Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Rai Jang just joined us,” Geish added.

  “I see it,” said Erik. “Her two buddies as well, so now we have five.” Five-on-five sounded nearly like a fair fight… except that three of those were light cruisers, and Erik was prepared to bet from their signatures out of jump that all five incoming sard were the same crazy high class that had nearly killed Phoenix last time they’d met. Makimakala and Phoenix together could make a formidable combination, but no human and tavalai warships had ever fought together in all of history, as far as Erik was aware. If you were going to get into a big fight with someone, you’d damn well better know their capabilities, tactics and captain’s personal preferences — and neither warship knew any of that of the other.

  * * *

  Dale’s marines took the stairs down from their hotel rooms to the lobby level. In the foyer, where the bar and restaurants were usually crowded with noisy barabo guests, they found instead red-uniformed Vola Station police, all armed and in no mood to let the humans pass. Unfortunately for them, Dale plus his marines made eight, and they were all in heavy armour and weapons, having shared their hotel rooms with it for the past few days.

  They formed a short line before the police, as nervous hotel staff backed away, and the small crowd of gawkers on the main strip outside grew larger. Dale lowered his visor, and the overlaid display lit up the cops like bullseyes. “You no leave!” the senior cop insisted through his translator mike. “Order of Stationmaster! You no permission to leave!”

  “My warship is coming this way fast,” Dale replied, as his own translator turned it into squawking Palapu. “Either I am on it, or my warship will extract me from this station by force.” The black-furred barabo seemed to swallow hard at that. “You don’t make an enemy of Phoenix, friend. Phoenix is under wartime alert, Phoenix will tear this station apart.”

  “Hello Lieutenant Dale,” crackled PH-1’s com in his ear, “we have station-confirmed berth at hub number 59, ETA thirty-one minutes, please confirm.”

  Dale held up his hand to forestall whatever the barabo cop was saying. “PH-1 this is Dale, I copy hub berth 59 in thirty-one minutes. Request that you change it to a rim berth for convenience, over.”

  “Lieutenant we requested that,” replied Ensign Yu, PH-1’s co-pilot. “But we’ve just come from the factory and they know we’re carrying a full cargo of missiles. Station rules say no rim docking with ordinance, will ETA be a problem?”

  “Not yet,” Dale replied. “I’ll get back to you on that.” He advanced on the cop, powered armour whining and thumping as he raised his Koshaim-20 crosswise before the barabo’s face. “If you fire on us, you will not scratch us. If I fire on you, there will be nothing left. We are leaving.”

  He had no desire to fire on poor dumb barabo cops just trying to fulfil some stupid Stationmaster’s order not to let the humans leave the hotel. No doubt that order had something to do with the hooded figure in their midst, with his female staffer companion. Fleet agents must have told Vola Station that Chankow was to be stopped from leaving. Vola Station’s problem was doing something about it.

  A loud female voice shouted in Palapu, and Dale looked to see a new officer arriving. Her red uniform was striped and she had short black dreadlocks, tight beneath her uniform cap, and the short trimmed beard that passed for feminine among barabo. The other cops parted for her, and she came right up to the lead barabo cop and shouted at him. Dale’s translator gave him mostly static — either these two were speaking some dialect the translator did not recognise, or they were going at it so hard that Palapu began to sound foreign. On some human stations, Dale had heard angry dockworkers doing that to English.

  The officer backed off, and the woman beckoned to Dale. “You come,” she said in English. “Take you to hub fast. Get you shuttle, before you blow many holes in station and station people.” With a glare at Dale’s weapon, before turning to head for the main walk outside. “You come with me, no more trouble with station, yes?”

  Dale indicated to his people, and they followed her out, through the bewildered cops and the spectators beyond, and onto the main walk. They made a protective formation about Chankow, the crowd wisely parting before them as the marines kept shoulder-to-shoulder in case of snipers from across the steel canyon to their side. With as many Fleet agents on station as Jokono had warned them of, it seemed very likely that one of them would take a shot at Chankow before he got on PH-1.

  Again his uplinks registered an incoming connection. “Lieutenant Dale, this is the Major, please respond.” Her voice sounded G-stressed.

  “Hello Major,” said Dale with relief. “We’re headed for the station hub now, when we lost contact with Phoenix and Joma Station we figured something was wrong and bailed. Slight trouble with the locals, but I think we’ll make the rendezvous.”

  “See that you do make the rendezvous, we have incoming sard vessels on our tail, we’re going to be cutting it very fine to make an intercept pickup of PH-1, and then we’re running. We’d do it faster but Vola’s current position is behind Rhea and we can’t manage jump pulse on that gravity slope.”

  “Yes Major, we’ll be there. What’s the situation on the coms blackout?”

  “Joma Station was attacked by a swarm of hacksaws.” Dale did not shock easily, but he nearly missed a stride. “We think they came from one of the ships docked at the rim, or maybe several. No telling who was infested, but if sard could strip Grappler like they did, they could probably do the same to some Joma Station ship and fill it with drones. It looks like sard and hacksaws are working together, Joma’s a complete mess, they targeted Phoenix and Makimakala specifically, we’ve light casualties but it was tight. It’s a whole other bunch of questions to ask Chankow, so we need him alive.”

  “I copy that Major, you’ll have him shortly.”

  He’d chosen the hotel in part because it was close to both a gym and the turbolifts up the station’s three-arm to the hub. The elevator car arrived full of barabo, whom the female police officer cleared away with much yelling and flashing of her shiny badge, to disgruntled looks all around. There was barely enough room for eight armoured marines, two unarmored humans and one unarmored barabo, but they all made the squeeze and the barabo spoke some kind of override command into the car’s voice recognition, and all impending stops on the display disappeared, giving them a clear route up to the hub.

  “Thank you,” said Dale, raising his visor. The barabo gave him a nod, with every impression of just wanting him the hell off her station as fast as possible. “Will you be in trouble with station?”

  A disinterested shrug. “Maybe. Maybe don’t care.” The black fur at her neck was shaved in odd stripes on each side. It made a sleek pattern from her shoulders up to her jaw. For perhaps the first time ever, Dale wished Romki were here, to tell him what it meant. “You talk your ship?” Dale nodded. “Ship say what happen Joma Station? We still no coms.”

  “Hacksaws,” said Dale. “Joma was attacked.”

  The barabo raised a quizzical eyebrow at him, thinking he was joking. Then studied his face, with dawning horror. “True?”

  “True.” And he looked at Chankow, staring at him beneath his civvie hood. “Any idea why or how?”

  “There were reports,” said Chankow. “From sard space, and Outer Neutral Space. Sard messing around with the old AI stuff they’d found. The tavalai no longer enforcing the anti-AI laws, Dobruta short of manpower from the war and told by tavalai command to leave the sard alone. The reports were ignored, humans thought anything that made trouble between sard and tavalai was good.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Dale muttered, as gravity grew lighter. Vola Station’s spoke arms were barely a kilometre long, and the rotational gravity disappeared fast compared to the monster stations Phoenix crew were more accustomed to. The car’s occupants grabbed rails in anticipation of floating. “This sounds like a lot more than just ‘messing around’ with old AI tech. You can’t reprogram hacksaws, and they won’t fight for anyone but
their own queens.”

  “Sounds more like an alliance,” Lance Corporal Ricardo said grimly.

  “Between sard and hacksaws?” Lance Corporal Kalo replied. “Well that’s fucking cheerful.” Until a short while ago, conventional wisdom had said that hacksaws were mostly extinct and encountering a group of them would be as likely as winning — or rather losing — a lottery. And now Phoenix had had two nasty encounters within three months. What the hell was going on?

  When they reached hub transition, everyone floated to the ceiling as the elevator car came to a halt. They emerged from the tube as forward windows showed the huge steel canyon walls moving smoothly past them — the stationary hub, holding still in space on frictionless magnetic bearings while the entire, multi-million tonne station rotated around it. Directly opposite them was a new vehicle car on rails, moving parallel to the elevator, and Dale pulled himself aboard, squeezing into a corner as the rest followed. Behind them, the transparent walls showed another car full of barabo passengers, waiting to move up and enter the now-empty elevator car, all staring at the armoured humans. Once full, someone hit the right button and their new car took an off-rail and began to slow.

  “Okay everyone,” said Dale as the car approached two others queued at a big hatch. “Bottleneck ahead, stay sharp. Perfect ambush spot, everyone watch the blindspots and mind your own sector. Keep it tight and watch your attitude jets amongst the civvies.”

  Ahead of them, the lead car full of barabo passengers accelerated away up the rail, chasing the nearest station-arm elevator. The car ahead moved up a spot, and their own bumped after it. Passengers hauled themselves from the car ahead as doors opened, floating one after another up the handlines.

  “Hello Lieutenant, this is PH-1,” came the crackle in Dale’s ear as they waited. “Our ETA is now twenty-four, please confirm your status?”

  “Don’t worry PH-1, we’ll make it with about ten to spare.”

  “Good thing, because Phoenix is coming in real fast and she’s got tavalai and barabo friends for company with sard right behind. Gonna be tight, see you there.”

  “Hey! What…?” It was their new replacement volunteer off Europa, Private Tabo. “Hey you! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  He was addressing the barabo policewoman, who was pulling herself out of the car’s farside door, into the narrow gap against the wall where no passengers were supposed to go. She seemed eager to get out in a hurry. Almost as though… and then Dale realised.

  “Oh fuck, grenade!” And marines nearly broke the car glass spinning to try and look for it. “Where the fuck is it?”

  “Get out!” yelled Carponi, and smashed the glass with a fist, then bang! as everything shattered, and the car was full of smoke. Dale barely felt it, with his visor down the armour was far too tough for small AP grenades. Then why… and then he realised again, also too late.

  “Oh man,” Private Yu complained, in the same tone as someone who had just seen something horrible. Dale looked, and it was indeed horrible — Supreme Commander Chankow, very dead and now spilling an awful lot of zero-G blood globules into the car. And innards. “Man, she stuffed it into his fucking coat.”

  “Dammit, the girl’s hurt bad,” said Private Halep, cradling Lieutenant Raymond, who was out cold and bloody. “LT? She’d get better care here, even if she’s not barabo — if we take her with us she might bleed out under Gs.”

  Dale could recall plenty of times being more angry than this, but rarely at himself. He bit back some more bad language, as the damaged car bumped up another spot to the wall hatch. The Major discouraged officers swearing in combat — it indicated a lack of control. “She comes with us, she might still know stuff. Patch her best you can and bring her. Corporal Kalo, get your section out there and secure the way.”

  “Yessir!”

  Of the backstabbing barabo officer there was nothing they could do — sure as hell he wasn’t going to go chasing and shooting through a civilian station to catch her when he was urgently needed at Berth 59. And just as sure he’d think twice before trusting barabo security again.

  * * *

  Erik was flat on his back for a 10-G burn when Europa’s message came through from Lieutenant Shilu’s post.

  “Phoenix, this is Europa. Europa is outbound and preparing to jump. All crew and passengers are safe and accounted for, including Calvin Debogande. I thought the Lieutenant Commander would like to know.”

  “Thank you Europa,” Shilu replied. “The Lieutenant Commander sends his best wishes to Europa, and to all aboard.”

  Erik’s attention was fixed on his holographic display of PH-1, burning hard away from Vola orbit, but still firmly snared in the much larger gravitational pull of enormous Rhea, looming to one side with swirling, malevolent clouds. He’d just dumped a little V with the jump engines, but could not cycle deeply into hyperspace this deep on the gravitational slope, and would have to lose the rest of the V with main engines. They were sharing data with PH-1 via two-way link, navcomp fixing a rendezvous point that their combined thrust would hit precisely, and any deviation would see them miss completely. The pursuing sard vessels were as jump-pulse limited as any others this close to Rhea, and would miss their fire-intercept window by nearly two minutes, assuming they’d already fired.

  “Hello Phoenix, this is Makimakala,” came Captain Pram’s voice, no doubt uplink formulated as Makimakala was pulling a similar manoeuvre behind them. “We request a common jump point for system exit, there is safety in numbers. Clearly these sard want us dead, and we should consider why.”

  It was hard to make life changing decisions for an entire crew while flat on your back at 10-G and attempting to line up a very non-standard rendezvous. A second uplink light blinked where his peripheral vision would usually be — at this G-stress, eyesight tended to tunnel.

  “Understood Makimakala, Phoenix copies. Please standby.” He flipped channels. “Hello Major.”

  “Take his offer,” said Trace. “Romki’s just been chewing my ear off down here, and I think he’s right. Take his offer, we need to get to the bottom of this.”

  “If we take it, we’ll miss Fleet’s offer of pardon. It will expire in our absence.”

  “Lieutenant Dale said Chankow told him we’d be dead in a year if we took it anyway. He said it was all about hacksaws. Romki says the same. Given what’s just happened, I have to agree. We fucked up Erik. I fucked up. I was obsessed with thinking we could make peace and save humanity from civil war. We can’t, we were stupid to think we could. But this, we can do. Fighting humanity’s foreign enemies is what we were made for. Let’s do that, and we might get to the bottom of our Fleet problem at the same time.”

  Erik knew she was right, of course. It was everything he’d already been thinking, every doubt that had nagged at the back of his mind since far before the hacksaw attack. But to make that decision here would be to condemn all of Phoenix’s nearly-600 crew to become hunted outlaws from their own species, from their families and everything they’d known, without giving them a vote on it. His visual showed him rendezvous in one minute thirty, and no time to stop and think about it.

  “LC, Makimakala’s sending us jump coordinates,” Kaspowitz told him. “It’s Tobana, unsettled system, I’d guess we’ll have to two-jump an escape unless the tavalai have some help waiting there.”

  “This is not a democracy,” Trace added. “This is the call, and you know there’s no choice. Call it.”

  “Kaspo,” Erik formulated. “Accept and lay in coordinates. Shilu, thank Makimakala for me. Operations, rendezvous ETA one minute and five, stand by.”

  “Operations copies LC.”

  Erik could see PH-1 adjusting thrust angle even now to bring the shuttle across and line up the position where Phoenix was about to arrive. He cast a final glance at the nav feed, and Europa’s position, disappearing at a more moderate yet purposeful thrust toward Kazak System’s outer fringes, one jump pulse down and preparing for the second, with human
space several jumps ahead. His biggest regret was that Lisbeth wasn’t on her… but how could he trust his sister to any ship holding Fleet’s pet killer, who found honour only in obeying orders, no matter how grotesque?

  At fifteen seconds Erik cut thrust as Phoenix’s velocity precisely matched PH-1’s. He left them thrust-neutral as Lieutenant Hausler flung PH-1 about with a precise rotation of thrust, and slammed her hard into the matching grapples.

  “PH-1 is aboard!”

  And Erik threw Phoenix end-over-end and kicked in the mains once more, building to a steady roar as they powered about Rhea’s gravity slope with the jump point emerging on the far side.

  “Hello Phoenix crew, this is the LC,” Erik addressed them all on open coms. “It seems that these sard are really out to get us, and our tavalai companion has some ideas why. Phoenix does not run from fights, but first we need to regroup and consider what we’re up against. We are leaving for Tobana System first, then possibly beyond. All hands standby for combat jump, LC out.”

  And just hope that our tavalai friend hasn’t been playing us all along, and isn’t leading us into a huge froggie trap on the far side.

  20

  After Medbay rounds and ship rounds, it took Erik a full two hours to finally intercept Trace in Assembly. They were two jumps out of Kazak and still on orange alert in case the sard pursuit found them again, but there hadn’t been any sard vessels on scan when they’d made the second jump, and Tobana System had no nav buoys to interrogate and tell later vessels where the earlier ones had gone. They were in fast transit now across a desolate and unsettled system known only as GH-14, three thousand K off Makimakala’s flank with Rai Jang another forty thousand K in front. Rai Jang’s two companions had not joined them in the first jump, and Erik had been surprised at the smaller ship’s speed — it had arrived only fifteen minutes late on each occasion.