That, fortunately, proved unnecessary. The Treaty of Kinkaid (6809) laid the foundationsfor a measure of autonomy within the Gael Cluster, while assuring that, ultimately, the question of autonomy would become a moot point. For their part, the five Gael worlds—Alba, Skye, Uist, Pomona, and Stratham—agreed to construct a battleship squadron as token of their support for Humanity in the ongoing KessRith War. Meanwhile, five thousand Gael youths were selected from among the children of the Gael worlds for Imperial schooling. It was hoped that these five thousand would become a vanguard of Gael leaders who would lead their people onto a path of total assimilation into the TOG Imperium.for the greater good of their people, and the glory of Caesar Julianus.
—Excerpt from a Provincial Report to the Emperor, submitted by Gaius Octavius Grethan, Senior District Administrator, Gael Cluster. Recorded by permission from Imperial Provincial Archives, New Rome, Terra, 15 Oct 6828
Kendric Fraser had been born on Alba, capital of the Five Worlds of the Gael Cluster Confederation. His father, Ramsay Graham Fraser, had been a member of the Alban Parliament.
Isolated from the rest of the Galaxy, unaware of anything in the universe beyond the thickly starred boundaries of the Cluster, Kendric's people had remained in complete ignorance of the Empire of TOG until First Contact. Kendric had been nine by Imperial reckoning, nearly eleven by the shorter Alban years. His love of star travel had been born within him during those early years. He had grown up hearing stories of Alban explorations within the Cluster, which they had thought to be the entire universe, a mere fifty light years across.
Then had come the Empire and, with it, proof that the universe was far larger than the Confederation's scientists had believed possible. The revelation was unsettling to many. Indeed, some Albans had proposed that the Confederation maintain its self-sufficiency and avoid political entanglements with a government so vast as to be utterly incomprehensible.
Kendric's mother had died in the anti-Unionist Riots of '08. His father, a champion of the Union Acts and one of the authors of the Treaty of Kinkaid, had died from a sniper's bullet at an ambassadorial ball. The bullet had been intended for Caius Elliot, and the elder Fraser had given his own life to save him.
The Treaty of Kinkaid in A.I. 6809 had formalized the Gael Act of Union and opened the way for the long-isolated Gael Cluster to become part of the TOG Imperium. A first step in that Union had been the selection of five thousand children from among the populations of the Five Worlds for education at Imperial schools elsewhere in the Galaxy. Enemies of Union had claimed the children were little more than hostages for the Confederation's good behavior, for the majority of the chosen were from wealthy and influential families.
Kendric had never believed that. The opportunities for education beyond the rigid blindness of Cluster politics and allegiance had offered such freedom! And to be able to travel among the stars! It had been Elliot who arranged for Kendric to be one of the five thousand selected for Imperial scholarships.
Except for infrequent visits, Kendric had not returned to his native planet. He had attended school on Kathlandi Primus, then gone on to win an appointment to the Imperial Naval Academy on Grelfhaven. Elliot had been his sponsor each time. He had returned long enough to marry Cara, an Alban girl he had met while on leave from the Academy when he was twenty. After the marriage, she had come to live with him at Grelfhaven. Since Cara's death four years after their marriage,
Kendric had never again set foot on Alban soil.
Instead, he had plunged headlong into his Imperial career. He had won his first command, a Cingulum much like the corvette docked Ik'Iow him, as a young Pluiarchos. Later, he had commanded the destroyer Virtus and the attack cruiser Delta Herculis. In ten years of Imperial Naval service, he had won rapid promotion and numerous commendations. Though he had faced the inevitable prejudice against "provincial" officers—Imperials entering the service from outlying or conquered provinces of the TOG Empire—it had only fueled the llames of his single-minded drive to rise within the Navy.
Kendric's last station had been as Executive Officer rather than as Commanding Officer, but that had been aboard the Imperial battleship Metus Magnus, a posting promising a spectacular future. It was only l ive months ago that he had taken temporary command of the Magnus during the savage battle with the KessRith at Tallifiero. The Crimson Star he now wore at his throat was evidence that he had, perhaps at last, overcome the prejudices of the conservative elements of the Fleet.
At least, so he had thought. Why were they posting him now to the Gael Squadron?
To be given command of a battleship, as Flag Captain of an entire battleship squadron, was an unparalleled opportunity, especially for an officer as young and as junior as he. Yet, Kendric knew that he would have been happier as Exec aboard his old corvette, the Fulger, than as Captain of the Gael Warrior, battleship of the Gael Imperial Squadron. The promotion seemed more like an enormous step backward.
Kendric rose from his seat and restlessly prowled forward toward the flight deck. Passengers were not encouraged to leave the confines of the narrow aft lounge or their quarters aboard the small corvette, but his rank—the term Navarchos translated roughly as "Captain" in the Gael Naval Militia—gave him privileges.
The Teachdair's Captain was Lieutenant Commander Derrick Spalding, a short and balding man from the Highland plains of Skye. "Mind if I watch you drive?" Kendric asked. The flight deck was as cramped as the rest of the ship, with instrument consoles surrounding the three positions for Pilot/Commander, Co-Pilot/Navigator, and Com Officer/Systems Engineer.
"Can't ask you to pull up a chair, sir," Spalding said, smiling in the wry way he had. "But you're welcome."
The ship's bridge had only narrow slits for windows, but a wide viewer wrapped along the forward bulkhead of the compartment gave a view of space ahead. Black stars swam in a milky sea of light. In T-space, the universe took on the appearance of a photographic negative, as though suns drank from an endless ocean of light and energy. Yet again, Kendric wondered how it was possible for something to glow black. At supralumic velocities, those black orbs drifted slowly past the ship on every side, awash in currents of light.
He was not, in fact, seeing the suns themselves, but their mass shadows, which spilled across the hyperdimensional barrier into Tachyon space. If the ship hit them on its straight-line course through T-space, the result would, of course, be as deadly as if they had hit the star in rational space. For that reason, navigational and computer officers were more important than the pilot, at least for the supralumic portions of an interstellar jump.
Stars were few and far between here, and the sight stirred the vague unease of Gael's Bane in Kendric. He rarely felt more than those minor stirrings, however. Though many starfaring Gaels had begun to overcome the uneasiness they felt when travelling beyond the Cluster stars, few had learned to like it. Kendric was one of the exceptions, for the excitement he felt at travelling the star lanes was more than enough to bury any lingering mental discomfort of Gael's Bane. It bothered him only when he was already worried or depressed.
As he was now.
"Another two days in T-space," Spalding said, using the Old Tongue. Kendric almost missed the meaning of the words, so long had he been speaking either Galstandard—the common tongue among Humans throughout the TOG Empire-—or Galatin—the Empire's language of trade and government.
Spalding was leaning back in the chair, his arms folded. It was not possible for a vessel to make a course change in T-space, and so the pilot's chief responsibility was to monitor various detectors and to drop to sublight should a hurried change of plans be necessary.
"Not much to see until then," the corvette's Captain added. Kendric could sense that the man was trying, in a tactful way, to chivvy him from his bridge. He stood on the flight deck a moment, watching the drifting black mass shadows of the stars. "Yeah, well, maybe I'd better get out of your way," he said.
Kendric didn't quite catch what the pilot mutter
ed to his co-pilot as he stepped through the door aft into the central passageway. Again, the words were in a burred, Skyean dialect of the Old Tongue, and difficult to follow.
Commander Lenard Morganen looked again at the words appearing on his desktop computer and cursed softly. He had not expected to keep his command, and yet...
Lenard Morganen had been born in Feyloch, Alba, a farming
i (immunity a thousand kilometers west across the Muirglas from the c apital at Balmarin. As far back as he could remember, Morganen had hated the TOG Imperials, his hatred a legacy of a stubborn, independent, and outspoken father who had died in the anti-Unionist riots when his son was only eighteen. The young Morganen had gone on to attend ilic Confederation's Naval College at Balmarin, despite the ill-feeling
ii home toward an Alban Parliament widely viewed as having freely traded independence for security.
With his father's death, the closest family Morganen had was a sister. His hatred of Imperials had been further fueled when she had c hosen to marry a cadet at the Imperial Naval Academy at Grelfhaven. The fact that the cadet was a native Alban—one of the five thousand hostages held against the Confederation's good behavior—had mattered little. The man seemed to have forgotten the Five Worlds' legacy of personal freedom and self-reliance during his years of schooling out in the Galaxy beyond the Cluster.
Cara Morganen Fraser's death on Grelfhaven four years later from the Snow Plague, a disease to which she had no native resistance, had made Morganen's bitterness complete. He had not dwelt on the pain in the years since her husband had brought her ashes back to Alba, but he had never been free of it, either. "You'd like him, Len," Cara had told him. "He's a man to be proud of."
Cara! How could you leave with him! Were you that.. .blind?
Now Kendric Fraser was returning to Alba once more, this time to take command of the Gael Warrior, the centerpiece of the Cluster's Treaty of Kinkaid, the battleship around which the rest of the Gael Squadron would be organized. Morganen, as one of the senior command officers in the small Confederation Navy Militia, had been her Commissioning CO—the man responsible for seeing to her final construction, her commissioning, and her trials.
He had known from the beginning that he would not be able to keep her. He was a commander—equivalent to a TOG Pluiarchos—a rank too junior for a vessel the size of a battleship, and there were political problems with his background. He had never done anything to put a blot, political or otherwise, against his record, but it was known that his father had been active in the organization of the Jacobites. That could not hold him back in the Militia Navy, however—not when most of the senior officers were Jacobites or Jacobite sympathizers themselves. The problem was that the man appointed to command the Gael Warrior, flag captain of the squadron, would have to be jointly approved by both Vice Admiral Arada and the Imperial Governor, with meticulous attention paid to past and politics. Morganen was frankly surprised that the TOG high command had not balked at allowing a native Gael to hold that command. TOG was not known for encouraging such nationalistic ideas as a provincial squadron manned and captained by provincials!
Fraser's appointment to the spot sounded to Morganen like a political compromise. The man was a Gael—so-called—and answered the requirements of the Treaty of Kinkaid, which provided for a fleet constructed and manned by the Gael Confederation. At the same time, he was an Imperial Naval officer, and unlikely to cause his TOG sponsors political embarrassment by disobeying orders...or raising the standard of revolt!
Not that the ten ships of the Gael Squadron would have a nanosecond's chance against the billion or so warships of the TOG Imperial Navy!
His door annunciator chimed, and Morganen tapped the admit button on his desk console. Purcell, the ship's secretary, entered with a sheaf of hardcopy in his hand.
"We finally got approval through from Port Balmarin on our requisition for more fighters, sir," he said.
"It's about time," Morganen answered. "We've had that request in for six weeks. Where'd they dig them up?"
"Flight Two, sir.. .on patrol out of Vanur Gamma. Four squadrons of Pilums chasing runners in the outer system."
"Well, maybe they'll welcome some soft duty aboard a battleship for a change. When are they due in?"
"No word on that, Captain. I guess as soon as their replacements arrive on station and they can shape a course for Alba."
"Good." Morganen accepted the hardcopy from Purcell and glanced at the names and backgrounds of the squadrons' pilots printed there. "At least the Warrior's next Captain will have a full Fighter Group aboard."
Lenard Morganen was grimly determined to keep his personal feelings from affecting his command of the Gael Warrior. No matter that the man to whom he would hand her over was a TOG lackey and the man who had taken Cara offworld to her death. He, Morganen, was a professional officer. He would do his duty—bitterness, pain, and hatred or not.
CHAPTER 3
Imperial records tell us that the Gael Cluster is visible from Terra.. .that it had been known, in fact, since antiquity. Among Terran astronomers, the Cluster was referred to by various names—NGC 4755, Kappa Crucis, and, poetically, the Jewel Box...
The long-ago severance of our ties with the rest of humanity catapulted us into a dark and savage time. The scarcity of readily available metals on our worlds made our return to civilization a slow and bloody process.
Return we did, though, and on our own. Though still clinging to the traditions and folkways passed from generation to generation, we recreated an industrial civilization and dared to dream of the stars. In the year 3289 of our own era—6752 by the Imperial calendar—men from Alba first ventured in their frail and thin-hulled ships into space. It was, of course, the discovery of the ancient starship grounded on A Iba's inner moon that returned to us the long-lost gift of travel among the stars.
It was a time of wonder, of exploration, of daring, even though we but retraced steps first explored millennia before. Almost sixty years were to pass before we discovered the Deep Black.
—From A History of the Gael People, by Wallis Kenzie Jamieson, Fireskye Press, New Skye, 6822 A.I.
On the thin, cold fringes of the Argrian star system, the half-dozen sleek shapes of a Pilum squadron accelerated outbound. Around them,
the blue-white triple cones of their exhaust flares rivaled the Cluster's stellar glory. Argrian itself was only another bright star at this distance, scarcely large enough to show a disk at their backs. Vanur—the gas giant Argrian VIII—was a crescent growing vanishingly slim just to one side of Argrian's glare. The giant planet's ring system created the impression of an arrow laid to a gold-green bow and drawn against the distant sun.
Lieutenant Jaime Douglass gripped the twin sticks of his controls, his left thumb squeezing tight against the red button that held the throttle full open. His ship's compensator fields shielded him from the crushing pressure of high-G acceleration, but enough of those forces leaked through to press him back against the seat and drain the blood from his head. For a moment, his vision faded until automatic systems balanced the compensator fields, easing the suffocating sensation of five grown men weighing down his body.
"Wheeeooo!" That piercing whistle over the tactical channel would be from none other than Davie Marshall, his wingman. "We're traveling now! Go! Go!"
"Silence on the channel," Jaime ordered. "No chatter!"
"Gold Leader, this is Gold Three," another voice cut in. "I have a target lock, bearing triple-zulu relative."
Jaime glanced down at his main computer screen, where the pulse of red warning lights marked their fleeing target. "That's confirmed, Gold Three. All Golds, this is Gold Leader. We've flushed them, dead ahead, range one-one-five kilometers. Maintain acceleration and close!"
The Pilum was a single-seat medium fighter, old and dated by modern Imperial standards, but maneuverable and deadly all the same. Sometimes referred to as the Flying Wing, it was little more than a sharp-finned delta wing mounting three
widely spaced engines. At each wing tip was the long, wicked, forward-thrusting lance of a 7.5/3 combat laser. A pair of mass driver cannon created the impression of a manta ray's horns flaring forward from either side of the flat ship's cockpit.
The six ships, flying in tight, three-groups-of-two formation, were members of Flight Two, Alban Naval Militia, popularly designated the Gyrfalcons after a winged Alban predator. The flight was currently stationed at the Militia base on Vanur Gamma, charged with patrolling the outer reaches of the Argrian System against the infrequent incursions by smugglers and other illegal traffic. Their patrol had flushed a "runner," a fast and as-yet-unidentified ship, lurking in the asteroidal rubble that circled Vanur's vast, dark, distant outer ring. For a time,
Gold Squadron had lost the intruder amid the confusing echoes of the dark ring, but a shrewd tactical guess by Jaime Douglass and a sudden acceleration toward the quarry's suspected hiding place had flushed the intruder, forcing him to break and run for interstellar space.
Gold Three and his wingman, Gold Four, were thirty kilometers ahead of the rest of the squadron, and that much closer to the target. Jaime opened the tac channel. "Gold Three, this is Gold Leader. Do you have a scan of the target yet?"
"Gold Leader, Three. Nothing definite yet, Lieutenant. Reads like a freighter.. .mass about five.. .six thousand tons.. .but she's humping one hell of an acceleration curve. I can't peg her ID."
It sounded like a small freighter with her drives converted for added speed and range. A runner, to be sure.
Jaime opened his long range ship-to-ship channel. "Attention, unidentified ship on vector one-three-niner. This is Squadron Leader Douglass of the Gael Naval Militia. Cease acceleration at once and open communications! This is your only warning!"
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