by Evan Currie
Her face twisted into a scowl as she turned to look at a screen that was replaying the battle in Oather territory on an infinite loop. She had been studying it since they escaped the system, her ship a smoldering wreck, and her life owed to a minor captain who showed depressingly little interest in advancement.
She pushed those thoughts away and examined the scene on the displays again, watching as her ships were rocked by explosions from nowhere.
How did dissidents sneak old-style nuclear weapons on board my ships?
She’d asked herself that question a thousand times, if not more, but no answers were forthcoming. Such a confusing mess, and no one had any answers. Imperial Intelligence was tearing apart the last ten ports she had put her ships into for resupply before the battle, but nothing had come up before she had received orders to ship out.
Worse, the placement didn’t make much more sense.
One or two weapons had been placed properly, but most of the explosions had been centered around bizarrely random locations on the targeted ships. The only theory that made sense was that somehow dissidents had managed to slip the weapons onto the ships disguised as items that the crew took to their quarters, workspaces, and such. That theory only opened up more questions than it solved, however, because those sorts of weapons weren’t the easiest things to disguise.
Internal Imperial politics were ugly as a rule but generally stopped short of employing nuclear weapons to resolve problems.
Then there were the weapons used by the Oathers and the anomalies.
Oather technology had been assessed as being comparable to Imperial levels just a short two years earlier. In fact, Imperials had a tactical edge according to every analysis at that time, due to the Oather disdain for using dedicated weapons technology on their vessels. Even giving the impetus that the Drasin would certainly have forced upon them, however, the new weapons capabilities simply did not match up.
The weapons must be from the ones that Aymes refers to as the anomalies.
She gestured and another display shifted focus, showing one of the smaller ships that fit the general mass and configuration of the anomaly that had plagued the original Drasin incursion. It was, as the reports indicated, devastatingly difficult to locate on scanners if you weren’t looking right at it, and in space, that was a rare event indeed.
The power curve of the smaller ships was effectively zero, at least as best they could detect at the ranges they’d engaged the ships. They would likely be able to register the curve more accurately if they got in closer, but to do that they’d have to be near perhaps the most terrifying thing she’d ever encountered.
Another gesture froze the image as white points of energy spat forth from the ship.
Antimatter, used as a projectile weapon.
That meant that either they had to generate the material on demand, which she refused to believe that a ship with such a nonexistent power curve could do, or they stored it!
Misrem shivered, a chill running down her spine at the very idea of having material that volatile stored within the same ship she depended on for life support. Sheer insanity, no matter how effective their containment techniques were.
So we are facing lunatics, then, she extrapolated, with mixed feelings.
Another Empire that she would revel in the opportunity to match wits against. A professional fleet to strike and counter, the sort of thing dynasties were born from. Tangling with insane people, however, was at best picking on the crippled and helpless. No matter how well one did, there was not much advancement to be had.
But that was the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario was that they were functionally insane. The sort of people who, despite every possible sign otherwise, somehow actually managed to operate and function within the universe. Those sorts of people were not the type any professional fleet woman wanted to face, because no matter how good you were at your job, they would find ways to outthink you by doing the stupidest possible thing and somehow making it work in their favor.
Ultimately, however, it should not matter.
The Empire had faced all kinds and would face them all again. Insanity was no true key to victory; it just slowed the inevitable defeat. A disciplined and professional fleet would always win out in the end.
She just wasn’t looking forward to learning the full nature of the cost her disciplined and professional fleet was going to pay to make that happen.
► Captain Aymes sat at his station, silently letting his people do their jobs as he examined the combat records from the last times he had ventured into Oather space.
Something had changed with the Oathers, and he was betting that the anomaly ships were key. The original split between Oather and Imperial had been a long time in the past, long enough that it was just legend by this point, with an institutional hatred for the arrogance of the Oathers bred into Imperial children from the youngest of ages via bedtime stories and the propaganda machine that passed for an entertainment industry.
They may have been arrogant, but Aymes had access to original records—as original as any, he supposed. The Oathers had been firmly tied to their principles, the Oaths that had been sworn for reasons no record still listed. The split had come when the Imperial forbears had argued that the Oaths were obsolete, but the Oathers refused to listen to reason.
When the split happened, the Oathers considered the Imperials to be forsworn and fighting broke out. Again, no records existed to show who struck first. Given what he knew of the Oathers, he suspected it was the Imperial faction, but that no longer mattered. What did matter was the Oather faction either lost and was driven out or refused to fight and left of their own accord.
Aymes could read between the lines, realizing that there was a great deal about the story he was missing. The reason for the institutional hatred of the Oathers certainly wasn’t in the records, yet he could tell that the hatred was entirely out of proportion to what had happened, particularly considering the time involved.
Very little of the history he had access to made any sense in context, but what it did generally show was that the Oathers were nearly pathologically inclined to pacifism at sometimes insane cost.
That wasn’t what he had seen during the last two encroachments on their territories.
Even those ships they had identified as almost certainly Oather in origin had been armed to the teeth and were willing to use their weapons with little hesitation.
Something changed, he supposed. What had changed was not particularly difficult to work out either.
The Drasin.
Aymes grimaced, thinking about those things. Setting them loose on the galaxy was a sign of hubris that the Oathers of propaganda legend could not have hoped to match.
He had no doubt the decision would inevitably sweep back and bite them all in the nether regions, but that was a worry for another day. His more immediate concern was if the results of setting the Drasin on the Oathers had somehow fundamentally shifted the nature of the people.
It seemed . . . impossible, frankly.
However, if he was right, they might have awakened a sleeping beast that the Empire was not expecting.
Aymes watched the battle records play, these thoughts at the front of his mind.
I hope I’m wrong, but I fear I’m not.
He knew he was missing critical information. Something very unexpected was happening, and it had destroyed the calculations that Imperial Intelligence had made concerning the Oathers.
Aymes couldn’t help but believe that it would all come down to the anomaly. Whatever, whoever, controlled that ship—those ships, now, he supposed—they were the wild cards he hadn’t been able to calculate on. They were throwing everything to the stellar winds, and for his life and career, Aymes couldn’t figure where any of it was going to land.
AEV Odysseus
► Master Chief Dixon was not a happy man.
“If I find out who’s messing with my decks, I’m going to keelhaul the bastard in a leaky suit,�
� he grumbled as he observed the mess someone had left along the engineering corridor.
Dixon had been hunting down system glitches ever since he came on board the Odysseus. It was in many ways his job description, but there was no way in hell he was cleaning this up.
He stalked over to the closest security panel and flipped open a channel.
“Ship’s services.”
“This is the chief,” Dixon growled. “I want a cleanup crew. Deck 12, engineering section. Tell them to bring a shovel.”
“A shovel, Chief?” The voice on the other side sounded disbelieving.
Dixon didn’t blame the man, not really, but it irritated the piss out of him anyway.
“Yes, a Goddamn shovel. It looks like someone raided the commissary and spread food and trash along eighty meters of my Goddamn deck!” he snapped out. He was in no mood to deal with someone not immediately jumping to action.
“Sorry, Chief. I’ll dispatch people right away!”
“Good, and tell security I’m coming up,” Dixon growled. “I want to see their surveillance, so they better pull those files now.”
“You got it, Chief.”
Dixon closed the channel and turned back to the disaster zone that had been his engineering corridor.
“A slow leak.” He nodded to himself. “Don’t want them to lose consciousness before they reach the aft gravity bubble.”
► Commander Michaels whistled as he made his way to the simulators, walking with a bit of a spring to his step that felt like it had been missing forever. He’d already been asked three times if he’d gotten lucky while on leave, and that had just made him laugh.
A night with a lovely lady was a grand thing, but it wasn’t what put a spring in his step. He’d gotten his hand on a real flight stick again. That was worth whistling about.
Oh, he loved the ’Disseus. She was a grand old ship. She even handled a lot less like the pig he’d expected her to be the first time the admiral had dropped his new assignment on him. The gravity wells used by the warp drive made her damn near as maneuverable and responsive as a fighter, and he couldn’t really argue with the results.
No, he would simply point out that “damn near” wasn’t “dead on.”
There was something about flying a fighter that got into a man’s blood. No inertial nullification, just the counter-mass unit and whether you could take what leaked through. The smaller mass of the fighters let them pull off high-speed maneuvers that made anything, even the Odysseus, look a bit slow.
But it was the feel that affected him, the sensation that he wasn’t piloting a fighter so much as had it strapped to his back.
You didn’t get that on the Odysseus.
They didn’t even use a restraint system of any kind on board. Anything that hit them hard enough to disrupt the inertial nullification was going to splatter the entire crew across the bulkheads. There just wasn’t any middle ground. Either smooth sailing, or everyone was dead. Not a lot of point in seatbelts.
He looked over the simulators that were evenly spaced along the open deck as he walked in, then nodded and headed to the third one.
“Lieutenant,” he greeted the man.
“Commander,” Lieutenant Keith Lancaster replied in turn from where he was sitting.
Steph leaned in to check the readouts the other pilot was dealing with. “Level nine? Not bad. How long have you been at it?”
“Almost an hour,” Keith told him. “Just trying to master close maneuvering.”
Steph nodded. “She’s a heavy beast, for all her speed. It’s still a lot of mass to move around, if you’re trying for precision.”
He straightened up, patting the side of the simulator. “Keep at it. I’ll review your files later. Don’t forget to keep your NICS qualification certified; otherwise you’re not sitting in the real hot seat.”
“Yes sir. I’m scheduled for my requalification test tomorrow.”
“Ace it.”
Keith nodded firmly. “Yes sir. Wilco, sir.”
Steph walked around the other simulators that were in use, observing and making comments or suggestions as he saw fit. The Odysseus’ helm was a complicated system, so every pilot on board had to regularly qualify on the current systems as well as the proposed updates being considered for implementation.
This most certainly included the chief helmsman himself, so when he was done checking over everyone else’s work, Steph climbed into an empty simulator and loaded the program from the last point he’d left off.
Level Thirty-Three.
His program started hot and heavy, and within a few minutes, Steph was sweating as he maneuvered his virtual Odysseus through a series of course changes that pushed his skills with the stick to the max. It didn’t take long before he forced himself to relax and settle back in his bolstered seat so he could thumb the NICS needles into place.
The sharp sting caused him to stiffen momentarily, but then it was old home week as Steph relaxed and composed his mind.
Slipping into Zen was a practiced skill for the pilots of the Double A squadron, a mental state that often registered as unconscious to unpracticed observers looking at their EKGs. The simulation smoothed out as Steph continued to work his way up the levels until he hit level fifty and decided that was enough for a warm-up.
He wasn’t looking to set a record. He had come to the sims for another reason.
Still connected via NICS, he glanced to the left and thumbed a switch.
“Computer, load Imperial scenario one and play from the beginning.”
They’d gathered a lot of data on the Imperial ships during the last encounter and from the wrecks that they and the Priminae had torn through. Most of the basic specifications were similar to Priminae tech, which strongly established the connection between the two cultures, but Imperial material science had taken a different path at some point.
The metal alloy armor they used was more durable than Priminae ceramics but not quite as good at handling laser weaponry. An odd choice, Steph had thought, and an indication that at some point the Imperials had done a lot of fighting with someone who preferred physical weapons. The metal armor would take a much more significant beating from kinetic weapons than the ceramic would. You could punch holes in the armor of the Imperials all day, and they’d just patch them and grin at you while they kept on coming. Priminae ceramic armor was prone to cracking and even shattering when hit just right. Patching that was considerably more difficult.
That same armor the Imperials used made them a little more vulnerable to the Odysseus’ lasers than the Priminae or even the Drasin were.
Steph was trying to determine just how much of a difference that was going to make in the real world.
Three Imperial cruisers, roughly equivalent to the Heroics, appeared in the simulation at his command. They were arrayed ahead of him in what seemed to be the standard formation for the enemy fleet, accelerating toward him at combat speeds.
Steph felt the nerve tingle buzz through him as he was targeted and slipped the ship to port to evade contact. He, in turn, locked up the lead element of the enemy formation and directed orders to his simulated tactical officer.
“Lead bandit locked in; fire when ready. Executing Maneuver Alpha Break Niner,” he said calmly, continuing the slip to port before powering up the gravity wells that provided propulsion to the big ship and plunging into the fight.
CHAPTER 4
Priminae Colony
► The Tetanna slowed, settling into a planetary synch orbit that kept them resting over the new Priminae colony site.
There wasn’t a lot down there yet, of course. Drey Martina had seen the colonial census and hadn’t expected much, but for someone used to seeing population centers easily from orbit, the locale was a little stark. One couldn’t tell that there had been any changes to the surface, at least not without employing advanced scanners.
“Captain,” Helena said, approaching him, “the colonial administrator made contact. They’re preparing a
landing zone for us to drop off supplies.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t finish that already,” he admitted, not that it bothered him much. They had enough flexibility in their schedule to allow for delays with little issue.
“The administrator was quite apologetic,” Helena said. “It seems that they had an unexpected cold front move in, and improving residence thermal insulation took a priority.”
Drey tilted his head, then nodded. “Well, I certainly cannot fault them for that. I expect I would have done the same.”
“Yes Captain. I expected you to agree,” Helena said with a bit of a smile. “At any rate, they should be prepared to receive goods within a couple more hours.”
“That’s fine,” Drey confirmed. “We will break orbit temporarily and use the time to complete system survey updates. Our records are at least eighty cycles old at this point. Likely nothing much has changed. As I recall, there were no predicted impact events in the old survey within at least two hundred cycles, but since we have the time anyway . . .”
“Yes sir. I will relay that to the administrator and have the crew get ready,” she confirmed.
“Thank you, Helena.”
► The navarch settled at her station, eyes casually skimming the daily take from their scanners.
They’d approached Oather territory with considerably more caution this time, not wanting a repeat of the previous excursion. This time things would be different; she needed to know just what had changed among the Oathers and who—or what—the anomalies were. With a specific mission to accomplish, rather than general data gathering, she could be more certain in her stratagems.
They’d slipped into the comet cloud of a system that had been identified as containing a young world still building infrastructure. Clearly, the Oathers were expanding again after the passing of the Drasin threat. She would see to that in good time, but for the moment, she was more interested in the ship perched in orbit of the small colony.
