“We had full magazines and we only shot off ten percent of them,” Kurzman confirmed. “We were…lighter on food and water. We can carry a six-month supply, but we weren’t expecting to need it. Tornado’s only loaded for two months.”
James grunted. Eight months’ food and water and a single set of missile reloads didn’t sound like much to take on an interstellar empire.
“Sir, I think we need the XO,” one of his troopers reported.
“Oh?” the Major replied. He was already gesturing for Kurzman to start moving toward Delta Patrol. His people had all been five-year-veteran noncommissioned officers of their national militaries before even being considered for the Special Space Service. He trusted their judgment.
“We’ve been briefed on every piece of tech we crammed into Tornado,” the soldier replied in a Texan drawl, “but ain’t nobody mentioned something called an ‘intra-hyperspatial anomaly scanner’ to me.”
The XO suddenly accelerated, almost leaving James behind as the stocky officer charged toward the container.
“Commander?”
“I thought that was just a theory,” Kurzman replied.
“Theory’s fine, Commander, but what is it?” James asked.
“It’s eyes that can see in hyperspace.”
#
“You found what?” Annette asked her XO and ground forces commander.
“The manifest for one of the containers says its holding an ‘intra-hyperspatial anomaly scanner,’” Kurzman told her. “I’ve never heard of it, but given what the hyperspatial anomaly scanner the survey ships have can do…”
Annette nodded slowly. A large portion of the data Casimir had given her was hyperspatial anomaly scans of the stars surrounding Sol. With those scanners, you could detect a ship in hyperspace from regular space—but the signature propagated at lightspeed. Its only use was to map where people had been, which was helping Rolfson’s team map out potential targets.
Tornado remained blind in hyperspace, though. The blank void they saw defeated any sensor they had beyond about a light-second—but if Casimir’s people had found a way to detect other ships in hyperspace…
“That could be handy. Well done, Commander. Anything else unexpected in Casimir’s presents?”
“Nothing yet,” Kurzman told her. “About what we expected—food, water, missiles.”
“Have McPhail bring a container of missiles back up when you return,” she ordered. “We need to fully restock our magazines as we plan our next move.”
“Any ideas on that?”
“A few,” Annette admitted. “I gave Rolfson until morning to pull together a briefing, though. If you can find a manual for that intra-hyperspatial scanner, that could help our plans too.”
“We’ll crack her open and see what she looks like,” her XO promised. “We’ll be back aboard before the briefing. Don’t wait up for us.”
Chapter 12
Morning. Five days now since the fall of Earth.
Captain Andrew Lougheed of Of Course We’re Coming Back had come aboard Tornado, joining Annette’s senior officers in the still-rough conference room. A series of petty officers had swarmed over the room over the last few days, setting up a proper briefing display so that Rolfson could give the summary he’d now had days to prepare.
Annette noted that the bearded tactical officer did not look happy. She wasn’t surprised—she hadn’t expected him to come up with anything particularly positive out of the data from Casimir and Dark Eye.
“Any concerns with Of Course We’re Coming Back, Captain Lougheed?” she asked the survey ship’s commander. Lougheed was the man that the UESF had insisted hold that command instead of her, a bulky Chinese Canadian.
“We’re not used to having the interface drive yet,” he admitted. “We’ve had a shuttle with it for a while, but the one on the ship itself is new. I wouldn’t object to borrowing some of your engineering team’s time—we have a grand total of twenty-four people aboard, and we’re seeing some odd glitches.”
“Kulap?” Annette glanced over at her engineer.
Kulap Metharom was a tiny Thai woman who’d been the lead engineer on Nova Industries’ gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine project. She’d been the one to coin the “interface drive” shorthand, and had decided to baby the first fully equipped experimental cruiser—a process that had led her into a uniform and command of Tornado’s two hundred–strong engineering department.
“We can spare,” she said quickly. “Will sort after.”
Lougheed nodded slowly, clearly taking a moment to process Metharom’s not-entirely-standard English.
Taking that matter as settled, Annette stood and faced her staff from the front of the room. Along with Lougheed and Metharom, she had Rolfson, Amandine, Kurzman and Wellesley gathered. Between the seven of them, they now represented every O-4 and above left of the United Earth Space Force.
Though, for that matter, if the full Weber Protocols had been activated, the United Earth Space Force didn’t exist anymore, though that was a rabbit hole Captain Annette Bond had no interest in diving down.
“All right, people,” she said. “We’ve got a lot to cover today. Lieutenant Commander Rolfson has been digging through everything we were given by the folks back home of what we know of the galaxy. Captain Lougheed was the source of some of that data, so I’d ask you to chime in if we’re off base.
“Kurzman and Metharom have been going over the handful of extra toys Nova Industries snuck in with the supply cache, and Captain Lougheed…well, you saw the end at Sol. We’re probably best off starting with you.”
She met the dark-skinned Captain and smiled sadly. She’d insisted on seeing the sensor data herself, and they’d pass at least a report on to the crew, but her senior officers needed to hear the truth.
“I think we all need to know where we stand.”
Lougheed nodded and sighed, replacing her at the front of the room and pulling out his com unit. A quick tap of the scroll-like device against the wallscreen linked the two, and he easily threw up a tactical plot showing the battle for Earth as Tornado had left it.
“Your trick with streaming missiles at a single point proved effective,” he noted first, the plot behind him moving in recorded real time as he spoke. “Your salvo took out one of their cruisers, and Admiral Harrison repeated the trick before Challenger was destroyed.
“There were no survivors from Alpha Squadron, and the rest of the Space Force was scuttled as per the Weber Protocols,” Lougheed said grimly. “I think…we expected less of the Force to survive that far.”
“We did,” Annette confirmed. “But…there was no point in having the remainder of the Force fight. Alpha Squadron were the only ones with compressed-matter armor and modern missiles.”
“Speaking of compressed-matter armor, watch this.” Lougheed brought up a video, overlapping the tactical plot with a video. “This was assembled by the Orbit One command center after the first cruiser went down, using footage relayed from Alpha Squadron’s ships and the missiles themselves.”
The room was silent as they watched the stream of missiles slam into the invisible energy shield, and the expanding pattern of light as the shield was slowly overwhelmed—and then the missiles snuck through.
“Two hits?” Annette asked questioningly. “We took out one of the A-tuck-Tol’s cruisers with two hits?”
“The one Alpha Squadron took down shortly afterwards came apart after one,” Lougheed added. “What little analysis was done before they shut down under the Weber Protocols suggests that their cruisers, at least, not only don’t have compressed-matter armor—they don’t have any armor.”
“I guess if you have an energy shield that can eat forty or fifty cee-fractional missiles, you don’t need it,” Kurzman noted dryly. “Still…the shield clearly has vulnerabilities we can exploit. Vulnerabilities that backing it with our armor would help reduce.”
“Indeed,” Annette agreed. Acquiring an energy shield for
Tornado was high on her priority list, even if she wasn’t yet sure how they would do so.
“What happened after the UESF surrendered?” she asked Lougheed.
“The A-tuck-Tol boarded Orbit One and the other major orbitals immediately upon arriving in orbit,” he told her. “I didn’t get a lot more detail after that, but I can tell you one thing: the boarding troops? They weren’t A-tuck-Tol.”
“They weren’t?”
Lougheed tapped on his com unit and another video replaced the one of the cruiser’s destruction. The screen showed one of the landing bays on Orbit One, with half a dozen of the space station’s police force standing a stiff-backed but unarmed escort around the station administrator and Admiral Villeneuve.
An airlock door slammed aside, and strange forms in black armor started to emerge. Annette half-expected something out of a nightmare, but the first wave of a dozen troopers were humanoids. Squat, wide, creatures with disproportionately large heads, but bipedal humanoids.
The second set of aliens were…more what she’d expected. The A!Tol were significantly larger than she’d gathered from the video of Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh. The armored, tentacled creatures stepping into the bay were over two meters tall, carrying themselves on their center tentacles with the manipulators waving all around as they approached Orbit One’s authorities.
There was no sound, but the initial meeting seemed to pass without violence before the footage cut off.
“That was as much as we got before we left the system,” Lougheed told them. “At that point, the surrender of the orbitals had gone peacefully and the groundside militaries had been summoned by the A-tuck-Tol to honor the UESF’s surrender.”
“Facing an enemy with possession of the orbitals, the official policy of the British military is to surrender immediately,” Major Wellesley told them in his irritatingly precise accent. “I believe that is also the Franco-German plan.”
“The Americans won’t,” Annette said with a sigh. “They’ll fight. They can’t win, but they’ll fight. And the Weber Protocols will set up a resistance movement as well. The A-tuck-Tol won’t find Earth easy to hold.
“However, there is no point in us returning without some kind of advantage or plan to turn ‘difficult to hold’ into ‘liberated,’” she noted. “Rolfson, you’ve been going over everything that Dark Eye and Nova sent us. What have you found?”
“Nothing good, though a lot that may prove useful,” her tactical officer replied. “May I, Captain Lougheed?” He gestured to the wallscreen.
“Of course.”
With everyone seated again, Harold Rolfson stepped up to the wallscreen and tapped it with his com unit, taking over control of the screen and bringing up a pseudo-three-dimensional display of the stars around Sol.
“The farther we go from Sol, the older our data is,” he warned. “Dark Eye has been sweeping systems out to sixty light-years, and Nova Industries scouts ran a loop about ten light-years out covering the same stars. Inside that ten-light-year loop, our data is relatively current. Outside it…” The bearded officer shrugged.
“The good news, such as it is, is that we appear to be on the ass end of nowhere,” he noted. “Further out along our arm of the spiral, we found almost nothing. There’s probably at least a few survey ships or similar out there now, but if there was nothing there fifty years ago, there probably isn’t anything significant now. Except…here.”
A pair of stars, both ten light-years farther along the rim, flashed red.
“This is where Hidden Eyes of Terra was supposed to scout on the mission she didn’t come back from,” Rolfson noted. “We presume one or both of these systems contains an A-tuck-Tol base of some kind. Could be as simple as Hidden Eyes ran into a patrol ship, or we could easily be looking at a relatively new fleet base.
“Hyperspatial anomaly scans suggest that hyperdrive traffic to this system”—he tapped one of the two—“started picking up about twelve to thirteen years ago. That would be consistent with assembling a fleet or logistics base to support expansion in this area.”
That was promising. While a fleet base was almost certainly beyond their ability to assault, they could probably pick off ships going to and from it.
“When we look toward the galactic core, though, we see a lot more traffic,” Rolfson told them, rotating the view to focus on those stars. “Our ten-light-year sweep was empty, but we did pick up activity starting at the thirty-light-year mark, and it was busy fifty years ago around the sixty-light-year line.”
A number of systems highlighted in orange, some with thick circles around them and some with thin.
“Based on Dark Eye’s scans of electronic emissions and the scout ships’ scans of hyperspatial anomalies, we believe these systems to be inhabited. Thicker bands represent higher likely populations.”
The orange systems formed the edge of a creeping sphere, the edge of an expanding Imperium.
“What I found interesting was these systems,” the tactical officer pointed out. A small number of systems shaded purple. “They’re about equally far away toward the core, though slightly farther from Earth on a direct line, and show similar traffic patterns—except they share no traffic we detected with the orange systems.”
“I was warned the A-tuck-Tol had enemies,” Annette told the others. “Kanzi or something like that. Any idea which of these is which?”
“The orange systems are definitely A-tuck-Tol,” Rolfson said firmly. “Backtracking Tan-tuck-Shallegh’s fleet leads us to this system.” One of the more lightly banded orange systems flashed with a red caret. “Our guess is that system definitely hosts a significant A-tuck-Tol military base, supported logistically by the larger colonies around it.
“We’re looking at the edge of their Imperium,” he admitted. “Wideband scans from beyond the sixty-light-year mark are picking up signals suggesting dozens, if not hundreds, of inhabited systems. But what we’re picking up there is so diffuse, we can’t give any details. Only an impression of sheer size.”
“We’re minnows facing a great blue whale,” Annette agreed, looking around the table. “I suggest we all get that into our heads now. We need to dance and pirouette, play the game better than they can. Right now, we can potentially take on a single A-tuck-Tol cruiser—but if we get caught by a squadron or one of the bigger ships they brought to Sol, we’re dead.
“So, we need to be smarter. We need to learn to do things we didn’t think were possible. And first on that list, gentlemen, ladies, is that we need to learn how to intercept and board ships in hyperspace.”
“But that isn’t possible!” Rolfson objected.
“Nova Industries disagreed with assessment,” Metharom told the tactical officer. “Major Wellesley, Commander Kurzman, brought back sensor. Nova design. Scans for anomalies inside hyperspace.”
“The manuals say they tested it, but I’m not sure how,” Kurzman noted. “I want to experiment with using it to track Of Course We’re Coming Back through hyperspace. It may well allow us to track ships but not give us enough detail to be able to engage with missiles.”
“In theory, once in hyperspace, missiles and shuttles can move around exactly as they do in normal space,” Amandine pointed out. “It’s just that our normal sensors and navigation systems don’t work.”
“We’ll be dumb-firing missiles and navigating shuttles by dead reckoning,” Annette agreed. “Until, at least, Metharom can build a version of the hyperscanner we can mount on shuttles and missiles. Boarding flights are going to be especially risky.”
“We took the job,” Wellesley replied calmly.
“Indeed.” She looked around. “We are privateers now. We need to capture ships—for technology, for information, for supplies. Without these things, we are doomed to fail and Earth remains a conquered world.”
She met Rolfson’s eyes.
“You’ve been studying this more than the rest of us,” she noted. “Do you have a suggested place to start?”
He nodded and t
apped one of the systems banded in light orange.
“Here. Yellow dwarf star, only has a catalog number on Earth, but looks to have had a small colony founded fifty-three years ago. My understanding is that we don’t want to attack civilian targets, but there is probably a military defense of some kind. We can engage under our own terms and extract local knowledge from the defenders.
“It’s also a logical stopover point for ships headed to Sol,” he noted. “We can raid supplies being sent to Tan-tuck-Shallegh and benefit both ourselves and the resistance.”
“Captain Lougheed.” She turned to Of Course’s commander. “Feel up to a scouting run ahead of us?”
“I’ll note, ma’am, that Of Course has no weapons.”
“Metharom—can we fix that?” Annette asked.
“We can’t fit her with launchers, but interface missiles don’t really need them,” the engineer pointed out. “I can rig up a remote initiator and then she should be able to use her probe racks to carry, say, eight or nine missiles?”
Lougheed sighed.
“Better than nothing,” he admitted. “What about Oaths of Secrecy?”
“She’s not due here for another week. We can hit this system and be back in ten days—we’ll leave an IFF-triggered beacon for Oaths, telling her to hide out and install her interface drive. We’ll be back before too long—and as much as in some ways we have all the time in the world, I’d rather free our home sooner than later!”
Chapter 13
“Hyperspace emergence in thirty seconds.”
Captain Andrew Lougheed nodded his acknowledgement silently. Of Course We’re Coming Back had been the first hyperspace-capable survey ship launched, and the only one anyone had admitted to until everything had come apart at the seams. His twenty-four-strong crew knew each other—and their captain—well by then.
He was the only UESF officer aboard, a command dropped on him by the maneuvers of the Space Force’s Captains who had point-blank refused to see “Bloody Annie” command something so prestigious.
The Terran Privateer Page 8
