The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3)

by A. G. Claymore

  “Keep at it,” Stiles urged. “Takes a little practice to get used to the power assist, for you and the suit both.”

  She took another step, aiming herself down the middle of the ornate arches spanning the Rope a Dope’s main hangar. She stepped off, wobbling as the suit tried to propel her towards the ceiling with every step. The effect was quickly lessening as the suit learned her regular walking gait. By the time she reached the aft hangar doors, she’d pretty much managed a normal-looking walk.

  “Excellent,” Stiles shouted, barely audible amid the clanging tools and heavy duty air exchangers of the hangar deck. “Now jog back.”

  Ava glanced up at the ceiling. She subvocalized and the helmet snapped back into place, startling her again even though she knew what to expect this time. She didn’t want her brains spread all over the panels above.

  She set off at her regular jogging pace and found herself bounding along like a Thompson’s Chromelle. She had to be lifting two meters from the deck with each stride. This part of the calibration was as much on her as it was the suit. She reduced her push-off, decreasing the altitude of each bound until she reached a suitable jogging pace.

  She had to adjust her suited jogging gait if she wanted to preserve the impressive leaping ability of the suit; otherwise, it would simply be calibrated out. She reached the armorer and turned to head back down the hangar.

  The pace was an easy one, but she was covering the distance as if she were almost running flat out. It might prove more useful in ground combat than on a ship, but she knew she’d be leading attacks on some pretty large Gray vessels. She returned to the two men and retracted her helmet.

  “Alright,” she said, barely breathing heavily after her run, “I’m sold on these things. I just wish we could get the project rolling immediately.”

  “We need to give Pulver’s team a little time to put together the CAD-Holos first,” Stiles replied, “and then we can start sourcing local suppliers. That will go a lot faster once we start knitting the colonies back together. I don’t think we could source all the parts on a single colony.”

  “Nor should we,” Ava flexed her right arm. “This should be something that helps tie our economies back together. The suits will almost certainly be used in conflicts between the colonies, but they’ll be our own fights, not Gray puppetry.”

  Stiles held up a large pistol in a holster, nearly twice the size of a regular model. “Seven millimeter, linearly accelerated rounds,” he said in the matter of fact voice one used in quoting stats. “The power cells draw their charge from induction plates on your palms and the holstering plates on your hips or chest. If you drop it and an enemy with no suit picks it up, they only get a couple of shots off before the cells die.” He slapped the weapon onto a holstering plate on her right hip.

  “How many rounds?”

  “Four hundred per magazine and the standard mag clip holds three spare mags.” Stiles held up a flat object with three magazines protruding from the front. He slapped it onto the left hip, mags facing ahead and slightly upward. “That gives you sixteen hundred rounds,” he said with evident satisfaction. “And they’ll punch out the seam on an HMA suit’s fixatropic plate, if you get the right angle.”

  He tapped Ava’s armored shoulder. “At sixty-eight percent of the armor protection of HMA and one-hundred-seventy-nine percent the mobility, this suit will get you in position to do just that.”

  It might just come to that. With renegade Marines still loose in the colonial territories and a war that would probably draw in the Imperium, nothing could be ruled out.

  Ava flexed her fist, smiling at her enlarged hand. “Let’s make the recording.” She stepped over to a crate and pulled out a recording ball.

  She walked over to one of the dragoon ship destroyers, stopping just to the side of the crest on the hull, and tossed the ball into the air in front of her.

  A holo replay projected below the ball showed her what the recording would look like. She activated a control holo and slid the ball to her left, bringing the three stars and the letters ‘1GD’ into full view over her right shoulder.

  “Begin recording,” she ordered.

  “This is Commodore Ava Klum of Roanoke,” she began. “We have been absent for some time now and it’s because we’ve learned a terrible secret. The Grays are responsible for creating and fueling the civil war that’s kept us divided for so long. They were behind the attack on Dresden and they’ve been very busy since then.

  “We’ve been silent until now because they have captured thousands of our people over the years and have implanted conditioning that increases the desire to carry on the fight. Even now, some will see the attached data proving our assertions and still argue for a continuation of the war.

  “These people are under the influence of a host of deeply imbedded behavioral imperatives and, if they’re pushed, they’ll attempt to kill themselves. Exercise extreme caution around them and, if they ask for FMG, let them have it. Tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in FMG, has been discovered to have great effect in eliminating this behavioral conditioning.

  “I urge all who hear this to cease operations against their fellow Humans and to prepare for what is coming. The Grays have done this to keep us from posing a threat to them and, now that we have revealed their schemes, they will consider us to be extremely dangerous.

  “We must unite and we must do so immediately.” She gestured toward the ship destroyer behind her. “And we don’t need to defend ourselves alone. There are those who aren’t welcome in the Imperium anymore but who are willing to join us in our struggle. This is their home now and they’re eager to fight for it.”

  She didn’t need to explain what the symbol behind her meant. The holovids brought out on each Fools’ Hope ship kept the colonies up to date on Imperial news and the 1st Gliessan Dragoons were widely admired.

  “By the time you see this message, we’ll be deep behind the Gray frontier, degrading their ability to support an attack on the colonies. Use that time to organize the defenses. Elect leaders, just as we always have. Don’t allow Imperial-style squabbling over seniority to eat away at our ability to fight.

  “We must unite,” she re-iterated, raising an armored fist in front of herself, “and, though chaos awaits us, it is infinitely preferable to annihilation. People of the colonies, this is our moment. Either we seize it and become a force that even the Imperium would fear to provoke, or we allow our enemies to destroy us at their leisure.”

  She steeled herself for the next bit of showmanship, or was it showwomanship? She subvocalized a command and her helmet snapped into place with brutal speed. It was a bit melodramatic, but you needed that kind of thing when you were trying to convince your people to save themselves.

  “End recording,” she commanded.

  She retracted the helmet.

  She’d take the ball back to her quarters on her own cruiser and do a little editing. By the time Julia opened a wormhole, she should have it ready for the public.

  Spreading the Word

  “We have the beacon, ma’am.” The communications officer turned to look back at Julia. “Commodore Klum’s ship is moving toward the outbound end.”

  “Very well.” Julia looked over to Pulver. “I’ll be in the hangar.”

  When she arrived, Ava’s shuttle was just touching down on the deck. As the ramp touched the plating, the intercom approximated the sound of a bosun’s pipe. “Commodore Klum, arriving.” The ship’s voice announced.

  Ava stepped out and the smile on her face made Julia suddenly aware of how much she was missing Paul. Ava didn’t bear a strong resemblance to her brother, but many of their facial expressions were the same.

  “Good to see you.” Julia returned the smile. “You’ve got the recording?”

  Ava pulled out a data crystal. She nodded toward the drone bank, just to the starboard side of the main hangar door.

  They walked over and loaded the recording in the drone bank’s memory. All
forty drones started blinking an amber light on their control panels.

  “Continuous transmission?” a drone-tech asked them.

  “Yes,” Julia answered, “but the first launch will remain silent until it receives an activation code.” She stepped forward as the tech stepped back and turned away, giving her the chance to enter a code without his seeing it.

  She input the code she’d already agreed on with Paul, wishing she could add a personal message as well, but she didn’t want to distract him during a crucial moment. It was enough for him to know she’d prepared this drone.

  Ava reached up to her ear. “The last of my ships are through.”

  Julia looked up from the drone, stepping back so the technician could resume his work. “Let’s launch the drones first. That’ll let us go over the latest target data before you head out.”

  Going Viral

  “What possesses a man to think short shorts are ok to begin with?” Oliver squawked through the speakers in Paul’s helmet.

  “C’mon, Ollie,” Paul urged, “he’s just expressing himself.”

  “It’s putting me off my coffee,” the Maegi groused. “I can’t look left. The damned crack of doom is there, at the next table, waiting to scar my eyeballs.”

  “So, don’t look left.”

  “Don’t look left, he says. You’re lucky you’re not down here to see this.”

  Paul chuckled. Oliver was doing his best to entertain him. He’d been crammed under the same heat exchanger for the last two centi-days and his butt was starting to lose circulation.

  An image suddenly flashed up on his HUD. “Cai bu shi!” he exclaimed. “I thought you were making it up.” He closed the image but two more popped up. “C’mon, Ollie. Have pity on me.”

  “Alright, but you owe me the next coffee.”

  One image closed but then two more opened.

  “Wei! You said you’d stop…”

  “I said I’d have pity. I was gonna fill your screen with hundreds of close-ups…”

  Paul suddenly grabbed a stanchion and pulled himself sideways slightly to get a better view through the fins of the exchanger. “Hang on! Knock it off, Ollie. I think I see the drone beacon.”

  The images cleared from his vision and Paul forced himself to not focus on any particular point in the star-field. After a moment, a series of faint flashes caught his attention.

  “That’s it alright. You ready down there?”

  “All set, Paul. I just need the file.”

  Paul slid out from beneath the heat exchanger, took a quick look around the area for sentries and then braced his left arm against the side of the cooling fins, aiming in the general direction of the drone.

  The reticle projected around the drone by his HUD turned green. “I have a secure link to the drone,” Paul told Oliver. “I’m shutting down its beacon before it draws unwanted attention.”

  He’d download the message using a communications laser, built into the pad on the back of his forearm. Utilizing a variable-slit interferometer, the link was relatively secure from casual interception. The pattern of the data would simply collapse if an interloper used a method like beam-splitting.

  The other drones, sent throughout the colony, would be transmitting in omnidirectional mode, spreading the word about what the Grays had done and how to cure it. This one drone would transmit to Paul only, allowing him to sneak the recorded message into the stations systems and from there, into every ship visiting the busy hub.

  “That’s all,” Oliver announced. “We’ll make use of the convenient back door the Grays left for us and just slip this in with the code we inserted earlier.” The Maegi was silent for a few moments. “Ok, the nest is coded; we just need to upload the video file.”

  A progress bar showed up on Paul’s HUD.

  “Ollie, should we set a delay for the video?”

  “A delay?”

  “Well, yeah. Think about it. A real life virus that kills the host within a few milli-days tends to disappear pretty quickly because the host rarely lives long enough to pass it on. If this just pops up on ship-wide holo screens the moment it loads in, they’ll drop everything they’re doing and dig it out of their system.”

  “Huh.”

  Paul could almost see the man rest his chin against his right hand as he considered the problem. Meanwhile, he cracked the security protocols in the Traffic Control department and found the data he’d be needing.

  “So…” Oliver must have paused for a sip. “… we’d need to know the average transit time of all ships departing Cerberus…”

  “Three point nine days,” Paul cut in.

  “What? How the hells…” Another pause. This time it was probably for a bemused head shake. “Never mind. I’ll set this to activate four days after installation.”

  “Better make that four days after departure, Ollie,” Paul advised. “Remember, the average ship spends point eight days in the docking clamps and another point zero three waiting for a departure window.”

  “Again, not sure how you’re getting your info, but I’m glad you caught that, Paul. Saved me from a major brain-fart, buddy. Damn near hot-boxed the whole deal.”

  “It’s always the mundane details that unravel an otherwise ingenious plot,” Paul told him. “I saw a treason plot come unraveled because the conspirators falsified maintenance records for a Marine unit but forgot about the third-party refurbishing companies.”

  “You followed the money trail, huh?” Oliver chuckled. “Cherchez les credits…”

  “Speaking of credits, are you signing on with the armor project?” Paul would have kept quiet, but he’d learned Oliver did his best work while conversing.

  “I might, but I’d only be able to help with the operating system, so I don’t know how much of a contribution it would be. Sure, the system is bloated, but how bad can it be?”

  “Ollie, I’d say that seventy percent of all fire-teams heading dirtside in a combat shuttle at any given moment will have at least one poor bastard wearing a bag-n-burn suit ‘cause his HMA wouldn’t boot up. The stuff the dragoons use is a little better but you still see them freeze up in combat. You need to be on that project. The colonies are going to need every edge we can get our hands on.”

  “I’ll definitely give it some thought,” Ollie told him. “We’re gonna have to come up with a way to get it into the public eye as soon as possible so the demand is there when we start rolling suits off the droid rows.”

  “Sounds like you’re in.”

  “And speaking of in,” Ollie said, “it’s time for you to drag your arse back down here. I’m all done with the video. Shall I order the usual?”

  Smash and Grab

  “We have a fix on our position.” The navigator updated the system and Ava’s command holo changed from grey to orange, distant planets and asteroids appearing. “We’re well within micro-jump range to Tel Khorgo.”

  “Very well,” Captain Korolev acknowledged. “Lay in a course for the shipyards at Tel Khorgo and pass it through the fleet. If we have any navigational errors, I’d prefer we all make the same mistake together.”

  Ava approved. It was a standard Imperial practice that Ava had given little thought to in the past, but it certainly reduced the danger of having a ship drop out of distortion behind the rest of her fleet. One simple error could wipe out half her forces and, if it happened in front of the enemy, they could expect little in the way of mercy.

  She watched as her ships slid into existence on the holo, appearing as though they were growing out of a flat plane in space. She shuddered. It was great having the captured wormhole generator at their disposal, but it was a two-edged sword. The Grays wouldn’t have been stupid enough to keep the technical details on only one planet, would they?

  The attack on Tel Ramh had set the Grays’ program back severely, but how long would it take for them to start producing more ships with source-directed wormhole drives? This was going to be more than a messy border skirmish. The Grays had to be kn
ocked on their bony little asses or Humans had to get their hands on the secrets of the drive on the Sucker Punch.

  “Hail from the Sucker Punch. It’s for the commodore.”

  “I’ll take it here,” Ava replied.

  Julia appeared in front of her, life sized. “The last of your ships are through the wormhole, Commodore. Good hunting!”

  “Thank you, General. We’ll see you at the rendezvous.” Ava cut the link and turned to Korolev. Formerly the chief engineer locked up by Captain Fall, he’d been elected to the captaincy of the Burt Rutan. As Ava had chosen the Gray cruiser formerly captained by Fall as her flagship, that made Korolev her flag captain.

  “Captain, we’ll jump in at your discretion.”

  Korolev nodded. “Aye, ma’am. We’re just lining up the last ships now.”

  Nineteen ships would be jumping into the fight. Four were captured heavy cruisers like the Burt. Another seven were Gray frigates and the remaining eight were a mix of Human-built privateer ships of varying configuration. Most of them had been freighters before their conversion and they still had vast cargo spaces as well as quick load systems.

  There would be no attempt at impersonating the Purists this time. The Quorum knew that group was no longer capable of an operation of this magnitude.

  A chill ran down Ava’s spine. Like all colonial citizens, she’d grown up in the shadow of the Gray Quorum. They were a technically advanced species that viewed Humans as little better than lab specimens. They’d have no qualms about wiping out every last Human if they deemed it to be in their interest and here she was, about to launch an overt attack on one of their major logistics centers.

  There’d be no backing down from this; the ram was at the gates.

  Perhaps in sympathy, the Universe shivered as well and her holo was repopulated with a view of Tel Khorgo. Several dozen stations ringed the planet in geosynchronous orbit, allowing each station to be replenished from the surface daily.