by Blaze Ward
“Oh, fine.” Sokolov settled himself more comfortably and visibly prepared for war with his science officer. “Top three.”
“As near as memory serves, she hasn’t moved in six years,” Javier ticked off his fingers. “I’m hoping that means that she was parked there by someone who knew what they were doing.”
“And the warship has not moved on its own, subsequent,” Sokolov observed.
“Which brings me to my second theory,” Javier continued. “The Sentience is dead, the ship is disabled, or she was ordered to remain there until someone came for her.”
“I have very little experience with Sentient ships,” Sokolov said. “What are the odds?”
“They tend to come off the assembly line extremely linear,” Javier replied. “Black and white. Like bright five-year-olds. What happens with their first crew, their first captain, tends to set their personality. I got lucky with my probe-cutter. Captain Ayumu Ulfsson was one hell of a man and set her on the right path. Who knows with Neu Berne? Especially a flagship.”
They both glanced quickly at Sykora, but she shrugged tightly, silently. Not out of her depth, but out of her expertise and willing to let the experts speculate unless asked a direct question.
Javier always forgot how professional the woman could be when they didn’t have to argue.
“Risks?” Sokolov asked.
“Eighty-five years of boredom,” Javier said. “Think how crazy you’d be, left in solitary confinement for that long.”
“Can we fix any of those issues?” Sokolov asked. “Dead, disabled, or crazy?”
“Dead could mean a simple power failure took her offline,” Javier said. “Or maybe a lunatic smashed the right boards and killed it. I can reprogram it from scratch in that case, given enough time and access to the right hardware and software backups, both of which are hopefully stored close at hand.”
Sykora twitched.
Coming from her, a scream in a darkened opera house would have been less disturbing. Javier could tell she wanted to inject something, probably bilious, into the conversation, but she held her silence.
Sokolov saw it as well. He glanced, but she shook her head.
“You told me, when we first captured you, Javier, that you couldn’t do that,” Sokolov observed dryly.
“No,” Javier replied with a hard smile. “I told you to go to hell. It wouldn’t be an easy or quick task. And would require a good chunk of the engineering crew for at least a month, if we have to code up from a declarations block. But it can be done. I’ve been practicing on my probes, and in a year, have gotten them about as smart as a cat. She would end up programming a good chunk of her own personality once we started.”
“Okay,” Sokolov breathed out, apparently willing to let that one go, unaware of how much of a lie it was. “What about crazy?”
Javier leaned back in his chair and took a long drink of coffee.
Sokolov was directly across from him, with the four women warriors between them. Five pairs of eyes fixed on him. Green, blue, brown, green, brown, from his right.
“That’s why Afia and not Ilan,” Javier said. “I’m proposing a combat insertion. Storm Gauntlet stays cloaked and deploys Del in the Assault Shuttle. He gets us to a certain point, maybe fifty kilometers out, and drops us. We EVA over and hopefully board her with no issue.”
“Or?” Sokolov asked.
“Or she kills us and then goes after Del,” Javier replied. “You’ll be able to get away, because her scanners aren’t likely good enough to penetrate a modern cloak. What you do at that point isn’t my concern.”
Captain Sokolov looked at the other four individually, until each nodded, Sykora last.
“Is it worth it?” Sokolov asked in a heavy, tired voice.
Javier tapped a finger on the tabletop.
“As I told Sykora, I’ve found someone I hate more than any of you,” he rasped. “I refuse to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for an assassin. These people only understand power and fear. Wealth gives them power to inflict fear on others. That offends me. Badly.”
He took another sip of coffee, getting close to the really good, caramel sludge at the bottom of his mug, and fixed the captain with his stare.
“Zakhar Sokolov,” Javier ground the words out. Witnesses, and all that. “I told you I was willing to start with a blank screen here. Old wounds and slights will be forgotten. We will be partners in this endeavor. I intend to dedicate my life to destroying those people. Burning their cities, pulling down the ruins, and salting the earth. Scipio Africanus the Younger. That sort of thing. If it gets me killed here, then those are the risks. I’ve talked to these four and spelled it out for them. They’re here.”
“I always thought Navarre was crazy,” Sokolov said with a wry smile. “Turns out Aritza is even worse.”
Javier nodded grimly as the four women warriors around him got a chuckle out of the captain’s words.
You have no idea.
BOOK EIGHTEEN: DERELICT
PART ONE
SUVI WAS in her big probe today, the armed one with the way-bigger memory block to store movies and books. Loaded for a vacation of at least three weeks before she had to loop.
To humans, the sensors on the face of her flyer apparently made it look like a big gray eyeball, floating in space. When she deployed the popup turret from the bottom, it got vaguely obscene.
Around her, Suvi tracked the other five humans getting ready for deep space. All that remained was to lock helmets in place, check everything, and transition to onboard systems.
Unlike the normal skinsuits they might wear for short jaunts, the humans had strapped themselves into anonymous, gray EVA suits. Heavier. Bulkier. Semi-armoured.
Backpacks with pressurized systems for directed flight. Gear bags and equipment belts. Spare oxygen tanks and power packs. Toolkits.
Each was equipped with on-board plumbing attachments that took some getting used to, apparently, to listen to Javier bitch. But Javier liked to complain about things. It was his nature. Of course, it was a little easier for females in that department.
Not that she had ever had physical form requiring such shenanigans, but she could research it, and commiserate with them.
Silently, of course. She didn’t really exist.
To make things even funnier, at least to an AI in her own pocket spaceship, the suits had some level of armored reinforcement, so people tended to waddle awkwardly when they moved. Like they had drunk themselves right up at the edge of too tipsy to operate heavy equipment safely.
Ugly, gray penguins.
Well, everyone except Djamila Sykora. She moved in her suit with a grace that would have embarrassed many professional athletes. Suvi finally understood the term: a Natural.
And they weren’t really anonymous as they prepared. Sykora was a head taller than anyone and had three weapons in holsters: both hips and under her left arm, where everyone else only had one on their dominant hip. Javier was broader than Hajna in the shoulders and body. And Sascha was bulkier than Afia.
That would be useful as Suvi helped them transit deep space, flying like a herding dog working vaguely-recalcitrant sheep, if her videos were accurate. The gear bag Javier had prepared for her to carry made her feel almost like a locomotive pulling a single, heavy car through space. It was two meters long, by a third of that square, and weighed forty kilograms in gravity, but Javier had explained that he was prepared for almost any task with it handy.
A sound drew her attention, so she rotated herself around to bring her primary video pickup in line.
Delridge Smith ambled loosely down the set of steps from his flight deck to the big cargo bay.
Del stared right at her and winked, as if they were sharing some joke.
Suvi never knew with the pilot. He was much older than the rest of the crew, and much looser. Today, he had clipped his white beard short, maybe only a number fifteen length on the trimmer, while he kept the white hair on his head around a te
n. Olfactory sensors suddenly picked up an alcohol-based volatile trace, but it was a perfume of some sort, and not bourbon.
Coconut, according to the onboard spectrograph, whatever that meant.
Like every day, he was in gray cargo pants and a floral shirt. Hawaiian, per her onboard encyclopedia. Off-peach with white parrot silhouettes. Not even the weirdest one he owned.
“Roughly fifty kilometers out,” Del announced. “Holding a lateral motion and on autopilot. So what do I do if it spots you and starts to move?”
“Run like hell,” Javier said. “Get rocks, moons, or planets between you and it and hope it either loses you, or loses interest. She can splatter you from here if she wants to. I’m hoping we’re not a threat, this small and this far away. Storm Gauntlet might have provoked a reaction.”
“Kid, you’re crazy,” Del said. “But I’ll give you credit for brass.”
He stopped and looked around at the rest.
“Ladies, if we all get killed today, it has been my pleasure flying with you.”
Everyone made insulting comments. Afia included a rude, universal gesture as well.
Del laughed, saluted, and tromped back up the stairs. A hatch latched shut with the sound of a vault door.
Suvi watched Javier step close to the dragon lady.
“When we latch down, you’re in charge,” he said. “The probe knows the basic hand language you use with your team. Everyone maintains complete radio silence until we’re all inside, either here or there. If anyone has an emergency, they return here on their own. Any questions?”
There were none, but that was ignorance, not confidence.
Nobody but Javier had any experience with a Sentient starship. Well, not counting her, but she found most of her cousins to be annoyingly stuffy, boring shits. Really bad conversationalists.
Humans were way preferable for that sort of thing.
One by one, the team locked their helmets down. External status lights cycled up to green for everyone else to see.
You never knew when maybe something was going wrong and you passed out before you knew it. Helpful if your suit yelled for assistance for you. Humans were really fragile creatures, that way.
And then silence. Everybody trapped in their own, private world. At least she had planned ahead and had enough music for a millennia aboard, plus whatever she might write between now and then.
Suvi went into the tiny airlock with the dragon lady first.
That made sense. Put the two best flyers out in vacuum before anyone else.
The confined space hissed weirdly on her audio pickups as pumps sucked the room empty.
Ready? Sykora signaled silently.
Suvi had a ring of signaling lights below her main sensor grid. She cycled a muted, Kelly green, clockwise pattern, and watched the giant woman nod.
Push came to shove, Suvi could turn the lights into a Times Square scrolling marquee, but she wasn’t supposed to be that smart, especially not around the dragon-lady.
And then silence. The outer door of the airlock opened towards them, revealing an eternity of stars dancing mutely.
Suvi bounced outward on her gyros and micro thrusters, just enough to get three meters from the hatch, so she could play lifeguard with her Santa Claus bag of goodies trailing behind her.
She watched Sykora grab a doorframe and pivot herself outward like the ballerina she was called. The dragoon let go of the ship so perfectly she didn’t move.
Wow.
Then the woman reached out with one finger and pushed just enough to drift backwards at a pace that snails would have appreciated. It was almost like watching paint dry.
Pretty impressive, especially for an organic.
The hatch closed outwards to them, sealed, and there was nothing to do but watch. Or passively scan on all frequencies available, with a spectrum bandwidth that would have made anybody but Javier nervous.
Hammerfield was over there. A transponder signal quietly chirping on channel eighty-three. Hash and junk on several other channels that Suvi decided must be gas giants gossiping to themselves under the triple solar wind.
She didn’t have any memories of being here before, but Javier hadn’t had any excuse before now to access her old drives, other than to confirm that the files were all securely stored on her old memory core, itself stashed away in a vacuum-sealed storage box in engineering.
One of these days, she would get to look at her old picture albums.
Sascha and Hajna came out second. Not quite as graceful as the dragon lady, but well above average. The sort of skill that only came with extensive practice in a zero-g environment.
Afia and Javier were last. Suvi would have said graceful, but she had just watched two experts and a dragon-lady give lie to that observation.
She suppressed the urge to bark out loud before she started herding, then realized that nobody would hear her, as long as she didn’t display it on one of her boards or transmit it over radio, so she gave one loud woof, just to set the tone in her own head.
Each suit was programmed with coordinates and burn cycles, but too much of it was estimation, and an expectation that the individual pilot would exercise terminal control. Or rely on one of the lifeguards if something went wrong.
One by one, they slowly began to move, accelerating at a comfortable, predictable pace, with fifty kilometers of space to cover but no major deadline, since these suits were good for up to two weeks of average use.
Suvi went last. She fired up a DeManx Symphony, Number Forty-three, from the sixty-third century. The late Corporate Wars period had produced some lovely orchestral music, not like the grand choral pieces of the early Pocket Empires Era, starting in the sixty-sixth century. But of the crew, only Piet Alferdinck, the pilot, had any true appreciation of music history anyway.
Hopefully, one of these days, she would get to discuss it with him.
PART TWO
IT HAD STARTED out as a point of light, just emerging from the darkness. Djamila had watched it resolve itself into an object, a gleaming, metallic form somewhere between a longsword and the Caduceus of Hermes. It looked organic to her, living in a period where naval architecture had gone to straight lines and geometric symmetry.
Overall, Hammerfield was just over a kilometer long, with a beam ratio of only thirteen to one. Stubbier than Storm Gauntlet, which made sense, since their vessel was a dedicated warship, where space was at a premium, while this relic was a galleon, armed with a variety of medium-sized guns, turreted on all four sides, wrapped around gargantuan cargo holds.
Storm Gauntlet had three big-gun twin turrets on her top deck, with point-defense weapons all around her. Sleek and deadly, like a knife, rather than a sledgehammer.
It did not look like a tomb, but Djamila wasn’t fooled. As remote and isolated as this system was, she couldn’t imagine someone parking the ship here and taking further flight in something smaller, something weaker. There had been very few warships larger than Hammerfield in that era, which made this one all the more important to whoever had her.
That meant that they had come here and never left.
Died here.
Djamila reviewed her mental list of the sorts of causes of death that she should prepare for. Sudden plague vectors that might still be viable, even after this period. Violent civil war among the crew. Accidental decompression, the kind that would kill some and isolate the rest in small, personal mausoleums from which they could never escape.
For the briefest moment, she entertained the exotic fiction of survivors, or the offspring thereof, somehow having managed to make it this far, like some dime-novel space fantasy. Unlikely, but still possible. One of the reasons why she was so well armed.
Survivors today would most likely be feral creatures, not civilized humans.
She took a deep breath to settle herself, tasting the flat, metallic tang of the recycling plant’s air. The onboard sensors were all green, but Djamila dialed up the humidity three percent anyway, hoping it wo
uld improve the taste in her mouth.
She listened as her thrusters began to taper down, blowing forward over her shoulders and around her hips to slow her. It had been two hundred and eight minutes, and they were very close to the ancient warship. It had resolved itself into a wall of steel.
The Last Flagship.
She wasn’t sure what she would have done, had the vessel begun to move as they approached, or opened fire.
Died gloriously in battle, she supposed. Everyone had always expected that of her.
Nothing more.
No grand accomplishments, save to make the Valkyries themselves jealous when they came for her.
Djamila let her backbrain consider what legacy she really wanted to leave, in a galaxy where violent death was not necessarily a job requirement. She had never really thought about it, but this ancient tomb spoke to her on very unconscious levels.
What we leave behind.
Silence. She was motionless relative to Hammerfield. Perhaps thirty meters away, drifting with the ship through space, pulled by unseen tides of solar gravity.
She looked over at Javier. He didn’t know the hand language well enough for complicated conversations, but had enough of the basics.
Next step? she asked.
He gave her a thumbs-up and began to close on the bow of the ship. The man had obviously studied the schematics she had provided, at least well enough to locate the forward crew airlock. She signaled the others to follow, and drew her right-hand pistol.
Djamila had visions of small, armed automatons on the hull, popping out to engage and destroy boarding parties in exactly this circumstance. She was prepared to kill them.
Perhaps she was a touch crazy, as well.
But better to be paranoid unnecessarily, rather than complacent and wiped out.
PART THREE
JAVIER LET visions of avarice dance in his background as he silently came to rest against the hull of the ancient, Neu Berne warship. For years, looting this beast had been a significant chunk of his retirement planning. The sort of thing that would generate enough cash that he could live on a private beach with his own, personal bartender for the rest of his days.
