The old man came through first, ahead of the flight crew. He was still trim and fit, despite his seventy-odd years. His first words on arrival were, “Donald, what a pleasure to see you.”
Marcolis, Lori, and some of the Research Division people stepped forward, and there was a lot of hand-shaking and earnest-sounding good cheer. Eventually, Maxim worked his way through it and gave Asher a perfunctory hug. “My boy. Still a Two-Bar, I see.”
Asher bit down a sharp reply. “Actually, it’s back to a Two-Bar. Got myself demoted.” He smiled at the old man’s evident discomfort. In the end, Maxim gave him a nervous smile and headed off toward the medical bay, surrounded by a gaggle of technicians and scientists.
“That was a little rude, Asher,” said Lori who at some point had come to stand close behind him.
He looked back at her and smiled. “Yeah, well. He deserved it.”
“What’s the problem between you two, anyway?”
“Just family,” said Asher as he headed back to his quarters. “You know how it is.” Something about the long look Lori gave him made him think that she didn’t know. Maybe, he thought, he was being too hard on his old man. But then, the man still referred to him as “Donald” and the second thing he had done after seeing his son for the first time in more than a year was comment on Asher’s low rank.
Back in the hotbunk, he found that Kaz was gone and there was very little to do except catch up on his sleep. He fell gratefully into the lower bunk and resolved to remain there until someone from the late shift came to kick him out and take his place.
He woke to the sound of “general quarters.” The shrill alarm had him out and dressed in moments. He had no clear idea where his post was on Cormorant, as he had no official duties. Even so, he armed himself and linked to the ship’s Security net.
Whatever the call to quarters was for, it wasn’t general knowledge yet. He watched as the ship logged personnel into their posts. The shipboard Security Net had no instructions for him, so he just remained in the bunk and out of the way. He did take the precaution of strapping himself into one of the crash seats that unfolded from the wall.
Once the majority of the crew were at their posts, Captain Echo Hawk’s voice rang out over Ship’s Business Net, overriding all other links. “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now at general quarters. We expect an imminent DiJeRiCo attack. The main battle group has engaged the enemy. As they entered Cierren Cythra orbit, they detected traces of five fusion torches fired in the direction of the jumpgate. We expect that a DiJeRiCo detachment, including at least one cruiser-class vessel, is on its way to engage us while the remainder of their carrier group engages our battle group. We will remain at quarters until any incoming enemy vessels have been repelled. I am opening a passive window on Battle Net to all who wish to monitor developments. That is all.”
As soon as the captain dropped off of Ship’s Business, Asher—and probably every other non-essential person on board—linked to Battle Net, Cormorant’s primary combat network. As he had expected, several hundred other operatives—crew members and bystanders alike—were already linked. He set about catching up on everything that had happened in the six hours that he had been asleep.
As Echo Hawk had said, the majority of Hokozana’s ships had set off for Cierren Cythra shortly after Maxim Asher’s arrival. They were just arriving in orbit now and were maneuvering to engage the DiJeRiCo carrier group. As they arrived, they had detected traces of five ships that had just left the area en route to the jumpgate. Presumably, the DiJeRiCo system commander was hoping to break through the Hokozana remnant at the gate so that his remaining ships could make a run for it. That was a desperate man’s plan, as even if it succeeded it would just take the DiJeRiCo ships deeper into Hokozana territory.
Echo Hawk, who was now the number two in-system Fleet commander—superseded by an Admiral Vorthree who had arrived with the heavy cruiser Lamia and a few reinforcements—had been left in command of seven major ships at the jumpgate. Asher cast his eye over the roster. They had two destroyer-class vessels, two smaller vessels classed as light patrol frigates, two scouts, and Cormorant, which, despite her supposed research mission, was classed by Battle Net as a light cruiser. There were also a two support ships, including an ag-and-fuel tender and the LongRanger, some kind of experimental ship that appeared to be a specialized sensor platform. Whatever it was, Asher hoped that it would give them advanced warning of the expected attack.
As always, Asher found the waiting for the fight far, far worse than the battle itself. The tension of awaiting the expected enemy made every instant crystal clear and clean-edged, drawing the minutes out into hours. After twenty minutes’ wait, Asher—and probably everyone else aboard—was anxious for any kind of news of the enemy. In the great blackness of space, though, it was supremely easy to hide. The endless minutes ticked by with no news to flood relief through Battle Net.
Finally, comm chatter erupted from the LongRanger, flooding through Battle Net. “Target Red One. Coords Z30 X102 Y17 ref SP178-LR. Target Red Two. Coords Z29 X97 Y26 ref Sp-178-LR. Target Red Three...” The chatter continued, but Asher was focused on the image Battle Net was providing to his visual cortex. The bright edge of Bernabeu curved across his field of vision. The cluster of Hokozana blue dots and the jumpgate floated high above the bluish gas giant. Tiny red lights winked on, one by one, as the DiJeRiCo fleet emerged from the shadow of the planet. A screen of purple dots, appeared, suspended between the red and blue clusters.
“Incoming missiles. Standard spread. Impact in approx one minute, seventeen seconds.” More and more purple lights appeared in a cloud between the two battle fleets. The DiJeRiCo ships must have deployed their missiles while still hidden behind the planet, giving them a small time advantage that might prove critical in the engagement. Green dots appearing all around the Hokozana ships indicated the deployment of countermeasures. Asher could already see that Cormorant and the destroyer Li Kun were too far from the other vessels to be fully covered by the main cloud of countermeasures. The attack from behind the planet had caught the Hokozana fleet in the midst of reorganizing, stranding the two vessels in a position that Battle Net was showing as above the rest of the ships, and slightly closer to the DiJeRiCo attackers. Asher had no idea how many of the incoming missiles were targeting Cormorant, but he assumed that the DiJeRiCo battle computers had quickly assessed it as the largest ship present, and therefore as a prime target. He assumed a substantial proportion of those purple dots would come for them.
Cormorant and Li Kun, of course, were not about to go down without a fight. The destroyer sprayed an impressive array of small green dots into the space between the two ships and the incoming missiles. These would be a variety of countermeasures including magnetic mines, auton turrets, and counter-missiles. Asher knew that of every ten missiles fired, only two could be expected to penetrate these kinds of defenses. Of course, two missiles were still more than sufficient to cripple or destroy the defending vessels. Battle Net helpfully informed him that twenty-three missiles were targeting either Cormorant or Li Kun.
The missiles slowly floated into the cloud of countermeasures. One by one, purple lights flashed off. From twenty-three, the number quickly fell to seventeen, then fifteen, then ten, then eight. Li Kun maneuvered into the path of the remaining missiles and launched close-in interdiction methods, including energy beams and particle streams. The eight missiles were cut to four before the light that indicated Li Kun blinked twice and flashed off. Two more missiles vanished along with the ship. Green and purple lights were replaced with an expanding neutral yellow cloud. Asher knew this was the representation of a debris field that had once been tens of thousands of tons of metal, plastic, and ceramic, along with a smattering of organic matter that had once been the crew of a Hokozana destroyer.
The final two missiles floated on, hunting their larger quarry, but they were no match for Cormorant’s close-in interdiction systems. The immediate threat dealt with, Asher felt the shiftin
g sensation in his stomach that indicated the big ship was on the move again. The rest of the Hokozana fleet was in the path of an immense barrage of forty-seven DiJeRiCo missiles. Their countermeasures were reducing the numbers, but Battle Net predicted that seventeen missiles would survive the initial culling and three or four would make it all the way to their targets. Beyond the cloud of purple and green where the missiles and countermeasures were locked in autonomous battle, a cloud of green dots was winging its way across the void toward the DiJeRiCo fleet. At least some of the Hokozana ships had found time to launch a counterstrike.
A vibration ran under Asher’s feet and up his spine as Cormorant shuddered slightly. A spread of green dots appeared in space between the ship and the DiJeRiCo attackers. The spread pattern of the missiles was the same as the so-called supernova bomb that they had used in the first battle for the jumpgate. Cormorant pumped more and more missiles out into the void, confusing the supernova spread pattern into a shapeless cloud of dots.
The DiJeRiCo ships were firing again, unloading a second barrage of missiles, many in the direction of Cormorant. Again, Asher’s stomach lurched as the big ship sprinted toward the other Hokozana ships and the cover of their countermeasure swarm. In the void, the second DiJeRiCo barrage and initial Hokozana counterstrike slipped past each other. Countermeasures erupted around the DiJeRiCo ships. Even so, two of the five red dots blinked twice and disappeared, to be replaced with expanding debris fields. The first launch from the DiJeRiCo ships was among the Blue Hokozana dots now, and three of the blue dots vanished. Of the original nine Hokozana ships, four were now gone. Battle Net informed him that the latest casualties were the ag-and-fuel tender Unearthly Radiance, the scout Sha Yu, and the frigate Attila.
The barrage from Cormorant was well on its way to the DiJeRiCo fleet. Asher noticed that the spread of supernova missiles had separated from the main body of ordnance and were heading for a point in space some distance from the enemy ships. Perhaps the idea was to confuse the DiJeRiCo captains into assuming these missiles were malfunctioning, so that they would not be heavily targeted by countermeasures. Asher wasn’t sure if every one of the spread of six missiles was required in order to get the full supernova effect. He found himself staring at the missiles, fervently hoping that none of them would be knocked out by the swarm of purple-hued countermeasure dots.
The two flights of missiles arrived at about the same time. Cormorant’s barrage behaved as planned, with the decoy missiles taking most of the heat from the DiJeRiCo countermeasures, leaving the supernova missiles largely ignored to detonate in space between the enemy fleet and the planet. As before in the first battle of the jumpgate, after the explosion of the supernova missiles, none of the DiJeRiCo ships remained. Even the debris fields had been largely destroyed, burned up and flung outward into an enormous cloud of tiny yellow dots—all that remained of three frontline warships.
With the loss of their mother ships, DiJeRiCo missiles that required the aid of targeting computers and sensors spun out of control and largely away from the Hokozana fleet. That left eighteen missiles to weather the fence of countermeasures and close-in-interdiction measures that the five remaining blue ships were spraying into space. One after another, purple dots blinked out until only three remained. Two of these plowed into the destroyer Rolling Thunder, vaporizing it instantly. The last, apparently out of fuel, detonated in the space between Cormorant and the frigate Jaden Martins.
Despite its size and momentum, Cormorant lurched heavily. Alarms flashed from various of the ships’ networks. Asher let the damage report cascade through his vision. Nothing had breached the hull, he was glad to see. Most of the damage was to external sensor systems and to two missiles tubes which had been open at the moment of the detonation. As far as the ship could tell, no one on Cormorant had been injured beyond a few bumps and bruises. The story from Jaden Martins was not so encouraging. The explosion had torn a huge gash in her hull, exposing numerous compartments directly to vacuum. A plume of debris now trailed away from the ship, which was drifting unpowered away from the site of the detonation. Asher’s net told him that it was now in a decaying orbit that would take it into Bernabeu’s upper atmosphere in about thirteen hours.
For the next several hours, most of the remaining Hokozana ships at the jumpgate were engaged in rescuing survivors from Jaden Martins. LongRanger was dispatched in-system to orbit a small asteroid where it could perhaps provide advanced warning of any incoming ships from the vicinity of Zvezda One. The scout Window Dressing went along to offer some fire support for the sensor ship.
Asher’s particular expertise, such as it was, was not really needed in the aftermath of the battle. He made himself useful ferrying wounded operatives from the airlocks, where they were deposited by various lighters and shuttles, to the medical bays. Trundling stretchers down the corridors of the Cormorant required no special training, and it freed up the emergency response people to concentrate on helping the injured. Survivors arrived in a constant stream. Almost all had suffered serious injuries. Asher thought that the worst were the ones who had been recovered floating outside the ship. Hokozana skinsuits provided reasonable protection and a supply of oxygen but even so, some who had been in the void for too long before recovery and repressurization were strangely swollen and distended. More than a few were clearly dead due to heart attacks, hypoxia, and—in a few cases—ruptured lungs. Asher knew, though, that those who still lived—even those whose lives hung by a thread—would eventually recover now that they were under the care of the medical teams and their tech.
Once the rescue operations had ended, Asher hung around in the medical bay watching the bots working on Miraneeria. He half hoped that he might have a private talk with his father, as he was feeling a little guilty about how they had got off on the wrong foot, again. Unfortunately, Dr. Asher was not there at the moment. Miraneeria was watched over by a harried-looking junior exobio operative from Research. Mostly, though, she was monitored by the bots that swung around her on long, spindly arms, occasionally poking and prodding, but mostly working at a distance. By now, her insides would have been imaged in detail and a digital model created. The bots could probably build an entire Cythran body from scratch, at this point.
Miraneeria looked well enough, but the bots were evidently maintaining her in an unconscious state. Asher checked in to Med Net, the ship’s medical system, but he didn’t have the correct clearance to learn the details of her condition or of the exobio team’s findings. He sighed and wandered off, hoping to find the hotbunk unoccupied. It didn’t seem likely, though. Everyone had put in a hard shift, so surely others would have claimed the six available beds by now.
As he left the med bays, he was hailed by a voice from one of the private rooms. Poking his head in, he found Jaydrupar sitting up in a large, comfortable-looking bed. The room was strewn with paper, of all things. It looked as though the man had been writing out notes and thoughts longhand. Asher tried to remember the last time he had actually written something by hand, and he couldn’t come up with it. He knew how to write—his father had provided him an old fashioned and slightly idiosyncratic education—but for years he hadn’t used anything but his neural net, or occasionally a keyproj. “What are you doing, Jaydrupar?” was all he could think to say, looking around at the mess of scribbled notes littering the floor.
“Convalescing, they tell me,” said the Intel operative. He appeared to notice the direction of Asher’s gaze. “The writing—I find it helps me think,” he said. “There is something about paper. I was brought up on Madras II, did you know? A non-corp world. Things were quite different there.”
Asher had spent very little time on non-corp worlds. Most of the places he visited on jobs for Hokozana were disordered worlds, like Cierren Cythra, looking to enter Ordered Space. Others were wild planets where people like his father spent their careers studying strange life forms or cataloging bizarre rock formations. Any other groundtime he had—which was not much—was spent on H
okozana proprietary planets or multi-corp planets where Hokozana had an interest. He had once visited a non-corp pirate world in the aftermath of a Hokozana victory over the pirates’ small predatory fleet. That had been a strange experience. The pirate families had gone native, subsisting on local plant and animal foods and living in caves barely altered from their natural state. Whatever tech they had was invested in their ships, and there seemed to be little to separate the pirates on the surface from the animals they ate. He knew that not all non-corp worlds were in quite so backward a state, but most lagged far behind the proprietary planets. He had never heard of Madras II though, he could not even place what system or sector it might be in. “How was it different?” he asked.
“Not as much as you might think, I suppose. Little things, like learning to read and write on paper. It was crowded too, compared to a corp world. Two hundred thousand or so of us crammed into four small domed cities in a habitable band at the terminator. It was tidally locked with a red dwarf, you see, so the temperature differences between the starward and darkward sides of the planet were extreme. There was only a narrow band where the pioneers were able to build dome environments in which a livable climate could be sustained.” Jaydrupar paused and looked up at the ceiling. “I was taught that that was why the planet was never claimed by a corporation. It was too hard a place to make a profit, and it could never sustain a large population.”
“Why do you keep speaking about it in the past tense?” asked Asher. “What happened there?”
Jaydrupar looked down at him. In a grave voice, he said, “The Avrunkar happened, Asher.”
Most of the alien sentients humankind had encountered during its expansion into the galaxy were peaceful, or at worst sort of grumpy. Many, like the possibly-intelligent forest on Dinshane and the Gasbags of Marian’s World, were so incomprehensible they might as well not have been sentient at all. Many others, like the Lillican Rocks, were capable of participating in Ordered Space, but thought and acted far more slowly than humans. Quite a few, like the bizarre entity known as the Jocularity Index of the Ramada System, just wanted to be left alone. Only a few species were really fully participant. The Greaterkind were widespread throughout the systems of the Ocuratore and Vincesco corporations, with others scattered about in enclaves here and there. The Ill Begotten worked occasionally as long-range scouts and pioneers with many corporations small and large, although most of their species never left their home world of Breiar.The Avrunkar were one of several friendly, but non-participant alien species humanity had met during its expansion into what would become Ordered Space. The Avrunkar systems were connected by their own jumpgate network, so the two races mainly left each other alone. Unfortunately for some of the human systems near Avrunkar space, though, the aliens had sent out generation ships to colonize nearby systems long before they had discovered jumpgate technology. These ancient Avrunkar were warlike and savage, far different from their modern descendants. Every now and then, one of the generation ships would emerge from its millennia-long voyage through real space and fall on some peripheral human colony like a plague, destroying everything in its wake. Hokozana maintained a moderately-powerful response fleet on station to deal with any such incursions. It was a strange war, if it could even be called that, but that didn’t make it any less deadly for places like Jaydrupar’s homeworld.
Participant Species: Asher in Ordered Space Volume I Page 12
