After three weeks of one gee acceleration, Defiant left the solar system. By this time, real-time communications were no longer possible; it took several hours for transmissions to get from Defiant to Earth or vice versa. Over the next few weeks, communications became even more difficult. Transmissions had to be timed with Earth’s rotation, and between the effects of time dilation and the ever-increasing delay due to distance, as well as interference from other sources of radiation that threatened to swamp the signal, messages had to be repeated several times to ensure that they got through. Confirming receipt of a transmission faced the same problem, of course, which resulted in the Eidejelans on Earth and Freya talking past each other. There was little to communicate in any case: it would be years, from the Earthers’ perspective, before Defiant neared another star, and even then it would not pass closer than ten light-years. Interstellar was—if all went well—extremely uneventful. The point of the communications, for the purposes of the mission, was simply to let those on Earth know that Defiant was still on course.
The transmitter at Camp Collins was far less powerful than the one on Defiant, and the Eidejelans suspected that Freya stopped receiving their communications after about eight weeks. Still, Reyes, O’Brien, Helena and several of the others at Camp Collins kept transmitting at all hours of the day, in case Freya was listening. By twelve weeks, transmissions from Defiant were too faint to be received, and the Eidejelans on the ground stopped transmitting. Freya was now on her own. She had one of the cuffs with her, so she had a virtually limitless supply of books, movies and music with her, but she would have no one to talk to for over three years—and possibly much longer than that, depending on what she found at the end of her voyage.
The months wore on, and life continued at Camp Collins. Without a goal or the threat of invasion hanging over their heads, the Eidejelans had to learn to live an ordinary life. A few of the older people talked about returning to Iceland, but this was a hard sell for those who grew up in the tropics. They had only one ship and barely enough people to crew it. In the end, most of the Eidejelans joined the local tribe, leaving Reyes, O’Brien, Helena and a few others at the camp. They no longer had the manpower to maintain any of their machinery, and they made no effort to preserve their technological knowledge. When the last two cuffs finally gave out, any record of Pleiades, the IDL and future history would vanish.
They never expected to hear from Freya again. Whatever she found at the end of her voyage, there would be no reason for her to return to Earth. They had to be content with the knowledge that they had done what they could to save humanity from the Cho-ta’an.
Reyes’s health began to decline rapidly after their arrival at Camp Collins. Without Pleiades to occupy her, she felt the absence of Sigurd much more sharply. The guilt of having left so many to die on Antillia, and of sending Freya across space alone, weighed heavily on her as well. She spent her days staring out to sea, waiting for news that would never come. Five years after their arrival, she fell ill. She gradually worsened over the next several weeks, eventually succumbing to pneumonia. By this time, all the other Eidejelans except for O’Brien and Helena had tired of the isolation of the abandoned camp and joined the neighboring tribe.
Chapter Fifty-five
Commander Tertius Dornen was in his quarters when a yeoman on the bridge informed him that a vessel of unknown provenance, traveling at nearly ten percent of light speed, had been spotted 344 septhars from their position. By the time Dornen got to the bridge, the distance had closed to 340 septhars. The ship was decelerating at just over one standard gravity at near-right angles to Varinga’s course, and would pass within forty septhars in just over half a standard day. The navigator had calculated that with two days of acceleration at three standard gravities, they could get within intercept range. Dornen gave the order.
The crew of Varinga hadn’t seen another ship for seven standard years. Seven years earlier, Varinga had been on its way to Toronus to pick up a battalion of marines when the planet was attacked by an Izarian battlecruiser group. The Concordat base on Toronus was destroyed and the troops stationed there were killed. Varinga, virtually unarmed and not built for ship-to-ship combat, changed course and fled. She had been running ever since.
Varinga’s arrival at Toronus was supposed to have signaled a turning point in the war with the Izarians: having systematically demolished the Izarians’ planetary defenses, the Concordat had intended to send Varinga to Izar with a battalion of mechsuit-equipped marines to secure the Izarian capital and force their surrender. Varinga, having been equipped with 800 top-of-the-line mechsuits on Solimar, was supposed to have picked up the marines on Toronus and delivered them to Izar. But the Concordat had fallen for a ruse: the Izarians had held back a battlecruiser group, waiting for the right moment to strike. They’d been tipped off to Varinga’s itinerary and had timed their hyperspace jump to coincide with her arrival at Toronus, intending to destroy Varinga along with the base and the awaiting battalion. Only a three-hour delay in Varinga’s departure from Solimar prevented the Izarians from achieving total success. Varinga got away, but with only its crew on board. The 800 mechsuits remained on the ship’s lower level, with no one to operate them.
The attack on Toronus was a devastating blow to the Concordat. Half of the Concordat’s fleet had been on Toronus, awaiting Varinga’s arrival so the ships could escort her to Izar. Those ships had been destroyed. In retrospect, it had been foolish to keep so many ships in one place, but Toronus had been thought untouchable: the Izarians’ hyperspace technology lagged behind the Concordat’s, preventing them from terminating a jump inside the gravity well of a star system. The Concordant would know about an intended attack on Toronus days before it happened. After all, the Izarians had only developed self-contained hyperspace drives five years earlier; before that, they had been dependent on strategically placed hyperspace gates to move its ships between stars. Now it seemed that they had taken another leap in hyperspace technology: their battlecruisers had emerged from hyperspace within forty septhars of Toronus. There had been no time to get the Concordat’s ships out of drydock before the Izarians’ antimatter torpedoes were launched.
The Izarians did not stop with Toronus. While the Concordat’s ships were still burning, the Izarians jumped to Quereval, devastating the mining operations in that system. For the next several years, the remnants of the Concordat fleet engaged in a desperate attempt to defend their other systems against the Izarian assault, but they had too few ships and too much area to cover. Their entire defensive strategy had been designed around the Izarians’ inability to jump inside systems. With a few battlecruisers, the Izarians had changed the balance of the conflict in their favor.
Varinga traveled from system to system, hoping to rendezvous with a contingent of marines to man the mechsuits. Varinga, the most advanced Orbital Deployment Cruiser the Concordat possessed, was capable of even more precise jumps that the Izarian battlecruisers, and the Izarians didn’t have enough ships to defend Izar while maintaining their offensive. That meant Varinga could conceivably get close enough to Izar to deploy the marines before the Izarian ships could intercept it. The marines would be dropped from orbit, rendezvous on the ground, and take the Izarian capital.
This plan was a longshot without any battleships to escort Varinga, and without a battalion of men trained to use the mechsuits, it was impossible. The Concordat had plenty of marines, but they were scattered across a dozen worlds, and the unceasing assault of the Izarians made a rendezvous impossible. On several occasions, Varinga attempted a rendezvous only to barely escape an Izarian onslaught. The Izarians, knowing the Varinga was the Concordat’s only hope, threw everything at her every time she emerged from hyperspace near a populated word.
Despite the Izarians’ successes in the wake of the attack on Toronus, the war was now essentially at a stalemate. Unable to defend all their worlds, the Concordat had pulled its forces back to the seven Core Worlds, ceding the rest of their space to th
e Izarians. The Concordat’s forces were tied up defending the Core Worlds, and the Izarians lacked the firepower to break through their defense. Neither side could go on the offensive without opening itself up to a devastating counterattack.
A new development threatened to break the stalemate, though: intelligence reports indicated that the Izarians were working on an incredibly powerful new weapon: a device that temporarily weakened the covalent bonds of molecules of any sort of matter. If activated in the atmosphere of a planet, the device would start a chain reaction that would effectively liquefy the entire planet, destroying any structures and killing any organic beings on the planet. The Concordat was calling it a “planet-killer.” Their intelligence indicated the Izarians would have a working planet-killer in less than five years.
For the last three years, Varinga had stayed several hundred light-years from Concordat space. The Concordat’s only hope at this point was that the Izarians would become overconfident. There was little hope any longer of Varinga rendezvousing with any of the remaining marines, but there was another possibility: if Varinga could arrive at one of the fringe worlds without being spotted by the Izarians, it might be possible to raise a force of soldiers from the local population. There were a dozen worlds where civilian populations eked out a life as farmers or miners, and it wouldn’t take much to convince a few hundred of the young men on one of these worlds to sign up for the Concordat Defense Force. The people of the fringe worlds had no great love for the Concordat, but there was little opportunity on such planets, and Varinga could at least promise regular meals, a bunk, and a chance to kill some Izarians. It would take a couple years to train them, but Varinga had the staff and the facilities: the Solimarian corporation that produced the mechsuits had provided training personnel and a simulation module to get the marines up to speed on the new mechsuit models while in transit to Izar. All they lacked were warm bodies to fill the suits.
Unfortunately, the Izarians seemed to be watching the fringe worlds almost as closely as the Concordat-affiliated planets, and recruiting an army would take time. If Varinga spent a year in orbit around one of the fringe worlds, the Izarians would notice. This left Commander Dornen with few options for saving the Concordat.
One possibility was to locate one of the settlements that was rumored to exist even farther out than the fringe worlds. During the Collapse, hundreds of colonization ships had fled the known worlds to escape the chaos and violence. Some of these ships settled what became known as the fringe worlds, but dozens were never heard from again. It was theorized that some of these ships may settled worlds that were so distant that the colonies had never reestablished contact with the known worlds. If they could find a human-inhabited world that was cut off from the Concordat, they could raise an army without the Izarians ever knowing.
There was another possibility that lingered in the back of Commander Dornen’s mind, but he never spoke it aloud. It was well-known that another world populated by humans existed somewhere in the galaxy: the semi-legendary cradle of humanity known as Terra. The location of Terra had been unknown even before the Collapse, and so much disinformation had been promulgated during and after the Collapse that it was impossible to tell how much was fabricated. Some theorized that Terra was itself a myth dreamed up by the Concordat. According to one version of this theory, humans were the result of an Izarian genetic experiment that had gotten out of hand. Originally designed to do work the Izarians considered distasteful, this theory said, humans had rebelled and broke away, settling several worlds and founded a great civilization. Then the Collapse happened, and records of humanity’s genesis were lost. The Izarians rediscovered humanity in the wake of the Collapse, and the Concordat was formed to resist them. A human homeworld, called Terra, was invented to evoke feelings of racial pride in the face of the Izarian threat.
The strongest argument against this theory was the fact that the Izarians themselves apparently didn’t believe it. As far as the Concordat’s intelligence operatives could determine, the Ivarians had no record of humanity prior to the Collapse. These reports were, of course, treated as additional evidence of the coverup by adherents of the conspiracy theory.
Most human anthropologists continued to believe in the existence of Terra, although its whereabouts were widely disputed. Its location was postulated to be anywhere from near the dead center of the galaxy to far out on the western edge of the spiral. With billions of stars in the galaxy, it was impossible to investigate them all, even with the advent of self-contained hyperspace drives. Someday humanity might rediscover Terra, but the odds of coming across it by accident were infinitesimal.
Thoughts of such matters plagued Commander Dornen’s mind as Varinga closed on the tiny vessel, which had come from an area of space thought to be uninhabited. How long had it been traveling? Judging from the craft’s radiation signature, its propulsion system resembled the old Darvian drives that interstellar ships had used pre-Collapse. A ship like that could approach light speed, but it couldn’t jump to hyperspace on its own. Unless it had access to a system of hyperspace gates, it would take the ship years to travel between stars. It was only with the invention of stasis chambers that interstellar travel became practical. Of course, now that self-contained hyperspace drives existed, both stasis and the Darvian drives were considered obsolete. Wherever this ship had come from, it was very far away and very primitive.
When it was within twenty septhars, Varinga hailed the unidentified ship with a standard greeting. After several hours, the ship responded in a language Varinga’s computer didn’t recognize. The unidentified ship made no attempt to change course or take evasive action. Dornen transmitted his attention to intercept the ship. Again, the ship’s response was unintelligible.
By the time the two ships were within a septhar of each other, Varinga had nearly matched the unidentified ship’s deceleration and trajectory. Apparently understanding what Dornen intended, the little ship cut its thrusters, terminating its deceleration. Dornen breathed a sigh of relief: Varinga had the capability of shutting down the ship’s engines remotely with an electromagnetic pulse, but the results could be messy. Intercepting a ship in freefall would be much easier. He ordered Varinga to stop decelerating as well and directed the gravity beam operator to bring the ship aboard. The beam locked onto the ship and slowly pulled her into one of the containment berms.
“What the hell is it?” asked Varinga’s navigator, Delio Starn.
“No idea,” Dornen answered. None of them had ever seen a ship like it. Its design resembled that of the old Darvian drive ships, but its lines were strange and its faded markings were in no language they knew. Dornen noted that a hole in its hull had been messily repaired with a patch. A scan indicated a single occupant, the size of a human—or an Izarian.
While the ship was still being scanned for potential threats, a hatch opened and a young human woman with stark blond hair exited.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Varinga’s protocol officer, Clea Marinus, echoing the thoughts of everyone on the bridge.
“I’m going down there,” said Commander Dornen.
*****
“You’re telling me,” Dornen said to the young woman, who had identified herself as Freya, “that you came from Terra?”
The translator on the table between them repeated the question in her language—or one of her languages, as she apparently spoke several.
“Earth. Terra. Yes,” said Freya. She had a slightly hunted demeanor about her, as if she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that she’d been rescued or terrified that she’d been captured. She’d been through a rather invasive decontamination process, but this was more than that: she seemed shell-shocked, like a marine who’d gone into battle and never fully come back.
They’d been talking for nearly an hour now, but it was only the past few minutes that they’d really been able to understand each other. It had taken longer for the translator to learn her language than would have been expected if she hailed from a
lost colony, but Dornen realized after half an hour that part of the problem was Freya’s facility with multiple languages. She seemed most comfortable with something called Frankish, but she was also fluent in at least two other languages. Recognizing cognates in Dornen’s language, Truscan, she had confused the translator by occasionally switching from Frankish to a language called Latin. When he realized what she was doing, Dornen managed to communicate that the translator would learn faster if she stuck to a single language. Frankish was evidently far less similar to Truscan than Latin, but the translator had picked it up quickly. They could now communicate with reasonably good accuracy in almost real time.
“How long have you been traveling?” he asked.
She gave an answer that the translator translated as “Three years.” Units of measurement were tricky, though. She probably meant three Terran years, and there was no way of knowing how closely those correlated to Concordat Standard Years. Time dilation was another complication: if she’d spend a significant amount of her trip at near light speed, she would have experienced far less time than what had elapsed at her origin or destination. However long it had been, he got the impression she’d been aboard the ship a long time.
“Are you Ivarians?” she asked. The translator repeated the word exactly as she said it, no translation needed.
“Why do you ask that?” he asked.
“I am looking for the Ivarians.”
“Why?”
“My people are at war with an alien race called the Cho-ta’an. The Ivarians have a weapon we need.”
The Voyage of the Iron Dragon Page 38
