The Long March (The Exiled Fleet Book 2)

by Richard Fox

  “Nothing,” Jellico said.

  “After point defense turrets report seeing shield strikes behind us,” Price said. “All minor.”

  “Not a bad idea to lead with your largest ship,” Loussan said. “Pushes the worst of the rocks out of the way of your smaller ships.”

  “That’s not how the Harlequins came through here?” Gage asked.

  “Oh no. Ships with the newest captain led the way, helped steel their nerves for a fight. Also helped us weed out the ships that didn’t have their act together. You’d be surprised how hard crews would train when they heard they’d run the gauntlet through the Ring of Fire.”

  There was a bump as another asteroid struck the Orion.

  “Flak’s a bit heavier than I remember. For what it’s worth,” Loussan said.

  Chapter 18

  Thorvald sat up on his gurney, wearing nothing but his waist wrap, bags of fluid running into IVs on one arm. He felt an itch from the new tissue and skin filling his bullet wound. The injury had been easy enough to repair, but the pain was nothing compared to the sense of loss gnawing at his heart.

  His armor lay on a surgical table next to him, the arms and legs straight, the whole thing flattened, like it had deflated.

  A shadow limped toward the curtain hiding Thorvald from the rest of the med bay, and Tolan peeked around a corner, then let himself in with a swish of the curtains. The spy had a gel bandage over his thigh and munched on a ration stick.

  “Well…shit,” Tolan said.

  “Are you really here to gloat?” Thorvald asked.

  “I’m wondering when you’ll stop moping around and get your stuff back on.”

  “It’s not a matter of desire,” the Genevan said. “Your crawfish disrupted my bond with the gestalt. It barely accepted me before. When I pulled myself out to try to kill Ja’war…the gestalt took it as a rejection.”

  “Awful moody for something designed to stop bullets.” Tolan raised a hand to tap the armor on the foot, then reconsidered when Thorvald tensed up.

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “We’re not exactly back to square one on Ja’war, but we’re close,” Tolan said, biting off a hunk of his ration bar. “Bullet wounds always make me hungry.”

  “If you were Ja’war, what would you do next?”

  “I’d wait. He’s not going to get to Aidan while we’re in slip space. He needs the opportunity to get him off the ship and hand over the Prince…or he needs to get the Daegon onto this ship so they can take him.” Tolan nodded his head slowly.

  “You’re coming up with something,” Thorvald said. “The last idea you had cost six lives.”

  “Well, I’m not one to sit around feeling sorry for myself, especially when there’s someone determined to kill me potentially around every corner,” Tolan said. He gave the gurney with Thorvald’s armor a quick shake, testing the weight.

  “I will try to reconnect to my armor once the system cycles down…which will be hours from now.”

  “No time to wait. How about we you find some clothes first?”

  ****

  Thorvald, dressed in a crewman’s overalls three sizes too small, pushed a covered food cart down a narrow passageway. An armsman followed close behind.

  The Genevan stopped at a sealed air lock and waited as the door slid open. He rushed the cart through and the door shut right behind the armsman.

  “Three seconds to get through,” the guard said, “three different sets of doors. That other one of you doesn’t fool around.”

  “She’s being lenient,” Thorvald said as he pushed the cart forward with a slight heave and stopped outside the Admiral’s quarters.

  “Thank you, sirs,” Bertram said through a speaker over the door. “We do appreciate the fresh food.”

  “Get Salis.” Thorvald looked up at the camera.

  “You know the protocol,” the woman said a moment later. “Leave so I can scan the—Thorvald?”

  “Bainvegna, Grisoni Salis,” Thorvald said.

  “Tgau, Thorvald.”

  “What the heck?” the armsman asked.

  “While Ja’war could look like any of us, it’s unlikely he can speak Genevan with my accent,” Thorvald said.

  The door to Aidan’s quarters snapped open and Salis wrapped her arm around the door and aimed a pistol at the armsman’s forehead.

  “Prove yourself,” she said.

  “We met beneath the castle.” Tolan let his guise slip just a tad. “Aidan had a teddy bear. We must have dropped it before we got onto my ship, the Joaquim.”

  Salis aimed her pistol toward the ceiling.

  “Hurry in,” she said.

  ****

  A glut of cold air from the vent overhead washed over his shoulders. That Thorvald felt the temperature change through his borrowed coveralls made him feel even worse. He looked at the food cart covered with a tablecloth. His armor lay beneath.

  For decades, he served the Albion royal family, wearing his old armor day in and day out, removing it only for maintenance to its systems and to the neuro-wire system beneath his skin that bonded him to the gestalt within the suit. His armor was taken from him when Captain Royce accused him of violating his oaths. Taking on the dead captain’s armor during the Daegon assault on the palace had been an act of desperation, one the armor’s gestalt barely agreed to.

  Now, after the damage from the Faceless’ ambush and Thorvald breaking out of the armor to save Tolan, the gestalt refused to acknowledge him.

  He heard the heavy footfalls on carpet moving across the adjoining room, and Salis stopped in the doorway. That she, a neophyte guard that donned her armor for the first time days before the Daegon attack, bore her armor and he did not only strengthened his self-loathing.

  “Anything?” she asked, nodding at the cart.

  “The gestalt is off-line. It is still alive, but it will not speak to me. Older AIs grow temperamental. That it was bonded to Royce the moment he died…rarely can a gestalt recover without going back to the forges on Geneva. How I bonded with it, severing to save that…spy. I’ve done everything wrong. It may never accept me again.”

  “None of your decisions were done for yourself,” she said. “Each time you acted for the good of others, for your oaths. Regret is not for you.”

  “Look at this…” Thorvald held up his arms, then touched a hand to his chest. “Weakness. I am just a man now. The burden falls to you to protect the Prince and the Commodore.”

  “Did you forget what you learned at our House when you took off the armor? Did you not go through the years of unarmored training before you were bonded? All those years on Albion protecting our charges and now you’re nothing? Nothing but an old fart with several million francs in cybernetics beneath his skin.”

  “Who are you calling ‘old,’ fish? But you have a point. My oath said nothing of serving with my gestalt and armor.” He rapped knuckles against his chest. “I can still take a bullet.”

  The pitter-patter of little feet approached and Salis rolled her eyes.

  “It is your turn to get him water, or tuck him in, or whatever he wants now,” she whispered.

  Aidan peeked around Salis’ waist.

  “What is that?” the boy asked.

  “My armor is…resting,” Thorvald said.

  “You look funny in those clothes,” Aidan said.

  Thorvald huffed.

  “I want to be a knight. Can I wear the helmet?” He tapped Salis on the side of her leg.

  Thorvald slid the sheet off the cart. The body of his armor was folded into a neat square, the gauntlets, boots, and helmet sitting on the second shelf.

  Aidan maneuvered past Salis and knelt to examine the helmet. The face visor was in place, a dark line cutting across the eyes and down the center.

  “Captain Royce never let me play with this. I told Mama to make him, but she said no.” Aidan touched the visor and left a smudge. He grasped it with his tiny hands and tried to lift it, but dropped it wit
h a clatter against the metal.

  “So heavy.” He looked at Salis.

  “The armor carries itself,” she said, “otherwise, Thorvald and I would become very tired.”

  “Why does Mr. Thorvald look so sad?” Aidan asked.

  “A long day of…big person problems,” Thorvald said. “Go back to bed, my lord. You need your sleep.”

  “But I’m scared. The silly man told Mr. Berty that there’s someone without a face looking for me,” Aidan said.

  “You are perfectly safe while we’re…” Thorvald felt a hum through his neuro-wires. A faint glow lit the inside of his helmet.

  “Prender el davent,” he said in Romanish.

  Salis scooped Aidan up and carried him back to his room, the boy protesting loudly along the way.

  The armor’s torso lifted up. The arms rose, like it was a set of clothes worn by an invisible man, and plugged into the gauntlets. The armored fingers clicked as they opened and closed into fists. The armor lifted up one side and kicked out a leg that ended just below the knee, then the other. It snapped the boots on with a twist, then stood up.

  It put its helmet back on, then went still, arms and legs locked tight at the position of attention. The hollow armor looked like it was meant for a man with a smaller frame, better matched to the dead Royce than Thorvald.

  Thorvald put a hand to the armor’s shoulder and pressed the neuro-wire port on his palm against the metal.

  +Ticino?+ he sent.

  +Stay…away.+

  Thorvald let go.

  “Now that’s some old-fashioned nightmare fuel,” Tolan said from the doorway. “Good call getting the kid out of here.”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Thorvald said. “Leave.”

  Tolan leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. “So what’s…going on here?”

  “The gestalt learns…very slowly. They develop personalities, quirks. But their core programming remains—to protect. Aidan expressed fear. The gestalt responded.”

  “Interesting.” Tolan raised a crooked finger and moved to tap the helmet.

  “Don’t,” Thorvald said.

  “Why, will it break my finger?”

  “No, but I will.”

  Tolan lowered his hand.

  “Just how smart is the ghost haunting that shell of yours? I might have an idea.”

  Chapter 19

  Gage watched his fleet creep closer to the ring of stone and ice. At several hundred miles in diameter, the celestial body struck him as a kind of a portal. Once he led the 11th through, they’d be one step closer to safety.

  Icons for the rest of the fleet trailed behind the Orion as the flagship used her shields and massed forward firepower to plow a path through the asteroids. From what little the sensors could read, the debris thinned considerably closer to the Ring.

  “I don’t envy you,” Loussan said from one side of the holo tank.

  “Something tells me you never wanted to be an officer in the Albion Space Navy,” Gage said.

  “Hardly.” He flung a bit of his long hair over a shoulder and leaned into the holo tank. “Sure, you have all the nice new toys, but life in the clans means a responsibility to yourself first and foremost, as no one will take care of you. Then you see to your ship. Then the crew. You…you’ve taken it all on. A mantle for this whole fleet, regency for a world that’s—”

  Gage gave the pirate a hard look.

  “—occupied. I never carry any responsibility I can’t walk away from if things become a tad untenable.”

  “Then why do men and women sign up to fight for you?” Gage asked.

  “Money, mostly. All crews share equally in the spoils and I have a reputation for success, all but for a certain incident that you well know. Plenty of disreputable scumbags in wild space that’ll void their crews after a score. I remain the right kind of disreputable—I’m practically a saint.”

  “You need to go back to wild space and stay there,” Gage said. “There’s no place for you in the core worlds.”

  “Well, don’t think I’d really fit in with the proper types like you. Not exactly sure how things will go for me back home. Sworn oaths before the table is one thing. Losing my ship is another. And you should hear my crew complaining in the brig. Nothing but ‘are they going to let us go’ and ‘why don’t they serve beer with meals’ and ‘soon as we get Loussan away from Ruprecht, he’s a dead man.’”

  Gage raised an eyebrow.

  “I haven’t actually heard them say that last one, but I know they’re thinking it.”

  A flash of white light broke from behind the Orion, lighting up the nebula like a cloud directly beneath the sun, and an alert popped up in the holo, toward the tail end of the line of ships.

  “Comms,” Gage said, looking into the bridge’s workstations.

  “Got a fragmentary message from the Mukhlos,” the ensign said. “She took an asteroid strike to the cargo hull…sending it to your tank.”

  The holo zoomed in on one of the two cargo ships, their web of interconnected cargo pods wrapping around the long spine of the ship’s axis like cloth around a bolt. The Mukhlos flashed amber and fell back from beside her sister ship, the Helga’s Fury. The warship on the fleet’s rear guard, the Valiant, slowed.

  “Damn it,” Gage said. The two ships carried a mountain of supplies and were essential to tending his fleet—once they were finally able to stop for repairs and refit.

  “I’ve got a video network established to Captain Ricci,” Clarke said. “The interference has cleared just a bit, but it won’t be perfect.”

  A grainy screen appeared in the holo, and a heavyset man with a week’s worth of beard looked up at Gage.

  “Commodore, I’ve only got bad news,” Ricci said. “Something got past the Valiant’s and my pitiful point defense. Hit the struts between demolition charge containers and one of the pods blew, which cracked my girl’s spine and killed my engines. All my crew are in the forward section, so no casualties.”

  Gage felt the bridge crew’s eyes turn toward him. He looked through the damage report and knew the ship was dead in space.

  “Can anything be salvaged?” Gage asked.

  “My drones are locked for transit and the cargo pods are breaking loose. They’ll scatter like billiards once the webbing finally tears.” Ricci shook his head. “But my crew and I would appreciate a pickup. All sixty of us.”

  “I’ll have the Valiant pick you up,” Gage said.

  “Sorry, boss,” Ricci said and cut the channel.

  “Commodore,” Price said from her seat just below the command dais, “forward scopes are picking up something.”

  “This day just gets better and better,” Loussan said.

  “The second you stop being value-added on my bridge is the second you go back to the brig,” Gage snapped. “Send it, Price.”

  The holo tank shifted to the Ring, and an inner ring of icons for unidentified objects appeared.

  “That’s…new,” Loussan said.

  Gage zoomed in on a live camera feed from one of the Orion’s forward batteries. A deep-blue diamond hung in space, the object tilted to one side, revealing linked segments of a Daegon warship.

  “They beat us here,” Gage said. There were fewer than two dozen Daegon ships, and none were the battleship-equivalent he’d encountered Tiberian on before.

  “I’d say it’s impossible, but I’ll believe my own eyes. They must have hacked the buoy at Anchor. I knew I should have upgraded the self-destruct systems,” Loussan said.

  “We can lay blame later.” Gage touched the holo and pulled up possible courses through the Ring. That their jump data made it to the Daegon through the Faceless somewhere on board was none of Loussan’s business. “Where’s the buoy? Can we still jump out of here?”

  “There,” Loussan said, touching the inner edge of the Ring at the five o’clock position. “Need line of sight to access the buoy and pull the jump data.”

  “The next stop—you ca
lled it Sanctuary? Is there anywhere else we can go?”

  “There’s Razor Fist. Do you want to know why we call it that and why the place called ‘Sanctuary’ is a better option?”

  “Pull both jump solutions. Don’t argue. I’ll explain later.” Gage opened a channel to his fleet captains.

  “11th, we have a fight on our hands. Here’s the plan.”

  Chapter 20

  Tiberian leaned over the side of his throne and looked at Barlow. The Albion captain sat against the throne, his upper body bare and shivering. A chain ran from the throne to around his waist, neck, and wrists. The Daegon hammered a fist against his armrest and his prisoner jerked as the pain torque sent a pulse through his body.

  Barlow stood up slowly, stooping against the weight from the chains. Tiberian tapped a command out on his armrest, activating translation software in the torque so the prisoner could understand his—and the rest of his crew’s—words.

  “Sire,” Barlow said, his face downcast and eyes staring at the chain.

  “Your fellows see my picket ships.” Tiberian grabbed Barlow by the jaw and turned his head toward a 3-D display on the bridge’s far wall. The view from within the Ring changed every few seconds to different Daegon ships arrayed within. Daegon script appeared next to each Albion ship as they emerged from the nebula.

  “Tell me, what will Gage do?” Tiberian raked a sharp nail down the side of Barlow’s face, leaving a thin line of blood behind.

  “He means…” the torque tightened around his neck, sensing hesitation, “he means to escape. There’s a slip nexus nearby, yes? He’ll try for that.”

  Gustavus stepped around the throne and drew his sword, setting the flat of the blade on Barlow’s shoulder.

  “This one is worthless,” Gustavus said. “The nexus is well beyond the asteroid, yet Gage and his fleet are on course to skirt the outer edge where he’ll come within range of our ships. He could avoid them entirely if he set course around incomplete moon. This is not the action of a man on the run. Let me throw this toy of yours into the pits for the thralls. Their aggression spikes are growing dull.”