Something hardened in her eyes, reminding me of a boa constrictor squeezing its prey. That disappeared a moment later, and she smiled. The sexual wattage pouring out of her almost made me reconsider the offer. As I debated with myself, the tip of her tongue slowly dragged across her lower lip.
I admit it, my groin stirred. The lady was sexy. I had to do something, or I was going to rip off her clothes and do her on the table. So, I laughed, stood and swept the wine goblet off the tablecloth, letting the glass shatter against the video of Mars at night.
Diana flinched in surprise.
“Wait here,” I said. In three swift strides, I opened the door and moved into the hall, shouting for N7.
The android opened a different door, giving me an inquiring glance. He looked like a choirboy with soft blond hair. He wasn’t that, but one of the most dangerous beings on our side. He wore a naval uniform and cap. He’d been with me in the artifact’s inner sanctum, meaning that N7 also knew the object’s name. No one thought to ask him, though. Lokhars in particular had an aversion to treating androids as people. Did androids lack souls? I suppose so because the Jelk built them to order. Even so, N7 had become one of my brothers in arms.
I told him my needs. N7 retreated and returned shortly with a heavy coat.
“Thanks,” I said. With the coat, I returned to my dinner date with Diana. “Here,” I said, tossing the long garment across the table. “Put this on.”
The coat draped carelessly across Diana as she lounged in her chair, messing her hair. She studied me, finally lifting the coat and running her fingers through her hair.
“You’re making a mistake,” she said.
“Yeah, how?” I asked.
“You should treat me with greater respect.”
“If you want respect, give respect.”
“What do you think I did by wearing this gown for you?”
“The gown is your teeth, Diana. You’re trying to sink your claws into me. I’m interested, but not enough to give you an edge.”
“The great Commander Creed is afraid of me?” she asked in a mocking tone. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Call it what it you want.”
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “But if this is what you’re ordering me to do—” She slid the gown off her left shoulder. I imagine she planned to strip in front of me.
My gaze locked onto that shoulder. Maybe I was being ridiculous. I don’t know. Ever since I’d had the nightmare of Abaddon, I’d begun missing Jennifer all over again. I had an ache, and Diana tempted me. Sex and love were powerful facets of human behavior. People toyed with them at their peril. If I slept with Diana—
No! That’s not going to happen. But in order to stop that from occurring, I had to change the dynamics. A man can resist sexual allurement for a time. If he remains where the enticement is, though, eventually he’ll give in. I had to retreat from the enticement, or it would overwhelm me. Some things are simply too hard to resist over time.
I know. That sounds weeny. A tough guy was supposed to be able to bed any beauty without a thought. To screw like a dog supposedly proved a man’s virility. I happened to disagree with the principle. I’d always believed in choosing one woman and committing to her alone.
Jennifer was my woman. Why otherwise did I have nightmares about my abandoning her? Even after the intervening years, the guilt tore at me was why. I refused to dally with Diana while Jennifer—
As Diana removed her silk gown, I turned my back on her.
“Really, Creed?” the Amazon Queen asked.
“I’m going to leave,” I told her.
After a short pause, Diana said. “It’s safe, Mr. Boy Scout. You can turn around now.”
I did. She sat in her chair with the coat buttoned all the way to her throat. The silk gown lay on the floor beside her. After all my interior moral posturing, I still managed to wonder if she was naked under the coat. I couldn’t believe it. I found myself wanting to rip off the coat and lay her down on the table.
“Just a second,” I said. I stepped into the hall again and shouted for N7. He showed up. “You’re coming with me to take notes,” I said.
The android frowned. “I have no need of taking notes, Commander. I can remember everything said. My brain core has a computer’s total recall.”
“Fine,” I said. “Sit and listen then. Come with me.”
Diana looked annoyed when I returned with N7. I thought she might protest. Finally, she shrugged, tossing her luxurious hair.
As N7 sat in a corner, I talked for a time about our military situation, finally adding, “Our nearest neighbors have bigger fleets than we do and industrial bases. They also have planetary populations. If the two power blocs splinter, it’s going to become a grab what you can type of galaxy. How can we compete in that kind of environment?”
“We have our Forerunner object,” Diana said. “The solar system has become holy ground.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But we just saw the Starkiens trying to grab our artifact. Sure, we can stop a pirate in his spaceship from hijacking the relic. Our ten starships are too many for a lone operator. What can we do against a planet-based foe with a military fleet?”
“The obvious answer is that we have to find our own allies,” Diana said. “We have to become enmeshed with others so we’re too big to attack.”
“I agree,” I said. “But who’s going to ally with animals?”
“They can’t really mean that about us,” she said.
N7 cleared his throat.
I laughed sourly. “He’s going to tell you they mean it, all right.”
N7 nodded. “The Commander is correct.”
“Are you saying we won’t be able to find allies?” Diana asked me.
“Not as we are now,” I said. “Either, we have to change how the aliens think about humans, or we have to seriously strengthen our star system’s defenses.”
“We need to trade, then,” Diana said.
“Will others trade with beasts?” I asked.
“If it’s to their benefit I think they would,” Diana said.
“Okay. What will we trade?”
“We’ve been buying these automated factories with fissionable materials and works of art,” Diana said. “Why not use those items on the open market?”
“Well, first,” I said, “the Lokhars have traded with us because they owed us for the one hundred thousand assault troopers lost in hyperspace. We haven’t paid tit-for-tat. If we’re going to really trade with others, we’ll need mining equipment.”
N7 squirmed on his chair.
“Do you want to add something?” I asked him.
“Indeed,” N7 said. “At the moment, we possess no mining equipment.”
“On Earth we do,” I said.
“We have the one operating mine,” he said. “As you know, most of the metallic objects on Earth have badly rusted.”
“Well…how about extracting ores from our asteroids?” I asked.
“We lack the needed equipment to do that,” N7 said.
“We lack pretty much everything,” Diana said. “And it seems like we have no way of getting a starter kit, as it were. The automated factories we received from the Lokhars barely produce enough to keep the freighters running. Most of their hardware works on restoring the atmosphere. As it is, we’re scraping by.”
Nodding, I said, “It’s as I thought. Humanity is in a hole. We bought our few starships with the lives of one hundred thousand assault troopers. The Lokhars were supposed to be grateful. Now, they’re onto the next thing, conveniently having forgotten about our sacrifices.”
“Commander,” N7 said. “I have a thought.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Doctor Sant told us the Saurian fleets have retreated,” N7 said. “Their hasty reassignment likely means certain Jelk Corporation worlds are unprotected.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Perhaps you could send a ship or two to a mining w
orld,” N7 said. “You might be able to land and take what you need, along with mining androids to work the machines.”
Diana laughed throatily. “That’s very clever, N7. You want to us to free your kind, is that it?”
“It has crossed my mind,” the android admitted.
“Vikings,” I said. “You want us to go a-Viking.”
Both N7 and Diana turned to me.
With the flat of my right hand, I slapped the table. It made Diana start and caused cutlery to jangle against the plates.
“We’ll be Star Vikings,” I said, liking the idea more and more. “We don’t have anything to trade, at least not yet or in any real quantity. All the aliens think of us as animals anyway. Therefore, we use the one thing we were able to buy, our ten starships.”
“There’s a problem with your plan,” Diana said. “If those ships are raiding the space lanes, what will protect the freighters back here?”
“Hmm,” I said, pondering the idea. “We can’t be obvious about this. Ten ships might be too many. Whatever we do, though, we’re going to have to move fast. We need tech. We need tools, and we need more starships. If the Saurian fleets really have retreated, now’s the time to strike and grab some of the things we need. Yes, I like your idea, N7.”
“I don’t,” Diana said. “Whose starships do we use? Not mine, I’ll tell you. We only have so much ordnance. I mean missiles, mines and laser coils. If you become a pirate—”
“Viking,” I said.
“Names don’t matter,” Diana said.
“I think they do.”
She shook her head as if I was simple. “Jelk Corporation planets will have missile defenses, I’d bet, and planetary beams. You won’t be able to just swoop down and make yourself rich.”
“It’s time to take risks,” I said. “You’re right about that.” With an elbow on the table, I made a fist and rested my chin on it. “Okay. You don’t want to risk your precious ships. I’ll use one of mine, then. It’s time to make a trial run. I’ll need a freighter, though, to carry our loot.”
“We can’t afford to waste any of our freighters,” Diana said. “We have too few as it is.”
“Wrong,” I said, “we can’t afford not to use them. But I’ll tell you what. Loan me a freighter and I’ll give you a percentage of our take.”
The Amazon Queen studied me, and I could see the calculations in her eyes. Finally, she asked, “How much of a percentage?”
We spent the next two hours haggling. Star Vikings, I liked the name. It was better than Forerunner Guardians. It was an Earth name rather than one the aliens had coined for us. Now we had to decide which star system to strike.
-9-
Several days later, I took the Aristotle, a former Lokhar cruiser, and the Maynard Keynes, a scow of a Jelk freighter. Diana had given me her worst vessel, not that I could blame her. Unfortunately, the engines broke down after the sixth jump.
Going through a jump gate took its toll on the passengers. Flu-like symptoms struck just about everyone, even our android. It also produced wear and tear to the equipment.
Thus, for three days, all my engineers and N7 struggled on the freighter’s propulsion systems, trying to get it mobile again. Luckily, this was an empty system. There was no one to give us grief. It had a brown dwarf for a star and burnt-out husks for planets. None of the worlds contained atmospheres. Most were ice-balls with particles of nickel-iron and rock.
On the third day, Ella Timoshenko found a drifting body on her scanner. It turned out to be a Lokhar soldier in wrecked powered armor.
“How long do you think he’s been adrift?” Ella asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t know and didn’t care. The raid weighed me down with responsibilities and worries. This wasn’t anything like joining Prince Venturi before on Indomitable. There hadn’t been any choices last time. The Kargs would break into our universe, and that would be the end of life as we knew it. Here, I could make good choices and bad ones. The wrong decisions would mean the end of the human race. Talk about piling on pressure. I felt the weight of past and future generations squeezing me down.
Finally, the Maynard Keynes could move again. The endless work had left our engineers exhausted, though. I let them rest and kept the two starships where they were. Soon enough, everyone would have to work at peak efficiency.
I lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. If you guessed that I was having second thoughts, you’d be right. I didn’t mind raiding the Jelk Corporation. That wasn’t the problem. I wondered about scale, though. This would solve our dilemma in a pinprick fashion. We needed strategic answers.
Alliance with the Jade League, full-bore military and economic assistance, would have made a world of a difference to what we planned. That’s what I’d originally thought I had been buying with the agreement to put one hundred thousand assault troopers into harm’s way. It turned out I’d been a fool. Despite the few automated factories they’d brought, the Lokhars had snookered us, and I didn’t like it.
With my fingers laced behind my head, I told myself I had to rid all thoughts of squeamishness from my heart. This was like a lioness with a den full of cubs. She went out and killed a baby gazelle or slew the mother and let the baby starve to death. I wasn’t in some airy-fairy tale where the universe played paddy cake with the Marquis of Queensbury Rules to guide us. This was the law of tooth and claw, survival of the fittest, baby.
What did that mean? It meant I had to play this as ruthless as I could. I hadn’t come to another race and laced their world with nukes. The tigers and, in a way, the Jelk had come and done it to us. Now, we scrambled for any advantage we could eke out. If I failed, humanity sank out of sight, never to lift its head again.
So be it. I would do whatever—
A knock at my hatch startled me. I swung my feet off the cot, stood and pressed a button. The hatch opened and N7 stood there with rolled-up star charts in his arms.
“Do you remember you wanted to look at these?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, having completely forgotten. “Let’s take a gander.”
For the next several hours, N7 and I pored over his charts. He knew a lot about this region of Jelk space and our target the Demar star system.
It had an “O” Spectral Class Star, a bluish-white furnace that burned at 30,000 Kelvin on the surface. The system lacked any terrestrial planets. In fact, it only had one Jupiter-sized gas giant. The moons of that Jovian world were heavy with mined ores. The Demar system also boasted Inner, Middle and Outer Asteroid Belts. Those, too, were rich in thorium and deuterium, a veritable mother lode of mineral wealth. The system contained a single huge habitat known as the Demar Starcity. It wasn’t a pleasure palace or breeding ground for Saurians. Instead, it had a giant processing center with sideline industries that produced finished goods.
N7 stood beside the table, with a star chart magnetized in place. Using a forefinger, he stabbed the starcity. “This is my origin point,” he said. “This is where I was built.”
I rubbed my jaw thoughtfully.
“Perhaps as important for you, here in the habitat are many military articles.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“I suspect you will find automated missile systems and beam cannons,” N7 said. “There will, of course, be mining equipment. Or, if you prefer, you can take gas giant scoopers to mine Jupiter and Saturn for deuterium.”
“Seems too good to be true,” I said.
“Agreed,” N7 said. “This was the base system for the Tenth Saurian taskforce. The fleet wasn’t on the frontier between the Jade League and Jelk Corporation territory. This was a secondary force meant to reinforce wherever needed.”
“And you think those warships are gone?” I asked.
N7 straightened. “I do not presume to know, Commander. I work only off the information you received from Doctor Sant.”
“Great,” I said. “Really, we’re in the dark about just about everything.”
“Yes.”
; I gazed at the star chart and the Demar system in particular.
“If the Jelk Corporation was in trouble,” I said, “I mean against invaders. It seems as if the secondary or reinforcing fleet would be the first one to go.”
“That is logical,” N7 said.
“The question is, will the Jade League members already have invaded these regions?”
“That is another reason to try here,” N7 said. “Logically, the Jade League members would wish to scour star systems close to their base worlds. This is farther away.”
“Do you think Doctor Sant told us the truth?”
“I have no way of verifying his words,” N7 said.
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my jaw again. I had a bad feeling about this, and I couldn’t fool myself. If we failed here, things would likely get even darker in a hurry.
***
I’m sure you’ve heard of deep-sea fish that live in a world of eternal gloom. Well, I mean the fish that used to live in the subterranean reaches of the Earth’s oceans. I’m sure the bio-terminator had settled down there by now, too.
My point is pressure. Those fish had learned to live with an intense pressure per square inch that would have crushed a human. No submarine had ever gone to such a depth, although a few bathyscaphes had. The fish could take intense pressure because their own bodies pushed outward. The funny thing occurred when that pressure stopped. If a fisherman hooked such a fish and reeled as fast as he could, the deep-sea creature would die. It couldn’t live with the lesser pressure.
What did any of that have to do with our raid? The Jelk Corporation had put intense pressure against the Jade League for uncounted years. These last few years, and now even more so, the pressure had lifted. It was gone. Like those deep-sea fish, it appeared that most of the Jade League members didn’t know what to do with the lesser threat. It had seemingly unhinged their thinking. It had also apparently opened old wounds among the members.
What we found as we cruised the jump lanes in Jelk Corporation territory was a decided lack of Jade League vessels. Several times, Saurian scout ships hailed us. N7 responded, using old codes.
Extinction Wars 3: Star Viking Page 8
