by Jim Rudnick
The Praix intended to own the RIM first, and then from there, the rest of the galaxy would be theirs ...
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Tanner sat in the navy administration building, having borrowed a room from the admiral. The admiral had wanted Tanner to use his office, but Tanner had nicely turned down that offer—and had accepted a meeting room down the hall. He’d asked for a small pot of tea—any kind—and had gratefully accepted the steaming green tea and had poured his own, shooing out the navy steward.
Tanner sat and drank his tea slowly, savoring the cup with only a touch of milk this time. Usually he added lemon but not this time. He sipped and thought. And then he knew that he had to make the EYES ONLY call and ask for help.
While he didn’t know what kind of help the Baroness might hold for him, he did know that the RIM task force was only partially ready to defend the RIM Confederacy at this point. The next sip of tea took a bit, as he nursed it and then nodded to himself. Time, he thought.
He leaned over to the console, hit the right sequence of buttons, placed his palm on the security panel, and was recognized as the Duke d’Avigdor. He hit a couple more buttons, and the screen in front of him was black at first followed by the twin crowns in red and blue on a shield, the icon of the Barony of Neres.
A few moments later, the icon disappeared, and the smiling face of the Baroness appeared.
He dipped his head and said, “Welcome, Baroness, so nice that you were able to talk to me this afternoon,” he said, with a high degree of respect in his voice. He too was a Royal now, but a major part of being a Royal was following tradition and protocol.
She smiled at him, and then from beside her, a hand holding a tall glass of white wine appeared, and she accepted it with a wave and a thank you. She took a quick sip and then placed the glass down on the table in front of her. And then she nodded at him. “How nice to see you again, Duke d’Avigdor. What might I ask is the call about today?”
He smiled back at her and began to explain to her what the task force was currently about when it came to the alien intruder ship.
He pointed out what he’d learned from the Issians first. That the aliens—the Praix they were called—were here on the RIM to get the Issians to come back into their society as slave masters. The Praix intended to first conquer the RIM Confederacy, planet by planet. It would be the Issians’ job to get total obedience from the realms, one by one, and make them obey the Praix.
She looked shocked, as she swallowed that. “Are you ... well ... sure about that, Duke? I mean that is so beyond the pale—”
And he interrupted her. A duke can do that, at least I hope so. “Ma’am, yes, this comes directly from the Master Adept. I have been granted access to the Issian history of how twenty or so thousand years ago, they were left on Eons by the Praix after their disastrous attempt at establishing an outpost on Ghayth. Yes, the wreck is their own. So are the contents of the warehouses that have been found too—all three of them, Ma’am.”
She nodded.
He went on to talk about the Caliph next. “On their way to Neen are three new frigates that are clad in Xithricite, ten inches thick, and those frigates should be able to help in any battle with the Praix. The Caliph has offered them to the task force with not a thing in return.” Twice, Tanner stressed that the Caliph did not ask for anything in return and tried to show that fact alone was important. “For better relations within the RIM Confederacy, Ma’am,” he added, and in response, the Baroness nodded.
He did mean that too. It augured well for the RIM Confederacy. That was something he’d believe and work with no matter whether the red ships helped in battle or fell to the Praix.
She picked up her glass of wine and stared at him as she took a drink and then another, and finally tilting the glass back, she drained it completely.
She looked away for a moment and then back at him, and before he could continue, she held up a hand to stop him. “Duke. In that same spirit, let me make the following offer. We, too, have been mining our own Xithricite from a location down in Pentyaan space. Surreptitiously, of course, but we have been able to acquire more than four tons of same. It’s been smelted and forged into hull panels, and we have a large shuttle—two hundred feet in length—now suitably clad. The panels that we used are a full foot thick, as we too wanted to avoid any projectile damage as well as the Caliph. We now offer our shuttle too, named the Defiant, crewed by Barony Navy officers, of course, but under the leadership of you—the task force leader.”
She nodded and another glass of wine appeared in moments. Now that the hard part was out of the way, Tanner noticed she was this time dressed in shades of red. Bright and dull, rusty and shiny, smooth and rough—but the colors all shimmered as she sat and moved even slightly in front of her monitor.
He smiled at her. “Baroness, I had no idea, of course—but I do thank you for your openness and the offer as well. Have the ship come over to Neen immediately as we’ll be launching our ships in just a few days. I thank you for that, gratefully, Ma’am,” he said as he dipped his head toward her.
She leaned forward and reached for the new glass of wine. “I also sent the Roma captain—Daika Rossum, I think you might remember—to Ghayth too. I thought that she could maybe look at the wreck and see it with different eyes. The eyes of a scavenger who sees things that maybe our xeno team has overlooked in the past year or so. All that she found—and perhaps she puts more importance on this than I do—was that in her opinion, the wreck—the Praix I guess—their AI is very much superior to what we have and expect. She put great stock in this, but how one can use that to defeat them, I have no idea. Perhaps you will?” She sipped her wine and just stared at him.
He nodded and his answer was simple. “We have no idea, but it’s good to know in case,” he said as he shrugged.
She nodded.
He nodded back, and they signed off. As he did, he thought that had been a good call and having the Baroness respond to the unspoken challenge of matching the Caliph’s offer had worked. Of course, he had had no idea that it might get him another Xithricite-clad ship.
He smiled. Now hopefully with that good news too, I might be able to sleep tonight ...
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Off Ghayth, near the Wilson, the planet’s space station, the ensemble cast of ships was staid. The Wilson was on one side of the ship, and then at three points around the Praix intruder ship lay the frigate the RN Coventry and two cruisers, the RN Whitney and the RN Newton. The feelings were that with the intruder ship surrounded, so to speak, that anything changing that formation would be instantly seen by the RIM forces.
Just a half hour ago, the Sword had dropped out of subspace and now sat between the Wilson and the Coventry. As usual, she’d been subjected to that ultra-bright teal ray that instantly popped out of the intruder ship whenever a new ship appeared. It read the Sword as a vessel, they all thought, and Tanner did so too, and then the ray snapped off.
“They know we’re here,” he said to no one in particular on the Sword bridge area and heads did nod.
“Give us a tour, please, Lieutenant,” Tanner said to his pilot.
Cooper acknowledged the request with “Aye, Your Grace,” and the Sword swung around to go around the Praix ship.
Big, Tanner thought, very, very big. The Atlas was the biggest ship on the RIM at almost eighteen hundred feet, but preliminary measurements showed the Praix ship was more than three thousand feet longer. How it ran was an unknown. How many Praix were aboard was an unknown. How they’d take to the refusal by the Issians was an unknown.
Tanner called for a halt when the Sword made the last corner around the Praix ship and again took its position beside the Wilson.
There were many unknowns, but one thing was for sure—as the Praix ship sat here, it was a threat that was unstated as yet. That was what the task force, under his command, was concerned with, he thought as he had another sip of the too hot tea and sucked in some air to try to cool his tongue. He put
the tea mug down and looked over at Bram. “Here goes—and this may not be the answer that we’re looking for—but worth the try,” he said. He nodded to Cooper. “Send the call, Lieutenant.”
Cooper said, “Aye, Your Grace” and made some keyboard commands.
Ten minutes later, off to port, the Crimson I, the red metal Caliphate ship with its ten-inch-thick hull plates of Xithricite, popped in. It was about a mile off from the Praix ship, slowly moving on impulse power to sit nearer the Wilson.
Tanner’s breath was held, and as he watched, he stared at the Crimson I. He waited a moment and then sucked in a big breath of air. A full minute had passed since the Caliphate ship had popped into existence.
No ultra-bright teal ray.
None of the usual monitoring of the ships around the Praix ship had taken place.
The Praix, therefore, could not “see” the Crimson I—the Xithricite hid the ship’s existence. Tanner smiled and let out a big sigh.
“Looks like the red metal keeps that ship undetectable,” Bram said. With an ear-to-ear grin, he hollered, “Woo-hoo!”
Even the pilot, Lieutenant Cooper grinned back at him, and Tanner nodded to him and said, “Bring in the other two.”
Cooper turned back to complete that order. Twenty minutes later, the red metal Caliphate ships were in position around the Praix intruder ship.
The Crimson II sat off the port side of the Whitney. Crimson III sat off the port side of the Newton, and the first in, the Crimson I, sat just to the left of the Coventry. Each of the Caliphate ships was positioned around the alien ship, and each was partnered with a RIM Navy ship at the same time.
The Sword’s Ansible station lit up, and during the next half hour or so, the discussions between the six captains of the ships—the three Caliphate Navy ships and the three RIM Navy ships—were all involved in the strategy of their mission. Each agreed that the three Caliphate ships had not been detected by the intruder ship. Each captain felt that was because of the Xithricite hull plating as that was the only difference. The Caliphate ships were frigates, each six hundred feet long, and the same size as the Coventry—so there could be no other answer.
Six ships now circled the intruder ship—and only three could be seen by the aliens. The discussions ended and Tanner signed off on the task force captains’ Ansible conference call.
While Tanner knew it was a good thing the aliens couldn’t see all the ships, it wasn’t a real answer. That would come when the Praix learned they were not going to be successful in reacquiring the Issians as their slave masters. Time would tell was the old adage that came to mind, and he sipped from his tea that had finally cooled down.
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After a quick jump back to Neen, Tanner had the Sword land on the Duchy d’Avigdor landing port. He was walking off the ramp when Lieutenant Cooper flagged him down from behind. He stood in the access port itself and called out to his duke.
“Your Grace, Major Stal is calling for you—should I transfer the Ansible over to your PDA?” he asked.
Tanner responded, “Yes, please,” and as he walked, the PDA on his left wrist vibrated once. He grinned as he hit the receive button, and a hologram of Alver appeared above his wrist
“Your Grace—so good of you to take this call,” Stal said, a big grin on his face.
“And nice for you to call me—what’s up, Major?” he replied.
Alver looked down at a tablet and then back up at the duke with a grin. “It appears that the Baroness is sending along, from Neres, a shuttle to join the task force, I’ve just been told. It will be under command of one Captain Magnusson—you know him, I believe?” he said.
Tanner nodded. Yes, the captain had been a Barony Navy man, and he’d had some dealings with him before. He’d been the “loose cannon” who’d used the just released Barony Drive to jump to Branton—Tanner’s home world—some thirteen hundred lights inward on his shakeout cruise. That alone was odd enough, but the captain had been under his eye often before when he’d been the Barony admiral.
“Yes, I know him,” he responded.
“And I’m to gather two platoons of my best marines and board the shuttle—she’s named the Defiant, I understand. Will be cramped for us—but marines adapt,” Alver said, the smile still plastered on his face.
Tanner nodded and signed off after sending word to the Wilson that they were to send down a shuttle to Ghayth to pick up the marines and hold them. Also, they were to Ansible to the Defiant to pick up their marines from the Wilson. He also sent another message to the task force captains; they were to watch and record the entry of the Defiant as it popped into space in their vicinity for any sign of whether the ultra-bright teal ray had been used or not..
As he walked into the administration building, he took the escalator down to the secure area, passed through some of the bonded cargo areas and the brig, and went right to the end of the long hallway.
There, he placed his hand on the access plate and allowed the retina scan to look into his eyes, and he grinned at the camera at the same time.
Going through the doors, he nodded to some of the folks in lab coats he met, and a minute later, he was in the lab where he found the man he was looking for, CWO Hartford. He smiled at the Tarvos native, sat on a stool at the lab counter, and waited.
Hartford waved at him as he finished some kind of a notation on a glass beaker, writing with a grease pencil on the side of same, and then came over. He asked for the room, and the two others inside left them alone.
Tanner said, “You messaged me with news that you’d made a breakthrough, Chief?” he asked, his one foot on the floor as he leaned on the edge of the table.
Hartford nodded, got up, and went over to a bench on the wall. He took up one of the belts, brought it back, and laid it on the table in front of him. He sat once again on a stool a few feet apart from Tanner.
“Your Grace, yes, we have made some progress—at least from what we had originally had, knowledge-wise, about these power belts,” he began as he picked one up and held it between them.
“Composition—we don’t know this element, but it is an alloy between the unknown metal and steel. That we do know. We have searched Gallipedia as well as every single engineering, metallurgy, and science database we know—and the metal is an unknown element. So much of a mystery as we can’t even find out its structure, molecular, and rhombohedral crystal layouts either. We will continue to work on this, but at this point, we’re stumped,” he said.
Tanner thought his voice held frustration more than anything else, and he knew that once a Tarvos citizen got his teeth into something, it would be worked on until an answer was found.
Hartford continued, his voice a bit apologetic. “Time of manufacture was, or rather is, still a difficult one. We cannot find any way to date when these power belts were made. By whom. Where they were made. How they were made. Why they were made might be easier, but it surely was for a defensive reason. We’re stumped there, Your Grace.”
Hartford leaned a bit closer, his hands with the two thumbs holding the belt intertwined with his fingers. “But what we did learn was accidental—I must say that right up front, Your Grace. While we were studying the power belt, as it was in testing, we tried every single item we could to get it to fail. Not a single thing we tried—energy pulse cannons, lasers, plasma cannons, a Merkel, a Colt, a needler, a stun gun—was successful. All failed to pierce the protective shield. Which is what we knew, of course,” he said as he placed the belt on the table beside them, paused, and looked at Tanner.
Tanner nodded and gestured for Hartford to continue.
“And yes, testing from within the belt itself—that is, a wearer of the power belt when it was turned on was unable to shoot any gun, carbine, or rifle that would go through the power belt shield at an attacker. Nor would a laser, and even one of those large handheld mobile energy pulse weapons. Being inside the power belt shield meant that there was a wall between the wearer and reality. At least that was our thin
king. So, we were stumped.”
He shifted in his seat a bit, and Tanner noticed that his ears—big Tarvos ears—were suddenly blushing. “And I must apologize, Your Grace, for what happened next, though it did lead to a discovery. One of my senior lab assistants had failed once again in his attempts to get any kind of weapon to work as he wore the belt and shot at the targets,” he said. He pointed over to a glass-walled area that was their practice testing range as if to emphasize the next thing he was going to say.
“He turned the belt off and threw it with some force down at the floor. Our solid steel decking, and the power belt buckle, broke open. I say broke, but maybe a better word is was forced open?” He shook his head, his large ears almost flapping, and he wiped his chin with a thumb, the rest of that hand closed up in a fist.
“The buckle broke open?” Tanner questioned.
“It did. We immediately looked inside, and yes, there is some kind of a circuit board there—an Ansible board from further testing, we were able to determine. Ansible science, we know, and that includes in the frequency of the various factors that create the subspace immediate real-time communications. Frequency comes from the Ansible crystals within the circuit board, and it was the first thing we found of interest. While there may be others, the thing is, Your Grace, we can control, at least at this point, in a limited fashion, the power belt’s shielding,” he said.
Tanner wondered for a second if he should address the hissy fit the lab assistant had had, and then he realized that kind of micromanaging was way beneath a duke’s pay grade. Instead, he said, “Can I see, Chief?”
And that got a real smile from Hartford, who said right away, “Of course, Your Grace—let me call my assistants back in.”
