by J. N. Chaney
“No way in hell.”
“And there you go. That’s another thing about the young: they often tend to believe it is better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.”
Dash gave a grim nod and started for the infirmary. “Let’s hope I just have a chance to actually forgive the dumb little bastard.”
Unlike the last time he’d been here, the infirmary tonight was deathly quiet. Aside from Conover, the only other patient was a woman, one of the Gentle Friends, who’d been shocked by a plasma discharge aboard the Snow Leopard. She rested quietly, watching what was happening with Conover with a grave discretion.
“How is he?” Dash asked, crowding up to the bedside.
“Not good.” The speaker was the same middle-aged man who’d helped Ragsdale evacuate Conover from the docking bay. “When I arrived on the scene, he’d gone into cardiac arrest.” The man pointed at a prominent burn down the side of Conover’s neck. “This is evidence of some sort of electrical discharge that he must have taken across his heart.”
Ragsdale, standing nearby, broke in. “Cyrus here got his heart started again. Used nothing but his fist.”
Dash gave the man, who was apparently named Cyrus, a look that was surprised, impressed, and grateful all at once. “You’re a doctor, right?”
Cyrus nodded. “I am. Or was, anyway, until our settlement got attacked by those bastards.”
He’d been laying his fingers against Conover’s neck on the unburned side; now he broke off and straightened. “His pulse is weak and thready. I’d do more, but”—he gestured at the infirmary around them—“I think this tech will be able to do a lot more for him than I can.” He gave a tired shrug. “This place kind of puts me out of a job.”
Dash shook his head. “Don’t be so sure. And don’t go anywhere. Custodian, what’s Conover’s condition?”
“The nerve impulses that would normally trigger his heart to beat have been disrupted. Although the emergency intervention in the docking bay restarted them, they remain unstable and erratic. The infirmary medical systems are now maintaining his heartbeat in a regular rhythm.”
“So does that mean he’s stuck here?”
“For the time being, anyway, this is the best place for him to be”—Cyrus looked around again—“of, well, probably anywhere in known space.”
Dash relaxed a fraction and watched Conover, still pale and waxy, lying motionless, the rise and fall of his chest his only movements. “Bloody idiot,” Dash snapped. “What the hell was he thinking?”
“He appears to have been attempting to interface with the Harbinger in order to learn more about its operations,” Custodian said.
Dash bit off a curse. “Yeah, I kind of figured that. What I meant was—”
“Where is he?”
The voice was Amy’s, and it preceded her only by a few seconds as she shoved her way up to the bedside. “Conover? Dammit—” She stopped, swallowing hard. “How is he?”
The grave silence around the bed answered her question. Amy stared for a moment, then blinked her eyes fast and muttered, “Shit. Conover.”
Dash exchanged a look with Viktor and Leira. Conover’s puppy-like attraction to Amy was now the stuff of legend among them. None of them had raised it with her, though, and just assumed she was indulgently okay with it.
What a horrible time to find out she might actually have some of the same feelings toward him.
Dash scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Well, we should probably just let him rest.”
Conover’s eyes opened. As they stared, stunned, he blinked and looked around.
“Where am—oh. Infirmary.” His voice sounded like a sticky hatch grinding open. “Guess things didn’t go quite as I’d hoped.”
Dash gaped for a moment, then shook his head in disbelief. “Custodian, what did you do?”
“Nothing specific. Conover’s nervous system has stabilized and re-established a regular heart rhythm. I have discontinued further medical intervention.”
“Okay, good.” Dash swung a hard glare onto Conover. “Because now I can kill him myself. Dammit, Conover, what the hell were you—”
“I know,” he croaked, holding up a hand. Cyrus handed him a cup of water. He sipped at it, then tried to sit up.
Amy pushed him back down. “Not so fast,” she snapped. “You stay right there, so that when Dash is done killing you, I can take my turn at it.”
“That was damned irresponsible, Conover,” Viktor said.
He put the glass of water down. “I know. And I’m sorry. I should have learned my lesson from that time with the Lens.”
“Yeah, you should have,” Dash said, caught between rage and relief and not entirely sure which side to come down on. “If you ever do anything like this again, I’m going to tell Custodian to lock you out of any alien tech, pull you off piloting the Pulsar, and send you to apprentice under Freya. Got it? A lifetime shovelling shit to grow plants.”
“We don’t actually use shit, you know. Or shovels,” Viktor said to Dash, grinning.
“I’ll find some of both. You mark me?” Dash asked Conover, who’d been watching the exchange.
Conover’s eyes widened, but he nodded again. “Got it, Dash.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “I did learn some things, though. Once I have time to sort them out in my own mind, I’ll give everyone a full briefing on it.”
“Can you give us a summary?” Dash asked.
“I—” Conover began, then shrugged. “There’s a lot to work through. What I can say is that it’ll probably take our research, and how we use the Forge, in a different direction.”
“Meantime, you just rest,” Amy said. She touched the scar on his neck. “And I know you just promised Dash this, but I want you to promise me, too.” She looked into his eyes. “Don’t you ever do anything that stupid again.”
Conover nodded. “I promise.”
Amy finally favored Conover with a smile. Dash gave everyone else a look, and they quietly withdrew, leaving the two of them alone.
18
“Hard to believe they’re going to be able to fit that thing inside the Rockhound,” Dash said, and Leira nodded.
“Much less power needed for it,” she added.
They were standing in one of the big installation and assembly bays adjacent to the fabrication level, watching as the components of a new weapon system were installed in the Rockhound. It was a railgun, a weapon that magnetically accelerated a projectile to phenomenal velocities. Custodian, working with Viktor and a still-recovering Conover, had determined their conventional ships—the Rockhound, the Snow Leopard, and the Slipwing most prominent among them—could be outfitted with a dark-lance or a railgun, but not both.
The issue was power; without entirely replacing the ships’ power plants, and all related systems like power distribution and even drives, it simply wasn’t possible to operate more than one of these systems. And, as Custodian pointed out, it would probably be easier to just build entirely new ships at that point.
Still, a railgun was a fearsome weapon at close range; it gave the Rockhound a punch she’d been lacking. Even then, it required banks of capacitors, accumulating a charge, and releasing it in a stupendous burst of kinetic impulse. Using Unseen tech, Viktor estimated they could pump a projectile up to nearly five percent of light-speed, with the recoil energy being fed back into the capacitors, allowing for a decent rate of fire.
Dash glanced at Leira as the maintenance remotes worked a bulky bank of capacitors into the Rockhound through an open cargo hatch.
“This is great,” he said. “It gives us more capability, and damned if it isn’t just the smallest bit dangerous. Those velocities are unnatural.”
She nodded, but just watched the ongoing work, the maintenance remotes engaged in an intricate series of precisely choreographed moves.
“We need more people, too,” Dash went on.
Again, Leira nodded but said nothing.
Dash decided to voice his thoughts anyway,
even if she wasn’t going to immediately reply. “And we need both of them soon. Now, in fact, despite not being able to trust—well, not everyone is going to be onboard with our concept of a free galaxy. Each different group means a new security concern, but I believe in taking the longer view. We’re not going to discount entire ships filled with people due to a potential threat. So for every intake of humanity, we trust, but verify. Until I have reason to believe otherwise, we’re going to bring people inside, vet them as best we can, and then find where they’ll thrive in this war effort.”
She finally turned to him, her eyes bright with determination. “I agree on every point. We’re too few to fight those bastards while looking over our shoulder all the time. So let’s go get them.”
“Which? Ships? Or people? Or both?”
“Ships we probably have to build ourselves, at least for now. People, though, we can get.”
“You seem to have someone in particular in mind.”
“Most of the refugees we’ve offered a place on the Forge say yes. They hate the Golden, and the Verity, and all their other minions. Sounds like a ready-made force to me.”
Dash cocked his head. “You mean the Verity slaves? The people they’ve taken and are holding? I—well, then yes. I’d considered most of our new forces coming from free people, but if you’re okay with recruiting among the enslaved, then I am.”
“Then let’s do this,” Leira replied. “The Verity are scum, after all, and probably have a lot more slaves somewhere.”
Dash nodded, then turned away from the bustle of activity around the Rockhound. “Custodian, have the most informed people we freed from the Verity brought to the War Room. It’s time to add a new target to the plan.”
“Instructions have been sent. They’re on their way and should be gathered within the next twenty minutes,” Custodian said.
Dash glanced at Leira, who nodded in thanks. “We’re on our way.”
A half dozen refugees—no, Dash reminded himself, former refugees, and now citizens of the Cygnus Realm, for the moment at least—sat in the War Room, looking variously awkward, uncomfortable, and curious. And worried, Dash noted, which prompted him to offer a charming smile.
“You guys look like you think we’re about to bite your heads off.” He turned to Leira, who also flashed a smile. “We’re not. We’re hoping you can help us out with something, so we just want to ask some questions.”
He’d been looking at Cyrus, the doctor, who had been one of those asked here by Custodian, but it wasn’t Cyrus who answered.
“Help you with what?” a young girl asked. Dash figured she couldn’t be more than sixteen or seventeen, with olive skin, short brown hair, and remarkably wide, grey eyes. She also probably looked the least uncomfortable of the bunch, and maybe even a little defiant.
Dash found himself immediately liking her.
“What’s your name?” Dash asked her.
“Roxandra.”
“Well, Roxandra—and everyone else here—we’re hoping that you might know something, anything, about people like yourselves. People who are being held by the Verity.”
“We want to rescue them,” Leira added.
“And, honestly, we’d then like to see if we can recruit them to our cause.”
Cyrus gave a fierce nod. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Anyone who’s seen what those…those bastards are capable of, they’d be more than happy to help you defeat them.”
“Damned right,” someone muttered.
“The only trouble is that I was taken on board that ship you guys captured, and that’s all I know,” Cyrus said. “I don’t know where anyone else might be being held.”
The others nodded—except for Roxandra, who leaned forward, a fierce, hard light burning in her eyes.
“I know where they’re holding people. A lot of them. I was held with them for a while.”
“Custodian,” Dash said. “Give us a star chart.” The holo-image appeared, and Dash turned to Roxandra. “Okay, if you could—”
She stood and pointed at a specific system. “There. Right there. They’re being held there.”
Leira narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure?” She glanced at Dash, and he got her meaning. The system Roxandra had identified was well removed from the broad trend of Verity activity that had been quite neatly paralleling the long axis of the galactic arm.
But Roxandra nodded her head firmly. “Absolutely. I was held there and…and…”
She stopped, swallowing.
Dash waited for her to go on.
Roxandra finally found her voice again. “And that’s where my brother, Mircea, is. Or was, anyway. It’s where I saw him last, before they took me away.”
Dash stepped up to the opposite side of the holo-image and studied the system she’d pointed out. An unremarkable yellow-orange star, with two major planets, both gas giants, and more than a hundred moons between them. That made it not greatly different from thousands, maybe millions of other systems in this arm of the galaxy alone. But Roxandra had immediately identified this one.
“Custodian, put that trend of Verity activity on this map,” Dash said.
The broad, curving line describing everything from hard data to rumors about Verity actions appeared. Sure enough, the system Roxandra had pointed out fell well off the trend.
“This is our best and most complete picture of what the Verity have been doing,” Dash said, now studying Roxandra through the holo-image. “This star system you’ve pointed us at isn’t on it.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“No, it’s not that,” Dash quickly replied. “I’m just wondering if there’s more you might know about what the Verity are doing there. Maybe you even know things without knowing you know them.”
Roxandra shrugged. “All I know is there are a lot of people there, on an orbiting station of some sort. These Verity seem to have something big going on they want a lot of people for.”
Dash glanced at Leira, who’d also been studying Roxandra. She returned a nod.
I believe her.
He looked back at the girl. “Okay. It looks like we’re going to this system. When we do, we’re going to rescue everyone there. That includes your brother, if he’s still”—Dash was going to say alive but switched it to—“there.”
Roxandra managed to push a weak smile through her otherwise hard demeanor. “Thank you. He’s…he’s all the family I have left.”
Dash nodded. “If he’s still there, we’ll bring him home to you.”
She nodded back and smiled a little more.
That smile, Dash thought, suddenly made being the Messenger worth it—at least for now. He only hoped they actually found her brother there, and alive, so that smile didn’t just vanish again, and for good.
They left Roxandra and the others with Custodian, who continued debriefing them. In the meantime, Dash called his commanders together in the Command Center and outlined for them what Roxandra had said.
“And you believe her?” Benzel asked.
“Yeah, Leira and I both do.”
“She also checks out,” Ragsdale said. “We can trace her identity back along with the claims she’s made, right to a birth certificate on a settlement called Torrence’s Landing.”
“I’ve been there,” Wei-Ping said. “An orbiting platform in an asteroid belt. Mining, mostly.” She looked at Benzel. “It’s where I got the idea, in fact, of setting up those nav buoys the way I did. Remember?”
“That’s fine, I believe you guys, too,” Dash cut in. “Anyway, assuming she’s not a spy and this isn’t a trap—”
“Which is still a possibility,” Ragsdale said. “We can be reasonably sure she’s not, but we can’t be a hundred percent certain.”
“Understood,” Dash replied. “So, assuming that, we’re going to attack here. I want to free these people. That’s job number one. Number two, though, is trying to recruit them to help us.”
“How many people are we talking about?” Benzel asked.
“Based on Roxandra’s observations, I would estimate approximately two hundred.”
“So we’ve got to get two hundred people back here to the Forge,” Leira said.
“Yeah, the Herald won’t hold that sort of crowd,” Benzel said, and turned to Wei-Ping. “You’ve been wanting to take the Retribution out for a shakedown cruise. Here’s your chance.”
Wei-Ping nodded. “Works for me.”
“Me too,” Dash said. “And it’s appropriate, too.”
“How so?” Leira asked.
“Because,” Dash replied, giving her a feral grin. “Retribution is a theme I’m quite happy with when it comes to the Verity.”
19
The system containing Quarantine Station—Roxandra had eventually remembered that was the name of the Verity holding station here—was quiet. Dash couldn’t help feeling it might very well be deceptively so. Benzel, Wei-Ping, Leira, even Viktor and Ragsdale had all urged caution regarding how they approached this. They’d been burned before by Verity traps, and even Dash couldn’t stop a nagging little voice that said Roxandra might be a spy.
Dash studied the heads-up, on which he’d called up the telemetry from the stealth drone they’d launched into the system. It was yet another new design, a drone with a Dark Metal-alloy armor configured to bend incoming energy around it. The physics were far beyond Dash, but it meant that x-rays, radio waves, and even light would refract around the drone, with nothing reflecting off it and making it effectively invisible. The problem was that the system required a huge amount of Dark Metal just to stealth up this single drone; it just wasn’t practical even for small ships, much less something the size of the Herald. This also meant it would register on a Dark Metal detector, but that was another advantage of the drone’s small size—from more than a few thousand klicks away, it would be virtually impossible to see as a neutrino shadow.
“Sentinel, I am seeing absolutely nothing in this telemetry,” Dash said.
