by Jim Rudnick
“You, Captain, are wrong. If you think that I could ever give up the Barony for a captain’s wife’s role is just not in the cards, Captain. I could call in an EliteGuard right now and order him to just shoot you dead right now … I am that mad at you, Tanner,” she said, and those words were spit out with anger.
He nodded to her. “Yes, Ma’am, you could, and he would simply follow orders, and I would die. Do you not see that this is not the way that two people—any two people—should begin a relationship like marriage, Ma’am? I would also think that the AI here in your quarters is also constantly checking me for weapons, for my deportment and competency, and how I treat you too. I am not really husband material, Ma’am—I’m just the same as the furniture. That is the real problem, Helena—that while I love you—ALL of you, it’s the Royal in you that I can’t handle, Ma’am. And I’m afraid that making me a Royal just makes me a different piece of furniture, Ma’am,” he said, and his voice cracked once but he went on.
“Ma’am, I don’t know where this leaves us—except to say that at this point, I’d say we need some time and space to think on this, Ma’am?”
She nodded and he noted she couldn’t even look at him anymore. She pointed to the door, and once again, she spat out the words. “Get out, Captain.” She stood there, arms crossed on her chest, while he struggled back into his uniform pants and draped the jacket over his shoulders as he made his way to the door.
He turned to look at her one more time, but she was just standing there, eyes closed, and so he left her quarters and went down the corridor to the lift down to the landing bay … thinking to himself that the whole thing had gone much worse than he’d hoped for…much worse indeed…
#####
The ship sat above Memories as if it belonged there—more than a full mile wide and half a mile tall, its saucer shape had arrays and enormous vents and no visible landing bays or cargo bay doors. But in its glowing pink color, it sat about two miles above the surface and did nothing.
It had just winked into existence directly above the planet which was not unseen by the two small RIM Confederacy satellites that lay hidden within some of the nebula lobes near the planet. They recorded the new ship’s entry to the planet and sent that news off to Juno, the RIM Confederacy capital, with full encryption on their Ansible frequencies. They also received for their own logs the “message received” confirmation from Juno.
This caused, of course, much action on Juno, as the call went out to the Team Memories navy ships all to get to Memories STAT—the invaders had arrived, and their presence was needed there immediately.
Memories was quiet. There were no sentients there at all, just smaller predator-prey creatures that were more concerned with not being some other creature’s dinner than anything that lay above.
After a full day of sitting dormant, the mother ship then scanned the surface below, those bright yellow beams first picking out the straight tracks of the terraformer foundries and following them until they found the bombed wrecks of the foundries themselves. Some were almost lying in pieces, their legs pointing up in the air; others still stood upright but were burned hulks with little interior equipment left intact. Some—less than a handful—were in better shape, their power sources destroyed, but they might have been fixable if one knew how. The Confederacy satellites recorded that and sent that news back to Juno too.
But were the mother ship even interested was the question, as it slowly moved along, those bright yellow beams scanning and recording what they found. They jumped to other continents, and after three days, their planetary scans were complete, and that news was also relayed to Juno.
And now the mother ship stood still, still up a couple of miles and over a nondescript continent, and it waited.
No one, satellites included, knew what for or for how long or what it was going to do next. It moved slowly back to sit just off Memories’ north polar area, an area covered with sheeted ice packs and icebergs all frozen in place.
It did nothing again for almost another full day.
Then, one side of the mother ship suddenly turned off that pink glow—force fields, it was assumed—and massive cargo doors opened up and out came four large diamond-shaped vehicles. Some might have said shuttles, but they were obviously never made to carry humans or even aliens. Each was about three hundred feet long, and each went down the ordinal directions from true north—each one at a ninety-degree angle—and each went about halfway down the planet’s surface until they found the open sea. Each dipped then to drop the bottom third of their length into the sea, and each began to suck up seawater at an astonishing rate.
The satellites recorded that they were ingesting at least a thousand gallons a second—and they worked for almost nine full hours. It appeared that they were then full, as each then climbed back up, out of the ocean waters, and returned to the mother ship. The pink force field curtain dropped, the ships entered, and then the pinkness resumed along the side of the mother ship, and that too was sent back to Juno.
Not a minute later, on the other side of the mother ship, more cargo bays opened as the pink force fields were turned off, and out of those bays came larger cargo shuttles. Nine of them left the mother ship, and each turned to again go south at the four points of the compass. One, however, did not go anywhere and instead moved up and above the dispersing group of similar ships, and the satellites thought that it might be playing some kind of “shepherd” type of role, which they sent to Juno too. They also noted that these nine cargo shuttles were mirror images of the Scavenger Roma refugee craft as well—right down to the huge single laser on the top of same and arrays with derricks and cranes too. It was also noted that the colorations were so close, as if the mother ship builders didn’t put much stock into refinishing and the maintenance of hull abrasions and dents and the like. Juno got it all and relayed it to the Team Memories admiral too.
These cargo shuttles went down to the surface, found each of the destroyed foundries, and then turned to follow the routes back, stopping to test at each of the vast laser shafts that they found. Some drilled down more with smaller lasers, the satellites noted. Others just scanned and moved on, and Juno got it all…
CHAPTER EIGHT
As the admiral had planned out on the way to Memories, each of the ten ships took on a circular position around the invader ship that lay at the north pole of Memories. Each suddenly appeared in order around the invading ship, and each was running full force field shields at the same time. A circle of blue from the Team Memories ships circled the invader ship’s pink force fields at the center.
There wasn’t a single response from the invader ship.
It sat as it had now for more than a month, gathering up water from its ocean-draining ships and minerals and ores from its land-based cargo shuttles. It had been harvesting Memories now for longer than Tanner thought it could, and still the water and ores being mined were shipped up to the mother ship from its minion ships below.
Encrypted Ansible conversations occurred almost hourly as updates went back and forth, and Tanner was able to gauge the other captains and their take on what to do too.
Strangely, he thought, there was little leadership in the simple “let’s just bomb them the hell outta here” counsel. In fact, only a couple of captains offered that the quickest route back to an even balance here on the RIM was to take them out.
The captain of the Tillion destroyer the TN Fendi said it perhaps best, for him at least, when he said, “Let’s just wait and see …”
Right now, the invader ship was harvesting a bleak world with no sentients, and it seemed somehow fitting to Tanner that as their foundries lay in waste on the planet, they could harvest for what they wanted for as long as they wanted.
Daily, the admiral had a meeting conference Ansible call as well for updates, and that’s where any news was relayed back and forth between them. Nothing appeared to be very new; the invader ship was unable to be scanned behind its pink force fields. They really had
nothing to see at all until the ground-mining ships came back up to the mother ship. As they approached, at the same distance always of almost exactly five miles out, a pink force field dropped and one of the massive side bays opened up as the mining shuttle approached and then slid inside. The force field immediately went back up, and as these mining shuttles returned often, the Team Memories group recorded all the analytics for same and gathered that up into their intel database.
Over the next seventeen days, the mother ship took more than one hundred of those mining shuttlecraft in and then back out again, their cargo unknown, but scans of same showed that they were laden with something.
The ocean-draining craft came back about three times each, and that made Tanner wonder just how big a liquid cargo hold the mother ship could have as they came full and left empty, scans showed.
But other than that, not a thing happened that could be in any way construed as being aggressive by the invader ship.
Not a single thing, and the days stretched out …
#####
On the rowing machine, the Lady St. August was sculling as if she was trying to get away from a waterfall barely in front of her boat with the huge effort of pulls of the arms and the pushing of her strong shapely legs. She had been going full tilt on the machine now for over eleven minutes and had only four more to finish her stint, but she rowed as if there was no tomorrow.
As the machine chimed and its AI took over to slow her strokes down, she snorted and slapped a hand over the display plate, and the AI kicked out as she rowed back up to that same breakneck speed once more.
She was angry, no doubt about that, and here in the gym on the Sterling, her anger may have accounted for the fact that, all around her in this wing of the gym floor, not a single crew member was using any of the equipment. She yanked away at those oars and jammed her feet even more solidly against the footrests, and the speed of the pseudo-boat rose quickly as she pounded away for five more minutes before she slowed and finally quit the rowing.
She sat sweating in the movable seat as she looked at one of her fingers on her left hand—not the ring finger, she noted. That was to have held an engagement ring—instead it was now covered with the rowing glove leather and an extra wrapping of gym tape to help with blister control. The forefinger, however, as the spot where the twisting of the oar itself occurred, had the same coverings, but the tape was now torn as was the leather finger guard, and she could see the red blister already.
She shook her head, turned to reach for her water, and was surprised to see Gillian, her Adept officer, standing quietly behind her, and she handed the water to her.
“Ma’am, when you’ve a minute or two, we should talk, Ma’am,” she said and just looked at her.
Issians were a strange race, Helena thought. Anyone who could read minds was either a threat or a boon—and after getting to know Gillian now for over a decade, she’d yet to decide which was the truest. Either we non-mind-readers were being manipulated or we were not, she thought, which had been her question for that same amount of time, and every time she thought that, Gillian just smiled. Like now.
She nodded and said, “Soon as I finish on the treadmill and shower. My quarters in an hour do?” She knew that the answer would be okay. And it was.
The treadmill got its pounding too for the next nine minutes as she ran her full two miles. She tucked the extra thick towel around her neck to soak up the sweat as she left the gym down the central corridor to lifts back up to Deck Nineteen where her quarters were just across the hallway from her captain’s.
Inside, she showered leisurely and was careful to peel off that broken tape from her left forefinger to not break the new blister. Once dry, she rubbed it with antiseptic and placed the blister bandage on same. She knew that within an hour, the bandage would have broken the blister, injected more antiseptic, as well as skin growth hormone, and the red blister would be replaced with new skin by lunchtime.
Love modern medicine, she thought as she stood in her enormous walk-in closet to choose an outfit for the day.
Something in white, she thought, would not color her day but allow the day to color her, and she dialed in the color and fashion choices of leggings and flouncy top with a pashmina in a splash color to contrast too.
In another half hour, she heard the chimes of the AI as someone had asked for admittance to her quarters, and she looked up at the ceiling to nod. A moment later, Gillian entered and went right to sit at the small meeting table on the outer bulkhead wall of the large suite’s living room. Watching her from the doorway to her closet, Helena smiled and still thought that she looked more like an aunt than anything else on the RIM, and that got a matching smile from her Adept officer.
“Ma’am, I come bearing greetings from the Master Adept. She offers up her condolences on the—um—recent changes in your own personal life, and as well, she may have a small idea as to how to help,” Gillian said as she bowed her head slightly as Helena took the other seat at the table.
Issians—not all, she knew—but a large minority could develop into what would be called Adepts; aliens who had the ability to read minds, to foretell the future, and it was whispered, to even change the future too. No one, of course, knew any of this for a fact as the Issians never openly discussed their powers, but it made most sense to know that anyone at the head of such a group would have the most superior powers. Hence, the Master Adept, that short woman of indeterminate age, should be the best in all, or at least most, of these powers. Also, Helena thought, they could be the master manipulators too …
She nodded to Gillian and rang for an aide for tea for them, and they sat chatting about life on the Sterling for a few minutes until the tea was served and both had had at least a sip.
Helena looked at Gillian and said politely but bluntly, “And how can the Master help me with my man troubles?” She sipped again at the bitter green tea that she’d taken to having just black.
Gillian spread her hands out on her dress and brushed the black fabric across her thighs. “Ma’am, you know that the Barony is in the process—almost done in fact—of moving its own naval academy over to become a part of the larger RIM Naval Academy based on Eons—our own Issian planet. You may also know that this is a huge move in that there are more than a thousand new students to be melded in with the four thousand already there. That there are items still requiring planning and management of housing and registrations, of scheduling and facilities building and management too. Then there’s the addition of the seven Barony Academy vessels to have them merge with the RIM Naval Academy forces too—Ma’am the list of planning, management, and all the subsequent incidentals is so long that I doubt a Throthian will live long enough to be successful at same, Ma’am,” she said.
Her tone was flat and about as interesting as a boring book, Helena though, but so what?
She nodded at her Adept officer and said, “So …” and waited.
“Ma’am, it just might suit you—as the Barony representative—to add a new name to the incoming Barony team of experts who are all being seconded out of the Barony forces to go to Eons to help with these … these … chores, Ma’am. You would be well within your authority to add some names, or a single name even, to that list and have it happen STAT, Ma’am,” she said as she leaned in toward Helena.
“Imagine if you will, the vexatious, small, and seemingly never-ending set of tasks that would stretch ahead of anyone so sent to help. Surely a tour of duty that would be eventually hated and despised. Something that someone—anyone—would try desperately to escape from in some way, Ma’am,” she said, and while there was no value-laden tone, Helena quickly gathered what she was offering up as advice.
“This person that I might assign to this duty—would they have to also perhaps even teach at the academy as well?” She wanted to know.
“If desired, yes, Ma’am—navy captains who have solid navy experience are at a real premium in any educational institute, Ma’am,” Gillian replied.
/> “And what would the minimum time period be,” Helena asked.
“At least six months ’til the teaching begins for the new fall semester, Ma’am. And as a semester there lasts a full half year, the minimum could be a full twelve months, Ma’am,” Gillian said and smiled.
The two stared at each other for a moment as each was thinking on their own.
Helena nodded first and asked, “And the Baroness is …”
Gillian dipped her head slightly and said, “She left the decision up to you, Ma’am … but she is apprised of all by the Master Adept, Ma’am.” She half-smiled.
Helena thought to herself about one thing only—that someone over the past few months had always complained that being a navy captain had way too much time spent on minuscule reports and summaries and the passing along of okays and verifications and jurisdictional arguments between various shipboard departments. Way too many. Enough to drown in, someone had said.
She smiled to herself and then smiled over at Gillian. “Where is this Team Memories right now,” she asked.
“Off Memories itself, just monitoring the invader ship which is still harvesting same, Ma’am. No time line on that mission either, Ma’am,” Gillian said.
Helena made her decision. “As soon as that mission is done and complete, I want Captain Tanner Scott seconded off the Atlas to Eons as a part of that new group of Barony personnel. Do not give him any kind of command position either—in fact, put him under whomever you would see as the most detail-oriented and fastidious boss we’re sending. This is for the full six-month merge into the RIM Academy and then one full semester of teaching something too—say naval warfare or some such thing. I want that done STAT, Gillian, as soon as the Memories mission is done. Take him off the Atlas and ship him to Eons STAT! Understood?” she said.
