Return

by Blaze Ward

  Lazarus had explained to her why Humans consumed poison. Alcohol wasn’t deadly to them, like it was to everyone else. Some alcohols, anyway.

  Lazarus drank it because it was slightly poisonous. Just enough to loosen the muscles and the mind. To help you relax when the weight of all the universe was pressing down on you in a lost warship seeking troubled skies.

  As Aileen completed her checklist and headed towards her cabin, she would have liked a good, stiff drink of...something.

  Five

  Lazarus

  It had taken a second week, but Lazarus wasn’t in any hurry. They had enough food aboard Ajax to feed this tiny crew for nearly a year if they were careful. And every day they sat parked was that much closer to Ajax being as repaired as the ship could get without returning to the graving locks for things.

  Already, his ship could kill everything he’d seen in Innruld space. And do significant damage to anything Westphalia might send his way. Once he got a proper crew trained, even a full GunWall would learn to fear them.

  The hardest part, looking around his bridge, had been drilling the deck plates so that he could install seating for non-bipeds. The floor here on the bridge was already set up for Human stations to move around, following standard configurations.

  He’d have liked to have had a chat with the fool who had never considered coil nests for the two Churquen, a squatting stand for a Vaadwig, a nest for an Ilount, or a docking station for a NavCrawler. But that was also him, back when he was just Pancho Oliveira.

  When this was only a Human endeavor.

  Before Innruld space.

  Before Lazarus of Bethany.

  “Pilot, prepare to break orbit,” Lazarus said in a loud voice, even though Kuei was only ten feet away.

  The moment was building up inside him and he was having a hard time pretending that it was just another day at the office.

  Kuei seemed to sense that. Her station was next to Wybert, and both glanced over inner shoulders at him.

  At least they were both grinning, although most Humans wouldn’t be able to see that in the way Wybert’s antenna wiggled, or Kuei’s ears came forward.

  “Standing by,” Kuei replied after a moment.

  “Fusilier, confirm your status,” Lazarus continued.

  Wybert panicked, but Lazarus had an identical screen in front of him, trusting that Kuei had her job handled. More importantly, nothing Wybert did right now would accidentally fire a beam.

  Shiva Zephyr Glaive was the only thing around to lock weapons onto, at the moment, and a Star Spear would blast that ship into glowing fragments at this range. Lazarus didn’t feel the need to buy Addison a new ship, just because Wybert was being Wybert.

  “Uhm, all systems show green,” Wybert eventually managed, his antenna going flat sideways in embarrassment.

  “This is why we train, Fusilier,” Lazarus said warmly. “Habits in peace become habits in war. If you do it enough times, it becomes so automatic that you don’t make mistakes by overthinking things.”

  Like an owl, an Ilount’s head could rotate one hundred and sixty degrees each direction. The first time Wybert had turned like that, Lazarus had nearly leapt out of his skin, but it was second nature now to just glance up from his boards and smile.

  “Really?” Wybert asked in awe. “That’s the secret?”

  Lazarus nodded. He supposed that Wybert, like all Ilount males, had been kicked out of the nest at the rough equivalent of fourteen and left to fend for himself. Most died pretty quickly as a result, but the Queen only needed one male to mate with every five years, and kept a few older ones around for their wisdom and experience, as well as backup in case no new candidates stepped forward.

  Only heroes got the opportunity to mate with a queen. Wybert of Capantzina was no hero, but he had also lived far longer than most of his broodmates, lucking into safe employment with Addison where his destructive tendencies could be channeled.

  “That’s the secret, Wybert,” Lazarus assured him. “Spend an hour every day practicing slowly and then building up your speed once your muscles know the movements.”

  “Huh.”

  The head turned back and around and the antennae returned to vertical. Lazarus shared a grin and a nod with Addison, seated off to one side as kind of a First Officer In Training, along with Eha, the Ambassador he was transporting to his home system.

  “Pilot, accelerate one quarter and come about starboard when we clear the planet,” Lazarus said. “I have designated a target on your boards as Aleph. Center us enough that the weapons can bear.”

  Lazarus took a deep breath as Kuei pressed buttons. Everything seemed to flicker a little as the generators handled the surge. Inertial dampers and artificial gravity would keep everything more or less stable as they moved, and the ship was riding friction on gravity waves, rather than using a chemical or electromagnetic thrust for propulsion.

  The feeling in space wasn’t all that different from driving a boat underneath the surface of an ocean, which had been the basis for much of the ancient leap into space in the first place. Self-contained. Able to handle extreme environments. Things you had to look at on screens rather than with an eyeball, both underwater and in space where four hundred miles was close battle range.

  “Engaging,” Kuei replied as the ship broke free into space.

  This gas giant had a plethora of moons in semi-random orbits, some of them just captured iceballs that would eventually hit others and explode into rings, but with the ray shields up, they’d be safe enough to get clear of the larger moons.

  Addison and Eha had remained silent up until now, watching carefully as the Rio Alliance Navy went to work with two new recruits here on the bridge and several more aft. Addison already knew how to command, but Lazarus needed to train him to sound like a naval officer, so that folks back home would treat him like one.

  “Is everything announced and repeated?” Addison asked querulously.

  “Indeed,” Lazarus smiled over at him. “Loud enough that everyone on the bridge might hear it, in case they need to react, such as a sensors officer reacting to new zones of clearance as the ship crests a horizon. The person executing the order repeats it back so the officer knows that it was understood the first time, or if they should clarify it. Again, habits in peace that make the place noisier than hell in battle, but everyone can follow reasonably well.”

  “Humans are a strange species, Lazarus,” Addison remarked.

  “It will get worse, my friend, before it gets better,” he replied with a smile.

  Lazarus pushed a button on his console and opened a channel to the engineering bays where the rest of his crew were monitoring things. Ereshkiki Nisab and Thadrakho were smart, and learning, but his previous Engineer had spent two decades in the fleet, learning the old power systems, and the last five years adapting to the new designs Lazarus and others had come up with when dreaming up Ajax.

  “Engineering here,” Ereshkiki Nisab replied with three voices.

  “How is our power output holding?” Lazarus asked.

  Like with Wybert, he had a series of readouts stacked down the side of his screen to monitor, but Ereshkiki Nisab had a much better understanding of what he was doing.

  “Far better than I would expect, given the damage you had supposedly sustained,” Ereshkiki Nisab said. “There are no leaks for Thadrakho to fix right now. I’m not sure how to handle ourselves down here.”

  “I’m sure that will change soon enough,” Lazarus said with a laugh that everyone on the bridge shared.

  Shiva Zephyr Glaive was always leaking somewhere. Or shorting. Something. Thadrakho was constantly inside repairing it, or building a replacement part.

  Ajax would be the same way, but they had just spent days cleaning filters and lines, so everything should behave for a bit longer. Later, it would get exciting.

  “Pilot, bring up a rear view on the main screen,” Lazarus said. “Lock on Shiva Zephyr Glaive and magnify.”

  Everyon
e had personal screens, but there was a monstrous projection on the front of the bridge where things could be shared without anyone needing to unbuckle and move. Shiva Zephyr Glaive appeared now, asymmetrical like a treble clef flying in space, slowly receding as Ajax powered up and out of orbit.

  Lazarus had originally placed his ship in a spot where the various gravity wells would hold it for at least a decade, so Addison’s ship would be safe there, assuming nobody stumbled across it while they were gone.

  All the water had been drained from the tanks into Ajax, so nobody would be taking it far if they did, unless they wanted to refill everything first.

  Addison’s eyes were rapt on the screen when Lazarus looked over, but Eha was studying him instead. Made sense, he supposed. It wasn’t her ship, except in that she had been Addison’s superior officer in the underground.

  She wasn’t in Lazarus’s chain of command. He just smiled back at her, willing to grant her Ambassadorial status for now, while Addison figured out what he wanted to do.

  Pancho Oliveira would be returning home, after all. And maybe he’d get a hero’s welcome. Maybe not.

  He had no idea if the spy who had sold him to Westphalia might be in a position to brand him a traitor. But bringing potential new allied species would go a long ways towards defeating that sort of sentiment as well.

  Addison was the one Lazarus trusted, not Eha. Addison’s crew had made him welcome, accepted him. Everything.

  Eha was a spy. Not necessarily a spy for anyone bad, but someone who of necessity lied for a living, and Lazarus would need to peel those layers back carefully and see what she was really all about. He couldn’t necessarily trust Addison’s judgment there, either, as the man had confessed a long crush on the woman and was finally acting upon it.

  Besotted or not, he was compromised in his emotional judgment. But Lazarus knew that. And he had the rest of the crew to fall back on, if something important came up.

  Aileen, for example, didn’t bend. If the Churquen got weird, he’d let her step in and speak, as she’d known Addison for many years.

  But that was just his own paranoia speaking and Lazarus understood that. He smiled at Eha, and she returned it. Nobody here knew his face well enough to read his thoughts, especially not her.

  Well, Aileen probably could by now, but that was the benefit of working with him daily for several months, as opposed to just eating meals together, as he had with most of the rest of the crew.

  Time passed as everybody settled into the normalcy of space flight.

  “We have cleared the planet and Target Aleph is on the centerline,” Kuei announced. “Current distance one thousand, two hundred miles and closing slowly.”

  “On the main screen,” Lazarus ordered.

  Right at the edge of where the normal Star Lance could engage, and even then it wouldn’t be all that accurate. Deadly, but fairly random.

  Ajax wasn’t going to use one of her Star Lance beams.

  His ship was bigger than any of the GunWall vessels, and didn’t have that huge defensive rim around the bow like a Viking shield. Didn’t have the articulated joint at the center where the engines could be rotated in a variety of directions to maneuver while keeping the wall itself and all the guns pointed at an enemy.

  The Westphalian GunWall moved and fought as an entity.

  Ajax had Kirov’s Lance instead.

  The target today was one of the outer moons of the gas giant. Sensors had shown it as a rock ball with an icy surface that might have been a world-girdling ocean, closer to the distant sun.

  “Fusilier, lock on Target Aleph with the Lance,” Lazarus said slowly and carefully.

  With any luck, his calmness might accidentally infect Wybert. Pigs might fly first, but anything was possible.

  The Ilount looked down and clacked his four mandibles together as he worked. Again, not that complicated a task for the person shooting. Most of the work was done by the pilot and the engineers to bring the bow onto the target.

  “Target locked,” Wybert finally said. “I think.”

  “You think or you know?” Lazarus fired back at him.

  The head rotated and Lazarus could see panic in the back of all five eyes, but Wybert blinked really hard and flinched all four arms together in such a way that the ripple went all the way aft to his spinnerets.

  “I know,” he said after a long moment. “Target acquired and locked.”

  “Engineering, prepare to fire the Lance,” Lazarus said as he opened a channel to the whole ship and left it for everyone who wanted to hear. “Fusilier, fire.”

  Wybert’s upper arms were stronger, designed to hold his powerspear or lift things. They weren’t as well designed or capable as a Human’s, but it worked for an Ilount. And Wybert usually used his lower pair of arms for finer manipulations, so it was almost a shock when his top, right hand stabbed at the screen in front of him.

  Except that he had been watching training videos made by Humans, for Humans, and they didn’t have the extra pair of arms coming out just above their hip bones.

  On the screen, Kirov’s Lance fired.

  Ajax had far more power systems than the ship’s mass required. Channeling it through the ray shields and engines had kept him alive during her first battle. Today, all that energy had gone into a ring of capacitors around the neck of the ship, just behind the front of the big fins aft.

  Every one of them dumped in a rapid sequence, lased into coherence at the midsection and then the bow, and leapt across space.

  The moon erupted into a huge cloud of plasma as the beam shut down.

  “Recharge the beam, Director?” Wybert asked immediately, sounding almost like a man who knew what he was doing.

  “Negative, Fusilier,” Lazarus replied automatically. “Route extra energy into ray shields.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Lacking a sensors officer, Lazarus was handling that himself today, although Kuei probably could have done it. He wanted her focused on flying this strange new vessel.

  The moon was a rock that had been hit with a cutting laser, as the cloud of plasma and debris cooled and expanded into adjacent space. The shot hadn’t hit square, so they had also introduced a wobble to the tidally-locked rock that would probably take decades or centuries to taper off.

  And that moon was ringing like a bell right now.

  Lazarus smiled. He’d never had a chance to fire the Lance during that first battle. It took time to charge, and he’d been fighting defensively for his life, using the three Star Lances on the engine pylons to engage the GunWall.

  He knew what it was intended to do. Kirov had designed the prototype and gotten the approvals to build a ship around the design, which was when a captain with a hard science engineering background named Pancho Oliveira had come in.

  Ajax had resulted.

  But it had never been fired in battle.

  “Wow,” Wybert whistled in awe.

  Looking over from his seat, Lazarus saw that the Ilount had managed to echo Lazarus’s screen on the side of his own, so he could see what he had just done to an innocent moon.

  “Pilot, new bearing up and port,” Lazarus said. “Get me clear of all the orbital debris and into deep space so we can start our journey out of the nebula.”

  “Up and port,” Kuei replied. “Stand by.”

  “Lazarus, that’s…” Addison said from the side.

  He had also been following along on his own screen. His pupils had opened all the way and his jaw had fallen open. Presumably shock.

  “You asked what Ajax was capable of, Addison,” Lazarus said firmly, pointing at the screen. “That.”

  “What would have happened had that been Zhoonarrim Station?” Addison asked.

  His tone wasn’t accusatory, so much as fearful.

  “Blown it into a billion pieces, Addison,” Lazarus said. “Hopefully, when the war comes, that won’t be necessary.”

  Lazarus understood the man’s nervousness. Nothing the Innruld possesse
d could stop Kirov’s Lance. One GunWall ship would turn to gas, but they were rarely lined up enough for a single shot to pass through and kill a second. However, Westphalia had bigger things than a GunWall and Ajax was designed for them as well.

  And hopefully, the Innruld would understand, although Lazarus supposed that he would probably have to demonstrate things at least once.

  After that, maybe the former Overlords of the Galaxy would understand.

  Six

  Lazarus

  It had taken them three days to navigate their way out of the nebula, and Kuei needed the practice calculating corners when she was used to a ship that could turn in trans-space and fly doglegs. They were in open space now.

  The Phraettis Nebula looked like a shield across a wide arc of sky when viewed from Brasilia, his homeworld and the capital of the Rio Alliance. From this close, it was a lumpy blob of newly-born stars and gas clouds that seemed a solid wall of tapioca pearls in milk on most screens.

  He had gone there to die. Expected to.

  But he had emerged reborn. Lazarus smiled, alone on the bridge for now, with Kuei and most of the rest asleep. Cormac the NavCrawler could keep the watch, but Lazarus had been in the Navy far too long to be comfortable without someone on the bridge. Cormac could handle most things, but Lazarus wasn’t used to a machine that was as Human as the rest of them.

  He was surprised when Eha opened the aft hatch and slithered onto the bridge. He had been expecting her to be with Addison, but maybe she had put him to sleep so the two of them could talk.

  “Cormac, I would appreciate time to have a private conversation with Lazarus,” she said to the NavCrawler as she reached her coil nest and settled in.

  “Cormac, why don’t you move down to the auxiliary bridge and I’ll transfer control to you when you arrive,” Lazarus offered, trying to make mental amends for not treating him like a full crew member.

  Addison and Kuei did. Sentient computer systems were still a taboo subject back home.

  “Very good,” Cormac replied, unplugging himself from the simple i/o interface Thadrakho had worked up and tracking across the bridge to the hatch.