Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars)

by R. Curtis Venture

  She now knew that it had started during the Mibes mission. When Disputer had arrived in the system, the helm officer had noted a slight discrepancy in the ship’s position. The error had been well within tolerable limits at Mibes, but every unbound wormhole they had opened since then had wandered just a little farther away from where it was supposed to be. It would not be long before discrepancy became disparity, and perhaps later… disaster.

  But why? She cradled her brow. Navigation: fine. Drives: fine. What then could be causing it?

  Yuellen would have had a suggestion. He had always been good with engineering issues, and with the physics side of things. She had always been able to rely on his insight.

  Thande sighed. A good XO was hard to come by, and every waking moment of every day since Meccrace Prime she had wondered what might have happened had she let Yuellen live.

  Stop it, she told herself. He would have destroyed you. Made you destroy yourself.

  And who else aboard Disputer was still like he had been? Her crew, their MAGA cohorts, the various other passengers… which of those was she carrying so obligingly into the midst of a crucial naval operation, where they might wreak havoc? Was someone aboard ship sabotaging their jumps incrementally? Gradually working their way up to a fatal helm miscalculation? Someone who could cover their tracks perfectly might just be able to do that—

  The door chime sounded.

  “Enter,” she called.

  “Captain.” Lieutenant Volkas stepped into the wardroom and allowed the hatch to close behind him. “You sent for me?”

  “I did. Please, sit down… I’m sorry, I don’t know your first name.”

  “Pavin, Captain. My name is Pavin.”

  “I’m not sure whether or not congratulations are in order,” said Thande.

  “Congratulations?”

  “You will be commanding Bravo Company for the duration of this mission. Have you received a field promotion?”

  “Ah. No, not officially. Although it was requested of me that I fill Captain Pinsetti’s boots, for the time being at least.”

  Thande smiled thinly. “More work, same pay.”

  “Yes. But that’s not really important; the guys have lost a leader and a full platoon, and with what’s left of the battalion being smeared along the Perseus arm we’re not likely to receive any backfill for a while.”

  “You do have some strange procedures, you MAGA types.”

  “It’s not that strange. If Disputer took a bad hit and you lost a few decks, you’d probably be able to function with the people you still had, right?”

  “Depends which decks, but let’s say yes.”

  “But you wouldn’t just leave the battle to go randomly steal replacement crew from other segments of the Fifth Fleet, would you? You’d make do until you were assigned new personnel, moving crew roles about until your basic needs were covered.”

  “Most likely.”

  “It’s the same thing. Except we don’t have a ship to run in the meantime. We don’t have the same overhead.”

  “I suppose, when you put it like that, it does make sense.”

  “Any functional MAGA unit is an asset in a combat situation. It doesn’t really matter if we’re incomplete as a company; we can still be thrown at an enemy position.”

  Thande smiled again. “I’m beginning to see why they asked you to step up, Lieutenant. You aren’t long for the lower ranks, are you?”

  “I should think not, Captain.”

  “Good. Because you are about to be thrown at an enemy position, and you’ll be supporting Shard Caden. I would imagine you’re going to have quite a lot to do, and plenty of opportunity to show that you can do it.”

  Volkas looked as though he had tasted something bitter.

  “Something wrong?” Thande asked.

  “I’m just not particularly fond of Caden,” Volkas said. “The first time was the worst, on Echo. Admittedly things got easier after that, but I find him… difficult.”

  “Give him a chance.”

  “And erratic. And uninformative. And stuck up his own arse, pardon my language.”

  Thande hesitated.

  “He is… all of those things, to some extent,” she said, “and I have to admit I felt the same way when he first came aboard this ship. But he got the job done at Mibes, and he’s a quick thinker. From what I can make out, he’s the one person who actually seems to be making headway against this threat we now face.”

  “From the reports I’ve read, some of that looks accidental.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. It strikes me that he leaves a lot of his thinking processes out of his duty logs. I suspect it may be a Shard thing; preventing any roaming eyes from getting ideas about how to subvert those wonderful thought patterns.”

  “You admire him?”

  “In a way. It would certainly be no disadvantage to this ship if some of my crew shared his faculties.”

  “Well as long as he remains as indifferent to my contributions as he has been so far, I’m sure we will get on famously.”

  “You may be in luck there, Pavin. Your job will be to get him where he is going, let him do his own work, then get him back again.”

  “You’ve been briefed already?”

  “Not fully — they’re not trusting much to databursts. I know the bare bones of Operation Keystone, but the details are of course under wraps for now. The entire task force will be briefed in full when everyone has made the rendezvous at Maidre Shalleon.”

  “The Shalleon system? They call it the Laeara of the upstream systems, right?”

  Thande nodded. “It’s the strategic gateway for everything between the junction of the Sagittarius and Orion arms, and the edge of Gomlic territory.”

  “This is going to be a big operation, isn’t it?”

  “I am not normally a betting person,” Thande said. “But I would stake this ship on it.”

  The door chime sounded again. Caden did not wait for permission to enter.

  “Captain Thande, good to see you again. Ah, Lieutenant Volkas. So you’re the one who will be leading Bullseye into this death trap.”

  “Welcome aboard, Shard Caden,” said Thande. “Apologies for not waiting — the lieutenant and I already started.”

  Caden nodded at Thande. She took it as a mark of respect; no insult had been perceived.

  “Death trap?” Volkas said. “I take it you know something we don’t?”

  “You didn’t hear this from me,” said Caden, “but we’re going to be hitting one of our silent worlds. From what we can tell from gate records it’s been dark basically since all this began.”

  “So… there could be anything waiting there?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Volkas looked to Thande.

  “In orbit, as well as on the surface,” she said. “I hope for our sake that Fleet Command know what they’re doing.”

  “The word is that both Fleet and Eyes and Ears have reconnoitred the system,” Caden said. “As I understand it, they are sending twice as much firepower as they think the job needs.”

  “And what exactly is the job?” Volkas asked.

  “Some kind of information gathering. The goal is to find out what’s happening on the worlds the Shaeld Hratha have attacked.”

  “Are you supposed to be telling us this?” Said Thande.

  “Not really. In fact, given that it’s top secret and we have been infiltrated by enemy agents, let’s say definitely not.”

  “Then maybe you should stop there.”

  “I’d actually finished,” Caden said, and smiled at Thande.

  “Good,” Thande said. “We’ve prepared selections of footage from the attack on Meccrace Prime so that you can both study the enemy ships’ movements and tactics. Fleet is not convinced that the dreadships revealed their full capabilities at Meccrace, so don’t take anything you see as being definitive.”

  “Will I really need to know any of that?” Volkas asked.

  “I
t can’t hurt to know a bit about the enemy,” said Caden.

  “Exactly,” said Thande. “You’ll find there’s also some footage from the Battle of Blacktree in there; just the parts the triumvirate panel would release to us, of course—”

  Caden frowned. “Triumvirate panel?”

  “Yes. Admiral Betombe has once again fallen foul of Fleet Command. They’re not happy with his actions in the Hujjur system.”

  “Oh,” Caden said. “I knew he and Santani had both been suspended, but I hadn’t realised Betombe’s situation was that serious. What exactly is the issue?”

  “It’s just a matter of conduct,” Thande said. ‘They’re saying he wasn’t fit for command. But they’ve been telling him he isn’t fit for command for decades, so I hardly see how this is any different.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And I wouldn’t be too concerned about Santani; I hear she’s got little to worry about now that her wild tales of monstrous alien ships have been proven true.”

  “Well, that makes me feel better. She’s a good captain, and I’d hate to see her robbed of her command.”

  “She doesn’t need to be robbed of it: she crashed it into a planet.”

  “If you recall, I was there when Hammer came down, Captain. Very nearly underneath it, in fact.”

  “Perhaps she was trying to kill you,” said Volkas.

  • • •

  Euryce Eilentes had waited for the ship to make her next jump before heading off to the gym compartment. Although the regular crew in Disputer were probably used to it, most other people — those who did not often travel between the stars — found the nauseating experience of crossing a wormhole’s boundary to be a remarkably effective prophylactic against the notion of exercise. As a result, the gym was usually quieter during jumps.

  Quiet was what she needed. Quiet, and endorphins.

  Eilentes reached forwards with a wavering hand and prodded the treadmill’s controls. Pace increase, gradient increase. Beads of sweat ran down her arm. She wiped her brow quickly, while the machine spooled up to make the run more difficult, then leaned into the new conditions with increased determination.

  Thirty-eight minutes, read the timer.

  She felt a tightness in her calves and the beginnings of a stitch encroaching on her midriff, and remembered to control her breathing. Deep, steady, pull in that air, that wonderfully sterile naval oxygen-nitrogen mix. Out, you carbon dioxide, out! Get thee to a scrubbery.

  The holos at the end of the wall were showing round-the-clock feeds from three of the many worlds’ most popular news channels. She stumbled when she recognised Meccrace Prime in the central display.

  That damned footage again. Whoever had recorded it, she wished nothing but the worst of luck for them. Each time those images popped up — and they had been popping up everywhere — she was forced to remember.

  Wormholes flared in the night. Great, dark leviathans emerged from them, as though spiders had created their own gargoyles to plague the nightmares of man. Imperial ships fired on each other for almost a full hour — the footage clipped down to show only the highlights — punching holes through each other’s hulls. The intruders penetrated the planet’s atmosphere, contaminating her with their touch, sullying her pure skies.

  And then of course, just before the footage ended, was The Falling.

  That was what they were calling it out in the colonies, now that the footage had been leaked by the empire’s cheerfully anonymous whistleblowers. Eilentes had to admit the name was as accurate as it was dramatic. She had been on the surface of Meccrace Prime when it began, so she was quite happy that the drama was justified.

  The Falling was exactly what it had felt like.

  The sound, that was what she remembered most vividly. A terrible sound, catastrophically intimate, reaching into her most primal gut and yanking it out, exposing it to the daylight. A sound that gripped her by the soul, as if she were feeling the sundering of the skies themselves, the demolition of the foundations of a heaven, as if she knew deep down in the core of her being that the gods of old had been felled brutally before the feet of their own creation.

  And at the climax of each sound, the impacts.

  She tried not to think about the stone, metal, and glass shearing away from the sprawl of the Eyes and Ears installation, but trying just made her brain focus more. She could still hear Caden protesting as she all but dragged him back to the shuttle.

  We have to go back.

  But we couldn’t, she thought. We couldn’t go back, not even for Throam.

  The timer ticked over to forty, and the track slowed gradually to a warm-down pace. She dropped to a light jog, grabbed her towel from the side rail and wiped her face and neck. The machine rumbled on.

  Ren, why didn’t you try?

  “Everything is fucked up, Elm. I can’t see a way out.”

  At the time, even with the shrieking roar of The Falling going on about her, the injured Doctor Bel-Ures to think about, and Caden’s suicidal desire to go back into the facility, something about the way Throam had said that had plucked at her mind; it had been tantalising but elusive.

  Now, after four days of thinking about it, she understood.

  Ren had not been talking about his hopeless situation inside a crumbling complex, or the inadvisable separation of the team. He had been talking about her.

  She was sure of it.

  The idea had been crystallising over the days, and now she was certain it had settled in its most perfectly flawless form. It made complete sense: he had been ashamed of himself before they arrived at Meccrace, confused by her reactions to his apology, and when it mattered most that he keep his wits about him he had been overwhelmed by the guilt. True to form, he had taken the opportunity to punish himself the moment it presented itself.

  Oh Ren, why didn’t you say?

  The treadmill came to a stop and she glanced disinterestedly at her workout summary. She towelled herself off, the sweat returning almost instantly, and headed for the free weights. On the way there she released a stability ball from the elasticated netting which restrained it against the bulkhead, and patted it idly with her hands as she made her way to a rack of dumbbells.

  The tricky part was getting her shoulders placed on the ball without it springing out from under her; not easy with a dumbbell in each hand. But she was no stranger to the problem, and within moments she was well into her first set of chest flyes.

  It had been a surreal experience when they left him behind. Not just for the simple fact of her own ambivalence — the strange reluctance of her heart to accept the end, the cool relief of leaving so many complex problems unaddressed — but also because of what Caden had declared to the airwaves.

  Even though she had quarrelled with Throam, even though she had been sure she did not want to continue her involvement with him, she thought the big lug might have saved some of his final words for her. But no, he had spent them on Caden. In a way she could not blame either of them; the conversation had cascaded quite naturally from Throam’s confirmation that he was in fact still alive, and it had been ended by a loss of contact before she was gifted with the right moment to join in.

  But Caden… what he had said.

  The Shard had said the words that she never could, and they had come so naturally to his lips. Ren was a lovable guy, as long as one obeyed a few simple rules. But when she had asked — what now felt like an age ago — Throam had said that he and Caden were not liable to be involved with one another.

  Ten Solars is a long time, she thought. A long time for them to come to depend on each other, a long time for Ren to forget any feelings he did once have for me.

  Maybe that was all there was to it: her old relationship with Throam, spanning as it had less than twelve months in total, was too short and too distant to compare favourably to the decade of friendship he had with Caden. Not even the reunion sex marathon could have competed with such abiding trust.

  Even without him here I
have my answer at last, she thought. You never loved me, did you Ren? Not like I loved you.

  Eilentes became aware of her surroundings again, saw that the few others in the gym were glancing in her direction. She had been clanging the dumbbells together.

  Time to end this set, she thought.

  • • •

  In one of the Disputer guest suites, Caden tapped a unified comms address into the public holo, feeling the soft breath of déjà vu swirl over him. The holo started to make the connection, reported success in reaching the gate local to Damastion, then gave him nothing. He tried again.

  After several minutes of attempting to reach home, he gave up and lay on the bunk.

  It did not mean anything; they were simply not there. He had told Lau to take their mother to the countryside, and that is exactly what Lau had done.

  But you can’t be sure.

  Oh by the worlds, he thought. Don’t you start putting thoughts like that in my head.

  The irony.

  “Piss off,” he said aloud.

  The Emptiness went silent, but its work was done. The doubt was there now; burrowing in and nourishing itself.

  Damastion was on the tail of the Orion arm, almost seven thousand light years downstream from Earth. The Deep Shadows lay to either side of that portion of the arm; between the Orion and Carina arms on the core-ward side, and between the Orion and Perseus arms on the rim-ward side.

  If the past two weeks had taught Caden anything, it was that the Deep held terrible secrets.

  No, he thought. That’s just paranoia.

  He forced himself to be rational. It was true that the Shaeld Hratha had launched their stealthier attacks at the fringes of the Deep Shadows — Herros and Echo being those two he knew of — and it was also true that they had spilled from the Deep when they had launched their devastating assault on the Meccrace system. But that did not necessarily mean the species originated in those dark, seldom-visited expanses. It did not mean that that was where their forces mustered… not necessarily.