by Nick Webb
“It’s no problem at all, sir. But thank you all the same.” Titus wasn’t sure whether to breath a sigh of relief, or to be even more worried, as clearly the Admiral was thinking about Titus reading those messages.
“I’m glad you understand.” He maintained his steely gaze, his face inscrutable. “For the record, unless I expressly forbid, feel free to read them. In fact, I encourage it. If the unthinkable were to happen and I were to die during one of these missions, I would much prefer that you were to step in to fulfill my mission than anyone else, so you had better be familiar with the plans.”
Titus hesitated. “Thank you, sir. I’m honored you would think that about me.” And yet, now that he thought about it, he was sure he wanted to know nothing of Trajan’s plans. Too much knowledge of the plans hadn’t proved very agreeable to the health of the former Chief Engineer.
“Good. Very good,” Trajan nodded, and turned to face the console screen. “So you are aware, many of these messages are for mercenaries scattered throughout the known worlds for whom Central Intelligence has given me contact information. We will cast a wide net, Captain, one that our quarry will not be able to evade.”
“And you hope that the mercenaries will cooperate with us? They are our sworn enemies, after all, the reason for the Pax Humana’s existence.”
Trajan turned back to his console. “I don’t hope it, I know it. We will make it so that to cooperate will be to their advantage. At least temporarily, and temporary strategy is all these people think about. They have no long-term plans. No aspirations. Just the day to day work of pirating the shipping lanes for the next day’s meal and to acquire prostitutes, slaves, and whatever other contraband they can get their hands on.” He pressed a few buttons on the display, speaking almost absentmindedly. “And besides, the pirates were only part of the reason for the Pax Humana.” He glanced back up at him. “But that is a story for another day, perhaps. I assure you, Captain, the pirates will do exactly what we want.”
“But can we trust them, sir? They may take whatever payment we offer, but I hardly think they’ll deliver such a valuable commodity as a capital ship like the Phoenix.”
Trajan shook his head. “Trust them? No, I do not trust them. But my plan does not involve trust. When dealing with the underbelly of humanity, Captain, you must appeal to their worst natures. Their base, envious, lustful, gluttonous natures. To do otherwise would lead to feeling betrayed when they eventually act according to their natural state. I have no plans for receiving any type of payment or delivery from them, and yet they will serve our purposes all the same.”
As vague as ever. For all the Admiral’s bluster about including Titus in his plans, the Captain knew he never would. It was not the Admiral’s style. He was a lone wolf—but no, that was the wrong imagery. He was the eccentric, brilliant tactician, who by his nature could trust no one to understand him, his methods, or his plans. “Very well, sir.”
Trajan closed his eye, and held a finger up at the music, which had struck a particularly dissonant chord. “Such dissonance. Many praise it. Calling it beautiful and different and acceptable.” He opened an eye and stared at Titus. “I call it madness. Deviation.”
A silence hung in the air with that last word. Titus wondered if he was free to leave.
“Dismissed, Captain.”
The doleful, plaintive duo of fiddles followed him out of the room, and as it shut he breathed a sigh of relief. Ever since the former Chief Engineer had met his end in that room, Titus absolutely detested going in. Somehow, he knew that even when Trajan left, if he left, he would have to convert the room into another use and repurpose the adjacent conference room as his ready room. He couldn’t bear the thought of sitting at the desk, staring at the dried outline that still stained the deckplate. He knew the maintenance crew would be able to remove all hint of the blood, but they could never cleanse the image from his memory.
***
Po cleared her throat. “Captain, we’ve only got fourteen of those things. You sure you want to waste one on the Sphinx? I think we can take her out without one.”
Jake glanced up from his command console and eyed his XO. She looked tired. Incredibly so. Dark rims lined her dark eyes, and he resolved to order her to bed as soon as the current crisis was over. If they could only live through it, of course. “I know we can, Megan, but somehow I don’t think the rest of the fleet is far behind. We need some breathing room before they get here to give us time to shift away.”
The bridge was a flurry of activity, the officers manning the tactical octagon yelling out targets and coordinates to each other, the damage control supervisors punching furiously at their consoles, trying to stay ahead of the damage caused by the incoming fire thundering down on the Phoenix’s pockmarked hull. She was still limping along, severely damaged from the events of three days ago, and hadn’t even had time to fully patch the gaping scars in the forward section left by the collision with the Caligula.
“And risking our necks to blow up the Sphinx will give us breathing room? Come on, Jake, let’s just choose some coordinates and get the hell out of here.”
Jake turned back to the front viewscreen. He’d been feeling irritable ever since the Imperial capital ship shifted into orbit, throwing off plans for the memorial honoring the fallen crew members, and Po’s disagreeing with him in front of the rest of the bridge crew wasn’t helping matters. He bit back a stern reply. Not that it would have mattered. Megan Po was the last person on Earth he felt he could be stern with. She would be like a mother if she wasn’t one of his best friends.
“Thank you, Commander. Let’s just get that torpedo loaded,” he said, not taking his eyes off the viewscreen, which flashed the scenes of the unfolding space battle. The massive Imperial capital ship was starting to turn on its axis, moving its bow and port side towards the Phoenix, as the fighter squadron’s efforts at destroying the railgun turrets was starting to yield fruit.
“Look. They’re turning. Now virtually all their guns are pointed at us. Their ship is in far better shape than ours, Captain. We might stand a chance, but it’s not going to be pretty. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
Dammit. She was right. But he wasn’t about to admit it in front of the bridge crew. Not yet. They weren’t ready to see him as the inexperienced hothead he knew he was. They needed to see him as someone who took decisive action—someone who would always put his ship and crew first. He couldn’t be seen as someone who was always being challenged by his senior staff.
“Thank you, Commander. Continue loading the quantum field torpedo. Ensign?” He called out to Ensign Roshenko, who manned the helm. “Begin calculations for the Natrium system. Make sure we can make the direct shift—I don’t want any pit stops along the way where the Imperials could ambush us.”
“Beginning calculations now, sir,” said the thin young brown-haired woman.
“Thank you, Ensign Roshenko. Ensign Ayala?” He stood and walked over to the bleached-white haired woman sitting at the tactical octagon. Intricate tattoos of trees, leaves, and twigs branched out from her neck onto the lower regions of her face, and dozens of rings pierced her eyebrows and ears.
“Sir?” she glanced up from her console. For some reason, Jake liked looking at her. She was attractive, sure—not overwhelmingly so, but the aura she exuded somehow calmed him. Her world had been destroyed over one hundred years ago when Corsica first started conquering its neighbors to form the Corsican Empire, or, the new Roman Empire, as it often styled itself. Belen rebelled, and as punishment the Imperial fleet leveled the surface with thousands of high-yield nuclear warheads. The bastards. Just one would have taught the lesson. Thousands was genocide.
They’d wanted to make an example. A demonstration of their power and resolve. And to let every world within the Empire know what happened to those who rebelled.
It worked.
Very few worlds ever rebelled after that, at least, not on the scale of Belen. Not that he was familiar with, anyway.<
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Except Earth. Old Earth, as the Corsicans called it. Perhaps that was why Jake felt a sort of kinship with Ayala, that maybe her presence on his bridge offered some sort of supernatural protection against the Imperials. It was true that the survivors of Belen held an almost mythical status throughout the Thousand Worlds. They were looked up to as sages. Almost like prophets. Rockstars at a minimum.
“Ensign,” he began, leaning over her console. “I need you to scan the area around the star. Is there anything in orbit there?”
Ayala pressed a few buttons while replying, “Captain, we did a full scan of the area around the sun and the nearest four planets shortly after we arrived. Surely there couldn’t be anything new—”
“I know, Ensign. Just humor me. Maybe look at all wavelengths this time, rather than just visible and radio.”
“Any in particular?”
He had no idea what he was looking for. But the Sphinx had found them somehow, and Jake wanted to find out how. “I don’t know. Ultraviolet? Terahertz? Microwave? You’re the sensor genius, not me, Ensign,” he said with a wink, and instantly scolded himself for it. He’d been trying to reign in his usual overly-friendly behavior towards women, now that he was commanding a ship half-full of them.
“Hardly, sir. I’m a weapons officer by training. I’m just filling in because—” she broke off, and Jake finished her sentence in his head.
Because the sensor officer was in the morgue. Cold and blue.
Keep the morale up. “I know, Ensign, I know. Just humor me. That’s an order,” he added, winking again—dammit! He straightened his back, nodded once at Ayala, and turned to his XO.
Po caught his eye. “What are you looking for, Jake?”
“Something that will tell us how the Imperials found us.”
A high-pitched beep sounded out from Po’s console, stealing her attention away from the Captain. As she read the message, her eyes closed, and her lips moved, as if uttering a silent prayer.
“What was it?” Jake stepped towards her. To steady her in case she collapsed, which, combining her extreme fatigue with the whatever awful news she just read, might happen at any time.
“We just lost fighter P-five. Lieutenant Short and Ensign Pierce.” She stared at him dangerously, as if daring him to continue the battle with the Sphinx.
He looked to the floor. Dammit, he hated running. If he had his druthers they’d plot a course to Corsica and let loose all they had at the Imperial capital. The quantum field disruptor torpedoes were far more potent than a simple nuclear warhead. Nukes had a blast radius and an explosive rating measured in kilotons or megatons. QFD torpedoes didn’t stop—as such there was no absolute rating. They disrupted the quantum field, disrupting the wave functions of any electrons the field touched, propagating outward until broken up by an asymmetry such as a mountain or a body of water.
They could be as weak as a kiloton, or as strong as a few hundred gigatons, depending on the environment they were dropped on. After Jake finally learned all the details from Alessandro during that morning’s chess game he understood why the Los Alamos program, code-named the Bronx project, was so secretive. He doubted that even Admiral Trajan knew anything about it.
Po was right. They couldn’t afford to lose even one more fighter pilot. They’d lost six during the battle of the Nine, as it had come to be called in the days since, and with only twenty to begin with, they were down by almost half.
“Pull them back,” he said, and without skipping a beat Megan Po was on the comm telling the fighters to hightail it back to the Phoenix, and then alerted the flight deck crew to ready the bay.
“Ben, cover their withdrawal,” he said to his friend at the head of the tactical octagon. Jake noticed the man had hardly said a word during the entire battle, except quiet instructions to his crew.
“Aye sir, laying down a cover screen. Lieutenant, redirect fire from the Sphinx and set up a moving point defense after the final fighter.” Ben’s hands were almost a blur on his console, directing and coordinating the work of the crew beneath him.
“Ensign Roshenko. What’s our status on those calculations?”
“Ready, sir,” the young Ensign squeaked, before clearing her throat and intentionally lowering her voice. “Waiting on your command.”
“Excellent.” He turned to the communications station and pointed at the young Ensign he’d pulled up from Sciences to man the empty post. Falstaff? Tyler Falstaff? Sounded right—he went for it. “Ensign Falstaff, send word to Bernoulli in engineering that we’re about to shift.” The young man tapped a few buttons to carry out the order, suggesting to Jake that he got the name right. He looked up at the viewscreen covering the front of the room. “All hands, prepare for gravitic shift.”
Ben’s voice shouted out. His tone suggested something he hadn’t expected. “Sir, I’m reading multiple new contacts.”
“Imperial?” He knew it. The rest of the fleet, hot on the tail of the Sphinx. Without waiting for the answer he turned back to the helmsman. “Ensign, prepare to shift on my mark. Po? Those fighters in yet?”
“Not yet, sir. Another thirty seconds should do it.”
Jake glanced at his console. “Who’s left?”
She looked up, with a face that Jake could read as “he’s not going to like this.”
“Lieutenant Grace.”
***
“Captain Titus, sir?” Ensign Evans, the light-haired officer at the long-range communications station, looked up at the man pacing the bridge. Titus turned and approached to look over the man’s shoulder.
“What is it, Ensign?”
“The Sphinx has just sent us a gravitic pod, sir. They’ve engaged the Phoenix and predict capture within the hour.”
Titus slapped the man on the back. “Very good. I’ll inform the Admiral.” Titus swallowed. This was information Trajan would prefer to hear in person rather than over the comm—Titus had grown accustomed to the Admiral’s idiosyncrasies, and this was one of them—important news was to be delivered face to face. He exited through the rear door of the bridge and walked down the long, curved hallway to the ready room and pressed the entrance request button.
A moment later, the Admiral’s voice blared through the speaker. “Come in, Captain.” The wail of the two fiddles he’d heard previously joined the Admiral’s voice through the comm, and Titus said a silent prayer of thanks to Minerva that at least the man wasn’t listening to the heavy metal screeching from a few days ago.
“You have news for me, Captain? I hope so, because I have news for you,” said Admiral Trajan as Titus stepped through the door.
“Oh?” Titus looked at the man hunched over his console, intently reading some message.
“I’ve just received word from our long range communications of the arrival of a certain gravitic pod I’ve been waiting for. But, you first. Tell me what you have for me.”
Titus swore softly at Ensign Evans under his breath—he’d just told the man not two minutes ago that he’d tell the Admiral himself.
“We’ve received word from the Sphinx, sir. They’ve engaged the Phoenix, and predict victory is imminent. I recommend we join them soon to assist in the boarding.”
“Excellent news, Captain, and right in time, too.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eye, as if deep in thought. He held up a hand, as if conducting the music, which still droned on dolefully in the background. “The Petulant Minors. Have you heard them?”
“Sir?” Titus did a double take. He’d just delivered what he thought was arrestingly important news, and the other man was still listening to music.
“The music, Captain. It is a husband and wife team who call themselves The Petulant Minors. Their product really is quite good, after you’ve listened to it for five hours like I have. Gritty, yet soulful, and oddly delicate for such a forbidding environment it originates from. They live on a frontier world in the Empire—the planet Tiberius, I believe. Terraforming has proceeded slower there than on most worlds
, and life is difficult for the sparse inhabitants. They mine iridium. This music is quite popular on worlds like theirs.”
He paused, drinking in the sawing tones playing against each other, the two fiddles dancing and pausing, striking harmonies before shifting to sudden dissonances and holding them, stubbornly, as if daring the listener to turn the music off.
“Terraforming is slow on Tiberius because the native cyanobacteria has not had time to produce enough oxygen for the settlers’ needs, and all attempts to increase the production rates have failed. As such, all the settlers walk around with oxygen masks. Imagine that, Captain, living your life with tubes stuck up your nostrils.”
Titus nodded. “Must be rather inconvenient.” His nose twitched.
“Indeed.” Trajan opened his eye and waved a hand at his screen readout. “I’ve been in contact with an array of individuals of ill repute. Pirates, mercenaries, smugglers—I’ve cultivated a variety of less savory contacts during my time as head of special operations for the Imperial fleet. And wouldn’t you know it, the group that I’ve been expecting a reply from has indeed sent a message back to me, inquiring about our terms for their cooperation.”
Titus raised an eyebrow. Perhaps Ensign Evans had not betrayed him after all.
Trajan continued, seeming to read his mind, “I ordered the long range communications crew to alert only me in the event of a response from one of these groups. I hope you don’t mind, Captain,” he glanced up at Titus with a look that told the Captain he had better not mind.
“Of course not, sir.”
Trajan’s gaze pierced Titus’s, and he wanted desperately to look away, but instead focused on the one, live, unblinking eye next to the crater that leered at him in his peripheral vision.
