Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2)

by Joel Shepherd

  Romki was similarly impossible, mostly because whatever oath he gave, no one would believe it. That, plus it was the last thing he actually wanted, and would probably only accept with a gun to his head, and possibly not even then. Stan Romki would always be a lone wolf and master of his own conscience, for better or worse. And Erik thought he was probably more use that way.

  Jokono and Hiro were another matter — ensign for both of them, the lowest rank on the officer scale save for warrant officer, but warrants had to know how to actually do stuff on the ship. Ensign, it was generally agreed, would allow each to become an operational part of the command structure without giving them the ability to question any of the more senior officers. Both were given the specialisation of IN-1, for Intelligence — something utterly unknown on Fleet ships to date. They were temporary ranks of course, applied under press-gang rules, often used in Fleet when ships in desperate need of crew were allowed by Fleet law to ‘recruit’ able civilians, against their will if necessary. Erik was grateful that both men seemed considerably more enthusiastic than that, but had little hope that either of them would stick around if this whole mess ended tomorrow. Neither were Fleet men by nature, just by circumstance. But this circumstance required that they improvise, and make the best use of every asset to hand — people in particular.

  And in that spirit, it gave Erik perhaps the greatest pleasure of all to pin a second lieutenant’s single bar on Tif’s collar, the lowest feasible rank for a pilot, and to see the shining pleasure in her big, golden eyes. Her salute was very rusty, and her parade steps worse, but no one cared — the other pilots said that she was a gun, and her co-pilot Ensign Lee had gone from the most nervous co-pilot on Phoenix to the most smug in record short time. There had never before been a kuhsi given rank on a Fleet warship. Erik did not need to check any records to know that — it was well known that the one prerequisite that all Fleet personnel had to meet was humanity. Tif was not merely the first kuhsi to hold rank on a Fleet vessel, she was the first non-human, and that was a record Erik was more than happy to smash.

  Finally there arrived at the event Lieutenant Draper, having been relieved from bridge duty by Lieutenant Dufresne. He beamed and looked the happiest Erik had ever seen him, as his new Captain pinned Erik’s old gold leaves on his collar. Erik was surprised how hard they were to part with. He’d worked so hard to get those leaves, and he’d been so proud when he’d received them. They’d been his highest rank in the war, the culmination of all his hard work and hopes that he could make his family proud. But he knew when he saw them pinned to the collar of the younger man that some old things had to be left behind. And with them, all the innocence and lightness that went with a lesser responsibility.

  When the ceremony was all over, there were handshakes instead of salutes, and everyone fell out for congratulations and some photos before heading back to duty. Erik was mildly surprised that Trace made a point of coming to shake his hand.

  “Congratulations Captain,” she told him, with a subdued smile to tell him that she really meant ‘about damn time’.

  “Given how much you disagreed with my last call,” said Erik, “I’m a bit surprised you didn’t stick it in my eye.” He could feel the new rank at his collar, tugging with unreasonable weight. It was the most curious sensation.

  Trace shook her head faintly. “No sir. It’s not the calls themselves. It’s the officer’s willingness to make them in the first place.”

  “But you think I was wrong to send the rescue after Europa’s crew?”

  “Yessir. They weren’t the objective. If we divide resources by chasing multiple secondary objectives, we increase the risk of failure.”

  “You know what’s really surprised me since we’ve been out here?” Erik asked her. “The thing I wouldn’t have predicted three months ago? How eager the crew is. I’d thought we’d have morale problems by now, but instead they’re keen as anything.”

  Trace nodded slowly. “I agree,” she said carefully.

  “This is why they signed up,” Erik insisted. “The Triumvirate War was always an awkward, nasty thing. Tavalai were never the horrible enemy we wanted them to be — which isn’t to say we shouldn’t have fought them. But it was a war of politics and advantage, not a war of passion.

  “This is a war of passion.” He jabbed his finger at the deck. “Our war. Phoenix’s war. Everyone can see the stakes. I think for a lot of them it’s almost a relief, particularly the veterans. The Triumvirate War left everyone with a bad taste in their mouths. We won, but it was never as sweet as we wanted it to be. But this fight, it seems almost as though the more dangerous it gets, the keener everyone becomes.

  “I’m different to you, Major. You’ve fought against that passion all your life. You’ve sought to control it. But I’m only here because of it. Most of the crew are also. If we’re not here to rescue the Europa crew, and others like them? Then we lose that passion. Without it, we’ve lost this fight before it even starts.”

  “That sounds nice, Captain,” Trace said calmly. “But combat doesn’t care about sentiment. Mostly it comes down to odds and percentages. You play the wrong ones, we all die.”

  “I know my ship,” Erik replied with certainty. “And I know my crew. I knew those odds, and I thought we could do it. Plus the Europa crew will go home now. They’ve got a scary story to tell, and a lot of them are people Fleet HQ can’t easily shut up. My uncle among them, but others as well. They’ll tell humanity the story that we can’t, and start the debate that we won't be present for. It was worth it.”

  “It’s always worth it when it works. It’s never worth it when it doesn’t.” As usual, it was impossible to tell exactly what Trace thought. “Would you really have removed me from command?” she asked. “If I’d continued to refuse your order?”

  “Yes,” said Erik, and meant it.

  “Good,” Trace replied, and meant that too.

  “And now that I properly outrank you,” Erik said edgily, “I won’t have to worry about that any longer, will I?”

  “No sir,” Trace said innocently. “Not that, at least.” And her smile turned faintly dangerous.

  * * *

  Ensign Jokono entered Engineering Bay 8D with no small trepidation. Within, he found a very odd sight — Stanislav Romki seated at a workbench at the side of the open bay floor, beside a large, square framework that contained the head of Phoenix’s resident drysine queen. Splayed in a great, blue holographic glow across the floor was a technical hologram, displaying shapes and diagrams so complicated that Jokono had no idea what he was looking at.

  The newly promoted Lieutenant Rooke was also here, Jokono saw as he came fully into the room, walking now through the interactive hologram and pointing to technical shapes, moving them by touch, joining things together. The shapes looked vaguely like hacksaw body parts. Perhaps they were considering how to build Styx the new body she had reportedly demanded. Neither man paid Jokono any attention, talking in a technical jargon so dense it might have been another language.

  “Hello Ensign Jokono,” said a female voice from the room speakers. Jokono had been warned of this too — the machine that pretended to have a gender, and to use vocal speech with emotive inclinations, to make its listeners feel more well disposed toward it. It was not, he’d been warned, anything more than that. “Have you been sent here to ask me some questions?”

  “Well yes,” Jokono said carefully, stepping about the edge of the bench to the holographic perimeter, where the single red eye within the frame-brace could see him directly. “Hello Styx. We haven’t yet been introduced. But you seem to know who I am already.”

  “A curious state of existence,” said Styx. “To only know intimately that to which you have been personally introduced. Can I take it we are now acquainted?”

  As though she were teasing him, Jokono thought. From Styx, it was neither comforting nor amusing. She had his details on file, of course, and knew his face on sight. AIs, she was suggesting, did not place gre
ater value on data just because it was standing directly before them. Data from memories many thousands of years old could seem just as strong, to a mind in which everything was digitally encoded.

  “Yes of course,” Jokono agreed, with all the cool he’d ever used while interviewing crazy people accused of crimes. “It’s very nice to meet you finally.”

  “Of course,” said Styx.

  “Careful,” Rooke told Jokono with an amused look. “She’s getting snippy. Comes from listening to Lisbeth too long.”

  Romki ignored them all, frowning as he considered the various components hovering in the display around him. “Now what if,” he suggested as something new occurred to him, “we realign this module with the X-matrix along here…” and he shifted the new parts into line, launching into his and Rooke’s foreign language once more.

  “As it happens,” Jokono continued, “as the ship’s intelligence officer, I have been asked by the Captain to gather more information from you on various things. If you can spare a moment?”

  “Of course I can,” said Styx. “Supervising these two is not taxing.”

  “Hey,” Rooke protested. “I heard that.”

  Jokono nodded. “Firstly, the drysine ships that are now preparing to leave. I take it you will not tell us where they are going?”

  “No. Their destination must remain hidden. They are now the last of their kind, as am I. I cannot accompany them for now, and so they must go alone.”

  Once upon a time, Phoenix had placed the highest priority upon destroying old hacksaw nests. Now they’d likely just created a huge new one, with FTL ships and more than a thousand drones. It made no one happy… except perhaps Lieutenant Rooke and Stan Romki, whom everyone agreed were enjoying their new ship-guest far too much.

  “Very well,” said Jokono. “Now the parren. I’d like to ask you some questions about where we’re going, and who you think we might be able to meet.”

  “Ensign Jokono,” said Styx. “Please understand that my data on the parren is now twenty five thousand years out of date. You’d do better consulting Mr Romki, his data is at least current, if incomplete.”

  “Well no,” Jokono insisted. “Actually I’d like to ask you of your old data. If we are to track the current whereabouts of this data-core, we first need to understand where it has been. My background is in criminal investigations, where we attempt to establish a timeline of events based on whatever snippets of information we can uncover. And so I’d like to begin by asking you of your memories of the parren, during your time.” He turned on his recorder, and sat on the edge of the bench. “Come to that, what was your time? Or put more simply, who are you? What are you?”

  Silence from the queen. Rooke and Romki both stopped what they were doing to look at her, fascinated. Typical that they hadn’t had the nerve to ask her already, Jokono thought drily. Both were so clearly in awe of her, it made them a potential liability in her presence. He made a mental note to report that to Captain Debogande, with the rest.

  “Any identifiers that I could communicate to you would be in drysine coded language, or the language of our enemies,” Styx said finally. “It would mean nothing to you.”

  “And that,” said Jokono, “is exactly the kind of unhelpful answer that I’ve been instructed to no longer accept from you. So please, take your time.”

  “But the parren,” Styx continued as though she hadn’t heard him. “The Tahrae faction, as you’ve called them. They called themselves ‘tukayran maskai’ — I believe it could translate as ‘the chosen’, in your English. Them I knew well.”

  “Twenty five thousand years ago? For how long?”

  “Our people evolve, Ensign. In body and mind, I was not the entity I am now even a hundred years before that time. Identity shifts. You ask me to identify a singular sense of self, yet it is not something my people typically possess.”

  “But the parren knew you as a single entity?” Jokono pressed. “You may not believe in such things, but they’re organics, and most organics do. How did they know you? What did they call you?”

  “They called me Halgolam,” said Styx.

  Jokono frowned, and was about to ask more when he saw Romki’s expression. His eyes were wide. “Stanislav? You recognise the name?”

  “Halgolam is one of the oldest parren gods,” said Romki. “Long dead, like our Greek and Roman gods. Zeus, Venus, Mars. Styx. I don’t think any parren have worshiped Halgolam in… oh, ten thousand years. At least.”

  “And what was she?” Jokono pressed, feeling cold dread prickling up his spine. Some old things in the galaxy, he was quite certain should stay dead and buried forever. “What kind of god was this Halgolam?”

  “The literal translation in the old tongue was ‘the wings of the night’,” said Romki. “Halgolam was the goddess of violent retribution, sent by the creator to wreak terrible justice upon the wicked.” He took a deep breath. “We might call her the Angel of Death.”

  About the Author

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joel Shepherd is the Australian author of twelve SF and Fantasy novels, including ‘The Cassandra Kresnov Series’ and ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel’, and ‘Renegade: The Spiral Wars’

  For more information:

  @ShepJoel

  joelshepherdauthor

  www.joelshepherd.com