by Blaze Ward
What did happily-ever-after taste like?
Zakhar’s eye caught his dragoon, Djamila Sykora, just settling into her station, but he refused to think about what the two of them might create, if they didn’t have to be pirates anymore.
He was The Captain, and that was a cold, lonely job.
“Thirteen minutes to insertion, Captain,” Piet called back.
Zakhar nodded to himself.
“Remember to come out under full cloak,” he ordered. “We have no idea how the target will react. I’d rather she not see us at all.”
“Roger that,” the pilot said.
A side hatch opened on his right, opposite where Djamila was buckling herself in, and the science officer entered.
Djamila was in all gray today. Piet wore a purple tunic and black slacks. Even Mary-Elizabeth Suzuki, the gunner, was in bright green and baby blue.
Javier wore an outfit that was almost an exact copy of Zakhar’s, except for the shoes. Javier had soft, blue moccasins today. Still, the Concord fleet officer must be running strong in both of them.
They locked eyes for a moment as Javier settled and logged into his boards.
No words passed, but none were needed.
How often did you know ahead of time that you were about to reach a point where the rest of your life would go down a different path from yesterday? The only question now was which of three options they faced.
Success in finding and claiming the lost Neu Berne flagship, Hammerfield.
Failure, either because it wasn’t there, or it was too badly degraded to save them.
Or death, because the ancient warrior vessel took offense to them even being there.
Simple as that.
Around him, everyone settled in, strapped themselves to their chairs, and prepared for their fate to unfold.
“Any final thoughts, Mr. Science Officer?” Zakhar asked, loud enough to include the whole bridge crew in what might have been a simple conversation between old comrades.
“Piet will be paying off on a twenty-drachma bet shortly,” Javier replied.
The pilot just shrugged.
“How’s that?” Zakhar said.
“That never in his studies or travels has he seen a star system so messy, so complicated,” Javier laughed. “So impossible.”
Zakhar wasn’t sure he believed Javier’s stories about the place, but it really didn’t matter much at this point. The proof would be in the pudding, as they said. Very shortly.
“All hands,” he said into a general comm. “Prepare for insertion and possible combat maneuvering in eight minutes.”
Zakhar watched as all stations checked in. Everyone knew the rumors. Knew the score about how badly damaged Storm Gauntlet was. She had given as good as she got, but it had still been ugly, protecting the assault shuttle so it could land, while they were all under fire.
Zakhar really looked forward to finding Ajax one of these days, and kicking her teeth in to return the favor. And really hurting Walvisbaai Industrial, the multi-system conglomerate that some of the more flamboyant news services might call one of the Pirate Clans.
Although never in a place with good libel laws on the books.
Zakhar worked for the Jarre Foundation. Another Clan, if you would.
In the darkness between stellar nations, the law was frequently the man with the bigger warship, the biggest hammer.
And if it was going to be a war between the pirates, the sort of lurid thing that would sell subscriptions, Zakhar wanted the biggest maul available.
A First Rate Galleon would serve that need quite nicely.
Even more than a century old, Hammerfield would outclass anything less than a modern cruiser, while still having cargo capacity comparable to the largest of the medium transports, or the smallest of the big bulk jobs that hauled thousands of standard shipping containers between major worlds.
Nobody even made that design anymore, relying today on commercial freighters and dedicated warships, rather than a single ship that mixed the two.
“Piet,” Zakhar said. “Bring up screen nine on the main display. Zero transparency. Twenty percent overlay.”
They had scanned this system from one jump away, when it was barely possible to resolve it as three stars with the best scanners, using a former probe-cutter’s eyes, stolen and welded onto a warship like this one.
Nothing else was really known, given the distance of this jump, except that they would drop out at around fifty AU, fifty times the distance from Earth to her sun. Even Neptune, the blue ice giant in the Homeworld’s system, orbited at thirty AU, so they should be safe enough out here, especially coming out seventy degrees above the ecliptic for the system.
And even then, Javier had warned them to pay attention to their surroundings. Which was frightening in itself, since he rarely ever got serious like that.
Emergence.
Realspace.
Engines primed but off. Shields at minimum only. Electromagnetic cloak fully deployed. Every turret ready to fire.
Riding the gyros and pretending to be an ugly asteroid, as the saying went.
Javier was face down over his boards, studying four different screens and listening to several audio channels through an earpiece.
Complete information overload to anybody but him. Which was why he was The Science Officer.
Piet’s hands were poised. Mary-Elizabeth’s, too. Even Djamila appeared to be holding her breath.
Long, silent minutes passed, everything and everyone hushed and waiting.
“She’s still there,” Javier said simply.
The sound of a dozen people breathing out was a heavy sigh across the room.
The main display blinked, and changed.
Nayarit Sector, system number 23, in Javier’s recollections.
NS005188-753A was at the center, a yellow main sequence star, a G8V, which was only about ten percent larger than that of the homeworld, still the measure everyone used.
At an orbital distance of roughly twelve AU, on a twenty-some degree inclination from the original ecliptic, two smaller stars, B and C, orbited each other around a common center, a barycenter in open space, not that anything could survive in that LaGrange point indefinitely. At least they were both cooler stars, so the total amount of solar wind wasn’t all that bad.
From Javier’s recollection, the two stars were about 0.9 and 0.7 times the size of A, which made this a complicated triple system, especially since the orbital inclination of the binary suggested that they had been captured fairly recently, perhaps in the last three hundred to five hundred million years at most.
What made it extra fun were the number of gas giants Javier was able to identify and flag on his projection already. Both systems had contained an interesting mix of gas giants, ice giants, and the smaller worlds: both rocky ones close and iceballs farther out.
In this case, it looked like all of the gas giants had somehow managed to be captured, rather than ejected from the combined solar system as all the other planets slowly fell into their various orbital resonance periods in at least two interacting ecliptic planes. The screen showed nine giants so far, with the promise of several more as passive sensors watched and counted.
Zakhar doubted that everything would be stable like this, and that many of these worlds would eventually be eaten or evicted, but that was an issue to occur in millions of years. All he had to worry about today were the possible number of things formerly in the local Oort Cloud, Kuiper Belt, or Scattered Disk.
Quite frankly, there was going to be crap flying everywhere, for a very long time. Even if a rocky world in one of the habitable zones could be identified, terraforming it would be a waste of time during the lifetime of man as a species, unless you wanted to dedicate unholy amounts of ships and men to locating and destroying all of the things that might slam into such a world with enough energy to cause extinction-level events.
There were so many other star systems in this galaxy that weren’t assholes to begin
with.
Piet actually stood up, pulled out a twenty-drachma bill from a pocket, and walked over to hand it to Javier with a face gone white.
Javier’s frog-faced grin said it all.
Nothing less extreme would have brought them here.
One little green dot.
Hammerfield, according to the transponder code faintly calling her name to eternity.
Tucked into the leading LaGrange point, L4, formed by the combination of A and the single gravity well of B and C.
At some point, the dance along multiple ecliptics would probably slam the warship into one of the giants, roaming around like wolves at the edge of the firelight, or their touch would kick the ship entirely out of the system, lost forever in the darkness.
But they were here today. And they had the time to plot a whole series of short hops that would culminate within reach of Neu Berne’s last flagship. Trying that in one jump was a recipe for disaster.
“Anybody else here?” Zakhar finally asked, breaking the spell that had wound itself around them with sticky webs.
“Negative, Captain,” the science officer said professionally, which told Zakhar how far down the rabbit hole Javier had gone in his mind.
He was never formal unless he had to be. Or he forgot where he was and fell into the old ways.
“Then you have the bridge,” Zakhar ordered. “Primary crew stand down for now. We’ll have food delivered when you are ready, Javier.”
Javier’s look told Zakhar how much sarcasm was on the tip of his tongue, but he held his silence.
They both knew that this place held the sort of mysteries that would keep him glued to his station until the caffeine stopped working.
Zakhar rose and considered some coffee himself and maybe a little dessert as a treat.
Now, the hard part would start.
PART THREE
DJAMILA POWERED her electronic book reader down and closed the brown, leather cover. It was technically an antique at this point, fifty-one years old, but it had belonged to her father as a child, before he gave it to her as a graduation present, and it had been built to last at least another century.
She traced soft fingertips on the faded brown leather, fifteen centimeters by twenty-five, and thought about the past. Her past.
Her world’s past.
They had been here in-system for one hundred and thirteen hours now. Still sitting out at the very top edge of the system, looking down from a dizzying height at everything moving, like a giant mobile that had hung over her crib.
Djamila had already studied everything there was to know about the Hammerfield.
Class specifications, interior systems diagrams, everything. There hadn’t been time to transform deck plans from her records into a full immersion video, but she had memorized most of the layout. That part didn’t concern her.
No, she had been reading a history of the war itself. One she had never read during her military student days.
It had been written some years after the war, by a woman who had been a mid-level officer serving the Admiralty Staff at the time of The Surrender.
That moment when the government itself had collapsed, and the survivors were too weary to push on any further, thirty-nine years of near-continuous warfare having apparently been enough, even for a warrior culture like hers had been.
It wasn’t there on the page, what Djamila sought today. It wouldn’t be.
As near as she knew, the secrets she wanted had probably never left this very star system, interred forever under alien suns.
At the same time, the words she read had been written when the memories of those days were fresh. Before the rise of the great legends and lies about betrayals and heroes gone into hiding, like Arthur gone to Avalon with Excalibur in his hand. Geoffrey of Monmouth would have been proud of the lies and myths her parents’ generation had concocted.
She had heard those stories enough growing up that she had believed them.
Not anymore.
High Command had gambled everything on a major offensive and been mousetrapped.
Slaughtered.
It wasn’t as bad as that final battle at A’Nacia, five hundred years ago, but it had broken Neu Berne’s back psychologically.
Hammerfield had managed to escape the wreckage and return home, undamaged. After a quick stop to pick up supplies and Admiral Ericka Steiner, head of the Admiralty itself, the warship had leapt into the darkness and never been heard from again.
Even today, any records of that mission were classified. Missing. Taken away by official men.
But not on Neu Berne or one of the Union worlds. Not even Balustrade, the immortal enemy.
No.
The Concord had swept it all up, six years later, when it flexed its newly-won hegemony across the near galaxy. Ridden in and taken control. All records simply disappeared except what was written down later by the people who knew, who remembered the truth, what little of it there was to know.
After that, only legends.
Now, eighty-five years later, Djamila Sykora looking for the warship, the weapon, that held the truth.
Would she find Excalibur?
Did she even want to?
PART FOUR
IMPORTANT EVENTS SHOULD BE TREATED as such. Javier’s grandmother had always told him that as a child.
As a result, he had shaved off several days of ugly, salt-and-pepper stubble from his chin. A shower with real water, rather than his usual pass through the low-power sonic cleaner. Aftershave that made him smell like his grandfather. Clothing without any stains, even if he had to go clear to the bottom of the drawer for the dungarees.
Gray fit his mood, anyway, so he wore the charcoal pants, with a marbled gray raglan pullover with black sleeves, and the soft blue moccasins he habitually wore when he wasn’t leaving the ship.
He had taken the time for a quick haircut. Javier didn’t figure he had been this spiffy even for dates in a while.
And he was there early for the meeting, prepped, and supplied with really good coffee. Sascha and Hajna were there, as was Sykora, and Afia Burakgazi.
Captain Sokolov entered the primary conference room like it was full of snakes. It wasn’t.
Hell, they weren’t any of them even doppelgängers, last time he had checked. Personally in three cases. Visually with Sykora.
There was no way in hell he was getting that intimate with the dragoon.
Nope. Javier, seated at the far end of the long, pseudo-grain-laminate table, sat and sipped coffee from his mug, the one he had found in the wardroom. The one that someone, somewhere, had picked up at a Merankorr brothel gift shop. The one which, based on the amount of hot coffee inside, would currently show a beautiful young woman with green hair, and no clothing north of her belly-button.
Because he could.
He hadn’t bought the damned thing. Just recognized it on a shelf in the wardroom for what it was and kept it. Because he had owned something similar, a long time ago.
On Javier’s immediate right was Afia, a short, skinny engineer with a heart-shaped face, dark green eyes, and the willingness and ability to beat up men twice her size in bars, though you would never guess it from the demure way she rested her chin on her laced fingers and smiled. Those women were always the most dangerous ones, anyway.
Her ancestors had originally come from somewhere in southeast Asia on the homeworld. Roughly between what used to be China and Indonesia, back in the old days. Her skin was darker, more golden, than the Chinese Diaspora, but not the red-brown of Javier’s.
Across from Afia was Sascha Koç, one of Sykora’s two pathfinder babes, the scouts she relied upon in hostile territory. Sascha was a short, Slavic brunette with lush hips and an amazing alto singing voice. Today she was in her usual field uniform: pants and button-up tunic with a gray and maroon splotch pattern apparently designed to vanish shipboard. Javier couldn’t see it, but they believed.
Diagonal from Sascha was her counterpart, Hajna Flores, the
lanky, Anglo blond with legs that seemed to go on forever and were born to tango. Like Sascha, Hajna dressed for war, although she had added a floral-scented something to her morning routine today.
Both women were card sharps of the first order, the kind that usually just about broke even playing with Javier; whereas the three of them cleaned out anybody else wanting to play.
Hajna might be the smarter of the pair, but that was like judging which day was nicer. They were both wicked brilliant women. And dangerous, which he appreciated.
Sykora waited at what would be Sokolov’s right hand when he sat. That was pretty much her reserved seat in any meeting he was attending. Like the pathfinders, she wore the steel and maroon that was supposed to hide you against gray walls.
Javier assumed it had something to do with inducing motion sickness in anyone watching the optical illusion of the spots moving for long enough. Fortunately, his stomach was made of sterner stuff.
Still, Sokolov blinked as he sat.
“I would have expected you to take Ilan, Javier,” he said as he settled.
“That man has not certified on combat EVA,” Javier retorted with a knowing grin.
Sokolov nodded, then turned sharply to stare at Afia, quite possibly the quietest person in the room. Most rooms.
To her credit, the woman shrugged nonchalantly and smiled a wicked, evil grin at the man.
Some people would have taken a different lesson from their adventures on Meehu Platform. Afia had apparently decided to become more dangerous. At this rate, she might end up on Sykora’s combat team, and not down in the engineering spaces.
Of course, as many times as he got drug along on assaults in his job as science officer, maybe this ship needed a dedicated combat engineer. Weirder things had happened, especially with this crew.
“So what do we know?” Sokolov turned back to Javier, all serious and military shit now.
“Nothing,” Javier retorted.
“Nothing?” Sokolov was surprised. “We’ve been here a week.”
“You said Know,” Javier snarked. “I have any number of pet theories to test.”
