.

  “. . . Admiral, the Grand High Governor of Pwok is requesting again to speak with the leader of the Alliance forces,” the tech with the chartreuse streak of hair repeated.